"Arrant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... love's invading, Sleep in Holland sheets no more; When a nymph is serenading, 'Tis an arrant shame to snore. ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... unsuspecting hearts sometimes quaked with fear of dark and lonesomeness; and then we came trooping back at the sound of the bell, untamed, happy little savages, ready to settle, with a long breath, to the afternoon's drowsy routine. Arrant nonsense that! the boundary of British America and the conjugation of the verb to be! Who that might loll away the hours upon a bank in silken ease, needed aught even of computation or the tongues? He ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... produce soups from potatoes. Now, as this is so great a staple of the plan of the campaign, it is worth while to examine it carefully; and if we examine only a very little, and do not allow ourselves to be misled, we shall be able to see that the whole thing is the most arrant Quixotism that was ever enacted before a community. What is the matter of popular sovereignty? The first thing, in order to understand it, is to get a good definition of what it is, and after that to see ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... severest battles, had gone through the Russian campaign, and was among the few of his regiment who survived the carnage of Waterloo. And yet this man, who had been familiar with death more than half his life, and who at times talked as though he were a perfect tornado in the field, was as arrant a poltroon as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... did not wait to receive the dog. He was an arrant coward, and, more than that, he stood as much in fear of Marmion as if he had been a bear or panther. Uttering a cry of terror, he dropped the bridle, and, with one bound, disappeared in the bushes. Marmion followed close at his heels, encouraged by terrific yells from ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... Tarrano dismissed the subject with a gesture. "That—is between her and me.... You have been following the general news, I assume? I provided you with it." He rolled a little cylinder of the arrant-leaf, ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... as one of their best and most dashing officers, for the express purpose of hunting Morgan. It was completely disorganized and shattered by this defeat. A great deal of censure was cast at the time upon these men, and they were accused of arrant cowardice by the Northern press. Nothing could have been more unjust, and many who joined in denouncing them, afterward behaved much more badly. They attacked with spirit and without hesitation, and were unable to close with us on account of their heavy loss in men and horses. They returned ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... what had occurred. At length they bethought them of employing the court fool to communicate the disastrous intelligence. Accordingly, that dignified individual took an opportunity of remarking to the king that he considered the English arrant cowards. ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... them bondis, nor are they decent men, but arrant robbers and malefactors. I would gladly pay a large portion of my property for them not to have come just at this time. It is an ill return that you make to Thorfinn for having saved you from shipwreck ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... that," I observed, "or we shall be an exception to the general rule. I hope, however, if we do meet with hostile Indians, that we may be able to beat them off. Martin Prentis, who has been a good deal among them, says that they are arrant cowards, and will only attack people when they find ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... man of wit; To all things fitted, though for nothing fit; Scourge of the world, yet crouching for a name, And honour bartering for the breath of fame: Born to command, and yet an arrant slave; Through too much honesty a seeming knave; At all things grasping, though on nothing bent, And ease pursuing e'en with discontent; Through Nature, Arts, and Sciences he flies, And gathers ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... frequently was the case, he made the most hideous grimaces, and when he saw the company were preparing to draw something from him by way of criticism which they could carry further and perhaps repeat again as springing from their own acute judgment, he began to talk the most arrant nonsense he could think of, or to fire off some of his stinging sarcasms steeped in the bitterness of gall, till there were none but blank and embarrassed faces around him—everybody thinking the man was mad; ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... shown later on, we were by no means defenceless. Our stores of weapons and ammunition, as well as our subsidies to the warlike Masai, might be reckoned as a surrogate for a military budget. As to the lack of a magistracy, we were such arrant barbarians that we did not even consider a civil or a criminal code necessary, nor did we at that time possess a written constitution. The committee, still in possession of the absolute authority committed to it at the Hague, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... distressingly young. He had no patience with their excessive and amazing juvenility. He did not understand it. His own childhood was too far behind him. He was like an old and irritable man, annoyed by the turbulence of their young spirits that was to him arrant silliness. He glowered silently over his food, finding compensation in the thought that they would soon have to go to work. That would take the edge off of them and make them sedate and dignified—like him. Thus it was, after the fashion of the human, that Johnny made of himself a yardstick with ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... taken by right of war, because it was fruitful, and good for feeding of cattle; but Moses, supposing that they were afraid of fighting with the Canaanites, and invented this provision for their cattle as a handsome excuse for avoiding that war, he called them arrant cowards, and said they had only contrived a decent excuse for that cowardice; and that they had a mind to live in luxury and ease, while all the rest were laboring with great pains to obtain the land they were desirous to have; and that ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... great an extent monopolized the therapeutic use of water, and so much arrant nonsense has been talked in that pure element's name, that we are in danger of overlooking its wonderful value as a curative means. It is one of the most powerful agents at the command of the practitioner, and should no more he trifled with than arsenic or opium. Used by a ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... interview; for if it were a fabrication, such a reason would wound her pride in her own honour towards him, and if it were partly true, he would certainly do better in leaving her alone than in reproaching her. It would simply amount to a proof that Paula was an arrant coquette. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... been some twenty-seven, and in 1404 but thirty. In 1535, on the eve of the Suppression, Battle Abbey was visited by the infamous Layton who reported to Thomas Cromwell that "all but two or three of the monks were guilty of unnatural crimes and were traitors," adding that the abbot was an arrant churl and that "this black sort of develish monks I am sorry to know are past amendment." Little more than two years later the abbot surrendered the abbey and received a pension of one hundred pounds. The furniture and so forth of the house was then very poor. "So beggary a house I never see, nor ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... makes the whole thing only the more arrant nonsense," grumbled Ray. "It's foolish enough in all conscience sake, if they had a chance of success, but when they haven't any, why the deuce do they want to drag us ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... Sinon, than a man Our state employs. He's gone: and being gone, I dare tell you, whom I dare better trust, That our night-eyed Tiberius doth not see His minion's drifts; or, if he do, he's not So arrant subtile, as we fools do take him; To breed a mungrel up, in his own house, With his own blood, and, if the good gods please, At his own throat, flesh him, to take a leap. I do not beg it, heaven; but if the fates Grant it these ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... folly, such arrant "faking" as this! What has philosophy, religion, politics to do with operatic music? It cannot express any one of them. Wagner, clever charlatan, knew this, so he worked the leading-motive game for all it was worth. Realizing the indefinite nature of music, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... arrant outrage than to hate God and to abhor His Law? What an excellent Law it is. Listen: "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods. . .showing mercy unto thousands . . . honor thy father and thy mother; ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... imagined. This I have lately understood to be the case in this quarter, from men who are of no party, but well disposed to the present administration. How should it be otherwise, when no stone has been left unturned that could impress on the minds of the people the most arrant misrepresentation of facts; that their rights have not only been neglected, but absolutely sold; that there are no reciprocal advantages in the treaty; that the benefits are all on the side of Great Britain; and, what seems to have had more weight with them than all the ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... most useful discipline of thought. They have given its tone and its strength to the intellect of Scotland. They teach it to face all difficulties manfully, and to turn with equal manliness from vain and presumptuous speculations, which, under a boastful show of profundity, conceal invariably an arrant dogmatism. We turn with hearty satisfaction from the tissue of false subtleties which the German professor lays before his youth, to the careful and modest analysis of mental phenomena by which a professor in our northern universities at once enlightens and fortifies the mind. Scotland, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... change apparently effected in her mental attitude to the established ecclesiastical system, since she had in the preceding December discovered the monks, of whatever color their cowl might be, to be arrant "hypocrites" and the most "dangerous generation of human kind"—if, indeed, any such change in her mental attitude had really taken place at all, and her present zeal was not altogether assumed from political ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... the street, his wrath rising up again at the recollection. "Good mind ter go back, and not do his old arrant." But then he thought of the smiles and compliments, and the promised reward. "Somefin' kinder decent 'bout dat mis'ble Sprowl, 'long wid a heap o' mean tings, arter all!" And ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... Caramanly family, or of the old Moorish dynasty of Bashaws, would have replaced Asker Ali. This tyrant, like all tyrants, on receiving his recal, was unmanned, and became weaker than a child, for the performance of acts of the darkest cruelty and the most arrant cowardice, are quite compatible. The tyrant Asker Ali shed tears! on leaving the country, where he had exercised the most atrocious cruelties. However, he was fated to execute one act of justice, in the style of the Turk, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... dwarfed the figures of the actors that buskins and padding were used in order to make the persons of the players more in keeping with their surroundings. With submission, I hold that this theory is arrant nonsense. Even on stilts ten feet high the actors still would have been, in one way, out of proportion with the background. If used at all in tragedy, buskins and pads probably were used to make the heroic characters of the drama literally greater ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... to be an arrant harbourer of smugglers and rebels, I took his lamentation for what ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... more a cloak, and nothing more—I drew a long breath. "Ah, it is gone at last, thank God!"—and then aware of the strange effect my unaccountable incoherence must have had on the skipper, I thought to brazen it out by trying the free and easy line, which was neither more nor less than arrant impertinence in our relative positions. "Why, I have been heated a little, and amusing myself with sundry vain imaginings, but allow me to take wine with you, Captain," filling a tumbler with vinde—grave to the brim, as I spoke. "Success to you, sir—here's to your speedy promotion—may you soon ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... have the testimony of Aubrey, who was at Stratford probably about the year 1680. He was an arrant and inveterate hunter after anecdotes, and seems to have caught up, without sifting, whatever quaint or curious matter came in his way. So that no great reliance can attach to what he says, unless it is sustained by ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... said the voice of Erland the Old; "we had better have tarried till daylight. It may be that they have already discovered what you have done. Truly you were an arrant simpleton to leave the weapon in your brother's breast. 'Twould have served our ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... wife Lizzie Kolken. Methought when I married them that it would not turn out over well, seeing that she was in common report of having long lived in unchastity with Wittich Appelmann, who had ever been an arch-rogue, and especially an arrant whoremaster, and such the Lord never blesses. This same Seden now brought me five loaves, two sausages, and a goose, which old goodwife Paal, at Loddin, had given him; also a flitch of bacon from the farmer Jack Tewert. But he said I must shield him from his wife, who would have had ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... Hears the petition with a smile, 120 Before the glass her charms unfolds, And in herself my Muse beholds. Truth, Goddess of celestial birth, But little loved or known on earth, Whose power but seldom rules the heart, Whose name, with hypocritic art, An arrant stalking-horse is made, A snug pretence to drive a trade, An instrument, convenient grown, To plant more firmly Falsehood's throne, 130 As rebels varnish o'er their cause With specious colouring of laws, And pious traitors draw the knife In ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... all, it was arrant nonsense for Hamilton to act like this. Admitting the man believed in himself,—and Covington believed that much,—he was, after all, Teddy Hamilton. The fact remained, even as he himself admitted, that he was not fit to be in the same room with her. It was ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... quickly captured, and not long afterwards twenty-five of her crew were tried, convicted, and hung near Newport, Rhode Island. But the arrant Low escaped without injury, and continued his career of contemptible crime for some time longer. What finally became of him is not set down in the histories of piracy. It is not improbable that if the men under his command were not too brutally ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... familiarise itself with just this aspect, so that in time its instinct will be to think first, and not last, of just this aspect. When he has arrived at that point he is saved. No man who, at the very inception of the fire, is visited with a clear vision of himself as an arrant ass and pitiable object of contempt, will lack the volition to put the fire out. But, be it noted, he will not succeed until he can do it at once. A fire is a fire, and the engines must gallop by themselves out of the station ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... to one of these wary animals to warrant a shot. It is only by great good luck that anybody ever shoots a coyote, although in countries where they abound every man's hand is against them; they are such arrant thieves, as ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... More arrant fudge could scarcely be found if Dr. Burdock's copy of verses had been recorded by Miss Amelia Wilhelmina Skeggs in "The ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... glance about to mark the effect of his insolent words. For the instant I believed Cassion's first thought was murder, for he gripped a pistol in his hand, and flung one foot forward, an oath sputtering between his lips. Yet the arrant coward in him conquered even that mad outburst of passion, and before I could grasp his arm in restraint, the impulse had passed, and he was staring after the slowly receding figure of De Artigny, ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... present, treat, flatter, and adore; Her majesty, to-morrow, calls for more. His wounded ears complaints eternal fill, As unoil'd hinges, querulously shrill. "You went last night with Celia to the ball." You prove it false. "Not go! that's worst of all." Nothing can please her, nothing not inflame; And arrant contradictions are the same. Her lover must be sad, to please her spleen; His mirth is an inexpiable sin: For of all rivals that can pain her breast, There's one, that wounds far deeper than the rest; To wreck her quiet, the most dreadful shelf Is if her lover dares enjoy ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... money; you carry it about you: give and take is square-dealing; for in my conscience he's as arrant a maid as you are. I was fain to use violence to him, to pull him hither: and he pulled, and I pulled: for you must know he's absolutely the strongest youth in Troy. T'other day he took Helen in one hand, and Paris in t'other, and danc'd 'em at one another at arms-end an' 'twere ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... be slaves by conquest, and wear their laurels only to shew they are sacrifices to their leaders triumph. They that found absolute monarchy upon the title of the sword, make their heroes, who are the founders of such monarchies, arrant Draw-can-sirs, and forget they had any officers and soldiers that fought on their side in the battles they won, or assisted them in the subduing, or shared in possessing, the countries they mastered. We are told ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... could do to keep his head above water, struggling as he was with the fear of a terrible death before his eyes. His two comrades were running up and down on the shore; not that they were such arrant cowards but what they would have been willing to do almost anything to help Joel; but unfortunately they had lost their heads in the sudden shock; and as Toby afterwards contemptuously said, "acted like so many chickens after the ax ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... have lived a longish life and have heard our ministers preach on universal peace hardly half a dozen times. Twenty years ago, in a drawing room, I dared in the presence of forty persons to moot the proposition that war was incompatible with Christianity; I was regarded as an arrant fanatic. The idea that we could get on without war was regarded as unmitigated ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... the cradle, Foul in the fable, 'Tis either too cold or too hot; An arrant liar, Fed by desire, It is ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... elsewhere, make him restore me a pair of saddle-bags whereof he hath saith indeed he did it not; but I saw him, not a month ago, in act to have them resoled.' Ribi on his side cried out with all his might, 'Believe him not, my lord; he is an arrant knave, and for that he knoweth I am come to lay a complaint against him for a pair of saddle-bags whereof he hath robbed me, he cometh now with his story of the boothose, which I have had in my house this many a day. An you believe me not, I can bring you ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... you out of my life; but against everything your face has lived triumphant. I don't know why God makes us feel like that for women of your stamp, why we should bring such great ideals to so poor a shrine. I am talking arrant nonsense, just raving at you, you think, and I sound rather absurd even to myself. Only—my God! you don't know what you have done—you have broken my faith in you; it was the strongest, the best thing in ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... boat," says the narrative, "we found more than seven hundred natives, who had assembled from all directions. They began by demanding stuffs and iron in exchange for their wares, and soon some of them proved themselves arrant thieves. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Prospero, by this good light that shines here, I am loth to kindle fresh coals, but an you had come in my walk within these two hours I had given you that you should not have clawed off again in haste, by Jesus, I had done it, I am the arrant'st rogue that ever breathed else, but now beshrew my heart if I bear you any malice ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... said Father Collins. "I am afraid the minute I enter the church to preach. When I open my mouth, I lose my voice out of fear. That is what it is—fear. I am simply an arrant coward. I tell you, Grady, I ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley
... suffer impertinence from any quarter to pass unchecked. It is certainly of great service to a public man, and it largely increases the estimation in which he is held, to establish such a character. It is no small detriment to Brougham that he is accounted an arrant coward; and it is remarkable that Peel never was known to deal in the insolence, and bullying, and offensive personalities in which the other has so copiously indulged, both in Parliament and at ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... almost as much amusement as did Bully Pigeon, who soon showed that he was very little altered from what he had been in his youth. He could not bully, but he could give abundant evidence of being still an arrant donkey. Pigeon now called himself a philosopher, and used to be very fond of broaching his philosophical principles, as he denominated his nonsense. One day, when dining in the gun-room, he began as usual. As he drank his wine he grew bolder and bolder in his assertions. At last he declared ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... You don't suppose I'm such an arrant donkey as to set any store by fame!" cried Lovelace, a broad smile lighting up his face and eyes. "Why, because a few people read my books and are amused thereby,—and because the Press pats me graciously on the back, ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... But he, Alexander Bendo, had with unswerving faithfulness and untiring assiduity for years courted the arts and sciences, and had learned dark secrets and received signal favours from them. He was therefore prepared to take part against unlearned wretches, and arrant quacks, whose impudent addresses and saucy pretences had brought scandal upon sage ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... the most arrant nonsense, Fan. You must be a goose, or what is almost as bad, a hypocrite, to say that I have any love or tenderness in me. I confess that I did once have a little affection for you, but that is pretty ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... ascertain by experience if the horse you propose to purchase will show equal docility in response to the whip. Every one knows what a useless thing a servant is, or a body of troops, that will not obey. A disobedient horse is not only useless, but may easily play the part of an arrant traitor. ...
— On Horsemanship • Xenophon
... were written to prove their pre-historic origin, and to claim for them a history that in our day reads as arrant nonsense. In 1784, a short pipe was asserted to have been found between the jaws of the skull of an ancient Milesian exhumed at Bannockstown, county Kildare. Upon this discovery, an elaborate and learned paper was written in the 'Anthologia Hibernica,' setting forth ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... the mind disappears; there is apparently a total scattering and end of the individual. That these phenomena should suggest the thought of annihilation is inevitable; to suppose that they prove the fact is absurd. It is an arrant begging of the question; for the very problem is, Does not an invisible spiritual entity survive the visible material disintegration? Among the unsound and superstitious attempts to prove the fact of a future ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... shook his head in dismay at such arrant folly. "Young stripling, be warned," he said. "Know what is good for thee. Greek is the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... arrant lies as ever woman told; And though not mine, I claim the price for them— This cap stuffed full of ducats ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... that nothing of this kind can be carried on between unmarried persons of the two sexes without being tinged with love; and the rather so, since the notion of Platonic love is, at the present day, pretty generally, and I believe justly too, exploded. Platonic love is arrant nonsense, and rarely, if ever, takes place until the parties have at least passed their grand climacteric. Besides, the New-England people, I am told, are odd, inquisitive kind of beings, and, when pricked on by foolish curiosity, may perhaps open the letter, which I do not choose should ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... was a delicate, feeble boy; not good at work; womanish in his ways; inclined to go in for petty bullying, until a boy showed fight, when he discovered himself to be an arrant coward. Four or five years later I met him at the university. His greeting was cool. My next affair was with a boy who was about my age (13), strong, full-blooded, coarse, always in 'hot water.' He was the son ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... well, and of receiving a blow in the face without apparently noticing it, were the most useful arts to human life; but, of the three, the last was the only one that he practised successfully. His intentions were good, but his intellect deficient. This arrant rogue was only a petty knave that any one ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... service in the field was "very brief," whose command in Washington was "behind fortifications," and whose capacity was "limited to attacks upon his superior officers."[845] The Herald declared him "as arrant an aristocrat as any Southern rebel. The slave-holder," it said, "lives upon his plantation, which his ancestors begged, cheated, or stole from the Indians. Wadsworth lives upon his immense Genesee farms, which ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... a letter declares; yea, with a design to bespatter the Presbyterian church of Scotland, a most scurrilous pamphlet was published at London, not only reflecting on our excellent reformers from popery, publishing arrant lies anent Mr. Alexander Henderson, abusing Mr. David Dickson, and breaking jests upon the remonstrators and presbyterians (as they called them), but also, in a most malicious and groundless kind ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... reueale it. Hor. Not I my Lord by heauen. Mar. Nor I my Lord. Ham. How say you then? would hart of man Once thinke it? but you'l be secret. Both. I by heauen, my lord. Ham. There's neuer a villaine dwelling in all Denmarke, But hee's an arrant knaue. Hor. There need no Ghost come from the graue to tell you this. Ham. Right, you are in the right, and therefore I holde it meet without more circumstance at all, Wee shake hands and part; you as ...
— The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke - The First ('Bad') Quarto • William Shakespeare
... proportion as a man is witty and humorous, there will always be about him and his a widening maze and wilderness of cues and catchwords, which the uninitiated will, if they are bold enough to try interpretation, construe, ever and anon, egregiously amiss—not seldom into arrant falsity. For this one reason, to say nothing of many others, I consider no man justified in journalizing what he sees and hears in a domestic circle where he is not thoroughly at home; and I think ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... lady, but I want nothing man can give me the night; and when one's on an arrant of life and death, it's little the cold or the storm can do to put out the ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... There is a rumor that several of the neutral ambassadors and consuls will flee, but this I cannot credit. They could have no sufficient excuse for deserting Paris so precipitately, and if they did they would appear arrant cowards. Mr. Herrick is sending Captain Pope, one of the military Attaches, and Mr. Sussdorf, the third secretary, to Bordeaux, in order that we may have some official representation with the French Government in its temporary exile, but feels that ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... I shall not report you," said his companion, with a friendly squeeze of the arm. "He is not only a great brute, but he is an arrant coward into the bargain. The men do not mind being cuffed and bullied, because they are used to it; but when they see their officer never expose himself, and always shouting from the rear 'Get on, you pigs!' ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... needed but one quality to be perfect. He should have been an arrant coward. He was a blustering braggart, always boasting of the men he had slain, and the odds he had contended against; filled with stories of his own valour, but alas! he shot straight, and rarely missed his mark, unless he was drunker than ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... where two such arrant jokers were in conflict, a vast throng filled the tavern-yard where the pair were to draw conclusions. At the appointed hour the court functionary dragged upon the scene a most dilapidated simulacrum of man's noblest conquest—blind, spavined, lean as Pharaoh's kind, creeking in every joint—at ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... and surely his candor would not have spared the parties, if he had found anything: it was the very point of all others on which scandal would have been most apt to fasten and feed; and yet even Aubrey, arrant old gossip as he was, supplies nothing to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... the Vai seem to be arrant cowards. The headmen salute their visitors Arab-fashion, with flourishes of the sword; but swording ends there. Of late they were attacked by the savages of the interior, Gallinas, Pannis, and Kusus. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... writhing under the torture of the bastinado on his feet. He was an excellent horseman, and very dexterous at the spear exercise; and although there was everything in his appearance to make one believe that he was a soldier and a man of prowess, yet in fact he was a most arrant coward. He endeavoured to conceal this defect of his nature by boasting and big words; and succeeded in persuading those who did not know his real character, that he was among the modern Persians, what Sam and Afrasiab[65] were ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... bottom on it, but the joke's atop, plain for annybody to see," said Fuller. "But Miss Bly the's come here this mornin' of a funny sort of a arrant, to my thinking, though her seems to fancy it's as solemn ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... book-collectors, a scandal, such as it would be among a hunting set to hint that a man had killed a fox. In the dialogues, not always the most entertaining, of Dibdin's Bibliomania, there is this short passage: "'I will frankly confess,' rejoined Lysander, 'that I am an arrant bibliomaniac—that I love books dearly—that the very sight, touch, and mere perusal——' 'Hold, my friend,' again exclaimed Philemon; 'you have renounced your profession—you talk of reading books—do bibliomaniacs ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... argument need be urged against this method of attacking the educational problem—it did not work. In the first place, the most brilliant school successes often turned out to be the most arrant life failures, while the school derelicts frequently became life successes of stellar magnitude. To the thinking man the inference was plain; the formula was not an unqualified success. Not only was this true of ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... interests, at vested rights, to say nothing of great political and social interests, which, though often thwarted by the common sense of the people, are sometimes too successful. At this very moment the news comes to us that a slight majority, led by arrant demagogues, have fastened upon the great Empire State of the Pacific a crude, ill-digested constitution, which while it doubtless contains some good features, embodies some of the most primitive and pernicious notions regarding commerce and manufactures and the whole political ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... convinced that the inhabitants of our bay were as arrant cannibals as any of the other tribes on the island, still I could not but feel a particular and most unqualified repugnance to the aforesaid Typees. Even before visiting the Marquesas, I had heard from men ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... were taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever breathed"[7]—John Endicott, who was governor for thirteen out of fifteen years following Winthrop's death, and John Norton, an able and upright but narrow and intolerant clergyman. The persecuting spirit ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... yearly burn tons of powder on the all-glorious Fourth of July, and crack our throats with huzzas for the 'star-spangled banner' and the American eagle? And a caviller might perhaps go farther, and ask the significant question, Are we not known all over the world as a race of arrant braggarts? ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... jackanapes!"—and the stout farmer brandished the tall paddle which served him at once as a walking stick and a weeding-hook, and began vigorously eradicating the huge thistles which grew by the roadside, as a mere vent for his vexation. "You'll see that he'll come back an arrant puppy," quoth Michael Howe. ...
— Town Versus Country • Mary Russell Mitford
... that's the point. Would she be happy? There are few men who can endure to be "cut", slighted, pointed at, and women suffer more than men in these regards. I, a grizzled man of forty, am not such an arrant ass as to suppose that a year of guilty delirium can compensate to a gently-nurtured woman for the loss of that social dignity which constitutes her best happiness. I am not such an idiot as to forget that there may come a time ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... he exclaimed, as the other ended; "and a thousand pities is it that so honest a fellow should be so arrant a knave. But, Harry, we can never let him go at large after all, our loyalty and our religion forbid it. We must tack ship, and stand after him; if fair words won't bring him to reason, I see ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... him that their fright was really a disgrace; and if one thousand of our men had come in town, the whole thirty-five hundred would have been at their mercy. Even the naval officers denounce it as a most arrant piece of cowardice; for instead of marching their troops out to meet ours, they all rushed into the Garrison, where, if attacked, their only retreat would have been into the river. The gunboats were ordered into the middle of the stream, in front of the Garrison; ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... sentimentalizing. To protest against the intrigue, bribery, and corruption of public life, to desire that her sons might follow some business that did not involve lying, cheating, and a hard, grinding selfishness, would be arrant nonsense. In this way man has been moulding woman to his ideas by direct and positive influences, while she, if not a negation, has used indirect means to control him, and in most cases developed the very characteristics ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... invader. To suppose that the men who smothered the Armada, or those who broke the fleets of Spain and France at Trafalgar, were more courageous than those of our day would be found in similar circumstances, is arrant folly. In smaller things we can see the same sterling qualities shown by members of our Navy now as their forebears exhibited of old. The impressive yet half comic character of the religion that guided the lives of seamen during Drake's ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... felt responsible and were too young for it, but to me it was a very jolly time, though I suppose I was an ingredient in your troubles. Yes, we brought ourselves up; but I maintain that it was better alternative than being drilled so hard as never to think of anything but arrant ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... has put such a loving thought into the heart of Walter, will keep him from harm? Would it be right to check him when he is bent on such a work? Besides, as to the wretched and unhappy man who has caused all this trouble, are not such characters, with all their bluster, commonly arrant cowards when ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... music, candles' glare And rapid whirl of many feet, The ladies' dresses airy, light, The motley moving mass and bright, Young ladies in a vasty curve, To strike imagination serve. 'Tis there that arrant fops display Their insolence and waistcoats white And glasses unemployed all night; Thither hussars on leave will stray To clank the spur, delight the fair— And vanish like a ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... has been done by the West Indian Assemblies. It is arrant trifling. They have done little; and what they have done is good for nothing,—for it is totally destitute of an executory principle. This is the point to which I have applied my whole diligence. It is easy ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... as to this accusation, they may plead the authority of the ancient fathers of the Church, for forgery, corruption, and mangling of authors, with more reason than for any of their articles of faith. St Jerom, St Hilary, Eusebius Vercellensis, Victorinus,[21] and several others, were all guilty of arrant forgery and corruption: For when they translated the works of several freethinkers, whom they called heretics, they omitted all their heresies or freethinkings, and had the impudence to own it to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... was a coward, an arrant cur, yet he infinitely preferred having to tackle flesh and blood, to ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... across the table at Mr. Seven Sachs, as who should say: "And have you too allowed yourself to be dragged into this affair? I really thought you were cleverer. Don't you agree with me that we're both fools of the most arrant description?" And under that brief glance Mr. Seven Sachs's calm deserted him as it had never deserted him on the stage, where for over fifteen hundred nights he had withstood the menace of revolvers, poison, and female treachery through three ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... Storri," replied Bess. "Now, Dorothy, listen to me. In the first place, you are an arrant hypocrite. You pretend to be soft and powerless and yielding, and to appeal to me for counsel. And all the time you are twice as obstinate as I am, and much less likely to accept a man you don't love, or give ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... in English. He was considered quite clever at playing the organ in the little village church, singing the mass, teaching school, and a hundred other things, but at speaking English he was known as an arrant failure. ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... would have done if Kitty had let them. But Kitty, flighty little butterfly as she seemed, had stores of tact and finesse in that little brain of hers, and the power of developing a fine reserve which had already wilted more than one of the young men of the house. For Kitty was none of your arrant and promiscuous flirts who count "all fish that come to their net." She was choice and dainty in her flirtations, but, possibly, none the less dangerous ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... reasonable, Carlier, and I'm glad to see it," responded the commissary in a softer tone. "Your friend is an arrant blackguard to have treated his wife as he has, and to have betrayed you because you took her part. But you surely knew how unscrupulous he was, and also that he was a most dangerous character. We know of one or two of his exploits, and ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... air, while surmounting the oblique futtock- shrouds, some unseen arm should all at once tumble me overboard. Therefore I held my peace; while Jarl went on to declare, that with regard to the character of the brigantine, his mind was now pretty fully made up;—she was an arrant impostor, a shade of a ship, full of sailors' ghosts, and before we knew where we were, would dissolve in a supernatural squall, and leave us twain in the water. In short, Jarl, the descendant of the superstitious old Norsemen, was full of old Norse conceits, and all manner of Valhalla marvels ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... which Solon addrest to Croesus, a speech which brought him neither largess nor honor. The king with much indifference saw Solon depart, since the former thought that a man must be an arrant fool who made no account of present good, but bade men always wait ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... said. He had such a queer, topsy-turvy way of looking at things; would express the most outrageous opinions with an innocent unconsciousness that made her long to box his ears, and support the most arrant absurdities by arguments that conveyed not the smallest meaning to her intellect. Look at him now, for instance; a cripple for life, and pretending to see nothing in it but a joke, and expressing as much admiration for his horrible wooden leg as though it ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... early, before the sun was up, I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup; But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head, Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... (2) But such arrant deception is not the commonest form of wrong. A more usual practice, and more dangerous- because it deceives even the intelligent-is to overcapitalize an honest business, to issue "watered" stock-that is, stock in excess of the actual value of plant, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... that the marble goddesses, or whoever they were, at the base of Nelson's monument opposite, were regarding him with stony disdain and indignation; that the statue of Wellington knew him for an arrant impostor, and averted his head with cold contempt; and that the effigy of Lord Mayor Beckford on the right of the dais would come to life and denounce ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... words to do his bidding, he threw down his pen and looked into the future. He could see nothing ahead of him but bitterness and cause for alarm, and, seeking consolation, he was forced to admit that only religion could heal, but religion demanded in return so arrant a desertion of common sense, so pusillanimous a willingness to be astonished at nothing, that he threw up his ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... ourselves for certain? But it may be said we must be slaves. And are we then in a clear state of liberty at present? It may also be said that it is a manly act for one to kill himself. No, certainly, but a most unmanly one; as I should esteem that pilot to be an arrant coward, who, out of fear of a storm, should sink his ship of his own accord. Now self-murder is a crime most remote from the common nature of all animals, and an instance of impiety against God our Creator; nor indeed is there any animal that ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... acted under a sudden impulse to gratify an abnormal passion, but these wretches planned weeks ahead to 'do up' Smith, yet such cowards were they, they dared not strike the blow, but hired the Marlboro tool to do it for them. Jenne, Howarth and Wilson, you are arrant cowards, and your weakness is only exceeded by ...
— The Story of a Dark Plot - or Tyranny on the Frontier • A.L.O. C. and W.W. Smith
... question, and he feared in his soul she might voice it. He could evade the questions of the volatile Winnie, but there was no getting by Kathlyn with evasions. Frowning, he replaced the order in the box, which he put away in a drawer. It was all arrant nonsense, anyhow; nothing could possibly happen; if there did, he would feel certain that he no longer dwelt in a real workaday world. The idle whim of a sardonic old ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... truth, for with a few more mutterings the thunder died away in the distance; and though the promised coolness did not come, both Owen and Toni were relieved by the lightening atmosphere—Toni because she was an arrant coward where thunderstorms were concerned; Owen because he felt that the clash of the elements would render the neuralgic pains ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... I have seen of Brandelaar I am convinced that he is an arrant rascal. It was very imprudent on your part to have anything to do with a man like that. If you are brought before a court-martial, you have ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... are often stigmatized as arrant cowards, who run away at the slightest provocation, their first thought being for the safety of their own skins. No doubt Chinese soldiers do run away—sometimes; at other times they fight to the death, as has been amply proved over and over again. It is ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... sitting-room I was surprised, however, to find the self-styled Kearney quietly seated on the sofa, the gentle May Sylvester, the "Lily of Lone Valley," sitting with maidenly awe and unaffected interest on one side of him, while on the other that arrant flirt, her cousin Kate, was practicing the pitiless archery of her eyes, with an ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... my masters, let us share, and then to horse before day. An the Prince and Pointz be not two arrant cowards, there's no equity stirring: there's no more valour in that ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... that would carry him off in a short time; and he had been already bled so much, and so often, that he could bear it no longer. The unfortunate patient, shocked at this declaration, replies, "Sir, you have always pretended to be a regular doctor; but now I find you are an arrant quack. I had an excellent constitution when I first fell into your hands, but you have quite destroyed it; and now I find I have no other chance for saving my life, but by calling for the help of some regular physician." In the debate, the members on both sides seemed to wander from the question, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... general, such blatant and obnoxious asses, such arrant posturers and wind-bags? Why is it as surprising to find an unassuming and likable fellow among them as to find a Greek without fleas? The answer is quite simple. To reach it one needs but consider the type of young man who normally ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... appeared to me rather embarrassed. He has sent for the most prudential persons on change to ask their advice concerning this addition, which he considers arrant folly. Another person, very much displeased with this addition, says, that if Amsterdam persists firmly in demanding the strict observance of the treaties, and a perfect neutrality, she can counteract this manoeuvre. Otherwise the servile submission of ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... dispatched, in retourning homewardes, it chaunced as he departed out of Ferrara, and riding towardes Verona, hee mette certayne men on horsebacke, whiche semed to be Marchauntes, but in verie deede were arrant theues: with whome he kepte companie, and without suspicion what they were, rode together familiarly talking. These good felowes seing this Marchaunt and thinking that he had money about hym, determined to robbe him, when they sawe their aduauntage, ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... was the Armstrongs, able men; Somewhat unruly, and very ill to tame. I would have none think that I call them thieves, For, if I did, it would be arrant lies. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... Yocomb, you must learn to understand me better or I shall have to run away in self-defence. When you talk in that style I feel like an arrant hypocrite. I give you my word that I've been ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... although he knew his alphabet and could even read imperfectly. The acquirement of book-learning he found a dull and dolorous business, to which he was driven only by the threats or entreaties of his parents, who showed some concern lest he should become an "arrant dunce." ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... itself that it had not been in existence on the date impressed on the envelope, then the fraud would be quite apparent. And if there had been such fraud, then would the testimony of all those four witnesses be crushed into arrant perjury. They had produced the fraudulent document, and by it would be thoroughly condemned. There could be no necessity ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... important branch of all natural history; and geologic curiosities, interesting as they are, can hardly compete with the tales of old Polperro privateers and smugglers. Polperro built its own boats as it bred its own seamen, and both were excellent. That they were arrant smugglers was a characteristic of the times and of the locality; it is not for us to judge them. That they were men of piety is proved by the epitaph of that smuggler who prays for the pardon of the Preventive man ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... says Adam, crossing his arms, "here's the truth on't. I found a poor wretch bent on vengeance, murder, and a rogue's death, which was pure folly. I offered you riches, the which you refused, and this was arrant folly. I took you for comrade, brought you aboard ship with offer of honest employ which you likewise refused and here was more folly. Your conduct on board ship was all folly. So, despite yourself, I set you on a fair island with the right ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... brought. She—while in various forms she tries Her furious spirit to disguise, At one place in her flight bestow'd Her brother's limbs upon the road; And at another could betray The daughters their own sire to slay." How think you now?—What arrant trash! And our assertions much too rash!— Since prior to th' Aegean fleet Did Minos piracy defeat, And made adventures on the sea. How then shall you and I agree? Since, stern as Cato's self, you hate All tales alike, both small and great. Plague ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... adapt this noble talent with respect to the differences of persons and of times. Cicero understood this very well, when, writing to a friend in England, with a caution, among other matters, to beware of being cheated by our hackney-coachmen (who, it seems, in those days were as arrant rascals as they are now), has these remarkable words, Est quod gaudeas te in ista loca venisse, ubi aliquid sapere viderere {129}. For, to speak a bold truth, it is a fatal miscarriage so ill to order affairs as to pass for a fool in one company, when in another you ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... good Salomon; I have been about a deed of darkness to night: O Lord, I saw fifteen spirits in the forest, like white bulls; if I lie, I am an arrant thief: mortality haunts us—grass and hay! the devils at our heels, and let's hence ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... rejoined Venner. "She is the popular craze just now, and from her professional work she derives a very large income which she scatters as if dollars were dead leaves. In a word, Detective Carter, Senora Cervera is an arrant spendthrift." ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... but a year old when his father died, and the discipline of such a restless spirit as he exhibited in early childhood seems to have been a task almost beyond the poor widow's powers. An incorrigible spirit of mischief possessed him. He was an arrant scape-grace, plundering cupboards, gardens, and orchards, lifting the gates of mill-races by night, and playing a thousand other practical and not always innocent jokes. Neither counsel nor punishment availed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... the authority of the church, or the sacraments, or anything of that sort. Such questions are at present of no interest to me. And yet the fact that they do not interest me, were enough to prove me in as false and despicable a position as ever man found himself occupying—as arrant a hypocrite and deceiver as any god-personating priest in the Delphic temple.—I had rather a man despised than excused me, Mr. Polwarth, for I am at issue with myself, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... experience of school life never before had she met a girl who pleaded in such coaxing terms for her own humiliation, and she was at sea as to what it might mean. Either Pixie was guilty, in which case she was one of the most arrant little hypocrites that could be imagined, or she was innocent, and a marvel of sweetness and charity. Which could it be? A moment before she had felt sure that the former was the case, now she was equally convinced of the latter. In any case she was gratified by the idea that she herself ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... walls of Florence. Had he commanded the troops from the beginning, and remained inside the city, it is just possible that the fate of the war might have been less disastrous. As it was, Malatesta Baglioni, the Commander-in-Chief, turned out an arrant scoundrel. He held secret correspondence with Clement and the Prince of Orange. It was he who finally sold Florence to her foes, 'putting on his head,' as the Doge of Venice said before the Senate, 'the cap of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... heart Snell was an arrant coward, and he knew that Hodge was really longing for a challenge. Wat felt sure that he would receive a severe drubbing at the hands of the dark-haired boy whom he had angered, and the thoughts of such punishment filled his ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... arrant folly to send her there. How do we know she has any more talent for elocution than ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... Chambermaid A Precisian An Inns of Court Man A Mere Fellow of a House A Worthy Commander in the Wars A Vainglorious Coward in Command A Pirate An Ordinary Fence A Puny Clerk A Footman A Noble and Retired Housekeeper An Intruder into Favour A Fair and Happy Milkmaid An Arrant Horse-Courser A Roaring Boy A Drunken Dutchman resident in England A Phantastique: An Improvident Young Gallant A Button-Maker of Amsterdam A Distaster of the Time A Mere Fellow of a House A Mere Pettifogger An Ingrosser of Corn A Devilish Usurer A Waterman A Reverend Judge ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... to a real pirate who chanced upon a cabin in the forest's solitude and here confessed his life to its inmate, Audubon, who left this "striking incident" a record in his works. However, "Dick Fid, that arrant old foretop man, and his comrade, Negro Sip, are the true lovers of the narrative;—the last, indeed, is a noble creature, a hero under the skin of Congo." "The Red Rover" is all a book of the sea. In Sir Walter Scott's journal, January, 1828, appears: ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... jangled in Duress. What reckons Love of Hairpins more or less? Guard well your Heart and let the Hairpins go - To lose your Heart were arrant Carelessness. ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... they were well deserved, Chauliac's conduct during the black death which ravaged Avignon in 1348, shortly after his arrival in the Papal City, would have been sufficient of itself to attest. The occurrence of the plague in a city usually gave rise to an exhibition of the most arrant cowardice, and all who could, fled. In many of the European cities the physicians joined the fugitives, and the ailing were left to care for themselves. With a few notable exceptions, this was the case at Avignon, but Guy was among ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... his head, Doctor Emory lighted a big Havana and continued audibly to luxuriate in his fictitious triumph over the other doctor. As he talked, he forgot to smoke, and, leaning quite casually against the chair, with arrant carelessness allowed the live coal at the end of his cigar to rest against the tip of one of Kwaque's twisted fingers. A privy wink to Miss Judson, who was the only one who observed his action, warned her ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... "An arrant impostor," put in the Sub-Pacha, "with the airs of a god. I thought to risk losing my arm when I cuffed him on the ear, but lo! 'tis stronger than ever." And he ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... however, would be spoiled by such arrant egotism as our author displays on every page. We are never rid of Mr. Parker for a moment. Wherever Mr. Choate is visible, Mr. Parker is strutting by his side. He exhibits, indeed, all the intrusiveness of Boswell, without any of that honest, self-forgetting, simple-hearted admiration ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that; hinting that here there was a weakness, and there . . . something worse. Every advanced thinker, and the majority of theorists, could count on finding a sympathetic listener in him: and not infrequently they found in him an advocate also; such an arrant anti-optimist was the pestilent fellow. As if Civilization, after thousands of years of travail, had produced nothing better than a clumsy abortion with the claws of an animal and the tastes of Jack-an-ape! Why, the man must be mad, to have such irregular fancies! It was ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... of consanguinity. We would do well to analyze the causes which lead to our feelings of dislike, and I fear we should often find that wounded self-esteem was the root of the evil. And, after all, what a great matter a little fire kindleth! Let us quench the spark before it ignites. It is arrant folly, not to mention wickedness, to make enemies for the little while we are here. There is an incurable heartache which comes from such mistakes. Owen Meredith describes it in a poem, every verse of which throbs with hopeless love and regret, and one of ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... pleasant borders of the Bronx: these were short fat men, wearing exceeding large trunk-breeches, and were renowned for feats of the trencher. They were the first inventors of suppawn, or mush and milk.—Close in their rear marched the Van Vlotens, of Kaatskill, horrible quaffers of new cider, and arrant braggarts in their liquor.—After them came the Van Pelts of Groodt Esopus, dexterous horsemen, mounted upon goodly switch-tailed steeds of the Esopus breed. These were mighty hunters of minks and musk-rats, whence came the word Peltry.—Then the Van Nests of ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... wife!" he says, speaking the words most softly, as if they greatly pleased him, and replacing with carefullest fingers a stray and arrant lock that has wandered from its fellows into my left eye. "What has come to you? Had I forgotten what you were like? How pretty you ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... did not tell Beth that. The girl was so accustomed to despise herself and so suspicious of any creditable impulses that at times unexpectedly obtruded themselves, that she would have dismissed such a suggestion as arrant flattery, and Louise was clever enough not to wish to arouse her cousin to a full ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... popular sovereignty principle, Lincoln declared it "the most arrant Quixotism that was ever enacted before a community.... Does he mean to say that he has been devoting his life to securing to the people of the Territories the right to exclude slavery from the Territories? If he means so to say, he means ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... deed. I knew that they had done this expressly, deliberately. But at the moment when head and body were severed, and fell into the trough, I groaned, and apprehended, not with my mind, but with my heart and my whole being, that all the arguments which I had heard anent the death-penalty were arrant nonsense; that, no matter how many people might assemble in order to perpetrate a murder, no matter what they might call themselves, murder is murder, the vilest sin in the world, and that that crime ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand asks, 'Are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'Odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, 'The simpleton ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... "They don't impress me, sir. I've said you're a coward, and I stand by it. I repeat it. You are a coward, Briggs, an arrant coward." ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... circumstances, and not according to our own imaginations, not according to abstract ideas of right, by no means according to mere general theories of government, the resort to which appears to me, in our present situation, no better than arrant trifling. I shall therefore endeavor, with your leave, to lay before you some of the most material of these circumstances in as full and as clear a manner as I am ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... am I,' says Captain Ward, 'There's no man bids me lie, And if thou art the King's fair ship, Thou art welcome to me.' 'I'll tell thee what,' says Rainbow, 'Our King is in great grief, That thou shouldst lie upon the sea, And play the arrant thief, ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... have had the effect of ruining a large number of the country gentry of Ireland, driving them from their native shores, impoverishing the landlords without any perceptible benefit to the tenants, who appear to be no better off than ever. What surprised him most was the arrant nonsense talked by the English Gladstonians, and the blindness and apathy of the English people generally, who in his opinion were being gradually led to the brink of a frightful abyss, which threatened to swallow ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... generally neither more nor less than a net of silken flattery. Your good guide, your dear guide, your pet guide, whom Neighbor So-and-so, going abroad, must look up immediately on his arrival, this invaluable creature, depend upon it, is an arrant flatterer. He does not go out of his way for you; he does not tell it you to your face; but, somehow or other, (if he knows his vocation,) he makes you believe, that, of all the travellers he ever escorted, (and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... Say, does thy blood rebel, thy bosom move With wretched avarice, or as wretched love? Know, there are words and spells, which can control Between the fits this fever of the soul: Know, there are rhymes, which fresh and fresh applied Will cure the arrant'st puppy of his pride. Be furious, envious, slothful, mad, or drunk, Slave to a wife, or vassal to a punk, A Switz, a High Dutch, or a Low Dutch bear; All that we ask is but a patient ear. 'Tis the first virtue, vices to abhor; And the first wisdom, to be fool no more. But to ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... he will—maybe till he have consumed us. Grena, I know not how it hath been with you, but for me, I have been an arrant coward. God aiding me, I will be thus no longer, but will go forth in the strength of the Lord God. Believe you these lying wonders and deceitful doctrines? for I do not, and have never so done, though I have made believe to do it. I will make believe ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... from him as a welcome to England, before the old gentleman fell ill of a pleurisy, which in four days' time deprived him of his life; and as he had no will, his estate of L300 a year, and about L700 in money (which he had lent out on securities), descended to his sister's son, as arrant a booby as ever breathed, and deprived Tim both of his present subsistance ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... but another hour, much as I should like to stay. Mr. Meredith, 't is a man's duty to aid a creditor to pay his debts. May I not hope to see you and Mrs. Meredith and Miss Janice at headquarters ere long? For if you come not willingly, I'll put Miss Janice under arrest as an arrant and avowed rebel, and have her brought ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford |
