"Pettifogging" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... defraud his creditors, with the aid of a pettifogging lawyer, and he makes over all his property to his clerk, Podkhaliuzin. The latter has long sighed for Lipotchka, but his personal repulsiveness, added to his merchant rank, has prevented his ever daring to hint at such a thing. Now, however, he sees his chance. He promises ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... pity that some good man has not set Hadley up in a better business than pettifogging. Apply to your patron, Judge Innes. Lick his foot. There's an immaculate judge for you! Talk of corruption! I've been present at every session of the court whenever the case of Burr came up. Away back as early as the beginning of November Daviess moved for a process to compel the attendance ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... to filibuster and postpone as long as possible, he took the common-sense way to a settlement. If he had resolved, as he had, to draw the boundary line "on his own hook," in case there was further pettifogging he committed no impropriety in warning the British statesmen of his purpose. In judging these Rooseveltian short cuts, the reader must decide whether they were justified by the good ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... be pleaded before any just judge to be at once established. But now ... the horror was, that it was no longer her cause at all. This was not Joanna Godden coming boldly to the Law of England to obtain redress from her grievous oppression by pettifogging clerks—it was just a miserable dispute between the Commissioners of Inland Revenue and the Lessor of Property under the Act. It was full of incomprehensible jargon about Increment Value, Original Site Value, Assessable Site Value, Land Value Duty, Estate Duty, Redemption ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... through a pettifogging colonial policy, commerce was turned into the merest peculation by a class of persons who made it their object to restrict the agriculturist, and hold his interests at their mercy. The more the farmer raised, the ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... usually threw their boots away or sold them to second-hand dealers may have been induced to send them to Mr Bosher instead. But all the same nearly everybody said it was a splendid idea: its originator was applauded as a public benefactor, and the pettifogging busybodies who amused themselves with what they were pleased to term 'charitable work' went into ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... of paternal government in imitation of our Government of India itself, which would have rendered improvement certain, and the growth of a middle and higher class no less so. He would have put the whole under our judicial courts, and thereby have created a middle class of pettifogging attorneys to swallow up all the surplus produce of the land. I would have kept the whole of the land in the hands of our fiscal courts, by making it all leasehold property, and maintaining the law of ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... average statecraft. They appeared in their new and august character of world-reformers with all the roots still clinging to them of the rank electoral soil from which they sprang. Their words alone were redolent of idealism, their deeds were too often marred by pettifogging compromises or childish blunders—constructive phrases and destructive acts. Not only had they no settled method of working, they lacked even a common proximate aim. For although they all employed the same phraseology when describing the objects for which their countries had fought ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... preparation the older, the "ladylike," Suffrage women did, but we came at last to see that all that was possible to accomplish that way had been done. The Cause hadn't moved an inch for years. It was even doing the other thing. Yes, it was going backward. Even the miserable little pettifogging share women had had in Urban and Borough Councils—even that they were deprived of. And they were tamely submitting! Women who had been splendid workers ten years ago, women with the best capacities ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... dwelt at length upon this, for misguided people have blinded both themselves and others as to Wagner's true aims and methods and the splendour of the accomplished thing by trying to read into his music a host of trifling and pettifogging allusions which he never intended. There is enough to break our minds upon ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... spirit of the Gospel, but according to human prudence. If Augustin, for the sake of the good fame of his Church, did not wish to incur the accusation of grasping and avarice, he dreaded nothing so much as a law-case. To accept lightly the gifts and legacies offered was to lay himself open to expensive pettifogging. Far better to refuse than to lose both his money and reputation. So were reconciled, in this man of prayer and meditation, practical good sense with the high disinterestedness of the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... of the Glenvarloch estate!" said Dalgarno. "Dare not say it is, or I will, upon the spot, divorce your pettifogging soul from your carrion carcass!" So saying, he seized the scrivener by the collar, and shook him so vehemently, that he tore it from ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... display so open a disregard of the ordinary rules of courtesy and hospitality. To drag in their political differences at such a time, when he had come beneath the other's roof merely to render him an unavoidable service! To stoop to the pettifogging sophistry of the agitator simply because his opponent had reluctantly yielded him ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... now swell the numerical tonnage of other countries without adding so very much to their shipping power. The Hamburg-America line and Nord-deutscher Lloyd and others, shorn of their real glory, still continue a pettifogging existence booking tickets for passengers on the ships of foreign lines. What a curious Germany! She has made a strange backward progress since the days of the Agadir incident, and the plea which eminent British ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... degenerate, pettifogging barrister, with all his father's faults and none of his grandfather's virtues—for whom Mary had advanced money so that he could go to college, came to her in her dire extremity and proffered help. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... bad case in hand and acted accordingly. Looking at D'Alton he shook his head, which Mrs. Brookes perceiving, she shook her head in turn, and, taking out her handkerchief, wept copiously. Dr. Tuffnell tried to soothe the patient with gentle words, but she (mistaking him for a pettifogging lawyer, whom D'Alton had engaged to bind her over to ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... scale like this, not capture contemptible places like Skandeia or Mende, or chase the people of AEgina, like birds who have been turned out of their nests. If we are to do an injustice, let us not do it in a miserable pettifogging way, but imitate such great examples as Crassus and Alexander the Great. Those who praise the one of these great men, and blame the other, do so only because they are unable to see any other distinction between them except that the one failed and ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... blow struck by her, and concerned themselves not with several previous abortive blows. The prisoner, knowing himself proved actually guilty, and the numerous chances existing against him on the record, if he chose to make pettifogging experiments upon its technical sufficiency, submitted ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... to do what you are attempting; it does, by Heaven—sheer, brazen gall! It's been done, though, by little, pettifogging shysters, by piking real-estate crooks—thousands of parcels of property scattered all over the United States have been filched in that manner. But a hundred-thousand acres! It's the biggest steal that ever has been attempted, to my knowledge, ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... instance, so much alive and so popular and so powerful? Because the musician or the singer influences thousands directly. Art, wonderful art!" She looked wistfully at the sky and went on: "Art gives wings and carries you far, far away. If you are bored with dirt and pettifogging interests, if you are exasperated and outraged and indignant, rest and satisfaction are only to ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... into three factions, were in no way prepared for what was now coming. When the news finally leaked out that applications for franchises had been made to the several corporate village bodies each old company suspected the other of invasion, treachery, robbery. Pettifogging lawyers were sent, one by each company, to the village council in each particular territory involved, but no one of the companies had as yet the slightest idea who was back of it all or of the general plan of operations. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... phrases, the shameless 'explaining away,' are of a character that would again justify the remark of Lord Salisbury (then Lord Robert Cecil) in another matter many years before, that they were 'tactics worthy of a pettifogging attorney,' and even the subsequent apology—to the attorney. But what answer could be made to a protest which reminded the right honourable gentlemen of the following deliberate and official ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... (with sometimes a third for a judge,) do not confine themselves to the matter in hand, but expatiate in a wide field, accusing their adversaries or defending themselves with all the adroitness of practised advocates, and not unfrequently with all the windings and subterfuges of pettifogging sycophants. In this way the poet endeavoured to make his poetry entertaining to the Athenians, by its resemblance to their favourite daily occupation of conducting, deciding, or at least listening to lawsuits. On this account Quinctilian expressly recommends him to the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... encumbrance, since he was in the vein for operatic entertainments just then, and, furthermore, he pictured himself as a future monopolist controlling the destinies of two houses. For he never dreamed, did this haggling, pettifogging lawyer, that Swiney would swerve from the old time allegiance to him, and he felt so secure on this point that he privately encouraged the desertion of his own forces. He made one exception, however, by stipulating that Cibber should remain at Drury Lane. Colley was too experienced, too ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... fellow, quotha? I scorn that base, broking, brabbling, brawling, bastardly, bottle-nosed, beetle-browed, bean-bellied name. Why, Robin Goodfellow is this same cogging, pettifogging, crackropes, calf-skin companion. Put me and my father over to him? Old Silver-top, and you had not put me before ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... hand, there was his distinct pledge to the people during his campaign, that if they elected him governor he would make himself the leader of the party, would broadly and not with pettifogging legalism interpret his constitutional relationship to the Legislature, would undertake to assist in legislative action, and not wait supinely for the Legislature to do something, and then sign or veto the ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... insult to those Revolutionary heroes to say that, after seven years' struggle with the despotic ideas of the old world, in the first hour of victory, with their souls all on fire with new-found freedom, they sat down like so many pettifogging lawyers, and drew up a little instrument for the express purpose of robbing women and negroes of their inalienable rights. Does the preamble look like it? Women did vote in America, at the time the Constitution was adopted. If the framers of the Constitution ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the world shattered upon so slight a pretext? A little time, a few days, even a few hours, might have sufficed to preserve the world from present horrors, but no time could be granted. A colossal snap judgment was to be taken by these pettifogging diplomats. A timely word from the German Chancellor would have saved the flower of the youth of Germany and Austria from perishing. It would be difficult to find in recorded history a greater discourtesy to a friendly power, for Austria was ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... of the Law," wrote the patroon, "be it known by these presents, thou art summoned to appear before me! I have work for you—not to serve any one with a writ; assign; bring an action, or any of your rascally, pettifogging tricks! Send me no demurrer, but your own ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... used without offence; but in Paris every profession, learned or unlearned, has its omega, the individual who brings it down to the level of the lowest class; and the written law has its connecting link with the custom right of the streets. There are districts where the pettifogging man of business, known as Lawyer So-and-So, is still to be found. M. Fraisier was to the member of the Incorporated Law Society as the money-lender of the Halles, offering small loans for a short period at an exorbitant interest, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... with his morning's work he started off in the direction of Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was pleased to find that the firm of George Fleming & Co. occupied good offices, and that the clerks looked as if they had been there a long time. It was just as well not to have a pettifogging lawyer to deal with. Mr. Fleming was in, but he was engaged for a little time. Perhaps the gentleman would state his business; but on the whole Field ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... happiness of childhood into political discussion, and this opened up a new source of political power. By touching something deeply instinctive in millions of people, Judge Lindsey animated dull proposals with human interest. The pettifogging objections to some social plan had very little chance of survival owing to the dynamic power of the reformers. It was an excellent example of the creative results that come from centering a political ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... declaring that "He never knew fairer or more noble conduct in a pleader than in Otis; that he always defended his causes solely on their broad and substantial foundations." Among other stories and items of fact put forth in evidence of his contempt of the pettifogging and professional lying so common in these degenerate days, is the following: Being engaged on one occasion to recover the amount of a bill which was alleged by the defendant to have been paid, he discovered, quite accidentally, among his client's papers, as the ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... the eyes of the public. Suppose a woman had been nominated at the right time and in the right way, according to your understanding of punctilios, wouldn't the same resistance have been made and the same row got up? You know right well that there would. Then what is all your pettifogging about technicalities worth? The only question that anybody cares a button about is this, "Shall woman be allowed to participate in your World's Temperance Convention on a footing of perfect equality with man?" If yea, the whole dispute turns on nothing, and isn't worth six lines in the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... reside at the Trecothick estate and the Polwellan Wheal, where I found, instead of profit, every kind of pettifogging chicanery; I passed over in state to our territories in Ireland, where I entertained the gentry in a style the Lord Lieutenant himself could not equal; gave the fashion to Dublin (to be sure it was a beggarly savage ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... priest in his vestments. What come vividly back on my mind are remembrances of my delight in the histories of Joseph and of David; and of my keen appreciation of the chivalrous kindness of Abraham in his dealing with Lot. Like a sudden flash there returns back upon me, my utter scorn of the pettifogging meanness of Jacob, and my sympathetic grief over the heartbreaking lamentation of the cheated Esau, "Hast thou not a blessing for me also, O my father?" And I see, as in a cloud, pictures of the grand phantasmagoria of the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... dismissal of a Police Commissioner? Thus we see the party of Order, during this whole period, compelled by its ambiguous position to wear out and fritter away its conflict with the Executive power in small quarrels about jurisdiction, in chicaneries, in pettifogging, in boundary disputes, and to turn the stalest questions of form into the very substance of its activity. It dares not accept the collision at the moment when it involves a principle, when the Executive power has really given itself a blank, and when the ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... I broke asunder all such pettifogging bounds, And forged a party's Will for (say) Five Hundred Thousand Pounds, With such an irresistible temptation to a haul, Of course the sin ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... damaging, and is really a libel, but to sustain an action real damage must be proved, or it must be shown that malice and ill-will have prompted the objectionable adverse opinions. But, as we know, there are certain pettifogging men of law who are ever ready to encourage people to bring actions for libel for the mere sake of getting damages. I believe I have thus stated the case correctly, but I am not a "limb of the law," not even an amputated ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... within the national borders, or it justified Canning's contention that it was in retaliation for the "Leopard's" action. His further plea, that it must therefore be taken into the account in determining the reparation due, was pettifogging, reducing a question of insult and amends to one of debit and credit bookkeeping; but the American claim that the step was necessary to internal quiet was puerile, and its precipitancy carried the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... But the country was never more disgusted than it is at present, with men who use politics as a mere trade by which to live. The infamy which has attached to the miserable and imbecile Buchanan, that type of degraded, pettifogging diplomacy, is rapidly extending to his whole tribe—and their name is legion. It is significant that a bank, whose notes bore as vignette a portrait of the ex-honorable ex-President, has been obliged to call them in, and substitute another device, since so many ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of the probable future. How far is this thing going to be done finely; how far is it going to be done cunningly and basely? How far will greatness of mind, how far will imaginative generosity, prevail over the jealous and pettifogging spirit that lurks in every human being? Are French and British and Belgians and Italians, for example, going to help each other in Africa, or are they going to work against and cheat each other? Is the Russian seeking only a necessary outlet to the seas of the world, or has he dreams ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... never repeated the senseless pit-digging and refilling programme for the priests, his invention was by no means exhausted. Direct incentive to rebellion proving completely abortive he now resorted to indirect pettifogging and pin-pricking tactics, harassing the unfortunate priests at every turn, depriving them of food or something else, reducing their rations, giving them the most repulsive work he could discover, and so forth. But it was all to ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... who long to exalt themselves by a parrot righteousness, and who are only happy when destroying natural joy in others. And he knew there were many men like himself, married and done for; tied up to these pettifogging saints; goaded under their stupid yoke; ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... could he help loving; in the trouble of the creatures' troubles, sprang to life in his heart the hope, that all that could groan should yet rejoice, that on the lowest servant in the house should yet descend the fringe of the robe that was cast about the redeemed body of the Son. He was no pettifogging priest standing up for the rights of the superior! An exclusive is a self-excluded Christian. They that shut the door will find themselves on the wrong side of the door they have shut. They that push with ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... loose the bonds; either by his personal initiative alone, and vigilant supervision, as did Hawke and Rodney, or by adding to this the broad view of discretion in subordinates which Nelson took. Before leaving this subject, note may be taken of a pettifogging argument advanced by Lestock and adopted by the Court, that orders to these three ships to press ahead would have resulted in nothing, because of the lightness of the wind then and afterwards. True, doubtless, and known after the fact; but who before the event could predict the uncertain ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... Bridges, Devil's Dykes, and the Faust legends show that Satan may be trusted to keep his word, while the saints invariably kept the letter and broke the spirit. To so primitive a tale as that of "The Countess Cathleen" the pettifogging quibbles of later saints are utterly unknown: God saves her soul because it is His will to reward such abnegation of self, and even the Evil One dare ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... years, eat with a highwayman who takes his life in his hands than with the civilian who robs his king and the king's poor, and has no better trick than false accounts, nor better friend than the pettifogging knave. Doltaire had no burning love for France, and little faith in anything; for he was of those Versailles water-flies who recked not if the world blackened to cinders when their lights went out. As will be seen by-and-bye, he had come here to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... replied his companion—"in those circumstances you are right; and, as they say in that beggarly assemblage of pettifogging rogues and traitors called the House of Commons, I must shape my motion in another way. The manner in which I will beg you to deal with the Duke, is this. Find an opportunity, before this night be over, of entreating him ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... against him. They used every possible weapon. They dragged out once more the old pettifogging engine of war which has always served the impotent against creative men, and, though it has never killed anybody, yet it never fails to have an effect upon the simple-minded and the fools: they accused him of plagiarism. They went and picked out artfully ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... of Euripides, in the "Troades," is a pettifogging sophist, who pleads her cause to Menelaus with rhetorical artifice. In the "Helena," again, Euripides quite deserts the Homeric traditions, and adopts the late myths which denied that Helen ever went to Troy. She remained in Egypt, ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... boy: Now for such a pettifogging fellow as thy clerk to persecute this lady; pr'ythee think on't: Tis a grievance of the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... house, his business, his projects. He buried his hands in his pockets and snorted. His cowardly dread of the consequences of fraud forced him into a half confession of fraud, but in his words lay the feverish pettifogging of the frenzied financier who fights for Mammon ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... behold, one sunshiny afternoon there rode into the great gate of the Manhattoes two lean, hungry-looking Yankees, mounted on Narraganset pacers, with saddle-bags under their bottoms, and green satchels under their arms, who looked marvelously like two pettifogging attorneys beating the hoof from one county court to another in quest of lawsuits; and, in sooth, though they may have passed under different names at the time, I have reason to suspect they were the identical ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... for the benefit of his neighbour's half-starved negroes, provided, always, they were hunted with honourable hound-dogs. He held such animals in high esteem, while curs he looked upon with utter contempt; he likened the one to the chivalrous old rice-planter, the other to a pettifogging schoolmaster fit for nothing but to be despised and shot. With these feelings he (Romescos) declared his intention to kill the very first negro he caught in his swamp with cur-dogs; and he kept his word. Lying in ambush, he would await ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... is a pettifogging cult about that says you ought to know these things; moreover, children keep on asking one. We always answer at random and say it's a wagtail or a flowering shrike or a female magnolia. We were brought up ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... grandson doing?" "What has become of him?" The old bourgeois replied with a sigh, that he was a sad case, and giving a fillip to his cuff, if he wished to appear gay: "Monsieur le Baron de Pontmercy is practising pettifogging in some ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... reluctant, determined to have her rights. But Mr. Pickwick acting on this assumption addressed the firm, from the first to the last in the most scurrilous language. He called them "robbers, swindlers,—a brace of pettifogging scoundrels!" Shocking and ungentlemanly terms, and what is worse, actionable. Yet the pair received this abuse with infinite good temper and restraint, merely securing a witness who should listen, and threatening the speaker with ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... difference between a country attorney and an attorney in Paris; tall Cointet was too clever not to know this, and to turn the meaner passions that move a pettifogging lawyer to good account. An eminent attorney in Paris, and there are many who may be so qualified, is bound to possess to some extent the diplomate's qualities; he had so much business to transact, business in which large interests are involved; questions of such wide interest ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... dead. In a letter of the enigmatic Thomas Allen, or James Stuart Hay, father of John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart, this mysterious person avers that he never knew Scott's opinion to be held as of any value by antiquaries (1829). They probably missed in him "a sort of pettifogging intimacy with dates, names, and trifling matters of fact,a tiresome and frivolous accuracy of memory" which Sir Arthur Wardour reproves in Monkbarns. Scott, in brief, was not as Dry-as-dust; all the dead bones that he touches come to life. He was as great an archeologist as a poet ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... concerned. Though not expressly stated in our recognised treatises, it is still a law of modern Political Economy that the larger the scale on which Capitalistic Production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterise its early stages. The pettifogging business tricks of the Polish Jew, the representative in Europe of commerce in its lowest stage, those tricks that serve him so well in his own country, and are generally practised there, he finds ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... she possessed a fief, the whole of it was confiscated. A good many sections of the code deal with legal procedure and the conduct and duty of magistrates, the great objects being to make the administration of justice simple, prompt, and pure, while repressing everything in the shape of pettifogging or ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... certain Minor Canon; a libel action had ensued, and the jury had been beguiled into finding for the defendant on a bare literal construction of words which to anybody acquainted with local circumstances bore another and much blacker meaning. This Mrs. Baxter called a pettifogging trick, and she pursued her parallel till the same terms were obviously indicated ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... fine appreciation of art, you must have a fine free life for your artists and for yourselves. That is another thing that Society can do for art: it can kill the middle-class ideal. Was ever ideal so vulnerable? The industrious apprentice who by slow pettifogging hardness works his way to the dignity of material prosperity, Dick Whittington, what a hero for a high-spirited nation! What dreams our old men dream, what visions float into the minds of our seers! Eight hours ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... message from the air, three thousand feet above Heligoland, in full view of German territory, to the office of The Morning, he has demonstrated the efficiency of his machine. If that is not sufficient, Mr. Carville's next journey will convince Europe, if not England. If the pettifogging Radical Government turn a deaf ear to our brilliant correspondent, if they ignore his claims and chaffer in any commercial spirit with his accredited agents, their days are numbered. It is hardly too much to say that the days of the Empire are ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... often exhumed the MS., and had set himself seriously to the task of deciphering it, only to acknowledge at the end of a terrible half-hour that he was ignominiously beaten. Whereupon he would console himself by saying that such a task was "not in his line," that his brains were not of that pettifogging order which would allow of his sitting down with the patience requisite to master the secret of the figures. To-night, for the twentieth time, he brought out the MS. He again read the prefatory note carefully over, although he could almost have said it by heart, and once more his ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... and good an air! she is, without exception, the most charming girl that I have ever seen in my life. Later on, she'll have virtues with an odor of violets. How graceful! one cannot live otherwise than nobly with such a creature. Marius, my boy, you are a Baron, you are rich, don't go to pettifogging, I ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... apprenticeship was only held for a season. Indeed, Khalid must have recoiled from the practice. Or in his recklessness, not to say obtrusion, he must have been outrageous enough to express in the office of the honourable attorney, or in the neighbourhood thereof, his views about pettifogging and such like, that the said honourable attorney was under the painful necessity of asking him to stay home. Nay, the young Syrian was discharged. Or to put it in a term adequate to the manner in which this was done, he was "fired." Now, Khalid betakes him ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... tended to the future good of mankind—who, raised by affluence, the reward of successful industry, and by the voice of fame above the want of any but the most honourable patronage, stooped to the unworthy arts of adulation, and abetted the views of the great with the pettifogging feelings of the meanest dependant on office—who, having secured the admiration of the public (with the probable reversion of immortality), showed no respect for himself, for that genius that had raised him to distinction, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... saved you and brought you hither. I did everything, as you have guessed. I ruined you, and why? That I might have you all to myself. To speak frankly, I was tired of your husband. You took to haggling and pettifogging: far otherwise do I go to work; I want all or none. This is why I have moulded and drilled you, polished and ripened you, for my own behoof. Such, you see, is my delicacy of taste. I don't take, as people imagine, those foolish ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... that way? Thoughtless girl, you don't know what you are doing. His family is all but noble. What am I saying? noble? why, half the House of Peers is sprung from the dregs of the people, and got there either by pettifogging in the courts of law, or selling consciences in the Lower House; and of the other half, that are gentlemen of descent, not two in twenty can show a pedigree like Talboys. And with that name a princely mansion—antiquity stamped on it—stands in its own park, in the middle ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... Against whom? Against a parcel of imbeciles who are pettifogging from morning till night ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... ready at any moment to give up their lives to defend ... what? Their guns, and these guns were in their eyes the palpable symbols of their rights and liberties. During this time the heroic Assembly was pettifogging at Versailles, and the Government was going to join them. Paris does not follow those ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... personages to whom they relate; and, instead of forming the instruments of knightly vengeance and redress, remind us of the machinery of a bad German novel, or of the disclosures which might be expected on the trial of a pettifogging attorney. The obscurity and intricacy which they communicate to the whole story, must be very painfully felt by every reader who tries to comprehend it; and is prodigiously increased by the very clumsy and inartificial manner in which the denouement ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... to Schuetz requesting him to journey to Schaffhausen on important business. The attorney arrived, and Wilhelmine observed how shabby was his coat, how rusty his general appearance. He was again the pettifogging lawyer in poor circumstances, and Wilhelmine reflected that he would be all the more anxious to serve her in order to return to his ill-gotten splendour at ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... under such circumstances, her custom was not wanted by Brown, Jones, and Robinson. The disappointed female would generally leave the shop with some loud remarks as to swindling, dishonesty, and pettifogging, to which Mr. Jones could turn a deaf ear. But sometimes worse than this would ensue; ladies would insist on their rights; scrambles would occur in order that possession of the article might be obtained; ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... taxes; with all the influence of all the corrupt; with all the Bristol newspapers and almost all the London newspapers; with all the Corporation of the City; with all the bigoted Clergy and all their next a-kin, the pettifogging Attorneys; with all the bigots, and all the hypocrites, and all alarmist fools; with all these against him, and with hundreds of bludgeon-men to boot; opposed to all this, and to thirty or forty hired barristers and attorneys, Mr. Hunt stood the poll for the thirteen days, in the face of horse ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... 'and I have no wish to reflect on her memory, though her mistrust has done so much injury, I will not say to me, but to the cause of my unhappy country. Her scheme was, I think, to have made you that wretched pettifogging being, which they still continue to call in derision by the once respectable name of a Scottish Advocate; one of those mongrel things that must creep to learn the ultimate decision of his causes to the bar of ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... important and costly, drug in trifling cases of common occurrence, where it was not at all needed, and so will lose all the advantages that might come from a judicious use of freedom of speech. He will therefore be very much on his guard against continual fault-finding, and if his friend is always pettifogging about minute matters, and is needlessly querulous, it will give him a handle against him in more important shortcomings. Philotimus the doctor, when a patient who had abscesses on his liver showed him his sore finger, said to him, "My friend, it is ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain heroism away. The Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful carping, but in a heat of admiration. But there is another ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... head,—these are but sorry fortifications, Trim.—O! very poor work, answered Trim, to what your Honour and I make of it.—The character of this last man, said Dr. Slop, interrupting Trim, is more detestable than all the rest; and seems to have been taken from some pettifogging Lawyer amongst you:—Amongst us, a man's conscience could not possibly continue so long blinded,—three times in a year, at least, he must go to confession. Will that restore it to sight? quoth my uncle Toby,—Go on, Trim, quoth my father, or Obadiah ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... out with toil intense A 'cosmic' poet's esoteric sense, Of which a world, unwitting, Recks nothing. Yet how terribly they'd trounce Parliament's pettifogging, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... provinces, and all to effect her dismemberment, and to add ten more slave states to our confederacy? Has not the cry of war for the conquest of Mexico, for the expansion of reinstituted slavery, for the robbery of priests, and the plunder of religious establishments, yet subsided? Have the pettifogging, hair-splitting, nonsensical, and yet inflammatory bickerings about the right of search, pandering to the thirst for revenge in France, panting for war to prostrate the disputed title of her king—has the sound ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... man rather than retire. At other times, concealed behind masses of floating herbage, from their canoes they sprang on board Brazilian ironclads, and were all killed in the vain endeavour to capture the vessels. I knew a little pettifogging lawyer, one Izquierdo, who, with ten companions, attempted in a canoe to take the Brazilian flagship (an ironclad); left alone on her deck, after the death of his companions, he sprang into the water under a shower of bullets, and, ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... Bligh, "I'm British too, and don't you forget it. Confound you, Sir! What the devil do I care for your pettifogging bones? I'm a British sailor, Sir; I come to your God-forsaken parish on a Government job, and I happen on a whole shopful of ancient remains. In pure kindness—pure kindness, mark you—I interrupt my work to dig 'em up; and this is all ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... house in London. And don't you think our Wenna would fascinate everybody with her mouselike ways and her nice small steps? And if they did have any trouble, wouldn't she be better to have somebody with her not timid and anxious and pettifogging, but somebody who wouldn't be cast down, but make ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... then, that a few of my influential readers will be vigilant, and challenge a full discussion by the whole mind of Parliament, so that no temporary, pettifogging half-measure may slip into a thin house—like a weasel into an empty barn—and so obstruct for many years legislation upon durable principle. The thing lies in a nutshell. The Legislature has been entrapped. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... Mr. Otis ranks high in his profession, having a very extensive knowledge of the law in all its ramifications, and a readiness in the application of his knowledge that enables him to baffle and confound his opponents without descending to mere pettifogging. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... not German, ladies-mark the cunning and audacity of the fellow; like that renegade Labour leader, who has never led anything, yet, if he had his will, would lead us all into the pit of destruction; like those other high-brow emasculates who mistake their pettifogging pedantry for pearls of price, and plaster the plain issue before us with perfidious and Pacifistic platitudes. We say at once, and let them note it, we will have none of them; we will have——" Here his words were drowned by an interruption greater even than that; which was fast gathering among the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and patriotism were ideologies bourgeoises and that the "economic interests" of Belgium would be best promoted by a submission. These pedantic barbarians got the answer which they deserved; but on their pettifogging thesis Raemaekers' cartoon is ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... the limit!" she reported to her confederates. "For calm self-complacency I've never seen anybody to equal her. The idea of imagining me as a new girl at her wretched pettifogging old school! Oh, it's too precious! She'd patronize the Queen herself! The Poplars must be executing a war-dance for joy to have got rid of her. Probably they'd have subscribed for more than a bracelet to ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... eldest of the brothers was the /Reichshofrath/ (Imperial Councillor) von Senkenberg, afterwards so celebrated. The second was admitted into the magistracy, and displayed eminent abilities, which, however, he subsequently abused in a pettifogging and even infamous way, if not to the injury of his native city, certainty to that of his colleagues. The third brother, a physician and man of great integrity, but who practised little, and that only in high families, preserved ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... realise the jewels? In all business affairs, Delia was the merest child. She had been brought up in the midst of large expenditure, of which she had been quite unconscious. All preoccupation with money had seemed to her mean and pettifogging. Have it!—and spend it on what you want. But wants must be governed by ideas—by ethical standards. To waste money on personal luxury, on eating, drinking, clothes, or any form of mere display, in ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... indicated. All educated respectable Europeans with a stake in the country should be made Justices of the Peace, with limited powers to try petty cases. There is a vast material—loyalty, educated minds, an honest desire to do justice, independence, and a genuine scorn of everything pettifogging and underhand—that the Indian Government would do well to utilise. The best friend of the Baboo cannot acquit him of a tendency to temporise, a hankering after finesse, a too fatal facility to fall under pecuniary temptation. The educated ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... he said to himself, "what chateau? Ah, I understand! Athos is not a man to be thwarted; he, like Porthos, has obliged his peasantry to call him 'my lord,' and to dignify his pettifogging place by the name of chateau. He had a heavy ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... you Cherokee!" screams out Mr. William. "Jump out of bed, and I'll drive my sword through your body. Why didn't I do it to-day when I took you for a bailiff—a confounded pettifogging bum-bailiff!" And he went on screeching more oaths and incoherencies, until the landlord, the drawer, the hostler, and all the folks of the kitchen were brought to lead him away. After which Harry Warrington closed his ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sacrament which, when a man partook of it, gave him life and more life! Was there not an honourable rivalry among nations, each to be better than the other, to replace this brawling about boundaries, this pettifogging with frontiers? Was there to be no end to this killing and preparing for killing? Would men, from now on, set themselves to the devisal of murderous and more murderous weapons of war until at last an ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... layman. There was nothing priestly in his mood; nothing scholastic in his reasoning; nothing sacerdotal in his conclusions. We breathe with him the clear sharp air of mathematics; and his imagination, shaking itself free from all controversial pettifogging, sweeps off into the stark and naked spaces of the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... we might gather that Danton was a poverty-stricken, pettifogging lawyer of the basest class. That Danton's family belong to the well-to-do upper middle ranks, we see from the object lesson before us. At the time of my visit, this large, roomy, well-built house, with coach-house, stables and half-a-dozen acres of garden, orchard ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... who believe the weather to be calm, because they have drawn a nightcap over their ears, and, burying their heads in pillows of domestic comfort, do not hear Satan sweeping in a hurricane over the earth; let envy, ambition, blindness, and the pettifogging wisdom of small times,—let all these artistically investigate the question of my official capacity, or the nature of my public authority; let them scrupulously discuss the immense problem whether I still possess, or possess no longer, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... should have had no more arithmetic for computing fingers than any perfect-headed marble Apollo mutilated at the wrists. He should have consented to know but the grand personal adventure on the grand personal basis: nothing short of this, no poor cognisance of confusable, pettifogging things, the sphere of earth-grubbing questions and two-penny issues, would begin to be, ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... deal, and has in its sound so much of the terrific, as in many instances to paralyze exertion on the part of the supposed offending person or persons. It has been made the instrument of artful, designing, and malicious persons, aided by pettifogging or pretended attorneys, to obtain money for themselves and clients by way of compromise; and in numerous instances it is well known that fear has been construed into actual guilt. Injunctions are become so common, that even penny printsellers have lately issued ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... "It's pettifogging in the city courts. Wait till I can get my basis,—till I have a fixed amount of money for a fixed amount of work,—and then I'll talk to you about taking up the law again. I'm willing to do it whenever it seems the right thing. ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... devil himself. It will be seen, despite of all that has been said to the disadvantage of the devil, that he has very much improved in his management of worldly affairs; so much so, that, instead of an administration of witches, wizzards, magicians, diviners, astrologers, quack doctors, pettifogging lawyers, and boroughmongers, he has selected some of the wisest men as well as greatest fools of the day to carry his plans into effect. His satanic majesty seems also to have considerably improved in his taste; owing, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... Here was a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read—who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in the office where Malin de Gondreville and Grevin studied pettifogging; was, about 1806, first justice of the peace at Arcis, and then president of the tribunal of the same town, at the time of the lawsuit in connection with the abduction of Malin, when he and Grevin were the prosecuting attorneys. [The Gondreville Mystery.] In the neighborhood ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... born at Vannes, started as a soldier for the army of Italy in 1799. His father, president of the revolutionary tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office that the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth Thermidor. On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this catastrophe occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to Italy at the age of ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... the admiral, but the pigmies by whom he is surrounded are so many drags on the wheels of State. There is not one that I would trust to manage a whelk-stall. They have no idea of the duty of a statesman. Little pettifogging personal equations and jobs occupy the whole of their time, except when they are engaged upon the congenial task of trying to thwart the Supreme Governor. The patriotism of the front officers and soldiers, and the medieval chivalry ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... twice at Petty Sessions, and taught him to know his place. But De Blacquaire's an officer and a gentleman'—he made a burly bow towards the General—' and I don't suppose for a minute that he'd be guilty even of dreaming of such a piece of rascality as this. It's much more likely to be some pettifogging lawyer's game—some sneaking rogue that's got these fellow-rascals round him, with an idea of doing a little bit of blackmail. Stubbs is a decent fellow—for a lawyer. I don't think Stubbs would have a finger in that sort of pie, any more ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... doubt, regarded as typical of the noble qualities of its wearer. These being so hateful to the ugly, sly, intriguing, slandering, malevolent, ill-conditioned, pettifogging, pitiful arch-enemy, it might well be supposed that the mere apparition of that type would scare him away. To this supposition is ascribable the adoption of the horse-shoe, as an infallible charm against the visits of ...
— The True Legend of St. Dunstan and the Devil • Edward G. Flight
... a man whom no one liked, and whom all feared. He was a deep drinker, a great swearer, in short, a perfect reprobate; who never cultivated his land, but went jobbing about from farm to farm, trading horses and cattle, and cheating in a pettifogging way. Uncle Joe had employed him to sell Moodie a young heifer, and he had brought her over for him to look at. When he came in to be paid, I described the stranger of the morning; and as I knew that he was familiar with ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Up to the beginning of the 18th century the offices of solicitors and notaries were filled from Mexico, where the licences to practise in Manila were publicly sold. After that period the colleges and the university issued licences to natives, thus creating a class of native pettifogging advocates who stirred up strife to make cases, for this purpose availing themselves of the intricacies ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Queen Marie Antoinette, is quite uncalled for. "The Revolution was in its conception, its inception, and its results a middle-class revolution. The revolution was inaugurated by the Parliament of Paris—a pettifogging legal assembly. Marie Antoinette was but one fine useless woman among the millions, and she personified the heedless prodigal selfishness of autocracy. We of the Socialist movement, who are full of the idea of social service, of making a full return to society for ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... with a harsh laugh. "You must remember there are two sides to the question. I should say that the interests of a husband and wife were identical, but that is not the view taken by those wretched little pettifogging ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... difference between a mere drudge and an intelligent workman; between the mere salesman or clerk and the enterprising merchant; between the obscure and pettifogging lawyer and the sagacious, influential counselor. It is the difference between one who deserves to be, and will be, stationary in the world, and one who, having determined to make the best of himself, will continually rise in influence and true respectability. This whole ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... majority, or the national necessity for the time being, has always been constitutional; which is only as much as to say that the Convention of 1787 was not wholly made up of inspired prophets, who could provide beforehand for every possible contingency. The doctrine of a strict and even pettifogging interpretation of the Constitution had its rise among men who looked upon that instrument as a treaty, and at a time when the conception of a national power which should receive that of the States into its stream as tributary was something which ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Scotland by Cromwell. As the Covenant was made between God and the Covenanters, on ancient Hebrew precedent it was declared to be binding on all succeeding generations. Had Scotland resisted tyranny without this would-be biblical pettifogging Covenant, her condition would have been the more gracious. The signing of the band began at Edinburgh in Greyfriars' Churchyard on ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... She hates them! So should I if I'd been bothered and worried out of my life by them in the way she has. I hate them myself—that kind: or, rather, it's wrong to say that of them, poor creatures, for they mean well, they really mean well at bottom, in their blundering, formal, pettifogging way. They think they can take the kingdom of Heaven, not by storm, but by petty compliances, like servile servants who have to deal with a capricious, exacting master. Poor souls, they know no better. They measure the universe ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... impression of vibrating with impatience and cried out, "That's pettifogging. Of course there are times when we are sure. Suppose you saw a little child about to take hold of the red-hot end ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... a gross want of courtesy!" muttered The Mackhai angrily. "Am I to be kept waiting by the son of a miserable pettifogging scoundrel of a London lawyer? The beginning of the end, Ken, ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to have represented before you?—not human nature in its height and vigour? But surely you might find the former with all its joys and sorrows, more conveniently in your own ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... every one thinks, that I'm a greedy, soulless woman, and that I even married you"—she laid a fierce emphasis on the pronoun—"out of the wretched, pettifogging ambition some day to be Lady Harwich. You did think it, Nigel. You ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... 104, and the said M. d'Espard in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, No. 22,'—to be sure, the President told me he lived in this part of the town—'having for her solicitor Maitre Desroches'—Desroches! a pettifogging jobber, a man looked down upon by his brother lawyers, and who does his ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... me that we teach history in the wrong way. We give boys the impression that it is an affair only of kings and queens and great statesmen, of generals and admirals, and such-like bores. Thousands of boys could probably draw you a map of many pettifogging little campaigns, with startling accuracy, but not one in a thousand could tell you what the private soldier carried in his knapsack. You could get sheaves of competent essays, from any school, dealing with such things as the Elizabethan ecclesiastical settlement, but how many boys ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... patrolled the coasts, incessantly active. A storm of genuine if not informed indignation broke out in the United States. The action of the Canadian authorities was denounced as unneighbourly and their insistence on the letter of ancient treaties as pettifogging; and, with more justice, it was declared that the Canadian Government used the fishing privileges as a lever, or rather a club, to force the opening of the United States markets to all ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... with a touch of romance, a conception of honour, a quality of imagination, and a clearness of intelligence that renders possible for them things inconceivable of any other existing nation. I may be the slave of perspective effects, but when I turn my mind from the pettifogging muddle of the English House of Commons, for example, that magnified vestry that is so proud of itself as a club—when I turn from that to this race of brave and smiling people, abruptly destiny begins drawing with a bolder hand. Suppose the Japanese were to make up their ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... beautiful little comic cuts exquisitely engraved (used to illustrate "A Shillingsworth of Nonsense"), and a couple of "Punch's Valentines." In one of these—the Lawyer—the original of Mr. Squeers may be seen in the character of an orthodox pettifogging attorney perched upon a stool. But Punch could not support such twin stars as Leech and "Phiz," and the latter left in 1844 for "The Great Gun," whose leading draughtsman he became. In the pages of "The Great Gun" he illustrated Maxwell's ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... squalid and lethargic figure with its sallow, unhealthy, repulsive face, I was overcome by a feeling of almost physical nausea. I realised fully how loathsome this gutter Iago had become to me during the past few months, during which I had had ample opportunity to note his pettifogging envy and jealousy, his almost simian inquisitiveness and prying curiosity. I felt I could not work with him; his presence had become intolerable to me. I realised that this was the finale, the destined end of the Tocsin and of my active revolutionary ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... criticising us, but, unconsciously, themselves. They skew their own dreams into their comment, and blame us for not writing what they once wanted to. You we can trust, for you have looked at life largely and without pettifogging qualms. The parallel lines of our eager pages meet at Infinity—that is, in the infinite understanding and judgment ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... my papers. "Good! Mine is too, for I had it made out just before leaving. But nevertheless, these murders do not augur us any good. I am afraid we shall not be able to do much business here; many of the families will be in mourning; and then, too, the bother and pettifogging of the authorities." "Pshaw! you take too gloomy a view of it," ...
— The Dean's Watch - 1897 • Erckmann-Chatrian
... when, in addition to this, the hitherto independent farmer has to contend with high rents, want of sympathy in his landlord, who probably is ignorant of his very existence, and has never seen him perhaps in his life; and when it is considered that he is left to the sharp practice and pettifogging, but plausible rapacity of a dishonest agent, who feels that he is irresponsible, and may act the petty tryant and vindictive oppressor if he wishes, having no restraint over his principles but his interest, which, so far from restraining, only ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Therefore, in what follows, we shall consider names, independent of whether they are first or last. And to begin with, look what a pull Cromwell had over Pym—the one name full of a resonant imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging, and unheroic to a degree. Who would expect eloquence from Pym—who would read poems by Pym—who would bow to the opinion of Pym? He might have been a dentist, but he should never have aspired to be a statesman. I can only wonder that he succeeded ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... figure marked with that easy, unmeaning vacancy of face, which speaks him formed by nature for a DUPE. Ignorant of the value of money, and negligent in his nature, he leaves his bag of untold gold in the reach of an old and greedy pettifogging attorney, who is making an inventory of bonds, mortgages, indentures, &c. This man, with the rapacity so natural to those who disgrace the profession, seizes the first opportunity of plundering his employer. Hogarth had, a few years before, been engaged in a ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... Happily this authority was not exercised; otherwise, as Gourlay has remarked, "we should have seen, perhaps, the Duke of Ontario leading in a cart of hay, my Lord Erie pitching, and Sir Peter Superior making the rick; or perhaps his Grace might now have been figuring as a pettifogging lawyer, his Lordship as a pedlar, and Sir Knight, as a poor parson, starving on five thousand acres of Clergy Reserves."[31] We were spared the spectacle of such absurdities, and life members of the Legislative Council were the nearest approach to a nobility vouchsafed ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... dazzle the French by a series of adventures, which indeed pleased the Parisians for the time, but at the cost of lasting distrust among the Powers. Generous in his aims, he at first befriended the German and Italian national movements, but forfeited all the fruits of those actions by his pettifogging conduct about Savoy and Nice, the Rhineland and Belgium; while his final efforts to please French clericals and Chauvinists[20] by supporting the Pope at Rome, lost him the support of States that might have retrieved the earlier blunders. In brief, by helping on the nationalists of North Germany ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... going to run off to London to get married, are you, miss?" he said ferociously. "Well, we'll see. You don't go out of my sight until we sail, and if I catch that pettifogging lawyer round at my gate again, I'll break every bone ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... line, or to a few lines. Burke will tell you that one of the great-great-grandfathers of the present Lord Foozlem was the First Baron; he is silent about his great-grandfather, the tinker, and his great-grandfather, the pettifogging country lawyer. Americans are far more apt to push their genealogical investigations in all directions, because they are prompted by a legitimate curiosity rather than by desire to prove a point, American genealogical ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... motives to honest exertion. Why force men to run the gauntlet through both series? It tends to make the Government to be considered as a rapacious tax-gatherer, instead of a liberal landlord, which it really is; and to foster the growth of a host of native pettifogging attorneys, to devour, like white ants, the substance of the landholders of all classes ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... then engaged to write a new opera, and he is obliged to adapt his own airs to the voices and capacity of the company. The manager intrusts the care of the financial department to a registrario, who is generally some pettifogging attorney, who holds the position of his steward. The next thing that generally happens is that the manager falls in love with the prima donna; and the progress of this important amour gives ample employment to the ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... down the platform where the train was standing, and tears trickled down each side of his nose. It was hard, he thought, to be within sight of safety and almost of home, and to be baulked by the want of a few wretched shillings and by the pettifogging mistrustfulness of paid officials. Very soon his escape would be discovered, the hunt would be up, he would be caught, reviled, loaded with chains, dragged back again to prison and bread-and-water and straw; his ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... here give the further history of this claim. It met with the usual delays and obstructions that private claims, having nothing but their intrinsic merits to support them, are compelled to encounter. It called forth the usual amount of legislative pettifogging. Session after session passed away, and still it hung between the two Houses of Congress, until the very time which had elapsed since it was first presented began to be brought up as an argument ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... over the dip of the horizon, was in his blood from his father's side. Friends thought he should be well satisfied when he was sent to live with his grandfather at Hartford and apprenticed to the law; but John Ledyard hated the pettifogging of the law, hated roofed-over, walled-in life, wanted the kind of life where men do things, not just dicker, and philosophize, and compromise over the fag-ends of things other men have done. At twenty-one years of age, without any of the prospects that lure the prudent soul, he ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... gone by. The Marquis de Vandenesse wore mourning for his father, and succeeded to his estates. One evening, therefore, after dinner it happened that a notary was present in his house. This was no pettifogging lawyer after Sterne's pattern, but a very solid, substantial notary of Paris, one of your estimable men who do a stupid thing pompously, set down a foot heavily upon your private corn, and then ask what in the world there is to cry out about? If, by accident, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... out pettifogging Attorneys, cancel improper Advocates, to regulate Fees; to war, in a calm but deadly manner, against pedantries, circumlocutions and the multiplied forms of stupidity, cupidity and human owlery in this department;—and, on the whole, to realize from every Court, now and onwards, "A decision ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... that pettifogging schemer told me he didn't wish me to come to his house again, and I wouldn't, even for Fanny Wyndham, force myself into any man's house. He would not let me see her when I was there, and I could not press it, because her brother was only just dead; so I'm obliged to take her refusal ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... even about the work he had committed to him, and also that there was in such punctual settlements an eagerness, a literalism, totally foreign to Mr. Dosson's domestic habits and to which he would even have imputed a certain pettifogging provinciality—treatable however with dry humour. If Gaston had cooled off he wanted at least to be able to say that he had rendered them services in America; but now her father, for the moment at least, scarcely appeared to think his services ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... how does the Devil know 1385 What 'twas that I design'd to do? His office of intelligence, His oracles, are ceas'd long since; And he knows nothing of the Saints, But what some treacherous spy acquaints. 1390 This is some pettifogging fiend, Some under door-keeper's friend's friend, That undertakes to understand, And juggles at the second-hand; And now would pass for Spirit Po, 1395 And all mens' dark concerns foreknow. I think I need not fear him for't; These rallying devils do no hurt. ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... deceptive, sophistical, jesuitical; illusive, illusory; specious, hollow, plausible, ad captandum [Lat.], evasive; irrelevant &c 10. weak, feeble, poor, flimsy, loose, vague. irrational; nonsensical &c (absurd) 497. foolish &c (imbecile) 499; frivolous, pettifogging, quibbling; finespun^, overrefined^. at the end of one's tether, au bout de son latin. Adv. intuitively &c adj.; by intuition; illogically &c adj.. Phr. non constat [Lat.]; that ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... in that way. He'd think it silly to be pettifogging and dishonest about money, or to go in for mad speculations run by shady companies; but he wouldn't think it extraordinary ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... the grounds of the demand and of the objection to comply with it; and secondly, that the Romans appointed a permanent machinery for the edictal development of their law, and associated it immediately with practice. By the former the Romans precluded the pettifogging practices of advocates, by the latter they obviated incapable law-making, so far as such things can be prevented at all; and by means of both in conjunction they satisfied, as far as is possible, the two conflicting requirements, that ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Pamphleteers and other temporary creatures of the damned sort, have found from of old to be the one way of permanently rising: by steady service, namely, of the Opposite of Beelzebub. By conforming to the Laws of this Universe; instead of trying by pettifogging to evade and profitably contradict them. The Hohenzollerns too have a History still articulate to the human mind, if you search sufficiently; and this is what, even with some emphasis, it will teach us concerning their adventures, and achievements of success in the field of life. Resist ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... certainly shall you spend your time in the gymnastic schools, sleek and blooming; not chattering in the market-place rude jests, like the youths of the present day; nor dragged into court for a petty suit, greedy, pettifogging, knavish; but you shall descend to the Academy and run races beneath the sacred olives along with some modest compeer, crowned with white reeds, redolent of yew, and careless ease, of leaf-shedding white poplar, rejoicing in the season of spring, when the plane-tree whispers ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... sure enough there was a long step-ladder hanging on a great nail over the last half-landing, and a square trap-door right over the landing proper! I ran up just to see the names on the two top doors; one was evidently that of some pettifogging firm of solicitors, while the other bespoke a private resident, whom I judged to be out of town by the congestion of postal matter that met my fingers in his letter-box. Neither had any terrors for me. The step-ladder was unhooked without another moment's hesitation. Care ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... Overstone with an affectation of tone and manner different from that in which he had addressed his previous companions, "have the Ninth United States Cavalry helped to serve a State court's pettifogging process?" ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte |
