"Spiteful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bellmore; "but you know how arbitrary and inconsiderate ghosts can be. Maybe, like love, they are 'engendered in the eye.' One advantage of those who see ghosts is that their stories can't be disproved. By a spiteful eye, a Revolutionary knapsack might easily be construed to be a hod. Dear Mrs. Kinsolving, think no more of it. I am ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... like a vise, with a muddy complexion and thin arms, treat themselves to the malicious pleasure of promenading their Adolphe through the quagmire of falsehood and contradiction: they question him (see Troubles within Troubles), like a magistrate examining a criminal, reserving the spiteful enjoyment of crushing his denials by positive proof at a decisive moment. Generally, in this supreme scene of conjugal life, the fair sex is the executioner, while, in the contrary case, man ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... marriage, in which his brother Spencer, in clerical disguise, acted the part of a priest. It was even suggested that the bride in this mock marriage was the lawyer's ward. Never squeamish about the truth, when he could gain a point by falsehood, Swift endorsed the spiteful fabrication, and in the Examiner, pointing at Lord Cowper, wrote—"This gentleman, knowing that marriage fees were a considerable perquisite to the clergy, found out a way of improving them cent. per cent. for the benefit of the Church. His invention was to marry a second ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... throughout the long and painful episode, the principal motive which actuated him was an inexcusable egoism. He was obsessed by a fear of ridicule. He knew that letters were regularly opened at the French Post Office, and he lived in terror lest some spiteful story of his absurd relationship with a blind old woman of seventy should be concocted and set afloat among his friends, or his enemies, in England, which would make him the laughing-stock of society for the rest of his days. He was no less terrified by the intensity of the sentiment ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... view a small spot denuded of hair, just behind the point of his shoulder; upon this the hunter brings the sight of his rifle to bear; lightly and delicately his finger presses upon the hair-trigger. Quick as thought the spiteful crack of the rifle responds to his slight touch, and instantly in the middle of the bare spot appears a small red dot. The buffalo shivers; death has overtaken him, he cannot tell from whence; still he does not fall, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... this was the time of the year when the flies and manifold sort of vermin, flying, crawling, hopping, hungry, and ever biting, were in the full rampancy of their young vigor. It was not only spiteful enemies in human form, that sent crashing shells and piercing bullets, but every kind of nipping, boring, sucking, and stinging creatures in the air and on the earth, that our brave soldiers, and especially our wounded, had to face. Even to the swallowing of a mouthful of coffee, or ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... members of the Verne family it must be said that Phillip Lawson had received much kindness and hospitality within the walls of their princely residence, and if the spoiled beauty indulged in spiteful taunts it was because she saw in the young man that ability and soundness of principle which placed her set of ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... hits off the spiteful envy of conceited critics toward successful writers. If the critic can write himself, he hates the author as a rival; if he cannot, he entertains against him the deep grudge an incapable man so often ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... a spiteful repartee, I must confess, but was provoked by many ill-natured remarks previously made by this renegade, and had the good effect of putting an end ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... splendor, the glorious river seeming to array itself more and more grandly, as for the admiration of kings, and proudly spreading its waters wide, as a courtier spreads his robes. Its lake-like expanses, without a spiteful rock or shoal, are alive with ships, barks, brigs, junks, proas, sampans, canoes; and the stranger is beset by a flotilla of river pedlers, expertly sculling under the stern of the steamer, and shrilly screaming the praises of their wares; while here and there, in the thick of the ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... a reply, she led the way to the stairs. Mr. Rayburn and Lucy followed. They were just beginning the ascent to the first floor, when the spiteful landlady left the lower room, and called to her lodger over their heads: "Take care what you say to this man, Mrs. Zant! He thinks ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... well as a beautiful copy of forty-five variations of a canonical theme that the organist had written and done me the honour of presenting to me,—all these I threw into the fire, and laughed with spiteful glee as the double counterpoint smoked and crackled. Then I sat down at the piano and tried first to imitate the tones of the guitar, then to play the sisters' melodies, and finished by attempting to sing them. At length about midnight my uncle emerged from his bedroom and greeted ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... side," said his Lordship to the writer; "can you count my ribs?" "Every one of them." "I am delighted to hear you say so. I called last week on Lady -; 'Ah, Lord Byron,' said she, 'how fat you grow!' But you know Lady — is fond of saying spiteful timings!" Let this gossip be summed up with the words of Lord Chesterfield, in his character of Bolingbroke: "Upon the whole, on a survey of this extraordinary character, what can we say, but 'Alas, poor ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... next farm so miserable that they were obliged to sell out, and leave the place. The farm passed through many hands, and at last became vacant, for no one could stay on it more than a few months; they were so worried and annoyed by this spiteful old man, who, upon the slightest occasion, threw down their fences and injured their cattle. In short, the poor people began to suspect that he was the devil himself, sent among them as a ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... after thought, "were I a thrifty man and a spiteful one, I would not eat them. Instead, I should have the same cluster served me every morning that I might say to mine enemies, with truth, that I have Cretan grapes for breakfast daily. They will keep," he added presently, "for it is tradition ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... up before the old woman; but she set to work so nimbly, and pulled the lace so tight, that Snow-White lost her breath, and fell down as if she were dead. "There's an end of all thy beauty," said the spiteful ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... rid of Gregorio, she would have felt almost sure of victory; but as it was, she believed the man absolutely meant to baffle her, partly out of a spiteful rivalry, partly because his master's torpid indolence could be used to his own advantage. She was absolutely certain that his sneering tone of remark made her husband doubly disinclined to let any religious book be near, or to permit her to draw him ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... away their bread god [sacrament][40] to satisfy with bread and food their hungry stomachs. And secondly, by the people suffering in their spiritual comfort, and in their communion of prayers and worship, thought to make Don Pedro odious to the people. Don Pedro, perceiving the spiteful intent of the archbishop, and hearing the outcries of the people against him, and their cries for the use of their churches, secretly retired to the palace of the Virey, begging his favor and protection, for ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... sink away into their depths and dream,—and never wish to wake. Sylvie was looking her fairest that afternoon,—the weather was chilly, and the close- fitting black velvet dress with its cape-like collar of rich sables, well became her figure and delicately fair complexion, and many a spiteful little whisper concerning her went round among more showy but less attractive women,—many an involuntary but low murmur of admiration escaped from the more cautious lips of the men. She was talking to the Princesse D'Agramont, who with her brilliant dark ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... consisted of the Britannia, Trafalgar, Vengeance, Rodney, Betterophon, Queen, Lynx, Sphynx, Tribune, Sampson, Terrible, Furious, Retribution, Highflyer, Spiteful, Cyclops, Vesuvius, Albion, Arethusa, London, Sanspareil, Agamemnon, Firebrand, Triton, Niger, constituting a most powerful navy. At that juncture, so great were the maritime resources of England, that a naval ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... description. There is the dome of Saint Anne's Chapel with a huge statue of the Patron, and the lantern of the central dome ending in a pointed roof; but each addition to the exterior seems only an ignorant or a spiteful accentuation of ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... provocation to rail at the public, as Ben Jonson did at the audience in the Prologues to his plays, I think I should do it in good set terms, nearly as follows:—There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself. From its unwieldy, overgrown dimensions, it dreads the least opposition to it, and shakes like isinglass at the touch of a finger. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... spiteful remarks may have reached Betsy Butterfly's ears. But she never paid the slightest attention to them. When she met Mehitable Moth or Mrs. Ladybug she always said, "How do you do?" and "Isn't this a lovely day?" in the sweetest tone you ...
— The Tale of Betsy Butterfly - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... Cat's Head and the Heart, with the Crescent Moon below. The characteristic of the Moon is change, mobility; it is also a symbol of good fortune in the tea-leaves. In combination with the Heart it indicates a romantic love affair. The Cat's Head shows interference by those who are mean and spiteful. ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... he often misses his mark by exaggeration, and one can truly say that he has deceived his opponents more frequently by speaking the truth than by making false pretenses. Behind his blustering behavior you can often spy the merry wag. To his opponents he can be provoking, malicious, even spiteful, but he is never false! He does not belong to that class of public men who believe that the world can be governed with sentimental phrases, or that evil conditions are alleviated when the discussion is interspersed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... his tea, gloomily. The words recalled to his mind those which had so disturbed him a day or two ago, just when all this queer business of the deafness had come on. He remembered the spiteful tones of the two neighbours, and recalled how the words had hissed in his ears. He had thought of going away himself, lest he should encourage false hopes in the breast of his gentle young friend—or her mother; surely Rose Ellen,—as he said the name to himself, ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... spiteful words inoculated me with a sort of moral disease, which crept on in secret. It would not have displeased me at all to have been the grandson of any person of consideration, even if it had not been in the most lawful way. My acuteness followed up ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... she whispered, "the Piskies have taken my cheeld! You d'knaw what that means to a poor female—you there, cuddlin' your liddle Jesus in the crook o' your arm. An' you d'knaw likewise what these Piskies be like; spiteful li'l toads, same as you or I might be if happen we'd died unchristened an' hadn' no share in heaven nor hell nor middle-earth. But that's no excuse. Aun' Mary, my dear, I want my cheeld back!" said she. That ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... serve you right," they say to the yelling brat, "you shouldn't tease the poor thing." But if you resent a baby's holding you by the throat and trying to gouge out your eye with a wooden ladle, you are called a spiteful beast, and "shoo'd" all round the garden. If people keep babies, they don't keep me; that's ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... infuriates me," he blazed. "I don't care if you are my father. Why in the hell did you come to America? Why did you stay? Why did you marry my mother—an American woman?... That's rot—just spiteful rot! I've heard you tell what life was in Europe when you were a boy. You ran off. You stayed in this country because it was a better country than yours.... Fifty years you've been in America—many years on this farm. And you ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... I took it, was in the market for the second time that season; but the cock, from his bright, unfaded plumage, looked like a new arrival. The hen resented every advance of the male. In vain he strutted around her and displayed his fine feathers; every now and then she would make at him in a most spiteful manner. He followed her to the ground, poured into her ear a fine, half-suppressed warble, offered her a worm, flew back to the tree again with a great spread of plumage, hopped around her on the branches, chirruped, chattered, flew gallantly at an ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... cats, exhibiting the highest degree of boldness and fury; but it was noticed that in these conflicts the leopards were far more active and spiteful than their kinsmen. In observing them through his glass Lucien noticed that they frequently seized each other by the tails, and he further noticed that several of them had their tails much shorter than the rest. Norman said that these had been bitten off ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... spread o'er his book-shelves; And, 'mid all the theologians' Squabbles, he most likely never Had read one polemic treatise. With dogmatics altogether, Science in her heavy armour, He possessed but slight acquaintance. But, whenever 'mongst his people Could some discord be adjusted— When the spiteful neighbours quarrelled; When the demon of dissension Marriage marred and children's duty; When the daily load of sorrow Heavily weighed down some poor man, And the needy longing soul looked Eagerly for consolation— ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... up than to be such a spiteful thing as you are!" she declared. "Did you tear down this palace that we took ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... "O spiteful voice, must you spoil even such appetite as I have for this fork-tongued spotty food? You by day and Rima by night—what shall I ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... publications. The Blackwood articles were usually most scathing, and those of the Literary Gazette were not far behind. Fortunately, the poet spent most of his time in Italy and thus remained in ignorance of the great majority of these spiteful attacks in the ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... to command the Belt to transform the magician into a Dove of Peace, but in her excitement she forgot to say more than "dove," and now Ugu was not a Dove of Peace by any means, but rather a spiteful Dove of War. His size made his sharp beak and claws very dangerous, but Dorothy was not afraid when he came darting toward her with his talons outstretched ...
— The Lost Princess of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... most spiteful Yahoo of the fiction was a noble creature compared with the Barere ...
— 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.
... Poles, so heavily struck by the war. We believe in the ultimate victory of the Slavs and their Allies, and we are convinced that this victory will contribute towards the welfare of the whole of Europe and humanity. The spiteful anti-Slav attitude of Ferdinand the Koburg and his government cannot retard the ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... suited to one another," said Will. "Whatever one of 'em is fur the tother's ag'in'. Looks like they go to bed spiteful and wake up acr'monious. 'Tain't like as if Jed was the breed of feller that beats his wife, or that Marthy was the kind that looks out of the corner of her eye at drummers stoppin' to ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... a plain statement of the greatness of his power; and the comic poets, in their spiteful manner, more than hint at it, styling his companions and friends the new Pisistratidae, and calling on him to abjure any intention of usurpation, as one whose eminence was too great to be any longer proportionable to and compatible with a democracy or popular government. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... had carefully moved his about for a little to make sure that nothing serious was the matter, he again turned his attention to the girl. His stock of patience was by this time nearly exhausted, and he glared up at her in a peculiarly spiteful fashion. Then, suddenly seized by a violent fit of energy, he leapt upon the barrel again with the determination to show this girl what he really could do when put to it But, owing to the previous hard usage the barrel had received, some of the staves had started, the result was that ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... is a disagreeable book at best; what might have been a powerful tragedy being disfigured by clumsy workmanship and sordid superfluous detail. The exaggerated unhealthy pessimism, which the very young mistake for insight, pervades the work and there are some spiteful touches of observation which seem to point to a woman's hand. Some of the minor personages have the air of being sketched from life. The novel can scarcely be acceptable to the writer's circle. Readers, however, in search of the unusual will find new ground broken in this immature ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Sarcastic joke Replete with malice spiteful, The people vile Politely smile And vote me quite delightful! Now, when a wight Sits up all night Ill-natured jokes devising, And all his wiles Are met with smiles, It's hard, there's no disguising! Oh, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... worshipped in the ugly pagan temple that overlooked the lake. At another time Saunders believed the spirit to belong to a man whom Eustace had once employed as a laboratory assistant, "a black-haired spiteful little brute," he said, "who died cursing his doctor because the fellow couldn't help him to live to settle some paltry ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... lurcher kind, a red-coloured, wire-haired brute, with a keen cold Indian look, and as apparently incurious as the best-taught warrior of the tribe: there was no wagging of the tail in friendly recognition, as might be expected from a kindly European dog; neither was there the warning growl and spiteful show of bristled crest and angry teeth, nor any suspicious circling round the stranger, with tail tucked close and thievish scrutiny, so common amongst low-bred white curs; this hound of the Red-man, on the contrary, deported himself in a manner creditable to ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... no established mail service. Each of them had been entirely innocent of any intentional wrong-doing, and their long life together, their great devotion to each other, and General Jackson's honourable career, forever silenced the spiteful calumny of his rivals and ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... spiteful fling at Shakespeare is unmistakable, and nobody questions that he is the "Shake-scene" of the passage. The terms of the allusion yield conclusive evidence as to how the Poet stood in 1592. Though sneered at as a player, it is plain that he was already throwing the other playwriters into ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... me. Well, her name is Musetta Her surname is Temptation. As to her vocation: Like a rose in the breezes, So she changes lover for lover without number. And like the spiteful screech owl, A bird that's most rapacious, The food that most she favors is the heart! Her food the heart is; Thus have I now none left! (to his friends, concealing his agitation) So pass ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... Phocion's, I feel assured, obscure or ignoble. For had he been the son of a turner, as Idomeneus reports, it had certainly not been forgotten to his disparagement by Glaucippus, the son of Hyperides, when heaping up a thousand spiteful things to say against him. Nor, indeed, had it been possible for him, in such circumstances, to have had such a liberal breeding and education in his youth, as to be first Plato's, and afterwards Xenocrates's scholar in the Academy, and to have devoted himself from the first to ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the evening of the 31st our right wing seemed to have run against a hornet's nest, and we could hear the musketry and cannon speak out real spiteful, but nothing came down our way. We had struck the railroad leading south from Atlanta to Macon, and began tearing it up. The jollity at Atlanta was stopped right in the middle by the appalling news that the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... that my father and Aunt Maria found us. Fate, spiteful at our happiness, had sent my father, stiff with an irreproachable neckcloth, and Aunt Maria, rustling in amber silk and black laces, towards the drawing-room, five minutes too early for dinner, but just in time to catch us in the most sentimental of attitudes, and to hear dear, candid, ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... which they were now excluded. The deputy-judge and archaeologist Desfondrilles belonged to neither party. With other independents like him, he repeated what he heard on both sides and Vinet made the most of it. The lawyer's spiteful tongue put venom into Madame Tiphaine's speeches, and by showing Rogron and Sylvie the ridicule they had brought upon themselves he roused an undying spirit of hatred in those bitter natures, which needed an ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... retorted Belle, resolving that it should last, just to disappoint "that spiteful minx;" as she ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... lord, you have had as many enemies and as many friends as ever any one particular person had; nor do I so much wonder at it, since I, a woman, cannot be exempt from the malice and aspersions of spiteful tongues, which they cast upon my poor writings, some denying me to be the true authoress of them; for your grace remembers well, that those books I put out first to the judgment of this censorious age were accounted not to be ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... people—there's no trusting them, Fred. There's an aunt of mind down in Dorsetshire that was going to die when I was eight years old, and hasn't kept her word yet. They're so aggravating, so unprincipled, so spiteful—unless there's apoplexy in the family, Fred, you can't calculate upon 'em, and even then they deceive you just ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... for Madame was a philosopher, and speedily accommodated herself to circumstances. We had not walked a quarter of an hour when every trace of gloom had left her face, which had assumed its customary brightness, and she began to sing with a spiteful hilarity as we walked forward, and indeed seemed to be approaching one of her waggish, frolicsome moods. But her fun in these moods was solitary. The joke, whatever it was, remained in her own keeping. When we approached the ruined brick tower—in old times a pigeon-house—she ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... She ran in to Number 4 Back Row one afternoon, and found him looking rather uncertainly and nervously at his tea-table, which Mrs Cooper had just prepared in her usual hurried manner— slapping down the cups and plates with a sort of spiteful emphasis, and leaving the cloth awry. He looked ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... ever so far, and can work sums in his head downright wonderful. There came an inspector once who praised him up, and said he'd recommend him to a place where he'd be taught to be a school-master, if any one would pay the cost; but the guardians wouldn't hear of it at no price, and were quite spiteful to find he was a good scholar, for fear, I suppose, that he'd know ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... my face into water whenever I dress got the better of my finer feelings. But, you see, he didn't kiss my stupid little child's intelligent mother, and this is the way that fool Fortune misbestows her favors. She is spiteful, too, that whirligig woman with the wheel. I am not an autograph collector, of course; if I was, I shouldn't have got the prize I received yesterday, when Rogers, after mending a pen for me, and tenderly caressing the nib of it with a knife as sharp as his own tongue, wrote, in his beautiful, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... on our literature. The inoffensive delicacy of an American elderly woman forbids her the role of her British sister. Our mother-in-law troubles are mostly confined to our low foreign population. Neither have we a character similar to the silly, spiteful, dried-up old maid of English literature and its American imitations, our spinsters being generally stout and jolly personages and rather over-fond of children. My mother-in-law was very nice, and we were the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... cats. The sight of cats almost makes me believe in witchcraft, in spite of myself. I can believe anything about a cat. She is heartless and mercenary. Her name has become the synonym of everything that is mean, spiteful, and vicious. "An old cat" is the unkindest thing you can ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... note of apology, but, if he expected a response, he was disappointed. A year went by, and now, with the beginning of this narrative, two newly completed country homes glowered at each other from separate hillsides, one envious and spiteful, the other ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... To the spiteful Crane child the schoolma'am was "stuck-up," while to the imaginative daughter of the Farnshaw house she was a bird of paradise, and though Lizzie was conscious that the teacher's voice was harsh, and her air affected, the child reached out like a drowning man toward this symbol of the ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... appointed hour on the following day if the condition of the herd permitted, the Pony Rider Boys ran for their ponies. In a few moments they were racing toward camp. They, too, were now able to hear the short, spiteful bark of ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Texas - Or, The Veiled Riddle of the Plains • Frank Gee Patchin
... prices nicely lonely closely wages races spices ages places faces cases cages stages laces blazes closes roses axes gazes noses rises hateful sizes uses prizes wasteful helpful rival naval needful spiteful final vital cheerful thankful oval opal graceful truthful local legal wakeful ...
— The Beacon Second Reader • James H. Fassett
... not spiteful by nature, my dear; but you're a little more than flesh and blood can stand! It's impossible, is it? Let you go, indeed! You're too good to be mixed up in my affairs, are you? Why, you little fool, the first day I laid eyes on you I saw that you and I were both in the same box—that's ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... extraordinary tales told of the artist's wife. She has been called hateful and spiteful as Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, but we think this is calumny. The stories came about in this way: Durer had a life-long friend, Wilibald Pirkheimer, who in his old age became the most malicious and quarrelsome of ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... are fine-looking men, hard-working, and good mechanics, yet they bear in their faces, and show in their actions, reasons for the detestation in which they are held: their glance, if you meet it, is the jettatura, or evil-eye, and they are spiteful, and cruel, and deceitful above all other men. All these qualities they derive from their ancestor Gehazi, the servant of Elisha, together with their tendency ...
— An Accursed Race • Elizabeth Gaskell
... beneath the mullion chambers nearly frightened her into fits. Henderson darted in and captured the two boys in the fact. Martyn's asseveration that he had taken the pair for Griff and Emily would have pacified the good-natured clergyman, but Mrs. Sophia was too much agitated, or too spiteful, as we declared, ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... chewing that, although she must have done so. Indeed, she appeared to dine as if it were a matter of no consequence, and as if she could think of other things more than of her business. All this, and her own manner of eating, I described to Eliza once, when I wanted to vex her for something very spiteful that she had said; and I never succeeded so well before, for the girl was quite outrageous, having her own perception of it, which made my observation ten times as bitter to her. And I am not sure but what she ceased to like poor Lorna from ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... pretense, for through all their endeavors to the contrary envy would often break forth in sly insinuations and malicious sneers, which gave me fresh matter of triumph, and frequent opportunities of insulting them, which I never let slip, for now first my female heart grew sensible of the spiteful pleasure of seeing another languish for what I enjoyed. Whilst I was in the height of my happiness her majesty fell ill of a languishing distemper, which obliged her to go into the country for the change of ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... and your attachment to angle-worms—which you will recall I do not share—you would be interested in our efforts along these lines—the gardens, not the worms. In this climate a garden is a lottery, and in ten seasons to one a spiteful summer frost will fall upon the promising potatoes and kill the lot just as they are ripening. The Eskimos at the Moravian stations put their vegetal charges to bed each night with long covers over the rows. The other day, in an old journal about the ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... she's really not so bad, dear, all the same; there are many worse. She's rather spiteful, but warmhearted—awfully kind if you break your ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... pay his fine. This theory afforded the Shimerdas great satisfaction, apparently. For weeks afterward, whenever Jake and I met Antonia on her way to the post-office, or going along the road with her work-team, she would clap her hands and call to us in a spiteful, crowing voice: ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... concealed themselves among some rocks, I barricaded them in, and went on with my hunting. On arriving in camp I sent men back to try and catch the cubs; in this they succeeded, and brought them to me. They were about the size of half grown cats, and more spiteful vicious little devils cannot be imagined; they were, however, very handsome, with immense heads and paws. For two or three days they refused all food; but at the end of that time they fed quite ravenously from the hand. They soon became very tame and playful, though always ready to set their backs ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... respectability among the sufferers; persons of this kind were not likely to be exposed to charges of disloyal conduct if they were actively loyal. Obscure and ignorant men are much more likely to have become the innocent victims of spiteful accusers or vile agents of police. Doubtless this might happen; but that does not of itself condemn Lincoln for having maintained an extreme form of martial law. The particular kind of oppression that is likely to have occurred is one against which the normal procedure of justice and police ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... was resolved to keep no terms with him, and will always treat him as such a pest of society merits from all men.' 'Steevens, Dr. Parr used to say, had only three friends—himself, Dr. Farmer, and John Reed, so hateful was his character. He was one of the wisest, most learned, but most spiteful of men.' Johnstone's Parr, viii. 128. Boswell had felt Steevens's ill-nature. While he was carrying the Life of Johnson through the press, at a time when he was suffering from 'the most woeful return of melancholy,' he wrote to Malone,—'Jan ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... can I help desiring it? Though marrying him lost me home and almost everything I once loved, yet I could have followed him all the world over if he had really loved me. But he hates me; he takes a spiteful pleasure in ill-treating me. He would never come near me at all, if he did not think that he could manage to squeeze some money out of me. How can I have any love left ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: The river which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was, rolled by, ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... as unjust as you like, A conscienceless, 'cute special-pleader; As spiteful as Squeers was to Smike, (You may often trace Squeers in a "leader.") Impute all the vileness you can, Poison truth with snake-venom of fable, Be fair—as is woman to man, And kindly—as CAIN was to ABEL. Suggest what is false ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 15, 1893 • Various
... them from her, and gave them to her sisters, as she said little Two Eyes did not handle them properly; but this was only from jealousy, because little Two Eyes was the only one who could reach the fruit, and she went into the house feeling more spiteful to her than ever. ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... And in the tower no other light was there But from these stars: all seemed to come from them. 'These are the planets,' said that low old man, 'They govern worldly fates, and for that cause 95 Are imaged here as kings. He farthest from you, Spiteful, and cold, an old man melancholy, With bent and yellow forehead, he is Saturn. He opposite, the king with the red light, An arm'd man for the battle, that is Mars: 100 And both these bring but little luck to man.' But at his side a lovely lady stood, The star upon her head was soft and bright, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Those spiteful persons who told the Queen how obliging the Duchesse de Montausier had shown herself towards me were also so extremely kind as to write an account of the whole affair to ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... revenge, On their mead-weary foes. With the might of their hands 230 Their shining swords from their sheaths they drew forth. With the choicest of edges the champions they smote— Furiously felled the folk of Assyria, The spiteful despoilers. They spared not a one Of the hated host, neither high nor low 235 Of living men that they might overcome. So the kinsmen-companions at the coming of morning Followed the foemen, fiercely attacking them, Till, pressed and in panic, the proud ones perceived That the chief ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... about his school life at all. The set of boys in which he lived was a curious one; they were fairly clever, but they must have been, I gathered afterwards, quite extraordinarily critical and quarrelsome. There was one boy in particular, a caustic, spiteful, and extremely mischief-making creature, who turned the set into a series of cliques and parties. Hugh used to say afterwards that he had never known anyone in his life with such an eye for other people's weaknesses, or with such a talent for putting them ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cat and dog, so is the hostility which divides the residents of these two towns. So the conversation became at once spirited, and eventually spiteful. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... ran strange thoughts. I recollected his words in Stretton Street regarding his spiteful wife when I had been called in to listen to his matrimonial troubles. But husband and wife now appeared to be on quite amicable ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... into scrapes, when two boys matched against each other by the instructor allowed their zeal to overcome their discretion; for, occasionally, they would lose their tempers when over the single-sticks and give one another such spiteful blows that the instructor would have to interfere and separate them by force ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... in the same way upon your emotions. Some cling to you in woebegone misery; others come back fiercely and weirdly, like ghouls bent upon sucking your strength away; others, again, have a catastrophic splendour; some are unvenerated recollections, as of spiteful wild-cats clawing at your agonized vitals; others are severe, like a visitation; and one or two rise up draped and mysterious, with an aspect of ominous menace. In each of them there is a characteristic point at which the whole feeling seems contained in one single moment. Thus there is ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... till you have taken your leave of Susan Holiday.' The huntsman, with a tenderness that spoke the most passionate love, and with his cheek close to hers, whispered the softest vows of fidelity in her ear, and cried, 'Don't, my dear, believe a word Kate Willow says; she is spiteful, and makes stories because she loves to hear me talk to herself for your sake.' 'Look you there,' quoth Sir ROGER, 'do you see there, all mischief comes from confidents! But let us not interrupt them; the maid is honest, and ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... husband on her own account, and without consulting her parents. If my darling girl had come to see her kind and admirable mother, she would not have given me this cruel pain I feel!—You do not know the world; it is malignantly spiteful. People will perhaps say that your husband sent you back to your parents. Children brought up as you were, on your mother's lap, remain artless; maidenly passion like yours for Wenceslas, unfortunately, makes no allowances; ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... peacock still strutted among the ricks, as conscious of his glorious plumage, as regardless of the ugliness of his feet as ever; now and then checking the rhythmic movement of his neck, undulating green and blue, to scratch the ground with those feet, and dart his beak, with apparently spiteful greed, at some tiny crystal of quartz or pickle of grain they exposed; or, from the towering steeple of his up lifted throat, to utter his ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... reverse, if favourable cards follow; if these last be at a small distance, expect to retrieve your losses, whether of peace or goods: eight of hearts signifies drinking and feasting; seven of hearts shows a fickle and unfaithful person, vicious, spiteful, malicious; six of hearts promises a generous, open, credulous disposition, often a dupe; if this card comes before your king or queen (as the case may be) YOU will be the dupe; if after, you will get the upper hand: five of hearts portends a wavering, unsteady, unreliable individual of either ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... herself. One thing she had decided upon was, that a person who was clever ought to be clever enough not to be unjust or deliberately unkind to any one. Miss Minchin was unjust and cruel, Miss Amelia was unkind and spiteful, the cook was malicious and hasty-tempered—they all were stupid, and made her despise them, and she desired to be as unlike them as possible. So she would be as polite as she could to people who in the ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... pain in a highly nervous subject, and will afford relief to the faceache or earache of a dyspeptic or rheumatic person. This Feverfew (Chrysanthemum parthenium), is best calculated to pacify those who are liable to sudden, spiteful, rude irascibility, of which they are conscious, but say they cannot help it, and to soothe fretful children. "Better is a dinner or such herbs, where love is; than a ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... pilot the steamer under the new order of things, not because he wished to be spiteful to his brother, but because he was smarting under a sense of injustice, which unfitted him for the duty. Though he did not comprehend the legal measures which had been taken, he felt that there was something wrong. The ...
— Haste and Waste • Oliver Optic
... you'll be signing again, signing away whole pounds of your flesh. And I daresay you overlook you've various little debts. No doubt you owe your tailor, say a year's account, and then your rooms are pretty expensive, and quarter-day has a spiteful habit of swooping down on one four times a year, and—and you mustn't have to bother your pretty head about all ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... a hand to spiteful chatter or to slander, and had not flirted with the best looking young man in the neighborhood, any more than she had with the officers who stayed at the chateau during the maneuver, or the neighbors, who came to see her parents. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... "How spiteful they are," thought Carrie Maynard; "I am glad I know better than to talk that way. Girls," she said aloud, "I think you are forgetting very quickly what Miss Evans read about the marks. The Bible ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... Dunciad, despite Mr. Ruskin's judgment of that poem as 'the most absolutely chiselled and monumental work "exacted" in our country.'[24] It is impossible to concur in this estimate. The imagery of the poem serves only to disgust, and the spiteful attacks made in it on forgotten men want the largeness of purpose that lifts satire above what is of temporary interest, making it ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... this virulent Satyr of Zadig's under his own Hand. Not only Zadig, but his two Friends and the Lady were immediately close confin'd. His Cause was soon over; for the Judges turn'd a deaf Ear to what he had to say. When Sentence of Condemnation was pass'd upon him, Arimazes, still spiteful, was heard to say, as he went out of Court, with an Air of Contempt, that Zadig's Lines were Treason indeed, but nothing more. Tho' Zadig didn't value himself on Account of his Genius for Poetry; yet he was almost distracted to find himself condemn'd for ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... truth, Toni, I hadn't time for much lunch. We're supposed to shut at one, you know, but of course we don't get off at once, and to-day everything went wrong! At the last minute I upset a box of ribbons, and the spiteful things all went and got unrolled, and then that odious little Jackson—you know, the shopwalker I told you about—came and ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... against one's self. That is what Saint Catherine did, and Saint Theresa, and all the others, and they are said to have had in consequence the most ineffable joys. Let us go in for a little ineffable joy!' I tried it; I swallowed my rising sobs, I made you my courtesy, I determined I would not be spiteful, nor passionate, nor vengeful, nor anything that is supposed to be particularly feminine. I was a better girl than you made out—better at least than you thought; but I would let the difference go and do magnificently right, lest I should not do right enough. I thought of it a deal for ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... she said, witheringly, "you—" she repeated and stopped helpless for the want of words but her eyes spoke with the fierce authority of the Turner clan, and its dominant power for half a century, and Nancy Dillon shrank, though she turned and made a spiteful face, when Melissa walked toward the ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... dishonor done to his remains. Perhaps he would convey them back to Egypt, a gift to the brooding vengeance of the Pharaohs, who would gratify their anger by preserving that body in the house of their gods;—thus showing their spiteful satisfaction at the disappointment of the prophet whom Jehovah would not permit to enter that promised land, in hope of which the great spoiler had led away the bondmen ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... frequently such as to obstruct, rather than further, mutual understanding and peace. As a rule, it is assumed that only the genuine Lutherans indulged in unseemly polemical invective, and spoke and wrote in a bitter and spiteful tone. But the Melanchthonians were to say the least, equally guilty. And when censuring this spirit of combativeness, one must not overlook that the ultimate cause of the most violent of these controversies was the betrayal ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... of gasoline and some provisions, we set out for the Ferry; and it was a sorry, bedraggled trio that limped up to camp eight hours later. We did little more than creep the last five miles. And all for a spiteful little engine that might prove ungrateful ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... have been made into the ground, which is sandy here and muddy there and again swampy. During dry weather they take turns in being dusty like the desert, or hard as stone or gently yielding; during rain they are without exception unreliable, spiteful, dangerous. The burden of the uninterrupted transport traffic escapes to the left and to the right farther and farther into the edges of the fields, cutting off continuously new widths of wheel tracks so that roadways are formed 150 to 300 feet wide, which ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... mangle me!" the man kept begging his rescuers. And Canby recalled how "Easy, boys! Don' mangle me!" sounded plaintively in his ears for days, bothering him in his work at the office. Remembering it now, he felt a spiteful satisfaction in classing that obsession with this one. It seemed at least a step toward teaching Miss Wanda Malone to know ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... Hath been but for a wayward son, Spiteful and wrathful, who, as others do, Loves for his own ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... me, as you can see, I'm getting old and spiteful. I have no mind to female kind, That once I deemed delightful; No more brim up the festive cup That sent me home at ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... unthankful spiteful wretch! the good gentleman vouchsafed to make him his companion, because my husband put him into a few rags, and now see how the unrude rascal backbites ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... essere nemico. "He who does not know how to disguise himself as a friend, does not know how to be an enemy." In the little corner of society in which Countess Steno, the Gorkas and Lincoln Maitland moved, who was hypocritical and spiteful enough to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... field rose in little spurts as the bullets struck, and the rattle of the spiteful machine-gun made a chorus with the snapping and popping of the American rifles. For Jimmy and the others fired from ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... Merchant who had three daughters, the youngest of whom was so beautiful that everybody called her Beauty. This made the two eldest very jealous; and, as they were spiteful and bad-tempered by nature, instead of loving their younger sister they felt nothing but envy and ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... be well out of it," said he, having reached his joke triumphantly. But Lady Victoria did not like Mr. Barker, or his jokes, very much. She once said so to her brother. She thought him spiteful. ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... wristbands of it; one or two rings of immense size and weight on his small fingers; boots with heels two inches high, and a rather long frock-coat buttoned closely round his little body. Signor Ercole had never been known to wear a swallow-tailed coat on any occasion. And spiteful people told each other, that his motive for never quitting the greater shelter of the frock was to be found in his fear of exhibiting to the unkindly glances of the world a pair of knock-knees of ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... The wife gave a spiteful nod, and Hans Vanderbum shambled up beside her, where the food, consisting of meat and a few simple vegetables, was spread upon a rude table which had no legs. Quanonshet and Madokawandock were not behind-hand in their movements, and the whole four fell to with such voracity, that, in a very ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... for the little beast sniggered away and grinned at Mr Fosset as if he had said something uncommonly smart at my expense. I saw, however, where the shoe pinched. He was angry at my having kept him waiting for his tea, and hence his spiteful allusion to my being late coming on watch; so I was just going to give him a sharp rejoinder, referring to his love for his little stomach, a weak point with him and a common joke with us all below at meal-times, when, ere ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... righd!" spat back the Professor with spiteful emphasis, "I'm addressing my remarks ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... water rise the bold walls of granite, with here and there a ledge thickly wooded with fir and birch. It looks as if the mountains had been torn asunder to admit the sea, and local legends say that a spiteful giantess did this and many other nasty things in the giant age. Half-way up the fjord the steamer fires a gun, so that the passengers may hear the echo, and the sound comes back time after time from every nook and cranny. At the end is Botnen, with a road running away north ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... forgetting that he seldom came off victor when crossing swords with Dexie, he determined to pay off old scores with interest. As his business kept him in town for several days, his calls were quite frequent, but he found no chance of annoying Dexie, save by the one small and spiteful way of addressing her as "Miss Dexter," and the quick, angry glance that was flashed at him as he said it told that ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... afternoon he saw that she was nervous and irritable. "The schoolmaster's been goin' for her—the derned fool," he said to himself, and at once began to soothe her. The task was not an easy one. She was cold to him at first and even spiteful; she laughed at what he said and promised, and made fun of his pretensions. His kindly temper stood him in good stead. He was quietly persistent; with the emollient of good-nature he wooed her in his own fashion, and before they reached the first settler's house ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... place, the king had ordered a great hunt, and early that morning we rode out to Epping Forest. The king was at first unusually cheerful and humorous, and he commanded me to ride near him, and tell him something from the chronique scandaleuse of our court. He laughed at my spiteful remarks, and the worse I calumniated, the merrier was the king. Finally, we halted; the king had talked and laughed so much that he had at last become hungry. So he encamped under an oak, and, in the midst of his suite and his dogs, he took a breakfast, which pleased him very ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... Donna Ana, who had never entirely ceased trembling, and she cast a spiteful glance at Jack. To the duenna, young men, and especially one so ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... in her fate had shaken her to the very foundations; in the course of about two hours her face had grown haggard; but she did not shed a tear. "It serves me right!"—she said to herself, with difficulty and agitation suppressing in her soul certain bitter, spiteful impulses, which alarmed even herself:—"Come, I must go down!"—she thought, as soon as she heard of Mme. Lavretzky's arrival, and she went.... For a long time she stood outside the door of the drawing-room, before she could bring herself to open it; with the thought: "I ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... and her dismal companion came near, Phoebus smiled on them so cheerfully that Hecate's wreath of snakes gave a spiteful hiss and Hecate wished she was ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... company—always "diagonalising." Failure to add largely to the population of birds does not seem to have damped the gaiety and impulsiveness of the erratic flights. They are as sprightly in their confabulations and as spiteful in their squabbles. The founders of the colony were, I am convinced, this season's birds. If so they could not have been more than two months old when they began to build. The young brood from old-established colonies hatched out just about ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... crystals have to live their lives, and mind their own affairs, in the midst of all this, as best they may. They are wonderfully like human creatures,—forget all that is going on if they don't see it, however dreadful; and never think what is to happen to-morrow. They are spiteful or loving, and indolent or painstaking, and orderly or licentious, with no thought whatever of the lava or the flood which may break over them any day; and evaporate them into air-bubbles, or wash them into a solution of salts. And you may look at them, ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... rocks. Sioux to rear had dismounted and were shooting carefully. There was exultant shout—one mule had broken loose. She galloped out, reddened, stirrups swinging, canteen bouncing, right into the waiting line; and down she lunged, abristle with feathered points launched into her by sheer spiteful joy. ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... lives as woven on the loom of spiteful fates, whom they endeavored to humor by calling euphonious names. The materialist supposes that his life is the creature of circumstances, a rudderless ship in a current, mere flotsam and jetsam on the wave. The Christian knows that the path of his life has been prepared ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... turned wrong, and have missed my road—how to regain it? 'sdeath! I could as soon compose an almanac as and a clue to this puzzle. Well, I was found in a wood when a baby, and have just lived to years of discretion to be lost in a wood again! Fortune! Fortune! thou spiteful gipsy! was this an honest trick to pass upon a faithful servant, who has worn thy livery from his cradle, and taken off thy hands a thousand knocks and buffetings without a murmur? Just at this moment ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... proper training. She was short in stature and inclined to become stout, her manners were awkward and her opinions narrow. Minna's hasty temper and continual jeering made the girl, who was naturally very good- natured, stubborn and spiteful, so that the behaviour of the 'sisters' often caused the most hateful scenes in our quiet home. I never lost my patience at these incidents, however, but remained, completely indifferent to everything ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... Shakespeare, which seemed to him to be "inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman."[91] Personally, Voltaire and Gibbon did not get on well together. Dr. Hill suggests that Voltaire may have slighted the "English youth," and if this is correct, Gibbon was somewhat spiteful to carry the feeling more than thirty years. Besides the criticism of the acting, he called Voltaire "the envious bard" because it was only with much reluctance and ill-humor that he permitted the performance of Iphigenie of Racine. Nevertheless, Gibbon is impressed with the social ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... horrible letters began to fly about the parish they were put down as the work of some spiteful servant, dismissed for dishonesty, perhaps. But little by little Mrs. Carstairs' name began to be whispered in connection with them—no one knew how the rumour started, though I have always held the belief that the Vicar's wife herself ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes |
