"Gibbet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... loud cannon plane Death's lightning-riven lane, Levelling that unskill'd valour, rude, unled: —Yet happier in their fate Than whom the war-fiends wait To rend them limb from limb, the gibbet-withering dead! ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... for a few seconds an uncovered face, with an expression of terror upon it, of which I have never imagined the like. It seemed as if the man, whoever he was, was being forcibly lifted, with his arms somehow pinioned or held back, towards the little gibbet on the stage. I could just see the nightcapped head behind him. Then there was a cry and a crash. The whole show-box fell over backwards; kicking legs were seen among the ruins, and then two figures—as some said; I can only answer for one—were visible running at top speed across the square ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James
... receives it defined in bulk and quality from the law's own hand, and the wretch who will rob him of an ounce of it is a felon without a felon's excuse; and as a felon I will proceed against him by the dog-whip of the criminal law, by the gibbet of the public press, and by every weapon that wit and honesty have ever found to scourge cruelty and theft since ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... Mr. Schmidt, by train and motor, getting off at stations unexpectedly, hopping into trains going in any direction but the right one, sleeping in strange beds and doing all manner of queer things. And here we are at last. I am sure you must look upon me as a very silly, flibberty-gibbet creature." ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... This was no part of the sentence, but was performed in accordance with a special order or direction of the court, given, probably, in most cases, verbally to the sheriff. After execution, the body of the felon was taken from the gallows and hung upon a gibbet conveniently near the place where the fact was committed, there to remain, until, from the action of the elements, or the ravages of birds of prey, it disappeared. Of the object of this ghastly feature of capital punishment it is alleged, "besides the terror of the example," "that it is a comfortable ...
— The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis, Slaves of Capt. John Codman • Abner Cheney Goodell, Jr.
... each of them tranquilly smoked his pipe, and seemed lost in contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated; wherein sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed. Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully leaping from the whale's mouth, like Harlequin through ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... be hanged with his face toward the people, but a female with her face toward the gibbet. So says Rabbi Eliezer; but the sages say the man only is hanged, not the woman. Rabbi Eliezer retorted, "Did not Simeon the son of Shetach hang women in Askelon?" To this they replied, "He indeed caused eighty women to be hanged, though two criminals ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... give them no actual assistance, situated as I was"—here the narrator smiled as he glanced round upon his guests—"it would have been simply absurd, you know, the idea of my putting men on board to keep her afloat for the nearest gibbet. Bah! I did not dream of such ridiculous nonsense. However, I determined to make her a visit, and, if there should be any thing to save from the wreck in an undamaged condition, why, I ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... you do not exceed it," replied Solomon Eagle. "Lift a finger against either of these young persons, and I will reveal all. Yes," he continued, menacingly, "I will disclose such dreadful things against you, that you will assuredly be adjudged to a gibbet higher than the highest tower ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... narratives gives an image, far from flattering, of the life and manners of his own time. It is he who tells of the robber who, being accustomed to commend himself in his adventures to our Lady, was supported on the gibbet for three days by her white hands, and received his pardon; and of the illiterate monk who suffered shame because he knew no more than his Ave Maria, but who, when dead, was proved a holy man by the five roses that came from his ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... surly grace; But, lost in thoughtless ease and empty show, Behold the warriour dwindled to a beau; Sense, freedom, piety, refin'd away, Of France the mimick, and of Spain the prey. All that at home no more can beg or steal, Or like a gibbet better than a wheel; Hiss'd from the stage, or hooted from the court, Their air, their dress, their politicks, import; [p]Obsequious, artful, voluble and gay, On Britain's fond credulity they prey. No gainful trade their industry can 'scape, [q]They sing, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... months ago, I wandered through the hospital, I found not a child that seemed to have heard of his creed, or the commandments. To breed up children in this manner, is to rescue them from an early grave, that they may find employment for the gibbet; from dying in innocence, that they may perish ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Lucien was paid off. The creditors did not even lose confidence. Lucien and his evil genius could breathe for a moment. Like some pool, they could start again along the edge of the precipice where the strong man was guiding the weak man to the gibbet or ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... murderer took all the money Wilson had, which was only one five-pound note, the number of which Raibey knew. A woman tried to pass it in Launceston, and her statements led to the discovery and conviction of the murderer, who was hanged in chains at the White Hills, and the gibbet remained there for ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... Cambridge, and Huntingdon. He surprised several bodies of peasants and utterly defeated them. The prisoners taken were brought before him, and putting off the complete armour which he wore, he heard the confession of his captives, gave them absolution, and then sent them straight to the gibbet. With the return of the peasants to their homes the gentlemen from the country were able to come with their retainers to town, and Richard found himself at the head of ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free, Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove them across ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony. Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night, had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts, to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... deadliest place I ever saw. Is that a swing in front of that cottage? No, it's a gibbet. Why, they've all got 'em! I suppose they're for the summer tenants at the close of the season. What a rush there would be for them if the boat should happen to go off and leave ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... by profession may be exterminated wherever they are seized; for they attack and injure all nations by trampling under foot the foundations of their common safety. Thus pirates are brought to the gibbet by the first into whose hands they fall. If the sovereign of the country where crimes of that nature have been committed reclaims the authors of them in order to bring them to punishment, they ought to be ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the great four-square gibbet which had made an end of Ritterdom in Plassenburg, I noted that there was a gathering of the hooded folk—the carrion crows. And lo! there before me, already comfortably a-swing, were our late foes, the two bravoes, and in the middle the dead Cannstadt ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... immortality? especially when we have so miserably lost it, and involved our souls into an eternal death. Life is precious in itself, but much more precious to one condemned to die,—to be caught out of the paws of the lion,—to be brought back from the gibbet. O how will that commend the favour of a little more time in the world! But then if we knew what an eternal misery we are involved into, and stand under a sentence binding us over to such an inconceivable and insupportable punishment as is the curse and wrath of God; O how precious an esteem would ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... "we have met with Christians at last. When men speak of the gibbet, I know that they have served the Lord and will fight the devil. To-night you have fought four devils instead of one, and like ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... Abbey stands, on the common hard by His gibbet is now to be seen. Not far from the road it engages the eye, The Traveller beholds it, and thinks with a sigh Of poor Mary ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... shall hear. I first took them down Feather-bed Lane, where we stuck fast in the mud. I then rattled them crack over the stones of Up-and-down Hill. I then introduced them to the gibbet on Heavy-tree Heath; and from that, with a circumbendibus, I fairly lodged them in the horse-pond at the ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... all are children, there is need of a master! Don't look at me like that, man! And for my cousin, let her hear the truth for once! Let her know what men who have seen the world think of the visions, from which she would have awakened in a dungeon, and the poor fools, her fellow-dupes, under the gibbet! A great rising for a great cause, if it be real, man, if it be earnest, if it be based on forethought and some calculation of the chances, God knows I hold it a fine thing, and a high thing! But the rising of a child with a bladder against an armed man, a rising that can ruin but cannot ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... am purposed to say about Christmas. Don't ask me yet what that Thing is. Truth dwells in no man, but is a shy beast you must hunt as you may in the forests that are round about the Walls of Heaven. And I do hereby curse, gibbet, and denounce in execrationem perpetuam atque aeternam the man who hunts in a crafty or calculating way—as, lying low, nosing for scents, squinting for trails, crawling noiselessly till he shall come near to his ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... geometrical tracings in the sand. But on a bleak moor in the twilight they saw the black beams of a gibbet, and below the cross-piece, swinging in the wind, they saw a human skeleton with bony wrists and ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... sneak out of the world. God will not allow it merely to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by default because no one appears against it. God will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya, it would not ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... served a grand dinner to the duke and his company, without any other preparation than having to open a box with three shelves; and to wind up the wonders, he had ordered three robbers, who were dead and hung to a gibbet, to come down from it, and come and make their bow to the duke, and then to go back and resume their place at the gallows. It was said, moreover, that on another occasion he had commanded the personages in a piece of tapestry to detach themselves from it, and to come and present ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Madame Sand's taste and higher art-instincts would have revolted against the practice—now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior writers—of forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet of well-known personalities, with little or no disguise; and Chopin himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, read her work without perceiving in it any intention there to portray their relations to each other, which, indeed, had ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... no one in Communipaw could understand. Some thought him a negro just from Guinea, who had either fallen overboard, or escaped from a slave-ship. Nothing, however, could ever draw from him any account of his origin. When questioned on the subject, he merely pointed to Gibbet-Island, a small rocky islet, which lies in the open bay, just opposite to Communipaw, as if that were his native place, though every body knew it had ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... your late leader," replied Jorworth, his eyes, while he was speaking, glancing with the vindictive ferocity which dictated his answer. "So many strangers as be here amongst ye, so many bodies to the ravens, so many heads to the gibbet!—It is long since the kites have had such a banquet of lurdane Flemings ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... believe that they are the "Christ of Nations."... I wish they would inquire whether there might not be a Cartouche of nations. Cartouche had many gallant qualities—had many fine ladies begging locks of his hair while the indispensable gibbet was preparing. Better he should obey the heavy-handed Teutsch police officer, who has him by the windpipe in such frightful manner, give up part of his stolen goods, altogether cease to be a Cartouche, and try to become ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... we made for the Port, while English men-at-arms might be plainly seen and heard, gazing, waving their hands, and shouting from the battlements of the two gate-towers. Down the road we ran, past certain small houses of peasants, and past a gibbet with a marauder hanging from it, just over ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... the song did last year. The tories are all ashamed of this, as they were of that; the author is not yet certainly known, though I think I am within a week of detecting him for certain. If I should, I shall try to cure him once for all, by stringing him up, not bodily, but in such a way as shall gibbet his memory in terrorem. It lies between Bernard, Waterhouse, and Jonathan Sewall. The first, they say, has not wit enough to write anything; the second swears off; and the third must plead guilty or not guilty as soon ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... day about a religious reformer who arose in Eastern lands a few years since, and gathered many disciples. He and his principal follower were seized and about to be martyred. They were suspended by cords from a gibbet, to be fired at by a platoon of soldiers. And as they hung there, the disciple turned to his teacher, and as his last word on earth said, 'Master! are you satisfied with me?' His answer was a silent smile; and the next minute a bullet was in his heart. Dear brethren, do ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... he be more a king than Henry himself. God speed the day of his coronation, when, before the very eyes of the Plantagenet hound, a black cap shall be placed upon his head for a crown; beneath his feet the platform of a wooden gibbet for a throne." ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... unfortunate will be recommended to the Queen's mercy, and escape hanging, unless, as might be just possible, she prefers depending on a gibbet to the tender mercies of Christian society—especially its women—towards a woman who, after being seduced by ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... familiarized to Greek and Latin, though a stranger to his vernacular literature; and that a verbal critic may sometimes be successful in his attempts on a single word, though he may be incapable of tasting an entire sentence. Let it also remain as a gibbet on the high roads of literature; that "conjectural critics" as they pass may not forget ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the road to Fenworth branches off, and the handpost stands. A gibbet once stood there not onconnected with our ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... world temptations also arise and difficulties spring up. In this land, the enemies of religion, have not power to kill and destroy the faithful; but they have power to pour contempt upon them. Cruel mockings may severely try those who fear neither the gibbet, nor the stake. These do try the people of ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... favourite speeches from our best plays. We are resolved to convert the great hall into a theatre, and get up the Beaux Stratagem without delay — I think I shall make no contemptible figure in the character of Scrub; and Lismahago will be very great in Captain Gibbet. Wilson undertakes to entertain the country people with Harlequin Skeleton, for which he has got a jacket ready ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... jury had, of course, been already unravelled by previous historians. Fitzjames was able, however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... "reaches." They have their long reach and their short reach, and a number of reaches, under local, or less obvious names. Some are named after some of their own pirates, which is here and there designated by a gibbet; a singular object, be sure, to greet the eye of a stranger on entering the grand watery avenue of the capital of the British empire. But there is no room for disputing concerning our tastes. The reach where our prison was moored was about three miles below Chatham; and is named from the village ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... and rayment, so they took Religion for their temptress and their cook.— Hence then you proud impostors get you gone, You Picts in gentry and devotion. You scandal to the stock of verse, a race Able to bring the gibbet in disgrace.— ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... to the rising generation, I would cheerfully give my consent to the disinterment of the bones of any genteel highwayman (the more genteel, the more cheerfully), and to their exposure, piecemeal, on any sign-post, gate, or gibbet, that might be deemed a good elevation for the purpose. My reason is as well convinced that these gentry were as utterly worthless and debauched villains, as it is that the laws and jails hardened them in their evil courses, or ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... 'tis indignation shakes me. With this sabre I'll slice him as small as atoms; he shall be doomed by the judge, and damned upon the gibbet. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Bow, where he defended himself by force of arms. He was at last forced from his retreat, condemned, and executed, amidst the regrets of the populace, who were so devoted to his memory, that they stole his gibbet, paid the same veneration to it as to the cross, and were equally zealous in propagating and attesting reports of the miracles wrought by it [p]. But though the sectaries of this superstition were punished by the justiciary [q], it received ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... up uneasy and imploring, as Charles continued: 'Would that more of you would come in this way! They have scored you deep, but know you what is gashed deeper still? Your King's heart! Ah! you will not come, as Coligny does, from his gibbet, with his two bleeding hands. My father was haunted to his dying day by the face of one Huguenot tailor. Why, I see a score, night by night! You are solid; let ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pathways through the brain. The other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier," Haendel in "Joseph's Legende," Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne auf Naxos." He has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... riddle for the executioner [4], as I guess it will turn out; they'll be so pinking you with goads, as you carry your gibbet [5] along the streets one day, as soon as ever the ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... foreign possessions, and to retire to his hereditary dominions. "What a severe sentence," exclaimed Count Zinzendorf, the emperor's ambassador, "have you passed on the emperor. No malefactor was ever carried with so hard a doom to the gibbet." ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... what is the best road to show you? Aye, which? Ah! there's the road of the gibbet and the rope. ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... judges themselves were taken into custody and had not the better counsel of the staid and solid men prevailed, the sheriff and those who aided him might have been hung to a gibbet erected in the court-house yard. On the fifteenth Captain Cochran and forty Green Mountain Boys, who had been apprised of the terrible affair, marched over the mountain to arraign themselves upon the side of the Whigs if the matter should come to real warfare. But fortunately further bloodshed was ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... his imposture." At the siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the rest to be slain. The pilgrims ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Ostend consisted altogether of some score of houses and three hundred cottages, huts or hovels built of the driftwood of wrecked vessels, it nevertheless rejoiced in the possession of a governor, a garrison, a forked gibbet, a convent, and a burgomaster, in short, in all the institutions ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... half-emptied purse, is not likely to possess it long, for an adroit professor of legerdemain has taken aim with a hooked stick, and by one slight jerk, will convey it to his own pocket. The profession of a gentleman in a round wig is determined by a gibbet chalked upon his coat. An enraged barber, who lifts up his stick in the corner, has probably been refused payment of a wager, by the man at whom ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... innocent person of illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men; his grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... a full-length figure of Hope, with dark hair, dressed in a red dress with large falling collar, having a blue flower at the point. In her left hand she holds an anchor. In the distant background is a cottage and a gibbet on a hill, the sun with rays just appearing under a cloud. On the hilly foreground is a red lily, and further afield a caterpillar and a strawberry plant. On the lower cover is a full-length figure of Faith, with fair hair, dressed in a blue dress with large falling ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... there weren't more of them watching the condemned man's march to the gibbet: the word that the Secretary had called me in must have gotten all over the Department since ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... laws of all well governed countries dispose of the remains of notorious felons, who, instead of being suffered to repose in the grave, are denied all interment; their bodies being delivered over to the surgeons for the benefit of science, or exposed on a gibbet, till the crows, eagles and vultures, devour their flesh, and then, even their bones are left to blacken in the winter's blast, as a warning to man, to shun the deeds that led them ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... his majesty. To the castle with him! To the castle! He will lodge to-night in the deepest dungeon of yon fortification," pointing to the Curfew Tower above them, "there to await the king's judgment; and to-morrow night it will be well for him if he is not swinging from the gibbet near the ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Stirn, who still, in a whisper, accused the Papishers. And, finally, there appeared amongst the other graphic embellishments which the poor stocks had received, the rude gravure of a gentleman in a broad-brimmed hat and top-boots, suspended from a gibbet, with the inscription beneath—"A warnin to hall tirans—mind your ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Shall they hoist me up And show me to the shouting varletry Of censuring Rome? Rather a ditch in Egypt Be gentle grave unto me! rather on Nilus' mud Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies Blow me into abhorring! rather make My country's high pyramides my gibbet, And hang ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... the ship until he could restore order. The sequel was that he received the august thanks of the Viceroy of Chili and a gold medal from His Catholic Majesty. As was the custom, the guilty slaves, poor wretches, were condemned to be dragged to the gibbet at the tails of mules, to be hanged, their bodies burned, and their heads stuck ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... the good citizens of Paris, to whom they were wholly obnoxious, and who occasionally repaid their aggressions with interest. In 1407 two of their number, convicted of assassination and robbery, were condemned to the gibbet, and the sentence was carried into execution; but so great was the uproar occasioned in the university by this violation of its immunities that the Provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville, was compelled to take down their bodies from Montfaucon ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... through, and, heralded by jeers and much applause came a procession of the proletariat, of odds and ends, soldiers and shop-girls, mechanics and street-sweepers and cabmen and students, carrying an effigy of the Kaiser on a gibbet. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... i is hard, as give, except in giant, gigantick, gibbet, gibe, giblets, Giles, gill, gilliflower, gin, ginger, gingle, to which may be ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... against a soldier of his, for that returning alone from forage he could give him no account where he had left a companion of his, took it for granted that he had killed him, and presently condemned him to death. He was no sooner mounted upon the gibbet, but, behold, his wandering companion arrives, at which all the army were exceedingly glad, and after many embraces of the two comrades, the hangman carried both the one and the other into Piso's presence, all those present believing ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... famous enemy of State and Church and of innumerable notorious and obscure criminals, including the infamous Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was burned alive, and Cartouche, broken on the wheel. A permanent gibbet stood there and a market cross, and there during the English wars the infuriated Parisians tied the hands and feet of hundreds of English prisoners taken at Pontoise and flung them into the Seine. Every St. John's eve—the church and cloister of St. Jean stood behind the Hotel ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Guarded themselves, but forc'd the bloody thieves, Being got between them, and this hellish Cave, For safety of their lives, to fly up higher Into the woods, all left to their possession, This sav'd your Brother, and your nephew from The gibbet, this redeem'd me from my Chains, And gave my friend his liberty, this preserv'd Your honour ready ...
— The Little French Lawyer - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont
... ready at eight o'clock, with their carbines clean, and a round of ball-cartridge each. Keep them sober; and, further, plant two upright posts at the near end of the bridge, with a cross one at top, in the manner of a gibbet. See to these matters, Hewson: I shall be with ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... "You're a great gibbet! You always manage me. Well, let us rather go to the 'pater' than to the rabbi; but at least let my servants ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... presses, That shaw'd the Dead in their last dresses; And (by some devilish cantraip sleight) Each in its cauld hand held a light. By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes, in gibbet-airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristened bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gabudid gape; Five tomahawks, wi' blude red-rusted: Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter which a babe had strangled: A knife, a father's throat had mangled. Whom his ain ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... The gibbet, indeed, certainly disables those who die upon it from infesting the community; but their death seems not to contribute more to the reformation of their associates, than any other method of separation. A thief seldom passes much of his time in recollection or anticipation, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... accustomed to danger, be cool-blooded, alive to the sentiment of honor, and above all, sensitive to that stern military code which, to the imagination of the soldier, ever holds out to him the provost's gibbet to which he is sure to rise, should he strike one blow too many. Should all these restraints, inward as well as outward, be wanting, the man plunges into insurrection. He is a novice in the acts of violence, which he carries out. He has no fear of the law, because he abolishes it. The action begun ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... from oblivion the martyrs of independence, to throw around the mighty names that flash upon us from the squalor of the Chronicles of Newgate the radiance of a storied imagination, to clothe the gibbet and the hulks 'in golden exhalations of the dawn,' and secure for the boozing-ken and the gin-palace that hold upon the general sympathies which has too long been monopolised by the cottage and the drawing-room, has been the aim ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... said Duclosse. "He's started the court under the big tree, as the Seigneurs did two hundred years ago. He'll want a gibbet and a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... neighbourhood in 1655, and Monmouth, in 1685, marched through Chard en route, as he thought, for the throne, a circumstance which Jeffreys did not allow the town to forget. "Hangcross tree," which once stood near the L. & S.W. station, was long locally reputed to be the gibbet on which some of the Duke's sympathisers expiated their treason. The town is nowadays chiefly dependent upon a large lace works and some collar factories. The church, which stands in the "old town" (turn ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... messenger should be hanged. Frontenac knew well how to deal with such a situation. He threw the letter in the envoy's face and turned his back upon him. The unhappy man, who understood French, heard the Governor give orders that a gibbet should be erected on which he was to be hanged. When the Bishop and the Intendant pleaded for mercy, Frontenac seemed to yield. He would not take, he said, an hour to reply, but would answer at once. He knew no such person as King William. James, though in exile, was the true King of ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... the thickets, and, seizing the stranger, hauled him from his horse and bore him away. To this succeeded another scene. He stood with a great multitude near by some foreign town. A bustle was heard, and he beheld the horseman of his earlier dream again led along a captive. A gibbet was erected, and the prisoner was at once hanged. In narrating this tale, Cunningham averred that the features of its hero were still fresh in his recollection; the door opened, and in the face of Andre, who at that moment presented himself, he professed to recognize ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... Hoogerbetz was also condemned to perpetual banishment. The body of Ledemberg, Secretary of the States of Utrecht, who, as hath been said, put an end to his life in gaol, was affixed in the coffin to a gibbet. Moerbergen, Counsellor of Utrecht, had only his country-house, for his prison, because, suffering himself to be moved by the tears of his wife and children, he made a kind of submission bordering on those which they wanted to draw from Hoogerbetz ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... stood round, like open presses; That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantrip slight Each in its cauld hand held a light— By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red-rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had strangled; ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... there happened to be at table one of the English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then hanged so fast, that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places. Upon this, I who took the boldness to speak ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... thought a knave, or fool, Or bigot, plotting crime, Who, for the advancement of his kind, Is wiser than his time. For him the hemlock shall distil; For him the axe be bared; For him the gibbet shall be built; For him the stake prepared. Him shall the scorn and wrath of men Pursue with deadly aim; And malice, envy, spite, and lies, Shall desecrate his name. But Truth shall conquer at the last, For round and round we run; And ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... white handkerchief. Immediately the old Captain was seized by Cossacks and dragged to the gibbet. Astride the cross-beam of the gallows, sat the mutilated Bashkirs who we had questioned; he held a rope in his hand, and I saw, an instant after, poor Ivan Mironoff suspended in the air. Then Ignatius was ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... name]: Old Dessauer, at sight of so many images of that bird, threw out the observation, loud enough, from the top of the table, 'Hah, Walrave, I see you are making yourself acquainted with the RAVENS in time, that they may not be strange to you at last,'"—when they come to eat you on the gibbet! (not a soft tongue, the Old Dessauer's). "Another day, seeing Walrave seated between two Jesuit Guests, the Prince said: 'Ah, there you are right, Walrave; there you sit safe; the Devil can't get you there!' As the Prince kept continually ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... moderately apportioned to offences in the time of Solon, partly from the high price of money, but partly, also, from the wise moderation of the lawgiver. The last grave penalty of death was of various kinds, as the cross, the gibbet, the precipice, the bowl—afflictions seldom in reserve ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rafters a' did dirl.— Coffins stood round like open presses, That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And, by some devilish cantrip slight, Each in its cauld hand held a light— By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet-airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had strangled; A knife, a father's throat had ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... quiet swinging led us very modestly, as it came and went on the wind, loud and low pretty regularly, even as far as the foot of the gibbet ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... my duty without malice, and with a light heart, and I never love a man better than when I have put my scant of wind collar about his neck, to dub him Knight of the order of Saint Patibularius [patibulum, a gibbet], as the Provost's Chaplain, the worthy Father Vaconeldiablo [possibly Baco (Bacchus) el Diablo (the Devil)], is wont to call the Patron ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... of an individual may be safely left to himself as most interested in them, except so far as they can be affected by argument or friendly monition; that the idea of compelling belief in particular doctrines is a solecism, as absurd as wicked; and, so far from condemning to the stake, or the gibbet, men who pertinaciously adhere to their conscientious opinions in contempt of personal interests and in the face of danger, we should rather feel disposed to imitate the spirit of antiquity in raising altars and statues to their memory, as having displayed the highest efforts of ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... pitiable, and melancholy garb; in its hour of degradation, craziness, and desperation. He had his recreation in such a spectacle, as men can find their pleasure in the death-struggle of a malefacter on the gibbet. He came, not to join the miserable throng that crowded round the tables, exhibiting every variety of low, unhealthy feeling; nor did he come, in truth, prepared to meet with one in whose affairs and conduct he had so deep an interest. It was with inexpressible ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... him there. He would go because there was no one else on the country side that would dare. But I had no pride of that sort. I was quite of the same way of thinking as the others, and would as soon have thought of passing my night at Jacob's gibbet on Ditchling Common as in the haunted house of Cliffe Royal. Still, I could not bring myself to desert Jim; and so, as I say, I slunk about the house with so pale and peaky a face that my dear mother would have it that I had been at the green apples, and sent me to bed early ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Stripped of the sophistical argumentation in which this doctrine has been habited, its naked nature is an effort to organize insurrection against the laws of the United States; to interpose the arm of state sovereignty between rebellion and the halter, and to rescue the traitor from the gibbet. Although conducted under the auspices of state sovereignty, it would not the less be levying war against the Union; but, as a state cannot be punished for treason, nullification cases herself in the complete steel of sovereign ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... vexed, tormented, betrayed, and sold as you have been by the scoundrels of whom you have told me, I should do like an Arab of the desert—I would devote myself body and soul to vengeance. I might end by dangling from a gibbet, garroted, impaled, guillotined in your French fashion, I should not care a rap; but they should not have my head until I had crushed ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... case proveth capital. And yet the late severity in France was more, where by a kind of martial law, established by ordinance of the King and Parliament, the party that had slain another was presently had to the gibbet, insomuch as gentlemen of great quality were hanged, their wounds bleeding, lest a natural death should prevent the example of justice. But, my lords, the course which we shall take is of far greater lenity, and yet of no less efficacy; ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... Saul, it seems, had no quarrel with the Twelve; his hatred and fanaticism were aroused against a sect of Hellenist Jews who openly proclaimed that the Law had been abrogated in advance by their Master, who, as Saul observed with horror, had incurred the curse of the Law by dying on a gibbet. All the Pharisee in him was revolted; and he led the savage heretic-hunt which ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... to carry the civilization of Massachusetts to the Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I smiled. While Massachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the rich and the poor, founding a church with a whipping-post, jail, and gibbet, and limiting the right to vote to a church membership fixed by pew rents, Carolina was the home of freedom where first the equal rights of men were proclaimed. New England people worth less than ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... censure. When the Dutch fleet was in the Thames, it was against the Chancellor that the rage of the populace was chiefly directed. His windows were broken; the trees of his garden were cut down; and a gibbet was set up before his door. But nowhere was he more detested than in the House of Commons. He was unable to perceive that the time was fast approaching when that House, if it continued to exist at all, must be supreme in ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... from motives of humanity is not now known. This seems to have been the fashion in France also, for in 1331 a woman named Duplas was scourged and buried alive at Abbeville, and in 1460 Perotte Mauger, a receiver of stolen goods, was inhumed by order of the Provost of Paris in front of the public gibbet. In Germany in the good old days certain kinds of female criminals were "impaled," a punishment too grotesquely horrible for description, but likely enough considered by the simple German of the period ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... the misfortune to be a poet of the "langue d'oil," and the Montfaucon gibbet was the only monument of which he stood in daily expectation. Could the lines of two poets offer a greater contrast? Blessed indeed is he who serves the rural gods, Pan and Old Sylvanus and the sister nymphs—as Virgil sang; ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... letters: "Guilty of high treason." Then the wretched General shivered from head to foot. Every detail of the melodramatic execution seemed burned into his brain as with a red-hot iron. He fancied he could see the procession and the three gibbets, painted black; beside each gibbet was an open ditch and a black coffin covered with a dark gray pall. He saw, in the hollow square formed by a battalion of Cossack infantry, the executioner, Froloff, in his red shirt and his plush trousers tucked into his boots, and, beside him, a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... personal interest. The more perplexed the state of public and private affairs, the better for them. Therefore, in revolutions, as a body, they remain neuter, unless it is made for their benefit to act. Individually, they are a set of necessary evils; and, for the sake of the bar, the bench, and the gibbet, require to be humoured. But any legislator who attempts to render laws clear, concise, and explanatory, and to divest them of the quibbles whereby these expounders—or confounders—of codes fatten on the credulity of States and the miseries of unfortunate millions, will necessarily ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... the roads. On all occasions the drovers were armed with various weapons to defend their charge from the cattle-stealers who were too often apt to hang upon their skirts, ready to carry off any stray beast they could find, though the gibbet was the penalty if they were captured. Trains of pack-horses also would bear them company as they approached Cambridge, carrying all kinds of stores and goods for ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... not exactly." he hummed. "You don't taste the full force of the joke yet. In a week's time you will build me a big gibbet in the Place de Greve, and there your last task as Grand Constable will be to hang ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the young girl, and at the background of the Place cast a pallid reflection, on one side upon the ancient, black, and wrinkled facade of the House of Pillars, on the other, upon the old stone gibbet. ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... to their annihilation. As they have dealt with me, so shall I deal with them. I shall grind them to powder, and strew their dust upon the air. There shall be a spy in every man's house, a traitor on every hearth, a hangman in every village, a gibbet in every square. Plague, leprosy, or fever shall be less deadly than my wrath; I will make every frontier a grave-yard, every province a lazar-house, and cure the sick by the sword. I shall have peace in Russia, though it be the peace of the dead. Who said I was a coward? Who said I was afraid? ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... down and made a hole in the floor; meanwhile the duke hung the crawfish up by a thread. Then he placed the gibbet in the middle of the room, ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew! what a gust! Down went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree! - I say, ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Romans. Its root was forked, and bears some resemblance to the legs of a man; for which reason the moneymakers [67] of the past increased the likeness, and attributed supernatural powers to the plant. It was said to grow only beneath a murderer's gibbet, and when torn from the earth by its root to utter a shriek which none might hear and live. From earliest times, in the East, a notion prevailed that the mandrake would remove sterility. With which purpose in view, Rachel said to ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... naked slope of a poor province A Roman soldier stood staring at a gibbet, Then he said, "Surely this was a righteous man," And a new chapter of history opened, Having that ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward |
