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Cotter   Listen
verb
Cotter  v. t.  To fasten with a cotter.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cotter" Quotes from Famous Books



... to the poet, which Telford recognised as his own, written many years before while working as a mason at Langholm. Their purport was to urge Burns to devote himself to the composition of poems of a serious character, such as the 'Cotter's Saturday Night.' With Telford's permission, several extracts from his Address to Burns were published in 1800 in Currie's Life of the poet. Another of his literary friendships, formed about the same time, was that with Thomas Campbell, then a very young man, whose 'Pleasures of Hope' had just ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... castle-hall, Wi' banners flauntin' ower the wall And serf and page in ready call, Sae grand to me As ane puir cotter's hut, wi' ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley

... Proper Designation. How to Explain Mechanical Forms. Defining Segment and Sector. Arcade, Arch, Buttress, Flying Buttress, Chamfer, Cotter, Crenelated, Crosses, Curb Roof, Cupola, Crown Post, Corbels, Dormer, Dowel, Drip, Detent, Extrados, Engrailed, Facet, Fret, Fretwork, Frontal, Frustrums, Fylfot, Gambrel Roof, Gargoyle, Gudgeon, Guilloche. Half Timbered, Hammer Beam, Header, Hip Roof, Hood Molding, Inclave, Interlacing ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe

... a matter of conjecture. With all the searching examination of "The Decline and Fall," it is surprising how few errors have been found and, of the errors which have been noted, how few are really important. Guizot, Milman, Dr. Smith, Cotter Morison, Bury, and a number of lesser lights have raked his text and his notes with few momentous results. We have, writes Bury, improved methods over Gibbon and "much new material of various kinds," but "Gibbon's historical sense kept ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... the honour of the Irish character, that the gentlemen of that country would take this matter into their serious consideration. Let them only for a moment place themselves in the situation of the half-famished cotter, surrounded by a wretched family clamorous for food, and judge what his feelings must be when he sees the tenth part of the produce of his potato garden exposed at harvest time to public CANT, or if he have given a promissory note for the payment of a certain ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith

... residentiary^; dweller, indweller^; addressee; occupier, occupant; householder, lodger, inmate, tenant, incumbent, sojourner, locum tenens, commorant^; settler, squatter, backwoodsman, colonist; islander; denizen, citizen; burgher, oppidan^, cockney, cit, townsman, burgess; villager; cottager, cottier^, cotter; compatriot; backsettler^, boarder; hotel keeper, innkeeper; habitant; paying guest; planter. native, indigene, aborigines, autochthones^; Englishman, John Bull; newcomer &c (stranger) 57. aboriginal, American^, Caledonian, Cambrian, Canadian, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... Lois G. Hufford. Cloth, 35 cents. The selections are forty-five in number and include The Cotter's Saturday Night, Tam O'Shanter, The Vision, The Brigs of Ayr, and all the more familiar short ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... note the Critical Review's regret that the dialect must "obscure the native beauties" and be often unintelligible to English readers. The same sentiment was expressed by the Monthly Review, LXXV, p. 439, in the critique reprinted (without its curious anglified version of The Cotter's Saturday Night) ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... during this fortnight of intense agony? Not those who can command the luxuries of life—not those who can reach its comforts—nor those who can supply themselves with its bare necessaries—neither the cotter who struggles to support his wife and helpless children—the mendicant who begs from door to door—nor even the felon in his cell—can imagine what he felt in the solitary misery of his feverish bed. Hard is the ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... forest told him nothing; he was not like his friend, Henry Ware, born to the forest, the heir to all the primeval instincts, alive to every sight and sound, and able to read the slightest warning the wilderness might give. Paul Cotter was a student, a lover of books, and a coming statesman. Fate, it seemed, had chosen that he and Henry Ware should go hand in hand, but for ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler

... The Cotter's Saturday Night John Anderson, My Jo Man Was Made to Mourn Green Grow the Rashes Is There for Honest Poverty To a Mouse To a Mountain Daisy Tam o' Shanter Bruce to His Men at Bannockburn Highland Mary My Heart's in the Highlands ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... was continued successively in "The Forest Runners," "The Keepers of the Trail," "The Eyes of the Woods," "The Free Rangers," "The Riflemen of the Ohio," and "The Scouts of the Valley." All the eight volumes deal with the fortunes and adventures of two boys, Henry Ware and Paul Cotter, and their friends Shif'less Sol Hyde, Silent Tom Ross and Long Jim Hart, in the early days of Kentucky. The action moves over a wide area, from New Orleans in the South to Lake Superior in the North, ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler

... elsewhere applied by Chaucer to the hairs of an old man. So Burns, in the "Cotter's Saturday Night," speaks of the gray temples of "the sire" — "His lyart ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... however, some equivocated, and others broke their word, the Duke was obliged to lay "the rod on more heavy." Fire and sword were therefore carried through the country of the Camerons; the cattle were driven away; even the cotter's hut escaped not: the homes of the poor were laid in ashes: their sheep and pigs slaughtered: and the wretched inmates of the huts, flying to the mountains, were found there, some expiring, some actually dead of hunger. The houses of the clergy ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson

... we won in Whinglen, Jean Linn— Ye mind when we won in Whinglen, Your daddy, douce carle, was cotter to mine, An' our herd was yer bonnie sel', then, Jean Linn, An' our herd was ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... I do; they were the most charming greys I ever met. They beat the plaids into fits; and the plaids were far from ungentlemanly, only they would always talk with a sham Scotch accent, and quote the 'Cotter's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 6, 1841, • Various

... will) of depicting the simplicity of every-day life and objects with more grace or comprehensiveness. There are some touches in his 'Village Blacksmith' inexpressibly beautiful, and worthy of BURNS' 'Cotter's ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various

... oppressive both to the cotter's body and to his soul, for it not only bound him to perpetual poverty but kindled within him a deep sense of injustice. The historian, Justin McCarthy, says that the Irishman "regarded the right to have a bit of land, his share, exactly as other ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... his Ode on Evening, or on the Poetical Character. Gray's Elegy, and his poetical popularity, are identified together, and inseparable even in imagination. It is the same with respect to Burns: when you speak of him as a poet, you mean his works, his Tam o'Shanter, or his Cotter's Saturday Night. But the enthusiasts for Chatterton, if you ask for the proofs of his extraordinary genius, are obliged to turn to the volume, and perhaps find there what they seek; but it is not in their minds; and it is of that I spoke. ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... saw the worth Of life among the lowly; The Bible at his Cotter's hearth Had made my own ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... made up of those who depended entirely on agricultural labor on the land of others for their support, was a class which had been increasing in numbers, and which was the most distinctly favored by the demand for laborers and the rise of wages. They were the representatives of the old cotter class, recruited from those who either inherited no land or found it more advantageous to work for wages than to take up small ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney

... and hammered to get them into place, bearings are filed to make them fit, bolts and screws are weak and loose, nuts gone for the want of cotter-pins; it is as if apprentice blacksmiths had spent their idle moments in ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... 20, 1805] Novr. 20 Wednesday 1805 Some rain last night despatchd. 3 men to hunt Jo. Fields & Cotter to hunt Elk & Labich to kill some Brant for our brackfast The Morning Cleared up fare and we proceeded on by the Same rout we went out, at the River we found no Indians. made a raft & Ruben Fields Crossed and took over a Small ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... king was doubtless ill-advised, and his councillors did not take the kindly or the wise way with the people at this time; for a host of wild Highlanders had been turned into the land, who plundered in cotter's and laird's hall without much distinction between those that stood for the Covenants and those that held for the king. So in the year 1679 Galloway was very hot and angry, and many were ready to fight the king's forces wherever they could be ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... scriber between the legs at the bowed portion. To make a more positive clamp before bending the legs to a bow, slip a short coil of wire over the pin, passing it down to the ring end. Wire 1/32 in. in diameter wound over a wire slightly larger in diameter than that of the cotter will do. In soldering, smoke the legs well to avoid solder adhering to them. The clamp is tightened by pushing up the coil ring toward the bow of the legs and then twisting it like a nut, the coil being wound right-handed, so that it ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... her; and when Joan learned what a capable girl Agnes was, understanding Euclid and algebra, as Mr. Simon said, better than any boy, Cosmo himself included, he had ever had to teach, the earl's daughter did feel a little pain at the heart because of the cotter's. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... couplet and by the finality of the last line, is a discovery of genius, and that the Alexandrine, 'forever feeling for the next stanza,' does much to bind the stanzas together. It has been adopted in no small number of the greatest subsequent English poems, including such various ones as Burns' 'Cotter's Saturday Night,' Byron's 'Childe Harold,' Keats' 'Eve of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... too, by Mr. TOM WOOTTWELL as Bert, the incorrigible amorist, for whom each new girl is "the only girl," and who has an apparently inexhaustible supply of identity-discs to leave with them as "sooveneers"; and by Mr. SINCLAIR COTTER as Alf, the cynical humourist—"Where were you eddicated, Eton or Harrod's?" is one of his best mots—who spends most of his time in wrestling with an automatic cigar-lighter. I think it would be only poetical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various

... Don's knowledge stood him in good stead, for with more than half the first-string players excused from practice, his services were called on at the start, and, with McPhee and Cotter running the squad, the signal drill was long and thorough. Harry Walton viewed Don's advent with disfavour. That was apparent to Don and anyone else who thought of the matter, although he pretended a good-natured indifference ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour

... statistics, and common sense, by a two-fold marriage. The wife of his youth (I am afraid he married early) had once been kitchen-maid at the Hall; but the sudden change from living luxuriously in a great house, to the griping poverty of a cotter's hovel, had changed, in three short years, the buxom country girl into an emaciated shadow of her former self, and the sorrowing husband buried her in her second child-bed. The powers of the parish clapped their hands; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... knighthood. Mr Broun claimed it as an heir apparent in 1836, and on finally meeting with refusal, publicly assumed the honour in 1842, a foolish and futile act. In 1854 Sir J. Kingston James was knighted as a baronet's son, and Sir Ludlow Cotter similarly in 1874, on his coming of age; but when Sir Claude de Crespigny's son applied for the honour (17th of May 1895), his application was refused, on the ground that the lord chancellor did not consider the clause ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... heaths, its blood-stained and desolated shores, its untaught and scanty population; behold the monarch listening now to Bede, and now to John Erigena; and then see the same realm, a mighty empire, full of motion, full of books, where the cotter's son, twelve years old, has read more than archbishops of yore, and possesses the opportunity of reading more than our Alfred himself;—and then finally behold this mighty nation, its rulers and its wise ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... old climbers, and their verdict of impossible opposed me as I lay awake thinking about it; but early next morning I had made up my mind, and, taking Cotter aside, I asked him in an easy manner whether he would like to penetrate the Unknown Land with me at the risk of our necks, provided Brewer should consent. In frank, courageous tone he answered after his usual mode, "Why ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various

... Ohio," while a complete story in itself, continues the fortunes of Henry Ware, Paul Cotter, and their friends, who were the central characters in "The Young Trailers," "The Forest Runners," "The Keepers of the Trail," "The Eyes of the Woods," and ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler

... that in this description of the principal kinds of poetry, only three of the poems included in this book have been mentioned. This is because the other three—The Traveller, The Deserted Village, and The Cotter's Saturday Night—do not fit exactly into any of the divisions. One would class them with the epics rather than with the lyrics or the dramas, but they are not properly narratives, because they tell no story; they are really descriptive and reflective poems. One ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various

... incivility of the republican servant has been banished. He is his own master, standing on his own threshold, and finds no need to assert his equality by rudeness. He is delighted to see you, and bids you sit down on his battered bench, without dreaming of any such apology as an English cotter offers to a Lady Bountiful when she calls. He has worked out his independence, and shows it in every easy movement of his body. He tells you of it unconsciously in every tone of his voice. You ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... have read the books, the books that we write ourselves, Extolling our love of an abstract truth and our pride of debate: I will go back to the love of the cotter who sings as he delves, To that childish infinite love and the God ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... to put forth their strength, produce box-lids, which are really worthy of being preserved as pictures. At first, nearly the whole subjects chosen as ornaments, were taken from Burns's poems; and there can be no doubt, that the "Cotter's Saturday Night," "Tam O'Shanter," "Willie brewed a peck o' maut," &c. &c., have penetrated in this form into every quarter of the habitable globe. Now, however, the artists of Cumnock take a wider range; the studios of Wilkie, and other artists, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various

... cotter pin and bend it over a small rod to bring the points together, as shown in the sketch. This will make a spring clamp that is opened to slip over the articles to be clamped together by inserting a scratch awl or scriber ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics

... of the Mercedes is of chrome nickel steel, and is retained in the piston by means of a set screw and cotter pin. The connecting rods, of I section, are very short and rigid, carrying floating bronze bushes which fit the piston pins at the small end, and carrying an oil tube on each for conveying oil from the crank pin ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian

... his origin from a younger son of the Laird of Macgregor, was one of a family who had, within the preceding century, been of humble fortunes. His great-grandfather had been a cotter; from his grandfather he inherited the generous temper and the daring spirit which, more or less, characterized the clan. Callum, or Malcolm, had been outlawed for an attempt to carry off an heiress, but obtained his pardon for saving the life of his enemy, the Duke of Argyle. ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson

... wortchin' four days a week, neaw; besides they'n enough to do for their own. Aw make no acceawnt o' slotchin' up an' deawn o' this shap, like a foo. It would sicken a dog, it would for sure. Aw go a fishin' a bit neaw an' then; an' aw cotter abeawt wi' first one thing an' then another; but it comes to no sense. Its noan like gradely wark. It makes me maunder up an' deawn, like a gonnor wi' a nail in it's yed. Aw wish to God yon chaps in Amerikey would play th' ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh

... this pamphlet has a note stating that Cotter was a gentleman of Cork who was executed for committing a rape on a ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... was on the edge of a well-wooded slope from which she could see the grassy canyon floor below. They were on a level bench, projecting out from the main canyon wall that loomed gray and rugged and pine fringed. Somers and Cotter and Springer gave careful attention to all points of the compass, especially in the direction from which they had come. They evidently anticipated being trailed or circled or headed off, but did not manifest much concern. Somers ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... Calvinism of the West with the milder Arminianism more common in his northern birthplace. Robert, who, amid all his after-errors, never ceased to revere his father's memory, has left an immortal portrait of him in The Cotter's Saturday Night, when ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... secretaries, Joseph J. Cotter, a man he greatly trusted, in describing his office work says: "Whatever was of human interest, interested Mr. Lane. His researches were by no means limited to the Department of the Interior. For instance, I remember that at one time, before the ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... wildness of Shakspere's youth. The common argument is that a man who is charged with the poaching of deer in his youth is too bad to write good poetry, therefore Bacon wrote Shakspere. Was Bacon an angel? By the same process of reasoning Burns could not have written the Cotter's Saturday Night. But I deny that Shakspere was profligate, and in making this denial I need not prove the impeccability of Shakspere. But his life was essentially pure, his heart good, because the influence of the life ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... I know that whoever he is, it makes good sense to send somebody like him along with two overspecialized robots like us. Look at us. You couldn't pull a cotter pin with a pair of pliers if you knew what a cotter pin was. As for myself, if I'd of gotten that gun away from Arnold, I'm not even sure I'd have ...
— Unspecialist • Murray F. Yaco

... and spectators there. Whilst the players who contended against Philidor at the slightest shade of odds included Sir Abraham Janssens, the Hon. Henry Conway, Count Bruhl, Mr. George Atwood (mathematician and one of Pitt's financial secretaries), Dr. Black, the Rev. Mr. Boudler, and Mr. Cotter. Stamma, of Aleppo, engaged in London on works of translation, and who was one of the best chess players, was matched against Philidor, but won only one out of eight games. These contests took place at ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird

... disconnection of a piston, by the fracture of either cotter, is sometimes caused by shutting off the steam too suddenly when the Engine is travelling fast with a heavy load. In this case also the slide should be detached and set in the middle position, and the piston-rod uncoupled ...
— Practical Rules for the Management of a Locomotive Engine - in the Station, on the Road, and in cases of Accident • Charles Hutton Gregory

... a chairus (or chyrus) a Gorgio penned to a Rommany chal, "Why does tute always jal about the tem ajaw? There's no kushtoben in what don't hatch acai." Penned the Rommany chal, "Sikker mandy tute's wongur!" And yuv sikkered him a cutter (cotter?), a bar, a pash-bar, a pash-cutter, a pange-cullo (caulor?) bittus, a pash-krooner (korauna), a dui-cullos bittus, a trin-mushi, a shuckori, a stor'oras, a trin'oras, a dui'oras, a haura, a poshero, a lulli, a pash-lulli. Penned the Rommany chal, "Acovo's sar wafri wongur." ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland

... homewards, as it began to grow very dark; but we could not carry nearly all we had bought. Wherefore we were forced to get a peasant from Bannemin to help us, who likewise was come into the town, and as I found out from him that the fellow who gave me the piece of bread was a poor cotter called Pantermehl, who dwelt in the village by the roadside, I shoved a couple of loaves in at his house-door without his knowing it, and we went on our way by the bright moonlight, so that by the help of God we got home about ten o'clock at ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... poor, even to the gipsey and the beggar, as they really are—contented, if our interest is excited, and knowing that nature is sufficient to excite it. From the palaces of kings—from the tents of warriors, he comes—equally at home with man in all aspects—to the cotter's hearth:—he bids us turn from the pomp of the Plantagenets to bow the knee to the poor Jew's daughter—he makes us sicken at the hollowness of the royal Rothsay, to sympathize with the honest love of Hugh the smith. No never was there one—not even Burns ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various

... had learned that Harry still lived, and he had met him. He did not understand until then how dear his cousin was to him. They were more like brothers than cousins. It was like the affection their great-grandfathers, Henry Ware and Paul Cotter, had felt for each other, although those famous heroes of the border had always fought side by side, while their descendants were compelled to face each ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler

... path along the village churchyard that led to the house of the old curate. The burial-ground itself was surrounded and shut in with a belt of trees. Save the small time-discoloured church and the roofs of the cottage and the minister's house, no building—not even a cotter's hut—was visible there. Beneath a dark and single yew-tree in the centre of the ground was placed a rude seat; opposite to this seat was a grave, distinguished from the rest by a slight palisade. As the young Evelyn passed slowly by this spot, a glove on the long damp grass beside ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... community. But the Bible was thrown open to all ranks and conditions "to run and read," with its wonderful table of contents from Genesis to the Revelations. Every village in England would present the scene so well described in Burns's Cotter's Saturday Night. I cannot think that all this variety and weight of knowledge could be thrown in all at once upon the mind of a people, and not make some impression upon it, the traces of which might be discerned ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... of which was a Colman, Cotter, or, diminutively, Cottrell, Cotterill. Hence the frequent ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley

... pleasant to stand upon it, and gaze therefrom at the river which laves the 'banks and braes o' bonnie Doon'—at the fields besprinkled with the 'wee, crimsoned-tipped flower'—at the cottages where once lived the 'auld acquaintance' of 'lang syne,' and where occurred the scenes of 'The Cotter's Saturday Night.' 'Highland Mary' has crossed this bridge, and this sanctifies it far more than the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... has no horses, and makes a pair of lean oxen draw his plow, is a cotter and must hold his tongue. In the tavern, in the town meeting, and everywhere. His opinion is worthless, and no regular farmer pays any ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... ride through wild Donegal; if otherwise, it was safer, having accomplished the purpose of the trip, to sail back to the West. The miserable village at the head of the bay showed a few dwellers when they landed on the beach, but little could be learned from them, save directions to a distant cotter who owned an ass and a cart, and always kept information and mountain dew for travelers and the gentry. The young men visited the cotter, and returned with the cart and the news. The rising was said to have begun, but farther east and south, ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... valet, is of the kind that builds new stock—one in whom the differentiation is clearly noticeable. He was a cotter's child, and he has trained himself up to the point where the future gentleman has become visible. He has found it easy to learn, having finely developed senses (smell, taste, vision) and an instinct for beauty besides. He has already risen in the world, and is strong enough not ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg

... that "those who have loved most what was best in Burns's poetry must have regretted that it was ever written." To the JOLLY BEGGARS, so far as my memory serves me, he refers but once; and then only to remark on the "strange, not to say painful," circumstance that the same hand which wrote the COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT should have stooped to write the JOLLY BEGGARS. The SATURDAY NIGHT may or may not be an admirable poem; but its significance is trebled, and the power and range of the poet first appears, when it is set beside ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... making an excellent position for defence against any force which might come against it from the upper valley. The sun was getting low behind us in the west, as we approached it, and the advance-guard had already halted. Captain Cotter's two bronze guns gleamed bright on the top of the ridge beyond the pretty little town, and before the sun went down, the new white tents had been carried up to the slope and pitched there. The steamers were moored to the shore, and the low slanting ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... "The ballad upon Cotter is vehemently suspected to be Irish manufacture; and yet is allowed to be sung in our open streets, under the very nose of the government."[14] These are a few among the many hardships we put upon that poor ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... the good fortune which brought me such mingled chastening and praise, in such long letters, from judges so generous and competent. Henry James, Walter Pater, John Morley, "Mr. Creighton" (then Emmanuel Professor at Cambridge), Cotter Morrison, Sir Henry Taylor, Edmond Scherer—they are all there. Besides the renewal of the old throb of pleasure as one reads them, one feels a sort of belated remorse that so much trouble was taken for so slight a cause! ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... chiefly either of the processes and appearances of external nature, as the 'Seasons' of Thomson; or of characters, manners, and sentiments, as are Shenstone's 'Schoolmistress,' 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' of Burns, 'The Twa Dogs' of the same Author; or of these in conjunction with the appearances of Nature, as most of the pieces of Theocritus, the 'Allegro' and 'Penseroso' of Milton, Beattie's 'Minstrel,' Goldsmith's 'Deserted Village.' ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... sell more books, too. I never yet heard that anybody got tired of "The Cotter's Saturday Night." I think it quite likely that the Book of Ruth will outlast all the short stories that will be written during the present decade. Yes, decidedly, our public men, and our writers, too, ought to "get down to earth." There is where the people live. The people walk ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge

... boast much of his triumph, although he noticed with secret pride the awe of the children. His best friend, Paul Cotter, openly expressed his admiration, but Braxton Wyatt, a boy of his own age, whom he did not like, sneered and counted it as nothing. He even cast doubt upon the reality of the deed, intimating that perhaps Ross or Sol had fired the shot, and had allowed Henry ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler

... life of fragments," as Carlyle called it; and the different fragments are as unlike as the noble "Cotter's Saturday Night" and the rant and riot of "The Jolly Beggars." The details of this sad and disjointed life were better, perhaps, forgotten. We call attention only to the facts which help us to understand the man and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... a cow from a poor widow, or a stirk from a cotter, is a thief; he that lifts a drove from a Sassenach laird is a gentleman-drover. And, besides, to take a tree from the forest, a salmon from the river, a deer from the hill, or a cow from a Lowland strath, is what no Highlander need ever think ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... pie is come home, and the boy's eyes open, and his mouth waters. The story is quaintly told by Townsend thus:—Lights and shadows of boyish days! how bright and deep they are! The schoolmaster's frown may be charmed away by the gift of a new top, or a score of marbles. But what are these in the cotter's life to the stirring vicissitudes of a pie! ——Before its departure for the bakehouse, did he not ponder admiringly on the delicate tact that mingled the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... the agricultural labourer, or cotter, Mr. Laing conceived 'his average condition to be that of holding land on which he could sow three-quarters of an imperial quarter of corn and three imperial quarters of potatoes, and which would ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... 6 a.m., and about breakfast time, with a clear atmosphere, the land from near Cape Cotter to Cape Adare was visible. What a day of delights! After four days of thick weather we find ourselves in sight of Cape Adare in a position about forty-five miles east of Possession Isles; in this time we have been set one hundred miles. Good going. Mount Sabine, the first land seen by us ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... target still remains For the Black Archer—and that it contains The cave where the Great Sleeper still sleeps sound. The country people all the castle round Are frightened easily, for legends grow And mix with phantoms of the mind; we know The hearth is cradle of such fantasies, And in the smoke the cotter sees arise From low-thatched but he traces cause of dread. Thus rendering thanks that he is lowly bred, Because from such none look for valorous deeds. The peasant flies the Tower, although it leads A noble knight to seek adventure ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... the story of his life—became interested, absorbed—and there I stood, I know not how long, on the greasy pavement, heedless of the passers who thrust me right and left, reading by the flaring gas-light that sad history of labour, sorrow, and death.—How the Highland cotter, in spite of disease, penury, starvation itself, and the daily struggle to earn his bread by digging and ditching, educated himself—how he toiled unceasingly with his hands—how he wrote his poems in secret on dirty scraps of paper and old ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... by the sea-shore with her children. We spoke to the servant-maid at the door, who invited us forward, and we sate down in the parlour. The walls were coloured with a blue wash; on one side of the fire was a mahogany desk, opposite to the window a clock, and over the desk a print from the 'Cotter's Saturday Night,' which Burns mentions in one of his letters having received as a present. The house was cleanly and neat in the inside, the stairs of stone, scoured white, the kitchen on the right side of the passage, the parlour on the left. In the room above the parlour the ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth

... invention of this melodious stanza, ever since called "Spenserian," was in itself a notable achievement which influenced all subsequent English poetry. [Footnote: The Spenserian was an improvement on the ottava-rima, or eight-line stanza, of the Italians. It has been used by Burns in "The Cotter's Saturday Night," by Shelley in "The Revolt of Islam," by Byron in "Childe Harold," by Keats in "The Eve of St. Agnes," ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... have obscured from the critics. Beattie confesses learning English as a dead language and taking several years over the task. But Boswell, 'scarce by North Britons now esteemed a Scot,' writes with an ease that renders his style his own. 'The fact is,' says Mr Cotter Morison, 'that no dramatist or novelist of the whole century surpassed or even equalled Boswell in rounded and clear and picturesque presentation, or ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... said he hated to think of that time, and what do you suppose he did? I was lying under the machine at the time, studying the differential, while he was jacking up an axle. Proposed, positively. I dropped a nut and a cotter pin out of my mouth, I was so astonished. We talked it over for about five minutes through one of the artillery, wheels, and I must say he took it beautifully. I wanted to be nice to him, because he had been so ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne

... rejoicing, almost with triumph, that I declare that the idle, genteel class has been cut up root and branch, has been driven forth out of its holding into the wide world, and has been punished with the penalty of extermination. The poor cotter suffered sorely under the famine, and under the pestilence which followed the famine; but he, as a class, has risen from his bed of suffering a better man. He is thriving as a labourer either in his own country or in some newer—for him better—land to which he has emigrated. He, ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... projected from above the door, supported at the apex by a single upright post; a secondary door was hinged to the post, and could be hasped on either cheek of the real entrance; so, whether the wind was north or south, the cotter could make himself a triangular bight of shelter where to set his chair and finish a pipe with comfort. There is one objection to this device; for, as the post stands in the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately issuing from the cottage must run his chance of a broken head. ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Ware and Paul Cotter, and three scouts are the chief characters in these books dealing with frontier life and adventures with the Indians about the time of the Revolutionary War. Each story is complete in itself, full of excitement, and ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Like the soul before it is Born from THAT world into THIS. 30 The next Peter Bell was he, Predevote, like you and me, To good or evil as may come; His was the severer doom,— For he was an evil Cotter, 35 And a polygamic Potter. And the last is Peter Bell, Damned since our first parents fell, Damned eternally to Hell— Surely ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... Old Cotter was sitting at the fire, smoking, when I came downstairs to supper. While my aunt was ladling out my stirabout he said, as if returning to some ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce

... cold stormy night in December, and the green logs as they blazed and crackled on the Cotter's hearth, were rendered more delightful, more truly comfortable, by the contrast with the icy showers of snow and sleet which swept against the frail casement, making all ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various

... on every side wholesome, just, and right. He has been fortunate in his biographers, and amply criticised by the best judges. His nephew, Sir George Trevelyan, has written his life at length in a fine book. Dean Milman and Mark Pattison have given us vignettes; Cotter Morison has adorned the Men of Letters series with a delightful and sympathetic sketch; and John Morley and Leslie Stephen have weighed his work in the balance with judicial acumen and temperate firmness. There is but one ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... blaws loud wi' angry sugh;[1] The short'ning winter-day is near a close; The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh; The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose: The toil-worn Cotter frae his labor goes— This night his weekly moil is at an end,— Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes, Hoping the morn[2] in ease and rest to spend, And, weary, o'er the moor, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... these now comparatively worthless fruits at a time when the land on which our most populous cities stand was covered by woods and brakes, nay, in many places by thick, tangled forests, or wild and deep morasses. But, even now, these fruits are treasures to the cotter and the child, as we shall see in the course of our discussion; and even to persons of more luxurious habits, several of those that I have named are of value and importance. Let us first look at those which rank under the natural ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various

... doubt but that pork will be raised, and bacon cured, to such an extent in America, as to deprive the Irish cotter of the assistance he has heretofore derived from his pig, and that foreign butter will supplant his in the English market: and that, in consequence, Irish lands must greatly fall in value, unless they be applied to the rearing and fattening of cattle; and such being the case, what a prospect ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various

... approached by a pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it was then summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely withdraws; but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of peats which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of the cotter were wading by the pier. The same day we visited the shores of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole, sounding as we went; and, having taken stock of all possible accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... summits; meeting courteous peasants well to do, driving fat pigs and cattle to market: noting the neat and thrifty dwellings, with their unusual quantity of clean white linen, drying on the bushes; having windy weather suggested by every cotter's little rick, with its thatch straw-ridged and extra straw-ridged into overlapping compartments like the back of a rhinoceros. Had I not given a lift of fourteen miles to the Coast-guardsman (kit and ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... and incorporate, and yet each retains its whole nature and full effect. I need hardly remind the reader that the feat has been repeated, and even with more completeness, in the wonderful, "Tam o' Shanter." I read on. "The Cotter's Saturday Night" filled my whole soul—my heart throbbed and my eyes moistened; and never before did I feel half so proud of my country, or know half so well on what score it was I did best in feeling proud. I had perused the entire volume from beginning to end, ere I remembered ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton

... complete domestication of this animal, and also to the fact that it is omnivorous, the creature has ever been a favorite with the cotter class. Those folk, who can afford neither sheep nor horned cattle, can often provide the food for pigs, and thus, in turn, be much better fed ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... worse than all this; whose crimes might have been 'foul, monstrous, unforgivable as the sin against the Holy Ghost.' If these things be done in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? If the peeress as a wife has no rights, what is the state of the cotter's wife? ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... this plant being the National Badge of Ireland. Its charm has been ever supposed there as an unfailing protection against evil influences, as is attested by the spray in the workman's cap, and in the bosom of the cotter's wife. ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... on the wide, wide plains, In valleys where wild torrents foam, In solitudes where silence reigns, And by the cotter's humble home. It cheers alike the rich and poor On Alpine heights, or by the sea, By castle wall or peasant's door— It ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite

... householder, lodger, inmate, tenant, incumbent, sojourner, locum tenens, commorant[obs3]; settler, squatter, backwoodsman, colonist; islander; denizen, citizen; burgher, oppidan[obs3], cockney, cit, townsman, burgess; villager; cottager, cottier[obs3], cotter; compatriot; backsettler[obs3], boarder; hotel keeper, innkeeper; habitant; paying guest; planter. native, indigene, aborigines, autochthones[obs3]; Englishman, John Bull; newcomer &c. (stranger) 57. aboriginal, American[obs3], Caledonian, Cambrian, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... far into the afternoon, and then got up hungry enough to make cotter fare quite palatable to the king, the more particularly as it was scant in quantity. And also in variety; it consisted solely of onions, salt, and the national black bread made out of horse-feed. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... breathlessly. "One wheel came off his wagon going down the Clearwater Trail, and the whole blame outfit pitched over into a ravine. There's several thousand dollars' worth of our boring machines smashed up, and Louis, who has pretty well split his head, is cussing the man who took the cotter out ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss

... passed rapidly away, and, all working with a will, the party were ready to start. The rays of the sun, just rising above the lofty summits of the hills, glanced down the loch as they assembled on the landing-place with their dependents, and every cotter on the estate from far and near, who had come to bid them farewell. Many a tear was shed by the females of the family, as Mrs Murray, the baby and Polly, with the gentlemen of the party, embarked on board the Stella, which was to convey them ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston

... 6th an attack was made by his company along an enemy trench, but his own bombing—party was cut off, owing to heavy casualties in the center of the attack. Things looked serious and Cotter went back under heavy fire to report and bring up ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... his poems are quite short, and of the kind called fugitive, except that they will not fly away. The Cotter's Saturday Night is for men of all creeds, a pastoral full of divine philosophy. His Address to the Deil is a tender thought even for the Prince of Darkness, whom, says Carlyle, his kind nature could ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... Massachusetts, during the early nineteenth century, but of a mode of thinking and feeling which is widely diffused wherever the Anglo-Saxon race has wandered. Perhaps Snow-Bound lacks a certain universality of suggestiveness which belongs to a still more famous poem, The Cotter's Saturday Night of Burns, but both of these portrayals of rustic simplicity and peace owe their celebrity to their truly representative character. They are evidence furnished by a single art, as to a certain ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry

... was Peter Smugger, milder, softer, neater, Like the soul before it is Born from THAT world into THIS. 30 The next Peter Bell was he, Predevote, like you and me, To good or evil as may come; His was the severer doom,— For he was an evil Cotter, 35 And a polygamic Potter. And the last is Peter Bell, Damned since our first parents fell, Damned eternally to Hell— Surely he deserves it ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... anecdotes of Fletcher with which we shall return will last a long time. It seems that the F.'s are an extensive clan, and that his father was a Highlander. Accordingly, wherever he goes, he finds out some cotter or small farmer who is his cousin. I wish you could see him walking into his cousins' curds and cream, and into their dairies generally! Yesterday morning, between eight and nine, I was sitting writing at the open window, when the postman came to the inn (which at Loch Earn Head is the post-office) ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... especially to children learning, and varies, according to the skill and industry of the worker, from 6d. to 5s. a week; but this is paid in cash immediately on the completion of the piece. It is easy to see what an important addition may thus be made to the means of a poor cotter, by the labour of the young children and girls, who would probably otherwise ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various

... this horrible thing came. About half an hour before sunrise Morten Bruus came to my house and had with him the cotter Jens Larsen of Veilbye, and the widow and daughter of the shepherd of that parish. Morten Bruus said to me that he had the Rector of Veilbye under suspicion of having killed his brother Niels. I answered that I had heard some such talk but had regarded it as idle and ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT; Poem in which Burns depicts the household of a Scottish peasant gathering about the hearth on the last evening of the week for supper, social converse and family worship. The picture ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... No ordinary clevis would hold him. When the pin was threaded at one end and screwed into its place, Gunda would work at it, hour by hour, until he would start it to unscrewing, and then his trunk-tip would do the rest. The only clevis that he could not open was one in which a stout cotter pin was passed through the end of the clevis-pin ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... peaceful hamlet lies, The drowsy god has seal'd the cotter's eyes. No more, where late the social faggot blazed, The vacant peal resounds, by little raised, But locked in silence, o'er Arion's[1] star The slumbering Night rolls on her velvet car: The church bell tolls, deep sounding down the glade, ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White

... room in the bitter cold of winter. Sickness without medicine. Imagine Douglas living here. His early youth had its hardships; but after all he has had a comfortable life. He soon became prosperous. Now he is rich. What public man has become so rich? Yes, here is the American cotter's home; and so many boys have come out of a place like this and gone to the wars or into public life. It ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... all, bought every pot and pan, arranged each detail. There were no modern conveniences until old Cotter died—he would not let James put them in. My boy loves this cottage; he sometimes spends several days here all alone, when he is very tired. He doesn't even like me to send Moses down, but of course I won't hear ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... Malachy's visit to Clairvaux was to secure St. Bernard's support of the petition which he was about to present to the Pope. For further information about St. Bernard the reader may consult V.P., Vacandard, J. Cotter Morison, The Life and Times of St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux (1868), and Richard S. Storrs, Bernard of Clairvaux, the Times, the Man, and his ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor

... chiefly either of the processes and appearances of external nature, as the Seasons of Thomson; or of characters, manners, and sentiments, as are Shenstone's Schoolmistress, The Cotter's Saturday Night of Burns, The Twa Dogs of the same Author; or of these in conjunction with the appearances of Nature, as most of the pieces of Theocritus, the Allegro and Penseroso of Milton, Beattie's Minstrel, Goldsmith's Deserted Village. The Epitaph, the Inscription, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... were safely stowed away for the night, the Shepherd went over and brought from the table in the room his well-worn copy of Robert Burns's "Poems," and the last view Jean had of him before she went to sleep, he was reading "The Cotter's Saturday Night" aloud to himself by the ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... top of the fort to find little gardens lying up the slope at the back of the poorer houses. Clones is better off in this respect by being behind the age. In Antrim and Down, in too many instances, the farmers have taken the cotter's gardens into their fields. I wished to be sure if the gardens belonged to the people who lived in the thatched cottages, and I spoke across the hedge to a man who was digging potatoes in one of them, a man with a leather apron, marking him out as a shoemaker, and a merry, ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall

... Robert Burns, her interest in his Grace of Borthwicke, and an absolute and unnatural silence concerning Danvers, I was in some anxiety, and could come to no conclusion whatever concerning the state of her feelings. I mentioned Danvers' good looks, and she quoted me back "The Cotter's Saturday Night." I praised his conduct, and she answered with "The Epistle to Davie." It was the name of Burns that was constantly upon her lips; she set his verses to the music of old songs, singing them softly to herself in the gloaming, and I could see had made a god of ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane

... each bird deemed his own The merits that would charm. One only sang To-day his daily song, nor joined the crowd In envious exultation. To him spoke Another of his kind. "Vain one, refrain That everlasting pipe, fit for a cage Behind some cotter's lattice, where thy gray And thickset form may shun the cultured eye. A word of warning, too—hide from the Prince." "Dear brother," cried the gray, "be not annoyed; Who sees your elegance of form, and ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon

... literature or prescriptions not made immortal in their application by unassailable truth and by the confirmation of science. An excellent remedy for the nonsense which still clings about religion may be found in two books: Cotter Monson's 'Service of Man,' which was published as long ago as 1887, and has since been re-issued by the Rationalist Press Association in its well-known sixpenny series, and J. Allanson Picton's 'Man and the Bible.' Similarly, those who wish to acquire ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... was a pity that such a maiden should be the daughter of a common thief. But this Evan hotly denied. According to Evan, Donald Bean Lean, though indeed no reputable character, was far from being a thief. A thief was one who stole a cow from a poor cotter, but he who lifted a drove from a Sassenach laird was "a ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... several children. Took farm at Ellisland 1788; became an excise officer 1789. Removed to Dumfries 1791; later years characterized by depression and poverty. Some of his best-known poems are "The Holy Fair," "The Cotter's Saturday Night," and "Tam O'Shanter"; wrote many of the most popular songs in the English language. A Man's a Man for A' ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris

... in a plaid shawl was coming slowly down the hillside. He recognized her for Bridget Roe MacFarlane of Cushendhu, a cotter tenant of ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... has changed, Mr. Cotter, but as we generally raise the stakes after playing for a bit, I am ready to do so. Shall we make it fifty ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty

... a brilliant review of Mr. Leslie Stephen's work in Macmillan's Magazine, February 1877, Mr. James Cotter Morison remarks on the Deists' view that natural religion must be always alike plain and perspicuous, 'against this convenient opinion the only objection was that it contradicted the total experience ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... any longer in the old sense? It hardly seems as if the young people of to-day can really understand the poetry of English domestic life, reading it, as they must, by a reflected illumination from the past. What would "Cotter's Saturday Night" have been, if Burns had written it by the opaque heat of a ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom

... me, but scarcely so stout; and Willie Lowrie, that had been at the school with her, and a neighbour's son, courted her, when they came to man's and woman's estate, for a long time. My father was a cotter on Sandyknowe farm, a worthy, God-fearing man, but sore distressed with the rheumatics, that came upon him long before he was an old man, and often laid him off work. His sons went about their own business; and he used to say that though ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... thrackin' mud into the study." And then, "Mister Cotter," she said, "if ye have a heart in your body, put it into the furnace flue. It was always a bad egg for drawin', and betimes the snow will lie six ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris

... that a general institution of religion had passed out of existence the fact would be highly significant. But it is well to remember that family worship has never been a general institution. We have generalized the picture of the "Cotter's Saturday Night" so eloquently drawn by Burns; it has been applied to every night and to every fireside. Daily family worship was observed in practically all the Puritan homes of New England; but there is no evidence for it as a uniform custom, either in other parts of this country or in ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope

... indeed is this felicity vouchsafed. But for those who have eaten oatmeal porridge in the wayside cottages of bonny Scotland, or who love to linger over "The Cotter's Saturday Night," there is a touch of tender pathos in the picture. The stone floor, the bare, whitewashed walls, the peat smoldering on the hearth, sending out long, fitful streaks that dance among the rafters overhead, and the mother and son sitting there watching the coal—silent. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... James Augustus Cotter Morison, English essayist and historian, was born in London on April 20, 1832, and was the son of the inventor and proprietor of "Morison's Pills." His first years were spent in Paris, where he laid the foundation of his intimate knowledge ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... ships at sea, at gay parties of pleasure. Was it not at the siege of Lucknow that it floated like a breath from home through the city hell-beset, and brought cheer and hope and comfort to all who heard it? The cotter's wife croons it over her sleeping baby; the lover sings it to his sweetheart; the child runs, carolling it, through the summer fields; finally, some world-honored prima-donna, some Patti or Nilsson, sings it as the final touch of perfection to a ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards

... than he looked, with his clean close-shaven face, bright brown eyes, and snow-white hair escaping from a broad-brimmed hat. He might have sat to a painter for some Covenanter's portrait, except that there was nothing dour about him, or for an illustration to Burns's 'Cotter's Saturday Night.' The air of probity and canniness combined with a twinkle of dry humour was completely Scotch; and when he tapped his snuff-box, telling stories of old days, I could not refrain from asking him about his pedigree. It should be said that there is a considerable family ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... Davie was the brawest lad In a' the Lairnie Glen, An' Jennie was the bonniest lass That e'er stole hearts o' men; But Davie was a cotter's lad, A lad o' low degree, An' Jennie, bonnie, sonsie lass, A highborn lass ...
— Polly and the Princess • Emma C. Dowd

... one's opinion becomes that the Christian will have to follow the Eastern example and winnow the wheat from the chaff—worse than chaff, sometimes the positively pernicious and even poisonous refuse. Burns, in the "Cotter's Saturday Night," pictures the good man taking down the big Bible for the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie

... A one-volume edition, containing the principal essays, is issued by several publishers. Sir George Otto Trevelyan's The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay in two volumes (1876) is a more interesting biography than Lockhart's Scott. The best single-volume estimate of Macaulay is J. Cotter Morison's Macaulay in the English Men of Letters series. Good short critical sketches of Macaulay and his work may be found in Sir Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library, volume 2, and in Lord Morley's ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... fellow-beings, that they might the better know their own. The space of this article will not permit even an enumeration of his wonderful poems; the world may almost be said to know them by heart. His "Cotter's Saturday Night," "Tam O'Shanter," "Bonnie Doon," "Auld Lang Syne," "Bruce's Address," "A Man's a Man for a' That," and many others that might be named, are likely to live for generation after generation; and his character ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... father assures me that the affair cost him fifty pounds. The case of Mrs. Taylor, of Ballinamore, was a very cruel one, which a word from the priest of the district would have altogether prevented. But that word was not spoken, for she was a Protestant. Her brother had discharged a cotter, I do not know whether justly or unjustly, but although Mrs. Taylor had nothing whatever to do with the affair—and it was not asserted that she had—she was severely boycotted. The brother, who was the guilty party, if anybody ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... Talent may be transmitted from father to son; but you can no more inherit genius than you can inherit a fall out of a balloon. It is the direct gift of that God who is no respecter of persons, and who sheds his glory on the cotter's child as freely as on those of monarchs and ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... the past was almost as definitively shown by the presence of this article as that of an esquire or nobleman by his old helmets or shields. It had been customary for every well-to-do villager, whose tenure was by copy of court-roll, or in any way more permanent than that of the mere cotter, to keep a pair of these stools for the use of his own dead; but for the last generation or two a feeling of cui bono had led to the discontinuance of the custom, and the stools were frequently made use of in the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... wi' angry sugh; The shortening winter day is near a close; The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh; The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose: The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes, This night his weekly moil is at an end, Collects his spades, his mattocks and his hoes, Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend, And weary, o'er the moor, his course does ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... the religious instruction of their children entirely to others, he loves to teach them himself. A household thus pervaded by a Christian atmosphere is a scene of sweet and tender beauty. Such a household is well depicted by our Scottish poet, Robert Burns, in his "Cotter's Saturday Night." There we see how beautiful family life may be ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees

... it. But poor Lily Rose has no one that belongs to her. Her relations are all dead. That's another reason why the Boarder is so nice to her. So ma is going to give her away. We're going to ask the neighbors and you and Mr. Derry and Mr. Cotter, of course. He's the ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates

... notch the west-wind sang Good morrow to the cotter; And once again Chocorua's horn Of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... lands rather than his principles. Now the King was doubtless ill-advised, and his councillors did not take the kindly or the wise way with the people at this time; for a host of wild Highlanders had been turned into the land, who plundered in cotter's hut and laird's hall without much distinction between those that stood for the Covenants and those that held for the King. So in the year 1679 Galloway was very hot and angry, and many were ready to fight the King's forces wherever they could ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various

... additional companies. After maintaining their position under fire for an hour and a half, the Indiana troops repulsed the enemy in every charge, and Hindman's force then withdrew. Colonel Willich had in the engagement only the eight companies of his command, with Cotter's battery. The enemy attacked with a force of 1,100 infantry, 250 cavalry, and 4 pieces of artillery. The Thirty-second Indiana lost 8 men killed and ten wounded. After the fall of Bowling Green, the Second Division reached Nashville on ...
— The Army of the Cumberland • Henry M. Cist

... Patrick Cotter, the successor of O'Brien, and who for awhile exhibited under this name, claiming that he was a lineal descendant of the famous Irish King, Brian Boru, who he declared was 9 feet in height, was born in 1761, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould



Words linked to "Cotter" :   cottier, cotter pin, helot, fastening, fixing, cottar, holdfast, bucolic, provincial, serf, peasant, villein



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