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More "Arrant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... almost in sight; Methuen was at Colenso with overwhelming force. The townspeople took heart. One man who had spent his days in a stinking culvert since the siege began now crept into the sun. "They are arrant cowards, these Boers," he cried, stamping the echoing ground; "why don't they come on and fight us like men?" So the day wears. At four o'clock comes an African thunderstorm with a deluge of rain, filling the water tanks and slaking ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... with her, on his part, but it appeared that the cow made him her confidant in return. If he began to murmur something to himself as he sat by the chimney corner, they would inquire what he was talking about. It was generally arrant nonsense that he told them. ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... the fellow to be an arrant harbourer of smugglers and rebels, I took his lamentation for what it ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... will ye?" said the tranter. "It looks better, and more becomes the high class of arrant which has brought us here." Thus ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... round again, jumping violently, and carrying the wagon perilously near the gully. William Mount and Walter Hart sprang to the horses' heads, while the ladies screamed in concert. Aunt Faith was an arrant coward where riding was concerned. "I would rather get out and walk all the way home than sit in this wagon a moment ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... were unmistakable signs in Sandy himself of what would have been called arrant terror in any other man. His face was so bloodless that the pallor showed even through the leathery tan; one eye stared wildly, the other being sheltered under a clumsy patch which could not quite conceal the ugly bruise beneath. Under his great moustache his lips were as puffed and ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... only, without the knowledge or pre-concert of any, as he himself in a letter declares; yea, with a design to bespatter the Presbyterian church of Scotland, a most scurrilous pamphlet was published at London, not only reflecting on our excellent reformers from popery, publishing arrant lies anent Mr. Alexander Henderson, abusing Mr. David Dickson, and breaking jests upon the remonstrators and presbyterians (as they called them), but also, in a most malicious and groundless kind of rhapsody, ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... soups from potatoes. Now, as this is so great a staple of the plan of the campaign, it is worth while to examine it carefully; and if we examine only a very little, and do not allow ourselves to be misled, we shall be able to see that the whole thing is the most arrant Quixotism that was ever enacted before a community. What is the matter of popular sovereignty? The first thing, in order to understand it, is to get a good definition of what it is, and after that to see how it ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... tell, whether a man, without being rated a lord or a baron, or what d'ye call um, d'ye see, may n't take to the highway in the way of a frolic, d'ye see?—Adad! for my own part, brother, I'm resolved as how to cruise a bit in the way of an arrant—if so be as I can't at once be commander, mayhap I may be bore upon the books as a petty officer or the ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... narrowing in its influences. All the society that he had ever had was that of a hundred students with the same ideals and inclinations as his own. The reputation of the friars in the Philippines has been depreciated by the conduct of the native priests. There was a padre named Pastor, an arrant coward, and wholly ignorant and superstitious. Sly old fox, he used to bet his last cent on the cock-fights, hiding up in the back window of Don Julian's. Once, on a drunken spree, he let a layman wear his gown and rosary. The natives, showing more ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... which Judge Harvey had presented to the Historical Society, and which had been so widely discussed as throwing new light upon the beginnings of the United States Republic, had a month before been pronounced and proved to be clever but arrant forgeries. The newspaper sensation and the praise that had attended the discovery and gift—warming and exalting Judge Harvey's very human pride—had been followed by an anti-climax of gibes and jeers at his gullibility. Whenever the hoax was spoken of, Judge Harvey writhed with personal humiliation, ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... that some would gladlier post off to another than the charge and care of their Religion. There be—who knows not that there be?—of Protestants and professors who live and die in as arrant and implicit faith as any lay Papist of Loretto. A wealthy man, addicted to his pleasure and profits, finds Religion to be a traffic so entangled, and of so many piddling accounts, that of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock going ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... thy bosom move With wretched avarice, or as wretched love? Know, there are words and spells, which can control Between the fits this fever of the soul: Know, there are rhymes, which fresh and fresh applied Will cure the arrant'st puppy of his pride. Be furious, envious, slothful, mad, or drunk, Slave to a wife, or vassal to a punk, A Switz, a High Dutch, or a Low Dutch bear; All that we ask is but a patient ear. 'Tis the first virtue, vices to abhor; And the ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... border was the Armstrongs, able men; Somewhat unruly, and very ill to tame. I would have none think that I call them thieves, For, if I did, it would be arrant lies. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... was greatly promoted by the humours of an eccentric personage whom Mr. Bracebridge always addressed with the quaint appellation of Master Simon. He was a tight, brisk little man, with the air of an arrant old bachelor. His nose was shaped like the bill of a parrot; his face slightly pitted with the small-pox, with a dry perpetual bloom on it, like a frost-bitten leaf in autumn. He had an eye of great ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... thus prolong your shames, And to such arrant nonsense sign your names, The diamond quit—with me the pencil take, So shall your shame but short duration make; For lo, the housemaid comes, in dreadful pet, With red right hand, and with a dishclout wet, Dashes out all, nor leaves a wreck to tell Who 't ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... the testimony of Aubrey, who was at Stratford probably about the year 1680. He was an arrant and inveterate hunter after anecdotes, and seems to have caught up, without sifting, whatever quaint or curious matter came in his way. So that no great reliance can attach to what he says, unless it is sustained by other authority. But in this ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... all, it was arrant nonsense for Hamilton to act like this. Admitting the man believed in himself,—and Covington believed that much,—he was, after all, Teddy Hamilton. The fact remained, even as he himself admitted, that he was not fit to be in the same room with ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... ACIS ARRANT, generally known to his jocular intimates as Knave ARRANT, had been living in luxury with his cousin's weak mother, whom he had contrived to marry. To effect this, however, he had been compelled to tear a will into little pieces, and had, at the same time, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... two as arrant fanatics as ever breathed"[7]—John Endicott, who was governor for thirteen out of fifteen years following Winthrop's death, and John Norton, an able and upright but narrow and intolerant clergyman. The persecuting ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... she replied, "that this time I'll have to satisfy the Professor. He was white and trembling all the time. I thought him an arrant coward." ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... claims, and "Fifty-four forty or fight!" became one of the battle-cries of the campaign. Clay, inveterate trimmer and compromiser that he was, professed to be for the annexation of Texas, provided it could be accomplished without war with Mexico, which was arrant nonsense, since Mexico had given notice that she would consider annexation an act of war. The result of Clay's attitude, and of a widespread distrust of his policies, was that Polk was elected by ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... pardonable ostentation of love I had given all the money I could spare to Flora; I had thought it glorious that the hunted exile should come down, like Jupiter, in a shower of gold, and pour thousands in the lap of the beloved. Then I had in an hour of arrant folly buried what remained to me in a bank in George Street. And now I must get back the one or the other; and ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The Person wearing the Feather, tho our Friend took him for an Officer in the Guards, has proved to be [an arrant Linnen-Draper. [1]] ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... heretic, arch hypocrite, arch rogue, it acquired a depreciatory sense, which has now become so weakened that archness is not altogether an unpleasing attribute. We may compare the cognate German prefix Erz. Ludwig has, as successive entries, Ertz-dieb, "an arch-thief, an arrant thief," and Ertz-engel, "an arch-angel." The meaning of arrant is almost entirely due to association with "thief." It means lit. wandering, vagabond, so that the arrant thief is nearly related ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... the easiest mystified, and when once the deception took place, it mattered not how arrant the nonsense or how exaggerated the costume. Indeed, children and dogs ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... fear, old hoss," replied Hiram encouragingly; albeit, at any other time he would have laughed at the steward's declaration that he was 'no coward,' when he was well known to be the most arrant one in the ship. "It ain't ye thet the ghost air arter, ye bet. It's the skipper. Ye remember ez how he promised us all he'd call in at the nearest port an' hev all the circumferences overhauled, ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... I leave such ideas to the ignorant and uneducated. I should be unworthy of the progressive teachings of my time if I believed such arrant nonsense." ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... early, before the sun was up, I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup; But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head, Had stayed at home behind me and was fast ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... sentimentalism which expressed itself in so uncontrolled a fashion in the Victorian era. One of the most penetrating of American thinkers, Henry James, Sr., sixty or seventy years ago wrote: "I have been so long accustomed to see the most arrant deviltry transact itself in the name of benevolence, that the moment I hear a profession of good will from almost any quarter, I instinctively look around for a constable or place my hand within ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... fruitful, and good for feeding of cattle; but Moses, supposing that they were afraid of fighting with the Canaanites, and invented this provision for their cattle as a handsome excuse for avoiding that war, he called them arrant cowards, and said they had only contrived a decent excuse for that cowardice; and that they had a mind to live in luxury and ease, while all the rest were laboring with great pains to obtain the land they were desirous to have; and that they were not willing ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... you what it is, Miss Judy," she said, "someone is putting thoughts into your head what oughtn't to do it. You are a motherless child, and there's someone filling your head with arrant nonsense. What do you know about engagements and—and disappointments, and dreams what proves but early mists of the morning? what do you know of fickleness and broken promises? There, child, you won't get any of that bad sort of knowledge ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... according to that nature and to those circumstances, and not according to our own imaginations, not according to abstract ideas of right, by no means according to mere general theories of government, the resort to which appears to me, in our present situation, no better than arrant trifling. I shall therefore endeavor, with your leave, to lay before you some of the most material of these circumstances in as full and as clear a manner as I ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... where received the news, and at once endorsed with heart and soul, the doings of the Anti-Colonization Meeting of colored freemen. From that time forth, the colored people generally have had no sympathy with the colonization scheme, nor confidence in its leaders, looking upon them all, as arrant hypocrites, seeking every opportunity to deceive them. In a word, the monster was crippled in its infancy, and has never as yet recovered from the stroke. It is true, that like its ancient sire, that was "more subtile than ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... treat, flatter, and adore; Her majesty, to-morrow, calls for more. His wounded ears complaints eternal fill, As unoil'd hinges, querulously shrill. "You went last night with Celia to the ball." You prove it false. "Not go! that's worst of all." Nothing can please her, nothing not inflame; And arrant contradictions are the same. Her lover must be sad, to please her spleen; His mirth is an inexpiable sin: For of all rivals that can pain her breast, There's one, that wounds far deeper than the rest; To wreck ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... as arrant ruffians as I had ever seen before me, and I saw I must not hesitate. 'Two or none, M. Fresnoy,' I said firmly. 'I gave you a commission for two, and two I will take—Matthew and Mark, or Luke ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... "Arrant nonsense!" was the vigorous reply. "A great empire, from hemisphere to hemisphere, can be kept together a good deal better by democratic control. Force is always the arriere pensee of the individual ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... coward, an arrant cur, yet he infinitely preferred having to tackle flesh and blood, to battling with ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... cattle-breeder. He got Ishmael Deadeye, the poacher, transported last year, and took the prize for Devons at the Great Mesopotamian Agricultural with a brindled bull. We remember his weeping at the wedding-breakfast over the loss of his eldest treasure, and wonder if he was an arrant humbug, or only a foolish, fond old man, inclining morosely toward the former opinion. We don't seem to care much about Sir Roland de Vaux, the celebrated geologist, whom we shall have the privilege of meeting this evening. What are strata to us, when our thoughts will ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... arrant deception is not the commonest form of wrong. A more usual practice, and more dangerous- because it deceives even the intelligent-is to overcapitalize an honest business, to issue "watered" stock-that is, stock in excess of ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... he, Maga's son, No base arrant wight am I. While I live I'll never cease Cualnge's raid ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... graceful phrase was well illustrated in the case of a friend of mine, not remarkable for physical courage, of whom a tactful phrenologist pronounced that he was "full of precaution against real or imaginary danger." It is not every one who can tell a man he is an arrant coward without offending him. The same art, as applied by a man to his own shortcomings, is exemplified in the story of the ecclesiastical dignitary who gloried in his Presence of Mind. According to Dean Stanley, who ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... aware of it subconsciously, and that accounts for my sensation of hostility toward the rector.' A lie had been told to me. My new self-confidence resented this; and I said to myself, 'If Marcus Harding can tell a lie to me, who almost worshiped him, he must be an arrant hypocrite.' ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... in theory, my dear madam," said the admiral; "but we must take into consideration what human nature really is. Monks in many instances proved themselves to be arrant knaves, and among every assemblage of mortals such will ever be found in time to leaven the whole mass. These and friaries and convents were not abolished a day too soon; and, advanced as the present generation esteems ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... heart went with it; because I respected his affection too much to trifle with it, and not at all on your account. Believe me, that from the time I first learned that you were married, every thought of you was rigidly repelled, and it was arrant presumption in you to suppose anything else," she continued, proudly, the angry ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... now love's invading, Sleep in Holland sheets no more; When a nymph is serenading, 'Tis an arrant ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... to shoot by at best, and an enraged bull moose is a very big and a very ugly customer. It is a poor thicket, therefore, that does not have at least one good tree with conveniently low branches. As a rule, however, you may trust your Indian, who is an arrant coward, to look ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... they have not,—when his avarice oversteps all the commandments,—when his pride builds castles full of splendor; and yet put this before his eye, and he reads with the most careless air in the world, and condemns as arrant fiction, what cannot be ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... my lady, but I want nothing man can give me the night; and when one's on an arrant of life and death, it's little the cold or the storm can do to put ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... to this office! Lepidus, I'd sooner trust Greek Sinon, than a man Our state employs. He's gone: and being gone, I dare tell you, whom I dare better trust, That our night-eyed Tiberius doth not see His minion's drifts; or, if he do, he's not So arrant subtile, as we fools do take him; To breed a mungrel up, in his own house, With his own blood, and, if the good gods please, At his own throat, flesh him, to take a leap. I do not beg it, heaven; but if the fates Grant it these eyes, they ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... up to him. "O good dear sir!" cried he, "for pity's sake, hinder my master from falling upon those lions by all means, or we shall all be torn a-pieces."—"Why," said the gentleman, "is your master so arrant a madman, then, that you should fear he would set upon such furious beasts?"—"Ah, sir!" said Sancho, "he is not mad, but venturesome."—"Well," replied the gentleman, "I will take care of that;" and with that advancing up to Don ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... allowed those qualities full expression. But she did not tell Beth that. The girl was so accustomed to despise herself and so suspicious of any creditable impulses that at times unexpectedly obtruded themselves, that she would have dismissed such a suggestion as arrant flattery, and Louise was clever enough not to wish to arouse her cousin to a full ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... we not yearly burn tons of powder on the all-glorious Fourth of July, and crack our throats with huzzas for the 'star-spangled banner' and the American eagle? And a caviller might perhaps go farther, and ask the significant question, Are we not known all over the world as a race of arrant braggarts? ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and he utters an angry protest. Krishna, he says, is not god at all. He is a mere cowherd's son of low caste who has debased himself by eating the leavings of the cowherds' children and has even been the lover of the cowgirls. As a child he was an arrant pilferer, stealing milk and butter from every house, while as a youth he has trifled with other men's wives. He has also slighted Indra. Krishna quietly listens to this outburst. Then, deeming Sisupala's ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... at length satisfied that no sensible things have a real existence; and that you are in truth an arrant sceptic? ...
— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists • George Berkeley
... Club," with half a dozen other "young rakes of the fourth or fifth order." Two of Thackeray's own drawings in the "Book of Snobs"—in chapters three and nine—show men, one civil the other military, smoking cigars out of doors; but as these were no doubt arrant snobs, the drawings may be accepted as proof of ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... head and said, "I cannot get rid of the idea, nor will anyone in the world remove it, or make me think otherwise—and he would be a blockhead who would hold or believe anything else than that that arrant knave Master Elisabad made free with ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... across the table at Mr. Seven Sachs, as who should say: "And have you too allowed yourself to be dragged into this affair? I really thought you were cleverer. Don't you agree with me that we're both fools of the most arrant description?" And under that brief glance Mr. Seven Sachs's calm deserted him as it had never deserted him on the stage, where for over fifteen hundred nights he had withstood the menace of revolvers, poison, and female treachery ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... and tweare not an old fellow, and sent after an arrant, chid give thee something, but chud be no money: But hold thee, for I see thou art somewhat testorne; hold thee, there's vorty shillings: bring thy master a veeld, chil give thee vorty more; look thou bring him: chil mall him, tell him, chill mar his dauncing tressels, chil use him, ...
— The London Prodigal • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... paltry spite; My heart's not black,—your liver 'tis that's white; So hold your jaw. Why should I grieve to see That men for love such arrant fools can be? The more the merrier; for on each day, Our Princess 'scapes a husband's dreaded sway; She gives us all a ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... that this theory can only account for a very small proportion of the facts observed. I am willing to admit that some so-called mediums of whom the public have heard much are arrant impostors who have taken advantage of the public demand for spiritualistic excitement to fill their purses with easily earned guineas; whilst others who have no pecuniary motive for imposture are tempted to cheat, it would seem, solely by a desire ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... on the view is the fact that, in spite of all its horrors, this War has given no attested instance of arrant cowardice on any front. Cruelty, lust, brutality, hate: these have appeared in unspeakable guise, but apparently no cowardice or weak timidity; yet the mail clad heroes of ancient wars, who met their adversaries face to face, were subjected ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... divinity do but direct me the way to it. I have known many travel far for it, and yet return as arrant knaves as they went forth, because they carried themselves always along with them. [Exit CARDINAL.] Are you gone? Some fellows, they say, are possessed with the devil, but this great fellow were able to possess the greatest devil, and ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... minister named Samuel Parris, who lived in Salem village, began suddenly to behave in a most curious manner. They would creep into holes, hide under chairs and benches, twist themselves into queer positions, make curious gestures and weird noises, and talk arrant nonsense. Their parents knew not what to make of it, and so they called in the doctors. Nowadays a clever doctor would have found out pretty soon that the children were merely pretending and playing a foolish trick upon their elders. But in those days doctors were not very wise, and they ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... Simms was an arrant coward, nor was he himself overly keen for an upstanding, man-to-man encounter such as must quickly follow any attempt upon his part to uphold the authority of Simms, or their claim upon the custody of ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... letter proves that he is an arrant knave. For here is proof of a conspiracy against Mr. Hamilton, who was booked to sail with Captain Annis, and Keith is in it." Denham read the letter to Benjamin, explaining its meaning as he went along, for he was well posted about ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... let me see. Ay, that is the name of the girl. An arrant flirt the little hussy is; but very pretty. Ay, Mary Barton is ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the chops and changes that have taken place during my absence. I congratulate you on your marriage, and I congratulate you on your escape, too,—you understand me. It was not my business to speak, but I know this, that a certain party is as arrant a little—well—well, never mind what. You acted like a man and a trump, and are well out ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the steward shook his head, Doctor Emory lighted a big Havana and continued audibly to luxuriate in his fictitious triumph over the other doctor. As he talked, he forgot to smoke, and, leaning quite casually against the chair, with arrant carelessness allowed the live coal at the end of his cigar to rest against the tip of one of Kwaque's twisted fingers. A privy wink to Miss Judson, who was the only one who observed his action, warned her against ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... political and social interests, which, though often thwarted by the common sense of the people, are sometimes too successful. At this very moment the news comes to us that a slight majority, led by arrant demagogues, have fastened upon the great Empire State of the Pacific a crude, ill-digested constitution, which while it doubtless contains some good features, embodies some of the most primitive and pernicious notions regarding ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... for these failures was Jose Santos Zelaya, one of the most arrant military lordlets and meddlers that Central America had produced in a long time. Since 1893 he had been dictator of Nicaragua, a country not only entangled in continuous wrangles among its towns and factions, but bowed under an enormous ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... no consistent characters in life," said Richmond, "and a consistent character in fiction is merely a strained form of art. In life the most arrant coward will sometimes fight; the bravest man at times lacks nerve; the generous man may sometimes show the spirit of the niggard. But your character in fiction is different. He must be always brave, or always generous, or always niggardly. He must be ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... you have given up, in these six hours, a tithe of your heart to this man—if, in fact, his screed be not arrant bosh—then will I hie me to London for good and all, and write political leaders all the days of ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of our bread— Up goes the cost of our caking! People must ever be fed; Bakers must ever be baking. So, though our nerves may be quaking, Dumbly, in arrant despair, Pay we the crowd that is taking All that ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams
... been summoned,—a magic circle, closed in by evergreens with glistening leaves. "Dark with excessive light" appears the scene; the marble basin of the fountain, standing out from the deep background, gleams snow-white beneath Diana's touch. "The moon's an arrant thief." Perchance she snatches from great Sol some beauties even rarer than that "pale fire" he grants her—it may be, against his will. So it may well be thought, for what fairest day can be compared with a moonlit night ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... exorbitant price for a place in the gallery: but as we'd been asked so much at the other doors, why I paid it without many words; but, then, to be sure, thinks I, it can never be like any other gallery, we shall see some crinkum-crankum or other for our money; but I find it's as arrant a take-in as ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... a jackanapes!"—and the stout farmer brandished the tall paddle which served him at once as a walking stick and a weeding-hook, and began vigorously eradicating the huge thistles which grew by the roadside, as a mere vent for his vexation. "You'll see that he'll come back an arrant puppy," quoth Michael Howe. ...
— Town Versus Country • Mary Russell Mitford
... eyes flashed. Hammersmith, who had watched this scene with intense interest, saw, or believed that he saw, in this flash the natural indignation of a candid mind face to face with arrant knavery. But when he forced himself to consider the complacent Quimby he did not know what to think. His aspect of self-confidence equalled hers. Indeed, he showed the greater poise. Yet her tones ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... the Colonel quickly declared, not understanding. "But you must let me assure you that the girls have given it little attention. They never gossip, sir!—for gossips, sir, are the most arrant of cowards! No one's character is safe from them, sir! They take a grain of fact," the old gentleman's face was becoming flushed as he thundered forth this pet denunciation, "and plant it in soil manured with the rottenest intentions, sir! And it ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... understand, and that was Austin himself. He wasn't like other boys one bit, she always said. He had such a queer, topsy-turvy way of looking at things; would express the most outrageous opinions with an innocent unconsciousness that made her long to box his ears, and support the most arrant absurdities by arguments that conveyed not the smallest meaning to her intellect. Look at him now, for instance; a cripple for life, and pretending to see nothing in it but a joke, and expressing as much admiration for his horrible wooden leg as though it had been a king's sceptre! ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... was a delicate, feeble boy; not good at work; womanish in his ways; inclined to go in for petty bullying, until a boy showed fight, when he discovered himself to be an arrant coward. Four or five years later I met him at the university. His greeting was cool. My next affair was with a boy who was about my age (13), strong, full-blooded, coarse, always in 'hot water.' He was the son of the headmaster of one of the best-known public schools. It was reported that two ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... vaunted popular sovereignty principle, Lincoln declared it "the most arrant Quixotism that was ever enacted before a community.... Does he mean to say that he has been devoting his life to securing to the people of the Territories the right to exclude slavery from the Territories? If he means so to say, he means ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... "it would be the most arrant selfishness on my part to suggest, that you should stay here an hour longer than necessary. I fear that after to-day my roof may no longer prove a sheltering one for you. But will you allow me to arrange for your safety, as I am arranging for that of my mother and Anne Mie? My English friend ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... ridicule himself struck the audience as a new and excruciatingly funny phase of his eccentricity. Encountering this blank wall of disbelief, Branch waxed more earnest, more convincing; in melancholy detail he described his arrant timidity, his cringing fear of pain, his abhorrence of blood and steel. His elongated face was genuinely solemn, his voice trembled, his brow grew damp with unpleasant, memories; he seemed bent upon clearing his conscience once for all. But he succeeded only in convulsing his hearers. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... his hand. Both arms wildly sawing the air, Ike shivered and shrank like the arrant craven he ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... this critical moment, when we were both self-convicted of an arrant cowardice, which would have shamed a Canadian child of six years old, Mrs. O—- tapped at the door, and although generally a most unwelcome visitor, from her gossiping, mischievous propensities, I ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... camp the distance was about twelve miles. With a pack train McKay was in no hurry; as a matter of fact, Donald was never in a hurry when there was danger about. He was an arrant coward, but had some brave men of the Wascos with him. I speak advisedly of ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... you are here of course I have, thank Heaven, nothing more to say one way or another. But you will surely think of asking a few likely young fellows over to the house, occasionally? We are not badly off for eldest sons in the neighbourhood; Molly, who is as arrant a little flirt, they tell me, as she is pretty, will be grateful to you for the attention, on the score of amusement ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... going to listen to you," Mordaunt said. "You are talking nonsense, my friend, arrant drivel—nothing less. Chris will tell you ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... portrayed by Fuller Mellish, delivers that arrant bit of nonsense "The Seven Ages of Man" in such a manner as a man might tell a rather serious story in a drawing room. "The Seven Ages of Man," of course, is just as much of an aria as La Donna e Mobile. ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... change of heart came, through a mutual love of the birds of heaven, to a real pirate who chanced upon a cabin in the forest's solitude and here confessed his life to its inmate, Audubon, who left this "striking incident" a record in his works. However, "Dick Fid, that arrant old foretop man, and his comrade, Negro Sip, are the true lovers of the narrative;—the last, indeed, is a noble creature, a hero under the skin of Congo." "The Red Rover" is all a book of the sea. In ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... expresses a certain direction of the free will. There exists no means of causing to proceed from nature, or from matter, the attributes of the spiritual being. This is only done by imaginary transformations, by a course of arrant juggling. The flame does not feel its own heat, light does not see itself, the planets know nothing of the laws of Kepler. Materialism is the result of a modesty wholly misplaced which leads man to forget himself, in order to attribute gratuitously ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... that that one sermon forged a chain which holds me in a position that I hate. It is a public declaration that I am or mean to be a preacher, and I must either adhere to it or break desperately away. Do you know, I feel myself to be an arrant coward. If I had half the strength that you have, I should have been out of it long ago; but the habit of obedience grows strong ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the hard lessons of life. Learnin' out of a book that is held out to us from the shadows by an onseen, inexorable hand. Settin' on hard benches that may fall out from under us at any time. Poor ignerent creeters that we are, would it not be a too arrant folly for us to judge each other hardly, we, all on us, so deplorably ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... Gal. i. 6, 7,) that "their folly may be made manifest to all men." (2 Tim. iii. 8, 9; 2 Peter ii. 1, 3.)—The cruel enemy, who in the day of prosperity boasts of his success, in the day of adversity becomes the most arrant coward and cringing suppliant,—whether it be Saul or Shimei. (1 Sam. xv. 30; 2 Sam. xix. 18.) Haughty persecutors have been changed to humble suitors for an interest in the prayers of their victims,—"to worship before their feet." "The word of ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... an arrant coward, and he knew that Hodge was really longing for a challenge. Wat felt sure that he would receive a severe drubbing at the hands of the dark-haired boy whom he had angered, and the thoughts of such punishment filled his soul ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... still more full of talk. This last was perhaps his most decided gift. To any one, of whatever degree, he would talk, he could hardly have been silent ten minutes with any human being, except Frampton or his father, and whether deep reflections or arrant nonsense came out of his mouth, seemed an even chance, though both alike were in the same soft low voice, and with the same air of quaint pensive simplicity. He was exceedingly provoking, and yet there was no ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... oblique futtock- shrouds, some unseen arm should all at once tumble me overboard. Therefore I held my peace; while Jarl went on to declare, that with regard to the character of the brigantine, his mind was now pretty fully made up;—she was an arrant impostor, a shade of a ship, full of sailors' ghosts, and before we knew where we were, would dissolve in a supernatural squall, and leave us twain in the water. In short, Jarl, the descendant of the superstitious old ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... because, if you take large holster pistols and load them up to their muzzles, you can't risk anything. They are sure to fire wide of the mark, and both parties can retire from the field with honor. Let me manage all that. Hein! 'sapristi,' two brave men would be arrant fools to kill each ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... has written a book, is above the unwriting average, and, as such, should be ranked mentally above them: no light research, and tact, and industry, and head-and-hand labour, are sufficient for a volume; even certain stolid performances in print do not shake my judgment; for arrant blockheads as sundry authors undoubtedly are, the average (mark, not all men, but the average) unwriting man is an author's intellectual inferior. All men, however well capable, have not perchance the appetite, nor the industry, nor the opportunity ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... more tolerable book, however, would be spoiled by such arrant egotism as our author displays on every page. We are never rid of Mr. Parker for a moment. Wherever Mr. Choate is visible, Mr. Parker is strutting by his side. He exhibits, indeed, all the intrusiveness of Boswell, without any of that honest, self-forgetting, simple-hearted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... she forfeits all claim to wages which have accrued since her last payment. If discharged unjustly and without sufficient cause before the expiration of her term, she is entitled to her wages in full; but if discharged without notice because of intoxication, immorality, dishonesty, arrant disobedience, or permanent incapacity from illness, she can claim nothing. It is customary with some housekeepers to start the new maid on a comparatively low salary, with the promise of an increase of perhaps fifty cents per ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... the purser with a quiet laugh, "if I were to deny that Maggot is a good man and true, in the matter of wrestling; nevertheless he is an arrant rogue, and defrauds the revenue woefully. But, after all he is only the cat's-paw; those who employ him are ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... were too young for it, but to me it was a very jolly time, though I suppose I was an ingredient in your troubles. Yes, we brought ourselves up; but I maintain that it was better alternative than being drilled so hard as never to think of anything but arrant idling out of lesson-time.' ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the desert ranges, the same called locally "carrion crow." He is handsomer and has such an air. He is nice in his habits and is said to have likable traits. A tame one in a Shoshone camp was the butt of much sport and enjoyed it. He could all but talk and was another with the children, but an arrant thief. The raven will eat most things that come his way,—eggs and young of ground-nesting birds, seeds even, lizards and grasshoppers, which he catches cleverly; and whatever he is about, let a coyote trot never so softly by, the raven flaps up and after; for whatever the coyote can pull down or ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... which lead to our feelings of dislike, and I fear we should often find that wounded self-esteem was the root of the evil. And, after all, what a great matter a little fire kindleth! Let us quench the spark before it ignites. It is arrant folly, not to mention wickedness, to make enemies for the little while we are here. There is an incurable heartache which comes from such mistakes. Owen Meredith describes it in a poem, every verse of which ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... bear. There the confusion, pressure, heat, The crash of music, candles' glare And rapid whirl of many feet, The ladies' dresses airy, light, The motley moving mass and bright, Young ladies in a vasty curve, To strike imagination serve. 'Tis there that arrant fops display Their insolence and waistcoats white And glasses unemployed all night; Thither hussars on leave will stray To clank the spur, delight the fair— And vanish like a ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... coward in any sense of that word. Many brave men there are who, although quite fearless in regard to danger and death, are the most arrant cowards in the matter of superstition, and could be made to flee before a mere fancy. But our hero was not one of these. His mind was strong, like his body, and well balanced. He stood his ground and prepared to face the matter out. He would indeed have been more than ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... murder, yellow as jaundice, and put on the whiteness of a virgin when you ought to be blushing like a penitent.' In short, 'You have no heart of your own, and you pretend to possess half a dozen: you're devoid of one steady beam, and play tricks with every scale of colour: you're an arrant widow, and that's what you ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the most arrant nonsense, Fan. You must be a goose, or what is almost as bad, a hypocrite, to say that I have any love or tenderness in me. I confess that I did once have a little affection for you, but that is ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... I knew that they had done this expressly, deliberately. But at the moment when head and body were severed, and fell into the trough, I groaned, and apprehended, not with my mind, but with my heart and my whole being, that all the arguments which I had heard anent the death-penalty were arrant nonsense; that, no matter how many people might assemble in order to perpetrate a murder, no matter what they might call themselves, murder is murder, the vilest sin in the world, and that that crime had been committed before my very eyes. By my presence and non-interference, ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... peculiarly disgusting. They were found to be comparatively harmless, however. If they had chanced to catch a man asleep they would have seized him no doubt, and dragged him into the water, but being arrant cowards, they had not the pluck to face even a little boy ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... was frightened out of his wits. A Federal officer told him that their fright was really a disgrace; and if one thousand of our men had come in town, the whole thirty-five hundred would have been at their mercy. Even the naval officers denounce it as a most arrant piece of cowardice; for instead of marching their troops out to meet ours, they all rushed into the Garrison, where, if attacked, their only retreat would have been into the river. The gunboats were ordered into the middle of the stream, ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... had been a feud between Pritchard and another man of the name of Wynne, a platelayer on the line. The object of their quarrel was the blacksmith's daughter in the neighbouring village—a remarkably pretty girl and an arrant flirt. Both men were madly in love with her, and she played them off one against the other. The night but one before his death Pritchard and Wynne had met at the village inn, had quarrelled in the bar—Lucy, of course, being the subject of their ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... I did not believe that you were such an arrant coward. You shall soon see where I go. It is seldom that man is seen or heard in this region, and the strange creatures marvel. That was one of the large night-hawks which so terrified your weak senses. Do you ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... are so intimately associated with the ball-room floor and the purlieus of polite society, that, in spite of my secret sympathy with the progress of the sex, I could not completely school my mental machinery so as to exclude a lurking regret that such arrant good looks were to be wasted upon people who had nothing the matter with them, and who would, perhaps, be slow in recognizing the fact. I was even weak enough ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... lord tel it. Ham. No not I, you'l reueale it. Hor. Not I my Lord by heauen. Mar. Nor I my Lord. Ham. How say you then? would hart of man Once thinke it? but you'l be secret. Both. I by heauen, my lord. Ham. There's neuer a villaine dwelling in all Denmarke, But hee's an arrant knaue. Hor. There need no Ghost come from the graue to tell you this. Ham. Right, you are in the right, and therefore I holde it meet without more circumstance at all, Wee shake hands and part; you as your busines And desiers shall leade you: for looke you, Euery man hath ...
— The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke - The First ('Bad') Quarto • William Shakespeare
... the mind disappears; there is apparently a total scattering and end of the individual. That these phenomena should suggest the thought of annihilation is inevitable; to suppose that they prove the fact is absurd. It is an arrant begging of the question; for the very problem is, Does not an invisible spiritual entity survive the visible material disintegration? Among the unsound and superstitious attempts to prove the fact of a future life ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... upon you all for arrant cowards! Looke how a dunghill cocke not rightly bred Doth come into the pitt with greater grace, Brislinge his feathers, settinge upp his plumes, Clappinge his winges and crowinge lowder out Then ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... give me leave To tell you what I now perceive, You'll find yourself an arrant chouse, If y' were but at a Meeting-House. — 1250 'Tis true, quoth he, we ne'er come there, Because, w' have let 'em out ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Own Times, i. 556. Swift has appended a note, "an arrant rascal," but Finch's great offence with the dean was probably his advancement by George I. rather than his conduct of state ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... confess that if Parson Dale were a penny the poorer, he would do a pennyworth's less good; and comparing one parish with another, such as Rood Hall and Hazeldean, he is dimly aware that there is no greater CIVILIZER than a parson tolerably well off. Then, too, Squire Hazeldean, though as arrant a Tory as ever stood upon shoe-leather, is certainly not a vampire nor blood sucker. He does not feed on the public; a great many of the public feed upon him: and, therefore, his practical experience a little staggers and perplexes Lenny Fairfield as to ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "Wonota it only a single generation removed from arrant savagery. She calls a spade a spade. You shouldn't blame her. It is civilization—which is after all a sort of make-believe—that causes us white folk to refer to a spade as an ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... are you afraid of?" continued he; at the same time trembling with such agitation that the whole carriage shook. This singular piece of behaviour incensed Miss Ramper so much that she cried, "D—n your pitiful soul, you are as arrant a poltroon, as ever was drummed out of a regiment. Stop the waggon, Joey—let me out, and by G—d, if I have rhetoric enough, the thief shall not only take your purse, but your skin also." So saying she leaped out with great agility. By this time the horseman came up and happened to ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... been corrupted, or even with Italian. There is a wider gap, and one implying greater boorishness, between ministerium and metier, or sapiens and sachant, than between druv and drove or agin and against, which last is plainly an arrant superlative. Our rustic coverlid is nearer its French original than the diminutive coverlet, into which it has been ignorantly corrupted in politer speech. I obtained from three cultivated Englishmen at different times three diverse pronunciations of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... scriptures in the mother tongue, shall forfeit land, cattle, life, and goods from their heirs forever, and so be condemned for heretics to God, enemies to the crown, and most arrant ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... of authority were ridiculed quite as sharply. I recall the surprise and indignation of a University professor who had consented to speak at a meeting arranged in the Board rooms, when next morning his nonpartisan and careful disquisition had been twisted into the most arrant uplift nonsense and so connected with a fake newspaper report of a trial marriage address delivered, not by himself, but by a colleague, that a leading clergyman of the city, having read the newspaper account, felt impelled to preach a sermon, calling upon all decent people to rally ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... was the eager response. Then, the Irishwoman shook her huge head admiringly. "Sure, when the women get the votes, you'll be elected alderman from the ward." But, as Cicily would have laughingly protested against this arrant flattery, a sudden thought came to the President of the new club, and she spoke with an increase of seriousness: "And, oh, I was forgetting one thing! What do you think now, Mrs. Hamilton? Carrington's men have ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... really studies faces disinterestedly, impartially, without prejudice. We like or dislike too readily, we are blinded by the race, sex and age of the one studied, and, most fatal of all, we judge by standards of beauty that are totally misleading. The sweetest face may hide the most arrant egoist, for facial beauty has very little to do with the nature behind the face. In fact, facial make-up is more influenced by diet, disease and racial tendency ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... theatrical registrar, had a dog named Bob, and a sagacious dog he was; but he was a pusillanimous dog, in a word, an arrant coward, and above all things he dreaded the fire of a gun. His master having taken him once to the enclosed part of Hyde Park next to Kensington Gardens, when the guards were exercising, their first ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... ways. My folks will think I'm dead ef I don't get along home, sence the horse and sleigh have gone ahead empty. I've done my arrant and had my joke; now I want my pay, Tilly," and Gad took a hearty kiss from the rosy cheeks of his "little sweetheart," as he called her. His own cheeks tingled with the smart slap she gave him as she ran away, ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... means defenceless. Our stores of weapons and ammunition, as well as our subsidies to the warlike Masai, might be reckoned as a surrogate for a military budget. As to the lack of a magistracy, we were such arrant barbarians that we did not even consider a civil or a criminal code necessary, nor did we at that time possess a written constitution. The committee, still in possession of the absolute authority committed to it at the Hague, contented itself with laying all its measures before ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... few who would denounce Thackeray and Besant and Mr. Kipling as arrant plagiarists; but critics of a more delicate perception of the principles of art would rather praise these authors for the ingenuity with which they had successively made use of Cooper's original device. Indeed, the more delicate the perceptions of the critic the less likely would he be to assert ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... his wicked wife Lizzie Kolken. Methought when I married them that it would not turn out over well, seeing that she was in common report of having long lived in unchastity with Wittich Appelmann, who had ever been an arch-rogue, and especially an arrant whoremaster, and such the Lord never blesses. This same Seden now brought me five loaves, two sausages, and a goose, which old goodwife Paal, at Loddin, had given him; also a flitch of bacon from the farmer Jack Tewert. But he said I must shield him from his wife, who would have had half for ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... couple of miles of him. He could see its red-brick walls, and its red-tiled roofs, and its tall smoke-vomiting chimneys, growing and extending over the slopes beyond the river. It was to him the most irritating sight in the world; for what were all those swarming weavers and spinners but arrant radicals, upstarts, sworn foes of ancient institutions and the landed interests of England? Sir Roger had passed through many a desperate conflict with them for the return of members to parliament. They brought forward men that were ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... of confidence, particularly among the friends of Don Juan Estrada-Rosa, she was not contented with saying that Fernanda was superior to her ex-lover in every feeling, but she proclaimed Luis as an arrant impostor, hypocrite, &c. And when she saw him the next day in Jacoba's house, she embraced him, choking ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... Such horrors bide here, poisoning this land With their destructive breath, I here proclaim The solemn doom of utter banishment On Jason, the Thessalian, Aeson's son, Spouse of a wicked witch-wife, and himself An arrant villain; and I drive him forth From out this land of Greece, wherein the gods Are wont to walk with men; to exile hence, To flight and wandering I drive him forth, And with him, this, his wife, ay, and his babes, The offspring of his marriage-bed. Henceforth No rood ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Those charges he thought he might throw to the winds; he was sure that no one believed them; but there was, he admitted, one cowardice of which his two friends had often been guilty, and it was a cowardice for which they need not blush; he meant the cowardice, the arrant, the noble cowardice of being afraid not to do what they thought right, and of being afraid to do what they knew ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... thing only the more arrant nonsense," grumbled Ray. "It's foolish enough in all conscience sake, if they had a chance of success, but when they haven't any, why the deuce do they want to drag us poor ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... in the plantation. Master Georgy has no right to be your brother. He is worse than a dissenter. Dissenters try to be gentlemen; but George has no misgivings about himself on that score; so he gives his undivided energy to his efforts to be parsonic. He is an arrant hypocrite." ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... in this quarter from men who are of no party, but well-disposed to the present administration. Nor should it be otherwise, when no stone has been left unturned that could impress on the minds of the people the most arrant misrepresentation of facts; that their rights have not only been neglected, but absolutely sold; that there are no reciprocal advantages in the treaty; that the benefits are all on the side of Great Britain; and, what seems to have had more weight with them than all the rest, and to have been ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... fellow, how could I help it? My mother wanted the general, my father's friend, and of course his wife must be asked also. I couldn't tell my mother that the lady had been a most arrant coquette, to put it mildly, and had married the old man in a pet, because my cousin and I declined to be ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... much the same there as here. As for the philosophy of such matters, it is thus summed up by Mr. Romilly: 'I have often wondered what the sorcerer thinks of himself; whether he really believes himself to be a magician, or whether he realizes the fact that he is an arrant old humbug. I think there is a mixture of both feelings.' It would be useless to pursue this enquiry ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... thought that fear of the terrors he had held up before him would cause Jackson—whom he knew to be an arrant coward—to refrain from adventuring himself ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... friends, and in this number, I fear, Sir, that I must consider you; for I have long expected the pleasure of a letter from home to no purpose. Olivia and Sophia too, promised to write, but seem to have forgotten me. Tell them they are two arrant little baggages, and that I am this moment in a most violent passion with them: yet still, I know not how, tho' I want to bluster a little, my heart is respondent only to softer emotions. Then tell them, sir, ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... a good horse in the stable, but may make an arrant jade on the journey"—to paraphrase Goldsmith—and the only way in which these irreconcilable differences could be settled was by bullet and bayonet, which settled them right ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... are arrant hypocrites. There is nothing of themselves in their tone. The trouble is to have a really beautiful voice one must have a really ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... volatile, and any lady with a coach and six horses would carry you to Japan." "If your ramble," says Swift, in another letter, "was on horseback, I am glad of it, on account of your health; but I know your arts of patching up a journey between stage-coaches and friends" coaches—for you are as arrant a Cockney as any hosier in Cheapside. I have often had it in my head to put it into yours, that you ought to have some great work in scheme, which may take up seven years to finish, besides two or three under-ones that may add another thousand pounds ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... real and sole causes of these phenomena, which had so much confounded the illiterate, the credulous, and the enthusiastic; that this boasted magnetic element had no real existence in nature, consequently that Messmer himself was either an arrant impostor, or a ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... kept his secret, since these men, for two years his side comrades in countless border raids and dangers, thus spake of him, not knowing that he was the most arrant physical coward in all that Rio Bravo country! Neither his friends nor his enemies had suspected him of aught else than the finest courage. It was purely a physical cowardice, and only by an extreme, grim effort of will had he forced his craven body ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... come on," exclaimed Martin; "the fellows, after all, are but arrant cowards. They make noise enough when they fancy that they are going to have things all their own way. I suspect they are far ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... Liberty of Prophesying [22] Taylor turns this way into mere ridicule. I love thee, Jeremy! but an arrant theological barrister that thou wast, though thy only fees were thy desires of doing ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... 'O, that am I,' says Captain Ward, 'There's no man bids me lie, And if thou art the King's fair ship, Thou art welcome to me.' 'I'll tell thee what,' says Rainbow, 'Our King is in great grief, That thou shouldst lie upon the sea, And play the arrant thief, ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... written a book, is above the unwriting average, and, as such, should be ranked mentally above them: no light research, and tact, and industry, and head-and-hand labour, are sufficient for a volume; even certain stolid performances in print do not shake my judgment; for arrant blockheads as sundry authors undoubtedly are, the average (mark, not all men, but the average) unwriting man is an author's intellectual inferior. All men, however well capable, have not perchance the appetite, nor the industry, nor the opportunity ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... magnetic battery, produced no results. Altogether twenty-nine experiments were tried, which convinced every one present, except Dr. Elliotson, that Animal Magnetism was a delusion, that the girls were of very exciteable imaginations, and arrant impostors. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... elsewhere, make him restore me a pair of saddle-bags whereof he hath saith indeed he did it not; but I saw him, not a month ago, in act to have them resoled.' Ribi on his side cried out with all his might, 'Believe him not, my lord; he is an arrant knave, and for that he knoweth I am come to lay a complaint against him for a pair of saddle-bags whereof he hath robbed me, he cometh now with his story of the boothose, which I have had in my house this many a ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling, monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... useful discipline of thought. They have given its tone and its strength to the intellect of Scotland. They teach it to face all difficulties manfully, and to turn with equal manliness from vain and presumptuous speculations, which, under a boastful show of profundity, conceal invariably an arrant dogmatism. We turn with hearty satisfaction from the tissue of false subtleties which the German professor lays before his youth, to the careful and modest analysis of mental phenomena by which a professor in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Mellish, delivers that arrant bit of nonsense "The Seven Ages of Man" in such a manner as a man might tell a rather serious story in a drawing room. "The Seven Ages of Man," of course, is just as much of an aria as La Donna e Mobile. It always awakens applause, but this time the ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... books," says Mr D—s, "is arrant nonsense." I am afraid this learned man does not sufficiently understand the extensive meaning of the word whisper. If he had rightly understood what is meant by the "senses whisp'ring the soul," in the ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... eyes that was peculiarly disgusting. They were found to be comparatively harmless, however. If they had chanced to catch a man asleep they would have seized him no doubt, and dragged him into the water, but being arrant cowards, they had not the pluck to face even a little boy when ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... honours and commands, and a high reputation with the people; which indeed every excellent man aims at; but whilst he pursues that only true honour, which nature has in view above all other objects, he finds himself busied in arrant trifles, and in pursuit of no conspicuous form of virtue, but only some shadowy representation of glory. For glory is a real and express substance, not a mere shadow. It consists in the united praise of good ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... critique. But it so chanced that the opera by some accident was not played! The Evening Bulletin, my old paper, rallied me keenly on this blunder, and I felt badly. John Forney, jun., however, said it was mere rubbish of no consequence. He was such an arrant Bohemian and hardened son of the press, that he regarded it rather as a joke and a feather in our caps, indicating that we were a bounding lot, and not tied down to close observances. Truly this is a very fine spirit of freedom, but it may be carried too far, as I think ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the duke's servants; two or three carried the lights which had dazzled me, three or four held pikes in rest. They were huddled together; their weapons were protruded before them; their faces were pale and agitated. To put it plainly, they looked in as arrant a fright as I have seen men look, and they gazed apprehensively at a man who stood in the middle of the bridge, sword in hand. Rupert Hentzau was in his trousers and shirt; the white linen was stained with blood, but his easy, buoyant pose told me ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... Ambitious, with more offences at my becke, then I haue thoughts to put them in imagination, to giue them shape, or time to acte them in. What should such Fellowes as I do, crawling betweene Heauen [Sidenote: earth and heauen] and Earth.[8] We are arrant Knaues all[10], beleeue none of vs.[9] Goe thy wayes to ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... teeth the nickname 'Buskin,' as descriptive of an endeavour on my part to fit both parties. But what of the man who pleases neither? What in heaven's name are we to call him? Yes! you—Critias? Under the democracy you were looked upon as the most arrant hater of the people, and under the aristocracy you have proved yourself the bitterest foe of everything respectable. Yes! Critias, I am, and ever have been, a foe of those who think that a democracy cannot reach perfection until slaves and those who, from poverty, would sell the city for a drachma, ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... forces him to love his half-sister despite himself, and awe and repentance convert the savage, who joys at the news of his brother's reported death, to a loyal and devoted subject of the same brother. But Judar with all his goodness proved himself an arrant softy and was no match for two atrocious villains. And there may be overmuch of forgiveness as ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Times, i. 556. Swift has appended a note, "an arrant rascal," but Finch's great offence with the dean was probably his advancement by George I. rather than his conduct of state trials as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... canon shook his head in dismay at such arrant folly. "Young stripling, be warned," he said. "Know what is good for thee. Greek is the tongue ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... dressed in my small low room, with its sloping ceiling of varnished wood, at the top of the house, I felt that after all I had learnt nothing really new respecting that disturbing young gentleman. Quinby had already proved himself such an arrant gossip as to discount every word that he had said before I placed him in his proper type: it is one which I have encountered elsewhere, that of the middle-aged bachelor who will and must talk, and he had confessed his celibacy almost in his first breath; but a more pronounced ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... great creators of wit in our mistresses. For Beatrix, she is a mere utterer of yes and no, and has no more sense than what will just dignify her to be an arrant waiting-woman; that is, to lie for her lady, and ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... never seen so great a town before, until we passed the gates of the stockade that keeps the town that lies without the old walls, and then he said, looking round him strangely, "Brother, you will laugh at me, no doubt, for an arrant dreamer, but this is the place whereto in dreams I have been many a time. Now we shall come to yon turn of the road among the houses, and beyond that we shall surely see a stone-arched gate in a great wall, and ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... size of the Greek stage, and of the palace in its rear which was its permanent set of scenery, so dwarfed the figures of the actors that buskins and padding were used in order to make the persons of the players more in keeping with their surroundings. With submission, I hold that this theory is arrant nonsense. Even on stilts ten feet high the actors still would have been, in one way, out of proportion with the background. If used at all in tragedy, buskins and pads probably were used to make the heroic characters of the drama literally ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... solitudes so deep that even our unsuspecting hearts sometimes quaked with fear of dark and lonesomeness; and then we came trooping back at the sound of the bell, untamed, happy little savages, ready to settle, with a long breath, to the afternoon's drowsy routine. Arrant nonsense that! the boundary of British America and the conjugation of the verb to be! Who that might loll away the hours upon a bank in silken ease, needed aught even of computation or the tongues? He alone ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... do work," I cried impetuously, as though he were my judge and I required vindication, and at the same time very much aware of my arrant idiocy in discussing the ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... at heart he was an arrant coward, and the being met by a stranger, alone, close to nightfall and in the forest, filled him with the greatest terror. The words of the ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... do so; because, if you take large holster pistols and load them up to their muzzles, you can't risk anything. They are sure to fire wide of the mark, and both parties can retire from the field with honor. Let me manage all that. Hein! 'sapristi,' two brave men would be arrant fools to kill each other ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... soon fly to the woods, enter a hollow and dilapidated tree, and carve out for itself its future fortunes, amid a world of labor and apparent discomfort. The bee, too, barring its industry, patience, and sweetened labors, is an arrant thief—robbing its nearest neighbors, with impunity, when the strongest, and mercilessly slaughtering its weaker brethren, when standing in the way of its rapacity. It has been extolled for its ingenuity, its patience, its industry, its perseverance, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... up into groups, lingering here and there to discuss my statements as they moved toward the door; and M'Allister told me that, as he stood near a group, he heard one man exclaim, "It's all arrant nonsense! five minutes with my 12-1/16-inch reflector would convince any sane man that there are no fine lines to be seen on Mars, because none exist!" This brought a murmur of assent; then some one else said, "Well, I certainly see some of the lines with my 7-1/2-inch, but regard them ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... steadily worse and worse. A comparison of the paintings and mosaics of the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries shows the rapid decline of all art qualities. Finally every figure produced was a most arrant libel on nature. It was always painted against a flat gold background; the limbs were wholly devoid of action; the feet and hands hung helplessly; and the eyes were round and staring. The flesh tints were a dull brick red, and all else a ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... paroxysm, swearing at intervals like a trooper, and cutting the most enormous capers. The moment Prince Violet recovered himself sufficiently, he dismounted, and regaining his trusty sword, belabored the impenetrable hide of the egregious monster with such arrant good will, that he retreated backward between every fit of sneezing, until finally falling into the moat, he stuck fast in the mud, sneezing ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... quasi venenum; Wine is poison to a sick body. A sick body is no sound body; ergo, wine is a pure thing, and is poison to all corruption. Try-lill! the hunters whoop to you. I'll stand to it: Alexander was a brave man, and yet an arrant drunkard. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... well deserved, Chauliac's conduct during the black death which ravaged Avignon in 1348, shortly after his arrival in the Papal City, would have been sufficient of itself to attest. The occurrence of the plague in a city usually gave rise to an exhibition of the most arrant cowardice, and all who could, fled. In many of the European cities the physicians joined the fugitives, and the ailing were left to care for themselves. With a few notable exceptions, this was the case at Avignon, but Guy was among ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... placed under General Johnson, regarded as one of their best and most dashing officers, for the express purpose of hunting Morgan. It was completely disorganized and shattered by this defeat. A great deal of censure was cast at the time upon these men, and they were accused of arrant cowardice by the Northern press. Nothing could have been more unjust, and many who joined in denouncing them, afterward behaved much more badly. They attacked with spirit and without hesitation, and were unable to close ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... day but one after the deakin sold himself Mr. Stickin'-Plaster I had an arrant three four mile or so up past his place, an' when I was comin' back, along 'bout four or half past, it come on to rain like all possessed. I had my old umbrel'—though it didn't hender me f'm gettin' more or less wet—an' I sent the old mare along fer ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... English carnival of gamblers is over for a month or two; the bookmakers have retired to winter quarters after having waxed fat during the year on the money risked by arrant simpletons. The bookmaker's habits are peculiar; he cannot do without gambling, and he contrives to indulge himself all the year round in some way or other. When the Newmarket Houghton meeting is over, Mr. Bookmaker bethinks him of billiards, and he goes daily ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... a coward, an arrant cur, yet he infinitely preferred having to tackle flesh and blood, to ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... many people got out of his way as from a blast, and glad they could prove their two last years' conversation. The very breath of him was pestilential, and if it brought not imprisonment or death over such on whom it fell, it surely poisoned reputation, and left good Protestants arrant papists, and something worse than that, in danger of being put in the plot ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... the organism dissolves, the mind disappears; there is apparently a total scattering and end of the individual. That these phenomena should suggest the thought of annihilation is inevitable; to suppose that they prove the fact is absurd. It is an arrant begging of the question; for the very problem is, Does not an invisible spiritual entity survive the visible material disintegration? Among the unsound and superstitious attempts to prove the fact of a future ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... purpose. But if it could be proved by the stamp itself that it had not been in existence on the date impressed on the envelope, then the fraud would be quite apparent. And if there had been such fraud, then would the testimony of all those four witnesses be crushed into arrant perjury. They had produced the fraudulent document, and by it would be thoroughly condemned. There could be no necessity ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... public registers that he was born at Antium. Pliny charges Gaetulicus as guilty of an arrant forgery, merely to soothe the vanity of a conceited young prince, by giving him the lustre of being born in a city sacred to Hercules; and says that he advanced this false assertion with the more assurance, because, the year before the birth of Caius, Germanicus had a son of ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... walk from the one end of London to the other, dine at Dolly's, & be in the Theatre at night; & as the Play would probably be bad, and as Mr. David Malloch, the Author, who has changed his name to David Mallet, Esq., was an arrant Puppy, we determined to exert ...
— Critical Strictures on the New Tragedy of Elvira, Written by Mr. David Malloch (1763) • James Boswell, Andrew Erskine and George Dempster
... moon, the force and direction of winds, etc., there may have been some real observation to found them on. But it is very clear that such a conception, if carried out consistently to extreme lengths and applied indiscriminately to everything, must result in arrant folly. Such was assuredly the case with the Chaldeo-Babylonians, who not only carefully noted and explained dreams, drew lots in doubtful cases by means of inscribed arrows, interpreted the rustle of trees, the plashing of fountains and murmur of streams, the direction and form ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... generally neither more nor less than a net of silken flattery. Your good guide, your dear guide, your pet guide, whom Neighbor So-and-so, going abroad, must look up immediately on his arrival, this invaluable creature, depend upon it, is an arrant flatterer. He does not go out of his way for you; he does not tell it you to your face; but, somehow or other, (if he knows his vocation,) he makes you believe, that, of all the travellers he ever escorted, (and he has been a travellers' escort from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... England, before the old gentleman fell ill of a pleurisy, which in four days' time deprived him of his life; and as he had no will, his estate of L300 a year, and about L700 in money (which he had lent out on securities), descended to his sister's son, as arrant a booby as ever breathed, and deprived Tim both of his present subsistance ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... excessively pious when recovering sobriety,—Steele reeled his way through life, and died with the reputation of being an orthodox Christian and a (nearly) habitual drunkard; the most affectionate and most faithless of husbands; a brave soldier, and in many points an arrant fool; a violent politician, and the best natured of men; a writer extremely lively, for this, among other reasons, that he wrote generally on his legs, flying or meditating flight from his creditors; and who embodied ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... stood with the wry, dazed look of a man who suddenly finds himself guilty of arrant stupidity, watching the cars whiz past on their way to the open country. Just ahead was the breach in the wall through which all trains entered or left the city. Into that breach shot the train, going faster and faster as it saw the straight, clear track beyond. He waited ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... those circumstances, and not according to our own imaginations nor according to abstract ideas of right; by no means according to mere general theories of government, the resort to which appears to me, in our present situation, no better than arrant trifling. I shall therefore endeavor, with your leave, to lay before you some of the most material of these circumstances in as full and as clear a manner as I am ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... crossing his arms, "here's the truth on't. I found a poor wretch bent on vengeance, murder, and a rogue's death, which was pure folly. I offered you riches, the which you refused, and this was arrant folly. I took you for comrade, brought you aboard ship with offer of honest employ which you likewise refused and here was more folly. Your conduct on board ship was all folly. So, despite yourself, I set you on a fair island with ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... make me wise. The path to wisdom is not necessarily through the schools. The brilliant scholar may be an arrant fool. True wisdom is found, not in mental acquisitions, but in a certain spiritual relation. The wise man is known by the pose of his soul. He is "inclined toward the Lord!" He has returned unto his rest, and he ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... to our boat," says the narrative, "we found more than seven hundred natives, who had assembled from all directions. They began by demanding stuffs and iron in exchange for their wares, and soon some of them proved themselves arrant thieves. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... took their fun and paid for it. He had contrived to avoid fights with his mates and thrashings from the teachers. On the one occasion when public opinion had driven him to put up his fists, he had been saved from disgrace only because the bully against whom he had turned proved to be an arrant craven. ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... brother Prospero, by this good light that shines here, I am loth to kindle fresh coals, but an you had come in my walk within these two hours I had given you that you should not have clawed off again in haste, by Jesus, I had done it, I am the arrant'st rogue that ever breathed else, but now beshrew my heart if I bear you any malice in ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... shrugging her shoulders with contempt, "of course, you are talking arrant nonsense! The thing's impossible. The world can't be turned into a monastery, and as long as people live they will always be overreaching each other, and deceiving each other. It's not possible to be perfectly honest, or ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... great an extent monopolized the therapeutic use of water, and so much arrant nonsense has been talked in that pure element's name, that we are in danger of overlooking its wonderful value as a curative means. It is one of the most powerful agents at the command of the practitioner, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... however, to find the self-styled Kearney quietly seated on the sofa, the gentle May Sylvester, the "Lily of Lone Valley," sitting with maidenly awe and unaffected interest on one side of him, while on the other that arrant flirt, her cousin Kate, was practicing the pitiless archery of her eyes, with an excitement that ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... unfortunate that at this moment the places of these two men should have been taken by two as arrant fanatics as ever drew breath. For thirteen out of the fifteen years following Winthrop's death, the governor of Massachusetts was John Endicott, a sturdy pioneer, whose services to the colony had been great. He was honest and conscientious, but ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... misdemeanours. On this last occasion the Knights' Marshals' men cut off the offender's sword, took off his spurs and flung them away, and broke his sword over his head, at the same time proclaiming him "an infamous arrant knave." ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... this teaching is necessary for the protection of virtue and the prevention of disease, and that, if anyone hesitates to encourage the spread of such literature and the teaching of such knowledge, he is an arrant and presumptuous blockhead. The arrogance of the extreme advocates of child hygiene blinds them to certain all-important truths. The first is that our teachers are not prepared, and, in too many cases, are not the most suitable persons to teach the subject. The second is that to bring ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... Parisian populace, even when a man grown, it is always the street Arab; to paint the child is to paint the city; and it is for that reason that we have studied this eagle in this arrant sparrow. It is in the faubourgs, above all, we maintain, that the Parisian race appears; there is the pure blood; there is the true physiognomy; there this people toils and suffers, and suffering and toil are the two faces of man. There ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... when we first knew him, was an arrant coward, for though strong, well-formed and versed in the use of arms, he more than once fled before the enemy. He had other traits of a coward, as we may know from his actions in hiding in his tent and hoping to escape the eye of his master ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... process of time his pupil gained the means of making what he pleased of himself; for his father having died, was not long survived by his eldest son, an arrant fisher and fowler, who departed this life, in consequence of a cold caught in his vocation, while shooting ducks in the swamp called Kittlefittingmoss, notwithstanding his having drunk a bottle of brandy that very night to keep the cold out of his stomach. Jonathan, therefore, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... true, notwithstanding. At first I thought them angels, but they did not leave me long under that delusion; three of the eldest and handsomest undertook the task of setting me right, and they managed so cleverly that in five minutes I knew them, at least, for what they were—three arrant coquettes." ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... to him. "O good dear sir!" cried he, "for pity's sake, hinder my master from falling upon those lions by all means, or we shall all be torn a-pieces."—"Why," said the gentleman, "is your master so arrant a madman, then, that you should fear he would set upon such furious beasts?"—"Ah, sir!" said Sancho, "he is not mad, but venturesome."—"Well," replied the gentleman, "I will take care of that;" and ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... of something much more grateful and comforting than steel swords, is a French Canadian by birth, and has been the admitted chief in his profession for more than 18 years. He ran away from his home in Quebec at an early age, and joined a travelling circus bound for South America. On seeing an arrant old humbug swallow a small machete, in Buenos Ayres, the boy took a fancy to the performance, and approached the old humbug aforesaid with the view of being taught the business. Not having any money, however, wherewith to pay the necessary premium, the overtures of the would-be apprentice ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... seat in its place.] There! I have tidied up the court-room and put the seats in readiness, and now I will go and tell the magistrates. [He walks about and looks around him.] But see! Here comes that arrant knave, the king's brother-in-law. I will go away without attracting his attention. [He stands apart. Enter Sansthanaka, ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... Had she fallen upon an adventure? Was Dennison's theory correct regarding the beads? She rose and went to the dresser, inspecting the beads carefully. Positively glass! That Anthony Cleigh should be seeking a string of glass beads seemed arrant nonsense. ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... now rode into the field, armed cap-a-pie, and followed by a train of cavaliers of their own roistering cast, great swearers and carousers, arrant swashbucklers, with clanking armor and jingling spurs. When the people of Toledo beheld the vaunting and discourteous appearance of these knights, they were more anxious than ever for the success of the gentle duchess; ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... you to that, gentlemen?" he cried. "Egad, I'll be sworn he deserves credit,—an arrant young spark out of the Colonies, scarce turned nineteen, defeating a duke of the realm on horseback, and preaching the gospel of 'no taxation' at Brooks's Club! Nor the favour of Sandwich or March could ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... nurse's heart yearned over her child; for he was feeble as a child; and, when he got well enough to amuse his weary hours by making love to her, and telling her a pack of arrant lies, she was a ready dupe. He was to marry her as soon as ever his old uncle died, and left him the means, etc., etc. At last he got well enough to leave her, and went away, her open admirer and secret lover. He borrowed twenty pounds of her ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... exceeding large trunk-breeches, and were renowned for feats of the trencher. They were the first inventors of suppawn, or mush and milk.—Close in their rear marched the Van Vlotens, of Kaatskill, horrible quaffers of new cider, and arrant braggarts in their liquor.—After them came the Van Pelts of Groodt Esopus, dexterous horsemen, mounted upon goodly switch-tailed steeds of the Esopus breed. These were mighty hunters of minks and musk-rats, whence came ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... Nor I my Lord. Ham. How say you then? would hart of man Once thinke it? but you'l be secret. Both. I by heauen, my lord. Ham. There's neuer a villaine dwelling in all Denmarke, But hee's an arrant knaue. Hor. There need no Ghost come from the graue to tell you this. Ham. Right, you are in the right, and therefore I holde it meet without more circumstance at all, Wee shake hands and part; you as your busines And desiers shall leade ...
— The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke - The First ('Bad') Quarto • William Shakespeare
... anything? Ay, now she had told him plainly enough—"I hate you!" And he, poor man (may God console him!), what did he do? Was it a laughing or a crying matter? Marianna ['S]roka did not know if she should think "Oh, you arrant fool!" or if she should wish, "If only he were my husband, or, at least, my lover." For the gospodarz was good, thoroughly good; he wouldn't stint, her—her and her two little ones. That woman was really too nasty. She didn't ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... "What arrant nonsense!" exclaimed Nelson, with some exasperation. "It always irritates me when I hear these old topers excused. A man should be able to take a glass of wine or beer or ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... a man of wit; To all things fitted, though for nothing fit; Scourge of the world, yet crouching for a name, And honour bartering for the breath of fame: Born to command, and yet an arrant slave; Through too much honesty a seeming knave; At all things grasping, though on nothing bent, And ease pursuing e'en with discontent; Through Nature, Arts, and Sciences he flies, And gathers ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... what I know, and begin to smell a rat. Get you in (to Celia), and never take such a liberty again. As for you two, arrant rogues, or I am much mistaken, if you wish to deceive me again, let your stories be a little ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... is it so?" growled Roger, his scowl relaxing—"now will I eat full and blithely, for Ralpho was an arrant knave." ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... considered my demeanour towards you—you of all persons in the world? I simply don't remember when you have been there and when you haven't. I don't remember the humours in which I have been when we have conversed. All that you have said seems to me to be the most arrant nonsense." ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... estimate to be possibly fifteen cents," said he, as the vehicle drew up at the curb; "and I think I owe you ten times the amount for the pleasure of kicking such an arrant cur as that specimen. Has he ever annoyed you before? Do you ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... doctor," he said heartily. "I value that sort of compliment. But I didn't want to go away from here and leave you to think me an arrant coward. The truth is, I shouldn't have been of much use to Mac or to myself. I'm not swimming, this summer, for I was unlucky enough to break my arm, last June, and it's not at ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... butterfly as she seemed, had stores of tact and finesse in that little brain of hers, and the power of developing a fine reserve which had already wilted more than one of the young men of the house. For Kitty was none of your arrant and promiscuous flirts who count "all fish that come to their net." She was choice and dainty in her flirtations, but, possibly, none the less ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... of the company may be assumed to be arrant rascals—rascals male and rascals female—chevaliers d'industrie, the offscourings of all the shut-up gambling-houses in Europe, demireps and lorettes, single and ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... you vex me with your babblement; I am like to think you dote in your old age. Is it not arrant folly to pretend That gods would have a thought for this dead man? Did they forsooth award him special grace, And as some benefactor bury him, Who came to fire their hallowed sanctuaries, To sack their shrines, ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... poorer, he would do a pennyworth's less good; and comparing one parish with another, such as Rood Hall and Hazeldean, he is dimly aware that there is no greater CIVILIZER than a parson tolerably well off. Then, too, Squire Hazeldean, though as arrant a Tory as ever stood upon shoe-leather, is certainly not a vampire nor blood sucker. He does not feed on the public; a great many of the public feed upon him: and, therefore, his practical experience a little staggers and perplexes Lenny Fairfield as to the gospel accuracy ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have the testimony of Aubrey, who was at Stratford probably about the year 1680. He was an arrant and inveterate hunter after anecdotes, and seems to have caught up, without sifting, whatever quaint or curious matter came in his way. So that no great reliance can attach to what he says, unless it is sustained by other authority. But in this case his words sound like truth, and are supported by ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... and intrepidity. Even a Seenawan Arab was frightened at my coming near his tent, in dread of another quarrel or attack during the night. All our people more or less were alarmed and agitated, although we numbered sixty in the presence of five Touaricks! I thought in myself, What arrant cowards you are! To cover their cowardice they pretended the Sheikh had hundreds of people not far off. Zaleâ, and his Arabs, certainly behaved the best. Zaleâ, in fact, was now the only man of the caravan. He told ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... pass unchecked. It is certainly of great service to a public man, and it largely increases the estimation in which he is held, to establish such a character. It is no small detriment to Brougham that he is accounted an arrant coward; and it is remarkable that Peel never was known to deal in the insolence, and bullying, and offensive personalities in which the other has so copiously indulged, both in Parliament and at ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... old Richelieu was better fitted with a set of arrant scoundrels. There was the cunning right hand of Hawk Rufe, the slick, villainous intriguer, Lem Marks. No diplomatic imp, serving his master in the kingdoms of the world, moved with more unscrupulous smoothness. There was Malan with his clubfoot, owned ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... had the courage to inform him of what had occurred. At length they bethought them of employing the court fool to communicate the disastrous intelligence. Accordingly, that dignified individual took an opportunity of remarking to the king that he considered the English arrant cowards. ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... subconsciously, and that accounts for my sensation of hostility toward the rector.' A lie had been told to me. My new self-confidence resented this; and I said to myself, 'If Marcus Harding can tell a lie to me, who almost worshiped him, he must be an arrant hypocrite.' ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... in a letter declares; yea, with a design to bespatter the Presbyterian church of Scotland, a most scurrilous pamphlet was published at London, not only reflecting on our excellent reformers from popery, publishing arrant lies anent Mr. Alexander Henderson, abusing Mr. David Dickson, and breaking jests upon the remonstrators and presbyterians (as they called them), but also, in a most malicious and groundless kind ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... put themselves in connexion with what they call the invisible world, nay fancy, though they deem it an object of terrour, that they can master it thereby. In fact the greater part of mankind are crazed, without choosing to confess it: nay, the very wisdom of thousands is arrant madness." ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... his body relaxing in fear. He was an arrant coward like the most of his downtrodden race. Then something shifted through his thick ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... word in reply; but after some time he raised his head and said, "I cannot get rid of the idea, nor will anyone in the world remove it, or make me think otherwise—and he would be a blockhead who would hold or believe anything else than that that arrant knave Master Elisabad ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... If you will give me leave To tell you what I now perceive, You'll find yourself an arrant chouse, If y' were but at a Meeting-House. — 1250 'Tis true, quoth he, we ne'er come there, Because, w' have let 'em out by ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... happy! Ay, that's the point. Would she be happy? There are few men who can endure to be "cut", slighted, pointed at, and women suffer more than men in these regards. I, a grizzled man of forty, am not such an arrant ass as to suppose that a year of guilty delirium can compensate to a gently-nurtured woman for the loss of that social dignity which constitutes her best happiness. I am not such an idiot as to forget that there may come a time when the woman I ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... all-glorious Fourth of July, and crack our throats with huzzas for the 'star-spangled banner' and the American eagle? And a caviller might perhaps go farther, and ask the significant question, Are we not known all over the world as a race of arrant braggarts? ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... very early, before the sun was up, I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup; But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head, Had stayed at home behind me and was ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... refusing to enter the League of Nations (now already established by twenty-nine nations) and bearing and deserving the contempt of the world, would submit an entirely new project. This act would either be regarded as arrant ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... later on, we were by no means defenceless. Our stores of weapons and ammunition, as well as our subsidies to the warlike Masai, might be reckoned as a surrogate for a military budget. As to the lack of a magistracy, we were such arrant barbarians that we did not even consider a civil or a criminal code necessary, nor did we at that time possess a written constitution. The committee, still in possession of the absolute authority committed to it at the Hague, contented itself with laying all its measures ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... eavesdropped in silence. Tudie was full of scorn. Amelie's arguments were piffle or worse to her, and her willingness to undergo "martyrdom" for them was the most arrant pigheadedness, as the martyrdom of alien creeds ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... that the inhabitants of our bay were as arrant cannibals as any of the other tribes on the island, still I could not but feel a particular and most unqualified repugnance to the aforesaid Typees. Even before visiting the Marquesas, I had heard ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... are talking arrant nonsense," Dudley replied frigidly. "I don't know where in the world you get all your queer ideas. Woman's sphere is most decidedly the home; you seem to -" but a small hand was clapped vigorously over his mouth, and eyes of feigned horror ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... Snell was an arrant coward, and he knew that Hodge was really longing for a challenge. Wat felt sure that he would receive a severe drubbing at the hands of the dark-haired boy whom he had angered, and the thoughts of such punishment filled his soul ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... twice his own strength and size? Those charges he thought he might throw to the winds; he was sure that no one believed them; but there was, he admitted, one cowardice of which his two friends had often been guilty, and it was a cowardice for which they need not blush; he meant the cowardice, the arrant, the noble cowardice of being afraid not to do what they thought right, and of being afraid to do what they knew to ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... in general, such blatant and obnoxious asses, such arrant posturers and wind-bags? Why is it as surprising to find an unassuming and likable fellow among them as to find a Greek without fleas? The answer is quite simple. To reach it one needs but consider the type of young man who normally gets stage-struck. Is he, taking averages, the intelligent, alert, ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... expected no quarter. The Chinese troops, as distinguished from the Manchus, behaved differently; they took to their heels before a shot had been fired. This behaviour, which seems to be nothing more than arrant cowardice, is nevertheless open to a more favourable interpretation. The yoke of the Manchu dynasty was already beginning to press heavily, and these men felt that they had no particular cause to fight for, certainly ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... domestic controversies of the Americans at first appear to a stranger to be so incomprehensible and so puerile that he is at a loss whether to pity a people which takes such arrant trifles in good earnest, or to envy the happiness which enables it to discuss them. But when he comes to study the secret propensities which govern the factions of America, he easily perceives that the greater part ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... said the voice of Erland the Old; "we had better have tarried till daylight. It may be that they have already discovered what you have done. Truly you were an arrant simpleton to leave the weapon in your brother's breast. 'Twould have ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... she could make him angry. Probably he would only be really angry with anyone he cared for, and of course he didn't care for her at all. Georgie pondered that point as she went. She was honest and sweet, but she was an arrant little flirt, and Val was not the first man who had kissed her. She never pretended anything to herself, but she could pretend things to other people. She was too vital to be vulgar, but she was also ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... of England is like the apostle that forbade the man casting out devils, and got forbid himself for it —with this difference that she won't be forbid. Well, she chooses her portion with Dives and not Lazarus. She is the most arrant respecter of persons I know, and her Christianity is worse than a farce. It was that first of all that drove me to doubt. If I could find a place where everything was just the opposite, the poorer it was the better I should like it. It ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... belonging to another. That galling thought made the blood gush from his gaping wound. How that woman and her lover must deride him! And to think that they had sought to turn him to ridicule by a baseless charge, an arrant lie which still and ever made him smart, all proof of its falsity to the contrary. He, on his side, had accused them in the past without much belief in what he said, but now the charges he had imputed to them must come ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... that the marble goddesses, or whoever they were, at the base of Nelson's monument opposite, were regarding him with stony disdain and indignation; that the statue of Wellington knew him for an arrant impostor, and averted his head with cold contempt; and that the effigy of Lord Mayor Beckford on the right of the dais would come to life and denounce ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... said I to myself, "farewell to life; these accursed, arrant sorcerers will bear me to some nobleman's larder or cellar and leave me there to pay penalty by my neck for their robbery, or peradventure they will leave me stark-naked and benumbed on Chester Marsh or some other bleak and remote place." But on ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... you get for your pains, Hervey," said a gentleman of his acquaintance, who joined the party at this instant. "Why didn't you stick to t'other muse, who, to do her justice, is as arrant a flirt as your heart could ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... his teeth he sprung towards his tormentor with his fist raised in the air. But second thoughts prevailing he refrained from delivering the blow which he had premeditated. The menace, however, did not fail to exercise its effect upon the bullying guard who instantly became an arrant coward. The Zouave's action was so unexpected that the soldier was taken completely by surprise. He commenced to yell as if he had been actually struck, and his vociferous curses, reaching the ears of his comrades, brought speedy assistance. They rushed up, secured ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... train to catch,' as a striking example of the influence of heredity. If the law which she so contemptuously brushed aside is to be aborted by the influence and position of her family, the precept will be a bitter and dangerous one. Much arrant nonsense is vented concerning the 'class-hatred' stirred up by any criticism of the rich. One such instance as the running-down of Miss Cleary bears within it far more than the extremest demagoguery the potentialities of an unleashed hate. It ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
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