"Shrew" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and he must pass for a man: what his wife has made him, is indicated by the cow's horns; which are so placed as to become his own. The hopes of the family, with a cockade in his hat, and riding upon papa's cane, seems much dissatisfied with female sway. A face with more of the shrew in embryo than that of the girl, it is scarcely possible to conceive. Upon such a character the most casual observer pronounces with ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... have three white stripes: our sailors caught one, but it got away again. The mole here is larger than in Europe; the upper part of the body is of a greyish brown, the lower part an ash grey; the legs are covered with a white fur, and the taper tail is one-fifth of the length of the body. A shrew-mouse also was caught. Two or three kinds of large cats are said to have been seen; a mustela, something of the nature of the Lutreola, was shot near the Rio Sacramento. The sea-otter still abounds here, but its hair is brownish, and not black. The Cervus Wapiti ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... happy thing to do, When twenty years united to a shrew. Released, he hopefully for entrance cries Before the ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... after they were parted. Their promises of correspondence were redeemed by Elinor with very long letters at uncertain intervals, and by Marian with shorter epistles notifying all her important movements. Marian, often called upon to defend her cousin from the charge of being a little shrew, was led to dwell upon her better qualities. Elinor found in Marian what she had never found at her own home, a friend, and in her uncle's house a refuge from that of her father, which she hated. She had been Marian's ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... quite wrong to have any dread of them; as a matter of fact, the bird you have just seen is, like all its species, more useful than injurious to man, for it destroys a vast number of small mammals—jerboas, shrew-mice, dormice, and field-mice, which ravage the farmer's crops. You will recollect that the owl, among the ancient Greeks, was the bird of Minerva; with the Aztecs it represents ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... deformed, invalid sister. Tender, loving, and patient as she was under them, her sufferings made my blood boil with indignation. If Mrs. Fishley had treated Flora kindly, she would have been an angel in my sight, however much she snapped and snarled, and "drove me from pillar to post." The shrew did not treat her kindly, and as the poor child was almost always in the house, she was constantly exposed to ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... public than the player that strolls nowadays. The theatre is stationary—the audience peripatetic. The wheels have been taken off the cart of Thespis. Hamlet's line, "Then came each actor on his ass," or the stage direction in the old "Taming of the Shrew" (1594), "Enter two players with packs on their backs," no longer describes accurately the travelling habits of the histrionic profession. But of old the country folk had the drama brought as it were to their doors, and ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... the notorious skunk of America, the overwhelming odour which they emit appears to serve exclusively as a defence. With shrew-mice (Sorex) both sexes possess abdominal scent-glands, and there can be little doubt, from the rejection of their bodies by birds and beasts of prey, that the odour is protective; nevertheless, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... almost, like Shakespeare's moonlight, to 'sleep upon the bank,' I can hardly conceive how so gentle-looking a dwelling can continue to send forth such an incessant clatter of obstreperous sound through its honeysuckle-fringed windows. It really reminds me of a pretty shrew, whose amiable smiles would hardly allow a casual observer to suspect the possibility of so fair a surface being occasionally ruffled ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... I will never get a clean shirt to my back; how my coat will always be out at the elbows; and how I never will get my breeches to stay up. I am thinking how I will be married to a shrew of a wife, who will beat me every evening and morning, and sometimes in the middle of the day. I am thinking what a d——d w—— she will be, and how my children will be most of them hanged, and whipped through towns, and burnt in the hand. I am ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... on foot to the place of sanctuary and disposed the nuns round the bar, with the reverend mother in the centre of them, having a little aureole round her head from the glamour of the pewter pots. The others crowded in anyhow and said in a dreadful chorus, like Katherine in "The Taming of the Shrew," "We want our supper!" ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... black stripe on each cheek. This made the third species of marsupial rat I had so far obtained— but the number of these animals is very considerable in Brazil, where they take the place of the shrews of Europe; shrew mice and, indeed, the whole of the insectivorous order of mammals, being entirely absent from Tropical America. One kind of these rat-like opossums is aquatic, and has webbed feet. The terrestrial species are nocturnal in their habits, sleeping during ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... Shakespeare called a man "humorous" he meant that he was changeable and capricious, not that he was given to a facetious turn of thought or to a "sportive" exercise of the imagination. When he talks in "The Taming of the Shrew" of "her mad and head-strong humor" he doesn't mean to imply that Kate is a practical joker. It is interesting to note in passing that the old meaning of the word still lingers in the verb "to humor." A woman still humors her spoiled child and her cantankerous husband when ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... ornament, is bold and vigorous in style, and, when devoted to satire, is keen and vehement. The ballad of "Watty and Meg," though exception may be taken to the moral, is an admirable picture of human nature, and one of the most graphic narratives of the "taming of a shrew" in the language. Allan Cunningham writes: "It has been excelled by none in lively, graphic fidelity of touch: whatever was present to his eye and manifest to his ear, he could paint with a life and a humour which Burns seems alone to excel."[41] ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... which she endured, there is a curious flavor of superficiality about her genius. A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr. Jordan, has divided the human race into two types, whom he calls "shrews" and "nonshrews" respectively.[206] The shrew-type is defined as possessing an "active unimpassioned temperament." In other words, shrews are the "motors," rather than the "sensories,"[207] and their expressions are as a rule more energetic than the feelings ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... known from the urbanity of his manners, by the familiar name of Billy Havard) had the misfortune to be married to a most notorious shrew and drunkard. One day dining at Garrick's, he was complaining of a violent pain in his side. Mrs. Garrick offered to prescribe for him. "No, no," said her husband; "that will not do, my dear; Billy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... returned from abroad penniless. Soon after he married, almost as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare. He told Drummond curtly that "his wife was a shrew, yet honest"; for some years he lived apart from her in the household of Lord Albany. Yet two touching epitaphs among Jonson's "Epigrams," "On my first daughter," and "On my first son," attest the ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... the hedgehog I will mention as a curiosity the shrew or sand-mouse, which, in spite of its name, is no mouse at all, but has the honor, if honor it be, of being the smallest animal known of the ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... of his defects sprang from his not having been on the stage as a child. He was stiff with self-consciousness; his eyes were dull and his face heavy. The piece we played was Garrick's boiled-down version of "The Taming of the Shrew," and he, as Petruchio, appreciated the humor and everything else far more than I did, as Katherine; yet he played badly, nearly as badly as I did; and how much more to blame I was, for I was at this time much more easy and skillful from a purely ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... use this dalliance to excuse Your breach of promise to the Porpentine. I should have chid you for not bringing it, 50 But, like a shrew, you first begin ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... The Taming of the Shrew, by Samuel Hickson Proverbial Sayings and their Origins William Basse and his Poems Folk Lore:—Something else about Salting. Norfolk Weather Proverb, Irish Medical Charms. Death-bed Superstitions Note on Herodotus ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... the Straits of Dover or the Irish Channel, to graze anew over deposits in which the bones and horns of their remote ancestors had been entombed long ages before, the feat would have been surely far beyond the power of such feeble natives of the soil as the mole, the hedgehog, the shrew, the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... I hear, O my lord?" she cried, in tone and manner more the European shrew than the submissive Eastern slave. "Is Sakr-el-Bahr to go upon this expedition against ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... 'benefit of clergy,'" exploded the younger man; "that mediaeval bonanza isn't to be mentioned in the same week with the ministerial half-rates, donations, and hold-ups we moderns put up with. This pulpit pounder's shrew pays me no more than she pays the doctor, the grocer, the butcher, and the rest. What a ukase I could issue if I were ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... on the road from Manfaloot. Seti and his bobtailed Arab, two shameless ones, worked their way to the front. Not Seti's strong right arm alone and his naboot were at work, but the bobtailed Arab, like an iron-handed razor toothed shrew, struck and bit his way, his eyes bloodred like Seti's. The superstitious Dervishes fell back before this pair of demons; for their madness was like the madness of those who at the Dosah throw themselves beneath the feet of the Sheikh's horse by the mosque ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... forth without ever asking or knowing why, and so, unknowing, was ill prepared to grapple with the problem set before him. It is easier to stem a torrent with a shingle than convince a lover that his idol is a shrew. ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... I bid him keepe him warme at home For if he come abroade, he shall cough me a mome. My mynde was vexed, I shrew his head ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... combined with lack of fortune.' I dared not defend myself. I am not clever enough to think of the right things to say. He meant Mr. Ffolliott to understand that I had married him because I thought he was grand and rich, and that I was a disappointed little spiteful shrew. I tried to act as if he was not hurting me, but my hands trembled, and a lump kept rising in my throat. When we returned to the drawing-room, and at last he left us together, I was praying and praying that I might be able ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... with hands that trembled. "It's because if I let myself get cross-grained and ugly now, p'r'aps someone else—some day—will be cross-grained and ugly too. And I should never forgive myself for that. I should always feel it was my fault. Fancy if it turned out a shrew like me, Bertie! ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... the series is occupied with the Deluge. After a lamentation by Noah on the sinfulness of the world, God is introduced repenting that he made man, telling Noah how to build the Ark, and blessing him and his. Noah's wife is an arrant shrew, and they fall at odds in the outset, both of them swearing by the Virgin Mary. Noah begins and finishes the Ark on the spot; then tells his spouse what is coming, and invites her on board: she stoutly refuses ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the agricultural labours of spring, a Shrew-mouse, Field-mouse, Mole, Frog, Adder, or Lizard, will provide us with the most vigorous and famous of these expurgators of the soil. This is the Burying-beetle, the Necrophorus, so different from the cadaveric mob in dress and habits. In honour of his exalted functions he exhales an ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... flatters," returned he, "it would tell a falsehood. A shrew can provoke a man who detests her. As to Miss Dundas, notwithstanding her parade of learning, she generally espouses the wrong side of the argument; and I may say with somebody, whose name I have forgotten, that any one who knows Diana Dundas never need be at a loss ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... his foreign adventures. But, alas!—and whose heart holdeth not communion with that word!—Cornelius was unhappy. He had one daughter, whom "he loved passing well;" yet, as common report did acknowledge, the veriest shrew that ever went unbridled. In vain did his riches and his revenues increase; in vain was plenty poured into his lap, and all that wealth could compass accumulate in lavish profusion. Of what avail was ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Taming of the Shrew no doubt passed for a light comedy in Shakespeare's day, though we describe it by a briefer name. Its rapid, bustling action is possible because we are always ready to take the character of a shrew for granted. It would have been a very different play had the poet required to account for Katharine's peculiarities of temper by a retrospective study of her heredity and upbringing. Many eighteenth-century ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... to th' lass. And, now that I think o' th' lass, comrade, I am not so sure that a scolding wife is not well paid for by a duteous daughter. Nay, I am sure o't. Methinks I would 'a' been wed twice, and each time to a shrew, could I but 'a' had my Keren o' one o' 'em. Ay, even ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... of the laborers resembled that of Christopher Sly in "The Taming of the Shrew." They were bewildered with astonishment at the appointments of their surroundings and the service of their attendants. A champagne headache was a natural accompaniment to the previous night's drinking and gorging; ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... found, for there would be nothing left but well-gnawed bones. And "time to spare," in this case meant twenty or thirty minutes. The Nipe had, if nothing else, a very efficient digestive tract. He ate like a shrew. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... surprise, dropped the meat which he held, and walked over to comfort her. She, however, turned on him like a veritable little shrew. ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine
... had belonged to Durer and which he thought the wife should give him after Durer was dead, but Agnes thought otherwise and would not give them up. Then, full of rage, the old man wrote the most outrageous letters about poor Agnes, saying that she was a shrew and had compelled Durer to work himself to death; that she was a miser and had led the artist an awful dance through life. This is the only evidence against her, and that so sane and sensible a man as the artist lived with her all his life and cherished her, is evidence enough that Pirkheimer ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... feminine sex (and indeed by no means to this class only) of a strapping and handsome footman is a commonplace of satire with eighteenth-century writers, both French and English. It is exercised possibly on both sisters, though the elder is a shrew; certainly on the younger, and also on their elderly bonne, Catherine. But it necessarily leads to trouble. The younger, Mlle. Habert (the curious hiding of Christian names reappears here), wants to retain Jacob in the joint service, and Catherine at least makes no objection, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... been happy enough not to understand. The forehead of the shrew unknotted a bit, and a look of satisfaction ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... that she was a termagant or a shrew for all this; she had the kindliest heart in the world, and acted towards me in particular in a truly maternal manner, occasionally putting some little morsel of choice food into my hand, some outlandish kind ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... servants, but in intelligence and in mental qualities their superior. Hira had been known in Govindpur from childhood as a widow, but no one had ever heard anything of her husband, neither had any one heard of any stain upon her character. She was something of a shrew. She dressed and adorned herself as one whose husband is living. She was beautiful, of brilliant complexion, lotus-eyed, short in stature, her face like the moon covered with clouds, her hair raised in ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... the worse for that Zeitgeist! The jade had to come to him, at last, completely subdued, as in the "Taming of the Shrew." ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... you, from that little Highland grandmother of yours, and when a man has that there's never any knowing where it will break out, or what dance it will lead him, especially when it comes to this love-making business. You are just as likely as not to lose your head over some little fool or shrew for the sake of her outward favour and make yourself miserable for life. When you pick you a wife please remember that I shall reserve the right to pass a candid opinion ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... read a line more; you are in antics of delight—you cannot keep yourself quiet for joy—you walk up and down—you sit—you rise—you laugh—you roar out. Oh! this is better than the "taming of a shrew." And do you think "a brute of a husband" is so easily tamed? The lion was a gentle beast, and made himself submissive to sweet Una; but the brute of a husband, he is indeed a very hideous and untameable wild-fowl. Poor, good, loving woman is happily content at some thing far under ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... between them was made by his dragging tail. The legend is like this, :-:-:-:-:-. Farther on are similar tracks, but alternate instead of opposite, like this,',',','. They were made by the short-tailed shrew. Still farther along a queer little ridge is seen in the snow across the wood road. It is the tunnel of the meadow mouse. Part of its fragile roof has fallen in and you may stoop and look into the little round tunnel which ran from the burrow ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... knee and looking about him. "Let that pass for a moment. You have the prettiest woodland parlor, child! Tell me, do they treat you well over there?" with a jerk of his thumb toward the glebe house. "Madam the shrew and his reverence the bully, are they kind to you? Though they let you go like a beggar maid,"—he glanced kindly enough at her bare feet and torn gown,—"yet they starve you not, nor beat you, nor deny ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... not unattractive woman of thirty-seven years, the mother of four children. She was characterized by her friends as refined, magnetic, and witty; by her enemies of the Republican party as a hard, unlovely shrew. The hostile press made the most of popular prejudice against a woman stump speaker and attempted by ridicule and invective to drive her from the stage. But Mrs. Lease continued to talk. She it was who ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... tell us, Emperor Jurgen," said they all, "your wife was an acidulous shrew, and the sort of woman who believes that whatever ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... in a dry room, sometimes turning them with a broom, but without washing, for fear of mouldiness. In Italy they arm the tops of long poles with nails and iron for the purpose, and believe the beating improves the tree; which I no more believe, than I do that discipline would reform a perverse shrew: Those nuts which come not easily out of their husks, should be laid to mellow in heaps, and the rest expos'd in the sun, till the shells dry, else they will be apt to perish the kernel: Some again preserve them in their own leaves, or in a chest made ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... observe that there are daily instances of as great changes made by marriage upon men's minds and humours. One might wear any passion out of a family by culture, as skilful gardeners blot a colour out of a tulip that hurts its beauty. One might produce an affable temper out of a shrew, by grafting the mild upon the choleric; or raise a jack-pudding from a prude, by inoculating mirth and melancholy. It is for want of care in the disposing of our children, with regard to our bodies and minds, that we go into a house and see such different complexions and humours ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... the habits of life, and the general place of each being in the economy of nature, would be of very high importance in classification. Nothing can be more false. No one regards the external similarity of a mouse to a shrew, of a dugong to a whale, of a whale to a fish, as of any importance. These resemblances, though so intimately connected with the whole life of the being, are ranked as merely "adaptive or analogical characters;" but to the consideration of these resemblances ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... making me a slave, and making yourself a laughing-stock. Its not fair. You get me the name of being a shrew with your meek ways, always talking as if butter wouldn't melt in your mouth. And just because I look a big strong woman, and because I'm good-hearted and a bit hasty, and because you're always driving me to do things I'm sorry for afterwards, people ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... review of the work of his predecessors. There is a great deal of information in his books about his own life. He was born at Pergamos in A.D. 130 in the reign of Hadrian. His father was a scholar and his mother somewhat of a shrew. Galen, in his boyhood, learned much from his father's example and instruction, and at the age of 15 was taught by philosophers of the Stoic, Platonist, Peripatetic, and Epicurean schools. He became initiated, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... thou hadst died! So had the Trojans respite from their toils 465 Enjoy'd, who, now, shudder at sight of thee Like she-goats when the lion is at hand. To whom, undaunted, Diomede replied. Archer shrew-tongued! spie-maiden! man of curls![14] Shouldst thou in arms attempt me face to face, 470 Thy bow and arrows should avail thee nought. Vain boaster! thou hast scratch'd my foot—no more— And I regard ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... as hardly to be distinction in the annals of kings and emperors. What famous beauty embellished the court of Elizabeth or either Mary? Even Anne's Mrs. Masham was not a shining personality, and her Sarah of Marlborough was only a brilliant shrew. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... smaller ones, and perilous and awful it is to behold; for betwixt those forces it filleth all the mountain ghyll, and there is no foothold for man, nay for goat, save at a hundred foot or more above the water, and that evil and perilous; and is the running of a winter millstream to the beetles and shrew-mice that haunt the greensward beside it, so is the running of that flood to the sons of Adam and the beasts that serve them: and none has been so bold as to strive to ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... Gareth drew (And there were none but few goodlier than he) Shining in arms, 'Damsel, the quest is mine. Lead, and I follow.' She thereat, as one That smells a foul-fleshed agaric in the holt, And deems it carrion of some woodland thing, Or shrew, or weasel, nipt her slender nose With petulant thumb and finger, shrilling, 'Hence! Avoid, thou smellest all of kitchen-grease. And look who comes behind,' for there was Kay. 'Knowest thou not me? thy master? I am Kay. We lack thee by ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... great need of information and of lore of talking and of speech, be the need never so great, neither of them understandeth other's speech no more than gagling of geese. For jangle that one never so fast, that other is never the wiser, though he shrew him instead of 'good-morrow'! This is a great mischief that followeth now mankind; but God of His mercy and grace hath ordained double remedy. One is that some man learneth and knoweth many divers speeches, and so ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... hunting adventures have not been mere pleasure excursions. They have been of service to science. On one of his hunts, perhaps his earliest trip after white goats, he secured a second specimen of a certain tiny shrew, of which, up to that time, only the type was known. Much more recently, during a declared hunting trip in Colorado, he collected the best series of skins of the American panther, with the measurements taken in the flesh, that has ever been ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... and admired his sculpture; but when he gave up sculpture and became a thinker he simply tried me beyond all endurance, he was so thoughtless, with the result that, having ventured once or twice to show my natural resentment, I have been handed down to posterity as a shrew. I've never complained, and I don't complain now; but when a woman is married to a philosopher who is so taken up with his studies that when he rises in the morning he doesn't look what he is doing, and goes off to his business in his wife's clothes, I think she is entitled ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... interruption by without comment. "The Unknown Woman is brimful of possibilities to a bushman," he went on; "for although she MAY be all womanly strength and tenderness, she may also be anything, from a weak timid fool to a self-righteous shrew, bristling with virtue and indignation. Still," he added earnestly, as the opposition began to murmur, "when a woman does come into our lives, whatever type she may be, she lacks nothing in the way of chivalry, and it rests with herself whether she remains an outsider ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... Scarborough, with a vicious sneer, "has been insulting me for your sins. She is a shrew! I don't wonder you ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... Where's Edward? Edward, Edward! Kiss me, you minx! Fair, I wish that my dear friend, your father, were alive. Well, well, patience does it, and the Lord knows, Unity, he's been patient! Oh, you black-eyed piece, you need a bit and bridle! Here's Edward! Edward, the shrew's tamed at last! Such a ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... old croakers. Old Plain Talk had a shrew for a wife, and that's made him shrewish; and Old Prudence, when a boy, broke down in an apple-stall, and that discouraged him for life. No better sport for a knowing spark like me than to hear Old Plain Talk wheeze out his sour old ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... (1818-1820). Possibly the old soldier preferred the freedom of barrack life, where his authority was unquestioned, to the henpecked existence he led at home. "Ella era l y l era ella," says Patricio de Escosura in speaking of this couple; for Doa Mara was something of a shrew. She was a good business woman who combined energy with executive ability, as she later proved by managing successfully a livery-stable business. But, however formidable she may have been to her hostlers, her son Jos found her indulgent. He, ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... him,—only a mockery and a prophecy, a cold and cynical prediction that I should soon tire of his shrill voice. Yes, Cheri, your sweet silver trills, your rippling June-brook warbles, were to him only a shrew's scolding. I took the bird wrathfully, his name had been Cherry, and rechristened him on the spot Cheri, in anticipation of the new life that was to dawn upon him, no longer despised Cherry, but Cheri, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... 4. Herman Goetz's opera "The Taming of the Shrew" given in New York City (in English) by the American Opera Company, Theodore Thomas conductor, at the Academy of Music. At this performance ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... endu'd With gifts and knowledge, per'lous shrew'd. Never did trusty Squire with Knight, Or Knight with Squire, e'er jump more right. 625 Their arms and equipage did fit, As well as virtues, parts, and wit. Their valours too were of a rate; And out they sally'd at the gate. 630 Few miles on horseback had they jogged, But ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... issued Stow's 'Chronicles,' and was the holder of several licenses for printing; for nearly half a century J. Smethwicke (who died in 1641) had a shop 'under the diall' of St. Dunstan's, whence he issued Shakespeare's 'Hamlet,' 'Love's Labour Lost,' 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'Taming of the Shrew,' as well as works by Henry Burton, Drayton, Greene, Lodge, and others; Richard Marriot was in St. Dunstan's Churchyard early in the seventeenth century, and his ventures included Quarles' 'Emblems,' 1635, Dr. Downes' 'Sermons,' 1640, and Walton's ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... the little shrew," he would say. "Neither man nor devil can bend or break her. If I smashed every bone in her carcass, she would die shrieking hell at me ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain?—Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs, interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases.... Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... shall be perils dire and deadly. O bethink thee, lest she change thee into a swine, or black dog, aye, or even a small shrew-mouse—I've heard of such ere now—or blast thee with fire, or loathly ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... Beth," said brother Jim in a tone of exasperation, "I know what you'll be when you grow up, if you don't mind. You'll be just the sort of long-tongued shrew, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... vision, by the way, is reasonably good, if I may say so; at any rate I am not stone-blind. Yet here have I been perambulating the Public Garden for an indefinite period, without seeing the first trace of a field-mouse or a shrew. I should have been in excellent company had I begun long ago to maintain that no such animals exist within our precincts. But the other day a butcher-bird made us a flying call, and almost the first thing he did was to ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... whole wide and visible hemisphere was without a blot. Nature, like a deceitful mistress, looked so hypocritically serene, that her face might never have been darkened with a cloud or furrowed by a frown. So winning was she withal, that, though the veriest shrew, and all untamed and ungovernable in her habits and conditions, this night she became hushed and gentle as the soothed ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Called The Taming of the Shrew. As it was acted by his Maiesties Seruants at the Blacke Friers and the Globe. Written by Will. Shakespeare. London, Printed by W. S. for Iohn Smethwicke, and are to be sold at his Shop in Saint Dunstones Church-yard ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... those women who thrust themselves conspicuously upon the notice of the public, and that he meant to hint that those who thus unsex themselves often make a showy appearance without displaying much solid merit. If this subtle, sharp, and strong-minded female did not turn out to be something of a shrew, before her husband was done with her, I am much mistaken. Possibly, however, Shakspeare's sarcasm might bear a more general interpretation, and implies that women in an argument seldom meet the true issue presented to them, but are prone to go off at a tangent on some ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... my old head like turnips through a slicer; And naught I ken who the bowdykite's to wed— Some bletherskite he's picked up in a ditch, Some fond fligary flirtigig, clarty-fine, Who'll turn a slattern-shrew and a cap-river Within a week, if I ken aught of Jim. Unless ... Nay, sure, 'twas ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... three kings!" cried one, "here is an old dotard shrew to have so goodly a crutch! Use the leg that God hath given you, man, and do not bear so heavily ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... time has written plays that are remembered. The John Lacy whom Charles II. admired so much that he had his picture painted in three of his characters, died in 1681, leaving four comedies and an alteration of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. He was a handsome man: first dancing-master, then quarter-master, then an admired comedian. Henley would hardly have used a blank in referring to a well-known writer who died thirty years before. There was another ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... indignation, ire, frenzy; virago, termagant, shrew, vixen, beldame, Xantippe; agitation, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... after groaning to think that he was dependent on this shrew and under the thumb of a peasant of the Vosges, was bewitched by her coaxing ways and by a maternal affection that attached itself solely to the physical and material side of life. He was like a woman who forgives ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... refreshed by a delightful coolness as they entered the avenue of tall green oaks. On either side the springs, the mothers of these giant shade trees, flowed on in their eternal course. And when they reached the house of the shrew they came, as chance would have it, upon the two lovers, Sophie and her miller, kissing each other beside the well; for the girl's aunt had just gone down to the lavatory behind the willows of the Viorne. ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... was official, which did not prevent her from being a shrew at home. She founded a hospice—the Marie Therese Infirmary—visited the poor, succoured the sick, superintended creches, gave alms and prayed; at the same time she was harsh towards her husband, her relatives, her friends, and her servants, ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... holiday. I long for bodily sloth, for the ragged intellectual companionship that only Paris can give me, for the resumption of study of the philosophy of the excellent Henri Bergson, for the absinthe that brings forgetfulness, for the Tanagra figured, broad-mouthed, snub-nosed shrew that fills every day ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Boldwood, I promised you nothing. Would you have had me a woman of clay when you paid me that furthest, highest compliment a man can pay a woman—telling her he loves her? I was bound to show some feeling, if I would not be a graceless shrew. Yet each of those pleasures was just for the day—the day just for the pleasure. How was I to know that what is a pastime to all other men was death to you? Have reason, do, and think more ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... Yule was not so grateful as he might have been. His marriage proved far from unsuccessful; he might have found himself united to a vulgar shrew, whereas the girl had the great virtues of humility and kindliness. She endeavoured to learn of him, but her dulness and his impatience made this attempt a failure; her human qualities had to suffice. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... scarce it pushes Its gentle way through strangling rushes Where the glossy kingfisher Flutters when noon-heats are near, 105 Glad the shelving banks to shun, Red and steaming in the sun, Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat Burrows, and the speckled stoat; Where the quick sandpipers flit 110 In and out the marl and grit That seems to breed them, brown as they. Naught disturbs its quiet way, Save some lazy stork that springs, Trailing it with legs and wings, 115 Whom the shy fox from ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... tasted the bastinado and been tamed; most of them had been wise enough to tame themselves. If Shakespeare had been a Turk he would probably have written a very different version of the Taming of the Shrew! ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... until the duchess had taken leave of Heinz, and then rode on with him; but as soon as a portion of the road intervened between her and the countess the young Bohemian exclaimed: "We must certainly try to save Sir Heinz from this disagreeable shrew!" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the right, once given, it attracts —attracts! We have both suffered from it. So many rich years out of my life have been squandered by it. And out of his life, so much force, energy—spent in battling with the shrew, the termagant he has now fled from; strength never to be replenished, never to ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... not a few were once applied to both sexes alike, which are now restricted to the female. It is so even with 'girl', which was once a young person of either sex{212}; while other words in this list, such for instance as 'hoyden'{213} (Milton, prose), 'shrew' (Chaucer), 'coquet' (Phillips, New World of Words), 'witch' (Wiclif), 'termagant' (Bale), 'scold', 'jade', 'slut' (Gower), must be regarded in their present exclusive appropriation to the female sex as evidences of men's rudeness, and ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... The shrew mole of North America is a ground-digger of great ingenuity. He is second only to the mole in the extent and pretensions of his engineering and tunnelling. His eyes are very small and deeply hidden in his fur. During the day he constantly comes to the surface of the earth, ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... Beroe, for shame! they're quite the worst That any head can possibly contain! And then her cheeks of green and yellow hues, The obvious penalty of poisonous envy— Zeus oft complains to me that that same shrew Each night torments him with her nauseous love, And with her jealous whims,—enough, I'm sure, Into Ixion's wheel ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... (Lepus variabilis or timidus) replaces the common hare (Lepus europaeus) in the higher regions; though absent from the intervening plains it again appears in the north of Europe and in Scotland. Among the Insectivora, the alpine shrew (Sorex alpinus) is restricted to the Alps. Of the Cheiroptera (bats) only Vesperugo maurus is ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... than the great carnivorous dinosaurs. Among such theories the most ingenious is that of the late Professor Cope, who suggested that some of the small, inoffensive, and inconspicuous forms of Jurassic mammals, of the size of the shrew and the hedgehog, contracted the habit of seeking out the nests of these dinosaurs, gnawing through the shells of their eggs, and thus destroying the young. The appearance, or evolution, of any egg-destroying animals, whether reptiles or mammals, which could attack this great ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... show thee who is master, O! shrew!" observed her master, as he surveyed his handiwork. "Thou wilt not walk, then shall thy sisters force thee to run; thou wilt lie down, then shall they drag thee ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... lived, I couldn't have left New York; but now, now that I am safe, why should I stay here, flatting with a shrew, provoking the Van Dams, to whom I owe some gratitude, wasting my life for a man who—who said he ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... point of view had been changing; a group of white foxgloves, like ghost-flames, that she had seen in a coppice, the creeping of a bright eyed shrew mouse through last year's leaves at her feet, the hundreds of little rabbits with curved-in backs that ran with their curious rocking action over the dewy fields at evening—all these things gave ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... convinced, hold most true, if applied to the most venomous individuals of human insects. A tyrant, a trickster, and a bully, generally wear the marks of their several dispositions in their countenances; so do the vixen, the shrew, the scold, and all other females of the like kind. But, perhaps, nature hath never afforded a stronger example of all this than in the case of Mrs. Francis. She was a short, squat woman; her head was closely ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... not half such scolds as they sound," answered Uncle Blair gaily. "If they would but 'tak a thought and mend' their shrew-like ways they would be ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... strapping Amazon, six foot if an inch, and massive in proportion. She was handsome too, in a swarthy way, though near at hand her face was sensuous and bold. Yet she had a suave, flattering manner and a coarse wit that captured the crowd. Dangerous, unscrupulous and cruel, I thought; a man-woman, a shrew, a termagant! ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... as the Scriptures say, all wives should do. But the lust of brandy overcame wifely obedience, and Brinsden, hoping for the best, was constrained to cut a hole in her skull. The next day she was as impudent as ever, until Matthias rose yet more fiercely in his wrath, and the shrew perished. Then was Thomas Pureney's opportunity, and the Sunday following the miscreant's condemnation he delivered unto him and seventeen other malefactors the moving discourse which ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... rights have crazed thee? Would'st thou be A Winter Amazon, more fierce than he? Can Summer birds thy shrew-heroics sing? Wilt tend no more the daisies on the lea, Nor wake thy cowslips ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... favour! Take me by the hand And lead me back again to thine own land, The nook supreme, the sanctum in the glen Where pixies walk,—unknown to peevish men And shrew-like women whom no faith uplifts! Show me the place where Nature keeps the gifts She most approves, and where the song-birds dwell, And I'll forego the land of ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... Mississippi relative. The spoon-beaked sturgeon of the Yangtsze and Hwang-ho is, however, now separated, as Psephurus, from the closely allied American Polyodon. Among insectivorous mammals the Chinese and Japanese shrew-moles, respectively forming the genera Uropsilus and Urotrichus, are represented in America by Neurotrichus. The giant salamander of the rivers of China and Japan and the Chinese mandarin duck are by some included in the same genera ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... time, have seen players make a minx out of Ophelia, a mild-mannered mouse out of Katherine, an honest woman out of Lady Macbeth and a benevolent old gentleman out of Shylock. I have seen French players cast as the servants of Petruchio invade "The Taming of the Shrew" with a comic pantomime in which they fought for their turns at the keyhole of Petruchio's bedroom wherein Kate was being subjected to a little off-stage taming. It would have amused Shakespeare immoderately, ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... Cat, or Catherine Hall, was a slattern and a minx, Mrs. Score was a far superior shrew; and for the seven years of her apprenticeship the girl was completely at her mistress's mercy. Yet though wondrously stingy, jealous, and violent, while her maid was idle and extravagant, and her husband seemed to abet the girl, ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... aggressive fashion, exactly reproducing the threatening action of an angry scorpion. Now, as a matter of fact, the devil's coach-horse is quite harmless, but I have often seen, not only little boys and girls, but also chickens, small birds, and shrew-mice, evidently alarmed at his minatory attitude. So, too, the bumble-bee flies, which are inoffensive insects got up in sedulous imitation of various species of wild bee, flit about and buzz angrily in the sunlight, quite after the fashion ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... industrious and thrifty man; but failure and the loss of an excellent wife had wrought a sad change in his character and temper; and having married a second wife, who turned out a virago and a shrew, there was little hope of his improving. He was still industrious, and owing to his former reputation for honesty and doing good work, he still retained many of his old customers. He had a small shop in a public part of ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... is from thirty to fifty miles wide; and five hoofed animals, including the Tapir, two species of rhinoceros, and an elephant. Besides these there are thirteen Rodents and four Insectivora, including a shrew-mouse and six squirrels, whose unaided passage over twenty miles of sea is even more inconceivable than ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the grind of doing the same thing day after day, year after year, seems to bring the meanness right out. I've seen lots of instances of that, and I'm perfectly sure that if I were a farmer's wife, and had to work like a slave I'd be a perfect shrew and there'd be no ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... contradictions of the popular judgment is that episode in Njla, where Kari has to trust to the talkative person whose wife has a low opinion of him. It begins like farce: any one can see that Bjorn has all the manners of the swaggering captain; his wife is a shrew and does not take him at his own valuation. The comedy of Bjorn is that he proves to be something different both from his own Bjorn and his wife's Bjorn. He is the idealist of his own heroism, and believes ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... long legs she walks with the uncertain step common to all young things. She hunts field-mice, shrew-mice—even partridge, and this hard work in the fields has toughened her young muscles and given a rather gloomy ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... things rather than persons; smell, and inspect a new piece of furniture several times; are attached to houses, and are extremely fond of scents, especially certain kinds emanating from plants. They seldom eat the rats which they kill, although they devour mice. If they should swallow a shrew, which is very rare, they almost immediately reject it. They will sit hour after hour watching at the mouth of a hole, and after seizing their prey, bring it to their favourites in the house to show their prowess, and strut about with a great air of self-satisfaction. They generally have ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... Well that Ends Well,' which may be tentatively assigned to 1595. Meres, writing three years later, attributed to Shakespeare a piece called 'Love's Labour's Won.' This title, which is not otherwise known, may well be applied to 'All's Well.' 'The Taming of The Shrew,' which has also been identified with 'Love's Labour's Won,' has far slighter claim to the designation. The plot of 'All's Well,' like that of 'Romeo and Juliet,' was drawn from Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure' ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... Gentlemen of Verona. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Measure for Measure. The Comedy of Errours. Much adoo about Nothing Loves Labour lost. Midsommer Nights Dreame. The Merchant of Venice. As you Like it. The Taming of the Shrew. All is well, that Ends well. Twelfe-Night, or what you ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... talk and coarser manners. Her tale is to show what a woman likes best, which, according to her, is to bear rule over her husband and household. The prioress is conventional and weak, aping courtly manners. The wife of the host of the Tabard inn is a vixen and shrew, who calls her husband a milksop, and is so formidable with both her tongue and her hands that he is glad to make his escape from her whenever he can. The pretty wife of the carpenter, gentle and slender, with her white apron and open dress, is ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... re-enact a modern edition of 'The Taming of the Shrew.' Y'u'll find me, sweet, as apt at the part as old Petruchio." He paced complacently up the room ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... Marsupialia (opossums, &c.) Marsupialia 52 Ruminantia (oxen, stag, &c.) Ruminantia 6th month, that of a ruminant; 53 Amphibia (seals) } 9 Tertiary 54 Digitigrada (dog, cat, &c.) Digitigrada / 7th month, that of a digitigrade animal; 55 Plantigrada (bear, &c.) Plantigrada / 56 Insectivora (shrew, &c.) Insectivora / 57 Cheiroptera (bats) Cheiroptera / 58 Quadrumana (apes) Quadrumana / 8th month, that of the quadrumana; 29 Bimana (man) Bimana 10 Superficial deposits 9th month, attains ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... greatest friend and was notable for three things, his enormous size, his surpassing skill on the violoncello and his devoted attachment to the veriest shrew of a little sharp-boned wife that ever crossed from Germany into England. For all these things Peter loved him, but Herr Lutz was never very actively conscious of Peter because from the moment that he entered ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... scatter, sdegno, sdrucciolo, sfavellare, [Greek: sphinx], sgombrare, sgranare, shake, slumber, smell, snipe, space, splendour, spring, squeeze, shrew, step, strength, stramen, ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... do, Kind critic, your "tongue has a tang" But—a sage never heeded a shrew In the ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail, Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter cricket thou; Braved in my own house by a skein of thread! Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant!" (Taming of the Shrew, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... all men are knaves, And shrew-bound gentlemen discourse of slaves; As reeling drunkards judge the world unsteady And idlers swear employers ne'er get ready— Thieves that the constable stole all they had, The mad that all except themselves are mad; So, in ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... Doctors in the camp Dissected the slain deer, weighed the trout's brain, Captured the lizard, salamander, shrew, Crab, mice, snail, dragon-fly, minnow and moth; Insatiate skill in water or in air Waved the scoop-net, and nothing came amiss; The while, one leaden got of alcohol Gave an impartial tomb to all the kinds. Not less the ambitious botanist sought plants, Orchis and gentian, fern and long whip-scirpus, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... supper, Lizzie tried to bring the child round again to that prettier and better state. But the charm was broken. The dolls' dressmaker had become a little quaint shrew, of the world, ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... is hooded; I could hear but that floweth The great hood below its mouth:" then the bird made reply. "If they know not, more's the pity, for the little shrew-mouse knoweth, And the kite knows, and the eagle, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... the study of philosophy, for which he had a natural bent. In person he was far from fulfilling the Athenian ideal of beauty, being short of stature, corpulent, with protruding eyes, upturned nose, large mouth, and thick lips. His domestic life was not happy, his wife, Xantippe, being a noted shrew. His failure to provide for the material welfare of his family, though quite natural in a man to whom all material things seemed unessential, must have sorely tried her patience. But Socrates bore her scolding with resignation. Indeed, he seemed to regard it as furnishing ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... Acton, she was miraculously meek and dumb; all the scold was quelled within her; the word "blood" was the Petruchio that tamed that shrew; she could see a plenty of those crimson spots, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... thought of sleep had I, rather I lay that I might watch her (furtively, beneath my arm) where she sat head aloft, cheeks flushed and bosom tempestuous. And (despite her beauty) a very termagant shrew I thought her. Then, all at once, I saw a tear fall and another; and she that had sung undaunted to the tempest and outfaced its fury, sat bitterly weeping like any heart-broke maid, yet giving due heed to our course none the less. Presently, chancing ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... and yet imprudent enough to consent to marry him. This had the effect of rendering him at once and surprisingly prudent. As the poet puts it, "he had found out a flat for his fair," and as he himself put it, "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow: but be-shrew me, we never thought of making my bank-manager one of the party, to break him in to our ways; the consequence being that Elinor's maid will have to stick a bedroom-suite priced five-pounds-ten, while the other domestics, unless dividends ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... beyond, from which few ever returned. Old birds are not caught with such wiles. I did succeed in gaining the ear of one of the gossips, and asking him what he could tell me of the good dame and her inn. It seemeth that she is somewhat of a shrew upon occasion, and that her tongue had more to do with her husband's death than the dropsy which the leech put it down to. Again, a new inn hath been started in the village, which is well-managed, and is like to draw the custom from ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... they were sinking gradually down to the level of the coarse men and women whom they saw; the worse and not the better parts of both their characters were getting the upper hand; and it was but too possible that after a while the hero might sink into the ruffian, the lady into a slattern and a shrew. ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... like the plains, come and water the earth. Sun, embrace the earth that she may be fruitful. Moon, lion of the north, bear of the west, badger of the south, wolf of the east, eagle of the heavens, shrew of the earth, elder war hero, younger war hero, warriors of the six mountains of the world, intercede with the Cloud People for us that they may water the earth. Medicine bowl, cloud bowl, and water vase give us your hearts, that the earth may ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... remarkable diamonds have been stolen after all, have they?" said Cleek, breaking silence suddenly. "And that vulgar and overbearing old shrew, the Dowager Duchess of Heatherlands, has paid for the possession of them with her life! Ah, my dear Mr. Narkom, what a disastrous thing lust of power and craving for position is! The lady would better have stuck to her father's beer vats and the glory of Hobson and Simkin's entire, and Heatherlands ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... bairn, Maggie?" answered the peace-officer, smiling and shaking his head with an ironical emphasis on the adjective, and a calmness calculated to provoke to madness the furious old shrew. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... too fresh at any time—had begun to fade, her face and figure to shrink, and her brow to tighten. At last, embittered by her responsibilities and disappointments, she had lost faith in human kind and had become a shrew. Since then her tongue had swept on as relentlessly as a scythe, sparing neither flower nor noxious weed, a movement which it was wise, sometimes, ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith |
