"Sycophant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which Mr Harris does not hesitate to give, is twofold: first, that Shakespear was, in his attitude towards earls, a sycophant; and, second, that the normality of Shakespear's sexual constitution is only too well attested by the excessive susceptibility to the normal impulse shewn in the whole mass of his writings. This latter is the really conclusive reply. In the case of Michel Angelo, for instance, one must admit that ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been definitely won. A kind of language which at one period of English history implied the noblest heroism is now the idlest and cheapest of clap-trap. The sycophant and the self-seeker bow before quite other idols than of old. The dangers of the time come from other quarters; other tendencies prevail, other tasks remain to be accomplished; and a public man who in framing his course followed blindly in the steps of the heroes ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... trusts his fortune to the sea and takes his gains, The warrior, for his deeds, is girt with gold; The wily sycophant lies drunk on purple counterpanes, Young wives must pay debauchees or they're cold. But solitary, shivering, in tatters Genius stands Invoking a neglected art, for ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... touched in sympathetic understanding; on the other, they were as far apart as the poles. No poor man, however civilised he may be, can range himself on the side of wealth, unless he is either a fortune hunter or a sycophant, and Leigh was neither. At the present moment he merely felt, with a sinking of spirit, the existence of an artificial barrier between them of which he had previously been ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy: that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1s. 4d. in the pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant, insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated bailiffs man, marfeast, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded perforated umbrella. Destitution: ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... could afford room for the vocation so aptly described in the following sketch of his "ways and means," given in a recent picture of life in Paris by a sycophant of millionnaires, at a period when interests, not rights, are the watchwords of the nation?—"Mon role de familier dans une veritable population d'enrichis me donnait du credit dans les boudoirs, et ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... unfavourable view, will not be put out of countenance by these letters. To be sure they will not be disappointed of the popular "Bozzy," ridiculous, vain, and a little vulgar, something of a snob, of a sycophant even, with an undignified zeal for notoriety and an imperfect moral sense; but beside him they will find another Boswell, the friend of Hume and Johnson, with his passion for excellence, generous nature, good understanding, and genius for observation—a man by no means to be despised. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... 'who in his boyhood was a thief, and has been from that time to this, a servile, false, and truckling knave: this man, who has crawled and crept through life, wounding the hands he licked, and biting those he fawned upon: this sycophant, who never knew what honour, truth, or courage meant; who robbed his benefactor's daughter of her virtue, and married her to break her heart, and did it, with stripes and cruelty: this creature, who has whined at kitchen windows for the broken food, and begged ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... fortunes to make." Yet there was his boyhood friend, Jonathan Sewall, already attorney-general, "rewarded ... with six thousand pounds a year, for propagating as many ... slanders against his country as ever fell from the pen of a sycophant." And the Hutchinsons and Olivers! With what concentrated bitterness does the young lawyer write of these men who, he is convinced, had submitted to be ministerial tools for the aggrandizement, of their families. His bitterness is the greater, and his conscious rectitude the more obtrusive, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... which proves abundantly that animals have no souls. The employment of a lover is that of a mountebank, of a soldier, of a quack, of a buffoon, of a prince, of a ninny, of a king, of an idler, of a monk, of a dupe, of a blackguard, of a liar, of a braggart, of a sycophant, of a numskull, of a frivolous fool, of a blockhead, of a know-nothing, of a knave. An employment from which Jesus abstained, in imitation of whom folks of great understanding likewise disdain it; it is a vocation in which a man of worth ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... of ridicule, or at the least passive contempt. The world did not want originality; would not welcome in its drawing room the free, unaffected child of nature. No, the world wanted pretense, imitation. It frowned upon truth and applauded the sycophant. ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... was a vulgar parvenu, a sycophant, a snob—heaven knows what. All wrong! For the true reading of his character one has to go back to the day when he was a ragged boy and the liveried coachman of the "bad Lord Raa" lashed at his mother on the road, and he swore that ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... number of idlers began to gather around, and listen to the altercation of words. None of them seemed disposed to interfere, although I saw that the mass were too much under the influence of Bully to say a word in our favor, while half a dozen sycophant curs boldly encouraged him in his course of aggression, and whispered to each other, that we should soon knuckle into "nuggets," when the ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... them any personal hopes. If this conclusion leaves us defeated, we submit that it leaves us disinterested. Ours is not the sort of protest, at least, that promises anything even to the demagogue, let alone the sycophant. Those we serve will never rule, and those we pity will never rise. Parliament will never be surrounded by a mob of submerged grandmothers brandishing pawn-tickets. There is no trade union of defective children. It is not very probable ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... This sycophant greeted us with effusion. Where had we been? Why had the delightful band been dispersed? Did we know Monsieur Papillard, the great poet? Before we could ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... furious at this that I dropped my suitcase, clenched my hands, and swore that I was straightway going to freight it back and knock all his teeth down "Senator's" Blair's throat ... the dirty sycophant! The lousy bootlicker! the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... lover's passion, No wretched father, no unthrifty son! No craving, subtle whore or shameless bawd, Nor stubborn clown or daring parasite, No lying servant or bold sycophant. We are not wanton or satirical. These have their time and places fit, but we Sad hours and serious studies to reprieve, Have taught severe Philosophy to smile, The Senses' rash contentions we compose, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... served by his dependant and sycophant, Mr. Diao, who is a weak, physically decadent man who can neither offend by word nor deed the man from whom he has had so much. His manner is too servile to allow one to place much confidence in him, but he is a believer, and proves by many actions that he is truly following Christ. ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... betray the Caesar and to place the destinies of Rome in her hands. It was strange indeed that this mealy-mouthed sycophant should be using those very words which had stood before her eyes like letters of fire, searing her brain ever since she had stood here—half an hour ago—with the grovelling Caesar ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... he said, seeing the servant had disobeyed his instructions and was following close behind him. He alone out of those scores of servants, those hundreds of fawning nobles, those thousands of sycophant souls who had but lately cringed before him, now accompanied the late master of France as he turned to leave the house in which he ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... at: the language of life must naturally receive, as in a mirror, the realities of life. Difficult it is to maintain a just equipoise in any moral habits, but in none so much as in habits of religious demeanor under a Pagan [that is, a degrading] religion. To be a coward, is base: to be a sycophant, is base: but to be a sycophant in the service of cowardice, is the perfection of baseness: and yet this was the brief analysis of a devotee amongst the ancient Romans. Now, considering that the word religion is originally Roman, [probably from the Etruscan,] it seems probable ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... else does enter? Hey? Am I to play the sycophant? Just try to kick me! You'll soon learn better. And laugh in my sleeve? Only no honest, fearless word! That is your peasant's philosophy. As long as they don't touch your pocket-book, you put up with anything. If you are ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... far above less prudent sinners as to give him a right to address his quondam associate as has been just related. But the agony of the culprit was past receiving an increase from this brutal attack; he merely motioned the coarse-minded sycophant and demagogue away, and continued his appeals to the two captains for mercy. At this moment Paul Powis stepped up to the editor, and in a low but firm voice ordered him to quit ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... deaths for his Imperial seat, Where throning he her faith in him maintained; Bound Reason to believe delayed defeat Was triumph; and what strength in her remained To head against the ultimate foreseen rout, Insensate taxed; of his impenitent will, Servant and sycophant: without ally, In Python's coils, the Master Craftsman still; The smiter, panther springer, trapper sly, The deadly wrestler at the crucial bout, The penetrant, the tonant, tower of towers, Striking from black disaster ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... daughter; has put ill-will between him and the royal family. And if Briennius bears no longer the fame of a rational man, and the renown of a good leader, he is deprived of both by following the advice of this artful sycophant." ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... de Paris. Gourdain and young Madame Deliere formed an interesting, unusually attractive exhibit of the parasitism that is as inevitable to the rich as fleas to a dog. Gourdain was a superior man, Clelie a superior woman. There was nothing of the sycophant, or even of the courtier, about either. Yet they already had in their faces that subtle indication of the dependent that is found in all professional people who habitually work for and associate with the rich ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Those were the days of his success, the happiest period of his life when, as secretary to the Lord Chamberlain and associate of the highest in the land, he breathed his native atmosphere, the praises and flattery of a fickle world of fashion. But, time-server as he was, he was no sycophant. Leaving de Vere's service after a sharp quarrel, he was not ashamed to take up the profession of teaching in which he had already had some experience. We see him next, therefore, a master of St Paul's, engrossed in the not unpleasant duties of drilling ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... greatest pleasure in his old age. The business, except for the final adjustment which would come after his death, was in Robert's hands. The latter was consistently agreeable to his sisters and their husbands and to his father, in view of the eventual control he hoped to obtain. He was not a sycophant in any sense of the word, but a shrewd, cold business man, far shrewder than his brother gave him credit for. He was already richer than any two of the other children put together, but he chose to keep his counsel and to ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... whether Williams' epigram was a sober opinion or merely one cast off in a fit of irritation, that moment of "haste," which even the Psalmist knew, when he was led to sweep all mankind in under the term of "liar." But, further, if Williams was the deliberate sycophant and racial toady Gardner strives to shelter behind his shield of excuse, how was it that he had not won from the planter party, whose voice reaches us through Long, a more softened if not a more favorable opinion? There must have been some marked independence ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... now and then officiated as experimentalist extraordinary before Lord Shelburne's guests. The compensation was not illiberal, and the relation seems to have been as free from degrading elements as such relations can be. Priestley was not a sycophant even in the day when men of genius thought it no great sin to give flattery in exchange for dinners. It was never his habit to burn incense before the great simply because the great liked the smell of incense and were accustomed to it. On the other hand, Shelburne ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... Hastings, the successor of Edward in her affections, was implicated with her, and his offence read from Paul's Cross. At Paul's Cross, newly restored by the bishop, the younger Kempe, and while the boy king was a prisoner in the palace hard by, that worthless sycophant, Dr. Ralph Shaw, the preacher (May 19, 1483), took for his text, "The multiplying brood of the ungodly shall not thrive, nor take deep rooting from bastard slips, nor lay any fast foundations" (Wisdom, iv. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... their last pagan sea-kong, Dudo, the great admirer of Northmen and the sycophant of the first Norman dukes in France, has left the following terrible character, on reading which in full we scarcely know whether the poem was written in reproach or praise. We translate ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... is it? And then you profess to think that we ought to be all housewives and cooks, and knitters of stockings, and sewers-on of our husbands' buttons; but what if we have no husbands, no buttons to sew? And is it not a little selfish, my dear male sycophant, to wish to keep us all to yourself? to attend upon the wants of the lords of creation, who often distinguish themselves so much in ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... called the 'History of Napoleon Bonaparte,' in which he plays the sycophant to all the legitimate crowned heads in Europe, whatever their crimes, vices, or miserable imbecilities, he, in his abhorrence of everything low which by its own vigour makes itself illustrious, calls Murat of the sabre the son of a pastry-cook, of a Marseilleise pastry-cook. It is a pity ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... life, was much concerned in the proposed planting of Nova Scotia, now chiefly remembered from its connection with the Order of Baronets, was Secretary of State for Scotland, and was raised to the peerage. He died in 1640. Professor Masson has called him "the second-rate Scottish sycophant of an inglorious despotism." He might as well be called "the faithful servant of monarchy in its struggle with the encroachments of Republicanism," and one description would be as much question-begging as the other. But we are here concerned only ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... not, in any degree, caused the cordiality of his relations with his minister to decline. There was nothing in "Cobbler" Horn to encourage sycophancy; and there was not in Mr. Durnford a particle of the sycophant. ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... being as obliging as the doctors. His homily led off with such fulsome praise of Monsieur, that, from that day forward, he lost all his credit, and sensible people thereafter only looked upon him as a vile sycophant, a mere dealer ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... the Latin races, but there is a worse animal, the sycophant, descended directly from the dinner-tables of ancient Rome. In old-fashioned houses there are often several of them, headed invariably by the "giornale ambulante," the walking newspaper, whose business it is to pick up items of news during the day in order to detail them to the family in ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... not, however, get the impression that the majority of the Negroes are leaving the South. Eager as these Negroes seem to go, there is no unanimity of opinion as to whether migration is the best policy. The sycophant, toady class of Negroes naturally advise the blacks to remain in the South to serve their white neighbors. The radical protagonists of the equal-rights-for-all element urge them to come North by all means. Then there are the thinking Negroes, who are still further divided. Both divisions ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... the Customs. Conveying malicious and unfounded misrepresentations of America under the seal of official correspondence had indeed long been a favorite means of mending the fortunes of those decayed gentlemen and bankrupt politicians whose ambition it was to rise in office by playing the sycophant to some great man in England. Mr. Bernard had "played this game," and had been found out at it, as every one knew. But Mr. Bernard was no American; and it was scarcely to be imagined that Mr. Hutchinson, who boasted "that his Ancestors were ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... all this shall I bless? No, indeed—no, thank you. Not even towards God Almighty Himself will I play the part of lick-spittle and sycophant. I have fine enough stuff in me, let alone the energy begotten by the flagrance of His injustice, to take higher grounds with Him than that. I will break what men hold to be His laws, wherever and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Europe the perfection of civilization and philanthropy. Little more needs to be said of the Sieur Lebrun. He lived through the dangers of the Revolution; wrote odes and satires indiscriminately on friend and foe; worshipped power to the last, and was the sycophant, and would have been the murderer, of Napoleon, as he had been of Louis and Robespierre; and died at last in receipt of a pension from the state, member (like Lord Brougham) of the National Institute of France; and had his panegyric pronounced on him by his successor, as if he had united ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... been sincere in the bitter and stinging personalities of his satires. Horace seems to be personal, but is not. Neither is Juvenal; the names he employs are mere allegoric names. Draco is any bloody fellow; Favonius is any sycophant: but ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... himself was that he seemed to himself a rather vulgar sort of hypocrite. This was highly disagreeable to him, as his whole nature tended to make him wish to be himself, to make him shrink from the part of the truckler and the sycophant which he was playing so haughtily and so artistically. At times it exasperated him that he could not regard his change of front as a deliberate sale for value received, and not as the weak and cowardly surrender which he ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... colours; as if blue and green and red and gold were not facts of the universe. He is too selfish to tell the truth and too impatient even to hear it. He cannot endure the truth, because it is subtle. This man is almost always like Bagstock—a sycophant and a toad-eater. A man is not any the less a toad-eater because he eats his toads with a huge appetite and gobbles them up, as Bagstock did his breakfast, with the eyes starting out of his purple face. He flatters brutally. He cringes with a swagger. And men of the world like Dombey are always ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... editor. Far be it from me to intrude on the barren and boggy province of hypothetical interpretation and controversial commentary; but I may observe in passing that the original of Simplicius Faber in "What you Will" must surely have been the same hanger-on or sycophant of Ben Jonson's who was caricatured by Dekker in his "Satiromastix" under the name of Asinius Bubo. The gross assurance of self-complacent duncery, the apish arrogance and imitative dogmatism of reflected self-importance and authority ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... were too desirous to have such a rogue to play his pranks in the dull abbey, to tell any tales on Laurence MacKim. But one, Berguet, a Belgian priest who had begged his way to Scotland, and whose nature was that of the spy and sycophant, approached and volunteered the information to the Abbot that this lad to whom he was desirous of showing favour, was a ribald ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... fellow, I have already cautioned you not to be duped by appearances. A hanger on is a sort of sycophant, or toad-eater, and, in the coffee-houses and hotels of London, many such are to be found—men who can spin out a long yarn, tell a tough story, and tip you a rum chant—who invite themselves by a freedom of address bordering on impudence to the tables and the parties of persons they ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... it is our part not to dissemble the trueth in any place, we will not denie that holy sermons, about the time wherein this sycophant liued in Island, namely in the yere 1554, were seldomer in vse then they are at this day, namely, the darkenesse of popery being scarsely at that time dispelled. Which also is to be vnderstood concerning the Psalmes of Dauid mumbled ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... reviving wine? Thy masters have abandoned thee to thy native dunghill! No more shalt thou wheedle for them when they borrow, or bully for them when they pay! No more charges of poisoning or magic shalt thou forge to imprison their troublesome creditors! Oh, officious sycophant, thy occupations are no more! Drink while thou canst, and then resign thy ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... mercy brewed bitter destruction, and the frightened rulers come back; Each comes in state with his train—hangman, priest, tax-gatherer, Soldier, lawyer, lord, jailer, and sycophant. ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... that the Anglican church holds them, and I will allow her to be an ally of despotism; but you shall bring your proofs from her canons, articles, and liturgy, not from the servants of court-chaplains, or the flatteries of those who forget the priest in the sycophant. Wolves and worldlings creep into every church. The apostolic age had its Demas, and ours has its Williams. Remember it has its Andrews too. But since your principles of freedom will be best exemplified by your practice, I trust ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... O, said the sycophant, you are very good, sir, very forgiving, indeed!—But come, added the profligate wretch, I hope you will be so good, as to take her to your bosom; and that, by to-morrow morning, you'll bring her to a better sense ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... individual at our leisure. He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a psalmist; a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the "Last Day" and by a creation of peers, who fluctuates between rhapsodic applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After spending "a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets," ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... [That is, "He says, I say, he denies, I deny." It is the parasite Gnatho that is referred to. Terence makes the shameless sycophant ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... no storm ever come, which will put the firmness of their attachment to the proof; and which, in the midst of confusions, and terrors, and sufferings, may demonstrate the eternal difference between a true and severe friend to the monarchy, and a slippery sycophant of the court! ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and 1216 ff. the meretrix plays matrona. Sagaristio and the daughter of the leno impersonate Persians (Per. 549 ff.), Collabiscus becomes a Spartan (Poen. 578 ff.), Simia as Harpax gets Ballio's money (Ps. 905 ff.), the sycophant is garbed as messenger (Trin. 843 ff.), Phronesium elaborately pretends to be a mother (Truc. 499 ff.). A swindle is almost invariably the object in view. But we have said enough on this score: no one who knows the plays at all ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... have said? The thought of Lucrezia and of her husband sent a cold shiver through me. I considered that, in spite of my love for Therese, I should become very miserable if everyone despised me. Linked to her destiny as a lover or as a husband, I would be a degraded, humbled, and mean sycophant. Then came the thought, Is this to be the end of all my hopes? The die was cast, my head had conquered my heart. I fancied that I had hit upon an excellent expedient, which at all events made me gain time, and I resolved to act upon it. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... genius at his proper post, picking his teeth and mincing an opinion, sheltered by rank, bowing to wealth—a poet framed, glazed, and hung in a striking light; not a straggling weed, torn and trampled on; not a poor Kit-run-the-street, but a powdered beau, a sycophant plant, an exotic reared in a glass case, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... a pettifogger, and was a sycophant to a nobleman in the neighbourhood, who had a post at court. He therefore thought he should oblige his patron, by showing his respect for the military; but treated our knight with the most boorish insolence; and refused to admit him into his house, until he had surrendered all ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... made himself. Tyler, Jr., as good a judge of men as his father, had taken him into his friendship, and between the two of them they had turned out a man who would have died for a Tyler as quickly as he would have for his flag. Yet there was none of the sycophant or fawner in Billings; ordinarily I do not wax enthusiastic about men, but this man Billings comes as close to my conception of what a regular man should be as any I have ever met. I venture to say that before Bowen J. Tyler sent him to college he had never heard ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of shearing a limb as of profiting by the chance that threw Cynthia in his way. Of course, a less scrupulous wooer might have devised a hundred plausible methods of revealing his identity—was not Mrs. Devar, marriage-broker and adroit sycophant, ready to hand and purchasable?—and there was small room for doubt that a girl's natural vanity would be fluttered into a blaze of romance by learning that her chauffeur was heir to an old and well-endowed peerage. But honor ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... tool of his various schemes, and the mean sycophant of his lady, had been employed by him to work upon her jealousy, by secretly informing her of his intention to go to town, at the same time that Cecilia went thither to meet her guardians. She pretended to have learned this ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... and of all times. He floated in people as birds in air. Dramatists have need to study men and women as a sculptor does anatomy. Seclusions are not the qualifications for dramatic art. Dryden was court follower and sycophant and a literary debauchee. Milton was publicist. Burns, loving and longing for courts and society, was enforced in his seclusion, and therefore angry at it. Wordsworth dwelt apart from men, as one who ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... however, the old peasant in shabby clothes, and with his look half-shy, half-sycophant, but vulgarly dressed in broadcloth and bright buttons, a tall hat on his head, and a crimson cravat round his neck. His face was flushed, and his eye flashing and insolent, so that O'Shea only feebly recognised ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... Emmeline's crow rose loud and clear, and as the waiter hastened away, suddenly transformed into a sycophant, poppa remarked, "I see you've got those hotel tickets, too. Let me give you a little pointer. Say nothing about it until next day. They are like that sometimes. In being deprived of the opportunity of swindling us, they feel that ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... agreed with Calvin about church-government, and those who differed from Calvin touching the doctrine of Reprobation. He was now in a chrysalis state, putting off the worm, and putting on the dragon-fly, a kind of intermediate grub between sycophant and oppressor. He was indemnifying himself for the court which he found it expedient to pay to the Ministers by exercising much petty tyranny within his own college. It would be unjust, however, to deny him the praise of having rendered about ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of procedure. The first who was tried under the new system was Rockwood. He was defended by Sir Bartholomew Shower, who in the preceding reign had made himself unenviably conspicuous as a servile and cruel sycophant, who had obtained from James the Recordership of London when Holt honourably resigned it, and who had, as Recorder, sent soldiers to the gibbet for breaches of military discipline. By his servile ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was anxious to get rid of him. It is probable that he felt somewhat condemned by the undeniable virtues of De Soto; for the most of men can feel the power of high moral principle as witnessed in others. De Soto, intensely proud, was not at all disposed to play the sycophant before his patron. He had already exasperated him by his refusal to execute orders which he deemed dishonorable. And worst of all, by winning the love of Isabella, he had thwarted one of the most ambitious of Don ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... them belong to the other side, the side of M. le Chevalier's enemy, who does nothing but breathe threats of vengeance against you and all the nobles together. They all hope to ruin you through your nephew. The ringleader of the conspiracy is this sycophant of a du Croisier, the pretended Royalist. Du Croisier's wife, poor thing, knows nothing about it; you know her, I should have heard of it before this if she had ears to hear evil. For some time these ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... in the Minds of those they leave behind them: Whether it was worth coming into the World for; whether it be suitable to a reasonable Being; in short, whether it appears Graceful in this Life, or will turn to an Advantage in the next. Let the Sycophant, or Buffoon, the Satyrist, or the Good Companion, consider with himself, when his Body shall be laid in the Grave, and his Soul pass into another State of Existence, how much it will redound to his Praise to have it said of him, that no Man in England eat better, that he had an ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... wife, has given more delicate pictures of the clergyman as he appeared at the tea-tables of the time. He varies according to her from the squire's excellent younger brother, who is simply a squire in a white neck-cloth, to the silly but still respectable sycophant, who firmly believes his lady patroness to be a kind of local deity. Many of the real memoirs of the day give pleasant examples of the quiet and amiable lives of the less ambitious clergy. There is the charming Gilbert White (1720-1793) placidly ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... equipment, environment all very dark to us. Probably a too restless, imponderous creature, too much of the Gundling type; structure of him GASEOUS, not solid; Perhaps a little of the coxcomb naturally; much of the sycophant on compulsion,—being sorely jammed into corners, and without elbow-room at all, in this world. Has, for the rest, a recognizable talent for "Magazine writing,"—for Newspaper editing, had that rich mine, "California of the Spiritually Vagabond," ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... temptation to it? hath he not acted so in like cases? Judge you, therefore, whether he did it not." Thus the close slanderer argueth; and a weak or prejudiced person is thereby so caught, that he presently is ready thence to conclude the thing done. Again: "He doeth well," saith the sycophant, "it is true; but why, and to what end? Is it not, as most men do, out of ill design? may he not dissemble now? may he not recoil hereafter? have not others made as fair a show? yet we know what came of it." Thus do calumnious tongues pervert ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... with great firmness, Mr. Pitt's motion for the adjustment of the Prince of Wales's debts, and moved for the reduction of the Prince's income. He professed himself ready to support the real splendour of the royal family "as any slippery sycophant of a court;" but said he thought there was more true dignity in manifesting a heart alive to the distresses of millions, than in all those trappings which encumber royalty without adorning it. He asked whether the legislature ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - No. 555, Supplement to Volume 19 • Various
... sycophant will everything admire; Each verse, each sentence, sets his soul on fire; All is divine! there's not a word amiss! He shakes with joy and weeps with tenderness; He overpowers ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... 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, without a mourner dy'd; And scarce a sycophant was fed by pride; Where ne'er was known the form of mock debate, Or seen a new-made mayor's unwieldy state; Where change of fav'rites made no change of laws, And senates heard before they judg'd a cause; How would'st ...
— English Satires • Various
... M. Perier, Governor of Louisiana, was relieved by M. de Biainville, and the King's plantation put on a new footing, by an arrangement suitable to the notions of the person {187} who advised it. A sycophant, who wanted to make his court to Cardinal Fleury, would persuade that minister, that the plantation cost his Majesty ten thousand livres a year, and that this sum might be well saved; but took care not to tell his Eminence, that for these ten thousand ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... apartment where his friend lived and led Sabinus into conversation. By throwing out some of his usual remarks he induced the other also to speak out freely all that he had in his mind. It is the practice of such as wish to play the sycophant to take the lead in some kind of abuse and to disclose some secret, intending that their victim either for listening to them or for saying something similar may find himself liable to indictment. To the sycophants, since they do it with a purpose, freedom of speech involves no danger. ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... that my Lady had actually offered her to him, with a bribe of a farm on easy terms; and when she found that he had other intentions, there seemed to be some broken-down sycophant of Mar's upon the cards, but of course I was preferable, both because my fair sister-in-law has some lingering respect for the honour of her own blood, and because the bar between Aurelia and my nephew would be perpetual. I knew likewise ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... open air. Could it be true? Had his ears deceived him? Was it possible that the beautiful woman on whom he had lavished all the first love of his life could be capable of playing with him in such a fashion? Jack was his rival! He was a sycophant! a ...
— Yorkshire Tales. Third Series - Amusing sketches of Yorkshire Life in the Yorkshire Dialect • John Hartley
... were men with these, but they shall be nameless, who struggled, and successfully, to fill their coffers to repletion, and for nothing else; who have been courted by the mercenary, and flattered by the fawning sycophant; who, with their hoardings, have passed away, and no grateful memory remains of their lives; their hoards are dissipated, and they are only remembered to be despised. And yet others, who swam in the creek and sported on the ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... Collector of Customs, with whom by the same trick of speech (slightly adapted) he managed to ingratiate himself, scenting the flesh-pots. For he belonged to the tribe to whom a patron never comes amiss. Captain Vyell was amused by the man; knew him for a sycophant; but tolerated him at table and promoted him (in Batty Langton's phrase) to be his trencher chaplain. He and Langton took an easy malicious delight, over their wine, in shocking Mr. Silk with their free thought and seeing ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch |
