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More "Cowardly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... country was still worse than its material circumstances. Scarcely had the year opened, when a series of the most atrocious murders that ever disgraced a country were perpetrated. A gentleman, steward to a person of large landed property in the county Tipperary, was shot near his own dwelling by cowardly assassins, who fired upon him from behind a hedge. Two brothers, in the same county, disputed about land; the younger clove the skull of the elder with the spade which he held in working. A poor emaciated man, in the same blood-stained county, while in a state of starvation ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... He must not be killed by us!" His voice and manner produced an effect on the mob. They paused, listened, fell back, and sullenly obeyed him, although there were still some murmurs of disappointed rage. At length one man, probably thinking he spoke for the crowd, cried out: "This is cowardly on your part, Lincoln!" Lincoln only gazed with contempt on the men who would have murdered one unarmed Indian but who quailed before his single hand. "If any man thinks I am a coward," said he, "let him test it." "Lincoln," was the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... association, through which to urge our claims. The column was put into the hands of Mrs. Campbell, the wife of E. L. Campbell, of the law firm of Patterson & Campbell of Denver, for editorship. This lady, from whose editorials quotations will be given, was too timid (she herself begs us to say cowardly) to use her name in print, and so translated it into its German equivalent of Schlachtfeld, thus nullifying whatever of weight her own name would have carried in the way of personal and social endorsement of an unpopular cause. Her sister, Mrs. T. M. Patterson, an early and earnest member ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... show a defenceless woman such an outrage, in your own house? I have seen the time when Bernard Wilkins would have scorned so cowardly an act ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... the arts have all of them lost their former virtues. The neurotic temper of the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize money. Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour brings back a new species of Italianate ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... as we stood there under the star-light drawn up over the whole field, like a spectral host. Was there a rebel ambuscade over yonder in the woods, watching for us to take up our unsuspecting march toward Carlisle in order to swoop down upon us unawares? A cowardly suggestion, but still one which occurred very naturally to raw troops thrust in this way into what, for aught they knew to the contrary, was the very front of danger. This was the first feeling; but soon we grew ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... forces are both useless and perilous, and he who founds the security of his dominion on the former will never be established firmly: seeing that they are disunited, ambitious, and undisciplined, without loyalty, truculent to their friends, cowardly among foes; they have no fear of God, no faith with men; you are only safe with them before they are attacked; in peace they plunder you; in war you are the prey of your enemies. The cause of this is that they have no other love nor other reason to keep the field, beyond ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... now I am so weary of life that the bullet or steel that should rid me of it would be more welcome than any other earthly thing. When it is too late, I have begun to realise the full depth of my villainy, and to see what a contemptibly cowardly creature I have been in permitting myself to seek such an ignoble method of revenge as piracy. But, as I said, it is now too ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... axed wether men shuld forgeue .vij. tymes/ thynkinge [that] .viij. tymes had bene to moch. And at [the] last soper Peter wold have died with christe/ but yet within fewe howres after/ he denied hym/ both cowardly & shamefully. And after [the] same maner/ though he had so longe herd that noman might auenge him selfe/ but rather turne [the] other cheke to/ then to smyte agayne/ yet when Christ was in takinge/ peter axed whether ...
— The prophete Ionas with an introduccion • William Tyndale
... it was, should he not be justified in going to any extremity for revenge? Revenge—yes, that was all he had to live for now; and the very thought seemed to put new vigour into his system, infuse fresh blood in his veins. So is it with all baser spirits; and perhaps in the indulgence of this cowardly craving they obtain a more speedy relief than nobler natures from the first agony of suffering; but their cure is not and never can be permanent; and to them must remain unknown that strange wild strain of some unearthly music which ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... very weak. He had meant to have acted in a high-minded, honest, manly manner; but circumstances had been so untoward with him, that on looking at his own conduct, it seemed to him to have been mean, and almost false and cowardly. As the order for the exclusion of this hated man from his house had been given, he should at any rate have stuck to the order. At the moment of his vacillation he had simply intended to make things easy for his wife; but she had taken advantage of his vacillation, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... well be warm," thought I, "while I prove to my complete satisfaction that it is more cowardly to live than to die. There is no ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... But I will tell you what may seem to you a strange and wonderful thing! There is no mean animal, no loathsome object, no horrible deformity of nature so utterly repulsive to a true man as a faithless wife! The cowardly murderer who lies in wait for his victim behind some dark door, and stabs him in the back as he passes by unarmed—he, I say, is more to be pardoned than the woman who takes a husband's name, honor, position, and reputation ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Mustardseed, I know your patience well: That same cowardly giant-like ox-beef hath devoured many a gentleman of your house: I promise you your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now. I desire you of more acquaintance, good ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... cried the captain. "When I begged you to let me challenge that scoundrel, Carrington, and fight him—in spite of our cowardly modern fashion, which has exploded duelling—you implored me not to hazard my life. I was your only friend, you told me, and if my life were sacrificed you would be helpless and friendless. I gave way in order to satisfy you, though I should have liked to send a ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... assume that inland the river is fed by pure streams, that there are fruits and herbs and game. Shall we lie out here and die of thirst and starvation with a land of plenty possibly only a few hundred yards away? We have the means for navigating a subterranean river. Are we too cowardly to utilize ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... prisoner had set her heart would have turned out more unfortunate for the prisoner than the present proceedings. Counsel had not words strong enough to stigmatise the character of a man who, having induced a girl to imperil her liberty for his own vile ends, was cowardly enough to abandon her in the hour of her deepest distress. Counsel drew attention to the trusting nature of the prisoner, who had not only pledged her employer's plate at his base instigation, but had likewise been foolish enough to confide the pawn-ticket ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... village, greeted us as we passed through the gate with a chorus of barks, sending the word down the line. To his credit be it said, Jack paid little attention to them, tittupping along, head up, tail up, only when they came too close turning on them with a flash of white teeth that sent the cowardly brutes flying and brought cries of delight from the village folk who crowded nearer to inspect the strange dog, so small, ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... A liar! a mean, cowardly schemer, but her husband for all that! She owed him love, honor and obedience; if he commanded, she must obey; if he called she must fain go ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... madmen, whom we threatened with the Emperor's anger; and we succeeded in driving them out of the house, and soon after took our departure, overwhelmed with thanks. In the evening I spoke to the Emperor of what I had done; and he approved highly, saying, "It cannot be helped. There are always some cowardly fellows in the army; and they are the ones who do the mischief. A brave and good soldier would ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... one who calls any State courageous or cowardly, will be thinking of the part which fights and goes out to war on the ...
— The Republic • Plato
... member of the Council of Five Hundred, he headed the Jacobin faction against the moderate party, of which Pichegru was a chief; and he had the cowardly vengeance of base rivalry to pride himself upon having procured the transportation of that patriotic general to Cayenne. In 1799, he again assumed the command of the army of Alsace and of Switzerland; but he crossed ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... damned, crushed, broken and in agonizing pain, and with the aasvogels tearing at my face. Pinned to the earth as by some great weight, my hands were fortunately still free; and my revolver still in its holster; and a few shots sent the lewd, cowardly birds flapping away. The blood was streaming from my face, and again and again I fainted with sheer agony; moreover the fierce midday sun beat down intolerably full in my eyes, for I lay on my back and could move nothing but my arms. But gradually the sun passed, a ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... a poor, cowardly body, but so far as his science went he was NO impostor," said MacAndrew, "and I'm prepared to give that proposition a very practical demonstration, Mr. Wilkinson, so soon as we've got the place a little more to ourselves. For I've no faith in all this publicity ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... power of the terrible goddess Davee, are not afraid to incur her displeasure by informing of their fellows, they reply, that Davee has done her worst in abandoning them. She can inflict no severer punishment, and therefore gives herself no further concern about her degenerate children. This cowardly doctrine is, however, of advantage to the Government that seeks to put an end to the sect, and has thrown a light upon their practices, which could never have been ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... next, or any other tribe; and this often leads to furious battles or cold-blooded murders; for they are by no means particular whether it be man, woman, or child who is the victim; and it is generally the poor women who suffer on these occasions; the men being too cowardly, unless under the influence of very strong passion, to attack those of equal strength with themselves. The women do all the work, such as building huts, carrying water, digging up roots, and procuring ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... The present expedition was during Lent, and as well as I can now remember, in the year 1524, our little army consisting of 27 cavalry, 23 musqueteers, 72 foot soldiers armed with sword and target, and one field-piece under the direction of a cowardly fellow of a gunner, who pretended to have served in Italy. Besides these, we had 50 Mexican warriors, and the cacique of Cachula with some of his principal people, who were all terribly afraid. On approaching Chiapa, an advanced guard of four of our most active ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... cowardly leave The faithful assembly To fight for a grave? Regardless of breathing The patriot's law, His country forsaking And basely withdraw From liberty's quarrel, Forgetting his vow, And tarnish the laurel ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... after the ship was attacked by pirates, and a sea-fight commenced; in the course of which Hamlet, desirous to show his valour, with sword in hand singly boarded the enemy's vessel; while his own ship, in a cowardly manner, bore away, and leaving him to his fate, the two courtiers made the best of their way to England, charged with those letters the sense of which Hamlet had altered to their own ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... freckled jackanapes is Harlequin; not your spangled Harlequin into which modern degeneracy has debased that first-born of Momus, but the genuine original zany of the Commedia, ragged and patched, an impudent, cowardly, blackguardly clown." ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... professor must, if he saw them, have enjoyed mightily the various letters and articles which have endeavored in solemn earnest to show that Milton was not justly entitled to the rank of a scientific expositor, and that it was a cowardly thing in the lecturer to attack Moses over Milton's shoulders. Whenever Professor Huxley enters on the defence of his science, as distinguished from the exposition of it, there are traces in his language ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... was a skilful swordsman. His fingers had a firm grasp of the hilt and could make the whistling blade flash, hover, and descend where he pleased, while his adversary encountered him with a wavering cowardly spit. How had it come about? The seconds will say, and the evening papers repeat, and to-morrow all Paris will take up the cue, that Paul Astier slipped as he made his thrust and ran on his opponent's ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... demon. I was wrong to attempt to deceive you; but I feared a stubbornness that exists in your character. I feared early instilled prejudice: I wanted to have you safe before hazarding confidences. This was cowardly: I should have appealed to your nobleness and magnanimity at first, as I do now—opened to you plainly my life of agony—described to you my hunger and thirst after a higher and worthier existence—shown to you, not my ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... of courage would have fought. His own ship was fairly well manned, and was of a commanding size, quite able to overpower the light vessels of the pirates; and such a crew as there was was eager to fight. But Cleomenes was as cowardly as he was incompetent. He ordered the mast of his ship to be hoisted, the sails to be set, and the cable cut, and made off with all speed. The rest of his fleet could do nothing but follow his example. The pirates gave chase, ...
— Roman life in the days of Cicero • Alfred J[ohn] Church
... is based upon the idea that one becomes like that which he eats. If one eats the heart of a mountain-lion or bear he becomes daring and courageous. But to eat the heart of the timid deer is to make oneself timorous and cowardly. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... dripping off 'em," added Ned, with a twinkle in his eye. "I mean, Mr. Strong, that we're trying to be better men in our rough way and the union is what's making us better and some of us would die for it. But we'd sooner see it die than see it do what's cowardly." ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... resort to the imaginary refuge of suicide, only to find on awakening into astral life that he had changed his condition for the worse instead of for the better, as the suicide always does, since his cowardly action cuts him off from the happiness and peace ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... against the monks' neglect of books. "Now slothful Thersites," he cries, "handles the arms of Achilles and the choice trappings of war-horses are spread upon lazy asses, winking owls lord it in the eagle's nest, and the cowardly kite sits upon the perch ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... so shameful, seen from a distance of sixty leagues, from St. Germain or the Louvre, appeared miraculous, awful, terrifying. The Court admired and trembled. Richelieu to please them did a cowardly thing. He ordered money to be paid to the ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... faithful Martia. Punctually every evening the ever-comforting sense of the north filled him as he jumped into bed; and he whispered his prayers audibly to this helpful spirit, or whatever it might be, that had given him a sign and saved him from a cowardly death, and filled his life and thoughts as even no ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... "Ye poor, miserable, cowardly French,—sinner ye," said the Elder, struggling for an epithet not unbecoming his cloth. "Did you think you was goin' to get me out o' yer way's easy's that, 's I dare say ye have better folks ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... these words, pale with the apprehensions of a cowardly spirit, rose and strode toward the palace, from which, in a few moments, he was seen on his way ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... probable result for himself, told the whole story of the crime, from the time Hopkins had first broached it to him until they were arrested in San Francisco. And during the entire narration of the cold-blooded, brutal, and cowardly deed, old Dan Hopkins sat with his eyes on the witness, as steady and unflinching in color and nerve and muscle as if he had been listening to a lecture or ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... Not by the thief who, encountering you as a man, stakes life against life, but by that most cowardly villain, who, in the moment when reason sleeps, and passion is roused, draws his snares around you, and ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton
... strong degree; and I do not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed everybody in those books even till to-day. His books are full of baffled villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the villains and the cowards are such delightful people that the reader always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and make a last remark; or that the bully ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... but it does not follow that the indulgence increases either his courage or his fierceness. The fact is it ruins his moral nature. He does not get many Englishmen to eat; and it would seem as if the flesh of women and children and poor cowardly natives, he devours, took its revenge upon him by undermining and destroying his natural courage. The fact is, he is well-known for a sneak. I sometimes can't help thinking the ruffian knows he is a rebel against the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... man!" said the people. "If the lady says falsely, can't you face her and tell her so? Never hold it down so cowardly!" ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... a pallid and cowardly countenance that the light revealed, and I was not surprised to recognise the man I had dubbed 'Smug' upon the day of my arrival at the World's Fair. He was ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... over the other Moro chieftains, since their wars are of little importance except when waged by the sea-routes. These Lutaos of the coast hold in a sort of vassalage the Subanos, or river-dwellers, who are slothful, ignorant savages, treacherous and cowardly. Combes next praises "the noble and brave nation of the Dapitans," a small tribe who migrated from Bohol to Mindanao; he relates their history as a people, and why they changed their abode, and how they have always been the loyal friends and followers ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... had reentered mercantile life, from which I make this extract: "As to your account of the flogging scene, I think you have given a fair history of it, and, if anything, been too lenient towards Captain Thompson for his brutal, cowardly treatment of those men. As I was in the hold at the time the affray commenced, I will give you a short history of it as near as I can recollect. We were breaking out goods in the fore hold, and, in order to get at them, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... this to comfort me, and you are thinking differently. What does this mean? What desperate game is this man playing? I swear that if harm has come to that poor boy, though I die for it, I'll shoot this rajah like a dog—like the cowardly ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... Ye dhirty, cowardly bastes!" and he rushed furiously at the Dogs, intent to do them ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... blow a warning. The uniform retreated in cowardly haste, the tasselled hat lowered, ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... so cowardly. In their eyes a lord may dance like a bear—as some lords not very far from me are—if he likes, and they'll take it for grace. And you shall begin with Molly Gibson, your friend the doctor's daughter. She's a good, simple, intelligent little girl, ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... on my hand with a grasp that hurt me. He set his mother right, it is only just to say, without one cowardly moment of hesitation. ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... her now, or after dinner?" I asked, while I drew out my latch-key; and then when she met me at the head of the staircase, with her shining eyes, I grew cowardly again, and said, "Not now—not now. To-night I ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... Manche, "ce qui sera une autre paire de manches." (In case you don't understand this joke, Remenyi must explain it to you.) So be of good courage and among good things! However things may be, never make capitulation with what is idle, cowardly, or false—however high your position may become-and preserve, under ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... is a new religion that is to sweep over the world and regenerate them. And to this end Lyon boldly advocated emancipation for the sake of the white man. If to-day, when patriotism is at a premium, men tremble before the acknowledged necessity of this measure, and are either too cowardly or too indolent to meet the demands of the times, it required no little boldness in 1860 to advance a theory so decided, even in a Kansas newspaper. But Lyon knew the inefficiency of half-way measures, and the moral degradation they inevitably ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... any means advise you to be reckless about getting cut and scratched, yet it is better and safer to run some risk of cuts and scratches in healthy play when young, and learn how to keep them clean, than to grow up pale and flabby-muscled and cowardly. ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... seen that fellow before. That was Pete Deveaux. He used to be an Air Mail pilot on the same run as my brother John, but was discharged for drunkenness. Since that he has blamed John, and has written him several threatening letters, but is too cowardly to ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... not the least important member of the party, but proved a constant source of amusement to all. In the novel domains they now traversed the small dog's excitable nature led him to investigate everything that seemed suspicious, but he was so cowardly, in spite of this, that once when Patsy let him down to chase a gopher or prairie dog—they were not sure which—the animal turned at bay and sent Mumbles retreating with his stubby tail between his legs. His comradeship for ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... his life; and there can be little or no doubt that he owed his success to the care he bestowed on his army. The Great Wall of Tsin Hwangti had been one barrier in the path of these enemies, but, held by a weak and cowardly garrison, it had proved inadequate for its purpose. Taitsong supplied another and a better defense in a consistent and energetic policy, and in the provision of a formidable and ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... constitutes a gentleman, and there are no distinctions in what is gentlemanly, {316} as there are in what is genteel. The characteristics of a gentleman are high feeling—a determination never to take a cowardly advantage of another—a liberal education—absence of narrow views—generosity and courage, propriety of behaviour. Now a person may be genteel according to one or another of the three standards described ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... angels who visited him. They told him that God is ever willing to pardon the sinner who sincerely repents and freely confesses his sin. It is with God always as it is with men at the season of the Gloria. But the wretched Judas could not think of repentance and confession; his cowardly soul was not torn by sorrow for past sin, it was paralysed by fear of future punishment; or we may have been intended to understand that the road to perdition lies through madness. He spoke three sentences, and the last word of each ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... devised or more consistently developed. His serpentine beauty, his winning graciousness, his aesthetic refinement, his masculine energy of intellect, his insinuating affectionateness, with his selfish love of pleasure and his cowardly recoil from pain, his subdulous serenity and treacherous calm, as of a faithless summer sea, make up a being that at once fascinates and repels, that invites love, but turns our love into loathing almost before we have given it." [Footnote: Westminster Review, July, 1881.] ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... perpetually to be an unanimated one; because there is not Fortitude enough to remove those bad Men. I remember the Factions in Carthage which prevented her making herself the Mistress of the World. We may avoid Factions and yet rid our Army of idle cowardly or drunken officers. HOW was Victory snatchd out of our Hands at German Town! Was not this owing to the same Cause? And Why was only one General officer dischargd? Was it because there were just Grounds to suspect only one? Is there not Reason to fear that our Commander ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... he read, "I too will be bold, I will fight for the truth and its glory!" He went to the playground, and soon had told A very cowardly story! ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... accidental abstinence. This meeting took place very soon, and the curious hunchback saw the boatman waiting below the square, at the Canal St. Antoine, for the young priest, who was handsome, blonde, slender, and well-shaped, like the gallant and cowardly hero of love, so celebrated by Monsieur Ariosto. Then the mechanician went to find the old dyer, who always loved his wife and always believed himself the only man who had a ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... recalled my father's stories of the stern passions of anti-slavery days. In this hall Wendell Phillips in the pride and power of his early manhood, had risen to reply to the cowardly apologies of entrenched conservatism, and here now another voice was about to be raised in behalf of those whom the law oppressed. My brother had also read Progress and Poverty and both of us felt that we were taking ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... best of their Weapons. And as they observed no Order, they perplexed the Enemy so sorely, with lashing 'em in the Eyes; and the Women and Children seeing their Husbands so treated, being of fearful and cowardly Dispositions, and hearing the English cry out, Yield and Live! Yield, and be Pardon'd! they all ran in amongst their Husbands and Fathers, and hung about them, crying out, Yield! Yield, and leave Caesar to their Revenge; that by Degrees the Slaves ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... fight without weapons, to the death, the survivor to give the other burial where he fell. Fyles was neither fool nor coward. It would have been foolish to run the risk of leaving Fort and people masterless for an Indian's whim; it would have been cowardly to do nothing. So he whipped out a revolver, and bade his rival march before him to the Fort; which Konto very calmly did, begging the favour of a bit of tobacco ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... brutal inhumanity of these cowardly ruffians," he added, speaking of the guards; "they will not allow me to approach her! I had planned an open attack upon them some leagues from Paris; having secured, as I thought, the aid of four men, who for a considerable sum hired me their services. The traitors, however, left me to execute ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... spoke to Cecil and one or two other commissioners, asking, as a favour, that the King would permit Cobham to die first. Before he was secured by the officers, he had found time for this last protest: 'Cobham is a false and cowardly accuser. He can face neither me nor death without acknowledging his falsehood.' He was then led ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... is exactly the reverse of what it is in the case of those who view the Indian at a distance and with no precise knowledge of any of his characteristics. In the estimation of such persons the Indian's vices greatly outweigh his virtues; his language is a gibberish, his methods of war cowardly, his ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... and the respectable and severe virtues, such as disinterestedness and self-control which subject our movements to the requirements of the dignity of our nature, been better understood or interpreted. Adam Smith is the philosopher of sympathy.(46) His theory triumphs over the cowardly and shameful egotism which concentrates the moral life of the individual in himself, and separates it from the life of the human race of the outre stoicism which refuses the aid of sentiment to reason.(47) According to him, the law of private ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... have on hands, and were willing to be let off. And so the Governor patched up a peace, and sent his militia home again, with their curses diverted from the Lawrence Abolitionists to Gov. Shannon. Cowardly, weak-minded and infirm in purpose as this unhappy man was, he was not wholly a fool; and we may justly believe that he had in his heart a foreboding of that awful day of reckoning that would surely ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... important duty, he continued, of posterity towards itself lies in passing righteous judgement on the forbears who stand up before it. They should be allowed the benefit of a doubt, and peccadilloes should be ignored; but when no doubt exists that a man was engrainedly mean and cowardly, his reputation must remain in the Purgatory of Time for a term varying from, say, a hundred to two thousand years. After a hundred years it may generally come down, though it will still be under a cloud. After two thousand years it may be mentioned in any society without holding up of hands in ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... about a revolver and threatening to fire, I hold it utter idiocy. I have never tried it, however, so I speak from prejudice which arises from the feeling that there is something cowardly in it. Always have your revolver ready loaded in good order, and have your hand on it when things are getting warm, and in addition have an exceedingly good bowie knife, not a hinge knife, because with a hinge knife you have got to get it open—hard work in ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... you can not do it. You are a brave man, Evan; I know, because I have seen you tried. You mustn't turn cowardly now." ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... own: the first are almost always unpunished, while the second are repressed by the courts. An institution which permits evil, creates it in a great measure: in saying that men are things, it necessarily engenders more crimes, more acts of violence, more cowardly deeds, than the imagination of romancers will ever invent. When a class has neither the right to complain, nor to defend itself, nor to testify in law; when it cannot make its voice heard in any manner, we may be excused for not taking in earnest the idyls chanted ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... regulars and provincials, were indignant with our cowardly and incompetent general, Abercrombie, or Mrs. Nabby Crombie, as the soldiers nicknamed him. We knew that the battle had been badly conducted. We wished to have the cannon brought to the front to batter down the breastworks, and were willing and eager to fight again. But Abercrombie began to ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... unusual sort of talk. Jack had never heard Edith break out in this direction before, and he wondered if many women were beginning to think of men in this way, as cowardly about their public duties. Not many in his set, he was sure. If Edith had urged him to go into Neighborhood Guild work, he could have understood that. Women and ethical cranks were interested in that. And women were getting queerer every day, beginning, as Mavick ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 373 et seq. This last opinion by no means stands alone. Thus it is asserted by the Committee of Fourteen in their Report on The Social Evil in New York City (1910, p. xxxiv) that "some laws exist to-day because an unintelligent, cowardly public puts unenforceable statutes on the book, being content with registering ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... is! I didn't think you'd be the one to draw back," said Lindsay reproachfully. "We've both pledged ourselves to do everything in our power to help Monica. It would be mean and cowardly to give in just because we felt afraid. If you don't care to come with me, I shall have to go alone. I'm only waiting for a ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... all damn'd cowardly fear! Now did I think I had drunk Nature up to Resolution: I have heard of those that could have dar'd in their Drink; But I find, drunk or sober, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... behind Lord Ranelagh's cowardly attack on the debutante? There was a simple explanation, and not one that redounded to his credit in any way. It was that, during her "Bohemian" period, he had endeavoured to fill the empty niche left in her affections by the departure of that light-o'-love, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... their children. Some of them were first stirred to action by Wedekind's powerful drama "The Awakening of Spring," which, with Teutonic grimness, thrusts over the footlights the lesson that death and degradation may be the fate of a group of gifted school-children, because of the cowardly reticence of their parents. ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... women is that there is an increasing tendency among them, especially among those who live in cities full of pleasures and excitements, to compromise with evil, to go as near the danger line as possible, so long as they do not cross it. And this cowardly, dallying virtue is almost no virtue at all. There was a time when women prayed sincerely: "Lead us not into temptation"; now it seems as if they pray to be led into temptation, with just this reservation: that they may come ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... was a fantastic, vacillating, abstracted, cowardly tyrant, issuing edicts in regard to the proper tarring of barrels, and rendering absurd decrees; declaring himself to be of the opinion of those who were right; falling asleep on the bench, and on awakening announcing that he gave judgment in favor of ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... not know why you should speak thus, Teule, for surely these white men are not cowardly murderers, still I take your words as an omen, and though the feast must be held, for see already the nobles gather, I will ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... had leisure to prepare themselves, thinking a long time in advance of that supreme moment. But they affronted death, came to it almost negligently, found strength even to say banal or taunting things to those around them. He recalled above all a boy of eighteen years old who had cowardly murdered an old woman and two children in a back-country farm, and had walked to his death without a tremor, talking reassuringly to the priest and the police official, who walked almost sick with horror on either side of ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... from Oddo's declaring that he was sometimes frightened, he was a brave boy. A cowardly boy would not have said it; a cowardly boy would not have offered to go at all; a cowardly boy would, if he had been sent, have wished that the house-door might be left open, that he might see the cheerful yellow light from within; whereas Oddo begged his mistress to shut the door, ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... buggy through your negligence and infernal laziness! The ponies ran away, and were stopped by a stranger who wasn't afraid of risking his bones, while you were limping around somewhere like a slouching, cowardly coyote." ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... certain, there was no safety except in flight, ignominious, cowardly flight... After all, how could Buddy have known? He was a good boy, and he had shown his love, his loyalty, in a thousand ways. Gray hated him at this moment, but, more bitterly even, he hated himself. It was fate.... He fell to cursing aloud, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... hesitated, why his mind had been torn by doubt. At the back of his mind he had always known he was going. Had he not written saying he was going, and wasn't that enough? And he thought for a moment of what her opinion of him would be if he stayed in Garranard. In a cowardly moment he hoped that something would happen to save him from the ultimate decision, and now doubt ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... the hind leg before you could say 'Jack Robinson.' Leaving the dead cat for 'Toby' and 'Nettle' to worry, the whole pack now fiercely attack the luckless Pariah dog. A dozen of his village mates dance madly outside the ring, but are too wise or too cowardly to come to closer quarters. The kangaroo hound has now fairly torn the rope from the keeper's hand, and with one mighty bound is in the middle of the fight, scattering the village dogs right and left. The whole village is now in commotion, the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... coincide with Colonel Newcome in his opinion that you have been guilty of falsehood and treachery, and that the charge of cowardice which you dare to make against a gentleman of his tried honour and courage, is another wilful and cowardly ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Where much is attempted, something is done." Firmness, both in sufferance and exertion, is a character I would wish to be thought to possess: and have always despised the whining yelp of complaint, and the cowardly, feeble resolve. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... but (pointing), you look at it, how gently it lies. Unless you'd like yourself to appear troublesome and cowardly— ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... that can be admitted to sight, the expressions of fear and ferocity are the most foul and detestable, and so there is in them I know not what sympathetic attractiveness for minds cowardly and base, as the vulgar of most nations, and forasmuch as they are easily rendered by men who can render nothing else, they are often trusted in by the herd of painters incapable and profane, as in that monstrous abortion of the first room of the Louvre, called the Deluge, whose ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... alone, they have had enough. 'Tis cowardly to fight a dozen to one. Listen, the row is on in the Quatre Voies again. We shall ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... number of other fights, and that finally a delegation of prominent citizens was obliged to wait upon Cortright and ask him if he wouldn't take that thing away somewhere and bury it. Jim pointed out to them that it was his hat, and that he would regard it as a cowardly concession if he submitted to their dictation in the matter of his headgear. He added that he purposed to continue to wear his top-hat on every occasion when he happened to feel that the wearing of a top-hat was a joy and a solace ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... laying England waste. In the last-mentioned reign, they seized EDMUND, King of East England, and bound him to a tree. Then, they proposed to him that he should change his religion; but he, being a good Christian, steadily refused. Upon that, they beat him, made cowardly jests upon him, all defenceless as he was, shot arrows at him, and, finally, struck off his head. It is impossible to say whose head they might have struck off next, but for the death of KING ETHELRED from a wound he had received in fighting ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... and small, hesitating as she did. Could she walk home? She looked at the black houses, and listened to the terrifying sinister roar that continued faintly to fill the air. Could she go by tram? If she did—whatever she did—the man might wait for her all night, and Keith would know how cowardly she had been. It might even come to the ears of Lord Templecombe, and disgrace Keith before him. To go or to stay was equally to bring acute distress upon herself, the breathless shame of being thought disgraced for ever. Already it seemed to her that the shadows were ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... brain was in a tumult. He tried to think, to find some solution to the problem. Jean was gone! Where had she gone? What had happened to her? His thoughts suddenly darted to Lupin, the cowardly villain. Then he recalled what he had heard a few nights before on the river as that mysterious canoe sped by in the darkness. "Seth's looking after the plans," were the final words which had reached his ears. Had those plans anything ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... the young chief had proved himself to be an excellent warrior, a fearless hunter, and an upright, courageous man among men. His tribe loved him, his enemies respected him, and the base and mean and cowardly feared him. ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... knowledge in his art, armed with courage in the full consciousness of his power, when in the year 1830 the great voice of the people arose in the West. Hundreds of youths had waited for the moment; but Chopin was the first on the summit of the wall, behind which lay a cowardly renaissance, a dwarfish Philistinism, asleep. Blows were dealt right and left, and the Philistines awoke angrily, crying out, 'Look at the impudent one!' while others behind the besieger cried, 'The one ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... was an indignity that demanded atonement—that justified punishment equally severe with that which should have followed a successful prosecution of his purpose. Women are by nature weak. They are not to be tempted. He who, knowing their weakness, attempts their overthrow by that medium, is equally cowardly and criminal. I could not doubt that he had made this attempt; but now it seemed necessary that I should suspend my indignation, in obedience with what appeared to be a paramount duty. A selfish reasoning now ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... "The cowardly cusses!" said Jerry, as we paused to take breath from our labors. "They wanted to smoke us out, did they? Well, I reckon, by the looks round, thet maybe they'll have ter huff it putty lively themselves, ef they git away from it. I've heerd of the biters gittin' ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... says the Pooka, 'will ye get up or will I kick the shtuffin' out av yer cowardly carkidge,' says he, turnin' round an' flourishin' his heels in ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... resigned the French Presidency there were those who regarded the act as weak, cowardly, undutiful and otherwise censurable. It seems to me the act, not of a feeble man, but of a strong one—not that of a coward, but that of a gentleman. Indeed, I hardly know where to look in history for an act more entirely gratifying ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... initials "X.X."; but it had plainly been floated for the first time into the business at a period of great depression some six years ago. The name of a distinguished royal personage had been mentioned by rumor in connection with this sum. "The cowardly desperado"—such, I remember, was the editorial expression—was supposed to have escaped with a large part of this mysterious fund ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... sir, that the federal government should observe, as far as in their power, the public engagements contracted by both nations; and that, by this generous and prudent conduct, they will give at least to the world, the example of a true neutrality, which does not consist in the cowardly abandonment of their friends in the moment when danger menaces them, but in adhering strictly, if they can do no better, to the obligations they have contracted with them. It is by such proceedings that they will render themselves ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... MR. RICHARDS: "Cowardly? You've no idea how much courage it took." Miss Galbraith puts her handkerchief to her face, and sobs. "Oh, don't cry! Bless my heart,—I'm sorry I did it! But you know how dearly I love you, Lucy, though I do think you've been cruelly unjust. I told you I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... healing on their wings, all good and lovely things are beneath me, above me, and everywhere around me, and all from God, while my incapability of enjoying, or, at best, languor in receiving them, is directly or indirectly from myself, from past procrastination, and cowardly impatience of pain." It was always upon some not less solid foundation that Coleridge built ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... sir," she began with dignity but in some confusion, "that I sincerely regret the accident which has confined you here, and that I desire and will pray for your speedy recovery. You cannot suspect the house of Stramen of conniving at such a cowardly assault; they are too powerful in the field to resort to such a pitiful stratagem. Our effort shall now be to secure ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... old gentleman had lived in his memory as objects of the deepest spite, the one for interfering, the other for having been the innocent cause; and he no sooner saw her in the post-office, than he promised himself revenge, such revenge as only the meanest and most cowardly spirit could have taken pleasure in. His best way of distressing Ellen, he found, was through her horse; he had almost satisfied himself; but very naturally his feeling of spite had grown stronger and blunter with indulgence, and he meant to wind up with such a treatment of her pony, ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... passion and our rage, we should have gone forth with our arms, and our horses, and our men, and at once have rescued our General. But we—since we have seen the audacity, the insolence, and the pride of Antony—we have become only more cowardly than before." Then he gives his opinion about the amnesty: "Let any of those who are now with Antony, but shall leave him before the ides of March and pass to the armies of the Consuls, or of Decimus, or of young Caesar, be held to be free from reproach. If one should quit their ranks through ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... ordered. "You're a pair of cowardly brutes. Can't be decent to a couple of helpless women in your power. Can't play fair in a fight with a man half the size of one of you. Get up, I say, and throw a dipperful of water in Trefoyle's face. He's not dead by a long shot, though he ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... vain and boastful; the Poitevins traitors and always adventurers. The Burgundians they considered vulgar and stupid. The Bretons were reputed to be fickle and changeable, and were often reproached for the death of Arthur. The Lombards were called avaricious, vicious and cowardly; the Romans, seditious, turbulent and slanderous; the Sicilians, tyrannical and cruel; the inhabitants of Brabant, men of blood, incendiaries, brigands and ravishers; the Flemish, fickle, prodigal, gluttonous, yielding ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... injustice came from you—no one would have doubted you if you had not first accused yourself! I had my doubts always, but I did not know enough to understand. You told a lie; nothing can palliate or do away with that! No motives can make a lie anything but a lie, and a lie is always a cowardly thing, whether we try to shield ourselves ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... any psychological reality—have been contrived to destroy the causal sense in man, they are an attack on the concepts of cause and effect!—And not an attack with the fists, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! But springing from the most cowardly, most deceitful, and most ignoble instincts! A priest's attack! A parasite's attack! A vampirism of pale, subterranean blood-suckers! When the natural consequences of a deed are no longer "natural," but are supposed to be brought about by the conceptual spectres ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... of land absolutely unexplored, and the numerous tribes of Indians inhabiting certain of the tropical regions are under scarcely more than the semblance of control. Yet it cannot be said that they are ferocious or dangerous. Some of them, indeed, are cowardly, and will not even venture far from their villages for fear of wild beasts, whilst others form the most active and fearless guides, varying characteristics which show the wide range of peoples embodied in the country, as set forth in a previous chapter. Whilst Mexico cannot ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... more cowardly than I am," he said with a half laugh, as he galloped on, with Black Boy going easily, and with a long swinging stride that carried him well over the plain, but whether into safety or danger he ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... bullies he was cowardly, and the unexpected resistance and the pain of the blow quite overcame his fortitude, and he ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... Alexander, declared against a father "who brought servitude to freemen," and retired to the Pskovians. It needed a soul of iron temper to resist the universal disapprobation, and counsel the Novgorodians to the commission of the cowardly though necessary act. Alexander arrested his son, and punished the boyars who had led him into the revolt with death or mutilation. The vetche had decided to refuse the tribute, and send back the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... it to pass, since you were so mighty a number, that you fainted, and durst not fight your foes?' 'Our general,' said they, 'was the first man that did run for it.' 'Pray,' quoth their landlord, 'who was that, your cowardly general?' 'He was once the Lord Mayor of Mansoul,' said they: 'but pray call him not a cowardly general; for whether any from the east to the west has done more service for our prince Diabolus, than has my Lord Incredulity, ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... soul of the man whose conscience troubles him with an instinctive apprehension. There is then no safety, his nerves tell him, except in bringing the affair, whatever it is, to an early issue—in having it out with her. Colville subdued the cowardly impulse of his own heart, which would have deceived him with the suggestion that Mrs. Bowen might be occupied with Effie, and it would be better to ask for Miss Graham. He asked for Mrs. Bowen, and she ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... accustomed us to; a man who by bribery or intrigue induces his fellow-professionals to support him. He was one of those who rule by personal dominance. His courage has already been remarked; and he knew how much fearlessness can achieve in a profession where most men are peculiarly cowardly. It was he who forced the issue between the President and Congress and obtained at a stroke a sort of captaincy in the struggle by moving in the House of Representatives that the consideration of Reconstruction ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... Gringo!" he cried. "He insults my courage! This from one who is a mere Gringo—the most cowardly race of people on the earth. Oh, I shall exact revenge for this insolence. And you, Nicolas, had the impudence to come here with ...
— The Young Engineers in Mexico • H. Irving Hancock
... suspiciously. The fugitive had discovered that the couple in the back of the car were not Mexicans, and Hotchkiss was suspicious of all Americans. Indeed, he was living a very uneasy existence. Being naturally of a cowardly nature, even the distance he had put between himself and Polktown did not seem to his mind great enough to insure safety. The fact that, although they had been four hours on the road from La Guarda to San Cristoval, they were ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... the Persians were now about to invade Greece, the Athenians deliberated as to who should be their leader. It is said that most men refused the post of General through fear, but that Epikydes, the son of Euphemides, a clever mob-orator, but cowardly and accessible to bribes, desired to be appointed, and seemed very likely to be elected. Themistokles, fearing that the state would be utterly ruined if its affairs fell into such hands, bribed him into forgetting his ambitious ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... round with his hoe uplifted, threatening to cut down any one who again attempted to strike him. Huckstep cursed my awkwardness, and told Harry to put down his hoe and came to him. He refused to do so and swore he would kill the first man who tried to lay hands on him. The cowardly tyrant shrank away from his enraged bondman, and for two weeks Harry was ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... of his daily life by the side of his unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chapter, we have a picture of the best man who could then be conceived; not a hard ascetic, living in haughty or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room might be left for any possible Calvinistic falsehood, God Himself bears the emphatic testimony, that 'there was none like him upon the earth, a perfect and upright man, who feared ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... erroneously. Travelers crossing the plains were always on the defensive, and ever ready to commence war on any Indian who came within the radius of their firearms. When I was a boy I read in my reader: "Lo, the cowardly Indian." The picture above this sentence was that of an Indian in war paint, holding his bow and arrow, ready to shoot a white man in ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... of her," said the Doctor, "in the open air, and among the throng of people; not for fright, like yon cowardly dog Anster, but because I would give no occasion for a fray, having no leisure to look to stabs, slashes, and broken bones. Men call the old hag a prophetess—I do scarce believe she could foretell when a brood of chickens will chip the shell—Men ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... no more oranges on these terms, was tempted to return, without accomplishing the other adventure; but Price having represented to her the disgrace of such cowardly behaviour, more particularly after having before manifested so much resolution, she consented to go and pay the astrologer a short visit, so as they might be enabled to regain the palace before ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... time, the Border Slave States, and especially Virginia, were playing a part at once cowardly and selfish. They assumed the right to stand neutral between the government and rebellion, to contract a kind of morganatic marriage with Treason, by which they could enjoy the pleasant sin without the ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... by the Hungarians to negotiate peace with the court, but it failed, Windischgraetz being so elated with his success that nothing short of unconditional submission on the part of the country would satisfy him. To accept such terms would have been both cowardly and suicidal, and the nation, therefore, driven to the sad alternative of war, determined rather to perish gloriously than pusillanimously to submit to be enslaved by the court. They followed the lead of Kossuth, who was now at the head of the Government, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... be made a victim; a victim must be had, and I am the victim. I studied to make Brigham Young's will my pleasure for thirty years. See now what I have come to this day! I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner. I cannot help it; it is my last word; it is so. I do not fear death; I shall never go to a worse place than I am now in. I ask the Lord my God, if my labours are done, to receive ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... Say" is a cowardly liar! He couldn't look an honest man straight in the eye, any more than he could face a cannon ball. He would turn as pale as a snow-wreath, and melt into nothing just about ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... dry season, well fenced in with walls built of loose stones. But no one would make a bid for it, for there were few English about, and most of the farmers were trekking, so at last he parted with it to a cowardly fellow, a Boer by birth, but, as I believe, a spy of the British Government, who gave him fifty pounds and an old waggon in exchange for the place and everything upon it except the stock which we took ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... heard—what have I endured? Listen to me, you cowardly libeller. It is true that I was at Dollington, and at Charteris, on the night you name. Also true that I went to London. Your hideous slander is garnished with two or three bits of truth, but only the more villainous for that. All that you have ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... to be fair. Tell me, is that your attitude? It is un-English, and it is cowardly. ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... of himself, Nellie?" her father said. "Do you suppose that a man on deck would be any the safer were he to stoop down with his head below the rail, or to screw himself up on the leeward side of a mast? No, no, lass; each man has to take his share of danger, and the most cowardly runs just as great a risk as the ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... striking a soldier near Khan Yunas. When identified by witnesses merely uttering two or three words, they were removed, cruelly pushed about in their chains and beaten on the head by the soldiers, who enjoyed the cowardly fun which they would not dare to perpetrate had the fine tall fellows had ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... accomplishment of it. Quite correct. Isn't it 'A life for a life'? It is written so in the Bible. Just that, no more. They must take mine. But—they must do it unexpectedly, suddenly. Just as I meant to do to him. Otherwise it won't be fair. Tell me, holy Father, is it cowardly to be so terrified? I am so terrified—of what is before me. There's nothing about this terror of death in the Scriptures. Those who settled my fate to-day looked like men. Then they ought to know that they are executing me a thousand times, not once. ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... mechanical man,—the ordinary animal. Such a creature has cunning, and is either cowardly or ferocious; seldom in these qualities he preserves a medium. He is not by any means easy to dupe. Nature defends her mental brutes by the thickness of their hide. Win his mistress if possible; she is the best person to manage ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... staying; but there was Berea! To go meant a violent end of their pleasant romance. To think of flight saddened him, and yet his better judgment was clearly on the side of going. "Much as I like her, much as I admire her, I cannot marry her. The simplest way is to frankly tell her so and go. It seems cowardly, but in the end she ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... of him I spoke," replied Francesco, "but of my cousin, that cowardly tyrant, Gian Maria Sforza. Tell me, Messer Valdicampo—what has become ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... dangerous thing. I believe that, in the case of the higher animals at least, the differences in individual temperament are quite likely to be more numerous than the specific likenesses. Just as individual men are bright or dull, nervous or phlegmatic, cowardly or brave, so individual animals vary in like respect. Our own hunters will recall from their personal experiences how the big bear may have sat down and bawled harmlessly for mercy, while the little unconsidered fellow did his best until finished off: how one buck dropped instantly to a wound ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... now at my end Lament nor sorrow at: but please your thoughts In feeding them with those my former fortunes Wherein I liv'd, the greatest prince o' the world, The noblest; and do now not basely die, Not cowardly put off my helmet to My countryman, a Roman by a Roman Valiantly vanquish'd. Now my spirit is ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... then I knew that they were carrying her out, out of the house where she had lived, out of the house wherein she had died, carrying her forth for burial,—forth to the grave her only son had made for her; and I, little, shivering, cowardly soul, hid my face in my hands, and let my tears fall,—not because I knew this proud lady dead,—not because a fibre from my warm heart was being drawn out to be knitted into that fathom-deep grave, for it never would be one of my graves,—but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Instances were given in which these freebooters had killed every chicken upon a farm. As they hunt only at night, they are hard to capture. Their notes and natures are said to be in keeping with their deeds of darkness; for their cry is wild, harsh, and unearthly, while in temper they are cowardly, savage, and untamable, showing no affection even for each other. A female has been known to kill ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... of activitie whatsoeuer, and if he and thou proue me not a man, send mee away comfortlesse: if thou refuse this, as a niggard of thy cates, I will haue amongst you with my sword, for rather wil I die valiantly, then perish with so cowardly an extreame (Collier's Poetical Decameron, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... he should have actually met the girl whose picture she had been cowardly enough to send in place of her own, but what followed literally chilled the blood in her veins. He was coming! Coming to Stillton! Coming to find her! Was actually on the way at that moment to claim her acquaintance,—perhaps ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... morning? What did it matter, a few years sooner or later? He must lay down the burden at last. Why not then? A pang of self-reproach followed the thought. Could he so lightly throw aside the love that had bent over his cradle. The sacred name of mother rose involuntarily to his lips. Was it not cowardly to yield up without a struggle the life which he should guard for her sake? Was it not his duty to the living and the dead to face the difficulties of his position, and overcome them if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... like spaniels, to lick the hand that beats us; but children's children at the farthest, will have outgrown such pitiful meanness, and will dare to do all that others have dared and done for the sake of freedom and independence. Then all this cowardly cant about the unhealthy climate, the voracious beasts, and venomous reptiles of Africa, will be at a discount, instead of passing current as now for ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... for a dangerous surprise, but not for this horror; and the life left her on the spot, for the poor weed was as soft and cowardly as any other product of the swamp. He rang for restoratives and sent for her maid. In ten minutes, somewhat restored, she faced the ordeal, if only to learn what ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... indeed, made his a Trojan, but it was to derive the Romans and his own Augustus from him; but all the three poets are manifestly partial to their heroes in favour of their country. For Dares Phrygius reports of Hector that he was slain cowardly; AEneas, according to the best account, slew not Mezentius, but was slain by him; and the chronicles of Italy tell us little of that Rinaldo d'Este who conquers Jerusalem in Tasso. He might be a champion of the Church, but we know not that he was so much as present at ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... received two Double-headed-Shot in the Bread-room, which were soon plugg'd up, and one Shot under the Larboard Chesstree, but so low in the Water, that could not get at it, and the Ship prov'd leaky. I had a Pack of sad cowardly, ignorant Dogs as ever came into a Ship. As to my common Sailors, who were not above Twelve Seamen, with the Officers, they stood by me. It was all owing to my Misfortune on the Mouse, that I was so poorly Mann'd. ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... not whether we should gain much by that, unless we could manage to surprise an Indian village, and capture some of their chief men to hold as hostages till they agreed to give up their captives. These Indians are very different to the cowardly tribes we have been wont to meet with on the Spanish Main, as experience should already have taught you," observed the captain: "still, with discipline and determination we shall be able, I doubt not, to tackle them. I like your proposal, however, and as soon as we can get a crew together, ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... of renewed hope. A little later the young secretary came up again to see me. To supplement my messages through Mr. Drake, I requested this young man to tell the General that I could see they were taking a cowardly advantage of me because I was a woman, and that they would never have detained a man under similar circumstances. In fact, I was on every occasion so importunate that I am quite sure the General's Staff only prayed for the moment that I should depart. That ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... paid to anonymous letters. The writers of such stamp themselves as cowardly, and cowards do not hesitate to say or write what is not true when it suits their purpose. All statements made in such letters should be regarded as false, and the writers as actuated by some bad ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... definite enemies. He had punched the heads of those in Pennsylvania, and would not object to shooting them here; but this impersonal, surrounding hostility of the unknown was new and bitter: the cruel, assassinating, cowardly Southwest, where prospered those jail-birds whom the vigilantes had driven from California. He thought of the nameless human carcass that lay near, buried that day, and of the jokes about its mutilations. Cumnor was not an innocent boy, either in principles or in practice, but this laughter ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... singularly involving a young girl, was indeed an adventure to provoke thought. It provoked more, for Dale grew conscious of an unfamiliar smoldering heat along his veins. He who had little to do with the strife of men, and nothing to do with anger, felt his blood grow hot at the cowardly trap laid for an ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... that country, glorify the deeds and character of all who took a part in the Revolutionary war, on the Republican side; but the Loyalists who could not feel justified in fighting against their Sovereign and country, are uniformly painted in the blackest colours, as if they were cowardly and base wretches who had no redeeming qualities. All that is hateful and mean is suggested by the word 'Tory' or 'Royalist' in the annals of the United States. They have never had fair play; because they were ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... than wicked, worse than absurd, it is cowardly, but what do you expect, doesn't everybody ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... transparent honesty that won me. You were all I'd dreamed of in a woman—all that I hadn't found in that other woman. But I was afraid. So I left Montricheux—went away at once. I didn't want to care for you. I'd been too badly hit before. Cowardly, you'll say, perhaps—you were never a coward, were you, Ann? Well, it may have been. Anyhow, I did go away and I tried to forget all about you. It wasn't easy, God knows, and then, by a trick of fate, I found you again, at my cottage—living there, sister of the man with whom I'd just made ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... swaggering, roysters,[29] that are ignorant of the nature of the fear of God, count it a poor, sneaking, pitiful, cowardly spirit in men to fear and tremble before the Lord; but whoso looks back to jails and gibbets, to the sword and burning stake, shall see, that there, in them, has been the most mighty and invincible spirit that has ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Pietro d'Oviedo brought, Don Diego replied that as he knew his lord and master was a prisoner, it would be disgraceful in him to obey an order that had probably been wrested from him by violence, and that the bearer deserved to die for undertaking such a cowardly office. He therefore bade his soldiers seize d'Oviedo and fling him down from the top of the walls: this sentence was ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... forgiven the scorn with which Ravenswood had torn the mask of courage and honesty from his countenance; and to exasperate Bucklaw's resentment against him was the safest mode of revenge which occurred to his cowardly, yet cunning ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... something or other and crying, Hold! I did wake of a sudden and not knowing who he was, nor thinking of the coachman between sleeping and waking I did take up the heart to take him by the shoulder, thinking verily he had been a thief. But when I waked I found my cowardly heart to discover a fear within me and that I should never have done it if ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Living rage no doubt supported him; no doubt also, the sense of the last cast, of the ships burned, of all doors closed but one, which is so strong a tonic to the merely weak, and so deadly a depressant to the merely cowardly. ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... rumpus, came running up to see the fun, and they laughed and danced over poor Little Moccasin's distress. Often afterward they called him "coffee-cooler"; which meant that he was cowardly and faint-hearted, and that he preferred staying in camp around the fire, drinking coffee, to taking part in the manly sports of hunting and ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... head, with its scanty, carefully brushed hair, back against the support of the worn armchair, and shut his eyes to keep them back. He would try not to be cowardly. Then, with the closing of the soul-windows, mental and physical fatigue brought their own gentle healing, and in the cold, little study, bare, even, of many books, with the fire smoldering cheerlessly ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... make a remark on the personal bearing of these Arabs. Whether they be Arabs or Turks, or Copts, it is always the same. They are a mean, false, cowardly race, I believe. They will bear blows, and respect the man who gives them. Fear goes further with them than love, and between man and man they understand nothing of forbearance. He who does not exact from them all that he can exact is simply a fool in their ...
— George Walker At Suez • Anthony Trollope
... to indignation at last, "it is cruel of you to treat me so, simply because I wouldn't commit murder. Yes—murder. I say it would have been murder! I'm no coward; and it is cowardly to shoot down a man ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... what I feel. It is a selfish pleasure, but it is one of the last I shall have." And she paused, with her great misty eyes fixed upon him. "I know how I have deceived and injured you; I know how cruel and cowardly I have been. I see it as vividly as you do—I feel it to the ends of my fingers." And she unclasped her hands, which were locked together in her lap, lifted them, and dropped them at her side. "Anything that you may have said of me in your ...
— The American • Henry James
... were on other things,—on the rescuing yawl speeding toward the spar buoy, on the stout hands and knowing ones who were pulling for all they were worth to that anchor of safety;—on two of his own men who, seeing Baxter's cowardly desertion, had sprung like cats at the bowsprit of the sloop in one of her dives, and were then on the stern ready to pay out a line to the yawl when she reached the goal. No,—he'd hold on "till ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to keep him well and strong, they gave him food and water, both of which he at first thought of refusing, and thus bringing his sufferings to an end as quickly as possible. On second thought, however, he decided that this course would be cowardly, and unworthy of his white blood. So he ate heartily all that was offered to him, determined to keep up his strength, and to make a desperate effort to escape should the slightest ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... a beast about three feet long, with a short stubbed tail, and might easily be mistaken for a large wild-cat. Its fur, which is short and very thick, and of a beautiful silver gray, is much used for muffs, tippets, and fur trimming. The lynx is a cowardly beast, and seldom attacks anything larger than hares, squirrels, and birds. It will sometimes rob a sheep-fold, as the gentle and pretty lambs have no means of defense against ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... his lord, grieving sorely at his death, the other ten thanes who had shown themselves to be faithless and cowardly approached with shame to his side. Then Wiglaf turned to them, ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... him. His soldiers spying his undaunted spirit A Talbot! a Talbot! cried out amain, And rush'd into the bowels of the battle. Here had the conquest fully been seal'd up, If Sir John Fastolfe had not play'd the coward. He, being in the vaward, plac'd behind With purpose to relieve and follow them, Cowardly fled, not having struck one stroke. Hence grew the general wreck and massacre; Enclosed were they with their enemies: A base Walloon, to win the Dauphin's grace, Thrust Talbot with a spear into the back; Whom all France with their chief assembled strength Durst not presume ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... command of Sir John Malcolm. No alternative was left him but to die or give up. The terms offered by Malcolm were so liberal as to excite astonishment in Europe. While the great Napoleon was condemned to spend his remaining days on a mere pittance at St. Helena, this most cowardly of Indian princes was allowed to live in luxury near Cawnpore, on a yearly grant of L80,000. His friend Trimbukji Dainglia, however, when captured, was condemned to close confinement in the fortress ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... latest news! What I specially come to tell you was, that if you ever lay hands on that child agin, I'll shoot you deader 'n any door-mat you ever wiped your great cowardly ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... he set this trap almost daily, and daily took a great number of birds whose necks he wrung and had them cooked for him with rice by his silly mother; that it was a sin in any case to take little birds by such cowardly means, but that since amongst these birds there were larks and thrushes and plump blackbirds and other sweet musicians of the air, whose innocent lives were spent in singing the praises of God, his sin became a ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... was almost more than I could bear; I turned away, waiting for the tremendous concussion; I heard awful curses from the men, the cowardly shouting of "Roaring John," the blasphemies of "Dick the Ranter." I knew that Black alone was calm; and at the last I fixed my eyes upon him when the head of the torpedo's foam was not thirty yards away from us. In that supreme moment the power of the man rose to a great height. He ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... almost garrulous in telling over the old story of that never-to-be-forgotten day, when he and Joshua stood alone and tried to put some heart into the cowardly mob before them. There is no mock modesty about the man. He says that, amidst many temptations to be untrue, he gave his report with sincerity and veracity, 'speaking as it was in mine heart,' and then he quotes twice, with a permissible satisfaction, the eulogium that had come upon ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... or you have wondered, why no letter has come from me. What you wrote at your return, had in it such a strain of cowardly caution as gave me no pleasure. I could not well do what you wished; I had no need to vex you with a refusal. I have seen Mr. ——[596], and as to him have set all right, without any inconvenience, so far ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... order that they may afterwards boast of the same, and for the accomplishment of which they are obliged to abuse and look ferocious at the blacks, cock their pistols, and flourish their whips, in a manner which is only worthy of being styled contemptible and cowardly. We need not say that our friends Harold and Disco had no such propensities. They had kindly consideration for the feelings of their "niggers," coupled with great firmness; became very sociable with them, and thus got hearty, willing work out ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... disturbance of his ordinary suave and well-bred equanimity that the Italian received the information that he need apprehend no obstacle to his suit from the insular prejudices or the worldly views of the lady's family. Not that he was mean and cowardly enough to recoil from the near and unclouded prospect of that felicity which he had left off his glasses to behold with unblinking, naked eyes,—no, there his mind was made up; but he had met in life with much that inclines a man towards ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... get your money, perhaps some grudge against your father, which he was afraid to show while your father was free, for your father was always his master. But Old Jimmie has brought you up exactly contrary to the orders he received. If revenge was Old Jimmie's motive, his cunning, cowardly brain could not have conceived a more diabolical revenge, one that would hurt your father more. Till a few years ago, when word was sent to your father that Old Jimmie was dead, Jimmie regularly wrote your father about the success of his ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... his brain like intoxication, and communicated itself to the poor girl who believed in him as if he were the living faith; and, in the madness of his passion, Michel, without being a coward, committed a cowardly action. ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... him!" interrupted her son in a low tense voice. "He's a white-livered, cowardly hypocrite, that's my name for ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... subsequent firing on Fort Sumter, yet no public notice was taken thereof; and when, months afterward, I came North, I found not one single sign of preparation. It was for this reason, somewhat, that the people of the South became convinced that those of the North were pusillanimous and cowardly, and the Southern leaders were thereby enabled to commit their people to the war, nominally in defense of their slave property. Up to the hour of the firing on Fort Sumter, in April, 1861, it does seem to me that our ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... knows it better than he himself. The idea of his coming here over that young lady's head was from the first abhorrent to me. When I saw him, and heard him, and found out what he was,—such a poor, cringing, cowardly wretch,—my feeling was of course exacerbated. It was terrible to me that the old squire, whom I had always respected, should have brought such a man among us. But that was the old squire's doing. He certainly did bring him, and as certainly intended to make him his heir. ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... to do no such thing. She will be sure to be finical, cowardly, or disagreeable in some way. And then such a host of all sorts of creatures as would reply to your advertisement. We shall do very well without ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... discarded girl, and, in his extremity, called upon him for advice and help. He could afford him none; and the seducer found himself in the world without an hour's happiness or quiet. What quails so readily as the heartiest soul of the sensualist? Who so cowardly as the man only courageous in his oppression of the weak? The spirit of Temple was laid prostrate. He walked, and eat, and slept, in base and dastard fear. Locks and bolts could not secure him from dismal apprehensions. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... would hear you. Who says anything of murdher? No, but just give him a bating that would go nigh taching him the taste of being murdhered,—and the same for Master Ussher; for I tell ye—may the tongue of the cowardly ruffian be blisthered for putting the name he did on your sisther!—but he was only repating what Ussher has said hisself, and that more nor ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... both found in work resource from despair, and both made the world richer not only by the fruits of self-conquest, but by the contagious power of heroic example. Such careers put to shame the self-centred, egotistic, morbid pessimism which has found so many voices in recent years that its cowardly outcries have almost drowned the great, sane, authoritative voices of ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the worst thing he could have said. He realized it the moment he had spoken. This forced, cowardly surrender was worse than brazen defiance, and he saw her lip curl. An idler is apt to be like a sullen child, except that in a grown man the child's sulky spite becomes a dark malice, all-embracing. For the very reason that Vance knew he was receiving what he deserved, and that this was the ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... cigar-box. He picked it up; two uncut diamonds were on the floor beneath it. The rough, inert pebbles silently attested the obvious manner of death which simultaneously forced itself upon the three men—the cowardly blow of an assassin, a dying struggle, perhaps, for the contents of the ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... Carry on! Things never were looming so black. But show that you haven't a cowardly streak, And though you're unlucky you never are weak. Carry on! Carry on! Brace up for another attack. It's looking like hell, but—you never can tell: Carry on, old ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... with the other mysteries of those distant times, that the mode of controlling the temper is now as undiscoverable as the manner of preparing the Tyrian dye and other forgotten arts? It is surely a disgrace to those cowardly Christians who, having in addition to all the natural powers of the heathen moralist the freely-offered grace of God to work with them and in them, should still walk so unworthy of the high vocation wherewith they are called, as ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... while the boy was wearing out his life in debauchery in the palace. Seneca dared say more to Nero, to venture more with him, than did any other man. For the young tiger was afraid of his old master long after he had tasted blood. Yet Seneca's system was a cowardly system. It was the best of Roman morality and Greek philosophy, and still it was mean. His daring was the bravest of the men of the old civilization. He is the type of their excellences, as is Nero the model of their power ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... on the way to Maluco. He was treacherously killed while sleeping one night, without apprehension or precaution, as one who did not dream of having enemies or traitors with him. The traitors were the Sangleys, whom he took with him to work his galley. Like the ineffably low, vile, and cowardly people that they are, they killed my father because he trusted them and set them loose for their own comfort. The news of this event reached me far from the place of its occurrence, while I was awaiting ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume IX, 1593-1597 • E. H. Blair
... conscious desire to preserve one's self-respect and the respect of one's fellow men; and therefore, the best way in which to train a man to be brave is to cultivate his self-respect and a desire to have the respect of his fellow men; and to foster the idea that he will lose both if he acts in a cowardly way. ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... enough people to create a disturbance, the meetings passed off quietly, but they were mobbed and broken up in every city from Buffalo to Albany. Democratic officials encouraged the mob spirit and where Republicans might have wished to oppose it, they were too cowardly to do so. The meetings were advertised for three days in Rochester, beginning January 12, and, as the newspapers occupied many columns with a discussion as to whether they would be broken up here as elsewhere, the opposition was thoroughly aroused ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... judgment for a man who expected to go on living to start out after one of the Tatums without he kept on till he had cleaned up the both of them, and maybe some of their cousins as well. I will not admit that I acted cowardly, but I will state that I used my ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... whether I had been in the pantry. That, if Joe knew it, and at any subsequent period of our joint domestic life remarked that his beer was flat or thick, the conviction that he suspected Tar in it, would bring a rush of blood to my face. In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... ill will for what you said then in my hearing. It is what you have done in so cowardly a manner since I last saw you, and at a time when I was not present to ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... is a point of honour amongst all schoolboys never to 'split' on mates. The boy who tells is everywhere regarded as a sneak—at Waddy he speedily became a pariah—and Dick was a stickler for points of honour. To be caned was bad, but nothing to the gnawing shame of long weeks following upon a cowardly breach of faith. To all the questions Cann or Peterson could put with the object of eliciting the names of the participators in the big raid, Dick returned only a distressing ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... looking at the dead bird with a heavy frown on his dark face. He must have heard Beth's altercation with Murphy, but he made no remark until Mrs. Caldwell came out, when he said something in Italian, to which she responded, "The cowardly brute!" ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... us call it, I was a little ashamed or abashed at the remembrance of my wild flights, and had a laugh at the thought of myself floundering around in the marshes and fields a mile from home, when Harriet, no doubt, had breakfast waiting for me! What absurd, contradictory, inconsistent, cowardly creatures we ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... objects of contempt, preserve an exquisite and absolute harmony. In almost every particular sort of wickedness he has had rivals. His sensuality was immoderate; but this was a failing common to him with many great and amiable men. There have been many men as cowardly as he, some as cruel, a few as mean, a few as impudent. There may also have been as great liars, though we never met with them or read of them. But when we put everything together, sensuality, poltroonery, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the deadly hail of battle, which defies the tyranny of custom and the hatred of the world. One may have compassion for age, which is naturally timid and sees fears in the way, but youth which is cowardly is contemptible. ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... unworthy. SEM. O fearful heart! why comparest thou with Nimrod Or Alexander? of this world not lords only, But worthy to subdue heaven, as saying go'th; And thou reputest thyself more high Than them both, and despairest so cowardly To win a woman, of whom hath been so many Gotten and ungotten, never heard of any? It is recited in the Feast of Saint John: This is the woman of ancient malice; Of whom but of a woman was it sung on, That ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... I haven't helped a great deal, but I've shown I was willing to give my life, and perhaps I've got to; but I don't blame anybody, and if it was to do over again, I'd do it. I'm a little sorry I wasn't wounded in front; it looks cowardly to be hit in the back, but I obeyed orders, and it doesn't matter in ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... matter for that. I know you well enough. Would you read about gnomes and then be so cowardly that you would fear to associate ...
— The Magic Soap Bubble • David Cory
... choose a place of retreat for himself; or remain a prisoner to France and the allies."—"This is all I know."—"I perceive, that the allies want Napoleon to be delivered up to them bound hand and foot: never will the French be guilty of such a cowardly act. Since our interview, the public opinion in his favour has been expressed with fresh strength; and I protest to you, that he never possessed the love of the French to so high a degree. The electors convoked for the Champ de Mai, and the new representatives of France[3], are arriving ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... said Jack firmly, "I can't agree to that. Both of you came into this thing to oblige and to help me, and it would be a cowardly trick on my part to put the risky work on ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... vendetta. In the one, the appeal to arms has always been tempered by a punctilious chivalry, which recoiled from the slightest unfairness in the attendant circumstances; in the other, the enemy is, if possible, taken unawares, shot down by a cowardly miscreant lurking behind a tree or a rock, or suddenly stabbed without an opportunity of putting himself on his defence. The practice of ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... mince matters in saying what he thought of the Lundy instructions, which he again declared angrily he intended to disobey. When he had finished his narrative and his protestations against what he considered a cowardly policy—a policy that would deprive Ulster of succour as sorely needed as Derry needed the Mountjoy to break the boom—Carson put a few questions to him in regard to the feasibility of his plans. Crawford explained the advantage it would ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... raised from a seedlin', I vow. So says I, 'Mr. Bradley, I guess you had better let me be; you know I can't fight no more than a cow; I never was brought up to wranglin', and I don't like it.' 'Haul off the cowardly rascal,' they all bawled out, 'haul him off, and lay it into him!' So he lays right hold of me by the collar, and gives me a pull, and I lets on as if I'd lost my balance and falls right down. Then I jumps up on eend, and says I 'Go ahead Clay,' and the old horse he ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the fierce, questioning face, and in those anxious moments I could not help feeling the danger of my position; but I had to speak. To refuse, now that he was driven to bay, might mean an order for immediate execution, and, cowardly or no, I could not speak. I suppose that I ought to have been brave, and exclaimed boldly, "Kill me, if you like; I will not fight against my countrymen." But I was very young; I had been badly wounded, and was just recovering and beginning to feel how ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... laid down as an unfailing and universal axiom, that "all pride is abject and mean." It is always an ignorant, lazy, or cowardly acquiescence in a false appearance of excellence, and proceeds not from consciousness of our attainments, but ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... hour afterward, and because she had been disabled by the shot of the American fleet. The gallies were largely manned by Canadians, and James, anxious to put the blame on these rather than the British, says that they acted in the most cowardly way, whereas in reality they caused the Americans more trouble than Downie's smaller sailing vessels did. His account of the armament of these vessels differs widely from the official reports. He gives the Linnet ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... to her feet, and quivering with scorn and indignation, cried: "Ah! then the deed is even more infamous—even more cowardly!" But alarmed by the threatening gleam in M. de Coralth's eyes, she went ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... then again to golf, and see at once that, with the miserable and cowardly exception of laying the stymie, there is no stroke in this game that fulfils the proper conditions which should govern athletic contests involving the use of spherical objects with or without instruments ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... flourishing about a revolver and threatening to fire, I hold it utter idiocy. I have never tried it, however, so I speak from prejudice which arises from the feeling that there is something cowardly in it. Always have your revolver ready loaded in good order, and have your hand on it when things are getting warm, and in addition have an exceedingly good bowie knife, not a hinge knife, because with a hinge knife you have got to get it open—hard work in a country where all things go ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and cowardly and imbecile brutality of those bundles of iron, launched in full flight against the lace-work, so delicate, that had risen confidently in the air for centuries, and which so many battles, invasions, scourges have never dared ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... poltroons?" said the philosopher; "what—to show which of you looks palest when a rat squeaks?—but take a candlestick and begone, you cowardly villains! the devils you are so much afraid of must be but paltry kites, if they hawk at such bats as ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... forms of expression in those days, which argued cowardly feelings. One would like to see a searching investigation into the state of society in Anne's days—its extreme artificiality, its sheepish reserve upon all the impassioned grandeurs, its shameless outrages upon all the decencies ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... their Natures, Tempers, Qualities, Actions, and way of Living, was made up of innumerable Contradictions: That they were the Wisest Fools, and the Foolishest Wise Men in the World; the Weakest Strongest, Richest Poorest, most Generous Covetous, Bold Cowardly, False Faithful, Sober Dissolute, Surly Civil, Slothful Diligent, Peaceable Quarrelling, Loyal Seditious ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... paling with mingled anguish and rapture in the arms of him whom she adored, "what you are doing is cowardly and base!" ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... remarked with emphasis of gesture as well as of speech—the inclined head and body, the right hand lightly placed upon the listener's knee, the abrupt change in the inflection of the voice, all so characteristic of him—-"this idle and often cowardly as well as ignorant harping! Why should we not change like everything else? In fiction, in poetry, in so much of both, French as well as English, and, I am told, in American art and literature, the shadow of death—call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference—is ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... eye and an earnestness in his voice, which awed the cowardly overseer; but at the same time they increased his hatred. He resolved to be revenged, and reported to Hull that the slave was rebellious. Hull permitted George Waters to be tied to a tree by four stout negroes, whose barbarous natures delighted in such work, and the overseer laid a whip a dozen ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... August, presently. "I'm responsible for this cowardly attack on you. I brought you out here. This is the second one. Beware of the third! I see—but tell me, do you remember that I said you must meet Snap as ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... what he said. Too cowardly to meet Pawnee Brown face to face, he wanted to make sure that the great scout should ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... out in a voice that rang through the room and fastened every eye upon him—"what his cowardly weakness will bring him? The misery it will entail; the sleepless nights, the fear, the remorse that will follow? The outrage on Bowdoin's home, on his children? Has he thought of the humiliation of the man ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the coachmen. The elderly individual looked for a moment at these last, and then said: 'To such fellows as you I have nothing to say;' then turning to the coachmen, 'and as for you,' he said, 'ye cowardly bullies, I have but one word, which is, that your reign upon the roads is nearly over, and that a time is coming when ye will be no longer wanted or employed in your present capacity, when ye will either have to drive dung-carts, assist as ostlers at village ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... heard it, or at least took any notice against us. I can give you no idea of the terror which the lady manifested when the boat stood out to sea, at the slightest squall of wind, or the least agitation of the waves; for besides being naturally cowardly, as all or most women are for the first time at sea, here was a poor soul who had been watching, and may be fasting, and worn out mind and body with the terror of perfecting her escape from the convent, where she had been immured all her life, and as helpless ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... Day, you schemed for the Day; Watch how the Day will go. Slayer of age and youth and prime (Defenseless slain for never a crime) Thou art steeped in blood as a hog in slime, False friend and cowardly foe. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... tree, defending himself as he best might, from a half dozen men in armor, each with his visor down. Ranier had no sword, for, not being a knight, it was forbidden him to bear such a weapon; but he bethought him of his ax, and hoped it might serve the men as it had the trees. So he wished these cowardly assailants killed, and when he uttered the prescribed words, the ax fell upon the villains, and so hacked and hewed them that they were at once destroyed. But it seemed to the knight thus rescued that it was ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... and Amelot, feeling all his efforts baffled, threw his sword from him, and weeping in pride and indignation, hastened back to tell the Lady Eveline of his bad success. "All," he said, "is lost—the cowardly villains have mutinied, and will not move; and the blame of their sloth and faintheartedness will be ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... immediately, as I have secured you a first lieutenant's commission in a cavalry company, which is to be mustered into my regiment. Your brothers have already accepted theirs, and are drilling their companies twice every week. Of course, we do not expect a war, for we have kept the cowardly Yankees under our thumbs so long that they will not dare to oppose us. However, we consider it best to ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... me his right eye, dear old father, which is the only one he has now; the other he lost from a cutlass wound in a boarding-party. There it hangs, and those are his epaulettes in the tin case. They used to lie under my pillow before I had a room of my own, and many a cowardly down-hearted fit have they helped me to pull through, Brown; and many a mean act have they helped to keep me from doing. There they are always; and the sight of them brings home the dear old man to me as nothing else does, hardly even his letters. I must be a great ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... him. The man's defense must be so abjectly hopeless, such a cowardly weak string of lies, that out of pity, as he might have ceased to beat a hound, Crane continued, speaking rapidly, holding the guilty man tight in the ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... fears lest she will not accept his love, whereas she, too, would have spoken out had she not feared to be rejected. In spite of this, the eyes of each reveal the hidden thought, if only they had heeded this evidence. They converse by glance of eye, but their tongues are so cowardly that they dare not speak in any wise of the love which possesses them. No wonder if she hesitates to begin, for a maid must be a simple and shrinking thing; but he—why does he wait and hold back who was ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... shop there was a little dark room for the shop-boy. There sat Petter Nord of to-day and came to an understanding with Petter Nord of yesterday. How pale and cowardly the churl looked. Now he heard what he really was. A thief and a miser. Did he know the seventh commandment? By rights he ought to have forty stripes. That was what ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... state. But the accounts of both, though they are very different writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. They were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded; and they dared to aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule; but when they might, they were afraid. The commons were on their side, the moderate men, the party of law, the lovers of republican government, and for the most part the magistrates; but they shrank ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the Irish, sailed to North Wales, and beat Rolf, the Norman Earl, at Hereford. Oh, yes, I heard that, and," added the Kent man, laughing, "I was not sorry to hear that my old Earl Algar, since he is a good and true Saxon, beat the cowardly Norman,—more shame to the King for giving a Norman the ward of ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... should not. To kill a man of twenty-five years of age is a much greater crime than to steal jewellery even by force, and a society which bands together in order to wield the sword of Justice is much more cowardly when it kills than the man who robs and kills quite alone, at his own risk and peril. Oh, what tears I wept for that man, whom I did not know at all—who was a rascal or perhaps a hero! He was perhaps a man of weak intellect who had turned thief, but he was only twenty-five years of age, and ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... terror!—his doom for life, without the means of death, would be solitary confinement. "Stay! with this knife in my hand—means of death—yes, it shall be so." And he hurriedly drew the knife across his throat; no use, nothing done; his cowardly skin shrank away from cutting—he dared not cut again; a little bloody ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... up to the hovering great ships. The blueskins, said the reports were spiritless and cowardly. They permitted themselves to be robbed. They kept out of the way. It had been observed that the population was streaming out of the city, fleeing because they feared the ships' landing-parties. The blueskins had abjectly produced all they'd promised of precious metals, ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... cannot but make a remark on the personal bearing of these Arabs. Whether they be Arabs or Turks, or Copts, it is always the same. They are a mean, false, cowardly race, I believe. They will bear blows, and respect the man who gives them. Fear goes further with them than love, and between man and man they understand nothing of forbearance. He who does not exact from them all that he can exact is simply a fool in their estimation, to the ...
— George Walker At Suez • Anthony Trollope
... your own impulses. They come from within you, they are a part of your nature—your self—and that is where your true duty lies. It is better that you should be true to yourself, even at the expense of others, than that you should be afraid and cowardly. ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... arrest is made, no jury is found that will convict. The result is that outlaws have everything their own way, while the peaceable people have no assurance that at any moment they will not be murdered by cowardly assassins."[20] ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love
... a weak, pusillanimous wretch you must be, having known me so long, and tried my temper so well, to hope to find me such a fool, after all,—that kind of fool, I mean! My deepest shame, in this unutterably shameful hour, is that I chose such a cowardly ass to besot myself with.—There, the subject sickens me, and I am going. Dare to follow me, and the geese of Hendrik shall have you. I go scot-free, fearing nothing, having nothing to lose; but I hold you, my ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted practice, they think they are to be ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The cowardly assault aroused the indignation of Merritt, who was a manly boy at all times. He remonstrated with the assailants, and when they continued to pelt the old man, he proceeded to attack them. Whether he could have won out alone and unaided will always ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... very soon after my adventure with Miss Crutty, and that cowardly ruffian, Captain Waters (he sailed the day after his insult to me, or I should most certainly have blown his brains out; NOW he is living in England, and is my relation; but, of course, I cut the fellow)—very soon after these painful events another happened, ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Osborne's lawyer so beheld her. She rose up trembling and flushing very much after reading the letter, and she tore the paper into a hundred fragments, which she trod on. "I take money to part from my child! Who dares insult me proposing such a thing? Tell Mr. Osborne it is a cowardly letter, sir—a cowardly letter—I will not answer it! I wish you good-morning," and she bowed the lawyer out of the room like ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... never experienced when prisoners of the Indians? No—the savages never starve their prisoners, nor deprive them the use of water. Dispirited, and every way disheartened, our poor fellows had, generally speaking, the aspect of a cowardly, low spirited race of men, and much inferior to the British. We here saw how wretched circumstances, in a short time, debases a brave and high spirited man. When people from the shore visited our ship, and saw our miserable soldiers, we do not wonder that they despised them. We sometimes ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... attributed to them, and more in accordance with His character. By placing in the mouth of the dying martyr these words: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? they have done him an injustice, presenting him in his last moments despairing and cowardly, traits so foreign to his life, to his teachings, to the resignation shown by him during his trial, and to the fortitude displayed by him in his last journey to Calvary; more than all, so unbecoming, not to say absurd, being in glaring contradiction ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... Doctor, "William has been told what is right and wrong; he has read the Scriptures. He has infringed one of the chief commandments in a most cruel and cowardly manner. I must not be indulgent towards a crime which, if his victim dies, the legal authority of his country will pronounce to be manslaughter. I will endeavour, however, first to ascertain how far he is sensible of his fault by showing ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... the road, the old man came into view. The two friends arose and advanced to meet him. On he came still singing. No doubt he mistook them for some of his own people. When he was very close to them they each stepped to either side of him and before he could make an outcry they pierced his cowardly old heart with two arrows. He had hardly touched the ground when they both struck him with their bows, winning first and second honors by striking an enemy after he has fallen. Chaske having won first honors, asked his friend to perform the scalping deed, which he did. ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin
... with its details as long as I could, and left the charge of that part of my inheritance to Westlock. As this was cowardly, I found an excuse for it in the quantity of work the money-matters of the deceased afforded me. At last there was no help for it; I had to undertake the responsibility. And if before I had had a pretty good guess at the elasticity of whatever it was that served my uncle instead of a conscience, ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... and promising salvation. Charles the Fat, the Lord's anointed, now appears with a multitude of a hundred tongues and encamps on Montmartre, but while the Parisians are preparing to second him in crushing their foes, they learn that the cowardly emperor has bought them off with a bribe and permission to winter in Burgundy. The Parisians, however, refused to give them passage and by an unparalleled feat of engineering they transported their ships overland for two miles and set sail again above the city. Next year, as Gozlin's ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... time we sat in silence, watching the succession of blue waves through which the Island Princess cut her swift and almost silent passage. A man must have been a cowardly bully to annoy harmless old Bill. Yet even then, young though I was, I realized that sometimes there is no more dangerous man than a coward and a bully, "He's great friends with the second mate," Bill remarked at last. "And the second mate has got no use at all for Mr. Thomas ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... the thought of facing him across a table during an interminable dinner and sitting with him alone for the long hours of a summer evening drove her to a state bordering on panic. She pushed the thick hair off her forhead with a little gasp. It was cowardly—but she could not, would not. Despising herself she crossed the ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... I therefore decided that it would be better to keep out of Mrs. Carmichael Smith's way, and learned afterwards that she had a reputation for asserting the faith that was in her, and for expressing her disapproval of everybody who believed less. For my part, I confess to a cowardly dread of elderly religious Englishwomen. They have examined me many a time, and I have never come out of the ordeal with satisfaction, either ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Nothing could be more cowardly than the effort to compel the observance of the Sabbath by law. We of America have outgrown the childishness of the last century; we laugh at the superstitions of our fathers. We have made up our minds to be as happy as we can be, knowing that the way to be happy is to make others ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... is need for careful distinction. There is a great difference between the impractical man who has energy, courage, and persistence, and the impractical man who is lazy and cowardly. No matter what a man's natural talent may be, it takes hard work to be successful in such callings as art, music, the pulpit, the stage, the platform, and the pen. Inspiration may seem to have a great deal to do with success. But even in the writing of a poem ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... divest themselves of this votive badge, the promise of valor, till they have slain an enemy. Over blood and spoils they unveil the countenance, and proclaim that they have at length paid the debt of existence, and have proved themselves worthy of their country and parents. The cowardly and effeminate continue in their squalid disguise. The bravest among them wear also an iron ring [171] (a mark of ignominy in that nation) as a kind of chain, till they have released themselves by the slaughter of a foe. Many of the ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... outlive any one contemporary, but unnatural to survive them as a mass,—a sort of risky thing, fraught with the various vague embarrassments and undefined perils threatening one who is out of his proper place. And yet one does n't want to die, though convinced he ought to, and that's the cowardly misery of it." ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... convinced, had left my system in a very shattered state. Often since did I torture myself for hours by mounting up on a table before the glass, and with a string tied around a loosened tooth, give it a little cowardly pull at intervals—lacking sufficient courage to rid myself of my trouble at once. I have sometimes sat in this interesting position for a whole morning; and should probably have continued it through the afternoon had not Fred, or Henry, perceiving my employment, ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... other than what they were; they did their devilish work openly, with the strong hand. Wall Street is a den of banditti who rob, not by open force, but by secret fraud. The tool of the seventeenth century freebooter was the flashing sword; that of his nineteenth century successor the cowardly and sneaking lie. The first pillaged a few ships, towns and castles; the latter plunders hundreds of thousands every year of the world, and then has the sublime audacity to come into court and plead that his business is both legitimate and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the fearless head of the hunchback, while the frail, cowardly body shivered and trembled inch by inch ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... water hole, and before he could stop the cowardly guide found himself over the brink and struggling in the muddy water. His cries for help were piercing, but as Mr. Bell and the boys were busy, and as they knew that the Mexican was in no actual peril, they left him there ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... emphasis into his words when he dared Helms to make a hostile motion. He was a true Alabamian and could be neither scared nor driven. He soon sold out, however, and went to a more congenial camp for he said these people were cowardly enough to waylay and kill ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... find this to be necessary Leviatt must do the murder. But I think it would be better to have him employ some other person to do it for him; that would give him just the character that would fit him best. I want to make him seem too cowardly—no, not cowardly, because I don't think he is a coward: but too cunning—to take chances ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Major Browne remarked as the door closed behind him. "I don't quite know what to make of him, but I don't think he could have committed that murder. It was a cowardly business, and although I believe he might have a hand in any desperate affair, as indeed this story he has just told us shows, I would lay my life he would not do ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... increasing virulence of the long controversy over slavery was brought home to the people by a cowardly assault committed by one Albert Rust upon Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York "Tribune," and one of the leaders of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... ruler, but received his kingdom from his parents, the earth and sky, and he prophesies that progress will continue in the overthrow of Jove by a yet brighter and better order. Enceladus is, however, furious at what he considers a cowardly acceptance of their fate, and urges ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... go with you directly, if it were right," said she, at last. "But would it be? I think it would be rather cowardly. I feel what you say; but don't you think it would be braver to stay, and endure much depression and anxiety of mind, for the sake of the good those always can do who see evils clearly. I am speaking all this time as if neither you ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... that made at Camp Moultrie. Replying to Charley Amathla's assertion that the last treaty had been forced upon them, he said: "You say that the white people forced you into the treaty of Payne's Landing. If you were so cowardly as to be forced by anybody to do what you ought not to do, you are unfit to be chiefs, and your people ought to hurl you from your stations." He explained to them the white people's Government; that the Indians living among white people might be charged with all kinds of offenses under the law, ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... I am something of a nurse. This is simply a bad contusion—no worse, I believe. He was struck down from behind, a cowardly blow in the dark, as he started to go up on deck. I had been waiting for him. When he didn't come I suspected something was wrong. I came down, found him lying there, ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... crossing it like a saddle, is the great enemy of the eider, pillaging its nest and devouring its young at every opportunity, and had probably driven the ducks from this place. It is a pirate of pirates, a Semmes in the air, cowardly toward equals, relentless toward the weak and unweaponed; and the chief care of the mother duck is to protect her little brood from these greedy confederates. One of the coolest, yet wariest rascals in the world, it can scarcely be surprised, but lingers about, just beyond gun-shot range, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... reathon to thuthpect that we know the cowardly thkunk who committed thith act of vandalithm, and if he ith ever theen prowling about thith ethtablithment again, by day or by night, nothing will give uth more thatithfaction than to thoot hith hide full ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... of Courage should never put any thing to the Risk but his Life. These are the Tools of a Man of Honour. Cards and Dice are only fit for cowardly Cheats, ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... woman has married with far less excuse that Christian did— married for money or position, or in a cowardly yielding to family persuasion, some one who she knew did not love her, or whom she did not love, with the only sort of love which makes marriage sacred. What agonies such women must have endured, if they had any spark of feminine feeling left alive, they themselves ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... dooming her to such a fate dissolved all engagements, as death itself would have done." Phineus made no reply, but hurled his javelin at Perseus, but it missed its mark and fell harmless. Perseus would have thrown his in turn, but the cowardly assailant ran and took shelter behind the altar. But his act was a signal for an onset by his band upon the guests of Cepheus. They defended themselves and a general conflict ensued, the old king retreating ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... them, Their grim power growing, until the greatest part Of the cowardly band they conquered in battle 295 On the field of victory. Vanquished and sword-hewn, They lay at the will of the wolves, for the watchful and greedy Fowls to feed upon. Then fled the survivors From the shields of their foemen. Sharp ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... can't discuss such questions with you, Mrs. Alving; you are by no means in the right frame of mind for that. But for you to dare to say that it is cowardly of you—! ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... "Dod rot your cowardly hide of you!" said Sneak, staring at him contemptuously; "now don't you know he knowed it ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... nun is she; One weak chirp is her only note. Braggart and prince of braggarts is he, Pouring boasts from his little throat: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink; Never was I afraid of man; Catch me, cowardly knaves, if you ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... more of curiosity than alarm. Unless brought to bay, or hungry, or wantonly irritated, these great cats were cowardly enough. It would hardly attack the two of us. Nearer and nearer it came, showing no signs of anger and none of fear, and paying no attention to the withered branch with which Diccon tried to scare it off. When it was ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... same way," agreed Walter, "but it would be cowardly to go now and leave the Seminoles to ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... it. You may argue that for seven years I've been doing a big work and there's no reason, in spite of what's happened, that I should now abandon it all. But there is. And in your strong old heart you'll know the thing I say is true—if cowardly. During seven years, or part of them, I've known a happiness that's compensated for every terror I've endured. Nancy's been my guardian angel, and the boy, that was to be born, was the beacon light of my life. My ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... as the reply was given, that 'Massa wouldn't return till the night of the ensuing day.' Here was an admission! I alone in this wild, outlandish place, attended only by my maid, a semi-German, semi-Irish girl, exceedingly timid, and a couple of negro servants, if possible more cowardly: I felt my heart sink, as after uttering some half-intelligible words, the sable visitor departed. While drinking tea in solitude, musing on the old familiar faces of my former home, never was the croaking of the frog so loud, the curlo's note so shrill, the evening air so gentle. I heard the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... the senses, or literary form and finish, or argumentative ingenuity, in comparison with "the best and master thing" for us, as he called it, the concern, how to live. Some people were afraid of them, he said, or they disliked and undervalued them. Such people were wrong; they were unthankful or cowardly. But the things might also be over-prized, and treated as final when they are not. They bear to life the relation which inns bear to home. "As if a man, journeying home, and finding a nice inn on the road, and ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... cozy chat when every one had gone to bed; but, to my confusion, he merely looked at me and turned on his heel. Allan never wasted words on these occasions; if people would not do their duty he washed his hands of them. I could not bear him to be disappointed in me, or think me cowardly and selfish, so I went sorrowfully up to Miss Ruth's room, and found Uncle Geoffrey coming in ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... deed are capable of doing any low, sneaking, cowardly villainy that could be invented in perdition. They are the very bastards of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... for the present, aunt?" interrupted Bertha, retreating toward the door in a rather cowardly fashion. "I leave M. de Bois to—M. de Bois ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... "Base, odious, cowardly, and so contrary to the generous spirit of the nation," replied Corentin, "that it will ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... no mistaking the cowardly insinuation, but Berrington said nothing. Richford could not possibly have seen the signal, and yet he implied an assignation if his words meant anything at all. It was a cruel disappointment, but the girl's face said nothing of her emotions. She passed quietly along till she came to the little ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... rage for his words were true about his aim, though I did not feel cowardly, for I was working hard to do my duty and keep ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... night, murky and heavy with dense rain-laden clouds, and so black as to render it impossible to see one's hand before one. Search after a while is found to be impossible and the cowardly would-be assassin so far is safe from arrest. Dispirited and indignant, they return to the room they left, to ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... a cowardly brute, fat, wheezy, out of training, sheltering behind this dear one branch ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... just as Dr Leichhardt was about to start on a reconnoissance, the Blackfellows came down to where the horses were grazing, and speared one of them in the shoulder. This was the first act of hostility. The Australian aborigines are very cowardly, and the aggressors hastily retreated into the bush on the appearance of two or three white men. After this, in February, some friendly and respectable barbarians were met with, and there was an interchange of courtesy and presents. Generally the natives were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... inspection. Alexius, in order to escape such an ordeal, resorted to the abject expedient of disabling his right hand by a pistol-shot. In no other way could the tsarevich have offended his father so deeply. He had behaved like a cowardly recruit who mutilates himself to escape military service. After this, Peter seemed for a time to take no further interest in Alexius. He left him entirely to himself. He employed him no more. He no longer pressed him ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... fevered imagination into the likeness of wilful crime. But against such doubts arrayed itself the ineffaceable memory of that wild joy which had filled his soul, when he had felt his enemy in his power! Had the man survived, Balder might still have doubted; being dead, doubts were but cowardly sophistry. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... capacity never reaching higher than to draw or carry burdens. Yet I am of opinion, this defect arises chiefly from a perverse, restive disposition; for they are cunning, malicious, treacherous, and revengeful. They are strong and hardy, but of a cowardly spirit, and, by consequence, insolent, abject, and cruel. It is observed, that the red haired of both sexes are more libidinous and mischievous than the rest, whom yet they much exceed in ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... exclaimed; "God has pointed out to me the means, and if I fail to do my duty, their blood will be upon my head. My self-respect and peace of mind will be forever lost, and I shall consider myself the most cowardly of wretches." It took me some time, however, to summon up resolution enough. Then I went downstairs ...
— The Dean's Watch - 1897 • Erckmann-Chatrian
... kindred and relation that then was between them and him (Neh 6:17-19). And as it was then, so we do expect it will be now; some will be even at the beginning of this work, in Babylon, at that time also some will be cowardly and fearful, yea, and even men hired to hinder the work (Neh 6:10-12). Wherefore I say, those of the church that at that day builded the city, they were men of a particular and peculiar spirit, which also ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... given his Master pain and trouble through his impulsive ways. But the culmination of it all came on the night of the betrayal, when, in the hall of the high priest's palace, Peter denied being a disciple of Jesus, denied even knowing him. While for the third time the base and cowardly words were on his lips, Jesus turned and looked upon his faithless disciple with a look of grieved love, and then Peter remembered the forewarning the Master had given him. His heart was broken with penitence, ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... Fitzner, and you, you stout Boekel, that the giving away our guns would be a mere trifle to any of us; the only thing is, that any one of you to whom this vile thought could occur would be a low, mean, cowardly scoundrel, who would make me sick whenever I saw him." To which proposition Fitzner and Boekel eagerly acceded, and Boekel declared that, for his part, he could stand such a fellow just as little as the forester himself; so that danger was averted. But the unemployed ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... anticipated a storm so terrible as that, but had intended to swamp his boat in the breakers and swim ashore, leaving Mellen, who could not swim, as he supposed, to his fate. But now everything else was forgotten in a cowardly thirst for life. No man could exist for a moment in that awful riot of waters. He watched Mellen as he kept the boat steadily in the current, with the keen anxiety of a man to whom death is the ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... jealousy of freedom had, even from the earliest ages of Rome, given way to the hopes of conquest, and a just sense of military discipline. The dictator, or consul, had a right to command the service of the Roman youth; and to punish an obstinate or cowardly disobedience by the most severe and ignominious penalties, by striking the offender out of the list of citizens, by confiscating his property, and by selling his person into slavery. [7] The most sacred rights of freedom, confirmed by ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... op. cit., pp. 373 et seq. This last opinion by no means stands alone. Thus it is asserted by the Committee of Fourteen in their Report on The Social Evil in New York City (1910, p. xxxiv) that "some laws exist to-day because an unintelligent, cowardly public puts unenforceable statutes on the book, being content ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... there were plenty of antelopes to be found, if one went to look for them, and the cowardly slinking coyote was often to be seen as one rode across the prairie; and often in walking I found tortoises with bright red eyes. These were small, about six inches long. In the creeks were plenty of mud turtles, which are fond of scrambling ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... prepared to start us again towards the Lumpiya. Then we three semi-corpses collected what little strength remained in us, and suddenly made an attack on them with stones; whereupon, incredible as it may seem, our cowardly guard turned tail and bolted! We went on in the direction of Taklakot, followed at a distance by these ruffians, who were entreating us to make no further resistance and to go with them where they wanted us to go. If we did not, ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... [Then Folly titter'd.] Mankind, who are accustomed to have their attention awaken'd to acts of daring Vice, or pre-eminent Virtue, may think the mean, base, cowardly, hypocritical Character not sufficiently interesting to claim their particular notice;—and that the exposing to the general knowledge of the World, those miserable, sneaking qualities which have not courage ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... the same sort of a Quaker as General Green," said Morton. "They were peaceable men, as long as peace and quiet were not inconsistent with self-defence. To be peaceable when a foe is wasting your fields and slaughtering your brethren, is cowardly and against nature." ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... not for a moment maintain that he enjoyed everybody in his daily life. But he enjoyed everybody in his books: and everybody has enjoyed everybody in those books even till to-day. His books are full of baffled villains stalking out or cowardly bullies kicked downstairs. But the villains and the cowards are such delightful people that the reader always hopes the villain will put his head through a side window and make a last remark; or that the bully will ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... government of the United States has, through a mistaken policy been constantly engaged in sending to the western borders all the eastern Indian tribes that were disposed to sell their land, and also the various tribes who, having rebelled against their cowardly despotism, had been overpowered and conquered during the struggle. This gross want of ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... should lay down his arms, his determination is weakened. It is therefore a vital necessity, quite apart from the humanitarian aspect, that the wounds of the civilians of belligerent countries should be cared for. If the civilians are allowed to become disheartened and cowardly, the heroic ideal of their fighting-men is jeopardised. This fact has been recognised by the Red Cross Societies of all countries in the present war; a large part of their energies has been devoted to social and relief work of a civil nature. Even in their ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
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