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Motley   Listen
adjective
Motley  adj.  (compar. motlier; superl. motliest)  
1.
Variegated in color; consisting of different colors; dappled; party-colored; as, a motley coat.
2.
Wearing motley or party-colored clothing. See Motley, n., 1. "A motley fool."
3.
Composed of different or various parts; heterogeneously made or mixed up; discordantly composite; as, motley style.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Motley" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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 I often recall those homely Saturday evening concerts; the long, shabby saal with its faded out-of-date decorations; its rows of small tables with the well-known groups around them; the mixed and motley audience.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

... motley dress and masked face, Of sparkling unrevealing eyes, They track in gentle aimless chase The ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke

... 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

... The motley crew of Gafsa have become his favourites ever since his arrival in the country two weeks ago, and he has a theory that it is a mistake to endeavour to learn their language—it only leads you astray, it ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... 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

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

... 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

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

... 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

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

... 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

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

... 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

... 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 only in ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... 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



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