"Sprat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whan the sonne shyneth brighte In March that chaungeth ofte tyme his face And that a cloud is put with wind to flighte Which over-sprat the sonne as for a space, A cloudy thought gan thorugh hir soule pace, That over-spradde hir brighte ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... mistaken notions of Sprat not deprived us of Cowley's correspondence, we doubtless had viewed the picture of lonely genius touched by a tender pencil.[A] But we have SHENSTONE, and GRAY, and SWIFT. The heart of Shenstone bleeds in the dead oblivion ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... ideas, Mr. Isaac Solomons, junior, produced the romance of Mrs. Cat, and confesses himself completely happy to have brought it to a conclusion. His poem may be dull—ay, and probably is. The great Blackmore, the great Dennis, the great Sprat, the great Pomfret, not to mention great men of our own time—have they not also been dull, and had pretty reputations too? Be it granted Solomons IS dull; but don't attack his morality; he humbly submits that, in his poem, no man shall mistake virtue for vice, no man shall allow a single ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unheeded, and no voice was raised in protest against this glaring infamy. Nay, the duke went further still in his efforts towards injuring the wife to whom he owed so much, and who loved him over-well; as he caused his chaplain, the Rev. Thomas Sprat, to marry him to my Lady Shrewsbury; and subsequently conferred on the son to which she gave birth, and for whom the king stood godfather, his second title of Earl of Coventry. His wife was henceforth styled by the courtiers Dowager Duchess of Buckingham. ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... Sardine at Ceylon; the S. neohowii, Val., alluded to above, and the S. leiogaster, Val. and Cuv. xx. 270, which was found by Mr. Reynaud at Trincomalie. It occurs also off the coast of Java. Another Ceylon fish of the same group, a Clupea, is known as the "poisonous sprat," the bonito (Scomber pelamys?), the kangewena, or unicorn fish (Balistes?), and a number of others, are more or less in bad repute from ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... the calmest way, and was evidently bent upon pumping him dry before he left the house. As a rule Steel was not a man to be pumped, but after some reflection he concluded that it was just as well to use a sprat to catch a mackerel. In plain English, he determined, with reservations, to gratify Mrs. Parry's curiosity, so that he might get a sight of what she had to show him. If he were reticent, she would show him nothing; whereas if he told her all ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... in Lent, the close morning promising a cleere day, (attended on by Thomas Slye{3:10} my Taberer, William Bee my seruant, and George Sprat, appointed for my ouerseer, that I should take no other ease but my prescribed order) my selfe, thats I, otherwise called Caualiero Kemp, head-master of Morrice-dauncers, high Head-borough of heighs, and onely tricker of your Trill-lilles and best bel-shangles{3:15} ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... the card index of his mind to find the reference, the key that opened the door to physical science, the pregnant point of view that would give birth to a whole new concept of man's relationship to the universe. He found the passages in Thomas Sprat's History of the ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... esteemed the greatest mischief a man can do to those whom he loves, to raise men's expectations of them too high by undue and impertinent commendations.—SPRAT. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... social work in one branch are exchangeable for ten minutes of social work in another. It will be easy to calculate how much social working time each single product requires."[1229] A hunter hunts all day and shoots a deer. A fisher fishes all day and catches a sprat. Will the hunter exchange his deer for the sprat, on the principle of equal labour-time? Will highly skilled workers be satisfied to receive the same wages as the most unskilled labourers? Will equal labour-time pay for all not lead to universal dawdling, ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... truly, never now a man Comes home, but he begins to scan; And to his household loudly cries, Why, where's my pitcher? What's the matter? 'Tis dead and gone my last year's platter. Who gnawed these olives? Bless the sprat, Who nibbled off the head of that? And where's the garlic vanished, pray, I purchased only yesterday? —Whereas, of old, our stupid youths Would sit, with open mouths and ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... was made from the Thynnus or Tunny as well as from the Scomber, but that from the Scomber was counted the most delicate. Commentators, however, are not agreed about the Scomber or Scombrus. Some suppose it was the Herring or Sprat; others believe it was the mackarel; after all, perhaps it was the Anchovy, which I do not find distinguished by any other Latin name: for the Encrasicolus is a Greek appellation altogether generical. Those who would be further informed ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Jack Sprat could eat no fat; His wife could eat no lean; So 'twixt them both they cleared the cloth, And ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous
... engaging qualities, both of disposition and manner, which, on a nearer intercourse, he disclosed, as well as by that entire absence of any literary assumption or pedantry, which entitled him fully to the praise bestowed by Sprat upon Cowley, that few could "ever discover he was a great poet by his discourse." While thus, by his intimates, and those who had got, as it were, behind the scenes of his fame, he was seen in his true colours, as well of weakness as of amiableness, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the birds in the air, but none of them knew the way to Shiny Wall. For why? He was still too far down south. But for that there was a remedy. And so he swam northward, day after day, till at last he met the King of the Herrings, with a currycomb growing out of his nose, and a sprat in his mouth for a cigar, and asked him the way to Shiny Wall; so he bolted the sprat head ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... determine the origin of the Danube; but I know in general the district in which it rises, and that its fountain is near that of the Rhine.' Not only, however, was it applied to time and space, but it had a large and very elegant figurative use. Thus in the History of the Royal Society by Sprat (an author who was finical and nice in his use of words)—I remember a sentence to this effect: 'the Society gave punctual directions for the conducting of experiments;' i.e. directions which descended to the minutiae and lowest details. ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... proclamation. Diabolus imposed a great oath on the townspeople never to desert him; he believed that if they entered into a covenant of this kind Shaddai could not absolve them from it. They 'swallowed the engagement as if it had been a sprat in the mouth of a whale.' Being now Diabolus's trusty children, he gave them leave 'to do whatever their appetites prompted to do.' They would thus involve themselves in all kinds of wickedness, and Shaddai's ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... three refractory establishments to order and obedience; and, by his firmness and good humour, succeeded. His tact was a little knowledge of everything (not like Solomon's, from the hyssop to the cedar), but from the boiler of a potato to the boiler of a steam-boat, and from catching a sprat to catching a whale; he could fatten pigs and poultry, and had a peculiar way of improving the size, though not the breed of the latter; in short, he was "jack of all trades ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... hacked and hewed the window-shutters of his chamber, as a memorandum of his being there. Here is a good picture of Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in his later age, . . . and here is the very flower pot and counterfeit association for which Bishop Sprat is taken up, and the Duke of Marlborough sent to the Tower. The reservoirs on the hill supply the city. The late Mr. Selwyn governed the borough by them, and I believe by some wine ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... Jack Sprat could eat no fat, His wife could eat no lean; And so, betwixt them both, you see, They licked ...
— Pinafore Palace • Various
... Whales, and before very long they began fighting with one another. The battle was very fierce, and had lasted some time without any sign of coming to an end, when a Sprat thought that perhaps he could stop it; so he stepped in and tried to persuade them to give up fighting and make friends. But one of the Dolphins said to him contemptuously, "We would rather go ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... All I know about Sprat is as the author of a dull history of the Royal Society, so I was surprised to meet with ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... did not boast of many lords and ladies, or persons of high ancestral lineage, yet everyone was, according to Adamic heraldry, a perfect gentleman or lady in their own right; for they all bore arms, with the exception of Jack Sprat, the bellman, who could only muster one, with which he ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... between being too fat or too lean, the wise woman would certainly take the smaller allowance of flesh. Jack Sprat might incite pleasant ridicule, but Jack Sprat's wife—lo! there would be naught but pity and tears for her! It is better by far to be the butt of jokes concerning "walking shoestrings" or "perambulating ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... the chariot of Dryden's triumph, was about to appear. First came, in 1671, the "Rehearsal," a play concocted among various wits of the time, including Sprat, Clifford, poor Butler, of "Hudibras," and chiefly the Duke of Buckingham. The object of this play was to turn rhymed heroic tragedy, and especially the great playwright of the day, under the name of Bayes, his person, manners, conversation, and habits, into unmitigated ridicule. The plan has often ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... I see him even now, As late he sailed along With smiling and unruffled brow Amid the finny throng, No gladder, gayer sprat than he In all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... been swallowed as well as he, there's no doubt that they could have been equally well accommodated. But as to what some wicked Infidels objected, about the swallow of the whale being too narrow to admit the passage of the man, it only required a little stretching, and even a herring or a sprat might have gulped him. He enlarged, most copiously, on the circumstance of the Lord speaking to the fish, in order to cause him to vomit; and insisted on the natural efficacy of the Lord, which was ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... of mankind. There is no fixed rule as to the manner or time of the offering. It is left to the caprice or childlike affection of the individual to decide how he will make it. With most natives it is a simple matter of business, the throwing of a sprat to catch a salmon; the man brings his offering only when he needs the help of the spirits. There is very little ceremony about it. The offerer will say, for example, 'There, I lay a cigar for you; smoke it and hereafter drive fish towards me'; or, 'Accompany me on the journey, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... the fools—a capital novel-style: but then you can pick almost anything out of Shakespeare. Elsewhere the constant presence either of semi-poetic phraseology or of some kind of "lingo" was almost fatal. You want what Sprat calls a more "natural way of speaking" (though not necessarily a "naked" one) for novel purposes—a certain absence of ceremony and parade of phrase: though the presence of slang and some other things, the rebuking of which was partly Swift's object in the Conversation, is not ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... so, what should he do? Was it not the case that in such event he would be altogether ruined,—a penniless adventurer with his profession absolutely gone from him? What little money he had got together had been expended on behalf of Mountjoy,—a sprat thrown out to catch a whale. Everything according to the present tidings had been left to Mountjoy. He had only half known his father, who had turned against him with virulence because of his unkindness. ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... was wonderful how mean this man could be when he had to expend his own money. Save clothes, which necessarily had to be of good material, though quiet in colour, he never failed to buy the cheapest article obtainable; unless, of course, when, on the principle of "throwing a sprat to catch a herring," he ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... Poetical Reflections to Howard.[6] An examination of the Poems and Essays, however, reveals no point of resemblance with our poem. How, then, does Howard fit into the picture? He was in the rival camp to Dryden and was a friend of Martin Clifford[7] and of Thomas Sprat, then Buckingham's chaplain: these three have been thought to be jointly responsible for The Rehearsal. Sprat had published a poem of congratulation to Howard on Howard's The British Princes (1669), the ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... by Mr. Yarrell, in the Zoological Journal, relative to the distinction between the sprat and the young of the pilchard and herring, I can state that Cornish fishermen term the young of both the latter fishes sprats; but, how far this should go in determining the judgment of a naturalist will appear, when I add that I have never seen above one specimen of the genuine sprat in Cornwall, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 547, May 19, 1832 • Various
... Cromwell died on the anniversary of Dunbar fight and of the field of Worcester. And yet the end, though it was to be sudden, did not at once seem likely to be so. There was time for the poets to tune their lyres. Waller, Dryden, Sprat, and Marvell had no doubt that "Tumbledown Dick" was to sit on the throne of his father and "still keep the sword erect," and were ready ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... door dates from Cottingham's time. He had found the archway partially blocked, so that an ordinary square-headed door might be inserted, a most barbarous arrangement. In the passage within is a portrait of Bishop Sprat, and in the Chapter Room itself one of King James I. and a view in St. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... that similia similibus curantur. There are Jack and Gill, who, not living in the days of the Cochituate, went up the hill for water, and who, in descending, met with cerebral injuries. There are the dietetic difficulties of Mr. and Mrs. Sprat, with the happy solution of a problem at one time threatening the domestic peace of this amiable pair. Be sure, little woman, we will find merry morsels in the silly-wise book! And there will be other silly-wise books. Cinderella shall again lose her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... mate, for instantaneously there was another rush in the water, a splash, and Oliver drew out the head of his prize, the rest having been bitten off as cleanly as a pair of scissors would go through a sprat, ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... Sprat, the Bishop of Rochester, in his interesting History of the Royal Society, so sensible and liberal—published shortly before Glanvill's book,—also contemplates the extension of science over the ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... BLEAK or fresh-water Sprat; a fish that is ever in motion, and therefore called by some the river-swallow; for just as you shall observe the swallow to be, most evenings in summer, ever in motion, making short and quick turns when he flies to catch flies, in the ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... renewed his acquaintance with Snoilsky, and was treated everywhere with the highest distinction. Ibsen and Bjoernson were how beginning to be recognized as the two great writers of Norway, and their droll balance as the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat of letters was already becoming defined. It was doubtless Bjoernson's emphatic attacks on Sweden that at this moment made Ibsen so loving to the Swedes and so beloved. He was in such clover at Stockholm that he might have lingered on there indefinitely, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... treat me as if I were on a different plane," she said. "I'm a sinner, too, in my own humble way. It's unreasonable of you to go on like that, unkind as well. I may be only a sprat in your estimation, but even a sprat has its little feelings, its little heartaches, too, I daresay." She broke off with a sigh and a laugh; then, drawing impulsively nearer to him, but still without turning: "Do you remember once, ages and ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Goose. "Well, if you can find no other place to stay to-night come with me. I have a big house, and with me live Little Bo Peep, Little Boy Blue, who is getting to be quite a big chap now, Little Tommie Tucker and Jack Sprat and his wife. Oh, I have many other friends living with me, and surely we can find room ...
— Uncle Wiggily and Old Mother Hubbard - Adventures of the Rabbit Gentleman with the Mother Goose Characters • Howard R. Garis
... part company with me, and as my boat began to gather way, they began to swim after her. The big fellow led, and all the others followed. There was hundreds of them, of all sizes, and one little chap, who brought up the rear, was no bigger than a sprat. After me they came with open months and big red eyes, all the hair on their backs standing up, and their tails whisking about like the flukes of a whale in a flurry. Didn't I just pull for dear life, for I knew what they'd be after if they once grappled me. They would have swallowed me, every ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... the gutter at a fine rate; but in the end I shall get it all back again, and more with it. This Balfour takes me for a foolish doting father, but he shall pay for all himself before I've done with him. I throw a sprat to catch a whale; and neither you nor any other fool shall interfere ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... modern poetical imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has, indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes' tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble, which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every capital in Europe for the last fifty years. We cast that badly, and give luster to the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... the same price; no matter what the quality of vegetables might be, all were reduced to the same level. Fish was simply fish. The best varieties and the most inferior were included in the same despotic law. Salmon and stickleback, turbot and sprat, herrings and soles, would (had they existed) have been sold at so much a pound independent of their qualities. The result was that if your servant went to market to buy a fine species of fish, the seller insisted upon his taking a due proportion ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... Samuel Adrian Inglethwaite. Why I was called Samuel I do not know. Possibly my parents did. Samuel may have been a baptismal sprat set to catch a testamentary whale, but if this was so no legacy ever came my way. Personally, I am rather attached to the name, as I was called nothing else until I encountered the lady who ultimately consented to become Mrs Inglethwaite. Since ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... have to smoke cubebs," Grey rejoined. "You remember Mrs. Opie's 'White Lies' and the 'Potted Sprats?' My asthma has proved a sprat, and there is a clay pipe at this moment waiting for me in the kitchen, and pretty soon you will see me puffing like a coal-pit. Do you suppose they will ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... "Hullo old sprat-catcher! Going for a sail?" called out a soldier, and I knew that the group were all round our boat, Heru trembling so violently in my breast that I thought she would ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold |
