"Pestilential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... asylums. The strength of the viciously strong, when inimical to society, is tempered by penal institutions and by the gallows. The short-sighted are provided with spectacles, and the sickly (when they can pay for it) with sanitariums. Pestilential marshes are drained, plagues are checked, and disasters averted. Yet, for all that, the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and the weak are crushed out. The men strong of brain are masters as of yore. They dominate ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... Forum not altogether unlike what it is today, but blackened with smoke, half choked with mouldering humanity, strewn with charred timbers, broken roof tiles and the wreck of much household furniture; a sorrowful confusion reeking with vapours of death, and pestilential with decay. It was no wonder that the poor plebeians lost heart and would have chosen to go back to the clear streets and cleaner air of Veii. Their little houses were lost and untraceable in the universal chaos. But the rich man's ruins stood out in bolder relief; he had his ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... knows how prominent a feature they form in the English landscape. There is the dismal corner in the great city, surrounded by blackened walls, where scarce a blade of grass will grow, and where the whole thing is foul and pestilential. There is the ideal country churchyard, like that described by Gray, where the old elms and yews keep watch over the graves where successive generations of simple rustics have found their last resting-place, and where in the twilight the owls hoot from the tower of the ivy-covered church. There ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... rice-grounds, looking like—what in truth they are— poisonous swamps. Then come swamps pure and simple, too bad even to be turned into rice grounds,—or rather simply swamps impure; for a stench at most times of the year comes from them, like a warning of their pestilential nature, and their unfitness for the sojourn of man. A few shaggy, wild-looking cattle may be seen wandering over the flat waste, muddy to the shoulders from wading in the soft swamps. A scene of more utter desolation it is hardly possible to meet with in such close ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... ever! Am I then, thus miserable and ruined, a proper subject upon which for you to exercise your ingenuity, and improve your power of tormenting? Was it not enough that I was publicly dishonoured? that I was deprived, by the pestilential influence of some demon, of the opportunity of avenging my dishonour? No: in addition to this, I have been charged with having in this critical moment intercepted my own vengeance by the foulest of crimes. That trial is past. Misery ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... but he can not. I became very angry when I was there, both with her ladyship and that pestilential old clergyman, and told them both pretty much what I thought. I have the comfort of knowing that I have two bitter ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... its attendant toil, And draws his household round their evening fire, And tells the ofttold tales that never tire; Or, where the town's blue turrets dimly rise, And manufacture taints the ambient skies, The pale mechanic leaves the labouring loom, The air-pent hold, the pestilential room, And rushes out, impatient to begin The stated course of customary sin: Now, now my solitary way I bend Where solemn groves in awful state impend: And cliffs, that boldly rise above the plain, Bespeak, bless'd Clifton! thy sublime domain. Here lonely wandering o'er the ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... though I thought these things I refrained from addressing the king. Some impulse, however, led me to follow him at a respectful distance, as did also many others. His majesty strolled through the most pestilential streets with as much unconcern as though he wore taking his pleasure in a garden of roses; he stepped quietly into the dirtiest hovels where lay both dead and dying; he spoke words of kindly encouragement to the grief-stricken and terrified mourners, who stared through their tears at the monarch ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... bore signs of the excessive dampness of the climate on The Coast, as the littoral of the African shore 'twixt the Niger and the Senegal Rivers is invariably referred to by the case-hardened white men who have fought against the pestilential climate ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... this the rank growth of religious mendicancy, under the fostering care of religious teaching and superstition. There are five and one-half millions of such lazy, worthless fellows encumbering that land today. The mass of them are sleek in body and pestilential in morals. Whenever a man finds work too hard, he dons the yellow cloth of the religious mendicant and becomes an immediate success. But alas for the community! Hindu charity is proverbial, but it is blinder than love itself. Such a body ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... other day our poor Maohn was terrified by a communication from Ali Bey (Moudir of Keneh) to the effect that he had heard from Alexandria that someone had reported that the dead cattle had lain about the streets of Luxor and that the place was pestilential. The British mind at once suggested a counter-statement, to be signed by the most respectable inhabitants. So the Cadi drew it up, and came and read it to me, and took my deposition and witnessed my signature, and the Maohn went his way rejoicing, in that ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... yesterday's issue you took occasion to speak of the organ-grinding nuisance, about which I hope you will let me ask you the following questions: Why must decent people all over town suffer these pestilential beggars to go about torturing our senses, and practically blackmailing the listeners into paying them to go away? Is it not a most ridiculous excuse on the part of the police, when ordered to arrest these vagrants, to tell a citizen that the city license exempts these public nuisances from arrest? ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... class; and the joke was well understood when, many years after, in the 8th of his Second Book of Satires, he said that Nasidienus's dinner- party broke up without their eating a morsel of the dishes after a certain point,—"As if a pestilential blast from Canidia's throat, more venomous than that of African vipers, had swept ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... pleasure and profit. Therefore now I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I fled: What hast thou done with thy ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... others; and that they could not have exaggerated the statements is proved by the risks they voluntarily encountered to gain their freedom. The bullets of the marines on duty, the fear of the voracious shark in waters where they abounded, the dangers of a pestilential climate, or the certainty, if retaken, of being subjected to a more revolting and excruciating punishment than was every devised by the Spanish Inquisition FLOGGING THROUGH THE FLEET could not deter British seamen from attempting to flee from ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... plains of burning sand No bird can move, nor ant, nor fly; No water slakes the fiery land, Intensely glows the flaming sky. No tiger fierce, nor lion ever Could breathe that pestilential air; Even the unsparing vulture never Ventures on blood-stained ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... journey, attended by all his court and all his sons, except the prince, who was in Spain. They travelled through the Sienese Maremma, and by this route he reached Pisa. The poison from the bad air of those marshes first attacked the Cardinal, who was taken with a pestilential fever after a few days, and died at the end of a brief illness. He was the Duke's right eye, handsome and good, and his loss was most severely felt. I allowed several days to elapse, until I thought their tears were dried, and then I betook ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... the wall, and breaking off handful after handful of these fragrant buds, carried them, all wet with dew, back to the hospital. As she bore her treasure along the fever ward, scenting the pestilential atmosphere with their pure breath, the sick turned their languid faces toward her, greedily inhaling the transient sweetness. Two or three of the convalescent women followed her with longing eyes. She felt these glances and turned back, leaving a spray of the dewy buds upon the pillow of ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... an eye-witness of the wonderful achievements of American medical science in the conquest of acute communicable and pestilential diseases in those regions of the earth where they were supposed to be impregnably entrenched, there is the strongest possible appeal in the present rapidly growing movement for the improvement of physical efficiency and the conquest of chronic ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... sportsmanlike feeling, if I may so express it, in these fallings away from the Church of our fathers. It denotes a failing of intellect amid the centres of human activity. There is a blight of unbelief abroad—a nebulous, pestilential rationalism. Acquaint him with these facts; they may serve to re-establish one whose temperament must be regarded as abnormal in the light of his great eccentricity of action. Now farewell, and God be ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... bell-man: nay, I hate their writings as much as I do themselves: there is nothing so pernicious as reading; it destroys all originality of sentiment. My lord Devonshire has more than ten thousand volumes in his house; I entreated his lordship to lodge me as far as possible from that pestilential corner: I have but one book, and that is Euclid, but I begin to be tired of him; I believe he has done more harm than good; he has set fools a reasoning.' 'There is one thing in Mr. Hobbes's conduct,' ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... the trees, and, commencing a descent, our little party did not stop till we had reached the bottom of a dark and damp glen, close to a greenish pool. After utilizing our halt by filling our gourds and killing an armadillo, we hurried to get away from a spot where the air seemed poisoned with pestilential miasma. Having again ascended the slope, I advanced through a grove of firs, encouraging my friend with the load, who was archly challenged to ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... by a divine being. Even the sickening tales of Krishna and his amours are less shocking than this. When we turn from such representations of divinity to "the Word made flesh" we seem to have escaped from the pestilential air of a charnel-house to the ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... Houses of Detention—Pest-houses of Detention—you could not expect a putrid fever to adopt new rules merely to accommodate legal prejudice. And in the same way if Cavendish Square came sniffing up pestilential effluvia in Drury Lane, it was The Square's look out, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... a pestilential disorder, which, in the course of two days, had carried off nearly 400 men in his camp. The black spots which appeared upon his body, his own dying expressions, and the advantages which France was likely to reap from his sudden ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... were two highwaymen, Charlie and Crabb Spring; two men, not highway, Saul Coplestone and John Cole; two marriageable sisters, Sarah and Christina Rowland. The highwaymen, being pestilential and murderous, badly wanted catching; of the two potential heroes, Saul was a stout enough fellow on the surface but a poltroon at bottom, while John, though less terrific in physique, was modest and courageous to a degree. Of the sisters, Sarah had most of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 4, 1914 • Various
... gloomy dungeon formed in one side of the Cavern; It also showed several other recesses of similar construction, but whose depth was buried in obscurity. Coldly played the light upon the damp walls, whose dew-stained surface gave back a feeble reflection. A thick and pestilential fog clouded the height of the vaulted dungeon. As Lorenzo advanced, He felt a piercing chillness spread itself through his veins. The frequent groans still engaged him to move forwards. He turned towards them, ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... O'Higgins, just quoted, I had never publicly attributed to him, though, in the estimation of every officer of the army and squadron, richly deserving it. It will be in the recollection of the reader, that instead of marching on Lima, he wasted nearly two months at Haura, and that from the pestilential character of the climate, a fearful amount of sickness amongst the troops was the consequence. I will here give a letter to me from his Aide-de-camp Paroissien, who was subsequently employed by San Martin ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... pestilential disease breaks out in the city, the plainness and urgency of the case compel all to see in the sickness of one the danger of all. Wants and discomforts, which charity had been too cold to attend to, now considered as sources of contagion, are administered to with a ready alacrity. The law ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... regards the climate of India as deadly to European children, will step in and save the little soul. The climate would do it no harm, but there is a moral miasma more baneful than any which rises from the pestilential swamps of the Terai, ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... and he peopled the darkness with grisly phantoms. They were around about him on each side, whirling and rustling, gibbering, groaning, shrieking, laughing, and lamenting. He was stunned, stifled. The air seemed to grow suffocating, pestilential; the wild laughter was redoubled; the horrible troop assailed him; they dragged him along the tomb, and amid their howls ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... clouds of sunset! "He it was who slew my father, By his wicked wiles and cunning, When he from the moon descended, When he came on earth to seek me. He, the mightiest of Magicians, Sends the fever from the marshes, Sends the pestilential vapors, Sends the poisonous exhalations, Sends the white fog from the fen-lands, Sends disease and death among us! "Take your bow, O Hiawatha, Take your arrows, jasper-headed, Take your war-club, Puggawaugun, And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... that could be seen was a fringe of thick, low trees, the edge of the forest that ran back from the river. Conspicuous among them was the ill-omened "fever tree," with its gaunt, bare, ungainly arms and yellow bark—the tree whose presence indicates a pestilential air. Here was no luxuriant variety of form, no wealth of colour, no festooned creepers nor brilliant flowers, but a dull and sad monotony, as we doubled point after point and saw reach after reach of the featureless stream spread ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Bouffon mentions under the generic name of mouffetes. It looks like a brown and white fox, with an enormous tail, which it holds up like a great feather in the air. It is known not only for the beauty of its skin, but for the horrible and pestilential odour with which it defends itself when attacked, and which poisons the air for miles around. Notwithstanding the warnings of the mozos as to its peculiar mode of defence, the gentlemen pursued it with guns and pistols, on horseback and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... adventures for Spanish treasure on land and sea until the shadows of failure compassed him round. His spirit broken and his body smitten with incurable disease, the fleet under his command anchored at Puerto Bello after a heavy passage from Escudo de Veragua, a pestilential desert island. He was then in delirium, and on the 28th January, 1596, the big soul of our greatest seaman passed away beyond the veil. His body was put into a lead and oak coffin and taken a few ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... their breath. I should be inclined to recommend the cutting down of the jungle in preference to the cutting up of the serpents; and I have little doubt that, were parts of the great forest cleared, and wide roads cut through it, it would cease to be so pestilential a locality as it is at present. In case of a war, there would be no difficulty, even now, in our troops possessing themselves of the whole territory to the foot of the Cheriagotty hills in the cold season; but as we should have to maintain ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... meanwhile, my dear," said I, throwing down the crow-quill pen and pushing my drawing away, "if you remain in this pestilential condition of morbidness, you will die without the necessity of drowning yourself. Instead of making ourselves miserable, let us go and dance at the Bal ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... all political rivalry and national prejudices, and demanded the earnest consideration of all parties. Canada, like the rest of the world, had heard of an unhappy land smitten with a hideous plague, of its crops lying in pestilential heaps and of its peasantry dying above them, of fathers, mothers, and children ghastly in their rags or nakedness, of dead unburied, and the living flying in terror, as it were, from a stricken battlefield. This dreadful Irish famine forced to Canada upwards of 100,000 ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... her requirements; perhaps, also, a more elastic physical constitution, which accommodates itself more readily to the conditions of the soil where he dwells. In Sardinia agriculture is prosecuted under physical conditions precisely similar even at the present day; the pestilential atmosphere exists, but the peasant avoids its injurious effects by caution in reference to clothing, food, and the choice of his hours of labour. In fact, nothing is so certain a protection against the "aria cattiva" as wearing the fleece of animals and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... with well-developed bust, noble mien, and glorious face, about fifteen years of age, and as beautiful as the most beautiful;" the unrighteous soul, on the contrary, directed its course towards the north, through a tainted land, amid the squalls of a pestilential hurricane, and there encountered its past ill deeds, under the form of an ugly and wicked young woman, the ugliest and most wicked it had ever seen. The genius Rashnu Razishta, the essentially truthful, weighed its virtues or vices in an unerring balance, and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of the slaves came from the west, and that the navigation of the Calabar stream, at no great distance was interrupted by an immense waterfall, beyond which the surface of the country became very elevated. Unfortunately, of all the sickly climates of Africa, this is perhaps the most pestilential, and Mr. Nicholls, before commencing his journey, fell a ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... Furius, if my villa faces, 'Tis not showery south, nor airy wester, North's grim fury, nor east; 'tis only fifteen Thousand sesterces, add two hundred over. Draft unspeakable, icy, pestilential! 5 ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... hand was extended to greet her—no heart warmed in affection towards her; on the contrary, every eye glanced at her, as a being marked with enmity towards God. Blanched faces and knit brows, the signs of fear and hatred, were turned upon her; her breath was considered pestilential, and her touch paralysis. There she stood, proscribed, avoided, and hunted like a tigress, all fearing to encounter, yet wishing to exterminate her! Who could she be?—or what had she done, that the finger of the Almighty marked her out for such ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... bad, evil, mischievous, pestilential, baneful, foul, noisome, poisonous, deadly, harmful, noxious, ruinous, deleterious, hurtful, perverting, unhealthful, destructive, injurious, pestiferous, unwholesome. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... doing, so tremendous would be the exercise of the faculties, so colossal the difficulties. I would have a few men do it all; I have no faith in the uneducated. The little brain, half opened by a village schoolmaster, is pestilential; but in the few with sufficient power over the many,—from whom will be evolved more and more to rank with the first few,—in those I have faith, and am ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... the sixteenth century that the Ursuline Order took its rise. The epoch was one peculiarly disastrous in the Church's history. Luther's heresy was working evil on a gigantic scale. It had spread from nation to nation with the rapidity of a pestilential contagion, blighting with its deadly venom all it touched, and everywhere marking its progress by a wide track of spiritual ruin and desolation, as well as of political anarchy and social disorganization. Each new success of its unholy work, necessarily inflicted a new pang on the heart of the ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... bold privateersman, who, when once consigned to it, found that the reward of a sea-rover was not always wealth and pleasure. A Massachusetts privateersman left on record a contemporary account of the sufferings of himself and his comrades in this pestilential hulk, which may well be condensed here to show some of the perils that the adventurers dared when they took ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... vague; they have barely heard of Cosenza or of Cotrone, and of Paola not at all; it would as soon occur to them to set out for Morocco as for Calabria. How shall I get along with people whose language is a barbarous dialect? Am I aware that the country is in great part pestilential?—la febbre! Has no one informed me that in autumn snows descend, and bury everything for months? It is useless to explain that I only intend to visit places easily accessible, that I shall travel mostly by railway, and that ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... farther and yet farther still through deep defiles and vast mountain fastnesses into a region where it must have seemed as though hope or help could never reach them. But "men, not mountains, determine the fate of nations"; and to-day, through the mercy of our God, that pestilential pen is no ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... the deleterious vapours and pestilential exhalations of the charcoal, which soon undermine the health of the heartiest, the glare of a scorching fire, and the smoke so baneful to the eyes and the complexion, are continual and inevitable dangers: and a cook must live in ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... summer droughts. Thus are thousands of acres of land drowned, and rendered worse than useless; for the water is kept up till Midsummer, and drawn off when a dog-day climate is just ready to convert the rich and slimy sediment of the pond into pestilential vapors. These waters, too, controlled by the mill-owners, are thus let down in floods, in Midsummer, to overflow the meadows and corn-fields of the farmer, or the intervals and ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm during all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late "rich man" had to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of fact we were in sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination. The excellent Father Superior mentioned to me with an air of immense commiseration: "The poor man has left a young daughter." Who was to look after her I don't ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... perhaps be given as illustrating not only his policy of smiting hard, instead of palavering, but also the necessity for strict secrecy. In 1878 when the Swat River Canal, which has turned the desert plain of Yusufzai into one great wheat-field, was under construction, the more pestilential class of mullah, always on the look-out for a cause to inflame Mahomedan fanaticism against the English unbeliever, stirred up the tribesmen to interfere with the work. A raid was consequently made by them, and a lot of harmless coolies ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... Japanese language, of what he had long suspected—the existence of a plot on the part of the native converts and the foreign emissaries to reduce Japan to the position of a subject state.[17] Putting forth strenuous measures to root out utterly what he believed to be a pestilential breeder of sedition and war, the Yedo Sh[o]gun advanced step by step to that great proclamation of January 27, 1614,[18] in which the foreign priests were branded as triple enemies—of the country, of the Kami, and of the Buddhas. This proclamation wound ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... their own business. The market-place was bordered to the east and west by an extensive swamp, covered with weeds and water and frequented by wild ducks, cranes, and vultures. The house which had been provided for him was close to a morass, the pestilential exhalations of which were increased by the sewers of the houses all opening ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... legal or voluntary service of their feudal vassals, who passed the Alps with reluctance, assumed the license of rapine and disorder, and capriciously deserted before the end of the campaign. Whole armies were swept away by the pestilential influence of the climate: the survivors brought back the bones of their princes and nobles, [142] and the effects of their own intemperance were often imputed to the treachery and malice of the Italians, who rejoiced at ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... F.R.C.S., published a chronologic table of some of the principal plagues on record. In comments on his table, Potter says that he has doubtless included mention of many plagues which, although described under that name, are probably a dissimilar disease, writers having applied the terms pestilential and pestilent in a generic sense to diseases specifically different. It must also be remembered that, in some cases, death must have been due to famine, want, and privation, which are so frequently coexistent with pestilence. Following ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... patron demon of Kali Ghatta, was hovering above them in the pestilential air as the carriage swiftly rolled along the superb streets of the metropolis born of Governor Charnock's settlement in sixteen eighty-six. The gift of an Emperor of Delhi to the ambitious English, Fort William had ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... Crimea. Florence Nightingale was one of those philanthropic and humane ladies who left their homes and the comforts of life, and resorted to the Crimea, where, on the field of battle and in the pestilential hospital, she comforted and nursed the sick and wounded soldiers. The tent can be made of white cloth, fastened to a frame of light strips of wood eight feet square, with a small flag fastened in front. A couch should be formed at one side of the tent, ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... prevent abortion. Sydenham, in the iliac passion, orders a live kitten to be constantly applied to the abdomen; others have used pigeons split alive, applied to the soles of the feet, with success, in pestilential fevers and convulsions. It was doubtless the impression that relief might be obtained by external agents, that the court of king David advised him to seek a young virgin, in order that a portion of ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... pay the piper in compassing its extinction? If, however, it really be that Upas—tree, under whose baleful shade every kindly feeling in the human bosom, whether of master or servant, withers and dies, I ask, who planted it? If it possess the magical, and incredible, and most pestilential quality, that the English gentleman, who shall be virtuous and beneficent, and just in all his ways, before he leaves home, and after he returns home, shall, during his temporary sojourn within its influence become a very Nero for cruelty, and have his ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... most essential natural remedy is as yet not universally recognized by the representatives of the regular school of medicine. Time and again I have been called to sickrooms where by order of the doctor every window was closed and the room filled with pestilential odors, the poisonous exhalations of the diseased organism added to the stale air of the unventilated and often overheated apartment. And this air starvation had been enforced by graduates of our best medical schools and colleges. This unnatural and inexcusable ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... resulted from my confinement, and for which no indemnification could be either offered or received, was in the death of my affectionate and faithful Basque Francisco, who having attended me during the whole time of my imprisonment, caught the pestilential typhus or gaol fever, which was then raging in the Carcel de la Corte, of which he expired within a few days subsequent to my liberation. His death occurred late one evening; the next morning as I was lying in bed ruminating ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... of the priest, As if he were an archangel, at least. It makes a peculiar atmosphere, This odor of earthly passions and crimes, Such as I like to breathe, at times, And such as often brings me here In the hottest and most pestilential season. To-day, I come for another reason; To foster and ripen an evil thought In a heart that is almost to madness wrought, And to make a murderer out of a prince, A sleight of hand I learned long since! He comes In the twilight he will not see the difference ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... practical age. All round us we see foreign competition making itself unpleasant. And we spend our time playing golf! What do we get out of it? Is golf any use? That's what I'm asking you. Can you name me a single case where devotion to this pestilential pastime has done a man any ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... orders of the people—surrounded the mighty city. Of these innumerable abodes hardly a trace remains. The modern traveller, as he looks forth over the site of the famous suburbs, beholds, here and there, a ruined aqueduct, or a crumbling tomb, tottering on the surface of a pestilential marsh. ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... weather never varies, the rains come on at once, and then cease till the following season. The tempests which raise the fogs from the ocean have no influence here, and they are strangers likewise to that hot moisture which produces the pestilential fevers in England and America. There are sometimes indeed heavy thunder storms, when the clouds burst, and pour down torrents of rain: but the storm ceases in a few minutes, and the heavens, under the influence of a powerful sun, resume their beauty ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... rules of honorable warfare, it's because my memory has been corrupted by the vileness of those Outcasts who, in their ego-mania, blaspheme the Almighty God by claiming kinship with Him. I wish you and I could go over there and clean up that pestilential Prussian herd! By gad, sir, they've the hoof and mouth disease, each confounded one of them! Whenever I think of them I get rush of blood to ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... substantial, not formal. If the Teutsch Ritterdom was actually at this time DEAD, actually stumbling about as a mere galvanized Lie beginning to be putrid,—then, sure enough, it behooved that somebody should bury it, to avoid pestilential effects in the neighborhood. Somebody or other;—first flaying the skin off, as was natural, and taking that for his trouble. All turns, in substance, on this latter question! If, again, the Ritterdom was ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... of old, the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity, and there is pestilential air at the bottom of it. I know not if a day is ever to come when the nature of right freedom will be understood, and when men will see that to obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... of unhealthiness of a narrow cut with no current, which is the case with Suez Canal now, where the mud is pestilential from ships' ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... white stains and indigo rills of bluing. The neighbours also had the habit of throwing their rubbish anywhere at all, and when it rained—since the mouth of the drain would always become clogged—an unbearable, pestilential odour would rise from the black, stagnant stream that inundated the patio, and on its surface floated ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... probable safety. He found Anna in a swoon, and Lena and the duchess bending over her. The duchess's chasseur Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz had been returning from Moran, when on the Brescian high-road he met the spy Luigi, and acting promptly under the idea that Luigi was always a pestilential conductor of detestable correspondence, he attacked him, overthrew him, and ransacked him, and bore the fruit of his sagacious exertions to his mistress in Milan; it was Violetta d'Isorella's letter to Carlo Ammiani. "I have read it," the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... element, lost to sense of degradation. The paupers make up the slums. And because the rents are cheaper in the miserable old rookeries that still defy public decency, the Italians especially crowd into these pestilential quarters, which are the hotbeds of disease, physical and moral filth, drunkenness, and crime. Thus pauperism and poverty ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... as well as of the bark, are "berberin" and "oxyacanthin." The sparingly-produced juice of the berries is cooling and astringent. It was formerly held in high esteem by the Egyptians, when diluted as a drink, in pestilential fevers. The inner, yellow bark, which has been long believed to exercise a medicinal effect on the liver, because of its colour, is a true biliary purgative. An infusion of this bark, made with boiling water, is useful in jaundice ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... writer's honesty. Wounded and taken prisoner in August, 1914, he suffered severely at the hands of the Germans, and his account of the camp at Wittenburg does nothing to decrease one's loathing for that pestilential spot. For many reasons it gives that a civilized race can sink to such depths of cruelty and cowardice. Perhaps the only people to whom it will give any comfort are those who have sent food and clothing to our prisoners. But ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... through the South it is carried on, but whereas in such cities as Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta, men show a little mercy to the stranger—realizing that, as he is presumably unacquainted with all the ladies at a dance, he cannot retaliate in kind—Birmingham is merciless and prosecutes the pestilential practice unremittingly, even going so far as to apply the universal-service principle and call out her highschool youths to carry on the work. Before I went to certain dances in Birmingham I felt that high-school ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... would more have charm'd his Head. Who, that has Reason, and his Smell, Would not among Roses and Jasmin dwell, Rather than all his Spirits choak With Exhalations of Dirt and Smoak? And all th' uncleanness which does drown In pestilential Clouds a pop'lous Town? The Earth it self breaths better Perfumes here, Than all the Female Men or Women there, Not without cause about ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... was deservedly held in such dread as to "make all seamen fly the river" for fear of being pressed and committed to it. For when the eight-foot cell at the rendezvous would hold no more, Bristol pressed men were turned in here—to come out, if they survived the pestilential atmosphere of the place, either fever-stricken or pitiful, vermin-covered objects from whom even the hardened gangsman shrank with fear and loathing. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1490—Capt. Brown, 4 Aug. 1759.] Putting humane considerations ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... suffered to remain in this state of stupefaction: the monster squatted down by me on the settee, and without farther ceremony or preamble, flings his arms about my neck, and drawing me pretty forcibly towards him, obliged me to receive, in spite of my struggles to disengage from him, his pestilential kisses, which quite overcame me. Finding me then next to senseless, and unresisting, he tears off my neck handkerchief, and laid all open there, to his eyes and hands: still I endured all without flinching, till emboldened by my ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... entertain doubts whether in a world without Clothes, the smallest Politeness, Polity, or even Police, could exist, let him turn to the original Volume, and view there the boundless Serbonian Bog of Sansculottism, stretching sour and pestilential: over which we have lightly flown; where not only whole armies but whole nations might sink! If indeed the following argument, in its brief riveting emphasis, be not of ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... trio, fearful of this new and unexplainable activity of Hope Georgia, slowly departed in search of Senator Langdon to make a last desperate attempt to prevent him from meeting this pestilential secretary ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... set spurs to his own horse and trotted after him. Laying a restraining hand on his fellow Justice's bridle, 'One moment more!' he entreated. ''Tis best you should know all ere you return. Not only at Swarthmoor, at Ulverston church also, hath this pestilential fellow caused a disturbance. It was on the Saturday that he arrived at Swarthmoor Hall, and violently brawled with our good Friend Lampitt during Mistress ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... war appears as a kind of Last Judgment, sentencing folly and sensuality to hell. The shame of France was consumed by the fire of 1870, and her true genius was restored. Abominable as the Boer War was, the mind of England was less pestilential after it than before. Passion purifies, and surely there can be no passion stronger than one which drives you to kill ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... o'er the field fly the fierce gods of war. Dark Nin-a-zu[7] her torch holds in her hand. With her fierce screams directs the gory brand; And Mam-mit[8] urges her with furious hand, And coiling dragons[9] poison all the land With their black folds and pestilential breath, In fierce delight thus ride ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... made. I have been told that this precious scheme has been borrowed from China: a pretty fountain-head for moral and political improvement: and if so, I may say, after Petronius: 'This windy and monstrous loquacity has lately found its way to us from Asia, and like a pestilential star has blighted the minds of youth otherwise ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... preachers of our holy faith. In a marshy spot, near Rouen, was bred a dragon, the very counterpart of that destroyed by St. Nicaise. It committed frightful ravages; lay in wait for man and beast, whom it devoured without mercy; the air was poisoned by its pestilential breath, and it was alone the cause of greater mischief and alarm, than could have been occasioned by a whole army of enemies. The inhabitants, wearied out by many years of suffering, implored the aid of St. Romain; and the charitable and generous pastor, who dreaded nothing in behalf of his flock, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... election of consuls held by Camillus, Marcus Aemilius was chosen of the patricians, and Lucius Sextius the first of the commonalty; and this was the last of all Camillus's actions. In the year following, a pestilential sickness infected Rome, which, besides an infinite number of the common people, swept away most of the magistrates, among whom was Camillus; whose death cannot be called immature, if we consider his great age, or greater actions, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Mutiny Bill..... Bill for encouraging the Importation of Iron from America..... Erection of the British Herring Fishery..... New African Company..... Westminster Election..... Earthquakes in London..... Pestilential Fever at the Session in the Old Bailey..... Disputes between Russia and Sweden..... Plan for electing the Arch-duke Joseph King of the Romans..... Opposition of the King of Prussia..... Disputes with the French about the Limits of Nova-Scotia..... ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... of his eldest son, the editor, Mr. Powers was enabled to secure a farm not far from Cincinnati, and removing his family to it, began the task of clearing and cultivating it. Unfortunately for the new-comers, the farm was located on the edge of a pestilential marsh, the poisonous exhalations of which soon brought the whole family down with the ague. Mr. Powers the elder died from this disease, and Hiram was ill and disabled from it for a whole year. The family was broken up and scattered, and our hero, incapable of performing ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... behaviour to him he invited me to join him in an elephant hunt. These animals were very numerous in the vicinity, and were devastating the plantations. But the season was particularly unhealthy, everybody was ill; we should have had to spend the night in pestilential marshes, where we were certain to get fever, and as I had hardly got clear of that we had caught in the Cazamanze River, I had to refuse the tempting offer. We spent several days in the Gaboon, amongst a race of negroes who struck me as being more intelligent and ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... strait road twenty-five miles in length, and the same landscape the whole way. The air is extremely damp, aguish and unhealthy. Those who travel late in the evening or early in the morning are recommended not to let down the glasses of the carriage, in order to avoid inhaling the pestilential miasma from the marshes, which even the canal has not been able to ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... we'll fix them. Recommend the City Council to pass an ordinance making it a misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, and revocation of license to practice, for a physician to make a diagnosis of any case as a pestilential disease. The Council will do it on ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... this country," said Bakkus. "They're everywhere. They infest the air like microbes. You only have to open your mouth and you get your lungs filled with them. It's a pestilential country and ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... wonderful engine threw the houses out at the windows, by which means they were purged of all pestilential air. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to do now, Ruth," he said, "is step out from under this roof and snap that energizing stud. Then this little package of destruction will be on its way to our Centaurian friends up there by that pestilential green moon." ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... unspeakable enormities of his Erotopaegnion! of his Cinaedica! and especially of his Epipedesis, that most pestilential and abominable book, quem ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... this simple act, the entire social community will experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... meadows down to Strathfieldsaye into a no less beautiful lake, two or three times a week; but then it subsides as quickly as it rises, so there is none of the lying under water which results in all sorts of pestilential exhalations, and this cottage is lifted out of every bad influence, nay, a kind neighbor having had my lane scraped, I walk dry-shod every afternoon a mile and a half, which is more than I ever expected ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... kept secret the sufferings on board these pestilential ships until August 8th, when the Caledonia, commanded by Captain Robert Drummond, drifted into Sandy Hook, New York, having lost one hundred and three men since leaving Darien, and twelve more within four days after arrival, leaving but sixty-five men on board fit for handling ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... detritus washed down either forms bars at the mouths of rivers, or chokes up and raises their beds; they are thus rendered liable to overflow their banks, and convert the adjoining plains into pestilential swamps. The supply of water, which is afforded by periodical rains, and which ought to support the reservoirs of rivers, is carried off at once in violent floods, rather than in a gentle gradual disembocation. The ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... of their entering the Straits of Banea, they began to experience the powerful effects of the pestilential climate, and malignant putrid fevers, with obstinate coughs and dysenteries, prevailed amongst the crews, happily, however, ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... a small compass, as would scarcely be thought sufficient to accommodate twenty, if considered as free men. This confinement soon produces an effect, that may be easily imagined. It generates a pestilential air, which, co-operating with, bad provisions, occasions such a sickness and mortality among them, that not less than twenty thousand[056] are generally taken ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... in Avignon for six or eight weeks, and the pestilential breath of the sick, who expectorated blood, caused a terrible contagion far and near; for even the vicinity of those who had fallen ill of plague was certain death; so that parents abandoned their infected ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... the theory of Plato, as far as I have been able to give it a lucid explanation in the time at my disposal. I put my trust in him when he says that the cause of epilepsy is the overflowing of this pestilential humour into the head. My inquiry therefore was, I think, reasonable when I asked the woman whether her head felt heavy, her neck numb, her temples throbbing, her ears full of noises. The fact that she acknowledged these noises to be more ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... And fro' my bronchials drave that cursed cough Which not unmerited on me my maw, A-seeking sumptuous banquetings, bestowed. For I requesting to be Sestius' guest 10 Read against claimant Antius a speech, Full-filled with poisonous pestilential trash. Hence a grave frigid rheum and frequent cough Shook me till fled I to thy bosom, where Repose and nettle-broth healed all my ills. 15 Wherefore recruited now best thanks I give To thee for nowise ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... every stricken field of the Revolution; their feet tracked with blood the snows of Jersey; their toil built up every fortification south of the Potomac; they shared the famine and nakedness of Valley Forge and the pestilential horrors of the old Jersey prisonship. Have they, then, no claim to an equal participation in the blessings which have grown out of the national independence for which they fought? Is it just, is it magnanimous, is it safe, even, to starve the patriotism of such a people, to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... upkeep has risen in their hands to the sum of fifteen million pounds, have given no thought to drainage. But the good Arabs, patiently and without murmuring, gather up their long robes, and with legs bare to the knee make their way through this already pestilential water, which must be hatching for them ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... much about them, and therefore was able to get a natural and rational focus upon them, with the result that they thrilled, blessed, and exalted me. But if I had previously overheated my imagination by drinking too much pestilential literary hot Scotch, I should have suffered disappointment ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... beneath it is Christ's love. When a coalpit gets blocked up by some explosion, no brave rescuing party will venture to descend into the lowest depths of the poisonous darkness until some ventilation has been restored. But this loving Christ goes down, down, down into the thickest, most pestilential atmosphere, reeking with sin and corruption, and stretches out a rescuing hand to the most abject and undermost of all the victims. How deep is the love of Christ! The deep mines of sin and of alienation are all undermined and countermined by His love. Sin is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... it divine of her to think of his comfort. The thought of her in his arms dancing set his heart to rioting. He was singing as he dressed, and as he rode put to Grinden Hall, singing a specimen of the new musical insanity known as "jazz"—so pestilential a music that even the fiddlers capered ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... [See Sir Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages, page 14.] "The fatal infection spread around with a baneful rapidity which no flight could escape, and with a fatal effect that nothing could resist. It destroyed with its pestilential breath whole families and tribes; and the horrid scene presented, to those who had the melancholy opportunity of beholding it, a combination of the dead, the dying, and such as, to avoid the fate of their friends around them, prepared to ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... pride and allurements of literary distinction, along with friends, home, the safety and happiness of civilized society, that she might take up the cross, and carry it, an offering of salvation, to the benighted Heathen of Asia, even in the depths of their own far and pestilential climates. ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... would ever allow a marriage to take place between his son and a French princess, and large sums had been wagered on the issue. Charles I at once put an end to all hesitation. He did not allow himself to be induced to defer his marriage even by the death of his father, or by a pestilential sickness which then prevailed, or by the lack of the desirable preparations in the royal palaces. He wished to show the world that he adhered to his policy of opposition to Spain. He even allowed the privateering, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... a brisk husband. You are able to draw after your tigers and attendant woods, and to retard rapid rivers. To your blandishments the enormous porter of the [infernal] palace yielded, though a hundred serpents fortify his head, and a pestilential steam and an infectious poison issue from his triple-tongued mouth. Moreover, Ixion and Tityus smiled with a reluctant aspect: while you soothe the daughters of Danaus with your delightful harmony, their vessel for some time remained dry. Let Lyde hear of the crime, and the ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... the Congo so fatal a river to Europeans; and I was by no means sorry when we found ourselves, three-quarters of an hour later, once more in safety alongside the Daphne, having succeeded in making good our escape before the pestilential fog overtook us. Our prizes, the buck and the bananas, were cordially welcomed on board the old barkie; the bananas being carefully suspended from the spanker-boom to ripen at their leisure, whilst the buck was handed over to the butcher to be operated upon ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... then forcibly illustrated the dangerous and pestilential results of our system of burying the dead, planting the germs of diseases in the ground to come forth again, and corrupting the water supply. London alone uses 2,200 acres of land for cemeteries, and England and Wales have ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... districts the ghouls and prowlers had been less in evidence, for I found many villages and towns untouched by fire. But they were filled by the pestilential dead, and I passed by without exploring them. It was near Lathrop that, out of my loneliness, I picked up a pair of collie dogs that were so newly free that they were urgently willing to return to their allegiance to man. These collies accompanied me for many years, and ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... basis. Would the Commons deal grudgingly with a prince who had done more for England than had ever been done for her by any of his predecessors in so short a time, with a prince who was now about to expose himself to hostile weapons and pestilential air in order to preserve the English colony in Ireland, with a prince who was prayed for in every corner of the world where a congregation of Protestants could meet for the worship of God? [597] But on this subject Lowther harangued ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... as the poisons of the deadliest kind Are to their own unhappy coasts confined, So Presbyt'ry and pestilential zeal, Can ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... very anxious to know how it was that their numbers did not increase, as they were exempt from all pestilential diseases, and live in such abundance, that a beggar by trade has never been known among them, and are remarkable ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... nightly fed by his companions, and gave them such assistance as he could at the work; but it soon became apparent that a man could not long exist in such a pestilential atmosphere. No tongue can tell how long were the days and nights the poor fellow passed among the squealing rats,—enduring the sickening air, the deathly chill, the horrible, interminable darkness. One day out of three was an ordeal for the workers, who at least had a rest of two days afterward. ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... sheltered by a Presbyterian minister, who was a secret adherent of the Stuarts. Johnstone at once took the precaution of exchanging his laced Highland dress for that of an old labourer, 'quite ragged, and exhaling a pestilential odour,' due apparently to its having been used for many years 'when he cleaned the stables of his master.' In this unpleasant disguise, he entered the town of Banff, then garrisoned with four hundred English ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang |
