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Dunghill

noun
1.
A foul or degraded condition.
2.
A heap of dung or refuse.  Synonyms: midden, muckheap, muckhill.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Dunghill" Quotes from Famous Books



... who told you that. He is not a man to wrestle with an enemy of my strength without a strong interest in it. It was Cerizet; he's the infamous calumniator, from whose hands I wrenched the lease of your house near the Madeleine,—Cerizet, whom in kindness, I went to seek on his dunghill that I might give him the chance of honorable employment; that is the wretch, to whom a benefit is only an encouragement to treachery. Tiens! if I were to tell you what that man is I should turn you sick with disgust; in the sphere of ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... their word. You're very soft-hearted in that article, sir, about the living. Did you think, when you sat down to write it, about the dead?—about that wilderness of white crosses out in France? You're proposing in cold blood to let those devils stay on their own dunghill." ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... can crow on his own dunghill!" That was Mr. Slide's first feeling, as with a painful sense of diminished consequence he retraced his steps through the outer lobbies and down into Westminster Hall. He had been browbeaten by Phineas Finn, simply because Phineas had been able to retreat within those happy doors. He knew ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... lose our sphere of Christian service, and be exposed as hollow and lifeless professors. The vine-branch that has no wealth of purple clusters is good for nothing. Salt which is savorless is fit neither for the land nor the dunghill. Vine-branches that bear no fruit are cast into the fire. Professors that lack the grace of a holy temper, and the beauty of a consistent life are taken away. "Men cast them into the fire ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... with the exception of the bull, which shuts its eyes and rushes blindly forward, will venture to attack an individual who confronts it with a firm and motionless countenance. I say large and fierce, for it is much easier to repel a bloodhound or bear of Finland in this manner than a dunghill cur or a terrier, against which a stick or a stone is a much more certain defence. This will astonish no one who considers that the calm reproving glance of reason, which allays the excesses of the mighty and courageous in our own species, has seldom any other effect than ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... cock of the vile dunghill obtained me respect among the wretches of whom I formed part, and served to set up my spirits, which otherwise were flagging; and my position was speedily made more bearable by the arrival on board our ship of an old friend. This was no other than my second ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... upon your perch: But when we fire your coats about your ears, And take your ships before your walled towns, We make a dunghill of your rotten bones, And cram our chickens with your ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley

... leaving only sadness behind. And one day he took the old road that led past the farm where she now lived. He looked at the roof from a distance. It was there, in there, that she lived with another! The apple trees were in bloom, the cocks crowed on the dunghill. The whole dwelling seemed empty, the farm hands had gone to the fields to their spring toil. He stopped near the gate and looked into the yard. The dog was asleep outside his kennel, three calves were walking slowly, one behind ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... come over by an invitation from the government, and generously furnished him with supplies for his journey: but as bigoted zeal still increased, his wife's body, which had been interred at Oxford, was afterwards dug up by public orders, and buried in a dunghill.[**] The bones of Bucer and Fagius, two foreign reformers, were about the same time committed to the flames at Cambridge.[***] John Alasco was first silenced, then ordered to depart the kingdom with his congregation. The ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume

... tablecloths, two hundred and forty chemises, eleven silk dresses, twelve dresses of Indian muslin, thirty-two pairs of silk stockings, five fine Aubusson tapestries. The plundered mistress of the house was driven out, to live on the charity of her friends. Her aunt, aged ninety-four years, was thrown upon a dunghill, where she died gazing on the peasants whom she had cared for and treated with kindness for years, as they divided among themselves her house-linen, her furniture, her plate, her porcelains, the very doors and windows of her home. All this was in the summer of 1789, long before a German trumpet ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... the nature of these poor creatures, how they will fight till they drop down dead upon the table, and strike after they are ready to give up the ghost, not offering to run away when they are weary or wounded past doing further, whereas where a dunghill brood comes he will, after a sharp stroke that pricks him, run off the stage, and then they wring off his neck without more ado, whereas the other they preserve, though their eyes be both out, for breed only of a true cock of the game. Sometimes a cock that has ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... consecration took place on the 17th of December 1559. He died on the 17th of May 1575, and was buried in his private chapel at Lambeth, in a tomb which he had himself prepared. His remains, however, were disinterred in 1648 by Colonel Scot, the regicide, and buried under a dunghill, but after the Restoration they were replaced ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher

... Winston Churchill, "for their own idiotic affairs." But the last word came from Lord Morley, the "father of Home Rule." "Give it them," he said, in friendly, private counsel, "give it them; let them have the full savour of their own dunghill civilization." ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement

... struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbors of his who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various

... characteristically. She began very soberly to say that she should be the last to advise a marriage between persons of different conditions in life. "But then," said she, "this Mercy is altogether an exception. If a flower grows on a dunghill, 't is still a flower, and not a part of the dunghill. She has the essence of gentility, and indeed her manners are better bred than most of our ladies. There is too much affectation abroad, and that is your true vulgarity. Tack 'my lady' on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... Mass.], rose, and as Motley always said, demolished the report, so that he was unable to defend it against the attack. You can imagine his disgust, after the pains he had taken to render it unassailable, to find himself, as he expressed it, 'on his own dunghill,' ignominiously beaten. While the result exalted his opinion of the speech-making faculty of a Representative of a common school education, it at the same time cured him of any ambition for political promotion ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... their quality; that gallant courage, that solid wisdom, that noble courtesy which advanced their families, and severed them from the vulgar; this degenerate wantonness and sordidness of language would return to the dunghill, or rather, which God grant, be ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... sanctimonious face brings back from the countries of the South with which to regale the minds of those who furnish the Bibles and shekels. And who will measure the slander that grows out of the dunghill of Protestant ignorance ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... character of the judge at once disappears. It was necessary to go to a corrupt tribunal in order to find a suitable case; a pure judgment seat supplies no such example. In certain circumstances you might gather from a dunghill a medicinal herb which cleaner ground would never bear. The grain which becomes our bread grows best when its roots are spread in unseen corruption; and so perfect is the chemistry of nature, that the yellow ears of harvest retain absolutely no taint of the putrescence whence they ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... cattle; carried off eighty negroes, which were all he had, not leaving him one to bake him a cake. Thus, in one hour, as the wild Arabs served Job, did the British serve my poor brother, breaking him up root and branch; and, from a state of affluence, reduced him to a dunghill. ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... noses, and strike from the shoulder were the order of the day. I felt all-confident and sailed in for all I was worth, and finished him in less than three minutes, to the evident satisfaction of Mr. Keefer, whom, when the fight was waxing hot, I espied standing on the dunghill with a broad smile taking in the combat. I had nearly stripped my opponent of his clothing, held a large wad of hair in each hand, his nose flattened all over his face, two teeth knocked down his throat, his shins skinned and bleeding, and both eyes closed. After ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston

... abruptly as he saw me,—"well, considering the peacock Harley brought so bright a plume to his own nest, we must admire the generosity which spared this gay dunghill ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... perceived by the nose when a disagreeable one is present in it. I have heard from the angels, that they distinguish in the extremes what is lascivious from what is not, as any one distinguishes the fire of a dunghill or of burnt horn by its bad smell, from the fire of spices or of burnt cinnamon by its sweet smell; and that this arises from their distinction of the internal delights which enter into ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... some of you, and turn this strumpet forth! Spurn her into the street; there let her perish, And rot upon a dunghill. Through the city See it proclaim'd, that none, on pain of death, Presume to give her comfort, food, or harbour; Who ministers the smallest comfort, dies. Her house, her costly furniture and wealth, We seize on, for the profit of the state. ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe

... the heap of rags, which she turned up for that purpose; together with a girl's cloak, quite worn out and very old; and the crushed remains of a bonnet that had probably been picked up from some ditch or dunghill. In this dainty raiment, she instructed Florence to dress herself; and as such preparation seemed a prelude to her release, the child complied with ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... his audacious demand for the hand of Lady Frances. On that occasion Mr. Greenwood had been very imperious. Mr. Greenwood had taken upon himself almost the manners of the master of the house. Mr. Greenwood had crowed as though the dunghill had been his own. George Roden even then had not been abashed, having been able to remember through the interview that the young lady was on his side; but he had certainly been severely treated. He had wondered at the moment that such a man as Lord Kingsbury ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope

... here's the lion skar'd with the 185 throat of a dunghill cock, a fellow that has newly shak'd off his shackles; now does he crow for ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... nature, which is better pleased with being at the head of the lowest class than at the bottom of the highest. Permit me to say, though the idea may be somewhat coarse, I had rather stand on the summit of a dunghill than at the bottom of a hill in Paradise. I have always thought it signifies little into what rank of life I am thrown, provided I make a great figure therein, and should be as well satisfied with exerting my talents well at ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... and cosmic bulks, all mixed with pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his dunghill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins, calls to the gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be as free as they—monuments of egotism reared by the epiphenomena; dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... whitewashed cabins with no upstairs, muck-heaps, and bad fences. Can spot a Home Ruler as far as I can see him. Darned if I couldn't track him by scent, like a foxhound. That's the rank and file—very rank, I should say, most of them. And old J. Bull concludes to let the dunghill folks, powerful lazy beggars they seem, come top-sawyer over the fellows that built a place like ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... five seconds, but breaks one of their two backs, and is good for threescore years and ten;—one trial enough,—settles the whole matter,—just as when two feathered songsters of the barnyard, game and dunghill, come together,-after a jump or two at each other, and a few sharp kicks, there is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous, Monsieur, with the beaten party in all the social relations for all ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... see the cottage smoke Curl upwards through the trees, The pigeons nestled round the cote On November days like these; The cock upon the dunghill crowing, The mill sails ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry

... instead of a vision, and darkness instead of prophesying:" or, as Esaias saith, "What if all the watchmen of the city are become blind?" "What if the salt have lost his proper strength and savoriness," and, as Christ saith, "be good for no use, scant worth the casting on the dunghill?" ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel

... he admires, are derived from a creature who sells the use of her charms indifferently to sculpture or to love. Fine poetry, like other arts called fine, springs from "strange places," as the flower in the fable said, when it bloomed on the dunghill; nor is Burns more to be blamed than was Raphael, who painted Madonnas, and Magdalens with dishevelled hair and lifted eyes, from a loose lady, whom the pope, "Holy at Rome—here Antichrist," charitably prescribed to the artist, while he laboured ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... see for water. Before night the pinnace brought on board several sorts of fruits that they found in the woods, such as I never saw before. One of my men killed a stately land-fowl, as big as the largest dunghill cock; it was of a sky-colour, only in the middle of the wings was a white spot, about which were some reddish spots; on the crown it had a large bunch of long feathers, which appeared very pretty; his bill was like pigeon's; he had strong legs and feet, like dunghill fowls, ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton

... with violence, and gigantic forms of evil are represented as having dominated mankind. Amidst it all, the Titanic pride, the godlessness, the scorn, the rudeness, and the violence, amidst it all, this one 'white flower of a blameless life' managed to find nutriment upon the dunghill, and to blossom fresh and fair there. You and I cannot, whatever may be our hindrances in living a consistent Christian life, have anything like the difficulties that this man had and surmounted. For us all, whatever our conditions, such a life ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... feel nobler, and Blenker was of that finer clay that does honestly want to feel nobler. He hated pessimism and all that criticism and self-examination that makes weak men pessimistic, he wanted to help weak men and be helped himself, he was all for that school of optimism that would have each dunghill was a well-upholstered throne, and his nervous, starry contributions to the talk were like patches of water ranunculuses trying to flower in ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... imagination. Whatever grandeur can display, or luxury enjoy, is procured by baseness, by offices of which the mind shrinks from the contemplation. All the delicacies of the table may be traced back to the shambles and the dunghill, all magnificence of building was hewn from the quarry, and all the pomp of ornaments dug from among the damps ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... Constantinople. Accordingly, they went back to Serindi, and brought away a quantity of the eggs in a hollow cane, and conveyed them safely to Constantinople. They superintended and directed the hatching of the eggs, by the heat of a dunghill: the worms were fed on mulberry leaves: a sufficient number of butterflies were saved to keep up the stock; and to add to the benefits already conferred, the Persian monks taught the Romans the whole of the manufacture. From Constantinople, the silk-worms were conveyed to Greece, ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... me, isn't it? I am amazed at it myself. My life? Bah! I've let it out for hire to be kicked about by rascals from one dirty place to another, like a football! It's my whim to give it a last kick myself, and throw it away decently before it lodges on the dunghill forever. Your sister kept a good cup of coffee hot for me, and I give her a bad life in return for the compliment. You want to thank me for it? What folly! Thank me when I have done something useful. Don't thank me ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... gold, forgetful of food, he was starved to death; on which a Vulture, standing over him, is reported to have said: "O Dog, you justly meet your death, who, begotten at a cross-road, and bred up on a dunghill, have suddenly ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus

... having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62). The word is an interesting one ("euthetos"), it means "handy" or "easy to place." (The word is used of the salt not "fit" for land or dunghill (Luke 14:35), and the negative of the inconvenient harbour (Acts 27:12).) This man is not adapted for the Kingdom of God; he is not easy to place there. Like the man who saved his talent but did not use it (Matt. 25:24), he is not exactly ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... the steaming dunghill; some of them were scratching with one claw in search of worms, while the cock stood up proudly in their midst. When he crowed, the cocks in all the neighboring farmyards replied to him, as if they were uttering challenges from farm ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... drug is bound around our cruel wounds, which are so atrociously inflicted upon the innocent, and there is none to put a plaster upon our ulcers; but ragged and shivering we are flung away into dark corners, or in tears take our place with holy Job upon his dunghill, or—too horrible to relate—are buried in the depths of the common sewers. The cushion is withdrawn that should support our evangelical sides, which ought to have the first claim upon the incomes of the clergy, and the common necessaries ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury

... need for any sorrowful heart ever to say, 'I am solitary as well as sad.' He will always come and sit down by us, and if it be that, like poor Job upon his dunghill, we are not able to bear the word of consolation, yet He will wait there till we are ready to take it. He is there all the same, though silent, and will be near all of us, if only we do not drive Him away. 'He will call upon Me and I will answer ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... yet got to Juliet. Nearly any kind of history is more important than formal literary history showing how in a literary way Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob. Any man of any time who has ever written with vigor has been immeasurably nearer to the dunghill on which he sank his talons while crowing than ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie

... the monastery, was set upon by the devil in the form of a black dog. Other monks who broke their vows shared no better. Because a monk had been guilty of hoarding up a large sum of money, contrary to the rules of his order, he was denied Christian burial, and his body was cast upon a dunghill. After mass was said for the miser thirty days, the deceased monk appeared to a brother of his order and told him that he had been in purgatory till that day. From this blessed liberation St. Gregory instituted the custom of saying thirty masses for ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... This singular mode of execution naturally excited the surprise of civilized nations. The Bohemians justified it as a national custom, and saw nothing remarkable in the whole affair, excepting that any one should have got up again safe and sound after such a fall. A dunghill, on which the imperial commissioners chanced to be deposited, had saved them ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... by the hand, and exclaiming with vehemence, "Gagliuffi! Gagliuffi! ah! that's a fine fellow! Gagliuffi at Mourzuk." Again the Egyptian laughed, and screamed with frantic gesticulations, and our people coming up were also merry with him. "Ah!" he continued, "Gagliuffi, a real cock of the dunghill, a noble fellow, Gagliuffi! Do you know Gagliuffi?" I said I did not. This he couldn't understand, and said, "Ah, Gagliuffi has got plenty of money, he's the Bashaw of Mourzuk. Every time you go to see him he gives you coffee." Another Fezzaneer, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... 'un, I know," said Master John. "What d'ye think—if he did'nt 'pitch into' our 'dunghill' the other day, and laid him dead at a blow. I owe him one!—Come along." I followed in his footsteps, and soon beheld Chanticleer crowing with all the ostentation of a victor at the hens he had so ruthlessly widowed. A clothes-horse, with a ragged blanket, screened us from his view; ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour

... thought to undervalue merit and virtue, wherever they are to be found; but will allow them capable of the highest dignities in a state, when they are in a very great degree of eminence. A pearl holds its value though it be found in a dunghill; but however, that is not the most probable place to search for it. Nay, I will go farther, and admit, that a man of quality without merit, is just so much the worse for his quality; which at once sets his ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... he cried, "of knightly deeds, of prowess, and of valour? I would as lief enjoin Roderigo Borgia to fulfil the sacred duties of his Vicarship; I might as profitably sprinkle incense on a dunghill. What we could say to Gian Maria we have said, and since it had been idle to have appealed to him as we have appealed to you, we have shown him yet another way by which Babbiano might be saved and ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini

... a Lawyer killing a Viper On a dunghill hard by his own stable; And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind 15 Of Cain ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... that the Inflamable Spirit, or as the Chymists esteem it, the Sulphur of Wine, may not only be separated from it by the gentle heat of a Bath, but may be distill'd either by the help of the Sun-Beams, or even of a Dunghill, being indeed of so Fugitive a Nature, that it is not easy to keep it from flying away, even without the Application of external heat. I have likewise observ'd that a Vessel full of Urine being plac'd ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle

... and west were led To thy foul cradle by thy planet red Shepherds of souls that feed their sheep with lies Till the utter soul die as the body dies, And the wise men that ask but to be fed Though the hot shambles be their board and bed And sleep on any dunghill shut their eyes, So they lie warm and fatten in the mire: And the high priest enthroned yet in thy name, Judas, baptised thee with men's blood for hire; And now thou hangest nailed to thine own shame ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... of the woods, and feed on the sea-beach, and are so very tame or foolish, as to stand and stare at us till we knocked them down with a stick. The natives may have, in a manner, wholly destroyed them. They are a sort of rail, about the size and a good deal like a common dunghill hen; most of them are of a dirty black or dark-brown colour, and eat very well in a pye or fricassee. Among the small birds I must not omit to particularize the wattle-bird, poy-bird, and fan-tail, on account of their singularity, especially as ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook

... fragment of one of the speeches of Job's friends, in which the speaker has been harping on the old theme that affliction is the consequence and evidence of sin. He has much ado to square his theory with facts, and especially with the fact which brought him to Job's dunghill. But he gets over the difficulty by the simple method of assuming that, since his theory must be true, there must be unknown facts which vindicate it in Job's case; and since affliction is a sign of sin, Job's afflictions are proof ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... succession of cakes? No, my friend; there is no succession of these cakes for those who eat them greedily. Your proposition is not a fair one, and we who have the whip-hand of you will not listen to it. Be good enough to vanish. Permit yourself to be swept quietly into the dunghill. All that there was about you of value has departed from you; and allow me to say that you are now—rubbish." And then the ruthless besom comes with irresistible rush, and the rubbish is swept into the pit, ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... on your double barbarity! Would you murder the tough dunghill cock, to choke a customer?—A certain person, that shall be nameless, will come to you in the course of this day, either by himself, or by ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman

... and hope into doubt. Indignation, without any calming faith in justice, and self-contempt, without any curative self-reproach, dull the intelligence, and degrade the conscience, into sullen incredulity of all sunshine outside the dunghill, or breeze beyond the wafting of its impurity; and at last a philosophy develops itself, partly satiric, partly consolatory, concerned only with the regenerative vigor of manure, and the necessary ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... that there was another reason why he should leave Newton and its neighbourhood. For him, as a bachelor, Beamingham Hall would be only too good a house. He, as a farmer, did not mean to be ashamed of his own dunghill. ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... again seed-time, took a more effectual way of crippling the tenant than before. He seized on the farm implements and stock, of which the dunghill was in his eyes the most important. He had it, without a legal sale, carried away to his own farm-yard, even to the very rakings and sweepings of the road and the yard near which it lay. This he did that Ring might have no manure for his potato ground, knowing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... a feudal country, covered with extensive ecclesiastic and seigniorial domains, the misery is the same. At Clermont-Ferrand,[5143] "there are many streets that can for blackness, dirt and scents only be represented by narrow channels cut in a dunghill." In the inns of the largest bourgs, "closeness, misery, dirtiness and darkness." That of Pradelles is "one of the worst in France." That of Aubenas, says Young, "would be a purgatory for one of my pigs." The senses, in short, are paralyzed. The primitive ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... were, linked together, and together they must fight their battles. As two pigs may be seen at the same trough, each striving to take the delicacies of the banquet from the other, and yet enjoying always the warmth of the same dunghill in amicable contiguity, so had these young ladies lived in sisterly friendship, while each was striving to take a husband from the other. They had understood the position, and, though for years back they had talked about Mr. Gibson, they had never quarrelled; but now, in these ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... thine hand, but save his soul and his life. Then Satan departed from the face of our Lord and smote Job with the worst blotches and blains from the plant of his foot, unto the top of his head, which was made like a lazar [leper] and was cast out and sat on the dunghill. Then came his wife to him and said: Yet thou abidest in thy simpleness, forsake thy God and bless him no more, and go die. Then Job said to her: Thou hast spoken like a foolish woman; if we have received and taken good things of the hand of our Lord, why shall ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... measure to try it by; proportion is no measure for infinity. He that hath no more of this world but a grave; he that hath his grave but lent him till a better man or another man must be buried in the same grave; he that hath no grave but a dunghill, he that hath no more earth but that which he carries, but that which he is, he that hath not that earth which he is, but even in that is another's slave, hath as much proportion to God, as if all David's worthies, and all the world's monarchs, and all ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne

... same place, were burnt the Rev. Thomas Whood, and Thomas Mills. June 24, the Rev. Wm. Alderhall; and June 28, John Clement, wheelright, died in the King's Bench prison, and were buried on the dunghill in the backyard. June 21, a young man, the servant of a merchant, was burnt ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... course that dunghill cock of mine in there, that used to belong to the old woman, had to come within an inch of ruining me, beginning to scratch and claw around where this (looking under cloak) was buried. Enough said. It just got me so worked up I took a club and annihilated that cock, the thief, the ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius

... shame on him, quoth I, that shamefull thought Doth entertain within his dunghill breast, Both God and Nature hath my spirits wrought To better temper and of old hath blest My loftie soul with more divine aspires Then to be touchd with such vile ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More

... every cock to his own dunghill! You think you will hoodwink the jury and get off. I hear you are a lawyer, an advocate, an old hand at a speech. Have you any judge to suggest who will be proof against such an experienced corrupter ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... to the window to look, and jumped into the tub, making it sink a good deal; but it held both the boys very well. Roger thought the cow very stupid that she did not get upon the great dunghill behind her, which would keep her whole body out of the water. Oliver thought that, as the dunghill was behind her, she could not see it. He wished he could go, and put her in mind of it. He thought he would ...
— The Settlers at Home • Harriet Martineau

... Maddox senseless in seven minutes—tried before she was eighteen for child-murder, but not hanged, although the man-child, of which the drab was self-delivered in a ditch, was found with blue finger-marks on its windpipe, bloody mouth, and eyes forced out of their sockets, buried in the dunghill behind her father's hut—not hanged, because a surgeon, originally bred a sow-gelder, swore that he believed the mother had unconsciously destroyed her offspring in the throes of travail, if indeed it had ever breathed, for the lungs would not swim, he swore, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned? It is neither fit for the land, nor yet for the dunghill; but men cast it ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... him, and in his bed murthered him the same yeare, the last day of May, crying out, 'Alas, alas, slay me not, I am a Priest.' And so lyke a butcher he lyved, and like a butcher he dyed, and lay 7 monethes and more unburyed, and at last, like a carion, buryed in a dunghill. An. 1546, Maij ult. Ex historia impressa."—(Foxe, edit. 1576, p. 1235.) Sir David Lyndesay thus alludes to the Cardinal's fate, in his poem entitled "The Tragedie of the umquhyle maist reverend Father ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... "Whosoever he be of you that renounceth not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. Salt therefore is good: but if even the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be seasoned? It is fit neither for the land nor for the dunghill: men cast it out. He that hath ears to ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles

... learn a long one now and then ... such as be setting food before a full man, or singing to a deaf one, or buying for one's pigs a silver trough, or, for the matter of that, casting pearls before a dunghill cock, or fishing for a heron, which is well able to fish for itself, and is an ill-natured bird after all, that pecks the hand of his mistress, and, for all her kindness to him, will not think ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... declared by the backwoodsmen against Messrs. Birkbeck and Flowers, was, that when they first settled upon the prairies, they attempted to act the patron and the benefactor, and considered themselves entitled to some respect. Now a west-country American would rather die like a cock on a dunghill, than be patronized after the English fashion; he is not accustomed to receive benefactions, and cannot conceive that any man would voluntarily confer favours on him, without expecting something in return, either in the shape of labour, or goods;—and as ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall

... waste. 'I have seen,' says a contemporaneous witness, 'the laborer endeavoring to work at his spade, but fainting for want of food and forced to quit it. I have seen the helpless orphan exposed on the dunghill, and none to take him in for fear of infection. And I have seen the hungry infant sucking at the breast ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... complain who has at his disposal a competent supply of good brown bread and butter; but to our unpractised palates, the rye-meal, and sour leaven, were not very inviting. Still we set to work, and aided by a cat, and a fine bold fellow of a dunghill cock, both of whom took post beside us, and insisted on sharing our meal, we made a pretty considerable inroad into the good woman's vivres, whose butter and beer were both of them excellent. This, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... And in a use of lamentation deduced from the foresaid doctrine, he showed, that all ranks in the land had reason to mourn over their breach of covenant, in regard that some of all ranks, from the throne to the dunghill, in church and state, are, or have been guilty of dealing falsely in God's covenant, in all and every one of these diverse ways, and of declining from it: and in regard that there has been so much ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery

... shirtless ease, With collyflowers all o'er his face, Did on the dunghill languish, His spouse thus whispers in his ear, Swear, husband, as you love me, swear, 'Twill ease ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... gospel to make real in the case of every one of us, the rapid and continuous increase in the depth and in the scour of 'the river of the water of life,' that flows through our lives. Luther used to say, 'If you want to clean out a dunghill, turn the Elbe into it.' If you desire to have your hearts cleansed of all their foulness, turn the river into it. But it needs to be a progressively deepening river, or there will be no scour in the feeble trickle, and we shall not be a bit ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... the gift of all hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or identity. Their images scarce ranged beyond the red horizon of the moor and the rainy hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling- piece, a spade, a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... original ways of execution in both painting and engraving, which in the confusion of London I had very much lost and obliterated from my mind. But whatever becomes of my labours, I would rather that they should be preserved in your greenhouse (not, as you mistakenly call it, dunghill) than in the cold gallery of fashion. The sun may yet shine, and then they will be brought ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... boiling, we regretted our inability to relieve them, but little thought that we should ourselves be afterwards driven to the necessity of eagerly collecting these same bones a second time from the dunghill. ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin

... of the soul was one of those false doctrines that Rome, borrowing from paganism, incorporated into the religion of Christendom. Martin Luther classed it with the "monstrous fables that form part of the Roman dunghill of decretals."(977) Commenting on the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes, that the dead know not anything, the Reformer says: "Another place proving that the dead have no ... feeling. There is, saith he, no duty, no science, no knowledge, no wisdom there. Solomon judgeth ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... and strained carriages, you shall, for the most part, meet with them in low men. Arrogance is a weed that ever grows on a dunghill. It is from the rankness of that soil that she hath her height and spreadings. To be modest and unaffected with our superiors is duty; with our equals, courtesy; with our inferiors, nobleness. There is no arrogance so great as the proclaiming ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... mistrusted divine goodness, and therefore the peace of the Lord is in thee. The lily of thy virtues has flowered upon the dunghill of ...
— Thais • Anatole France

... silence, only joining occasionally in the conversation; whilst two or three walk up and down the verandah, in solemn consultation as to the best mode of hedging, having unhappily backed a colt for the Margaux Cup that turns out to be a dunghill. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... company, and stain his gentility with droppings of ale. He is fearful of being sheriff of the shire by instinct, and dreads the assize-week as much as the prisoner. In sum, he's but a clod of his own earth, or his land is the dunghill and he the cock that crows over it: and commonly his race is quickly run, and his children's children, though they escape hanging, return to the place from whence ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle

... on the edge of the Taufusi swamp, was a small collection of huts, jumbled together in squalor and dirt, with pigs dozing in the ooze and slatternly women beating out siapo in the shade. It was a dunghill of out-islanders, Nieues, Uveans, Tongans, Tapatueans, banded together in a common poverty; landless people of other archipelagoes, despised of the Samoans, and paying tribute to the lord of the soil—a few men in war; a grudging ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... This beautiful bird greatly resembles the purple Gallinule in shape and make, but is much superior in size, being as large as a dunghill fowl. . . . This species is pretty common on Lord Howe's Island, Norfolk Island, and other places, and is ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... who were in an aviary, and others on the trees and bushes, almost tore their little throats with singing; but the cock, who minded only his hens, and the hens, who were solely employed in scraping a neighbouring dunghill, did not show in any manner that they took the least pleasure ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... his ground. Well, I don't allow him to take it. 'Beggars can't be choosers' is mine, and I pin him to it. Oh, yes, I'm poison to him, but it does him good. 'That cock won't crow,' I say. He's game enough on his own dunghill, but a high-blooded lass like you ought to be his master by this time. Hint that you'll cut the painter, kick over the traces—you needn't do it, y'know. Threaten you'll run and join the stage—nothing unlikely in that— and, by George, it'd bring ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... friendly Rhimes, For raking in the dunghill of their crimes. To name each Monster wou'd make Printing dear, Or tire Ned Ward, who writes six Books a-year. Such vicious Nonsense, Impudence, and Spite, Wou'd make a Hermit, or a Father write. Tho' Julian rul'd the World, and held no more Than deist Gildon taught, or Toland ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... his tongue under a bridle. But his heart was burning in him; and what he could not say in the Forum he thought he might venture on with impunity in the Senate, which might be called his own dunghill. His chief wrath was at the late consuls. They were both powerful men. Gabinius was Pompey's chief supporter. Calpurnius Piso was Caesar's father-in-law. Both had been named to the government of important provinces; and, if authority was not to be brought ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude

... for know, Sir, that the wings on which my Soul is mounted, have long since born her too high, to stoop to any Prey that soars not upwards. Sordid and dunghill minds, compos'd of earth, in that gross Element fix all their happiness; but purer Spirits, purged and refin'd, shake off that clog of humane frailty; give me leave t'enjoy my self; that place that does ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... combating, and is the universal resort of all wild animals, including man, to gain or defend their possessions, or avenge their insults. Two dogs who tear each other for a bone, or two bantams fighting on a dunghill for the love of some beautiful hen, or two fools on Wimbledon Common, shooting at each other to satisfy the laws of offended honour, stand on the same footing in this respect, and are each and all mere duellists. As civilisation advanced, the best-informed men naturally ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... some hole obscure he flies, When rains descend, and tempests rise, Till the sun clears the air; and then Crawls back neglected to his den.[4] So, when the war has raised a storm, I've seen a snake in human form, All stain'd with infamy and vice, Leap from the dunghill in a trice, Burnish and make a gaudy show, Become a general, peer, and beau, Till peace has made the sky serene, Then shrink into its hole again. "All this we grant—why then, look yonder, Sure that must be a Salamander!" Further, we are by Pliny told, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... thought" has been carried to that extreme. The right of the State to demand the sacrifice of the citizen's life is a doctrine as old as the patriotism that concedes it, but the right to require him to forego his good name—that is something new under the sun. From nothing but the dunghill of modern democracy could so noxious ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... reputation through the whole county of a specialist in dirty jobs. Every time a pit, a dunghill, or a cesspool required to be cleared away, or a dirt-hole to be cleansed out he was the person employed to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... I've an old coat and waistcoat as I've nearly done with, but they've got a good bit of wear in them yet. They'll just about fit you, I reckon. You shall go back in them, and keep them and welcome, and we'll make these as they've spoilt a present to the dunghill. I only wish all other bad habits, and more particularly them as comes through rum, brandy, and such like, could be cast away on to the same place. You did quite right, Jim, to come ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson

... to Charles in 1647-8. 'When I think of dying', he wrote, adapting a saying of Cicero, 'it is one of my comforts, that when I part from the dunghill of this world, I shall meet King Charles, and all those faithfull spirits, that had virtue enough to be true to him, the Church, and the Laws unto the last.' (Memoires, p. 331.) Passages in the Memoires show that they were begun after the summer ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... his high renown, Saw his unlettered sire Still by the old log fire, Saw the unpolished dame— And the dunghill from ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster

... unwelcome; and in another composition by Holbein, where men of almost every condition,— popes, sovereigns, lovers, gamblers, monks, soldiers,—are taunted with their fear of Death and do indeed see his approach with terror, Lazarus alone is easy and composed, and sitting on his dunghill at the rich man's door, tells Death that he does not ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... may be taken, perhaps, rather as an indication of the manners of the times than as an expression of his own feeling, but even so it must have been a little galling to the poorer of his auditors. "Whoreson dog," "whoreson peasant," "slave," "you cur," "rogue," "rascal," "dunghill," "crack-hemp," and "notorious villain"—these are a few of the epithets with which the plays abound. The Duke of York accosts Thomas Horner, an armorer, as "base dunghill villain and mechanical" (Henry VI., Part 2, Act 2, Sc. 3); Gloster speaks of the warders of the Tower ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy

... the land in the spring is left to go to seed. It requires a good hot dry soil; but although the crop is often of great value, it so much exhausts the land as to be hazardous culture in many light soils where the dunghill is not handy. ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... wonderful in the Old Testament. Think of the depths out of which we have come, and the heights to which we are raised. "He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill to set them among princes and to make them inherit the throne of glory." [Footnote: 1 Sam. ii. 8.] Think of the sinner lifted out of all his bondage and ruin to be the Bride of the Lamb! There is nothing higher that God can give than this. This will be our glorious position by and by when the ...
— The One Great Reality • Louisa Clayton

... behind the cottages a miserable wigwam, compiled of earth, loose stones, and turf, where the wealthy might perhaps shelter a starved cow or sorely galled horse. But almost every hut was fenced in front by a huge black stack of turf on one side of the door, while on the other the family dunghill ascended ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... well, I thanke you: follow that lord: And doe you heare sirs? take heede you mocke him not. Gentlemen, for your kindnes I thanke you, And for a time I would desire you leaue me. Gil. Our loue and duetie is at your commaund. Exeunt all but Hamlet. Ham. Why what a dunghill idiote slaue am I? Why these Players here draw water from eyes: For Hecuba, why what is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? [F1] What would he do and if he had my losse? His father murdred, and a Crowne bereft him, He would turne all his teares to droppes of blood, Amaze the standers ...
— The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke - The First ('Bad') Quarto • William Shakespeare

... hypocrisy, ignorance—of esteem, genuine and earnest, for the Holy Scriptures, and for the more moderate of the Reformers who were spreading the Scriptures in Europe,—and all this great light wilfully hidden, not under a bushel, but under a dunghill. He is somewhat like Socrates in face, and in character likewise; in him, as in Socrates, the demigod and the satyr, the man and the ape, are struggling for the mastery. In Socrates, the true man conquers, and comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor is ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... dashed against the ruined church like living waves, while swarms of wood-lice and crickets attacked the foundations and reduced them to dust with their sawlike teeth. Yet again, on the other side, there was Desiree's poultry-yard, where the dunghill reeked with suffocating fumes. Here the big cock, Alexander, sounded the assault, and the hens loosened the stones with their beaks, and the rabbits burrowed under the very altars; whilst the pig, too fat to stir, grunted and waited till all the sacred ornaments should be reduced to warm ashes in ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... overcome God, or God's design must overcome thee. Thy design is to give thy good life, thy good deeds, a part of the glory of thy justification from the curse. And God's design is to throw all thy righteousness out into the street, into the dirt and dunghill, as to that thou art for glory, and for glorying here before God; yea, thou art sharing in the glory of justification when that alone belongeth to God. And he hath said, "My glory will I not give to another." Thou wilt not trust wholly ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan

... non-producers win all the prizes while the toilers do without. Yet out of this system that sows hate and discontent, that is a practical denial of brotherhood, of God, springs here and there love like a flower in a dunghill. ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... said the frier: "by the dignity of man, I will twist the neck of every one of you as sure as ever the neck of a dunghill-cock was twisted." At which words he pulled off his mask, and the tremendous majesty of Colonel Bath appeared, from which the bucks fled away as fast as the Trojans heretofore from the face of Achilles. The colonel did not think it worth ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... Clearpurse, with his Princely companion, who keep alwaies six and thirty Game-Cocks at nurse by the Master of the Pit; never goes away from thence, before he hath got, by his ordinary dunghill Cock that runs about the streets, and without false spurs too, half a score Crown-pieces, and as much more as will pay his reckoning in his pocket. But if they both begin to appear with their Shake-bags, then it is, Stand clear Gentlemen, here comes the honour of the Pit; and ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh

... shank of a pipe, and a long great coat, for it is many the dab he put in his pocket. His coat was greasy, and it was no wonder, and an old grey hat as grey as snuff as it was many the day it was in the dunghill.' ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others

... ground for any difficulty with him: although the Major had a right to suppose that any man base enough to make such charges, would have no hesitancy in lying out of his disreputable and cowardly abuse. I therefore pronounce your Governor, here upon his own dunghill, an UNMITIGATED LIAR AND CALUMNIATOR, and a VILLAINOUS COWARD, wanting the nerve to stand up to his abuse of better ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds, in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines, such as were professed and acted on by the unlettered Apostles, the Apostolic Fathers, and the Christians, of the first century. Their Platonizing successors, indeed, in after ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... any of the inhabitants of Europe, for they powder not only their heads but their beards too. Their heads however were decorated with more showy ornaments, for I observed that most of them had, just above one ear, stuck a feather, which appeared to have been taken from the tail of the common dunghill cock; so that these gentlemen are not without poultry for their table. They were armed with spears, and long sticks or poles, like the quarter-staff; but we did not see any bows and arrows among them: Possibly they might have them on board, and think proper to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... in wet weather. If you walk under the houses you are drenched by the waterspouts; if you attempt the middle, there is a river; if you would go between both, there is the dunghill. The rains here are very violent, and the streams in the streets, on a declivity, so rapid as to throw down men; and sometimes to overset carriages. A woman was drowned some years ago, in one of the most frequented ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... been left him by his father; he answered, that his father had indeed left him the inheritance, but not the fortune which had preserved both himself and that.—However, fortune did him no great injury in replacing him on the dunghill, from which she had raised ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... from working a detestation of them in the spectators' minds (who, perchance, were utterly ignorant of them, till they were acquainted with them at the play-house, and so needed no dehortation from them), that it often excites dangerous dunghill spirits, who have nothing in them for to make them eminent, to reduce them into practice, of purpose to perpetuate their spurious ill- serving memories to posterity, leastwise in ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... first cut off Coligni's head, which was presented to Catherine of Medicis. The populace then exhausted all their brutal and unrestrained fury on the trunk. They cut off the hands, after which it was left on a dunghill; in the afternoon they took it up again, dragged it three days in the dirt, then on the banks of the Seine, and lastly carried it to Montfaucon (an eminence between the Fauxbourg St. Martin and the Temple, ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss

... longing for weeping increased. Horrible awakening! Josephina was not there; only the void was about him. It was useless to seek the past in the field of death. Memories could not be aroused in that cold ground, stirred by worms and decay. Oh, where had he come to seek his dreams! From what a foul dunghill he had tried to raise the roses ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... tribulations and calamities; the manner in which the Pagans contaminate the sanctuaries of God, and shed the blood of saints around the altar, devastating the joy of our house, and trampling on the bodies of holy men in the temple of God, as though they were treading on a dunghill in the street. But of what effect is our wailing unless we come before the altars of Christ and cry, 'Spare me, O Lord! spare thy people, and take not thine inheritance from them;' nor let the Pagans say, 'Where is ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... then, my good man?' interrogated the sexton, as one in authority, and standing on his own dunghill. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... us, with her blue-stocking whims. I cannot talk to her of my affairs, nor yet of my mother's. She asserts that her husband is a greater man than I am." Madame de Berny, he added, had foreseen his mother's and sister's transformation when she told him he was a flower that had sprung up on a dunghill! If Madame de Berny told him this, it was no doubt in a fit of anger against them for endeavouring to sever the liaison, an endeavour they were perfectly justified in. These portions of Balzac's confidences, which reflect upon his character ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... lawyer killing a viper On a dunghill hard by his own stable; And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind Of Cain and ...
— English Satires • Various

... tarnished silver. Overhead in a tower window a single light twinkles: women's voices rise and fall on the roofs. In a rich man's doorway slaves are sleeping, huddled on the tiles. A cock crows from somebody's dunghill, a skeleton dog prowls ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... the devil, who, four weeks ago, had come to miller Kierski at midnight—the man who lived at Latalice, north of Gradewitz, and was always swearing and drinking—and had almost wrung his neck off. He had been left on the dunghill behind his barn, where he lay quite stiff and blue in the face; and if St. Peter's cock had not flown on to the roof of the mill and crowed three times, [Pg 41] so that the devil thought it was the miller's cock crowing in the early morning, the miller would have been found as ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig

... have been honored with statues within this stately mausoleum; but only two—those of Ferdinand I. and Cosmo II.—seem to have been placed here. They were a bad breed, and few of them deserved any better monument than a dunghill; and yet they have this grand chapel for the family at large, and yonder grand statue for one of its most worthless members. I am glad of it; and as for the statue, Michael Angelo wrought it through ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... there were more people than sheaves of grain. The Doctor believed that more sheaves are grown than there are people, but still more people than stacks of grain. "But a stack of grain yields hardly a bushel, and a man cannot live a whole year on that." Even a dunghill invited him to deep reflection. "God has as much to clear away as to create. If He were not continually carrying things off, men would have filled the world with rubbish long ago." And if God often punishes those who fear Him worse ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... an inverse ratio with the amount of food. This strange doctrine has apparently arisen from individual animals when supplied with an inordinate quantity of food, and from plants of many kinds when grown on excessively rich soil, as on a dunghill, becoming sterile; but to this latter point I shall have occasion presently to return. With hardly an exception, our domesticated animals, which have long been habituated to a regular and copious supply of food, without the labour of searching for ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... for the sovereignty of the dunghill, and one of them having got the better of the other, he that was vanquished crept into a hole, and hid himself for some time; but the victor flew up to an eminent place, clapt his wings, and crowed ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various

... that celestiall fire, The base-borne brood of Blindnes cannot gesse, Ne ever dare their dunghill thoughts aspire Unto so loftie pitch of perfectnesse, But rime at riot, and doo rage in love, 395 Yet little wote what doth ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser

... dreamt that in my house of clay, A beggar buried by me lay; Rascal! go stink apart, I cry'd, Nor thus disgrace my noble side. Heyday! cries he, what's here to do? I'm on my dunghill ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi

... different animal from any that we have yet seen. we also saw several of the heath cock with a long pointed tail and an uniform dark brown colour but could not kill one of them. they are much larger than the common dunghill fowls, and in their habits and manner of flying resemble the growse or prarie hen. at the distance of 4 miles further the road took us to the most distant fountain of the waters of the mighty Missouri in surch of which we have spent so many ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... relish for distinction, each hero or philosopher, for all are dubbed with these new titles, endeavors to make hay while the sun shines; and every petty municipal officer, become the idol, or rather the tyrant of the day, stalks like a cock on a dunghill." ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... these their funerals 3000 duckats or thereabout, the meaner sort two or three hundred. Such as for pouertie be not able to go to that charges, are in the night time darke long without all pompe and ceremonies buried in a dunghill. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt

... Browning disdained for the time all the philosophy of heredity and environment; and indeed it was characteristic of him to believe in the sudden creation of beauty, purity and nobility out of their contraries and in spite of them. The miracle of the unrelated birth of genius—that out of the dunghill might spring the lily, and out of the stratum of crime the saint—was an article of faith with him. Nature's or God's surprises were dear to him; and nothing purer, tenderer, sweeter, more natural, womanly and saintly was ever made ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... vinedressers; while the filth of the purlieus is unutterable. Throwing open the double casements of the widow's sanctum, I may not call it boudoir, when I leapt out of bed to enjoy the fresh morning air,—underneath was a noisome dunghill, grim gables frowned on either hand, but beyond was the riant landscape just described. Here truly God made the ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... named it the root of all Evil, the begetter of hate and bloodshed, the sure cause of the soul's damnation. It has been called "trash," "muck," "dunghill excrement," by grave authors. The love of it is denounced in all Sacred Writings; we find it reprehended on Chaldean bricks, and in the earliest papyri. Buddha, Confucius, Christ, set their faces against it; and they have ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith

... houses, which is the chiefest cause of the farmer's so beastly manner of living and savage condition, lying and living together with his beast, in one house, in one room, in one bed, that is clean straw, or rather a foul dunghill." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various

... perception that things are evil to the assertion of what ought to be or shall be. It triumphs over the Prince of Darkness, and covers a multitude of sins, as dew or hoar frost cover and make beautiful a dunghill. Dunghills exist; but he who makes of Macbeth's or Clytemnestra's crimes an elevating or exhilarating spectacle triumphs over the god of this world, as Jesus did when he made the most ignominious ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... eyelids' quick gleam— The intelligent sight, are no more; But the worms of the soil, as they wriggle and coil, Come hither their dwellings to bore. No lineament here is left to declare If monarch or chief art thou; Alexander the Brave, as the portionless slave That on dunghill expires, is as low. Thou delver of death, in my ear let thy breath Who tenants my hand, unfold; That my voice may not die without a reply, Though the ear it addresses is cold. Say, wert thou a May,[106] of beauty a ray, And flatter'd thine eye with a smile? Thy meshes ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... with a deadly scowl as he answered: 'Ay, ay, you're a brave cock, Master Warneford, upon your own dunghill. It may be my turn some day. Here, doctor, a word with you outside.' They both left the room, and I rang the bell, discharged the score, and was just going when Lee returned. He was still pale and shaky, though considerably recovered from the panic-terror ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various

... proverb, "One hand washes the other, and both together wash the face." "Una mano lava l'altra e tutt'e due si lavano la faccia," is more or less the modern version. In chapter vii. we have also "gallum in suo sterquilino plurimum posse," which corresponds to our own, "Every cock crows best on its own dunghill."] ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley

... blind this while? They lie who say so! Thou dost know and feel The things they do to thee and thine. The heel That scratched thy neck in passing—whose? Canst say? Yes, yes, 'twas his, and this is his fete-day. Oh, thou that wert of humankind—couched so— A beast of burden on this dunghill! oh! Bray to them, Mule! Oh, Bullock! bellow then! Since they have made thee blind, grope in thy den! Do something, Outcast One, that wast so grand! Who knows if thou putt'st forth thy poor maimed hand, There may be venging ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... like a king, in gold and purple and all the colors of the rainbow; while you have not a bit of color on your wings." "True," replied the Crane; "but I soar to the heights of heaven and lift up my voice to the stars, while you walk below, like a cock, among the birds of the dunghill." ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... souls of himself and his master. The old woman had been lately put upon board wages. Lucky old woman! Frank rang a third time, and with the impetuosity of his age. A face peeped from the belvidere on the terrace. "Diavolo!" said Dr. Riccabocca to himself. "Young cocks crow hard on their own dunghill; it must be a cock of a high race to crow ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Blake. 'Out of my house, my young gamecock! Get out and crow on your own dunghill, if you can ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit

... beautiful modesty leads you to misconstrue me, sir. You pay my judgment no compliment. I know your worth, sir; I merely meant, sir, that in me—poor, humble me—you have secured a sympathizer in your tastes and plans. Agricola Fusilier, sir, is not a cock on a dunghill, to find a jewel and then scratch ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... o'er one child; but triumphs in the rest. How just his grief! one carries in his head A less proportion of the father's lead; And is in danger, without special grace, To rise above a justice of the peace. The dunghill breed of men a diamond scorn, And feel a passion for a grain of corn; Some stupid, plodding, monkey-loving wight, Who wins their hearts by knowing black from white, Who with much pains, exerting all his sense, Can range aright his shillings, pounds, and pence. ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young



Words linked to "Dunghill" :   unsanitariness, mound, pile, muckhill, agglomerate, heap, cumulus, midden, cumulation



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