"Motley" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With Plato, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... from the stage-lights, to the right, as we look down towards the audience, Gustavus the Third was assassinated at a masquerade; and he was borne into that little chamber there, close by the scene, whilst all the outlets were closed, and the motley group of harlequins, polichinellos, wild men, gods and goddesses with unmasked faces, pale and terrified crept together; the dancing ballet-farce ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... five inches are suffered to escape from this confinement, and are then frizzed and curled, like a mop or a poodle's coat. Leonard Harper and I returned in this boat, Tahitian steering, Samoan, Futuman, and Anaiteans making one motley crew. The brisk trade soon carried us to the beach in front of Mr. Inglis's house, and arrived at the reef I rode out pick-a-back on the Samoan, Leonard following on a half-naked Anaitean. We soon found ourselves in the midst of a number of men, women and ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... time that motley group of bandits stood in the light, as if intimidated by the great dignity of the house, by the mysterious prestige of the Casa whose interior, probably, none of them had ever seen before. They gazed about silently, as if surprised to find ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... I found myself a part of that motley throng of keen-faced, fearless American life then pushing out over the frontiers. About me were men bound for Oregon, for California, for the Plains, and not a few whose purpose I took to be partisanship in the border fighting between slavery and free soil. ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... success, it was recognized that a twofold change of system was necessary: in internal and in external affairs. To strengthen the state internally a complete revolution of its administration was begun under the auspices of Count F. W. Haugwitz (1700-1765); the motley system which had survived from the middle ages was gradually replaced by an administrative machinery uniformly organized and centralized; and the army especially, hitherto patched together from the quotas raised and maintained by the various diets and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley. Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra's head, who pretend to clear the law of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... sitting as usual on our piazza, when, suddenly, I saw a flash of fire in the woods, followed by the report of a rifle, then others in quick succession. Rushing to the scene I found a few Southern whites armed with repeating rifles, facing a large band of negroes carrying a motley array of pitchforks, scythes, razors, clubs, and a few ancient shotguns. Yelling: "Hold up!" I sprang between the embattled hosts, and demanded to know what was ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... symbols of the power and majesty of death in the world. For the involuntary honour paid to death even by the ignorantly busy, and happy, he kept ever a grateful and a jealous eye; and as some funeral cortege passed like a dream, Charon's barge amid all the motley craft of merchandise and pleasure, he would watch sternly to see if the fat and prosperous moment would do honour to the carriages of the king. For a bowed head or a doffed hat he felt a personal gratitude. And, since Jenny died, ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... free traders say what they please on the subject, success has accompanied Bismarck's genius on this novel field, as well as on the older fields where all mankind acknowledges his superiority. For the coffers of the empire are filling. A motley majority in the Reichstag not only accepts, but improves upon his protectionist demands. He has become the demigod of the bloated manufacturing, mining, and landlord interests throughout the country. He is now about to win the last of the great industries, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... the house of Kantor. Attuned to the intimate atmosphere of the tenement which is so constantly rent with cry of child, child-bearing, delirium, delirium-tremens, Leon Kantor had howled no impression into the motley din of things. Isadore, already astride his chair, well into center-table, for first vociferous tear at the four-pound loaf; Esther Kantor, old at chores, settled an infant into the high chair, careful of tiny fingers in ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... broken. The spectators cannot bear to be so suddenly tossed from the serious to the mirthful, and from the mirthful to the serious. In short, such an heterogeneous adulteration has all the absurdity reproached to the motley mixture in tragi-comedy, without any thing of that connection which is preserved in that kind of justly exploded dramatic composition. How easy too to avoid this defect, by adapting the subjects of the dances to the different exigences of the ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... formed rather a motley band. Among them, besides those of our friends already mentioned, there were our hero's mother and all the Leather family. Captain Stride's daughter as well as his "Missus," and Mr Crossley's housekeeper, ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... was "among the captives by the river Chebar" that Ezekiel lived and prophesied, and it was on Chebar's banks that he saw his first vision of the Cherubim.(3) He and other of the Jewish exiles may perhaps have mingled with the motley crowd that once thronged the streets of Nippur, and they may often have gazed on the huge temple-tower which rose above the city's flat roofs. We know that the later population of Nippur itself included a considerable Jewish element, for the ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... again—the mad blaspheming week of revelry and devilry. The streets were rainbow with motley wear and thunderous with the roar and laughter of the crowd, recruited by a vast inflow of strangers; from the windows and roofs, black with heads, frolicsome hands threw honey, dirty water, rotten eggs, and even boiling oil upon the pedestrians and cavaliers below. Bloody tumults broke out, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... I think in the first mile the last umbrella went overboard, all having their covers burnt off from the frames, when a general melee took place among the deck passengers, each whipping his neighbor to put out the fire. They presented a very motley appearance on arriving at the first station. Then rails were secured and lashed between the trucks, taking the slack out of the coupling chains, thereby affording us a more steady run to the top of ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... motley crew of destroyers, drunkards, gluttons, satyrs and sirens, our friend the Jolly Baker was on the job—unfortunately for him, accompanied this ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... the works of John L. Motley may wish to see if their favorite passages are listed in this selection. The eBook editor will be glad to add your suggestions. One of the advantages of internet over paper publication is the ease of ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... having ordered the best dinner that the landlord was capable of serving, and a couple of bottles of wine. Over this they became so exhilarated as to attract a good deal of attention. A village tavern is always haunted by idle clerks, and a motley crowd of gossips, on the Sabbath, and to these the irruption of two young bloods from the city was a slight break in the monotony of their slow shuffling jog toward perdition; and when the fine gentlemen began to get drunk and ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... medicate, blend, cross; alloy, amalgamate, compound, adulterate, sophisticate, infect. Adj. mixed &c v.; implex^, composite, half-and-half, linsey-woolsey, chowchow, hybrid, mongrel, heterogeneous; motley &c (variegated) 440; miscellaneous, promiscuous, indiscriminate; miscible. Adv. among, amongst, amid, amidst; with; in the midst of, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... old-fashioned windows, the ceiling, panels, and chimney-piece of grim black oak—the latter elaborately but not very tastefully carved,—with tables and chairs to match, an old bookcase on one side of the fire-place, stocked with a motley assemblage of books, and an elderly cabinet piano on ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Loud the motley crowd were laughing at the strange, ungirlish freak, And the boy was scared and panting, and so dashed he could not speak; And, "Miss, I have good apples," a bolder lad did cry; But she answered, "No, I thank you," from the ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... man at work. It was a motley crowd. Creoles, Frenchmen, Spaniards, prison convicts, negroes, and even Lafitte, the far-famed "Pirate of the Gulf," and his crew of buccaneers, answered Jackson's call. The people cheerfully submitted to martial law. The streets ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... examples in real life as Rousseau and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, one such demonstration of the same moral in fiction as Werther, were enough to discourage the man of feeling. Therefore, when he still exists, he takes to motley, the only wear for the human race in troublesome circumstances which beset it with unpleasant recurrence. When you cannot exactly believe anything in religion, in politics, in literature, in art, and yet neither wish nor know how to do without it, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... their crew. The captain, while a competent seaman, was a brute in his treatment of his men. He knew, or at least he used, but two arguments in his dealings with them—a belaying pin and a revolver—nor is it likely that the motley aggregation he signed would have ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... comparatively passive for a time, and allowed himself to be hauled, by the united efforts of the crew, some three or four fathoms towards the brig, when, annoyed by the restraint imposed upon him, or disliking the wild and motley appearance of the ship's company, he took a broad sheer to starboard, the hook snapped like a pipestem, and the hated monster swam off in another direction, wagging his tail in the happy consciousness that he was "free, untrammelled, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Browning; and did we dare rebel against God's will, we should grieve deeply that she was not permitted to glorify the Right in America as she has glorified it in Italy. Among the last things that she read were Motley's letters on the "American Crisis," and the writer will ever hold in dear memory the all but final conversation had with Mrs. Browning, in which these letters were discussed and warmly approved. In referring to the attitude taken by foreign nations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... journalists, made free of a few newspaper offices, and welcomed in the pleasure haunts of pressmen. This life, whose dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of universal blague, like the stupid clowning of a harlequin by the spangles of a motley costume, induced in him a Frenchified—but most un-French—cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority. Of his own country he used to say to his French associates: "Imagine an atmosphere of opera-bouffe in which all the comic business of stage statesmen, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... fair and our station on the parapets at Grotta-Ferrata. Opposite us is a penthouse, (where nobody peaks and pines,) whose jutting fraschi-covered eaves and posts are adorned with gay draperies; and under the shadow of this is seated a motley set of peasants at their lunch and dinner. Smoking plates come in and out of the dark hole of a door that opens into kitchen and cellar, and the camerieri cry constantly, "Vengo subito" "Eccomi qua"—whether they come or not. Big-bellied flasks of rich ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... International Assembly of Scientists, officially known as Conference No. 2, had been sitting, but not progressing, in the large lecture hall of the Smithsonian Institution, which probably had never before seen so motley a gathering. Each nation had sent three representatives, two professional scientists, and a lay delegate, the latter some writer or thinker renowned in his own country for his wide knowledge and powers of ratiocination. ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... the throng outside the gate covers the road leading off to Joppa. Turning from the Pharisee, we are attracted by some parties who, as subjects of study, opportunely separate themselves from the motley crowd. First among them a man of very noble appearance—clear, healthful complexion; bright black eyes; beard long and flowing, and rich with unguents; apparel well-fitting, costly, and suitable for the ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... night, when my custom invites A stroll in old London for curious sights, I am likely to stray by a devious way Where goodies are spread in a motley array, The things which some eyes would appear to despise Impress me as pathos in homely disguise, And my battered waif-friend shall have pennies to spend, So long as I've got 'em (or chums that will lend); And the urchin shall share ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... monks have chaunted mass, And clown's and gossip's laughing face Is turned unto the porch,— For now comes mime and motley fool, Guarding the dizened Lord Misrule With mimic pomp and march; And the burly Abbot of Unreason Forgets not that the blythe Yule season Demands his paunch at church; And he useth his staff While the rustics laugh,— And, still, as he layeth his crosier ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... that he found himself at last, under the escort of a slave-party, on the way to Ujiji. Mr. Waller has graphically described the situation. "At last he makes a start on the 11th of December, 1868, with the Arabs, who are bound eastward for Ujiji. It is a motley group, composed of Mohamad and his friends, a gang of Unyamwezi hangers-on, and strings of wretched slaves yoked together in their heavy slave-sticks. Some carry ivory, others copper, or food for the march, while hope and ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... applause followed this announcement. The breaking up of a camp is always joyous news to men whose trade is war. It seemed to have a like effect upon this motley ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... winding mountain path See the long-drawn column go; Himalayan aftermath Lying rosy on the snow. Motley ministers of wrath Building better than they know, In the rosy aftermath ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... respects, however, the advantage lay wholly with the enemy. They had ninety guns, while the allies had but fifty-one; while out of the 60,000 troops under Marshal Tallard 45,000 were the best troops France could produce. The allied army was a motley assembly, composed of nearly equal numbers of English, Prussians, Danes, Wurtemburghers, Dutch, Hanoverians, and Hessians. But although not more numerous than the troops of other nationalities, it was felt by all that the brunt of the battle ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... No. 20 looks out on the narrow yard wherein ordinary captives are allowed to disport themselves for three half-hours daily. It is a very motley crowd. There are no Confederate soldiers here; all these are confined in the Old Capitol; but of every other ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool;—a miserable world!— As I do live by food, I met a fool, Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good terms, In good set terms,—and yet a motley fool. 'Good morrow, fool,' quoth ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... who are living not by years nor by weeks, but by breaths. They are motley enough, for the most part, sitting upon a long bench with their backs against the wall,—ill-shaved, haggard, anxious, and the dungeon door at their left opens now and then to show behind it a moving bayonet. There are women within the court proper, edging upon the reporters, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... afternoon, comfortable in a rim of shade in the courtyard, the men were arranging for the start the next morning. The sun beat fiercely on the square opening roofed by the blue of the sky and cut by the black shadow of walls. In the cooling shade the motley company lay sprawling on the ground or propped against the doors of the store rooms. The open space was brilliant with the blankets of Indians, the bare limbs of brown children, and the bright serapes of the Mexicans, who were too lazy to move out of the sun. In ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... a monkey. It was very common for his companions to make bets with him: for example, that he would not be able to climb up the ceiling of a room, or scramble over a certain house-top. Grimaldi, the famous clown, used to say, "Colonel Mackinnon has only to put on the motley costume, and he would totally ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... them voters if they would adopt it. That is, Total Abstinence from Tobacco, as well as from Ardent Spirits. Thus, no report of modern times equals the good Squire's summing-up, which he gives on these occasions, from the great farm-wagon tribune, to the multitudinous and motley congregation assembled under his park trees. This year it was unusually rich and piquant, from the expanded area of events and aspects. In presenting these, as bearing upon the causes of Temperance, Peace, Anti-War, Anti- Slavery, Anti-Tobacco, Anti-Capital ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the highest officials of the Provisional Government, so the others were forced to wait outside in the gathering dusk. And those Ministers, those secretaries of departments, those generals and colonels, what a motley crowd they formed! There was scarcely a whole garment among them. They were sunburnt, wind-browned, earnest men, the old ones grayed and grizzled from worry, the younger ones wasted from hardships in the field. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... of it. He told me (but I am sure this is not known to any out of our own family) that as Dr. Lindhorst was returning home after his second long absence, he entered a small village near Turin, just as a detachment of 'The Army of Italy' were leaving it. The rear presented the usual motley collection of baggage-wagons, disabled soldiers, sutlers, camp-women, and hangers-on of all sorts, who attend in the steps of a victorious troop. As Paul Lindhorst stopped to view the spectacle, and while the wild strains of music could be heard echoing and re-echoing as ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the captain of the Guard that the motley caravan in the avenue was made up of loyal, representative citizens from the important villages of the realm. They were admitted to the grounds ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... lilies rear them in the watery mead; From early dawn the livelong hours she told, Till late at silent eve she penn'd the fold. Deep in the grove, beneath the secret shade, 15 A various wreath of odorous flowers she made: Gay-motley'd[12] pinks and sweet jonquils she chose, The violet blue that on the moss-bank grows; All sweet to sense, the flaunting rose was there; The finish'd chaplet well adorn'd ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... A motley company have here performed their parts: Savages of the mound-building age, rearing upon these banks curious earthworks for archaeologists of the nineteenth century to puzzle over; Iroquois war-parties, silently swooping upon sleeping villages ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... to neither class; my persuasion is, that they originate in some brain now far distant; that that brain had no distinct volition in anything that occurred; that what does occur reflects but its devious, motley, ever-shifting, half-formed thoughts; in short, that it has been but the dreams of such a brain put into action and invested with a semisubstance. That this brain is of immense power, that it can set ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... memory. He stood with his hand resting on the rail of the gangway, and when presently it was raised to the side of the steamer, he still kept his position, so that he could instantly catch sight of his father as he passed down. I stood close behind him, and watched the motley procession of passengers; most of them had the dull colourless skin which bespeaks long residence in India, and a particularly yellow and peevish-looking old man was grumbling loudly as he slowly made his ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... motley crew. Women laden with bundles and dragging reluctant children by the hands panted up the steep slope with terror stamped on ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... The motley crowd from the garret had come with all the pails of the farm. They flung themselves upon the well. It was a leisurely old machine, long dwelling in indolence. It was in the habit of giving out water with a sort of reluctance. ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... Brennoralt, also a tragedy, was first published under the title of The Discontented Colonel, in 1639, as a satire on the Scottish insurgents. The Goblins, a comedy in five acts, is enlivened by the presence of a motley crew of devils, clowns, wenches, and fiddlers; and an unfinished piece, entitled The Sad One, may also be classed as a tragedy, as it opens briskly with a 'murder within' in the very first scene, which undoubtedly would have culminated in wholesale horrors had ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in, the sweeps being worked by the motley crew of scoundrels on board with a regularity which drew rough compliments from the men, and made ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... couple of huge elephants, surrounded by camels, horses, and mules, while on trollies stood cages of wild beasts, lions, tigers, jackals; one of the elephants was trumpeting, the camels were groaning, the carnivora roaring; mixed with their din were the voices of a motley crew, men and women, having the same appearance in dress and manner as that of the two men he had followed. Dene saw that it was a travelling menagerie and circus, and he looked on it with an amusement which predominated over ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... to gaze out over the mysterious, foreign motley array of roofs and obtruding skyscrapers of ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... ordinary masked ball. Numbers of artists had arranged to go, accompanied by a whole cohort of models and pupils, who, by midnight, began to create a tremendous din. Raoul climbed the grand staircase at five minutes to twelve, did not linger to look at the motley dresses displayed all the way up the marble steps, one of the richest settings in the world, allowed no facetious mask to draw him into a war of wits, replied to no jests and shook off the bold familiarity of a number of couples who had already become a trifle too gay. Crossing the big crush-room ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... Wind tumultuous thousands pour. With these I enter'd a stupendous Hall, The scene of some approaching festival. O'er the wide portals, full in sight, were spread Banners of yellow hue, bestrip'd with red, Whereon, in golden characters, were seen: THE ANNIVERSARY OF FOLLY'S QUEEN! Strange motley ornaments the Building grac'd, With every emblem of corrupted Taste. No stately Column rose to meet the Dome, No Sculpture borrow'd from the Arts of Rome; No well-wrought Frieze crept graceful on the walls, Th' Acanthus weav'd no splendid Capitals; Nor did the Attic elegance supply ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... part, the owners of large collections have their chief anxiety about the binding and the type. Take down the whole set of Walter Scott's novels, and find that only one of them has been read through. There are Motley's histories on that shelf; but get into conversation about the Prince of Orange, and see that Motley has not been read. I never was more hungry than once while walking in a Charleston mill amid whole harvests of rice. ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... cranks of an Achard, by the wreathed smiles of a Rose Cheri. Where the funeral once took its slow and solemn way, rouged processions pass, tinsel heroes strut, and vapour. Thousand-tinted garlands supplant the pale immortelles that decked the graves; the sable cloak is doffed, and motley's the only wear. Surely actors must be bold men to tread a stage covering so many mouldering relics of mortality. Not for Potosi, and the Real del Monte to boot, would we do it, lest, at the witching hour, some ghastly skeleton array should rise and drive us from the Golgotha, or drag us to the charnel-house ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... with U—— to Mr. Motley's balcony, in the Corso, and saw the Carnival from it yesterday afternoon; but the spectacle is strangely like a dream, in respect to the difficulty of retaining it in the mind and solidifying it into a description. I ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... observe how at this early period of Carlyle's life, when all the talent and learning of England bowed at these levees before the gigantic speculator and dreamer, he, perhaps alone, stood aloof from the motley throng of worshippers,—with them, but not of them,—coolly analyzing every sentence delivered by the oracle, and sufficiently learned in the divine lore to separate the gold from the dross. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the corvette Louisiana, anchored in the stream. No sooner had the heads of the British columns appeared than they were driven back by the fire of the American batteries; the field-pieces, mortars, and rocket guns were then brought up, and a sharp artillery duel took place. The motley crew of the Louisiana handled their long ship guns with particular effect; the British rockets proved of but little service [Footnote: Latour, 121.]; and after a stiff fight, in which they had two field-pieces and a light mortar dismounted, [Footnote: ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... you please, the Jack Pudding to the company, whose business it was to crack the best joke, and sing the best song,—he could. Unluckily, however, this functionary was for the present obliged to absent himself from St. Ronan's; for, not recollecting that he did not actually wear the privileged motley of his profession, he had passed some jest upon Captain MacTurk, which cut so much to the quick, that Mr. Meredith was fain to go to goat-whey quarters, at some ten miles' distance, and remain there in a sort of concealment, until the affair ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... himself treated like a sans-culotte was guillotined four days before Robespierre, whose death would have saved him. His young widow left prison, reduced to extreme want, and took refuge with her father-in-law, at Fontainebleau; then she made her appearance in the motley society which, first showed itself in the drawing-room of Madame Tallien, then at the Luxembourg under Barras. Rivalling Madame Tallien and Madame Recamier in popularity, she smiled through her tears, like Andromache in Homer. Her means becoming greater, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—John Lothrop Motley. ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... clown." The uncle smiled. "This at first, was a boy's whim, an illusion. That ambition was based entirely upon a desire to acquire sufficient money to make me comfortable. It was a boyish fancy at the beginning but some of the happiest days of my life were when I wore the motley and endeavored to spread gladness as ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... (Psa. 37:1) "Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased" (Psa. 49:16). But go thou into the sanctuary of thy God, read His Word, and understand the end of these men-(Mason). Often, as the motley reflexes of my experience move in long processions of manifold groups before me, the distinguished and world-honoured company of Christian mammonists appear to the eye of my imagination as a drove of camels heavily laden, yet all at full speed; and each in the confident expectation ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... on, with folded arms; moved by the grandeur and majesty of the scene. The devouring element, loosed in its awful recklessness there in the heart of this lonely forest. The motley group of black and white standing out in the great red light, powerless to do more than wait and watch. But more was he stirred to the depths of his being, by the sight of this human tragedy ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... on his cap and bells, he too was "wont to set the table on a roar," as the feasters at a hundred tables, from "Casey's Table d'Hote" to the banquets of the opulent East, now rise to testify. But Shakespeare plainly reveals, concerning Yorick, that mirth was not his sole attribute,—that his motley covered the sweetest nature and the tenderest heart. It could be no otherwise with one who loved and comprehended childhood and whom the children loved. And what does Hamlet say?—"He hath borne me ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... hard in time; after which it is whitewashed. The roof was thatched with a hard sort of rushes, more durable and less likely to catch fire than straw. There was no ceiling under the roof, but the rafters overhead were hung with a motley assemblage of the produce of the chase and farm, as large whips made of rhinoceros-hide, leopard and lion skins, ostrich eggs and feathers, strings of onions, ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... little chance of this. As they crossed the court, lackeys, with smoking dishes and, full jugs, passed and repassed continually, although it was long past midnight. On entering the hall, they found Sir Randal at the head of a vast table, surrounded by a fiercer and more motley collection of individuals than had congregated there even in the time of Sir Rollo. The lord of the castle had signified that "it was his royal pleasure to be drunk," and the gentlemen of his train had ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... commission of the prince of Orange. This event, which took place on the 1st of April 1572, was the first blow in the long war of Dutch independence, and was followed by a general outbreak of the patriotic party (Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, part iii. chapter vi.). "The Brill" was one of the four Dutch towns handed over to Queen Elizabeth in 1584 as security for English expenses incurred in aiding the Dutch. Brielle is the birthplace of the famous admiral Martin van Tromp, and also of Admiral van Almonde, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new; Most true it is that I have look'd on ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of Bilhah and Zilpah, wives of his father. Joseph complained on his brethren, and accused them to their father of the most evil sin. Israel loved Joseph above all his sons for as much as he had gotten him in his old age, and made for him a motley coat. His brethren then seeing that he was beloved of his father more than they were, hated him and might not speak to him a peaceable word. It happed on a time that Joseph dreamed, and saw a sweven ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... clustered on that miserable noontide, about four hundred human beings—a weak, hungry, and emaciated looking throng for the most part; their half naked forms, browned by the sun, and hardened by the winter winds—a motley gathering; amongst whom there were scores of fasting men, and hundreds through whose wretched dwellings the, wind and rain found free ingress. They were poor, they were weak, they were ignorant, they were unarmed! but there was one, thing at least which they possessed—that quality which ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... a motley crowd, ragged, swaggering, jolly. There were husky, big-limbed youths, and bold-faced, loud-tongued girls. To-morrow they would start up-country to some backwoods barony in the kingdom of cotton, and work till Christmas time. Today was the last in town; there was craftily advanced money in their ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of puzzles," he resumed, "which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word—the name of town, river, state or empire—any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... mediaeval name and forms of the Holy Roman Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria, combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second order, such as Saxony ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... City, Sunday, March 2. We have a rather motley-looking set. A good many look like broken-down schoolmasters or ministers who have excellent dispositions but not much talent. As the kind of talent required where we are going is rather peculiar, the men may be useful, but I don't believe there will ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... this violent emotion, was a young man, dressed in a mean and tattered garb, his face begrimed corresponding with that of the motley crew by which he was surrounded. He was a perfect stranger to the others present, and had not participated in their previous conversation, nor been personally ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... up and deep in the discoloured wall, allowed a few rays of yellow sunlight to fall revealingly upon a motley collection of antiquities. Empire chairs were piled upon Louis Quinze writing-desks. Tables of every known period formed a leaning tower in one corner. Rich Persian rugs draped huge Florentine mirrors; priests' vestments trailed from half-open chests ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... arrived at Quebec. In the colony of New York Sir William Johnson, the rough and cheery Irishman, much loved of the Iroquois, was gathering forces to attack Canada. Early in July, 1755, Johnson had more than three thousand provincial troops at Albany, a motley horde of embattled farmers, most of them with no uniforms, dressed in their own homespun, carrying their own muskets, electing their own officers, and altogether, from the strict soldier's point of view, a rabble rather than an army. To meet this force and destroy ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... Scanning the motley scene that varies round. There some grave Moslem to devotion stoops, And some that smoke, and some that play, are found. Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground Half-whispering, there the Greek is heard to prate. Hark! from the mosque the nightly solemn sound; The Muezzin's call doth shake ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... pretended to join in the pursuit of the nimble runaways, but only pretended. Then he suddenly perceived that they were growing breathless and had almost fallen beneath the feet of a mighty Norman horse. The man beneath his motley uniform rose to the emergency. Catching the bridle of a near-by pony, he flung the monkey from its back, scooped the babies up from the ground, set them in the monkey's place and, mounting behind ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... Such a crowd of people—for Janenne took part in it—that there was scarcely anybody left to look at it. But then the processionists had the pleasure of looking at each other. The band came first, in blue blouse and clean white trousers. Then came the soldiery, a motley crew, with Monsieur Dorn at their head, drawn sword in hand, and next to him a personage who might have been translated clean from Astley's—a gentleman in long hose, with a flower on each shoe, and a hat of red velvet shaped like a bread tray, decorated with prodigious coloured ...
— Schwartz: A History - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... years flit by And after them at headlong pace The evanescent fashions fly In motley and amusing chase. The world is ever altering! Farthingales, patches, were the thing, And courtier, fop, and usurer Would once in powdered wig appear; Time was, the poet's tender quill In hopes of everlasting fame A finished madrigal would frame Or couplets more ingenious still; Time was, ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... table d'hote at six p.m., coffee, tea, liquors, and a grand ball to complete the work of digestion. A long corridor leads to this earthly Eden, and the two doors at the end of it open, the one into the dining, and the other into the ball-room. A motley crew collected there for the evening meal, and on Sundays it is next to impossible to procure a seat. But the dining-room is the Grand Turk's greatest attraction, for as soon as the dessert is over the head waiter makes ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... with vacant face, The Proteus Hill[17] put in his modest plea,— Let Favour speak for others, Worth for me.— For who, like him, his various powers could call Into so many shapes, and shine in all? 110 Who could so nobly grace the motley list, Actor, Inspector, Doctor, Botanist? Knows any one so well—sure no one knows— At once to play, prescribe, compound, compose? Who can—but Woodward[18] came,—Hill slipp'd away, Melting, like ghosts, before the rising day. With that low cunning, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... to be coldly pondered over, and skeptically conned; they were read aloud at solemn festivals to listening thousands: they were to arrest the curiosity—to amuse the impatience—to stir the wonder of a lively and motley crowd. Thus the historian imbibed naturally the spirit of the tale-teller, as he was driven to embellish his history with the romantic legend—the awful superstition—the gossipy anecdote—which yet characterize the stories of the popular and oral fictionist in the bazaars of the Mussulman, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Orange Lodge, of which community he certainly shows no favourable specimen; but by degrees these national feelings and asperities become more softened, and the second generation know little of them. The settlement from whence these sketches are drawn, was formed of a motley mixture of all the different nations—Blue Nose, English, ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... cried Eddring, suddenly. "Open the gates! Let 'em out! I want to hear 'em holler!" The pack poured out, motley, vociferous, eager for the chase, filling the air with their wild music, with a riot of primeval, savage life. "Get me a horse saddled, Cal, quick," cried Eddring. "I want to feel leather under me again. I want to feel the air in my ears. I've got to ride, to ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... the Box Street tenement looked out upon the river. It was lifted high: the activities of the broad stream and of the motley world of the other shore went silently; the petty noises of life—the creak and puff and rumble of its labouring machinery,—straying upward from the fussy places below, were lost ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... in the gallery giving the signal and their friends on the lawn joining in enthusiastically. They were a motley crowd—over a hundred I should think—ranging from the municipal councillor of La Ferte, in his high hat and black cloth Sunday coat, to the humpbacked daughter of the village carpenter and the idiot boy who lived in a cave on the road and frightened the ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... held in no other spot. Hence the Arabs are said to be stone worshippers; but the phrase is an awkward one: what they worshipped was not the stone but a god connected with it. And the early gods of Arabia are a motley company; it is only in their relations to their worshippers and in the order of the worship paid them that they have some uniformity. The greatest and oldest deity of the Arabs is Allat or Alilat, "the Lady." Like the female deity found in all primitive Semitic religions, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... hodge-podge. The question I put in a wider reference is the question of the Englishman, as expressed in the Scotchwoman's dialect, What's intilt? and I assume that there enter into it, as radically component parts, at least the ingredients of this motley soup. Into the large hodge-podge of nature and terrestrial economics, as into this small section of Scotch cookery, there enter the element of water, the flesh of animals, and the fruits of the earth, as well as the processes by which these are brought to hand and rendered serviceable to ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... Frenchman, who had found some boys playing at soldiers, and was teaching them in his own tongue from apparently vague recollections of the manual of arms. I do not insist that we profited by the occasion; I only say that life likes a motley wear, and that he who rejects the antic aspects it so often inappropriately puts ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... not, however, object to the sergeant joining him; and the other three men were accordingly ordered to take up their quarters at the hut, with its motley inhabitants. ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... are wrong. We are not sure whether Mr. Kemble, who, as an excellent critic has observed, is always seeking for novelty and always running into error, may not lately have added that patch to his motley garb of new readings; but his authority is disallowed. Even Garrick, whose claims were of a very superior kind, when he attempted to render the English language, already too unstable, more so, by his innovations, was ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... saw the corner where I once sat down on a stool to have a pair of ready-made half-boots fitted on. I have been seduced more than once, in that street on a Saturday night, by a show-van at a corner; and have gone in, with a very motley assemblage, to see the Fat-pig, the Wild-indian, and the Little-lady. There were two or three hat-manufactories there then (I think they are there still); and among the things which, encountered anywhere or under any circumstances, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... ago, at the hour of noon, a motley throng of people might have been seen pouring forth from the gates of a far Eastern city and moving towards a hill called Calvary. Amidst soldiers and civilians, both friends and foes, the central figure is that of a man scarcely more than thirty years of age. He has all the attributes, ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe |
