|
|
|
More "Invective" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with clever arguments and inflaming literature, he sought recruits. With stinging sarcasm and withering scorn he taunted the laboring people—told them they were fools and cowards to submit to the degrading slavery of their capitalist owners. With biting invective and blistering epithet he pictured their employer enemies as the brutal and ruthless destroyers of their homes. With thrilling eloquence he fanned the flames of class hatred, inspired the loyalty of his followers to himself and held out to them golden ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... informal conference debating the same argument as has recently occupied the dignitaries at The Hague. It inspired some of the most earnest pages of D'Alembert and of the Encyclopedie. It drew from Voltaire some happy invective, affording the opportunity of airing once more his well-loved but worthless paradox on the trivial causes from which the great actions of history arise. Saint-Pierre's ideal informs the early chapters of Gibbon's History, but its influence disappears ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... repeated before every paragraph of invective, like a prelude and refrain. "You, you, you!" and she fairly hurled the words at Carroll—"you, you, you! gettin' my man"—with a fierce backward lunge of her bare right elbow towards her husband, who shrank away, and a fierce backward roll of a blue ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... self-assertion of this and other letters about this time was really self-defence, the invective against him, and the calumnies, being such as can hardly be credited by those not familiar with the publications ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... this instance it is rather to the woman and the wife that I address myself than to the Queen. As a woman, the bitterness and invective of this missive," and he laid his spread hand emphatically upon the paper, "would suffice to cover you with blame and to deprive you of sympathy, while as a mother it would authorize your separation from ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... doctrines of Locke and Sidney, held that a people who spoke the Celtic tongue and heard mass could have no concern in those doctrines. Molyneux questioned the supremacy of the English legislature. Swift assailed, with the keenest ridicule and invective, every part of the system of government. Lucas disquieted the administration of Lord Harrington. Boyle overthrew the administration of the Duke of Dorset. But neither Molyneux nor Swift, neither Lucas nor Boyle, ever thought of appealing to the native ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... persecution from the bantering humour of Dr. KING. One of the most amusing declaimers against what he calls les Sciences des faux Scavans is Father MALEBRANCHE; he is far more severe than Cornelius Agrippa, and he long preceded ROUSSEAU, so famous for his invective against the sciences. The seventh chapter of his fourth book is an inimitable satire. "The principal excuse," says he, "which engages men in false studies, is, that they have attached the idea of learned where they should ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... had been bullied into a frenzy over the demands of those desiring the extension of slavery. The anti-slavery members of Congress met this in many instances by sober, candid discussion, but in others by sharp invective, dealt out by superior learning and consummate skill in the use ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... distinctness the colossal proportions of his argument. Of humor he had none; but his wit and sarcasm at times would glitter like the brandished cimeter of Saladin, and, descending, would cut as keenly. The pathetic he never attempted; but when angered by a malicious assault his invective was consuming, and his epithets would wound like pellets of lead. Although gallant to the graces of expression, he always compelled his rhetoric to act as handmaid ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... frivolity of mind and mistaken in all their calculations, set fire last July to the whole of Europe and even to their own hearths and homes, have now noticed their fresh colossal mistake, and in the Parliaments of Budapest and Berlin have poured forth brutal invective of Italy and her Government with the obvious design of securing the forgiveness of their fellow-citizens and intoxicating them with cruel visions of hatred and blood. ["Bravo!"] The German Chancellor said ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... submit to its exercise. Their pride and self-conceit, swelled to an inordinate height by their successful struggle, would defy the power of England as they had already successfully defied that of their Northern countrymen. After our people by their cold disapprobation, and our press by its invective, had combined with their own difficulties to damp the spirit of the Free States, and drive them to submit and make peace, we should have to fight the Slave States ourselves at far greater disadvantages, when we should no longer have the wearied and exhausted North for an ally. ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill
... that up to this period the Earl of Mar was acting without a commission from the Chevalier. The disposition which is too predominant in society, and which leads men always to add the bitterness of invective to the mortification of failure, has attributed to the Earl of Mar, relatively to this commission, a line of conduct from which it is agreeable to be able to clear his memory. It was not very long after the meeting in ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... dared to dispute the sanctity of the martyr, calling him a wicked traitor who had met with his deserts. In vain did Abbot Joffrid, himself a Norman from St. Evroult, expostulate with the inconvenient blasphemer. He launched out into invective beyond measure; till on the spot, in presence of the said father, he was seized with such a stomach-ache, that he went home to St. Alban's, and died in a few days; after which all went well with Crowland, and the Norman monks who worked ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... whatever it may be, which they assume in this poem, it is scarcely necessary for me to protest against the system of inculcating the truth of Christianity or the excellence of Monarchy, however true or however excellent they may be, by such equivocal arguments as confiscation and imprisonment, and invective and slander, and the insolent violation of the most sacred ties ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... his employers were awaiting his services was received by the chauffeur with a volley of invective, which dealt more particularly with Mrs. Slumper's pedigree, but touched lightly upon a whole variety of subjects, including the ultimate destination of all composers and ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... good deal more in the original, totally uninteresting to the reader, in the same querulous strain of invective against Oviedo, but which is here abridged as ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... has added to the picturesqueness of political invective by describing Mr. Wilson's last Presidential message as "worthy of a Byzantine logothete." It is not often that one finds a rough-rider and ex-cowboy who is able to tackle a don in his own lingo. But Tommy at the front manages to converse ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... Elizabeth. Gardiner's discourse was an enthusiastic eulogium of the deceased queen, and he set forth, as her special merit, that she hated the heretics so ardently and had so many of them executed. He closed with an invective against the Protestants, in which he so little spared the young queen, and spoke of her in such injurious terms, that he was that very day committed to prison.—Leti. vol. I, p. 314.] A short time after this eventful walk in the garden of Whitehall, ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... of an ambitious leader in a farce; he held his hearers with his eloquence, as much as he had done with the song of his grotesque and desecrating love. He vaunted his sagacity and his valour, and overwhelmed with invective all sorts of names—my own and Castro's among them. He revealed the unholy ideals of all that band of scoundrels—ideals that he said should find fruition under his captaincy. He boasted of secret conferences with O'Brien. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... forth a far-sounding crash of music, the giver of the feast steps forward and pronounces a florid eulogium on the deceased, a warm panegyric on the guests who have honoured him by their presence, and a fluent invective against his absent foes. Nor does he forget to throw in some delicate allusions to his own noble generosity in providing the assembled visitors with this magnificent entertainment. For this great effort of eloquence the orator has been primed in the morning by the sorcerer. The process ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... If this vehement invective against majorities meant no more than that, in the construction of government, it is wise to provide checks and balances, so that there should be various limitations on the power of the mere majority, it would only mean what the ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Philip's own signature, is a tissue of invective and virulence. The illustrious object of its abuse is accused of having engaged the heretics to profane the churches and break the images; of having persecuted and massacred the Catholic priests; of hypocrisy, tyranny, and ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... wheeled about with an expression of lively interest, as his reiterated "Mr. President, Mr. President," secured him the floor. They were not disappointed, nor was Betty. In a few moments he was roaring like a mad bull and hurling invective upon the entire Republican Party, which "would deprive the South of legitimate representation if it could." He was witty and scored many points, provoking more than one laugh from both sides of the Chamber; and when he finished ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... sentiments, and the dialogue concluded with a general and bitter invective against beauty, and with many compassionate considerations for all honest plain girls who are deluded by the wicked arts of ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... respectably ridiculous a conclave as the House of Commons. It was little for one honourable gentleman to give another honourable gentleman the lie direct before the eyes of the country. The honourable gentlemen descended—or, as they thought, ascended—to the most vehement invective, and such was at times the torrent of personal abuse which parties heaped on one another, while good-natured John Bull looked on and smiled at his rulers, that, as in the United States of to-day, a debate was often the prelude ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... serious of speech, That though he'd long foreseen the worst He'd been against it from the first. By various means they vainly tried The testament to set aside, Each ready with his empty purse To take upon himself the curse; For they had powers of invective Enough to make it ineffective. The ingrates mustered, every man, And marched in force to Ispahan (Which had not quite accommodation) And ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... woman had not made away with them at once was a mystery. Perhaps they were being reserved for an even more terrible fate than that of the hunchback. They were being carried along a dim-lit passage now, and Tom was cursing his captors in a never-ending stream of invective. ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... concerned with the delinquencies of the Comte de Buttafuoco, the deputy for the twelve nobles of the island to the National Assembly of France. In a letter written on January 23rd, 1791, Buonaparte overwhelms this man with a torrent of invective.—He it was who had betrayed his country to France in 1768. Self-interest and that alone prompted his action then, and always. French rule was a cloak for his design of subjecting Corsica to "the absurd feudal regime" of the barons. In his selfish royalism he had protested ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... With a silent invective upon negroes in general, and this one in particular, Mrs. Nichols choked, stammered, and finally said, "I didn't ask for a nigger; I want your ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... interesting characteristic to the student of literature must always be the way in which it leads up to, without in the least foretelling, the bursts of eloquence already referred to. Even Milton's alternations of splendid imagery with dull and scurrilous invective, are hardly so strange as Raleigh's changes from jog-trot commonplace to almost inspired declamation, if only for the reason that they are much more intelligible. It must also be mentioned that Raleigh, like Milton, seems to have had little ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... man, Bayard, of Delaware, was responsible for the election of Jefferson. Finding that Burr would not "commit himself," Bayard announced that he would cast the single vote of his State for Jefferson. "You cannot well imagine the clamor and vehement invective to which I was subjected for some days," he wrote to Hamilton. "We had several caucuses. All acknowledged that nothing but desperate measures remained, which several were disposed to adopt, and but few were willing openly to disapprove. We broke ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... them, 'the Directory has transported us.' 'Caffarelli,' said others, 'is the agent that has been made use of to deceive the General-in-Chief.' Many of them, having observed that wherever there were vestiges of antiquity they were carefully searched, vented their spite in invective against the savants, or scientific men, who, they said, had started the idea of she expedition to order to make these searches. Jests were showered upon them, even in their presence. The men called an ass a savant; and said of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the night he preached in New York," said Mr. Boulder. "He preached a sermon to the poor. He told them they were no good. I never heard, outside of a Scotch pulpit, such splendid invective." ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... During the process of arranging the carts for the night one of the women became enraged at the father of her brood because he would not aid her in the preparation of the simple tent under which the family was to repose. The woman ran to him, clenching her fist and screaming forth invective which, I am convinced, had I understood it and had it been directed at me, I should have found extremely disagreeable. After thus lashing the culprit with language for some time, she broke forth into screams and danced frantically ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... passion—that is to say, what truth—there is in this bitter invective against Hegel, prototype of the rationalist!—for the rationalist takes away our fever by taking away our life, and promises us, instead of a concrete, an abstract immortality, as if the hunger for immortality that consumes us were an abstract ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... and that it could be secured only by direct popular action. This was the simple message that filled the pages of the Ami du peuple—the Friend of the People—a newspaper which he edited from 1789 to 1792. With fierce invective he assailed the court, the clergy, the nobles, even the bourgeois Assembly. Attached to no party and with no detailed policies, he sacrificed almost everything to his single mission. No poverty, misery, or persecution could keep him quiet. Forced even to hide in cellars ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... conduct proving the pernicious influence of their theory. Their abuse will be, not the expression, half in badinage, of minds protesting by anticipation against the abuse of forms and ceremonies; but the ignorant invective of coarse-minded people against a principle that would tame them, and mould them into a more agreeable presence. They exclaim loudly against what they personally dislike, however beneficial it may be either to themselves or others. For them this little book of the "Laws and ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... satirist have been in evidence in well-nigh all ages of the world's history. The chief instruments of the satirist's equipment are irony, sarcasm, invective, wit, and humour. The satiric denunciation of a writer burning with indignation at some social wrong or abuse, is capable of reaching the very highest level of literature. The writings of a satirist of this type, and to some extent of every satirist who touches on the social aspects of life, present ...
— English Satires • Various
... this discourse for an invective against the Bank of England. I believe it is a very good fund, a very useful one, and a very profitable one. It has been useful to the Government, and it is profitable to the proprietors; and the establishing ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... moderate the attacks of the press on foreign sovereigns. This was the only form of restriction which Cavour, then and afterwards, was willing to countenance. He held that the excuse for umbrage given to foreign rulers by personal invective published in the newspapers was a danger to the State which no government ought to tolerate. The Extreme Right and Left were immediately up in arms, the first declaring that the Bill did not go far enough, and ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Coming behind me as I sat on a stile, they cut short my meditations by a tap on the shoulder, collared and marched me to the right about in double quick time. Tom Crauford was one of those who held me, and outdid himself in zealous invective at my base ingratitude in absconding from the best of masters, and the most affectionate, tender, and motherly of ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... disputes between nations, it is her truest interest to set an example of fairness, legality and sincerity. No country, not even the greatest, can afford to neglect that reasonable and enlightened opinion of thoughtful men in other countries—not to be confounded with the invective and misrepresentation employed by the press of each nation against the others—which determines the ultimate judgment of the world, and passes into the verdict ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... innuendo, resolved to make an opportunity on the following Monday for his vindication and retort. He rose, therefore, immediately after the skilful and winning appeal of the secretary, and pronounced an invective against the right honourable gentleman which was neither ill-conceived nor ill-delivered. It revived the passions that for a moment seemed inclined to lull, and the Protectionists, who on this occasion were going to support the government, forgot the common point ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... Union was formed over Clerambault; clericals and Jacobins came together to condemn him, and the man whom they admired yesterday was dragged in the mud today. The national poet became at once a public enemy, and all the myrmidons of the press attacked him with heroic invective. The greater number of them united bad faith with a remarkable ignorance. Very few knew Clerambault's works, they scarcely knew his name or the titles of his books, but that no more kept them from disparaging him now than it had hindered them from praising ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... one or two writers on the abuses of clericalism in Ireland, written in violent, unmeasured invective, and innocent—which is more important—of all notion of the value of evidence, are, I understand, eagerly snapped up and readily believed by pious Protestants in England, and it is from these books that ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... a sincere discussion of political evils and remedies; and not intended, we trust, for Mr Carlyle's own sake, to express his real belief in the true causes of the evils of society. If we could suppose that this piece of extravagant and one-sided invective were meant to be seriously taken, as embodying Mr Carlyle's social and political creed, we should scarcely find words strong enough to reprobate its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... thus far when news came of the death of Lord Byron, and put an end at once to a strain of somewhat peevish invective, which was intended to meet his eye, not to insult his memory. Had we known that we were writing his epitaph, we must have done it with a different feeling. As it is, we think it better and more like himself, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... passionate appeals to religious feeling, his sermons were noble exceptions to the common practice. And the descent from Gerson to even his more eminent successors is swift and steep. The orators of the pulpit varied their discourse from burlesque mirth or bitter invective to gross terrors, in which death and judgment, Satan and hell-fire were largely displayed. The sermons of Michel Menot and Olivier Maillard, sometimes eloquent in their censure of sin, sometimes trivial or grotesque, sometimes pedantic ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... of course I would give him money—my dear old friend! And, as an alterative and a wholesome shock to check that burst of passion and grief in which the poor fellow indulged, I thought fit to break into a very fierce and angry invective on my own part, which served to disguise the extreme feeling of pain and pity that I did not somehow choose to exhibit. I rated Clive soundly, and taxed him with unfriendliness and ingratitude for not having sooner applied to friends who would think shame of themselves whilst he was in ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and it was noticed that his shirt front was stained with tobacco juice, and yet Toombs was a remarkably handsome man. "Genius sat upon his brow, and his eyes were as black as death and bigger than an ox's." His presence captivated even the idolators of McDuffie. His argument and invective, his overpowering eloquence, linger in the memory of old men now. McDuffie said of him: "I have heard John Randolph of Roanoke, and met Burgess of Rhode Island, but this wild Georgian is ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... every political movement, to lead a large party, and forcible and ironical in debate, Jefferson Davis stood at the head of the disaffected in the Senate, as he now does in the field. Cautious and deliberate in speech, he yet never failed to launch out in strong invective, and to make effective use of irony in his attacks. He is in personal appearance, rather small and thin, with a refined and decidedly intellectual countenance, and a not unamiable expression. His health ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... was rarely permitted to enter any of the churches. I was so perfectly swallowed up in my work and dominated by the singleness of my purpose, that I took no thought of anything else; and the vigor of my invective in dealing with the scurrilous attacks of my assailants was very keenly realized, and, I believe, universally acknowledged. With the truth on my side, I was delighted to find myself perfectly able, ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... to a roar, and the train pulled into the station. Grayson was faithful to the last, and still thundered forth the invective that delighted the soul of Plover. The train whistled and moved off again, and Harley waited ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... mind, would, under such circumstances, have been left, undisturbed by any unjust provocation, to work its usual softening and, perhaps, humbling influences on his spirit. But,—luckily, as it proved, for the further triumphs of his genius,—no such moderation was exercised. The storm of invective raised around him, so utterly out of proportion with his offences, and the base calumnies that were everywhere heaped upon his name, left to his wounded pride no other resource than in the same summoning up of strength, the same instinct ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... prominence in public life would seem to entitle him; but when he did happen to stand with the majority, he pleased it with his witty vehemence more than Peter R. Livingston did with his coarse vituperation. In the debate on the judiciary, however, abuse and invective were not confined to Root and Livingston. Abraham Van Vechten and some of those who acted with him, employed every means in their power to defeat the opponents of the judges, although they scarcely equalled the extra-tribunal methods of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the situation, and, rising to the occasion with that prompt energy which betokens true genius, she seized Hester by the nape of the neck, hurled her to the ground, and sent her oranges flying in all directions! At the same time she began to storm at her with a volubility of invective that astonished herself as well as the amused bystanders. As for poor Hugh Sommers, the noise had prevented him from hearing the word "father!" and all that met his eyes was one black girl roughly using another. Alas! the poor ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... female fruiterers of the Emerald Isle; during which incivilities were exchanged in language not altogether acceptable to the auricular organs of delicacy. The brogue was that of Munster,—the war of words waged quicker and faster; and from invective the heroines seemed rapidly approximating to actual battle. Neither park-keeper nor constable were at hand; and although the surrounding mobility "laughed at the tumult and enjoyed the storm," Sir ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... tenor of the beautiful words there cut from time to time De Courtenay's voice, cool, contemptuous, a running fire of invective, now in French, now in English, and again in the Assiniboine tongue, which was familiar to the Nakonkirhirinons, they being friends with ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... you?" she cried. "What affair is it of yours what I do?... You're a silly, jealous idiot." With which childish invective she flung out ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... he turned to me and said quietly, and without the slightest anger or excitement: "If I could think of any other way in which half a million of dollars would do as much good to the State, I would give the legislature no more trouble.'' Shortly afterward, when the invective was again especially bitter, he turned to me and said: "I am not sure but that it would be a good thing for me to give the half a million to old Harvard College in Massachusetts, to educate the descendants of the men ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... abolitionist in the cast of your mind, your temper, and spirit. Nothing gives me such an idea of the world of despair as when I read ultra anti-slavery speeches. I see how the lost will hate God's mysterious providence, and revile it; and how they will fight with each other, and pour out their furious invective and sarcasm and vituperation, and scourge one another with their fiery tongues, as they now do, when some one of the party appears to falter. If there were not something truly good in connection with slavery amid ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... We both hoped sincerely that any English friends who saw that speech, and paused to realise that the orator was a parent of mine, would consider the number of Irish resident in Illinois, and the amount of invective which their feelings require. Poppa doesn't really know sometimes whether he is himself or a shillelagh, but whatever his temporary political capacity he is never ungrateful. He went on to give me the particulars of his interview with the President ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... that day you will allow your faithful servant Ivo to retire to his ancestral manors in Anjou; for England will be too hot for him. Sire, you know not this man,—a liar, a bully, a robber, a swash-buckling ruffian, who—" and Ivo ran on with furious invective, after the fashion of the Normans, who considered no name too bad for an ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... The invective levelled against Froude by Freeman is now generally recognised as exaggerated and unjust, but it would certainly appear, as Mr. Gooch says, that Froude "never realised that the main duty of the historian ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... by a fresh burst of fury from her denouncer. In all the coarsest invective his education could supply, in all the hideous vulgarities of his untutored dialect, in that uncurbed licentiousness of tone, look, and manner which passion, once aroused, gives to the dregs and scum of the populace, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... history of invective, I know of nothing so fierce as Hutten's appeal against Duke Ulrich In five different pamphlets his crime was described to the German people, and all good men, from the Emperor down, were called on to help him in his struggle against ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... Trowbridge was subjected to very great insolence from Mr. Fenwick during the discussion which took place in poor old farmer Trumbull's parlour respecting the murder. Our friend, the Vicar, did not content himself with personal invective, but made allusion to the Marquis's daughters. The Marquis, as he was driven home in his carriage, came to sundry conclusions about Mr. Fenwick. That the man was an infidel he had now no matter of doubt whatever; ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... out of the kitchen. They had broken windows, overturned the furniture, and worked up a lively humor. Algy had exhausted his supply of hot water, but not his supply of language. It seemed as if the stream of Oriental invective being poured through the walls of the building might have withered almost anything extant. But Goldite whisky had failed on his besiegers earlier and their vitals were proof ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... slanging matches and bullyragging competitions which form their courtship it is always the maiden that is most successful. Against her merry flow of invective and her girlish wealth of offensive personalities the insolence and abuse of her boyish adorer cannot stand for ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... later Mr. Arnot broke out anew with muttered complaint and invective, as he heard the carriage driven ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... motionless. The wrath and disdain passed from his features, and stoicism settled over them like a mask of stone. Multnomah's cold regard had not faltered a moment under the chief's invective. No denunciation could shake ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... sat down, and Baxter himself attempted to put in a word; but the chief justice drowned all expostulation in a torrent of ribaldry and invective, mingled with scraps of Hudibras. 'My lord,' said the old man, 'I have been much blamed by Dissenters for ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... had gone, his pent-up wrath broke forth in one of those fits of volcanic fury which sometimes shattered his iron outward calm. Walking up and down the room he burst out in wild regret for the rout and disaster, and bitter invective against St. Clair, reciting how, in that very room, he had wished the unfortunate commander success and honor and had bidden him above all things beware of a surprise. [Footnote: Tobias Lear, Washington's Private Secretary ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... said before, and hundreds would say again. Still he was cheered, and still he went on; and as he became more and more conscious of his failure there grew upon him the idea,—the dangerous hope, that he might still save himself from ignominy by the eloquence of his invective against the police. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... irony and invective made Isabelle laugh, and also subtly changed her self-preoccupation. Evidently Dr. Renault was not a Potts to go to with a ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... the sonnet on the Sistine and the capitolo in answer to Francesco Berni, written in the name of Fra Sebastiano. Sometimes his satire becomes malignant, as in the sonnet against the people of Pistoja, which breathes the spirit of Dantesque invective. Sometimes the fierceness of it is turned against himself, as in the capitolo upon old age and its infirmities. The grotesqueness of this lurid descant on senility and death is marked by something rather Teutonic ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... surprise when she awoke to find this insignificant Hebrew actually Chancellor of the Exchequer! He was easily master of all the tortures supplied by the armory of rhetoric; he could exhaust the resources of the bitterest invective; he could sting Gladstone out of his self-control; he was absolute master of himself and his situation. You could see that this young man intended to make his way in the world. Determined audacity ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... beginnings of his labors the old lawyer had looked forward to writing just this period of his life. He meant to clear up his name once for all. He meant to use invective, argument, testimony and a powerful emotional appeal, such as a country lawyer invariably attempts with ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... was no sooner dead than the public press began to attack him, and while those private virtues were not denied him for which he had always been conspicuous, they enlarged in a strain of severe invective against his careless and expensive habits, his addiction to gambling; and above all they raked up the old story of Mrs. Clark and the investigation of 1809, and published many of his letters and all the disgusting ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... of Mr. Justice Keogh was made the subject of animadversion. Right on he read, his lordship striving to look as composed and indifferent as possible, while every word of the bitter satire and fierce invective written against him by Luby and O'Leary was being launched at his heart. When articles of that class were exhausted, the prisoner turned to the most treasonable and seditious documents he could find, and commenced ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... elemental nature. He seldom indulged physically in such things; but his printed squibs and hoaxes and his keen love of the ridiculous placed him in the joker class, while his prompt temper, droll manner, and rare gift of invective made ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and purest principles which I know; and I lament to find my judgment so extremely in opposition. To me it seems that inability to refrain shows weakness, not power, of soul, and that nothing is easier than to give vent to violent invective against bad rulers. The last sentence quoted, seems to say, that the speaking of Truth is never to be condemned: but I cannot agree to this. When Truth will only exasperate, and cannot do good, silence is imperative. A man who reproaches an armed tyrant in words too plain, does but ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... precincts of Magdalen, preaching from the little open-air pulpit there an impassioned sermon on the sacredness of human life, and referring to Zuleika in terms which John Knox would have hesitated to utter. As he piled up the invective, he noticed an ominous restiveness in the congregation—murmurs, clenching of hands, dark looks. He saw the pulpit as yet another trap laid for him by the gods. He had walked straight into it: another ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... coming, to their mother sped. Thus days and years passed by, and hope was bright, Nor dreamed they of a dark and gloomy night. Men came empowered, with handcuffs and with warrants, And, entering homes, tore from their warm embrace Husbands and fathers, and in copious torrents Poured forth invective on our northern race, And done all "lawfully;" because 't was voted By certain men, who, when they had the might, Fostered plans on which their passions doted, Despite of reason and God's law of right; And, bartering liberties, the truth dissembled, While Freedom's ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... Soeur Gabrielle at Clermont-en-Argonne, gathering her flock of old men and children about her and interposing her short stout figure between them and the fury of the Germans. We found her in her Hospice, a ruddy, indomitable woman who related with a quiet indignation more thrilling than invective the hideous details of the bloody three days; but that already belongs to the past, and at present she is much more concerned with the task of clothing and feeding Gerbeviller. For two thirds of the population have already "come home"—that is what they call the return to this ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... not endure to change my invective into panegyric all at once, and so soon. We, or such as I at least, love to keep ourselves in countenance for a rash judgment, even when we know it to be rash. Everybody has not your generosity in confessing a mistake. It requires a greatness ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the poet wrote to Dagmar then or not. But surely you remember how she stayed by him during the trial—still Victorian in her black gown and veil, mourning for the hope that was dead, at least! You remember his imprisonment; the bitter invective of his enemies; the defection of his followers; the dark scandals that filled the newspapers, offended public taste, and destroyed Cecil Grimshaw's popularity in an England ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... enough account of the beauty so patiently entwined with mortal things; while Ruskin's sharpest agonies were endured when he found, to his dismay, that men and women could not be induced by any appeal or invective to heed ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sufferings. She must pretend to have confidence in Rash, when at heart she cried against him as an infant and a fool. Never was woman in such a ridiculous situation as that into which she had been thrust; never was heart so wild to ease itself by invective and denunciation; and never was the padlock fixed so firmly on the lips. Hour by hour the man she loved was being weaned and won away from her; and she must stand by with grimacing smiles, instead of throwing up her arms ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... things make mean men proud, and vanity catches small occasions; or that all contrariety of opinion, even in those that can defend it no longer, makes proud men angry; there is often found in commentaries a spontaneous strain of invective and contempt, more eager and venomous than is vented by the most furious controvertist in politicks against those whom he ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... Stott, which was sent to the Falkland Islands, in consequence of the forcible seizure of them by the Spanish squadron. It is remarkable that this paltry dispute, which might be almost forgotten but for the virulent invective of "Junius," and the masterly defence of the Government by Dr. Johnson, should have given to the navy two such officers as Nelson and Pellew; neither of whom might otherwise have found an opportunity to join the service until they were too old, in the five years of peace which followed. After the ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... Parties were walking about and all talking of the battle or Bonaparte.... Till this day I had never heard him openly and honestly avowed, but here I had several opportunities of incorporating myself in groups in which his name was bandied about with every invective which French hatred and fluency could invent. Their tongues, like Baron Munchausen's horn, seemed to run with an accumulated rapidity from the long embargo laid upon them. "Sacre gueux, bete, voleur," ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... their elementary books contain garbled and false accounts of naval and land engagements, in which every credit is given to the Americans, and equal vituperation and disgrace thrown upon their opponents. Monarchy is derided, the equal rights of man declared—all is invective, uncharitableness, and falsehood. ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... one must be a wrongful ghost at all," the apparition continued, "it would be much pleasanter to be the ghost of some man other than John Hinckman. There is in him an irascibility of temper, accompanied by a facility of invective, which is seldom met with. And what would happen if he were to see me, and find out, as I am sure he would, how long and why I had inhabited his house, I can scarcely conceive. I have seen him in his bursts of passion; and, although he did not hurt the people he stormed at ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... with a large command of quotations and illustrations. There were remarkable powers of sarcasm—powers, however, which he rarely used, preferring the summer lightning of banter to the thunderbolt of invective. There was admirable lucidity and accuracy in exposition. There was great skill in the disposition and marshaling of his arguments, and finally—a gift now almost lost in England—there was a wonderful variety and grace of appropriate gesture. But above ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... untimely and awful death of Mr. Brann with poignant regret, and tenders its condolence to his afflicted family. In many ways he won the admiration of the American people. He was a man of great mental endowments, and in the use of invective, often degenerating into billingsgate, he stood without a rival in American journalism. His mind was broad and he despised religious intolerance. As an American he loved the stars and stripes and was opposed to an Anglo- American ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... consideration due to her sex, (for a female satirist ever places herself beyond the pale of such forbearance,) or he is subdued by her superior volubility. He revenges himself, however, in her absence: he abuses her with such a variety of comic invective, and pours forth his pent-up wrath with such a ludicrous extravagance and exaggeration, that he betrays at once how deep is his mortification, and how unreal ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... consort Henrietta. Cleveland also was honoured with the early notice of Charles;[11] one of the most distinguished metaphysical bards, who afterwards exerted his talents of wit and satire upon the royal side, and strained his imagination for extravagant invective against the Scottish army, who sold their king, and the parliament leaders, who bought him. All these, and others unnecessary to mention, were read and respected at court; being esteemed by their contemporaries, and doubtless believing ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... or forget the public interests and your own, as to be returning back with the multitude to Egypt, or that you should with them be hankering after the leeks and onions of our old bondage." There follows an earnest invective against the Stuarts; but the tone of respectfulness to Monk is kept up studiously throughout. There is no sign of Milton in the language, and one guesses on the whole that the tract was a concoction of a few of the City Republicans, with Barebone among them, meeting privately ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... inflamed with desire to change the domestic institutions of existing States. To accomplish their objects they dedicate themselves to the odious task of depreciating the government organization which stands in their way and of calumniating with indiscriminate invective not only the citizens of particular States with whose laws they find fault, but all others of their fellow citizens throughout the country who do not participate with them in their assaults upon the Constitution, framed and adopted by our fathers, and claiming for the privileges ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... the period of white heat in the anti-slavery struggle, when the public heard the keenest debates, the sharpest invective. At an anti-slavery meeting the red-hot lava was always on the flow. The anti-slavery men were like anthracite in the furnace,—red hot,—white hot,—clear through. I have little doubt that the sharpness and ruggedness of ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... pre-eminent intellect, the happily acquired friend, and the most humane of conquerors. At present we can only console ourselves with the conviction that his country will at last recover from that violence of invective and reproach which has been so long raised against him, and will learn to understand that the dross and lees of the age and the individual, out of which even the best have to elevate themselves, are but perishable and transient, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... point, Mrs. Bury broke out again into a stream of protest and invective, only modified by her fear of waking her patient upstairs, and interrupted by appeals to David. But whenever she came near to take the baby Louie put her hands over it, and her wide black eyes shot out intimidating flames before which the aggressor ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... guessed, would not sit tamely by, and see the leading idea of the Anglican Church thrown to the winds, her via media profaned, her park made a common, and her distinctive doctrines and fences levelled to the ground. What their feelings were, may be gathered from this indignant invective: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... of decided talent, the best and most loving side of Macaulay's nature was made manifest at home. His bubbling wit, brilliant conversation, and good-cheer were for his own fireside, first; and all that cutting, critical, scathing flood of invective was for the public ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... She greeted him not only without a trace of embarrassment, but with such a friendly, fresh, gay confidence that he scarcely recognised in her the dry-eyed, feverish woman of an hour ago, whose very lips shrank back, scorched by the torrent of her own invective. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... unwieldy column of quartos and octavos; sometimes from the light squadrons of occasional pamphlets and flying sheets. Every month has brought on its periodical calumny. The abuse has taken every shape which the ability of the writers could give it; plain invective, clumsy raillery, misrepresented anecdote.[38] No method of vilifying the measures, the abilities, the intentions, or the persons which compose that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... depths they blackened into ink, across which shot the red and yellow flocks of a fiery and passionate autocracy. The iron jaw, inherited from seafaring forefathers, snapped on words of threat, rebuke, and invective. He wore his sixty-five years as lightly as foliage, standing straight and strong like a poplar tree, save as he bent to the gusts of his own passion. Where his clenched fist fell upon desk or table ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... Trooper's "long-faced chum" under the auspices of a pitiless, bitter-tongued Rough-Riding Sergeant-Major! Rough! What a character the fellow was! Never an oath, never a foul word, but what a vocabulary and gift of invective, sarcasm and cruel stinging reproof! A well-educated man if not a gentleman. "Don't dismount again, Muggins—or is it Juggins?—without permission" when some poor fellow comes on his head as his horse (bare of saddle and ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... severe moral invective in all Pope, is the prophetical conclusion of the epilogue to ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... the attitude of Miss Wilberforce herself. She was a Tartar. She felt that all men's hands were against her. She used her tongue to good purpose and, at a pinch, her teeth and claws. The policemen of Nepenthe could bear witness to that fact. Drunk, she had a perfectly blistering flow of invective at command. Sober, she was apt to indulge in a dignified bestiality of logic that cut like a knife. It was only in the intermediate stage that she was affable and human. But to catch her in that intermediate stage was extremely difficult. It was ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... aesthetic flavor wherever it is separable from its political quality; for I should not hope to interest any one else in what I had myself often found very tiresome. I suspect, indeed, that political satire and invective are not relished best in free countries. No danger attends their exercise; there is none of the charm of secrecy or the pleasure of transgression in their production; there is no special poignancy to free administrations ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... extolled as far superior to any similar vehicles ever known in the world. Their velocity is the subject of special commendation, and is triumphantly contrasted with the sluggish pace of the continental posts. But with boasts like these was mingled the sound of complaint and invective. The interests of large classes had been unfavourably affected by the establishment of the new diligences; and, as usual, many persons were, from mere stupidity and obstinacy, disposed to clamour against the innovation, simply because it was an innovation. It was vehemently ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is more with folly than with vice, and when she attacks the latter, it should be rather with ridicule than invective. But sometimes she may be allowed to raise her voice, and change her usual smile into ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... an absence of truth or fairness; never has the language of political opponents stooped to such depths of coarseness and scurrility. From the age of Bolingbroke to the age of Burke the gravest statesmen were not ashamed to revile one another with invective only worthy of the fish-market. And outside the legislature the tone of attack was even more brutal. Grub Street ransacked the whole vocabulary of abuse to find epithets for Walpole. Gay amidst general applause set the statesmen of his day on the public stage in the guise ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... perhaps with some outside suggestions from the Megarian farce and its Sicilian offshoot, the mythological court comedy of Epicharmus. The chief note of this older comedy for the ancient critics was its unbridled license of direct personal satire and invective. Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes, says Horace, assailed with the utmost freedom any one who deserved to be branded with infamy. This old political Comedy was succeeded in the calmer times that followed the Peloponnesian War by the so-called Middle Comedy (390-320) of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... character lie on the surface. He that runs may read them; nor have there been wanting attentive and malicious observers to point them out. For many years after the Restoration, they were the theme of unmeasured invective and derision. They were exposed to the utmost licentiousness of the press and of the stage, when the press and the stage were most licentious. They were not men of letters; they were, as a body, unpopular; ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... which now looked dark as wine when we lift the glass to see the ruby gleam of light within the purple. But she never for a moment laid aside the silent, meek, constrained manner; and when I remembered her bursting out in her brilliant wrath on me, pouring forth that torrent of stinging invective in her mysterious language, I was lost in wonder and admiration at the change in her, and at her double personality. Having satisfied my wants, she moved quietly away and, raising a straw mat, disappeared behind it into her own sleeping-apartment, ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... placed in golden letters on the pedestal of Webster's monument in Central Park the last sublime line of that sentence: "Liberty and Union, now and forever: one and inseparable." Mr. Webster's power in sarcastic invective was terrific. After he had made his angry and ferocious rejoinder to the charges of Mr. Charles J. Ingersoll, of Pennsylvania, the witty Dr. Elder was asked, when he came out of the Senate chamber: "What did you ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... the Land Bill was long almost beyond precedent, but by August it left the Commons, and Lord Salisbury, though furious in his invective, declined to advise its total rejection. The Irish landlords had their will of it in Committee, and sent it back unrecognizable. The Lords' amendments were then reviewed by Mr. Gladstone, and, broadly speaking, rejected. There was the usual threat of a collision between the Houses. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... result for Timar that Herr Brazovics flew into a rage, and in order to show that he was master in his own house, seized the pen and signed the power of attorney. But when he had given it, both fell on Timar, and overwhelmed him with such a flood of reproaches and invective, that he would willingly have taken yet another bath in the Danube to wash them away. Frau Sophie only scolded Timar indirectly, as she abused her husband for giving such a ragged, dirty fellow, such a tipsy, beggarly ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... Criticism.—In this outburst of invective, nothing was spared. It was charged that each of the political parties had fallen into the hands of professional politicians who devoted their time to managing conventions, making platforms, nominating candidates, and dictating ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... ladies and had more than once said publicly that he was in entire agreement with a statement attributed to the German Emperor, by which the energies of women were confined to babies, baking and bazaars for church purposes. Miss Lentaigne scorched this sentiment with invective, and used language about Lord Torrington which was terrific. Her abandonment of the cause of Christian Science appeared to be as complete as the most enthusiastic general practitioner could desire. Frank was exceedingly uncomfortable. ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... great apostle mentions Demas, in his second letter to Timothy, is very touching. "Demas," saith he, "has forsaken me, having loved the present world" (2 Tim. iv. 16). We might have expected him to give vent to his feelings in bitter invective—as is customary in such cases—and to denounce the cowardliness of this desertion in language aflame with indignation. It would have been no more than justice to the offender, and it might have deterred others from stumbling ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... chance to take a good look at Sir Richard, and you'll answer your question yourself," the other man answered oracularly. Then he broke out again into sustained invective:—"Hold up there, you little fool of a tight-rope-dancing, bella Napoli gorilla, and don't go dropping good, honest, Welsh steam-coal overboard into your confounded, stinking local sewer! I don't care to see any of your ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... practice in warfare in Ireland differed somewhat from what he observed elsewhere, and as from that day to this it has been the subject of furious invective, a few words thereon are plainly needed. Cromwell had gone to Ireland, at imminent risk to his cause, to recover it to the Parliament in the shortest possible time, and with a relatively small army. He had gone there first to punish, as was believed, a wholesale massacre and a social ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... than this virulent invective, which was bitterly felt by Caesar (Suet. Caes. 73), is another nearly contemporary poem of the same author (xi.) to which we may here refer, because with its pathetic introduction to an anything ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... taxing the other with misdemeanours both political and {67} personal. During the long period which must elapse before a reply could be received, the Sovereign Council was turned into an academy of invective. Besides governor, bishop, and intendant, there were seven members who were called upon to take sides in the contest. No one could remain neutral even if he had the desire. In voting power Laval and Duchesneau had rather the best of ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... recalled the scene in the garden, and her heart throbbed with anger. She regretted her own temperate conduct, and imagined herself stealing out upon them, standing before them, and pouring forth floods of invective till they cowered. She wished she had refused to let Bertha enter the house again, and had threatened to expose Dan if he did not meekly submit to her dictation. She ought to have exposed him too. She should have gone to Bertha's mother. But where was Dan at that moment? She jumped ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... self-engrossed, wildly happy, had flung at once into his theme, which, it need hardly be said, was Christian. Then the storm broke, and the lightning blazed, and the thunders of the house uttered their voice, while Larry, amazed, horrified, gradually, as the invective gathered volume and venom, becoming angry, stood in silence, and received in a single cloud-burst the bitter flood of long-pent prejudice, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the strange contrast in their way of expressing themselves. He was full of eagerness, positiveness, and a fresh-hearted egoism. He had an opinion on everything; he liked or disliked everything; and when he disliked anything, he never spared invective in giving expression to his antipathy. His moral convictions were not simply strong—they were vehement. His intellectual opinions were hobbies that he rode under whip and spur. A theory for everything, a solution of every difficulty, a "high moral" view of politics, ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... snapped back at him. "You know what I mean. Your own associates are responsible for it!" He turned back to face the chair, and, with a surprising minimum of invective, described the scene in which Claire Pelton had demonstrated her Literacy. "And that's not all, brother Literates," he continued. "Since then, I've been receiving reports from the Pelton store. Claire Pelton has been openly doing the work of ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... Age, or that Englishmen and Frenchmen, Guelphs and Ghibellines, were inclined to sink their racial differences in the unity of Christian citizenship. Lord Hugh's doctrine might be called by some modern and by others primitive; but medieval it can only be called on the principle that, in invective, a long word, is ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... the strength of this temper in him which led to his extraordinary detestation and contempt for the Greeks. Their turn for pure speculation excited all his anger. In a curious chapter, he exhausts invective in denouncing them.[12] The sarcasm of Sallust delights him, that the actions of Greece were very fine, verum aliquanto minores quam fama feruntur. Their military glory was only a flash of about a hundred and fourteen years from Marathon; compare ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... furious desire to slay Bertha and the monk's bastard, he sprang up the stairs with one bound; but at the sight of the corpse, for whom his wife and her son repeated incessant litanies, having no ears for his torrent of invective, having no eyes for his writhings and threats, he had no longer the courage to perpetrate this dark deed. After the first fury of his rage had passed, he could not bring himself to it, and quitted the room like a coward and a man taken in crime, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... to be cut off from the Church for the good of her own soul, and that the Church might not suffer by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer, an impostor, giving forth false fables at one time, and making a false penitence the next. It is very unlikely that she heard anything of that flood of invective. At the end of the sermon the preacher bade her "Go in peace." Even then, however, the fountain of abuse did not cease. The Bishop himself rose, and once more by way of exhorting her to a final repentance, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... inflaming literature, he sought recruits. With stinging sarcasm and withering scorn he taunted the laboring people—told them they were fools and cowards to submit to the degrading slavery of their capitalist owners. With biting invective and blistering epithet he pictured their employer enemies as the brutal and ruthless destroyers of their homes. With thrilling eloquence he fanned the flames of class hatred, inspired the loyalty of his followers to himself and held out to them golden promises of reward if they ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... He haled forth Wolf Larsen's soul naked to the scorn of men. He rained upon it curses from God and High Heaven, and withered it with a heat of invective that savoured of a mediaeval excommunication of the Catholic Church. He ran the gamut of denunciation, rising to heights of wrath that were sublime and almost Godlike, and from sheer exhaustion sinking to the vilest ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... confinement; but the truth now burst from disguise, and stood revealed with bitter aggravation. The duke, fired with indignation at the duplicity of the marquis, poured forth his resentment in terms of proud and bitter invective; and the marquis, galled by recent disappointment, was in no mood to restrain the impetuosity of his nature. He retorted with acrimony; and the consequence would have been serious, had not the friends of each party interposed for their preservation. ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... with him. The fiery denunciations of the Doctor kindled an answering flame in the breasts of his youthful auditory. In five minutes hands, lungs, and feet were all at work. The youths before him awakened the hot, headlong youth still within him, and he launched forth upon a tirade of invective that was wild and reckless even ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... a little such invective occasionally, to refresh my zeal," he said, with provoking meekness. "It shows me where I am. It assures me that I am fighting the good fight. I do not blame my good mother; she is worldly-minded, and sees things from her stand-point. Neither she nor Susan can perceive anything but loss ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... of invective and malediction answered him, and then there were the sounds of conflict, even the crashing of fists as well as the thuds on the deck, coming to Denman through ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... for satire. The absence of the training of the rhetorical schools from a woman's education might well account for such a failure. At the worst, Sulpicia stands as an interesting example of the type of womanhood at which Juvenal levelled some of his wildest and most ill-balanced invective. ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... broke into a torrent of invective against Comyn for his gross act of treachery in betraying him by sending to Edward a copy ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... how universal was the belief that wearers of ermine and gentlemen of the long robe would practice any sort of fraud or extortion for the sake of personal advantage. In the pamphlets and broadsides, in the squibs and ballads of the period, may be found a wealth of quaint narrative and broad invective, setting forth the rascality of judges and attorneys, barristers and scriveners. Any literary effort to throw contempt upon the law was sure of success. The light jesters, who made merry with the phraseology and costumes of Westminster Hall, were only a few degrees less welcome ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... many passages which sufficiently remind us of Horace, some of them light and playful, others level and almost flat, these do not form the staple of his Satires: there are passages of dignified declamation and passionate invective which suffer less in translation, and which may be so rendered as to leave a lasting impression of pleasure upon the mind of the reader. Like Horace, he has an abundance of local and temporary allusions, in dealing with which the most successful ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... as Pao-y heard this remark, he at once burst out in a fit of his raving complaint, and unclasping the gem, he dashed it disdainfully on the floor. "Rare object, indeed!" he shouted, as he heaped invective on it; "it has no idea how to discriminate the excellent from the mean, among human beings; and do tell me, has it any perception or not? I too ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... an orator, the speech on the whole is not an unfair summing up of the grievances of the coloured people, and there is a very solemn warning in it. The European labour agitators may well envy Dr. Abdurahman: his logic, his doctrine and his power of invective. He has so much to complain of, he asks for so very little. Just equality of opportunity. He does not propose to set up any Trades' Hall government within a government; he does not talk about or attempt to incite to riot or revolution; he does not speak for a few skilled artisans ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... the burning of the city to the other atrocities contemplated. Cicero discovered the scheme, and unveiled its horrid details in four orations; but again the miserable being was permitted to escape justice. He was present and listened in rage to the invective of Cicero until he could bear it no longer, and then rushed wildly out and joined his armed adherents, an open enemy of the state. His plot failed in the city through imprudence of the conspirators and the skill of Cicero, and he himself fled, hoping to reach Gaul. He was, ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... a bayonet sacks of flour, etc. A short search, to the pretended amazement of the assistant, proved the correctness of the captain's scent. The baker was sent for, and with indignant manner and hands lifted in holy horror, he poured volley after volley of invective at the confounded assistant. ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... necessary to change ALL her foremen unless they could agree in harmony, she sought the dignified seclusion of her castle. But her respected parents, whose triumphant relief at the stranger's departure had emboldened them to await her return in their porch with bended bows of invective and lifted javelins of aggression, recoiled before the resistless helm of this cold-browed Minerva, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... indulging in a feeling of indescribable fear, as I listened to the torrent of profane invective that burst forth continually from the lips of the boatman. Once or twice we were in danger of being overset by the boughs of the pines and cedars which had fallen into the water near the banks. Right ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... a Latin poem in four books, entitled 'Callipaedia, seu de pulchrae prolis habenda ratione,' at Leyden, under the name of Calvidius Laetus, in 1655. In discussing unions harmonious and inharmonious he digressed into an invective against marriages of Powers, when not in accordance with certain conditions; and complained that France entered into such unions prolific only of ill, witness her gift of sovereign power to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... shirt front was stained with tobacco juice, and yet Toombs was a remarkably handsome man. "Genius sat upon his brow, and his eyes were as black as death and bigger than an ox's." His presence captivated even the idolators of McDuffie. His argument and invective, his overpowering eloquence, linger in the memory of old men now. McDuffie said of him: "I have heard John Randolph of Roanoke, and met Burgess of Rhode Island, but this wild Georgian is ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... appeared, I met him with a blast of invective which, in view of the events which quickly followed, must have blown out whatever spark of kindly feeling toward me he may ever have had. I demanded that he permit me to send word to my conservator asking him to come at once and look after my interests, for I was being unfairly ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... healthful activities did Mr Nutt disport himself, until the ensuing Saturday found him at the same desk, dictating to the same typist, and using the same blue pencil on the first instalment of Mr Finn's revelations. The opening was a sound piece of slashing invective about the evil secrets of princes, and despair in the high places of the earth. Though written violently, it was in excellent English; but the editor, as usual, had given to somebody else the task of breaking it up into sub-headings, ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... declared himself head of the English church; and both his convictions and his passions becoming still more strongly engaged on the side which he had already espoused, he published a work on the unity of the church, in which the conduct of his sovereign and benefactor became the topic of his vehement invective. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the oration of an ambitious leader in a farce; he held his hearers with his eloquence, as much as he had done with the song of his grotesque and desecrating love. He vaunted his sagacity and his valour, and overwhelmed with invective all sorts of names—my own and Castro's among them. He revealed the unholy ideals of all that band of scoundrels—ideals that he said should find fruition under his captaincy. He boasted of secret conferences with O'Brien. There were murmurs ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in literary and even personal quarrels with his fellow-authors. The circumstances of the origin of this 'poetomachia' are far from clear, and those who have written on the ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... of the tract, good and bad, the vivid familiar manner, the vehemence, the pictorial quality, the violent invective, are the notes of Knox's "History." Already, by 1547, or not much later, he was the perfect master of his style; his tone no more resembles that of his contemporary and fellow-historian, Lesley, than the style ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... little to unnerve a mind already driven to the verge of distraction. The next time that Weil saw Roseleaf, the latter received him with a coolness that could not be ignored. When he pressed for a reason, the young man broke out into invective. ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... what is the matter?' and then—then it burst forth. Oh, my God, I must have been beside myself. Surely some demon must have entered into my childish heart before I could have poured forth that torrent of passionate invective and reproach. ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... stair-case from a strong smell of morocco leather. In vain he shows me fine editions, gold leaves, Etruscan bindings, &c.—naming them one after another, as if he were showing a gallery of pictures!" Lucian has composed a biting invective against an ignorant possessor of a vast library. "One who opens his eyes, with an hideous stare, at an old book, and, after turning over the pages, chiefly admires ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... This valiant invective from the honest little fag failed even to appear ludicrous in the midst of the general excitement. Further words were now interrupted by the appearance of the Parretts' crew ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... dead silence which is so peculiarly oppressive because it is possible only when many human beings are gathered together, Mr. Webster rose. He had sat impassive and immovable during all the preceding days, while the storm of argument and invective had beaten about his head. At last his time had come; and as he rose and stood forth, drawing himself up to his full height, his personal grandeur and his majestic calm thrilled all who looked upon him. With perfect quietness, unaffected apparently by the atmosphere ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... parents never again to mention the question of her marrying him. The mother and daughter were on one side and the father on the other; neither would yield an inch, and Hatton House, Holborn, became the scene of violent invective and bitter weeping. ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... said that Webster rarely indulged in personalities. When we consider how great were his powers of sarcasm and invective, how constant were the provocations to exercise them furnished by his political enemies, and how atrociously and meanly allusions to his private affairs were brought into discussions which should have been confined to refuting his reasoning, his moderation in this matter is to be ranked as a ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... prizefighter broke loose in a turbid stream of profanity. It boiled from his lips like molten lava from a crater. The raucous words poured forth from a heart furious with rage. The man was beside himself. He raved like a madman—and the object of his invective was ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... On ne se trompera point sur Constantin, en croyant tout le mal ru'en dit Eusebe, et tout le bien qu'en dit Zosime. Fleury, Hist. Ecclesiastique, tom. iii. p. 233. Eusebius and Zosimus form indeed the two extremes of flattery and invective. The intermediate shades are expressed by those writers, whose character or situation variously tempered the influence of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... their fallacies and crush all their sophistries. That famous plea which makes Alison love Austria and Palmer love Louisiana—the plea that a people can be best educated for freedom and religion by dwarfing their minds and tying their hands—is, in this book, shivered by argument and burnt by invective. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... cloud of mosquitoes. The men on the bank have finally given it up as a bad job, and they set round the fires smoking and slapping different parts of their persons, swearing volubly in English. For the Cree language is devoid of invective. In the morning we are a sorry crowd, conversation is monosyllabic and very much to the point. It is the first serious trial to individual good-humour. When each one of your four million pores is an irritation-channel of ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... invective and misrepresentation, by irritating the public, disqualify it for the deliberate exercise of its functions. If the slaves have to mourn over the want of freedom, the planters may lament the want of ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... That was a Wittie Invective made by Montaigny upon the Antipodean, Who said they must be Thieves that pulled on their breeches when Honest Folk were scarce abed. So is it Obnoxious to them that purvey Christmas Numbers, Annuals, and the like, that they commonly write under Sirius his star as it were Capricornus, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in so respectably ridiculous a conclave as the House of Commons. It was little for one honourable gentleman to give another honourable gentleman the lie direct before the eyes of the country. The honourable gentlemen descended—or, as they thought, ascended—to the most vehement invective, and such was at times the torrent of personal abuse which parties heaped on one another, while good-natured John Bull looked on and smiled at his rulers, that, as in the United States of to-day, a debate was often the prelude to a duel. Pitt and Fox, Tierney, Adam, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... provocation, to work its usual softening and, perhaps, humbling influences on his spirit. But,—luckily, as it proved, for the further triumphs of his genius,—no such moderation was exercised. The storm of invective raised around him, so utterly out of proportion with his offences, and the base calumnies that were everywhere heaped upon his name, left to his wounded pride no other resource than in the same summoning up of strength, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... so that he knew it almost completely by heart. Some of his attacks upon Christianity are very bitter, and have been much quoted against Socialism, but they are not one whit more bitter than the superb thunderbolts of invective which the ancient Hebrew prophets hurled against an unfaithful Church and priesthood. For the most part, they are attacks upon religious hypocrisy rather than upon Christianity. Marx was, of course, an agnostic, even an atheist, ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... the witnesses had been examined and cross-examined, and bullied and threatened in the approved fashion, Maitre Duval addressed the jury on behalf of the dead man's relatives. In the course of this he delivered a powerful speech, full of passion and invective, drawing a parallel between this affaire d'honneur and the historic one between Alceste and Oronte in Moliere's drama. According to him, Dujarier was a shining exemplar, while de Beauvallon was an unmitigated scoundrel, with a "past" of ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... scarcely an exception, the leading men of each party, those who have any title to the name of statesman, are animated with an honest, patriotic desire to promote the best interests of the nation; and that the elucidation of truth is not aided by unreasoning invective and the undeserved imputation of ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... Dog's afraid." And then he, too, reined deliberately about and signalled to his men to follow. For a moment there was silence as Elk stumblingly put into Sioux the lieutenant's ultimatum. Then came an outburst of wrath and invective. Red Dog afraid, indeed! Loudly he called for his horse, and the crowd gave way as a boy came running leading the chief's pet piebald. In an instant, Indian fashion, he had thrust his heavily-beaded moccasin ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... no answer was returned, indulged in strong invective, and then decided upon measures certainly in themselves by ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... guest had gone, his pent-up wrath broke forth in one of those fits of volcanic fury which sometimes shattered his iron outward calm. Walking up and down the room he burst out in wild regret for the rout and disaster, and bitter invective against St. Clair, reciting how, in that very room, he had wished the unfortunate commander success and honor and had bidden him above all things beware of a surprise. [Footnote: Tobias Lear, Washington's Private Secretary ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... his transitions are abrupt, and his inuendos and allusions most perplexing. He must have been a man of very bilious temperament, who could scarcely distinguish a theological opponent from a personal enemy; for he pours forth upon those who differ from him whole torrents of sarcasm and invective. [371:1] His strong passion, acting upon a fervid imagination, completely overpowered his judgment; and hence he deals so largely in exaggeration, that, as to many matters of fact, we cannot safely ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... deal more in the original, totally uninteresting to the reader, in the same querulous strain of invective against Oviedo, but which is here abridged as conveying ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... I would give him money—my dear old friend! And, as an alterative and a wholesome shock to check that burst of passion and grief in which the poor fellow indulged, I thought fit to break into a very fierce and angry invective on my own part, which served to disguise the extreme feeling of pain and pity that I did not somehow choose to exhibit. I rated Clive soundly, and taxed him with unfriendliness and ingratitude for not having ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mind in which kindness and sensibility were so strongly predominant. At this time, however, his character was not developed, or at least not understood, by those that surrounded him. To strong feelings and enduring affections he added a keenness of perception and a bitterness of invective, of which, in his conversation with his father concerning Yellow Sam, the reader has already had sufficient proofs. At breakfast little or nothing was eaten; the boy himself could not taste a morsel, nor any other person in the family. When the form of the meal was ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Mrs. Bury broke out again into a stream of protest and invective, only modified by her fear of waking her patient upstairs, and interrupted by appeals to David. But whenever she came near to take the baby Louie put her hands over it, and her wide black eyes shot out intimidating flames before which the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... from the fact that plays were then acted on Sundays), and in 1579 transferred his pen from service of the players to attack on them, in a piece which he called "The School of Abuse, containing a Pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth; setting up the Flag of Defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their Bulwarks, by Profane Writers, Natural Reason, and Common Experience: a Discourse as pleasant for Gentlemen that favour ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... to end, our eccentric author treats us to a dazzling flood of epigram, invective, and what appears to be argument; and finally leaves us without a single clear idea as to what ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... try to stem Dulac's invective. He was not angered by it, nor was he hurt by it.... He waited for it to subside, and with a certain dignity that sat well on his young shoulders. Generations of ancestors trained in the restraints were with him this night, and stood him ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... Minnesota championed the farmers' cause, it is true, and in some States there was a fusion of party organizations; but men like Schurz and Trumbull held aloof from these radical movements, while Easterners like Godkin of the Nation met them with ridicule and invective. ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... chronicles the untimely and awful death of Mr. Brann with poignant regret, and tenders its condolence to his afflicted family. In many ways he won the admiration of the American people. He was a man of great mental endowments, and in the use of invective, often degenerating into billingsgate, he stood without a rival in American journalism. His mind was broad and he despised religious intolerance. As an American he loved the stars and stripes and was opposed to an Anglo- American alliance. He ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... customary in good society for tolerable performers to disavow all praises, (secretly yearning for more,) and to assail with invective their own artistic accomplishments. Here was a young lady who played well, and had the hardihood to acknowledge it. This rather took away my breath, and a vacuum began to come ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... friends, bound by a common bond of enmity against a certain New Light minister of the name of Lindsay, 'had a bitter black outcast,' and, in the words of Lockhart, 'abused each other coram populo with a fiery virulence of personal invective such as has long been banished from all popular assemblies.' This degrading spectacle of two priests ordained to preach the gospel of love, attacking each other with all the rancour of malice and uncharitableness, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... so well. And then, as he strikes, a relenting comes over him; he remembers old days with a sudden gush of fondness, and puts in a touch of scorn for his allies or himself. Coleridge may deserve a blow, but the applause of Coleridge's enemies awakes his self-reproach. His invective turns into panegyric, and he warms for a time into hearty admiration, which proves that his irritation arises from an excess, not from a defect, of sensibility; but finding that he has gone a little too far, he lets his praise slide into equivocal ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... that I had a tartar to deal with, but if I could switch her invective on some one absent, it would assist me in controlling myself. So I said to the old lady: "Why, I've known Mr. Lovelace now almost a year, and over on the Nueces he is well liked, and considered a cowman whose word is as good as gold. What have you ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... to deal with. It will therefore form the staple of my argument. The latter blends at so many points with medieval literature of the monastic kind, that it is chiefly distinguished by boldness of censure and sincerity of invective. In these qualities the serious poems of the Goliardi, emanating from a class of men who moved behind the scenes and yet were free to speak their thoughts, are unique. Written with the satirist's eye upon the object of his sarcasm, tinged with ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... abstract reasoning. Our history, recent and remote, affords many examples of the abandoning by our public men of a principle, to defend which they entered public life; and our action on such an occasion is invariably the same—to regard the delinquent as simply a traitor, to load him with invective and scorn and brand him for ever. We never see it is not innate wickedness in the man, but a weakness against which he has been untrained and undisciplined, and which leaves him helpless in the first crisis. Ireland has recently been incensed by the action of some of her mayors and lord mayors ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... wide difference in the ceremonial forms of retaliatory invective has practically disarmed this usually eloquent person, and he long since abandoned every hope of expressing himself with any satisfaction in encounters of however acrimonious a trend. At first, with an urbane smile ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... somewhat ineffective profanity. He had a wide vocabulary of invective, but most of it was of the stand-and-fight variety. There is some language which is not to be used, unless you are willing to have it out on the ground, there and then. Y.D. had no such desire. Possibly a curious sense of honor entered into the case. It was not fair to call a young man names, ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... the speaker did not allow him even time for the dissent and disapprobation which his republican maxims and fiery denunciations perpetually excited in a mind aristocratic both by creed and education. At length after a peroration of impetuous and magnificent invective, the orator ceased. ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Already the preaching and printing of Gilbert Tennent's "Nottingham Sermon" had made further fellowship between the two parties for the time impossible. The sermon flagrantly illustrated the worst characteristic of the revivalists—their censoriousness. It was a violent invective on "The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry," which so favorable a critic as Dr. Alexander has characterized as "one of the most severely abusive sermons which was ever penned." The answer to it came in a form that might have been expected. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... midst of Struve's flood of invective the girl's hand leaped quickly from the lap-robe. A cold muzzle pressed against his cheek brought the convict's outburst ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... who was a member of the Privy Council and a man of great influence, did his best to refute their evidence and to discredit them before the King.[834] Their entire report, he declared, was "a scandalous lible and invective of Sir William ... and the royal party in Virginia".[835] His brother's conduct had been always prudent and just, and it was noticeable that not one private grievance had ever been brought against him before this rebellion.[836] The meetings of Lord Berkeley ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... reputation for sobriety of thought, and makes himself impossible in posts of administration and trust. There is the parliamentary speaker who, amid shouts of applause, pursues his adversary with scathing invective or merciless ridicule, and who all the time is accumulating animosities against himself, shutting the door against combinations that would be all important to his career, and destroying his chances of party leadership. There is the ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... beating it as she advanced, close up to Lady Caroline, who, still stretched in her low chair, waited till she had done, and then turned her head and in the sweetest tones poured forth what appeared to be music but was really invective. ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... wrong or injury done to any one, it was enough to throw him into a frenzy; he would get black in the face and absolutely shriek out his denunciations of the wrongdoer. I do believe he would have visited his own brother with the most unsparing invective, if that brother had laid a harming finger on a street-beggar, or a colored man, or a poor person of any kind. I don't blame the feeling; though with a man like him, it was very apt to be a false or mistaken ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... four bays of the nave were finished, and a splendid beginning made to the west front that has perished utterly, and been replaced by the miserable monstrosity of a frigid and ill-proportioned "restoration." Seldom has that much-abused word so richly deserved all the invective that could be heaped upon it. By Lelieur's plan we know that in 1525 the western front of Cibo scarcely can be said to have existed. But it cannot have been long after the reign of Francis I. that Cibo's architect carried his west front between 40 and 50 metres high, because the crest and devices ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... whose authority I have the honor to act. The delicacy I have observed, in refraining from everything offensive in this way, entitles me to expect a similar treatment from you. I have not indulged myself in invective against the present rulers of Great Britain, in the course of our correspondence, nor will I even now avail myself of so fruitful ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... Hawe climbed astride his horse. His comrades followed suit. Certain it appeared that the sheriff was contending with more than fear and wrath. He must have had an irresistible impulse to fling more invective and threat upon Stewart, but he was speechless. Savagely he spurred his horse, and as it snorted and leaped he turned in his saddle, shaking his fist. His comrades led the way, with their horses clattering into a canter. They disappeared through ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... many things there are which we would never have done for our own sakes, but do for the sake of a friend! We submit to make requests from unworthy people, to descend even to supplication; to be sharper in invective, more violent in attack. Such actions are nut creditable in our own interests, but highly so in those of our friends. There are many advantages too which men of upright character voluntarily forego, or of which they are content to be deprived, that their friends may ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... done it in ignorance, but his explanation was cut short by a harangue loud and long. The stripling sat on his horse, my father stood before him with bowed head and folded arms, whilst a torrent of abuse poured over him, with a plentiful mixture of such terse and biting missiles of invective as greatly enrich the South African Dutch language. We stood around and remembered that only a few months before the man thus rated like a dog was standing before enthusiastic thousands in England, who hung with bated breath upon his utterances. ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... success, these two were the targets for the bitter invective or the envy of their competitors on the one hand, and, on the other, of the laudation of their friends and beneficiaries. Harsh statements were made as to the methods of both, but, in reality, if we but knew the truth, they were no worse than the other millionaires of the time except ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... mountains, trembling and moaning like a bruised and stricken thing. Lightning, playing across the inky heavens, blazed in constant sheets from end to end of the horizon. Its quivering glare turned the wild night into a kind of ghastly, uncertain day. Thunder, hoarse with invective, and hurled mercilessly back and forth by the fitful wind, drew farther and farther into the recess of the mountains, only to launch its anger against its own imprisoned echoes. Under it all the two refugees, high on the mountainside, looked down ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... Captain Stott, which was sent to the Falkland Islands, in consequence of the forcible seizure of them by the Spanish squadron. It is remarkable that this paltry dispute, which might be almost forgotten but for the virulent invective of "Junius," and the masterly defence of the Government by Dr. Johnson, should have given to the navy two such officers as Nelson and Pellew; neither of whom might otherwise have found an opportunity to join the service until they were too old, in the five years of peace which followed. ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... the shaking curtains came one volley of invective. It did not last long, but in kind and quality, in blistering, biting appropriateness, it was beyond anything that even Kim had heard. He could see the carter's bare chest collapse with amazement, as the man ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... ridiculous manner. He concluded that he was an ideot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson, as a very good man. To his great surprise, however, this figure stalked forwards to where he and Mr. Richardson were sitting, and all at once took up the argument, and burst out into an invective against George the Second, as one, who, upon all occasions was unrelenting and barbarous; mentioning many instances, particularly, that when an officer of high rank had been acquitted by a Court Martial, George the Second had with his own hand, struck his name ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... avenged himself by writing a satire full of stinging invective, which he caused to be transmitted to the favorite vizier who had instigated the sultan against him. It was carefully sealed up, with directions that it should be read to Mahmud on some occasion when his mind was perturbed with affairs of state, and his temper ruffled, as it was a poem likely ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... greater reluctance and greater repugnance than I have done through all my political life. There is no man more convinced that we could not have avoided it without national dishonor." That was the beginning of the most effective war speech since the start of hostilities. With scorn and logic and invective he raked the German position, and in a thrilling outburst invoked all that was honest, loyal, and strong in the British people to strike hard and deep on behalf of outraged Belgium. That was the first war speech of his life. The second was not long in following. It was ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... was informed by some person that the Empress Eudoxia had set Epiphanius against him. Being of a fiery temperament and of ready utterance, he soon after pronounced to the public an invective against women in general. The people readily took this as uttered indirectly against the Empress, and so the speech, laid hold of by evil-disposed persons, was brought to the knowledge of those in authority. At length the Empress, having been informed of it, immediately ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... regal; but her piety, charity, temperance, conjugal love, and whatever other virtues do best adorn a private life; wherein, without question or flattery, she hath no superior: yet, neither will it be satire or peevish invective to affirm, that infidelity and vice are not much diminished since her coming to the crown, nor will, in all probability, till some more effectual remedies ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... checked. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' and that title cannot be denied even to a florid youth. Still, as I was saying, people did not like it at the time, and the then Duke of Argyll said, in his place in the House of Lords, that if anybody so much as named him in an invective, he would first run him through the body, and then throw himself—not out of the window, as one was charitably hoping—but on a much softer place—the consideration of their Lordship's House. Some persons of quality, of less truculent ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... with a difficult question or in weakening the effect of an argument really unanswerable, a clear and musical voice, great ease and felicity of expression, and a wonderful command, always discreetly used, of all the weapons of irony and invective. He is, perhaps, the only nobleman in the House of Lords whom Lord Brougham has ever feared to encounter. All these elements of successful oratory Lord Lyndhurst has retained to an extraordinary degree until within ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... years has allowed Josef and Nina to remain in the house without paying any rent. Nina's Christian relatives use every form of deceit in their attempt to turn Anton against Nina. Nina's Aunt Sophie spews invective in every direction. She tells Nina, "Impudent girl!—brazen-faced, impudent, bad girl! Do you not know that you would bring disgrace upon us all?" To Nina's father she says, "Tell me that at once, Josef, that I may know. Has she your sanction ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... bitterly, almost amongst strangers and another generation. This sense of desolation may account for the acrimony which too much disfigures his writings henceforward. Between 1732 and 1740, he was chiefly engaged in satires, which uniformly speak a high moral tone in the midst of personal invective; or in poems directly philosophical, which almost as uniformly speak the bitter tone of satire in the midst of dispassionate ethics. His Essay on Man was but one link in a general course which he had projected of ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... before every paragraph of invective, like a prelude and refrain. "You, you, you!" and she fairly hurled the words at Carroll—"you, you, you! gettin' my man"—with a fierce backward lunge of her bare right elbow towards her husband, who shrank ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... John Fiske the struggle has continued, and still continues—the Three Hundred Years' War for intellectual freedom in dealing with natural phenomena. It has been a conflict against ignorance, tradition, and vested interests in church and university, with all that preposterous invective and cruel misrepresentation which characterize the fight against new and critical ideas. Those who cried out against scientific discoveries did so in the name of God, of man's dignity, and of holy religion and morality. Finally, however, it has come about that our instruction in the natural ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... would not sit tamely by, and see the leading idea of the Anglican Church thrown to the winds, her via media profaned, her park made a common, and her distinctive doctrines and fences levelled to the ground. What their feelings were, may be gathered from this indignant invective: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... concerned about religious questions, but "there were limits." The problem was how to rouse the Lord without rousing O'Flynn—a piece of negotiation so delicate, calling for a skill in pious invective so infinitely absorbing to Mac's particular cast of mind, that he was quickly stone-blind and ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... This invective against the bourgeoisie was uttered in a tone of heated conviction which could scarcely fail ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... Horace Walpole; and Walpole, who regarded politics in a personal light, exercised an unfortunate influence upon him. Barre, who had served with distinction in Canada, was a coarse man, eloquent, and feared by his opponents on account of his remarkable power of invective. He sat for one of Shelburne's boroughs, and believing himself slighted by Pitt, attacked him vehemently in the house on his resignation of office. As a supporter of Bute he was appointed adjutant-general and governor of Stirling, posts ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... learning—Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar—meet us in these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric "thick and slab." The whole epistle ends in a long-drawn peroration of invective against "that excrement in human shape," who had had the ill-luck, by pretence to scholarship, by big gains from the Papal treasury, by something in his manners alien from the easy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse the rancour ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... situation in voluble Yiddish, and made Esther wince again under the impassioned invective on her clumsiness. The old beldame expended enough oriental metaphor on the accident to fit up a minor poet. If the family died of starvation, their blood would ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... him a free pardon for a female convict for life, who had never landed from the Glatton, to enable her to cohabit with him on his passage home, I might, in that case, have avoided much of his insults here and his calumnious invective in England; but after refusing, as my bounden duty required, to comply to his unwarrantable demands, which, if granted, must have very justly drawn on me your lordship's censure and displeasure, with the merited reproach ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... rarely attacked. Ollier's writings were always hasty and he rarely took the time to polish them, while Bruil's style was more smooth and uniform. Ollier's style, however, was easy and original. He replied effectively to the invective of his enemies in prose and in verse. He seems to have had no difficulty in the composition of his sentences nor did he take the pains which would seem to be necessary for the average man to acquire the finished journalistic ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... and essential difference which separates her from them lies, primarily not in any special dogma, but in the authority on which all her dogmas rest. Protestants, basing their religion on the Bible solely, have conceived that Catholics of course profess to do so likewise; and have covered them with invective for being traitors to their supposed profession. But the Church's primary doctrine is her own perpetual infallibility. She is inspired, she declares, by the same Spirit that inspired the Bible; and her voice is, equally with the Bible, the voice ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... out by a pinnace to a trawler, and by that to the hospital ship, where the cases were sorted out. When once they had left the beach, our knowledge of them ceased, and of course our responsibility. One man arriving at the hospital ship was describing, with the usual picturesque invective, how the bullet had got into his shoulder. One of the officers, who apparently was unacquainted with the Australian vocabulary, said: "What was that you said, my man?" The reply came, "A blightah ovah theah put ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... instance the third canto of the Inferno, and the sixth of the Purgatorio, as passages incomparable in their kind. The merit of the latter is, perhaps, rather oratorical than poetical; nor can I recollect anything in the great Athenian speeches which equals it in force of invective and bitterness of sarcasm. I have heard the most eloquent statesman of the age remark that, next to Demosthenes, Dante is the writer who ought to be most attentively studied by every man who desires to ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... out-Heroding their own, a compound of oaths and obscenities. The Pere Duchesne was nearly always in a state of grande joie or of grande colere, and at the epoch we have reached his anger is being continuously poured out, the filthiest stream of invective conceivable, against the Girondins. ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... proportions of his argument. Of humor he had none; but his wit and sarcasm at times would glitter like the brandished cimeter of Saladin, and, descending, would cut as keenly. The pathetic he never attempted; but when angered by a malicious assault his invective was consuming, and his epithets would wound like pellets of lead. Although gallant to the graces of expression, he always compelled his rhetoric to act ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... tune in Christ Church, Dublin, the Deputy, the Archbishop, and the Mayor of the city assisting. Browne preached from the text: "Open mine eyes that I may see the wonders of the law" —a sermon chiefly remarkable for its fierce invective against the new ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... towards the end of 1770, in the Juno, Captain Stott, which was sent to the Falkland Islands, in consequence of the forcible seizure of them by the Spanish squadron. It is remarkable that this paltry dispute, which might be almost forgotten but for the virulent invective of "Junius," and the masterly defence of the Government by Dr. Johnson, should have given to the navy two such officers as Nelson and Pellew; neither of whom might otherwise have found an opportunity to join the service until they were too old, in the ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... came towards her, his eyes glaring, and a burst of invective on his white lips. Then he made a rush for a heavy stick that leant ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... first impressions from my later direct knowledge. I do remember that I was at once impressed with the feeling that here was a political leader whose methods differed from those of any politician to whom I had listened. His contentions were based not upon invective or abuse of "the other fellow," but purely on considerations of justice, on that everlasting principle that what is just, and only what is just, represents the largest and highest interests of the nation ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... when Mr. Lincoln—after having escaped assassination from the "Chivalry" of Maryland, and after having been subjected to a virulence of invective such as no other President had incurred—arrived at Washington, his mind was utterly unaffected by the illusions of passion. His Inaugural Message was eminently moderate. The Slave Power, having failed to delude or bully Congress, or to intimidate the people,—having ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... the wide difference in the ceremonial forms of retaliatory invective has practically disarmed this usually eloquent person, and he long since abandoned every hope of expressing himself with any satisfaction in encounters of however acrimonious a trend. At first, with an urbane smile and gestures of dignified contempt, he impugned the authenticity ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... Commons. It was little for one honourable gentleman to give another honourable gentleman the lie direct before the eyes of the country. The honourable gentlemen descended—or, as they thought, ascended—to the most vehement invective, and such was at times the torrent of personal abuse which parties heaped on one another, while good-natured John Bull looked on and smiled at his rulers, that, as in the United States of to-day, a debate was often the prelude to a duel. Pitt ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... vigorous poetic invective; and the effect of such outbursts is heightened by the rapid subsidence of the passion that inspires them and the quick advent of a calmer mood. We have hardly turned the page ere denunciations of Catherine and ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... decided talent, the best and most loving side of Macaulay's nature was made manifest at home. His bubbling wit, brilliant conversation, and good-cheer were for his own fireside, first; and all that cutting, critical, scathing flood of invective was for the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... place among menials? It is enough to make my poor brother rise in his grave, and your poor, dear mother too, to think of a Fenton stooping to such degradation." But I will forbear to transcribe all the wordy avalanche of lady-like invective that was hurled at me, accompanied by much ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... divinity, as only the very few in any age have done. But this "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," was also he whose blazing words against established iniquity and hypocrisy constitute him the supreme exemplar not only of love but of moral indignation, and of a sublime invective which has been equalled not even by Dante at his highest. We forget, perhaps, when we use such a phrase as "whited sepulchre," that we are quoting the untamable fierceness, the courage, fatal and vital, of the "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," who was murdered not for loving children, but for hating ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... This sense of desolation may account for the acrimony which too much disfigures his writings henceforward. Between 1732 and 1740, he was chiefly engaged in satires, which uniformly speak a high moral tone in the midst of personal invective; or in poems directly philosophical, which almost as uniformly speak the bitter tone of satire in the midst of dispassionate ethics. His Essay on Man was but one link in a general course which he had projected of moral philosophy, here and there pursuing his themes into ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... logic and the accurate knowledge of Chase, nor the lofty invective of Sumner, nor the smooth eloquence of Everett, nor Seward's rare combination of political adroitness with an alertness to moral forces, matched, in hand to hand debate, the keen-mindedness, the marvelous readiness, and the headlong ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... regiment bristles with bayonets, so bristled his speech with facts, which thrust through and through with the merciless truth of history the arrogance and pretentions of the South. His sarcasm was terrific. His invective had the ferocity of a panther. He upon whom it sprang had his quivering flesh torn away. It was not in human nature to suffer such lacerations of the feelings and forgive and forget the author of them. The slave leaders did not forgive Sumner, ...
— Charles Sumner Centenary - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 14 • Archibald H. Grimke
... moments later Mr. Arnot broke out anew with muttered complaint and invective, as he heard the ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... been nice to me," Adelle protested lamely, feeling that in her invective Pussy was reflecting upon ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... any one, it was enough to throw him into a frenzy; he would get black in the face and absolutely shriek out his denunciations of the wrongdoer. I do believe he would have visited his own brother with the most unsparing invective, if that brother had laid a harming finger on a street-beggar, or a colored man, or a poor person of any kind. I don't blame the feeling; though with a man like him, it was very apt to be a false or mistaken one; ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... deportment, gentle in language, he attracted from his dependants a loyalty that knew no limits, and from his friends a devotion that did not even shrink from death on his behalf. Even in his pure and polished oratory passion revealed itself chiefly in appeals to pity, not in the harsher forms of invective or of scorn. His mode of life was simple and restrained, but apparently with none of the pedantic austerity of the stoic. In an age that was becoming dissolute and frivolous he was moral and somewhat serious.[311] ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... very idea of qualifying the absolute cession of Hanover was an afterthought, lay hidden in the conscience of the Prussian Cabinet. Never had a Government more completely placed itself at the mercy of a pitiless enemy. Count Haugwitz, on reaching Paris, was received by Napoleon with a storm of invective against the supposed partisans of England at the Prussian Court. Napoleon declared that the ill faith of Prussia had made an end even of that miserable pact which had been extorted after Austerlitz, and insisted that King Frederick ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... cultivated in the practice of affairs. The most respectable personages were obliged to mix with the crowd, and derived their degree of ascendancy only from their conduct, their eloquence, and personal vigour. They had no forms of expression, to mark a ceremonious and guarded respect. Invective proceeded to railing, and the grossest terms were often employed by the most admired and accomplished orators. Quarrelling had no rules but the immediate dictates of passion, which ended in words of reproach, in violence and blows. They ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... see if I don't—and I'll have my own, too, or I wouldn't give that for the laws!" shouted Mrs. Squallop, again furiously snapping her fingers in his face; and then pausing for breath after her eloquent invective. ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... contrast presented by Cecil and Russell irritated the father, and hence his settled dislike of the latter. The faithful discharge of duty on the part of the clerk afforded no plausible occasion for invective; he felt that he was narrowly watched, and resolved to give no ground for fault-finding; yet during the long summer days, when the intense heat prevented customers from thronging the store, and there ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... attention, and examine with candour the arguments we make use of in favour of our Church views. We should gain more of the sympathy of our countrymen who differ from us, by a calm expostulation than by bitter invective. Beautifully and wisely was it written by a sacred pen nearly three thousand years ago, "A soft answer turneth ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... reproach of impiety; la Princesse d'Elide and l'Amour medecin were but charming interludes in the great struggle henceforth instituted between reality and appearance. In 1666, Moliere produced le Misanthrope, a frank and noble spirit's sublime invective against the frivolity, perfidious and showy semblances of court. "This misanthrope's despitefulness against bad verses was copied from me; Moliere himself confessed as much to me many a time," wrote Boileau one day. The indignation of Alceste is ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the hole. But scarcely was the thought formed, when a fierce rumbling clatter sounded in the bank. The mink shot out, a streak of red showing plainly across his brown face. After him came a kingfisher clattering out a storm of invective and aiding his progress by vicious jabs at his rear. He had made a miscalculation that time; the old mother bird was at home waiting for him, and drove her powerful beak at his evil eye the moment it appeared at the inner end of the tunnel. That took ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... poured forth in a torrent of invective against the populace. She clenched the railing of the balcony so fiercely as to break her nails; the two stone lions at her back seemed to bite her shoulders and join their ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... kicking up the freshly disturbed earth among the workers and sending them scurrying to various points of safety. In an instant the crossing was deserted, and work had been stopped, while from the top of the adjacent lumber-pile the Black Minorca poured a stream of lead and filthy invective at every point which he suspected of harbouring a ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... eminently proper on a boat, he affected nautical manners and nautical ways. But his vernacular savored so hopelessly of the track and stall that he had been able to acquire no mastery over the art of marine invective. And he possessed not so much as one maritime oath. As soon as we had swung clear of the cove he made for the weather stays, where he assumed a posture not unlike that in the famous picture of Farragut ascending Mobile Bay. His leather case was swung over his shoulder, and with his glasses ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sporting contests; little fitted to conciliate opponents, but eminently fitted to win the enthusiastic loyalty of his followers, to rally a dispirited minority, to lead a party attack. His keen and rapid judgment; his perfect command of pure and lucid English; his unfailing readiness in argument, invective, sarcasm, and repartee; his indomitable courage, and the somewhat imperious dignity of his manner, all marked him out for the position which he held. If there was some truth in the common taunt that he was more a party leader ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and our poet, the jealousy and envy of his great fame and endowments, and, as some say, the resentment of the female part of Athens, subjected him to a degree of ridicule and rancorous invective, which induced him to leave Athens; when he went into Macedonia, and lived at the court of king Archelaus, who considered it an honour to patronise such a great poet, bestowing upon him the most ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... saying that the tone of that special paper is juedisch. The modern campaign against Jews began nearly thirty years ago, when a Court chaplain called Stoecker startled the world by the violence of his invective. But the fire he stirred to flame must have been smouldering. He and his followers gave the most ingenuous reasons for curtailing Jewish rights and privileges in Germany, one of which was the provoking fact ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... and that her appearance of fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blonde hair swept away in a clean line from her forehead. For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitues of Old Red Front ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... and Munatius, the most intimate of all, he put into a state of resentment that was well nigh past cure; so that when Caesar was writing his book against Cato, this passage in the charges against him furnished matter for the most bitter invective. ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... not understanding the terms of her invective, had sat up on his haunches and turned his one eye mildly upon the bristling tufts of grey hair which formed a sort of halo around Mrs. Gammit's virginal nightcap. Then Mrs. Gammit, realizing that the time for action was come, had rushed downstairs to the kitchen, seized the first weapon she could ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... State paper to the courts of Europe. The style and manner are praised by Beaumarchais himself, who, in his private quarrel, attempted a reply; but he flatters me, by ascribing the memoir to Lord Stormont; and the grossness of his invective betrays the loss of temper and of wit; he acknowledged, Oeuv. de Beaumarchais, iii. 299, 355, that le style ne seroit pas sans grace, ni la logique sans justesse, &c. if the facts were true which he undertakes to disprove. For these facts my credit is not pledged; I spoke as ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... being somewhat dissatisfied with the result of their performances, afterward rendered my friend's position on the hurricane deck one of extreme peril and inconvenience, by reason of skilfully projected oranges and apples, accompanied with some invective. Yet there is certainly something to interest us in the examination of that cheerless damp closet, whose painted wooden walls no furniture or company can make habitable, wherein our friend is to spend so many vapid days ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... party, and forcible and ironical in debate, Jefferson Davis stood at the head of the disaffected in the Senate, as he now does in the field. Cautious and deliberate in speech, he yet never failed to launch out in strong invective, and to make effective use of irony in his attacks. He is in personal appearance, rather small and thin, with a refined and decidedly intellectual countenance, and a not unamiable expression. His health ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... little man with the tantrums of a dozen prima donnas, a temperamental tyrant who, at the dropping of a stitch in the orchestral knitting, tore his hair, screamed at the top of his inexhaustible Latin lungs, doused his trembling players with streams of blistering invective. ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... listening between submission and embarrassment; while beside the nearer fireplace, but at some distance from him, lounged a nobleman, very richly dressed, and wearing on his breast the Cross of the Holy Ghost; who seemed to be the object of his invective, but affecting to ignore it was engaged in conversation with a companion. A bystander muttering that Crillon had been drinking, I discovered with immense surprise that the declaimer on the table was that famous soldier; and I was still looking ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... on the stair-case from a strong smell of morocco leather. In vain he shows me fine editions, gold leaves, Etruscan bindings, &c.—naming them one after another, as if he were showing a gallery of pictures!" Lucian has composed a biting invective against an ignorant possessor of a vast library. "One who opens his eyes, with an hideous stare, at an old book, and, after turning over the pages, chiefly admires the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... loose in a turbid stream of profanity. It boiled from his lips like molten lava from a crater. The raucous words poured forth from a heart furious with rage. The man was beside himself. He raved like a madman—and the object of his invective was Stephen Yeager. ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... of the beautiful words there cut from time to time De Courtenay's voice, cool, contemptuous, a running fire of invective, now in French, now in English, and again in the Assiniboine tongue, which was familiar to the Nakonkirhirinons, they being ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... Invective made by Montaigny upon the Antipodean, Who said they must be Thieves that pulled on their breeches when Honest Folk were scarce abed. So is it Obnoxious to them that purvey Christmas Numbers, Annuals, and the like, that they commonly write under Sirius his ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... suddenly on his back, upon the grass plot before the hall door, to his eternal disgrace, when he 'offered' to kiss her, while the fiddler and tambourine-man were playing. She used to wring big boys by the ears; overawe fishwives with her voluble invective; put dangerous dogs to rout with sticks and stones, and evince, in all emergencies, an adventurous spirit and an alacrity ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... given from St. Mary's pulpit last autumn to the youth of Oxford, by the good Bishop of Carlisle, his Lordship took occasion to warn his eagerly attentive audience, with deep earnestness, against the crime of debt; dwelling with powerful invective on the cruelty and selfishness with which, too often, the son wasted in his follies the fruits of his father's labor, or the means of his family's subsistence; and involved himself in embarrassments which, said the Bishop, "I ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... went on discussing clearly, logically and deeply, all the issues of the Civil War; the attitude, responsibilities and influences of California, particularly San Francisco. He made no great emotional appeals; he dealt in no impassioned oratory nor invective. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... something he had never done before. He swore, with a depth of feeling and a range of language to be equalled only by a lumberjack. Matt Peasley waited until he subsided for lack of new invective and then said reproachfully: ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... the Angevin dynasty; he lived to draw the most terrible picture extant of their lives and characters. During his lifetime he never ceased to inveigh against Archbishop Hubert Walter; after his death he repented and recanted. His invective was sometimes coarse, and his abuse was always virulent. He was not over-scrupulous in his methods of controversy; but no one can rise from a reading of his works without a feeling of liking for the vivacious, cultured, impulsive, humorous, irrepressible Welshman. ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... once was a mystery. Perhaps they were being reserved for an even more terrible fate than that of the hunchback. They were being carried along a dim-lit passage now, and Tom was cursing his captors in a never-ending stream of invective. ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... conservative. Afterwards Garibaldi got up—at first he tried to make out the statistics and particulars which he had on paper, but blinded by passion and by fever, he threw down his notes and launched into a fierce invective against 'the man who had made him a foreigner in his own birthplace and the government which was driving the country straight into civil war.' At the words 'civil war' Cavour sprang to his feet, unwontedly moved, and uttered some expressions ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... been magnetized by the inimitable wit and wisdom of that marvelous man, and their hearts had drawn heroic courage from his heart. Others still had been captivated by the boyish and unstudied drollery of Walter Scott, only to be swept away by a whirlwind of passionate appeal and terrible invective, or to be melted with the tenderness of his portrayal of the love of Jesus. And all these came to Kansas bearing a great cause in their hearts, and determined to build up here such churches as they had left behind them. But this was not all. Here ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... physically speaking, when the brains are out the man does honestly die, and trouble you no more. But how different when it is with arguments you fight! Here no victory yet definable can be considered as final. Beat him down, with Parliamentary invective, till sense be fled; cut him in two, hanging one half in this dilemma-horn, the other on that; blow the brains or thinking-faculty quite out of him for the time: it skills not; he rallies and revives on the morrow; to-morrow he repairs his golden ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... him!" rose in all directions. One resolution after another was offered looking toward his expulsion or censure, and it was not until February 9, three days later, that he was able to take the floor in his own defense. His speech was a masterpiece of argument, invective, and sarcasm. He showed, among other things, that he had not offered the petition, but had only asked the opinion of the Speaker upon it, and that the petition itself prayed that slavery should not be abolished. When he closed ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... stated, his intellection is slow, when unexcited, it is most prompt and rapid when he is thoroughly aroused.{17} Memory, logic, wit, sarcasm, invective pathos and bold imagery of rare structural beauty, well up as from a copious fountain, yet each in its proper place, and contributing to form a whole, grand in itself, yet complete in the minutest proportions. It is most difficult ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... excited some hostility against him, especially on the part of the monks who did not belong to his order—that of the Dominicans. He had poured such bitter invective both in his books and in his sermons upon the vices of the Popes and the Cardinals, that they too formed a powerful party in league against him. In addition the friends of the Medicis resented the overthrow ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... beneath the cold scorn of his antagonist, surprised that another man should dare to use his methods of invective. ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... daughter was frenzied. She detested Sir John Villiers, and she implored her parents never again to mention the question of her marrying him. The mother and daughter were on one side and the father on the other; neither would yield an inch, and Hatton House, Holborn, became the scene of violent invective and bitter weeping. ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... employers were awaiting his services was received by the chauffeur with a volley of invective, which dealt more particularly with Mrs. Slumper's pedigree, but touched lightly upon a whole variety of subjects, including the ultimate destination of all composers and the uses ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... purest principles which I know; and I lament to find my judgment so extremely in opposition. To me it seems that inability to refrain shows weakness, not power, of soul, and that nothing is easier than to give vent to violent invective against bad rulers. The last sentence quoted, seems to say, that the speaking of Truth is never to be condemned: but I cannot agree to this. When Truth will only exasperate, and cannot do good, silence is imperative. ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... is a rebuke—sinks into the heart and convinces the judgment; an enemy's or stranger's rebuke is invective and irritates—not converts. The great vice of the new prisons is general self-deception varied by downright calculating hypocrisy. A shallow zealot like Mr. Lepel is sure to drive the prisoners into one or other of these. ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... Phoebe; hog every new girl that comes along!" amiably bawled a bright-faced, tidy young woman who answered to the name of Mrs. Smith. Mrs. Smith worked briskly as she talked, and the burden of her conversation appeared to be the heaping of this sort of good-natured invective upon the head of her chum—or, as she termed it, her "lady-friend," Phoebe. The amiability with which Mrs. Smith dealt out her epithets was only equaled by the perfect good nature of her victim, who replied to each and all of them with a musically ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... churchyard. His predecessor used to hang out his washing on the tombstones to dry, but then he was a person entirely lost to all sense of decency, and had finally to be removed, preaching a farewell sermon of a most vituperative description, and hurling invective at the Man of Wrath, who sat up in his box drinking in every word and enjoying himself thoroughly. The Man of Wrath likes novelty, and such a sermon had never been heard before. It is spoken of in the village to this day with bated breath and ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... been gathering his voice for wild invective, but that last statement took away all his power ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... and begged her to beware how far she encouraged the advances of such a man as M. de La Tour d'Azyr, she became roundly abusive. She shocked and stunned him by her virulently shrewish tone, and her still more unexpected force of invective. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... for the good of her own soul, and that the Church might not suffer by her sin; a heretic, a blasphemer, an impostor, giving forth false fables at one time, and making a false penitence the next. It is very unlikely that she heard anything of that flood of invective. At the end of the sermon the preacher bade her "Go in peace." Even then, however, the fountain of abuse did not cease. The Bishop himself rose, and once more by way of exhorting her to a final repentance, heaped ill names upon her helpless head. The narrative shows that the ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... cause. In his tract on the Falkland Islands, the materials for which were furnished him by Government, he appears to have much the better of the argument; for he has to shew the folly of involving the nation in a war for a questionable right, and a possession of doubtful advantage; but his invective against his opponents is very coarse; he does not perform the work of dissection neatly: he mangles rather than cuts. When he applies the word "gabble" to the elocution of Chatham, we are tempted to compare him to one of the baser fowl, spoken of by an ancient ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... of O'Connell's biographers that he never prepared his addresses to judges or juries—he trusted to the inspiration of the moment. He had at command humour and pathos, invective and argument; he was quick-witted and astonishingly ready in repartee, and he brought all these into play, as he found them serviceable in influencing the bench ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... passionate invective it is fair to set this remarkable letter of Cassiodorus, written it is true in the young King's name and presenting the Court view of these transactions, but still written after the death of Theodoric, and perhaps republished by Cassiodorus in the 'Variarum' ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... grounding his partisanship on the close similarity of handwriting established by careful comparison of facsimiles; the likeness of the style of Sir Philip's speeches in Parliament to that of Junius—biting, pithy, full of antithesis and invective; the tenderness and bitterness displayed by Junius towards persons to whom Sir Philip stood well or ill affected; the correspondence of the dates of the letters with those of certain movements of Sir Philip; and the evidence of Junius' close acquaintance with the War Office, where Sir Philip ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... to contain. By another, the ignorance and vices of the sacerdotal order, their mutual dissensions and persecutions, their usurpations and encroachments upon the intellectual liberty and civil rights of mankind, have been displayed with no small triumph and invective; not so much to guard the Christian laity against a repetition of the same injuries (which is the only proper use to be made of the most flagrant examples of the past,) as to prepare the way for an insinuation, that the religion itself is nothing but a profitable ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... nobleness of Pierre Philibert is almost beyond the range of fallible mortals," said the Lady de Tilly. "In the sudden crash of all his hopes he would not utter a word of invective against your brother. His heart tells him that Le Gardeur has been made the senseless instrument of others ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... authorship—meditating a translation of "Father Paul's History," which was never executed—writing in the Gentleman's Magazine lives of Boeerhaave and Father Paul, &c., &c., &c.—and published separately "Marmor Norfolciense," a disguised invective against Sir Robert Walpole, the obnoxious premier of the day. About this time he became intimate with the notorious Richard Savage, and with him spent too many of his private hours. Both were poor, both proud, both patriotic, both ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... just the question he wanted; and partly from design, and partly from irrepressible indignation, he poured out a torrent of invective and reproach which soon sent his visitor away, perfectly convinced that the spirit they had undertaken to break had not yet begun ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... topic, I innocently inquired what he thought of the Negro Emancipation Bill which Mr. Stanley, as the organ of the ministry, had introduced a few evenings previously? and was rewarded by a perfect deluge of loquacious indignation and invective—during a pause in which hurly-burly of angry words I contrived to ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... persons who desire on the whole to be fair in their judgments, but who must have their duty made quite evident before they see it. Defoe is never vituperative—that is, vituperative for a time when Pope and Swift and Dennis made their personal invective so much higher flavored than modern taste endures. He seems to have been tolerant by nature; and although this proceeds in his case from the fact that his moral enthusiasm was never very warm, and not from any ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... private affairs were dragged into the political arena, and family and domestic matters, that had nothing whatever to do with public life, were paraded before the world. Bitter personalities and invective seem to be inseparable concomitants of the early stage of journalism in all countries. This was the case in France and Germany; it is the case in Russia at the present day. That it was the case in America, let the following extract from ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... acquaintance with both schools of law, his impassioned and versatile eloquence, his ready repartee, his habitual, grim and grotesque humour, his outrageous sallies of wit, his unmerciful logic, his fierce invective, his irony, his sarcasm, and his deep, irresistible scorn, all heightened by his singularly expressive personal presence, and eyes kindling with lambent fire, made him a forensic antagonist with whom few willingly chose ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... this storm of invective and bitter reproach, walked slowly towards the house. Her ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... applicable to himself. "I, too," he said, "am a neglected book gnawed by the moth," "a stream dammed up with mud," "a Phalaris, clapped, for nothing in particular, into the belly of a brazen bull." Like Ovid, too, he could and did pronounce his invective against the Ibis, the cause of all his troubles, that is to say, Rashid Pasha, whose very name was as gall and wormwood. His fate, indeed, was a hard one. The first linguist of his day, for he spoke twenty-eight languages and dialects, he found himself relegated ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... good result for Timar that Herr Brazovics flew into a rage, and in order to show that he was master in his own house, seized the pen and signed the power of attorney. But when he had given it, both fell on Timar, and overwhelmed him with such a flood of reproaches and invective, that he would willingly have taken yet another bath in the Danube to wash them away. Frau Sophie only scolded Timar indirectly, as she abused her husband for giving such a ragged, dirty fellow, such a tipsy, beggarly scoundrel, a ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... so far succeeded that for some time I gave it up for lost; and to follow their blows, in the publick papers of the next day it was attack'd and triumph'd over as a dead and damn'd piece: a swinging criticism was made upon it in general invective terms, for they disdain'd to trouble the world with particulars; their sentence, it seems, was proof enough of its deserving the fate it had met with. But this damn'd play was, notwithstanding, acted twenty-eight nights together, and left off at a receipt ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... change the domestic institutions of existing States. To accomplish their objects they dedicate themselves to the odious task of depreciating the government organization which stands in their way and of calumniating with indiscriminate invective not only the citizens of particular States with whose laws they find fault, but all others of their fellow citizens throughout the country who do not participate with them in their assaults upon the Constitution, framed and adopted by ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... becoming still more strongly engaged on the side which he had already espoused, he published a work on the unity of the church, in which the conduct of his sovereign and benefactor became the topic of his vehement invective. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the dramatic lampoon to an art, and make out of a casual burlesque and bit of mimicry a dramatic satire of literary pretensions and permanency. With the arrogant attitude mentioned above and his uncommon eloquence in scorn, vituperation, and invective, it is no wonder that Jonson soon involved himself in literary and even personal quarrels with his fellow-authors. The circumstances of the origin of this 'poetomachia' are far from clear, and those who have written on ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... he knew that he had been hearing another sound, hearing it often and long at a time. It was a voice that shouted invective and ranted hatred and glorified the steel might of his planet and the destiny of a man ...
— Happy Ending • Fredric Brown
... of accuracy, or possibly because an outrage committed against a Greek poet was to him the most horrid of all outrages; but anyhow, during these studies, he altogether laid aside that restraint which he was usually so jealous to maintain over his powers of sarcasm and invective. He lay on the study sofa while the lesson was going on, with a Tauchnitz Euripides in his hand; but sometimes, when a false quantity or a more than usually stupid grammatical blunder was made, he would spring ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... I might not see by reason of the crowd, but I heard the voice of Mings upraised in fierce invective, and the throng presently parting, beheld him trussed hand and foot and dragged along with Tressady towards Bartlemy's tree. There a noose was set about the neck of each, and the rope's ends cast over a branch. But as at Adam's command these miserable ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... us like to be thought well of. None of us wish to be looked upon as objects of repugnance. Anyhow, I was in no pleasant frame of mind, and I had hard work to keep from bursting out with some strong invective against my brother, but I held my tongue and waited for her ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... of bitter invective and false accusations. He had been stirring up the people against the Roman government, they said. He had been forbidding them to pay tribute to Caesar; ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... thoughts. But the voice of D'Aulney again sounded in his ears, and renewed the strife of bitter feelings, which had been so briefly calmed. His cheek glowed with deeper resentment, and it required a powerful effort of self-command to repress the invective that trembled on his lips, but which, he felt, it would be more than useless to indulge. He entered his prison, therefore, in silence; and, with gloomy immobility, listened to the heavy sound of the bolts, which secured ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... parts of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest circumstances with a sort of relish and retrospective fondness. But so near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions, which in his unregenerate state served but to inflame his appetites, in his ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... speech from him, whom everybody knew to be remarkably reliable and keen, made a profound impression upon most of the Isbel faction. But, to Jean's surprise, his father did not rave. It was Blaisdell who supplied the rage and invective. Bill Isbel, also, was strangely indifferent to this new element in the condition of cattle dealing. Suddenly Jean caught a vague flash of thought, as if he had intercepted the thought of another's mind, and he wondered—could his brother Bill ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... this speech he appears as a practised rhetorical bravo, whose one object is to vilify his opponents, and throw contempt on their arguments, by an unscrupulous use of the weapons of ridicule, calumny, and invective. He reproaches the magistrates for convening a second assembly, in a matter which had already been decided; and this was, in fact, strictly speaking, a breach of the constitution. He laughs at the Athenians as weak sentimentalists, always ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... The writer shows a talent for invective, but there is a good deal of evidence that he was well-read in other Pope attacks. The phrase, Pope's "Mountain Shoulders," (p. 5) recalls Pope's "Mountain Back" in The Difference Between Verbal and ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... of the self-styled Democratic party have not greatly reformed in the space of one year, but little argument will be adduced, but little gentlemanly courtesy manifested; and instead of facts, figures and arguments, bitter invective, low blackguardism, and Billingsgate abuse of secret organizations, dark lanterns, and Protestant clergymen, will be the order of the day. In this congenial work, all the conglomeration of ignorant men, foreign paupers, and fag-ends and factions, styling ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... time for the mildness of censure and the sobriety of reproach. I would utter myself in the fierce and unqualified language of invective. You have sinned beyond redemption. I would speak daggers. I would wring blood from your heart at every word. But no; I will not waste myself in angry words. I will not indulge to the bitterness of opprobrium. Nothing but the anguish of my soul should ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... the assumed name of a political writer who in 1769 began to issue in London a series of famous letters which opposed the ministry in power, and denounced several eminent persons with severe invective and ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... a fury of invective and denunciation, but Ray's hand restrained him. Still weak from his unhealed wound, from recent illness, from mental agitation and sleeplessness, Blake thought he never saw Ray so brave, so strong, as ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... agreement with the Puritan attacks made by the pulpit on the stage (arising chiefly from the fact that plays were then acted on Sundays), and in 1579 transferred his pen from service of the players to attack on them, in a piece which he called "The School of Abuse, containing a Pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth; setting up the Flag of Defiance to their mischievous exercise, and overthrowing their Bulwarks, by Profane ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... heard this remark, he at once burst out in a fit of his raving complaint, and unclasping the gem, he dashed it disdainfully on the floor. "Rare object, indeed!" he shouted, as he heaped invective on it; "it has no idea how to discriminate the excellent from the mean, among human beings; and do tell me, has it any perception or not? I too ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... outside suggestions from the Megarian farce and its Sicilian offshoot, the mythological court comedy of Epicharmus. The chief note of this older comedy for the ancient critics was its unbridled license of direct personal satire and invective. Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes, says Horace, assailed with the utmost freedom any one who deserved to be branded with infamy. This old political Comedy was succeeded in the calmer times that followed the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... into a torrent of invective against Comyn for his gross act of treachery in betraying him by sending to Edward a copy of ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... unpleasant intelligence to Washington, he added: "With such gloomy prospects as this letter affords I am tied here to be baited by continual clamorous demands; and for the forfeiture of all that is valuable in life, and which I hoped at this moment to enjoy, I am to be paid by invective. Scarce a day passes in which I am not tempted to give back into the hands of Congress the power they have delegated, and to lay down a burden which presses me to the earth. Nothing prevents me but a knowledge of the difficulties ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... Claude Quillet published a Latin poem in four books, entitled 'Callipaedia, seu de pulchrae prolis habenda ratione,' at Leyden, under the name of Calvidius Laetus, in 1655. In discussing unions harmonious and inharmonious he digressed into an invective against marriages of Powers, when not in accordance with certain conditions; and complained that France entered into such unions prolific only of ill, witness her gift of sovereign power to a ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... was returned, indulged in strong invective, and then decided upon measures certainly in themselves ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of their ancient foe aroused the Salariki, inflaming warriors who leaned across the table to hurl tongue-twisting invective at the captive monster. Dane gathered that seldom had a living gorp been delivered helpless into their hands and they proposed to make the most of this wonderful opportunity. And the Terran suddenly wished the monstrosity had fallen back into the sea. He had no soft thoughts ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... but his explanation was cut short by a harangue loud and long. The stripling sat on his horse, my father stood before him with bowed head and folded arms, whilst a torrent of abuse poured over him, with a plentiful mixture of such terse and biting missiles of invective as greatly enrich the South African Dutch language. We stood around and remembered that only a few months before the man thus rated like a dog was standing before enthusiastic thousands in England, who hung with bated breath upon his utterances. Something of shame must have arrested the wrath of ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane
... equally aware that her struggles were to no purpose; but she could not be equally patient. At one moment she raved upon the brutality of Mr. Tyrrel, whom she affirmed to be a devil incarnate, and not a man. At another she expostulated, with bitter invective, against the hardheartedness of the bailiff, and exhorted him to mix some humanity and moderation with the discharge of his function; but he was impenetrable to all she could urge. In the mean while Emily yielded with the sweetest ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... ungovernable disposition, her mad freaks and lawless character were in their way as proverbial as the story of her father's weaknesses, and as philosophically accepted by the townsfolk. She wrangled with and fought the schoolboys with keener invective and quite as powerful arm. She followed the trails with a woodman's craft, and the master had met her before, miles away, shoeless, stockingless, and bareheaded, on the mountain road. The miners' camps along the stream supplied her with subsistence during ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... Vindication of their Opinions," published by those witnesses, and Dr. Carson's "Remarks" on that publication, in which he exposes their shortcomings with a master's hand, in a style as terse as it is bold, and as elegant as it is severe; never were the weapons of irony, satire, and invective more effectively used; his impeachment is as withering as his victory at the trial was complete. The authors of the "Vindications" had not only done what in them lay to ruin him in every conceivable way, public and private, but they had exposed themselves to his "Remarks," ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... the little world in which he lived. His brow grew red, his lip grew pale, he set his teeth, he clenched his hand, and then with mechanical readiness grasped the weapon of which the clergyman had given so hideous a character; and at length, as the preacher heightened the colouring of his invective, he felt his rage become so ungovernable, that, fearful of being hurried into some deed of desperate violence, he rose up, traversed the chapel with hasty ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... few years before Shakespeare took hold of it, our information is full and clear, not only in the specimens that have survived, but in the criticisms of contemporary writers. A good deal of the criticism, however, is so mixed up with personal and polemical invective, as to be unworthy of much credit. George Whetstone, in the dedication of his Promos and Cassandra, published in 1578, tells us: "The Englishman in this quality is most vain, indiscreet, and out of order. He first grounds his work on impossibilities; then in three hours ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... made their heads into a sort of organ-pipe, so that their mouths should catch the wind and sound with its blowing. It was horrible. However brave a man might be, he could never stand such a concert, from such lips, and in such a place. I heaped every invective upon them that my tongue could utter as I rushed away from them into the mist, and even after I had lost sight of them, and turning my head round could see nothing but the storm-wraiths driving behind me, I heard their ghostly chanting, and felt as though one of them would rush after me and grip ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... I have reason for what I say, since we have often met together in familiar converse, and may the day be cursed on which you ever said any good about anybody on earth." How Michelangelo answered this intemperate and unjust invective is not known to us. In some way or other the quarrel between the two sculptors must have been made up—probably through a frank apology on Sansovino's part. When Michelangelo, in 1524, supplied the Duke of Sessa with a sketch for the sepulchral ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... the Doctor kindled an answering flame in the breasts of his youthful auditory. In five minutes hands, lungs, and feet were all at work. The youths before him awakened the hot, headlong youth still within him, and he launched forth upon a tirade of invective that was wild and reckless ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... concerned. Esmeralda, it is true, had surpassed herself in violence of diction in the letter which came in answer to the one breaking the news; but while Bridgie shed tears of distress, and Jack frowned impatience, the person against whom the hurricane of invective was hurled, received it with unruffled and ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... zeal and activity of the new reformers. In France, every man distinguished in letters was found in their ranks. Every year gave birth to works in which the fundamental principles of the Church were attacked with argument, invective, and ridicule. The Church made no defence, except by acts of power. Censures were pronounced; books were seized; insults were offered to the remains of infidel writers; but no Bossuet, no Pascal, came forth to encounter Voltaire. There appeared not a single defence of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... all Duncedom an everlasting monument of vengeance, and became at length so confident of his force, so collected in his might, that he made no secret whatever of his dreadful resolution, but, compounding all the materials of fun, sarcasm, irony, and invective, into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of Richmond Hill; and whilst the authors were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst and poured ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... are, though they would not so name themselves, gross materialists; and the tendency is increasing on them daily and yearly. Those who protest occasionally against current thought, who appear like prophets with bitter invective and words of warning on their lips, are swept away by the tide, and write of trade and treaties, of wars of principle and convenience. The very divines are tainted. 'Live your life to ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of a certain nobleman, who is continually railing against matrimony, and who makes a very indifferent husband to an obliging wife: I have known more men than one, said Sir Charles, inveigh against matrimony, when the invective would have proceeded with a much better grace from their wives' lips than from theirs. But let us inquire, would this complainer have been, or deserved to be, happier in any state, ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... every fact and detail, and trying the conclusions that had been drawn therefrom by the most rigorous and searching logic,—and then, assailing the credibility of the testimony brought forward to prove the habitual cruelty of his client, he gave utterance to a withering torrent of invective and sarcasm, in which the character of the main hostile witness shrivelled and blackened like paper in a flame. Then—having been eight hours on his feet—he began to avail himself of that last dangerous resource which genius only may use,—the final arrow ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... contained. The /Obelisks/ was prepared hastily and was not intended for publication, but it was regarded as so important that copies of it were circulated freely even before it was given to the world. Luther replied in the /Asterisks/, a work full of personal invective and abuse. A Dominican of Cologne, Hochstraten, also entered the lists against Luther, but his intervention did more harm than good to the cause of the Church by alienating the Humanist party whom ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
