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Vandal   Listen
noun
Vandal  n.  
1.
(Anc. Hist.) One of a Teutonic race, formerly dwelling on the south shore of the Baltic, the most barbarous and fierce of the northern nations that plundered Rome in the 5th century, notorious for destroying the monuments of art and literature.
2.
Hence, one who willfully destroys or defaces any work of art or literature, or anything valluable. "The Vandals of our isle, Sworn foes to sense and law."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vandal" Quotes from Famous Books



... The vandal hand of a conquering Roman tore loose the stone portal of the tomb, and mummy and imprisoned soul were carried across the great sea and with other husks of former life exhibited in the triumph of Octavius; then placed in a museum to be gazed upon by ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... at Southold the following spring,[28] but the deeds themselves have long been lost, and the pages of the volume on which they were entered despoiled of their contents by some vandal years ago. These items of record, however, point to one conclusion, that if the owners of Shelter Island were unable to produce Forrett's deed from the Indians in 1652, which they seem to have been unable to do, it is not at all likely that it will ever be discovered. It ...
— John Eliot's First Indian Teacher and Interpreter Cockenoe-de-Long Island and The Story of His Career from the Early Records • William Wallace Tooker

... our little forest is for sale. And oh, Philip, if some vandal buys my dear trees and cuts them down, my very life will die of grief! They are my brothers. And if a man built a house there and asked me to marry him, I would, if he were as ugly as old Jeremiah! (I suppose all the prophets were like this, ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... 'Vandal!' he exclaimed, with a mixture of indignation and contempt; 'you talk like a man whom posterity will never mention. Look at the names you have insulted! Look at this letter from Montaigne to Boetius, so illegible that it has never been ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... of our fathers is too manifest. It creates and lets loose upon their institutions the vandal spirit of innovation and overthrow; for, after the memory of our fathers shall have been rendered contemptible, who will uphold and sustain their institutions? The memory of our fathers should be the watch-word ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... the ruby. In the temple its influence was beneficent, its crimson glow benignant and abounding with blessings for all true believers; but when desecrated by the plundering vandal's touch it became a great ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk

... thought alone shall brace your thews To trample under heel those Vandal hordes Who laugh when blood of mother and babe imbrues Their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various

... of the brain, welds an image which the sceptic would deny me, because I cannot see with my physical eyes the changeful, lovely face of my thought-child. He would break the mind's mirror. This spirit-vandal would humble my soul and force me to bite the dust of material things. While I champ the bit of circumstance, he scourges and goads me with the spur of fact. If I heeded him, the sweet-visaged earth would vanish into ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller

... see how the past injected itself into the present, and gave it tone and color. She reasoned only from what met her sight. It is not strange that she felt bitterly toward those who had committed such seemingly vandal acts. No wonder she spoke bitterly, wrote hard things to her Northern friends, and denied the civilization and Christianity of those who could harry, oppress, and destroy the poor, the ignorant, and the weak. It is not surprising that she sneered at the "Southern Gentleman," or that she wrote ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... one of extreme gravity. It is also one of pressing importance. The growth of the Criminal is one of the most ominous clouds on every national horizon. In spite of advances in criminology the rate of increase is so alarming that the "Unfit" threatens to be to the new Civilization what the Hun and Vandal were to the old. How to deal with this dangerous class is perhaps the most serious question that faces Sociologists at this hour. And something must be done speedily, else our civilization is in imminent peril of being swamped by the increasingly ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple

... one man may be a great minister of State and the other a lad fresh from school. The laws of a "corps" remind you of the laws made by English schoolboys for themselves,—they are as solemnly binding, as educational, and as absurd. If a Vandal meets a Hessian in the street he may not recognise him, though the Hessian be his brother; but outside the town's boundary this prohibition is relaxed, for it is not rooted in ill feeling but in ceremony. One corps will challenge another to meet it on the duelling ground, just as an ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

... of color in the pearl and primrose light, under clouds changeful as opal; and each separate, dainty picture of farmhouse, or lock, or group of flags and reeds had its double in the water, lying bright and clear as a painting under glass, until our vandal boat came ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... But vandal hands destroyed the prize And sank it 'neath a weight of stones, While ALMETA sends forth her sighs, And PONOMO emits his groans. Here let them rest, if rest they may, Amid the beauteous scenes around, And wait in peace the final day, When ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite

... Praise to you, Vandal guns of dull intent! We lacked till now our Beauty's monument Twice hallowed o'er by insult's ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... must be true that under This earth of ours there lies a Purgatory For those who seek to rob grief of the glory That shines through hope of life immortal. In Sin's lexicon this is the vilest sin - Needless and cruel, ugly, gaunt and mean, Without one poor excuse on which to lean, A vandal sin, that with no hope of gain Finds pleasure only in ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... land, in the air, on sea, and under the sea. And while all creation stands aghast beside the gaping graves, by rivers of blood, mourning with us the loss of some of the greatest Englishmen that ever lived, South Africa, having constituted herself the only vandal State, possesses sufficient incompassion to celebrate the protection conferred on her by the British Fleet and devote her God-given security to an orgy of tyranny over those hapless coloured subjects of the King, whom the Union constitution has ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... fewer still was the authorship placed upon record. Early in 1843, however (p. 82, Vol. IV.), Mr. Blackwood, of Edinburgh, sent in one of the earliest of Scottish witticisms, a conundrum; Joseph O'Leary, a reporter of the "Morning Herald," is said to have contributed a poem on "The English Vandal;" and R. B. Peake, who had adapted "A Night with Punch" for W. J. Hammond, began his little series of "Punch's Provincial Intelligence," of which the most notable is a humorous report of the University Boatrace of the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... know," said Mainwaring, conscientiously, "if a chap's got the wind to do it; and all Americans, especially the women, dance better than we do. But I say, Bradley, to hear you talk, a fellow wouldn't suspect you were as big a Vandal as anybody, with a beastly, howling saw-mill in the heart of the primeval forest. By Jove, you quite bowled me over that first day we met, when you popped your head out of that delirium tremens shaking mill, like the ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte

... to describe the end of the age of Faith in the East. The Byzantine system, out of which it had issued, was destroyed by three attacks: 1st, by the Vandal invasion of Africa; 2nd, by the military operations of Chosroes, the Persian ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... those ruins, covered by that ashes, were preserved for two thousand, three thousand, five thousand years uninjured, the choicest sculpture and the most precious records of ancient nations,—retained beyond the reach of vandal hands, until scholarship had grown wise enough to ask questions of forgotten history, and had sent Layard and Schliemann and De Sarzec and Evans and a hundred other men to dig with their competitive spades. But in all the long list of enthusiasts not one deserves a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... talent for selecting typical and essential facts and not overburdening his narrative with detail he leads us down the ages. The hero of his introductory romance in The Ancestors is a Vandal chieftain who settles among the Thuringians at the time of the great wandering of the nations—the hero of the last of the series is a journalist of the nineteenth century. All are descendants of the ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... often like a ship without a rudder. Now, perhaps, he's got the crazy notion in his head that we might prosecute him either for what he tried to do up here to our hydroplane, or on account of breaking into our hangar, and doing a certain amount of damage, if the vandal ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy

... Budlong wore a "blazer" and a pair of mountain boots that had involved him in a quarrel with a Pullman conductor, who had called him a vandal for snagging a plush seat with the hob-nails. At his wife's request, Mr. Budlong was bringing a canvas telescope filled with a variety of tinned fruits. It was so heavy that it sagged from the handle as he bore it in front of him with ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart

... have no more imagination than a turnip-top! You must possess the taste of a Goth or Vandal, to turn such noble ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... that hero, who, in each campaign, Had braved the Goth, and many a Vandal slain, Lay fortune-struck, a spectacle of woe! Wept by each friend, forgiven by every foe: Was there a generous, a reflecting mind, But pitied Belisarius, old and blind? Was there a chief but melted at the sight? A common soldier, but who clubb'd his mite? Such, such emotions should ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... all arts, all crafts appal: At Mars' harsh blast arch, rampart, altar fall! Ah! hard as adamant, a braggart Czar Arms vassal-swarms, and fans a fatal war! Rampant at that bad call, a Vandal-band Harass, and harm, and ransack Wallach-land! A Tartar phalanx Balkan's scarp hath past, And Allah's standard falls, ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... to have a friend like you, Gertrude,' said Cadurcis, 'a friend who is neither a Goth, nor a Vandal, nor a Hun, nor a Calmuck, nor a Canadian savage; but a woman of fashion, style, ton, influence in the world! It is impossible that a greater piece of good fortune could have befallen me than having you ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli

... St. Angelo; and, not content with this, he has added insult to injury, and commemorated his robbery in a Latin inscription, in which he claims to be commended as for a praiseworthy act. But even this is not the heaviest weight resting on the memory of that vandal pope. He shares with Bernini the reproach of having added those hideous belfries which now rise above each end of the vestibule—as wanton and unprovoked an offense against good taste as ever was committed. A cocked hat upon the statue of Demosthenes ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various

... the hem of my tailored linen down two inches, so it will brush against those rhododendrons as a lady's should, and sew up the opening in the neck of my chiffon blouse an inch and a half, so I won't spill any of Mrs. Farraday's tea down it. Good-night!" It goes to say that when Greek meets Vandal or the East meets the West, ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess

... a County-Council," Hadria exclaimed, "or the practical man. No, you shall have no more beauty to annihilate, little Vandal." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... soils and clays of the home country, the flowers of plants and sections of wood of trees; the skins of animals and birds (taxidermy is a fascinating employment for the young) eggs and nests (here the child should be taught to be a naturalist and not a vandal), ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... of life to an unwieldy corpulence, was covered with ulcers and devoured by immense swarms of those insects who have given their names to this most loathsome disease." It is also said that the African Vandal King, the Arian Huneric, died of the disease. Antiochus, surnamed the "Madman," was also afflicted with it; and Josephus makes mention of it as afflicting the body of Herod the Great. The so-called "King Pym" died of this "morbus pedicularis," but as prejudice and passion militated ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... lightning of the stormy fight, Nor in the rush upon the vandal foe, Did Kingly Death with his resistless might Lay the ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott

... to be mediators between God and man. They enacted laws, they fulminated their excommunications, and sentenced to death. The bishops succeeded, by insensible degrees, to their temporal authority in the Goth and Vandal government. The popes set themselves at their head, and armed with their briefs, their bulls, and reinforced by monks, they made even kings tremble, deposed and assassinated them at pleasure, and employed every artifice to draw into their own purses moneys from all parts of Europe. ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire

... there really a danger, that in providing and calculating for them, we shall strengthen the argument of race, while our institutions of charity are filled with descendants of the Saxon, the Norman, the Goth, and the Vandal? I think not. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... of those gathering, furtive hosts in the lower level, thought Larry. Now he knew what they had been waiting for! They had been waiting for that usurping vandal to depart. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various

... a hand to tuck away the curl. But he seized the hand. "Little vandal!—What have you been ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Sir John Clopton, descendant of the man who built the first house at the end of the fifteenth century. Sir John pulled down the old house, rebuilt it, and was succeeded by Sir Hugh Clopton. From him in an evil hour it passed into the hands of a clerical Vandal, Francis Gastrell by name. He was a wealthy man and mean, so he quarrelled with the Stratford rating authorities, who assessed him too heavily, or so he said, for the relief of the poor. He had already cut ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan

... was not willing to leave his youthful heirs—Arcadius was only eighteen—without a protector, and the most natural protector was one bound to them by ties of relationship. Accordingly on his deathbed he commended them to the care of the Vandal Stilicho, whom he had raised for his military and other talents to the rank of commander-in-chief, and, deeming him worthy of an alliance with his own family, had united to his favorite niece Serena. We can hardly doubt that it was in this capacity, as the husband of his niece and a trusted friend, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... quarter of a century ago there was a single hair from her head still in existence. It was drawn through the wax of a seal attached to the parchment of a state document. It was surreptitiously snipped out, seal and all, by some vandal relic-hunter, and carried off. Doubtless it still exists, but only the ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain

... now," he said, shaking his head sadly. "Nothing can escape the Vandal horde of tourists and relic hunters. Piece by piece they have carried the hole away, and there is no trace of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 27, October 1, 1870 • Various

... palace. The architects of our day have too heavy a hand to touch these delicate works of the Renaissance. We still cherish a hope that they will not dare. Moreover, this demolition of the Tuileries now, would be not only a brutal deed of violence, which would make a drunken vandal blush—it would be an act of treason. The Tuileries is not simply a masterpiece of the art of the sixteenth century, it is a page of the history of the nineteenth. This palace no longer belongs to the king, but to the people. Let us ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... help wondering whether, after all, it might not be an inside job and the fixing of the window merely a blind. Or was the vandal fascinated by the subtle influence of mysticism that so often seems to emanate from objects that have come down from the remote ages of the world? I could not help asking myself whether the story that Miss White had told was absolutely true. Had there been anything more than ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... feverish interest in the market reports, but his thoughts were wandering. Certainly, nothing could have been worse. He felt as if a bud, which he had been long and eagerly watching, was suddenly torn open by a vandal hand. When he first touched Ruth's eyes with his finger tips, he had trembled like a schoolboy, and he wondered if ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed

... old gray mansion is pointed out to the visitor as Washington's headquarters on several occasions during the Revolution. Fortunately, the State has secured possession of the house and protects it from the hands of the vandal. ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... committed assault and battery upon him. They turned his exquisitely naive humour into their own coarseness, they put doubles entendre into his mouth, they blurred his female faces,—as a picture is blurred when the hand of a Vandal is drawn over its yet wet colours,—and they turned his natural descriptions into the natural descriptions of "Windsor Forest" and the "Fables." The grand old writer does not need translation or modernisation; but perhaps, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... one cared for the building, and it was left entirely to the mercy of the vandal and relic hunter. In 1852 the tile roof fell in, and all the tiles, save about a thousand, were either then broken, or afterwards stolen. The rains and storms beating in soon brought enough sand to form a lodgment for seeds, and ere long a dense ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James

... me in to gaze upon it that first afternoon. You'd of thought he was trying to sell it to me, the way he showed it off. It stood on end, having a bulge like a watermelon in the top, so no vandal could stand it up wrong; and it was wide open to show the two insides. He opened up every room in it, so I could marvel at 'em. He fawned on that trunk. And at the last he showed me a little brass hook he had screwed into the side where the clothes hangers ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... from different standpoints, while Professor Woodlouse, in a frenzy of scientific zeal, traveled all over it and all around it hoping to find an inscription. But if there had ever been one, it had decayed or been removed by some vandal as a relic. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... diverted from the ornamental to a like practical purpose, were wound around and around his excellency's legs and arms, holding him so tightly to the chair he could scarcely move. Having completed this task, Mr. Heatherbloom next, with vandal hands, whipped from the wall a bit of priceless embroidery, threw it over the nobleman's head and, in spite of sundry frenzied objections, effectually gagged him. Then drawing the heavy curtains so that they almost concealed the bound figure in the ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham

... fighting against the Vandals in the days when Rome was crumbling. Finally, by a curious freak of history, Genseric the Vandal took a fleet out from Carthage against Rome, and swept the Mediterranean. In the year 455, some six centuries after Rome had wreaked her vengeance on Carthage, this Vandal fleet anchored unopposed in the Tiber and ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... he instructed her. "Cows and Englishmen, and all such sentimental cattle, including Germans, are Germanic. Italians are Latin—with a touch of the Goth and Vandal. Lions and tigers growl and fight because they're Mohammedans. Dogs still bear without abuse the grand old name of Sycophant. Cats are of the princely line of Persia, and worship fire, fish, and flattery—as you may have noticed. Geese belong indifferently ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... before him, he exhorted to keep together the records of the past, that they may sanctify the present and be an encouragement to good and a warning against evil for the future. He commented severely upon the vandal act of the British troops under General Ross in burning the national archives at Washington. In this connection he introduced the beautiful lines ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... and mercenary pen, Polydore, Lucan, Allan, Vandal, Goth. Malignant poet and historian both. Go seek the novice statesmen and obtrude On them some ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various

... churchyard of St Mary Redcliffe for upwards of three centuries, was destroyed by a churchwarden. The spirit of veneration was strong in the boy, and he sent to the local journal on the 7th of January 1764 a clever satire on the parish Vandal. But his delight was to lock himself in a little attic which he had appropriated as his study; and there, with books, cherished parchments, saved from the loot of the muniment room of St Mary Redcliffe, and drawing ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... that he was a severe student. It is, however, true, as we observed above, that, by allowing a settlement within the Roman frontier to a barbarous people, Marcus Aurelius raised the first ominous precedent in favor of those Gothic, Vandal, and Frankish hives, who were as yet hidden behind a cloud of years. Homes had been obtained by Trans-Danubian barbarians upon the sacred territory of Rome and Caesar: that fact remained upon tradition; whilst the terms upon which they had been obtained, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... imagine ailed him? Why, that miserable cuye was perched upon him, coolly nibbling that beautiful rattle, of which only three or four beads were left! In my righteous indignation I tore open the slide and "snaked out" the vandal as quickly as possible. Afterward it occurred to me to wonder that I had not been struck; for nothing so alarms and angers a crotalus as a swift motion like that with which I had removed the cuye. The rattles never grew again, and my best snake was spoiled. Why the cuye ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... to the feeble and intimidated Arcadius, and that was the skill and courage of Stilicho, by birth a Vandal, but who had risen in the imperial service until he was virtually intrusted by Theodosius with the guardianship of his sons and of the empire. He was the lieutenant of Honorius, who had espoused his daughter, but summoned by the dangers of Arcadius, he advanced to repulse the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... wilt not yield the Vandal toll, Maryland! Thou wilt not crook to his control, Maryland! Better the fire upon thee roll, Better the shot, the blade, the bowl, Than crucifixion of the soul, Maryland, ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... dear Theodora," he at length broke the silence by saying, carelessly, "why should we trouble ourselves about that elderly Goth, or Vandal, if you choose—Sir Dugald? Who does trouble themselves about Sir Dugald, and his amiably ponderous jocoseness? Not Lady Throckmorton, I am sure; not society in general, you must know; consequently, let us treat Sir Dugald with silent contempt, in a ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett

... have never seemed so green Since I remember, As in these groves and gardens of September, And yet already comes the chill That bodes the world's last garden ill, And in the shadow I have seen A spectre,—even thine, O Vandal, O November. ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer

... like you to go on to Florence, and I'll follow, very slow. It's all very well, Rodney, but you were going at about seven miles an hour. Talk of motors—I couldn't see the scenery as we rushed by. That's such a Vandal-like ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay

... loyal lands Despise the faithful sons of duty, And with the swords of vandal hands Destroy the homes of joy and beauty; The honest lords of low commands Will find a nobler way of thriving, In lonely vales where sorrow stands, By sweets of giving ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller

... organization, the separate cities and their territories being governed by oligarchies or tyrants frequently at war with each other, until, in the fifth century B.C., the Carthaginians began to contribute a new admixture of language and blood, followed by Roman, Vandal, Gothic, Herulian, Arab, and Norman subjugation. Thus some of the conditions above suggested have existed in this case, but, whatever the explanation, the accounts given by travelers of the extent to which the language of signs has been used even during the present generation are so ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery

... many alien conquerors of India have despoiled in it in succession, taking away the solid silver gates, the diamonds, rubies, sapphires and other precious stones from the flower decorations, and even the gold and silver from the mosaic work. All the precious stones looted by vandal hands have been restored by imitations, which closely resemble the priceless originals. Restorations have also been made where the marble has been ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch

... is on thy shore, Maryland, my Maryland! His touch is on thy senate door, Maryland, my Maryland! Avenge the patriotic gore That stained the streets of Baltimore, When vandal mobs our ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge

... camps of the living side by side with the resting places of the dead. All the way from Middletown to Cedar creek the debris of battle was scattered over the fields. Here and there were seen the remains of our comrades of the morning, their lifeless bodies stripped by vandal rebels of almost every garment. They lay like specters in the pale moonlight; here, still in death, under a cluster of bushes, was stretched a group; there, by the side of a wall, a row of inanimate bodies marked a spot where brave men had fallen at their ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens

... and that the inhabitants of the high tracts of Mons Aurasius are completely xanthous, having red or yellow hair and blue eyes, which fancifully, and without the shadow of any proof, they have been conjectured to have derived from the Vandal troops of Genseric. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... Thrace and Moesia came the Visigoths, led by the great Alaric. They poured through the Pass of Thermopylae, and devastated almost the entire peninsula of Greece; but, being driven from that country by Stilicho, the renowned Vandal general of Honorius, they crossed the Julian Alps, and spread terror throughout all Italy. Stilicho followed the barbarians cautiously, and, attacking them at a favorable moment, inflicted a terrible and ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... race of Berbers, has never, modern explorers tell us, become really Islamite, any more than it ever really became Phenician, Roman or Vandal. It has imposed its habits while it appeared to adopt those of its invaders, and has perpetually represented, outside the Ismalitic and Hispano-Arabic circle of the Makhzen, the vast tormenting element of the dissident, the rebellious, the unsubdued ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... until she had taken it all in, her face pressed between the bars (only the privileged possessing a key are admitted to the gardens within), Fudge scampering up and down, wild to get at the two gray squirrels, which some vandal has since stolen, and then, remembering his promise to Ganger, he called her to ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith

... less natural intelligence—with the lovers of music. Instead of being sorry for the poor folks who have 'no ear,' and whom 'a little music in the evening' bores to extremity, they overwhelm them with reproaches for what is in fact a natural infirmity. 'You Goth! you Vandal!' they exclaim, 'how contemptible is the creature who has no music in his soul!' Which is really very rude. Even persons who are not musical have their feelings. 'Hath not a Jew ears?'—that is to say, though they have ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn

... too by natural obstacles of the gravest kind. Elsewhere in the Roman world the work of the conquerors was aided by the very civilization of Rome. Vandal and Frank marched along Roman highways over ground cleared by the Roman axe and crossed river or ravine on the Roman bridge. It was so doubtless with the English conquerors of Britain. But though Britain had long been Roman, ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green

... pray, what you mean, with your declamations against artists? Cry out against them as much as you please, but respect art. Oh, you Vandal! I like that stern sectarian who wants to dress Taglioni in a stuff-gown and sabots, and set Liszt's hands to turn the machinery of a wine-press, and who yet, as he lies on the grass, finds the tears come into his eyes at the least linnet's song, and who makes a ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... April in Provence on a small hill above an ancient town that Goth and Vandal as yet have forborne to "bring up ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany

... into Dundrum, or Lecale. They are now mine. With this sword I won them, with this sword I will keep them.' Sidney, indignant at these pretensions, wrote thus to Leicester: 'No Atila nor Yotila, no Vandal nor Goth that ever was, was more to be dreaded for over-running any part of Christendom, than this man is for over-running and spoiling of Ireland. If it be an angel of heaven that will say that ever O'Neill will be a good subject till ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... future life would unfold before me. All hearts were at this time occupied with the public interests of the country. The "sorrow of the time" was ripening to a second harvest. Napoleon had commenced his Vandal, or rather Hunnish War with Britain, in the spring of this year, about eight months before; and profound public interest it was, into which the very coldest hearts entered, that a little divided with me the else monopolizing awe attached to the solemn act of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... not alone in painting and sculpture. The whatnot was a museum whither might come the Northern Goth and Southern Vandal to learn what a Roman home can teach of the artistic taste that Matthew Arnold declares to be the natural heritage only of the nation which rocked the cradle of the Renaissance when its old Romanesque and Byzantine parents died. That whatnot ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... need respect. The children of the breed of men who speak the tongue of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, have been disarmed and made subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! Can human flesh endure it? When Goth and Vandal barbarians overran Rome, the negro was the slave of the Roman Empire. The savages of the North blew out the light of Ancient Civilization, but in all the dark ages which followed they never dreamed the leprous infamy of raising a black slave to rule over his former master! No people in the history ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon

... and what it meant to the world; and he had scarcely finished when a hand beckoned to him from the door. Leaving one of his friends to distribute the presents, he went outside to discover that one vandal had come on ahead, drunk and boisterous. Promptly the doctor tied him to a tree and, leaving Pleasant Trouble to guard him, shouldered a Winchester and himself took up a lonely vigil on the mountainside. Within, Christmas ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox

... while, and then damned the six in mass. He would have made a dutiful overseer. The soldiers had shown quite as little consideration for the residences along the way. I came to one dwelling where some pertinacious Vandal had even pried out the window-frames, and imperilled his neck to tear out the roof-beams; a dead vulture was pinned over the door by ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... robes, soldiers, and civilians, and, side by side, walked Andrew Henry and Philemon Henry, brothers indeed in all the wide and varied interests that go to make up brotherhood and not a little human love. The bells of Christ Church, that had once been taken down and hidden from vandal hands, were rehung, and rung at intervals all day long, while flags floated and bonfires blazed at night, and a grand supper was eaten by the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... he was especially blamed for not admiring the Venus de Medici. Modern taste, enlightened by the works of a better period of Greek art, has come round to Smollett's opinions. But, in his own day, he was regarded as a Vandal and a heretic. ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... the above I find in Vandal, L'Avenement de Bonaparte, p. 20, in Nelson's edition, a phrase about the Revolutionary soldiers: 'Ils se modelaient sur ces Romains . . . sur ces Spartiates . . . et ils creaient un type de haute vertu guerriere, quand ils croyaient ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... me. I, too, like to have things cluttered up. The most dreadful day in the week is, to my thinking, Friday—not because we invariably have fried fish upon that day, but because it is upon Friday that a vandal hired girl appears in my study and, under the direction of my wife, proceeds to "put things in shape." Alice insists that I am not orderly or methodical, yet amid all the so-called disorder of my study I can at any moment lay my hands upon ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... down those hedges and drive away the birds to find a fresh home; you will plough up the green grass, cut out a street and lay down granite stones. Then I see your ugly little houses coming up like mushrooms all over the place. You are a vandal, my ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... in this blessed nineteenth century should be such a Vandal, and that my Uncle Roland should talk in a strain that Totila would have been ashamed of, within so short a time after my father's scientific and erudite oration on the Hygeiana of Books,—was enough to make one despair ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... There shall the Vandal sages come and go, And learn at last why Belgium felt chagrin, And pace the Prussian goose-step very slow, From class to class, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various

... made Alaric—the head of their most illustrious family, the Balti—their leader. Honorius was controlled by the influence of Stilicho, a brave soldier, by birth a Vandal; Arcadius was ruled by a Goth, Rufinus, a cunning and faithless diplomatist. Alaric and his followers were enraged at the withholding of the pay which was due to them yearly from Arcadius. Rufinus, in order to keep up his sway, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... the country as having first been settled by a race who came out of a great cave and traveled over the realm on the backs of turtles, founding cities and towns wherever they went. This will show that the traditions of the aborigines are so fabulous as scarcely to deserve mention. Touching the vandal act of the Catholic priest Zumarrage, Prescott says: "We contemplate with indignation the cruelties inflicted by the early conquerors. But indignation is qualified with contempt when we see them thus ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou

... it, would be to alter the sound of the whole language. It must, however, be regretted that it subjects our tongue to some of the most hissing, snapping, clashing, grinding sounds that ever grated the ears of a Vandal; thus, rasped, scratched, wrenched, bridled, fangled, birchen, hardened, strengthened, quickened, &c. almost frighten us when written as they are actually pronounced, as rapt, scratcht, wrencht, bridl'd, fangl'd, birch'n, strength'n'd, quick'n'd, &c.; they become still more formidable when ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... character, he had in him a mixture of robust good-nature with a touch of vulgarity, and could rough it in a jolly manner with fishermen and peasants. He may have appeared to better advantage when he stood on top of the massive old city gate, which the present government, with the impulse of a vandal, took down a few years ago. The demolition had to be accomplished in the night, under a guard of soldiers, so indignant were the populace. At that time the homely saint was deposed; and he wears now, I ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... knees till they were torn away by violence. They were most cruelly beaten and scourged every day for a long time; yet by God's grace every one of them persevered to the end of the persecution firm in the faith. See St. Victor, De Persec. Vandal. l. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... her radiant tear-dewed eyes that stirred the deepest stores of tenderness in the man. His finer instincts, vandal and pagan though he was, responded ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... zeal inspired, and led by fame, To thee, once favourite isle, with joy I came; What time the Goth, the Vandal, and the Hun, Had my own native Italy[1] o'errun. Ierne, to the world's remotest parts, Renown'd for valour, policy, and arts. Hither from Colchos,[2] with the fleecy ore, Jason arrived two thousand years before. Thee, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... of Belisarius is presented to us under two totally different points of view, in the works of his Secretary Procopius. In the authentic history of the Persian, Vandal, and Gothic wars, he appears as the commander-in-chief of the Roman armies, his actions are narrated by a Roman historian, and his conduct is held up to the admiration of Roman society. In the secret history, on the contrary, we have, it is true, the same man described by the same author, but the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... dreamy, quiet and picturesque towns which have not as yet been desecrated by the Vandal tourist. Persons holding "through tickets" from Messrs. Cook or Gaze do not stop there—there are no "sights" save the old sanctuary called Monte Virgine standing aloft on its rugged hill, with all the memories of its ancient days clinging to it like ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli

... numerous medicines are "sure cures" for grippe and pneumonia. "Rosy teachers look better in the schoolroom than the sallow sort," is surely a good introduction to a new food. Woman's vanity sells many a remedy advertised to counteract the "vandal hand of disease, which robs her of her beauty, yellows and muddies her complexion, lines her face, pales cheek and lip, dulls the brilliancy of her eye, which it disfigures with dark circles, aging ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... successor. "The African province, the cherished jewel of the Roman Empire, sparkled for a while in the Vandal diadem. The Greek supplanted the Vandal, and the Saracen supplanted the Greek, and the home of Augustine was blotted out from the map of Christendom." The light of the gospel was totally extinguished in Northern Africa. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... the town had begun at once, from within, even before chunks of asteroid material, man-accelerated and—aimed, had begun to splatter blossoms of incandescence into the confusion of deflating domes and dying inhabitants. Other vandal bands had ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun

... with coarse and grimy fingers, what a smutched and tawdry look it would soon have. You cannot help the admiring glances, flattering words, and the homage that ever waits on beauty, any more than the marble face the soiling touch of any Vandal hand; but you can prevent your soul from being stained and smirched ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... see the distant horizon, defined by India-inky woods, relieving a lighter sky. A few stars widely spaced in this picture glimmered sadly. I noticed again the infinite depth of patient sorrow in their serene faces; and I hope that the vandal who first applied the flippant "twinkle" to them may not be driven melancholy-mad by their reproachful eyes. I noticed again the mystic charm of space that imparts a sense of individual solitude to each integer of the densest constellation, involving ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... the Vandals, son of Godigiselus, founder of the Vandal kingdom in Spain, and bastard brother of Gunderic, whom he succeeded in A.D. 429; from Spain he crossed to Africa, and in conjunction with the Moors added to his kingdom the land lying W. of Carthage, ultimately gaining possession of Carthage itself; he next set himself to ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... disappointment, offered his interest to bring on my play at the other house, which I eagerly accepting, he forthwith wrote a letter of recommendation to Mr. Bellower, actor and prime minister to Mr. Vandal, proprietor of that theatre, and desired me to deliver it with my tragedy, without loss of time. Accordingly, I hastened to his house, where after having waited a whole hour in the lobby, I was admitted ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett

... of the Red men and the ravages of time, as the centuries came and went, have affected but not obliterated these ancient mounds. The vandal hand of conquering man has destroyed or hid from sight many of the monumental works of this primitive people. But there yet remain many mournful ruins here in Ohio which cannot fail to impress us with a ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... 172: Duport, Gnom. Hom. p. 20, compares the words of Belisarius in Procop. Vandal. i. [Greek: Machontai men anthropoi, brazeyei de o theos opos pote auto dokei, kai ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... of man, And make the tale of Fijian banquets dull By drinking whiskey from a loyal skull,— But let us guard, till this sad war shall cease, (God grant it soon!) the graceful arts of peace No foes are conquered who the victors teach Their vandal manners and barbaric speech. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... that didn't know. But you know. It sounded as though I was claiming you for myself, when I didn't want you to go away. I'm ashamed—ashamed!" She averted her eyes from him. The crimson in her cheeks was deeper. It was a vandal hand that had wrecked the little shrine of her childhood. His indignation ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... noise and running around, Looking for something that's not to be found? For every door was relieved of its handle By some friend, of course, surely not by a vandal, ...
— Our Little Brown House, A Poem of West Point • Maria L. Stewart

... west of the village of Mackinaw. It is a high perpendicular bluff, one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet in height, rising boldly from the shore of the lake. A solitary pine tree formerly stood upon its brow, which some Vandal has cut down. ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland



Words linked to "Vandal" :   vandalize, undoer, savage, destroyer, vandalise, barbarian, waster



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