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More "Insolent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... money, erecting batteries, and raising and arming men at their leisure; above all, they acquired a prestige, and accustomed men's minds to the thought of disunion, not only as possible, but actual. They began to grow insolent, and, while compelling absolute submission to their rebellious usurpation at home, decried any exercise of legitimate authority on the part of the General Government as Coercion,—a new term, by which it was sought ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... head to foot. I had said this bold and insolent thing to her face, and she still bade ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... trespass, and next day, in honour of a holiday, treats them to a gallon of vodka, and they drink and shout 'Hurrah!' and when they are drunk bow down to his feet. A change of life for the better, and being well-fed and idle develop in a Russian the most insolent self-conceit. Nikolay Ivanovitch, who at one time in the government office was afraid to have any views of his own, now could say nothing that was not gospel truth, and uttered such truths in the tone of a prime minister. 'Education is essential, ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... "You insolent pup," panted Roger, "do you want any more?" Then he saw that Aubrey was really hurt. With horror he observed a trickle of blood run down the side of the ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... of the Champs Elysees, where Saturday is the favorite day, makes on this particular Saturday its largest receipts in the year; the Jardin Mabille is packed; the very hackney-coachmen wear the independent, half-insolent look that they have had since morning and will have till the evening of the next day—unfailing sign in Paris that some great spectacle is impending; milliners and dressmakers are out of their wits; the world has gone mad. The restaurant-waiters and the barbers of the Boulevard may condescend, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... said the lad hastily. "He came to worry me with an absurd request, and—and when I ridiculed it, he burst out laughing in a rude, insolent way." ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... stretching his proud neck, squealing every now and then in the most pert fashionable voice and flaunting his great supercilious dandified tail. Don't let us be too angry, my dear, with the useless, haughty, insolent creature, because he despises us. SOMETHING is there about Peacock that we don't possess. Strain your neck ever so, you can't make it as long or as blue as his—cock your tail as much as you please, and ...
— The Second Funeral of Napoleon • William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA "Michael Angelo Titmarch")
... of 1877 there appeared a version of some insolent lines addressed by "A Russian Poet to the Empress of India." To these the first of the two following sonnets was designed to serve by way of counterblast. The writer will scarcely be suspected of royalism or imperialism; but it seemed to him ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... men it would have the seal of divine authority, but as it opens a door to the FOOLISH, the WICKED, and the IMPROPER, it hath in it the nature of oppression. Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... whiff of overripe peaches." These "spice-boxes," however, Huysmans continues, are more seductive when their perfume is filtered through the garments. "The appeal of the balsam of their arms is then less insolent, less cynical, than at the ball where they are more naked, but it more easily uncages the animal in man. Various as the color of the hair, the odor of the armpit is infinitely divisible; its gamut covers the whole ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... anxious to visit, I found I could not penetrate to the Coteau de Prairie from that quarter, and no resource was left to me but to return, or go about three hundred miles higher up, where I was aware I should meet a pretty insolent set of fellows amongst the Yanktons and Tetons. The Sioux, who had committed pretty bad Indian murders amongst the Chippewas, were in great numbers about Lac qui Parle, and there was no avoiding them. However, it ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... and a hiss of "Papist! papist!" greeted him as he passed. His hand went to the hilt of his dagger, but the fellows flourished their oaken cudgels within an inch of his nose; so he contented himself with a counter hiss of "Insolent dogs!" ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... indignant at this invasion of the Savoy territory, the duchess sent the Count de Gruyere to Berne to remonstrate against the infraction of the still existing alliance with her house. A strange reception was accorded him. No penitence for the unwarranted attack upon the Savoy fortresses, but an insolent ultimatum, declaring instant war unless she immediately recalled Count Romont from his command in the Flemish provinces, and herself declared war upon Duke Charles. No more Lombard soldiers of Duke Charles were to be permitted to pass through the Bernese territories, ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... Aylett pride. Surely, no one living has more reason than I to comprehend how unreasoning and implacable I find it is. I looked for injustice at Winston Aylett's hands. I read him truly in our only private interview. Insolent, vain, despotic—wedded to his dogmas, and intolerant of others' opinion, he disliked me because I refused to play the obedient vassal to his will and requirements; stood upright as one man should in the presence of a brother-mortal, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the sentence uncompleted, and eagerly seized the tumbler containing brandy and soda, which the beautiful, wicked-eyed Eurasian passed to him. She turned, and prepared a drink for me, with the insolent insouciance which had ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... without the least benefit or prospect from them. Respect and deference are perhaps justly demandable of the obliged, and may be, with some reason at least, from expectation, paid to the rich and liberal from the necessitous; but that men should be allured by the glittering of wealth only to feed the insolent pride of those who will not in return feed their hunger—that the sordid niggard should find any sacrifices on the altar of his vanity—seems to arise from a blinder idolatry, and a more bigoted and senseless superstition, than ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... re-establish myself,' said Siegmund as he closed behind him the dining-room door and went upstairs in the dark. 'I am a family criminal. Beatrice might come round, but the children's insolent judgement is too much. And I am like a dog that creeps round the house from which it escaped with joy. I have nowhere else to go. Why did I come back? But I am sleepy. I will ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... a step; then checked. He inherited mental sluggishness from his father. "You are insolent!" he charged Caryll. "You ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... give way before them, how surprised they will be on entering the world to find themselves crushed beneath the weight of that universe they have expected to move at their own pleasure! Their insolent airs and childish vanity will only bring upon them mortification, contempt, and ridicule; they must swallow affront after affront; cruel trials will teach them that they understand neither their own position nor their own strength. Unable to do everything, they ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... the truth. How is it possible he could, unless he were a witch, like his mother? Stay where you are, and let us hear what he has got to say. Of course, you can talk to him from the azotea, while he remains below. If he show any signs of being insolent, as he has already been to both of us, let us have him arrested, and cooled a few hours in the calabozo. I hope the fellow will give us an excuse for it, for I haven't forgotten his impudence at ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... contrast between the society which I had just quitted in the capital of Peru and that which I here found in the capital of Chile was of the most striking kind. The former, oppressed by proud mandatories, imperious chiefs, and insolent soldiers, had been long labouring under all the distressing effects of espionage—greatest enemy to the charm of every society—the overbearing haughty Spaniards, either with taunts or sneers, harrowing the very souls of the Americans, who suspected their very oldest ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... marcheront avec moi, pour moi, et comme moi." And this is the legacy of the revolution, the advancement of freedom! A hundred volumes of imperial special pleading will not avail against such a speech as this—one so insolent, and at the same time so humiliating, which gives unwittingly the whole of the Emperor's progress, strength, and weakness. The six hundred thousand armed Frenchmen were used up, and the whole fabric falls; the six hundred thousand are reduced to sixty thousand, and straightway all the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... or written to ask for this interview with Sabina? She had come suddenly, in order to take advantage of the surprise her appearance must cause. For once, Sabina wished that her mother were with her, her high and mighty, insolent, terrible mother, who was afraid ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... thus long on the early conduct of the Irish administration for two reasons—the one to vindicate the people of Ireland from the insolent charge made against them by their enemies—"That conciliation had been tried in vain with that sottish and discontented people—that they had not intellect to understand, nor gratitude to acknowledge benefits—and that, therefore, the present system of unconstitutional ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... down the path, his keen face and insolent eyes triumphant. He was too absorbed in his own emotion especially to note hers. Besides, she had always been receptive ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... "Who is this insolent young fellow?" inquired Captain Langford, who still remained beside Dr. Clarke. "If he be in his senses, his impertinence demands the bastinado; if mad, Lady Eleanore should be secured from further inconvenience ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... went his way in silent, burning rage. Why should he be elbowed into the roadside dust by an insolent bully? Why had he not stood his ground? Pshaw! All this fine frenzy was useless, and he knew it. The sweat oozed on his forehead. It wasn't man against man, or he would have dragged the pale puppy from his horse and rubbed his face in the earth. It wasn't even one against many, else how willingly, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... interested them both beyond measure. Helen studied each individual couple, wondering who they were, how long married, if they were happy, where they were going to. She wondered if that coarse, loudly dressed woman really cared for her husband, or if this brutal looking man with insolent stare of the libertine, illtreated his delicate little wife. She herself could not understand marriage without genuine affection on both sides. Any such intimate relation as the marriage tie involved must surely be repellent and abhorrent to any self-respecting woman unless love were there to ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... could not be enforced without bloody resistance, the Rev. Mr. Fulton exclaimed: "If the floodgates of blood are to be opened, we will not shoot down the poor and ignorant, but the swaggering and insolent men whose hearts are ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... fellow with a red beard who called himself the good man of Ballangiech, at the gate, and said he was come to dine with the King of Kippen. As soon as Buchanan heard these words, he knew that the king was there in person, and hastened down to kneel at James's feet, and to ask forgiveness for his insolent behaviour. But the king, who only meant to give him a fright, forgave him freely, and, going into the castle, feasted on his own venison, which Buchanan had intercepted. Buchanan of Arnpryor was ever afterwards called ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... went to jeer a group of enthusiasts that willingly forfeit all delights of the world in the hope of realising a new aestheticism; we went insolent with patent leather shoes and bright kid gloves and armed with all the jargon of the school. "Cette jambe ne porte pas;" "la nature ne se fait pas comme ca;" "on dessine par les masses; combien de tetes?" "Sept et demi." "Si j'avais un morceau ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... I have heard my daughter talk of her. An insolent, ill-bred girl. I have been taught to consider her somewhat a disgrace to your ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... habitable sphere. Now that Mrs. Burman, on her way to bliss, was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show himself to be, this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the enjoyments, this Victor Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself upon the world as a factory of ideas. Colney's insolent charge, that the English have no imagination—a doomed race, if it be true!—would be confuted. For our English require but the lighted leadership to come into cohesion, and step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their benevolent aim. And that astral head giving, as a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... threateningly. You're like the rest of them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died. But wait awhile. You'll all get a short shrift and a long day from me. Low blackguardism! I'm going to get rid of you. Wouldn't care if I was stretched out stiff. He's dead. The man upstairs ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... hundred seventy-five thousand miles from the planet. At a fourth place barely eighty thousand miles short of collision with the Huk world. At a fifth place. A sixth. Each time it appeared, it seemed to remain in plain, challenging, insolent view, without ceasing to exist at the spots where it had appeared previously. In much less than a minute, the seeming of a sizable squadron of small human ships had popped out of emptiness and lay off the ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... standing opposite Annesley. He stared with insolent incredulity. "'Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Smith.' A ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... so situated, that it is almost impossible for us to have any dispute. I only come to require a slave named Assad, to be delivered up to me. He was carried away by one Behram, a captain of a ship belonging to this city, the most insolent man in the world. I hope your king will do me justice, when ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 2 • Anon.
... order, for that would not increase or improve his ideas, but one conversant with the habits and feelings of a superior class, and yet he did not want a fine gentleman for an intimate, who would have been either an insolent patron or a designing parasite. Rodney had relations with the aristocracy, with the political world, and could feel the pulse of public life. His appearance was engaging, his manners gentle if not gentlemanlike, and ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... the bravest warriors, but was at last slain by Achilles. But when the hero bent over his fallen foe, and contemplated her beauty, youth, and valor, he bitterly regretted his victory. Thersites, an insolent brawler and demagogue, ridiculed his grief, and was in consequence slain by ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... will think he has a right to insult her with his licentious passion; and should the unhappy creature shrink from the insolent overture, he will sneeringly taunt her ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... and laid the paper-cutter on the table. She folded her arms and began tapping the rug with her toe. She was almost insolent. ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... had uttered words of apology, but his tone had been insolent, and his apology was more offensive than his original blunder. Had it not been for Ben's reluctance to make a disturbance, he would have struck the offender in the mouth. If he had had a pistol, he could have shot him; his great ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... back, and giving my Lord a little touch of the fist (just at the last button of the waistcoat, my dear,—a rare place if you wish to prevent a man from speaking too much: it sent him reeling to the other end of the room). 'Ruffian!' says I. 'Dog!' says I. 'Insolent puppy and coxcomb! what do you mean by laying ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... month previous, some chiefs of La Laguna (which is five leagues from this city) had asked him when the Castilians were going to leave. They will have been already undeceived in this regard, and the insolent and audacious designs of the hostile mestizos and foreigners will have received a heavy blow when they see this city enclosed and defended by ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume IX, 1593-1597 • E. H. Blair
... twenty years at one fell swoop. I beg you, Maximus, to order the number of consuls since her birth to be reckoned. If I am not mistaken, you will find that Pudentilla has barely passed her fortieth year. The insolent audacity of this falsehood! Twenty years' exile would be a worthy punishment for such mendacity! Your fiction has added a good half to the sum, your fabrication is one and a half times the size of the ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... as follows: "Be just, and without mature consideration, neither excuse nor accuse your poor soul, lest if you excuse it when you should not, you make it insolent, and if you accuse it lightly, you discourage it and make it cowardly. Walk simply and you will walk securely." I once heard him utter these striking words: "He who excuses himself unjustly, and affectedly, accuses himself openly and truly; and he who accuses himself ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... the account given me by M. Doormann. I observed that I did not understand how the imaginary apprehension of any violence on the part of Russia should have induced him to admit so insolent an attack upon the most powerful sovereign in Europe, whose arms would soon dictate laws to Germany. The Syndic did not dissemble his fear of the Emperor's resentment, while at the same time he expressed a hope that the Emperor would take into consideration the extreme difficulty ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... been constantly urged to press for recognition and mediation but he had always refused on the ground that the neutral policy hitherto pursued by the Government was the right one and that if we departed from it we should only meet with an insolent rejection of our offer[794]." A long conference with Lyons gave cause for further thought and Russell committed himself to the extent that he acknowledged "we ought not to move at present without Russia[795]...." Finally, October 22, Palmerston ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... builders had been lavish of highly colored marbles and mosaics, spendthrift of light and gilding; on every side shone the signs and seals of predatory wealth. Its walls were like costly confectionery, its ornaments insolent, its waste criminal. Every decorative feature was hot, restless, irreverent, and cruel, quite the sort of avenue one might expect to find in his walk towards the glittering woman of the ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... organs exposed, but immediately he realized that he was seen he concealed them. The solemnity of exhibitionism at this age finds expression in the climax of the sonnet, "Oraison du Soir," written at 16 by Rimbaud, whose verse generally is a splendid and insolent manifestation ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Paltock's winged people "are the most beautiful creatures of imagination that ever were devised," and added that Sir Walter Scott was a warm admirer of the book. With Charles Lamb at Christ's Hospital the story was a favourite. "We had classics of our own," he says, "without being beholden to 'insolent Greece or haughty Rome,' that passed current among us—'Peter Wilkins,' the 'Adventures of the Hon. Captain Robert Boyle,' the 'Fortunate Blue-Coat Boy,' and the like." But nobody loved the old romance with such devotion as Leigh Hunt. He was never tired of discoursing about its beauties, and ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... a man leaning carelessly against the wharf-rail. Raising his eyes from the ground, he beheld the one man of all the villagers who had remained unmoved, unsoftened by the spectacle. With his red cap shoved back upon his shining black hair the insolent stranger stood looking on with folded arms. Gregory noticed that Mascola had not even taken the trouble to remove the cigarette which ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... sack, with the hoop, with wrestling, with hurling at the stake. They say, moreover, that grinding poverty renders men worthless, cunning, sulky, thievish, insidious, vagabonds, liars, false witnesses, etc.; and that wealth makes them insolent, proud, ignorant, traitors, assumers of what they know not, deceivers, boasters, wanting in affection, slanderers, etc. But with them all the rich and poor together make up the community. They are rich because they want nothing, poor because they possess nothing; and ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells
... else certainly has written the authentic story of the French Revolution at large, or of more than certain aspects and incidents of it. In spite of misconceptions, and such mistaken estimates as those of Mirabeau and Bonaparte, such insolent mockery of good and able men, such ridiculous caricatures as that of the "Feast of Pikes" and the trial of the King, such ribald horse-play as "Grilled Herrings" and "Lion Sprawling," in spite of blots and blunders in every chapter—the French Revolution ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... confess my splendour rather dazzled me. If only it had been for Anthony Cardew's eyes! But I hated that I should appear so fine to do honour to the Dawsons, and I dreaded more than ever meeting Richard Dawson's insolent gaze. ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... him in full. I never want to see him again. He's been so insolent of late—he'd hardly do a thing I asked him. And he looked at me in such a queer, ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... Fairport was ablaze at the idea of American seamen being forced to serve on English ships, and of decks whose timber grew in the free forests of Maine or North Carolina, being trodden by the unscrupulous feet of British officers with insolent search-warrants in ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... our lady will forget all about this wedding by to- morrow," thought the steward; "and here am I worrying myself for nothing! As for that insolent fellow, we must tie him down if it comes to that, we must let the police know . . . Ustinya Fyedorovna!" he shouted in a loud voice to his wife, "heat the samovar, my good soul . . ." All that day Tatiana hardly went out of the laundry. At first she had started ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... the detachment was ordered by Cook to draw upon the natives, if they persisted in throwing stones, or became insolent. Under these circumstances, a pirogue was fired into, and it was soon apparent that a robbery had been committed by ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... see? or will ye not observe The strangeness of his alter'd countenance? With what a majesty he bears himself, How insolent of late he is become, How proud, how peremptory, and unlike himself? We know the time since he was mild and affable, And if we did but glance a far-off look, Immediately he was upon his knee, That ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... The colonial treasury is, as usual, short of funds, and can do little to defend the islands from the Dutch; the Madrid government is unwilling to spend much more on the Philippines, although beset with importunities to save that colony, and Spanish commerce generally, from the insolent Dutch. The usual building of ships in the islands has so harrassed and exhausted the unfortunate natives that it is necessary to have ships built for the Philippines in India and other countries where timber and labor ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... bewildered, Athena, in the guise of a young countryman, came to his aid, and told him where he was. Then, smiling upon his amazement and joy, she shone forth in her own form, and warned him not to hasten home, since the palace was filled with the insolent suitors of Penelope, whose heart waited empty for him as the ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... teeth rattled audibly, like dice in a box; I kicked him, pushed him, and, as the gratification grew with what it fed on, at one dread reckoning I paid off the horror I experienced from his account of the girl I had worshipped, and his insolent mention of my father. I took a fiendish delight in prolonging his agonies. Another minute's indulgence in the punishment would have raised the tiger that lies sleeping, but always awakable, in every man's heart, and I might have killed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... of offices; hence party animosities, embittered by the jealousies of conscious weakness on one side, and a deep sense of unmerited exclusion and provocation on the other.... Hence on the one side a selfish, insolent, baseless ecclesiastical and political oligarchy, and, on the other side, an abused, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... gods with their heads of falcon, ibis and jackal, who, on the walls, converse in a continual exalted pantomime. And then the feeling comes over you, that you are guilty of sacrilege standing there, before this open coffin, in this unwonted insolent light. The dolorous, blackish face, half eaten away, seems to ask for mercy: "Yes, yes, my sepulchre has been violated and I am returning to dust. But now that you have seen me, leave me, turn out that light, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... gaze, the staring gaze, of insolent Day you shun; In veils of light, in veils of light, hid from the face of ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... Your word isn't "but," Mrs. Bradley. It's (consulting book)—it's: "Insolent! You will cross my path ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... in in an insolent way. "I am going to quarter here to-night and chance it," he said. "Hallo! Dick, my prince! You here? And what may your name be, old cock?" he added, turning to me, now seeing me indistinctly for the first time, for I was sitting back ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... bright kitchen back, of the Pink Fountain room Miss Gussie Fink sat at her desk, calm, watchful, insolent-eyed, a goddess sitting in judgment. On the pay roll of the Newest Hotel Miss Gussie Fink's name appeared as kitchen checker, but her regular job was goddessing. Her altar was a high desk in a corner of the ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... for this reply of the insolent earl, and Buchan answered him: "I care not," said he; "whoever keeps my castle over my head, and my cellars full, is welcome to reign over John of Buchan. So onward, my gallant Cospatrick, to make our ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... party of Union soldiers headed by Corporal Evans, an insolent young fellow of about twenty-five. He has a very boisterous manner, giving ...
— The Southern Cross - A Play in Four Acts • Foxhall Daingerfield, Jr.
... in the first place, my worthy friend,' said Cargrim, in silky tones, for he did not relish the insolent tone of the ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... Clive broke out, "can it be possible that a young creature can have been brought to like such a selfish, insolent coxcomb as that, such a cocktail as Barnes Newcome? You know very well, Lord Kew, what his life is. There was a poor girl whom he brought out of a Newcome factory when he was a boy himself, and might have had a heart one ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... suffer themselves to be out-blustered and out-gloomed of their own wills, instead of being fooled out of them by acts of tenderness and complaisance.—I wish, that it does not demonstrate too evidently, that, with some of the sex, insolent controul is a more efficacious subduer than kindness or concession. Upon my life, my dear, I have often thought, that many of us are mere babies in matrimony: perverse fools when too much indulged and humoured; creeping slaves, when treated harshly. But shall ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the altar. Now a supreme act of insolent impiety; Samson, too, shall sacrifice to Dagon. A boy is told to lead him where all can witness his humiliation. Samson feels that the time for retribution upon his enemies is come. He asks to be led between the marble pillars that ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... her parting lips uttered a line she had thoroughly mastered them, the innate purity of her perfected womanhood, the evident innocence of her purpose, shielding her against all indecency and insult. The ribald scoffing, the insolent shuffling of feet, the half-drunken uneasiness, ceased as if by magic; and as her simple act proceeded, the stillness out in front became positively solemn, the startled faces picturing an awakening to higher things. It was a triumph far exceeding the noisy outburst that greeted ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... the restaurant. Michael in his well-made clothing and with his strikingly handsome face and gold hair attracting at once every eye in the place: Sam with an insolent air of assurance to cover a sudden embarrassment of pride at the company ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... my pleasure!" answered Sir Piercie; "a goodly question after the part you have acted towards me!—Young man, I know not what infatuation has led thee to place thyself in direct and insolent opposition to one who is a guest of thy liege-lord the Abbot, and who, even from the courtesy due to thy mother's roof, had a right to remain there without meeting insult. Neither do I ask, or care, by what means thou hast become possessed of the fatal secret by which thou ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... instead of a war of self-defence. Charles crossed the Alps in 1493, marched the whole length of Italy without opposition, and was crowned at Naples; while its royal family, an illegitimate offshoot from the Kings of Aragon, fled into Sicily, and called on Spain for help. But the insolent exactions of the French soldiery caused the people to rise against them; and when Charles returned, he was beset at Fornovo by a great league of Italians, over whom he gained a complete victory. Small and puny though he was, he fought like a lion, and seemed quite inspired by the ardour ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... out so exactly, and—God bless the mark! 'Tis a foot, DOLLY, worthy so Grand a Monarque). He exclaimed, "Oh, mon Roi!" and, with tear-dropping eye, Stood to gaze on the spot—while some Jacobin, nigh, Muttered out with a shrug (what an insolent thing!) "Ma foi, he be right—'tis de Englishman's King; And dat gros pied de cochon—begar me vil say Dat de foot look mosh better, if turned toder way." There's the pillar, too—Lord! I had nearly forgot— ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... various towns where the body of his queen rested, when it was conveyed from Herdelie, near Lincoln, to Westminster. The three that still remain are Geddington, Northampton, and Waltham. ELEAZAR the Moor, insolent, bloodthirsty, lustful, and vindictive, like "Aaron," in [Shakespeare's?] Titus An-dron'icus. The lascivious queen of Spain is in love with this monster.—C. Marlowe, Lust's dominion ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... it seemed heavy. There was Miss Bentley, with her clumsy finery, put on as it were one dollar above the other. She patronized me, as a little country-girl who knew nothing. Must I not undeceive her? There was Faustina St. Clair, really of a good family, and insolent on the strength of it; must I never let her know that mine was as good and that my mother had as much knowledge of the proprieties and elegances of life as ever hers had? These girls and plenty of the others looked down upon me as something inferior; not belonging to their part ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Audiencia, considering his insolent replies and disobedience to the royal decrees, and the scandals thus caused, and that the whole arose from the influence of Father Raymundo Verart, determined, for the more thorough justification and proof of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... spirit that was his, could I return to St. Quentin with the account of my morning's achievements. It was just here that, looking at the business with my father's eyes, I began to have a suspicion that I had behaved like an insolent young fool. But I was still ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... insolent. And those too many excellencies, that feed Your pride, turn to a Pleurisie, and kill That which should nourish vertue; dare you think All blessings are confer'd on you alone? Y'are grosly cousen'd; there's no good in you, Which ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (1 of 10) - The Custom of the Country • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... Saxon Her cannon shall thunder in scorn, Till in triumph through insolent England Shall the Faith and King ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... brewers have refused to brew, the bakers to bake, the tapsters to draw liquors. The city swarms with multitudes of men thrown out of employment. The Spanish soldiers themselves have long been without pay, for Alva thinks of nothing but bloodshed. Consequently they are insolent to their officers, care little for order, and insult and rob the citizens in the streets. Assuredly something must come of this ere long; and the people's despair will become a mad fury. If they rise, Constance, and my father does not say nay, ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... coat off and his hat on, he did come into the circle of the poets without the usual poetic habiliments. He was not dressed up at all, and he was not at all abashed or apologetic. His air was confident and self-satisfied, if it did not at times suggest the insolent and aggressive. It was the dress circle that was on trial, and ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... have!' said the old gentleman, and, taking up his forage cap as he spoke, he crammed it on his head. 'Perhaps you are too insolent,' he added, 'to inform me of the time of the ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... a true picture of all hypocrites. Living in manifest sins, they grow insolent and proud, aiming all the while to appear righteous. They will not yield even to God himself and his Word when upbraided by them. Nay, they set themselves against God, contend with him, and excuse their sin. Thus David says, that God is judged of men, but that at length he clears and justifies ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... garment of a Sufi, was brought into the presence of the great conqueror, he was nothing abashed at the blaze of silks and jewelry which decorated the pavilion where Tamerlane sat in state. And Tamerlane, meeting the poet with a frown of anger, said, "Art not thou the insolent verse-monger who didst offer my two great cities Samarkand and Bokhara for the black mole upon thy lady's cheek?" "It is true," replied Hafiz calmly, smiling, "and indeed my munificence has been so great throughout my life, that it has left me destitute, so that I shall ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... passed, when the cardinals began to look with dismay and bitter repentance on their own work. "In Urban VI," said a writer of these times (on the side of Urban as rightful pontiff), "was verified the proverb—None is so insolent as a low man suddenly raised to power." The high-born, haughty, luxurious prelates, both French and Italian, found that they had set over themselves a master resolved not only to redress the flagrant ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... they have no juries here; which by the bye is odd enough; and as he says I suppose it is a great shame. For, as he put the case to me, how should I like, to have my estate seized on, by some insolent prince or duke? For you know, I being a baronet in my own right, Aby, no one less in rank would dare infringe upon me. Well! How should I like to have this duke, or this prince, seize upon my estate; and, instead of having my right tried by a special jury of ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... and provided with ample supplies of money to engage in secret plots against our neutrality with the object of stopping munition shipments. German officials in this country have admitted handling millions of dollars in illegal operations carried on in defiance of our laws and in insolent disregard of international diplomatic courtesy. Our courts have convicted and sentenced to 18 months' penal servitude three high German officials of the Hamburg-American Steamship Line for a conspiracy to help German warships in defiance of our laws. These officials admitted spending ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson
... done before, a man who would clean the place of the too-ready gun-slingers who had gathered there, making the town's notoriety their capital, invading even the respectable districts in their nightly debaucheries to such insolent boldness that a man's wife or daughter dared not show her ear on the street ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... consternation was heard from a group of girls of which Marjorie formed the center. The latter took a hurried step forward. Marjorie was determined that Connie must not be cheated of her chance. She had caught a glimpse of Mignon, her black eyes blazing with insolent triumph and positive joy at the possibility of this unexpected elimination of ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... adoption in the internal organization of the Catholic church in England. It was officially communicated to them when printed, in 1848. They made no objection. And yet, when it was promulgated in 1850, their chief spoke of it, in his ill-timed letter to the Bishop of Durham, as "insolent and insidious." For many an age to come, Catholics will read with astonishment that so inoffensive an act of the Holy See, done at the request of the Catholic bishops of England, and in the interest of the Catholic people, at the time some seven millions ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... but in vain. An insolent answer was all he got for his pains. He determined, however, to keep Charlie close beside him all night, and also made up his mind to keep a sharp look ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... Willoughby. Her veil was down, and he seemed trying to read her face behind it. As he passed he threw a quick, vivid glance at Girasole. It was not a pleasant glance by any means, and was full of quick, fierce, and insolent scrutiny—a "Who-the-devil-are-you?" glance. It was for but an instant, however, and then he glanced at Mrs. Willoughby again, and then ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... not fleeing from self-accepted retribution or falling away from a confessed morality of ours. Evil is a force even more than a folly; it is a positive agent busily building away at the City of Dreadful Night, constructing its insolent and scoffing society within the very precincts of the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... master of the prize schooner Daniel Trowbridge, for the log slates of the schooner which he, the master, had put among his private baggage, it was reported to me that the master in delivering these articles to the messenger, the sergeant of marines, used this insolent language—"D—— them. I hope they will do them no good, and if they want a shirt I can lend them that too." I had the man seized and put in double irons. Lat. ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... elapsed before the tide of war turned, and the Medes began to make head against their assailants, recovering possession of most parts of their country, and expelling or overpowering the hordes at whose insolent domination they had chafed from the first hour of the invasion. It was probably as early as B.C. 627, five years after the Scyths crossed the Caucasus, according to Herodotus, that Cyaxares, having sufficiently ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... resentment; and afterwards, when the driver chose to lose his temper and scold them, they were more determined than ever to refuse. Had he appeared at this time with his former good-natured expression, and had he shown any signs of compunction for his insolent behavior, there is no doubt that they would have brought up the subject of their own accord, and promised him as handsome a sum as his exploit deserved. But his continued sulks prevented them from introducing the subject, and so they ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... did not; so he settled himself in an arm-chair, with an ugly glance at his wife and an insolent one at Quarrier; and the game went on in silence; Leila and the major still losing heavily under the sneering gaze ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... for his life, and has not brought forward his children and relatives to plead for him, as others would have done on so serious an occasion. He says that he has relatives, and three children; but he declares that not one of them shall appear in court for any such purpose —not from any insolent disposition on his part, but because he believes that such a course would be degrading to the reputation which he enjoys, as well as a disgrace to the state. He then ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... at refusing; afterward, when the time arrives for fulfilling their promises, then, obliged, of necessity they discover themselves. They are afraid, and yet the circumstances[74] compel them to refuse. Then, in that case, their very insolent remark is, "Who are you? What are you to me? What {should I give up} to you what's my own? Look you, I am the most concerned in my own interests."[75] But if you inquire where is honor, they are not ashamed.[76] Here, where there is occasion, they are not afraid; there, where there is no occasion, ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... "He's insolent to ladies, we know. But my brother can be trusted to bring him to his senses. That woman, Philip, whom you saw will carry the baby to the hotel. Of course you must tip her for it. And try, if you can, to get poor Lilia's silver bangles. They were nice ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... promptly overcome if Asiatic Hellas were not supported by Hellas in Europe. While the Lydian satrap was demanding reinforcements from his sovereign, Aristagoras therefore repaired to the Peloponnesus as a suppliant for help. Sparta, embroiled in one of her periodical quarrels with Argos, gave him an insolent refusal;* even Athens, where the revolution had for the moment relieved her from the fear of the Pisistratidaa and the terrors of a barbarian invasion, granted him merely twenty triremes—enough to draw down reprisals on her immediately ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... lower empire, Where the praetorian bands take up the matter;— A "dreadful trade," like his who "gathers samphire,"[595] The insolent soldiery to soothe and flatter, With the same feelings as you'd coax a vampire. Now, were I once at home, and in good satire, I'd try conclusions with those Janizaries, And show them ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... neglect, over the delicate sweetness of the English scene: nor is any blasphemy or impiety, any frantic saying, or godless thought, more appalling to me, using the best power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope, than the insolent defiling of those springs by the human herds that drink of them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and pure, like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of feathery weeds, all waving, which it ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... beauty and fine dress than the young queen's, and she found herself quite neglected. The nobles, too, were angered at the airs that Gaveston gave himself; he not only dressed splendidly, had a huge train of servants, and managed the king as he pleased, but he was very insolent to them, and gave them nick-names. He called the king's cousin, the Earl of Lancaster, "the old hog;" the Earl of Pembroke, "Joseph the Jew;" and the Earl of Warwick, "the black dog." Meantime, the king and he were wasting the treasury, ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Henderson. Perhaps we can do something for you some day." Whether this was a threat, a kind wish, or an insinuation, no mortal could have told. Miss Kalski's face was always suggesting insolence without being quite insolent. As she returned to her own domain she met the cashier's head clerk in the hall. "That Devine woman's a crime," she murmured. The head clerk ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... great an industry it must have been. We can have no doubt that colours fixed in the fire must have formed the chief element in the decoration of the buildings of Nebuchadnezzar, of that Babylon whose insolent prosperity so impressed the imagination and provoked the anger of the Jewish prophets. It was to paintings of this kind that Ezekiel alluded when he reproved Jerusalem under the name of Aholiba for its infidelity and its ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... Shaw was enraged at his not going with him to his camp, and said to Meer Fuzzul Oollah that he would one day have his revenge for the affront offered him by such neglect. This declaration being told to Dewul Roy, he made some insolent remarks, so that, notwithstanding the connection of family, their hatred ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... the blood of the brave and the blooming, Snatched from the altars of insolent foes, Burning with star-fires, but never consuming, Flash its broad ribands ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,—though he could still keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless Ahab's head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... this century Dr. Arnold inveighed with characteristic vigour against "the insolencies of our aristocracy, the scandalous exemption of the peers from all ignominious punishments short of death, and the insolent practice of allowing peers to vote in criminal trials on their honour, while other men vote on their oath." But generally the claims of rank and birth were admitted with a childlike cheerfulness. The high function of ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... a thumping before we let you go, Diamond, just to teach you a lesson," he said, in a most insolent manner. "I've wanted to get at you or your friend Merriwell ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... complete justification of his conduct: he might have justified it by every civil, and by every criminal mode of process. Did he do this? No. Your Lordships have in evidence the manner, equally despotic, rebellious, insolent, fraudulent, tricking, and evasive, by which he positively refused all inquiry into the matter. How stands it now, more than twelve years after the seizure of their goods, at ten thousand miles' distance? You ask of these women, buried in the depths of Asia, secluded from human commerce, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... Tcheriapin, yet when he chose he could win over his bitterest enemies. Women followed him as children followed the Pied Piper; he courted none, but was courted by all. He would glance aside with those black, slanting eyes, shrug in his insolent fashion, and turn away. And they would follow. God knows how many of them followed—whether through the dens of Limehouse or the more fashionable salons of vice in the West End—they followed—perhaps down to Hell. So much ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... drew good prizes in the lottery of war, and founded, at the expense of the noblest Saxons, families from which men are proud to be descended. Sir Walter has used this fact in "Ivanhoe," when he makes the usually silent Athelstane reply with so much eloquence to De Bracy's insolent remark that the princes of the House of Anjou conferred not their wards on men of such lineage as his. "My lineage, proud Norman," replied Athelstane, "is drawn from a source more pure and ancient ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... the due of mental merit they scarcely ever receive. Now and then you hear of a portrait-painter, who has made himself the rage of the town, being asked to dine and to sup. But he is seldom really held to be des notres, as the haughty elect ones would phrase it, and his popularity, based upon insolent patronage, often quickly crumbles. The solid devotion is all saved for the solid millionnaires. Frederick the Great, if I recall rightly, said that an army was like a snake, and moved on its stomach. Of New York society this might also be asserted, though with a meaning much more luxurious. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... report), and was prepared for trouble, but their clanging cries, their cynical eyes, their clutching insolent hands were more terrifying than anything I had imagined. Their faces expressed something remorseless, inhuman and mocking. Their grins were like those ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... all-absorbing passion, hatred of Napoleon. In the dark days after Jena, when, pressed back to the Baltic, his brave followers succumbed to the weight of numbers, he began to store up vials of fury against the insolent conqueror. Often he beguiled the weary hours with lunging at an imaginary foe, calling out—Napoleon. And this almost Satanic hatred bore the old man through seven years of humiliation; it gave him at seventy-two years of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... hills were whitened with the tents of camps of instruction, where an army of reserves was soon produced. Mr. Greeley, however, was not satisfied with the military preparations, and he published an insolent letter to President Lincoln, in which he charged him with being "disastrously remiss in enforcing the laws." Mr. Lincoln replied, calmly but positively: "I would save the Union. I would save it in the shortest way, under the Constitution. ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... doubt, for not taking your advice," he said, looking her in the eyes. Their expression, half bitter, half insolent, reminded her. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of religious reform. But, though an abbot or a prior here or there might be found among the supporters of the movement, the monastic orders as a whole repelled it with unswerving obstinacy. The quarrel only became more bitter as years went on. The keen sarcasms of Erasmus, the insolent buffoonery of Hutten, were lavished on the "lovers of darkness" and of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... everything in life with a two-foot rule were making roads and building jetties for coal-smacks to lie at. There was constant influx of strange men and women—men of stunted growth and white faces, and who had an insolent, swaggering air, intolerably vulgar when contrasted with the Doric simplicity and quiet gigantic manhood of ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... security among as many people as he can. He should not wish to have his tenants mere Ephemerae—mere beings of an hour.' BOSWELL. 'But, sir, if they have leases, is there not some danger that they may grow insolent? I remember you yourself once told me, an English tenant was so independent, that,—if provoked, he would throw his rent at his landlord.' JOHNSON. 'Depend upon it, sir, it is the landlord's own fault, if it is thrown at him. A man may always keep his tenants in dependence ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... was only waiting for a spark of encouragement to shout itself hoarse in enthusiastic huzzahs. Eyes shone with suppressed excitement, and strong hearts swelled with pride in the towering man whose fame had surged like a tidal wave over the land. Yet with insolent deliberation he mounted the step and seated himself in the waiting carriage, giving no sign of having even noticed the flattering demonstration made in his honor. The smiles, nods, and hand-clasps expected of the chief were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... slaves, as Crassus did a little later. The first mentioned class was the least numerous. To those nobles who gave their attention to money-getting must be added those plebeians who elevated themselves from the masses by means[43] of the curule magistracies. These were insolent and purse-proud, and greedy to increase their wealth by any means in their power. Next to these two divisions of the nobility came those whom the patricians had been wont to despise and to relegate to the ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... and talented than all of those haughty Christian women. How often did they neglect and insult us in society! How often did they offensively try to eclipse us! How often did they vex us by their scorn and insolent bearing! We will pay it all back to them; we will scourge them with the scourges with which they have scourged us, and compel them to ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... live alone; and ended by offering himself, after his own fashion, straight out and with no circumlocutions. The Duchess, with a quick movement of pride, threw up her head, grasping her whip handle tightly, as if to strike the insolent fellow who dared to talk to her as he might to a super at the opera. But the insult was also a compliment, and there was pleasure as well as anger in her blush. Danjou steadily urged his point, and tried to dazzle her with his polished ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... the cliffs above, while the water deepened in shadow, and busy muskrats marked its glossy surface with long silvery lines. Mischievous camp-birds peered at the couple from the branches of the pines uttering satirical comment, while squirrels, frankly insolent, dropped cones upon their heads ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... the message was received, the bell summoned the popular assembly together, and, in the name of the doge, Pietro Mocenigo described to them the terrible nature of the peril that threatened them, told them that, after the insolent reply of Doria, there was now no hope save in their own exertions, and invited all to rally round the national standard, for the protection of their hearths and homes. The reply of the assembly was unanimous; and shouts ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... twenty-seven years later than Croker's attack) of the statesman's generous tribute. "Macaulay," says Gladstone, "was singularly free of vices ... one point only we reserve, a certain tinge of occasional vindictiveness. Was he envious? Never. Was he servile? No. Was he insolent? No.... Was he idle? The question is ridiculous. Was he false? No; but true as steel and transparent as crystal. Was he vain? We hold that he was not. At every point in the ugly list ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the young clergyman would have enjoyed turning upon the insolent fellow standing there with his arms folded so evidently enjoying his discomfiture and thrashing him soundly, had he been able to find an excuse. Unhappily he had none, however, and his wrath all ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... the performance began, another gentleman with his lady presented himself in Colonel Ansart's box, and requested him to vacate. He was told that he was rather presuming in his conduct and had better go where he belonged. The man insisted upon crowding himself in, and was very insolent, when Colonel Ansart seized him and threw him over the front, when, of course, he went tumbling down among the audience below. Colonel Ansart was for this act afterward arrested and imprisoned for a short time, but was ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... Insolent to rudeness with every one who is not in power, he is mean and slavish before rank or a full purse. He sows flattery by handfuls; he will give you his house, his children, his soul, to get rid of a difficulty, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... displeasure, and said not one word. Nor did the artist open his lips. And at last the girl, to break the uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?" and the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long as you hang it with the face to the wall." It was an insolent, a cruel thing to say, but the artist did not answer her bitterly; he said gently that she need not take the portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case he would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for the work. She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he never ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... such occasions the Rue Mouffetard swarmed with people, and a people not well disposed toward his cloth. However good a man one may be, it is far from agreeable to be forced to lower the eyes to avoid malevolent looks, and to stop the ears against insolent words heard in passing. There was a certain drinking-shop which the abbe particularly dreaded—a shop brilliant with gas and exhaling an odor of alcohol through its open doors, through which one could ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... with opium, and they announced their intention to arrest them and to punish them with death. Not only did Commissioner Lin and the Canton authorities claim the right to condemn and punish British subjects, but they showed in the most insolent manner that they would take away their liberty and lives on the flimsiest and falsest pretext. Captain Elliot, weak and yielding as he was on many points, declared that "this law is incompatible with safe or honorable continuance at Canton." Apparently the Chinese authorities acted on the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Who'd stay in such a house even if they beg me on their knees. You're insolent to have induced me to go to such a false accuser ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... barbarous countries on the very verge of the world? They have not been taught the maxims of our sages; they never heard of the Rites; how can they know what good manners mean? We often think them rude and insolent when I'm sure they don't mean ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... we[466] may knowe their farther pleasure out of Englande: for otherwise this people (who nowe at length have gotte[467] the raines[468] of former servitude into their owne swindge) would in shorte time growe so insolent, as they would shake off all government, and there would be no living ...
— Colonial Records of Virginia • Various
... made him the soul of select society, and there was literally a contest for his company, his noble character, his disinterestedness, his self-respect, his proper pride, enemy of every vanity of bad taste and of every insolent reclame, the security of intercourse with him, and the exquisite delicacy of his manners, making him a friend equally ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... you people doing here?" he cried, undeterred by the presence of a lady, and speaking in the insolent, supercilious voice of the English landlord in defence of his pheasant preserves. "This is private property. You must have seen the notice at the gate, 'Trespassers will ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... decline such insolent advances now and always," Marietta interrupted angrily; "that I will have no more of your brazen impertinences. You ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... protect them against an expected assault; when a brave man, Major Anderson, took measures to defend the post that had been confided him, this unexpected resistance by which the programme was deranged, appeared as ill-timed to Mr. Buchanan as insolent to the people of Charleston; and the despatch of the 30th of December, addressed to their commissioners, exculpates him from the crime of having sent the reinforcements, and makes excuses in pitiful terms for ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... Egypt preferred not to meddle in their affairs. When, however, the "lords of the sands" grew too insolent, the Pharaoh sent a column of light troops against them, and inflicted on them such a severe punishment, that the remembrance of it kept them within bounds for years. Offenders banished from Egypt sought refuge with the turbulent kinglets, who were ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... thinking of it all. That he should have been stricken dumb by the beauty of any girl was surprising even to himself; for though young and almost boyish in his manners, he had never yet feared to speak out in any presence. The tutor at his college had thought him insolent beyond parallel; and his grandfather, though he loved him for his open face and plain outspoken words, found them sometimes almost too much for him. But now he stood there looking and longing, and could not summon courage to go up and address a few words to this young ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... informed me, that one of his labourers, of the name of RODNEY, (who, by-the-bye, I believe had acquired this nick name from the circumstance of his having been a sailor, and fought under Admiral Rodney) had behaved to him in the most insolent manner. ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... more insolent and arrogant than even before. He was clearly in high spirits. "You have done well, O King of the Rain," he said, turning gayly to Felix; "and you too, O Queen of the Clouds; you have done right ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... hands, went a figure in floating robes of daffodil gauze, a dancer from one of the frescoes of Pompeii, wearing a mask—four inches of black velvet—only for the form. Her bare shoulders and arms, of an insolent beauty, forbade any mistake as to her identity. Gerald knew, like the rest, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... exhibition of works which were competing for the Grand Prix in sculpture? The subject given out for competition was Niobe weeping for her children. Do you also remember my indignation at one of the competing works around which the crowd was so compact that we could scarcely approach it? The insolent youth had dared to turn that sacred subject into jest! His Niobe was infinitely touching in her beauty and grief, but to represent her children, as he did, by monkeys squirming on the ground in the most varied and grotesque attitudes, ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... management of the great composer Haendel, and there she finally displaced in the public favor her old-time rival, Cuzzoni. The singer known as Catarina Gabrielli was the daughter of the cook of the celebrated Cardinal Gabrielli; in spite of her low origin, she was possessed of a great though insolent beauty, in addition to her wonderful vocal powers, and her brilliant career in Europe was most exceptional in every way. In Italy, later in Vienna, and even in far-away St. Petersburg, she not only achieved ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... of this doctrine was greeted by the critic of the "Edinburgh Review" with the insolent: "This will never do." In truth, Wordsworth's fondness for the inner beauty of common things sometimes led his verse into the commonplace. Wordsworth reached the height of his poetic fervor ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... the majority shall not rule; that the right of suffrage shall be nullified; that the Constitution, under which that vote was given, shall be overthrown? This is what the rebellion has done in attempting to destroy the Republic, merely because of the election of Mr. Lincoln. This arrogant and insolent slave-holding oligarchy would not even wait to hear what the President of your choice would say. They treated the President of your choice, and therefore they treated you and the Constitution under which you acted, with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... because it is anything new, but because we have had, within the memory of us all, an illustration of its truth in municipal politics. Waring and Roosevelt were the Patrick Mullens of the reform administration which Tammany replaced with her insolent platform, "To hell with reform!" It was not an ideal administration, but it can be said of it, at least, that it was up to the times it served. It made compromises with spoils politics, and they were wretched failures. It took Waring and ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... and very handsome, in an insolent way. She was supposed to be the best-dressed woman at the Court, and to rule Annunciata with an iron hand, although it was known that they quarreled a great deal over small things, especially ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... with the food and the service," he complained. "I rarely find fault, but I am compelled to do so this time. The man who has been serving me seems to be a rank amateur, and twice he was almost insolent. This hotel has a reputation which it scarcely is maintaining ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... impudence, assurance, audacity, hardihood, front, face, brass; shamelessness &c. adj.; effrontery, hardened front, face of brass. assumption of infallibility. saucebox &c. (blusterer) 887[obs3]. V. be insolent &c. adj.; bluster, vapor, swagger, swell, give oneself airs, snap one's fingers, kick up a dust; swear &c. (affirm) 535; rap out oaths; roister. arrogate; assume, presume; make bold, make free; take a liberty, give an inch and take an ell. domineer, bully, dictate, hector; lord it over; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... have played this comedy long enough," said the judge, his manner growing more insolent, his look more threatening. "Will you, or will you ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... perform that rite. Neither tiredness, weakness, haste, rough ground, nor rain would induce him to confirm from the saddle. A young bishop afterwards, with no possible excuse, would order the frightened children up among restive horses. They came weeping and whipped by insolent attendants at no small risk—but his lordship cared nothing for their woe and danger. Not so dear Father Hugh. He took the babes gently and in due order, and if he caught any lay assistants troubling them would reproach them terribly, sometimes even thrashing ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... from the Church to the state. She saw the sons and the daughters of aristocratic pride, glittering in gilded chariots, and surrounded by insolent menials, sweep by her, through the Elysian Fields, while she trod the dusty pathway. Her proud spirit revolted, more and more, at the apparent injustice. She had studied the organization of society. She was familiar with the modes of popular oppression. She ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... contemptuously. "Bah," he exclaimed, "you're a fool; I should have sent a servant to talk with you. You are a child—but you are an insolent child," he cried, suddenly, his anger breaking out, "and I shall punish you. You dare to call me names! You shall fight me, you shall fight me to-morrow. You have insulted an officer, and you shall meet me at ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... so much as have been born without Germany," said the lady whose hair came off, with difficulty controlling a desire to shake this insolent and perverted Junker who could repeat the infamous English lie as to who began the war. "You owe your very existence to Germany. You should be giving thanks to her on your knees for her gift to you of life, instead of jeering at this representative—" she flung ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... up the task eagerly. Leaving the buggy in charge of a small boy, the two gentle men joined the crowd, and James soon recognised that the speaker was delivering something very like a sermon of his own, but seasoning it with a sort of quaint, insolent humour, that suited the tastes of his hearers admirably. The ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... a brazen front! So to abuse us is to oblige us. I believe you are under the delusion that you are really talking to slaves; after the insolent excesses of your tongue, do you propose to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... began it. Leaning back in a very low chair, with her legs crossed and her arms flung wide, a position almost insolent in ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... yellowish-and-brown cross-barred cap. He had on a short, badly-cut frieze overcoat, his hands stuck defiantly in his trousers pockets, forcing its lapels wide open. And he appeared to be partially if not entirely drunk, and very insolent. I had the idea that the drunkenness and the dress were a pose, or else that he had been in some neighborhood in search of copy which required such an outfit. Charitably let us accept the last. He was accompanied ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... less so. We were rather entertained by the behaviour of a young Scotchman, the engineer of the steamer, on my husband addressing him with reference to the management of the engine. His manners were surly, and almost insolent. He scrupulously avoided the least approach to courtesy or outward respect; nay, he even went so far as to seat himself on the bench close beside me, and observed that "among the many advantages this country offered to settlers like him, he did not reckon it the least of them that ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... were Protestants all of them, but their theology was rather practical than speculative. If Italians and Spaniards chose to believe in the Mass, it was not any affair of theirs. Their quarrel was with the insolent pretence of Catholics to force their creed on others with sword and cannon. The spirit which was working in them was the genius of freedom. On their own element they felt that they could be the spiritual tyrants' masters. But as things were going, rebellion was likely to break out at home; their ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... wild-fire through the whole place, and your life in consequence will become an absolute burden for the remainder of your sojourn in this spot. Refuse, and the wretches who have hitherto been wheedling and cringing at your heels, will at once grow insolent and threatening, especially in the case of unprotected ladies. It is in fact a choice of two evils, and the only remedy that we ourselves can suggest is for the persecuted traveller to select a good stout larrikin and pay him freely to keep at arm's length his detestable brothers and ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... that you are in Germany, and that you have shed your blood for your country? Your German brethren will not deride you; they will not rejoice at your sufferings; they will hope with you for a better and more fortunate day when you will get even with that insolent and hateful enemy, for the battles ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... seized with madness, she rushes into the house to meet her own inevitable doom, while from behind the scene we hear the groans of the dying Agamemnon. The palace opens; Clytemnestra stands beside the body of her king and husband; like an insolent criminal, she not only confesses the deed, but boasts of and justifies it, as a righteous requital for Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia to his own ambition. Her jealousy of Cassandra, and criminal connexion with the worthless Aegisthus, who does not appear till after ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... used to play with his schoolfellows, and as they were all inferior to him in rank, they shewed him great respect, according to the example of their master, who many times would pass by faults in him that he would correct in his other pupils. This indulgence spoiled Agib; he became proud and insolent, would have his play-fellows bear all from him, and would submit to nothing from them, but be master every where; and if any took the liberty to thwart him, he would call them a thousand names, and many ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... winter; after which, amid storms and alarms, daylight came steadily nearer. Storms and alarms: for there came rumors of quarrels out at Potsdam, quarrels on the old score between the Royal Spouses there; and frightful messages, through one Eversmann, an insolent royal lackey, about wedding Weissenfels, about imprisonment for life and other hard things; through all which Wilhelmina studied to keep her poor head steady, and answer with dignity yet discreetly. On the other hand, her Sisters are permitted to visit her, and perceptible ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Douglas, and presented its authour with a gold medal. Some years ago, at a coffee-house in Oxford, I called to him, "Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Sheridan, how came you to give a gold medal to Home, for writing that foolish play?" This you see, was wanton and insolent; but I MEANT to be wanton and insolent. A medal has no value but as a stamp of merit. And was Sheridan to assume to himself the right of giving that stamp? If Sheridan was magnificent enough to bestow ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... on purpose that I might tell you; suppose that, and you'll suppose nothing but the truth. I'd have been burnt alive before I'd have told her." He spoke these words between his set teeth, and scowled savagely as he uttered them. "I'd have been burnt alive first. I made her pay for her pretty insolent ways; I made her pay for her airs and graces; I'd never have told her—never, never! I had my power over her, and I kept it; I had my secret and was paid for it; and there wasn't a petty slight as she ever put upon me or ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... Leonard!" said the other sister, Laura, a few days later. She showed it to her husband. He wrote a cruel insolent reply, but sent more money than Blanche, so Leonard soon ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... aid of quinine for themselves, and bad gin for the natives, have held their own. Except for the trade goods it never would be held. It is a country where the pay is cruelly inadequate, where but few horses, sheep, or cattle can exist, where the natives are unbelievably lazy and insolent, and where, while there is no society of congenial spirits, there is a superabundance of animal and insect pests. Still, so great are gold, ivory, and rubber, and so many are the men who will take big chances for little pay, that every foot of the West ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... with the toe of her slipper. There were prostrate bodies around them, with teeth bared, insolent, silent, horrible. One couldn't be sorry they were dead, but one didn't like to see them. Jacqueline's boot pointed to a man lying on his face. A silk hat was near by in the dust. A rusty black wig was loosened from his head. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... a dwarf who drank the sea dry. As he was walking one day with Vishnoo, the insolent ocean asked the god who the pigmy was that strutted by his side. Vishnoo replied it was the patriarch Agastya, who was going to restore earth to its true balance. Ocean, in contempt, spat its spray in the pigmy's face, and the sage, in revenge of this affront, drank the waters of the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... who have ever known me, and begin a new career of honesty, God permitting. I will not remain with the character of a thief stamped upon me, to be a drag round your neck, and I have made up my mind no longer to persecute dear Betty Bevan with the offer of a dishonest and dishonoured hand. In my insolent folly I had once thought her somewhat below me in station. I now know that she is far, far above me in every ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... soldiers, who forced them in a rude manner to return to the vessels. Our two conductors Van and Chou, coming up at the time, and being made acquainted with the circumstance, gave to each of the soldiers a most severe flogging. One of these, who had been particularly insolent, had his ears bored through with iron wire, and his hands bound to them for several days. The viceroy of Canton was at this time with the embassy, and being in rank superior to the offending officer, he ordered the latter to appear before him, gave him a severe ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... weakness in the blue of my insolent eyes; the white is pure mother-of-pearl, prettily marked with tiny veins, and the thick, long lashes fall like a silken fringe. My forehead sparkles, and the hair grows deliciously; it ripples into waves of pale gold, ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... the value of a longer speech from the tone in which it was uttered, and from the look and gesture which accompanied it. Unorna's voice was gentle, soft, half-indolent, half-caressing, half-expectant, and half-careless. There was something almost insolent in its assumption of superiority, which was borne out by the little defiant tapping of two long white fingers upon the arm of the carved chair. And yet, with the rising inflection of the monosyllable ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... exactness in the 'France nouvelle' of Prevost-Paradol, victim like Renan of universal suffrage? It is evident that a strange melancholy oppresses these lofty minds, weighed down under the conviction of their ideal strength and their real weakness. The insolent triumph of the mediocre adds to this sadness. But it is not quite without sweetness. It has something of the pleasure extolled by Lucretius in the famous verses on those temples of the calm faith from ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... pretty accurately. Grouping them in two families, one finds himself a clever, genial, witty, wise, brilliant, sparkling, thoughtful, distinguished, celebrated, illustrious scholar and perfect gentleman, and first writer of the age; or a dull, foolish, wicked, pert, shallow, ignorant, insolent, traitorous, black-hearted ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... wood fire. Magnificent tapestries covered the walls with glowing colour, and upon one of these, in barbaric bad taste, was hung a single great picture by Titian, Philip's favourite master. Dolores blushed as she recognized in the face of the insolent Venus the features of the Princess of Eboli. Prom his accustomed chair, the King could see this painting. Everywhere in the room there were rich objects that caught and reflected the light, things of gold and silver, of jade and lapis lazuli, in a sort of tasteless profusion that detracted from ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... outcries, rapidly succeeded each other; the most violent speedily surrounded the carriage of the marshal, and were already about to unharness the horses, when Davoust made his appearance, rushed upon the most insolent of these insurgents, dragged him behind his carriage, and made his servants fasten him to it. Frightened at this action, the people stopped short, seized with motionless consternation, and then quietly and silently opened a passage for the marshal, who passed ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... expect me to be seen with you, in your carriage? I cannot comprehend your object, Mademoiselle de Gramont. What possesses you to try to exasperate me by your insolent propositions?" ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the old gentleman, and, taking up his forage cap as he spoke, he crammed it on his head. 'Perhaps you are too insolent,' he added, 'to inform me of the time of ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Comment, insolent, tu veux que je laisse un honnete homme dans l'erreur, et que je souffre que tu epouses sa fille sous mon nom? Ecoute, si tu me parles encore de cette impertinence-la, des que j'aurai averti monsieur Orgon de ce que tu es, ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... the Queen—mother, who welcomed every accession of strength with a suavity and condescension rendered doubly acceptable from the contrast which it exhibited with the morose indifference of the King, and the insolent haughtiness of De Luynes. Thus constant arrivals afforded a pretext for perpetual gaieties; and the Due d'Epernon received the new allies of his royal mistress with a profusion and recklessness of expenditure which excited ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... entertained Mrs. Beauchamp, while Mr. Tuckham led Miss Halkett over the garden. Cecilia considered that his remarks upon Nevil were insolent. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with insolent vociferation. Our Sheikh of Kerek, a man of sixty, far excelled all his people in these youthful, exercises; indeed he seemed to be an accomplished Bedouin Sheikh; though he proved to be a treacherous friend to me. As I thought ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... here that Charles I. had collected his forces. This city had remained faithful to him, after the whole nation had forsaken his cause to join the standard of Parliament and liberty. The memory of that unfortunate king and his companions, the amiable Falkland, the insolent Goring, his queen, and son, gave a peculiar interest to every part of the city which they might be supposed to have inhabited. The spirit of elder days found a dwelling here, and we delighted to trace its footsteps. If these feelings had not ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... parrot, enormous and coloured like a tropical sunset, drowsy-eyed and insolent looking. When he saw the sailor man he seemed to rouse up. He looked at Raft and Raft ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... disaffected came to me with a complaint that they had not enough meat, and that they must be allowed to make a razzia upon the cattle of the natives to procure some oxen. This demand being of course refused, they retired, muttering in an insolent manner their determination of stealing cattle with or without my permission. I said nothing at the time, but early on the following morning I ordered the drum to beat and the men to fall in. I made them a short address, reminding them of the agreement made ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... to draw the line between the two, and that there is no difference in real character. In fact short sagas might be called thaettir and vice versa. Also, as hinted before, there is exceedingly little comedy in the sagas. The roughest horse-play in practical joking, the most insolent lampoons in verbal satire, form, as a rule, the lighter element; and pieces like the Bandamanna Saga, which with tragic touches is really comic in the main, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... before, still submitting to the insolent authority of the schoolmistress with a steady fortitude very remarkable in any girl—and especially in a girl whose face revealed a sensitive nature. Linley approached her, and said his few kind words before Miss Wigger could assert herself for ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... to say about it?" asked David, who did not like the insolent tone assumed by the young horseman. "Do the birds ...
— The Boy Trapper • Harry Castlemon
... his wife came, all the old man prophesied in a few brief sentences to his wife proving true. There was no great struggle on the mother's part; she stepped aside from governing, and became as like a servant as could be. An insolent servant-girl came, and she and Rodney's wife started a little drama of incompetency, which should end as the hotel-keeping ended. Wastefulness, cheap luxury, tawdry living, took the place of the old, frugal, simple life. But the mother went about with that unchanging sweetness ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... eye, as though they were now my sins, when I had so transferred them upon thy Son, as though they could now be raised to life again, to condemn me to death, when they are dead in him who is the fountain of life, yet were it an irregular anticipation, and an insolent presumption, to think that thy present mercy extended to all my future sins, or that there were no embers, no coals, of future sins left in me. Temper therefore thy mercy so to my soul, O my God, that I may neither decline to any faintness of ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... adversity" seemed "but a few days for the love he had to her." By his wife Muriel, daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton, he had two sons, of whom Francis was the elder. He was educated at Gloucester Hall; and having been very actively participant in the rebellion of Essex, was on his trial extremely insolent to the Lord Chancellor. His life was saved only by the intercession of Lady Catherine Howard, whose services were purchased apparently for 1500 pounds. Catesby never ceased to regret the admission of Tresham to the conspiracy: but if as is probable (see ante, Monteagle), Lord Monteagle ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... glance, insolent and piercing. Then she laughed, but neither hysterically nor mirthfully. It was the laughter of one in deadly anger. "I had believed you to be a man of some reason, Mr. Worth. Do you suppose, even had I entertained some sentiment toward you, that it would ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... he, then, with his insolent, bestial face purple with good living, who had slammed the door. I half started indignantly from my chair—then I remembered it was ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... brother (Gilbert), who could drive the plough very well, and help me to thrash the corn. A novel-writer might, perhaps, have viewed these scenes with some satisfaction, but so did not I; my indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent, threatening letters, which used to set us ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... He ceased to be himself in manner completely, and even in disposition, in so far that his faded neutral eyes matching his discoloured hair so well, were discovered then to be capable of expressing a sort of underhand hate. He was at first defiant, then insolent, then broke down and burst into tears; but it might have been from rage. Then he calmed down, returned to his soft manner of speech and to that unassuming quiet bearing which had been usual with him even in his greatest days. But it seemed as ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... unreservedly, from South Carolina as from Massachusetts. His authority should be admitted as fully in Virginia as it is in New York, in Georgia and Alabama as in Pennsylvania and Ohio. This can follow only from his reelection; and it can follow only from his reelection by a decisive majority. That insolent spirit which led the South to become so easy a prey to the Secession faction, when not a tenth part of its people were Secessionists, should be thoroughly, emphatically rebuked, and its chief representatives ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... another girl whose brother knew Wollaston Lee, and he told him. After a little, Wollaston and Maria never spoke when they met. The girl did not seem to see the boy; she was more delicate in her manner of showing aversion, but the boy gazed straight at her with an insolent stare, as at one who had dared him. He told the same boy who had told him what Maria had said, that he thought Amy Long was the prettiest girl in school, and Maria was homely enough to crack a looking-glass, and that came back to Maria. Everything said in the school ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... (swiftly rising) You're a cruel woman—a hard, insolent woman! I knew what I was doing! What do you know about it? About me? I didn't go to the Outside. I was left there. I'm only—trying to get along. Everything that can hurt me I want buried—buried deep. Spring is here. This ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... everywhere, of all shades, from pure jet up to the lightest yellow. Some of these niggers have money, and are quite independent. You would be surprised at their impertinence. I kicked one of them in the hotel yesterday, and he asked me what the devil I was doing, so I knocked the insolent scoundrel down. He says that he will sue me, but I cannot believe that the law is so servile as to bolster up a black man against ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... girl: she had been offensive and insolent to Elsa, the cause of Elsa's tears; but just now, when he turned back in answer to that piteous call from her, she looked so forlorn, so pathetic, so terrified that all the kindliness and chivalry which are inherent in the true ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... devise some way of making most tasks less repulsive, of lessening the burdens of those tasks that couldn't be anything but repulsive? Was this stupid system, so cruel, so crushing, and producing at the top such absurd results as flashy, insolent autos and silly palaces and overfed, overdressed women, and dogs in jeweled collars, and babies of wealth brought up by low menials—was ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... intended to put up a wind-mill in my bedroom to-morrow morning, I could only take off my hat to them. When a man offers you five per cent. where you've only had four, he is instantly your lord and master. It doesn't signify how vulgar he is, or how insolent, or how exacting. Associations of the tenderest kind must all give way to trade. But the shooting which lies to the north and west of us is, I think, safe for the present. I suppose I must go and see what my father wants, or I shall be held to have ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... Mackintosh would have wished (for was it not part of the University idea that men of all grades of society should meet as equals under the college roof?). But, then, he had never been summoned for any very grave or disgraceful breach of the rules, and was never insolent or offensive to any of the Fellows. Finally, he came of a very distinguished family; and Mr. Mackintosh had the keenest remembrance still of his own single interview, three years ago, with the ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... statesman's generous tribute. "Macaulay," says Gladstone, "was singularly free of vices ... one point only we reserve, a certain tinge of occasional vindictiveness. Was he envious? Never. Was he servile? No. Was he insolent? No.... Was he idle? The question is ridiculous. Was he false? No; but true as steel and transparent as crystal. Was he vain? We hold that he was not. At every point in the ugly ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... salt fish (for the use of the poor) from the Propontis and Euxine is a great part of Attic commerce. A large part of the business at the Agora centers around the fresh fish stalls, and we have seen how extortionate and insolent were the fishmongers. Sole, tunny, mackerel, young shark, mullet, turbot, carp, halibut, are to be had, but the choicest regular delicacies are the great Copaic eels from Boeotia; these, "roasted on the coals and wrapped in beet leaves," are a dish fit for the ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... I wanted to see you, I was not going to be snubbed by an insolent clerk, I would have braved him even if you had not come though I thank my stars you did come all the same, it is very degrading to be seen arguing with a common ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... mean, deceitful, avaricious, spiteful, everything that's wicked. He is ruining you, and he will ruin Dick, too. He threatens that, when he dies, we may find all his wealth left to charities. Charities, indeed, when we have to pinch and screw to satisfy insolent tradesmen, and the everlasting hunger of a lot of cringing, crawling loafers and vagabonds who ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... Ixion (taking shadow for power), mingle in the moral meaning of this and its collateral legends; and give an aspect, at last, not only of foolish cunning, but of impiety or literal "idolatry," "imagination worship," to the dreams of avarice and injustice, until this notion of atheism and insolent blindness becomes principal; and the "Clouds" of Aristophanes, with the personified "just" and "unjust" sayings in the latter part of the play, foreshadow, almost feature by feature, in all that they ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... money!" said the Marquis gloomily, as he rose from his tumbled bed to take his first breakfast, and read his early morning letters—"And to crush a small and insolent race, whose country is rich in mineral product, is simply the act of squeezing an orange for the necessary juice. Life would be lost, of course, but we are over- populated; and a good war would rid the country of many scamps and vagabonds. Widows and orphans ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... had not been at work many days before he discovered that things were no longer as they had been when he received his hurt. The Greek had never been courteous in his behaviour to the Galatea party, but now he was downright insolent, and his insolence seemed to increase every day. At the outset of the work the gentlemen of the party, that is to say, Captain Staunton, Lance, and Rex, had been required to look on and direct the progress of the work only, but now Lance was the only one to whom this privilege ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... the failure of the expedition, stirred up all the provinces of his vast empire, and called for new levies from far and near, resolved upon leading in person such an army into Greece that the insolent Athenians should be crushed at a single blow, and the tarnished glory of the Persian arms restored. In the midst of these preparations, with the Egyptians in revolt, the king suddenly died, in the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... that this was a most insolent demand. If the governor considered himself aggrieved by our change of station, his redress lay in an appeal to Washington. This attempt to assume command of us, and order us out of a United States fort, ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... waters that spread their miasma upward when Life frowns too long and too darkly. Sometimes misfortunes pile up so remorselessly, this miasma whispers that a man's chief strength consists in going straight to the devil and be done with it all. A resounding slap on Life's face. An insolent assertion of the individual will against Society. Or perhaps it is merely a disposition to run full tilt, hoping for the coup de grace—much as I felt when I lay neglected on the battlefield for twenty-four hours and longed for some Yank to come ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... minutes, yet am addressed twice by natives in my own tongue; and at Pfalzburg, a smaller town, where I remain over night, I find the same characteristic. Ere I penetrate thirty kilometres into German territory, however, I have to record what was never encountered in France; an insolent teamster, who, having his horses strung across a narrow road- way in the suburbs of Saarburg, refuses to turn his leaders' heads to enable me to ride past, thus compelling me to dismount. Soldiers drilling, soldiers at target practice, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... proof of his divine origin; actors were scorned and prize-fighters revered; the genius of courtesans, the folly of education, and the poetry of pantomime formed the themes on which the articles which made the centre of the paper were written. Insolent letters were addressed to eminent people, and a novel by Harding, the hero of which was a butler and the heroine a cook, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... genius, little inferior to inspiration. To show the enmity of the unconverted to those who bear the image of Christ, he descends step by step. They first mock, or deride them by mimicry; second, flout, or treat them with contemptuous sneers, both by words and actions; third, scoff at them with insolent ridicule, sometimes accompanied by a push or blow; fourth, taunt, revile, upbraid, bully, and challenge them: all these produce, fifth, hate, abhorrence, and detestation, leading inevitably to, sixth, persecution—to pursue with malignity—to afflict, harass, and destroy. Such are ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... time violently insolent to your father. And even the bishop thought to trample upon him. Do you remember the bishop's preaching against your father's chanting? If I ever forget it!" And the archdeacon slapped his closed fist against ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... against inexorable limitations! Sylvia was aware that an insolent young man, with moist protuberant eyes, had come up where she stood there, alone, motionless on the public street. He put his arm in hers, clasped her hand in a fat, soft palm, and, "Allons, ma belle!" he said ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... a tolerably correct notion of his character. He was clearly a man not destitute of real patriotism and magnanimity, a man whose vices were not of a sordid kind. But he must also have been a man in the highest degree arrogant and insolent, a man prone to malevolence, and prone to the error of mistaking his malevolence for public virtue. "Doest thou well to be angry?" was the question asked in old time of the Hebrew prophet. And he answered, "I do well." This ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... on; such a march for insolence, say the Austrians!" [Archenholtz (ii. 115-116); who is in a hurry, dateless, and rather confuses a subsequent DAY (September 18th) with this "night of August 30th." See RETZOW, ii. 26; and still better, TEMPELHOF, iv. 203.] Till, in this way, the insolent King has Schweidnitz under his protective hand again; and forces the Chain to coil itself wholly together, and roll into the Hills for a safe lodging. Whither he again follows it: with continual changes of position, vying in inaccessibility with your own; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and inclined to bluster. He was accompanied by a friend, also drunk, who came to see the fun, and was ready to use his influence on the winning side. The teacher went inside, brought out his gun, and slipped two cartridges in. "I've had enough of this," he said. "Now then, be off, you insolent blackguards, or I'll shoot you like rabbits. Go!" and he snapped his jaw and the breech of his gun together. As they rode off, the old local hawk happened to soar close over a dead lamb in the fern at the corner of the garden, and the teacher, who had been "laying" for him a long time, ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... scorn, he was aware, too, that there were shades of animosity in it for which he had no ready supply of terms. Such exclamatory fragments as forced themselves up through the troubled incoherence of his thoughts were of the nature of "damned American," "vulgar Yankee," "insolent bounder," rendering but inadequately the sentiments of a certain kind of Englishman toward his fancied typical American, a crafty Colossus who accomplishes everything by money and brutal strength. Had there been ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... to be in readiness to receive the newly-elected monarch upon his arrival. Their general, Stanislaus, artfully contrived even to place a thousand of these Polish troops in garrison in the citadel of Moscow. These foreign soldiers at last became so insolent that there was a general rising of the populace, and they were threatened with utter extermination. The storm of passion thus raised, no earthly power could quell. The awful slaughter was commenced, and the Poles, conscious of their danger, resorted to the ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... outrageous usage of the three men by the insolent seamen, I observed the fellows ran scattering about the land, as if they wanted to see the country. I observed also, that the three other men had liberty to go where they pleased; but they sat down all three upon the ground very pensive, and ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... "ill-intentioned demagogues who live by agitation and are too lazy to work." It sought, of course, without success, to represent to the workers that Roberts and the Union's agents whom the Union very naturally had to pay, were insolent swindlers, who drew the last farthing from the working-men's pockets. When such insanity prevails in the property-holding class, when it is so blinded by its momentary profit that it no longer has eyes for the most conspicuous signs of the times, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... great time in Chicago with the labor union men. They made what I regarded as a rather insolent demand upon me, and I gave them some perfectly straight talk about their duty and about the preservation of law and order. The trouble seems to be increasing there, and I may have to send Federal troops into the city—though I shall not do so unless ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... the use of electricity for transportation. The last night of the ten years found the city buried in stygian gloom, because the duty of lighting its streets is still a matter of private profit; and the insolent corporation which fattens upon this franchise surrendered the privilege of murdering its linemen unpunished, only when its poles were cut and its wires torn down. A more classic application of the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... his superhuman energy remained unimpaired. He was even meditating and was making preparation for a last campaign. The authority of Rome on the eastern frontier had not recovered from the effects of the destruction of the army of Crassus. The Parthians were insolent and aggressive. Caesar had determined to go in person to bring them to their senses as soon as he could leave Rome. Partly, it was said that he felt his life would be safer with the troops; partly, he desired to leave the administration free ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... utilitarian. Its halls, bare and cheerless, echoed to the tread and were repellent as those of a barracks. The visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the insolent servant of an indifferent hostess. It seemed the home of the mathematical, the mechanical, the material; but this was a mistake. It was a house of dreams. The right knock at one of those ugly doors would permit one ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... the good men that died for holding with the pope. My conscience, my conscience doth grudge me every day for it." Life was fast losing its value for him. What was life to him or any man when bought with a sin against his soul? "If he be disposed to die, for that matter," the insolent Croxton said, "he may die ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... even more swiftly into the faces of insolent varlets!" cried Siebenburg, raising his right hand threateningly. "Now take me to your master ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Lord Henry Howard, to Ralegh's extraordinary haughtiness, may be regarded even with more suspicion. An old acquaintance, however, and a political ally, the Earl of Northumberland, similarly describes Ralegh as 'insolent, extremely heated, a man that desired to seem to be able to sway all men's courses.' That this was the current opinion, due, as it was, more or less to misconception, is borne out by a mass of authority. Ralegh must have profoundly ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... to be taken for a farmer or planter, was so treated by soldiery before a tobacco-warehouse under guard. They wanted tobacco, and begged him to allow some to be turned out. He approached a young lieutenant commanding the post, but the latter was insolent to the "old Southerner." The latter sent a soldier to General Grant, who himself rode up, post-haste, at the summons. The soldiers were given some of the Indian weed, and the donor, turning to the impertinent officer, who had thought him a converted ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... puts on a cravat well folded, a very long coat, and a very short waistcoat. He combs down his hair till it is quite straight, rouges the tip of his nose, takes a whip, puts on gaiters and a little pointed hat, and studies himself in the glass in order to give himself a stupid and insolent air, the result of the make-up being entirely successful. It may be difficult for the most unbiassed Englishman of to-day to recognise himself in this portrait or to find it half-way somewhere about 1860, or even, going back to actual "temp. of tale," to discover anything much like it in physiognomies ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Before her parting lips uttered a line she had thoroughly mastered them, the innate purity of her perfected womanhood, the evident innocence of her purpose, shielding her against all indecency and insult. The ribald scoffing, the insolent shuffling of feet, the half-drunken uneasiness, ceased as if by magic; and as her simple act proceeded, the stillness out in front became positively solemn, the startled faces picturing an awakening to higher things. It was a triumph far exceeding the noisy outburst that greeted the Mexican—a ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... lifetime crowds the brain of a drowning man; that same crowded my brain during the few moments which swung in to us Daniel, scowling, masterful, his raw bulk and his long shambling stride never before so insolent. ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... to him they received his insolent silence meekly and as being the natural and proper conduct of so great a man; when he opened his lips 10 they all hung on his words with admiration (he never honored a particular individual with a remark, but addressed ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... compactly organized and vigorously wielded, placed in its hands the power of the state. It bestowed political offices and honors, and was thereby enabled to command the apostate homage of political ambition. Other nations felt the prevalence in your national councils of its insolent and domineering spirit. There was a moment, most critical in the history of America and of the world, when it seemed as though that continent, with all its resources and all its hopes, was about to become the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... of the three hostile groups into which the invaders were broken—the Normans, the English, and the men of the Welsh border. To the new comers the natives were simply barbarians. When the Irish princes came to do homage, their insolent king pulled their long beards in ridicule; at the outrage they turned their backs on the English camp, and the other kings hearing their tale, refused to do fealty. Any allies who still remained were ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... "Insolent serf! unsay thy words, or maintain them with thy sword!—Crouch, like a low-born slave as thou art, and beg Macpherson's pardon, if thou darest not ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... world, enthroned and insolent, Beware, lest with a song your towers fall, Your pride sent blazing up the firmament— Poets must make their honey ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... had n't; matter of some personal importance to me," the voice taking on a lazy, insolent drawl. "Of course, the fellow is under arrest all right, but that murder business is only part of ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
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