"Scurrility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, in which every infirmity and peculiarity of Hervey are handed down in calm, cruel irony, and polished verses, to posterity. The verses are almost too disgusting to be revived in an age which disclaims scurrility. After the most personal rancorous invective, he thus writes of ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... vulgar. Let him reject the antiquated phrase, and whatever is covered with the rust of time; let his sentiments be expressed with spirit, not in careless, ill-constructed, languid periods, like a dull writer of annals; let him banish low scurrility, and, in short, let him know how to diversify his style, that he may not fatigue the ear with a monotony, ending for ever with ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... happened just at that time, there arrived from Alexandria a ship, which was said to be freighted (374) with dust for the wrestlers belonging to the emperor [621]. This so much inflamed the public rage, that he was treated with the utmost abuse and scurrility. Upon the top of one of his statues was placed the figure of a chariot with a Greek inscription, that "Now indeed he had a race to run; let him be gone." A little bag was tied about another, with a ticket containing these words; ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... reproaches: although even some of my masters the philosophers spent a good deal of their lamp-oil in setting forth the excellency of it. Grant, I say, whatsoever they will have granted; that not only love, but lust, but vanity, but (if they list) scurrility, possesseth many leaves of the poet's books: yet think I, when this is granted, they will find their sentence may with good manners put the last words foremost; and not say that poetry abuseth man's wit, but ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... ago the public press was managed with much less talent and principle than the respectable portion of it now possesses. Personality and scurrility appear to have gone out of fashion, and such attacks as that from which the Duke of Buckingham suffered in the columns of a provincial paper, are of ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... cheek. Blows showered on him as thick as hail, and, disappearing under a shower of slaps, the flour on his face and the red powder of his wig enveloped him like a cloud. At last he exhausted all his resources of low scurrility, ridiculous contortions, grotesque grimaces, pretended aches, falls at full length, etc., till the ringmaster, judging this gratuitous show long enough, and that the public were sufficiently fascinated, sent him ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... by them with regard to customs and ceremonies, but also present as fully as possible the doctrinal articles which they held over against ancient and modern heresies, falsely imputed to them. Thus to some extent it is due to the scurrility of Eck that the contemplated Apology was transformed into an all-embracing Confession, a term employed by Melanchthon himself. In a letter to Luther, dated May 11, 1530, he wrote: "Our Apology is being ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... man was a zealous Puritan, or rather a Brownist, a small sect, which afterwards increased, and received the name of "Independents." He had written against the hierarchy several tracts, such as Martin Marprelate, Theses Martinianae, and other compositions, full of low scurrility and petulant satire. After concealing himself for some years, he was seized; and as the statute against seditious words required that the criminal should be tried within a year after committing the offence, he could not be indicted for ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Night Thoughts, there prevails an obscurity and hardness in his style."—Blair's Rhet., p. 150. "There is, however, in that work much good sense, and excellent criticism."—Ib., p. 401. "There is too much low wit and scurrility in Plautus."—Ib., p. 481. "There is too much reasoning and refinement; too much pomp and studied beauty in them."—Ib., p. 468. "Hence arises the structure and characteristic expression of exclamation."—Rush on the Voice, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... sacrifice usual on occasion of victory, they set a fine upon him. Children also were introduced at these public tables, as so many schools of sobriety. There they heard discourses concerning government, and were instructed in the most liberal breeding. There they were allowed to jest without scurrility, and were not to take it ill when the raillery was returned. For it was reckoned worthy of a Lacedaemonian to bear a jest: but if any one's patience failed, he had only to desire them to be quiet, and they left off immediately. When they first ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... the result; or if he escaped unhurt, though he might have been the injured party, yet by some fatality he was sure to be accounted the aggressor. If he happened to say a good thing, it was invariably attributed to another person, while, if a piece of scurrility or a foolish remark circulated, he never failed to have the ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... fellow who would not work, Cozens, though the man had not complained to him, intermeddled in the affair with great bitterness, and grossly insulted the purser, who was then delivering out the provisions close by the captain's tent, and was himself sufficiently violent. Enraged by his scurrility, and perhaps piqued by former quarrels, the purser cried out, A mutiny; adding, the dog has pistols, and then immediately fired himself a pistol at Cozens, but missed him. On hearing this outcry, and the report of the pistol, the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... given birth to a species of poetry more legitimate and useful in its design, and more valuable in its tendencies and characteristics. Instead of the "namby pamby" verses of the period I have alluded to, and the coarse scurrility of style which runs with a discolouring vein through the satirical pages of Dr. Wolcot, we have now the heart-stirring metres of a Campbell, as in that beautiful rainbow of poetic loveliness and imagination, his "Pleasures of Hope." We have now a series of pictures bearing an impress as pleasant ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... the Reader also to take notice, that in writing of it I have made myself a recreation of a recreation; and that it might prove so to him, and not read dull and tediously, I have in several places mixed, not any scurrility, but some innocent, harmless mirth, of which, if thou be a severe, sour-complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge; for divines say, there are offences given, and ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... the fertile scurrility of our readers, we leave the matter in their hands, commending their souls to the merciful God ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... organs and singing by said choir and vast audience which are assembled by means of said newspaper advertisements for the purpose of inducing a habit of free and copious flow of money through religious and patriotic excitement produced by and through the vulgarisms, scurrility, buffoonery, obscenity and profanity of defendant pretending to be in the interest of the cause of religion through what he denominates "hitting the trail", the real object being to induce a religious ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... to the judgment of a silly girl; 'Is she,' said my aunt, bridling herself, 'fit to decide between us?' Mr. Bennet spoke very favourably of what I had said; upon which my aunt burst almost into a rage, treated me with downright scurrility, called me conceited fool, abused my poor father for having taught me Latin, which, she said, had made me a downright coxcomb, and made me prefer myself to those who were a hundred times my superiors ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... drawn up in Holland, under the direction of the Committee, by James Stewart, a Scotch advocate, whose pen was, a few months later, employed in a very different way. In this paper were set forth, with a strength of language sometimes approaching to scurrility, many real and some imaginary grievances. It was hinted that the late King had died by poison. A chief object of the expedition was declared to be the entire suppression, not only of Popery, but ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and to quarter-deck language, as such, the sailor entertained no rooted objection. What he did object to, and object to with all the dogged insistence of his nature, was the fact that this habitual flow of profane scurrility was only the prelude to what, with grim pleasantry, he was accustomed to describe as "serving out slops." Anything intended to cover his back was "slops" to the sailor, and the punishments meted out to him covered ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... a prominent part either in local or general politics is attacked on the platform and by the press, with a fierceness, a scurrility, and a vulgarity which spare not even the sanctity of private life. The men of wealth, education, and talent, who have little either to gain or lose, and who would not yield up any carefully adopted principle to the insensate clamour ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... forward to be placed among other ornaments of his Senate. Sers has just cunning enough to be taken for a man of sense when with fools; when with men of sense, he reassumes the place allotted him by Nature. Without education, as well as without parts, he for a long time confounded brutal scurrility with oratory, and thought himself eloquent when he was only insolent or impertinent. His ideas of liberty are such that, when he was a municipal officer, he signed a mandate of arrest against sixty-four individuals of both sexes, who were at ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... attacks were also made against Otis, and some were marked by scurrility and coarseness of language, which could not fail to arouse a man of his temper and fine sense of honor. How he did regard them appears from the following extract from a letter to ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... any profundity of disgust to induce, even for an instant, a violation of the dignity of truth. What is not false, amid the scurrility of this man's statements, it is not in my nature to brand as false, although oozing from the filthy lips of which a lie is the only natural language. The errors and frailties which I deplore, it cannot at least be asserted that I have been the coward to deny. Never, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... assailant was one of Clement's own physicians, who loaded him with scurrility in a formal letter. These circumstances brought forth our poet's "Four Books of Invectives against Physicians," a work in which he undoubtedly exposes a great deal of contemporary quackery, but which, at the same time, scarcely leaves ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... brought him within the law. Curll, we are told, possessed himself of a command over all authors whatever; he caused them to write what he pleased; they could not call their very names their own. Curll was the deadly enemy of Pope and his friends, and his unlimited scurrility drew from the poet of Twickenham a retaliation every whit as coarse and as biting as anything the bookseller's warped mind ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... the rules of decorum and morality; of monks revelling in the dissipating pleasures of sensual enjoyments, and of nuns whose frail humanity could not maintain the purity of their virgin vows. But these instances are too rare to warrant the slanders and scurrility that historians have heaped upon them. And when we talk of the sensuality of the monks, of their gross indulgences and corporeal ease, we surely do so without discrimination; for when we speak of the middle ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... is a little better ascertained. Of Cooper's work there is no doubt, and some purely secular men of letters were oddly mixed up in the affair. It is all but certain that John Lyly wrote the so-called Pap with a Hatchet,[45] which in deliberate oddity of phrase, scurrility of language, and desultoriness of method outvies the wildest Martinist outbursts. The later tract, An Almond for a Parrot,[46] which deserves a very similar description, may not improbably be the same author's; and Dr. Grosart has reasonably attributed four anti-Martinist tracts ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... which he showed when he undertook to edit Milton; none of that perverted ingenuity which deforms so many of his notes on Horace; none of that disdainful carelessness by which he laid himself open to the keen and dexterous thrust of Middleton; none of that extravagant vaunting and savage scurrility by which he afterwards dishonoured his studies and his profession, and degraded himself almost to the level ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... possible. The efficiency of a controversialist in the seventeenth century was almost estimated in the ratio of his scurrility, especially when he wrote Latin. From this point of view Milton had got his opponent at a tremendous disadvantage. With the best will in the world, Salmasius had come short in personal abuse, for, as the initiator of the dispute, he had no personal antagonist. In denouncing the general herd ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... only say," said Berry, "that I am surprised and pained. From the bosom of my family I, as the head, naturally expect nothing but the foulest scurrility and derision. But when a comparative stranger, whom, with characteristic generosity, I have made free of my heart, seizes a moment which should have been devoted to the mastication of one of my peaches to vilify her host, then indeed I feel almost unsexed—I mean unmanned. Are my veins ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... that demolishes an antagonist and an argument is not rhetoric, but truth. This accumulation of "bad names" and ingenious combination of scurrility is merely rhetoric. It serves the rhetorical purpose, but it does not convince. It does not show the hearer or reader that one course is more expedient than another, nor give him any reason whatever for any opinion upon the subject. ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... prepared to hear of his making such a speech at such a place as Derry, and on such an occasion as a 'Prentice Boy' commemoration. The rage and fury of the Orangemen there and of the Orange press here are boundless, and the violence and scurrility of their abuse are the more absurd because Dawson only described in glowing colours, and certainly without reserve, the actual state of Ireland, but did not argue the question at all further than leaving on his hearers the inevitable inference ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... favored of heaven as any of the sons of Adam. Exacting nothing undue, they yield nothing but justice and courtesy, even to royal blood. They cannot be flattered, duped, nor bullied out of their rights or their propriety. They smile with contempt at scurrility and vaporing beyond the seas, and they turn their backs upon it where it is "irresponsible;" but insolence that ventures to look them in the face, will never fail ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... in question at the siege of Troy betwixt sundrie Grecian and Trojan Lords: especially debated to discover the perfection of a Souldier. Containing mirth to purg melancholly, wholsome precepts to profit manners, neither unsavoury to youth for delight, nor offensive to age for scurrility. Ea habentur optima qu & jucunda, honesta' & utilia. Robertus Greene, in Artibus Magister. London, Printed by Eliz. ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... without all embellishment and jesting, wholly composed for real effect and seriousness; not smelling of the lamp, as Pytheas scoffingly said, but of the temperance, thoughtfulness, austerity, and grave earnestness of his temper. Whereas Cicero's love for mockery often ran him into scurrility; and in his love of laughing away serious arguments in judicial cases by jests and facetious remarks, with a view to the advantage of his clients, he paid too little regard to what was decent. Indeed, Cicero was by natural temper very much disposed to mirth and pleasantry, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... you that, thanks to your editing and carping and general scurrility, this book is going to be," I meekly stated, "a little better than The Apostates and not just 'pretty much ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... which Spanish fanaticism ordained that the Cagots (lepers) of the Pyrenees should enter the churches in a stooping attitude], but to exclude from it altogether, and for ever. Briefly, then, for this licensed scurrility, in the first place; and, in the second, for this foul indignity of a spiteful exclusion from a right four times secured by treaty, it is that the Chinese are facing the unhappy ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... editor of the Quarterly from its foundation in February, 1809, until September, 1824, and undoubtedly established its reputation for scurrility. It is probable that more reviews were written, or directly inspired, by him than have been actually traced to his pen; and, in any case, as Leigh Hunt puts it, he made it his ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Boston paper, when this town, particularly the TRADESMAN of it are reaping such advantages from Franklin's liberality. The Editor of the Centinal ought to blush for his arrogance in vilifying this TRADESMEN'S FRIEND, by retailing the scurrility of so wretched a puppy as ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... sub-editors, reporters, etc., of most of the papers of any note. And the more accustomed he became to the House of Commons, the greater liberties did he take with the conventional fairness and courtesy of debate. His personality and scurrility were so indiscriminating and excessive that he was perhaps at this time the most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a perfect wealth of sectarian scurrility at his command. His epithets are at times unquotable and ferocious. When, however, his friends are at the bar, the witnesses against them comprise the choicest scoundrels of all time—Mr. Envy, Mr. Pick-thank, and others, whose friends are Lord Carnal-Delight, Lord Luxurious, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies |
