Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Spurious   /spjˈʊriəs/  /spˈəriəs/   Listen
Spurious

adjective
1.
Plausible but false.  Synonym: specious.  "Spurious inferences"
2.
Born out of wedlock.  Synonyms: bastardly, misbegot, misbegotten.
3.
Intended to deceive.  Synonyms: inauthentic, unauthentic.



Related searches:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Spurious" Quotes from Famous Books



... has been wickedly and traitorously printed and published this morning in the New York World and New York Journal of Commerce, newspapers printed and published in the city of New York, a false and spurious proclamation purporting to be signed by the President and to be countersigned by the Secretary of State, which publication is of a treasonable nature, designed to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States and to the rebels now at war against the Government and their ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... her play; I hope, act it only in private; for her other was murdered, and the audience did not exert the least gallantry to so pretty an authoress, though she gave them so fair an opportunity. For my own play, I was going to publish it in my own defence, as a spurious edition was advertised here, besides one in Ireland. My advertisement has overlaid the former for the present, and that tempts me to suppress mine, as I have a thorough aversion to its appearance. Still, I think ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... Hedin an obsession; they spoke a language he knew. He hated the grosser furs, as he loved the finer. He despised the trade tricks and spurious trade names by which the flimsiest of furs are foisted upon the gullible purchasers of "seal," "sable," "black fox," "ermine," and "beaver." He prided himself that no misnamed fur had ever passed over ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx

... was a fake, prearranged by the Volitionalists, with Dr. Harnosh and this Dallona of Hadron as their tools. They fed the whole thing to that idiot boy hypnotically, in advance, and then, on a signal, he began typing out this spurious communication. And then, of course, Dallona and this Assassin of hers ran off somewhere together, so that we'd be blamed with discarnating or abducting them, and so that they wouldn't be made to testify about the communication ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper

... 1766, under the title of Matinees du Roi de Prusse, purporting to be 'Morning Conversations' of Frederick the Great with his Nephew the Heir-Apparent, every line of which betrays itself as false and spurious to a reader who has made any direct or effectual study of Frederick or his manners or affairs,—it is set forth, in the way of exordium to these pretended royal confessions, that 'notre maison,' our Family of Hohenzollern, ever since the first origin of it among the Swabian mountains, or its ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle

... bring the historical romance into disrepute. Many writers frankly make no pretence—leastways none that can be discerned—of aiming at historical precision; others, however, invest their work with a spurious scholarliness, go the length of citing authorities to support the point of view which they have taken, and which they lay before you as the fruit of ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini

... portraits must not be forgotten; it respects their authenticity. We have too many supposititious heads, and ideal personages. Conrad ab Uffenbach, who seems to have been the first collector who projected a methodical arrangement, condemned those spurious portraits which were fit only for the amusement of children. The painter does not always give a correct likeness, or the engraver misses it in his copy. Goldsmith was a short thick man, with wan features and a vulgar appearance, but looks tall and fashionable in a ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... above suffering from such spurious publications; but I could not help thinking, that many men would be much injured in their reputation, by having absurd and vicious sayings imputed to them; and that redress ought in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... deserve to be considered next. The question of their genuineness does not affect the present inquiry; for the seven letters contained in what is commonly called the Short Greek recension, whether spurious or not, were confessedly the same which Eusebius read; and to these I refer. For the sake of convenience I shall call the writer Ignatius, without prejudging the question of authorship. Ignatius then presents some striking coincidences with our Synoptic ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... merits of what I understand is known as lingerie, he had become a man: a man with a quick hand and a sure eye, a man who had met one of his kind in fair fight and killed him. In his mind there had been born pride—the right sort of pride. Not the spurious article which had passed for it at Mogg's—that unpleasant type of conceit of which pimples and a high collar are the outward and visible sign. No, not that at all. He had cast that off with his frock ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... dull to the true logic of Attic irony! can't you comprehend that an affection may be genuine as felt by the man, yet its nature be spurious in relation to others? A man may generally believe he loves his fellow-creatures when he roasts them like Torquemada, or guillotines them like St. Just! Happily Jack's scalene triangle, being more produced from air than from fire, does not give ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... raising Leotychides to the throne of Demaratus, and Leotychides should assist Cleomenes in his vengeance against Aegina. No sooner was this conspiracy agreed upon than Leotychides propagated everywhere the report that the birth of Demaratus was spurious. The Spartans attached the greatest value to legitimacy,—they sent to consult the Pythian—and Cleomenes, through the aid of Colon, a powerful citizen of Delphi, bribed the oracle to assert the illegitimacy of his foe. Demaratus was deposed. Sinking at once ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... seem not to have been a person of sufficient character or importance to make this trial a political event. But not only had he powerful backers, but his opponents also, by proposing an innovation in the manner of selecting the jurors for trying him, had managed to give a spurious political importance to the case. One of the most brilliant of the early letters (XV, p. 37) gives us a graphic picture of the trial. Clodius was acquitted and went to his province, but returned in B.C. 60, apparently prepared for a change of parties. Cicero ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... to which we refer was passed by Massachusetts in 1705, (chap. 6.) It is entitled "An act for the better preventing of a spurious and mixed issue," &c.; and it provides, that "if any negro or mulatto shall presume to smite or strike any person of the English or other Christian nation, such negro or mulatto shall be severely whipped, at the discretion of the justices before ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard

... Russian masses under multiform circumstances, both material and spiritual—and orphaned in a peculiarly distressing and irrevocable way. They might even feel when their saints' days came around quite correctly the next year that some spurious adventurer—Angel of Darkness—was ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... put together a highly entertaining collection of diamond-cut-diamond yarns, adventure tales that have the great advantage (for these days) of being concerned, not with bloodshed and mysterious murders, but with the wiles of dealers in the spurious antique and the exploits of Lord Louis in defeating them. This Lord Louis is indeed a very pleasant as well as a very ingenious gentleman. From the rotundity of his conversational periods and a certain general suavity of demeanour I suspect him of ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various

... rented-by-the-month piano in her parents' back parlor in Mrs. Schum's boarding house, her two chestnut braids rather precociously long and thick down her back, her mother rocking rhythmically overhead, were spurious to this narrative. ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... or spurious plays which have been with more or less show of reason ascribed to this first period of Shakespeare's art, I have here no more to say than that I purpose in the proper place to take account of the only two among them which bear the slightest trace of ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... discovery that it might be gratified, under the 37th clause of the 31st of George III., chap. 31. Next, the select committee of the House of Commons, in 1828, on the Civil Government of Canada, influenced by the spurious liberality of the times, extended this opinion of the Crown lawyers ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... would be uniform and would take the place of the notes of sixteen hundred banks, differing in style, and so easily imitated and altered that while notes of one-sixth of the existing banks had been counterfeited, 1,861 kinds of imitations were afloat, and 3,039 alterations, in addition to 1,685 spurious notes, in which hardly any care had been taken to show any resemblance to the genuine." The national banks would be depositories of public moneys and their notes would be receivable for taxes. He concluded by declaring that "we cannot maintain our nationality ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... himself it is his strenuous and sometimes absurd particularity about immaculate form. He would never overlook a line of five feet in a poem of hexameters. But—as will, I think, appear later and conclusively—the line is really of six feet, and is not iambic, trochaic, anapaestic, the spurious spondaic that some writers have tried to manufacture for English verse, or anything else recognized in Coleridge's immortal stanza, or in text-books. It simply cannot be scanned by classical rules; it cannot be weighed ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... forged;—nothing that the editors and commentators, who, for the most part possessed of remarkable perspicacity and discernment, have applied their minds to minute revision and close examination of these books, have, after such diligent attention never considered them to be spurious, but belonging to the domain of true history;—nothing that they have stood for close on four hundred years unchallenged, deceiving the wisest and the most learned as well as the best and the most experienced ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... admiration, and St. Jerome appeals to him as "our Seneca." The Council of Trent go further still, and quote him as though he were an acknowledged father of the Church. For many centuries there were some who accepted as genuine the spurious letters supposed to have been interchanged between Seneca and St. Paul, in which Seneca is made to express a wish to hold among the Pagans the same beneficial position which St. Paul held in the Christian ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... been the characteristic of the mind of the West in presenting its faith to the East. This did not make so much difference, so long as the Indian was submissive and had not waked up to the spirit of self-assertion. But to-day, when that spirit is so rampant, and when a new nationalism and a half-spurious patriotism glories in everything eastern and is annoyed by all that is western, the matter ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... latter, as the highest form of religious association, demands the former, and the former looks to the latter as its completion. Where the religion of the family does not move in the element of the church, it is at best but sentimentalism on the one hand, and rationalism on the other. It is a spurious pietism. To be genuine it must be moulded by the church. Without this it is destitute of sterling principle, of a living-faith, of well-directed effort and lofty aims. The family which does not move in the element of ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... noted in his friend was only on the surface. Charnock had not really deteriorated in Canada; the qualities that had brought him down had been overlaid by a spurious grace and charm, but it now looked as if moral slackness might develop into active vice. On the whole, he thought Sadie would have trouble with Bob, but this was ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss

... Abdulka was astonished, and mentioned Allah. And then he ordered his daughter, or some pretty maiden, whoever she was,—anyhow, she had the gaze of a jackal,—to fetch a leathern bottle of wine.—And I set to work.—'But thy sabre is spurious,' says he; 'here, take this genuine one. And now thou and I are friends.'—And you have lost your wager, ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... possible, in accordance with the expression of his and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bruyere, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various

... interest of representing Camden's last thoughts. It is nominally a translation of the sixth Latin edition, but it has a good deal of additional matter supplied to Philemon Holland by the author, whereas later English issues containing fresh material are believed to be so far spurious. The Britannia grew with the life of Camden. He tells us that it was when he was a young man of six-and-twenty, lately started on his professional career as second master in Westminster School, that the famous ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... "will of the people" was in short a spurious affair, unnaturally created by a political morphine that gave glorious dreams; and this wretched drug was ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... put a stop to my surveying; and with much difficulty I was able to get jim to abingdon, being obliged to get a sled to carry him on, as he could neither walk, stand or ride.'"—Washington's Diary. See Spurious Letters ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... for soup, rubber preservatives in sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock, billets doux in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, porringers of toad in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days' indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes, season tickets available for all tramlines, coupons of the royal and privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of the World's Twelve ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... to your opinion of the young Pretender being a cheat; nor, as the rebellion is near at end, do I see what end it would answer to prove him original or spurious. However, as you seem to dwell upon it, I will mention it again to ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... people who conceive that their misdeeds are revocable and pardonable, or in a society where absolution and expiation are officially provided for us all. The demand may be very real; but the supply is spurious. Thus Bill Walker, in my play, having assaulted the Salvation Lass, presently finds himself overwhelmed with an intolerable conviction of sin under the skilled treatment of Barbara. Straightway he begins to try to unassault the lass and deruffianize his ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... 258. Spurious Announcements.—A word may be said in conclusion about getting society news. One of the first precautions to a prospective society editor is not to accept announcements of engagements, marriages, and births of children from any others ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer

... quite illiterate, he had posed as the introducer of Western civilisation into Egypt; but his grandiose and expensive policy had imposed terrible burdens upon the fellahin (peasantry), and the heavy taxation which was necessary to maintain his armies and the spurious civilisation of his capital was only raised ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir

... proud. Right can now assert itself in a way which was entirely beyond the reach of our predecessors of a hundred years ago; and wrong receives summary judgment at the hands of a whole people. Yet there is a growing danger that this great liberty of the individual may become, in one direction, a spurious liberty, and that the elements of physical force, exerting themselves under the aegis of uncurbed freedom, may enter into conspiracy against intellect, individual effort, and thrift in such a way as to produce ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde

... still discontented he entered their assembly, presumably compelled thereto by the tribunes, where he inveighed against the senate and promised to speak in support of Manilius. For this he fell into ill repute generally, and was termed "deserter." [Probably spurious: "because Caesar cultivated the populace from the beginning, whereas Cicero usually played a double part; sometimes he sided with the people, sometimes with the assembly, and for this reason he was termed 'deserter.'"—Mai, ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio

... first-born race to be so rude, And suffer'd her to be so oft subdued; By sev'ral crowds of wandering thieves o'er-run, Often unpeopled, and as oft undone; While ev'ry nation that her powers reduced, Their languages and manners introduced; From whose mix'd relics our compounded breed, By spurious generation does succeed; Making a race uncertain and uneven, Derived from all the nations ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe

... always denounced as a lie—they disown it, cast it off, throw it on the parish; whereas the product of your own imagination, the mere figment, the sheer fiction, is adopted, petted, termed pretty, proper, sweetly natural—the little, spurious wretch gets all the comfits, the honest, lawful bantling all the cuffs. Such is the way of the world, Peter; and as you are the legitimate urchin, rude, unwashed, and naughty, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... not indeed as now, at Pekin and Lima, at Bokhara and Timbuctoo, but in London, and even as far off as Ireland. They had acquired a less honourable renown as coiners of bad money. In allusion to their spurious groats, some Tory wit had fixed on demagogues, who hypocritically affected zeal against Popery, the nickname of Birminghams. Yet in 1685 the population, which is now little less than two hundred thousand, did not amount ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... have been for the most part of the last meanness: the Barnum picture above all ignoble and awful, its blatant face or frame stuck about with innumerable flags that waved, poor vulgar-sized ensigns, over spurious relics and catchpenny monsters in effigy, to say nothing of the promise within of the still more monstrous and abnormal living—from the total impression of which things we plucked somehow the flower of the ideal. It grew, I must in justice proceed, much ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... stars almost the antipodes of each other in the celestial vault; hoping to detect some effect due to the size of the earth's orbit, which should apparently displace them with the season of the year. All these fancied results however, were shown to be spurious, and their real cause assigned, by the great discovery of the aberration of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... the said passenger to reflect that the road being feet deep in sand one was bound to fall soft anyhow. Yet, candidly, he rather enjoyed it. After thirty-three hours in a South African "Flying Watkin" even this spurious excitement was welcome. ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... desire of an appropriate "visiting acquaintance." The accomplishment of that desire had been deferred awhile by the excitement of Lionel's departure for Paris, and the IMMENSE TEMPTATION to which the attentions of the spurious Mr. Courtenay Smith had exposed her widowed solitude: but no sooner had she recovered from the shame and anger with which she had discarded that showy impostor, happily in time, than the desire became the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... its power; whose hearts are filled with self-sufficiency and spiritual pride, and perhaps zeal for the truths and external duties of religion, while the real spirit of piety has no place there. They trust to some imaginary change, long since passed by, and which has proved to be spurious by its failing of its fruits. The best way, in fact the only way, to guard against this danger, especially with the young, is to show, by your manner of speaking and acting on this subject, at all times, that you regard a truly religious life, as the only evidence of piety;—and that consequently, ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... that the first stanza contains a satirical allusion to the luxury of the popish clergy, while the second, which makes an apparently light reference to "seven bairns", is actually concerned with the seven sacraments, five of which were the spurious offspring ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols

... desire to remove the free people of color out of the country? Was it from motives of real philanthropy? The colored people were the first to detect its spurious humanity, the first to see through the artful disguises employed to impose upon the conscience of the republic. Their removal, they intuitively divined, was proposed not to do their race a benefit, but rather to do a service to the owners of slaves. These ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... This spurious sentimentality—which refuses to recognise the obvious inequalities of intelligence and morality, and thereby reduces the teaching of the highly developed to the level attainable by the least evolved, sacrificing the higher to the lower in a way that injures both—had no place in the virile ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... I began to be apprehensive that his lordship, finding I had travelled, was afraid I might have been infected with this spurious and sordid desire abroad, and took this method of sounding my sentiments on the subject. Fired at this supposed suspicion, I argued against it with great warmth, as an appetite unnatural, absurd, and of pernicious consequence; and ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... the young and old, were all forced to pay him? But my present friend (for such he is, because he renders himself altogether my equal) has no wish to seem great and sublime: he smiles at the endeavours of so many men to do so, and considers this of itself as an assurance that there is something spurious and hollow to be concealed; since a clear consciousness of worth would only wish to pass for what it feels itself to be, and the wisest of mortals must after all acknowledge that he too, as well as the most ignorant vagabond, is merely a child of ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... the proof of the righteousness of their assumptions to excessive temporal authority. Wickliffe declared them false and apocryphal. For this he was condemned by the sixteenth General Council, held at Constance in 1414, and his bones ordered dug up and burnt because of his daring impudence. The spurious character of these false decretals have since been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt; and since it is impossible to deny it longer, it is admitted even by Romanists. So, after all, this infallible Council was wrong, the Papists ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith

... formed, or manufactured, in the name of the celebrated Isidore of Seville. But with the donation of Constantine to Pope Sylvester and many others in the later compilation of Gratian, these are usually looked upon as spurious and false. The great and authorised collection was completed by a simple Benedictine monk of St. Felix, in Bologna, a native of Chiusi, the ancient Clusium, in Tuscany, a man so learned in the law as to have earned the title of "Magister." This is the work ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... industry is equally impossible for high minded and impecunious men. The alternative open to them is beggary or privation. Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance undisturbed to work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a secondary, and in a sense spurious, leisure class—abjectly poor and living in a precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the lady who has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now. This pervading sense of the indignity of the ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... Calais and other foreign cities." The court revelled in gorgeous tournaments and luxury of dress; and the establishment in 1346 of the Order of the Garter which found its home in the new castle that Edward was raising at Windsor marked the highest reach of the spurious "Chivalry" of the day. But it was at this moment of triumph that the whole colour of Edward's reign suddenly changed. The most terrible plague the world has ever witnessed advanced from the East, and after devastating Europe from the shores of the Mediterranean to ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... overrated him stylistically, but he was a man of their own people. Men such as Becker, Weise, Lorenz and Langrehr have proceeded upon a distinctly exaggerated ideal of Plautus' eminence as a master dramatic craftsman and literary artist and therefore have amputated with the cry of "Spurious!" everything that offends their ideal. Lessing is obsessed with too high an estimate of the Captivi. Lamarre, Naudet and Ritschl commit the error of imputing to our poet a moral purpose. Schlegel and Scott deprecate the crudity of his wit ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke

... painted imitation of various woods or marbles, the subject has been discussed in various architectural works, and is evidently becoming one of daily increasing interest. When it is considered how many persons there are whose means of livelihood consist altogether in these spurious arts, and how difficult it is, even for the most candid, to admit a conviction contrary both to their interests and to their inveterate habits of practice and thought, it is rather a matter of wonder, that the cause of Truth should ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... Fringed eyelids leashing Sheathed and leaping lights... Infinite bubbles of light Bursting, reforming... Silvery filings of light Incessantly falling... Scintillant, sided dust of light Out of the white flares of Broadway— Like a great spurious diamond In ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge

... and Luther, and their flocks, with all the hardest-headed and truest-hearted faithful left in Christendom, thus spurned away the spurious art, and all art with it (not without harm to themselves, such as a man must needs sustain in cutting off a decayed limb), certain conditions of weaker Christianity suffered the false system to retain influence over them; and to ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... of Great Britain be all manner of real vice; but ten thousand times further from them, as far as from pole to pole, be the whole tribe of false, spurious, affected, counterfeit, hypocritical virtues! These are the things which are ten times more at war with real virtue, these are the things which are ten times more at war with real duty, than any vice ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... pistol in a fit of jealous rage. Hackman was hanged at Tyburn, Boswell attending the funeral. Croft's supposed letters between Hackman and Martha Reay, which made a great sensation when issued under the title of Love and Madness, are now known to be spurious (see ch. x. p. 115). Martha Reay was buried in the chancel of Elstree Church, but Lord Sandwich, who, although he sent word to Hackman, who asked his forgiveness, that 'he had robbed him of all comfort in this world,' took no pains to erect ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... past the gates of ivy-mantled homes of blessed outlook. Here a croquet party stops playing, for the grass is getting wet with evening dew, and there, in the river, and up to the knees in it, are half a dozen anglers sweeping the wave with their spurious fly. Peebles is not far off, and the quiet nooks of the high road are filled with pedestrians. The entrance to Peebles is exquisite. The long rows of trees, the situation of the road high above the river in the dell, combine to make an eerie blend of sound ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... between these two systems of false religion. Each one is founded, after a fashion, on the Bible, to which each has supplemented a volume of miserable fables, the one called the Book of Mormon, and the other the Koran. Each has a spurious prophet, who is exalted above the prophets of Scripture. Both systems permit polygamy, and both are most ultra-Protestant in relation to the forms and ceremonies, images and pictures of the Oriental and Latin churches. And as God sent the great Mohammedan imposture to punish the corrupt Christianity ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... monotonous arguments of their credulous skepticism. With those critics, if an epistle touches on points which make it accord with the narrative of the Acts it was forged to suit them; if it seems to disagree with them the discrepancy shows that it is spurious. If the diction is Pauline it stands forth as a proved imitation; if it is un-Pauline it could not have proceeded from the apostle." [Footnote: Life and Work of St. Paul, chap, xlvi] One grows weary with this reckless and carping skepticism, much of which springs from a theory of a permanent ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden

... surely sufficiently, and more than sufficiently, shown the failure of the attempts to base Christian oneness upon uniformity of opinion, or of ritual, or of purpose. The difference between the real unity, and these spurious attempts after it, is the difference between bundles of faggots, dead and held together by a cord, and a living tree lifting its multitudinous foliage towards the heavens. The bundle of faggots may be held together in some sort of imperfect union, but is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... subject.... Their challenge once made, to which you, Monsieur Chapron, have to reply by yes or no, these gentlemen should withdraw immediately.... It is not your fault, it is Ardea's, who has allowed that dabbler in spurious dividends to perform his part of intriguer.... But we will rectify all in the right way, which is the French.... And ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... intended to serve as a ball-room or concert-hall. A regiment of reporters was entrenched in the front seats, and those who were to be called on to give evidence occupied chairs to one side of the table behind which the coroner sat, while the jury, in double row, with plastered hair and a spurious ease of manner, flanked him on the other side. An undistinguished public filled the rest of the space, and listened, in an awed silence, to the opening solemnities. The newspaper men, well used to these, muttered among themselves. Those of them who knew Trent by sight, assured ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley

... this spurious Spanish lady had no real knowledge of that which she professed. The whole affair was an imposture; and on the very night of her first appearance the truth exploded. On the discovery of the truth, I declined to allow the English adventuress, ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... something more and different to be said also. While the authorized Mysteries were what we have asserted, there did afterwards arise spurious Mysteries, in names, forms, and pretensions partially resembling the genuine ones, under the control of the most unprincipled persons, and in which unquestionably the excesses of unbelief, drunkenness, and prostitution ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... the celebrated "Dorfgeschichten," by Berthold Auerbach. The latter introduced, in a time of literary poverty, a wide range of new subjects for epical treatment,—the life of German peasants, with their simple, healthy, vigorous natures undepraved by a spurious civilization. In painting these sinewy figures, full of a character of their own, he was very felicitous, had an enormous success, and drew a host of less gifted followers after him. Herr Ludwig is one of these. We shall not despair of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... in consequence of over or false culture; by the reading of a spurious literature, which dwells in the regions of fiction and romance, to the proportionate neglect of the stirring incidents of our time, which actually go to make up true history—which seem marvellous enough of themselves, without the necessity of invention, ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit

... connections was degraded to a transient society of profit or pleasure. According to the various conditions of life, both sexes alternately felt the disgrace and injury; an inconstant spouse transferred her wealth to a new family, abandoning a numerous, perhaps a spurious progeny to the paternal authority and care of her late husband; a beautiful virgin might be dismissed to the world, old, indigent, and friendless; but the reluctance of the Romans, when they were pressed to marriage by Augustus, sufficiently marks that the prevailing institutions ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... unsatisfied gaze stoically upon our modern world, and if his heart be not warm enough to feel pity, let it at least feel bitterness and hate! It were better for him to show anger and scorn than to take cover in spurious contentment or steadily to drug himself, as our "friends of art" are wont to do. But if he can do more than condemn and despise, if he is capable of loving, sympathising, and assisting in the general work of construction, he must still ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche

... on one knee before her, he helped her to remove her hat, and disentangle her pretty hair from it, was quite a chivalrous sight. Yet who, knowing him only on the surface, would have expected chivalry—and of the true sort, too; not the spurious—from Mr. Grewgious? ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... profoundest impulses, with reference to none but God or his own soul, not taking woman into count at all, in this primary responsibility to his own deepest soul; once man vacates this strong citadel of his own genuine, not spurious, divinity; then in comes woman, picks up the scepter and begins to ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence

... demands of us, who belong to Christ, that we exalt Him. Everything in the present time seems to be aimed at the setting aside of the doctrine upon which our Hope rests. Higher Criticism, the evil doctrines, which reject the eternal punishment of the wicked, the spurious gospels, ethical teachings and every other false doctrine strikes at the blessed Person of our Lord. The shadow of the Anti-christ is cast in our days. Let us heed God's Word. Let us be separated from those who deny ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein

... accept this fact as we find it,—that is, we must accept it indissoluble and entire, and we must keep it indissoluble and entire. We have seen what psychology brought us to by tampering with it, under the pretence of a spurious, because ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... in order to make a bid for the large Italian vote in the forthcoming Presidential elections in the U.S.A. a violent anti-British propaganda campaign is raging on the other side of the Atlantic, and that an enormous amount of spurious sympathy is being manufactured on behalf of the purveyors of rotary music and frozen confectionery in Soho. Beautiful Italian girls are daily besieging the British Embassy at Washington with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various

... 30th. I believe I sincerely desire that no spurious self-satisfaction may be mistaken for the peace of God, that no activity in works of self-righteousness may be mistaken for doing the day's work in the day. Oh, who can tell the snares that surround me? Yet I have been comforted this morning, in thinking ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall

... a hillbilly family from way out in Oregon was any different? This was probably Bill MacDonald's little racket and it was just Philon's bad luck to stumble on it. MacDonald probably peddled his spurious first editions down on Front Street for a few hundred dollars to old bookstores unable to afford ...
— The House from Nowhere • Arthur G. Stangland

... Of special importance for some years were those persons who were descendants of Negro fathers and indentured white mothers, and who at first were of course legally free. By 1691 the problem had become acute in Virginia. In this year "for prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue, which hereafter may increase in this dominion, as well by Negroes, mulattoes and Indians intermarrying with English or other white women, as by their unlawful accompanying with one another," it was enacted that "for the time to come whatsoever English or other ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... he is commended by Dr. Warburton for distinguishing the genuine from the spurious plays. In this choice he exerted no judgement of his own; the plays which he received, were given by Hemings and Condel, the first editors; and those which he rejected, though, according to the licentiousness of the press in those times, they were printed during Shakespeare's life, with ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson

... the other. A severely critical expression sat singularly ill upon his broad face, which was like a baked apple, puffy, and wrinkled, and red, and there was about him a queerly pursed-up air of settled opposition to everything which did duty for both the real and spurious object of his attention. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... has had no licensing laws; and no effort to apply elementary principles of fair dealing to the drink trade had apparently been made until initiated under military law for the protection of the troops. Foreign wine dealers at Alexandria consequently flooded the market with spurious liquor, concocted from the weirdest raw materials. The only genuine claim they could set up for their merchandise was that it was at all events alcoholic. Owing to the utilisation of refuse beet and potatoes, alcohol is cheap ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst

... London announcing the new heir. An ambassador had been sent to tell the Pope that Mary could feel the new life within her, and the people rushed to St. Paul's Cathedral to listen to the venerable Archbishop of Canterbury describe the baby-prince and give thanks for his deliverance. The spurious labor pains passed away, and after being assured that no real pregnancy existed in her case, Mary went into violent hysterics, and Philip, disgusted with the whole affair, deserted her; then commenced the persecution of the Protestants, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... to marry him, if you weren't in the way, but I'd have my own mind about that, and knowing what you've told me—truth or lie—I'd weigh it all carefully. Besides, he's not the only man. Doesn't that ever strike you? Why try to hold him by a spurious bond when there are other men as good-looking, as clever? Is your world so bare of men—no, I'm sure it isn't," she added, for she saw anger rising in the impulsive girl. "There are many who'd want to marry you, and it's better to marry some one who loves you than to hold to one who ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... ask as a careful scientist? Instead of eating apples, as Adam did, we work the fruit up into apple-jack and pie, while even the simple oyster is perverted, and instead of being allowed to fatten up in the fall on acorns and ancient mariners, spurious flesh is put on his bones by the artificial osmose and dialysis of our advanced civilization. How can you make an oyster stout or train him down by making him jerk a health lift so many hours every day, or cultivate his body at ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various

... Chamber. She said, for instance, that it was not true that the Marquis de Sallenauve was his father; that it was not even true that the Marquis de Sallenauve was still living; and moreover that the spurious Sallenauve was a man of no heart, who had repudiated his real parents,—adding that she could, by the help of the able man who accompanied her, compel him to disgorge the Sallenauve property and 'clear out' ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... transl. by REINAUD, Introd. to ABOULFEDA, sec. iii. p. ccc. See also REINAUD, Mem. sur l'Inde, p. 343. I have before alluded (p. 538, n.) to the treatise De Moribus Brachmanorum, ascribed to Palladius, one version of which is embodied in the spurious Life of Alexander the Great, written by the Pseudo-Callisthenes. In it the traveller from Thebes, who is the author's informant, states, that when in Ceylon, he obtained pepper from the Besadae, and succeeded in getting so near them as to ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... The history of art is perforce full of the chronicles of unfruitful effort and the galleries as replete with unprofitable pictures. Our ardent though rapid quest will, unaided by the catalogue, discover for us the real, and sift it free of the spurious if we have settled with ourselves what art is and what its purpose. If we hold to the present popular notion that art is imitation, the results will come out at variance with the popular opinion of five centuries. If, on the other hand, we delegate to its proper place fidelity to the surface ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore

... eyes steadily on mine, I was rooted to the spot. All power of volition left me. Submissive to the infant's gesture, I followed him to the crag he had indicated, and seated myself there in silence. Most readers have seen something of the effects of electro-biology, whether genuine or spurious. No professor of that doubtful craft had ever been able to influence a thought or a movement of mine, but I was a mere machine at the will of this terrible child. Meanwhile he expanded his wings, soared aloft, and alighted amidst a copse at the brow ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... professing to be contemporary with Shakespeare, and containing passages of interest in regard to him, or to the dramatic affairs of his time, have been pronounced spurious by the highest palaeographic authorities in England, and in one of them (a letter addressed to Henslow, and bearing Marston's signature) a pencilled guide for the ink, like those above mentioned, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... of his hard usage. But James was unmoved by his application, and granted the revenue of his see to the duke of Lennox. For the rest of his life Adamson was supported by charity; he died in 1592. His recantation of Episcopacy (1590) is probably spurious. Adamson was a man of many gifts, learned and eloquent, but with grave defects of character. His collected works, prefaced by a fulsome panegyric, in the course of which it is said that "he was a miracle of nature, and rather seemed to be the immediate production of God Almighty than born of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... philosophic instructor in the ethics of vanity, they have attempted in France a regeneration of the moral constitution of man. Statesmen like your present rulers exist by everything which is spurious, fictitious, and false,—by everything which takes the man from his house, and sets him on a stage,—which makes him up an artificial creature, with painted, theatric sentiments, fit to be seen by the glare of candle-light, and formed to be contemplated at a due ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... piety, when it is real, spoils nothing, but on the contrary perfects everything. Whenever it clashes with the legitimate calling of those who profess it, you may be quite certain that such devotion is spurious. 'The bee,' says Aristotle, 'draws her honey from a flower, without injuring that flower in the least, and leaves it fresh and ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus

... demands holiness of morals, although all the moral perfection to which man can attain is still only virtue, that is, a rightful disposition arising from respect for the law, implying consciousness of a constant propensity to transgression, or at least a want of purity, that is, a mixture of many spurious (not moral) motives of obedience to the law, consequently a self-esteem combined with humility. In respect, then, of the holiness which the Christian law requires, this leaves the creature nothing but a progress ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant

... supposed author of the book in which it is found, viz., Enchiridion Leonis Papae. However, the Enchiridion was a book of magic, and not authorised by the Church of Rome, but used by spurious monks and charlatans, wizards and quacks, in their exploits amongst the credulous rural folk. It was full of charms, prayers, and rhymes to ward off evil spirits. The Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John verses ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green

... also least important, of Milton's early critics was the greatest of English scholars, Richard Bentley, who in 1732 issued an edition of Paradise Lost in which whole passages were relegated to the margin as the spurious interpolations of an imaginary editor. Such a book is, of course, merely a curiosity connecting two {251} great names. The real beginning in the work of editing Milton as a classic should be edited was made by Thomas Newton, afterwards Bishop of Bristol, who in 1749 brought ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... death should free her.... She looked at him, and thanked God that he was as he was, young, decent, clean, capable of loving her and cherishing her.... For her sake she was glad it was he, but his very attributes accused her. She was accepting these beautiful gifts and was giving in return spurious wares. For love she would give pretense of love. ... Yet if he had been other than he was, if he had been old, seeking her youth as some men might seek it, steeped in experience to satiety as some rich man might have been, she knew ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, and to add to it that of the Irish rebellion; but as it was suspected by one of the delegates of the press, that the edition from which they were printing the "Irish Rebellion" was spurious, as it attributed the origin of the rebellion to the Protestants instead of the Catholics; a much earlier copy was procured from Dublin, through the chaplain of the then Lord Lieutenant, which reversed the accusation which was contained ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various

... strengths of the Catholic Church is the semi-clericalising of the laymen who live in or near any religious centre. It flatters the uneducated to feel themselves akin to their spiritual dictators, and it gives them a spurious refinement. Undoubtedly, the host of the Roemischer Kaiser was an excellent specimen ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... of mine, which I did not choose should be printed, was published in Dublin and transmitted to be sold in London. As soon as I was informed of it, and had procured a spurious copy, I went to the bookseller to put a stop to its circulation. I there met with a copy of the work of Madame de Lamotte, which has been corrected by some one at Paris and sent back to the bookseller for a second edition. Though not in time to suppress the first ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... to Reach Young Men Hunting Dogs Insecure Abodes Lunch on the Cars Mattie Mashes Minnesota Merrie Christmas More Dangerous Than Kerosene Mrs. Langtry One of Beecher's Converts Preparing for War Raising Elephants Registry of Electors Selling Clams She was no Gentleman Southern "Honaw" Spurious Tripe Sure of Heaven Supreme Court Judges and U.S. Senators Ten Days in Love The Advent Preacher and the Balloon The Day We Reached Canada The Dog Law The Glorious Fourth of July The Mule not the Eagle The Old Sweet Songs ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck

... two things are required—reasoning power and knowledge. In other words, it is necessary to reason from certain positive data which represent the condensed results of previous research, which cannot be improvised, and must, therefore, be learnt. To distinguish a genuine from a spurious charter would, in fact, be often an impossible task for the best trained logician, if he were unacquainted with the practice of such and such a chancery, at such and such a date, or with the features common to all the admittedly genuine charters ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... we may turn to the Pelasgians. Notwithstanding the rebuke of Niebuhr, who, speaking of the historian in general, shows him as hating "the spurious philology, out of which the pretences to knowledge on the subject of such extinct people arise," the origin of the Pelasgians is conjectured to have been from—(a) swarthy Asiatics (Pellasici) or from some (b) mariners—from the Greek Pelagos, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... Metellus;" whereas the speech is delivered in the name of Caesar, vindicating Metellus and himself from the aspersions cast upon them by their common defamers. The speech addressed "To his soldiers in Spain," Augustus considers likewise as spurious. We meet with two under this title; one made, as is pretended, in the first battle, and the other in the last; at which time, Asinius Pollio says, he had not leisure to address the soldiers, on account of the suddenness of ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... from very many lives over a long course of years. Here the author need but reveal the tangled skein woven by Fate, Meddling Parents, Pride, Prejudice, Caprice, Ambition, Passion. In other words it is human nature in a tornado, and human nature is a vagrant ship, with a spurious chart, an uncertain compass, a drunken pilot, a mutinous crew and a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... genuine." And after the formation of A.J. White & Co. and the purported transfer of Dr. Morse's pills to it, Moore still continued to sell the same medicine and to denounce the White-Comstock product as spurious. The latter was packaged under a white label showing an Indian warrior riding horseback and was signed "A.J. White & Co." While the color was shortly changed to blue and the name of the proprietor several times amended through the ensuing vicissitudes, ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw

... that of Germany. "Poet" was amongst us a term of abuse, while in France the Great Monarch himself did homage to his great poets. But the professorial poets who had failed to learn the lessons of good taste from the Greek and Roman classics, were not likely to profit by an imitation of the spurious classicality of French literature. They heard the great stars of the court of Louis XIV. praised by their royal and princely patrons, as they returned from their travels in France and Italy, full of admiration for everything that ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... of partisanship would be aroused; while in truth, the race itself was to be a sham. The boats were to reach the goal at the same moment, nobody was to win, yet every one was to claim the victory; the air was to be rent with cries of "foul!" and spurious shouts of triumph, accompanied by vehement demands for a "fresh try." Then a second start was to be made—One, two, three, and off! All was to go well at first, and when the interest of the spectators was at its height, every eye strained and ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge

... the thousands who reside in India, and those other thousands who, visiting its coral shores from time to time, often discuss in wondering amazement how the Indian conjuror performs his tricks. It is also written to uphold the reputation of the Western conjuror against the spurious ascendancy held by his ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson

... time, till these Gentlemen may be thus disposed of, I would earnestly exhort them to take Care of those unfortunate Creatures whom they have brought into the World by these indirect Methods, and to give their spurious Children such an Education as may render them more virtuous than their Parents. This is the best Atonement they can make for their own Crimes, and indeed the only Method that is left them ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... Mentor's orders, had been very attentive to Madame de Serizy. It was, in fact, indispensable that Lucien should not be suspected of having kept a woman for his mistress. And in the pleasure of being loved, and the excitement of fashionable life, he found a spurious power of forgetting. He obeyed Mademoiselle Clotilde de Grandlieu by never seeing her excepting in the Bois ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... of the typewriting machine for the production of spurious papers," he began, rattling the note significantly. "It is partly due to the great increase in the use of the typewriter generally, but more than all is it due to the erroneous idea that fraudulent typewriting cannot be detected. The ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... the idea of friendship, and is so anxious to have it truly valued, and carefully kept. The worldly-wise warnings are after all in the interests of true friendship. To condemn hypocrisy is not, as is so often imagined, to condemn religion. To spurn the spurious is not to reject the true. A sneer at folly may be only a covert argument for wisdom. Satire is negative truth. The unfortunate thing is that most men, who begin with the prudential worldly-wise philosophy, end there. They ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black

... Do you understand what I mean by the verb to koepenick? That is to say, to replace an authority by a spurious imitation that would carry just as much weight for the moment as the displaced original; the advantage, of course, being that the koepenick replica would do what you wanted, whereas the original does what seems best ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki

... fastidious affectation of some commentators has denounced this ode as spurious. Degen pronounces the four last lines to be the patch-work of some miserable versificator, and Brunck condemns the whole ode. It appears to me, on the contrary, to be elegantly graphical: full of delicate expressions ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... A spurious and hydra-headed mind-healing is naturally glared at by the pulpit, ostracized by the medical faculty, and scorned by people of common sense. To aver that disease is normal, a God-bestowed and stubborn reality, but that you can heal it, leaves you to work against that which is natural and a ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy

... difference. The public printer, conservative Joseph Royle of the Virginia Gazette, refused to publish the resolves at all. What went into print outside the colonies were the four true resolves, plus the three spurious ones, often made more radical in tone as they were reprinted. The effect was electric. If this was the expression of the Virginia House of Burgesses, long thought to be the most reasoned in its approach to constitutional issues, then a new day had ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... foolishly become enamored of a native beauty. This girl was prompted by a native soothsayer to bite Dravot in order to decide whether he was a god or merely human. The blood that she drew on his neck was ample proof of his spurious claims and the two adventurers were chased for miles through a wild country. When captured Daniel is forced to walk upon a bridge, the ropes of which are then cut, and his body is hurled hundreds of feet down upon the rocks. The story of the survivor, ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... can be suspected of mockery. The earliest laughter of English literature is ridicule; and if this ridicule seems to touch things sacred, it will, on the whole, I think, be found that not the sacred things themselves, but some unreal or spurious use of them, is really attacked. So here, if there is any appearance of a sly derision, the thing derided is not the Pater Noster, but the vain and magical uses which were too often ascribed to the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle



Words linked to "Spurious" :   counterfeit, illegitimate, false, imitative



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org