"Unenviable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... here of the "Divine Aretino," as with heroic impudence the notorious publicist styles himself. The sensual type is preserved, but rendered acceptable, and in a sense attractive, by a certain assurance and even dignity of bearing, such as success and a position impregnable of its unique and unenviable kind may well have lent to the adventurer in his maturity. Even Titian's brush has not worked with greater richness and freedom, with an effect broader or more entirely legitimate than in the head with its softly flowing beard and ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... cafe, he had cut a bullying hussar's head clean off with his own sabre for knocking a woman down; and in another duel, where he had detected a French count cheating him at cards, he shot his nose off for a bet. With this unenviable reputation, and at the urgent solicitations of his agent, after years of absence he returned to his ancestral home. We met as of old—it was Paul and Henry—and though still the same restive, hot-headed spirit as he had ever been, he yet always listened ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... United States Commissioner of Labor, and a congressional committee devoted their time to numerous investigations, thereby giving immense satisfaction to those obscure agitators who were lifted suddenly into the glare of universal notoriety, to the disgust of the town thus dragged into unenviable publicity, and to ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... was not one of those who possess the rather questionable and at times unenviable accomplishment of pleasing every one. He was wise enough to distrust those astonishing personages who are always praising everybody. In looking about us, we often see men of success and reputation, who are ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... the assistance of Dunn, and succeeded in relieving him from his unenviable situation. Not satisfied, however, they succeeded, after a hard struggle, in getting him upon the floor, when the Dutchman-after calling the assistance of a miserable negro, held him down while Dunn beat him with his stick. His cries of ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... offers no more interesting case between poet and critic than that of John Keats. The imputed influence of a savage critique in hastening the death of the poet has given the Quarterly Review an unenviable notoriety which clings in spite of the efforts of scholars to establish the truth. To many students, Keats, Endymion, and Quarterly are practically connotative terms; and this is a direct result ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... the occasion were bribed to reveal the "menu." Dining room windows had to be located conveniently to allow free inspection from the street of the dainties served; the passing Imperial food inspector did not like to intrude upon the sanctity of the host's home. The pitiable host of those days, his unenviable guests and the bewildered cooks, however, contrived and conspired somehow to get up a banquet that was a trifle better than ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... because they and the old cannot converse on the same common topics; and of the old that survive, there are few one can commence a friendship with, because one has probably all one's life despised their heart or their understandings. These are the steps through which one passes to the unenviable lees of life! ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... at longer or shorter intervals, to thrust itself upon public attention. Meanwhile it was not the only instance of abuse of power on the part of the Executive to which the people of Upper Canada were constrained to submit. Several other notable contemporaneous examples shared with it in the unenviable work of widening the breach between the Government and the people, and in destroying popular confidence in the impartial administration of justice. It is a rather singular fact that of all the many high-handed ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Mr. Gifford; I won't call it, as it seems at first sight, wildly improbable, but it is at any rate an almost incredible coincidence. With your knowledge of the law I need scarcely remind you that the facts as you have just recounted them place you in a rather unenviable position." ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... end of the Foam; and such will, in every ease, probably be the concluding scene of piratical craft and their crews now-a-days. They certainly deserve no better; and although their captains, to rise to that unenviable post, must possess some of those fiercer qualities which people are apt to admire, I have no fancy for making them interesting characters, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... the Recollets at this time was unenviable. The agents of the merchants were not better disposed towards them than the interpreters. Some of these agents were demoralized, and the reproach that they received from the fathers caused them to avoid their presence. The conduct of some of these ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... never been charged with a want of spirit; on the contrary, they are proverbially "plucky," and yet the House is never disgraced by those shameful brawls which have given to our legislative assemblies, state and national, so unenviable a reputation throughout the civilized world. How does this happen? To Englishmen it does not seem a very difficult matter to manage. If one member charges another with ungentlemanly or criminal conduct, he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... as in Committee of the Whole, having been concurred in, etc., the Joint Resolution, as originally reported by the Judiciary Committee, was at last passed, (April 8th)—by a vote of 38 yeas to 6 nays—Messrs. Hendricks and McDougall having the unenviable distinction of being the only two Senators, (mis-)representing Free States, who voted against this definitive ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... about his neck, and kissed him. It was very reprehensible, I suppose. Young people were honestly friendly in those days, and seldom had a chaperone; yet they did not play at love, unless they were real flirts; and a flirt soon gained an unenviable reputation. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... conflict with his own honesty. If he values his skin, he must accommodate himself to current dogmas and refrain from truthful comments and conclusions. He has the choice of being a chronologer or a ballad-monger-obsolete and unimportant occupations. Unenviable fate of those who aspire to be teachers of mankind, that they themselves should be studied with a kind of antiquarian interest, stimulating thought not otherwise than as warning examples! Clio has fallen from her pedestal. That radiant creature, in identifying her interests with ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... back to his room again, in a most unenviable frame of mind; not even the prospect of being delivered from the goddess could reconcile him to the price he must pay for it. He was going to take a plunge into downright crime now; and if his friend the inspector came ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... to despair. There are few conditions in life so utterly unenviable as penury and love—to be next door to starving, and at the same time in love. Day after day Shiel, who was thus afflicted, had revelled in Gladys's company, and had intoxicated himself with her beauty, fully aware that for each moment of pleasure there would, later on, be a corresponding ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... Shouting "H-o-i!!" at a person close enough to hear a whisper, as loud as though he were a good mile away, is a peculiarity of the Persians that has often irritated travellers to the pitch of wishing they had a hot potato and the dexterity to throw it down their throats; and in my present unenviable condition, and its accompanying unenviable frame of mind, I don't mind admitting that I mentally relegated this vociferous melon-vender to a place where infinitely worse than hot potatoes would overtake ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... for treating with England, that he had held out hopes to the French government which were totally unauthorized, that he had brought on a renewal of the hostilities of that government, and that he had placed us in all ways in the most unenviable light, Washington recalled him, and appointed Charles Cotesworth Pinckney in his place. By this time too he was thoroughly disgusted with Monroe's performances, and in his letter to Pinckney, on July 8, 1796, offering ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... be wise to trust yourself ashore alone with those fellows?" I asked. "You must remember that we have seen very little of them, thus far; and it will be well to keep in mind, too, the fact that they have rather an unenviable reputation for treachery. Why not order so many canoe-loads of wood from them, and let it ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... served by Butler's acquittal. But in the light of after events, it is perhaps unfortunate that the jury did not stretch a point and so save the life of Mr. Munday of Toowong. Butler underwent his term of imprisonment in Littleton Jail. There his reputation was most unenviable. He is described by a fellow prisoner as ill-tempered, malicious, destructive, but cowardly and treacherous. He seems to have done little or no work; he looked after the choir and the library, but was not above breaking up the one and smashing ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... been advanced concerning the supreme position of Adriano Lemmi, who, further, himself denies it, and, whatever his past history, is as much entitled to belief as accusers who betray their true character in this unenviable manner. ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... the name Frothi, which appears so often in the Danish line of kings that its reappearance would cause no difficulty; and his retention of Frothi as the slayer of his brother is additional evidence that to him, not to Ingjald, was this unenviable rle first assigned. Ingjald, whom he has in his story about Hrolf Kraki, he also retained, but in a different relationship from that in his second book. It will be observed that Saxo merely shifted the name Halfdan from father to son, and that Harald, almost a ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... Irish family has not its Family Ghost? A banshee—the heritage of Niall of the Nine Hostages—is still the unenviable possession of his descendants, the O'Donnells, and I, who am a member of the clan, have both seen and heard it several times. As it appears to me, it resembles the decapitated head of a prehistoric woman, and I shall never forget my feelings ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... and though she had been generally condemned for it, her woman's prerogative was recognized nevertheless. But for a lady, and ward of a priest, to dance in public and for money, was a thing unheard of; and gossip was fast giving her an unenviable reputation. This latest escapade, as it was generally termed, had nearly cost her her position in the school. When, however, it was taken into consideration that her services were gratuitous and that ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... Gwen stayed in the playground until the bell rang, fuming with indignation. Every fresh little episode seemed to serve to make her more of an alien in the Form than ever. But here her decision was absolutely justifiable; not one of the girls would have cared to accept the unenviable role which they had wished to thrust upon her. Perhaps for that very reason they were all the more annoyed at her action. She was received with black looks when she re-entered the classroom. Elspeth Frazer whispered something to a friend, and turned away. ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... hour, but presently there came the distinct dip of oars. In spite of my unenviable position I felt excited. I thought there were two boats. Naturally there would be. The dinghy was small; crew and confederates could ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... catalogue of his books is almost the first classically arranged one in the eighteenth century: and it must be confessed that the collection was both curious and valuable. Bridges was succeeded by ANTHONY COLLINS,[379] the Free Thinker; a character equally strange and unenviable. Book-fanciers now and then bid a few shillings, for a copy of the catalogue of his library; and some sly free-thinkers, of modern date, are not backward in shewing a sympathy in their predecessor's fame, by the readiness ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... sitting with half-a-dozen friends in the chess-room at Very's, about eleven o'clock on the night of the twentieth of December, talking over some of the marvellous successes which had been won by Paul Morphy when in Paris, and the unenviable position in which Howard Staunton had placed himself by keeping out of the lists through evident fear of the New-Orleanian, when Adolph Von Berg came behind me and laid his hand on ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... side of Church street, and so crabbed in appearance that you might, without endangering your reputation, have sworn it had incorporated in its framework a portion of that chronic disease for which the State has gained for itself an unenviable reputation. Jutting out of the black, moss-vegetating roof, is an old-maidish looking window, with a dowdy white curtain spitefully tucked up at the side. The mischievous young negroes have pecked half the bricks ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... thought it would be much better to make some kind of effort to elevate the Negro than to grieve about what was already done. So the idea of a manual training-school was advanced by two gentlemen, one of whom is a stanch Southerner, who for a long time had the unenviable reputation of believing and openly advocating the strange and illogical theory that the Negro has no soul; the other is a minister of Southern birth, but of Northern education. Infatuated with the prospects of ultimate success, and having, it seems providentially, come ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 9, September, 1896 • Various
... would be strange if these peculiar forms of dependence did not appear in the avian community. We do find such developments in that department of creation. Across the waters there is one bird that has won an unenviable reputation as a parasite: the European cuckoo relies almost wholly on the efforts of its more thrifty neighbors to hatch and rear its young, and thereby perpetuate the species. Strangely enough, our American cuckoos are not given to such slovenly habits, but build their own nests and faithfully ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... our Officers from a neighbourhood which has, by reason of the atrocities perpetrated in it, obtained an unenviable renown, even among similar districts of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... with the Governor General, Mr. Gohr, the Director of Justice—who at present is in the unenviable position of having many critics in Europe, usually imperfectly informed of the details and evidence laid before the judges—Mr. Vandamme, who knows everyone and everything connected with the State, Commandant and Madame Sillye, Judge and Madame Webber, and some others. ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... divided our little force into three portions. I ordered the first to remain in their position, the second was to proceed with the Krupp round our left wing, while I despatched the third party to hold back the left wing of the British. I had no wish to share General Cronje's unenviable position. ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... offspring of prolific Thetys, and daughters of Ocean your sire, who rolls around the whole earth in his unslumbering stream; look upon me, see clasped in what bonds I shall keep an unenviable watch on the topmost ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... to hear this remark, and as soon as it was generally known, created the greatest consternation among them, and upon arriving at Kelley's Island and not receiving the messenger promised by Cole, they were in a very unenviable position. To go to Sandusky they would be arrested; the only course they could take to save their own lives and liberty, was that which they eventually adopted. Capt. Beall, after hearing this report, quickly determined ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... sovereign and an early death, has left little which we can reasonably deplore but its brevity; while that brevity itself throws around his character the last touches of romantic interest, and assigns him the not unenviable lot of having carried off the rewards of age without its infirmities, and borne a maturity of honors into the safe asylum of ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... reached the Dindings, a lovely group of small islands ceded to England by the Pangkor Treaty, and just now in the height of an unenviable notoriety. The sun was low and the great heat past, the breeze had died away, and in the dewy stillness the largest of the islands looked unspeakably lovely as it lay in the golden light between us and the sun, forest-covered to its ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... difficulties which beset the new Prime Minister brings home a sense of his unenviable position. Ireland was on the verge of starvation and revolt; everywhere in Europe the rebellions which culminated in 1848 were beginning to stir, seeming then more formidable than they really were in their ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... acquired an unenviable fame by some petty act of larceny which the magistrates had been bound to punish, and was explaining in tears on her doorstep to some lady's sympathetic ears that she had done the unfortunate deed merely because she was "temp'ed," ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... should get reconciled and jog on as before. Do you ever get dissatisfied with your own temper when you are long fixed to one place, in one scene, subject to one monotonous species of annoyance? I do: I am now in that unenviable frame of mind; my humour, I think, is too soon over- thrown, too sore, too demonstrative and vehement. I almost long for some of the uniform serenity you describe in Mrs. ——'s disposition; or, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... attainments as a surgeon," he said, "were very great;" and, in other respects, he looked upon him as one of the most original and wisest men of the age. It will be remembered by my professional readers that Z——, although esteemed in England one of her first surgeons, acquired an unenviable notoriety through the publication of certain physiological lectures, in which the doctrines of materialism and infidelity were supported, it must be allowed, with all the eloquence and power of a first-rate mind. With ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... were the children of a drunken father, a slatternly mother. Brought up in a comfortless, poverty-stricken home, without any religious teaching or influences, what wonder that they became addicted to most of the petty vices,—that they acquired an unenviable reputation for mischief, mendacity, and thieving ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... the most eminent of the reformers, was born at Vezelai, in the Nivernois, in 1519, and was originally a Catholic, and intended for the law. At the age of twenty, he gained an unenviable reputation by the composition of Latin poetry which was at once elegant and licentious, and which, some years afterwards, he published under the title of "Juvenile Poems." Though not in orders, he possessed benefices of considerable ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... took any step of importance without first consulting her dear Agnes. The "dear Agnes" improved her intimacy and played her cards so well, that although she never paid her board, she was never requested to do so, and thus enjoyed the unenviable advantage of being enabled to live rent free. Having accomplished her first object, she now undertook to achieve her second. One day she sought the widow, and in a fit of gushingly-tender confidence revealed ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... seated before a blazing fire, in the lazy comforts of convalescence, with pipe and tobacco at his elbow, presented a not unenviable picture when contrasted with the ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... In this unenviable state of mental anxiety, and corporeal lassitude, was our justly renowned hero, at the period of those preparations being completed, which were calculated to display him, in the view of an enraptured ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... the virtue of allowing ourselves to be imposed upon, but there is little fear that the individual who opens the question will err in this direction. It behooves him rather to consider the danger of his occupying the unenviable position of the "fuss-budget." ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... the Princesse de Conde, and the Duc d'Angouleme—the wife, sister, and brother-in-law of the prisoner—to approach him. He was weary of the contest, and eager for the termination of the tragic drama in which he played so unenviable a part. ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Even the corner of the mantel-shelf holds a plate, and you enviously see the owner thereof leaning carelessly against the chimney, and looking placidly round upon his less fortunate companions. You glance at the different groups to see if any one else is in your most unenviable predicament. Ah, yes! Yonder stands a gentleman worse off yet, for, in addition to your perplexities, he is talking with a young, laughing girl, who is watching his movements, with a merry twinkle in her bright eyes. He evidently wishes to astonish ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... writings in general, and above all in the history of Faustus, in which the names Wittenberg and Wuertemberg are confounded. Our hero's abode at the former place was very probably merely that of a traveller; he left there, as we shall soon see, a very unenviable reputation. It is true that Saxony was the principal scene of the Doctor's achievements; but this very circumstance makes it improbable that he was born and brought up there, as it is well known that "a prophet hath no honor in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the queen's birthday, but that I had a most beautiful trimming worked me for it by Miss Cambridge, who half fatigued herself to death, for the kind pleasure that I should have my decorations from her hands. If in some points my lot has been unenviable, what a constant solace, what sweet and soft amends, do I find and feel in the almost unexampled union of kindness and excellence in my chosen ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... establishing a mercantile house in connection with a gentleman named Waldron, a native of Portsmouth, who had resided several years in Charleston. I had one brief interview with him, but no opportunity offered of entering into the details of my unenviable position on board the John. On a hint from me that I was dissatisfied, and should not object to accompany him in the Edwin, he gravely shook his head, and remarked that such a course would be unusual and improper; that he was about to retire from ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... of clothes. The way in which Sir Frederick Haldimand came to their relief is deserving of high praise. If he had adhered to the letter of his instructions from England, the position of the Loyalists would have been a most unenviable one. Repeatedly, however, Haldimand took on his own shoulders the responsibility of ignoring or disobeying the instructions from England, and trusted to chance that his protests would prevent the ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace
... obliged when the next one came, to fall back on her original talent, and ate her ice abashed and silent speaking only when she was spoken to, and then in short words and long hesitations. Thereupon the Sisters were of opinion that after all poor Miss Howe could not help her unenviable lot, she was perhaps more to be pitied on account of it than—anything else. It came to this, that Sister Ann Frances even had an exhibitor's pride in her, and Hilda knew the sensations of a barbarian female captive in the bonds ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... appearance, is to plunge into the nearest river, by which they think to purify themselves. This course, however, in reality, tends to shorten their existence. When the small pox rages among the Aborigines, a most unenviable position is held by their "Medicine Man." He is obliged to give a strict account of himself; and, if so unfortunate as to lose a chief, or other great personage, is sure to pay the penalty by parting with his own life. The duties of the "Medicine ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... retractation. What was the good? Supposing he took it upon himself to extenuate the old man's statements, Morestal was the sort of uncompromising man who would give him the lie in public. And then the government would find itself in an unenviable plight indeed! ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... truth, I had forgotten my sweet companion for a moment. 'I am sorry,' said I, taking her hand, 'very sorry, that you think the United States so unenviable a place of residence. I hope, dear lady, to persuade you to make it ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the Greeks were left solely to their mythology, their views of a future state were melancholy and confused. Death was an evil, not a release. Even in their Elysium, their favourite heroes seem to enjoy but a frigid and unenviable immortality. Yet this saddening prospect of the grave rather served to exhilarate life, and stimulate to glory:—"Make the most of existence," say their early poets, "for soon comes the dreary Hades!" And placed beneath a delightful climate, and endowed ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of August Winslow set out from his camp at Fort Beausejour, or Cumberland, on his unenviable errand. He had with him but two hundred and ninety-seven men. His mood of mind was not serene. He was chafed because the regulars had charged his men with stealing sheep; and he was doubly vexed by an untoward incident that happened ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... to refute such a statement implies so wide a knowledge of contrasted civilizations that to most of us the words have no significance. It is true that certain communities have earned for themselves in the course of centuries an unenviable reputation for discourtesy. The Italians say "as rude as a Florentine"; and even the casual tourist (presuming his standard of manners to have been set by Italy) is disposed to echo the reproach. The Roman, with the civilization of the world at his back, is naturally, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... Arkansas, that they are born with skins like alligators, and with strength like bears. They work hard, and they play hard. Gaming is the recreation most indulged in, and the gaming-houses of the western part of Arkansas have branded it with an unenviable notoriety. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... New Orleans a few years later, where General Butler commanded, and gained the unenviable sobriquet of "Beast" by his war upon the women and those not engaged in the struggle, and by trampling upon every right and liberty sacred to the people. He had issued some degrading order, which the ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... which was existent between two British regiments in a town somewhere in Ireland, while he was there. One was the 65th, an English, and the other the 89th, an Irish regiment. It seems that the latter had been formed from the North Cork militia, which, I understand, bore an unenviable reputation from their conduct during the rebellion in 1798. The townspeople had a long memory of this, and in the disturbance amongst the soldiers, supported the English regiment against their own countrymen. Fraser listened to it all, and then ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... Chateauguay, were "thieves and knaves."[300] La Vente, cure of Mobile, joined in the cry against Bienville, and stirred soldiers and settlers to disaffection; but the bitterest accuser of that truly valuable officer was the worthy matron who held the unenviable post of directress of the "King's girls,"—that is, the young women sent out as wives for the colonists. It seems that she had matrimonial views for herself as well as for her charge; and she wrote to Ponchartrain that Major Boisbriant, commander of the garrison, ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... some time of his friends at Brudenell Hall. He knew that Mr. Middleton had a first-class school at his house, and he envied the privileged young gentlemen who had the happiness to attend it: little knowing how unenviable a privilege the said young gentlemen considered that attendance and how a small portion of happiness ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... purposes in Stoppani's Arcade Baths, in Chambers Street, between Broadway and Center Street. The site is now occupied by the building of the American News Company. The acoustics of the new opera house are said to have been good, but the inconvenience of the location and unenviable character of the neighborhood are indicated quite as much as Signor Palmo's enterprising and considerate nature by his announcement that after the performances a large car would be run uptown as far ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the Standard Oil Company, however, was not due solely to the alliance with the railroads, although this advantage came at a strategic time when it was fighting for supremacy. Its marketing department gave it an unenviable reputation, but achieved amazing success. The department was organized to cover the country, find out everything possible about competitors, and then kill them off by price-cutting or other means. The ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... some place of amusement. Very often the proprietor of the house is simply victimized by such people, and several respectable houses have been so far overrun by them that decent persons have avoided them altogether. One or two of the smaller hotels of the city bear a most unenviable reputation of this kind. Even the first-class hotels cannot keep themselves entirely free from the presence of courtezans of the better class. Rich men keep their mistresses at them in elegant style, and the guests, and ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... This is obstinacy. But true independence is that sort of self-confidence and resolution which leads one to go forward in what he has to do, with decision and energy, without leaning upon others. Without this, a man will gain to himself that unenviable distinction described by the homely but expressive term shiftless. The following description, from Mrs. S. C. Hall's "Sketches of Irish Character,"* furnishes an admirable illustration of the results of a ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... now about six hundred miles from King George's Sound and in a most unenviable position, with the prospect of another one hundred mile stage without water, and the full knowledge that retreat was impossible. Their horses, in consequence of the repeated sufferings from thirst that ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... interest. He wanted to talk about Louise. But not in Mrs. Cranceford's manner nor in her eyes when she looked straight at him was there a hint that Tom had told her that the girl had been seen. Perhaps the boy had decided to elect him to this unenviable office. The Major asked him about his trip, but he answered as if he cared not what he said; but when shortly afterward the Major went out, Taylor's unconcern fell from him and he stood up and in tremulous anxiousness looked at Mrs. ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... applause awarded to adventure made a gamester of him, and at Paris he began, from the same motive, that worship of the conventional Venus, the serious inculcation of which has earned for him the largest and most unenviable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... Roman orator was given up by Augustus to the revenge of Antony, it was a cobbler who conducted the sicarii to Formiae, whither Cicero had fled in a litter, intending to put to sea. His bearers would have fought, but Cicero forbade them, and one Herennius has the unenviable notoriety of being ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... human agency, and a very guilty agency, too. Inspector, I am but a child in your estimation, and I feel my position in this matter much more keenly than you do, but I would not be true to the man whom I have unwittingly helped to place in his present unenviable position if I did not tell you that, in my judgment, this cry was a spurious one, employed by the gentleman himself as an ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... and rival bookseller to, Gaine in seventeen hundred and sixty was James Rivington. Mr. Hildeburn has given Rivington a rather unenviable reputation; still, as he occasionally printed (?) a child's book, Mr. ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... of the car track the boys discussed in whispers the possibility of aiding Skip to escape from his unenviable position, with never a thought of the deed with which Billings was to ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... first town beyond Yonkers, covers the old Post Estate. In early times the inhabitants seem to have developed a rather unenviable reputation as sports, cock fights and horse racing being mentioned as the principal amusements. Here, in 1776, a troop of Sheldon's Horse ambuscaded a body of Hessians, only one of whom escaped. Peter Post, who appears to have helped lead the ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... hanging up of the northern land claims, and the inability of the Government to buy native land while it refused to let private persons do so, joined, with a trade collapse in Australia, to make the condition of the Auckland settlers soon almost as unenviable as that of their fellow-colonists ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... damsel, with far greater enthusiasm and sincerity than he ever did his mortal osteological relics that lay in so much profusion in the recesses of his old castle. But he had, doubtless, so far succeeded in his plans; for he possessed a most unenviable fame for all sort of cantrips and sorceries; and the wandering beggar would rather have solicited a bit of bread from the iron hand of misery itself, than ventured near Ballochgray to ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... emigration, intending to pass in it to America; and in the same author we find that the vessel arrived in the harbour of Charlestown [N. E.] on July 1, 1630. There was a MAY-FLOWER which, in 1648, gained an unenviable notoriety as a slaver. But this was not the MAY-FLOWER which had carried over the first settlers, it being a vessel Of 350 tons, while the genuine MAY-FLOWER was of only 180 tons." Of the first of her two known visits, after her voyage ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... thronging came, Some with a sense of self-rebuke and shame, Envying the unenviable; and others Making the joy which should have been another's 30 Their own by gentle sympathy; and some Sighing to think of an unhappy home: Some few admiring what can ever lure Maidens to leave the heaven serene and pure ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Count Fosco and myself. Laura, however, unconsciously helped him to extract all my information, by making inquiries herself, which left me no alternative but to reply to her, or to appear in the very unenviable and very false character of a depositary of Sir Percival's secrets. The end of it was, that, in about ten minutes' time, the Count knew as much as I know of Mrs. Catherick, and of the events which have so strangely connected us with her daughter, Anne, from the time when Hartright ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... dirty mixture. The rest of us contrived to keep our legs. The ship was running before the wind, and rolling considerably, and the motion, aided by the wine and the act of plucking aside the flag, might have precipitated the captain into his unenviable situation; he thought otherwise. No sooner was he placed upon his feet, and his mouth sufficiently clear from the salt water decoction of hog-wash, than he collared the poor victim of persecution, and spluttered out, "Mutiny—mu—mu—mutiny—sentry. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the rare biographical details which, as has been explained, may "force the consigne" here, is that Beyle in his youth, and almost up to middle age, was acquainted with an old lady who had the very unenviable reputation of having actually "sat for" ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... among the drummer-boys rose to fever pitch and the lives of Jakin and Lew became unenviable. Not only had they been permitted to enlist two years before the regulation boy's age—fourteen—but, by virtue, it seemed, of their extreme youth, they were allowed to go to the Front—which thing had not happened to acting-drummers within ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... mother of his little brothers and sisters will, if not corrected, grow up to be just such another sneak as Jerry; and Jerry, unless he cures himself of his vice, will become a mere odious meddler and scandalmonger in society, and may arrive at the unenviable distinction of being the most detested ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... were obeyed, all would be well; if they were neglected, matters could not be much worse than they were at present. As the new commissioners had merely to take a message and were credited with no discretionary power, it was thought unnecessary to burden the higher magnates of the State with the unenviable task, or to expose them to the undignified predicament of finding their representations flouted by a rebel who might have eventually to be recognised as a king. A chance was given to younger members of the senatorial order, and the three who landed in Africa were branded by the hostile ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... shade. Religion and marriage became a mockery, and every form of impure and vindictive passion walked abroad, with the consciousness that public opinion did not require them to assume even a slight disguise. The fish-women of Paris will long retain an unenviable celebrity for the brutal excess of their rage. The goddess of Reason was worshipped by men, under the form of a living woman entirely devoid of clothing; and in the public streets ladies might be seen who scarcely paid more ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... for two or three days, Victor Emmanuel abdicated on the 13th of March. The Queen desired to be appointed regent, but, to her intense vexation, the appointment was given to Charles Albert. A more unenviable honour never fell ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... was away in Hanover. England was in the toils of a foreign war, and her prestige had lately suffered heavily from the sudden defeat at Fontenoy. There were very few troops in England to employ against an invasion, and the Scottish commander-in-chief, Sir John Cope, whose name lives in unenviable fame in the burden of many a Jacobite ballad, was as incapable a well-meaning general as ever was called upon to face a great unexpected emergency. It must be admitted that all these were excellent points in the prince's ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... writers alike were wont to agree in giving Catherine Street an unenviable reputation. Gay is specially outspoken in his description of that thoroughfare and the class by which it used to be haunted. It was in this street, too, that Jessop's once flourished, "the most disreputable night house of London." That nest of iniquity, ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... we must accept and do our best to mitigate. The Code has a number of necessarily rather complicated provisions aiming at selecting the correct name for any cultivar. These provisions are important mainly to the comparatively few horticulturists and botanists who take on the unenviable job of sorting out the nomenclature of cultivated plants, though the results of their labours affect us all. The rules are set out fully in the Code, and here I will attempt only to pick out one or two of the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... (this very fine story). Ordinarily they begin, as do our own, with the formula, "once upon a time there was." The ending is also a variable formula, often a couplet referring to the happy termination of the tale and the relatively unenviable condition of the listeners. The Sicilian ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... the accurate antiquarian, Antony Wood, speaks of music as part of 'the Act', which was really performed at the preliminary gathering, the Encaenia. The new function gradually grew in importance, and additions were made to it; the munificent Lord Crewe, prince-bishop of Durham, who enjoys an unenviable immortality in the pages of Macaulay, and a more fragrant if less lasting memory in Besant's charming romance Dorothy Forster, left some of his great wealth for the Creweian Oration, in which annual honour is done to the ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... memory of our New England grandsires; and let us remember that these negative toilet traits were not peculiar to them, but dated from the fatherland. A century ago the English were said to be the only European people that had the unenviable distinction of going to the dinner-table without previously ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... demand which can only be put forth by an animality striving up to the absolute. Man, therefore, without gaining anything for his humanity by a rational expression of this sort, loses the happy limitation of the animal, over which he now only possesses the unenviable superiority of losing the present for an endeavor after what is remote, yet without seeking in the limitless future ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... felt this keenly, and cursed the falsehood which had placed him in such an unenviable position. It was vain to assume the old superiority that was forfeited; but too much a man of the world to be long discomforted by any contretemps like this, he rapidly regained his habitual ease of manner, and avoiding the ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... slain by Huon.] The hero of this poem, Huon of Bordeaux, and his brother Girard, were on their way from Guienne to Paris to do homage to Charlemagne for their estates. Charlot, the monarch's eldest son, who bears a very unenviable reputation in all the mediaeval poems, treacherously waylaid the brothers, intending to put them both to death. He attacked them separately; but, after slaying Girard, was himself slain by Huon, who, quite unconscious of the ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... inside the harbour, sailing close along the land. Late on the evening of the 28th, when rounding Cape St. Angelo, a squall from the high land carried away our fore and second masts, and left us in a very unenviable situation, considering we had but a few hours' coals on board. However, a breeze favouring us all night, we arrived here at ten A.M., 29th May. Upon the foremast we lost ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... estimate made from figures of the city directory in 1904 gave it then a population of 485,000, probably a considerable exaggeration. In it are mingled inhabitants from most of the nations of the earth, and it may claim the unenviable honor of possessing the largest population of Chinese outside of China itself, the colony ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... wander down to the sands. The tide is low. The long billows of the Bay of Biscay roll smugly in, hypocritical and placid, with nothing to betray the unenviable reputation they sustain in mediis aquis. The broad, smooth beach is not notably different in kind from other beaches; but we instantly see the peculiar charm of its location. The shore sweeps off in a long, lazy crescent, ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... who had joined from the Territorial Force Reserve, was in charge at the Depot, and later commanded for some time the 3rd Line, with the unenviable task of getting together and training in an extraordinarily short space of time, personnel to replenish the 1st and 2nd Lines. Many young Officers and others who passed through his hands in those days look back with pleasure and affection ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... be kept. It was also obvious that as long as they were kept and continued to matter, the Secretary of Defense would be saddled with the task of deciding in the end which racial tag to attach to each man in the armed forces. It was an unenviable duty, and it could be performed ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... heart of the Highlands, will have need of some endurance still, and must care nothing about the condition of earth or sky. Formerly, it was not possible to survey more than a district or division in a single season, except to those unenviable persons who had no other pursuit but that of amusement, and waged a weary war with time. The industrious dwellers in cities, who sought those solitudes, for a while to relieve their hearts from worldly anxieties, and gratify that love of nature which ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... will not confess, but I am convinced that you are the cause of it... Listen: you think, perhaps, that I am looking for rank or immense wealth—be undeceived, my daughter's happiness is my sole desire. Your present position is unenviable, but it may be bettered: you have means; my daughter loves you; she has been brought up in such a way that she will make her husband a happy man. I am wealthy, she is my only child... Tell me, what is keeping you back?... You see, I ought not to be saying all ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... mind was unenviable. He had been brought all the way across France, leaving his wife and family; he had, it seems, been met by no letters from his noble friends, who may well have ceased to expect him, so long was his delay. He was not at ease in his conscience, for, to be plain, he was not sure that he was not ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... in the history of the Chicago club had any of its teams ever started a pennant race so badly as did the Chicago "Colts" in 1894. They finished the April campaign with the unenviable record of eight defeats out of nine games played, they then being a bad tail-ender in the race, with the poor percentage figures of .111 only. They remained in the last ditch up to May 10th, by which date ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... treatment was bad and torture still occasionally practised; but he nowhere found things so bad as in England. In Holland the prisons were so neat and clean as to make it difficult to believe that they were prisons: and they were used as models for the legislation of 1779. One cause of this unenviable distinction of English prisons had been indicated by an earlier investigation. General Oglethorpe (1696-1785) had been started in his philanthropic career by obtaining a committee of the House of Commons in 1729 to inquire into the state of the gaols. The ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... though, and I think he felt himself in a trap. He certainly acted like a bird out of its senses, while the gull, flapping hugely, and forgetting, in the excitement, his own bondage, gradually forced the raven's head back and back over his back, till that raven was in the unenviable position of staring over his own back at his own tail, upon which he was ignominiously sitting. Also, his neck was half-dislocated, and he was nearly choking. And about this time it began to dawn upon him that it did not pay in the wild ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... wearying; he, too, feels the strain upon his nerves. When he returns home at evening he is easily disturbed by a worried wife, tired and fretful children, and the unmistakable atmosphere of gloom and friction that permeates many homes. He contrasts his unenviable position with the freedom and good-fellowship of the club, and chafes under the family bonds. In many cases he breaks them and sets himself free by way of the divorce court. The course of men of the upper ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... discovered that I was worthless. My great failings are insincerity of character and sly ugliness. Any one who watched me a little while would discover my unenviable nature." ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... cultivation of his faculty of observation. Sir Tancred himself had a natural gift of understanding his fellow-creatures, which, along with his finer brain, little by little placed him in the noble but unenviable position of being the first person to whom his friends flew to be extricated from their scrapes. He had found that his gift stood him in such good stead in his varying fortunes that he spared no pains to equip Tinker with the faculty even more ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... that once upon a time he had seen Black Madge, who was the daughter of a Frenchwoman by an Italian father; Black Madge, who had already made an unenviable record for herself on both sides of ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... mentioned such a thing to the women I had the unenviable success of making them laugh heartily. And I laughed with them, remarking however, that as they were so good and clever they would have no difficulty in accomplishing the feat if they would only set themselves ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... freedom, and efficiency of the church. Had either Philip, or, after him, Louis, succeeded, by linking the Catholic cause to his personal ambition, in realizing his dream of universal monarchy, Europe would most likely have been plunged into a political and social condition as unenviable as that into which old Asia has been plunged for these four hundred years; and it may well be believed that it was Providence that raised and directed the tempest that scattered the Grand Armada, and that gave victory to the arms ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Peter von Hagenbach, his deputy in charge of this unremunerative territory, is a character painted in the darkest colours by all historians. It is more than probable that his unpopular efforts to make bricks without straw were largely responsible for his unenviable reputation. Ground between the upper and lower millstones of Charles's clamours for revenues and popular clamours that the people had nothing wherewith to pay, Hagenbach developed into a taskmaster of the hardest and most unpitying type, who made himself thoroughly ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... Yang-Wei went ashore similarly battered to pieces and burning. She was much further off, and we made her out less distinctly. On the Japanese side not one ship had sunk as far as we had seen, and though the flagship and some of the smaller craft were in an unenviable state, the attack was kept up with immense spirit, and prompt obedience was paid to signals, which were frequent, whereas we looked in vain for any sign of leadership on the part of the Celestials. Later in the action another of their best ships, the Chih-Yuen, came ...
— Under the Dragon Flag - My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War • James Allan
... asked, if the life of a Boys' Dog is so unhappy, why do they enter upon such an unenviable situation, and why do they not dissolve the partnership when it becomes unpleasant? I will confess that I have been often puzzled by this question. For some time I could not make up my mind whether their unholy alliance was the result of the influence of the dog on the boy, or vice versa, and ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... your own peregrinations if you care to. I believe they follow a vicious circle bisecting the semi-fashionable world, and the—other. Shall we say that the expression, unenviable notoriety, summarises the reputation you ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... rhyme for it. I thought about it all the time I was dressing—it's dreadfully bad for one to think whilst one's dressing—and all lunch-time, and I'm still hung up over it. I feel like those unfortunate automobilists who achieve an unenviable motoriety by coming to a hopeless stop with their cars in the most crowded thoroughfares. I'm afraid I shall have to drop the aasvogel, and it did give such lovely ...
— Reginald • Saki
... of the crown at this time were men whose names have justly acquired an unenviable notoriety. We must take heed, however, that we do not load their memory with infamy which of right belongs to their master. For the treaty of Dover the King himself is chiefly answerable. He held conferences ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that I commanded in Louisiana and Texas my position was a most unenviable one. The service was unusual, and the nature of it scarcely to be understood by those not entirely familiar with the conditions existing immediately after the war. In administering the affairs of those States, I never acted except by authority, and always from conscientious ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... I felt that I ought not to keep such a good thing to myself, but that I should preach the doctrine far and wide. I soon found, however, that it was an impossible task to try to save men from themselves, and I acquired the unenviable sobriquet of "crank"; but I was not dismayed. From my native friends I turned to the foreign community in Peking, thinking that the latter would possess better judgment, appreciate and be converted to the sanitarian doctrine. Among ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... constitutionality of the act, I urge further legislation along the lines advocated in my Message to the preceding Congress. The practice of putting the entire burden of loss to life or limb upon the victim or the victim's family is a form of social injustice in which the United States stands in unenviable prominence. In both our Federal and State legislation we have, with few exceptions, scarcely gone farther than the repeal of the fellow-servant principle of the old law of liability, and in some of our States even this slight modification of a ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... acts. A student while in a hilarious mood one night did a decapitating operation on one of the bodies. His loot was the head of an old man with patriarchal beard and he carried it around from one place of debauchery to another, exhibiting it to gaping crowds of a rather unenviable class of citizenship. ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... looking down, wondering how on earth he was to endure this stark publicity. He was there poised bleakly for all to see, an unenviable position. And there was no escape. He must stand there, because it was his job, and recover from the nervousness that had come from finding himself so abruptly thrust on to this veritable pillar of Stylites in the midst of an ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... In an unenviable humor I stumbled across the room, tripping and barking my shins over various malignant hassocks, tables, and chairs. Finding the switch at last, I flooded the room with light, and saw myself in the mirror, with tie and ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... a great measure lost sight of in the general scramble for gold, until the strictest integrity, the most self-sacrificing honesty, are beginning to be looked upon as marvels, and we have won for ourselves among the nations of the world the unenviable title of worshippers of the 'almighty dollar.' Religion itself is twisted and distorted into every imaginable shape to bring it into harmony with our all-absorbing pursuit: all our ideas of public policy and of social progress are made ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... around and take it easy. She swallowed the quinine meekly enough, but she worked fiercely all day, hunting out superfluous tasks to do. That night she slept the sleep of exhaustion, but her dreams were unenviable and the awakening ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... full of life and fun, she had held for the whole of her married life a sway over her lord and master all the greater that neither of them was conscious of the fact. A most devoted and submissive wife, a most indulgent and affectionate mother, Mrs. Wedmore occupied the not unenviable position of being half slave, half idol in ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... appeared to be no one on whom he could visit his wrath. Dismissing the under-gardeners curtly, he was forced to return to his work in a very unenviable frame of mind, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... may call on him to perform. On the other hand, without relinquishing this principle, it is often possible, by a little tactful and unostentatious redistribution of troops, to avoid placing a soldier in so unenviable a position as taking part in an attack on his own home. Sometimes, however, this is impossible, as in ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... time he followed his wife's movements, as chronicled in Paris society papers. He learnt that a daughter had been born to him. Finally a tragi-comic story was reported with acclamation in all the papers; his wife played an unenviable part in it. Barbara Paulovna had become a notoriety. He ceased to follow her movements. Scepticism, half formed already by the experiences of his life and by his education, took complete possession of his heart, and he became indifferent ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... long been vainly struggling. "The nations of the West"—such was the substance of innumerable discourses which I had heard—"are at present on the high-road to political and social anarchy, and England has the unenviable distinction of being foremost in the race. The natural increase of population, together with the expropriation of the small landholders by the great landed proprietors, has created a dangerous and ever-increasing Proletariat—a great disorganised ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... leave out the pericope, are the three following—[Symbol: Aleph]BT: and the degree of attention to which such an amount of evidence is entitled, has been already proved to be wondrous small. We cannot forget moreover that the two former of these copies enjoy the unenviable distinction of standing alone on a memorable occasion:—they alone exhibit St. Mark's Gospel mutilated in respect of ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... glowed among the records of human character. In the chain might be traced the vain-glory of conquest linked with defeated ambition, and the sullied splendour of royalty just breaking through the clouds of discontent, and slowly dispelling the mists of disaffection and political prejudice. What an unenviable contrast to the man who has "no enemy but wind and rough weather." The same objects that prompted these discordant reflections gave rise to others of the most opposite character; and within the walls, where treaties, abdications, and warrants, by turns, settled and resettled, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 330, September 6, 1828 • Various
... Clemence Maille de Breze, Princess de (wife of the Great Conde), married at thirteen to the Duke d'Enghien, who yielded only to compulsion, 80; the unenviable light in which she was held by her husband and relatives, 80; a fair estimate of her qualities, 81; her fidelity to her husband during adversity, 81; her zeal during the Woman's War, 81; her truly deplorable existence from earliest childhood, 82; her hour of fame and distinction, 83; her ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... years old, he was condemned to six months' imprisonment and to a fine of two hundred lire for an outrage on a neighbour's wife. Perhaps it was to escape from an unenviable reputation that he left Venice soon after and set up painting in the Marches, where he lived from 1468 to 1473. He then went on to Camerino in Umbria, where his great triptych, now in the Brera, was painted, and a few years later he was in Ascoli, with ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... respectfully-worded written statement on March 6, 1572.[50] By about this time there had arrived in Salamanca Diego Gonzalez—an experienced official, whose conduct of the Inquisitionary case against Bartolome de Carranza, the Archbishop of Toledo, has earned him an unenviable repute.[51] Under the presidency of Gonzalez, who might be trusted to keep the weaker brethren, if there were any, up to the mark, the local Inquisition on March 15 resolved to recommend the arrest of Luis de Leon. Apparently the gravity of this step was recognized. Another ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... annoyed. The scandal, which spread throughout the kingdom, placed him in a very unenviable position. The marquis would probably have passed the rest of his life in one of the oubliettes of the Bastile had he not escaped from France. Madame de Montespan, in her wonderfully frank Memoirs, records all these facts without any apparent consciousness of the infamy to which ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... floor that his remarks were addressed to white men alone, I shall have no word of reply. Let him feel that a Negro was not only too magnanimous to smite him in his weakness, but was even charitable enough to grant him the mercy of his silence. I shall, sir, leave to others less charitable the unenviable and fatiguing task of sifting out of that mass of chaff the few grains of sense that may, perchance deserve notice. Assuring the gentleman that the Negro in this country aims at a higher degree of intellect ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... their multitude, it would be found that they are indeed 'evil.' We speak not of the thief, and the murderer, and the adulterer, and such like, whose crimes draw down the cognizance of earthly tribunals, and whose unenviable character it is to take the lead in the paths of sin; but we refer to the men who are marked out by their practice of many of the seemliest moralities of life—by the exercise of the kindliest affections, and the interchange of ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... with a fidelity, a whole-heartedness, and a loftiness of self-sacrifice which are as rare as they are great in these days of pretense and hypocritical virtue, and she had paid the full price for her idealism. She did not repine or regret. She only suffered, not alone because of her unenviable notoriety, but because Death had taken her loved one from her. Surely this was indeed an evidence of real love in an unreal civilization, which should have brought out the fearless sympathy and approval of every good woman in the land. It should have been food for sermons ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Narenta, the principal river of Dalmatia and Herzegovina, by one of the numerous mouths which combine to form its delta. Its ancient name was the 'Naro,' and it is also called by Constantine Porphyrogenitus 'Orontium.' Later it acquired an unenviable notoriety, as being the haunt of the 'Narentine Pirates,' who issued thence to make forays upon the coast, and plundered or levied tribute on the trading vessels of the Adriatic. At one time they became ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... was not the chief character—at first! It was a case in which the Vicar's wife won an unenviable notoriety. It seemed there had been a secret in her life, years before when she was a pretty, silly girl, which was known to very few besides her husband and, I presume, her own people. Now you would not think I was a sympathetic person—one in whom a sentimental, rather ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... addressed a message, which forcibly illustrates the political position of that body in those times. AEmilianus proposed to resign the whole civil administration into the hands of the senate, reserving to himself only the unenviable burthen of the military interests. His hope was, that in this way making himself in part the creation of the senate, he might strengthen his title against competitors at Rome, whilst the entire military administration going on under his own eyes, exclusively directed to that ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... undoubtedly a conviction that the epic conflict had best come sooner and not later. How long this idea has influenced German policy we do not pretend to say. But it has certainly contributed to her unenviable prominence in the 'race of armaments' which all thinking men have condemned as an insupportable, tax upon Western civilization, and which has aggravated all the evils that it was intended ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... handled." Here the only statement of any real importance, the alleged assault by Christ Church men on the Junior Censor, is untrue. The fact is that nearly all the disturbers were out-College men, and, though it is true that the Censor was struck by a stone thrown from a window, the unenviable distinction of having thrown it belongs to no member of the House. I doubt if we have one single man here who would be capable of so base ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood |
