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More "Insidious" Quotes from Famous Books



... the publication of their circular letter and declaration in all the provincial newspapers, "that the good people of the United States may be informed of what nature are the Commissioners, and what the terms, with expectation of which the insidious Court of Great Britain had endeavoured to amuse and disarm them; and that the few who still remain suspended by a hope, founded either on the justice or moderation of their late King, might now at length be ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson

... creature in the picture confined itself to a ribonny dress which floated charmingly about it—and discharged her flowers. She was prepared for astonishment in her audience, and her reception was all she could ask; but what she was not prepared for was the insidious decay which had set in among the blooms, and which robbed them entirely of their natural colour and fragrance, transforming them into a composition recognized by polite people only upon their lawns. It had been Mary's first encounter with the baffling thaumaturgy of chemistry; and to the end ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis

... sweetness and poison intermixed. I have never had my soul strangled by the coils of a woman's hair—black hair, black as night,—in the perfumed meshes of which a jewelled serpent gleams ... I have never felt the insidious horror of a love like strong drink mounting through the blood to the brain, and there making inextricable confusion of time, space, eternity, everything, except the passion itself; never, never have I felt all this, ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... sister, whose delicate health alarmed them all, more and more, as time went on, was only another royal road to Lydia's heart. Elizabeth was becoming frail, shadowy, her appetite was fitful, her eyes larger and more wistful, her fingers smaller and weaker. No one seemed to realize the insidious oncreepings of "the white man's disease," consumption, that was paling Elizabeth's fine English skin, heightening her glorious English color, sapping her delicate English veins. Only young George would tell himself over and ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson

... want of natural affinity to the family; but, it far exceeded her self-command to make a direct allusion to it to Robert Willoughby. Still, it was now rarely absent from her mind; the love she bore the captain and his wife, and Beulah, and little Evert, coming to her heart through a more insidious and possibly tenderer tie, than that of purely filial or sisterly affection. It was, indeed, this every-day regard, strangely deepened and enlivened by that collateral feeling we so freely bestow on them ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper

... better feeding, better dressing, better health and better child-culture? Is it any wonder that to our parlor-mindedness the daily press descends, gives us the pap we are used to, and then artfully peppers our pap, insinuating some sparkle of alcohol, some solace of insidious drug, that we may "get the habit" more firmly? Is it any wonder that we, parlor-bred and newspaper-fed, continue to cry out fiercely against personal, primitive, parlor sins, and remain calm and unshocked by world-sins that should ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... their bloodhound sockets, vacantly on him, and assume that the detonations were part of the tour's programme? Could he not fill him up with conflicting alcohols, and see what inebriety would do for him? But Mr. Ducksmith declined insidious potations. He drank only at meal-times, and sparingly. Aristide prayed that some Thais might come along, cast her spell upon him, and induce him to wink. He himself was powerless. His raciest stories ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... holds, Daughter of sapient Atlas, who the abyss Knows to its bottom, and the pillars high Himself upbears which sep'rate earth from heav'n. His daughter, there, the sorrowing Chief detains, 70 And ever with smooth speech insidious seeks To wean his heart from Ithaca; meantime Ulysses, happy might he but behold The smoke ascending from his native land, Death covets. Canst thou not, Olympian Jove! At last relent? Hath not Ulysses oft With victims slain amid Achaia's fleet ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... cried Kate. "You have a great deal to do with all our lives. You are a dear old insidious sapper-and-miner, looking at first very inoffensive, and then working your way into our affections, and spoiling us with coaxing. How you behave about children, ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... Another way would be to call it an essay upon insecurity, although the word essay is too dry to use in a story which is fairly awash with alcohol. The war, the story seems to say, sapped our security of property and comfort and life. But insecurity is an insidious disease that spreads, like bacteria, where strength is relaxed. It infects the lives of those who have lost their certainties and become doubtful of their wills. In this relaxed society of the 1920's, where nothing seemed certain but the need of money and a drink, insecurity spread ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... law of England, I see it excepted to, though ignorantly, in two points. The one, that it should make no difference between an insidious and foul murder, and the killing of a man upon fair terms, as they now call it. The other, that the law hath not provided sufficient punishment and reparations for contumely of words, as the lie, and the like. But these are no better than childish novelties ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... retired with Margaret to the latter's room, he began to feel disturbed in spite of his firm belief that his cause was wholly that of justice victorious. Margaret had insidious ways of stating a case; and her point of view, no matter how absurd or unjust, was almost always adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Schofield ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington

... hand, is more practical. He knows his own people better, and anticipates much greater success from an insidious surprise in which the warriors shall stealthily crawl over walls and through windows upon the unguarded and unsuspecting garrison, and ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... father, again resenting with impotent passion the change in their fortunes, but ending usually by comforting herself with the thought that Mr. Van Dam was true to her. He was as true and faithful as an insidious, incurable disease when once infused into the system. His infernal policy now was to gradually alienate her interest from her family and centre it in him. Though promising nothing in an open, manly way, he adroitly made her believe that only through him, could ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... remaining two talk'd together about the singular events of the evening. As the time wore on, Gills show'd no disposition to leave his cosy chair; but sat toasting his feet, and bending over the coals. Gradually the insidious heat and the lateness of the hour began to exercise their influence over the old man. The drowsy indolent feeling which every one has experienced in getting thoroughly heated through by close contact with a glowing fire, spread in each ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... thrust with the very forces which gave it birth. Once having happened, it so acts as to persist. But it should be remarked that this opposition between the careless and rough course of the cosmos, the insidious forces of dissolution, on the one hand, and the self-preserving care of the organism on the other, is present absolutely ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... there would have been no necessary harm in working a miracle to feed Himself. But its evil is betrayed by the words, 'If Thou art the Son of God,' and the answer of our Lord, which begins emphatically with 'man,' puts us on the right track to understand why He repelled the insidious proposal even while He was faint with hunger. To yield to it would have been to shake off for His own sake the human conditions which He had taken for our sakes, and to seek to cease to be Son of man in acting as Son of God. He takes no notice of the title given by Satan, but falls back ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... religious aspect, it concurs with Christianity a certain way, and then diverges from it; and consequently proves in the event, sometimes its serviceable ally, sometimes, from its very resemblance to it, an insidious and dangerous foe. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... encouragement, however, deepened and strengthened his hopes, in spite of her insidious hints concerning Mr. Pixley's possible intentions. For she was a shrewd, shrewd woman, and those soft brown eyes of hers saw far and deep. And, since she bade him hope, hope he would, though every brick in London town became a Pixley set ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... to appear on your apples out here, is one of the most insidious diseases we have in the whole fruit industry. I think that scab fungous disease is probably the one that affects you the most. Now, scab fungus will not be noticed particularly in the spring of the year. The time that those spores are most prevalent, ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... with vexatious passions; may, by false reports, odious suggestions, and slanderous defamations, blast our credit, raise a storm of general hatred, and conjure up thousands of enemies against us; may, by insidious practices, supplant and undermine us, prejudice our welfare, endanger our estate, and involve us in a ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox

... a situation typical of all that is worst in American industrial life, a local manufacturing enterprise grown rich upon the labor of underpaid foreigners, through the practice of all the vicious, lawless, and insidious methods of an ingrown autocracy, and had believed it to be fairly representative. Had not Horace Vanney, doubtless genuine in his belief, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... and more insidious crimes against the political state, it is enough to say that graft has become a science in city, state and nation. Losses by such misapplication of public funds—piled Pelion on Ossa—no longer run in the millions but the hundreds of millions. Our city governments ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... past. And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years, to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the house. Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious re—ception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations which cover our waters ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... a common barker at envied power—to beat the drum of faction, and sound the trumpet of insidious patriotism, only to displace a rival,—or to be a servile voter in proud corruption's filthy train,—to market out my voice, my reason, and my trust, to the party-broker, who best can promise, or pay for prostitution; these, sir, are services my nature abhors,—for ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin

... mechanism or relationship known to biology which could account for what is popularly termed "pre-natal influence." A developing embryo has its own circulation, so insulated from that of the mother that only a few of the most virulent and insidious disease germs can ever pass the barrier. The general health of the mother is of utmost importance to the vitality, chances of life, constitution and immunity from disease of the unborn child. Especially must she be free from diseases which may be communicated to the ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... however, was very slow to be convinced. Petitions of Independent congregations for toleration to themselves were coolly received and neglected; the Presbyterians more and more saw the importance of making Anti-Toleration their rallying dogma; more and more the call to be wary against this insidious notion of Toleration rang through the pulpits of England and Scotland. [Footnote: Hanbury's Historical Memorials relating to the Independents, Vol. II. pp. 68-ll7; where ample extracts from the pamphlets mentioned ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... observed, to prevent his religion from damaging his morality. The simpleminded people with whom this sharp-witted and fresh-spirited young Englishwoman met had not fortified themselves against that insidious peril. One woman told a lie and the offense was sheeted home to her. 'Ah, well,' she replied, in a nonchalant and easy way, 'I do not feel that I have grieved the Spirit much!' George Eliot was horrified. ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham

... Sampson, from whom, in his own juridical style of wit, he contrived to extract great amusement, both for himself and one or two friends whom the Colonel regaled on the same occasion. The grave and laconic simplicity of Sampson's answers to the insidious questions of the barrister, placed the bonhomie of his character in a more luminous point of view than Mannering had yet seen it. Upon the same occasion he drew forth a strange quantity of miscellaneous ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... the only ones who need information upon the subject. Thousands of young men are to-day being treated for seminal troubles who will never be cured, because they are entirely ignorant of the existence of a Varicocele of the Cord, that most insidious and dangerous of all forms of Varicocele, or, if aware of it, do not understand the terrible influence it has on their Sexual Powers, and how great and persistent a stumbling-block it will be in ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown

... the timorous prudence of this judicious class is far from exempting them from the dominion of chance, a subtle and insidious power, who will intrude upon privacy and embarrass caution. No course of life is so prescribed and limited, but that many actions must result from arbitrary election. Every one must form the general plan of his conduct by his own reflections; he must resolve whether ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... apprehensions about his own re-election were keen, and the resignation of Chase, along with the retention of Blair, seemed likely to provoke anger which was very dangerous to himself. An excellent successor to the indispensable man was soon found. Chase found more satisfaction than ever in insidious opposition to Lincoln. Lincoln's opportunity of ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... finding the tribal cure for cancer; of the time when, on a girl-chase, he had toured with a theatrical company for a few months while his father thought he was at the hospital working. Her sponge-like eagerness for all the Romance, the Adventure he could give her was insidious in its effect on him; she was flattered that he, with all his cleverness, his "grown-up-ness" that went so queerly with his babyishness, should have so thrown himself on her mercy; to her nineteen years it seemed a wonderful and beautiful thing that a man of twenty-seven should find in her an anchor. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... they can well be received and observed without any violence to good conscience." (C. R. 7, 270.) It was as late as September, 1556 that Melanchthon, though even then only in a qualified way, admitted that he had sinned in this matter, and should have kept aloof from the insidious counsels of the politicians. (8, 839.) Indeed, in 1557 and 1560 the Leipzig and Wittenberg theologians still defended the position they had occupied during the Interim. Evidently, then apart from other motives of ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... Domestic treason, with insidious stab, Snatched from Zenobia's side her gallant lord, And threw into her hand the exigencies Of an unstable and capricious throne. Yet was her genius not inadequate. The precepts of experience, intertwined With intellectual ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various

... cast a hurried glance over her shoulder. Alas, they had not calculated on the insidious levels of the terraced plain, and the faithful Pedro had suddenly disappeared; the intervention of six inches of rising wild oats had wiped him out of the prospect and their possible salvation as completely as if he had been miles ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... whole claim is in full force. In the course of a month or two, perhaps in a less period, a sheriff's writ is served, and the poor fellow's furniture, or small stock in trade, is seized, and he broken all up again. To have replied—"You have no claim against me," to the insidious question, seemed in the mind of the poor, but honest man, so much like a public confession that he was a rogue, that he could not do it. And yet this was his only right course, and he should have taken it firmly. Letters are often written, calling attention to the old matter, ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur

... sullen and discontented faces; a spirit of insubordination was beginning to manifest itself among the troops, and the very men who would have rushed to the cannon's mouth, grew cowardly at the approach of the invisible foe that stole away their lives, by the gradual and insidious poison of disease. The songs and jests of the bivouac were hushed, the white tents were mournful as sepulchres, and the men lost all confidence in their leaders. They now accused the emperor and Lacy of incapacity, and declared that they must either be disbanded ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... Indian public opinion have been poisoned for years past by those who claim to represent the intelligence and enlightenment of modern India. Only too graphically also do they illustrate one of the most unpleasantly characteristic features of the literature of Indian unrest—namely, its insidious appeals to the Hindu Scriptures and the Hindu deities, and its deliberate vilification of everything English. Calumny and abuse, combined with a wealth of sacred imagery, supply the place of any serious process of reasoning such as is displayed in Mr. Pal's programme ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... he said, "how the insidious something which men call Death seems to grow nearer to me day by day. Now, as we stood together, I felt just a touch of the cold hand; the touch was but a feather weight, but any instant it will come down like a giant on its prey. It is terrible to stand as ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade

... was once a light in the re-reformed faith. That was the reason, said Mrs. Welland, why the owner of Redbeck House continued to dwell in foreign parts. If ever she came back at all, it would be as an insidious enemy; but more likely she would never return; possibly her life would close in a convent, like that of other hapless Englishwomen whose personal property excited the covetousness of the Pope. In the Bartles newspaper there had appeared, from time to time, enigmatic paragraphs, ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... at this point that the guileful James delivered his insidious yorker, and the dull thud of the tennis ball on the board which served as the wicket told a listening world that Charchester had won the fourth test match, and that the scores ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse

... resisted the depressing influence of disease. But she was perfectly aware of her danger even before the bloom faded from her cheek sufficiently to excite the alarm of those around her. It was a malady which had proved fatal to many of her family; and she had too often witnessed its insidious approaches in others, to be deceived when she was herself the victim. Towards the close of winter, she was confined entirely to her apartment, and Lucie, and the faithful Annette, were her kind and unwearied attendants. Her decline was from ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney

... suppose they had the slightest weight upon his side of their discussion. The more he thought the less they seemed to be on Likeman's side, until at last they began to take on a complexion entirely opposed to the old man's insidious arguments, until indeed they began to bear the extraordinary interpretation of a ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... democracy than anarchy is snobbery. The former is violent, while the latter is insidious. Both poison the source of the stream of democracy. If the home instills into the minds of children the notion of inherent superiority, they will carry this into the school and it will produce a discord. A farmer and ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... discrimination as to persons, but they still uphold discrimination as to localities.[3] Now, among abuses of sovereign power, this is one of the most galling, for of all taxes the transportation tax is perhaps that which is most searching, most insidious, and, when misused, most destructive. The price paid for transportation is not so essential to the public welfare as its equality; for neither persons nor localities can prosper when the necessaries of life cost them more than they cost their competitors. In towns, no cup of water ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams

... etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us ...
— Prufrock and Other Observations • T. S. Eliot

... region would have consented to a form of government which should give to a majority of three fourths of the States the power to deprive them of their dearest rights and privileges. Yet to this extremity the new-born theory of the power of amendment would go. Against this insidious assault, this wooden horse which it is threatened to introduce into the citadel of our liberties, I have sought to warn the inheritors of our free institutions, and earnestly do invoke the resistance of all ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... time a slow insidious madness worked in Heathcliff. When it was at its height he was not fierce, but strangely silent, scarcely breathing; hushed, as a person who draws his breath to hear some sound only just not heard as yet, as a man who strains his eyes to see the speck on the horizon which will rise the ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... first, that chief renown'd— The Power of Love! by every nation own'd. His sway thou soon, as well as we, shalt know, Stung to the heart by goads of dulcet woe. In him unthinking youth's misgovern'd rage, Join'd with the cool malignity of age, Is known to mingle with insidious guile, Deep, deep conceal'd beneath an infant's smile. The child of slothful ease, and sensual heat— By sweet delirious thoughts, in dark retreat, Mature in mischief grown—he springs away, A winged god, and thousands own his sway. Some, as thou seest, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... at Gettysburg, nor cry continually, 'O Beautiful! My country!' Yet, in the long dull interspans between these sacred moments we need some one to remind us that we are a nation. For in the dead vast and middle of the years insidious foes are lurking—anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan decadencies, the egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the cold sickening of the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant fraud and corruption. ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... much of this little pool,' he thought. And as he smiled, he saw, very faintly, his own shadow in the water. It made him conscious of himself, seeming to look at him. He glanced at himself, at his handsome, white maturity. As he looked he felt the insidious creeping of blood down his thigh, which was marked with a long red slash. Siegmund watched the blood travel over the bright skin. It wound itself redly round the rise ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... and was waiting impatiently for the death of Edward, an event which would enable him to control yet more completely the supreme power, through the puppet queen whom he had ready at hand to place upon the throne. An Italian of the sixteenth century, steeped in the traditions of the bloody and insidious state-craft of Milan and the Lombard cities, Cardan would naturally shrink from committing himself to any such perilous utterance: all the more for the reason that he had already formed an estimate of the English as a fierce and cruel people. With his character as a magician ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... reality fully a mile distant from the nearest point of the coast, seem in this clear atmosphere as though they were lying within a stone's throw of the beach. Around these bare bluffs of rock, seemingly flung by the hand of Nature in a sportive mood into the blue waves, lingers one of the most insidious of all the old Greek legends, for it was past these lonely cliffs that the cunning Ulysses sailed during his long career of mazy wanderings in search of his island home and his faithful Penelope. In those days, so the Greek bard tells us, there dwelt upon ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... territories. He was shortly after appointed to the command of the brig Argus, stationed for the protection of our commerce on the southern maritime frontier. In this situation he acted with vigilance and fidelity, and though there were at one time insidious suggestions to the contrary, it has appeared that he conformed to his instructions, promoted the public interest, and gave entire satisfaction to the government. In 1811, he was transferred to the command of the sloop-of-war Wasp, ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various

... To-day, as in the days of Lee, the Mormon missionary is abroad in the world. He is in your midst; he makes his converts among your neighbors; within the month, on one detected occasion, he stood at the portals of your public schools and gave his insidious pamphlets, preaching Mormonism, into the ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee

... Japanese walnut might not be a safeguard in the area where they don't have the disease, in that you will detect the disease the quickest on the Japanese walnut, and in that way anyone would become wise to it, rather than if it was in the black walnut. It might be so insidious that it could be well spread before persons knew they had it at all. I wonder if the Japanese walnut, through its quickness in showing the disease, might not be a safeguard to ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various

... impossible. The early Christian might be wrong in believing that by entering the brotherhood men could in a few years become perfect even as their Father in Heaven was perfect, but he believed it and acted flatly and fearlessly on the belief: this is the type of the higher visionary. But all the insidious dangers of the vision; the idleness, the procrastination, the mere mental aestheticism, come in when the vision is indulged, as half our Socialistic conceptions are, as a mere humour or fairy-tale, with a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... increasing in intensity for the last twenty-four hours, from the insidious steeping of a Scotch mist to the violence of a chronic thunderstorm, and had about reached this crisis when we started in the morning for the Pre de S. Livres. I had already tested its effects before breakfast, in a search for the ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne

... who is by and by to become a father. Under these circumstances, he has fallen under the too common temptation of selfish love, and a desire to wait upon and cultivate an exclusive intimacy with the woman who was to bear a child through him. This is an insidious temptation, very apt to attack people under such circumstances; but it must nevertheless be struggled against." Charles, he went on to say, had come to him for advice in this case, and he (Noyes) had at first refused to ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff

... travelling that such good fortune must be largely attributed. His faring on foot has caused him to see much that he would otherwise have never seen; it has also widened his knowledge of his fellow-men, and has helped him to control prejudices which are not to be entirely overcome, but ever remain an insidious snare to the ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... biography. He realises the hopelessness of writing a history of the Victorian Age; it can only be dealt with in detail; it must be nibbled into here and there; discredited piecemeal; subjected to the ravages of the white ant. He has seen that the lives of the great Victorians lend themselves to this insidious kind of examination, because what was worst in the pretentiousness of their age is to be found enshrined in the Standard Biographies (in two volumes, post octavo) under which most of them are buried. Mr. Strachey has some criticism of these monsters ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... had skirted the Pacific Coast from Cape Horn to Alaska, and had brought to the attention of the fur-dealing and fur-wearing world the sea-otter of the Northern Pacific. He also gave a psychological prophetic glimpse of the insidious sealskin sack. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... Nawab's only faithful general, Mir Mudin, who was mortally wounded by a cannon-shot, was, as we have said, the crisis of the battle. It so disheartened the Nawab that from that moment he gave himself up in despair, and became only too ready to listen to the insidious advice of the leaders who had betrayed him, that he should quit the field and leave it to them to continue the battle. Important as Plassey was, and well as it was fought by Clive and his small ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... not merely enthroned, he is enshrined. To the nobility he is omnipotence, and to the rabble mystery. Since the occupation of the country by the Jesuits, many foreigners have fancied that the government is becoming more and more silent, insidious, secretive; and that this midnight council is but the expression of a "policy of stifling." It is an inquisition,—not overt, audacious, like that of Rome, but nocturnal, invisible, subtle, ubiquitous, like that of Spain; proceeding without witnesses or warning; ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... all golf clubs have extensive bars! It is not hard to understand why men who realize that they have become incurable victims of the insidious habit of golf should wish to drown the thought in drink. But in Birmingham they can't do it—not, at least, at bars. Alabama has beaten her public bars into soda fountains and quick-lunch rooms, and though her club bars still look like real ones, the drinks served are so soft that ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... sea-voyage of three or four days. They are especially inviting to those persons who have occasion to avoid the rigor of Northern winters. People threatened with consumption seek Nassau on sanitary principles, and yet it was found upon inquiry that many natives die of that insidious disease, which rapidly runs its career when it is first developed in a tropical climate. To the author it would seem that consumptives might find resorts better adapted to the recovery of their health. Intermittent fever, also, is not unknown ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... the silence he heard a gentle scratching sound—low, but very distinct in the quiet of the night. It came from the door of the house. Ferrier crept into the hall and listened intently. There was a pause for a few moments, and then the low insidious sound was repeated. Someone was evidently tapping very gently upon one of the panels of the door. Was it some midnight assassin who had come to carry out the murderous orders of the secret tribunal? Or was it some agent who was marking up that the ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle

... labors. But there is such a want of straightforwardness, and we might almost say, of real faith, in his theological statements, that no one can be surprised to find that, while he is taken as the representative of orthodoxy by some, he has been attacked by others as the most dangerous and insidious enemy of Christianity. Writers of the school of De Maistre see in him a decided atheist ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... to shun him as a moral leper; but how shall I tell you that, not satisfied with pressing his effusions upon the shrinking object of his precocious affections, the impious wretch has availed himself of the shelter of a church to cloak his insidious advances, and even force a response to them from a ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... believe, this letter be spurious, none the less may it serve to indicate how firmly the persuasion was fixed in the minds of the Protestants that insidious designs were cherished ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... and insolent, Of warlike aspect and defiant mien, With wall and rampart unassailable, Impregnable to the assaults of man— Surrender at the mold's insidious tread. ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... lurking in brandy balls. Our society women while in theatres sit grossly intoxicated from eating these candies filled with brandy. When the fire fiend sweeps down upon them they are unable to escape. The candy stores are the devil's distilleries. If you assist in the distribution of these insidious confections you assist in the destruction of the bodies and souls of your fellow-beings, and in the filling of our jails, asylums and almshouses. Think, girl, ere you touch the money for which brandy ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... spending the time with his old friend and comrade and cousin, John de Brocas. It had become evident to all who knew him that John was not long for this world. He might linger on still some few years, but the insidious disease we now call consumption had firm hold upon him, and he was plainly marked as one who would not live to make any name in the world. He showed no disposition to seclude himself from his kind by entering ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... the contrary, is one incessant course of strife, struggle and calamity, beginning with the unprovoked attack on the Ciconians. Polyphemus the savage Cyclops is the opposite of the civil ruler Alcinous; Circe, the enchantress, is the insidious foe to domestic life represented by Arete; State and Family in Phaeacia are counterbalanced by an anti-State and an anti-Family in Fableland. Thus man and woman are shown in the two different places as institutional and anti-institutional. ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... built one over the other, and all above the ground, to be safe from the encroachment of water, the ever-pervading foe of New Orleans. Not only must the dead be stowed away above-ground, but the living must wage a daily war against this insidious foe, and watch with vigilance ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... be inappreciable under the name of Doppelkinn, which happens to be, as doubtless you have already surmised, a name of mine own invention. I could likewise tell you how the ancient dukes of Barscheit fought off the insidious flattery of Napoleon, only it is a far interest, and Barscheit is simply a characteristic, not a name. Some day I may again seek a diplomatic mission, and what government would have for its representative a teller ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath

... oaths. No American carried small bright flashing daggers such as he carried in his inner pockets, nor did Americans talk glibly as he talked of weird poisons, not every day drugs, but marvelous, death dealing concoctions done up in lustrous jewel-like capsules or diluted in sparkling, insidious gorgeous hued fluids. The man was too wise—altogether too wise to be an American. He had traveled much, knew strange secrets. They rather thought he knew black art. Certainly he knew more of the arts of healing than the ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... study much French on that morning in late October. For suddenly a new, insidious question jumped into the forefront of his thoughts: Why had he blurted out everything to Mr. Beaver? ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... whole corpus of international sanctions on which her independence finally rests. In the last analysis, then, the Chinese note of the 9th February to the German Government was a categorical and unmistakable reply to all the insidious attempts which had been made since the beginning of the war to place her outside and beyond the operation of the Public Law of Europe; and it is solely and entirely in that light that her future actions must be judged. The leaders who direct the destinies of China became fully prepared for ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... takes sometimes little less than Ithuriel's spear to make the low, insidious, unobtrusive forms of evil stand up and shew themselves what ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... stretches from Switzerland to the sea is far worse to face than the fire of machine guns or the great black trench-mortar bombs that come twisting down through the air. It is more terrible than the frost and the rain—you cannot even stamp your feet to drive away the insidious chill that mud always brings. Nothing can keep it from your hands and face and clothes; there is no taking off your boots to dry in the trenches—you must lie down just as you are, and often you are lucky if you have two empty sandbags under you to save ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett

... her, that heightened that reckless desire for risk and excitement which really made up the greater part of his gallantry. Nevertheless, as was his habit, he had treated her always with a charming unconsciousness of his own attentions, and a frankness that seemed inconsistent with any insidious approach. In fact, Mr. Hamlin seldom made love to anybody, but permitted it to be made to him with good-humored deprecation and cheerful skepticism. He had once, quite accidentally, while riding, come upon her when she had ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... even these measures, insidious, violent, and unconstitutional as they were, produce so much discontent as the tone and the spirit in which they were tarried into execution. The most insulting imputations on the loyalty, and even on the intellect ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous

... treachery'! Into what cloud cuckoo land have we been beguiled by Coleridge's laudanum trances? A limbo—of this we are confident—where Shakespeare never set foot at any moment in his life, and where no robust critical intelligence can endure for a moment. We must save ourselves from this insidious disintegration by keeping our eye upon the object, and the object is just a good (not a very good) play. Not an Ibsen, a Hauptmann, a Shaw, or a Masefield play, where the influence and ravages of these 'ideas' are certainly perceptible, but merely a Shakespeare play, one of ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... "materiel" of war, and next day expect it to act like a regular army, as to expect engines to be managed with any general prospect of success, unless the men are properly trained and prepared for the duty which is expected from them. Fire is both a powerful and an insidious enemy, and those whose business it is to attack it will best succeed when they have become skilful and experienced in ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood

... had resolved itself into the Delhi Sikh, Jiwan Singh. He had been on a tramp among the Hills, combating insidious Home-Rule fairy-tales among the villagers: and finding the Sahib very ill, had stayed on ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... friends, and to restore the repute of his political connection, thought fit, without consulting his colleagues, to publish a manifesto denouncing the aggression of the Pope upon our Protestantism as insolent and insidious, and as expressing a pretension of supremacy over the realm of England which made ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... power would be taken away from the assemblies. Instantly the distinction of "external" and "internal" taxation was abandoned; and from end to end of the Atlantic seaboard a cry went up that the duties were an insidious attack on the liberties of the Americans, an outrageous taking of their property without their consent, and a wanton interference with their {42} governments. Not merely agitators such as the shrewd Samuel Adams and the eloquent Patrick Henry uttered these views, but men of far more considerable ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith

... permitted to Mr. Burke, he would have shown distinctly, and in detail, that what the Assembly calling itself National had held out as a large and liberal toleration is in reality a cruel and insidious religious persecution, infinitely more bitter than any which had been heard of within this century.—That it had a feature in it worse than the old persecutions.—That the old persecutors acted, or pretended ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... may be spoiled by unwise handling. I think I can promise you that I will not spoil it. I feel that Betty is my vocation; and I shall set myself up as a rival of Wordsworth's 'nature,' of whose methods I have always had a decided distrust, in spite of his insidious verses." ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... consideration inclines me to hesitate about the policy of a present nomination. It is this—that Jackson ought first to be admonished to be passive: for, the moment he shall be announced as a candidate, he will be assailed by the Virginia junto with menaces, and with insidious promises of boons and favours. There is danger that Jackson might be wrought upon by such practices. If an open nomination be made, an express should ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... this singular change in character. He had trained himself, in order to fight a paralyzing something in the desert's influence, to oppose with memory and thought an insidious primitive retrogression to what was scarcely consciousness at all, merely a savage's instinct of sight and sound. He felt the need now of redoubled effort. For there was a sheer happiness in drifting. ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

... gains the moiety of a fortune by marrying the young, gay Miranda, but cannot rest without securing to himself the portion of the elder sister as well. Althea's thoughtful and less volatile nature has hitherto resisted the assaults of love, but her insidious brother-in-law undermines her virtue by giving her wanton books and tempting her with soft speeches until she yields to his wishes. When he attempts to make her sign a deed of gift instead of a will to provide for their child, she discovers ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher

... the will of God, not belief in destiny, not fortitude or fatalism, not unselfishness or devil-may-care indifference, had saved the people from the haunting dread of being mown down by the unseen and insidious foe. ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... idea of being able to forget all about Andrew J. Burris for a little while was almost insidious. Malone liked it more the more he thought about it. Burris went on naming vacation spots and drawing magnificent travel-agency pictures of how wonderful life could be, and after a while Malone left. There just wasn't anything else to say. ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett

... mental inside is equally indecent and equally discomposing. 'I have never thought about thinking,' said the wise Goethe. No one can go through a treatise on insanity and come out as sane as he started. And there is an even more insidious way in which this human vivisection operates for evil. People now forgive their friends—they call their eccentricities 'pathological,' and endure instead of discouraging them. I had two letters this very morning. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... that may be, our Lord here, with a singular mixture of dignity, tenderness, and decisiveness, puts aside the insidious snare without shaming its contrivers, and turns from the kinsmen, with whom He had no real bond, to draw closer to Himself, and pour out His love over, those who do the will of His Father in heaven. His words go very deep; let us try ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... his mind. And while we see around us some men addressing themselves with stout, brave hearts to what Carlyle terms, with homely vigor, their "heavy job of work," and, by denying themselves many an insidious indulgence, doing it effectually and well, and rearing up well-taught families in usefulness and comfort, to be the stay of the future, we see other men yielding to the ignoble solicitations of appetite or of indolence, and becoming worse than useless themselves, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... very cold. The insidious fog penetrated his tightly buttoned coat, and set his teeth to chattering in spite of the aid he sometimes drew from a pocket-flask. His clothes were wet and the stern-sheets were covered with spray. The comforts of ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte

... is as insidious as the sleeping-draught of an Indian soothsayer, under its spell men go mad for gain and forget that to stand on the brow of a mountain at night, arms outstretched in kinship to Vega and Capella, is a golden moment of purer alloy than certified bonds. What magnate remembers where the best tackle ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... opinion and the compact majority and all that devilry? No, thank you! And what I want to do is so simple and clear and straightforward. I only want to drum into the heads of these curs the fact that the liberals are the most insidious enemies of freedom—that party programmes strangle every young and vigorous truth—that considerations of expediency turn morality and justice upside down—and that they will end by making life here unbearable. Don't you think, Captain Horster, that I ought to be able ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen

... closely enough, may we not observe that the moral force of character and the higher intellectual capacities in parents seem often to wear out mysteriously in the course of transmission to children? In these days of insidious nervous exhaustion and subtly-spreading nervous malady, is it not possible that the same rule may apply, less rarely than we are willing to admit, to the bodily gifts ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... than we are here, at this moment, the designs of the mischief-makers will not fail to be accomplished, and brethren and friends will be made strangers and enemies to each other, without ever having said or thought a thing amiss of each other. I presume that the most insidious falsehoods are daily carried to you, as they are brought to me, to engage us in the passions of our informers, and stated so positively and plausibly as to make even doubt a rudeness to the narrator; who, imposed on himself, has no other ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... aware how firmly fixed in our Constitution is the policy of this Confederacy against the opening of that trade, but we are informed that false and insidious suggestions have been made by the agents of the United States at European Courts of our intention to change our constitution as soon as peace is restored, and of authorizing the importation of slaves from Africa. If, therefore, ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois

... just as absolutely as though I were his chattel. Talk about abolishing slavery! We have not abolished slavery; we have only abolished one rude form of it—chattel slavery. There is a deeper and more insidious form, a more cursed form yet before us to abolish, in this industrial slavery that makes a man a virtual slave, while taunting him and mocking him in the name ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... the murders of the Lusitania were justified. A German chemist friend of mine told me that the chemists of Germany were called on, after poison gas had been met by British and French, to devise some new and deadly chemical. Flame throwers soon appeared together with more insidious gases. And it is only because of the vigilance of other nations that German spies have not succeeded in sowing the microbes of pestilence in countries ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... general knowledge of the existence of this sentiment which has called into being the present epidemic of curious cults and catholicons—due, it would appear, more to this insidious temptation to such commercial enterprise than to any other cause—and which form so prominent a feature throughout all sections of the community—and especially in the press—throughout the length and breadth of the land. To such, in an alarming ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... your facts." The voice was friendly, almost paternal, but it held an insidious challenge, too, and for one betraying moment all the native antagonism that was really there flashed in the Colonel's eyes. Few enemies of his had been permitted to see it so clearly. It was a triumph for Neil, if a barren one. "Be ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton

... and he suddenly thought of Mrs. Heeny's clippings. His mother, alarmed by an insidious gain in weight, had brought the masseuse back from New York with her, and Mrs. Heeny, with her old black bag and waterproof, was established in one of the grand bedrooms lined with mirrors. She had been loud in her ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... literalism—a school which in after life both my brother and myself came to regard as the main obstacle to the complete overthrow of unbelief; we therefore looked upon it with something stronger than aversion, and for my own part I still deem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which the cause of Christ has ever encountered. ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... man had nothing else to do except this second work of this Commandment, he would yet have to work all his life-time in order to fight this vice and drive it out, so common, so subtle, so quick and insidious is it. Now we all pass by this good work and exercise ourselves in many other lesser good works, nay, through other good works we overthrow this and forget it entirely. So the holy Name of God, which alone should be honored, is taken in vain ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... civilization brings in such quantity seemed all at once to mean the abeyance of some central life or power men ought to share with—Nature.... You shall read it all in my written report. I merely wish to show you now how the insidious thing got at me along the line of my special knowledge. I saw the truth that priests and doctors are the only possible and necessary 'professions' in the world, and—that they should be ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... the insidious Falcon, by not making his approaches in a way to alarm her, acquired her friendship as well as her gratitude; and, in short, she got used to him and liked him. Not being bound by any limit of fact whatever, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade

... so he discharged himselfe of them, and thereby disobliged those persons, who thought their quality, tho' not their busines, required a patient and respectfull entertainment. This I reflect upon, because I heard from a good hand, that the Marquiss of Argile making him an insidious visit, and he, knowing he neither loved him nor the Church, entertaining him not with that franknes he should have done, but plainly telling him, he was at that time a little busy about the King's affairs, this great Lord took it so much in indignation, and esteem'd it such a Lordly ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House. Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those ...
— Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death • Patrick Henry

... examination of the heart during acute infections will generally show signs of endocarditis if it is present, even if there are no subjective symptoms, the disease may be so insidious as not to be noted until a valvular lesion occurs. Often, however, during the course of the disease, especially in rheumatism, there is a slight increase in fever and there is a discomfort complained of in the region of the heart, frequently accompanied by slight dyspnea. Real pain is seldom ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... has generated innumerable paralogisms which disfigure the pages of their philosophical writings. This procedure is grounded in the common fallacy of supposing that infinity and quantity are compatible attributes, and susceptible of mathematical synthesis. This insidious and plausible error is ably refuted by a writer in the "North American Review."[219] We can not do better than transfer his argument to our pages in an ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... [Greek: gnothi seauton] of the Greek philosopher lies the secret of all reform. To know one's faults is already one half the battle to correct them. He who becomes conscious that health of body and mind are steadily yielding to the inroads of an insidious foe, is worse than a fool if he do not at once apply the knife to the seat of disease, however painful may be the operation. And though to-day we hear but little of reform, and all parties seem striving which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the world's mental power had been ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak

... whose vile proceedings so many tales were told; these were the men, of all ranks and classes, who poured into the jealous despot's ear the venom of calumny and falsehood; these the spies and traitors who, by secret and insidious denunciations, brought sudden arrest and unmerited punishment upon their innocent fellow-citizens, and who kept the King advised of all that passed in Madrid, from the amorous intrigues of a grocer's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... only Stratagem left to draw him in) was given him: That pursuant to this the Donation it self was without Delay, before several reputable Witnesses, tendered to him gratis, with the open Profession of not the least Reserve, or most minute Condition; but that yet immediately after Induction, his insidious Introducer (or her crafty Procurer, which you will) industriously spread the Report, which had reached my Ears, not only in the Neighbourhood of that said Church, but in London, in the University, in mine and his own County, and where-ever else it might ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... was calculated not only to ruin the mother-country, but the colonies themselves; and that the heads of the rebellion, neglecting to take the sentiments of the people at large, had refused to accept the British proposals for peace; that for his part, rather than trust to the insidious offers of France, "I preferred," he continues, "those of Great Britain, thinking it infinitely wiser and safer to place my confidence in her justice and generosity than to trust a monarchy too feeble to ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... were fixed and content and passionless. She liked to sit in the sun, feel its warmth, see its brightness; and sometimes she almost forgot to go back to her patient. She fought at times against an insidious change—a growing older—a going backward; at other times she drifted through hours that seemed quiet and golden, in which nothing happened. And by and by when she realized that the drifting hours were gradually swallowing up the restless and active hours, then strangely, ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... cough troubled her by day and prevented her resting at night; an accompanying weakness created some little anxiety as to what its issue might be; but, with the hoping spirit which is ever attendant on that insidious disease called consumption, she believed that the coming spring would ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers

... in their infancy, if it may be so called, that we ought to be upon our guard against their seduction; they are then soothing and insidious; but if we suffer them to gain strength, and establish their empire, reason, obscured and overcome, rests in a shameful dependence upon the senses; her light becomes too faint to be seen, and her voice too feeble to be heard; and the soul, hurried on by an impulse to which no obstacle is presented, ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett

... voice to a loud tone, replied, "Such, indeed, are the insinuations, equally false and insidious, with which the desperate emissaries of a party endeavour to poison the minds of his majesty's subjects, in defiance of common honesty and common sense. But he must be blind to all perception, and dead to candour, who does not see and own that we are involved ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett

... have flung it from me with unconcern. No other than an attempt to destroy Man's dearest hopes, is this infamous book: no other than an insult, the grossest imaginable, offered to the Majesty of Heaven; an attack, the more foul because it is so insidious, against the Everlasting Gospel of JESUS CHRIST. In such a cause I will not so far give in to the smooth fashion of a supple and indifferent age, as to pay these seven writers a single compliment which they will care to accept. The most foolish composition of the seven is Dr. Temple's; the ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... a slender blonde, with eyebrows nearly white, and pale blue eyes, almost round; her speech honeyed, her look hypocritical, her manners insinuating and insidious. ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... be that society in our day has its dangers and disorders of a different and more insidious kind, we are thankful that our lot is not cast in the harsh and troublous times of our history. All around us the former scenes of rapine and violence are changed to fertility and peace. The Old Castle serves well to illustrate the contrast. ...
— The Hawarden Visitors' Hand-Book - Revised Edition, 1890 • William Henry Gladstone

... ridge tops a few miles, they were shining in the window of Lucy's tiny room, perhaps lighting her fair face. It seemed that these stars were telling him all was not well in Lucy's mind and heart. He could not shake the insidious vague haunting thought, and longed for dawn, so that in the sunlight he could dispel all morbid doubts and the shadows that came ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... disease. He is the most selfish of parasites. The world for a long time disregarded him, but now acknowledges him as one of the mightiest of conquerers; for while other devastators have slain thousands, millions have fallen beneath his insidious attacks. He is a foe to be dreaded, for he is forever lying in ambush for ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell

... Gould for his "gold conspiracy" were those who had built their fortunes on blood-soaked army contracts. Nor could the worst aspects of Gould's conspiracy, bad as they were, begin to vie in disastrous results with the open and insidious abominations of the factory and landlord system. To repeat, it was a system in which incredible numbers of working men, women and children were killed off by the perils of their trades, by disease superinduced and aggravated by the wretchedness of ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... distinctions strove hard to save the three spiritual forms, which have been recognised as the triad of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, from confusion with the fourth form, still unknown, yet insidious through its indeterminateness, and mother of scandals. For us this triad has finished its task, because we are capable of reaching the distinction far more directly, by welcoming even the selfish, subjective, merely pleasurable feelings, among the respectable forms of the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... challenge you again. Go about this wooing as you will; dazzle the lady with your wealth and your magnificence, with your servants, your horses, your equipages; and all the splendours you can command; yet I make bold to say that not a year of your scented attentions and most insidious wiles will bear you fruit. Are ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini

... interest and the Irish interest, and they will be always at variance. Consider how parties within a single state are at variance, Conservatives and Radicals, in any country in Europe. The proposals of one are always insidious, dangerous or reactionary, as the case may be, in the eyes of the other; and in no case will the parties agree; they will at times even charge each other with treachery; there is never peace. It is the rule of party war. Who, then, can ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... la Plata takes its rise in one of the world's most backward plains, the home of uncivilized Indians, heartless rubber adventurers, and the most rapacious of officials. Not infrequently, the degenerate white men of these regions, yielding to the subtle and insidious influence of the tropics, inflict the most outrageous abuses upon the natives, and even kill them on slight provocation. The natives in turn hate their oppressors, and when the chance comes betray them or leave them to perish in sickness and misery. The upper Mississippi, ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... her neck. But she checked her hands, fearing that if she put it on she would never bring herself to let it go. Already as she watched and fingered it and bent her head now and again to scrutinise a stone, small insidious voices began to whisper ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason

... spheres of activity, and wherever he appears he is always facile princeps in the public eye. Everyone who has any knowledge of him is compelled to think about him, and those who have no direct knowledge of him—so insidious is his influence—are to be found constantly thinking in terms of Bernard Shaw. The active, talking, persuading, book-writing, lecturing, propagandist population of England has been bitten by him; it re-writes and popularises ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... whether the rapid but insidious increase of ritual in India is understood at home. In England it is bad enough, but in a heathen and Mohammedan land it is, if possible, worse; and the worst is, the spirit of it, or the spirit of tolerance toward it, which is on the increase ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... first, with displeasure and repugnance; later on, with more of toleration; and, at last, with a sense of amusement at the singularity of the notions, or the dexterity with which he defended them. The poison of his doctrines was the more insidious, because, mingled with a certain dash of good nature, and a reckless, careless easiness of disposition, always attractive to very young men. His reputation for courage, of which he had given signal ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... most was his observations about Virginia and her beggar brother. I was so proud of Virginia, I felt that her brother ought not to be a beggar. Such was the effect produced in so short a time by the insidious discourse of this man. Had he still remained at the steps, I do believe that I should have asked, probably have followed, his advice. Fortunately he had left, and, after a little reflection, I had the wisdom to go and seek Peter Anderson, and consult him as to what I could do, for to change my mode ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... working. But, with a surprising lack of political acumen, he likewise expressed his determination to preserve in the new councils the presence and power of the landlord and ex-officio element. This was, in the circumstances, with the Land Question unsettled and landlordism still an insidious power, a rather gratuitous surrender ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan

... a very admirable and seasonable book, displaying much reading and the soundest views. It sets forth, with much detail and in a popular and picturesque style, the many evils of Popery' and the present danger of Britain from this insidious foe. It would be difficult to find a better text-book for popular lectures and young men's classes, on the subject, and we ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock

... this busy old man became in some degree master of other people's affairs by such correspondences as these; and he could himself bear witness to his success in cross-examination, as he had been surprised into an avowal of the rencontre between the brothers, by an insidious observation of the said Touchwood. He reported, therefore, to the Earl, after this interview, that, on the whole, he thought he had no reason to fear much on the subject of the traveller, who, though he had become acquainted, by some means or other, with some leading facts of his remarkable ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... them all, more and more, as time went on, was only another royal road to Lydia's heart. Elizabeth was becoming frail, shadowy, her appetite was fitful, her eyes larger and more wistful, her fingers smaller and weaker. No one seemed to realize the insidious oncreepings of "the white man's disease," consumption, that was paling Elizabeth's fine English skin, heightening her glorious English color, sapping her delicate English veins. Only young George would tell himself ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson

... therefore, for the first time criticised my future wife. It was a good, honest, plain, sensible face, with some fine, insidious lines about the corners of the eyes and lips, and across the forehead. They could hardly be called wrinkles yet, but they were the first faint sketch of them, and it is impossible to obliterate the ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... not last. The public mind was growing anxious. Extensive interests, in some cases whole fortunes, were becoming involved in the question of ultimate payment. The alarm gained upon Congress. Burgoyne, indeed, was conquered; but a more powerful, more insidious enemy, one to whom they themselves had opened the gate, was already within their works and fast making his way to the heart of the citadel. The depreciation had reached four for one, and there was but one way to prevent it from going lower. Congress deliberated anxiously. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... uneasy about the ship's position, perpetually imagining dangers. If a sea hit us exceptionally hard he'd be out of the cabin in an instant making an outcry of inquiries, and he was pursued by a dread of the hold, of ballast shifting, of insidious wicked leaks. As we drew near the African coast his fear of rocks ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... throws down the cross, scorns the thorny crown, and despises Calvary, to perish at last miserably in the arid desert! Although Helen had never been a pious Catholic, she had always declared herself one, and resisted every open attack on her faith; but now, insidious scorn, worldly interests, and human love had entered her soul, and poisoned it, and for ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey

... the instructions of that excellent parent," said Peveril, "that I was enabled, in my early youth, to resist and repel the insidious attacks made upon my religious faith by the Catholic priests into whose company I was necessarily thrown. Like her, I trust to live and die in the faith of the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... something every morning before breakfast. After a while he'll get so that he can dispose of several things at once, and the time may come when I'll have to look over the rubbish to be sure that nothing valuable has gone, because throwing away is just as insidious a habit as ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane

... their philosophical writings. This procedure is grounded in the common fallacy of supposing that infinity and quantity are compatible attributes, and susceptible of mathematical synthesis. This insidious and plausible error is ably refuted by a writer in the "North American Review."[219] We can not do better than transfer his argument to our pages in ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... had been so hard to meet as this insidious drain of distrust in his own powers; this sense of a traitor within the walls. His iron-gray hair had turned white. It was always this now, from the beginning of the day to the end of the night: how was he to know? How was he to be inevitably, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... Thou too, O human world, if old desires, If thoughts, not alien once, can move thee now, Teach him not yet that idly he aspires Where thou hast fail'd; not soon let it be plain, That all who seek in thee for nobler fires, For generous passion, spend their hopes in vain: Lest that insidious Fate, foe of mankind, Who ever waits upon our weakness, try With whispers his unnerved and faltering mind, Palsy his powers; for she has spells to dry, Like the March blast, his blood, turn flesh to stone, ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps

... of the defenders from Ireland, appears to have created continual anxiety: a committee of officers was formed to examine persons suspected, when Harold, a priest, was arrested, and accused his fellow prisoners. His testimony was insidious, and discredited; but the alarm led to the formation of a volunteer company of a hundred persons, who armed for the suppression of rebellion. The more distrusted of the Irish prisoners were conveyed to Norfolk Island; there, some months ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... but the tabloid she tried to pass to her husband was intercepted, and the volley of ball cartridge that dealt stern justice in the grey light of a wet afternoon had rid our lines of a deadly and insidious peril that ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry

... this first great experiment has been successful. But that success has induced the most insidious attacks of those who advocate the opposite policy. We must be watchful, or our liberties will be gone. The game they now play is new in history; but, it is one easily comprehended. It has been well said that the price of liberty is ...
— Mysticism and its Results - Being an Inquiry into the Uses and Abuses of Secrecy • John Delafield

... not have always resisted the horrid temptations and contaminations about her. Hundreds of times she must have had deceit forced on her; she must have lied, through ungovernable fear; she must have been left (at a critical time in her life, mind!) with no more warning against the insidious advances of the passions than—than—I'm repeating what Mr. Presty said of a niece of his own, who went to a bad school at Paris; and I don't quite remember what comparisons that eloquent man used when he was excited. But I know what ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins

... her the greatest happiness when he bound her: and whatever she had done afterward to injure him, or to vex him, presented itself to her as only an innocent means of attracting his attention. She cursed their separation. She bewailed the sleepy state into which she had fallen. She execrated the insidious lazy routine which had betrayed her into accepting so insignificant a bridegroom. She was transformed—doubly transformed, forward or backward, whichever way we ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... compared to the danger within the gates from the unworthy sons of the Church of England herself? I have but little hope that the propounders and framers of these innovations will desist from their insidious course; but I rely with confidence on the people of England, and I will not bate a jot of heart or life so long as the glorious principles and the immortal martyrs of the Reformation shall be held in reverence ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid

... all now. By an insidious mass hypnosis minions from that other dimension ... or was it one supreme intelligence ... had deliberately sown the seeds of dissension. The reduction of the world's mental power had been ...
— The Street That Wasn't There • Clifford Donald Simak

... of the "Suffrage History" say: "As early as 1828 the standard of the Christian party in politics was openly unfurled. Frances Wright had long been aware of its insidious efforts, and its reliance upon women for its support. Ignorant, superstitious, devout, woman's general lack of education made her a fitting instrument for the work of thus undermining the republic. Having deprived her of her just rights, the country was now to find in woman its most dangerous ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... churlish of you not to accept," she said, putting away from her the insidious suggestion that perhaps if Florian loved her as much as he professed, an invitation to a banquet at Naples would have had no attraction for him as compared with being present at the first view of her picture on the morning she had herself appointed—"I ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... thought that it was Elsie that was sending you. However, it's no matter. The point is that you are becoming acquainted with the luxuries of life. You are being tried by the insidious softness of ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates

... right,' I said. I tried to make my voice indifferent, for I was on guard against insidious friendliness. I had bludgeoned my mind into an attitude of safe hostility towards her, and I saw the old chaos ahead if I ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... invigorate his mind. And while we see around us some men addressing themselves with stout, brave hearts to what Carlyle terms, with homely vigor, their "heavy job of work," and, by denying themselves many an insidious indulgence, doing it effectually and well, and rearing up well-taught families in usefulness and comfort, to be the stay of the future, we see other men yielding to the ignoble solicitations of appetite or of indolence, and becoming worse than useless themselves, and the parents of ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... a sign of progress. Hitherto he had relied, with a far greater sense of security and comfort, on those who had enabled him not to think. Consultation with Max, insidious as the drug-habit, and as secretively employed, was henceforth to count for much in the development of the Constitutional Crisis. Hereditary monarchy had conceived the idea of turning its hereditary material to account. No doubt the Cabinet would have objected, preferring ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... secret of longevity was the crux of all this turmoil—the lever by which Tarrano was raising himself. Scores of facts amid the tumultuous news of these hours showed us that. For months, throughout Venus, Tarrano had spread the insidious propaganda that he alone had the secret of immortality—that when he was made ruler, he would use it for the benefit of ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... the 20th of May, 1775. And yet, in the face of this strong phalanx of unimpeachable testimony, there are a few who have attempted to rob North Carolina of this brightest gem in the crown of her early political history, and tarnish, by base and insidious cavils the fair name and reputation of a band of Revolutionary patriots, whose memories and heroic deeds the present generation and posterity ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter

... art in which he was now embarking, our spirited leather-merchant was beyond all reproach. But, happily for the investor, forgery is an affair of practice. And as Morris sat surrounded by examples of his uncle's signature and of his own incompetence, insidious depression stole upon his spirits. From time to time the wind wuthered in the chimney at his back; from time to time there swept over Bloomsbury a squall so dark that he must rise and light the gas; about him was the chill ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... men had been sent on board the brig, and we remained only with eight and the Helen's crew—a very fair complement, had we not always required two to stand sentry over the prisoners. We had another and a more insidious enemy on board, of whom we wot not, and whom no sentry could control— the plague—that fell scourge of Asiatic cities. How it came on board we could not discover. It might have been in some of the pirates' ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... strictly normal, the inevitable outcome of the play of the sexual impulse. No doubt it may often become morbid, and is never a healthy process when indulged in to excess, as it is liable to be by refined young people with artistic impulses, to whom it is in the highest degree seductive and insidious.[230] As we have seen, however, day-dreaming is far from always colored by sexual emotion; yet it is a significant indication of its really sexual origin that, as I have been informed by persons of both sexes, even in these apparently ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... him in) was given him: That pursuant to this the Donation it self was without Delay, before several reputable Witnesses, tendered to him gratis, with the open Profession of not the least Reserve, or most minute Condition; but that yet immediately after Induction, his insidious Introducer (or her crafty Procurer, which you will) industriously spread the Report, which had reached my Ears, not only in the Neighbourhood of that said Church, but in London, in the University, in mine and his own County, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... to conquer this weakness, and to conquer it where it had originated and necessarily held the strongest sway. At all events, he was gone and she was here, and I had done nothing as yet to relieve that insidious dread with which she must anticipate a night in this ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green

... Donatist faction. As their cause was examined with attention, perhaps it was determined with justice. Perhaps their complaint was not without foundation, that the credulity of the emperor had been abused by the insidious arts of his favorite Osius. The influence of falsehood and corruption might procure the condemnation of the innocent, or aggravate the sentence of the guilty. Such an act, however, of injustice, if it concluded ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... medicines, by their insidious character, constitute a particularly dangerous variety. They depend, for their effect, upon the amount of alcohol that they contain. Many conscientious temperance workers have not only unsuspectingly ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various

... eye, to the popular eye—but I knew when I was dropping information and when I was letting drive at the court with an insidious argument. But the court knew it, bless you, and weakened every time! And Brabant knew it. I just reminded him of it in a quiet way, and its final result, and he said in a whisper, 'You did it, Colonel, you did it, sir—but ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... to reckon with the insidious process of idealising the absent. Indian to the core, she was deeply imbued with the higher tenets of Hindu philosophy—that lofty spiritual fabric woven of moonlight and mysticism, of logic and dreams. But ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... that conference, but because he was unwilling to interrupt any of the allies in their discourse." He asserted, that "Philip was neither treating for peace with sincerity; and that he had never waged war with true courage, at any time: that in negotiating, he was insidious and fradulent; while in war he never fought on equal ground, nor engaged in regular battles; but, skulking about, burned and pillaged towns, and, when worsted, destroyed the prizes of victory. But not in that manner did the ancient kings of Macedon behave; they decided the ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius

... who resolved that they should "be published in the several gazettes, that the good people of the United States might be informed of what nature were the commissioners, and what the terms, with the expectation of which, the insidious court of Britain had sought to amuse and disarm them; and that the few who still remained suspended by a hope, founded either in the justice or moderation of their late king, might now, at length, be convinced, that the valour alone of their country ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall

... labour,—for what? Not the food for which they famish: not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels: not those comforts of civilization without which civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage; oppressed as he is by all its insidious evils, within the daily and taunting prospect of its innumerable benefits assiduously exhibited before him:—no; for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... of submission; it is not the pouring-out of ourselves in weakness, but the gathering of ourselves together in increasing strength. There is no weakness in Spirit, it is all strength; and we must therefore always be watchful against the insidious approaches of the Negative which would invert the true position. The Negative always points to some external source of strength. Its formula is "I AM NOT." It always seeks to fix a gulf between us and the ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... wrong it was to give way to a sense of romantic disappointment at such a time, though as a matter of fact it is always in a moment of crisis or of strained nerves that we are most open to the insidious advances of romance. Also that there was no one on earth, or beyond it, whom I ought more greatly to have rejoiced to see. I had left Kaatje with Anscombe and Heda; therefore Kaatje could tell me what had become of them. And at this thought my heart sank—why ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard

... heart to come to Dr. Slavens' defense, although she knew that the charge was calumnious. But it furnished her a sudden and new train of thought. What interest had the chief of police in circulating such a report? Was the motive for Dr. Slavens' disappearance behind that insidious attempt to discredit him, and fasten a character upon him ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... and tired his employer looked. He realized, too, that for a week he had been fighting an incipient influenza and that doubtless his entire mental attitude was influenced by the insidious workings of the disease, one of the marked symptoms of which he knew to be a feeling of despondency and mental depression, which ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... but Lakratides, a wise man, who was at that time chief of the board of Ephors, restrained him, pointing out that it would be wrong to disturb Lysander in his grave, and that it would be better that so clever and insidious a composition should be buried with him. Among other honours which were paid to Lysander after death, the Spartans fined the suitors of his daughters, because when after his death his poverty was discovered, they refused to marry them, thus showing that they had paid their court ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... had changed since their talk, so that he wasn't going to need any assistant, or that he had found some one in New York better qualified for the work, was, really, a little artificial. She encouraged it as a defense against another which was, in its insidious ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... his side, paid me a kind of doglike service of admiration, gazing at me from afar off as at one who had liberally enjoyed those "advantages" which he envied for himself. He followed at heel; his laugh was ready chorus; our friends gave him the nickname of "The Henchman." It was in this insidious form that ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... frightened at the state of their beloved daughter-in-law. Preparations were at once made for a journey abroad. But it seemed as if it were already too late; and the invalid herself opposed the project with gentle obstinacy. Thin and pale in the great armchair, where the insidious and obscure nervous malady made her appear smaller and more frail every day without effacing the smile of her eyes or the charming grace of her wasted face, she clung to her native land and wished to breathe her native ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad

... have a great deal to do with all our lives. You are a dear old insidious sapper-and-miner, looking at first very inoffensive, and then working your way into our affections, and spoiling us with coaxing. How you behave ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... progress, although in winter there is great temptation in the direction of overheating. Full time for development in moderate heat will bring stout joints, and impart a vigorous constitution that materially aids the plants in resisting the insidious attacks of disease. The waning autumn and dull winter days are the most troublesome periods of management, and it is remarkable that of two days equal in duration and apparently in other conditions, the autumnal appears to be less favourable than the spring day. But if, ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... people laughed at will never consent to think the way well mannered, and Ibsen was bitterly blamed for "want of taste," that vaguest and most insidious of accusations. We are told that he began his enterprise in prose [Note: "Svanhild: a Comedy in three acts and in prose: 1860," is understood to exist still in manuscript], but found that too stiff and bald a medium for a satire on the social ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... mean you've got what they used to call 'religion,' Court? 'Hit the trail,' as it were?" Tennelly asked as if he were delicately inquiring about some insidious tubercular or cancerous trouble. He seemed half ashamed to connect such a perilous possibility with his ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... the efforts they make to do right. Doubtless there is a danger to be guarded against. To adopt the practice of noticing and commending what is right, and paying no attention whatever to what is wrong, would be a great perversion of this counsel. There is a danger more insidious than this, but still very serious and real, of fostering a feeling of vanity and self-conceit by constant and inconsiderate praise. These things must be guarded against; and to secure the good aimed at, and at the same time to avoid the ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... the invincible belief in the reality of existence would come back, insidious and inspiring. He squared his shoulders, held himself straight, and walked with a firmer step. He felt a glow within him and the quickened beat of his heart. Then he calculated in silent excitement Lingard's chances of success, and he lived for a time with the life of that other man who knew ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... heard, and answ'ring with a doubtful smile, Where half was sweetness, half insidious guile, His golden quiver o'er his shoulder threw, And gliding soft thro' yielding azure flew. Pleasure, the graces, and unthinking sport, 110 Born by the ...
— The Fourth Book of Virgil's Aeneid and the Ninth Book of Voltaire's Henriad • Virgil and Voltaire

... spirit to a man's eloquence, or to ensure his powers of endurance, when supplied in the manner above described. Men there are, doubtless, whose tongues would not be stopped even by such an argument as this; but Mr Moffat was not one of them. As the insidious fluid trickled down beneath his waistcoat, he felt that all further powers of coaxing the electors out of their votes, by words flowing from his tongue sweeter than honey, was for that occasion denied to him. He could not be self-confident, energetic, witty, and good-humoured ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... infancy is judicious and rational, its health becomes so firmly established that, in after life, its power of endurance will be greatly increased, and it will be enabled most effectually to ward off the insidious attacks of disease. On the other hand, where this organ has either inherited deficiencies and imperfections, or where they have been subsequently induced by early mismanagement, it becomes peculiarly susceptible, and frequently yields to the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... other chance words, which I have since forgotten, that M. de Rosny was pressing the king to accept the help of the King of Navarre, and warning him against the insidious offers of the Vicomte de Turenne. The mention of a Republic, however, seemed to excite his Majesty's wrath rather against Rosny for presuming to refer to such a thing than against Turenne, to whom he refused to credit it. He paused near my end of ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... to speak the truth if, from whatever cause, they have an interest in deception. A repressive discipline induces a coarse outward submission, but cannot reach the inward parts: it only engenders hatred, and substitutes for open revolt an insidious secret retaliation. Those only that come under the generous nurture of freedom can be counted on for hearty and willing devotion. If we would reap the higher virtues, we must sow on the soil of liberty. Encourage a man to say whatever he thinks, and you make the most of ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... subverts all essential difference of right and wrong, they have found the means of proving and explaining, "the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation," that is, the great and only sufficient antidotes of the right faith against this insidious poison. For Pantheism—trick it up as you will—is but a painted Atheism. A mask of perverted Scriptures may hide its ugly face, but ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... dangerous foe, and it is dangerous because it is insidious. If there is any one thing that puts a woman's wits to the test, it ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain

... persons. If it were a dinner-table jest, made over the walnuts and the wine, I would willingly sing ditto; but alas and alack, it is uttered without a smile, in a solemn and magisterial manner, as the last word in science! Toussenel, in his day, asked the naturalists an insidious question. (Alphonse Toussenel (1803-1885), the author of a number of learned and curious works on ornithology.—Translator's Note.) Why, he enquired, have Ducks a little curly feather on the rump? No one, so far as I know, had an answer for the teasing cross-examiner: evolution ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... natural verdure, clothing its sides and summit, and of cultivated fields along the lower slopes. These by irrigation are turned into paddy plantations, the winds blowing over which give rise to those insidious fevers, intermittent, I am told, in their character, which are so prevalent at Coepang, as well as dysentery, from which indeed the crew of the Beagle ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... whenever his name was mentioned, Willy thought of this incident, so very typical did it seem to him of the man, and he liked to twit his father with it. But Mr. Brookes could not be brought to see the joke, and he fell back on the plausible and insidious argument that, notwithstanding his manners, Berkins was worth eight thousand ...
— Spring Days • George Moore

... There is an insidious foe to mastery and freedom, which dooms millions to self-imposed bondage. Most people know it has them in its grip; countless others do not know what the hidden power is which holds them from the richer, freer, happier ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock

... for all our crude attempts to determine the relative strain on different persons of the same kind of toil, yet not only will the ratio, dealing, as it does, with our subjective feelings, be a blundering one, but a system based upon it will involve inequalities greater, because more insidious, than those of the present ...
— The Altruist in Politics • Benjamin Cardozo

... entitled "Tartuffe," one of the most powerful of Moliere's compositions. It was applauded, but from the clamor excited against the poet and the performance, as an attack on religion, instead of its impious and insidious adversary, hypocrisy, the representation was for the time interdicted; a fortunate circumstance, perhaps, since in consequence the drama underwent a sedulous revision, given by Moliere to few ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... her, upon the before-affrighted innocent, what a barbarity was that! What a poor piece of barbarity! in order to obtain by terror, what thou dispairedst to gain by love, though supported by stratagems the most insidious! ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... felt himself suddenly become identified with one of the logs. It was one which was just drawing around to the fateful cleft. Would it win past once more? No; it was too far out! It felt the grasp of the outward suction, soft and insidious at first, then resistless as the falling of a mountain. With straining nerves and pounding heart Henderson strove to hold it back by sheer will and the wrestling of his eyes. But it was no use. Slowly the head of the log turned outward from ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts

... extremely partial to what the men termed "drinking;" in other words, it shipped a good deal of water over the bows. Now it happened that while we were straining our eyes ahead, to catch a sight of our haven, an insidious squall was creeping fast down behind us. The first intimation we had of its presence was a loud and ominous hiss, which made us turn our heads round rather smartly; but it was too late—for with a howl, that appeared to be quite vicious the wind burst upon our sails, and buried the boat ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne

... perfectly sure. We believe it is an insidious attempt to sow dissension in the ranks of our sex—a bill cunningly devised to create jealousy and unworthy distrust among us—an ingenious and inhuman conspiracy to disorganize the National Federation of Free ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers

... style is frequent in acts of this nature, and is that only which is suited to the occasion. An insidious use has been made of the words enact and declare, as if they were formal and operative words of force to distinguish different species of laws producing different effects. Nothing is more groundless; and I am persuaded no lawyer will stand to such an assertion. The gentlemen who say ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... Lucas came, in February, to spend a few days with us. She was greatly shocked with many texts in the Old Testament, to which we called her attention, and said: "Here is an insidious influence against the elevation of women, which but few of us have ever taken into consideration." She had just returned from a flying visit to America; having made two voyages across the Atlantic and traveled three thousand miles ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... circles of the Orleans and Mississippi territories. He was shortly after appointed to the command of the brig Argus, stationed for the protection of our commerce on the southern maritime frontier. In this situation he acted with vigilance and fidelity, and though there were at one time insidious suggestions to the contrary, it has appeared that he conformed to his instructions, promoted the public interest, and gave entire satisfaction to the government. In 1811, he was transferred to the command of the sloop-of-war Wasp, mounting eighteen twenty-four ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various

... the attention of the Society to the prevalence, at the present time, of puerperal fever of a peculiarly insidious and malignant character. "In the practice of one gentleman extensively engaged as an obstetrician, nearly every female he has attended in confinement, during several weeks past, within the above limits" (the southern sections and neighboring districts), "had been ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... that hour the Master had played a very close game with Mrs. Henry; avoiding pointedly to be alone with her, which I took at the time for an effect of decency, but now think to have been a most insidious art; meeting her, you may say, at meal-time only; and behaving, when he did so, like an affectionate brother. Up to that hour, you may say he had scarce directly interfered between Mr. Henry and his wife; except ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... ignored. Assuming that there is something precious, to be guarded as a chief treasure in the instinct of nationality, as I assume, there are grave dangers in too much friendly commercial "infiltration" from the outside. The indirect influences of commercial exploitation with foreign capital are the insidious, the dangerous ones. The dislike of the foreign trader, the foreign creditor, may voice itself crudely as mere envy, know-nothingism, but it has a healthy root in national self-preservation. For an Italian the German article ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... fear of persecution; because, after all, the searching persecutions were rare and intermitting, and not, perhaps, in any case, so fiery as they have been represented. We think more of that gentle but insidious persecution which lay in the solicitations of besieging friends, and more still of the continual temptations which haunted the irresolute Christian in the fascinations of the public amusements. The theatre, the circus, and, far ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... who are victims of nosophobia are probably the most miserable and wretched individuals on earth. This is essentially so because of the peculiar characteristics of the disease. It is an insinuating and insidious ailment and its progress is cumulative. When we begin to worry about our health the germ of nosophobia takes up its habitation in our midst and we never know another ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... these gentlemen of the pen! Cowardly, malicious, insidious in their anonymity. How this band will triumph now, and over me! How they will laud their editor to the skies! There lies the contemptible sheet! In it stands my defeat, trumpeted forth with full cheeks, with scornful ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... strong and plain; Her warmth offended, and her truth was vain: The many left her, and the friendly few, If never colder, yet they older grew; Till, unemploy'd, she felt her spirits droop, And took, insidious aid! th' inspiring cup; Grew poor and peevish as her powers decay'd, And propp'd the tottering frame with stronger aid, Then died! I saw our careful swains convey, From this our changeful world, the Matron's clay, Who to this world, at least, with ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe

... grown. I wonder if the Japanese walnut might not be a safeguard in the area where they don't have the disease, in that you will detect the disease the quickest on the Japanese walnut, and in that way anyone would become wise to it, rather than if it was in the black walnut. It might be so insidious that it could be well spread before persons knew they had it at all. I wonder if the Japanese walnut, through its quickness in showing the disease, might not be a safeguard ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 41st Annual Meeting • Various

... the big-mouthed black bass is going to sing—there is only one regular song for a bass singer to sing. From time to time insidious efforts have been made to work in songs for basses dealing with the love affairs of Bedouins and the joys of life down in a coal mine; but after all, to a bass singer who really values his gift of song and wishes to make the most of it, there is but one suitable ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... be sure of your facts." The voice was friendly, almost paternal, but it held an insidious challenge, too, and for one betraying moment all the native antagonism that was really there flashed in the Colonel's eyes. Few enemies of his had been permitted to see it so clearly. It was a triumph for Neil, if a barren ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton

... families in the nations which she wished to enslave. Among other young German chieftains, Arminius and his brother, who were the heads of the noblest house in the tribe of the Cherusci, had been selected as fit objects for the exercise of this insidious system. Roman refinements and dignities succeeded in denationalizing the brother, who assumed the Roman name of Flavius, and adhered to Rome throughout all her wars against his country. Arminius remained unbought by honors or wealth, uncorrupted by refinement or luxury. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various

... blooming health; but the seeds of disease were inherited and only awaited a combination of circumstances to assert their fatal power. Absorbing enthusiasm for her profession, and the cares of a rapidly increasing practice, made her overlook the insidious danger lurking in a cold, and not until her alarmed physician ordered her to the soft climate of Southern California did she comprehend her danger. This peremptory order was a terrible shock, and the forced exile from the field of her hopes and ambitions, more bitter than death. She never ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... ear, repressed by the uncongenial accessories around her, tends to concentrate her existence in a realm of mere imaginative life, where, if it be the only life, the diviner part of our being can find no sustenance. This danger is for her the greater and more insidious, because in her the sensuous, so strongly developed, is refined from all its grossness by the presence ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown

... only to those who see in the faith of the Ruthenian, a "relic of the Middle-Ages," an obstacle to Canadian citizenship—the danger to the faith of our Ruthenian people is greater than in the days of open attack. This method of neutral proselytism is more insidious, and in the long run, more telling. We know perfectly well that if the Canadian Ruthenian is "to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar" he must first "give to God what ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly

... his first conversations with M. de Saci at Port-Royal, was Montaigne. One cannot destroy Pascal, certainly; but of all authors Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences; or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument. It is hardly too much to say that Montaigne is the most essential author to know, if we would understand the ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal

... said, "how the insidious something which men call Death seems to grow nearer to me day by day. Now, as we stood together, I felt just a touch of the cold hand; the touch was but a feather weight, but any instant it will come down like a giant on its prey. It is terrible to stand as I do, looking into the face of Death; ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade

... thee to let thy own life be regulated. Allow not thyself to be led away by pleasures; shun, like the plague, the foolish familiarities thou seest between some men and women; harmless enough at first, but which by insidious degrees corrupt the heart, and thence lead it to negligence, and then into the vile slough of vice. Credit me, the greatest safeguard to female chastity is sobriety of demeanour. I beseech and direct that thou often call to mind the friendship which ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... ally; was this the only false and ugly invader that had taken advantage of her shattered defence? Had the unwelcome visitor entered her heart alone? Was there not a companion still more wicked, more perverted, more insidious, more dangerous? For the first time Lloyd knew ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris

... for the open; struggled for it, as the swimmer struggles up for air to escape from the insidious sucking ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange

... the opportunity When to do it with impunity: 50 You are neither—then he'll flatter, Till he finds some trait for satire; Hunts your weak point out, then shows it, Where it injures, to expose it In the mode that's most insidious, Adding every trait that's hideous— From the bile, whose blackening river ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... man—not an ancient mariner, or a meandering imbecile—who could remember the talk of a grandmother who had known Matthew Haygarth's wife. And this visit to Mr. Goodge was my own idea, not prompted by the far-seeing Sheldon. I felt myself advancing in the insidious arts of a ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... mysterious country beyond Hot Creek where a hidden force works mischief, mole-like, under the crust of the earth. Whatever agency is at work in that neighborhood, and it is popularly supposed to be the devil, it changes means and direction without time or season. It creeps up whole hillsides with insidious heat, unguessed until one notes the pine woods dying at the top, and having scorched out a good block of timber returns to steam and spout in caked, forgotten crevices of years before. It will break up sometimes blue-hot and bubbling, in the midst of a clear creek, ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin

... good minister of Jesus Christ, how glorious, how sublime!" said she. "There is nothing I so much desire for you. But you are going into scenes very different from those in which you have been reared—scenes which will have their peculiar and insidious perils. I foresee that you will rise to distinction in your studies. But do not seek high things for yourself. Be not anxious to become what is called a great preacher, nor aspire to a 'brilliant settlement.' ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson

... are now recognizing, the fight against much of the remaining typhoid must be in the direction of the improvement of milk supplies, precautions against secondary infection, and attention to a large number of details surrounding the individual, which may effectively protect him against the insidious attack of the disease favored ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy

... has done so much harm to the cause of the missionary as this forcing the opium trade on the people." "If there are honest missionaries," he remarks, "there are also sincere believers in the ancient faiths of Cathay to resent the insidious encroachments of blatant foreign priests, who preach to the heathen the doctrines of self-imposed poverty and mendicancy, and yet themselves live sumptuously enough in comfortable houses, surrounded by a wife and a numerous progeny, in the midst ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... light sirupy mixture, there lurked liqueurs of which the potency was only rendered doubtful because of their low temperature. The beginning of the long drink was absolutely delicious, so soothing and so cooling; but at the end of it was as if one had filled one's self with insidious quick-running flame. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... room. The colonel, meantime, to put an end to the burlesque scene, nodded to a little confectioner who was waiting for the floor, a well-known Republican. The new questioner, in a falsetto voice, put the following insidious question to the candidate,—a question which might, by the way, be ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... sufficient honor to my son, the other is to honor him as much as myself.'"[Footnote: Voltaire, xxxvii. 144.] Such words as these were hardly to be borne. But the French authorities recognized that there was a greater and more insidious danger to the church in certain other passages by which Frenchmen were made to learn some of the results of ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... to a truth which was soon to become obvious to all the world, he let the insidious foe steal across his threshold, and guessed not how soon that dark and hidden enemy was to drive him from the hearth by which he sat, secure in self-approval and ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon

... had been drawn to very different purpose; for in this elementary novel of adventure, the characters need to be presented with but one class of qualities—the warlike and formidable. So as they appear insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, they have served their end. Danger is the matter with which this class of novel deals; fear, the passion with which it idly trifles; and the characters are portrayed only so far as they realise the sense of danger and provoke the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the group of nerves appropriated by his class-consciousness almost beyond endurance; but he managed to stand it by reminding himself that irritation of all such was a healthy sign and vastly preferable to insidious tolerance. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... landing, I visited the proprietor of my old tub, related my misadventure, and offered to pay damages, if the boat shall turn out in the morning to have sustained any. Meanwhile, I suppose, it is held secure against the next tidal revolution, however insidious.—But for my old gentleman. I have decidedly picked up an acquaintance, if not made a friend. I gave him a very good cigar; and before we reached home, we had become thoroughly intimate. In exchange for my cigar, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... which, without appearing to do so, strike to the very roots of history. We soon lose all inclination to doubt. We penetrate into another world and come to a stop all out of countenance. We no longer know where we stand; before and after overlap and mingle. We no longer distinguish the insidious and factitious but indispensable line which separates the years that have gone by from the years that are to come. We clutch at the hours and days of the past and present to reassure ourselves, to fasten on to some certainty, to convince ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck

... almost as cruel as the grave. How few have done justice to the sad partings, the mournful alienations that have been caused by circumstances! Bereavement in all its varied bitterness has been sung by many poets in strains worthy of the subject; but circumstances are so insidious, and often so prosaic, that their tragical operation has been rarely treated ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... as far removed from parsimony as from corrupt and corrupting extravagance; that single regard for the public good which will frown upon all attempts to approach the Treasury with insidious projects of private interest cloaked under public pretexts; that sound fiscal administration which, in the legislative department, guards against the dangerous temptations incident to overflowing revenue, and, in the executive, maintains an unsleeping watchfulness against the tendency of all national ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... given to them by Lloyd Osbourne. Here Mr. and Mrs. Baker, whose hair has been whitened by the snows of many winters since the Stevenson days, receive the visitors who come to reverently examine the relics left by the man who fought so bravely and so successfully against the same insidious enemy with whom they themselves are struggling. On the veranda, where, in that time so long past, his slender figure might often have been seen walking up and down, a beautiful bas-relief by Gutzon Borglum, representing him in the fur cap and coat and the boots ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... unsophisticated but sympathetic ears all the duplicity, all the treachery, all the insidious cunning and all the serpent-like wisdom of her unscrupulous sex. What she said neither I nor any of the sons of men are ever likely to know! but so proud of belonging to that nefarious sisterhood, so overweening ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... particularly warned Mr. Blowter that under no circumstances should he sleep ashore. He gave a variety of reasons, such as the prevalence of Beri-Beri, the insidious spread of sleeping sickness, the irritation of malaria-bearing mosquitoes, and of other insects which it would be impolite to mention in the ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... one understands, are insidious things. If you take them regularly, in small doses, they increase their hold on you until you become wrapped up in dreams and unrealities. If, however, you get too big a dose of them at the beginning, it leads to a vigorous revulsion. It's ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... revealed to them; but it may be doubted if there were many inspectors who realised then, what some among them see clearly now, that the evils which distressed them were significant as symptoms even more than as sources of mischief,—as symptoms of a deep-seated and insidious malady, of the gradual ossification of the spiritual and mental muscles of both the teacher and the child, of the gradual substitution in the elementary ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... us seem to us kinder than the magistrates of the commonwealth, who wear our hearts out with their malignity, their plundering, and their deceit. At one and the same time to superintend bishops and clergy, monasteries also and the people, carefully to watch against insidious attacks of our enemies, and be perpetually on guard against the treachery and ill-treatment of our rulers, you, my brother, can the better judge what labour and sorrow is here in proportion to the purity of your affection for me who ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies

... Our society women while in theatres sit grossly intoxicated from eating these candies filled with brandy. When the fire fiend sweeps down upon them they are unable to escape. The candy stores are the devil's distilleries. If you assist in the distribution of these insidious confections you assist in the destruction of the bodies and souls of your fellow-beings, and in the filling of our jails, asylums and almshouses. Think, girl, ere you touch the money for which ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... How tragic those two words. He Waited! And his waiting sounded the death-knell of a thousand boyhood hopes. HE WAITED!! And health slowly took wings and flew away. HE WAITED!! And the insidious little Devil-of-Fear piece by piece tore down his will-power, sapped his power-of-concentration. HE WAITED!! And that first simple nervous condition turned into something near ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue

... produce the slightest sign of intoxication, or even of discomfort, or headache, may be slowly and fatally damaging the cells of the liver or kidney. In fact, the conviction is growing among scientists that alcohol does the greatest harm in this slow, insidious way without its user's realizing it in any way until too late to break ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... well-meaning, good girl in the main, she would have been a plaything in the hands of such a man. Her absolute truth and crystal purity of principle incased her in heaven's armor, and neither he nor any other evil-disposed person could harm her. She would not listen to the first insidious suggestion of the tempter. Thus the man who expected to go away despising now honored, reverenced, loved her, and through her strong but gentle ministry had turned his back on evil, and was struggling ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... belittle his soul, for any consideration? If Hepsy Ann Nickerson had claims, had not he also, and his Art? If he were willing, in this dire extremity, to sacrifice his love, his prospects of married bliss, might he not justly require the same of her? Was not Art his mistress?—Thus whispered the insidious devil of Selfishness to this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... winter was exceedingly good. Dr. Almquist's report enumerates only a few serious maladies, all successfully cured, among which may be mentioned stomach colds and slight cases of inflammation of the lungs, but not a single case of that insidious disease, scurvy, which formerly raged in such a frightful way among the crews in all long voyages, and which is still wont to gather so many victims from ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... The clergy of the Church of England—fashioned, almost to a man, on the model of Abraham Plymley—were dreadfully alarmed. Bishops charged against the proposed concession. Clerical meetings all over the country petitioned Parliament to defend them against insidious attacks on our national Protestantism. Before long, the storm rolled up to Yorkshire, and a meeting of the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Cleveland was assembled at Thirsk on the 24th of March 1823. To this meeting a Resolution was submitted, protesting against the emancipation ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... the sunshine. The mother comes down again to bask herself at every doorstep, and the little street is once more alive with chat and laughter. The very beggars exchange their whine for a more cheerful tone of insidious persuasion. The women sing as they jog down the hill-paths with the big baskets of olives on their heads. The old dispossessed friar slumbers happily by the roadside. The little tables come out on to the pavement, and the society of the place forms itself afresh into buzzing groups ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... the general knowledge of the existence of this sentiment which has called into being the present epidemic of curious cults and catholicons—due, it would appear, more to this insidious temptation to such commercial enterprise than to any other cause—and which form so prominent a feature throughout all sections of the community—and especially in the press—throughout the length and breadth ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... an antidote to the pothouse—no. For the people knew the frequenting of the pothouse to be a vice; it was a temptation of Satan that often in overcoming them was the cause of their flying back to grace: whereas museums and picture galleries were insidious attractions cloaked by the name of virtue, whereby they ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of the policy of the imperial government, and to gain control of this association with the object of using it as a means of stimulating a feeling against England, and strengthening himself in French Canada by such insidious methods. Lord Elgin, with that intuitive sagacity which he applied to practical politics, recognized the importance of identifying himself with the movement initiated by the bishops and their friends, of putting himself "in so far as he could at its head," of ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot

... you that I knew you were doing all that for my best good, and I wish—I wish you could have seen how exemplary you looked when you were trying to pour a cocktail out of a corked bottle, between your remarks on passionate fiction and puffs of the insidious cigarette! When the venomous tobacco began to get in its deadly work, and you turned pale and reeled a little, and called for air, it made me mentally vow to go back to Miss Fray instantly, whether I was engaged to her or not, and cut out ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... they still uphold discrimination as to localities.[3] Now, among abuses of sovereign power, this is one of the most galling, for of all taxes the transportation tax is perhaps that which is most searching, most insidious, and, when misused, most destructive. The price paid for transportation is not so essential to the public welfare as its equality; for neither persons nor localities can prosper when the necessaries of life cost them more than ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams

... to wait, the Council had informed her. Wait, while the information she had given them was analyzed, digested. As though, perhaps, what she had said was part of some insidious plot; as though it were too fantastic to be ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden

... relations towards truth may change, for that which is hidden from us today may become known to us tomorrow. "It often happens," says St. Augustine, "that when it becomes necessary to defend certain points of Catholic doctrine against the insidious attacks of heretics they are more carefully studied, they become more clearly understood, they are more earnestly inculcated; and so the very questions raised by heretics give occasion to a more thorough knowledge ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... these are taken on behalf of the people in general against the malignant influence supposed to be exercised by strangers, it is no wonder that special measures are adopted to protect the king from the same insidious danger. In the middle ages the envoys who visited a Tartar Khan were obliged to pass between two fires before they were admitted to his presence, and the gifts they brought were also carried between ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... waterways: anglerfish whose comical movements qualify them for the epithet "clowns," black Commerson anglers equipped with their antennas, undulating triggerfish encircled by little red bands, bloated puffers whose venom is extremely insidious, some olive-hued lampreys, snipefish covered with silver scales, cutlass fish whose electrocuting power equals that of the electric eel and the electric ray, scaly featherbacks with brown crosswise bands, greenish ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... the papers say. Whether true or not, the Greek-fire of the righteous indignation of a loyal people is fast shattering the offspring of his infamous teachings,—the armed treason of the South, and its more cowardly ally the insidious treachery that lurks under doubtful cover in the loyal States. In thunder tones do the masses declare, that now and for ever, they repudiate the Treason and despise the Traitor. Nobly are the ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong

... in a speech held by all who heard it to be a marvellous display of oratory. He described Hastings as "by turns a Dionysius and a Scapin," a tyrant and a trickster, with a mind in which "all was shuffling, ambiguous, dark, insidious, and little".[210] Indeed throughout the proceedings against Hastings his accusers constantly disregarded moderation and even decency of language. The third charge and other articles having been accepted by the commons, Burke, on May ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... the laws of his country to the advantage of mankind. He leaves bad statutes, which aim at or would promote injustice, to sleep till themselves become obsolete, or parries their insidious thrusts at humanity; he selects good statutes which enact natural Justice into positive law; and mixes his own fresh instincts of humanity with the traditional institutions of the age. All this his official function requires of him—for his oath to keep and ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker

... completely to the end, except about two centimetres (About three-quarters of an inch.—Translator's Note.) left for the final cotton plug. Certainly no foe will break in through the double rampart; but he will make an insidious attack from the rear. The Leucopsis will come and, with her long probe, thanks to some imperceptible fissure in the tube, will insert her dread eggs and destroy every single inhabitant of the fortress. Thus are the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... pouring life while it is still fluid into the wrong mould, of letting it drift and harden into the wrong shape, is an insidious peril which is not sufficiently guarded against. It is easy enough to say, Begin as you mean to go on; but the difficulty is to know exactly the moment when you begin, and when the point of going on has been ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell

... subject upon which Hayward felt he spoke with authority, he had assumed the air that it was his part to give information rather than to exchange ideas. Weeks had listened politely, with smiling modesty, till Hayward finished; then he asked one or two insidious questions, so innocent in appearance that Hayward, not seeing into what a quandary they led him, answered blandly; Weeks made a courteous objection, then a correction of fact, after that a quotation from some ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... had a place in this myth. It was a mountain over against Tulan. There it was that the eldest sister of Quetzalcoatl resided. When he was made drunken by the insidious beverage handed him as a healing draught by Tezcatlipoca, he sent for this sister, held to her lips the intoxicating cup, and with her passed a night of debauch, the memory of which filled him with such shame that nevermore dared he face his subjects. Such is the ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various

... valuable aid in the education of boys. His style seems to have been constructed entirely for their tastes; his topics are admirably selected, and his mode of communicating excellent lessons of enterprise, truth, and self-reliance might be called insidious and ensnaring if these words did not convey an idea which is only applicable to lessons of an opposite character and tendency taught in the same attractive style. The popularity of this book, "Self-Help," abroad has made it a powerful instrument of good, and many an English boy has risen from ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... grandfather Meeker, of whom her uncle says she always reminds him. She possesses a kind and happy nature; and since she was stricken by the terrible malady, she has grown day by day more gentle and more heavenly, as her frame has been gradually weakened under its insidious inroads. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... when I was in the Anglican Church, the argument in behalf of Rome is stated with considerable perspicuity and force. And at the time my friends and supporters cried out, "How imprudent!" and, both at the time, and especially at a later date, my enemies have cried out, "How insidious!" Friends and foes virtually agreed in their criticism; I had set out the cause which I was combating to the best advantage: this was an offence; it might be from imprudence, it might be with a traitorous design. It was from neither the one nor the other; but ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... freedom to such able-bodied slaves as are willing to join him, and take up arms against the good people of this Colony, giving thereby encouragement to a general insurrection, which may induce a necessity of inflicting the severest punishments upon those unhappy people, already deluded by his base and insidious arts, and whereas, by an act of the General Assembly now in force in this Colony, it is enacted, that all negro or other slaves, conspiring to rebel or make insurrection, shall suffer death, and be ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... in one of the world's most backward plains, the home of uncivilized Indians, heartless rubber adventurers, and the most rapacious of officials. Not infrequently, the degenerate white men of these regions, yielding to the subtle and insidious influence of the tropics, inflict the most outrageous abuses upon the natives, and even kill them on slight provocation. The natives in turn hate their oppressors, and when the chance comes betray them or leave them to perish in sickness and misery. The upper Mississippi, on the other ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... instant Langholm dreamt of the readiest and the vilest resource; in another he remembered, not only that he could swim, but the insidious sympathy for this man which a darker scoundrel had sown in his heart. It had grown there like Jonah's gourd; only his flippancy affected it; and Steel was far from flippant now. Langholm signed to him to ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung

... but a belief that I am safe. A man who is prosperous, or at ease, is sure to drop into the notion that 'to-morrow will be as this day, and much more abundant,' unless he keeps up unslumbering watchfulness against the insidious illusion of permanence. If he yields to the temptation, in his foolish security, forgetting how fragile are its foundations, and what a host of enemies surround him threatening it, then there is nothing for it but that the merciful discipline, which this ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... just where the trouble lies, Nelson, with drinking intoxicating things. People should be able to drink or not, as they feel inclined. But alcohol is insidious. Why! you teach that in your ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long

... against the infamous practice of paying assiduous court to old people for the purpose of obtaining a legacy under their wills. "Later, childlessness conferred advantages in the shape of the greatest authority and Lower; undue influence became very insidious in its quest of wealth, and in grasping the joyous things alone, debasing the true rewards of life; and all the liberal arts operating for the greatest good were turned to the opposite purpose, and commenced to ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... find that Mr. Greg looked upon my own poor part in that correspondence as controversial. I merely asked him a question which he declared to be insidious and irrelevant (not considering that if it were the one, it could not be the other), and I stated a few facts respecting which no controversy was possible, and which Mr. Greg, in his own terms, "sedulously abstained" ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin









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