FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • More 'Motley' Quotes from Famous Books

... were employes of the mines of less note, clerks of the comerciantes, young farmers of the valley, gambucinos, vaqueros, ciboleros, and even "leperos" of the town, shrouded in their cheap serapes. A motley throng was ...

— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid

... our way. I sometimes wonder what thoughts come to the eagle that perches over the great stone gateway on Ellis Island, as he watches the procession that files through it into the United States day after day, and never ends. He looks out of his grave, unblinking eye at the motley crowd, but gives no sign. Does he ask: "Where are the Pilgrim Fathers, the brave Huguenots, the patient Puritans, the sturdy priests, and the others that came for conscience' sake to build upon this continent a home for freedom? And these, why do they ...

— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... which he could be capable. He considered himself as an inexhaustible quarry of humours, vanities, jealousies, whims, absurd enthusiasms, absurd mortifications. He was able, as he said, to sit at his ease in the side-scene and see himself jigging on the stage in motley or the tragic sock—see himself as a lover, and cry aloud in delight at the mad persistence of the fool he appeared; see himself directing the affairs of the nation, and be ready to die of laughing at himself ...

— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... vale, where the Cherwell and the Isis mingle their full, clear waters. Here and there primeval elms and oaks overshadow them; while in their various windings they encircle gardens, meadows, and fields, villages, cottages, farm-houses, and country-seats, in motley mixture. In the midst rises a mass of mighty buildings, the general character of which varies between convent, palace, and castle. Some few Gothic church-towers and Romaic domes, it is true, break through the horizontal lines; yet the ...

— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... Charles had said—built in a lane leading out of the principal street. This lane was almost blocked up with play-goers of all ranks and in all sorts of equipages, from the coach-and-six to the sedan-chair, mingled with a motley crowd on foot, all jostling, fighting, and screaming, till the ...

— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... assortment also. They came along in straggling companies, their personal goods and small stock of cabin wares usually tied up in bundles and slung upon a stick across the shoulder. In fact the whole valley was literally pouring itself out northward, and in wild confusion. If in that motley crowd of fugitives there was one brave heart worthy to enjoy the free institutions which the starry banner symbolizes, he must have hung his head in shame as he passed under the shadow of the fort whose protection he sought, where he himself should have been, one of ten thousand ...

— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood

... was apprised of the situation. It was the intention of the mate and crew to murder him and the Captain and put the vessel about for a piratical cruise in the Indian Ocean. They were a motley gang of foreigners, low bred and capable of any crime when led by a man like the mate, fresh from a career of ...

— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds

... prospect of success, had certainly given the lady's complexion a fine tint. Her dainty profile offered a striking contrast to the motley crew of negroid Arabs who surrounded her. And she came to meet them in a buoyant spirit, though the fierce sun was scorching her delicate skin through the ...

— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy

... neither class; my persuasion is that they originated in some brain now far distant; that that brain had no distinct volition in anything that occurred; that what does occur reflects but its devious, motley, ever-shifting, half-formed thoughts; in short, that it has been but the dreams of such a brain put in action and invested with a semi-substance. That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it is malignant and destructive, ...

— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... landing, I found the streets nearly deserted, although it was the hour when the business of the day is usually transacted. Soon I discovered the cause. The militia of the place were out on parade. Preceded by a colored band, playing national airs—in doleful keeping with the occasion—and followed by a motley collection of negroes of all sexes and ages, the company was entering the principal thoroughfare. As it passed me, I could judge of the prowess of the redoubtable captain, who, according to Pompey, will hang the President "so high de crows won't scent him." He was a harmless-looking young man, ...

— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore

... Ophites, 1864). See also Lipsius, "Ophit. Systeme", i. d. Ztschr. f. wiss. Theol. 1863. IV, 1864, I. These schools claimed for themselves the name Gnostic (Hippol. Philosoph. V. 6). A part of them, as is specially apparent from Orig. c. Celsum. VI., is not to be reckoned Christian. This motley group is but badly known to us through Epiphanius, much better through the original Gnostic writings preserved in the Coptic language. (Pistis Sophia and the works published by Carl Schmidt Texte u. Unters. Bd. VIII.). Yet these original ...

— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... crowded with folks in motley garments showing signs of wear and tear. Their possessions were done up in bags and shapeless bundles, rolled in pieces of sacking, old shawls, red-and-white-checkered table-cloths. The men, with drawn and heavy faces, waited patiently. The women collected and watched ...

— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke

... he, 'amidst this motley crew Of Georgians, Russians, Nubians, and what not, All ragamuffins differing but in hue, With whom it is our luck to cast our lot, The only gentlemen seem I and you; So let us be acquainted, as we ought: If I could yield you any consolation, 'T would ...

— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... the world had shown by day; Now listening to the lark, she stray'd across the flowery hill, Where trickles down from bowering groves the brook that turns the mill; And now she roam'd the city lanes, where human tongues are loud, And mix the lofty and the low amid the motley crowd, Where subtle-eyed philosophy oft heaves a sigh, to scan The aspiring grasp, and paltry insignificance ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... characterizes the true-born Briton. But the great event of the morning was the arrival of the mail-train, bringing the bags destined for various African ports, loose letters for the passengers, and a motley contingent of the passengers themselves. Amongst these latter, he had no difficulty in recognizing the two Jewesses, of whom the clerk in the office had spoken, who were accompanied by individuals, presumably their ...

— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard

... and took the command of the motley besieging force. One thousand of the best men in the fleet were sent to assist in the siege. Just at this time Nelson received a peremptory order from Lord Keith to sail with the whole of his force for the protection of Minorca; or, at least, to retain ...

— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey

... blundered out a detail of this warlike experiences—and the absurd grimaces which he made in order to enforce his story, provoked not only the risibility of Charles, but even of the statesmen around him, and added absurdity to the motley complexion of the scene. The King terminated this dispute, by commanding ...

— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... touching these well-known words, MR. G. LLOYD says, "It is also stated, I do not know on what authority, that the old and lamented warrior, Sir Charles Napier, wrote on the conquest of Scinde, Peccavi!" The author of Democritus in London, with the Mad Pranks and Comical Conceits of Motley and Robin Good-Fellow, thus alludes to this saying in that work. I presume he had ...

— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various

... this motley crew would have convinced us, had we not been quite sure of it already, that we had no favour to expect. There was not a countenance among them that exhibited the slightest trait of grace or mercy. No such expression could be seen around us, and we felt satisfied that our time ...

— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... familiar strains that used to call him to his task, and had leaped the fence and made his way to where the crowd was gathered, to play his pretty part on the village green, before the sober citizens of Centerville and Hilltown, as he had played it hundreds of times before, under the canvas, to the motley crowd drawn together by the attractions of ...

— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning

... at him, lost in astonishment. There he was before me, in motley, as though he had absconded from a troupe of mimes, enthusiastic, fabulous. His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he ...

— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... not to let go till she had seen him in the bosom of his class-mates. There a sullen wild-eyed mite in petticoats was being dragged along, screaming, towards distasteful durance. It was a drab picture—the bleak, leaden sky above, the sloppy, miry stones below, the frowsy mothers and fathers, the motley children. ...

— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... have the most uniform upper class and the most varied democracy. In France it is the peasants who are solid to uniformity; it is the marquises who are a little mad. But in England, while good form restrains and levels the universities and the army, the poor people are the most motley and amusing creatures in the world, full of humorous affections and prejudices and twists of irony. Frenchmen tend to be alike, because they are all soldiers; Prussians because they are all something else, probably policemen; even Americans ...

— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... dance and tremble all the young leaves of a wild plant. Even when at the convent she had been fond of repeating the infant rhymes with which they had sought to lull or to amuse her, but now the taste was more strongly developed. She confounded, however, in meaningless and motley disorder, the various snatches of song that came to her ear, weaving them together in some form which she understood, but which was jargon to all others; and often, as she went alone through the green lanes or the bustling ...

— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... when he was very genuine, she had been attracted by him. Now, in New York, when he was dressed up in motley, with painted face and eyes that strove, though sometimes in vain, to be false, he fascinated her. The new Claude, harder, more dominant, secretly unhappy, feverish with a burning excitement of soul and brain, appealed ...

— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... at length, by the influence of books upon men, did to a certain degree really become so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one nation to another, and with the progress of refinement this diction became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of tricks, ...

— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... mix'd, conspicuous: some recline in groups, Scanning the motley scene that varies round; There some grave Moslem to devotion stoops, And some that smoke, and some that play, are found; Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground; Half whispering there the Greek is heard to prate; Hark! from the mosque the nightly solemn sound, ...

— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore

... in her most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honour they acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered to Christianity. In the following pages we shall ransack the stores of both, to discover the true spirit that animated the motley multitude who took up arms in the service of the cross, leaving history to vouch for facts, but not disdaining the aid of contemporary poetry and romance, to throw light upon feelings, motives, ...

— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... Strongbow. The advantage of a numerous, loyal, and able-bodied population was seen in 1573, when the Earl of Essex passed through the place on his way to Ireland. It happened that he left behind him a detachment of soldiers, and the "motley coats" and "blue coats," having quarrelled, used their weapons on each other. With admirable promptitude, the Mayor summoned the trained bands, and the rest of the story may be told in the ...

— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... and one of his lieutenants, filled the two mansions with intoxicating music. The motley crowd whirled in the waltz until they presented a curious confusion of velvets, satins, laces, and diamonds. Almost every head and bosom sparkled with jewels; the palest cheeks were rosy; heavy eyes now shone like stars; and the glistening ...

— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau

... and so forth; during which contemplation the joke was uttered and laughed at, and Mr. M., resuming his professional duties, was tumbling over head and heels. Do not suppose I am going, sicut est mos, to indulge in moralities about buffoons, paint, motley, and mountebanking. Nay, Prime Ministers rehearse their jokes; Opposition leaders prepare and polish them; Tabernacle preachers must arrange them in their minds before they utter them. All I mean is, that I would like to know any one of ...

— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Gardens are kept going by Belfast. The Dublin Botanical Gardens are wholly supported by Government. Further examples are needless, the facts being simple as they are undeniable. Dublin gets everything. Belfast gets absolutely nothing. Disloyalty is at a premium. Motley's the only wear. The screamers are always getting something to stop their mouths, a sop, not a gag. Steady, quiet, hard-working folks are of no account. The Belfast men ask for nothing, and get it. They want no pecuniary aid, being used to self-help, and liking it best. Stiff ...

— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... time; after which it is whitewashed. The roof was thatched with a hard sort of rushes, more durable and less likely to catch fire than straw. There was no ceiling under the roof, but the rafters overhead were hung with a motley assemblage of the produce of the chase and farm, as large whips made of rhinoceros-hide, leopard and lion skins, ostrich eggs and feathers, strings of onions, rolls of tobacco, ...

— The Mission • Frederick Marryat

... 1841, Henry A. Wise uttered "a motley compound of eloquence and folly, of braggart impudence and childish vanity, of self-laudation and Virginian narrow-mindedness." After him Hubbard, of Alabama, "began grunting against the tariff." Three days later Black, of Georgia, "poured forth his black bile" for an hour and a ...

— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse

... Tartar Wall posts had to be abandoned. With the German retirement the Americans abandoned their positions facing west and rushed down to safety below. It cannot be said that the Americans are afraid; they have merely realised from the beginning what a few of us have understood. The motley crowd gathered in the British Legation, as well as our commander-in-chief, were much stirred by the American retirement, for they already saw themselves directly bombarded from the menacing height of the city walls—a ...

— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... came. Nea and Maya, walking side by side. Behind them were half a dozen women, playing fifes and horns. One was carrying a tattered flag. Behind the musicians came a motley crowd. Old women, young women, half-grown children, and dozens of old men. All were armed. And they came forward like the wrack of a ...

— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam

... cordially,—revolve in succession like the different figures in a magic lantern, while the place of Punch and Pierrot is supplied by a host of laborious drolls and gens a l'incroyable. The various members of this motley assemblage appear also more distinct from each other, as connected in the recollection with places so strongly marked by historical events, or bearing in themselves so peculiar a character:—the place Louis Quinze, the grim old Conciergerie, the ...

— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... as he bid them, gladly enough, for it had begun to drizzle and Cicely was afraid lest her boy, with whom London did not agree too well, should take cold. Here, then, they stood amusing themselves in watching the motley throng that came and went. Bolle, to whom the scene was strange, gaped at them with his mouth open; Emlyn took note of every one with her quick eyes, while old Jacob Smith whispered tales concerning individuals as they passed, ...

— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard

... an effort to retard the march of the enemy. From the reports of scouts we began to understand what was occurring. Before dawn on the eighteenth of June the British army began leaving the city, crossing the Delaware at Gloucester Point, and by evening the motley host, comprising Regulars, Hessians, Loyalists, and a swarm of camp followers, were halted near Haddenfield, five ...

— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish

... while other sweat-streaked, motley-dressed homeseekers would straggle up to this end of the long trail. Their thoughts went back to their old homes, or to the loved ones that they had laid away tenderly in the shifting sands of the Plains. Most of them faced the future with fortitude; the difficulties they ...

— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker

... as they drove along, to remarks about the people they passed, the doings of the Newport summer, concerning which he had heard all the gossip during the last few hours, the prospect of Madame Patti in opera during the coming season, horses, dogs, and mutual friends—all the motley array of subjects permissible, desultory, and amusing. Suddenly, as they bowled out on an open road by the sea, ...

— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford

... It is now part of Finsbury Park, but in the middle of the last century its long-room 'on popular holydays, such as Whit Sunday, might be seen crowded as early as nine or ten in the morning with a motley assemblage eating rolls and butter and drinking tea at an extravagant price.' 'Hone remembered the old Hornsey Wood House as it stood embowered, and seeming a part of the wood. It was at that time kept by two sisters—Mrs. Lloyd and Mrs. Collier—and these aged ...

— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... commencement we touch one of the secondary interests of the book, the incidental characters. Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, the Pope, and, in a lesser degree, Violante and Pietro, are the chief characters, and the main interest contracts around them. But, through all they say and do, as a motley crowd through a street, a great number of minor characters move to and fro; and Browning, whose eye sees every face, and through the face into the soul, draws them one by one, some more fully than others in perhaps a hundred lines, some only in ten. Most of them are types ...

— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... His parents were dead, perhaps happily for them; his relatives had seen little of him, and had scarce heard as much about him as the outside world. No man is a prophet in his own country, and, even if he migrates, it is advisable for him to leave his family at home. His friends were a motley crew; friends of the same friend are not necessarily friends of one another. But their diversity only made the congruity of the tale they had to tell more striking. It was the tale of a man who had never made ...

— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... customs and ceremonies are quite dissimilar. If any proof were wanted to shew the power of European influence in removing prejudices or effecting a total revulsion of their former habits and customs, a stronger one could scarcely be given than this motley assembly of "all nations and languages." In their primitive state such a meeting could never take place; the distant tribes would never have dreamt of attempting to pass through the country of the intermediate ones, nor would the latter have allowed a passage ...

— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... to find a vessel suited for their purpose. After inspecting a number, a beautiful little Spanish schooner, of about eighty tons, which had just come into the harbour, was purchased, and a motley crew engaged. The crew consisted of one Englishman, who had been twenty years from home, a negro, a Tahitian, and a native Indian; but still they all pulled wonderfully well together. Charley Blount was ...

— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston

... and of generous though rather unchastened taste, finding, as Peacock says, in the earliest of his gibes at the universities, that there are no such things as men of taste and philosophy in Oxford, assembles a motley host in London, and asks them down to his place at Llanberis. The adventures of the visit (ending up with several weddings) form the scheme of the book, as indeed repetitions of something very little different form the scheme of all the other books, with the exception of The Misfortunes of ...

— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... next lid, scratched and worn, And within a motley store Of headless dolls, of schoolbooks torn, Birds and beasts that speak no more, Spoils brought home from the fairy ground Only trod by youthful feet, Dreams of a future never found, Memories of a past still sweet, Half-writ poems, stories wild, April letters, warm and cold, Diaries of a wilful ...

— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... farcical, which apparently seems to be introduced more arbitrarily, but which, however, is founded on imitation of some actual custom. This is the introduction of the merrymaker, the fool with his cap and bells and motley dress, called more commonly in England "clown," who appears in several comedies, though not in all, but, of the tragedies, in Lear alone, and who generally merely exercises his wit in conversation with the principal persons, though he is also sometimes incorporated ...

— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... sat down on a stool to have a pair of ready-made half-boots fitted on. I have been seduced more than once, in that street on a Saturday night, by a show-van at a corner; and have gone in, with a very motley assemblage, to see the Fat Pig, the Wild Indian, and the Little Lady. There were two or three hat manufactories there then (I think they are there still); and among the things which, encountered anywhere, or under any circumstances, will instantly recall that time, ...

— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... of troops gradually debouched into view upon the plain—a motley crowd of infantry clad in rags so effectually bleached and discoloured by exposure to rain and sun that it would probably have puzzled their own officers to name the various regiments to which they belonged; about one hundred ...

— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood

... unnoticed man of prompt decision, resource, and confidence, will take the command, whatever his position. Hope, as well as timidity and fear, is infectious, and one cheery voice will revive the drooping spirits of a multitude. Paul had already established his personal ascendency in that motley company of Roman soldiers, prisoners, sailors, and disciples. Now he stands forward with calm confidence, and infuses new hope into them all. What a miraculous change passes on externals when faith looks ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... Such a motley set of wedding guests as they were, with their coats inside out and their other disguises! Such a race of pied pipers! And looking at their hangdog faces you would have said, "Such a lot of sheep-thieves!" Though ...

— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston

... are twelve feet thick at the piers, and six feet thick at the embrasures. It rises sheer out of the water, and is apparently situated in the centre of the bay, but on its side towards James Island the water is extremely shallow. It mounts sixty-eight guns, of a motley but efficient description. Ten-inch columbiads predominate, and are perhaps the most useful. They weigh 14,000 lb. (125 cwt.), throw a solid shot weighing 128 lb., and are made to traverse with the greatest ease by means of Yates's system of cogwheels. There ...

— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle

... such a contest the immortal gods descend, fight with human weapons, and dispute in human terms! Where is the single purpose that should mark the divine will? where the repose of the wisdom that foreordained and knows the end? Not, it is clear, in this motley array of capricious and passionate wills! Then, perhaps, in Zeus, Zeus, who is lord of all? He, at least, will impose upon this mob of recalcitrant deities the harmony which the pious soul demands. He, whose rod shakes the sky, will arise and assert ...

— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... curious marbles which are the just glory of this surprising part of the world, I could scarcely contrive, perhaps, to arrange them so meanly as not to gain some attention from the respect due to the places they once belonged to. Such a piece of motley Mosaic work will these anecdotes inevitably make. But let the reader remember that he was promised nothing better, and so be ...

— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... hair grows, the binding is lengthened also, and only about four or five inches are suffered to escape from this confinement, and are then frizzed and curled, like a mop or a poodle's coat. Leonard Harper and I returned in this boat, Tahitian steering, Samoan, Futuman, and Anaiteans making one motley crew. The brisk trade soon carried us to the beach in front of Mr. Inglis's house, and arrived at the reef I rode out pick-a-back on the Samoan, Leonard following on a half-naked Anaitean. We soon found ourselves in the midst of ...

— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... mind of Joseph Smith had overmastered Susannah's mind. As Elvira had said, he, lying in a gaol far away, enduring hardship, imminent danger of torturing death, was by his spirit animating this motley crowd, and now at last again his will broke down the barriers of reason that Susannah had raised and fortified even against the love of her child and the long reverence she had yielded to her husband. ...

— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... million persons. So Prale swung his stick jauntily, and hummed the Spanish love song again, and told himself that Rufus Shepley and Kate Gilbert, old Griffin and the hotel manager and the rest of the motley crew that had made the day miserable for him amounted to nothing in the broader scheme of things, and were not ...

— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong

... this violent emotion, was a young man, dressed in a mean and tattered garb, his face begrimed corresponding with that of the motley crew by which he was surrounded. He was a perfect stranger to the others present, and had not participated in their previous conversation, nor been personally addressed by ...

— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn

... of venturesome mind, must needs attempt all manner of tricks upon this motley company of soldiers. He would dig a pit with Little John and Much, and hide it up with branches and earth, so that Master Carfax might stray into it and haply break ...

— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick

... the room was full. It was a motley crowd, as all classes of Winsted were represented. The would-be Smart Set in rather elaborate hats and gowns, mingled with the quieter Three R's, and their own maid servants and the "gentlemen ...

— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett

... you please, the Jack Pudding to the company, whose business it was to crack the best joke, and sing the best song,—he could. Unluckily, however, this functionary was for the present obliged to absent himself from St. Ronan's; for, not recollecting that he did not actually wear the privileged motley of his profession, he had passed some jest upon Captain MacTurk, which cut so much to the quick, that Mr. Meredith was fain to go to goat-whey quarters, at some ten miles' distance, and remain there in a sort of concealment, until the affair should be made up through the mediation ...

— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... log! Now, boys, pull with a will!" cried Max, not insensible to the novelty and picturesqueness of the situation, as a motley crowd, some in smock-frocks, some in corduroy and some in gaiters and great-coats, pressed into the great hall dragging the log after them with many a "Whoop!" ...

— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden

... As a very pretty woman said to me a few nights ago, with the tears in her eyes, as she sat at the harpsichord, 'Alas! the Italians must now return to making operas.' I fear that and maccaroni are their forte, and 'motley their only wear.' However, there are some high spirits among them still. Pray ...

— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron

... Of this motley army some were in canoes, some in pirogues and others in batteaux. In a large canoe, third back from the prow, sat a fine-looking man, distinguishable from his associates in more ways than may be easily described. His clothes were such as one would see ...

— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane

... afterwards the two Indians entered the defile, and the goats and sheep, which had been spread widely over the open valley, scampered, crowded, and overleaped one another as they closed into the narrow way. There seemed to be fully two thousand of them, intermingled with a motley herd of horses, mules, asses, and kine of all sizes and descriptions, numbering three hundred or more, all driven by ...

— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis

... cause must fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered that the heritage of priceless liberty should be their children's pride. But read Motley, or the recent and remarkably well-written volumes of Douglas Campbell, and you will see that every atrocity that Spanish hatred, religious intolerance, and mediaeval bigotry could invent, every horror that ever followed in the train of war, swept ...

— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... a motley mixture. My short bicycling skirt did beautifully for tiger-hunting. There was a vast company of native swells, nawabs and ranas, in gorgeous costumes, whose precise names and titles I do not pretend to remember; there were also Major Balmossie, ...

— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... of spring's promise of plenty, with fruit in abundance. Autumn lingers in red and yellow motley, stoutly resisting winter's attack until boisterous winds from east and north send the last leaves shivering to the ground and spread out the city's winter garb. Then Prague assumes a severer aspect; reds and warm greys have vanished, castle, churches, ...

— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker

... to 1860 was that of our greatest purely literary achievement, and, indeed, most of the greater names of to-day were familiar before 1850. Conspicuous exceptions are Motley and Parkman and a few belles-lettres writers, whose novels and stories mark a distinct literary transition since the War of the Rebellion. In the period from 1845 to 1860, there was a singular development of sentimentalism; it had been growing before, it did not altogether disappear ...

— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... is a philosophizing journeyman who from every capital of Europe pours forth his lyrico-cosmic effusions, and the hero of his historical novel The Messenger of God (1911) is a Swiss dominic who at the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War collects a motley rabble about him for new works of peace and single-handed makes of himself the restorer of a devastated community. But with all the scope of the theme there is a lack of genuine historical color; and compared with the great historical novel of ...

— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... Motley procession! Twenty odd, disheveled, half-clothed men of these worlds. The changing, lightening gravity on the incline caught them. Dr. Frank bounded up to the rail under the impetus of his step; caught and held himself. Drew himself back. The ...

— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings

... men, or one more united by personal relations and intellectual aims, it would have been difficult to find. In connection with these names, those of Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, and Holmes also arise most naturally, for the literary men and scholars of Cambridge and Boston were closely united; and if Emerson, in his country home at Concord, was a little more withdrawn, his influence was powerful in the intellectual life of the whole community, ...

— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... which she had seen in the faces of the young men whilst they spoke of Mrs. Stanhope, the match-maker. Belinda's mind, however, was not yet sufficiently calm to reflect; she seemed only to live over again the preceding night. At last, the strange motley figures which she had seen at the masquerade flitted before her eyes, and she sunk into ...

— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth

... attempt a description. Beards of awful size, moustaches of every shade and length under a foot, phizzes of all colors and contortions, four-story hats with sky-scraping feathers, costumes ring-streaked, speckled, monstrous, and incredible, made up the motley crew. There was a Northern emigrant just returned from Kansas, with garments torn and water-soaked, and but half cleaned of the adhesive tar and feathers, watched closely by a burly Missourian, with any quantity of hair ...

— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... this little Nepenthe domain, though he saw it for only a few weeks in the year, was the apple of his eye. He guarded it jealously, troubled at the thought that its chaste recesses might be profaned, if but for one day, by the presence of a motley assemblage of nonentities. But a man of his income is expected to do something to amuse his fellow-creatures. One owes certain duties to society. Hence this gathering, which had become a regular feature in the spring calendar of the island. Having once decided on the step, he did not ...

— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... in company with Jingle, talking very earnestly, and not bestowing a look on the groups who were congregated on the racket-ground; they were very motley groups too, and worth the looking at, if it were ...

— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... the Phrygian worship led an obscure existence until the establishment of the empire. That closed the first period of its history at Rome. It attracted attention only on certain holidays, when its priests marched the streets in procession, dressed in motley costumes, loaded with heavy jewelry, and beating tambourines. On those days the senate granted them the right to go from house to house to collect funds for their temples. The remainder of the year they confined themselves to the sacred enclosure of the Palatine, celebrating ...

— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... there will be no disorder," Trueman assures her. He walks with Ethel at the head of the motley crowd that only an hour ago was clamoring for the body of Purdy; this same crowd is now transformed into an orderly procession. The absence of music, or of any sound other than the tramp of feet on the smooth hard roadway, makes the procession ...

— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams

... at last to deposit in a heap upon the floor a whopping pile of parcels and bundles, the topmost being a huge box of American Beauty roses. Almost before the wide-eyed, gaping youngsters could realise what had happened, the motley quartette vanished into the outer hall, the door banged to behind them and Mr. Flanders ...

— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon

... extravagant Fancy, I will here set it down. I could not but fancy, if my Soul had at that Moment quitted my Body, and descended to the poetical Shades in the Posture it was then in, what a strange Figure it would have made among them. They would not have known what to have made of my motley Spectre, half Comick and half Tragick, all over resembling a ridiculous Face, that at the same time laughs on one side and cries o tother. The only Defence, I think, I have ever heard made for this, as it seems to ...

— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... of the fifty-fourth regiment showed a kindly spirit of comradeship by sending their band from Colberg. Otherwise, as is usually the case in the country, we were confined to our family circle; only Motley, the former American Ambassador in London, a friend of my early youth, happened to be here on a visit. Besides her Majesty the Queen, his Majesty the King of Bavaria, and their Royal Highnesses Prince Carl and Friedrich ...

— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... extensive grounds showed with how prodigal a hand the owner squandered a princely fortune. The flower garden and lawn comprised fifteen acres, and the subdivisions were formed entirely by hedges, save that portion of the park surrounded by a tall iron railing, where congregated a motley menagerie of deer, bison, a Lapland reindeer, a Peruvian llama, some Cashmere goats, a chamois, wounded and caught on the Jungfrau, and a large white cow from Ava. This part of the inclosure was thickly studded with large oaks, groups of ...

— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... called for "special constables," and, partly attracted by the plenteous supply of drink and free feeding;[1] and partly impelled by their savage fury against the "Hirish" or the "Fenians,"—suddenly become convertible terms with English writers and speakers—a motley mass of several thousands, mainly belonging to the most degraded of the population, were enrolled. All the streets in the neighbourhood of the prison were closed against public traffic, were occupied by police or "specials," ...

— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown

... skill of the Americans was not due to special training; for the British service was better trained in gunnery, as in everything else, than the motley armies and fleets that fought at New Orleans and on the Lakes. Critics constantly said that every American had learned from his childhood the use of the rifle; but he certainly had not learned to use cannon in shooting birds or hunting deer, and he knew less than the Englishman about the handling ...

— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... long struggles, I seized my spectacles and sauntered into the little town. Putting them to my eyes I peered into the houses and at the people who passed me. Here sat a family at breakfast, and I stood at the window looking in. O motley meal! fantastic vision! The good mother saw her lord sitting opposite, a grave, respectable being, eating muffins. But I saw only a bank-bill, more or less crumpled and tattered, marked with a larger or lesser figure. If a sharp wind blew suddenly, I saw it tremble and flutter; it was thin, ...

— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various

... Herodotus, and Plato; Virgil, Livy, and Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, and Petrarch; Cervantes; Thomas a Kempis; Goethe and Schiller; Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Bunyan, Addison, Gray, Scott, and Wordsworth; Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier. He who reads these, and such as these, is not in serious danger of spending his time amiss. But not even such a list as this is to be received as a necessity by every reader. One may find Cowper more profitable ...

— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder

... forth very early in the morning, slowly gliding along several streets in a barge, watching the motley crowds thronging banks and bridges—a far more brilliant crowd than in these later centuries, since both sexes were alike gay in plumage. From every house, even those out of the line of the procession, hung tapestry, or coloured cloths, and ...

— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge

... ground, strewn with potsherds and heaps of refuse. Here, in contrast to its usual solitude, a dense crowd had collected in evident anticipation of some interesting event. Presently two or three horsemen and a motley gang of soldiers emerged from the city and proceeded quickly along the causeway. Closely following were coolies carrying three red burdens, on bamboo poles, and these in turn were followed by more soldiers and a few officials in sedan ...

— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... woman to come by a certain train to Washington where he would meet her, and true to his appointment he met that train. But in the motley throng that filed through the gate was no Mam' Lyddy, and inquiring of the train men showed that no one answering to her description could have been ...

— Mam' Lyddy's Recognition - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page

... and hazards on Lake Ontario that he was not likely to give Perry any more men than could be spared. This reluctance caused Perry to send a spirited protest in which he said: "The men that came by Mr. Champlin are a motley set, blacks, soldiers, and boys. I cannot think you saw them ...

— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine

... chuckle o'er their jest! Must they, to give a people rest, Their dainty wit forego? The tyrants sit in a stately hall; They gibe at a wretched people's fall; The tyrants forget how fresh is the pall Over their dead and ours. Look how the senators ape the clown, And don the motley and hide the gown, But yonder a fast rising frown ...

— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... as he had noted so many times before, the motley appearance of the army, but with involuntary motion he began to straighten and smooth his own shabby uniform. He was about to enter the presence of a woman and he was young and so ...

— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... our adventurers were now associated was composed of a motley crew of Red River half-breeds, out for the great spring buffalo hunt. It consisted of nearly 700 hunters, as many women, more than 400 children, and upwards of 1000 carts, with horses and draught oxen, besides about 700 buffalo-runners, or trained hunting-horses, and more ...

— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne

... fourteen competitors presented themselves—a motley group, clad for the most part in trousers, horse-rug, and wide-awake, or, more simply still, in Ulster frieze coat only. The group of spectators had by this time grown to some hundreds, nearly all directly interested in the noble art; and the dips became fast ...

— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... man is neatly and trimly dressed is he apt to conduct himself with like decency. The worst vagabonds in our communities are the tramps, with their dirty bodies and dirty clothes; the most brutal deeds in all history were those of the ragged, motley mobs of Paris in the days of the French Revolution; the first act of the mutineer has ever been to debase and deride ...

— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... Do come!' said Beletski, without the least surprise. 'But isn't it a pretty picture?' he added, pointing to the motley crowds. ...

— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy

... with out of tablets. In early morning a train disgorged a crowd of men who had been prisoners with the Boers at Pretoria, some ever since the first battle. When Roberts came they all escaped, under shell-fire from the Boers as a final conge. They were a most motley crew, dressed in all manner of odd clothes. At 7 P.M. coffee and porridge, and at 7.30 orders came to detrain and harness up sharp, the sections to separate again. Then followed a whole series of contrary orders, but we ultimately harnessed up and hooked in; the right section ...

— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... Patrons discovered applying their eyes to peepholes, through which a motley collection of coloured lithographs of the Crimean Campaign, faded stereoscopic-views, Scriptural engravings, and daubed woodcuts from the "Illustrated Police News," is arranged ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various

... expedition that it had to be given up for that year, but the next summer a vast armament set sail. Motley[1] says it consisted of ten squadrons, of more than one hundred and thirty ships, carrying upwards of three ...

— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... took with him a few confidential followers, and departed in secret for the camp of the Arabian Emir, Muza ben Nozier. The camp was spread out in one of those pastoral vallies which lie at the feet of the Barbary hills, with the great range of the Atlas mountains towering in the distance. In the motley army here assembled were warriors of every tribe and nation, that had been united by pact or conquest in the cause of Islem. There were those who had followed Muza from the fertile regions of Egypt, across the deserts of Barca, ...

— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... Australia. That is a world which has first to pass through the children's disease of republicanism; after it has recovered from it, both of us will be ready to inoculate it with monarchical principles. But here is Europe! Your majesty, look at this motley chaos of colors and states, of big and little thrones, lying between France and Russia. We are their bulwarks on the east and west; why should we not rule over them? We are able to do so by joining hands over the heads of ...

— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... witnessed carnivals. Here are all our harlequins and columbines of the spoken and written drama. They flash to and fro, they thrill us with expectancy. Then, presto! What a dreary lot they are when the revellers lay aside the motley! ...

— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... gathered in knots under the porticoes, eagerly discussing the questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With Plato, "philosophy was only another name for religion: philosophy is the love of perfect Wisdom; perfect ...

— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... intensely interested, for all was new and strange. She had a keen, quick eye for character, and a human interest in humanity, even though those around her did not belong to her "set." Therefore it was with appreciative eyes that she watched the motley groups of her fellow-passengers waving handkerchiefs and exchanging farewells with equally ...

— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... a nickname for a jester (Chapter XX), from his motley clothes, is also sometimes a variant of Pash. And the dim. Patchett has become confused with Padgett, from Padge, a rimed form of Madge. Pentecost is recorded as a personal name in Anglo-Saxon times. Michaelmas is now Middleman (Chapter III), and Tiffany is an old name for Epiphany. It comes from ...

— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... unfamiliar to the newcomer, who looked with evident interest at the twisted columns of the high altar, at the vast mosaics in the dome, at the red damask hangings of the nave, at the Swiss guards, the chamberlains in court dress and at all the mediaeval-looking, motley figures that moved about within the space kept ...

— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford

... what of those who scold at us When we would read in bed? Or, wanting victuals, make a fuss If we buy books, instead? And what of those who've dusted not Our motley pride and boast? Shall they profane that sacred spot?" Says I to ...

— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field

... the crowd There didst thou love to linger out the day Loitering beneath the laurels barren shade. SPIRIT of SPENSER! was the wanderer wrong? This little picture was for ornament Design'd, to shine amid the motley mob Of Fashion and of Folly,—is it not More honour'd ...

— Poems • Robert Southey

... reception that awaited me. To be sure, I found Cruces as like Gorgona, in its dampness, dirt, and confusion, as it well could be; but the crowd from the gold-fields of California had just arrived, having made the journey from Panama on mules, and the street was filled with motley groups in picturesque variety of attire. The hotels were also full of them, while many lounged in the verandahs after their day's journey. Rude, coarse gold-diggers, in gay-coloured shirts, and long, serviceable boots, elbowed, ...

— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole

... the tribunal of posterity for these atrocities, devised by members of its Cabinet and its Congress, directed by its Presidents, and executed by its armies and its courts. The cruelties of Alva in the Netherlands, which make the pen of Motley glow as with fire as he tells them, the dragonnades which scorched over the fairest regions of France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, have a certain excuse, as being instigated by a sincere, though ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... of the motley towns and cities, The distant purple haze—that now is gone, Nor could be found, though I should go to seek it; But here within me, when I call, there rises A something, rules my spirit, and I feel As if it might in thee as well— [He changes his tone.] Knowst ...

— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... Coast steamer marched up Manila Bay, Trask stood under the bridge on the skimpy "promenade deck" and waited impatiently for the doctor's boat to come alongside. He was the only white passenger among a motley lot of Chinese merchants and half-castes of varied hues, and he was glad the passage was ...

— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore

... procession which now met us as we went up from the narrow beach, having first made fast our boat. A lean Mexican priest, with an enormous shovel hat and particularly shabby cassock, came toward us, followed by a motley crowd of Mexicans, prominent among whom was a pompous old man clad in a seedy Mexican uniform and wearing a trailing rapier at his side. The rest of the procession was brought up with a crowd of shy women, dark-eyed and tawny and all ...

— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me. The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by ...

— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... invitation, Will visited the Vatican. Its historic walls have rarely, if ever, looked upon a more curious sight than was presented when Will walked in, followed by the cowboys in their buckskins and sombreros and the Indians in war paint and feathers. Around them crowded a motley throng of Italians, clad in the brilliant colors so loved by these children of the South, and nearly every nationality was ...

— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore

... of England draw representatives of trading communities or subject races from all parts of the globe, and the faces and costumes of the Hindoo, the Parsi, the Lascar, and the ubiquitous Chinaman, mingle in the motley crowd with the merchants of Europe and America. The streets of London are, in this respect, to the modern, what the great Place of Tyre must have been to the ancient world. But pile Carthage on Tyre, Venice on Carthage, Amsterdam on Venice, and you will not make the equal, or anything near the equal, ...

— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various

... soprano's tongue, and as soon as the canonesses' litter was a safe distance ahead he began to beguile the way with fragments of reminiscence and adventure. Though few of his allusions were clear to Odo, the glimpse they gave of the motley theatrical life of the north Italian cities—the quarrels between Goldoni and the supporters of the expiring commedia dell' arte—the rivalries of the prime donne and the arrogance of the popular comedians—all these peeps into a tinsel ...

— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... Hazard was a favourite game in Ireland, and Dublin could boast of three or four hells doing a brisk trade. The most frequented and longest established was called "The Coal Hole," being situated on the coal quay. Here, at any hour after midnight, a motley company might be seen, each individual, however, well known to the porter, who jealously scanned his features before drawing back the noiseless bolts which secured the door. The professional gambler trying to live by his winnings, the fashionable ...

— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... Mediterranean, partook these sentiments, and invited the English and Spanish fleets off their coast to come to their assistance, and garrison their city. The allied admirals took possession accordingly of Toulon, and a motley force of English, Spaniards, and Neapolitans, prepared to defend the place. In the harbour and roads there were twenty-five ships of the line, and the city contained immense naval and military stores of every description, ...

— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... three men tackle this crowd, that's what!" he went on to remark, as he swept his eye proudly over the motley array of weapons; for even Allan had armed himself, having a stout stick, with which he doubtless felt able to render a good account of himself in ...

— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter

... mediaeval name and forms of the Holy Roman Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria, combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the ...

— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... at the hour of noon, a motley throng of people might have been seen pouring forth from the gates of a far Eastern city and moving towards a hill called Calvary. Amidst soldiers and civilians, both friends and foes, the central figure is that of a man scarcely more than thirty years of age. He has all the ...

— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe

... fear, but a few came up smiling, one and all comforted by their protector, either Turk, child, or fond mother. The fathers invariably showed the most distressed concern. It was a comical sight; outside the rails a motley crowd of interested spectators and waiting children, and in the inclosure the doctor pricking his patients one after the other in a most indifferent manner. His clerk noted the names, and we, with some of the local grandees, drank tiny cups ...

— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon

... curious study for a thoughtful observer, this motley crowd of human beings sinking all differences of race, creed, and habits in the common purpose to move Westward—to the mountain fastnesses, the sage-brush deserts, the ...

— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various

... represent umbrellas of dignity. Sometimes a man riding on a wooden horse is carried, horse and all, by his friends as the Raja, and others assume the form of or paint themselves up to represent certain beasts of prey. Behind this motley group the main body form compactly together as a close column of dancers in alternate ranks of boys and girls, and thus they enter the grove, where the meeting is held in a cheery dashing style, wheeling and countermarching and forming lines, circles and columns with grace ...

— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... break-up of the Union and berating the North for continuing, through pride alone, a bloody conflict doomed to failure. Meanwhile in midsummer attention was diverted from the ethical causes at issue by the publication in the Times of Motley's letter analysing the nature of the American constitution and defending the legal position of the North in its resistance to secession. Motley wrote in protest against the general British press attitude: "There is, perhaps, a readiness in ...

— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... Parisian roughs, drafted out of the "Regiments de la Charte," most of them wearing blouses and caps. Many of the non- commissioned officers had come from the Royal Guard, and still wore their blue cloaks. The excessively whimsical get-up of the officers put the finishing touch to this motley show. Most of them had adopted the Mameluke dress—white turbans, huge trousers, yellow boots, a sun embroidered on their backs, and a scimitar. After the Zouaves I saw the squadron of "Chasseurs Algeriens," the nucleus of the future "Chasseurs d'Afrique," march past. They wore Turkish ...

— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... Blair was serving his second term as football captain, having been elected to succeed himself the previous fall. At this moment, attired in the Crimson sweater, moleskin trousers, and black and crimson stockings that made up the school uniform, he looked every inch the commander of the motley array ...

— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour

... Minister to Austria, whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—John Lothrop Motley. ...

— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... the gipsies' children sat down at table with the sons and daughters of the Count. They issued an order forbidding begging, and twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, they distributed food and clothing to the poor. One picture will illustrate this strange campaign. Among the motley medley that lived about the castle was an old grey-haired Jew, named Rabbi Abraham. One bright June evening, Zinzendorf met him, stretched out his hand, and said: "Grey hairs are a crown of glory. I can see from your head and the expression ...

— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... river scenery. From the great oriel window a noble vista is unrolled. In the distance, the twin-towered Houses of Parliament are outlined against the sky, while the massive proportions of the "water front" of Somerset House, the motley groupings of the structures that crowd the intervening water-side, and the flashing river hound by many-arched bridges, ...

— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various

... had been rising for some time, now gave very unequivocal notice of an approaching storm. The rain began to fall, and the decks were quickly cleared of their motley groups. ...

— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for the denizens of Grub street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by agricultural labor; or, Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full experiment; or Candide and his motley associates, at work in their cabbage-garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would ...

— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... at Hillsboro was broken into by a mob. The assembly passed some measures designed to conciliate the back country; but before they became operative, Governor Tryon's militia, about twelve hundred men, largely from the lowlands, and led by the gentry whose privileges were involved, met the motley army of the Regulators, who numbered about two thousand, in the battle of the Alamance (May, 1771). Many were killed and wounded, the Regulators dispersed, and over six thousand men came into camp and took the oath of submission to the colonial authorities. The battle was not the first battle ...

— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... Goddis wounds! he found her nonywhere; And whiles he searched, Sir Maligraunce rashed in, wood wroth, and cried, "Methinketh that ye straunger knyght hath snuck away my bride!" And whiles he spake a motley score of other knyghts brast in And filled ye royall chamber with a mickle fearfull din, For evereche one had lost his wiffe nor colde not spye ye same, Nor colde not spye ye straunger ...

— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field

... One and all they were thankful for the occupation of erecting the flagstaff, and Arthur had no lack of assistants in his task. The hole was dug out to the proper depth with the assistance of such motley tools as the ferrules of sticks and parasols, and the stones which were scattered along the beach, while the cloth was sewed to the stick by the careful Esther, who never by any chance travelled ...

— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey

... a long row of boys waiting, with countenances of no pleasant anticipation, to be treacled; and another file, who had just escaped from the infliction, making a variety of wry mouths indicative of anything but satisfaction. The whole were attired in such motley, ill-assorted, extraordinary garments, as would have been irresistibly ridiculous, but for the foul appearance of dirt, disorder, and disease, with ...

— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... when presently it was raised to the side of the steamer, he still kept his position, so that he could instantly catch sight of his father as he passed down. I stood close behind him, and watched the motley procession of passengers; most of them had the dull colourless skin which bespeaks long residence in India, and a particularly yellow and peevish-looking old man was grumbling loudly as he slowly made his way down ...

— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall

... from Mr M'Lean may be allowed, as embodying the descriptions often given by Dr Burton of the motley crew of competitors for the scholarships and bursaries dispensed by the university: "Gazing round the room, I noted that my competitors consisted of raw-boned red-haired Highlandmen, fresh from their native hills, with all their rusticity ...

— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... The men have lived and are dead. La Noue, the Huguenot Bayard, now exists only in a dusty memoir and a page of Motley. Madame de Montpensier is forgotten; all of her, save her golden scissors. Mayenne, D'Aumale, a verse preserves their names. Only Henry—the "good King," as generations of French peasants called him—remains ...

— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman

... umbrella went overboard, all having their covers burnt off from the frames, when a general melee took place among the deck passengers, each whipping his neighbor to put out the fire. They presented a very motley appearance on arriving at the first station. Then rails were secured and lashed between the trucks, taking the slack out of the coupling chains, thereby affording us a more steady run to the top of the inclined plane ...

— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody

... breath of asthma, or heroic energy defy paralysis? More formidable still are those subtle results of disease, which cannot be resisted, because their source is unseen. Voltaire declared that the fate of a nation had often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime-minister; and Motley holds that the gout of Charles V. changed the destinies of ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... to set the table on a roar," as the feasters at a hundred tables, from "Casey's Table d'Hote" to the banquets of the opulent East, now rise to testify. But Shakespeare plainly reveals, concerning Yorick, that mirth was not his sole attribute,—that his motley covered the sweetest nature and the tenderest heart. It could be no otherwise with one who loved and comprehended childhood and whom the children loved. And what does Hamlet say?—"He hath borne me upon his back a thousand times . . . Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how ...

— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... country's courage and its caution in equal proportions; and, like a wise man, he did not choose to trust his money by risking it to strangers. In such a motley company it would not be safe to do so now a-days; but it would have been much less so then. For, at that time, and especially on the Borders, the law of mine and thine was still imperfectly understood. But Andrew's determination to humble the champion was well-nigh overcoming his caution, when ...

— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various

... yes, only a song That the Spirit said "Sing to-night; Thy voice is thy Master's by purchased right"; But you thought, "'Mid this motley throng I care not to sing of the city of gold"— And the heart that your words might have reached grew cold; You were "out ...

— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... leagues of Vincennes on the Wabash. It was Clark's determination not to wait for attack from the British but to surprise Hamilton in his own fort. It required almost superhuman power to gather the men necessary from the motley crowds at Kaskaskia and from other posts on the river, but the day after the "Willing" (for so he named his barge) sailed, he moved out of Kaskaskia, with a hundred and seventy men following him, to march the two hundred and thirty miles across the wintry wilderness ...

— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... busy gaiety of its streets, the elegance of life there, contrasting with while it adds some mysterious endearment to the thought of his own rude home. Without envy, in hope only one day to share, to win them by kindness, he gazes on the motley garden-plots, the soft bedding, the showy toys, the delicate keep of the children of Phaedra, who turn curiously to their half-brother, venture to touch his long strange gown of homespun grey, like the soft coat of some wild creature who ...

— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... rear them in the watery mead; From early dawn the livelong hours she told, Till late at silent eve she penn'd the fold. Deep in the grove, beneath the secret shade, 15 A various wreath of odorous flowers she made: Gay-motley'd[12] pinks and sweet jonquils she chose, The violet blue that on the moss-bank grows; All sweet to sense, the flaunting rose was there; The finish'd chaplet well adorn'd ...

— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins

... river was the occasion for a pandemonium of noise as the Indian dogs swept out upon the ice to greet them with barks, yaps, growls, whines, and howls. Never had the boy seen such a motley collection of dogs. Big dogs and little dogs, long tailed, short tailed, and bob tailed—white dogs and black dogs, and dogs of every colour and all colours between. In only two particulars was there any uniformity—they ...

— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx

... said that he wanted to shoot buffalo while there were still buffalo left to shoot, and Gorringe had suggested that he go to Little Missouri. That villainous gateway to the Bad Lands was, it seems, the headquarters for a motley collection of guides and hunters, some of them experts,[1] the majority of them frauds, who were accustomed to take tourists and sportsmen for a fat price into the heart of the fantastic and savage country. The region was noted for game. It had been a great winter ...

— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... these devotions, passing on into the city. There he lost all purpose and the count of time in rapture with the colours of the motley throng, which budded in the night of long, dark tunnels and blossomed in the open alleys, full of shade. The sense of an infinitude of burning light, resting above, gave to the shadow and its bedded splendours something magical, reminding Iskender of his childish fancies ...

— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall

... condemned I could not but witness, with sympathy, the punishment reserved for translators. The translators of Virgil, in particular, were a vast and motley assemblage of most respectable men. Bishops were there, from Gawain Douglas downwards; Judges, in their ermine; professors, clergymen, civil servants, writhing in all the tortures that the blank verse, the anapaestic measure, the metre of the 'Lay of the ...

— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... with a long line of attendants, wending his steps towards the river's front. Infirm old men and little children, crazy-looking devotees and comely youths, boys and girls, people of all ages and degrees, are represented in the motley groups who come to these muddy waters for moral purification. There is a singular mingling of races also, for these people do not all speak one tongue. They are from the extreme north and the extreme south of India, while the half-starved ...

— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou

... noble, rich, and great, From Levite, Pharisee and Priest, Down to the lowest dregs of fate, From mightiest even to the least; Yes, in this motley throng we find The palsied, sick, mute, ...

— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... priest, the miller, the reeve, the manciple, the seller of indulgences, and, lastly, the poet himself—all these various sorts and conditions of men and women we find journeying down to Canterbury in a sort of motley caravan. Foreign pilgrims also came to the sacred shrine in great numbers. A curious record, preserved in a Latin translation, of the journey of a Bohemian noble, Leo von Rotzmital, who visited England in 1446, gives ...

— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers

... moving a little he could see the gate at the far end of the main street. A number of men, women and children were running toward it. It swung open, revealing the head of a caravan upon the opposite side. In trooped the motley organization—black slaves and dark hued Arabs of the northern deserts; cursing camel drivers urging on their vicious charges; overburdened donkeys, waving sadly pendulous ears while they endured with stoic patience the brutalities ...

— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... general muster was called, and a rude and motley group presented itself to the eye of the commander. But rough as was the exterior, he well knew that there was that within which would bid defiance to danger and outrage so long as ...

— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly

... to multiply Your sheep by next subtracting votes From over-suffraged Tory goats. By Registration Law perplexed, Take "qualifying periods" next, And at one swoop reduce with glee Twelve months, or more, to only three. Add labour to your motley crew, Subtract (from life) a church or two. Produce, with geometric skill, The lines of many a promised bill. But state—the Unionists to vex— That Home Rule always equals x. Raise, in a rash, disastrous hour, Campaigning Ireland to a power. And thus, to prayers and ...

— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various

... cried Eddring, suddenly. "Open the gates! Let 'em out! I want to hear 'em holler!" The pack poured out, motley, vociferous, eager for the chase, filling the air with their wild music, with a riot of primeval, savage life. "Get me a horse saddled, Cal, quick," cried Eddring. "I want to feel leather under me again. I want to feel the air in my ears. ...

— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough

... some respects both distinctive and unusual. Norgate, looking around him, thought that he had never in his life been among such a motley assemblage of people. There were eight or nine musical comedy young ladies; a couple of young soldiers, one of whom he knew slightly, who had arrived as escorts to two of the young ladies; Prince Edward of Lenemaur; a youthful ...

— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... that was one way of seeing Venice: but I would much rather sit at a little table on the Riva degli Schiavoni, with a plate of bread and cheese and a mezzo of Chianti before me, watching the motley crowd in the street and the many-coloured sails in the harbour; or spend a lazy afternoon in a gondola, floating through watery alley-ways that lead nowhere, and under the facades of beautiful palaces whose names I did not ...

— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... us have witnessed carnivals. Here are all our harlequins and columbines of the spoken and written drama. They flash to and fro, they thrill us with expectancy. Then, presto! What a dreary lot they are when the revellers lay aside the motley! ...

— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... eyes discover as we walk along on Market street. Such a medley—infinite, incongruous, comical, pathetic, motley and sublime. ...

— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey

... squashes, lettuce, radishes, turnips and many kinds of grain, including that peculiarly Yankee "institooshun" pop-corn. The bazaar was held out of doors in a public square, with a few shops of dry goods around, and a most terrible din arose from the motley crowd there assembled. In one place a number of soldiers from the cantonments were bidding on some glassware offered at auction, and in another mothers of families and khansamahs were bustling about engaging their necessary household supplies. Here was a wretched ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... hogan fairly early in the evening. When dusk has settled, the medicine-man begins his songs, singing first the twelve "hogan songs" of the Bahozhonchi. After he has finished, anyone present who so desires may sing songs taken from the ritual of the same order. This motley singing and hilarity continue until well toward sunrise, when the mother brings in a bowl of yucca suds and washes the girl's hair. Her head and hair are dried with corn-meal, after which the girl takes her last ...

— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis

... not but fancy, if my Soul had at that Moment quitted my Body, and descended to the poetical Shades in the Posture it was then in, what a strange Figure it would have made among them. They would not have known what to have made of my motley Spectre, half Comick and half Tragick, all over resembling a ridiculous Face, that at the same time laughs on one side and cries o tother. The only Defence, I think, I have ever heard made for this, as it seems to me, most unnatural Tack of the Comick Tail to the Tragick Head, is this, ...

— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... call him the trailer. The rest rush yelping after, and as fast as possible follow the hunters, with torches or lanterns or by moonlight, carrying axes and hatchets, guns, and antidotes for snake-bite in flat, black bottles. Trailer's motley crew catch a sniff of the trail and disappear in the darkness of the brushy woods, baying, barking, yelping, squealing, each after its kind. After them go the whooping hunters, following by ear as the dogs do by nose, for none can use ...

— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... moment it happened that the Court Tailor came into the room to measure the King for a new mantle of ermine. Forthwith the grinning Jester began shrieking with laughter, so that the bells upon his motley cap were ...

— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston

... philanthropy and the composition of the "Principia" would not in many minds suffice to overthrow. We believe it is authentic that General Grant never got over the impression produced on him by seeing that Mr. Motley parted his hair in the middle, and it is said—and if not true is not unlikely,—that Mr. R. H. Dana's practice of wearing kid gloves told heavily against him in his memorable contest with Butler in the Essex district. We may all remember, too, the gigantic efforts made by Mr. ...

— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin

... hung with flags and cedar boughs, and the benches down the long uncovered tables were crowded. The men's attire was motley—broadcloth and duck; white shirts, starched or limp, and blue ones; shoes with the creeper-spikes filed down, and long boots to the knees. There were women present also, and they wore anything from light print, put together for the occasion, to treasured garments made in Montreal or ...

— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss

... voltigeurs of the best blood of the North African Moors, Tartar bowmen, Negro wrestlers, Indian divers, and Turks, who generally accompanied the Cardinal on his hunting expeditions. When he was overtaken by an early death (1535), this motley band carried the corpse on their shoulders from Itri to Rome, and mingled with the general mourning for the open-handed Cardinal their medley of ...

— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... the banks of the Rio Bravo del Norte—a mere rancheria, or hamlet. The quaint old church of Morisco-Italian style, with its cupola of motley japan, the residence of the cura, and the house of the alcalde, are the only stone structures in the place. These constitute three sides of the piazza, a somewhat spacious square. The remaining side is taken up with shops or dwellings of the common people. They are built of large unburnt ...

— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... broker, as an insurance agent, as an adjuster of marine losses and averages, as an itinerant solicitor for a life-insurance company, as an accountant, and in various other situations. All in vain. He was shunned like an escaped convict; the motley suit itself would hardly have added to his disgrace. No one put faith in him or gave him employment,—save in a few instances, for charity's sake. Few men can brave a city; and Sandford, certainly, was not the man to do ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... coast, and on we went, steaming, smoking, and splashing, after the most orthodox fashion of fire-boats in general. I had now time and opportunity to look around me. Every available spot of the deck and paddle-boxes of the small, flat-bottomed iron steamer, was crowded with as motley a set of passengers as ever sailed since the days of Captain Noah. Sepoys returning from furlough to join their regiments; lascars, or enlisted workmen belonging to the different civil branches of the army; and camp-followers in all their varieties, ...

— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... inner circle, and knew as little about them as a looker-on leaning from a window in a foreign town knows about the people who pass beneath him in the street. But there were times when she entirely recognised the usefulness in the scheme of creation of those motley crowds of well-dressed persons, even though they bore names she had never heard before. During her preparation for the bazaar, for instance, which she was getting up in the single-minded conviction that nothing better could be done for the institution she was trying to befriend, ...

— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell

... sounds of applause at one of these theatres, I edged my way through the crowd, and succeeded, after many apologies, in securing a favorable position. Amid a motley gathering of Russians, Poles, Germans, and French—for here all nations and classes are represented—my ears were stunned by the clapping of hands and vociferous cries Bis! Bis! The curtain was down, but ...

— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... pantomimes—London itself a pantomime and a masquerade—all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me often into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart ...

— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... resolve to exact vengeance on the man whom he regarded as untrue to his oath. The difficulties in the way of his enterprise were indeed enormous. He could reckon on no support within England itself. At home he had to extort the consent of his own reluctant baronage; to gather a motley host from every quarter of France and to keep it together for months; to create a fleet, to cut down the very trees, to build, to launch, to man the vessels; and to find time amidst all this for the common ...

— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... beer-garden; among the rhododendron trees Madame Blavatzky, Colonel Olcott and Mr. Sinnett move mysteriously in the performance of their wonders; and the wealthy tourist from America, the botanist from Berlin, and the casual peer from Great Britain, are not wanting to complete the motley crowd. There are no roads in Simla proper where it is possible to drive, excepting one narrow way, reserved when I was there, and probably still set apart, for the exclusive delectation of the Viceroy. Every one rides—man, woman, and child; and every variety of horseflesh may ...

— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford

... this conduct only a further proof of the hypocrite's villainy, breaks out once more into a tempest of agonised despair. Upon her cry for immediate revolt against the scoundrelly tyrant, the people collect together and form a motley and passionate crowd. Luzio, who also returns, counsels the people with stinging bitterness to pay no heed to the woman's fury; he points out that she is only tricking them, as she has already tricked him—for he still believes in her shameless infidelity. Fresh confusion; ...

— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... said of Denis Quirk in those days that his only pleasure was in his work. He was lonely for Desmond O'Connor, now a student at Manly. The flat was still frequented by the representatives of motley and variegated talent, as in the old days. Jests were made, good stories told, and songs sung by well-trained voices; but these were mere acquaintances. Denis longed for the intimate companionship of ...

— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin

... commencement of the performances, with every species of mortal, except woman. Women were exceedingly rare creatures at that time—the meetings of all sorts were composed almost entirely of men, in their varied and motley garbs. ...

— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne

... our talk was gay; not without brilliancy, and even fire. We looked-out on Life, with its strange scaffolding, where all at once harlequins dance, and men are beheaded and quartered: motley, not unterrific was the aspect; but we looked on it like brave youths. For myself, these were perhaps my most genial hours. Towards this young warmhearted, strongheaded and wrongheaded Herr Towgood I was ...

— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... I was dragged out of our dark prison and brought into the presence of Neptune, who was seated on a throne composed of a coil of ropes, with his court, a very motley assemblage, arranged round him. In front of him his valet sat on a bucket with two assistants on either side, who, the moment I appeared, jumped up and pinioned my arms, and made me sit down on another bucket ...

— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston

... thronged the sight to greet, And motley figures throng the spacious street; Majestical and calm through all they stride, Wearing the blanket with a monarch's pride; The gazers stare and shrug, but can't deny Their noble forms and blameless symmetry. ...

— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... and prate anything without judgment or wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, or incline his attention to such motley ragged discourse; that without nauseating he scarce should endure to observe men lavishing time, and squandering their breath so frivolously. 'Tis an affront to good company to ...

— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow

... it. He must have suffered a very great inconvenience on such a warm night, but people stared at him as they passed by, and he was more than repaid by the attention which he attracted; so he stood and suffered on. There were about twenty-five clowns in their motley dresses, seven or eight pantaloons, three devils, and perhaps forty or fifty dominoes. Joey soon found himself close to the orchestra, which was a blaze of light, and he listened very attentively to a lady in ostrich feathers, who was pouring out a bravura, which was quite unintelligible ...

— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... the swelling of his heart! The long three-week ride had ended. The stage had rolled down a main street the like of which Pan had never even imagined. It was crude, rough, garish with lights and stark board fronts of buildings, and a motley jostling crowd of men; women, too, were not wanting in the throngs streaming up and down. Again it was Saturday night. Always it appeared Pan hit town on this of all nights. Noise and dust filled the air. Pan pulled down his bag, ...

— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... November day of the Indian rabbit drive and hunt. The motley army of the Piute tribe was sweeping tremendously across a sage-brush valley of Nevada, their force two hundred braves in number. They marched abreast, some thirty yards apart, and formed a line that was ...

— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels

... an occasional damaged silk hat topped off a coat that would have made Joseph's of old look plain; with ironclad army shoes; or a half-worn wedding swallow-tail, eked out by a plantation broad-brim, and boots too much worn for either comfort or beauty. This motley band, led by a gentle and spiritual-faced woman, will not soon be forgotten by those who saw it depart. Leaving a few at one depot, and a few at another, to be met at the journey's end by their employer, Mrs. Griffing took those ...

— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... of old New York reads like a romance. There is scarcely a plot of ground below Fourteenth Street without its story and its associations, its motley company of memories and spectres both good and bad, its imperishably adventurous savour of the past, imprisoned in the dry prose of registries and records. Let us just take a glance, a bird's-eye view as it were, of that region which we now know ...

— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... spot of distant shrubbery or woodland, and we see it brighten with many hues, standing forth prominently from the dimness around it. The sunlight gradually spreads, and the whole sombre scene is changed to a motley picture,—the sun bringing out many shades of color, and converting its gloom to an almost laughing cheerfulness. At such times I almost doubt whether the foliage has lost any of its brilliancy. But the clouds intercept the sun again, and lo! old Autumn appears, ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... kind of annex to the public school system, as I shall shortly point out to you. For the moment, let us consider, together, what to my mind constitutes the very hopeful struggle of the two possibilities: either that the motley and evasive spirit of public schools which has hitherto been fostered, will completely vanish, or that it will have to be completely purified and rejuvenated. And in order that I may not shock you with general propositions, let us first try to recall one of those public school ...

— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... man the chief actor, and the source from which the dramatist must cull his choicest beauties, painting up to nature the varied scenes which mark the changeful courses of her motley groups. Here she opes her volume to the view of contemplative minds, and spreads her treasures forth, decked in all the variegated tints that Flora, goddess of the flowery mead and silvery dell, with many coloured ...

— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... with him into the verandah outside, he seated himself in a long chair and proceeded to sip it slowly, as if it were some elixir whose virtue would be lost by haste. Some people might have been amused by the motley crowd that passed along the street beyond the verandah-rails, but Gideon Hayle, for such was his name, took no sort of interest in it. He had seen it too often to find any variety in it. As a matter of fact the mere ...

— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby

... who are a match for Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes; and no essayists who are a match for Emerson and James Russell Lowell—no jurists who are the rivals of Marshall, Kent and Story; and no living historians equal Bancroft, Prescott and Motley. These facts do not necessarily indicate (as some assert) a widespread intellectual famine. The most probable explanation of the fact is that the mental forces in our day exert themselves in other directions. This is an age of scientific ...

— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... be compared with the disciplined troops. They were simply a motley mob, armed with stray guns, arms, and powder, and their pay is what they can loot; whereas the African private's drill and duties are identical with those of the British private. His orders are given to him in English, and his knowledge of ...

— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty

... is just now a great demand for agricultural and domestics, so that settlers are actually bidding against each other for the individuals they want to engage. Our ship-load was no special body of people, but a motley collection of men, women, and children from all parts of the old country. Among them are natives of Kent and of Cornwall, of Yorkshire and of Wales, of Inverness and ...

— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... he maintained for the unity of the Roman Empire, we who consider Africa as an extension of France. More than any other writer, he has expressed the temperament and the genius of his country. This motley Africa, with its eternal mixture of races at odds with one another, its jealous sectarianism, the variety of its scenery and climate, the violence of its sensations and passions, its seriousness of character and its quick-changing ...

— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... we mariners were a motley crew, and motley was the cue of our reception. Exclamations of wonder at our strangeness gave way to laughter. The ki-sang invaded us, dragging us about, making prisoners of us, two or three of them to one of ...

— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... stage-lights, to the right, as we look down towards the audience, Gustavus the Third was assassinated at a masquerade; and he was borne into that little chamber there, close by the scene, whilst all the outlets were closed, and the motley group of harlequins, polichinellos, wild men, gods and goddesses with unmasked faces, pale and terrified crept together; the dancing ballet-farce had ...

— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... the Corso. So utterly had the Carnival with all its gay follies vanished from her mind, that she was for a moment astonished at finding herself entangled in a motley crowd, so dense that the coachman was obliged to rein in his horses and ...

— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge

... from a shot. The ornaments upon his head and beak are in the most awkward position. He was put together in a dream, of uneven and odd pieces that live and move, but do not fit. Ponderously gawky, he steps as if the world was his, like a "motley" crowned in sport. He is good eating, but he is not beautiful. After the eye has been accustomed to him for some time—after you have fed him every day and come to take an interest in him—after you have seen a hundred turkey-cocks, then he may become passable, or, if you have the fancier's taste, ...

— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... beheld, in mingled train, Twelve mortals ape twelve deities in vain; Caesar assumed what was Apollo's due, And wine and lust inflamed the motley crew. At the foul sight the gods avert their eyes, And from his throne great Jove ...

— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... coach-yard, which was filled with a motley and mixed crowd of people. I was greatly disappointed in Tattersall's. Indeed, few things in London have answered my expectations. They have either exceeded or fallen short of the description I had heard of them. I was prepared, both from what I was told by Mr. Slick, and ...

— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... moreover, was composed of a more than usually singular mixture of the motley crowd that always throngs to the American frontier. The shock of convulsions in lands far distant reached even to the highland valley shut in by the Otsego hills. Representatives of almost every ...

— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... interest in the condition of the keepers and their families, and when cases of suffering come to their knowledge, as lately, when a keeper at the South was burnt out and lost all his possessions, are prompt with their assistance. In this instance they helped to sort and arrange the motley piles of donated literature, which was then bound up nicely, in uniform volumes, at the Government Printing Office, and a neat little library-case of strong oak wood was made, fitted up with shelves and having heavy metal clasps and handles; ...

— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous

... home life, all the more attractive in that its background was rough-and-ready Skaguay—a plain town enough to look at, but one full of thrilling human interest, of tragedy and comedy. Through its streets had passed a motley procession of men—some on their way to fortune, some to disappointment, but all battling with the realities of life. The doctor was struck by the simple and straightforward outlook of these people, their sincerity, and the pleasure they found in their life; far as it ...

— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke

... flying over Laramie stockade, and this flag the mountain men saw fit to salute with many libations, hearing now that it was to fly forever over California as over Oregon. Crowding the stockade inclosure full was a motley throng—border men in buckskins, engages swart as Indians, French breeds, full-blood Cheyennes and Sioux of the northern hills, all mingling with the curious emigrants who had come in from the wagon camps. Plump Indian girls, many of them very comely, some of them ...

— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough

... carriages started, Sylvie's light victoria leading, and the Princesse D'Agramont's landeau following. Half way back to Rome a picturesque little beggar, whose motley-coloured rags scarcely clothed his smooth brown limbs, suddenly sprang out of a corner where he had been in hiding with a great basket of violets, and threw the whole fragrant heap dexterously ...

— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... bound up with her companions, loving Phoebe like a parent, and the other two like a nurse, and really liking the brother. All took delight in the winter paradise of Hyeres, that fragment of the East set down upon the French coast, and periodically peopled with a motley multitude of visitors from all the lands of Europe, all invalids, or else attendants ...

— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... golden lamps swing blazing over the ecarte tables, and the soft strains of the Mazurka enervate the atmosphere of the gorgeous temples of May Fair. Never yet was there a woman really improved in attraction by mingling with the motley throng of the beau monde. She may learn to dress better, to step more gracefully; her head may assume a more elegant turn, her conversation become more polished, her air more distinguished;—but in point of attraction ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various

... last did the storm break, and with her shuttle the enraged goddess smote the web of Arachne, and the fair pictures were rent into motley rags and ribbons. Furiously, too, with her shuttle of boxwood she smote Arachne. Before her rage, the nymphs fled back to their golden river and to the vineyards of Tymolus, and the women of Colophon in blind terror rushed away. And Arachne, shamed to the dust, knew that life for her was no longer ...

— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... back again, this time as king, with a motley army of mercenaries gathered to crush the two brothers De Lacy, who for the moment dominated all Ireland—the one, Hugo, being Earl of Ulster, and Viceroy; the other, Walter, Lord of the ...

— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... strolls, I caught sight of one of these congregations, I always made a point of joining it; and would find myself surrounded by a motley crowd of seamen from all quarters of the globe, and women, and lumpers, and dock laborers of all sorts. Frequently the clergyman would be standing upon an old cask, arrayed in full canonicals, as a divine of the Church of England. Never have I heard religious ...

— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... not for you. Clap to the leaves and go no farther than this, for I tell you plainly that if you go farther you will be scandalized by seeing good, sober folks of real history so frisk and caper in gay colors and motley that you would not know them but for the names tagged to them. Here is a stout, lusty fellow with a quick temper, yet none so ill for all that, who goes by the name of Henry II. Here is a fair, gentle lady before whom ...

— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle

... historians, Bancroft, Motley, Prescott, Sparks, Palfrey, Parkman, and John Fiske, are Unitarians. Educators, like Horace Mann, like the last seven presidents of Harvard University, Unitarians. Great scientists, like Agassiz, ...

— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... Governor Branch had been in the Cabinet of General Jackson, and upon his defeat in this contest, retired from public life in North Carolina to receive the appointment of territorial Governor of Florida. In the Gubernatorial contest, two years later, John Motley Morehead, of Guilford, as the nominee of the Whigs, likewise defeated the Democratic ...

— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore

... danger that the seals might charge 'em in a herd, bein' angered by the loss of their mates. In this way they pretty well cleared out the cave—all but one great beauty that old Leggo had sworn to take alive. For, instead of bein' yellow or motley-brown like the rest, this fellow was white as milk all over, besides bein' powerful as any other two. He seemed to know from the first that the three men didn't mean to shoot him. The lanterns and the firing ...

— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... tribes from the Alpine district of Noricum and the fluvial plains of Pannonia. Two centuries later the names of these non-Lombard tribes still survived in certain villages of Italy which had formed their centers.[146] The army which Attila the Hun brought into Gaul was a motley crowd, comprising peoples of probable Slav origin from the Russian steppes, Teutonic Ostrogoths and Gepidae, and numerous German tribes, besides the Huns themselves. When this horde withdrew after the death of Attila, Gepidae and Ostrogoths settled along the middle Danube, and the Slavonic contingent ...

— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... tears she dropped into the crystal brine For me, unworthy, as we slowly swung Free of the mooring. Her last look was mine, Seeking me still the motley crowd among. ...

— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... brilliant and pompous, had failed in his undertaking, and exposed himself to ridicule: but now, when he was going to commence the war a second time, taught by experience he concentrated his powers in a real and effectual preparation. Rejecting those motley numbers and many-tongued threats of the barbarians, and arms ornamented with gold and precious stones, which he considered to be the spoils of the victors, and to give no strength to those who possess them, he set about having Roman swords made, and heavy shields manufactured; and he got together ...

— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... not yet deposited. The noises as from a great city swelled strident: shouts, hammerings, laughter, rumble of vehicles, cracking of lashes, barkings of dogs innumerable—betokening a thriving mart of industry. But although pedestrians streamed to and fro, the men in motley of complexions and costumes, the women, some of them fashionably dressed, with skirts eddying furiously; and wagons rolled, horses cantered, and from right and left merchants and hawksters seemed to be calling their wares, of city itself I could see ...

— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... Clarendon was Lord Chancellor; Burnet was a bishop and favorite of William III.; Thiers and Guizot both were prime ministers; while Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Macaulay, Grote, Milman, Froude, Neander, Niebuhr, Mueller, Dahlman, Buckle, Prescott, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, have all been men of wealth or position. Nor do I remember a single illustrious historian who has ...

— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord

... village street, surrounded by a company whom their chief has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, 'I have come to speak to your people,' I do not need to begin by telling them that there is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,—the bold, gaunt cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village smithy; women ...

— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois

... be presumed that no President was ever confronted with such a motley crowd of visitors as the members of that delegation—between seventy and eighty in number—as they formed in line around three sides of the East Room in the White House. Their garments were a sight! Some of the men were in full military dress and some ...

— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume

... which vantage point I saw Jerry dismounting from the car in front with three other men, Flynn, Christopher and a large colored man, while from the other car, a hired machine, by the look of it, four other figures descended—all unloading suit-cases upon the terrace steps—a motley crowd in flannel shirts and sweaters, with cropped heads, thick necks and red hands, all talking loudly and staring up at the towers of the house as though they expected them to fall on them. This then was Jerry's house-party—! ...

— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... spent in India I had seen a good deal of both sides of that motley, amazing fabric which we call life. I had felt the throbbing of its great loom. I had touched with my own shrinking hand the closeness of the texture, had marked the interweaving of the alien strands, had marvelled and been dismayed, had marvelled and been awed, had seen the dye of my own blood on ...

— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley

... resting on the warm brick hearth, sits Aunt Betty Cofer. Her frail body stoops under the weight of four-score years but her bright eyes and alert mind are those of a woman thirty years younger. A blue-checked mob cap covers her grizzled hair. Her tiny frame, clothed in a motley collection of undergarments, dress, and sweaters, is adorned by a clean white apron. Although a little shy of her strange white visitors, her innate dignity, gentle courtesy, and complete self possession indicate long association ...

— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various

... Gregorians, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Mennonites, Separatists, Pietists, Karaim Jews, Talmudists, Mahometans, and numerous Russian sects, such as the Molokanye and the Skoptsi or Eunuchs. America herself could scarcely show a more motley list in her statistics ...

— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... Dublin could boast of three or four hells doing a brisk trade. The most frequented and longest established was called "The Coal Hole," being situated on the coal quay. Here, at any hour after midnight, a motley company might be seen, each individual, however, well known to the porter, who jealously scanned his features before drawing back the noiseless bolts which secured the door. The professional gambler trying to live by his winnings, the fashionable swell finishing his round ...

— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... fumbling fingers several moments to unloose, and dropping one hand to his side, he held it there rigid as he saluted with two fingers at the brim of an imaginary hat; while his roving eye quickly took in the various motley articles of furniture of our camp,—a small kitchen table with oil-stove and tea outfit of plain white ware, some plates and bowls, a few saucepans, half a dozen chairs, no two alike, and the two cots huddled in the shadows,—his voice, that had been pitched in a ...

— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright

... Tisnacq lived in dangerous times, and may have found it necessary to walk warily in them; that through him had been sent, only the year before, that famous letter from William of Orange, Horn, and Egmont, the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley's fourth chapter; that the crisis of the Netherlands which sprung out of that letter was coming fast; and that, as De Tisnacq was on friendly terms with Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat loose on his shoulders; especially if he ...

— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... tribute either to the Abyssinian Lion, or to his other master the Pasha of Khartoum. A few days after our arrival at Metemma he returned from Abyssinia, and politely paid us a visit, accompanied by a motley and howling train of followers. We returned his call; but he had got drunk in the interval, and was at least uncivil, ...

— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc

... philosophizing journeyman who from every capital of Europe pours forth his lyrico-cosmic effusions, and the hero of his historical novel The Messenger of God (1911) is a Swiss dominic who at the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War collects a motley rabble about him for new works of peace and single-handed makes of himself the restorer of a devastated community. But with all the scope of the theme there is a lack of genuine historical color; and compared with ...

— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... first, had already put out for the scene of trouble, rowing lustily. Nobody could beat him to his garlands now; that was clear; clear, too, that there really wasn't much peril, after all. So the motley gathering of idlers became content to stand upon the edge of the boat pavilion, gazing most ...

— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... that the only safe issue from the situation was to take part in and shape the action of that gathering. Under his lead a committee from the Pittsburgh meeting, followed by a large body of the citizens, went out to the rendezvous. Here they found a motley assemblage, arrayed in the picturesque campaign costume which the mountaineers wore when they equipped themselves to meet the Indians,—yellow hunting-shirts, handkerchiefs tied about their heads, and rifles on the shoulder; the militia were on foot, and the light horse of the counties ...

— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens

... pilgrims saluted and parted and went their several ways and were swallowed up in the motley masquerade. ...

— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... and bells with face elaborately decorated in every color of the rainbow. He was distributing printed announcements to the gaping citizens of Everdoze. Not so much as a frankfurter or a glass of lemonade did the people of this motley caravan buy. ...

— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... and leopard, and one or two costly Persian prayer-rugs, partially hid the groundwork of dusty matting, taken over with the bungalow from its former occupant, and in places revealing the stone floor beneath. The broad mantel-shelf was given over to books, a motley crowd in divers stages of dilapidation. 'The Master of Ballantrae' shouldered 'The Queen's Regulations,' one would fancy with a swaggering hint of scorn; a battered copy of the 'Pilgrim's Progress' stood resignedly between Bogle's 'Mission to Thibet' and a technical handbook on ...

— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... Bagdad. He sees their actions conditioned and to some extent controlled by the influences of majestic inhuman powers, the genii of eastern tales, huge, cloud-girt spirits of oppressive solemnity. In reality most people wear motley all day long and the fairy powers are leprechauns, tricksy, irresponsible sprites, willing enough to make merry with those who can laugh with them; but players of all Puck's tricks on ...

— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... topics of the hour, he prophesied of the order of the future, he wrote comedies and tragedies, epics and epistles, satires and lyrics. His canvasses were myriad and he crowded every one of them with figures. At his most Byronic moment he flung his dark cloak aside, and danced in motley through Paul Clifford, with its outrageous caricature of George IV. and his Ministers as a gang of Hounslow highwaymen. Perhaps his best claim to regard is the insatiability of his human curiosity, evinced in the almost infinite variety ...

— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... well-known words, MR. G. LLOYD says, "It is also stated, I do not know on what authority, that the old and lamented warrior, Sir Charles Napier, wrote on the conquest of Scinde, Peccavi!" The author of Democritus in London, with the Mad Pranks and Comical Conceits of Motley and Robin Good-Fellow, thus alludes to this saying in that work. I presume he had good authority for ...

— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various

... of the feast in no wise differ from any other celebration, except that those who buried the deceased have marked attention paid them. There are the same motley group of primitive men and women, the same impartial distribution of the food, the same wild shouts of merriment, the same rivalry to finish each one his allotted portion, the same generous reciprocation ...

— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... spectacle before them—always, in its scenic splendour, so moving to her companion—broke up, under her scrutiny, into a thousand minor points: the things in the shops, the types of character and manner of occupation shown in the passing faces, the street signs, the names of the hotels they passed, the motley brightness of the flower-carts, the identity of the churches and public buildings that caught her eye. But what she liked best, he divined, was the mere fact of being free to walk abroad in the bright ...

— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... Council, Caucus, Causerie, there's an aim Which many know and some might even name; But see yon motley muster, Like shades in Eblis wandering up and down! Types there of every 'Show Class' in the Town Elbow ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various

... down academically upon the motley crowd as though doubting the aptitude of his salutation. "Fellow-citizens," he corrected, "the phenomenon we have just witnessed is, to the lay mind, inexplicable. To me—and to my honorable colleagues (added as an afterthought) it is quite clear. Quite clear, indeed. ...

— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... below. At our appearance at the top of the stairs those who were convalescent below rose and stood at attention. They stood in a line at the foot of their beds, boys and grizzled veterans, clad in motley garments, supported by crutches, by sticks, by a hand on the supporting back of a chair. Men without a country, where were they to go when the hospital ship had finished with them? Those who were able would go back to the army, of course. But what of that large percentage ...

— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... was a great clamour and opposition for some time, after it had subsided, he pointed to the glass to shew that it was still full. Mr. Holcroft (the author of the Road to Ruin) was one of the most violent and fiery-spirited of all that motley crew of persons, who attended the Sunday meetings at Wimbledon. One day he was so enraged by some paradox or raillery of his host, that he indignantly rose from his chair, and said, "Mr. Tooke, you are a scoundrel!" His opponent without ...

— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... is required. The historians of this day write of the past; and the historian of our present civil war is not yet born, who shall emulate the completeness and conciseness of Irving's Columbus, or Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, or Motley's Dutch Republic. Nor can we expect an early solution to the 'Fremont question,' which shall be full and satisfactory, though the length of time involved be but one hundred days. But it is different with ...

— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... our party, who were younger and lighter of foot than we sober married folks, ran on before; so that when the blanket, that served the purpose of a door, was unfastened, we found a motley group of the dark skins and the pale faces reposing on the blankets and skins that were spread round the walls ...

— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill

... a fool!—I met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool;—a miserable world!— As I do live by food, I met a fool, Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms,—and yet a motley fool. 'Good morrow, fool,' quoth I: 'No, sir,' quoth he, 'Call me not fool till heaven hath sent me ...

— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... pleasant garden, past the magnificent mansions of the rich they went—on, and on, amid throngs of the gay and fashionable, till the streets grew dingy with a motley crowd of the miserable and ragged, who seemed to herd together, as if thus to hide their degradation and shame. Some looked upon them, as they walked along, with a bold and impudent stare; but others shrunk from their observation, ...

— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... that generate The calm, the blissful, and the enduring mighty! Lo there! the soldier, rapid architect! Builds his light town of canvas, and at once The whole scene moves and bustles momently. With arms, and neighing steeds, and mirth and quarrel The motley market fills; the roads, the streams Are crowded with new freights; trade stirs and hurries, But on some morrow morn, all suddenly, The tents drop down, the horde renews its march. Dreary, and solitary as a ...

— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... entered the defile, and the goats and sheep, which had been spread widely over the open valley, scampered, crowded, and overleaped one another as they closed into the narrow way. There seemed to be fully two thousand of them, intermingled with a motley herd of horses, mules, asses, and kine of all sizes and descriptions, numbering three hundred or more, all driven by ...

— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis

... floor of the barn, upon a heap of hay, sat a fool in motley blowing with all his wind into a pipe. It was a cunning tune he played too, rich and heady. And so seemed the company to find it, dancers—some thirty or more—capering round him with all the abandon heart can feel and heel can answer to. As for ...

— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare

... almost unaware of the presence of the rest. You would see a family party of peasants gathered round their ox cart and making a meal of bread and raw red wine without so much as a glance at the motley thousands streaming by at their elbows; a soldier would strip off his wet clothes on the road's edge to change them for some that he had looted from a wayside store with no apparent perception of the women trudging past; nor did they seem to notice him. ...

— World's War Events, Volume III • Various

... my supper, and whilst I ate surveyed the mound of clothes he made on the deck—a motley heap indeed, with the colours and the finery of the lace and buttons of the coats I had piled upon him—and fell into some startling considerations of him. Was it possible, I asked myself, that he could have lain in his frozen stupor for fifty years? But why not? for suppose he had been ...

— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... looking on, with folded arms; moved by the grandeur and majesty of the scene. The devouring element, loosed in its awful recklessness there in the heart of this lonely forest. The motley group of black and white standing out in the great red light, powerless to do more than wait and watch. But more was he stirred to the depths of his being, by the sight of this human tragedy enacted ...

— At Fault • Kate Chopin

... been surprised by a party of Spanish soldiers about three months before. The name of this chief was Orellana; he belonged to a very powerful tribe which had committed great ravages in the neighbourhood of Buenos Ayres. With this motley crew (all of them except the European Spaniards extremely averse to the voyage) Pizarro set sail from Monte Video, in the River of Plate about the beginning of November, 1745, and the native Spaniards, being no strangers to the dissatisfaction of their ...

— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter

... which we found in our maps defined as Vinegar Yard, we were surrounded by a motley and terrific group of the inhabitants, both male and female. Of their sex we were in great doubt, especially of those who carried on their heads a kind of wicker basket, in which were a quantity of fish, of whose genus our naturalist declared himself perfectly ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various

... few of the expressions that came from a motley assemblage of persons as they stood in a train shed in Hoboken, one June morning. Motley indeed was the gathering, and more than one traveler paused to give a second look at the little group. Perhaps a brief list of them may not be ...

— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope

... open glade we came, and there, before the three rogues, stood the little innocent fawn. She visibly trembled at the sight of the motley group. The two human rogues looked to her, I presume, just as bad as the other three. Chagoo regarded her with a mixture of curiosity and defiance, while Wanahon stood as if rooted to the ground, evidently planning how to get at her. But Ohitika (Brave), generous Ohitika, his occasional barking ...

— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... browned with sun, as to tell of long sojourn in savage parts, if not association with the savages themselves. In obedience to the counsels of the Texan, Florence Kearney—a candidate for command over this motley crew—made early appearance in their midst. Not so early as to find that, on entering the room, he was a stranger to its occupants. Cris Rock had been there before him, along with a half-score of his confreres—old Texans of the pure breed—who having taken part ...

— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid

... along the narrow stream, and through the tangled labyrinths on either side; till, on the first of August, they reached Lake Onondaga, and, with sails set, the whole flotilla glided before the wind, and landed the motley army on a rising ground half a league from the salt springs of Salina. The next day was spent in building a fort to protect the canoes, bateaux, and stores; and, as evening closed, a ruddy glow above the southern forest told them that the town ...

— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... in granite of Catalonia, the mourning-hued corridor veined black and white in slate of Murviedro, the pink corridor in cipolin of the Alps, the pearl corridor in lumachel of Nonetta, and the corridor of all colours, called the courtiers' corridor, in motley. ...

— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... Northwold, and was delighted to enjoy some exchange of sympathy upon Terrace subjects—above all, when separated from the school-room party. Time had brought her to perceive that the fantastic Viscount did not always wear motley, and it was almost as refreshing as meeting with Clara, to have some change from the two worlds in which she lived. In her imaginary world, Adeline had just been rescued from the Corsairs by a knight hospitalier, with his vizor down, and was being conducted home by him, with ...

— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... and clothing, the men being forced to free themselves of all surplus incumbrances in order to keep up with the moving mass. At one place we passed General Early, sitting on his horse by the roadside, viewing the motley crowd as it passed by. He looked sour and haggard. You could see by the expression of his face the great weight upon his mind, his deep disappointment, his unspoken disappointment. What was yesterday a proud, well-disciplined army that had accomplished during ...

— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... of POESY, And when thou shouldst have prest amid the crowd There didst thou love to linger out the day Loitering beneath the laurels barren shade. SPIRIT of SPENSER! was the wanderer wrong? This little picture was for ornament Design'd, to shine amid the motley mob Of Fashion and of Folly,—is it not More ...

— Poems • Robert Southey

... this Congress! destined to unite All that's incongruous, all that's opposite. I speak not of the Sovereigns—they're alike, A common coin as ever mint could strike; But those who sway the puppets, pull the strings, Have more of motley than their heavy kings. Jews, authors, generals, charlatans, combine, 710 While Europe wonders at the vast design: There Metternich, power's foremost parasite, Cajoles; there Wellington forgets to fight; There Chateaubriand[342] forms new books of ...

— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... The floor of the dancing-room is usually the mother earth, which is frequently sprinkled with water to keep down the dust. The men are in their everyday habiliments, with the addition of any clean thing they may chance to possess; but, usually they are a motley crowd, a glance at whom at first leaves the impression that they are far from being refined. Except when dancing, they cling to their blankets, and at the least pause in the proceedings, they at once draw forth the materials and make their cigarettos. Both men and women indulge in these articles; ...

— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... forward march. He offers him a staff position, promising to release him, then to move to the eastward. Valois' knowledge of the frontier is invaluable, and he cannot pass an enemy in arms. Maxime Valois, with fiery energy, aids in urging the motley command forward. On February 7, 1862, the wild brigade of invasion reaches the mesa near Fort Craig. The "gray" and "blue" meet here in conflict, to decide the fate of New Mexico and Arizona. Feeble skirmishing begins. On the 2lst of February, the bitter conflict of Val Verde shows Valois for ...

— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... discretion, anxious to reach the next town as expeditiously as possible, where they purposed sleeping for the night. They mounted the tandem, smack went the whip, and in a few minutes the stage-coach and its motley group ...

— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... repulsive sores, that many were sent away as too weak. Most of them shrieked with fear, but a few came up smiling, one and all comforted by their protector, either Turk, child, or fond mother. The fathers invariably showed the most distressed concern. It was a comical sight; outside the rails a motley crowd of interested spectators and waiting children, and in the inclosure the doctor pricking his patients one after the other in a most indifferent manner. His clerk noted the names, and we, with ...

— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon

... and before, behind, and around them all, a hideous concourse of vagabonds, male and female, in uncounted thousands, armed with every conceivable weapon, yelling, blaspheming, and crowding against the carriages so that they surged to and fro like ships in a storm. This motley multitude kept up an incessant discharge of fire-arms loaded with bullets, and the balls often struck the ornaments of the carriages, and the king and queen were often almost suffocated with the smoke of powder. The two body-guard, who ...

— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... Juntoku, a young man of twenty-four, possessing, apparently, all the qualities that make for success in war, and thereafter an Imperial decree deprived Yoshitoki of his offices and declared him a rebel. The die was now cast. Troops were summoned from all parts of the Empire to attack Kamakura, and a motley ...

— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... these men?" I inquired, indicating the motley crew who were to accompany me. "Are ...

— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... one else to defend, therefore he is mine, my creature.' These theories she expounded to Madame de Ruth, never to Serenissimus. He, poor deluded one, thought his mistress a very charitable lady, and loved her the more for her kindness to sinners. Among this motley crew of her choosing was an Italian of the name of Ferrari, who had come to Tuebingen with ...

— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... even Latin and French terms, such as res scibilis and citrouille. The mixture startled the critics and carpers to whom its object had not been explained; but my conviction still remains that it represents, with much truth to nature, the motley suit of the Arabo-Egyptian. And it certainly serves one purpose, too often neglected by writers and unnoticed by reviewers. The fluent and transparent styles of Buckle and Darwin (the modern Aristotle who has transformed the face of Biological Science) are instruments ...

— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... sloped rapidly down, and Brother Shoveller conducted his young companions between the overhanging houses, with stalls between serving as shops, till they reached the open space round the Market Cross, on the steps of which women sat with baskets of eggs, butter, and poultry, raised above the motley throng of cattle and sheep, with their dogs and drivers, the various cries of man and beast forming an incongruous accompaniment to the bells of the churches ...

— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... hotly. "Not 't'll, sir. They're talking rot. She thought I was ninety, and daft at that. They always do," he added sighing, the sigh of a sore heart that motley ...

— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... his second term as football captain, having been elected to succeed himself the previous fall. At this moment, attired in the Crimson sweater, moleskin trousers, and black and crimson stockings that made up the school uniform, he looked every inch the commander of the motley array ...

— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour

... Grandsire, who has run life's circle and come back to childhood; the ruddy School-boy with his golden curls, frisking along the march; the Artisan's stuff jacket; the Noble's star-decorated coat;—the whole presenting a motley spectacle, yet with a dusky grandeur brooding over it. Onward, onward, into that dimness where the lights of Time which have blazed along the procession, are flickering in their sockets! And whither! We know not; and Death, hitherto our leader, ...

— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... men, loved the motley. In fact, the individual who is incapable of viewing the world from a jocular basis is unsafe, and can be trusted only when the opposition is strong enough to ...

— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... of the city of Derne, in 1805, by General Eaton, at the head of nine Americans, forty Greeks, and a motley array of Turks and Arabs, was one of those feats of hardihood and daring which have in all ages attracted the admiration of the multitude. The higher and holier heroism of Christian self-denial and sacrifice, in the humble walks of private duty, ...

— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... mourning-hued corridor veined black and white in slate of Murviedro, the pink corridor in cipolin of the Alps, the pearl corridor in lumachel of Nonetta, and the corridor of all colours, called the courtiers' corridor, in motley. ...

— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... Europe even at that early day. Thither flocked young men from Germany, England, and Italy, as well as from all parts of France, to the number of twenty-five or thirty thousand. These students were a motley crowd: some of them were half-starved youth, with tattered clothes, living in garrets and unhealthy cells; others again were rich and noble,—but all were eager for knowledge. They came to Paris as pilgrims flocked to Jerusalem, ...

— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord

... There is surely another political deluge forward, and these motley would-be couples are seeking ...

— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various

... Claudio's life. Isabella, perceiving in this conduct only a further proof of the hypocrite's villainy, breaks out once more into a tempest of agonised despair. Upon her cry for immediate revolt against the scoundrelly tyrant, the people collect together and form a motley and passionate crowd. Luzio, who also returns, counsels the people with stinging bitterness to pay no heed to the woman's fury; he points out that she is only tricking them, as she has already tricked him—for he still believes in her shameless ...

— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... From out the motley, looking neither to right nor left, came Scotchman McPherson; but though he passed fair before the leader's eyes and not a yard away, no number was spoken; no hint of recognition, of cognisance, crossed the latter's face. Implacable, ...

— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge

... the last one went overboard, all having their covers burnt off from the frames, when a general melee took place among the deck passengers, each whipping his neighbour to put out the fire. They presented a very motley appearance on arriving at the first station." Here, "a short stop was made, and a successful experiment tried to remedy the unpleasant jerks. A plan was soon hit upon and put into execution. The three links in the couplings of ...

— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various

... the launch, with a touch of his forelock, handed over the discharge notes and certificates of such of the motley group that came up the side that had these documents, which the second lieutenant, a knowing fellow, who was in charge of our shipping office that morning, had pocketed when he engaged the men; doing this as a sort of preventative to their ...

— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson

... rose sharply by leaps and bounds, the yellow road swerving to right and left, deep tilted meadows on one side with a screen of birches beyond, and on the other a sloping rabble of timber, whose foliage made up a tattered motley, humble and odd and bastard, yet, with it all, so rich in tender tones and unexpected feats of drapery that Adele cried that it was a slice of fairyland and sat with her chin on her shoulder, till the road ...

— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... to the fair and our station on the parapets at Grotta-Ferrata. Opposite us is a penthouse, (where nobody peaks and pines,) whose jutting fraschi-covered eaves and posts are adorned with gay draperies; and under the shadow of this is seated a motley set of peasants at their lunch and dinner. Smoking plates come in and out of the dark hole of a door that opens into kitchen and cellar, and the camerieri cry constantly, "Vengo subito" "Eccomi qua"—whether they come or not. Big-bellied flasks of rich Grotta-Ferrata ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... gypsy friends would have done if turned loose in Cairo among their cousins. How naturally old Charlotte would have waylaid and "dukkered" and amazed the English ladies in the Muskee, and how easily that reprobate old amiable cosmopolite, the Windsor Frog, would have mingled with the motley mob of donkey-boys and tourists before Shepherd's Hotel, and appointed himself an attache to their excursions to the Pyramids, and drunk their pale ale or anything else to their healths, and then at the end of the day have claimed a wage for his politeness! And how well ...

— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland

... who had made promises to his constituents, every politician of every grade who thought he had the party in his debt, every adventurer who on any pretext could make a showing of party service rendered, poured into Washington. It was a motley horde. ...

— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... some to purchase, if a good bargain should offer and a beauty be sold cheap. Here were sprightly Greeks, sage Jews, and moody Armenians, but all outnumbered by the sedate old Turks, with beards sweeping their very breasts. It was a motley crowd that thronged ...

— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray

... the questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With Plato, "philosophy was only ...

— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... cachet of his smile on my description of his motley plate. He joined me in one of his favorite cigarettes, only shaking a superior head at his ...

— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... triumphant passage. I think of the sentences with which Isaak Walton ends his life of Donne. I think of the last pages of Motley's "Dutch Republic," with its eulogy on William the Silent ...

— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... The motley company had increased to ten. One or two knew each other and conversed. Others stood off a few feet, not wishing to be in the crowd and yet not counted out. They were peevish, crusty, silent, eying nothing in particular ...

— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser

... along the entire front of the Palace, on the face of which is emblazoned the Sun of Mewar, the emblem of the Sesodias. This terrace was evidently the happy home of a great number of cows, peacocks, geese, and pigeons, which stalked calmly enough, among the motley crowd of natives, and gave one the impression of a glorified farmyard. The building itself, like most Indian palaces, is composed of a heterogeneous agglomeration in all sorts of sizes and styles. Each successive Maharana having apparently ...

— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... foliage weaves, And gems with icicles the sheltering eaves; —Thy muffled friend his nectarine-wall pursues, What time the sun the yellow crocus wooes, Screen'd from the arrowy North; and duly hies [Foonote 4] To meet the morning-rumour as it flies; To range the murmuring market-place, and view The motley groups that faithful TENIERS drew. When Spring bursts forth in blossoms thro' the vale, And her wild music triumphs on the gale, Oft with my book I muse from stile to stile; [Footnote 5] Oft in my porch the listless noon beguile, Framing ...

— Poems • Samuel Rogers

... funds, and we may be sure Lord Kew's name was at the head of the list, as it was of any list, of any scheme, whether of charity or fun. The English were invited, and the Russians were invited; the Spaniards and Italians, Poles, Prussians, and Hebrews; all the motley frequenters of the place, and the warriors in the Duke of Baden's army. Unlimited supper was set in the restaurant. The dancing-room glittered with extra lights, and a profusion of cut-paper flowers decorated the festive scene. Everybody was present, those crowds with whom our story has nothing ...

— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... There was a motley crowd collected on the pier and on the beach when Joe and his friend landed. Rough, bearded men, in Mexican sombreros and coarse attire—many in shirt-sleeves and with their pantaloons tucked in their boots—watched the new ...

— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... than these two has been her never-ending war with the sea. Holland has been called a land enclosed in a fortress reared against the sea. For generations her people have warred with angry waves; but, as Motley has said, they gained an education for a struggle "with the still more savage despotism of man." Let me not forget here Holland's great school of art—comparable only to that of Spain, or even to that of Italy. F. ...

— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... past the magnificent mansions of the rich they went—on, and on, amid throngs of the gay and fashionable, till the streets grew dingy with a motley crowd of the miserable and ragged, who seemed to herd together, as if thus to hide their degradation and shame. Some looked upon them, as they walked along, with a bold and impudent stare; but others shrunk from their ...

— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... A motley crowd of gentlemen in uniforms and glittering gala-dresses had filled the anterooms of the French embassy ever since the arrival of General Bonaparte and Josephine. All these high-born representatives of German sovereigns and states ...

— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... me to be a good boy and that he would see me in the spring. Some of the women shed tears as he passed through the gate, and many of us climbed to sentry box and cabin roof that we might see the last of the little company wending its way across the fields. A motley company it was, the refuse of the station, headed by its cherished captain. So they started back over the weary road that led to that now far-away land of civilization ...

— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... swords'; and so the heroes ceased not to talk, but always forgot to fight";—the sum of all their achievements being to lay waste the country, to interrupt honest industry, and to put in peril the lives of the unoffending. Mr. Brooke soon tired of this farce. Gathering a motley force, consisting of Malays, Dyaks, Chinese, and his own crew, he prepared for an assault. Then, planting his cannon where they commanded the stronghold of the enemy, with a few well-directed volleys he brought ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various

... about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season, that I encountered my friend. He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I was so pleased to see him, that I thought I should never ...

— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe

... stucco, which was peeling off, with their sunken windows, gaudy sign-boards, iron canopies over steps, and wretched little green-grocer's shops; the facades, inscriptions, sentry-boxes, troughs; the golden cap of St. Isaac's; the senseless motley Bourse; the granite walls of the fortress, and the broken wooden pavement; the barges loaded with hay and timber; the smell of dust, cabbage, matting, and hemp; the stony-faced dvorniks in sheepskin coats, with high collars; the ...

— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev

... above Syracuse all was silent. The moonlight, flooding slope and valley, wood and ruin and church, shone on the figure of a man in motley lying motionless upon the grass. It shone, too, on the sad face of a girl wandering, wandering through the pine woods. The moonlight shone caressingly upon her crown of flame-colored hair, upon his ...

— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... things went, and, in fact, seemed to take an outsider's interest only. He experienced no morbid sentiment at the loss of his property—it is doubtful if he cared at all. Anyhow, his leisurely attitude and his appearance of good-natured indifference caused many surprised remarks amongst the motley collection of bidders who were present. In spite of these appearances, however, he did take a very keen interest. A representative of Lablache's was there to purchase stock, and Bill knew it, and his interest was ...

— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... to be seen along the roadways of the irrigating canals that appeared to overspread the valley like a net. Camels plodding along beneath their heavy burden and water buffalos standing knee-deep in the clover were not uncommon sights at every station, while the train was surrounded by motley crowds of Bedouins, Arabs and Egyptians, the women being veiled to the eyes, a fact for which we probably had reason to be devoutly grateful, if we but knew it, as there was nothing in their shapeless figures ...

— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson

... reflections also weigh with me, And one of more especial gravity; Say that there lurked among our motley band Some sneaking, sly pretender to her hand; Say, his attentions became undisguised,— We should be ...

— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen

... others had disappeared, I was dragged out of our dark prison and brought into the presence of Neptune, who was seated on a throne composed of a coil of ropes, with his court, a very motley assemblage, arranged round him. In front of him his valet sat on a bucket with two assistants on either side, who, the moment I appeared, jumped up and pinioned my arms, and made me sit down on another bucket in front of ...

— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston

... my Soul had at that Moment quitted my Body, and descended to the poetical Shades in the Posture it was then in, what a strange Figure it would have made among them. They would not have known what to have made of my motley Spectre, half Comick and half Tragick, all over resembling a ridiculous Face, that at the same time laughs on one side and cries o tother. The only Defence, I think, I have ever heard made for this, as it seems to me, most unnatural ...

— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... the party, following a trail along the bluffs, rode up in the direction of the contractors' camps they discerned out on the river bottom a motley cluster of tents and shanties pitched under a hill. A number of flatboats lay in the backwater behind the bend and a quantity of ties corded along the bank indicated a loading-place, but no one seemed to be doing ...

— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman

... embrasures. It rises sheer out of the water, and is apparently situated in the centre of the bay, but on its side towards James Island the water is extremely shallow. It mounts sixty-eight guns, of a motley but efficient description. Ten-inch columbiads predominate, and are perhaps the most useful. They weigh 14,000 lb. (125 cwt.), throw a solid shot weighing 128 lb., and are made to traverse with the greatest ease by means of Yates's system of cogwheels. There are also ...

— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle

... suddenly as she had tossed aside her head coverings, Judy dropped her long loose cloak upon the floor and stood revealed clad in motley raiment indeed. In an instant all that she had said was forgotten as the girls crowded around examining ...

— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed

... scourge of the cradled grubs. The female has no wings, but, being a Wasp, she carries a sharp poniard. To novice eyes she would easily pass for a sort of robust Ant, distinguished from the common ruck by her garb of staring motley. The male, wide-winged and more gracefully shaped, hovers incessantly a few inches above the sandy expanse. For hours at a time, on the same spot, after the manner of the Scolia-wasp he spies the coming of the females out of the ...

— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... of Cooper's novels, the writings of Theodore Parker, the poetry of Bryant, the masterly law arguments of Lysander Spooner, the miscellanies of Margaret Fuller, the histories of Hildreth, Bancroft and Motley, Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature, Judd's Margaret, the political treatises of Calhoun, the rich, benignant poems of Longfellow, the ballads of Whittier, the delicate songs of Philip Pendleton Cooke, the weird poetry of Edgar Poe, the wizard ...

— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler

... sheep, which had been spread widely over the open valley, scampered, crowded, and overleaped one another as they closed into the narrow way. There seemed to be fully two thousand of them, intermingled with a motley herd of horses, mules, asses, and kine of all sizes and descriptions, numbering three hundred or more, all driven by ...

— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis

... prisoner with thy motley coat, That from thy vaulted, wiry dungeon singest, Like thee I am a captive, and, like thee, I have ...

— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... visit has been mainly occupied with the day at the Colonial Secretary's Lodge, and in walking and driving through the streets. The city is ablaze with color and motley with costume. The ruling race does not show to advantage. A pale-skinned man or woman, costumed in our ugly, graceless clothes, reminds one not pleasingly, artistically at least, of our dim, pale islands. Every Oriental costume from the Levant to China floats through ...

— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... of flowers. Across the gleaming yellow of the sky a black riband of homeward passing rooks streamed slowly towards the trees they loved. Under the spreading branches of the cedar stood the big motley group of flushed and receptive children, flanked by their more staid teachers, and faced by Bung, who sat upon his tail before them, and panted serenely, with his tongue hanging out sideways nearly to the ground. Dotted ...

— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens

... flourishes still, And who can deny that forever it will? A blending of breeding with puff and with plume; A strange sort of mixture of rick and mushroom. Some amble, some scramble, (some gamble), to fill The motley and ...

— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... hue and cry on her pathway close behind; but so rapid was the flight along the wide avenue, that the astonished citizens, as they poured forth from their dwellings to learn the cause of alarm, were only able to comprehend the nature of the case in time to fall in with the motley mass in pursuit (as many a one did that night), to raise an anxious prayer to heaven, as they refused to join in the pursuit, that the panting fugitive might escape, and the merciless soul dealer for once be disappointed ...

— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown

... the crowd, a motley crowd made up of men and women of every class, from vagabond to nobleman, from harlot to lady of fashion. Trees were despoiled of their leaves, and the green cockade was ...

— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... their Opera-loves On Iv'ry Tablets, or in clean white Gloves: Some of Platonic, some of carnal Taste, Hoop'd, or un-hoop'd, ungarter'd, or unlac'd. Thus thick in Air the wing'd Creation play, When vernal Phoebus rouls the Light away, A motley race, half Insects and half Fowls, Loose-tail'd and dirty, May-flies, ...

— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... many of the older States had removed the early restrictions upon voting, and the new States carved out of the West had written manhood suffrage into their constitutions. This new democracy flocked to its imperator; and Jackson entered his capital in triumph, followed by a motley crowd of frontiersmen in coonskin caps, farmers in butternut-dyed homespun, and hungry henchmen eager for the spoils. For Jackson had let it be known that he considered his election a mandate by the people to fill the offices with his ...

— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth

... as a whole did not progress like those in the North, and in course of time deteriorated. The old cathedrals decayed and were not rebuilt. The old Spanish stock died out and in its stead grew up a motley race given to revolt, revolution, and corruption. Even when the provinces became free, they weren't able to unite and form a strong nation. The Isthmus of Panama became a pest-hole where the scum of the Four Seas settled. The people became mean and unhealthy in mind and body and morals, ...

— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach

... forms floated over the warm pavement like a motley crowd of phantoms. Their thin silken garments were wet through and clung to their delicate figures, and a warm rain descended upon them from the roof of the bath, rising up again in vapor when ...

— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... like Mr. H. G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells to suggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are to embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is a man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the motley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which he proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of necessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities and differences must be melted into the huge mould of a World State, or else (and I think these ...

— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... me to choose the spot where even the corners speak of a secular past, there to evoke some representatives of the most modern, as well as the most arbitrary and the most momentary, life. You, who know better than any one the motley world of cosmopolites, understand why I have confined myself to painting here only a fragment of it. That world, indeed, does not exist, it can have neither defined customs nor a general character. It is composed of exceptions and of singularities. We are so naturally ...

— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... 'The motley crew, in vessels new, With Satan for their guide, sir, Pack'd up in bags, or wooden kegs, Come ...

— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson

... the Place d'Armes looking at the sights, the five themselves began to attract much attention. Their height and strength, their long, sender barreled rifles, and their deerskin attire made them highly picturesque figures. The motley population of New Orleans was used to all kinds of people, armed or unarmed, but generally armed. These, however, were different. They bore themselves with dignity, there was about them an air of absolute simplicity and honesty, and they kept close together ...

— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler

... the hatchway of the Black Eagle, checking the cargo as it was hoisted out of her, while McPherson and his motley assistants, dock labourers, seamen, and black Kroomen from the coast, worked and toiled in the depths below. The engine rattled and snorted, and the great chain clanked as it ...

— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... drew up to the sandy landing-beach, I looked at the motley array of paddlers, and my mind went back hundreds of years to the first Spanish crew which landed here, and I wondered whether these pirates of early days had any fewer sins to their credit than Case's convicts—and ...

— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... hardly finished before there were loud cries, and from the huts poured a motley gathering of Indians. They were attired in very scant costumes—in fact, they were as near like the aborigines as is customary in these modern days. And most of them had, streaked on their faces and bodies, ...

— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope

... thought he had some chance of getting, and for the barest equipment that would carry him across the water. Another man would at least have had a bodyguard; but Columbus relied upon himself, and alone held his motley crew in the bonds of discipline. A Pinzon could have navigated the fleet from Palos to Guanahani; but only a Columbus, only a man burning with belief is himself and in his quest, could have kept that superstitious crowd of loafers and malefactors ...

— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... the emigrants formed rather a motley band. Among them, besides those of our friends already mentioned, there were our hero's mother and all the Leather family. Captain Stride's daughter as well as his "Missus," and Mr Crossley's housekeeper, ...

— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne

... entering the canal, we very soon found ourselves among a motley and strange population. On landing, the attention is drawn to the vast number of small stalls and shops with which the streets are lined on each side, and to the crowds of people passing to and fro, all intent upon their ...

— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... knew that the planetoid was doomed. His supposedly impregnable screen was failing in spite of its utmost measure of energy, and, that defense down, the citadel would not last a minute. Therefore he summoned a chosen few of his motley crew of renegade scientists and issued brief instructions. For minutes a host of robots toiled mightily, then a portion of the shield bulged out, extended into a tube beyond the attacking layers of force, ...

— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... the great court-yard, where most of the inhabitants of the fortress, and those who, under recent circumstances, had taken refuge there, were drawn up, in order to look, for the last time, on their departed lord. Among these were mingled a few of the motley crowd from without, whom curiosity, or the expectation of a dole, had brought to the castle gate, and who, by one argument or another, had obtained from the warder ...

— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... declared friends, kept apart from their companions. There were few, indeed, they would deign to notice; and no one, unless her Papa had a carriage. There was an air of scorn in their countenances, which seemed to say, "here is a motley group, indeed!" ...

— The Boarding School • Unknown

... to be pushed up as quickly as possible to 200. Which of us in the country districts does not remember the blue emergency suits, of which a co-operative society was able by a lucky stroke to provide 400,000 for the new recruits?—or the other motley coverings of the hosts that drilled in our fields and marched about our lanes? The War Office Notes, under my hand, speak of these months as the "tatterdemalion stage." For what clothes and boots there were must ...

— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Perhaps we have given the best. In comparison with the Frenchman, he might be described as an angel; and, compared with the other wretches on the raft, he was, perhaps, the least bad: for the word best could not, with propriety, be applied to anyone of that motley crew. ...

— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... evening come the slaves back from their work: barristers, thinking out their eloquent appeals; school-boys, conning their dog-eared grammars; City men, planning their schemes; the wearers of motley, cudgelling their poor brains for fresh wit with which to please their master; shop boys and shop girls, silent now as, together, they plod homeward; the artisan; the labourer. Two or three hours you shall have to yourselves, slaves, to think and love ...

— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased" (Psa. 49:16). But go thou into the sanctuary of thy God, read His Word, and understand the end of these men-(Mason). Often, as the motley reflexes of my experience move in long processions of manifold groups before me, the distinguished and world-honoured company of Christian mammonists appear to the eye of my imagination as a drove of camels heavily laden, yet all at full speed; and each in the confident expectation ...

— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... traditional object of ambition for those most in favor at court; but they seemed to me to present a constrained figure, as I saw them soberly ranged in the stalls of the canons, clad in a costume of no particular epoch, wrapped in long mantles of motley color, and following, with a distracted air, the phases of a ceremony to which they were so little accustomed that they were constantly rising, sitting down, and kneeling ...

— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... manustrupation! Krafft-Ebing calls attention to this relation between religious and sexual feeling in psycho-pathological states. "It suffices," says he, "to recall how intense sensuality makes itself manifest in the clinical history of many religious maniacs; the motley mixture of religious and sexual delusions that is so frequently observed in psychoses (e. g., in maniacal women who think they are or will be the mother of God), but particularly in masturbatic insanity; and finally, the sexual, cruel self-punishment, injuries, self-castrations, and even self-crucifixions, ...

— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... headsmen's bloody hand,— The dungeon, block, and nameless tomb Prepare—for Douglas seeks his doom! But hark! what blithe and jolly peal Makes the Franciscan steeple reel? And see! upon the crowded street, In motley groups what masquers meet! Banner and pageant, pipe and drum, And merry morrice-dancers come. I guess, by all this quaint array, The burghers hold their sports to-day. James will be there; he loves such show, Where the good yeoman bends his bow, And the ...

— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... shining out already through the wind-driven bright rain. Jewels of blue had begun to star the black and white and golden clouds. A strange white light-ghost of Spring passing in this last violent outburst-painted the leaves of every tree; and a hundred savage hues had come down like a motley of bright birds on ...

— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... That motley drama!—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased forever more, By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness and more of Sin And Horror the soul ...

— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... whom I should have supposed would have been content to spend their latter days at home; but, strange as it may seem, they were urged on by the same desire which animated many of their younger companions—to make money—to do what they had failed to do at home. As I watched the motley collection of people from my high perch, I observed that some were laughing and joking as if nothing important was taking place. Others were thoughtful, as if conscious that they were taking an important step in life, while others looked ...

— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... the train stops, out get all the passengers, and a very motley assemblage they form as they pace up and down on the platform. Uniforms of all sorts predominate, from the modern-coated, richly-laced officer of the Emperor's guard, to the sombre-dressed rank and file of the line. There were Circassians and Georgians, and Cossacks of the ...

— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston

... feverishly to find reason in this chaos, the door opened and a motley crowd, roused from sleep by the cries, poured in. Jimmy, turning his head back again to attend to this invasion, perceived Mrs. Pett, Ann, two or three of the geniuses, and Willie Partridge, in various stages of negligee ...

— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... long-legged, lank fellows who took just as much care of their rifles and knapsacks as the Indians did? They were hunters, and Tom could not resist the temptation to turn his eyes away from the fore-castle back to the main-deck to take a second survey of the motley group of men he had seen there. They were cowboys all of them, and their clothing, especially their hats and boots, were as nearly perfect as money could buy. They were all young fellows, from twenty to twenty-five years of age, and wore their six-shooters ...

— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon

... secret counsels of the Emperor, he was able freely to unloose the purse-strings which had been so parsimoniously closed to Belisarius, and he had set his whole heart on succeeding where Belisarius had failed. Moreover, he was himself both wealthy and generous, and he brought with him a huge and motley host of barbarians, Huns, Lombards, Gepids, Herulians, all eager to serve under the free-handed Chamberlain, and to be enriched by him ...

— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... breed, Motley fruit of mongrel seed; By the dam from lordlings sprung. By the sire exhaled from dung: Think on every vice in both, Look on him, and see their growth. View him on the mother's side,[2] Fill'd with falsehood, spleen, and pride; Positive and overbearing, Changing still, and still adhering; ...

— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... as the men approached. As they drew nearer, Frank made out that they were indeed a motley crew. Spanish faces — or South American, to be more exact — predominated, but there were a few who seemed to be English or Americans. Also, there were two plainly of African descent and three who seemed to be Chinese ...

— The Boy Allies with Uncle Sams Cruisers • Ensign Robert L. Drake

... scarecrow of bigots, this artistic sorcerer, had made my flesh creep first in the gallery at Madrid with a work representing a horrible army of living skeletons scattered about an immense space, in conflict with a motley crowd of desperate and confused men and women, whom they were dragging into an abyss where Death awaited them. Only from the diseased imagination of a man alarmed by the terrors of damnation could such an extravagant ...

— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis

... after his arrival he, with Jacob, who was now raised to the rank of major, and William Long, who was one of his lieutenants, entered the palace of Holyrood, where the king's court was held. Here were gathered a motley assembly. A few English Cavaliers, many loyal Scotch nobles and gentlemen, and a large number of somber men of the Covenant. Next to Charles stood a tall man, whom Harry instantly recognized. Argyll, for it was he, stared fixedly at the young colonel, who returned his look ...

— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty

... chance of success, it was recognized that a twofold change of system was necessary: in internal and in external affairs. To strengthen the state internally a complete revolution of its administration was begun under the auspices of Count F. W. Haugwitz (1700-1765); the motley system which had survived from the middle ages was gradually replaced by an administrative machinery uniformly organized and centralized; and the army especially, hitherto patched together from the quotas raised and maintained by the ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... way of seeing Venice: but I would much rather sit at a little table on the Riva degli Schiavoni, with a plate of bread and cheese and a mezzo of Chianti before me, watching the motley crowd in the street and the many-coloured sails in the harbour; or spend a lazy afternoon in a gondola, floating through watery alley-ways that lead nowhere, and under the facades of beautiful palaces whose names I did not ...

— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... What motley cares Corilla's mind perplex, Whom maids and metaphors conspire to vex! In studious dishabille behold her sit, A lettered gossip and a household wit; At once invoking, though for different views, Her ...

— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... suddenly there was a dreadful noise on the stairs, a song shouted out in chorus by twenty mouths and a regular march like that of a Prussian regiment. The whole house was shaken by the steady tramp of feet. The door flew open, and a motley throng appeared—men and women in file, two and two holding each other by the arm and stamping their heels on the ground to mark time, advanced into the studio like a ...

— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... ministers of grace were engaged in pleasant conversation a different kind of a crowd had met not far away. They were moonshiners. Their rendezvous was a cave near the top of a hill about one mile back from the Cumberland River. A motley company of about a dozen men they were, dressed in cheap trousers supported by "galluses," coarse ...

— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick

... got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of ...

— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx

... "Streff," he became again his old whimsical companionable self. Once or twice she tried to turn the talk to his altered future, and the obligations and interests that lay before him; but he shrugged away from the subject, questioning her instead about the motley company at Violet Melrose's, and fitting a droll or malicious anecdote to each of ...

— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... intonation; some silently looking on, or listening. Two or three common looking fellows began to smoke their segars, but when it was suggested that this might incommode the ladies on the other side of the curtain, they with genuine politeness ceased directly. Through this motley and picturesque assemblage I have to make my way to my bed-room in a few minutes—I will take another look ...

— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... luxuriance of black curls I have ever seen falling in dense masses to her knees. After a conversation of amorous banter, he gives her a golden chain, which she assumes, well pleased, and gives him her name, La Magdalena. A motley crowd of street loafers here rushed upon the scene, and I am sure there was no one of Northern blood in the theatre that did not shudder for an instant at the startling apparition that formed the central figure of the group. The world has long ago agreed upon a typical face and figure for the ...

— Castilian Days • John Hay

... century not only in Boston and Cambridge, but in Paris, Rome, Florence, and other European cities. He was descended from one of the oldest and wealthiest families of Boston, and graduated from Harvard in 1831, together with Wendell Phillips and George Lothrop Motley. He was not distinguished in college for his scholarship, but rather as a wit, a bon vivant, and a good fellow. Yet his companions looked upon him as a strong character and much above the average in intellect. After taking his degree of Bachelor of Arts he went through the ...

— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns

... to diminish from the reputation of its author; but as a mannerism becomes increasingly disagreeable by repetition, we suspect that, without having less merit, this work will have less popularity than its predecessors. The style is the same "motley wear," and has the same jerking movement—seems at times a thing of shreds and patches hung on wires—and is so full of brief allusions to his own previous writings, that to a reader unacquainted with these it would be scarce intelligible. ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... first time this young gentleman's name had been mentioned, and it made my blood run cold to see how many side-long looks and expressive shrugs it caused in the motley assemblage. But I had no time for sentiment; the inquiry ...

— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green

... as the canonesses' litter was a safe distance ahead he began to beguile the way with fragments of reminiscence and adventure. Though few of his allusions were clear to Odo, the glimpse they gave of the motley theatrical life of the north Italian cities—the quarrels between Goldoni and the supporters of the expiring commedia dell' arte—the rivalries of the prime donne and the arrogance of the popular comedians—all these peeps into a tinsel world of mirth, cabal and folly, enlivened ...

— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... of the floor of the barn, upon a heap of hay, sat a fool in motley blowing with all his wind into a pipe. It was a cunning tune he played too, rich and heady. And so seemed the company to find it, dancers—some thirty or more—capering round him with all the abandon heart can feel and heel can answer ...

— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare

... tables, drinking eau-sucré and playing at dominoes or cards, or lounge on the sofas reading the gazettes. The garçons in scarlet tunics, relieved by their white turbans and cambric trowsers, are hurrying to and fro at the call of the motley guests. ...

— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... devoted to a few men, who were smoking; the other was the one from which Trenholme had descended. Its seats, upholstered in red velvet, were dusty from the smoke and dirt of the way; its atmosphere, heated by a stove at one end, was dry and oppressive. It would have been impossible, looking at the motley company lounging in the lamplight, to have told their relations one to another; but it was evident that an uncertain number of young people, placed near the lady who held the baby, were of the same party; they slept in twos and threes, leaning on one another's shoulders and covered ...

— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... among the orange boxes, the moving farms, and the wig-makers of Covent Garden, he had come upon a sculptor's shop, oddly crowded in among Cockney carters and decaying vegetables. Faces of Greece and Rome gazed at him suddenly from a broad window, and for a few moments he forsook the motley beauty of modern London for the ordered ...

— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne

... been compelled (by Lee's invasion) to take away to Monocacy nearly all of his troops, and so we had to appeal to the citizens for the defence of the city. All loyal citizens were appealed to and they responded nobly; they made, however, a motley army, but patriotic to the core, they vigorously ...

— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith

... while, one of my young men (who had contrived to get hold of some of the vessel's paint pots) very deliberately painted the man (whose nose I had rubbed with red paint) with different colours from head to foot while he grinned his approbation at his own motley appearance. His comrades seemed to enjoy it as much as he did and they quitted the ...

— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee

... vocation, and were permanent fixtures in the temple. The natives crowded about these small bazars, and seemed to freely invest the few coppers they had. We were followed about the courts, chapels, and departments of the immense structure by a motley and curious crowd, the girls and women satisfied to watch and stare at us; but the boys had imported a London and Dublin idea: turning cart-wheels, somersaults, and walking all about us on their hands, with feet in the air, to attract attention and elicit pennies. One ...

— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—John Lothrop Motley. ...

— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... must fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered that the heritage of priceless liberty should be their children's pride. But read Motley, or the recent and remarkably well-written volumes of Douglas Campbell, and you will see that every atrocity that Spanish hatred, religious intolerance, and mediaeval bigotry could invent, every horror ...

— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... recollection. At our feet flowed the Vire under its old stone bridge. On the middle of the bridge lay the figure of Shrove Tuesday on a litter of leaves, surrounded by scores of maskers dancing, singing, and carrying torches. Some of them in their motley costumes ran along the parapet like fiends. The rest, worn out with their revels, sat on the posts and dozed. Soon the dancing stopped, and some of the troop, seizing a torch, set fire to the effigy, after which they flung it into the river with redoubled ...

— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... seen that on an emergence, such as an irruption of the Scots, or the necessity of resisting the Welsh more effectually, the sheriffs of different counties were commanded to array the able-bodied men within their jurisdiction, and join the royal standard by an appointed day; and, no doubt, many a motley, and ill-favoured, and ill-appointed company were seen in the sheriff's train. We have also been reminded with how great difficulty even these musters could be collected, and kept together, and marched to the place of ...

— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... new to me, I might have found food for reflection, or observed circumstances to astonish me. But I had been long accustomed to mix in as motley a throng, as that which now surrounded the table of the Swampville hotel. A supper-table, encircled by blanket and "jeans" coats—by buckskin blouses and red-flannel shirts—by men without coats at all—was nothing strange to ...

— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... all women alive. For that virtue,[69] which was erst in the minds of the women of times past, those of our day have diverted to the adornment of the body, and she on whose back are to be seen the most motley garments and the most gaudily laced and garded and garnished with the greatest plenty of fringes and purflings and broidery deemeth herself worthy to be held of far more account than her fellows and to be honoured above them, considering not that, ...

— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... said, presenting it with a motley-coloured hand; "it's for you to take to London town ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various

... feather, and bright golden tassel. Max came next, and placed beside the cap a small silver watch, his last birthday gift, with a bright steel chain attached. Otto brought a great picture-book, just sent him by his godmother; Rudolph a tiny marble vase, richly sculptured; and so on, until a still more motley collection than before lay ...

— The Big Nightcap Letters - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow

... what crowds the uncouth forms advance: Each would outstrip the other, each prevent Our careful search, and offer to your gaze, 80 Unask'd, his motley features. Wait awhile, My curious friends! and let us first arrange In proper ...

— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... Strand is, perhaps, the finest street in Europe." Charles Lamb said: "I often shed tears in the motley Strand for fulness of ...

— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... at school since she was nine years old—there was the dominant fact in these motley uncomfortable years behind her, which, in her young ignorance of the irrevocableness of living, she wished so impatiently to forget. As to the time before her school life, she had a dim memory of seemly and pleasant things, ...

— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... a sort of coach-yard, which was filled with a motley and mixed crowd of people. I was greatly disappointed in Tattersall's. Indeed, few things in London have answered my expectations. They have either exceeded or fallen short of the description I had heard of them. I was prepared, both from what I was told by Mr. Slick, and ...

— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... could do—or would do. He tried digging ditches for the city, along with a motley collection of the sons of all nations ...

— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower

... floor were set several tables, around which were seated a motley company, all of them with glasses of beer or whiskey ...

— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger

... was tolerably comfortable. After the fatigue of his journey, Ben enjoyed a good supper and a comfortable bed. The evening, however, he spent in the public room of the inn, where he had a chance to listen to the conversation of a motley crowd, some of them native and residents, others strangers who had been drawn to Centerville by ...

— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... A vast, motley crowd; soldiers, serving maids, boys, girls, children, students, work girls, gendarmes, etc. It is evening. The shops are decked with tiny lamps; a huge lantern lights up the entrance to the Cafe Momus. ...

— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica

... escape the fearful storm. They leave arms, ammunition, tents, blankets, trunks, clothes, books, letters, papers, pictures,—everything. They pour out of the intrenchments into the road leading to Dover, a motley rabble. A small steamboat lies in the creek above the fort. Some rush on board and steam up river with the utmost speed. Others, in their haste and fear, plunge into the creek and sink to rise no more. All fly except a brave little band ...

— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin

... become of the light-hearted sketchers? I often recall those homely Saturday evening concerts; the long, shabby saal with its faded out-of-date decorations; its rows of small tables with the well-known groups around them; the mixed and motley audience. How easy, after a little while, to pick out the English, by their look of complacent pleasure at the delightful ease and unceremoniousness of the whole affair; their gladness at finding a public entertainment where one's clothes were not obliged to be selected with ...

— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... of Commodore Perry states that at the famed battle of Lake Erie, fully ten percent of the American crews were blacks. Perry spoke highly of their bravery and good conduct. He said they seemed to be absolutely insensible to danger. His fighters were a motley collection of blacks, soldiers and boys. Nearly all had been afflicted with sickness. Mackenzie says that when the defeated British commander was brought aboard the "Niagara" and beheld the sickly and parti-colored beings around him, an expression of chagrin escaped him at ...

— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney

... descriptions, in this motley city, hailed our hero with the most perfect unity of sentiment; and, at the theatres, and other public places, even the hat with the Gallic tri-coloured cockade of republicanism was waved with exultation ...

— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison

... preceded by a crowd of old and young in motley array. Behind came the alcalde, the municipal guard officers, the monks, and the Spanish Government clerks. Ibarra was talking with the alcalde; Captain Tiago, the alferez, the curate and a number of the rich country ...

— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... Old Rye; for the conviviality of Washington sets in at an early hour, and, so far as I had an opportunity of observing, never terminates at any hour, and all these drinks are continually in request by almost all these people. A constant atmosphere of cigar-smoke, too, envelopes the motley crowd, and forms a sympathetic medium, in which men meet more closely and talk more frankly than in any other kind of air. If legislators would smoke in session, they might speak truer words, and fewer of them, and bring about more ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... shouldering his bamboo, with his cases hanging at either end of it, off he marched, uttering aloud his cries to attract customers. I called him back; I felt inclined to rush after him—to seize him—to force the information from him; but he would not listen, and he was soon lost among the motley crowd I have described. I felt almost sure that he would come back the next day but in the meantime I was left in a state of the most cruel anxiety. Here was the best clue I had yet met with almost within my grasp, to guide me in ...

— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... companions, loving Phoebe like a parent, and the other two like a nurse, and really liking the brother. All took delight in the winter paradise of Hyeres, that fragment of the East set down upon the French coast, and periodically peopled with a motley multitude of visitors from all the lands of Europe, all invalids, or ...

— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to fall behind, and the bell was to be taken off if the rest of the mules would follow without the sound of its shallow music. No wind moved the weeds or shook the stiff grass, and the rising sun glittered pink on the patched and motley-shirted men as they blew on their red hands or beat them against their legs. Some were lucky enough to have woollen or fur gloves, but many had only the white cotton affairs furnished by the government. Sarah the squaw laughed at them: the interpreter was warm as she rode in her bright green ...

— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... to the Mermaid Inn, One dark May night, Fiddling a tune that quelled our motley din, With quaint delight, It haunts me yet, as old lost airs will do, A phantom strain: Look for me once, lest I should look for you, And ...

— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes

... before, behind, and around them all, a hideous concourse of vagabonds, male and female, in uncounted thousands, armed with every conceivable weapon, yelling, blaspheming, and crowding against the carriages so that they surged to and fro like ships in a storm. This motley multitude kept up an incessant discharge of fire-arms loaded with bullets, and the balls often struck the ornaments of the carriages, and the king and queen were often almost suffocated with the smoke of powder. The two body-guard, who had been massacred while so faithfully defending ...

— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... a festa of the people, and the Cyprian peasants who were a gentle, superstitious, ignorant race, devoutly subject to their priests and trained to the letter of their religious rites, came in from the mountains and the neighboring villages in numbers but rarely seen in the city: a motley throng—yet no shepherd among them was too poor to wear the boot of dark-green leather reaching to the knee—the bodine roughly fashioned and tough enough to protect them from the bites of the ...

— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... hanging by a slender rust-eaten nail, had been wrought into a fantastic shape. As they drove through the gateway, a green lizard scampered down from the top of one of the posts, where he had been sunning himself, and a rattlesnake lying in the path lazily uncoiled his motley brown length, and sounding his rattle, wriggled slowly off into the rank grass and weeds that ...

— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... throng of 'pretty people' at Stanhope Gate, but to mingle with the common herd in its special precincts,—precincts not set apart, indeed, by any legal formula, but by a natural law of classification which seems to be inherent in the universe. It was a curious and motley crowd—a little dull, perhaps, but orderly, well-behaved, and self-respecting, with here and there part of the flotsam and jetsam of a great city, a ragged, sodden, hopeless wretch wending his way about with the rest, thankful ...

— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... write this I am at Charleston, South Carolina, and I see how hard it will be for an American to understand the possibility of such a motley assembly being reasonable or even proper. It seems to me down here that there must have been odd feelings sometimes in those days. I can only say, however, that I never personally even thought of it. East London ...

— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... of no less than two emperors, and the responsibility falling on captain, crew, red trousers, and gilt eagles—He bien, what then? Neither were they cunning with their dark warnings of outlawry and violence. Dreadfulest horrors might lurk in the motley Gulf town held by force against bloodthirsty Mexicans. But croaking like that only gave brighter promise of the ecstatic shiver. ...

— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... the pupil was the narrative of Alexander. Books about that hero were easy to come by long before the invention of printing, though Alexander would have had difficulty in recognising his identity under the strange mediaeval motley in which his namesake wandered over the land. No single man, with the possible exception of Charlemagne, was so much written about or played so brilliantly the part of a hero to the Middle Ages and after.[18] The simplicity and universality of his success were of a type to appeal to ...

— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... presence, the whole of the time, in the motley-coloured crowd, of one of the diabolical ...

— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng

... when he saw the leather-winged creatures that had him in their grip. And again there were figures high overhead—white, floating figures on pinions of pure white; their faces, kindly and serene, looked down upon the motley throng. ...

— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin

... water-carriers and long lines of laden camels moving in ghostly silence along the river bank. Very beautiful also were the pictures made by the dahabiehs and other native boats, with their big lateen sails and with the motley gathering of natives in the stern. All these boats have enormous rudders which rise high out of the water and add greatly to the effectiveness of the picture as seen against the ...

— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch

... We sat in awed silence, gazing with timid curiosity about the room, the stained, plastered walls of which were well-nigh covered with a motley assortment of pictures, chromos, and advertisements, pasted on without much regard ...

— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... them along. A motley throng they were, soaked through with the rain, drunk with their own baffled rage, and with the brandy ...

— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... rising for some time, now gave very unequivocal notice of an approaching storm. The rain began to fall, and the decks were quickly cleared of their motley groups. ...

— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... outer ward, a strange scene presented itself to the view. Motley groups were scattered about—most of the persons composing them being clad in threadbare doublets and tattered cloaks, and wearing caps, from which the feathers and ornaments had long since disappeared; ...

— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth

... upon a grand final assault. Large and heavy shields, four or five feet high, were made by lashing together three split logs with the aid of cross-bars, and covered with these mantelets a chosen band advanced, followed by the motley throng of warriors. In spite of a brisk fire they reached the palisade, and crouching below the range of shot, hewed furiously with their hatchets to cut their way through. Daulac had crammed a large musketoon with powder, and lighting a fuse, he tried to throw it over the barrier, to burst like ...

— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... assured me that the government of Austria was especially desirous of not being regarded by the United States as responsible in any manner for the attempt to establish an empire under the Austrian archduke in Mexico. Mr. Motley thought a visit by me to Vienna while the Mexican question was pending might produce undue excitement. Hence I limited my tour in that ...

— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... flatter myself that I was equally admirable in my own metier. I was assorting a motley collection of guide-books, novels, maps, smelling-salts, and kodaks when he came in, and was dying to look up, but I remained as sweetly expressionless as ...

— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... of Maggie, and by the time Bidwell came clattering up the trail with a big freight-wagon the whole gulch was aroused, and a dozen men encircled the heap of motley bags on which Mrs. Delaney sat, ...

— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... Party has been urged to such extreme measures and such motley self-stultification by the pressure of the South, if every downward step has been only the more likely to be taken because it seemed impossible six months before, what are we not to look for, now that its leaders are emboldened by success, and its lieutenants are eager for more plunder at ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... themselves. For all that had previously been expelled from the city, now coming back with him, made their way into it, and were joined by a mixed multitude of foreigners and disfranchised persons, and of these a motley and irregular public assembly came together, in which they presently divested Phocion of all power, and chose other generals; and if, by chance Alexander had not been spied from the walls, alone in close conference with Nicanor, and ...

— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... transport dies away: Some more refin'd transcribe their Opera-loves On Iv'ry Tablets, or in clean white Gloves: Some of Platonic, some of carnal Taste, Hoop'd, or un-hoop'd, ungarter'd, or unlac'd. Thus thick in Air the wing'd Creation play, When vernal Phoebus rouls the Light away, A motley race, half Insects and half Fowls, Loose-tail'd and dirty, ...

— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... as like Gorgona, in its dampness, dirt, and confusion, as it well could be; but the crowd from the gold-fields of California had just arrived, having made the journey from Panama on mules, and the street was filled with motley groups in picturesque variety of attire. The hotels were also full of them, while many lounged in the verandahs after their day's journey. Rude, coarse gold-diggers, in gay-coloured shirts, and long, serviceable boots, elbowed, ...

— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole

... in the first flicker of the acetylene through a maze of hurrying figures, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the light, the plot would thicken: books orderly and disorderly, on bracketed shelves, cameras great and small in motley confusion, guns and a gramophone-horn, serpentine yards of gas-tubing, sewing machines, a microscope, rows of pint-mugs, until—thud! he has obstructed a wild-eyed messman staggering into the kitchen with a box ...

— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... Chancellor; Burnet was a bishop and favorite of William III.; Thiers and Guizot both were prime ministers; while Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Macaulay, Grote, Milman, Neander, Niebuhr, Muller, Dahlman, Buckle, Prescott, Irving, Bancroft, Motley, have all been men of wealth or position. Nor do I remember a single illustrious historian who has been poor ...

— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... round the room as she took her seat. There were a couple of forms, notched and cut and inked all over; a small deal desk perched on four legs, at which no doubt the master sat; a few dog's-eared books upon a high shelf; and beside them a motley collection of peg-tops, balls, kites, fishing-lines, marbles, half-eaten apples, and other confiscated property of idle urchins. Displayed on hooks upon the wall in all their terrors, were the cane and ruler; and near them, on a small ...

— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... of delight as went up from that motley monkey crew! It was simply indescribable. This was immediately followed by an immense amount of jabbering, as they gathered in little groups, no doubt discussing the merits of the action and the valor of the hero. Doubtless the monkey I had slain was a great tyrant over the others, ...

— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various

... and Levin pushed through the motley crowd on the little porch into the bar, where Mrs. Cannon administered, she set before them two ...

— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... on foot, which had its fatigues. This was to be a raid EN MASSE and on horseback. The whole country-side was to assemble at Shingle Hut and proceed thence. It assembled; and what a collection! Such a crowd! such gear! such a tame lot of horses! and such a motley swarm of ...

— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd

... discussing the questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With Plato, "philosophy was only another name for religion: philosophy is the ...

— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... following from Richardson: "Homer, Plutarch, Herodotus, and Plato; Virgil, Livy, and Tacitus; Dante, Tasso, and Petrarch; Cervantes; Thomas a Kempis; Goethe and Schiller; Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Bunyan, Addison, Gray, Scott, and Wordsworth; Hawthorne, Emerson, Motley, Longfellow, Bryant, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier. He who reads these, and such as these, is not in serious danger of spending his time amiss. But not even such a list as this is to be received as a necessity by every reader. One may find Cowper more profitable than Wordsworth; ...

— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder

... son," he cried gaily. "In this cap and bells, I see life under a different aspect. Never has it appeared to me sweeter and more irresponsible. Don't you feel it? But I forgot. You haven't any motley. I apologise for my want of tact. Blanquette," he added in French, "why haven't you found a costume ...

— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... together were about fifty sunburnt laborers, arrayed in coarse woollen shirts. To their despondent-looking trousers the blue tenacious prairie mud clung like glue. Several nationalities were represented in the motley assembly, for it was the time of the great North-West boom, and men had been ...

— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith

... wide terrace stretches along the entire front of the Palace, on the face of which is emblazoned the Sun of Mewar, the emblem of the Sesodias. This terrace was evidently the happy home of a great number of cows, peacocks, geese, and pigeons, which stalked calmly enough, among the motley crowd of natives, and gave one the impression of a glorified farmyard. The building itself, like most Indian palaces, is composed of a heterogeneous agglomeration in all sorts of sizes and styles. Each successive ...

— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... were not fortunate enough even to possess a disreputable old gun, armed themselves with pitchforks, so that altogether it was a motley armed party that started out one early October morning ...

— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honour they acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered to Christianity. In the following pages we shall ransack the stores of both, to discover the true spirit that animated the motley multitude who took up arms in the service of the cross, leaving history to vouch for facts, but not disdaining the aid of contemporary poetry and romance, to throw light upon feelings, ...

— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... Hill! Lo! It flourishes still, And who can deny that forever it will? A blending of breeding with puff and with plume; A strange sort of mixture of rick and mushroom. Some amble, some scramble, (some gamble), to fill The motley and ...

— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice

... Jew, Yaff, Masha, the deacon, the Cossack-thief, all his neighbours, the whole world, himself? His brain was giving way. The last card was trumped! (That simile gratified him.) And he was again the most worthless, the most contemptible of men, a common laughing-stock, a motley fool, a damned idiot, an object for jibes—to a deacon!... He fancied, he pictured vividly how that loathsome pig-tailed priest would tell the story of the grey horse and the foolish gentleman.... O damn!! ...

— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev

... whom six hundred Indians attached themselves—making an aggregate of one thousand three hundred and thirty;" we say, it is an achievement worthy of all remembrance and honour, that General Brock should, with such motley and slender forces, cross the Detroit river, and, by the skilful arrangement of his handful of soldiers, take, without shedding a drop of blood, a fort strongly protected by—iron ordnance, nine twenty-four-pounders, eight twelve-pounders, five nine-pounders, three six-pounders; brass ...

— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson

... the village of San Antonio del Norte, finely situated on a grassy plain, of considerable extent, a dependency of the valley of the Goascoran. We had intended stopping here for the night; but the cabildo was already filled with a motley crowd of arrieros and others on their way to San Miguel. A tall mestizo, covered with ulcers, sat in the doorway, and two or three culprits extended their claw-like hands towards us through the bars ...

— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... taking the dog's-eared volume from its shelf, glide off into an enchanted realm, where there were no lessons to get and no boys to smash my kite. In a lidless trunk in the garret I subsequently unearthed another motley collection of novels and romances, embracing the adventures of Baron Trenck, Jack Sheppard, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Charlotte Temple—all of which I fed ...

— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... the Box Street tenement looked out upon the river. It was lifted high: the activities of the broad stream and of the motley world of the other shore went silently; the petty noises of life—the creak and puff and rumble of its labouring machinery,—straying upward from the fussy places below, were lost in the ...

— The Mother • Norman Duncan

... of coach-yard, which was filled with a motley and mixed crowd of people. I was greatly disappointed in Tattersall's. Indeed, few things in London have answered my expectations. They have either exceeded or fallen short of the description I had heard of them. I was prepared, both from what I was told by Mr. Slick, and ...

— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... the court, lackeys, with smoking dishes and, full jugs, passed and repassed continually, although it was long past midnight. On entering the hall, they found Sir Randal at the head of a vast table, surrounded by a fiercer and more motley collection of individuals than had congregated there even in the time of Sir Rollo. The lord of the castle had signified that "it was his royal pleasure to be drunk," and the gentlemen of his train had obsequiously ...

— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... great landing lay beneath his glance, a vivid exposition of the vast, half-tamed valley's bounty, spoils, and promise; of its motley human life, scarcely yet to be called society, so lately and rudely transplanted from overseas; so bareboned, so valiantly preserved, so young yet already so titanic; so self-reliant, opinionated, and uncouth; so strenuous and materialistic in mind; ...

— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... by Superintendent DOGSNOSE of the D division, with an exulting mob of men and boys hooting at his heels: if Demosthenes or Cicero, disguised as Chartist orators, mounting a tub at Deptford, were to Philippicize, or entertain this motley auditory with speeches against Catiline or Verres, straightway the Superintendent of the X division, with a posse of constables at his heels, dismounts the patriot orator from his tub, and hands him over to a plain-spoken business-like justice of the peace, who ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... were flung open, and there burst in upon us a motley crew of grotesque and hideous masks, each one bearing a basket or bucket or sack, and all singing and shouting in every key and in ...

— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon

... of the great ranch, and kept subordinate the restless, roving, dissolute men-of-fortune he employed,—the deliberate and impartial judgment which had made his word as near law as it was possible for any mandate to be among the motley inhabitants within a radius of fifty miles. Had Rankin chosen he could have attained honor, position, power in his native Eastern home. No barrier built of convention or of conservatism could have withstood him. Society reserves her prizes largely for the man of initiative; and, uncomely ...

— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge

... worked intensely; quick, interested, almost capable, she had worked and worried. School-discipline early loomed large as a rock threatening disaster, dragging into her consciousness a sinister fear of failure. Thirty little ones, from almost as many different homes, representing a motley variety of home-training, looked to her to mold them into an orderly, happy unit. Some of her little tots were as thorns in her flesh—she couldn't keep her arms from around others; while some afternoons the natural restlessness of them ...

— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... white asters in Autumn, are found The tents all bestrewing the carpeted ground; The din of a camp, with its stir and its strife, Its motley and strange, multitudinous life, Floats upward along the brown slopes, till it fills The echoing hollows ...

— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston

... the last guests left the Casino. Without exception, liberal indulgence in champagne and brandy had done its work, and the motley crowd that left the building thus "early" was in a decidedly boisterous mood, and the limits of decency and good manners had been passed ...

— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg

... in straight rows, well patted down between, and treats the small seeds that he plants with a sort of paternal patience. Ian disdains any seed smaller than a nasturtium or bean, whose growth is soon apparent, and has collected a motley assortment of bulbs, roots, and plants, without regard to size or season, and bordered his patch with onion sets for Corney Delaney's express benefit, the goat having a Gallic taste for highly ...

— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright

... down. I could not but fancy, if my Soul had at that Moment quitted my Body, and descended to the poetical Shades in the Posture it was then in, what a strange Figure it would have made among them. They would not have known what to have made of my motley Spectre, half Comick and half Tragick, all over resembling a ridiculous Face, that at the same time laughs on one side and cries o tother. The only Defence, I think, I have ever heard made for this, as it seems to me, most unnatural Tack of the Comick Tail to the Tragick Head, ...

— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... for a jester (Chapter XX), from his motley clothes, is also sometimes a variant of Pash. And the dim. Patchett has become confused with Padgett, from Padge, a rimed form of Madge. Pentecost is recorded as a personal name in Anglo-Saxon times. Michaelmas is now Middleman ...

— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... dash, tinge, tincture, season, sprinkle, besprinkle, attemper^, medicate, blend, cross; alloy, amalgamate, compound, adulterate, sophisticate, infect. Adj. mixed &c v.; implex^, composite, half-and-half, linsey-woolsey, chowchow, hybrid, mongrel, heterogeneous; motley &c (variegated) 440; miscellaneous, promiscuous, indiscriminate; miscible. Adv. among, amongst, amid, amidst; with; in the ...

— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... forcing the outer gate, and arrived at length in the great court-yard, where most of the inhabitants of the fortress, and those who, under recent circumstances, had taken refuge there, were drawn up, in order to look, for the last time, on their departed lord. Among these were mingled a few of the motley crowd from without, whom curiosity, or the expectation of a dole, had brought to the castle gate, and who, by one argument or another, had obtained from the warder permission to enter ...

— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... cozen, jockey the trustful young creature. Do. There 's a great-hearted gentleman. You need n't fear my undeceiving her. I know my place; I know who holds the purse-strings; I know which side my bread is buttered on. Motley's my wear. So long as you pay my wages, you may ...

— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... corruptions, introduced by his transcribers, and particularly by a simpleton who is called Samuel, or his master Beulanus, or both, who appear to have lived in the ninth century, that it is difficult to say how much of this motley production is original and authentic. Be that as it may, the writer of the copy printed by Gale bears ample testimony to the "Saxon Chronicle", and says expressly, that he compiled his history partly from the ...

— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown

... ninety years ago. They, of course, saw everything in the blackest light; and the colony has long since weeded and settled itself under a course of good government. But poor Don Josef Maria Chacon must have had a hard time of it while he tried to break into something like order such a motley crew. ...

— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... the towns of the South you will find a military academy, and here the young cadet has been trained to arms and qualified for office: we have no such class in the Free States, except a few graduates from West Point. Under such officers, a motley army has been collected, composed of foreigners who have toiled in Southern cities as draymen and porters, of Northern clerks driven by coercion or sheer necessity to enlist, the poor whites, the outcasts of the South, a class the most degraded in public estimate,—a class which ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various

... she was to meet there. The hostess was fond of collecting together all sorts of stray oddities, and of trying to further a scheme of universal brotherhood by mixing up in her drawing-room a most motley crowd, including all classes, from the ultra fine lady to the emancipated slave. It was not, perhaps, very amusing to the portion of her guests who found themselves lost in a sea of unknown faces, ...

— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill

... their disdainful tread and long, swaying necks, never failed to interest her. It was a large caravan; the bales on the camels' backs looked heavy, and beside the merchants on riding camels and a motley crowd of followers—some on lean little donkeys and others on foot—there was an armed guard of mounted men. It took some time to pass. One of two of the camels carried huddled figures, swathed and shapeless with a multitude of coverings, that ...

— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... is more prejudicial than a deficiency of talent. There is an art of writing for the Theatre, technically called TOUCH and GO, which is indispensable when we consider the small quantum of patience which so motley an assemblage as a London audience can be expected to afford. All the contributors have been very exact in sending their initials and mottoes. Those belonging to the present collection have been carefully preserved, and each has been affixed to its respective ...

— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... them. Every fresh contribution is a permanent gain. Even in the same field the results of one exploration do not interfere with or supersede those of another. Robertson has, in many respects, been surpassed, but he has not been supplanted, by Prescott; Froude and Motley may traverse the same ground without impairing our interest in the researches ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... dykes before the gate, or carry stones and stakes, And bloody token of the war the shattering trump awakes. Mothers and lads, a motley guard, they crown the threatened wall, For this last tide of grief and care hath voice to cry for all. Moreover to the temple-stead, to Pallas' house on high, The Queen goes forth hedged all about by matron company, And bearing gifts: next unto whom, the cause of all this woe, ...

— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil

... of the cliffs for a considerable distance. The ground was rolling and tree-dotted and covered with grazing animals, alone, in pairs and in herds—a motley aggregation of the modern and extinct herbivore of the world. A huge woolly mastodon stood swaying to and fro in the shade of a giant fern—a mighty bull with enormous upcurving tusks. Near him grazed an aurochs ...

— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... his beat was on the look-out for the missing child. At the same time, an officer was told off to accompany the anxious father on a personal search for his little girl. First of all, they visited the casual ward at the workhouse, and astonished its motley and dilapidated occupants by waking them to ask if they had fallen in with a strayed child on any of the roads by which they had severally approached the town. When they had recovered from their first alarm beneath the gleam of the policeman's bulls-eye, these waifs ...

— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth

... present at the coronation of the Emperor and Empress of Austria, as King and Queen of Hungary. Through the courtesy of Mr. Motley, then Minister to Austria, he received from the Prime Minister of the empire every facility ...

— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various

... sarafani, their many-hued cashmere caps attached to pearl-embroidered, coronet-shaped kokoshniki, and terminating in ribbons which descend to their heels, and are outshone in color only by the motley assemblage of ...

— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... chair was occupied. Twenty men had breasted the storm that they might be at that dinner, and some had traversed a thirty mile trail that they might honor the old man and share his generous cheer. It was a remarkable and, perhaps we may say, a motley company that the Trapper looked upon as he took his place, knife and fork in hand, at the head of the table, with a hound on either side of his great chair, to perform the duty of host ...

— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray

... Spanish and Oriental: numerous canals. A strange and motley population, the artisans for the most part Chinese. Malays and Chinese live apart. Much evidence of volcanic activity in the Philippines. Natural resources abundant. Primitive tools cause much waste of labour. The buffalo as a draught animal. Rice the ...

— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various

... follies of which he could be capable. He considered himself as an inexhaustible quarry of humours, vanities, jealousies, whims, absurd enthusiasms, absurd mortifications. He was able, as he said, to sit at his ease in the side-scene and see himself jigging on the stage in motley or the tragic sock—see himself as a lover, and cry aloud in delight at the mad persistence of the fool he appeared; see himself directing the affairs of the nation, and be ready to die of laughing at himself for pretending to be serious, and at his countrymen ...

— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... and polished floor. Holly and mistletoe, rosemary and bay, and all the decorations of an old-time English Christmas were tastefully arranged. A burst of laughter ran through the hall, as through the ample doorway, and down the broad stair, trooped the Motley train of the Lord of Misrule to open the Christmas revels. A fierce and ferocious-looking fellow was he, with his great green mustache and his ogre-like face. His dress was a gorgeous parti-colored jerkin and half-hose, ...

— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks

... stand, they are at least, in one important aspect, only a kind of annex to the public school system, as I shall shortly point out to you. For the moment, let us consider, together, what to my mind constitutes the very hopeful struggle of the two possibilities: either that the motley and evasive spirit of public schools which has hitherto been fostered, will completely vanish, or that it will have to be completely purified and rejuvenated. And in order that I may not shock you with general propositions, let us first try to recall one of those public school experiences which ...

— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... do, sor," replied Mick, with a broad grin, as he cuddled the monkey up to him in his arms; Jocko taking off Mick's cap the while, and carefully scattering its motley contents to the winds. "Oi call him, sure, a Saint Michael's ...

— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson

... would need to last them until they should reach Georgetown, British Guiana, on the north coast of South America. This would be their first stop. Somehow the townspeople quickly guessed their identity, and they were followed from store to store as they shopped by a curious and motley throng of dark-skinned natives, among whom were noticed quite a few white children, presumably belonging to American employees of ...

— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser

... I had found a sterile monotony of dress and even of stature and features. But here was resplendent variety and display. Men from all the professional and military classes mingled indiscriminately, their divers uniforms and decorations suggesting a dress ball in the capital of the world. But the motley costumes of the women, who dressed with the license of unrestrained individuality, were even more startling and bizarre—a kaleidoscopic ...

— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... turned, and, as the fog broke away before the waving plume, he saw that the sun was rising. Issuing with its bright beams through the passes of the snowy mountains beyond appeared a strange and motley crew. Instead of the dark and romantic visages of his last phantom train, the Father beheld with strange concern the blue eyes and flaxen hair of a Saxon race. In place of martial airs and musical utterance, there rose upon the ear a strange din of harsh gutturals and singular sibilation. ...

— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... barbette battery. Its walls are twelve feet thick at the piers, and six feet thick at the embrasures. It rises sheer out of the water, and is apparently situated in the centre of the bay, but on its side towards James Island the water is extremely shallow. It mounts sixty-eight guns, of a motley but efficient description. Ten-inch columbiads predominate, and are perhaps the most useful. They weigh 14,000 lb. (125 cwt.), throw a solid shot weighing 128 lb., and are made to traverse with the ...

— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle

... weel, that is a droll motley cabinet, I vow.—Vary whimsical upon honour.—But they are aw great politicians at Bath, and settle a meenistry there with as much ease as they do the tune of ...

— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin

... Danube which separates this part of the new city from the old. A row of magnificent coffee-houses occupy the bank, and numbers of persons were taking their breakfasts in the shady porticos. The Ferdinand's Bridge, which crosses the stream, was filled with people; in the motley crowd we saw the dark-eyed Greek, and Turks in their turbans and flowing robes. Little brown Hungarian boys were going around selling bunches of lilies, and Italians with baskets of ...

— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various

... front, with its neat farm-houses at the eastern point, and its high bluff at the western extremity, crowned with the telegraph—the middle space occupied by tents and sheds for the cholera patients, and its wooded shores dotted over with motley groups—added greatly to the picturesque effect of the land scene. Then the broad, glittering river, covered with boats darting to and fro, conveying passengers from twenty-five vessels, of various size and tonnage, which rode at anchor, with their flags flying from the mast-head, gave an air of ...

— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... wharf we met several herds of the brown-haired goats driven by milkmen through the streets; and, assembled near the dock around a group of English Salvation Army lads and lasses who were singing familiar hymns accompanied by cornet and drum, we saw a motley crowd of men, many of whom from their diverse and peculiar costumes were evidently sailors from various ports of the world. Then, having completed our hurried tramp through the city in the time allotted for ...

— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... prize gained—or—lost! These possessors of the soil will, in a little time, be disinherited—these tenants of a day exchanged—the funeral pall will cover the most ambitious and the most active of them all, and the motley multitude be succeeded by others equally busy, equally anxious, equally thoughtless of another ...

— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox

... the former each part is separately conceived, and then by a succeeding act put together;—not as watches are made for wholesale,—(for there each part supposes a pre-conception of the whole in some mind)—but more like pictures on a motley screen. Whence arises the harmony that strikes us in the wildest natural landscapes,—in the relative shapes of rocks, the harmony of colours in the heaths, ferns, and lichens, the leaves of the beech and the oak, the stems and rich ...

— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... the world on fire, though she perish in the conflagration! A fourth is undressing. The fellow bringing in a pewter dish, as part of the apparatus of this elegant and Attic entertainment, a blind harper, a trumpeter, and a ragged ballad-singer, roaring out an obscene song, complete this motley group. ...

— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... assembled on Vigrid's broad plain. On one side were ranged the stern, calm faces of the AEsir, Vanas, and Einheriar; while on the other were gathered the motley host of Surtr, the grim frost giants, the pale army of Hel, and Loki and his dread followers, Garm, Fenris, and Ioermungandr, the two latter belching forth fire and smoke, and exhaling clouds of noxious, deathly vapours, which filled all heaven and ...

— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... ran the length of the beach, shaded by trees, and crossing a gentle stream. Along this avenue was all the life and commerce of Tai-o-hae. Two traders' shops, empty offices, a gendarme, a handful of motley half-castes lounging under the trees—this was all that was left of former greatness. Only nature had not changed. It flung over the broken remnants of the glory and the dream its lovely cloak of verdure and ...

— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... I saw the entry of the new king, William Frederick, of the new kingdom of the Netherlands.(274) Tapestry, or branches of trees, were hung out at all the windows, or, in their failure, dirty carpets, old coats and cloaks, and even mats-a motley display of proud parade or vulgar poverty, that always, to me, made processions on the continent ...

— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... Against the dark green, which is the dominant shade everywhere, stand out these thousand scraps of bunting, emblems of the different nationalities, all displayed, all flying in honor of far-distant France. The colors most prevailing in this motley assemblage are the white flag with a red ball, emblem of the Empire of the Rising Sun, where we ...

— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti

... only the bitterness of self-contempt. He chides with Fortune "that did not better for my life provide than public means that public manners breed"; he writhes at the thought that he has "made himself a motley to the view" of the gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars. "Thence comes it," he adds, "that my name receives a brand, and almost thence my nature is subdued to that it works in." But the application of the words is a more than doubtful one. In spite of petty squabbles with ...

— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... heights, the tocsin of Brunecken and St. Lawrence had not called them in vain. They came down the mountains and up the valley; they came, men and women, old men and children; and all were armed: he who did not possess a gun had a flail, a pitchfork, or a club. Like a broad, motley river, the crowd was surging up from all sides, and at the head and in the midst of the war-like groups were to be seen priests in holy vestments, holding aloft the crucifix, blessing the defenders of the country with fervent, pious ...

— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach

... more disastrous to ocean-going craft than is the ocean itself in its violent moments. The waters of the bay contain all manner of fish, wherefore its surface is ploughed by the keels of all manner of fishing boats manned by all manner of fishermen. To protect the fish from this motley floating population many wise laws have been passed, and there is a fish patrol to see that these laws are enforced. Exciting times are the lot of the fish patrol: in its history more than one dead patrolman has ...

— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London

... eager. Baldos, from his serene position on the cushions, watched her with kindling eyes. The grizzled driver grinned and shook his head despairingly. "Oh, pshaw! You don't understand, do you? Hospital—h-o-s-p-i-t-a-l," she spelt it out for him, and still he shook his head. Others in the motley retinue ...

— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... I enter'd a stupendous Hall, The scene of some approaching festival. O'er the wide portals, full in sight, were spread Banners of yellow hue, bestrip'd with red, Whereon, in golden characters, were seen: THE ANNIVERSARY OF FOLLY'S QUEEN! Strange motley ornaments the Building grac'd, With every emblem of corrupted Taste. No stately Column rose to meet the Dome, No Sculpture borrow'd from the Arts of Rome; No well-wrought Frieze crept graceful on the walls, Th' Acanthus weav'd no splendid Capitals; Nor did the Attic elegance supply One simple ...

— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe

... several small white rats, a monkey hugging a little white kitten, a white cat, which had been dyed a brilliant yellow, superintending the sports of a number of mice and dormice; and a duck, a hen, and a guinea-pig, which were conversing together in one corner of the cage. Over this motley assembly was a board which announced that this Happy Family was supported entirely by voluntary contributions; and a woman was going about amongst the crowd shaking a tin plate at them, and crying out against their stinginess if they refused ...

— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton

... the early fall Breed pulled down a yearling mountain sheep on a high plateau. A motley crew answered the meat call. Breed, the yellow hybrid, Shady, the half-blood renegade, and four pairs of coyotes born in Sand Coulee Basin; the dog coyote with his timber-wolf mate and several of Breed's and ...

— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... Christian doctors, crying sacrilege and blasphemy, sprang forward in a transport of fury to fall upon the Jew; and a troop of monks, in motley dresses of black and white, advanced with a standard on which were painted pincers, gridirons, lighted fagots, and the words Justice, Charity, Mercy.* "It is necessary," said they, "to make an example of these impious wretches, and burn them for the glory of God." They began even ...

— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... supposed that the persecution and the slaughter of "Heretics" and "Infidels" was the exception. It was the rule. Motley, the American historian, states that Torquemada, during eighteen years' command of the Inquisition, burnt more than ten thousand people alive, and punished nearly a hundred thousand with infamy, confiscation of property, or ...

— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... subscribed the funds, and we may be sure Lord Kew's name was at the head of the list, as it was of any list, of any scheme, whether of charity or fun. The English were invited, and the Russians were invited; the Spaniards and Italians, Poles, Prussians, and Hebrews; all the motley frequenters of the place, and the warriors in the Duke of Baden's army. Unlimited supper was set in the restaurant. The dancing-room glittered with extra lights, and a profusion of cut-paper flowers decorated the festive scene. Everybody was present, ...

— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... This motley conglomeration is for the most part arranged against the inner wall of the hut, and opposite the entrance, so as to be observable by any one looking in at the door, or even passing by it. For its purpose is to impress the superstitious victims of Shebotha's craft with a belief in her ...

— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid

... enduring mighty! Lo there! the soldier, rapid architect! Builds his light town of canvas, and at once The whole scene moves and bustles momently. With arms, and neighing steeds, and mirth and quarrel The motley market fills; the roads, the streams Are crowded with new freights; trade stirs and hurries, But on some morrow morn, all suddenly, The tents drop down, the horde renews its march. Dreary, and solitary as a churchyard; ...

— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... news been communicated when it was found that the expedition was surrounded by a large body of armed men, who instantly began an attack. The assailants, a motley crowd of Kakhyens and Chinese border men, were soon repulsed; but as reports came streaming in that large bodies of Chinese train bands were advancing to their aid, it was thought best to beat ...

— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... mind set to work again on that motley procession of pictures which he had likened to a patchwork film. Was it as disjointed as it seemed? Could it not be so put together as to make a true continuity, consistent ...

— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt

... the crowding footsteps of many men were heard at both entrances to the wide hall-way which ran through the house. At the same moment the door was violently thrown open, and the dining-room was filled with an irregular mass of motley, ragged, red-coated men, whose reckless demeanor and hardened faces indicated that they had been recruited from the lowest and most depraved classes of the inhabitants of the colony. They were led by a middle-aged man of dissipated appearance, ...

— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... dismounting from the car in front with three other men, Flynn, Christopher and a large colored man, while from the other car, a hired machine, by the look of it, four other figures descended—all unloading suit-cases upon the terrace steps—a motley crowd in flannel shirts and sweaters, with cropped heads, thick necks and red hands, all talking loudly and staring up at the towers of the house as though they expected them to fall on them. This then was Jerry's house-party—! ...

— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs

... eight years, made up from almost every nationality under the sun. Bohemians and Poles furnish the majority of the working force, while Germans, Irish, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, negroes, Indians, and Americans contribute to the motley contingent. They come from every direction and from various distances, some of them traveling a hundred miles or more to secure a few days' or weeks' work. Almost every farmer or woodsman living anywhere in the region of the marshes turns out with his entire family; and the families of all ...

— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various

... for what he thought he had some chance of getting, and for the barest equipment that would carry him across the water. Another man would at least have had a bodyguard; but Columbus relied upon himself, and alone held his motley crew in the bonds of discipline. A Pinzon could have navigated the fleet from Palos to Guanahani; but only a Columbus, only a man burning with belief is himself and in his quest, could have kept that superstitious crowd of loafers and malefactors ...

— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... inner contemplation long, By thoughts that need no speech nor oath nor song, My spirit soars above the motley throng ...

— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... fount, my muse hath sung, Translating into heavenly tongue Whatever came within my reach, From hosts of beings borr'wing nature's speech. Interpreter of tribes diverse, I've made them actors on my motley stage; For in this boundless universe There's none that talketh, simpleton or sage, More eloquent at home than in my verse. If some should find themselves by me the worse, And this my work prove not a model true, To that which I at least rough-hew, Succeeding hands will give the finish due. Ye ...

— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... place at which to study the appearance and character of the Monteros is at the Central Market, where they come daily by hundreds from the country in the early morning to sell their produce, accompanied by long lines of mules or horses with well-laden panniers. It is a motley crowd that one meets there, where purchasers and salesmen mingle promiscuously. From six to nine o'clock, A. M., it is the busiest place in all Havana. Negroes and mulattoes, Creoles and Spaniards, Chinamen and Monteros, men and women, beggars, ...

— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou

... did the storm break, and with her shuttle the enraged goddess smote the web of Arachne, and the fair pictures were rent into motley rags and ribbons. Furiously, too, with her shuttle of boxwood she smote Arachne. Before her rage, the nymphs fled back to their golden river and to the vineyards of Tymolus, and the women of Colophon in blind terror rushed away. And Arachne, shamed to the dust, knew that life for her ...

— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... many of them, resembling the rovers and adventurers in the Caribbean or representing some of the many activities prevalent in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thomas Weston, former ally of the Pilgrims, settled with a motley crew of rude fellows at Wessagusset (Quincy) and there established a trading post in 1622. Of this settlement, which came to an untimely end after causing the Pilgrims a great deal of trouble, only a blockhouse and stockade ...

— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews

... of the smoke was explained. With the word at Big Salmon that the trail was broken to Pelly, there was no longer any need for the smoke wreath to linger in his wake; and Rasmunsen, crouching over lonely fire, saw a motley string of sleds go by. First came the courier and the half-breed who had hauled him out from Bennett; then mail-carriers for Circle City, two sleds of them, and a mixed following of ingoing Klondikers. ...

— The Faith of Men • Jack London

... charming cordiality to be found in no colder latitude, the cosy breakfasts that prefaced days of real enjoyment—the midnight revels of the bal masque! And then the carnival!—those wild weeks when the Lord of Misrule wields his motley scepter—leading from one reckless frolic to another till Mardi Gras culminates in a giddy whirl of delirious fun on which, at midnight, ...

— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... Congress! destined to unite All that's incongruous, all that's opposite. I speak not of the Sovereigns—they're alike, A common coin as ever mint could strike; But those who sway the puppets, pull the strings, Have more of motley than their heavy kings. Jews, authors, generals, charlatans, combine, 710 While Europe wonders at the vast design: There Metternich, power's foremost parasite, Cajoles; there Wellington forgets to fight; There ...

— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... who are to swell Rennenkampf's force. Their cadres, the skeletons of the battalions of which they are the flesh, are waiting for them—officers, organization, equipment, all is ready. The endless trains decant them; they swing in leisurely columns through the streets to their depots, motley as a circus—foresters, moujiks in fetid sheepskins, cattlemen, and rivermen, Siberians, tow-haired Finns, the wide gamut of the races of Russia, all big or biggish, with those impassive, blunt-featured faces that mask the Russian ...

— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... under the splash of icy, limpid waters, and everywhere men were hammering and sawing and splitting, erecting soldiers' huts, huts for settlers, sheds, stables, store-houses, and barracks to shelter this motley congregation assembling here under the cannon of the Upper Fort, the ...

— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... into the verandah outside, he seated himself in a long chair and proceeded to sip it slowly, as if it were some elixir whose virtue would be lost by haste. Some people might have been amused by the motley crowd that passed along the street beyond the verandah-rails, but Gideon Hayle, for such was his name, took no sort of interest in it. He had seen it too often to find any variety in it. As a matter of ...

— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby

... mentioned Mr. Tucker, seat himself, at Edmonton Fair, in one of those vulgar vehicles called swings: he was highly delighted with the novelty of the exercise, which he enjoyed amidst the rude stare and boisterous grins of the motley group around him; "this is life," said he, upon getting out of the swing, "what shall we see next?" In his poem of Hypocrisy, he has beautifully eulogized General Graham, who showed his sense of this intellectual tribute by sending the author ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various

... a mass of light brighter than that Which burned in Circe's palace, and beneath it A motley crew, dancing to joyous music. But from that light explosion comes, and flame; And forth the dancers rush in haste and ...

— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... books, in motley row, Invite us to the task— Gay Horace, stately Cicero; Yet there's one verb, when once we know, No higher skill we ask: This ranks all other lore above— We've learned "amare" means ...

— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood

... clerical air, you might have taken us for the denizens of Grub street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by agricultural labor; or, Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full experiment; or Candide and his motley associates, at work in their cabbage-garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points of husbandry, ...

— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... sooner had the heads of the British columns appeared than they were driven back by the fire of the American batteries; the field-pieces, mortars, and rocket guns were then brought up, and a sharp artillery duel took place. The motley crew of the Louisiana handled their long ship guns with particular effect; the British rockets proved of but little service [Footnote: Latour, 121.]; and after a stiff fight, in which they had two field-pieces ...

— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt

... that had come to seem a trifling matter, for that afternoon Aunt Polly was to come, and a new world was to be opened for her conquest. Helen was amusing herself by sorting out the motley collection of souvenirs and curios which she had brought home to decorate her room, when she heard a carriage drive up at the door, and a minute later heard the voice of Mrs. ...

— King Midas • Upton Sinclair

... woman closes the checkered adventures of some of the personages of this motley story; such as the honest Hibernian Reed, and Dorion the hybrid interpreter. Turcot and La Chapelle were two of the men who fell off from Mr. Crooks in the course of his wintry journey, and had subsequently such disastrous ...

— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving

... thus we failed, not thus; When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us. Children we were—our forts of sand were even as weak as we, High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea. Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd, When all church bells were silent our cap ...

— Poems • G.K. Chesterton

... of the Macedonian brutal; but the crew was made up of a motley class of human beings of every class of viciousness ...

— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,

... with the utmost minuteness every look of contempt which she had seen in the faces of the young men whilst they spoke of Mrs. Stanhope, the match-maker. Belinda's mind, however, was not yet sufficiently calm to reflect; she seemed only to live over again the preceding night. At last, the strange motley figures which she had seen at the masquerade flitted before her eyes, and she sunk into an ...

— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth

... he contemplated the motley mass of humanity that presented itself with such eagerness for the attainment of so degrading an office; and as he listened to their vulgar boastings and brutal language, he blushed to think that such men were ...

— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... he might be described as an angel; and, compared with the other wretches on the raft, he was, perhaps, the least bad: for the word best could not, with propriety, be applied to anyone of that motley crew. ...

— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... the childless uncle of large fortune. The second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley—a gibe at the poverty of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and cunning are most usually found, according to the ...

— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... desecrated, lies a broad green vale, where the Cherwell and the Isis mingle their full, clear waters. Here and there primeval elms and oaks overshadow them; while in their various windings they encircle gardens, meadows, and fields, villages, cottages, farm-houses, and country-seats, in motley mixture. In the midst rises a mass of mighty buildings, the general character of which varies between convent, palace, and castle. Some few Gothic church-towers and Romaic domes, it is true, break through the horizontal lines; yet the ...

— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... that the enlivening sounds of voices became more and more distinct, when, topping the brow of the hill, a blue light, most opportunely lighted up, disclosed to him at a very short distance on the opposite side of the valley, a substantial gentleman's house, in front of which a motley and mixed medley of some couple of hundred people or more—some of them gentlemen, but the majority consisting of miners and agricultural labourers—were assembled, either as actors, assistants, or lookers-on, at a display of various kinds of fire-works that ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... remarkable; nor was she ignorant of some of the best French and German, not to speak of Latin, authors. We have never known one of her age whose intellectual tastes were of a higher order. She seemed to feel equally at home in reading Shakespeare and Goethe; Prescott, Motley, and Froude; Mrs. Austin, Scott, and Dickens; Taine, Huxley, and Tyndall; or the popular biographies and fictions of the day. And yet her studious habits and devotion to books did not render her any the less the unaffected, attractive, and ...

— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... wiry of limb and dark of skin, an Indian or two, silent, grave, emotionless, a single negro, and trailing behind them a number of dirty, delighted children, and dogs of every breed and degree. It was a motley gathering, and appeared almost like a multitude as it hurried forth into the open parade-ground, and surged joyfully about us, all eager to welcome us to Dearborn, and hopeful that we brought them encouragement and relief. We were of their ...

— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish

... sloping very precipitously to the plain, save at one point, where a winding gully curved downwards, its mouth choked with sand-mounds and olive-hued scrub. Along the edge of this position lay the Arab host—a motley crew of shock-headed desert clansmen, fierce predatory slave dealers of the interior, and wild dervishes from the Upper Nile, all blent together by their common fearlessness and fanaticism. Two races were there, as wide as the poles apart—the ...

— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... with some consternation, rose from the battlements: "Ach Gott!" "Mutter Gott—it is he! It is Jann, Der Wanderer. It is himself." The chains rattled, the ponderous drawbridge creaked and dropped; and across it a medley of motley figures rushed pellmell. But, foremost among them, the very maiden whom he had left not ten minutes before flew into his arms, and with a cry of joyful greeting sank upon his breast. Mr. Clinch looked down upon the fair head and long braids. It certainly ...

— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... of his followers, who had been surprised by a party of Spanish soldiers about three months before. The name of this chief was Orellana, and he belonged to a very powerful tribe, which had committed great ravages in the neighbourhood of Buenos Ayres. With this motley crew, all of them except the European sailors averse from the voyage, Pizarro set sail from Monte Video about the beginning of November 1745: and the native Spaniards, being no strangers to the ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... escorted by Grenadiers and surrounded by women and bullies, some armed with pikes and some carrying long branches of poplar. This favourite part of the cortege looked at some distance like a moving grove, amidst which shone pike-heads and gun-barrels. Above and in front of the motley procession which accompanied them, mounted high on one of the waggons, rode Death himself, so the spectators thought, grinning, triumphing, and directing the whole, in the shape of the skull-like countenance of ...

— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall

... In those glorified days, he had striven to have his own lineaments depicted above the robe of the central figure, but the artist had declared them to be unpictorial, and clung to the majesty of the gentleman in the white beard. Around the latter's feet were gathered a motley crew—the fine lady in her ball dress, the shoeblack, the crowned king, the red Indian in Fenimore Cooper feathers, the half-naked negro, the wasted, ragged mother with her babe, the jockey, the Syrian leper, and a score of other types of humans, including in the background a hairy-faced ...

— Septimus • William J. Locke

... brows. His right hand holds a stiletto, his pockets bulge with weapons or plunder, his left hand is raised with the air of a priest encouraging his flock. And his words are the words of religion—"God with us." At the sign the motley crew ...

— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... velvet plumage gay, With many an amorous dame, Fierce strutted o'er the way; And motley ducks Were waddling seen, And drake with ...

— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte

... of us, with his ferret eyes in the doorway. Quickly Kennedy passed over the money in return for the motley array of objects taken from Brodie. The dip and his gun- moll disappeared into the darkness as quickly as ...

— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... termed "Self-control." I once saw him, in the company of the above mentioned Mr. Tucker, seat himself, at Edmonton Fair, in one of those vulgar vehicles called swings: he was highly delighted with the novelty of the exercise, which he enjoyed amidst the rude stare and boisterous grins of the motley group around him; "this is life," said he, upon getting out of the swing, "what shall we see next?" In his poem of Hypocrisy, he has beautifully eulogized General Graham, who showed his sense of this intellectual ...

— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various

... treaty with the Fula emir of Nupe, he proceeded to clear the ground, build houses, form enclosures and pave the way for a future city. Numbers flocked to him from all neighbouring districts, and in his settlement were representatives of almost all the tribes of West-Central Africa. To the motley commonwealth thus formed he acted not merely as ruler, but also as physician, teacher and priest. In less than five years he had opened up the navigation of the Niger, made roads, and established a market to which the native produce was brought for sale and barter. He had also collected vocabularies ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... in a chair along a narrow causeway between the padi fields, or else I skirt a tree-clad mountain. My bearers chat gaily as they trudge along in the bright morning and every now and then, distant and mysterious, I hear the deep sound of a monastery bell. In the streets of Peking there is a motley crowd and it scatters to allow passage to a string of camels, stepping delicately, that bring skins and strange drugs from the stony deserts of Mongolia. In England, in London, there are certain afternoons in winter when the clouds hang heavy and low and the light is so bleak ...

— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham

... unsubstantial in fact, but in appearance brilliant and pompous, had failed in his undertaking, and exposed himself to ridicule: but now, when he was going to commence the war a second time, taught by experience he concentrated his powers in a real and effectual preparation. Rejecting those motley numbers and many-tongued threats of the barbarians, and arms ornamented with gold and precious stones, which he considered to be the spoils of the victors, and to give no strength to those who possess ...

— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... scholar away from his books, become interesting instead of remaining commonplace, because the contrasts become marked which exist between them. Moreover, men undertake journeys for divers purposes, and a pilgrimage in Chaucer's day united a motley group of chance companions in search of different ends at the same goal. One goes to pray, the other seeks profit, the third distraction, the fourth pleasure. To some the road is everything; to others, its terminus. All this vanity lay in the mere ...

— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... have no poets who are a match for Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier and Holmes; and no essayists who are a match for Emerson and James Russell Lowell—no jurists who are the rivals of Marshall, Kent and Story; and no living historians equal Bancroft, Prescott and Motley. These facts do not necessarily indicate (as some assert) a widespread intellectual famine. The most probable explanation of the fact is that the mental forces in our day exert themselves in other ...

— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... Hall, The scene of some approaching festival. O'er the wide portals, full in sight, were spread Banners of yellow hue, bestrip'd with red, Whereon, in golden characters, were seen: THE ANNIVERSARY OF FOLLY'S QUEEN! Strange motley ornaments the Building grac'd, With every emblem of corrupted Taste. No stately Column rose to meet the Dome, No Sculpture borrow'd from the Arts of Rome; No well-wrought Frieze crept graceful on the walls, Th' Acanthus weav'd no splendid Capitals; Nor ...

— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe

... of one other Englishman, the young British subaltern, with the sage intrepidity of ripest experience, hastily summoned the chiefs of the Derajat and Bannu districts to his aid, and assembled their motley followings under his banner. He sent messengers to the friendly chief of Bhawulpore, and called on him to join in the crusade against Mooltan. Then after much feinting and fencing, and greatly assisted by the stout Van Cortlandt, Edwardes threw ...

— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband

... revenged? On the Jew, Yaff, Masha, the deacon, the Cossack-thief, all his neighbours, the whole world, himself? His brain was giving way. The last card was trumped! (That simile gratified him.) And he was again the most worthless, the most contemptible of men, a common laughing-stock, a motley fool, a damned idiot, an object for jibes—to a deacon!... He fancied, he pictured vividly how that loathsome pig-tailed priest would tell the story of the grey horse and the foolish gentleman.... O damn!! In ...

— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev

... in the pleasant paths of POESY, And when thou shouldst have prest amid the crowd There didst thou love to linger out the day Loitering beneath the laurels barren shade. SPIRIT of SPENSER! was the wanderer wrong? This little picture was for ornament Design'd, to shine amid the motley mob Of Fashion and of Folly,—is it not More honour'd ...

— Poems • Robert Southey

... drove past he saw an old Italian woman bargaining with smiles and lively gestures over the open counter. Farther on, from an improvised wooden booth, the raucous voice of the phonograph was jarring the night air and entertaining a motley group gathered in front of it. Across the street a flaunting poster announced "Moving Picture Show for a Nickel." Vehicles of all descriptions, from a Maine "jigger" to a "top buggy," were stationary along the village ...

— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... certainly have the faculty of presenting a sharply-outlined and vivid picture, while Taine heaps up hundreds of little facts, so that the reader, as the French say, can hardly see the wood for the trees. I may add that the French scholar's opinion of Prescott and Motley and Bancroft is still lower than that which he cherishes for ...

— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... the coronation of the Emperor and Empress of Austria, as King and Queen of Hungary. Through the courtesy of Mr. Motley, then Minister to Austria, he received from the Prime Minister of the empire every facility for ...

— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various

... and a scarlet cloak, or rather a cloak that had once been scarlet, but was now completely faded from its original color. It had been broken here and there, but was pieced with different colored cloths, so as to appear a motley and strange garment; and her bony feet were bare and unprotected. Nanny, from different circumstances, was unanimously elected the witch or bugbear of the village; and though the brats were then ...

— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... of intense activity followed. The differences between Governor Shirley and the commander, Colonel William Johnson, were composed, and the motley army would soon march forward to the head of Andiatarocte to meet Dieskau and the French. It was evident that the beautiful lake which both English and French claimed, but which really belonged to the Hodenosaunee, had become one of two keys to the North American lock, ...

— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler

... that dust not yet deposited. The noises as from a great city swelled strident: shouts, hammerings, laughter, rumble of vehicles, cracking of lashes, barkings of dogs innumerable—betokening a thriving mart of industry. But although pedestrians streamed to and fro, the men in motley of complexions and costumes, the women, some of them fashionably dressed, with skirts eddying furiously; and wagons rolled, horses cantered, and from right and left merchants and hawksters seemed to be calling their wares, of city itself I could see ...

— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... also stated, I do not know on what authority, that the old and lamented warrior, Sir Charles Napier, wrote on the conquest of Scinde, Peccavi!" The author of Democritus in London, with the Mad Pranks and Comical Conceits of Motley and Robin Good-Fellow, thus alludes to this saying in that work. I presume he had ...

— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various

... action thrills us. The old hero was, in general, brave and brilliant. He had the tornado's movement. His onset redeems him. He blustered, was spectacular, heartless, and did not guess the meaning of purity; but he was warrior, and the world enjoys soldiers. And this motley hero has been attempted in our own days. He was archaic, but certain have attempted to make him modern. Byron's Don Juan is the old hero, only lost to the old hero's courage. He is a villain, with not sense enough to understand he is unattractive. He ...

— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... tongue, lick the whole labor flat" The work has prospered so far only because nobody but its promoters has taken it seriously. It has not engaged attention from those having the knowledge and the insight to discern beneath its cap-and-bells and the motley that is its only wear a serious menace to all that civilized men hold precious in woman. It is of the nature of men—themselves cheerful polygamists, with no penitent intentions—to set a high value upon chastity in woman. (We need not inquire why they do so; those to whom the reasons ...

— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... where he spent a night was but another brooding-place of discontent and regret, each little petty detail connected with the command of the motley party (mainly time-expired men, homeward bound), was drudgery; each Hindoo pugree that he met was but a beastly contrast, or so it seemed to him, to the turbans of the troop that but a week ago had thundered ...

— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... irreverend sophistries,' said I, 'and say what company is this a coming.' 'Bohemians,' cried he, 'Ay, ay, this shall be the rest of the band.' With that came along so motley a crew as never your eyes beheld, dear Margaret. Marched at their head one with a banner on a steel-pointed lance, and girded with a great long sword, and in velvet doublet and leathern jerkin, the which stuffs ne'er saw I wedded afore ...

— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... welcome sounds. As he vaulted over the rail of his own ship to the deck of the stranger, a motley crew of half-wild sea-savages swarmed behind him. They had cutlasses and boarding-pikes, and their faces were blackened with powder. Their eyes were reddened with sulphurous fumes and their clothes torn with splintered ...

— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston

... Fitzurse, with the axe he had taken from the carpenters, was foremost, shouting as he came, "Here, here, king's men!" Immediately behind him followed Robert Fitzranulph, with three other knights, and a motley group—some their own followers, some from the town—with weapons, though not in armour, brought up the rear. At this sight, so unwonted in the peaceful cloisters of Canterbury, not probably beheld ...

— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... and selfishness had marked for their own;—certain it was, that, at this sight Walter experienced a more displeasing revulsion of feeling—a more entire conviction of sadness—a more consummate disgust of this weary world and the motley masquers that walk thereon, than all the tragic scenes he had just ...

— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... stores close, and their thousand of employees turn out into the streets. They form a motley yet effective feature among the wayfarers. The Malay girls are usually very pretty, with languishing eyes, shaded by long lashes, and supple figures, whose graceful lines are revealed by their thin clothing. ...

— The Boys of '98 • James Otis

... his own affairs and hazards on Lake Ontario that he was not likely to give Perry any more men than could be spared. This reluctance caused Perry to send a spirited protest in which he said: "The men that came by Mr. Champlin are a motley set, blacks, soldiers, and boys. I cannot think you saw ...

— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine

... are separated by a sheet of fresh water three-quarters of a mile long; its sloping banks are studded with pretty cottages, its surface is alive with boats gay with awnings of red and blue and green, and seats of motley color, and is altogether a fairy spectacle. Asbury Park is the worldly correlative of Ocean Grove, and esteems itself a notch above it in social tone. Each is a city of small houses, and each is teeming with life, but Ocean Grove, ...

— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... sharply by leaps and bounds, the yellow road swerving to right and left, deep tilted meadows on one side with a screen of birches beyond, and on the other a sloping rabble of timber, whose foliage made up a tattered motley, humble and odd and bastard, yet, with it all, so rich in tender tones and unexpected feats of drapery that Adele cried that it was a slice of fairyland and sat with her chin on her shoulder, till the road curled up into the depths of a broad pine-wood, ...

— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... sentries were placed and the theatre not open that Evening, but that single evening was the only exception, and the next day the Palais Royal was as brilliant and more cheerful than ever, with its motley groups of visitors. The Cossacks were not quartered in the Palais Royal, they were in the Ch. Elysees, the trees of which bear visible marks of their horses' teeth, but a good many came in from ...

— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... that pleasant sense of disorder that the best conducted Ark is always able to impart. The sliding roof had rarely been known to close entirely. There was always a pair of giraffe-legs sticking out, or an elephant-trunk, taking from the stiffness of its outline, and reminding us that our motley crowd of friends inside were uncomfortably cramped for room and only too ready to leap in a cascade on the floor and browse and gallop, flutter and bellow and neigh, and be their natural selves ...

— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... porticoes, eagerly discussing the questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With Plato, "philosophy was only ...

— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... ashamed. Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus; When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us. Children we were—our forts of sand were even as weak as we, High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea. Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd, When all church bells were silent our cap and ...

— Poems • G.K. Chesterton

... he says in indignation. "Scoundrel! The devil devour me! Whatever am I to do now? Why, my wife is in that train! She's there all alone, expecting me, consumed by anxiety. Ach, I'm a motley fool!" ...

— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... men approached. As they drew nearer, Frank made out that they were indeed a motley crew. Spanish faces — or South American, to be more exact — predominated, but there were a few who seemed to be English or Americans. Also, there were two plainly of African descent and three who seemed ...

— The Boy Allies with Uncle Sams Cruisers • Ensign Robert L. Drake

... bread, the driver's own provisions (it was part of the bargain that he was to "find" himself), loose articles of all kinds, thrown in at the last moment, five adults, two children, one small dog and an unhappy-looking canary? This motley assemblage was stowed away as well as possible, the kettles and pails being hung at the back and sides, after the fashion of the travelling tinkers' carts. There certainly was a very emigrant-like appearance about the whole thing, in spite of the tasteful ...

— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon

... Swimming across with my clothes first, I tie the bicycle to the fence-posts, which barely keep it from sinking, and manage to navigate it successfully across. The village of Be-o-wa-we is full of cowboys, who are preparing for the annual spring round-up. Whites, Indians, and Mexicans compose the motley crowd. They look a wild lot, with their bear-skin chaparejos and semi-civilized trappings, galloping to and fro in and about the village. "I can't spare the time, or I would," is my slightly un-truthful answer to an invitation to stop over ...

— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... was turned down the coast, and on we went, steaming, smoking, and splashing, after the most orthodox fashion of fire-boats in general. I had now time and opportunity to look around me. Every available spot of the deck and paddle-boxes of the small, flat-bottomed iron steamer, was crowded with as motley a set of passengers as ever sailed since the days of Captain Noah. Sepoys returning from furlough to join their regiments; lascars, or enlisted workmen belonging to the different civil branches of the army; and camp-followers in all their varieties, ...

— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various

... the witches hie, The stubble is yellow, the corn is green; Thither the gathering legions fly, And sitting aloft is Sir Urial seen: O'er stick and o'er stone they go whirling along, Witches and he-goats, a motley throng. ...

— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... are men, again, with initiative but no endurance, and others with endurance but no initiative. Lastly, there are men, and a great many of them, who appear to be quite incapable of coherent thought, yet can handle machinery or any mechanical device to a marvel. Yes, we are a motley organisation. ...

— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay

... much delay that he found himself at last, under the escort of a slave-party, on the way to Ujiji. Mr. Waller has graphically described the situation. "At last he makes a start on the 11th of December, 1868, with the Arabs, who are bound eastward for Ujiji. It is a motley group, composed of Mohamad and his friends, a gang of Unyamwezi hangers-on, and strings of wretched slaves yoked together in their heavy slave-sticks. Some carry ivory, others copper, or food for the march, while hope and fear, misery and villainy, may be ...

— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... Add to this motley crowd, men dressed la Mexicaine, with their large ornamented hats and serapes, or embroidered jackets, sauntering along, smoking their cigars, lperos in rags, Indians in blankets, officers in uniform, priests in their shovel hats, monks of every order; Frenchmen exercising their wit upon ...

— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... you wish to sit apart from the crowd, just under the shadow of the tree, or in some favourite corner where you can smoke, and contemplate the motley guests, formed into calm and solemn groups, who wish to hold no communion with the Giaour. There is ample food here for the observer of character, costume and pretension: the tradesman, the mechanic, the soldier, the gentleman, the dandy, the grave old man, looking wise on the past and dimly ...

— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... dollars lying in the —— Bank in Massachusetts, so she would have Mosside purchased in her name for Colonel Tiffton, not as a gift, for he would not accept it, but as a loan, to be paid at his convenience. This was Alice's plan, and Mr. Liston acted upon it at once. Taking his place in the motley assemblage, he bid quietly, steadily, until at last Mosside, with its appurtenances, belonged ostensibly to him, and the half-glad, half-disappointed people wondered greatly who Mr. Jacob Liston could ...

— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes

... us, only raising their heads from their crossed arms; grave Turks, smoking their nargiles in front of the cafes that open on the Marina, turned their chairs round to look at us without stopping their hubble-bubbling; and all about us, where nothing else was, a line of motley humanity—Greek, Turk, Egyptian, Nubian, Abyssinian, under hats, caps, tarbouches, turbans, hats Persian and ecclesiastical, and no hats at all—half circled us with ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various

... days of Strongbow. The advantage of a numerous, loyal, and able-bodied population was seen in 1573, when the Earl of Essex passed through the place on his way to Ireland. It happened that he left behind him a detachment of soldiers, and the "motley coats" and "blue coats," having quarrelled, used their weapons on each other. With admirable promptitude, the Mayor summoned the trained bands, and the rest of the story may be told in the vivacious language of ...

— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell

... glass of pure Old Rye; for the conviviality of Washington sets in at an early hour, and, so far as I had an opportunity of observing, never terminates at any hour, and all these drinks are continually in request by almost all these people. A constant atmosphere of cigar-smoke, too, envelopes the motley crowd, and forms a sympathetic medium, in which men meet more closely and talk more frankly than in any other kind of air. If legislators would smoke in session, they might speak truer words, and fewer of them, and bring about ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... state there would be a fitting place for both. The social organism indeed, in its highest state of perfection, would manifest the richest variety in the development of such various parts. It might consist of a number of motley communes[10] of monogamists and of free-lovers, of ascetics and sybarites, of saints and [Greek: paiderastai]—each of them being stones in this true Civitas Dei, this holy city of God. Of course it may be contended that ...

— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock

... other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley. Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra's head, who pretend to clear the ...

— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... in her motley history, an old-clothesman, one Domenico— he and his "Compagnia del Bruco," his Company of the Worm[1]— reigned over Siena and gave to her people a taste for blood. It was bloodshed on easy terms they had; for surely no small nation (except that tiger-cat Perugia) has achieved ...

— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... What a motley crowd is on the streets! They hear the Aramaic speech of Palestine, which Quintus has been taught by his Athenian tutor, and their ears also catch the accents of other foreign tongues. They meet traders ...

— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford

... country; the first man that Mr Banks saw was Tupia, faithfully attending with his musquet; and soon after, Oberea brought him some of her country clothes as a succedaneum for his own; so that when he came to us he made a most motley appearance, half Indian and half English. Our party soon got together, except Dr Solander, whose quarters we did not know, and who had not assisted at the concert: In a short time Tootahah made his appearance, ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... rough wooden huts and "flakes," or stages for drying cod. The rude inmates of these huts gathered round the company that landed from the English ships; and the captains and officers of the other vessels were there by special summons. A very curious and motley group was that which then stood on the beach of St. John's harbor—swarthy, bronzed sailors and fishermen of Spain, Portugal, and France, in the costumes of the sixteenth century. Soon a circle formed round ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... January, 1666, he returned to Whitehall, and a month later the queen, who had been detained by illness, joined him. Once more the thread of life was taken up by the court at the point where it had been broken, and woven into the motley web of its strange history. Unwearied by time, unsatiated by familiarity, the king continued his intrigue with the imperious Castlemaine, and with great longing likewise made love to the beautiful Stuart. But yet his pursuit of pleasure ...

— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy

... of a warm, murky day late in October that our steamer, the United States, touched the landing at Hilton Head. A motley assemblage had collected on the wharf,—officers, soldiers, and "contrabands" of every size and hue: black was, however, the prevailing color. The first view of Hilton Head is desolate enough,—a long, low, sandy ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... while the streets were alive with motley and noisy crowds. The sun was up, if still red and hazy, and sunlight came like a tunnel of gold down the swampy valley and from over the sea; the orange orchards lying to the south, called the gardens of the Sultan, were red rather than yellow, ...

— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine

... The world would have more confidence in the caliber of Bryant had he been able to rank himself in the Lincoln following. But the greater part of the best intelligence of the North could have subscribed to Motley's words, "My respect for the character of the President increases every day."(1) The impression he made on men of original mind is shadowed in the words of Walt Whitman, who saw him often in the streets of ...

— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... left the Governor, to rest upon the woman beside me; had he pointed to her with his hand, he could not have more surely drawn upon her the regard of that motley throng. By degrees the crowd had fallen back, leaving us three—the King's minion, the masquerading lady, and myself—the centre of a ring of staring faces; but now she became the sole target at which all ...

— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston

... horsemen all around; and so had they segregated themselves instinctively, friend with friend, that the northern side was a mass of bright colors to show that there stood the Spanish caballeros; and opposite them, a more motley showing and yet a more sinister one, stood the Americanos, with Bill Wilson pressed against the rope half-way down the line, and beside him big Jerry Simpson, lounging ...

— The Gringos • B. M. Bower

... and modern sportsmen, Hebrew doctors and classical artists, mediaeval monks and Anglican bishops, perform their strange antics before us, and the scenery shift from Manchester to Damascus, or Pall Mall to Bethany, in obedience to laws dictated by the fancy instead of the reason; let each of the motley actors be alternately the sham and the reality, and our moods shift as arbitrarily from grave to gay, from high-strung enthusiasm to mocking cynicism, and we shall witness a performance which is always amusing and original, and sometimes even poetical, and of which only the harshest ...

— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... stood at the hatchway of the Black Eagle, checking the cargo as it was hoisted out of her, while McPherson and his motley assistants, dock labourers, seamen, and black Kroomen from the coast, worked and toiled in the depths below. The engine rattled and snorted, and the great chain clanked as it was ...

— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... my place in spite of pressure and crowding. The first to come ashore were all men—English merchants, returning Canadians, a couple of uniformed officers, Frenchmen decked out in lace and fine clothing, and a motley sprinkling of others. They passed on, some being met and embraced by waiting friends; and next came an elderly, sour-looking dame, who regarded me with ill-favor. I followed her a few paces beyond the crowd, never doubting that ...

— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon

... set on fire during the artillery bombardment and protection was furnished only by a raw, unfinished parapet of earth and a double row of log breastworks with red clay tamped between them. It was a motley army that Jackson led. Next to the levee were posted a small regiment of regular infantry, a company of New Orleans Rifles, a squad of dragoons who were handling a howitzer, and a battalion of Creoles in bright uniforms. The line was extended by the freebooters of Pierre Lafitte, their heads ...

— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine

... way, but also to point the finger at certain individual spectators, was essential to this species of poetry. As Tragedy delights in harmonious unity, Comedy flourishes in a chaotic exuberance; it seeks out the most motley contrasts, and the unceasing play of cross purposes. It works up, therefore, the most singular, unheard-of, and even impossible incidents, with allusions to the well-known and special circumstances of ...

— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... the boat in utter darkness. To that slowly moving mass, for she was now drifting ahead under quarter-speed, this obliteration of light imparted a sense of stealthiness. This note of suspense, of watchfulness, of illicit adventure was reflected in the very tones of the motley deckhands who brushed past him in the ...

— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... and finally said as he reached his hands across the table and grasped Grant's big flinty paw, "Grant—let me tell you something—it's Margaret. I'm a fool—a motley fool i' the forest, Grant, but I can't help it; I can't help it," he cried. "So long as she lives—she may need me. I don't trust that damn scoundrel, Grant. She may need me, and I stand ready to go to hell itself with her if ...

— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... Herrera, Historia del mundo iii. 60 seq. In 1860 Mr. Motley (History of the United Netherlands ii. ch. xviii.) communicated extracts from the letters exchanged at that time between Alex. Farnese and Philip II, which reveal the wishes of ...

— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... $1,000 for enough wood alcohol to heat malted milk for his infant grandchild. Monday he was no more successful in buying provisions. He appeared with a basket on his arm, rubbed elbows with those nearest in the motley line and apparently none was more grateful than he when his basket was filled with beans, potatoes, canned vegetables, rice and other staples. He was eager to pay for his supplies, but money is refused at the supply depots. It was arranged to change this system on ...

— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall

... not difficult to be wise after the event. Everybody knows now that with the motley groups of growing strength arrayed against them it behooved the Peers to walk warily, to look askance at the cloaks trailed before them, to realize the danger of accepting challenges, however righteous the cause might be. But no amount ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... the doings of the Newport summer, concerning which he had heard all the gossip during the last few hours, the prospect of Madame Patti in opera during the coming season, horses, dogs, and mutual friends—all the motley array of subjects permissible, desultory, and amusing. Suddenly, as they bowled out on an open road by ...

— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford

... half. Azrael passed, touched the warrior with the tip of his wing, and hurled him into the ocean. At the noise of his fall, the dying Powers sat up in their beds of pain; and stealthily advancing with furtive tread, the royal spiders made partition of Europe, and the purple of Caesar became the motley of Harlequin. ...

— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... A man in motley garb, with a face of scarlet and white, sitting on a blue half-barrel near the flap which indicated the entrance to the men's section of the dressing-tent, caught sight of an arm and hand lying limp under the ...

— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... then, we proceed to the ore-yard, which presents a very motley appearance. Under its capacious roof there were tons upon tons of every variety of ore—native and foreign, blue and red, green and yellow, and all intermediate colours—indiscriminately piled around. There was the beautiful green malachite from Australia, the gray sulphuret ...

— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various

... scene of indescribable confusion; enormous contingents come for a few hours only, the numbered trains that brought them are drawn up outside the main lines awaiting their departure. Here we are hustled by a motley throng; fashionable ladies bedizened with rosaries, badges, and medallions; elegant young gentlemen, the jeunesse dore of a vanished rgime, proudly wearing the pilgrim's badge, all travelling third-class ...

— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... of war in the warm wet shires, Where rain nor fruitage fails, Where England of the motley states Deepens like a garden to the gates In the ...

— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton

... The party is decidedly motley. The man of quaintest aspect in it is Sidi Mabarak Bombay. He is of the Wahiyow tribe, who make the best slaves in Eastern Africa. His breed is that of the true woolly-headed negro, though he does not represent a good specimen of them physically, being somewhat ...

— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke

... of that year,—l'an premier de la liberte,—the name and rights of a French citizen were bestowed upon a number of foreigners who had 'consecrated their arms and their vigils to defending the cause of the people against the despotism of kings'. A motley band of heroes had been selected for this honor,—the names of Washington and Wilberforce and Kosciusko being put to pickle in the same brine with those of Pestalozzi, J. H. Campe, Klopstock and Anacharsis Cloots,—and the bill was about to pass when a deputy arose,—he ...

— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... were to be received on a Saturday at eleven. We went in the prescribed costume, black silk, with the picturesque Roman veil thrown over the head. From the foot of the Scala Regia, (Royal Staircase) one of the papal guard, in a motley suit which seemed one glare of black and yellow, escorted us to the door of a long corridor, known as the Loggia of Raphael, where we were received by a higher official in rich array of crimson velvet. About seventy persons were seated in rows, facing ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... that miserable noontide, about four hundred human beings—a weak, hungry, and emaciated looking throng for the most part; their half naked forms, browned by the sun, and hardened by the winter winds—a motley gathering; amongst whom there were scores of fasting men, and hundreds through whose wretched dwellings the, wind and rain found free ingress. They were poor, they were weak, they were ignorant, they were unarmed! but ...

— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various

... year ago, when the world, myself included, was young, I knew a circus. This does not mean that I knew it from the wooden benches outside the ring. I knew it behind the scenes. I was on terms of intimacy with the most motley crowd it has been my good fortune to meet. It was a famous French circus of the classical type that has by now, I fear me, passed away. Its haute ecole was its pride, and it demanded for its premiere equestrienne the homage due to the great artists of the world. Bernhardt of the Comedie ...

— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... amongst those who played an active, albeit unselfish, part in the varied field of administrative work from the days of Strafford downwards, there was none more industrious, none more loyal, and none less selfish than he. It was all to his credit that he was unlikely to consort on easy terms with the motley crew that ...

— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik

... length of the beach, shaded by trees, and crossing a gentle stream. Along this avenue was all the life and commerce of Tai-o-hae. Two traders' shops, empty offices, a gendarme, a handful of motley half-castes lounging under the trees—this was all that was left of former greatness. Only nature had not changed. It flung over the broken remnants of the glory and the dream its lovely cloak of verdure and of flower. Man had almost ceased to be a ...

— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... Emilies shrink into insignificance amid the tragedy and comedy of actual life portrayed in The Waverley Novels. The tyrannical marquises, vindictive stepmothers, dark-browed villains, scheming monks, chattering domestics and fierce banditti are thrust aside by a motley crowd of living beings—soldiers, lawyers, smugglers, gypsies, shepherds, outlaws and beggars. The wax-work figures, guaranteed to thrill with nervous suspense or overflow with sensibility at the appropriate moments, are replaced by real folk like "Old Mortality," ...

— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... after him, and soon returned in triumph to build a glorious fire, which drew all forlorn wanderers to its hospitable circle. A motley assemblage; but mutual danger and discomfort produced mutual sympathy and good will, and a general atmosphere of ...

— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott

... required. The historians of this day write of the past; and the historian of our present civil war is not yet born, who shall emulate the completeness and conciseness of Irving's Columbus, or Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, or Motley's Dutch Republic. Nor can we expect an early solution to the 'Fremont question,' which shall be full and satisfactory, though the length of time involved be but one hundred days. But it is different with Gen. Patterson. It is ...

— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... Motley accoutrements! of power to smile At thorns, and brakes, and brambles, and, in truth, More ragged than need was. Among the woods, And o'er the pathless rocks, I forc'd my way Until, at length, I came to one dear nook Unvisited, where ...

— Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth

... weak. Most of them shrieked with fear, but a few came up smiling, one and all comforted by their protector, either Turk, child, or fond mother. The fathers invariably showed the most distressed concern. It was a comical sight; outside the rails a motley crowd of interested spectators and waiting children, and in the inclosure the doctor pricking his patients one after the other in a most indifferent manner. His clerk noted the names, and we, with some of the local grandees, drank tiny cups ...

— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon

... precaution to have the enormous tapestry screens which surrounded her Majesty's bed secured with cords; but for this they certainly would have been thrown down upon her. It was impossible to move about the chamber, which was filled with so motley a crowd that one might have fancied himself in some place of public amusement. Two Savoyards got upon the furniture for a better sight of the Queen, who ...

— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan

... was called—though only behind his back—yet it might better have been Vulture. Big and gross, with thick unstable lips and stubby, hairy fingers, more than once he and his motley gang of hi-jackers had painted a crimson splash across the far corners of the frontiers, and daubed it to the tortured groans of the crews of honest trading ships. Often they had plunged on isolated trading posts ...

— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore

... of the hamlet presented a motley appearance. Their denizens were usually clothed in all kinds of costume—from the peculiar garments of Englishmen, to the turbans, shawls, and petticoats of Lascars, Malays, and others. Cases of spirits, chests of tools, barrels of flour, piles of hams, cheeses, curious arms, ...

— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various

... Martel must no longer be the Mauler, he will only be excluded from a very motley band. Here are a few of his ...

— Notes & Queries,No. 31., Saturday, June 1, 1850 • Various

... were. Take David's advice, "Fret not thyself because of evil-doers" (Psa. 37:1) "Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased" (Psa. 49:16). But go thou into the sanctuary of thy God, read His Word, and understand the end of these men-(Mason). Often, as the motley reflexes of my experience move in long processions of manifold groups before me, the distinguished and world-honoured company of Christian mammonists appear to the eye of my imagination as a drove of camels heavily laden, yet all at full speed; and each ...

— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... the guests sprang up in anger and drew their swords to slay the man who dared speak thus to the King, but the angel answered calmly: "Thou art not the King, but henceforth thou shalt be the king's jester and wear cap and bells and motley. As counselor thou shalt lead an ape, and thou shalt obey my servants and ...

— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman

... many kinds of grain, including that peculiarly Yankee "institooshun" pop-corn. The bazaar was held out of doors in a public square, with a few shops of dry goods around, and a most terrible din arose from the motley crowd there assembled. In one place a number of soldiers from the cantonments were bidding on some glassware offered at auction, and in another mothers of families and khansamahs were bustling about engaging their necessary household supplies. Here was a wretched beggar, with ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... his eastern frontier which brought the Pasha to terms. His exiled brother, Hamet Caramelli, had fallen in with an American adventurer by the name of Eaton, who persuaded him to join an expedition against their common enemy. With a motley army they marched across the desert from Egypt and fell upon the outlying domains of the Pasha. That astute monarch then yielded to persuasion. On June 3, 1805, with many protestations that he was being subjected to humiliating terms, he agreed ...

— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson

... but their names. Still, it is a privilege to have known such men as John Lawrence, Guizot, Thiers, Landseer, Merimee, Comte de Flahault, Doyle, Lords Elgin and Dalhousie, Duc de Broglie, Pelissier, Panizzi, Motley, Delane, Dufferin; and of gifted women, the three Sheridans, Lady Seymour - the Queen of Beauty, afterwards Duchess of Somerset - Mrs. Norton, and Lady Dufferin. Amongst those who have a retrospective interest were Mr. and Lady Blanche Balfour, parents of Mr. Arthur Balfour, who came ...

— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... of Savage. With some of them he kept up an acquaintance as long as he and they lived, and was ever ready to shew them acts of kindness. He for a considerable time used to frequent the Green Room, and seemed to take delight in dissipating his gloom, by mixing in the sprightly chit-chat of the motley circle then to be found there. Mr. David Hume related to me from Mr. Garrick, that Johnson at last denied himself this amusement, from considerations of rigid virtue; saying, 'I'll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite ...

— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... forms of the Holy Roman Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria, combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second order, such as Saxony and ...

— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... his capital on the Danube, could threaten both the East and the West. The emperors at Constantinople bought him off with lavish gifts, and so the robber-ruler turned to the western provinces for his prey. In 451 A.D. he led his motley host, said to number half a million men, across the Rhine. Many a noble municipality with its still active Roman life was visited by the Huns with fire and sword. Paris, it is worthy of note, escaped destruction. That now famous city was ...

— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... brick hearth, sits Aunt Betty Cofer. Her frail body stoops under the weight of four-score years but her bright eyes and alert mind are those of a woman thirty years younger. A blue-checked mob cap covers her grizzled hair. Her tiny frame, clothed in a motley collection of undergarments, dress, and sweaters, is adorned by a clean white apron. Although a little shy of her strange white visitors, her innate dignity, gentle courtesy, and complete self possession indicate ...

— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various

... peculiarly true in the latter part of the summer season. Then the motley population of New Orleans fly from the annual scourge of the yellow fever, and seek safety in the cities that lie farther north. Of these, Saint Louis is a favourite "city of refuge,"—the Creole element of its population being related to that kindred race ...

— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid

... were at once called to a council. These people, consisting of bands assembled from a dozen different nations, listened with unsuppressed discontent to the overtures of the Frenchman. Seated under the palisades that environed the fort, or standing in knots about the speaker, were gathered a motley but a ferocious crew. Alienated from their ancient friends, here were Delawares from the Susquehanna eager to speed the fatal stroke, and Shawanoes from Grave Creek and the Muskingum; scattered warriors of the Six Nations; Ojibwas, Pottawottomis from the far Michigan; ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... prettier sight in my life," cried Cecil, as she stood with a motley group in the verandah of "The Maples," the rendezvous of the sleighing party. As each sleigh turned in at the gate and deposited its freight, it fell into rank which extended all round the lawn, till scarcely a space was left on the drive that encircled it, and the air rang with the bells ...

— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... beginning of the nineties. There were no more hounds or sporting dogs at Yasnaya then, but till the end of her days she gave shelter to a motley collection of mongrels, ...

— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy

... thousand persons were already assembled on the ground, and a more motley gathering I never beheld. All sorts of costumes and all classes of people were there; but the genuine back-woods corn-crackers composed the majority of the assemblage. As might be expected, much the larger ...

— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... the Doxology rolled out on the summer air through the open church windows, followed by a brief silence, and then the great doors swung open and the motley congregation thronged out ...

— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown

... people, and the Cyprian peasants who were a gentle, superstitious, ignorant race, devoutly subject to their priests and trained to the letter of their religious rites, came in from the mountains and the neighboring villages in numbers but rarely seen in the city: a motley throng—yet no shepherd among them was too poor to wear the boot of dark-green leather reaching to the knee—the bodine roughly fashioned and tough enough to protect them from the bites of the serpents ...

— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... were available. The lack of men with technical knowledge was doubtfully supplied by the enlistment of a 'Railway Battalion' 800 strong. These men were drawn from many tribes and classes. Their only qualification was capacity and willingness for work. They presented a motley appearance. Dervish prisoners, released but still wearing their jibbas, assisted stalwart Egyptians in unloading rails and sleepers. Dinkas, Shillooks, Jaalin, and Barabras shovelled contentedly together at the embankments. One hundred civilian Soudanese—chiefly ...

— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... Supplement to Europe during the Middle Ages, p. l33, and in Motley's Dutch Republic, Vol. I. pp. 32, 33, various causes mentioned for voluntary and compulsory servitude in the early European times. See also Summer's White Slavery, ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... best Flemish training had flatly and shamefully run away." Yet this was the commencement of the struggle which ended with the dispersion and defeat of the great Armada, and destroyed the projects of the Spanish tyrant for introducing religious and political slavery into England! It seems as if Mr. Motley's Seventh Chapter were a ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... aquatic van drew up to the sandy landing-beach, I looked at the motley array of paddlers, and my mind went back hundreds of years to the first Spanish crew which landed here, and I wondered whether these pirates of early days had any fewer sins to their credit than Case's convicts—and I ...

— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... years ago, at the hour of noon, a motley throng of people might have been seen pouring forth from the gates of a far Eastern city and moving towards a hill called Calvary. Amidst soldiers and civilians, both friends and foes, the central figure is that of a man scarcely more than thirty years of age. He has all the attributes, ...

— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe

... fight geology has had. A generation after Newton's death fossils were referred for their origin to a certain "plastic power" in Nature—mere idle whittlings of bone that had never known an outfit of flesh and blood. Then came a long and motley procession of cosmogonies, every speculator, from John Wesley down to Pye Smith, insisting warmly on what seemed good in his own eyes. The last stand was made on the antiquity of man, and it is only a dozen years since the ablest of British—perhaps ...

— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... around us—the Poetry of Modern Civilisation and Daily Existence, is shut out from us in much, by the shadowy giants of Prejudice and Fear. He who would arrive at the Fairy Land must face the Phantoms. Betimes, I set myself to the task of investigating the motley world to which our progress in humanity—has attained, caring little what misrepresentation I incurred, what hostility I provoked, in searching through a devious labyrinth for the foot-tracks ...

— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... land and luxuriates in the beautiful garden of Europe; the queer inflections of the American's quiet drawl are heard everywhere as he strolls round the tables; Roumanian boyards, Parisian swindlers, Austrian soldiers, Hungarian plutocrats, flashy and foolish young Englishmen—all gather in a motley crowd; and the British bookmaker's interesting presence is obtrusive. His very accent—strident, coarse, impudent, unspeakably low—gives a kind of ground-note to the hum of talk that rises in all places of public resort, and he recruits his delicate health in anticipation of the time when ...

— Side Lights • James Runciman

... came back again, this time as king, with a motley army of mercenaries gathered to crush the two brothers De Lacy, who for the moment dominated all Ireland—the one, Hugo, being Earl of Ulster, and Viceroy; the other, Walter, Lord of ...

— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... to the Liederkranz masked ball, which was to take place in a few evenings, and would be a grand spectacle. Together we attended the ball, and during the evening I was well entertained. The dancers kept on their masks until midnight, and the merry and motley throng presented a brilliant scene, moving gracefully beneath the bright gas-light to the inspiriting music. To me it was a novel and entertaining sight, and in many respects reminded me greatly of an ...

— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody

... very first rank." "With Frederick the Great" is a tale of the Seven Years' War, and has twelve full-page illustrations by Wal. Paget; "A March on London" details some stirring scenes of the times when Wat Tyler's motley crew took possession of that city, and the illustrations are drawn by W. A. Margetson, while Wal. Paget has supplied the pictures for "With Moore at Corunna," in which the boy hero serves through the Peninsular ...

— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White

... holy Kirk that nursed, The Brownists and the ranters' crew; Foul error's motley vesture first Was oaded (98) in a northern blue; And what's th' enthusiastick breed, Or men of Knipperdolin's creed, But Cov'nanters ...

— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... vivacious sort of history!—it was a bold thing to undertake; and Dr. Doran did his work well—did it with adequate "love." These Annals of the English Stage, from Thomas Betterton to Edmund [74] Kean, are full of the colours of life in their most emphatic and motley contrasts, as is natural in proportion as the stage itself concentrates and artificially intensifies the character and conditions of ordinary life. The long story of "Their Majesties' Servants," treated thus, becomes from age to age an agreeable addition to those personal memoirs—Evelyn's, ...

— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... served at least to renovate the living; and Schomberg was ready to take the field early in the year 1690, notwithstanding the loss of about 10,000 men. James, with the constitutional fatuity of the Stuarts, had lost his opportunity. If he had attacked the motley army of the revolutionary party while the men were suffering from want and disease, and while his own troops were fresh and courageous, he might have conquered; the most sanguine now could scarcely see any other prospect for him than defeat. ...

— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... other Vedas being devoted to the soma sacrifice.(2) The Yajur-Veda has two divisions, known as the Black and the White Yajur, which have common matter, but differ in arrangement. The Black Yajur-Veda is also called the Taittirya, and it is described as "a motley undigested jumble of different pieces".(3) Last comes Atharva-Veda, not always regarded as a Veda properly speaking. It derives its name from an old semi-mythical priestly family, the Atharvans, and is full of magical formulae, imprecations, folk-lore and spells. ...

— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... similarity of Aerssens position to that of Motley 250 years later, in the biographical sketch of Motley by Oliver ...

— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... monastic orders, then it spreads rapidly among the common people. Books, such as "The Everlasting Gospel," appear among the former; sects, such as the Catharists, Waldenses, Petrobrussians, arise among the latter. They agreed in this, "that the public and established religion was a motley system of errors and superstitions, and that the dominion which the pope had usurped over Christians was unlawful and tyrannical; that the claim put forth by Rome, that the Bishop of Rome is the supreme lord of the universe, and that neither princes nor bishops, civil governors nor ...

— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... speech? The Power, that made the Tongue, restrain'd Thy lips from lies, and speeches feign'd; Who made the Hearing, without wrong Did rescue thine from Siren's song. He let thee see the ways of men, Which thou with pencil, not with pen, Careful Beholder, down didst note, And all their motley actions quote, Thyself unstain'd the while. From look Or gesture reading, more than book, In letter'd pride thou took'st no part, Contented with the Silent Art, Thyself as silent. Might I be As speechless, deaf, and ...

— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... wise man must shut his eyes to all the perils and horrors that lie round him; but the cap and bells can go bobbing along the most slippery ledges and the bauble will not stir up sleeping lions. Hurray! for motley, for a good sound insouciance, for ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... recognition I was in direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me. The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit of a man who had ...

— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... happy and interested, and what a bustle and movement there was! The banging of the guns on the men-of-war began again as the motley, fascinatingly interesting crowd, cavalry outriders, Sikhs, Parsees, Gourkas, Hindoos, and Mussulmen, sped away down to the Apollo Bundar to see the Prince go off to the flagship. H. and I went with the tide, a jolly cheery medley of coloured races, ...

— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... that bright November day of the Indian rabbit drive and hunt. The motley army of the Piute tribe was sweeping tremendously across a sage-brush valley of Nevada, their force two hundred braves in number. They marched abreast, some thirty yards apart, and formed a line that was more ...

— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels

... sheltering eaves; —Thy muffled friend his nectarine-wall pursues, What time the sun the yellow crocus wooes, Screen'd from the arrowy North; and duly hies [Foonote 4] To meet the morning-rumour as it flies; To range the murmuring market-place, and view The motley groups that faithful TENIERS drew. When Spring bursts forth in blossoms thro' the vale, And her wild music triumphs on the gale, Oft with my book I muse from stile to stile; [Footnote 5] Oft in my porch the listless noon beguile, Framing ...

— Poems • Samuel Rogers

... prayer-rugs, partially hid the groundwork of dusty matting, taken over with the bungalow from its former occupant, and in places revealing the stone floor beneath. The broad mantel-shelf was given over to books, a motley crowd in divers stages of dilapidation. 'The Master of Ballantrae' shouldered 'The Queen's Regulations,' one would fancy with a swaggering hint of scorn; a battered copy of the 'Pilgrim's Progress' stood resignedly between Bogle's 'Mission to Thibet' ...

— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... had passed. The train upon which I had every reason to expect Mr. Gryce had arrived, and I stood in the doorway awaiting with indescribable agitation the slow and labored approach of the motley group of men and women whom I had observed leave the depot at the departure of the cars. Would he be among them? Was the telegram of a nature peremptory enough to make his presence here, sick as he was, an absolute certainty? The written ...

— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green

... houses), and, though it was three in the morning, the streets filled by an immense multitude. Nothing could be more picturesque than the scene, for the flames made it as light as day and threw a glare upon the strange and motley figures moving about. All the gentility of London was there from Princess Esterhazy's ball and all the clubs; gentlemen in their fur cloaks, pumps, and velvet waistcoats mixed with objects like the sans-culottes in the French Revolution—men and women ...

— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... implacable severity shall also claim Claudio's life. Isabella, perceiving in this conduct only a further proof of the hypocrite's villainy, breaks out once more into a tempest of agonised despair. Upon her cry for immediate revolt against the scoundrelly tyrant, the people collect together and form a motley and passionate crowd. Luzio, who also returns, counsels the people with stinging bitterness to pay no heed to the woman's fury; he points out that she is only tricking them, as she has already tricked him—for he still believes in her shameless infidelity. Fresh ...

— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... pronunciation, and suggests, by anticipation, the jovial reign of a monarch who at his breakfast-table lays aside his robes of majesty and sometimes plays the role of his servitor, the merry philosopher in motley. ...

— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... enchantment did it wave around you, in the golden days "when George the Third was king!" But our clown lies in his grave; and our harlequin, Ellar, prince of how many enchanted islands, was he not at Bow Street the other day,* in his dirty, tattered, faded motley—seized as a law-breaker, for acting at a penny theatre, after having wellnigh starved in the streets, where nobody would listen to his old guitar? No one gave a shilling to bless him: not one of us who owe him ...

— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray

... him into the verandah outside, he seated himself in a long chair and proceeded to sip it slowly, as if it were some elixir whose virtue would be lost by haste. Some people might have been amused by the motley crowd that passed along the street beyond the verandah-rails, but Gideon Hayle, for such was his name, took no sort of interest in it. He had seen it too often to find any variety in it. As a matter of fact the mere sight of a pigtail was sufficient ...

— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby

... these holiday-folks in Greenwich Park; and, ridiculous as it may sound, I fancy myself to have caught very satisfactory glimpses of Arcadian life among the Cockneys there, hardly beyond the scope of Bow-Bells, picnicking in the grass, uncouthly gambolling on the broad slopes, or straying in motley groups or by single pairs of love-making youths and maidens, along the sun-streaked avenues. Even the omnipresent policemen or park-keepers could not disturb the beatific impression on my mind. One feature, at all events, of the ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... names, tied to the pier and rocking to the slightest motion of the water. From her windows Sidonie could see the restaurants on the beach, silent through the week, but filled to overflowing on Sunday with a motley, noisy crowd, whose shouts of laughter, mingled with the dull splash of oars, came from both banks to meet in midstream in that current of vague murmurs, shouts, calls, laughter, and singing that floats without ceasing up and down the Seine on holidays ...

— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... each other—men with hands in their pockets and arms tight to their sides, women with piqued noses and hurrying steps; while sulky lamps offered half-hearted resistance to the conquering fog that settled over palaces, parks, and motley streets until it hugged the very Thames ...

— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter

... himself. He tried to act as a curb-stone broker, as an insurance agent, as an adjuster of marine losses and averages, as an itinerant solicitor for a life-insurance company, as an accountant, and in various other situations. All in vain. He was shunned like an escaped convict; the motley suit itself would hardly have added to his disgrace. No one put faith in him or gave him employment,—save in a few instances, for charity's sake. Few men can brave a city; and Sandford, certainly, was not the man to do it. The scowling, or suspicious, or contemptuous, ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... noted so many times before, the motley appearance of the army, but with involuntary motion he began to straighten and smooth his own shabby uniform. He was about to enter the presence of a woman and he was ...

— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... conversation, but meaneth to sputter and prate anything without judgment or wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, or incline his attention to such motley ragged discourse; that without nauseating he scarce should endure to observe men lavishing time, and squandering their breath so frivolously. 'Tis an affront to good company to pester it with ...

— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow

... his Cabinet were in accord in regard to the controversy with Great Britain as to the Alabama Claims. Mr. Sumner advocated a more exacting policy. Mr. Motley appeared to be following Mr. Sumner's lead, and the opposition to Mr. Sumner extended to Mr. Motley. It had happened that the President had taken on a prejudice to Mr. Motley at their first interview. ...

— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell

... had now approached to within a short distance of the expectant little party, was of a most motley description, and its appearance, under many circumstances, would cause considerable risibility. Men and women were mixed indiscriminately together, and in the shouting, the latter, if such a thing were possible, exceeded the former, ...

— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... and great, From Levite, Pharisee and Priest, Down to the lowest dregs of fate, From mightiest even to the least; Yes, in this motley throng we find The palsied, sick, mute, halt, ...

— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... in black, emitting a stale odor from their innumerable skirts and petticoats; the young ones erect in rigid corsets which crushed their breasts and obliterated the prominent curves of their hips, displaying with stately pride, above the motley hued handkerchiefs, gold chains and enormous crucifixes. There were brown faces and olive, with great eyes of dramatic expression; coppery virgins with glossy, oily hair divided by a part which their rough ...

— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... and covers were laid for 200 guests. The Prince of Wales acknowledged the toast of his health and that of the Princess, the Duke of Cambridge responded to the toast of the army, Mr. Childers to the navy, Lord Elcho to the volunteers, Mr. Motley to "The Prosperity of the United States," Mr. Gladstone to "Her Majesty's Ministers," the Archbishop of York to, "The Guests," and Mr. Dickens to "Literature." The last toast having been proposed in a highly eulogistic speech, Mr. ...

— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... also represented. Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Goldsmith, Smollett, Frances Burney, Samuel Lover, John Galt, Maria Edgeworth, Susan Ferrier, William Godwin, Mary Shelley, Fennimore Cooper, J. G. Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, Thos. Moore, Harriet Martineau, J. L. Motley, Horace Smith, Charles Lever, Meadows Taylor, and Wm. Carleton,—these (in greater or less degree) notable names were bound to have a place; and, coming to less distinguished writers, I may mention the brothers ...

— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield