"Unsavoury" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hanging just over the edge ready to seize and haul in anything nice that floated by. Their appetite by night was such that no form of animal food came amiss to them. The "pots" were baited with most unpleasant dainties, but nasty as these were they were not so unsavoury as the food which the crayfish found for themselves and thoroughly enjoyed, such as dead water-rats and dead fish, worms, snails, and larvae. They were always hungry, and one of the simplest ways of catching them was to push into their holes a gloved finger, which the creature ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... profound ignorance, not the faintest preconception should be formed of the events that really befell me. My temper was inquisitive, but there was nothing in the scene to which I was going from which my curiosity expected to derive gratification. Discords and evil smells, unsavoury food, unwholesome labour, and irksome companions, were, in my opinion, the unavoidable attendants of ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... rose-crowned hens, a green-headed, curly-tailed drake "steered forth his fleet upon the lake" of brown ducks and their yellow progeny, and pigs of the plum-pudding order rooted in the intermediate regions. The road which led to the cart-sheds and to the house, skirted round this unsavoury tract. ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... appearance flushed with the heat of the stove and the excitement of turning the muffins, and the little iron spatula she used for that purpose still in her hand; and a fresh and larger puff of the unsavoury blue smoke accompanied her entrance. She came forward however gravely and without the slightest embarrassment to receive her cousin's somewhat unceremonious "How do, Fleda?"—and keeping the spatula still in one hand shook hands with him with the other. But at the very different ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... Mariner stood in one of the foulest and narrowest of the streets of the unsavoury seaport, and Dr. Woodford sighed, and fumed, and wished for a good pipe of tobacco more than once as he hesitated to try to force a way for his niece through the throng round the entrance to the stable-yard of the Jolly Mariner, apparently too rough to pay respect to gown ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... must hear the unsavoury details. That evening they sat in the walled garden. Agues, according to arrangement, left him alone with his aunt. He asked her, and was ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... dead, lo! here I prophesy, Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend: 1136 It shall be waited on with jealousy, Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end; Ne'er settled equally, but high or low; That all love's pleasure shall ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... entered the place an unsavoury odour, an odour of freshly washed flesh, disgusted him and a chill ran over his skin: the dampness of the walls seemed to add weight to his clothing, which hung more heavily on his shoulders. He went straight to the glass separating the spectators from the corpses, and with his pale face ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... He had not enjoyed the experience of the day as an experience, but already in retrospect he was thrilled by it. The fellows would surely envy him! When he was wet to the skin and chilled to numbness, he had longed again and again for the warmth of the mail boat, even with its unsavoury smells, and he had asked himself why he had been so foolish as to go ashore. Now that he was dry and warm, his regrets passed, and he ...
— Left on the Labrador - A Tale of Adventure Down North • Dillon Wallace
... readers back to that very unsavoury public-house in South Main Street, Cork, in which, for the present, lived Mr. Matthew Mollett ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... quaintly and flippantly dull. In one of his works he tells us that Bishop Sprat was very properly so called, inasmuch as he was a very small poet. And in the book now before us he cannot quote Francis Bugg, the renegade Quaker, without a remark on his unsavoury name. A wise man might talk folly like this by his own fireside; but that any human being, after having made such a joke, should write it down, and copy it out, and transmit it to the printer, and correct the proof-sheets, and send it forth into the world, is enough ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this matter solely because of some calculation of social harm; many, but not all and not even most. Many people think that paper money is a mistake and does much harm. But they do not shudder or snigger when they see a cheque-book. They do not whisper with unsavoury slyness that such and such a man was "seen" going into a bank. I am quite convinced that the English aristocracy is the curse of England, but I have not noticed either in myself or others any disposition to ostracise a man simply for accepting a peerage, as the modern Puritans would ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... The Rogue, and it had as running title The Spanish Rogue. There is a novel by George Fidge entitled The English Gusman; or, The History of that Unparalleled Thief James Hind (1652, 4to). Salamanca had an unsavoury reputation owing to the fictions of Titus Gates. cf. The Rover ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... seriously to impair. When weary of my lonesome attic, I would start through the nearest barrier, avoiding the streets and districts where I might encounter former acquaintances, and take long walks in the environs of Paris, returning with an appetite that gave a relish even to the tough and unsavoury viands of ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... had ears well trained enough to hear, resounded to the click of ivory that was not the click of pool and billiard balls! Upstairs, if one could get upstairs, a gambling hell supplanted the billiard hall below. It was an unsavoury place, the resort of crooks, some of whom lived there—amongst them, ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... horsy hay which greeted my nostrils. Neither could the cabmen and stablemen, hanging round the public-house doors and the mews generally, be calculated to increase one's democratic aspirations, but I walked resolutely on, and turning to my left, dexterously avoiding an unsavoury heap of horse manure, straw, and other offal, I clambered up a break-neck ladder, at the top of which loomed the office of ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... circle which seems to itself the pivot of the nation and is in truth only a clique like another; and Fleeming was to her the nameless assistant of a nameless firm of engineers, doing his inglorious business, as she now saw for herself, among unsavoury surroundings. But when their walk brought them within view of the river, she beheld a sight to her of the most novel beauty: four great, sea-going ships dressed out with flags. 'How lovely!' she cried. 'What is it for?' - 'For you,' said Fleeming. Her surprise was only equalled by her pleasure. But ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has fresh damascene grapes all the year round, with pomegranates, oranges, lemons, and excellent olive trees; likewise the finest roses I ever saw, both red and white. The apples are excellent, but the pears and peaches are unsavoury, owing as is said to too much moisture. A fine clear river runs past the city, which is so well supplied with water that almost every house has a fountain of curious workmanship, many of them splendidly ornamented with embossed or carved work. Outwardly their ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... appointed, else we would be swallowed up and come to nought, &c. for I could never have been removed out of this life in a more seasonable time than now, having both the favour of God and man (being hopeful that my name shall not be unsavoury when I am gone) for none knoweth what affronts, grief and calamities I might fall into, had I lived much longer in this life.——And for crosses and trouble, how might my life have been made bitter to me, ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... pretty wife, and, in the City, with a marketable reputation; then company-promoting of a more and more doubtful kind; and, finally, a swindle more energetic and less skilful than the rest, which bomb-like went to pieces in the face of the public, filling the air with noise, lamentations, and unsavoury odours. Nor was this all. A man has many warnings of ruin, and when things were going badly in the stock market, Richard Boyce, who on his return from the East had been elected by acclamation a member of several fashionable clubs, tried to retrieve himself ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... He was the girl's lover and Blood's associate on a venture. Blood coveted the girl, and killed Levasseur to win her. Pah! It's an unsavoury tale, I own. But men live by different codes out in ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... simple fact, there is nothing very interesting in seeing a number of old women's feet washed, or in beholding a number of peasants who would be much better if the washing extended above their feet, engaged in gulping down an unsavoury repast. The whole charm of the thing rests in the idea, and this idea is quite extinguished by the extreme length and tediousness of the whole proceeding. The feet have too evidently been washed before, and the pilgrims are too palpably ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... men fearing Sir Richard's disposition, stole away aboard the General and other ships. Sir Richard thus over- matched was sent unto by Alfonso Bacan to remove out of the Revenge, the ship being marvellous unsavoury, filled with blood and bodies of dead, and wounded men, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... time of crankling, though sometimes he sees it afterwards. The crank is a person who holds views which to us seem ridiculous. The man who first objected to cannibalism was a crank. The man who first thought lunatics should not be chained to walls or left naked on unsavoury beds of straw was a crank. Galileo was an intellectual crank of the shameless type. Shelley is the beautiful crank of all times, champion of forlorn causes, the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... of these louts.... For God's sake what have you been doing to get yourself dragged into a mess like this?" "What could you expect me to do, prince, when I saw this unfortunate lion with the begging bowl in its teeth, humiliated, enslaved, ridiculed, serving as a laughing stock for this unsavoury rabble...?" "But you are mistaken my noble friend." Said the prince, "This lion on the contrary is an object of respect and adoration. It is a sacred beast, a member of a great convent of lions founded three centuries ago by Mahommed-ben-Aouda, a sort of wild fierce ...
— Tartarin de Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... it be possible that in a handful of centuries the Christian character has fallen away from an imposing heroism that scorned even the stake, the cross, and the axe, to a poor little effeminacy that withers and wilts under an unsavoury smell? We are not prepared to believe so, the reverend Doctor and his friend ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wherever they could in the rooms and barns. As for me, by ferreting around I found in the gardener's quarters a fairly good room with a fireplace; I settled in there with two friends, and leaving to the gardener and his family their very unsavoury beds, we made some out of planks and straw, on which we were ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... street in the colony, Victoria street or Queen's road; this traverses the city from end to end, and constitutes the great business thoroughfare of the place. After about an hour's walk along it, for the first part under an arcade of trees, we find ourselves in the filthy, unsavoury Chinese quarter, as the nose is careful to remind you if there be any doubt about it. They are certainly a very dirty race, these Chinamen; the dirtiest on earth, I should be inclined to say, considering their boasted civilization ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... Mohammedan conquest. The present population are a continual source of dread to the neighbouring towns and villages, on account of their lawlessness and thieving proclivities, and mix very little with any of their neighbours, who have given the unsavoury city the Turkish nickname of "Pokloo Kalla," or "Filth Castle." Yezdi-Ghazt would not be a desirable residence during an earthquake. The latter are of frequent occurrence round here. Many of the villages have been laid in ruins, but, curiously enough, the rock-city has, up till ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... with shameless brows. List, lady; be not coy, and be not cozened With that same vaunted name, Virginity. Beauty is Nature's coin; must not be hoarded, But must be current; and the good thereof 740 Consists in mutual and partaken bliss, Unsavoury in the enjoyment of itself. If you let slip time, like a neglected rose It withers on the stalk with languished head. Beauty is Nature's brag, and must be shown In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities, Where most may wonder at the workmanship. It is for homely ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... be induced to search for tesselated pavements and relics of royalty amongst the piggeries of this dirty Wallack village. It is a literal fact that a very fine specimen of Roman pavement exists here in an unsavoury outhouse, not unknown to pigs ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... journeyed to Gustave Dor's favourite resort, Barr, a close, unsavoury little town enough, but in the midst of bewitching scenery. "An ounce of sweet is worth a pound of sour," sings Spenser, and at Barr we get the sweet and the sour strangely mixed. The narrow streets smell of tanneries and less wholesome nuisances, not a ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... whole quantities of cray-fish, until its stomach becomes crammed to such a degree as to distort the shape of its whole body. When this kind was drawn out, it was treated very rudely by the boys—because its flesh was known to be extremely unsavoury, and none of them cared to eat it. Marengo, however, had no such scruples, and he was wont to make several hearty meals each day ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... will put her 'bearer' (if she can find one in London) in possession of the two volumes in question. I shall like her to have them, and she must try to find my love, as the King of France did the poison (a 'most unsavoury simile,' certainly), between the leaves. I send with them, in any case, my best love. Ah, so sorry I am that she has suffered from the weather you have had. She is a most interesting child, and of a ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... all. 'Twas next the scene Of vague (and viscous) vegetations; Queer fissures gaped, with oozings green, And moist, unsavoury exhalations,— Faint wafts of wood decayed and sick, Till, where he meant to carve his Motto, Strange leathery fungi sprouted thick, And made ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... soon make off, the other six will have to be carried away. We have a good account to give of ourselves, but the watch would probably not trouble themselves to ask any questions, and I have no fancy for spending a night locked up in the cage with perhaps a dozen unsavoury malefactors. Which way does your course ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... volley of oaths and unsavoury exclamations, and all was bustle and confusion, and packing up of bundles, and ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... antiquary. Between the two points tumbles along the same little beck in which the pretty feet are said to have twinkled, and not far off the trade of the damsel's father is still plied, perhaps on the very spot where that unsavoury craft, of old the craft of the demagogue, was so strangely to connect itself with the mightiest of Norman warriors ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... whose innocence Mrs. Quickly was so creditably vigilant. On the other hand, no student of Jonson will need to be reminded how closely and precociously familiar the big stalwart Westminster boy, Camden's favoured and grateful pupil, must have made himself with the rankest haunts and most unsavoury recesses of that ribald waterside and Smithfield life which he lived to reproduce on the stage with a sometimes insufferable fidelity to details from which Hogarth might have shrunk. Even his unrivalled proficiency in classic learning can hardly have been the fruit of greater or more ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... exultation, which is vigorously expressed in a ballad of the day, written in a stirring salt-water rhythm.[7] It represents the Venetians, as they enter the bay, in arrogant mirth reviling the Genoese with very unsavoury epithets as having deserted their ships to skulk on shore. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... on account of the bruises I had received in the shoe. At last under the table, round which the family had been sitting, I found a pincushion, which, being stuffed with bran, afforded me enough to satisfy my hunger, but was excessively dry and unsavoury; yet, bad as it was, I was obliged to be content at that time with it; and had nearly done eating when the door opened, and in ran two or three of the children. Frightened out of my senses almost, I had just time to escape down a ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... grip, out of sight, of Lance's coat; Mr. Smith grew red and bit his lips; but Lance walked close to him, and as they began to be jostled, took his arm, holding the blue sunshade over both their heads. Unsavoury missiles began to fly; but a woman screeched, 'Bad luck to ye, ye vagabone! ye've ruinated the young ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... him going into Balak as he left for Edelweiss that morning. He wore a disguise, but Jacob says he could not be mistaken. Moreover, he was accompanied by several men whom he recognised as Graustark mountaineers and hunters of rather unsavoury reputation. They left Brutus at the gates of Balak and went off into the hills. All this happened before I knew that Peter was living in Edelweiss. When I saw him here, I knew at once that his presence meant something sinister. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Dubonnet and dreaming of the Boulevard Montparnasse. I bought her another Dubonnet—what stranger would have done less? In her was epitomized the sadness of the stranger in Vienna. Lured by lavish tales of gaiety, she had left Paris, to seek an unsavoury fortune in the love marts of Vienna. But her dream had been broken. She was lonely as only a Parisian can be, stranded in an alien country. She knew scarcely a score of German words, in fact no language but her own. Her youth and coquetry did not avail. She was an outsider, ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... culinary poem on the model of the 'Ring and the Book,"' said Mrs. Sinclair, "or we might deal with the story in practical shape by letting every one of us prepare the same dish. I fancy the individual renderings of the same recipe would vary quite as widely as the versions of the unsavoury story set forth in Mr. Browning's ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... better. We could have got from them pardon for a crime, but never for a good action." And so forth, with much magnanimous acrimony. Prostitution is only introduced for the pleasure of applying the unsavoury word to certain critics "of whom we have so many in these days, and of whom we say that they prostitute their pens to money, to favour, to lying, and to all the vices most unworthy of an ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... discrimination. Her ideas of what constitute a gentleman must be somewhat vague!" Mrs Fanshawe said disagreeably. She felt disagreeable, and she never made any effort to conceal her feelings, kindly or the reverse. It was annoying that one of her own guests should be mixed up in an unsavoury scandal with a common soldier: annoying to have people going about with long faces, when she had planned a festive week. Really this Claire Gifford was becoming more and more of an incumbrance! Mrs Fanshawe paused with her hand on the coffee-pot, to ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in San Francisco argued on insufficient premises they condemned a fellow-creature to a most unpleasant death in a far country which had nothing whatever to do with the United States. They foregathered at the top of a tenement-house in Tehama Street, an unsavoury quarter of the city, and, there calling for certain drinks, they conspired because they were conspirators by trade, officially known as the Third Three of the I. A. A. - an institution for the propagation of pure light, not to be confounded with any others, though it is affiliated to many. The ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... paper which your lordship sent to me before it came to me from the palace. The scurrilous, unsavoury, and vulgar words which it contained did not matter to me much. I have lived long enough to know that, let a man's own garments be as clean as they may be, he cannot hope to walk through the world without rubbing against those who are dirty. It ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... conscience. Hence a myth has arisen that in order to punish Prajapati for his incest with his daughter the gods created Bhuta-pati (who is Pasu-pati or Rudra under a new name), who stabbed him. The rest of the myth is as immaterial to our purpose as it is unsavoury; what is important is that the conscience of the Brahmans was beginning to feel slight qualms at the uncleanness of some of their old myths and to look towards Rudra as in some degree an avenger of sin. In this is implied an immense moral advance. Henceforth there will be a gradual ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... Save for this unsavoury composite wraith, the hall was empty when P. Sybarite entered it. But it echoed with sounds of rowdy revelry from the room in back: mechanical clatter of galled and spavined piano, despondent growling of a broken-winded 'cello, nervous giggling ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the crocodile surpasses all medicines for the removal of pustules and the like from the eyes. Vincent of Beauvais mentions the same, besides many other medical uses of the reptile's carcass, including a very unsavoury cosmetic. (Matt. p. 245; Spec. Natur. Lib. XVII. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... word of my Lord, which by the gospel is preached unto all, shall endure for ever. Why then dost thou thus madly cling to and embrace that glory, which, like spring flowers, fadeth and perisheth, and to beastly unsavoury wantonness, and to the abominable passions of the belly and the members thereunder, which for a season please the senses of fools, but afterwards make returns more bitter than gall, when the shadows and dreams of this vain ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... course, like that of most secret societies, has been marked by violent dissensions amongst the members—the Blavatsky-ites passionately denouncing the Besantites and the Besantites proclaiming the divine infallibility of their leader—whilst at the same time scandals of a peculiarly unsavoury kind have been brought to light. This fact has indeed created a serious schism in the ranks of the Theosophists, which shows that a number of perfectly harmless people are to be found amongst them. Yet ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... with fat: the fat of beef; fat of mutton—anything they could not finish in the sitting-room; the overplus of cabbage or potatoes, savoury or unsavoury; vast slices of bread and cheese; ale, and any number of slop-basins full of tea—the cups were not large enough—and pudding, cold dumpling, hard as wood, no matter what, Jearje ate ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... found wherever two or three cottages lie contiguous to each other; they are certainly far from inviting, as dried fish, train-oil, tallow, and many other articles of the same description combine to produce a most unsavoury atmosphere. Yet they are infinitely preferable to the dwellings of the peasants, which, by the by, are the most filthy dens that can be imagined. Besides being redolent of every description of bad odour, these cottages are infested with vermin to a degree which can certainly not be surpassed, ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... Hunter, relieved this apprehension; but now fresh trouble occurred in the torments of toothache which befell Mrs Fielding. A servant was despatched in haste to Wapping, but the desired 'toothdrawer,' arrived after the ship had at last, on Sunday morning, the 30th of June, left her unsavoury moorings. That Sunday morning "was fair and bright," and the diarist records how, dropping down to Gravesend, "we had a passage thither I think as pleasant as can be conceiv'd." The yards of Deptford and Woolwich were 'noble sights'; the Thames with ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... ancient title but to vast collateral wealth. He had been born and reared in France, and it was there that the heralds of this stupendous change in his affairs had found him out. There was a good deal more to the story, including numerous unsavoury legends about people now many years dead, and it was impossible to observe the young Duke and not seem to perceive signs that he was still nervously conscious of these legends. The story of his wife—a ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... begin the Song appointed. {Indian Musicians.} At the same time, one drums, and the other rattles, which is all the artificial Musick of their own making I ever saw amongst them. To these two Instruments they sing, which carries no Air with it, but is a sort of unsavoury Jargon; yet their Cadences and Raising of their Voices are form'd with that Equality and Exactness, that (to us Europeans) it seems admirable, how they should continue these Songs, without once missing to agree, each with the ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... Active Citizen Electors shall for this time have free choice of only One-third of their National Assembly. Such enactment, of Two-thirds to be re-elected, we append to our Constitution; we submit our Constitution to the Townships of France, and say, Accept both, or reject both. Unsavoury as this appendix may be, the Townships, by overwhelming majority, accept and ratify. With Directory of Five; with Two good Chambers, double-majority of them nominated by ourselves, one hopes this Constitution may prove final. March it will; for the legs of it, the re-elected Two-thirds, are ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... fine sparkling Castalian champagne! A happy thought at this time started into one of our minds, that some condiment would render the lettuces a little more palatable, when an individual in the company, recollected a question, once propounded by the most patient of men, "How can that which is unsavoury be eaten without salt?" and asked for a little of that valuable culinary article. "Indeed, sir," Betty replied, "I quite forgot to buy salt." A general laugh followed the announcement, in which our host heartily joined. This was nothing. We had plenty of other ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... were no hares about, he seized young foxes and magpies, although their flesh was unsavoury. The foxes would defend themselves long and stubbornly, biting viciously, and they had to be attacked cautiously and skilfully. It was necessary to strike the bill at once into the animal's neck near its head, and, immediately clutching its back with the talons, to rise into the ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... was definite, and as his character was, there was no wavering. I wrote to him immediately to express my lively gratitude, and we considered, the Marquise and I, as to the intermediary to whom we could entrust the unsavoury commission of approaching the Marquis de Montespan. He hated all my family from his having obtained no satisfaction from it for his wrath. We begged the Chancellor Hyde, a personage of importance, to be good enough to accept this mission; he saw no reason to refuse ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... prefer the other. In "Wild Youth" Sir GILBERT PARKER gives us the unedifying picture of a horrible old man married to a young and pretty girl. Jealous, tyrannical and vicious, this creature—referred to as a behemoth—is in all conscience unsavoury enough; but no one can read his story without feeling that he never had a dog's chance; and although the tale is in many respects well-told, I feel that it would have been vastly improved if some redeeming qualities had been vouchsafed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... the fighting, drunken, riotous mobs? Quarterstaves were rising and falling upon heads and shoulders. No deadlier weapons were used, but showers of missiles from time to time descended, unsavoury ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... bow-string at full stretch, Till the kind looseness comes, and then, Conclude the bow relax'd again. And now, the ladies all are bent, To try the great experiment, Ambitious of a regent's heart, Spread all their charms to catch a f— Watching the first unsavoury wind, Some ply before, and some behind. My lord, on fire amid the dames, F—ts like a laurel in the flames. The fair approach the speaking part, To try the back-way to his heart. For, as when we a gun discharge, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... real life can guess that her return to her rightful lord and master must entail disagreeables; but only a reader well brazened in modern fiction could expect Don Juan promptly to make love to and marry the husband's sister without a word of apology to anyone. This kind of rather unsavoury dabbling in problems best left to themselves generally concludes with the decease of most of the characters and a sort of clearing up, and to this rule, after many years and pages of discomfort, MARY E. MANN'S new story, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... with a better adjusted nervous system, would sometimes presume to torment him just for the fun of the thing. While he was minister of Justice, political exigencies compelled Mackenzie to take into his Cabinet a man who, by reason of his unsavoury political record, was eminently distasteful to Blake. This man knew perfectly well that the great lawyer was not proud of the association, but being as thick-skinned as Blake was sensitive, he rather enjoyed his colleague's discomfort. He was known to go into Blake's office on a short ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... upon its meaner neighbours in much the same way that its mistress looked upon the denizens of the street, stood Miss Prime's cottage. It was not on the mean street,—it would have disdained to be,—but sat exactly facing it in prim watchfulness over the unsavoury thoroughfare which ran at right angles. The cottage was one and a half stories in height, and the upper half-story had two windows in front that looked out like a pair of accusing eyes. It was painted a dull lead colour. In summer the front yard was filled with flowers, hollyhocks, bachelor's-buttons, ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of Mary's literary activities during her last days is her correspondence with Elizabeth Jeffries. "That unsavoury person" was, with her paramour, John Swan, convicted at Chelmsford Assizes on 12th March, 1752, of the murder at Walthamstow, on 3rd July, of one Joseph Jeffries, respectively uncle and master to his slayers. Elizabeth induced John to kill the old gentleman, who, aware of their intrigue, had ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... Matthew Arnold said, was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating his wings in a luminous void in vain." In consequence he declared that Shelley was not a classic, especially as his private circle had had an unsavoury morality, to be expressed only by the French word sale, and as moreover Shelley himself occasionally showed a distressing want of the sense of humour, which could only be called bete. These strictures, if a bit incoherent, are separately remarkably just. They unmask essential ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... blackish seeds about the bigness of peppercorns; whose taste is also hot on the tongue somewhat like pepper. The fruit itself is sweet, soft and luscious, when ripe; but while green it is hard and unsavoury: though even then being boiled and eaten with salt-pork or beef, it serves instead of turnips and is as much esteemed. The papaw-tree is about 10 or 12 foot high. The body near the ground may be a foot and a half or 2 foot diameter; and it grows up tapering ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... is love," but he does not say marriage. Love is the business of the idle and the idleness of the busy, but marriage is quite another affair—a grave matter, and not to be undertaken lightly, since it is the one step that can never be retraced, save through the unsavoury channels of shame and notoriety, or ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... pointing the traces of a vista which once had gladdened all eyes with its sweetness, but was now itself blind, did the little squire happen upon a treasure worthy in his sight to be bestowed. At this juncture, however, a particularly unsavoury smell attracted his straining nostrils.... A moment later what was, despite the ravages of decomposition, still recognizable as the corpse of a large black bird was deposited with every circumstance of cheerful ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... lad that Price is! He's the very salt of the earth!' murmured the old captain, as he threaded his way later through the unsavoury streets, now ablaze with lights that enticed and beckoned forth misery to stalk out from every dark corner. 'He is a true Christian—that's what it is! To think how my boys have ill-treated him, and here he is caring for Alick so tenderly that the poor boy's mother couldn't have done more, ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... being struck from his hand, and himself tumbled backwards into a deep and muddy ditch, extinguishing both light and life apparently together. But he arose, and would have run a tilt at them in this unsavoury condition, had he not been caught by one of his enemies, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... From associates at White's he descended to the lower resorts. There was one fellow that I specially feared, and with whom he had become a boon companion, a Captain Villecourt, a gambler and a rake, whose reputation was unsavoury. I pleaded, but in vain. I could not desert the boy. He loved me, and I him, and so I dogged his footsteps, helped him out of difficulty whenever I could, and lost no opportunity for pleading his cause with ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... of which the Neapolitans are so proud; gone in these latter days is classic Santa Lucia with its water-gate and its fountain, its vendors of medicated water and frutti di mare, those toothsome shell fish of the unsavoury beach; vanished for ever is many a landmark of old Naples, and new buildings, streets and squares, blank, dreary, pretentious and staring, have arisen in their places. This thorough sventramento di Napoli, as the citizens graphically term this drastic reconstruction of the old capital ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... him narrowly, puzzled. He knew nothing of this man, beyond his reputation—something unsavoury enough, in all conscience!— had seen him only once, and then from a distance, before that conference in the rue Chaptal. And now he was becoming sensitive to a personality uncommonly insinuating: Wertheimer was displaying all the poise of an Englishman of the better ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... a trifle unsavoury and unswept. Municipal authorities seem particularly stingy in the matter of brooms, brushes and water-carts. Such little disagreeables must not prevent the traveller from exploring every corner. But the real, the primary attraction of Moret lies less in its historic monuments and antiquated ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards |
