"Bugbear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mrs. Maverick will be met by these friends of the daughter, he trusts that the mother's interviews with the Doctor, and a knowledge of the kindly influences under which Adele has grown up, may lessen the danger of a religious altercation between mother and child, which has been his great bugbear in view ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... determine that men were responsible to God alone, and not to priests or Churches, for their opinions and their deeds. It also decided that the Church must be subordinate to the State, not the State to the Church. This is called Erastianism, and is the bugbear of High Churchmen. But there is no escape from the alternative, and the Church of Rome has never abandoned her claim to universal authority. Against it Henry VIII. and Cromwell, Elizabeth and Cecil, set up the supremacy of the law, made and administered by laymen. As Froude said ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his creations. As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a bugbear, it became tangible property at last. Only a year or two before ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Discreet man that he was, Wendell Pemberton could not entirely conceal his wonder that Patricia should have remained so long in ignorance of her condition. He spoke concerning malformation and functional weaknesses and, although obscurely because of the bugbear of professional courtesy, voiced his opinion that Patricia had not received the most adroit medical treatment at the time of little ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... either a knave or a fool. He could not place himself in the position from which the other fellow was thinking or acting. He believed that it was his duty to maintain what he held to be the popular cause against the "schemes of the aristocrats," the bugbear of that day. He was a fighter from his youth up and his theory of government was that of enforcing the control of the side for which he was the partisan. Such a man could never be accepted as the father of ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... constitutional legislators; they know that when the fear of punishment is wanting, nothing else is of avail. And this is doubly so with us who are tyrants; whose power is based upon compulsion; who live in the midst of enmity and treachery. The bugbear terrors of the law would never serve our turn. Rebellion is a many-headed Hydra: we cut off one guilty head, two others grow in its place. Yet we must harden our hearts, smite them off as they grow, and—like lolaus—sear ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... advantages—particularly after lunch; and sometimes, where an old house was empty, we would go over it, and stare at beams and chimneypieces and hear the haunted tale of its fortunes, with a faint half-memory in our breasts of that one-time bugbear we had known as "copy." But though more than once a flaccid instinct would move us to have out our pencils, we would only end by bunging our foolish mouths with them, as if they were cigarettes, and then vaguely wondering at them for that, being ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... that method. What now chiefly hinders its immediate introduction is not so much the real difficulty of providing a good simple system, as the false fear that all our literature may take on the phonetic dress; and this imagination is frightful enough to be a bugbear to reasonable people, although, so far as one can see, there is no more danger of this result than there is of all music ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... rebellion that we associate likin, a tax which has for years past been the bugbear of the foreign merchant in China. The term means "thousandth-part money," that is, the thousandth part of a tael or Chinese ounce of silver, say one cash; and it was originally applied to a tax of one cash per tael on all sales, ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... this age, when nations are breaking up all around us, when unions are dissolving, when dynasties disappear before the light like ghosts at cock-crowing, and when emperors and kings rely upon universal suffrage, once so terrible a bugbear in their eyes, for the titles to their crowns. Opinion is rapidly formed, and is as rapidly dismissed. We may be as much astonished now at the peace of Villafranca as we were on the day when first it was announced, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... 'What a bugbear that woman is!' I observed, rather irritably, as we retraced our steps in the direction of the Man and Plough, the little inn that stood at the junction of the four roads. Everything looked dark ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Miss Burkham's bugbear. She was always endeavoring to instill into the minds of her charges, that a lady never attracts undue attention. The word had been in use so frequently that it had become a by-word among ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... argument, and lacked nothing for words, though it might perhaps be proved that they were short in numbers. It was considered that the speech in which Mr. Daubeny reviewed the long political life of Mr. Mildmay, and showed that Mr. Mildmay had been at one time a bugbear, and then a nightmare, and latterly simply a fungus, was one of the severest attacks, if not the most severe, that had been heard in that House since the Reform Bill. Mr. Mildmay, the while, was sitting with his hat low down over his eyes, and many men said ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... said Anne cheerfully, "abroad if possible; but I have become a bugbear to Daisy, and it is best that ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... complete bugbear," he groaned. "It ought to be indicted for a nuisance, waking people up o' mornings when they ought to be in the arms of Morpheus—I've a great mind to lie still. Half an hour's ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... that Manius Egerius was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line, whereas others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed people at Aricia, and they derived the name Manius from Mania, a bogey or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in wait for pilgrims on the Arician slopes. These differences of opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Aricia and Egerius Laevius of Tusculum, as well as the resemblance of both ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... could call forth either the depth of enthusiasm in his supporters or the depth of antagonism in his opponents which is called forth by every public appearance of Mr. Gladstone. No other man has, in the same measure as he has, won the glory of being the bugbear of cultivated "society" and the object of the reverence and affection of thinking men. But, apart from this, the issues were different. Mr. Smith and Mr. Stuart stood directly as Liberal candidates. Mr. Gladstone, at least in his earlier elections, was still in party nomenclature ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... a relief to you to know at once that there will not be any statistics in this series of talks. We want instead just now to get broad and general, but distinct, impressions. Statistics are burdensome to most people. They are a good deal of a bugbear to the common crowd of us every-day folks. They are absolutely essential. They are of immense, that is, immeasurable, value. You need to have them at hand where you can easily turn for exact information, as you need it, to refresh your memory. And an increasing amount of ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... same effect. 'What a pity is it,' said he to me, 'that Campbell does not give full sweep to his genius. He has wings that would bear him up to the skies, and he does now and then spread them grandly, but folds them up again and resumes his perch, as if afraid to launch away. The fact is, he is a bugbear to himself. The brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his future efforts. He is afraid of the shadow that his own fame ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... is no such secret;—it is a bugbear! But the moral perversion of the person who could soberly ask the question that Helwyse asked is not so easily disposed of. It met, indeed, with full recognition. As for the subtile voice, having accomplished its main purpose, it began now to evade the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... for forming a resolution; nor was it sooner formed than that it was begun to be put into action, yet not before the excited girl was away, no doubt to tell some of her companions of her relief from the bugbear of the man with the terrible eyes. The formation of a purpose might have been observed in her puckered lips and the speculation in her grey eyes. The spirit of romance had visited the small house in Toddrick's Wynd, where for fifteen years the domestic lares had sat quietly ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... interests and sentiments without which, as he believed, free governments should not exist. This work, which reproduced more at length and in a more obnoxious form the fundamental ideas of his 'Defence of the American Constitution,' made Adams a great bugbear to the ultra-democratic supporters of the principles and policy of the French revolutionists; and at the second presidential election in 1792, they set up as a candidate against him George Clinton, of New York, but Mr. Adams was re-elected ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... in the army. This Fray Diego was his constant companion. The baron inspired universal terror with his gloomy character, his eccentricities, and more especially by the fearful appearance of his face. The children were quite panic-stricken in his presence. Parents and nurses used him as a bugbear to ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... of my sunshine with your bugbear of a Charles Lamb! "I have heard you for some time with patience. I have been cool,—quite cool; but don't put me ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... such a Bugbear! And this old Uncle of mine may one day be gathered together, and sleep with his Fathers, and then I shall have six thousand Pound a Year, and the wide World before me; and who the Devil cou'd relish these Blessings ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... and withdrew, Fay running after him, for she had made friends with him during her days of solitude, being a fearless child, and not having been taught to make a bugbear of him. "The soot won't come ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and disquietude was upon the assembly. There was a distinct impression of fear, though a vague notion as to its cause—a sort of extempore superstition—a power which hath most hold on the mind in proportion as its limits and operations are least known or understood. The bugbear owing its magnitude and importance to obscurity and misapprehension, becomes divested of its terrors when it ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... alas, poor devil! Has not slept to-night? would a'not, a naughty man, let it sleep one twinkle? A bugbear take him! ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... arm and drew him to a distant window. "Now, lad," he said, "let me hear all about this bugbear. I'll see if it can be in any way ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... concerning the declaration of war, and told with approval how the Royal hand had trembled in committing itself to the form of signature to which its action is limited. If there was money to be paid, there was a bugbear to be slain for it; and a bugbear is as obnoxious to the repose of commercial communities as rivals are ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had resumed publication were howling for measures of extermination. A threatening crowd surrounded the prisoners and was particularly violent against the woman, in whom the excited bourgeois beheld one of those petroleuses who were the constant bugbear of terror-haunted imaginations, whom they accused of prowling by night, slinking along the darkened streets past the dwellings of the wealthy, to throw cans of lighted petroleum into unprotected cellars. ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... London causeways. A poor woman in a remote hamlet, untouched by tourist or guide-book, has shown me the ash-tree under which Monmouth was seized after Sedgemoor; a Suffolk peasant, equally innocent of book-knowledge, has pointed Out "Bloody Mary's lane," through which that bugbear of Protestants passed three hundred years before on her way to Framlingham. The abbey immortalised in Carlyle's "Past and Present," and still the wonder of Eastern England, is surrounded now by the same villages that Jocelyn tells us of. ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... said. "It was awfully sweet of her. Evidently she'd been bullied about her unseemly behaviour when she was small, till you, and I, and Brockhurst, had been made into a perfect bugbear. She's quite amusingly afraid of you still. But she's no notion what really happened. Of course she can't have, or she could not have mentioned the subject to me." Richard shrugged his shoulders. "Obviously it would ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... sense tells an Englishman that he really exists himself and that everything he sees around him really exists also. He cannot abandon these two primary convictions. Not so the Hindu Vedantist. Dualism is his bugbear, and common sense, when it maintains any kind of real duality, either the separate independent existence of a man's own spirit and of God's spirit, or of spirit and matter, is guilty ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... would be mutually beneficial, that it would induce white immigration, relieve the congested overproduction of the staples of the Southern States, introduce a higher class of industries, and simplify the so-called problem by removing the bugbear of Negro domination by ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... God! Believe it, fellow-creature, There's no such bugbear: all was made by Nature. We know all came of nothing, and shall pass Into the same condition once it was By Nature's power, and that they grossly lie That say there's hope of immortality. Let them but tell us what a soul is: then We shall adhere to these mad ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... vacillation, incapacity, by poor judgment and crass stupidity. Her homely wisdom, the fruit of observant years, her native common sense, her strength and discernment were all at the service of the first comer. Responsibility, the bugbear of mankind, was as the ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... ground and is consumed. Having only this abominable and hideous mask before its eyes, it is afraid of death. But its fear is only because of its lack of understanding. If it knew, it would by no means be afraid or shudder at death. Our reason is like a little child who has become frightened by a bugbear or a mask, and cannot be lulled to sleep; or like a poor man, bereft of his senses, who imagines when brought to his couch that he is being put into the water and drowned. What we do not understand we cannot intelligently deal with. If, for instance, a man has a penny and imagines it to ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... added more and greater ones to them out of his own store. In order to produce something of a startling and dramatic effect, he has strained a point or two. In order to quell and frighten away the bugbear of Modern Philosophy, he was obliged to make a sort of monster of the principle of population, which was brought into the field against it, and which was to swallow it up quick. No half-measures, no middle ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... expedient for the future of the New College that the present principal should resign. This was, of course, an extreme view of the results of Alec's interference; but Trenholme had accustomed himself to look at his bugbear in all lights, the most extreme as well as the most moderate. That for the future; and, for immediate agitation, there was his resolution to speak to Sophia. As he walked and talked, his heart was ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... at this girl who presumed to call him horrid and hard-hearted, and to hold up as an example his bugbear and opponent, Bill Howroyd. Horatia returned his look with a perfectly fearless one. 'So you prefer Bill Howroyd's way? Perhaps you prefer his home to mine? He'll never build himself a Balmoral,' said the millionaire with ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... at once they ceased to be, Returning to the barren womb of nothing, Whence first they sprung; then might the debauchee Untrembling mouth the heavens:—then might the drunkard Reel over his full bowl, and, when 'tis drain'd, Fill up another to the brim, and laugh At the poor bugbear Death: then might the wretch That's weary of the world, and tired of life, 390 At once give each inquietude the slip, By stealing out of being when he pleased, And by what way, whether by hemp, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... and property's so dear, They scorn their laws or governors to fear; So bugbear'd with the name of slavery, They can't submit to their own liberty. Restraint from ill is freedom to the wise! But Englishmen do all restraint despise. Slaves to the liquor, drudges to the pots; The mob are statesmen, and ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... him an opening in some profession, and the thought of being made a notary was a bugbear to the young man: "Think of me as dead, if they cap me with that extinguisher." And yet, in the next sentence, he breaks out into a cry of desolate disgust at the aridity of his actual circumstances: "They call this mechanical ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the 1st of July, Bressant sat at his table, with his books and papers about him. He was in an excellent humor, for he had just arrived at the conclusion that he might, and would, safely encounter his bugbear Cornelia. If the professor invited him to tea, and to spend the evening, he was resolved to accept; and, at that moment, he felt a hand laid upon his shoulder, and, turning quickly round, recognized the sombre figure ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... and 4th and 5th, two spies. These men united in a conspiracy to destroy various persons who were obnoxious to them in the province, some of them actuated by political motives, and others in order to get possession of the property of their victims. The bugbear of the Court is Carbonarism, and Matteis pretended that there was a Carbonari plot on foot, in which several persons were implicated. He employed the spies to seduce the victims into some imprudence of language or conduct, and then to inform against them; in this way he apprehended ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... and wranglers. Owsley's firm administration, From the bench and bar judicial, In the governor's chair of power, Comes in heraldry unsullied, On the banner of the contest, Of the pen and diction contest, Mightier than the sword of battle. He reduced the annual bugbear, The state debt, so long amassing, And devoted all his efforts To the Commonwealth's advantage. In eighteen hundred two and sixty, He laid down his useful manhood, In the dust of lasting greatness, At his home in Boyle county. Long his psalm of life be chanted, Long his earnest work ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... miserable by endeavouring to find it out. It seems as though there were some power somewhere which mercifully stays us from putting that sting into the tail of death, which we would put there if we could, and which ensures that though death must always be a bugbear, it shall never under any conceivable circumstances be ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... Wentworth, rather mournfully. He had been waiting at Mrs Hadwin's for the last two hours. He had seen that worthy woman's discomposed looks, and felt that she did not shake her head for nothing. Jack had been the bugbear of the family for a long time past. Gerald was conscious of adding heavily at the present moment to the Squire's troubles. Charley was at Malta, in indifferent health; all the others were boys. There was only Frank to give the father a little ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... jealousy and anxiety to protect themselves have, in some sections of the country, run into the adoption of extreme measures. They are already preparing to retrace their steps, and for several reasons. They are discovering that they have been fighting a bugbear; also, that their legislation against the bugbear cannot legislate. Also, that money stays away from radical communities, that many possible advantages are lost; that combinations properly controlled have, within ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... residence and carries on a dry goods business, he might gamble as much as should please him and the law would not take hold of him. He would ask anybody to read the law understandingly and then deny this round assertion. This act, said he, is bugbear—it is a disgrace as it now stands, for it smacks of cowardice. The legislators, he presumed, had a little sense, and they knew that some kind of a law must be passed, and they were ingenious enough to know how to frame it to sound well, and yet be comparatively powerless. They knew by ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... state upon another is either absolute or limited by some certain terms of agreement. The dependence of these Colonies, which Great Britain calls constitutional, as declared by acts of Parliament, is absolute. If the contrary of this be the bugbear so many have been disclaiming against, I could wish my countrymen would consider the consequence of so stupid a profession. If a limited dependence is intended, I would be much obliged to any one who will show me the Britannico- American Magna Charta, wherein the terms ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... Beelzebub been approaching, their terror could not have been greater. Yet fear kept many from escaping, while they knew not which way to run for safety. Rigby in the nick of time galloped up to this awful and hostile appearance, crying out to his troops that he would soon demolish the bugbear. This saying encouraged some of the runaways, who followed him to the combat. Approaching within a sword's length, for he was not deficient either in hardihood or valour, he made a furious stroke right in the face of this flaming ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... of the Supreme Court at Washington against the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 has had its effect, and to-day we find the Negro more discriminated against in his civil than in any other class of rights. Then, too, the social bugbear has had much to do with this discrimination. However, progress has been made. It has been slow, of course, because of the channel (public opinion) through which it has been compelled to come. In many sections of the country the Negro enjoys the most of his civil rights. He is admitted ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... of Quarantine, but in our favored country there are many untravelled persons who do not precisely know what it is, and who no doubt wonder why it should be such a bugbear to travellers in the Orient. I confess I am still somewhat in the same predicament myself, although I have already been twenty-four hours in Quarantine. But, as a peculiarity of the place is, that one can do nothing, however good a will he has, I propose to set down my experiences each ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... House, presents with a vividness of detail and verisimilitude that leaves nothing to be desired the outlines of the first twenty years of his life. The Second George had been ten years on the throne, the Young Pretender, alike the bugbear and the consolidator of the House of Hanover, was a stripling of seventeen, when, in the summer of 1737, William Fitzmaurice, afterward earl of Shelburne (the name by which history best knows him) and marquis of Lansdowne, was born in Dublin. "I spent the four first years, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... the confederate states are strengthened by the increasing manufactures of the Americans; and the union which began to exist in their opinions, gradually forms a part of their habits: the course of time has swept away the bugbear thoughts which haunted the imaginations of the citizens in 1789. The federal power is not become oppressive; it has not destroyed the independence of the states; it has not subjected the confederates to monarchical institutions; and the Union has ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... to let papa be a bugbear to frighten me. What can he do? I don't suppose he'll beat me. And I'd rather he would than shut me up here. As for you, mamma, I don't think you care for me a bit. Because Sophy is going to be married to that oaf, you are become so proud of her that you haven't ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the 8th about noon I arrived at Kolor, a considerable town, near the entrance into which I observed, hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees, which I was told, on inquiry, belonged to Mumbo Jumbo. This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection; for as the kafirs are not restricted in the number of their wives, every one marries as many as he can conveniently maintain—and as it frequently happens that the ladies disagree ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... anthropomorphic. Some one has said, "Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is." This means, as you know, that we look at things from the point of view of ourselves. We see things as men, as anthropoi. This has been erected in certain quarters into a good deal of a bugbear in the way of thinking. We are told we can never know the universe really, because we shape everything into our own likeness, we are anthropomorphic, we look at everything from the point ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... gave themselves a free rein; that old bugbear Mother Goose was resuscitated, and many a child, on reading the newspaper, might have recognized the ogre of Goodman Perrault in the disguise of a socialist; they surmised, they invented; the press being suppressed, it was quite ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... the fellow, more sensible in his skin than in his head, having received a scratch, was frighted: it gave him first a puke, then a fever, and then he died, that was all. And how could Belton help that? —But sickness, a long tedious sickness, will make a bugbear of any thing to a languishing heart, I see that. And so far was Mowbray a-propos in the verses from Nat. Lee, ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... The costs will be heavy and the expenses ruinous. You will have to spend from twelve to fifteen thousand francs merely to win the suit,—but you will win it, if you care to. The suit will only increase the enmity of the Gravelots, for the expenses will be even heavier on them. You will be their bugbear; you will be called litigious and calumniated in every ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... The other bugbear which alarmed them was a report that the English intended either to take possession of Berbera, or that they would give it to Shermarky—a native chief and ally of ours who lives at Zeylah. In short, these ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... pure food—or any other definite thing—they are going to get it, and without delay. Although there was some grumbling among the marketmen, the provision stores were soon put through such a course of scrubbing and whitening as to make the old-fashioned "spring house-cleaning," which has been the bugbear of pater familias and one of the chief assets of the paragrapher for so many years, a process of incomparably mild flavor. At the abattoir it had not been so easy to effect a reform, but with such women as Mrs. Bateman, Mrs. Albert Turner and the Reverend Martha Kendall coming down there ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... home the booty. 'T was then the merry times began, the blunders, an' the laffin', The nudges an' the nods an' winks an' stale good-natured chaffin'. Ole Uncle Hiram Dane was there, the clostest man a-livin', Whose only bugbear seemed to be the dreadful fear o' givin'. His beard was long, his hair uncut, his clothes all bare an' dingy; It wasn't 'cause the man was pore, but jest so mortal stingy; An' there he sot by Sally Riggs a-smilin' ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... should first have turned to this as a mode of obtaining the desired results; but, alas! all attempts in that direction signally failed—the ware most persistently refused to have anything to do with emulsion. The bugbear was the fixing agent or hypo., which not only left indelible marks, but, despite any amount of washing, the image on a finished plate vanished to nothing at the end of an hour's exposure in the show window. There was nothing left but to seek other means for the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... there is often in men's minds an exaggerated notion of some bit of truth, which proves a great assistance to falsehood. For instance, the shame of some particular small falsehood, exaggeration, or insincerity, becomes a bugbear which scares a man into a career of false dealing. He has begun making a furrow a little out of the line, and he ploughs on in it to try and give some consistency and meaning to it. He wants almost to persuade himself that it was not wrong, and ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... Methodism, was just beginning to be the bugbear set up for those whom the world held to be ultra-religious, and my mother was so far disturbed at our interest in what was termed Oxford theology that the warning would have alarmed her if it had come from ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Tom Staple was not a happy man; university reform had long been his bugbear, and now was his bane. It was not with him, as with most others, an affair of politics, respecting which, when the need existed, he could, for parties' sake or on behalf of principle, maintain a certain amount of necessary zeal; it was not with him a subject for ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... before the glass, Miss Amy—there is nothing to look at," or when in a bad humor, "Don't make such faces, child—you have no beauty to spare," and I can very well remember how both would endeavor to persuade me that I was the most veritable little fright that ever existed, and quite a bugbear to ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... altered without a law.'[1178] Exaggerated dread of Popery suspected latent evils, it scarcely knew what, lurking in this kind of worship. Perhaps, too, it was thought to border upon 'enthusiasm,' that other religious bugbear of the age. A paper in the 'Tatler' speaks of it not with disapproval, but with something of condescension to weaker minds, as 'the rapturous way of devotion.'[1179] In fact, cathedrals in general were almost unintelligible to the prevalent sentiment of the eighteenth century. Towards the end of ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... problem to successive chiefs of scouts, a bugbear to the reservation Indians, and a terror to Arizona. If a man was killed or a woman missed, the Indians came galloping and the scouts lay on his trail. If he met a woman in the defiles, he stretched ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... looks up the present system, with Cocker,[299] and Walkingame,[300] and always looks down the proposed system. The word decimal is obstinately associated with fractions, for which there is no need. Hence it becomes so much of a bugbear, that, to parody the lines of Pope, which probably suggested one of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... with an air of pleasant detachment, "I see. You are in a first-rate fix. I was always prepared for that. Coke told me about Bulmer—warned me off, so to speak. I forgot his claims at odd times, just for a minute or so, but he is a real bugbear—a sort of matrimonial bogey-man. If all goes well, and we enter Pernambuco without being fired at, you will be handed over to the British Consul, and he will send a rousing telegram about you to England. ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... much, give each subject its proper proportionate space; and be exact without caring to round off the edges of what you have to say." Later, he declines Bamford's offer of verses, saying "verse is a bugbear to booksellers at present. These are prosaic, earnest, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... he cried; but Panoria, not having before her eyes the fear of the Bonapartes' bugbear, "their ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... Duke!" said Adelaide. "I have been hearing of him as a sort of bugbear all my life. I don't think I ever saw him but once, and then he gave me a kiss and a pair of earrings. He never paid any attention to us at all, but we were taught to think that Providence had been very good to us in making the ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the party set forth, looking forward with delight to a continuous picnic a month long. Soon every vestige of human habitation disappeared, and we were alone in the midst of one of the loneliest lands in the world. Sahara itself, that bugbear of childhood, could not be much more desert than this. Fort Laramie, distant nearly one hundred miles, two long days' journey toward the north, was our first point of destination. Over ridge after ridge of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the nicer feelings. The grossest enormities are constantly committed in this good republic of ours, under the pretence of being done by the public, and for the public. The public have got to bow to that bugbear, quite as submissively as Gesler would have wished the Swiss to bow to his own cap, as to the cap of Rodolph's substitute. Men will have idols, and the Americans have ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... boys took their turn and gave their visitors a radio concert that was wonderful in its variety and beauty. The night happened to be unusually free of the annoying static that is the bugbear of the wireless, and every note of the music was as clear and sweet as though the performers were only a few yards away. Tim and Larry listened as though they were entranced, and when the concert was finished they were as enthusiastic "fans" as the ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... doctrines, that all this does not depend on the man's own sins and omissions, but was already predestined to happen, one really is at a loss what to think. Our highly educated Rationalists say, to be sure, "It's all false, it's a mere bugbear; we're in a state of constant progress, step by step raising ourselves to ever greater perfection." Ah! what a pity we didn't begin sooner; we should already ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... said. "Is it necessary that I enlighten you, madam? He is my bugbear—my death's head! The sight of him poisons my life, and something gnaws at me, driving me nearly mad! To see that man chills me, like ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... don't know it; and I don't know that I understand it now you tell it me," replied the major, just a little crossly, for he did not like poetry; it was one of his bugbear humbugs. "But one thing is plain: you must not expose yourself to what in such a search ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... for the last thirty years; we get them regularly every spring and summer; just bullying and sabre-rattling." People did not believe in war, no one wanted it; war had been proved to be impossible,—it was a bugbear that must be got out of the heads of free democracies ... and he enlarged on this theme. The night was calm and sweet; all around familiar sounds and sights; the chirp of crickets in the fields, a glow-worm shining in the grass,—delicious perfume of honey-suckle. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... we like what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm our will against it, to know the worst we have ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... extending to the control of the energies of the human factor. We have already spoken of guarantees that affect the spirit and the morale of labor. We hear of the prevention of unemployment, the removal of the bugbear of "losing the job." Most advance of all is being made in the application of the principles of mental and physical hygiene and of scientific management to the actual details of movement and the whole process of expenditure ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... pardon, I understood, would restore to them all their rights of citizenship. But he insisted that the officers and men of the Confederate army were unnecessarily alarmed about this matter, as a sort of bugbear. He then said that Mr. Breckenridge was near at hand, and he thought that it would be well for him to be present. I objected, on the score that he was then in Davis's cabinet, and our negotiations should be confined strictly to belligerents. He then said Breckenridge ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... always Uncle John's cry. His enormous fortune was a constant bugbear to him. He had been so interested in his business enterprises for many years that he had failed to realize how his fortune was growing, and it astounded him to wake up one day and find himself possessed of many ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... was needed; and, in our own day, there is on record an instance of a woman commanding a vessel during a long voyage over exceedingly dangerous seas, and bringing it successfully into the desired port. But apart from this, the fact is, the argument is simply used as a bugbear to frighten the timid and deter them from claiming their just position, both social and civil. By law, certain classes of men are exempt from war, except in extreme cases, so that by no means all who vote, now, are expected to fight. Then, women render an equivalent to the State, and risk their ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... raise a strong barrier against future threats of Ashanti invasion, and make security more secure. The political officers of the Protectorate will be the best judges of the steps to be taken; and, if they are active and prudent, we shall hear no more of the Kumasi bugbear. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... both places there was danger of Guy's being led into mischief by his musical connections. Therefore he did his best, for Amabel's sake, to turn them from their purpose, persuaded in his own mind that the fever was a mere bugbear, raised up by Arnaud; and, perhaps, in his full health and strength, almost regarding illness itself as a foible, far more the dread of it. He argued, therefore, in his most provoking strain, becoming more vexatious as the former annoyance was revived at finding the impossibility ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... found for a few of the smaller specimens mounted whole but in the average home they are the bugbear of the housekeeper, early exiled to the attic. A friend of mine has his collection of small game birds, occupying the plate rail of his dining room, well out of the way and admired by many. Well mounted ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... said Dr. Latimer, "is only a bugbear which frightens well-meaning people from dealing justly with the negro. I know of no place on earth where there is perfect social equality, and I doubt if there is such a thing in heaven. The sinner who repents on his death-bed cannot be the equal of St. Paul ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... Was it Christian Science? Did you dare, Eloise Evringham, did you dare spoil your life—my life—our future, by scaring Dr. Ballard with that bugbear?" The angry woman was ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... arise in it, nor find access to it; his aversion to the unsubstantial phantoms of political abstraction extends beyond disdain, even to disgust.[1152] That which was then called ideology, is his particular bugbear; he loathes it not alone through calculation, but still more through an instinctive demand for what is real, as a practical man and statesman, always keeping in mind, like the great Catherine, "that he is operating, not on paper, but on the human hide, which is ticklish." Every idea entertained ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... American press. Several of our own journalists have had the wit to see and the energy to adopt the best feature of the American style; and the result has been a distinct advance in the raciness and readableness of some of our best-known journals. The "Americanisation of the British press" is no bugbear to stand in awe of, if only it be carried on with good sense and discrimination. We can most advantageously exchange lessons of sobriety and restraint for suggestions of candour, humour, and point; and America's share in the form of the ideal English reading journal ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... prejudice the chances of the fit. There are no arm-chair sentimentalists to oppose this very practical consideration. The Indian judges it by his standard of common sense: why live a life that has ceased to be worth living when there is no bugbear of a hell to make one cling to the most miserable of existences rather than risk greater misery?" Let us now see the kind of life which the author, freed himself no doubt from "the bugbear of hell," considers eminently sensible—the kind of life of which only an "arm-chair sentimentalist" ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... always intended, ever since my conversation with Mr. T. about the Malstrom, to have called in at Loffoden Islands on our way south, and ascertain for myself the real truth about this famous vortex. To have blotted such a bugbear out of the map of Europe, if its existence really was a myth, would at all events have rendered our cruise not altogether fruitless. But, since leaving Spitzbergen, we had never once seen the sun, and to attempt to make ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... moving the tongue to cry out or to eat, one creates as many accidents as there are movements of the parts of the tongue, and one destroys as many accidents as there are parts of that which one eats, which lose their form, which become chyle, blood, etc.' This argument is only a kind of bugbear. What harm would be done, supposing that an infinity of movements, an infinity of figures spring up and disappear at every moment in the universe, and even in each part of the universe? It can be demonstrated, moreover, that that ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... the entrance into which he saw hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees, which he was told belonged to Mumbo Jumbo. The account of this personage is thus narrated by Mr. Park: "This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection, for as the kafirs are not restricted in the number of their wives, every one marries as many as he can maintain, and, as it frequently happens, that ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... stress on what may be termed the minor morals, the small proprieties, and lesser virtues that lie on the surface of things and give life its polish, Audrey was for ever riding full-tilt against prejudices or raising a crusade against what she chose to term 'the bugbear of feminine existence—conventionality.' ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... have, from the first, steadily refused to look upon spiritualism in this bugbear fashion. The thing was either true or false—or, more probably still, partly true and partly false: and I must bring to bear on the discovery of its truth or falsehood, just the same critical faculties that I should employ on any other problem ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... a sort of bugbear to you," said Rapp. "You'll keep prodding him till he horns you one ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... Dead Man. "When you shall have learned that 'what people say' is the most senseless bugbear in all this wide world of senseless bugbears, you will be far on the road to true greatness. You will have broken the heaviest, most galling, most idiotically useless fetter that weights down humanity. ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... have sufficient funds on hand to pay them ten dollars per acre spot cash, so I shall turn over to them their signed contracts and thus relieve them of that bugbear, and for these three- dollar contracts they shall credit me with a payment of four dollars and twenty-five cents per acre on the land! I will secure them for the balance by a first mortgage on the property! And with that accomplished, I court an ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... Cours Sauvaire, he had published, in the "Independant," a terrible article on the intrigues of the clergy, in response to a short paragraph from Vuillet, who had accused the Republicans of desiring to demolish the churches. Vuillet was Aristide's bugbear. Never a week passed but these two journalists exchanged the greatest insults. In the provinces, where a periphrastic style is still cultivated, polemics are clothed in high-sounding phrases. Aristide called his adversary "brother Judas," ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... as horrible Prophaneness, and says he does me no wrong in't; now if he insists that Hell is too serious a thing to ridicule, why, perhaps, I think so too, in its Intense quality; but to act a Goblin, a Ghost, a Frog, or a Fury, and to sing to a Country Clown of such Bugbear matters, only to cause a little Diversion in a Noblemans House, has always been very customary, especially at Festivals, and far from being thought to ridicule the main matter. The Absolver, to turn back a little, affirms indeed, That ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... Crust is the bugbear of all runners and is out and away the most difficult to tackle. It may be hard, and then with nothing apparent on the surface to warn you, the Skis break through and catch in the crust and down you go. When ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... this matter. The more I reflect, the stronger appear the objections. It will doubtless be urged in favour of an immediate sale, that our funds are in danger of seizure by the United States. This is a mere bugbear. Such a thing will never again be even proposed, and, if proposed, will never receive three votes in the Senate. I hope, therefore, our legislature will not suffer themselves to be precipitated into this sale from ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... not say all this to Lord Etherington?" said Mowbray; "wait until he propose such a terrible bugbear as matrimony, before you refuse to receive him. Who knows, the whim that he hinted at may have passed away—he was, as you say, flirting with Lady Binks, and her ladyship has a good deal of address, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... has talked to us again about an outbreak and civil war—a ridiculous bugbear which is regularly revived every time the House protests against these abuses, as it was under Craig, under Dalhousie, and still more persistently under the present governor. Doubtless the honourable gentleman, having studied military tactics as a lieutenant in the ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... and irredeemable atheists—who deny the reality of progress. Specious, but quite insubstantial; for we can analyze the terrestrial conditions which led to that catastrophe, and assure ourselves that the bugbear of their recurrence is nothing more than a bugbear. The printing-press alone is an inestimable safeguard. If the Greeks had hit upon the idea of movable types—and it is little to the credit of the Invisible King that they did not—the onrush of barbarism and Byzantinism would not have been ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... indeterminate limbo where dwelt that bugbear of Charles Courtier, the great Half-Truth Authority, he himself had a couple of rooms at fifteen shillings a week. Their chief attraction was that the great Half-Truth Liberty had recommended them. They tied him to nothing, and were ever at his disposal when he was in London; for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... can get easily), but I question if they try either. I recommended them to send him to Tripoli, to the English doctor there, but they heard of the proposal with horror. None of these Berkat people have ever visited Tripoli. The Turks are their bugbear. They were not extremely friendly; rude and ignorant villagers as they were, they could not understand why I wanted to go to Soudan. I observed they were all well clothed and seemed to live in Saharan affluence. The term Berkat, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... but who nevertheless do not like to be left alone in the dark. We would beg you to let your light shine into a few dark corners out of which we cannot clearly see our way. Do not despise us if we still secretly believe a little in the black man. We will not forget that he is merely a bugbear; but it will pacify us to hear from your own mouths what the true and natural facts of the case are. In the first place, what are, in your opinion, the means employed by nature, in the struggle for the existence of species, to keep the growth of numbers from reaching the limit of the food-supply? ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... from head to foot, rapid as an instantaneous exposure. "Tramps" were a permanent bugbear to the ladies of Cullerne, and a proper dread of such miscreants had been instilled into Anastasia Joliffe by her aunt. It was, moreover, a standing rule of the house that no strange men were to be admitted on any pretence, unless there was some ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... probable that it will increase materially in its sugar production. American laws will militate against the importation of contract labor, and will therefore prevent any undue competition. As the New York Sun very justly observes, the bugbear of the Louisiana sugar planter is not territorial expansion, but the war taxes and the possibility of their permanent adoption, bringing with it the reopening of the old tariff agitation, which they supposed was ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... weather-eye open in the hope of catching sight of some passing sail. It must be owned that the whole party were far from sorry to be relieved of his presence; his uncomely figure and repulsive countenance was a perpetual bugbear. He had given out in plain terms that he did not intend to part with any of his property, except for current money, and Servadac, equally resolute, had strictly forbidden any purchases to be made, hoping to wear out the ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... utterance of a word which might explain away any difficulty in which he chanced to find himself; and this helped to keep his tongue tied in the matter where Larry Hogan had continued to make himself a bugbear. He had a horror, too, of being thought capable of doing a dishonourable thing, and the shame he felt at having peeped into a letter was so stinging, that the idea of asking any one's advice in the dilemma in which he was placed ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... once for all, through you, that I will come into and go out of this place as often as I like, so long as he keeps Nell here; and that if he wants to be quit of me, he must first be quit of her. What have I done to be made a bugbear of, and to be shunned and dreaded as if I brought the plague? He'll tell you that I have no natural affection; and that I care no more for Nell, for her own sake, than I do for him. Let him say so. I care for the whim, then, of coming to and fro and reminding her of my existence. I WILL see ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... sighed Zellerndorf; "though it may not be without its advantages after all, for now we still have this second bugbear to frighten Leopold with. So long, of course, as the American lives there is always the chance that he may return and seek to gain the throne. The fact that his mother was a Rubinroth princess might make ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... our only bugbear; and yet I may affirm, without suspicion of flattery, that he now speaks better, and that his character is maintained with much more vigour in the fourth and fifth acts, than it was by Fletcher in the three former. I have always acknowledged the wit of our ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... the car's musical siren, though; a fascinating bugbear, supposed to warn children, chickens, and other light-minded animals that something important is coming, and they'd better look alive. It has two tunes, one grave, one gay. I suppose we would use the grave one if the creature ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated. Trades' Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... that "he alone is great, who, by a life heroic, conquers fate"; that "diligence is the mother of good luck"; that nine times out of ten what we call luck or fate is but a mere bugbear of the indolent, the languid, the purposeless, the careless, the indifferent; that, as a rule, the man who fails does not see or seize his opportunity. Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... feel, as he never has done yet, the need of woman's help in the great field of human government, and so demand it; or woman must arise and come forward as she never has, and take her place. I still think that one of the main hindrances is with women. The fact is, that the worst bugbear is the never-seen, ever-felt law of caste which has always walled woman around, and which few have the courage ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... he wouldn't go, my friend! punishment or no punishment! Why, I can scarcely make my own fellows go! Bosh! I know boys; school is their bugbear." ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... down, as was most feared, their enfranchisement has tended to elevate them. Under our system of the Australian ballot, they have found that the contaminating influence of which they had been told was but a bugbear, born of fright, produced by shadows. They learned that to deposit their vote did not subject them to anything like the annoyance which they often experienced from crowds on "bargain days," while their presence drove from the polls the ward workers who had ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... about instinct incompatible with the doctrine of final causes. It might appear that a philosopher who has re-established the objective existence of space in opposition to Berkeley, was in danger of that materialism which had been Berkeley's bugbear. But Stewart escapes the danger by his assertion that our knowledge of matter is 'relative' or confined to phenomena. Materialism is for him a variety of ontology, involving the assumption that we know the essence of matter. To speak with Hartley of 'vibrations,' animal spirits, and ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... conciliation, and subsidies, we might hope in the course of time that the wounds we had inflicted would gradually be healed, and a more stable condition ensue. For a short period it was so; but then the old bugbear of Russian advance over the dreary wastes of Central Asia again supervened, and exercised its ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... Nubra and return to Leh we were obliged to cross the great fords of the Shayok at the most dangerous season of the year. This transit had been the bugbear of the journey ever since news reached us of the destruction of the Sati scow. Mr. Redslob questioned every man we met on the subject, solemn and noisy conclaves were held upon it round the camp-fires, it was said that the 'European woman' and her 'spider-legged ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... Tannenberg. He won it because the ground was exceedingly difficult, and because he knew the ground far better than any other man on earth. He was entitled to very high credit. He got it. He became the idol of the German populace, and the bugbear of the Allied countries. But he has done nothing since. Soon after Tannenberg he made a fool of himself on the Russian frontier, and showed that success had got into his head. He subsequently initiated several terrific attempts, all of which were excessively costly ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... that I have often thought the habit of debt to be our national inheritance—from that bugbear of out-of-place men, the Sinking Fund, to the parish-clerk, who mortgages his fees at the chandler's; and that my countrymen seem to have resolved to increase their own enjoyments at the expense of posterity, with whose provision, even Swift thinks ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... years of steady progress. "The Immortals" were soon left far behind. At the end of the first twelve months he stood fifty-first in a class of seventy-two, but when he entered the first class, and commenced the study of logic, that bugbear to the majority, he shot from near the foot of the class to the top. In the final examination he came out seventeenth, notwithstanding that the less successful years were taken into account, and it was a frequent remark ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... mile that she now travelled was so much to the good, increasing our chances of getting across the Line and making our escape from the awful region of equatorial calms which constitute such a ghastly bugbear to those who go down to the sea in sailing-ships. Our self-congratulations proved, however, to be premature, for the breeze lasted only about half an hour when it died away again, leaving us as completely becalmed as before. But during that half-hour we had ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... mountains, and the water is tempered by warm currents that flow in from the gulf stream. The national apprehension of both Norway and Sweden that Russia covets one of their seaports has existed a good many years. The bugbear has appeared at intervals for half a century, and a great deal of money has been expended in preparations to meet it. The people are, therefore, cordially patriotic in their support of the army, although many of them ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... other pleasures: these to me are none. Why do I prate Of women, that are things against my fate! I never mean to wed That torture to my bed: My Muse is she My love shall be. Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone And that great bugbear, grisly Death, Shall take this idle breath, If I a poem leave, that ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... "Tut, tut, that bugbear Love!" he said shortly. "And so you'd lose a good friend for a dead lover? I' faith, I'd befriend thee well if thou wert ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... see," said Patty, as they started off in the car one morning, "why people make such a bugbear of Christmas shopping. ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... wretched bugbear of English spelling was dealt with by a method which, so long as our present monstrous orthography continues, seems to me the best possible. During the last half-hour of every day, each scholar was required to have before him a copy- book, of which each page was ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... bugbear of two generations of Englishmen; and classical scholars, who interpreted modern politics by the light of ancient Greece, saw in the absorption of Athens by Macedon a convincing demonstration of the fate which the modern barbarian of the north was to inflict ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... as she grew older, had much time to spend outdoors, there were many tasks about the house and farm she had to perform. The chest was soon filled with quilts and that bugbear was gone from her life. But there was continual scrubbing, baking, mending, and other household tasks to be done, so that much practice caused the girl to develop into a capable little housekeeper. Aunt Maria frankly admitted that Phoebe worked cheerfully ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... matter, he procured his recall and subjected him to a State prosecution. In fact, Bismarck believed that under a Republic France would be powerless in war, and, further, that she could never form that alliance with Russia which was the bugbear of his later days. A Russian diplomatist once told the Duc de Broglie that the kind of Republic which Bismarck wanted to see in ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... a candle or sit by the fire might be dangerous, but as long as people were careful, it was all right, and Agatha had already assisted in some experiments at Rock Quay, which had shown her to be thoroughly understanding and trustworthy, and capable of keeping off the amateur—the great bugbear. ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... to happen. No doubt was left upon Mr. Britling's mind, though a whole-page advertisement in the Daily News, in enormous type and of mysterious origin, implored Great Britain not to play into the hands of Russia, Russia the Terrible, that bugbear of the sentimental Radicals. The news was wide and sweeping, and rather inaccurate. The Germans were said to be in Belgium and Holland, and they had seized English ships in the Kiel Canal. A moratorium had been proclaimed, and the reports of a food panic showed Mrs. Faber to be merely ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... have at the pamper'd jades of Asia! He has got hold of a new word, and that the verb to 'exploit.' I am exploited, thou art exploited,—he exploits! Who? Why, such men as that English duke whom the lecturer gripped and flagellated. The English duke is Mr. Cullen's bugbear; never a speech from Mr. Cullen but that duke is most horribly mauled. His ground rents,—yah! Another word of which Mr. Cullen is fond is 'strattum,'—usually spelt and pronounced with but one t midway. You and I have the misfortune to belong to a social 'strattum' which is ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the duchess, too," put in Fitzgerald, reaching for a bunch of yellow grapes. "With all due respect to your cause and beliefs, Madame the duchess, your mistress, is a bugbear to me. The very sound of the title arouses in my heart ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... of living, the climacteric or change of life, has become the bugbear of womanhood. It seems to be universally assumed that this period in a woman's life must be fraught with manifold sufferings and dangers. It is taken as a matter of course that during these changes in her organism a woman is assailed by the most serious physical, mental, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... editor of the Perth paper had had a bad time of it, for further on we find him still more bitter against any communication being opened up with the sister colony. It must he remembered that Western Australia was a free colony, and consequently the bugbear of convict contamination was one that was always raised when the subject of opening up a stock route with the older colonies was ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... arrant'st puppy of his pride. Be furious, envious, slothful, mad, or drunk, Slave to a wife, or vassal to a punk, A Switz, a High Dutch, or a Low Dutch bear; All that we ask is but a patient ear. 'Tis the first virtue, vices to abhor; And the first wisdom, to be fool no more. But to the world no bugbear is so great, As want of figure, and a small estate. To either India see the merchant fly, Scared at the spectre of pale poverty! See him, with pains of body, pangs of soul, Burn through the Tropic, freeze beneath the pole! Wilt thou do nothing for a nobler end, Nothing, to make philosophy thy friend? ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... young she had been at the time of Maddox's treason, the Colonel began to doubt if her imagination had not raised a bugbear, and he questioned her, "My dear, why are you so much afraid, of this person? What do ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the principles of slavery in all your proceedings; you neglect in your conduct the foundation of all legitimate government, the rights of the people; and, setting up this bugbear, you spread a panic for the very purpose of sanctifying this infringement, while again the very infringement engenders the evil which you dread. One extreme naturally leads to another. Those who dread republicanism fly for shelter to the Crown. Those who desire Reform ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... him whom I am bound to curse for being the cause of my misfortune. Let us to the ban dog's kennel, and explain to him what is to be done in every view of the question. If we can persuade him to stand the bier ordeal, it may be a mere bugbear, and in that case we are safe. If he take the combat, he is fierce as a baited bear, and may, perchance, master his opponent; then we are more than safe, we are avenged. If Bonthron himself is vanquished, we ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... dread of this humble functionary, and imagining that much study and labour had made his friend a little mad, Gozlan took no denial, and, button-holing Balzac, lugged him off into the leafy avenues. And there, sure enough, after a while, they saw the bugbear, who, as soon as he perceived the two pedestrians, bore down on them with plodding but vigorous step. The shorter of the two turned pale, but tried to put on an air of dignified indifference. Soon the official ran in under their lee, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... it starves and dies. Carlisle simply stayed quiet and held her tongue; and as the days passed without more developments of any sort, she found her philosophical attitude thoroughly justified by events. Town-talk, that bugbear of the delicate-minded, shot off first to the Hoover divorce, and then to the somewhat public disagreement between the Governor of the State and Congressman Hardwicke, at the Chamber of Commerce luncheon for the visiting President; ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Australia. He would blow out his brains. He would have "an explanation" with Amelia, tell her that she was a vixen, and proclaim his hatred. He would rush down to Allington and throw himself in despair at Lily's feet. Amelia, was the bugbear of his life. Nevertheless, when she flirted with Cradell, he did not like it, and was ass enough to speak to ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... terrifying experience in the French capital, and not knowing when the Apache band might, knowing her part in the affair, avenge themselves upon her for the failure of the snare of "The Red Crawl," residence in France became a bugbear to Ailsa Lorne. Despite the pleadings of Athalie and the baron, whom she had served so well in giving help to Cleek, she was steadfast in her determination to leave it and to return to her native land. She therefore ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... on which a vote was taken related to the election for a borough. The ministers carried their point by six voices, [764] In an instant every thing was changed; the spell was broken; the Club, from being a bugbear, became a laughingstock; the timid and the venal passed over in crowds from the weaker to the stronger side. It was in vain that the opposition attempted to revive the disputes of the preceding year. The King had wisely authorised ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... memory, that it did artistic service in the way of a foil to the loveliness of the rectory garden. This garden was the rector's delight, but to my restless seven years it was a sort of gay-colored and ever-threatening bugbear. ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... known to us through its more serious effects. Why should he be ashamed of his own agitated feeling merely because he dressed for dinner, wore a white tie, and lived among people who might laugh at his owning any conscience in the matter, as the solemn folly of taking himself too seriously?—that bugbear of circles in which the lack of grave emotion passes for wit. From such cowardice before modish ignorance and obtuseness, Deronda shrank. But he also shrank from having his course determined by mere contagion, without consent of reason; or from allowing ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... which he uses something of the scholastick language, there is nothing but what every man has heard, and imagines himself to know. But who would not believe that some wonderful novelty is presented to his intellect, when he is afterwards told, in the true bugbear style, that "the ares, in the former sense, are things that lie between the have-beens and shall-bes. The have-beens are things that are past; the shall-bes are things that are to come; and the things that are, in the latter sense, are things that have not been, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... has been our nursery bugbear, to apprehend a Russian invasion on the Indus. This, by testimony from every quarter (the last being that of Sir Roderick Murchison, who had travelled over most of the ground), is an infinitely impossible chimera; ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... their quarters to the house of some other rich man where better food and better accommodation might be expected. There is nothing that a Corean fears so much as that people should speak ill of him, and especially this is the bugbear under which the nobleman of Cho-sen is constantly labouring, and upon which these black-mailers and "spongers" work. High officials, whose heads rest on their shoulders, "hung by a hair," like Damocles' sword, suffer very much at the hands of these marauders. Were ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... wife, as if resenting the word. "But you make such a bugbear of the least little matter that there's no encouragement ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells |
