"Plague" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Mohawks alone. After which, saying that the Black Robe priests had sent them a famine plague in a box, the Mohawks seized new and sharper hatchets, again sped upon the war-trail to the St. Lawrence; and smote so terribly that at last they killed, in the forest, even Piskaret himself, while singing a peace-song he started to ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... did not know what to do with the succession of pairs of young men, whose mission seemed to be to plague their master consciously, and to plague him unconsciously. Once or twice Mr. Gibson had declined taking a fresh pupil, in the hopes of shaking himself free from the incubus, but his reputation as a clever surgeon had spread so rapidly that fees which he had thought prohibitory, were willingly ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... with very few other comforts. He was one of the finest men I ever saw, full of natural intelligence and activity of mind and body, but he could neither read nor write. He drank but little whiskey, and but rarely chewed tobacco, and was therefore more free from that plague spot of spitting which rendered male colloquy so difficult to endure. He worked for us frequently, and often used to walk into the drawing-room and seat himself on the sofa, and tell me all his plans. He made an engagement with ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... whom Grotius calls the honour and last resource of Germany[364]: the tenth of July, 1639, was the last of this illustrious personage. It was at that time very doubtful[365] whether he died of the plague, which prevailed in those parts, or of poison. Grotius tells us[366], that the Duke himself thought they had shortened his days: he even cites on this subject the Prince's funeral oration delivered at Brisac, wherein the author was not afraid of advancing this anecdote. Grotius was also ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... search thee as Jerusalem is searched with lighted candles. I tell thee the truth, I shall bend from heaven all My power which My Father has given Me, and all My wisdom, and all My love, and all My grace. What to do, dost thou think? What to do but to make thee to know and to acknowledge the plague of thine own heart. The deceitfulness, that is, the depth of wickedness, and the abominableness, past all words, of thine own heart. I do not ascend to My Father, with all things in My hand, to make thy seat soft, and thy cup sweet, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... thought of going to New York in this hot weather, when the smallpox, and the dysentery, and the plague, and mercy knew what was there? Besides that, how did Barbara intend to manage? What was she ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... preposterous prejudices about liberty and justice. The man of sense tramples on such impositions, and shows what Nature's justice is.... I confess, Socrates, philosophy is a highly amusing study—in moderation, and for boys. But protracted too long, it becomes a perfect plague. Your philosopher is a complete novice in the life comme il faut.... I like very well to see a child babble and stammer; there is even a grace about it when it becomes his age. But to see a man continue the prattle of the child, is absurd. Just so with your philosophy." ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... eye was on the Inchcape float. Quoth he, 'My men, put out the boat, And row me to the Inchcape Rock, And I'll plague the Abbot of Aberbrothok.' ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... ending to this period of prosperity was brought about by the devastations of the pestilence known to modern readers as the Black Death, which since 1347 had decimated the Levant. This was the bubonic plague, almost as familiar in the east of to-day as in the mid-fourteenth century. It was brought along the chief commercial highways which bound the western world to the markets of the east. First introduced into the west at the great ports of the Mediterranean, Venice, ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... course, explaining why God had allowed the volcano to behave in this unseemly fashion, and brimming over with words of consolation for his daughter-to-be. God, if so disposed, could work a miracle and drive away the plague, even as he had sent it. Ashes or no ashes, all was for ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... also Feva), the son of the aforementioned Flaccitheus, following his father's devotion, began, at the commencement of his reign, often to visit the holy man. His deadly and noxious wife, named Gisa, always kept him back from the remedies of clemency. For she, among the other plague-spots of her iniquity, even tried to have certain Catholics re-baptized: but when her husband did not consent, on account of his reverence for St. Severinus, she gave up immediately her sacrilegious intention, burdening the Romans, nevertheless, with hard conditions, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... back, "you wish to cause my death, you ecclesiastical idiot. The principal thing for you is to enjoy yourself; my sweet carcass, a thing accessory. Your pleasure will be my death, and then you'll canonise me perhaps? Ah, you have the plague, and you would give it to me. Go somewhere else, you brainless priest. Ah! touch me not," said she, seeing him about to advance, "or I will stab ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... their little beehive-shaped cells, or fled from the dreadful solitude to gather in some wealthy abbey which could still feed its monks; and isle and vale which had echoed their holy chants knew the sounds no more. Over all, unlifting, unchanging, brooded the deadly vapour, bearing the plague in its heavy folds, and filling the air with a sultry ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... full. Then the evenings were usually clear, so that when the party broke up, the mermen could see their way in the moonlight to swim home safely with their mermaid friends. For, there were sea monsters that loved to plague the merefolk, and even threatened to eat them up! The mermaids, dear creatures, had to be escorted home, but they felt safe, for their mermen brothers and daddies were so fierce that, except sharks, even the larger fish, such as porpoises and dolphins were ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... large mouse is seen in the burrows of the ground; it is of the eight-toothed species (Octodon Cummingii, Benn.), and has a brush-formed tail. As the fields round Valparaiso are not cultivated these animals do no harm, otherwise they would be the plague of agriculture, and probably are so in the interior parts of the country. Now and then a sea-dog may be observed in the bay; but the whale is seldom seen, and whenever one appears he is immediately killed, as there is always a whaler at ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... boy was not so old as Trot, and small as she was he was half a head shorter in height. The most remarkable thing about Button-Bright was that he was always quiet and composed, whatever happened, and nothing was ever able to astonish him. Trot liked him because he was not rude and never tried to plague her. Cap'n Bill liked him because he had found the boy cheerful and brave at all times, and willing to do anything ...
— The Scarecrow of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... to cut off Mantell and Throbson's from the fire station that was still in ineffectual progress. Further a number of people appeared to be destroying interminable red and grey snakes under the heated direction of Mr. Rusper; it was as if the High Street had a plague of worms, and beyond again the more timid and less active crowded in front of an accumulation of arrested traffic. Most of the men were in Sabbatical black, and this and the white and starched quality of the women and children in ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... wine towards him at the same time. Durnovo had not slept for forty hours. The excitement of his escape from the plague-ridden camp had scarcely subsided. The glitter of the silver on the table, the shaded candles, the subtle sensuality of refinement and daintiness appealed to his hot-blooded nature. He was a little off his feet perhaps. He took the decanter and put it to the worst ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... the other; "some paltry convenience to the baronet. A plague on all rogues! I shall but just drink destruction to them to-night and leave London to-morrow ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... Pope's expense, and a decent suit of clothes provided for him at the cost of eight ducats[413]. Besides these there was a bookbinder, also called John. In the following year two keepers only are mentioned, Demetrius and Josias. The latter died of the plague in 1478. The salary of the librarian was at the rate of ten ducats a month, and that of each of his subordinates at the rate of one ducat for the same period. This arrangement appears to have been confirmed by a Bull of Sixtus IV. before the end ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... to plague you, darling. As you say, why want to know more? Why want to know anything of that 'small' mystery—Je m'en fiche, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Ortol, and the remaining Ortolians, with their aid, tried to rebuild the civilization. But what a sorry thing! The cities were gigantic, stinking, plague-ridden morgues. And the plague broke among those few remaining people. The Ortolians had done everything in their power with the serums—but too late. The Seltonians had been protected with it on landing—but even that was not enough. Again the wild fires of that ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... care. Yet, to be just to these poor men of pelf, Each does but hate his neighbour as himself: Damned to the mines, an equal fate betides The slave that digs it, and the slave that hides. B. Who suffer thus, mere charity should own, Must act on motives powerful, though unknown. P. Some war, some plague, or famine they foresee, Some revelation hid from you and me. Why Shylock wants a meal, the cause is found— He thinks a loaf will rise to fifty pound. What made directors cheat in South-Sea year? To live on venison when it sold so dear. Ask you ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... danger, they return thanks to Heaven,—we easily learn to understand how natural it was that such men should see miracles in every blessing vouchsafed to them, whether great or small, just as the Jews of old, in that sense the true people of God, saw miracles, saw the finger of God in every plague that visited their camp, and in every spring of water that saved them from destruction. When the Egyptians were throwing the Greek fire into the camp of the Crusaders, St. Louis raised himself in his bed at the report of every ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... that we have sent to India from this Western World have been trying with Bibles, and good deeds, and kind faces, and Sunday-schools to get the Hindoos to believe that it would not be a sin to kill the rats and stop the bubonic plague. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... angry myself that, sapperment! I did give him a tip over the side; but split him! the comical little devil swam like a duck; so I made him swim astern for a mile to teach him manners, and then took him in when he was sinking. By the knocking Nicholas I he'll plague you, now he's come over the herring-pond! When he was so high he had the spirit of thunder ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... "Like the Plague of Frogs, there they are come out; defiling the Reich's honor. Stork, when wilt thou appear, then," and with thy stiff mandibles act upon them a little? [Mentzel, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... when the manuscript was at hand; and so many of the characters resemble those adopted to represent the planets and the signs of the zodiac, that one is led to suspect in it a note of the positions of the heavenly bodies at the time of some remarkable accident;—perhaps the plague, of which 30,578 persons died in London, during the year ending 22nd December, 1603. The period of the commencement, the duration, or the cessation of such an epidemic might naturally be ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... other legends of Babylonia may be mentioned those of Namtar, the plague-demon, of Urra, the pestilence, of Etanna and of Zu. Hades, the abode of Nin-erisgal or Allat, had been entered by Nergal, who, angered by a message sent to her by the gods of the upper world, ordered Namtar to strike off her head. She, however, declared that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... displeasure, is a question of Fate. A war is undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe for a duchy. The prolific sun, and the sudden and rank plenty which his heat engenders, make subsistence easy. On the other side, the desert, the simoom, the mirage, the lion, and the plague endanger it, and life hangs on the contingency of a skin of water more or less. The very geography of old Persia showed these contrasts. "My father's empire," said Cyrus to Xenophon, "is so large, ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and tempestuous sea, these wretched young men remained eighty hours in a painful position, till they reached Leghorn, where they were conducted to the quarantine, as though affected with leprosy and plague, and thence embarked for New York, where they arrived totally destitute of clothes ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... blasphemous, and lost in fathomless admiration for the marvellous power of the wizard, Gerald sought to get closer to Karospina and Mila. But wedged in by uniformed men, and the darkness thick as an Egyptian plague, he despairingly awaited the apotheosis. His eyes were sated by the miracles of harmonies—noiseless harmonies. It was a new art, and one for the peoples of the earth. Never had the hues of the universe been so assembled, grouped, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... stirrings of your heart in matters of superiority. Pray to be delivered from such thoughts as these: I am older. I deserve better. I have laboured more. I have more talent. Such thoughts are the plague and poison of the heart. Believe me, if there remain in you any allowed hankerings after the praises of men, though you may have spent many years in prayer, or rather in idle forms of prayer, you have made no progress, and never will, till your heart is crucified ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... inflamed his yellow balls: I cried and threw my staff and he was gone. Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me, And once a town declared me for a spy; But at the end, I reach Jerusalem, Since this poor covert where I pass the night, This Bethany, lies scarce the distance thence A man with plague-sores at the third degree Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here! 'Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe, To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip And share with thee whatever Jewry yields. A viscid choler is observable In tertians, I was nearly bold to say; And ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... a larger scale than usual of the mysterious physical agency concerned in earthquakes, and also for the awful human tragedy [Endnote: 5] Of this no picture can ever hope to rival that hasty one sketched in the letter of the chaplain to the Lisbon factory. The plague of Athens as painted by Thucydides or Lucretius, nay even the fabulous plague of London by De Foe, contain no scenes or situations equal in effect to some in this plain historic statement. Nay, it would perhaps be difficult to produce a passage from Ezekiel, from Aeschylus, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... own possessions, together with such a cultivation of their crops as would provide them with bread, and such care of their immense flocks and herds, as would secure their profitable increase, must have kept at home the main body of the nation. During the plague of darkness, God informs us that "ALL the children of Israel had light in their dwellings." We infer that they were there to enjoy it. See also Ex. ix. 26. It seems improbable that the making of brick, the only service named during the latter part of their ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... 1652 and 1653," says Colonel Lawrence, in his Interests of Ireland, "the plague and famine had so swept away whole counties, that a man might travel twenty or thirty miles and not see a living creature, either man, or beast, or bird, they being all dead, or had quitted those desolate places. Our soldiers would tell stories of the places ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... patented land—a so-called 'placer claim'—experts have reported against it. McFarlane has protested against it, but nothing is done. The mill is also on deeded land, and together they are a plague spot. I'm their enemy, and they know it; and they've threatened to burn me out. Of course they won't do that, but they're ready to play any kind of trick ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... to be Kind. But were the Indies all within his Pow'r To give, he would but lavish all his Store, He might confine the Sea, as soon as her. What then (since Love no Rival will submit) Must he indure that with this plague do's meet: When every Thought is Death and Discontent To know, what he wants power to prevent, The case can only this conclusion have, He's twice more wretched ...
— The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony: Responses from Men • Various
... the horrid plague of it,' she said, with a nonchalance which seemed to contradict her words. 'It is so dreadfully reasonable that we should marry. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... a low voice to Fontanares) You contemptible seducer! (Aloud) Here I give you ten thousand sequins. (In a low voice) Atrocious wretch! (Aloud) My daughter's income for one year. (In a low voice) May the plague choke you! (Aloud) Upon the presentation of this check, Senor Avaloros will count out to you ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... a circuit of perhaps a hundred miles, in order to strike into a land with few or no inhabitants. But in such a land they were sure to meet absolute starvation. Then, again, whether with or without this 15 plague of starvation, whether with or without this plague of hostility in front, whatever might be the "fierce varieties" of their misery in this respect, no rest ever came to their unhappy rear; post equitem sedet atra cura: it was a torment ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... or what is perhaps nearer the truth, may disregard those slight disorders of frame which fix the attention of a man who has nothing else to think of; but this does not tend to prove that activity of mind will enable a man to disregard a high fever, the smallpox, or the plague. ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... American experience befalls you when the steamship anchors at quarantine inside Sandy Hook, and the United States inspection officers come on board to hunt for infectious or contagious diseases—cholera, smallpox, typhus fever, yellow fever, or plague. No outbreak of any of these has marked the voyage, fortunately for you, and there is no long delay. Slowly the great vessel pushes its way up the harbor and the North River, passing the statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, that beacon which all incomers are enjoined ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... not to hear; but at last he looked into my face balefully, as if he wished to convey the plague to me. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... to a house wheir we drank aromatik, then to New Colledge, a great building. In the tyme of the plague the king lodged in the on syde and forrein embassadors on the other. They wer the French for gifting them a poringer worth 5 pound; but it was just at the tyme his Master declared war against England so that he went away ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... Madras; every day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens, by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself unable to manage it with decorum: these details are ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... One other plague in modern editions is the abuse of the pedal. Mozart never indicated the pedal. As purity of taste is one of his great qualities, it is probable that he made no abuse of the pedal. Beethoven indicated it in a complicated and cumbersome manner. When he wanted ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens
... 1663, about the time of his marriage. In polishing, re-writing, and writing out fair, much might remain to be done, after the poem was, in a way, finished. It is in 1665, that we first make acquaintance with Paradise Lost in a complete state. This was the year of the plague, known in our annals as the Great Plague, to distinguish its desolating ravages from former slighter visitations of the epidemic. Every one who could fled from the city of destruction. Milton applied to his young friend Ellwood to find ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... with her, he felt her hand steal into his as the vicar read the Litany; and the pressure of her hand waxed closer as the vicar's voice sounded through the church: "From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death." Then rose the fervent response from the congregation, "Good Lord, deliver us." And none prayed it more fervently than the widow as she knelt by the side of ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... was barred, because you were all 'good pals,' and didn't want to look like the 'boring people' who were to be avoided like the plague, and only asked to the big evenings, which were given as seldom as possible, and then only if it would amuse the painter or make the musician better known. The rest of the time you were quite happy playing charades and having supper in fancy dress, and there was no need to mingle ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... with mulching, or the Maritime northwest where I now live, and a catastrophe develops. During the first year these soil animals are present but cause no problem. But after the first mild winter with no population setback, they become a plague. Slugs (and in California, snails) will be found everywhere, devastating seedlings. Earwigs and sow bugs, that previously only were seen eating only decaying mulch, begin to attack plants. It soon becomes impossible ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... lodgings, and constituted a republic of their own, ruled by an abbe of the scholars, one of themselves, chosen by universal suffrage. A terror they were often to the respectable burghers, for they had all the right to carry arms; and a plague likewise, for, if they ran in debt, their creditors were forbidden to seize their books, which, with their swords, were generally all the property they possessed. If, moreover, any one set up a noisy or unpleasant trade near their lodgings, the scholars ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... is there, not only to sprinkle the mercy-seat with his blood, but he speaks, and his blood speaks; he hath audience, and his blood hath audience; insomuch that God saith, when he doth but see the blood, he "will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... of universal anarchy that lay beyond Christendom heaved another of its colossal and almost cosmic waves and swept everything away. Through all the eastern gates, left open, as it were, by the first barbarian auxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring savages from Denmark and Scandinavia; and the recently baptized barbarians were again flooded by the unbaptized. All this time, it must be remembered, the actual central mechanism of Roman government had been running down like a ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... agreeable thoughts, and I was quite startled to hear the bell ring for prayers. I jumped up in a great flurry and dressed as quickly as I could. Everything conspired together to plague me. I could not find a clean collar, or a handkerchief. It is always just so. Susan is forever poking my things into out-of-the-way places! When at last I went down, they were ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... latter years of Pericles were marked by the outbreak of that great war with Sparta, which crippled the power of Athens and tarnished her glories. He also was afflicted by the death of his children by the plague which devastated Athens in the early part of the Peloponnesian war, to which attention is now directed. The probity of Pericles is attested by the fact that during his long administration he added nothing to his patrimonial ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... that their shores shall not be visited, as of old, by devastating plagues. "As touching the pestilence," says Sir Thomas (or rather the poet in his name), "you fancy yourselves secure because the plague has not appeared among you for the last hundred and fifty years—a portion of time which, long as it may seem, compared with the brief term of mortal existence, is as nothing in the physical history of the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the long run. These are the Early Malcolm—it's a turnip that can't be produced except in just one orchard, and the supply never is up to the demand. Take some more water, Washington—you can't drink too much water with fruit—all the doctors say that. The plague can't come where this article ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ground for war, that Santa Anna had avowed his determination to 'drive slavery beyond the Sabine.' That was what the gentleman from Virginia most apprehended—that slavery would be abolished in Texas; that we should have neighbors at our doors not contaminated by that accursed plague-spot. He would have war with Mexico sooner than slavery should be driven back to the United States, whence it came. If that is to be the avowed opinion of this committee, in God's name let my constituents know it! The sooner it is proclaimed on the house-tops, the better—the house ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... Wit-carriers, whose business is, to export the fine Things they hear, from one Room to another, next to a Reciting-Poet; these Fellows are the most exquisite Plague to a ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... use in having fathers and mothers, anyhow? They only plague the life out of one. They don't ever think of letting a fellow alone once in ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... be possible for me to write you as I want to—letters that will be free of the plague of myself—letters that you can treasure if I never come back? Sleeping and waking, I never forget the wonderful truth of your love for me. It did not seem real when I was with you, but, now that we are separated, I know that it is real. Mostly my mind contains only two things—this ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... star, And think to wed it, he is so above me: In his bright radiance and collateral light Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. The ambition in my love thus plagues itself: The hind that would be mated by the lion Must die for love. 'Twas pretty, though a plague, To see him every hour; to sit and draw His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls, In our heart's table,—heart too capable Of every line and trick of his sweet favor: But now he's gone, and my idolatrous ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the greater part of those troops that had been sent to Rhode Island. At New York they were in the greatest distress for all kinds of fresh provisions and vegetables; at the same time, a fever, similar to the plague, prevailed there, that in all probability before the Spring will carry off to the Elysian shades, at least one half of the troops that remain there, and prepare an immediate grave for the Germans, and all the other troops ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... going to show me a bacillus," Mrs. Barberry announced with enthusiasm. "Plague, or cholera, or something really bad. He caught it two days ago, and put it in jelly for me—wasn't it dear of him? Good-bye, you nice thing,"—Mrs. Barberry addressed Alicia—"Good-bye, Mr. Lindsay. Fancy a live bacillus from Hong Kong! ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... wish, if possible, you would let Clarkson understand that it is quite useless to send his wife to plague Bella. She agrees with me that women had better always leave business to their husbands, and I have no intention of letting her be humbugged out of ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... (1378-1455), who was born in Florence, and was both a goldsmith and sculptor; and though his fame rests upon his bas-reliefs, yet the exquisite detail and careful finish in them came from his practice of the goldsmith's art. In 1398 a plague broke out in Florence, and Ghiberti fled to Rimini for safety. While there he painted a few pictures; but his name is so linked with the splendid gates which he made for the Baptistery of Florence that it is of those that ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... the first settlers could stop it, and Madeira lighted the ships of Henry on their way to the south, like a volcano, till 1428. This was at least the common story as told in Portugal, and it was often joined with another—of the rabbit plague, which ate up all the green stuff of the island in the first struggling years of Zarco's settlement, and so prevented the export of anything but timber. So much of this was brought into Portugal that Henry's lifetime is a landmark in the domestic architecture ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... of his stay in Tunis exceeded the original intention, but doubtless with the approval of the commodore. It was brought to a close in the fall of 1818 by an outbreak of the plague, which increased to such an alarming extent that Mr. Folsom felt compelled to send his charge away just when the approach of another winter of comparative idleness for the squadron would have justified a longer stay. But deaths in Tunis had risen ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... for his work of "THE ORDER OF THE GARTER." In May following, Hollar accompanied the author to Windsor, to take views of the castle. In the winter of 1665, Ashmole composed a "good part of the work at Roe-Barnes (the plague increasing)." In May, 1672, a copy of it was presented to King Charles II.: and in June, the following year, Ashmole received "his privy-seal for 400l. out of the custom of paper, which the king was pleased to bestow upon him for the same." This, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... inevitable death; nay, but in men and women alike there appeared, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, whereof some waxed of the bigness of a common apple, others like unto an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils. From these two parts the aforesaid death-bearing plague-boils proceeded, in brief space, to appear and come indifferently in every part of the body; wherefrom, after awhile, the fashion of the contagion began to change into black or livid blotches, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... friend in the world, because of their money. I saw young girls whose souls were utterly dead in them because they had been brought up to think of themselves as keepers of money-bags, and to guard against men who sought to prey upon them. I hated the thing... I fled from it as I would from a plague. In that world I had met a woman I might have loved... a woman who was noble and beautiful and true; and yet I dared not speak to her... I dared not even permit myself to know her... because I was a poor man, ...
— The Machine • Upton Sinclair
... (590-604). Others, following a venerable tradition, say that the three first lines were the composition of angels, and the fourth, Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia, was added by Pope Gregory. The legend tells us that when in the year 596 Rome was desolated by the plague, Pope Gregory the Great exhorted his people to penance and prayer, and carrying in his hands the picture of the Blessed Virgin, said to be painted by St. Luke, he led them in procession to the ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... burning ever since, so that the English Merchants here are entirely ruined. There have been three Shocks every Day since the first, but none so violent as the first. The King has ordered all the Soldiers to assist in burying the Dead, to prevent a Plague; and indeed upon that Account the Fire was of Service in consuming the Carcasses both of Men and Beasts. The English have miraculously escaped, for notwithstanding the Factory was so numerous, not more than a Dozen are known to have been killed; amongst ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... living. And the reason at this point is most obvious. Was it not precisely because Cromwell had failed to fulfil Milton's expectation of him, in his sonnet of May 1652, that he would deliver the Commonwealth from the plague of "hireling wolves," calling themselves a Clergy—was it not because Cromwell from first to last had pursued a contrary policy—that it remained for Milton now, seven years after the date of that sonnet, to have to offer, as a private thinker, and on mere printed ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... have already mentioned. The palaces all round here are probably different of aspect from the burgher houses which stood here before the baroque irruption of the seventeenth century, so Vladislav on his way to coronation would have been greeted by a homelier sight; neither could he have seen the plague memorial. The plague commemorated visited Prague in 1715; the man who committed this pyramid, dedicated to Holy Trinity, was one Giovanni Battista Alliprandi, an Italian architect, but not of the Renaissance spirit. This peculiar group of sculpture fails to impress me; the figures, ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... was broadly tolerant, and more than once he startled total strangers by laughing hilariously at nothing. When he could not talk he whistled in tune to the singing voices within him. But it was seldom indeed that he could not talk, and before long his intimate friends began to avoid him like a plague. It was his partner, Kurtz, who finally dubbed him "The Pestilence that talketh in darkness and the Destruction ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... seamstress of the household. And thus did our sweet little Jessie win her first really decisive victory over the little wizard which had hitherto been to her like the fisherman's wife, Alice, in the fairy tale—the plague of ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... little teacher reading so readily; and her mother would often scold when she saw Hepsa with a book in her hand, declaring it was foolish nonsense; but, as time went on, and the first difficulties were overcome, and her mother began to find Hepsa growing very gentle, and Tom had less occasion to plague his sister, they all felt that the books Hepsa had studied, and the little girl who came so often to see her, were kind friends, and love began to bind them all together. Hepsa no longer wore torn clothes; Genevieve's mother had given her some ...
— The Angel Children - or, Stories from Cloud-Land • Charlotte M. Higgins
... Tudors and Stuarts, entered on his career with the perfectly familiar expectation of possibly closing it—it might be in an honourable and ceremonious fashion, in the Tower and on the scaffold—just as he had to look forward to the possibility of closing it by small-pox or the plague. So that when disaster came, though it might be unexpected, as death is unexpected, it was a turn of things which ought not to take a man by surprise. But some premonitory signs usually gave warning. There was nothing to warn Bacon ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... Person of Prague, Who was suddenly seized with the plague; But they gave him some butter, Which caused him to mutter, And cured that Old Person ...
— Book of Nonsense • Edward Lear
... The student of the Latin Quarter was then harder to convince than now that God was Infinite Love and His world a perfect harmony, when perfect love and harmony showed them, even in the Latin Quarter, and still more in revealed truth, a picture of suffering, sorrow, and death; plague, pestilence, and famine; inundations, droughts, and frosts; catastrophes world-wide and accidents in corners; cruelty, perversity, stupidity, uncertainty, insanity; virtue begetting vice; vice working for good; happiness without sense, selfishness without ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... evermore, And grace of Artemis make women's travail light; No devastating curse of fell disease This city seize; No clamour of the State arouse to war Ares, from whom afar Shrinketh the lute, by whom the dances fail— Ares, the lord of wail. Swarm far aloof from Argos' citizens All plague and pestilence, And may the Archer-God our children spare! May Zeus with foison and with fruitfulness The land's each season bless, And, quickened with Heaven's bounty manifold, Teem grazing flock and fold. Beside ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... to them, supplies a dietary which would kill anybody but a professional fasting-man in a month, and keeps a keen eye on mendicancy. It is like the sun, with a difference: it looks alike on the just and the unjust The mischief is, it is made for the comfort of the worthless and is the plague of the deserving. There are easy-going boards of guardians, easy-going workhouse masters and labour masters, who do not insist upon the tale of work which is demanded by others. The old stagers know the easy places and give them ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... slain in the very act of Rebellion and Sacriledge; your atheisticall Dorislaw, Ascam and the Sodomiticall Ariba, whom though they escaped the hand of Justice, yet Vengeance would not suffer to live: What became of Rainsborough? Ireton perished of the Plague, and Hoyle hanged himself; Staplie 'tis said, died mad, and Cromwell in a fit of raging; and if there were any others worthy the taking notice of, I should give you a list of their names and of their destinies; but it was not known whence they came which succeeded them; nor ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... of the house, watched with surprise the way in which I used a knife and fork; even the servants stared at this, to them, singular spectacle. When I had sufficiently appeased my appetite in this public manner, the table was as carefully brushed as if I had been infected with the plague. Flat cakes of bread were then brought and laid upon the uncovered table, instead of plates, and six or seven of the same dishes which had been served to me. The members of the family each washed their hands and faces, and the ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... also there is much abuse. First, when it follows the flatterers, which is a common and especially harmful plague of this power, against which no one can sufficiently guard and protect himself. Here it is led by the nose, and oppresses the common people, becomes a government of the like of which a heathen says: "The spider-webs catch the small flies, ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... understanding become very cheerless at the prospect of leaving home. They say unto themselves,—These are our friends! This is our country! Alas, how shall we leave these?—One should certainly leave the country of one's birth, if it be afflicted by plague or famine. One should live in one's own country, respected by all, or repair to a foreign country for living there. I shall, for this reason, repair to some other region. I do not venture to live any longer in this place, for I have done a great wrong to thy child. O king, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... were better to be exposed to every plague on earth than to endure the cumulative effects of a guilty con- 405:24 science. The abiding consciousness of wrong- doing tends to destroy the ability to do right. If sin is not regretted and is not lessening, then it is 405:27 hastening ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... all danger was over Evan received another lesson in the curious workings of human nature. Once more the brotherhood drew away from Evan as if the latter had the plague. Evan had them in an uncomfortable hole now, for all were conscious of being under an obligation to him. That only made matters worse, for when a person is resolved to hate you, to put him under an obligation only obliges him to be more hateful. As for Corinna, she retired ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... for a long time unavailingly, to think of some means of getting rid of what he, as well as his neighbours, had come to regard as a plague of birds. At last he recalled a circumstance which promised a solution of the difficulty. The experience was of some years ago in China, far up-country, towards the head-waters of the Yang- tze-kiang, where the smaller tributaries spread out ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... a postscript dashed across the rest. See that there be no traitors in your camp: We seem a nest of traitors—none to trust Since our arms failed—this Egypt-plague of men! Almost our maids were better at their homes, Than thus man-girdled here: indeed I think Our chiefest comfort is the little child Of one unworthy mother; which she left: She shall not have it back: the child shall grow To prize the authentic mother of her mind. I took ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... slavery, which fifteen States of the Union maintain as a part of their domestic life, is, by many of the people in the Free States, regarded as they regard the plague and death; they prescribe certain degrees of latitude as barriers to it, as though they enacted thus: 'North of 36 deg. 30' whooping-cough is prohibited, measles are forbidden, cholera-morbus is forever interdicted.' They regard slave-holders as living in ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... tells us,[548] was one of extraordinary severity; the roads were blocked with snow, and navigation on the Tiber stopped by the ice. This miserable winter was followed too suddenly by a hot season, in which a plague broke out which consumed both man and beast, and continued so persistently that the Senate ordered the Sibylline books to be consulted. This persistence is the first point we should notice; "Cuius insanabili pernicie quando ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... not a word more, not a single syllable of that silly fool! What, to leave me and you, as if we were infected with the plague and breathed contagion? I cannot bear the affront, it shall not go unavenged. I had rather ...
— The Lawyers, A Drama in Five Acts • Augustus William Iffland
... that they pleased God? Why is no intimation given in the later books of the Old Testament that such supplications were offered to Moses, or Aaron, or Abraham, or Noah? When wrath was gone out from the presence of the Lord, and the plague was begun among the people, Aaron took a censer in his hand, and stood between the living and the dead, and the plague was stayed. If the soul of Aaron was therefore to be regarded as a spirit influential with God, one whose intercession could avail, one who ought to be approached ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... her keenly, then, gathering her meaning, flagged like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it fell on her hands, which, once rosy, were ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... to tell you of our wooing. She came to love me even as I loved her. I learned that Parmes had seen her before I did, and had shown her that he too loved her, but I could smile at his passion, for I knew that her heart was mine. The white plague had come upon the city and many were stricken, but I laid my hands upon the sick and nursed them without fear or scathe. She marvelled at my daring. Then I told her my secret, and begged her that she would let me ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... instigators, restless mischief-makers and overturners of the established order of things that they are! Then there are their fellow criminals, the highwaymen, forgers, cutpurses and bullies of whom we relieve his Majesty's government. They are few in number, but each is a very plague spot, infecting honester men. The slaves, always excepting the Portuguese and Spanish mulattoes from the Indies, who are devils incarnate, have not brain enough to conspire. But in the actual event of a rising they ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... probable,—if the estimates were based upon absolute knowledge—that the extent of the prevalency of these diseases would be greatly increased rather than reduced. It is however a fact, that the combined ravages of the Great White Plague, leprosy, yellow fever, and small-pox, are merely incidents compared to the effects which the venereal diseases have had upon mankind. It is useless to think that these diseases can be driven out of the land. Any hope of this nature is the impression ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and came out every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his return from Nahant in October and continuing far into December. That was the year of the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled the transportation in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburb and the city on the street railways. "I did think," Longfellow pathetically lamented, "that when the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... or Syer (1500-1501), was translated to Canterbury shortly after his appointment to Salisbury. He is believed to have been one of the victims of the Great Plague, and to have ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... write verses for mine honest friend Punch and his audience";[126] and to a would-be tragedian he said: "In the present day there is only one reason which seems to me adequate for the encountering the plague of trying to please a set of conceited performers and a very motley audience,—I mean the want of money."[127] This degraded condition of the London stage Scott thought to be a consequence of limiting ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... his whip: but she, being but a poor innocent, could not be persuaded to desist from her attachment to him, but would often run after him testifying with gestures and broken words the affection she had to him: until she was become, as he said, the very plague of his life. Yet, being that affairs in which he was now engaged necessarily took him by the house in which she lived, he could not (as I am willing to believe he would otherwise have done) avoid meeting with her from time to time. We shall further show you that this was the posture of things up ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... said the painter; 'I now and then dabble in the comic, but what I do gives me no pleasure, the comic is so low; there is nothing like the heroic. I am engaged here on a heroic picture,' said he, pointing to the canvas; 'the subject is "Pharaoh dismissing Moses from Egypt," after the last plague—the death of the first-born,—it is not far advanced—that finished figure is Moses': they both looked at the canvas, and I, standing behind, took a modest peep. The picture, as the painter said, was not far advanced, the Pharaoh was merely in outline; my ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... disciple, to do for his native city what they had done for Rome. The result was the most genial and generally delightful work of history that has been written since Herodotus. Villani, who lived till 1348, when the plague carried him off, seems to have been a man of an equable disposition and sober judgement. Like Dante and all the Florentines of that day, he belonged to the Guelf party; and, unlike his great fellow-citizen, he adhered to it throughout, though ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... not suffice to hold them, and they turned the church of St. Germain into a stable and crowded it with these animals. The saint, as the Abbe D'Abbon relates, indignant at this desecration, sent a terrible plague among the cattle, and when the Danes in the morning entered the church it contained nothing but carcasses in the last ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... The plague that had fallen upon them was such as none of them had ever before seen. The legs of the sufferers swelled to huge, unsightly, and livid masses of flesh. Their sinews shrivelled to blackened strings, pimpled with purple clots of blood. The ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... Anselme, why am I interrupted?" he grumbled querulously, still half-asleep. "What the plague do you want? Have you no thought for the King's affairs? Babylas"—this to his secretary—"did I not tell you that I had much to do; that I must ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... he, with a cup o' tea, says he, if the cook can bile the water 'ithout burnin' it. Now, look you! Saucy Bill North is wonderful fond of his little joke; an' 'twas this here habit o' burnin' the water he'd pitched on t' plague the poor cook with, since we put out o' Twist Tickle on ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... death. Outre-tombe! Outre-tombe!—is the burden of their thoughts, from Dante to Savonarola. Even the gay and licentious Boccaccio gives a keener edge to his stories by putting them in the mouths of a party of people who had taken refuge in a country-house from the danger of death by plague. It was to this inherited sentiment, this practical decision that to be preoccupied with the thought of death was in itself dignifying, and a note of high quality, that the seriousness of the great Florentines of the fifteenth century was partly due; and it was reinforced ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... or to destroy the evil consequences resulting from a violation of the taboo law. For this purpose sprinkling with water, bathing in water, and the employment of charms are held to be effective. Thus in the old Hebrew code the taboo resting on a house supposed to be infected with the plague is removed by sprinkling the house with water and the blood of a slain bird, and setting free a second bird alive, which is supposed to carry the plague-power off with it.[1015] A woman is tabooed forty days at the birth of a male child, and eighty days at the birth of a female child; ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... not; and it becomes our duty to look on Charles, and those who were corrupted by his example and his influence, as plague-spots upon the fair brow of our beloved country. We should learn to speak of him, not as distinguished for "gallantry," but as the monarch who reduced those he insulted by his love below the level of the poor Georgian slave, who knows no higher destiny than to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... winds, which hung it on the trees, over the camps, whence it dropped on to its victims. So terror-stricken were the tribes that, with few exceptions, they did not stay to bury their dead; and because they did not do so, flying even from the dying, a curse was laid on them that some day the plague would return, brought back by the Wundah or white devils; and the blacks shudder still, though it was generations before them, at the thought that such ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... advice. I have as good an estate as you have, and am as much a lord as yourselfe.—Why the devill then, am I to be treated as I am?—Why the plague—But I won't sware neither. I desire not to see you, any more than you doe me, I can tell you thatt. And iff we ever meet under one roofe with my likeing, it must be at the House of Peeres where I shall be upon a parr with you in every ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... were a few men who used their eyes. Sir Charles Dilke took a turn round the globe, and when he came back said "Greater Britain." That was an idea, and ideas are like the plague—they are catching. Sir John Seeley took a tour through the history of the last three centuries, and said "Expansion of England"; that meant continuity in the Nation's life not merely in space but in time. Whatever the cause, a few years ago there set in an epidemic of fresh ideas, ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... softly shone the summer night, And the sun had ne'er a thought of sleeping. Now will I bring my sweetheart dear the hidden treasure bright, For faithfully my vows I would be keeping. Heigh, ho! New and fine my stockings are, new and fine my shoes, And not a care in all the world to plague me! ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... blindness almost incredible these terms were refused, and a last attack made on the walls of Damietta. The besieged made but slight resistance, and the Christians entered the city, to find out of seventy thousand but three thousand remaining, so fearful had been the scourge of plague and famine. Several months were spent in Damietta. The climate either weakened the frames or obscured the understandings of the Christians, for after their conquest they remained inactive until the Moslems ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... enchanted castle, that's certain. What a plague has this little witch done to you all? And how did she bring ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... always liked him," Monck admitted. "But he didn't like me for a long time after. That thrashing stuck in his mind. It was a pretty stiff one certainly. He was always very polite to me, but he avoided me like the plague. I think he was ashamed. I left him alone till one day he got ill, and then I went round to see if I could do anything. He was pretty bad, and I stayed with him. We ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... in Rajputana there pass with it, as well as the rats and cobras and the mongoose, those beggars who were wont to plague the former owner. That is a custom so based on ancient logic that the English, who appreciate conservatism, have not ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... you," she had said to Mrs. Forrester, "with you I am never pursued and never bored." Where Mrs. Forrester evaded and relegated bores, Madame von Marwitz sombrely and helplessly hated them. "What can I do?" she said. "If no one will protect me I am delivered to them. It is a plague of locusts. They devour me. Oh their letters! Oh their flowers! Oh their love and their stupidity! No, the earth ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... go into spasms of laughter every time they look at the human ape hanging to his limb. Hurry up, plague take it; I'm getting weary of posing to suit your convenience. Why don't he, come back and finish? I declare if I can stand this any longer. I tell you I'm coming up, Will—picture or ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... Lord Jesus! They had then encompassed the kingdom like a conflagration or like a plague. Not only Sieradz and Lenczyca, but they destroyed many other towns. What now? Are not our people mighty and indestructible? And although those dog-brothers, the Knights of the Cross, were severely chastised, yet if you cannot crush them they ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... They write from Italy, that the Plague is no longer observ'd at Marseilles, Aix, & several other Places; and that at Toulon it is very much decreas'd: But alas! how should it be otherwise, when the Distemper hath hardly any Objects left to work upon? At Arles it is likewise abated, we fear for the same Reason. Mean while, ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... were right, nonsense he must have talked. Cornwallis, an Englishman, corroborates Foster; Cornwallis is disregarded. "All that was best and noblest in Ireland" was gathered into the Orange Association, which has been the plague of every Irish Government since the Union. Froude's model sovereign of Ireland, as of England, was George III., who ordered that in a Catholic country "a sharp eye should be kept on Papists," and would doubtless ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... thus. An awful pestilence devastates Thebes. Oedipus, the king, is introduced to us, powerful and beloved; to him whose wisdom had placed him on the throne, look up the priest and the suppliants for a remedy even amid the terrors of the plague. Oedipus informs them that he has despatched Creon (the brother of his wife Jocasta) to the Pythian god to know by what expiatory deed the city might be delivered from its curse. Scarce has he concluded, when Creon himself enters, and announces "glad tidings" in the explicit answer of the oracle. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is dispelled by the course of events in Ireland, how much more strikingly must it be so in England? for the former country is almost altogether free from that most hopeless of all mental affections, the general paralysis of the insane—the plague of all other ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... by the great army of American physicians, surgeons and nurses, in caring for soldiers and sailors, a service of scarcely less magnitude was rendered to the civilian populations of France, Belgium and Italy. Tuberculosis in France was a real plague, taking a toll of 80,000 lives every year. American physicians and nurses preached the doctrine of fresh air, care of the teeth and proper food for children. Almost immediately this campaign of sanitation had its effect in ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... exhaustion, and demoralization engendered by these conflicts determined the advent of the Despots; and after 1400 Italy could only have been united under a tyrant's iron rule. At such an universal despotism Gian Galeazzo Visconti was aiming when the plague cut short his schemes. Cesare Borgia played his highest stakes for it. Leo X. dreamed of it for his family. Machiavelli, at the end of the Principe, when the tragedy of Italy was almost accomplished, invoked it. But even for this last chance of unification it ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... hastening along the gloomy street beneath, as rapidly as their wearied limbs would carry them, to join the embassy. He heard them encouraging each other to proceed, to seize the last chance of escaping through the open gates from the horrors of famine and plague; and caught the infection of the recklessness and despair which had seized his fellow-sufferers from one end of Rome ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... Sir, but look In Galen, No—in my Lord Cook, I vow to God I was mistook: I'll take out a Provincial Writ, And trounce him for his Knavish Wit; Upon my Life we'll win the Cause, With all the ease I cure the (kk) Yaws; Resolv'd to plague the holy Brother, I set one Rogue to catch another; To try the cause then fully bent, Up to (ll) Annapolis I went, A City Situate on a Plain, Where scarce a House will keep out Rain; The Buildings framed with Cyprus rare, Resembles much our Southwark Fair: But ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... the eagerness of the young officers to go and enjoy themselves on shore they had to submit to a quarantine of four days, on account of rumours of cases of plague having occurred in the lazaretto of Marseilles. Without pausing to relate the details of Messrs. Du Bouzet, Coupvent, and Dumoulin's ascent of the Peak, we will merely quote a few enthusiastic remarks of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... we are at present, bless God for it. We have all gotten safe to Nova Scotia, but do not like it at all, and a great many besides us, and are coming back to England again, all that can get back. We do not like the country, not never shall. The mosquitos are a terrible plague in this country. You may think that mosquitos cannot hurt, but if you do you are mistaken, for they will swell you legs and hands so that some persons are both blind and lame for some days. They grow worse every year and they bite the English the worst. We have taken a farm of one ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... Trinidad, whither timber without end drifts from that river? In a word, I have no explanation whatsoever to give; as I am not minded to fall back on the medieval one, that the devil must have brought them thither, to plague the inhabitants ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... action was, of course, the outbreak of smallpox, which at that time and in fact until very recently, was as greatly dreaded as bubonic plague is now, and probably more. Vaccination, whatever may be its value in the prevention of the disease, had not been discovered in the sense that it is now understood and was not known at all except in the centers of medical practice ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... Foe would never have ranked above the level of his time. It is customary for critics to speak in awe of the "Journal of the Plague" and it is gravely recited that that book deceived the great Dr. Meade. Dr. Meade must have been a poor doctor if De Foe's accuracy of description of the symptoms and effects of disease is not vastly superior to the detail he supplies as a sailor and ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... found with difficulty the true boundaries between ethics and expediency. A busybody despotism may protect the fool, but it thereby helps to perpetuate and multiply his folly; yet if the fool is left alone, he too often is a plague to the wise and ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... is the destruction of illusions Discontent of those who travel to enjoy themselves Excellent but somewhat scattered woman Inability to stand still for one second is the plague of it Leaves it with mingled feelings about Columbus One ought not to subject his faith to too great ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... continued Mrs. Pennybet, "though he's a plague now, will be a brilliant and dominating man, I think. He's not easily mastered, and I don't believe adverse circumstances will ever beat him.... Isn't it funny to think that these restless boys are here to inherit the world? We old fogies"—Mrs. Pennybet laughed, ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... on the pistol-case may have conduced to Lord Fleetwood's thought, that his days among unrepentant ephemeral Protestant sinners must have their immediate termination. These old friends were the plague-infected clothes he flung off his body. But the Cross where it lay, forbidding a movement of the hand to that box, was authoritative to decree his passage through a present torture, by the agency of the hand he held back from the solution of his perplexity, at the cost which his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Ah! plague take them," Vassily's companion commented. "Too well off, I suppose. Well, did you dig ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... he made famous under the name of Fiammetta, seems to have loved him in return. It was for her amusement, and for the amusement of the Queen of Naples, that he composed many of the stories in "The Decameron." He returned to Florence in 1350, after the great plague, which he has described in so vivid a manner in the opening chapter of his great work, had abated; and three years afterwards he published "The Decameron," the title being derived from the Greek words signifying "ten days." This collection of a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... elasticity of mind. Because certain men had put certain ideas into the world it did not follow that every other man had definitely to accept or reject each and all of them, and to become an "'ite" or an "anti-'ite" in so doing. Plague take great men! What right had they to force one into the jury-box? Still less was it compulsory to return a verdict if, as the vulgar were apt to think, the acceptance of any one "'ism" precluded the acceptance of another, so that to be an Ibsenite was synonymous with detesting the dramas of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... answered the regent, laughing, "have you become a sufficiently good Catholic no longer to believe in predestination? I believe in it, as you know. Would you wish me to plague my mind about a danger which has no existence; or which, if it does exist, has its result already inscribed in the eternal book? No, my mother, no; the only use of all these exaggerated precautions is to sadden life. Let tyrants tremble; but I, who am what St. Simon pretends to be, ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... use, We march with colours furled, Only concerned when Death breaks loose On a front of half a world. Only for General Death The Yellow Flag may fly, While we take post beneath— That is the place for a spy. Where Plague has spread his pinions over Nations and Dominions— Then will be work ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... mountains for joy, saying, 'I have not, in my heart, thought anything too dear for Mansoul: the day of vengeance is in mine heart for thee, my Mansoul: and glad am I that thou, my Father, hast made me the Captain of their salvation. And I will now begin to plague all those that have been a plague to my town of Mansoul, and will deliver it from ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... upward progress of the lateen-sail; has heard, moreover, the report concerning those on board. He wonders where is the country from which they come. Is it the land the storks fly to, of which mother (before the plague carried both her and father to a stranger land still) used to tell such wonderful stories? Does the world really extend far beyond the valley? Is the world all valley and river, with now and then some hills, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence and famine; from battle and murder and sudden ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... "Plague take him!" thought la Peyrade; "he spies everything; there's no hiding anything from him! No," he said, aloud, "I am not in love; on the contrary, I am very cautious. I must admit that this marriage with a crazy ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... of the head in many fevers a great inroad is frequently made upon the memory, and it is long before the convalescent can rightly put together all the ideas of his past life. Such was one of the effects of the plague at Athens, as we learn from Thucydides; "and many, on recovery, still experienced such any extraordinary oblivion of all things that they knew neither themselves nor their friends." A few years ago a man with a brain-fever was taken ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... you I don't trouble myself about it. I am subject to convulsions, which are the plague of my life. I want to try the Teplitz waters, which are said to be excellent for all nervous affections; but the king has refused his permission, which I, nevertheless, hope to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt |
