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More "Motley" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... scanty in numbers, they thought them a set of madmen rushing upon certain destruction." They began, however, to prepare to receive them, and the Eastern chiefs arrayed, as quickly as time and place allowed, the varied races who served in their motley ranks. Mountaineers from Hyrcania and Afghanistan, wild horsemen from the steppes of Khorassan, the black archers of Ethiopia, swordsmen from the banks of the Indus, the Oxus, the Euphrates and the Nile, made ready against the enemies of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... hands; Italy has her Pontine Marshes, New York city her 'Sixth Ward'; but he must be a green-eyed monster indeed who would represent these as characteristics. Illinois deserves an explorer with clear, kind eyes, and a historiographer as genial as Motley. All in good time. She will 'grow' these, probably. While we are waiting for them, let us prepare a few jottings for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... criminal, his chin sunk on his breast, and his cap slouched over his brows. His right hand holds a stiletto, his pockets bulge with weapons or plunder, his left hand is raised with the air of a priest encouraging his flock. And his words are the words of religion—"God with us." At the sign the motley crew will get ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... Martel must no longer be the Mauler, he will only be excluded from a very motley band. Here are a few ...
— Notes & Queries,No. 31., Saturday, June 1, 1850 • Various
... shrewdness and selfishness had marked for their own;—certain it was, that, at this sight Walter experienced a more displeasing revulsion of feeling—a more entire conviction of sadness—a more consummate disgust of this weary world and the motley masquers that walk thereon, than all the tragic scenes he had just witnessed had excited ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... purpose of saving the port-anchorage dues, which amount to eight pounds sterling, but a government boat came off, and ordered the vessel to hawl close up to the quay, an order which was given in rather a peremptory manner. Upon our turning the pier, we saw as we warped up to the quay, an immense motley crowd, flocking down to view us. A panic ran throughout our poor fellow passengers. From the noise and confusion on shore, they expected that some recent revolution had occurred, and that they were upon the point of experiencing ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... relation between religious and sexual feeling in psycho-pathological states. "It suffices," says he, "to recall how intense sensuality makes itself manifest in the clinical history of many religious maniacs; the motley mixture of religious and sexual delusions that is so frequently observed in psychoses (e. g., in maniacal women who think they are or will be the mother of God), but particularly in masturbatic insanity; ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... passed after M. Roussillon's return, when that big-hearted man took it into his head to celebrate his successful trading ventures with a moonlight dance given without reserve to all the inhabitants of Vincennes. It was certainly a democratic function that he contemplated, and motley to ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... above the brown hood; a venerable letter-writer at a small table, spectacles on nose and pen in hand, with two women whispering to him what he was to write for them. She made her way up the steep lane, through the busy, motley, malodorous crowd, until she reached the corner pointed out to ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... I drank up close to the right side of the handle of the cup, as I thought that would be the spot least contaminated. In order not to breathe any more germs than I could possibly avoid, I kept away from theatres and places where motley crowds assemble and shunned dust and impure air as I would a leper. I had read that there was on the market a sanitary mask to be worn when going to places where there was the greatest danger of coming into contact with germs, but I did not think ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... at one of the quays, after having, of course, been cheated in the fare (for the Maltese will never lose an opportunity of robbing you, though, to give the creature his due, he will not let any one else do so if he can prevent it—you are his own sweet pastures, and his solely), we pass through the motley, swarthy crowd of boatmen and fishermen, and, holding our nose to exclude the rancid smell of fish, boiling oil, and powerful odours of garlic, commence the ascent of the dreaded endless series of stone stairs up to the city of Valetta. And, when under a powerful sun such ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... went over the bright pattern of the grazing cattle. A motley bunch they were, red, black and white, with here and there descendants of the yellows which none but John Dement had ever owned in Lost Valley. Dement, riding near the head of the line saw this and ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... short time in her motley history, an old-clothesman, one Domenico— he and his "Compagnia del Bruco," his Company of the Worm[1]— reigned over Siena and gave to her people a taste for blood. It was bloodshed on easy terms they had; for surely no small nation (except that tiger-cat ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... greatness. It is curious to observe how at this early period of Carlyle's life, when all the talent and learning of England bowed at these levees before the gigantic speculator and dreamer, he, perhaps alone, stood aloof from the motley throng of worshippers,—with them, but not of them,—coolly analyzing every sentence delivered by the oracle, and sufficiently learned in the divine lore to separate the gold from the dross. What was good and productive he was ready to recognize and assimilate; leaving the opium pomps and splendors ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... were left with the herd to keep it from scattering. Ted and Stella rode in the lead as they entered the town, which was crowded with a motley assemblage of cow-punchers, gamblers, and Indians in their gay ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... fighting, the arrests, the bombardment keeping the excitement at an intense pitch. The people deserted the streets, which were silent and empty, except for the soldiers of the Commune—a disorderly crew in motley uniforms—the movement of ammunition wagons, and the other scenes incident to a state of war. But the usual swarming life of Paris had vanished. There was no movement, scarcely any sound. The shop-windows were shut, many of them ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... good earnest when we arrived at the ballroom. There was the usual motley assemblage of costumes of all nations under the sun, and some which the sun, when he put down the impudence of the wax-lights upon his return the next morning, must have marvelled to behold. Childish as it may be called, a fancy ball is certainly, for the first ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... left the Governor, to rest upon the woman beside me; had he pointed to her with his hand, he could not have more surely drawn upon her the regard of that motley throng. By degrees the crowd had fallen back, leaving us three—the King's minion, the masquerading lady, and myself—the centre of a ring of staring faces; but now she became the sole target at which ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... in tiny terraced fields. Farther north, however, in the neighbourhood of Ning-yuean-fu, the valley widens out into a broad, open plain. Apparently in this favoured region tropics and temperate zone meet, for I never saw before such motley vegetation. Rice and cotton alternate with wheat and maize and beans, while saffron and indigo fit in anywhere. Fruits, too, of many kinds are abundant. A short time ago the poppy made every turn brilliant, ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... found a motley crowd of people. Soldiers had gathered them into camps along the line to prevent "sooners" from entering before the appointed time. We stopped in a camp directly north of the claim our little boomer wanted. ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... bizarre and at the same time more motley than this troop. One had a round-jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two holster-pistols, another was in his shirt-sleeves, with a round hat, and a powder-horn slung at his side, a third wore a plastron of nine sheets of gray paper and was armed with a saddler's awl. There was one who was shouting: ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the company of the above mentioned Mr. Tucker, seat himself, at Edmonton Fair, in one of those vulgar vehicles called swings: he was highly delighted with the novelty of the exercise, which he enjoyed amidst the rude stare and boisterous grins of the motley group around him; "this is life," said he, upon getting out of the swing, "what shall we see next?" In his poem of Hypocrisy, he has beautifully eulogized General Graham, who showed his sense of this intellectual ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... criminals" lived in the midst of an humble crowd of flatterers, parasites, clients, dependents, and slaves. Among the throng that at early morning jostled each other in the marble atrium were to be found a motley and hetrogeneous set of men. Slaves of every age and nation—Germans, Egyptians, Gauls, Goths, Syrians, Britons, Moors, pampered and consequential freedmen, impudent confidential servants, greedy buffoons, who lived by making bad jokes at other people's tables; Dacian gladiators, with whom ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... at the hour of noon, a motley throng of people might have been seen pouring forth from the gates of a far Eastern city and moving towards a hill called Calvary. Amidst soldiers and civilians, both friends and foes, the central figure ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria, combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second order, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Jewels of blue had begun to star the black and white and golden clouds. A strange white light-ghost of Spring passing in this last violent outburst-painted the leaves of every tree; and a hundred savage hues had come down like a motley of bright birds on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... unspeakable horridness, all would have been well. Now her only hope was that liberal-minded woman, Miss Mergle, who, a year ago, had sent her out, highly educated, into the world. Miss Mergle had told her at parting to live fearlessly and truly, and had further given her a volume of Emerson's Essays and Motley's "Dutch Republic," to help her ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... University of Berlin. Since his return to America he has been connected with the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons. His first volume, "The Human Fantasy", 1911, attracted attention by the faithfulness with which it depicted the motley life of New York. His second was "The Beloved Adventure", 1912; followed by "Love and Liberation", 1913, and "Dust and Light", 1919. The last volume, from which the selections in this anthology are taken, contains ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... I was free, like other little girls in the street, instead of being hemmed about with prohibitions and obligations at every step. And yet if the golden truth of Judaism had not been handed me in the motley rags of formalism, I might not have been so ready to put ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... stand, they are at least, in one important aspect, only a kind of annex to the public school system, as I shall shortly point out to you. For the moment, let us consider, together, what to my mind constitutes the very hopeful struggle of the two possibilities: either that the motley and evasive spirit of public schools which has hitherto been fostered, will completely vanish, or that it will have to be completely purified and rejuvenated. And in order that I may not shock you with general ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to me, I might have found food for reflection, or observed circumstances to astonish me. But I had been long accustomed to mix in as motley a throng, as that which now surrounded the table of the Swampville hotel. A supper-table, encircled by blanket and "jeans" coats—by buckskin blouses and red-flannel shirts—by men without coats at all—was ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... assortment also. They came along in straggling companies, their personal goods and small stock of cabin wares usually tied up in bundles and slung upon a stick across the shoulder. In fact the whole valley was literally pouring itself out northward, and in wild confusion. If in that motley crowd of fugitives there was one brave heart worthy to enjoy the free institutions which the starry banner symbolizes, he must have hung his head in shame as he passed under the shadow of the fort whose protection he sought, where he himself should have been, one of ten thousand ready ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... more attractive in that its background was rough-and-ready Skaguay—a plain town enough to look at, but one full of thrilling human interest, of tragedy and comedy. Through its streets had passed a motley procession of men—some on their way to fortune, some to disappointment, but all battling with the realities of life. The doctor was struck by the simple and straightforward outlook of these people, their sincerity, and the pleasure they found in their ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... varied field of administrative work from the days of Strafford downwards, there was none more industrious, none more loyal, and none less selfish than he. It was all to his credit that he was unlikely to consort on easy terms with the motley crew that now thronged ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... dusty flat barrens, low squat mud houses, and queer-looking little people, children naked or extremely ragged and dirty, women in loose garments with flares of red, and men in white man's garb, slovenly and motley. All these strange individuals stared apathetically as ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... any text-book in history ever appealed to you as a work of literature? What literary qualities have you noticed in standard historical works, such as those of Macaulay, Prescott, Gibbon, Green, Motley, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... from Richardson: "Homer, Plutarch, Herodotus, and Plato; Virgil, Livy, and Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, and Petrarch; Cervantes; Thomas a Kempis; Goethe and Schiller; Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Bunyan, Addison, Gray, Scott, and Wordsworth; Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier. He who reads these, and such as these, is not in serious danger of spending his time amiss. But not even such a list as this is to be received as a ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... retaining a scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for the denizens of Grub street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by agricultural labor; or, Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full experiment; or Candide and his motley associates, at work in their cabbage-garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points of husbandry, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... an army for his protection; but Columbus asked for what he thought he had some chance of getting, and for the barest equipment that would carry him across the water. Another man would at least have had a bodyguard; but Columbus relied upon himself, and alone held his motley crew in the bonds of discipline. A Pinzon could have navigated the fleet from Palos to Guanahani; but only a Columbus, only a man burning with belief is himself and in his quest, could have kept that ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... arise on earth, With cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth; 50 See motley life in modern trappings dress'd, And feed with varied fools the eternal jest: Thou who could'st laugh where want enchain'd caprice, Toil crush'd conceit, and man was of a piece: Where wealth, unloved, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... and convenience for a mountain cabin; but time had played strange pranks with it, till now it was uneven and sloped off in a jerky fashion toward the back door. On one wall was fastened a rude set of shelves, on which was perched a motley collection of pickle bottles and tin cans. Stretched along one wall stood a crude, home-made table, and in one corner stood the remains of a little, old-fashioned stove. A wooden chest stood under the shelves, and had probably been used ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... may be imagined that there is a motley and considerable crowd; but it will scarcely be imagined that there is only one regulation, which is, that no persons may enter or depart till the mail-bags have been landed. The wharf is small and at night unlighted, and the scene which ensued on our landing ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... placed beside the cap a small silver watch, his last birthday gift, with a bright steel chain attached. Otto brought a great picture-book, just sent him by his godmother; Rudolph a tiny marble vase, richly sculptured; and so on, until a still more motley collection than before lay ...
— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... character of the expedition brought with it many drawbacks and difficulties for the unfortunate Jones. He had a motley array of ships,—those which were left over after the French officers had been satisfied. The flagship, the Bonhomme Richard, was a worn-out old East Indiaman, which Jones refitted and armed with six eighteen-pounders, twenty-eight twelve-pounders, ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... They were a motley crowd clad in every kind of garment, ranging from a moth-eaten General's tunic to practically nothing at all. Indeed, one tall, thin fellow sported only a battered helmet of rusty steel that had drifted ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... wild and motley aspect of the caravan can be but imperfectly conceived without an idea of the costumes of its various members. The most fashionable prairie dress is the fustian frock of the city-bred merchant, furnished with a multitude of pockets capable ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... prettier sight in my life," cried Cecil, as she stood with a motley group in the verandah of "The Maples," the rendezvous of the sleighing party. As each sleigh turned in at the gate and deposited its freight, it fell into rank which extended all round the lawn, till scarcely a space was left on the drive that encircled it, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... decision, resource, and confidence, will take the command, whatever his position. Hope, as well as timidity and fear, is infectious, and one cheery voice will revive the drooping spirits of a multitude. Paul had already established his personal ascendency in that motley company of Roman soldiers, prisoners, sailors, and disciples. Now he stands forward with calm confidence, and infuses new hope into them all. What a miraculous change passes on externals when faith looks at them! The circumstances were the same as they had been for many ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... drum. In this ludicrous doggrel, with phrases and figures of a correspondent cast, homely, ridiculous, graphic, these men of service paint their hopes and doings. There are ranks and kinds among them; representatives of all the constituent parts of the motley multitude, which followed this prince of Condottieri. The solemn pedantry of the ancient Wachtmeister is faithfully given; no less so are the jocund ferocity and heedless daring of Holky's Jaegers, or the iron courage and stern camp-philosophy ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... b-b-boys?" he asked, looking over the crowd with an air of superiority and waving his hand with an inclusive gesture. The motley throng of loafers sidled up to the bar with a deprecatory and automatic movement. They took their glasses, clinked them, nodded to their entertainer, muttered incoherent toasts and drank his health. The delighted landlord, feeling it incumbent upon him to break the silence, ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... coronation of the Emperor and Empress of Austria, as King and Queen of Hungary. Through the courtesy of Mr. Motley, then Minister to Austria, he received from the Prime Minister of the empire every facility for witnessing ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... had seen in the faces of the young men whilst they spoke of Mrs. Stanhope, the match-maker. Belinda's mind, however, was not yet sufficiently calm to reflect; she seemed only to live over again the preceding night. At last, the strange motley figures which she had seen at the masquerade flitted before her eyes, and she sunk into an ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... fresh follies of which he could be capable. He considered himself as an inexhaustible quarry of humours, vanities, jealousies, whims, absurd enthusiasms, absurd mortifications. He was able, as he said, to sit at his ease in the side-scene and see himself jigging on the stage in motley or the tragic sock—see himself as a lover, and cry aloud in delight at the mad persistence of the fool he appeared; see himself directing the affairs of the nation, and be ready to die of laughing at himself for pretending to be ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... they subside as quickly as they rise, and the particular river which barred our road had lost its menace before the sun had risen in a cloudless morning sky. All the valley seemed in motion. We joined the motley throng of camels, carts, and horsemen; and even the motor car coughed and wheezed its way to Urga under the stimulus of two ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... have lived and are dead. La Noue, the Huguenot Bayard, now exists only in a dusty memoir and a page of Motley. Madame de Montpensier is forgotten; all of her, save her golden scissors. Mayenne, D'Aumale, a verse preserves their names. Only Henry—the "good King," as generations of French peasants called him—remains a living figure: ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... him. Harry Headlong of Headlong Hall, Esquire, a young Welsh gentleman of means, and of generous though rather unchastened taste, finding, as Peacock says, in the earliest of his gibes at the universities, that there are no such things as men of taste and philosophy in Oxford, assembles a motley host in London, and asks them down to his place at Llanberis. The adventures of the visit (ending up with several weddings) form the scheme of the book, as indeed repetitions of something very little ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... brought him to the Blackfriars Road, and then he turned towards the river and crossed the bridge just as the motley stream of city workers was crossing it in the opposite direction on ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... MOTLEY, JOHN LOTHROP: The Rise of the Dutch Republic. This, with other histories by the same writer, is a long and brilliant account, full of interest to the older youths who ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley. Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra's head, who pretend to clear ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... stage-playing, should have written in these terms about the theatre; but we must remember that in Sonnets CX. and CXI. Shakespeare shows us that he too was wearied of the world of puppets, and full of shame at having made himself 'a motley to the view.' The 111th ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... bracelets; her hair fell from her forehead and temples, dropping over her shoulders in two ribbon bound braids. A tall, gray-cowled monk, whose military bearing gave the lie to his cassock, a Spanish grandee, and a fool in motley saw her at the same moment and hurried to intercept her, but with a slide which carried him a quarter of the way across the floor the Bedouin arrived first, and before the others had come up he was drifting away with her in the tide of ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... field with 25,000 troops, a motley aggregate of French, Flemish, and Walloon Huguenots and of German mercenaries. But he had no genius for war to oppose to the veterans of Alva. Continually harassed by the Spaniards he was kept in ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the afternoon of the day following the encounter in Bloomsbury Square, a little group of excited loiterers filled the entrance and passage way at 59 Bradwell Street, the former lodgings of the two young gentlemen from Scotland. The motley assemblage seemed for the most part to make merry at the expense of a certain messenger boy, who bore a long wicker box, which presently he shifted from his shoulder to a more convenient resting place on ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... eight or nine vagrants, who had been munching their crusts and sardinhas in the shade, now sprung up, and placing themselves between the travelers and the water, vociferously demanded alms. To rid themselves of this motley troop, L'Isle and Mrs. Shortridge threw each of them a small coin. They were not so easily satisfied, but thrusting themselves among the horses, continued to rival each other in whining petitions and adjurations of their favorite saints. Lady Mabel, who had emptied her purse of small ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... at window and door filled and lit the store. The doorway framed a picture of blue sky, slow-moving water, and ragged landing; the window gave upon crimson sumac and the gold of a sycamore. Truelove, in her gray gown and close white cap, sat in the midst of the bouquet of colors afforded by the motley lining of the Fair View store, and gazed through the window at the riotous glory of this world. At last she looked at MacLean. "When, a year ago, thee was put to mind this store, and I, coming here to buy, made thy acquaintance," she said softly, "thee wore always so stern and sorrowful ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... spring. Some of the women shed tears as he passed through the gate, and many of us climbed to sentry box and cabin roof that we might see the last of the little company wending its way across the fields. A motley company it was, the refuse of the station, headed by its cherished captain. So they started back over the weary road that led to that now far-away land of civilization ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... time Caesar had been serving his apprenticeship as a soldier. The motley forces which Mithridates had commanded had not all submitted on the king's surrender to Sylla. Squadrons of pirates hung yet about the smaller islands in the Aegean. Lesbos was occupied by adventurers who were fighting for their own hand, and the praetor Minucius ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... mixed &c. v.; implex[obs3], composite, half-and-half, linsey- woolsey, chowchow, hybrid, mongrel, heterogeneous; motley &c. (variegated) 440; miscellaneous, promiscuous, indiscriminate; miscible. Adv. among, amongst, amid, amidst; with; in the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the beginning of the nineties. There were no more hounds or sporting dogs at Yasnaya then, but till the end of her days she gave shelter to a motley collection of mongrels, and ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... grand coat of arms and ducal coronet emblazoned on the panels, which inspired a certain awe as well as respect in the motley throng of pedestrians, the equipage would undoubtedly have been roughly dealt with-but as it was, they contented themselves with resolutely and obstinately barring its passage, after it had reached the middle of the square. ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... by some of these rich men was a curious conglomeration of almost every stamp, showing the results of a mixed assemblage of customers. There were Spanish pistoles, guineas, Arabian coin, bank dollars, Dutch and French money—a motley assortment all carefully heaped together. Without doubt, those enterprising pirate captains, Kidd and Burgess, and their crews, were good customers of these accommodating and undiscriminating merchants. It was a time ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... were greeted with the music of the Royal Hawaiian Band, and a motley crowd of Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Americans, bearing colored leis, or wreaths of flowers, which they waved at friends on board, and with which they bedecked them as soon as they came off the gangplank. It was ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... Chancellor; Burnet was a bishop and favorite of William III.; Thiers and Guizot both were prime ministers; while Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Macaulay, Grote, Milman, Froude, Neander, Niebuhr, Mueller, Dahlman, Buckle, Prescott, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, have all been men of wealth or position. Nor do I remember a single illustrious historian who has been poor ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... took literary America by storm; the "Professor" and the "Poet at the Breakfast-Table" followed in after years, and remain his most widely popular works; "Elsie Venner," a novel dealing with the problem of heredity, "The Guardian Angel," "Songs of Many Seasons," "Memoirs of Motley and of Emerson," are some of his many works, all of which have the impress of his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the political significance of the scene, swarmed from their dingy homes to gaze on kings, queens, knights, and ladies dressed in their utmost splendor. Beggars, itinerant minstrels, venders of provisions and small luxuries, mixed with wagoners, ploughmen, laborers, and the motley troop of camp-followers, crowded round, or stretched themselves beneath the summer's sun on bundles of straw and grass, in drunken idleness. No better lodging awaited many a gay knight and lady who had travelled far to be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... vacant head, with vacant face, The Proteus Hill[17] put in his modest plea,— Let Favour speak for others, Worth for me.— For who, like him, his various powers could call Into so many shapes, and shine in all? 110 Who could so nobly grace the motley list, Actor, Inspector, Doctor, Botanist? Knows any one so well—sure no one knows— At once to play, prescribe, compound, compose? Who can—but Woodward[18] came,—Hill slipp'd away, Melting, like ghosts, before the rising day. ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... because of Indian activity, stray cowboys from the nearby valleys, thronged the numerous dives, seeking excitement. Women, gaudy of dress, shrill of voice, flitted from door to door through the jostling crowds. Lamps blazed over the motley assembly, loud-voiced barkers yelled, and a band added its discords to the din. The "Poodle Dog" glared in light, resounded with noise; lamps gleamed from the hotel windows, and the huge dance hall stood wide open. Out from the shacks and tents crept the day's ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... conflagration! A fourth is undressing. The fellow bringing in a pewter dish, as part of the apparatus of this elegant and Attic entertainment, a blind harper, a trumpeter, and a ragged ballad-singer, roaring out an obscene song, complete this motley group. ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... made an appointment on this piazza: the multitude thronging it was so great as to overflow into all the neighbouring streets, which started from this centre like the rays of a star. The crowds of people, looking like a motley moving carpet, were climbing up into the basilica, grouping themselves upon the stones, hanging on the columns, standing up against the walls; they entered by the doors of houses and reappeared at the windows, so numerous and so ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hours in the midst of this motley crowd, looking in at the windows of the rich and curious shops, the jewellery establishments glittering with quaint Japanese ornaments, the restaurants decked with streamers and banners, the tea-houses, where the odorous beverage was being drunk with saki, a liquor concocted ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... some important point—put a frivolous bonnet on the top of a grave and flowing garment that Albert Durer might have designed for a mantle. There were fashionable costumes that Mrs. Mason or Madame Eliot might have turned out that morning. The motley crowd mingled, forming into groups, sometimes dazzling you by the array of colours that you never thought to see in full daylight.... Canary-coloured garments flitted cheerily by garments of the ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... day-break, according to the custom of the country; the first man that Mr Banks saw was Tupia, faithfully attending with his musquet; and soon after, Oberea brought him some of her country clothes as a succedaneum for his own; so that when he came to us he made a most motley appearance, half Indian and half English. Our party soon got together, except Dr Solander, whose quarters we did not know, and who had not assisted at the concert: In a short time Tootahah made his appearance, and we pressed him to recover our clothes; but neither ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... with the tip of his wing, and hurled him into the ocean. At the noise of his fall, the dying Powers sat up in their beds of pain; and stealthily advancing with furtive tread, the royal spiders made partition of Europe, and the purple of Caesar became the motley of Harlequin. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of the forces Hodder had summoned was visibly apparent on that first Sunday after what many had called his apostasy. Instead of the orderly, sprucely-dressed groups of people which were wont to linger in greetings before the doors of St. John's, a motley crowd thronged the pavement and streamed into the church, pressing up the aisles and invading the sacred precincts where decorous parishioners had for so many years knelt in comfort and seclusion. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fellows and the State. His career thus far had prepared him for the highest service. Born and brought up amid what our society classifiers, with their sure democratic instincts, loved to call the "aristocratic" circle in New York, his three years in the Assembly at Albany introduced him to the motley group of Representatives of high and low, bank presidents and farmers, blacklegs and philanthropists, who gathered there to make the laws for New York State. There he displayed the preference, characteristic of him through life, of choosing his ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... yes, only a song, That the Spirit said, 'Sing to-night; Thy voice is thy Master's by purchased right.' But you thought, ''Mid this motley throng, I care not to sing of the City of God'; And the heart that your words might have reached grew cold— You were out of ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... A motley crew they were. The boys had their trousers rolled above their knees, and some of the girls took off their shoes and stockings and waded about in the wet, sedgy grass. There was a little dock where the boats were tied; and soon two of them were loosened and filled up ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... fair and our station on the parapets at Grotta-Ferrata. Opposite us is a penthouse, (where nobody peaks and pines,) whose jutting fraschi-covered eaves and posts are adorned with gay draperies; and under the shadow of this is seated a motley set of peasants at their lunch and dinner. Smoking plates come in and out of the dark hole of a door that opens into kitchen and cellar, and the camerieri cry constantly, "Vengo subito" "Eccomi qua"—whether ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the busy tread of active feet, and the motley group were all on board, and many sorrowing friends stood upon the shore, breathing a tearful farewell, to the dear ones ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... had seen a sullen lowering fellow, with cropped head, ironed-legs, and the motley garments of disgrace, driven forth at early morning with his gang of bad compeers; a slave, toiling till night-fall in piling cannon-balls, and chipping off the rust with heavy hammers; a sentinel stood near with a loaded musket; they might not speak to each other, that ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... my theme; I go out of my way; but 'tis rather by licence than oversight; my fancies follow one another, but sometimes at a great distance, and look towards one another, but 'tis with an oblique glance. I have read a dialogue of Plato,—[The Phaedrus.]—of the like motley and fantastic composition, the beginning about love, and all the rest to the end about rhetoric; they fear not these variations, and have a marvellous grace in letting themselves be carried away at the pleasure of the wind, or at least to seem as if they were. The titles of my chapters ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... presence of one other Englishman, the young British subaltern, with the sage intrepidity of ripest experience, hastily summoned the chiefs of the Derajat and Bannu districts to his aid, and assembled their motley followings under his banner. He sent messengers to the friendly chief of Bhawulpore, and called on him to join in the crusade against Mooltan. Then after much feinting and fencing, and greatly assisted by the stout Van Cortlandt, Edwardes threw his army across the Indus, ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... sea-garments we mariners were a motley crew, and motley was the cue of our reception. Exclamations of wonder at our strangeness gave way to laughter. The ki-sang invaded us, dragging us about, making prisoners of us, two or three of them to one of us, leading us about like go many dancing boars and putting us through our antics. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... two companies of foot with a squad of cavalry, close on two hundred men in all, were drawn up as a guard of honour. Hardy and well set up most of them looked, giving the impression of thoroughly serviceable human material, in spite of a manifestly defective drill and the motley appearance of dress ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... a crowder to the Mermaid Inn, One dark May night, Fiddling a tune that quelled our motley din, With quaint delight, It haunts me yet, as old lost airs will do, A phantom strain: Look for me once, lest I should look for ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... gratified at thinking over the most triumphant divisions; and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view, about which all of us must some day or other be speculating. O brother wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear friends and companions, is my amiable object—to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of conversation, but meaneth to sputter and prate anything without judgment or wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, or incline his attention to such motley ragged discourse; that without nauseating he scarce should endure to observe men lavishing time, and squandering their breath so frivolously. 'Tis an affront to good company to pester it with ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... out of a vicious constitution of government and religion. Almost every accession to the throne was contested by numerous competitors of the same family; and a succession of sovereigns, wearing on their brows but the semblance of a crown, came and departed, like the shadows of Macbeth. The motley tribes of Asiatics, of whom the Spanish Arabian population was composed, regarded each other with ill-disguised jealousy. The lawless predatory habits, which no discipline could effectually control in an Arab, made them ever ready for revolt. The Moslem states, thus reduced in size and crippled ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them presses a wild, motley throng— Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes, Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Celt, and Slav, Flying the old world's poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those, tiger passions, here to stretch ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... hung over his defenceless head!—too busy for the gad-fly life of the clubs—a strong, lonely swimmer in the tide of New York life, he was as yet a comparative stranger to Folly and her motley crew of merry wantons ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... applied to designate the enclosure adjacent to a cathedral, already evinced tokens of the fatal scene which was that day to be acted. The soldiers of the City Guard were on their posts, now enduring, and now rudely repelling with the butts of their muskets, the motley crew who thrust each other forward, to catch a glance at the unfortunate object of trial, as she should pass from the adjacent prison to the Court in which her fate was to be determined. All must have occasionally observed, with disgust, the apathy with which the vulgar ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... otherwise. To learn of the prodigious industry of the youthful Mill, the perseverance of Darwin, the heroic struggle of Scott, the gentleness of Stevenson, the modesty of Browning, the lifelong consecration of Motley,—is not the leaven of inspiration made of ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... in motley row, Invite us to the task— Gay Horace, stately Cicero; Yet there's one verb, when once we know, No higher skill we ask: This ranks all other lore above— We've learned ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... presents a gay picture framed in a quadrangle of equipages. It is sometimes difficult, even by charging large admission-fees, to keep the number of spectators within convenient limits. Notwithstanding the motley assemblage which a match always attracts, so unobjectionable are the associations of the cricket-field that clergymen do not feel it unbecoming to participate in the diversion, either as players, umpires ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... see any three men tackle this crowd, that's what!" he went on to remark, as he swept his eye proudly over the motley array of weapons; for even Allan had armed himself, having a stout stick, with which he doubtless felt able to render a good account of himself ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... began, looking down academically upon the motley crowd as though doubting the aptitude of his salutation. "Fellow-citizens," he corrected, "the phenomenon we have just witnessed is, to the lay mind, inexplicable. To me—and to my honorable colleagues (added as an ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... track upon the opening afternoon of the fair was beginning to assume colossal proportions—colossal, that is to say, for San Lorenzo. Beneath the grand stand, where the pools are always sold, the motley throng surged thickest. Jew and gentile, greaser and dude, tin-horn gamblers and tenderfeet, hayseeds and merchants, jostled each other good humouredly. In the pool box were two men. One —the auctioneer—a perfect specimen of the "sport"; ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... reveals how much and yet how very little divides the performers in the ring from the audience in the sixpenny seats. I wish I had space to quote a particularly fine passage—you will find it on pp. 72-74—in which Mrs. Woods describes the progress of these motley characters through Midland lanes on a fresh spring morning; the shambling white horses with their red collars, the painted vans, the cages "where bears paced uneasily and strange birds thrust uncouth heads out into the sunshine," the two elephants and the camel padding through the dust ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... arrived. They constituted a motley, good-humoured gathering in all shades. One, John Smith, a genial hybrid, commanded them, and presently a great shout arose, when it transpired that he had secured choice of innings. The Doctor said, in ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... intensely interested, for all was new and strange. She had a keen, quick eye for character, and a human interest in humanity, even though those around her did not belong to her "set." Therefore it was with appreciative eyes that she watched the motley groups of her fellow-passengers waving handkerchiefs and exchanging farewells with equally diversified groups ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... grizzled warrior had taken his seat on his cross-legged, round-backed chair, and a boy of some twelve years old stood before him, in a sullen attitude, one foot over the other, and his shoulder held fast by a squire, while the motley crowd of retainers ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... quite so pretty, perhaps, as in ordinary attire, but she looked delightfully trim and business-like, and her young brothers and sisters were proud of her and made favourable comparisons between her and the other lady riders assembled in the square. It was a picturesque sight to see the motley collection of vehicles drawn up by the kerbstones, the riders pacing to and fro, greeting fresh arrivals, who kept trotting in from every direction, the pink coats of the men making welcome touches of colour, ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... History and Antiquities of Bristol, by William Barrett:" Bristol, 1789, quarto; a Work which Mr. Park described as " a motley compound ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... aware of her unsteadiness; anger and fear and relief in quick succession had left her rather weak. Once through the motley crowd of loungers, she saw an old gray stage-coach and four lean horses. A grizzled, sunburned man sat on the driver's seat, whip and reins in hand. Beside him was a younger man with rifle across his knees. Another man, young, ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... contemplated the motley mass of humanity that presented itself with such eagerness for the attainment of so degrading an office; and as he listened to their vulgar boastings and brutal language, he blushed to think that ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... troops, had resisted all her endeavours to raise such a body; Paget had laboured loyally for a fortnight, and at the end he assured the queen on his knees that he had not been allowed to enlist a man.[219] Divided on all other points, the motley group of ministers agreed to keep Mary powerless; with the exception of Gardiner and Paget, they were all, perhaps, unwilling to check too soon a demonstration which, kept within bounds, might prove the justice of their ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... of the launch, with a touch of his forelock, handed over the discharge notes and certificates of such of the motley group that came up the side that had these documents, which the second lieutenant, a knowing fellow, who was in charge of our shipping office that morning, had pocketed when he engaged the men; doing this as a sort of preventative ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and the annoyance of passengers, who were fain to make their way, as they best could, among carts, baskets, barrows, trucks, casks, bulks, and benches, and to jostle with porters, hucksters, waggoners, and a motley crowd of buyers, sellers, pick-pockets, vagrants, and idlers. The air was perfumed with the stench of rotten leaves and faded fruit; the refuse of the butchers' stalls, and offal and garbage of a hundred kinds. It was indispensable to most public conveniences in ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... princely fortune. The flower garden and lawn comprised fifteen acres, and the subdivisions were formed entirely by hedges, save that portion of the park surrounded by a tall iron railing, where congregated a motley menagerie of deer, bison, a Lapland reindeer, a Peruvian llama, some Cashmere goats, a chamois, wounded and caught on the Jungfrau, and a large white cow from Ava. This part of the inclosure was thickly studded with large oaks, groups of beech and elm, and a few enormous cedars which would not ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... fire and from flaring pine-knots played fitfully over the motley throng, now bringing out in strong relief some one face or figure, then plunging it into profoundest shadow. It burnished the high forehead and scalp lock of the Indian, and made to gleam intensely the gold earring in the ear of the mulatto. The scarlet cloth wound ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... country to the village of San Antonio del Norte, finely situated on a grassy plain, of considerable extent, a dependency of the valley of the Goascoran. We had intended stopping here for the night; but the cabildo was already filled with a motley crowd of arrieros and others on their way to San Miguel. A tall mestizo, covered with ulcers, sat in the doorway, and two or three culprits extended their claw-like hands towards us through the bars of their cage and invoked alms in the name of the Virgin ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... arrived at Quebec. In the colony of New York Sir William Johnson, the rough and cheery Irishman, much loved of the Iroquois, was gathering forces to attack Canada. Early in July, 1755, Johnson had more than three thousand provincial troops at Albany, a motley horde of embattled farmers, most of them with no uniforms, dressed in their own homespun, carrying their own muskets, electing their own officers, and altogether, from the strict soldier's point of view, a rabble rather than an army. To meet this force and destroy it if he ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... undertaking, and exposed himself to ridicule: but now, when he was going to commence the war a second time, taught by experience he concentrated his powers in a real and effectual preparation. Rejecting those motley numbers and many-tongued threats of the barbarians, and arms ornamented with gold and precious stones, which he considered to be the spoils of the victors, and to give no strength to those who possess them, he set about having Roman swords made, and heavy shields ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley. Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra's head, who pretend to clear the law ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... which place I was myself going. We stopped at Tarifa in order to perform quarantine, which, however, turned out a mere farce, as we were all permitted to come on shore; the master of the felouk having bribed the port captain with a few fowls. We formed a motley group. A rich Moor and his son, a child, with their Jewish servant Yusouf, and myself with my own man Hayim Ben Attar, a Jew. After passing through the gate, the Moors and their domestics were conducted by the master to the house of one of his acquaintance, where he intended ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... down, and Brother Shoveller conducted his young companions between the overhanging houses, with stalls between serving as shops, till they reached the open space round the Market Cross, on the steps of which women sat with baskets of eggs, butter, and poultry, raised above the motley throng of cattle and sheep, with their dogs and drivers, the various cries of man and beast forming an incongruous accompaniment to the bells of the churches that surrounded ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Sonnets as a record of his personal feeling, his new profession as an actor stirred in him only the bitterness of self-contempt. He chides with Fortune "that did not better for my life provide than public means that public manners breed"; he writhes at the thought that he has "made himself a motley to the view" of the gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars. "Thence comes it," he adds, "that my name receives a brand, and almost thence my nature is subdued to that it works in." But the application of the words is a more than doubtful one. In spite of petty squabbles ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... at that moment it happened that the Court Tailor came into the room to measure the King for a new mantle of ermine. Forthwith the grinning Jester began shrieking with laughter, so that the bells upon his motley cap ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... a motley crowd that I was the means of bringing to your table," said Stanton, with an oath; "and I've no doubt you have wished us all ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... fight the enemy, and proceed up the lake; but, having no one to command the 'Niagara,' and only one commissioned lieutenant and two acting lieutenants, whatever my wishes may be, going out is out of the question. The men that came by Mr. Champlin are a motley set—blacks, soldiers, and boys. I cannot think you saw them after they were selected. I am, however, pleased to see any thing in ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... landing lay beneath his glance, a vivid exposition of the vast, half-tamed valley's bounty, spoils, and promise; of its motley human life, scarcely yet to be called society, so lately and rudely transplanted from overseas; so bareboned, so valiantly preserved, so young yet already so titanic; so self-reliant, opinionated, and uncouth; so strenuous and materialistic ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... of glasses on tables, heralding all too plainly the hypocrisy of the landlord, and possibly that of the city fathers also. Tom knew what company was gathered there: gamblers, truckmen, drunken farmers, men from the river steamers making riot while their boats lay at the wharf, with a motley gathering of good-for-nothings of the back-alleys, and tippling clerks from the Main Street stores. There came loud cries for a song, and, in answer, the voice of Crailey rose over the general din, somewhat hoarse, and never so musical when he sang as when he spoke, yet so touching ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... the smoke was explained. With the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken to Pelly, there was no longer any need for the smoke wreath to linger in his wake; and Rasmunsen, crouching over lonely fire, saw a motley string of sleds go by. First came the courier and the half-breed who had hauled him out from Bennett; then mail-carriers for Circle City, two sleds of them, and a mixed following of ingoing Klondikers. Dogs and men were fresh and fat, while Rasmunsen and ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... charming egotism took literary America by storm; the "Professor" and the "Poet at the Breakfast-Table" followed in after years, and remain his most widely popular works; "Elsie Venner," a novel dealing with the problem of heredity, "The Guardian Angel," "Songs of Many Seasons," "Memoirs of Motley and of Emerson," are some of his many works, all of which have the impress of his bright, engaging ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... hung with flags and cedar boughs, and the benches down the long uncovered tables were crowded. The men's attire was motley—broadcloth and duck; white shirts, starched or limp, and blue ones; shoes with the creeper-spikes filed down, and long boots to the knees. There were women present also, and they wore anything from light print, put together for the occasion, to ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... others were well-knit studies of evil, with health still hanging on, more or less, and much deviltry to do. A blue blouse, or a bit of khaki; British puttees and a flare of crimson; Russian boots and a glimpse of sodden gray; or an American campaign-hat crowning a motley of many services,—explained that the soldiers of the world found Equatoria desirable in not a few cases for finishing enlistments. It was quite as evident, too, that the criminal riff-raff of this ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... equipped in the way of weapons, although it is safe to say that each of us had a firearm of some sort; but it seemed to give Sergeant Corney the fidgets to see us carrying such a motley collection of guns, and he insisted on making a quantity of wooden muskets to be used in the drill, to the end that we might present a more soldierly appearance when lined up ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... an obligation I didn't feel myself able to return,' said Miss Motley, the English governess, who had spent her holidays amidst the rank and fashion of Margate. 'When I go to the sea-side with my sister and her family, I pay my own expenses, and I feel I've a ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... "Fret not thyself because of evil-doers" (Psa. 37:1) "Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased" (Psa. 49:16). But go thou into the sanctuary of thy God, read His Word, and understand the end of these men-(Mason). Often, as the motley reflexes of my experience move in long processions of manifold groups before me, the distinguished and world-honoured company of Christian mammonists appear to the eye of my imagination as a drove of camels heavily laden, yet all at full speed; and each in the confident expectation ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... assails, And gain and grandeur load the tainted gales: Few know the toiling statesman's fear or care, Th' insidious rival, and the gaping heir. [h]Once more, Democritus, arise on earth, With cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth, See motley life in modern trappings dress'd, And feed with varied fools th' eternal jest: Thou, who could'st laugh where want enchain'd caprice, Toil crush'd conceit, and man was of a piece; Where wealth, unlov'd, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... Jorian! Let not thy love of mirth do thee any injury. For thou art a good comrade, and fools were ever apt to divert thee too much. I have seen thee at this before—that time we went to Wilna, and the fellow in motley gave thee griping spasms with ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... far the most interesting portion of the exercises had been concealed from view. The butterflies, while naturally the most conspicuous element, were now seen to be in a small minority among the insect gathering, the bramble leaves being peopled with a most motley and democratic assemblage of insects. Class distinctions were apparently forgotten in the common enthusiasm; the plebeian bluebottle and blowfly now consorted with Aphrodite and sipped at the same drop. Many a leaf was begemmed with the blue bodies ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... genealogical investigation, the name Van Dyke might have recalled to this descendant of many hidalgos that foggy battle-field in the Netherlands on which her ancestor and his took pot-shots at each other with the primitive cross-bow. Motley records that on that day far-gone Holland laid low the Spaniard. The present historian is forced to chronicle the final triumph of Spain. The only bow used in this last encounter was in the hands of a mythological person whose existence is doubted only ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... portal there was a constant ingress and egress of men—a motley crowd—business men, politicians, professionals and men perhaps of shady character, for a great hotel cannot discriminate, and hundreds pass in and out who are not guests and have no connection with ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... when the business of the day is usually transacted. Soon I discovered the cause. The militia of the place were out on parade. Preceded by a colored band, playing national airs—in doleful keeping with the occasion—and followed by a motley collection of negroes of all sexes and ages, the company was entering the principal thoroughfare. As it passed me, I could judge of the prowess of the redoubtable captain, who, according to Pompey, will hang the President "so ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... 1524 first ten new dialogues, afterwards four, and again six, were added to the Formulae, and at last in 1526 the title was changed to Familiarium colloquiorum opus. It remained dedicated to the boy Froben and went on growing with each new edition: a rich and motley collection of dialogues, each a masterpiece of literary form, well-knit, spontaneous, convincing, unsurpassed in lightness, vivacity and fluent Latin; each one a finished one-act play. From that year on, the stream of editions and translations ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... middle of the last century not only in Boston and Cambridge, but in Paris, Rome, Florence, and other European cities. He was descended from one of the oldest and wealthiest families of Boston, and graduated from Harvard in 1831, together with Wendell Phillips and George Lothrop Motley. He was not distinguished in college for his scholarship, but rather as a wit, a bon vivant, and a good fellow. Yet his companions looked upon him as a strong character and much above the average in intellect. After taking his degree of Bachelor of Arts he went ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... him down with the embalmed dead, and felt within their dust the expectation of another life, mingled with cold and suffocating doubts—the children born of long delay. He has walked the ways of mighty Rome, has seen the great Caesar with his legions in the field, has stood with vast and motley throngs and watched the triumphs given to victorious men, followed by uncrowned kings, the captured hosts and all the spoils of ruthless war. He has heard the shout that shook the Coliseum's roofless walls ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... face, sullen as a dean's, Buck Mulligan came forward, then blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... unimpassioned, and his knowledge made him profound. He was a great historical authority, like Ranke, but was more admired fifty years ago than he is at the present day, when dramatic writings like those of Motley and Froude have spoiled ordinary readers for profundity allied with dulness. He resembles Hallam more than Macaulay. But it is life rather than learning which gives immortality to historians. It is the life and the individuality of Gibbon which preserve his fame and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... of the Town Guard mustered—Kaffirs, Parsees, Jews, Arabians, Englishmen, Dutchmen, nearly every sort and nationality of men—and when the Mayor read an address expressing in the conventional terms of such compliments the emotions of this motley crowd, one asked oneself what it was that had held these very ordinary-looking people to so heroic an intention. Remember that the defence of Mafeking had been one big bluff, that there was nothing to prevent the Boers, with determination and ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... large seraglios of native women. Captain Woodes Rogers, who touched at Madagascar for slaves, sixteen years after Every's time, described those he met as having been on the islands above twenty-five years, with a motley crowd of ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... mother, he could do this, and sin not. Solemn indeed, my dear children, and beautiful to behold, must have been that picture,—that little fort, so far away in the heart of the lonely wilderness, with its motley throng of painted Indians and leather-clad backwoodsmen gathered round their young commander, as, morning and evening, he kneeled in prayer before the Giver of all good, beseeching aid and protection, ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... on the morning of Neykia's wedding, a motley mass of natives clothed in many colours crowded about the little church, which, for lack of space, they could not enter. Presently the crowd surged back from the door and formed on either side of the path, leaving an opening down the centre. A tall half-breed with a shock of wavy black hair ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—John Lothrop Motley. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... these had passed, bearing upon his brow A threefold crown; his countenance was calm. His eye severe and cold; but his right hand Was charged with bloody coin, and he did gnaw By fits, with secret smiles, a human heart 275 Concealed beneath his robe; and motley shapes, A multitudinous throng, around him knelt. With bosoms bare, and bowed heads, and false looks Of true submission, as the sphere rolled by. Brooking no eye to witness their foul shame, 280 Which human hearts must feel, while human tongues Tremble ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... very interesting place, nor was there much to be seen; but she took a lazy, languid interest in the sight which met her eyes. There were the two carriages. The horses were being led to water. Around the carriages was a motley crowd, composed of the poor, the maimed, the halt, the blind, forming that realm of beggars which from immemorial ages has flourished in Italy. With these was intermingled a crowd of ducks, geese, goats, pigs, and ill-looking, ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... the commencement of the performances, with every species of mortal, except woman. Women were exceedingly rare creatures at that time—the meetings of all sorts were composed almost entirely of men, in their varied and motley garbs. ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... justice; the man who has elected to try life with another mate; the wandering hobo who means to come back some sweet day but not now; the cowardly pregnancy deserter; the low-grade irresponsible—a motley crew. They are grouped together here for convenience, since they constitute those with whom coercive measures have most ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... party that covets the experience of the camp comes down to primitive conditions of dress and equipment. There are guides and porters to carry the blankets for beds, the raw provisions, and the camp equipage; and the motley party of the temporarily decivilized files into the woods, and begins, perhaps by a road, perhaps on a trail, its exhilarating and weary march. The exhilaration arises partly from the casting aside of restraint, partly from the adventure of exploration; and the weariness, from ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... TRAULUS, of amphibious breed, Motley fruit of mongrel seed; By the dam from lordlings sprung. By the sire exhaled from dung: Think on every vice in both, Look on him, and see their growth. View him on the mother's side,[2] Fill'd with falsehood, spleen, and pride; Positive and overbearing, Changing still, and still adhering; ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... Austen, Francis Motley: son of Francis Austen (ii); acquires Kippington property, 3-4; believed to have had Jane ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... resting on the rail of the gangway, and when presently it was raised to the side of the steamer, he still kept his position, so that he could instantly catch sight of his father as he passed down. I stood close behind him, and watched the motley procession of passengers; most of them had the dull colourless skin which bespeaks long residence in India, and a particularly yellow and peevish-looking old man was grumbling loudly as he slowly made his way down ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... 'tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to thy view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... charity!' Lastly, the members of a brotherhood for burying the dead: hideously masked, and attired in shabby black robes, white at the skirts, with the splashes of many muddy winters: escorted by a dirty priest, and a congenial cross-bearer: come hurrying past. Surrounded by this motley concourse, we move out of Fondi: bad bright eyes glaring at us, out of the darkness of every crazy tenement, like glistening fragments ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... through the motley rout, That little Jackdaw kept hopping about; Here and there like a dog in a fair, Over comfits and cakes, and dishes and plates, Cowl and cope, and rochet and pall, Mitre and crosier! he hopp'd upon all! With saucy air, he perch'd on the chair Where in state, the great Lord Cardinal ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... was Sunday, the ranchmen and a county officer proceeded toward the scene of the discovery. The shearers heard of the affair, and paused in the arrangement of a horse-race. They went in a body to the store and purchased candles, and then the motley cavalry coursed over the prairie after the rest. They lifted Juan Lucio from the river and bore him to a live-oak tree, where the coroner and his jurymen debated his situation. They inclined to think that he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... out, and with the aid of sjamboks soon quelled the disturbance and brought their motley pack into subjection, the animals having made a general dash at the intruders, when the latter arrived within some fifty yards of the wagon, while Leo, the lion cub, excited by the disturbance, had broken ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... invocation that we might be kept in safety. Poling and rowing through a maze of junks, our little floating caravan, with the two magnates on board, and their picul of rice, their curry and their sugar, and slenderest outfits, bowled along under plain sail, the fore-deck packed with a motley team of somewhat dirty and ill-fed trackers, who whistled and halloed the peculiar hallo of the Upper Yangtze for ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... trees, and waving banners appeared as a procession approached, headed by the pope in his vestments, and surrounded by the village dignitaries, venerable, grey-bearded patriarchs." A wide space in the procession was left for "a strange and motley band of gnomes and sprites, fairies and wood-nymphs," who, as the peasants believed, had been caught by the holy singing and the sacred sign on the waving banner. The chanting still went on as the crowd formed a circle around the glittering cross, ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... his defenceless head!—too busy for the gad-fly life of the clubs—a strong, lonely swimmer in the tide of New York life, he was as yet a comparative stranger to Folly and her motley crew of merry wantons in ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... both in years and in folly. What are you doing in a monk's robe? Where is your motley, ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... roamed the grassy paths and flower-strewn ways of Wimbledon, is wrapping the heavy folds of her dew-moistened mantle around her, and stealing silently away. Yet for a moment let her turn a parting glance toward the motley groups which have companioned her midnight rambles, and are seen passing in the distance with their eyes fixed steadily ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... completely European. The likeness is sustained by carriages of every description, filled with smartly dressed women, driving through all the streets—a sight never seen at Cairo, for the generality of the streets are scarcely wide enough for the passage of donkeys. But the population is still motley and Asiatic. Turbans, caps, and the scarlet fez, loose gowns, and embroidered trousers, make the streets picturesque. On the other hand, crowds of Europeans, tourists, merchants, and tailors, are to be seen mingling ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... have a still better opportunity of study. He will then find not only representatives of the Finnish and Tartar races, but also Armenians, Circassians, Persians, Bokhariots, and other Orientals—a motley and picturesque but decidedly ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... condemned I could not but witness, with sympathy, the punishment reserved for translators. The translators of Virgil, in particular, were a vast and motley assemblage of most respectable men. Bishops were there, from Gawain Douglas downwards; Judges, in their ermine; professors, clergymen, civil servants, writhing in all the tortures that the blank verse, the anapaestic measure, the metre of the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' the ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... fighting. I directed, therefore, immediately on landing that all the vehicles and draft animals, whether horses, mules, or oxen, in the vicinity should be collected and loaded to their capacity with ammunition. Quite a train was collected during the 30th, and a motley train it was. In it could be found fine carriages, loaded nearly to the top with boxes of cartridges that had been pitched in promiscuously, drawn by mules with plough, harness, straw collars, rope-lines, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... waltzers. It is well known, that the waltz is a dance, above all others, requiring grace and youth, and activity in those who perform it. Nothing, therefore, to a stranger, can be more entertaining, than the sight of those motley and aged couples, who, with a desperate resolution, stand up to bid defiance to the warnings of nature; and who, after they have first swallowed a tumbler of punch, (which is their constant practice,) ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... position reversed, when he moralizes angrily to have his angry use of the scourge condoned. Nevertheless, he fills a serviceable place; and certainly he is not happy in his business. Colney suffered as heavily as he struck. If he had been no more than a mime in the motley of satire, he would have sucked compensation from the acid of his phrases, for the failure to prick and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... king o' the sea!" bawled the fellow through the horn; and then the motley crowd yelled in chorus, some blowing huge conch-shells, and all making a most ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... recognized me. I think his eyesight was getting bad. His coat had taken on a few more faded shades of color, the twine strings were more frayed and ragged, the last remaining button—the button of yellow horn—was gone. A motley descendant of ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... three o'clock wit, as some one has called it, the man who was always awake; Lowell, with his rich culture and his passionate loyalty to all that was best in life and art; and the historians of the country, Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, and Francis Parkman, with his splendid record of patient and tireless energy. And then we have the New England writers of the second generation in Edmund Clarence Stedman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... dreaming of immortality. We know less about his early years in London, where there were wider and better opportunities of gaining an insight into "all seemly and generous arts and affairs." London was a great centre of traffic, a motley crowd of adventurers and traders even in those days, and the boy Milton must often have wandered down to the river below London Bridge to see the ships come in. His poems are singularly full of figures drawn from ships and shipping, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... gathered there from the distant parts of the empire, lived each in the quarter nearest to its respective province. They all continued to wear their peculiar national costume, so that it was easy to determine their origin; and the same order and system of arrangement prevailed in the motley population of the capital, as in the great provinces of the empire. The capital, in fact, was a ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... to the fair and our station on the parapets at Grotta-Ferrata. Opposite us is a penthouse, (where nobody peaks and pines,) whose jutting fraschi-covered eaves and posts are adorned with gay draperies; and under the shadow of this is seated a motley set of peasants at their lunch and dinner. Smoking plates come in and out of the dark hole of a door that opens into kitchen and cellar, and the camerieri cry constantly, "Vengo subito" "Eccomi ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... caught very satisfactory glimpses of Arcadian life among the Cockneys there, hardly beyond the scope of Bow-Bells, picnicking in the grass, uncouthly gambolling on the broad slopes, or straying in motley groups or by single pairs of love-making youths and maidens, along the sun-streaked avenues. Even the omnipresent policemen or park-keepers could not disturb the beatific impression on my mind. One feature, at all events, of the Golden Age was to be seen in the herds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... up to the sandy landing-beach, I looked at the motley array of paddlers, and my mind went back hundreds of years to the first Spanish crew which landed here, and I wondered whether these pirates of early days had any fewer sins to their credit than ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... comparison to that of private interests, which so crossed each other and in so many different ways, which turned with such mobility, that, in the ignorance which prevailed of the secret motives of the principal actors in that drama so vivid, motley, and turbulent, nothing could be predicated of what they would do, and a looker-on might have been disposed at times to have pronounced them as insensates, who were rather their own enemies than ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... narrative of Alexander. Books about that hero were easy to come by long before the invention of printing, though Alexander would have had difficulty in recognising his identity under the strange mediaeval motley in which his namesake wandered over the land. No single man, with the possible exception of Charlemagne, was so much written about or played so brilliantly the part of a hero to the Middle Ages and after.[18] The simplicity ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... point the finger at certain individual spectators, was essential to this species of poetry. As Tragedy delights in harmonious unity, Comedy flourishes in a chaotic exuberance; it seeks out the most motley contrasts, and the unceasing play of cross purposes. It works up, therefore, the most singular, unheard-of, and even impossible incidents, with allusions to the well-known and special circumstances of the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... spread of the monstrous story of the conspiracy of Dr. Fian. Dr. Fian was nothing less than a Scottish Dr. Faustus. He was a schoolmaster by profession. After a dissolute youth he was said to have given soul to the Devil. According to the story he gathered around him a motley crowd, Catholic women of rank, "wise women," and humble peasant people; but it was a crew ready for evil enterprise. It is not very clear why they were supposed to have attacked the king; perhaps because of his well known piety, perhaps because he was a Protestant. In any case they set ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... In the Park, the motley hour of mid-afternoon, when foreigners and other pathetic folk drive, thinking themselves to be in fashion, had passed; the right, the proper, hour had come, was nearly gone, before Soames and Irene seated themselves under the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... complainingly, the drivers uttered brief shouts. The hats of men and women, various kinds of furs, the liveries of coachmen, the horses puffing steam, covered here and there with colored nets, formed a motley, changing line, moving forward with a rattle and an outcry along the white snow, in an atmosphere glittering ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... with regard to the identity of this Hobab. Probably he was a man of about the same age as Moses, his brother- in-law, and a son of Jethro, a wily Kenite, a Bedouin Arab. Moses begs him to join himself to his motley company, and to be to him in the wilderness 'instead of eyes.' What did Moses want a man for, when he had the cloud? What do we want common-sense for, when we have God's Spirit? What do we want experience and counsel for, when we have divine guidance ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... mob have thronged the sight to greet, And motley figures throng the spacious street; Majestical and calm through all they stride, Wearing the blanket with a monarch's pride; The gazers stare and shrug, but can't deny Their noble forms and blameless ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... They were found to be but a momentary protection, for I think in the first mile the last umbrella went overboard, all having their covers burnt off from the frames, when a general melee took place among the deck passengers, each whipping his neighbor to put out the fire. They presented a very motley appearance on arriving at the first station. Then rails were secured and lashed between the trucks, taking the slack out of the coupling chains, thereby affording us a more steady run to the top of the inclined ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... of omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own window—which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like people in some fairyland; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for the humour of the thing, have put on motley for once, and are able to throw a world of serious innuendo into their burlesque looks, with a sort of comedy which shall be but tragedy seen from the other side. He brought his sketch to our house to-day, and I was present when my father questioned ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... a curious study for a thoughtful observer, this motley crowd of human beings sinking all differences of race, creed, and habits in the common purpose to move Westward—to the mountain fastnesses, the sage-brush deserts, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... violent emotion, was a young man, dressed in a mean and tattered garb, his face begrimed corresponding with that of the motley crew by which he was surrounded. He was a perfect stranger to the others present, and had not participated in their previous conversation, nor been personally addressed ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... Mr. Wells to suggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are to embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is a man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the motley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which he proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of necessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities and differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else (and I think these ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the stage below; Noteth well the players as they quickly come and go; Queens and kings and maidens fair, motley fools and friars, Lords and ladies, stately dames, ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... motley for my lady's amusement," he was saying to her, "no new philosophies to spread out for my lady's inspection, no bright pictures to display for my lady's pleasure, and so I, like a poor poverty-stricken minstrel whose harp has been broken, ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Into this motley but splendid assemblage Judge Merlin led his beautiful daughter. At first her entrance attracted no attention; but when one, and then another, noticed the dazzling new star of beauty that had so suddenly risen above their horizon, a ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... left Ali Masjid at the head of a motley procession that grew noisier and more confident every hour. Ismail still clung to his stirrup, but began to grow more lively and to have a good many orders to fling to ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... She had beneath Orlando's convoy strayed, Since rescued from the cave. When on the plain The damsel saw the motley troop arrayed, She asked Orlando what might be the train? "I know not," said the Count; and left the maid Upon the height, and hurried towards the plain. He marked Zerbino, and at the first sight A baron of ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... the next lid, scratched and worn, And within a motley store Of headless dolls, of schoolbooks torn, Birds and beasts that speak no more, Spoils brought home from the fairy ground Only trod by youthful feet, Dreams of a future never found, Memories of a past still sweet, Half-writ ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... is true I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new; Most true it is that I have look'd ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... ward I saw numbers of German wounded, most of them bearded; many there were who seemed weakly and undersized, and among them were many grey heads, a very motley company. These, the Colonel informed us, received precisely the same treatment as our own wounded, ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... inexhaustible quarry of humours, vanities, jealousies, whims, absurd enthusiasms, absurd mortifications. He was able, as he said, to sit at his ease in the side-scene and see himself jigging on the stage in motley or the tragic sock—see himself as a lover, and cry aloud in delight at the mad persistence of the fool he appeared; see himself directing the affairs of the nation, and be ready to die of laughing at himself for pretending to be serious, and at his countrymen for thinking ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... part of the business of the historian. To catch some dim historic figure, and give it life and color,—this power he had. And it was evidently this which gave him the praise of such men as Prescott and Bancroft and Motley. Washington had begun to loom vaguely and impersonally in the mind, a mere great man, when Irving with a touch turned him from cold bronze ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... here concerned to show is that the search for consistency and connection in the manifold impressions of the moment is a deeply rooted habit of the mind, and one which is retained in a measure during sleep. When, in this state, our minds are invaded by a motley crowd of unrelated images, there results a disagreeable sense of confusion; and this feeling acts as a motive to the attention to sift out those products of the dream-fancy which may be made to cohere. When once the foundations of a dream-action are laid, new images ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... cattle, but not equal; to some more, to others less. The King goes the round of these farms at will, and lives upon their produce. Any day you may see hosts of slaves bringing fruits of all sorts to the King, as he goes through the country with his motley following, all ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... M'Lean may be allowed, as embodying the descriptions often given by Dr Burton of the motley crew of competitors for the scholarships and bursaries dispensed by the university: "Gazing round the room, I noted that my competitors consisted of raw-boned red-haired Highlandmen, fresh from their ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... grand people there were employes of the mines of less note, clerks of the comerciantes, young farmers of the valley, gambucinos, vaqueros, ciboleros, and even "leperos" of the town, shrouded in their cheap serapes. A motley throng was the fandango. ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... inadequate dramaturgic equipment, and just as Johnson wrote essays because essay-writing was popular and advantageous in spite of his deficiency in the ease and lightness which the essay demands, so Brougham and Motley and Froude adventured themselves in fiction. We may even doubt whether George Eliot was a born story-teller and whether she would not have been more successful in some other epoch when some other literary ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... nationality, the revolution has an extraordinary importance, since it engendered the separation of the Low Countries into two distinct nationalities, which were later to be known as Belgian and Dutch. Most English readers who remember their Motley, or any of the less valuable writings he inspired, are under the impression that if the Belgians did not adopt the same attitude as the Dutch all through the struggle against Spain, it was either because they were blinded by their religious ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... of sun falls on a certain spot of distant shrubbery or woodland, and we see it brighten with many hues, standing forth prominently from the dimness around it. The sunlight gradually spreads, and the whole sombre scene is changed to a motley picture,—the sun bringing out many shades of color, and converting its gloom to an almost laughing cheerfulness. At such times I almost doubt whether the foliage has lost any of its brilliancy. But the clouds intercept the sun again, and lo! old Autumn ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... 'person' was driving homeward very sad and ill at ease. She was vexed that she had not done better, and yet she was wounded by Robert's enjoyment. The Puritan in her blood was all aflame. As she sat looking into the motley lamplit night, she could have 'testified' like any ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... scanned the little wharf, where a motley collection of men were gathered, with a quick-beating heart. Which of them could be Uncle Richard? Would he give him a kind welcome? The boy's spirits began to rise somewhat under the influence of ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... Well: 'tis a motley assemblage this! The world is checkered here not less than in the noisy and elegant capital; and man's peculiarities, man's excellencies, and man's defects, follow him even into the heart of these ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... with matchless art and whim, He gave the power of speech to every limb; Tho' mask'd and mute, conveyed his quick intent, And told in frolic gestures what he meant: But now the motley coat and sword of wood Require a tongue to make ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the storm break, and with her shuttle the enraged goddess smote the web of Arachne, and the fair pictures were rent into motley rags and ribbons. Furiously, too, with her shuttle of boxwood she smote Arachne. Before her rage, the nymphs fled back to their golden river and to the vineyards of Tymolus, and the women of Colophon in blind terror rushed ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... comfortable. After the fatigue of his journey, Ben enjoyed a good supper and a comfortable bed. The evening, however, he spent in the public room of the inn, where he had a chance to listen to the conversation of a motley crowd, some of them native and residents, others strangers who had been drawn to Centerville by the ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... week again—the mad blaspheming week of revelry and devilry. The streets were rainbow with motley wear and thunderous with the roar and laughter of the crowd, recruited by a vast inflow of strangers; from the windows and roofs, black with heads, frolicsome hands threw honey, dirty water, rotten eggs, and even boiling oil upon the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... it—his name is Jacques: Whistler is a fool. The fools were the wisest men at court. Shakespeare, who dearly loved a fool, belonging to the breed himself, placed his wisest sayings into the mouths of men who wore the motley. When he adorned a man with cap and bells, it was as though he had given bonds for both that man's ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... China Coast steamer marched up Manila Bay, Trask stood under the bridge on the skimpy "promenade deck" and waited impatiently for the doctor's boat to come alongside. He was the only white passenger among a motley lot of Chinese merchants and half-castes of varied hues, and he was glad the passage was ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... arranged every thing in my grandmother's house as neatly as possible. I put white quilts on the beds, and decorated some of the rooms with flowers. When all was arranged, I sat down at the window to watch. Far as my eye could reach, it rested on a motley crowd of soldiers. Drums and fifes were discoursing martial music. The men were divided into companies of sixteen, each headed by a captain. Orders were given, and the wild scouts rushed in every direction, wherever a colored ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... went round, "Who is he?" And when, in some inscrutable way, the truth leaked out, the poor people regarded him with a kind of awe. Some, indeed, criticised, and said he did not look much like a millionaire; but there were many in that motley crowd in whose hearts, during those few brief days on the ocean, "Cobbler" Horn made for himself a ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... Immediately in the rear of the post-chaises followed those who claimed relationship to the deceased; amongst whom Bertram fancied that he could distinguish plumes of feathers—and occasionally, as the inequalities of the ground threw the files into a looser array, a motley assemblage of colors and a glittering ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... intonation; some silently looking on, or listening. Two or three common looking fellows began to smoke their segars, but when it was suggested that this might incommode the ladies on the other side of the curtain, they with genuine politeness ceased directly. Through this motley and picturesque assemblage I have to make my way to my bed-room in a few minutes—I will take another look ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... what supplies they would need to last them until they should reach Georgetown, British Guiana, on the north coast of South America. This would be their first stop. Somehow the townspeople quickly guessed their identity, and they were followed from store to store as they shopped by a curious and motley throng of dark-skinned natives, among whom were noticed quite a few white children, presumably belonging to American employees ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... were younger and lighter of foot than we sober married folks, ran on before; so that when the blanket, that served the purpose of a door, was unfastened, we found a motley group of the dark skins and the pale faces reposing on the blankets and skins that were spread round ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... clean white Gloves: Some of Platonic, some of carnal Taste, Hoop'd, or un-hoop'd, ungarter'd, or unlac'd. Thus thick in Air the wing'd Creation play, When vernal Phoebus rouls the Light away, A motley race, half Insects and half Fowls, Loose-tail'd and dirty, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... Prussia and the Danubian States for the Czar. For the founder of the Continental System such a choice was natural; but, viewed from the standpoint of Continental politics, his treatment of Austria was a serious blunder. His frightful pressure on her motley lands endowed them with a solidity which they had never known before; and in less than four years, the conqueror had cause to regret having driven the Hapsburgs to desperation. It may even be questioned ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... with solemn thrill and stately movement through hours of wondrous preparation for an imposing function, through the splendid gravity of the function itself, accompanied by brilliant crowds collected and looking on in a fashionable church, and motley crowds collected to look on outside the edifice, the latter pushing and jostling each other and commenting in more or less respectful if excited undertones, but throughout devouring with awe-struck or envious eyes. Great people whom Emily had only known through the frequent mention ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... telescope conducts the mortal gaze to revel in the stars. Merman and mermaid, nereid and triton, were there, rejoicing in the sunbeams thus poured upon them through this subtle conduit of ocean, as do the motes of summer in her rays; but soon these disappeared, a motley crowd, confused and joyous, leaving the vision free to pierce the depths, glowing with golden light, in search ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... to describe minutely the appearance of the motley crowd, through which our adventurers elbowed their way, gazing curiously on the strange scene, which seemed to them more like a dream than reality, after their long sojourn in the solitudes of the forest. Processions headed by long-robed priests with flambeaux and ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... For a time that motley group of bandits stood in the light, as if intimidated by the great dignity of the house, by the mysterious prestige of the Casa whose interior, probably, none of them had ever seen before. They gazed about silently, as if surprised to ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... aspect of everything. Instead of the quiet, deserted, winding ways, you could hardly call them streets, everything seemed alive with a motley, moving throng. A long line of boats, and what one might call a caravan, seemed to have risen from the very earth, or been evolved from the wilderness. There were shouting and singing, white men turned to brown by exposure, Indians, half-breeds of varying shades, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... hindrance. At length a sudden frenzy seized them to march upon (p. 171) Rome. Moncada had shown them the way, and on 6th May, 1527, the Holy City was taken by storm. Bourbon was killed at the first assault; and the richest city in Christendom was given over to a motley, leaderless horde of German, Spanish and Italian soldiery. The Pope again fled to the castle of St. Angelo; and for weeks Rome endured an orgy of sacrilege, blasphemy, robbery, murder and lust, the horrors of which no brush could depict nor tongue ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... there's an aim Which many know and some might even name; But see yon motley muster, Like shades in Eblis wandering up and down! Types there of every 'Show Class' in the Town Elbow and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... but by a deity, and facts also confirmed them in this opinion, inasmuch as the power of Sertorius increased beyond all expectation; for with the two thousand six hundred men whom he called Romans, and four thousand Lusitanian targetiers, and seven hundred horsemen, whom he joined to a motley band of seven hundred Libyans, who crossed over with him to Lusitania, he fought with four Roman generals, who had under them one hundred and twenty thousand foot soldiers, six thousand horsemen, two thousand bowmen and slingers, ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... partially hid the groundwork of dusty matting, taken over with the bungalow from its former occupant, and in places revealing the stone floor beneath. The broad mantel-shelf was given over to books, a motley crowd in divers stages of dilapidation. 'The Master of Ballantrae' shouldered 'The Queen's Regulations,' one would fancy with a swaggering hint of scorn; a battered copy of the 'Pilgrim's Progress' stood resignedly between Bogle's 'Mission ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... feature in our discussion. The audience of Plautus was not of a high class. Terence, even in later times, when education had materially progressed, often failed to reach them by over-finesse. Plautus with his bold brush pleased them. Surely a turbulent and motley throng they were, with the native violence of the sun-warmed Italic temperament and the abundant animal spirits of a crude civilization, tumbling into the theatre in the full enjoyment of holiday, scrambling for vantage points on the sloping ground, if such were handy, or a good ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... quietly as the men approached. As they drew nearer, Frank made out that they were indeed a motley crew. Spanish faces — or South American, to be more exact — predominated, but there were a few who seemed to be English or Americans. Also, there were two plainly of African descent and three who seemed ...
— The Boy Allies with Uncle Sams Cruisers • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... dinner took place in the large central room, and covers were laid for 200 guests. The Prince of Wales acknowledged the toast of his health and that of the Princess, the Duke of Cambridge responded to the toast of the army, Mr. Childers to the navy, Lord Elcho to the volunteers, Mr. Motley to "The Prosperity of the United States," Mr. Gladstone to "Her Majesty's Ministers," the Archbishop of York to, "The Guests," and Mr. Dickens to "Literature." The last toast having been proposed in a highly eulogistic speech, Mr. ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... one of the gulches in the rear of the extreme right. This proved to be the rear guard of Joseph's outfit. The wily savage had outwitted the troops. He had left a few men to skirmish with Rawn's pickets, and while the command was expecting an assault in front he, with his motley band, had filed up and down through the gulches and woods, past the line of works, and was now well on his way down the creek. Rawn at once deployed his forces and pursued the fugitives, but did not overtake them until they had reached the Bitter ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... things our eyes discover as we walk along on Market street. Such a medley—infinite, incongruous, comical, pathetic, motley and sublime. ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... few minutes the page came back, followed, close at his heels, by a man in motley dress, with a viol hung over his shoulders, Count Pierre, without waiting to greet the latter, thrust the parchment into his hands with the ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... The motley Muse's maundering nous Cares nothing what the union rate is, If any young things want a house I'll build ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... moments with fixed gaze upon the royalist fugitive, who with the felt hat of an insurgent, the jacket of an infantry soldier, and the pantaloons of a dragoon officer, presented a somewhat motley appearance. ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... escape from this confinement, and are then frizzed and curled, like a mop or a poodle's coat. Leonard Harper and I returned in this boat, Tahitian steering, Samoan, Futuman, and Anaiteans making one motley crew. The brisk trade soon carried us to the beach in front of Mr. Inglis's house, and arrived at the reef I rode out pick-a-back on the Samoan, Leonard following on a half-naked Anaitean. We soon found ourselves in the midst of a number ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... disaster might result as a consequence of an incongruous military and political situation, in which German and Austrian consular officials walked the streets side by side with French and British officers. Men who had lived through many strange situations declared that this motley of tongues and nationalities and conflicting interests to be found in Salonika during those last weeks of 1915 was without a parallel ...
— The Deserter • Richard Harding Davis
... the Legislature of 1847, some new members appeared. Caleb Cushing came from Newburyport, and Fletcher Webster, and J. Lothrop Motley from Boston. The Democrats of Boston and vicinity were then engaged in raising and equipping a regiment for Mexico. Cushing was Colonel of the regiment and Edward Webster, a brother of Fletcher, was the Captain of one ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... side lane into the Corso, the mirth was at its height. Out of the seclusion of his own feelings, he looked forth at the tapestried and damask-curtained palaces, the slow-moving double line of carriages, and the motley maskers that swarmed on foot, as if he were gazing through the iron lattice of a prison window. So remote from the scene were his sympathies, that it affected him like a thin dream, through the dim, extravagant material of which ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... less worthy of regard, are those who have picked and chosen among the precepts of the Lord, have accepted what seemed good to them and have explained away the rest. It would be easy, did space allow, to present a motley succession of fanatics and heretics from apostolic days to the present who have developed fantastic theories and have maintained them by means of passages drawn from the Sermon ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... Among the motley crew of destroyers, drunkards, gluttons, satyrs and sirens, our friend the Jolly Baker was on the job—unfortunately for him, accompanied this ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... sing; at first in a low tone, and in unintelligible words; but his voice was good, and it attracted attention, even among that motley crew, and after a little, perceiving that they were listening, he ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... command with a crew of sixty, all told; of whom, however, Jack Keene, midshipman, and Tasker, the gunner's mate—who in his new ship held the rank of gunner—were the only individuals with whom I had already been shipmate; the rest were a motley crowd indeed, collected out of the gutters and slums of Freetown. The Dolphin, it was arranged, was to act in the first instance as tender to the Eros; but, later, might perhaps be detached for certain special work which was just then beginning to ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... be said of Denis Quirk in those days that his only pleasure was in his work. He was lonely for Desmond O'Connor, now a student at Manly. The flat was still frequented by the representatives of motley and variegated talent, as in the old days. Jests were made, good stories told, and songs sung by well-trained voices; but these were mere acquaintances. Denis longed for the intimate ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... of those who've passed before us, Denounced all foolishness and fun, Not so the gay and blithesome Horace; And Shakespeare's Jaques, somewhat hotly, Declared the only wear is Motley! ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... Onely a show or two, and so agree, The Play may passe: If they be still, and willing, Ile vndertake may see away their shilling Richly in two short houres. Onely they That come to heare a Merry, Bawdy Play, A noyse of Targets: Or to see a Fellow In a long Motley Coate, garded with Yellow, Will be deceyu'd. For gentle Hearers, know To ranke our chosen Truth with such a show As Foole, and Fight is, beside forfeyting Our owne Braines, and the Opinion that we bring To make that onely true, we now intend, Will leaue ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Dreamer, they the Dream; I roamed 30 Delighted through the motley spectacle; Gowns, grave, or gaudy, doctors, students, streets, Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers: Migration strange for a stripling of the hills, A northern villager. As if the change 35 Had waited on some ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... silent throngs of the oppressed; and they were innumerable as the sands of the sea. Their thin faces were earthy with want and cavernous from disease, and their eyes were dull with despair. They passed in their tattered motley, some in the fantastic rags of the beggars of Albrecht Duerer and some in the grey cerecloths of Le Nain; many wore the blouses and the caps of the rabble in France, and many the dingy, smoke-grimed weeds of ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... ruins, but near the shore are some well built Khans, and in the inhabited part of the town are several good private houses. The aspect of Suez is that of an Arabian, and not an Egyptian town, and even in the barren waste, which surrounds it, it resembles Yembo and Djidda; the same motley crowds are met with in the streets, and the greater part of the shop-keepers are from Arabia or Syria. The air is bad, occasioned by the saline nature of the earth, and the extensive low grounds on the north and ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... of dinner-hour, had assembled the house of Kantor. Attuned to the intimate atmosphere of the tenement which is so constantly rent with cry of child, child-bearing, delirium, delirium-tremens, Leon Kantor had howled no impression into the motley din of things. Isadore, already astride his chair, well into center-table, for first vociferous tear at the four-pound loaf; Esther Kantor, old at chores, settled an infant into the high chair, careful of tiny fingers in lowering the ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... and stimulating mental condiments for the jaded brains of that gilded cult. His table ballets, his bizarre parlor circuses, his cunningly devised fads in which he set forth his own inimitable antics, won him the motley and the cap and bells of this tinseled court, and forced him well out into the glare of publicity, which was what he ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... however, they were ushered into the study of the courteous Briton whose difficult and sometimes exasperating duty it is to look after the rights and interests of the motley world composed of those Englishmen and Englishwomen who make a short or long sojourn in Paris. Once they were in his presence nothing could have been kinder and more considerate than the British Consul's reception of the ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... art? Yes; those words there are, and many men live by them and for them. And yet it seems to me that if Shakespeare could be born again he would have no cause to retract his Hamlet, his Lear. His searching glance would discover nothing new in human life: still the same motley picture—in reality so little complex—would unroll before him in its terrifying sameness. The same credulity and the same cruelty, the same lust of blood, of gold, of filth, the same vulgar pleasures, the same senseless sufferings in the ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, the day of her defeat wore a tartan dress (polymita) and an "embroidered" or "fur" mantle; probably the fur was inside, and the skins embroidered outside. Dion Cassius,[560] who describes Boadicea's motley tunic, says that the bulk of the people wore what was apparently a chequered tartan. Semper says that the early tribes of Northern Europe, like the North American Indians of the present time, embroidered their fur wraps. The ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... made a motley group: first came a stout American with two pretty daughters; then a young Frenchman and his valet; then a Sister of Charity draped in black, her close-fitting, white, starched cap and broad white collar framing her face, one hand clutching the rope rail as she stepped feebly toward the steamer, ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... is the mixture of the pigments compounded so as to form a close reproduction both of its colour and its pattern. A sweep of the shrimp net detaches a battalion of these sleeping prawns, and if we turn the motley into a dish and give a choice of seaweed, each variety after its kind will select the one with which it agrees in colour, and vanish. Both when young and when full-grown, the AEsop prawn takes on the colour of its immediate surroundings. At nightfall ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... 2. We have a rather motley-looking set. A good many look like broken-down schoolmasters or ministers who have excellent dispositions but not much talent. As the kind of talent required where we are going is rather peculiar, the men may be useful, but I don't believe there will be a great deal of cotton raised ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... 1860 was that of our greatest purely literary achievement, and, indeed, most of the greater names of to-day were familiar before 1850. Conspicuous exceptions are Motley and Parkman and a few belles-lettres writers, whose novels and stories mark a distinct literary transition since the War of the Rebellion. In the period from 1845 to 1860, there was a singular development of sentimentalism; it ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... fifty in breadth, crossed by a bridge resting on double arches, the construction of which dates back to the time of the ancient Romans. This bridge affords a favorite lounging-place for the inhabitants, and at evening a motley assemblage may be seen lolling over its moss-grown sides,—men with their picturesque knit caps of scarlet or brown falling gracefully on one shoulder, and women with their shining black hair and the enormous pearl earrings ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... traffic and pleasure. Between the houses coloured coral-pink, white, blue, and yellow, and the pale green transparent water lies a long stretch of beach covered with every sort of craft that sails the Mediterranean, and with a motley crowd of fishermen, tourists and noisy children; whilst the whole atmosphere rings with raucous voices raised in giving directions, in quarrelling, or in addressing the many perplexed strangers. We disembark, and cross the intervening ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... squares seemed to be full of motley, ill-clad, ill-nourished, but formidable multitudes. Towards evening the tradesmen began to shut up their shops, and a regiment of cavalry paraded the principal streets with a band that ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... in the council-hall, A strange and a motley pageant, all: What seek they? to win for their land a name The brightest and best in the lists of fame? The light of Mercy's all-hallowed ray To look with grief on the culprit's way? Nay! watch the smile and the flushing brow, And in that crowd what read ye now? The daring ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... streets were alive with motley and noisy crowds. The sun was up, if still red and hazy, and sunlight came like a tunnel of gold down the swampy valley and from over the sea; the orange orchards lying to the south, called the gardens of the Sultan, were red ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... restaurations, styled picanterias. These places are divided by partitions into several small compartments, each of which contains a table and two benches. The restaurateur, usually a zambo or a mulatto, prides himself in the superiority of his picantes and his clicha. The most motley assemblages frequent these places in the evening. The Congo negro, the grave Spaniard, the white Creole, the Chino, together with monks and soldiers, may be seen, all grouped together, and devouring with evident relish refreshments, served ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... Motley fruit of mongrel seed; By the dam from lordlings sprung. By the sire exhaled from dung: Think on every vice in both, Look on him, and see their growth. View him on the mother's side,[2] Fill'd with falsehood, spleen, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... days. It was gentility in tatters. Often retaining a scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for the denizens of Grub street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by agricultural labor; or, Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full experiment; or Candide and his motley associates, at work in their cabbage-garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... San Antonio del Norte, finely situated on a grassy plain, of considerable extent, a dependency of the valley of the Goascoran. We had intended stopping here for the night; but the cabildo was already filled with a motley crowd of arrieros and others on their way to San Miguel. A tall mestizo, covered with ulcers, sat in the doorway, and two or three culprits extended their claw-like hands towards us through the bars of their cage and invoked ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... men into battle for foolish causes. I wanted to hurry the fall of the blow. I even protested against my parents and Mr. Pound driving with me to the railroad, and they did not understand. I had to meet their last embraces under the eyes of the motley crowd who had come to the station to see the train, and under such conditions I dared not show emotion. Again they did not understand and were a little hurt by my coldness. I sprang up the car steps jauntily. To show my independence I stood by the smoker door and ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... his Shadow spoke, that, as a matter of fact, he had observed the men who usually wore the red and white feather cloaks among the motley crowd of grovelling natives who lay flat on their faces in the mud of the cleared space the night before, and prayed hard for mercy. Only they were not wearing their robes of office at the moment, in accordance with a well-known savage custom; they had come naked and in disgrace, as befits ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... filling with a motley crowd of diners, but I paused only to exchange a nod with Monsieur Jourdain, and then hurried away. The fugitives had taken the French line, of course, and I hastened on to the foot of Morton Street, ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... pulled up his domestic establishment what an enormous quantity of roots he had been making during the years he had been planted there." Before announcing his intention, he came early one morning, with his friend Lothrop Motley, to inspect our house, which was similar to the one he thought of buying. I did not know his intention at the time, but I was delighted with his enthusiasm for the view over Charles River Bay, which in those days was wider and more beautiful ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... a general muster was called, and a rude and motley group presented itself to the eye of the commander. But rough as was the exterior, he well knew that there was that within which would bid defiance to danger and outrage so long as life ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... would have been the case with a Spaniard; it seemed to awaken a desire to set tolerance an example. Any one might join his community except felons and atheists; and as a matter of fact, his assortment of colonists soon became as motley as that of Williams in Providence. The landing of the first expedition on an island in the Potomac was attended by the making and erecting by the Jesuit priests of a rude cross, and the celebration of mass; but there ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... and the jangle of trolley cars, sounded beyond the wide dark portal of the dock-house. The murky water below splashed between ship and pier. Deep voices rang out, and merry laughs, and shrill glad cries of welcome. The bright light shone down upon a motley, dark-garbed mass, moving slowly. The spirit ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... such an undertaking proved how surely he had deserved and won the confidence of his superior officers. In those days railroad travelling was far from pleasant. The train upon which Lieutenant Chalaron embarked at Knoxville was a motley affair,—perhaps a single passenger-car, rough and dilapidated (crowded with those who, though ill, made shift to sit up or recline upon the seats), box-cars and cattle-cars filled with suffering men helplessly sick. In order that these ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... picture the performances, the little dimly- lighted schoolhouses with the weatherbeaten faces shining in the light of the leaky magic lantern, and the delighted Windy running here and there, talking the jargon of stageland, arraying himself in his motley and strutting ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... Sedgwick's Linwoods, Paulding's Old Continental, Mrs. Child's Rebels, Motley's Morton's Hope, Herman Melville's Israel Potter, Kennedy's Horse Shoe Robinson. There is an account of the battle of Bunker Hill in Cooper's Lionel Lincoln. Thompson's Green Mountain Boys gives interesting descriptions of many of the events in that region. The border warfare ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... are always open to visitors at stated hours, and the President is easy of access to all who call at such hours. Formerly presidential receptions were open to all comers, and the result was a motley crowd, who formed in line and shook hands with the President, bowed to the attending ladies, passed into the great east room and gradually dispersed. In late years these receptions have become less frequent, and in their place we have had diplomatic, military and navy, and congressional receptions, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Clarendon was Lord Chancellor; Burnet was a bishop and favorite of William III.; Thiers and Guizot both were prime ministers; while Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Macaulay, Grote, Milman, Froude, Neander, Niebuhr, Mueller, Dahlman, Buckle, Prescott, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, have all been men of wealth or position. Nor do I remember a single illustrious historian who ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... the prospect of success, had certainly given the lady's complexion a fine tint. Her dainty profile offered a striking contrast to the motley crew of negroid Arabs who surrounded her. And she came to meet them in a buoyant spirit, though the fierce sun was scorching her delicate skin through the thin fabric ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... much worn and patched. To Genevieve they looked quite impossible. She almost cried when she saw how eagerly Mrs. Jones gathered the motley pile into her arms and began to sort them out ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... who patched together his things I know not whence, and tacked that motley piece to him; they shall not have place in this great collection. But yet I hope to obtain your leave to publish a-part, as an appendix to the Natural History,—that exotic work,—gathered together from this and ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... my son," he cried gaily. "In this cap and bells, I see life under a different aspect. Never has it appeared to me sweeter and more irresponsible. Don't you feel it? But I forgot. You haven't any motley. I apologise for my want of tact. Blanquette," he added in French, "why haven't you found a ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... again—the mad blaspheming week of revelry and devilry. The streets were rainbow with motley wear and thunderous with the roar and laughter of the crowd, recruited by a vast inflow of strangers; from the windows and roofs, black with heads, frolicsome hands threw honey, dirty water, rotten eggs, and even boiling oil upon the pedestrians ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... disorder that the best conducted Ark is always able to impart. The sliding roof had rarely been known to close entirely. There was always a pair of giraffe-legs sticking out, or an elephant-trunk, taking from the stiffness of its outline, and reminding us that our motley crowd of friends inside were uncomfortably cramped for room and only too ready to leap in a cascade on the floor and browse and gallop, flutter and bellow and neigh, and be their natural selves again. I think ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... of crevices, finally set foot on the land we had been so long trying to reach. Our advent created a great commotion among the myriads of birds that frequent the ledges and cliffs, and the intrusion caused them to whirl about in a motley cloud and scream at each other in ceaseless uproar. A few minutes sufficed to survey the situation, before attempting to ascend at a spot that seemed scarcely to afford footing for a goat. Near the foot of the cliffs ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie, How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry, 60 Maggots half-form'd in rhyme exactly meet, And learn to crawl upon poetic feet. Here one poor word an hundred clenches makes, And ductile Dulness new meanders takes; There motley images her fancy strike, Figures ill pair'd, and similes unlike. She sees a mob of metaphors advance, Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance; How Tragedy and Comedy embrace; How Farce and Epic[252] get a jumbled race; 70 How Time himself stands still at her command, Realms shift their ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... Rule (now the Christian Endeavor World) calls attention to an incident on a night railroad train narrated in the late Benjamin F. Taylor's World on Wheels, in which "this hymn appears as a sort of Traveller's Psalm." Among the motley collection of passengers, some talkative, some sleepy, some homesick and cross, all tired, sat two plain women who, "would make capital country aunts.... If they were mothers at all they were good ones." Suddenly in a dull silence, near twelve o'clock, ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... also to point the finger at certain individual spectators, was essential to this species of poetry. As Tragedy delights in harmonious unity, Comedy flourishes in a chaotic exuberance; it seeks out the most motley contrasts, and the unceasing play of cross purposes. It works up, therefore, the most singular, unheard-of, and even impossible incidents, with allusions to the well-known and special circumstances of the immediate locality ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... bring fulfilment of spring's promise of plenty, with fruit in abundance. Autumn lingers in red and yellow motley, stoutly resisting winter's attack until boisterous winds from east and north send the last leaves shivering to the ground and spread out the city's winter garb. Then Prague assumes a severer aspect; reds ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... not to give these worldly objects less of our time, let us endeavour at least to give them less of our hearts: striving that the settled frame of our desires and affections may be more spiritual; and that in the motley intercourses of life we may constantly retain a more lively sense of the Divine presence, and a stronger impression of the reality of unseen things; thus corresponding with the Scripture description of true Christians, "walking ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... presumed that no President was ever confronted with such a motley crowd of visitors as the members of that delegation—between seventy and eighty in number—as they formed in line around three sides of the East Room in the White House. Their garments were a sight! Some of ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... history is required. The historians of this day write of the past; and the historian of our present civil war is not yet born, who shall emulate the completeness and conciseness of Irving's Columbus, or Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, or Motley's Dutch Republic. Nor can we expect an early solution to the 'Fremont question,' which shall be full and satisfactory, though the length of time involved be but one hundred days. But it is different with Gen. Patterson. It is true that his loyalty is disputed, and in this question ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... term only very recently bestowed, had ever constituted a serious problem for the neighboring states as well as for the central government. It was with the Confederacy as with the old Union. The Reserve Indians were a motley horde, fragments of many tribes that had seen better days. They were all more or less related, either geographically or linguistically. Some of them, it is difficult to venture upon what proportion, had been induced to enter into negotiations with Pike ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... her rights to the lands which the Georgians claimed under the various State treaties with the Indians, but which by the treaty of New York had been confirmed to the Creeks by the United States. On another occasion he entitled his motley force the Sans Culottes, and masqueraded as a major general of the French army, though the French Consul denied having any connection with him. He established for the time being a little independent government, with blockhouses and small wooden ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... strange one," but he knew now that he was right in his belief that Howe aimed at Philadelphia. He therefore gathered his forces and marched south to meet the enemy, passing through the city in order to impress the disaffected and the timid with the show of force. It was a motley array that followed him. There was nothing uniform about the troops except their burnished arms and the sprigs of evergreen in their hats. Nevertheless Lafayette, who had just come among them, thought that they looked like good soldiers, and the Tories woke up sharply to the fact that ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Indians. It consisted of about sixty men, thirty women, and as many children of various ages—about a hundred and twenty souls in all. Many of the boys were capable of using the gun and setting a beaver-trap. The men were a most motley set. There were Canadians, half-breeds, Iroquois, and Scotchmen. Most of the women had Indian blood in their veins, and a ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... eye of Yates and Renmark. Both were astonished to see the number of men that O'Neill had under his command. They found a motley crowd. Some tattered United States uniforms were among them, but the greater number were dressed as ordinary individuals, although a few had trimmings of green braid on their clothes. Sleeping out for a couple of nights had given the gathering the unkempt appearance ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... corruptions, introduced by his transcribers, and particularly by a simpleton who is called Samuel, or his master Beulanus, or both, who appear to have lived in the ninth century, that it is difficult to say how much of this motley production is original and authentic. Be that as it may, the writer of the copy printed by Gale bears ample testimony to the "Saxon Chronicle", and says expressly, that he compiled his history partly from the records of the Scots and ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... Two such examples in real life as Rousseau and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, one such demonstration of the same moral in fiction as Werther, were enough to discourage the man of feeling. Therefore, when he still exists, he takes to motley, the only wear for the human race in troublesome circumstances which beset it with unpleasant recurrence. When you cannot exactly believe anything in religion, in politics, in literature, in art, and yet neither wish nor know how to do without it, the safe way is to make a not too grotesque ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... business begins. That man in an ordinary civilian's dress who stands beside Master Parys is John More, the University stationer, and it is his office to fix the value of the pledges offered, and to take care that none are sold at less than their real value. It is a motley group that stands around; there are several masters and bachelors,. . . but the larger proportion is of boys or quite young men in every variety of coloured dress, blue and red, medley, and the like, but without any academical dress. Many of them are very scantily clothed, and all have ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... him as one of our glories—we who have kept up, for now almost a century, a struggle like to that which he maintained for the unity of the Roman Empire, we who consider Africa as an extension of France. More than any other writer, he has expressed the temperament and the genius of his country. This motley Africa, with its eternal mixture of races at odds with one another, its jealous sectarianism, the variety of its scenery and climate, the violence of its sensations and passions, its seriousness of character and its quick-changing humour, its mind at once practical and frivolous, its materialism ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... companionable self. Once or twice she tried to turn the talk to his altered future, and the obligations and interests that lay before him; but he shrugged away from the subject, questioning her instead about the motley company at Violet Melrose's, and fitting a droll or malicious anecdote to each of the people ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," Kingsland's "Scientific Idealism," with several quite learned volumes of astronomy and geology, side by side with Gulliver and all kinds of travel and story-books which we have most of us adored. It was I who had the task of sorting and arranging this motley collection, and I can hardly tell you, Padre, ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the substantial gate that is the entrance to the pretty farm, and a curious and a motley group is there. We see such groups almost daily, here in Carmarthenshire; but as all the counties of England and Wales are not thoroughfares for the Irish from their country to England, we will describe these poor ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... admitted to his presence. Those who were registered were organized into trains, with the little movable property they possessed, and dispatched towards Fort Bridger. They arrived there in the course of May,—as motley, ragged, and destitute a crowd as ever descended from the deck of an Irish emigrant-ship at New York or Boston. The only garments which some possessed were made of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... (by Lee's invasion) to take away to Monocacy nearly all of his troops, and so we had to appeal to the citizens for the defence of the city. All loyal citizens were appealed to and they responded nobly; they made, however, a motley army, but patriotic to the core, they vigorously performed ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... seemed to turn a disapproving eye upon the rather motley congregation of native Anchurians, and made his way at once toward Goodwin, who was the most conspicuously Anglo-Saxon figure present. Goodwin greeted him ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... when he rode into that construction camp. The place was a bedlam. A motley horde of men appeared to be doing everything under the sun but work, and most of them seemed particularly eager to board a long train of box-cars and little old passenger-coaches. Neale made a dive for the train, ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... shoulders, looked at themselves in the brilliantly lighted mirrors which repeated their reflections several times. Now this same room was dimly lighted by two candles. On one small table tea things and supper dishes stood in disorder, and in the middle of the night a motley throng of people sat there, not merrymaking, but somberly whispering, and betraying by every word and movement that they none of them forgot what was happening and what was about to happen in the bedroom. Pierre did not eat anything though he would very much have liked to. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... and motley mob hustle one another around the long green table-covers: Turcos out for the day and staking their double halfpence, Moorish traders from the native town, Negroes, Maltese, colonists from the inland, who have come forty leagues in order to risk on a turning card the price of a plough ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... Others of the swiftly-moving landing-parties drove the chosen ground-cars away from the streets. The remaining cars received a blaster-bolt apiece. In seven minutes and thirty seconds from the landing of the small space-craft, a motley assortment of cars roared out of the village, heading for the capital city of Garen. As the last car cleared the houses, there was a monstrous explosion. One of the space-boats flew to bits. Before the cars had vanished, ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... he contemplated the motley mass of humanity that presented itself with such eagerness for the attainment of so degrading an office; and as he listened to their vulgar boastings and brutal language, he blushed to think that ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... The motley crowd from the garret had come with all the pails of the farm. They flung themselves upon the well. It was a leisurely old machine, long dwelling in indolence. It was in the habit of giving out water with a sort ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... gazeth evermore at the stage below; Noteth well the players as they quickly come and go; Queens and kings and maidens fair, motley fools and friars, Lords and ladies, stately dames, ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... the following morning at 12 o'clock in the coche d'eau for Lyons. There was a very numerous and motley company on board: there were three bourgeois belonging to Lyons returning thither from Paris; a quiet good-humoured sort of woman not remarkable either for her beauty nor vivacity; a young Spaniard, an adherent of King Joseph Napoleon, very taciturn and wrapped up in his cloak tho' the weather was ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... their crossed arms; grave Turks, smoking their nargiles in front of the cafes that open on the Marina, turned their chairs round to look at us without stopping their hubble-bubbling; and all about us, where nothing else was, a line of motley humanity—Greek, Turk, Egyptian, Nubian, Abyssinian, under hats, caps, tarbouches, turbans, hats Persian and ecclesiastical, and no hats at all—half circled us with mute and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... account of it. He told me (but I am sure this is not known to any out of our own family) that as Dr. Lindhorst was returning home after his second long absence, he entered a small village near Turin, just as a detachment of 'The Army of Italy' were leaving it. The rear presented the usual motley collection of baggage-wagons, disabled soldiers, sutlers, camp-women, and hangers-on of all sorts, who attend in the steps of a victorious troop. As Paul Lindhorst stopped to view the spectacle, and while the wild strains of music could be heard echoing and re-echoing as the columns ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... went with U—— to Mr. Motley's balcony, in the Corso, and saw the Carnival from it yesterday afternoon; but the spectacle is strangely like a dream, in respect to the difficulty of retaining it in the mind and solidifying it into a description. ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... owned the feed-store back of which the gang had loafed for years, and though himself a respectable businessman his name had been attached to the pack of hoodlums who held forth at his back door as the easiest means of locating and identifying its motley members. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... all the motley swarm of women and children caught themselves mounts—some already loaded with the gipsy baggage, some with saddles, some without, some with grass halters for bridles. In another minute Fred and I were riding surrounded by a smelly swarm of them, he with big fingers already on ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... prescindir de, to dispense with regadio, irrigation rieles, rails tal cual (of goods), as they are, as they were tomar en consideracion, to take into consideration, to entertain turba, crowd (motley) virtualmente, practically, virtually ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... of carriages swept on, and the motley crowds of men and women passed on their way unnoticing. Little they knew that a tragedy was being played out before their very eyes. A few noticed that stately white-haired lady gazing strangely at the house across the way, and a few too saw the figure of the man on whom ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... than any of his friends around him, his lazy blue eyes scanning from beneath their drooping lids the motley throng around him, stood Sir Percy Blakeney, the centre of a gaily-dressed little group which seemingly had just ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... of fishing-vessels and its considerable foreign trade, Bergen is a much more lively and bustling place than either Christiania or Drontheim. The streets are well populated, and the great square at the head of the harbour is always thronged with a motley concourse of fishermen, traders, and country people. Drunkenness seems to be a leading vice. I saw, at least, fifty people, more or less intoxicated, in the course of a short walk, one afternoon. The grog shops, however, are rigidly closed at six o'clock on Saturday evening, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... while other sweat-streaked, motley-dressed homeseekers would straggle up to this end of the long trail. Their thoughts went back to their old homes, or to the loved ones that they had laid away tenderly in the shifting sands of the Plains. Most of them faced the future with fortitude; ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... those most in favor at court; but they seemed to me to present a constrained figure, as I saw them soberly ranged in the stalls of the canons, clad in a costume of no particular epoch, wrapped in long mantles of motley color, and following, with a distracted air, the phases of a ceremony to which they were so little accustomed that they were constantly rising, sitting down, and kneeling at ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... came there solely to smoke their opium-drugged pipes, and some to purchase, if a good bargain should offer and a beauty be sold cheap. Here were sprightly Greeks, sage Jews, and moody Armenians, but all outnumbered by the sedate old Turks, with beards sweeping their very breasts. It was a motley crowd that thronged ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... not dismiss us as finished men; the desired "unity with life" can be attained only upon its stage—the world—in the motley throng of fellow-men, but minds and bodies were carefully trained according to their individual peculiarities, and I might consider myself capable of receiving higher lessons. True, my character was not yet steeled sufficiently to resist every temptation, but I no longer need fear the danger ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Phrygian worship led an obscure existence until the establishment of the empire. That closed the first period of its history at Rome. It attracted attention only on certain holidays, when its priests marched the streets in procession, dressed in motley costumes, loaded with heavy jewelry, and beating tambourines. On those days the senate granted them the right to go from house to house to collect funds for their temples. The remainder of the year they confined themselves to the sacred enclosure of the Palatine, celebrating foreign ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Box Street tenement looked out upon the river. It was lifted high: the activities of the broad stream and of the motley world of the other shore went silently; the petty noises of life—the creak and puff and rumble of its labouring machinery,—straying upward from the fussy places below, were lost ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... the door leading into the saloon. His five feet eleven inches and one hundred and eighty pounds were more noticeable there, and it was part of his plan to attract attention to himself. No one, however, appeared to notice him. The pool-players were noisily intent on their game, the same crowd of motley-robed Mexicans hung over the reeking bar. Gale's roving glance soon fixed upon the man he took to be Rojas. He recognized the huge, high-peaked, black sombrero with its ornamented band. The Mexican's face was turned aside. He was in earnest, excited colloquy with a dozen or more comrades, most ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... Lake Simcoe, ten or twelve miles from this body of water, surrounded by a country rich in corn, squashes, and a great variety of small fruits, with plenty of game and fish. When the warriors had mostly assembled, the motley crowd, bearing their bark canoes, meal, and equipments on their shoulders, moved down in a southwesterly direction till they reached the narrow strait that unites Lake Chouchiching with Lake Simcoe, where the Hurons had a famous fishing wear. ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... long as he and they lived, and was ever ready to shew them acts of kindness. He for a considerable time used to frequent the Green Room, and seemed to take delight in dissipating his gloom, by mixing in the sprightly chit-chat of the motley circle then to be found there[596]. Mr. David Hume related to me from Mr. Garrick, that Johnson at last denied himself this amusement, from considerations of rigid virtue; saying, 'I'll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk stockings and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... hundred times over. Alone, helpless, conscious of guilt, and abandoned by every better thought, my mind was one motley scene of terror, confusion, and remorse. A thousand expedients suggested themselves, and a thousand fears told me they would be vain: at last, in an agony of despair, I packed up a few clothes, took what money and trinkets were in the house, and set out ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... presently noted by some coolhead that the renter of boats, having seen the disaster first, had already put out for the scene of trouble, rowing lustily. Nobody could beat him to his garlands now; that was clear; clear, too, that there really wasn't much peril, after all. So the motley gathering of idlers became content to stand upon the edge of the boat pavilion, gazing most eagerly, gossiping not ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... which it might occupy if its promoters chose to stretch it out—space for booths innumerable; space for the great circus, with its big tent for animals as well as men, women and children; space for the huge varieties of shows, and space enough and to spare—one would think—for the motley crowd to wander about in. Neighbours from all the country round visited the fete. The richer women, of all classes, secured lodgings. The poorer, who could not afford this luxury, procured rooms among friends. Others camped out all night ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... the Labyrinth really began last October, when General de Maud-Huy stopped the Prussian Guard before Arras with his motley array of tired Territorials, whom he gathered together in a mighty rush northward after the battle of the Marne. The crack Guards regiments afterward took on the job at Ypres, while the Crown Prince of Bavaria assumed the vain task ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... gladiators halted in front of Agrippa's throne, giving to him the accustomed salutation of "Hail, King, we who are about to die, salute thee," to be rewarded with a royal smile and the shouts of the approving audience. Last of all came the Christians, a motley, wretched-looking group, made up of old men, terrified children clinging to their mothers, and ill-clad, dishevelled women. At the pitiful sight, that very mob which a few short minutes before had hung upon ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... commission of the prince of Orange. This event, which took place on the 1st of April 1572, was the first blow in the long war of Dutch independence, and was followed by a general outbreak of the patriotic party (Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, part iii. chapter vi.). "The Brill" was one of the four Dutch towns handed over to Queen Elizabeth in 1584 as security for English expenses incurred in aiding the Dutch. Brielle is the birthplace of the famous admiral Martin van Tromp, and also of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... unbecoming color! You must take up with blue now; blue is the only wear for a Fairfax. Most men might wear motley for a sign of their convictions. Let us return to the octagon parlor; it is cheerful with a fire after dinner. At Abbotsmead there are not many evenings when a fire is not ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... the Holy Ghost, he goes his way Wisdom his motley, Truth his loving jest; The mills of Satan keep his lance in play, Pity and innocence his ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a curtain of thin silk for the chair, so that I, when I was set therein, had great privacy, though I knew by the sounds that I was attended by the motley crowd which usually is in following at such affairs, beside the little troop of horse which was my escort, and my brother and Parson Downs riding on either side. Parson Downs, though some might reckon him as being somewhat contumelious ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... dollars lying in the —— Bank in Massachusetts, so she would have Mosside purchased in her name for Colonel Tiffton, not as a gift, for he would not accept it, but as a loan, to be paid at his convenience. This was Alice's plan, and Mr. Liston acted upon it at once. Taking his place in the motley assemblage, he bid quietly, steadily, until at last Mosside, with its appurtenances, belonged ostensibly to him, and the half-glad, half-disappointed people wondered greatly who Mr. Jacob Liston could be, or from what quarter of the globe he had ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... at Musselburgh or Shinnecock, In motley Hose or humbler motley Sock, The Cup of Life is ebbing Drop by Drop, Whether the Cup be filled with Scotch ...
— The Golfer's Rubaiyat • H. W. Boynton
... left the ship's side the departing chieftain fired his pistols in the air as long as their charges lasted, while the motley desperadoes of the Revenge gave him many a parting yell. Then all the boats of the Revenge were lowered, and every man who could crowd into them left their ship for the shore. Black Paul tried to restrain them, for he feared ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... Mr. Motley, who visited the mountain in the dry season, and paid much attention to botany, gives the following list of genera of European plants found on or near the summit: Two species of Violet, three of Ranunculus, three of Impatiens, eight or ten of Rubus, and species ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the launch, with a touch of his forelock, handed over the discharge notes and certificates of such of the motley group that came up the side that had these documents, which the second lieutenant, a knowing fellow, who was in charge of our shipping office that morning, had pocketed when he engaged the men; doing this as a sort of preventative ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... stage-lights, to the right, as we look down towards the audience, Gustavus the Third was assassinated at a masquerade; and he was borne into that little chamber there, close by the scene, whilst all the outlets were closed, and the motley group of harlequins, polichinellos, wild men, gods and goddesses with unmasked faces, pale and terrified crept together; the dancing ballet-farce had ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... that they, like his own Recording Angel, might have blotted out his faults with a tear. But that was not Thackeray's way. Charlotte Bronte found "a finished taste and ease" in the Lectures, a "something high bred." Motley describes their style as "hovering," and their method as "the perfection of lecturing to high-bred audiences." Mr. Marzials quotes this expression "hovering" as admirably descriptive. It is. By judicious selection, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... taken the precaution to have the enormous tapestry screens which surrounded her Majesty's bed secured with cords; but for this they certainly would have been thrown down upon her. It was impossible to move about the chamber, which was filled with so motley a crowd that one might have fancied himself in some place of public amusement. Two Savoyards got upon the furniture for a better sight of the Queen, who ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... delights in straight rows, well patted down between, and treats the small seeds that he plants with a sort of paternal patience. Ian disdains any seed smaller than a nasturtium or bean, whose growth is soon apparent, and has collected a motley assortment of bulbs, roots, and plants, without regard to size or season, and bordered his patch with onion sets for Corney Delaney's express benefit, the goat having a Gallic taste for highly flavoured morsels. Both boys are fairly patient with their own gardening operations, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... treaty was formally announced to the British Government through Mr. Motley, who succeeded Mr. Johnson as Minister in London. Mr. Fish, in his letter of instructions, suggested to Mr. Motley the propriety of suspending negotiations for the present on the whole question. At the same time he committed the Government of the United States ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... terms, such as res scibilis and citrouille. The mixture startled the critics and carpers to whom its object had not been explained; but my conviction still remains that it represents, with much truth to nature, the motley suit of the Arabo-Egyptian. And it certainly serves one purpose, too often neglected by writers and unnoticed by reviewers. The fluent and transparent styles of Buckle and Darwin (the modern Aristotle who has transformed the face of Biological Science) are instruments admirably fitted for ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... returning to Juchitan. Officers were on horses, common soldiers on foot, pack-mules were laden with luggage, the women (accompanying their husbands) were weighed down with coffee-pots, bundles of clothes, and babies, all strapped on their backs together. They were a motley crew. At Jiquipilas a company was encamped in the plaza. Our mule, Chontal, took particular delight in running into such bands of marching soldiers as we encountered, causing no end of trouble. On one occasion, as a group approached us, he ran forward ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... and showmen, of every description, traversing in joyous bands the paths which led to the Palace of Princely Pleasure; for so the travelling minstrels had termed Kenilworth in the songs which already had come forth in anticipation of the revels which were there expected. In the midst of this motley show, mendicants were exhibiting their real or pretended miseries, forming a strange though common contrast betwixt the vanities and the sorrows of human existence. All these floated along with the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... hated the Outagamies, not only by reason of bitter wrongs, but also through jealousy of the growing importance which these fierce upstarts had won by their sanguinary prowess. The Huron chiefs came to meet the motley crew of warriors, and urged them to instant action. "You must not stop to encamp," said the Huron spokesman; "we must all go this moment to the fort of our fathers, the French, and fight for them." Then, ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... the village hotel, having ordered the best dinner that the landlord was capable of serving, and a couple of bottles of wine. Over this they became so exhilarated as to attract a good deal of attention. A village tavern is always haunted by idle clerks, and a motley crowd of gossips, on the Sabbath, and to these the irruption of two young bloods from the city was a slight break in the monotony of their slow shuffling jog toward perdition; and when the fine gentlemen began to get drunk and noisy it was really quite interesting. ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... in ten days, when a man knew what he was after. It was exactly ten days later. Bruce Gordon stood in the motley crowd inside the barnlike room where Fats ran a bar along one wall, and filled the rest of the space with assorted tables—all worn. Gordon was sweating slightly as he stood at the roulette table, where both zero and double-zero ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... that I am!" he says in indignation. "Scoundrel! The devil devour me! Whatever am I to do now? Why, my wife is in that train! She's there all alone, expecting me, consumed by anxiety. Ach, I'm a motley fool!" ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the dramatic scene, and the principal actors in it, in the following graphic paragraphs: "Near noon I found myself a member of the motley crowd gathered around the side entrance to Willard's Hotel. Soon an open barouche drove up, and the only occupant stepped out. A large, heavy, awkward-moving man, far advanced in years, short and ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... and adventurers in the Caribbean or representing some of the many activities prevalent in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thomas Weston, former ally of the Pilgrims, settled with a motley crew of rude fellows at Wessagusset (Quincy) and there established a trading post in 1622. Of this settlement, which came to an untimely end after causing the Pilgrims a great deal of trouble, only a blockhouse ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... who are to swell Rennenkampf's force. Their cadres, the skeletons of the battalions of which they are the flesh, are waiting for them—officers, organization, equipment, all is ready. The endless trains decant them; they swing in leisurely columns through the streets to their depots, motley as a circus—foresters, moujiks in fetid sheepskins, cattlemen, and rivermen, Siberians, tow-haired Finns, the wide gamut of the races of Russia, all big or biggish, with those impassive, blunt-featured faces that mask the Russian soul, and ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... upwards of three hundred men were carried, dragged, and driven abroad; of all ages, kinds, and descriptions; in all the various stages of intoxication from that of sober tipsiness to beastly drunkenness; with the uproar and clamor that may be more easily imagined than described. Such a motley group has never been seen since Falstaff's ragged regiment paraded the streets ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... gently on a high chair, and drooping her head pensively on her hand, sat for some time in unbroken silence, gazing out through the open door at the motley crowds passing by. ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... generally impaled a cake; during the dancing slices of this cake are distributed to the lookers on, who are supposed to make a contribution to the 'Treasury,' a money-box carried by an individual called the Squire, or Clown, dressed in motley, and bearing in the other hand a stick with a bladder at one end, and a ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... of the Caesars and of the Popes which has caused me to choose the spot where even the corners speak of a secular past, there to evoke some representatives of the most modern, as well as the most arbitrary and the most momentary, life. You, who know better than any one the motley world of cosmopolites, understand why I have confined myself to painting here only a fragment of it. That world, indeed, does not exist, it can have neither defined customs nor a general character. It is composed of exceptions and of singularities. We are so naturally creatures of custom, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... on the populace was most magical. They all fell back and opened a space for the approach of a motley ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... decidedly motley. The man of quaintest aspect in it is Sidi Mabarak Bombay. He is of the Wahiyow tribe, who make the best slaves in Eastern Africa. His breed is that of the true woolly-headed negro, though he does not represent a good specimen of them physically, being ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... on the night-wind faintly borne, Strains from that mighty hunting-horn, Which through these woods, in other days, Startled the echoes of the chase. On trooped the vision; lord and dame, On fiery steed and palfrey tame, Pilgrims, with palms and cockle-shells, And motley fools, with cap and bells, Princes and Counties Palatine, Who ruled and revelled on the Rhine, Abbot and monk, with many a torch, Came winding from each convent porch; And holy maids from Nonnenwerth, In the pale moonlight all came forth; Thy love, Roland, among the rest, Her meek ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... having no one to command the 'Niagara,' and only one commissioned lieutenant and two acting lieutenants, whatever my wishes may be, going out is out of the question. The men that came by Mr. Champlin are a motley set—blacks, soldiers, and boys. I cannot think you saw them after they were selected. I am, however, pleased to see any thing in the shape ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... corridor in turquin of Genoa, the violet in granite of Catalonia, the mourning-hued corridor veined black and white in slate of Murviedro, the pink corridor in cipolin of the Alps, the pearl corridor in lumachel of Nonetta, and the corridor of all colours, called the courtiers' corridor, in motley. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... could be done in ten days, when a man knew what he was after. It was exactly ten days later. Bruce Gordon stood in the motley crowd inside the barnlike room where Fats ran a bar along one wall, and filled the rest of the space with assorted tables—all worn. Gordon was sweating slightly as he stood at the roulette table, where both zero and double-zero were reserved for ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... of position lost. And gray Roger knew that the planetoid was doomed. His supposedly impregnable screen was failing in spite of its utmost measure of energy, and, that defense down, the citadel would not last a minute. Therefore he summoned a chosen few of his motley crew of renegade scientists and issued brief instructions. For minutes a host of robots toiled mightily, then a portion of the shield bulged out, extended into a tube beyond the attacking layers of force, and from it there erupted a beam of violence incredible. A beam behind which ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... plaided Highlander, with his dirk and claymore. Athenian orators, Roman tribunes, Knights of the Round Table, Scandinavian Vikings and Peruvian Incas jostled one another against the rich velvet and tapestry which hung from ceiling to floor. Truly, a motley assemblage, and one well calculated to impress the beholder with the transitoriness of mortal fame. In this miscellaneous concourse the occupants of the picture frames of all the public and private galleries of Europe seemed to have been restored to life, and personally brought ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... extra blunder in the conduct of Irish affairs is only like an additional mask in a fancy ball—the whole thing is motley; and asking for consistency would be like requesting the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... man once wrote of the hand being subdued to what it works in. The man who wrote that surely never tramped along the Haworth road as the bell rang for twelve o'clock. From out the factories poured a motley mob of men, women and children, not only with hands dyed, but with clothing, faces and heads as well. Girls with bright-green hair, and lemon-colored faces, leered and jeered at me as they hastened pellmell with hats askew, and stockings down, and dragging shawls, for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... few rough wooden huts and "flakes," or stages for drying cod. The rude inmates of these huts gathered round the company that landed from the English ships; and the captains and officers of the other vessels were there by special summons. A very curious and motley group was that which then stood on the beach of St. John's harbor—swarthy, bronzed sailors and fishermen of Spain, Portugal, and France, in the costumes of the sixteenth century. Soon a circle formed round one commanding figure—a man of noble presence, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... were to be allowed to rule. In Upper Canada the governing party, known as the 'Family Compact,' composed chiefly of representatives of the Crown and men who had inherited position or caste from their Loyalist fathers, had been attacked by a motley and shifting opposition, sober Whig and fiery Radical, newcomers from Britain or from the States, and {19} native-born, united mainly by their common antagonism to clique rule. In Lower Canada the same contest, on account of the monopoly of administration held by the English-speaking minority, ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... their estranged and troubled souls. Burr was gone; this August night he was floating down the Ohio toward New Orleans and the promised blow. Had some fool or knave or sickly conscience among the motley that was conspiring with him turned coward or been bought? It was possible. Burr might be betrayed, but hardly Lewis Rand. That was a guarded maze to which Mr. Jefferson could ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... directed, therefore, immediately on landing that all the vehicles and draft animals, whether horses, mules, or oxen, in the vicinity should be collected and loaded to their capacity with ammunition. Quite a train was collected during the 30th, and a motley train it was. In it could be found fine carriages, loaded nearly to the top with boxes of cartridges that had been pitched in promiscuously, drawn by mules with plough, harness, straw collars, rope-lines, etc.; long-coupled wagons, with racks ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... to me of yonder motley masses, Whom but to see, puts out the fire of Song! Hide from my view the surging crowd that passes, And in its whirlpool forces us along! No, lead me where some heavenly silence glasses The purer joys that round the Poet throng,— Where Love and Friendship ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... flung itself upon Palestine. Men, women, and children, poured eastwards in that first crusade, and this mixed vanguard of the coming army of warriors was led by Peter the Hermit and Gaultier Sans-Avoir. This vanguard was "a motley assemblage of monks, prostitutes, artists, labourers, lazy tradesmen, merchants, boys, girls, slaves, malefactors, and profligate debauchees;" "it was principally composed of the lowest dregs of the ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... left-hand as you faced it, was the usual line of boot-blacks—the only cheap thing left in Jerusalem—a motley two dozen of ex-Turkish soldiers, recently fighting the British gamely in the last ditch, and now blacking their boots with equal gusto, for rather higher pay. Some of them still wore Turkish uniforms. Two or three were redheaded and blue-eyed, ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... courteous Governors stand every winter, with a patience and forbearance worthy of a better cause. An officer in glistening regimentals looked at my card through his eyeglass, and dutifully called out "Miss Hampden," while I bowed, and followed the motley procession of young and old, that were wending their way ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... which had been rising for some time, now gave very unequivocal notice of an approaching storm. The rain began to fall, and the decks were quickly cleared of their motley groups. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... her shoulders impatiently. I think I was a little disappointed in her. I expected then people to be more of a piece than I do now, and I was distressed to find so much vindictiveness in so charming a creature. I did not realise how motley are the qualities that go to make up a human being. Now I am well aware that pettiness and grandeur, malice and charity, hatred and love, can find place side by side in ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... Eddring, suddenly. "Open the gates! Let 'em out! I want to hear 'em holler!" The pack poured out, motley, vociferous, eager for the chase, filling the air with their wild music, with a riot of primeval, savage life. "Get me a horse saddled, Cal, quick," cried Eddring. "I want to feel leather under me again. I want to feel the air in my ears. ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... Hall, to the office. Everywhere along the route he was greeted with jeers or pitying words, as his appearance excited the mirth or commiseration of the passers-by. When he reached the entrance to the Daily News office he was followed by a motley crowd of noisy urchins whom he dismissed with a grimace and the cabalistic gesture with which Nicholas Koorn perplexed and repulsed Antony Van Corlear from the battlement of the fortress of Rensellaerstein. Then closing the door in their astonished ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... lackeys, with smoking dishes and, full jugs, passed and repassed continually, although it was long past midnight. On entering the hall, they found Sir Randal at the head of a vast table, surrounded by a fiercer and more motley collection of individuals than had congregated there even in the time of Sir Rollo. The lord of the castle had signified that "it was his royal pleasure to be drunk," and the gentlemen of his train had obsequiously followed their master. Mercurius ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with open-work, and embossed with coral studs like ladybirds, is the low comedian and comic singer of the establishment. The remainder of the audience—a tolerably numerous one by this time—are a motley ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... celebrated tonight by the Cincinnati anarchists. It was the most revolutionary gathering ever seen in this city, and the speech of Mrs. Lucy E. Parsons, wife of the condemned anarchist, was of a very inflammatory character. The hall was crowded with men and women who drank beer at tables. It was a motley and dangerous looking throng. On the walls were mottoes with red borders, and the entire hall was profusely decorated with large red flags. There wasn't an American flag in the hall, and above the stage was a picture of the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... happy and interested, and what a bustle and movement there was! The banging of the guns on the men-of-war began again as the motley, fascinatingly interesting crowd, cavalry outriders, Sikhs, Parsees, Gourkas, Hindoos, and Mussulmen, sped away down to the Apollo Bundar to see the Prince go off to the flagship. H. and I went with the tide, a jolly cheery medley of coloured races, waddling, trotting, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... Of motley dress and masked face, Of sparkling unrevealing eyes, They track in gentle aimless chase The moment ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... like would be left at home, he had sense enough to know; but that every officer and man in the command would be allowed to discard any and all portions of the regulation uniform and appear rigged out in just such motley guise as his poetic or practical fancy might suggest, had never been pointed out to him; and that he, commanding his troop while a captain commanded the little battalion, could by any military possibility take his place in front of his men without his sabre, had never for an instant ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... he had noted so many times before, the motley appearance of the army, but with involuntary motion he began to straighten and smooth his own shabby uniform. He was about to enter the presence of a woman and he was young and so ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... of as motley a character as his conduct; and seemed to waver, during this whole reign, between the ancient and the new religion. The queen, engaged by interest as well as inclination, favored the cause of the reformers: ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... of the beach, shaded by trees, and crossing a gentle stream. Along this avenue was all the life and commerce of Tai-o-hae. Two traders' shops, empty offices, a gendarme, a handful of motley half-castes lounging under the trees—this was all that was left of former greatness. Only nature had not changed. It flung over the broken remnants of the glory and the dream its lovely cloak of verdure and of flower. Man had almost ceased to be a figure in the scene he had dominated ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... there cannot have been much to show that the inhabitants of Attica and Boeotia and the Peloponnese were markedly superior to those of, say, Lycia or Phrygia, or even Epirus. By the middle of the fifth century the difference is enormous. On the one side is Hellas, on the other the motley ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... this singular hall, rose a motley pile of musketry, rifles, hand-grenades, basket and cross-hilted swords, steel cuirasses, which, from their rude and sullied condition, appeared to have suffered much and hard service; buff and other coloured doublets, breast-plates, shoulder-belts with gilt and plain ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... resting on the warm brick hearth, sits Aunt Betty Cofer. Her frail body stoops under the weight of four-score years but her bright eyes and alert mind are those of a woman thirty years younger. A blue-checked mob cap covers her grizzled hair. Her tiny frame, clothed in a motley collection of undergarments, dress, and sweaters, is adorned by a clean white apron. Although a little shy of her strange white visitors, her innate dignity, gentle courtesy, and complete self possession indicate ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... receive into membership, as we shall afterward see, almost all sorts of men except atheists. Being composed of Jews, Turks, Mohammedans, Mormons, and infidels, as well as of believers in Christianity, they endeavor to establish such forms as will be acceptable to their mongrel and motley membership. Hence their prayers and other forms of worship are such as may be consistently used by the irreligious and by infidels, and only by them. We do not say that no Christian prayers are offered up in Masonic lodges. No doubt some godly men, as chaplains, offer up extempore prayers ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... ascribed to the great Catholic revival." It would be pleasant, {718} were there space, to quote similar enthusiastic appreciations from the French scholars Quinet and Thierry, the Englishman Herbert Spencer and the Americans Motley and Prescott. They all regarded the Reformation as at once an enlightenment and enfranchisement. Even the philosophers rushed into the same camp. Carlyle worshipped Luther as a hero; Emerson said that his "religious movement was the foundation of so much intellectual life in Europe; that ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... make tea with out of tablets. In early morning a train disgorged a crowd of men who had been prisoners with the Boers at Pretoria, some ever since the first battle. When Roberts came they all escaped, under shell-fire from the Boers as a final conge. They were a most motley crew, dressed in all manner of odd clothes. At 7 P.M. coffee and porridge, and at 7.30 orders came to detrain and harness up sharp, the sections to separate again. Then followed a whole series of contrary orders, but we ultimately harnessed up and hooked in; the right section marched ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... little jealous of his wife. Mrs. Hooghley had always an opportunity at the Cedars of meeting some friends in her former profession, for Mr. Vigo liked to be surrounded by genius and art. "I must have talent," he would exclaim, as he looked round at the amusing and motley multitude assembled at his splendid entertainments. And to-day upon his lawn might be observed the first tenor of the opera and a prima-donna who had just arrived, several celebrated members of the English stage of both sexes, artists of great reputation, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the Doxology rolled out on the summer air through the open church windows, followed by a brief silence, and then the great doors swung open and the motley congregation thronged out ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... constitution. When we turn the mind in upon itself, and make it our object, the very act of earnest reflection obscures the idea, or destroys the emotion we desire to contemplate. This is especially the case in the present instance. The ludicrous, when we attempt to grasp it, shows off its gay and motley garb, and appears in grave attire. It is only by abstracting our mind from the inquiry, and throwing it into lighter considerations, that we can at all retain the illusion. A clever sally appears brilliant ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... thee, rest thee, Muse, review the scene Where thou with me from peep of dawn hast been: We did not promise that this motley throng Should every one supply a votive song; Nor every tenant:—yet thou hast been kind, For untold tales must still remain behind, Which might o'er listening patience still prevail. Did fancy ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... and Jenny really must not walk the whole way, to the great amusement of the latter, leaped on Hurry, and fled away in front of us. Before we had accomplished one-quarter of the distance, we heard the thundering tread of many feet galloping down the avenue, and presently espied our motley troop of steeds being driven furiously toward us. Storm, Lightfoot, Swift, Grumble, Stentor, Arrow and Dart were there, with Jack, on his fleet two-legged courser, at their heels. At his saddle-bow hung a cluster of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and Antiquities of Bristol, by William Barrett:" Bristol, 1789, quarto; a Work which Mr. Park described as " a motley compound of real and ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... Murphy's gang, a motley crew, mostly French Canadians and Irish, just out of the woods and ready for any devilment that promised excitement. Most of them knew by sight, and all by reputation, Macdonald and his gang, for ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... stranger. Suddenly in eerie harmonies of newest French or oldest Tartar, here are the tricks and traits where meet the extremes of latest Romantic and primeval barbarian. In this motley cloak sounds the typical Yankee tune, first piping in piccolo, then grunting in tuba. Here is Uncle Sam disporting himself merrily in foreign garb and scene, quite as if at home. If we wished, we might see a political satire ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... well-known words, MR. G. LLOYD says, "It is also stated, I do not know on what authority, that the old and lamented warrior, Sir Charles Napier, wrote on the conquest of Scinde, Peccavi!" The author of Democritus in London, with the Mad Pranks and Comical Conceits of Motley and Robin Good-Fellow, thus alludes to this saying in that work. I presume he had good ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... its other side, in the doctrine of the unity of God, which was not only taught by Jews and Christians, but generally admitted by serious heathens. The philosophers spoke of a dim Supreme far off from men, and even the polytheists were not unwilling to subordinate their motley crew of gods to some mysterious divinity beyond them all. So far there was a general agreement. But underneath this seeming harmony there was a deep divergence. Resting on a firm basis of historic revelation, Christianity could bear record of a God who loved the world and of a Redeemer who had ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... of motley black and yellow; a slender and graceful figure; wings not spread out flat, when resting, but folded lengthwise in two; the abdomen a sort of chemist's retort, which swells into a gourd and is fastened to the thorax by a long neck, first distending ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... earnest conviction, both in the choice of a subject and the method of its treatment, has been signally illustrated by a countryman of our own. The interest of the general reader and the approbation of historical scholars were at once enlisted by Motley's "Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic." That work differs from and is superior to any American historical composition by virtue of a certain fluent animation, a certain decided and sustained tone, such as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... junks, our little floating caravan, with the two magnates on board, and their picul of rice, their curry and their sugar, and slenderest outfits, bowled along under plain sail, the fore-deck packed with a motley team of somewhat dirty and ill-fed trackers, who whistled and halloed the peculiar hallo of the ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... around him with some curiosity, for he had never been in such a motley gathering before. There were perhaps one hundred and fifty boys recruited from the street, to about all of whom except himself the term ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... and fourteen competitors presented themselves—a motley group, clad for the most part in trousers, horse-rug, and wide-awake, or, more simply still, in Ulster frieze coat only. The group of spectators had by this time grown to some hundreds, nearly all directly interested in the noble art; and the dips became fast and frequent. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Red Jabez, ranged back and forth before the mighty rock portals of the Cave of Terrible Things, like some magnificent tigress hedged with foes. Beyond those portals Red Jabez, Sultan of pirates, arbiter of life and death over the motley community, lay at grips with the grim specter to whom he had consigned scores far more readily than he now yielded up his own red-stained soul. Red Jabez was dying a death as hard as his lurid life ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... most interesting portion of the exercises had been concealed from view. The butterflies, while naturally the most conspicuous element, were now seen to be in a small minority among the insect gathering, the bramble leaves being peopled with a most motley and democratic assemblage of insects. Class distinctions were apparently forgotten in the common enthusiasm; the plebeian bluebottle and blowfly now consorted with Aphrodite and sipped at the same drop. ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... was to discover fresh follies of which he could be capable. He considered himself as an inexhaustible quarry of humours, vanities, jealousies, whims, absurd enthusiasms, absurd mortifications. He was able, as he said, to sit at his ease in the side-scene and see himself jigging on the stage in motley or the tragic sock—see himself as a lover, and cry aloud in delight at the mad persistence of the fool he appeared; see himself directing the affairs of the nation, and be ready to die of laughing at himself for pretending ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... country; the first man that Mr Banks saw was Tupia, faithfully attending with his musquet; and soon after, Oberea brought him some of her country clothes as a succedaneum for his own; so that when he came to us he made a most motley appearance, half Indian and half English. Our party soon got together, except Dr Solander, whose quarters we did not know, and who had not assisted at the concert: In a short time Tootahah made his appearance, and we pressed him to recover our clothes; but neither he nor Oberea ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... letters to the Journal. After examination of the great fortresses in the Duchy of Luxembourg, he went into Germany, tarrying at Heidelberg, Nuremberg, Munich, and Vienna. He then passed down "the beautiful blue Danube" to Buda-Pesth, where, having been given letters and commendations from J. L. Motley, the historian of the Netherlands and our minister at Vienna, he saw the glittering pageant which united the crowns of Austria and Hungary. This was performed in the parish church in Buda, an edifice built over six hundred years ago. It had been captured by the Turks and made into ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... were merely proceeding to their anchorage for the night. At daybreak the rest of the fleet put in at the island, bringing the whole of the forces which Demosthenes had at his disposal, except a few, who were left to garrison the fort at Pylos. They were a motley host, armed for the most part with slings, javelins, and bows, but admirably suited for the work which was to be done. Swarming over the island by hundreds and by thousands they took up their stations on every piece ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... up in packets of a hundred pounds lay at the feet of the voyageurs awaiting De la Verendrye's command. A dozen soldiers in the plumed hats, slashed buskins, the brightly colored doublets of the period, joined the motley company. Priests came out to bless the departing voyageurs. Chapel bells rang out their God-speed. To the booming of cannon, and at a word from De la Verendrye, the gates opened. Falling in line with measured tread, the soldiers ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... fine morning: before him lay the whole scenery of the town, in its great variety of clay houses, huts, sheds, green open places affording pasture for oxen, horses, camels, donkeys, and goats, in motley confusion, with many beautiful specimens of the vegetable kingdom—the slender date-palm, the spreading alleluba, and the majestic silk-cotton tree— the people in all varieties of costume, from the almost naked ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... naturally played by the low comedians of the time. The harlequin of Mrs. Behn's farce was personated by an actor named Jevon, who was followed in the part by Pinkethman, a comedian much commended by Steele in "The Tatler." Pinkethman was found so amusing in his motley coat, and what Cibber calls "that useless unmeaning mask of a black cat," that certain of his admirers fancied that much of the drollery and spirit of his grimace must be lost by the concealment of his face. Yielding to their request, therefore, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... certain estate with slaves and cattle, but not equal; to some more, to others less. The King goes the round of these farms at will, and lives upon their produce. Any day you may see hosts of slaves bringing fruits of all sorts to the King, as he goes through the country with his motley following, all living ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... I looked up. It seemed to me, as he eyed me, that he had addressed it particularly to me. I blushed. Some strange country girls on either side of me began to titter. I blushed more decidedly. The motley chap in the ring must have seen it. He grinned from ear to ear, walked up to the very edge of ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... territorial possession of Rome in the modern sense of the term. The form and order of the government remained substantially as they were; only the Roman community came in place of the former monarchs. Those Asiatic provinces consisted as formerly of a motley mixture of domanial possessions, urban territories de facto or de jure autonomous, lordships pertaining to princes and priests, and kingdoms, all of which were as regards internal administration more or less left ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... I mingled with the motley throng, my ears alert for any spoken opinions. I had seen the flying-belt thrown from the machine and the stoppage of the engine. I wanted now to learn something of the hot breath of the people who had set it in motion eleven months and ten ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... goodly company; And they served the Lord Primate on bended knee. Never, I ween, was a prouder seen, Read of in books, or dreamt of in dreams, Than the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims! In and out through the motley rout, That little Jackdaw kept hopping about: Here and there, like a dog in a fair, Over comfits and cates, and dishes and plates, Cowl and cope, and rochet and pall, Miter and crosier! he hopped upon all. With a saucy air, he perched on the chair Where, ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... the then totally unknown lands of the Snake Indians. It consisted of about sixty men, thirty women, and as many children of various ages—about a hundred and twenty souls in all. Many of the boys were capable of using the gun and setting a beaver-trap. The men were a most motley set. There were Canadians, half-breeds, Iroquois, and Scotchmen. Most of the women had Indian blood in their veins, and a ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... without a word, conducted the visitors between the flower-beds upon narrow, winding paths which traversed the garden like a lovely labyrinth. The graceful ease of her gait showed that she was enjoying the chance of showing others the motley splendors of her garden. As if she had determined to make her guests giddy, she moved on faster and ever faster like the leader of a lively folk-dance. Then, quite suddenly, so that Casanova seemed to ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... strange. Your house is grown a nuisance to its neighbours, Where twice in every week, if not more frequent, A motley crowd at midnight hour assembles; Whose ruffian-like attendants in the street, Alarm the peaceful, and ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... sold, exhibited a very gay appearance; and gilt hams, gilt cheese, festoons of gilt sausages, intermixed with evergreens, and fringes of maccaroni, illuminated Virgin Marys, and gingerbread Holy Families, divided the attention of the stranger, with the motley crowds in all the gay variety of Neapolitan costume. At the depth of seventy or eighty feet beneath these crowded haunts of busy men, lies buried, in a solid mass of hard volcanic matter, the once splendid city of Herculaneum, which was overthrown in the first century of the Christian era, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... than revise. In 1523 and 1524 first ten new dialogues, afterwards four, and again six, were added to the Formulae, and at last in 1526 the title was changed to Familiarium colloquiorum opus. It remained dedicated to the boy Froben and went on growing with each new edition: a rich and motley collection of dialogues, each a masterpiece of literary form, well-knit, spontaneous, convincing, unsurpassed in lightness, vivacity and fluent Latin; each one a finished one-act play. From that year on, the stream of editions and translations flowed ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... the Union and berating the North for continuing, through pride alone, a bloody conflict doomed to failure. Meanwhile in midsummer attention was diverted from the ethical causes at issue by the publication in the Times of Motley's letter analysing the nature of the American constitution and defending the legal position of the North in its resistance to secession. Motley wrote in protest against the general British press attitude: "There is, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... tedious leisure of their sullen and suspicious occupation of Rome, by erecting in the camp a stage of planks, and performing thereon a rude mystery-play. The play thus improvised by a handful of troopers before this motley invading army: before the feudal cavalry of Burgundy, strange steel monsters, half bird, half reptile, with steel beaked and winged helmets and claw-like steel shoes, and jointed steel corselet and rustling steel mail coat; before the infantry of Gascony, rapid and rapacious with their ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... were flung open, and there burst in upon us a motley crew of grotesque and hideous masks, each one bearing a basket or bucket or sack, and all singing and shouting in every key and ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... to us? This: He is action; and action thrills us. The old hero was, in general, brave and brilliant. He had the tornado's movement. His onset redeems him. He blustered, was spectacular, heartless, and did not guess the meaning of purity; but he was warrior, and the world enjoys soldiers. And this motley hero has been attempted in our own days. He was archaic, but certain have attempted to make him modern. Byron's Don Juan is the old hero, only lost to the old hero's courage. He is a villain, with not sense enough to understand he is unattractive. He is a libertine ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... were on the wing for Venice in a coasting boat, which would touch at Chiozza, where Goldoni's mother then resided. The boy pleased them. Would he like the voyage? This offer seemed too tempting, and away he rushed, concealed himself on board, and made one of a merry motley shipload. 'Twelve persons, actors as well as actresses, a prompter, a machinist, a storekeeper, eight domestics, four chambermaids, two nurses, children of every age, cats, dogs, monkeys, parrots, birds, pigeons, and a lamb; it was another Noah's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... books to choose. History is always good reading for a boy of your age. You would find Macaulay's History of England both valuable and interesting, and a small volume entitled A History of Our Own Times, by Justin McCarthy, might be read in connection with it. The historical writings of Motley and Prescott are also standard works of the greatest value. If you prefer biography, the "English Men of Letters Series" will give you a complete outline of English literature. It would be foolish for you to buy books which would simply amuse you for a short time, and ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... would not lose the form and balance which are of the essence of Greek art. It is necessary also to preserve as much as possible the simplicity of diction, and to avoid words and phrases suggestive of very modern ideas. After all, it is difficult, with a material so motley and irregular as the English language, to produce anything like the pure marble of the Greek. There are translations of Greek tragedies or parts of them by writers of high poetic reputation, which are no doubt poetry, but ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... station on the parapets at Grotta-Ferrata. Opposite us is a penthouse, (where nobody peaks and pines,) whose jutting fraschi-covered eaves and posts are adorned with gay draperies; and under the shadow of this is seated a motley set of peasants at their lunch and dinner. Smoking plates come in and out of the dark hole of a door that opens into kitchen and cellar, and the camerieri cry constantly, "Vengo subito" "Eccomi qua"—whether they come or not. Big-bellied flasks of rich Grotta-Ferrata wine are filled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest?" I got my worsted and sat down stairs at my work, to be ready to see the doctor when he should come. Mrs. Sandford took post at the window; and so we waited. The weather to-day was clear and bright; the street full yet of motley groups, returned soldiers and gathered civilians, looking however far less dismal than the day before. Mrs. Sandford from the window detailed all she saw; while my worsted needle went in and out to an interrupted refrain - "He shall not be afraid of evil tidings" ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... conspicuous: some recline in groups, Scanning the motley scene that varies round; There some grave Moslem to devotion stoops, And some that smoke, and some that play, are found; Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground; Half whispering there the Greek ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... thronged the sight to greet, And motley figures throng the spacious street; Majestical and calm through all they stride, Wearing the blanket with a monarch's pride; The gazers stare and shrug, but can't deny Their noble forms and blameless symmetry. If the Great Spirit their morale has slighted, And wigwam ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... music was a part of the man, and this gentle creature seemed a part of the music; it was, in fact, when she sat beside him that whatever was tender or fairy-like in his motley fantasia crept into the harmony as by stealth. Doubtless her presence acted on the music, and shaped and softened it; but, he, who never examined how or what his inspiration, knew it not. All that he knew was, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... window set high up and deep in the discoloured wall, allowed a few rays of yellow sunlight to fall revealingly upon a motley collection of antiquities. Empire chairs were piled upon Louis Quinze writing-desks. Tables of every known period formed a leaning tower in one corner. Rich Persian rugs draped huge Florentine mirrors; ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... not fairly out of their teens, and committed to their own discretion in the huge motley world of London, had been solemnly charged to behave with the greatest wariness. She was to treat every man or woman she encountered well-nigh as a dangerous enemy in disguise till her suspicions were proved to be misplaced, and the stranger shown to Rose's satisfaction and that of her seniors and ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... composed of tourists, business men, nabobs and adventurers. There life rolls on in the refined corruption of fashionable society amidst sports and amusements, scandals and intrigues, every race and every tongue contributing its share of good and evil. A motley crowd swarms their streets, presenting to the eye of an onlooker the picturesque spectacle that the contrast of costumes always produces. They are people of different colours, dress and education, attracted ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... approached, they saw a group of people—perhaps twenty-drawn closely together, either in the sympathy of segregation from an unfeeling world, or for protection from the keen wind. On the hither bank, and leaning on the rails of the drive, had collected a motley crowd of spectators, men, women, and boys, who exhibited some impatience and much curiosity, decorous for the most part, but emphasized by occasional jocose remarks in an undertone. A serious ceremony ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and luxuriates in the beautiful garden of Europe; the queer inflections of the American's quiet drawl are heard everywhere as he strolls round the tables; Roumanian boyards, Parisian swindlers, Austrian soldiers, Hungarian plutocrats, flashy and foolish young Englishmen—all gather in a motley crowd; and the British bookmaker's interesting presence is obtrusive. His very accent—strident, coarse, impudent, unspeakably low—gives a kind of ground-note to the hum of talk that rises in all places of public resort, and he recruits his delicate health in anticipation of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... A rather motley crew was this first German party landed at Melbourne. I fear they were not all vinedressers. But the difficulty was to get them to describe themselves as such, even when they were so. This was almost as hard upon them as for an Indian Brahmin to write himself ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... said of Denis Quirk in those days that his only pleasure was in his work. He was lonely for Desmond O'Connor, now a student at Manly. The flat was still frequented by the representatives of motley and variegated talent, as in the old days. Jests were made, good stories told, and songs sung by well-trained voices; but these were mere acquaintances. Denis longed for the intimate ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... Mrs. Browning; and did we dare rebel against God's will, we should grieve deeply that she was not permitted to glorify the Right in America as she has glorified it in Italy. Among the last things that she read were Motley's letters on the "American Crisis," and the writer will ever hold in dear memory the all but final conversation had with Mrs. Browning, in which these letters were discussed and warmly approved. In referring to the attitude taken by foreign nations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... Florida with a strong force of United States troops and Creek Indians, to punish the Seminoles. He was met by a motley crowd of Indians and negroes. Even children joined their fathers to resist the approach of the whites and Creeks. Though they did not present an imposing appearance, the Florida Indians and their allies proved to be ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... there idly plucking at the wet grass, her mind was overrun with a motley host of memories—some absurd, some sweet, some of an austerity that chilled her to the core. She thought of the difficulty she had in persuading Delafield to allow himself even necessary comforts and conveniences; ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... table d'hote at six p.m., coffee, tea, liquors, and a grand ball to complete the work of digestion. A long corridor leads to this earthly Eden, and the two doors at the end of it open, the one into the dining, and the other into the ball-room. A motley crew collected there for the evening meal, and on Sundays it is next to impossible to procure a seat. But the dining-room is the Grand Turk's greatest attraction, for as soon as the dessert is over the head waiter makes a sign, ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... merchandise, the Red Hall of the Flemings resounding with the noise of artificers, the wealthy religious houses which kept alive the flame of ancient learning, and dispensed befitting charities, the streets presented a motley assemblage of seafaring men, monks, warriors, and soldiers; the wives and daughters of the burghers, all in holiday attire, crowded the housetops or gazed from the windows and balconies; and the burghers themselves, leaving their booths and warehouses, flocked to the port to gossip ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... Armored in smiles, a motley Britomart— Her lance is high adventure, tipped with scorn; Her banner to the suns and winds unfurled, Washed white with laughter; and beneath her heart, Shrined in a garland of laborious thorn, Blooms the unchanging Rose of all ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... glamor of the motley towns and cities, The distant purple haze—that now is gone, Nor could be found, though I should go to seek it; But here within me, when I call, there rises A something, rules my spirit, and I feel As if it might in thee as well— [He changes his tone.] Knowst thou the day, on ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... the "motley crew" along with whom Dr Burton received his education fell into difficulties in the course of their lives. An application from one of them always met with a prompt response. To send double the amount asked on such occasions was his rule, if money was the object desired. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... would be difficult to find a more motley and diversified company than sat down to the ungarnished fare which Katty laid before them. There were first Fathers Philemy, Con, and the Auxiliary from the far part of the diocese; next followed Captain Wilson, Peter ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... assembled around it the three generations of men who issued from the three subdivisions of the diligence, and presented that motley and mixed assemblage of ranks, ages, and countries, which forms so very amusing a part ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Nowhere, in the dim shimmering vistas over west, where the gray line of grease-wood met the blue of the horizon. Slowly they assumed definite shape; and the coyote ceased his orisons to speculate upon the ultimate possibility of breakfast and this motley trio of "desert rats" with their burro train, who dared invade his desolate ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... close about the cellar walls, is a motley throng, curious, eager, expectant; among the faces peering down may be seen that of the portly gentleman; his diamond pin glistening as he turns this way and that; his great coat blown back by the gusts of wind, and ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... drowsiness, but rather a desire for fresh air, I mounted to the cupola that adorned the roof of our house, and for a couple of hours I sat there, enjoying the delicious breeze and the picturesque panorama that lay beneath my feet, and the motley groups that swarmed to early ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... description, traversing in joyous bands the paths which led to the Palace of Princely Pleasure; for so the travelling minstrels had termed Kenilworth in the songs which already had come forth in anticipation of the revels, which were there expected. In the midst of this motley show, mendicants were exhibiting their real or pretended miseries, forming a strange though common contrast betwixt the vanities and the sorrows of human existence. All these floated along with the immense tide of population, whom mere curiosity had drawn together; and where the mechanic, in ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... armour-plates to shield him from a shot. The ornaments upon his head and beak are in the most awkward position. He was put together in a dream, of uneven and odd pieces that live and move, but do not fit. Ponderously gawky, he steps as if the world was his, like a "motley" crowned in sport. He is good eating, but he is not beautiful. After the eye has been accustomed to him for some time—after you have fed him every day and come to take an interest in him—after you have seen a hundred turkey-cocks, then he may become passable, or, if you ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... oak chest in which spare shawls, rugs, and coats were kept was soon ransacked, and the mummers' gay dresses hidden by motley wrappers. But no sooner did Darkie and Pax behold the coats, etc., than they at once began to leap and bark, as it was their custom to do when they saw any one dressing ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... as they have come like shadows, and soon their place is taken by the beasts, a great and motley procession: lions, tigers, bears, and the innumerable smaller savage things that flee from them, for every kind of beast, and, more particularly; all the man-eaters, live cheek by jowl on the favoured island. Their tongues are hanging out, ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... pretty, perhaps, as in ordinary attire, but she looked delightfully trim and business-like, and her young brothers and sisters were proud of her and made favourable comparisons between her and the other lady riders assembled in the square. It was a picturesque sight to see the motley collection of vehicles drawn up by the kerbstones, the riders pacing to and fro, greeting fresh arrivals, who kept trotting in from every direction, the pink coats of the men making welcome touches of colour, and finally the ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... himself. He brought together the most miscellaneous collection of mercenaries who ever fought under one standard,—men with hardly a common tie, and burning with the spirit of jealousy and faction; wild tribes of the natives also, who had been sworn enemies from their cradles. Yet this motley congregation was assembled in one camp, to breathe one spirit, and to move on a common ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... favorite resort for juvenile fishermen. Flounders, tom-cod, and eels, to say nothing of an occasional sculpin, which boys still persist in calling "crahpies," or "crahooners," used to furnish abundant sport to a motley group of youngsters wherein the sons of merchants mingled democratically with the dirty, ragged children of the "Ten-footers" in the vicinity. The pier was neutral ground, and Frederic Augustus made a friend of Michael or Dennis, and probably neither was much damaged by this free companionship; for ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... had better luck with his Lieutenant, a certain horse-coper or dealer. This man had sold Balmawhapple the chargers upon which to mount his motley array, and seeing no chance of getting his money except by "going out" himself, he had accepted the post of Lieutenant in the Chevalier's army. So far good. But just at the moment when it seemed that our hero was about to ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... order had not yet reached General Wilcox, the surgeon spent the day among the rebels, conversing with their officers, while his boatmen, having with them a canteen of brandy, soon made themselves very popular with the crowd of rebel soldiers who gathered about, dressed in motley colors, buff, blue, gray, butternut, and colors indescribable. They were all in good humor and lively, and the hours passed pleasantly, as the men from the two opposing armies chatted in the shade of some oak trees. Finding little prospect of ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... as 'twere, his private mind, Unhindered by repression, To make his motley life a kind, ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... to have caught very satisfactory glimpses of Arcadian life among the Cockneys there, hardly beyond the scope of Bow-Bells, picnicking in the grass, uncouthly gambolling on the broad slopes, or straying in motley groups or by single pairs of love-making youths and maidens, along the sun-streaked avenues. Even the omnipresent policemen or park-keepers could not disturb the beatific impression on my mind. One feature, at all events, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... impression was of a motley mass of steeds and men, glittering in purple, gold, silver and jewels. It consisted in reality of a troop of more than two hundred horsemen mounted on pure white Nicaean horses, whose bridles and saddle-cloths were covered with bells and bosses, feathers, fringes, and embroidery. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... about the people she was to meet there. The hostess was fond of collecting together all sorts of stray oddities, and of trying to further a scheme of universal brotherhood by mixing up in her drawing-room a most motley crowd, including all classes, from the ultra fine lady to the emancipated slave. It was not, perhaps, very amusing to the portion of her guests who found themselves lost in a sea of unknown faces, through which no pilot guided them; yet people went to her, ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... to sing; at first in a low tone, and in unintelligible words; but his voice was good, and it attracted attention, even among that motley crew, and after a little, perceiving that they were listening, he ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... He looked like nothing in the world I have ever seen, and his pale, sallow face, and cracked, wheezy voice, were in comic keeping with his discourse. His text was: 'Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.' And addressing the motley gathering of poor whites and small-planters before him as the 'chosen people of God,' he urged them to press on in the mad course their State had chosen. It was a political harangue, a genuine stump-speech, but its frequent allusion to the auditory as the legitimate children of the old patriarch, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... him into the verandah outside, he seated himself in a long chair and proceeded to sip it slowly, as if it were some elixir whose virtue would be lost by haste. Some people might have been amused by the motley crowd that passed along the street beyond the verandah-rails, but Gideon Hayle, for such was his name, took no sort of interest in it. He had seen it too often to find any variety in it. As a matter of fact the ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... street, surrounded by a company whom their chief has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, 'I have come to speak to your people,' I do not need to begin by telling them that there is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,—the bold, gaunt cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white with the ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... the populace. The nobles assembled in the Alcazaba were promised honors and rewards by Boabdil as soon as he should be firmly seated on the throne. These well-timed measures had the customary effect, and by daybreak all the motley populace of ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... What a motley crowd of human beings throng the board walk! How like the vast interminable deep is this thronging, surging mass of humanity, where they, like restless waves, pause awhile on the margin of the boundless sea until the ebb tide moves out ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... came. A crowd of volunteers came hurrying from farms and caves, bringing such weapons probably as they had been able to keep in hiding. They were willing to respond. It was a motley crowd, no doubt. There were thirty-two thousand of them. These four tribes had once numbered as many as one hundred and eighty-four thousand five hundred fighting men. And at another, later, enumeration ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... time for the Fair to be opened, Azalea went over to Elise's booth. As she had planned, Elise had a log cabin, and in it she had arranged a motley collection of antiques and heirlooms that were quaint and valuable. It was the design of the Fair to sell really worthwhile things at their full value; and as they expected many wealthy patrons, the committees felt pretty sure of ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... put my real name on the book because it is too late: the design for the cover is ready and the book printed. [Footnote: "Motley Tales" is meant.] Many of my Petersburg friends advised me, even before you did, not to spoil the book by a pseudonym, but I did not listen to them, probably out of vanity. I dislike my book very much. It's a hotch-potch, a disorderly medley ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... gate, on the left-hand as you faced it, was the usual line of boot-blacks—the only cheap thing left in Jerusalem—a motley two dozen of ex-Turkish soldiers, recently fighting the British gamely in the last ditch, and now blacking their boots with equal gusto, for rather higher pay. Some of them still wore Turkish uniforms. Two or three were redheaded and blue-eyed, and almost certainly ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... very common for his companions to make bets with him: for example, that he would not be able to climb up the ceiling of a room, or scramble over a certain house-top. Grimaldi, the famous clown, used to say, "Colonel Mackinnon has only to put on the motley costume, and he would ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... the American's quiet drawl are heard everywhere as he strolls round the tables; Roumanian boyards, Parisian swindlers, Austrian soldiers, Hungarian plutocrats, flashy and foolish young Englishmen—all gather in a motley crowd; and the British bookmaker's interesting presence is obtrusive. His very accent—strident, coarse, impudent, unspeakably low—gives a kind of ground-note to the hum of talk that rises in all places of public resort, and he recruits ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... When dusk has settled, the medicine-man begins his songs, singing first the twelve "hogan songs" of the Bahozhonchi. After he has finished, anyone present who so desires may sing songs taken from the ritual of the same order. This motley singing and hilarity continue until well toward sunrise, when the mother brings in a bowl of yucca suds and washes the girl's hair. Her head and hair are dried with corn-meal, after which the girl takes her last ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool;—a miserable world!— As I do live by food, I met a fool, Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms,—and yet a motley fool. 'Good morrow, fool,' quoth I: 'No, sir,' quoth he, 'Call ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Coutlass the Greek, and Hassan, reputed nephew of Tippoo Tib, were headed in one boat toward the steamer, the worse for the handling, but right side up and no angrier than the usual passenger. Following them was another boat containing a motley assortment of Arabs and part-Arabs, who might, or might not ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... cod line and a halibut hook. He remained comparatively passive for a time, and allowed himself to be hauled, by the united efforts of the crew, some three or four fathoms towards the brig, when, annoyed by the restraint imposed upon him, or disliking the wild and motley appearance of the ship's company, he took a broad sheer to starboard, the hook snapped like a pipestem, and the hated monster swam off in another direction, wagging his tail in the happy consciousness that he was "free, untrammelled, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for the denizens of Grub street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by agricultural labor; or, Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full experiment; or Candide and his motley associates, at work in their cabbage-garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... He told me (but I am sure this is not known to any out of our own family) that as Dr. Lindhorst was returning home after his second long absence, he entered a small village near Turin, just as a detachment of 'The Army of Italy' were leaving it. The rear presented the usual motley collection of baggage-wagons, disabled soldiers, sutlers, camp-women, and hangers-on of all sorts, who attend in the steps of a victorious troop. As Paul Lindhorst stopped to view the spectacle, and while the wild strains of music could be heard echoing and re-echoing as the columns ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Do come!' said Beletski, without the least surprise. 'But isn't it a pretty picture?' he added, pointing to the motley crowds. ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... parties—were riding northward, but the great mass was facing the City whither they were pressing to warm themselves in the glow of the Coronation. On foot, on horseback, in wagons and on crutches, they were as motley a throng as had ever trod the Roman stones; and the respectable element among them was by no means large enough to leaven the lump. Sometimes a group of merchants was to be seen, conducting loaded wagons; sometimes, a thane's pompous ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... Trafford scanned the little wharf, where a motley collection of men were gathered, with a quick-beating heart. Which of them could be Uncle Richard? Would he give him a kind welcome? The boy's spirits began to rise somewhat under the influence of the broad, cheerful glow of sunshine and the speedy prospect of meeting this ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... ground, strewn with potsherds and heaps of refuse. Here, in contrast to its usual solitude, a dense crowd had collected in evident anticipation of some interesting event. Presently two or three horsemen and a motley gang of soldiers emerged from the city and proceeded quickly along the causeway. Closely following were coolies carrying three red burdens, on bamboo poles, and these in turn were followed by more soldiers and a few officials in sedan chairs. It was an execution. The hurrying cavalcade ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... the English London is. Its public reception to the Prince was remarkable. It had managed it rather well. It had stated that all who wished to be present must apply for tickets of admission. Thousands did, and they passed before the Prince in a motley and genial crowd of top hats and gingham skirts, striped sweaters and satin charmeuse. But though they came in thousands, the numbers of ticket-holders were ultimately exhausted. When the last one had ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... was full of Murphy's gang, a motley crew, mostly French Canadians and Irish, just out of the woods and ready for any devilment that promised excitement. Most of them knew by sight, and all by reputation, Macdonald and his gang, for from the farthest reaches of the Ottawa down the St. Lawrence to Quebec the Macdonald ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... stated, I do not know on what authority, that the old and lamented warrior, Sir Charles Napier, wrote on the conquest of Scinde, Peccavi!" The author of Democritus in London, with the Mad Pranks and Comical Conceits of Motley and Robin Good-Fellow, thus alludes to this saying in that work. I presume he had good authority for ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... to get ashore, but finally, not appreciating the appearance of the motley crowd, we pushed on until we reached Plank Lane, where, the crowd of idlers being a little less dense, we summoned up ...
— Through Canal-Land in a Canadian Canoe • Vincent Hughes
... everywhere visible. Since Goethe no one has been able to say with so much truth, "My writings are my confessions." Her biography lies there, presented, indeed, in a fragmentary shape and under wayward disguises, but nevertheless giving to the motley groups the strong and uumistakable charm of reality. Her grandmother, by whom she was brought up, disgusted at her not being a boy, resolved to remedy the misfortune as far as possible by educating her like a boy. We may ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... was held, at night the mazy dance was trod by quaint maskers. The scene of this night outshone all others. The dazzling lights hanging from the galleries, displayed the grace of lords and ladies of the court. The "motley fool" retailed his jest, the juggler performed his feat, the minstrel plied his harp, and the ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... of annex to the public school system, as I shall shortly point out to you. For the moment, let us consider, together, what to my mind constitutes the very hopeful struggle of the two possibilities: either that the motley and evasive spirit of public schools which has hitherto been fostered, will completely vanish, or that it will have to be completely purified and rejuvenated. And in order that I may not shock you with general ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the day following the encounter in Bloomsbury Square, a little group of excited loiterers filled the entrance and passage way at 59 Bradwell Street, the former lodgings of the two young gentlemen from Scotland. The motley assemblage seemed for the most part to make merry at the expense of a certain messenger boy, who bore a long wicker box, which presently he shifted from his shoulder to a more convenient ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... turrets of this antique tower The bougainvillea hangs a crimson crown, Wistaria-vines and clematis in flower, Wreathing the lower surface further down, Hide the old plaster in a very shower Of motley blossoms like a broidered gown. Outside, ascending from the garden grove, A crumbling stairway winds to ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... about at the motley crowd. "This is a place where you need only to be introduced properly," he whispered to me, "to have any kind of crime ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... temple, in its degree too, of deep initiations, mounted guard at the right. Here, frankly, discrimination drops—every particular in the impression once so quick and fresh sits interlinked with every other in the large lap of the whole. The motley, sunny, breezy, bustling Port, with its classic, its admirable fisher-folk of both sexes, models of type and tone and of what might be handsomest in the thoroughly weathered condition, would have seemed the straightest appeal to curiosity had not the old Thackerayan side, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... This motley conglomeration is for the most part arranged against the inner wall of the hut, and opposite the entrance, so as to be observable by any one looking in at the door, or even passing by it. For its purpose is to impress the superstitious victims of Shebotha's ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... a kind of Phoenix." But in this special department of Everyman's Library we have been eclectic enough to choose our history men from every school in turn. We have Grote, Gibbon, Finlay, Macaulay, Motley, Frescott. We have among earlier books the Venerable Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, have completed a Livy in an admirable new translation by Canon Roberts, while Caesar, Tacitus, Thucydides and Herodotus ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... found the work of clearing the tables well advanced, and very soon its before-dinner aspect of calm waiting was restored. Surveying it I reflected that one might well wonder if aught momentous had indeed so lately occurred here. A motley day it had been. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... beach below, a great fire of driftwood and some score or more of men gathered in the circle of light. The distance was too great for him to tell much about their faces, but Jeremy was sure that no English or Colonial sloop-of-war would be manned by such a motley company. Their clothes varied from the sea-boots and sailor's jerkin of the average mariner to slashed leather breeches of antique cut and red cloth skirts reaching from the girdle to the knees. Some of the group wore three-cornered ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... was at the rear of the trader's party; but the ground being good we left our people and cantered on to the advanced flag. It was curious to witness the motley assemblage in single file extending over about half a mile of ground. Several of the people were mounted on donkeys, some on oxen; the most were on foot, including all the women to the number of about sixty, who were the slaves of the ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... what will be heading our way. I sometimes wonder what thoughts come to the eagle that perches over the great stone gateway on Ellis Island, as he watches the procession that files through it into the United States day after day, and never ends. He looks out of his grave, unblinking eye at the motley crowd, but gives no sign. Does he ask: "Where are the Pilgrim Fathers, the brave Huguenots, the patient Puritans, the sturdy priests, and the others that came for conscience' sake to build upon this continent a home for freedom? And these, why do they come with their strange tongues—for ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... wears gray to match his hair and eyes) and he would carry him around on his shoulder, it was a mighty pretty sight! the gray cat sound asleep against papa's gray coat and hair. The names that he has given our different cats, are realy remarkably funny, they are namely Stray Kit, Abner, Motley, Fraeulein, Lazy, Bufalo Bill, Cleveland, Sour Mash, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... were a motley crew, and motley was the cue of our reception. Exclamations of wonder at our strangeness gave way to laughter. The ki-sang invaded us, dragging us about, making prisoners of us, two or three of them to one of us, leading us about like go many dancing boars ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the Town Guard mustered—Kaffirs, Parsees, Jews, Arabians, Englishmen, Dutchmen, nearly every sort and nationality of men—and when the Mayor read an address expressing in the conventional terms of such compliments the emotions of this motley crowd, one asked oneself what it was that had held these very ordinary-looking people to so heroic an intention. Remember that the defence of Mafeking had been one big bluff, that there was nothing ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... day-light fair, and loving well Its forms and dyes, and all the motley play Of lives that win their colour from the day, Are fain some wonder of it all to tell To you that in that elder kingdom dwell Of Ancient Night, and thus we make assay Day to translate to Darkness, so to say, To talk Cimmerian for ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... the pageant wound through the dejected street, pursuing neither method nor set route, till it came to a deserted slag-heap, selected for the speech-making. Slowly the motley regiment swung into that grim amphitheatre under the pale sunshine; and, as I watched, a strange fancy visited my brain. I seemed to see over every ragged head of those marching women a little yellow flame, a thin, flickering gleam, spiring ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the planetoid was doomed. His supposedly impregnable screen was failing in spite of its utmost measure of energy, and, that defense down, the citadel would not last a minute. Therefore he summoned a chosen few of his motley crew of renegade scientists and issued brief instructions. For minutes a host of robots toiled mightily, then a portion of the shield bulged out, extended into a tube beyond the attacking layers of force, and from it there erupted a beam of violence incredible. A beam behind which was every volt ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... for money's sake, Men marry: women are in marriage given The churl or ruffian, that in wealth has thriven, May match his offspring with the proudest race: Thus everything is mix'd, noble and base! If then in outward manner, form, and mind, You find us a degraded, motley kind, Wonder no more, my friend! the cause is plain, And to ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... arrayed In velvet plumage gay, With many an amorous dame, Fierce strutted o'er the way; And motley ducks Were waddling seen, And drake with neck Of ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... the days of Strongbow. The advantage of a numerous, loyal, and able-bodied population was seen in 1573, when the Earl of Essex passed through the place on his way to Ireland. It happened that he left behind him a detachment of soldiers, and the "motley coats" and "blue coats," having quarrelled, used their weapons on each other. With admirable promptitude, the Mayor summoned the trained bands, and the rest of the story may be told in the vivacious ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... rented to those among the most degraded whom she could bring to conform to a few simple rules of decency, industry, and benevolence—one of these rules being that they should pay her the rent every Saturday night. To this motley gathering she became chief counselor and friend, quieted their brawls, taught them to aid each other in trouble or sickness, and strove to introduce among them that law of patient love and kindness, illustrated by her own example. The young girls in ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes; and no essayists who are a match for Emerson and James Russell Lowell—no jurists who are the rivals of Marshall, Kent and Story; and no living historians equal Bancroft, Prescott and Motley. These facts do not necessarily indicate (as some assert) a widespread intellectual famine. The most probable explanation of the fact is that the mental forces in our day exert themselves in other directions. This is an age of scientific research ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... also weigh with me, And one of more especial gravity; Say that there lurked among our motley band Some sneaking, sly pretender to her hand; Say, his attentions became undisguised,— We should ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... to my place in spite of pressure and crowding. The first to come ashore were all men—English merchants, returning Canadians, a couple of uniformed officers, Frenchmen decked out in lace and fine clothing, and a motley sprinkling of others. They passed on, some being met and embraced by waiting friends; and next came an elderly, sour-looking dame, who regarded me with ill-favor. I followed her a few paces beyond the crowd, never doubting that I was ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... in what the Present and the Past opened up to her. True, her father and mother hardly shared in her pleasure; Mr. Copley's taste was blunted, I fear, for all noble enjoyment; and Mrs. Copley cared mainly to be comfortable in her home quarters, and to go out now and then where the motley world of fashion and of sight-seeing did most congregate. Especially she liked to go to the Pincian Hill Sunday afternoon, and watch the indescribable concourse of people of all nationalities which is there to be seen at that time. But ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... the regular County Court day in the village. The public square was crowded with vehicles, live stock, and countrymen whose chief pleasure was to mix in motley crowds, and to whose fancy an uproar of some kind was ever welcome. On such occasions, in the somewhat lax administering of justice of those early times, the killing of a fellow creature seemed indeed a ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... more of lesser degree,— In sooth, a goodly company; And they served the Lord Primate on bended knee. Never, I ween, was a prouder seen, Read of in books, or dreamt of in dreams, Than the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims! In and out through the motley rout, That little Jackdaw kept hopping about: Here and there, like a dog in a fair, Over comfits and cates, and dishes and plates, Cowl and cope, and rochet and pall, Miter and crosier! he hopped upon ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... along, to remarks about the people they passed, the doings of the Newport summer, concerning which he had heard all the gossip during the last few hours, the prospect of Madame Patti in opera during the coming season, horses, dogs, and mutual friends—all the motley array of subjects permissible, desultory, and amusing. Suddenly, as they bowled out on an open road by the sea, ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... than he was attacked by the Sikh army, which had been moving up from Bugurrarah while he was gaining the passage. This was a terrible engagement. The sun had hardly risen upon river, and swamp, and undulating plains, when the Mooltanee forces fell upon the motley crowd of the British levies, and in such superior numbers that victory seemed certain. For nine hours the English lieutenant resisted the onslaught, and by his valour, activity, presence of mind, and moral influence, kept ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... especially of the tragic fable, is unpleasingly broken. The spectators cannot bear to be so suddenly tossed from the serious to the mirthful, and from the mirthful to the serious. In short, such an heterogeneous adulteration has all the absurdity reproached to the motley mixture in tragi-comedy, without any thing of that connection which is preserved in that kind of justly exploded dramatic composition. How easy too to avoid this defect, by adapting the subjects of the dances to the different exigences of the different dramas, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... Dubuque, clothed with woods to the top, and looking more like York State than anything I had seen since I had taken the schooner at Buffalo to come up the Lakes. I lay that night, unable to sleep. For one thing, I needed to be wakeful, lest some of the motley crowd of movers might take a fancy to my cattle. I was learning by experience how to take care of myself and mine; besides, I wanted to be awake early so as to take passage by ferry-boat "before soon" as the Hoosiers ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... "full dress," and white shirts, collars, and the like would be left at home, he had sense enough to know; but that every officer and man in the command would be allowed to discard any and all portions of the regulation uniform and appear rigged out in just such motley guise as his poetic or practical fancy might suggest, had never been pointed out to him; and that he, commanding his troop while a captain commanded the little battalion, could by any military possibility take his place in front of his men without his sabre, had never for an instant ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... we proceed to the ore-yard, which presents a very motley appearance. Under its capacious roof there were tons upon tons of every variety of ore—native and foreign, blue and red, green and yellow, and all intermediate colours—indiscriminately piled around. There was the beautiful ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... The moment that the motley army of our assailants came close enough to the house to enable them to see that it had been put into a state of defence, they halted, and some half-a-dozen of them clustered about an immensely tall and powerful-looking negro who was attired ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... unfortunate sisterhood, of what is sardonically called the life of pleasure. Upon the whole, I am afraid there is a good deal in common between the political life and the life of the streets. Certainly, the camp followers in political warfare are a motley crew of mercenaries, and they take their tone from quite a number of ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... outer gate, and arrived at length in the great court-yard, where most of the inhabitants of the fortress, and those who, under recent circumstances, had taken refuge there, were drawn up, in order to look, for the last time, on their departed lord. Among these were mingled a few of the motley crowd from without, whom curiosity, or the expectation of a dole, had brought to the castle gate, and who, by one argument or another, had obtained from the warder permission ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... set thick with spines like a hedgehog, swung in the breeze over the doorway, and the windows on each side of the doorway displayed, without any attempt at arrangement, all sorts of motley treasures of the sea: purple sea-fans; coral in every fairy shape, white as sea-foam; conches patterned like some tessellated pavement of old Rome; monster star-fish, sharks' teeth, pink pearls, and shells of every imaginable convolution and iridescence, ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... a certain degree really become so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one nation to another, and with the progress of refinement this diction became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... nickname for a jester (Chapter XX), from his motley clothes, is also sometimes a variant of Pash. And the dim. Patchett has become confused with Padgett, from Padge, a rimed form of Madge. Pentecost is recorded as a personal name in Anglo-Saxon times. Michaelmas is now Middleman ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... which were various enticing-looking articles to be raffled for. The noble park, with its groups of trees of different species, its sloping sward, and a lake in the centre well stocked with water-fowl of various kinds, gave ample room and amusement to the motley multitude which had gathered for ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... our sensations of pleasure and pain are experienced with great vivacity in our dreams; and hence all that motley group of ideas, which are caused by them, called the ideas of imagination, with their various associated trains, are in a very vivid manner acted over in the sensorium; and these sometimes call into action the larger muscles, which have been much associated with them; as appears from the muttering ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... flying over Laramie stockade, and this flag the mountain men saw fit to salute with many libations, hearing now that it was to fly forever over California as over Oregon. Crowding the stockade inclosure full was a motley throng—border men in buckskins, engages swart as Indians, French breeds, full-blood Cheyennes and Sioux of the northern hills, all mingling with the curious emigrants who had come in from the wagon camps. Plump ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... studying during 1909 at Gottingen and during 1910 at the University of Berlin. Since his return to America he has been connected with the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons. His first volume, "The Human Fantasy", 1911, attracted attention by the faithfulness with which it depicted the motley life of New York. His second was "The Beloved Adventure", 1912; followed by "Love and Liberation", 1913, and "Dust and Light", 1919. The last volume, from which the selections in this anthology are taken, contains some of Mr. Wheelock's finest lyrical work, ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... those who were urging them forward to be the enemy. Women shrieked and wrung their hands, children wailed piteously, oxen lowed, and the infirm and aged vented their grief in groans and cries to Heaven, or their ancient god, for mercy. In truth, so difficult was the task of marshalling this motley array at night, numbering as it did ten or twelve thousand souls, that a full hour went by before the mob even began to move, slowly and uncertainly, towards the place of refuge, whereof the opening was so narrow that but few of them could pass it ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... he could hardly bear the weight of it. He must have suffered a very great inconvenience on such a warm night, but people stared at him as they passed by, and he was more than repaid by the attention which he attracted; so he stood and suffered on. There were about twenty-five clowns in their motley dresses, seven or eight pantaloons, three devils, and perhaps forty or fifty dominoes. Joey soon found himself close to the orchestra, which was a blaze of light, and he listened very attentively to a lady in ostrich feathers, who was pouring out a bravura, which was quite unintelligible ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... cared to risk capital in opening quarries. In 1888 surface (boulder) marble was being cut near Montalban (Rizal) under contract with the Dominican friars to supply them with it for their church in Manila. It was of a motley whitish colour, polished well, and a sample of it sent by me to a marble-importer in London was ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... beginning of the Rowley fiction—which might be metaphorically described as a motley edifice, half castle and half cathedral, to which Chatterton all his life was continually adding columns and buttresses, domes and spires, pediments and minarets, in the shape of more poems by Thomas Rowley (a secular priest of St. John's, ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... the lands which the Georgians claimed under the various State treaties with the Indians, but which by the treaty of New York had been confirmed to the Creeks by the United States. On another occasion he entitled his motley force the Sans Culottes, and masqueraded as a major general of the French army, though the French Consul denied having any connection with him. He established for the time being a little independent government, with blockhouses and small wooden towns, in the middle of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... sounds and scenes the world had shown by day; Now listening to the lark, she stray'd across the flowery hill, Where trickles down from bowering groves the brook that turns the mill; And now she roam'd the city lanes, where human tongues are loud, And mix the lofty and the low amid the motley crowd, Where subtle-eyed philosophy oft heaves a sigh, to scan The aspiring grasp, and paltry ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Americans? Our cause has lost an ardent supporter in Mrs. Browning; and did we dare rebel against God's will, we should grieve deeply that she was not permitted to glorify the Right in America as she has glorified it in Italy. Among the last things that she read were Motley's letters on the "American Crisis," and the writer will ever hold in dear memory the all but final conversation had with Mrs. Browning, in which these letters were discussed and warmly approved. In referring to the attitude taken by foreign nations with regard to America, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... that they were merely proceeding to their anchorage for the night. At daybreak the rest of the fleet put in at the island, bringing the whole of the forces which Demosthenes had at his disposal, except a few, who were left to garrison the fort at Pylos. They were a motley host, armed for the most part with slings, javelins, and bows, but admirably suited for the work which was to be done. Swarming over the island by hundreds and by thousands they took up their stations on every piece of rising ground, ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... interested, and what a bustle and movement there was! The banging of the guns on the men-of-war began again as the motley, fascinatingly interesting crowd, cavalry outriders, Sikhs, Parsees, Gourkas, Hindoos, and Mussulmen, sped away down to the Apollo Bundar to see the Prince go off to the flagship. H. and I went with ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... own officers, and this weakened their efficiency for offensive purposes. When the siege commenced, every citizen indiscriminately assumed the uniform of the National Guard. Each battalion of this motley force elected its officers, and both men and officers united in despising discipline as a restraint to natural valour. The National Guard mounted guard occasionally on the ramparts, and the rest of their time ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... low on the least suspicion of a squint. Horace and Jodocus Damhouder, (to whose harmless Dam our impatience tempts us to add an n,) Tibullus and Johannes Wouwerus, St. Augustine and Turnebus, with a motley mob of Jews, Christians, Greeks, Romans, Arabians, and Lord-knows-whats, are all thrust into the dock cheek by jowl. For ourselves, we would have taken Mr. Story's word for it, without the attestation of these long-winded old monsters, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... North African Moors, Tartar bowmen, Negro wrestlers, Indian divers, and Turks, who generally accompanied the Cardinal on his hunting expeditions. When he was overtaken by an early death (1535), this motley band carried the corpse on their shoulders from Itri to Rome, and mingled with the general mourning for the open-handed Cardinal their medley of tongues and ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Mrs Cutts is a most kind motley woman," Harry said. "But it isn't the Back Kitchen, neither," he ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... later he came back again, this time as king, with a motley army of mercenaries gathered to crush the two brothers De Lacy, who for the moment dominated all Ireland—the one, Hugo, being Earl of Ulster, and Viceroy; the other, Walter, Lord ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... (Psa. 37:1) "Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased" (Psa. 49:16). But go thou into the sanctuary of thy God, read His Word, and understand the end of these men-(Mason). Often, as the motley reflexes of my experience move in long processions of manifold groups before me, the distinguished and world-honoured company of Christian mammonists appear to the eye of my imagination as a drove of camels heavily laden, yet ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Sunday morning, July 21st, the English ships commenced their attacks upon their unwieldy antagonists. "The Spanish ships," says Motley, "seemed arrayed for a pageant in honor of a victory won. Arranged in the form of a crescent whose horns were seven miles asunder, those gilded towers and floating castles, with their brilliant standards and martial music, bore slowly up the Channel. The admiral, the 'Golden Duke,' stood in ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... the world Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here More zeal than knowledge in it Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men Most journalists would have been literary men if they could Motley Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps Nearly nothing as chaos could be Neatness that brings despair Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it Never paid in anything but hopes of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... I felt no danger in joining others of my class, lounging listlessly about in small groups discussing the situation, and gazing with awe upon those strange ships of war, swinging by their cables in the broad stream. It was a motley crew among whom I foregathered, one to awaken interest at any other time—French voyageurs from the far-off Illinois country, as barbarian in dress and actions as the native denizens of those northern plains, commingling freely with Creole hunters ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... the jetty. There were barges passing up and down the Channel, and Le Despenser's intention was to row out to one of those bound for Ireland, and so prosecute his voyage. He wore, we are told, a coat of furred damask; and carried with him a cloak of motley velvet. The term "motley" was applied to any combination of colours, from the simplest black and white to the showiest red, blue, and yellow. In the one portrait occurring in Creton's life-like illuminations, ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... could not get near enough to deliver the legs of mutton which had been ordered; the lumbering coal-carts 'still stopped the way.' A crowd—the easiest curiosity in the world to collect—soon gathered round the motley mob of butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers, and makers and sellers of everything else that mortal can want; the mob thronged the pavement, the carts filled the road, and soon the carriages of the noble of the land dashed up in all the panoply ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... in books, but action. And, turning from the history of the imposture to the poems themselves, the young reader bent before their beauty, literally awed and breathless. How this strange Bristol boy tamed and mastered his rude and motley materials into a music that comprehended every tune and key, from the simplest to the sublimest! He turned back to the biography; he read on; he saw the proud, daring, mournful spirit alone in the Great City, like himself. He followed its dismal career, he saw it falling with bruised ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... point of enthusiasm to the Derby Day. Special trains carry thousands, and the field presents a gay picture framed in a quadrangle of equipages. It is sometimes difficult, even by charging large admission-fees, to keep the number of spectators within convenient limits. Notwithstanding the motley assemblage which a match always attracts, so unobjectionable are the associations of the cricket-field that clergymen do not feel it unbecoming to participate in the diversion, either ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... finger of the right and left hand he had a nickname, by which he indicated in the merriest way when it was to be used. The black and white keys were likewise symbolically designated, and even the tones appeared under figurative names. Such a motley company worked most pleasantly together. Fingering and time seemed to become perfectly easy and obvious; and, while the scholar was put into the best humor, every thing else ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... people, consisting of men, women, and children, flocked to the roadside. The band struck up, and they accompanied the regiment for a mile or more, crowding and jostling each other in their endeavors to keep abreast of the music. The boys were wonderfully amused, and addressed to the motley troupe all the commands known to the volunteer service: "Steady on the right;" "Guide center;" "Forward, ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... to enumerate the numberless laws found on the motley map of German common rights. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... public squares seemed to be full of motley, ill-clad, ill-nourished, but formidable multitudes. Towards evening the tradesmen began to shut up their shops, and a regiment of cavalry paraded the principal streets with a band that played the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... of the world. It was a peaceful home life, all the more attractive in that its background was rough-and-ready Skaguay—a plain town enough to look at, but one full of thrilling human interest, of tragedy and comedy. Through its streets had passed a motley procession of men—some on their way to fortune, some to disappointment, but all battling with the realities of life. The doctor was struck by the simple and straightforward outlook of these people, their sincerity, and the pleasure they found in their life; far as it was from ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... dusk, the ruddy hearth-fires in the Hottentot kraals are glowing, And the motley, changeful signals on the Table Mountain growing Dim and distant—when the Caffre sweeps along the lone karroo— When in the bush the antelope slumbers, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... only there was work all the year round; for she couldn't afford to sit idle through the long summer months—well, I should say not!—with eight small brothers and sisters at home, and a rather incompetent father, and sixteen dollars a month rent! The experiences of a score of shops, and the motley crew of people she had worked with in these busy years, Bessie in her careless, simple narrative had the power to invest ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... mean time there passed through the motley crowd, not so much a cry as a sensation of "They've found her, they've found her!" and then the one terrible picturesque fact, "She ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... diversity of environment that would be represented in our accounts? Let them move in procession before the eyes of our imagination, those happy folk whose friendship has been the benediction of our lives! What a motley company they are! For some are blind, and some are crippled, and some are invalid; not many are rich and fortunate; many are poor—a company of handicapped but radiant spirits whose victorious lives, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... those who claimed relationship to the deceased; amongst whom Bertram fancied that he could distinguish plumes of feathers—and occasionally, as the inequalities of the ground threw the files into a looser array, a motley assemblage of colors and a glittering ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... acting company. They were on the wing for Venice in a coasting boat, which would touch at Chiozza, where Goldoni's mother then resided. The boy pleased them. Would he like the voyage? This offer seemed too tempting, and away he rushed, concealed himself on board, and made one of a merry motley shipload. 'Twelve persons, actors as well as actresses, a prompter, a machinist, a storekeeper, eight domestics, four chambermaids, two nurses, children of every age, cats, dogs, monkeys, parrots, birds, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... poultry, a large open shed for the exhibition of agricultural machinery and implements, a long wooden building—usually called "Farmers' Hall"—where fruits, grain and vegetables are displayed, and another, called "Floral Hall," where there is a motley display consisting of flowering plants and cut flowers, needlework, embroidery, pieced bed-quilts, silk chair-cushions and sofa-pillows, jellies, preserves, jams, butter, cake, bread—the handiwork of women. There is generally a crowd of women from the country around ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... quiet early dawn 320 British regulars and 400 Canadian militia were in readiness to embark; and, as sunrise coloured the sky, a motley fleet pushed off from the Canadian shore. The war vessel Queen Charlotte and the batteries at Sandwich opened fire, while the wooded shores re-echoed to the savage yells of 600 painted braves. Brock stood erect in the ...
— Tecumseh - A Chronicle of the Last Great Leader of His People; Vol. - 17 of Chronicles of Canada • Ethel T. Raymond
... room, lighted by many windows, and, with the exception of the platform where he stood, it was entirely enclosed by heavy netting. The floor was of bare ground well raked and loosened to make it soft. This immense hall was full of a motley crowd of aspiring ball-players. ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... attracted by the plenteous supply of drink and free feeding;[1] and partly impelled by their savage fury against the "Hirish" or the "Fenians,"—suddenly become convertible terms with English writers and speakers—a motley mass of several thousands, mainly belonging to the most degraded of the population, were enrolled. All the streets in the neighbourhood of the prison were closed against public traffic, were occupied by police or "specials," ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... extreme right. This proved to be the rear guard of Joseph's outfit. The wily savage had outwitted the troops. He had left a few men to skirmish with Rawn's pickets, and while the command was expecting an assault in front he, with his motley band, had filed up and down through the gulches and woods, past the line of works, and was now well on his way down the creek. Rawn at once deployed his forces and pursued the fugitives, but did not overtake them until ...
— The Battle of the Big Hole • G. O. Shields
... the dilapidated wooden tables was a motley throng of red-nosed women, loafers, heavy-jowled young aliens, and a scattering of young girls attired in cheap finery; a prevailing color of chemical yellow as to hair, and flaming ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... be fairly set against this conclusion, that there are certain myths which are not mere explanations of traditional practices, but exhibit the beginnings of larger religious speculation, or of an attempt to systematise and reduce to order the motley variety of local worships and beliefs. For in this case the secondary character of the myths is still more clearly marked. They are either products of early philosophy, reflecting on the nature of the universe; or they are political in scope, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... time their fame was known to all men, and they could supply that which was lacking—namely ships, artillery, a first-class fighting force, and last, and best of all, the moral support which would stiffen and put heart into the motley horde which at present surged around the gates ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... kitchens, the pantomimes—London itself a pantomime and a masquerade—all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me often into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... he passed through the streets of the capital, and the region near the harbor, his mind was so engrossed by his recent experiences and his anxiety concerning the runaway youth, that he paid little attention to the throng of vessels lying at anchor, the motley crowd of ship owners, traders, sailors, and laborers, representatives of all the nations of Africa and Asia, who sought a livelihood here, and the officials, soldiers, and petitioners, who had followed Pharaoh from Thebes to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... cachet of his smile on my description of his motley plate. He joined me in one of his favorite cigarettes, only shaking a superior head ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... Caron, "that no promulgation was ever received in London with more coolness—yes, with more sadness.... The people were admonished to make bonfires, but you may be very sure not a bonfire was to be seen."—Motley, "United Netherlands," iv, 223, 224. For payments made by the city chamberlain to heralds on the occasion of proclamation of the peace, see Repertory 26, pt. ii, ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... d'Arthur," Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee," Kingsland's "Scientific Idealism," with several quite learned volumes of astronomy and geology, side by side with Gulliver and all kinds of travel and story-books which we have most of us adored. It was I who had the task of sorting and arranging this motley collection, and I can hardly tell you, Padre, how ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... arms; grave Turks, smoking their nargiles in front of the cafes that open on the Marina, turned their chairs round to look at us without stopping their hubble-bubbling; and all about us, where nothing else was, a line of motley humanity—Greek, Turk, Egyptian, Nubian, Abyssinian, under hats, caps, tarbouches, turbans, hats Persian and ecclesiastical, and no hats at all—half circled us with mute ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... broadcloth penitent should have a sackcloth confessor, and your frock may absolve my motley doublet into ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... lover of tea. Kant drank tea habitually for breakfast. Motley used either tea or coffee ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... bold announcement on my part, which was at length broken by O'Gorman, who, looking round upon his motley ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern London for the ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... Hawthorne. Some Minor Poets. Timrod, Hayne, Ryan, Stoddard and Bayard Taylor. Secondary Writers of Fiction. Mrs. Stowe, Dana, Herman Melville, Cooke, Eggleston and Winthrop. Juvenile Literature. Louisa M. Alcott. Trowbridge. Miscellaneous Prose. Thoreau. The Historians. Motley, Prescott and Parkman. Summary of the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... confronted him were as ill-looking a quartet as Duke William's motley host could show. One, the leader, was an unfrocked priest of Rouen; one was a hedge-robber from the western marches who had followed Alan of Brittany; a third had the olive cheeks and the long nose of the south; and the fourth was a heavy German from beyond the Rhine. ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... or "frost," and so great a one that "Siberia" was the only word adequately to express the chagrin of the men who hoped so much from its discovery. Being one of these myself, I can cordially endorse the appropriateness of the name. What a motley crowd of eager faces throngs the streets and camp on the first news of a new rush—every one anxious to be off and be the first to make his fortune—every man questioning his neighbour, who knows no more than himself, about distances and direction, where the nearest water may ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... Motley accoutrements! of power to smile At thorns, and brakes, and brambles, and, in truth, More ragged than need was. Among the woods, And o'er the pathless rocks, I forc'd my way Until, at length, I came to one dear nook Unvisited, where not a broken bough Droop'd with its wither'd leaves, ...
— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... our talk was gay; not without brilliancy, and even fire. We looked-out on Life, with its strange scaffolding, where all at once harlequins dance, and men are beheaded and quartered: motley, not unterrific was the aspect; but we looked on it like brave youths. For myself, these were perhaps my most genial hours. Towards this young warmhearted, strongheaded and wrongheaded Herr Towgood I was even near experiencing the now obsolete ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... drew up to the sandy landing-beach, I looked at the motley array of paddlers, and my mind went back hundreds of years to the first Spanish crew which landed here, and I wondered whether these pirates of early days had any fewer sins to their credit than Case's convicts—and I ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... and cry on her pathway close behind; but so rapid was the flight along the wide avenue, that the astonished citizens, as they poured forth from their dwellings to learn the cause of alarm, were only able to comprehend the nature of the case in time to fall in with the motley mass in pursuit (as many a one did that night), to raise an anxious prayer to heaven, as they refused to join in the pursuit, that the panting fugitive might escape, and the merciless soul dealer for once be disappointed of his prey. And now with the speed of an arrow—having ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... old New York reads like a romance. There is scarcely a plot of ground below Fourteenth Street without its story and its associations, its motley company of memories and spectres both good and bad, its imperishably adventurous savour of the past, imprisoned in the dry prose of registries and records. Let us just take a glance, a bird's-eye view as it were, of that region which we now know as Washington ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... insurrection of Brill, which was the first tangible token of Dutch independence, we have to wait until the last chapter of all. The reader who is endowed with sufficient history to reconcile these divagations should, I think, by the time the book is finished, have (with Motley's assistance) a vivid idea of this great war, so magnificently waged by Holland, which lowers in the background ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... on the Danube, could threaten both the East and the West. The emperors at Constantinople bought him off with lavish gifts, and so the robber-ruler turned to the western provinces for his prey. In 451 A.D. he led his motley host, said to number half a million men, across the Rhine. Many a noble municipality with its still active Roman life was visited by the Huns with fire and sword. Paris, it is worthy of note, escaped destruction. That now famous city was then ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... those who played an active, albeit unselfish, part in the varied field of administrative work from the days of Strafford downwards, there was none more industrious, none more loyal, and none less selfish than he. It was all to his credit that he was unlikely to consort on easy terms with the motley crew ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... why take ye thought for the rest?" I got my worsted and sat down stairs at my work, to be ready to see the doctor when he should come. Mrs. Sandford took post at the window; and so we waited. The weather to-day was clear and bright; the street full yet of motley groups, returned soldiers and gathered civilians, looking however far less dismal than the day before. Mrs. Sandford from the window detailed all she saw; while my worsted needle went in and out to an interrupted refrain - "He ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... for the key, and she gave it to him. There was a sudden hush and a little thrill of expectation in the motley crowd gathered round as he turned to fit ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... street; but a good number of women, excited to fanaticism by the sermons of the abbe, encouraged the warlike assemblage with their cries. At the head of the troop advanced the gigantic blaster, brandishing his formidable bar, followed by a motley mass, armed with sticks and stones. Their heads still warmed by their recent libations of brandy, they had now attained a frightful state of frenzy. Their countenances were ferocious, inflamed, terrible. This unchaining of the worst passions seemed to forbode the most ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... "belly-whoppers" made up of bits of board, sometimes without runners, and the girls from the fine houses facing the park and up along Eighty-sixth Street, in their toboggan togs with caps and tassels, and chaperoned by their young fellows, just a little disposed to turn up their noses at the motley show. But they soon forget about that in the fun of the game. Down they go, rich and poor, boys and girls, men and women, with yells of delight as the snow seems to fly from under them, and the twinkling lights far up the avenue come nearer and nearer with lightning speed. The slide is lined on both ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... beneath it, of course, the everlasting black silk handkerchief, with the corners dangling over the neck behind. Following him was his servant, in slouched hat and spangled garters, carrying an old Spanish musket over his shoulder, and casting somewhat timid looks at the motley assemblage of Indians and trappers, who every now and then jostled against him. Beyond these, there were a score or two of go-ahead Yankees—"gentlemen traders," I suppose they called themselves—with a few pretty Californian women, who are on their ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... homespun, Lysander is distinguished from Oberon by his wearing an Athenian dress, and Launce has holes in his boots. The Duchess of Gloucester stands in a white sheet with her husband in mourning beside her. The motley of the Fool, the scarlet of the Cardinal, and the French lilies broidered on the English coats, are all made occasion for jest or taunt in the dialogue. We know the patterns on the Dauphin's armour and the Pucelle's sword, the crest ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... doubt you will send them—I could fight the enemy, and proceed up the lake; but, having no one to command the 'Niagara,' and only one commissioned lieutenant and two acting lieutenants, whatever my wishes may be, going out is out of the question. The men that came by Mr. Champlin are a motley set—blacks, soldiers, and boys. I cannot think you saw them after they were selected. I am, however, pleased to see any thing in the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... he rode into that construction camp. The place was a bedlam. A motley horde of men appeared to be doing everything under the sun but work, and most of them seemed particularly eager to board a long train of box-cars and little old passenger-coaches. Neale made a dive for ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... screech that she had discovered the lost property. It did not take long to move away the stones and to transfer the plates from the floor to the table, after which three much flustered hostesses opened the door and gushed a welcome to their guests. It was rather a motley group who entered: Irene as a nun in waterproof and hood; Agnes as a Red Cross Nurse; Esther a Turk, with a towel for a turban; Joan a sportsman in her gymnasium knickers; Sheila, in a tricolor cap, represented France; and Lorna was draped with the Union Jack; ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... of it is that the author of Hamlet and the Tempest does not only live in a different world from that of these motley exponents. He lives in an antagonistic one. Shakespeare was as profoundly the enemy of scholastic pedantry as he was the enemy of puritan squeamishness. He was almost unkindly averse to the breath of the profane crowd. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... honest friend Punch and his audience";[126] and to a would-be tragedian he said: "In the present day there is only one reason which seems to me adequate for the encountering the plague of trying to please a set of conceited performers and a very motley audience,—I mean the want of money."[127] This degraded condition of the London stage Scott thought to be a consequence of limiting the number of theaters. We can hardly suppose, however, that he was pessimistic in regard to the ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... the French, with three frigates and six thousand men, attacked the poorly-constructed works of Porto Ferrairo, whose defensive force was a motley garrison of fifteen hundred Corsicans, Tuscans, and English. Here the attacking force was four times as great as that of the garrison; nevertheless they were unsuccessful after several bombardments and a siege ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... called, and fourteen competitors presented themselves—a motley group, clad for the most part in trousers, horse-rug, and wide-awake, or, more simply still, in Ulster frieze coat only. The group of spectators had by this time grown to some hundreds, nearly all directly interested in the noble ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... front, in which are turning the slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony, garbage-laws, magistrates, and murderers are mixed in motley, and there are whirling vacant-lot schemes abroad, potato-patches, wood-yards, organized charity, Wayfarers' Lodges, resounding cries of municipal reform, and various other interests of ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... out, carbines unslung, as the motley crowd rushed to the spot. Pop, pop, pop; at least half a dozen shots were fired. One bullet whizzed unpleasantly close to Harry's nose, another smashed in amongst the bottles of an apothecary's stall, from which an assortment of odours arose, attar of rose ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... the attention of the critics of the day, and that was satirical writing. They could not tolerate that style—no, not for a moment; and many an author has had his cap and bells, aye, and the lining too, severed from the rest of his motley, simply because he would go and play with Satyrs instead of keeping company with ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... whatever his position. Hope, as well as timidity and fear, is infectious, and one cheery voice will revive the drooping spirits of a multitude. Paul had already established his personal ascendency in that motley company of Roman soldiers, prisoners, sailors, and disciples. Now he stands forward with calm confidence, and infuses new hope into them all. What a miraculous change passes on externals when faith looks at them! The circumstances were the same as they had been for many days. The wind was ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... new shapes and new colours, affected by what went before, but not resembling it. And then on the fresh mass, the old forces of composition and elimination again begin to act, and create over the new surface another world. 'Motley was the wear' of the world when Herodotus first looked on it and described it to us, and thus, as it seems to me, were ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... be wronged. Each found that the existing system required very important alterations to check its excesses and supply its defects. Numa's reforms were all in favour of the people, whom he classified into a mixed and motley multitude of goldsmiths and musicians and cobblers; while the constitution introduced by Lykurgus was severely aristocratic, driving all handicrafts into the hands of slaves and foreigners, and confining the citizens to the use of the spear and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... sentimentalist and the cynic. The churl by nature would appear through some veneer of manner, if only to bring into relief the finer qualities of his fellows; lastly, and most surely, one other would jingle a merciful cap and bells, and mingle motley with the rest. ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... walk leading to the Wells was full of company. The windows of all the houses in St. Vincent's parade were crowded with well-dressed ladies, who were looking out in expectation of the archery procession. Parties of gentlemen and ladies, and a motley crowd of spectators, were seen moving backwards and forwards under the rocks, on the opposite side of the water. A barge, with colored streamers flying, was waiting to take up a party, who were going upon the water. The ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... they were ushered into the study of the courteous Briton whose difficult and sometimes exasperating duty it is to look after the rights and interests of the motley world composed of those Englishmen and Englishwomen who make a short or long sojourn in Paris. Once they were in his presence nothing could have been kinder and more considerate than the British Consul's reception of the American Senator and ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... fancy, if my Soul had at that Moment quitted my Body, and descended to the poetical Shades in the Posture it was then in, what a strange Figure it would have made among them. They would not have known what to have made of my motley Spectre, half Comick and half Tragick, all over resembling a ridiculous Face, that at the same time laughs on one side and cries o tother. The only Defence, I think, I have ever heard made for this, as it seems to me, most unnatural Tack of the Comick ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... yourselves to the utmost of the services of us both. Neither rescind your resolution to sail to Sicily, on the ground that you would be going to attack a great power. The cities in Sicily are peopled by motley rabbles, and easily change their institutions and adopt new ones in their stead; and consequently the inhabitants, being without any feeling of patriotism, are not provided with arms for their persons, and have not regularly established ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... one to the other of the passers-by who had crowded in, and the grave gentlemanly Turks bowed and left in the most courteous manner, while the others, a very motley assembly, showed some disposition to stay, but were eventually persuaded to go outside, and ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... weigh the value of the inheritance that Venice thus left to the nations of Europe, and then judge if so vast, so beneficent a power could indeed have been rooted in dissipation or decay. It was when she wore the ephod of the priest, not the motley of the masquer, that the fire fell upon her from heaven; and she saw the first rays of it through the rain of her own tears, when, as the barbaric deluge ebbed from the hills of Italy, the circuit of her palaces, and the orb ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... gorgeously dressed official may be seen, with a long line of attendants, wending his steps towards the river's front. Infirm old men and little children, crazy-looking devotees and comely youths, boys and girls, people of all ages and degrees, are represented in the motley groups who come to these muddy waters for moral purification. There is a singular mingling of races also, for these people do not all speak one tongue. They are from the extreme north and the extreme south of India, ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... tobacco stores close, and their thousand of employees turn out into the streets. They form a motley yet effective feature among the wayfarers. The Malay girls are usually very pretty, with languishing eyes, shaded by long lashes, and supple figures, whose graceful lines are revealed by their thin clothing. In fine weather their bare feet are thrust into light, gold-embroidered ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... historians would be even more calamitous than that of their Continental brethren. If the touchstone of impartiality were applied, Prescott might perhaps pass unscathed through the trial. But few will deny that Motley wrote his very attractive histories at a white heat of Republican and anti-Catholic fervour. He, as also Bancroft, are classed by Mr. Gooch amongst those who "made their histories the vehicles of political and religious propaganda." Washington Irving's claim ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... awfully. And—she's worth every bit of it. But how are you going to win her in the guise of a chauffeur? I always knew you possessed a large amount of self-confidence, but allow me to inform you, sir, there are some things your natural qualifications can't overshadow. Come, Jack, do strip off your motley and court her as a naval officer—you see I, at least, have kept track of you—and a gentleman should; I don't ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... and greyish-lilac houses, covered with stucco, which was peeling off, with their sunken windows, gaudy sign-boards, iron canopies over steps, and wretched little green-grocer's shops; the facades, inscriptions, sentry-boxes, troughs; the golden cap of St. Isaac's; the senseless motley Bourse; the granite walls of the fortress, and the broken wooden pavement; the barges loaded with hay and timber; the smell of dust, cabbage, matting, and hemp; the stony-faced dvorniks in sheepskin coats, with high collars; the cab-drivers, huddled up dead asleep ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... had come to seem a trifling matter, for that afternoon Aunt Polly was to come, and a new world was to be opened for her conquest. Helen was amusing herself by sorting out the motley collection of souvenirs and curios which she had brought home to decorate her room, when she heard a carriage drive up at the door, and a minute later heard the voice of Mrs. ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... a crowd of old and young in motley array. Behind came the alcalde, the municipal guard officers, the monks, and the Spanish Government clerks. Ibarra was talking with the alcalde; Captain Tiago, the alferez, the curate and a number of the rich country gentlemen ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... &c. v.; implex[obs3], composite, half-and-half, linsey- woolsey, chowchow, hybrid, mongrel, heterogeneous; motley &c. (variegated) 440; miscellaneous, promiscuous, indiscriminate; miscible. Adv. among, amongst, amid, amidst; with; in the midst ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
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