"Gibbet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon the face of a Negro baby. A black woman cries out to him, passing along, "God bless you, old man; I wish I could help you, but I cannot." The most ignominious death known to our laws awaits him. Already has the gibbet been erected. The sticks "standant and crossant" are in place, and the hungry rope is "pendant." A forty acre field is filled with those drawn together by this strange scene. Three thousand soldiers with loaded guns stand ready to repel any attempt at rescue. Well shotted cannon turn their open ...
— John Brown: A Retrospect - Read before The Worcester Society of Antiquity, Dec. 2, 1884. • Alfred Roe
... sedition." Hence their sanguinary conflicts with the good citizens of Paris, to whom they were wholly obnoxious, and who occasionally repaid their aggressions with interest. In 1407 two of their number, convicted of assassination and robbery, were condemned to the gibbet, and the sentence was carried into execution; but so great was the uproar occasioned in the university by this violation of its immunities that the Provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville, was compelled to take down ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... visibly; but none sees but themselves; for instance, if a man's fatal end be hanging, they will see a gibbet, or a rope about his neck: if beheaded, they will see the man without a head; if drowned, they will see water up to his throat; if unexpected death, they will see a winding sheet about his head: all which are represented to their view. ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... counsel. It is unknown whence or of what family she came, but for all that she saved Hugh's life, who had been made prisoner by Frantz of Lutzelbourg. He was to have been hanged that very day, and a gibbet had already been set up on the ramparts, when Huldine, at the head of her husband's vassals, whom she had armed and inspired with her own courage, bravely broke in, released Hugh, and hung Frantz ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... life and immortality? especially when we have so miserably lost it, and involved our souls into an eternal death. Life is precious in itself, but much more precious to one condemned to die,—to be caught out of the paws of the lion,—to be brought back from the gibbet. O how will that commend the favour of a little more time in the world! But then if we knew what an eternal misery we are involved into, and stand under a sentence binding us over to such an inconceivable and insupportable punishment ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Papishers. And, finally, there appeared amongst the other graphic embellishments which the poor stocks had received, the rude gravure of a gentleman in a broad-brimmed hat and top-boots, suspended from a gibbet, with the inscription beneath—"A warnin to hall tirans—mind your ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... editor, and arrange for a meeting, which rendered it necessary to remind him that we were not in the England of fifty years ago, and that duelling was abolished, and that his traducer would not only refuse to fight, but denounce his challenger to the police and gibbet him in his paper. I pointed out, on the other hand, that the article was clearly libellous, and recommended Mr. Fortescue either to obtain a criminal information against the proprietor of the paper, or sue him ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... be something wicked in the times, and cheatery rampant indeed," I thought, "when the common gibbet of Inneraora has a drunkard's convoy on either hand to prop ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... looked up uneasy and imploring, as Charles continued: 'Would that more of you would come in this way! They have scored you deep, but know you what is gashed deeper still? Your King's heart! Ah! you will not come, as Coligny does, from his gibbet, with his two bleeding hands. My father was haunted to his dying day by the face of one Huguenot tailor. Why, I see a score, night by night! You are solid; let me ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... duties of sheriff at Dudley's execution, although he had himself been one of the supporters of the Lady Jane in her claim to the crown. For the next few days the city presented a sad spectacle; whichever way one turned there was to be seen a gibbet with its wretched burden, whilst the city's gates bristled with human heads.(1397) Wyatt himself was one of the last to suffer, being brought to the block on Tower Hill on the 11th April. His head and a portion of his body, after being exposed on gallows, were ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... authorship. This acquaintance continued for many years, and for many years I was a contributor to his paper. He was elected secretary of the Senate in 1843 by the Democratic Party. A little later I wrote an article called "Gibbet Hill" in which I attempted to present the tradition concerning the hill in Groton which bears that name. That article was printed in the Yeoman's Gazette or the Concord Freeman. For several years beginning about the year 1836, ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... white handkerchief. Immediately the old Captain was seized by Cossacks and dragged to the gibbet. Astride the cross-beam of the gallows, sat the mutilated Bashkirs who we had questioned; he held a rope in his hand, and I saw, an instant after, poor Ivan Mironoff suspended in the air. Then Ignatius was ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... cut off your leg that was shot at Quebec and Saratoga," said the plucky and witty officer, "and bury it with the honors of war, and hang the rest of your body on a gibbet." ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... nodded. The three went heavily up the grandiose stairway as if a gibbet waited at the top. They went into Sir Joseph's room, which adjoined that of his wife. Mr. Verrinder paused ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... left behind us the gibbet and the stake. No further need of the Voltaires, the Rousseaus and the Diderots to declaim against kingcraft and priestcraft. We have done something more than mark time. We report progress. Yet despite the miracles of modern invention ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the end," said Sir Richard feebly. "God has been good to me beyond my deserts, and this is a crowning mercy. Consider, Justin, it might have been the gibbet and a crowd—instead of this snug bed, and you and Bentley ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... his manhood. He had known the final shame; his soul had surrendered to force. He could not redress that wrong; he could only repeat it and repay it. He could make the souls of his soldiers surrender to his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could 'make the souls of the nations surrender to his soldiers. He could only break men in as he had been broken; while he could break in, he could never break out. He could not slay in anger, nor even sin ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... it be otherwise with those who may be called the outlaws of the human race? They did but justify the seeming paradox of the traveller's exclamation, who, when at length, after a dreary passage through the wilderness, he came in sight of a gibbet, returned thanks that he had now arrived at a civilized country. "The pastoral tribes," says the writer I have already quoted, "who were ignorant of the distinction of landed property, must have disregarded the use, as well as the abuse, of civil jurisprudence; and the skill of an eloquent ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... (Rabenstein), a translation of the German word for the gibbet, which in Germany and Switzerland is permanent, and made of stone." [Compare Werner, act ii. sc. 2. Compare, too, Anster's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... of the beneficial working of the later law? A blessing has been conferred on society, and in a manner highly creditable to the spirit of modern times; reform has been accomplished, not by persecution, not by the gibbet and the rack, but by justice and tolerance. The traveller has flung aside his cloak, not compelled by the angry buffeting of the north wind, but because the mild, benignant weather makes such a defence no longer necessary. The law no longer compels the ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... to stand; To him he lost his lady-love, And to the King his land. Ourselves beheld the listed field, A sight both sad and fair; We saw Lord Marmion pierce the shield, And saw the saddle bare; We saw the victor win the crest He wears with worthy pride; And on the gibbet-tree, reversed, His foeman's scutcheon tied. Place, nobles, for the Falcon-Knight! Room, room, ye gentles gay, For him who conquered in the right, Marmion ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... do with us before. Why, we are at war, I tell you; and it is not we who declared it! They have made war on us now for the last twenty years and more. What of all the Catholics—priests and others—who have died on the gibbet, or rotted in prison? If her Grace makes war upon us, why should we not make war upon her Grace? ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... which was about three stories high, and endeavoured to see what there was about it which had once arrested my attention, and came to the conclusion that it was its exceptional situation on the dock, and the ghostly effect of the hoisting-beam projecting from the upper story like a gibbet. And yet this beam was common to many a warehouse in the vicinity, though in none of them were there any such signs of life as proceeded from the curious mixture of sail loft, boat shop, and drinking saloon, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... thereabouts); they were not far apart. The one was the Toll House, where all merchants or traders paid the charges in corn or kind due to the Baron; the other was the Court House, where he sat to administer justice and decide causes, or to send the criminal to the gibbet. ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... to the alcayd[^e] of theft. As the property was found in his possession, the alcayd[^e] ordered him to be hung. His parents went on their way to Compostella, and returned after eight days, but what was their amazement to find their son alive on the gibbet, and uninjured. They went instantly to tell the alcayd[^e]; but the magistrate replied, "Woman, you are mad! I would just as soon believe these pullets, which I am about to eat, are alive, as that a man who has been gibbeted eight days is not dead." No sooner ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... courses of the river they call "reaches." They have their long reach and their short reach, and a number of reaches, under local, or less obvious names. Some are named after some of their own pirates, which is here and there designated by a gibbet; a singular object, be sure, to greet the eye of a stranger on entering the grand watery avenue of the capital of the British empire. But there is no room for disputing concerning our tastes. The reach where our prison was moored was about three miles below ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... talking like that," the Jew said quietly. "We are useful to each other. I have saved your life from the gibbet, you have done the work I required. Between us, it is worse than childish to threaten in the present matter. I do not doubt that you will do your business well, and you know that you will be well paid for it; what can either of ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... criminal pursuits that injure his country: which at the same time has been to him nothing more than a step-mother. In the paroxysm of his rage, in the exacerbation of his mind, he loses sight of his neighbour's rights, he overlooks the gibbet, he forgets the torture; his unruly desires have become too potent—they have completely absorbed his mind; by a criminal indulgence they have given an inveteracy to his habits which preclude him from changing them; laziness has made him torpid: remorse has gnawed his peace; despair ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... The gibbet, indeed, certainly disables those who die upon it from infesting the community; but their death seems not to contribute more to the reformation of their associates, than any other method of separation. A thief seldom passes much of his time in recollection ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... evening, Sancho Mendez was publicly hanged. Confessing the crime, he was carried to the rude gibbet at the far edge of the wheat field and paid the price in full. He had been tried by a jury of twelve; and there was absolutely no question as to his guilt. His companion, a lad named Dominic, callously betrayed by the older ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... stone; I was a Roman soldier of fortune; I was a Highland outlaw of the Rebellion. Always I fought for a lost cause, and always my sympathies were with the rebel. I feasted with Robin Hood on the King's venison; I fared forth with Dick Turpin on the gibbet-haunted heath; I followed Morgan, the Buccaneer, into strange and exotic lands of trial and treasure. It was a wonderful gift of visioning that was mine in those days. It was the bird-like flight of the pure child-mind to whom the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... dreams," he muttered. "'S death, but he be more a king than Henry himself. God speed the day of his coronation, when, before the very eyes of the Plantagenet hound, a black cap shall be placed upon his head for a crown; beneath his feet the platform of a wooden gibbet for a throne." ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... declared that the seal and the writing were undoubtedly those of Labrosse. Whereupon the chamberlain was arrested, accused of high treason, correspondence with the enemies of France, peculation, everything except the real offence, and finally hung upon the celebrated gibbet of Montfaucon,—the first mention of it in history, though it had been ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... order. Elizabeth wished her subjects would be content to live together in unity of spirit, if not in unity of theory, in the bond of peace, not hatred, in righteousness of life, not in orthodoxy preached by stake and gibbet. She was content to wait and to persevere. She refused to declare war. War would tear the world in pieces. She knew her danger. She knew that she was in constant peril of assassination. She knew that if the Protestants were crushed in Scotland, in ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... public and private affairs, the better for them. Therefore, in revolutions, as a body, they remain neuter, unless it is made for their benefit to act. Individually, they are a set of necessary evils; and, for the sake of the bar, the bench, and the gibbet, require to be humoured. But any legislator who attempts to render laws clear, concise, and explanatory, and to divest them of the quibbles whereby these expounders—or confounders—of codes fatten on the credulity of States and the miseries of unfortunate ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... are making toward venality and corruption. We already hear the sounding title of Highness and Most Honorable trumpeted in our ears, which, ten years since, would have exalted a man to a station as high as Haman's gibbet." Page of Virginia was ablaze with indignation. "Good God!" he exclaimed. "What, authorize in a free republic, by law, too, by your first act, the exertion of a dangerous royal prerogative in your Chief Magistrate!" Gerry, in remarks whose oblique criticism upon arrangements at the President's ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... whom he receives his pay, is not likely to be trusted by us. I know your character, that is sufficient. Now, although the government make no difference between one party or the other, with the exception that some may be honoured with the axe instead of the gibbet, you will observe what we do: and as our lives are already forfeited by attainder, we make no scruple of putting out of the way any one whom we may even suspect of betraying us. Nay, more; we can furnish the government with sufficient proofs against you without any risk to ourselves, for we have ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... magistrate—that's enough," said Duclosse. "He's started the court under the big tree, as the Seigneurs did two hundred years ago. He'll want a gibbet and a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... CHAINS. A vile, desperate fellow. Persons guilty of murder, or other atrocious crimes, are frequently, after execution, hanged on a gibbet, to which they are fastened by iron bandages; the gibbet is commonly placed on or near the place ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... great kettle, or caldron, which, as fast as it grew too hot, was cooled with a baboon's blood. To these they poured in the blood of a sow that had eaten her young, and they threw into the flame the grease that had sweaten from a murderer's gibbet. By these charms they bound the infernal spirit to answer ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... strange tongue; and I found out later that this was Picardy, a village where the French weavers wrought for the Linen Company. Here I got a fresh direction for Pilrig, my destination; and a little beyond, on the wayside, came by a gibbet and two men hanged in chains. They were dipped in tar, as the manner is; the wind span them, the chains clattered, and the birds hung about the uncanny jumping-jacks and cried. The sight coming on me suddenly, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... delivered up to Massachusetts her governor and gentry. Another, incapable of being suppressed, though a servant, seized the destinies of an aristocratic colony, and held them for a while, until accumulating enemies bore him down, and wedlock and the gibbet followed close together. Poverty would not relinquish its gripe upon the race; they struggled up like clods upon the ploughshare, and fell back again ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... from the curious method adopted for their publication. Others declare that he suffered punishment in a funereal chamber draped with black; while another authority declares that the poet, the victim of his own satires, was hung on a fork-shaped gibbet, not on account of his abuse of Pius IV., but through the hatred of Pius V., which some personal quarrel had excited. This conjecture is, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... attained. "Cortez and his companions," says Chevalier, "had incurred the necessity of signalizing themselves by some great exploit. They had committed a fault which the laws of all states treated as crime, and one that the leaders must expiate on the gibbet and their followers at the galleys, unless atoned for by brilliant deeds. Their departure from Cuba was an act of flagrant rebellion." In his great haste to get away from Cuba he embarked in nine small vessels, the largest not over one hundred tons and some were ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... furnished occupation as well for secret correspondents and spies as for the most dignified functionaries of Government. Capons or sausages on Good Friday, the Psalms of Clement Marot, the Sermon on the Mount in the vernacular, led to the rack, the gibbet, and the stake, but ushered in a war against the inquisition which was to last for eighty years. Brederode was not to be the hero of that party which he disgraced by his buffoonery. Had he lived, he might, perhaps, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... unfortunate will be recommended to the Queen's mercy, and escape hanging, unless, as might be just possible, she prefers depending on a gibbet to the tender mercies of Christian society—especially its women—towards a woman who, after being seduced by a ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... principles, and most likely Perette Mauger, the great Paris receiver of stolen goods, not yet dreaming, poor woman! of the last scene of her career when Henry Cousin, executor of the high justice, shall bury her, alive and most reluctant, in front of the new Montigny gibbet. (1) Nay, our friend soon began to take a foremost rank in this society. He could string off verses, which is always an agreeable talent; and he could make himself useful in many other ways. The whole ragged army of Bohemia, and whosoever ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... will suffer the penalty for his imposture." At the siege of the castle of Lavaur, in 1211, Amaury, Lord of Montr6al, and eighty knights, had been made prisoners: and "the noble Count Simon," says Peter of Vaulx- Cernay, decided to hang them all on one gibbet; but when Amaury, the most distinguished amongst them, had been hanged, the gallows-poles, which, from too great haste, had not been firmly fixed in the ground, having come down, the count, perceiving how great was the delay, ordered the rest to be slain. The pilgrims therefore ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Jim said "She's a flibberty-gibbet. She'd much better get married. She's not much use in the world at present. Now if she was a doctor ... or doing something useful, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... prisoner. But the sentence had hardly been carried out when the temper of the mob appeared to change. Stones were thrown, angry cries were raised, and the mob, as if animated by a common purpose, began to press around the scaffold. One man leaped upon the gibbet and cut the rope by which the body was suspended; others gathered round as if to carry off the body. Then it is asserted that Porteous completely lost his head. The passion that had been swaying him all day entirely overmastered him. He is said to have snatched ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... dead—dead on the gibbet. He was hanged for piracy at Port Royal, Jamaica. Jack," said Nanny, seizing my hand, and pressing it in her long fingers, "this is a secret; recollect, a secret deep as the grave; promise me, as ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... not exceed it," replied Solomon Eagle. "Lift a finger against either of these young persons, and I will reveal all. Yes," he continued, menacingly, "I will disclose such dreadful things against you, that you will assuredly be adjudged to a gibbet higher than the highest tower of this ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under such circumstances, invariably rises above its detractor, and leaves him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the object ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... gibbet! How dismal 'tis to see The great tall spectral skeleton, The ladder and the tree! Hark! hark! it is the clash of arms,— The bells begin to toll,— "He is coming! he is coming! God's mercy on his soul!" One last long peal of thunder,— The clouds are cleared away. ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... fly—the grand vizier! the pasha of three tails! O'er the horizon's bounding hills, where distant vision fails, All stealthily, with eyes on earth, and shrinking from the sight, As a nocturnal robber holds his dark and breathless flight, And thinks he sees the gibbet spread its arms in solemn wrath, In every tree that dimly throws its shadow ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... wells: which would not keep them down, deep as they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony. Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night, had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts, to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... by way of stimulation, a man, looking on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last to preserve a corner of green country unbedevilled. And here, appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this stone was never ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only in political but also in religious matters? And, because she was called queen, can it be considered treason for an Irishman to believe in the spiritual supremacy of the Pope? Yet, unless we look upon as martyrs those who died on the rack and the gibbet in Ireland during her reign, because they refused to admit in a woman the title of Vicar of Christ, to ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... of ampler wing that knows no line—is at home in the open or in the woods. His sonorous voice has a human sound that is uncanny; his form is visible afar in the desert and sinister as a gibbet; his plumage fits in with nothing but the night, which he does not love. This evil genius of the land is the Raven of the north. Its numbers increased as we reached the Barrens, and the morning ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon by which the sailors steered,—like an unhooped cask upon a pole,—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... the Greeks and the Romans. Its root was forked, and bears some resemblance to the legs of a man; for which reason the moneymakers [67] of the past increased the likeness, and attributed supernatural powers to the plant. It was said to grow only beneath a murderer's gibbet, and when torn from the earth by its root to utter a shriek which none might hear and live. From earliest times, in the East, a notion prevailed that the mandrake would remove sterility. With which purpose in view, Rachel said to Leah: "Give ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... "Ye dinna say so? God's santie! man, but this is grewsome, and gars the flesh creep on one's banes. Let his foul carcase be taen awa', and hangit on a gibbet on the hill where Malkin Tower aince stood, as a warning to a' ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... at Paris must needs know the Greve, The fatal retreat of th' unfortunate brave; Where honour and justice most oddly contribute To ease hero's pains by a halter and gibbet (PRIOR).] ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... dead could never shed its hallowed spirit of peace again if once it had been outraged with the indignities of a gibbet! If once it bore, instead of its own sweetly wholesome produce, that debased fruit of the gallows tree, its dignity would be forever broken! There in the flooding moonlight of the white-and-blue night it was protesting ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... book she was reading. Beyond, through the open window and door, the fire was also slowly fading from the sky and the mountain ridge whence the sun had dropped half an hour before. The view was uphill, and the sky-line of the hill was marked by two or three gibbet-like poles from which, on a now invisible line between them, depended certain objects—mere black silhouettes against the sky—which bore weird likeness to human figures. Absorbed as she was in her book, she nevertheless occasionally ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... it rather odd that Holland should be the only "mister" of the party, and I said to myself, as Gibbet said when he heard that "Aimwell" had gone to church, "That looks suspicions" (act ii. sc. 2).—James Smith, Memoirs, Letters, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... De Soto passed a high gibbet upon which three malefactors were hung in chains, swaying in the breeze. That revolting spectacle revealed the sad truth that in Peru, as well as elsewhere, man's fallen nature developed itself in crime and woe. The Emperor had also a large standing ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... Southern States have committed a crime which will take its place among the calamities of history. The rupture of the Union will fatally follow the assassination of Brown. As to Brown, he was an apostle and a hero. The gibbet has only increased his glory ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... was written down at all, its meaning was veiled in terms of alchemy and astrology so that only those possessing the key could read it aright. This was made necessary in order to avoid the persecutions of the theologians of the Middle Ages, who fought the Secret Doctrine with fire and sword; stake, gibbet and cross. Even to this day there will be found but few reliable books on the Hermetic Philosophy, although there are countless references to it in many books written on various phases of Occultism. And yet, the Hermetic Philosophy is the only Master Key which ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... John Wilson jeered at Robinson on his way to meet his death, and reviled him as he stood beneath the gibbet, over the hole that was his grave; but even the savage Endicott knew well that all the trainbands of the colony could not have guarded Christison to the gallows from the ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... replied Jorworth, his eyes, while he was speaking, glancing with the vindictive ferocity which dictated his answer. "So many strangers as be here amongst ye, so many bodies to the ravens, so many heads to the gibbet!—It is long since the kites have had such a banquet of lurdane Flemings and ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... We had not travelled long, ere some mischance Disjoined me from my comrade; and, through fear Dismounting, down the rough and stony moor I led my horse, and, stumbling on, at length Came to a bottom, where in former times 235 A murderer had been hung in iron chains. The gibbet-mast had mouldered down, the bones And iron case were gone; but on the turf, Hard by, soon after that fell deed was wrought, Some unknown hand had carved the murderer's name. 240 The monumental letters were ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... above the heads of the multitude. On one was written Sanction or death; on another, The recall of the patriot ministers; on the third, Tremble tyrant, thine hour is come. A man, his arms bared to the shoulders, bore a gibbet, from which hung the effigy of a crowned female, with the inscription, Beware the lantern. Farther on a group of hags raised a guillotine, with a card bearing the words, National Justice on tyrants; ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men: his grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door. ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... This celebrated gibbet was, in the memory of the last generation, still standing at the western end of the town of Crieff, in Perthshire. Why it was called the kind gallows we are unable to inform the reader with certainty; but it is alleged that the Highlanders used to touch their bonnets as they passed ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then hanged so fast, that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon that he said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped, there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places. Upon this, I who took the boldness to speak freely before ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... also arise and difficulties spring up. In this land, the enemies of religion, have not power to kill and destroy the faithful; but they have power to pour contempt upon them. Cruel mockings may severely try those who fear neither the gibbet, nor the stake. These do try the people of God ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... however, to produce quaint survivals of the old state of things, under which a man's neighbours were assumed to be capable of deciding his guilt or innocence from their own knowledge. There was the Gibbet Law of Halifax, which lasted till the seventeenth century. The jurors might catch a man 'handhabend, backbarend, or confessand,' with stolen goods worth 13-1/2d. in his possession and cut off his head on a primitive guillotine without troubling the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... been so often baffled by the outcome. Among the many such cases known to us during this time there is no mention of a conviction.[1] In Kent there was a flickering revival of the old hatred of witches. In the year that Charles gained the throne the city of Canterbury sent some women to the gibbet. Not so in Essex. In that county not a single case during this period has been left on record. In Middlesex, a county which from the days of Elizabeth through to the Restoration had maintained a very even pace—a stray conviction now and then among many acquittals—the ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... that in Cheapside there had been but a little before a gibbet set up, and the picture of Huson hung upon it in the middle of the street. [John Hewson, who had been a shoemaker, became a Colonel in the Parliament Army, and sat in judgement on the King: he escaped hanging by flight, and died in 1662 at Amsterdam.] ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... of a poor province A Roman soldier stood staring at a gibbet, Then he said, "Surely this was a righteous man," And a new chapter of history opened, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... is to be hanged with his face toward the people, but a female with her face toward the gibbet. So says Rabbi Eliezer; but the sages say the man only is hanged, not the woman. Rabbi Eliezer retorted, "Did not Simeon the son of Shetach hang women in Askelon?" To this they replied, "He indeed caused eighty women to be hanged, ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... once been seen here. A partial darkness obscured one end, across which, as for deeper mystery, an old russet curtain was drawn, by way of screen to a sombre band of winter cloaks, pendent each from its pin, like a malefactor from his gibbet. From amongst these cloaks, and behind that curtain, the Nun was said to issue. I did not believe this, nor was I troubled by apprehension thereof; but I saw a very dark and large rat, with a long ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... of his which was taking him there. He would go because there was no one else on the country side that would dare. But I had no pride of that sort. I was quite of the same way of thinking as the others, and would as soon have thought of passing my night at Jacob's gibbet on Ditchling Common as in the haunted house of Cliffe Royal. Still, I could not bring myself to desert Jim; and so, as I say, I slunk about the house with so pale and peaky a face that my dear mother would have it that I had been at the ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... it. His subjects cut up by his subjects were only capers to his leg of mutton. From none of his palaces and parks was there any view so rural, so composing to his spirits, as the shambles. When these were not fresh, the gibbet would do. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... and Secunda, three virgins of Tuburga, had gall and vinegar given them to drink, were then severely scourged, tormented on a gibbet, rubbed with lime, scorched on a gridiron, worried by wild beasts, and at ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... this, who is for independence, and who is not? Those who are for it, will support it, and the remainder will undoubtedly see the reasonableness of paying the charges; while those who oppose or seek to betray it, must expect the more rigid fate of the jail and the gibbet. There is a bastard kind of generosity, which being extended to all men, is as fatal to society, on one hand, as the want of true generosity is on the other. A lax manner of administering justice, falsely termed moderation, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... freedom, each of which he would turn to abuse, must be taught, by external force, and from motives of fear, to counterfeit those effects of innocence, and of duty, to which he is not disposed: he must be referred to the whip, or the gibbet, for arguments in support of a caution, which the state now requires him to assume, on a supposition that he is insensible to the motives which recommend ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... about the island in idleness, take these hundred reals now, and some time of the day to-morrow quit the island under sentence of banishment for ten years, and under pain of completing it in another life if you violate the sentence, for I'll hang you on a gibbet, or at least the hangman will by my orders; not a word from either of you, or I'll make him feel ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... I hate wild winter's spite — The gibbet trees, the world in white, The sky but gray wind over a grave — Why should I ache, the season's slave? I'll sing from the top of the ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... lash from the tongue was enough. Now, can you imagine it possible that any one could sink so low as to earn his living by watching his fellow-creatures, spying their every act, and then betraying them for the sake of a few dirty shillings, to send them to prison or to the gibbet? There can be nothing on earth so base as a thing like this. Why, a footpad is ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... as he deals with the sea, so he deals with the wind and rain and snow and vapour and fire. Those who love Victor Hugo will think of a hundred examples of what I mean, from the burning castle in "Ninety-three," to the wind-rocked gibbet on the Isle of Portland, when the child hero of the "Man who Laughs" escapes ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... committed to the Tower. That they were not also hung was, according to the mild and merciful Dr. Reeves, Dean of Westminster, "a main cause of God's punishing the land" in the future time. For those destined to suffer, a gibbet was erected at Charing Cross, that the traitors might in their last moments see the spot where the late king had been executed. Having been half hung, they were taken down, when their heads were severed from their ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... without malice, and with a light heart, and I never love a man better than when I have put my scant of wind collar about his neck, to dub him Knight of the order of Saint Patibularius [patibulum, a gibbet], as the Provost's Chaplain, the worthy Father Vaconeldiablo [possibly Baco (Bacchus) el Diablo (the Devil)], is wont to call the Patron Saint ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... standing bolt upright, planted on both feet, like some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in upon him. He was intently watching an agate ball that rolled over a sun-dial, and awaited its final settlement. The worthy man had received neither pension nor decoration; he had not known how ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... some one deserving of death.' So he gave him one that was likest to Alaeddin and they covered his head and carried him to the place of execution between Ahmed ed Denef and Ali ez Zibec of Cairo. Now they had brought Alaeddin to the gibbet, to hang him, but Ahmed ed Denef came forward and set his foot on that of the hangman, who said, 'Give me room to do my office.' 'O accursed one,' replied Ahmed, 'take this man and hang him in Alaeddin's stead; for he is innocent and we will ransom him with ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... brother (his family of course included) acknowledge a woman, of whose guilt they entertain not the slightest doubt, you think you can gain your object by threatening an exposure. Don't threaten any more! Make your exposure! Go to the magistrate at once, if you like! Gibbet our names in the newspaper report, as a family connected by marriage with Mr. Sherwin the linen-draper's daughter, whom they believe to have disgraced herself as a woman and a wife for ever. Do your very worst; make public every shameful particular that ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... in the cottage! Rushbrook was evidently stupefied from excess of feeling; first, the strong excitement which had urged him to the deed; and now from the reaction the prostration of mental power which had succeeded it. Jane dreaded the present and the future—whichever way she turned her eyes the gibbet was before her—the clanking of chains in her ears; in her vision of the future, scorn, misery, and remorse—she felt only for her husband. Joey, poor boy, he felt for both. Even the dog showed, as he looked ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... before a cultured audience, but the crowds who came to an Elizabethan play were of a temper to enjoy a Mohawk scalp dance. They were accustomed to violent scenes and sensations; they had witnessed the rack and gibbet in constant operation; they were familiar with the sight of human heads decorating the posts of London Bridge or carried about on the pikes of soldiers. After witnessing such horrors free of cost, they would follow their queen and pay their ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... in herself, 'Why do I weary myself in vain? These two love and know each other and both are friends of my husband. Their desire is an honourable one and meseemeth it is pleasing to God, since the one of them hath scaped the gibbet and the other the lance-thrust and both the wild beasts of the wood; wherefore be it as they will.' Then, turning to the lovers, she said to them, 'If you have it still at heart to be man and wife, it is my pleasure also; be it so, and let the nuptials ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... gaolor, "Give us some one who deserveth death." So he gave him one that was likest of men to Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat; and they covered his head and carried him to the place of execution between Ahmad al-Danaf and Ali al-Zaybak of Cairo.[FN102] Now they had brought Ala al-Din to the gibbet, to hang him, but Ahmad al-Danaf came forward and set his foot on that of the hangman, who said, "Give me room to do my duty." He replied, "O accursed, take this man and hang him in Ala al-Din's stead; for he is innocent and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... scene, the plot breaks out in a fresh place. The man with the "gash," and Gipsy George are together, going over some youthful reminiscences. It seems that once upon a time there were six pirates; four were those pendents from the gibbet at Execution-Dock one hears so much about at the commencement; the fifth is the speaker, Gipsy George; and "you," exclaims that person, striking an attitude, and addressing Sir Gregory, "make up the half-dozen!" They all formerly did business in a ship called the "Morning ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the noses of the landlords, which have bloomed and given place to another set of proboscises as germane us the old ones to the very welcome,—please to light—'Orses forward, and ready out. The skeleton at Barnby Moor has deserted his gibbet, and that is ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... place, the fleet came to anchor in Port St Julian on the 20th June, where they saw the gibbet still standing, on which Magellan had formerly executed some of his mutinous company. Here also Admiral Drake executed one Captain Doughty, the most suspected action of his life. Mr Doughty had been guilty of certain actions, tending towards contention ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... those castles where the seigneur was of "the religion." The Catholic party thought the destruction complete, the court went in state to return thanks for deliverance from a supposed plot, while Coligny's body was hung on a gibbet. The Pope ordered public thanksgivings, while Queen Elizabeth put on mourning, and the Emperor Maximilian II., alone among Catholic princes, showed any horror or indignation. But the heart of the unhappy young king was broken by the guilt he had incurred. Charles ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thought a knave, or fool, Or bigot, plotting crime, Who, for the advancement of his kind, Is wiser than his time. For him the hemlock shall distil; For him the axe be bared; For him the gibbet shall be built; For him the stake prepared. Him shall the scorn and wrath of men Pursue with deadly aim; And malice, envy, spite, and lies, Shall desecrate his name. But Truth shall conquer at the last, For round ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... But Wendell Phillips, always an extremist among extremists, published an article entitled "Abraham Lincoln, the Slave-hound of Illinois," whereof the keynote was struck in this introductory sentence: "We gibbet a Northern hound to-day, side by side with the infamous Mason of Virginia." Mr. Garrison, a man of far larger and sounder intellectual powers than belonged to Phillips, did not fancy this sort of diatribe, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... hunger, as your charity began abroad it should end at home. A much less sum, a tithe of the bounty bestowed on Portugal, even if those men (which I cannot admit without enquiry) could not have been restored to their employments, would have rendered unnecessary the tender mercies of the bayonet and the gibbet. But doubtless our friends have too many foreign claims to admit a prospect of domestic relief; though never did such objects demand it. I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsula, I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey, but never under the most ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... had gone I kicked the hedge to pieces quickly, cut the twitch-ups at the butts and threw them with their wire nooses far into the thickets, and posted a warning in a cleft stick on the site of the last gibbet. Then I followed Wally to a second and third line of snares, which were treated in the same rough way, and watched him with curiously mingled feelings of detestation and amusement as he sneaked down ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... hundred years ago, when the Bible held the greatest sway over the human mind and Christianity was at the zenith of its power, when it was denied that woman has a soul, when she was bought and sold as the cattle of the field, robbed of her name, her children, her property, and "elevated" (?) on the gibbet of infamy, and on the high altar of lust by the decree of ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... as I writ, was the Mortimer hanged, without defence by him made (he had allowed none to Sir Hugh Le Despenser and my Lord of Kent): and four days hung his body in irons on the gibbet, as Sir Hugh's the father had done. Verily, as he had done, so did God apay him, which is just Judge ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... reason: thinkest thou I'll endanger my soul gratis? At a word, hang no more about 15 me, I am no gibbet for you. Go. A short knife and a throng!—To your manor of Pickt-hatch! Go. You'll not bear a letter for me, you rogue! you stand upon your honour! Why, thou unconfinable baseness, it is as much as I can do to keep the terms of my honour precise: I, I, I 20 myself ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... halberts, sheep-hooks, cardinals' hats, turbans, drums, gallipots, a gibbet, a cradle, a rack, a cart-wheel, an altar, a helmet, a back-piece, a breast-plate, a bell, a tub, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... was torn up, and a rope fastened round the neck of the corpse, which was then dragged through the streets by the infuriated mob; and the desecrated remains of the recently powerful favourite were hung by the feet to a gibbet, dismembered in the most brutal manner, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... and Scotland, and all the realms, castles, and lordships thereto pertaining, are proved guilty of high treason and lese majeste, and are thereby condemned to be divested of all symbols of nobility and knighthood, which you have disgraced; to be dragged on a hurdle to the common gibbet, and there hung by the neck till you are dead; your head to be cut off; your body quartered and exposed at the principal towns as a warning to the disaffected and the traitorous of all ranks in either nation, and this is to be done at whatsoever time the good pleasure of our sovereign ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... sin is any unlikeness to the Spirit of Christ, revealed supremely in that act of self-sacrifice. The lifeless form of the Son of God on the tree is the striking evidence of the antagonism between the children of men and their Father. Jesus completely represented Him, and this broken body on the gibbet was the inevitable result. Golgotha convinces us of the ruinous forces that live in and dominate our world; it faces us with the suicidal elements in men's spirits that drive them to murder the Christlike in themselves; it ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... no place to him could be So lonely, but that thence might come a pang Brought from without to inward misery. 75 Now, as he plodded on, with sullen clang A sound of chains along the desert rang; He looked, and saw upon a gibbet high A human body that in irons swang, Uplifted by the tempest whirling by; 80 And, hovering, round it often did a raven ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... iniquity as into a theatre, to behold a sight—the sight of human nature in its lowest, most pitiable, and melancholy garb; in its hour of degradation, craziness, and desperation. He had his recreation in such a spectacle, as men can find their pleasure in the death-struggle of a malefacter on the gibbet. He came, not to join the miserable throng that crowded round the tables, exhibiting every variety of low, unhealthy feeling; nor did he come, in truth, prepared to meet with one in whose affairs and conduct he had so deep an interest. It ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... separation between political and judicial functions was a thing of which he had no conception. It had probably never occurred to him that there was in Bengal an authority perfectly independent of the Council, an authority which could protect one whom the Council wished to destroy, and send to the gibbet one whom the Council wished to protect. Yet such was the fact. The Supreme Court was, within the sphere of its own duties, altogether independent of the Government. Hastings, with his usual sagacity, had seen how much advantage he might ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you? Do you? None, I believe, ever thought that before. But the same wood, I suppose, that makes the gibbet could make the mast of a man-of-war. I tell you, however, why you have taken this fancy to me,—the strong sympathize with the strong. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... year 1798, on the baffled and dispersed United Irishmen. Of the chiefs imprisoned in March and May, Lord Edward had died of his wounds and vexation; Oliver Bond of apoplexy; the brothers Sheares, Father Quigley, and William Michael Byrne on the gibbet. In July, on Samuel Nelson's motion, the remaining prisoners in Newgate, Bridewell, and Kilmainham, agreed, in order to stop the effusion of blood, to expatriate themselves to any country not at war with England, and to reveal the general secrets of their system, without inculpating ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... his present situation, he resolved rather to blow up the vessel than to surrender; he concerted measures to achieve this end with a brave Dutchman named Bedaulx, whose sole alternative, if taken, would have been the gibbet. The captain insisted upon stopping at the islands; but government and orders would have been found there, and he followed a direct course, less from choice than from compulsion.[15] At forty leagues from shore, they were met by a small vessel: the captain turned pale, ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... and joy he beheld his first view end In a favourite prospects church that was ruin'd- But alas! what a sight did the next cut exhibit! At the end of the walk hung a rogue on a gibbet! He beheld it and wept, for it caused him to muse on Full many a Campbell that died with his shoes on. All amazed and aghast at the ominous scene, He order'd it quick to be closed up again With a clump of Scotch firs that served for ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... process against him they accuse him of nothing criminal. They cannot impute to him having joined with bad men. All that they charge him with is an attempt to give freedom to the republic, and to make Rome the centre of its government. And is this a crime worthy of the wheel or the gibbet? A Roman citizen afflicted to see his country, which is by right the mistress of the world, the slave of the ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... under Cartier, and about fifty of their number perished before the coming of the spring. Their lot was rendered more dreadful still by quarrelling and crime. Roberval could keep his colonists in subjection only by the use of irons and by the application of the lash. The gibbet, reared beside the fort, claimed its toll ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock |
