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More "Palliate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of his time. And, in truth, if a zealous patriotism, a fiery valor, and skilful leadership are worthy of honor, then is such tribute due to Dominic de Gourgues, despite the shadowing vices which even the spirit of that wild age can only palliate, the personal hate that aided the impulse of his patriotism, and the implacable cruelty that sullied ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... such a case, she blamed herself for having omitted herself to question the confidential clerk, and having left all to Lord Ormersfield, who, cool and wary as he ordinarily was, would be less likely to palliate Mr. Ponsonby's errors than those of any other person. Her heart grew sick as she counted the weeks ere she could hear ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be over seventy," growled Anderson, as if seeking for some excuse to palliate his restraint. "I'm mad—but it was funny." The working of his face finally set in the ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... social system. I am sure no theory can be correct which a mother is not willing for her daughter to practice. Decent women should not live with licentious husbands in the relation of wife. As society is now, good, pure women, by so living, cover up and palliate immorality and help to violate the law of monogamy. Women must take the social helm into their own hands and not permit the men of their own circle, any more than the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... broad lands would be swallowed up in the costs of sale, or that a greedy tribe of expert middlemen would in days to come bleed Maori and settler alike. Yet it would have been but reasonable for the Colonial Office to exert itself to palliate the effects of the staggering blows it thus dealt the pioneer colonists of New Zealand. They were not all land-sharks; most of them were nothing of the sort. It was but natural that they felt with extreme ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... entirely excuse him for remaining in office at His Majesty's entreaty to pursue a course of colonial policy which his reason and his conscience disapproved. This was a political fault, which no circumstances can palliate. Others have done worse, no doubt, from meaner motives; but the mere desire of serving the King does not absolve the Minister from censure for having acted contrary to his own convictions on a question of such ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... But there is one misdeed, one which outweighs all others whatsoever—a crime which it is useless to palliate, let our other friend say what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It sate heavy, for him, on his soul, and alone of all the actions of his life we are certain that he wished it undone—the death and eating of that poor foolish Lampe, the hare. It was a paltry revenge in Reineke. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... decency, charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny,'" said John savagely. "Quite so, Mrs. Goddard. I shall not attempt to palliate it, nor will I ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... accused him to herself vehemently of a sin over and above those sins which had filled Alice with dismay. He had demanded money from the girl whom he intended to marry! According to Kate's idea, nothing could excuse or palliate this sin. Alice had accounted it as nothing,—had expressed her opinion that the demand was reasonable;—even now, after the ill-usage to which she had been subjected, she had declared that the money should be forthcoming, and given ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... not merely to palliate as is so often done by practitioners in dealing with these distressing maladies. We do not prescribe coca mixtures, whiskey, malt extracts, so-called celery compounds or other nerve stimulants, which only spur the already weakened ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... is only intended to authorize the manner in which I have treated a life far more extraordinary than any of those he has transmitted to us. It is my part to describe a man whose inimitable character casts a veil over those faults which I shall neither palliate nor disguise; a man distinguished by a mixture of virtues and vices so closely linked together as in appearance to form a necessary dependence, glowing with the greatest beauty when united, shining with ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... or palliate to me, dearest Tom," replied Mary; "my eyes have been opened, too late it is true, but they have been opened; and although it is kind of you to say so, I feel the horrid conviction of my own guilt. See what misery I have brought about. There is a father who has sacrificed his youth and ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to soften or palliate the fact, that nothing would reconcile Miss Templeton and her sister to such a marriage; that her brother's character was regarded by them with abhorrence; that their cherished brother should marry the sister of a billiard-marker—a mere adventurer and gambler—was utterly impossible; and Leah's ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... exertions would be shared by others, whether equally or unequally making them, and that the exertions of others would equally avail him, notwithstanding a deficiency in his own. Skilful arrangements might palliate this tendency, but it would be difficult to counteract ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... sudden access of courage, born possibly of her despair, she sought neither to attempt denial nor palliate the fact. ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... she indignantly. "You would palliate your unfaithfulness, represent your fickleness of mind as magnanimity! But I hear only one thing in your words—you give me up, you ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... horrid transaction, the French court endeavoured to palliate it by forms of law. They pretended to justify the massacre by a calumny, and accused the admiral of a conspiracy, which no one believed. The parliament was commanded to proceed against the memory of Coligni; and his dead body was hung in chains ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... knew it. The disease had taken on a form that usually baffles the skill of our most eminent physicians, and Dr. Hillhouse saw little chance of anything but a fatal termination. He could do nothing except to palliate as far as possible the patient's intense suffering and endeavor to check farther complications. But he ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... hear. Ah! I am but a poor broken man, liable, as you have seen, to fits of madness and extravagance. You shall hear everything. And listen,—as a witness that I shall speak truth, I will say my say before the face of Hiero Glyphic yonder, and upon the steps of his altar! See, I desire neither to palliate nor falsify. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... despoiled Condition (as these Men deem it) be the immediate Work of Creation itself, or the Effect of Adam's Sin, and Abuse of his intellectual Powers. We are what we are by Necessity, strict Necessity: and though it may be called moral Necessity, in order to palliate and distinguish it from that which is natural; it operates on us, to all Intents and Purposes, equally the same; and the giving it a milder Name, looks like a sophistical Artifice. If Man's Nature be impaired by the Act of another, God, as a just and good ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... Kitchener). Now, Mr Prater was one of the most sportsmanlike of masters. If he had merely met Harrison out of bounds, and it had been possible to have overlooked him, he would have done so. But such a proceeding in the interior of a small shop was impossible. There was nothing to palliate the crime. The tobacconist also kept the wolf from the door, and lured the juvenile population of the neighbourhood to it, by selling various weird brands of sweets, but it was only too obvious that Harrison was not after these. Guilt was in his eye, and the packet of cigarettes in ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at best could only palliate. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... vanities, with the little interludes of wisdom; these have been the occupations of my manhood; these will furnish forth the materials of that history which is now open to your survey. Whatever be the faults of the historian, he has no motive to palliate what he has committed nor to conceal what ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... subjects, nor strips them of their last rag and turns them out to shiver in the road. The despotism of Louis XVI. was not the despotism of Philippe le Bel, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula; but it was bad enough to justify the French Revolution, and to palliate even its horrors. If an appeal be made to the intense attachments which exist between wives and their husbands, exactly as much may be said of domestic slavery. It was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome for slaves to submit to death by torture rather than betray their masters. In the proscriptions ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... Darrow was all attention. He would be delighted to show it. Suppose they make a practical test of it by playing a game. This they did and Maitland played superbly, but he was hardly a match for the old gentleman, who sought to palliate his defeat by saying: "You play an excellent game, sir; but I am a trifle too much for you on my own ground. Now, if you can spare the time, I should like to witness a game between you and my daughter; I think you will be ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... of the crew on deck, and he soon understood the whole matter. He was very severe upon Cleats for leaving the deck, declared that he could not be trusted, and that he should be discharged. The latter was very humble, acknowledged his error, and made no attempt to palliate it. He had always been faithful, so far as was known, and probably had never been guilty of any graver offence than that of leaving the deck for a few minutes during his watch. But he had been expressly cautioned not to do this, and had sent a hand below for his ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... the battle took place. He said also to the same person, that when he found them hesitating in the presence of the enemy, he "burst into a passion," called them cowards, and dashed into the river as before narrated. If this account be true, it may somewhat palliate, but certainly not justify ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... the relationship between these two plays there always seemed to be something which needed explanation. It was the only instance among the works of Shakspeare in which a direct copy, even to matters of detail, appeared to have been made; and, in spite of all attempts to gloss over and palliate, it was impossible to deny that an unblushing act of mere piracy seemed to have been committed, of which I never could bring myself to believe that Shakspeare had been guilty. The readiness to impute this act to him was to me but an instance of the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... too long to dwell particularly on the punishments inflicted by the Court of Star-chamber in this reign. Such historians as have not written in order to palliate the tyranny of Charles, and especially Rushworth, will furnish abundant details, with all those circumstances that portray the barbarous and tyrannical spirit of those who composed that tribunal. Two or three instances are so celebrated that I cannot pass them over. Leighton, a Scots divine, having ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... more, Miss Walton," said he, his face distorted by an expression of intense self-loathing. "Do not try to palliate my course. I would much rather you would call my cowardly selfishness and lack of principle by their right names. The best thing I can do for the world is to get out of it, and from present feelings, this 'good- riddance' will soon occur. Will you excuse me if I sit down?" and he sank ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... palliate not my wound; When you have argued all you can, 'tis incest. No, 'tis resolved: I charge you plead no more; I cannot live without Almeyda's sight, Nor can I see Almeyda, but I sin. Heaven has inspired me with a sacred thought, To live alone to ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... I champion a bad cause and seek to palliate what is inexcusable. As we travel about the world on our way through life we meet and pass here and there, in peace or in war, other men, fellow-travellers: and sometimes there is no more than time for a glance, eye to eye. And in that glance you see the sort of man: and chiefly there ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... sought to escape; crept out into the back yard; tried to scale the wall; fallen back exhausted; and been found at morning on the stones in a dying state. But though there was some evidence of cruelty, there was none of murder; and the aunt and her husband had sought to palliate cruelty by alleging the exceeding stubbornness and perversity of the child, who was declared to be half-witted. Be that as it may, at the orphan's death the aunt inherited her brother's fortune. Before the first wedded year was out, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong 90. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... who was the host of his assailants, and with whom they were previously on the most friendly relations, it was an act of treachery, and reflects dishonor upon the fame of Cortez. At the same time, the position occupied by the Spaniards was so strange, and even desperate, as to palliate, though it cannot excuse, such a ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... above you, that you may see their EVERY-DAY character, manners, habits, etc. One must see people undressed to judge truly of their shape; when they are dressed to go abroad, their clothes are contrived to conceal, or at least palliate the defects of it: as full-bottomed wigs were contrived for the Duke of Burgundy, to conceal his hump back. Happy those who have no faults to disguise, nor weaknesses to conceal! there are few, if any such; ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... I palliate, what I cannot defend, my behaviour while I overheard you and your aunt? In vain do I plead that I was asleep, when you came into the coach; and that I first discovered you by the sound of your voice and the turn of the conversation; that I dreaded exciting any sudden alarm ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... vitality as they cannot be painted from the outside. He must see his creatures as well as hear them; and he must know always what they are doing and how they are looking when they are speaking. He cannot comment on them or explain them, or palliate their misdeeds. He must project them outside of himself; and he cannot be his own lecturer to point out their motives. He must get on without any attempt to point out the morality of his work, which remains implicit ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... be very strictly subordinated to the sense of honour and fair play. The book-making spirit has undoubtedly entered far too largely into many of the most characteristic of British sports, and I have no desire to palliate or excuse our national shortcomings in this or other respects. But the hard commercial spirit to which I have alluded seems to me to pervade American sport much more universally than it does the sport of England, and to form almost always a much ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... appropriateness to the old comedy, as a work of defined art, of allusions and descriptions, which morality can never justify, and, only with reference to the author himself, and only as being the effect or rather the cause of the circumstances in which he wrote, can consent even to palliate. ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... citizens, was in itself sufficient to ruin the prosperity of every Italian town. This law operated continually and unobservedly and resulted in placing,[25] year by year, a still larger quantity of the soil of Italy in the hands of the Roman aristocracy. In order to palliate the evils of conquest or at least to hide their conditions of servitude, the Romans had accorded to a part of the Italians the title of allies, and to others the privileges of municipia.[26] These privileges were combined in a very skillful manner in the interest of Rome, but ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... as a reminder that George Sand in her love affairs was always the man. She treated Chopin as a child, a toy, used him for literary copy- -pace Mr. Hadow!—and threw him over after she had wrung out all the emotional possibilities of the problem. She was true to herself even when she attempted to palliate her want of heart. Beware of the woman who punctuates the pages of her life with "heart" and "maternal feelings." "If I do not believe any more in tears it is because I saw thee crying!" exclaimed Chopin. Sand ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... particularly into the story of Cosmo the Third's wife, of whom I had read much in French Memoires; and into that of John Gaston, which was so fresh when I was at Florence; but as the author, in spite of the Great Duke's injunctions, has tried to palliate some of the worst imputations on Cosmo and his son Ferdinand, so he has been mighty modest about the Caprean amours of John Gaston and his eldest brother. Adieu! I have been writing a volume here myself. Pray remember to ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... and he went on just the same at cards. However, he never blamed his companions, or lost his temper when his plan of action was defeated. He certainly talked incessantly, but it was always to explain or to palliate some point in the game, and the eternal repetitions, delivered in the same eloquent and persuasive tone, provoked a ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... not deny, that after losing his senses upon the occasions, and in the manner to be afterwards stated, he may have committed improprieties which fill him with sorrow and regret: but he hopes, that in case he shall be able to show circumstances which abridge and palliate the guilt of his imprudent excess, the Venerable Court will consider these improprieties as the effects of that excess only, and not as arising from any radical vice in his temper or disposition. When a man is bereft of his judgment by the influence of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... as if she would have done the same, but stood gazing at the young monkey before her, wondering whether he was deserving of her sympathy, or had really misbehaved himself, and was trying to palliate his conduct. ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Djiaffer Pacha, had formerly shown me much kindness on my arrival at Souakim, during my first journey in Africa. I had therefore reckoned upon him as a friend; but no personal considerations could palliate the secret hatred to the ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... "Do not try to palliate your conduct, Gascoyne," said Mr Mason, earnestly. "The blackness of your sin is too great to be deepened or lightened by what men may have said of you. You are a pirate. Every pirate ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... own that Free Trade has been a failure. "In the House of Commons on March 12th, 1906, Mr. P. Snowden, M.P., said: 'Sixty years of Free Trade had failed to mitigate or palliate to any considerable extent the grave industrial and social evils which Free Traders and Protectionists alike were compelled to admit. Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman had admitted them when he said that 30 per cent. of our population were on the verge ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... redress by constitutional means. The long sanction they have received from the proper authorities and from the people, not less than the unexampled growth and increasing prosperity of so many millions of freemen, attest that no such oppression as would justify, or even palliate, such a resort can be justly imputed either to the present policy or past ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... first sputtering of its fuse, the old negress clasped him to her breast and rushed out of harm's way. It was not an exhibition of which a Fearless Firer might have been proud, nor did the screams of laughter greeting it serve to palliate his anger. But it was neither fun nor anger with Aunt Timmie. Her mind was a torment of fear lest he be maimed for life. Since early morning she had employed every art, every diplomatic ruse in which her race is ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... There is always something pathetic to me in the fables historians invent to excuse or palliate, or, perhaps it would be juster to say, make tolerable, the stained pages of the past. It is brought doubly nearer and distinct by this miserable war, and the strange fate that has fallen upon us—to be the guests of ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... that otherwise is inexplicable, but we may understand why so much and such resplendent poetry is lavished on incidents so bare, meagre, and commonplace, and why they present both poet and patron with frailties and faults naked and repellant; and we can the better palliate and forgive the weakness and subjection which the Sonnets indicate on the part of their author. With such a reading the Sonnets become a chronicle of the modes and feelings of their author, resembling in this respect the In Memoriam of ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... sovereignty, whom her Poet crowns with his choicest graces, on whom he devolves the task of prefacing this so critical, and, one might think, perhaps, perilous exhibition. But her description does not disguise the matter, or palliate its extremity. ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... been little more than the quotation of his own confession. His tremulously susceptible nature, especially assailable by the delights of sense, led him astray. There are traces in his life of occasional craft and untruthfulness which even the exigencies of exile and war do not wholly palliate. Flashes of fierce vengeance at times break from the clear sky of his generous nature. His strong affection became, in at least one case, weak and foolish fondness for ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... productions, and amongst the rest a Life of Napoleon, which is perhaps one of the most impartial extant, and very interesting, as containing a sort of recapitulation of facts, without any endeavour to palliate such of his actions as stern justice must condemn. M. Mignet has also chosen the path of history, and has not followed it unsuccessfully; the foundation of his present prosperity consisting entirely in his writings, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... he now began to wish that the punishment would be light. His confidence that Jim needed only to be pushed a little to confess was somewhat shaken, and the charge was really serious. He felt a desire to explain, to palliate, ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... letter is not the manoeuvre of the needy, sharping author, fastening on those in upper life, who honour him with a little notice of him or his works. Indeed, the situation of poets is generally such, to a proverb, as may, in some measure, palliate that prostitution of heart and talents, they have at times been guilty of. I do not think prodigality is, by any means, a necessary concomitant of a poetic turn, but I believe a careless indolent attention to economy, is almost inseparable ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Gall possessed most of the social virtues, particularly beneficence and good-nature—qualities, he observes, precious in all ranks of society, and which ought to make amends for many defects; but for Gall, they had only to palliate a certain roughness of character, which might wound the susceptibility of delicate persons, although the sick and unfortunate never had to complain; and, indeed, the doctor ought, in strict justice, to have more merit in our ideas, from never having once lost sight, in his writings, of either decency ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... was ever invented which stopped a case of acute articular rheumatism. It cannot be stopped by bleeding, or sweating, or purging, by niter, by tartar emetic, by guaiacum, by alkalies, by salines, by salicylic acid, or by anything else. The physician can palliate the pain and perhaps shorten the attack, can control and perhaps prevent complications and stiffness of the joints, but he cannot arrest the disease. Where rest, proper diet, and warmth are enjoined, most cases will get well just as soon without as with the use of medicinal ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... nineteen propositions we see very little to blame except the articles against the Catholics. These, however, were in the spirit of that age; and to some sturdy churchmen in our own, they may seem to palliate even the good which the Long Parliament effected. The regulation with respect to new creations of Peers is the only other article about which we entertain any doubt. One of the propositions is that the judges shall hold their offices during good behaviour. To ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a long reply, the purport of which was that many of the reprisals were bogus, many were actions undertaken in self-defence, while the rest were generally due to men "seeing red" after their comrades had been brutally murdered. The Government did not palliate such cases, and had instituted inquiries and taken disciplinary action against the offenders, when known; but they were not prepared to set up a public inquiry such as Lord CREWE had demanded. It would only substitute "a competition ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... Norah tried hastily to palliate Vladimir's misdeed in their eyes, but it is doubtful whether they heard her. The Major's fury clothed and reclothed itself in words as frantically as a woman up in town for one day's shopping tries on a succession of garments. He reviled and railed at fate and the general scheme of things, he pitied ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... and base in his treatment of her? And yet she recoiled from the application of such hard terms by another to Philip, by a cool-judging and indifferent person, as she esteemed Jeremiah to be. From some inscrutable turn in her thoughts, she began to defend him, or at least to palliate the harsh judgment which she herself had ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the sight of God he was a murderer made Blair collapse during the day. He was confined to his room; and it was then that he told the Fort Benton physician all that was haunting him, hour by hour. Blair did not attempt to palliate his sin, and although the doctor had known much and suspected more, he could hardly find it in his heart to forgive either Winifred's brother or the woman who had led him on. The only ray of mercy he felt was that matters were not so bad as he had feared between ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... determined to be about the year 754 before Christ. As to Romulus himself, the tradition is that he was but eighteen or twenty years old when he commenced the building of it. If this is true, his extreme youth goes far to palliate some of the wrongs which he perpetrated—wrongs which would have been far more inexcusable if committed with the deliberate purpose of middle life, than if prompted by the unthinking impulses ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... dread, of being dragged in chains to the court of Milan or Constantinople, to defend his life and fortune against the malicious charge of these privileged informers. The ordinary administration was conducted by those methods which extreme necessity can alone palliate; and the defects of evidence were diligently supplied by the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... antipathy of the nation is such, that their passions being once fully excited, they will proceed to such acts of reprisal and mutual violence, as will occasion clamors and altercations, which no soft words can palliate. As I pretend to know something of the counsels of both nations, I know there are strong advocates for war in both. The more reasons they have to produce in favor of their system, the sooner ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... deceives us a little sometimes, so that David's dictum hardly needs his apology of haste, it is a comfort to remember that many lies are not downright, but sympathetic; and an understanding of their nature, if it does not palliate them, may put us on our guard. Sympathetic we think a better name than the unfortunate title of white, which was given them by Mrs. Opie, because that designation carries a meaning of innocence, if not even of virtue; and instead of protecting our virtue, may even expose us to practise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... their fathers were left to bleach upon the fields. And when exasperated by the brutality of their conquerors, and driven to deeds of vengence, there was very little appreciation of the motives which influenced them, and no attempt was made to palliate their cruelties. ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... understood the danger he was in, he immediately sent a galley with messengers to demand him of Dionysius; alleging that he stood engaged for his safety, upon the confidence of which Plato had come to Sicily. Dionysius, to palliate his secret hatred, before Plato came away, treated him with great entertainments and all seeming demonstrations of kindness, but could not forbear breaking out one day into the expression, "No doubt, Plato, when you are at home among the philosophers, your companions, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the recognition of the fact, seeking miserably to palliate and excuse it. When she had given Garth that impetuous assurance of her confidence, she had not, in her crudest imaginings, dreamed of anything so hideous and ignoble as the actual truth had proved to be. Vaguely, she had deemed him outcast for some big, reckless sin that by the splendour ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... he laid his hand very kindly on the boy's shoulder, "you must remember that the injustice came from you—no one would have doubted you if you had not first accused yourself! I had my doubts always, but I did not know enough to understand. You told a lie; nothing can palliate or do away with that! No motives can make a lie anything but a lie, and a lie is always a cowardly thing, whether we try to shield ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... Kenilworth some hundreds of oxen, in perpetual danger of being "sniped "; and the populace argued (not unreasonably) that to force on us irrational rations was in the circumstances a callous thing. There were doubtless considerations to palliate this procedure on the part of the Protector, but we would not see them. The cattle were there in sufficient numbers to feed us until relief arrived. True, relief appeared to be remote, but our view was that (if a calamity ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... served with tickets was endured, a traveler found fault in good Saxon English as to the stupidity of such delay about trifles, and also complained of having been robbed of some small article of luggage. Another Englishman, particularly disposed to palliate matters, said there must be some mistake about it; he had been here before, and the people of Burgos were proverbially honest. By and by a great excitement was apparent on the platform, when it came to light that the apologist and indorser of the good people here was declaring that a leather ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... this by an example—it has been known to happen that nations have been told to their faces that they did not require as much freedom as many other nations do. This statement might, indeed, be dictated by forbearance and a desire to palliate, the true meaning being that they were utterly unable to endure so great freedom and that only a high degree of rigidity could prevent them from destroying one another. If, however, the words are taken as they are spoken, they are true under the presupposition that such a nation is entirely incapable ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... European colonies. Of consequence the trade itself, were it possible to suppose convicts or prisoners of war to be justly sentenced to servitude, is accountable for ninety-nine in every hundred slaves, whom it supplies. It an insult to the publick, to attempt to palliate ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... and voice recovered their usual briskness: he shook her heartily and gratefully by the hand, and entered on the subject in a manner to prove, that he now only wanted time and persuasion to think the engagement no very bad thing. His companions suggested only what could palliate imprudence, or smooth objections; and by the time they had talked it all over together, and he had talked it all over again with Emma, in their walk back to Hartfield, he was become perfectly reconciled, and not far ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... prominent and moving character. There can be no question but that Boito ("Tobia Gorria" is but an anagramatic nom de plume of Arrigo Boito) was highly successful in remodeling the tragedy for operatic purposes, but he did not palliate its moral grossness or succeed in inviting our compassionate feelings for anyone entitled to them. The only personages who in this opera escape disaster are a pair of lovers, whose sufferings, as depicted or inferred, cannot be said to have refined the guilt ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... enlarge upon the enormity of the design. The most prominent impression in his mind evidently was that we were acting a base and treacherous part in deserting his party, in what he considered a very dangerous stage of the journey. To palliate the atrocity of our conduct, we ventured to suggest that we were only four in number while his party still included sixteen men; and as, moreover, we were to go forward and they were to follow, at least a full proportion of the perils he apprehended ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... continued until reason shall be convinced; until prejudice shall be overcome by the power of conviction; until men are constrained, from very shame, to withdraw from a position which no argument, no experience can justify, which no consideration of decency will palliate. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... transaction took the shape of a formal permission for the King of France to exercise all the rights of sovereignty over all the places and harbors of Corsica, as security for debts owing to him by the republic. This cession, disguised under the form of a security in order to palliate the aggrandizement of France in the eyes of Austria and England, recalls the conditional and thinly veiled surrender of Cyprus to England nine years ago,—a transfer likely to be as final and far-reaching as that of ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... answered he, composedly. "It is, however, justifiable in its place, although to me it signifies nothing, who know too well that you did commit both crimes, in your own person, and with your own hands. Far be it from me to betray you; indeed, I would rather endeavour to palliate the offences; for, though adverse to nature, I can prove them not to be so to the cause of pure Christianity, by the mode of which we have approved of it, and which ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... social excess as may happen without much moral blame; and recollected that some physicians maintained, that a fever produced by it was, upon the whole, good for health: so different are our reflections on the same subject, at different periods; and such the excuses with which we palliate what we know ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... never dispense with the renown which the praises of the Patriarch of Incredulity gave to him. Catherine II. of Russia kept up a close correspondence with him; his expressions to her were confiding, even tender. She required that trumpet to celebrate her exploits, and palliate the crimes committed in the pursuit of her ambition. 'My Catau (his name for the Empress) loves the philosophers, her husband will suffer for it with posterity.' At the same time, she respected him more than Frederick, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... jury," said Dan Anderson, "I stand here before you to make no excuses for this Law, to palliate nothing in the way of its workings, to set no tentative or temporizing date for the time of the arrival at this place of the image of the Law. I say to you here to-day, at this hour, that image now sits ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... his lord's affairs, Will soon grow necessary to his heirs. His policy consists in setting traps, In finding ways and means, and stopping gaps; He knows a thousand tricks whene'er he please, Though not to cure, yet palliate each disease. In either case, an equal chance is run; For, keep or turn him out, my lord's undone. You want a hand to clear a filthy sink; No cleanly workman can endure the stink. A strong dilemma in a desperate ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Khem: "A full Egyptian idea of Khem can scarcely be presented to the modern reader, on account of the grossness of the forms under which it was exhibited. Some modern Egyptologists endeavor to excuse or palliate this grossness; but it seems scarcely possible that it should not have been accompanied by indelicacy of thought or that it should have failed to exercise a corrupting influence on life and morals. Khem, no doubt, represented ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... more unjustly punished. My name and injuries will ever stain the annals of Frederic the Great; even those who read this book will perhaps suppose that I, from political motives of hope or fear, have sometimes concealed truth by endeavouring to palliate his conduct. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... with obtaining my liberty, if I could not insist upon coming off scathless also. In fact, I was not content to evacuate the fortress, if I were not to march out with all the honours of war. This feeling I neither attempt to palliate nor defend, I merely chronicle it as, are too many of these confessions, a matter of truth, yet not the less ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... many a brave and wise friend, whose lot was cast in no such western paradise, but rather in the infernos of this sinful earth, toiling even then amid the festering alleys of Bermondsey and Bethnal Green, to palliate death and misery which they had vainly laboured to prevent, watching the strides of that very cholera which they had been striving for years to ward off, now re-admitted in spite of all their warnings, by the carelessness, and laziness, and greed of sinful ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... the scandalous rout of Bull Run, the participants in the panic began to try to palliate the disgrace. The President, listening with revived sarcasm to ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... to deny or palliate this imposture, but he made a fairly adequate reply to other counts of the indictment, and promised a judicial inquiry into the casualties enumerated by Mr. BILLING. The revelation that he himself has a son in the Flying Corps was perhaps the most effective point in a speech which did not wholly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... them with labor, provisions, and intelligence, and concealing their designs from us." In fact, the Acadians, while calling themselves neutrals, were an enemy encamped in the heart of the province. These are the reasons which explain and palliate a measure too harsh and indiscriminate ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... itself, which was a "serious disgrace to the age, and to the government, and the country in which we live," without endeavouring, by the enactment of more stringent laws, to correct it, the evasions, by means of which they now seek to palliate their neglect, and the strange want of perspicacity which they display in not being able to discover the real source of mischief, or their timidity in not daring to denounce it, must naturally excite our astonishment. Let any man read the reported ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... protestant supporters, ought to have been aware that their undertaking was assuming the form of a conspiracy with the enemies of their queen and country against her government and personal safety; against the public peace, and the religion by law established; and nothing can excuse the blindness, or palliate the guilt, of their perseverance in a course ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... they lighten hearts, if but for a moment; they inculcate habits of order and self-restraint, which may be useful when the poor man finds himself in Canada or Australia. And it is a cruel utilitarianism to refuse to palliate the symptoms because you cannot cure the disease itself. You will give opiates to the suffering, who must die nevertheless. Let him slip into his grave at least as painlessly as you can. And so you must use these charitable societies, remembering ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... late hour in those days. The paralytic masher of the present day, who is most alive at midnight, rises at noon. Then the day began earlier with a long morning, followed by a pleasant period called the forenoon. Under modern conditions we spend the morning in bed, and to palliate our sloth call the forenoon and most of the rest of the day, the morning. These young men of Clement's Inn were a lively, not to say a rowdy, set. They would do anything that led to mirth or mischief. What passed when they lay all night in the windmill in St. George's ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... aright; for the confession consisteth in the general, in a man's taking to himself his transgressions, and standing in them, with the acknowledgement of them to be his, and that he cannot stir from under them, nor do any thing to make amends for them, or to palliate the rigour of justice against the soul. And this the Publican did when he cried, "God be merciful to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the attendant circumstances that were connected with the act of Nero in murdering his mother, which could palliate or extenuate the deed in the slightest degree. It was not an act of self-defense. Agrippina was not doing him, or intending to do him any injury. It was not an act of hasty violence, prompted by sudden passion. It was not required by any political necessity as a means ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... he fly, and thus acknowledge his guilt? No, signor, no excuse can palliate such misdeeds. I burn with indignation at the thought that such signal favors have met with such cold and base ingratitude. The idea of your affliction restrains me from speaking of the outrage done my daughter. Fortunately, the reputation and social position of my family is such as to ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... have to request. Plead for me with my two best friends, Mrs. Richman and Mrs. Sumner. I ask you not to palliate my faults,—that cannot be done,—but to obtain, if possible, their forgiveness. I cannot write all my full mind suggests on this subject. You know the purport, and can better express it ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... that Poodles had browbeaten and threatened him; and we were disposed to palliate Pearl's offence, in consideration of his poverty and his dependent position, after he ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... In the Eastern Hemisphere the African had always been in a servile condition. In Hayti and Jamaica experiments had been tried of freeing them, under the auspices of France and England. Miseries had resulted and ruin overwhelmed the islands. "Fanaticism may palliate, but could not conceal the utter prostration of the race." The best specimens of the race were to be found in the Southern States, in closest contact with slavery. The North does not want the negro, does not encourage his immigration. The great fact of the inferiority of ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... inclination to palliate the mistakes, or omissions, or want of steadiness, or unhappy misunderstandings, among a few of those who ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... with a man over his cups, or in any wise to molest him in his drink, is an offense against the proprieties that even the good-natured Epicurean can not find it in his easy heart to palliate or pardon. On this point he speaks mildly, ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... British service, would flock to his standard, and form a corps at whose head he might again display his accustomed intrepidity. With this hope he published an address to the inhabitants of America, in which he laboured to palliate his own guilt, and to increase their dissatisfaction with ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... said the prince; and he seated himself by her side. "I will not attempt to palliate a deception which your charms could alone inspire and can alone justify. Hear me, Lady Iduna, hear me with calmness. I love you; I love you with a passion which has been as constant as it is strong. My birth, my rank, my fortunes, do not ...
— The Rise of Iskander • Benjamin Disraeli
... which cannot bear the truth of it. The violent on both sides will condemn the character of Absalom, as either too favourably or too hardly drawn. But they are not the violent whom I desire to please. The fault on the right hand is to extenuate, palliate, and indulge; and to confess freely, I have endeavoured to commit it. Besides the respect which I owe his birth, I have a greater for his heroic virtues; and David himself could not be more tender of the young man's life, than I would be of his reputation. But since the most ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... murder with a tranquil sense of enjoyment which seems almost incredible. There is no exaggeration in calling the deed a murder, for it certainly was not sanctioned by any law, divine or human, nor justified or excused by any of the circumstances which are supposed to palliate homicide. Nor, when the elaborate and superfluous luxury of arrangements made by Philip for the accomplishment of his design is considered, can it be doubted that he found a positive pleasure in his task. It would ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... my anger from the grave! She knew that I must become unhappy. Death and damnation! she knew it, and yet betrayed me! Look to it, serpent! That was thy only chance of forgiveness. This confession has condemned thee. Till now I thought to palliate thy crime with thy simplicity, and in my contempt thou hadst well nigh escaped my vengeance (seizing the glass hastily). Thou wert not thoughtless, then— thou wert not simple—thou wert nor more nor less than a devil! (He drinks.) The drink is bad, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and killing, were defective and in need of revision, is indeed more shocking than to violate the current rules of action. For we are accustomed to actual crimes, misdemeanors, and sins, which are happening all the time, but we will not tolerate any suspected attempt to palliate them ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... the most distant ages. Cromwell began as a reformer, but ended as a usurper. Whatever name he goes by, whatever title he may have assumed, he became, by force of his victories and of his army, the absolute ruler of England,—as Caesar did of Rome, and Napoleon of Paris. We may palliate or extenuate this fact; we may even excuse it on the ground that the State had drifted into anarchy; that only he, as the stronger man, could save England; that there was no other course open to him as a patriot; and that it was a most fortunate thing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Niblo who had a theater (or let me give it his name, and call it—a garden) within the length of some three stone-throws from their own house. It must be granted they did not foresee that which was about to happen. But this will scarcely palliate the folly of taking the head of a rival ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... where the Fever had been neglected till about the third or fourth Period, or badly treated in the Beginning, and the Bowels were inflamed or overcharged with corrupted Gall, he was obliged to endeavour to palliate the most pressing Complaints, and to watch Evening, Night, and Morning for a Remission, and then immediately to fly to the Bark, as the only Remedy that could avert the Danger. If the Patient was strong, he gave Half an Ounce of the Bark, with ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... "but then of course," he added, wishing to palliate the offence, "it was a very hot day. I suppose, however, you are right. Serious things do not interest her—and that is—I ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... his execution Lee made a confession in which he attempted to palliate his guilt by throwing the burden of the crime on his accomplices, especially on Haight and Higbee, and to show that the massacre was committed by order of Brigham Young and the High Council, all of ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... occupy my place;—and be surrounded by the same temptations,—and then comport himself wisely—if he can! Such an one would need to be either god or hero; and I profess to be neither. But I do not wish to palliate or deny the errors of the past. The present is my concern,—the present time, and the present People. Great changes are fermenting in the world; and of these changes, especially of those directly ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... saintliness will be assigned the same positions in the rewards of the last day; and it is just as unlikely that human estimates are right when they venture to assign the degrees of final condemnation. Two things it is our duty to do in regard to Judas: first, not so to palliate his sin as to blunt the healthy, natural abhorrence of it; and, secondly, not to think of him as a sinner apart and alone, with a nature so different from our own that to us he can be no example. But for the rest, there is only one verdict which is at once righteous, dignified and safe; and ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... British distrust of American commercial honesty was originally created, perhaps, more than by anything else, by the scandals which were notoriously associated with the early history of railways in the United States. It is not desired here either to insist on the occurrence of those scandals or to palliate them. The point is that the conditions which made those scandals possible (of which the incapacity on the part of the North-western lines to keep faith with each other may be regarded as symptomatic) were concomitants of a particular stage only ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... corners of The Enormous Room with Gottverdummers which echoingly telescoped one another, producing a dim huge shaggy mass of vocal anger, The Young Pole began to laugh less and less; began to plead and excuse and palliate and demonstrate—and all the while the triangular tower in its naked legs and its palpitating chemise brandished its vast fists nearer and nearer, its ghastly yellow lips hurling cumulative volumes of rhythmic profanity, its blue eyes snapping like fire-crackers, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and—as they conceived—the innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view of facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always—as far as I know—been right in their view of morals; they have never deigned to admit Mary's guilt, and then to palliate it by those sentimental, or rather sensual, theories of human nature, too common in a certain school of French literature,—too common, alas! in a certain school of modern English novels. They have not said, "She did it; ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... Johnson's malignity, is the manner in which he has treated the character and conduct of Milton. To enforce this charge has wearied sophistry, and exhausted the invention of a party. What they cannot deny, they palliate; what they cannot prove, they say is probable. But why all this rage against Dr. Johnson? Addison, before him, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... was as soft as it was inflammable. He was utterly unable to resist such tenderness as Mrs. Woodward showed to him. He had made a little resolution to be stiff and stern, to ask for no favour and to receive none, not to palliate his own conduct, or to allow Mrs. Woodward to condemn it. He had felt that as the Woodwards had given him up, they had no longer any right to criticize him. To them at least, one and all, to Mrs. Woodward and her daughters, his conduct had been sans reproche. They had no cause to upbraid ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... hedges should have grown up and helped to hide it, she felt sure that it would be a better world. In detail it was not so bad now, but the whole was a violent effect of porches, gables, chimneys, galleries, loggias, balconies, and jalousies, which nature had not yet had time to palliate. ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... those rivers which intersects and winds itself so beautifully majestic through a vast extent of territory of the United States is the present situation of your unworthy but constant and affectionate daughter. I pretend not to justify or even to palliate my clandestine elopement. In hopes of pacifying your mind, which I am sure must be afflicted beyond measure, I write you this scrawl. Conscious of not having thus abruptly absconded by reason of any fancied ill treatment from you, or disaffection toward any, the thoughts of my disobedience are ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... her offspring to her ferocious assailants. The third child was also sacrificed in the same way, and soon after, the wretched being reached her home in safety. Here she related what had happened, and endeavoured to palliate her own conduct, by describing the dreadful alternative to which she had been reduced. A peasant, however, who was among the bystanders, and heard the recital, took up an axe, and with one blow cleft her skull in two, saying, ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... a course for my adoption, and frankly to tell me if my evidence could be of service. He assured me it could not; there was no question of the fairness of the duel, and the sole crime was in the breach of military discipline. This crime my testimony could in no way palliate. He requested me to see M. de Berg, and to tell him that, to avoid the possibility of the cause of the duel becoming known, he should refuse to answer questions, plead guilty to the charge, and state, as sole extenuation, that the quarrel ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... to Mr. Puttock's previous speeches. Mr. Puttock, in his turn, fidgeted, and Coxon smiled sardonically. The Premier, encouraged by this success, pulled himself together and approached the last and most delicate part of his task, which was to defend or palliate a phrase of Norburn's that had been greeted with angry groans and protests. Mr. Norburn had in fact referred to the Capitalist class as a "parasitic growth," and Medland was left to get out of this indiscretion as best he ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... McClellan's Report nothing more than a report, were the General himself nothing more than an officer endeavoring to palliate a failure, we should not have felt called on to notice his plea, unless to add publicity to any new facts he might be able to bring forward. But the Report is a political manifesto, and not only that, but an attack on the administration which appointed him to the command, supported ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... hours of leisure which business, political debates, and amusements allowed him to give to his home and family, his children were an agreeable recreation, an interesting pastime; and when the children, carried away by the sparkling fire of youth, shouted or cried too loud, the father endeavored to palliate their misdemeanor, and obtain their pardon from their mother. Then Letitia's eyes were fastened with a flaming glance upon her husband, and, imperatively bidding him leave the children, she would say: "Let them alone. Their education concerns ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... to propose a new, crude, difficult, and unsympathetic game. They may all of them, or most of them, hate war, but they will cling to the belief that their method of operating may now, after a new settlement, be able to prevent or palliate war. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... died away beneath the common pressure of the stranger. The Conquest was hardly over when we see the rise of a new national feeling, of a new patriotism. In his quiet cell at Worcester the monk Florence strives to palliate by excuses of treason or the weakness of rulers the defeats of Englishmen by the Danes. AElfred, the great name of the English past, gathers round him a legendary worship, and the "Sayings of AElfred" embody the ideal of an English king. We see the new vigour drawn ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... Burr" with considerable severity at the time of its appearance; and we are the more glad to meet with a book of his which we can as sincerely and heartily commend. The same quality of sympathy with his subject, which led him in his former work to palliate the moral obliquity and overlook the baseness of his hero, in consideration of brilliant gifts of intellect and person, gives vigor and spirit to his delineation of a character in most respects so different as that of Jackson. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... and he has sufficient address to conceal it, or sufficient ingenuity to palliate it, but he does neither; instead of availing himself of concealment and palliation, with the candor of a great mind, he confesses his error, and makes all the apology or atonement which the occasion requires. None has a title to true honor but he who can say with moral elevation, when truth ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... a state of things in a portion of the United Kingdom itself, which was a "serious disgrace to the age, and to the government, and the country in which we live," without endeavouring, by the enactment of more stringent laws, to correct it, the evasions, by means of which they now seek to palliate their neglect, and the strange want of perspicacity which they display in not being able to discover the real source of mischief, or their timidity in not daring to denounce it, must naturally excite our astonishment. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... inquiry, and nearly expel Adam Smith for reading Hume's 'Essay on Human Nature;' let them be, as many allege, narrow-minded, hypocritical, and ignorant; we cannot charge them with wrong-dealing in expelling the originator of such open blasphemy, which nothing can be found to palliate, and of which its perpetrator did not appear to repent, rather complaining that the treatment of the Dons was harsh. The act of expulsion was, of course, considered in the same light by his numerous ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... fiery heat of debauch, and amid the beastly orgies of intemperance; but is he the less criminal? I tell thee nay; for he hath added crime to crime, and drawn down, perchance, a double punishment. He is my brother, and thou knowest, if possible, I would palliate his offence; but hath it not been told, and the very air of yon polluted city was rife and reeking with the deed, that Harry Downes, the best-beloved of his father, and the child of many hopes, did wantonly, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Marlowe would look at it quite differently. His own careful earnings, scraped together by untiring industry and ceaseless self-denial, were lost—stolen by the man he had trusted implicitly. For Roland Sefton did not spare himself any reproaches; he did not attempt to hide or palliate his sin. There were other securities for small sums, like old Marlowe's, gone like his, and ruin would overtake half a dozen poor families, though the bulk of the loss would fall upon his senior partner, who was ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... plentiful in the Confederacy, but because of lack of transportation to carry the food from the interior to the front, while the Union prisoners perished from hunger in the midst of abundance. Again, even assuming the plea of scarcity to be true, that would not palliate the numerous murders of helpless prisoners by volleys fired into the stockades at the pleasure of the guards.[1] There was a vindictiveness in these crimes which ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... they were all. But there is one misdeed, one which outweighs all others whatsoever—a crime which it is useless to palliate, let our other friend say what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It sate heavy, for him, on his soul, and alone of all the actions of his life we are certain that he wished it undone—the death and eating of that ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... conspiracy with the enemies of their queen and country against her government and personal safety; against the public peace, and the religion by law established; and nothing can excuse the blindness, or palliate the guilt, of their perseverance in a course so ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... other the choice cannot be doubtful. We are not defending coarseness in any guise. It is always to be assailed, and never to be defended. It is always a detriment, and never an ornament. No excellence can justify it. No occasion can palliate it. But coarseness is of two kinds,—one of the surface, and one in the grain. The latter is pervading and irremediable. It touches nothing which it does not deface. It makes all things common and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... appeal, we do not desire to detail the causes which may, in a measure, explain or palliate this failure in our national sympathy, whose existence (in so far as it is true) we profoundly deplore. Enough, and more than enough, debate has been already held on the complicated motives which have blended in your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... years after the battle took place. He said also to the same person, that when he found them hesitating in the presence of the enemy, he "burst into a passion," called them cowards, and dashed into the river as before narrated. If this account be true, it may somewhat palliate, but certainly not justify ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... It was mean, perhaps, to send him another girl's picture, but, considering that the whole world acknowledged that Mabel Moreley was far the better-looking of the two, did not this sacrifice of vanity palliate the offence? It seemed, after all, a very remote possibility that any harm could come to the other girl through this freak of hers. She could not, of course, have sent her own picture, and this was the only one in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... was determined to be about the year 754 before Christ. As to Romulus himself, the tradition is that he was but eighteen or twenty years old when he commenced the building of it. If this is true, his extreme youth goes far to palliate some of the wrongs which he perpetrated—wrongs which would have been far more inexcusable if committed with the deliberate purpose of middle life, than if prompted by the unthinking ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... make -corrections,make improvements &c. n.; doctor &c. (remedy) 662; purify,&c. 652. relieve, refresh, infuse new blood into, recruit. reform, remodel, reorganize; new model. view in a new light, think better of, appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober. palliate, mitigate; lessen an evil &c. 36 . Adj. improving &c. v.; progressive, improved &c. v.; better, better off, better for; all the better for; better advised. reformatory, emendatory[obs3]; reparatory &c. (restorative) 660[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... would only have revived those faults which his natural equity did not allow him to think less because they were committed by one who favoured him; but of which, though his virtue would not endeavour to palliate them, his gratitude would not suffer him to prolong the ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... sides—allowances which will have more or less weight with the judgment, according as it may be more or less fastidiously disposed, in letting excuses for rapine and oppression pass muster. The incessant and urgent demands of the Directors upon him for money may palliate, perhaps, the violence of those methods which he took to procure it for them; and the obstruction to his policy which would have arisen from a strict observance of Treaties, may be admitted, by ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... something which needed explanation. It was the only instance among the works of Shakspeare in which a direct copy, even to matters of detail, appeared to have been made; and, in spite of all attempts to gloss over and palliate, it was impossible to deny that an unblushing act of mere piracy seemed to have been committed, of which I never could bring myself to believe that Shakspeare had been guilty. The readiness to impute this act to him was to me but an instance of the unworthy manner in which he had almost ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... of being a young man, which the honorable gentleman has, with such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing,—that I may be one of those whose follies cease with their youth; and not of that number who are ignorant in spite ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of life, with qualities to produce happiness; that these ought not to be lost; and, that the gentleman on whose account she was divorced had gained her heart while thus unhappily situated. Seduced, perhaps, by the charms of the lady in question, I thus attempted to palliate what I was sensible could not be justified; for when I had finished my harangue, my venerable friend gave me a proper check: 'My dear Sir, never accustom your mind to mingle virtue and vice. The woman's a whore, and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... unarmed, that in case they resisted he would spear them. On being taxed by the governor with this outrage, he at first stoutly denied it; but on being confronted with the people who were in the boat, he changed his language, and, without deigning even to palliate his offence, burst into fury and demanded ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... wrong, and deny or excuse their wrong-doing, the father of the family is the more moved to wrath; whereas, on the other hand, confession secures pardon or a lighter punishment. But it is the nature of hypocrites to excuse and palliate their sin or to deny it altogether and under the show of religion, to ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... thought I was free, but in fact I was bound," he acknowledged. "The words I spoke on the steps that night escaped me unaware. I was tortured by jealousy, and tempted by love. I had no right to speak them then; nothing can excuse or palliate the weakness which allowed me to. I should have waited until I could come to you untrammeled—as now. I attempt no justification of my madness, Princess. I have no excuse but my love, and can only sue for pardon. You will forgive me, sweetheart"—using the ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... indignant,—all except Miss Furnival, who did not say much, but endeavoured to palliate the crimes of Lady Mason in that which she did say. "I do not know that she is more to blame than any other lady who marries a gentleman thirty years older ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... clear to us to-day which two centuries ago were only beginning to be dimly discerned by a few of the keenest and boldest spirits. The faults of the Puritan theocracy, which found its most complete development in Massachusetts, are so glaring that it is idle to seek to palliate them or to explain them away. But if we would really understand what was going on in the Puritan world of the seventeenth century, and how a better state of things has grown out of it, we must endeavour to distinguish and define the elements of wholesome strength in that theocracy no ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... contracting parties that the other does not labor under any grave personal defect. If it were possible to regard the passage containing this proposal as an interpolation in the original romance, it might then be regarded as an attempt to palliate Henry VIII.'s conduct to Anne ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... or inclination to palliate the mistakes, or omissions, or want of steadiness, or unhappy misunderstandings, among a few of those ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... differences. The royal hero could never dispense with the renown which the praises of the Patriarch of Incredulity gave to him. Catherine II. of Russia kept up a close correspondence with him; his expressions to her were confiding, even tender. She required that trumpet to celebrate her exploits, and palliate the crimes committed in the pursuit of her ambition. 'My Catau (his name for the Empress) loves the philosophers, her husband will suffer for it with posterity.' At the same time, she respected him more than Frederick, and her letters were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Not small your wit, nor rugged and unkempt; 'Twill answer bravely to a bold attempt: Whether you train for pleading, or essay To practise law, or frame some graceful lay, The ivy-wreath awaits you. Could you bear To leave quack nostrums, that but palliate care, Then might you lean on heavenly wisdom's hand And use her guidance to a loftier land. Be this our task, whate'er our station, who To country and to self ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... So far as theology and metaphysics are concerned, these defences are plausible. The Sakti is identified with Prakriti or with the Maya of the Advaita philosophy and defined as the energy, coexistent with Brahman, which creates the world. But attempts to palliate the ceremonial, such as the argument that it is a consecration and limitation of the appetites because they may be gratified only in the service of the goddess, are not convincing. Nor do the Saktas, when able to profess their faith openly, deny the nature of their rites or the importance attached ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Beverley, Stith, Keith and Burke, but not one of them go into the disgusting and improbable details named in the "Brief Declaration." Campbell also reports the stories, but adds, in regard to the wife murderer, "upon his trial it appeared that cannibalism was feigned to palliate the murder," p. 93. Neill quotes from the Records of the Virginia Company, "The Tragical Relation of Virginia Assembly," which was transmitted to England about 1621; this was intended as a reply to a petition of Alderman ...
— Colonial Records of Virginia • Various
... look queer in Chowringhee," he said, "but this is not a censorious public." Then, as if to palliate the word, he added, "They will think me no more mad to carry paper bags than to carry myself, when it is plain that I might ride—and they see me ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... Christ, he knew only humanity and humanity crucified. Tongue of the dumb, eyes of the blind, feet of the impotent, his voice alone, among the voices that were everywhere heard and heeded, was sent by God to challenge every word, or look, or deed that seemed to him possibly to palliate oppression ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... vision like this. All the journals approve, palliate, or keep silent; nobody dares offer resistance.[31130] Property as well as lives belong to whoever wants to take them. At the barriers, at the markets, on the boulevard of the Temple, thieves, decked with the tricolor ribbon, stop people as they pass along, seize ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... with his usual placid effrontery, that the inference was unavoidable. He even mentioned other concurring and contemporary incidents, which had eluded the observation of his censurer, and which added still more force to the conclusion. He was studious to palliate the vices of this woman, as long as he was her only paramour; but, after her marriage with his father, the tone was changed. He confessed that she was tidy, notable, industrious; but, then, she was a prostitute. When charged with being instrumental ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... one of the best captains of his time. And, in truth, if a zealous patriotism, a fiery valor, and skilful leadership are worthy of honor, then is such tribute due to Dominic de Gourgues, despite the shadowing vices which even the spirit of that wild age can only palliate, the personal hate that aided the impulse of his patriotism, and the implacable cruelty that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... possibility of Johnny Crapeau beating us, where there was any thing approaching to an equality of force; but, say as much as we please about larger ships and more men, and a variety of excuses which proud John Bull, with some truth very often I will admit, has pertinaciously thrust forward to palliate his losses during the short war, a regard for truth and fair dealing, which I hope are no scarce qualities amongst British seamen, compels me to admit, that although I would of course peril my life and credit more readily with an English crew, yet I believe a feather would turn ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the back-yard—tried to scale the wall—fallen back exhausted, and been found at morning on the stones in a dying state. But though there was some evidence of cruelty, there was none of murder; and the aunt and her husband had sought to palliate cruelty by alleging the exceeding stubbornness and perversity of the child, who was declared to be half-witted. Be that as it may, at the orphan's death the aunt inherited her ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... particularities of Jaffier's depositions, and the motive which prompted him to offer them, (the latter, as we have already shown, resting on a gross anachronism,) are, we believe pure inventions by St. Real; and Otway has used a poet's license to palliate still farther deviations from authentic history. Under his hands, Pierre,—whom all accounts conspire in representing to us as a foreign, vulgar and mercenary bravo, equally false to every party, and frightened into confession,—is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... under Kawabe no Nie fared differently. Japanese annals attempt to palliate his discomfiture by a story about the abuse of a flag of truce, but the fact seems to have been that Kawabe no Nie was an incompetent and pusillanimous captain. He and his men were all killed or taken prisoners, the only redeeming feature being the intrepidity of a Japanese officer, Tsugi no ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Seb. O, palliate not my wound; When you have argued all you can, 'tis incest. No, 'tis resolved: I charge you plead no more; I cannot live without Almeyda's sight, Nor can I see Almeyda, but I sin. Heaven has inspired me with a sacred thought, To live alone to ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... full excuse for insult, but it will greatly palliate. If it was a full excuse, it might be well counterfeited to wound ...
— The Code of Honor • John Lyde Wilson
... there was scarcely a single person examined before the privy council, who did not prove that the Slave-trade was the source of the tragedies acted upon that extensive continent. Some had endeavoured to palliate this circumstance; but there was not one who did not more or less admit it to be true. By one the Slave-trade was called the concurrent cause, by the majority it was acknowledged to be the principal motive ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... alliance, by democratic sympathy, and by the transference of our political capital to Westminster. Tracts, periodicals, and the whole horde of Benthamy rushed in. Without manufactures, without trade, without comfort to palliate such degradation, we were proclaimed converts to Utilitarianism. The Irish press thought itself imperial, because it reflected that of London—Nationality was called a vulgar superstition, and a general European ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... left to bleach upon the fields. And when exasperated by the brutality of their conquerors, and driven to deeds of vengence, there was very little appreciation of the motives which influenced them, and no attempt was made to palliate their cruelties. ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... attended her, would have proved quite sufficient to have set aside the will, and exposed the parties concerned; but, as one of them was a very near relation of mine, and one whose faults I have always been anxious to conceal and palliate, rather than expose and condemn, I put up with the loss without opposing the proof of the will. There is one fact more connected with this case, which I will state, to show to what extent the cruelty of ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... when I found all these allegations, point for point, in the indictment, together with thy answers, containing much that might serve to palliate thy conduct, but no evidence weighty enough fully to ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... thought I gave it justified the deed. My position as an officer of the King would palliate deserting the ship which ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... of six months would set for ever at rest. But it is only among the enlightened and benevolent that so great a sacrifice of appetite and prejudice can be expected, even though its ultimate excellence should not admit of dispute. It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine than to prevent them by regimen. The vulgar of all ranks are invariably sensual and indocile; yet I cannot but feel myself persuaded that when the benefits of vegetable diet are mathematically proved, when it is as clear that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... est le vin bon bon trouve"—"O divine Decretals, how good you make good wine taste!" "The miracle would be greater," said Pantagruel, "if they made bad wine taste good." The most that can now be done by the devout for the Decretals is "to palliate the guilt of their forger," whose name, like that of the ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... impugned by Colonel the Hon. FitzWilliam Elliot. He "hopes, though he cannot expect," that I will give my reasons for not sharing his belief that Sir Walter did a certain thing which I could not easily palliate.' ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... clothed the famous name of Wittenberg with infamy and made the story of naval warfare a continuing record of wanton crime. No man can think, without shame, of the so-called civilisation and culture which could palliate such perversions of justice as those recalled by the fate of ...
— No. 4, Intersession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, - B.A. • B. N. Michelson
... is how worldly minded people talk. That is how they palliate these sins against good taste and propriety. I like these girls; they are genuine, somehow; but I suppose our bringing up has made us old-fashioned, for I seemed to shrink inwardly every time they opened their lips. ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in the wall, not without the opposition of his neighbor. This side we avoided when we wanted not to be observed by him in coming home. My mother, whose mediation always came in well for us, had endeavored to palliate my absence in the morning at breakfast, by the supposition that I had gone out early; and I experienced no disagreeable effects ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... and unobtrusive. She made no attempt to break down the wall thus established between us. And I was determined, on the whole, to be more than just with Rebecca. I would be kind to her in her disgrace. I would palliate her weakness as far as I could consistently with a pure and high standard of action. I even congratulated myself on the magnanimity of my intentions, except when I met the clear, sad gaze of those dispassionate eyes. Then I experienced ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... gayeties which were sparingly allowed her at home. I know she does not love Eugene; she never did; and, assuredly, his future is dark enough. I believe, if she could reform him she would not; his excesses sanction, or at least in some degree palliate, hers. Oh, Beulah, I see ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... and took great interest in the outfit of the flotilla. This governor-general, Djiaffer Pacha, had formerly shown me much kindness on my arrival at Souakim, during my first journey in Africa. I had therefore reckoned upon him as a friend; but no personal considerations could palliate the secret hatred to the object ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... near or touch them, in twenty-four hours a mob would be raised to pull them down and ascertain what the planks contained." I mention this conversation, to shew in what a dexterous manner this American gentleman attempted to palliate one of the grossest outrages ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... no justification of Lord Cornwallis's policy; but there were some mitigating circumstances that palliate the severities which he inflicted. Among those who had been taken prisoners at the capture of Charleston, and professed loyalty, was, as Lord Mahon says, "One Lisle, who had not only taken the oath of allegiance, but accepted military rank as a King's officer; waited just long enough ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... short at best, that I urged you to gild the brief period with the light of your love. I would not have bound you always to me; and when I asked your hand a few minutes since, I knew that death would soon sever the tie and set you free. Let this suffice to palliate my 'unmanly' pleading. I have but one request to make of you now, and, weak as it may seem, I beg of you not to deny me. You are preparing to leave my house; this I know; I see it in your face, and the thought is harrowing to me. Electra, remain under my roof while ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... After the excitement was over, too, he would begin to make excuses for the man, thinking that perhaps he was poor, and his children were suffering for bread, and it was on their account that he was tempted to steal, and this, though it would not justify, might in some degree palliate the act for which he was slain; or that he had been badly brought up, having never received any proper instruction, but had been trained and taught from his ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... word would call my anger from the grave! She knew that I must become unhappy. Death and damnation! she knew it, and yet betrayed me! Look to it, serpent! That was thy only chance of forgiveness. This confession has condemned thee. Till now I thought to palliate thy crime with thy simplicity, and in my contempt thou hadst well nigh escaped my vengeance (seizing the glass hastily). Thou wert not thoughtless, then— thou wert not simple—thou wert nor more nor less than ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... should change for the worse. And when we see a man rendered uninteresting and unamiable by cares, temptations, and bursts of passion or folly, yet who still governs vigilantly and ably, our indignation should be modified, when the lower propensities are indulged. It is not pleasant to palliate injustices, tyrannies, and lusts. But human nature, at the best, is weak. Of all men, absolute princes claim a charitable judgment, and our eyes should be directed to their services, rather than to their defects. These remarks ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... me! My conscience never martyrs me so horribly, as when I catch my base thoughts in search of an excuse! No, nothing can palliate my guilt; and the only just consolation left me, is, to acquit the man I wronged, and own I erred without a cause of ...
— The Stranger - A Drama, in Five Acts • August von Kotzebue
... liars," and everybody deceives us a little sometimes, so that David's dictum hardly needs his apology of haste, it is a comfort to remember that many lies are not downright, but sympathetic; and an understanding of their nature, if it does not palliate them, may put us on our guard. Sympathetic we think a better name than the unfortunate title of white, which was given them by Mrs. Opie, because that designation carries a meaning of innocence, if not even of virtue; and instead ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... and turns them out to shiver in the road. The despotism of Louis XVI. was not the despotism of Philippe le Bel, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula; but it was bad enough to justify the French Revolution, and to palliate even its horrors. If an appeal be made to the intense attachments which exist between wives and their husbands, exactly as much may be said of domestic slavery. It was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome for slaves to ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... the origin of the enmity of this particular clan towards the neighbouring tribes, I cannot so confidently speak. I will not say that their foes are the aggressors, nor will I endeavour to palliate their conduct. But surely, if our evil passions must find vent, it is far better to expend them on strangers and aliens, than in the bosom of the community in which we dwell. In many polished countries civil contentions, as well ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Lee was no coward, and did not usually lack for words. He was, too, a hardened man of the world, and, in the phrase of that day, impudent to boot. But then and there he stammered and hesitated. The fierce question was repeated. Lee gathered himself and tried to excuse and palliate what had happened, but although the brief words that followed are variously reported to us across the century, we know that Washington rebuked him in such a way, and with such passion, that all ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... If there had been no rupture, he would be as blithe as a lark at this moment, and might outlive you and M. le President and me. ... The ways of Providence are mysterious, let us not seek to fathom them," he added to palliate to some extent the hideous idea. "It cannot be helped. We men of business look at the practical aspects of things. Now you see clearly, madame, that M. de Marville in his public position would do nothing, and could do nothing, as things are. He has broken off ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... treating Perkin as an impostor.—Answer. When Sir Thomas More wrote, Henry the Seventh was still alive: that argument therefore falls entirely to the ground: but there was great necessity, I will not say to defend, but even to palliate the titles of both Henry the Seventh and Eighth. The former, all the world agrees now, had no title(49) the latter had none from his father, and a very defective one from his mother, If she had any right, it could ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... upon my word!" he remarked. Then he began to enlarge upon the enormity of the design. The most prominent impression in his mind evidently was that we were acting a base and treacherous part in deserting his party, in what he considered a very dangerous stage of the journey. To palliate the atrocity of our conduct, we ventured to suggest that we were only four in number while his party still included sixteen men; and as, moreover, we were to go forward and they were to follow, at least a full proportion of the perils he ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... compressed in it. As the said distance of degrees given by them was not true, as would be quite apparent if they brought a good map, and one made some time before, in which their said navigation should be contained, and as they had no just excuse to palliate such contention, they said that they brought the said maps only to locate the Cabo Verde islands, which by the very same map was proved to be contrary to the truth and was not a sufficient excuse, since the said islands were not located on this map, as is evident ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... most sportsmanlike of masters. If he had merely met Harrison out of bounds, and it had been possible to have overlooked him, he would have done so. But such a proceeding in the interior of a small shop was impossible. There was nothing to palliate the crime. The tobacconist also kept the wolf from the door, and lured the juvenile population of the neighbourhood to it, by selling various weird brands of sweets, but it was only too obvious that Harrison was not ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... they need to have internal vitality as they cannot be painted from the outside. He must see his creatures as well as hear them; and he must know always what they are doing and how they are looking when they are speaking. He cannot comment on them or explain them, or palliate their misdeeds. He must project them outside of himself; and he cannot be his own lecturer to point out their motives. He must get on without any attempt to point out the morality of his work, which ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... the prince; and he seated himself by her side. "I will not attempt to palliate a deception which your charms could alone inspire and can alone justify. Hear me, Lady Iduna, hear me with calmness. I love you; I love you with a passion which has been as constant as it is strong. My birth, my rank, my fortunes, ...
— The Rise of Iskander • Benjamin Disraeli
... in England, told the King that all was well in the colony, that the old contentions had been forgotten, and the people were happy and prosperous. But this favorable report, which was made by the Governor to palliate his desertion of his post, was far from being true. There was, as he well knew, a deep-seated cause of discontent in Virginia, that threatened constantly to drive the people again into mutiny and disorder. This was ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... courtesy was not appreciated, although it afforded the cheerful Jimmy some amusement as he made his way out of the station. Indeed, considering that inhospitable hour of the morning, he was made fairly happy by what the Judge said. Furthermore, to palliate the dreariness of the winter morning, was the thought that now he could break the news of his discharge to his mother because he could couple it ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... restless, more intently listening, more easily starting at the lightest sound; until, at last, when the late day touched the rooms with fiery sunset colors, her friend, watchful of her changing mood, ready at every point to palliate circumstance, drew her out into ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... not born but damned into the world. Criminals, in consequence, have come not to be so much condemned as pitied, their perversion of character is regarded not so much in terms of iniquity as of disease, and as we thus condone transgression in others, so in ourselves we palliate our wrong. We regard it as the unfortunate but hardly blamable consequence of temperament or training. Our fathers, who thought that the trouble was the devil in them, used to deal sternly with themselves. Like ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... rewards of the last day; and it is just as unlikely that human estimates are right when they venture to assign the degrees of final condemnation. Two things it is our duty to do in regard to Judas: first, not so to palliate his sin as to blunt the healthy, natural abhorrence of it; and, secondly, not to think of him as a sinner apart and alone, with a nature so different from our own that to us he can be no example. But for the rest, there is only one verdict which is at once righteous, dignified and safe; and ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... sputtering of its fuse, the old negress clasped him to her breast and rushed out of harm's way. It was not an exhibition of which a Fearless Firer might have been proud, nor did the screams of laughter greeting it serve to palliate his anger. But it was neither fun nor anger with Aunt Timmie. Her mind was a torment of fear lest he be maimed for life. Since early morning she had employed every art, every diplomatic ruse in which her race is so proficient, to avoid this dangerous pastime. Now suddenly, and without ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... sort of people; or because cannibalism was universal before the days of Orpheus. I almost fear lest the emancipationists, by adopting cannibalism as right, with such high authorities and precedents to support their position, may endeavor to palliate African cannibalism on the ground that it is not a monopoly, and claim exemption from the great verdict of modern civilization which denounces, as forfeited and condemned, this disgusting and leading custom of barbarism. But ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... have played your cards most foolishly; you have thrown away your money—rather, I should say, my money, in a manner which nothing can excuse or palliate. You might have made the turf a source of gratifying amusement; your income was amply sufficient to enable you to do so; but you have possessed so little self-control, so little judgment, so little discrimination, that you have allowed yourself to be plundered ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... her home-laundered handkerchiefs dipped in turpentine, she gently rubbed it clean. It then looked (as she said later in a feeble attempt to palliate her subsequent conduct) very pink and boyish and pathetic, but somehow faithful and reliable ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... entire corps would doubtless have fought well under favorable circumstances. It is but fair, after casting upon the corps the aspersion of flight from before the enemy, to do it what justice is possible, and to palliate the bad conduct of the whole by bearing testimony to the good conduct of ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... take in sail. moderate, soften, mitigate, temper, accoy^; attemper^, contemper^; mollify, lenify^, dulcify^, dull, take off the edge, blunt, obtund^, sheathe, subdue, chasten; sober down, tone down, smooth down; weaken &c 160; lessen &c (decrease) 36; check palliate. tranquilize, pacify, assuage, appease, swag, lull, soothe, compose, still, calm, calm down, cool, quiet, hush, quell, sober, pacify, tame, damp, lay, allay, rebate, slacken, smooth, alleviate, rock to sleep, deaden, smooth, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... my observation has gone, in nineteen out of twenty cases of infidelity in wives, the crimes have been fairly ascribable to the husbands. Folly or misconduct in the husband, cannot, indeed, justify or even palliate infidelity in the wife, whose very nature ought to make her recoil at the thought of the offence; but it may, at the same time, deprive him of the right of inflicting punishment on her: her kindred, her children, and the world, will justly hold her in ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... instructions are not mine. I do not excuse or palliate them. The daring youngster who conceived this paid the penalty with his life. It's all that any of us can give for his country. There's something that interests me now far more than this sensation—far more than the mere fact that my true business here ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... one scrap of paper they contain—the bartering of a thousand Weeners being an inadequate equivalent—your miserable substance will be attached to four tractors headed in divergent directions. Don't come back here, but attempt for once to palliate the offense of your birth and go interview that Francis female. Interview her, not yourself. Bring back a story, complete and terse, or commit the first sensible act of your life with any weapon you choose and charge the ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... right," said he; "I have plenty of faults of my own: I know it, and I don't wish to palliate them, I assure you. God wot I need not be too severe about others; I have a past existence, a series of deeds, a colour of life to contemplate within my own breast, which might well call my sneers and censures from my neighbours to myself. I started, or rather (for like other defaulters, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... a part of the benefit to soften the inconvenience. The perfect cure is impracticable, because the disorder is dear to those from whom alone the cure can possibly be derived. The utmost to be done is to palliate, to mitigate, to respite, to put off the evil day of the Constitution to its latest possible hour, and may it be a very ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which now perpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer have its way. At the end of the ends such things do defile, they do corrupt. We may palliate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but that is the truth, and I do not see why they should not be dropped from literature, as they were long ago dropped from the talk of decent people. The literary histories might keep record of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... story as short as I can, so I will not attempt to offer any excuses for my conduct, or to seek to palliate it in any way. Irene had trusted herself to me, and I betrayed her trust. I did not marry her. She did not leave me; she did not even openly upbraid me; but nevertheless it hung like a dark cloud over her life. By degrees, she became altered. ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... no desire to palliate my sin. Sin, I know it was, heavy and deadly; against God's law, against my trusting wife, and against that hapless creature on whom I brought a whole lifetime of misery. Ay, not on her alone, but on that innocent being who has received from me nothing but the heritage of shame, and to whom ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... G.F. has entered upon a pretty minute account of this strange society, and does his best to palliate the enormities of which, there seems no reason to doubt, its really profligate members are almost habitually guilty. That gentleman is certainly liberal in his views of the natives in general, and on the whole appears disposed to give more credit to human nature than, perhaps, it will be found ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... departure of Vidus Vidius for Italy was appointed to succeed that physician as professor of surgery to the Royal College. His character is easily estimated. With greater coarseness in his manners and language than even the rude state of society in his times can palliate, with much varied learning and considerable eloquence, he was a blind, indiscriminate and irrational admirer of Galen, and interpreted the anatomical and physiological writings of that author in preference to giving demonstrations ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the danger he was in, he immediately sent a galley with messengers to demand him of Dionysius; alleging that he stood engaged for his safety, upon the confidence of which Plato had come to Sicily. Dionysius, to palliate his secret hatred, before Plato came away, treated him with great entertainments and all seeming demonstrations of kindness, but could not forbear breaking out one day into the expression, "No doubt, Plato, when ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... conversation in Boston before Hawthorne started with Mr. Pierce; but he was unable, with that slight opportunity, to reach any definite conclusion. Dr. Holmes prescribed and had put up for him a remedy to palliate some of the poignant symptoms, and this Hawthorne carried with him; but "I feared," Dr. Holmes writes to the editor, "that there was some internal organic—perhaps malignant—disease; for he looked wasted and as if stricken with a ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... transaction, the French court endeavoured to palliate it by forms of law. They pretended to justify the massacre by a calumny, and accused the admiral of a conspiracy, which no one believed. The parliament was commanded to proceed against the memory of Coligni; and his dead body was hung in chains on Montfaucon gallows. The king himself ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... particularly repulsive in his countenance and manner. What, then, was his surprise and momentary delight when he beheld before him his only daughter, and felt her arms entwining his neck! After the first transport of greeting she became sensible that, in order to palliate his misery, she must put a strong curb upon her own, and in a short time was calm enough to enter into conversation with her father upon the subject of his present situation, and to deliver a message from the old earl, her grandfather, by which he was informed that an appeal had been made from ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... over his cups, or in any wise to molest him in his drink, is an offense against the proprieties that even the good-natured Epicurean can not find it in his easy heart to palliate or pardon. On this point he speaks mildly, but ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... the charge of covenant-breaking to be a nihil respondes, and the argument of the covenant too low to be thought on in a controversy about church government, "O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be not thou united." It is in vain for them to palliate or shelter their covenant-breaking with appealing from the covenant to the Scripture, for subordinata non pugnant. The covenant is norma recta,—a right rule, though the Scripture alone be norma recti,—the rule of right. If they hold the ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... affairs, Will soon grow necessary to his heirs. His policy consists in setting traps, In finding ways and means, and stopping gaps; He knows a thousand tricks whene'er he please, Though not to cure, yet palliate each disease. In either case, an equal chance is run; For, keep or turn him out, my lord's undone. You want a hand to clear a filthy sink; No cleanly workman can endure the stink. A strong dilemma in a desperate case! To act with infamy, or quit the place. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Edmonstone; 'and happening to meet him in London some little time after his marriage, he—he was pleased with the manner in which he was behaving then, thought—thought—' And here, recollecting that she must not speak ill of old Sir Guy, nor palliate his son's conduct, poor Mrs. Edmonstone got into an inextricable confusion—all the worse because the fierce twisting of a penwiper in Guy's fingers denoted that he was suffering a great trial of patience. She avoided the difficulty thus: 'It is hard to speak of such ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and he laid his hand very kindly on the boy's shoulder, "you must remember that the injustice came from you—no one would have doubted you if you had not first accused yourself! I had my doubts always, but I did not know enough to understand. You told a lie; nothing can palliate or do away with that! No motives can make a lie anything but a lie, and a lie is always a cowardly thing, whether we try to shield ourselves with ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn
... done or said or been could excuse or palliate his conduct. The fact that he was of a good family only rendered his alliance with "niggers" against his own race and class the more infamous. The fact that he was a man of substantial means, and had sought no office or aggrandizement by the votes of colored men, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... not, he says, to palliate or extenuate the crimes he himself has been guilty of: but laments, for Mr. Lovelace's own sake, that he gives him, with so ludicrous and unconcerned an air, such solemn and useful lessons and warnings. ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... know what I mean—and not lose the privilege of being near you. It may be—it is conceivable, I mean; no more—that a revelation to me of myself, a light thrown on what I am, would bring me what would palliate the wrench of losing what I have of you. It may be so—it may be! All I know is—all I can say is—that I can now imagine nothing, no treasure of love of wife or daughter, that would be a make-weight for what I should lose if I had to part from you." He paused a moment, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... personal investigation in such a case, she blamed herself for having omitted herself to question the confidential clerk, and having left all to Lord Ormersfield, who, cool and wary as he ordinarily was, would be less likely to palliate Mr. Ponsonby's errors than those of any other person. Her heart grew sick as she counted the weeks ere she could ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... you say is very wrong, for if I perfectly understand you, you are bringing an infamous accusation against my predecessors. Perhaps you think to palliate my fault thus in my own eyes. I thank you for the intention, but it is an improper course, and the reproach which you try to cast upon the worthy priests who have succeeded one another in this parish, takes ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... land of their own, and of those who still possessed land a large proportion had no longer the cattle and horses necessary to till and manure their allotments. No doubt M. Witte was beginning to perceive his mistake, and had done something to palliate the evils by improving the system of collecting the taxes and abolishing the duty on passports, but such merely palliative remedies could have little effect. While a few capitalists were amassing ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... to accept of more moderate terms of peace; and it is probable that, in order to palliate this change of resolution, he ascribed it to a vow made during a dreadful tempest, which attacked his army on their march, and which ancient historians represent as the cause of this sudden accommodation.[*] The conferences between the English ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... Roman citizens, was in itself sufficient to ruin the prosperity of every Italian town. This law operated continually and unobservedly and resulted in placing,[25] year by year, a still larger quantity of the soil of Italy in the hands of the Roman aristocracy. In order to palliate the evils of conquest or at least to hide their conditions of servitude, the Romans had accorded to a part of the Italians the title of allies, and to others the privileges of municipia.[26] These privileges were combined in a very skillful manner in the interest ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... long reply, the purport of which was that many of the reprisals were bogus, many were actions undertaken in self-defence, while the rest were generally due to men "seeing red" after their comrades had been brutally murdered. The Government did not palliate such cases, and had instituted inquiries and taken disciplinary action against the offenders, when known; but they were not prepared to set up a public inquiry such as Lord CREWE had demanded. It would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... activity, the stupid machine of war throws out, from minute to minute, bleeding men. We pick them up, and here they are, swathed in bandages. They have been crushed in the twinkling of an eye; and now we shall have to ask months and years to repair or palliate the damage. ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... to think lightly of sin? or, by example and conduct, to palliate and overlook its enormity? Not so; sin, as sin, can never be sufficiently stamped with the brand of reprobation. But we must seek carefully to distinguish between the offence and the offender. Nothing should be ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... to excuse and palliate his conduct toward Scotland. They have glossed over his crimes and tried to explain away the records of his deeds of savage atrocity, and to show that his claims to that kingdom, which had not a shadow of ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... quiet, and deliberate satisfaction in torturing to death any wretched victim whom they can have any pretext for destroying, especially if they can invent some new means of torment to give a fresh piquancy to their pleasure. These monsters do not act from passion. Men are sometimes inclined to palliate great cruelties and crimes which are perpetrated under the influence of sudden anger, or from the terrible impulse of those impetuous and uncontrollable emotions of the human soul which, when once excited, ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... attracted wide and warm admiration. He therefore recommended himself as a suitable editor of the works of Burns, when a new edition was contemplated by Messrs Wilson and M'Cormick, booksellers in Ayr. In the performance of his editorial task, he was led, in an attempt to palliate the immoralities of Burns, to make some indiscreet allusions respecting his own clerical brethren; for this imprudence he narrowly escaped censure from the ecclesiastical courts. His memoir, though commended in Blackwood's ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... be all good philosophy, Mr. Ratcliffe," answered Miss Vere; "but, excuse me, it by no means emboldens me to visit, at this late hour, a person whose extravagance of imagination you yourself can only palliate." ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... protection and whose cause it was the mission of his life to sustain and defend. The violation of divine and human justice had been erected into a system by the conquerors and discoverers and nothing, in his eyes, could palliate the evils which that system fostered, and by which the colonists prospered, while the native races were dwindling to extinction. Beyond these primary facts, he refused to see; of them, he had seen more than enough to inflame his indignation and start ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... obtaining my liberty, if I could not insist upon coming off scathless also. In fact, I was not content to evacuate the fortress, if I were not to march out with all the honours of war. This feeling I neither attempt to palliate nor defend, I merely chronicle it as, are too many of these confessions, a matter of truth, yet not the less a ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... and cents; and the desire to win must be very strictly subordinated to the sense of honour and fair play. The book-making spirit has undoubtedly entered far too largely into many of the most characteristic of British sports, and I have no desire to palliate or excuse our national shortcomings in this or other respects. But the hard commercial spirit to which I have alluded seems to me to pervade American sport much more universally than it does the sport of England, ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the compassion of the reader by bringing before him ill-assorted or compulsory marriages. Although habitual tolerance has long since relaxed our morals, an author could hardly succeed in interesting us in the misfortunes of his characters, if he did not first palliate their faults. This artifice seldom fails: the daily scenes we witness prepare us long beforehand to be indulgent. But American writers could never render these palliations probable to their readers; their customs and laws are opposed to it; and as they despair of rendering levity of conduct ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... and chimerical by those three high-born and splendidly-gifted women who figured so conspicuously in the civil war of the Fronde; and, though so much self-abnegation, courage, constancy, and heroism, well or ill displayed, may obtain some share of pardon for errors it would be wrong to palliate or condone, their example, it is to be hoped, will prove deterrent rather than contagious. La Rochefoucauld—a moralist, though by no means a moral man—who well knew the sex, had seen at work these political women of the time ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... of starch, and poorer in nitrogen, as well as in phosphoric acid, than other cereals, it is less laxative, and is of value as a demulcent to palliate irritative diarrhoea, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... the said day is observed, it will fully answer the intent of the said Act; if the preacher shall commend, excuse, palliate, or extenuate the murder of that royal Martyr; and lay the guilt of that horrid rebellion, with all its consequences, the following usurpations, the entire destruction of the Church, the cruel and continual persecutions of those who could be discovered to profess ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... Miss Walton," said he, his face distorted by an expression of intense self-loathing. "Do not try to palliate my course. I would much rather you would call my cowardly selfishness and lack of principle by their right names. The best thing I can do for the world is to get out of it, and from present feelings, this 'good- riddance' will soon occur. Will you excuse ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... to palliate the effect of their own mistake, or rather of the defeat their hopes, which the deeper sagacity of the king had contrived, they began to fill the emperor's ears, which were at all times most ready to receive all kinds of reports with false accusations against Para; pretending ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... an attempt to palliate the foolishness of Billy Folsom. It is not an essay in the emotional or the pathetic. You may pity him or reproach him, if you like, but my purpose is not to evoke any feeling toward or opinion of him. I do not seek to play upon your ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... pamphlets, I suppose:— All scribbled in the worst of times, To palliate his friend Oxford's crimes; To praise Queen Anne, nay more, defend her, As never favouring the Pretender: Or libels yet concealed from sight, Against the court to show his spite: Perhaps his travels, part the third; A lie at every second word— Offensive to a loyal ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... and the garrisons, taken out of the castles under pretence of carrying the treaty into effect, were delivered over as rebels to the vengeance of the Sicilian court. A deplorable transaction! a stain upon the memory of Nelson and the honour of England! To palliate it would be in vain; to justify it would be wicked: there is no alternative, for one who will not make himself a participator in guilt, but to record the disgraceful story with sorrow ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... the book; and it seems like blasphemy to intimate that the Spirit of God could have had anything to do with its composition. It is absolutely sickening to read the commentaries, which assume that it was dictated by the Holy Ghost, and which labor to justify and palliate its frightful narrative. One learns, with a sense of relief, that the Jews themselves long disputed its admission to their canon; that the school of Schammai would not accept it, and that several of the wisest and best of the early fathers of the Christian church, ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... on the road to the mountains. In the many miles, as he fared along, his thoughts could hardly have been pleasant company. As he sought to discover fault or flaw in himself, search as he might, he could find naught that might palliate the flippant faithlessness of his beloved, or the treachery of his brother. His ambition might have been too worldly a thing, but not a pulse of that most vital emotion beat for himself. He realized it now—he realized his life in looking back upon this completed episode, as he might have ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... probably it is in your morals, which cannot bear the truth of it. The violent on both sides will condemn the character of Absalom, as either too favourably or too hardly drawn. But they are not the violent whom I desire to please. The fault on the right hand is to extenuate, palliate, and indulge; and to confess freely, I have endeavoured to commit it. Besides the respect which I owe his birth, I have a greater for his heroic virtues; and David himself could not be more tender of the young man's life, than I would be of his reputation. But since ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... not? I thought that perhaps the one sin might palliate the other. You know, aunt, no young lady, let her be ever so ill-disposed, can marry two objectionable young men,—at the ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... from Northumbrian, died away beneath the common pressure of the stranger. The Conquest was hardly over when we see the rise of a new national feeling, of a new patriotism. In his quiet cell at Worcester the monk Florence strives to palliate by excuses of treason or the weakness of rulers the defeats of Englishmen by the Danes. AElfred, the great name of the English past, gathers round him a legendary worship, and the "Sayings of AElfred" embody the ideal of an English king. We see the new vigour drawn from this deeper consciousness ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... He talked unceasingly, making a running commentary upon every stroke he made; and he went on just the same at cards. However, he never blamed his companions, or lost his temper when his plan of action was defeated. He certainly talked incessantly, but it was always to explain or to palliate some point in the game, and the eternal repetitions, delivered in the same eloquent and persuasive tone, provoked a smile from ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... benefits on both, to give up a part of the benefit to soften the inconvenience. The perfect cure is impracticable; because the disorder is dear to those from whom alone the cure can possibly be derived. The utmost to be done is to palliate, to mitigate, to respite, to put off the evil day of the Constitution to its latest possible hour,—and may it ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... repulsive in his countenance and manner. What, then, was his surprise and momentary delight when he beheld before him his only daughter, and felt her arms entwining his neck! After the first transport of greeting she became sensible that, in order to palliate his misery, she must put a strong curb upon her own, and in a short time was calm enough to enter into conversation with her father upon the subject of his present situation, and to deliver a message from the old earl, her grandfather, by which he was informed that an appeal had ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... among you occupy my place;—and be surrounded by the same temptations,—and then comport himself wisely—if he can! Such an one would need to be either god or hero; and I profess to be neither. But I do not wish to palliate or deny the errors of the past. The present is my concern,—the present time, and the present People. Great changes are fermenting in the world; and of these changes, especially of those directly affecting our own country, I became actively ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... to gild the brief period with the light of your love. I would not have bound you always to me; and when I asked your hand a few minutes since, I knew that death would soon sever the tie and set you free. Let this suffice to palliate my 'unmanly' pleading. I have but one request to make of you now, and, weak as it may seem, I beg of you not to deny me. You are preparing to leave my house; this I know; I see it in your face, and the thought is harrowing to me. Electra, remain ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... done wrong, and deny or excuse their wrong-doing, the father of the family is the more moved to wrath; whereas, on the other hand, confession secures pardon or a lighter punishment. But it is the nature of hypocrites to excuse and palliate their sin or to deny it altogether and under the show of religion, ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... sight of God he was a murderer made Blair collapse during the day. He was confined to his room; and it was then that he told the Fort Benton physician all that was haunting him, hour by hour. Blair did not attempt to palliate his sin, and although the doctor had known much and suspected more, he could hardly find it in his heart to forgive either Winifred's brother or the woman who had led him on. The only ray of mercy he felt was that matters were not so bad as he had feared between these ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... losing his senses upon the occasions, and in the manner to be afterwards stated, he may have committed improprieties which fill him with sorrow and regret: but he hopes, that in case he shall be able to show circumstances which abridge and palliate the guilt of his imprudent excess, the Venerable Court will consider these improprieties as the effects of that excess only, and not as arising from any radical vice in his temper or disposition. When a man is ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... something pathetic to me in the fables historians invent to excuse or palliate, or, perhaps it would be juster to say, make tolerable, the stained pages of the past. It is brought doubly nearer and distinct by this miserable war, and the strange fate that has fallen upon us—to be the guests of a family whose hopes are fixed upon what would ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... universal grin, Sees not a countenance there that speaks a joy Half so refined or so sincere as ours. Cards were superfluous here, with all the tricks That idleness has ever yet contrived To fill the void of an unfurnished brain, To palliate dulness and give time a shove. Time, as he passes us, has a dove's wing, Unsoiled and swift and of a silken sound. But the world's time is time in masquerade. Theirs, should I paint him, has his pinions fledged With motley plumes, and, where the peacock shows His azure eyes, is ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... by Colonel the Hon. FitzWilliam Elliot. He "hopes, though he cannot expect," that I will give my reasons for not sharing his belief that Sir Walter did a certain thing which I could not easily palliate.' ...
— Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy • Andrew Lang
... arose. But a man who loves England for being Anglo-Saxon may go against all facts for his fancy. He may end (like Carlyle and Freeman) by maintaining that the Norman Conquest was a Saxon Conquest. He may end in utter unreason—because he has a reason. A man who loves France for being military will palliate the army of 1870. But a man who loves France for being France will improve the army of 1870. This is exactly what the French have done, and France is a good instance of the working paradox. Nowhere else is patriotism more purely abstract and arbitrary; and nowhere ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... danger, and he knew it. The disease had taken on a form that usually baffles the skill of our most eminent physicians, and Dr. Hillhouse saw little chance of anything but a fatal termination. He could do nothing except to palliate as far as possible the patient's intense suffering and endeavor to check farther complications. But he ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... suspicion on all that was transacted on that occasion. But there is no force in such an objection. Your Committee has no concern in the defence of these witnesses, nor of the Lords who found their verdict on such testimony, nor of the morality of those who produced it. Much may be said to palliate errors on the part of the prosecutors and judges, from the heat of the times, arising from the great interests then agitated. But it is plain there may be perjury in witnesses, or even conspiracy unjustly to prosecute, without the least doubt of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... proceeding, upon my word!" he remarked. Then he began to enlarge upon the enormity of the design. The most prominent impression in his mind evidently was that we were acting a base and treacherous part in deserting his party, in what he considered a very dangerous stage of the journey. To palliate the atrocity of our conduct, we ventured to suggest that we were only four in number while his party still included sixteen men; and as, moreover, we were to go forward and they were to follow, at least a full proportion of the perils he apprehended would fall upon us. But ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... pleasure, the great drama of vanities, with the little interludes of wisdom; these have been the occupations of my manhood; these will furnish forth the materials of that history which is now open to your survey. Whatever be the faults of the historian, he has no motive to palliate what he has committed nor to conceal what he ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... set for ever at rest. But it is only among the enlightened and benevolent that so great a sacrifice of appetite and prejudice can be expected, even though its ultimate excellence should not admit of dispute. It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine than to prevent them by regimen. The vulgar of all ranks are invariably sensual and indocile; yet I cannot but feel myself persuaded that when the benefits of vegetable diet ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... be something which needed explanation. It was the only instance among the works of Shakspeare in which a direct copy, even to matters of detail, appeared to have been made; and, in spite of all attempts to gloss over and palliate, it was impossible to deny that an unblushing act of mere piracy seemed to have been committed, of which I never could bring myself to believe that Shakspeare had been guilty. The readiness to impute this ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... child had sought to escape; crept out into the backyard; tried to scale the wall; fallen back exhausted; and been found at morning on the stones in a dying state. But though there was some evidence of cruelty, there was none of murder; and the aunt and her husband had sought to palliate cruelty by alleging the exceeding stubbornness and perversity of the child, who was declared to be half-witted. Be that as it may, at the orphan's death the aunt inherited her brother's fortune. Before the first wedded year was out, ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... The effort to palliate Rossian cruelty, skilful as it is, by the alleged necessities of war, by denials, or by asserting it to be mere revenge for similar atrocities committed by Poles, must be appreciated according to the sources whence it emanates. What ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... consequence, have come not to be so much condemned as pitied, their perversion of character is regarded not so much in terms of iniquity as of disease, and as we thus condone transgression in others, so in ourselves we palliate our wrong. We regard it as the unfortunate but hardly blamable consequence of temperament or training. Our fathers, who thought that the trouble was the devil in them, used to deal sternly with themselves. Like Chinese Gordon, fighting ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... remembered, till it has faded into nothingness. Instead of the life being the main thing, and being absolutely necessary to give value and emphasis to the belief, it has come to pass that it is the belief, and the acceptance of the belief, that has been held to hallow the life and excuse and palliate its errors. ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... disabled, in a body, all the deponents themselves, whether on oath or not on oath by discrediting the whole province as a set of criminals who gave evidence to palliate their own rebellion. They administered interrogatories to the commissioner instead of the culprit. They took a base fellow, whom they had themselves ordered their commissioner to imprison for crimes, (crimes charged on him, not by the commissioner, but by themselves,) ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the Whig alliance, by democratic sympathy, and by the transference of our political capital to Westminster. Tracts, periodicals, and the whole horde of Benthamy rushed in. Without manufactures, without trade, without comfort to palliate such degradation, we were proclaimed converts to Utilitarianism. The Irish press thought itself imperial, because it reflected that of London—Nationality was called a vulgar superstition, and a general European Trades' Union, to be followed by a universal Republic, became ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... Chamber of Commerce at Liverpool to that of Bristol. The natural antipathy of the nation is such, that their passions being once fully excited, they will proceed to such acts of reprisal and mutual violence, as will occasion clamors and altercations, which no soft words can palliate. As I pretend to know something of the counsels of both nations, I know there are strong advocates for war in both. The more reasons they have to produce in favor of their system, the ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... has been little more than the quotation of his own confession. His tremulously susceptible nature, especially assailable by the delights of sense, led him astray. There are traces in his life of occasional craft and untruthfulness which even the exigencies of exile and war do not wholly palliate. Flashes of fierce vengeance at times break from the clear sky of his generous nature. His strong affection became, in at least one case, weak and foolish fondness for an ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... may appear, they were essential parts of the national belief. Yet, with the most extreme folly, Charles, acting like Henry VIII. as his own Pope, thrust the canons and this Liturgy upon the Kirk and country. No sentimental arguments can palliate such open tyranny. ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... saying mass in their house to the Indians, with considerable notoriety and scandal to them, and no little affliction to the fathers, they were ejected from the [illegible in MS.] at my instance; for I asked it, and chose to give them this punishment, in order to palliate their offense. Thereupon your Lordship [illegible in MS.] occasioned some disturbance to result. This is what I have done for this order, and the way in which I have favored them, which in truth I might have done in many things most deservedly, and very rightly and justly. But I protest ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... asserting that such is our universal character. It is the character, I grant, that our inhuman masters have agreed to give us, and which they have so industriously and too successfully propagated, in order to palliate their own guilt, by blackening the helpless victims of it, and to disguise their own cruelty under the semblance of justice. Let the natural depravity of our character be proved—not by appealing to declamatory invectives, and interested ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... serve to palliate so atrocious a crime, or excuse the woman who first committed it, and the man who joined in the rebellion? Would they indeed have been less criminal, if a seraph of glory had proposed to them the impious ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... it. But I have it now. I could not resume my place as the husband of a now unknown wife—you know what I mean—and not lose the privilege of being near you. It may be—it is conceivable, I mean; no more—that a revelation to me of myself, a light thrown on what I am, would bring me what would palliate the wrench of losing what I have of you. It may be so—it may be! All I know is—all I can say is—that I can now imagine nothing, no treasure of love of wife or daughter, that would be a make-weight for what I should lose if I had to part from you." He paused a ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... negativd both by Bernard & Hutchinson the latter, who can smile sweetly even upon the Man he hates, when he is instructed or it is his Interest so to do, fawnd & flatterd one of the HEADS OF THE FACTION, & at length approvd of him when he was elected a Councellor last May. To palliate this inconsistent Conduct it was previously given out that Mr H had deserted the faction, & became as they term each other, a Friend to Governmt. But he had Spirit enough to refuse a Seat at the Board, & continue a Member of the House, where he has in every Instance joyned with the friends ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... I was free, but in fact I was bound," he acknowledged. "The words I spoke on the steps that night escaped me unaware. I was tortured by jealousy, and tempted by love. I had no right to speak them then; nothing can excuse or palliate the weakness which allowed me to. I should have waited until I could come to you untrammeled—as now. I attempt no justification of my madness, Princess. I have no excuse but my love, and can only sue for pardon. You will forgive me, sweetheart"—using the old word tenderly—"for ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... enjoy it. I like nothing better than to sit round after a heavy lunch with half a dozen heavy friends, smoking heavy cigars. I am well aware that that is wicked. I merely confess the fact. I do not palliate it. ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... to be lost; and, that the gentleman on whose account she was divorced had gained her heart while thus unhappily situated. Seduced, perhaps, by the charms of the lady in question, I thus attempted to palliate what I was sensible could not be justified; for when I had finished my harangue, my venerable friend gave me a proper check: 'My dear Sir, never accustom your mind to mingle virtue and vice. The woman's a whore, and there's an ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... his hands, and a storm of agony swept over him as he recalled the word "traitor," branded upon his brow as a badge of shame, and again he wandered along that devious path which had led him year by year downward. Too bitterly self-accusing to palliate his past, he only knew that in all the long years of social pariahhood he had learned to despise all men and to trust no woman! For had not Friendship been a lie to him, Love only a hollow cheat, and woman's vows of deathless loyalty but writ in sand to be washed out ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... profession, who seemed to regard or believe one syllable of the Gospel: And the same, at least, may be affirmed of the fleet. The consequences of all which upon the actions of men are equally manifest. They never go about, as in former time, to hide or palliate their vices, but expose them freely to view, like any other common occurrences of life, without the least reproach from the world, or themselves. For instance; any man will tell you he intends to be drunk this evening, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... accoy^; attemper^, contemper^; mollify, lenify^, dulcify^, dull, take off the edge, blunt, obtund^, sheathe, subdue, chasten; sober down, tone down, smooth down; weaken &c 160; lessen &c (decrease) 36; check palliate. tranquilize, pacify, assuage, appease, swag, lull, soothe, compose, still, calm, calm down, cool, quiet, hush, quell, sober, pacify, tame, damp, lay, allay, rebate, slacken, smooth, alleviate, rock to sleep, deaden, smooth, throw cold water ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... said he; "I have plenty of faults of my own: I know it, and I don't wish to palliate them, I assure you. God wot I need not be too severe about others; I have a past existence, a series of deeds, a colour of life to contemplate within my own breast, which might well call my sneers and censures from my neighbours to myself. I started, or rather ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... had formed an attachment, which you both say—with what truth I am unable to gauge —had not yet resulted in immoral relations, but which you both admit was about to result in such relationship. Your counsel has made an attempt to palliate this, on the ground that the woman is in what he describes, I think, as "a hopeless position." As to that I can express no opinion. She is a married woman, and the fact is patent that you committed this crime with the view ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... she was quiet and unobtrusive. She made no attempt to break down the wall thus established between us. And I was determined, on the whole, to be more than just with Rebecca. I would be kind to her in her disgrace. I would palliate her weakness as far as I could consistently with a pure and high standard of action. I even congratulated myself on the magnanimity of my intentions, except when I met the clear, sad gaze of those dispassionate eyes. Then I experienced an unaccountable sensation, as though I had received ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... treatment is contra-indicated, all that can be done is to palliate the symptoms by bromides, opium, phenacetin, caffein, ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... would rank highest in merit or saintliness will be assigned the same positions in the rewards of the last day; and it is just as unlikely that human estimates are right when they venture to assign the degrees of final condemnation. Two things it is our duty to do in regard to Judas: first, not so to palliate his sin as to blunt the healthy, natural abhorrence of it; and, secondly, not to think of him as a sinner apart and alone, with a nature so different from our own that to us he can be no example. But for the rest, there is only one verdict which is at once righteous, dignified ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... she say?—ha! that word would call my anger from the grave! She knew that I must become unhappy. Death and damnation! she knew it, and yet betrayed me! Look to it, serpent! That was thy only chance of forgiveness. This confession has condemned thee. Till now I thought to palliate thy crime with thy simplicity, and in my contempt thou hadst well nigh escaped my vengeance (seizing the glass hastily). Thou wert not thoughtless, then— thou wert not simple—thou wert nor more nor less ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... not prompted either by an idle curiosity, or by any wish to discover what prudence would dictate to conceal. It is necessary that I should be informed of these things, and I take the plain, open, candid method of acquiring information. To palliate or conceal any evils or disorders in our situation, can answer no good purpose; they must be known before they can be cured. We must also know what resources can be brought forth, that we may proportion our efforts to our means, and our demands ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... the conduct of the crew on deck, and he soon understood the whole matter. He was very severe upon Cleats for leaving the deck, declared that he could not be trusted, and that he should be discharged. The latter was very humble, acknowledged his error, and made no attempt to palliate it. He had always been faithful, so far as was known, and probably had never been guilty of any graver offence than that of leaving the deck for a few minutes during his watch. But he had been expressly cautioned not to do this, and had sent a hand ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... becoming his prize. He further added that many ridiculous tales had been propagated about the strength of the sides of these ships, and their being impenetrable to cannon-shot; that these fictions had been principally invented to palliate the cowardice of those who had formerly engaged them; but he hoped they were none of those present weak enough to give credit to so absurd a story. For his own part he did assure them upon his word that, whenever he met with them, he would fight them so near that they should find ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... public that they were not to go near or touch them, in twenty-four hours a mob would be raised to pull them down and ascertain what the planks contained." I mention this conversation, to shew in what a dexterous manner this American gentleman attempted to palliate one of the grossest outrages ever ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... two seperate principles I found them inextricably intwined together & I was again cast into perplexity & doubt—I might have considered the earth as an imperfect formation where having bad materials to work on the Creator could only palliate the evil effects of his combinations but I saw a wanton malignity in many parts & particularly in the mind of man that baffled me a delight in mischief a love of evil for evils sake—a siding of the multitude—a dastardly ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... whenever he ran counter to the predilections and passions of his countrymen. Gladstone succeeded when he attacked the Irish Church, and denounced the abominations of Turkish misrule: he failed when he tried to palliate his blunders in Egypt, and to force Home Rule down the throat of the "Predominant Partner." Bright succeeded when he pleaded for the Repeal of the Corn Laws and the extension of the Suffrage: he failed when he opposed the Crimean War, and lost his seat when he protested against ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... laws of optics and ingenuities of composition which may palliate this effect, but the fact remains that the floor should be covered in a way which will leave the mind tranquil and the eye satisfied, and this is hard to accomplish with what is commonly known as ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... prudent, and certainly not expedient, to proffer any information concerning the objects of royal indignation, except that which the newspapers afforded: nor was it perfectly safe, for a considerable time after the turbulent times in which the sufferers lived, to palliate their offences, or to express any deep concern for their fate. That there was much to be admired in those whose memories were thus, in some measure, consigned to oblivion, except in the hearts of their descendants; much which deserved to be explained ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... Nie fared differently. Japanese annals attempt to palliate his discomfiture by a story about the abuse of a flag of truce, but the fact seems to have been that Kawabe no Nie was an incompetent and pusillanimous captain. He and his men were all killed or taken prisoners, the only redeeming feature being the intrepidity of a Japanese officer, Tsugi no ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... a day, is a more useful benefactor than he who maintains in idleness for two. —I could not help wishing that the poor might no longer be tempted by the facility of a resource, which perhaps, in most instances, only increases their distress.—It is an injudicious expedient to palliate an evil, which great national works, and the encouragement of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... demonstration was repeated on the Porta Pia; and the Vatican, indignant at its powerlessness to suppress these symptoms of disaffection, is anxious to stir up the crowd to some overt act of insurrection, which may justify or, at any rate, palliate the employment of violent measures. So in order to incense the crowd, the public executioner was sent out in a cart guarded by gendarmes to excite some active expression of anger on the part of the mob. It is hard for us to understand the feeling with which the Italians, and especially ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... To palliate this record (which grows worse as the Afro-American becomes intelligent) and excuse some of the most heinous crimes that ever stained the history of a country, the South is shielding itself behind the plausible screen of defending the honor of its women. This, too, in the face of the fact that ...
— Southern Horrors - Lynch Law in All Its Phases • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... the new age the State must provide them with something better than saloons. "Flowers and sunshine for all," in Richard Jefferies' wistful phrase-the State should make a determined and thoroughgoing effort, not merely to repress, to punish, to palliate conditions, but in every positive way that expert thought can devise and the people will vote to support, to add to the worth of human life. We may consider these paternal functions of government under three heads: the improvement of human environment, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... the Irish Office, Lord CURZON made a long reply, the purport of which was that many of the reprisals were bogus, many were actions undertaken in self-defence, while the rest were generally due to men "seeing red" after their comrades had been brutally murdered. The Government did not palliate such cases, and had instituted inquiries and taken disciplinary action against the offenders, when known; but they were not prepared to set up a public inquiry such as Lord CREWE had demanded. It would only substitute "a competition ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... angrily. Oh, well, it was done and could not be undone now. It was mean, perhaps, to send him another girl's picture, but, considering that the whole world acknowledged that Mabel Moreley was far the better-looking of the two, did not this sacrifice of vanity palliate the offence? It seemed, after all, a very remote possibility that any harm could come to the other girl through this freak of hers. She could not, of course, have sent her own picture, and this was the only one in her collection ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... system. I am sure no theory can be correct which a mother is not willing for her daughter to practice. Decent women should not live with licentious husbands in the relation of wife. As society is now, good, pure women, by so living, cover up and palliate immorality and help to violate the law of monogamy. Women must take the social helm into their own hands and not permit the men of their own circle, any more than ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... because of lack of transportation to carry the food from the interior to the front, while the Union prisoners perished from hunger in the midst of abundance. Again, even assuming the plea of scarcity to be true, that would not palliate the numerous murders of helpless prisoners by volleys fired into the stockades at the pleasure of the guards.[1] There was a vindictiveness in these crimes which ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... idle and worthless; and the quality of her charity was, in fact, as admirable as its quantity. Her chief aim was the extension and improvement of popular education; but there was no kind of misery that she heard of that she did not palliate to the utmost, and no kind of solace that her quick imagination and sympathy could devise that she did not administer. In her methods, she united consideration and frankness with singular success. For one instance among a thousand:—A lady with whom she had had friendly relations some time before, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... this jury," said Dan Anderson, "I stand here before you to make no excuses for this Law, to palliate nothing in the way of its workings, to set no tentative or temporizing date for the time of the arrival at this place of the image of the Law. I say to you here to-day, at this hour, that image now sits there enthroned ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... the passage referred to, whereupon the prisoner undertook to show that the remark had been misunderstood. He had not said—at least, he did not intend to say—that; they had quite misinterpreted his words. With such remarks did he try to palliate the effect ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... fruit of his exertions would be shared by others, whether equally or unequally making them, and that the exertions of others would equally avail him, notwithstanding a deficiency in his own. Skilful arrangements might palliate this tendency, but it would be ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... distinguishing quality of this extraordinary man's mind, while he felt that a sort of disgrace ought to attach to his idleness on the occasion mentioned, the last thought that could occur would be to attempt to palliate ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... elements in us rise in irrepressible repugnance before such pageants of wickedness as have clothed the famous name of Wittenberg with infamy and made the story of naval warfare a continuing record of wanton crime. No man can think, without shame, of the so-called civilisation and culture which could palliate such perversions of justice as those recalled by the fate of Nurse Cavell and ...
— No. 4, Intersession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, - B.A. • B. N. Michelson
... all the consequences ought to fall on him; and, as far as my observation has gone, in nineteen out of twenty cases of infidelity in wives, the crimes have been fairly ascribable to the husbands. Folly or misconduct in the husband, cannot, indeed, justify or even palliate infidelity in the wife, whose very nature ought to make her recoil at the thought of the offence; but it may, at the same time, deprive him of the right of inflicting punishment on her: her kindred, her children, and the world, will justly ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... characters as Gomez Arias are unfortunately within the pale of human nature. I have endeavoured, however, to soften the character, as it is depicted, from that of an utterly abandoned libertine into a man of extraordinary ambition; for great passions, though they cannot palliate crime, are nevertheless not inconsistent with a dereliction ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... well-fought fields, you will find your soft theories corrected by hard experience, and you will know that in the case of a sentinel steeping upon, his post there can be no mitigating circumstances; that nothing can palliate such flagrant and dangerous neglect, involving the safety of the whole army; a crime that martial law and custom have very necessarily made punishable by death," said ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Poodles had browbeaten and threatened him; and we were disposed to palliate Pearl's offence, in consideration of his poverty and his dependent position, after ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... apostle preaching Christ, he knew only humanity and humanity crucified. Tongue of the dumb, eyes of the blind, feet of the impotent, his voice alone, among the voices that were everywhere heard and heeded, was sent by God to challenge every word, or look, or deed that seemed to him possibly to palliate oppression or to ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... had not spoken to her one word of love. Love will excuse roughness. Spoken love will palliate even spoken roughness. Had he once called her his own Lizzie, he might have scolded her as he pleased,—might have abused her to the top of his bent. But as there had been nothing of the manner of a gentleman to a lady, so also had there been nothing of the lover to his mistress. That dream ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... were very indignant,—all except Miss Furnival, who did not say much, but endeavoured to palliate the crimes of Lady Mason in that which she did say. "I do not know that she is more to blame than any other lady who marries a gentleman thirty years ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... Greedy, M.A., whose case, as reported by precious Mr. Grant Allen, so painfully moved serious circles—I was sliding back to the level of the savagery around me. May these confessions be accepted in the same spirit as they are offered; may it partly palliate my guilt that I had apparently no chance of escape from the island, and no hope beyond that of converting the natives and marrying Doto. I trusted to do it, not (as of old) by open and fearless denunciation, but by slowly winning ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... worship of station? Is it not fitting that wealth should tender this homage to culture? Is it not touching to witness these efforts, if little availing, Painfully made, to perform the old ritual service of manners? Shall not devotion atone for the absence of knowledge? and fervour Palliate, cover, the fault of a superstitious observance? Dear, dear, what do I say? but, alas! just now, like Iago, I can be nothing at all, if it is not critical wholly; So in fantastic height, in coxcomb exaltation, Here ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... the pure royalists to palliate the treachery of the government. They tried to persuade the people that the tranquillity and welfare of the nation depended but on the re-establishment of an absolute monarch, of a feudal aristocracy, and of all the trumpery of superstition. Such was the tendency of the ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... which will have more or less weight with the judgment, according as it may be more or less fastidiously disposed, in letting excuses for rapine and oppression pass muster. The incessant and urgent demands of the Directors upon him for money may palliate, perhaps, the violence of those methods which he took to procure it for them; and the obstruction to his policy which would have arisen from a strict observance of Treaties, may be admitted, by the same gentle casuistry, as ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong 90. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges the present ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... disgusting and improbable details named in the "Brief Declaration." Campbell also reports the stories, but adds, in regard to the wife murderer, "upon his trial it appeared that cannibalism was feigned to palliate the murder," p. 93. Neill quotes from the Records of the Virginia Company, "The Tragical Relation of Virginia Assembly," which was transmitted to England about 1621; this was intended as a reply to a petition of Alderman Johnson and others, ...
— Colonial Records of Virginia • Various
... became the slave of men who hated and despised him. No doubt the barbarous excesses of the followers of Gautier and Peter the Hermit made him look upon the whole body of them with disgust, but it was the disgust of a little mind, which is glad of any excuse to palliate or justify its own ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... monarch who was the host of his assailants, and with whom they were previously on the most friendly relations, it was an act of treachery, and reflects dishonor upon the fame of Cortez. At the same time, the position occupied by the Spaniards was so strange, and even desperate, as to palliate, though it cannot excuse, such a course ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... follow your train of thought," said he, with a melancholy shake of the head. "There are things which cannot be extenuated however we may try to palliate them." ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... composedly. "It is, however, justifiable in its place, although to me it signifies nothing, who know too well that you did commit both crimes, in your own person, and with your own hands. Far be it from me to betray you; indeed, I would rather endeavour to palliate the offences; for, though adverse to nature, I can prove them not to be so to the cause of pure Christianity, by the mode of which we have approved of it, and which we wish ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... most alive at midnight, rises at noon. Then the day began earlier with a long morning, followed by a pleasant period called the forenoon. Under modern conditions we spend the morning in bed, and to palliate our sloth call the forenoon and most of the rest of the day, the morning. These young men of Clement's Inn were a lively, not to say a rowdy, set. They would do anything that led to mirth or mischief. What passed when they lay all night in the ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... Finally the novelist turns against life itself. "Birth," he says, speaking of Tess, "seemed to her an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify and at best could only palliate." It is strange to find pessimism in a romantic setting; strange, too, to find a paganism which is so little capable of light ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... premises after their reconstruction. The accepted view seemed to be that as soon as Mr. Bartlett and his abettors cleared out and died away, the walls would begin to dry, and would make up for lost time. Everyone seemed inclined to palliate this backwardness in the walls, and to feel that they, themselves, had they been in a like position, could not have done much drying—with all them workmen in and out all day; ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... with an unlawful intent. The charge is not of a mistake in the exercise of supposed powers, but of the assumption of powers not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both, and nothing is suggested to excuse or palliate the turpitude of the act. In the absence of any such excuse or palliation there is only room for one inference, and that is that the intent was unlawful and corrupt. Besides, the resolution not only contains no mitigating suggestions, but, on the contrary, it holds up the act complained ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... stupid machine of war throws out, from minute to minute, bleeding men. We pick them up, and here they are, swathed in bandages. They have been crushed in the twinkling of an eye; and now we shall have to ask months and years to repair or palliate the damage. ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... Merrifield, as she said, 'lashed herself up' to go with Gillian, carry back the remnant of the unhappy 'Waif,' and 'have it out' with Constance, who would, she feared, never otherwise understand the measure of her own delinquency, and from whom, perhaps, evidence might be extracted which would palliate the poor child's offence in the eyes of Colonel Mohun. Both the Hacket sisters looked terribly frightened when she appeared, and the elder one made an excuse for getting her outside the door to beseech ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all. But there is one misdeed, one which outweighs all others whatsoever—a crime which it is useless to palliate, let our other friend say what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It sate heavy, for him, on his soul, and alone of all the actions of his life we are certain that he wished it undone—the death and eating of that poor foolish Lampe, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... little parting courtesy was not appreciated, although it afforded the cheerful Jimmy some amusement as he made his way out of the station. Indeed, considering that inhospitable hour of the morning, he was made fairly happy by what the Judge said. Furthermore, to palliate the dreariness of the winter morning, was the thought that now he could break the news of his discharge to his mother because he could couple it with a ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... is aggravated in proportion to the pleasure which they are capable of affording to vindictive, turbulent, and unprincipled readers. Could it be supposed, though for a moment, that the author seriously wished what he had thus wildly imagined, 50 even the attempt to palliate an inhumanity so monstrous would be an insult to the hearers. But it seemed to me worthy of consideration, whether the mood of mind and the general state of sensations in which a poet produces such vivid and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... gave it justified the deed. My position as an officer of the King would palliate deserting the ship which had ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... desire to palliate my sin. Sin, I know it was, heavy and deadly; against God's law, against my trusting wife, and against that hapless creature on whom I brought a whole lifetime of misery. Ay, not on her alone, but on that innocent being who has received from me nothing but the heritage of shame, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... find some reason or other to give for, or excuses to palliate. Men plead want to extenuate theft, and strong provocations to excuse murders, and many a lame excuse they will bring for whoring; but this sordid habit even those that practise it will own to be a crime, and make no excuse for it; ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... his fair liability to any. The intervals of rigour were meant to notify to the sceptical that the Government was at last on the track of evidence which would confirm the equity of everything from the beginning done against him. Constantly he had to stand on his defence against attempts to palliate the effrontery of the Winchester judgment by experimental accusations that he had been tampering with new conspiracies. For ten years the contest proceeded between him and the Court on that basis. He asseverated the right of an innocent man to freedom, and the Court ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... rendered uninteresting and unamiable by cares, temptations, and bursts of passion or folly, yet who still governs vigilantly and ably, our indignation should be modified, when the lower propensities are indulged. It is not pleasant to palliate injustices, tyrannies, and lusts. But human nature, at the best, is weak. Of all men, absolute princes claim a charitable judgment, and our eyes should be directed to their services, rather than to their defects. These remarks not only pertain to Tiberius, but to Augustus, and many other emperors ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... he had previously done or said or been could excuse or palliate his conduct. The fact that he was of a good family only rendered his alliance with "niggers" against his own race and class the more infamous. The fact that he was a man of substantial means, and had sought no office or aggrandizement by the votes of colored men, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... consisteth in the general, in a man's taking to himself his transgressions, and standing in them, with the acknowledgement of them to be his, and that he cannot stir from under them, nor do any thing to make amends for them, or to palliate the rigour of justice against the soul. And this the Publican did when he cried, "God be merciful ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... he did know, had really known from the first, though now his fault stood before him in its unsightliness; all the pretexts by which he had attempted to palliate it fell from it like a veil, and showed the hateful thing it was. He could not bring himself to acknowledge it, however. Sullenly he set down the apples and peanuts, murmuring, "I ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... differently regarded by different persons; it shows that she was at least living human flesh and blood. In later life, we are told by Hotham, who was in the habit of frequently seeing her, up to her death, in 1831, "she continually talked of him, and always attempted to palliate his conduct towards her, was warm and enthusiastic in her praises of his public achievements, and bowed down with dignified submission to the errors of his ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... their native land. In the Eastern Hemisphere the African had always been in a servile condition. In Hayti and Jamaica experiments had been tried of freeing them, under the auspices of France and England. Miseries had resulted and ruin overwhelmed the islands. "Fanaticism may palliate, but could not conceal the utter prostration of the race." The best specimens of the race were to be found in the Southern States, in closest contact with slavery. The North does not want the negro, does not encourage his immigration. The great fact of ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... wedlock, until mutual inspection has satisfied each of the contracting parties that the other does not labor under any grave personal defect. If it were possible to regard the passage containing this proposal as an interpolation in the original romance, it might then be regarded as an attempt to palliate Henry VIII.'s conduct ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Parton's "Life of Aaron Burr" with considerable severity at the time of its appearance; and we are the more glad to meet with a book of his which we can as sincerely and heartily commend. The same quality of sympathy with his subject, which led him in his former work to palliate the moral obliquity and overlook the baseness of his hero, in consideration of brilliant gifts of intellect and person, gives vigor and spirit to his delineation of a character in most respects so different as that of Jackson. This man, who filled so large a place in our history, and left perhaps ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... Rome, and became a matter of discussion in the senate, the former partisans of Jugurtha applied themselves, by interrupting the debates and protracting the time, sometimes exerting their interest, and sometimes quarreling with particular members, to palliate the atrocity of the deed. And had not Caius Memmius, one of the tribunes of the people elect, a man of energy, and hostile to the power of the nobility, convinced the people of Rome that an attempt was being made, by the agency of a small faction, to have the crimes ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... everywhere seen cause to condemn sex-antagonism, and it is my hope that no page or line or word of this book can be accused of illustrating or justifying or inciting to or even attempting to palliate either form of this wholly abominable spirit of the pit. If such places there be, there assuredly is misdirection and falsity. This spirit is one of the great enemies of mankind. As aroused in women against men, it has done and is doing no little harm; ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... nothing to palliate, wrote very frankly. "Look, my Lord," he said to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, "upon the country near Boston. It is all fortification." His mathematics has been already quoted; he adds that the army had nothing for transport in an active campaign of any duration. Proceeding, he ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... Allures the bee to hover round and round? Not small your wit, nor rugged and unkempt; 'Twill answer bravely to a bold attempt: Whether you train for pleading, or essay To practise law, or frame some graceful lay, The ivy-wreath awaits you. Could you bear To leave quack nostrums, that but palliate care, Then might you lean on heavenly wisdom's hand And use her guidance to a loftier land. Be this our task, whate'er our station, who To country and to self would fain ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... least to the dread, of being dragged in chains to the court of Milan or Constantinople, to defend his life and fortune against the malicious charge of these privileged informers. The ordinary administration was conducted by those methods which extreme necessity can alone palliate; and the defects of evidence were diligently supplied ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... rid of thoughts of Him. And when He is felt to be near, it is as a questioner, bringing sin to mind. The shuffling excuses, which venture even to throw the blame of sin on God ('the woman whom Thou gavest me'), or which try to palliate it as a mistake ('the serpent beguiled me'), have to come at last, however reluctantly, to confess that 'I' did the sin. Each has to say, 'I did eat.' So shall we all have to do. We may throw the blame on circumstances, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... obligations which no man can neglect without infamy. The conspirators condemned by the Special Commission—and among them are to be found the most prominent of the Irish leaders[124]—have been guilty of conduct which no wise man ought to forget and no good man ought to palliate. They have for years excited Irish ignorance against England and against English officials by a system of gross incessant slander; witness the pages of United Ireland when Lord Spencer and Sir George Trevelyan were in power at Dublin. The men whom we are told to trust are men who did enter into ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... to make my story as short as I can, so I will not attempt to offer any excuses for my conduct, or to seek to palliate it in any way. Irene had trusted herself to me, and I betrayed her trust. I did not marry her. She did not leave me; she did not even openly upbraid me; but nevertheless it hung like a dark cloud over her life. By degrees, she became altered. She tried to drown her memory by frivolity, by all manner ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... more than human fortitude. You resolve, in this particular, not to offend the prejudices of your family, and the world. I submit. To indulge sensibility but a little were to be heart-broken! But no personal grief can authorise me in deserting the post I am placed in; nor palliate the crime of neglecting its duties. To the end of time I shall persist in thinking you mine by right; but I will never trouble you more with an assertion of that right—Never!—Unless some new and unexpected claim should spring up, of which I see ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... position of the intruders somewhat uncomfortable. Mr. Keepum, whose designs Snivel would put in execution, sinks, cowardly, upon the sofa, while his compatriot (both are celebrated for their chivalry) stands off apace endeavoring to palliate the insult with facetious remarks. (This chivalry of ours is a mockery, a convenient word in the foul mouths of fouler ruffians.) Mr. Snivel makes a second attempt to overcome the unprotected girl. With every expression of hate and scorn rising to her face, she bids ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... want at this season in London. I have written to tell her that my Holidays commence on the 6th of August, but however, July the 1st is the proper day.—I beg that if you cannot find some means to keep her in the Country that you at least will connive at this deception which I can palliate, and then I shall be down in the country before she knows where I am. My reasons for this are, that I do not wish to be detained in Town so uncomfortably as I know I shall be if I remain with her; that I do wish to see my Sister; and ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... rain fall, and the grass look green upon his grave. Thou art perpetrating gradually, by the use of ardent spirits, what he has effected suddenly by opium or a halter. Considering how many circumstances from surprise, or derangement, may palliate his guilt, or that, unlike yours, it was not preceded and accompanied by any other crime, it is probable his condemnation will be less than yours at the day ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... endeavor to palliate Franklin's error in failing to detect the duplicity of de Vergennes. On the contrary, it would give a less agreeable idea of him had he been ready to believe so ill of an old and tried friend. For years Franklin had been the medium through whom had passed ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... No one wishes to palliate the crimes of which England has been guilty in Ireland. Her hand has been heavy, her whip one of braided scorpions, her rule emphatically of blood and iron. But all this is of the past, and the pendulum, not only of public feeling but of legal enactment, ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... there had been no rupture, he would be as blithe as a lark at this moment, and might outlive you and M. le President and me. . . . The ways of Providence are mysterious, let us not seek to fathom them," he added to palliate to some extent the hideous idea. "It cannot be helped. We men of business look at the practical aspects of things. Now you see clearly, madame, that M. de Marville in his public position would do ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... inexplicable, but we may understand why so much and such resplendent poetry is lavished on incidents so bare, meagre, and commonplace, and why they present both poet and patron with frailties and faults naked and repellant; and we can the better palliate and forgive the weakness and subjection which the Sonnets indicate on the part of their author. With such a reading the Sonnets become a chronicle of the modes and feelings of their author, resembling in this respect the In Memoriam of Tennyson; and their poetry becomes deeper ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... the choice cannot be doubtful. We are not defending coarseness in any guise. It is always to be assailed, and never to be defended. It is always a detriment, and never an ornament. No excellence can justify it. No occasion can palliate it. But coarseness is of two kinds,—one of the surface, and one in the grain. The latter is pervading and irremediable. It touches nothing which it does not deface. It makes all things common and unclean. It ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... commits an error, and he has sufficient address to conceal it, or sufficient ingenuity to palliate it, but he does neither; instead of availing himself of concealment and palliation, with the candor of a great mind, he confesses his error, and makes all the apology or atonement which the occasion requires. None has ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... to go away because he felt that he was in a dying state; but the response intimated that he had often expressed the same feeling before, and his fears had proved groundless. During the interval of these few hours of abandonment nothing can palliate or excuse, George Borrow died as he had lived—alone! His age was seventy-eight years ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... "I am ashamed, sir," said she, "that you should have taken this fresh piece of trouble about one so little worthy of it; but, to the humane, I know there is a pleasure in goodness for its own sake: if you have patience for the recital of my story, it may palliate, though it cannot excuse, my faults." Harley bowed, as a sign of assent; and ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... cruel and base in his treatment of her? And yet she recoiled from the application of such hard terms by another to Philip, by a cool-judging and indifferent person, as she esteemed Jeremiah to be. From some inscrutable turn in her thoughts, she began to defend him, or at least to palliate the harsh judgment which she herself had been ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... satisfaction in torturing to death any wretched victim whom they can have any pretext for destroying, especially if they can invent some new means of torment to give a fresh piquancy to their pleasure. These monsters do not act from passion. Men are sometimes inclined to palliate great cruelties and crimes which are perpetrated under the influence of sudden anger, or from the terrible impulse of those impetuous and uncontrollable emotions of the human soul which, when once excited, seem to make men insane; but the ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... or still more unjustly punished. My name and injuries will ever stain the annals of Frederic the Great; even those who read this book will perhaps suppose that I, from political motives of hope or fear, have sometimes concealed truth by endeavouring to palliate his conduct. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... Sophia, was charmed by her beauty and intelligence, and he proposed that her parents should place her under his care, and allow him to convey her to France. The misery to which the poor people were reduced, may perhaps palliate the shame of acceding to this extraordinary proposition; but, be this as it may, they consented to surrender up their daughter for the sum of 1,500 piastres, and Sophia was that same day conducted to the ambassador's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... me too long to dwell particularly on the punishments inflicted by the Court of Star-chamber in this reign. Such historians as have not written in order to palliate the tyranny of Charles, and especially Rushworth, will furnish abundant details, with all those circumstances that portray the barbarous and tyrannical spirit of those who composed that tribunal. Two or three instances are so celebrated that I cannot pass them over. Leighton, a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... artifice of some celebrated authors, whose writings have had a great share in forming the modern standard of political opinions. Being subjects either of an absolute or limited monarchy, they have endeavored to heighten the advantages, or palliate the evils of those forms, by placing in comparison the vices and defects of the republican, and by citing as specimens of the latter the turbulent democracies of ancient Greece and modern Italy. Under ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... rebellious boy take whatever punishment his mistaken course might bring, he now began to wish that the punishment would be light. His confidence that Jim needed only to be pushed a little to confess was somewhat shaken, and the charge was really serious. He felt a desire to explain, to palliate, to minimize. ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... many things he acted in a way that much displeased me, for he caused to be made for himself a folding chair such as bishops use, and gloves, and a cap of peacocks feathers, with a small gold cross; but I was well pleased with the cross. He had scabbed feet, which he endeavoured to palliate with ointments[3]; was very presumptuous in speech, was present at many of the vain and idolatrous rites of the Nestorians, and had many other vanities with which I was much displeased. Yet we joined his ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... billiard-room' was the damning answer. Thus, had John's single departure from the truth brought instant punishment. For no other purpose but to see Alan would he have entered a billiard-room; but he had desired to palliate the fact of his disobedience, and now it appeared that he frequented these disreputable haunts ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not shrunk from perpetrating the most horrid cruelty, endure more from the consciousness that no man will sympathise with their sufferings, than from apprehension of the personal agony of their impending punishment; and are known often to attempt to palliate their enormities, and sometimes altogether to deny what is established by the clearest proof, rather than to leave life under the general ban of humanity. It was no wonder that Nigel, labouring under the sense of ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... Christine is mild, and more than modest—she is meek. But what can meekness itself do to palliate such a calamity? Desirous of averting the stigma of his family from all he could with prudence, my father caused my sister, like myself, to be early taken from the parental home. She was given in charge to strangers, under such circumstances ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... robbed of their treasures, and the bones of their fathers were left to bleach upon the fields. And when exasperated by the brutality of their conquerors, and driven to deeds of vengence, there was very little appreciation of the motives which influenced them, and no attempt was made to palliate their cruelties. ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... be an odious and abominable thing, contrary to the holy nature of God, and awakening in that nature the most holy and awful displeasure. His knowledge upon this subject will be so identical with that of God, that he will be unable to palliate or excuse his transgressions, as he does in this world. He will see them precisely as God sees them. He must know them as God knows them, because he will "know even as he ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... glory, not for dollars and cents; and the desire to win must be very strictly subordinated to the sense of honour and fair play. The book-making spirit has undoubtedly entered far too largely into many of the most characteristic of British sports, and I have no desire to palliate or excuse our national shortcomings in this or other respects. But the hard commercial spirit to which I have alluded seems to me to pervade American sport much more universally than it does the sport of England, and to form almost always a much larger factor in the interest ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... crime, its cause should be of interest to those who represent the State. I am not seeking to minimize or palliate or excuse whatever crime may have been committed in this case, but that society which is seeking its own safety and perpetuity cannot too strongly be urged to beware of the universal menace to its existence, as well as to guard against ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... George Sand in her love affairs was always the man. She treated Chopin as a child, a toy, used him for literary copy- -pace Mr. Hadow!—and threw him over after she had wrung out all the emotional possibilities of the problem. She was true to herself even when she attempted to palliate her want of heart. Beware of the woman who punctuates the pages of her life with "heart" and "maternal feelings." "If I do not believe any more in tears it is because I saw thee crying!" exclaimed Chopin. Sand was the product of abnormal ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... portion of the United Kingdom itself, which was a "serious disgrace to the age, and to the government, and the country in which we live," without endeavouring, by the enactment of more stringent laws, to correct it, the evasions, by means of which they now seek to palliate their neglect, and the strange want of perspicacity which they display in not being able to discover the real source of mischief, or their timidity in not daring to denounce it, must naturally excite our astonishment. Let any ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... with her wonderful tenderness, had bridged over the chasms between her stark peaks of discovery. She knew all that we knew. Further attempts at deception would have been vain cruelty. Barbara could palliate the offence; she could show how irresistible had been the temptation; she could prove how our love for Adrian had been unshaken by disastrous knowledge and urge that Doria's love should be unshaken likewise; she could apply all the healing remedies of which she only has the secret—but ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... proof of Johnson's malignity, is the manner in which he has treated the character and conduct of Milton. To enforce this charge has wearied sophistry, and exhausted the invention of a party. What they cannot deny, they palliate; what they cannot prove, they say is probable. But why all this rage against Dr. Johnson? Addison, before him, had said ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... the paltry excuse of an interested motive to palliate the offence. O God! that I should be brought so low!"—and the doctor wrung ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... evidence, which, though brought against Rebecca Nurse, bears harder, as we read it now, upon Ann Putnam than any one else, and makes it more difficult to palliate her conduct on the supposition of partial insanity. It is, all along, one of the obscure problems of our subject to determine how far delusion may have been accompanied by fraud and imposture. Edward Putnam testified, that ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... railway servants, having eaten his dinner, felt himself rather sleepy, and resolved to have a short nap. It was our friend Sam Natly, the porter, who came to this unwise as well as unfair resolution. Yet although we are bound to condemn Sam, we are entitled to palliate his offence and constrained to pity him, for his period of duty during the past week had been fifteen ...
— The Iron Horse • R.M. Ballantyne
... doctrine of Thwackum served greatly to palliate the contrary errors in that of Square, which our good man no less saw and condemned. He thought, indeed, that the different exuberancies of these gentlemen would correct their different imperfections; and that from both, especially with his ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... kept out of such editions as are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which now perpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer have its way. At the end of the ends such things do defile, they do corrupt. We may palliate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but that is the truth, and I do not see why they should not be dropped from literature, as they were long ago dropped from the talk of decent people. The literary histories might keep record of them, but it is loath some to think of those heaps ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... country, and were supported by the misguided natives; while the Spaniards who remained loyal, fearing conspiracies among the natives, had to keep under shelter of the fort, or in the strong houses which they had erected in the villages. The commanders were obliged to palliate all kinds of slights and indignities, both from their soldiers and from the Indians, fearful of driving them to sedition by any severity. The clothing and munitions of all kinds, either for maintenance or defence, were ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... field. Enveloped in the mists of receding years; obscured by the glamour of poetry; belied by the vivid imagination of stragglers and camp-followers who, on the first note of danger, made a frantic rush for Winchester, seeking to palliate their own misconduct by spreading exaggerated reports of disaster, the union army that confronted Early at Cedar Creek, for many years made a sorry picture, which the aureole of glory that surrounded its central figure ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... trouve"—"O divine Decretals, how good you make good wine taste!" "The miracle would be greater," said Pantagruel, "if they made bad wine taste good." The most that can now be done by the devout for the Decretals is "to palliate the guilt of their forger," whose name, like that of the Greek ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... may attempt to palliate the conduct of the French, but it might naturally be supposed that upon learning from his papers the errand of mercy upon which Lieutenant Thomas had been engaged, the French officer would have done all in ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... perfectly well—for he seems to have been sane—that nobody but the subjects of these biographies would seek them "with avidity," and he made these plausible, bombastic assertions to excuse himself for having sprung such a trap on an unsuspecting public. That he tries to palliate the offence is, sufficient proof ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
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