"Lout" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have nothing to do with the quarrel; but if I were walking along the streets and saw a big lout pick a quarrel with a weaker one and then proceed to smash him up altogether, I fancy I should take a hand in the business. The Germans deliberately forced on the war. They knew perfectly well that when they put up a German Prince as candidate ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... the flattering table of her eie, Hang'd in the frowning wrinkle of her brow, And quarter'd in her heart, hee doth espie Himselfe loues traytor, this is pittie now; That hang'd, and drawne, and quarter'd there should be In such a loue, so vile a Lout as he ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... we all felt very blue; because he had been the joy of our lives. He left the command to Kleber—a great lout of a fellow who soon afterward lost the number of his mess. An Egyptian assassinated him. They put the murderer to death by making him sit on a bayonet; that's their way, down there, of guillotining a man. ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... out When they to spoil did fall; Rude Robin Goodfellow, the lout, Would skim the ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... fool! Why talk rubbish, lout that you are—a real peasant!" came rebukes from all sides addressed to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... clown, hind; clod, clodhopper; hobnail, yokel, bog-trotter, bumpkin; plowman, plowboy[obs3]; rustic, hayseed*, lunkhead [U. S.], chaw-bacon*[obs3], tiller of the soil; hewers of wood and drawers of water, groundling[obs3]; gaffer, loon, put, cub, Tony Lumpkin[obs3], looby[obs3], rube* [U. S.], lout, underling; gamin; rough; pot-wallopper[obs3], slubberdegullion|; vulgar fellow, low fellow; cad, curmudgeon. upstart, parvenu, skipjack[obs3]; nobody, nobody one knows; hesterni quirites[Lat], pessoribus orti[Lat]; bourgeois ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... rough jerkin of a labouring man, and set to cleaving firewood in the courtyard with the scolding assistance of a maid-servant. When the troopers entered to search for the master of the house, they heard the maid vehemently 'flyting' the great hulking lout for his awkwardness, and threatening to 'draw a stick across his back' if he did not work to a ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... cleaving firewood in the courtyard with the scolding assistance of a maid-servant. When the troopers entered to search for the master of the house, they heard the maid vehemently "flyting" the great hulking lout for his awkwardness, and threatening to "draw a stick across his back" if he did not work ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... If he, in his turn, happened to have a son whom he chose to name Henry, the youth was known as Jack's Tom's Harry. Our friend Tommy's father had been called Hob, and hence the name of the ill-tempered lout who was gazing on the unsullied sea. Tommy watched the green water breaking over the brown sand, and far out at sea he saw the thick haze still brooding low. He knew the evening would be fine, and he knew that ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... because he soon blurred over what had happened. To him all criticism was "rudeness": he never heeded it, for he never needed it: he was never wrong. All his life he had ordered little human beings about, and now he was equally magisterial to big ones: Stephen was a fifth-form lout whom, owing to some flaw in the regulations, he could not send up to the ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... and seemed so unable to return Oonah's fond greeting, that she felt the pique which every pretty woman experiences who fancies her favours disregarded, and thought Andy the stupidest lout she ever came across. Turning up her hair, which had fallen down in the excess of her friendship, she walked out of the cottage, and, biting her disdainful lip, fairly cried ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... to hear it. This Rivers is such a lout, that I could not tell how it might be. I did not look to see you ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... stepped promptly forward at the announcement of the overgrown lout, who had signified his intention of whipping the young engineer of No. 999. Clark had told Ralph that athletics was his strong forte. He looked it as he squared ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... name of the gods, Rag, get thee to sleep once more, thou stupidest lout in Britain! It is a scurvy trick to waken thus at the wrong time and trumpet thy nonsense in such fashion. Good youth canst not skip that bit for peace's sake, and get on to ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... juvabit. Look at Clive, I was saying; a lout, a bear, a booby—as a boy, mark you; yet now! Is there a man whose name rings more loudly in the world's ear? And what Robert Clive is, that Desmond Burke might be if he had the mind and the will. You are going farther? Ah, I have not your love of ambulation. I will ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... is his beard, and blossoming-white his crown, Shapely his limbs, his countenance is proud. Should any seek, no need to point him out. The messengers, on foot they get them down, And in salute full courteously they lout. ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... doctor's eyes as we followed the dog, who, obedient to his mistress's voice, had rushed before us into the house. I felt the red blood surging to the roots of my hair, and I knew when I stopped on the threshold beside my captain to make my grand bow that I looked more like an awkward country lout than the fine gentleman I was in ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... to say what hard work being a good farmer meant. And I thought: What a stupid, lazy lout! When we talked seriously he would drag it out with his awful drawl—er, er, er—and he works just as he talks—slowly, always behindhand, never up to time; and as for his being businesslike, I don't believe it, for he often keeps letters given him ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... on him as he walked to Lowick. Fred's light hopeful nature had perhaps never had so much of a bruise as from this suggestion that if he had been out of the way Mary might have made a thoroughly good match. Also he was piqued that he had been what he called such a stupid lout as to ask that intervention from Mr. Farebrother. But it was not in a lover's nature—it was not in Fred's, that the new anxiety raised about Mary's feeling should not surmount every other. Notwithstanding his trust in Mr. Farebrother's generosity, notwithstanding what Mary had said ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... harmless play Beguiles the rustic's closing day, When drawn the evening fire about, Sit aged crone and thoughtless lout; Come, show thy tricks and sportive graces, Thus circled round with merry faces. Backward coiled, and crouching low, With glaring eyeballs watch thy foe. The house wife's, spindle whirling round, Or thread, or straw, that on the ground Its shadow throws, by urchin ...
— Baby Chatterbox • Anonymous
... learned to respect. Jan Baars was the touchstone so to speak, the training that taught me to tolerate a Dutch environment. Without the schooling of Jan Baars I could not have endured my present life. He was a boor, a dolt, a dirty lout, a narrow-minded churl, but he did all sorts of kind and generous things. Once convinced of the fact that my intentions toward Elsje were honorable, he stood by us through thick and thin, and did not trouble himself about conventions, nor about gossip, nor ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... you have had me address him?" he inquired. "Would you have had me use cajolery with him—the lout? Would you have had me plead mercy from him, and beg him, in honeyed words, to be patient with a wilful lady? Let be, Messer Gonzaga, we shall weather it ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... lead to the conviction of so besotted a traitor, than many an incautious hint of his, and many a tale-telling vaunt of his irresistible egotism, afforded her; for, like all the weak wretches of his sort, there was not a more bungling lout, to try the patience of a clever man, than Philip Withers, when his game lay between his safety ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... Lothair," said St. Aldegonde; "or is it the dress that turns them out such swells? I feel quite a lout by some of ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... you drunken lout, you! How dare you lay a hand upon my guest. Know you not that he who harms the guest of a true believer ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... these confines wander out, Where the old gun, bucolic lout, Commits all day his murderous crimes: Though cherries ripe are sweet, no doubt, Sweeter ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... it does? How do we know but that in Boston, among well-bred people, he may be regarded as an absolute lout? The way he calls women 'Sister,' and ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... than I have ever known it myself until within the last few hours. They say that when a man is nearing his end he sees more clearly than at any other time of his life. For my part I now see for the first time that I have never been anything but a worthless lout from my cradle. I have never been fit to walk alone, and if health and strength were to come back to me I should not be one whit better than I have hitherto been. I don't know whether I ever told ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... smoked and pored over a pocket-map of the department, a lout of a lad shambled out of the auberge wearing a fixed scowl in no degree mitigated by the sight of the customer. In the dooryard, which was also the stableyard, the boy caught and saddled a dreary animal, apparently a horse designed by a Gothic architect, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... undone. Its sense of bodily beauty was rudimentary; its knowledge of the nude alternately insufficient and pedantic; the forms of Donatello's David and of Benedetto's St. John are clumsy, stunted, and inharmonious; even Michelangelo's Bacchus is but a comely lout. This sculpture has, moreover, a marvellous preference for ugly old men—gross, or ascetically imbecile; and for ill-grown striplings: except the St. George of Donatello, whose body, however, is entirely encased in inflexible leather and steel, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... corse, in sorrow drowned, The damsel throws herself, in her despair, And shrieks so lout that wood and plain resound For many miles about; nor does she spare Bosom or cheek; but still, with cruel wound, One and the other smites the afflicted fair; And wrongs her curling lock of golden grain, Aye calling on the well-loved youth ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... rather amused than offended with his manner, and was pleased that I had to deal with a gentleman instead of a lout. ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... know I am, would have cried shame on me if I had lingered behind. I told her that if I stayed it would be for her sake, and you should have seen how she flouted me, saying that she would have no tall lout hiding behind her petticoats, and that if I stayed, it should not be as her man. And now I must be off to my supper, or I shall find that there is not a morsel ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... I met them face to face. I thought they would have recognized me, for amongst them was one whom I remember to have seen doing sentry duty; but I'm such a scarecrow in these clothes, and so dishevelled, that they took me for some farm hand or village lout, and let me pass. But in a little while they will be asking questions of the farmer, there'll be a hue and cry, and they'll know that one of the prisoners who escaped has been close to them. We must move. That comfortable little spot, which sounds so inviting, is ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... The dancing had become more and more excited. Lorchen had ceased to pay any attention to Christophe; she was too busy turning the head of a young lout of the village, the son of a rich farmer, for whom all the girls were competing. Christophe was interested by the struggle; the young women smiled at each other and would have been only too pleased to scratch each other. Christophe forgot ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... whole town knew what he meant to do. He had made a will in that son's favor; he had gone as far as the Code will permit a man to go in the way of disinheriting one child to benefit another; and what was more, he had been putting by money for the past fifteen years to enable his lout of a son to buy back from Emile that portion of his father's estate which could not legally be ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... There lay the big lout of fifteen, who already boasted of his love-affairs, learned German, and was to be a gentleman like his father—there he lay on the bottom-boards in the bow in a ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... ever wee had measur'd halfe a mile of our way, he gave me over in the plain field, protesting he would not hold out with me; for, indeed, my pace in dauncing is not ordinary. As he and I were parting, a lusty country lasse being among the people, cal'd him faint-hearted lout, saying, "If I had begun to daunce, I would have held out one myle, though it had cost my life." At which words many laughed. "Nay," saith she, "if the dauncer will lend me a leash of his belles, I'le venter to treade one myle with him myself." ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... hard blow in wanton play; I growl with new-born ecstasy; Then speaks she in a sweet vain jest, I wot "Allons lout doux! eh! la menotte! Et faites serviteur Comme un joli seigneur." Thus she proceeds with sport ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... to have you out there in that store for these folks to look over and pick to pieces, my girl," he said decidedly. "You stay aft and I'll 'tend to things for'ard and handle this crew. Besides, there's that half-grown lout, Amiel Perdue. Abe said he sometimes helped around. He knows the ship, alow and aloft, and ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... a very choice and particular hatred. 'That prig,' as hereafter he always designated Roger—'he shall pay for it yet,' he said to himself by way of consolation, after the father and son had left him. 'What a lout it is!'—watching the receding figure. 'The old chap has twice as much spunk,' as the squire tugged at his bridle-reins. 'The old mare could make her way better without being led, my fine fellow. But I see through your dodge. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... and moiled, and a deal of work was done (I warrant) to justify the mirth of the crazy sun As this and t'other lout, struck dumb at the sudden show Of red robes and white wigs, boggled nor answered "Boh!" When asked why he, Tom Styles, should not—because Jack Nokes Had stolen the horse—be hanged: for Judges must have their jokes, And louts must make allowance—let's say, for some ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... the workmanlike manner in which the locks had been restored, and the care that had evidently been taken to remove the more obvious and brutal traces of burglary. This somewhat staggered his theory that Seth Davis was the perpetrator; mechanical skill and thoughtfulness were not among the lout's characteristics. But he was still more disconcerted on pushing back his chair to find a small india-rubber tobacco pouch lying beneath it. The master instantly recognized it: he had seen it a hundred ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... Brownie sits in the Scotchman's room, And eats his meat and drinks his ale, And beats the maid with her unused broom, And the lazy lout with his idle flail; But he sweeps the floor and threshes the corn, And hies him away ere ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... do anything. He took the handles from me,—his own handles, mind you, of his own barrow,—and trundled it solemnly along. I was struggling with hysterics. I am not in the least hysterical by nature, but the combination—the professor taken for a lout and commanded to trundle his own barrow, stolen by a sophomore, the twig in my eye and the stone in my foot—was too much for me. Besides, there seemed nothing in particular to say. I could not begin 'Please, sir, I thought you were ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... the woods, where we worshipped "blushing sixteen" in dainty boots and white muslin. There, too, we met a match for sighing Orlando,—mirrored in the water; there, too, some diluted Jaques may have "moralized" the excursion for next day's "Courier," and some lout of a Touchstone (there are always such in picnics) passed the ices, made poor puns, and won more than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... and did the Richard III swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow, in the presence of the village boys. This blacksmith cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones. This vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably. He disappeared, and presently turned up in St. Louis. I ran across him there, by and by. He was standing musing on a street corner, with his left hand on his hip, the thumb of his right supporting his chin, face bowed and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... said that possibility was not to make any difference to us. Wouldn't it be making the wrong sort of difference to let it keep a great lout like me in idleness while Bernard is going ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... she said, "that my heart bodes ill of this match? Eric is a mighty man, and, great though thou art, I think that thou shalt lout low before him." ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... strange, untraceable ways, that it seemed almost like mental telegraphy. The Greens of Westbrook were there—the three little girls in blue, now women grown. One of them came with her husband and baby; another with a blushing lout of a lad, to whom she was betrothed; and the third, with a meek blue eye, on the watch for a possible lover in the company. The Lawson sisters, from Granby, arrived early in the day, being conveyed thither by an obliging neighbor. Amelia Stokes ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... with water and feast on the food they have collected. In the Fricktal, Switzerland, at Whitsuntide boys go out into a wood and swathe one of their number in leafy boughs. He is called the Whitsuntide-lout, and being mounted on horseback with a green branch in his hand he is led back into the village. At the village-well a halt is called and the leaf-clad lout is dismounted and ducked in the trough. Thereby he acquires ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... himself, as he watched John Dormay ride slowly away through the park, "and, if it were not that he is husband to my cousin Celia, I would have nought to do with him. She is my only kinswoman, and, were aught to happen to Charlie, that lout, her son, would be the heir of Lynnwood. I should never rest quiet in my grave, were ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... various geniuses have developed which, in a manner almost spectacular, rise before us as we study the literatures of the past? The youthful years of Shakespeare were spent under circumstances which might have produced in him one dull and unaspiring British country lout, like, as one egg to another, to a hundred thousand others who lived in his age. What made this one country boy the most astonishing genius in all the history of literature? Study the youth of Robert Burns, of Heinrich Heine, or ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... astounding. Standing with the potato-bowl on one hip and a hand holding the knife on the other, she delivered her views as to David's laziness, temper, and general good-for-nothingness. If Reuben chose to incur the risks of throwing such a young lout into town-wickedness, with no one to look after him, let him; she'd be glad enough to be shut on him. But, as to writing to Mr. Gurney and that sort of talk, she wasn't going to bandy words—not she; but nobody had ever meddled with Hannah Grieve's affairs yet and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sir," cried one of them, "I thrashed him in the Grande Place, right before the hotel there—what's its name?—the first hotel in Petersburg. Yes, I had told the lout of a postilion, who had grazed my britska against the curbstone of every corner we had turned, that if he did it again I would punish him; that is, I did not exactly tell him—for he understood no language but his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... in the Moon, put on at Drury Lane in 1697, is quite different from Mrs. Behn's farce. Settle has written a comedy which deals with the rehearsal of a new opera, The New World in the Moon. Tom Dawkins, a country lout just arrived in London, is taken to the theatre to see the rehearsal, and ordinary comic scenes intermingled with provision for elaborate sets, as the opera proceeds, form the strangest jumble. The piece takes its name from the first operatic ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... nothing better than a good drubbing, you filthy cattle lout! If you don't pay up your bets, we'll take it out of your hide. I, for one, have a special use for my money at the ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... to his task. It called to his spirit of a gentleman. He would just show this lout what ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... applications, but the mental shortcoming was beneath his efforts. Johnny meanwhile, who was as hard as nails, no sooner recovered from a thumping than he renewed and redoubled his loud contempt for a great lout over six feet high, who had never drawn a sword or pulled a trigger. And now for the winter this book would be a perpetual snowball for him to pelt his big brother with, and yet (like a critic) be scarcely fair object for a hiding. In season out ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... scarce looked at him," she said. "He is a lout, with great eyes staring, and a red nose. It does not need that one should look at men to win them. They look at us, and that ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was against the lout who had spoken that the fire of his rage was principally directed, and the fellow realised at once that all that had gone before, on the part of the stranger from the Den, was mere sparring and self-defence. ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... fragment of a size so large That if it had in fact fulfilled its mission, And Roland not availed him of his targe, There would have been no need of a physician[344]. Orlando set himself in turn to charge, And in his bulky bosom made incision With all his sword. The lout fell; but o'erthrown, he However ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... knows you! "sportsman" from suburban alleys, Stretched under seaweed in the treacherous punt; Knows every lazy, shiftless lout that sallies Forth to waste ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... I would have turned but for the stupidity and ill-breeding such a movement would evidence, yet as I held on my way at a slower pace and the pair approached, I felt every limb an encumbrance, I felt the country lout ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... Doctor. "He's an ordinary sort of lout—Skelmersdale is his name. But everybody about here ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... to the table with a bold step; there was nothing now of the country lout about him; on the contrary, he moved with remarkable dignity, and bore himself so well that many a pair of feminine eyes watched him kindly, as he took his seat ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... at her stubbornness and seeing himself as a lout cast out of heaven. Then he saw her at a distance, on the platform of the subway station at Seventy-second Street. She was with Phil Dunleavy. She looked well, she was talking gaily, oblivious of old sorrows, certainly not in need of ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... energetic, entered the shop and attained some proficiency in the work. But as he grew toward manhood, he became, as the old man called it, "trifling"; a word which bore with it in the local dialect no suggestion of levity or vivacity, for Luke Matchin was as dark and lowering a lout as you would readily find. But it meant that he became more and more unpunctual, did his work worse month by month, came home later at night, and was continually seen, when not in the shop, with a gang of low ruffians, whose head-quarters were in ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... for mankind a generous shame, As of a luck not quite legitimate, Since fortune snatched from wit the lion's part? Was it a college pique of town and gown, As one within whose memory it burned That not academicians, but some lout, Found ten years since the Californian gold? And now, again, a hungry company Of traders, led by corporate sons of trade, Perversely borrowing from the shop the tools Of science, not from the philosophers, Had won the brightest laurel of all time. 'Twas always thus, and will ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Her Majesty the Queen of Portugal clasped that of the Regent's wife; indeed there were gala entertainments from the halls of the governor's residence to the lowest hut, and the pirates went from one to another, here a gentleman and there a lout, carousing, dancing, fighting, and love-making all day long. For an entire fortnight there was neither night nor day, only one continuous revel, a sea of pleasure whose depths ...
— The Corsair King • Mor Jokai
... jolly shepheard, pype thou now apace Unto thy love that made thee low to lout; Thy love is present there with thee in place; Thy love is there advaunst to be ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales
... maid Maria, once when she had accompanied her mistress on a stroll in the Lustgarten, and they had passed the same sentry, had told her that he was the lover of Johanna Elizabetha's waiting-maid, the woman who had always been so insolent to Wilhelmine at the castle. 'He would do me harm, that lout, if he could,' Wilhelmine reflected as she walked on, and the man's frowning face haunted her for a time, but soon the freshness of the evening breeze and the garden's beauty drove all unquiet ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... this matter.—Thou art welcome, Trim, quoth my uncle Toby—speak,—speak what thou thinkest upon the subject, man, without fear.—Why then, replied Trim, (not hanging his ears and scratching his head like a country-lout, but) stroking his hair back from his forehead, and standing erect as before his division,—I think, quoth Trim, advancing his left, which was his lame leg, a little forwards,—and pointing with his right hand open towards a map of Dunkirk, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... perhaps—or perhaps the right man hasn't turned up. Florrie Hensor is several cuts above a malingering lout like Steadbolt. Well there, poor devil! Maybe, it's not unnatural that I should feel a sneaking sympathy for an unsuccessful lover. That abominable lie was a bit too strong though—and before you! The man must have been downright ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... rooms, and that there were numbers of people, both lackeys and officers, of various descriptions, who were awaiting the commands of the fool. The fool, seeing that all these people had a decent and honourable appearance, and that he alone was a lout, wished to be ...
— Emelian the Fool - a tale • Thomas J. Wise
... the word 'lout,' of which Johnson gives two derivations for our choice: it is either the past participle of 'to lower, or make low;' a lowed person, (as our House of Lords under the direction of railway companies and public-house keepers); ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... John. A trifle more liquor, if you please. Thank you. Yes, I used to call her the wild plum. Sweet thing, and I had no idea that she was married until her lout of a husband came down to the landing with a double-barrel gun. Ah, Lord, if she had been single and worth money I could have made her very happy. Fate hasn't always been my ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... between the mouthfuls, the old Hilda awoke in full force. She could not endure this; mamma never could have intended it! The Hartleys were different, of course. She was willing to acknowledge that she had been in the wrong about them; but this lout, this oaf, this villainous-looking churl,—to expect a lady to sit at the same table with him: it was too much! She would ask if she might not dine in her own room after this, as apparently it was only at dinner that this "creature" made ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... Are kneading pasty, making pies and tarts; Or, clad in motley coat, the footman neat Is dangling after Miss with shuffling feet, Bearing in state to church her book of pray'r, Or the light pocket she disdains to wear;{1} Or in a parlour snug, 'the powdered lout The tea and bread and butter hands about. Where are the women, whose less nervous hands Might fit these lighter tasks, which pride demands? Some feel the scorn that poverty attends, Or pine in meek dependance on their friends; Some patient ply the needle day by day, Poor half-paid ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... hardly believe there's such another lazy lout in all the village as my husband, it's as much as I can do to get him up in the morning by pulling him out of bed by the hair. The scoundrel knows to-day is market-day, and yet he lies there asleep at this hour of the morning. The pastor said to me the other day, "Nille, ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... and prolonged muscular exertion. He was big-boned and deep-chested, and had nervous as well as muscular strength. The timidity in him was strange in such a man. What could it spring from? It was not like ordinary shyness, the gaucherie of a big, awkward lout unaccustomed to woman's society but able to be at his ease and boisterous in the midst of a crowd of men. Domini thought that he would be timid even of men. Yet it never struck her that he might be a coward, unmanly. Such ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... streames of blew and white: Or, as a line doth guide, So thou doest leuell slide, And throw'st into the sea thy mite? Is't, that with twisted line, The Angler doth vntwine The fishes life, by giuing breath. Or, as the threshing lout, Rusheth his Lyners out, So Lyner on his course rusheth: Or, as some puppy seat, Lineth a mastiue great, And getteth whelps of mongrell kinde: Lyner, the sea so lines, And streame with waue combines, Begetting ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... But al the tyme whyle Vertu was away. A my{gh}ty conflycte kept they {with} Vycys rout. And yet neuertheles for al that grete afray. Hope stod vpryght & feyth wold neuer lout And euermor{e} sayd Baptym syres put no dout. Vertu shal return & haue his entent. This feld shal be ours or let ...
— The Assemble of Goddes • Anonymous
... of the grammar, coarse and fine at one and the same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was concerned, given to the perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and "in what concerns the sex," as he said in his jargon—a downright, unmitigated lout. His wife was twelve or fifteen years younger than he was. Later on, when her hair, arranged in a romantically drooping fashion, began to grow gray, when the Magaera began to be developed from the Pamela, the female ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the hard laugh or brutal hurried negative in their faces. In his foolish heart he thanked God he had not tried it. Then the apathetic recoil which is apt to follow any keen emotion overtook him. He was dazedly conscious of being rudely shoved once or twice, and even heard the epithet "drunken lout" from one who had ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... is this lout on the way to destroy the foundations of Rome's greatness. Rome must be saved from him. My duty is clear. He must be put out of the way.' "Nice situation for me. I dare not let loose any such possible ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... conceit which come so naturally to Frenchmen in the expression of their feelings—"what is extraordinary in the fact of your loving a young and beautiful woman, artist enough to be able to earn her living like Tinti, and of giving you some of the pleasures of vanity? What lout but would then become an Amadis? This is not in question between you and me. What is needed is that we both love faithfully, persistently; at a distance from each other for years, with no satisfaction but that of knowing that we ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... forefathers, and to lay his old bones in the family vault; but the place was poisoned to him for evermore, he told Angela. He could not stay where he and his had been held in highest honour, to have his daughter pointed at by every grinning lout in hob-nailed shoes, and scorned by the neighbouring quality. He only waited till Denzil Warner should be pronounced out of danger and on the high-road to recovery, before he ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... easy-going shoemaker, with a beery, humorous eye and ponderous calves, who lived mostly on his wife's earnings, stood in a corner of the room, exchanging shots of the roughest description of repartee with every boy in turn. "Stumps, you lout, you've had too much beer again to-day." "'Twasn't of your paying for, then." "Stumps's calves are running down into his ankles; they want to get to grass." "Better be doing that than gone altogether like yours," etc. Very ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... Dick, "My work is yet in bits, But still in every part it fits; Besides, you reason like a lout— Why, man, ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... which, he was ignorant of the arts of reading and writing, and would not be able to send word how matters went on after their departure. In this emergency, while Isoult and John were talking over the subject, Barbara presented herself with a deprecatory courtesy, or rather lout. ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... shook her curls, and flirted through the window with a handsome but ill-tempered looking man on a fine horse, who praised her 'golden locks,' as he called them; and, oddly enough, when Melchior said the man was a lout, and that the locks in question were corkscrewy carrot shavings, she only seemed to like the man and his compliments the more. Meanwhile, the untidy brother pored over his book, or if he came to the window, it was only to ridicule the fine ladies and gentlemen, so Melchior sent him to Coventry. ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Beverley could again secure Alice for a dance, and he found it annoying him atrociously to see her smile sweetly on some buckskin-clad lout who looked like an Indian and danced like a Parisian. He did not greatly enjoy most of his partners; they could not appeal to any side of his nature just then. Not that he at all times stood too much on his aristocratic traditions, or lacked the virile traits common to ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... ordered his Boy to get off, and got on himself. But they hadn't gone far when they passed two women, one of whom said to the other: "Shame on that lazy lout to let his poor ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... be accomplished with the other," he answered hotly, and struck the cut-steel hilt of his sword. "You shall be rid of this lout as soon as ever I can come to him. I go after ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... of a practical joker fresh from a village ale-house. For to this teaching his more recent writings plainly tend; and alike in Tess and Life's Little Ironies the part played by the "President of the Immortals" is no sublimer—save in the amount of force exerted—than that of a lout who pulls a chair suddenly from under an old woman. Now, by wedding Necessity with uncouth Jocularity, Mr. Hardy may have found an hypothesis that solves for him all the difficulties of life. I am not concerned ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Meaister," retorted one of the biggest of the boys, a rustic lout of sixteen. "You ain't got the ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... is ready, dear," she said. "Don't worry; it was only some foolish lout from Bannalec. No one in St. Gildas or St. Julien would do ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... with tears of rage in his voice. "Ginseng! You and your imagination, you swine, you! Get off my ship, you lout, or I'll ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... been accomplished; but he just huddled down in one corner of the cage, half frightened to death, like a logy, lumpy, country bumpkin as he was, and I swept him back to his native coop in disgust. Relieved from the lout's presence, Cheri gradually laid aside his tantrums, smoothed down his ruffled plumes, and resumed the manners ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... was sent down with the thread as a line. An inquisitive lout of a seal did all it could to bite through the thread, but whether this was too strong or its teeth too poor, we managed after a lot of trouble to coax the marlinspike up again, and the interfering rascal, who had to come up to the surface now and then to take breath, ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... will be kind to you, you poor little fool. But a merchant will be so strict that you won't feel at home in your own house. You'll be wanting to fondle him and he will be counting his money, and when you sit down to meals with him, he'll grudge you every mouthful, though it's your own, the lout! . . . ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... squires' tables, "the bodies of young lads and maidens not exceeding fourteen or under twelve." Amiable humourist! laughing castigator of morals! There was a process well known and practised in the Dean's gay days: when a lout entered the coffee-house, the wags proceeded to what they called "roasting" him. This is roasting a subject with a vengeance. The Dean had a native genius for it. As the Almanach des Gourmands says, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... misconception which we regret to say is shared by the judge on the bench with the workingman on the construction gang, and the idiotic observation that "if women expect to vote they must expect to stand up in the street-car," is not, alas! confined to the lout, but is quite often voiced ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... number of old white-headed men smoking their pipes, and leathery-faced women on household duties intent, with a score or so of little cotton-headed children running about over the manure pile in the neighborhood of the barn, to keep the pigs company; here and there a strapping lout of a boy swinging on a gate and whistling for his own amusement; while cows, sheep, goats, chickens, and other domestic animals and birds browse, nibble, and peck all over the yard in such a lazy and rural manner as would delight an artist. This ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... shadow." All this began to depress me, and I carefully avoided walking in the sun; but this could not everywhere be the case: for in the next broad street I had to cross, and, unfortunately for me, at the very hour in which the boys were coming out of school, a humpbacked lout of a fellow—I see him yet—soon made the discovery that I was without a shadow, and communicated the news, with loud outcries, to a knot of young urchins. The whole swarm proceeded immediately to reconnoitre me, and to pelt me with mud. ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... "Old Lakatos Pal has hankered after him so, though he cared little enough about Andor at one time. Andor was his only brother's only child, and I suppose Pali bacsi[3] was suddenly struck with the idea that he really had no one to leave his hoardings to. He was always a fool and a lout. If Andor had lived it would have been all right. I think Pali bacsi was quite ready to do something really handsome for him. Now that Andor is dead he has no one; and when he dies his money all goes to the government. It is a pity," he added, ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... manager with a disgusted accent. "He always was an awkward lout. Of course there's a doctor—why didn't ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... sense in it! If I had been your reverence, I should have refused to do it. You haven't had your proper sleep, and you may have caught cold in the church. It is that which has upset you. Besides which it would be better to marry brute beasts than that Rosalie and her ugly lout. That brat of theirs dirtied one of the chairs.—But you ought to tell me when you feel poorly, and I could make you something warm.—Eh! Monsieur ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... a rosebud or a spray of forget-me-not would be found deposited on the chair in which she sat to play propriety when the pupils took their lessons. On the days when with great difficulty she managed to elude Reggie, a lout of a grammar-school sixth-form boy, whose name even she did not know, would watch her exit from the school, and stalk at her heels, keeping sentinel over her, in a way that she felt was making her ridiculous, to her own door. She had caught Mr. Pretty peeping between ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... march recline Dead gods devoid of feeling; And thick about each sun-cracked lout Dried Howisons ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... accurate, something jars. The orchestra plays Grieg and Moszkowski; a smell of chocolate is in the air; that tall, pink lieutenant over there, with his cropped head and his outstanding ears, his backfisch waist and his mudscow feet—that military gargoyle, half lout and half fop, offends the roving eye. No doubt a handsome man, by German standards—even, perhaps a celebrated seducer, a soldier with a future—but the mere sight of him suffices to paralyse an American esophagus. Besides, there is the smell ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... mule that drew our barge made fast, But not till a good hour was gone. Sleep was not to be thought upon, The cursed gnats were so provoking, The bull-frogs set up such a croaking. A bargeman, too, a drunken lout, And passenger, sang turn about, In tones remarkable for strength, Their absent sweethearts, till at length The passenger began to doze, When up the stalwart bargeman rose, His fastenings from the stone unwound, And left the mule to graze around; Then down upon ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... you'll be sorrier yet. There's the Governor with an attack of gout, screaming like a wounded horse, and you nowhere to be found. Be off, man—away with you at speed to Government House! You're awaited, I tell you. Best lend him a horse, Kent, or the lout'll be all night ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... Reilly, a huge lout of a fellow with a lowering countenance, ventured to expostulate. "Ye want to be careful of him. He's quicker'n ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... as address, of which peers and peeresses had become weary. They therefore welcomed this rustic candidate for the honour of giving wings to their hours of lassitude and weariness, with a welcome more than common; and when his approach was announced, the polished circle looked for the advent of a lout from the plough, in whose uncouth manners and embarrassed address they might find matter both for mirth and wonder. But they met with a barbarian who was not at all barbarous: as the poet met in Lord Daer feelings and sentiments as natural as those of a ploughman, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... my brain with thinkin' The way life goes in the world above, But lessons here there ain't no blinkin' Make me guess that the Umpire's Love! God knows I've muffed some easy chances Of doing good, like a silly lout; But because He's fairer nor any fancies I'm not in ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... dead—dead as Mumbo Jumbo. "Thank God!" he added inconsequently. He walked faster and faster, and on more than one occasion he brushed hurriedly against some of the brutal frequenters of that part of the world on foggy evenings. A rough lout growled belligerently at him, but shrank from the gladsome light of battle which leaped instantly into John Arniston's eye. To strike some one would have been a comfort to ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... three of the great novelists mentioned above would have made chapters of this); the dramatic and risky passages at the castle en Barrois; the contrast of Katherine's passion and Gerard's sluggishness; and the fashion in which this latter at once brings on the lout's defeat and saves the lady from danger at his hands—all this is novel-matter of almost the first class as regards incident, with no lack of character-openings to boot. Nor could anybody want a better "curtain" than the falling ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... but harsh to those whom he liked not, and from the first he scorned the young man. "For none," said he, "but a low-born lout would crave meat and drink when he might have asked for a horse and arms." But Sir Launcelot and Sir Gawain took the youth's part. Neither knew him for Gareth of the Orkneys, but both believed him to be a youth of good promise who, for his own reasons, ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... a lout who was even more empty-headed than his most empty-headed neighbour and who yet, throughout the domain, was looked on as a shrewd and ...
— A Book Without A Title • George Jean Nathan
... leaning against the rear wheel of the wain, were a lumpish wagoner and our surly host. The one was stolidly smoking, the other was holding the battered lantern out at arm's length, and I could, as it were, see him growling to the lout at his side, "'Ew's to fork out for this'n?" A girl went towards them from the house, circling, with averted head, far round the dead dragoon, bearing them from the kitchen ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the contents of the note, and handed it to his wife. Lady Angora, seeing it was an invitation from the Tortoshells to dinner on that day week, tossed her head as she gave it back, and Mr. De Mousa blandly informed the servant—a stupid lout, who had been bred in a farm-yard—that he would ...
— Comical People • Unknown
... the Devil with your book and your sucking animals. You've got nothing to show in your book. I know you—and your lout of a son, and your wenches of daughters, that ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... plans to gain his own, fair visions rose before his eyes; he'd hew a pathway to his throne—and he forgot the matron's pies. And then the cowherd's wife came in; she smelled the smoke, she gave a shout; she biffed him with the rolling pin, and cried: "Ods fish, you useless lout! You are not worth the dynamite 'twould take to blow you off the map! Your head is not upholstered right—you are ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... says, he is merciful to his beast. In the Hills there was no surer way to find trouble than to strike the horse of the cattle-drover. I have seen an indolent blacksmith booted across his shop because he kicked a horse on the leg to make him hold his foot up. And I have seen a lout's head broken because the master caught ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... they were truly the Lady Mirdath and her maid; and so I took chance when they had danced somewhat my way, to step over to them, and ask boldly for a dance. But, indeed, the tall one answered, simpering, that she was promised; and immediately gave her hand to a great hulking farmer-lout, and went round the green with him; and well punished she was for her waywardness; for she had all her skill to save her pretty feet from his loutish stampings; and very glad she was to meet the end of ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... I'm fond of Austin, God knows—but all my life he has been put in front of me. He has had all the chances; I've had none. With my father when he was alive, with my mother, it has always been Austin this and Austin that. He was the head of the school when I, the elder, was a lout in the lower fourth. He had a brilliant University career and went into the world and is making a fortune. I'm only able to ride and shoot and do country things. I've stuck here with only this mortgaged house belonging ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke |
