"Scribbler" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appeared, from time to time, in the great English reviews, and in erudite and authoritative philological periodicals; and it has been laughed at, danced upon, and tossed in a blanket by nearly every newspaper and magazine in the English-speaking world. Every scribbler, almost, has had his little fling at it, at one time or another; I had mine fifteen years ago. The book gets out of print, every now and then, and one ceases to hear of it for a season; but presently the nations and near and ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... the rest. Propinquity is the strongest of agents in a love affair, and in Denis Oglethorpe's love affair, propinquity had accomplished what nothing else would have been likely to have done. The desperate young scribbler of twenty years had been the lodger of the elder Miss Gower, and Priscilla, aged seventeen, had brought in his frugal dinners to him, and receipted his modest bills on their ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... old days the Bohemian scribbler was not in Society, he could at least imagine himself there. There was nothing to prevent his speaking of a member of the aristocracy as "one of us" with far less embarrassment and with as much truth as he could nowadays when he is invited—but still as the oil that never will mix with water. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... But the result was, that my brother (having really, as my mother and aunt insisted, taken wrong measures with me) should write again in a more moderate manner: for nobody else was permitted or cared to write to such a ready scribbler. And, I having declared, that I would not receive any more of his letters, without command from a superior authority, my mother was to give it hers: and accordingly has done so in the following lines, written on the superscription ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... starting off for the war with Lawrence next week, if you hadn't chosen what you're pleased to call a literary life. Literary life, indeed! I little thought a son of mine would ever have been so wanting in spirit as to prefer dabbling in ink to a life of action—to be the scribbler of mere words, rather than an officer ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... Gray says petulantly enough that "Dryden was as disgraceful to the office, from his character, as the poorest scribbler could have been from his verses."—Gray to Mason, 19th ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... hesitate to confess that this is the story of a hungry girl in a big city. Well, now, wait a minute. Conceding that it has been done by every scribbler from tyro to best seller expert, you will acknowledge that there is the possibility of a fresh viewpoint—twist—what is it the sporting editors call it? Oh, yes—slant. There is the possibility of getting a new slant on an old idea. That may serve to deflect ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... Benchers of the Inner Temple,' I have delivered myself, and truly, a Templar born. Bell clamors upon this, and thinketh that he hath caught a fox. It seems that in a former paper, retorting upon a weekly scribbler who had called my good identity in question, (see P.S. to my 'Chapter on Ears,') I profess myself a native of some spot near Cavendish Square, deducing my remoter origin from Italy. But who does not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Sunday. It was an odd thing for Mr. Stokes to do, for I could little interest a brilliant and educated man like him. The reason for my receiving such an honor was a communication I had written for the "Pittsburgh Journal." Even in my teens I was a scribbler for the press. To be an editor was one of my ambitions. Horace Greeley and the "Tribune" was my ideal of human triumph. Strange that there should have come a day when I could have bought the "Tribune"; but by that time the pearl had lost its luster. Our air castles ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... are, indeed, well practised in abuse, and have long learned to call mathematicians and astronomers cheats and charlatans. They freely used their vocabulary for the benefit of De Morgan, whom they denounced as a scurrilous scribbler, a defamatory, dishonest, abusive, ungentlemanly, and ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... as the symbol of their own law. What Tory writers and officials say warrants the inference that the Patriots kept away. Dalrymple said that the Convention was planet-stricken; "Sagittarius," a Tory scribbler, says the Convention ran, and tells how they ran:—"The courage of the faithful only consisted in blustering, for the morning that the troops landed they broke up, and rushed out of town like a herd of scalded hogs." If the Patriots generally ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... no doubt such faithful freedom that made that defamatory scribbler say, in his Presbyterian Eloquence, that he said in a sermon at Galashields, that cess paying to Charles II. was as bad as sacrificing to ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... mention the name of that odious man!" almost shrieked Madame Carolina, forgetting the dignity of her semi-regal character in the jealous feelings of the author. "How can you mention him! A scribbler without a spark, not only of genius, but even of common invention. A miserable fellow, who seems to do nothing but clothe and amplify, in his own fantastic style, the details of ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... this morning, and I am empowered to arrest you. You can look at it for yourselves; you've both seen them before." He opened the paper and spread it out for them to read. "Walter Pennold, alias William Perry, alias Wally the Scribbler, number 09203 in the Rogues' Gallery. First term at Joliet, for forgery; second at Sing Sing for shoving the queer. This warrant only holds you as a suspicious character, Pennold, but we can dig up plenty of other things, if it's necessary; there's a forger named Griswold ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... new thing to me that on this occasion he should be Euergetes' tool. Old Philammon told me all about it. Just now the messenger came back from Memphis, and brought a paltry scrap of papyrus on which some wretched scribbler had written in the name of Philometer, that nothing was known of Irene at court, and complaining deeply that Asclepiodorus had not hesitated to play an underhand game with the king. So they have no idea whatever of voluntarily releasing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Nejdanov flung down the pen. "Well, now you must try and sleep and forget all this nonsense, scribbler!" he exclaimed, and lay down on the bed. But it was long before he ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... a fine and disagreeable episode (for me) there, if that pitiless court had discovered that the very scribbler of that piece of dictation, secretary to Joan of Arc, was present—and not only present, but helping build the record; and not only that, but destined at a far distant day to testify against lies and ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... Robin, what can Traulus[2] mean By bellowing thus against the Dean? Why does he call him paltry scribbler, Papist, and Jacobite, and libeller, Yet cannot prove ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... in our more refined age; but they were then considered essential to faithful dealing. The Bishop in his reply, called 'Dirt wiped off,' beat the tinker in abusive language; he calls Bunyan 'A wretched scribbler,' 'grossly ignorant,' 'most unchristian and wicked,' 'a piece of proud folly,' 'so very dirty a creature that he disdains to dirt his fingers with him,' 'Bunyan can no more disgrace him than a rude creature can eclipse the moon by barking at her; or make ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and I stand, or stood, with regard to each other, would have had the liberality to act thus; none but a great soul dared hazard it. The height on which he stands has not made him giddy:—a little scribbler would have gone on cavilling to the end of the chapter. As to the justice of his panegyric, that is matter of taste. There are plenty to question it, and glad, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... partially successful, for the English were a very yielding people and did not take much trouble to resist attempts of this kind. "Blackwood," however, was outdone in this rowdy style of reviewing by "Fraser's Magazine." From that periodical we learn that Cooper was "a passable scribbler of passable novels," a "bilious braggart," a "liar," a "full jackass," "a man of consummate and inbred vulgarity," "a bore of the first magnitude in society," who went about fishing for (p. 175) introductions. ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... leave your doors unbolted? Is not the character, the honour, and the tranquillity of a citizen preferable to his treasures? and, by the liberty of the Press, you leave them at the mercy of every scribbler who can write or think. The wound inflicted may heal, but the scar will always remain. Were you, therefore, determined to decree the motion for this dangerous and impolitic liberty, I make this amendment, that conviction of having written a libel carries with ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... "Across?" questioned the scribbler. "We call him 'Sister Anne.' You know she was the lady in Bluebeard's yarn that kept looking out the window. He is always sticking his head out of the trenches, to see what he can see. He's going to get his ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... window-box you wonder if they're fair enough to bloom beside your Dinkie. I don't suppose I ever made a haystack that you didn't wonder whether it wasn't going to be a grand place for Dinkie to slide down. And when Dinkie draws a goggle-eyed man on his scribbler you see Michael Angelo totter and Titian turn in his grave. And when Dinkie writes a composition of thirty crooked lines on the landing of Hengist you feel that fate did Hume a mean trick in letting him pass away before inspecting that final ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... who kept him amused. No doubt, too, he knew her record and secretly despised her. Even if he did not care for her and told her so—even if he were willing to marry her, what then? She would be a fool to listen to him. What kind of a life could he, a penniless scribbler, give her compared with the comforts and gifts which Willard Brockton was ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... the "great pine forest," the "dressed-stone mansion," etc. But I found out then, and never have forgotten since, that we never read the dull explanatory surroundings of marvelously exciting things when we have no occasion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is trying to defraud us; we skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... rest your whole faith upon them, Jonathan. If some fine day a Republican spellbinder, or a Democratic scribbler, tries to upset you and prove that Socialists are all liars and false prophets, just tell him the figures are quite unimportant to you, that you don't care to know just exactly how much of the wealth the richest one per cent. gets and how little of it the poorest fifty per cent. ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... mother ever since to make one for their new friend. But they stopped short at sight of the light and dark head so close together over something they did not know about, and when Martha drew nearer and informed the dark-haired scribbler that she had "brought it," Kate merely nodded her ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... a guide to the development of his taste. At present his work has about it a softness bordering on effeminacy, which leads us to believe that his conception of the poet's art is rather imperfect. It is only in caricature that we discover the poet as a sighing, long-haired scribbler of gushing flights of infantile awe or immature adoration. Earnestness, dignity, and at times, sonorous stateliness, become a good poet; and such thoughts as are generally suggested by the confirmed use of "Oh", "Ah", "dear", "little", ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... only be inserted, but are really understood,"—Wright's Gram., p 209. "He was since a hired Scribbler in the Daily Courant."—Notes to the Dunciad, ii, 299. "In gardening, luckily, relative beauty need never stand in opposition to intrinsic beauty."—Kames, El. of Crit., ii, 330. "I doubt much of the propriety of the following examples."—Lowth's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... she considered whether it would be advantageous to cultivate her pupil's talent for poetry. Excellence in the poetic art cannot be obtained without a degree of application for which a girl in her situation could not have leisure. To encourage her to become a mere rhyming scribbler, without any chance of obtaining celebrity or securing subsistence, would be folly and cruelty. Early prodigies in the lower ranks of life are seldom permanently successful; they are cried up one day, and cried down the next. Their productions rarely have that superiority ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... eye of the pardonable Master he read—having the sort of divination that belonged to his talent—that this personage had ever a store of friendly patience, which was part of his rich outfit, but was versed in no printed page of a rising scribbler. There was even a relief, a simplification, in that: liking him so much already for what he had done, how could one have liked him any more for a perception which must at the best have been vague? Paul Overt got up, trying to show his compassion, ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... she protested in dismay. "I should perish with shame if His Excellency were to be so beset by every sorry scribbler." ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... his captain, the captain of becoming general, the clerk of supplanting the chief of his department, the new-fledged attorney of being admitted to the high court, the cure of being ordained a bishop, the shallow scribbler of seating himself on the legislative bench. Offices and professions vacated by the appointment of so many upstarts afford in their turn a vast field for the ambition of the lower classes."—Thus, step by step, owing to the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... cool examination of reason, preposterous. What! the heiress of so many millions, brought up doubtless in the expectation of the most brilliant worldly alliance, the heiress with the world presently at her feet, would she look at a lawyer's clerk and an unsuccessful scribbler? Oh, the vanity of youth and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... satirist, a hired buffoon, A monthly scribbler of some low lampoon. Condemned to drudge, the meanest of the mean, And furbish falsehoods for a magazine. English Bards and ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... a counter invective of unusual ferocity from some unknown scribbler, is the expression of a sentiment which, sound enough within limits, Byron pushed to an extreme. He had a rooted dislike, of professional litterateurs, and was always haunted by a dread that they would claim equality with him on the common ground of authorship. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... verse, every essay, every entrefilet, is destined to pass, however swiftly, through the minds of some portion of the public, and to colour, however transiently, their thoughts. When any subject falls to be discussed, some scribbler on a paper has the invaluable opportunity of beginning its discussion in a dignified and human spirit; and if there were enough who did so in our public press neither the public nor the parliament would find it in their minds to drop to meaner thoughts. The writer has the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... your theatres. Your comic operas were, like Muzio Clementi's carts, mere vehicles for music, and vehicles withal of such a clumsy fabric, that poor Euterpe, when she took her nightly airings, reminded the spectator of Punch's wife in a wheelbarrow; every expense was incurred, and every scribbler taken into pay, except poor ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... are, of course, obvious enough. He cares nothing, for example, for what we call the beauties of nature. There is scarcely throughout his books one description showing the power of appealing to emotions through scenery claimed by every modern scribbler. In passing the Alps, the only remark which one of his characters has to make, beyond describing the horrible dangers of the Mont Cenis, is that 'every object which here presents itself is excessively ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... half to herself. "And once I almost felt inclined to sympathize with a Transatlantic scribbler, who compared the Revelation to what he termed a wholesale jewelry show. He was a townsman who had never crossed the Rockies—and if there are glories like this on earth, what must ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... more be called the imitator of Shakespeare than Shakespeare the imitator of Ford. There were perhaps few other points of resemblance between these two men than that which the universal and inevitable influence of their age produced. And this is an influence which neither the meanest scribbler nor the sublimest genius of any era can escape; and which I ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... descriptions of new lands, especially when attempted by an unskilled pen, to that which the explorer himself experiences. All are here on an equal footing; the most finished writer and the most imperfect scribbler are on the same level; they are equally capable of the exquisite enjoyment of discovery, they are equally susceptible of the feelings of delight that gush upon the heart as every forward step discloses fresh prospects, and brings a still more new horizon, if I may so speak, to view. And it may ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... success in grasping my theory of "special" writing was his own character, as it was revealed to me from day to day in intimate working contact with him under these conditions. Here, as I soon learned, and was glad to learn, was no namby-pamby scribbler of the old happy-ending, pretty-nothing school of literary composition. On the contrary he sounded, for the first time in my dealings with literary aspirants of every kind, that sure, sane, penetrating, non-sentimental note so common to the best writers ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... A contemptible scribbler, of whom I have learned no more than that, after having disgraced and deserted the clerical character, he picks up in London a scanty livelihood by scurrilous lampoons under a feigned name, has impudently and falsely asserted that the passages omitted were defamatory, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... reign of Henry the Sixth closely resembled the cauchoises still worn by those of Normandy; and which excited the displeasure of Dan John in so great a degree as to have induced him to invoke the aid of his Muse in effecting their abolition. It seems no subject escaped that eternal scribbler's attention; and if his abilities had equalled his disposition, he would probably have become the Juvenal of his age. Upon this occasion, however, he appears to have soared on rather a higher wing than usual; and the moral ...
— A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 • Anonymous
... Maddalena dei Pazzi; Saint Denys in matter, Saint Maddalena in manner. As a writer, no doubt she is not supreme, and the poverty of her borrowed style is sometimes painful; still, considering that she lived in the seventeenth century, she was at any rate not a mere scribbler of vapid aspirations, like most of the ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... beautiful, half so dear. That you must and will believe. Well, then—no, don't draw your hands away—about this money, for I'm perfectly sober and desirous of telling you the truth. You have the right to know. One thing led to another, but the first of it was like this. I've always been a scribbler in my lazy moments, as you know, but perhaps you can't be expected to know that I have put care and strong thought, art and heart both, into some verse that I occasionally would take out and look ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... written by Richard Johnson, the author of the well-known romance of the Seven Champions, and Delony, the writer of Jack of Newbury's Life, and the "Gentle Craft," who lived in the time of James and Charles.[61] One Martin Parker was a most notorious ballad scribbler in the reign of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... published, by some scoundrel lawyer, on the prerogative; in which is scraped together all the flattery and blasphemy of our old law-books in honour of kings. I presume it is understood, that the court will support the cause of this impudent scribbler." Works, vol. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... become as arrant a scribbler as somebody else. I begin to like writing. A great compliment to you, I assure you. I see one may bring one's mind to any thing.—I thought I must have had recourse, when you and my brother left us, and when I was married, to the public amusements, to fill up my leisure: and as ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... cause,—and against Christ, for not allowing divorces: the same, O horrid! that defended the lawfulness of the greatest crime that ever was committed, to put our thrice-excellent King to death: a petty schoolboy scribbler, that durst grapple in such a cause with the prince of the learned men of his age, Salmasius, [Greek: philosophias pasaes aphroditae kai lyra], as Eunapius says of Ammonius, Plutarch's scholar in Egypt, the ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... rarely run higher, or assumed an aspect more startling to a European, than during my residence in the States; and though it is not my intention to deal largely with a subject which every brother scribbler, who spends his six months here, arranges to his great ease and perfect satisfaction, yet, whenever I think my object of making the people known may be advanced by giving a smack of their politics, I shall do so with perfect freedom, considering this as ground ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... in this famous island of Britain a certain paltry scribbler, very voluminous, whose character the reader cannot wholly be a stranger to. He deals in a pernicious kind of writings called "Second Parts," and usually passes under the name of "The Author of the First." I easily foresee that as soon as ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... learning of Shakespeare, and easily shows that he was full of mythological lore. So was all Elizabethan literature. Every English scribbler then knew what most men have forgotten now. Nobody was forced to go to the original authorities- -say, Plato, Herodotus, and Plutarch—for what was accessible in translations, or had long before been copiously decanted into English prose and poetry. Shakespeare could ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... as intellectual gifts, the famous doctrine of supply and demand is so thoroughly carried out. We raise, however, no hue and cry after 'poor trash.' Neither have we the blood-thirsty wish to run to ground the panting scribbler, or to adorn ourselves with the glories of his 'brush.' Let those who countenance him by reading his works, and who can reconcile the purchase thereof with their consciences, answer to their fellow men for the inevitable consequences. But it ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... think that we can praise it ourselves, without incurring the reproach of bad taste. The folly we yearly practise, of flying into passion with some inferior English writer, who caricatures our faults, and tells dull jokes about his tour through the land, has only the effect to exalt an insignificant scribbler into notoriety, and give a nominal value to his recorded impertinence. If the mind and heart of the country had its due expression, if its life had taken form in a literature worthy of itself, we should pay little regard to the childish tattling ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... fiercely resented any attempt to improve their deportment. If Cooper had possessed an acute sense of humor he would never have written Home as Found, nor would he have dignified with a reply the attack of every scribbler who assailed him. But he took all criticisms seriously, and felt it a solemn duty, in justice to himself and to the principles for which he stood, to defend himself against all and sundry. There is no doubt that in standing alone against the whole world he believed ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... Mrs. Dean the dire results to themselves of allowing her to escape, and mentions the annoyance of Parson Swinton, "a great favourite of Miss Blandy's," at the "freedom" taken with his name by some anonymous scribbler. This was not the first time that reverend gentleman had to complain of the "liberty" of the Press, as we learn from certain curious pamphlets of 1739, from which it would seem that his reputation had no very sweet savour in contemporary nostrils. Mr. Sharpe, writing to Mr. ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... that even in stories no author would dare—not even the veriest amateur scribbler—would presume to affront intelligent readers by introducing such a coincidence ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... said Jorian. 'She set Edbury on to face him with the Dauphin. You don't fancy it came of the young dog "all of himself," do you? Why, it was clever! He trots about a briefless little barrister, a scribbler, devilish clever and impudent, who does his farces for him. Tenby 's the fellow's name, and it's the only thing I haven't heard him pun on. Puns are the smallpox of the language;—we're cursed with an epidemic. By gad, the next time I meet ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... my stories to Miss Sylvia. In my own excuse I must allege that she tempted me to do it. I did not go around with manuscripts under my arm, inflicting them on defenceless females. But Miss Sylvia had discovered that I was a magazine scribbler, and moreover, that I had shut myself up in my room that very morning and perpetrated a short story. Nothing would do but that I read ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... bunches of wild white honeysuckle and blue flag, or posies of arrowheads and cardinal-flowers. Or suppose that I was very unwisely and reluctantly labouring at some serious piece of literary work, promised for the next number of THE SCRIBBLER'S REVIEW; and suppose that in the midst of this labour the sad news came to me that the fisherman had forgotten to leave any fish at our cottage that morning. Should my innocent babes and my devoted wife be left to perish ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... eagerly, "if you imagine me a hireling scribbler for the purposes of defamation or of flattery, you as little know my situation as my character. My subjects shall be my own, and my satire shall be general. I would as much disdain to be personal with an anonymous pen, as to attack an unarmed ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... Jesuit says, "To put a gloss upon this action before the eyes of the people, Rienzi gave out that the Governor, John di Vico, keeping a correspondence with the conspirators, came with no other view than to betray the Romans." And if this scribbler, who pretends to have consulted the Vatican MSS., had looked at the most ordinary authorities, he would have seen that John di Vico did come with that view. (See for Di Vico's secret correspondence with the Barons, La Cron. Bologn. page 406; and ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... no mistake," roared a voice which was accustomed to command. "He's been trying to hoodwink you. Watch the surprise in his face when he sees me, the cursed meddler and scribbler. It would be a pleasure to witness his hanging. Come, show him ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... The facile Scribbler writes; and, having writ, No Rules of Rhetoric bother him a Bit, Or lure him back to cancel half a Line, Nor Grammar's protests change ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Cayenne • Gelett Burgess
... "Look here, Scribbler, what do you mean by this, 'Among the most beautiful girls was Alderman Horatio Dingley'? Old Dingley ain't a girl, you idiot! He's ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... to pursue them steadily and actively. I am now reading Demosthenes with interest and admiration indescribable. I am slowly, at odd minutes, getting through the stupid trash of Diodorus. I have read through Seneca, and an affected empty scribbler he is. I have read Tacitus again, and, by the bye, I will tell you a curious circumstance relating to that matter. In my younger days I always thought the Annals a prodigiously superior work to the History. I was surprised to find ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... culpa! I believe that I was wrong. The book has been read as a collection of essays and stories and dialogues only pulled together by the binder's tapes; as otherwise disjointed, fragmentary, decousue, a "piebald monstrous book," a sort of kous-kous, made out of the odds and ends of a scribbler's note-book. Some have liked some morsels, others other morsels: it has been a matter of the luck of the fork. Very few, one only to my knowledge, can have seen the thing as it presented itself to my flattering eye—not as a ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... made, some scribbler said, And every rhymester thinks the saying true: Better unborn than wanting labor's aid: Aye, all great poets—all great men—are made Between the hammer and the anvil. Few Have the true metal, many ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... peril, to pay prescriptive homage to false concords and inconsequential criticisms, because the writer of them has the character of the first or second Greek or Latin scholar in the kingdom. If you do not swear to the truth of these spurious credentials, you are ignorant and malicious, a quack and a scribbler—flagranti delicto! Thus the man who can merely read and construe some old author is of a class superior to any living one, and, by parity of reasoning, to those old authors themselves: the poet or prose-writer of true and original genius, by ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the publishers. Pasquier's Letters contains the following passage, which applies perhaps quite as forcibly to the present age as to his own time: "I cannot forbear complaining at this time of the calamity of this age which has produced such a plenty of reputed or untimely authors. Any pitiful scribbler will have his first thoughts to come to light; lest, being too long shut up, they should grow musty. Good God! how apposite are these ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... to Borgia heights without making enemies. The evil tale was taken up in all its foul trappings, and, upon no better authority than the public voice, it was enshrined in chronicles by every scribbler of the day. And for four hundred years that lie has held its place in history, the very cornerstone of all the execration that has been heaped upon the name of Borgia. Never was vengeance more terrible, far-reaching, and abiding. ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... be satisfied on every occasion. I am informed, every morning when I wake, that some general and eternal law has just been discovered, which I never heard mentioned before. There is not a mediocre scribbler who does not try his hand at discovering truths applicable to a great kingdom, and who is very ill pleased with himself if he does not succeed in compressing the human race into the compass of an article. So great a dissimilarity between two very enlightened nations ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... is not only in bogus jewelry that prizes are warranted. Gold pens are held out as an inducement. What village poetaster or scribbler for the weekly journal—enjoying a reputation among his acquaintances for 'smart writing'—imagining himself a second Byron or another Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., but what likes to sport a gold pen with 'silver case' before the admiring eyes ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... conduct which the race has built up, guided by an unerring instinct of self-preservation. Humanity defends herself against those who attempt to subvert her; and none, neither Napoleon nor the wretched scribbler such as you are, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... In Central Park you see giraffes—and tortoises too. Central Park has more talent than this scribbler of yours.' ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... a mere scribbler to intrude upon the chaste mysteries of the toilet. Suffice it therefore to say that, when all was completed, George Anne and Mrs. March the dresser stood back, breathless, to contemplate the work ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... hand-writing—" "A most impertinent woman!" cried the king, walking with rapid strides up and down my room.— "She has dared not to believe me on my word! Writing!—signature! She mistrusts me as she would the lowest scribbler of France. A writing! My signature! My grandfather, Louis XIV, repented having given his to Charost. I will not commit a similar error." "But, sire, when a prince has a real desire to keep his word, it is of little import ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... disputation concern them? Pierre Ronsard, being an offshoot of this same College of Navarre, hath indubitably a claim upon our consideration. But he is old, and I marvel that his gout permitted him to hobble so far. Oh, the mercenary old scribbler! His late verses halt like himself, yet he lowereth not the price of his masques. Besides which, he is grown moral, and unsays all his former good things. Mort Dieu! your superannuated bards ever recant the indiscretions of their nonage. Clement Marot took to psalm-writing in his ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... justly, and knew within themselves that there was a fiery quality in what they wrote. But how many poets have fed themselves in vain on the same hopes, have thought themselves unduly contemned and slighted! There is hardly a scribbler of verse who has not the same delusion, and who has not in chilly and comfortless moments to face the fact that he does not probably count for very much, after all, in the scheme of things. How hard it is in the case of Keats and Shelley to feel that they had not some inkling of all the desirous ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... straining eye has found A little spot that, black and round, Lies near the crimsoned fire-orb's rim. O blessed, beauteous evening star, Well named for her whom earth adores,— The Lady of the dove-drawn car,— I know thee in thy white simar; But veiled in black, a rayless spot, Blank as a careless scribbler's blot, Stripped of thy robe of silvery flame,— The stolen robe that Night restores When Day has shut his golden doors,— I see thee, yet I know thee not; And canst thou call thyself ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and publishers. Many applications for manuscript came in and she was told that "any publisher this side of Baltimore would be glad to get a book" from her. "There is a sudden hoist," she says, "for a meek and lowly scribbler. Fifteen years of hard grubbing may come to something yet." Her receipts for the year 1863, amounted to $600 and she takes comfort in saying that she had spent less ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... met or seen or corresponded with about five hundred of the three thousand set down in "Men of the Time," and been kindly classed among them, it was worth while to mention my meetings with many of them. Had the humblest scribbler of the age of Elizabeth so much as mentioned that he had ever exchanged a word with, or even looked at, any of the great writers of his time, his record would now be read with avidity. I have really never in my life run after such men, or ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of books] library, bibliotheca[obs3]. press &c. (publication) 531. [complete description] definitive work, treatise, comprehensive treatise (dissertation) 595. [person who writes a book] writer, author, litterateur[Fr], essayist, journalism; pen, scribbler, the scribbling race; literary hack, Grub-street writer; writer for the press, gentleman of the press, representative of the press; adjective jerker[obs3], diaskeaust[obs3], ghost, hack writer, ink slinger; publicist; reporter, penny a liner; editor, subeditor[obs3]; playwright ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Madness of the Town, A Farce without Contrivance, without Sense Should run to the Astonishment of Mankind; Think how you will be read in After-times, When Friends are not, and the impartial Judge Shall with the meanest Scribbler rank your Name; Who would not rather wish a Butler's fame, Distress'd, and poor in every thing but Merit, Than be the ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... influence of his contemporaries was concerned, might have been living in the Middle Ages or the moon. At a time when Voltaire's fame was ringing through Europe, he refers to him incidentally as an insignificant scribbler, and misspells his name. But the combination of such abilities and such aloofness was a singular exception, becoming, indeed, more extraordinary and improbable every day. For now the movement which had begun in the early years of the century ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... glimmering on my sight again, and as it brightens you fade away. Oh, I should be loth to lose my treasure of past happiness and become once more what I was then—a hermit in the depths of my own mind, sometimes yawning over drowsy volumes and anon a scribbler of wearier trash than what I read; a man who had wandered out of the real world and got into its shadow, where his troubles, joys and vicissitudes were of such slight stuff that he hardly knew whether he lived or only dreamed ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... oblige me with the sequel of your letter to your father? For, you promise, my dear charming scribbler, in that you sent me, to write again to his letter; and I long to see how you answer the latter part of it, about your relations desiring already to come and live with him. I know what I expect from you. But let it be what it will, send it to me exactly as you wrote it; and I shall see ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... and lost his secretaryship. This also is thought to have injured him in a tender point. He had already conceived an affection for the Countess-Dowager of Warwick, who had been disposed to encourage the addresses of the Secretary, but looked coldly on those of the mere man and scribbler Joseph Addison, who, to crown his misfortunes at this time, had resigned his Fellowship, suffered some severe pecuniary losses of a kind, and from a quarter which are both obscure, and was trembling lest he should be deprived of his small Irish ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... from oblivion. The commentator, opulent in words, produces vast tomes of dissertations; the common herd of editors send up mists of obscurity from their notes at the bottom of each page; and every casual scribbler brings his farthing rushlight of eulogy or research to swell the cloud of incense ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... retribution," and tell the true but melancholy story of the unhappy master of the Raven. It was she who generously came forward as "one of the friends" of him who was said to have no friends. She was his steady champion from first to last. Whether it was some crackbrain scribbler who tried to prove Poe "mad," some accomplished scholar who endeavored to disparage him in order to magnify some other writer, or some silly woman who attempted to foist herself into notice by relating "imaginary facts" concerning ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... could and did say "our occidental rays of Phoebus were upon their turning oriental to the other hemisphere of the terrestrial globe." Alas! poor Sir Thomas, who must needs babble the foolish hopes which wiser men reticently keep cloistered in their own bosoms! who confessed what every scribbler thinks, and so gets laughed at,—as wantons are carried to the round-house for airing their incontinent phraseology in the street, while Blowsalinda reads romances in her chamber without blushing. Modesty is very well; but, after all, do not the least self-sufficient of us hope for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... great advance on that unsatisfactory and effete style. To satisfy the exacting palate of our reading people, we require a real flesh-and-blood detective, with a popular name and reputation, to pose as the figurehead, while an ingenious scribbler does the romancing. There is something thrilling and realistic in this method, and it carries an air of veracity which is irresistibly attractive and convincing. The French people did something of the same ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... time be scarcely described as living; it was from his death-bed he shot the poisoned arrow. And what brought out the venom? Merely a few careless words of Moore's, in which he described Croker "as a scribbler of all work," words that Earl Russell would have erased, if it had occurred to him to do so. Another countryman, Thomas Crofton Croker, assailed after his death the man whose shoe-latchets he would have been proud to unloose during his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... palled public and dyspeptical reviewers will call for the thousandth time a cacoethes; word of cabalistic look, unknown to Dr. Dilworth. Truly, my masters, though disciple I be of venerable Martinus the Scribbler; though, for aught I know, himself in progress of transmigration; still, I submit, my cornucopia is not crammed with leaves and chopped straw; and if, in utter carelessness, the fruit is poured out pell-mell after this desultory ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... since otherwise they break the very covenant by which we hold our power there. Even if these Institutes had been arbitrary, which they are not, they might have been excused as the acts of conquerors. But, my Lords, he is no conqueror, nor anything but what you see him,—a bad scribbler of absurd papers, in which he can put no two sentences together without contradiction. We know him in no other character than that of having been a bullock-contractor for some years, of having acted fraudulently in that capacity, and afterwards giving fraudulent contracts to others; and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... charge for Weber, I unhappily in the present case ascribed it to madness, for which I pray God to forgive me, since the blow has fallen heavily when I really thought it would not be felt. I considered Lamb as a thoughtless scribbler, who, in circumstances of ease, amused himself by writing on any subject. Why I thought so, I cannot tell, but it was the opinion I formed to myself, for I now regret to say I never made any inquiry upon the subject; nor by any accident in the whole course of my life did ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... scooped up the scribbler while the Com-tech half turned to make adjustments to the controls, picking up a speaker ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... Mr. Scribbler," said the constable (whose son, as everyone knows, had treacherously deserted Mademoiselle de Piennes, to whom he was betrothed, to espouse Diana of France, daughter of the mistress of certain high personages and ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... not a starving scribbler; if you determine to write, you can write well, though not so easily, on many topics. You have not that last sad excuse of hunger, which drives poor women to the streets, and makes unhappy men act as public blabs and spies. If you take ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... consequence of them, was received with loud applause; and the author—only twenty-three years of age—"awoke one morning, and found himself famous;" for although his name was not attached to the poem, it soon transpired. One Rolt, an obscure scribbler, then in Ireland, claimed the authorship, transcribed the poem with his own hand; nay, according to Dr. Johnson, published an edition with his own name, and was invited to the best tables as the ingenious Mr. Rolt. His conversation did not indeed sparkle with ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... as his Greek literature, happens to be a respectable Joe Miller from the era of Hierocles, and through him probably it came down from Pythagoras. Yet still Voltaire was very far indeed from being a 'scribbler.' He had the graceful levity and the graceful gaiety of his nation in an exalted degree. He had a vast compass of miscellaneous knowledge; pity that it was so disjointed, arena sine calce; pity that you could never rely on its accuracy; and, as respected his epic poetry, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... closely on the heels of Dickens when the latter scored his great success in The Pickwick Papers. He was a most voluminous scribbler, but none of his productions ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... permitted to use his chisel until they have decided how far love or pride may go in commemoration of the dead. They mutilate, with equal sovereignty of will, the printed pages of a classic and the manuscript of an unknown scribbler,—sit in judgment upon Botta and Laplace, as their predecessors sat in judgment upon Guicciardini and Galileo,—and, in the fervor of their undiscriminating zeal, condemn Robertson and Gibbon, Reid ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... or of an artist inferior to himself, to whose work he has frequently imparted a vitality of which it would have been destitute but for the interposition of his hand. He was ready, moreover, to execute woodcuts for a song-book or the political skits of any scribbler of his time, whether on the ministerial or the popular side mattered little to him. It was therefore not unnatural that doing "just what was suggested or thrown in his way," Lockhart should come to ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... poison his mind {1753.}. The author was Henry Rimius.130 He had been Aulic Councillor to the King of Prussia, had met Moravians in Germany, and now lived in Oxenden Street, London. For two years this scribbler devoted his energies to an attempt to paint the Brethren in such revolting colours that the Government would expel them from the country. His method was unscrupulous and immoral. He admitted, as he had to admit, that such English ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... war, the social glass, and, in short, all the valuable and time-honored institutions justly dear to our common humanity and especially to republicans, are made the butt of coarse and senseless ribaldry by this low-minded scribbler. It is time that the respectable and religious portion of our community should be aroused to the alarming inroads of foreign Jacobinism, sansculottism, and infidelity. It is a fearful proof of the widespread nature of this contagion, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... you are wondering what we are now doing, and speculating upon the scribbler with arch eyes and elevated crest, as if you would know the subject of his lucubrations. What the wiser or better wouldst thou be of human knowledge? Sometimes that little heart of thine goes pit-a-pat, when a great, ugly, staring contributor ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... what might germinate in the brain of a washerwoman.' He then proceeds to call the author by such elegant names as 'lickspittle,' 'beggarly skittler,' jackass, ninny, haberdasher, 'fifty-fifth rate scribbler of gripe-visited sonnets,' and 'namby-pamby writer in twaddling albums kept by the mustachioed widows or bony ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... your works. By me he has lost somewhat—by Fox, Amos, and himself very much. I can sell your "Thalaba" quite as well in your absence as in your presence. I am employed from I-rise to I-set (that is, from nine in the morning to twelve at night), a pure scribbler. My mornings to booksellers' compilations, after dinner to Stuart, who pays all my expenses here, let them be what they will; the earnings of the morning go to make up an hundred and fifty pounds for my year's expenditure; ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... character having been lampooned by some obscure scribbler, who could not be discovered, the ministry, in consequence of her complaint, ordered no fewer than five-and-twenty abbes to be apprehended and sent to the Bastille, on the maxim of Herod, when he commanded the innocents to be murdered, hoping that ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... look, When they have got their picture tow'rds a book; Or pompous title, like a gaudy sign, Meant to betray dull sots to wretched wine. If at his title T—— had dropt his quill, T—— might have pass'd for a great genius still. But T——, alas! (excuse him, if you can) Is now a scribbler, who was once a man. Imperious some a classic fame demand, For heaping up, with a laborious hand, A waggon-load of meanings for one word, While A's deposed, and B with pomp restor'd. Some, for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... poet from whom the mob of Athens snatched the laurel to bestow it upon a mean and execrable scribbler, and to one hundred of whose comedies the prize was denied, while only eight of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... became the subject of a furious controversy. One party held that God had wonderfully brought this precious volume to light, for the guidance of His Church at a most critical moment. The other party wondered that any importance could be attached to the nonsense of a nameless scribbler of the thirteenth century. Much was written about the deprivations of Chrysostom and Photius, of Nicolaus Mysticus and Cosmas Atticus. But the case of Abiathar, whom Solomon put out of the sacerdotal office for treason, was discussed with peculiar eagerness. No small quantity of learning and ingenuity ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... endeavoured in vain to procure a copy of it. At last I was indebted to the malice of one of Johnson's numerous petty adversaries, who, in 1775, published a new edition of it, 'with Notes and a Dedication to SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. by TRIBUNUS;' in which some puny scribbler invidiously attempted to found upon it a charge of inconsistency against its authour, because he had accepted of a pension from his present Majesty, and had written in support of the measures of government. As a mortification to such impotent malice, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... page of his scribbler began to spread out a widening tail, eyed and starred like a peacock's; and, when the eyes and stars of its indices had been eliminated, began slowly to fold itself together again. The indices appearing and disappearing were eyes opening and closing; the eyes opening and closing were stars being ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... seemed to hug the earth very intimately, to belong most indispensably, with an effect of permanence, of orderliness and dignity that brought to mind instinctively the term estate, and caused Sally to recall (with misspent charity) the fulsome frenzy of a sycophantic scribbler ranting of feudal aristocracies, representative houses, ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... readers to note how, even in this little trifle, the singular taste and genius of Mr. Tennyson break forth. In such a dear little room a narrow-minded scribbler would have been content with one sofa, and that one he would probably have covered with black mohair, or red cloth, or a good striped chintz; how infinitely more characteristic is white dimity!—'tis as it were a type of the purity of the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... most egregious scribbler; and so tormented with violent fits of printing, that he even printed lists and catalogues of his friends. I have even seen at the end of one of his works a list of names of those persons who had given him books. He printed his works at his own expense, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... by ireful male citizens, and the publisher of the Boston News Letter braved the wrath of womankind by inserting the following advertisement in his paper: "Just published and Sold by the Printer hereof, HOOP PETTICOATS, Arraigned and condemned by the Light of Nature and Law of God."[138] Many a scribbler hiding behind some Latin pen name, such as Publicus, poured forth in those early papers his spleen concerning woman's costume. Thus in 1726 the New England Weekly Journal published a series of essays on the vanities of females, and the writer evidently found much ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... into my actions. I am careless of personal fame. Look at me, boy! As I stand before you I am Homer, I am Shakespeare ... I am every cosmic manifestation in art. Men have doubted in each incarnation my individual existence. Historians have more to tell of the meanest Athenian scribbler or Elizabethan poetaster than of me. The radiance of my work obscured my very self. I care not. I have a mission. I am a servant of the Lord. I am the vessel that bears ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... a statement made in print was far more likely to be true than one made orally. Then he who stood up in his proper person and uttered his facts on the responsibility of his personal character, was far less likely to gain credit than the anonymous scribbler, who recorded his lie on paper, though he made his record behind a screen, and half the time as much without personal identity as he would be found to be without personal character, were he actually ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... strangely in our more refined age; but they were then considered essential to faithful dealing. The Bishop in his reply, called 'Dirt wiped off,' beat the tinker in abusive language; he calls Bunyan 'A wretched scribbler,' 'grossly ignorant,' 'most unchristian and wicked,' 'a piece of proud folly,' 'so very dirty a creature that he disdains to dirt his fingers with him,' 'Bunyan can no more disgrace him than a rude creature ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... are ourselves, it is but too well known, altogether without pretensions to that high office—and really see no great charms either in the salary or the connexion—and, for the glory of writing such verses as we have now been reviewing, we do not believe that there is a scribbler in the kingdom so vile as to think it a thing ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... you these things, have a story of my own, of which some of you are not ignorant. You know, for one thing, that I was not always poor, nor always a professor of philosophy, nor a scribbler of pedantic articles for a living. Many of you can remember why I was driven to sell my patrimony, the dear castello in the Sabines, with the good corn-land and the vineyards in the valley, and the olives, too. For I am not old yet; at least, Mariuccia ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... the boy's bent close together, and turned from us so that the westering light could fall upon their books. Fred Esquillant was to be a great scholar and to do my father infinite credit when he went to the university. For me I was only a reader of English, a scribbler of verses in that language, a paltry essayist, with no sense of the mathematics and no more than an average classic. Therefore in the school I was a mere hewer of wood and drawer of ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... forms) most unhappily for his lordship's critical discernment of flavours, as well as his Greek literature, happens to be a respectable Joe Miller from the era of Hierocles, and through him probably it came down from Pythagoras. Yet still Voltaire was very far indeed from being a 'scribbler.' He had the graceful levity and the graceful gaiety of his nation in an exalted degree. He had a vast compass of miscellaneous knowledge; pity that it was so disjointed, arena sine calce; pity ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... opinion about the Association football player of the past or his colleagues and successors, I will introduce them to you, and in figurative language allow them to tell their own unvarnished tale. My last advice, however, to you, my old friends, before leaving you to the tender mercies of a scribbler, is not to answer all the questions he thinks proper to put. Please don't tell him what you heard or saw after leaving the football field clinging to my sole and instep, of my love intrigues, my stolen interviews with blue-eyed Annie, and when she jilted me and got married to ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... expanded and permanent splendour, till it consecrates his ashes, till it illumines his tomb." After this the reader, who may never have heard of the name of Percival Stockdale, must be told that there exist his own "Memoirs of his Life and Writings."[A] The memoirs of a scribbler who saw the prospects of life close on him while he imagined that his contemporaries were unjust, are instructive to literary men. To correct, and to be corrected, should be their daily practice, that they may be taught ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... connected with the writing of my first book and with my first contact with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing less than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life. And the sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler would gladly burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and start all over again with truer ideals for his craft, could he by so doing have chance to meet the ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... in bed, covered only with a blanket, through two holes in which he passed his arms to write. Boyse, it appears, when still in this position would lay out his last half-guinea to buy truffles and mushrooms for his last scrap of beef. Of another scribbler Johnson said, "I honour Derrick for his strength of mind. One night when Floyd (another poor author) was wandering about the streets at night, he found Derrick fast asleep upon a bulk. Upon being suddenly awaked, Derrick started up; 'My dear Floyd, I am sorry to see ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... a 'Whirling Coxcomb,' or a 'pensioned scribbler,' was a very mild amenity in eighteenth century party warfare; and the abuse of such small fry as these anonymous pamphleteers might be wholly disregarded did it not show Fielding's prominence, during these anxious times, as a strenuous ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... maternal parent. No one grieves more sincerely than I do for your great misfortune, or is more contrite than my husband and myself because it was our keeper that shot you, but there are limits! We must draw the line at our daughter marrying a scribbler with his eyes out, on high principles." At this point the image may be said to have got the bit in its teeth, for it added:—"If Gwen squinted and had a wooden leg, nothing would please us ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... have scribbled so much in fifty years that I have become saturated with convictions of one sort and another concerning a scribbler's limitations; and these are so strong that when I am familiar with a literary person's work I feel perfectly sure that I know enough about his limitations to know what he can not do. If Mr. Howells should pretend to me that he wrote the Plague-Spot Bacilli rhapsody, I should receive the statement ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Every scribbler of the day who has a Perryian pen in hand, is pleased to exercise it on the decline of the drama; one of the legitimate targets of penny-a-liners. But how inadequately are the goose quills, and ostrich quills, phoenix quills, and roc quills, of the few standard ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... world;" he has had adventures and passions and all that sort of thing; and now, in the evening of his days, like an old French diplomatist, he takes it into his head to write his memoirs. To this end he has lured poor Theodore to his gruesome side, to mend his pens for him. He has been a great scribbler, says Theodore, all his days, and he proposes to incorporate a large amount of promiscuous literary matter into these souvenirs intimes. Theodore's principal function seems to be to get him to leave things out. In fact, the poor youth seems troubled in conscience. His patron's lucubrations have ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... a rule, No creature smarts so little as a fool. Let peals of laughter, Codrus! round thee break, 85 Thou unconcern'd canst hear the mighty crack: Pit, Box, and gall'ry in convulsions hurl'd, Thou stand'st unshook amidst a bursting world. Who shames a Scribbler? break one cobweb thro', He spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew: 90 Destroy his fib or sophistry, in vain, The creature's at his dirty work again, Thron'd in the centre of his thin designs, Proud of a vast extent of flimsy lines! ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... perfected the drama of incident; if to have sent all France to the theatre to see in three dimensions those stories of Chicot, Edmond Dantes, d'Artagnan, which it knew by heart from books were an achievement within the reach of every scribbler who dabbles in letters; if all this were true, and Dumas were merely a piece of human journalism, produced to- day and gone to-morrow, there would still be enough of him to make his a memorable name. He was a ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Marston, of all men on earth, a share in the concoction of this shapeless and unspeakable piece of nonsense. The fact that one of the puppets in the puppet-show is supposed to represent a sullen scholar, disappointed, impoverished, and virulent, would have suggested to a rational reader that the scribbler who gave vent to the impotence of his rancor in this hopeless ebullition of envious despair had set himself to ape the habitual manner of Jonson and the occasional manner of Marston with about as much success as might be expected from a malignant monkey when ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... reputation now rests mainly on his achievements as a precursor of the Revolution, to the eighteenth century he was as much a poet as a reformer. The whole of Europe beheld at Ferney the oracle, not only of philosophy, but of good taste; for thirty years every scribbler, every rising genius, and every crowned head, submitted his verses to the censure of Voltaire; Voltaire's plays were performed before crowded houses; his epic was pronounced superior to Homer's, Virgil's, and Milton's; his epigrams were transcribed by every letter-writer, and got by heart by ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... arm, The strength of action, and the force of words, The well-turn'd period, and the well-timed voice, With all the lesser ornaments of phrase? 310 Ah! fled for ever, as they ne'er had been; Razed from the book of fame; or, more provoking, Perchance some hackney hunger-bitten scribbler Insults thy memory, and blots thy tomb With long flat narrative, or duller rhymes, With heavy halting pace that drawl along; Enough to rouse a dead man into rage, And warm with red resentment the wan cheek. Here the great masters of the healing art, These mighty mock defrauders ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... been kind; Thus prostitute my Congreve's name is grown To every lewd pretender of the town. Troth, I could pity you; but this is it, You find, to be the fashionable wit; These are the slaves whom reputation chains, Whose maintenance requires no help from brains. For, should the vilest scribbler to the pit, Whom sin and want e'er furnish'd out a wit; Whose name must not within my lines be shown, Lest here it live, when perish'd with his own;[4] Should such a wretch usurp my Congreve's place, And choose out wits who ne'er have seen ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... People: His Books remain Unsold, Unread, Unregarded; while this Treatise of Mine shall be Bought by all who love Pudding or Dumpling; to my Bookseller's great Joy, and my no small Consolation. How shall I Triumph, and how will that Mercenary Scribbler be Mortify'd, when I have sold more Editions of my Books, than he has Copies of his! I therefore exhort all People, Gentle and Simple, Men, Women and Children, to Buy, to Read, to Extol these Labours of Mine, for the ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... influences which tended to lower its poetic and imaginative aspirations, were not such as to bring great writers rapidly to the front. On the other hand, the new opening which letters afforded for a livelihood was such as to tempt every scribbler who could handle a pen; and authors of this sort were soon set to hack-work by the Curles and the Tonsons who looked on book-making as a mere business. The result was a mob of authors in garrets, of illiterate drudges as poor as they were thriftless and debauched, selling their pen ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... forces of a man's life; but if we add to them a third, found where the truth about a man not infrequently lies, in the rag-bag of his enemies, our materials will be nearly complete. "Dale hates his fellow-human- beings," wrote some anonymous scribbler, and, even expressed thus baldly, the statement is not wholly false. But he hated them because of their imperfections, and it would be truer to say that his love of humanity amounted to a positive hatred of individuals, and, pace the critics, the love was ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... doctor of music;[9] a romance had been founded upon it by a man of eminence; it was made the subject of a play, of an opera, and of a pantomime; it had been claimed by others; a sequel had been written to it by some scribbler, who professed to have composed the whole ballad; it had been assigned an antiquity far beyond the author's time; the Society of Antiquaries had made it the subject of investigation; and the author had been advertised for ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... wholesome awe,—Beaufort Lovelace, or as he is commonly called. "Beau" Lovelace, a brilliant novelist, critic, and pitiless satirist. For him society is a game,—a gay humming-top which he spins on the palm of his hand for his own private amusement. Once a scribbler in an attic, subsisting bravely on bread and cheese and hope, he now lords it more than half the year in a palace of fairy-like beauty on the Lago di Como,—and he is precisely the same person who was ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... him to say that he made no public complaints, and that when some gutter-scribbler in 1810 made charges of plagiarism from him against Scott, he furnished Southey with the means of clearing him from all share in the matter (Lockhart, iii. 293; Southey's Life and Correspondence, iii. 291). But there is a suspicion of fretfulness even in the Preface to Christabel; ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury |
