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Plague   Listen
noun
Plague  n.  
1.
That which smites, wounds, or troubles; a blow; a calamity; any afflictive evil or torment; a great trail or vexation. "And men blasphemed God for the plague of hail." "The different plague of each calamity."
2.
(Med.) An acute malignant contagious fever, that often prevails in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey, and has at times visited the large cities of Europe with frightful mortality; hence, any pestilence; as, the great London plague. "A plague upon the people fell."
Cattle plague. See Rinderpest.
Plague mark, Plague spot, a spot or mark of the plague; hence, a token of something incurable.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Plague" Quotes from Famous Books



... crumbled beneath the shock; the moribund life which it was pursuing to imbecility and foulness, was extinguished. For another reason, the end of the universe seemed near; such cities as had been forgotten by Attila were decimated by famine and plague. The Latin language in its turn, seemed to sink ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... said I, "that I may answer you in a suitable manner." "I," said he, "am Taliesin, {49} the prince of the Bards of the West, and that is a piece of my composition." "I know not," said I, "what could be your meaning, unless it was, that the yellow plague {50} which destroyed Maelgwn of Gwynedd, put an end to you on the sea-shore, and that your body was divided amongst the crows and the fishes." "Peace, fool!" said he, "I was alluding to my two callings, of man of the law and poet. Please to tell me, has a lawyer more similitude to a raven, ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... ran away from your window, Dick, with that pack of people behind me, I dashed into a full-fledged scrape that was none of mine. You know that Mr. Ritchie, whom some of the Central Grammar boys plague so fearfully, just because he always gets so mad and makes such threats against ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock

... thy plighted vows? — That which makes others break a house, And hang, and scorn ye all, before Endure the plague of ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... in the nursery, so Johnny can't plague you," said the peace-loving Milly. "I'm so sorry ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May

... administered to their famous Juve has taught them a lesson. They are keeping quiet at present. Plague take the lot of them!... It makes me furious when I think what happened the other day—creating a scandal about things the public ought to be kept in ignorance of—ought never to hear of—never!... Those confounded meddlers complicate our ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre

... steps above the level of the church, still hangs this famous "Madonna" of the Rucellai—not far, perhaps, from the spot where Boccaccio's youths and maidens met that Tuesday morning in the year of the great plague; nor far, again, from where the solitary woman, beautiful beyond belief, conversed with Machiavelli on the morning of the first of May in 1527.[125] We who can call to mind the scenes that picture has looked down upon—we who have studied the rise and ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... Cartesian vortices, he despaired of ever being able to discover whether there is a secret principle in nature which, at the same time, is the cause of the motion of all celestial bodies, and that of gravity on the earth. But being retired in 1666, upon account of the Plague, to a solitude near Cambridge; as he was walking one day in his garden, and saw some fruits fall from a tree, he fell into a profound meditation on that gravity, the cause of which had so long been sought, ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire

... Hepsa with a book in her hand, declaring it was foolish nonsense; but, as time went on, and the first difficulties were overcome, and her mother began to find Hepsa growing very gentle, and Tom had less occasion to plague his sister, they all felt that the books Hepsa had studied, and the little girl who came so often to see her, were kind friends, and love began to bind them all together. Hepsa no longer wore torn clothes; Genevieve's mother had given her some neat dresses, and Genevieve had ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins

... did not exist in the fifteenth century; in its stead there was only the undressed body, ill-developed, untrained, pinched, and distorted by the garments only just cast off, cramped and bent by sedentary occupations, livid with the plague-spots of the Middle Ages, scarred by the whip-marks of asceticism. This stripped body, unseen and unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the eyes of others, shivered and cowered for cold and for shame. The Giottesques ignored its ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... has; but no power on earth could make him part with that nag. I've always liked that boy, always liked old John, but the plague knows what ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes

... week. Still she stood by her post. Often, she said, those who were well and happy when they retired, ere daylight came were in the grave, for they were buried the same hour they died. Night after night she prayed to God in the dark, and at length the fury of the plague was abated. ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... glance at its massive flint walls was sufficient to show. In ancient times there had been a large Abbey at Boisingham, two miles away, which, the records tell, suffered terribly from an outbreak of the plague in the fifteenth century. After this the monks obtained ten acres of land, known as Molehill, by grant from the de la Molle of the day, and so named either on account of their resemblance to a molehill (of ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard

... her physic, though she cry that it is bitter and loathsome; nor will God set aside His physic for your Ladyship's crying. Yet, dear my Lady, this is not because He loveth to see you weep, but only because He would heal you of the deadly plague of your sins. Our Lord's blood shed upon the rood delivereth us from the guilt of our sins; but so tied to sin are we, that we must needs be set under correction for to make us to loathe it. I pray your Ladyship mercy for my rude speaking, ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt

... Roos said locusts were a plague, as in the days of King Pharaoh, sent by God, and the country would assuredly be loaded with shame and obloquy if it tried to raise its hand against the mighty hand ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick

... "I don't want to plague you, darling. As you say, why want to know more? Why want to know anything of that 'small' mystery—Je m'en fiche, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... one-third at a single blow the amount of labour put forth in a day by any class of workers, is precisely equivalent to a sudden removal of one-third of these workers from the field of labour. We know from history that the result of a disastrous epidemic, like the Black Plague, has been to raise the wages and improve the general condition of the labourer even in the teeth of legal attempts to keep down wages. The advocates of an Eight Hours Act assert that the same effect would follow ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson

... can grind us to the dust," he rejoined in French, "but we will not leave the land which has always been ours. We settled it; our fathers gave their lives for it in a thousand places. The Indians killed them, the rivers and the storms, the plague and the fire, the sickness and the cold wiped them out. They were burned alive at the stake, they were flayed; their bones were broken to pieces by stones—but they blazed trails with their blood in the wilderness from New Orleans to Hudson's Bay. They paid for the land with their lives. Then ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... it, though I have been a great plague and nuisance to every one, especially to you, Marian. I know what you're going to say, so let alone that. I wish—. But no use talking of that, she was very kind and we got very comfortable together after you were gone, Marian, and I like to ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... struck down. However, it has pleased God to spare him, and, after a long struggle, he is safe from the disorder and almost restored to his former health. But we are still under a sort of quarantine, for, although people pretend to believe in vaccination, they avoid the house as if the plague were in it, and stop their carriages at the end of the village and send inquiries and cards, and in my mind they are right. To say nothing of Reading, there have been above thirty severe cases, after vaccination, in our immediate neighborhood, five of them fatal. I had ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... and, during the terms of the law courts, established his residence in Edinburgh. He was early employed as a counsel at the circuit courts; but his devotion to literature prevented him from giving his heart to his profession, and he did not succeed as a lawyer. In 1816 appeared his "City of the Plague," a dramatic poem, which was followed by his prose tales and sketches, entitled "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life," "The Foresters," and "The Trials ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... on while no reasons are thrown before me. With these, you have made my temples throb again. Just heaven! dost thou grant us fairer fields, and wider, for the whirlwind to lay waste? Dost thou build us up habitations above the street, above the palace, above the citadel, for the Plague to enter and carouse in? Has not my youth paid its dues, paid its penalties? Cannot our griefs come first, while we have strength to bear them? The fool! the fool! who thinks it a misfortune that his love is unrequited. Happier young man! look at the violets until thou drop asleep on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... its misery. An unjust government, produces discouragement in the soul: its vexations depopulate a country; under its influence, the earth remains without culture; from thence is bred frightful famine, which gives birth to contagion and plague. The misery of a people produce revolutions; soured by misfortunes, their minds get into a state of fermentation; the overthrow of an empire, is the necessary effect. It is thus that physics and morals are always connected, or rather are the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... and corrupt men, who suck the blood and gold of the country. Paris and the maritime towns taxed; the rural districts ruined and laid waste by the soldiers and other agents of the Cardinal; the peasants reduced to feed on animals killed by the plague or famine, or saving themselves by self-banishment—such is the work of this new justice. His worthy agents have even coined money with the effigy of the Cardinal-Duke. Here are some of his ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... home. He thought of his circle of friends, his position in business, his own education and health. He saw how much he had to make him happy; and all jarred and marred, and cursed by his miserable fits of irritation; the fever, the plague increasing daily; becoming his nature, breathing the pestilent atmosphere of hell over himself and ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur

... so much better than an honest Indian that the murderer must go free because there was no judge or jury to try him, while the Indian must be shot by the soldiers, without trial, for trying to protect himself from murder. If the innocent could be separated from the guilty, "plague, pestilence, and famine" would not be an unjust punishment for the crimes committed in this country against the original occupants of the soil. And it should be remembered that when retribution comes, though we may not understand why, the innocent often share the fate of the guilty. The law ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... "The plague of it is that younger sons must live! Money they must have!—and there's the gate off the hinges! The best, and indeed the only thing to help is, that the two other aristocracies make common cause to keep the rich in ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald

... twenty-five cents. Provoked at the laugh this occasioned, he watched for Joe to pass by, and set his big dog upon him, screaming furiously, "Call me an old swindler again, will you." An evil spirit is more contagious than the plague. Joe went home and scolded his wife, and boxed little Joe's ears, and kicked the cat; and not one of them knew what it was all for. A fortnight after, Reuben's big dog was found dead by poison. Whereupon ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... with my friends, Messrs. Tom Taylor and Charles Reade, to see the first representation of a play of theirs called, I think, "The King's Wager," in which Charles the Second, Nell Gwynn, and the Plague were prominent characters. Accidental circumstances prevented one of the gentlemen from coming with me, and I have often since wondered at my temerity in having placed myself in ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... world, seizes the ardent youth to-day with a stern command to bring about juster social conditions. Youth's divine impatience with the world's inheritance of wrong and injustice makes him scornful of "rose water for the plague" prescriptions, and he insists upon something strenuous ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams

... permission, to insure its contradiction. "What a needless annoyance in travelling it is for a family to be stopped by douaniers, only to extort money for not doing a duty which would be absurd if done!" "Why, really I don't see that," &c. &c. "What a plague it is to send your servant (a whole morning's work) from one subaltern with a queer name, to another, for a lady's ticket to witness any of the functions at the Sistine!" Well, it did appear to him the simplest thing in the world; it was ten times ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... surely you won't think to leave me in this strait? Why three of us are hardly able for the work, and how can I make head against this plague with only the poor sav—with only Jacky, that is first-rate at light work till he gets to find it dull—but can't lift a sheep and fling her into the water, as the like of ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... made it impossible to practise manoeuvres before sailing for the front. Then, in the bungling hurry of fitting out, the hulls of several vessels were left foul, which made them dull sailers; while nearly all the holds were left unscoured, which, of course, helped to propagate the fevers, scurvy, plague, and pestilence brought on by bad food badly stowed. Nor was this all. Officers who had put in so little sea time with working fleets were naturally slack and inclined to be discontented. The fact that they were under sealed orders, which had been communicated ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood

... from the pained sympathy of friendship to the scientific zeal of character study. "Girls, have you noticed Mary Winchester lately? It is the strangest thing! She seems more alone and alien than ever. The girls avoid her as if she had the plague. In the library and the corridor to-day it was as plain as could be. They stop talking when she comes around. They watch her all the time though they try not to let her know it. Of course, she couldn't help feeling it. They point her out to each other, and raise their brows and ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz

... arrived in Australia the one place that I determined nothing should drag me to was Western Australia. No, not all the gold in the mines would get me to that pestilential plague spot. Here is a place boomed "at home" and abroad at the time of Queen Victoria's Jubilee, when nightly speeches were made at banquets glorifying the charms of the speculators' Eldorado, Western Australia—when columns were written of its boasted civilisation, and cheers were given when ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... consequence, had not the English people come forward, and by the most stupendous act of national generosity which the world ever saw, and which none but a country so rich as England could afford, arrested "the plague of hunger," which must otherwise have desolated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various

... made for man below. Yet all her schemes with nicest art are planned, Good counteracting ill, and gladness woe. With gold and gems if Chilian mountains glow, If bleak and barren Scotia's hills arise; There, plague and poison, lust and rapine grow; Here, peaceful are the vales, and pure the skies, And freedom fires the soul, and ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie

... returning the answer that he would himself know next day the reason for this refusal. And indeed, next day, the rumour spread in London that the French Embassy had contagion, and that two of the lords in it having died of the plague at Calais, the queen, whatever wish she might have to be agreeable to Henry III, could not endanger her precious existence by receiving his envoys. Great was the astonishment of M. de Bellievre at learning this news he protested that the queen was ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... their example he had destroyed a fine constitution; that in his distress his bottle companions had all forsaken him; they could not bear the thought of death. Had I my days to begin again, said he, I would flee from a swearer or a drunkard, as I would from the plague. He prayed fervently that God would forgive his iniquity for the sake of his Son Jesus Christ. His fever increased, and in a few days he went the way of all ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous

... strong-smelling oil, called in those days "rock oil"—a crude petroleum. When all cracks in the bed and near wall were treated with this, it greatly mitigated, if it did not quite end, the nuisance of the "plague ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton

... the beginning of 1722, the author gave an eighth, to which he prefixed a long preface, particularly calculated to refute what had been advanced in France, concerning the absence of contagion in the malady that had afflicted them: he also now added a more distinct description of the plague, and its causes; and confirmed the utility of the measures he had recommended, for preventing its extension, from examples of good success, where the same had been put in practice: to these he has likewise annexed, a short chapter relating to the cure of this deplorable affliction.—In ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead

... Apollo. When Lyrnessus was taken, Astynome fell to the share of Agamemnon, but the father begged to be allowed to ransom her. Agamemnon refused to comply, whereupon the priest invoked the anger of his patron god, and Apollo sent a plague into the Grecian camp. This was the cause of contention between Agamemnon and Achilles, and forms the subject of Homer's epic ...
— 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.

... families. The whirlwind came; it made no distinction of persons. "It smote the four corners of the house," and the high-minded and honorable fell indiscriminately with the rest. Well may it be asked, Whence came this desolation upon the community? No pestilence visited our land; it was not the plague; it was not the yellow fever, or cholera. Health was borne on every breeze; the earth yielded her produce, and Peace ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee

... Back and fro, back and fro— On the dark of the earth and where 'twas light. When 'twas cold and no sound but the steps of I on the road, and the fox's bark; when 'twas hot and the white dust smouldered in the mouth of I, and things flying did plague I with the wings of they—But 'twas always the same thought as I had—"Some day I shall come back to Steve," I did tell me. And then again—"Some day I shall get and hold Dorry in my arms." And now I be comed. And Steve—and ...
— Six Plays • Florence Henrietta Darwin

... in France, Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills, They shall be fam'd; for there the Sun shall greet them, And draw their honours reeking up to heaven; Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime, The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France. Mark, then, abounding valour in our English; That, being dead, like to the bullet's grazing, Break out into a second course of mischief, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... after one a clock wee are at anchor in Malta harbour, and have many salutes. But we have no prattick by reason of the plague, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various

... used here in a criminal sense. I know that colonizationists regard slavery as an evil; but an evil which has been entailed upon this land, for the existence of which we are no more to blame than for the prevalence of plague or famine. ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison

... some of you say, cannot some influence be brought to bear upon this plague-spot? Will the legislature or congress do nothing? Is the law and moral right to continue to be trodden under foot? Are the magistrates and the police powerless? The truth is, the harlots and whoremongers are master of ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... lay under the ground, and every one else avoided her like the plague, when they did not require her services. Others met and enjoyed a gossip, but no one thought of running in to Maren for a cup of coffee. Even her neighbors kept themselves carefully away, though they often required a helping hand and got it too. She had but one living friend, who looked to her ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo

... drawing-room," whispered the major, in a voice that betokened a degree of suspicion; "but where the plague that is, Heaven only knows! Stand by, my boys!—are your pistols ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... he proved an extraordinary proficient; and it is remarkable that he had such a strength of memory as to be able to say all Terence and Horace by heart. He was now arrived to the thirteenth year of his age, and had been continually under the watchful eye of his mother, who died of the plague then raging at Deventer. The contagion daily increasing, and having swept away the family where he boarded, he was obliged to return home. His father Gerard was so concerned at her death that he grew melancholy, and died soon after: neither of his parents being much ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus

... in 1395, to Maria, daughter of Andrea Priuli, and, en secondes noces, to Maria, or Marina, daughter of Bartolommeo Nani. By his two wives he was the father of ten children—five sons and five daughters. Of the five sons, four died of the plague, and the fifth, Jacopo, lived to be the cause, if not the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... art not safe, and when thou desirest to lay it aside thou canst not rid thyself of? Are friends any protection who have been attached by fortune, not by virtue? Nay; him whom good fortune has made a friend, ill fortune will make an enemy. And what plague is more effectual to do hurt than a ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius

... thousand versts. From Tyumen to Tomsk I had cold and flooded rivers to contend with. The cold was awful; on Ascension Day there was frost and snow, so that I could not take off my sheepskin and felt boots until I reached the hotel at Tomsk. As for the floods, they were a veritable plague of Egypt. The rivers rose above their banks and overflowed the meadows, and with them the roads, for dozens of versts around. I was continually having to exchange my chaise for a boat, and one could not get a boat for nothing—for a good boat one had to pay with one's heart's blood, for one had ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... to a store of sporting outfits, bought a revolver and cartridges, had their shoes shined at the next corner, and slowly wended their way toward the depot. Their actions were almost mechanical. Suicide is an attack of insanity, a sort of mental plague. If one has caught the fever, one is doomed. There is no escape from it. At the same time it is contagious. The literary man was somewhat infected by it. All his interests in life seemed to be dulled, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... encountered Eveena, who had been seeking me anxiously. Much alarmed for her, I bade her return at once to her room. She obeyed as of course, equally of course surprised and a little mortified; while I, marvelling by what conceivable means the plague of Cairo or Constantinople could have been conveyed across forty million miles of space and some two years of Earthly time, paced the peristyle for a few minutes. As I did so, my eye fell on the roses which grew ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... "A plague upon Queen Mab!" quoth he, "And all her maids where'er they be: I think the devil guided me, To seek her so provoked!" Where stumbling at a piece of wood, He fell into a ditch of mud, Where to the very chin he stood, In danger ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... respect for "composition," ingrained perhaps by his Public School and University training. Borrow arrays his page by instinct, Kinglake by study. His irony (as in the interview with the Pasha) is almost too elaborate; his artistic judgment (as in the Plague chapter) almost too sure; the whole book almost too clever. The performance was wonderful; the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... best absent: in musing on her, wishing her well, having said the adieu. For it was wearisome to hear praises of 'innocence'; and women can do so little to cure that 'wickedness of men,' among the lady's conversational themes; and 'love' too: it may be a 'plague,' and it may be 'heaven': it is better left unspoken of. But there were times when Mrs. Marsett's looks and tones touched compassion to press her hand: an act that had a pledgeing signification in the girl's bosom: and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... passed by in the darkness of the night. With the cart came a cry; so loud, so clear, so piercing, that it could be heard in all the closed houses of the street. 'Bring out your dead, bring out your dead!' Then, one door after another was hurriedly opened, and from the plague-stricken houses one body after another was brought out, and was thrown hastily into ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton

... think, my dear Rivers, that marriage, on prudent principles, is a horrid sort of an affair? It is really cruel of papas and mammas to shut up two poor innocent creatures in a house together, to plague and torment one another, who might have been ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke

... of suffering, they took a circuit of perhaps a hundred miles, in order to strike into a land with few or no inhabitants. But in such a land they were sure to meet absolute starvation. Then, again, whether with or without this 15 plague of starvation, whether with or without this plague of hostility in front, whatever might be the "fierce varieties" of their misery in this respect, no rest ever came to their unhappy rear; post equitem sedet atra cura: it was a torment like the undying worm of conscience. 20 ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... O'Ryan by three years, which in men is little, but in boys, at a certain time of life, is much. It means, generally, weight and height, an advantage in a scrimmage. Constantine Jopp had been the plague and tyrant of O'Ryan's boyhood. He was now a big, leering fellow, with much money of his own, got chiefly from the coal discovered on his place by Vigon, the half-breed French-Canadian. He had a sense of dark and malicious humor, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... the comic is so low; there is nothing like the heroic. I am engaged here on a heroic picture,' said he, pointing to the canvas; 'the subject is "Pharaoh dismissing Moses from Egypt," after the last plague—the death of the first-born; it is not far advanced—that finished figure is Moses': they both looked at the canvas, and I, standing behind, took a modest peep. The picture, as the painter said, was not far advanced, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... of that class that I keep the medicine ready. La Grippe is a splendid thing for my trade. It is affecting more pilgrims just now than any other disease. Some churches are more than decimated by the ravages of this plague." ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris

... with many more thorns than leaves, the former is elegantly decorated by the hand of art, and set apart as the favorite retreat of festive pleasure. True it is that the climate of Italy suits out-of-door amusements better than our own, and that Pompeii was not exposed to that plague of soot which soon turns marble goddesses into chimney-sweepers. The portico is composed of columns, fluted and corded, the lower portion of them painted blue, without pedestals, yet approaching to the Roman rather than to the Grecian Doric. The ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... aspect of the work led the rabbis of Palestine and Babylon in later days, when the spread of Hellenized Judaism was fraught with misery to the race, to regard it as an awful calamity, and to recount a tale of a plague of darkness which fell upon Palestine for three days when it was made;[22] and they observed a fast day in place of the old Alexandrian feast on the anniversary of its completion. They felt as the old Italian proverb has it, Traduttori, traditori! ("Translators are ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich

... long, for irrigation purposes. What could isolated men do in that struggle against the dry climate? What could they obtain through individual effort when South Russia was struck with the marmot plague, and all people living on the land, rich and poor, commoners and individualists, had to work with their hands in order to conjure the plague? To call in the policeman would have been of no use; to associate was ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... Don't plague me! A thousand times I have told you not to bother me with your politics! This is no question of politics! And you," said Chubikoff, turning to Dukovski and shaking his fist, "I won't forget this ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various

... (what they call) the average man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all but the paltriest considerations. I accept the issue. We can only know others by ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the expression!) does not make us different from our fellow-men, or it would make us incapable of writing novels; and the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just like you and me, or he would not be average. It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon the latter ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... first visit to India, and my first impression was certainly not a good one. The heat was intense, and signs of the plague were discernible everywhere. The streets were deserted and the hotels bad and dirty for want of servants, who had abandoned the town in fear ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... In the year 1720 and 1722 the Plague made dreadful havock at Marseilles; at which time the Bishop was indefatigable in the execution of his pastoral office, visiting, relieving, encouraging, and absolving the sick with extream tenderness; and though perpetually exposed to the infection, like Sir John Lawrence mentioned ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin

... horror, upon certain possibilities, or what were esteemed such, really brought about the corruption of imagination at least, which at first they had shuddered at. Moreover, there was a sort of uncertainty as to who might be infected—not unlike the overpowering dread of the plague, which made some shrink from their best-beloved with irrepressible fear. The brother or sister, who was the dearest friend of their childhood and youth, might now be bound in some mysterious deadly pact with evil spirits ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell

... terror-stricken were the tribes that, with few exceptions, they did not stay to bury their dead; and because they did not do so, flying even from the dying, a curse was laid on them that some day the plague would return, brought back by the Wundah or white devils; and the blacks shudder still, though it was generations before them, at the thought that such ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker

... up gladly. Green things venture timidly out of the parched earth, then shoot up as rapidly as the beanstalk of the fairy tale. But inside houses dampness reigns. Green fungus adorns boots and all things of leather, tobacco reeks with moisture, and the white man scratches himself and curses the plague ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly

... the Peak district are in a state of great alarm at the invasion of a great part of their beautiful country by what some of them describe as a plague of locusts, and yesterday considerable numbers of people visited the district where the hosts are still advancing. Many from Sheffield and Manchester alighted at Chinley, Edale, and Hope, among them some eminent etymologists, anxious to be of assistance in ridding the country of ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various

... apparitions: but since they have been driven out of our Country and Houses; there's another sort of Imp come in, ten times wickeder then any of the other; which regards nor cares neither for Crosses, Holy-water, Exorcisms, or any sort of Divel-drivers; but dares boldly shew himself at noon-day, namely a Plague-Divel, which sets Man an Wife together by the ears, to try who of them both shall have the command and government ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh

... come. I am glad of it, with all my heart and soul. It is quite good enough for you. Now you are well served for coming to fight in favor of the American rebels, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible contagion—domestic felicity—which same, like the small pox or the plague, a man can have only once in his life; because it commonly lasts him (at least with us in America—I don't know how you manage these matters in France) for his whole life time. And yet after all the maledictions you so richly merit on the subject, ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford

... he had your courage in his limbs for an hour to make him uneasy, and plague and torment him, till he were compelled to leave ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... believe that such things are the decrees of a just and loving God who created this world? Slavery, Polygamy, Famine, and Plague were once universal scourges and accepted as the mysterious ways of God. We have outgrown them all and created a new and nobler God. We find that these things are not the results of his law, but the results of the violation ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... the chateau to see the children. They brought them wreaths of flowers and other votive offerings. They sang songs to serenade them, and they built bonfires around the walls of the chateau at night, to drive away the infection of the plague, which was then prevailing in some parts of the country, and ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... humiliations had to be endured; so long as a Corsair raid upon Spain suited the policy of France; so long as the Dutch, in their jealousy of other states, could declare that Algiers was necessary to them; there was no chance of the plague subsiding; and it was not till the close of the great Napoleonic wars that the Powers agreed, at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, to act together, and do away with the scourge of Christendom. And even then little was accomplished ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole

... sister, after screaming, fell on the floor in a swoon. Emily instantly followed her example, and there they both lay, like two petrified queens in Westminster Abbey. It was a beautiful sight, "pretty, though a plague." ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... robbed the orchard three times—what of that? It was the old abbot's residence when there was plague or ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... every hand, hunted from place to place, he finally sought peace and shelter with his old friend, the teacher who had first inspired him in his youth, OEcolampadius, and here in Basle in a quiet retreat, he died of the plague in November 1527, hardly more ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... had dispatched three lesser D's to be the damnation of nuns, and those three D's were Dances, Dresses, and Dogs. Medieval England was famous for dancing and mumming and minstrelsy; it was Merry England because, however plague and pestilence and famine and the cruelties of man to man might darken life, still it loved these things. But there were no two views possible about what the Church thought of dancing; it was accurately summed up by one moralist in the aphorism, 'The Devil is the inventor and governor and ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... the great assassin who slays as many thousands as ever did plague or cholera, drink or warfare; "they say," the thief of reputation, who steals, with stealthy step and coward's mask, to filch good names away in the dead dark of irresponsible calumny; "they say," a giant murderer, iron-gloved to slay you, a fleet, elusive, vaporous will-o'-the-wisp, when you would ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... catch With his surcease success; that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We 'ld jump the life to come. But in these cases We still have judgement here; that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... learned, ingenious and industrious Dr. Schliemann has set the question forever at rest by uncovering the bones of the slain frogs. One of the forms of moral suasion by which Pharaoh was besought to favor the Israelities was a plague of frogs, but Pharaoh, who liked them fricasees, remarked, with truly oriental stoicism, that he could stand it as long as the frogs and the Jews could; so the programme was changed. The frog is a diligent songster, having a good voice but no ear. The libretto ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... likely thing enough. Cities were often made desolate in a few days by the plague—the people running to the hills, a weird devil's silence all about the gates. These might well betoken the presence of a foe to which the army of Plassenburg ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... said irascibly, "I wish they'd die. Andrew calls them his, but they'd starve only for me. I'm always saying I'll have no more pets, and still they're brought here. Some day when he has a home of his own and people plague him, he'll ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... suddenly rousing himself, he said, striking the table with his hand: "Yes, Pavel, the peasant will lay the land bare for himself when he rises to his feet. He will burn everything up, as if after a plague, so that all traces of his wrongs will vanish ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky

... consider your duty would be, (1) were the country invaded, (2) were London in the hands of the mob, (3) were your neighbourhood visited by fire, and decimated by the plague. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various

... brilliant but hypercriticised painter, Joseph William Turner, was met by a volley of abuse from all the art galleries of Europe. His paintings, which have since won the applause of all civilized nations, "The Fifth Plague of Egypt," "Fishermen on a Lee Shore in Squally Weather," "Calais Pier," "The Sun Rising Through Mist," and "Dido Building Carthage," were then targets for critics to shoot at. In defense of this outrageously abused man, a young author ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... for our own intellectual difficulties, and for the difficulties of the world, there is nothing like time and patience. The mysteries that used to plague us when we were boys melted away when we grew up. And many questions which trouble me to- day, and through which I cannot find my way, if I lay them aside, and go about my ordinary duties, and come ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... friend; I have done a second fantastic tale for the Revue des Deux Mondes, a tale for children. I have written about a hundred letters, for the most part to make up for the folly or to soften the misery of imbeciles of my acquaintance. Idleness is the plague of this age, and life is passed in working for those who do not work. I do not complain. I am well! every day I plunge into the Indre and into its icy cascades, my sixty-eight years and my whooping-cough. When I am no longer useful nor agreeable to others, I want to go away quietly without ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... unemployment will no longer haunt men and women, every infant born will be well-born and welcome, and the numerous anxieties and ambitions that now disturb the lives of so many of the earth's inhabitants will no longer plague us. They will be the dead memories of a ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... (considering the prodigious advantages of the ground for defensive war) little to be looked for by an invader but hard knocks, 'more kicks than halfpence,' so long as there was any indigenous population to stand up and kick. But often it must have happened in a course of centuries, that plague, small-pox, cholera, the sweating-sickness, or other scourges of universal Europe and Asia, would absolutely depopulate a region no larger than an island; as in fact, within our brief knowledge of the New Hollanders, has happened through small-pox alone, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... pitiful coward—unjustly, because, nurtured as she had been on the proprieties, surrounded all her days by men and women of a class most sensitive to public opinion, who feared the breath of scandal worse than a plague, confession for her must mean a shame unspeakable. What! Admit that she, Dorothea Westcote, had loved a French prisoner almost young enough to be her son! that she had given him audience at night! that he had been shot and captured beneath ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... mind, being crown'd with you, Drink up the monarch's plague, this flattery? Or whether shall I say, mine eye saith true, And that your love taught it this alchemy, To make of monsters and things indigest Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble, Creating every bad a perfect best, As fast as objects to his beams assemble? O! 'tis the first, 'tis ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare

... bosom of your mother. Did it never seem to you that the work which you did with me was a good work—the reduction of the corvee, the decrease of conscription, the lessening of taxes of the fellah, the bridges built, the canals dug, the seed distributed, the plague stayed, the better dwellings for the poor in the Delta, the destruction of brigandage, the slow blotting-out of exaction and tyranny under the kourbash, the quiet growth of law and justice, the new industries started—did not all these seem good to you, as you served the land with me, your great ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... religion it is; worshipping or serving the false Gods of any nation, by committing adultery with their princes, or by worshipping them; a Council of a kingdom, by its image; idolatry, by blasphemy; overthrow in war, by a wound of man or beast; a durable plague of war, by a sore and pain; the affliction or persecution which a people suffers in labouring to bring forth a new kingdom, by the pain of a woman in labour to bring forth a man-child; the dissolution of a body politic or ecclesiastic, ...
— Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John • Isaac Newton

... now," he pleaded; "my nights have been sleepless, solitary. In the days I have drunk deeply, squandered my money, tried all dissipations, and proved them disappointments. If you leave me I swear that I will plague myself and you." ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... partial to sugar-cane. The jackal is credited with digging corpses out of the shallow graves, and devouring bodies. I once came across the body of a child in the vicinity of a jungle village which had been unearthed by one. At Seonee we had, at one time, a plague of mad jackals, which did much damage. Sir Emerson Tennent writes of a curious horn or excrescence which grows on the head of the jackal occasionally, which is regarded by the Singhalese as a potent charm, by the instrumentality of which every wish can be realised, and stolen property will return ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... preaching, for it's enough to raise the swelling under one's arms with fright: but then, after that, he says Florence is to be regenerated; but what will be the good of that when we're all dead of the plague, or something else? And then, the third thing, and what he said oftenest, is, that it's all to be in our days: and he marked that off on his thumb, till he made me tremble like the very jelly before me. They ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... cabin once occupied by the liner's former skipper. His loneliness increased. He began to feel those daunting self-doubts such as plague the most unselfish and conscientious people. His actions to date, of course, did not trouble him. Today's actions were the ones which bothered his conscience. He felt that they were not quite adequate. The balance left in the ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster

... place in the East. The climate, though hot, is very fine; but the place is often shaken by earthquakes, which have at times caused great destruction to lives and property. That dreadful scourge, also, the plague, is a frequent visitor. The former may truly be said to be beyond man's control; but the latter is, I am certain, brought about very much by the dirty habits of the people, and ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston

... be armed either with the power of kicking out, or with imperturbable composure. This latter is the more useful and more dignified endowment, but it springs from a sense of self-sufficiency which fails him. If he had but the gift of epigram he might escape from his tormentors. The plague of it is that he never succeeds except when he reasons like a man of sense, and weapons forged on this anvil are too blunt to pierce the thick ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... making late hay, somewhere out of town; and though the fragrance had a long way to come, and many counter fragrances to contend with among the dwellings of the poor (may God reward the worthy gentlemen who stickle for the Plague as part and parcel of the wisdom of our ancestors, and who do their little best to keep those dwellings miserable!), yet it was wafted faintly into Princess's Place, whispering of Nature and her wholesome air, as such things will, even unto prisoners and captives, and those ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... washed and given to Prince Fire-fade. The Sea-king also gave him two jewels. One was called the tide-flowing jewel, and the other was called the tide-ebbing jewel. And he said then to the Prince: "Go home now to your own land, and take back the fish-hook to your brother. In this way you shall plague him. If he plant rice-fields in the upland, make you your rice-fields in the valley; and if he make rice-fields in the valley, do you make your rice-fields in the upland. I will rule the water so that it may do good to you, ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various

... Cicero and the humanists and all that had ever been known in the virulence of its invective against "the most hellish father, St. Paul, or Paula III" and his "hellish Roman church." "One would like to curse them," he wrote, "so that thunder and lightning would strike them, hell fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them"—and so on for page after page. Of course such lack of restraint largely defeated its own ends. The Swiss Reformer Bullinger called it "amazingly violent," and a book than which he "had never read anything more savage ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... of English history is more crowded with great events than that of the reign of Edward III. Cressy and Poitiers; the destruction of the Spanish fleet; the plague of the Black Death; the Jacquerie rising; these are treated by the author in "St. George for England." The hero of the story, although of good family, begins life as a London apprentice, but after countless adventures and perils ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade

... picture, because it is the picture of the year; and it is a wondrous improvement upon all our former historical attempts. Whoever has visited the Exhibition will at once know that we allude to Mr Poole's "Plague of London." There has not been so powerful a picture painted in this country since the best days of Sir Joshua Reynolds. For its power we compare it with the "Ugolino" of the President, and we do so the more readily as both pictures are now publicly exhibited. Unlike as they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... that many lately reincarnated spirits speak the languages of Venus and Mercury, and tell of the terrific physical convulsions in both planets, that wars are raging in Mercury, and a singular plague devastating Venus. The country people have sent in word by the canals that rockets in clusters covering hundreds of square miles are arising from Scandor. The cause is unknown, cannot even be surmised, and last night Herschell and Gauss, at the big telescopes, detected ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... it, and Madeira lighted the ships of Henry on their way to the south, like a volcano, till 1428. This was at least the common story as told in Portugal, and it was often joined with another—of the rabbit plague, which ate up all the green stuff of the island in the first struggling years of Zarco's settlement, and so prevented the export of anything but timber. So much of this was brought into Portugal that Henry's lifetime is a landmark in the domestic ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley

... this time in his jealousy and dislike of foreigners the Prince wrote: "The strangers, they give out, are certain to commence a thorough revolution here, to murder Victoria and myself, and to proclaim the Red Republic in England; the Plague is certain to ensue from the confluence of such vast multitudes, and to swallow up those whom the increased price of everything has not already swept away. For all this I am to be responsible, and against all this I have to ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne

... will this your madness baffle us?) "Nihilne te nocturnum praesidium Palati, ... nihil horum ora voltusque moverunt?" (Does the night watch of the Palatium, ... do the faces and expressions of all these men fail to move you?) "In te conferri ..." (This plague should have been inflicted upon you long ago, which you have plotted against ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... more; He is faithful who promised, thou heard'st Him declare That all thou intrusts to his fatherly care He will keep in the sheltering fold of his love, Where nothing shall harm them and nothing shall move. He will suffer no plague nigh thy dwelling to come, And His angels shall guard thee wherever thou roam; No weapon shall prosper that's formed against thee, For the truth thou hast loved, shield and buckler shall be. This the heritage is of the child of the Lord, Of him who confides in his covenant ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney

... well be expected of a volcano, however, as from a man of Bonaparte's temperament, and it was not long before he was again engaged in warfare, but not with his old success; and finally, the plague having attacked his army, Bonaparte, too tender-hearted to see it suffer, leaving opium for the sick and instructions for Kleber, whom he appointed his successor, set sail for France once more ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs

... family, or at least to weaken the so swarming of those vermin, is, in the first place, to sweeten the skin, head, and clothes of the chief breeders; and then, though all the family should be apt to breed them, the number of them, and so the greatness of that plague there, will be the more impaired. Why, there are some people that are in chief the devil's sin-breeders in the towns and places where they live. The place, town, or family where they live, must needs be horribly lousy, and, as it were, eaten up with ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... might be well to pray from the pulpit—as in time of plague, and in the bad year when the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... himself and his three workmen) sleep." And again: "I am impatient to get away from this place, for my mode of life here is so wretched, that if you only knew what it is, you would be miserable." The summer was intensely hot at Bologna, and the plague broke out. In these circumstances it seems miraculous that the four sculptors in one bed escaped contagion. Michelangelo's parsimonious habits were not occasioned by poverty or avarice. He accumulated large sums of money ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... for certain natural phenomena—thunderstorms, tempests, volcanoes, earthquakes, and the like. It concludes with a theory of disease, illustrated by a fine description of the plague at Athens. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... a subordinate. To his clear, capable head was owing somewhat of the greatness of England on the seas. In the exploits of Hawke, Rodney, or Nelson, this dead Mr. Pepys of the Navy Office had some considerable share. He stood well by his business in the appalling plague of 1666. He was loved and respected by some of the best and wisest men in England. He was President of the Royal Society; and when he came to die, people said of his conduct in that solemn hour—thinking it needless to say more—that it was answerable to the greatness of his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... had, at the beginning of the century, a population of over sixty thousand inhabitants, now has barely thirty thousand. This certainly looks as if there were some truth in the foregoing remarks; and there is no doubt that, on the visitation of the plague about ten years ago, the mortality was something frightful. A great percentage of deaths are ascribed to Resht fever—a terrible disease, due to the water and the exhalations from the marshes surrounding the city. It is certainly the dampest place in the world. The ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt

... Blackwater, in one of the most fertile agricultural districts of Ireland. The situation is fine, and an American naturally expects to see a charming rural town, planted with trees and filled with clean, comfortable homes; but he finds instead a wretched place, smitten with a plague of filth and mud, and offering but one object upon which the eye can dwell with pleasure, and that is the ruins of an old castle, "Mallow Castle over Blackwater," which dates back to the time of Queen Elizabeth. It stands amid noble trees on the banks ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... in a Gardner, will grace your Garden, and all your house, and helpe to stay vnbridled Seruingmen, giuing offence to none, not calling your name into question by dishonest acts, nor infecting your family by euill counsell or example. For there is no plague so infectious as Popery and knauery, he will not purloine your profit, ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson

... with a wrathful look; "nay, a legion of evil spirits possess me! A plague on that fellow Biarne: he has poisoned the ears of Freydissa with lies about that girl Astrid, to whom I have never whispered a sweet ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne

... on the north-western frontier of India, and his trousers split. I shall be a mockery and a scorn. I know it. And you, fully cognizant of what I am in for, come babbling about good news. What news could possibly be good to me at this moment except the information that bubonic plague had broken out among the scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School, and that they were all confined to ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... into Egypt, which he would probably have permanently conquered if he had not been hampered by perpetual insurrections in Barbary. Distant governors, and often whole tribes of Berbers, were constantly in revolt, and the disastrous famine of 928-929, coupled with the Asiatic plague which his troops had brought back with them from Egypt, led to general disturbances and insurrections which fully occupied the later years of his reign. The western provinces, from Tahart and Nakur to Fez and beyond, frequently threw off all show of allegiance. His authority was founded more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... began with fever and then, after a period of what seemed convalescence, or inaction, it continued to progress slowly but surely. Of course the manner in which it had been caught was more than presumptive evidence that it was at least of the nature of the fatal plague of the East. ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne

... observed by Gesner, that the jaw-bones, and hearts, and galls of Pikes, are very medicinable for several diseases, or to stop blood, to abate fevers, to cure agues, to oppose or expel the infection of the plague, and to be many ways medicinable and useful for the good of mankind: but he observes, that the biting of a Pike is venomous, and ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... to do as she pleased. She grew up to be perhaps the wickedest woman in that part of the country. She had a large family of children, who became about as wicked as herself; her descendants have been a plague and a curse to that county ever since. The records of that county show that two hundred of her descendants have been criminals. In a single generation of her descendants there were twenty children. Three of these died in infancy. Of the remaining seventeen, who lived to grow up, nine were sent ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton

... semi-transparent mist all along Glenartney from Ben Ledi to Comrie. I felt rich enough in the enjoyment of the surpassing loveliness of our own Strath to say "Laich in"—(I would not hurt any person's feelings for the world)—"Plague take your Alps, with their sky-scraping ridges and peaks and winding sheets of snow,—we don't want them here; they would simply spoil a scene like that before us." I don't know, and may never know, the meaning my companion read into my silence. Having shortly before ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... from Shangaanland,' he said, 'and there, when the baboons plague us, we have a way ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... said Alice; "I tried very hard, and it's no use; your books are dull and stupidly heavy. What do I care about something that a queer lot of saints did hundreds of years ago in times of plague and famine? Saints must have been poky people, and it is poky people who care to read about them, I think. I like reading about brave, heroic men and beautiful women, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... some time before she spoke again. "They can't say now I sacrificed his genius to my pride. You will catch the post, won't you? What a plague I am, but if they're posted before seven he'll get them in the morning and he'll have time to write. Perhaps he won't be starting ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... distinguishable from pure fictions. Thus, they present a transition to narratives of a third class, in which the fictitious element predominates. Here, again, there are all imaginable gradations, from such works as Defoe's quasi-historical account of the Plague year, which probably gives a truer conception of that dreadful time than any authentic history, through the historical novel, drama, and epic, to the purely phantasmal creations of imaginative genius, such as the old "Arabian ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... there are two topics—the town guard and the plague, known as bubonic; owing to the latter, great is the ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross

... to be driven, or a house or two to be burned, or some poor widow to be avenged, or some prisoner to be released. So things went right merrily, and the larder was always full. But now that this cursed peace hath come, and King Jamie reigns in London—plague on the man for leaving this bonnie land!—the place is as quiet as the grave, and the horses grow fat, and our men grow lean, and they quarrel and fight among themselves all day, an' all because they have nought else to do. Moreover, the pastures round ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson

... hopeless dismay. Those who still saw a possibility of effecting their escape from the fated land, swarmed across the frontier. All foreign merchants deserted the great marts. The cities became as still as if the plague-banner had been unfurled ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... method of criminal procedure. After a certain stated period in gaol, we allow Criminals—even of the most dangerous character—to go out free without making the slightest effort to secure that they are fit to be returned to society. We quarantine the plague-stricken or small-pox ship, and keep the passengers isolated till the disease is eradicated. But we send up the Criminal only for a definite time, and at the end of that, he is allowed to go at large even though we may know he is a more dangerous character than when he entered ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple

... of Virginia have invoked God's blessing on those tiny ventures which were destined to become the seeds of a mighty nation, and the starting-point of the United States,—these walls, which still bear the monument of your heroic townsman Strange, who expended for his plague-stricken brethren, talents, time, wealth, and at last life itself. For, to return, and to apply, I hope, to your consciences, the example of the soldier with which I began this Sermon:—shall it be only on the battle-field that the power of fellow-feeling ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley

... been estimated that consumption (the great white plague) kills one-tenth of all the human race. Cancer kills half as many, or one in every twenty. Constipation, and the diseases which are caused directly by it, kills one in every three of all the people ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... and bang, and communicate, in the house of the Rev. Mr. Wesley, the father of John Wesley, at Epworth, in England. This ghost was very troublesome, and utterly useless. In fact, none of the ghosts that haunt houses are of the least possible use. They plague people, but do no good. They act like the spirits ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum

... need of help and friendly care. Though he lived so much in the clouds and among philosophical abstractions, he was an excellent man of business. Though a philosopher he was pious, and was courageous, dreading the plague no more than the good doctor dreaded the tempest that fell on him when he was ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang

... to plague a society that makes it possible for some to enjoy "progress" while others must suffer from "poverty." Labor saving machinery has increased the quantity of the industrial product, but as yet there has been no general ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing

... emanations hitting the planet, or the sun growing cold, become babyish fancies. How clearly the possibility is pointed in the discussions about the use in the next War of bacterial bombs containing the bacilli of cholera, plague, dysentery and many others! What influenza did in destroying millions, they can repeat a thousand times and ten thousand times. What else the laboratories will bring forth, of which no man dreams, in the way of destructive agents acting at ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... playhouse learning and experience they acquired from the itinerant actors. These were rarely the leading performers of the established London companies, however, unless it so happened that the capital was suffering from a visitation of the plague. "Starring in the provinces" was not an early occupation of the players of good repute. As a rule, it was only the inferior actors who quitted town, and as Dekker contemptuously says, "travelled upon the hard hoof from village to village for cheese and buttermilk." "How chances ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... heretic high, Where the crows and pigeons pass! Let the brood of Calvin die; Long live the mass! A plague on the Huguenots, ah! Let the cry of battle ring: Huguenots, Huguenots, Huguenots, ah! Long live ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens

... notwithstanding the kindnesses that He had showed them (Gen. 13:13), for the land of Sodom was now like the garden of Eden heretofore (Gen. 13:10). This, therefore, provoked Him the more to jealousy, and made their plague as hot as the fire of the Lord out of Heaven could make it. And it is most rationally to be concluded, that such, even such as these are, that shall sin in the sight, yea, and that too in despite of such examples that are set continually before them, to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... strikes and lockouts among preventable industrial diseases, just as the modern science of medicine classes smallpox, diphtheria, typhoid fever, the plague, tuberculosis, and the hookworm amongst preventable bodily diseases. The strike is a violent eruption, according to those who have made the closest study of the situation, resulting from long-continued abuses of bad management, bad selection, bad ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... but I am in the mind that witches and warlocks havena half the power they had lang syne; at least, sure am I, that ae ill-deviser, like auld Ellieslaw, or ae ill-doer, like that d—d villain Westburnflat, is a greater plague and abomination in a country-side than a haill curnie o' the warst witches that ever capered on a broomstick, or played cantrips on Fastern's E'en. It wad hae been lang or Elshie had burnt down my house and barns, and I am determined to try if he will do aught to build them ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... following you," the Captain said. Then he turned to Mrs. Errington. "These chaps are the plague of the Park," ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... that day forth, my springiness and elasticity left me. Fallen was my muscles brawny vaunt. I quailed. My genius stood rebuked before him. Nevertheless, at hop—step—and—jump I was his match still. When out came the City of the Plague! From that the Great Ostrich could not hold the candle to the Flying Philosopher. And now, heaven help me! I can scarcely cover nineteen feet, with every advantage of ground for the run. It is true, the Professor was always in condition, and never ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... up an eating-house in London for gentlemen's servants on board wages. The other courted my affection by showing her own importance, and telling me that many a substantial farmer in the neighbourhood would be glad to marry her, but she was resolved to please her eye, if she should plague her heart. Then she would launch out into the praise of my proper person, and say, she was sure I would make a good husband, for I was very good-natured. I began to be uneasy at the importunities of these inamoratas, whom, at another time perhaps, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... change in the student Anselmus; he resumed his liking for him, and begged forgiveness for the hard words which he had let fall before. "Yes," added he, "we have many examples to show that certain phantasms may rise before a man and pester and plague him not a little; but this is bodily disease, and leeches are good for it, if applied to the right part, as a certain learned physician, now deceased, has directed." The student Anselmus knew not whether he had been drunk, crazy, or sick; ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various



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