"Bugbear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... your charge, Lady Carfax. I can see you're a capable woman. I'm coming back in September to perform that operation. You will have a willing patient ready for me—by willing I mean something gayer than resigned—and my bugbear, Nap—that most lurid specimen of civilised devilry—hunting scalps on the other ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... his closing years, and found among the Shelburne papers at Lansdowne House, presents with a vividness of detail and verisimilitude that leaves nothing to be desired the outlines of the first twenty years of his life. The Second George had been ten years on the throne, the Young Pretender, alike the bugbear and the consolidator of the House of Hanover, was a stripling of seventeen, when, in the summer of 1737, William Fitzmaurice, afterward earl of Shelburne (the name by which history best knows him) and marquis of Lansdowne, was born in Dublin. "I spent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... always been Susy Branch's bugbear; they were still, and more dangerously, to be Susy Lansing's. She detested them, detested them doubly, as the natural enemies of mankind and as the people one always had to put one's self out for. The greater part of her life having been passed among them, she knew nearly all that there was to ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... cried; but Panoria, not having before her eyes the fear of the Bonapartes' bugbear, "their uncle the ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... with the T'ai-p'ing rebellion that we associate likin, a tax which has for years past been the bugbear of the foreign merchant in China. The term means "thousandth-part money," that is, the thousandth part of a tael or Chinese ounce of silver, say one cash; and it was originally applied to a tax of one cash per tael on all sales, said to ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... "That bell's a complete bugbear," he groaned. "It ought to be indicted for a nuisance, waking people up o' mornings when they ought to be in the arms of Morpheus—I've a great mind to lie still. Half an hour's ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... get things done unimpeded. So you make one more grand reform for the sake of efficiency, and set up your Imperator, and have peace, and decent government; and you have, wittingly or not, started up old bugbear Monarchy again; and things go well for a time. But, bless you, you have not found the Way; you know nothing about Tao, which is not to be discovered in the fields of politics, and has nothing whatever to do ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... because he had asked for none. He was appointed major in the National Guard, although he was utterly incapable of giving the word of command. In 1815 Napoleon, always his enemy, dismissed him. During the Hundred Days Birotteau was the bugbear of the liberals of his quarter; for it was not until 1815 that differences of political opinion grew up among merchants, who had hitherto been unanimous in their desires for public tranquillity, of which, as they knew, business affairs stood ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated. Trades' Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... been the custom of all cathedrals since the Reformation, it is not to be altered without a law.'[1178] Exaggerated dread of Popery suspected latent evils, it scarcely knew what, lurking in this kind of worship. Perhaps, too, it was thought to border upon 'enthusiasm,' that other religious bugbear of the age. A paper in the 'Tatler' speaks of it not with disapproval, but with something of condescension to weaker minds, as 'the rapturous way of devotion.'[1179] In fact, cathedrals in general were almost unintelligible to the prevalent sentiment of the eighteenth century. Towards the end of ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... was Miss Burkham's bugbear. She was always endeavoring to instill into the minds of her charges, that a lady never attracts undue attention. The word had been in use so frequently that it had become a by-word among ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... me right at my ease. I was in the presence of a knight; but he was first and last a man. Straight to the point he went. He never puts a man through that bugbear of the soldier, a host of seemingly inconsequential questions; he has the particulars of each man who is likely to come under his direction long before ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... only a bugbear: there is little reason to fear that women will acquire too much courage or fortitude; for their apparent inferiority with respect to bodily strength, must render them, in some degree, dependent on men in the various relations of life; but why should it be increased by prejudices that give a sex ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... longer than others, and would win only to backseats. Man's place in the ever-fluxing chaos of the world was definite and pre-ordained—if by no other token, then by denial that there was any ever-fluxing chaos. This was a mere bugbear of mankind's addled fancy; and, by stinging audacities of thought and speech, by vivid slang that bit home by sheerest intimacy into his listeners' mental processes, he drove the bugbear from their brains, showed them the loving clarity ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... the ascendancy of Napoleon was, of course, well known to British statesmen at the time. There was also the fear of an Afghan invasion, which led to the mission of Malcolm to Persia, and which was, perhaps, not the mere bugbear which it now appears. A masterly statement of Lord Wellesley's political complications will be found in his brother's Memorandum, given as an Introduction to Professor Owen's Selection, published in 1880. It is quite clear, again, that Sindhia, for ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... enjoy yourself," returned Mrs. Cheyne, quietly, as she drew the girl's face down to hers. "I have given you such a bad impression that you look on me as a sort of moral bugbear. I can be very different, when I like, and I have liked to be agreeable to-night." And then this strange woman took up a rich cashmere shawl from the couch where she was lying, and folded it around Phillis's shoulders. "The evenings are chilly. Jeffreys can bring this back with her;" for Mrs. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... people are a nuisance. That is a general proposition, and I stand by it. Go over your list of acquaintances and you will admit it is true. Here's to trouble! May it always chasten and never overwhelm us: our greatest bugbear and our best friend! It sifts our friends and unmasks our enemies. Like a lovely woman, ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... and the expenses ruinous. You will have to spend from twelve to fifteen thousand francs merely to win the suit,—but you will win it, if you care to. The suit will only increase the enmity of the Gravelots, for the expenses will be even heavier on them. You will be their bugbear; you will be called litigious and calumniated in every way; still, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... only five full vowels and three[1] diphthongs, which can be explained to every speaker in terms of his own language. All the modified vowels, closed "u's" and "e's," half tones, longs and shorts, open and closed vowels, etc., which form the chief bugbear in correct pronunciation, and often render the foreigner unintelligible—all ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... so the sensible dame began to exercise her judgment. A few minutes sufficed for forming a resolution; nor was it sooner formed than that it was begun to be put into action, yet not before the excited girl was away, no doubt to tell some of her companions of her relief from the bugbear of the man with the terrible eyes. The formation of a purpose might have been observed in her puckered lips and the speculation in her grey eyes. The spirit of romance had visited the small house in Toddrick's Wynd, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... poor, and she knew that everybody knew it; yet so long as she was not in absolute want, and the poor-house, that bugbear of honest poverty, was yet far distant, she managed to keep a cheerful heart, and visited her neighbors on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... higher sphere. In her home, and in her person, she was little less elegant than a countess; yet nothing more than a merchant-captain's wife; and she reared that commander's children in a suburban villa, with the manners which adorn a palace. When they happen to be there. She had a bugbear; Slang. Could not endure the smart technicalities current; their multitude did not overpower her distaste; she called them "jargon"—"slang" was too coarse a word for her to apply to slang: she excluded ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... not whether the people shall be governed or not, but, by which party they shall be governed;—not whether the taxes shall be paid or not, but who shall receive them. Now, it must be admitted that Buonaparte is a political bugbear, most convenient to any administration: "if you do not adopt our measures and reject those of our opponents, Buonaparte will be sure to prevail over you; if you do not submit to the Government, at least ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... says he does me no wrong in't; now if he insists that Hell is too serious a thing to ridicule, why, perhaps, I think so too, in its Intense quality; but to act a Goblin, a Ghost, a Frog, or a Fury, and to sing to a Country Clown of such Bugbear matters, only to cause a little Diversion in a Noblemans House, has always been very customary, especially at Festivals, and far from being thought to ridicule the main matter. The Absolver, to turn back a little, affirms indeed, That those that bring Devils ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... growth of faith experienced in my brother's case was due almost entirely to this cause, and to the school of literalism in which he had been trained; but, however this may be, we both of us hated being made to say our prayers—morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid it, as indeed children generally will, by every artifice which we could employ. Thus we were in the habit of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer time, and would gratefully hear my ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... that can as little obtain admission into a mind like yours: such as the fear, or pretence of fear, that, in spite of your own power and the trifling power of Great Britain, you may be conquered by the Pope; or that this commodious bugbear (who is of infinitely more use to those who pretend to fear than to those who love him) will absolve his Majesty's subjects from their allegiance, and send over the Cardinal of York to rule you as his viceroy; or that, by the plenitude of his power, he will take that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... is a fanciful picture that the reformers have drawn of their power and resources—power which is really derived only from intermarriages among the few remnants of the earliest loyalist settlers, or from admiration of their private conduct and abilities. In short, "the family compact" is a useful bugbear; it is kept up constantly before the Canadians, to deter them from looking too closely into other compacts, which, to say the truth, are sometimes neither so national, so ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... in the Council, which Luther again recommended should not be bluntly refused. A refusal, he said, would exactly please the Pope, who wished for nothing so much as obstacles to the Council; it was for this reason that, in speaking of the extirpation of heresy, he held up the Evangelicals as a 'bugbear,' in order to frighten them from the project. Good people might likewise object, on the ground that the troubles with the Turks and the Emperor's engagement in the war with France, were made use of by the Evangelicals to refuse the Council, whilst in reality the knaves at Borne ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... No. 121. Halme. [Greek: Drapetes] is the title. All readers of Plautus and Terence know what a bugbear to slaves the threat of being sent to the mill was. They would have to turn it instead of horses, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... spirited. When he joins us, he will have the animal intended for her. When this bargain was struck between them I thought his eyes looked dangerous, but she didn't notice or didn't care. Fenton tells me he has dreamed again of the red-faced man with the purple moustache. I laughed at his bugbear and flung Colonel Corkran in his teeth. By the way, nothing has been heard of C. by any of us since the day he handed in his resignation. Suppose he has gone back ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Fisher's Hill had long been the bugbear of the valley. The position was, in truth, a purely defensive one, its chief value being that there was no other. Except for defence it was worthless, because it was as hard to get out of as to get at; and even for defence it was subject to the drawback that it could be easily and secretly ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to contend ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... John's cry. His enormous fortune was a constant bugbear to him. He had been so interested in his business enterprises for many years that he had failed to realize how his fortune was growing, and it astounded him to wake up one day and find himself possessed of many ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... the Supreme Court at Washington against the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 has had its effect, and to-day we find the Negro more discriminated against in his civil than in any other class of rights. Then, too, the social bugbear has had much to do with this discrimination. However, progress has been made. It has been slow, of course, because of the channel (public opinion) through which it has been compelled to come. In many sections of the country the Negro enjoys the most ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... life. Besides the apotheosis of James Lampton into the immortal Sellers, Orion became Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his creations. As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a bugbear, it became tangible property at last. Only a year or two before Clemens had written ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... felt the stir of an unnamed, unacknowledged fear; and now the fear raised its head and looked at her. Well! She would look back at it, then: look it straight in the malignant eye. What was it, after all, but a "bugbear to scare children"—the ghost of the opinion of the many? She had suspected from the first that Wyant knew of her having shortened the term of Bessy Amherst's sufferings—returning to the room when he did, it was almost impossible ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... thoughts of the gallows," said Turpin to Peter. "More fools they. A mere bugbear to frighten children, believe me; and never yet alarmed a brave man. The gallows, pshaw! One can but die once, and what signifies it how, so that it be over quickly. I think no more of the last leap into eternity than clearing a five-barred gate. A rope's end for it! ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... what it has hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its imagination that there is now no such thing as law and the transgression of law, that sin is a phantom, and punishment a bugbear, that it is free to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still further, when it does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think and hold just what it will, that "the world is all before it where to choose," and what system to build up as its own private persuasion; ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... aren't many large houses—this is as large as most—and John is very strict." She sighed; and it was evident to Ida that though her cousin John's "religion" might be some amusement to him, it was rather a bugbear and nuisance to his family. "But we must get Joseph to take you about; and perhaps you and Isabel might go to a matinee or two; but John mustn't ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... won't be such a bugbear as you think. If you were not worried into a morbid condition over all this trouble, you would not look so seriously upon a thing which I regard as a piece of mere night prowling, with ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... journalists have had the wit to see and the energy to adopt the best feature of the American style; and the result has been a distinct advance in the raciness and readableness of some of our best-known journals. The "Americanisation of the British press" is no bugbear to stand in awe of, if only it be carried on with good sense and discrimination. We can most advantageously exchange lessons of sobriety and restraint for suggestions of candour, humour, and point; and America's share in the form of the ideal English reading journal of the future will ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... morals, the small proprieties, and lesser virtues that lie on the surface of things and give life its polish, Audrey was for ever riding full-tilt against prejudices or raising a crusade against what she chose to term 'the bugbear of feminine existence—conventionality.' ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... entourage gave themselves a free rein; that old bugbear Mother Goose was resuscitated, and many a child, on reading the newspaper, might have recognized the ogre of Goodman Perrault in the disguise of a socialist; they surmised, they invented; the press being suppressed, it was quite easy; ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... difficulty? Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects; a mere notice of the necessity for exertion; a bugbear to children and fools; only a mere ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... must dine with the colleagues with whom his whole waking life is passed—excellent fellows and capital company—but nature demands an occasional enlargement of the mental horizon. Then if by chance he has one special bugbear—a bore or an egotist, a man with dirty hands or a churlish temper—that man will inevitably come and sit down beside him and insist on ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... with an air of pleasant detachment, "I see. You are in a first-rate fix. I was always prepared for that. Coke told me about Bulmer—warned me off, so to speak. I forgot his claims at odd times, just for a minute or so, but he is a real bugbear—a sort of matrimonial bogey-man. If all goes well, and we enter Pernambuco without being fired at, you will be handed over to the British Consul, and he will send a rousing telegram about you to England. Bulmer, of course, will cause ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... their turn and gave their visitors a radio concert that was wonderful in its variety and beauty. The night happened to be unusually free of the annoying static that is the bugbear of the wireless, and every note of the music was as clear and sweet as though the performers were only a few yards away. Tim and Larry listened as though they were entranced, and when the concert was finished they were as enthusiastic "fans" as the ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... assure you, sir, that all which is said for is very extraordinary and far from encouraging. The partisans of this plan argue that fear of a war, disastrous for England, which might end by putting France once more in possession of Canada, would be the most certain bugbear for America, where the propinquity of our religion and our government is excessively apprehended; they say, in fact, that the Americans, forced by a war to give up their project of liberty and to decide between us and them, would ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... this does not depend on the man's own sins and omissions, but was already predestined to happen, one really is at a loss what to think. Our highly educated Rationalists say, to be sure, "It's all false, it's a mere bugbear; we're in a state of constant progress, step by step raising ourselves to ever greater perfection." Ah! what a pity we didn't begin sooner; we ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... complications," said his wife, as if resenting the word. "But you make such a bugbear of the least little matter that there's no encouragement to ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... my best pupil yet," said I, "though she were born of beggars and lodged in a cellar; for the rest, it is absurd to make a bugbear of her origin to me—I happen to know that she was a Swiss pastor's daughter, neither more nor less; and, as to her narrow means, I care nothing for the poverty of her purse so long as her heart overflows ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... extremes, for in that is the aim of wisdom. Visit the gaols, the slaughter-houses, and the market-places; for the presence of the governor is of great importance in such places; it comforts the prisoners who are in hopes of a speedy release, it is the bugbear of the butchers who have then to give just weight, and it is the terror of the market-women for the same reason. Let it not be seen that thou art (even if perchance thou art, which I do not believe) covetous, a follower of women, or a glutton; for when the people ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Norwegian fjords never freeze. They are protected by the monstrous mountains, and the water is tempered by warm currents that flow in from the gulf stream. The national apprehension of both Norway and Sweden that Russia covets one of their seaports has existed a good many years. The bugbear has appeared at intervals for half a century, and a great deal of money has been expended in preparations to meet it. The people are, therefore, cordially patriotic in their support of the army, although many of them emigrate ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... fixed place of residence and carries on a dry goods business, he might gamble as much as should please him and the law would not take hold of him. He would ask anybody to read the law understandingly and then deny this round assertion. This act, said he, is bugbear—it is a disgrace as it now stands, for it smacks of cowardice. The legislators, he presumed, had a little sense, and they knew that some kind of a law must be passed, and they were ingenious enough to know how to frame it to sound well, ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... lunch; and sometimes, where an old house was empty, we would go over it, and stare at beams and chimneypieces and hear the haunted tale of its fortunes, with a faint half-memory in our breasts of that one-time bugbear we had known as "copy." But though more than once a flaccid instinct would move us to have out our pencils, we would only end by bunging our foolish mouths with them, as if they were cigarettes, and then vaguely wondering ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... mile that she now travelled was so much to the good, increasing our chances of getting across the Line and making our escape from the awful region of equatorial calms which constitute such a ghastly bugbear to those who go down to the sea in sailing-ships. Our self-congratulations proved, however, to be premature, for the breeze lasted only about half an hour when it died away again, leaving us as completely becalmed as before. But during that half-hour we had succeeded in covering quite two miles; ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... did artistic service in the way of a foil to the loveliness of the rectory garden. This garden was the rector's delight, but to my restless seven years it was a sort of gay-colored and ever-threatening bugbear. ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... all constitutional legislators; they know that when the fear of punishment is wanting, nothing else is of avail. And this is doubly so with us who are tyrants; whose power is based upon compulsion; who live in the midst of enmity and treachery. The bugbear terrors of the law would never serve our turn. Rebellion is a many-headed Hydra: we cut off one guilty head, two others grow in its place. Yet we must harden our hearts, smite them off as they grow, and—like lolaus—sear the wounds; thus only shall we ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... looks up the present system, with Cocker,[299] and Walkingame,[300] and always looks down the proposed system. The word decimal is obstinately associated with fractions, for which there is no need. Hence it becomes so much of a bugbear, that, to parody the lines of Pope, which probably suggested ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... policy must be either a knave or a fool. He could not place himself in the position from which the other fellow was thinking or acting. He believed that it was his duty to maintain what he held to be the popular cause against the "schemes of the aristocrats," the bugbear of that day. He was a fighter from his youth up and his theory of government was that of enforcing the control of the side for which he was the partisan. Such a man could never be accepted as the father of ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... was newly scrubbed, and Miss Scofield was a tidy housekeeper, and had, besides, a temper as hot and ready to light as her father's pipe. The old man stopped now, half chuckling, peeping in at the window to see if all was clear within. But you must not think for this that Dode's temper was the bugbear of the house,—though the girl herself thought it was, and shed some of the bitterest tears of her life over it. Just a feverish blaze in the blood, caught from some old dead grandfather, that burst out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... My dear Cole, don't trouble to perjure yourself. I don't mind, believe me. They're easily shocked, these country clergy, and no doubt I'm a bugbear to 'em. Yet, I could have sworn I'd never seen this one before. Let's ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... observe, that this Anglomania bugbear, by which her ladyship pretends to have been so much distressed, is the merest piece of nonsense and affectation in the world. We will not be so ungallant as to suppose that Lady Morgan has intentionally related what is not altogether so true as might be, but she has ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... are no arm-chair sentimentalists to oppose this very practical consideration. The Indian judges it by his standard of common sense: why live a life that has ceased to be worth living when there is no bugbear of a hell to make one cling to the most miserable of existences rather than risk greater misery?" Let us now see the kind of life which the author, freed himself no doubt from "the bugbear of hell," considers eminently sensible—the kind of life ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... loves: these are already his. He wants none of thy rewards; behold also, he fears none of thy penalties. Thou canst not answer even by killing him: the case of Anaxarchus thou canst kill; but the self of Anaxarchus, the word or act of Anaxarchus, in no wise whatever. To this man death is not a bugbear; to this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... which it is not suitable to record. Discreet man that he was, Wendell Pemberton could not entirely conceal his wonder that Patricia should have remained so long in ignorance of her condition. He spoke concerning malformation and functional weaknesses and, although obscurely because of the bugbear of professional courtesy, voiced his opinion that Patricia had not received the most adroit medical treatment at the time of little ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... outside her own bounds, either by land or sea; and England looked with scorn on the threats of a state which possessed neither army nor fleet. "America," Lord Sidmouth wrote at this time, "is a bugbear: there is no terror in her threats!" Canning indeed saw in the embargo only a carrying out of his policy by the very machinery of the American Government. The commerce of America ceased to exist. Her seamen were driven to seek employment ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... a sort of bugbear to you," said Rapp. "You'll keep prodding him till he horns you ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... termination of our Continent, with their souls full of its shipwrecks and disasters—top-sails cautiously reefed, and everything guardedly snug—these strangers at first unexpectedly encountering a tolerably smooth sea, rashly conclude that the Cape, after all, is but a bugbear; they have been imposed upon by fables, and founderings and sinkings hereabouts are all ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... which unite the confederate states are strengthened by the increasing manufactures of the Americans; and the union which began to exist in their opinions, gradually forms a part of their habits: the course of time has swept away the bugbear thoughts which haunted the imaginations of the citizens in 1789. The federal power is not become oppressive; it has not destroyed the independence of the states; it has not subjected the confederates to monarchical institutions; and the Union has not rendered the lesser states dependant ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... been a great bugbear with the ill-informed, bit it is not nearly so deleterious as some careless or unscrupulous writers would have us believe. In the first place there is a very insignificant quantity of tannin in properly drawn teas, say in those drawn for ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... in the winter is like a wine, so exhilarating is its effects on the system; while its extreme dryness and elasticity prevents any discomfort from the cold which is such a bugbear to many. The extreme cold does not last but for a few days, and should the invalid choose to be domiciled during this brief interval, no great harm would come; but we apprehend that, once there, they could not be kept in-doors in consequence ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... conqueror. Here, then, we may raise a strong barrier against future threats of Ashanti invasion, and make security more secure. The political officers of the Protectorate will be the best judges of the steps to be taken; and, if they are active and prudent, we shall hear no more of the Kumasi bugbear. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... be a relief to you to know at once that there will not be any statistics in this series of talks. We want instead just now to get broad and general, but distinct, impressions. Statistics are burdensome to most people. They are a good deal of a bugbear to the common crowd of us every-day folks. They are absolutely essential. They are of immense, that is, immeasurable, value. You need to have them at hand where you can easily turn for exact information, as you need it, ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... our stock in the funds of the United States. We have already talked over this matter. The more I reflect, the stronger appear the objections. It will doubtless be urged in favour of an immediate sale, that our funds are in danger of seizure by the United States. This is a mere bugbear. Such a thing will never again be even proposed, and, if proposed, will never receive three votes in the Senate. I hope, therefore, our legislature will not suffer themselves to be precipitated into this sale from any such ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... in the "Independant," a terrible article on the intrigues of the clergy, in response to a short paragraph from Vuillet, who had accused the Republicans of desiring to demolish the churches. Vuillet was Aristide's bugbear. Never a week passed but these two journalists exchanged the greatest insults. In the provinces, where a periphrastic style is still cultivated, polemics are clothed in high-sounding phrases. Aristide called his adversary "brother Judas," or "slave ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... sensitive man will hesitate. Yet it is also part of the test of a writer's courage; by his hesitation a soldier-author may know that he is in danger of failing in his duty. Yet the opinion of the public, which intimidates us, is no mere bugbear. It is very serious. People do not enjoy the destruction of their cherished illusions. They do not crown the defamers of their idols. What is it that balks a soldier's judgment when he begins to write about the War? He ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... go, my friend! punishment or no punishment! Why, I can scarcely make my own fellows go! Bosh! I know boys; school is their bugbear." ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... play that in spite of the change of manners and of prejudices still holds undisputed possession of the stage. Shakespeare's malignant has outlived Mr. Cumberland's benevolent Jew. In proportion as Shylock has ceased to be a popular bugbear, 'baited with the rabble's curse', he becomes a half favourite with the philosophical part of the audience, who are disposed to think that Jewish revenge is at least as good as Christian injuries. Shylock is A GOOD ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... the core Who, beckoned by the forward-leaning wave, First left behind him the firm-footed shore, And, urged by every nerve of sail and oar, Steered for the Unknown which gods to mortals gave. Of thought and action the mysterious door, 250 Bugbear of fools, a summons to the brave: Strength found he in the unsympathizing sun, And strange stars from beneath the horizon won, And the dumb ocean pitilessly grave: High-hearted surely he; But bolder ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... me to such a degree, and the expedient which they would represent to me as sufficient seemed so bald and feeble, that it gave the bugbear only a more fearful aspect; and, as soon as I had reached Leipzig, I tried to free myself altogether from my connection with the church. How oppressive, then, must have been to me the exhortations of Gellert, whom, considering the generally laconic style with which he was obliged to ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... for theories about instinct incompatible with the doctrine of final causes. It might appear that a philosopher who has re-established the objective existence of space in opposition to Berkeley, was in danger of that materialism which had been Berkeley's bugbear. But Stewart escapes the danger by his assertion that our knowledge of matter is 'relative' or confined to phenomena. Materialism is for him a variety of ontology, involving the assumption that we know the essence of matter. To speak with Hartley of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... to do with themselves when they came among the mountains, that the innocent insolence could do no harm. It became a fixed sentiment when she alone survived to uphold it, and one demonstration of it amused the whole neighborhood in a good-natured way. "People from Birthwaite" were the bugbear—Birthwaite being the end of the railway. In the Summer of 1857, Mrs. Wordsworth's companion told her (she being then blind) that there were some strangers in the garden—two or three boys on the mount, looking at the view. ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... sentence he wrote A Hymn to the Pillory. This was bought and read and shouted in the ears of his enemies by thousands of the people. It was a more daring satire than even The Shortest Way. In the end of it Defoe calls upon the Pillory, "Thou Bugbear of the Law," to speak and ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... attested the rapid celebrity of the work. The edition of Antwerp—the one used by me in this compilation—is in the duodecimo form, exceedingly well printed, and garnished with wood-cuts, in which Satan,-for the author had a full measure of the ancient credulity,—with his usual bugbear accompaniments frequently appears in bodily presence. In the Preface, Cieza announces his purpose to continue the work in three other parts, illustrating respectively the ancient history of the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... said. "Is it necessary that I enlighten you, madam? He is my bugbear—my death's head! The sight of him poisons my life, and something gnaws at me, driving me nearly mad! To see that man chills me, like ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... him; gave him his life: but the fellow, more sensible in his skin than in his head, having received a scratch, was frighted: it gave him first a puke, then a fever, and then he died, that was all. And how could Belton help that? —But sickness, a long tedious sickness, will make a bugbear of any thing to a languishing heart, I see that. And so far was Mowbray a-propos in the verses from Nat. ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... Lower Nubra and return to Leh we were obliged to cross the great fords of the Shayok at the most dangerous season of the year. This transit had been the bugbear of the journey ever since news reached us of the destruction of the Sati scow. Mr. Redslob questioned every man we met on the subject, solemn and noisy conclaves were held upon it round the camp-fires, it was said that the 'European woman' and ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... and outside of his official duties, he was often employed in various miscellaneous offices by Mr. Grant. He lived in a small cottage adjoining the Woodville estate. This man was a great bugbear to Fanny, who had a very proper and wholesome regard for the ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... "hell," like always living with strangers, or a mad dog, or in a room full of those ornaments which belong, almost exclusively, to lodging-houses everywhere. Briefly, he is always there—ready to burst into flames at any moment, ready to misunderstand everything anybody does or says, a perpetual bugbear; and not even the emotional repentances, which are often the only partially saving grace of bad-tempered people, can atone for the atmosphere of disturbance which they always inflict. And the man or woman who loses his temper whenever anything goes in the slightest bit wrong—well, from ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... papa be a bugbear to frighten me. What can he do? I don't suppose he'll beat me. And I'd rather he would than shut me up here. As for you, mamma, I don't think you care for me a bit. Because Sophy is going to be married to that oaf, you are become so proud of her that you haven't ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... after the long loitering at Munich, thinking that in both places there was danger of Guy's being led into mischief by his musical connections. Therefore he did his best, for Amabel's sake, to turn them from their purpose, persuaded in his own mind that the fever was a mere bugbear, raised up by Arnaud; and, perhaps, in his full health and strength, almost regarding illness itself as a foible, far more the dread of it. He argued, therefore, in his most provoking strain, becoming more vexatious as the former annoyance was revived at ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the unicorn, the claw of the griffin, and other relics of equal verity and value, were sought eagerly by those rich enough to procure them, and when obtained were believed to ensure much good fortune to the possessor. A fear of the "evil eye"—that bugbear which still disturbs the happiness of the lower class Italians and of the Eastern nations generally—was carefully provided against. One great preservative was the wearing of a ring with the figure of a cockatrice upon ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... of living, the climacteric or change of life, has become the bugbear of womanhood. It seems to be universally assumed that this period in a woman's life must be fraught with manifold sufferings and dangers. It is taken as a matter of course that during these changes in her organism a woman is assailed by the most serious physical, mental, and ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... it; and I don't know that I understand it now you tell it me," replied the major, just a little crossly, for he did not like poetry; it was one of his bugbear humbugs. "But one thing is plain: you must not expose yourself to what in such ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... from escaping, while they knew not which way to run for safety. Rigby in the nick of time galloped up to this awful and hostile appearance, crying out to his troops that he would soon demolish the bugbear. This saying encouraged some of the runaways, who followed him to the combat. Approaching within a sword's length, for he was not deficient either in hardihood or valour, he made a furious stroke right in the face of this flaming apparition, when ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... merely the statement of a monk—of a man who resembles an echo—repeating simply what he hears. I understand that Mazarin is at this very moment extremely uneasy as to the state of affairs; that his orders are not respected like those of our former bugbear, the deceased cardinal, whose portrait as you see hangs yonder—for whatever may be thought of him, it must be allowed that Richelieu ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... we death? Did Brutus fear it? or the Grecian friends Who buried in Hipparchus' breast the sword, And died triumphant? Caesar should fear death, Brutus must scorn the bugbear. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... absorbing thought that he was nephew to Aunt Priscilla's bugbear has swallowed up all others; but now, as he himself reveals this other truth to her, she feels that her cup is ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... is a worry! And doubtless, if the iron glove Should meet us here in Kent or Surrey, Its clasp might soften into love; We might despatch him with a grey grin, And all the German Scribes would vow "Our bugbear is the Montenegrin; We do not hate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... careful, it was all right, and Agatha had already assisted in some experiments at Rock Quay, which had shown her to be thoroughly understanding and trustworthy, and capable of keeping off the amateur—the great bugbear. ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... late. Perhaps you're some of those nuns that have been made homeless? Well, although women are nothing but women, I don't think I have any right to be impolite, for all that the sun set long ago. Of course, there is an old law saying that nobody can be arrested after sunset, but though the law is a bugbear, I think it's too polite to insist on anything when it's a question of ladies. Hush, hush, tongue! Why, the old thing is going like a spinning-wheel, but that comes from that infernal gin! Why should I be dragged into this kind of thing? Of course, I'll get well paid and be a man of means, ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... would never take the pains To seek the prize that labor gains, Until the time had passed; For, all his life, he dreaded still The silly bugbear of uphill, And died a ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... its uncanny aspect. In its wider bed it could spread itself out comfortably; and on the western reaches of its sea-green mirror the travelers saw the reflection of Orsova on its island—for them the fourth, and greatest, bugbear. ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... convinced to this day that I committed murder—no one will dare accuse me of cowardice, no one will dare say that I could not perform my painful duty to the end. From the beginning till the end I remained firm and unbribable; and though a bugbear, a fanatic, a dark horror to some people, I may awaken in others a heroic dream of the infinite ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... cottage, and that the open air would be good for her also. Aunt Ninette was much gratified by this courtesy, and accepted it with pleasure; quite forgetting the noise of the children, which had been so great a bugbear to her. ...
— Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country • Johanna Spyri
... Egerius was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line, whereas others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed people at Aricia, and they derived the name Manius from Mania, a bogey or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in wait for pilgrims on the Arician slopes. These differences of opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Aricia and Egerius Laevius of Tusculum, as well as the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... of the rough mariners and warriors when they saw their stern mistress, whose name was used by mothers and nurses all over the kingdom, as a bugbear, with which to frighten naughty children, now comforting and caressing this stolen child; when she fed him with her own hands, and then took him in her arms and hushed him to sleep—singing to him a wild, childish ditty, which she remembered, ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... Glencoe; and all who have, are pained by its manifestation of his failing powers. In fact, his was an unfinished fame—a brilliant beginning, but no continuance. Sir Walter Scott has touched it with a needle, when he says, "Campbell is in a manner a bugbear to himself; the brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his after efforts. He is afraid of the shadow which his own fame casts before him." Byron placed him in the second category of the greatest living English poets; but ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... me tell him once for all, through you, that I will come into and go out of this place as often as I like, so long as he keeps Nell here; and that if he wants to be quit of me, he must first be quit of her. What have I done to be made a bugbear of, and to be shunned and dreaded as if I brought the plague? He'll tell you that I have no natural affection; and that I care no more for Nell, for her own sake, than I do for him. Let him say so. I care for the whim, then, of coming to and fro and reminding her of my existence. I WILL see ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Drake Was a Bugbear to fright Children; Nurses still'd Their little Spanish Nynnyes when they cryde ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... Mrs. Maverick will be met by these friends of the daughter, he trusts that the mother's interviews with the Doctor, and a knowledge of the kindly influences under which Adele has grown up, may lessen the danger of a religious altercation between mother and child, which has been his great bugbear in view of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... should he be ashamed of his own agitated feeling merely because he dressed for dinner, wore a white tie, and lived among people who might laugh at his owning any conscience in the matter, as the solemn folly of taking himself too seriously?—that bugbear of circles in which the lack of grave emotion passes for wit. From such cowardice before modish ignorance and obtuseness, Deronda shrank. But he also shrank from having his course determined by mere contagion, without consent of reason; or from allowing a reverential pity ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... was then the merry times began, the blunders, an' the laffin', The nudges an' the nods an' winks an' stale good-natured chaffin'. Ole Uncle Hiram Dane was there, the clostest man a-livin', Whose only bugbear seemed to be the dreadful fear o' givin'. His beard was long, his hair uncut, his clothes all bare an' dingy; It wasn't 'cause the man was pore, but jest so mortal stingy; An' there he sot by Sally Riggs a-smilin' ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... this marriage is such a bugbear to me! much might be if we could invent but any way ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... said. "It was awfully sweet of her. Evidently she'd been bullied about her unseemly behaviour when she was small, till you, and I, and Brockhurst, had been made into a perfect bugbear. She's quite amusingly afraid of you still. But she's no notion what really happened. Of course she can't have, or she could not have mentioned the subject to me." Richard shrugged his shoulders. "Obviously it would ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and without delay. Although there was some grumbling among the marketmen, the provision stores were soon put through such a course of scrubbing and whitening as to make the old-fashioned "spring house-cleaning," which has been the bugbear of pater familias and one of the chief assets of the paragrapher for so many years, a process of incomparably mild flavor. At the abattoir it had not been so easy to effect a reform, but with such women as Mrs. Bateman, Mrs. Albert Turner ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... wretch! a poor capocchia! hast not slept to-night? Would he not, a naughty man, let it sleep? A bugbear take him! ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... will you miss this splendid opportunity of giving a sop to your Cerberus? Of conciliating your bugbear? your bete noire? ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... there is no such secret;—it is a bugbear! But the moral perversion of the person who could soberly ask the question that Helwyse asked is not so easily disposed of. It met, indeed, with full recognition. As for the subtile voice, having accomplished ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... a gloom and disquietude was upon the assembly. There was a distinct impression of fear, though a vague notion as to its cause—a sort of extempore superstition—a power which hath most hold on the mind in proportion as its limits and operations are least known or understood. The bugbear owing its magnitude and importance to obscurity and misapprehension, becomes divested of its terrors when it can ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... the procureur-general," said Conrart, "and we have M. Fouquet left us still, of whom we have no reason to complain; but, as he is no procureur-general without his gown, we agree with M. de la Fontaine and pronounce the gown to be nothing but a bugbear." ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the bugbear of little minds; it is also the trade-mark of them. Paine also detested monarchies. "Some talent is required to be a simple workman," he wrote; "to be a king there is need to have only the human shape." Of Burke, he said: "Mr. Burke's mind is above the homely sorrows of the vulgar. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... Reading and writing were all right, and might be put to some practical use, but arithmetic seemed rather useless, and when it came to the "higher branches," geometry and trigonometry, they loomed up to Injun like a bugbear of the future. In his heart Injun pined for his truly loved ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... property's so dear, They scorn their laws or governors to fear; So bugbear'd with the name of slavery, They can't submit to their own liberty. Restraint from ill is freedom to the wise! But Englishmen do all restraint despise. Slaves to the liquor, drudges to the pots; The mob are statesmen, ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... puppy of his pride. Be furious, envious, slothful, mad, or drunk, Slave to a wife, or vassal to a punk, A Switz, a High Dutch, or a Low Dutch bear; All that we ask is but a patient ear. 'Tis the first virtue, vices to abhor; And the first wisdom, to be fool no more. But to the world no bugbear is so great, As want of figure, and a small estate. To either India see the merchant fly, Scared at the spectre of pale poverty! See him, with pains of body, pangs of soul, Burn through the Tropic, freeze beneath the pole! Wilt thou do nothing for a nobler end, Nothing, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... mind of the public with persons who beat their breast, tear their hair, and declaim blood-curdling episodes. A decade or more ago, the drawing-room reciter was of this type, and was rapidly becoming the bugbear of social gatherings. The difference between the stilted reciter and the simple story-teller is perhaps best illustrated by an episode in Hans Christian Andersen's immortal "Story of the Nightingale." The real Nightingale ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... Academy were years of steady progress. "The Immortals" were soon left far behind. At the end of the first twelve months he stood fifty-first in a class of seventy-two, but when he entered the first class, and commenced the study of logic, that bugbear to the majority, he shot from near the foot of the class to the top. In the final examination he came out seventeenth, notwithstanding that the less successful years were taken into account, and it was a frequent remark amongst his brother ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... evening, reminding us of the danger, inculcated strict vigilance on picket and on guard. So long did this last without any attack being made that the shadowy expectation of what never occurred became our bugbear, a chimera which haunted us ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... suited Uncle John better, and he freely revelled in the shops, purchasing the most useless and preposterous things in spite of that growing bugbear ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... that men can get to be so saturated with liberty, that they become insensible to the nicer feelings. The grossest enormities are constantly committed in this good republic of ours, under the pretence of being done by the public, and for the public. The public have got to bow to that bugbear, quite as submissively as Gesler would have wished the Swiss to bow to his own cap, as to the cap of Rodolph's substitute. Men will have idols, and the Americans have merely ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... seems to be hardly any feeling, which comes more directly home to the affectionate compassion of the human heart, than the pitiable and touching condition of helpless little beings left to the tender mercies of a stepmother; who, with her traditional severity, may be called a kind of standing bugbear of the popular imagination. The Danes have a beautiful ballad, in which the ghost of a mother is roused by the wailings and sufferings of her deserted offspring, to break with supernatural power the gravestone, ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... Habr Awal, was curious in his inquiries concerning me: the astute Senior had heard of our leaving the End of Time with the Gerad Adan, and his mind fell into the fancy that we were transacting some business for the Hajj Sharmarkay, the popular bugbear of Harar. Our fate was probably decided by the arrival of a youth of the Ayyal Gedid clan, who reported that three brothers had landed in the Somali country, that two of them were anxiously awaiting at Berberah the return of the third from Harar, and that, though dressed like Moslems, they ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... Parks that there were 2,000 of them sick in Philadelphia. The editor of a leading white paper in Jackson, Mississippi, made the remark that he feared that the result of the first winter's experience in the North would prove serious to the South, in so far as it would remove the bugbear of the northern climate. The returned migrants were encouraged to speak in disparagement of the North and to give wide publicity to their utterances, emphasizing incidents of suffering reported ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... that huge empire was a mere blank to be filled up by the imaginings of prejudice and hostility. Was it not a task worth setting before oneself, worth pursuing for a lifetime, that of trying to make known to English folk their bugbear of ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... difficult it is for me to think of marriage. Whenever we approve, we can find an hundred good reasons to justify our approbation. Whenever we dislike, we can find a thousand to justify our dislike. Every thing in the latter case is an impediment; every shadow a bugbear.—Thus can I enumerate and swell, perhaps, only imaginary grievances; 'I must go whither he would have me to go; visit whom he would have me to visit: well as I love to write, (though now, alas! my grand inducement to write is over!) it must be ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... trace the history of this matter in detail, I think it ought now to be manifest to everyone who studies it, that up to the commencement of the present century the progress of science in general, and of natural history in particular, was seriously retarded by what may be termed the Bugbear of Speculation. Fully awakened to the dangers of web-spinning from the ever-fertile resources of their own inner consciousness, naturalists became more and more abandoned to the idea that their science ought to consist in a mere observation of facts, or tabulation of phenomena, ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... so, not a man. I cannot love my enemy; for my enemy is not a man, but a beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat him." No equivocation here, surely. On superstition he comments,—"It has been long a bugbear, by reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthusiast ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... considerable town; near the entrance into which I observed, hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees, which I was told on inquiry belonged to MUMBO JUMBO. This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the Pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection; for as the Kafirs are not restricted in the number of their wives, every one marries as many as he can conveniently maintain; and as it frequently happens ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... Christian Science? Did you dare, Eloise Evringham, did you dare spoil your life—my life—our future, by scaring Dr. Ballard with that bugbear?" The angry woman was ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... worthy a special chronicle during the day. The men were drilled in various exercises, and gave excellent satisfaction to their officers. The next morning the St. Regis was off Cape Hatteras, and though it is a greater bugbear than it generally deserves, it gave the ship a taste of its quality. The wind had hauled around to the south-west, and was blowing a lively gale. The sails had been furled in the morning watch, and off the cape the course ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... however, has for many years been the most terrible bugbear, and to prevent its introduction into the seaports of Europe and the United States has been the chief end and aim of the absurd and ridiculous quarantine regulations to which I have referred. It has never been regarded as contagious by well-informed ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... an easier house to enter. I used to feel that keenly as a boy, when, by a prophetic irony, burglars were my bugbear, and I looked under my bed every night in life. The bow-windows on the ground floor finished in inane balconies to the first-floor windows. These balconies had ornamental iron railings, to which a less ingenious rope-ladder than ours could have been hitched with equal ease. Raffles had brought it ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... do not doubt me. I will cling with tenacity to that juste milieu under which we have hitherto so eminently prospered. Neither the Parcae and the Eumenides, nor Ixion and his friends, shall advance a point. I will keep each faction in awe by the bugbear of the other's supremacy. Trust me, ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... management, and, instead of being dragged down, as was most feared, their enfranchisement has tended to elevate them. Under our system of the Australian ballot, they have found that the contaminating influence of which they had been told was but a bugbear, born of fright, produced by shadows. They learned that to deposit their vote did not subject them to anything like the annoyance which they often experienced from crowds on "bargain days," while their presence drove ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... abominable and hideous mask before its eyes, it is afraid of death. But its fear is only because of its lack of understanding. If it knew, it would by no means be afraid or shudder at death. Our reason is like a little child who has become frightened by a bugbear or a mask, and cannot be lulled to sleep; or like a poor man, bereft of his senses, who imagines when brought to his couch that he is being put into the water and drowned. What we do not understand we cannot intelligently deal with. If, for instance, ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... capital, take it by storm, and annex the whole province to Connecticut. The name of Yankee became as terrible among the Nieuw Nederlanders as was that of Gaul among the ancient Romans, insomuch that the good wives of the Manhattoes used it as a bugbear wherewith to ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Arnim, opposed his wishes in this matter, he procured his recall and subjected him to a State prosecution. In fact, Bismarck believed that under a Republic France would be powerless in war, and, further, that she could never form that alliance with Russia which was the bugbear of his later days. A Russian diplomatist once told the Duc de Broglie that the kind of Republic which Bismarck wanted to see in France was "une ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... bugbear Love!" he said shortly. "And so you'd lose a good friend for a dead lover? I' faith, I'd befriend thee well if thou wert ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... just as my maid was going to bed, she suddenly saw, in the bright moonlight, a tall figure step out of the shadow of the fir-trees. For an instant a marauding Boer—a daily bugbear for weeks—flashed across her mind, but the next moment she recognized Sergeant Matthews from Setlagoli. He had ridden over post-haste to tell us the Boers were swarming there, and that he and his men had evacuated the barracks. He also warned us the same commando was coming here on the ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... The other bugbear which alarmed them was a report that the English intended either to take possession of Berbera, or that they would give it to Shermarky—a native chief and ally of ours who lives at Zeylah. In short, these numerous fears arose from Herne's ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... to rob our neighbours; all we ask is, to keep the Prussians out of Paris." He said a good deal more which it is needless to repeat, but I willingly fulfil his request, to give my testimony that he, and thousands like him, who are the bugbear of the inhabitants of the richer districts of the city, are not by any means as black as they are painted. They are impulsive and somewhat inclined to exaggerate their own good qualities and the faults of others; they seem to think that anyone ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere |
