"Besmirch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The man that once did sell the lion's skin While the beast liv'd, was kill'd with hunting him. Let me speak proudly:—Tell the Constable, We are but warriors for the working-day; Our gayness and our gilt, are all besmirch'd With rainy marching in the painful field; There's not a piece of feather in our host (Good argument, I hope, we will not fly), And time hath worn us into slovenry; But, by the mass, our hearts are ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... hundreds approve their action but do not follow it because they dislike to be thought singular. The out-and-out journalistic supporters of the country vilify the mother country as a whole. They belittle its history and besmirch its rulers. Loyal Australians pooh-pooh these prints and entreat the stranger within their gates to believe that they are despised and without influence. The stranger has only to travel to learn better than this. The strongest current of Australian feeling is setting ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... by that time-serving vassal Guicciardini, and others of his kidney, whom the upstart Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere—sometime pedlar—in his jealous fury at seeing the coveted pontificate pass into the family of Borgia, bought and hired to do his loathsome work of calumny and besmirch the fame of as sweet a lady as Italy has known. But this poor chronicle of mine is rather concerned with the history of Madonna Paola di Santafior, and it were a divergence well-nigh unpardonable to set my pen at present to that other task. Moreover, there is scarce the need. If any there ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... grief and mourning, and fled from your bosom to Aemilianus and Rufinus, who afterwards uttered many insults against you to your face, and manufactured others with the help of his uncle, who has dragged your name through the law-courts, has attempted by using your own letters publicly to besmirch your fair fame, and has accused upon a capital charge the husband of your choice, with whom, as Pudens himself objected, you were madly in love! Open the will, my good boy, open it, I beg you. You will find it easier then to prove your ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... agitation; had, perhaps, even seen certain marks of blood upon her. The news of her father's death had pointed all too clearly to what that agitation and those blood-spots meant. She had remained silent that she might not besmirch her father's name, and also, perhaps, that she might protect the other woman. I felt that I held in my hand the key to ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson |
