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Pestilent   Listen
adjective
Pestilent  adj.  Pestilential; noxious; pernicious; mischievous. "Corrupt and pestilent." "What a pestilent knave is this same!"






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pestilent" Quotes from Famous Books



... Discovery of Witchcraft, wherein the lewde dealing of witches and witchmongers is notably detected; the knavery of conjurers, the impiety of inchanters, the folly of soothsayers, the impudent falsehood of cozeners, the infidelity of atheists, the pestilent practices of pythonists, the curiosities of figure-casters, the vanity of dreamers, the beggarly art of alcumstrie, the abomination of idolatrie, the horrible art of poisoning, the virtue and power of natural magic, and all the conveniencies of legerdemaine ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... twenty-five boxes of lemons, besides great bunches of half-ripened bananas. Live chickens were kept under the bed in one of these rooms. The fruit which is ripened in these places is sold daily in every section of the city, and people who live with healthful surroundings, far away from this pestilent hole, are risking the health of themselves and their children, unwittingly, by purchasing fruit that cannot help but have absorbed something of the poison from the atmosphere of these filthy, crowded quarters. The Board of Health know about this place, for ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks

... fire spares, sea doth drown; whom sea, Pestilent air doth send to clay; Whom war ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... until their wretched lives ended with sordid deaths, and the very cost of their burial would have come from the pockets of pinched workers. I fancy that I have shown the advisability of neglecting strict economic canons in this instance. I abhor the pestilent beings who swarm in certain quarters, and I should never dream of removing any burden from their shoulders if I thought that it would only leave the rascals with more money to expend on brutish pleasures; but I desire to look far ahead, and I can see that, when the present generation of ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... black as pitch, and fishes of the same colour swimming in it; marshes formed by the standing waters of Acheron, and the mountain whose roots go down to hell. The terrible aspect of this place, the thick shades with which it is covered by a surrounding wood, and the pestilent odour which this water exhales, characterize it very justly as the Tartarus of the poets. There wants only the boat of Charon, which, however, would be unnecessary, as there is only a shallow ford to pass over. The Styx and the kingdom of Pluto are now ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... authority was sacred, yet was there a great difference between the authority and the persons who exercised it;[**] and that it ought to be considered, whether or not those abominations, called by the pestilent Papists religion, and which they defend by fire and sword, be the true religion of Christ Jesus. They remonstrated with such of the queen's army as had formerly embraced their party, and told them, "that as they were already ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... prologue to the drama about to be played. The year 1805 was one of threatening peril to England. Napoleon was then in the ambitious youth of his power, full of dreams of universal empire, his mind set on an invasion of the pestilent little island across the channel which should rival the "Invincible Armada" in power and ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... Swarms of buzzing, piping insects rose up at every step and formed a dense cloud around our heads, settling on our hands and faces and inoculating us with their filthy venom. Never had I ventured into so pestilent and ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle

... (swinging his hand at her and missing her) Daughter, you've such a pestilent hussy there I can't live with her longer, without sin. I can't discuss things in the state I'm in. My mind's so flustered by her insolent talk, To calm myself, I ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere

... and swifts, untirable on their wings, but too gentle to hold their own in a jostling crowd, soared away after the midges and May-flies and pestilent gnats that rise from marsh and pond to hold their joyous dances under the blue dome. Continually rushing open-mouthed after these, they have stretched their gape from ear to ear; but their bills have dwindled by disuse and left only an apology ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)

... he deemed indispensable for the nations; he could only wish it had for its ministers philosophers instead of controversialists. He deplored the fact that the Jacobins were for replacing it by a newer and more pestilent religion, the cult of liberty, equality, the republic, the fatherland. He had observed this, that it is in the vigour of their youth religions are the fiercest and most cruel, and grow milder as they grow ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... their gum, or "dragon's blood," and left but a few for a time of better prices. And, what was far worse, at the suggestion surely of Satan I had turned three tame rabbits loose upon the island; and from the one doe were bred in two or three years so many thousands of these pestilent creatures that when in 1425 we came to plant the vines and canes, not one green shoot in a million escaped. Thus it happened that by 1428 my kingdom had become but a barren rock, dependent for its revenues upon the moss called the orchilla weed ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... bride. Should not the matrimonial bond be held to exclude the three-fourths of the wife that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? A question not to be put without a shudder. The fact is, that Hawthorne had succeeded only too well in misleading himself by a common fallacy. That pestilent personage, John Bull, has assumed so concrete a form in our imaginations, with his top-boots and his broad shoulders and vast circumference, and the emblematic bulldog at his heels, that for most observers he completely hides the Englishman ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... clear the air. These explosions were periodic, inevitable, wholesome. The Britannia Loan, &c, &c, &c, had run its pestilent course; exciting avarice, perturbing quiet industry with the passion of the gamester, inflating vulgar ambition, now at length scattering wreck and ruin. This is how mankind progresses. Harvey Rolfe felt glad that no theological or scientific dogma constrained ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... Derby, in the preface to his translation of the Iliad, calls it "That pestilent heresy of the so-called English Hexameter; a metre wholly repugnant to the genius of our language; which can only be pressed into the service by a violation of every rule of prosody." Lord Kames, ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon

... in secret raged at Chancellor Black. Each day his rage increased. It seemed as though there would never be an end to Doctor Gilman. The stone he had rejected had become the corner-stone of Stillwater. Whenever he opened a newspaper he felt like exclaiming: "Will no one rid me of this pestilent fellow?" For the "Rise and Fall," in an edition deluxe limited to two hundred copies, was being bought up by all his book-collecting millionaire friends; a popular edition was on view in the windows of every book-shop; It was offered as a prize ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis

... be said that the abstract Utilitarian doctrine reached its high-water mark in Mill's book on the Subjection of Women, to which Mr. Stephen allots one section of a chapter. The book is a particular enlargement upon Mill's general view that it is a pestilent error to regard such marked distinctions of human character as sex or race as innate and in the main indelible. What is called the nature of women he treats as an artificial thing, an isolated fact which need not at any rate be recognised by law; the proper test was, he argued, to ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... Ethelberta wished heartily, for his sake, there could be warm friendship between herself and him, as well as all her lovers, without that insistent courtship-and-marriage question, which sent them all scattering like leaves in a pestilent blast, at enmity with one another. She was less pleased when she found that Ladywell, after saying all there was to say about his painting, gently signified that he had been misinformed, as he believed, concerning her future intentions, which had led to his absenting himself entirely ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... justified in his anger is shown by the fact that, as he had foreseen, he reaped all the odium of Mann's conversion. The Bishop of Cordoba in Council branded him as "a dangerous, pestilent person, who under the pretence of selling the Scriptures went about making converts, and moreover employed subordinates for the purpose of deluding weak and silly people into separation from the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... is ther sent ouer to be prynted the booke that Frythe made last against the blessed sacrament answering to my letter, wherewyth I confuted the pestilent treatice that he hadde made agaynst it before. And the brethen looked for it nowe at thys Bartlemewe tide last passed, and yet looke euery day, except it be come all redy, and secretly runne among them. But in the meane whyle, ther is come ouer a nother booke againste ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various

... those demoniacs justice, I had got through time imperceptibly by their pestilent help; and I was startled to see, by my watch, how late it was. I had just resolved to leave a line fixing an appointment for the morrow, and so depart, when I heard Vivian's knock,—a knock that had great character in it, haughty, impatient, irregular; ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the theatres. Among them the most important is a college play, entitled "The Return from Parnassus," dating 1601-02. In it a much-quoted passage makes Burbage, as a character, declare: "Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye and Ben Jonson, too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit." Was Shakespeare then concerned in this war of the stages? And what could have been the ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson

... the Persian army at Marathon redoubled the wrath of King Darius against the Athenians. He resolved in his autocratic mind to sweep that pestilent city and all whom it contained from the face of the earth. And he perhaps would have done so had he not met a more terrible foe even than Miltiades and his army,—the all-conqueror Death, to whose might the greatest monarchs must succumb. Burning ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... institution of slavery should be removed from our midst as a trouble and a stumbling-block. The delusion could not be traced in any of the component parts of the Southern Constitution. In that instrument we solemnly discarded the pestilent heresy of fancy politicians, that all men of all races were equal, and we have made African inequality, and subordination, the chief corner-stone of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various

... work. Assuredly, somewhere back in her life, something had gone amiss with this silly, helpful creature, and left a taint on her brain. The hearty, pretty smile would go suddenly from her face, something foreign looking out of it, instead, as if a pestilent thought had got into her soul; she would rise uneasily, going to the window, looking out, her forehead leaning on the glass, her body twitching weakly. One would think from her face she saw some work in the world which God had forgotten. What could it matter to her? Whatever hurt ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... suppose her pestilent father thought it was the nearest way to a coronet. I don't know why men should marry at all. They always ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... silk pocket handkerchief, instead of blowing it up with a match and train, is rarely successful; and, after three or four other and much guiltier victims than Lenny had been incarcerated in the stocks, the parish of Hazeldean was ripe for any enormity. Pestilent jacobinical tracts, conceived and composed in the sinks of manufacturing towns—found their way into the popular beer-house—heaven knows how, though the Tinker was suspected of being the disseminator by all but ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... of which we had a specimen every afternoon when the office was busy, and which we knew to be quite monstrous. That, perhaps, in short, this Prerogative Office of the diocese of Canterbury was altogether such a pestilent job, and such a pernicious absurdity, that but for its being squeezed away in a corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, which few people knew, it must have been turned completely inside out, and ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... is more obvious' than that equal labour implies the 'same sacrifice' in all states of society.[377] It might seem to follow that the value of anything was measured by the labour which it would command. This doctrine, however, though maintained by Malthus, was, according to M'Culloch, a pestilent heresy, first exploded by Ricardo's sagacity.[378] Things exchange, as he explains, in proportion to the labour which produces them, but the share given to the labourer may vary widely. The labourer, he says, 'gives a constant, but receives ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... near Argos, were infested by great numbers of serpents, which, as fast as they were destroyed, were replaced by new swarms; draining the marshes, and, probably, setting fire to the adjacent thickets or jungles, he destroyed these pestilent reptiles, on which it was fabled that he had destroyed the Hydra of Lerna, with its heads, which grew as fast as they were cut off. The forest of Erymanthus was full of wild boars, which laid waste all the neighbouring country: he destroyed them all, and brought one ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... had a pretty good idea of diphtheria. He speaks of it in connection with other throat manifestations under the heading of "crusty and pestilent ulcers of the tonsils." He divides the anginas generally into four kinds. The first consists of inflammation of the fauces with the classic symptoms, the second presents no inflammation of the mouth nor of the fauces, but is complicated ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... that name was Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, was put to death as a criminal, under the procurator, Pontius Pilate. But this pestilent superstition, checked for a while, broke out afresh, and spread not only over Judea, where the evil originated, but also in Rome, where all that is evil on the earth finds its way, and is practiced. At ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... I was accused by Tertullus, speaking for the priesthood, as a pestilent fellow and a mover of sedition among all the Jews and a leader of the sect ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... philosophers, anti-national instructors are the idols of many a pale-faced and stunted son of Britain. The reverence which made us great is decadent and openly scoffed at. What is the remedy? Aristophanes burnt out the pestilent teachers. We had better not copy him till we are satisfied that the demand for them has ceased. A nation gets the instruction for which it is morally fitted. There is but one hope; we must follow the genuine Socratic ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb

... the defensive being a negligible factor at sea, or even the mere pestilent heresy it is generally represented, it is of course inherent in all war, and, as we have seen, the paramount questions of strategy both at sea and on land turn on the relative possibilities of offensive and defensive, and upon ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... has done definite harm is this: that he has (not always or even as a rule intentionally) increased that anarchy of thought which is always the destruction of thought. Much of his early writing has encouraged among the modern youth that most pestilent of all popular tricks and fallacies; what is called the argument of progress. I mean this kind of thing. Previous ages were often, alas, aristocratic in politics or clericalist in religion; but they ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... virtue. Though they thus humbly addressed him, his friends advised him not to pardon these turbulent and ill-conditioned men, but to yield them to the desires of his soldiers, and utterly root out of the commonwealth the ambitious affectation of popularity, a disease as pestilent and pernicious as the passion for tyranny itself. Dion endeavored to satisfy them, telling them that other generals exercised and trained themselves for the most part in the practices of war and arms; but that he had long studied in the Academy how to conquer anger, and not ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... said Rupert. (He had a most pestilent trick of perpetually playing monitor, to the wet-blanketing of all ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... than he, and certainly received a much larger share of abuse. For the Romans love faction more than party, and understand it better; so that popular opinion is too frequently represented by a transitory frenzy, violent and pestilent while it lasts, utterly insignificant when it ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford

... poisoned the wells and brought on the Black Death, had pierced the host, killed children for their blood, blasphemed the saints, and done all that the imagination of defalcating debtors could suggest. But the Roman Jews were merely pestilent heretics. Perhaps it was the comparative poverty of the Ghetto that made its tragedy one of steady degradation rather than of fitful massacre. Nevertheless bloodshed was not unknown, and the song died on Rachel's lips, though the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... means signify that the realm was rid of superstition. In Middlesex, in Somerset and Devon, in York, Northumberland, and Cumberland, the attack upon witches on the part of the people was going on with undiminished vigor. If no great discoveries were made, if no nests of the pestilent creatures were unearthed, the justices of the peace were kept quite as busy with ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... intelligence, common decencies and common virtues have nothing to do with present conditions, and the ardent leveller of class-distinctions counts as his enemy any one who seeks to give the poor a truer knowledge of how far their earnings may be made to go toward securing better food or less pestilent homes. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... there from further outrage. One of his vessels, the Experiment, soon captured a Tripoli cruiser of fourteen guns, the earliest stroke of any civilized power for many years by way of showing a bold front to these pestilent corsairs. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... at it again. Why did you bring up the subject? I beg your pardon; I had no right to say that. Let me be polite; let me be hospitable. I beg to invite you to come and see me, when my room is purified from its pestilent smell. I can only offer you a cup of tea. Oh, that river, that river, what devil set me talking about it? I'm not mad, Mr. Roylake; only wretched. When may I expect you? Choose your ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins

... his safe-conduct had been disgracefully broken, he blustered. The Pope insisted the Emperor had no right to interfere in the treatment of a pestilent heretic. The Emperor broke his sacred word and sacrificed ...
— John Hus - A brief story of the life of a martyr • William Dallmann

... raise the necessary fees for a patent, or to get any one to help him thereto. The manufacturer "makes what his customers call for." Why should he spend his money and spoil his plant to introduce improvements? So things go, until some pestilent Yankees flood the markets with better articles at a lower price; and British consumers suddenly discover that they want something that the native manufacturer cannot make. The need was there; but invention ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various

... lack that. He is the best of comrades, and he has fine qualities and plenty of courage. But there are times when I fear he will be his own undoing. When he disputes in the schools he will often tread perilously near some 'pestilent heresy,' as the masters would deem it, or show by some of his arguments that he has a dangerous knowledge of forbidden books. Just now things are quiet in Oxford, and not much notice is taken. But who knows how long the calm may last? London has been set in a commotion ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green

... tic been lately? I had one fiery night when this same dragon "tic" held me for some hours with pestilent violence. It still comes at intervals with abated fury. Owing to this and broken sleep, I am looking singularly charming, one of my true London looks—starved out and worn down. Write soon, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... as if people had discovered that the best way to flatter him was to try to deceive him. In 1604, there was in Oxford a certain Richard Haydock, a Bachelor of Physic. This Haydock practised his profession during the day like other mortals, but varied from the kindly race of men by a pestilent habit of preaching all night. It was Haydock's contention that he preached unconsciously in his sleep, when he would give out a text with the greatest gravity, and declare such sacred matters as were revealed to him in slumber, "his preaching ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang

... watch the gradual emasculation of the monsters of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The chimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have been proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tie a ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer of milk. Who ever ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... hospitality, friends all," said he, in his slightly swaggering and yet withal effeminate way; "and see, in some measure of return for it, we leave you our Sherwood free from pestilent robbers and evil defiers of the law. When we came to Nottingham there were these and others; but now they are all driven out of our Royal forest—many slain with the arrows of my Hubert, or beaten ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick

... ship's officers, through a small window in the bulkhead, near the caboose. After one had thus procured fire the rest were also soon supplied, and our pipes were all in full operation in the course of a few minutes. The smoke which rose around us appeared to purify the pestilent air by which we were surrounded; and I attribute the preservation of my health, in a great degree, to the exercise of this habit. Our greatest difficulty was to procure tobacco. This, to some of the prisoners, was impossible, and it must have been an aggravation ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... came sweeping down the Gulf like a rush of mad spirits; tore up the white crests of the sea and flung them on the beach in thundering surf; burst through the heavy fog that had trailed upon the moon's track and smothered the island in its soft pestilent brooding; and in one mighty pouring out of cold pure ether changed earth and sky from torrid to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... is, that in Oldport we all incline to the attitude of repose. Now and then a man comes here, from farther east, with the New England fever in his blood, and with a pestilent desire to do something. You hear of him, presently, proposing that the Town Hall should be repainted. Opposition would require too much effort, and the thing is done. But the Gulf Stream soon takes its revenge on the ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... with equal weapons, to conquer, to crush, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion, tribute, etc. What do such phrases mean? Squeeze them, and you obtain nothing. Yes, you do obtain something; for from such words proceed absurd errors, and fatal and pestilent prejudices. Such phrases tend to arrest the fusion of nations, are inimical to their peaceful, universal, and indissoluble alliance, and retard the progress ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... brothers remain at Careggi. "Two thousand crowns of gold to him who will bring to the Signory at Florence the head of either of the outlawed Medici; five thousand crowns to him who will deliver to the Signory the bodies of these pestilent rebels alive." Thus read the cruel ban of their native city and, first, Pietro, and next, Giovanni, turned from the familiar scenes of their loved country-house and fled in great secrecy toward Bologna. But the hunters were after them, and for ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... comfortable quarters in which they had ensconced themselves were to be vacated forthwith. Concentration, aggregation, synthesis, were the words; and this time the reassembled army was not to disintegrate into winter quarters until this pestilent Mr. Washington was attended to, and attended to so effectually that they could enjoy the enforced hospitality of the surly but substantial Jerseymen through the long winter nights undisturbed. For his part, Mr. Washington, having tasted success, the first real ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... pestilent Barbary States, held a number of American captives which she refused to release except upon the payment of a large ransom. It had been the custom for years for the powerful Christian nations to pay those savages to let their ships alone, ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.

... he declared it was of no use to work on his farm; it was the most pestilent little piece of ground in the whole country; everything about it went wrong, and would go wrong, in spite of him. His fences were continually falling to pieces; his cow would either go astray or get among the cabbages; weeds were sure to grow quicker in his fields than any where else; ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... will, I assure you, make a profound sensation. For the rest it would be strange, certainly, if the race did not show an improvement. In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... law, on arriving at a certain age; in others, universal emancipation is to take place after a certain date, fixed by the laws. The empire of Brazil, and the United States are the only American nations, that have taken no measures to destroy this most pestilent system; and I have recently been assured by intelligent Brazilians, that public opinion in that country is now so strongly opposed to slavery that something effectual will be done toward abolition, at the very next meeting of ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... crew is this Which just have fled! Foul suckers that drop off When they no more can on their victims gorge! This Tigellinus.... Within his sunshine basked and buzzed and stung; And, now the shadow comes, off, like a fly— A pestilent and stinking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... semblance of a wealthy member of my congregation. It were a great blessing, if every particular of what in the sum we call popular sentiment could carry about the name of its manufacturer stamped legibly upon it. I gave a stab under the fifth rib to that pestilent fallacy,—'Our country, right or wrong,'—by tracing its original to a speech of Ensign Cilley at a dinner ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... were encouraged, or rebuked, as the case might require, with becoming zeal, and the "pestilent opposition sheets" were attacked with that felicitous but inexorable sarcasm which distinguishes editorial contests. The rhetorical expression of contempt or indignation, and the large share which these ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... did it. I did not remove General Curtis because of my full conviction that he had done wrong by commission or omission. I did it because of a conviction in my mind that the Union men of Missouri, constituting, when united, a vast majority of the people, have entered into a pestilent, factious quarrel among themselves; General Curtis, perhaps not of choice, being the head of one faction, and Governor Gamble that of the other. After months of labor to reconcile the difficulty, it seemed to grow worse and worse, until I felt it my duty to break it up somehow, and as I could not ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... even words of contempt and dishonor; we can afford to let them say that in laboring for our country we are groveling in mud and defiling our hands with impurity; but we cannot afford to let them steal our children from us, nor to submit to the pestilent influence of their corruption in our ranks. Those who would be of the republic must labor for the public good, instead of insolently asserting that there is no good in the public on which they have fattened and thriven ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... futurity to warn her. She came with so much hope, so eagerly, to her new kingdom, so full of pleasure and interest and readiness to hear and see, and to be pleased with everything—even John Knox, that pestilent preacher, of whom she must have heard so much; he who had written the book against women which naturally made every woman indignant yet curious, keenly desirous to see him, to question him, to put him ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... Doctrine Chretienne" have been shot by their fellow-Christians of the Commune. A friend of mine saw Madame Milliere in a prisoners' gang, and we have authentic intelligence to-day that her husband, one of the most pestilent of the apostles of Fraternity and wholesale slaughter, ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... superintend the preparation of food for a thousand men, and assist in feeding them herself. Just so she moved amidst the flying bullets upon the field, bringing succor to the wounded; or through the hospitals amidst the pestilent air of the fever-stricken wards. Self-controlled, she could control others, and order and symmetry sprung up before her as a natural result of the ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... end: From his holy ordinance I will never descend, But my whole delight shall be to live therein, Utterly abhorring all filthiness and sin.[169] All Christian people which be here present, May learn by me hypocrisy to know, With which the devil, as with a poison most pestilent, Daily seeketh all men to overthrow: Credit not all things unto the outward show, But try them with God's word, that squire[170] and rule most just, Which never deceiveth them, that in him put their trust. Let no flattering friendship, nor yet wicked company, Persuade you in no ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley

... thought of an alternative, sir captain; but it depends upon your charity. It is that you put us ashore on one of the islands of this pestilent archipelago, and leave us ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... insalubrity; unhealthiness &c. Adj.; nonnaturals[obs3]; plague spot; malaria &c. (poison) 663; death in the pot, contagion; toxicity. Adj. insalubrious; unhealthy, unwholesome; noxious, noisome; morbific[obs3], morbiferous[obs3]; mephitic, septic, azotic[obs3], deleterious; pestilent, pestiferous, pestilential; virulent, venomous, envenomed; poisonous, toxic, toxiferous[obs3], teratogenic; narcotic. contagious, infectious, catching, taking, epidemic, zymotic[obs3]; epizootic. innutritious[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... to be reminded of the great fundamental doctrine of the worthlessness of all human efforts and motives. Some of them were altogether too much pleased with the success of the Temperance Society and the Association for the Relief of the Poor. There was a pestilent heresy about, concerning the satisfaction to be derived from a good conscience,—as if anybody ever did anything which was not to be hated, loathed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... That pestilent Buckingham, to gratify his own wounded vanity, had by this time involved the country in war with France, as well as with Spain. For such miserable causes and such miserable creatures are wars sometimes made! But ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens

... captures the citadels and masters the most impregnable strengths. The news of him reached King Herdoub, thy father, by the report of the old princess Dhat ed Dewahi; and thou hast done good service to the army of the Greeks by helping them to lay hands on this pestilent lion." When she heard this, she looked at the knight and said to him, "What is thy name?" And he answered, "My name is Masoureh son of thy slave Mousoureh ben Kasherdeh, chief of the nobles." Quoth she, "And how ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous

... the same dreary stretch of reeds, now withered and yellow under the glare of the sun. Sturt endeavoured to penetrate this solitude, but the physical exertion of pushing their way through the reeds was too great for them. If they paused to rest, they were almost suffocated in the hot and pestilent air; the only sound they could hear was the distant booming of the bittern, and a feeling of the most lonely wretchedness pervaded the scene. At length they were glad to leave this dismal region and strike to the west through a flat and monotonous district where the shells and claws ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland

... at his hands. There is no such thing as a positive right to do as we list. One way of acting in every emergency is reasonable, and the other is not. One way will benefit mankind, and the other will not. It is a pestilent doctrine and a denial of all virtue, to say that we have a right to do what we will with our own. Everything we possess has a destination prescribed to it by the immutable voice of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... forming, or it would become insupportable. But then, again, the thought would come back that every hour that passed without an alarm was another step towards a safe haven; and who could say that in a week or so things might not be, at least, no worse than they were before this pestilent little galvanic battery broke ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... See, which your life and merits have inherited, and to keep the orthodox religion, which you preach, with faithful and blameless devotion, so far as our rude perception allows. For, even before your injunction, we had avoided the communion of Peter, Acacius, and all his followers, as pestilent contagion; and much more now, after the admonition of the Holy See, must we abstain from that pollution. And if there be any others, who have followed, or shall follow, the sect of Eutyches or ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies

... minutes afterwards the other boys saw Hook in the water striking wildly for the ship; no elation on his pestilent face now, only white fear, for the crocodile was in dogged pursuit of him. On ordinary occasions the boys would have swum alongside cheering; but now they were uneasy, for they had lost both Peter and Wendy, ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie

... "Then they are pestilent fellows!" cried the warrior king Vikram, who hated nothing more than clandestine and runaway matches. "No one knew that the villain, Manaswi, was the father of her child; whereas, the Pandit Shashi married her lawfully, before witnesses, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton

... who visited the banks of the Garigliano, some fifty years after this, beheld them in imagination thronged with the shades of the illustrious dead, whose bones lay buried in its dreary and pestilent marshes. There is a sombre coloring in the vision of the old chronicler, not unpoetical. Vies ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott

... doublets and cloths and a thousand sharp razors to shave off the Kazi's beard, except he fear my resentment and adjudge the bag to be my bag.' Now when the Kazi heard what I and the Kurd avouched, he was confounded and said, 'I see ye twain be none other than two pestilent fellows, atheistical-villains who make sport of Kazis and magistrates and stand not in fear of reproach. Never did tongue tell nor ear hear aught more extraordinary than that which ye pretend. By Allah, from China to Shajarat Umm Ghaylan, nor from Fars to Sudan nor from Wadi Nu'uman to Khorasan, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton

... "This man is a pestilent fellow," said the community. "He troubles us overmuch with this vision that he has knowledge of. Come, let ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce

... alarming matter, strange expressions about subsidies from France, allusions to a vast scheme which would "give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion that it had ever received," and which "would utterly subdue a pestilent heresy." It was natural that those who saw these expressions, in letters which had been overlooked, should suspect that there was some horrible villainy in those which had been carefully destroyed. Such was the feeling of the House of Commons: "Question, question, Coleman's ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... to have understood the connection. Wherein, that is, in which pestilent speeches, necessity, or, the obligation of an accuser to support his charge, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson

... sallies to attack the smaller parties of the Danes. They would send agents and emissaries about the kingdom to arouse, and encourage, and assemble such Saxon forces as were yet to be found. In a word, they would commence a series of measures for recovering the country from the possession of its pestilent enemy, and for restoring the rightful sovereign to the throne. The development of these projects and plans, and the measures for carrying them into effect, were very much hastened by an event which suddenly occurred in the neighborhood of Ethelney, the account of which, however, must ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... thing; and as we believe that Keats was made presumptuous chiefly by the treacherous puffing of his cockney fellow gossips, and profligate in his poems merely to make them saleable, we regret that he did not live long enough to acquire common sense, and abjure the pestilent and perfidious gang who betrayed his weakness to the grave, and are now panegyrising his memory into contempt. For what is the praise of cockneys but disgrace, or what honourable inscription can be placed over the dead by the hands ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... He who is a captious, impracticable, dissatisfied member of his little club or coterie is immediately set down as a bad member of the community in general, as no friend to regularity and order, as 'a pestilent fellow,' and one who is incapable of sympathy, attachment, or cordial co-operation in any department or undertaking. Thus the most refractory novice in such matters becomes weaned from his obligations to the larger society, which only breed him inconvenience ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... solem e mundo,' as Tully quoth. Nay, wonder not at my fervour, good youth; where the general weal stands in jeopardy, a little warmth is civic, humane, and honourable. Now there is settled of late in this town a pestilent Arabist, a mere empiric, who, despising anatomy, and scarce knowing Greek from Hebrew, hath yet spirited away half my patients; and I tremble for the rest. Put forth thine ankle; and thou, Hans, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... and fruit orchards—which, with the murazzi or sea-walls of Venice, stand sentinel between the city and the sea. On the lido along which the boat was coasting, the vintage was long since over and the fruit gathered; the last yellow and purple leaves in the orchards, "a pestilent-stricken multitude," were to-day falling fast to earth, under the sighing, importunate wind. The air was warm; November was at its mildest. But all color and light were drowned in floating mists, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Word of God in their own tongue; "for why," said he, "are we to be the dross of the nations?" However, the rulers of the Church grew more and more alarmed at the circulation of the book. At length Archbishop Arundel, a zealous but not very learned prelate, complained to the Pope of "that pestilent wretch, John Wycliffe, the son of the old Serpent, the forerunner of Antichrist, who had completed his iniquity by inventing a new translation of the Scriptures"; and, shortly after, the Convocation of Canterbury forbade ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... man, bating he is a pestilent Roundhead and Puritan," said Whitaker, "is no bad neighbour. What has he ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the grey wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... and take a look of the crookedness and perverseness of man's spirit since his departure from God. Self love and pride were the first poison that the malice of Satan dropped into man's nature, and this is so strong and pestilent, that it has spread through the whole of mankind, and the whole in every man. Every one is infected, and all in every one. What are all the disordered affections in men but so many streams from this fountain? And from these do men's affections ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... answered the other, "are that he is to be kept in this cabin until we have finally disposed of these three pestilent English ships; and when that is done, and we have captured them, he is to be locked up in the fore hold, with the other prisoners we shall take—if the rascals do not in this case fight to the death, as they often do. Then when we return to Cadiz they are all to ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... that ungoverned feminine imagination can coin in sickliest indolence,—ball-room amours, combats of curled knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties, charities in costume,—a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish vanity—impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir, and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural veracity; the faces falsely drawn—the lights falsely cast—the forms effaced or ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... because they could find no description of it in the immortal works of Galen. The causes seemed to be uncleanliness, gluttony, immoderate drinking, and also severe inundations leaving decaying vegetation. Richmond's army has been considered a factor in the germination of the seeds of pestilent disorder which broke out soon after in the camps of Litchfield, and on ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... might not know in the battle whom to single." Parker, in fact, replied to Marvell anonymously, by "A Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed," with a mild exhortation to the magistrate to crush with the secular arm the pestilent wit, the servant of Cromwell, and the friend of Milton. But this was not all; something else, anonymous too, was despatched to Marvell: it was an extraordinary letter, short enough to have been an epigram, could Parker have written one; but short as it was, it was more ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... pay twenty-fold for it all, or he would not have been fool enough to do it. I had a great-grandfather, too; and I hope it will not be considered aristocratic if I venture to hint as much. He—a dishonest, pestilent knave, no doubt—leased that very lot for six years without any rent at all, in order that the 'poor, confiding creature' might make himself comfortable, before he commenced paying his sixpence or shilling an acre rent for the remainder ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper

... in his hand a very fair orange, whereof the meat or substance within was taken out, and filled up again with the part of a sponge, wherein was vinegar, and other confections against the pestilent airs; the which he most commonly smelt unto, passing among the press, or else when he was pestered with many suitors." ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various

... sinking so low, perhaps, before the end of a single summer, as to be heard complaining of butter at boarding-house tables, which is the lowest deep of vulgarity of grumbling. There is no help for this; I have seen it again and again. I have caught it myself. One grumbler in a family is as pestilent a thing as a diseased animal in a herd: if he be not shut up or killed, the herd ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson

... He was constantly urging Philip to use greater severity in dealing with his heretical subjects, and could scarcely restrain himself from leaving his retreat, in order to engage personally in the work of extirpating the pestilent doctrines, which he heard were ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... deaf to 't: One of Pasquil's paper-bullets, court-calumny, A pestilent air, which princes' palaces Are seldom purg'd of. Yet, say that it were true, I pour it in your bosom, my fix'd love Would strongly excuse, extenuate, nay, deny Faults, were they apparent in you. Go, be safe In your ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster

... by overlooking or despising such speculations, but by boldly confronting and closely grappling with them, that we shall best protect the mind of the thinking community from their insidious and pestilent influence. ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... let me tell you—that my Cormorant has made her goodly name, ay, and brought her commander a fair share of his credit, by her energy in bringing to an incredible number of those d——d French sharks—beg pardon, but you know the pestilent breed. Well, we shall never agree upon the subject I fear. As for me, the smart of the salt air, the sting of the salt breeze, the fighting, the danger, they have got into my blood; and even now it sometimes comes over me that life will not be perfect life to me without the dancing ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... "Ha! the 'pestilent heretic' helped thee to it, I reckon!" replied the guest laughing. "Ay, Robin, this is he thou knewest of old time. We will fight out our duello another time, lad. I am rare glad ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt

... pestilent innovator, it is certain. Before his time the Hall had been a fine block of the mellowest red brick; but Sir Richard had travelled in Italy and become infected with the Italian taste, and, having more money than his predecessors, he determined to leave an Italian palace ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... community expound the most difficult matters to the ignorant. Of course each party affords only its own point of view; but every man has a neighbor who is put under treatment by some other party, and who is constantly attacking all who will listen to his provoking and pestilent counter-statements. All the common school education of the United States does not equal the education of election day; and as in some States elections are held very often, this popular university seems to be kept in session almost the whole year round. The consequence is a remarkable average ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... is far more unkind Than the thousands that struggle apart. Dark, wild, inescapable dust, In fiercest, untamable clouds, That men into misery helplessly thrust, And bury in agony-shrouds; A simoom of sorrow whose pestilent breath To the strong and the weak, to the young and the old, Brings despair that is reckless of possible gain, And the awfullest anguish of death; Till the soul in its rage uncontrolled, Droops low in the horrible sickness and ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller

... is little that goads us with fiercer despair (Those who buy, you perpend, stock, debenture or share, Such as speculate mainly; investors are rare—) Than this growl ill-conditioned of pestilent Bear! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various

... their usual colour gave more than once "fatal premonition" of coming misfortunes during the great civil wars; and Bacon mentions a tradition that "if the oak-apple, broken, be full of worms, it is a sign of a pestilent year." In olden times the decay of the bay-tree was considered an omen of disaster, and it is stated that, previous to the death of Nero, though the winter was very mild, all these trees withered to the roots, and that a great pestilence in Padua ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... swelling of the throat. He had lately been touched by the deceased King Charles for the king's evil. I opened his swelling. ... I left him in the hands of a surgeon of the town, to finish his cure. M. de Fontaine, Knight of the Order of the King, had a severe continued pestilent fever, accompanied with many inflammatory swellings in sundry parts of the body. He had bleeding at the nose for two days, without ceasing, nor could we staunch it: and after this haemorrhage the fever ceased, with much sweating, and by and bye the swellings suppurated, and he was dressed by me, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... civility as well as Christianity; and while they make a boast of being gentlemen, they hardly rise above the prejudices of boors. Principles which have become truisms, and which it is a disgrace for an educated man not to admit, they boldly denounce as pestilent paradoxes; and in reading Mr. Wilson's book an occasional shock of shame must be felt by the most imperturbable politician, at the spectacle of the legislature of "a model republic" experiencing a fierce resistance in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... followed his precipitate logic. With woman's well-known aversion from the abstract, she was concentrating her attention on the concrete case, the glorious animal before her. Now it would be very wrong to suppose that Hardy was in the least tainted with socialism, anarchism, or any such pestilent heresies, or that he had read "Emile" and "Walden." He had never heard of either of these works, and had no desire whatever for the restoration of society on a primitive basis of animalism, modified by light literature, clothing, and the moral law. For ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... what a pestilent correspondent I am likely to become; but then you shall be as quiet at Newstead as you please, and I won't disturb your studies as I ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... surrounding woods and marshes, completely enveloped and concealed their beloved village, and overhung the fair regions of Pavoniaso that the terrible Captain Argal passed on totally unsuspicious that a sturdy little Dutch settlement lay snugly couched in the mud, under cover of all this pestilent vapor. In commemoration of this fortunate escape, the worthy inhabitants have continue, to smoke, almost without intermission, unto this very day; which is said to be the cause of the remarkable fog which often hangs over Communipaw ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... delivered from clouds of war, from pestilence, from night-fear, from murder, From falling, from stifling, from hunger, from cold, from slander, discontent, and sloth, That walk in beasts and birds of night, driven back by the sandy desert, Like pestilent fogs round cities of men; and the happy earth sing in its course, The mild peaceable nations be opened to heaven, and men walk with their fathers in bliss." Then hear the first voice of the morning: "Depart, O clouds of night, and no more Return; be withdrawn ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... carries him to the English camp, where information is thus gleaned of the doings of the enemy. He and his band are here, there, and everywhere. We had hoped to have seen them here by this. Colonel Armstrong sent a message praying him to come and help him to attack a pestilent nest of savages which is the curse of his life. We had hoped you were the forerunners of his band when you appeared. But in these troublous times who can tell whether the messenger ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... most definite work of the color school. Giotto or Raphael could not have made the black more resolutely black, (though the whole color of the school of Athens is kept in distinct separation from one black square in it), nor the green more unquestionably green. Yet the whole is pestilent and loathsome. ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin

... and new, 'Twixt Cant and Blasphemy—the two Rank ills with which this age is curst— We can no more tell which is worst, Than erst could Egypt, when so rich In various plagues, determine which She thought most pestilent and vile, Her frogs, like Benbow and Carlisle, Croaking their native mud-notes loud, Or her fat locusts, like a cloud Of pluralists, obesely lowering, At once benighting ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... a sacrifice of taste? Their model must have been a toad with a stick thrust through it (three of which, so impaled and hung up in the sun to dry, Luther recommended as the best cure for all manner of "pestilent humors"). At any rate, the difference between their aspect and that of the sail-boat is that of a beetle and a butterfly. The acme of ugliness is reached in the freight ferry-boats, floating fragments of railroad, whose cars look ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... the sixth." The heathen origin of Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate that solemn day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on account of him who made the sun. In like manner Leo the Great rebuked the pestilent belief that Christmas was solemnised because of the birth of the new sun, as it was called, and not because of the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... the very best medicos in the world; for what pestilent pills and potions of the Faculty are half so serviceable to man, and health-and-strength-giving, as roasted lamb and green peas, say, in spring; and roast beef and cranberry sauce in winter? Will a dose of calomel ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... of the same way of thinking as Hogarth. Writing of a speech made at the Oxford Commemoration of 1754 by the Jacobite Dr. King (see post, Feb. 1755), he said:—'There cannot be a greater instance of the lenity of the government he abuses than his pestilent harangues so publicly made with impunity furnishes (sic) all his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... Riedriech the cabinet-maker, most cunning of craftsmen, who knew all there is to know about old furniture and just what should and shouldn't be done to it. In addition he was a grizzled, bearded, shambling old angel who clung to a reeking pipe and Utopian notions, a pestilent and whole-hearted socialist who would call the President of the United States or the president of the Plumbers' Union "Comrade" equally, and who put propagandist literature in everything but ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... Normandie, about the beginning of August, leauing England full of all those calamities, which ciuill warre is accustomed to bring with it, as burning of houses, killing, robbing, and spoiling of people, so that the land was in danger of vtter destruction, by reason of that pestilent discord. ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (4 of 12) - Stephan Earle Of Bullongne • Raphael Holinshed

... I understand. But why should she be sacrificed? Were there no nurses in the country to be hired, but that she must go and remain there for a month at the bedside of a pestilent fever? There ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... stuck in my throat, and spoiled my palate, so that nothing put into it is swallowed with much relish,—unless it be cayenne. However, I have grievances enough to occupy me that way too;—but for fear of adding to yours by this pestilent long diatribe, I postpone the reading of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... very glad to hear you say so," rejoined Mrs. Stevens, "for that convinces me that my fears were groundless. I was under the impression you had imbibed some of those pestilent abolition sentiments coming into vogue. I see you are not aware of it, but you certainly have two coloured scholars; and there," said she, pointing to Clarence, ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... and thou hast much cool store of wine. But the town thirsts, and every beat of our blood Hastens us on to maniac agony. The Assyrians have our wells, and half the tanks Are dry, and the pools shoal with baking mud: The water left to us is pestilent. And therefore have we asked the governors For death: and it is ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie

... living at Barchester, a young man, a surgeon, named John Bold, and both Mr Harding and Dr Grantly are well aware that to him is owing the pestilent rebellious feeling which has shown itself in the hospital; yes, and the renewal, too, of that disagreeable talk about Hiram's estates which is now again prevalent in Barchester. Nevertheless, Mr Harding and Mr Bold are acquainted with each other; we may say, are friends, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope

... archdeacon hardly knew how to get rid of by other means.) There was living at Barchester a young man, a surgeon, named John Bold, and both Mr. Harding and Dr. Grantly were well aware that to him was owing the pestilent rebellious feeling which had shown itself in the hospital; and the renewal, too, of that disagreeable talk about Hiram's estates which was again prevalent in Barchester. Nevertheless, Mr. Harding and Mr. Bold were acquainted with each other, and were friends in spite ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... competition, by means of fraternal co-operation, to make the actual world as blessed as that he had dreamed of. At first they derided him, but, seeing his earnestness, grew angry, and denounced him as a pestilent fellow, an anarchist, an enemy of society, and drove him from them. Then it was that, in an agony of weeping, he awoke, this time awaking really, not falsely, and found himself in his bed in Dr. Leete's house, with ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... Name of the home of a certain Englishman, called in the chronicle "the pestilent Morton," who set up ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... humbly; "but it is thus. We have here"—and he jerked his thumb towards me—"a magician of the most pestilent—um, I crave his pardon—of the very best sort, for he hath but just now, only by placing his eyes close to the nose of the worthy Captain Paulus, dragged him, the said Paulus, through the gates that Paulus swore the ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... place; filling the homes of the land with discontent, bickerings, disorder, and continual strife, from the jostling together of antipathetic elements; cursing society with the influences derived from character formed and nurtured in such pestilent domestic atmospheres; and sending out thousands of unhealthy, misorganized, wrongly educated beings, the fruit of these disunions, to work ill both to themselves and their race. The world has much yet to learn with regard to the conditions necessary to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... the carriage out of this pestilent throng, that I may the better hear thee," said the governor. The Escribano entered the carriage, when in a twinkling the door was closed, the coachman smacked his whip, mules, carriage, guards, and all dashed off at a thundering rate, leaving ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... my helpless condition, and carried me off unresisting to a place which railways can never reach, and where there is nothing to attract fashionable travellers. The surly Atlantic keeps watch over it and growls off the pestilent crowd of excursionists who bring uncleanness and greediness in their train, and are pursued by the land-sharks who prey upon such frivolous flying-fish. A little town, whose life stands still, or rather goes backward, whose ships have sailed away to other ports, whose ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... JAYNE, my plucky JAYNE, Punch fancies you looked sly When you met them, met them down at Chester, And gave them "one in the eye." Bigotry's waning fast, my boy, But Cant we sometimes hear, And Chester cant is pestilent cant, My Lord, that's pretty clear. Then pithy JAYNE, my plucky JAYNE, Of smiting don't be shy; But meet them, meet the moonstruck Puritans And tell ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various

... a week to Christmas. For many days the weather had been as bad as it can be even in London. Windows glimmered at noon with the sickly ray of gas or lamp; the roads were trodden into viscid foulness; all night the droppings of a pestilent rain were doleful upon the roof, and only the change from a black to a yellow sky told that the sun was risen. ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... such work, God knows, was as much as she chose That dreary winter-tide, When Death hung o'er the damp and pestilent camp, And his scythe ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole

... that the anaconda kills its prey by its pestilent breath, is wholly fabulous. Waterton altogether denies the existence of any odour in the snake's breath. It is possible, however, that some species may produce a horrible stench, from a substance secreted in certain glands near the tail—a fact which ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... each. They lived in Catalonia. When the French troops entered Spain in 1808 General Canclaux, a friend of the Prince de Conti, brought to the notice of Napoleon that the tiresome formalities insisted on by the pestilent clerks of all nations were observed towards these regal personages. Gaudin, the Minister of Finance, apparently on his own initiative, drew up a decree increasing the pensions to 80,000 francs, and doing away with the formalities. "The Emperor signed at once, thanking the Minister of Finance." The ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... must content ourselves with Gorboduc and Cornelia, with Cleopatra and Philotas, at the very best with Sejanus and The Silent Woman. Again Sidney commits himself in this same piece to the pestilent heresy of prose-poetry, saying that verse is "only an ornament of poetry;" nor is there any doubt that Milton, whether he meant it or not, fixed a deserved stigma on the Arcadia by calling it a "vain ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... regrets,' replied Melville, 'that the measure had anticipated his resignation. His baggage is seized at his quarters and at Tully-Veolan, and is found to contain a stock of pestilent Jacobitical pamphlets, enough to poison a whole country, besides the unprinted lucubrations of his worthy friend ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... of all your honours, and paid the duty I owed to our friendship—long in arrear, but interrupted by the great complexity of events—to the very utmost. Not, believe me, that the will to shew you attention and honour was ever wanting to me; but certain pestilent persons—vexed at another's fame—did at times alienate you from me, and sometimes changed my feelings towards you. But I have got the opportunity, for which I had rather wished than hoped, of shewing ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... God, who did execute this greuous punishment, euen by the handes of those, whom he suffred twise to be ouercomen in batel, doth this day retein his power and iustice. Cursed Iesabel of England, with the pestilent and detestable generation of papistes, make no litle bragge and boast, that they haue triumphed not only against Wyet, but also against all such as haue entreprised any thing against them or their procedinges. But let her ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox

... I have no great acquaintance with this man, nor do I desire to have further knowledge of him; however, this I know, that he is a very pestilent fellow, from some discourse that the other day I had with him in this Town; for then talking with him, I heard him say, That our Religion was naught, and such by which a man could by no means please God. Which sayings of his, my Lord, your Lordship very well knows, what necessarily ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey

... building of hundreds of houses and the furnishing of them down to the last center table, they will not recall the rebuilding of the entire P. R. R., nor scores of little items like $43,000 a year merely for oil and negroes to pump it on the pestilent mosquito, the thousand and one little things so essential to the success of the enterprise yet that leave not a trace behind. Greater perhaps than the building of the canal is the accomplishment of the United States in showing ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck

... in a few words. 'You cannot conceive,' he wrote, 'what difficulty we had in persuading our Emperor that it was necessary to let loose this war. But it has been done; and I hope that for a long time to come we shall hear no more in Germany of pacifism, internationalism, democracy, and similar pestilent doctrines.' Sir Charles Walston, in his thoughtful book 'Aristodemocracy,' lays great stress on this. 'It appeared to me,' he says, 'ever since 1905, that in the immediate future it was all a question as to whether the labour-men, the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... noble-hearted patriot is a fatal blot upon his conqueror's memory, but it should not be forgotten that Edward was profoundly convinced of the legality of his own claims over Scotland, and that Wallace to him was merely a pestilent rebel, who had earned his doom by treason to his lord and by the cruelties he had inflicted upon Englishmen. The same year the king prepared a new constitution for the conquered kingdom, divided it into sheriffdoms like the English counties, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... also because their kindred were pleased with their sufferings; for they forgot the relation they bare to them, and at the sight of this sad accident approved of the judgment given against them; and because they looked upon the people about Dathan as pestilent men, they thought they perished as such, and did ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... 'that pestilent fellow Howe,' to use Macdonald's phrase, was a first charge upon the energies of the government. The history of the repeal movement in Nova Scotia, {154} with all its incidents and sidelights, has yet to be written. It was but one of the disintegrating forces which Macdonald found so hard to cope ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun

... that the line of road is nearly impassable, and that a long succession of formerly cultivated estates presents now a series of pestilent swamps, overrun with bush, and productive of ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... years 1674, 1675, and part of 1676, was seized, and contained many extraordinary passages. In particular, he said to La Chaise, "We have here a mighty work upon our hands, no less than the conversion of three kingdoms, and by that perhaps the utter subduing of a pestilent heresy, which has a long time domineered over a great part of this northern world. There were never such hopes of success since the days of Queen Mary, as now in our days. God has given us a prince," meaning ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume

... great object was effectually attained. The wrongs of Napoleon, the cold cruelty of the English government, and the pestilent petty tyranny of Sir Hudson Lowe, were the perpetual themes of table-talk all over Europe. There were statesmen of high rank in either house of the British parliament, who periodically descanted on these topics—and the answers as often elicited from the ministers ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... on in the sultry and pestilent steam which rose up from the floor. Gnats and flies of all kinds buzzed in the heavy air, or settled in black knots on the walls and the rafters. With a bunch of dried maize-leaves he drove them off the old man's face and hands and limbs, ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... tell you, that a Wit of the Town, a Friend of mine at Wills Coffee House, the first Night of the Play, cry'd it down as much as in him lay, who before had read it and assured me he never 'saw a prettier Comedy. So complaisant one pestilent Wit will be to another, and in the full Cry make his Noise too; but since 'tis to the witty Few I speak, I hope the better Judges will take no Offence, to whom I am oblig'd for better Judgments; and those I hope will be so kind to me, knowing ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn

... may see this, as we have declared, not so much by ancient histories, as ye may, if ye search what hath been wickedly done of late through the pestilent behaviour of them that are ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous

... further money should be raised, the burden should only be laid upon the backs of those who can afford to pay it. I hear that there is much wild talk, and that the doctrines of Wickliffe have done grievous harm. I say not, my son, that there are not abuses in the Church as well as elsewhere; but these pestilent doctrines lead men to disregard all authority, and to view their natural masters as oppressors. I hear that seditious talk is uttered openly in the villages throughout the country; that there are men who would fain persuade the ignorant that all above them are drones who live on the ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty

... been here an hour I find Englishmen crawling about within it. Where are we to be free from this pestilent race? Can a Frenchman upon French land not sit down in a French auberge without having his ears pained by the clack of their hideous talk? Send them packing, inn-keeper, or it may be the worse for them ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... foul and pestilent discovery, Didst thou find place within the human heart? Through thee is martial glory lost, through thee The trade of arms became a worthless art: And at such ebb are worth and chivalry, That the base often plays the better part. Through thee ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... conceded—yet you are no nearer than before to the conclusion that you possess power which may deal with other subjects as effectually as with this. Slavery, we are further told, with some pomp of metaphor, is a canker at the root of all that is excellent in this republican empire, a pestilent disease that is snatching the youthful bloom from its cheek, prostrating its honor and withering its strength. Be it so—yet if you have power to medicine to it in the way proposed, and in virtue of the diploma which you claim, ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various



Words linked to "Pestilent" :   pestiferous, pestilential, pernicious, pestilence, baneful



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