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Pestilential   Listen
adjective
Pestilential  adj.  
1.
Having the nature or qualities of a pestilence. "Sends the pestilential vapors."
2.
Hence: Mischievous; noxious; pernicious; morally destructive. "So pestilential, so infectious a thing is sin."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pestilential" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the criminal was merely the beginning of a weird life of horror. It was customary at that period to immure prisoners in solitary confinement. There, in their small and reeking cells, filled with damps and pestilential odors, they were confined day after day, year after year, condemned to perpetual inactivity and silence. If they presumed to speak, they were brutally lashed with the whip. They were not allowed to write letters, nor to communicate with ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus

... presiding had already entered on his duties. All night long, and throughout the entire city, the scavengers of the law had been at work, and now, as a result, every miserable atom of humanity that had made itself a pestilential offence to society was gathered here to be disposed of according ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... burning sand No bird can move, nor ant, nor fly; No water slakes the fiery land, Intensely glows the flaming sky. No tiger fierce, nor lion ever Could breathe that pestilential air; Even the unsparing vulture never Ventures ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... thing was to be done at all, it must be set about quickly. Nilssen was an utter wreck. Prolonged residence in this pestilential Congo had sapped his constitution; the poison was constantly eating at him; and he must either get relief in a very short time, or give up the fight and die. So that same afternoon saw Kettle journeying in a dug-out canoe over the beer-colored ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... grass and flowers, and the feet of joy trip merrily over the paths once trodden by heavy-footed care. Yet the more subtle effects of persecution remain with the living. They are not screwed down in the coffin and buried with the dead. They become part of the pestilential atmosphere of cowardice and hypocrisy which saps the intellectual manhood of society, so that bright-eyed inquiry sinks into blear-eyed faith, and the rich vitality of active honest thought falls into the decrepitude of timid ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... documentary proof in the Japanese language, of what he had long suspected—the existence of a plot on the part of the native converts and the foreign emissaries to reduce Japan to the position of a subject state.[17] Putting forth strenuous measures to root out utterly what he believed to be a pestilential breeder of sedition and war, the Yedo Sh[o]gun advanced step by step to that great proclamation of January 27, 1614,[18] in which the foreign priests were branded as triple enemies—of the country, of the Kami, and of the Buddhas. This proclamation ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... slew my father, By his wicked wiles and cunning, When he from the moon descended, When he came on earth to seek me. He, the mightiest of Magicians, Sends the fever from the marshes, Sends the pestilential vapors, Sends the poisonous exhalations, Sends the white fog from the fen-lands, Sends ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow

... Xanti, a nick-name for Xantippe, that scold of glorious memory, who never let poor Socrates have one moment's peace of mind; yet with unexampled patience, he bore her pestilential tongue. I shall beg the ladies' pardon if I insert a few passages concerning her; and at the same time I assure them, it is not to lessen those of the present age, who are possessed of the like laudable talents; for I will confess, that ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... course, nightly fed by his companions, and gave them such assistance as he could at the work; but it soon became apparent that a man could not long exist in such a pestilential atmosphere. No tongue can tell how long were the days and nights the poor fellow passed among the squealing rats,—enduring the sickening air, the deathly chill, the horrible, interminable darkness. One day out of three ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various

... for any man, let him be never so fearful or phlegmatic, to be an unconcerned spectator in this busy scene. The demon of play hovers in the air, like a pestilential vapour, tainting the minds of all present with infallible infection, which communicates from one person to another, like the circulation of a general panic. Peregrine was seized with this epidemic distemper to a violent degree; and, after having lost a few loose hundreds, in his progress through ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... unconscious mesmeriser. The other day our poor Maohn was terrified by a communication from Ali Bey (Moudir of Keneh) to the effect that he had heard from Alexandria that someone had reported that the dead cattle had lain about the streets of Luxor and that the place was pestilential. The British mind at once suggested a counter-statement, to be signed by the most respectable inhabitants. So the Cadi drew it up, and came and read it to me, and took my deposition and witnessed my signature, and the Maohn went his way rejoicing, in that 'the words of the Englishwoman' ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... cars was a separate apartment for women. It was of comfortable dimensions, and without a stove; and here I betook myself with my children, escaping from the pestilential atmosphere of the other compartment, and performing our journey with ease enough. My only trial here was one which I have to encounter in whatever direction I travel in America, and which, though apparently a trivial matter in itself, has caused me infinite trouble, and no little compassion ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... city, bathed in the clear lucid flame of the full moon, he seemed to pause. He saw bridges, piles of buildings, dark flowing canals, a strange medley of streets, some broad and beautiful, others dark, narrow and pestilential, reeking with ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)

... purple of violets, and the warm flesh tints of roses. And nothing could have been sweeter or more suggestive of springtide than this soft breath of perfume encountered on the footway, on emerging from the sharp odours of the fish market and the pestilential smell of the butter ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... reliable person in the boat whom I could have charged with the business of calling back my servant; I did not trust the sailors. So we docked at Cologne before six o'clock in the morning on a Sunday, the weather being by now pestilential. I went into an inn and gave orders to the ostlers to hire me a carriage and pair, ordering a meal to be made ready by ten o'clock. I attended Divine Service, the lunch was delayed. I had no luck with the carriage and pair. I tried to hire a horse; my own were useless. ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... ironically. "I dare to tell you now to your face what all men say of you in your absence. They believe you to be—and rightly—a conscienceless pirate. You are a scathe and a blight; a pestilential ogre, drunk with self-worship. When first I saw you, you were gloating over having bought lambs that you had never seen for seven dollars which you sold, still unseen, for ten. Since then you have simply amplified, on the scale of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... spider-webs, and the floor paved with mortar. On the eastern wall hangs a large sheet of paper with the inscription, 'Hence blows the breath of life', which not many visitors will believe, because, instead of a quickening breath, pestilential odors enter by the window and offend the nostrils of those whose olfactory nerve has not lost all sensitiveness.... On the opposite wall, to the west, appear the words, 'A memorial unto the destruction ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... The second reader is wiser than that; he knows that the imagery is not baseless; it is the imagery of febrile delirium; really seen, but not seen as an external reality. The mariner had caught the pestilential fever, which carried off all his mates; he only had survived—the delirium had vanished; but the visions that had haunted the delirium remained. 'Yes,' says the third reader, 'they remained; naturally they did, being scorched by fever into his brain; but how did ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... chief, not to be distinguished by dress or ornament from the rest, treated him with ceremony and marked deference. The children were brought to see and even to touch him. So great was their amazement that any one should have escaped from these pestilential vapours, that they attributed it to divine interposition, and looked upon him with some of the awe of superstition. He was asked to stay with them altogether, and to take command of ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... in the rose-garden of Quetzalcoatl, and when they had gathered together, he fell upon them and slew them with a hoe. Disguised with Huitzilopochtli, he irritated the people until they stoned the brother gods to death, and from the corrupting bodies spread a pestilential odor, to which crowds of the Toltecs fell victims. He turned the thought of thousands into madness, so that they voluntarily offered themselves to be sacrificed. By his spells all articles of food soured, and ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton

... about them, and therefore was able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot Scotch, I should have suffered ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... in a condition nearly bordering on idiocy. There were, to be sure, momentary intervals of perfect sanity, and, now and then, even of energy; but these were few. It must be remembered that I had been, for many days certainly, inhaling the almost pestilential atmosphere of a close hold in a whaling vessel, and for a long portion of that time but scantily supplied with water. For the last fourteen or fifteen hours I had none—nor had I slept during that ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... the pestilential scourge, known as the Black Death,(554) appeared in England, and reached London in the following November. The number of victims it carried off in the city has been variously computed,(555) but all conjectures of the kind must be received with caution. All that is known for certain ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe

... be allowed to follow, pleading the black blood that I now knew to circulate in my veins: to all my appeals he turned a deaf ear, and, bending back a portion of the screen of bushes, disappeared into the pestilential silence of ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson

... whole into a huge and dreary swamp, covered with dense forests of mangrove, and other trees of spreading and luxuriant foliage. The equatorial sun, with its fiercest rays, cannot penetrate these dark recesses; it only exhales from them pestilential vapours, which render this coast the theatre of more fatal epidemic diseases than any other, even of Western Africa. That human industry will one day level these forests, drain these swamps, and cover this soil with luxuriant harvests, we may confidently anticipate; but many ages must probably ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various

... the abbot, when he had read the letter,—"very midsummer madness; not unfrequently an accompaniment of this pestilential disease, and I should do well in requiring of those soldiers who shall first apprehend this youth Augustine, that they reduce his victuals immediately to water and bread, taking care that the diet do not exceed in ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... this the rank growth of religious mendicancy, under the fostering care of religious teaching and superstition. There are five and one-half millions of such lazy, worthless fellows encumbering that land today. The mass of them are sleek in body and pestilential in morals. Whenever a man finds work too hard, he dons the yellow cloth of the religious mendicant and becomes an immediate success. But alas for the community! Hindu charity is proverbial, but it is blinder than love itself. Such a body of worthless consumers would tax even a wealthy ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... United States guarantees liberty of conscience. Nothing is dearer or more fundamental. Pope Pius IX., in his Encyclical Letter of August 15, 1854, said: 'The absurd and erroneous doctrines or ravings in defense of liberty of conscience, are a most pestilential error—a pest, of all others, most to be dreaded in a State.' The same pope, in his Encyclical Letter of December 8, 1864, anathematized 'those who assert the liberty of conscience science and of religious worship,' also 'all such as maintain that ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... one which stifled all political rivalry and national prejudices, and demanded the earnest consideration of all parties. Canada, like the rest of the world, had heard of an unhappy land smitten with a hideous plague, of its crops lying in pestilential heaps and of its peasantry dying above them, of fathers, mothers, and children ghastly in their rags or nakedness, of dead unburied, and the living flying in terror, as it were, from a stricken battlefield. This dreadful Irish famine forced to Canada upwards of 100,000 persons, the ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot

... houses were covered with dead bodies, among whom some miserable wretches were crawling about in the different stages of the most offensive diseases, occasioned by famine, the most unnatural food, and the pestilential smell of the corrupting carcases. Even the trees were stripped of their bark, and the ground had been everywhere dug up in search of any kind of roots it might be able to afford. Not a drop of water could be any where procured; and though it was the constant practice ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr

... the miles slipping behind and as the Mistress and the Master glanced back less and less often for a pat or a cheery word to their sulking chum, Lad's dislike for that pestilential bag grew sharper. True, it held squares of fried liver;—liver whose heavenly odor penetrated through the musty leather smell of the suitcase and to the dog's acute senses. Also, it held a doll which exuded ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune

... Days seemed months and months appeared to be lengthened into years; and even existence itself had become as it were paralyzed by the monotonous life we led. It was an interposition of Divine Providence, that in our destitute and helpless condition we were not afflicted with any pestilential disease; as in the crowded state we were in, it must have made rapid and fearful havoc in our midst. At length it was rumored that the prisoners were to be removed; but where to, none of them knew. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... diseases, which are permanent. The science of pathology teaches what these are. They are manifold, such as diseases whereby the whole body is so far infected that the contagion may prove fatal; of this nature are malignant and pestilential fevers, leprosies, the venereal disease, gangrenes, cancers, and the like; also diseases whereby the whole body is so far weighed down, as to admit of no consociability, and from which exhale dangerous effluvia and noxious vapors, whether from the surface of the body, or from its ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... I see you understand me now... I wish to so cover him with ridicule that the very name of the small wayside flower will become a term of derision and of scorn. Only then shall we be rid of these pestilential English spies, only then will the entire League of the Scarlet Pimpernel become a thing of the past when its whilom leader, now thought akin to a god, will have found refuge in a suicide's grave, from the withering contempt of ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... made on foot. It is true that this was quite contrary to the wishes of Agnes, who felt that the journey ought to be performed in the most toilsome and self-renouncing way, and that they should trust solely to prayer and spiritual protection to ward off the pestilential exhalations. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... Rothiemurchus Banff was reached, and the fugitives were sheltered by a Presbyterian minister, who was a secret adherent of the Stuarts. Johnstone at once took the precaution of exchanging his laced Highland dress for that of an old labourer, 'quite ragged, and exhaling a pestilential odour,' due apparently to its having been used for many years 'when he cleaned the stables of his master.' In this unpleasant disguise, he entered the town of Banff, then garrisoned with four hundred English soldiers, and went straight to the house of a former acquaintance, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang

... more than two years since Mr. Doughty, of Flushing which is a town here, went to Virginia, where he is now a preacher. He left because he was not well supported. On October 13, Mr. Moore, of Middelburg, which is another town here, died of a pestilential disease, which prevailed in several of our English towns and in New England. He left a widow with seven or eight children. A year before, being dissatisfied with the meagre and irregular payments from his hearers, he went to Barbadoes, ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various

... descriptive, in which his reading made him largely a borrower; the lyrical in which he excelled; the satirical, in which he was personal and licentious; and the Jacobitical, in which he issued forth treason of the most pestilential character. He has disfigured his verses by incessant appeals to the Muses, and repeated references to the heathen mythology; but his melody is in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... stark-naked men jumped along the route, waving their clubs, crying gutturally in a way the beasts seemed to understand. They worked their way out from the marsh and turned toward the city, leaving behind, to swathe the view of them a while and then fade away, a pestilential haze that hung like an aura about the naked, long-haired men. It was terrible and magnificent. In order not to be shoved into the water, Rouletabille had climbed a small rock that stood beside the ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux

... has never been heard of since. One report is, that he has been condemned to some mysterious penal seclusion by his ecclesiastical superiors—another, that he has volunteered, as a sort of Forlorn Hope, to accept a colonial curacy among rough people, and in a pestilential climate. I asked his brother, the sculptor, about him a little while ago, but he only shook his ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... was a pestilential spirit of gossip. There was no lying scandal, there was no malicious whisper, that did not thrive with rank luxuriance in that mean atmosphere, which, at the same time, starved up every great and high-minded ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... allies pledged themselves, should the negotiations not result in a final understanding, to vacate the territory occupied by them, and to return on the road to Vera Cruz to a point beyond the Chiquihuite, near Paso Ancho,"* i.e., in the pestilential coast region. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson

... that a merciful superstition, which regards the climate of India as deadly to European children, will step in and save the little soul. The climate would do it no harm, but there is a moral miasma more baneful than any which rises from the pestilential swamps of the ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... Republic of Venice depended in great measure on the preservation of its impregnable position on the lagoons on which that city, as it were by a miracle, is built; and that, whenever those lagoons silted up with earth, the air would become infected and pestilential, and the city consequently uninhabitable, or at the least exposed to all the dangers that threaten cities on the mainland. He set himself, therefore, to think in what way it might be possible to provide for the preservation ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari

... himself would have thought nothing more about it had there not appeared a few lines on the subject in a weekly newspaper called the "Brotherton Church," which was held to be a pestilential little rag by all the Close. Deans, canons, and minor canons were all agreed as to this, Dr. Pountner hating the "Brotherton Church" quite as sincerely as did the Dean. The "Brotherton Church" was edited nominally by a certain ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... days I was not fastidious, and I seldom had any but the slightest intercourse with those who dwelt under the same roof, yet it happened now and then that I was driven away by human proximity which passed my endurance. In other cases I had to flee from pestilential conditions. How I escaped mortal illness in some of those places (miserably fed as I always was, and always over-working myself) is a great mystery. The worst that befell me was a slight attack of diphtheria—traceable, I imagine, to the existence of a dust-bin under the ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... prowling through your house with the intention of stealing your silver; your jewelry; your property of whatever kind or value. How much more, then, should you guard the honor of your wife, from these pestilential marauders?" ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... join him in an elephant hunt. These animals were very numerous in the vicinity, and were devastating the plantations. But the season was particularly unhealthy, everybody was ill; we should have had to spend the night in pestilential marshes, where we were certain to get fever, and as I had hardly got clear of that we had caught in the Cazamanze River, I had to refuse the tempting offer. We spent several days in the Gaboon, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... not escape the shame she merits. I ask no other favour than your silence; In all besides I give my wrath free scope. Make your escape from this captivity, Be bold to bear me company in flight; Linger not here on this accursed soil, Where virtue breathes a pestilential air. To cover your departure take advantage Of this confusion, caused by my disgrace. The means of flight are ready, be assured; You have as yet no other guards than mine. Pow'rful defenders will maintain our quarrel; Argos spreads open arms, and Sparta calls ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine

... been commandeered from neighboring houses, we judged. Also, through the goodness of his heart, Mittendorfer, who impressed us more and more as a strange compound of severity and softness, took pity on Gerbeaux and Stevens, and bringing them forth from that pestilential hole next door, he convoyed them in to stay overnight with us. They told us that by now the air in the improvised prison was absolutely suffocating, what with the closeness, the fouled straw, the stale food and the proximity of so many dirty ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... were not, seeking my own pleasure and profit. Therefore now I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I fled: What hast thou ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... begun to feel disgust that this gift had been extended from the citizens to the allies, and thus rendered common: in the next place they frequently heard the consul Verginius in the assemblies as it were prophesying, that the gift of his colleague was pestilential: that those lands were sure to bring slavery to those who received them: that the way was being paved to a throne. Else why were it that the allies were thus included, and the Latin nation? What was the object of a third ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius

... Xanti's* everlasting tongue, [Footnote: Xanti, a nick-name of Xantippe, that scold of glorious memory, who never let poor Socrates have one moment's peace of mind; yet with unexampled patience he bore her pestilential tongue. I shall beg the ladies' pardon if I insert a few passages concerning her: and at the same time I assure them it is not to lesson those of the present age, who are possessed of the like laudable talents; ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... decent start under American conditions. This would stop the influx of cheap labor, and the resulting competition which gives rise to so much of bitterness in American industrial life; and it would dry up the springs of the pestilential social conditions in our great cities, where anarchistic organizations have their greatest possibility ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... women of the lower classes, without bonnets, the elder ones with white caps, the younger bareheaded. I have hardly seen a lady in Marseilles; and I suspect, it being a commercial city, and dirty to the last degree, ill-built, narrow-streeted, and sometimes pestilential, there are few or no ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... hideous accuracy to others; and that they could not have exaggerated the statements is proved by the risks they voluntarily encountered to gain their freedom. The bullets of the marines on duty, the fear of the voracious shark in waters where they abounded, the dangers of a pestilential climate, or the certainty, if retaken, of being subjected to a more revolting and excruciating punishment than was every devised by the Spanish Inquisition FLOGGING THROUGH THE FLEET could not deter British seamen from attempting to flee from their ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... late visit from a barbarous and merciless foe. Young women were lying in their houses brutally violated,—the streets were strewed with broken furniture, intermixed with the putrid carcasses of murdered peasants, mules, and donkeys, and every description of filth, that filled the air with pestilential nausea. The few starved male inhabitants who were stalking amid the wreck of their friends and property, looked like so many skeletons who had been permitted to leave their graves for the purpose of taking vengeance on their oppressors, and the mangled body of every Frenchman ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid

... my villa faces, 'Tis not showery south, nor airy wester, North's grim fury, nor east; 'tis only fifteen Thousand sesterces, add two hundred over. Draft unspeakable, icy, pestilential! 5 ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus

... bad, evil, mischievous, pestilential, baneful, foul, noisome, poisonous, deadly, harmful, noxious, ruinous, deleterious, hurtful, perverting, unhealthful, destructive, injurious, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... in the vain hope that it might afford some nutriment to re-enforce the vital principle, for a little time at least, in the dreadful struggle which it was waging within them. There are certain forms of pestilential disease which, in cases like this, always set in to hasten the work which famine alone would be too slow in performing. Accordingly, as was to have been expected, camp fevers, choleras, and other corrupt and infectious maladies, broke out ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... election of consuls held by Camillus, Marcus Aemilius was chosen of the patricians, and Lucius Sextius the first of the commonalty; and this was the last of all Camillus's actions. In the year following, a pestilential sickness infected Rome, which, besides an infinite number of the common people, swept away most of the magistrates, among whom was Camillus; whose death cannot be called premature, if we consider his great age, or greater actions, yet was he more lamented than all the rest put together ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... effects is unquestionable. One who dwelt in the country at the time writes: [See Sir Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages, page 14.] "The fatal infection spread around with a baneful rapidity which no flight could escape, and with a fatal effect that nothing could resist. It destroyed with its pestilential breath whole families and tribes; and the horrid scene presented, to those who had the melancholy opportunity of beholding it, a combination of the dead, the dying, and such as, to avoid the fate of their friends ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne

... of the town go veiled from head to foot under a black crape, and being mixed with a breed of renegadoes, are said to be many of them fair and handsome. This city was besieged in 1270, by Lewis (sic) king of France, who died under the walls of it, of a pestilential fever. After his death, Philip, his son, and our prince Edward, son of Henry III. raised the siege on honourable terms. It remained under its natural African kings, till betrayed into the hands of Barbarossa, admiral of Solyman the Magnificent. The emperor Charles V. expelled Barbarossa, but ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... fellow-citizens, dates back to the dread arbitrament of battle. Their bones whiten every stricken field of the Revolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toil built up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famine and nakedness of Valley Forge and the pestilential horrors of the old Jersey prisonship. Have they, then, no claim to an equal participation in the blessings which have grown out of the national independence for which they fought? Is it just, is it magnanimous, is it safe, even, to starve the patriotism of such a people, to cast their hearts ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... language of stones; let us not forget this, which is their theological language; and, as we would not wantonly pollute the fresh waters when they issue forth in their clear glory from the rock, nor stay the mountain winds into pestilential stagnancy, nor mock the sunbeams with artificial and ineffective light; so let us not by our own base and barren falsehoods, replace the crystalline strength and burning color of the earth from which we were born, and to which we must return; ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... to front and defy the danger, not for money, or to be honored for it, or to protect their own household; but from mere humanity, and to obey the unerring dictates of duty. They nurse the sick, breathing the pestilential atmosphere of the hospital. They explore the abodes of want and misery. With the gentleness of woman, they soften the pains of the dying, and feed the lamp of life in the convalescent. They perform the last sad offices to the dead; and they seek no other reward than ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... talk. I have heard too often that kind of slang about New England. I heard it here for ten years, when your Barksdales, and your Keitts's, and your other Traitors, now in arms against the Government, filled these Halls with their pestilential assaults not only upon New England, but on the ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... attended by all his court and all his sons, except the prince, who was in Spain. They travelled through the Sienese Maremma, and by this route he reached Pisa. The poison from the bad air of those marshes first attacked the Cardinal, who was taken with a pestilential fever after a few days, and died at the end of a brief illness. He was the Duke's right eye, handsome and good, and his loss was most severely felt. I allowed several days to elapse, until I thought their tears were dried, and then I ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... of love, the Christian is confident that they are not inherently antagonistic to it: "to them that love God all things work together for good." What is called "nature" is not something fixed, but plastic; something which can be conformed to the will of the God and Father of Jesus. A pestilential Panama, for instance, is not natural, but subnatural, and must be brought up to its divine nature, when it will serve the children of God. The Rule of God in nature, like the Kingdom in Jesus' parables, must both be awaited patiently—for ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin

... is so true. However, when he began to lay on with such rhetoric as "the treasures of the nation lavished in wasteful thoughtlessness,"—"thousands of our troops sacrificed wantonly in pestilential swamps of Walcheren," and gave the details we know so well, Ministers wriggled a good one, though 'twas no news to 'em. Castlereagh kept on starting forward as if he were going to jump up and interrupt, taking the strictures entirely as a ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... the further fact that, when a man has died of some pestilential disease, and, owing to the odour, the birds will not peck at the body, nor will the famished dogs go near it, then a large number of Lamas, having made the usual exorcisms, sit down by it, and do not get up again until they have devoured the whole ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... attention with which it ought to protect property from such violence,—the commonwealth then is become totally perverted from its purposes; neither God nor man will long endure it; nor will it long endure itself. In that case, there is an unnatural infection, a pestilential taint, fermenting in the constitution of society, which fever and convulsions of some kind or other must throw off, or in which the vital powers, worsted in an unequal struggle, are pushed back upon themselves, and, by a reversal of their ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... in a passive state, as though the taste of life had gone from her, and there was nothing to call forth her interest or energy. The first thing that roused her was the dangerous illness of her brother Clement, the result of blood-poisoning during a mission week in a pestilential locality, after a long course of family worries and overwork in his parish. Low, lingering fever had threatened every organ in turn, till in the early days of January, a fatal time in the family, he was almost despaired of. However, Dr. Brownlow and Lancelot Underwood had strength ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge

... arbours, so often resorted to for recreation, social pleasures, or silent meditation, were now the haunts of death, the abode of agony and despair. The gardens, so late a paradise, were transformed into the seat of corruption and pestilential putridity. A similar spectacle was exhibited by Grosbosch's, Reichel's, and all the other spacious gardens round the city, which the allies had been obliged to storm.—The buildings which had suffered most were those at the outer ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)

... his face northward. He felt that it would be a hopeless task to renew his search on the battlefield, much of which had been burned over. He also had the conviction it would be fatal to him to look upon its unspeakable horrors, and breathe again its pestilential air. ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... inasmuch as broken faith is no part of God's Intention. And when two persons, man and woman, swear to be true to each other before God, so long as life shall last, and afterwards break that vow, confusion and chaos result from their perjury, and all the pestilential furies attending on a wrong deed whip them to their graves! In these times of ours, when wars and rumours of wars shake the lethargic souls of too-exultant politicians and statesmen with anxiety for themselves ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... of one spy), proclaims at once the morality of the governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the latter good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if employed, wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of tyranny perish by its own pestilential breath. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... need for us to sink down this unhappy man into deeper humiliation. Never before did the abuse and prostitution of talents bring with them such prompt and memorable punishment. The pestilential air which Leigh Hunt breathed forth into the world to poison and corrupt, has been driven stiflingly back upon himself, and he who strove to spread the infection of loathsome licentiousness among the tender moral constitutions of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... favor of larger social interests. It is obviously dangerous and reactionary—and therefore wrong—to insist upon strikes or other forms of class warfare in moments of great calamity, as, for example, during disasters like the Johnstown flood and the Messina earthquake, or amid the ravages of a pestilential plague. Marx, to whom we owe the formulation of the theory of class struggle which has guided the Socialist movement, would never have questioned this important truth; he would never have supported class separatism under conditions such as those prevailing in Russia at the end ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... this land, albeit the cost of annual upkeep has risen in their hands to the sum of fifteen million pounds, have given no thought to drainage. But the good Arabs, patiently and without murmuring, gather up their long robes, and with legs bare to the knee make their way through this already pestilential water, which must be hatching for ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... Brazilian of German extraction—was a godsend to me. Thanks to him, I returned that night quite happy to the miserable hotel. Happy, because in less than half an hour I had arranged to leave that pestilential hole the following day. Mr. Schnoor had kindly undertaken that he would send me, at eleven o'clock the next morning, in a special train to the end of the line in construction, some 45 kil. farther north. In a town of gentle folks like Araguary the luxury of sleeping with one's ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... duty, all the pride and allurements of literary distinction, along with friends, home, the safety and happiness of civilized society, that she might take up the cross, and carry it, an offering of salvation, to the benighted Heathen of Asia, even in the depths of their own far and pestilential climates. ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... action or change in the situation. Meanwhile as Antony's camp had been placed in a pestilential spot for midsummer heat, he suffered great losses from disease. By this time Cleopatra was interested in nothing but a return to Egypt. Accordingly she persuaded Antony to order a naval battle without asking anybody's advice, and he set the date August 29 for the sally of his fleet. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... Kali, patron demon of Kali Ghatta, was hovering above them in the pestilential air as the carriage swiftly rolled along the superb streets of the metropolis born of Governor Charnock's settlement in sixteen eighty-six. The gift of an Emperor of Delhi to the ambitious English, Fort William had grown to be an octopus of modern splendor. Down the circular road, past the splendid ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... lies mainly with the audience, with the human beings greedy for pleasure and entertainment, with the traveller who, after a happy evening at the Comedie Francaise, endeavours to get taken to the abattoirs of Paris, or risks his life in a visit to the outer Boulevards in order to visit some pestilential Cafe de la Mort where he will see crude horrors contrived by looking-glasses, drink bad beer out of papier-mache skulls, and receive, in change for his money, base or demonetised coin from waiters dressed as undertakers. And, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... main land by the branches of the Mincio, and approachable only by five narrow causeways, of which three were defended by strong and regular fortresses or entrenched camps, the other two by gates, drawbridges, and batteries. Situated amidst stagnant waters and morasses, its air is pestilential, especially to strangers. The garrison were prepared to maintain the position with their usual bravery; and it remained to be seen whether the French general possessed any new system of attack, capable of abridging ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... being enacted. Seated on benches or small wooden stools among valises, boxes, and baskets, a few feet from the engines, in the heat of the boilers, amid the human smells and the pestilential odor of oil, were to be seen the great majority of the passengers. Some were silently gazing at the changing scenes along the banks, others were playing cards or conversing in the midst of the scraping of shovels, the roar of ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... a time there were two highwaymen, Charlie and Crabb Spring; two men, not highway, Saul Coplestone and John Cole; two marriageable sisters, Sarah and Christina Rowland. The highwaymen, being pestilential and murderous, badly wanted catching; of the two potential heroes, Saul was a stout enough fellow on the surface but a poltroon at bottom, while John, though less terrific in physique, was modest and courageous ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various

... clearly what she has to destroy. So do we. No American and Englishman can meet but that they grip hands and thank God together that they are comrades in this Holy War. They are out, like Knights of Fable, to rid the earth of a pestilential monster; and they will not rest until their foot is on ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... practically but one test—that is to say, desire on the part of the visitor—the coming proves the desire, and this suffices. A family, we will say, has just gathered its first harvest; the heat on the plains is intense, and the malaria from the rice grounds little less than pestilential; what, then, can be nicer than to lock up the house and go for three days to the bracing mountain air of Oropa? So at daybreak off they all start, trudging, it may be, their thirty or forty miles, and reaching Oropa by nightfall. If there ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler

... Adv. of Learn. book ii. What Lord Bacon desired for the mere gratification of scientific curiosity, the welfare of mankind now imperiously demands. Shallow systems of metaphysics have given birth to a brood of abominable and pestilential paradoxes, which nothing but a more profound philosophy can destroy. However we may, perhaps, lament the necessity of discussions which may shake the habitual reverence of some men for those rules which it is the chief interest of all men to practise, ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh

... destroy'd many thousands of these Natives, who no sooner than they are attack'd with the violent Fevers, and the Burning which attends that Distemper, fling themselves over Head in the Water, in the very Extremity of the Disease; which shutting up the Pores, hinders a kindly Evacuation of the pestilential Matter, and drives it back; by which Means Death most commonly ensues; not but in other Distempers which are epidemical, you may find among 'em Practitioners that have extraordinary Skill and Success in removing those ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson

... were an archangel, at least. It makes a peculiar atmosphere, This odor of earthly passions and crimes, Such as I like to breathe, at times, And such as often brings me here In the hottest and most pestilential season. To-day, I come for another reason; To foster and ripen an evil thought In a heart that is almost to madness wrought, And to make a murderer out of a prince, A sleight of hand I learned long since! ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... hoped for, and that they could not hope for success with the force now at their disposal. Even had they been victorious, he argued, they had intended to leave their present camp, which was unhealthy at all times, and was now in the hot season becoming pestilential. The time was the beginning of autumn, and many of the Athenians were sick, while all were disheartened. Nikias, however, opposed the idea of retreat, not because he did not fear the Syracusans, but because he feared the Athenians more, and the treatment ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... prominent a feature they form in the English landscape. There is the dismal corner in the great city, surrounded by blackened walls, where scarce a blade of grass will grow, and where the whole thing is foul and pestilential. There is the ideal country churchyard, like that described by Gray, where the old elms and yews keep watch over the graves where successive generations of simple rustics have found their last resting-place, and where in the twilight the owls hoot from the tower of ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... Rome,—priests, nobles, and beggars,—for there was nothing which in any degree corresponded to a citizen class; such business as there was consisted chiefly in usury, and was altogether in the hands of the Jews. Rome was the lonely and ruined capital of a pestilential desert, and its population was composed of marauders ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... had been awaiting their trial for weeks in Houses of Detention—Pest-houses of Detention—you could not expect a putrid fever to adopt new rules merely to accommodate legal prejudice. And in the same way if Cavendish Square came sniffing up pestilential effluvia in Drury Lane, it was The Square's ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... a muddy, polluted, pestilential river, instead of allowing it to resolve itself into a million irrigating-ditches, has been the fight of the centuries. The trouble is that irrigation is not an end—it is just a beginning. Irrigation means constant and increasing effort, and priests and preachers have never prayed, "Give us this ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... hardships and peril, and racked by the pestilential fever that still hovers about the river lowlands, De Soto paid the debt of nature, and his thrice decimated followers made their way back to France. It seemed a strange, incredible story that they told, for such a mighty river, with its vast ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various

... record. In comments on his table, Potter says that he has doubtless included mention of many plagues which, although described under that name, are probably a dissimilar disease, writers having applied the terms pestilential and pestilent in a generic sense to diseases specifically different. It must also be remembered that, in some cases, death must have been due to famine, want, and privation, which are so frequently coexistent with pestilence. Following the idea of Hecker, the dancing ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... eve the night-bird fly, And vulture dimly flitting by, To revel o'er each morsel stolen From the cold corse, all black and swoln That on the shattered ramparts lay, Of him who perished yesterday,— Of him whose pestilential steam Rose reeking on the morning beam,— Whose fearful fragments, nearly gone, Were ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... war appears as a kind of Last Judgment, sentencing folly and sensuality to hell. The shame of France was consumed by the fire of 1870, and her true genius was restored. Abominable as the Boer War was, the mind of England was less pestilential after it than before. Passion purifies, and surely there can be no passion stronger than one which drives you ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... elaborate nor loaded with ornament; it rises supreme by its own natural purity. This windy and high-sounding bombast, a recent immigrant to Athens, from Asia, touched with its breath the aspiring minds of youth, with the effect of some pestilential planet, and as soon as the tradition of the past was broken, eloquence halted and was stricken dumb. Since that, who has attained to the sublimity of Thucydides, who rivalled the fame of Hyperides? Not a single poem has glowed with a healthy color, but all of them, as though nourished on the same ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... robbery, murder, and every species of wickedness, which, if we did not practise, others would commit. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that they were to take it up. What good would it do them? What advantages, for instance, would they derive from this pestilential commerce to their marine? Should not we, on the other hand, be benefited by this change? Would they not be obliged to come to us, in consequence of the cheapness of our manufactures, for what they wanted for the African market? ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson

... Park, now the Hall of Records, and the other was the old Sugar-House in Liberty Street, next to the Middle Dutch Church. The jail was so crowded with the captured Americans that they had scarcely room to lie on the bare floor. The air was stifling, the rooms pestilential, ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... and there and endeavor to redeem or recover him while the environment remains unchanged, is a waste of force: as foolish as it would be to spend millions on remedies for people sick with malaria in a pestilential and malarial district, and ignore the condition of the district. True wisdom would demand first of all that the district be purged, the environment made healthy, ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman

... enthusiasm Pours itself on the plain, then wandering Down one clear path of effluence crystalline Sends its superfluous waves, that they may fling At Arno's feet tribute of corn and wine; Then, through the pestilential deserts wild Of tangled marsh and woods of stunted pine, It ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... well-known risk and the ultimate cost of his life; Florence Nightingale and the noble sisterhood inaugurated by her, who have won all the untarnished and undisputed laurels of recent wars on both sides of the Atlantic; and the Christian missionaries to savage tribes and in pestilential climates, who have often gone to their work with as clear a consciousness of deadly peril as if they had been on their way ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... fond wishes, or the guilty's prayer; Though vainly in repeated vows they trust, None e'er find grace before him but the just. Oft to a banished, wandering, houseless race The sacred dictates have assigned a place: Oft from the strong he saves the weak in war, And heals the barren land, and pestilential air. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... disturbed the order established by the wisdom of man? And what is that infidelity which founded empires by its prudence, defended them by its valor, and strengthened them by its justice—which built powerful cities, formed capacious ports, drained pestilential marshes, covered the ocean with ships, the earth with inhabitants; and, like the creative spirit, spread life and motion throughout the world? If such be infidelity, what then is the true faith? Doth ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... we are with those of Squeers and Micawber, as types of a class; and the joke was well understood when, many years after, in the 8th of his Second Book of Satires, he said that Nasidienus's dinner- party broke up without their eating a morsel of the dishes after a certain point,—"As if a pestilential blast from Canidia's throat, more venomous than that of African ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... rounding, laboriously, by the extremity of the South. Four days; days of a rain as of Noah,—without fire, without food! For fire you cut down green trees, and produce smoke; for food you eat green grapes, and produce colic, pestilential dysentery, (Greek). And the Peasants assassinate us, they do not join us; shrill women cry shame on us, threaten to draw their very scissors on us! O ye hapless dulled-bright Seigneurs, and hydrophobic splashed Nankeens;—but O, ten times more, ye poor sackerment-ing ghastly-visaged ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... an uncommon lot for the bold privateersman, who, when once consigned to it, found that the reward of a sea-rover was not always wealth and pleasure. A Massachusetts privateersman left on record a contemporary account of the sufferings of himself and his comrades in this pestilential hulk, which may well be condensed here to show some of the perils that the adventurers dared when ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... plague rage in Avignon for six or eight weeks, and the pestilential breath of the sick, who expectorated blood, caused a terrible contagion far and near; for even the vicinity of those who had fallen ill of plague was certain death; so that parents abandoned their infected children, and all ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker

... lands. Such facts, it would seem, might reach the conscience of all who are wantonly destroying Heaven's gifts. Can you, for a little selfish gain, persist in converting the bread of multitudes into pestilential fire? How utterly unlike the example of Him who, while feeding thousands by miracle, could still say, "Gather up the fragments which ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... yards of silent scurry through this pestilential tract, they struck hard ground, and went at full speed up the hill-side for open country and purer air. Still following Me Dain, who pushed on as fast as he could go, Jack and his father plunged into a bamboo groove, and followed a narrow path. This brought them in a few minutes to a small clearing, ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... refreshing to pass from Protestant England across to Catholic Ireland or to the Continent and visit Sardinia! The moral atmosphere of these countries, compared with England, must be as a healthful breeze to a pestilential marsh. ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... most part in a north or south direction, are kept in neat order, regularly watered, and planted with rows of trees in the Dutch style. Formerly canals intersected the streets in all directions, rendering the city the most pestilential place within the tropics; but by the orders of Sir Stamford Raffles, while the English had possession of the island, they were all filled up, except the Grand Canal and its tributaries. The city is still far from healthy, and no one who can help it remains there; the government officers ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... is simply steeping the cut plants in water, is a delicate operation, requiring constant watching, to say nothing of its serious inconvenience from a sanitary point of view, on account of the pestilential emanations from the retteries. Decortication by steam having been effected, the work of M. Favier ceases, and the process is carried forward by M. Fremy. The ribbons having been produced, the fiber in them has to be freed from the mucilaginous secretions. To this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 417 • Various

... raged as fiercely outside as on the day before, but I could not stay in that pestilential and filthy hut. Even Artisarlook—and an Eskimo is not over-particular—found difficulty in eating his breakfast. For my part—I could not breathe. The air was horrible and it was refreshing to get outside and to be going through the storm and over the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... through battle's flood, Dashed the hot war-horse on. These spots of excavation tell The ravage of the bursting shell - And feel'st thou not the tainted steam, That reeks against the sultry beam, From yonder trenched mound? The pestilential fumes declare That Carnage has ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott

... exist for me at all. As an audience I can only imagine an assembly of friends who have come together for the purpose of knowing my works somewhere or other, best of all in some beautiful solitude, far from the smoke and pestilential business odour of our town civilization. Such a solitude I might find in Weimar, but certainly not in a larger city. If I now turn to my great work, it is done for the purpose of seeking salvation from my misery, forgetfulness of my life. I have no other aim, and shall think myself ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... not at all; it would as soon occur to them to set out for Morocco as for Calabria. How shall I get along with people whose language is a barbarous dialect? Am I aware that the country is in great part pestilential?—la febbre! Has no one informed me that in autumn snows descend, and bury everything for months? It is useless to explain that I only intend to visit places easily accessible, that I shall travel mostly ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... with a long score to pay the walking boss, seized the iron starting-bar, and descended. Out from the inscrutable white forest murder breathed like a pestilential air. The two men talked ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... the entire social community will experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... are filled with pestilential dust which once was the bones, the flesh, the bodies of great ones who sate upon thrones, deciding causes, ruling assemblies, governing armies, conquering provinces, possessing treasures, tearing down temples, flattering themselves with pride, majesty, fortune, praise and dominion. ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton

... wilderness beauty that was full of charm in such a place as this, and the sisters looked about them with eager eyes, rejoicing in the beauty before them, and inhaling the pure freshness of the air after the heavy and somewhat pestilential atmosphere ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green

... week after he had set out, he saw three of the men who had been put under his orders die before his eyes, after a few hours' illness, and amid atrocious convulsions. They had the cholera. During the next four months, seven succumbed to fevers which they had contracted in these pestilential swamps. And towards the end of the expedition, when the work was nearly done, the survivors were so emaciated, that they had hardly strength enough to hold themselves up. Daniel alone had not yet suffered from these terrible ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau

... WON'T be sensible," cried the Boy, getting up, "I'm going off home. No, I can't stop for sonnets; my mother's sitting up. I'll look you up to-morrow, sometime or other, and do for goodness' sake try and realize that you're a pestilential scourge, or you'll find yourself in a ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... daily in the streets like cabbages and turnips, the good people of Paris inhaling them along with the pestilential vapors ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... which protects the weak from the strong, I commit the care of your innocence and virtues, if they have not already received their full reward, and if your youth and delicacy have not long since fallen victims to the violence of the African trader, the pestilential stench of a Guinea ship, the seasoning in the European colonies, or the lash and lust of a ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano

... in that season, nor are any mineral waters proper in your case, being all of them heating, except Seltzer's; then, what would do you more harm than all medicines could do you good, would be the pestilential vapors of the House of Commons, in long and crowded days, of which there will probably be many this session; where your attendance, if here, will necessarily be required. I compare St. Stephen's Chapel, upon those days, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... seeing when he was not there, and who, on that account, seemed to keep secret among themselves some part of the life of his mistress more real, more inaccessible and more mysterious than anything that he knew. Whereas upon that pestilential, enviable staircase to the old dressmaker's, since there was no other, no service stair in the building, one saw in the evening outside every door an empty, unwashed milk-can set out, in readiness for the morning ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... be for her own good, as well as the redemption of mankind from her unwholesome foreign influences, typified as they are in the beautiful city of Havana, which has become the center of political plagues and pestilential fevers, whose contagion has at frequent intervals ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... and breaks under the drop of water which incessantly falls upon it, so that great nation had to break and to fall into pieces under, not the drop, but the rivers of impure waters which for centuries have incessantly flowed in upon it from the pestilential fountain of the confessional. "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach, ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy

... nightmare he scrambled out. Half-way up, he recollected Bondell's gripsack. It had fallen into the hole with him; the pack-strap had evidently broken, and he had forgotten it. Back he went into the pestilential charnel-pit, where he crawled around on hands and knees and groped for half an hour. Altogether he encountered and counted seventeen dead horses (and one horse still alive that he shot with his revolver) before he found Bondell's grip. Looking back upon a life that had not been without valour ...
— Lost Face • Jack London

... up her heart" at the shrine of affection, by being closed in a sack and thrown into the lake. But, I felt persuaded, there was something English, in the tones of your voice. Did you forsake Old Albion for the sultry, pestilential deserts of these ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various

... destroyed, as one would think, the land as well as the inhabitants, leaving but grey cinders and blackened stone behind. Siena and Florence ruined Volterra once more in the Middle Ages, isolating it near the pestilential Maremma and checking its growth outward and inward. The cathedral, the pride of a mediaeval commonwealth, is still a mean and unfinished building of the twelfth century. There is no native art, of any importance, of a later period; what ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... London gave the lie to these suppositions, and for many weeks the bridge was a sight in itself, crowded with carriages and waggons all filled with the richer folks and their goods, hastening to the pleasant regions of Surrey to forget their fears and escape the pestilential atmosphere of ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green

... he would ever allow a marriage to take place between his son and a French princess, and large sums had been wagered on the issue. Charles I at once put an end to all hesitation. He did not allow himself to be induced to defer his marriage even by the death of his father, or by a pestilential sickness which then prevailed, or by the lack of the desirable preparations in the royal palaces. He wished to show the world that he adhered to his policy of opposition to Spain. He even allowed the privateering, which his father ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke



Words linked to "Pestilential" :   epidemic, pestilence, plaguey, pestilent, pestiferous



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