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More "Bungling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... began, "I do not know what to say. I want to make you understand and I am afraid I may make further mistakes. I see I have wronged you. In a sense, I've been a bungling fool; but as true as God hears me, I didn't want you upon my canvas for any low or mean reason. I swear that as truly as I ever spoke. It seemed my right to make live what I saw in you. Maybe it was not my right—I begin to fear it was not—but it ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... made some progress, it was not marked by much improvement. Its charm lay essentially in its simplicity, and to give it full development, retaining unimpaired meanwhile such original excellences as Nature in Sambo shapes and inspires, was the task of the time. But the task fell into bungling hands. The intuitive utterance of the art was misapprehended or perverted altogether. Its naive misconceits were construed into coarse blunders; its pleasing incongruities were resolved into meaningless jargon. Gibberish became the staple of its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... bungling marked our departure from Charlotte Town. The captain, a sturdy old Northumbrian seaman, thoroughly understood his business; but the owners of the ship compelled him to share its management with a very pertinacious pilot, and the conflicting ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... "I'm bungling it," thought Jeff, uncomfortably, and stood still, waiting. "Perhaps I ought to have let Evelyn ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... this would not serve his turn, he named two famous battles, in each of which he had lost half an ear, a fighting like a true man against traitors and rebels. But the hangman showed them the two cuts were made at one time, and by measurement. ''Tis no bungling soldiers' work, my masters,' said he, ''tis ourn.' Then the burgomaster gave judgment: 'The present charge is not proven against thee; but, an thou beest not guilty now, thou hast been at other times, witness thine ears. Wherefore ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... of government, the people of Holland cannot easily overcome a feeling of vague distrust that the nation which in the past has so often abused them cannot entirely be counted upon to treat them justly this time. Incidentally, I may say that the bungling of Mr. Churchill in Antwerp, which we know much better than do the people of England, is another reason why we are a bit afraid of the island across the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... have mended her idol discreetly and permanently, so that for the outward world it would still present the same uncompromising surface, so that no inquisitive or bungling touch could bring to light the grim, disfiguring fracture which it had sustained, it is probable that she would have chosen this part, and hidden the grief of her life from the eyes of all save those who were ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... was he safe from the clutch of the law? Of these things he had not troubled to think, so assured was he that the mere threat would suffice. From his present point of view it was easy enough to see that the plot had been a wretched piece of bungling; in failing of its end it became the project of a simpleton. Had the girl herself been cool enough to see this? Did she defy him in knowledge of the weakness of his position? Probably not; in that case she would have spoken differently ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... fellow," he had said as the door had closed behind him. But the very truth of the words had left a wound,—a clean-cut wound however. There was never any bungling where Doctor Hilary ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... guests, And took them unprepared to give us welcome. Their scouts we killed, then found their body sleeping; And as they lay confused, we stumbled o'er them, And took what joint came next, arms, heads, or legs, Somewhat indecently. But when men want light, They make but bungling work. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... either. You must excuse me, Miss Knowles. There was something about your voice and face—rather threw me off my balance. If you'll kindly overlook the bungling start-off! I'm greatly pleased to meet you. My wife will be, too. May I ask you to step aboard the car?—No, here she ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... Hellenic or Asia Minor excavations! no more cosmopolitan Wissenschaft! On that fatal August 4 a whole world went down submerged beneath the waves of war, and the Squire cared for no other. His personal chagrin showed itself in abuse of the bungling diplomats and 'swashbuckler' politicians who, according to him, had brought us into war. So that when Aubrey applied for a commission, the Squire, mainly to relieve his own general irritation, had quarrelled with him for some months, ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... think about them. Excitement makes me content to be, and careless about doing. My truest and best life is in myself, and I can only live it in circumstances of tranquil monotony. People talk so much about making the most of life, but their attempts are curiously bungling. What they call living is for the most part more pain than pleasure to them; for the truth is, that life should not be lived by men of mind, but contemplated; it is the spectator, not the actor, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... and weight of a man. He dropped headlong—dropped and missed again! As he rushed past he saw the face of Ostrog's aeronaut confident and cool and in Ostrog's attitude a wincing resolution. Ostrog was looking steadfastly away from him—to the south. He realized with a gleam of wrath how bungling his flight must be. Below he saw the Croyden hills. He jerked upward and once more he gained ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... all their race. When they are once gone, my jaws will clap together like two doors, the upper lip will grow just thrice as long, and again one can't tell what sort of a face will come of it. Time, my dear young friend, is, as somebody found out many many years ago, a bungling workman; he makes a creature pretty enough; then he daubs and trims and pares and pulls and squeezes the thing about, draws the nose and chin out of their sheaths, knocks in the cheeks, eats ruts into the forehead, till he has turned it into a scarecrow; ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... but nevertheless a sure passage to freedom. It had seemed, in the past, a cowardly thing to avail himself of his knowledge—it was like going with his debts unpaid. But now, in the bright, moonlit room it no longer appeared so. He had finished his task, had ended the bungling, and had heard a clear call ringing with commendation and approval. There was ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... and humiliating scenes with the landlady. The visits to the play ceased, the maid was discharged, the hairdresser was no more brought into requisition. Their fall to destitution was worthy of the harebrained design, the bungling conduct, of Ned; the childish inexperience, the blind confidence, of Madge. 'Twas a fall as progressive as a series of prints by Hogarth. The brother was perpetually in liquor; he no longer took Madge out with him. Often he stayed away nights ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... She made rather bungling work in counting her fingers, going over them three or four times, and getting terribly ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... she had a foot or two of water in her, which he sought to excuse, but every word he said on the subject was untrue. The pump was stopped up, and we had to help him clear it out, which was accomplished after much trouble and bungling. We cleared it out, but we had that to do three times, because in repairing the boat they had left all the chips and pieces of wood lying in the hold between the planks, and when we pumped, this stuff would continually obstruct the pump, though we succeeded in ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... The universal, all-embracing Trust made marionettes of us, every one. Our strength was, to them, no more than that of a mouse to a lion. Their system is perfect, their lines of supply and communication are without a flaw. The Prussian army machine of other days was but a bungling experiment by comparison with the efficiency of this new mechanism. I tell you, Gabriel, we've got to give these tyrants credit for being infernally efficient tyrants! All that science has been able to devise, or press and church and university ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... again, it can hardly be said that the truth had come back upon him as a new blow. Through such dreams there seems to exist a double memory, and a second identity. The misery of his isolated position never for a moment left him; and yet there were repeated to him over and over again those bungling, ill-arranged, impossible pictures of trivial transactions about the place, which the slumber of a few seconds sufficed to create in his brain. "Mr. Ralph, you must go to bed;—you must indeed, sir," said the old butler, standing over him with a candle during ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... nothing. But I knew that he was making a mighty effort to restrain comment on the bungling amateur detective work of the ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... 'If you love Christ Jesus because you know that He died for you,' then there will be something else than the copybook. That copy and pattern will be laid to your heart and transferred there. You will not have to go on trying to make a bungling imitation; you will get it photographed on your spirit, and on your character more distinctly and more clearly down to the very minutest shade of resemblance to the Master, and with simple loving trust you will go on from strength ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... to the Baron, and attempted some innocent and bungling measures. "He still breathes," he kept saying. "All is not yet over; he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... happiness had led her to this collapse. This man was Nigel. He thought he had saved her from her worst self. But really he had stirred this worst self from sleep. In London she had been almost a good woman, compared to the woman she was now. His bungling search after nobility of spirit had roused the devil within her. She longed to let him know what she really was. Often and often, while they two had been isolated together on the Loulia, she had been on the edge of telling ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... and hurled it; the poor beast bleated once, and rolling down the rock thudded at my feet, where I despatched it with my knife. My next care was to skin it, which unlovely task I made worse by my bungling, howbeit it was done at last and I reeking of blood and sweat. None the less I persevered and, having cleaned the carcass I cut therefrom such joints as might satisfy our immediate needs, and setting them in my ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... had been given her. She was letting it slip away. She had her reward in her hand for the mere pulling of a trigger and no incrimination for the result. For a bit of human sentiment she was bungling ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... mad when I think of it,' said Joshua, the elder. 'And here we work and work in our own bungling way, and the utmost we can hope for is a term of years as national schoolmasters, and possible admission to a Theological college, and ordination ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... me see his insolent rubbish. Where are your eyes? You bungling louts ought to protect me against the foul brood that peoples this city, and their venomous jests. Past grievances are forgotten. Set the painter's father and brother at liberty. They have had a warning. Now I ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... related. General McClernand was appointed to this command by President Lincoln in person, who had no knowledge of what was then going on down the river. Still, my relief, on the heels of a failure, raised the usual cry, at the North, of "repulse, failure, and bungling." There was no bungling on my part, for I never worked harder or with more intensity of purpose in my life; and General Grant, long after, in his report of the operations of the siege of Vicksburg, gave us all ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... advancement of the youth of the country, it seems eminently fitting to first make the way clear to a plain, practical handwriting. Neatness and accuracy should characterize the hand-writing of every one. Botch-work and bungling are inexcusable, as well in writing as in the transaction of business. No person has a right to cause a tinge of shame to their correspondent, by sending a letter addressed in a stupid and awkward manner, nor to consume the ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... Finished the Andria and to-day began the Adelphi. I am amused at comparing the comedy of that day with the modern French school. Davus in Andria is but a rough sketch of Moliere's valet, and the whole plot is so bungling in comparison. Have had very few attacks of melancholy lately; because, I suppose, my health is good and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... trying to do what he had been told, though in rather a bungling fashion. Inch by inch he allowed the bush to slip through his hands, looking down as well as he was able at the same time, in order to ascertain just how near he might be to that same ledge Hugh ...
— The Chums of Scranton High on the Cinder Path • Donald Ferguson
... dying beds over and over again; chairs with carved backs; and all manner of old world curiosities; family pictures, and samplers, and embroidery; fragments of tapestry; an inlaid floor; everything having a story to it, though, to say the truth, the possessor of these curiosities made but a bungling piece of work in telling the legends connected with them. In one or ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... this last work, viz. rigging and fitting my mast and sails; for I finished them very complete, making a small stay, and a sail or foresail to it, to assist, if we should turn to windward; and, which was more than all, I fixed a rudder to the stern of her, to steer with; and though I was but a bungling shipwright, yet as I knew the usefulness, and even necessity of such a thing, I applied myself with so much pains to do it, that at last I brought it to pass, though, considering the many dull contrivances I had for it that failed, I think it cost ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... quietly behind Cameron and swiftly threw a line over his shoulders and, drawing it tight, bound his arms to his side. Again and again he repeated this operation till Cameron stood swathed in the coils of the rope like a mummy, inwardly raging, not so much at his captor, but at himself and his stupid bungling of his break for liberty. His helpless and absurd appearance seemed to restore ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... and last, but not least, steam-radiators, than which it has never entered into the heart of man to conceive anything more surprising and unaccountable,—flat, pin-cushiony things, big as a bedquilt, dangerous-looking hedgehoggy affairs, some huge and bungling, others frail and leaky, but radiators still. In brief, the heating apparatus, whatever it may be, stands in ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... dangerous classes," which society creates, and then shrinks in horror, like Frankenstein, from the monster her own clumsy ambition has created. Thou Frankenstein Mammon! hast thou not had warnings enough, either to make thy machines like men, or stop thy bungling, and let God make ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... that bodies created to sweep the streets and admirably adapted to that duty may be conspicuously not adapted to supply electric power or interfere with transit, is accountable for much disheartening bungling. Instead of taking a clear line from the outset, and denouncing these glorified vestries as useless, impossible and entirely unscientific organs, too many Socialists tried to claim Bumble as their friend and use him as their tool. And Bumble turned ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... or snuffling: the speech is as clear as a bell and as keen as an arrow: and its elisions and contractions are either melodious, ("na," for "not,"—"pu'd," for "pulled,") or as normal as in a Latin verse. The long words are delivered without the slightest bungling; and "bigging" finished ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... farmers, and poultrymen. Heavy men with coarse voices, red necks, and great whips in their hands, wearing blue blouses and otter-skin caps, bargaining over their cups, stamping their feet, striking their fists, familiar with the servant, and bungling ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... did her part without bungling, and in spite of the look of reproach that Willie gave her. His time was come. He held in as long as the human engine can, then exploded. The force of the explosion blew the nickel out of his mouth, and, lo, all Margery had to do was pick ...
— A Little Question in Ladies' Rights • Parker Fillmore
... lack of which has made failures of the lives of many men—the value of knowledge of one's own capacities. 'Frisco Kid knew what he was able to do, and because of this he had confidence in himself. He was cool and self-possessed, working hurriedly but not carelessly. There was no bungling. Every reef-point was drawn down to stay. Other accidents might occur, but the next squall, or the next forty squalls, would not carry one of those ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... leader. No one would have mentioned him, if he hadn't constantly committed fresh blunders. A few, who were quite sensible, sometimes said perhaps it was lucky for Fumle-Drumle that he was such a bungling idiot, otherwise Wind-Rush and Wind-Air would hardly have allowed him—who was of the old chieftain stock—to remain with ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... cover. Why not strip off the letter entirely, that it might seem to have been opened, read, and then flung back upon the writer's hands with contumely? Half-way measures were unsafe and foolish. Stratagem, to be efficient, should be not only deft, but thorough; else it was bungling, not diplomacy. His hand did not shake in divesting the closely-written sheet of its wrapping, but in one respect his behavior was in consonance with the gentlemanly instincts he vaunted as a proof of pure ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... man, who was by this time sitting up and gently chafing his wrists and ankles, and attempted to put to him the question which Dick had suggested. But he found that the words would not come to him; he felt that he knew but could not remember them; and after two or three bungling attempts he was obliged to ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... susceptible to flattery there is danger of bungling, of making the effort so conscious that it is offensive. "Your natural beauty will be enhanced by one of our suits for our cutter understands how to set off a woman's form and features so she is admired wherever she goes." ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... clauses the Constitution of 1844 was still less satisfactory to the opponents of ratification. They seemed to see everywhere running through the whole instrument erroneous principles, inexpedient provisions, and confused, inconsistent, and bungling language. They declared that the legislative, executive, and judicial departments of the government were not sufficiently separate and distinct. The principle of the separation of powers was clearly violated (1) by giving to the Executive the power of veto, and (2) by ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... be nothing more than a gambling excitement as to the final outcome of your aerial squabble: but to the poor men who had to bear the wrongs, Inquisitions, rack-rents, Waterloos, unspeakable horrors, it was hard earnest, you know! Oh the wretchedness—the deep, deep pain—of that bungling ant-hill, happily wiped out, my God! My sweetheart Clodagh ... she was not an ideal being! There was a man called Judas who betrayed the gentle Founder of the Christian Faith, and there was some Roman king named Galba, a horrid ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... seemingly require no skill, a bungler makes himself and every one watching him uneasy if not actually fearful of his awkwardness. And as inexpertness is quite as irritating in personal as in mechanical bungling, so there is scarcely any one who sooner or later does not feel the need of social expertness. Something, some day, will awaken him to the folly of scorning as "soft," men who have accomplished manners; despising as "effeminate," youths who have physical grace; of being ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... his rod, but there was never a fish at the end of it, only the hook and the bait. If he had known how to fish properly, he would have been able to catch plenty of fish, but although he was the greatest hunter in the land he could not help being the most bungling fisher. ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... ordinary amount of bungling could have done it, Tom's voyage would have terminated within a hundred yards of the Cherwell. While he had been sitting quiet and merely paddling, and almost letting the stream carry him down, the boat had trimmed well enough; but now, taking a long breath, he leaned ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... asserted confidently. "We are at least beyond reach of these bungling English spies. There is no further fear of eavesdroppers. We are entirely alone. Each may speak his own mind. There is nothing to be feared in the way of interruption. I trust, Monsieur Douaille, that you ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... entrancingly enough to bring about the meeting between her lover's back and her father's knife. That she does not warble herself into the position of "particeps criminis" in a murder she owes only to the bungling of the old man. Having done this, however, she turns physician and nurse and brings the wounded man back to health, thus sacrificing her love to the duty which her lover thinks he owes to the invaders of her country and oppressors of her people. After this ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Salvator, "Ho! ho! Antonio, weigh well what you are about to do. You are a clever chirurgeon, and perhaps will never be anything more than a bungling painter all your life long; for, with your permission, as young as you are, you are decidedly too old to begin to use the charcoal now. Believe me, a man's whole lifetime is scarce long enough to acquire ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... tell-tale handkerchief, and puts on such a sweet smile as utterly precludes the idea of chagrin. The men, with the usual amount of bungling, fall into their places, and Cecil seizes the opportunity to say to Marcia, in ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... only the copy. You burned only the copy. Mr. Vanringham, it develops, knew well enough what that bungling Degge had been deputed to do, and he preferred to treat directly with Lord Humphrey's principal. Mr. Vanringham is an intelligent fellow. I dare make this assertion, because I am fresh from an interview with Mr. ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... my masts and sails; for I finished them very complete, making a small stay, and a sail, or foresail, to it, to assist if we should turn to windward; and, what was more than all, I fixed a rudder to the stern of her to steer with. I was but a bungling shipwright, yet as I knew the usefulness and even necessity of such a thing, I applied myself with so much pains to do it, that at last I brought it to pass; though, considering the many dull contrivances I had for ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... to think, one day, how much better camps might be made from bark peeled, cut, and pressed into the required lengths and shapes, beforehand, as we prepare it for our Indian canoes, than by following our usual bungling method, I concluded to put things in train for trying the experiment this fall; and this fall especially, as I was then calculating, unless you wished to join, to hunt only in company with the two Elwoods, and I was desirous of getting up ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... Literary newspapers, too, are a singularly cunning device for robbing the reading public of the time which, if culture is to be attained, should be devoted to the genuine productions of literature, instead of being occupied by the daily bungling ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... had been frightened. But now everything was calm and peaceful. The glass hung in fragments about the leaden sashes; the chair and priere-dieu of the lady abbess had altogether an innocent and comfortable air, and the images, of which there were several, as horrible as a bungling workman and a bloody imagination could produce, though of a suffering appearance, were really insensible to pain. While we were making this reconnoissance a bugle sounded on the main, and looking ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... it is his darling weapon he seems always afraid of it, and is never sure of his aim till he is quite close to his object. I have mentioned this fact to several Europeans who had accompanied various tribes to battle, and they all informed me they made a sad bungling use of the musket; their aim would be surer if they had large and ferocious animals to hunt or contend with. There is another circumstance that operates against their acquiring skill in the use of the gun: they ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... babies, when hungry, have always yelled. And, of old, as to-day, when a baby yelled, the woman who had borne it was likely to appear at once upon the scene. Ab's mother came running lightly from the river bank toward where the youngster lay. She was worthy of attention as she ran, and this is but a bungling attempt at a description of her ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... any characteristic series of pictures or incidents from Madame Bovary: take Bovary's bungling and gruesome operations on the club-footed ostler's leg, with the entire village clustering agape; take the picture of the eyeless, idiotic beggar on the road to Rouen; or the scene in which Emma offers herself for three thousand francs to Rodolphe; or the following ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... general to whom it was addressed. If it were meant for a system of espionage upon the general by thus inseparably tying to him a civilian over whom he had no control, like an agent of a secret police reporting to a Fouche or a Savary, it would be an intelligible though bungling contrivance; but as a means of secret communication with a general it was ridiculous in the extreme. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxii. pt. ii. pp. 150, 159, 161, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... occurred at the trial and his knowledge of Maslova, Nekhludoff was convinced that she was innocent, and at first was confident that the other jurors would so find her, but when he saw that because of the merchant's bungling defense of Maslova, evidently prompted by his undisguised liking for her, and the foreman's resistance which it caused, but chiefly because of the weariness of the jury, there was likely to be a verdict of guilty, he ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... one who charges high is not learned. Look at Dr. Guevara; after performing a bungling operation that cost the life of both mother and child, he charged the widower fifty pesos. The thing to know is ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... to "expose" things when people go to the Egyptian Hall on purpose to be mystified. I remember how the fact of having seen Dr. Sexton do the trick of reading the names in the hat spoilt my enjoyment of Dr. Lynn's experiment. He really appeared quite bungling when I knew all he was about. He did not, on this occasion, produce the letters on his arm; but I saw he could quite easily have done so, though the doing it would have been no sort of reproduction of Mr. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... lips was the painful smile of a dancer hissed off the boards. With the excuse that the footlights dazzled her, she was turning every moment towards the audience to look for her son. Perhaps there would be a duel with the Prince, if he was there. And all her fault—all through her stupid bungling. ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... considered not that the contrary inference was much juster. If Somerset was so great a novice in this detestable art, that, during the course of five months, a man who was his prisoner and attended by none but his emissaries, could not be despatched but in so bungling a manner, how could it be imagined, that a young prince, living in his own court, surrounded by his own friends and domestics, could be exposed to Somerset's attempts, and be taken off by so subtile a ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... worse than problematically a change to the better. At least one could scarcely help desiring rather to accept peaceably the warrant of a natural death, than to risk the enhancement of a conflict on the doubtful aid of a bungling doctor, whose chief recommendation, perhaps, if he would but allow himself to be favoured by it, consisted in his avowed ignorance securing his neutrality. In such a case, indeed, and it seems on the whole to be almost the very one which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... their sudden haste, caused by the occurrence of an unlooked-for incident. "The floors of a house where a crime has just been committed," said a famous detective, "burn the feet." M. Lecoq seemed exasperated, like a true artist, before the gross, pretentious, and ridiculous work of some green and bungling scholar. ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... these Romans are! They have no real taste for art, for beauty. They cannot even conduct a murder, save in a bungling way. They have to call in us Hellenes to help them. Ha! ha! this is the vengeance for Hellas, for the sack and razing of Corinth and all the other atrocities! Rome can conquer with the sword; but we Greeks, though conquered, can, unarmed, conquer Rome. How these Italians can ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... This bungling, barefaced attempt to destroy the steamer touched Mayo's pride as deeply as it stirred his wrath. Fogg evidently viewed the pretensions of the new ownership with contempt. He must have belief in his own power to ruin and to escape consequences, pondered the ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... waiting upon offspring just out of the nest. I watched one as he offered his charge a rather large insect. The awkward fledgeling let it fall three times; and still the parent picked it up again, only chirping mildly, as if to say, "Come, come, my beauty, don't be quite so bungling." But even in the midst of their family cares, they still found leisure for music; and as they and the black-throated greens were often singing together, I had excellent opportunities to compare the songs of the two species. The voices, while both very peculiar, are at the same ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... dream of a fine mass worthy of the Cathedral, the Canon Obrero attacks me and begs for something Italian and simple, an affair of half-a-dozen musicians that I must pick up in the town, and then I have to conduct a few bungling musicians, raging to hear how the miserable orchestra sounds under these vaults, which were built for something grander. In the end, friend Luna, it ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... found him looking amused, terrified and helpless, all at once, while three men reporters and one woman special writer bombarded him with questions. The woman had brought a staff artist with her, and he was now engaged in making a bungling sketch of Theodore's face, with its ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... known anyone by the name of Weltz. This was just what I had expected. The man for whom we are searching is shrewd almost beyond belief, and if we succeed in finding him it will not, we may be assured, be the result of any bungling on his part. ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... Cesar is a mutilated tragedy: it ends with the speech of Antony over the dead body of Caesar, borrowed from Shakspeare; that is to say, it has no conclusion. And what a patched and bungling thing is it in all its parts! How coarse-spun and hurried is the conspiracy! How stupid Caesar must have been, to allow the conspirators to brave him before his face without suspecting their design! That Brutus, although he knew Caesar to be his father, nay, immediately after this fact ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... had been any bungling on your part, Gibbons, there might be something in what you say, but no one could have foreseen that before we had been on shore two minutes we should have been attacked in that way. You both did all that men could do, as was shown by the condition of the fellows ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... after McClellan had so tragically failed in the Seven Days, when Lincoln was at the front, Pope was busy with the Committee, assuring them virtually that the war had been won in the West, and that only McClellan's bungling had saved the Confederacy from speedy death.(7) But somehow Lincoln trusted him, and continued to trust him even after he had proved his incompetency in ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... walk through an exhibition of horrors, mechanically set in motion to prove their prowess. Dr. Drake seems happier when the hideous beings are put to rout, and the transformation-scene, which places fairyland before us, suddenly descends on the stage. Yet the bungling attempts of Dr. Drake are interesting as showing that grave and critical minds were prepared to consider the tale of terror as a legitimate form of literature, obeying certain definite rules of its own and aiming at the excitement of a pleasurable fear. The seed of Gothic story, sown ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... against the wall, a queue of waiting women. They would be there until the early morning, many of them, and it was possible that then the bread would not be sufficient. And this not from any real lack, but simply from the mistakes of a bungling, peculating Government. No wonder that ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... a healthy-minded young person; she was not given to introspection. She never took herself to pieces, in a morbid way, to examine the inner workings of her own mind, after the manner of some folk, who regulate themselves in a bungling fashion, and wind themselves up afresh daily; and who would even time their own heart-beats ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... adjusted properly, so they saw every thing with a blur. Definite outlines, cleanly cut edges, exact apprehension of volume and weight, nice measurement of relations, were matters outside of their observation and experience. They had broad minds, but bungling; and their language was no better than their apprehensions—usually it was worse, because language is rarely as definite as apprehension. Men rarely do their work to suit them, because their tools ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... a very pretty musical little laugh at Smellie's elaborate assumption of mock gallantry and his bungling efforts ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... You need not have put yourself in a fatigue, and spoilt your drawing. Lord Hartledon shall be your husband before six months are over—or reproach me ever afterwards with being a false prophetess and a bungling manager." ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... very outset, a degree of tacit intimacy between them which would not otherwise have occurred in a fortnight, perhaps never. But he had done it with an assurance almost, if not quite, hypnotic, and he had removed his hand—a move, she recognized, which offered more opportunities for bungling than the initial venture—with the exact degree of insouciance, of abstraction, but at the same time not without a slight lighting of the eyes expressive alike of humility and gratitude. Lurking in her mind was an irritation over the position in which ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... controlled our foreign policy at the time, waited till the last moment, blustered, found himself impotent to move without French support, and left Denmark smarting with a sense of betrayal which lasted till 1914. By such bungling Morier knew that we were incurring enmity on both sides and lowering our reputation for courage as ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... of mind when the captain proposed that we should land upon the island. I saw he had something to say, and only feared it might be consolation, for I could just bear my grief, not bungling sympathy; and yet I had no choice but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cougar alive but twice, and both times by chance. On one occasion one of my men, Merrifield, and I surprised one eating a skunk in a bull-berry patch; and by our own bungling frightened it away from its unsavory ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... performance, than many a listener at a splendid concert. Mozart, for whom he had a special cultus, would surely have felt satisfied, if his clairvoyant spirit had been abroad, with my friend's marvellous bungling over that first finale of "Don Giovanni." The soul, the whole innermost nervous body (which felt of the shape of the music, fluid and infinitely sensitive) of the poor creature at the piano would draw itself up, parade grandly through that minuet, dance it in glory with the most glorious ghosts ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... growing uneasy in his mind; his side of the conversation grew awkward and disjointed, and he made the blunder of drifting into an embarrassing silence before coming to the point. He took one elbow from the rail, and said, with a bungling attempt at carelessness which was made more transparent by the awkward pause ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... possibly need advice! Not he, of course—not he. Mr. Seward is the Alpha and Omega—knows everything, and can do every thing himself. Happily, the people at large is the genuine statesman, and can correct the mistakes—and worse—of its blundering, bungling servants. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... altogether until the time when this indispensable condition should be fulfilled. But it was precisely my rage over the tinker that, in a moment of agitation, gave me the theme for Siegfried's furious outburst against the bungling Mime. I played over the childishly quarrelsome Polter theme in G minor to my sister, furiously singing the words at the same time, which made us all laugh so much that I decided to make one more effort. This resulted in my writing down a good part ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... make so much over what you ought to have by rights. I actually cried the other night. I was driving the cow 'long here and saw you through the window in the kitchen cooking your supper. A woman's heart is tender toward children and to a man that she—to a man that is plumb helpless and bungling about over things he has no business to fool with. Alfred, your frying-pan had a sediment of eggs, meat, grease, and pure dirt on the bottom as hard as the iron itself. I had to chop it out with a hatchet. Your coffee-kettle was full to the ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... as He looks o'er the building, He will bring my work to the light, And, seeing the marring and bungling, And how far it ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... think, is to be found in the ease with which our currency is inflated, under a banking system which varies from State to State, and which, outside of New England and New York, where it is by no means perfect, is as bungling a contrivance, for the ends to be answered, as was ever inflicted on the patience of mankind. Much of the trouble is due also to the extravagance and reckless waste of our people, which, though owing in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... in the pit, suddenly failed in his powers. The natives were sure it was not their fault that the cover had not been securely fastened. The bearers repeated they were all at work and could find no fault with themselves. They were used to dealing with white men who did not permit bungling. Their wailing was very loud. . . . To lose such a tiger was worth more than many natives, some white men would say. . . . But Cadman Sahib was rich. He fumed but little; being of all white men most miraculously compassionate. . . . ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... tangled, but ordinarily she would have been able to braid them into some semblance of neatness, but the trying experience of the past moments, the joy of gaining an adopted mother, set her fingers bungling. ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... paper to see if that lost child at the asylum had been found. Edgar jumped on the car, and seemed determined that I should not read the paper until I reached home. He was very kind, but slightly bungling in his attentions. I knew then that something was wrong, but just what was beyond my imagination, unless Jack Howard had been expelled from Harvard, or Bell Winship had been lost at sea on the way home; so I persisted in reading, and at last I found the fatal item. I don't know ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... other to the Queen. The adventuress was too obvious a scapegoat to be spared. While Rohan was allowed to leave the Bastille after a short imprisonment, the woman was brought to trial, and was sentenced to public whipping and branding. Her execution was carried out in bungling fashion, and at the foot of the steps leading to the law courts, whence Danton's voice was to reverberate so loudly in his struggle with so-called Justice ten years later, a disgraceful scene occurred. The crowd saw La Motte struggling in the hands of the executioners and rolling ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... however, shows this fascination for the super-empirical at its height and culmination. It was an attempt, though a bungling attempt, to pass from an abstract God to a God of character, and it was a circuitous way of getting ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... she owed no such deference to Mrs. Bodine as she did to her father, and, with an ominous flash in her eyes, said decidedly, "You are bungling, Cousin Sophy. George Houghton is incapable of what you term a Yankee trick. I will be pliant under all motives of love and duty to my father, but you must not outrage my sense of justice. You must remember that I have a conscience, as truly as ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... taxes; the interior customs lines, preventing the easy passage of goods from one part of France to another; the extravagance of the king's household; the pensions granted to undeserving persons; every evil of the bungling, iniquitous old rgime was brought under the scrutiny of the new thinkers, who tested the existing system by the light of reason and the welfare of the great ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... fortunate, were executed with the usual atrocity; and Lord Cobham and two others were pardoned on the scaffold. His Sowship thought it wonderfully knowing in him to surprise the people by pardoning these three at the very block; but, blundering, and bungling, as usual, he had very nearly overreached himself. For, the messenger on horseback who brought the pardon, came so late, that he was pushed to the outside of the crowd, and was obliged to shout and roar out what he came for. The miserable ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... fool. Do you think I'm a bungling theorist like yourself? Who do you think is operating that short-wave station? I am. Who do you think put the world to sleep? I did. Who do you think ...
— The End of Time • Wallace West
... of parties, be they in-door or out-door, morning or evening, city or country, is to endeavor to find out the wishes of the majority of the guests and act upon that knowledge. To force a large party of people to listen to awkward, bungling charades, because two or three amateur actors desire to "show off," proves a want of tact in the hostess; to allow a few young people to guide the entertainments in a large assembly of older and graver ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... Marechal d'Uxelles, and others. The late Duke of Marlborough, who was at least as able a negotiator as a general, was exceedingly ignorant of books, but extremely knowing in men, whereas the learned Grotius appeared, both in Sweden and in France, to be a very bungling minister. This is, in my opinion, very easily to be accounted for. A man of very deep learning must have employed the greatest part of his time in books; and a skillful negotiator must necessarily have employed much the greater part of ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the corpse of John Hampden was disinterred by the late Lord Nugent for the purpose of settling the disputed point of history as to the manner in which the patriot received his death-wound. The examination seems to have been conducted after a somewhat bungling fashion for a scientific object, and the facts disclosed were these: 'On lifting up the right arm we found that it was dispossessed of its hand. We might therefore naturally conjecture that it had been amputated, as the bone ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... a time, my dear," said I, "I flattered myself on being an artist in life. I am humbler now and acknowledge myself a wretched bungling amateur. But I still recognise ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... the king to evade the demands of the Allies. They increased in severity from the surrender of the fleet to that of the army's batteries and then to its disbandment; but they were backed by inadequate force and bungling diplomacy. On 1 December detachments of Allied troops, landed at the Piraeus, were driven back with bloodshed, and well into the new year the King continued to defy the Entente and push Greece deeper into anarchy. On its side the Entente wished to avoid a civil war, which would be almost worse ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... her little best according to orders, for she dared not offend Dick's father. None of the Challoners were accomplished girls. Dulce sang a little, and so did Nan, but Phillis could not play the simplest piece without bungling and her uncertain little warblings, which were sweet but hardly true, were ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... not Drake's conscience had anything to do with the bungling manner in which he made this first attempt at piracy, we cannot say, but he soon gave his conscience a holiday, and undertook some very successful robbing enterprises. He received information from some natives, ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... least take after his forefathers, and that he wouldn't suit as a leader. No one would have mentioned him, if he hadn't constantly committed fresh blunders. A few, who were quite sensible, sometimes said perhaps it was lucky for Fumle-Drumle that he was such a bungling idiot, otherwise Wind-Rush and Wind-Air would hardly have allowed him—who was of the old chieftain stock—to remain with ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... real piazza at work. I was on the streets all hours of day and night, and what I saw was nothing like the trite imaginings of the German Chancellor. As I have said in a previous chapter, the "demonstrations" did not begin in any perceptible form until the bungling hand of Prince von Buelow betrayed his intrigue with Giolitti and the politician's intention of defeating the Salandra Government in its preparations for war became evident. At no time did the rioting in the streets equal the violence of what a third-class strike in an American mill town ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... the evening paper to see if that lost child at the asylum had been found. Edgar jumped on the car, and seemed determined that I should not read the paper until I reached home. He was very kind, but slightly bungling in his attentions. I knew then that something was wrong, but just what was beyond my imagination, unless Jack Howard had been expelled from Harvard, or Bell Winship had been lost at sea on the way home; ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... the only opening to the porch, except the window. But this was a feint. He turned back and sat himself down upon the farther end of the settee from Julia. He understood human nature perfectly, and had had long practice in making gradual approaches. He begged her pardon for the bungling manner in which he had communicated intelligence that must be so terrible to a heart so sensitive! Julia was just going to declare that she did not care anything for what August said or thought, but her natural truthfulness ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... It is sincerely to be regretted that the art of stimulating the nations—about which the delegates were so solicitous—to enthusiastic readiness to accept the Council as the "moral guide of the world" should have been exercised in such bungling fashion. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... in time to be successful in this plan. That there had been some bungling was not open to question. Yet I am unable to assert to whom our failure was due—whether to the Commandants of the South African Republic, or to Commander-in-Chief Prinsloo, or to Vechtgeneraal De Villiers. For then I was merely a Vice-Commandant, ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... he formulated his subject and put it in writing. With his temper vexed by the persistent neglect and insult cast upon him by the Milanese doctors he would naturally sit down con amore to compile a list of the errors perpetrated by the ignorance and bungling of the men who affected to despise him, and if his object was to sting the hides of these pundits and arouse them to hostility yet more vehement, he succeeded marvellously well. He was enabled ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Sinang. "Every one who charges high is not learned. Look at Dr. Guevara; after performing a bungling operation that cost the life of both mother and child, he charged the widower fifty pesos. The thing to know ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... of the suggestion; floundered along, bungling terribly. Committee tried to help him out; that didn't help matters much. To have a Member in one part of the House filling up an awkward pause by suggesting "dried fruit," another "coffee," a third ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... us welcome. Their scouts we killed, then found their body sleeping; And as they lay confused, we stumbled o'er them, And took what joint came next, arms, heads, or legs, Somewhat indecently. But when men want light, They make but bungling work. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... said Harry, "this is lucky. I'm glad I came upon you at such a time. You won't have to trust to a bungling Spaniard to ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... following day, when, after being duly cited, he neither compeared nor pled "ane aguish distemper," the Bishop and Synod charged the Presbytery of Auchterarder to proceed with the excommunication, which after some bungling they did, and finally the superior Court ordered the {200} intimation of the excommunication to be read from every pulpit in the Diocese on the first Sabbath of January, 1681, but no attempt was made ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... only confessed to the murder of Irene Tackley, but furnished conclusive proofs of the same. Bert Danniker, a convict dying of consumption in Folsom Prison, was implicated as accessory, and his confession followed. It is inconceivable to us of to-day—the bungling, dilatory processes of justice a generation ago. Emil Gluck was proved in February to be an innocent man, yet he was not released until the following October. For eight months, a greatly wronged man, he was compelled to undergo ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... houses in the capital, where the conversation was always moral at least, if not entertaining! Dang. Now, egad, I think the worst alteration is in the nicety of the audience!—No double-entendre, no smart innuendo admitted; even Vanbrugh and Congreve obliged to undergo a bungling reformation! Sneer. Yes, and our prudery in this respect is just on a par with the artificial bashfulness of a courtesan, who increases the blush upon her cheek in an exact proportion to the diminution of her modesty. Dang. Sneer ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan
... myself. If one has to tell such things at all, it is better to be silent about them. As to the Carlsruhe plan you are probably sufficiently enlightened. Devrient has thought it desirable to make an excuse for the bungling and neglectful way in which he has taken up the idea of a first performance of "Tristan" at his theatre, by saying that it is impossible to execute the work. To that ALSO I do not reply. Why should I speak? I know my fate and my position, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... outset, a degree of tacit intimacy between them which would not otherwise have occurred in a fortnight, perhaps never. But he had done it with an assurance almost, if not quite, hypnotic, and he had removed his hand—a move, she recognized, which offered more opportunities for bungling than the initial venture—with the exact degree of insouciance, of abstraction, but at the same time not without a slight lighting of the eyes expressive alike of humility and gratitude. Lurking in her mind was an irritation over the position in which she had been placed, and her only solace ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... on this occasion," interrupted Middlemore, with ludicrous pathos—"the only poor devil who is to be made to remember Hartley's point for ever. But no matter. I am not the first instance of a second being shot, through the awkward bungling of his principal, and certainly Grantham you were in every sense the principal in this affair, for had you taken my advice you would have let the fellows go to the devil ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... evening, including in the latter elastic term many hours more properly claimed by the night, were spent in confused and bungling attempts to issue the clothing and camp and garrison equipage considerately provided for us by the Government. First everybody opened all the boxes at once, and grabbed for everything. Then everybody put his things back and petitioned for somebody else's. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to mollify the effect of his smile. He had not taken the time to think that in his sly currying of Witherspoon's favor he might be discovered, but now that he was caught he fell back upon the recourse of a bungling compliment. "Oh, I'm sure," said he, "that your business is most important. Your paper shows the care and ability with which you preside over it. I think it's the best paper in town, and advertisers tell me that they get excellent returns from ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... chanced handy and hurled it; the poor beast bleated once, and rolling down the rock thudded at my feet, where I despatched it with my knife. My next care was to skin it, which unlovely task I made worse by my bungling, howbeit it was done at last and I reeking of blood and sweat. None the less I persevered and, having cleaned the carcass I cut therefrom such joints as might satisfy our immediate needs, and setting them in ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... his patience, whether it was in bungling, in harvesting his graft, or whether it was a form of slackness. Nor could they help doing so, for patience, a wonderful purposeful patience, was his greatest characteristic. Every other feature of his personality was subservient to ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... are beginning to see how perfectly insane your scheme was," she said. "You have to support your act with a whole series of bungling lies. Possibly Marcus, like a fool, has mentioned it in Monte Carlo, and we shall have the detectives out here asking why you have not reported ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... child on the man's breast had power to still Becky's distraught mind. She could not understand, but a groping of that part of her that could still feel and suffer reached the underlying suggestion of the artist. Here was someone who was doing what, in a vague and bungling way, Becky herself had always wanted to do—shield the young, helpless thing that belonged ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... ghastly hue as the child screamed and fainted away, nor did the color return as he watched the woman's clumsy fingers, the bungling movements which, unlettered as he was, told him of her inexperience—bungling movements which had ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... necessary dollars this winter; and I will try it again." If the matter had presented itself to her mind in that way Mrs. Frankland probably would have felt a repulsion from the work she was doing. It is a very bungling mind, or a more than usually clear and candid mind, that would view a delicate personal concern in so blunt a fashion. Mrs. Frankland's mind was too clever to be bungling, and too emotional and imaginative to be critical. What she saw, with a ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... you said to me once about women receiving a kiss. Don't you? Why, that instead of our being charmed by the fascination of their bearing at such a time, we should immediately doubt them if their confusion has any GRACE in it—that awkward bungling was the true charm of the occasion, implying that we are the first who has played ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... few minutes of our getting safe under cover in the cottage. I had, of course, brought back the birding-piece and, after once more helping in the blissful task of getting Mistress Waynflete into the domino, bungling as usual over arranging the hood because my fingers lost control of themselves at the touch of her hair, I sat down to reload it, intending to carry it with me. I had settled matters with the absent gaffer, Doley, by putting one of my guineas conspicuously on the table, and was just ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... you, Ruth. He actually hungers and thirsts for his intellectual and moral affinity, and yet even he did not have the sense—the astuteness—to select a wife who would have stood at his side, instead of one who lay in a wad at his feet. Oh, the bungling marriages that we see! I believe one reason is that like seldom marries like. For my part I do not believe in the marriage of opposites. Look at Robert Browning and his wife. That is my ideal marriage. Their art and brains were married, as well as their ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... he muttered disgustedly as he strode along, without daring to look back at the wondering little white-clad figure, watching him out of sight around the bend, "when he gets to talking with a woman—a woman with—with eyes like hers! They—why, they make me feel as if I was in church! What sort of bungling novice am I, ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... or inclosure bear the traces of some bungling repairs made between the earthquake of 63 and the eruption of 79. They were Doric, but the attempt was to render them Corinthian, and, to this end, they were covered with stucco and topped with capitals that are not becoming to them. Against one of these columns still leans a statue in the form ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... many irons in against this folly of the disarming as I could manage. It did not reach my ears till nearly too late. What a risk to take! What an expense to incur! And for how poor a gain! Apart from the treachery of it. My dear fellow, politics is a vile and a bungling business. I used to think meanly of the plumber; but how he shines beside ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dragging in her train Austria, her confederate and her dupe. Palmerston, who controlled our foreign policy at the time, waited till the last moment, blustered, found himself impotent to move without French support, and left Denmark smarting with a sense of betrayal which lasted till 1914. By such bungling Morier knew that we were incurring enmity on both sides and lowering our reputation for courage as well ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... watching us. You're bungling your part wretchedly. Can't you understand that I'm on the ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... to hang him over; and father got all worked up about it. He said the man had suffered death the first time to "all intents and purposes," so that fulfilled the requirements of the law, and they were wrong when they hanged him again. Laddie said it was a piece of bungling sure enough, but the law said a man must be "hanged by his neck until he was dead," and if he weren't dead, why, it was plain he hadn't fulfilled the requirements of the law, so they were forced to hang him again. Father said that law was wrong; the man never ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... sure of hitting him—at a fairly long range, too. How many men were there in Roxton and Easton this morning—was there even one woman?—capable of sighting a rifle with such calm confidence of success? Mind you, Fenley had to be killed dead. No bungling. A severe wound from which he might recover would not meet the case at all. Again, how many rifles are there in the united parishes of Roxton and Easton of the type ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... He looks o'er the building, He will bring my work to the light, And, seeing the marring and bungling, And how far it all ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor
... naturally a little earlier. But on the south side a singular change took place in the fourteenth century. As at Waltham, the builders of that day cut away the triforium and threw the two lower stages into one. But what was done at Waltham in the most awkward and bungling way in which anything ever was done anywhere, was at Fecamp at least done very cleverly. Without meddling with the vaulting or the vaulting-shafts, the pier-arches and triforium range of the thirteenth century have been changed into arches of the ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... Or if thou'lt not thy archery forbear, To some base rustic do thyself prefer, And when corn's sown or grown into the ear, Practice thy quiver and turn crowkeeper; Or being blind, as fittest for the trade, Go hire thyself some bungling harper's boy; They that are blind are minstrels often made, So mayst thou live to thy fair mother's joy; That whilst with Mars she holdeth her old way, Thou, her blind son, mayst sit by ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... politely call Almighty God in His construction of our unhappy selves. Design?—There's not a trace of design in the whole show. Bodies, souls, gifts, superfluities, deficiencies, just pitched together anyhow. The most bungling of human artists would blush to turn ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... clamour of the economists and sociologists in the publishers' announcements, almost drowning there the drone of the cataract of new novels. But it is too late now. The wrath will come. After mischievously bungling with the magic which imprisoned the Djinn, we may wish we had not done it; but once he is out there is nothing for it but to be surprised and sorry. The lid is off; and it is useless for the clever reconstructionists ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... knickerbockers, and Norah held her own head higher in the air. And she let Mr. Williamson, the new book-keeper at Conner's (he who would have mortgaged two farms for her), take her to the ice-cream table, leaving the bungling lover (christened Patrick Maurice, his surname being Barnes), to jostle dismally over to the apron table, where ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... muslins and laces rivalling, not excelling, the pure whiteness of the muslins and netting of the room. Margaret explained how it was that her mother could not accompany them to return Mrs. Thornton's call; but in her anxiety not to bring back her father's fears too vividly, she gave but a bungling account, and left the impression on Mrs. Thornton's mind that Mrs. Hale's was some temporary or fanciful fine-ladyish indisposition, which might have been put aside had there been a strong enough motive; or that ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... supposition that Seward the Great can possibly need advice! Not he, of course—not he. Mr. Seward is the Alpha and Omega—knows everything, and can do every thing himself. Happily, the people at large is the genuine statesman, and can correct the mistakes—and worse—of its blundering, bungling servants. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... He was only aware that she was crying, and tried in a bungling way to soothe her. But now that she had given way, she sat down in the grass ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... two virtues—"I am never ashamed of my name; indeed, I have never done any thing to disgrace me. I have never indulged in low company, nor profligate debauchery: whatever I have executed by way of profession, has been done in a superior and artistlike manner; not in the rude, bungling way of other adventurers. Moreover, I have always had a taste for polite literature, and went once as apprentice to a publishing bookseller, for the sole purpose of reading the new works before they came out. In fine, I have ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... knew that he was making a mighty effort to restrain comment on the bungling amateur detective work of the son of ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... spontaneously from the right side. In the afternoon the auditory canal was found excoriated and red, and deep in the meatus the kernel was found, covered with blood. The patient had been so excited and pained by the bungling attempts at extraction that the employment of instruments was impossible; prolonged employment of injections was substituted. Discharge from the ear commenced, intense fever and delirium ensued, and the patient had to be chloroformed to facilitate the operation of extraction. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... felt all over the country. Never was nation in a more tractable humour; La France, like a tired woman, was ready to agree to anything; never was mismanagement so clumsy; and La France, like a woman, would have forgiven wrongs more easily than bungling. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... committed the folly of undertaking to steal away. He and his niece were arrested and imprisoned in an inn, where they were subjected to very unpleasant treatment. The action of Frederick was unworthy of a king. Its meanness was intensified by the bungling stupidity of the resident. The people of Frankfort grew indignant, and the burgomaster began to show resentment, for Frankfort was a free city and the King of Prussia had no right to trespass upon its privileges. It was mean in a monarch to strike this ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the fact, whether we regard the work as genuine or not. If it is not genuine, the forger has executed his task with consummate skill and appreciation; and yet here he is charged with a piece of bungling which a schoolboy would have avoided. It is not merely an anachronism, but a self-contradiction of the most patent kind. The writer, on this hypothesis, has not made up his mind whether Ignatius is or is not supposed to ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... he always worked for the good of his fellow-men. One day, when Mansell was bungling most abominably with his Euripides, he flung his Bohn along the desk, Mansell picked it up, propped it in front of him and read it off. Claremont never noticed. This was the start of a great system of combination. ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... beforehand in a sort of formal division or frame-work of the understanding; and the connexion between the premises and the conclusion, between one branch of a subject and another, is made out in a bungling and unsatisfactory manner. There is no principle of fusion in the work: he strikes after the iron is cold, and there is a want of malleability in the style. Sir James is at present said to be engaged in writing a History of ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... that he was bungling horribly, but he knew no other way of getting on in his attempt. He was terrified by the openness of his tactics. It seemed to him that any man must be able to perceive what he was driving at, but he desperately assured himself ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... the night had taught her a new humility. She came to Jacqueline as a suppliant, begging to be forgiven not only for her moment of cruel anger but for her stupid and bungling interference in her child's life. Nothing was very clear in her mind except that Philip must be told the truth, and that, whatever happened, she and her child would bear ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... overlap. As for instance, a keen and regular player may, by some more than usually gross bit of bungling on the part of the G.-C., be moved to a fervour and eloquence worthy of Juvenal. Or, again, even the absolute slacker may for a time emulate the keen player, provided an opponent plant a shrewd kick ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... only the orderlies of Colonel McVeigh and Captain Masterson, and the colored men whose quarters were almost a half mile in the rear of the Terrace. She was glad they were at that distance, though she scarcely knew why. Pierson's delay made her fear all sorts of bungling and extreme measures—men ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... searching than those of the philosophers, will this very day compel me to add a somewhat curious problem to those you have stated. I am wondering what the result will be when two 'lucks'—in other words, two unconsciousnesses, of which one is adroit and fortunate, the other inept and bungling—meet and in some measure blend in the same venture, the same undertaking? Which will triumph over the other? I soon shall know. This afternoon I propose to take a step that will be of supreme importance to the person ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... scrambled into the priest's robe which the discomfited Higgins resigned to him. Evidently the bungling actor was in disgrace, for he was told to go to the office and get his pay ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... following pages in my simple language, and in a bungling manner, I have told the story of my life. I am no author, but claim a title which I consider nobler, that of a "Mechanic." Being possessed of a remarkable memory, I am able to give a minute account and even the date ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... had something to do with his dissatisfaction; in any event, they made his bungling seem the more ridiculous. His fellow scouts had called him "bull head" and "butter fingers," but only in good humor and because they loved to jolly him; for in plain fact they all knew and admitted that Tom Slade, ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... my dear Alixe, has been one of my delights, for I can project my futile desires into another's soul. I am denied the gift of music-making, so this is my revenge on nature for bungling its job. If Richard had genius, my intervention would be superfluous. He has none. He is dull. You must realize it. But since he has known me, has felt my influence, has been subject to my volition, my sorcery, you may call it,—" his laugh was disagreeably ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... him, is a singularly unsuspicious mortal. Even as a boy his head was always in the clouds. He has not seen much society save that of his mother and an old-maid sister. Moreover, he is so dreadfully pious, and life with him such a solemn thing, that unless we are very bungling he will not even imagine such frivolity, as he would call it, until the truth is forced upon him. Then there will be a scene. You will shock him then, Lottie, to your heart's content. He will probably tell you that he is dumbfounded, and that he would not believe that a young ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... bungled, her toilette failed, and she decided not to accompany her husband to the Review at all. Her husband, the Distinguished Visitor, did desire to see the cavalry go past at the gallop, and so the Chief Commissioner's Distinguished Visitor's wife's maid's bungling had a tremendous influence upon the fate of Damocles de Warrenne, ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... and personal responsibility, in State affairs, is grounded on a high consciousness that is not satisfied with half-measures, bungling, waste, cheap politicians, and freakish legislation. The German takes himself too seriously to permit a bunko-politician to come on with faking, as a substitute for the ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... generally built on the outside of the structure, in Virginia, was a small window, one-half of which, in the decay of the glass panes, had been boarded up to exclude the wind and the rain. The job had evidently been performed by a bungling hand, and had never been more than half done. The wood was as rotten as punk; and without difficulty, and without much noise, the fugitive succeeded in removing the board which had covered the ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... do!" she said, at the end of about eight lines. "After such a complete exhibition of incompetence we won't inflict any more of your bungling upon the form. We must see if we can find a way of sharpening your wits. Your brain seems to have been lying fallow since you came to school! You will report yourself to Miss Bishop at four o'clock ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... revolutionists there will always be dissension."[29] Another speaker maintained that Most could be no more considered a socialist. He is at best a Blanquist and, indeed, one in the worst sense of the word, who had no other aim than to pursue the bungling work of a revolution. It is, therefore, necessary that the congress should declare itself decidedly against Most and should expel him from the party.[30] The word "revolution" has been misunderstood, and the socialist members of the Reichstag have been ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... should be glad to understand how it is that your daughters are able to play the numerous pieces which I have heard from them so correctly and intelligently, without bungling or hesitation, and with so much expression, and the most delicate shading; in fact, in such a masterly manner. From my youth upwards, I have had tolerable instruction. I have played scales and etudes for a long time; and have taken great pleasure in studying and industriously ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... he snarled, "think you that we can rob the seth of his treasure without an outcry—and if there is an outcry, that he will not go back to those of his caste in Poona, and when trouble is made, think you that the Dewan will thank us for the bungling of this? And as to the matter of a thug or a decoit, half our men have been taught the art of the strangler. With these,"—and extending his massive arms he closed his coarse hands in a gnarled grip,—"with these I would, with one sharp in-turn on the ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... a period of bungling and robbery, was placed in the same financial position as the United States after a period of war. In one case, as in the other, taxation was the only remedy. But the Heligolanders did not like their medicine, and, like children, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... doubtless frequently did, under disguise of the enemy, become guilty of crimes which could easily have been proven against them. The Mexicans have often tried to criminate the Pueblos for thus acting; but they have proceeded with such bungling policy, that it has seldom happened that anything criminal has been definitely proven against them. If a part of them have thus acted, there is not the least doubt but that the majority are guiltless. They are, as a body, loyal to the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... better than the Newgate birds, pick pockets without bungling, outlie a Quaker, outswear a lord at a gaming-table, and brazen out all their ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... now. I must know what my criminal bungling has amounted to, first. When I have seen the flood go down, then it will be time to go. I want ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... when the wind howls; it gets into my imagination. I'd rather talk. The thing I have to tell you—is what I shall tell Farwell if I ever see him again. It's rather a bungling thing I've done. I'll receive my reward, doubtlessly, but I would do the same, were I placed in the same ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... Quelifu." And on leaving Quelinfu: "Sachiez que es autres trois journees oultre et plus xv. milles treuve l'en une cite qui a nom Vuguen." This seems to mean from Cugui to Kelinfu six days, and thence to Vuguen (or Unken) three and a half days more. But evidently there has been bungling in the transcript, for the es autre trois journees belongs to the same conception of the distance as that in the G.T. Pauthier's text does not say how far it is from Unken to Fuju. Ramusio makes ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... building her hopes on Mademoiselle Kayser's beauty as on some temporary profitable investment. As the old woman looked at her, she shook her head. Marianne had to be quick. She was pale, already weary, and her beauty, heightened by this weariness, was "in full blast," as the former bungling artiste said in ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... woman's pride and happiness hung on her faith in that picture. I tried to make her understand that it was worthless—but she wouldn't; I tried to tell her so—but I couldn't. I behaved like a maudlin ass, but you shan't pay for my infernal bungling—you mustn't buy the picture!" ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... would have been as easy as robbing a babe! But lots of girls, I notice, get engaged in their uniforms, feeding a patient perfectly scientifically out of his own silver spoon, who don't seem to stay engaged so especially long in their own street clothes, bungling just plain naturally with their own knives and forks! Even you, Zillah Forsyth," she hacked, "even you who trot round like the Lord's Anointed in your pure white togs, you're just as Dutchy looking as anybody ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... symmetry of this plot by unnecessarily prolonging the duration of the Wrath, while the embassy to Achilleus, in the ninth book, unduly anticipates the conduct of Agamemnon in the nineteenth, and is therefore, as a piece of bungling work, to be referred to the hands of an inferior interpolator. Mr. Grote thinks it probable that these books, with the exception of the ninth, were subsequently added by the poet, with a view to enlarging the original Achilleis into a real Iliad, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... a clumsy man," he said, turning to the widow. "He had the name for it when he was on the Destruction with me; 'Bungling ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... between anatomy and surgery. Would it not be the height of absurdity to lay down the rule that nobody who dissected the dead should be allowed to operate on the living? The effect of such a division of labour would be that you would have nothing but bungling surgery; and the effect of the division of labour which the honourable Member for Montrose recommends will be that we shall have plenty of bungling legislation. Who can be so well qualified to make laws and to mend laws as a man whose business ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "I concealed myself so well that I knew I might bid defiance to those bungling sbirri—although their scent was sharpened by the hope of the reward set on my head by the prince. While I thus lay hidden, I beheld a scene that would have done good to the heart of even such a callous fellow as yourself—I mean callous to female qualifications. In ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... negotiatin' for another. If you don't succeed, it's the fault of the mission, of course, and defeat won't break your heart; if you do carry your point, why, in the natur of things, it is all your own skill. I have done famously for you; but I made a bungling piece of business for myself, I assure you. What my brother, the lawyer, used to say is very true: 'A man who pleads his own cause has a fool for his client.' You can't praise yourself unless it's a bit of ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... enough, squire," said the doctor. "Young man like he is soon mends a hole in his flesh. You did quite right; but I suppose the bandaging was young Dick's doing, for of all the clumsy bungling I ever saw it ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... was much juster. If Somerset was so great a novice in this detestable art, that, during the course of five months, a man who was his prisoner and attended by none but his emissaries, could not be despatched but in so bungling a manner, how could it be imagined, that a young prince, living in his own court, surrounded by his own friends and domestics, could be exposed to Somerset's attempts, and be taken off by so subtile a poison, if such a one ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... added to myself, "that the real inamorato keeps his bungling foot out of this till I get clear!" And I reflected with much comfort that he was hardly likely to make an attempt upon ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... agent, or a Department clerk—then we should select for such places persons who know least about them, for they have the most to learn; and inasmuch as such persons, before having acquired the necessary knowledge, skill, and experience, will inevitably do the public business in a bungling manner, and therefore at much inconvenience and loss to the people, they should, in justice to the taxpayers, instead of drawing salaries, pay something for the instruction they receive. For as soon as they have learned enough really to earn a salary, they will have to ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a patron of sport in many forms, a traveller in many countries, and a recipient of the honour of knighthood from His Majesty, in recognition of my services for various philanthropic works. These facts, however, have availed me nothing now that the bungling amateur investigator into crime has pointed the finger of suspicion towards me. My servants and neighbours have alike been plagued to death with cunning questions as to my life and habits. I have been watched in the streets and watched in ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... finished them very complete, making a small stay, and a sail, or foresail, to it, to assist if we should turn to windward; and, what was more than all, I fixed a rudder to the stern of her to steer with. I was but a bungling shipwright, yet as I knew the usefulness and even necessity of such a thing, I applied myself with so much pains to do it, that at last I brought it to pass; though, considering the many dull contrivances I had for ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... returned Mr. Hamlin, sententiously, "tells me that's the only way you can trust anybody. ONCE doesn't make a habit, nor show a character. I could see by his bungling that he had never tried this on before. Just now the temptation to wipe out his punishment by doing the square thing, and coming back a sort of hero, is stronger than any other. 'Tisn't everybody that gets that chance," he added, with an ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... child has that congenital disease for which the father is responsible. If the theist insists that his deity is all that he claims him to be, then it is only logical that instead of man asking his god for forgiveness, what actually should be is that God should ask the forgiveness of man for his bungling and error. ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... deserved to win it; for they, too, were doing what would have cost them their heads if Elizabeth had known it—corresponding, as Essex was accused of doing, with Scotland about the succession, and possibly with Spain. But they were playing cautiously and craftily; he with bungling passion. He had been so long accustomed to power and place, that he could not endure that rivals should keep him out of it. They were content to have their own way, while affecting to be the humblest of servants; he would be nothing less than a Mayor of ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... of the elephants with which Julianus, in his futile, bungling attempts at preparations for resistance, had had some of his men drill. Each now carried in his tower eight Danubians, four tall Dacian spearmen and four Scythian archers, bow in hand, leaning over the ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... previous to his rival—and he never put forth the claim that he did so—Columbus, by his voyages of 1492 and 1493, led the way thither. If Vespucci, as some have asserted, claimed to have sailed in 1497, in order to establish a priority of discovery, he did it in a very bungling manner, and at a time when it might easily have been refuted, so many of his companions were then living. Besides, though his name was bestowed upon the newly discovered continent—perhaps as a consequence ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... accountant's desk, or at golf, gives an impression of such ease as to make his accomplishment seemingly require no skill, a bungler makes himself and every one watching him uneasy if not actually fearful of his awkwardness. And as inexpertness is quite as irritating in personal as in mechanical bungling, so there is scarcely any one who sooner or later does not feel the need of social expertness. Something, some day, will awaken him to the folly of scorning as "soft," men who have accomplished manners; despising ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... ungraceful, bungling, maladroit, gawky, inelegant, ungainly, loutish, unskillful, unwieldy, uncourtly; embarrassing. Antonyms: graceful, dexterous, deft, courtly, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... "business"—the laying of the left hand on the heart and of the right on the pit of the stomach—with which incompetent actors always fill up their idle intervals, and how he would beg them, in Wotan's name, rather to do nothing than do that. But to take the first bungling representation of the "Ring" as an ideal to be approached as closely as possible, to insist on competent actors and actresses standing doing nothing when some movement is urgently called for, is to deny to Wagner all the advantages of the new acting which modern stage singers ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... Franklin, "these men have fallen into a bungling error, and it will require some prudence on our part to make them see it. But compose yourself. Put down your veil; say nothing till I call you—and may God, in his mercy, grant that our ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... proportion and grace of detail—vast rosetted arches and slender rows of fluted pillars—our modern and Hellenicised taste has treated with too ready contempt. For this Vitruvian art, unoriginal and bungling in the eyes of our purists, was yet full of the serenity, the ampleness which the Middle Ages lacked, and affected the men of the fifteenth century much like a passage of Virgil after a canto of Dante. It formed the fit setting for those ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... no answer, but snatching the rope from his companion's hand, proceeded to bind old John himself; but his very first move was so bungling and unskilful, that Mr Dennis entreated, almost with tears in his eyes, that he might be permitted to perform the duty. Hugh consenting, he achieved it ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... the excellent training of both officers and men could hardly be given than the rapidity, skill, and perfect order with which every thing was done. Any indecision on the part of the officers or bungling on the part of the men would have lost every thing. The prisoners on shore had manned a battery and delivered a furious but ill-directed fire at their retreating conquerors. The frigate, sloop, and corvette, stood out of the harbor in the order indicated, on the port tack, passing close under ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... poor and incomplete. A mere human engineer who constructed an engine whose workings were perpetually at fault—which went wrong when called upon to do the labor it was made for—who would not scoff at it and cast it aside as a piece of worthless bungling? ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is the case with the instruments I have examined, in which his signature, written probably by his secretary, or his title of Marques, in later life substituted for his name, is garnished with a flourish at the ends, executed in as bungling a manner as if done by the hand of a ploughman. Yet we must not estimate this deficiency as we should in this period of general illumination,—general, at least, in our own fortunate country. Reading and writing, so universal now, in the beginning of the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... insane are also admirably managed. I have heard that the plan for relieving the poor is much better systematized here than in England. Well! I fear, and I say it with shame, that it could not be much worse or more bungling anywhere. Our wretched system of miscalled Workhouses or Unions is utterly unworthy of us; some of these places, in fact, are abominably demoralizing and degrading. We clothe the poor in a dress of shame, and then ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... labor in common; how it expels nuns and monks from hospitals and schools, with what detriment to the hospital and to the sick, to the school and to the children, and against what unwillingness and what discontent on the part of physicians and fathers of families, and at what bungling waste of public money, at what a gratuitous overburdening ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... half like this boat-service in open daylight, Winchester," observed the senior, beckoning to the other to take a chair. "The least bungling may spoil it all; and then it's ten to one but your ship goes half-manned for a twelvemonth, until you are driven to ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... seceded, and it was important that it should not do so. The same was true of Kentucky and Maryland. It is easy to see, upon reading Fremont's proclamation, that it is the work not of a soldier, but of a politician, and a bungling ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... the name as being synonymous with bungling and silly notions and star-gazing, and it hit Tom in a dangerous spot. He answered with a kind of proud independence which ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... among the late lamented," she continued, "I can forgive you for bungling the Hooker end of your job. With Hank's finger out of the pot, I'm content to split with Jerkline Jo. So, no thanks to you, everything has worked out all right after all. Can't you send Pete out with instructions to bite a rattlesnake, or ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... as she sweetened it. Crimes which escape social vengeance are many enough, and as a rule they are of this order—to wit, murders committed without any startling sign of violence, without bloodshed, bruises, marks of strangling, without any bungling of the business, in short; if there seems to be no motive for the crime, it most likely goes unpunished, especially if the death occurs among the poorer classes. Murder is almost always denounced ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... third—'the biggest widow's cap of all'—would be for Aunt Mai. She did well to be angry; she was deserted in her hour of need; and after all, could she be sure that even the male sex was so impeccable? There was Dr. Sutherland, bungling as usual. Perhaps even he intended to go off one of these days, too? She gave him a look, and he shivered in his shoes. No!—she grinned sardonically; she would always have Dr. Sutherland. And then she reflected that there was one thing more that she ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... The glass hung in fragments about the leaden sashes; the chair and priere-dieu of the lady abbess had altogether an innocent and comfortable air, and the images, of which there were several, as horrible as a bungling workman and a bloody imagination could produce, though of a suffering appearance, were really insensible to pain. While we were making this reconnoissance a bugle sounded on the main, and looking out, we saw the Oberwinter postilion coming round the nearest bend in the river. On ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... good. They should be removed often (every month) and not allowed to grow fast or cause sores in the vagina. There are the ring support and the stem variety and others. The stem variety can be taken out and replaced by wearer at any time. They are made to buckle around the abdomen. They are bungling but effective. The ring kind should be introduced by a competent person who should see that it is of correct size and shape, and worn with comfort. Sometimes these supports fail to cure when adhesions and other diseases exist; it may be ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... but there was never a fish at the end of it, only the hook and the bait. If he had known how to fish properly, he would have been able to catch plenty of fish, but although he was the greatest hunter in the land he could not help being the most bungling fisher. ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... S. S. W.'s informants are wrong in supposing that the criminals were burnt whilst living. The law, indeed, prescribed it, but the practice was more humane. They were first strangled; although it sometimes happened that, through the bungling of the executioner, a criminal was actually burnt alive, as occurred in the celebrated case of Katherine Hayes, executed for the murder of her husband in 1726. The circumstances of this case are so remarkable, that, having referred to it, I am induced to recapitulate the chief ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 34, June 22, 1850 • Various
... in confusion, for the attack was unexpected. The Indian always expected a night attack. They further testify that after Reno made his attack with a portion of his men, thus depleting his effective fighting force by one half and in desperation made his bungling retreat, had he later come to the aid of Custer with the added reinforcements of Benteen, French, and Weir, who begged him to hear the appeal of Custer's rapid volleys, Custer would have broken the Indian camp. Reno remained on the hill until ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... It was executed promptly, skilfully. There was no bungling, not a wrong motion or an unnecessary one, as they went through the movements of loading, sighting and firing the guns. It was easy to see why French artillery has won its renown. The training of the ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... as clear as a bell and as keen as an arrow: and its elisions and contractions are either melodious, ("na," for "not,"—"pu'd," for "pulled,") or as normal as in a Latin verse. The long words are delivered without the slightest bungling; and "bigging" ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of that which had been her heaven, and come down to earth. That I had had anything to do with this, I should even now have denied to God or man with complete conviction. I had no interest in the causes of her descent, only in the fact of it. And all that time of bungling dressing for dinner I kept thinking, not that I should help her look for a new heaven, but that I must try, as her true friend, to get her back into her old one. At that time John Fulton had no better friend than I. It seemed to me really terrible that things ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... disagreeable features, and will endanger the compromitting us with Great Britain. I am not at liberty to mention its contents, but I believe it will meet with opposition from both sides of the House. It has been a bungling negotiation. Ellsworth remains in France for his health. He has resigned his office of Chief Justice. Putting these two things together, we cannot misconstrue his views. He must have had great confidence in Mr. Adams's continuance ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Faustus and Helena; we know them; but who is this son Euphorion? To me it seems as if there could be but one answer—the Renaissance. Goethe indeed has told us (though, with his rejuvenation of Faustus, unknown to the old German legend and to our Marlowe, in how bungling a manner!) the tale of that mystic marriage; but Goethe could not tell us rightly, even had he attempted, the real name of its offspring. For even so short a time ago, the Middle Ages were only beginning to be more than a mere historical expression, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... cried Colin hotly; "and more disgraceful still was it that the fire came from our own side—from the Seminary scholars, who had gone in advance; a thing they had no business to do. But this was not the worst—at least it was not the end of the bungling; for if you will believe me, the same thing happened three distinct times. Twice more after we had got the men formed up again, and were leading them up the hill behind the English guns, did those wretched Seminary scholars mistake them for the enemy and fire into their ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... far down the street, against the wall, a queue of waiting women. They would be there until the early morning, many of them, and it was possible that then the bread would not be sufficient. And this not from any real lack, but simply from the mistakes of a bungling, peculating Government. No wonder that one's heart ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... and she closed the door. So carefully that he did not hear it, she locked the door; no more than in Hannigan's case did she want Barlow to come bungling into a scene before ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... sitting up and gently chafing his wrists and ankles, and attempted to put to him the question which Dick had suggested. But he found that the words would not come to him; he felt that he knew but could not remember them; and after two or three bungling attempts he was obliged ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... The Author rose to accompany me, casting a withering look upon Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, who despised The Author for a bungling and intrusive idiot, and let his glance convey the fact. He was sorry for me, with a compassionate understanding of what I had been through. But I wanted neither his sorrow nor his compassion. He had punished The Author, but he hadn't saved me from a ridiculous and ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... in a bungling masculine fashion between her lips as she leaned back, with closed eyes. She choked, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... my years," Lansing gave a boastful laugh, then did a bungling thing. "Won't you smoke, Uncle Levi?" and he passed a handsome silver case forward; "it's a great tie ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... through the station, and I followed. In a secluded part of the waiting-room he sat down, his face drawn up in a scowl such as I had never seen. Plainly he was disgusted with himself - with only himself. This was no bungling of Burke or any one else. Again the counterfeiters had escaped from the ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... be squeamish, or get scared. Not that there's much real danger. There mayn't be any, if the thing's cleverly managed. But there must be no bungling; and, above all, no backing ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... and complaining as the rationing and heat made existence a misery; insisting that Lake and the others were to blame for the food shortage, that their hunting efforts had been bungling and faint-hearted. And he implied, without actually saying so, that Lake and the others had forbidden him to go near the food chamber because they did not want a competent, honest man to check up ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... traveller and naturalist:—'As for your pretty little seed-cups, or vases, they are a sweet confirmation of the pleasure Nature seems to take in superadding an elegance of form to most of her works, wherever you find them. How poor and bungling are all the imitations of Art! When I have the pleasure of seeing you next, we will sit down, nay, kneel down if you will, ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... classical and literary system of education was swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions of unnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting the new policies into effect was entrusted to the slow and bungling hands of the old literati; but this was a necessary stroke of policy, for without their support the new movement would ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... be not an offence against good sense and good taste; but it is as unreasonable to deny the vigour and originality of their author's conceptions, as to deny that the execution is imperfect, and, at times, bungling and absurd. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... comes and says, 'If you love Christ Jesus because you know that He died for you,' then there will be something else than the copybook. That copy and pattern will be laid to your heart and transferred there. You will not have to go on trying to make a bungling imitation; you will get it photographed on your spirit, and on your character more distinctly and more clearly down to the very minutest shade of resemblance to the Master, and with simple loving trust you will go on from strength to strength glorifying God in your life. They ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... corporations, but where in its wrangling from the Sherman Act to the Commerce Court has it shown any sympathetic understanding of the constructive purposes in the trust movement? It has either presented the business man with money or harassed him with bungling enthusiasm in the pretended interests of the consumer. The one thing Congress has not done is to use the talents of business men for ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... one little arm stretched over her pillow and toward her mother as if feeling for the dear presence. Somehow the picture comforted Mary-Clare. She was strangely at peace. After her bungling—and she knew she had bungled with Larry—she had secured safety for Noreen and herself. It was right: the other way would have bent and cowed her and ended as so many women's lives ended. Larry never could understand, ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... judge nature from the standpoint of human intelligence, then we must logically decide that it is full of waste, full of bungling, full of plans that come to nothing, of ends that are never realised, of pain and misery that might have been avoided by the exercise of almost ordinary intelligence. There are few animals concerning which a competent anatomist or ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... after dinner, as he bent and graciously kissed Alice de Breville's hand, "forgive an old savage who pays you homage and the assurance of his profound respect." The next moment my courtyard without rocked with his reprimand to a bungling lieutenant. ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... seen quite a number of this type who had been brought into this unnecessary state by bungling doctors who were treating them for typhoid ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... towards Greece and the Holy Land? It was a little difficult to decide, but somehow Michael never answered that question. Fate took the matter into her own hands, as she often does when the knot becomes too intricate for the bungling ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
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