"Livered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eh?" cried Tim Sullivan. "Well, they will thot! If there's a divil inside there's a worse one outside, an' thot's me! Git in there now, ye black-livered spalapeens!" and catching up a big club the Irishman made a rush for the hesitating laborers. With a howl they rushed into the tunnel, and were soon loading ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... him. I'll tell him to come in and get you. I'll show him the way in, you white-livered cur!" bullied the cattleman, giving way ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... black curs go," exclaimed the Professor as he polished his blue spectacles and mopped his face. "They are a white-livered lot of sneaks. Look! There she is, creeping off to the left. If we run round that sand-hill ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... spitefully ejecting a wad of tobacco from his mouth and swearing in an undertone about "white-livered Greasers." He cocked his ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... cried, "ain't you goin' to say your prayers, you white-livered electrician? Come, git up! If I'm to fight, you must pray! D'ye hear? ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... ye was a little white-livered sneak that wouldn't dare to put up your hands to a Sunkhaze mosquito of the June breed, an' that ye were tryin' to come in here an' do business amongst real men. I ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?... But I'm a dull and muddy mettled-rascal, Who calls me coward? gives me the lie i' the throat? ... Why I should take it; for it cannot be, But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall To ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... white-livered," I said with a species of laugh. "I never crowd and stare when somebody is hurt in ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... of those who had a few hours before fancied themselves masters of all the wealth of both Indies may easily be imagined. The Directors, in their fury, lost all self command, and, in their official letters, railed at the betrayers of Scotland, the white-livered deserters. The truth is that those who used these hard words were far more deserving of blame than the wretches whom they had sent to destruction, and whom they now reviled for not staying to be utterly destroyed. Nothing had happened but what might easily have ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... "old woman" stirred up Mrs. Crull. She left the old gentleman's side, and advanced to within a yard of the profligate. "Old as I am," said she, "I'm strong enough to spank such a white-livered, broken-down puppy as you are. But I'll leave you to the hands of the law. It's a long lane that hasn't any turning, remember; and you'll pull up at the gallows at ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... of honour, we are bound to stick to our word; and, hark ye, you dirty one-eyed scoundrel, if you don't immadiately make way for these leedies, and this lily-livered young jontleman who's crying so, the Meejor here and I will lug out and force you." And so saying, he drew his great sword and made a pass at Mr. Sicklop; which that gentleman avoided, and which caused him and his companion to retreat from ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... panted. "I give in! It's a fair cap! But if that white-livered hound had stood by me, I'd have beaten the lot of you! As it is, I've given as good as I've got, I fancy!" and he nodded tauntingly as he glanced to where ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... stranger. "Are your senses playing bo-peep with the ghost of some pigeon-livered coast captain, eh? Come, take another pull at the keg, to clear your head-lights, and tell us a bit ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... weight Was the least to dread,—aha, how we two laughed a-good As, stealing round the midden, he came on where I stood With billet poised and raised,—you, ready with the rope,— Ah, but that's past, that's sin repented of, we hope! Men knew us for that same, yet safe and sound stood we! The lily-livered knaves knew too (I've balked a d——) Our keeping the 'Pied Bull' was just a mere pretence: Too slow the pounds make food, drink, lodging, from out the pence! There's not a stoppage to travel has chanced, this ten long year, No break into hall or grange, no ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... "Silence! ye milk-livered slave!" cried the young laird. "Do ye pretend to bear the name o' Scott, and yet tremble like an ash leaf at the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... the miscreant cry and idiot laugh, withdrew to sigh his last breath in foreign climes. The public is as envious and ungrateful as it is ignorant, stupid, and pigeon-livered— ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... "Is there another white-livered town in the whole realm where the operatives are all working half-time, and thanking the Capitalists for keeping the mills going, and only starving them by inches?" said Devilsdust ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... crime Booth found on whom he could rely. John Surratt was sent northward by his mother on Thursday. Sam Arnold and McLaughlin, each of whom was to kill a cabinet officer, grew pigeon-livered and ran away. Harold true to his partiality, lingered around Booth to the end; Atzerott went so far as to take his knife and pistol to Kirkwood's, where President Johnson was stopping, and hid them under the bed. But either his courage failed, or a trifling ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... think, for my part, such a white-livered, baby-faced chap as you are would have been better off at your mother's apron strings, than coming so far from home ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... types," and that those types are repeated until they became conventionalized. There is always a very bad and a very good woman, a very generous and noble man and one so bad as to seem a monster. There is the type of the "love-lorn maiden," of "the lily-livered" hero, of the faithful friend, of the poltroon. It is supposed by many that such types repeated in play after play do not mark the highest original power, but rather poverty of invention, weak and shadowy conception, indistinctness of coloring. ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... Daylight commanded. "Take that chair over there, you gangrene-livered skunk. Jump! By God! or I'll make you leak till folks'll think your father was a water hydrant and your mother a sprinkling-cart. You-all move your chair alongside, Guggenhammer; and you-all Dowsett, sit right there, while I just irrelevantly explain the virtues of this here ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... thought," exclaimed Dolphin. "You're a cock-tail. In your old age you've grown white-livered. I guess, Garstang, you'd better retire, and leave those to carry out the work who don't know ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... there was quite a meeting of our folks here. My back gate kept a-clicking till sundown. All but Paterson came, Miss Jenkins, and he's less than half a Roscoe, and no Collamer at all. His mother was one of them white-livered Lulls, from Pomfret. He's bound, anyway, to stand by you, because he's getting wages from your uncle. Well, I settled it all then and there, this fair business, I mean, but I told them to wait, for I ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... hear me? Goon! What is it ye are, annyhow, a bunch of white-livered cowards that ye can't work ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... man at the bottom of all this trouble," our host had been remarking, one second earlier. "The niggers know too much; and where did they get their rifles? People at Rozenboom's believe some black-livered traitor has been stirring up the Matabele for weeks and weeks. An enemy of Rhodes's, of course, jealous of our advance; a French agent, perhaps; but more likely one of these confounded Transvaal Dutchmen. Depend upon ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... short," interposed Kansas Kimball, with an oath. "Daylight will catch us and nothing done, if we listen to that white-livered spy. We don't believe in that wagon he talks about, and as for this kid, he brought her along ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... find out. You white livered Abolitionist, come out, damn you! we are going to give you a coat of tar and feathers, and your black wench nine-and-thirty. Yes, come down—come down!" shouted several, "or we will ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... write me such infernal trash about the opinions of a villanous dog who can't even en a decent sentence? I've been damning you for a white-livered Austrian up and down the house. Let the fellow bark till he froths at the mouth, and scatters the virus of the beast among his filthy friends. I am mad-dog proof. The lines you quote were written ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a coward—a mean, white-livered coward. You have skulked in the after house, behind women, when there was man's work to do. If I wash that deck, it will be ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... well as a fool," he said afterwards in the bosom of his family; "a white-livered fool who hasn't the nerve to look at a ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sobbed at last. "He's a nervous, chicken-livered kind of man; and when I look at him he turns the colour of putty. If I pass his shop I usually just drop in and stand and look at him. I never speak, but just look. It paralyses him. Sometimes the shop is full of people; but it is ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... anyhow," said Johnson, addressing his remarks exclusively to Mr. Bates, but his glare exclusively to Mr. Applerod. "I'm going to put this check into the hands of Mr. Chalmers, so Mr. Robert don't get cheated by any yellow-livered snake in the grass!" And he spit out those last violent words with a sudden vehemence which made Mr. Applerod ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... starting to her feet, hurried away, and hid herself in the room where the bucklers were hung up. There, bolting the door, she bawled from her refuge, "Drive out that black-visaged coward, that murderer of innocents, that white-livered terror of house-lambs, who durst not look a ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... here, and damned welcome to you. At the same time, if I ware telling anybody as to what kind of a fellow you was, I should say,—yessir, after thinking the matter over carefully, and taking all points into consideration,—I might say that I thought ye an all-around white-livered, cowardly cuss, an' that's ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... those chicken-livered black-hided cowards laughing to themselves about the way they fooled vessels with their ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... government in this instance. I'm standing for Uncle Sam. That's what I meant when I took those ten per cent. contracts. I'm too old to go out and fight his enemies abroad, but I can stay behind and watch for yellow-livered buzzards such as you. Call that business, do you? Fattening your dividends by sending our boys up against the Prussian guns in junky motor-tanks covered with tin armor! Bah! Your ethics need chloride of lime on them. And you come here whining that ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... cowardly; fearful, shy; timid, timorous; skittish; poor- spirited, spiritless, soft, effeminate. weak-minded; infirm of purpose &c. 605; weak-hearted, fainthearted, chickenhearted, henhearted[obs3], lilyhearted, pigeon-hearted; white- livered[obs3], lily-livered, milk-livered[obs3]; milksop, smock-faced; unable to say " bo " to a goose. dastard, dastardly; base, craven, sneaking, dunghill, recreant; unwarlike, unsoldier-like. " in face a lion but in heart a deer". unmanned; frightened ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... God that o'er-rulest The waters, and coolest The face of the foolish With the touch of thy death, I, Sadler, a Yankee, Lean, leathery, lanky, Red-livered and cranky, ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... "I'm not chicken-livered, Raffles, but I'm mighty glad my lines are cast in less strenuous scenes. When a book-agent comes in here, for instance, and holds me up for nineteen dollars a volume for a set of Kipling in words of one syllable, illustrated by his aunt, and every volume autographed by ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... he said, half-aloud, "that was Monsieur's reason for coming to Azay-le-Roi! And she won't have him! All women are fools, and these great ladies seem to be the biggest fools of all. She will not find his equal among the white-livered aristocrats who swarm around her. I wish I could revenge Monsieur for this," he said, savagely, and jumping on his horse he rode after the ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... He was carrying his lily-livered pacifism right to the White House, and I couldn't see it. So I fought him every inch of the way. I'll fight what he ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... benefit of the cook I informed him that Scotty was a damned liar; that it was I who had been with him; that he ran like a white-livered cur under fire from his cookhouse and didn't stop until he had reached the wagon lines; that he was there without being relieved and that he would shortly have another ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... t'ye, Joel for a lily-livered dog!" growled a great, bony fellow, "Here's good an ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... "You little, white-livered sneak," he said in a deep rumbling voice that was like thunder in the still room. "Pull yourself together and try to be a man. Take on the bet or not, whichever you like. You're savin' up for the housekeepin' I suppose. Well, take it or leave it—fifty pounds that I ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... "Well, he's a white-livered scoundrel. He's a type of your Northern gentlemen. A Southern man would starve rather than act so pusillanimously. Of course I'm not going to talk of family secrets, or say anything not befitting a high-toned gentleman, but I taught that snob how a man ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... imprecations. 'You noisy slut,' he growled, shoving his face, hideous in its crape mask, into the coach, and speaking in a voice husky with liquor, 'will you stop your whining? Or must I blow you to pieces with my Toby? For you, you white-livered sneak,' he continued, addressing the tutor, 'give me any more of your piping and I'll cut out your tongue! Who is hurting you, I'd like to know! As for you, my fine lady, have a care of your skin, for if I pull you out into the road it will be the worse for ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... that white-livered hypocrite, it is useless for me to try to convince you. But, if you must know it,—though, mind you, I tell you this only because you compel me,—I once interfered, because my conscience forced me to do so, in a very disgraceful love-affair of his in Denmark. He has hated me ever since, and ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... those days, Bill; it'll drive me mad. Oh! if I was a boy again! But no, no; I'm a fool,' exclaimed he, springing up, apparently swallowing his emotion at one fierce gulp, and in an instant becoming as hardened as ever. 'Am I crazy, to-night, or what ails me, that I've become as white-livered as a girl? Where's the grog? Give us a sup; and we'll see what's to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... a glass of wine—'t is delicious," said Philip, taking another tart at the same time. "For to tell you the truth, my friend, I think you are rather a white-livered sort of rogue for a colonel, to think of hanging, drowning, shooting, and poisoning yourself about such a ridiculous story as that. One of these modes would be too much, but as to all the four—nonsense. I tell you that at this moment I ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... this but a more perfect expression of Hamlet's nature than Hamlet himself gives? Hamlet declares bitterly that he is "pigeon livered," and lacks "gall to make oppression bitter"; he says to Laertes, "I loved you ever," ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... "Don't be white-livered, Martin!" sneered Norton. "You may get some cold steel from your own countrymen for uttering such sentiments. My information is all right, it comes from his lordship himself. Washington is too dangerous to leave longer alone; ...
— Then Marched the Brave • Harriet T. Comstock
... "That bull I imported last fall for three thousand dollars," he went on, turning back to the foreman. "They shot him up and drove off his twenty-five cows from the Coyote Bluff pastures. Dirty spite an' meanness. The white-livered scum!" Then with a fierce oath the usually even-tempered Bud hurled his wrath upon the waiting man. "Gorl darn it, you're standin' around like a barbed wire fence post. What in hell's brought you around now? ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... the rest of the body, and a separate name devised for it, before the belief that the hair was the source of strength could gradually come into existence. The evolution of these ideas may have extended over thousands of years. The expression 'white-livered,' again, seems to indicate that the quality of courage was once held to be located in the liver, and the belief that the liver was the seat of life was perhaps held by the Gonds. But the primary idea seems necessarily to have been that the life was equally distributed all over the body. And ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... readily, and is accompanied by a knight named Acars, who has charge of a casket of jewels destined for the princess as a wedding-gift. Young Aigres encounters and kills the lions singlehanded, and the lily-livered and faithless Acars envies him the glory of his exploit. On their way back to Loquiferne with the Princess Melia, as they pass near a deep well Acars purposely allows the casket of jewels to fall into it and pretends to be distracted at the misfortune. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... saw that their training must begin earlier; the old junior class has become the senior class, and a new junior class has been set on foot which begins its recreational exercises in the service of William II., Got and Allah, at the age of eight. It is all great fun, but those pigeon-livered little boys who are not diverted by it have to go on with their fun all the same, for, needless to say, the Izji is compulsory on all boys. Of course they wear a uniform which is made in Germany and ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... enough for lily-livered, goose-fleshed lawyers to hold their tongues when men and soldiers talk," I retorted. "We are not making indentures to the devil, and so have no need of ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... of a pardner that 'ar yaller-livered Mayfield would make up on that box, partik'ly ez I heard before we started that he'd requested the kimpany's agent in Sacramento to select a driver ez didn't cuss, smoke, or drink. He ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... evenings last Fall with oil-cloth capes and kerosene lamps. I told you that those fellows'd be no where when the war they were trying to bring on came. I'm not at all astonished that he showed himself lily-livered when he found the people that he was willing to rob of their property standing ready to fight for ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... Massachusetts, for having called out the militia promptly in the flurry of May 26th. After fairly exhausting its jeering and sneering on this subject, that portion of the Northern Fourth Estate which would be termed Satanic and traitorous were it not too utterly white-livered and cowardly to be complimented with such forcible indices of even bad character, had a cruel extinguisher clapped upon it on May 29th, by a letter to the Boston Journal from Lieutenant-Colonel ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... Naab waved his arm from the gaping crowd to the swinging rustlers. "You've led these white-livered Mormons to do my work. How can I avenge ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... are, flabby, bony, white-livered, or'nary suckers. Niggers and Injuns won't touch 'em, ony in the spring; they'd ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... going to clear out and shut up. Valencia's liver is whiter than paper; it's as Pastiri says. Brave enough when it comes to exploiting boobs like you and the other tramps and low lives,... but when he bucks up against a chap that's all there, hey? Bah! He's a white-livered wretch, that's what." ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... professions—who take every tenderness their wives bring them, and every expression of affection, and every service, and every yearning sympathy, and trample them under feet without tasting them, and without a look of gratitude in their eyes. Hard, cold, thin-blooded, white-livered, contemptible curmudgeons—they think their wives weak and foolish, and themselves wise and dignified! I beg my readers to assist me in despising them. I do not feel adequate to the task ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... white-livered wretch!" the scold again yelled. At this moment she went soaring off into the air. A piercing shriek came from her lips as she found herself swinging out over the pond. ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... I am, I have observed these three swashers. I am boy to them all three: but all they three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for, indeed, three such antics do not amount to a man. For Bardolph,—he is white-livered, and red-faced; by the means whereof 'a faces it out, but fights not. For Pistol,—he hath a killing tongue, and a quiet sword; by the means whereof 'a breaks words, and keeps whole weapons. For Nym,—he hath heard, that men of a few words are the best men; and therefore he scorns to say ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... sure of one thing, my friend," the duke observed. "I shall never give Lorance de Montluc to a white-livered flincher." ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... something more in you than texts and litanies and the Athanasian creed, I'll be hanged if I'd ever have let you look twice at Edith. That girl has got blood in her veins, David; she's not to be thrown away on any lantern-jawed, white-livered doctor of souls, I ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... open the door. "Small credit to you. Even the women are out for capital and corruption, I hear. Your Governor's done more for the United Breweries in six months than I've been able to do in six years. He's the lily-livered sort we're ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... white-livered cowards have their way," the old sailor said, contemptuously. "Put their captain on the top of them. Now ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... to twist his head towel around his nose. With feeblest protest Isuke saw him take the torch and disappear into the passage. Soon his voice was heard. "Isuke! Isuke! Is he milk livered? How about the gold and silver? Would Isuke abandon it?" Isuke would not. In a trice he was on hands and knees, to rejoin his master who was roaring with laughter. "Gold and silver may be here," Shu[u]zen explained. "Otherwise Isuke would have backed out of the undertaking, all the way ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... opposition to the will of the majority meant nothing; his voice raised in opposition meant much. For very soon the avowed pacifists and the secret protagonists of Kultur, the blood-eyed anarchists and the lily-livered dissenters, the conscientious objectors and the conscienceless I.W.W. group, saw in him a buttress upon which to stay their cause. The lone wolf wasn't a lone wolf any longer—he had a pack to rally about him, yelping approval of his every word. Day by day he grew ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... she cried, "what do I want with that! God in heaven, are you utterly devoid of all sensibility, all heart? Or are you afraid—afraid even yet, oh, very chicken-livered lover—that behind the beauty of Naples you may find the filth? It is not so, Dickie. It is not so, I tell you.—Look at me. What would you have more? Surely, for any man, my love ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... tag and hockey,—and taught him to swim and row, and to fight bigger boys and leave smaller boys in peace, instructions which he was at first inclined to reverse,—and put him in the way to be an honest, fearless man, when he was in danger of becoming a white-faced and white-livered spooney. And that Noisy Boy himself, perversely declining to verify Mr. Abbott's decorous prophecies, has not turned out badly, after all, but has Reverend before his name and reverence in his heart, and has his theology sound because his lungs are so. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... said, with the utmost apparent sincerity. "Think of the disgrace! It would be in all the papers that Professor Scotch, a white-livered Northerner, after insulting Colonel La Salle Vallier and presenting his card, had taken to his heels in the most cowardly fashion, and had fled from the city without giving the colonel the satisfaction that is due from one gentleman to another. The Northern papers would copy, and you ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... come to the point," urged the junior member of the firm impatiently. "It is no news to me that your brain is diseased and your heart rotten. What is it you want me to do? Calm yourself, you white-livered maniac. I gather that I am in some way to meddle with this mine. If I but had your head for my very own along with the sand in my craw, I'd tell you to go to hell. Having only brains enough to know what I am, I'm cursed by having to depend upon you. ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... bullies are always white-livered rogues," observed Buttar, "so are nearly all the tyrants one reads about in history. Conscience makes cowards of them all. Depend on it that he will hold his tongue, and neither tell the Doctor nor any ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... her from under his eyebrows. "He's all in, but he's got to make it," he said. "I've been that way myself—and made it. What I can do, a horse can do. Come on, you yella-livered bonehead!" ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... Lennox. If there's one mean thing I nachally despises as a stunnin' insult, it's being named white-livered; and my Confederate record is jest as good as if I wore three gilt stars on my coat collar. You might say I was a liar and a thief, and maybe I would take it as a joke; but don't call Bedney Darrington no coward! It bruises my feelins mor'n I'le stand. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... blow the money in; and this man ended up with manslaughter. I got him convicted, though they were scared of the Mountain even at Nettleton; and then a queer thing happened. The fellow sent for me to go and see him in gaol. I went, and this is what he says: 'The fool that defended me is a chicken-livered son of a—and all the rest of it,' he says. 'I've got a job to be done for me up on the Mountain, and you're the only man I seen in court that looks as if he'd do it.' He told me he had a child up there—or thought he had—a little girl; and he wanted her ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... next term he whispered to me half a word that perhaps he had been wrong. With all a stupid boy's slowness, I said nothing; and he had not the courage to carry reparation further. All that was fifty years ago, and it burns me now as though it were yesterday. What lily-livered curs those boys must have been not to have told the truth!—at any rate as far as I was concerned. I remember their names well, and almost ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... exclaimed, "it's durned ridic'lous. Ther's two fellers we know livin' in the hills. Jest two. Ther's Buck an'—the Padre. Buck's bin around this creek ever since he was raised. I ain't no use for Buck. He's kind o' white livered, but he's a straight citizen. Then the Padre," he laughed again, "he's too good. Say, he's next best to a passon. So it can't ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... charges himself with lack of feeling, spirit, and courage, in that he has not yet taken vengeance on his uncle. But unless we are prepared to accept and justify to the full his own hardest words against himself, and grant him a muddy-mettled, pigeon-livered rascal, we must examine and understand him, so as to account for his conduct better than he could himself. If we allow that perhaps he accuses himself too much, we may find on reflection that he accuses himself altogether ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... men who have been trained in our public schools, who stand by and refuse to help; what shall we say of them? And you young chaps, healthy, strong, unmarried, without home ties, what if you refuse to respond to the call of your country? I will tell you what I think of you: you are white-livered cowards." ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... nothing strange in him. Any low hound will sell out to save his hide. No, Dan, I mean the other. I mean the old man. He's the one who used to run the blockade off Mobile, and a whiter-livered, more contemptible old grandmother I never hope to see anywhere, no, never! Yet not a month ago, the day of that Cimatario scrimmage, I found him on the battlefield, and he had been wounded. But he didn't seem to know it. He didn't even seem to know that the shells were still ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... sergeant, in a whisper, "you're right about the chaplain's sermon. It's the duty of every man who can carry a gun to fight for his country. I saw the chaplain looking straight at you, and he was as mad as fire. A white-livered coward stands a mighty poor chanst of salvation, is what the ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... frequenting. They accosted him: by taunts and jeers which he had not firmness enough to resist, they drew him into their company. Once there, they thought him within their power. When they could not induce him to violate his pledge by taking rum, they called him a "cold-water man;" "a white-livered coward;" "priest-ridden;" "afraid of his minister," and many other titles of reproach. They then told him he had not promised to drink no wine; and, after much persuasion, they induced him to take a glass. But in this glass they had mingled the poison. Once stimulated, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... speech, and one which should have put heart into the veriest white-livered militiaman that ever pretended to be a soldier; but, to my surprise, I could see on the faces of those who had talked surrender the loudest, an expression telling that the words passed by them as does ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... use yo' comin' back," the darky blurted out. "I'm gwineter do de cookin' and de chamber-wo'k. Dere ain't 'nough to eat fo' mo'n two. When dem white-livered, no-count, onery gemmens dat stole Marse George's money git in de chain-gang, whar dey b'longs, den may be we'll hab sumpin' to go to market on, but dat ain't yit; an' don't ye tell Marse George I tol' yer or I'll ha'nt ye like dat witch I done heared 'bout down to Wesley—ha'nt ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... became completely deserted; Shaftesbury, Sturminster, and Sherborne, shared in her ruin; and Swindon became one of the most flourishing places in the kingdom." We cannot think so meanly of our countrymen, as to suppose that they will yield like white-livered cravens, and die without a struggle; and in thus raising the voice of Maga to warn them of their danger, and instruct them how to avoid it, we consider that we are doing the state some service, and pointing out new means profitable employment for the capital of the rich, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... lily-livered; seldom he witnessed what others died under; he intended nothing further then;—many men who faint at sight of blood can probe a soul to its utmost gasp. Now he motioned, and they paused. Then others lifted the woman and held her beside him, yet a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... of the man who split upon me. That's my maxim, and pass me the liquor.—You wouldn't turn on a man. I know you. You're an honest feller, and will stand by a feller, and have looked death in the face like a man. But as for that lily-livered sneak—that poor lyin' swindlin' cringin' cur of a Clavering—who stands in my shoes—stands in my shoes, hang him! I'll make him pull my boots off and clean 'em, I will. Ha, ha!" Here he burst out into a wild laugh, at which Strong ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 'You white-livered dog!' I broke out. 'Do you dare to tell me you're an Englishman, and won't fight? But I'll stand no more of this! I leave this place, where I've been insulted! Here! what's to pay? Pay yourself!' ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a difference, lad," Cross pointed out, setting down the tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like it, because we ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Nicolson! Stand back, you white-livered hounds! First one of you lays a hand on me or Daddy Nep gets his head blown off! Damn you, Mosely! don't make me tell you again ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... and nights. 'T was luck That he still lived.... And queer how little then He seemed to care that Dick.... perhaps 't was pluck That hardened him—a man among the men— Perhaps.... Yet, only think things out a bit, And he was rabbit-livered, blue with funk! And he'd liked Dick ... and yet when Dick was hit He hadn't turned a hair. The meanest skunk He should have thought would feel it when his mate Was blown to smithereens—Dick, proud as punch, Grinning like sin, and holding up the plate— But he had gone on munching his ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... a word to say for yersilf, ye white-livered coward? Is there niver anudder lie on yer tongue like thim ye found so handy this twelvemonth back? Git out uv me sight, ye spalpeen, and out uv me doors! Go find them as'll kape yees to stale rich folks' children, an' thin lie ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... that brave fellow—once my dear friend, my rival now, by no fault of his—will rise between her and me, and reproach me with my bloody inheritance. The heart never deceives; I feel it now whispering in my ear: 'Skulking captain, white-livered soldier, that stand behind a parapet while a better man does your work! you assassinate the husband, but the rival conquers you.' There, he puts his hand to his ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... "tenderloin," a procurer of young girls to glut the lust of godless libertines. Its sign was the ligniyoni, its ideal the almighty dollar. Through its feculent columns Muckle- mouthed Meg and Doll Tearsheet made assignations with forks-of-the-creeks fools, while blear-eyed bummers and rotten-livered rounders requested respectable women to meet them at unfrequented places and wear camp-meeting lingerie. The ICONOCLAST compelled its unrespected contemporary to purify its "personal column"—and this service to society has never been forgiven by the bench- legged hydrocephalous grand ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... afraid, Black Cat? Only white-livered cowards fear the Sioux! Surely no Mandane brave fears the Sioux—ugh! ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... the outer gate when Belden came clattering up and reined his horse across the path and called out: "See here, you young skunk, you're a poor, white-livered tenderfoot, and I can't bust you as I would a full-grown man, but I reckon you better not ride this ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... "Jee-rusalem, ye white-livered Dutchman!" screamed out the other, now white with rage, and with his eyes glaring like those of a tiger, as he threw out his arms and rushed at Jan Steenbock, "I'll give ye goss fur ev'ry lyin' word ye hev ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... "You are both white-livered cowards," roared Sibley. "One sneaks off under cover of the day—I never saw a fellow taken with a pious fit so suddenly before. The other, in order to keep his skin whole, prates of his dread lest his principles be punctured. the devil take you both for a brace of champion sneaks;" and he ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... what? To renew his old life and habits? No, no! The horrors of his recent imprisonment and escape were still too fresh in his memory; he was not safe yet. Then he wondered if he had not grown spiritless and pigeon-livered in his solitude and loneliness. The next day he searched for her with his glass, and saw her playing with one of the children on the beach,—a very picture of child or nymphlike innocence. Perhaps it ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... this coast country. It's Orloff's work, the renegade. 'Father,' he calls himself. Father to these devils he rules and robs for himself in the name of the Church. His hate is bitter, and he'd have my life if these watery-livered curs didn't dread the sound of my voice. God help him ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... a burden to you, if I were! I'd learn you to ill-use a woman! I'd give it you, you white-livered dotipole [cowardly simpleton] of a Pharisee! Never since the ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... the infinite Future is his vassal; History holds her iron stylus as his scribe; Lachesis awaits his word to close or to suspend her fatal shears;—but the moment his vote is cast, he becomes the serf of circumstance, at the mercy of the white-livered representative's cowardice, or the venal one's itching palm. Our only safety, then, is in the aggregate fidelity to personal rectitude, which may lessen the chances of representative dishonesty, or, at the worst, constitute a public opinion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... a acorn drappin'. You fellers is afeerd o' yore shadders; what does the gang mean by sendin' out sech white-livered chaps?" The only sound for a moment was the gurgling of the whiskey as it ran into the jug. "How's Toot like his isolation?" concluded Dill, grunting as he lifted the jug down from ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... his part. Right or wrong, he was not the man to see a great and beneficent Act in danger of postponement without being tempted to secure it if he could do so by terrifying some unprincipled and white-livered opponents. With the knowledge that he was always acquiring of the persons in politics, he had been able to pick out two Democratic Congressmen who were fit for his purpose—presumably they lay under suspicion of one of those treasonable practices which martial law under Lincoln ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... helpless agony. Slightly wounded soldiers went limping to the rear, seeking surgical aid; while badly wounded men were eagerly caught up and borne off the field by their "comrades in battle" or by white-livered recreants, anxious to desert their braver companions and place themselves in safety. A certain percentage of such craven-hearted libels on humanity—let it be said here—are always to be found in every army and on every battle-field, dusky ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... words," answered Duncan with measureless contempt in his tone, "you are a miserable coward, a white-livered wretch, whose life wouldn't be worth saving if it were in danger. Go back to your bed! Go to sleep! or go to hell, damn you, for the cowardly ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston |
