"Gibbet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still while he terrorizes the whole country? While he 'hustles' every head of stock from us, and—and spirits it away? No, if we spend fortunes upon his capture we must not rest until he swings from a gibbet at the end of his ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... understand. Some thought him a negro just from Guinea, who had either fallen overboard, or escaped from a slave-ship. Nothing, however, could ever draw from him any account of his origin. When questioned on the subject, he merely pointed to Gibbet-Island, a small rocky islet, which lies in the open bay, just opposite to Communipaw, as if that were his native place, though every body knew it had ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... were men of present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free, Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... name, amid cries of scorn and malicious exultation, or of commiseration more bitter to bear than either. At length he cleared the town, but here a no less fearful trial awaited him. The carriage turned out of the high road into a narrow, unfrequented path—a path which led to the gibbet, and alongside which, by command of the prince, he was borne at a slow pace. After he had suffered all the torture of anticipated execution the carriage turned off into the public road. Exposed to the sultry ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Boston in flames and Quebec triumphant, and the print explains that thus popery and tyranny will triumph over true religion, virtue and liberty. Among the other personages, look at the kneeling figure of a Catholic priest, with cross in one hand and gibbet in the other, assisting King George, as the print again says, in enforcing his tyrannical system of civil and religious liberty: What do you think of that? Does it look like the real fellowship for us which they profess in their ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... principles of honour, he engages in criminal pursuits that injure his country: which at the same time has been to him nothing more than a step-mother. In the paroxysm of his rage, in the exacerbation of his mind, he loses sight of his neighbour's rights, he overlooks the gibbet, he forgets the torture; his unruly desires have become too potent—they have completely absorbed his mind; by a criminal indulgence they have given an inveteracy to his habits which preclude him from changing them; laziness ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... people, and of modern democracy itself. The great work of emancipation had to be sealed, therefore, with the blood of the just, even as it was inaugurated with the blood of the just. The tragic history of the abolition of slavery, which opened with the gibbet of John Brown, will close ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... doubt right in considering the lucubrations of the poet Baudelaire, and his necrophile imagination of his own carrion hung on a gibbet and devoured by vultures, as a mixture of sadism and masochism. He sought out the most repulsive women of all races, Chinese, negresses, dwarfs, giants, or modern women as artificial as possible, to satisfy his pathological instinct. ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... ma'am, where the gibbet used to stand," replied John, who was bringing in the muffins. "It's no nonsense, my lady. Every word as that man says comes true, and he ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... Huguenots had been too strong to be attacked, and in those castles where the seigneur was of "the religion." The Catholic party thought the destruction complete, the court went in state to return thanks for deliverance from a supposed plot, while Coligny's body was hung on a gibbet. The Pope ordered public thanksgivings, while Queen Elizabeth put on mourning, and the Emperor Maximilian II., alone among Catholic princes, showed any horror or indignation. But the heart of the unhappy young king ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... those joys the sons of pleasure know Extorted from his fellow-creature's woe. Here while the courtier glitters in brocade, 315 There the pale artist plies the sickly trade; Here while the proud their long-drawn pomps display, There the black gibbet glooms beside the way, The dome where pleasure holds her midnight reign Here, richly decked, admits the gorgeous train: 320 Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square, The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare. Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy! Sure these ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... damn bad, Tupcombe! I can hardly keep my seat. I shall never be any better, I fear! Have we passed Three-Man-Gibbet yet?' ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... book as possible, for the original, and then to complain of the unfaithfulness of the resemblance. Madame Sand's taste and higher art-instincts would have revolted against the practice—now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior writers—of forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet of well-known personalities, with little or no disguise; and Chopin himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, read her work without perceiving in it any intention there to portray their relations to each other, which, indeed, had differed essentially from those ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... it is the council's pleasure, For more example in so bad a case, A gibbet be erected in Cheapside, Hard by the Standard; whether you must bring Lincoln and those that were the chief ...
— Sir Thomas More • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... fear not. He is very headstrong, and would rather have his joke on the gibbet than own ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... that a scholar may be familiarized to Greek and Latin, though a stranger to his vernacular literature; and that a verbal critic may sometimes be successful in his attempts on a single word, though he may be incapable of tasting an entire sentence. Let it also remain as a gibbet on the high roads of literature; that "conjectural critics" as they pass may not forget the unhappy fate ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... were taken into custody and had not the better counsel of the staid and solid men prevailed, the sheriff and those who aided him might have been hung to a gibbet erected in the court-house yard. On the fifteenth Captain Cochran and forty Green Mountain Boys, who had been apprised of the terrible affair, marched over the mountain to arraign themselves upon the side of the Whigs if the matter should come to real warfare. But fortunately further ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... other steps languidly in roadways well worn. He is not even amusing any longer. The contriver of wonderful orchestral machines, the man who penetrated into the death-chamber and stood under the gibbet, has turned to toying with his medium, to imitating other composers, Mozart in "Der Rosenkavalier," Haendel in "Joseph's Legende," Offenbach and Lully (a coupling that only Strauss has the lack of taste to bring about) in "Ariadne auf Naxos." He has become increasingly facile and unoriginal, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... None, I believe, ever thought that before. But the same wood, I suppose, that makes the gibbet could make the mast of a man-of-war. I tell you, however, why you have taken this fancy to me,—the strong sympathize with the strong. You, too, could ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cannon plane Death's lightning-riven lane, Levelling that unskill'd valour, rude, unled: —Yet happier in their fate Than whom the war-fiends wait To rend them limb from limb, the gibbet-withering dead! ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... panel, the victuals were transferred with safety and despatch. It was built entirely of stone, having a conical roof with a turret at the top for the escape of steam and smoke. A fire was still burning, provided with a large cauldron suspended on a sort of versatile gibbet, by which contrivance it could be withdrawn from the flame. Fire-rakes and fire-jacks were laid on the hearth, and around the walls were iron pots, trivets, pans, kettles, ladles, platters, and other implements of domestic economy. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... struck a light, decorated his guest with an old night-gown, and, having made him take off a cordial, requested to know what had brought him to the gibbet. It would have been a truly singular exhibition, observed Junker, to have seen me, at that late hour, engaged in a tete-a-tete with a dead man ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... in a quick, involuntary glance, then turned to the ruined tower. He saw it against the northern sky as they came from the south, and, blackened by the lightning, it accentuated the desolation of the dunes. In itself, it looked sinister as a broken gibbet. "If the marabout had a strong preference for the place, he didn't betray it," was the only answer he could make. "Have you ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... nothing in the shape of a prison,—this delectable institution being the work and discovery of civilization. Our Irishman might indeed, without a bull, with his back to The Desert, and his face to the civilized communities of the Coast, exclaim, on sight of the first prison and gibbet, "Thank God, I am out of the land of Barbarians, and have reached the land of Civilization!" Of fines, I heard of no other case than that of the Sultan fining two strangers a couple of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... thought it would do any good to the rising generation, I would cheerfully give my consent to the disinterment of the bones of any genteel highwayman (the more genteel, the more cheerfully), and to their exposure, piecemeal, on any sign-post, gate, or gibbet, that might be deemed a good elevation for the purpose. My reason is as well convinced that these gentry were as utterly worthless and debauched villains, as it is that the laws and jails hardened them in their ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... surly grace; But, lost in thoughtless ease and empty show, Behold the warriour dwindled to a beau; Sense, freedom, piety, refin'd away, Of France the mimick, and of Spain the prey. All that at home no more can beg or steal, Or like a gibbet better than a wheel; Hiss'd from the stage, or hooted from the court, Their air, their dress, their politicks, import; [p]Obsequious, artful, voluble and gay, On Britain's fond credulity they prey. No gainful trade their industry can 'scape, [q]They ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... gentleman will allow me to show my gratitude. Who the villains were from whom you rescued the duke we have been as yet unable to ascertain, but there can be no doubt that their purpose was to murder him; indeed, preparations for hanging some one were found made this morning under the gibbet at Tyburn; and coupling this with a threatening letter received a few days ago by the duke, we suspect that they intended to put him thus ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... they demanded sepulture; or they had committed a wrong, and wished to make restitution; or they had left debts which they were anxious to pay; or they had advice, or warnings, or threats to communicate; or they had been murdered, and were determined to bring their assassins to the gibbet. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... doubtless produce. Cromwell—Roundhead and rebel as he is—unless he be marvellously changed—has generosity enough to guarantee the youth's safety, were he a thousand times more dangerous than he can be. Whatever may be my fate, his will be a happy one. They may leave me to rot upon a gibbet, so he and my sweet Barbara ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... the ideals of a pitiless industrialism, were sufficiently expressed along the busy shores, where the innumerable derricks of oil- wells silhouetted their gibbet shapes against the horizon, and the myriad chimneys of the foundries sent up the smoke of their torment into the quiet skies and flamed upon the forehead of the evening like baleful suns. But why should I be so violent of phrase against these guiltless means of millionairing? There must be iron ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a gentleman, a knight of Cappadocia, and have left all for to serve the God of heaven. Then the provost enforced himself to draw him unto his faith by fair words, and when he might not bring him thereto he did do raise him on a gibbet; and so must beat him with great staves and broches of iron, that his body was all tobroken in pieces. And after he did do take brands of iron and join them to his sides, and his bowels which then appeared he did do frot with salt, and so sent him ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... deal, and because he was younger, more reckless, less prudent, than he of riper years, he had incautiously put himself in the power of Morgan and had been hanged with short shrift. Benjamin, standing upon the outskirts of the crowd jesting and roaring around the foot of the gibbet, with a grief and rage in his heart at his impotency, presently found himself hating his old captain with a fierceness proportioned to his devotion in the past. For he had appealed for mercy personally to Morgan by the memory of his ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... brutalizing scenes before a cultured audience, but the crowds who came to an Elizabethan play were of a temper to enjoy a Mohawk scalp dance. They were accustomed to violent scenes and sensations; they had witnessed the rack and gibbet in constant operation; they were familiar with the sight of human heads decorating the posts of London Bridge or carried about on the pikes of soldiers. After witnessing such horrors free of cost, they would follow their queen and pay their money to see a chained bear ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... the midst of the which disorders came one, from beyond seas, whom men called Ivo, who by might of sword and cunning tongue made himself Duke in my place. Sir Benedict told of a fierce and iron rule, of the pillage and ravishment of town and city, of outrage and injustice, of rack and flame and gibbet—of a people groaning 'neath a thousand cruel wrongs. Then, indeed, did I see that my one great sin a thousand other sins had bred, and was I full of bitter sorrow and anguish. And, in my anguish, I thought on thee, and sent to thee Sir Benedict, and watched ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... neighbouring parish where I was born, and the village carpenter came to my father to borrow a pair of Wellington boots for the lower limbs of a stuffed effigy of Buonaparte, which was hung on a gibbet, and guns and pistols were discharged at him, while we and the parson of the parish sat in a tent where we had beef and plum pudding and loyal toasts. To this hour I remember the smell of the new-cut hay in the meadow as we went in our best summer clothes ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... that it was agreeable to the girl also, she said in herself, 'Why do I weary myself in vain? These two love and know each other and both are friends of my husband. Their desire is an honourable one and meseemeth it is pleasing to God, since the one of them hath scaped the gibbet and the other the lance-thrust and both the wild beasts of the wood; wherefore be it as they will.' Then, turning to the lovers, she said to them, 'If you have it still at heart to be man and wife, it is my pleasure also; be it so, and let the nuptials be celebrated here at Lionello's ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... tiptoe rais'd, like one prepared to fly. Yon wight behold, whose sole aspiring hope Eccentrick soars to catch the hangman's rope. In order rang'd, with date of place and time, Each owner's name, his parentage and crime, High on his walls, inscribed to glorious shame, Unnumber'd halters gibbet him to Fame. ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... 1724 that incomparable young rascal, Jack Sheppard, used to frequent the "Bible" public-house—a printers' house of call—at No. 13. There was a trap in one of the rooms by which Jack could drop into a subterraneous passage leading to Bell Yard. Tyburn gibbet cured Jack of this trick. In 1738 the lane went on even worse, for there Thomas Carr (a low attorney, of Elm Court) and Elizabeth Adams robbed and murdered a gentleman named Quarrington at the "Angel and ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Lucrezia heard the tidings with more firmness, and proceeded to dress herself to go to the chapel, exhorting Beatrice to resignation; but she, raving, wrung her, hands and struck her head against the wall, shrieking, "To die! to die! Am I to die unprepared, on a scaffold! on a gibbet! My God! my God!" This fit led to a terrible paroxysm, after which the exhaustion of her body enabled her mind to recover its balance, and from that moment she became an angel of humility and an example ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was performed in accordance with a special order or direction of the court, given, probably, in most cases, verbally to the sheriff. After execution, the body of the felon was taken from the gallows and hung upon a gibbet conveniently near the place where the fact was committed, there to remain, until, from the action of the elements, or the ravages of birds of prey, it disappeared. Of the object of this ghastly feature of capital ...
— The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis, Slaves of Capt. John Codman • Abner Cheney Goodell, Jr.
... the confession is maintained in the face of opposition, and that the denial is a cowardly attempt to save one's skin at the cost of treason to Jesus. The temptation does not come in that sharpest form to us. Perhaps some cowards would be made brave if it did. It is perhaps easier to face the gibbet and the fire, and screw oneself up for once to a brief endurance, than to resist the more specious blandishments of the world, especially when it has been christened, and calls itself religious. The light laugh of scorn, the silent pressure of the low average of Christian character, the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... have thy reward. And now I rede thee go not to the Burg of the Four Friths; for this tale of thee shall get about and they shall take thee, if it were out of the very Frith-stool, and there for thee should be the scourge and the gibbet; for they of that Burg be robbers and murderers merciless. Yet well it were that thou ride hence presently; for those be behind my tormentors whom thou hast slain, who will be as an host to thee, and thou mayst not deal with them. If thou follow my rede, thou wilt take the way that goeth ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... they regularly practise the denunciation of Atheists in language foul as it is false. They call them 'traitors to human kind,' yea 'murderers of the human soul,' and unless hypocrites, or much better than their sentiments, would rather see them swing upon the gibbet than murderers of the body, especially if like John Tawell, 'promoters of religion ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... disgusts. He seems to say, "I am a villain. I know that I am so, and I am proud of being so. To obtain the rank I possess I have respected no human laws, and I bid defiance to all Divine vengeance. I might be murdered or hanged, but it is impossible to degrade me. On a gibbet or in the palace of a Prince, seized by the executioner or dining with Sovereigns, I am, I will, and I must, always remain the same. Infamy cannot debase me, nor is it in the power of grandeur to exalt me." General, Ambassador, Field-marshal, First Consul, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... gone I kicked the hedge to pieces quickly, cut the twitch-ups at the butts and threw them with their wire nooses far into the thickets, and posted a warning in a cleft stick on the site of the last gibbet. Then I followed Wally to a second and third line of snares, which were treated in the same rough way, and watched him with curiously mingled feelings of detestation and amusement as he sneaked down the dense hillside with tread light as Leatherstocking, the old gun over his ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. And here, appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this stone was never ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deals with the sea, so he deals with the wind and rain and snow and vapour and fire. Those who love Victor Hugo will think of a hundred examples of what I mean, from the burning castle in "Ninety-three," to the wind-rocked gibbet on the Isle of Portland, when the child hero of the "Man who ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... wicked in the times, and cheatery rampant indeed," I thought, "when the common gibbet of Inneraora has a drunkard's convoy on either hand to ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... things visibly; but none sees but themselves; for instance, if a man's fatal end be hanging, they will see a gibbet, or a rope about his neck: if beheaded, they will see the man without a head; if drowned, they will see water up to his throat; if unexpected death, they will see a winding sheet about his head: all which are represented ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... know the awful gibbet's anguish, Not they who, while sad years go by them, in The sunless cells of lonely prisons languish, Do suffer ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... subject, for reasons which will appear presently, to the gravest suspicion. James, if himself guilty of the plot, had to invent a story to excuse himself; the other man had to adopt the version of the King, to save his own life from the gibbet. On the other hand, James, if innocent, could not easily have a credible story to tell. If the Master was sane, it was hardly credible that, as James averred, he should menace the King with murder, in his brother's house, with no traceable preparations either for flight ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... in an authoritative tone. "Are ye mad?" he said, "or would ye execute an act of justice as if it were a crime and a cruelty? This sacrifice will lose half its savour if we do not offer it at the very horns of the altar. We will have him die where a murderer should die, on the common gibbet—we will have him die where he spilled the blood of ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... sophistical argumentation in which this doctrine has been habited, its naked nature is an effort to organize insurrection against the laws of the United States; to interpose the arm of state sovereignty between rebellion and the halter, and to rescue the traitor from the gibbet. Although conducted under the auspices of state sovereignty, it would not the less be levying war against the Union; but, as a state cannot be punished for treason, nullification cases herself in the complete steel of sovereign power." "The citizen of the ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... involves the fate of a king, multiplies all the circumstances of horrour. The babe, whose finger is used, must be strangled in its birth; the grease must not only be human, but must have dropped from a gibbet, the gibbet of a murderer; and even the sow, whose blood is used, must have offended nature by devouring her own farrow. These are touches of judgment ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... was at the zenith of its power, when it was denied that woman has a soul, when she was bought and sold as the cattle of the field, robbed of her name, her children, her property, and "elevated" (?) on the gibbet of infamy, and on the high altar of lust by the ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... rocks, in order to get salvage, the said lord, the salvers, and all concerned, are declared to be accursed and excommunicated, and punished as thieves and robbers; and the pilot condemned to be hanged upon a high gibbet, which is to abide and remain to succeeding ages, on the place where erected, as a visible caution to other ships sailing thereby. Nor was the fate of the lord of the coast less severe,—his property was to be confiscated, and himself fastened to a post in ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... who is for independence, and who is not? Those who are for it, will support it, and the remainder will undoubtedly see the reasonableness of paying the charges; while those who oppose or seek to betray it, must expect the more rigid fate of the jail and the gibbet. There is a bastard kind of generosity, which being extended to all men, is as fatal to society, on one hand, as the want of true generosity is on the other. A lax manner of administering justice, falsely termed moderation, has a tendency both to dispirit public virtue, and promote the growth ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... that miserable Appin affair is off my mind. I know what they'll say about that: I have a good notion what they're saying already—as if I personally had a scrap of animosity to this poor creature sent to the gibbet on Leven-side." ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... the state of war, and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, self-collected and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect urbanity dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of his speech and the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... says, "I am crucified with Christ," do you suppose that the idea of a cross was in his mind? Did he intimate that sanctification is effected by a piece of wood, with a transverse beam, used as a gibbet? Or did he simply mean, I am dead to the world, and the world is dead to me, yea, and put to death (not merely dying in a natural way), through the power of the Saviour's sufferings and death on my behalf? The burial of Christ, following his death for sin, and so completing the ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... vos a werry promising cove as Capitals go. And now to see 'im cut off afore 'is time, and in such a outrageous, onnat'ral manner, touches me up, Mr. Barty, sir,—touches me up werry sharp it do! For arter all, a nice, strong gibbet vith a good long drop is qvicker, neater, and much more pleasant than an 'orse's 'oof,—now ain't it? Still," said Mr. Shrig, sighing and shaking his head again, "things is allus blackest afore the dawn, sir, and—'twixt you and ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... said Sir Richard feebly. "God has been good to me beyond my deserts, and this is a crowning mercy. Consider, Justin, it might have been the gibbet and a crowd—instead of this snug bed, and you and Bentley here—just two ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... sketches of equal skill,—but these last were mostly subjects that appalled the eye and revolted the taste: they displayed the human figure in every variety of suffering,—the rack, the wheel, the gibbet; all that cruelty has invented to sharpen the pangs of death seemed yet more dreadful from the passionate gusto and earnest force of the designer. And some of the countenances of those thus delineated were sufficiently removed from ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... anniversary of so glorious a triumph.[730] About the same time, in order to exhibit more clearly the spirit by which it was animated, the same dignified tribunal gave the order that the bodies of Francis D'Andelot and his wife should be disinterred and hanged upon a a gibbet![731] ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... which had no humour in it. "And as to deserts, he drank overmuch and beat the watch. Truly a vicious rascal! God send us all sober to bed, Uncle, and may a sudden end find nothing worse on our conscience than a dizzy brain. But that's not all. Midway between the castle and the Loire stands the Valmy gibbet, fair set in the sunshine and for all to see: and as I rode past there were two hung from it; two hang from it still, but they ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... gain their affection by showing them that the cruelties which had been committed did not originate with him, but solely in the ferocious disposition of his minister. Taking advantage of the discontent, he caused Ramiro to be massacred one morning in the market-place, and his body exposed upon a gibbet, with a cutlass near it stained with blood. The horror of this spectacle satisfied the resentment of the people and petrified them at once with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... attestation, as their names would accord in the verses of a poet. If Master Fibbet happens to tell a fiction, Master Bibbet swears it as truth. If Master Bibbet chances to have gotten drunk in the fear of the Lord, Master Fibbet swears he is sober. I have called my own secretary Gibbet, though his name chances to be only Gibeon, a worthy Israelite at your service, but as pure a youth as ever picked a lamb-bone at Paschal. But I call him Gibbet, merely to make up the holy trefoil with another rhyme. This squire of thine, Colonel Everard, looks as if he might be ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Villon and Francois Villon I, We both would mock the gibbet which the law has lifted high; HE in his meagre, shabby home, I in my roaring den— HE with his babes around him, I with my hunted men! His virtue be his bulwark—my genius should be mine!— "Go, fetch my pen, sweet Margot, and a ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... Pizarro and his faithful adherents were left weltering in their blood. Some were for dragging forth the governor's corpse to the market-place, and fixing his head upon a gibbet. But Almagro was secretly prevailed on to grant the entreaties of Pizarro's friends, and allow his interment. This was stealthily and hastily performed, in the fear of momentary interruption. A faithful attendant and his wife, with ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... the older Church. Protestantism was led by Luther and several of his associates into the same line of thought and practice. Said Luther. "To exchange anything with any one and gain by the exchange is not to do a charity; but to steal. Every usurer is a thief worthy of the gibbet. I call those usurers who lend money at five or six per cent." But it is only just to say that at a later period Luther took a much more moderate view. Melanchthon, defining usury as any interest whatever, condemned it again and again; and the Goldberg Catechism of 1558, for which ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Don Martin Panga, as leaders and chiefs, and being convicted by witnesses, were condemned to be dragged and hanged; their heads were to be cut off and exposed on the gibbet in iron cages, as an example and warning against the said crime. All their goods were to be confiscated and set apart, half for the royal treasury and half for judicial expenses. The above-mentioned appealed from the aforesaid ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... lost in contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated; wherein sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed—Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage, Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet, and Jonah appeared most manfully bouncing out of the whale like Harlequin through a ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... gibbet suddenly sprung by the hangman, the log instantly responded by turning half over. Without so much as a wail Miki was off like a shot, hit the water with a deep and solemn CHUG, and once more disappeared as completely as if he had been ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban; the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn; the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rizpah beneath the gibbet; Sisera bowing in weariness; Saul—great Saul—by the tent-prop with the jewels ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered,—like an unhooped cask upon a pole,—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... so many images of that bird, threw out the observation, loud enough, from the top of the table, 'Hah, Walrave, I see you are making yourself acquainted with the RAVENS in time, that they may not be strange to you at last,'"—when they come to eat you on the gibbet! (not a soft tongue, the Old Dessauer's). "Another day, seeing Walrave seated between two Jesuit Guests, the Prince said: 'Ah, there you are right, Walrave; there you sit safe; the Devil can't get you there!' ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... enlightened than the prelate. "I have read over," said he, "your twenty-four articles, and I find them so curiously penned, that I think that the Spanish Inquisition used not so many questions to entrap the priests." Nevertheless fines, imprisonment, and the gibbet continued to do their work in the vain attempt to put down opinions, till within four or five years of the queen's death when there ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Moor was his reviler. A Protestant wore to their bloodshot eyes the semblance of the torturer who had mocked and scourged the meek Redeemer, who had crowned his guileless head with thorns, who had pierced and slain him. The rack, the gibbet, and the stake were not enough to glut the pious hate this priestly trickery inspired. It was not enough that the doubter's life should go out in the blaze of the crackling fagots, but it must be loaded in eternity with the curses of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... witness. We should have preferred accommodations in any of the ivy-grown, steep-roofed cots about us, or in the old stone inn, with its peaked porch, where honest yokels quaffed nutty ale and a sign-board creaked and groaned from its gibbet across the road. But we had come too late in the painting-season for any other than Hobson's choice: the tidbits of grime and squalor were all taken, and we must e'en content ourselves to be mocked and reviled for the philistinism of our domestic establishing, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... the Lords of the Council and all the nobility were there, and it is a point of religious etiquette in London that in the hangman's house nobody speaks of the rope; but our poor John gave them the gibbet as well. It was a fearful thing to do, but nobody will make me believe he had not got his reasons. He hasn't been here since, but I am certain he has his eye on some fine folks, and, whoever they are, I'll bet 'my bottom dollar' they ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... included) acknowledge a woman, of whose guilt they entertain not the slightest doubt, you think you can gain your object by threatening an exposure. Don't threaten any more! Make your exposure! Go to the magistrate at once, if you like! Gibbet our names in the newspaper report, as a family connected by marriage with Mr. Sherwin the linen-draper's daughter, whom they believe to have disgraced herself as a woman and a wife for ever. Do your very worst; make public every shameful particular ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... the virtue of those who are summoned to quell an open rebellion. Dalziel was put in command of the insurgent districts, and his little finger was indeed found thicker than Turner's loins. Twenty men were hanged on one gibbet in Edinburgh and many others in various parts of the country: crowds were shipped off to the plantations: torture was freely applied, and the ingenious devices of the boot and the thumbkin were ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... hiccuping votary of Bacchus, displaying a half-emptied purse, is not likely to possess it long, for an adroit professor of legerdemain has taken aim with a hooked stick, and by one slight jerk, will convey it to his own pocket. The profession of a gentleman in a round wig is determined by a gibbet chalked upon his coat. An enraged barber, who lifts up his stick in the corner, has probably been refused payment of a wager, by the man at whom he ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... vexed, tormented, betrayed, and sold as you have been by the scoundrels of whom you have told me, I should do like an Arab of the desert—I would devote myself body and soul to vengeance. I might end by dangling from a gibbet, garroted, impaled, guillotined in your French fashion, I should not care a rap; but they should not have my head until I had crushed my ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... as give, except in giant, gigantick, gibbet, gibe, giblets, Giles, gill, gilliflower, gin, ginger, gingle, to which may ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... the great four-square gibbet which had made an end of Ritterdom in Plassenburg, I noted that there was a gathering of the hooded folk—the carrion crows. And lo! there before me, already comfortably a-swing, were our late foes, the two bravoes, and in the middle the dead Cannstadt tucked ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... the profligate Cavalier, and the psalm-singing Puritan of this most change-loving country? And one day or another I may be hung up at the yard-arm of a Commonwealth—Heaven bless the mark!—a Commonwealth cruiser!—or scare crows from a gibbet off Sheerness or Queenborough, or be made an example of for some act of piracy ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... raises its own criminals. It plows the land, sows the seed, and harvests the crop. I believe that the shadow of the gibbet will not always fall upon the earth. I believe the time will come when we shall know too much to raise criminals—know too much to crowd those that labor into the dens and dungeons that we call tenements, ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... to his scholars, and to Ireland, the spirit which he desired to see expressed in "that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet." Strange country, that has the gibbet always before the eyes and almost before the aspiration of its idealists! It was so yesterday—in all the yesterdays—and yet the reason is plain. All the aspirations of such idealists have been regarded ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... rood, gibbet; rebated cross, gammadion, fylfot, saltire, swastika, cross bottony. Associated Words: crucify, crucifixion, crucifier, cruciform, crucial, cruciate, crucigerous, crucifer, vexillum, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... recently been performing a similar "haute oeuvre." The most violent, base, and ignorant of all the attacks on Darwin at the time of the publication of the "Origin of Species" appeared in the "Quarterly Review" of that time; and I have built the reviewer a gibbet as high as Haman's. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... threescore years, has buffeted against Fate's obstruction and men's perfidy, like genius and courage amid poltroonery, dishonesty and commonplace; faithfully enduring and endeavouring,—O Parlement of Paris, dost thou reward it with a gibbet and a gag? (9th May, 1766: Biographie Universelle, para Lally.) The dying Lally bequeathed his memory to his boy; a young Lally has arisen, demanding redress in the name of God and man. The Parlement of Paris ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... interrupted the pilot "There is reason in his doubts, and they shall be appeased. I like the proud and fearless eye of the young man, and while he dreads a gibbet from my hands, I will show him how to repose a noble confidence. Read this, sir, and tell me if ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in contemplation of the blue and white tiles with which the fireplaces were decorated; wherein sundry passages of Scripture were piously portrayed. Tobit and his dog figured to great advantage; Haman swung conspicuously on his gibbet; and Jonah appeared most manfully leaping from the whale's mouth, like Harlequin ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... There is the bare back, there is the web of cloth; thou shalt cut me a coat to cover the bare back, thou whose trade it is. 'Impossible?' Hapless Fraction, dost thou discern Fate there, half unveiling herself in the gloom of the future, with her gibbet-cords, her steel-whips, and very authentic Tailor's Hell; waiting to see whether it is 'possible'? Out with thy scissors, and cut that ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... there grows so very tall that it is impossible from the ground to reach the fruit. This little flower now in my hand becomes in that climate a towering and sturdy plant, the tobacco plant. The wild justice of those lawless savannahs uses it as a gibbet for the execution of criminals, whence the term 'Lynchburg tobacco.' You cannot readily imagine the scale on which life expands. It was formerly not necessary to be a great man there to have a hundred slaves. For my part, sixty domestics sufficed me" (I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... magistrate—that's enough," said Duclosse. "He's started the court under the big tree, as the Seigneurs did two hundred years ago. He'll want a gibbet and a gallows next." ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... oh, shame to say! They were seized from behind, their arms bound behind their backs, and, in spite of their protests, led out on the watch tower, where was a permanent gibbet, and, in sight of all their ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... hotels, the first glimpse gives us an insight into its life and meaning, makes us feel that we ought to have been living two or three hundred years ago. We glance back at the railway station, wondering whether a halt were wise, whether indeed the gibbet, wheel, and stake were not really prepared ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... figure that might have fallen from a gibbet—he listening and hiding here—Barnaby first upon the spot last night—can she who has always borne so fair a name be guilty of such crimes in secret!' said the locksmith, musing. 'Heaven forgive me if I am wrong, and send me just thoughts; but she is poor, the temptation may be great, and ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... mos' ob dese yere flibberty-gibbet niggers. I don' believe in hants an' ghostes, but they's some things which I does think is signs of death. Ef somebody brings a axe in de house hits a sho sign. Yer better watch when a cow lows arter dark, or a dog barks at ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... "a column [the insignia of jurisdiction] or gibbet of stone, which is usually placed at the entrances of towns or villages; on which are ignominiously exposed the heads of persons executed or of criminals" ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... passing the villages of Chelsea and Putney, and, topping the rise beyond, they proceeded along the old Portsmouth Road, which crosses the northern part of Putney Heath. At the top of the steep hill leading down into Kingston Vale they alighted, made their way past the gibbet where swung the corpse of a well-known highwayman, Jerry Abershaw, long the terror of travellers on that road. Did Pitt know that libellers likened him to the highwayman; for "Jerry took purses with his pistols, and Pitt with his Parliaments"? Lower down Pitt and ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... festival was held, according to the annual custom, on the last day of the Hindoo year. There were fewer gibbet posts erected at Serampore, but we hear that amongst the swingers was one female. A man fell from a stage thirty cubits high and broke his back; and another fell from a swinging post, but was not much hurt. Some days after the first swinging, certain natives revived the ceremonies. As Mr. ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... feet, the miserable men were launched into eternity. A barge was then brought alongside, into which the bodies were lowered, and carried to Fort Ricasoli, at the entrance of the great harbour. Four of the bodies, being sewn up in tarred canvas, were hung in chains to a lofty gibbet; while two were buried beneath it. For many long months afterwards the four pirates hung there,—a terrible and disgusting sight, and an awful warning to all who might be inclined to ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... stretching. Each of these different courses of the river they call "reaches." They have their long reach and their short reach, and a number of reaches, under local, or less obvious names. Some are named after some of their own pirates, which is here and there designated by a gibbet; a singular object, be sure, to greet the eye of a stranger on entering the grand watery avenue of the capital of the British empire. But there is no room for disputing concerning our tastes. The reach where our prison was moored was about three miles below Chatham; and is named from the village ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... detailed by witnesses. When your secret conference with those vile instruments—not yet so vile as yourself—whom it has pleased you to use as tools, were made known before a court and jury, your brazen impudence would depart, and the specter of a gibbet in the distance—and but a short distance, too—would pale your unblushing cheek and palsy your false tongue, skillful as you may have been in casting blame upon others by deceptive and lying words. When it was proved that you stole my father's horse; that you are responsible for the absence ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... occupant unmanned him. And he saw besides, as he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a changeful light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived his terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... the occasion, and directed several of his nobles to forcibly drag the Earl of March from the apartments of the guilty pair, and in 1330 he became the Earl of Double-Quick March—a sort of forced March—towards the gibbet, where he was last seen trying to stand on the English climate. The queen was kept in close confinement during the rest of her life, and the morning papers of that time contained nothing of a social ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... the town, De Soto passed a high gibbet upon which three malefactors were hung in chains, swaying in the breeze. That revolting spectacle revealed the sad truth that in Peru, as well as elsewhere, man's fallen nature developed itself in crime and woe. The Emperor had also a large standing army, and the country ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... generals were obliged to give an account of their conduct; and they all were made responsible for the events of the war. Ill success was punished there as a crime against the state; and whenever a general lost a battle, he was almost sure, at his return, of ending his life upon a gibbet. Such was the furious, cruel, and barbarous disposition of the Carthaginians, who were always ready to shed the blood of their citizens as well as of foreigners. The unheard-of tortures which they made Regulus suffer, are a manifest proof of this assertion; and their history will ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... In an unusually bloodthirsty moment Ambrose had once suggested really putting out her eyes with red-hot gauffering-irons, but this was overruled, and Jemima's eyes, pale blue and quite expressionless, continued to stare placidly on the stake, gibbet, or block, as ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... said I, 'will you? Infamous scoundrel! it is for such as you that the gibbet is erected. Know that the blood which flows in my veins is noble, and purer in every sense than yours. Yes,' I added, 'I do know what has happened to your son; and if you irritate me further, I will have him strangled before morning; and I promise you the consolation ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... husband and his favourite, ran away to France, and there, with the help of the Count of Hainault and other friends in England, she raised an army and attacked and defeated her husband and his favourite. The young Despenser was hanged on a gibbet fifty feet high, and a Parliament was called to decide what should be ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... inconvenient to Pope Alexander VI. On the 23rd of May, 1498, he met his doom in the great piazza at Florence where in happier days he had held the multitude spell-bound by his burning eloquence. There sentence was passed upon him. Stripped of his black Dominican robe and long white tunic, he was bound to a gibbet, strangled by a halter, and his dead body consumed by fire, his ashes being thrown into the river Arno. Such was the miserable end of the great Florentine preacher, whose strange and complex character ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... the book she was reading. Beyond, through the open window and door, the fire was also slowly fading from the sky and the mountain ridge whence the sun had dropped half an hour before. The view was uphill, and the sky-line of the hill was marked by two or three gibbet-like poles from which, on a now invisible line between them, depended certain objects—mere black silhouettes against the sky—which bore weird likeness to human figures. Absorbed as she was in her book, she nevertheless ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... in this hour of tragic failure. Here are your enemies triumphant at the gate, thirsting for your blood. Beyond that gate, betrayal, torture, and public shame are waiting for you. In the background of all stands the cruel gibbet to which your own countrymen, the people you have loved with an all-absorbing love, shall presently commit you. Tell me what you would pray in like circumstances. Your agony would be just as great as that of Jesus, though perhaps your prayer ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... Noisy has made (without a pun) some noise in history. One of its ancient lords, Enguerrand de Marigny, was the inventor of the famous gibbet of Montfaucon, and in the poetic justice which should ever govern such cases he came to be hung on his own gallows. He was convicted of manifold extortions, and launched by the common executioner into that eternity whither he could carry none of his ill-gotten gains with him. Here, at least, we ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... "Gentlemen; it is enough for me to look upon the life of this most beautiful and accomplished of her sex, blasted by the heartless villainy of man, without seeing, at the-end of it; the horrible spectacle of a gibbet. Gentlemen, we are all human, we have all sinned, we all have need of mercy. But I do not ask mercy of you who are the guardians of society and of the poor waifs, its sometimes wronged victims; I ask only that justice which you and I shall need in that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to be hanged with his face toward the people, but a female with her face toward the gibbet. So says Rabbi Eliezer; but the sages say the man only is hanged, not the woman. Rabbi Eliezer retorted, "Did not Simeon the son of Shetach hang women in Askelon?" To this they replied, "He indeed caused eighty women to be hanged, though two criminals are ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... the town of Ostend consisted altogether of some score of houses and three hundred cottages, huts or hovels built of the driftwood of wrecked vessels, it nevertheless rejoiced in the possession of a governor, a garrison, a forked gibbet, a convent, and a burgomaster, in short, in all the institutions of ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... that the faithful discharge of your duty may expose you to gaol or gibbet ... is not very complimentary to the freedom of the Government under whose protection you are placed. Situated as you are in the burning centre of excitement, and aware of the high hopes, as well as high-handed measures of your ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... the beneficial working of the later law? A blessing has been conferred on society, and in a manner highly creditable to the spirit of modern times; reform has been accomplished, not by persecution, not by the gibbet and the rack, but by justice and tolerance. The traveller has flung aside his cloak, not compelled by the angry buffeting of the north wind, but because the mild, benignant weather makes such a defence no longer necessary. The law no longer compels the Gitanos to stand ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... of John Hill's information. We passed on, and in due time I reported what I had heard to the Rector. He was able to show me from the parish account-books that a gibbet had been paid for in 1684, and a grave dug in the following year, both for the benefit of George Martin; but he was unable to suggest anyone in the parish, Saunders being now gone, who was likely to throw any further light on ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... employment, take the hundred reals, and, some time to-morrow, be sure you get out of this island, nor set foot in it again these ten years, unless you would finish your banishment in the next life: for if I find you here, I will make you swing on a gibbet—at least the hangman shall do it for me: so let no man reply, or he ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... endeavoured to see what there was about it which had once arrested my attention, and came to the conclusion that it was its exceptional situation on the dock, and the ghostly effect of the hoisting-beam projecting from the upper story like a gibbet. And yet this beam was common to many a warehouse in the vicinity, though in none of them were there any such signs of life as proceeded from the curious mixture of sail loft, boat shop, and drinking saloon, now before me. Could it ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... beheld his first view end In a favourite prospects church that was ruin'd- But alas! what a sight did the next cut exhibit! At the end of the walk hung a rogue on a gibbet! He beheld it and wept, for it caused him to muse on Full many a Campbell that died with his shoes on. All amazed and aghast at the ominous scene, He order'd it quick to be closed up again With a clump of Scotch firs that ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... destruction. Of course, we shall not convert ourselves into a nation of Iscariots, and give over civilization to the bowie-knife, with the mere hope of so making money out of Southern trade,—which we should not do,—and with the certainty of a gibbet in history, to mention no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... ship until he could restore order. The sequel was that he received the august thanks of the Viceroy of Chili and a gold medal from His Catholic Majesty. As was the custom, the guilty slaves, poor wretches, were condemned to be dragged to the gibbet at the tails of mules, to be hanged, their bodies burned, and their heads stuck upon poles in ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... Saumaise, in displaying his teeth, signified that the least of his worries was the thought of the gibbet. ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... should enter the enclosure, on pain of death, and that no one should make the least noise, nor even speak loud. Accordingly, on the 30th of April, 1586, the first to enter the barrier was the chief justice and his officers, and the executioner to plant the gibbet, not merely as a matter of ceremony. Fontana went to receive the benediction of the pope, who, after having bestowed it, told him to be cautious of what he did, for a failure would certainly cost him his head. On this occasion, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner |
