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More "Knavish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hand was a pillar, round which stood a set of men, some rough, some knavish-looking, with the blue coats, badges, short swords, and bucklers carried by serving-men. They were waiting to be hired, as if in a statute fair, and two or three loud-voiced bargains were going on. In the middle aisle, gentlemen in all the glory of plumed hats, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... displayed, and breeding more rancorous hatred than any which can now exist between the people of Boston and Charleston, between the Knickerbockers of New York and the Creoles of New Orleans. A Scotchman was to the South a comprehensive name for a greedy, beggarly adventurer, knavish and money-loving to the last degree, full of absurd pride of pedigree, clannish and cold-blooded, vindictive as a Corsican, and treacherous as a modern Greek. An Englishman was to the North a bullying, arrogant coward,—purse-proud, yet cringing to rank,—without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... Tropically.[82] This play is the image of a murder[83] done in Vienna: Gonzago is the Duke's name; his wife, Baptista: you shall see anon;—'tis a knavish piece of work: but what of that? your majesty, and we that have free souls, it touches us not: Let the galled jade wince,[84] our withers[85] ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... "Phaedo"—that wonderful story to which I have just alluded, and which lives so vividly in my memory. Sometimes I think that Mr. Gladstone has the same superstition. He has moments—especially if there be the stress of the sheer brutality of obstructive and knavish hostility—when he seems to retire into himself—to transfer himself on the wings of imagination to regions infinitely beyond the reach, as well as the ken, of the land in which the Lowthers, the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... abused by the malice of that knavish attorney, Potts, who has always manifested the greatest hostility towards Alizon," said Nicholas; "but he will not prevail, for she has only to show herself to dispel ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and had in mind a year after I left London—six years ago. But I kept it to myself. I had to do my work under frightful disadvantages. Oliver, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas—he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I went on working; I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous at ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... concede to kings or nations a right to interfere with 'the soul' or religious principles or practices—these are to be slain, if false, by persecution of the preacher. Kings and nations will restore to the people the immense property and revenue of which they have been plundered, under the hollow knavish pretence of curing souls and forgiving sins. THUS will human laws kill the body of Antichrist. Every motive for professing to believe absurdities and contradictions will be at an end, when neither rule nor honour, nor pelf is to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... to be such an one, a blasphemer of the gods, and a renegade from thy father's love and admonition." But thou shalt not alway mock the invincible gods, nor shall their enemies rejoice for long, nor shall these knavish sorceries prevail. For except thou become obedient unto me, and right-minded toward the gods, I will first deliver time to sundry tortures, and then put thee to the cruellest death, dealing with thee not as with a son, but as with ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... greater interest in them than I did myself. At first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated going partners with a knavish fellow-countryman on a guano venture. I did not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know, but he saw how thick we were getting, and found out for me, and without my asking him. Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... same trick again, and trying who can keep silence longest? Remember that all tricks are either knavish or childish; and that it is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... upon this attachment of Lucy to another. A consciousness of his utter meanness and degradation of spirit in consenting to marry any woman under such circumstances, filled him with shame even to glance at it. He feared, besides, that if her knavish father had heard it, he would at once have attributed his conduct to its proper motives—that is to say, an eagerness to get into the possession and enjoyment of the large fortune to which she was entitled. He himself, in his conversations ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... person in seedy raiment and tattered hat, possessed of courage, kindness, and virtue, is entitled to more respect from those to whom his virtues are manifested than any cruel profligate emperor, selfish aristocrat, or knavish millionaire in the world. ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... candid with you) the result of a bet made between myself and the constable, who shares it with the King. Both have wagered that they know who is the lady of my heart; and I have wagered to the contrary. No one more than myself hates the English, who took my estates in Piccadilly. Is it not a knavish trick to put justice in motion against me? Ho! Ho! my lord constable, a chamberlain is worth two of you, and I will beat you yet. My dear Petit, I give you permission to search by night and by day, every nook and cranny of my house. But ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... not thou death! Fie, there's a knavish itch In that salt blood, an utter foe to smarting. Had Jaffier's wife prov'd kind, he'd still been true. Faugh, how that stinks! thou die, thou kill my friend! Or thou! or thou! with that lean wither'd face. Away, disperse all to your several ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy • Thomas Otway
... Yon island carrions,[15] desperate of their bones, Ill-favour'dly become the morning field: Their ragged curtains poorly are let loose,[16] And our air shakes them passing scornfully: Big Mars seems bankrupt in their beggar'd host, And their executors, the knavish crows, Fly o'er them, all impatient for their hour. Description cannot suit itself in words To demonstrate the life of such a battle In life so lifeless as ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... knavish tricks! Yet know I five or six Smokers who freely mix Still with their neighbours; Jones—who, I'm glad to say, Asked leave of Mrs. J.) - Daily absorbs a clay After ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... appropriated by the government. In the latter instance, the natives were perfectly in the right. At that time, the law against the traffic in ardent spirits (every now and then suspended and revived) happened to be in force; and finding a large quantity on the premises of Victor, a low, knavish adventurer from Marseilles, ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... mind to submit to much fatigue, some danger, and innumerable annoyances; such as filth, bad fare, the continual torment of vermin; lodgings, to which a stable with clean hay would be in comparison a paradise; knavish attempts at imposition of various kinds, etc. He must mount on a mule whose saddle is of rude and of abominable construction; whose bit is a sort of iron vice, which clasps the animal's nose and under-jaw, and every day wears away the flesh; and whose bridle is a piece of rope fastened to the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... dungeon, and the next year were brought forth for trial. Vaudreuil, for lack of evidence, was acquitted properly acquitted, so far as can be known, his chief fault having been a fatal ill-judgment; but a just fate overtook Bigot, Cadet, and their knavish parasites. The Intendant was banished from France for life, and all his property confiscated; Cadet was banished for nine years and fined six million livres; the others received sentences in keeping with the measure ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... gear They spend the one half of the year; In gathering gear and knavish art They somehow ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Jove! if she were to come over here, I'd drive you out of the settlement with a shot-gun, 'deed if I wouldn't. Now you will probably change your mind about unselfishly surrendering Rita to Williams. I tell you, Dic, a fool conscience is more to be dreaded than a knavish heart." ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... and the light strange eyes, found success attend his every enterprise from that hour in which he had spilt life upon the pavement of the Convent chapel. The tarantula-pounce never missed a prey. Every knavish venture brought in money or money's worth, every base plot was carried through triumphantly. Bough, alias Van Busch, was not ordinarily a superstitious man, but his run of luck made him ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... his amusing, half-knavish autobiography, has described his first introduction to the Welsh astrologer of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... rest: Is he not the very image of the State? He has had no education, or he would never have allowed the blind god of riches to lead the dance within him. And being uneducated he will have many slavish desires, some beggarly, some knavish, breeding in his soul. If he is the trustee of an orphan, and has the power to defraud, he will soon prove that he is not without the will, and that his passions are only restrained by fear and not by reason. Hence he leads a divided existence; ...
— The Republic • Plato
... industry and habits of deep thinking; and with the northern nations, an honest sincerity and persevering courage. We sometimes judge with tolerable correctness; at others are wholly mistaken, and not unfrequently run into such extremes, that having established a principle, that a particular people are knavish, or cowardly, or stupid, we are unwilling to admit any exceptions, but include the whole race in our sweeping censure. We are prejudiced at first sight against a Portuguese or Italian, and are careful of our communications with him, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... A KNAVISH attorney asking a very worthy gentleman what was honesty, "What is that to you?" said he; "meddle with those things ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... rest till the next man goes in! The tired arms lie with every sinew slack On the mown grass. Unbent the supple back, And elbows apt to make the leather spin Up the slow bat and round the unwary shin,— In knavish hands a most unkindly knack; But no guile shelters under the boy's black Crisp hair, frank eyes, and honest English skin. Two minutes only! Conscious of a name, The new man plants his weapon with profound Long-practised ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Melanthius a goatherd, who covered them with insults. "In truth one churl is leading another, for the god ever bringeth like to like. Whither art thou taking this glutton, this evil pauper, a kill-joy of the feast? He hath learned many a knavish trick and is like to refuse to labour; creeping among the people he would rather ask alms to fill his insatiate maw." Leaping on Odysseus, he kicked at him, yet failed to stir him from the pathway. Swallowing the insult Odysseus ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... present condition, but so little satisfying, that Newfangle receives a terrible drubbing for his trick. Judge Severity arrives on the scene conveniently to lecture him severely and witness his second knavish device, which is no other than to hand over to the Judge the two fugitives from justice, Cutpurse and Pickpurse, for the piece of land of which he spoke is the gallows. Hankin Hangman takes possession of his victims, and the Devil, entering with a 'Ho, ho, ho!', carries ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... at Mr. JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY'S re-adjustment of history. It was all for our delight that Claude Duval, instead of perishing on the scaffold, should escape from prison, have his freedom confirmed by the KING'S pardon, confound everybody else's knavish tricks and marry the lady of his heart. Nor do I complain that the historic highwayman (as I am credibly informed—for I got the facts from another critic) was only twenty-nine when they hanged him, and that Mr. BOURCHIER is—well, let me say, past the military ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... course, must have had visions of keeping this useful queen of spades up his sleeve, that he might be ready to trump one of our knavish tricks with her, at any moment; but the gods fought against him for once. Just before theatre-time, arrived a long cablegram from James Richard, alias Richard James. He thanked Somerled enthusiastically (Mrs. James showed the message to me, and ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... setting in, and the situation of the embassy became more comfortless from day to day. Notes were written, and answers received from the monarch, but the royal interview was still postponed, partly by the artifice of the knavish governors, who kept a longing eye on the presents, and partly by the barbarian etiquette of showing the natives the scorn with which their king was entitled to treat all the nations ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... was right enough. Perhaps we never hate severity when it has its source in greatness of character and pure morals, and is skilfully tempered with kindness. My father, it is true, never left me a moment to myself, and only when I was twenty years old gave me so much as ten francs of my own, ten knavish prodigals of francs, such a hoard as I had long vainly desired, which set me a-dreaming of unutterable felicity; yet, for all that he sought to procure relaxations for me. When he had promised me a treat beforehand, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the same colour are never matched but a grey against a pile, a yellow against a red, or the like. This might have been originally designed to prevent disputes or knavish impositions. The Malay breed of cocks is much esteemed by connoisseurs who have had an opportunity of trying them. Great pains is taken in the rearing and feeding; they are frequently handled and accustomed to spar in public, in order to prevent any shyness. Contrary ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... my conviction, and wish it may stand recorded to posterity, that there never was a bad man that had ability for good service. It is not in the nature of such men; their minds are so distorted to selfish purposes, to knavish, artificial, and crafty means of accomplishing those selfish ends, that, if put to any good service, they are poor, dull, helpless. Their natural faculties never have that direction; they are paralytic on that side; the muscles, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of his plans came quickly to Philip's knavish ears, and he wrote in haste to his confederate, "the devil is loose; take care of yourself," an admonition which John was quite likely to obey. His hope of seizing the crown vanished. There remained to meet his placable brother with a show of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Printing had been invented, commerce had arisen, gunpowder had come into use, the feudal system was passing, royal authority had become paramount, and Spain was giving to the world its first lessons in what was early stigmatized as the "knavish calling of diplomacy." ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... ordinary Teuton what Protestantism is, he will scarcely know what you mean precisely. American Protestantism and German Protestantism are radically unlike. The one is peaceful and trustful, the other is warlike and knavish. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... softly with sandal'd feet— Ah! why are the stolen waters sweet?— And one crept stealthily after; I would I had taken him there and wrung His knavish neck when the dark door swung, Or torn by the roots his treacherous tongue, And ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... Gitanos such as they are, and to illustrate their character; and, on that account, we have endeavoured, as much as possible, to bring them before the reader, and to make them speak for themselves. They are a half-civilised, unlettered people, proverbial for a species of knavish acuteness, which serves them in lieu of wisdom. To place in the mouth of such beings the high-flown sentiments of modern poetry would not answer our purpose, though several authors have not shrunk from such ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... I baffled many a knavish trick to gain possession of the fine fellow; but, after all, I lost him in the middle of the day, when I thought the boldest rogues would not have run the risk. The shouts and laughter of some officers who were riding down from the front first ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... arisen. In the real circumstances of the Christian church, when struggling with Jewish persecution at some period of the generation between the crucifixion and the siege of Jerusalem, arose probably that secret defensive society of Christians which suggested to Josephus his knavish forgery. We must remember that Josephus did not write until after the great ruins effected by the siege; that he wrote at Rome, far removed from the criticism of those survivors who could have exposed, or had a motive for exposing, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... at such an adventure turning out so seriously, first of all flew into a terrible rage, rushed off to the lawyer's office and threatened to cut off his knavish ears for him. But when his access of fury was over, and he thought of it, he shrugged his ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... combats. The address of a combatant, expert in all the niceties of his art, who knows how to shift and ward dexterously, to put the change upon his adversary with art and subtlety, and to improve the least advantages, must not be confounded here with the cowardly and knavish cunning of one who, without regard to the laws prescribed, employs the most unfair means to vanquish his competitor. Those who disputed the prize in the several kinds of combats, drew lots for their ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... each year a shoe of my horse, in order that his brother might profit by the job of replacing it; and then I proceeded to reprove the smith for the ingratitude which had led him to return my bounty by the conception of so knavish ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... sporting days had passed away, and nothing was left but ceaseless toil, these essentially combative people, to whom violent and continuous excitement was the very breath of life, became, for a while at least, knavish and immoral, sunk almost to one dead social level, and totally uninteresting because, in their new life of peaceful tillage—a life far more suited to their English law-givers than to themselves—they were ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... regular practitioner, and to the scientific student of mind and body and of the properties of the materia medica. Why, even here in Connecticut, it is impossible to get a law to protect the community from the imposition of knavish or ignorant quacks, and to require of a man some evidence of capacity and training and skill, before he is let loose to experiment upon suffering humanity. Our teachers must pass an examination—though the examiner sometimes does not know as much as the candidate,—for ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... maintain to be a flattery which takes the form of medicine; and tiring, in like manner, is a flattery which takes the form of gymnastic, and is knavish, false, ignoble, illiberal, working deceitfully by the help of lines, and colours, and enamels, and garments, and making men affect a spurious beauty to the neglect of the true beauty which is ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... the gnoles, but to quit this sinister wood in the nick of time and retire from business at once and buy a place in the country. Then he descended softly and beckoned to Nuth. But the gnoles had watched him though knavish holes that they bore in trunks of the trees, and the unearthly silence gave way, as it were with a grace, to the rapid screams of Tonker as they picked him up from behind—screams that came faster and faster until they were incoherent. And where they took him it is not good ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany
... vigorously to his touch; whilst others, not less free upon the wire, were carefully packed up, and sent home safe. By seizing and boxing up in the Tower mere bystanders, wholly unconcerned in the sport, he made his 'little tin soldiers' fancy that he did not see their antics. The only hitch in his 'knavish piece of work' arose when, too assured, he placed upon the boards a real live judge, who refused to take the bench in the manager's sham Court of Justice. In every other respect the mystery play was a complete success; everybody ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... have seen,[85] Nashe confounds elves with fairies in deriving all alike from fauns and dryads. Robin is "mad-merry," "jocund and facetious," "a cozening idle friar or some such rogue" [in origin], and so forth—simply described by Shakespeare as a "shrewd and knavish sprite." The forms of mischief in which he delights are described in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, II. i. 33-57, and all these "gests" may be found in the contemporary Robin Goodfellow literature;[86] though we have observed that some of the functions attributed to Queen Mab in Mercutio's ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... the value of the stake for which he was striving by the strength of his emotions, drew small comfort from the sight. More than once it had occurred to me, and now it occurred to me again, to extricate myself by a blow. But a natural reluctance to strike an unarmed man, however vile and knavish, and the belief that he had not trusted himself in my power without taking the fullest precautions, withheld me. When he grudgingly, and with many dark threats, proposed to wait three days—and not an hour more—for my answer, I accepted; for I saw no other alternative open. And ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... them than from their archetypes in London. Everyone knows that, in our refined metropolis, a lady of fashion cannot give a ball or a rout, without engaging Mr. Townsend, or some other Bow street officer, to attend in her ball, in order that his presence may operate as a check on the audacity of knavish intruders. ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... the news that you were revelling in golden wealth, and the wretch promised to make you and your uncle beggars if the surprise succeeded. He did this, though he knew that it was you who took him up from the road and saved his life; for nothing good and noble dwells in his knavish soul. He yearned for me, and still more ardently for the Alexandrians' gold. Worse than the wolf that licked the hand of the man who bandaged its wounds, he would have shown his teeth to the preserver ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... my death, were it for the benefit of my country," said he. "But to fall a sacrifice to a cabal, to the jealousy of an insidious, knavish favorite, is what makes the death-hour fearful. Ah, I die for naught, I die that Munnich, Ostermann, and Biron may remain securely in power. It is horrible ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... very probable, that the beggarly knavish Crew will be this year also printing Prophecies and Predictions in my name, to cheat the country as they used to do. This is therefore to give notice, that if there is anything of that kind done in my name besides this Almanack printed by the Company of Stationers, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... of Grantams curse, for the Millers Eeles, that were stolne: ... Why then ho, beware, looke about you my neighbours; if any of you have a sheepe sicke of the giddies, or an hogge of the mumps, or an horse of the staggers, or a knavish boy of the schoole, or an idle girle of the wheele, or a young drab of the sullens, and hath not fat enough for her porredge, nor her father and mother butter enough for their bread; and she have a little helpe of the Mother, Epilepsie, ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... speaks well; and no rigid Papist neither, but one that would not have a Protestant servant leave his religion, which he was going to do, thinking to recommend himself to his master by it; saying, that he had rather have an honest Protestant than a knavish Catholique. I was not called in to the Council and therefore home, first informing myself that my Lord Hinchingbroke hath been married this week to my Lord Burlington's daughter: so that that great business is over; and I am mighty glad of it, though I am not satisfied ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... When he struck, With his broad head, 'Gainst the old column of the house-wall. Uller's splendid flatterer Swung the iron beam Straight 'gainst the head Of the knavish giant. ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... sunset till some time after daybreak. The dwarf's tastes, however, were catholic. A little later in the book the reader finds him, when encamped in the back parlour of the old man's shop, smoking pipe after pipe, and compelling that knavish attorney, Sampson Brass, to do the same. Tobacco-smoke always caused Brass "great internal discomposure and annoyance"; but this made no difference to Quilp, who insisted on his "friend" continuing to smoke, while ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... long time, to see whether Johnson would be induced to write first. Johnson became anxious, though he half-guessed the truth, and in reference to Boswell's confession gave his disciple a piece of his mind. "Remember that all tricks are either knavish or childish, and that it is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend as upon ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... it for the public, I should have been more exact and full. Many temperaments and explanations there would have been, if ever I had had a notion that it should meet the public eye." He was justly indignant at the knavish publisher, whose conduct surpassed that of the Dublin pirates, or Edmund Curll. But he was at a loss to know how the publisher obtained a copy. He did not suppose that the Duke of Portland had given up ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Matthias, of Don John, of Anjou, into so many additional weapons for his own cause, can never be too often studied. It is instructive to observe the wiles of the Macchiavelian school employed by a master of the craft, to frustrate, not to advance, a knavish purpose. This character, in a great measure, marked his whole policy. He was profoundly skilled in the subtleties of Italian statesmanship, which he had learned as a youth at the Imperial court, and which he employed in his manhood in the service, not ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... have a strong suspicion that the inundation of the Nave at Rochester was a knavish conspiracy of the Tee-totallers to submerge the Cathedral during the absence of the Dean. The vergers have had Water-on-the-Brain, but Messrs. Bishop and Sons from London have assured Mr. Luard Selby that there is no ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... talent of captivating the confidence and good opinion of the multitude, by pretending to perform miracles in the public streets. This trade descends from father to son; and is so lucrative, that the most fertile parts of the country swarm with these knavish hypocrites. When they die, the neighbouring tribes erect a sort of mausoleum to their memory, consisting of a square tower, surmounted by a cupola of the most fantastical architecture. To these tombs, called likewise marabouts, the devout ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Alexandrian brought me the news that you were revelling in golden wealth, and the wretch promised to make you and your uncle beggars if the surprise succeeded. He did this, though he knew that it was you who took him up from the road and saved his life; for nothing good and noble dwells in his knavish soul. He yearned for me, and still more ardently for the Alexandrians' gold. Worse than the wolf that licked the hand of the man who bandaged its wounds, he would have shown his teeth to the preserver of his life. I have learned this, and if he dies here ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... natives were perfectly in the right. At that time, the law against the traffic in ardent spirits (every now and then suspended and revived) happened to be in force; and finding a large quantity on the premises of Victor, a low, knavish adventurer from Marseilles, the Tahitians ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... was widely different. In that State the corruption of the Republican managers was flagrant; it extended to the manipulation of election returns; and the Federal Government interfered freely, and with notable results. A knot of knavish adventurers were in control,—Henry C. Warmoth, William P. Kellogg, F. F. Casey, and United States Marshal S. B. Packard. Casey was the President's brother-in-law, and General Grant was almost as incapable of believing a relative of his to be a bad man as he was incapable ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Then the first knavish wight took his needle so bright And threaded its eye with a wee ray of light From the Rhine, sunny Rhine; And, in such a deft way, patched a mirror that day That where it was mended no expert could say— Done so ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... edge of the circle contiguous to the first row of spectators, he observed within a yard of him the eye of a man darted keenly into his side features. Troy hastily shifted his position, after having recognized in the scrutineer the knavish bailiff Pennyways, his wife's sworn enemy, who still hung about the outskirts ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... art and gathering gear They spend the one half of the year; In gathering gear and knavish art They ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... go to my death, were it for the benefit of my country," said he. "But to fall a sacrifice to a cabal, to the jealousy of an insidious, knavish favorite, is what makes the death-hour fearful. Ah, I die for naught, I die that Munnich, Ostermann, and Biron may remain securely in power. It is horrible ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... has been abused by the malice of that knavish attorney, Potts, who has always manifested the greatest hostility towards Alizon," said Nicholas; "but he will not prevail, for she has only to show ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... were mixed up as silent partners with people who are involved in the most knavish and hazardous market in the world, it would soon have to hand in its schedule. It has, even now, immense difficulty in protecting itself against forgeries and false circulations of all kinds. Where would it be if it had to take account ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... should cavil at Mr. JUSTIN HUNTLY MCCARTHY'S re-adjustment of history. It was all for our delight that Claude Duval, instead of perishing on the scaffold, should escape from prison, have his freedom confirmed by the KING'S pardon, confound everybody else's knavish tricks and marry the lady of his heart. Nor do I complain that the historic highwayman (as I am credibly informed—for I got the facts from another critic) was only twenty-nine when they hanged him, and that Mr. BOURCHIER is—well, let me say, past the military age, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... to me equally obvious. These, I take it, were the vital considerations, not the situation of the "unredeemed" Italians in Trent and Trieste. But Austria, in that grudging maximum of concession which she finally offered to Italy's minimum of demand, insisted upon taking the sentimental or knavish view of the Italian attitude: she would yield the more Italianated parts of the territory in dispute, not the vitally strategic places. Nor would she deliver her concessions until after the conclusion of the war—if ever!—after she had ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... season was now setting in, and the situation of the embassy became more comfortless from day to day. Notes were written, and answers received from the monarch, but the royal interview was still postponed, partly by the artifice of the knavish governors, who kept a longing eye on the presents, and partly by the barbarian etiquette of showing the natives the scorn with which their king was entitled to treat all the nations of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Cooks)—Ver. 257. The "coqui" were in the habit of standing in the market-place for hire by those who required their services. See the Pseudolus, the Aulularia, and the Mercator of Plautus, and the Notes to Bohn's Translation. See also a remark on the knavish character of the sausage-makers in the Truculentus of ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Paris and elsewhere; spells and incantations by the inventor of the "black" art to describe, &c. But this is all induced by ignorance of the facts. John Fust, the putative inventor of printing, was a shrewd silversmith, and we suspect a knavish one, for without having any thing to do with the invention of the "art preservative of arts," he managed to rob another of the credit and profit of it. He was, however, never in Paris; he was never in his lifetime accused of the exercise of magical arts; he simply endeavored ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... language in every other line betrayed a Grecian origin, that the plot was not Roman, that the scene was not Roman, that the customs were not Roman; he would say, if he had patience to reason with his antagonist, that a fashionable rake, a grasping father, an indulgent uncle, a knavish servant, an impudent ruffian, and a timid clown, were the same at Rome, at Thebes, and at Athens, in London, Paris, or Madrid. He would ask, of what value were such broad and general features common to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... one trod softly with sandal'd feet— Ah! why are the stolen waters sweet?— And one crept stealthily after; I would I had taken him there and wrung His knavish neck when the dark door swung, Or torn by the roots his treacherous tongue, And stifled his ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... sir. I know this man well: he hath been since an ape-bearer; then a process-server, a bailiff; then he compassed a motion of the Prodigal Son, and married a tinker's wife within a mile where my land and living lies; and, having flown over many knavish professions, he settled only in rogue: some call ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... Did she not deal to me, one summer eve, the best bower in the pack, who reigns over all the kings and queens in or out of Christendom, and whose sway remains supreme through all the changing suits of time and fortune? He does not sport the garb of those elder knaves, it is true, though he is knavish enough when occasion offers,—he is at this moment inspecting a new jack-knife, and will, I fear, whittle off one of his dear, chubby fingers,—but he outranks all the crowned monarchs in the world. Whom do ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... Moerocles of Mantinea. He's a knavish fellow; his backers are recalling their bets. But he hopes to win on a trick; beware, lest he ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... impostor. The honest wizard always expects that his charms and incantations will produce their supposed effect; and when they fail, not only really, as they always do, but conspicuously and disastrously, as they often do, he is taken aback: he is not, like his knavish colleague, ready with a plausible excuse to account for the failure, and before he can find one he may be knocked on the head by ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... utter and pitiful. His tone was too confident, he was too sure of his ground to leave me a doubt as to what would befall if I made appeal to his knavish followers. My arms fell to my sides, and I looked at Gervasio. His face was haggard, and his eyes were very full of sorrow as ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... his whole demeanour was continually saying, "You are all a pack of poor lousy rascals, who have a design upon my purse. 'Tis true, I could buy your whole generation, but I won't be bubbled, d'ye see; I am aware of your flattery, and upon my guard against all your knavish pranks; and I come into your company for my own ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... be a scoundrel among us," Liputin grinned suddenly, his knavish little eyes seeming to peer into ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he sent to me immediately after your holiness' departure, and when I presented myself, he called my work a stew of onions, and told me he would send me to complete it in a galley; and such was the effect upon me of his knavish words, that in my passion I felt my face in flame, and so intolerable a heat attacked my eyes that I could not find my own way home. Two days afterwards, cataracts fell on both my eyes; I quite lost my sight, ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... quick to charge some of this loss to Seward. "The clamour against Sewardism lost us many votes," it declared the morning after the election. Two or three days later, as the reduced majority became more apparent, it explained that "A knavish clamour was raised on the eve of election by a Swiss press against Governor Seward's late speech at Rochester as revolutionary and disunionist. Our loss from this source is considerable." The returns, however, showed plainly that one-half of the Americans, following ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... except myself." "Indeed," replied the stranger (looking grave), "Then he's a double knave; He knows that rogues and thieves by scores Nightly beset unguarded doors: And see, how easily might one Of these domestic foes, Even beneath your very nose, Perform his knavish tricks; Enter your room, as I have done, Blow out your candles—thus—and thus— Pocket your silver candlesticks, And—walk off—thus!"— So said, so done; he made no more remark Nor waited for replies, But marched off with his prize, Leaving the gouty ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... racking the resources of allusive diction to veil and to suggest an immodest movement of his hero (Adonis being goaded beyond the bounds of boyish delicacy by lascivious sights), he suddenly subsides with a knavish titter into prose: ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... their heart and money in their purse, if they had for their enjoyment a Cecilia, a Marinetta, and even a more lovely beauty in perspective, they would soon entertain a very different opinion of life! I hold them to be a race of pessimists, recruited amongst beggarly philosophers and knavish, atrabilious theologians. If pleasure does exist, and if life is necessary to enjoy pleasure, then life is happiness. There are misfortunes, as I know by experience; but the very existence of such misfortunes proves that the sum-total of happiness is greater. Because ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Confound such knavish tricks! Yet know I five or six Smokers who freely mix Still with their neighbors,— Jones, who, I'm glad to say, Asked leave of Mrs. J., Daily absorbs a clay After ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... or virtuous, let the colour of the skin be what it might. He bade his young men look at the hands of the Big-knives. They were not empty, like those of hungry beggars. Neither were they filled with goods, like those of knavish traders. They were, like themselves, warriors, and they carried arms which they knew well how to use—they were worthy to ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... high-powered automobile approached on the other. It was attempting to rush the swale for the hill opposite, and making rather bad weather of the newly repaired road. A pile of loose soil that Newton had allowed to lie just across the path made a certain maintenance of speed desirable. The knavish Newton planted himself in the path of the laboring car, and waved its driver a command to halt. The car came to a standstill with its front wheels in the edge of the loose earth, and the chauffeur fuming at the possibility of stalling—a contingency ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... trick again, and trying who can keep silence longest? Remember that all tricks are either knavish or childish; and that it is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... contrivance between himself and Lunt in order to procure money from the government. The prisoners were immediately acquitted, and the ministry incurred a heavy load of popular odium, as the authors or abettors of knavish contrivances to insnare the innocent. The government, with a view to evince their abhorrence of such practices, ordered the witnesses to be prosecuted for a conspiracy against the lives and estates of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... that a person in seedy raiment and tattered hat, possessed of courage, kindness, and virtue, is entitled to more respect from those to whom his virtues are manifested than any cruel profligate emperor, selfish aristocrat, or knavish millionaire in ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... Children, And seem'd like Fathers anxious for our Welfare. Whom see we now? their haughty Conquerors Possess'd of every Fort, and Lake, and Pass, Big with their Victories so often gain'd; On us they look with deep Contempt and Scorn, Are false, deceitful, knavish, insolent; Nay, think us conquered, and our Country theirs, Without a Purchase, or ev'n asking for it. With Pleasure I wou'd call their King my Friend, Yea, honour and obey him as my Father; I'd be content, would he keep his own Sea, And leave these ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... Dissidents. And of course Catholics. If you ask an ordinary Teuton what Protestantism is, he will scarcely know what you mean precisely. American Protestantism and German Protestantism are radically unlike. The one is peaceful and trustful, the other is warlike and knavish. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... honest sincerity and persevering courage. We sometimes judge with tolerable correctness; at others are wholly mistaken, and not unfrequently run into such extremes, that having established a principle, that a particular people are knavish, or cowardly, or stupid, we are unwilling to admit any exceptions, but include the whole race in our sweeping censure. We are prejudiced at first sight against a Portuguese or Italian, and are careful of our communications ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... denounced them as forgeries; they had the misfortune to corroborate other Italian finds against which M. de Mortillet had a grudge. But Dr. Munro thinks that the two plaques of Volosova may have been made for sale by knavish boys. In that case the boys fortuitously coincided, in their fake, with similar plaques, of undoubted antiquity, and, in some prehistoric Egyptian stones, occasionally inscribed with ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... Returning once more to his attacks on what he justly deemed the Romanizing tendency of the practices of certain members of the English Church, he gives us the cartoon of Religion a la Mode, in which a handsome woman is about to "confess" to a truculent and knavish looking ritualist. In the distance appears John Bull with his horsewhip, "No, no, Mr. Jack Priest," says he; "after all I have gone through, I am not such a fool as to stand any of this disgusting nonsense." Some sensation was created this year by a private fete which was given by a member ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... this outpouring of his soul was "Steenie Ellison," who, from his childhood, was subject to periodical and violent affections of the body—contortions that gave him, in the eyes of many, an appearance of one possessed. Stephen had a considerable share of cunning, a sort of knavish sagacity and ready impertinence, peculiar to most of his kind. He was an orphan, early left to the care of chance or charity, and being a follower of bell-ringers, grave-diggers, and the like, assumed a sort of semi-official attitude at all funerals, weddings, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... my scoundrel servant, that he did as much as possible by his sharp remonstrances to confirm the good people in their opinions. He gave me a most amusing account of his proceedings; and as he saw it animated me, he thought to add to my enjoyment by a display of his own knavish tricks. Shall I confess it? I was not a little flattered by even the illusion of being mistaken for the head ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... Barrington Erle, from whose hands he feared to accept even the gift of a vote. Parliamentary hermits were distasteful to him, and dwellers in political caves were regarded by him with aversion as being either knavish or impractical. With a good Conservative opponent he could shake hands almost as readily as with a good Whig ally; but the man who was neither flesh nor fowl was odious to him. According to his theory of parliamentary government, the House of Commons should be divided by a marked ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... the quickness of spring, and readiness, learned in many a wrestling bout, that knavish trick must have ended me; but scarce was the word "fire!" out of his mouth ere I was out of fire, by a single bound behind the rocky pillar of the opening. In this jump I was so brisk, at impulse of the love of life (for ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... never! For to honour my parents was always my wish from my childhood, No one ever appear'd so prudent and wise as my parents, Who in the darker days of childhood carefully watch'd me. Much indeed it has been my lot to endure from my playmates, When with their knavish pranks they used to embitter my temper. Often I little suspected the tricks they were playing upon me: But if they happen'd to ridicule Father, whenever on Sundays Out of church he came with his slow deliberate footsteps, If ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... blood stains upon his hands have doubtless worried Dr. Jose somewhat, and all the others who joined with him in the work of carnage. But the blood stains are on their hands still, and the groans and wails of innocents must ever ring in their ears. "It was a knavish piece of work." "Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... would indicate to him the banking house where his precious son-in-law had deposited the half-million francs obtained for the emeralds. This latter information I would indeed have offered him gratuitously had he but known with what immense pleasure I thus put a spoke in that knavish Marquis's wheel of fortune. ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... outbreak. Nothing of the kind, however, occurred. The Crows were probably daunted by the resolute, though quiet demeanor of the white men, and the constant vigilance and armed preparations which they maintained; and Rose, if he really still harbored his knavish designs, must have perceived that they were suspected, and, if attempted to be carried into effect, might bring ruin on his ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... sail near the wind. disgrace oneself, dishonor oneself, demean oneself; derogate, stoop, grovel, sneak, lose caste; sell oneself, go over to the enemy; seal one's infamy. Adj. dishonest, dishonorable; unconscientious, unscrupulous; fraudulent &c 545; knavish; disgraceful &c (disreputable) 974; wicked &c 945. false-hearted, disingenuous; unfair, one-sided; double, double- hearted, double-tongued, double-faced; timeserving^, crooked, tortuous, insidious, Machiavelian, dark, slippery; fishy; perfidious, treacherous, perjured. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the word, then? By all means let us be frank. I found Prince James in the palace. He accepted my company. We had some conversation, my lord. I present to you the results. You have used my name to warrant a silly, knavish plot for murdering Prince James in France. You entered upon a silly, knavish plot to murder him on this mad visit to London, and while engaging me to aid your motions against the Jacobites you gave me ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... new 'boy' (all coloured servants are 'boys,'—a remnant of slavery), and he is the type of the nigger slave. A thief, a liar, a glutton, a drunkard—but you can't resent it; he has a naif, half-foolish, half-knavish buffoonery, a total want of self-respect, which disarms you. I sent him to the post to inquire for letters, and the postmaster had been tipsy over-night and was not awake. Jack came back spluttering threats against 'dat domned Dutchman. Me no WANT (like) him; me go and kick ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... covered the site of Minturnae. With all this, however, they suffered more severely from the inclement season than their robust adversaries. Numbers daily sickened and died. They were much straitened, moreover, from want of provisions, through the knavish peculations of the commissaries who had charge of the magazines in Rome. Thus situated, the fiery spirits of the French soldiery, eager for prompt and decisive action, and impatient of delay, gradually sunk under the protracted miseries of a war, where the elements were the ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... several of Fontaine's Tales from the French; and they have lost nothing in the translation, either of their wit or malice. I need not name them: but the one I like the most, is that of Cupid in search of Venus's doves. No one could insinuate a knavish plot, a tender point, a loose moral, with such unconscious archness, and careless raillery, as if he gained new self-possession and adroitness from the perplexity and confusion into which he throws scrupulous imaginations, and knew how to seize on all the ticklish parts ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... Perkins did not, unhappily, delay the progress of my uncle to that destruction to which his silly wife and knavish lawyer had destined him. His business was brought before the court by the claimants, Messrs. Banks & Tressell; and a brief period only was left him for putting in his answer. When I thought of Julia, I resolved, in spite of all previous difficulties—the sneers of the father, and the more direct, ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... days had passed away, and nothing was left but ceaseless toil, these essentially combative people, to whom violent and continuous excitement was the very breath of life, became, for a while at least, knavish and immoral, sunk almost to one dead social level, and totally uninteresting because, in their new life of peaceful tillage—a life far more suited to their English law-givers than to themselves—they were apparently incapable of maintaining ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... for trial. Vaudreuil, for lack of evidence, was acquitted properly acquitted, so far as can be known, his chief fault having been a fatal ill-judgment; but a just fate overtook Bigot, Cadet, and their knavish parasites. The Intendant was banished from France for life, and all his property confiscated; Cadet was banished for nine years and fined six million livres; the others received sentences in keeping with the measure ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... the chief political officer in Cabul, went still further, and in April 1840 not only urged a march on Bokhara, but also contemplated sending a Mission to Kokand, in order, as he said, 'to frustrate the knavish tricks of the Russians ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... subtly infusing a semi-sense of volitional power into the minds of their intended victims, so that at last they come to believe themselves to be self-acting, when in fact they are the merest shuttlecocks bandied about between the battledores of knavish devils on one side, and devilish knaves upon the other, and between the two the poor fallen wretches ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... That is what I don't know; unless he wished to take credit to himself for the good result which fortunately has arisen from his knavish conduct. ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... thought ahead for me, weighed my plans and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated going partners with a knavish fellow countryman on a guano venture. I did not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know; but he saw how thick we were getting and found out for me, and that without my asking. Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock about on the beach ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... light of day, destined as thou weft to be such an one, a blasphemer of the gods, and a renegade from thy father's love and admonition." But thou shalt not alway mock the invincible gods, nor shall their enemies rejoice for long, nor shall these knavish sorceries prevail. For except thou become obedient unto me, and right-minded toward the gods, I will first deliver time to sundry tortures, and then put thee to the cruellest death, dealing with thee not as with a son, but as with an enemy ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... you) the result of a bet made between myself and the constable, who shares it with the King. Both have wagered that they know who is the lady of my heart; and I have wagered to the contrary. No one more than myself hates the English, who took my estates in Piccadilly. Is it not a knavish trick to put justice in motion against me? Ho! Ho! my lord constable, a chamberlain is worth two of you, and I will beat you yet. My dear Petit, I give you permission to search by night and by day, every nook and cranny of my house. ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... race is perfectly illiterate,' said the man in black; 'they are possessed, it is true, of a knavish acuteness, and are particularly noted for giving subtle and evasive answers—and in your answers, I confess, you remind me of them; but that one of the race should acquire a learned language like the Armenian, and have a general knowledge ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... merchantmen. As for the position into which Sweden has been lured by allowing her diplomatic agents to assist Germany's secret service, Mr. Punch would hardly go the length of saying that it justifies the revision of the National Anthem so as to read, "Confound their Scandi-knavish tricks." But he finds it hard to accept Sweden's professions of official rectitude, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... you heard; with virtue fought, Then spread those morals which the Houyhnhnms taught. Our labours here must touch thy generous heart, To see us strain before the coach and cart; Compell'd to run each knavish jockey's heat! Subservient to Newmarket's annual cheat! With what reluctance do we lawyers bear, To fleece their country clients twice a year! Or managed in your schools, for fops to ride, How foam, how fret beneath a load of ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... but little progress, then the slender success that attends his research, aided by a slothful disposition, while it wearies his diligence disposes him to credulity. It was thus, that a crafty ambitious Arab, subtle and knavish in his manners, insinuating in his address, profiting by this credulous inclination, made his countrymen adopt his own fanciful reveries as permanent truths, of which it was not permitted them for an instant to doubt; following up these opinions ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... 'Tete d'Or.' My grandaughter keeps it. She is a mijauree, but not so knavish as most hotel-keepers, and her house ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... villain? no, he is my friend; Thou, but a poor anatomy of bones, Cas'd in a knavish tawny withered skin. Wilt thou not stoop? art thou so ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... souls. With such great show as they exhibit in their knavish life, as going through with mass, begging, singing, &c., do they allure and draw light-minded and unstable souls, who are without faith, to imagine that everything is spiritual; and all is shaped to this end, that men may think that in that estate every ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... reported with the boldest confidence, was, that I had my misses, yea, two wives at once, and the like. Now these slanders, with the others, I glory in, because but slanders, foolish, or knavish lies, and falsehoods cast upon me by the devil and his seed; and should I not be dealt with thus wickedly by the world, I should want one sign of a saint, and a child of God. "Blessed are ye (said the Lord Jesus) when men shall revile you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Great were our hopes, both of glory and of gold, in the kingdom of Powhatan. But it grieves me much to say that all hath resulted in infelicity, misfortune, and an unhappy end. Our ships were wrecked, or captured by the knavish Spaniards. Our brave sailors are perished. As I was blameworthy for thy risk, I send by the messenger your L50, which you shall not lose by my over-hopeful vision. For its usance I send a package of a new herb from the Chesapeake, called by the natives tobacco. Make it not into tea, as ...
— Shakespeare's Insomnia, And the Causes Thereof • Franklin H. Head
... crabbed Don's this with the knavish Look of an old plodding Conveyancer, whose Face and Profession are ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... to be a new ground of triumph for his enemies, and that it was a foothold for a new attack. By the threat of prosecution they strove to drive him to fly, and when he refused to yield to their threats, they contrived to make the King the agent in their knavish schemes, and procured from him the peremptory message which made Clarendon quit the field. No sooner was he gone, than the very flight which they had contrived was made the ground of new accusations, and he was sentenced to perpetual ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... foot. Should rain fall while in this situation, the indigo loses its colour and gloss, and is called aliad. Some deceitfully mix the crops of all the three years, steeping them together, which fraud is hard to be discovered, but is very knavish. Four things are required in good indigo; a pure grain, a violet colour, a gloss in the sun, and that it be light and dry, so that either swimming in water or burning in the fire it casts forth a pure light violet vapour, leaving ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... them all deadly, yet I am fain to give them good words. O, they are pestilent fellows, they speak nothing but bodkins, and piss vinegar. Well, do what I can in outward kindness to them, yet they do nothing but bewray my house: as there was one that made a couple of knavish verses on my country chimney, now in the time of my sojourning here at London; and it was thus— Sir Raderic keeps no chimney cavalier, That takes tobacco above once a year. And another made a couple of verses on my ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... that the beggarly knavish Crew will be this year also printing Prophecies and Predictions in my name, to cheat the country as they used to do. This is therefore to give notice, that if there is anything of that kind done in my name besides this Almanack printed by the Company of Stationers, you may ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... the poor wight of an usher to recover one penny of it—the legal condition of his doing so being his actual possession of the schoolhouse itself, of which Jack, by this last manoeuvre, had contrived to deprive him. But, as if to finish the matter, and to prove the knavish spirit in which this protestation was made, he instantly got a private friend and relative of his own, with whom the whole scheme had been arranged beforehand, to come forward and bring an action on the case, in which the latter claimed the whole fund which would have belonged to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... proves to be no more than a beggar's bag, bottle and staff, suitable to their present condition, but so little satisfying, that Newfangle receives a terrible drubbing for his trick. Judge Severity arrives on the scene conveniently to lecture him severely and witness his second knavish device, which is no other than to hand over to the Judge the two fugitives from justice, Cutpurse and Pickpurse, for the piece of land of which he spoke is the gallows. Hankin Hangman takes possession of his victims, and the Devil, entering with a 'Ho, ho, ho!', carries ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... yet the most vicious cannot totally efface in themselves the idea of true virtue. There never was yet any man upon earth that could prevail either with others, or himself, to allow, as a received maxim, that to be knavish, passionate, and mischievous, is more honourable than to be ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... realised. The gross, squarely-built man with the bushy whiskers and the light strange eyes, found success attend his every enterprise from that hour in which he had spilt life upon the pavement of the Convent chapel. The tarantula-pounce never missed a prey. Every knavish venture brought in money or money's worth, every base plot was carried through triumphantly. Bough, alias Van Busch, was not ordinarily a superstitious man, but his run of luck made him almost afraid ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... meddle with matters of State; but His Grace will have none of that. I can tell you no more. On the other hand if Chris thinks he must be a monk, well and good; I do not think so myself; but that is not my affair; but I hope he will not be a monk only because a knavish woman has put out her tongue at him, and repeated what a knavish priest has put into her mouth. But I suppose he had made up his ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... and show'd me much civility; while he, tho' the master, was a little neglected. In truth, he was an odd fish; ignorant of common life, fond of rudely opposing receiv'd opinions, slovenly to extream dirtiness, enthusiastic in some points of religion, and a little knavish withal. ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... in the course of our journey; and plainly perceived he had a fellow-feeling with the inn-keepers on the road; but, in other respects, he was very obliging, serviceable, and even entertaining. There are some knavish practices of this kind, at which a traveller will do well to shut his eyes, for his own ease and convenience. He will be lucky if he has to do with a sensible knave, like Joseph, who understood his interest too well ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... detection, as was my undeserved luck that night, I needed never to ask again why he had been willing to accept risks from which most men shrink from fear if not from conscience. He loved money, not as the spender loves it, openly and with luxurious instincts, but secretly and with a knavish dread of discovery which spoke of ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... as they are, and to illustrate their character; and, on that account, we have endeavoured, as much as possible, to bring them before the reader, and to make them speak for themselves. They are a half-civilised, unlettered people, proverbial for a species of knavish acuteness, which serves them in lieu of wisdom. To place in the mouth of such beings the high-flown sentiments of modern poetry would not answer our purpose, though several authors have not shrunk from such ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... little while and go away." And Al-Marwazi said to her, "Arise, thou, and hie thee home." So she arose and repaired to her house, whilst the man of Marw abode in his place till the night was half spent, when he said to himself, "How long? Yet how can I let this knavish dog die and lose the money? Better I open the tomb on him and bring him forth and take my due of him by dint of grievous beating and torment." Accordingly, he dug him up and pulled him forth of the grave; after which he betook himself to a garden hard by the burial-ground and cut thence staves ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the sun never sets here where we live. But now, what you call winter, is coming on. You will soon see us lie down, and we shall not rise again till the spring. Take my advice. Do not leave the lodge. I have sure knowledge that that knavish Island Spirit is on the prowl, and as he has command of a particular kind of storm, which comes from the south-west, he only waits his opportunity to catch you abroad and do you a mischief. Try and amuse yourself. That cupboard," pointing to a corner of the lodge, ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... timeservers that the world has ever seen. The English marvelled alike at both classes. There were indeed many stouthearted nonconformists in the South; but scarcely any who in obstinacy, pugnacity, and hardihood could bear a comparison with the men of the school of Cameron. There were many knavish politicians in the South; but few so utterly destitute of morality, and still fewer so utterly destitute of shame, as the men of the school of Lauderdale. Perhaps it is natural that the most callous and impudent vice should be found in the near neighbourhood of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... heart upon Crazy Jane, on finding that his father—who possessed as much firmness as he did of generosity—absolutely refused to pay for her, resolved to lose no more time in putting Bryan's friendship to the test. To this, indeed, he was urged by Burton, a wealthy but knavish country horse-dealer, as we said, who wrote to him that unless he paid for her within a given period, he must be under the necessity of closing with a person who had offered him a higher price. This message was very offensive to Hycy, whose great foible, ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... proclamations occasionally issued out to enforce them are wholly unregarded as things of form. Religious societies, though begun with excellent intention, and by persons of true piety,[4] have dwindled into factious clubs, and grown a trade to enrich little knavish informers of the meanest rank, such as common ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... not felt like writing; these last days have been so stodgy—sticky, I was going to say. Endless infant talk. The methods of head nurses, teething, the knavish tricks of nursemaids, patent foods, bottles, bibs—everything. Enough to put one off forever from wishing to get married. And Mary Mackintosh sitting there all out of shape, expounding theories that can have no results in practice, ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... not that from the inception of our acquaintance with the pages of Plautus we have all passed through a similar experience. In the beginning we have been vastly diverted by the quips and cranks and merry wiles of the knavish slave, the plaints of love-lorn youth, the impotent rage of the baffled pander, the fruitless growlings of the hungry parasite's belly. We have been amused, perhaps astonished, on further reading, at meeting our new-found friends ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... friends with all of them. Sunday I shall go to walk with Votini, the well-dressed boy who is always polishing himself up, and who is so envious of Derossi. In the meantime, Garoffi came to the house to-day,—that long, lank boy, with the nose like an owl's beak, and small, knavish eyes, which seem to be ferreting everywhere. He is the son of a grocer; he is an eccentric fellow; he is always counting the soldi that he has in his pocket; he reckons them on his fingers very, very rapidly, ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... into the water again, and to forbid killing any but wild animals, much more noble is it, in dissensions and differences with human beings, to be a generous, just and true enemy, and to check and tame all bad and low and knavish propensities, that in all intercourse with friends a man may keep the peace and abstain from doing an injury. Scaurus was an enemy and accuser of Domitius, but when one of Domitius' slaves came to him to reveal some important matters ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... a canting, knavish hypocrite; one of the four guardians of Anne Lovely, the heiress. Colonel Feignwell personates Simon Pure, and obtains the Quaker's consent to his marriage with Anne Lovely.—Mrs. Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... shouts loudly for me to stop, and the mirza and mudbake supplement his vocal exertions by gesticulating to the same purpose. Dismounting, and allowing them to approach, in reply to my query of "Chi mi khoi?" the khan's knavish countenance becomes overspread with a ridiculously thin and transparent assumption of seriousness and importance, and pointing to an imaginary boundary-line at his horse's feet he says: "Bur-raa (brother), Afghanistan." "Khylie koob, Afghanistan inja-koob, hoob, sowari." (Very good, I understand, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Shang had no other evidence than the natural cunning of his own knavish soul—but he imagined in the intentions of Gust what he himself would have been glad to accomplish had the means lain ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... him, with outrageous crimes and frauds. The conflict between the Mormons and the Missourians resulted in the migration of the former to Nauvoo in Illinois, where a community was organized in which Smith exercised supreme power. In 1843 Smith, who was as profligate as he was knavish, professed to receive a revelation sanctioning polygamy. His bad conduct, and that of his adherents, brought on a conflict with the civil authorities. Smith, with his brother, was killed in the jail by a mob. Driven out of Nauvoo, the ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... want of a beating. The heroic penchant lay snugly latent in his heart, unchecked and unmodified. He flattered himself that he was achieving a capital imposition upon the world at large, that he was actually hoaxing mankind in general, and that such an excellent piece of knavish tranquillity had never been perpetrated before ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... these knavish traders gave their customers, who could not conveniently pay their money down, was carried to an exorbitant charge; since, even in Elizabeth's reign, it was one of the popular grievances brought into Parliament—it is there called, "A bill against Double Payments of Book ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... personal attractions had won her heart and her allegiance, and that she, and not himself, was the victim. He had tried to use her in the accomplishment of outside purposes; to make a tool of her in carrying forward his mercenary or knavish ends. Other men had striven to hide their unlovely affairs from her, but the new lover had exposed his, and claimed her assistance in carrying them forward. This was a degradation that she could not submit to. It did not natter her, or minister ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... vigour quite unparalleled in its native soil. Unscrupulous persons take advantage of this extraordinary accident. From a country so near and so readily accessible they can get plants home, pot them up, and sell them, before the withering process sets in. May this revelation confound such knavish tricks! The moral is old—buy your orchids from one of the great dealers, if you do not care ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... pressed heavily in London, where you pay half-a-crown at least for a bed that would cost only a shilling in the provinces. In the midst of his knaveries, and what were even more shocking to my remembrance, his confidential discoveries in his rambling conversations of knavish designs, (not always pecuniary,) there was a light of wandering misery in his eye at times, which affected me afterwards at intervals when I recalled it in the radiant happiness of nineteen, and amidst the solemn tranquillities of Oxford. That of itself was interesting; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... French tragedy, red-heeled, patched, and be-periwigged, lies in the grave; and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess has raised. There are classical comedies in verse, too, wherein the knavish valets, rakish heroes, stolid old guardians, and smart, free-spoken serving-women, discourse in Alexandrines, as loud as the Horaces or the Cid. An Englishman will seldom reconcile himself to the roulement of the verses, and the painful recurrence of the rhymes; for my part, I had ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... set on dishes and tasted them, Shaft-mon, handbreadth, Shaw, thicket, Sheef, thrust, Sheer-Thursday, Thursday in Holy Week, Shend, harm, Shenship, disgrace, Shent, undone, blamed, Shour, attack, Shrew, rascal, Shrewd, knavish, Sib, akin to, Sideling, sideways, Siege, seat, Signified, likened, Siker, sure, Sikerness, assurance, Sith, since, Sithen, afterwards, since, Skift, changed, Slade, valley, Slake, glen, Soil (to go to), hunting ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... biscuits. I had been seated a very short time only, when the quick, consequential step, and sharp, cracked voice of Dr Lee sounded along the passage; and after a momentary pause at the bar, his round, smirking, good-humoured, knavish face looked in at the parlour-door, where, seeing me alone, he winked with uncommon expression, and said aloud: 'A prime fire in the smoking-room, I see; I shall treat myself to a whiff there presently.' This said, the shining face vanished, in order, I doubted ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... world! Art thou mad to fellow thy beloved with my beloved?" He said, "Allah upon thee, O my lady, go back with me and look upon my mistress, and after I will with thee and look upon thy beloved." She answered, "It must needs be so, O accursed, for thou art a knavish devil; but I will not go with thee nor shalt thou come with me, save upon condition of a wager which is this. If the lover thou lovest and of whom thou boastest so bravely, prove handsomer than mine whom I mentioned and whom I love and of whom ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... charlatan who is exactly on the level of the Indian Medicine Man, to the regular practitioner, and to the scientific student of mind and body and of the properties of the materia medica. Why, even here in Connecticut, it is impossible to get a law to protect the community from the imposition of knavish or ignorant quacks, and to require of a man some evidence of capacity and training and skill, before he is let loose to experiment upon suffering humanity. Our teachers must pass an examination—though the examiner sometimes does not know as much as the candidate,—for misguiding the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... people, religious because there is communication with spirits. In the Californian tribes and others they become occasions of merrymaking; a peculiar feature of these gatherings among the Maidu and other tribes is the presence of a clown who mimics the acts and words of the dancers and performs knavish tricks; the origin of this feature of the dances is not clear. In all such ceremonies the tendency to regulate the details of religious performances is apparent, and such regulation is found in so many parts of the ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... be ranked among the best classes of the Indians. They are malicious, revengeful, and knavish. Their character has evidently deteriorated amidst the numerous revolutions which preceded the establishment of the Republic, and the frequent passage of troops through the town. The Padre Requena sketched to me a terrible picture of his Indios brutos; ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... others, while his own occupations claim his attention,—he refuses, I say, to aid others in getting a foothold, as he was aided in getting his own; and when, in the impotence of their isolation, these poor laborers are compelled to sell their birthright, he—this ungrateful proprietor, this knavish upstart—stands ready to put the finishing touch to their deprivation and their ruin. And you ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... which was on both the obverse and reverse of the coin. Beaumont and Fletcher, in the 'Scornful Lady,' show the difference between the penny and three-farthing piece, and inform us of a knavish trick then practised, to impose upon ignorant people the lesser as the greater coin. Lovelass, speaking of Morecraft, the usurer, says: 'He had a bastard, his own toward issue, whipt and thin cropt, for washing out the rose in three ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... them not. For this I overlook your prying—nay, more, I will in confidence explain the secret of this chamber; but, mark you! keep it, or I shall soil my rapier with thy knavish blood. This private entrance hath much served me ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... The address of a combatant, expert in all the niceties of his art, who knows how to shift and ward dexterously, to put the change upon his adversary with art and subtlety, and to improve the least advantages, must not be confounded here with the cowardly and knavish cunning of one who, without regard to the laws prescribed, employs the most unfair means to vanquish his competitor. Those who disputed the prize in the several kinds of combats, drew lots for their precedency ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... cut-throat alleys, south of the Ghetto, along the Tiber bank. Night after night, accompanied by his stout young vicar, Don Giorgio Appolloni, the Cardinal worked there as hard as any hard-working curate: visiting the sick, comforting the afflicted, admonishing the knavish, persuading the drunken from their taverns, making peace between the combative. Not infrequently, when he came home, he would add a pair of stilettos to his already large collection of such relics. And his homecomings were apt to be late—oftener ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... over me when I recovered consciousness. I lay stretched upon the bed across which that blackguard Belville had struck his knavish blow. The suit-case was on the floor, but ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... are standing here," said the apprentice; "and if you want further proof, behold, he is closing his visor. He thinks to hide himself from our notice; but the trick shall not avail him. A groan for the knavish extortioner, my masters—a deep groan for ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... once, in the city of Baghdad, a man, [by name El Merouzi,][FN30] who was a sharper and plagued[FN31] the folk with his knavish tricks, and he was renowned in all quarters [for roguery]. [He went out one day], carrying a load of sheep's dung, and took an oath that he would not return to his lodging till he had sold it at the price of raisins. Now there was in another city a second sharper, ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... Auditors of the Exchequer at the Dolphin by Mr. Wayth's desire, and after dinner fell to business relating to Sir G. Carteret's account, and so home to the office, where Sir W. Batten begins, too fast, to shew his knavish tricks in giving what price he pleases for commodities. So abroad, intending to have spoke with my Lord Chancellor about the old business of his wood at Clarendon, but could not, and so home again, and late at my office, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... to your opinion, father; if we could get together some thirty trusty fellows, and the means of carrying our provisions, we would march from one end of the country to the other, and compel those knavish Indians at the point of our swords to deliver up their prisoners," answered Roger; "we might then, perchance, fall in also with Captain Audley, if he is, as I trust, still in the land ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... their bosom from the first, a vehement inclination to dishonest ways. Knavish propensities are inherent: born with the child and transmissible from parent to son. The children of a sturdy thief, if taken from him at birth and reared by honest men, would, doubtless, have to contend ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... in a similar style every card of the pack exposed some knavish scheme, and ridiculed the persons who were its dupes. It was computed that the total amount of the sums proposed for carrying on these projects was upwards of three hundred millions sterling, a sum so immense that it exceeded the value of ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... remark that no Nation will throw-by its work, and deliberately go out to make a scene, without meaning something thereby. For indeed no scenic individual, with knavish hypocritical views, will take the trouble to soliloquise a scene: and now consider, is not a scenic Nation placed precisely in that predicament of soliloquising; for its own behoof alone; to solace its own sensibilities, maudlin or other?—Yet in this respect, of readiness ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... he, with the familiar air of a privileged servant, "did you see that knavish-looking Gabinius following Madame Fabia all the way back ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... is in the air?" thought Little John. "Some knavish business doubtless, or my friend Roger would not be in it. By my faith, ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... who broke the silence, saying, with his predetermined smirk, that the parchment was ready for my signature. Thinking it well beneath me to measure words with this knavish pettifogger, I looked beyond him and ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... went on. No trick was too knavish or too despicable to prevent our guardian learning the truth concerning our plight. He very rarely walked about unaccompanied. Tongue in cheek, the Germans, who always were cognisant of the object of his visit, and who had always taken temporary measures to prove the grievance to be ill-founded, ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... To bitterness, and all our lives o'erflow Till dearest love be grown a hateful woe; My sun of youth has set, methinks it should Have set with such a splendour as had all My sober days with mellow light imbued; O bitter sun of youth whose knavish pledge Of high-born hope and holy privilege But led me undefended to my fall, O lamentable day when I was born! What shapes are those that mock me with their scorn? What trumpet-call is this within my breast? I am grown wise, my senses are increased, It is the breath ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... examination, God be thanked), and putting a piece of cloth into my hands, asked me, 'Sir, is there enough of this to make me a cap?' I, measuring the piece, answered Yes. Now he bade me view it again, and see if there was not enough for two. I guessed his drift, and told him there was. Persisting in his knavish intentions, my customer went on increasing the number of caps, and I still saying yes, till we came to five caps. A little time ago he came to claim them. I offered them to him, but he refuses to pay me ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... send what majority he will to the House of Commons pledged to amend the Education Act of 1902: he does it in vain. The House of Lords—which is really not a political but a social body, the citadel of a class—will confound his politics, frustrate his knavish tricks. Can you wonder that he loses his temper, sometimes inelegantly? And when the rich Nonconformist tires of striving against all the odds—when he sets up his carriage and his wife and daughters find that it won't carry ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... which it is developed from the modern fashion of composition. The lover remains in the country and the heroine in her chamber during the whole action, leaving their fate to be decided by a foolish father, a cunning mother, and two knavish servants. Machiavelli has executed his task with judgment and taste. He has accommodated the plot to a different state of society, and has very dexterously connected it with the history of his own times. The relation of the trick put on the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at graze. He therefore affirms In confident terms, That his active courage and earnest zeal Have usefully served your common weal: He has openly shown The style and tone Of your democracy ruling abroad, He has placed its practices on record; The tyrannical arts, the knavish tricks, That poison all your politics. Therefore shall we see, this year, The allies with tribute arriving here, Eager and anxious all to behold Their steady protector, the bard so bold; The bard, they say, that has dared to speak, To attack ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Colomba resolutely, "you are deceived. You do not know the lawyer. He is the most cunning and knavish of men. I beseech you not to make Orso do a thing that would overwhelm him ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... terrible hours—terrible and yet worthy that I should wish them back again—have I often wept on Bendel's bosom, when, after the first unconscious intoxication, I recollected myself, looked sharply into myself—I, without a shadow, with knavish selfishness destroying this angel, this pure soul which I had deceived and stolen. Then did I resolve to reveal myself to her; then did I swear with a most passionate oath to tear myself from her, and to fly; then did I burst out ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... this state of things was that a crowd of projectors, ingenious and absurd, honest and knavish, employed themselves in devising new schemes for the employment of redundant capital. It was about the year 1688 that the word stockjobber was first heard in London. In the short space of four years a crowd of companies, every one of which confidently ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... acknowledge; but without fear and trembling, as my Reflectors would have it. For why should I fear my representatives? they are summoned to consult about the public good, and not to frighten those who chose them. It is for you to tremble, who libel the supreme authority of the nation. But we knavish coxcombs and villains are to know, say my authors, that "a vote is the opinion of that House." Lord help our understandings, that know not this without their telling! What Englishman, do you think, does not honour ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... clear, I'll manage him you need not fear; The Case is judg'd, good Sir, but look In Galen, No—in my Lord Cook, I vow to God I was mistook: I'll take out a Provincial Writ, And trounce him for his Knavish Wit; Upon my Life we'll win the Cause, With all the ease I cure the (kk) Yaws; Resolv'd to plague the holy Brother, I set one Rogue to catch another; To try the cause then fully bent, Up to (ll) Annapolis I went, A City Situate on a Plain, ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... he struck, With his broad head, 'Gainst the old column of the house-wall. Uller's splendid flatterer Swung the iron beam Straight 'gainst the head Of the knavish giant. ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... he is represented by Dryden as an Irishman, "when he knows that I never saw Ireland till I was three-and-twenty years old, and was there but for four months." He had understood Dryden's parable literally; so true it is, that a knavish speech ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... to him a knavish lawyer named Vholes, who made him believe the great chancery suit must soon end in his favor, and who (when Richard had put the case in his hands) proceeded to rob him of all he had. He poisoned his mind, too, against ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... your shape and making quite, Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite Called GRANDOLPH GOODFELLOW. Are you not he That did your best to spill Lord S-L-SB-RY? Gave the Old Tory party quite a turn, And office with snug perquisites did spurn? And now you'd make Strong Drink to bear no barm (Or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... he is able to regain his money from a second robber. This feature of the magic beating-stick seems to be borrowed from the preceding story. He now returns the cane to the old woman, and she sells him a magic guitar. The next adventure—with his former master, who is substituted for the knavish monk—contains a distorted reminiscence of the shooting of the bird, and ends with the dance among the thorns (here bamboo-spines). The hero is bought off by his master, who immediately rushes to town and accuses him of theft. The rest ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... here, that this lay Pharisee, Ananias, is we have seen he was, sect. 39, took upon him to appoint a fast at Tiberias, and was obeyed; though indeed it was not out of religion, but knavish policy.] ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... undetermined thoughts to the study of astrology as his principal pursuit, he put himself in the year 1632 under the tuition of one Evans, whom he describes as poor, ignorant, drunken, presumptuous and knavish, but who had a character, as the phrase was, for erecting a figure, predicting future events, discovering secrets, restoring stolen goods, and even for raising a spirit when he pleased. Sir Kenelm Digby was one of the most promising characters ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
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