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More "Knavery" Quotes from Famous Books
... heath; so that the country-people made no more question, but that the old lady walked with a candle in her hand, and that they saw the light of it; in a word, it passed for an apparition, and was generally conceived as such by the neighbourhood, till the knavery was discovered, the boys punished, and the towns-people laughed at ... — Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... "Honesty is the best policy;" and it is only by scrupulous honesty that enduring success can be obtained. Trickery and sharp practice may earn wealth rapidly, but depend upon it they have their reward; for it is a curious fact in the history of man that wealth acquired by knavery rarely stays with its possessors for more than a generation, ... — Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... this lord. There is something very fantastical in the distribution of civil power and capacity among men. The law certainly gives these persons into the ward and care of the Crown, because that is best able to protect them from injuries, and the impositions of craft and knavery; that the life of an idiot may not ruin the entail of a noble house, and his weakness may not frustrate the industry or capacity of the founder of his family. But when one of bright parts, as we say, with his eyes ... — The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... luxury. Spirituous liquors and intoxicating drugs are indulged in to a large extent, and chiefs of clans assume the title of Bhangi or drinkers of hemp (bhang) as a mark of honour.... In lying, thieving and knavery the Beria is not a whit inferior to his brother gipsy of Europe. The Beria woman deals in charms for exorcising the devil and palmistry is her special vocation. She also carries with her a bundle of herbs and other real or pretended charms against sickness of body or mind; ... — The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... and deep grievance in her heart as to what men thought of women, and as to the harshness of men, was stirred constantly by the remembrance of his irresolute looks, and his not having dared to speak nobly for Dahlia, even though he might have had, the knavery to think evil. As the case stood, there was still mischief to counteract. Her father had willingly swallowed a drug, but his suspicions only slumbered, and she could not instil her own vivid hopefulness and trust into him. ... — The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security—for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by their knavery. But damn ye altogether; damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and ye who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They villify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference: they rob the poor under cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under protection of our ... — History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... we've now to name our terms, But, whatsoe'er the whims that seize you, This oldest of all mortal firms, Folly and Co., will try to please you. Or, should you wish a darker hue Of goods than we can recommend you, Why then (as we with lawyers do) To Knavery's shop next door we'll send you. ... — The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Wild gave to it) so far exceeds that of all others, embracing, as it does, all in turn, that it has come to be considered the type of roguery in general; and now, just as all the political squibs were made to come of old from the lips of Pasquin, all the reflections on the prevailing cant, knavery, quackery, humbug, are put into the mouth of Monsieur ... — The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Folly and knavery were, for a time, completely in the ascendant. The sharpers of society were let loose, and jobbers and schemers became more and more plentiful. They threw out railway schemes as lures to catch the unwary. They fed the mania with a constant succession of new projects. The railway papers became ... — Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... if I say it myself, a superior woman. Her father, Captain Baltus Van Hoorn, had been a burgher of substance in old Dorp, until the knavery of a sea-captain who turned pirate with a ship owned by my grandfather drove the old gentleman into poverty and idleness. For years his younger daughter, my mother, kept watch over him, contrived by hook or by crook to collect his old credits outstanding, and maintained at least enough of ... — In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... but nothing ever corresponded less than their performances with their pretensions. The composition of the Government was radically defective, and with a good deal of loose talent there was so much of passion, folly, violence, and knavery, together with inexperience and ignorance mixed up with it, that from the very beginning they cut the sorriest possible figure. Such men as Richmond, Durham, Althorp, and Graham, in their different ways, were enough to spoil any Cabinet, and consequently their course has been marked ... — The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... exclusive subjects of his meditation. Just as Ben Jonson, who applied himself to the drama after having served in Flanders, fills his earliest plays with true or pretended soldiers, the wrongs and neglects of the former, and the absurd boasts and knavery of their counterfeits. So Lessing's first comedies are placed in the universities, and consist of events and characters ... — Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... for many years he had been keeping the tavern, and no one either of the peasants or of the gentry had ever made complaint against him to his landlord. Of what should they complain? He had good drinks to choose from; he kept his accounts strictly, but without any knavery; he did not forbid merriment, but would not endure drunkenness. He was a great lover of entertainments; at his tavern marriages and christenings were celebrated; every Sunday he had musicians come from the village, including ... — Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... faults of impression, they were owing to the knavery of a printer, who, when I had corrected the sheets, amused me with revised proofs, and never printed off the whole number, and then ran away. This accounts, too, for the difference of the ink in various sheets, and for some other blemishes; though there are still ... — The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... illustrates this contention, as well as the essential difference of the spirits animating the Diggers and their opponents, by relating how one of the Colonels of the Army told him—"That the Diggers did work upon Georges Hill for no other end than to draw a company of people into arms; and that our knavery was found out, because it takes not that effect": on which ... — The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... of the streets with Captain Galsworthy having been a mere parade, as I have related, and now I was in no mood to encounter them, having the trouble of my father's illness on my mind. But I perceived that they were engaged in wreaking their knavery upon the sign board of Nelly Hind, and my blood waxed hot at the thought of the poor woman's distress, and my fingers itched to strike a blow on ... — Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... and morasses to assail the Spaniards with their arrows, but were generally repelled without doing any harm, and some of them made prisoners, who, to regain their liberty, pretended to shew the passes to the Spaniards, and led them to such places as were not fit for the purpose. On their knavery being discovered, some of them were torn in pieces by the dogs, which so intimidated the rest, that at length one of them undertook to guide them, and very easily brought them into the ... — A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... trained in the school of good morals; and when people, brought up without the pale of the precepts of probity, are congenitally cursed with a greed for pelf and a legion of evil and rascally proclivities, they become easily pervious to the promptings of all sorts of knavery. ... — Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... instances, and Zacchias, Velchius, and Sinibaldus mention eases. Pare seemed to be well conversant with the possibility as well as the actuality of superfetation; and Harvey reports that a certain maid, gotten with child by her master, in order to hide her knavery came to London in September, where she lay in by stealth, and being recovered, returned home. In December of the same year she was unexpectedly delivered of another child, a product of superfetation, which proclaimed the crime that she ... — Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... Mr. Kingsley thinks it right to adopt. Observe this first:—He means by a man who is "silly" not a man who is to be pitied, but a man who is to be abhorred. He means a man who is not simply weak and incapable, but a moral leper; a man who, if not a knave, has everything bad about him except knavery; nay, rather, has together with every other worst vice, a spice of knavery to boot. His simpleton is one who has become such, in judgment for his having once been a knave. His simpleton is not a born fool, but a self-made idiot, one who has drugged and abused himself into a ... — Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... a young gentlewoman, uncertain if she loved him, was most utter folly. Also, for a penniless youth to sue a lady with a fortune, even though it was (the Brithwoods took care to publish the fact) smaller than was at first supposed—would, in the eye of the world's honour, be not very much unlike knavery. There ... — John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Pleasure heard the Sound of Battle, And oft return'd with Victory and Triumph; Yet I'm not fond to fight without just Cause, Or shed the Blood of Men for my Diversion; But I have seen, with my own Eyes I've seen, High Provocations from our present Foes, Their Pride and Insults, Knavery and Frauds, Their large Encroachments on our common Rights, Which every Day increase, are seen by all, And grown so common, they are disregarded. What calls on us more loudly for Revenge, Is their Contempt and Breach of public Faith. ... — Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... Has made it a Fashion, Let's send for a Black Coat, whilst we're in the Mind. But it is damn'd Slavery, And Priestly Knavery, That Parsons must conjure e're Lovers ... — The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... inform myself well in things relating to the East Indys; both of the country, and the disappointment the King met with the last voyage, by the knavery of the Portugall Viceroy, and the inconsiderableness of the place of Bombaim, [Bombay.] if we had had it. But, above all things, it seems strange to me that matters should not be understood before they went out; and also that such a thing as this, which was ... — The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... morning in their actual drawing-rooms, or should meet them this afternoon in the Park! What a genius! what a vigour! what a bright-eyed intelligence and observation! what a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! what a vast sympathy! what a cheerfulness! what a manly relish of life! what a love of human kind! what a poet is here!—watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind him! What generations he has taught ... — Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as to what we have lost from Thynne's great storehouse of information; how valuable would have been "that long and no common discourse" which he tells us he might have composed on that most curious form of judicial knavery, the ordeal; and possibly much more so is that of his "collections" for his edition of Chaucer! This last may, however, be still recovered by some fortunate ... — Animaduersions uppon the annotacions and corrections of some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucer's workes - 1865 edition • Francis Thynne
... in his character above alluded to, were disclosed in a private letter from Hamilton, who said: "This man (Arnold) is in every sense despicable. In addition to the scene of knavery and prostitution during his command in Philadelphia, which the late seizure of his papers has unfolded, the history of his command at West Point is a history of little as well as great villainies. He practiced every dirty act ... — Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... brought to you, of my own accord; what I have restored to you, fully and unconditionally, it is plain Watson embezzled, and that I was aiding in the fraud. To restore what was never stolen always betrays the thief. To give what might be kept without suspicion is, without doubt, arrant knavery. To be serious, madam, in coming thus far, for this purpose, I have done enough; and must ... — Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... not have used them up. The trader knew not what to do. There was no sale for them. He applied to the governor—that robber of whom I have spoken. He said to the trader, with a wink of his eye—that sort of wink which the white fool gives when he means to pass from folly to knavery—'Wait,' he said, 'and you shall see.' Then he issued an order that no Indian should dare to appear in his district, or in church during festival-days, without spectacles! The consequence was that the spectacles were ... — The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... from the moment of my entering the Republic till this, while in Italy every day and almost every hour was marked by its peculiar extortions. Every where I have found kindness and truth written on the faces and evinced in the acts of this people, while in Italy rapacity and knavery are the order of the day. How does a monarchist explain this broad discrepancy? Mountains alone will not do, for the Italians of the Apennines and the Abruzzi are notoriously very much like those of the Campagna and of the Val d'Arno; ... — Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... doctrine:—"How can an honorable valet devote himself to the interests of a penniless master? We grow tricky in waiting upon such fellows. They scold us; sometimes they beat us. We have more wit than they. We support them; we are obliged to invent, for their benefit, all sorts of knavery, in which they are always ready to take a share; and, withal, they are the masters, and we the servants. It is not just. Hereafter I mean to scheme for myself, and become a master ... — The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... his colleague Bergier have the vehicles unloaded, putting the most valuable effects on one cart, which they appropriate to themselves, and drive away with it to some distance out of sight, paying the driver out of their own pockets: "No doubt whatever exists as to the knavery of Montbrion and Bergier; administrators and commissioners of the administration of the department."—De Sades, the author of "Justine," pleads his well-known civism and the ultra-revolutionary petitions drawn up by him in the name of ... — The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... mean? I must go to Lebadea, swaddle myself up in absurd linen, take a cake in my hand, and crawl through a narrow passage into a cave, before I could tell that you are a dead man, with nothing but knavery to differentiate you from the rest of us? Now, on your seer-ship, what is a Hero? I ... — Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... I tell? It is a fact, however, that the story has been circulated everywhere, but in such a cautious manner that there is no way of calling the authors to account. They have even gone so far as to say that this piece of knavery brought me in an enormous sum, and that I used Rochecotte's, Kervaulieu's, and Coralth's names in betting against my ... — Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... be without the knowledge of God: how miserable death must be without a Saviour. He comes to the man of business, and shows him visions of vast wealth. He whispers, "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me." And that implies false dealing, sharp practice, trickery, knavery. It implies loss of self-respect, loss of honour, the reproaches of an ever-accusing conscience. The tempter comes to the young man or woman, and shows them all the delights of a life of pleasure. They see the sparkle of the wine cup, the glitter of the ball room, the ... — The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... first article, as yet without a continuation) by the same man (of Jesus College?) on whose article in the "Ecclesiastic" on Hippolytus' book I have thrown some degree of light? The leading thought is exactly the same in both; the account of Calixtus' knavery is interpolated (by Novatianus), says the writer in the "Chronicle." This is a proof that nothing can be said against my argument requiring a serious answer. Gladstone felt ashamed of the review. It has helped the book; but it would be read ... — Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... charitable corporation, as he and Thompson had neglected to surrender themselves, according to the terms of a bill which had passed for that purpose. During this session, five members of parliament were expelled for the most sordid acts of knavery; a sure sign of national degeneracy and dishonour. All the supplies were granted, and among other articles, the sum of two-and-twenty thousand six hundred and ninety-four pounds, seven shillings and sixpence, for the agio ... — The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... their city flocks,— The rings of rogues that rob the luckless town, Those evil angels creeping up and down The Jacob's ladder of the treasury stairs,— Not stage, but real Turpins and Macaires,— Could doff, like us, their knavery with their clothes, And find ... — The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... washes of a mercenary wit; never did he spare a sop for being rich, or flatter a knave for being great. He had a wit that was accompanied with an unaffected greatness of mind, and a natural love to justice and truth; a wit that was in perpetual war with knavery, and ever attacking those kind of vices most, whose malignity was like to be the most dissusive, such as tended more immediately to the prejudice of public bodies; and were a common nusance to the happiness of human kind. Never was his pen drawn but on the side of good sense, and usually ... — The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... contact with the person. How is it to penetrate within? The necessary conditions will be fulfilled when mechanical rigidity no longer requires for its manifestation a stumbling-block which either the hazard of circumstance or human knavery has set in its way, but extracts by natural processes, from its own store, an inexhaustible series of opportunities for externally revealing its presence. Suppose, then, we imagine a mind always thinking of what it has just done and never of what ... — Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... and recounted to him all that had betided her and her husband, first and last, up to the time when they took up their abode with the old man and woman who dwelt on the sea-shore. Then she set out that which the Magian had practised on her of knavery and how he had carried her off in the ship and all that had betided her of humiliation and torment, what while the cadis and judges and deputies hearkened to her speech. When the king heard the last of his wife's story, he said, 'Verily, there hath betided ... — Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... great cities of today, elections that control taxation and expenditure, the mass of the voters vote in absolute ignorance of the candidates. The citizen who supposes that he does all his duty when he votes, places a premium upon political knavery. Thieves welcome him to the polls and offer him a choice, which he has done nothing to prevent, between Jeremy Diddler and Dick Turpin. The party cries for which he is responsible are: "Turpin and Honesty," "Diddler and Reform." And within a few years, as a result of this indifference ... — Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... Grandier and the barefaced knavery of the exorcist, M. de Laubardemont prepared a report of the expulsion of the three devils, Asmodeus, Gresil, and Aman, from the body of sister Jeanne des Anges, through three wounds below the region of the heart; a report which ... — CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... reason to be thankful for her humiliation than she could suspect, with her narrow knowledge of the world. Perhaps that sudden downfall of her fancied queenship was needed, to shut her out, once and for all, from that downward path of spiritual intoxication, followed by spiritual knavery, which, as has been hinted, was but too easy ... — Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... directly asserting is that, if he be not found to be a knave, he will be found to be a fool. By implication we make the further statement that, if he be not cleared of folly, he will stand condemned of knavery. This inference is so immediate that it seems indistinguishable from the former proposition: but since the two members of a complex proposition play the part of subject and predicate, to say that ... — Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... shall make a shift yet, old as I am, To find your knavery: you are sent here, Sirra, To discover certain Gentlemen, a spy-knave, And if ye find 'em, if not by perswasion To bring 'em back, by ... — Beggars Bush - From the Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... strike Colson favorably. The two held a whispered consultation, which seemed to yield mutual satisfaction. They were, indeed, congenial spirits, and agreed upon one point, that it was better to make a living by knavery than by doing honest work for honest wages. Yet there is no harder or more unsatisfactory way of living than this. Ill-gotten gains seldom benefit the possessor, and the plans of wicked ... — In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... showed him in leading-strings like a sucking giant, rifled his pockets without ceremony, ridiculed him to his face, traduced his character, and exposed him in a thousand ludicrous attitudes for the diversion of the public; while at the same time he knew their knavery, saw their drift, detested their morals, and despised their understanding. He was so infatuated by indolence of thought, and communication with folly, that he would have rather suffered himself to be led into a ditch with company, than be at the pains of going ... — The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... eleven others, the publication of which was however prevented by the death of Liston. McLean published a large and clever design, bearing the somewhat lengthy title of Law Gorging on the Spoils of Fools and Rogues, and Honest Men among Knavery, producing Repentance and Ruin; or, the Fatal Effects of Legal Rapacity,—wherein the highway of Law conducts to Ruin through a series of toll-gates labelled respectively, "Opinion of Counsel," "Injunction," "Filing the Bill," ... — English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... way cheat me out of every dollar that I put into his hands. It would take just about as much evidence to prove that young crows would be black when their feathers are grown, as it would to satisfy the community that these statements are true, especially where he is known. For knavery, untruthfulness, and wickedness, I have never seen anything, in all my business experience of forty years, that will compare with this. He would not have taken such a course with me once, but he took advantage of my age and misfortunes to commit these frauds, ... — History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... has run up and down mine Country and learn many fine thing, and mush knavery, now more and all dis me know you'll jumbla de fine vench and fill her belly with garsoone, her name is La ... — The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... upon him, and cheating him. JOHNSON. 'I am much pleased with this design; but I think there was no occasion to make the son honest at all. No; he should be a consummate rogue: the contrast between honesty and knavery would be the stronger. It should be contrived so that the father should be the only sufferer by the son's villainy, and thus there would ... — Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... morality and reason, and it finally induces a serene exaltation of temper. It was a pardonable foible of Elizabethan writers distinctly to identify with the English character this healthily energetic sort of patriotism—the sort of patriotism to which an atmosphere of knavery or ... — Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... heard of the sins of his youth, of his apprenticeship, and how he set up, and married, and what a life he hath led his wife; and now I will tell you some more of his pranks. He had the very knack for knavery; had he, as I said before, been bound to serve an apprenticeship to all these things, he could not have been more cunning, he could not have been ... — The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... confessions or apprehensions of Witches to a natural melancholique humour, any one that pleased physikally to consider upon the natural humour of Melancholy, according to all the physicians that ever writ thereupon, shall find that that will be over short a cloake to cover their knavery with."[47] ... — Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... money-bags I think that La Chesnaye's servile nature would have bargained to send souls in job lots blindfold over the gangplank. But, as La Chesnaye said when Pierre Radisson remonstrated against the knavery, the gin ... — Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... things about her game. Living round a college she must of tried her wiles on at least ten graduating classes of young men. Naturally she'd learned technique and feminine knavery. She was still flirty enough. She had a little short upper lip that she could lift with great pathos. And the party hadn't more than landed here when I saw that at last she did have ... — Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... yourself, and leave these passions: Now do I sound the depth of all their drifts, The devil's[154] device and Churms his knavery; On whom this heart hath vow'd to be reveng'd. I'll scatter them: the plot's already in my head. Nurse, hie thee home, commend me to my sister; Bid her this night send for Master Churms: To him she must recount her many griefs, Exclaim against her ... — A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... an outcast; and I linked my destiny with Fitzroy's. He had my confidence; such confidence as confederates in knavery can bestow. When he obtained his liberty, which he did shortly after my own was accomplished, he introduced me to his companions; men who, like himself, lived by plundering the unwary, and who looked up to him as ... — The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... years of age, [19] the man stands before us. We see the crisp, erect figure, bristling with aggressive vigour, the coarse, red hair, the keen, grey eyes, piercingly fixed on his opponent's face, and reading at a glance the knavery he sought to hide; we hear the rasping voice, launching its dry, cutting sarcasms one after another, each pointed with its sting of truth; and we can well believe that the dislike was intense, which could make an enemy provoke ... — A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... hundred of poorly-paid and over-worked artisans. Education in the hands of the poor would be a powerful agent with which they would alleviate their own condition, and defend themselves against oppression and knavery. ... — Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... after all is less the wronger than the wronged. Who made him what he is? Who, keen and clear-sighted enough in fields which they had not selected as their special parade-ground for self-conceit, trained him on to knavery and self-degradation? Who helped him through his blunders with ingenious excuses—"the manifestations are at first so weak"; or "Sludge is himself disturbed by the strange phenomena"; or "a doubter is in the company, and ... — Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... when a complication in M. Ferdinand de Coralth's affair, brought that young nobleman to his office. The trouble arose from a little stock exchange operation which M. Ferdinand had engaged in—an affair which savored a trifle of knavery. It was strange, but Pascal rather took a liking to M. de Coralth. The honest worker felt interested in this dashing adventurer; he was almost dazzled by his brilliant vices, his wit, his hardihood, conceit, marvellous assurance, and careless impudence; ... — The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... faction is their religion; nor are those combinations ever entered into upon real and substantial motives of conscience, how erroneous so ever, but consist of many glutinous materials, of will, and humour, and folly, and knavery, and malice, and ambition, which make men cling inseparably together till they have satisfaction in all their pretences, or till they are absolutely broken and subdued, which may always be more easily done than the ... — The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... the farmers were justly punished for their knavery, brutality, and folly. But neither are the squires and landlords to be excused; for to them is owing the depopulating of the country, the vast number of beggars, and the ruin of those few ... — The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... their future, carried on this amazing mad war of theirs, in violation of all human instincts of self-respect and self-preservation, to say nothing of the obligations of religion and morality observed among mankind from the first dawnings of civilization. The knavery, the villainy, and the besotted bestiality of it can never be forgotten, and must never be forgiven, and Louis Raemaekers, gifted as he is with the rare dramatic genius that discriminates his Cartoons, has but discharged an obvious patriotic duty in publishing them to the world at large, as true ... — Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... find no occasions of doing any good—the ill company will sooner corrupt him than be the better for him; or if, notwithstanding all their ill company, he still remains steady and innocent, yet their follies and knavery will be imputed to him; and, by mixing counsels with them, he must bear his share of all the blame that belongs wholly ... — Utopia • Thomas More
... knowledge in the hut in the mountains of India. Do you not think that while you hold that note young Percival will gladly serve you in any fashion that you may choose, rather than that so foolish a piece of wife's knavery should come abroad?" ... — Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... France and Pretender Great Britain defend her, Foes let them fall; From foreign slavery, Priests and their knavery, And Popish Reverie, ... — Handel • Edward J. Dent
... infant has wilted into the premature man, with his old cunning look, blending so fantastically, so mournfully, with the unformed features of youth. Knowing the world on its worst side—knowing its hostility, its knavery, its foulness, its heartless materialism—knowing it as the man does not know it who has only breathed the country air, and looked upon the open face of nature. Is it not very sad, my friends, that the vagrant boy should know so much; and, without one hour of romance, one ... — Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... Jollie's Vindication of the Surey Demoniack in 1698 with a pamphlet entitled Popery, Superstition, Ignorance and Knavery ... very fully proved ... in the Surey Imposture. Then came The Lancashire Levite Rebuked, by the unknown writer, "N. N.," whose views we give in the text. Taylor seems to have answered in a letter to "N. N." ... — A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... think it will prove otherwise," said the lawyer. "This woman has played a part till she believes it; or, if she be a thorough-paced impostor, without a single grain of self-delusion to qualify her knavery, still she may think herself bound to act in character-this I know, that I could get nothing out of her by the common modes of interrogation, and the wisest thing we can do is to give her an opportunity of making the discovery her own way. And now have you ... — Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... foreign trade are subject; but they had an immense capital divided among an immense number of proprietors. It was naturally to be expected, therefore, that folly, negligence, and profusion, should prevail in the whole management of their affairs. The knavery and extravagance of their stock-jobbing projects are sufficiently known, and the explication of them would be foreign to the present subject. Their mercantile projects were not much better conducted. The first trade which ... — An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... a toiler, austere in his morals, had slowly made his way in that particular ministry which develops both honesty and knavery at the same time. A clerk in the ministry of Foreign Affairs, he had charge of the most delicate division of its archives. Jacquet in that office was like a glow-worm, casting his light upon those secret correspondences, deciphering and classifying despatches. ... — Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... haven't much to count on anywhere. I don't know, though," the knitting needle was doing duty in the stocking again, "about taking your money. You were not his wife, you hadn't spent it or connived at his knavery." ... — Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... were, in different ways, the most impatient of mankind. Frederic was frugal, almost niggardly. When he had secured his plaything he began to think that he had bought it too dear. Voltaire, on the other hand, was greedy, even to the extent of imprudence and knavery; and conceived that the favourite of a monarch who had barrels full of gold and silver laid up in cellars ought to make a fortune which a receiver-general might envy. They soon discovered each other's feelings. Both were angry; and a war ... — Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... come in the way of an inevitable Providence to us (whatever knavery some people may have to answer for, who have been the agents in the removal), and I never receive inevitable Providences with resignation merely; but with joy, as certainly, undoubtedly, the best possible events that can happen for me—and immediately I begin to weave the apparent straw ... — Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... had he ran upon him, and with his teeth gave him three sore wounds on his head, and scoffing said, "Have I hit you, Mr. Wolf? I will yet hit you better; you have killed many a lamb and many an innocent beast, and would impose the fault upon me, but you shall find the price of your knavery. I am marked to punish thy sins, and I will give thee thy absolution bravely. It is good for thee that thou use patience, for thy evil life is at my mercy. Yet, notwithstanding, if thou wilt kneel ... — Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... has come over the inhabitants of Staithes since 1846, when Mr. Ord describes the fishermen as 'exceedingly civil and courteous to strangers, and altogether free from that low, grasping knavery peculiar to the larger class of fishing-towns.' Without wishing to be unreasonably hard on Staithes, I am inclined to believe that this character is infinitely better than these folk deserve, and even when Mr. Ord wrote of the place I have reason ... — Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... affair of such consequence; the wisdom and solid judgment of that renowned queen; with the little or no advantage which she could reap from so poor an artifice. All this might astonish me; but I would still reply that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence than admit of so signal a violation of the laws ... — The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... whatsoe'er the whims that seize you. This oldest of all mortal firms, Folly and Co., will try to please you. Or, should you wish a darker hue Of goods that we can recommend you, Why then—as we with lawyers do— To Knavery's shop next door we'll send ... — The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... them. On hearing these tales, the Romans would make the sign of the cross, and pass more quickly by the walls of this garden, which thenceforth they called "The Charmed Garden." It was indeed a charmed garden! It was an island of happiness, behind these walls, concealed from the knavery of the world. Like an eternal smile of the Divinity rested the heavens over this ever-blooming, ever-fragrant garden, in whose myrtle-bushes the nightingales sang, and in whose silver-clear basins ... — The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... assumption that we all fulfilled our mission in the same way, the Council had good reason not to thank any of us, for the transactions of all alike were in that case atrocious. But if some of us acted uprightly, while others did the reverse, it must, it seems, have been owing to the knavery of their colleagues that the virtuous were forced to take their share of this dishonour. {33} How then can you all ascertain without any difficulty who is the rogue? Recall to your minds who it is that has denounced the transaction ... — The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant and the slave, the people linked with kings to rivet on the chains of despotism and superstition. I see folly join with knavery, and together make up public spirit and public opinions. I see the insolent Tory, the blind Reformer, the coward Whig! If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago. The theory is plain enough; but they are prone to mischief, 'to every good ... — Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... obvious imposture, that they will listen to such self-convicted charlatans, that they will repose confidence in such ten-times-exposed deceivers. The history of the Home Rule movement will in future ages be quoted as the most extraordinary combination of knavery, slavery, and credulity the world has ever seen. And yet some Englishmen believe in it. After all, this is not so wonderful. There were people who believed in Cagliostro, Mormon Smith, Joanna Southcote of Exeter, Mrs. Girling, the Tichborne Claimant, General Boulanger, electric ... — Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... were mostly men and women I have known and who left with me a love of my kind that even a wide experience with knavery and misfortune has never dissipated. For my knowledge of Mr Greeley I am chiefly indebted to David P. Rhoades, his publisher, to Philip Fitzpatrick, his pressman, to the files of the Tribune and ... — Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... rather than Slavery! Well might you wish to be quit of that ill, But you were sold by political knavery, Meshed in diplomacy's spider-like skill: And you rejoice to see Slavery banished, While the free servant works well as before, Confident, though many fortunes have vanished, Soon to recover ... — My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... sum of money, on condition that it be restored in a few days; and also suppose, that after the expiration of the term agreed on, he demands the sum: I ask, What reason or motive have I to restore the money? It will, perhaps, be said, that my regard to justice, and abhorrence of villainy and knavery, are sufficient reasons for me, if I have the least grain of honesty, or sense of duty and obligation. And this answer, no doubt, is just and satisfactory to man in his civilized state, and when trained up according to a certain discipline and education. ... — A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... conquerors, the Big-knives arrived in Canada, and a war commenced between them and the confederated Iroquois. Thus placed between two fires, and in danger of being exterminated, they resorted to their old cunning and knavery. They sent a deputation of their principal warriors, with the sacred calumet (1) and the belt of peace, to the sons of their grandfather. But they appeared not to wish for peace, but to be guided by wisdom and compassion ... — Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... hast got more confidence? Where didst find it? I never thought the wide circle of the world had within it another jot for thee. Well, Nol, I see no reason why shouldst stand before me with thy hat off, in the courtyard and in the sun, counting the stones in the pavement. Thou hast some knavery in thy head, I warrant thee. Come, put on ... — Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... his co-heiress and his co-heir. The sense of humiliation at being intimately connected and classed with them would not leave him. He felt himself—absurdly once again—to be mysteriously associated with them in a piece of sharp practice or even of knavery. They constituted another complication of his existence. He wanted to disown them and never to speak to them again, but he knew that he could not disown them. He was living in gorgeousness for the sole reason that he and they were in the ... — Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... Marie Antoinette. Whether this imputation were correct, or whether the Cardinal Duc de Rohan was the only distinguished person deluded by the artifices of the Countess de la Motte, it is certain that Joseph Balsamo, commonly called Alexandre, Count de Cagliostro, was capable of any knavery, however infamous. Guile was his element; audacity was his breastplate; delusion was his profession; immorality was his creed; debauchery was his consolation; his own genius—the genius of cunning—was the ... — Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... under the influence of drink and somewhat mad. Favonius was a candidate for the aedileship and was losing his election, when Cato, who was present, observed that the voting tablets were written in one hand, and so proved the knavery, and by appealing to the tribunes stopped the return. Afterwards when Favonius was made aedile, Cato both administered the other duties of the aedileship, and superintended the exhibitions in the theatre, giving to the actors ... — Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... of the rebellious Provinces, perhaps something might be done with them; but, on the whole, he was inclined to think that they had been influenced by knavish and deceitful motives from the beginning. He enjoined it upon Parma, therefore, to proceed with equal knavery—taking care, however, not to injure his reputation—and to enter into negotiations wherever occasion might serve, in order to put the English off their guard and to keep back the reinforcements so imperatively required ... — The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... rookery near Saint Giles's and the desperate neighbourhood of Saffron Hill in our own time. And yet, on the very site of the sordid tenements and squalid courts we have mentioned, where the felon openly made his dwelling, and the fraudulent debtor laughed the object of his knavery to scorn—on this spot, not two centuries ago, stood the princely residence of Charles Brandon, the chivalrous Duke of Suffolk, whose stout heart was a well of honour, and whose memory breathes of ... — Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and methods in a more guarded form, said the other side. Beyond question, there was in Louisiana, at all stages of reconstruction, some degree of terrorism, and occasional acts of cruelty and outrage. There was knavery among the Radicals, and there was violence among the Conservatives. At the 1874 election the Conservatives were successful at the polls; but the State returning-board at once began to juggle with the returns so palpably that the Conservative member protested and resigned. ... — The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... brothers," said he, with the grin of one too well accustomed to knavery to trust any thing opposed to his own observation. "I suppose them's things happens in Canada as elsewhere," said he, laughing, and hoping the jest might turn her flank. Meanwhile the press-leader never took his eyes off me, ... — Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the lady I say nothing. Indeed, I have heard some things which appear to entitle her to compassion and respect. But as to Peschiera all who prize honour suspect him to be a knave,—I know him to be one. Now, I think that the longer we preserve that abhorrence for knavery which is the generous instinct of youth, why, the fairer will be our manhood, and the more reverend our age. You agree with me?" And Harley suddenly turning, his eyes fell like a flood of light upon ... — My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... very different temper. With this man's knavery was strangely mingled an eccentric vanity which resembled madness. The thought that he had raised a rebellion and bestowed a crown had turned his head. He swaggered about, brandishing his naked sword, and crying to the crowd of spectators who had assembled to see the army march out ... — The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nay, 'tis the devil and all. It besets a man in every one of his senses. I lose my appetite at the sight of successful knavery, and sicken to loathing at the noise and nonsense of self-important folly. When the hollow-hearted wretch takes me by the hand, the feeling spoils my dinner: the proud man's wine so offends my palate ... — The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Gluck, was still Italian in its sympathies, so far at any rate as opera seria was concerned. Mozart wrote his first opera, 'La Finta Semplice,' for Vienna, when he was twelve years old. It would have been performed in 1768 but for the intrigues of jealous rivals and the knavery of an impresario. It was not actually produced until the following year, when the Archbishop of Salzburg arranged a performance of it in his own city to console his little protege for his disappointment at Vienna. It is of course an extraordinary work when the composer's age is taken ... — The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... like fools for months, and months, and months, but a short distance from all these vast hoards of gold. This knowledge almost maddened him as he brooded over it by night and by day. When he had been set free from the French prison to which his knavery had consigned him, Banker gave himself up body and soul to the consideration of the treasure which Captain Horn had brought to France from Peru. He considered it from every possible point of view, and when at last ... — Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... sir; the large sanctified hat, and the little precise band, with a swinging long spiritual cloak, to cover carnal knavery—not forgetting the black patch, which Tribulation Spintext wears, as I'm informed, upon one eye, as a penal mourning for the ogling offences of his youth; and some say, with that eye he first discovered the frailty of ... — The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... keistrels.]—The first of these terms I am unable to explain; but it occurs in Middleton's Black Book, "So, drawing in amongst bunglers and ketlers under the plain frieze of simplicity, thou mayest finely couch the wrought velvet of knavery;" and in his Father Hubburd's Tales, we find "like an old cunning bowler to fetch in a young ketling gamester:" see Middleton's Works, v. 543, 589, ed. Dyce. Keistrels are hawks of a worthless and ... — Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... grateful to my heart. His judgment was penetrating and manly, totally unmixed with imbecility and confusion, while at the same time there was such an uncontending frankness in his countenance, that a superficial observer would have supposed he must have been the prey of the first plausible knavery that was practised against him. Great reason have I to remember him with affection! He was the most ardent, I had almost said the last, of my friends. Nor did I remain in this respect in his debt. There was indeed a great ... — Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... the ostler's work," he announced. "There was knavery and treachery writ large upon his ugly face. I always felt it, and this business proves how correct were my instincts. The rogue was bribed when he discovered how things were with you, you greasy sots. But you, La Boulaye," ... — The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... silken coats, and caps, and golden rings, With ruffs, and cuffs, and farthingales and things; With scarfs, and fans, and double change of bravery, With amber bracelets, beads, and all this knavery. Taming of the Shrew, Act ... — The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... have ever agreed in is an error on the face of it. The credulous bigot shudders at the idea of altering anything in 'time-hallowed' institutions; and under this cant phrase can bring himself to tolerate any knavery or any folly, the Inquisition, Holy Oil, the Right Divine, etc.;—the more refined sceptic will laugh in your face at the idea of retaining anything which has the damning stamp of custom upon it, and is for abating all former precedents, 'all trivial, fond records,' the whole frame and fabric of ... — Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... sought by an immense number, in plunging into the abyss of revolution. And a great proportion of the Southern merchants, with full intent to defraud their creditors, by lighting the flames of civil war, in 1860 swelled their indebtedness to their Northern friends to the utmost. This was low knavery seeking protection behind the black mantle of treason. If the facts could be fully laid bare, it would be found that disinclination to pay their honest debts has transformed vast numbers from Unionists into traitors. The North can never respect those who seek to slay their creditors, that they may ... — The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... has been hurt to this day. And it is, believe me, it is the miserable, wretched independence in small things, the paltry republicanism which recoils from honest service to an honest man, but does not shrink from every trick, artifice, and knavery in business, that makes these slaves necessary, and will render them so, until the indignation of other countries sets ... — The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the beadle and the parish officers: the system of signals was not then perfected, and the means of conveying secret and swift intelligence, by telegraphic science, had not in those days been practised. The art of begging was then only art without science: the native genius of knavery unaided by method or discipline. The consequence was, that the beggars fled before my father's beadles, constables, and overseers; and they were dispersed through other parishes, or led into captivity to roundhouses, ... — Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... "Pardon me, my lord the cauzee, I have been mistaken, the wallet is not mine; but I must away and search for the thief who has stolen my valuable property." Having said this, he ran off, leaving the cauzee, myself, and the spectators bursting with laughter at his impudent knavery. ... — The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... weigh so much with Florence, but Dodger was more practical, and he wished to restore her to the social position which she had lost through the knavery of her cousin. ... — Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... Soon must I mingle in the wordy war, Where Knavery takes in vice her sly degrees, As slip, away, not guilty, from the bar, Counsel, or client, as their Honors please. To breathe, in crowded courts, a pois'nous breath— To plead for life—to justify a death— To wrangle, jar, to twist, ... — The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... of stocks: and although the foundation of credit be still the same, and upon a bottom that can never be shaken; and though all interest be duly paid by the public, yet through the contrivance and cunning of stock-jobbers, there has been brought in such a complication of knavery and cozenage, such a mystery of iniquity, and such an unintelligible jargon of terms to involve it in, as were never known in any other age or country of the world. I have heard it affirmed by persons skilled in these calculations, that if the ... — The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... tell. This has gone on for at least three centuries. It may have served some good purpose at some period, under men of strict probity, but, in my opinion, based on such experience as I have been able to command, it has of late years led to nothing but secret peculation, jobbery and knavery. As regards my own position, it has simply been that I have never at any time been permitted to see any accounts other than those placed before me by the Town Trustees. My belief is that no one but themselves actually knows what the financial condition of the town really is. I am of impression ... — In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... of the immense drama which knavery plays in Paris. His lair was the green-room whence theft emerged, and into which roguery retreated. A tattered knave arrived at this dressing-room, deposited his thirty sous and selected, according to the part which he wished to play, the costume which suited him, ... — Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the log of man's fugitive castaway soul upon a doomed and derelict planet. The minds of all men plod the same rough roads of sense; and in spite of much knavery, all win at times "an ampler ether, a diviner air." The great poets, our masters, speak out of that clean freshness of perception. We ... — Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... shoulders above the rest—calling in the Americaine tongue. Another man, big and red, named Joe, and a handsome little Creole in elegant dress and full of laughter, wish to stop him, but the flat-boatmen, ha-ha-ing and cheering, will not suffer it. Ah, through some shameful knavery of the men, into whose hands he has fallen, he is drunk! Even the women can see that; and now he throws his arms wildly and raises his voice until the whole great circle hears ... — Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... orphan daughter of a London merchant, who was once very wealthy, but became bankrupt and died, leaving his daughter L200 a year. This annuity, however, she loses through the knavery of her man of business. When reduced to penury, her old lover, Henry Morland (supposed to have perished at sea), makes his appearance and marries her, by which she becomes the Lady Duberly.—G. Coleman, The ... — Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... not content," Guy continued, "to shake off that past, reeking with loathsome and dishonorable crimes, but he brought his knavery within these respectable walls—he dared to pay his attentions to your ward, and speak words of forbidden love into her ears, while the crime of having enticed as young and respectable a girl from her ... — Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... of some of his works, viz. Collections in Defence of the King. Toleration Discussed. Relapsed Apostate. Apology for Protestants. Richard against Baxter. Tyranny and Popery. Growth and Knavery. Reformed Catholic. Free-born Subjects. The Case Put. Seasonable Memorials. Answer to the Appeal. L'Estrange no Papist; in answer to a Libel, intitled L'Estrange a Papist, &c. with Notes and Animadversions upon ... — The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... the white vapour from the cottage hearth, on a morning that is sunny and serene;—if to impart that sober sadness over the spirit, which inclines us to forgive our enemy, that calm philosophy which reconciles us to the ingratitude and knavery of the world, that heavenly contemplation whispering to us, as we look around, that "All is good;"—if these be merits, they ... — Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... sure, now, Olimpiada Samsonovna is a cultivated young lady; but I, Samson Silych, am no common trash; you can see for yourself, if you please. I have capital, and I'm a good manager in that line." Why shouldn't he give her to me? Ain't I a man? I haven't been detected in any knavery; I'm respectful to my elders. But in addition to all that, as Samson Silych has mortgaged his house and shops to me, I can frighten him with the mortgage. Knowing as I do the disposition of Samson Silych to ... — Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... He is a great enemy to the fine gentleman, and these things of complement, and hates ceremony in conversation, as the Puritan in religion. He distinguishes not betwixt fair and double dealing, and suspects all smoothness for the dress of knavery. He starts at the encounter of a salutation as an assault, and beseeches you in choler to forbear your courtesy. He loves not any thing in discourse that comes before the purpose, and is always suspicious of a preface. Himself falls rudely still ... — Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... a wild boar, which suddenly attacked them while they were walking together, he considered it rather a cowardice than a breach of duty; and turned an occurrence of no small hazard into a jest, because there was no knavery in his steward's conduct. He put to death Proculus, one of his most favourite freedmen, for maintaining a criminal commerce with other men's wives. He broke the legs of his secretary, Thallus, for taking a bribe of five hundred denarii to discover ... — The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... perplexed him. He felt that he ought to be doing something—that he had no right to remain in ignorance of the progress of Marian's affairs—that he should be at hand to frustrate any attempt at knavery on the part of the lawyer—to be sure that the old man's wealth suffered no diminution before it reached ... — Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... proclaiming my deserts. In the German author it was a manifest act of pocket-picking to stuff his novel with such insufferable rubbish. And it seemed to me that, by translating it, I should make myself a party to his knavery as well as to his dulness. However, if any man complains of this omission, for an adequate "consideration" (as the lawyers say) I shall be happy to cart the whole of it upon his premises—deliver it in choice English—and shoot it into the coal-cellar ... — Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... constitutionality of appropriations for the improvement of Western rivers and harbors. The debate was continued between the conflicting absurdities of the Southern Democracy, which is slavery, and the Western Democracy, which is knavery." Under the leadership of Jackson and other Southerners, the Democrats, notwithstanding their long ascendency, had adhered to their position on internal improvements more consistently, perhaps, than ... — Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... praise, and she dearly liked praise from Tom; but on this occasion it failed to soothe her. She said curtly, "I suppose it's not paid for. If we can't afford much, we can afford to live at our own expense, and not on the knavery or the forbearance of tradesmen." With which she threw the locket into a box of odds and ends, and turned ... — A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... barbarian masters to release their slaves without payment or condition must have had a reality in it at which the kindred of Anglo-Saxon sugar-planters have no right to sneer. Odd were the absurdities of Maori lay preachers, and knavery was sometimes added to absurdity. Yet these dark-skinned teachers carried Christianity into a hundred nooks and corners. Most of them were honest enthusiasts. Two faced certain death in the endeavour to carry the Gospel to the Taupo heathen, and met their fate with cheerful courage. ... — The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... cotton boll o'er fields of Carolina, And fills with snowy flosses the dusky hands of Dinah; Till war has dealt its final blow, and Mr. Seward's knavery Has put an end in all the land to freedom ... — War Poetry of the South • Various
... one principle which cements men together in society, could only be upheld by alternate stratagem and force. The unhappy people of India, feeble and effeminate as they are from the softness of their climate, and subdued and broken as they have been by the knavery and strength of civilization, still occasionally start up in all the vigor and intelligence of insulted nature. To be governed at all, they must be governed with a rod of iron; and our empire in the East would, long since, have been lost to Great Britain, if civil skill and military ... — The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... own eyes than he would have cared to acknowledge, had been so absolutely barren of results. That portion of his moral anatomy which he would have called his conscience pricked him shrewdly now and again, but such pricks had their origin in the fact of his knavery having been unsuccessful. Had his wrong-doing won for him such a prize as he had fondly hoped to gain by its means, Conscience would have let her rusted spear hang unheeded on the wall, and beyond giving utterance now and then to a faint whisper in the dead of night, would ... — The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... defy, some to lower, and some to brighten, many to ignore, a few to challenge or charm,—as we pass. And what lessons of fortune and of character are written thereon,—the blush of innocence and the hardihood of recklessness, the candid grace of honor and the mean deprecatory glance of knavery, intelligence and stupidity, soulfulness and vanity, the glad smile of friendship, the shrinking eye of fallen fortune, the dubious recognition of disgrace, the effrontery of the adventurer, and the calm, pleasant bearing of rectitude,—all that is beautiful and base in humanity, gleams, ... — The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... Hylactor, but we both felt bound by the obligation of our hospitable entertainment there: though nameless fugitives we were still under the spell of the standards of our former lives. We admitted to each other that he might steal an axe from that farm and I condone the knavery and avail myself of its proceeds; but we agreed that such baseness must be stooped to only as a desperate last resort. He was to set ... — Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... necessary, why, I should be forced to do it, and, with any good to her memory and fame, my own pain in the attempt would be turned into joy—I should do it at whatever cost: but it is not only unnecessary but absurdly useless—and, indeed, it shall not be done if I can stop the scamp's knavery ... — Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... is conveyed in those two short words—'The Parish!' And with how many tales of distress and misery, of broken fortune and ruined hopes, too often of unrelieved wretchedness and successful knavery, are they associated! A poor man, with small earnings, and a large family, just manages to live on from hand to mouth, and to procure food from day to day; he has barely sufficient to satisfy the present cravings of nature, and can take no heed of the future. His taxes are in arrear, quarter-day ... — Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... flavour of good birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach ... — New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in M. Ferdinand de Coralth's affair, brought that young nobleman to his office. The trouble arose from a little stock exchange operation which M. Ferdinand had engaged in—an affair which savored a trifle of knavery. It was strange, but Pascal rather took a liking to M. de Coralth. The honest worker felt interested in this dashing adventurer; he was almost dazzled by his brilliant vices, his wit, his hardihood, conceit, marvellous assurance, and careless impudence; and he studied this ... — The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Kerry. "I'm for Leman Street in three hours. If there's double-dealing behind it, then the mugs are in the East End, and it's folly, not knavery, I'm looking for. It's a race, Mary, and the credit of the Service is at stake! No, my dear, I'll have a snack when I ... — Dope • Sax Rohmer
... this court, some very near me if I remember rightly. In what are their characters superior, or their claims to respect greater, that you should thus single me out as the fool or knave who could not only commit so wild and despicable an act, but go so far in folly—let alone knavery—as to conceal ... — The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... rose. The man was a sanctimonious Chadband. He had come with nefarious designs on Judith's slender capital. I saw knavery in the whites of ... — The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... me out of every dollar that I put into his hands. It would take just about as much evidence to prove that young crows would be black when their feathers are grown, as it would to satisfy the community that these statements are true, especially where he is known. For knavery, untruthfulness, and wickedness, I have never seen anything, in all my business experience of forty years, that will compare with this. He would not have taken such a course with me once, but he took advantage of my age and misfortunes to commit these frauds, ... — History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... and scoundrels. For one man that may have been shot or hanged, there will have been a hundred who have gained the confidence of the British to betray it either to their own use or that of the enemy. No one could ever know or assess the extent of the knavery which has arisen, flourished, and grown fat in this long-protracted war. And what a field for sharps and knaves! Was not the control of the whole country in the hands of straightforward and fair-thinking English officers,—men whose word was their bond, and who never thought to distrust ... — On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... chance. About the first there clung some flavour of good birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with silent chucklings as he ... — The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Ismail, starting. "He is true to me—Sadik is true to me?" he urged, with a shudder; for if Sadik was false in this crisis, with Europe clamouring for the payment of debts and for reforms, where should he look for faithful knavery? ... — The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... eagerness of a maiden for the dance. Seeing the splendor reserved for itself, it groans and travails unceasingly. Similarly, we Christians groan and intensely desire to have done at once with the Turks, the Pope, and the tyrannical world. Who would not weary of witnessing the present knavery, ungodliness and blasphemy against Christ and his Gospel, even as Lot wearied of the ungodliness he beheld in Sodom? Thus Paul says that creation groaneth and travaileth while waiting for the revelation and the glorious liberty of the ... — Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... urchin does when he first possesses himself of a nest which he has been watching for weeks. This would, indeed, be a dreary world if we had not some excitement, some stimulus to lead us on, which occupies our thoughts, and gives us fresh courage, when disheartened by the knavery, and meanness, and selfishness of those who surround us. How sad is the analysis of human nature—what contradictions, what extremes! how many really brave men have I fallen in with, stooping to every meanness for patronage, court favour, or gain; slandering those ... — Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... to those of the purchaser. These 'sale-speakers' exercise no other trade. They go from market to market, to promote business, as they say. They have generally a great knowledge of cattle, have much fluency of tongue, and are, above all, endowed with a knavery beyond all shame. They dispute by turns furiously and argumentatively as to the merits and defects of the animal, but as soon as it comes to be a question of price, the tongue is laid aside as a medium, and the conversation ... — Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Knavery, damn'd Sedition, Libels, Treason, Successions, Rights and Privileges, with a new-fashion'd Oath of Abjuration, call'd the Association.—Ah, Rogue, what will you say when these shall be ... — The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... Visions of gallantry, knavery, robbery, flocked into her brain and rendered her afraid to question him. She rocked herself upon a chair, wringing her hands and weeping bitterly. The baby in the cradle woke up and cried; the boy in the clothes-basket fell over on his back with the basket ... — Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... day when desponding I read in thine aspect the story Of those that were slain when defending Their homes and their mountains of glory. And curst be the guile Of treacherous knavery That throws o'er our isle In its tyranny vile ... — The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... carried on this amazing mad war of theirs, in violation of all human instincts of self-respect and self-preservation, to say nothing of the obligations of religion and morality observed among mankind from the first dawnings of civilization. The knavery, the villainy, and the besotted bestiality of it can never be forgotten, and must never be forgiven, and Louis Raemaekers, gifted as he is with the rare dramatic genius that discriminates his Cartoons, has but discharged an obvious patriotic duty ... — Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... without inclosures or bounds by which horses can be secured: they must be turned into the woods for their subsistance, and feed upon leaves and young shoots of trees. Many projects, such as belts, hobles, &c., were tried, but none of these were a security against the wildness of the country and the knavery of the people we were obliged to employ: by these means we lost our horses almost as fast as we could collect them, and those which remained grew very weak, so we found ourselves every day less able to undertake the extra-ordinary march ... — Conestoga Wagons in Braddock's Campaign, 1755 • Don H. Berkebile
... faithfully as if we had breakfasted with them this morning in their actual drawing-rooms, or should meet them this afternoon in the Park! What a genius! what a vigour! what a bright-eyed intelligence and observation! what a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! what a vast sympathy! what a cheerfulness! what a manly relish of life! what a love of human kind! what a poet is here!—watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind him! What generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly! What scholars ... — Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... companies for foreign trade are subject; but they had an immense capital divided among an immense number of proprietors. It was naturally to be expected, therefore, that folly, negligence, and profusion, should prevail in the whole management of their affairs. The knavery and extravagance of their stock-jobbing projects are sufficiently known, and the explication of them would be foreign to the present subject. Their mercantile projects were not much better conducted. The first trade which they engaged in, was that of supplying ... — An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... imposition, not imagining that a person so rich as an Englishman MUST be, would go out in a cold night for the sake of obtaining a reasonable bargain. They were, however, much mistaken, as I told them that rather than encourage them in their knavery, I should be content to return to Lisbon; whereupon they dropped their demand to three and a half, but I made them no answer, and going out with Antonio, proceeded to the house of the old man who had accompanied us ... — The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... nothing. Indeed, I have heard some things which appear to entitle her to compassion and respect. But as to Peschiera, all who prize honor suspect him to be a knave—I know him to be one. Now, I think that the longer we preserve that abhorrence for knavery which is the generous instinct of youth, why, the fairer will be our manhood, and the more reverend our age. You agree with me?" And Harley suddenly turning, his eyes fell like a flood of light upon ... — The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... poems were published in 1668; he translated-likewise the second Epod of Horace, several pieces out of Claudian, and likewise a dramatic piece from Aristophanes, which he calls Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery, a pleasant comedy printed in 4to. London 1651. A gentleman of St. John's College, writes thus in honour of ... — The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... spectacle, and the noise of their chains with the roaring of the beaten waters has something of the strange and fearful to one unaccustomed to it. They are chastised on the least disorder, and without the least humanity; yet are they cheerful and full of knavery. ... — The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... may form habits of honesty, or knavery; truth, or falsehood; of industry, or idleness; frugality, or extravagance; of patience, or impatience; self-denial, or self-indulgence; of kindness, cruelty, politeness, rudeness, prudence, perseverance, circumspection. In short, there, ... — Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... protest from Grandier and the barefaced knavery of the exorcist, M. de Laubardemont prepared a report of the expulsion of the three devils, Asmodeus, Gresil, and Aman, from the body of sister Jeanne des Anges, through three wounds below the region of the heart; ... — CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... now, Herr Schmick," I made haste to exclaim, seeing lachrymose symptoms in his blear old eyes. Then I became firm once more. This knavery must cease, or I'd know the reason why. "The next man who comes here to cart away so much as a single piece is to be kicked out. Do you understand? These things belong to me. Kick him into the river. Or, better still, ... — A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... and women I have known and who left with me a love of my kind that even a wide experience with knavery and misfortune has never dissipated. For my knowledge of Mr Greeley I am chiefly indebted to David P. Rhoades, his publisher, to Philip Fitzpatrick, his pressman, to the files of the ... — Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... tell, not what they had to demand, that excited him to trembling; the assembled neighbourhood seemed to strike him in the light of a safeguard. When, however, he found the incomers were inclined to accuse him of trick or knavery, ... — What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... be confessed, that the farmers were justly punished for their knavery, brutality, and folly. But neither are the squires and landlords to be excused; for to them is owing the depopulating of the country, the vast number of beggars, and the ruin of those few sorry ... — The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... colleague Bergier have the vehicles unloaded, putting the most valuable effects on one cart, which they appropriate to themselves, and drive away with it to some distance out of sight, paying the driver out of their own pockets: "No doubt whatever exists as to the knavery of Montbrion and Bergier; administrators and commissioners of the administration of the department."—De Sades, the author of "Justine," pleads his well-known civism and the ultra-revolutionary petitions drawn up by him in the name of the ... — The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... happiness, Alas! for human sorrow; Our Yesterday is nothingness, What else will be our Morrow? Still Beauty must be stealing hearts, And Knavery stealing purses; Still Cooks must live by making tarts, And Wits by making verses; While Sages prate and Courts debate, The same Stars set and shine; And the World, as it roll'd through ... — The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... do duty for two meals. We took it at a rough table in the tower, lighted by a flambeau that sent sparks flying like pigeons into the sombre height of the building which tapered high overhead as a lime-kiln upside down. From this retreat we could see the proof of knavery in the villages below. Far down on Knapdale, and back in the recesses of Lochow, were burning homes, to judge ... — John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... he cried in a tempest of wrath. "A murrain upon his greedy, crafty lust! The gods blast him in his knavery! Now is my precious amulet in his hands. Would it were white-hot and clung to him ... — The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... these passions: Now do I sound the depth of all their drifts, The devil's[154] device and Churms his knavery; On whom this heart hath vow'd to be reveng'd. I'll scatter them: the plot's already in my head. Nurse, hie thee home, commend me to my sister; Bid her this night send for Master Churms: To him she must recount her ... — A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... parish of St Giles it was gotten into several streets, and several families lay all sick together; and, accordingly, in the weekly bill for the next week the thing began to show itself. There was indeed but fourteen set down of the plague, but this was all knavery and collusion, for in St Giles's parish they buried forty in all, whereof it was certain most of them died of the plague, though they were set down of other distempers; and though the number of all ... — A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... with those of the neighbouring islands, are mostly black, or of a mixed colour, very encroaching in their manners, and much addicted to knavery. The island is extremely rocky and uneven, but the vallies are fertile. The inhabitants raise cotton, and they have several sugar works; the quantity they raise of both, does not, however, much exceed their own consumption, but there is no doubt that it might be considerably ... — Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... man, a toiler, austere in his morals, had slowly made his way in that particular ministry which develops both honesty and knavery at the same time. A clerk in the ministry of Foreign Affairs, he had charge of the most delicate division of its archives. Jacquet in that office was like a glow-worm, casting his light upon those ... — Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... I beshrew your knave's heart, Ere I take part in your knavery: I will speak fair, by our[544] lady. Sir, I beseech your maship to be As good as ye ... — A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... practising his father's maxims upon him, and cheating him. JOHNSON. 'I am much pleased with this design; but I think there was no occasion to make the son honest at all. No; he should be a consummate rogue: the contrast between honesty and knavery would be the stronger. It should be contrived so that the father should be the only sufferer by the son's villainy, and thus there ... — Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... made of the Rover," returned the countryman; "but never to enter into any of the intricate particulars of his knavery." ... — The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... and when he saw the numerous advantages which Francisco's good character procured. Such had been Piedro's wretched education, that even the hard lessons of experience could not alter its pernicious effects. He was sorry his knavery had been detected, but he still thought it clever to cheat, and was secretly persuaded that, if he had cheated successfully, he should have been happy. "But I know I am not happy now," said he to himself ... — The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... those two short words—'The Parish!' And with how many tales of distress and misery, of broken fortune and ruined hopes, too often of unrelieved wretchedness and successful knavery, are they associated! A poor man, with small earnings, and a large family, just manages to live on from hand to mouth, and to procure food from day to day; he has barely sufficient to satisfy the present ... — Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... was overwhelmed with despair for what he had done, and he tried to make his peace with Francis; but while that monarch did not punish him directly for his knavery; he would have no more to do with him, and this was the worst punishment the artist could have had. However, his genius was so great that other than French people forgot his dishonesty and he began life anew in ... — Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... are the titles of some of his works, viz. Collections in Defence of the King. Toleration Discussed. Relapsed Apostate. Apology for Protestants. Richard against Baxter. Tyranny and Popery. Growth and Knavery. Reformed Catholic. Free-born Subjects. The Case Put. Seasonable Memorials. Answer to the Appeal. L'Estrange no Papist; in answer to a Libel, intitled L'Estrange a Papist, &c. with Notes and Animadversions ... — The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... acquire her regard in that fashion. He would have preferred to take the chances of a rifle-shot, for while he had few scruples he had been born with a pride which, occasionally at least, prevented his indulgence in petty knavery; and, crushing down his anger, he set himself to consider by what means he ... — The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... sooth the door of device is straitened upon me!" Replied she, "At once I will devise for thee to do away his life." "How so?" asked he; and she answered, "By means of our female slave the so-called Bakun." Now this Bakun was past mistress in all kinds of knavery and was one of the most pestilent of old women, in whose religion to abstain from wickedness was not lawful; she had brought up Kuzia Fakan and Kanmakan who had her in so great affection that he used to sleep at her feet. So when ... — The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... gave himself up for dead, and made answer meekly, "Sir Knight, this youth that I am chastising is my servant, employed by me to watch a flock of sheep that I have hard by, and he is so careless that I lose one every day, and when I punish him for his carelessness and knavery he says I do it out of niggardliness, to escape paying him the wages I owe him, and before God, and on my ... — Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... is the same to touch one of their parishioners and the apple of their eye. At times they make use of unjust and compromising expressions: Thus the tobacco monopoly is "an imposition" or "a bit of knavery." The impost for elections of gobernadorcillos, the signing of a passport, or any other accidental expense which is incurred [by the Indian], is "a theft." The services for the repairing of roads and bridges are "annoyances" ... — The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... Knave of Clubbs, 1600 (Percy Soc. ed. p. 18). The word Shifter is employed by Rowlands in the Knave of Harts, 1613, and by others of our elder writers in the same sense. In the following passage, shift is used to signify a piece of knavery:— ... — Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... you news from court; Marke, these things will make you good sport. All the French that lately did prance There, up and downe in bravery, Now are all sent back to France, King Charles hath smelt some knavery. ... — Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... deuce, thought I, wasn't he expending this precious acquirement on a platoon of agricultural recruits? The officer who suffers such gladly has his name inscribed on the Golden Legend (unfortunately unpublished) of the British Army—"but when it comes," he went on, "to low-down lying knavery, then I'm done. I don't know how to tackle it. All I can do is to get out of the knave's way. I've found Gedge to be a beast, and I'm very honourably in love with Gedge's daughter, and I've asked her to marry me. I attach some value, Major, to your opinion of me, and I want ... — The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... be made whole of the ailment in which his simplicity caused him believe, to publish the privy diversions of his wife; and this hath brought to my mind somewhat of contrary purport to itself, to wit, a story of how one man's knavery got the better of another's wit, to the grievous hurt and confusion of the over-reached one, the which it pleaseth me to relate ... — The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... friend Mrs. Grundy—that is,'the World'—without injury to any one. We must suppose that that footman of Trevanion's was out of his mind,—it is but a charitable, and your good father would say a philosophical, supposition. All great knavery is madness! The world could not get on if truth and goodness were not the natural tendencies of sane minds. Do ... — The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one to be discussed on its merits, in order to arrive at a distinct opinion how far it may be connected with facts insufficiently appreciated and explained by science, and how far with superstition, delusion, and sheer knavery. Such investigation, pursued by careful observation in a scientific spirit, would seem apt to throw light ... — The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... earnest, something practical, is a fitful and fantastic and extravagant thing. How poorly prepared are that young man and woman for the duties of to-day who spent last night wading through brilliant passages descriptive of magnificent knavery and wickedness! The man will be looking all day long for his heroine in the tin-shop, by the forge or in the factory, in the counting-room, and he will not find her, and he will be dissatisfied. A man who gives himself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be nerveless, ... — Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... through its horrors, (and which yet, through that single want, had nearly perished)—they persued a long and dlifficult march through a dreary country, scantily peopled, dotted with robber clans, and exhibiting impediments of all kinds in the knavery and villany of the native authorities; until they reached the borders of Abyssinia. We had by no means been aware that volcanoes had made so large a share of this portion of Africa. The whole border seems to be volcanic, and to retain in its blasted ... — Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... look, an oily voice, downcast eyes, immovable spectacles, clothes like sacristans as if of black wood, almost all told thin beads ostentatiously, and with more strategy and more knavery than the wicked, took toll from ... — En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... Nemours, where we met with an innkeeper who exceeded in knavery all we had met with, either in France or Italy: for supper, we had a soupe maigre, a partridge and a chicken roasted, a plate of celery, a small cauliflower, two bottles of poor vin du Pays, and a dessert of two biscuits and four apples: here is the ... — East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... a speech in favor of the constitutionality of appropriations for the improvement of Western rivers and harbors. The debate was continued between the conflicting absurdities of the Southern Democracy, which is slavery, and the Western Democracy, which is knavery." Under the leadership of Jackson and other Southerners, the Democrats, notwithstanding their long ascendency, had adhered to their position on internal improvements more consistently, perhaps, than to any other of the contentions which they ... — Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... it, that he will find no occasions of doing any good: the ill company will sooner corrupt him, than be the better for him: or if notwithstanding all their ill company, he still remains steady and innocent, yet their follies and knavery will be imputed to him; and by mixing counsels with them, he must bear his share of all the blame that ... — Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... Plot; to produce it here would be to swell the volume far beyond its present dimensions. One point, however, must not be omitted. There have been two raids on the Public Record Office, two acts of abstraction and knavery with respect to these Gunpowder Plot papers; and it can be certainly stated, from the extracts made from them by Dr Abbott and Archbishop Bancroft, that the stolen papers were precisely those which proved Garnet's guilt most conclusively. A Manuscript letter from Dr Jardine to Mr ... — It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... thankful for her humiliation than she could suspect, with her narrow knowledge of the world. Perhaps that sudden downfall of her fancied queenship was needed, to shut her out, once and for all, from that downward path of spiritual intoxication, followed by spiritual knavery, which, as has been hinted, was but too ... — Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... bulk of the members stayed in the Great Chamber. I was informed that this was one trick among others concerted to ruin me, and, telling the Duc d'Orleans of it, he said that if the old buffoon, the Keeper of the Seals, was concerned in such a complication of folly and knavery, he deserved to be hanged by the side of Mazarin. But the sequel showed that I was not ... — The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... said anything to them; but we will pass them and proceed. You have heard of the sins of his youth, of his apprenticeship, and how he set up, and married, and what a life he hath led his wife; and now I will tell you some more of his pranks. He had the very knack for knavery; had he, as I said before, been bound to serve an apprenticeship to all these things, he could not have been more cunning, he could not have been more ... — The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... reality made but a small part of the motive force; one may almost say they were no more than the turning of the handle which admits the driving power into the machine. Only once does he appear to see something of the truth. It is when he uses the phrase 'to plume up my will in double knavery.' ... — Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... solicitor to threaten the printer with a prosecution for having taken so much liberty with his name—take notice, too, that he had accepted the money! Dodsley, you may believe, laughed at the lawyer; but that does not lessen the dirty knavery.... I have done with countenancing kings." After he had remained in prison more than six years, "he took the benefit of the Act of Insolvency, and went to the Old Bailey for that purpose: in order ... — Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... remote parts of North America are now able to pay for the linens, woollens, and iron ware, they are furnished with by English traders, though Indians have nothing but what they get by hunting, and the goods are loaded with all the impositions fraud and knavery can contrive, to inhance their value; will not industrious English farmers," employed in the culture of hemp, flax, silk, &c. "be able to pay for what shall be brought to them in the fair way of commerce;" and especially when it is remembered, that ... — Report of the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations on the Petition of the Honourable Thomas Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, John Sargent, and Samuel Wharton, Esquires, and their Associates • Great Britain Board of Trade
... his money-bags I think that La Chesnaye's servile nature would have bargained to send souls in job lots blindfold over the gangplank. But, as La Chesnaye said when Pierre Radisson remonstrated against the knavery, the gin was ... — Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... miserable fall, and for such a purpose! To expect to find the streaked daffodil unguarded in an outhouse! To sell it for five pounds and think to spend the money on creature comforts! It is hard to say which of the three was the worst. The really good have little idea how such fool's knavery looks to the shadily clever; it brings home to them the wrongness of wrong, disgusting them with it and with themselves, as no preaching in the ... — The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... it. I have an inward shame and a sharp remorse, if sometimes a lie escapes me: as sometimes it does, being surprised by occasions that allow me no premeditation. A man must not always tell all, for that were folly: but what a man says should be what he thinks, otherwise 'tis knavery. I do not know what advantage men pretend to by eternally counterfeiting and dissembling, if not never to be believed when they speak the truth; it may once or twice pass with men; but to profess the concealing their thought, and to brag, as some of our princes ... — The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... John Cockle, I'll pledge you a pottle, Were it the best ale in Nottinghamshire: But then, said our king, now I think of a thing; Some of your lightfoot I would we had here. Ho! ho! quoth Richard, full well I may say it, 'Tis knavery to eat it, ... — The Book of Brave Old Ballads • Unknown
... head. Colonel Murray did tell him in the House, that, if any lives were lost, his Lordship should join the number. Nor yet is he so lunatic as to deserve pity. Besides being very debauched, he has more knavery than mission. What will be decided on him, I do not know; every man that heard him can convict him of the worst kind of sedition: but it is dangerous to constitute a rascal a martyr. I trust we have not much holy fury left; I am persuaded ... — Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... on the land system confirmed some of the conditions as set forth by Randolph's report. Stating that the country was "ill peopled" despite the headright system, they explained that "The first great abuse of this design arose from the ignorance and knavery of surveyors, who often gave out drafts of surveys without even coming on the land. They gave their descripton [sic] by some natural bounds and were sure to allow large measure, that so the persons for whom they surveyed should enjoy much larger tracts than they paid quit-rents ... — Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... you going, Great-Heart? "To end the rule of knavery; To break the yoke of slavery; To give the world delivery." Then ... — Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... Romans would make the sign of the cross, and pass more quickly by the walls of this garden, which thenceforth they called "The Charmed Garden." It was indeed a charmed garden! It was an island of happiness, behind these walls, concealed from the knavery of the world. Like an eternal smile of the Divinity rested the heavens over this ever-blooming, ever-fragrant garden, in whose myrtle-bushes the nightingales sang, and in whose silver-clear ... — The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... mental recreation of "'swapping lies;" their respective exchanges consisting on this occasion of feats of stealing; the experiences of one I recollect in particular. He had stolen an axe from a man on the North Pacific Railroad and a few days later sold him the same article. This Piece of knavery was received as the acme of cuteness; and I well recollect the language in which the brute wound up his self-laudations: "If any chap can steal faster than ... — The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... &c.; To be but imaginary Erronious conceptions and novelties; Wherein also the lewde, unchristian practises of Witchmongers, upon aged, melancholy, ignorant and superstitious people in extorting confessions by inhumane terrors and Tortures, is notably detected. Also The knavery and confederacy of Conjurors. The impious blasphemy of Inchanters. The imposture of Soothsayers, and infidelity of Atheists. The delusion of Pythonists, Figure-casters, Astrologers, and vanity of Dreamers. The fruitlesse ... — Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... same for policemen—those 'Finders out of Occasions,' as Othello styles them—those 'rough and ready' to choke ideas, as the bud is bit by the venomous worm 'ere it can spread its sweet leaves to the air.' I was about to encounter the assailing eyes of knavery. A gentleman of the administration welcomed me in. 'Sir,' I said, coldly, 'I was invited to meet the prefect of the police. I wish to know what is deemed an outrage to the established ... — Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... the large sanctified hat, and the little precise band, with a swinging long spiritual cloak, to cover carnal knavery—not forgetting the black patch, which Tribulation Spintext wears, as I'm informed, upon one eye, as a penal mourning for the ogling offences of his youth; and some say, with that eye he first discovered the ... — The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... the Lines of Wickedness to the Eye at one view: Besides, they fancied some sort of Analogy in the Rotundity of the Figure, with the continued Circular Motion of all Court-Policies, in the stated Round of Universal Knavery. ... — The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... made it a Fashion, Let's send for a Black Coat, whilst we're in the Mind. But it is damn'd Slavery, And Priestly Knavery, That Parsons must conjure e're ... — The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... place I could safely revel in his friendship, and as an author I certainly found him a most charming companion. The adventures of his rogue of a hero, who began life as the servant and accomplice of a blind beggar, and then adventured on through a most diverting career of knavery, brought back the atmosphere of Don Quixote, and all the landscape of that dear wonder- world of Spain, where I had lived so much, and I followed him with all the ... — Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fool confided in the spendthrift. My dear, I understand. In nature Pevensey gave the gems to some nymph of Sadler's Wells or Covent Garden. For I was out of England. And so he capped his knavery with insolence. It is an additional reason why Pevensey should not live to scratch a gray head. It is, however, an affront to me that Umfraville should have believed him. I doubt if ... — The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the foreigner to be a villain. Knowing that it would be impossible for him to relinquish his reason into what he now denominated the partial hands of his aunt and cousin, he persisted in his opinion to both the ladies, that their unsuspicious natures had been rendered subservient to knavery and artifice. ... — Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... last, we asked them for some peaches, and they answered, "Go and pick them," which showed their politeness. However, in order not to offend them, we went off and pulled some. Although they are such a poor, miserable people, they are, nevertheless, licentious and proud, and given to knavery and scoffing. Seeing a very old woman among them, we inquired how old she was, when some young fellows, laughing and jeering, answered twenty years, while it was evident to us she was not less than an hundred. ... — Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... Prussia, Malmesbury declared that he could find no quality but "great and shabby art and cunning; ill-will, jealousy, and every sort of dirty passion." From the head quarters of Moellendorf he wrote to a member of Pitt's Cabinet: "Here I have to do with knavery and dotage.... If we listened only to our feelings, it would be difficult to keep any measure with Prussia. We must consider it an alliance with the Algerians, whom it is no disgrace to pay, or any impeachment of good sense to ... — History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... master hand we watch with bated breath the unfolding of a story of unparalleled interest. Ever the unexpected happens, surprise follows surprise, plot is succeeded by counterplot. Vice and virtue, honor and knavery, true love and duplicity, struggle desperately and incessantly for mastery until the mind is bewildered and the heart and soul are stirred to ... — The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... would have reckoned so much for the good air, and so much for the view of the country. Thus he built up a tidy fortune with other people's money, became as round as a butt, larded with fat, and was called Monsieur. At the time of the last fair three young fellows, who were apprentices in knavery, in whom there was more of the material that makes thieves than saints, and who knew just how far it was possible to go without catching their necks in the branches of trees, made up their minds to amuse themselves, and live well, condemning certain hawkers or others in all the expenses. ... — Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... said of them is that they are drawn from a wrong point of view; but from that point of view their honesty is unquestionable. He does not distinguish men by their party. The folly of his own side is exhibited as relentlessly as the knavery of his opponents. Of no one did he write a more unfavourable character than the Earl of Arundel. He explains the failure of Laud, and he does not conceal the weakness ... — Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... expresses the national faith and feeling as regards the inevitable righteousness of England, the Almighty's consequent respect and partiality for that redoubtable little island, and his presumed readiness to strengthen its defence against the contumacious wickedness and knavery of all other principalities or republics. Tennyson himself, though evidently English to the very last prejudice, could not write half so good a song for the purpose. Finding that the entire dinner-table struck in, with voices of every pitch between rolling thunder and the squeak of a ... — Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... represented real transactions, with the names, dress, gestures, and likeness, in masks, of whomsoever it thought fit to sacrifice to the public derision. In a state where it was held good policy to unmask whatever carried the air of ambition, singularity, or knavery, comedy assumed the privilege to harangue, reform, and advise the people upon their most important interests. No one was spared in a city of so much liberty, or rather licentiousness, as Athens was at that time. Generals, magistrates, ... — The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... superficial contact with the person. How is it to penetrate within? The necessary conditions will be fulfilled when mechanical rigidity no longer requires for its manifestation a stumbling-block which either the hazard of circumstance or human knavery has set in its way, but extracts by natural processes, from its own store, an inexhaustible series of opportunities for externally revealing its presence. Suppose, then, we imagine a mind always thinking of what it has just done and never of what it ... — Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... him with delight. It had accomplished two objects, both of which gave him keen pleasure. Bert's most dangerous rival for the prize had been put out of the way, and Cohen, whom he cordially disliked, had been well punished for his knavery. ... — Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... common law, or countors (quos banci narratores vulgariter appellamus) as of an order of men well known. And we have an example of the antiquity of the coif in the same author's history of England, A.D. 1259. in the case of one William de Bussy; who, being called to account for his great knavery and malpractices, claimed the benefit of his orders or clergy, which till then remained an entire secret; and to that end voluit ligamenta coifae suae solvere, ut palam monstraret se tonsuram habere clericalem; ... — Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... quality as well—something elfin, wayward, mischievous. They peep and whisper. It is said they can cast spells. To sleep upon a daisied lawn is to run a certain risk. There is this hint of impudence in their attitude, half audacity, half knavery, that shows itself a little in the way they stare unwinkingly all day at everything above them—at the stately things that tower proudly in the air—then just shut up at sunset without a word of explanation or apology. They see everything, ... — The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... had to undergo infinite annoyance from one of her neighbors, who was a witch and whom she was fain to conciliate with all sorts of attention, for this witch could throw a charm upon children which made them cry themselves to death. A pastor having punished her for some knavery, she cast a spell upon him by means of some earth upon which he had walked, and which she bewitched. The poor man hereupon fell sick of a malady which no remedy could remove, and shortly ... — The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... Saint Giles's and the desperate neighbourhood of Saffron Hill in our own time. And yet, on the very site of the sordid tenements and squalid courts we have mentioned, where the felon openly made his dwelling, and the fraudulent debtor laughed the object of his knavery to scorn—on this spot, not two centuries ago, stood the princely residence of Charles Brandon, the chivalrous Duke of Suffolk, whose stout heart was a well of honour, and whose memory breathes of loyalty and valour. Suffolk House, as Brandon's ... — Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... in fetters. When his steward, Diomedes, left him to the mercy of a wild boar, which suddenly attacked them while they were walking together, he considered it rather a cowardice than a breach of duty; and turned an occurrence of no small hazard into a jest, because there was no knavery in his steward's conduct. He put to death Proculus, one of his most favourite freedmen, for maintaining a criminal commerce with other men's wives. He broke the legs of his secretary, Thallus, for taking a bribe of five hundred denarii to discover the contents of one of his letters. ... — The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... obligation of our hospitable entertainment there: though nameless fugitives we were still under the spell of the standards of our former lives. We admitted to each other that he might steal an axe from that farm and I condone the knavery and avail myself of its proceeds; but we agreed that such baseness must be stooped to only as a desperate last resort. He was to ... — Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... chance to take offence, the higher life they were to lead began at once. And yet it seemed at times to Honora as though this higher life were the gift the fates would most begrudge: a gift reserved for others, the pretensions to which were a kind of knavery. Merriment, forgetfulness, music, the dance; the cup of pleasure and the feast of Babylon—these might more readily have been vouchsafed; even deemed to have been bargained for. But to take that ... — The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... everything and everywhere: "in the great manufacturers who drive along the streets of the village, crushing men and beasts; in the bailiff and the recorder, who are such bad characters that their very faces betray their knavery;" and finally, in the central figure of the story, Axinia, the wife of Stepan, the youngest son of ... — Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... conducts himself in this way is said to have his hands and feet well-controlled. One should not indulge in vociferous abuse or censure. One should not speak words that are vain. One should forbear from knavery and from calumniating others. One should observe the vow of truthfulness, be sparing of speech, and always heedful. By conducting oneself in this way one will have one's organ of speech well-restrained. One should not abstain entirely from food. One ... — The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... of his assistance. The committee, incensed by the treachery and appalled by the danger, knew not what course to take. But Clive was more than Omichund's match in Omichund's own arts. The man, he said, was a villain. Any artifice which would defeat such knavery was justifiable. The best course would be to promise what was asked. Omichund would soon be at their mercy; and then they might punish him by withholding from him, not only the bribe which he now demanded, but also the compensation which all the other ... — Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Governor's action, and maybe had counseled with him, siding against Bigot. If that were so—as it proved to be—he was in a nest of scorpions; for who among them would spare him: Marin, Cournal, Rigaud, the Intendant himself? Such as he were thwarted right and left in this career of knavery ... — The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... elections of the great cities of today, elections that control taxation and expenditure, the mass of the voters vote in absolute ignorance of the candidates. The citizen who supposes that he does all his duty when he votes, places a premium upon political knavery. Thieves welcome him to the polls and offer him a choice, which he has done nothing to prevent, between Jeremy Diddler and Dick Turpin. The party cries for which he is responsible are: "Turpin and Honesty," "Diddler and ... — Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... biographies of the good and great. She read ennobling works of poetry and counsel. She brought before his mind by example how superior was earnestness to trivialty, strict integrity to knavery and falsehood, goodness and piety to wickedness and infidelity. As she read and commented, her voice became to Philip as the voice of an angel. Her work was indeed accomplished when, after having listened to her rendering of St. Paul's grand epistles, ... — Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... less title to the hostile name of the Lycophron of philosophy.[194] But the comedy of The Philosophers was a scandalous misrepresentation, introducing Diderot personally on the stage, and putting into his mouth a mixture of folly and knavery that was as foreign to Diderot as to any one else in the world. In 1782 the satirist again attacked his enemy, now grown old and weary. In Le Satyrique, Valere, a spiteful and hypocritical poetaster, is intended partially at least for Diderot. A colporteur, not ill-named as M. Pamphlet, comes ... — Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Juno. "I see, Juno," said he, "you mischief-making trickster, that your cunning has stayed Hector from fighting and has caused the rout of his host. I am in half a mind to thrash you, in which case you will be the first to reap the fruits of your scurvy knavery. Do you not remember how once upon a time I had you hanged? I fastened two anvils on to your feet, and bound your hands in a chain of gold which none might break, and you hung in mid-air among the clouds. All the gods in Olympus ... — The Iliad • Homer
... with a grievous beating, what while he cried out for succour, but none succoured him, and besought protection, but none protected him. Then said he to them, "O folk, ye are quit[FN295] of that which ye have taken from me; but now restore me to my lodging." They replied, "Leave this knavery, O rascal! thine intent is to sue us for thy clothes on the morrow." The youth cried, "By the truth of the One, the Eternal One, I will not sue any for them!" but they said, "We find no way to this." And the Prefect ... — Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... age, [19] the man stands before us. We see the crisp, erect figure, bristling with aggressive vigour, the coarse, red hair, the keen, grey eyes, piercingly fixed on his opponent's face, and reading at a glance the knavery he sought to hide; we hear the rasping voice, launching its dry, cutting sarcasms one after another, each pointed with its sting of truth; and we can well believe that the dislike was intense, which could ... — A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... - me has run up and down mine Country and learn many fine thing, and mush knavery, now more and all dis me know you'll jumbla de fine vench and fill her belly with garsoone, her name ... — The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... without a snib, and next morning when the dominie reached his desk he was surprised to find on it a little cotton glove. He raised it on high, greatly puzzled, and then, as ever when he suspected knavery, his eyes sought Tommy, who was sitting on a form, his arms proudly folded. That the whelp had put the glove there, Cathro no longer doubted, and he would have liked to know why, but was reluctant to give him the satisfaction of asking. So the gauntlet—for gauntlet it was—was laid aside, the ... — Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... court with falsehood's blackness, And stained by the yoke of slavery, Full of godless flattery, of vicious lying, And ev'ry possible knavery. ... — History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... this person was dark, and his age somewhat advanced. He wore his own hair, combed smooth down, and cut very short. It was jet black, slightly curled by nature, and already mottled with grey. The man's face expressed rather knavery than vice, and a disposition to sharpness, cunning, and roguery, more than the traces of stormy and indulged passions. His sharp quick black eyes, acute features, ready sardonic smile, promptitude and effrontery, ... — The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the former days are these days, he says in his foreword to Ha-Shahar. Thirty or twenty years ago we had to fight the enemy within. Sanctimonious fanatics with their power of darkness sought to persecute us, lest their folly or knavery be exposed to the light of day.... Now that they, who hitherto have walked in darkness, are beginning to discern the error of their ways, lo and behold, those who have seen the light are closing their eyes against ... — The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... and they looked at him. The two men in the runabout resembled each other, and were evidently brothers. Carroll's eyes on the men were sharp, so were theirs on him. Carroll's eyes were looking for knavery, and the men's were looking ... — The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... thought of women, and as to the harshness of men, was stirred constantly by the remembrance of his irresolute looks, and his not having dared to speak nobly for Dahlia, even though he might have had, the knavery to think evil. As the case stood, there was still mischief to counteract. Her father had willingly swallowed a drug, but his suspicions only slumbered, and she could not instil her own vivid hopefulness and trust into him. Letters from Dahlia came regularly. ... — The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the powers and every charm of verse, Each science opening in his ample mind, His fancy glowing and his taste refined, See Trumbull lead the train. His skilful hand Hurls the keen darts of satire round the land. Pride, knavery, dullness feel his mortal stings, And listening virtue triumphs while he sings; Britain's foil'd sons, victorious now no more, In guilt retiring from the wasted shore, Strive their curst cruelties to hide in vain; The world resounds them ... — The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... upon making the Adams administration odious. In referring to the President and his secretary of state, he did not personally join in the cry of bargain and sale, of fraud and corruption, of treachery and knavery; nor did he speak of them as "the Puritan and the Blackleg;" but for three years his criticisms had so associated the Administration with Federalism and the offensive alien and sedition laws which Jefferson condemned and defeated in 1800, ... — A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c. This I daily hear, and such like, both private and public news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world; jollity, pride, perplexities and cares, simplicity and villainy; subtlety, knavery, candour and integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves; I rub on privus privatus; as I have still lived, so I now continue, statu quo prius, left to a solitary life, and mine own domestic discontents: saving that sometimes, ne quid mentiar, as Diogenes went into the city, and Democritus ... — The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... people—a pure fool-like Parsifal, who could not conceive such treachery and knavery because it was incapable of such things itself—toiled and worked day by day, enjoyed the blessings of peace, was happy in its existence and ignorant of the looming clouds gathering on its frontiers. All hail to our chosen leaders who kept watch and ward over ... — What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... ostler's work," he announced. "There was knavery and treachery writ large upon his ugly face. I always felt it, and this business proves how correct were my instincts. The rogue was bribed when he discovered how things were with you, you greasy sots. But you, La Boulaye," he cried suddenly, "were ... — The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
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