"Byword" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wonders of an achievement grander than any of Schwartz, or Guttenberg, or Galileo. Oh, this beautiful, grand simplicity of Science, which was able, from the snail itself, the very type and symbol and byword of torpidity and inaction, to evolve what was to conquer time and space,—to outrun the wildest ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... of bread or a few maccaroni. When their purse was low, the old man would accompany him to the scene of his labors, and constantly urge him on, by repeating Luca, fa presto, (hurry Luca) which became a byword among the painters, and was fixed upon the young artist as a nickname, singularly appropriate to his wonderful celerity of execution. He afterwards traveled through Lombardy to Venice, still accompanied by his father, and having studied the works of Correggio, Titian, and other ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... replied Aram, "which gave to the character of Cicero its poorest and most frivolous infirmity? Has it not made him, glorious as he is despite of it, a byword in the mouths of every schoolboy? Wherever you mention his genius, do you not hear an appendix on ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... refused to credit the Serbians of the kingdom, and the triumphs of the valiant Serbian peasant soldiers immediately imparted a heroic glow to the country whose very name, at any rate in central Europe, had become a byword, and a synonym for failure; Belgrade became the cynosure and the rallying-centre of the whole Serbo-Croatian race. But Vienna and Budapest could only lose courage and presence of mind for the moment, ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... Association: types of a dying feudalism, disposed to believe nothing advantageous to the community if it conflicts with any privilege of their class. Under the name of Junker, the Conservative landowners of the region of Prussia east of the Elbe, they have become everywhere a byword for pride, selfishness, in a word—reaction. They and men of their kidney are to be distinguished from the German "people" in the English sense, and hold themselves vastly superior to the burghertum, the vast middle class. They dislike the "academic ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... fear that in the end he may be forced to give it all up, to the great scandal and reproach of the French name, which by such conduct is made a laughing-stock and a byword among the nations. For as though their wish was to oppose the conversion of these poor Western peoples, and the glory of God and of the King, we find a set of men full of avarice and envy, who would not draw a sword in the service of the King, nor suffer the slightest ill in the world ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... made one mistake, tumbling head over heels in love with a young fellow who had mortified her before the world when their engagement was less than a few months old, making her name and affections a byword, and she could not and would not repeat the blunder. This had shattered her customary self-reliance, leaving her wellnigh helpless. Perhaps after all—an unheard-of thing in her experience—she had better seek advice of some older and wiser pilot. Two heads, or even three—(here her canny Scotch ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... agony are common to the most self-restrained of us, "you have been for twenty years a living lie! For twenty years you have cheated and mocked me. For twenty years—in company with a scoundrel whose name is a byword for all that is profligate and base—you have laughed at me for a credulous and hood-winked fool; and now, because I dared to raise my hand to that reckless boy, you confess your shame, and ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... projecting windows, were interspersed with ruinous palm-thatched bamboo huts and grotesquely decorated temples filled with fat priests and hideous, ochre-daubed gods, and noisy with the incessant blare of conch shells and the jangling of bells. Lalpuri was a byword throughout India and was known to its contemptuous neighbours as the City of Harlots and Thieves. Poverty, debauchery, and crime were rife. Justice was a mockery; corruption and abuses flourished everywhere. A just magistrate or an honourable official was ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... to coerce unfortunate masters to pay higher wages than they can afford, is climaxed by those brigand processions of idle roughs who go about bawling, "We've no work to do, and wouldn't do it if we had." The British workman (of course with many exceptions) has become a byword for everything unpleasant, which both large contractors and small employers avoid if they can: drink, bank holidays, radical spouters, the conceit of being better than their betters, and above all ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... an honest man cursed the great scholar, as he looked at his young children, and wished to have one good blow at the head that was hatching such devilish malice against the poor! The name of Adam Warner became a byword of scorn and horror. Nothing less than the deep ditch and strong walls of the Tower could have saved him from the popular indignation; and these prejudices were skilfully fed by the jealous enmity of his fellow-student, the terrible Friar Bungey. This man, though in all ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Americans abroad, it is not an unwise thing to have in each capital a man who in the intervals of his more important duties, can keep this struggling mass of folly from becoming a scandal and a byword throughout Europe. No one can know, until he has seen the inner workings of our diplomatic service, how much duty of this kind is quietly done by our representatives, and how many things are thus avoided which would tend to bring scorn upon our ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... to weave again thy wiles! Go then thyself! thy godship abdicate! Renounce Olympus! lavish here on him Thy pity and thy care! he may perchance Make thee his wife—at least his paramour! But thither go not I! foul shame it were Again to share his bed; the dames of Troy Will for a byword hold me; and e'en now My soul with endless ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... stealing your horses' oats, and that your coachman,—that is the man who was before me,—gave you, in the dark, a good sound drubbing, of which you said nothing. In short, what is the use of going on? We can go nowhere but we are sure to hear you pulled to pieces. You are the butt and jest and byword of everybody; and never does anyone mention you but under the names of miser, stingy, ...
— The Miser (L'Avare) • Moliere
... wholly obsolete. Such new-fangled words as "eftsoon," "albeit," "wench," "soothly," "zounds," "whenas," and "sithence" had stolen into common usage, making more direct and simpler speech a jest and a byword. ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... than a round of shot. The truth is, March's carpenters and fishermen refused to fight, though reenforcements joined them halfway home and they made a second attempt on Port Royal in August. March returned to Boston heartbroken, for his name had become a byword to the mob, and he was greeted in the streets with shouts of ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... erected, at his entrance into the town, a triumphal arch, with the inscription, "Salvatorem expectamus;" and all hailed, as a sure omen of victory, the presence of the champion whose very name had become a byword of terror among the Turks. The beleaguered garrison was, meanwhile, cheered by frequent messages promising speedy relief from the Duke of Lorraine, whose emissaries, selected for their knowledge of the Turkish language, contrived to pass and re-pass securely; but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... true—you'll pardon me if I put my questions bluntly, the circumstances don't permit of sparing either your feelings or my own—isn't it true that for two or three years before your husband's death your name in Paris was nothing short of a byword?" ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... in the office, and had lit that lantern and wuz now hangin' along in the rear of that gay procession, with that mummy-like figger, a jest, a byword and a sneer, for laughter riz up round 'em and sneers follered 'em as they swep' onwards. As they come nigh me I riz up almost wildly and ketched holt of my ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... not a thriving trade. The fact is, being all of one sort, the profession is overcrowded, and the result is that the sharpest amongst them emigrate, or rather I should say go farther a-field to exercise their craft. I am told that many of the low Jews, who make themselves a byword and a reproach by their practices of cheating and usury throughout Hungary, may be traced back to this foul nest in the Marmaros Mountains. It would be well for the credit of the Jewish community in Hungary, as well as elsewhere, if something were done to raise these people out ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... it "a beautiful city," afterwards expostulated with the doctor for this rough interruption: "Now, sir," said he, "was not that rude?" The full rudeness is only apparent when we remember that Brentford was in that day a byword for dreariness and dirt—Thomson in the Castle of Indolence calls it "a town of mud." When Johnson visited Glasgow, however, he joined the troop of its admirers himself, and Boswell took the opportunity to put him then in mind of ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... purpose. I loved him, and I consented—yes, because I loved him so, I consented to even more. I agreed to keep the marriage secret from you. You see what it has led to. I, a Von Holtzhausen, and the last of my name, stand here a byword and a scorn; my story will be found amusing at every dinner-table in the country-side, and my shame will even cling to my unborn child. This is the return he has made me for my sacrifice of self-respect, and for consenting to marry him at all; to outrage ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... whose beauty had power to drive the thought of me from the heart of Odysseus, and bring him, who of all men was the greatest hero and the foremost left alive, to do a dastard deed and make his mighty name a byword and a scorn. Knowest thou, Meriamun, that I find the matter strange, since if all else be false, yet is this true, that among women the fairest are the most strong. Thou art fair indeed, Meriamun, but judge if thou art more fair ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... enjoyed a peculiarly poisonous variety of him. In his Renaissance guise, whether projected upon actual history, as in the person of Richard III, or strutting sublimated through Marlowe's blank verse, he spared at any rate to sentimentalise his brutality. Our forefathers summed him up in the byword that an Italianate Englishman was a devil incarnate; but he had the grace of being Italianate. It is from the Germanised avatar—the Bismarck of the 'Ems telegram,' with his sentimentalising historians and philosophers—that Europe would seem to ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... establishment of that which should be clear as sun at noon-day! You say I am innocent, and yet you tell me I am to be condemned as a guilty man, have my gown taken from me, be torn from my wife and children, be disgraced before the eyes of all men, and be made a byword and a thing horrible to be mentioned, because I will not fee an attorney to fee another man to come and lie on my behalf, to browbeat witnesses, to make false appeals, and perhaps shed false tears in defending me. You have come to me asking me to do this, if I understand you, telling me that ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... forces at work at blossom time; the methods adopted by the greatest masters of the form are inconsistent with the motives that impelled them to its use, and where these motives were followed to their logical conclusion, the resuit, both in literature and in life, became a byword for absurd unreality. To live at all the ideal appeared to require an atmosphere of paradox and incongruity: in its essence the most 'natural' of all poetic forms, pastoralism came to its fairest flower amid the artificiality ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... I spoke the truth. Haven't I shamed myself enough already— That you must call me liar! (To ELIZA) Speak out now, If you're not tongue-tied: tell her all you ken— How I'm a byword among honest women, And yet, no liar. You'd tongue enough just now To tell me what I was—a cruel tongue Cracking about my ears: and have you none To answer your son's wife, and ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... the law. Otherwise he may find unpleasant surprises in store for him. Had Mr. Mercer made it his business to acquire some rudiments of this useful knowledge, he would never have undergone that outrageous official ill-treatment which has become a byword in the annals of international amenities. And if these strictures be considered too severe, let us see what Italians themselves have to say. In 1900 was published a book called "La Quistione Meridionale" (What's Wrong with the South), that throws ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Fourteenth Street was burgeoning out as the new Rialto. Society set its seal upon the establishment. The clubs of the immediate neighbourhood, of which there were several, did not think it necessary to install cuisines when Delmonico's was so close at hand. The name of the house is still a byword in the land, but the names of Filippini and Lattard, two of the maitre d'hotel who helped to make Delmonico's famous, have been forgotten by all but a very few. What supper parties were given in the old establishment, and what dances of that exclusive circle to which Mr. Ward McAllister ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... California with geraniums in the garden at Christmas, and bathing in the ocean in January, and oranges everywhere for the picking, and a host of kindred wonders in which her untravelled neighbour friends were to be instructed. And instead she found the very name of California and El Monte were a byword and a hissing in the mouths of the inhabitants of Orchard Glen, and had to spend the first month after her return ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... the happy English, but rather his poor scabbard and how he should clean it after the march, and his poor clothes, all coated with mud, and needing an hour's brushing, and his poor temper, which, if he did not take great care, would make him grow up to be an anti-militarist and a byword. ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... to be scattered to the four winds of heaven. The constituted authorities, placed there by the same high authority that placed Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Jackson in the chair, are to be captured and carried off, to become a byword and a scorn to ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... know he was there. He had wedged the crowd silently, gradually, till he reached the spot he had quitted soon after our entrance, to greet his former class mates. I knew by his countenance that he had heard all, and a sick, deadly feeling came over me. He, to hear my mother's name made a byword and reproach, myself alluded to as the indigent daughter of an outcast,—he, who seemed already lifted as high above me on the eagle wings of fortune, as the eyry of the king-bird is above the nest of the swallow,—it was more than ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... mud-hovels, who led their simple lives with praise to Allah; envied the poor camel-driver singing in the sunshine as he jogged along. Alas for him, he had no part with these, but was a Protestant, a stranger in his native land, a monstrous creation of those English who had cast him off, a byword, a bad joke. The iridescent plumage of some pigeons, which, emboldened by his stillness, came strutting and pecking on the ground before him, drew his gaze; and, half-unconsciously, he began to trace their likeness on the page before him. While thus engaged he heard ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... except perhaps in bad times, and they showed none now. Nor mercy. The situation would have been ridiculous had it not been so utterly tragic—to have failed without trying! Edwards's escape became camp offal. We became the butt and the byword of the camp, so that I honestly regretted not having pushed on alone. I felt sure that the almost certain capture and more certain punishment would have been more bearable than this. There was nothing that I could say in my own defense except at the other ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... shelter. He had too much sympathy, his honesty was not tempered by the graces of a diplomat—a price was placed upon his head. By the help of that one noble friend, whose love upheld him to the last, he escaped to a country where freedom of speech is not a byword. But misunderstanding followed close upon his footsteps, even his wife doubted his sanity, mistaking his genius for folly, and died undeceived. Calumny, hate, brutal criticism, the contempt of the so-called learned class—and all the train of woe ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... little hamlet town has, cruelly enough, passed into a byword—a synonym for everything that is rowdy, vulgar, apish in the English character, with the dregs stirred up. But yet it will ring down the silver grooves of Time as long as Time ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... calmer still, made him strong, almost made him happy. A life for a life. He would expiate his offense in God's good time. So no danger was too big for William Dale to face; his courage became a byword; gentlefolk and ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... Germany. There has been much irritation in spite of these promises, cumulative irritation, which however might have remained submerged had it not been for the revelations of the acts of Count Luxburg, which have made the expression "spurlos versekt" a byword. This exhibition of callous plotting against Argentine lives immediately resulted in the handing of passports to the German Ambassador to Argentina, and during the third week in September both houses of Congress voted by large majorities for a severance ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... now you have several Churches, some amongst you, the carping and ambitious, will go out and in turn set up new Confessions of Faith, and at length so fill the earth with rival Churches that religion will become a burden to the poor and a byword with fools who delight in saying there is no God? In a village, how much better one House of God, with one elder for its service, and always open, than five or ten, each with a preacher for a price, and closed from Sabbath to Sabbath? For that there ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... time when Linton Stephens, the most vigorous as the most popular public man during the reconstruction period, was endeavoring to arouse the people. Governor Brown's apostasy was unfortunate. No man was then more execrated by the people who had honored him. His name, for a while, was a byword and a reproach. Mr. Stephens defended his position as conscientious if not consistent, and gave Governor Brown the credit for the purity as well as the courage of his convictions. Governor Brown bore the contumely with patience. He contended ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... improvement, and will strive unceasingly to quicken the sense of racial duty and responsibility; I will in all these ways aim to uplift my race so that, to everyone bound to it by ties of blood, it shall become a bond of ennoblement and not a byword ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... the chieftain had only too surely passed away, and when the General Election of 1895 was over it was a battered, broken and bitterly divided Irish Party which returned to Westminster—a Party which had lost all faith in itself and which was a byword and a reproach alike for its helpless inefficiency and its ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... always been a byword between us, by the way, since I applied to him the phrase first used of Alexander Pope—"that he could not make tea without a conspiracy." And it may be that in this case Charteris spoke the truth, and had come to Fairhaven just for the pleasure ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... cravenly study The getting of guerdons and gain, May have found their gold blasted and bloody, And tarnished by tears for the slain; And because they dishonoured their stations Were weak when they should have been strong, May be treated with scorn by the nations, A byword and hissing among. ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... the byword during the war and still is during the transition from war to peace. However, when deferred demand slackens, we shall once again face the deflationary dangers which beset this and other countries during the 1930's. Prosperity can ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... Vicarage. He didn't want to meet the Vicar and have the door shut in his face. Rowcliffe, informed by Mrs. Blenkiron, was aware, long before Gwenda had warned him, that he ran this risk. The Vicar's funniness was a byword in the parish. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... life they talk of is the bait that covers the hook for gudgeons. You have to accept the superstition, or your beautiful life to them is a byword and ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... "the idea is a noble one—But look at the reality! Has not priestly pandering to tyrants made the Church, in every age, a scoff and a byword among ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... Pak Chung Chang, falling on his knees. "It is impossible! It is impossible! You cannot strike off my father's nose. He cannot go down without his nose to the grave. He will become a laughter and a byword, and all my days and nights will be filled with woe. O reflect! Report that you have seen no such nose in your travels. You, ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... munificent charity is unable to check the accumulation of evil, moral and physical, with which it vainly endeavours to contend? How is it, that while the wealth of England is a proverb among nations, the distress of her labourers is a byword no less universal; that while her commerce encircles the globe, while her colonies are spread through both hemispheres, while regions hitherto unknown are but the resting-place of her never-ceasing enterprise, the producers of all this wealth, the causes of all this luxury, the instruments ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time. It would be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible, the byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer, and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to find as clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certain persons, here and there; but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... slays one hundred thousand a year, and causes ten thousand murders every year, steals the vittles and clothes from starvin' wimmen and children, has its deadly grip on Church and State, and makes our civilization and Christianity a mock and byword amongst ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... throne, and great-grandfather of the present king, could not refrain from lamenting his own fate and that of the House of Hohenzollern, once so great and so prosperous, but now, by the rash ambition of its chief, made a byword to all nations. These complaints, and some blunders which William committed during the retreat from Bohemia, called forth the bitter displeasure of the inexorable King. The prince's heart was broken by the cutting ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a wave. Everybody felt it at once. People wondered how any sane, intelligent community could tolerate the presence of a set of corrupt scoundrels like the twenty aldermen of the city. Their names, it was said, were simply a byword throughout the United States for rank criminal corruption. This was said so widely that everybody started hunting through the daily papers to try to find out who in blazes were aldermen, anyhow. Twenty names are hard ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... the Cardinal had built near the Baths of Diocletian. Having attained her first object, Vittoria took less pains to play the saint, and began to dress with unbecoming magnificence and to live on a very extravagant scale. Her name became a byword in Rome and her lovely face was one of the city's sights. The Cardinal, devotedly attached to his nephew, disapproved of the latter's young wife and regretted the many gifts he had bestowed upon her. Like most clever men, too, he was more than reasonably angry ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... hop, fly, or flop into this field during the absence of Jimmy Scarecrow, and therefrom purloin, steal, or abstract corn, shall be instantly, in a twinkling and a trice, turned snow-white, and be ever after a disgrace, a byword and a reproach to his whole race. Per order of ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... before they were aware of it. When asked why not stay with their friends till the armies should move away, they answered that they were sure they could not endure the rigors of the climate! The phrase became a byword at our headquarters, where we were longing for the invigorating ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... the lot. I stared at them in bewilderment. They were my own checks, sure enough; and underneath my name, on the back of each one, was the indorsement of the infamous blackleg whose name had been a byword ever since I could remember as that of the chief devil in the policy blackmail conspiracy that had robbed the poor and corrupted the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... Eastthorpe thought none the better of him for these negative virtues. He was not known to be immoral, but he was for ever playing with this girl or the other, smiling, mincing, toying, and it all came to nothing. A very unpleasant creature was Mr. Charlie Colston, a byword with women in Eastthorpe, even amongst the nursery-maids. Mrs. Furze knew all about his youth; but she brought out her philosopher's stone and used it with effect. She did not intend to mate Catharine with a fool, and make ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... Leopardi, but adopted and promoted by the archbishop, was devoted to maintaining the righteousness of all that system of extreme despotism, oath-breaking, defiance of national sentiment, and violations of ordinary decency, which had made the kingdom of Naples a byword during so many generations. Therein patriotism was proved to be a delusion; popular education an absurdity; observance of the monarch's sworn word opposition to divine law; a constitution a mere plaything in the monarch's hands; the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... that I should tamely submit to be a derided, outcast husband, that I should take no vengeance upon, that villainous Pope for having made me a thing of scorn, a byword throughout Italy?" Livid hate writhed in his fair young face. "Did you think I should, indeed, remain in Pesaro, whither I fled before their threats to my ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... but rather to the innate caution of the hill farmer; and doubtless, also, to a natural awe of the unwonted splendour with which they were surrounded. In a brief time his kindly hospitality became a byword in the capital, and fabulous accounts of it were carried home at week ends to toiling wives and sons and daughters, to incredulous citizens who sat on cracker boxes and found the Sunday papers stale and unprofitable for weeks thereafter. The geraniums—the price of which Mr. Crewe had forgotten ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a poet of Wordsworth's greatness. Jeffrey's petulant "This will never do," uttered, professedly, at least, more in sorrow than in anger, because the poet would persist, in spite of all friendly counsel, in misapplying his powers, has become a byword of ridiculous critical cocksureness. But the curious thing is that "The Excursion" has not "done," and that the Wordsworthians who laugh at Jeffrey are in the habit of repeating the substance of his criticism, though in more temperate and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... even its Song of Hate, accompanied on the timbrel by Miriam. The treatment of the Amalekites and other Palestine tribes is a byword. "We utterly destroyed every city," Deuteronomy declares; "the men and the women and the little ones; we left none remaining; only the cattle we took for a prey unto ourselves with the spoil of the cities." David, who is promised of God that his seed shall ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... of each will help to an understanding of this. In the following paragraph from Macaulay's essay on Milton, each of the details mentioned points directly to "those days" when the race became a "byword and a shaking of the head to the nations." Their aggregate mass enforces the topic of the paragraph. They are all one body equally informed with the common principle which is the topic. Notice that one sentence is not the source of the next, but that all the sentences ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... chief singer of Israel and skalds and bards and minnesingers are all gone, tradition is almost a byword, but mothers still live, and children need not wait until they have conquered the crabbed types before they begin to love ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... to those who happen to interfere in any way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... few days . . . the golden dream in which everyone liked and trusted her, and her beauty was a pleasure instead of a burden. Tomorrow she must return to her destiny of shabby clothes and second places, with the added bitterness of knowing her name made the byword of the ship! That was something she could never live down, if the voyage lasted a year. There would merely be two April fools instead of one, and she the wretched masquerader in borrowed plumes not the least of them! Slowly she turned away from the ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... She was a byword in Falmouth; yet, strange to say, her victims kept a sneaking fondness for her, a soft spot In their hearts; while as sporting onlookers we boys took something like a fearful pride in the Warrior, as we called her. It was not in her nature to encourage any ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... flushed from odd nooks and corners, baited openly in saloon and reading-room, trailed as with the wile of the serpent along devious passageways and through crowded assemblages, hare to her hound, up and down, high and low, until he became a byword among his companions for the stricken eye of eternal watchfulness. Sometimes the persecutress stalked him, unarmed; anon she threatened with a five-dollar bill. Now she trailed in a deadly silence; again, when there were few to ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a humble little bit of tin and horn; I'm a byword, I'm a plaything, I'm a jest; The virtuoso looks on me with scorn; But there's times when I am better than the best. Ask the stoker and the sailor of the sea; Ask the mucker and the hewer of the pine; Ask the herder of the plain, ask the gleaner of the grain— There's ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... about the table. Knowing no social distinctions, Susie was no respecter of persons. She chaffed and flouted the man who wintered a thousand head of cattle with the same impartiality with which she gibed his blushing cowpuncher. Her good-nature was a byword, as were her generosity and boyish daring. Susie MacDonald was a local celebrity in her way, and on the big hay-ranch her lightest word ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... possible, choosing deliberately to foster the merry humor in which they had been all day. He told her of his father, the crotchety old soldier, whose absurd sense of duty and whose elaborate Southern courtesy had become a byword in the South. He told her household tales that were prized like pieces of the Burrell plate, beautiful heirlooms of sentiment that mark the honor of high-blooded houses; following which there was much to recount ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... smile, But never sees the shadow in her eyes His hounds are beaten till they scarce draw breath, And then caressed beyond the worth of hounds. His vassals know not if, from day to day, He will approve, or strike them with a curse. His humours are the byword of the court, And, were it not for his good-heartedness, His prowess, and undaunted strength at arms, Men would speak lightly of him in disdain; He is so often in a stormy rage, Or supplicating humour to atone,— Too petty to ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... rule in Scripture, or indeed in any literature, is probably one drawn up and condensed into a single verse by Paul. You will find it in a letter—the second to the Corinthians—written by him to some Christian people who, in a city which was a byword for depravity and licentiousness, were seeking the higher life. To see the point of the words we must take them from the immensely improved rendering of the Revised translation, for the older Version in this case greatly obscures the sense. ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... a condescension, but still I did it. My first wife was the Princess of England. How can we admit into a house which has formed such alliances as these a woman who is the widow of a hunchback singer, a mere lampooner, a man whose name is a byword through Europe?" ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had increased of late years with the knowledge that James looked on him as the real prop of his decline. It seemed pitiful that one who had been so careful all his life and done so much for the family name—so that it was almost a byword for solid, wealthy respectability—should at his last gasp have to see it in all the newspapers. This was like lending a hand to Death, that final enemy of Forsytes. 'I must tell mother,' he thought, 'and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... strange that Roman courage became a byword. The fibre of Rome was toughened by perpetual strain of conflict. Even while she was struggling with Gaul and with the memories of the Carthaginian wars still fresh at Rome, the Goths were at her gates—their blows directed ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... watched him from the gallery—Lincoln, conversely, made no such overpowering impression. His observers, however much they have to say about his humor, his seasons of Shakespearian mirth, never forget their impression that at heart he is sad. His fondness for poetry in the minor key has become a byword, especially the line "Oh, why should the ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... at the north end of Drury Lane. Several times before this there had been smaller outbreaks, which had resulted in the building of a pest-house. Even after this check the parish continued to increase rapidly, and by the early part of the last century was a byword for all that was squalid and filthy. Its rookeries and slums are thus described in a newspaper cutting of 1845: "All around are poverty and wretchedness; the streets and alleys are rank with the filth of half a century; the windows are half ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... weren't such an awful tease," admitted A.O. "But I know how you'll criticize him afterward. You'll make a byword of everything he said and quote it to me till kingdom come. You know how it would be, don't you, Mary?" turning to her. "You wouldn't want her taking notes on everything he said if you ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... "I need hardly say that the fault is wholly Makar Alexievitch's." Finally it became "OF COURSE Makar Alexievitch is to blame." Do you see the sequence of things, my darling? Every mistake was attributed to me, until "Makar Alexievitch" became a byword in our department. Also, while making of me a proverb, these fellows could not give me a smile or a civil word. They found fault with my boots, with my uniform, with my hair, with my figure. None of these things were to their ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... firmly believe this and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political structure no better than the builders of Babel; we shall be divided and confounded and we ourselves become a reproach and a byword down to future ages. And, what is worse, mankind may hereafter despair of establishing government by human wisdom and leave it to chance, war ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... and Allah hath retaliated upon him in this world." And it related that the goldsmith, when his wife told him how the water-carrier had used her, said, "Tit for tat, and blow for blow!; had I done more the water-carrier had done more";—which became a current byword among the folk. Therefore it behoveth a wife to be both outward and inward with her husband; contenting herself with little from him, if he cannot give her much, and taking pattern by Ayishah the Truthful and Fatimah the virgin mother (Allah Almighty accept ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... account of the early life of Dickens that Chesterton gently leads us to the birth of the immortal Mr. Pickwick, that supreme Englishman who is a byword amongst even those who scarcely know Dickens. The birth pangs of the advent of Pickwick was a sharp quarrel 'that did no good to Dickens, and was one of those which occurred far too frequently in ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Crasthole, which by the high site, might more fitly be termed Open hill, a poore village but a much frequented thorow-fare, somewhat infamous, not vpon any present desert, but through an inueterate byword, viz. that it is peopled with 12. dwellings, and 13. cuckolds: for as the dwellings are more then doubled, so (I hope) the cuckolds ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... dumpy: A flowing cape it's certain will Well—not become one short and stumpy. Yet since, although you are not tall, You wear a cape, you may take my word That in the mouths of one and all You have become a very byword. ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... Maxim.— N. maxim, aphorism; apothegm, apophthegm[obs3]; dictum, saying, adage, saw, proverb; sentence, mot[Fr], motto, word, byword, moral, phylactery, protasis[obs3]. axiom, theorem, scholium[obs3], truism, postulate. first principles, a priori fact, assumption (supposition) 514. reflection &c (idea) 453; conclusion &c (judgment) 480; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... his prime he must have been a very colossus of strength and stature, and even now, in his senility, the muscles that had made terrible those great limbs could be plainly traced. For this was Dominus Gillian, whose name had been first a byword and then a terror, and even now was a power to conjure with; Dom Gillian, renegade and hero, gallows-bird and world-builder, but ever and in all things a man, as all ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... far, my friends have been mere skirmishers, but I have given them red-hot shot to-night. To-morrow you will know why we are making game of 'Potelet.' The article is called 'Potelet from 1811 to 1821.' Chatelet will be a byword, a name for the type of courtiers who deny their benefactor and rally to the Bourbons. When I have done with him, I am ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... say when he gave his signature. His father had a reputation for miserly thrift which had survived him; he was one of the old-fashioned tradesmen, who went around in his shirt-sleeves and apron, and weighed out soap and flour by the pound. He had no time to dress decently; his shoes were still a byword; the toes were sticking out, and when he walked it looked as if his toes were searching for pennies on the flagstones. The son did not resemble the father much; for him the old horizons had been broken, cracked wide, and opened large views; his optimistic ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... whom he had no legal rights, and certainly no moral ones, with the obstinacy and violence of a drunken navvy clamouring for the wife whom he has well-nigh done to death. Beyond the mere intemperance and the violence born of intemperance which made Charles Edward's name a byword and served the Hanoverian dynasty better than all the Duke of Cumberland's gibbets, there was at the bottom of the Pretender's character—his second character at least, his character after the year 1750—heartlessness and selfishness, an absence of all ideal and all gratitude, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... these poor lost children has been cleared up, and, living or dead—God forbid it should prove to be the latter!—they are restored to their parents. Now, mark my words, Count, unless my child Elizabeth is found, I'll make your name a byword throughout the length and breadth of the country—I'll——"; but words failed him, and, shaking his fist, he staggered out of ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... the speaking, and regrets must be uttered by me which could not certainly be shared by him. "I am broken down and trampled upon, and all the glory is departed from my name, and I have become a byword and a reproach rather than a term of honour in which future ages may rejoice, because I have been unable to carry out my long-cherished purpose by—depositing you, and insuring at least your departure!" And then Crasweller ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... arm. After a few months the music publishers used to smile when they saw him coming into their places of business, and shake their heads before he had a chance even to show them his manuscripts. As time went on he came to be a byword among them. ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... to be found alive through having gone away to the house of somebody else. I've thought of it all this morning, and I've chosen my course. A runaway wife is an encumbrance to everybody, a burden to herself and a byword—all of which make up a heap of misery greater than any that comes by staying at home—though this may include the trifling items of insult, beating, and starvation. Liddy, if ever you marry—God forbid that you ever should!—you'll ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... question was her corruption. I have seen in the State in the Union foremost in power and wealth four judges of her courts impeached for corruption, and the political administration of her chief city become a disgrace and a byword throughout the world. I have seen the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs in the House rise in his place and demand the expulsion of four of his associates for making sale of their official privilege of selecting the youths to be educated at our great military schools. When the greatest ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... all glory,—a new Tyre, - Her very byword sprung from victory, The 'Planter of the Lion,' which through fire And blood she bore o'er subject earth and sea; Though making many slaves, herself still free And Europe's bulwark 'gainst the Ottomite: ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... and worship them: 7. Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given them; and this house which I have hallowed for My name, will I cast out of My sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all people: 8. And at this house, which is high, every one that passeth by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss; and they shall say, Why hath the Lord done thus unto this land, and to this house? 9. And they shall ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a famous Arranstoun of the Court of James IV of Scotland, whose exploits had been the terror and admiration of the whole country, and who was even yet a byword for ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... "I know well that I have treated you very badly, but I heartily repent of my fault." But the maiden answered, "Your pleadings and your repentance come too late, and nothing can help you more. I dare not overlook your offence, for that would bring me disgrace, and make me a byword among the people. Twice have you sinned against me: for, firstly, you have despised my love; and, secondly, you have stolen my ring; and now you must suffer your punishment." As she spoke, she placed ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... misfortunes, instead of showing manly delicacy and desire to shield, demands not only hard but indecent conditions? Even if he purposed to marry you, what right has he to require of you such indelicate action as would make your name a byword and hissing among all your old acquaintances, and a lasting stain to your family? They would not receive you with respect again, though some might tolerate you and point you out as the girl so desperate for a husband that she submitted ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... his cloth. There was ever a fire to extinguish at his throat, nor could he veil his wanton eye at the sight of a pretty wench. Again and again the lust of preaching urged him to repent, yet he slid back upon his past gaiety, until Parson Pureney became a byword. Dismissed from Newmarket in disgrace, he wandered the country up and down in search of a pulpit, but so infamous became the habit of his life that only in prison could he find an audience fit ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... after the peace with Spain in 1670, resorted to Charleston, New York, Providence, or Boston, and under licenses granted by royal governors joined hands with the colonial free-trader or East Indian "interlopers" to make the acts of trade a byword and a reproach. New England and Dutch merchants, "regarding neither the acts of trade nor the law of nature," carried provisions to Canada during the French wars. Tobacco was taken to Holland and Scotland, or smuggled from Maryland through Pennsylvania into the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Christian citizen to do his utmost to remove it. No one of us can have a right to enjoy either riches or repose until to the extent of his ability he strive to wash himself of all share in the guilt of this fearful inequality, which will be a blot in the history of our country and make her a byword among ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... a thing to be shuddered at, a woman without a name, a byword for shame for ever?" Madame Staubach had been interrupted in her statement as to the belief entertained in respect to Linda's journey by herself and her two colleagues, and did not recur to that special point in her narrative. When ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... this he was profanely admonished by the captain and ridiculed by the men. Johnson had made the same mistake, but corrected himself in time, and nothing was said about it; but Breen was bullied and badgered in the watch below,—the lubberly nomenclature becoming a byword of derision and contempt,—until, patience leaving him, he doubled his sore fingers into fists one dog-watch, and thrashed the Irishman—his most unforgiving critic—so quickly, thoroughly, and scientifically that persecution ceased; for the Irishman had been the master spirit ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... faith in journalism as a drum for the rousing of the people against wrong. Its beat had led too often to the trickster's booth, to the cheap-jack's rostrum. It had lost its rallying power. The popular Press had made the newspaper a byword for falsehood. Even its supporters, while reading it because it pandered to their passions, tickled their vices, and flattered their ignorance, despised and disbelieved it. Here and there, an honest ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... Emanuel Swedenborg walking with stately tread through college, taking all the honors, looked upon by teachers and professors with a sort of awe, and pointed out by his fellow students in subdued wonder. His physical strength became a byword, yet we do not find he ever exercised it in contests; but it served as a protection, and commanded respect ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... to me not to betray the King and France," answered De Thou. "Know you that the preservation of your country is at stake; that if you yield to Spain our fortifications, she will never return them to us; that your name will be a byword with posterity; that French mothers will curse it when they shall be forced to teach their children a foreign ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 'The holy city shall they tread under foot'; that is, all the city constitutions, her forts and strength, her laws and privileges for a long time, shall be laid aside and slighted, shall become a hissing, a taunt, and a byword among the nations. And truly thus it was in the letter, in the destruction of Jerusalem by the king of Babylon and his wicked instruments, by whose hands the city was broken up, the walls pulled down, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... will serve our Lord full well with thee at this.' Thereafter, telling it from one to another throughout the city, they brought it to a common saying there that the most acceptable service one could render to God was to put the devil in hell, which byword, having passed the sea hither, is yet current here. Wherefore do all you young ladies, who have need of God's grace, learn to put the devil in hell, for that this is highly acceptable to Him and pleasing to both parties and much good ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... had joined us with him at the very instant of the charge that night, died in the charge; so that there was none to give explanation of his conduct. Ranjoor Singh himself was a very rock for silence. Our British officers said nothing, doubtless not suspecting the distrust; for it was a byword that Ranjoor Singh held the honor of the squadron in his hand. Yet of all the squadron only the officers and I now trusted him—the Sikh officers because they imitated the British; the British because faith is a habit with them, ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... hall will be a byword in all the neighboring settlements from this time out," said ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... We have already shown how much the monotheistic side of the Egyptian religion resembles that of modern Christian nations, and it will have come as a surprise to some that a people, possessing such exalted ideas of God as the Egyptians, could ever have become the byword they did through their alleged worship of a multitude of "gods" in various forms. It is quite true that the Egyptians paid honour to a number of gods, a number so large that the list of their mere names would fill a volume, but it is equally true ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge |
