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More "Flout" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some jury duty. You shirk fatherhood, and all its happy and sacred obligations! You deny posterity! You strike a blow at it! You flout it! You menace the future of this Republic! Your inertia is a crime against the people! Instead of pro bono publico your motto is pro bono tempo—for a good time! And, dog Latin or not, it's the truth, and our ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... at once from schoolroom's form. Instead of all this angry storm, Another might have thanked you well For saving prey from that grim cell, That hollowed den 'neath journals great, Where editors who poets flout With their demoniac laughter shout. And I have scolded you! What fate For charming dwarfs who never meant To anger Hercules! And I Have frightened you!—My chair I sent Back to the wall, and then let fly A shower of words the envious ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... together these Like thunderclouds outlightening, thrilling the air. With shattering trumpet-challenge, when the blasts Are locked in frenzied wrestle, with mad breath Rending the clouds, when Zeus is wroth with men Who travail with iniquity, and flout His law. So grappled they, as spear with spear Clashed, shield with shield, and man on man ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... thou would'st view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruin'd central tower; When buttress and buttress, alternately, Seem framed of ebon and ivory; When silver edges the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... marvel-bloom to be worn on head! * Though a stranger among you fro' home I fled: Make use of wine in my company * And flout at Time who in languish sped. E'en so cloth camphor my hue attest, * O my lords, as I stand in my present stead. So gar me your gladness when dawneth day, * And to highmost seat in your homes be I led: And quaff your cups in all jollity, * And ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Nellie escaped so much better than many of her friends, that in time she seemed to forget it and didn't rebel at Malcolm's advent, or Elizabeth's, but by that time I had been practically ostracized from the nursery; governesses were empowered to flout and insult me; I scarcely saw my children, and what I did see made me furious, so I vetoed more orphans bearing my name, and gave up doing anything. Then came the tragedy of Elizabeth. Surely you understand 'just ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... girl I left to wait on them, seeing the table set With all supplies myself, and then retired. But such their confidence; their talk so loud And free, I could not help but hear some words That raised suspicion; then I listened close And heard, 'mid gibe and jest, the enterprise That was to flout us; make the Loyalist A cringing slave to sneering rebels; make The British lion gnash his teeth with rage;— The Yankee, hand-on-hip, guffawing loud The while. At once, my British blood was up, Nor had I borne their hated presence more, But for the deeper cause. My husband judged ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... offer sacrifice; Three tongues prefer strange orisons on high; Three gaudy standards flout the pale blue skies;[64] The shouts are France, Spain, Albion, Victory! The Foe, the Victim, and the fond Ally That fights for all, but ever fights in vain,[65] Are met—as if at home they could not die— To feed the crow on Talavera's plain, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... were not able to enjoy the shout of laughter over his discomfiture which would surely have gone up from Paris and Strasburg and Basel and Zurich. Estienne and Gessner would hardly have felt acute sorrow at a flout put upon Julius Caesar Scaliger. Crooked-tempered as he was, Cardan, compared with Scaliger, was as a rose to a thistle, but there were reasons altogether unconnected with the personalities of the disputants which swayed the balance to Cardan's advantage. The greater part of Scaliger's ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... And D may be dull, and E's very thick skull Is as empty of brains as a ladle; While F is F sharp, and will cry with a carp, That he's known your best joke from his cradle! When your humour they flout, You can't let yourself go; And it does put you out When a person says, "Oh! I have known that ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... His father's an honest man, a worshipful fishmonger, and so forth; and now does he creep and wriggle into acquaintance with all the brave gallants about the town, such as my guest is (O, my guest is a fine man!), and they flout him invincibly. He useth every day to a merchant's house where I serve water, one master Kitely's, in the Old Jewry; and here's the jest, he is in love with my master's sister, Mrs. Bridget, and calls her mistress; and there he will sit you a ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... if any one here her birth doe disdaine, Her father is ready, with might and with maine, To proove shee is come of noble degree: Therfore never flout att prettye Bessee." ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... was condemned at a Council at Soissons presided over by the papal legate (1121). It was twenty years before he was again subjected to the censures of the Church. But, meanwhile, he had more than once fallen foul of Bernard, and had not hesitated to flout with his gibes the one man before whom the whole of Catholic Europe bent in awestruck reverence. But the time came when Bernard, noting the spread of the Petrobrusian heresy, determined to strike at the source ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... feast I do not fawn, Nor if the folks should flout me, faint; If wonted welcome be withdrawn, I cook no kind of a complaint: With none disposed to disagree, But like them ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... to destroy his admiration for her had directly the opposite effect. He swore, and he swore vengeance; but he swore, too, that there was no woman in the East so worth a prince's while as this one, who dared flout him with ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... Monsieur Guillaume—"a headache. And is it so very amusing to see in a picture what you can see any day in your own street? Don't talk to me of your artists! Like writers, they are a starveling crew. Why the devil need they choose my house to flout it in ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... unfamiliar America. And it would be a barer America. In spite of our brood of special magazines for the literati and the advanced, which Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer praises so warmly, we are not so well provided with the distributive machinery for a national culture as to flout a recognized agency with a gesture and a sneer. But the family magazine has undeniably lost its vigorous appeal, and must be reinvigorated. The malady is due to no slackening of literary virility in the country; indeed there has probably not been so much literary ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... he had never heard of nobler atonement for unmitigable surname. He could not help thinking that this Phillida did not look the one to flout a fellow, after the fashion of the only other Phillida he had ever heard of, and then that it was beastly cheek to start thinking of her like that and by her Christian name. But he was of the age ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... the table with his fist: "You are the limit!... The take-the-cake limit!... You flout me! You practise on my credulity!... Now you would steal a march on me! Try it on—will you?... Ah! You are not Corporal Vinson!... No?... You are a journalist!... You have got to prove that!... Even if you do prove it, you have got yourself into a pretty pickle ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... John, solemnly; "for an Other's sake. We know that the world hated Him before it hated us. Bishop Poynet is not the man they aim at; he is but a commodious handle, a pipe through which their venom may conveniently run. He whom they flout thus is an other Man, whom one day they as well as we shall see coming in the clouds of Heaven, coming to judge the earth. The question asked of Paul was not 'Why persecutest thou these men and women at Damascus?' It is not, methinks, only 'Inasmuch as ye did' this good, but ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... omens had been more favourable. Pride, pride was his last and truest safeguard. He, a descendant of the companion of Aeneas, to fear the Carthaginian sword! he, a Roman noble, about to face death for his country, to waste his thoughts upon a silly girl who chose to flout him! ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... follows." Does he glory in the present? he reverently bows before the past also. Does he sound the call of battle for the Union? but he nourishes the sick and wounded of the enemy as well. Does he flout at the old religions? but he offers a larger religion in their stead. He is never merely negative, he is never fanatical, he is never narrow. He sees all ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... which my friend Bagster finds himself is a very common one. It is no longer true that the good die young; they become prematurely middle-aged. In these days conscience doth make neurasthenics of us all. Now it will not do to flout conscience, and by shutting our eyes to the urgencies and complexities of life purchase for ourselves a selfish calm. Neither do we like the idea ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... me be most foolish myself, and one whom Democritus may not only laugh at but flout, if I go one foot further in the discovery of the follies and madnesses of the common people. I'll betake me to them that carry the reputation of wise men and hunt after that golden bough, as says the proverb. Among whom ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... laws which thou despisest. But try the plan, it merits praise, Success may crown its winning ways! The lady must be blind indeed, With whom such offers of neglect, And cool, habitual disrespect Would not succeed. But come no longer here to flout us, Since, truly, thou canst do without us; For dignity is lost in sport, An outlaw for contempt of court; We banish thee with all thy pride Until thy ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... not their words, but would frown and flout, and go back to his companions, and lead them. And his companions followed him, for he was fair, and fleet of foot, and could dance, and pipe, and make music. And wherever the Star-Child led them they followed, ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... and made her laughter but part of a gay duet. "I know I have gone too fast, have said things I should have waited to say; but, ah! remember the small chance I have against the others who can see you when they like. Don't flout me because I try to make the most of a rare, stolen ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... of the universe they ignore, complacent in their ignorance until it leads them to place the evening star within the arc of the crescent moon, when they are annoyed to be told that the moon does not grow from this shape to the full orb once a month. But ofttimes, though the artist may not flout the universe, he shows his carelessness of natural fact and needs the snubbing. It is in this range that the little critic walks triumphantly posing as a shrewd and a discerning one. He holds up inconsistencies with his deft thumb and finger and cries, ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... misread the essay 'Of Love,' and felt herself bound in honor to bring the philosopher to his knees at her feet. It is credible that from the outset of their sentimental intercourse, she intended to win and then to flout him. But coquetry cannot conquer the first laws of human feeling. To be a good flirt, a woman must have nerve and a sympathetic nature; and doubtless the flirt in this instance paid for her triumph with the smart of a lasting wound. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... manifestation of that power which ordains life and all its privileges and abolishes all the noisesomeness of death. Alive, he nourishes, comforts, consoles, corrects us. Dead, all that is mortal he transforms into ethereal and vital gases. Obey him, and he blesses; flout him, and you perish. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... on your heads doth show, Yet homeless[FN237] am I in your land, I trow. Make drink your usance in my company And flout the time that languishing doth go. Camphor itself to me doth testify And in my presence owns me white as snow. So make me in your morning a delight And set me in your houses, high and low; So shall we quaff ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... businesslike precision about the American soldier that stood San Francisco in good stead. The San Francisco water rat thug and "Barbary Coast" pirate might flout a policeman, but he discovered that he could not disobey a man who wears Uncle Sam's uniform without imminent risk of being counted in that abstract mortuary list usually designated as ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... not conceal their lack of respect for the Upper House, and used revolutionary threats against it as a relic of mediaevalism which should no longer be tolerated in a free state. But the time had passed when the peers could flout an aroused nation. When the Third Reform Bill was ready for passage, the ministers secured the King's promise to frustrate the opposition of the Lords by filling up the House with new peers created expressly to vote ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... sturdier growth, So between earth and heaven stand simply great, 35 That these shall seem but their attendants both; For nature's forces with obedient zeal Wait on the rooted faith and oaken will; As quickly the pretender's cheat they feel, And turn mad Pucks to flout ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... sentimental, much more when it ceases to exist at all, then the hour of that people's decay and doom hast struck. On this anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let us remember and vow never to forget that when it becomes general or popular among us, as it has become common, to flout at the Declaration and its principles; whenever the nation commits itself to courses which for the sake of consistency and respectability invite and compel its disparagement; when our politics does not match our poetry and cannot be sung; when Washington and Jefferson and Sumner and Lincoln cease ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... my renown, However the wits may flout— As wide almost as this blessed town" (But he winced as if with gout). "I paid 'em like sin For to put me in, But it's O, and O, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... nor are its laws pliant to our wills, as the pragmatists do vainly talk. It is a divinely ordered system, which includes man, the roof and crown of things, and Christ, in whom is revealed to us its inner character and meaning. It is not the province of faith either to flout scientific knowledge, or to contaminate the material on which science works by intercalating what M. Le Roy calls 'transhistorical symbols'—myths in fact—which do not become true by being recognised as false, as the new apologetic seems ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... pause for thought, every man who chose to go contrary to the will of Tahn-te, found himself well nigh helpless in the Indian land, his infernal gods were so strong that the Castilians were none too eager to flout them, only Yahn Tsyn-deh seeing the crisis of things, crept ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... study, the whole vast world of living creatures is ours, throughout all zones and all lands. It is not ours to flout, to abuse, or to exterminate as we please. While for practical reasons we do not here address ourselves to the invertebrates, nor even to the sea-rovers, we can not keep them out of the background of our thoughts. ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... quite one thing for a man to assert his own independence, and to show his bride at the outset on whose feet the highest-heeled boots would be, but quite another to flout the customs of the ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the benefit of courtiers and ladies, to whom his work is principally addressed, translations of their names; several of which would require to be retranslated for the benefit of the modern reader, as for example the three following, all figures of derision:—"The fleering frump;"—"The broad flout;"—"The privy nip." At the present day, however, the work of Puttenham is most of all to be valued for the remarks on language and on manners, and the contemporary anecdotes with which it abounds, and of which some examples may be quoted. After observing ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... our hearts began With ne'er a word translate the words complete:— Did Lesbia find them half so sweet? A hundred kisses, said he?—hundreds more, And then confound the telltale score! So may we live and love, till life be out, And let the greybeards wag and flout. Yon failing sun shall rise another morn, And the thin moon round out her horn; But we, when once we lose our waning light,— Ah, Love, ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... promise of the King... It is the King's authority they flout... They arrogate to themselves the whole sovereignty in Brittany. The King has dissolved them... These insolent nobles defying their sovereign ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... then, to front that law (From which your sophists draw Their only right to flout one human creed) That nothing can proceed— Not even thought, not even love—from less Than its own nothingness? The law is yours! But dare you waive your pride, And kneel where you denied? The law is yours! Dare you re-kindle, then, One faith for faithless ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... haughty paramour's meek slave. Freeborn am I, yet see! mine arms are chained!— Through the long, troubled nights, upon my couch I lie and weep; each morn, as the bright sun Returns, I curse my gray hairs and my weight Of years. All scorn me, flout me. All I had Is gone, save heavy heart and scalding tears.— Nay, I will speak, and thou ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the Vote— Are things on which the swains all dote. Fearing to flout or slight. She dances, having now her way, No bygone Easter holiday E'er saw so fine ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... starch; Savans, lorettes, deputies, Arch- Bishops, and there together range Sous-lieutenants and cent-gardes (strange Way these soldier-chaps make change), Mixed with black-eyed Polish dames, With unpronounceable awful names; Laces tremble and ribbons flout, Coachmen wrangle and gendarmes shout— Bless us! what is the row about? Ah! here comes Rosy's new turnout! Smart! You bet your life 'twas that! Nifty! (short for magnificat). Mulberry panels,—heraldic spread,— Ebony wheels picked out with red, And two gray mares ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... brewers of the force of public opinion is a recent affair. In former years they were totally indifferent to it, if indeed they did not openly flout it. Even now their appeal to public sentiment is mainly a special plea for defensive purposes, and has little or no educational value. Brewers have opposed practically every effort to effect a change in excise laws, often without any ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... sake, don't flout the Almighty in that wicked manner! If you would only be baptized and take refuge in prayer, as every Christian should, you would find peace for your poor, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... being governed by a vice-legate, was considered as foreign territory. There he found his daughter, Madame d'Urban, who did all she could to induce him to stay with her; but to do so would have been to flout Louis XIV's orders too publicly, and the marquis was afraid to remain so much in evidence lest evil should befall him; he accordingly retired to the little village of l'Isle, built in a charming spot near the fountain of Vaucluse; there he was lost ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... wife, why dost thou flout? Now is now, and then was then: Seek now all the world throughout, Thou ken'st not clowns from gentlemen. They are clad in black, green, yellow, or gray, So far above their own degree: Once in my life I'll do as they, For I'll have ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... shall he escape me? Shall he mock My queenship? He, an alien, flout my sway? Will no one arm and chase them, or undock The ships? Bring fire; get weapons, quick! Away! Swing out the oars! Ah me! what do I say? Where am I? O, what madness turns my brain? Poor Dido, hath thy folly found its prey? Thy sins, alas! they sting thee, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... of us carries a carcase), but the horror of sudden death is above them: a man may strangle with his thoughts cleaner than with his pair of hands. And as "matter" is but the stuff wherewith Nature works, and she is only insulted, not defied, when we flout or mangle it, so it is against the high dignity of Art to insist upon the carrion she must use. She will press, here the terror, there the radiance, of essential fact; she will leave to us, seeing it in her face, to add mentally the poor stage properties we have grown ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... Yea, dost thou jeer and flout me in the teeth? Think'st thou I jest? Hold, take thou ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... recovered from her surprise. Her worst suspicions were confirmed. Her wits were alert, sharpened by the hideous necessity of placating this amazing creature she dared not openly flout. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... not the dreamy rush Of the rain: Touch not the marring doubt Words bring, to the certainty Of its soft refrain, But let the flying fringes flout Their gouts against the pane, And the gurgling throat of the water-spout Groan ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... here her birth do disdain, Her father is ready, with might and with main, To prove she is come of noble degree: Therefore never flout ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... rouse your phlegmatic blood, my Britons; sit down, with your thumbs in your mouths, my masters, and allow a coterie to flout you at will, whilst the Frenchmen, the Germans, the Russians alternately laugh at and pity you. Pity you, the sons of the men who chased their fathers half over Europe at the point of the blood-red bayonet! Have you grown tame, have you waxed fat and foolish ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... place apart Behind light words that tease and flout, But oh, the agitated heart Till someone find us really out. 'Tis pity if the case require (Or so we say) that in the end We speak the literal to inspire The understanding of a friend. But so with all, from babes that play At hide-and-seek to God ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... English minister came forward from the town to flout us with an address of welcome in which he used not our incognitos but our ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... his reputation had preceded him, and made his task all the easier. Bannuchi and Waziri tribesmen had carried a faithful report of his doings to their more northern compatriots, and the word quickly went round that "Nikalseyn" was a dangerous man to flout. There were some, as it happened, who ventured to cross swords with him, but the result taught them that this stern-faced, black-bearded giant of a sahib was their master every whit ...
— John Nicholson - The Lion of the Punjaub • R. E. Cholmeley
... flout at his dreams, and his cowardice, and his good-for-nothingness, the dame hurried to serve her customers. Jeremiah heard her loud voice addressing them, and their hoarse tones answering. She came out again for two pints to draw some beer, and commanded him to follow her ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... "Ye flout me! Ye who will have for a husband, one whom thou canst not name!" She laughed derisively. That hurt Elsa very much because it was true. Ortrud had remained with her through the night, and had continued to say so many things which had aroused ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... be, of course," he said, after a pause. "Human nature is weak, engagingly weak, Guildea. And you're inclined to flout it. I could understand a certain class of lady—the lion-hunting, the intellectual lady, seeking you. Your reputation, ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... and care less for gregarious games than isolated or lonely adventures. They would rather go trespassing than play cricket; they would organise a secret raid before a public pastime. Intuitively they desire romance, and feeling that law and order is opposed to romance, find the need to flout law and order in measure of their strength, and, of course, applaud the successful companion who does so ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... (contempt) 930. vilipendency|, vilification, contumely, affront, dishonor, insult, indignity, outrage, discourtesy &c. 895; practical joking; scurrility, scoffing, sibilance, hissing, sibilation; irrision[obs3]; derision; mockery; irony &c. (ridicule) 856; sarcasm. hiss, hoot, boo, gibe, flout, jeer, scoff, gleek|, taunt, sneer, quip, fling, wipe, slap in the face. V. hold in disrespect &c. (despise) 930; misprize, disregard, slight, trifle with, set at naught, pass by, push aside, overlook, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... claims some sympathy. Sometimes when I listen to him speak, hear the almost piquant sadness of his words, watch the spirit of isolation which, by design or otherwise, shows in him, for the moment I am conscious of a pity or an interest which I flout in wiser hours. This is his art, the potent ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... terms of visual acquaintance. The reigning beauty of the hour, her portrait was enjoying a vogue of its own in the public prints. Furthermore, Lady Diantha Mainwaring was moderately the talk of the town, in those prim, remotely ante-bellum days—thanks to high spirits and a whimsical tendency to flout the late Victorian proprieties; something which, however, had yet to lead her into any prank perilous ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... involving sums of more than twenty thousand livres, as well as all criminal cases of the third order (estate). The representations of the provincial assembly of Dauphiny severely criticised the impropriety of this measure. "The ministers," they said, "have not been afraid to flout the third estate, whose life, honor, and property no longer appear to be objects worthy of the sovereign courts, for which are reserved only the causes of the rich and the crimes of the privileged." The number of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... loath to be kept in Russian leading-strings. Their last act, in 1885, had been to annex the Turkish province of Eastern Roumelia without asking the consent of the Tsar. At the moment they could safely flout the Sultan of Turkey, their nominal suzerain; but diplomatists doubted whether they could, with equal safety, ignore the Treaty of Berlin and the wishes of their Russian protector. The path was full of pitfalls. The Austrian Government was on the watch to embarrass ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... enough to find her premature airs and graces a fine joke indeed. She ruled them all with her temper and her shrewish will. She would have her way in all things, or there should be no sport with her, and she would sing no songs for them, but would flout them bitterly, and sit in a great chair with her black brows drawn down, and her whole small person breathing ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... They wheel about and whirl, They jeer at me, they fleer at me, They flout me as they swirl! As whirling fast or swaying slow, Reeling, wheeling, to and fro, Around, around the corpse they go, They chill me with their chants! These be neither men nor ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But I am not sure that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... They flout me as half-English—a disgrace For which scarce all your virtues can atone, Mother, in whom I find no flaw but one, That you are Saxon!—but this fault of race Fell not on me nor yet, I fear, your grace Of English speech, else had more smoothly run These echoes of Welsh Lyrics, ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... little knows what dirty clo'es May kiver up a poet; What fires may burn an' flout an' skurn, An' no wan iver ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... so great wrong already, and that you hold me, your lawful Lord, here a prisoner and in chains! Ye know well, as I cannot doubt, that you are doing an evil and a wicked thing, so I pray you go your way, and cease to flout me." "Good my Lord Argon," said Boga, "be assured we are not mocking you, but are speaking in sober earnest, and we will swear it on our Law." Then all the Barons swore fealty to him as their Lord, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... more bold advanc'd his head, And saw the monarch of the flood Lying half smothered in the mud. He calls the croaking race around: "A wooden king!" the banks resound. Fear once remov'd they swim about him, And gibe and jeer and mock and flout him; And messengers to Jove depute, Effectively to grant their suit. A hungry stork he sent them then, Who soon had swallow'd half the fen. Their woes scarce daring to reveal, To Mercury by night they steal, And beg him to entreat ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... faster than they intend," said Henry. "When Roger Mortimer took Simon's doings in wrath, and vowed that his sister should never wed a Montfort, he knew not what he did. He and his proud wife could flout and scorn my Isabel—they might not break her faith to me. Thou knowst, perhaps, Richard, since thou art hand and glove with our foes, that like a raven to the slaughter, the Lady Mortimer came as near the battle-field as her care for her dainty person would ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of Tennyson.' In course of time Byron was forgotten, or only remembered with disdain; and when Thackeray, the representative Briton, the artist Philistine, the foe of all that is excessive or abnormal or rebellious, took it upon himself to flout the author of Don Juan openly and to lift up his heavy hand against the fops and fanatics who had affected the master's humours, he did so amid general applause. Meanwhile, however, the genius and the personality of Byron had come to be vital influences ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... one side of the shield; there is a reverse side, at least equally prominent and alarming. The second side upholds maidenly claims, finds nothing good enough to match with them, and is tempted to scout and flout, laugh and mock at the rival claims of the lover upon trial. This is true even in the most innocent of dove-cots, where satire is still as playful and ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... Lindhorst's garden, he could not help wondering how all this had once appeared so strange and marvelous to him. He now saw nothing but common, earthen flowerpots, quantities of geraniums, myrtles, and the like. Instead of the glittering party-colored birds which used to flout him, there were only a few sparrows fluttering hither and thither, which raised an unpleasant, unintelligible cry at sight of Anselmus. The azure room also had quite a different look; and he could not understand how that ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... shalt not wrong good men so," interrupted Mary, her fair face coloring a little. "The leaders aye must lead, and the younger and simpler aye must follow in every community, and I mark not that those you flout for speaking so well fail of their share in the labor, nor do I think John Alden or the rest would do well to thrust their advice upon their betters. At all rates, yon boat had not slid down so merrily if John Alden had not put his shoulder to ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... I was then but a lad, that she would never give over fretting herself at the thought that I was to be lord of all the broad acres and wide moors of Beechcot, and that Jasper would be but a landless man. And so, though she never dare flout or oppress me in any way, for fear of Sir Thurstan's displeasure, she, without being openly unfavorable, wasted no love on me, and no doubt often wished me out ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... pressed it openly and been repulsed," she replied in a low voice. "But if he could have carried me to some far fortress, how should I flout him there, that is, if I still lived? There, with no price to pay in gold or lands or power, he would have been my master, and I should have been his slave till such time as he wearied of me. That is the fate from which you have saved me, Prince, or rather from death, for I am not ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... thou need a friend about thee To cheer and comfort when she flout thee. So, an thou wilt a-wooing wend, I'll follow thee like trusty friend. In love or fight thou shalt not lack A sturdy arm to 'fend thy back. I'll follow thee in light or dark, Through good or ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... creature moving in a world of horrible unreality; voluble people issuing from a cafe, the queue at theatre doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate pleasure-seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show in the jewellers' windows—all the familiar sights contributing to flout his own unhappiness, want, and isolation. At the same time, if he be at all after my pattern, he is perhaps supported by a childish satisfaction: this is life at last, he may tell himself, this is the real thing; the bladders on which I was set swimming are now empty, my own weight ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... does a man who loves as I do, care for the conventions of the sham world you and I have left so far behind. I adore you. And you flout me." ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... his upper lip, And coming up close to her, said at last: "Girl, for I see ye scorn my courtesies, Take warning: yonder man is surely dead; And I compel all creatures to my will. Not eat nor drink? And wherefore wail for one, Who put your beauty to this flout and scorn By dressing it in rags? Amazed am I, Beholding how ye butt against my wish, That I forbear you thus: cross me no more. At least put off to please me this poor gown, This silken rag, this beggar-woman's weed: I love that beauty should ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... confidentially consulted the Warden when a cousin had blundered into the hands of the police, embarrassing that flustered official with torrents of half intelligible speech, the purport of which generally was to flout the proceedings with evidence of indubitable alibi? All this he translated to his countrymen as proof of personal influence with court authorities, and, what was more to the point, made ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... Italy,— Die and count no friend? Is it true,—may it be spoken,— That she who has lain so still, With a wound in her breast, And a flower in her hand, And a grave-stone under her head, While every nation at will Beside her has dared to stand, And flout her with pity and scorn, Saying "She is at rest, She is fair, she is dead, And, leaving room in her stead To Us who are later born, This is certainly best!" Saying "Alas, she is fair, Very fair, but dead,—give place, And so we have room for the race." —Can it be true, ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... have sworn To keep my heart hard and my knees unworn. Enough you have of jester, player, priest: I as the skeleton attend your feast, In the mad revelry to make a lull With shaken finger and with bobbing skull. However you my services may flout, Philosophy disdain and reason doubt, I mean to hold in customary state, My dismal revelry and celebrate My yearly rite until the crack o' doom, Ignore the cheerful season's warmth and bloom And cultivate an ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... throw down no Altar, nor never do falter, So much as to change a Gold-chain for a Halter; Though some Men do flout us, and others do doubt us, We commonly bear forty Pieces about us; But many good Fellows are fine and look fiercer, And owe for their Cloaths to the Taylor and Mercer: And if from the Harmans I keep out my Feet, [4] I fear not the ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... so good a maid as thou, will never stay long without friends. Thou wouldst never flout an honest fellow's love and draw him on, and turn him back, and use him worse than a baby doth its puppet. The man who loves ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... circle that shut me out— Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in!" The Shoes ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... fragrancy and fair!" A Maiden-blush, which heard him, said, With face unwontedly flushed red. "Tell me, for what committed wrong Am I the metaphor of song? I would you could write rhymes without me, Nor in your ecstacies so flout me. In every ditty must we bloom? Can't you find elsewhere some perfume? Oh! does it add to Chloe's sweetness To visit and compare my meetness? And, to enhance her face, must mine Be made to wither, peak, ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... those who misname themselves "evangelical" and flout their new-found liberty: Have you put down the tyranny of the Pope and obtained liberty in Christ through the Anabaptists and other fanatics? Or have you obtained your freedom from us who preach faith ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... said he, "there is something in your attitude which I admit puzzles me. I ask you in all honor, I ask you on the hilt of that sword which I know you will never disgrace, why did you thus flout the Lady Catharine Knollys? Why did you scorn her and take up with this ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... voluntary acts, for even the supposition that he is wholly free does not dispose of the massive fact that God made him as he is, and that God could have made him a saint if He had so desired. To deny this is to flout omnipotence—a crime at which, as I have often said, I balk. But here I begin to fear that I wade too far into the hot waters of the sacred sciences, and that I had better retire before I lose my hide. This ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... to fall into the Annals of Cicely or no, this must I needs say—and Jack may flout me an' he will (but that he doth never)— that I do hate, and contemn, and full utterly despise, this manner of dealing. If I love a man, maybe I shall be bashful to tell him so: but if I love him not, never will I make lout nor leg afore him ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... you know. There is no disgrace attached to laying down a dollar here and there—we all do it. That is part of our amusement, in Benton." She halted. "You are game, sir? What is life but a series of chances? Are you disposed to win a little and flout the ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... is the lure of all Egypt, and he who hath been transplanted to her would flout the favor of the gods, did he make homesick ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... to answer for it to my God—" He stretched out his arms and looked haggardly at Paul. "But it is God's will. It is God's will that I should voice His message to the Empire. Paul, Paul, my beloved son—you cannot flout ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the old man, raising protesting hands up toward the very distant, quite invisible sky. "How could I, a humble priest of the Lord, range myself with those who would flout ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... good manners, and association with vivisection led these dignitaries and editors to flout and insult a man whose shoe strings they were not worthy to tie. Time is merciful and their ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... in their name; yet they persistently refuse to adopt them. The great employers of labor, the cormorants of competition, know through what hideous injustice they enrich themselves; but speak to them of fair play, and they flout you from their presence. The wealthy corporations owning these street car lines in New York see that their drivers and conductors are kept on the rack from sixteen to eighteen hours every day of the week, including Sundays; but when a bill is brought ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... watched her with reluctant admiration. The child had all the thoroughbred points of a Ludlow. All the same she should be shown that, even in the twentieth century, young girls could not break away from discipline and flout authority without punishment. The smile became almost gleeful at the thought of the little surprise that was in ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... horses was remarkable. No animal that man has broken to his use is keener to recognize a master and flout a coward than the horse. No coward has ever been able to do anything with ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... Against every kind of authority, but particularly against bishops. He's always got his knife into them, and I dare say he's glad of the chance of flouting them. High Church parsons are, aren't they? I expect if you were a bit higher you'd flout them too. And if you were a bit lower, the C.G.'d take you as a padre. You're just the wrong height, old thing, that's what's ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... been but one Thoreau, and we should devoutly thank the gods of New England for the precious gift. Thoreau's work lives and will continue to live because, in the first place, the world loves a writer who can flout it and turn his back upon it and yet make good; and again because the books which he gave to the world have many and very high literary and ethical values. They are fresh, original, and stimulating. He ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... discretion's there. If, by a monstrous chance, we learn That this illustrious vaunt's a lie, Our minds, by which the eyes discern, See hideous contrariety. And laugh at Nature's wanton mood, Which, thus a swinish thing to flout, Though haply in its gross way good, Hangs such a ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... you. 'Tis not till the ape hath mounted the tree that she, shows her tail so plain. Nay, there sits the servant; God help him! And while so it is, fear not thou his kin will ever be so poor in spirit as come where the likes of you can flout their dole." And casting one look of mute reproach at her cousin for being so little of a man as to sit passive and silent all this time, she turned and went haughtily out; nor would she shed a single tear till she got home and thought of it. And now here were two ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... was his sincere conviction that it belonged there, ready to apprize him of the vibrations of the popular will. Roosevelt was the born leader with an innate instinct of command. He did not scorn or flout the popular will; he had too confirmed a conviction of the sovereign right of the people to rule for that. But he did not wait pusillanimously for the popular mind to make itself up; he had too high a conception of the duty of leadership for that. He esteemed it his peculiar function as the man entrusted ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... wise old Gascon suggests that it is the part of wisdom to give your affection to one who is both plain and elderly—one who is not suffering from a surfeit of love, and one whose head has not been turned by flattery. "Young women," says the philosopher, "demand attention as their right and often flout the giver; whereas old women are ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... dialect way the knights of the Gray Gave a flout at the buckeye bandana, And the buckeye came back with a gosh-awful whack, And that's what's ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... who must supply the leisure, the independence, the setting, the background for the women. All Europe says that our women are spoiled, that they are tyrants, that they treat us men badly, that they flout us, do not do their duty by us, and finally divorce us. We can afford to let them say it! We have given our women an independence that many of them abuse, it is true. We perhaps give them more than their share to spend, and more of luxury than ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... availed, for wings could not outstrip fear. The one went under, and the other, flying, turned his breast upward. Not otherwise the wild duck on a sudden dives when the falcon comes close, and he returns up vexed and baffled. Calcabrina, enraged at the flout, kept flying behind him, desirous that the sinner should escape, that he might have a scuffle; and when the barrator had disappeared he turned his talons upon his companion, and grappled with him above the ditch. But the other was indeed a sparrowhawk ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... Wakes to mock at us and flout us That so coldly do delay: When the very birds are mating, Pray you, why should we be waiting— We that might ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Office. The Munitions Ministry in due course did splendid work. Chancellor of the Exchequer become lord-paramount of a great spending Department of State, its chief was on velvet. "Copper" turned footpad, he knew the ropes, he could flout the Treasury—and he did. But it is a pity that unwarrantable claims should have been put forward on behalf of the department in not irresponsible quarters at a time when they could not be denied, claims which have tended to bring the department ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Vine had struck a Fibre; which about It clings my Being—let the Sufi flout; Of my Base Metal may be filed a Key, That shall unlock the Door he ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Whidden had a passion For eating of his iron ration— A thing, you know, which isn't done (Except, just now and then, for fun), Because there is a rule about it And decent people rarely flout it. But Tom was greedy and each day He'd put a tin or two away, Though duty told him, clear and plain, To keep them safe as brewers' grain, For eating as a last resort When eatables were running short. His Corporal said, "My lad, don't do it!" His Sergeant groaned, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... town-folk, and what he would show them was what a big man he was. For, like most scorners of the world's opinion, Gourlay was its slave, and showed his subjection to the popular estimate by his anxiety to flout it. He was not great enough for ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... cheap!" said Tim, red in his fury. "You'll flout me and mock me and throw my offers for your good in ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... myself," he said, "I come pretty nigh knowin' what I'm talkin' about. Kun'l Gid Ward can never flout and jeer that the man that has married his sister was nothin' but a prop'ty-hunter. I'm knowin' to it that Cap'n Sproul has got thutty thousand in vessel prop'ty of his own, 'sides what his own uncle Jerry ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... discourse ought to be as a field, without coming home to any man. I knew two noblemen, of the west part of England, whereof the one was given to scoff, but kept ever royal cheer in his house; the other would ask of those that had been at the other's table, "Tell truly, was there never a flout or dry blow given?" To which the guest would answer, "Such and such a thing passed." The lord would say, "I thought he would mar a good dinner." Discretion of speech is more than eloquence; and to speak agreeably to him with whom ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... her fate?" replied E-Med. "Have I not heard? Did she not flout the great jeddak, heaping abuse upon him? By my first ancestor, I think O-Tar might make a jed of the man who subdued her," and ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sailor the Caribbean Sea was a happy hunting-ground where he might indulge at his pleasure any propensities to lawless adventure. If in 1588 he had helped to scatter the Invincible Armada, he now pillaged treasure ships on the coasts of the Spanish Main; if he had been with Drake to flout his Catholic Majesty at Cadiz, he now closed with the Spaniards within their distant cities beyond the seas. Thus he lined his own pockets with Spanish doubloons, and incidentally curbed Philip's power of invading England. Nor must we think these mariners the same ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... become nervous lest we should miss our supply of ice. The fly, the murrain, the potato-rot, and the grasshoppers, all have a divine office in tipping over our calculations. The phantom host of the great North come out for parade without announcement, and shoot their arrows toward the zenith, and flout the stars with their rosy flags, and retire, leaving us looking into heaven and wondering. Long weeks of drought parch the earth, and then comes the sweet rain, and sets the flowers and the foliage dancing. All the seasons ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... thou outrageous Moor, Hast broken thy false prophet's rule, and so Fell into unused drink, that thus thou darest To flout me with thy cloudy menaces? What mean'st thou, sir? And what have I withheld From thy vile touch? By heavens, I pass my days In seeking thy dusk corpse, I deemed well drilled Ere this, but ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... silver frocks Do flout the sonsy clover; The humble bee Consorts wi' me And hails me for ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... lambing season, for with the sheep he proved a fair wonder same as he done with everything else. And nothing was a trouble. For a fortnight the man never slept, save a nod now and again in the house on wheels, where he dwelt in the valley among the ewes. And old shepherds, with all the will to flout him, was tongue-tied afore the man, because of his excellent skill and ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... pearly bite? You hardly know perhaps; but Chloe knows, And pours you out the necessary dose, Meticulously measuring to scale, The cup of Circe or the Holy Grail— An actress she at home in every role, Can flout or flatter, bully or cajole, And on occasion by a stretch of art Can even speak the language of the heart, Can lisp and sigh and make confused replies, With baby lips and complicated eyes, Indifferently apt to weep or wink, Primly pursue, provocatively shrink, Brazen or bashful, as ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... it in our cool libraries, that all the agents with which we deal are subalterns, which we can well afford to let pass, and life will be simpler when we live at the centre and flout the surfaces. I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other that they are like grass and trees, and ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... this quiet port and its brooding solitude with religious veneration. Then he recalled the miraculous stories with which his mother used to lull him to sleep—the great miracle wrought upon these waters by a servant of God to flout the hardened sinners. Saint Raymond of Penafort, a virtuous and austere monk, became indignant with King Jaime of Majorca who was basely enamored of a certain lady, Dona Berenguela, and who remained deaf to holy counsels. The friar determined ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... they met, and himself opened the topic of the Norwegian jaunt. Urquhart took up the ball. "I think you might come. Your wife and boy will love it, and you'll kindle at their joy. 'They for life only, you for life in them,' to flout the bard. Besides, you are not a fogey, if I'm not. I believe our ages tally. You shall climb mountains with me, Macartney, and improve the muscles of your calves. You don't fish, I think. Nor do I. I thought I should catch your brother-in-law with that bait—but ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... teardrops as they fall; I flout my daytime fears; I mumble thanks to God for all These gibes and happy jeers. But, when the warning dawn awakes, Begins my wandering; With stealthy strokes through tangled brakes, A ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... it not sin against secrecie, I would say it were a peece of gentlemanlike knauery. I must goe to Pedringano and tell him his pardon is in this boxe! Nay, I would haue sworne it, had I not seene the contrary. I cannot choose but smile to thinke how the villain wil flout the gallowes, scorne the audience, and descant on the hangman, and all presuming of his pardon from hence. Wilt not be an odde iest, for me to stand and grace euery iest he makes, pointing my figner at this boxe, as who [should] ...
— The Spanish Tragedie • Thomas Kyd
... world have brushed the dew off her belief that she could trust him. And, now that he had fixed his own gaze elsewhere, and she was in this bitter trouble, he felt on her account the rancour that a brother feels when Justice and Pity have conspired to flout his sister. The voice of Frith the chauffeur roused him ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... my master and my dame That doth such cheer afford; God bless them, that each Christmas they May furnish thus their board. My stomach having come to me, I mean to have a bout, Intending to eat most heartily; Good friends, I do not flout. ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... We must therefore surrender all titles of honour, all honorary offices. It will constitute an emphatic demonstration of the disapproval by the leaders of the people of the acts of the Government. Lawyers must suspend their practice and must resist the power of the Government which has chosen to flout public opinion. Nor may we receive instruction from schools controlled by Government and aided by it. Emptying of the schools will constitute a demonstration of the will of the middle class of India. It is far better for the nation even to neglect the literary instruction ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... Sovereign Will! But stranger and more mysterious and tragic still is it that we should choose to exercise that power and find pleasure, and fancy that we shall ever find advantage, in refusing to listen to His entreaties and choosing to flout ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... to be the size of another. But all disappear like will-o'-the-wisps when the search-party arrives on the scene, and none but ordinary specimens, that have no reputation to maintain, are there to flout ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... were either Black Negroes or Cophtic Christians, and they used me with Decent Civility; nor did the Master of the Musicians—otherwise a most cruel Moor—go out of his way to flout, much less smite me with his Rattan. If he had dared but to lay one Stripe upon me, I would have sprang upon the Wretch and dashed out his Brains with my Cymbals, even if I had been put upon the Pale for it half an ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... creation gives him clue to nothing older: Naked, life receives him—wondering beholder Of the world about him—and ere aught is certain, Time and mystery flout him; and death ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... Father Lasse that he was obsessed by a sense of unfaithfulness. But there was no alternative; if he wanted to get on he must adapt himself in everything, in prejudices and opinions alike. But he promised himself to flout the lot of them so soon ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Harte! Come, Sims, though gigmen flout thy labours! Tom Hardy, blow the clouds apart With sound of rustic fifes and tabors! Dick Blackmore, full of homely joy, Come from thy garden by the river, And pelt with fruit and flowers, old boy, These dismal bores who drone ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... here put an argument in the favour of what do now be doubted and scorned by some. I will but say that I have seen and know that which hath been wrought by these hags o' the broom and of their power which they held at their beck and wink the which is not to be set on one side at the flip and flout of our young masters and misses, fresh from some teaching drove into their brain pans by some idiotick and skeptick French teacher. I therefore say no more ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... no man flout, The wisest Kings have all some folly; Nor let his piety any doubt; Charles, like a Sov'reign, wise and holy, Makes young men judges of the bench, And bishops, those ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... said he. "I will make no words about it. Neither will I shun her sight. I will face it out, and shame them who think to flout me thus." ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... master of so rich a store May laugh at Croesus and esteem him poor; And with his smoky sceptre in his fist, Securely flout the toiling alchemist, Who daily labors with a vain expense In distillations of the quintessence, Not knowing that this golden herb alone ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... extempore. He were as good have let me had the best part, for I'll be revenged on him to the uttermost, in this person of Will Summer, which I have put on to play the prologue, and mean not to put it off till the play be done. I'll sit as a chorus, and flout the actors and him at the end of every scene. I know they will not interrupt me, for fear of marring of all; but look to your cues, my masters, for I intend to play the knave in cue, and put you besides all your parts, if you take not the better heed. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... wind about, and in and out, Along the crowded pavement, While here and there the mockers flout My costume ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... for if you give her breath, she'l scorn and flout you, seem how she will, this is the way to win her, ...
— Wit Without Money - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher • Francis Beaumont
... their respective countries from depths of humiliation to undreamt of heights of triumph. The first thing was to restore the prestige of their States. No people can be strong in action that has lost belief in its own powers and has allowed its neighbours openly to flout it. The history of the world has shown again and again that politicians who allow their country to be regarded as une quantite negligeable bequeath to some abler successor a heritage of struggle and war—struggle for the nation to recover its self-respect, and war to regain ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... be clearer," said he imperturbably. "This lad is your betrothed. He is at heart a good lad, an honourable and honest lad—at times haply over-honest and over-honourable; but let that be. To please a whim, a caprice, you set yourself to flout him, as is the way of your sex when you behold a man your utter slave. From this—being all unversed in the obliquity of woman—he conceives, poor boy, that he no longer finds favour in your eyes, and to win back this, the only thing that in the world he values, he behaves foolishly. You flout ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... in the matter of the Regency Bill as if the dearest wish of his heart were to flout the King's wishes and to wound his feelings. The King wished, lest he should again be stricken with illness while the heir-apparent was still an infant, to be given the right to name a regent by will. ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... whose aim is at the leadership of the English people know, that however truly based the charges of hypocrisy, soundness of moral fibre runs throughout the country and is the national integrity, which may condone old sins for present service; but will not have present sins to flout it. He was in tune with the English character. The passion was in him nevertheless, and the stronger for a slow growth that confirmed its union of the mind and heart. Her counsel fortified him, her suggestions opened springs; her phrases ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... porphyry, that are there, and the tombs and the door of San Giovanni, which was locked, Messer Betto and his company came riding on to the piazza of Santa Reparata, and seeing him among the tombs, said:—"Go we and flout him." So they set spurs to their horses, and making a mock onset, were upon him almost before he saw them. Whereupon:—"Guido," they began, "thou wilt be none of our company; but, lo now, when thou hast proved that God does not exist, what wilt thou have achieved?" ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... make me amends in public for the foul words that knave uttered. That they should both sue to me for pardon: that it should be showed to the world what manner of man it is that they have dared to flout.' ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... conspicuous charms. In fact, she had lived up to them pretty furiously, until time began to take a ruthless toll of her contrasting points. From the concert-platform she still seemed to discount, almost to flout, the years, but in secret she yielded ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the reins, a bright-eyed, well-built lad, a pupil at the old Grammar-School, where he used the desk at which his father had sat before him. Whatever fault of boyhood showed itself in Harry Morton, he knew not the common temptation to be ashamed of his mother, or to flout her love. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... many of her friends, that in time she seemed to forget it and didn't rebel at Malcolm's advent, or Elizabeth's, but by that time I had been practically ostracized from the nursery; governesses were empowered to flout and insult me; I scarcely saw my children, and what I did see made me furious, so I vetoed more orphans bearing my name, and gave up doing anything. Then came the tragedy of Elizabeth. Surely you understand 'just how' it was ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... have pressed it openly and been repulsed," she replied in a low voice. "But if he could have carried me to some far fortress, how should I flout him there, that is, if I still lived? There, with no price to pay in gold or lands or power, he would have been my master, and I should have been his slave till such time as he wearied of me. That is the fate from which you have saved me, Prince, or rather from death, for I am not one who could ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... dinners, and their vulgar obsequiousness at table. They swill more than they should and would like to swill more than they do, they spoil the wine with unwelcome and untimely disquisitions, and they can not carry their liquor. The ordinary people who are present naturally flout them, and are revolted by the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... come near thee if he didn't," answered Dickon. "Birds is rare choosers an' a robin can flout a body worse than a man. See, he's making up to thee now. 'Cannot tha' ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to a barnyard brood! I dusted my fingers free from the soil of him. "I will marry her to you, if only to see her flout you," I promised vengefully. "Now to the canoes, and have your paddles ready." I had no smile for him, though he sought it, as ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... to be worn on head! * Though a stranger among you fro' home I fled: Make use of wine in my company * And flout at Time who in languish sped. E'en so cloth camphor my hue attest, * O my lords, as I stand in my present stead. So gar me your gladness when dawneth day, * And to highmost seat in your homes be I led: And quaff ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... "O Bell my wife, why dost thou flout? Now is now, and then was then: Seek now all the world throughout, Thou ken'st not clowns from gentlemen. They are clad in black, green, yellow, or gray, So far above their own degree: Once in my life I'll do as they, For I'll have a new ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various
... cried, and made her laughter but part of a gay duet. "I know I have gone too fast, have said things I should have waited to say; but, ah! remember the small chance I have against the others who can see you when they like. Don't flout me because I try to make the most of a rare, stolen moment ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... the Princess Augusta came in : she addressed me with her usual sweetness, and, when she had looked at her sister's portrait, said, "Madame d'Arblay, when the princess royal can spare you, I hope you will come to me," as she left the room. I did not flout her; and when I had been an hour with the princess royal, she told me ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... served her has gotten himself killed in some way and the man who stepped into his shoes, out of some spite, has refused Teboen's gold. And as for her object—I wonder at you, lord of my heart! What kind of a lover are you that you cannot guess that?" Feigning to flout him, she drew away; then feigning to relent, turned back and laughed it into his ear. "It is a love-token! To hold him to the fair promises he made at its giving, and to remind him of her, and to win her a crown, and to do so many strange ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... object which represented him. There was no compulsion, however, to believe the story if a man did the acts or took part in them. As to his private beliefs no one inquired; if he took part in the proper acts of worship he counted as a religious man, unless he went so far as openly to flout the current ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... speak more plainly, the complexity of modern art influences may make it necessary to call attention to the primitive principles of expression that should never be lost sight of in any work, but hardly justifies the attitude of those anarchists in art who would flout the heritage of culture we possess and attempt a new start. Such attempts however when sincere are interesting and may be productive of some new vitality, adding to the weight of the main stream. But it must be along the main stream, along lines ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... dame watched her with reluctant admiration. The child had all the thoroughbred points of a Ludlow. All the same she should be shown that, even in the twentieth century, young girls could not break away from discipline and flout authority without punishment. The smile became almost gleeful at the thought of the little surprise that ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... in. "What does a man who loves as I do, care for the conventions of the sham world you and I have left so far behind. I adore you. And you flout me." ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... port and its brooding solitude with religious veneration. Then he recalled the miraculous stories with which his mother used to lull him to sleep—the great miracle wrought upon these waters by a servant of God to flout the hardened sinners. Saint Raymond of Penafort, a virtuous and austere monk, became indignant with King Jaime of Majorca who was basely enamored of a certain lady, Dona Berenguela, and who remained deaf ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... dumfoundered by this obstinacy. It was unheard of—absolutely without parallel in his domestic annals—that one of his children should actually flout him! yes! actually flout him with such an answer ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... that you advised me to flout the law; to do just the things I have been doing, roving the world, shooting and plundering! There's a policeman at the other end of the platform; call him and turn me over ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... ones which you must break. Remember that a new order of things is beginning for you. Hitherto I have praised your frivolity, because it was opportune and in keeping with the rest of your nature. I thought it feminine for you to play with Fortune, to flout caution, to destroy whole masses of your life and environment. Now, however, there is something that you must always bear in mind, and regard above everything else. You must gradually train yourself—in the allegorical sense, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... belonging at that time to the pope and being governed by a vice-legate, was considered as foreign territory. There he found his daughter, Madame d'Urban, who did all she could to induce him to stay with her; but to do so would have been to flout Louis XIV's orders too publicly, and the marquis was afraid to remain so much in evidence lest evil should befall him; he accordingly retired to the little village of l'Isle, built in a charming spot near the fountain of Vaucluse; there he was lost sight of; none ever heard him spoken of again, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... gregarious games than isolated or lonely adventures. They would rather go trespassing than play cricket; they would organise a secret raid before a public pastime. Intuitively they desire romance, and feeling that law and order is opposed to romance, find the need to flout law and order in measure of their strength, and, of course, applaud the successful companion who does so with ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... and my dame That doth such cheer afford; God bless them, that each Christmas they May furnish thus their board. My stomach having come to me, I mean to have a bout, Intending to eat most heartily; Good friends, I do not flout. ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... lorettes, deputies, Arch- Bishops, and there together range Sous-lieutenants and cent-gardes (strange Way these soldier-chaps make change), Mixed with black-eyed Polish dames, With unpronounceable awful names; Laces tremble and ribbons flout, Coachmen wrangle and gendarmes shout— Bless us! what is the row about? Ah! here comes Rosy's new turnout! Smart! You bet your life 'twas that! Nifty! (short for magnificat). Mulberry panels,—heraldic spread,— Ebony wheels picked ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... pilgrims did find no answer to the riddle, and the Clerk of Oxenford thought that the Prioress had been deceived in the matter thereof; whereupon the lady was sore vexed, though the gentle knight did flout and gibe at the poor clerk because of his lack of understanding over other of the riddles, which did fill him with shame and make merry ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... to his enemies. "I'll show them," he thought proudly. "Them" was the town-folk, and what he would show them was what a big man he was. For, like most scorners of the world's opinion, Gourlay was its slave, and showed his subjection to the popular estimate by his anxiety to flout it. He was not great enough for the carelessness of ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... no Altar, nor never do falter, So much as to change a Gold-chain for a Halter; Though some Men do flout us, and others do doubt us, We commonly bear forty Pieces about us; But many good Fellows are fine and look fiercer, And owe for their Cloaths to the Taylor and Mercer: And if from the Harmans I keep out my Feet, [4] I fear not the Compter, ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... that the king had the eyes of a slave, and that the queen had in three ways shown the behaviour of a bondmaid. Thus he reviled with insulting invective not so much the feast as its givers. And presently his companions, taunting him with his old defect of wits, began to flout him with many saucy jeers, because he blamed and cavilled at seemly and worthy things, and because he attacked thus ignobly an illustrious king and a lady of so refined a behaviour, bespattering with the shamefullest abuse ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... as good have let me had the best part, for I'll be revenged on him to the uttermost, in this person of Will Summer, which I have put on to play the prologue, and mean not to put it off till the play be done. I'll sit as a chorus, and flout the actors and him at the end of every scene. I know they will not interrupt me, for fear of marring of all; but look to your cues, my masters, for I intend to play the knave in cue, and put you besides all your parts, if you take not the better heed. Actors, you rogues, come ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... matter of the Regency Bill as if the dearest wish of his heart were to flout the King's wishes and to wound his feelings. The King wished, lest he should again be stricken with illness while the heir-apparent was still an infant, to be given the right to name a regent by will. Grenville and Grenville's colleagues, who were now as jealous ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of the force of public opinion is a recent affair. In former years they were totally indifferent to it, if indeed they did not openly flout it. Even now their appeal to public sentiment is mainly a special plea for defensive purposes, and has little or no educational value. Brewers have opposed practically every effort to effect a change in excise laws, often without any convincing reason, but simply because ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... let me rouse your phlegmatic blood, my Britons; sit down, with your thumbs in your mouths, my masters, and allow a coterie to flout you at will, whilst the Frenchmen, the Germans, the Russians alternately laugh at and pity you. Pity you, the sons of the men who chased their fathers half over Europe at the point of the blood-red bayonet! Have you grown tame, have you waxed fat and foolish during these ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... inevitable result of possessing wealth. But one of the penalties of property is that it cultivates whatever egotism and sensitiveness to its prerogative its owner is capable of. That one of the common laborers employed upon her estate should thus openly flout her ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... condemned to a dull, level life. Desborough would talk to her about poetry, but their tastes did not agree. He would even tease her with futile metaphysical talk until she scarcely knew whether to laugh or to flout him. ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... if it would, escape its distinctive name, and, since Greece and Judea, no name has the same worth and honor among men. We Americans may flout England a hundred times. We may oppose her opinions with reason, we may think her views unsound, her policy unwise; but from what country would the most American of Americans prefer to have derived the characteristic impulse of American development and civilization ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... he make a sound or lift a finger against her life, never more would he contradict her or flout her; never more would he come peeping through that papered panel between his room and hers, never more could hateful and humiliating demands be made upon her as his right; no more strange distresses ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and sold them to the Yarmouth herring-mongers "for ready gold, so that it amounteth to a great sum of money, which money doth never come again into England." "We are daily scorned," he says, "by these Hollanders, for being so negligent of our Profit, and careless of our Fishing; and they do daily flout us that be the poor Fishermen of England, to our Faces at Sea, calling to us, and saying, 'Ya English, ya sall or oud scoue dragien;' which, in English, is this, 'You English, we will make you glad ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... Byron was forgotten, or only remembered with disdain; and when Thackeray, the representative Briton, the artist Philistine, the foe of all that is excessive or abnormal or rebellious, took it upon himself to flout the author of Don Juan openly and to lift up his heavy hand against the fops and fanatics who had affected the master's humours, he did so amid general applause. Meanwhile, however, the genius and the ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... knows their tongues are venal, sold to flatter wealth and power, And to crouch with serpent homage in the dust at Fortune's shrine, Ready to revile and slander if calamity should lower, And to flout as base, deceitful, what they ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... people issuing from a cafe, the queue at theatre doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate pleasure-seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show in the jewellers' windows—all the familiar sights contributing to flout his own unhappiness, want, and isolation. At the same time, if he be at all after my pattern, he is perhaps supported by a childish satisfaction: this is life at last, he may tell himself, this is the real thing; the bladders on which I was set swimming ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... this that rises to my touch, So like a cushion? Can it be a cabbage? It is, it is that deeply injured flower, Which boys do flout us with;—but yet I love thee, Thou giant rose, wrapped in a green surtout. Doubtless in Eden thou didst blush as bright As these, thy puny brethren; and thy breath Sweetened the fragrance of her spicy air; But now thou seemest like a bankrupt beau, Stripped of his gaudy hues ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... course," he said, after a pause. "Human nature is weak, engagingly weak, Guildea. And you're inclined to flout it. I could understand a certain class of lady—the lion-hunting, the intellectual lady, seeking you. Your ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... material and external, but psychological not only touching what others might do or what might happen to them, but raising also speculation as to what he might do, or what might happen to him at his own hands; for example, how far he would flout authority, defy the usual, and deny the accepted. The love of rebellion, of making foolish the wisdom of the wise, of hampering the orderly and inexorable treatment of people just as, according to the best modern lights, they ought to be treated, this ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... so-called friends every week; she cultivated grand passions for actors, authors, musicians, and even for professors. Sometimes she played to select audiences with all her old ravishing skill, but this happened more and more rarely, until at last she utterly declined, and even went so far as to flout H.S.H. the Duke of KALBSKOPF, who had been specially ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... in the Landes the rider is thought to be Judas Iscariot. In other parts of France the wild huntsman is known as Harlequin or Henequin, and in some parts of Brittany he is "Herod in pursuit of the Holy Innocents." (Alas, that no such Herod visits London! How welcome would he be, were he only to flout a few of the brawling brats who, allowed to go anywhere they please, make an inferno of every road they choose ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... purchases of bric-a-brac for his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But I am not sure that this is accurate. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... searching, never stays; To brave the rattling, hissing streams of lead, The bursting shrapnel and the million ways That war entices death; when dying, dead And living, mingle in the ghastly glare That taints the beauty of a night once fair, And seems to flout the Majesty divine." F. ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... watched his departure. On the point of commanding him to return, he checked, fearing lest in his present mood Sakr-el-Bahr should flout his authority and under the eyes of all refuse him the obedience due. He knew that it is not good to command where we are not sure of being obeyed or of being able to enforce obedience, that an authority once successfully flouted is in ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... follow her, beauties flee; Is there no method to tell her in Spanish June's twice June since she breathed it with me? Come, bud, show me the least of her traces, 45 Treasure my lady's lightest footfall! —Ah, you may flout and turn up your faces— Roses, you are not so ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... nail show truth he has no soul of his own." The Devil he bowed his head on his breast and rumbled deep and low: — "I'm all o'er-sib to Adam's breed that I should bid him go. Yet close we lie, and deep we lie, and if I gave him place, My gentlemen that are so proud would flout me to my face; They'd call my house a common stews and me a careless host, And — I would not anger my gentlemen for the sake of a shiftless ghost." The Devil he looked at the mangled Soul that prayed to feel the flame, And he thought of Holy Charity, ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... brood of special magazines for the literati and the advanced, which Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer praises so warmly, we are not so well provided with the distributive machinery for a national culture as to flout a recognized agency with a gesture and a sneer. But the family magazine has undeniably lost its vigorous appeal, and must be reinvigorated. The malady is due to no slackening of literary virility in the country; indeed there ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... ruined wall, and agreed that nothing in the world could be so beautiful and picturesque as Conway Castle, and that never could there have been so fit a time to see it as this sunny, quiet, lovely afternoon. Sunshine adapts itself to the character of a ruin in a wonderful way; it does not "flout the ruins gray," as Scott says, but sympathizes with their decay, and saddens itself for their sake. It ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... contumely, affront, dishonor, insult, indignity, outrage, discourtesy &c. 895; practical joking; scurrility, scoffing, sibilance, hissing, sibilation; irrision[obs3]; derision; mockery; irony &c. (ridicule) 856; sarcasm. hiss, hoot, boo, gibe, flout, jeer, scoff, gleek|, taunt, sneer, quip, fling, wipe, slap in the face. V. hold in disrespect &c. (despise) 930; misprize, disregard, slight, trifle with, set at naught, pass by, push aside, overlook, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... For firmness hath its appetite and craves The stronger lure, more strongly to resist; Would know the touch of gold to fling it off; Scent wine to feel its lip the soberer; Behold soft byssus, ivory, and plumes To say, "They're fair, but I will none of them," And flout Enticement ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... transcendent manifestation of that power which ordains life and all its privileges and abolishes all the noisesomeness of death. Alive, he nourishes, comforts, consoles, corrects us. Dead, all that is mortal he transforms into ethereal and vital gases. Obey him, and he blesses; flout him, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the horizon rose the cloud of strife, Two proud, strong nations battling for the prize: Which swarming host should mould a nation's life; Which royal banner flout ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... gazing thus: it is Garcia, Whose name hath reach'd thee long ere now, I trow; Whom thou hast met in deadly fight full oft, When France and Spain join'd in the battle field. Beyond the Pyrenean boundary That guards thy land, are forty thousand men: Their unfurl'd pennons flout fair France's sun, And wanton in the breezes of her sky: Impatient halt they there; their foaming steeds, Pawing the huge and rock-built barrier, That bars their further course—they wait for thee: For thee whom France hath injur'd and cast off; For thee, whose blood it pays ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... Youth's rosy blush or Passion's pearly bite? You hardly know perhaps; but Chloe knows, And pours you out the necessary dose, Meticulously measuring to scale, The cup of Circe or the Holy Grail— An actress she at home in every role, Can flout or flatter, bully or cajole, And on occasion by a stretch of art Can even speak the language of the heart, Can lisp and sigh and make confused replies, With baby lips and complicated eyes, Indifferently apt to weep or wink, Primly pursue, provocatively ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... her tears, has made my vengeance fly I thought of my own, Pascal, who died so long ago. Care thou for thine! And now fear nought from me, I trow, Eden is coming down to earth for thee, no doubt, But I, whom henceforth men can only hate and flout, Will to the wars away! For in me something saith I may recover from my rout, Better than by a crime! Ay! by a soldier's death!" Thus saying, Marcel vanished, loudly cheered on every side; And then ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... he escape me? Shall he mock My queenship? He, an alien, flout my sway? Will no one arm and chase them, or undock The ships? Bring fire; get weapons, quick! Away! Swing out the oars! Ah me! what do I say? Where am I? O, what madness turns my brain? Poor Dido, hath thy folly found its prey? Thy sins, alas! they sting ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... they will square it Some fine day; Then the little pigs they're teaching For to fly; And the niggers they'll be bleaching By-and-by! Each newly joined aspirant To the clan Must repudiate the tyrant Known as Man; They mock at him and flout him, For they do not care about him, And they're "going to do ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... course. Against every kind of authority, but particularly against bishops. He's always got his knife into them, and I dare say he's glad of the chance of flouting them. High Church parsons are, aren't they? I expect if you were a bit higher you'd flout them too. And if you were a bit lower, the C.G.'d take you as a padre. You're just the wrong height, old thing, that's ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... wonder in euery barber's shop, and a mouthfull of pitty (that he had no better fortune) to midwiues and talkatiue gossips; and all the content that this transitory life can giue him seemes but to flout him, in respect the restraint of liberty barres the true vse. To his familiars hee is like a plague, whom they dare scarce come nigh for feare of infection, he is a monument ruined by those which raysed him, he spends the day with a hei mihi! ve miserum! and the night with a nullis ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... you to take care. He lodges with us, so we know him well, And can tell You all about him, And we strongly advise you not to flout him." ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... every circumstance. The wicked go into hell by the necessary and benignant love of God, not by his indignation; and their retributions are in their own characters, not in their prison house. This does not flout and trample all magnanimity, nor shock the heart of piety; and yet, showing us men compelled to prefer wallowing in the filth and iniquities of hell, clinging to the very evils whose pangs transfix them, it gives us the direst of all the impressions of sin, and beneath ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 1560), of which the title is a sufficient clue to its purpose, permits a boy to refuse to go to school, and, as a young man, to flout his father's advice in regard to matrimony, only to bring him to the bottom rung of miserable drudgery and servitude under a scolding wife. Of some interest is the lad's report of a schoolboy's life, voicing, as it possibly does, a ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... thou raise such woeful wail, And waste in briny tears thy days? 'Cause she that wont to flout and rail, At last gave proof of woman's ways; She did, in sooth, display the heart That might have wrought ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... hostile nation Once since hath entered Ville Marie, But we avenged that desecration At Chrystler's farm and Chateauguay— Peace! peace! 'tis cowardly to flout Our triumphs in a cousin's face: That page was long since blotted out And Friendship ...
— Fleurs de lys and other poems • Arthur Weir
... hunting-ground where he might indulge at his pleasure any propensities to lawless adventure. If in 1588 he had helped to scatter the Invincible Armada, he now pillaged treasure ships on the coasts of the Spanish Main; if he had been with Drake to flout his Catholic Majesty at Cadiz, he now closed with the Spaniards within their distant cities beyond the seas. Thus he lined his own pockets with Spanish doubloons, and incidentally curbed Philip's power of invading England. Nor must we think these mariners the same ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... well be Simplicity, for thou showest thy folly. I have a parsonage, but what? of St Nihil; and Nihil is nothing: Then, where is the church, or any bells for to ring? Thou understandest her not: she was set for to flout. I thought, coining in their names, I should go without. 'Tis easy to see that Lucre loves not Love and Conscience; But God, I trust, will one ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... the responsibility of her success. Who does? My dear Charmian, who wrote the successful novel of last year, do you not already repent your rash act? If you do not write a better novel this year, will not the public flout you and jeer you for a pretender? Did the public overpraise you at first? Its mistaken partiality becomes now your presumption. Last year the press said you were the rival of Hawthorne. This year it is, "that Miss Charmian who set herself ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... They may be there (for each of us carries a carcase), but the horror of sudden death is above them: a man may strangle with his thoughts cleaner than with his pair of hands. And as "matter" is but the stuff wherewith Nature works, and she is only insulted, not defied, when we flout or mangle it, so it is against the high dignity of Art to insist upon the carrion she must use. She will press, here the terror, there the radiance, of essential fact; she will leave to us, seeing it in her face, to add mentally the poor stage properties ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... lad, a pupil at the old Grammar-School, where he used the desk at which his father had sat before him. Whatever fault of boyhood showed itself in Harry Morton, he knew not the common temptation to be ashamed of his mother, or to flout her love. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Fallen in your supreme defence! Gone is the friend that in a phrase The "Common Sense" of things could settle, That with a stroke could slay a craze, And folly lash with flail of nettle. Who now will thunder in the Times Against the Socialistic Rad's tone? Who'll flout the cant and check the crimes ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... first I would remark that it is not a prudent plan For any culinary gent to flout his fellow-man; And, if a colleague can't agree with his peculiar whim, To wait on that same colleague, and trip up ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... charity!" broke in the prisoner, with a scornful burst; "when my heart is full of rage, and bitterness, and despair! Give me time for this repentance which you say is so needful—time to lure back long since banished hope, and peace, and faith! Poh!—you but flout me with words without meaning. I am unfit, you say, for the presence of men, but quite fit for that of God, before whom you are about to arrogantly cast me! Be it so—my deeds are upon my head! It is at least not my fault that ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight. For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray: When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruin'd central tower; When buttress and buttress alternately Seem framed of ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... our cool libraries, that all the agents with which we deal are subalterns, which we can well afford to let pass, and life will be simpler when we live at the centre and flout the surfaces. I wish to speak with all respect of persons, but sometimes I must pinch myself to keep awake and preserve the due decorum. They melt so fast into each other that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. Though the ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... mixed. In October their work is over, the chorus ended, but you hear an occasional "Katy-did" and finally as late as Indian Summer, which is Hallowe'en, I have heard the last of the fiddlers rasp out "she did"; and do it in daytime, too, as though to flout the followers of Cicada. And, if the last word be truth, as they say, we may consider it settled, that Katy really and truly did. And yet I believe next year the same dispute will arise, and we shall have the noisy ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... for thought, every man who chose to go contrary to the will of Tahn-te, found himself well nigh helpless in the Indian land, his infernal gods were so strong that the Castilians were none too eager to flout them, only Yahn Tsyn-deh seeing the crisis of things, crept ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... nymphs learn Irish raillery. But thy merit is thy failing, And thy raillery is railing. Thus with talents well endued To be scurrilous and rude; When you pertly raise your snout, Fleer and gibe, and laugh and flout; This among Hibernian asses For sheer wit and humour passes. Thus indulgent Chloe, bit, Swears you have ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... to 'Crosby's Magazine' in 1807 ('Life', p. 669). His scorn was, in part, provoked by indignities offered to Pope and Dryden, and, in part, assumed because one Lake poet called up the rest; and it was good sport to flout and jibe at the "Fraternity." That the day would come when the message of Wordsworth would reach his ears and awaken his enthusiasm, he could not, of course, foresee (see 'Childe Harold', canto iii. stanzas 72, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... live to God, we must be prepared to suffer the direst persecution, and all the horrors of the Great Tribulation, with its thousands of martyrs, will be the portion of those who will cleave to God, and flout Antichrist." ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... words my son, come easily, when he That speaks is wise, and speaks but for the right. Else come they never! Swift are thine, and bright As though with thought, yet have no thought at all Lo this new God, whom thou dost flout withal, I cannot speak the greatness wherewith He In Hellas shall be great! Two spirits there be, Young Prince, that in man's world are first of worth. Demeter one is named; she is the Earth— Call her which name thou will!—who feeds man's frame With sustenance of things dry. And that which came ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... elegancies, as the commonest so the commendablest phrases of a language. To use them is a grace, to understand them a good, but to gather them a paine to me, though gain to thee. I, but for all that I must not scape without some new flout: now would I were by thee to give thee another, and surely I would give thee bread for cake. Farewell if thou meane well; els fare as ill, as thou wishest ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... here her birth doe disdaine, Her father is ready, with might and with maine, To proove shee is come of noble degree: Therfore never flout att prettye Bessee." ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... face flushed, brow dark and fretted with indignation, lips pouting, breast heaving, and her eyes overflowing with tears, in bounded his sister, Seraphine Duchatel, exclaiming: "And is this the creature that has stood between me and Claude? and brought here, too, to flout me to my face! I'll not endure it;" and she burst into ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... it availed, for wings could not outstrip fear. The one went under, and the other, flying, turned his breast upward. Not otherwise the wild duck on a sudden dives when the falcon comes close, and he returns up vexed and baffled. Calcabrina, enraged at the flout, kept flying behind him, desirous that the sinner should escape, that he might have a scuffle; and when the barrator had disappeared he turned his talons upon his companion, and grappled with him above the ditch. But the other ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... at home we fed, Like witless fools, with fostering bread, Have impiously come to this— They've stolen the Acropolis, With bolts and bars our orders flout And shut ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled back. Loud on left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler. Came now the storm that hist his heart. And Master Lynch bade him have a care to flout and witwanton as the god self was angered for his hellprate and paganry. And he that had erst challenged to be so doughty waxed wan as they might all mark and shrank together and his pitch that was before ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... tears to come into his eyes, until he had to lay the book aside. Likewise he was fond of music, and could accompany himself on the piano as he sang the love songs of his friend A— or gipsy songs or themes from operas; but he had no love for serious music, and would frankly flout received opinion by declaring that, whereas Beethoven's sonatas wearied him and sent him to sleep, his ideal of beauty was "Do not wake me, youth" as Semenoff sang it, or "Not one" as the gipsy Taninsha rendered that ditty. His nature was essentially one of those ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... darker. He took up the argument again, more pugnaciously than ever. It was the strangest attempt ever made to gibe and flout a wandering sheep back into the fold. Robert's resentment was roused at last. The squire's temper seemed to him totally inexplicable, his arguments contradictory, the conversation useless and irritating. He got up ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gather strength, and march unto him straight: Let him perceive how ill we brook his treason. And what offence it is to flout his friends. ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... Urquhart when they met, and himself opened the topic of the Norwegian jaunt. Urquhart took up the ball. "I think you might come. Your wife and boy will love it, and you'll kindle at their joy. 'They for life only, you for life in them,' to flout the bard. Besides, you are not a fogey, if I'm not. I believe our ages tally. You shall climb mountains with me, Macartney, and improve the muscles of your calves. You don't fish, I think. Nor do I. I thought ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... She looks just like her mother. That pale face Making its sad obedience a reproach. If she would flout, sulk, scold, resist my will, I'd make her have him ere ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... Then dost thou need a friend about thee To cheer and comfort when she flout thee. So, an thou wilt a-wooing wend, I'll follow thee like trusty friend. In love or fight thou shalt not lack A sturdy arm to 'fend thy back. I'll follow thee in light or dark, Through good or ill—Saints ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... would'st view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruin'd central tower; When buttress and buttress, alternately, ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... outlandish sounds of Greek and Latin and German, till they have learned to read and love the great authors who have written in those languages, so WESLEY, and SOUTHEY, and even HALLAM himself, jest and flout and call names at Jacob Behmen, because they have not taken the trouble to learn his language, to master his mind, and to drink in his spirit. At the same time, and after all that has been said about Behmen's barbarous style, Bishop Martensen ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... Sometimes this breakage comes with the first gleams of morning light and I feel the chill of their passing as they sink slowly to the grass. They are beautiful in their eerie suggestions as they flout my three o'clock in the morning courage, but lovelier far when they sparkle on the grass and shrubs under the sudden flare of the rising sun. I fancy that with clearer light all our gorgons and chimeras ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... a circle that shut me out Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win, We drew a ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... a grimy sweep Was creeping down the street, When Quartern Loaf, the biker's boy, Below he chanced to meet: "Sweep!" sneered the baker: and the sweep Gave Puff a sooty flout; But Puff-crumb did not deal in soot, So turned his face about; Nor did he care to soundly drub The imp of dirty flues: "Go change your clothes!" said he, "and then "I'll thrash you when you choose! "It will not ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... constitute an emphatic demonstration of the disapproval by the leaders of the people of the acts of the Government. Lawyers must suspend their practice and must resist the power of the Government which has chosen to flout public opinion. Nor may we receive instruction from schools controlled by Government and aided by it. Emptying of the schools will constitute a demonstration of the will of the middle class of India. It is far better for the nation even to neglect the literary instruction of the children than ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... ancient song Was wont to flout her swain, I prithee be not always coy, But turn your face again. My heart is true, and it will rue, That ever you should doubt me, So sweet, be kind, and change your mind, And don't ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... and flout, and say "the platform stinketh loud enough, but the smell thereof is not the smell uv the Afrikin—it is of the rotten material uv wich it is composed, and the corrupshun they hev placed upon it"—and ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... and would fain have precedence even of love. She could take no sort of satisfaction in a captive that her bright eyes had not shackled. Somehow this love seemed to flout, to diminish, her attractions. It was like an accident. She could account for his subjection on no other grounds. As she sat silent, grave enough now and very beautiful, gazing askance and troubled upon him, ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... creeping recklessly through the night! God's mercy! I even ventured to dream my charms had pierced the dull armor of your cold English heart, yet here you merely stand and laugh at me,—would even flee my presence as though pestilence were upon my breath. Why, I wonder? am I not also fair? Why then flout me thus disdainfully? Naladi has not been accustomed to such harsh treatment at the hands ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... young man! She is merely shrewish, scolding,— She is plastic to your molding, She is woman in her yielding to the fires desires fan. Flout her ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... jury duty. You shirk fatherhood, and all its happy and sacred obligations! You deny posterity! You strike a blow at it! You flout it! You menace the future of this Republic! Your inertia is a crime against the people! Instead of pro bono publico your motto is pro bono tempo—for a good time! And, dog Latin or not, it's the truth, and our ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... from our poet, Whose true scope, if you would know it, In all his poems still hath been this measure, To mix profit with your pleasure; And not as some, whose throats their envy failing, Cry hoarsely, All he writes is railing: And when his plays come forth, think they can flout them, With saying, he was a year about them. To this there needs no lie, but this his creature, Which was two months since no feature; And though he dares give them five lives to mend it, 'Tis known, five weeks fully penn'd it, From ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... loose enough to find her premature airs and graces a fine joke indeed. She ruled them all with her temper and her shrewish will. She would have her way in all things, or there should be no sport with her, and she would sing no songs for them, but would flout them bitterly, and sit in a great chair with her black brows drawn down, and her whole small ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... deeply in the eyes, caught him by the ear, and with a twist made him wince, pushed him on the shoulders and made his knees bend. Then he released him with a flout of contempt. ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... at Cairo. The wealth and fashion of Bayswater, South Kensington, and even the bosky Wood of the Evangelist had sent their latest luxury and style to flout the tombs of the past with the ghastly flippancy of to-day. The cheap tripper was there—the latest example of the Darwinian theory—apelike, flea and curio hunting! Shamelessly inquisitive and always hungry, ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... bright with steel and gold, And plumes that flout the sky, I 'll wear a soul of hardier mould, And thoughts that sweep as high. For scarf athwart my corslet cast, With her fair name y-wove; I 'll have her pictured in my breast, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... seemed to jostle bodily, Like children full of play designs That spring at once from schoolroom's form. Instead of all this angry storm, Another might have thanked you well For saving prey from that grim cell, That hollowed den 'neath journals great, Where editors who poets flout With their demoniac laughter shout. And I have scolded you! What fate For charming dwarfs who never meant To anger Hercules! And I Have frightened you!—My chair I sent Back to the wall, and then let fly A shower of words the ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... performance sufficiently binding, and binding no doubt it was from a moral point of view, so long as there was reasonably good behaviour on either side, or so long as neither Silius nor Marcia's father was prepared wantonly to flout general opinion or to offend a whole connection by simply changing his mind. On the other hand, there was no legal compulsion whatever to carry out the contract. The Roman world knew nothing of actions for breach of promise. If either party chose to repudiate ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... is something in your attitude which I admit puzzles me. I ask you in all honor, I ask you on the hilt of that sword which I know you will never disgrace, why did you thus flout the Lady Catharine Knollys? Why did you scorn her and take up with this woman yonder in ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... cases of the third order (estate). The representations of the provincial assembly of Dauphiny severely criticised the impropriety of this measure. "The ministers," they said, "have not been afraid to flout the third estate, whose life, honor, and property no longer appear to be objects worthy of the sovereign courts, for which are reserved only the causes of the rich and the crimes of the privileged." The number ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... has a tough Fibre which about While clings my Being;—let the Canine Flout Till his Bass Voice be pitched to such loud key It shall unlock the door ...
— The Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten • Oliver Herford
... shapes, appear'd. I have not seen a dapper Jack so brisk: He wears a short Italian hooded cloak, Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap A jewel of more value than the crown. While others walk below, the king and he, From out a window, laugh at such as we, And flout our train, and jest at our attire. Uncle, 'tis this that makes me impatient. E. Mor. But, nephew, now you see the king is chang'd. Y. Mor. Then so I am, and live to do him service: But, whiles I have a sword, a hand, a heart, I will not yield to any such upstart. ...
— Edward II. - Marlowe's Plays • Christopher Marlowe
... who were thus the saviours, as well as the servants, of society, yet have we seen it possible for an Englishman of to-day to mouth against their memory the ineptitudes of their long-vanquished foes, and to flout the consecrated dead in their graves, as the Boeotian did the living Pericles in the ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... madame has such a kind heart that she can't bear to see any one suffer without trying to help and comfort them," said the specious Jeanne. "Now I am of quite a different mind—nothing I would like better than to flout a sentimental suitor; fine words would not gain any favour ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... fittest. This could not satisfy a heart that was hungry for enthusiasm and affection, so dreams of family life became my religion. Self-sacrificing devotion to one's family was the only kind of altruism and idealism I did not flout ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... place themselves under the protection of the foreign consuls, and then they can flout their riches in the Emperor's face ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... from depths of humiliation to undreamt of heights of triumph. The first thing was to restore the prestige of their States. No people can be strong in action that has lost belief in its own powers and has allowed its neighbours openly to flout it. The history of the world has shown again and again that politicians who allow their country to be regarded as une quantite negligeable bequeath to some abler successor a heritage of struggle and war—struggle ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... as all our stores were full as usual, I asked the Lord, that He would be pleased to put it into their hearts to put money into the boxes: and this sum I found in them this evening.—Yesterday it was necessary to purchase ten sacks of flout, which, being just now twice as dear as darning the last years, cost 27l. 10s.; and this day it was needful to spend 8l. 1s. 2d. for smith's work. How kind, therefore, of the Lord to have sent me today, yesterday, and the afternoon ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Fourth Part • George Mueller
... about that I owed money to the brewer, they presently left off all that kind of thing; and now, during the last three days, since the tale of my misfortune with the cocks has got wind, almost everybody has left off coming to the house, and the few who does, merely comes to insult and flout me. It was only last night that fellow, Hunter, called me an old fool in my own kitchen here. He wouldn't have called me a fool a fortnight ago; 'twas I called him fool then, and last night he called me old fool; what do you think of that? the man that beat Tom of Hopton, to ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... go!" the Baron exclaimed. "What right have you to the child? None at all! Her Highness wishes to be generous. It pleases you to flout her generosity. Mr. Arnold Greatson, you are a fool! Don't you see that you are a pigmy, who has stolen through the back door into the world where great things are dealt with? You have no place there. You cannot keep the child ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I whispered. "Plainly, Providence has a hand in this design. It might be dangerous to flout such a ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... view fair Melrose aright Go visit it by the pale moonlight, For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild, but to flout, the ruins, Gray." ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the Ministry of Munitions but of the War Office. The Munitions Ministry in due course did splendid work. Chancellor of the Exchequer become lord-paramount of a great spending Department of State, its chief was on velvet. "Copper" turned footpad, he knew the ropes, he could flout the Treasury—and he did. But it is a pity that unwarrantable claims should have been put forward on behalf of the department in not irresponsible quarters at a time when they could not be denied, claims which have tended to bring the department as a whole into undeserved ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... courage, then, to front that law (From which your sophists draw Their only right to flout one human creed) That nothing can proceed— Not even thought, not even love—from less Than its own nothingness? The law is yours! But dare you waive your pride, And kneel where you denied? The law is yours! Dare you re-kindle, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... them—true! Or it were with a run done, Sir. I'm only the Metropolis. Pooh! Provincial pedants flout the U- -niversity of London, Sir! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... the least of her, for she has the heart and the principles of the purest and the best. But, oh, laddie, in her dealings with men she has the knowledge of the deil himself. Mayhap she'll cry a bit, or flout the duke, or laugh at his ways. She'll do the thing which she finds his mood and the hour suit, and she'll come away with the pardon in her hand, and say ever after that the duke is maligned and that at heart he is a very good man. And she'll ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... new confidence and consecration, which would make our defense impregnable, our triumph assured. Then we should have little or no disorganization of our economic, industrial, and commercial systems at home, no staggering war debts, no swollen fortunes to flout the sacrifices of our soldiers, no excuse for sedition, no pitiable slackerism, no outrage of treason. Envy and jealousy would have no soil for their menacing development, and revolution would be without ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... than they intend," said Henry. "When Roger Mortimer took Simon's doings in wrath, and vowed that his sister should never wed a Montfort, he knew not what he did. He and his proud wife could flout and scorn my Isabel—they might not break her faith to me. Thou knowst, perhaps, Richard, since thou art hand and glove with our foes, that like a raven to the slaughter, the Lady Mortimer came as near the battle-field as her care for her ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... erratic, and impulsive. You would follow no teaching implicitly, but, when you saw fit, would trample on conventionalities and venerable stage-traditions. You would set up the standard of revolt against the ancient canons of Art, and flout it in the faces of the critics, and—fail,—ay, fail, in spite of your great, staring eyes, the tragic weight of your brows, and the fiery ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... pause, nor rest, save where the streams That feed the Kansas run, Save where our pilgrim gonfalon Shall flout the ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... With a flout at his dreams, and his cowardice, and his good-for-nothingness, the dame hurried to serve her customers. Jeremiah heard her loud voice addressing them, and their hoarse tones answering. She came out again for two pints to draw some beer, and commanded him to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... generally, but unfortunately not uncommonly—the enforcement of punishments and orders calculated, if not intended to humiliate Indians as a race, to cause unwarranted inconvenience amounting on occasions to injustice, and to flout the standards of propriety and humanity, which the inhabitants not only of India in particular but of the civilised world in general have a right to demand of those set in authority over them. It is a matter for regret that, notwithstanding the conduct of the majority, there should ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... with horses was remarkable. No animal that man has broken to his use is keener to recognize a master and flout a coward than the horse. No coward has ever been able to do anything ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... butterfly catcher has no provocations? Was it seventeen or seventy times (I forget) in one page that I laid down my pen, put off my spectacles and caught up my net to rush after that brute of a Papilio polymnestor, who just came to the duranta flowers to flout me and skip over the wall into the next garden? And does anyone but a butterfly hunter know how it feels to open your cabinet drawers just a few hours after the ants have got the news that the camphor ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... replied Jack. "I'd marry 'most any girl you wanted me to. But if Columbine were to flout me as she used to—why, I'd buck sure enough.... Dad, are you sure she knows nothing, suspects nothing ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... very reason his son would fain avenge him," said Hubert flippantly, "and flout the ghosts, if such things there be. And if men—Frenchmen or the like—see fit to attire themselves in masquerade, no coward fear will blunt the edge ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... dined at a table, gay with lights and flowers, that should have commanded the Falls but for the curtain of fog. Niagara, however, might flout them if it pleased; they could do without Niagara. They were delighted that the hotel, apparently, contained no one they knew. All they wanted was to be together, and alone. But the bride was tired by a long day in the train; her smiles began presently to flag, and by nine o'clock her ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... neither flout nor frown That we now for him bear, But will add to our heavenly crown, When he comes in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... drew a circle that shut me out Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win, We drew a circle ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... wavering, no concession made by the family.... The boy must be made into what he ought to be—but how? And he must have his lesson for this day's scene. He must be shown that he could not, with impunity, outrage the Family Tradition and flout the Family Ghosts.... Again—how? ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... of the King... It is the King's authority they flout... They arrogate to themselves the whole sovereignty in Brittany. The King has dissolved them... These insolent nobles defying ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... violence of sentiment and sudden changes of emotion, found herself condemned to a dull, level life. Desborough would talk to her about poetry, but their tastes did not agree. He would even tease her with futile metaphysical talk until she scarcely knew whether to laugh or to flout him. ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... was dumfoundered by this obstinacy. It was unheard of—absolutely without parallel in his domestic annals—that one of his children should actually flout him! yes! actually flout him with such an answer ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... home we fed, Like witless fools, with fostering bread, Have impiously come to this— They've stolen the Acropolis, With bolts and bars our orders flout And shut ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... all that kind of thing; and now, during the last three days, since the tale of my misfortune with the cocks has got wind, almost everybody has left off coming to the house, and the few who does, merely comes to insult and flout me. It was only last night that fellow, Hunter, called me an old fool in my own kitchen here. He wouldn't have called me a fool a fortnight ago; 'twas I called him fool then, and last night he called me old fool; what do you think of that? the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... of quick life crops out In watchful mutual mockery. Gibe and flout In low asides flow freely. Oh, bland elysium for the brave and fair, Whose pleasures are the snigger and the stare, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... laughter as now, never so many fools and madmen. 'Tis not one [257]Democritus will serve turn to laugh in these days; we have now need of a "Democritus to laugh at Democritus;" one jester to flout at another, one fool to fleer at another: a great stentorian Democritus, as big as that Rhodian Colossus, For now, as [258]Salisburiensis said in his time, totus mundus histrionem agit, the whole world plays the fool; we have a new theatre, a new ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... "Them" was the town-folk, and what he would show them was what a big man he was. For, like most scorners of the world's opinion, Gourlay was its slave, and showed his subjection to the popular estimate by his anxiety to flout it. He was not great enough for ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... exclaimed Monsieur Guillaume—"a headache. And is it so very amusing to see in a picture what you can see any day in your own street? Don't talk to me of your artists! Like writers, they are a starveling crew. Why the devil need they choose my house to flout it in ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... by brewers of the force of public opinion is a recent affair. In former years they were totally indifferent to it, if indeed they did not openly flout it. Even now their appeal to public sentiment is mainly a special plea for defensive purposes, and has little or no educational value. Brewers have opposed practically every effort to effect a change in excise laws, often without any convincing reason, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... Tom Whidden had a passion For eating of his iron ration— A thing, you know, which isn't done (Except, just now and then, for fun), Because there is a rule about it And decent people rarely flout it. But Tom was greedy and each day He'd put a tin or two away, Though duty told him, clear and plain, To keep them safe as brewers' grain, For eating as a last resort When eatables were running short. His Corporal said, "My lad, don't do it!" His Sergeant groaned, "I'm sure you'll ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... scholars; and one of the strongest instincts of her national life is her search for genius. Initiative is originality in motion. Originality is too rare to flout and scout. Not all originality is good, but all good things, so far as humanity is concerned, were once original. That is to say, they were the work ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... shouted, thumping the table with his fist: "You are the limit!... The take-the-cake limit!... You flout me! You practise on my credulity!... Now you would steal a march on me! Try it on—will you?... Ah! You are not Corporal Vinson!... No?... You are a journalist!... You have got to prove that!... Even if you do prove it, you have ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... That seemed to jostle bodily, Like children full of play designs That spring at once from schoolroom's form. Instead of all this angry storm, Another might have thanked you well For saving prey from that grim cell, That hollowed den 'neath journals great, Where editors who poets flout With their demoniac laughter shout. And I have scolded you! What fate For charming dwarfs who never meant To anger Hercules! And I Have frightened you!—My chair I sent Back to the wall, and then let fly A shower ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... is the glad town Where something real abides; 'Tis not the money-mad town That all its spirit hides. Though strangers scoff and flout it And even jeer its name, It has a charm about it No other ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... level beauty of her gaze. I bowed, just as I caught a trace of mockery in the mouth's scarlet curve, and bowed the lower for it, too, straightening slowly to the dignity her mischievous eyes seemed to flout; and her lips, too, defied me, all silently—nay, in every limb and from every finger-tip she seemed to flout me, and the slow, deep courtesy she made me was too slow and far too low, and her recovery a ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... there is death: what then is death? If it be a stopping of life, then that is which cannot be. But it may be only a change in the form of life that looks like a stopping, and is not! If Death be stronger than Life, so that he stops life, how then was Life able so to flout him, that he, the thing that was not, arose from the antenatal sepulchre on which Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it? Life alone is: nothingness is not; Death cannot destroy; ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... thee if he didn't," answered Dickon. "Birds is rare choosers an' a robin can flout a body worse than a man. See, he's making up to thee now. 'Cannot tha' ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... may scorn her and scout her, But true to her colours are WE, The learned may mock her and flout her, But surely we'll rally about her, In the College that ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... make our defense impregnable, our triumph assured. Then we should have little or no disorganization of our economic, industrial, and commercial systems at home, no staggering war debts, no swollen fortunes to flout the sacrifices of our soldiers, no excuse for sedition, no pitiable slackerism, no outrage of treason. Envy and jealousy would have no soil for their menacing development, and revolution would be without the passion ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... man flout, The wisest Kings have all some folly; Nor let his piety any doubt; Charles, like a Sov'reign, wise and holy, Makes young men judges of the bench, And bishops, those ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... "What does a man who loves as I do, care for the conventions of the sham world you and I have left so far behind. I adore you. And you flout me." ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... you'll go "stoney")— Of the much derided Mob. Yes, the Proletariat "Bob" (With the Guinea of the Nob) must aid the Sons of Light. Gath and Askelon, you see, can give Me, L.S.D. All true Egoists love those pregnant letters Mystic Three! Flout Philistia with great glee, fair and free, But agree To take its "tin," Though with a grin ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... them as hoar frost upon all things below, showing us how thin and of little substance they really are. Sometimes this breakage comes with the first gleams of morning light and I feel the chill of their passing as they sink slowly to the grass. They are beautiful in their eerie suggestions as they flout my three o'clock in the morning courage, but lovelier far when they sparkle on the grass and shrubs under the sudden flare of the rising sun. I fancy that with clearer light all our gorgons and chimeras dire will become but sparkling fairies, ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... a mild kind of lunacy, an everlasting opium dream without the opium; but I am grateful to him for living such a life, since it has bequeathed us some exquisite poetry,' said Lesbia, who had been too carefully cultured to fleer or flout at Wordsworth. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... drink!" cried Cleopatra, half rising from her seat and flashing a fierce look on his white face. "By Serapis! so surely as I yet shall sit in the Capitol at Rome, if thou dost thus flout the Lord Antony, I'll have thee scourged to the bones, and the red wine poured upon thy open wounds to heal them! Ah! at length thou drinkest! Why, what is it, good Eudosius? art sick? Surely, then, this wine must be as the water ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... for me the flowers of your wit. Show to others no fine surface to call forth flattery, compliments, or praise. Come to me, laden with hatred or scorn, the butt of calumny, come to me with the news that women flout you and ignore you, and not one loves you; then, ah! then you will know the treasures of Louise's ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... himself opened the topic of the Norwegian jaunt. Urquhart took up the ball. "I think you might come. Your wife and boy will love it, and you'll kindle at their joy. 'They for life only, you for life in them,' to flout the bard. Besides, you are not a fogey, if I'm not. I believe our ages tally. You shall climb mountains with me, Macartney, and improve the muscles of your calves. You don't fish, I think. Nor do I. I thought I should catch your brother-in-law with that bait—but ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... critics, who never heard Thalberg, have the impertinence to flout him, to make merry at his fantasias. Just compare the Don Juan of Liszt and the Don Juan of Thalberg! See which is the more musical, the more pianistic. Liszt, after running through the gamut of operatic extravagance, began ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... Devil he bowed his head on his breast and rumbled deep and low: — "I'm all o'er-sib to Adam's breed that I should bid him go. Yet close we lie, and deep we lie, and if I gave him place, My gentlemen that are so proud would flout me to my face; They'd call my house a common stews and me a careless host, And — I would not anger my gentlemen for the sake of a shiftless ghost." The Devil he looked at the mangled Soul that prayed to feel the flame, And he thought of Holy Charity, ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... to miracles, Lahiri Mahasaya often said, "The operation of subtle laws which are unknown to people in general should not be publicly discussed or published without due discrimination." If in these pages I have appeared to flout his cautionary words, it is because he has given me an inward reassurance. Also, in recording the lives of Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, and Sri Yukteswar, I have thought it advisable to omit many true miraculous stories, which could hardly have been included without writing, also, an ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... 930. vilipendency|, vilification, contumely, affront, dishonor, insult, indignity, outrage, discourtesy &c. 895; practical joking; scurrility, scoffing, sibilance, hissing, sibilation; irrision[obs3]; derision; mockery; irony &c. (ridicule) 856; sarcasm. hiss, hoot, boo, gibe, flout, jeer, scoff, gleek|, taunt, sneer, quip, fling, wipe, slap in the face. V. hold in disrespect &c. (despise) 930; misprize, disregard, slight, trifle with, set at naught, pass by, push aside, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... wear no clout? Thou only walk in love-robes pure? Why should thy step alone be sure? Thou only free of fortune's flout? Nay, nay! but learn to go without, And so ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... and other such-like illuminating and uplifting problems, warranted to make any school-child wiser than Solomon. It is a beautiful system; only, God, who is no respecter of systems, every now and then delights to flout it by making him a dunce like Peter Champneys, to be the torment of school-teachers—and the delight of the angels of the ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the white goat with the twin kids that Mermnon's daughter too, the brown-skinned Erithacis, prays me to give her; and give her them I will, since thou dost flout me. ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... no teaching implicitly, but, when you saw fit, would trample on conventionalities and venerable stage-traditions. You would set up the standard of revolt against the ancient canons of Art, and flout it in the faces of the critics, and—fail,—ay, fail, in spite of your great, staring eyes, the tragic weight of your brows, and the fiery swell ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... [ere you flout old ends any further, examine your conscience] Before you endeavour to distinguish yourself any more by antiquated allusions, examine whether you can fairly claim them for your own. This, I think is the meaning; or it may be understood ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... the west part of England, whereof the one was given to scoff, but kept ever royal cheer in his house; the other would ask of those that had been at the other's table, "Tell truly, was there never a flout or dry blow given?" To which the guest would answer, "Such and such a thing passed." The lord would say, "I thought he would mar a good dinner." Discretion of speech is more than eloquence; and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal, is more than to speak in good words, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... on a time a grimy sweep Was creeping down the street, When Quartern Loaf, the biker's boy, Below he chanced to meet: "Sweep!" sneered the baker: and the sweep Gave Puff a sooty flout; But Puff-crumb did not deal in soot, So turned his face about; Nor did he care to soundly drub The imp of dirty flues: "Go change your clothes!" said he, "and then "I'll thrash you when you choose! "It will not do for me to fight "With ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... Aurora and its kindred books. And as our schoolboys laugh and jeer at the outlandish sounds of Greek and Latin and German, till they have learned to read and love the great authors who have written in those languages, so WESLEY, and SOUTHEY, and even HALLAM himself, jest and flout and call names at Jacob Behmen, because they have not taken the trouble to learn his language, to master his mind, and to drink in his spirit. At the same time, and after all that has been said about Behmen's barbarous style, Bishop Martensen ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... adventure. To flirt with her would be a confession on my part of a kind of superiority that I could never feel; a suggestion of the ridiculous assumption that I could afford to dally with and in certain circumstances flout her. I could sooner have dallied with and flouted a supreme work of art. Wherefore when she challenged me with her daring "Why?" I met her eyes with a look that if it in any way represented what I was feeling, must have expressed a grave and ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... struck a Fibre; which about It clings my Being—let the Sufi flout; Of my Base Metal may be filed a Key, That shall unlock the ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... eager hands and strong. Then lay with empty arms. The elfin throng Breasted the pulsing air with mocking song. "Alas," she said, "could ye not give one kiss— One tender clasp of hands! And must I miss Your throbbing hearts from my cold, barren breast, Ye soulless ones, that flout my lonely rest?" ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... Jack. "I'd marry 'most any girl you wanted me to. But if Columbine were to flout me as she used to—why, I'd buck sure enough.... Dad, are you sure she knows nothing, suspects nothing of where ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... Crewe Is now seventy-two, And avers she hath half forgotten The truth of the tale, when you ask her about it, And says, as if fain to deny it or flout it, "POOH! THE ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... of course. Against every kind of authority, but particularly against bishops. He's always got his knife into them, and I dare say he's glad of the chance of flouting them. High Church parsons are, aren't they? I expect if you were a bit higher you'd flout them too. And if you were a bit lower, the C.G.'d take you as a padre. You're just the wrong height, old thing, that's ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... tower the beauteous gallery, clear Beyond the city-wall, projected out, From whence might be discovered, far and near, The spacious fields and different roads about. When Gryphon now, in his opprobrious gear, And arms, dishonoured by the rabble's flout, Makes, by ill fortune, to the gate resort, He by the king is ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... to one who is both plain and elderly—one who is not suffering from a surfeit of love, and one whose head has not been turned by flattery. "Young women," says the philosopher, "demand attention as their right and often flout the giver; whereas old ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... thou wouldst view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight: For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild but to flout the ruins gray." ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... huntsman is known as Harlequin or Henequin, and in some parts of Brittany he is "Herod in pursuit of the Holy Innocents." (Alas, that no such Herod visits London! How welcome would he be, were he only to flout a few of the brawling brats who, allowed to go anywhere they please, make an inferno of every road they choose to ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... at him and flout him, For they do not care about him And they're "going to do without him" If ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruin'd central tower; When buttress and buttress, alternately, Seem framed of ebon and ivory; When silver edges the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... interestingly alive. But it does not follow that they did not live when they are supposed to have lived, or do the things attributed to them. Their architecture was ephemeral, and bears no witness to them; they built no pyramids to flout time; they raised no monument but a people, a culture, an idea, that ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... one here her birth doe disdaine, Her father is ready, with might and with maine, To proove shee is come of noble degree: Therfore never flout att ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... but a trifle; and I can tell thee, that if by mischance thou shouldst come to lose thy way in the Fair, thou mayst chance to be very roughly handled. There is always a scum of villains there on the outlook to decoy strangers, and, if they will not consent to be cheated, to flout and mock them with gibes and scurril jests. 'Twas but the other day they put Truepenny into the STOCKS, and kept him there till he thought he should never get out again; and he only did get out by parting with all the ready money he had. I pray thee, neighbour, take warning, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... lady-smocks In silver frocks Do flout the sonsy clover; The humble bee Consorts wi' me And hails me ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... indulge at his pleasure any propensities to lawless adventure. If in 1588 he had helped to scatter the Invincible Armada, he now pillaged treasure ships on the coasts of the Spanish Main; if he had been with Drake to flout his Catholic Majesty at Cadiz, he now closed with the Spaniards within their distant cities beyond the seas. Thus he lined his own pockets with Spanish doubloons, and incidentally curbed Philip's power of invading England. Nor must we think these mariners the same as the lawless buccaneers of a later ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... ventured to dream my charms had pierced the dull armor of your cold English heart, yet here you merely stand and laugh at me,—would even flee my presence as though pestilence were upon my breath. Why, I wonder? am I not also fair? Why then flout me thus disdainfully? Naladi has not been accustomed to such harsh treatment at ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... and met her gaze faintly. "And so, proud Seigneur, you must needs flout e'en our Lord Chamberlain, in the name of our butler with three dove-cotes and the perquage. In sooth thy office must not be set at naught lightly—not when it is flanked by the perquage. By my father's doublet, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the War Office. The Munitions Ministry in due course did splendid work. Chancellor of the Exchequer become lord-paramount of a great spending Department of State, its chief was on velvet. "Copper" turned footpad, he knew the ropes, he could flout the Treasury—and he did. But it is a pity that unwarrantable claims should have been put forward on behalf of the department in not irresponsible quarters at a time when they could not be denied, claims which have ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... think this performance sufficiently binding, and binding no doubt it was from a moral point of view, so long as there was reasonably good behaviour on either side, or so long as neither Silius nor Marcia's father was prepared wantonly to flout general opinion or to offend a whole connection by simply changing his mind. On the other hand, there was no legal compulsion whatever to carry out the contract. The Roman world knew nothing of actions for breach of promise. If either party chose to repudiate ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... the transcendent manifestation of that power which ordains life and all its privileges and abolishes all the noisesomeness of death. Alive, he nourishes, comforts, consoles, corrects us. Dead, all that is mortal he transforms into ethereal and vital gases. Obey him, and he blesses; flout him, and you perish. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... them, yea, And what they weigh even to the utmost scruple; Scrambling, out-facing, fashion-monging boys, That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave, and slander. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... she cried. "You may flout our beliefs,—but wouldn't you like to bolster up your report with an endorsement by the wife of a clergyman! It sounds so respectable and sane, doesn't it? No, sir! You can't prop up your wild-eyed theories ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... madam, for you do not love me and you have never loved me! What a poor fellow I must be to let you mock and flout me as you have done! Why did you give me every reason for hope, at Perros ... for honest hope, madam, for I am an honest man and I believed you to be an honest woman, when your only intention was to deceive me! Alas, you have deceived us all! You have taken a shameful advantage of the candid ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... wonder Tory landlords flout "Fix'd Duty," for 'tis plain, With them the Anti-Corn-Law Bill Must go against ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... criminal cases of the third order (estate). The representations of the provincial assembly of Dauphiny severely criticised the impropriety of this measure. "The ministers," they said, "have not been afraid to flout the third estate, whose life, honor, and property no longer appear to be objects worthy of the sovereign courts, for which are reserved only the causes of the rich and the crimes of the privileged." The number of members of the Parliament of Paris was reduced to sixty-nine. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... for wings could not outstrip fear. The one went under, and the other, flying, turned his breast upward. Not otherwise the wild duck on a sudden dives when the falcon comes close, and he returns up vexed and baffled. Calcabrina, enraged at the flout, kept flying behind him, desirous that the sinner should escape, that he might have a scuffle; and when the barrator had disappeared he turned his talons upon his companion, and grappled with him above the ditch. But the other was indeed a sparrowhawk full grown to gripe him well, and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... "Stick each to his own art— "That yours should be the sophistry, "And mine the fighting part. "My creed, I need not tell you, is "Like that of Wellington, "To whom no harlot comes amiss, "Save her of Babylon; "And when we're at a loss for words, "If laughing reasoners flout us, "For lack of sense we'll draw our swords— "The sole ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... here her birth doe disdaine, Her father is ready, with might and with maine, To prove shee is come of noble degree— Therefore, ever flout ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... thanes were cast into prison," Wulf said, "the count kept us to wait upon him; not for our services, but that he might flout and ill-treat us. We obtained possession of a rope, and let ourselves down at night from the battlements, and made our way on foot as far as Forges, where the good prior, learning from us that we had a message of importance to you, though nothing of its import, sent us forward on palfreys, ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... was then but a lad, that she would never give over fretting herself at the thought that I was to be lord of all the broad acres and wide moors of Beechcot, and that Jasper would be but a landless man. And so, though she never dare flout or oppress me in any way, for fear of Sir Thurstan's displeasure, she, without being openly unfavorable, wasted no love on me, and no doubt often wished ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... forget her prayers nor her Bible." There was a soft response and fresh embrace at each pause. "Nor play cards of a Sunday, nor ever play high. And my Aura must be deaf to rakish young beaux and their compliments. They never mean well by poor pretty maids. If you believe them, they will only mock, flout, and jeer you in the end. And if the young baronet should seek converse with you, promise me, oh, promise me, Aurelia, to grant him no favour, no, not so much as to hand him a flower, or stand chatting with him unknown to his mother. Promise me again, child, for naught save evil can ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... who believes thoroughly in your heart's deep inward goodness. I believe in you even when you do not believe in yourself. I can affirm, for I know better than you know yourself. You cover the beauty of your heart from others. You flout and jeer. Above all, you experiment dangerously with words and actions. But, after all, I am necessary to you. You will not send me away in anger. For you need some one to believe in the soundness of your heart. And I, ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... and a spectacle," continued Aunt Dalmanutha, bitterly, "but a laughing-stock and a byword for the preachers in especial to mock and flout at. Yes, I that were once the workingest and most capablest woman up and down Clinch; I that not only could weave my fourteen yard', or hoe my acre of corn, or clear my man's stint of new ground, a day, but likewise had such faculty in my head-piece that I were able to manage and ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... not unnaturally, quite a sensation in her circle over this attack; Papa Gontier and Maman Cochet clasped each other's hands in sympathy and said, "What will people say next of us, a respectable and time-honoured old couple, if they flout pretty popular little Dorothy Perkins?" "Of course, if people who live in a brand-new red-brick villa choose to invite Dorothy into their garden, one can't expect her to look her best; but, after all, there's only that languishing Stella Gray who can stand such a trial as that, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... renown, However the wits may flout— As wide almost as this blessed town" (But he winced as if with gout). "I paid 'em like sin For to put me in, But it's O, and ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... whispered. "Plainly, Providence has a hand in this design. It might be dangerous to flout such ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... than once, but with no different result, and upon the same lines. Mrs. Willoughby received his attacks with a patient humility, and rushed out to catch him a flout as he was retiring. Finally, however, she shifted her position, and became the aggressor. She suggested that Fielding was really in love with Clarice, and trying to gain favour with her by bringing an admirer ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... attendance at crowded dinners, and their vulgar obsequiousness at table. They swill more than they should and would like to swill more than they do, they spoil the wine with unwelcome and untimely disquisitions, and they can not carry their liquor. The ordinary people who are present naturally flout them, and are revolted by the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... bold advanc'd his head, And saw the monarch of the flood Lying half smothered in the mud. He calls the croaking race around: "A wooden king!" the banks resound. Fear once remov'd they swim about him, And gibe and jeer and mock and flout him; And messengers to Jove depute, Effectively to grant their suit. A hungry stork he sent them then, Who soon had swallow'd half the fen. Their woes scarce daring to reveal, To Mercury by night they steal, And beg him to entreat of Jove The direful tyrant to remove. 'No,' says the ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... bignonias, aristolochias, and orchids, the flowers of which, drooping over windows and doorways, shut out the too garish sunlight, while filling the air with fragrance. Among these whirr tiny humming birds, buzz humble bees almost as big, while butterflies bigger than either lazily flout and flap about on soft, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... some fault in the Dutch, making them subject to the slight derision of the nations who hold themselves to be more romantic, and, as it were, more slender. We English, once upon a time, did especially flout the little nation then acting a history that proved worth the writing. It may be no more than a brief perversity that has set a number of our writers to cheer the memory of Charles II. Perhaps, even, it is no more than another rehearsal of that untiring success at the expense ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... him to suppress his past; it was so inseparable from Father Lasse that he was obsessed by a sense of unfaithfulness. But there was no alternative; if he wanted to get on he must adapt himself in everything, in prejudices and opinions alike. But he promised himself to flout the lot of them so soon as ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... horrible unreality; voluble people issuing from a cafe, the queue at theatre doors, Sunday cabfuls of second-rate pleasure-seekers, the bedizened ladies of the pavement, the show in the jewellers' windows—all the familiar sights contributing to flout his own unhappiness, want, and isolation. At the same time, if he be at all after my pattern, he is perhaps supported by a childish satisfaction: this is life at last, he may tell himself, this is the real thing; the bladders ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... he would irritably flout the possibility that she could do aught to materially avert disaster she was wont to protest: "You jes' watch me. I'll find out some way. I be ez knowin' ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... appeared in the harbor of New York. Who knew how many more there were on their voyage here? From that hour France, on the one hand, and England on the other, receded, and the American Government regained its position and its power. . . . Now, shall we flout the Russian Government in every court in Europe for her friendship? Whoever of the representatives of the American people in this House, on this question, turns his back, not only upon his duty, but ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... would have gone yesternight, but, when I should get there, I know no more than a stray dog where to go or from whom to inquire. They would see I am a country fellow. They would shut the doors in my face. But you carry respect with you. No one would dare to flout you. You could find ways and means to know who moves this scheme, how far it is advanced, what chance there is of our defeating it. Go, I beseech ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... the purities, the elegancies, as the commonest so the commendablest phrases of a language. To use them is a grace, to understand them a good, but to gather them a paine to me, though gain to thee. I, but for all that I must not scape without some new flout: now would I were by thee to give thee another, and surely I would give thee bread for cake. Farewell if thou meane well; els fare as ill, as thou wishest ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... dies, Or the frivolous butterfly child of the city, All blind to the glory of earth and of skies? Is it fate, or ill fortune, hath woven about you Strong meshes which ye are too helpless to break? Shall we scornfully wonder, or angrily flout you, Or strive from their torpor ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... you don't! You may flout our beliefs; but wouldn't you like to bolster up your report with "the wife of a clergyman who was present!" It sounds so respectable and sane, doesn't it? No, sir! You ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... own time were not able to enjoy the shout of laughter over his discomfiture which would surely have gone up from Paris and Strasburg and Basel and Zurich. Estienne and Gessner would hardly have felt acute sorrow at a flout put upon Julius Caesar Scaliger. Crooked-tempered as he was, Cardan, compared with Scaliger, was as a rose to a thistle, but there were reasons altogether unconnected with the personalities of the disputants which swayed the balance to Cardan's advantage. The greater part of Scaliger's ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... paced his hall, Now gnaw'd his under, now his upper lip, And coming up close to her, said at last: "Girl, for I see ye scorn my courtesies, Take warning: yonder man is surely dead; And I compel all creatures to my will. Not eat nor drink? And wherefore wail for one, Who put your beauty to this flout and scorn By dressing it in rags? Amazed am I, Beholding how ye butt against my wish, That I forbear you thus: cross me no more. At least put off to please me this poor gown, This silken rag, this beggar-woman's weed: I love that beauty should ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... "there is something in your attitude which I admit puzzles me. I ask you in all honor, I ask you on the hilt of that sword which I know you will never disgrace, why did you thus flout the Lady Catharine Knollys? Why did you scorn her and take up with this woman ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... Whigs whose name you flout, Slip of the tree you fain would fell; Your colleagues own, I cannot doubt, Your plan, George Russell, likes them well, "What will regain," you heard them cry, "That popular praise we once enjoyed?" And instant was your smart reply, "Free Breakfasts ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... only ones which you must break. Remember that a new order of things is beginning for you. Hitherto I have praised your frivolity, because it was opportune and in keeping with the rest of your nature. I thought it feminine for you to play with Fortune, to flout caution, to destroy whole masses of your life and environment. Now, however, there is something that you must always bear in mind, and regard above everything else. You must gradually train yourself—in the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... an emphatic demonstration of the disapproval by the leaders of the people of the acts of the Government. Lawyers must suspend their practice and must resist the power of the Government which has chosen to flout public opinion. Nor may we receive instruction from schools controlled by Government and aided by it. Emptying of the schools will constitute a demonstration of the will of the middle class of India. It is far ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... be the few measures asked in their name; yet they persistently refuse to adopt them. The great employers of labor, the cormorants of competition, know through what hideous injustice they enrich themselves; but speak to them of fair play, and they flout you from their presence. The wealthy corporations owning these street car lines in New York see that their drivers and conductors are kept on the rack from sixteen to eighteen hours every day of the week, including Sundays; but when ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... men old enough to be her father, and loose enough to find her premature airs and graces a fine joke indeed. She ruled them all with her temper and her shrewish will. She would have her way in all things, or there should be no sport with her, and she would sing no songs for them, but would flout them bitterly, and sit in a great chair with her black brows drawn down, and her whole small person ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Again with living green; the spring o' the year Came in with flush of flower and bird-call clear; And Nature, for whom nothing wrought is vain, Out of shed blood caused grass to spring amain, And seemed with tender irony to flout Man's folly and pain when twixt dead spears sprang out The crocus-point and pied the plain with fires More gracious than his beacons; and from pyres Of burnt dead men the asphodel uprose Like fleecy clouds flushed with the morning rose, A holy pall to hide ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... it openly and been repulsed," she replied in a low voice. "But if he could have carried me to some far fortress, how should I flout him there, that is, if I still lived? There, with no price to pay in gold or lands or power, he would have been my master, and I should have been his slave till such time as he wearied of me. That is the fate from ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... two of the clan went to raise Hunter, and get him to fight, but it was no go; though he was not killed, he had had enough for that evening. Oh, I wish you had seen my customers; those who did not belong to the clan, but who had taken part with them, and helped to jeer and flout me, now came and shook me by the hand, wishing me joy, and saying as, how 'I was a brave fellow, and had served the bully right!' As for the clan, they all said Hunter was bound to do me justice; so they made him pay me what he owed for himself, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... of course," he said, after a pause. "Human nature is weak, engagingly weak, Guildea. And you're inclined to flout it. I could understand a certain class of lady—the lion-hunting, the intellectual lady, seeking you. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... which was better, To send it back, or burn the letter. But guessing that it might import, 355 Though nothing else, at least her sport, She open'd it, and read it out, With many a smile and leering flout: Resolv'd to answer it in kind, And thus perform'd ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... hath reach'd thee long ere now, I trow; Whom thou hast met in deadly fight full oft, When France and Spain join'd in the battle field. Beyond the Pyrenean boundary That guards thy land, are forty thousand men: Their unfurl'd pennons flout fair France's sun, And wanton in the breezes of her sky: Impatient halt they there; their foaming steeds, Pawing the huge and rock-built barrier, That bars their further course—they wait for thee: For thee whom France hath injur'd and cast off; For thee, whose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... but one Thoreau, and we should devoutly thank the gods of New England for the precious gift. Thoreau's work lives and will continue to live because, in the first place, the world loves a writer who can flout it and turn his back upon it and yet make good; and again because the books which he gave to the world have many and very high literary and ethical values. They are fresh, original, and stimulating. He drew ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... scullion who formerly served her has gotten himself killed in some way and the man who stepped into his shoes, out of some spite, has refused Teboen's gold. And as for her object—I wonder at you, lord of my heart! What kind of a lover are you that you cannot guess that?" Feigning to flout him, she drew away; then feigning to relent, turned back and laughed it into his ear. "It is a love-token! To hold him to the fair promises he made at its giving, and to remind him of her, and to win her a crown, and to do so many strange wonders that no tongue can number them! Are you not ashamed ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... immortal Gods! ye are still immortal, although no longer ye hover o'er Olympus. The Crescent glitters on your mountain's base, and Crosses spring from out its toppling crags. But in vain the Mufti, and the Patriarch, and the Pope flout at your past traditions. They are married to man's memory by the sweetest chain that ever Fancy wove for Love. The poet is a priest, who does not doubt the inspiration of his oracles; and your shrines are still served by a faithful band, ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... often her eldest boy who held the reins, a bright-eyed, well-built lad, a pupil at the old Grammar-School, where he used the desk at which his father had sat before him. Whatever fault of boyhood showed itself in Harry Morton, he knew not the common temptation to be ashamed of his mother, or to flout her love. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... of the judicious, he had made a happy escape, for the cruelty involved in the lady's methods and the careless flout of the opinion of the sober, decorous world were not indicia of worthy traits; but he was of sensitive fibre, and tingled and winced with the consciousness of the cheap gibe and the finger of scorn. He often said to himself then, however, as now to the friend of ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... is still spread, though not bellied. It hangs limp and loose, giving an occasional flap, so feeble as to show that this proceeds not from any stir in the air, but the mere balancing motion of the vessels. For there is now not enough breeze blowing to flout the long feathers in the tail of the ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... you shall not go!" the Baron exclaimed. "What right have you to the child? None at all! Her Highness wishes to be generous. It pleases you to flout her generosity. Mr. Arnold Greatson, you are a fool! Don't you see that you are a pigmy, who has stolen through the back door into the world where great things are dealt with? You have no place there. You cannot keep the child away from us. You have no influence, no money. You ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I don't. Young sir, caper not too confidently in your coat of many colours! If you flout me once too often I may go after you, as a Mohawk follows a scalp too often flaunted by the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... essence of successful rule in the China of the Twentieth Century was to support the foreign point of view—nominally at least—because foreigners disposed of unlimited monetary resources, and had science on their side. He knew that so long as he did not openly flout foreign opinion by indulging in bare-faced assassinations, he would be supported owing to the international reputation he had established in 1900. Arguing from these premises, his instinct also told him that an appearance ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... ourselves a place apart Behind light words that tease and flout, But oh, the agitated heart Till someone find us really out. 'Tis pity if the case require (Or so we say) that in the end We speak the literal to inspire The understanding of a friend. But so with all, from babes that play ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... perfection, the ardent desire to draw near to God, sometimes takes the form of an unhappy perversion of reason and common sense. The popular soul knows no hesitation when laying its offerings upon the Altar of the Good. It dares not only to flout the principles of patriotism, of family love, and of respect for the power and the dogmas of the established church, but, taking a step further, will even trample underfoot man's deepest organic needs, and actually ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... son Meredith wrote: "Look for the truth in everything, and follow it, and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing flout your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that your understanding wavers whenever you chance to doubt that He leads to good. We grow to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. Do not lose the habit of praying to the unseen Divinity. Prayer for worldly goods is worse ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... heard of nobler atonement for unmitigable surname. He could not help thinking that this Phillida did not look the one to flout a fellow, after the fashion of the only other Phillida he had ever heard of, and then that it was beastly cheek to start thinking of her like that and by her Christian name. But he was of the age and temperament when thoughts will come of contact with ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... of their own ability, or however some might flout to find their errors censured or their pretensions disallowed; whatever improvement may actually have been made, or however fondly we may listen to boasts and felicitations on that topic; it is presumed, that the general ignorance on the subject of grammar, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... boy and girl I left to wait on them, seeing the table set With all supplies myself, and then retired. But such their confidence; their talk so loud And free, I could not help but hear some words That raised suspicion; then I listened close And heard, 'mid gibe and jest, the enterprise That was to flout us; make the Loyalist A cringing slave to sneering rebels; make The British lion gnash his teeth with rage;— The Yankee, hand-on-hip, guffawing loud The while. At once, my British blood was up, Nor had I borne their hated presence ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... you, if you tell me first who was the father of Lagus." This was a jeer at the obscure birth of the king, and all his courtiers were indignant at it as an unpardonable liberty; but Ptolemy said, "If it is not kingly to take a flout, neither is it kingly to give one." And Alexander was more savage than usual in his behaviour to Callisthenes and Clitus. So Porus, when he was taken captive, begged Alexander to use him as a king. And on ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... are its laws pliant to our wills, as the pragmatists do vainly talk. It is a divinely ordered system, which includes man, the roof and crown of things, and Christ, in whom is revealed to us its inner character and meaning. It is not the province of faith either to flout scientific knowledge, or to contaminate the material on which science works by intercalating what M. Le Roy calls 'transhistorical symbols'—myths in fact—which do not become true by being recognised as false, as the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... dyed beard heard such words from the slave-girl, he raged with exceeding rage in fury's last stage and said to the broker, "O most ill-omened of brokers, this day thou hast brought to our market naught save this gibing baggage to flout at all who are therein, one after other, and fleer at them with flyting verse and idle jest?" And he came down from his shop and smote on the face the broker, who took her an angered and carried her away, saying to her, "By ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... driven to rioting and the throwing of bombs. Unless, indeed, the insurrection of the outsiders takes a still graver form, and the Press, which has ceased entirely to be a Party Press in Great Britain, helps some adventurous Prime Minister to flout and set aside the lower House altogether. There is neither much moral nor much physical force behind the House of Commons at the ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... teeth afterwards. "This, then, is what he meant—that insolent one! 'After the fiesta will I send the answer'—so he told that simpering maid who took my letter and the rose. And the answer, then, is my rose and my letter returned, and no word else. Madre de Dios! That he should flout me thus! Now will I tell Jose to kill him—and kill him quickly. For that blue-eyed gringo I hate!" Then she flung herself across her bed ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... of us voyagers durst flout it. Did they not show us the identical spot where the idol fell? We descended into the hollow, now verdant. Questionless, Keevi himself would have vouched for the truth of the miracle, had he not been unfortunately dumb. But by far the most cogent, and pointed ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... M., "Dukes—Earls! What should I care for them? These worldly ranks I scorn and flout!" "Of course," the agent said, ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... perfection of deferential courtesy. Once the secretary came in—a young man rather like himself—and they talked together in a foreign language that was not French nor German; then the secretary bowed and retired.... We were alone.... There can be no sort of doubt that unless I was prepared to flout the wisdom of the ages, I ought to have refused his suggestion. But is not the wisdom of the ages a medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I was prepared to flout it, as in our highest and our lowest moments we often are. Moreover, how many women in ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... not flout him," says Monica, indignantly. "But what am I to do? am I to make Aunt Priscilla wretched, then, because of him, and break her poor ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... enjoying a vogue of its own in the public prints. Furthermore, Lady Diantha Mainwaring was moderately the talk of the town, in those prim, remotely ante-bellum days—thanks to high spirits and a whimsical tendency to flout the late Victorian proprieties; something which, however, had yet to lead her into any prank perilous to ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... with steel and gold, And plumes that flout the sky, I 'll wear a soul of hardier mould, And thoughts that sweep as high. For scarf athwart my corslet cast, With her fair name y-wove; I 'll have her pictured in my breast, The ladye that ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... withdrew to Avignon. The district of Venaissin, still belonging at that time to the pope and being governed by a vice-legate, was considered as foreign territory. There he found his daughter, Madame d'Urban, who did all she could to induce him to stay with her; but to do so would have been to flout Louis XIV's orders too publicly, and the marquis was afraid to remain so much in evidence lest evil should befall him; he accordingly retired to the little village of l'Isle, built in a charming spot near the fountain of Vaucluse; there he was lost sight ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... man myself," he said, "I come pretty nigh knowin' what I'm talkin' about. Kun'l Gid Ward can never flout and jeer that the man that has married his sister was nothin' but a prop'ty-hunter. I'm knowin' to it that Cap'n Sproul has got thutty thousand in vessel prop'ty of his own, 'sides what his own uncle Jerry here left to him. Gid ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... interest Margret in 'the childher,' or bidding young Jack be on his best behaviour before the Sunday guest. The young folk didn't like the derision in Margret's pale eyes, and kept out of her way as much as possible, since they feared their mother too much to flout her openly, as they were ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... remarkable. No animal that man has broken to his use is keener to recognize a master and flout a coward than the horse. No coward has ever been able to do anything ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... the man's ardor somewhat. For a full minute he stood silent eyeing Enoch from under his shaggy brows. "Would you dare flout me to ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... withering head reclined With envy and despair! One common fate we both must prove; You die with envy, I with love.' 30 'Spare your comparisons,' replied An angry rose, who grew beside. 'Of all mankind, you should not flout us; What can a poet do without us! In every love-song roses bloom; We lend you colour and perfume. Does it to Chloe's charms conduce, To found her praise on our abuse? Must we, to flatter her, be made To wither, envy, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... most foolish myself, and one whom Democritus may not only laugh at but flout, if I go one foot further in the discovery of the follies and madnesses of the common people. I'll betake me to them that carry the reputation of wise men and hunt after that golden bough, as says the proverb. Among whom the grammarians ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... to offer sacrifice; Three tongues prefer strange orisons on high; Three gaudy standards flout the pale blue skies;[64] The shouts are France, Spain, Albion, Victory! The Foe, the Victim, and the fond Ally That fights for all, but ever fights in vain,[65] Are met—as if at home they could not die— To feed the crow ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... is this that rises to my touch, So like a cushion? Can it be a cabbage? It is, it is that deeply injured flower, Which boys do flout us with;—but yet I love thee, Thou giant rose, wrapped in a green surtout. Doubtless in Eden thou didst blush as bright As these, thy puny brethren; and thy breath Sweetened the fragrance of her spicy air; ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... opposite to his own swinging gate, looked to all the world as though it were an appendage of the Vicarage. A cottage built there would have been offensive; but a staring brick Methodist chapel, with the word Salem inserted in large letters over the door, would, as he was aware, flout him every time he left or entered his garden. He had always been specially careful to avoid any semblance of a quarrel with the Methodist minister, and had in every way shown his willingness to regard Mr. Puddleham's flock as being ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... time a grimy sweep Was creeping down the street, When Quartern Loaf, the biker's boy, Below he chanced to meet: "Sweep!" sneered the baker: and the sweep Gave Puff a sooty flout; But Puff-crumb did not deal in soot, So turned his face about; Nor did he care to soundly drub The imp of dirty flues: "Go change your clothes!" said he, "and then "I'll thrash you when you choose! "It will not do for me ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... hour of that people's decay and doom hast struck. On this anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let us remember and vow never to forget that when it becomes general or popular among us, as it has become common, to flout at the Declaration and its principles; whenever the nation commits itself to courses which for the sake of consistency and respectability invite and compel its disparagement; when our politics does not match our poetry and cannot be sung; when Washington ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... excessively urbane to Urquhart when they met, and himself opened the topic of the Norwegian jaunt. Urquhart took up the ball. "I think you might come. Your wife and boy will love it, and you'll kindle at their joy. 'They for life only, you for life in them,' to flout the bard. Besides, you are not a fogey, if I'm not. I believe our ages tally. You shall climb mountains with me, Macartney, and improve the muscles of your calves. You don't fish, I think. Nor do I. I thought I should catch ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... any one do her disdain, Her father is ready with might and with main To prove she is come of noble degree, Therefore let none flout ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... has no soul of his own." The Devil he bowed his head on his breast and rumbled deep and low: — "I'm all o'er-sib to Adam's breed that I should bid him go. Yet close we lie, and deep we lie, and if I gave him place, My gentlemen that are so proud would flout me to my face; They'd call my house a common stews and me a careless host, And — I would not anger my gentlemen for the sake of a shiftless ghost." The Devil he looked at the mangled Soul that prayed to feel the flame, And he thought of Holy Charity, but he thought of his ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... never heard Thalberg, have the impertinence to flout him, to make merry at his fantasias. Just compare the Don Juan of Liszt and the Don Juan of Thalberg! See which is the more musical, the more pianistic. Liszt, after running through the gamut of operatic extravagance, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... destroy his admiration for her had directly the opposite effect. He swore, and he swore vengeance; but he swore, too, that there was no woman in the East so worth a prince's while as this one, who dared flout him with her riding-whip before ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... crowded dinners, and their vulgar obsequiousness at table. They swill more than they should and would like to swill more than they do, they spoil the wine with unwelcome and untimely disquisitions, and they cannot carry their liquor. The ordinary people who are present naturally flout them, and are revolted by the ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... pomp of early leaves, and thrilling lays, And ceaseless chime of song (that never cloys, Altho' the winds be redolent of praise.) Wakes not in man that stupor of amaze, Bird, beast, and plant, in universal choir, Pay to Almighty in a thousand ways, That sterner reason's votaries would flout, Giving their tardy homage in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... aggressive; in his nature he was wholly unpartisan, and full of lenient charity; and I suspect that his kindly regard of the world, although returned with kindly liking, cost him something of that respect for sturdiness and force which men feel for writers who flout them as fools in the main. Like Scott, he belonged to the idealists, and not to the realists, whom our generation affects. Both writers stimulate the longing for something better. Their creed was short: "Love God and honor the King." It is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and they were good landlords, good masters blithely followed to the wars. Sing an old battle of Normandy, Picardy, Gascony, and you celebrate deeds of theirs. At home they were vexatious neighbours to a town of burghers claiming privileges: nor was it unreasonable that the Earl should flout the pretensions of the town to read things for themselves, documents, titleships, rights, and the rest. As well might the flat plain boast of seeing as far as the pillar. Earl and town fought the fight of Barons and Commons ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and scout her, But true to her colours are WE, The learned may mock her and flout her, But surely we'll rally about her, In the College that stands by ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... What, man! I know them, yea, And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple, Scambling, out-facing, fashion-monging boys, That lie and cog and flout, deprave and slander, Go antickly, show outward hideousness, And speak off half a dozen dangerous words, How they might hurt their enemies, if they durst; And this ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... to-morrow. They go back to Rotterdam, where they expect to find Starr's aunt, and, they hope, a skipper for the motor-boat. Cousin Helen asked if I could recommend a suitable man; but even if I knew one, I should not make it easier for her to flout the ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... we fed, Like witless fools, with fostering bread, Have impiously come to this— They've stolen the Acropolis, With bolts and bars our orders flout And shut ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... completely master the Aurora and its kindred books. And as our schoolboys laugh and jeer at the outlandish sounds of Greek and Latin and German, till they have learned to read and love the great authors who have written in those languages, so WESLEY, and SOUTHEY, and even HALLAM himself, jest and flout and call names at Jacob Behmen, because they have not taken the trouble to learn his language, to master his mind, and to drink in his spirit. At the same time, and after all that has been said about Behmen's barbarous style, Bishop Martensen tells us how the readers of SCHELLING ...
— Jacob Behmen - an appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... to us to sort out for ourselves. In this new instance, to work off a piece of strictly professional criticism, it is clear that both prologue and epilogue are much too protracted. It is a sound dramatic canon, which not even our most brilliant chartered libertine of stage-land can flout with impunity, not to keep your audience in too long a suspense while preparing your salient theme, nor, after quickening their interest and firing their imagination, to chill with the obvious ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... spring at once from schoolroom's form. Instead of all this angry storm, Another might have thanked you well For saving prey from that grim cell, That hollowed den 'neath journals great, Where editors who poets flout With their demoniac laughter shout. And I have scolded you! What fate For charming dwarfs who never meant To anger Hercules! And I Have frightened you!—My chair I sent Back to the wall, and then let fly A shower of words the envious use— "Get out," I said, with ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... husband, my wife, impatient of that drooping sickness and faint-fits of a pining languishment, should abandon and prostitute herself to the embraces of another man, and not only then not help and assist me in my extremity and need, but withal flout at and make sport of that my grievous distress and calamity; or peradventure, which is worse, embezzle my goods and steal from me, as I have seen it oftentimes befall unto the lot of many other men, it were enough to undo me utterly, to fill brimful the cup of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... In laughter spasms ye reel, or shout applause, Music surceased. Like rocks your fathers sat; In every song they knew some mystery lay, Mystery of man or nature. Greater God Is none than Thor, whom, witless, thus ye flout. That giant knew his greatness, and, at morn, While vexed at failure through the gates he passed, Addressed him reverent: 'Lift thy head, great Thor! Disguised thou cam'st; not less we knew thee well: Brave battle fought'st ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum and water, and attempts to enter into conversation with the company about politics and business; the company flout him or give him the cold shoulder, or perhaps complain to the landlord, who comes and asks him what business he has in the parlour, telling him if he wants to drink to go into the tap- room, and perhaps collars him and kicks him out, provided he refuses to move." With respect ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... came, And moaned, "Why did you flout her? Well could I do without her! For both our burdens ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... consulted the Warden when a cousin had blundered into the hands of the police, embarrassing that flustered official with torrents of half intelligible speech, the purport of which generally was to flout the proceedings with evidence of indubitable alibi? All this he translated to his countrymen as proof of personal influence with court authorities, and, what was more to the point, made them pay ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... to those who misname themselves "evangelical" and flout their new-found liberty: Have you put down the tyranny of the Pope and obtained liberty in Christ through the Anabaptists and other fanatics? Or have you obtained your freedom from us who preach faith in Christ Jesus? If there ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... still hath been this measure, To mix profit with your pleasure; And not as some, whose throats their envy failing, Cry hoarsely, All he writes is railing: And when his plays come forth, think they can flout them, With saying, he was a year about them. To this there needs no lie, but this his creature, Which was two months since no feature; And though he dares give them five lives to mend it, 'Tis known, five weeks fully penn'd it, From ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... late," she cried. "I will show you. I will prove to you that my love has grown, that it is greater to me than my class and all that is dearest to me. All that is dearest to the bourgeoisie I will flout. I am no longer afraid of life. I will leave my father and mother, and let my name become a by-word with my friends. I will come to you here and now, in free love if you will, and I will be proud and glad to be with you. If I have been ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... home to any man. I knew two noblemen, of the west part of England, whereof the one was given to scoff, but kept ever royal cheer in his house; the other would ask of those that had been at the other's table, "Tell truly, was there never a flout or dry blow given?" To which the guest would answer, "Such and such a thing passed." The lord would say, "I thought he would mar a good dinner." Discretion of speech is more than eloquence; and to speak agreeably to him with whom ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... spurred them on, And their own prowess. Crashed together these Like thunderclouds outlightening, thrilling the air. With shattering trumpet-challenge, when the blasts Are locked in frenzied wrestle, with mad breath Rending the clouds, when Zeus is wroth with men Who travail with iniquity, and flout His law. So grappled they, as spear with spear Clashed, shield with shield, and ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... and there together range Sous-lieutenants and cent-gardes (strange Way these soldier-chaps make change), Mixed with black-eyed Polish dames, With unpronounceable awful names; Laces tremble and ribbons flout, Coachmen wrangle and gendarmes shout— Bless us! what is the row about? Ah! here comes Rosy's new turnout! Smart! You bet your life 'twas that! Nifty! (short for magnificat). Mulberry panels,—heraldic spread,— Ebony wheels ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... same as he done with everything else. And nothing was a trouble. For a fortnight the man never slept, save a nod now and again in the house on wheels, where he dwelt in the valley among the ewes. And old shepherds, with all the will to flout him, was tongue-tied afore the man, because of his excellent skill and ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... caught." But little it availed, for wings could not outstrip fear. The one went under, and the other, flying, turned his breast upward. Not otherwise the wild duck on a sudden dives when the falcon comes close, and he returns up vexed and baffled. Calcabrina, enraged at the flout, kept flying behind him, desirous that the sinner should escape, that he might have a scuffle; and when the barrator had disappeared he turned his talons upon his companion, and grappled with him above the ditch. But the other was indeed a sparrowhawk full ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... in one of his weaker petulant moods: it left on the embarrassed spectators no impression of outraged dignity, but rather of the over-weening self-assertion of an autocrat who could push on hostile preparations, and yet flout the ambassador of the Power that took reasonable precautions in return. The slight offered to our ambassador, though hotly resented in Britain, had no direct effect on the negotiations, as the First Consul soon ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... and its brooding solitude with religious veneration. Then he recalled the miraculous stories with which his mother used to lull him to sleep—the great miracle wrought upon these waters by a servant of God to flout the hardened sinners. Saint Raymond of Penafort, a virtuous and austere monk, became indignant with King Jaime of Majorca who was basely enamored of a certain lady, Dona Berenguela, and who remained deaf to holy counsels. The friar determined ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... kind a man may be with fools, And nerve them but to flout him more; And Mischief oft may bring thee peace, When ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... your leave) was extempore. He were as good have let me had the best part, for I'll be revenged on him to the uttermost, in this person of Will Summer, which I have put on to play the prologue, and mean not to put it off till the play be done. I'll sit as a chorus, and flout the actors and him at the end of every scene. I know they will not interrupt me, for fear of marring of all; but look to your cues, my masters, for I intend to play the knave in cue, and put you besides all your parts, if you take not the better heed. Actors, you rogues, come away; clear ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... the judicious, he had made a happy escape, for the cruelty involved in the lady's methods and the careless flout of the opinion of the sober, decorous world were not indicia of worthy traits; but he was of sensitive fibre, and tingled and winced with the consciousness of the cheap gibe and the finger of scorn. He often said to himself then, however, as now to the friend of his inmost thought, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... me and you mock me!" he cried, and made her laughter but part of a gay duet. "I know I have gone too fast, have said things I should have waited to say; but, ah! remember the small chance I have against the others who can see you when they like. Don't flout me because I try to make the most of a ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... go "stoney")— Of the much derided Mob. Yes, the Proletariat "Bob" (With the Guinea of the Nob) must aid the Sons of Light. Gath and Askelon, you see, can give Me, L.S.D. All true Egoists love those pregnant letters Mystic Three! Flout Philistia with great glee, fair and free, But agree To take its "tin," Though with a grin ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... home-town is the glad town Where something real abides; 'Tis not the money-mad town That all its spirit hides. Though strangers scoff and flout it And even jeer its name, It has a charm about it No ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... the Caucus for its heat, Its hate—its absence of the Light and Sweet, So jays might flout the vulture. Partisan bitterness and purblind haste? Come, view the haunts of dilettante ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... of sight-seeing," exclaimed Monsieur Guillaume—"a headache. And is it so very amusing to see in a picture what you can see any day in your own street? Don't talk to me of your artists! Like writers, they are a starveling crew. Why the devil need they choose my house to flout it in ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... vast industrial mill. Tressady knew a good many of them by sight—sullen, quick-eyed folk, who buy their "greeners" at the docks, and work them day and night at any time of pressure; whose workshops are still flaring at two o'clock in the morning, and alive again by the winter dawn; who fight and flout the law by a hundred arts, and yet, brutal and shifty as many of them are, have a curious way of winning the Gentile inspector's sympathy, even while he fines and harasses them, so clearly are they and their "hands" alike ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... room, free from all invasion except of her own thoughts. The quicker flow of blood that came with awaking, the expanding thrill of physical strength and buoyancy of life renewed, brought with it the moral courage which morning often brings to flout the compromises of the confusion of the evening's weariness. The inspiriting, cool air of night electrified by the sun cleared her vision. She saw all the pictures on the slate of yesterday and their message plainly, as something that could not be erased by any Buddhistic ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... to be a gentleman, at the least. His father's an honest man, a worshipful fishmonger, and so forth; and now does he creep and wriggle into acquaintance with all the brave gallants about the town, such as my guest is (O, my guest is a fine man!), and they flout him invincibly. He useth every day to a merchant's house where I serve water, one master Kitely's, in the Old Jewry; and here's the jest, he is in love with my master's sister, Mrs. Bridget, and calls her mistress; and there he will sit you ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... my embassy, so palter and juggle with my faith, so flout me in the eyes of Christendom, I would—I would—" he paused, and relaxed his hold of the duke, and added, with an altered voice—"I would leave his wife and his lemans, and yon things of silk, whom ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... slave; drink!" cried Cleopatra, half rising from her seat and flashing a fierce look on his white face. "By Serapis! so surely as I yet shall sit in the Capitol at Rome, if thou dost thus flout the Lord Antony, I'll have thee scourged to the bones, and the red wine poured upon thy open wounds to heal them! Ah! at length thou drinkest! Why, what is it, good Eudosius? art sick? Surely, then, this ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... you lost to the good cause of your country, and to the altars of her gods; for who can love his country, and deny the gods who made and preserve it? But then who am I to condemn? When I see the gods to hurl thunderbolts upon those who flout them, it will be time enough for us mortals to assume the robes of judgment. I will hope that farther thought will reclaim you from ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... me rouse your phlegmatic blood, my Britons; sit down, with your thumbs in your mouths, my masters, and allow a coterie to flout you at will, whilst the Frenchmen, the Germans, the Russians alternately laugh at and pity you. Pity you, the sons of the men who chased their fathers half over Europe at the point of the blood-red bayonet! Have you grown tame, have you waxed fat ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... Of me and fragrancy and fair!" A Maiden-blush, which heard him, said, With face unwontedly flushed red. "Tell me, for what committed wrong Am I the metaphor of song? I would you could write rhymes without me, Nor in your ecstacies so flout me. In every ditty must we bloom? Can't you find elsewhere some perfume? Oh! does it add to Chloe's sweetness To visit and compare my meetness? And, to enhance her face, must mine Be made to ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... the promise of the King... It is the King's authority they flout... They arrogate to themselves the whole sovereignty in Brittany. The King has dissolved them... These insolent nobles defying ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... my son, come easily, when he That speaks is wise, and speaks but for the right. Else come they never! Swift are thine, and bright As though with thought, yet have no thought at all Lo this new God, whom thou dost flout withal, I cannot speak the greatness wherewith He In Hellas shall be great! Two spirits there be, Young Prince, that in man's world are first of worth. Demeter one is named; she is the Earth— Call her which name thou ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... any one here her birth doe disdaine, Her father is ready, with might and with maine, To proove shee is come of noble degree: Therfore never flout att ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... cry, Of lips that lie and flout, I saw the slow sun dim and die And the slim dusk slip out . . . Life held no ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... he imperturbably. "This lad is your betrothed. He is at heart a good lad, an honourable and honest lad—at times haply over-honest and over-honourable; but let that be. To please a whim, a caprice, you set yourself to flout him, as is the way of your sex when you behold a man your utter slave. From this—being all unversed in the obliquity of woman—he conceives, poor boy, that he no longer finds favour in your eyes, and to win back this, the only thing that in the world he values, ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... should make me amends in public for the foul words that knave uttered. That they should both sue to me for pardon: that it should be showed to the world what manner of man it is that they have dared to flout.' ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... inner room, with face flushed, brow dark and fretted with indignation, lips pouting, breast heaving, and her eyes overflowing with tears, in bounded his sister, Seraphine Duchatel, exclaiming: "And is this the creature that has stood between me and Claude? and brought here, too, to flout me to my face! I'll not endure it;" and she burst into a fresh torrent ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... its own in the public prints. Furthermore, Lady Diantha Mainwaring was moderately the talk of the town, in those prim, remotely ante-bellum days—thanks to high spirits and a whimsical tendency to flout the late Victorian proprieties; something which, however, had yet to lead her into any prank perilous to ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... stoves at such another price, what does it profit him, and other such-like illuminating and uplifting problems, warranted to make any school-child wiser than Solomon. It is a beautiful system; only, God, who is no respecter of systems, every now and then delights to flout it by making him a dunce like Peter Champneys, to be the torment of school-teachers—and the delight of the angels of the ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... Then must I find another avenger; Sigurd shall not live long to flout at me and thee! (Clenching her hands in convulsive rage.) With her—that simpleton—with her mayhap he is even now sitting alone, dallying, and laughing at us; speaking of the bitter wrong that was done me when in thy stead ...
— The Vikings of Helgeland - The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. • Henrik Ibsen
... tender or the fierce and bright, Youth's rosy blush or Passion's pearly bite? You hardly know perhaps; but Chloe knows, And pours you out the necessary dose, Meticulously measuring to scale, The cup of Circe or the Holy Grail— An actress she at home in every role, Can flout or flatter, bully or cajole, And on occasion by a stretch of art Can even speak the language of the heart, Can lisp and sigh and make confused replies, With baby lips and complicated eyes, Indifferently apt to weep or wink, Primly pursue, provocatively shrink, ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... her, said at last: "Girl, for I see ye scorn my courtesies, Take warning: yonder man is surely dead; And I compel all creatures to my will. Not eat nor drink? And wherefore wail for one, Who put your beauty to this flout and scorn By dressing it in rags? Amazed am I, Beholding how ye butt against my wish, That I forbear you thus: cross me no more. At least put off to please me this poor gown, This silken rag, this beggar-woman's weed: I love that beauty should go beautifully: For see ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... enterprise, persisted like themselves in the same obstinate belief of the same 'cunningly devised' frauds; and though they had many accomplices in their singular conspiracy, had the equally singular fortune to free themselves and their coadjutors flout all transient weakness towards their cause and treachery towards one another; and, lastly, that these men, having, amidst all their ignorance, originality enough to invent the most pure and sublime system of morality which the world has ever ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... your heads doth show, Yet homeless[FN237] am I in your land, I trow. Make drink your usance in my company And flout the time that languishing doth go. Camphor itself to me doth testify And in my presence owns me white as snow. So make me in your morning a delight And set me in your houses, high and low; So shall we quaff the cups in ease and cheer, In endless joyance, ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... her teeth afterwards. "This, then, is what he meant—that insolent one! 'After the fiesta will I send the answer'—so he told that simpering maid who took my letter and the rose. And the answer, then, is my rose and my letter returned, and no word else. Madre de Dios! That he should flout me thus! Now will I tell Jose to kill him—and kill him quickly. For that blue-eyed gringo I hate!" Then she flung herself across her bed ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... airily, as eerily, They wheel about and whirl, They jeer at me, they fleer at me, They flout me as they swirl! As whirling fast or swaying slow, Reeling, wheeling, to and fro, Around, around the corpse they go, They chill me with their chants! These be neither men nor mists— Hearken ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... which you must break. Remember that a new order of things is beginning for you. Hitherto I have praised your frivolity, because it was opportune and in keeping with the rest of your nature. I thought it feminine for you to play with Fortune, to flout caution, to destroy whole masses of your life and environment. Now, however, there is something that you must always bear in mind, and regard above everything else. You must gradually train yourself—in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... voice of this queer, kindly, satiric personality. London generally falls into the arms of those who flout her; and Mariette, with his militant Catholicism, and his contempt for our governing ideals, became the fashion. As for Anderson, the contact with English Ministers and men of affairs had but carried ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "Look for the truth in everything, and follow it, and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing flout your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that your understanding wavers whenever you chance to doubt that He leads to good. We grow to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. Do not lose the habit ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... was obsessed by a sense of unfaithfulness. But there was no alternative; if he wanted to get on he must adapt himself in everything, in prejudices and opinions alike. But he promised himself to flout the lot of them so soon ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... it would, escape its distinctive name, and, since Greece and Judea, no name has the same worth and honor among men. We Americans may flout England a hundred times. We may oppose her opinions with reason, we may think her views unsound, her policy unwise; but from what country would the most American of Americans prefer to have derived the characteristic impulse of American development and civilization rather than England? ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser
... in the eyes, caught him by the ear, and with a twist made him wince, pushed him on the shoulders and made his knees bend. Then he released him with a flout of contempt. ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... th' hill-fowk wander yeer by yeer, An' they toss their heeads an' flout me, when they see me ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... cried, without an oath—no Yordas ever used an oath except in playful moments—"fool! what fear you? There hangs my respected father's chain. Ah, he was something like a man! Had I ever dared to flout him so, he would have ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... know: there is a Charm about The quiet State of Golf, tho' fools may flout, That with its magic has unlock'd the Door Of ...
— The Golfer's Rubaiyat • H. W. Boynton
... may flout me. One thing's sure enough; 'tis neither frost, 30 No, nor fire, shall freeze or burn from out me Thanks for truth—tho' falsehood, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... yours, dear, utterly; and nothing you give me would have that sense: I know you too well to think it. But in the face of the present fashion (and to flout it), which expects the lover to give in this sort, and the beloved to show herself a dazzling captive, let me cherish my ritual of opposition which would have no meaning if we were in a world of ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... heart is full of rage, and bitterness, and despair! Give me time for this repentance which you say is so needful—time to lure back long since banished hope, and peace, and faith! Poh!—you but flout me with words without meaning. I am unfit, you say, for the presence of men, but quite fit for that of God, before whom you are about to arrogantly cast me! Be it so—my deeds are upon my head! It is at least not my fault that I am hurled to judgment before ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... was marred by a spirit which prompted—not generally, but unfortunately not uncommonly—the enforcement of punishments and orders calculated, if not intended to humiliate Indians as a race, to cause unwarranted inconvenience amounting on occasions to injustice, and to flout the standards of propriety and humanity, which the inhabitants not only of India in particular but of the civilised world in general have a right to demand of those set in authority over them. It is a matter for regret that, notwithstanding ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... is said to be a jealous mistress, but literature is a young lady who likes to be loved for herself alone, and thinks permission to adore is sufficient reward for her votary. Common-sense told Philip that the jealous mistress would flout him and land him in failure if he gave her a half-hearted service; but the other young lady, the Helen of the professions, was always beckoning him and alluring him by the most subtle arts, occupying all his hours with meditations on her grace and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and elderly—one who is not suffering from a surfeit of love, and one whose head has not been turned by flattery. "Young women," says the philosopher, "demand attention as their right and often flout the giver; whereas old women are ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... rider is thought to be Judas Iscariot. In other parts of France the wild huntsman is known as Harlequin or Henequin, and in some parts of Brittany he is "Herod in pursuit of the Holy Innocents." (Alas, that no such Herod visits London! How welcome would he be, were he only to flout a few of the brawling brats who, allowed to go anywhere they please, make an inferno of every road they choose to ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... book aside. Likewise he was fond of music, and could accompany himself on the piano as he sang the love songs of his friend A— or gipsy songs or themes from operas; but he had no love for serious music, and would frankly flout received opinion by declaring that, whereas Beethoven's sonatas wearied him and sent him to sleep, his ideal of beauty was "Do not wake me, youth" as Semenoff sang it, or "Not one" as the gipsy Taninsha rendered that ditty. His nature was essentially one of those which follow public opinion concerning ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... To keep my heart hard and my knees unworn. Enough you have of jester, player, priest: I as the skeleton attend your feast, In the mad revelry to make a lull With shaken finger and with bobbing skull. However you my services may flout, Philosophy disdain and reason doubt, I mean to hold in customary state, My dismal revelry and celebrate My yearly rite until the crack o' doom, Ignore the cheerful season's warmth and bloom And cultivate ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... fled: Till one more bold advanc'd his head, And saw the monarch of the flood Lying half smothered in the mud. He calls the croaking race around: "A wooden king!" the banks resound. Fear once remov'd they swim about him, And gibe and jeer and mock and flout him; And messengers to Jove depute, Effectively to grant their suit. A hungry stork he sent them then, Who soon had swallow'd half the fen. Their woes scarce daring to reveal, To Mercury by night they steal, And beg him to entreat of Jove The direful tyrant to remove. 'No,' ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... rather uncanny, under the street lamp there, this usually rather quiet man. 'And that,' he said at length, 'that's only half the story. The cream of it is this: the way I myself felt, sitting there among all those soft, easily lived people. That's the cream of it. To flout them, to sting them, to laugh at them, to know you had more courage than all of them put together, you who were once so afraid of them! To feel that—even if they knew it was about yourself you were talking—that even then they were afraid of you, and would ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... near thee if he didn't," answered Dickon. "Birds is rare choosers an' a robin can flout a body worse than a man. See, he's making up to thee now. 'Cannot tha' see ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... play cards of a Sunday, nor ever play high. And my Aura must be deaf to rakish young beaux and their compliments. They never mean well by poor pretty maids. If you believe them, they will only mock, flout, and jeer you in the end. And if the young baronet should seek converse with you, promise me, oh, promise me, Aurelia, to grant him no favour, no, not so much as to hand him a flower, or stand chatting ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself—and they talked together in a foreign language that was not French nor German; then the secretary bowed and retired.... We were alone.... There can be no sort of doubt that unless I was prepared to flout the wisdom of the ages, I ought to have refused his suggestion. But is not the wisdom of the ages a medicine for majorities? And, indeed, I was prepared to flout it, as in our highest and our lowest moments we often are. Moreover, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... all the world throughout That all's but vanity, Her pleasures doe but flout With ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... frocks Do flout the sonsy clover; The humble bee Consorts wi' me And hails me for ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... assert that the dramatist is also handicapped by the necessity for rigid economy in the use of material. This is not so. Rigid economy in the use of material is equally advisable in every form of art. If it is a necessity, it is a necessity which all artists flout from time to time, and occasionally with gorgeous results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto not been less guilty of flouting it than the ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... she had no other recourse, and advised her to see her husband. She said that it was hopeless and she expressed a bitter opinion of the law. It seemed harsher than the Church, especially harsh to those who did not flout its authority. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... through the night! God's mercy! I even ventured to dream my charms had pierced the dull armor of your cold English heart, yet here you merely stand and laugh at me,—would even flee my presence as though pestilence were upon my breath. Why, I wonder? am I not also fair? Why then flout me thus disdainfully? Naladi has not been accustomed to such harsh treatment at the hands ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... thy withering head reclined With envy and despair! One common fate we both must prove; You die with envy, I with love.' 30 'Spare your comparisons,' replied An angry rose, who grew beside. 'Of all mankind, you should not flout us; What can a poet do without us! In every love-song roses bloom; We lend you colour and perfume. Does it to Chloe's charms conduce, To found her praise on our abuse? Must we, to flatter her, be made To wither, envy, pine ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... the circle - they will square it Some fine day; Then the little pigs they're teaching For to fly; And the niggers they'll be bleaching By-and-by! Each newly joined aspirant To the clan Must repudiate the tyrant Known as Man; They mock at him and flout him, For they do not care about him, And they're "going to do without him" ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... meet learned people. I would go, I would have gone yesternight, but, when I should get there, I know no more than a stray dog where to go or from whom to inquire. They would see I am a country fellow. They would shut the doors in my face. But you carry respect with you. No one would dare to flout you. You could find ways and means to know who moves this scheme, how far it is advanced, what chance there is of our defeating it. Go, I beseech ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... and ten, the psalmist saith, And half my course is well-nigh run; I've had my flout at dusty death, I've had my whack of feast and fun. I've mocked at those who prate and preach; I've laughed with any man alive; But now with sobered heart I reach The Great Divide ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... rather lumbering conveyance. The weather was not promising, but it proved a good day for the mediaeval Pompeii; a gray, melancholy, moist, but rainless, or almost rainless day, with nothing in the sky to flout, as the poet says, the dejected and pulverized past. The drive itself was charming; for there is an inexhaustible sweetness in the gray-green landscape of Provence. It is never absolutely flat, and yet is never ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... as the advanced Whigs were already beginning to be called, did not conceal their lack of respect for the Upper House, and used revolutionary threats against it as a relic of mediaevalism which should no longer be tolerated in a free state. But the time had passed when the peers could flout an aroused nation. When the Third Reform Bill was ready for passage, the ministers secured the King's promise to frustrate the opposition of the Lords by filling up the House with new peers created expressly to vote for reform. The ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... so sure about that. You never asked him to reveal himself. You gave him no reason to suppose you would do otherwise than scorn and flout him, let him be who he might. It is different now. If it is Hugh Ingelow, you will ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
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