"Gibbet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Francois Villon and Francois Villon I, We both would mock the gibbet which the law has lifted high; HE in his meagre, shabby home, I in my roaring den— HE with his babes around him, I with my hunted men! His virtue be his bulwark—my genius should be mine!— "Go, fetch my pen, sweet Margot, and a jorum ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... broad daylight; but I see no reason why we should not still be roasting heretics alive, in a private room. It is very likely (to speak in the manner foolishly called Irish) that if there were public executions there would be no executions. The old open-air punishments, the pillory and the gibbet, at least fixed responsibility upon the law; and in actual practice they gave the mob an opportunity of throwing roses as well as rotten eggs; of crying "Hosannah" as well as "Crucify." But I do not like the public executioner being turned into the private executioner. I think ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... conceal an incapable and huckstering soul, he only awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under such circumstances, invariably rises above its detractor, and leaves him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the object of his fear ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... also in religious matters? And, because she was called queen, can it be considered treason for an Irishman to believe in the spiritual supremacy of the Pope? Yet, unless we look upon as martyrs those who died on the rack and the gibbet in Ireland during her reign, because they refused to admit in a woman the title of Vicar of Christ, to such decision must ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... But why are such notions absurd, and why should sanity reject them? The law of Relativity, of which we have previously spoken, may find its application here. These Evolution notions are absurd, monstrous, and fit only for the intellectual gibbet, in relation to the ideas concerning matter which were drilled into us when young. Spirit and matter have ever been presented to us in the rudest contrast, the one as all-noble, the other as all-vile. But is this correct? Upon ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... wicked love influenced her to participation in the murder rests in her own breast, and up to this time she has not differed from mothers at large—to twist her own bow-string rather than build his gibbet. ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... and prepared to defend his post, as he rightly guessed that it was destined to act against us. He sent off all his invalids to an Indian village at some distance, and exhorting his soldiers to stand by him, he erected a gibbet, and placed a guard on the road to Chempoalla. On the arrival of the deputation from Narvaez at Villa Rica, they were astonished to meet none but Indians, as Sandoval had ordered all the soldiers to remain ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... the end," said Sir Richard feebly. "God has been good to me beyond my deserts, and this is a crowning mercy. Consider, Justin, it might have been the gibbet and a crowd—instead of this snug bed, and you and Bentley ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... They fought with the fury of despair, neither expecting nor receiving quarter. More than twenty thousand of the citizens fell in the battle, and were left, by the King's order, unburied on the field. The corpse of Artevelde, who had been suffocated in the press, was hanged on a gibbet for a warning to all demagogues. With him died the day-dream of an independent Flanders. Though her cities remained prosperous, they were destined to be successively the subjects of the Burgundian, the Spaniard, and the Austrian. It was only in 1831 that Flanders ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... has come from Sam Adams's meddling," said Mr. Shrimpton. "May the Devil take him and John Hancock. They ought to be hanged, and I hope King George will yet have a chance to string 'em up—curse 'em! I'd like to see 'em dangling from the gibbet, and the crows picking their bones," he said, smiting his fists together, walking to ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... when we have so miserably lost it, and involved our souls into an eternal death. Life is precious in itself, but much more precious to one condemned to die,—to be caught out of the paws of the lion,—to be brought back from the gibbet. O how will that commend the favour of a little more time in the world! But then if we knew what an eternal misery we are involved into, and stand under a sentence binding us over to such an inconceivable and insupportable punishment as is the curse and wrath of God; O how precious an esteem ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... few of his friends, did so," replied the young stranger with a smile, "and we admire them very much for so doing, but I am afraid we should hang them, nevertheless, if they were in a position to try the thing over again. The illustration of the gibbet and the statue might have more applications than one, for I sincerely believe, if we could revive historical characters, we should almost in all cases erect a gallows for those to whom we now ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... lineaments to trace, The rustick grandeur, or the surly grace; But, lost in thoughtless ease and empty show, Behold the warriour dwindled to a beau; Sense, freedom, piety, refin'd away, Of France the mimick, and of Spain the prey. All that at home no more can beg or steal, Or like a gibbet better than a wheel; Hiss'd from the stage, or hooted from the court, Their air, their dress, their politicks, import; [p]Obsequious, artful, voluble and gay, On Britain's fond credulity they prey. No gainful trade their industry ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... to resign and quit. This shall not be a case that goes by default because no one appears against it. God will arraign it, handcuff it, try it, bring against it the verdict of all the good, and then gibbet it so high up that if one half of the gibbet stood on Mount Washington and the other on the Himalaya, it would not ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... with small success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett, . . . the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a seaside inn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet-irons, went to sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the very man he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett's supposed victim, having been attacked on the night in question by a violent bleeding ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... apportioned to offences in the time of Solon, partly from the high price of money, but partly, also, from the wise moderation of the lawgiver. The last grave penalty of death was of various kinds, as the cross, the gibbet, the precipice, the bowl—afflictions seldom in reserve for ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thousand florins reward to the man who should bring you the head of Dietisalvi, Nerone Nigi, Angelo Antinori, Niccalo Soderini, and twice the money if they were handed over alive; God will forgive you for dooming to the scaffold or the gibbet the son of Papi Orlandi, Francesco di Brisighella, Bernardo Nardi, Jacopo Frescobaldi, Amoretto Baldovinetti, Pietro Balducci, Bernardo di Banding, Francesco Frescobaldi, and more than three hundred others whose names were none the less dear to Florence because ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... time there is no mention of a conviction.[1] In Kent there was a flickering revival of the old hatred of witches. In the year that Charles gained the throne the city of Canterbury sent some women to the gibbet. Not so in Essex. In that county not a single case during this period has been left on record. In Middlesex, a county which from the days of Elizabeth through to the Restoration had maintained a very even pace—a stray conviction now and then among many acquittals—the ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... present valor, stalwart old iconoclasts, Unconvinced by axe or gibbet that all virtue was the Past's; But we make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free. Hoarding it in mouldy parchments, while our tender spirits flee 70 The rude grasp of that great Impulse which drove ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... be something wicked in the times, and cheatery rampant indeed," I thought, "when the common gibbet of Inneraora has a drunkard's convoy on either hand ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... was likest of men to Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat; and they covered his head and carried him to the place of execution between Ahmad al-Danaf and Ali al-Zaybak of Cairo.[FN102] Now they had brought Ala al-Din to the gibbet, to hang him, but Ahmad al-Danaf came forward and set his foot on that of the hangman, who said, "Give me room to do my duty." He replied, "O accursed, take this man and hang him in Ala al-Din's stead; for he is innocent and we will ransom him with this fellow, even as Abraham ransomed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance, my gallants, you'll be none the warmer! Whew! what a gust! Down went somebody just now! A medlar the fewer on the three-legged medlar-tree! ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as well civil as religious, of the Bohemians. For Ferdinand, not content to scotch the snake, never rested till it had ceased to be. The Carolinum, with all its endowments, privileges, and libraries, was handed over to its rival. Protestantism was declared to be extinct; and the gibbet, and the stake, and confiscations, and banishments, rendered the decree, in due time, more than an idle boast. There is, probably, no instance on record of an extirpation of a religious creed more absolute than that which ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... who know the awful gibbet's anguish, Not they who, while sad years go by them, in The sunless cells of lonely prisons languish, Do suffer fullest ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... in an authoritative tone. "Are ye mad?" he said, "or would ye execute an act of justice as if it were a crime and a cruelty? This sacrifice will lose half its savour if we do not offer it at the very horns of the altar. We will have him die where a murderer should die, on the common gibbet—we will have him die where he spilled the blood ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... cannon plane Death's lightning-riven lane, Levelling that unskill'd valour, rude, unled: —Yet happier in their fate Than whom the war-fiends wait To rend them limb from limb, the gibbet-withering dead! ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... cries aroused me; sitting up in the dark, I heard men going along the street, roaring news of a hanging that had just taken place. "Execution of Mrs."—I forget the name of the murderess. "Scene on the scaffold!" It was a little after nine o'clock; the enterprising paper had promptly got out its gibbet edition. A morning of midwinter, roofs and ways covered with soot-grimed snow under the ghastly fog-pall; and, whilst I lay there in my bed, that woman had been led out and hanged—hanged. I thought with horror of the possibility that I might ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... and tear him limb from limb. Are we going to sit still while he terrorizes the whole country? While he 'hustles' every head of stock from us, and—and spirits it away? No, if we spend fortunes upon his capture we must not rest until he swings from a gibbet at the end ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... "a column [the insignia of jurisdiction] or gibbet of stone, which is usually placed at the entrances of towns or villages; on which are ignominiously exposed the heads of persons executed or of criminals" (Barcia, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... presently reappeared bringing a lute; and the Caliph took not of it and knew it for that of Abu Ishak the Cup-companion.[FN55] "By Allah," said the Caliph, "if this damsel sing ill I will crucify all of you; but if she sing well I will forgive them and only gibbet thee." "O Allah cause her to sing vilely!" quoth Ja'afar. Asked the Caliph, "Why so?"; and he answered, "If thou crucify us all together, we shall keep one another company." The Caliph laughed at his speech. Presently the damsel took the lute ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... and other vices too, Why should not reason use her own just sense, And square her punishments to each offence? Suppose a slave, as he removes the dish, Licks the warm gravy or remains of fish, Should his vexed master gibbet the poor lad, He'd be a second Labeo, STARING mad. Now take another instance, and remark A case of madness, grosser and more stark. A friend has crossed you:—'tis a slight affair; Not to forgive it writes you down a bear:— You hate the man and his acquaintance fly, As Ruso's debtors hide from ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... up at once and off we go, unless we're anxious to exhibit Our fairy forms all in a row, strung up upon the Castle gibbet! ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... us the gibbet and the stake. No further need of the Voltaires, the Rousseaus and the Diderots to declaim against kingcraft and priestcraft. We have done something more than mark time. We report progress. Yet despite the miracles of modern invention how far in the arts of government ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... shore we skirted, near Enough to scare the birds with our white sails, We saw a three-limbed gibbet rising sheer. Detached against the ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray
... a woeful path they found, and their sister's son wounded on a gibbet, wind-cold outlaw-trees,[122] on the town's west. Ever vibrated the ravens' whet: there ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... compromise, and to make my brother (his family of course included) acknowledge a woman, of whose guilt they entertain not the slightest doubt, you think you can gain your object by threatening an exposure. Don't threaten any more! Make your exposure! Go to the magistrate at once, if you like! Gibbet our names in the newspaper report, as a family connected by marriage with Mr. Sherwin the linen-draper's daughter, whom they believe to have disgraced herself as a woman and a wife for ever. Do your very worst; make public every shameful particular that you can—what advantage will you ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... receives it defined in bulk and quality from the law's own hand, and the wretch who will rob him of an ounce of it is a felon without a felon's excuse; and as a felon I will proceed against him by the dog-whip of the criminal law, by the gibbet of the public press, and by every weapon that wit and honesty have ever found to scourge cruelty and theft since civilization dawned ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... one cry sent Even from the hideous gibbet height, 'Praise to the Lord Omnipotent, The vultures have a ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... and smell the fruits and he could not but admit that it was even so as they had avouched. Then said the boy-Kazi to the boy-defendant, " 'Tis clear thou art a rogue and a rascal, and thou hast done a deed wherefor thou richly deservest the gibbet." Hearing this the children frisked about and clapped their hands with glee and gladness, then seizing hold of him who acted as the merchant of Baghdad, they led him off as to execution. The Commander of the Faithful, Harun al-Rashid, was greatly pleased at this acuteness of the boy who ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... a gibbet for the murderer and a gibbet for the martyr, an execrating hiss for a dastardly act, and as loud a hiss for many a word of generous truthfulness or just insight: a mixed condition of things which is the sign, not of hopeless confusion, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... sanguinary conflicts with the good citizens of Paris, to whom they were wholly obnoxious, and who occasionally repaid their aggressions with interest. In 1407 two of their number, convicted of assassination and robbery, were condemned to the gibbet, and the sentence was carried into execution; but so great was the uproar occasioned in the university by this violation of its immunities that the Provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville, was compelled to take down their bodies from Montfaucon and see ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... come to the main road (at the far end of this semi-private road) turn to the right, and just where the gibbet used to stand, so it is said, in the good old days, there is a sharp left-angled turn which leads to the village of E——. Keep straight on, however, for a mile or two (notice the fine old timbered houses on the right of the footpath opposite the old boundary-post), ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... against a soldier of his, for that returning alone from forage he could give him no account where he had left a companion of his, took it for granted that he had killed him, and presently condemned him to death. He was no sooner mounted upon the gibbet, but, behold, his wandering companion arrives, at which all the army were exceedingly glad, and after many embraces of the two comrades, the hangman carried both the one and the other into Piso's presence, all those present believing it would be a great pleasure ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... curtain is drawn up and discovers a gibbet and Pulcinello standing on a ladder affixed to it with a rope round his neck. The showman with the utmost gravity and assumed melancholy informs the audience that a most serious calamity is about to happen to Naples: that Signor Pulcinello is condemned to be hanged for a robbery, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... "The gibbet, then, I suppose, must be my doom?" said Lord Menteith. "Yet I wish they had spared me the halter, were it but for the dignity ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... through the open window and door, the fire was also slowly fading from the sky and the mountain ridge whence the sun had dropped half an hour before. The view was uphill, and the sky-line of the hill was marked by two or three gibbet-like poles from which, on a now invisible line between them, depended certain objects—mere black silhouettes against the sky—which bore weird likeness to human figures. Absorbed as she was in her book, she nevertheless occasionally ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... doubt right in considering the lucubrations of the poet Baudelaire, and his necrophile imagination of his own carrion hung on a gibbet and devoured by vultures, as a mixture of sadism and masochism. He sought out the most repulsive women of all races, Chinese, negresses, dwarfs, giants, or modern women as artificial as possible, to satisfy his pathological instinct. The following case quoted by Krafft-Ebing ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... the other day about a religious reformer who arose in Eastern lands a few years since, and gathered many disciples. He and his principal follower were seized and about to be martyred. They were suspended by cords from a gibbet, to be fired at by a platoon of soldiers. And as they hung there, the disciple turned to his teacher, and as his last word on earth said, 'Master! are you satisfied with me?' His answer was a silent smile; and the next minute a bullet was in his heart. Dear brethren, do you turn to Jesus Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... in subsequent conversations learned that Mrs. Lincoln had no sympathy for the South. "Why should I sympathize with the rebels," she would say; "are they not against me? They would hang my husband to-morrow if it was in their power, and perhaps gibbet me with him. How then can I sympathize with a people at war with me and mine?" She always objected to ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... 'prentice-boy and pretty girl! Passed away tipsy trainband-man with wig and bandolier! On the spot where Tom Idle (for whom I have an unaffected pity) made his exit from this wicked world, and where you see the hangman smoking his pipe as he reclines on the gibbet and views the hills of Harrow or Hampstead beyond—a splendid marble arch, a vast and modern city—clean, airy, painted drab, populous with nursery-maids and children, the abodes of wealth and comfort—the elegant, the prosperous, the polite Tyburnia rises, the most ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... blazing temper," remarked Hamilton. "Lee and Ramsay and Stewart were like to have died of fright. I wish to God he'd strung the first to a gibbet!" ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... there until he died. And how many others! I have tried, without success, to find whether in battles and forays the Marshal committed any serious misdeeds. I have discovered nothing, except that he had a pronounced taste for the gibbet; for he liked to string up all the renegade French whom he surprised in the ranks of the English or in the cities which were not very much ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... Duclosse. "He's started the court under the big tree, as the Seigneurs did two hundred years ago. He'll want a gibbet ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... oh, shame to say! They were seized from behind, their arms bound behind their backs, and, in spite of their protests, led out on the watch tower, where was a permanent gibbet, and, in sight of all their ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... Offley to perform the duties of sheriff at Dudley's execution, although he had himself been one of the supporters of the Lady Jane in her claim to the crown. For the next few days the city presented a sad spectacle; whichever way one turned there was to be seen a gibbet with its wretched burden, whilst the city's gates bristled with human heads.(1397) Wyatt himself was one of the last to suffer, being brought to the block on Tower Hill on the 11th April. His head and a portion of his body, after being exposed on gallows, were taken away by ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... disorderly and fast we made for the Port, while English men-at-arms might be plainly seen and heard, gazing, waving their hands, and shouting from the battlements of the two gate-towers. Down the road we ran, past certain small houses of peasants, and past a gibbet with a marauder hanging from it, just ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... right hand might be seen the vassals of that renowned Mynheer, Michael Paw, who lorded it over the fair regions of ancient Pavonia, and the lands away south even unto the Navesink mountains, and was moreover patroon of Gibbet Island. His standard was borne by his trusty squire, Cornelius Van Vorst; consisting of a huge oyster recumbent upon a sea-green field; being the armorial bearings of his favorite metropolis Communipaw. He brought to the camp a stout force of warriors, ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... strove 'Gainst Marmion's force to stand; To him he lost his lady-love, And to the king his land. Ourselves beheld the listed field, A sight both sad and fair; We saw Lord Marmion pierce his shield, And saw his saddle bare; We saw the victor win the crest He wears with worthy pride; And on the gibbet-tree, reversed, His foeman's scutcheon tied. Place, nobles, for the Falcon-Knight! Room, room, ye gentles gay, For him who conquered in the right, Marmion ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... impute to him having joined with bad men. All that they charge him with is an attempt to give freedom to the republic, and to make Rome the centre of its government. And is this a crime worthy of the wheel or the gibbet? A Roman citizen afflicted to see his country, which is by right the mistress of the world, the slave of the vilest ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... committed a wrong, and wished to make restitution; or they had left debts which they were anxious to pay; or they had advice, or warnings, or threats to communicate; or they had been murdered, and were determined to bring their assassins to the gibbet. ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... with Robert Bovill' What in Heaven's name did one of Coffyn blood with Robert? If ever man had a devil, 'twas he. I mind his sullen black face and his beard in two prongs. I have heard he is dead—on a Panama gibbet?" ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... and torment and all that other side of futurity, who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor flipperty-gibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as incapable of passion and crime as they were incapable of heroism ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... bursting fiercely through the crowd, till he reached the front ranks, where tall gates of open ironwork barred all farther progress, but left a full view of the tragedy which was enacting within, where the poor innocent wretch, suspended from a gibbet, writhed and shrieked at every stroke of the hide whips of ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... battled for their homes, lives, and liberty for eighty years. For four-fifths of a century they faced not only the best and bravest soldiers of Europe, but they faced, along with their wives, their children, and their old folk, the flame, the gibbet, the flood, the siege, the pestilence, the famine, "and all men know, or dream, or fear of agony," all for one thing—to teach the oppressor that his cause must fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered that ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... it gives me a shudder to name it! We were within the castle, and they set up the gibbet before our eyes. Before the eyes of the son of the one man, the wife and son of the other! I remember catching up Isabel, and running with her into an inner chamber—any whither to be out of sight of that awful thing. I remember, ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... riper years, he had incautiously put himself in the power of Morgan and had been hanged with short shrift. Benjamin, standing upon the outskirts of the crowd jesting and roaring around the foot of the gibbet, with a grief and rage in his heart at his impotency, presently found himself hating his old captain with a fierceness proportioned to his devotion in the past. For he had appealed for mercy personally to Morgan ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... present situation, he resolved rather to blow up the vessel than to surrender; he concerted measures to achieve this end with a brave Dutchman named Bedaulx, whose sole alternative, if taken, would have been the gibbet. The captain insisted upon stopping at the islands; but government and orders would have been found there, and he followed a direct course, less from choice than from compulsion.[15] At forty leagues from shore, ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... "The family gibbet, I presume, is in good working order?" asked the king of the family executioner, a tall gaunt man in black and scarlet, who was only employed in the case of ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... not propose, O valiant grave-diggers, to depreciate your merits; such is far from being my intention. I have that in my notes, on the other hand, which will do you more honour than the story of the gibbet and the Frog; I have gleaned, for your benefit, examples of prowess which will shed a new lustre upon ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... up uneasy and imploring, as Charles continued: 'Would that more of you would come in this way! They have scored you deep, but know you what is gashed deeper still? Your King's heart! Ah! you will not come, as Coligny does, from his gibbet, with his two bleeding hands. My father was haunted to his dying day by the face of one Huguenot tailor. Why, I see a score, night by night! You are solid; let me ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself unenviably conspicuous as a servile and cruel sycophant, who had obtained from James the Recordership of London when Holt honourably resigned it, and who had, as Recorder, sent soldiers to the gibbet for breaches of military discipline. By his servile cruelty he had earned the nickname of the Manhunter. Shower deserved, if any offender deserved, to be excepted from the Act of Indemnity, and left to the utmost rigour of those laws ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mutinied against him, and he was delivered into the hands of his enemies. This venerable noble, who had nearly reached his ninetieth year, was instantly without trial, or witness, or accusation, or answer, condemned to death by the rebellious barons: he was hanged on a gibbet; his body was cut in pieces, and thrown to the dogs;[****] and his head was sent to Winchester, the place whose title he bore, and was there set on a pole and exposed to the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... vexed, tormented, betrayed, and sold as you have been by the scoundrels of whom you have told me, I should do like an Arab of the desert—I would devote myself body and soul to vengeance. I might end by dangling from a gibbet, garroted, impaled, guillotined in your French fashion, I should not care a rap; but they should not have my head until I had crushed ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... from its comparative harmlessness, and from its being not so much a madness as a folly of the people. Unlike other notions that sprang from the belief in witchcraft, and which we have already dwelt upon at sufficient length, it has sent no wretches to the stake or the gibbet, and but a ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... paltry booty of lame horses and lean kine, or squealing and dealing death in some moorland feud of the ferrets and the wild cats. One after another closed his obscure adventures in mid-air, triced up to the arm of the royal gibbet or the Baron's dule-tree. For the rusty blunderbuss of Scots criminal justice, which usually hurt nobody but jurymen, became a weapon of precision for the Nicksons, the Ellwalds, and the Crozers. The exhilaration of their exploits seemed to haunt the memories of their descendants alone, ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his favourite, ran away to France, and there, with the help of the Count of Hainault and other friends in England, she raised an army and attacked and defeated her husband and his favourite. The young Despenser was hanged on a gibbet fifty feet high, and a Parliament was called to decide what should be done ...
— Royal Children of English History • E. Nesbit
... Dessauer, at sight of so many images of that bird, threw out the observation, loud enough, from the top of the table, 'Hah, Walrave, I see you are making yourself acquainted with the RAVENS in time, that they may not be strange to you at last,'"—when they come to eat you on the gibbet! (not a soft tongue, the Old Dessauer's). "Another day, seeing Walrave seated between two Jesuit Guests, the Prince said: 'Ah, there you are right, Walrave; there you sit safe; the Devil can't get you there!' As the Prince kept continually ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... of theft. As the property was found in his possession, the alcayd[^e] ordered him to be hung. His parents went on their way to Compostella, and returned after eight days, but what was their amazement to find their son alive on the gibbet, and uninjured. They went instantly to tell the alcayd[^e]; but the magistrate replied, "Woman, you are mad! I would just as soon believe these pullets, which I am about to eat, are alive, as that a man who has been gibbeted eight days ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the river they call "reaches." They have their long reach and their short reach, and a number of reaches, under local, or less obvious names. Some are named after some of their own pirates, which is here and there designated by a gibbet; a singular object, be sure, to greet the eye of a stranger on entering the grand watery avenue of the capital of the British empire. But there is no room for disputing concerning our tastes. The reach where our prison was moored was about three miles below Chatham; and is named from ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... erected a gibbet, two posts and a horizontal bar, and on the bar they hung the living prisoners, with a cord of parau bark passed through the scalp and tied around the hair. Their arms were tied behind them, and they ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... give up the Netherlands, and all his foreign possessions, and to retire to his hereditary dominions. "What a severe sentence," exclaimed Count Zinzendorf, the emperor's ambassador, "have you passed on the emperor. No malefactor was ever carried with so hard a doom to the gibbet." ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... the Danish Queen, As she struck the board with vigour: “To-morrow, ere folk to breakfast go, On a gibbet thou shalt figure!” ...
— Alf the Freebooter - Little Danneved and Swayne Trost and other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... is called, and it derives its vile name from him. Now, with all these crimes upon him, does he not deserve death, nay, many deaths? For my part I know none bad enough but that supplied by his own shape —that shape which he gave to the gibbet named Stayros after him ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Holland over these children of the sun was at least an improvement on the tyranny which roasted them alive if they rejected religious dogmas which they could not comprehend, and which proclaimed with fire, sword, and gibbet that the Omnipotent especially forbade the nutmeg trade to all but the subjects, of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Lane, ma'am, where the gibbet used to stand," replied John, who was bringing in the muffins. "It's no nonsense, my lady. Every word as that man says comes true, and ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... his imposture." At the siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the rest to be slain. The pilgrims therefore fell upon ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... likely to possess it long, for an adroit professor of legerdemain has taken aim with a hooked stick, and by one slight jerk, will convey it to his own pocket. The profession of a gentleman in a round wig is determined by a gibbet chalked upon his coat. An enraged barber, who lifts up his stick in the corner, has probably been refused payment of a wager, by the man ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... deals with the sea, so he deals with the wind and rain and snow and vapour and fire. Those who love Victor Hugo will think of a hundred examples of what I mean, from the burning castle in "Ninety-three," to the wind-rocked gibbet on the Isle of Portland, when the child hero of the "Man who Laughs" escapes from ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... which he himself was seized, but recovered. He converted many apostates, one of whom was a bashaw. By preaching the faith to the Mahometans he incurred the utmost severity of the Turkish laws, was twice imprisoned, and the second time condemned to a cruel death. He was hung on a gibbet by one hand, which was fastened by a chain, and pierced with a sharp hook at the end of the chain; and by one foot in the same manner. Having been some time on {357} the gibbet, he was released,[1] and ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... sprites, That dames may listen to the sound at nights; . . . . . . Next view in state, proud prancing on his roan, The golden-crested haughty Marmion, Now forging scrolls, now foremost in the fight, Not quite a felon, yet but half a knight, The gibbet or the field prepared to grace; A mighty mixture of the great and base. And think'st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance, On public taste to foist ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the rest to be pierced with Lances, and run through with the point of the Sword, by a multitude of Men: And Anacaona her self who (as we said before,) sway'd the Imperial Scepter, to her greater honor was hanged on a Gibbet. And if it fell out that any person instigated by Compassion or Covetousness, did entertain any Indian Boys and mount them on Horses, to prevent their Murder, another was appointed to follow them, who ran them through the back or in the hinder parts, and if they chanced to escape ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... noble earls, on the side of mercy, would have had more weight and influence, had weight and influence been needed, if their own Government, after every rebellion, however small or under however great provocation, had not uniformly followed its victory by the gibbet, by imprisonment, by transportation of the men who had taken up arms against intolerable oppression. If noble earls of England had scrutinized English policy, and advised their own Government as they now advised the Government of the United States, some heroic lives would have been spared ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... dirl.— Coffins stood round, like open presses; That shaw'd the dead in their last dresses; And by some devilish cantrip slight Each in its cauld hand held a light— By which heroic Tam was able To note upon the haly table, A murderer's banes in gibbet airns; Twa span-lang, wee, unchristen'd bairns; A thief, new-cutted frae a rape, Wi' his last gasp his gab did gape; Five tomahawks, wi' bluid red-rusted; Five scimitars, wi' murder crusted; A garter, which a babe had strangled; A knife, a father's throat had mangled, Whom his ain son o' life ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... rose-strewn, for thee and thy happiness still would I give it. Far afield, in the din and rush of maddening battle, Others have laid down their lives, nor wavered nor paused in the giving. What matters way or place—the cyprus, the lily, the laurel, Gibbet or open field, the sword or inglorious torture, When 'tis the hearth and the country that call for ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the Spirit of Christ, revealed supremely in that act of self-sacrifice. The lifeless form of the Son of God on the tree is the striking evidence of the antagonism between the children of men and their Father. Jesus completely represented Him, and this broken body on the gibbet was the inevitable result. Golgotha convinces us of the ruinous forces that live in and dominate our world; it faces us with the suicidal elements in men's spirits that drive them to murder the Christlike in themselves; it tears the veil from ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... abbey on the queerest principles; and most likely Perette Mauger, the great Paris receiver of stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman! of the last scene of her career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury her, alive and most reluctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet.[9] Nay, our friend soon began to take a foremost rank in this society. He could string off verses, which is always an agreeable talent; and he could make himself useful in many other ways. The whole ragged army of Bohemia, and whosoever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the game?" said Governor Manco; he gave orders, and immediately a gibbet was reared on the verge of the great beetling bastion that overlooked the Plaza. "Now," said he, in a message to the captain-general, "hang my soldier when you please; but at the same time that he is swung off in the square, look up to see your ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... previous historians. Fitzjames was able, however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... drew on him much deserved, and some undeserved, censure. When the Dutch fleet was in the Thames, it was against the Chancellor that the rage of the populace was chiefly directed. His windows were broken; the trees of his garden were cut down; and a gibbet was set up before his door. But nowhere was he more detested than in the House of Commons. He was unable to perceive that the time was fast approaching when that House, if it continued to exist at all, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... there flags waved above the heads of the multitude. On one was written Sanction or death; on another, The recall of the patriot ministers; on the third, Tremble tyrant, thine hour is come. A man, his arms bared to the shoulders, bore a gibbet, from which hung the effigy of a crowned female, with the inscription, Beware the lantern. Farther on a group of hags raised a guillotine, with a card bearing the words, National Justice on tyrants; ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... world at peace, adorned with every form of art, with music's myriad voices thrilled, while lips are rich with words of love and truth; a world in which no exile sighs, no prisoner mourns; a world on which the gibbet's shadow does not fall; a world where labor reaps its full reward, where work and worth go hand in hand, where the poor girl trying to win bread with the needle—the needle that has been called "the asp for the breast of the poor"—is not driven ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... it, by all my efforts as a writer, by all my words and all my votes as a legislator! I declare it before the crucifix; before that Victim of the penalty of death, who sees and hears us; before that gibbet, in which, two thousand years ago, for the eternal instruction of the generations, the human law nailed ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... glasses to the health of his Most Sacred Majesty, and the damnation of Red-nosed Noll. That tenderness to the fallen which has, through many generation% been a marked feature of the national character, was for a time hardly discernible. All London crowded to shout and laugh round the gibbet where hung the rotten remains of a prince who had made England the dread of the world, who had been the chief founder of her maritime greatness, and of her colonial empire, who had conquered Scotland and Ireland, who had humbled Holland ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... behold, whose sole aspiring hope Eccentrick soars to catch the hangman's rope. In order rang'd, with date of place and time, Each owner's name, his parentage and crime, High on his walls, inscribed to glorious shame, Unnumber'd halters gibbet him to Fame. ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... skims over whatever is sound, to detect and settle upon some spot which is tainted. But to the purpose. If I conduct thee or send thee a prisoner to St. Mary's, thou art to-night a tenant of the dungeon, to-morrow a burden to the gibbet-tree. If I were to let thee go hence at large, I were thereby wronging the Holy Church, and breaking mine own solemn vow. Other resolutions may be adopted in the capital, or better times may speedily ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... river, Bobadilla beheld on either bank a gibbet with the body of a Spaniard hanging on it, apparently but lately executed. He considered these as conclusive proofs of the alleged cruelty of Columbus. Many boats came off to the ship, every one being anxious to pay early court to this public censor. Bobadilla remained on board all day, in ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... The purpose intended is that we should not despair in death but entertain the unwavering assurance that the believers in the promised seed shall live, and be taken by God, whether from the water or the fire or the gibbet, or the tomb. We desire to live, and we shall live, namely the eternal life through the promised seed, which remains when this ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... fine portal of the original sanctuary is still to be seen. But of the old castle not a trace remains; only its name survives,—la Hourquie,—with its significant etymological story: Horcae,—furcae,—- fourches patibulaires,—the gibbet. For these viscounts of Morlaaes had recourse to a savage expedient to control the lawlessness of their day. They kept a gallows-tree erect before the castle gateway, a speaking symbol of vengeance, and there the blackened corpse, might ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... triumphant shouts of the Indians. Flames were seen bursting forth from the house. They burned up bright and clear in the night air. By their light he observed a man dragged along among a crowd of Indians. They stopped and appeared to be busily at work. In a short time a gibbet was erected near ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... breast. Knowing them, he saw no use in any appeal; also he saw that it was indeed her life or theirs. On the one hand, the downfall of all their hopes, the death or perpetual enslavement of many, and for himself surely the gibbet and the ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... Secunda, three virgins of Tuburga, had gall and vinegar given them to drink, were then severely scourged, tormented on a gibbet, rubbed with lime, scorched on a gridiron, worried by wild ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... murdering one of the public officers, escaped with his concubine to the church of St. Mary le Bow, where he defended himself by force of arms. He was at last forced from his retreat, condemned, and executed, amidst the regrets of the populace, who were so devoted to his memory, that they stole his gibbet, paid the same veneration to it as to the cross, and were equally zealous in propagating and attesting reports of the miracles wrought by it [p]. But though the sectaries of this superstition were punished by the justiciary [q], it received so little encouragement from the established ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... signification of real and existing virtues. Horses, dogs, even rats, are now more safe from wanton brutality than great numbers of men and women in the eighteenth century. To any one who studies that period, the stocks, the whipping post, the gibbet, cock fights, prize-fights, bull-baitings, accounts of rapes, are simply the outward signs of an all-pervading cruelty. If he opens a novel, he finds that the story turns on brutality in one form or other. It is not only in such novels as those of Fielding and Smollett, which are ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... not? Those who are for it, will support it, and the remainder will undoubtedly see the reasonableness of paying the charges; while those who oppose or seek to betray it, must expect the more rigid fate of the jail and the gibbet. There is a bastard kind of generosity, which being extended to all men, is as fatal to society, on one hand, as the want of true generosity is on the other. A lax manner of administering justice, falsely termed ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... that ill-looking figure that might have fallen from a gibbet—he listening and hiding here—Barnaby first upon the spot last night—can she who has always borne so fair a name be guilty of such crimes in secret!' said the locksmith, musing. 'Heaven forgive me if I am wrong, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... good old Bishop, in the early years of Christianity. Since then, thousands and thousands of noble souls have given their bodies to the gibbet and the stake, to help onward the slow progress of truth and freedom; a great unknown continent has been opened as a new, free starting point for the human race; printing has been invented, and the command, "Whatsoever ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... committed to the Tower. That they were not also hung was, according to the mild and merciful Dr. Reeves, Dean of Westminster, "a main cause of God's punishing the land" in the future time. For those destined to suffer, a gibbet was erected at Charing Cross, that the traitors might in their last moments see the spot where the late king had been executed. Having been half hung, they were taken down, when their heads were severed from their trunks and set ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... in new-made graves—bloody corpses of young men; The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud, And all these things bear ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... Monsieur? Do you understand? As it was yesterday it is to-day! They killed the President La Place this morning! And they are searching! They are still searching! The river is not yet full, nor the gibbet glutted! I have but to open that window and denounce you, and your life would hang by no stronger thread than the life of a mad dog which they chase ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... right of the individual man. Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster Hall—"What use of so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia, and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;" or when at Berlin, having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his servants to be hanged in order to test it; or in his review of parade fights, when he ordered his men to use ball, and to take the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Pledges, as Lullies from Hedges. [2] We are not in fear to be drawn upon Sledges, But sometimes the Whip doth make us to skip And then we from Tything to Tything do trip; But when in a poor Boozing-Can we do bib it, [3] We stand more in dread of the Stocks than the Gibbet And therefore a merry mad Beggar I'll be For when it is night in the ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men; his grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... often surprised, cut to pieces by the dragoons, who hung part of the prisoners on the neighbouring trees, and took the others to prison, from whence they were sent to the galleys, or hung on the nearest public gibbet. ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... Noisy has made (without a pun) some noise in history. One of its ancient lords, Enguerrand de Marigny, was the inventor of the famous gibbet of Montfaucon, and in the poetic justice which should ever govern such cases he came to be hung on his own gallows. He was convicted of manifold extortions, and launched by the common executioner ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... verify the cheat of Perkin; and if the latter was astonishingly adroit, the king was ridiculously clumsy. 6. Perkin himself confessed his imposture more than once, and read his confession to the people, and renewed his confession at the foot of the gibbet on which he was executed.—Answer. I have shown that this confession was such an aukward forgery that lord Bacon did not dare to quote or adhere to it, but invented a new story, more specious, but equally inconsistent with, probability. 7. After Henry the ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... the army of the Sultan Misnar, which had escaped to the mountains, were all drawn out, the cymbals sounded, and a gibbet forty feet high was erected in their front, to which the captain of the guard ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... The imagination whose pictures they drew will quench all her lustre for the deserters that devote themselves to the slavish passions of the hour. The history whose tales of glory and ignominy they related will rear a gibbet for their own reputation in the future time. As for us, at the present, we mention not their names, but, like the injured ghost in the poet's picture of the world of spirits, turn from them silently and pass on. We remember there was a grand old republican in the realm of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... Elizabeth wished her subjects would be content to live together in unity of spirit, if not in unity of theory, in the bond of peace, not hatred, in righteousness of life, not in orthodoxy preached by stake and gibbet. She was content to wait and to persevere. She refused to declare war. War would tear the world in pieces. She knew her danger. She knew that she was in constant peril of assassination. She knew that if ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... in the nature of a foul, premeditated murder? "Gentlemen; it is enough for me to look upon the life of this most beautiful and accomplished of her sex, blasted by the heartless villainy of man, without seeing, at the-end of it; the horrible spectacle of a gibbet. Gentlemen, we are all human, we have all sinned, we all have need of mercy. But I do not ask mercy of you who are the guardians of society and of the poor waifs, its sometimes wronged victims; I ask only that justice which you and I shall need in that last, dreadful hour, when death will be ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... his success was attained. "Cortez and his companions," says Chevalier, "had incurred the necessity of signalizing themselves by some great exploit. They had committed a fault which the laws of all states treated as crime, and one that the leaders must expiate on the gibbet and their followers at the galleys, unless atoned for by brilliant deeds. Their departure from Cuba was an act of flagrant rebellion." In his great haste to get away from Cuba he embarked in nine small vessels, the ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... water in it and any number of rats. I was threatened with prosecution at their old Bailey, or Chatelet, with the Question (that is, the torture) ordinary and extraordinary, with the galleys for life as a wind-up, even if I escaped the gibbet in the place de Greve. Luckily for me, at this time the Gentleman of the Chamber fell into disgrace with Father la Chaise for eating a Chicken Sausage in Lent; and to spite him and the Minister, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... comrades in life. Four short days gone, the hands, then clasped by friendship, were fettered by hostile bonds. Yet nine days more and the darling of the army, the youthful hero of the hour, had dangled from a gibbet." ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... of British officers, one of whom holds a paper from which he reads. Facing the ruined Residency is a long grim row of gallows; below these, bound hand and foot and closely guarded is a row of prisoners. A signal is given, and from every gibbet swings what lately was a man. These are the ringleaders in the insensate tragedy, who, brought to justice by the strong resistless power of British bayonets, hang facing the scene of their infamy, for a sign throughout the length and breadth of Asia ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... pay enormous damages to the ruffian's family and erect a chapel for the good of his soul. The city was condemned for a time to the forfeiture of all its privileges. The body was cut down from the gibbet on which it had been hanging for three years, and accorded a solemn funeral. Four Capitouls bore the pall, and all fathers of families were required to walk in the procession. When they came to the Schools, the citizens solemnly begged pardon of the University, and the cortege ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Raymond Berenger, your late leader," replied Jorworth, his eyes, while he was speaking, glancing with the vindictive ferocity which dictated his answer. "So many strangers as be here amongst ye, so many bodies to the ravens, so many heads to the gibbet!—It is long since the kites have had such a banquet of lurdane ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... bodies hidden from the eye of man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony. Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night, had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts, to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs quail, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... Gore vindictively; "not one politician living has the brains or the art to defend his own cause. The ocean of history is foul with the carcases of such statesmen, dead and forgotten except when some historian fishes one of them up to gibbet it." ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... priests are all singing, Two ghastly heads on the gibbet are swinging; One is Jarl Hakon's and one is his thrall's, And the people are shouting from windows and walls; While alone in her chamber Swoons Thora, the fairest ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... like language, but which no one in Communipaw could understand. Some thought him a negro just from Guinea, who had either fallen overboard, or escaped from a slave-ship. Nothing, however, could ever draw from him any account of his origin. When questioned on the subject, he merely pointed to Gibbet-Island, a small rocky islet, which lies in the open bay, just opposite to Communipaw, as if that were his native place, though every body knew it ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... dreams," he muttered. "'S death, but he be more a king than Henry himself. God speed the day of his coronation, when, before the very eyes of the Plantagenet hound, a black cap shall be placed upon his head for a crown; beneath his feet the platform of a wooden gibbet for a throne." ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... down at all, its meaning was veiled in terms of alchemy and astrology so that only those possessing the key could read it aright. This was made necessary in order to avoid the persecutions of the theologians of the Middle Ages, who fought the Secret Doctrine with fire and sword; stake, gibbet and cross. Even to this day there will be found but few reliable books on the Hermetic Philosophy, although there are countless references to it in many books written on various phases of Occultism. And yet, the Hermetic ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... an ironing-board. No games can be suggested but Thread-my-needle, and Thimble-rig. No books are at hand but Harper, with the fashion-plate at the end; the newspapers of the day are cut into uncouth shapes; and conversation (when conducted in English) hangs the unsuccessful Bloomer reform upon the gibbet of ridicule. ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... the times become murmurs against the prince. Under this gentle and pious sire, the gallows crack with the hung, the blocks rot with blood, the prisons burst like over full bellies. This king hath one hand which grasps, and one which hangs. He is the procurator of Dame Tax and Monsieur Gibbet. The great are despoiled of their dignities, and the little incessantly overwhelmed with fresh oppressions. He is an exorbitant prince. I love not this monarch. And ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... wild winter's spite — The gibbet trees, the world in white, The sky but gray wind over a grave — Why should I ache, the season's slave? I'll sing from the top of the ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... of bazaars and brand-new hotels, the first glimpse gives us an insight into its life and meaning, makes us feel that we ought to have been living two or three hundred years ago. We glance back at the railway station, wondering whether a halt were wise, whether indeed the gibbet, wheel, and stake were not really prepared for ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... he was overcome, the king gave orders to put out his eyes, and afterwards to emasculate him; and his steward, William by name, who was the son of his stepmother, the king commanded to be hanged on a gibbet. Then was also Eoda, Earl of Champagne, the king's son-in-law, and many others, deprived of their lands; whilst some were led to London, and there killed. This year also, at Easter, there was a very great stir through all this nation and ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... appear before the awful bar to which you now strive prematurely to consign this noble, this gallant young man! Should you succeed, you must meet him there. Could you, in the presence of Almighty God—He who knows the inmost thoughts—justify your work of to-day? His mandate is not to the gibbet. Eternal Justice dictates there, whose decrees are eternal. Do you think of this? Do you defy it? If not—if you invoke it, do it through your acts toward your fellow-man. Have you to-day done unto this man as you would he should do unto you? I pause for a ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... coals, call to order; take to task, reprove, lecture, bring to book; read a lesson, read a lecture to; rebuke, correct. reprimand, chastise, castigate, lash, blow up, trounce, trim, laver la tete[Fr], overhaul; give it one, give it one finely; gibbet. accuse &c. 938; impeach, denounce; hold up to reprobation, hold up to execration; expose, brand, gibbet, stigmatize; show up, pull up, take up; cry "shame" upon; be outspoken; raise a hue and cry against. execrate &c. 908; exprobate[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... as I writ, was the Mortimer hanged, without defence by him made (he had allowed none to Sir Hugh Le Despenser and my Lord of Kent): and four days hung his body in irons on the gibbet, as Sir Hugh's the father had done. Verily, as he had done, so did God apay him, which is just Judge over ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... one of the banditti, "Nature's own hand has marked you out for an assassin—come, prithee be frank, and tell us how thou hast contrived so long to escape the gibbet? In what gaol didst thou leave thy last fetters? Or from what galley hast thou taken thy departure, without staying ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... cause in Europe in the sixteenth century, take it for all in all, was the cause of stake and gibbet, inquisition, dungeons, and political tyranny. It did not lose its character because in Ireland it assumed the accidental form of the defence of the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... "Sylvanus," and wrote with an admirable gusto of racing men and racing scenes in the forties, has set down in his Bye-lanes and Downs of England a strange picture of the Ring on Epsom downs as he saw it. In his day it was formed "on the crest of the Down, round a post or limb of a gibbet"—similia similibus, you might suppose reading the list of heroes who met there. "The 'plunging prelate and his ponderous Grace'; my lord George, the 'bold baker,' and Mr. Unwell; Sir Xenophon Sunflower, the Assassin, and the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... doctrines" had been uncertain and wavering. It was by no means impossible that, imitating the example of the Elector of Saxony, the French monarch should even yet put himself at the head of the movement. Severe persecution had, indeed, dogged the steps of the Reformation. Fire and gibbet had been mercilessly employed to destroy it. The squares of Paris had already had the baptism of blood. But the cruelties complained of by the "Lutherans," if tolerated by Francis, had their origin in the bigotry of others. The Sorbonne ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... indictment; for which the commissioners ordained him, upon Wednesday, 21 May, 1656, betwixt two and four hours in the afternoon, to be taken to the ordinary place of execution for the Burgh of Dumfries, and there to be hanged on a gibbet while [till] he be dead, and all his ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... wretched General shivered from head to foot. Every detail of the melodramatic execution seemed burned into his brain as with a red-hot iron. He fancied he could see the procession and the three gibbets, painted black; beside each gibbet was an open ditch and a black coffin covered with a dark gray pall. He saw, in the hollow square formed by a battalion of Cossack infantry, the executioner, Froloff, in his red shirt and his plush trousers tucked into his boots, and, beside ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... delivered up to Massachusetts her governor and gentry. Another, incapable of being suppressed, though a servant, seized the destinies of an aristocratic colony, and held them for a while, until accumulating enemies bore him down, and wedlock and the gibbet followed close together. Poverty would not relinquish its gripe upon the race; they struggled up like clods upon the ploughshare, and fell back again ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... the body just for style, And they hung him in chains for the volatile Wind to scour him flesh from bones. Way out on the moor you can hear the groans His gibbet makes when it blows a gale. ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... ghastly gibbet! How dismal 'tis to see The great tall spectral skeleton, The ladder and the tree! Hark! hark! it is the clash of arms,— The bells begin to toll,— "He is coming! he is coming! God's mercy on his soul!" One last long peal of thunder,— The clouds are cleared away. And the glorious sun once ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... neighbourhood in 1655, and Monmouth, in 1685, marched through Chard en route, as he thought, for the throne, a circumstance which Jeffreys did not allow the town to forget. "Hangcross tree," which once stood near the L. & S.W. station, was long locally reputed to be the gibbet on which some of the Duke's sympathisers expiated their treason. The town is nowadays chiefly dependent upon a large lace works and some collar factories. The church, which stands in the "old town" (turn down Axminster ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... the novelist contrasts the lives and fates of Varney, Bill Sykes and Undy Scott; they stir the blood, proving uncontestibly that Undy Scott was as real to Trollope as he is to us: 'The figure of Undy swinging from a gibbet at the broad end of Lombard Street would have an effect. Ah, my fingers itch to be at ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... his associates into the same line of thought and practice. Said Luther. "To exchange anything with any one and gain by the exchange is not to do a charity; but to steal. Every usurer is a thief worthy of the gibbet. I call those usurers who lend money at five or six per cent." But it is only just to say that at a later period Luther took a much more moderate view. Melanchthon, defining usury as any interest whatever, condemned it again and again; and the Goldberg Catechism of 1558, for which he ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... according to their deserts; but fearing the captain of the pirates should make his escape (as he had formerly done, being their prisoner once before) they judged it safer to leave him guarded on ship-board for the present, while they erected a gibbet to hang him on the next day, without any other process than to lead him from the ship to his punishment; the rumour of which was presently brought to Bartholomew Portugues, whereby he sought all possible ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin |
