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More "Abortive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in-madness w-will p-pass for w-wit w-with nine-ninet-teen out of t-twenty.' — 'And affected stuttering for humour: replied our landlord, tho', God knows, there is an affinity betwixt them.' It seems, this wag, after having made some abortive attempts in plain speaking, had recourse to this defect, by means of which he frequently extorted the laugh of the company, without the least expence of genius; and that imperfection, which he had at ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... these abortive attempts been crushed before another avenue of hope opened itself to Charles and his adherents. It was one for which Hyde had no great liking, and from which he expected little good result. But obviously it was not ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... so far in the confidence of Queen Henrietta Maria, as to be sent as her envoy to the captive king, beseeching him to save his head by conceding the demands of Parliament. When, the errand proving abortive, the royal head was lost, Davenant returned to Paris, consoled himself by finishing the first two books of his "Gondibert," and then, despairing of a restoration, embarked (in 1650) from France for Virginia, where monarchy and the rights of Charles ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... (Landtage) met at Innsbruck, a proceeding which marks the beginning of an organic unity in the Austrian lands. In these ways Maximilian proved himself a capable and energetic ruler, although his plans for making Austria into a kingdom, or an electorate, were abortive. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... their design had proved abortive, went directly to the place of rendezvous, and told the first of his troops whom he met that they had lost their labour, and must return to their cave. He himself set them the example, and they all ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... smashing blow on his own knuckles. With admirable presence of mind he crushed down an oath and substituted the harmless comment, "Butter fingers!" But the pain was sharp, his nerve was shaken, and after an abortive trial he found he must desist ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dearth; and, as a rule, the crisis ended long before the cumbrous machinery of the law enabled the new lands to come under the plough. It is, however, possible that he hoped to inaugurate a system of enclosures of waste lands by a clause which appeared in his abortive proposals of the year 1797 for the relief of the poor. His Bill on that subject comprised not only very generous plans of relief, but also the grant of cows to the deserving poor, the erection of Schools of Industry in every parish or group of parishes, and facilities ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... supposed the force of the water where it flowed smoothly, would not be as great as where it dashed against the rocks and appeared more boisterous. This was a mistake. Every endeavor to fix a bent where the water was smooth, proved utterly abortive. At length an architect conceived the idea of placing the bridge, down where the water began to be broken in its descent, and of obtaining a foot-hold for his bent, behind some rock against which ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... stricken down with a severe sickness, and they were compelled to lie in camp and attend to the sufferings of their unfortunate comrade. He had a high fever, grew delirious, and as in those days bleeding was considered a panacea for all the ills that flesh is heir to, the captain made several abortive attempts to draw the diseased blood from the poor man, but failed completely. He also dosed his victim with copious draughts of calomel, but the result was far from salutary; the man grew worse, but the party determined ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... chivalrous sincerity and disinterestedness of Hamilton pervaded the assembly with all the power of his fascinating manners. The flashing eloquence of Gouverneur Morris recalled the dangers of anarchy, which must be accepted as the alternative of an abortive experiment. The calm, clear, statesmanlike views of Madison, the searching and profound expositions of King, the prudent influence of Franklin, at ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... of January, 1604, which saw here such magnificent masquings saw also in Hampton Court a gathering of a very different kind—a gathering which, although it proved abortive so far as its particular purpose was concerned, yet had one remarkable consequence. Says Carlyle in his survey of the beginnings of the seventeenth-century prefatory to the ...
— Hampton Court • Walter Jerrold
... time the captain's wrath had been diverted to the mate. He struck out with his right hand, intending to fell him to the ground, but, the mate swerving, he fell from the force of his abortive blow, and, being under the influence of his morning potations, could not ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... neither the king nor their own accomplice, Rutland, had arrived. Suspecting treachery they resolved to proceed at once to Windsor and surprise Henry, but arrived only to find that he had escaped. They afterwards raised the standard of revolt, but their insurrection proved abortive, and the fate of the leaders ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... one of those families who did not now receive her. However, in the drawing-rooms where she still appeared—and what were they but marriage markets?—one or two affairs did spring up—tentative approachments on the part of scions of wealth. They were destined to prove abortive. One of these youths, Pedro Ricer Marcado, a Brazilian, educated at Oxford, promised much for sincerity and feeling until he learned that Berenice was poor in her own right—and what else? Some one had whispered something ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... composer, or when the first tenor at the Argentina theatre has lost his voice on the way, or when the male prima donna[4.1] of the Valle theatre is laid up with a cold,—in brief, when the chief source of recreation which the Romans were hoping to find proves abortive, and then comes Holy Thursday and all at once cuts off all the hopes which might perhaps have been realized It was just after one of these unlucky Carnivals—almost before the strict fast-days were past, when a certain Nicolo Musso opened a theatre ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... was marked by disillusions and failures. Since the war on the nobles had begun in 1789, all their efforts at resistance, disdainful at first, stubborn later on, blundering always, had been pitifully abortive. Their rebuffs could no longer be counted, and there was some justification in that for the scornful hatred on the part of the new order towards a caste which for so many centuries had believed themselves to be possessed of all the talents. Many of them, it is true, had resigned themselves ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... Society do the same effect, and is judged to be the same thing with the poyson both in colour and smell, and effect. I saw also an abortive child preserved fresh in spirits of salt. Thence parted, and to White Hall to the Councilchamber about an order touching the Navy (our being empowered to commit seamen or Masters that do not, being hired ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... asked I. But I knew he meant an abortive sketch of Phillis, which had not been successful enough for him to complete ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... throne is not in itself improbable. Indeed, it is possible that many such plots were entered into by Egyptian patriots during the long ages of their country's bondage. But ancient history tells us little of the abortive ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... the father's speculations was soon seen. Deprived of Laird Lewis's personal and active superintendence, all his undertakings miscarried, and became either abortive or perilous. Without a single spark of energy to meet or repel these misfortunes, Godfrey put his faith in the activity of another. He kept neither hunters, nor hounds, nor any other southern preliminaries to ruin; but, as has been observed of his countrymen, he kept ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... emphasis and significant eyes—as that Bampton preacher not long ago, who assured us, apropos of the resurrection of the body, that 'all attempts to resuscitate the inanimate corpse by natural methods had hitherto been experimentally abortive.' I go into the place where degrees are given—the Convocation, I think—and there one hears a deal of unmeaning Latin for hours, graces, dispensations, and proctors walking up and down for nothing; all in order to keep up a sort of ghost of things passed away ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... last effort. This was hosiery webbing, which could be cut up and made into as-yet-unheard-of garments. Miss Pinnegar kept her thumb on this enterprise, so that it was not much more than abortive. And then James left ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... as the lines of sight of the two observers and B converge at this point. But whether the explosion occurs immediately above the vessel as is desired, it is impossible to say definitely, because it may explode too far behind to be effective. Consequently, if this shell should prove abortive, the practice is to decrease the range gradually with each succeeding round until the explosion occurs at the critical point, when, of course, the balloon is destroyed. An interesting idea of the difficulty of picking up the range of ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... sight of all this helpless though secretly critical womanhood disposed attentively about him invariably, through association of ideas, brought to his mind every similar and abortive attempt he had made in this direction. When he opened the book to read aloud to them, he was always irritated, with that deep-seated irascibility which has its foundation in self-discontent, however externals may ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... recently been written upon the subject of an abortive Renaissance within the Middle Ages. The centre of it was France, and its period of brilliancy may be roughly defined as the middle and end of the twelfth century. Much, again, has been said about the religious movement in England, which spread to Eastern Europe, and ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... tiny fishing village and resort on the coast—an ugly village, robbed of quaintness by its rows of villas owned by summer visitors. The villas are red and yellow brick, built chateau fashion and set at random on the sand. Efforts at lawns have proved abortive. The encroaching dunes gradually cover the grass. Here and there are streets; and there is one main thoroughfare, along which is a tramway that formerly connected ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... operations of 1812 are of quite minor importance. No more than two are worthy of being mentioned between the greater events before and after them. Both were abortive attempts at invasion—one across the upper Niagara, the other across the frontier ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... part of the current, which accident was observed by a part of the family then at the front windows of the house; sudden and dreadful as the alarm was, they had the consolation of seeing the sagacious animal instantaneously follow his companion, when after diving, and making two or three abortive attempts, by laying hold of different parts of his apparel, which as repeatedly gave way or overpowered his exertions, he then, with the most determined and energetic fortitude, seized him by the arm, and brought him to the edge of the bank, where the domestics of ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... coast to be devoured by a monster of the deep) on condition he might make her his wife: but Phineas, her uncle, sought to prevent him, by attempting, with a party, to carry off the bride. The attempt, notwithstanding, was rendered abortive; for the hero, by showing them the head of the Gorgon, at once ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... to as one suffering from oppression and injustice. It was, therefore, distinctly a class movement, and its class-consciousness was sufficiently developed to keep its leaders from wasting their lives in abortive appeals to the master class. The leading exponents of this Communism of the workers were Wilhelm Weitling, in Germany, and Etienne ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... of some alleviation in no long time opened upon me; but this my usual ill fortune rendered abortive. The keeper once more made his appearance, and with his former constitutional and ambiguous humanity. He pretended to be surprised at my want of every accommodation. He reprehended in strong terms ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... they were flocks of wool. But it often happens, too, that a man of might strikes a blow which falls without effect upon a stubborn stone; a short, sharp report is heard, and all is over. History is able to record little or nothing of such abortive efforts. Hence the anxiety which every one must feel who, observing the approach of an event, wonders whether those about to witness it will be worthy of it. This reciprocity between an act and its reception is ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Murray.' But Wolfe knew a good man when he saw one and gave his full confidence to his 'old antagonist' both at Louisbourg and Quebec. Murray was not born under a lucky star. He saw three defeats in three successive wars. He began his service with the abortive attack on pestilential Cartagena, where Wolfe's father was present as adjutant-general. In mid-career he lost the battle of Ste Foy. [Footnote: See The Winning of Canada, chap. viii. See also, for the best account of this battle and other events of the year between Wolfe's victory and ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as if he were a stranger in a city halfway around ...
— The First One • Herbert D. Kastle
... promptings of their long-checked ambition. Soon several hundreds of waggons drawn by long teams of oxen came lumbering into Natal, for the purpose of establishing there the Republic, which had so often been planned out in imagination and never yet found any but an abortive existence. This ideal State was eventually formed and called the Republic of Natalia, and it enjoyed for several ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... and Tunis, there was a recognized medium of negotiation of which the relations took advantage. As will presently be seen, the office of consul in those days carried with it little of the power or dignity that becomes it now, and the efforts of the consul were often abortive. ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... house an embarrass. He gives that pretended lady the small-pox. Other contrivances in his head to bring Clarissa back, if she should get away. Miss Howe's scheme of Mrs. Townsend is, he says, a sword hanging over his head. He must change his measures to render it abortive. He is of the true lady-make. What that is. Another conversation between them. Her apostrophe to her father. He is temporarily moved. Dorcas gives him notice of a paper she has come at, and is transcribing. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... fort was at last cleared of snow. It was now ready, waiting for the elements to render abortive in a few short hours the labour of many days. Julyman and Steve had spent the brief daylight in setting up a snow-break before the open sheds which housed the sleds and canoes. Oolak was at the quarters of the train ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... opening a way to the wound. Out over the flats swung the long skirmish line, picturesque in the variety of its undress, Cutler striding vociferous in its wake, while a bugler ran himself out of breath, far to the eastward front, to puff feeble and abortive breath into unresponsive copper. And still the same flutter of distant, scattering shots came drifting back from the brakes and canons in the rocky wilds beyond the stream. The guard still pursued and the Indians still led, but ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... middle 'fifties coal-boring in Scotland was not the honourable profession that it now is. More than once, speculators procured lying reports that there were no minerals, and after landowners had been ruined by their abortive preliminary experiments, stepped in, bought the land, and boomed it. In one notorious case a family, now great in the public eye, bribed a laird's own borers to conceal the truth, and then buying the Golconda from its impoverished owner, ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... uncurtained couch, and showed to Morton the working of his harsh features, which seemed agitated by some strong internal cause of disturbance. He had not undressed. Both his arms were above the bed-cover, the right hand strongly clenched, and occasionally making that abortive attempt to strike which usually attends dreams of violence; the left was extended, and agitated, from time to time, by a movement as if repulsing some one. The perspiration stood on his brow, "like bubbles in a late disturbed stream," and these marks of emotion ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... they ought to invite the Marquis to supper at their lodgings, and he would take upon himself to provide everything proper for the occasion. Matta desired to know if it was to play at quinze, and assured him that he should take care to render abortive any intention he might have to engage in play, and leave him alone with the greatest blockhead in all Europe. The Chevalier de Grammont did not entertain any such thought, being persuaded that it would be impossible ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic. But a young spirit panting for fame, doubtful of its powers, and certain only of its aspirations, is ill qualified to assign its true value to the sneer of this world. He knows not that such stuff as this is of the abortive and monstrous births which time consumes as fast as it produces. He sees the truth and falsehood, the merits and demerits, of his case inextricably entangled...No personal offence should have drawn from me this public comment upon ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... having always a childish aspect, although the features of his face were those of a man. They were, however, hard and badly cut. He seemed incomplete, abortive, only half finished, and disquieting as a mystery. He was a close impenetrable being, in whom there seemed always to be some active, dangerous mental travail ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... which ministers would have to supply, would, according to the present disbursements and receipts, amount to 11,578,000l. unless that expenditure were reduced, every such attempt as they were at present making would, he was convinced, prove abortive: it was a mere topical application while a mortal distemper was raging within. He had taken no notice in his estimate of the charges for sinecures or the bounties on exports and imports: and yet the returns upon which he went, exclusive of these charges, ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... grim contrast between what the rich man said and what God said. The man's words were empty breath; God's are powers, and what He says is a deed. The divine decree comes crashing into the abortive human plans like a thunder-clap into a wood full of singing birds, and they are all stricken silent. So little does life consist in possessions that all the abundance cannot keep the breath in a man for one moment. His life is 'required of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... this abortive experiment, he proposed to take her portrait by a scientific process of his own invention. It was to be effected by rays of light striking upon a polished plate of metal. Georgiana assented; but, on looking at the result, was affrighted to find the features of ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... unstaid perverseness! Know ye not That we are worms, yet made at last to form The winged insect, imp'd with angel plumes That to heaven's justice unobstructed soars? Why buoy ye up aloft your unfleg'd souls? Abortive then and shapeless ye remain, Like the untimely embryon of a worm! As, to support incumbent floor or roof, For corbel is a figure sometimes seen, That crumples up its knees unto its breast, With the feign'd posture stirring ruth unfeign'd In the beholder's fancy; ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... put, so far? To practically none, save the destruction of life. About five years before the war some of us in England tried to initiate an international movement to ban the use of flying for military purposes. The effort was entirely abortive. The fact is, man never goes in front of events, always insists on disastrously buying his experience. And I am inclined to think we shall continue to advance backwards unless we intern our inventors till ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... terror-haunted days. A shock, a cry Whose echoes ring the globe—the spectre's laid. Hurled o'er the abyss, see the crowned martyr lie Resting in peace—fear, change, and death gone by. Fit end for nightmare—mist of blood and tears, Red climax to the slow, abortive years. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... meeting or quiet Quaker conference, where, for hours perhaps, nobody opens his mouth. It now bore an aspect of a political club meeting. But it was a quiet, peaceful, obedient debating society. It has left the record of its abortive undertakings in the "Kogisho Nishi" or journal of "Parliament." The Kogisho was dissolved in the year of its birth. And the indifference of the public about its dissolution proves how small an influence ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... ample warning which the enemy received of what was impending before ever a soldier was landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula that, far more than anything which occurred subsequently, rendered the Dardanelles operations abortive. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... within the range of probabilities that something might come out, enabling me to use that knowledge to good purpose. The plaintiff and old Mr. Ward were seated in court beside Mr. Barnes, as on the former abortive trial; but Mary Woodley had, fortunately for herself, lost much of the interest which attaches to female comeliness and grace when associated in the mind of the spectator with undeserved calamity and sorrow. The black dress which ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... suppress the increase of crime must take these matters into consideration, and it will unquestionably prove abortive unless a much stricter censorship is exercised over the publication of the gruesome details of crimes and scandals and also over the sale of the type of literature ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... owing to circumstances upon which the impetuous Biron had failed to calculate, proved, however, abortive; and he had no sooner convinced himself of the fact, and comprehended the perilous position in which he had been placed by his imprudence, than he hastened to Lyons, where the King was then sojourning; and having obtained ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... mesa, or table-land, covered with low shrub growths; after some ten or twelve miles of this, they descended among winding ridges, into a narrow valley,—the Poway valley. It was here that the Mexicans made one of their few abortive efforts to ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... disproportioned to the object. Nero, however, who longed to achieve things that exceeded credibility, exerted all his might to perforate the mountains adjoining to Avernus, and to this day there remain traces of his abortive project. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... fell, and the event created little or no excitement; and when Burr saw himself met with universal scorn, he knew it was the eruption of an accumulated hatred toward himself, and that all his ambition for future preferment and power was at an end. Immediately he left for the West, and commenced an abortive effort to break ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... miniature representatives of higher plants in the mycelium or roots, stem, branches, and at length capsules bearing sporidia, which correspond to seeds. It is true that leaves are absent, but these are sometimes compensated by lateral processes or abortive branchlets. A tuft of mould is in miniature a forest of trees. Although such a definition may be deemed more poetic than accurate, more figurative than literal, yet few could believe in the marvellous beauty of a tuft of mould if they never saw it as exhibited ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... to bring the Revolution to a just termination, and finding his efforts rendered abortive by that feeling which former oppression had created, he resolved to return to America, a country he saw thriving by a policy he wished to ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... other refugees, they used every available means to injure the commercial credit of the Medici in that city. Their attempts greatly annoyed Piero; but by his friends' assistance, he was enabled to render them abortive. Diotisalvi Neroni and Niccolo Soderini strenuously urged the Venetian senate to make war upon their country, calculating, that in case of an attack, the government being new and unpopular, would be unable to resist. At this time there ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... copulating with other creatures shall perish as the brute beasts by whom they were begotten, not having a reasonable soul nor any breath of the Almighty infused into them; and such can never be capable of resurrection. And the same is also true of imperfect and abortive births. ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... probably circling round most of the myriads of stars, whose physical constitution, where-ever it has as yet been observed spectroscopically, does not differ much from that of our sun. But we perceive around us a countless number of abortive seeds and germs; we find out of any group of a thousand men selected at random, some who are crippled, insane, idiotic, and otherwise born incurably imperfect in body or mind, and it is possible that this world may rank among other worlds ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... loneliness of her father's house, and her very sharpness and prickly spiritualism were for the child's enduring good. Her attempts, however, to make Leam regard mamma in heaven as in any wise different from mamma on earth were utterly abortive. Leam's imagination could not compass the thaumaturgy tried to be inculcated. Mamma, if mamma at all, was mamma as she had known her; and if as she had known her, then she was unhappy and desolate, seeing what a wicked thing this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... purpose by arms against the force which the United States brought to bear against it. Did they sustain it? Were their arms victorious? If they were, then their secession was an accomplished fact. If not, it was nothing more than an abortive attempt—a purpose unfulfilled. This, then, is simply a question of fact, and we all know what the fact is. They did not succeed. They failed to maintain their ground by force of arms—in other words, they failed ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... Nelly, Rosalie, Juno and Marjorie were invited. Lily Pearl's and Helen's attentions to Peggy and Polly having proved abortive, they contrived ways and means of their own to reach the Land o' Heart's Desire. Helen's old bachelor uncle, a queer, dull old gentleman, whose mind was certainly not active, and whom Helen could, figuratively speaking, turn and twist about her little finger, was persuaded ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... subject, which had suffered interruption through his abortive little act of mercy. "You knew my uncle in Italy. It seems strange, Benjulia, that I should never have heard ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... with infinite tact—a problem of protuberant eyes and paralyzing self-consciousness, of unnatural silences and then unexpected attempts at speech that died in painful rasps and gurgles, of stubbing toes and nudging elbows, of a centipedal supply of arms and legs that interfered with abortive and conscience-stricken attempts at courtesy, and above all an interest in the weave of the carpet that was at once a mania and an epidemic—but by the time supper was well under way, things, in the language of Roger, had begun to hum, and by ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... property of the predecessors of the North British Alizarine Company. These patents expire in about two months, and the lecturer explained that an attempt made by the German manufacturers to further monopolize this industry (even after the expiry of the patent) proved abortive. He also stated that alizarine, 20 per cent. quality, is sold to-day at 2s 6d. per lb., but that if the price were reduced by one-half there will still be a handsome profit to makers, and that the United Kingdom is the largest consumer, absorbing one-third of the entire production, and that England ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... one of her letters to her uncle, the King of the Belgians, wrote thus of the abortive rising of fifty years later ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... mortals with erring mortal mind, instead of resting on the omnipotence of the divine Mind, must prove abortive. Committing the 459:15 bare process of mental healing to frail mor- tals, untaught and unrestrained by Christian Science, is like putting a sharp knife into the hands of a blind 459:18 man or a raging maniac, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... an abortive attempt to preserve my youth I neither take tea nor drinks between meals. I will have one of your excellent cigarettes and get round to the club. Why, this is Enton over again, ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Although the enemy, in more or less force, had been viewed practically every day, it had always been impossible to bring him to close quarters, and the policy of wearing out infantrymen's hearts, tempers, constitutions, and boots in abortive pursuits of mounted enemies was, and in the light of all that we now know still is, open to question, for a reference to the Times history of the war shows that all our wanderings and meanderings are ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... camp— interesting testimony to the diligence and patience of the deceased occupants was obtained. It was evident that the sea had been largely drawn upon for supplies, if only on account of the many abortive and abandoned attempts at fishhooks in more or less advanced stages of completion. The brittleness of the fabric and the crudeness of the tools employed had evidently put the patience of the makers to severe task, who for one satisfactory hook must have contemplated many ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... stood up with ashen under-lip, to say that such a scheme, it seemed to him, must remain for ever abortive, unless enforced by ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... brought five years ago were stored in the basement box-room; but under the camp bed was her dressing-bag, the only "lock-up" receptacle she possessed. In it she kept a few letters and an abortive diary which in some moods had given her ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... central current rushed: the wind Sighed through the tawny sedge. 'So fleets our life— Like yonder gloomy stream; so sighs our age— Like yonder sapless sedge!' Thus Laurence mused Standing on that sad margin all alone, His twenty years of gladsome English toil Ending at last abortive. 'Stream well-loved, Here on thy margin standing saw I first, My head by chance uplifting from my book, King Ethelbert's strong countenance; he is dead; And, next him, riding through the April gleams, ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... evidence of the soft and yielding nature of the great creature's food. But there were signs that at some period of the development of the whale it had possessed a double row of teeth, because at the bottom of these upper sockets we found in a few cases what seemed to be an abortive tooth, not one that was growing, because they had no roots, but a survival of teeth that had once been perfect and useful, but from disuse, or lack of necessity for them, had gradually ceased to come to maturity. ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... and west, by fugitives, soon announce the failure of this abortive attempt. The golden opportunity of the fall ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... a Richmond paper of Sept. 12 (quoted in the New-York Gazette of Sept. 18) declares that "the plot has been entirely exploded, which was shallow; and, had the attempt been made to carry it into execution, but little resistance would have been required to render the scheme entirely abortive." But it is necessary to remember that this is no more than the Charleston newspapers said at the very crisis of Denmark Vesey's formidable plot. "Last evening," wrote a lady from Charleston in 1822, "twenty-five hundred of our citizens ...
— Black Rebellion - Five Slave Revolts • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... so, my dear friend; I am at Besancon, while you thought I was traveling. I would not tell you anything till success should begin, and now it is dawning. Yes, my dear Leopold, after so many abortive undertakings, over which I have shed the best of my blood, have wasted so many efforts, spent so much courage, I have made up my mind to do as you have done—to start on a beaten path, on the highroad, ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... is impossible to express the abortive attempt at a bow which accompanied this salutation,—"I want to know if the minister ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... of Hawthornden to our own, some of the noblest flights of English poetry have been taken on the wings of this verse; but with ordinary readers it has been more or less discredited by the far greater number of abortive efforts, on the part sometimes of considerable poets, to adapt it to purposes with which it has no expressional correspondence; or to vary it by rhythmical movements which are destructive ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... the Virgin came to an end. With the last stanza the wild singer disappeared; and the sick woman, after several abortive efforts, rose painfully to her feet. The recluse approached her with the solicitude of a shopkeeper concerned for the quality of his wares. Were things going any better? Were the visits to the Virgin doing good?... The unfortunate woman ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... June 6. Latitude 16 degrees 30 minutes, longitude (chron.) 134 degrees. Dry night and wind steady enough to require no change in sail; but this A.M. an attempt to lower it proved abortive. First the third mate tried and got up to the block, and fastened a temporary arrangement to reeve the halyards through, but had to come down, weak and almost fainting, before finishing; then Joe tried, and after twice ascending, fixed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for "Romola," "Hypatia," "Henry Esmond," and "The Cloister and the Hearth." In several countries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to get itself born, but all its attempts had been abortive. "Waverley" is not only vastly superior to "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and "The Scottish Chiefs" (1809); it is something quite different in kind.[34] The Waverley Novels, twenty-nine in number, appeared in the years 1814-31. The earlier numbers of the series, "Waverley," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Persia should have met them with a fleet three times as large. Had Memnon been given from the first a free hand at sea, instead of satrapial power on land, it is quite conceivable that the invasion of Asia by Alexander might have proved as abortive an enterprise as the contemplated ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... Danglar's power. There was always an alternative. Yes, it was quite as bad as that—death at her own hands was preferable. Balked, outwitted, the plans of the criminal coterie, of which Danglar appeared to be the head, rendered again and again abortive, and believing it all due to the White Moll, all of Danglar's shrewd, unscrupulous cunning would be centered on the task of running her down; and if, added to this, he discovered that she was masquerading as Gypsy Nan, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... not believe the execution would take place. In the first place, no victim had been struck with death, and it had long been the custom not to punish an abortive crime with the last degree of severity. Then, this crime, however terrible in intention, was disinterested, born of an abstract idea. The man's past, his abandoned childhood, his life of hardship, pleaded also in his favor. In the independent press generous voices were raised ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... from his own government; that they met twice a day; and that their conversation chiefly turned on the vices of Napoleon, on his designs against Spain, and on the best mode of rendering those designs abortive. In truth, Barere's baseness was unfathomable. In the lowest deeps of shame he found out lower deeps. It is bad to be a sycophant; it is bad to be a spy. But even among sycophants and spies there are degrees of meanness. The vilest sycophant is he who privily ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Claverhouse, and gave no indication that he had that interview in mind. Claverhouse had learned one lesson, however—patience—and he would have many more to learn; he had also been taught not to take hasty views, but to wait for the long result. And his heart lifted when, after the abortive siege of Charleroi, he was summoned for a second time to the Prince's presence. On this occasion the Prince said little, but it was to the point; it was the crisis ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... than this was, from the beginning of the world. Finally, they brought the Hebrew nation into contempt, that they might themselves appear comparatively less impious with regard to strangers. They confessed what was true, that they were the slaves, the scum, and the spurious and abortive offspring of our nation, while they overthrew the city themselves, and forced the Romans, whether they would or no, to gain a melancholy reputation, by acting gloriously against them, and did almost draw that fire upon the temple, which they seemed to think came ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... might formerly have been affianced to some woman, who having accidentally discovered his intentions, took this desperate method of rendering them abortive: but this was a short- lived thought, and speedily gave way to her esteem for his general character, and her confidence in the firmness of ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... short. You frightened me with your 'Shepherds-tell-me' air and tone. Lead me to one of your garden-seats: out of hearing to Dr. Middleton, I beg. He mesmerizes me, he makes me talk Latin. I was curiously susceptible last night. I know I shall everlastingly associate him with an abortive entertainment and solos on big instruments. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... important to the comprehension of the changes effected in that period of transition, for which Hawke and Rodney stand, to recognize the distinctive lesson of each of these two abortive actions, which together may be said to fix the zero of the scale by which the progress of the eighteenth century is denoted. They have a relation to the past as well as to the future, standing far ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... things, somehow his enthusiasm for foreign missions ebbed away, and left him desperately tired and worried. He made several abortive attempts to put some fire into his missionary plea, but it was useless; and he was about to give up when he heard Mrs. Betty's gentle voice inquiring from ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... Action of the Colonies. The earlier and largely abortive attempts to form non-intercourse associations generally did not mention slaves specifically, although the Virginia House of Burgesses, May 11, 1769, recommended to merchants and traders, among other things, to agree, "That they will ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... will be remembered, was the one which successfully resisted the Boers under President Burger and Commandant Paul Kruger—a successful resistance which was one of the troubles leading directly to the abortive annexation of the Transvaal. The Secocoeni tribe were afterwards conquered by British troops, and handed over to the tender mercies of the Boer Government upon the ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... hour in which she had nothing whatever to amuse her, and he was a very welcome interruption. And, upon the whole, she liked her grandson. She had paid his gambling-debts twice, she had taken the greatest interest in his various duels, and sided passionately with him in one abortive love-affair. ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... other rooms, a long succession of them, filled with melancholy evidences of incapacity and defeat in almost every department of human activity—plans of abortive military campaigns, prospectuses of moribund business enterprises, architectural and engineering drawings of structures never to be reared, charts, models, unfinished musical scores, finally a huge papier-mache globe on which were traced the routes of Mr. Colman Hoyt's four unsuccessful dashes ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... since 1864 had been minister of France to Mexico, endeavored to obtain an audience for "the chamberlain of Maximilian" as bearer of a letter from the Emperor of Mexico to the President.* But the mission proved a failure, and only added one more to the many abortive attempts made during those four years ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... the name Waterloo to history, paused now and then a moment to study Jackson at New Orleans. The Duke of Wellington, chosen by assembled Europe to meet the crisis, could find time even at Brussels to call for 'all available information on the abortive expedition against Louisiana.'"[3] ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... remember, that 'twas not the workman, but his instruments that fail'd: I was ready to engage, but wanted arms. Who rob'd me of them I know not; perhaps my eager mind outrun my body; or while with an unhappy haste I aim'd at all; I was cheated with abortive joys. I only know I don't know what I've done: You bid me fear a palsie, as if the diseast cou'd do greater that has already rob'd me of that, by which I shou'd have purchas'd you. All I have to say for my self, is this, ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... not dare, the silence of the ship seemed so sacred and awful; and till late afternoon I sat there, watching the black and massive hull. Above her water-line emerged all round a half-floating fringe of fresh-green sea-weed, proving old neglect; an abortive attempt had apparently been made to lower, or take in, the larch-wood pram, for there she hung by a jammed davit-rope, stern up, bow in the water; the only two arms of the windmill moved this way and that, through some three degrees, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... influenced by the actions of the Charlestonians than by their words. The original information was given on May 25th. The time passed, and the plot failed on June 16th. A plan for its revival on July 2d proved abortive. Yet a letter from Charleston in the "Hartford Courant" of August 6th, represented the panic as unabated: "Great preparations are making, and all the military are put in preparation to guard against any attempt ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... missiles, but a few useless shots were exchanged from the fusees of the chiefs, more in bravado than with any expectation of doing execution. As some time was suffered to elapse, in demonstrations and abortive efforts, we shall leave them, for that period, to return to such of our characters as remained in the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... American life and tendencies, both Northern and Southern, are given with discrimination and truth. The dying scene, which closes the First Part, seems to us nobly wrought. The "death-bed hymn" of the slaves sounds a pathetic wail over an abortive life shivering on the brink of the Unknown. In the Second Part we find less of the color and music of a poem, and more of the rapid movement of a drama. The doom of Slavery upon the master now comes into full relief. The characters of Herbert and his father are favorable specimens ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... about the thorns is that they are suppressed or abortive branches. The ancestor of this tree must have been terribly abused sometime to have its branches turn ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... and "Bonnie Prince Charlie," was born in Rome in 1720. From his earliest years he was the hope of the Jacobites, as the political descendants of the partisans of James II were called. In 1743 Charles headed an abortive expedition for the invasion of England from France. In August, 1745, he landed with seven followers in the Hebrides, and on the 19th raised the standard of his father in Glenfinnan, Scotland. There at once the Highland clans rallied to his support and began what is known as the "Rising of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... pressed quickly on towards fort Edward, upon Hudson's river, about twenty miles above Albany. Here his progress was interrupted by the American army, being halted and reinforced a little below him. This circumstance, with the following events, have continued that interruption, and bid fair to render abortive, at least, the great advantages expected by our enemies from their first successes on ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... herself, strengthen and aggrandize one of the chiefs of the Importants, and weaken Mazarin by depriving of an important government a person upon whom he had entire reliance—Richelieu's niece, the Duchess d'Aiguillon. The Cardinal succeeded in rendering this manoeuvre abortive, without appearing to have any hand in it. And herein, as in many other matters, the art of Mazarin was to wear the semblance of merely confirming the Queen in the resolves with which ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... 1780 and 1814 were all of one pattern, and the one which Gourdon composed upon the Cup-and-Ball will give an idea of them. They required a certain knack or proficiency in the art. "The Chorister" is the Saturn of this abortive generation of jocular poems, all in four cantos or thereabouts, for it was generally admitted that six would wear the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... whistled and rubbed, and washed and scrubbed, but as there seemed no end to the job, and he was a long washing this one garment as Bell would have been performing the same operation on fifty, I laughed to myself, and thought of my own abortive attempts in that way, and went fast asleep. In the morning John came to his breakfast, with his jacket ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... heard that the French Government were not too well pleased with Baudin's work.* (* Girard, writing in 1857, stated that rumours about Baudin's conduct, circulated before the arrival of Le Geographe, induced the public to believe that the expedition had been abortive, without useful results, and that it was to the interest of the Government to forget all about it. F. Peron, page 46. But Girard cites no authority for the statement, and as he was not born in 1804, he is not himself an authoritative witness. ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... observed that of those inventions a large proportion turned out to be entirely worthless, and a source of ruin and disappointment to their authors. And it is further stated that he discovered that, among these abortive inventions, many were but the embodiment of ideas which had suggested themselves to his own mind—which, probably, when they first presented themselves, he had welcomed as great discoveries, likely to contribute to his own fame and to the advantage ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... more destructive even than the foreign, which might have defeated the whole movement. Ancient and modern history is replete with examples proceeding from conflicts between distinct orders, of revolutions attempted which proved abortive, of republics which have terminated in despotism. It is owing to the simplicity of the elements of which our system is composed that the attraction of all the parts has been to a common center, that every change ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... the greater the thief the greater the power; and Gould, in spite of abortive lawsuits and denunciations, had the cardinal faculty of holding on to the full proceeds of his piracies. In 1873 there was no man more rancorously denounced by the mercantile classes than Gould. If one were to be swayed by their utterances, he would be led to believe that these classes, ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... The Royal Society was incorporated in 1663 as the Royal Society of London for promoting Natural Knowledge. In the same year there was an abortive insurrection in the North against the infamy of ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... usefulness as a spy in Sir John's camp must prove abortive, as I encountered Captain Walter Butler at the Dead Water, who knows me, and who is aware of my business in New York. Attempting to take him, I made a bad matter of it, he escaping by diving. Some men in green uniforms, whom I suppose were foresters from Sir John's corps, firing on us, I deemed it ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... regular geometrical solids? Or, again, are they, as others thought, the products of the germs of animals and of the seeds of plants which have lost their way, as it were, in the bowels of the earth, and have achieved only an imperfect and abortive development? It is easy to sneer at our ancestors for being disposed to reject the first in favour of one or other of the last two hypotheses; but it is much more profitable to try to discover why they, who were really not one whit less sensible persons than our ...
— The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology - Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and unreclaimed land of Lord Cumnor's, which was close to Squire Hamley's property; that very piece for which he had had the Government grant, but which now lay neglected, and only half-drained, with stacks of mossy tiles, and lines of up-turned furrows telling of abortive plans. It was not often that the squire rode in this direction now-a-days; but the cottage of a man who had been the squire's gamekeeper in those more prosperous days when the Hamleys could afford ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... at this psychological moment, in 1791 to 1794, when the planters of the lower Delta saw ruin staring them in the face, that there came to the rescue of the colony a man of color, one of the refugees from Santo Domingo, where the blacks had risen in 1791. From the failure of this abortive attempt to emulate the spirit of the white man, refugees flew in every direction, and Louisiana welcomed them, if not exactly with open arms, at least with more indifference than other colonies. And these black refugees were her saviors. For they ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... his eyes—those very eyes which he had already brought into an Accessit,[19] or inchoate state of humidity; this vexed him: and his mortification was the greater on thinking of his own pathetic exertions, and the abortive appetite for the prize which he had thus uttered in words as ineffectual as his own sermons; and at this moment he was ready to weep for spite—and 'to weep the more because he wept in vain.' As to Flacks, a protocol was ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Three days after her abortive attempt to break away, Gyp, with much heart-searching, wrote to Daphne Wing, telling her of Fiorsen's illness, and mentioning a cottage near Mildenham, where—if she liked to go—she would be quite comfortable and safe from all curiosity, and finally begging to be allowed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the field being cleared, Wallace ordered the tower to be forced. A strong guard was still within, and, as the assailants drew near, every means was used to render their assaults abortive. As the Scots pressed to the main entrance, stones and heavy metals were thrown upon their heads; but, not in the least intimidated, they stood beneath the iron shower, till Wallace ordered them to drive a large felled tree, which ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... clerk was a wretch, a forger of matchless skill. He instantly sent for a detective; and the next morning, when Justin Chevassat came as usual, he was arrested. It was then thought that his crime was confined to this abortive attempt. Not so. A minute and careful examination of all the papers soon revealed other misdeeds. Evidence was found, that, on the very next day after the day on which he had been appointed confidential clerk, he had stolen a thousand dollars, concealing his theft by a false entry. ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... approved of the match. More than one intrigue was set on foot within the chateau to separate the princes. Many were the attempts to sow the seeds of dissension between the dauphin and the comte d'Artois, as well as to embroil the dauphin with . The first attempt proved abortive, but the faction against succeeded so far as to excite a lasting jealousy and mistrust in the mind of Marie Antoinette. This princess was far from contemplating the marriage of the comte d'Artois with any feelings of pleasure, and when her new sister-in-law ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... After the abortive attempt to establish the colony of 'North Australia' at Port Curtis, at a cost of L.15,000, and the abandonment of Port Essington, it is not uninteresting to learn that Cape York presents many natural capabilities for a settlement. There ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... bargain. What do they do then? They wretchedly stay at their own miserable homes, destitute of their well-beloved daughters, the fathers cursing the days and the hours wherein they were married, and the mothers howling and crying that it was not their fortune to have brought forth abortive issues when they happened to be delivered of such unfortunate girls, and in this pitiful plight spend at best the remainder of their time with tears and weeping for those their children, of and from whom they expected, (and, with good reason, should ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... nomination as a tactical error on the part of the Populist leaders: "Mr. Weaver has belonged to the group of third-party 'come-outers' for so many years that his name is not one to conjure with in either of the old camps;... his name suggests too strongly the abortive third-party movements of the past to excite much hope or enthusiasm. He is not exactly the sort of a Moses who can frighten Pharaoh into fits or bring convincing plagues upon the monopolistic oppressors of Israel. The wicked politicians ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... little or no excitement; and when Burr saw himself met with universal scorn, he knew it was the eruption of an accumulated hatred toward himself, and that all his ambition for future preferment and power was at an end. Immediately he left for the West, and commenced an abortive effort to break up ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... a godly, painstaking, and most intelligent minister, whose history is very remarkable. In early life he had been, like Bunyan, a thoroughly depraved character; like him had entered the army, and had been promoted to the rank of a major in the royal forces. Having made an abortive attempt to raise a rebellion in his native county of Kent,[90] he and eleven others were made prisoners, tried by martial law, and condemned to the gallows. On the night previous to the day appointed for his execution, his sister found access to the prison. The guards were asleep, and his companions ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Rosalie, Juno and Marjorie were invited. Lily Pearl's and Helen's attentions to Peggy and Polly having proved abortive, they contrived ways and means of their own to reach the Land o' Heart's Desire. Helen's old bachelor uncle, a queer, dull old gentleman, whose mind was certainly not active, and whom Helen could, figuratively speaking, ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... "the abortive revolution of 1905." This novel is an emotional statement of those "nightmarish" days. Against this rather hazy, tempestuous background we have the sharply outlined portrait of an individual, a poet, ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... presume, that an Attempt to make a Law to restrain Irony, &c. would prove abortive, and that the Attempt would be deem'd the Effect of a very partial Consideration of things, and of present Anger at a poor Jest; which Men are not able to bear themselves, how much soever they abound in Jests, ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... state from the hands of the king and his ministers. The Black Prince was the chief agent in urging these reforms, but his death, in the midst of the Parliament's deliberations, for a time rendered almost abortive the good work he had begun. Edward died June 21, 1377. Both in his home and foreign relations he showed considerable prudence and sagacity, and he may be allowed the merit of having endeavored as much as possible to keep on good terms with his subjects. His expeditions ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... wretches in garrets and night-cellars, petty pilferers and marauders, who cut throats and pick pockets with their own hands? The thing is impossible. The laws of the country are, therefore, ineffectual and abortive, because they are made by the rich for the poor, by the wise for the ignorant, by the respectable and exalted in station for the very scum and refuse of the community. If Newgate would resolve itself into a committee of the whole Press-yard, with Jack Ketch at its ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... long time lay very still wiping the perspiration off his chin. The dinner-tins were put away quickly. On deck we discussed the incident in whispers. Some showed a chuckling exultation. Many looked grave. Wamibo, after long periods of staring dreaminess, attempted abortive smiles; and one of the young Scandinavians, much tormented by doubt, ventured in the second dog-watch to approach Singleton (the old man did not encourage us much to speak to him) and ask sheepishly:—"You ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... pathological lie have been added to those offered by Delbruck, Risch, Koppen, and Vogt. The pathological liar lies, not according to a plan, but the impulse seizes him suddenly. This propensity grows stronger. Under strict supervision it comes to only an abortive attack, similar to what happens in cases of dipsomania, or of tendency to rove in which the repressed outbreak expresses itself in tormenting psychical and physical unrest. While the normal liar and swindler is forced to be on his guard lest he divulge something of the actual ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... with scarlet fruit, and another species with rose-coloured fruit, of most exquisite taste—particularly when the seed was abortive, and the pericarp more developed—were abundant on the flats of the river; and Aemena?, with smaller fruit and thin acidulous rind, grew ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... scalped and murdered by the French and their Indian allies. French spies gained early intelligence of every movement contemplated by the British, and were thus, in many cases, the means of rendering those movements abortive. The grand British scheme of the year, however, was the reduction of Louisburg, in furtherance of which an armament such had never before been collected in the British Colonies, assembled at Halifax. This armament consisted ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Alexandria, he set himself to oppose and make war against the Pythagorean doctrine, and that of natural philosophy; seeking by means of his logical ratiocination to propose definitions and notions, certain fifth entities and other abortive portions of fantastical cogitations, as principles and substance of things, more anxious about the esteem of the vulgar stupid crowd, which is influenced and governed by sophisms and appearances which ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... 'Shepherds-tell-me' air and tone. Lead me to one of your garden-seats: out of hearing to Dr. Middleton, I beg. He mesmerizes me, he makes me talk Latin. I was curiously susceptible last night. I know I shall everlastingly associate him with an abortive entertainment and solos on big instruments. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the whole creation of which must have depended upon one law or decree of the Almighty, though it did not all come forth at one time. After what we have seen, the idea of a separate exertion for each must appear totally inadmissible. The single fact of abortive or rudimentary organs condemns it; for these, on such a supposition, could be regarded in no other light than as blemishes or blunders—the thing of all others most irreconcilable with that idea ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... I write with the imbecile idea of rendering those preparations abortive. No, I am not so mad. My sole view is to explain the motive of my conduct in a particular instance, and to obviate the accusation of treachery which may ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... no describing the sudden look of rage with which he turned on her. His face grew a mottled red, his clenched fist made an abortive gesture as though he would have liked to ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... only one, namely, a proximate object. But the analysis of the perception of matter yields as its result, a remote as well as a proximate object. The proximate object is the perception—the remote object is the reality. And thus the analysis of the given fact necessarily renders abortive every endeavour to construct a doctrine of intuitive perception. The attempt must end in representationism. The only basis for a doctrine of intuitive perception which will never give way, is a resolute forbearance from all analysis of the fact. Do not tamper with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... station was not reached, practically no supplies were landed, the "Proteus" was nipped by the ice and sunk, and the remnant of the expedition came supinely home, reporting utter failure. It is impossible to acquit the commanders of the two ships engaged in this abortive relief expedition of a lack of determination, a paucity of courage, complete incompetence. They simply left Greely to his fate while time still remained for his rescue, or at least for the convenient deposit of the vast store of provisions they ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... revelations, in so far as they have professed to be infallible, are, from the Catholic standpoint, abortive Catholicisms 311 ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... Public interest in the abortive attempt to reinstate Dom Corria De Sylva as President was waning rapidly when it was fanned into fresh activity by news that reached this port to-day. It appears that on the 31st ulto. a daring effort was made to free De ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... of the father's speculations was soon seen. Deprived of Laird Lewis's personal and active superintendence, all his undertakings miscarried, and became either abortive or perilous. Without a single spark of energy to meet or repel these misfortunes, Godfrey put his faith in the activity of another. He kept neither hunters, nor hounds, nor any other southern preliminaries ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... He explained to her that as she was now resident in London, it would be simpler to recommence the business entirely. She sagaciously agreed. As she by no means wished to wound him again, she made no inquiry about those other formalities which, owing to red-tape, had so unexpectedly proved abortive! She knew she was going to be married, and that sufficed. The next day she carried out her filial idea ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... late Edward Huntington, a successful English merchant, who had resided many years in India and had realized a fortune, which he had proposed to return to his native land to enjoy with his wife and only child. But death had stepped in to put an abrupt end to his hopes, and to render abortive all his well-arranged plans, some twelve months previous to the period of which we have spoken. Mrs. Huntington, the widow, had remained in Calcutta to settle up her husband's affairs, and this done, she determined to embark at once with ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... the two World Wars, Lithuania was annexed by the USSR in 1940. On 11 March 1990, Lithuania became the first of the Soviet republics to declare its independence, but Moscow did not recognize this proclamation until September of 1991 (following the abortive coup in Moscow). The last Russian troops withdrew in 1993. Lithuania subsequently restructured its economy for integration into Western European institutions; it joined both NATO and the EU in the spring ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... things—she who has been kept in the castle cellar for twenty years restored to the delights of hair-pins and a mauve dress, the ingenue to the protecting arm, etc. The music-hall is a protest against Mrs Kendal's marital tendernesses and the abortive platitudes of Messrs Pettit and Sims; the music-hall is a protest against Sardou and the immense drawing-room sets, rich hangings, velvet sofas, etc., so different from the movement of the English comedy with its constant change ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... entry] June 6. Latitude 16 degrees 30 minutes, longitude (chron.) 134 degrees. Dry night and wind steady enough to require no change in sail; but this A.M. an attempt to lower it proved abortive. First the third mate tried and got up to the block, and fastened a temporary arrangement to reeve the halyards through, but had to come down, weak and almost fainting, before finishing; then Joe tried, and after twice ascending, fixed it and brought down the block; but it was very exhausting ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... minute account of Count D'Estaing's abortive expeditions to America; the barren results of the first two years' alliance between Congress and the King of France, by Dr. ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... pirate—cruel, vicious, debased to the lowest degree of turpitude—established a moral code governing his actions and circumscribing his wanton license, and it was in the rigorous observance of these "trade laws" and customs of their realm that this abortive sense of ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... name, which every scribe usurps; that now, especially in dramatick, or (as they term it) stage poetry, nothing but ribaldry, profanation, blasphemies, all licence of offence toward God and man is practised. I dare not deny a great part of this (and I am sorry I dare not), because in some men's abortive features (and would God they had never seen the light!) it is over true; but that all are bound on his bold adventure for hell, is a most uncharitable thought, and uttered, a more malicious slander. For every particular I can (and from a most clear conscience) affirm that I have ever trembled to ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... not till 1620, after so many abortive efforts had been made both by Government and powerful bodies to form an establishment in North Virginia, that at length it received, under unexpected circumstances, an influx of settlers which soon rendered it by far the most prosperous of all colonies in North America. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... my dear friend; I am at Besancon, while you thought I was traveling. I would not tell you anything till success should begin, and now it is dawning. Yes, my dear Leopold, after so many abortive undertakings, over which I have shed the best of my blood, have wasted so many efforts, spent so much courage, I have made up my mind to do as you have done—to start on a beaten path, on the highroad, as the longest but the safest. I can see ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... Hermaphrodite: Said of a flower having both stamens and pistils. Fertile: Said of a flower capable of bearing seed without pollen from another flower. Sterile: Said of a flower without or with abortive pistils. Perfect: Said of a flower having both stamens and pistils. Imperfect: Said of a flower wanting either stamens or pistils. Peduncle: The stalk of a flower-cluster. Pedicel: The ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... European, American and Indian pharmacopoeias is emmenagogue, antispasmodic, anthelmintic, excitant, diaphoretic, antiseptic and abortive. It contains an essential oil, and rutinic acid (C25H28O15, Borntrager), starch, gum, etc. The essential oil is greenish-yellow, thick, acrid and bitter; specific gravity 0.911. It boils at 228, is slightly soluble in water, and soluble in absolute alcohol. It is promptly oxidized by nitric ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... system on its theoretical side; that it goes far toward explaining both the physiological and the structural gradations and relations between the two kingdoms, and the arrangement of all their forms in groups subordinate to groups, all within a few great types; that it reads the riddle of abortive organs and of morphological conformity, of which no other theory has ever offered a scientific explanation, and supplies a ground for harmonizing the two fundamental ideas which naturalists and philosophers conceive to have ruled the organic ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... noticing that Batty Langley, the abortive restorer of Gothic, also recommended the natural style of landscape gardening as early as 1728 in his "New ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the sexual instinct, to other ends than those which they seemed designed to serve. Art and poetry are fed on this fuel and the evolution of character and mental force is largely of the same origin. All the forms which this sublimation, or the abortive attempts at sublimation, may take in any given case, should come out in the course of a thorough psychoanalysis. It is not the sexual life alone, but every interest and every motive, that must be inquired into by the physician who is seeking to obtain all the data ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... built upon a ship of vast size; within the castles were 200 Turks, who were intended to distract the attention of the defendants by continually pouring in all sorts of artificial fireworks. This device was however abortive, as Jacome Leite went by night in two small vessels with twenty men, and though discovered he succeeded in setting the floating castle on fire, a great part of which blew up with all the Turks, and the remainder of the ship burnt with so great a flame that the enemy was seen ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... actions, and sometimes even determine them, by a process analogous to that of suggestion upon a hypnotized person, and this is so because of the tendency in every idea to resolve itself into action—an idea being simply an inchoate or abortive act. It was this notion that suggested to Fouillee his theory of idea-forces. But ordinarily ideas are forces which we accommodate to other forces, deeper and much ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... up from the hatches in such dense volumes, that all attempts to go below to extinguish the fire were abortive. Each man felt that his last hour was come,—there was not a shadow of hope that their lives could be saved; it was but a choice of death by fire or water: to quit the ship must be fatal; they had seen ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... about the cities and villages vainly looking for work; the absence of personal liberty; the numerous arrests, and the relative popularity withal of the Dictator. This popularity, it was explained, the press contributed to keep alive, especially since the abortive attempt made on his life, when the journals declared that he was indispensable for the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... cough, aphonia, odynphagia, hemoptysis, wheezing, dyspnea, cyanosis, apnea, subjective sensation of foreign body. Croupiness in foreign body cases, as in diphtheria, usually means subglottic swelling. Obstructive foreign body may be quickly fatal by laryngeal impaction on aspiration, or on abortive bechic expulsion. Lodgement of a non-obstructive foreign body may be followed by a symptomless interval. Direct laryngoscopy for diagnosis is indicated in every child having laryngeal diphtheria without ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... Dunmore raids in 1775-1776 and an abortive plot in 1776 by Dr. John Connolly in the Fort Pitt region there were no loyalist military operations in Virginia. Several hundred loyalists joined the royal army, a small number in comparison to most ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... the great majority of legal practitioners obtained their preparation in a law office. Though the University of Pennsylvania attempted to establish a law school in 1791, and Columbia in 1797, both attempts were abortive, and it remained for Harvard to establish the first permanent law school in 1817. Even this was but a feeble affair until Justice Joseph Story became associated with it in 1830. Up to 1870 but three terms of study were required for a ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... her brows into the most abortive attempt at a frown. What right had he to suppose that she ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... Sophists; the antidote was the recollection of former virtue and past prosperity, which the Poet systematically revives in contrast with the turpitudes and trivialities of the present day. There is no turning back the course of history; but if Aristophanes' efforts have remained abortive, they are not therefore inglorious. Is the moralist to despair and throw away his pen, because in so many cases his voice finds ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... persisted it was necessary to find additional help, to escape in safety, and not bring both him and myself to destruction. At length we came to the following determination, which, however, after eight months' incessant labour, rendered my whole project abortive. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... thought of it, the less easy seemed the justification of her desire for obscurity. From regarding it as a high instinct she passed into a humour that gave that desire the appearance of a whim. But could she really set in train events, which, if not abortive, would take her to the altar ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... respect to the fair orphan having thus proved abortive, he lost no time in bewailing his miscarriage, but had immediate recourse to other means of improving his small fortune, which, at this period, amounted to near two hundred pounds. Whatever inclination ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... the criminal attempt of December 9, have the honor to address to the President of the Republic a last appeal in favor of the condemned."[10] It has long been the custom in France not to punish an abortive crime with the death penalty, and it was generally believed that Vaillant's sentence would be changed to life imprisonment. President Carnot, however, refused to extend any ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... trenches during the abortive gas attack on December 19th, but was not affected by the gas, which passed just behind it. ...
— Short History of the London Rifle Brigade • Unknown
... of Grenville, so inactive in its foreign policy, is memorable only for one redeeming measure of home-policy—the abolition of the slave trade. Before Fox's death, the attention of parliament had been divided mainly between Windham's abortive scheme for a vast standing army, to be raised on the basis of limited service, and the secret inquiry into the conduct of the Princess of Wales. This resulted in her being acquitted of the more scandalous charges against her, but on the advice of the cabinet, she was censured by the king for ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... walk over the surface of this fair Earth, an erring and a wayward being, at times dejected by the trials of a solitary and an almost abortive life, or sustained or elevated by its prosperous incidents; I sometimes think that no one other blessing of existence hath ever comforted my heart and restored my soul so much, as the pleasures and delights of COLOUR. It is my wealth, my joy, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... and showed to Morton the working of his harsh features, which seemed agitated by some strong internal cause of disturbance. He had not undressed. Both his arms were above the bed-cover, the right hand strongly clenched, and occasionally making that abortive attempt to strike which usually attends dreams of violence; the left was extended, and agitated, from time to time, by a movement as if repulsing some one. The perspiration stood on his brow, "like bubbles in a late disturbed stream," and these marks of emotion were accompanied ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... many abortive attempts are wrecked in the effort to achieve poise is a type of sentimentality peculiar ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... account of the ceremony to a farrago of cheap menus, comments on his own liver, and a belittling of an Englishman of such noble character and achievements that a rising nation has chosen him for their King, and one whom our own nation loves to honour. We shall not, of course, mention our abortive correspondent's name, unless compelled thereto by any future utterance ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... will perhaps stay but a little while among them. If you lay the state of your case before any of them, and your brother come to inquire of them, your uncle's intended mediation will be discovered, and rendered abortive —I shall appear in a light that I never appeared in, in my life—for these women may not think themselves ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... reiteration of the words that are said to him by Sophia, in the moment when the fond father knows that his idolised Olivia has fled with her lover; his collapse, when the harmless pistols are taken from his nerveless hands; his despairing cry, "If she had but died!"; his abortive effort to rebuke his darling child in the hour of her abandonment and misery, and the sudden tempest of passionate affection with which the great tender heart sweeps away that inadequate and paltry though eminently appropriate morality, and takes its idol to itself as ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... In Suffolk an abortive calf is buried under the path along which the cows go to the fields, to prevent them being accidentally injured. One description of herb given to a horse prevents the horse-shoer pricking the animal's feet; and another, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... machinery we were using. But I was not excited about being held up on the Caraquet road,—after I'd once been to Skunk's Misery. I was not red-hot about hurrying there, either; I wanted to give Hutton time to get back to his lair and feel easy about pursuit after his abortive raid. "I expect we'll worry along," I said idly. "Gimme that clean ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... "Septimius Felton" was written; but the manuscript, thrown aside, was mentioned in the Dedicatory Preface to "Our Old Home" as an "abortive project." As will be found explained in the Introductory Notes to "The Dolliver Romance" and "The Ancestral Footstep," that phase of the same general design which was developed in the "Dolliver" was intended to take the place of ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to adopt some different course of action. Shalmaneser had discovered during his abortive campaign that there were discords and jealousies among the various Phoenician cities; that none of them submitted without repugnance to the authority of Tyre, and that Sidon especially had an ancient ground of quarrel with her more powerful sister, and always cherished the hope of recovering ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... one spark of consolation. It came from the fact that Rodney Bayham, of Bayham, followed her always with his eyes. It had been three years since she had tried her abortive love-affair with him. Yet still, on the winter mornings he would ride up to her shafts and just say: "Good day," and look at her with eyes that were not imploring, but seemed to say: "You see, I am still, as the Germans say, A. ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... 1812 are of quite minor importance. No more than two are worthy of being mentioned between the greater events before and after them. Both were abortive attempts at invasion—one across the upper Niagara, the other across the ...
— The War With the United States - A Chronicle of 1812 - Volume 14 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • William Wood
... Europe, affairs were more disturbing. Several attempts were made on the life of the King of the French, while an abortive insurrection with a view of establishing a military empire was made by Louis Bonaparte at Strasburg. The Prince was allowed to leave the country and go to the United States, but his accomplices were detained for trial. In Algiers the French Government determined to prosecute operations ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... and nerve centers explains the pathogenesis of abortion and the birth of dead fetuses ("mortinatatite") Copper and lead did not cause abortion, but mercury did so in two out of six cases. Arsenic is a powerful abortive agent in the guinea-pig, probably on account of placental hemorrhages. An important deduction is that whilst the placenta is frequently and seriously affected in syphilis, it is also the special seat for the accumulation ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... French king. The negotiations were conducted through the Bishop of Tarbes,[116] and at the first conference the Bishop raised a question in the name of his government, on the validity of the papal dispensation granted by Julius the Second, to legalise the marriage from which she was sprung. The abortive marriage Scheme perished in its birth, but the doubt which had been raised could not perish with it. Doubt on such a subject once mooted might not be left unresolved, even if the raising it thus publicly had not itself destroyed the frail chance of an undisputed ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... all Jacques could invent! And to come to such an abortive story—was that the reason ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... indeed, to have made occasional efforts to secure for themselves the opportunity for glory in the same pungent and fascinating form. A notable example of this class of Revolutionary civilians with abortive military desires, is John Hancock. In June, 1775, when Congress had before it the task of selecting one who should be the military leader of the uprisen colonists, John Hancock, seated in the president's chair, gave unmistakable signs of thinking that the choice ought to fall upon himself. ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... I may be permitted for seeing in it clear proof of her bright wit and intelligence. She told me just exactly all that it was essential to know: of the pursuit, of the absence of pressing danger, of the abortive attempt to exchange babies, and where she was to be found. Suppose that I had not met Lady Henriette, I was fully prepared for ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... reply, and Mrs Jarley, after sticking a great many pins into various parts of her figure, and making several abortive attempts to obtain a full view of her own back, was at last satisfied with her appearance, and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the Emosaid family (800-1300); (3) in the far east, in Central and Further Asia, by the discoveries of Marco Polo and the Friar preachers following on the tracks of the earlier Moslem travellers. The first of these was a Northern secret, soon forgotten, or an abortive development, cut short by the Tartars; the second was an Arabic secret, jealously guarded as a commercial right; the third alone added much direct new knowledge to the main ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... done his utmost to justify the actions of Hudson Lowe, but no one can read his work without feeling that the historian was conscious all through of an abortive task. He reproduces in vain the instructions and correspondence between Lowe and his Government, and the letters and conversations with Napoleon and members of his household, and deduces from these that the Governor could not have acted otherwise than in the manner he did. It is easy ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... God create such men as I?— All pride and passion and divine desire, Raw, quivering nerve-stuff and devouring fire, Foredoomed to failure though they try and try; Abortive, blindly to destruction hurled; Unfound, unfit to grapple with the world. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... of the Holy Alliance, and after the revolution of 1830. The hatred of Protestantism led the two kings to draw together, though Henry II. had had no mean part in that work which had enabled the Protestant Maurice of Saxony to render abortive all the plans of Charles V. for the full restoration of Catholicism in Germany. During the thirty years that followed the death of Henry II., the dissensions of France had rendered her unable to contend with the House of Austria, then principally represented ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... word, Robert Audley, you are a very agreeable companion," exclaimed Alicia at length, her rather limited stock of patience quite exhausted by two or three of these abortive attempts at conversation. "Perhaps the next time you come to the Court you will be good enough to bring your mind with you. By your present inanimate appearance, I should imagine that you had left your intellect, such as it is, somewhere in the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... Since the revolution of 1830, these Templars have made public, but abortive efforts, to bring themselves into notice, by instituting some ceremonies, in which they ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... bequeathed the aggregate amount to the nearest of blood, bearing the name Ellison, who should be alive at the end of the hundred years. Many futile attempts had been made to set aside this singular bequest; their ex post facto character rendered them abortive; but the attention of a jealous government was aroused, and a decree finally obtained, forbidding all similar accumulations. This act did not prevent young Ellison, upon his twenty-first birth-day, from entering into possession, as the heir of his ancestor, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... dwarfish, abortive, counter bank set up at Noirbourg this year: but the gentlemen soon disagreed among themselves; and, let us hope, were cut off in detail by the great Lenoir. And there was a Frenchman at our inn who had won two Napoleons per day for the last six weeks, and who had ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... favour. The campaign of Seti had opposed merely a passing obstacle to its expansion, and had not succeeded in discouraging its ambitions, for its rulers still nursed the hope of being able one day to conquer Syria as far as the isthmus. The check received at Qodshu, the abortive attempts to foment rebellion in Galilee and the Shephelah, the obstinate persistence with which Ramses and his army returned year after year to the attack, the presence of the enemy at Tunipa, on the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the contest as hopeless on the part of a scattered population, without credit, or money, or military stores, or a settled army, or experienced generals, or a central power. Washington saw on every hand dissensions, jealousies, abortive attempts to raise men, a Congress without power and without prestige, State legislatures inefficient and timid, desertions without number and without redress, men returning to their farms either disgusted or feeling ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... early in the sixteenth century that tidings of the golden empire in the south reached the Spaniards, and more than one effort was made to discover it. But these proved abortive, and it was not until after the brilliant conquest of Mexico by Cortes that the enterprise destined for success was set on foot. Then, in 1524, Francisco Pizarro, Almagro, and Father Luque united their efforts to pursue the design of discovering and conquering this rich realm ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... quilt was embroidered by the hands of Mary-Queen of Scots, during her imprisonment at Fotheringay Castle; and having evidently been a work of years, she had doubtless shed many tears over it, and wrought many doleful thoughts and abortive schemes into its texture, along with the birds and flowers. As a counterpart to this most precious relic, our friend produced some of the handiwork of a former Queen of Otaheite, presented by her to Captain Cook: it was a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... assured, has raised up impassable barriers between the races. I understand by this expression, that the blacks are of a different species from ourselves, so that all attempts to generate offspring between us and them must prove as abortive, as between a man and a beast. It is a law of Nature that the lion shall not beget the lamb, or the leopard the bear. Now the planters at the south have clearly demonstrated, that an amalgamation with their slaves is not only possible, ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... antagonist through the body. But he had been drinking, and neither hand nor eye were steady; whilst Tom's clutch upon his coat collar, as he kept swinging him half off his feet, and laying his stout staff to his back, almost throttled him, and rendered his efforts abortive. ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... could be prosecuted and convicted. And by degrees the desire for vengeance slackened as the desire for gain resumed its sway. Many men have threatened to spend a property upon a lawsuit who have afterwards felt grateful that their threats were made abortive. And so it was with Mr. Mason. After remaining in town over a month he took the advice of the first of those new lawyers and allowed that gentleman to put himself in communication with Mr. Furnival. The result was that by the end ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... regularly visit the fellow in his lair. I feel certain of it. Of course they have been followed, but only in daylight, and then they are found to be on their ordinary business. But there is one of them who goes abroad at night; and all attempts at following him have proved abortive. He loses himself in the chapparal paths in spite of the spies. That is why I am certain ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... my archaeological mission being abortive, I was told by the Christian secretary of the pasha that the difficulty had been that I had not offered to give to His Excellency the coins that might be found in the excavations, and that if I did this I might hope for a firman. As it was not in my power to give what, by the agreement arrived at ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... heads—flying so close at times that they might almost have been caught by the hand. Neither was it surprising that innumerable shots were fired, by both sportsmen, without a single bird being a whit the worse for it, or themselves much the better; the energetic efforts made to hit being rendered abortive by the very eagerness which caused them to miss. And this was the less extraordinary, too, when it is remembered that Harry in his haste loaded several times without shot, and Charley rendered the right barrel of ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the right. Feelings and resentments closed their ears to the counsels of moderation and wisdom, and the monarchy was not less systematically pushed towards its catastrophe by the hand of its friends than that of its enemies. The plan was abortive. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... intolerable and disproportioned to the object. Nero, however, who longed to achieve things that exceeded credibility, exerted all his might to perforate the mountains adjoining to Avernus, and to this day there remain traces of his abortive project. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... air. To what use has it been put, so far? To practically none, save the destruction of life. About five years before the war some of us in England tried to initiate an international movement to ban the use of flying for military purposes. The effort was entirely abortive. The fact is, man never goes in front of events, always insists on disastrously buying his experience. And I am inclined to think we shall continue to advance backwards unless we intern our inventors ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... relative to the succession to the title. His emissaries had discovered that the wet-nurse had been brought home in O'Brien's frigate, and was kept so close that they could not communicate with her. He now felt that all his schemes would prove abortive. His legal adviser was with him, and they had been walking in the garden, talking over the contingencies, when they stopped close to the drawing-room windows of ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... Two abortive attempts characterised the sixties of last century in France. As regards the first of these, it was carried out by three men, Nadar, Ponton d'Amecourt, and De la Landelle, who conceived the idea of a full-sized ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... such a slough of muck, that it wants the pluck of a Hercules in the Augaean stable to commence operations, and a deus ex-machina—that is, the Public Prosecutor from the Treasury—to see that the proceedings are not abortive. Oh, where, and Oh, where is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... said as an afterthought. The man regarded his back for a moment, was struck with an idea, began an abortive gesture, sighed, gave it up, and went on also with ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... are, and what His judgment will be, are the things here taught: not what He once did, nor what He once suffered, but what He is now doing—and what He requires us to do. That is the pure, joyful, beautiful lesson of Christianity; and the fall from that faith, and all the corruptions of its abortive practice, may be summed briefly as the habitual contemplation of Christ's death instead of His Life, and the substitution of His past suffering ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... All which, if it were to be first rased from his book (as just so much of nothing to the purpose) how little would remain to give the trouble of an answer! To which let me add, that the spirit or genius, which animates the whole, is plainly perceived to be nothing else but the abortive malice of an old neglected man,[8] who hath long lain under the extremes of obloquy, poverty and contempt; that have soured his temper, and made him fearless. But where is the merit of being bold, to a man that is secure of impunity to his person, and is past ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... to a juke box in Manfred's Tavern. He'd been there many times before, and he was sure several of the couples recognized him. But except for a few abortive glances in his direction, it was as if he were a stranger in a city halfway around ...
— The First One • Herbert D. Kastle
... enormous interest of the national debt, which ministers would have to supply, would, according to the present disbursements and receipts, amount to 11,578,000l. unless that expenditure were reduced, every such attempt as they were at present making would, he was convinced, prove abortive: it was a mere topical application while a mortal distemper was raging within. He had taken no notice in his estimate of the charges for sinecures or the bounties on exports and imports: and yet the returns upon which he went, exclusive of these ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... though hopeless rivalry of his manner— which account for the reception it at first met with, and seem to have excited in Denham's contemporaries expectations which were never fulfilled. This uprise, as well as that of the Irish (which took place the year before it), turned out, on the whole, abortive. And yet what fine lines and sentiments are the following, culled from "Sophy" almost ad ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... of this volume,—the "Pioneers of France in the New World,"—the author gives us historical narratives of stirring and even heroic enterprise in two localities at extreme points of our present territory: first, the story of the sadly abortive attempt made by the Huguenots to effect a settlement in Florida; and second, the adventures, undertakings, and discoveries of Champlain, his predecessors and associates, in and near Canada. The volume is touchingly dedicated to three near kinsmen of the author,—young men who in the glory ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... every minute is travailing in pain, as it were, and is delivered of some one birth or another, and no creature can open its womb sooner, or shut it longer, than the appointed and prefixed season. There is no miscarrying as to him whose decrees do properly conceive them though to us they seem often abortive. Now, join unto this, to make the allusion full, as long as they are carried in the womb of time, they are hid from all the world. The womb is a dark lodging and no understanding nor eye can pierce into it, to tell what ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Edward in the rear. The earl's activity, promptitude, all-provident generalship, form a mournful contrast to the errors, the pusillanimity, and the treachery of others, which hitherto, as we have seen, made all his wisest schemes abortive. Despite Clarence's sullenness, Warwick had discovered no reason, as yet, to doubt his good faith. The oath he had taken—not only to Henry in London, but to Warwick at Amboise—had been the strongest which can bind man to man. If the duke had not gained all he had hoped, he had still ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... uttered it, he might have cast himself at the same moment on the body of Huish, might have picked him up, and flung him down, and wiped the cabin with him, in a frenzy of cruelty that seemed half moral. But the moment passed; and the abortive crisis left the man weaker. The stakes were so high—the pearls on the one hand—starvation and shame on the other. Ten years of pearls! The imagination of Davis translated them into a new, glorified existence ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... choice, or to my desire of living single; he would have been content to undergo a twelvemonth's probation, or more: but he was confident, that one month would either complete all their purposes, or render them abortive: and I best knew what hopes I had of my father's receding—he did not know ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... rendered the expedition abortive in its principal object, but most materially affected the condition of each particular ship, and none so fatally as the Wager, who being an old Indiaman, bought into the service upon this occasion, was now fitted out as a man of war: ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... the room. Since the night of the abortive raid upon The Cedars he had showed a marked aversion from the society of newspaper men. Regarding the facts of his donation to the fund he had vouchsafed no word to Zoe. Closely had the story of his doings at Richmond been hushed up; as closely as a bottomless purse can achieve ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... them two ropes, and had gathered into some sort of coherence. The procession marched to the Plaza where Jenkins was duly hanged. The lawless element gathered at the street corners, and at least one abortive attempt at rescue was started. But promptness of action combined with the uncertainty of the situation carried the Committee successfully through. The coroner's jury next day brought in a verdict that the deceased "came to his death on the part of an ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... we ever heard of, at all rivaling this story in an abortive ending, is one which we once heard related at a party, where the conversation turned on the singular manner in which valuable articles thrown into the sea had been sometimes recovered, and restored to their owners—the ring ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... painter, not as now, shaping from shadow and in solitude the dim glories of his heart, caught at once his inspiration from the glow of earth and its living wanderers, and, lo, the canvas breathed! Oh! what are the dull realities and the abortive offspring of this altered and humbled world—the world of meaner and dwarfish men—to him whose realms are ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... benevolence. So under another phase of its primary sense we find the epithet used to express the excellence and characteristic qualities proper to the idea or standard of its subject, to wit, genuine, thrifty, well-liking, appropriate, not abortive, monstrous, prodigious, discordant. In the Litany, "the kindly fruits of the earth" is, in the Latin versions "genuinus," and by Mr. Boyer rightly translated "les fruits de la terre chaqu'un selon ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... lunch at a queer auberge, in an abortive village appropriately named Les Deserts, where the highroad for Chambery began. An outer room roughly flagged with stone, was kitchen, nursery, and family living-room in one. It swarmed with children, and was presided over by two of Macbeth's witches, ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the close of the summer of 1841, this defile was occasionally traversed by adherents of the Ex-Queen-Regent Christina, entering Spain secretly and in small parties, to be ready to take share in the abortive attempt subsequently made to replace the reins of government in the hands of Ferdinand's widow. Not a few Carlists also, weary of the monotonous inactive life they were leading in France, prepared to join the projected insurrection; and, leaving the towns in which a residence had been assigned ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... 'Gan thunder, and both ends of heav'n: the clouds From many a horrid rift abortive poured Fierce rain with lightning mixt, water with fire In ruin reconciled; nor slept the winds Within their stoney caves, but rush'd abroad From the four hinges of the world, and ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... which so many abortive attempts are wrecked in the effort to achieve poise is a type of sentimentality ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... bridge. The reconnoissance was a success in one way —that is, in finding out that the enemy was at the point supposed by, General Pope; but it also had a tendency to accelerate Beauregard's retreat, for in a day or two his whole line fell back as far south as Guntown, thus rendering abortive the plans for bagging a large ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... prolonged the discussion that the war was over before a decision was reached; but Connecticut seized the Dutch lands at Hartford, and Roger Ludlow, who had moved to Fairfield from Windsor after 1640, began an abortive military campaign of his own. The situation remained unchanged as long as the Dutch held New Netherland, and the region between Greenwich and the Bronx continued to be what it had been from the beginning of settlement, a territory occupied only by Indians and a few ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... replied the Roman, "that there have been such reports; and it is not impossible that government may have made use of these men at particular periods, such as at the time of your abortive revolution, when your carbonari were so busy with their machinations all over the country. The information that men like these could collect, who were familiar, not merely with all the recesses and secret places of the mountains, but also with all the dark and ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... Perhaps I should have returned to Paris by way of Adrianople and Vienna, after annihilating the house of Austria. Well, my dear general, that is the project which that little hovel of a Saint-Jean-d'Acre rendered abortive!" ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... was conclusive evidence of the soft and yielding nature of the great creature's food. But there were signs that at some period of the development of the whale it had possessed a double row of teeth, because at the bottom of these upper sockets we found in a few cases what seemed to be an abortive tooth, not one that was growing, because they had no roots, but a survival of teeth that had once been perfect and useful, but from disuse, or lack of necessity for them, had gradually ceased to come to maturity. The interior of the mouth and throat was of a livid white, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... confidence in our management of your finances or not; if you disapprove, the sooner I know it the better. Then he dashed into a close and elaborate defence in detail, under all the heads of attack,—his manner of dealing with the unfunded debt, his abortive scheme of conversion, his mode of charging deficiency bills. This astonishing mass of dry and difficult matter was impressed in full significance upon the House, not only by the orator's own buoyant and energetic interest in the performance, but by the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... logs, trod those not yet under way, and so arrived on solid ground. The jam itself started with every indication of meaning business, gained momentum for a hundred feet, and then plugged to a standstill. The "break" was abortive. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... given to me. But I much fear at my time of life that my Tragedy of Nero must remain unwritten, as also my Novel of Charlotte Clopton, and that thrilling Handbook of the Marvellous; not to mention my abortive Epic of Home, and sundry essays, satires, and other lucubrations which, alas! may now be considered addled eggs. In a last word, I somewhat vaingloriously claim for ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... be said to be in the command of the estuary of the Niger, and, therefore, any attempt to establish a channel of commerce without allowing them to participate in the profits, or to be permitted to exact a duty on all goods passing by water through their territory, must necessarily prove abortive. The jealousy of their character would be aroused, they would see in the traffic of the European a gradual decline of their own emoluments, and by degrees a total exclusion from those branches of commerce, from which they had hitherto derived the greatest profit. That the commerce of the interior ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... surely she was like a daughter of Venus, though Sievewright's wife was an ugly shrew, as he remembered to have heard afterwards. He made a long face, but, in truth, felt scarcely more sorrowful than a mute at a funeral. These first passions of men and women are mostly abortive; and are dead almost before they are born. Esmond could repeat, to his last day, some of the doggerel lines in which his muse bewailed his pretty lass; not without shame to remember how bad the verses were, and how good he thought ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... one of us. Do what you will and pray how you will, you will never make up for the million years that have passed him by, the million years during which the dim sketch which is the basis of all ethics has lain in his brain undeveloped, or developed only into a few fantastic and abortive God shapes and ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... possible that their suspicions were not a little increased by the malicious insinuations of persons, who, from motives too obvious to require any explanation, took great pains at that time to render abortive every public undertaking in which I was engaged. But be that as it may, the fact is, I could never find means to remove these suspicions entirely, and I met with so much difficulty in carrying the measure into execution, that I was induced at last to abandon it, or ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... lair. I feel certain of it. Of course they have been followed, but only in daylight, and then they are found to be on their ordinary business. But there is one of them who goes abroad at night; and all attempts at following him have proved abortive. He loses himself in the chapparal paths in spite of the spies. That is why I am certain ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... efforts, after many months of negotiation, a formal peace was signed (15th April, 1288). But through the influence, as was alleged, of Count Ugolino (Dante's) who was then in power at Pisa, the peace became abortive; war almost immediately recommenced, and the prisoners had no release.[4] And, when the 6000 or 7000 Venetians were thrown into the prisons of Genoa in October 1298, they would find there the scanty ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... outset of the attack the employment of fomentations, or especially a turpentine stupe, gives great relief, and occasionally in the non-specific form this treatment, combined with a good dose of calomel and salts, may render the attack abortive. Some relief is always obtained by inhalations, and theoretically, an acute specific bronchitis should be successfully treated by inhalation of antiseptic and soothing remedies. In practice, however, it is found that the strength cannot be sufficiently ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... scurry before the Bourbons scuttled out of Paris in 1814, Bourrienne was made Prefet of the Police for a few days, his tenure of that post being signalised by the abortive attempt to arrest Fouche, the only effect of which was to drive that wily minister into the arms ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... informed of my uncle's dangerous state of health, been inspired with the fear of hurrying me out of the world as I advanced in my pregnancy, by thus tormenting and obliging me to take sudden journeys to avoid him; and then his speculations on my uncle's fortune must prove abortive. ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... Richmond paper of September 12th (quoted in the "New York Gazette" of September 18th) declares that "the plot has been entirely exploded, which was shallow; and had the attempt been made to carry it into execution, but little resistance would have been required to render the scheme entirely abortive." But it is necessary to remember that this is no more than the Charleston newspapers said at the very crisis of Denmark Vesey's formidable plot. "Last evening," wrote a lady from Charleston in 1822, "twenty-five hundred of our citizens were under arms to guard our property and lives. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... Southern States would have been left to their own counsels, South Carolina would have stood alone, and her Secession of 1860 would have proved as abortive as her Nullification of 1832. The Disunion movement in the remaining States of the South originated in Washington. Finding that the Cotton States, especially those bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, were moving too slowly, the senators from ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... a satisfactory reply, and Mrs Jarley, after sticking a great many pins into various parts of her figure, and making several abortive attempts to obtain a full view of her own back, was at last satisfied with her appearance, and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Chamber of Deputies which was made the object of the criminal attempt of December 9, have the honor to address to the President of the Republic a last appeal in favor of the condemned."[10] It has long been the custom in France not to punish an abortive crime with the death penalty, and it was generally believed that Vaillant's sentence would be changed to life imprisonment. President Carnot, however, refused to extend any mercy, and Vaillant ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... never forgive himself for having advised the young man to embark in the cursed speculations. But Sheldon begged him not to be unnecessarily distressed, as it was no fault of his that the schemes proved abortive; and the good doctor finally coincided, and settled down to ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... coast of Kent, the rustics made short work of the few who were rash enough to land. Perkin sailed away to the Yorkist refuge in Ireland, but Kildare was no longer deputy. Waterford, to which he laid siege, was relieved, and the pretender sought in Scotland a third basis of operations. An abortive raid on the Borders and a high-born Scottish wife[24] were all that he obtained of James IV., and in 1497, after a second attempt in Ireland, he landed in Cornwall. The Cornishmen had just risen against Henry's extortions, marched on London and been defeated at Blackheath; but Henry's lenience ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... mean the abortive attempt at a military insurrection in St. Petersburg, to which I have alluded in the foregoing chapter—gave the key-note to Nicholas's reign. The armed attempt to overthrow the Imperial power, ending in the execution or exile of many young members of the first ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... years. So far as they were concerned, I had no ground to stand upon in making a protest. Yet when did this consideration restrain an angry lover? I had a savage feeling that they ought to have known, if they didn't. And reflection upon the late scene on the gulf side—upon the altercation, upon the abortive way in which I had allowed mastery of the situation to slip through my fingers, and upon poor Tulp's sufferings—only served to ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... laid out on the great rivers of the colony. As they were located in the middle region, east of the fall line, among pine barrens, or in malarial lands in the southern corner of the colony, they all proved abortive as towns, except Orangeburg[96:5] on the North Edisto, where German redemptioners made a settlement. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who came to Williamsburg, on Black River, suffered hardships; ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the domain which she could not occupy, and on France especially she kept an eye of deep distrust. When, in 1541, Cartier and Roberval essayed to plant a colony in the part of ancient Spanish Florida now called Canada, she sent spies and fitted out caravels to watch that abortive enterprise. Her fears proved just. Canada, indeed, was long to remain a solitude; but, despite the Papal bounty gifting Spain with exclusive ownership of a hemisphere, France and Heresy at length took root in the sultry ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... caught the trick of his precursor's scolding. Volkmar had paraphrased Origen's words in a way of which his critic disapproved, and Tischendorf comments as follows: "But here again we have to do with nothing else than a completely abortive fabrication, a certificate of our said critic's poverty. For the assertion derived from the close of the work of Origen rests upon gross ignorance or upon intentional deception. The words of Origen to his patron Ambrosius, who had prompted ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... and the Squatters' Bill, both abortive measures, but, nevertheless, showing clearly the attitude of mind of the white rulers towards the Coloured races. In order to find employment for poor whites, Coloured railway employees who had served the country faithfully and well were dismissed. A white South Africa has been declared ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... chance is very great, that such obstacles prove insurmountable. In fine, there are few men who do not look back in secret to some period of their {p.226} youth, at which a sincere and early affection was repulsed or betrayed, or became abortive from opposing circumstances. It is these little passages of secret history, which leave a tinge of romance in every bosom, scarce permitting us, even in the most busy or the most advanced period of life, to listen with total indifference to a tale ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... having secured his passage home, was in good spirits as far as his own affairs were concerned, though still irritable on the score of his nephew's. Since the abortive attempt on his confidence of the night before, Roger had avoided all private conversation with his uncle; and for once the old had to learn patience ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... grows moist as you lift your foot again. Pleasant to pass along this extensive walk, watching the surf-wave;—how sometimes it seems to make a feint of breaking, but dies away ineffectually, merely kissing the strand; then, after many such abortive efforts, it gathers itself, and forms a high wall, and rolls onward, heightening and heightening, without foam at the summit of the green line, and at last throws itself fiercely on the beach, with a loud roar, the spray flying above. As you walk along, you are preceded by a flock ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... members, of rudimentary and abortive limbs, does seem, at first sight, to be unfavorable to the idea of supremacy of purpose and all-pervading design. It should be remarked, however, that this is an argument based upon our ignorance, and not upon our knowledge. It ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... is the harbour of Yerba Buena crowded with strange craft, but its streets with queer characters—adventurers of every race and clime— among whom may be heard an exchange of tongues, the like never listened to since the abortive attempt at building ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... is it to reflect how his whole development has suffered for this mistake, all his life-blood gone to feed this abortive thing. The gentler charities of life have been neglected, fine qualities atrophied, the man has grown narrow and selfish, all the real things have been lost for this shadow: that he might become, ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... spot "Septimius Felton" was written; but the manuscript, thrown aside, was mentioned in the Dedicatory Preface to "Our Old Home" as an "abortive project." As will be found explained in the Introductory Notes to "The Dolliver Romance" and "The Ancestral Footstep," that phase of the same general design which was developed in the "Dolliver" was intended to take the place of this unfinished ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... attempt was made at Inneshannon, near Bandon, in Ireland, by the Hugnenot refugees, but proved abortive. The climate proved too cold or damp for the rearing of silkworms with advantage. All that remains is "The Mulberry Field," which still retains its name. Nevertheless the Huguenots successfully established the silk manufacture ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... son, if he has any defect, in the same manner we ought not [to contemn] our friend. The father calls his squinting boy a pretty leering rogue; and if any man has a little despicable brat, such as the abortive Sisyphus formerly was, he calls it a sweet moppet; this [child] with distorted legs, [the father] in a fondling voice calls one of the Vari; and another, who is club-footed, he calls a Scaurus. [Thus, does] this ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... civili, i.e. after the abortive attempt of Lepidus to make himself master of the state 77 B.C. C. Dolabellam, impeached for illegal extortion during his government of Macedonia. Repetundarum (sc. pecuniarum), post-Aug. for de repetundis (pecuniis), used i. of money extorted by an official and to be returned, ii. of money ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... observers viewed Weaver's nomination as a tactical error on the part of the Populist leaders: "Mr. Weaver has belonged to the group of third-party 'come-outers' for so many years that his name is not one to conjure with in either of the old camps;... his name suggests too strongly the abortive third-party movements of the past to excite much hope or enthusiasm. He is not exactly the sort of a Moses who can frighten Pharaoh into fits or bring convincing plagues upon the monopolistic oppressors ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... Afghans holding the sungahs on its face. Sir Frederick Roberts had to recognise that the direct attack by so weak a force unaided by a diversion, could not succeed, and he ordered further efforts to be deferred. The casualties of the abortive attempt included three officers, one of whom, Major Cook, V.C. of the Goorkhas, than whom the British army contained no better soldier, died of his wound. Macpherson was directed to hold the ground he had won, including the lower advanced hill, ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... manufactured between 1780 and 1814 were all of one pattern, and the one which Gourdon composed upon the Cup-and-Ball will give an idea of them. They required a certain knack or proficiency in the art. "The Chorister" is the Saturn of this abortive generation of jocular poems, all in four cantos or thereabouts, for it was generally admitted that six ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... able to effectuat it, and then he procured Mr. Wm. Ramsay his second sone to be made conjunct Clerk of Edr. Bot his death att Newcastell some few years after made the designe of this profitable place abortive. ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... this a strong plea for good works? And is it not a strong argument that Restoration is true? Is it to be supposed that the divine government is based on any possibility of good efforts being abortive? Surely, in God's perfect government of the world it is so arranged that every good influence will have its due effect. To my mind, this consideration makes strongly for the truth of the theory ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... to find additional help, to escape in safety, and not bring both him and myself to destruction. At length we came to the following determination, which, however, after eight months' incessant labour, rendered my whole project abortive. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... insure the continuity of the collective mind; that is manifestly a primary necessity for Socialism. The attempt to realize the Marxist idea of a democratic Socialism without that, might easily fail into the abortive birth of an acephalous monster, the secular development of administrative Socialism give the world over to a bureaucratic mandarinate, self-satisfied, interfering and unteachable, with whom wisdom would die. And yet we Socialists can produce in our plans no absolute bar to these possibilities. ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... were reserved to fates not less abortive and wretched. The first entered the navy as surgeon-mate, but was discharged for drunkenness. He died in penury, an outcast. Harman became a portrait painter in New York, but he lost his strength of body and mind, and finally perished in an almshouse on Blackwell's Island. His body lies buried ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... of inanimate nature; in other words, he tacitly assumes that the Laws of Similarity and Contact are of universal application and are not limited to human actions. In short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art. Regarded as a system of natural law, that is, as a statement of the rules which determine the sequence of events throughout the world, it may be called Theoretical Magic: regarded as a set of precepts which human beings observe in order to compass ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... which Alcyone is the chief. But since Maedler's time it has been demonstrated that the Pleiades cannot be the center of revolution of the universe, and, as already remarked, all attempts to find or fix such a center have proved abortive. Yet so powerful was the hold that the theory took upon the popular imagination, that even today astronomers are often asked if Alcyone is not the probable site of ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... that the higher powers favoured Dangerfield; and that, beside his absurd sentiment, not to say passion, which could not but be provoking, Puddock's complicity in the abortive hostilities of poor Nutter and the gallant O'Flaherty rankled in Aunt Becky's heart. She was, indeed, usually appeasable and forgiving enough; but in this case her dislike seemed inveterate and vindictive; and she ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... to the fair orphan having thus proved abortive, he lost no time in bewailing his miscarriage, but had immediate recourse to other means of improving his small fortune, which, at this period, amounted to near two hundred pounds. Whatever inclination he had to resume the character he had formerly borne in the polite world, he durst not venture ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... a step nearer Mr. Job Pratt, and the letter was reluctantly yielded; though not until the widow Martin had made a nervous but abortive ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... lady, owing to her great age, was also virtually an invalid; so that both she and her daughter scarcely ever left their room, and hence their influence upon young Ernst's education and training was practically nil. His uncle, however, after an abortive attempt to follow the law, had settled down to a quiet vegetative sort of existence, which he regulated strictly according to fixed rules and methodical procedure; and these he imposed more or less upon the household. Justizrath Otto (or Ottchen, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... comic thrusts which were intended to shape the policy of himself and his officers towards the crew. If the captain happened to be a person of no humour and without the sense of music this method of conveyance was abortive, but it went on all the same until nature forced a glimpse into his hazy mind of what it all meant! Happily there are few sailors who inherit such a defective nature. It is a good thing that some of these thrilling old songs have been preserved to us. Even if they do not convey an accurate impression ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... pans. The tea shrub is an evergreen, being in flower from October to January, and the seed ripens in the September or October following, so that both flower and seed may be gathered at the same time; but for one fully ripened seed, an hundred are abortive. There are the two sorts of seeds mentioned by Father Le Compte, in his description of tea; and what be describes as a third sort, under the name of slymie pease, consists merely of the young flower-buds, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... clear. Reference has already been made to them in the descriptions of several ruins, and for want of a better name they have been designated chimney-like structures. At the time that they were examined they were supposed to be new, and the first hypothesis formed was that they were abortive chimneys, but further examination showed that this idea was not tenable. Subsequently Nordenskioeld's book on the Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde was published, and it appears therefrom that this feature ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... seven and twenty Yeas. The Ministers gave in their Arguments yesterday, else it had hardly gon, because several have married their wives sisters, and the Deputies thought it hard to part them. 'Twas concluded on the other hand, that not to part them, were to make the Law abortive, by begetting in people a conceipt that such Marriages were not against ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... to be anything more to say, nor did Lord Jasper seem anxious to continue the conversation; but just when it appeared that the effort to be pleasantly chatty was likely to be abortive, Lord Jasper suddenly walked towards the door of the box. "Come and have ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... not to warn: that was the question mainly agitating Members. The majority appeared to think that some system of sound-signals was desirable; others pointed out that many threatened raids proved abortive, and that sirens would interfere with business, as in the leading case of Ulysses. Thanks to the HOME SECRETARY'S conciliatory methods there was considerably less tension in the atmosphere when the time came for the PRIME MINISTER to make his statement. When air-raids are about there ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... de l'Academ. de Science, that the summer figs of Paris, in Provence, Italy, and Malta, have all perfect stamina, and ripen not only their fruits, but their seed; from which seed other fig-trees are raised; but that the stamina of the autumnal figs are abortive, perhaps owing to the want of due warmth. Mr. Milne, in his Botanical Dictionary (art. Caprification), says, that the cultivated fig-trees have a few male flowers placed above the female within the same covering or receptacle; which in warmer ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... General Thario and others in similar position, was enjoying the new comradeinarms atmosphere the abortive war had brought on, a sudden series of submarine attacks on the Pacific Fleet provided a disagreeable jolt and ended the bloodless stage of the conflict. Tried and proved methods of detection and defense became useless; the warships were nothing more than targets ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... World Wars, Lithuania was annexed by the USSR in 1940. In March of 1990, Lithuania became the first of the Soviet republics to declare its independence, but this proclamation was not generally recognized until September of 1991 (following the abortive coup in Moscow). The last Russian troops withdrew in 1993. Lithuania subsequently has restructured its economy for eventual integration into Western ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Influenced by the splendid prospects of this undertaking my father determined if possible to surpass it. He wrote to Fiel of Paris and expected to be able to secure an objective of 4 feet diameter, exceeding that of the Lick Observatory by one foot, a hopeless and as it proved an utterly abortive design. He spent an entire year in New York after leaving Irvington examining the various possible locations for his new observatory. The requisites were nearness to the equator, an equable climate, elevation and a clear atmosphere. During ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... fills, with paradoxical vacancy, the throne! Nothing but the sharpest essence of villany, compounded with the strongest distillation of folly, could have produced a menstruum that would have effected a separation. The Congress in 1774 administered an abortive medicine to independence, by prohibiting the importation of goods, and the succeeding Congress rendered the dose still more dangerous by continuing it. Had independence been a settled system with America, (as Britain has advanced,) she ought to have doubled ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... afterward was an instructor in the college at Zaragoza. Desiring to labor among the heathen, he entered the Philippine missions, arriving at Manila June 28, 1626. About that time, the Jesuits attempted to found missions in Formosa and Jolo, to which task Colin was assigned; but, these proving abortive, he remained at Manila, occupying a chair in the Jesuit college, and acting as confessor to Governor Nio de Tavora. After the latter's death, Colin became rector of the college, and soon afterward was sent (1634) to the new mission of Mindoro, where he spent three years. Recalled to Manila, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 27 of 55) • Various
... the necessity of working," he added, after going through the catalogue of his abortive studies, "that is, not for my livelihood." Some of the governors nodded their heads a little, as though they recognised the ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... who had come as a deputation to ask counsel of the old sage. He, if any one, would find some means of averting or, at any rate, mitigating the fearful calamity impending over the town and country, and against which prayer, sacrifice, processions, and pilgrimages had proved abortive. They were quite resolved to leave no means untried, not even if heathen magic should ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a vain struggle to speak, but no words came! Only abortive sounds painfully shattered! How precious those unborn words! Oh, that ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... Channel, which was begun for that end, and designed to be 2000. paces long and 100. paces broad, betwixt the River Altmull, falling into the Danube above Ratisbone, and the River Rott, passing at Nurenberg, and thence running into the Main, and so into the Rhine. But yet this also proved abortive, though there was great appearance of success ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... in the far east, in Central and Further Asia, by the discoveries of Marco Polo and the Friar preachers following on the tracks of the earlier Moslem travellers. The first of these was a Northern secret, soon forgotten, or an abortive development, cut short by the Tartars; the second was an Arabic secret, jealously guarded as a commercial right; the third alone added much direct new knowledge to the main part of ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... citizen does not make that person a citizen in the honest sense of the word. Let Mr. Warrington live among us half a dozen years, and then we shall see. The senator, who is not without some wisdom and experience, will doubtless withdraw this abortive candidate. It's the only logical thing he can do. We dare say that the dramatist accepted the honor with but one end in view: to find some material for a new play. But Herculaneum declines to be so honored. He is legally, but not morally, a citizen. He is ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... not that I write with the imbecile idea of rendering those preparations abortive. No, I am not so mad. My sole view is to explain the motive of my conduct in a particular instance, and to obviate the accusation of treachery which may ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... functionaries, both high and low, the municipal officers, and the military commanders had all become extremely remiss in their duty, and presuming upon this impunity showed a pernicious indulgence to the rebels and their adherents which rendered abortive all the regent's measures of coercion. This general indifference and corruption of so many servants of the state had further this injurious result, that it led the turbulent to reckon on far stronger support than in reality they had cause for, and to count on their own side all who ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... that their design had proved abortive, went directly to the place of rendezvous, and told the first of his troops whom he met that they had lost their labour, and must return to their cave. He himself set them the example, and they all ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... who can see nothing but particular circumstances. Of lawgivers in whom the speculative element has prevailed to the exclusion of the practical, the world has during the last eighty years been singularly fruitful. To their wisdom Europe and America have owed scores of abortive constitutions, scores of constitutions which have lived just long enough to make a miserable noise, and have then gone off in convulsions. But in the English legislature the practical element has always predominated, and not seldom unduly predominated, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... illiberality, but a wide-embracing sympathy for the modes of Christian worship, and a reverence for individual belief, as a matter between the Deity and man's soul, and with which no other has a right to interfere. With the feeling here described, and with his acute intellectual perception of the abortive character of all intolerant measures, as defeating their own ends, it strikes one as nothing less than ludicrous that he should be charged with desiring to retain this obsolete enactment, standing, as it does, ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... on the whole was the flayed caricature of a man done so cunningly that through the abortive hideousness of its outlines, its ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... contemplate it through the medium of its natural motives of fidelity to the Government on the one hand, and of its artificial delusion on the other. He may now go to the bottom of Southern society, and find in its conflicting elements the antagonistic motives that render the plans of treason abortive. These will be sure to continue, and sure to strengthen on the side of fidelity to the National Government. When the South is made a solid, compact unit in political motive, it will become so, disarmed of all ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... confined to the southern portion of the province of San Paulo, and are called by the Brazilians Bugres — that is, slaves. A more unfitting name it would have been impossible to hit upon, as all efforts to civilize them have proved abortive, and to-day they still range the forests, attacking small parties of travellers, and burning isolated farm-houses. The Brazilians assert that they are cannibals, but little is known positively as to this. What has ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... this was that, between October and April, he was in the hospital four times, always owing to an increase in the low fever induced by physical and mental exhaustion. Through the winter, Becker had made a few feeble attempts at protection, all of which proved abortive. But finally, in the early spring, noting Ivan's look of frailty, and fearing a breakdown that must be brought to the notice of Prince Michael, he took the case in hand vigorously, and procured for the boy at least unbroken sleep at night, though he could force no other consideration from ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... with a will, discharged a smashing blow on his own knuckles. With admirable presence of mind he crushed down an oath and substituted the harmless comment, "Butter fingers!" But the pain was sharp, his nerve was shaken, and after an abortive trial he found he must ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we found from a comparison of dates, must have followed almost immediately after his passing from the earth; and he said he thought that his two previous seizures were probably abortive attempts of his spirit to ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... that he was not the real owner. Failing in this, he stirred up the petty-governor and headmen against him. The petty-governor was urged to litigation, and when he received an unfavourable sentence, the priest, enraged at the abortive result of his malicious intrigues, actually left his vicarage to accompany his litigious protege to the chief judge of the province in quest of a reversion ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... miniature-painting with the city of Paris, have often dwelt on this notion of a Renaissance in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, a Renaissance within the limits of the middle age itself—a brilliant, but in part abortive effort to do for human life and the human mind what was afterwards done in the fifteenth. The word Renaissance, indeed, is now generally used to denote not merely that revival of classical antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century, and to which ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... the Emperor first turned his attention in 777, when he was invited by the discontented emirs on the north of the Ebro to free them from the Caliph of Cordova. The next year saw his abortive march through the pass of Roncesvalles to the walls of Saragossa—an expedition immortalised in the Chanson de Roland, the earliest and most famous epic of the Charlemagne cycle, but fabulous from first to last, except in ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... of the greater part of the Mercantile Marine, to be operated by them for the purpose of shipping foodstuffs to Europe generally, and to Germany in particular. The reluctance of the Germans to agree to this was productive of long and dangerous delays in the supply of food, but the abortive Conferences of Treves and Spa (January 16, February 14-16, and March 4-5, 1919) were at last followed by the Agreement of Brussels (March 14, 1919). The unwillingness of the Germans to conclude was mainly due to the lack of any absolute ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... romance, even in this form, was again abandoned, as we learn from the prefatory note to Pierce in "Our Old Home," written in July, 1863. He there speaks of it as an "abortive project, utterly thrown aside," which "will never now be accomplished." In November of that year, "The Dolliver Romance" was announced for serial publication; and in the first page of the isolated opening scene, published ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... given to celebrate his removal to London, "I cannot speak; if I could, I should not have left you." But if he could not speak he could write, and the establishment of Blackwood's Magazine, after its first abortive numbers, gave him scope. "The scorpion which delighteth to sting the faces of men," as he or Wilson describes himself in the Chaldee Manuscript (for the passage is beyond Hogg's part), certainly justified the description. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... predecessors of the North British Alizarine Company. These patents expire in about two months, and the lecturer explained that an attempt made by the German manufacturers to further monopolize this industry (even after the expiry of the patent) proved abortive. He also stated that alizarine, 20 per cent. quality, is sold to-day at 2s 6d. per lb., but that if the price were reduced by one-half there will still be a handsome profit to makers, and that the United Kingdom ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... long-continued popularity; we hear of performances of them being given even a hundred years after his death, and Horace speaks with gentle sarcasm of the enthusiasts who put him on a level with Menander. With his contemporary Quinctius Atta (who died B.C. 77, in the year of the abortive revolution after the death of Sulla), he owed much of his success to the admirable acting of Roscius, who created a stage tradition that lasted long after his own time. To the mass of the people, comedy (though it did not err in the direction of over-refinement) seemed tame ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... not succeed the minds of husband and wife are troubled by doubts and anxieties which are damaging to their intimate relationships. And, moreover, if this harmful restraint succeeds in preventing conception there eventuates the inevitable prevalence of sex excitement followed by abortive and half-realised satisfaction, and the enhanced risk of the man or woman yielding ...
— Love—Marriage—Birth Control - Being a Speech delivered at the Church Congress at - Birmingham, October, 1921 • Bertrand Dawson
... at New Caledonia. After their decease the ships returned to France as rapidly as they could. They were detained by the Dutch at Sourabaya for several months, as prisoners of war, and did not reach Europe till March, 1796. Their mission had been abortive. ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... in a polite note expressed himself unable to accept Count BERNSTORFF'S offer as a full satisfaction of America's demands. The sands are evidently running out, and there is serious danger of the negotiations proving abortive. In the meantime a sharp Note has been addressed to England in regard to her interference with American commerce. Six munition works were yesterday blown up. The outrage is attributed to Germans. President WILSON is carefully ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... He made an elaborate provision for plants which depended for its efficiency on the presence of quadrupeds, He nevertheless, after all, neglected to place the quadrupeds in the same islands as the plants! Now, I submit that such abortive attempts at adaptation bring the thesis of the special creationists to a reductio ad absurdum; so that the only possible explanation before us is, that while the seeds of these plants were able to float to the islands, the quadrupeds were not ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... of the Medici, Machiavelli, who for a few weeks had vainly hoped to retain his office under the new masters of Florence, was dismissed by decree dated 7th November 1512. Shortly after this he was accused of complicity in an abortive conspiracy against the Medici, imprisoned, and put to the question by torture. The new Medicean people, Leo X, procured his release, and he retired to his small property at San Casciano, near Florence, where he devoted himself to literature. In a letter to Francesco Vettori, ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... already said, was the response to Brunswick's proclamation. The bloody days of September were the reaction of panic at the capture of Longwy and Verdun by the Prussians. The surrender of Cambrai provoked the execution of Marie Antoinette. The defeat of Aix-la-Chapelle produced the abortive insurrection of the Tenth of March; and the treason of Dumouriez, the reverses of Custine, and the rebellion in La Vendee, produced the effectual insurrection of the Thirty-first of May 1793. The last of these two risings of Paris, headed ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... to airing his abortive sense of humor overmuch, and he was a sound judge of horse and man. If he was right—but the major had to laugh at such a possibility. Garrison to ride like that! He who had confessed he had never thrown a leg over a horse before! By a freak of nature he might possess the instinct ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... Cortlant had been store-keeper for the Company and deacon of the church; later he was burgomaster of New Amsterdam. Michiel Jansz and Thomas Hall were farmers, the latter, the first English settler in New York State, having come to Manhattan as a deserter from George Holmes's abortive expedition of 1635 against Fort Nassau on South River. Elbert Elertsz was a weaver, Hendrick Kip a tailor. Govert Loockermans, on the other hand, brother-in-law to both Couwenhoven and Cortlandt, was the chief merchant and Indian trader of the province, often in partnership with Isaac ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... occasion the bells of Horncastle Parish Church were rung in the night, announcing the joyful tidings that coal had been found. But, alas! all these hopes were illusory. Mr. Parkinson himself became a ruined man, and many a poor investor lost his all, sunk in the mine. The attempt thus proving abortive, the mine was closed, and remained so for several years, Mr. Parkinson himself disappearing from the scene, and his Woodhall property passing into other hands—the ancestors of the present owners of the estate. As the result of this ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... created the wave which bears themselves, and humanity, onwards. The artificial social movements which have had their origin in the arbitrary will of individuals, guided with however much determination and reason, have of necessity proved ephemeral and abortive. An Alexander might will to weld a Greece and an Asia into one; a Napoleon might resolve to create of a diversified Europe one consolidated state; and by dint of skill and determination they might for a moment appear to be accomplishing that which they ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... attracted by prurient sexual adventures. A vulgar work obviously meant to appeal to a neurotic taste for sexuality, it includes no attack on Swift as it explores at length some topics to which Gulliver in his memoirs only tangentially alludes. The second abortive effort, an animal satire of exotic talking fowl, also resembles Swift's satire as it touches on several similar topics—the hypocrisy of the people, the scepticism of their nobility, the love of luxury of the higher clergy—but again because ...
— A Letter From a Clergyman to his Friend, - with an Account of the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver • Anonymous
... after her abortive attempt to break away, Gyp, with much heart-searching, wrote to Daphne Wing, telling her of Fiorsen's illness, and mentioning a cottage near Mildenham, where—if she liked to go—she would be quite comfortable and safe from all curiosity, and finally begging to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The sketches of American life and tendencies, both Northern and Southern, are given with discrimination and truth. The dying scene, which closes the First Part, seems to us nobly wrought. The "death-bed hymn" of the slaves sounds a pathetic wail over an abortive life shivering on the brink of the Unknown. In the Second Part we find less of the color and music of a poem, and more of the rapid movement of a drama. The doom of Slavery upon the master now comes into full relief. The characters of Herbert and his father ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... south of Miliana, and soon appeared in full force in the Sahara as the bewildered French pursuers returned to their cantonments in despair of reaching him. This is a sample of the evolutions by which genius made amends for inferiority of force. The ablest military combinations were rendered abortive by an enemy that was ever slipping between columns, flitting in the front, hovering on the flanks, assailing the rear, and, with perfect knowledge of the country, was sometimes in the mountains and again in the plains, ubiquitous, unattainable ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Here many a foetus laugh and half encore Clings to the roof, or creeps along the floor; By puffs concipient some in ether flit, And soar in bravos from the thundering pit; Some forth on ticket-nights {66} from tradesmen break, To mar the actor they design to make; While some this mortal life abortive miss, Crush'd by a groan, or strangled by a hiss. So, when "Dog's-meat" re-echoes through the streets, Rush sympathetic dogs from their retreats, Beam with bright blaze their supplicating eyes, Sink their hind-legs, ascend their ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... ones! That feeble in the mind's eye, lean your trust Upon unstaid perverseness! Know ye not That we are worms, yet made at last to form The winged insect, imp'd with angel plumes That to heaven's justice unobstructed soars? Why buoy ye up aloft your unfleg'd souls? Abortive then and shapeless ye remain, Like the untimely embryon of a worm! As, to support incumbent floor or roof, For corbel is a figure sometimes seen, That crumples up its knees unto its breast, With the feign'd posture stirring ruth unfeign'd In the beholder's fancy; so I saw These fashion'd, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... there was still delay; there were the usual abortive attempts at a congress, which, as in 1859, broke down through the refusal of Austria to give way. There were dark intrigues of Napoleon, who even at the last moment attempted to divert the Italians from ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... composed of the Corean contingent Kublai easily persuaded himself that this defeat did not indicate what would happen when he employed his own Mongol troops. He also succeeded in sending several envoys to Japan after his first abortive attempt, and they brought back consistent reports as to the hostility and defiance of the Japanese, who at last, to leave no further doubt on the subject, executed his envoy in 1280. For this outrage the haughty monarch ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... in an enemy's camp, I proceeded to strip the slain; and with some little difficulty—partly, indeed, owing to my unsteadiness on my legs—I succeeded in denuding the worthy alderman, who gave no other sign of life during the operation than an abortive effort to "hip, hip, hurra," in which I left him, having put on the spoil, and set out on my way the the barrack with as much dignity of manner as I could assume in honour of my costume. And here I may mention (en parenthese) that ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... protocols, joint declarations, sole mediation, joint mediation, identic notes, sole notes, united notes—everything has been tried. Couriers from the Queen have been scouring Europe with the exuberant fertility of abortive projects. After the termination of the most important Conference, held in the capital of the Queen, over which the chief Minister of Her Majesty's foreign relations presided, and which was attended with all the pomp and ceremony requisite for so great an occasion, we find that ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... applied after exposure to infection. This is called "early treatment." This term is inapplicable, as a disease cannot be treated before it exists. It is also likely to be confused with "abortive treatment," which implies treatment immediately ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... gave no indication that he had that interview in mind. Claverhouse had learned one lesson, however—patience—and he would have many more to learn; he had also been taught not to take hasty views, but to wait for the long result. And his heart lifted when, after the abortive siege of Charleroi, he was summoned for a second time to the Prince's presence. On this occasion the Prince said little, but it was to the point; it was the ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... their course to the more northern parts of the continent, had been among the first adventurers to North America. Their voyages of discovery are of a very early date, and their attempts to establish a colony were among the first which were made. After several abortive efforts, a permanent settlement was made in Canada, in the year 1604, and the foundation of Quebec was laid in the year 1608. In November 1603, Henry IV. appointed De Mont lieutenant-general of that part of the territory ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... anxious he may have been, he could not have foreseen Essex's unaccountable and to this day unintelligible failure. But failure was the end, from whatever cause; failure, disgraceful and complete. Then followed wild and guilty but abortive projects for retrieving his failure, by using his power in Ireland to make himself formidable to his enemies at Court, and even to the Queen herself. He intrigued with Tyrone; he intrigued with James ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... keep awake at all, except over lives of the other sort; hence, one of great and successful villany is a prize for the scribe. In the dearth of such, let us content ourselves with briefly noticing one of the multitude of abortive cubs, its villany nipped—as Nature is wont to nip it—in the promising bud of its tenderness. Many a flourishing young rogue suddenly disappears, and the world never knows how or why. But it shall know, if it will heed our one-story tale, how Chip Dartmouth of these parts was turned down ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... ultimate duality would be rendered abortive if the future were determined in any more definite way than by the premonition, the hope, the dream, the passion, the prophecy, the vision, of those invisible companions whose existence is implied whenever two separate souls communicate their ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... The undertaking proved abortive. Johnson, having now abandoned all hopes of promoting his fortune in the country, determined to become an adventurer in the world at large. His young pupil, Garrick, had formed the same resolution; and, accordingly, in March, 1737, they arrived in London together. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
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