"Pestilential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he was dry I fastened him up in the middle of my drawing-room, and my household, myself included, sniffed at him from all points of the compass. Then, leaving him still chained up, we went into the garden and nearly fainted from the pestilential odours borne on the breeze, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... this girl will come here. It would be just like her to follow up her new admirer. Mrs. Willoughby is so hot in her advocacy of what she terms the 'New South,' that she must speak of everything which seems to favor her pestilential ideas. By birth she belongs to the Old South and the only true South, and she tries to keep in with it, but she is getting the cold ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... me up, and show me how the gods keep house. I counter-offered to keep him with me, by force of dynamite, carry him back to civilization, and go shares on his voice, as per circular. And this is where the big But comes in. My offer was pestilential; he shunned it. ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... than your silence; In all besides I give my wrath free scope. Make your escape from this captivity, Be bold to bear me company in flight; Linger not here on this accursed soil, Where virtue breathes a pestilential air. To cover your departure take advantage Of this confusion, caused by my disgrace. The means of flight are ready, be assured; You have as yet no other guards than mine. Pow'rful defenders will maintain our quarrel; ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... room covered with black soot, the four walls garnished with spider-webs, and the floor paved with mortar. On the eastern wall hangs a large sheet of paper with the inscription, 'Hence blows the breath of life', which not many visitors will believe, because, instead of a quickening breath, pestilential odors enter by the window and offend the nostrils of those whose olfactory nerve has not lost all sensitiveness.... On the opposite wall, to the west, appear the words, 'A memorial unto the destruction of the Temple'. To this day I do not know what there was to commemorate the fall of the Holy ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm during all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late Rich man had to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of fact we were in sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination. The excellent Father Superior mentioned to me with an air of immense commiseration: "The poor man has left a young daughter." Who was to look after her I don't know, but I saw the devoted Martin taking the trunks ashore with great care ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... held in the royal palace of the King of Connaught. He obtained subsidies in horses and arms from those who came to this assembly. On this occasion two fires were lit, between which cattle were driven as a preventative or charm against the murrain and other pestilential distempers. From this custom the feast of St. Philip and St. James was anciently called Beltinne, or the Day ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... length of time in which this work of creation had been accomplished. According to the Egyptians, Menes, the first of their mortal kings, had found, so they said, the valley under water. The sea came in almost as far as the Fayum, and, excepting the province of Thebes, the whole country was a pestilential swamp. Hence, the necessary period for the physical formation of Egypt would cover some centuries after Menes. This is no longer considered a sufficient length of time, and some modern geologists declare that the Nile must have ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... he has produced defy him and refuse absolutely to obey his most fundamental postulates or accept his axioms. The fittest survive no more; these gregarious, new-born things presently form themselves into a pestilential ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... but Francis the First, a forsworn gentleman, a despotic king, vainglorious, selfish, sunk in debaucheries, was but the type of an era which retained the forms of the Middle Age without its soul, and added to a still prevailing barbarism the pestilential vices which hung fog-like around the dawn of civilization. Yet he esteemed arts and letters, and, still more, coveted the eclat which they could give. The light which was beginning to pierce the feudal darkness gathered its rays around his throne. Italy was rewarding ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... begun to feel disgust that this gift had been extended from the citizens to the allies, and thus rendered common: in the next place they frequently heard the consul Verginius in the assemblies as it were prophesying, that the gift of his colleague was pestilential: that those lands were sure to bring slavery to those who received them: that the way was being paved to a throne. Else why were it that the allies were thus included, and the Latin nation? What was the object of a third of the land that had been taken being restored to the Hernicans, ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... laid long since, the question is substantial, not formal. If the Teutsch Ritterdom was actually at this time DEAD, actually stumbling about as a mere galvanized Lie beginning to be putrid,—then, sure enough, it behooved that somebody should bury it, to avoid pestilential effects in the neighborhood. Somebody or other;—first flaying the skin off, as was natural, and taking that for his trouble. All turns, in substance, on this latter question! If, again, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... I was not fastidious, and I seldom had any but the slightest intercourse with those who dwelt under the same roof, yet it happened now and then that I was driven away by human proximity which passed my endurance. In other cases I had to flee from pestilential conditions. How I escaped mortal illness in some of those places (miserably fed as I always was, and always over-working myself) is a great mystery. The worst that befell me was a slight attack of diphtheria—traceable, I imagine, to the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... were covered with one-storey hovels, cowsheds, in which people lived. The roofs of these hovels were covered with deposits of filth, in some places a couple of feet deep—the contributions from the back windows of the second and third storeys. I could make out fish and meat bones, garbage, pestilential rags, old boots, broken earthenware, and all the general refuse of a ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... are— poisonous swamps. Then come swamps pure and simple, too bad even to be turned into rice grounds,—or rather simply swamps impure; for a stench at most times of the year comes from them, like a warning of their pestilential nature, and their unfitness for the sojourn of man. A few shaggy, wild-looking cattle may be seen wandering over the flat waste, muddy to the shoulders from wading in the soft swamps. A scene of more utter ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Christians had begun. It was known that Andrianivo favoured the Christians. On the question being put to him, he frankly admitted that he was one of them. He was therefore despoiled of all he possessed, and banished into perpetual exile and slavery. He was sent in chains to a pestilential part of the island, with the intention that toil and disease should end his life. So secretly and promptly was he spirited away that no one could tell the precise locality to which he had been banished. His heart-broken wife and child were also ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... merrily over the paths once trodden by heavy-footed care. Yet the more subtle effects of persecution remain with the living. They are not screwed down in the coffin and buried with the dead. They become part of the pestilential atmosphere of cowardice and hypocrisy which saps the intellectual manhood of society, so that bright-eyed inquiry sinks into blear-eyed faith, and the rich vitality of active honest thought falls into the decrepitude of timid ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... prosperity and for these gifts he was truly thankful, and though he feared he might prove tedious, still he would hope that Felix in his great clemency might allow him to say a few further words about a pestilential fellow, an agent of sedition among the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of the sect known as the Nazarenes: one who came to Jerusalem but to profane the Temple, and wishing, he said, to judge him for his blasphemy according to our law, we laid hands upon him, ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... kept secret the sufferings on board these pestilential ships until August 8th, when the Caledonia, commanded by Captain Robert Drummond, drifted into Sandy Hook, New York, having lost one hundred and three men since leaving Darien, and twelve more within four days after arrival, leaving but sixty-five men on board fit for handling ropes. ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... Indian war were let loose on the fair valleys and cities of Rohilcund. The whole country was in a blaze. More than a hundred thousand people fled from their homes to pestilential jungles, preferring famine, and fever, and the haunts of tigers, to the tyranny of him to whom an English and a Christian government had, for shameful lucre, sold their substance, and their blood, and the honor of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... From the pestilential blight, From the sun-beams scorching light, From temptation's mighty power, In some lone unguarded hour. From the dangers that we know, From the dark undreamt of foe, From the death-splash of the wave, Father, ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... myself and they were awful. Once every night I play the Tune of Time in which the wickedness of the dead man is spread out like dry rot in a green field. This man kept his genius so long stagnant that it decayed on his hands, and then into his pestilential music he poured his poison, and would have made the world sick. Oh, for delivery from the crushing transgressions of another! His name? Ah, but that is my secret! I ate his sin, and truth, my son, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... sixteenth century that the Ursuline Order took its rise. The epoch was one peculiarly disastrous in the Church's history. Luther's heresy was working evil on a gigantic scale. It had spread from nation to nation with the rapidity of a pestilential contagion, blighting with its deadly venom all it touched, and everywhere marking its progress by a wide track of spiritual ruin and desolation, as well as of political anarchy and social disorganization. Each new success of its unholy work, necessarily inflicted a new pang on the heart ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... her pleasure, any incident to divert thoughts that make her sensible of her own bereavement. She stops to listen to the denunciations of the crazed prophet, and herself partakes, though callously, of his insanity—half believes, but scarcely feels. The sky is lurid, pestilential; it touches with plague what it illuminates. Such is the picture in its design. The colouring is quite in accordance with the purpose, and completes the sentiment; there is much of a green tone, yet under great variety. There is very ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... anticipated. This was disappointing, for it was evident that they had turned into one of the shallow mouths, and navigation might come to an end a few miles up. Captain Drake dropped anchor well away from the shore and its pestilential night mists, and made all snug against the morning. He recognized that the navigation of the river was going to be no easy matter, and ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... day time half-clad, filthy, emaciated creatures pass you on the gloomy streets, and startle you with the air of misery which they carry about them. At night these poor creatures huddle into cellars, so damp, foul, and pestilential that it seems impossible for a human being to exist in them. The walls are lined with "bunks," or "berths," and the woodwork and bedding is alive with vermin; the floors are covered with wretched beds in a similar condition. The place is either as dark as ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... the Monks they did the mischief! Theirs all the grossness, all the superstition Of a most gross and superstitious age— May He be praised that sent the healthful tempest And scatter'd all these pestilential vapours! But that we owed them all to yonder Harlot Throned on the seven hills with her cup of gold, I will as soon believe, with kind Sir Roger, That old Moll White took wing with cat arid broomstick, And raised the last night's ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... would have thought nothing more about it had there not appeared a few lines on the subject in a weekly newspaper called the "Brotherton Church," which was held to be a pestilential little rag by all the Close. Deans, canons, and minor canons were all agreed as to this, Dr. Pountner hating the "Brotherton Church" quite as sincerely as did the Dean. The "Brotherton Church" was edited nominally by a certain Mr. Grease,—a ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... with gallant arms? Such a burden as that {better} befits my shoulders; I, who am able to give unerring wounds to the wild beasts, {wounds} to the enemy, who lately slew with arrows innumerable the swelling Python, that covered so many acres {of land} with his pestilential belly. Do thou be contented to excite I know not what flames with thy torch; and do not lay claim to praises {properly} ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... incessantly falls upon it, so that great nation had to break and to fall into pieces under, not the drop, but the rivers of impure waters which for centuries have incessantly flowed in upon it from the pestilential fountain of the confessional. "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach, ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... muddy, polluted, pestilential river, instead of allowing it to resolve itself into a million irrigating-ditches, has been the fight of the centuries. The trouble is that irrigation is not an end—it is just a beginning. Irrigation means constant and increasing effort, and priests and preachers have never prayed, "Give ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... armies of the Huns first appeared on the banks of the Volga, then in Pannonia, finally on the borders of the Marne and the Po, ravaging the beautiful plains where, from the time of Antwor, the genius of man had accumulated monuments upon monuments. Thus blew from the Mongolian desert a pestilential wind which, even as far as the Cisalpine plains, blighted the delicate flower of art, the object of cares so ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... by suffering. This sick man, the sole occupant of a deserted mansion, was her brother-in-law, Lord Fareham. A large high-backed armchair stood beside the bed, and on this Angela seated herself. She recollected the Superior's injunction just in time to put one of the anti-pestilential lozenges into her mouth before she bent over the sufferer, and took his clammy hand in hers, and endured the acrimony of his poisonous breath. That anxious gaze, the dark yellow complexion, and those great beads of sweat that poured down the pinched countenance ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... general the only effect which such barbarous conduct produces, is to heap distress on the weak and helpless. To the other terrible calamities inseparable from war, especially when carried on in this barbarous manner, a pestilential disease was superadded which committed dreadful ravages in Chili, especially among the natives. During the incursions of Villagran into the Araucanian territory, some Spanish soldiers, who were either infected at the time ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... kind hand was extended to greet her—no heart warmed in affection towards her; on the contrary, every eye glanced at her, as a being marked with enmity towards God. Blanched faces and knit brows, the signs of fear and hatred, were turned upon her; her breath was considered pestilential, and her touch paralysis. There she stood, proscribed, avoided, and hunted like a tigress, all fearing to encounter, yet wishing to exterminate her! Who could she be?—or what had she done, that the finger of the Almighty marked ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... the same time it must be confessed that when an error, however flagrant and pestilential, has ceased to shock and scandalize the general body of the commonwealth; when the people listen to the doctrine without indignation, and their worst sentence upon it pronounces it merely "queer," there is little hope of legal restraints there enduring long or effecting much. Penalties for the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... home, the safety and happiness of civilized society, that she might take up the cross, and carry it, an offering of salvation, to the benighted Heathen of Asia, even in the depths of their own far and pestilential climates. ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... foul pestilential place, there is no doubt. The mist was all about us by midnight, and smelt very heavy and cold. I awoke shivering in the morning, and not feeling by any means as fresh or vigorous as usual; but nevertheless I determined to explore ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... from the despondency into which they had fallen; their lively imaginations making it assume the form of a flaming cross leading them on to victory. Famine was not the least of the evils they endured. Unwholesome food, and the impure air from the neighbouring marshes, engendered pestilential diseases, which carried them off more rapidly than the arrows of the enemy. A thousand of them died in a day, and it became at last a matter of extreme difficulty to afford them burial. To add to their misery, each man grew suspicious of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Alcmaeonidae to submit their case to the judgment of three hundred Eupatridae, by whom they were adjudged guilty of sacrilege, and were expelled from Attica. The banishment of the guilty race did not, however, deliver the Athenians from their religious fears. A pestilential disease with which they were visited was regarded as an unerring sign of the divine wrath. Upon the advice of the Delphic oracle, they invited the celebrated Cretan prophet and sage, Epimenides, to visit Athens, and purify their city from pollution ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... choir boy folded the altar cloth, wiggled his haunches, stood tiptoe on one foot and flipped his arms as if to fly away like a cherub, on pretext of reaching up to light the black tapers whose odour of coal tar and pitch was now added to the pestilential ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... natural world we should indeed know just as well what to expect in practice and should receive the same education in perception and reflection; but what difference would there be between such an idealist and the most pestilential materialist, save his even greater wariness and scepticism? Berkeley at this time—long before days of "Siris" and tar-water—was too ignorant and hasty to understand how inane all spiritual or poetic ideals would be did they not express man's tragic dependence on nature and his ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... partner, Mr. J. Pacifico, who is lately dead of the plague. I paid him a visit a few hours before his death; I met there Don Pedro de Victoria, who was smoking a segar; he offered me one, and urged me to smoke it. I believe that the smoke of tobacco is anti-pestilential; this, added to the precaution of avoiding contact, and inhalation of the breath of the person infected, appears to be quite sufficient to secure ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... We must keep our boys, as I said, from association with all bad men, but especially from flatterers. For, as I have often said to parents, and still say, and will constantly affirm, there is no race more pestilential, nor more sure to ruin youths swiftly, than the race of flatterers, who destroy both parents and sons root and branch, making the old age of the one and the youth of the others miserable, holding out pleasure as a sure bait. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... in houses, fields, and woods, which arise in like manner in summer, with no oviform matters sufficient to account for them; also such as devour meadows and lawns, and in some hot localities fill and infest the air; besides those that swim and fly unseen in filthy waters, wines becoming sour, and pestilential air. These facts of observation support those who say that the odors, effluvia, and exhalations emitted from plants, earths, and ponds, are what give the initiative to such things. That when they have come forth, they are afterwards ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... With scorching, pestilential breath The desert-blast swept by, And with a fierce, relentless glare The sun looked from on high; Yet onward still, though worn with toil, The eager wand'rer pressed, While hope lit up his dauntless eye, And nerved ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... part of their history is remarkable: They appear to be most numerous, and to thrive best in those districts which are most infected with malaria. In the Pontine marshes they find a favorite retreat, and in the pestilential Maremma scarcely any other animals are to be seen. In the northern portions of Italy, where malaria is much less frequent than in the south. Buffaloes are to be found in the greatest numbers precisely in those localities where ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... woman-prisoner as a nurse, and Mr. Norton supplied them with money and necessaries. These helps were barely sufficient to preserve them from the horrors of despair, when they saw their little darling panting under the rage of a loathsome pestilential malady, during the excessive heat of the dog-days, and struggling for breath in the noxious atmosphere of a confined cabin, where they scarce had room to turn on the most necessary occasions. The eager curiosity with which the ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... and for this, or perhaps some other reason also, various diseases came among the flock, by which the poor things were swept off in thousands. The state of corruption which ensued produced a smell really pestilential; and, because the dead and diseased had to be taken away and separated from the healthy, the business was indeed extremely wearisome and repulsive, and caused many an unhappy ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... to take passage upon the raft and to accompany its master downstream. The raft is then launched into the water and allowed to follow the will of the current. No one may even touch it or approach it on its downward course, for it has become foul by contact with its pestilential owners.[24] ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... him. The dead, he fancied, were bursting from their coffins, and he peopled the darkness with grisly phantoms. They were around about him on each side, whirling and rustling, gibbering, groaning, shrieking, laughing, and lamenting. He was stunned, stifled. The air seemed to grow suffocating, pestilential; the wild laughter was redoubled; the horrible troop assailed him; they dragged him along the tomb, and amid their howls he fell, and ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... hundred men. Balboa had nearly five hundred men under his command, but he at once submitted to the decision of his king and accepted Pedrarias as his superior. The fifteen hundred new men landed in that pestilential climate, in the unhealthy season, paid bitterly for their imprudence. A violent disease attacked them; scarcity of provisions made it worse; and within a month more than six hundred of them had died, while others hastened away from that ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... which they recover; but we mean inherent diseases, which are permanent. The science of pathology teaches what these are. They are manifold, such as diseases whereby the whole body is so far infected that the contagion may prove fatal; of this nature are malignant and pestilential fevers, leprosies, the venereal disease, gangrenes, cancers, and the like; also diseases whereby the whole body is so far weighed down, as to admit of no consociability, and from which exhale dangerous ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... avowing that, in respect to the wicked, God is changed into a consuming fire full of hatred and vengeance. But that is unmitigated blasphemy. God is unchangeable, his very nature being disinterested, immutable goodness. The sufferings of the wicked are of their own preparation. If a pestilential exhalation is drawn from some decaying substance, it is not the fault of any alteration in the sunlight. But a Christian writer assures us that when "the damned are packed like brick in a kiln, so bound that they cannot move a limb nor even an ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... poetry, embracing the descriptive, in which his reading made him largely a borrower; the lyrical in which he excelled; the satirical, in which he was personal and licentious; and the Jacobitical, in which he issued forth treason of the most pestilential character. He has disfigured his verses by incessant appeals to the Muses, and repeated references to the heathen mythology; but his melody is in the Gaelic tongue ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... after three hundred yards of silent scurry through this pestilential tract, they struck hard ground, and went at full speed up the hill-side for open country and purer air. Still following Me Dain, who pushed on as fast as he could go, Jack and his father plunged into a bamboo groove, and followed a narrow path. This brought them ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... sensible," cried the Boy, getting up, "I'm going off home. No, I can't stop for sonnets; my mother's sitting up. I'll look you up to-morrow, sometime or other, and do for goodness' sake try and realize that you're a pestilential scourge, or you'll find yourself in a most awful ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... trail left by the war—carcases of horses and oxen lining the road, a carcase every few hundred yards surrounded by a gorged flock of aasvoegels, the foulest of the vulture tribe. With a nervous horse the passage of these pestilential spots was made difficult as well as revolting, and it was with a feeling of relief that one saw the tents and waggons of the Paardeberg camp ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... in the clear lucid flame of the full moon, he seemed to pause. He saw bridges, piles of buildings, dark flowing canals, a strange medley of streets, some broad and beautiful, others dark, narrow and pestilential, reeking with the fumes ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... India had not prepared Bedient for this. With glad welcome he discovered David Cairns here and there among short-story contributors, but the love of man and woman which the stories in general exploited, struck him of Indian ideals as shifty and pestilential. The woman of fiction was equipped with everything to make her as common as man. She was glib, pert, mundane, her mind a chatter-mill; a creature of fur, paint, hair, and absurdly young. The clink of ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... cultivation has taken place, a dense population has arisen, and the dangerous qualities of the atmosphere have disappeared. Within the last twenty years, the district called Grossete has been reclaimed, in the most pestilential part of the Maremma of Tuscany, by an industrious population, which has succeeded in introducing agriculture and banishing the malaria; and the ruins of the Roman villas on the banks of the Tiber, near the sea, prove ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... the Ariadne carried eighteen midshipmen; and as six lieutenants were appointed from them, only twelve remained. From these twelve, in the dingy after-cockpit, where the superficial area was not more than twelve square feet; where the air was foul, and the bilges reeked with a pestilential stench; where the purser's store-room near gave out the smell of rancid butter and poisonous cheese; where the musty taint of old ropes came to them, there ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... little distance. I heard: 'Military post—doctor—two hundred miles—quite alone now—unavoidable delays—nine months—no news—strange rumours.' They approached again, just as the manager was saying, 'No one, as far as I know, unless a species of wandering trader—a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from the natives.' Who was it they were talking about now? I gathered in snatches that this was some man supposed to be in Kurtz's district, and of whom the manager did not approve. 'We will not be free from unfair competition till one of these fellows is hanged ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... her to think of his comfort. The thought of her in his arms dancing set his heart to rioting. He was singing as he dressed, and as he rode put to Grinden Hall, singing a specimen of the new musical insanity known as "jazz"—so pestilential a music that even the fiddlers ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... wearing an excess of whiskers, two hats, and a pestilential air slid into the seat ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... Louis, embarked for Madagascar, in order to purchase a few slaves, to assist him in forming a plantation on this island. He landed at Madagascar during that unhealthy season which commences about the middle of October; and soon after his arrival died of the pestilential fever, which prevails in that island six months of the year, and which will forever baffle the attempts of the European nations to form establishments on that fatal soil. His effects were seized upon by the rapacity of strangers, as commonly happens to persons ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... of March, Kossuth, in the diet at Pressburg, delivered the famous speech which was the declaration of war of Hungarian Liberalism against the Austrian system. "From the charnel-house of the Vienna cabinet," he exclaimed, "a pestilential air breathes on us, which dulls our nerves and paralyses the flight of our spirit." Hungary liberated was to become the centre of freedom for all the races under the Austrian crown, and the outcome was to be a new "fraternization of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... wandering about the streets once more. They were shrouded in the fog which made the night heavy, opaque, and nauseous. It was like a pestilential rock dropped on earth. It could be seen swirling past the gas-lights, which it seemed to put out at intervals. The pavement was as slippery as on a frosty night after a rain, and all sorts of evil smells seemed to come up from the bowels ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... trial for weeks in Houses of Detention—Pest-houses of Detention—you could not expect a putrid fever to adopt new rules merely to accommodate legal prejudice. And in the same way if Cavendish Square came sniffing up pestilential effluvia in Drury Lane, it was The ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... down into the stifling air of the hold, with a lemon, a cup of tea, and, better and more efficacious than all, a kind word for the sick. While encamped before Vera Cruz, he gave up his own tent to a sick comrade, and went himself to lodge in the pestilential city. On the march, and even on the battle-field, he found occasion to exercise those feelings of humanity which show most beautifully there. And, in the hospitals of Mexico, he went among the diseased and ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... strange contrasts with the blue-gray bush. Along the few main roads moved dusty stages, light, low, almost spring-less three-seated vehicles, with thin sun-tops overhead and boxes and bags in front, behind and underneath, and all swarmed about by pestilential flies, millions of flies, sprung from nowhere to ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... which, if we did not practise, others would commit. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that they were to take it up. What good would it do them? What advantages, for instance, would they derive from this pestilential commerce to their marine? Should not we, on the other hand, be benefited by this change? Would they not be obliged to come to us, in consequence of the cheapness of our manufactures, for what they wanted for the African market? But ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... dignified and, if I may say it, a chaste, style, is neither elaborate nor loaded with ornament; it rises supreme by its own natural purity. This windy and high-sounding bombast, a recent immigrant to Athens, from Asia, touched with its breath the aspiring minds of youth, with the effect of some pestilential planet, and as soon as the tradition of the past was broken, eloquence halted and was stricken dumb. Since that, who has attained to the sublimity of Thucydides, who rivalled the fame of Hyperides? Not a single poem has glowed ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... absence of forethought in providing open spaces for the recreation of the people, the allowance of intramural burials, and of fetid nuisances, such as slaughter-houses and manufactories of offensive stuffs, have converted cities into pestilential inclosures, and kept Jefferson's saying—"Great cities are great sores"—true in its most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... the plague had actually touched her, and in fancy she could hear her gasping and begging for a drink of water like the dying wretches to whom her fate had led her. And then—then came the servants of the senate and shut her into the pestilential house with the sick; she saw the pest in mortal form, a cruel and malignant witch; behind her, tall and threatening, stood her inexorable companion Death, reaching out a bony hand and clutching her mother, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... spurs to his own horse and trotted after him. Laying a restraining hand on his fellow Justice's bridle, 'One moment more!' he entreated. ''Tis best you should know all ere you return. Not only at Swarthmoor, at Ulverston church also, hath this pestilential fellow caused a disturbance. It was on the Saturday that he arrived at Swarthmoor Hall, and violently brawled with our good Friend Lampitt during Mistress ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... completely sterile—a hard clay surface called Pat,—and this kind of country extends around to the east of the spur of the Suliman into the Derajat country. Subject to terrific heats and to a fiercely hot pestilential wind, the Kachi is at times fatal even ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... confined. The latter, once as strong as Hercules, was nearly famished the first year, and when a better allowance was granted he had wholly lost the power of digestion. He lingered a long time, and when reduced almost to the last extremity, he was removed into a somewhat more airy prison. The pestilential atmosphere of these narrow receptacles, so much resembling real tombs, was doubtless very injurious to others as well as to him. But the remedy sought for was too late or insufficient to remove the cause of his sufferings. He had scarcely been a month in this spacious prison, when, ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... occasion. I gazed on the procession till it was out of sight; and when the last wheeze of the clarionet died upon my ear, I could not help thinking how happy were they who were thus to dwell together in the peaceful bosom of their native village, far from the gilded misery and the pestilential vices of the town. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... poor Maohn was terrified by a communication from Ali Bey (Moudir of Keneh) to the effect that he had heard from Alexandria that someone had reported that the dead cattle had lain about the streets of Luxor and that the place was pestilential. The British mind at once suggested a counter-statement, to be signed by the most respectable inhabitants. So the Cadi drew it up, and came and read it to me, and took my deposition and witnessed my signature, and the Maohn went his way ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... heaven's vital air lest it be poison, or to grasp the hand of a brother or friend lest the grip of the pestilence should clutch him. Such was the dismay that now followed in the track of the disease or ran before it throughout the town. Graves were hastily dug and the pestilential relics as hastily covered, because the dead were enemies of the living and strove to draw them headlong, as it were, into their own dismal pit. The public councils were suspended, as if mortal wisdom might relinquish its devices now that ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... let him only feel angry or disgusted with the wordy nonsense, and just make one sign, or raise one finger, and 1200—aye, 2000 men would in a trice surround him, and send the orator and all his staff to preach their pestilential doctrines under the turf, and this without more ceremony and remorse than if they were so many mad dogs. Poor fools! who think it possible to change a people in a few weeks, and imagine that a fine discourse from lips unknown and unloved will have a deeper effect upon men's minds ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... years ago, before the glorious principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity had made short shrift of all such pestilential aristocrats, the ci-devant banker, then a widower with an only daughter, Esther, had journeyed to England. He soon returned to Paris, however, and went on living there with his little girl in comparative ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... for that reader, into a baseless fairy tale. The second reader is wiser than that; he knows that the imagery is not baseless; it is the imagery of febrile delirium; really seen, but not seen as an external reality. The mariner had caught the pestilential fever, which carried off all his mates; he only had survived—the delirium had vanished; but the visions that had haunted the delirium remained. 'Yes,' says the third reader, 'they remained; naturally ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... dared!" he laughed ironically. "I dare to tell you now to your face what all men say of you in your absence. They believe you to be—and rightly—a conscienceless pirate. You are a scathe and a blight; a pestilential ogre, drunk with self-worship. When first I saw you, you were gloating over having bought lambs that you had never seen for seven dollars which you sold, still unseen, for ten. Since then you have simply amplified, on the scale of a Colossus, that single cheap ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... Revolution. I cleft him to the teeth, through steel and bone. It has done great deeds, this little weapon, and each of these blows was a deliverance to the Church. This sword," he said, again sheathing it, "has yet more to do,—to weed out this base and pestilential heresy of Erastianism; to vindicate the true liberty of the Kirk in her purity; to restore the Covenant in its glory,—then let it moulder and rust beside the bones ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... being intent on their own business. The market-place was bordered to the east and west by an extensive swamp, covered with weeds and water and frequented by wild ducks, cranes, and vultures. The house which had been provided for him was close to a morass, the pestilential exhalations of which were increased by the sewers of the houses all ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... brave Scarlet Robes and Fur Tippets, with great monstrous Wigs, and the King's Arms behind them under a Canopy, done in Carver's work, gilt. They frowned on us dreadfully when we came trooping into the Dock, bringing all manner of Deadly pestilential Fumes with us from the Gaol yonder, and which not all the rue, rosemary, and marjoram strewn on the Dock-ledge, nor the hot vinegar sprinkled about the Court, could mitigate. The middle Judge, who was old, and had a split lip and a fang protruding from ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... cost of his life; Florence Nightingale and the noble sisterhood inaugurated by her, who have won all the untarnished and undisputed laurels of recent wars on both sides of the Atlantic; and the Christian missionaries to savage tribes and in pestilential climates, who have often gone to their work with as clear a consciousness of deadly peril as if they had been on their ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... to hear, and he said it so determinedly. He described hell to them as a pestilential hole, where all the filthiness of the world flowed together. There was no air except the hot, sulphurous flames; there was no bottom; they sank and sank into everlasting silence! It was terrible, only to hear about it; but the clergyman said it right honestly out of his heart, and all ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... the deleterious vapours and pestilential exhalations of the charcoal, which soon undermine the health of the heartiest, the glare of a scorching fire, and the smoke so baneful to the eyes and the complexion, are continual and inevitable dangers: and a cook must live in the midst of them, as a soldier on the field ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... pestilential "pianiste," The screechy singer too, The writer of the stupid book And of the dull review, The actor who is greatest when He takes his exit cue;— Chacun son metier: ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... He found Anna in a swoon, and Lena and the duchess bending over her. The duchess's chasseur Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz had been returning from Moran, when on the Brescian high-road he met the spy Luigi, and acting promptly under the idea that Luigi was always a pestilential conductor of detestable correspondence, he attacked him, overthrew him, and ransacked him, and bore the fruit of his sagacious exertions to his mistress in Milan; it was Violetta d'Isorella's letter to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the subject of vulgar huckstering, a means of buying a livelihood; and worse than the prostitution of the streets is that of the marriage for a livelihood sanctioned by law and custom, because under its pestilential poison-breath not only the dignity and happiness of the living, but the sap and strength of future generations are blasted and destroyed. As love, that sacred instinct which should lead the wife into the arms of the husband, united with whom she might bequeath to ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... proceeded. It had appeared to be a lofty chain of mountains, but they were soon at the end of it, and came out into the open air. But an obstacle opposed itself. A huge dragon, Ladon the terrible, reared up his hundred heads, his eyes flashing fire and fury, his mouths emitting baleful flames and pestilential breath, his tail, covered with metallic scales of green, scarlet, and blue, coiling away to a great distance. The page drew his sword; but the knight took a little black book and aimed it at the volcanic heads. It was a Holy Book, and the names therein quenched the threatening fire and ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... to protect property from such violence, the commonwealth then is become totally perverted from its purposes; neither God nor man will long endure it; nor will it long endure itself. In that case there is an unnatural infection, a pestilential taint fermenting in the constitution of society, which fever and convulsions of some kind or other must throw off; or in which the vital powers, worsted in an unequal struggle, are pushed back upon themselves, and, by a reversal of their whole functions, fester to gangrene, to death; ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Hercules, Bat, and Austin, wishing to spare her the unpleasantness more than the fatigue of a passage across this marshy plain, made a litter of bamboos, on which she consented to sit. Her little Jack was placed in her arms, and they endeavored to cross that pestilential marsh ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... Mincio, and approachable only by five narrow causeways, of which three were defended by strong and regular fortresses or entrenched camps, the other two by gates, drawbridges, and batteries. Situated amidst stagnant waters and morasses, its air is pestilential, especially to strangers. The garrison were prepared to maintain the position with their usual bravery; and it remained to be seen whether the French general possessed any new system of attack, capable of abridging the usual operations of ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... that a lease is only voidable in case of material defect, or nuisance, as of pestilential air, not in a case which, after all, is a mere vice d'esprit. Here Maitre Chopin sits down, with a wink at the court, and Nau pleads for the tenant. First, why abuse the judge at Tours? The lessors argued the case before him, and cannot ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang |
