"Belabour" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Trojans on "like dogs at a wild boar or lion." In xi, 557, Ajax retreating slowly from the Trojans is compared to an ass who has gone to feed in a field, and whom the boys find great difficulty in driving out, "though they belabour him well with cudgels." Agamemnon is compared to a bull, Sarpedon and Patroclus in deadly combat to two vultures, and Diomed and Ulysses pursue Dolon as two fleet hounds chase a hare. All these were evidently intended to be most poetical, if not elevating similes; their dignity would have been lost ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... no longer. He rose, and they both stood up to stamp their feet and belabour their chests for some time—the cold at such a height being intense, while their wet garments and want of covering rendered them peculiarly unfitted to withstand it. The effort was not very successful. The darkness of the night, the narrowness of their ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... my orders," cried Bess. And, catching the attorney by the collar, she began to belabour him soundly with ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the skirmish in silence; but the pewter cups and platters flew spinning across the floor, while the table pinned me to the ground among the ruins of my stool. Having me at this disadvantage—for at first I made no resistance the landlord began to belabour me with the first thing he snatched up, and when I tried to defend myself, cursed me with each blow for a treacherous rogue and a vagrant. Meanwhile the three merchants, delighted with the turn things had ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... fule!" he screamed in his passion, dancing about the poop and bringing his fist down with a resounding thump on the brass rail, as if the inanimate material represented for the nonce the back of the mate, whom he longed to belabour. "Guess one'd think ye wer coaxin' a lot o' wummen folk to come to a prayer-meetin'! Why don't ye go down in the fo'c's'le an' drive 'em up, if they won't come on deck when they're hailed? Below thaar, d'ye ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... a Tuesday St. John Eddle, a staunch upholder of the C. and P.P., would enter Jabez's store and hit him in the face because he'd sent a tin of sardines to the Furdlehoe Mansion on the other side of the River. And maybe on a Friday Moses Whortleberry, a leading light of the D. S. and C. C. would belabour him with one of his own hams for daring to acquaint old Hiram Holdit, the station master, with the result ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward |
