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More "Knavish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and escaped detection, as was my undeserved luck that night, I needed never to ask again why he had been willing to accept risks from which most men shrink from fear if not from conscience. He loved money, not as the spender loves it, openly and with luxurious instincts, but secretly and with a knavish dread of discovery which spoke of ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... sword Nagelring, the fame whereof went out afterwards into the whole world. They tied up their horses and went together into the cave. Grimur, seeing strangers, at once challenged them to fight; but looking round anxiously for Nagelring, he missed it, whereupon he cursed the knavish Alpris, who had assuredly stolen it from him. However, he snatched from the hearth the blazing trunk of a tree and therewith attacked Theodoric. Meanwhile Hildebrand, taken at unawares, was caught hold of by Hildur, who clung so tightly round his ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... who broke the silence, saying, with his predetermined smirk, that the parchment was ready for my signature. Thinking it well beneath me to measure words with this knavish pettifogger, I looked beyond him and ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... was sometimes called, Robin Goodfellow) was a shrewd and knavish sprite, that used to play comical pranks in the neighbouring villages; sometimes getting into the dairies and skimming the milk, sometimes plunging his light and airy form into the butter-churn, and while he was dancing his fantastic ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... inasmuch as they are momentary, and that their aim, whenever they are to have one, must not be remote. Beaumarchais has seized their full value, and the effects of his "Figaro" spring pre-eminently from this. Whereas such good-humored roguish and half-knavish pranks are practised with personal risk for noble ends, the situations which arise from them are aesthetically and morally considered of the greatest value for the theatre; as, for instance, the opera of "The Water-Carrier" treats perhaps the happiest ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... and pitiful. His tone was too confident, he was too sure of his ground to leave me a doubt as to what would befall if I made appeal to his knavish followers. My arms fell to my sides, and I looked at Gervasio. His face was haggard, and his eyes were very full of sorrow ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... said Prieme impatiently; 'then it was only one Swede, and it didn't much matter whether he lived or died. But, boy, if many thousand innocent people are about to perish through one man's knavish trick, ought we not to bring the traitor to justice, ay, though he be father, brother, or son? Look at that dear, good woman, your blind mother! Do you want the Swedes to get in and slaughter her? Are you going to let sixty thousand brave men and women perish, and all our toils and ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... implicitly in all things. The justice bore it into his chamber, and examined it by the light with some curiosity. On the lid was neatly written with red chalk: "For the lovely and dear Marietta." But Monsieur Hautmartin well knew that this was some of Colin's mischief, and that some knavish trick lurked under the whole. He therefore opened the box carefully for fear that a mouse or rat should be concealed within. When he beheld the wondrous cup, which he had seen at Vence, he was dreadfully shocked, for Monsieur ...
— The Broken Cup - 1891 • Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke
... that. I can tell you no more. On the other hand if Chris thinks he must be a monk, well and good; I do not think so myself; but that is not my affair; but I hope he will not be a monk only because a knavish woman has put out her tongue at him, and repeated what a knavish priest has put into her mouth. But I suppose he had made up his mind before he ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... terrible hours—terrible and yet worthy that I should wish them back again—have I often wept on Bendel's bosom, when, after the first unconscious intoxication, I recollected myself, looked sharply into myself—I, without a shadow, with knavish selfishness destroying this angel, this pure soul which I had deceived and stolen. Then did I resolve to reveal myself to her; then did I swear with a most passionate oath to tear myself from her, and to fly; then did I burst out into tears, and concert with Bendel ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... me, weighed my plans and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated going partners with a knavish fellow countryman on a guano venture. I did not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know; but he saw how thick we were getting and found out for me, and that without my asking. Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock about ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... the era when that refractory animal, the working or serving man, shall be a buried by-gone, a superseded fossil. Shortly prior to which glorious time, I doubt not that a price will be put upon their peltries as upon the knavish 'possums,' especially the boys. Yes, sir (ringing his rifle down on the deck), I rejoice to think that the day is at hand, when, prompted to it by law, I shall shoulder this gun and go ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... knavish tricks! Yet know I five or six Smokers who freely mix Still with their neighbours; Jones—who, I'm glad to say, Asked leave of Mrs. J.) - Daily absorbs ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... of this extraordinary accident. From a country so near and so readily accessible they can get plants home, pot them up, and sell them, before the withering process sets in. May this revelation confound such knavish tricks! The moral is old—buy your orchids from one of the great dealers, if you do not ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... a virgin; if any one be so impudent as to attempt sodomy with a male; or if, upon another's making an attempt upon him, he submits to be so used. There is also a law for slaves of the like nature, that can never be avoided. Moreover, if any one cheats another in measures or weights, or makes a knavish bargain and sale, in order to cheat another; if any one steals what belongs to another, and takes what he never deposited; all these have punishments allotted them; not such as are met with among other nations, but more severe ones. And as for attempts of unjust behavior towards ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... our God, arise, Scatter his enemies, And make them fall. Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks, On Thee our hopes we fix, God ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... loss to Seward. "The clamour against Sewardism lost us many votes," it declared the morning after the election. Two or three days later, as the reduced majority became more apparent, it explained that "A knavish clamour was raised on the eve of election by a Swiss press against Governor Seward's late speech at Rochester as revolutionary and disunionist. Our loss from this source is considerable." The returns, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... so long, my lords of France? Yon island carrions,[15] desperate of their bones, Ill-favour'dly become the morning field: Their ragged curtains poorly are let loose,[16] And our air shakes them passing scornfully: Big Mars seems bankrupt in their beggar'd host, And their executors, the knavish crows, Fly o'er them, all impatient for their hour. Description cannot suit itself in words To demonstrate the life of such a battle In life so ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... Moerocles of Mantinea. He's a knavish fellow; his backers are recalling their bets. But he hopes to win on a trick; beware, lest he trip you ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... I mistake your shape and making quite, Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite Called GRANDOLPH GOODFELLOW. Are you not he That did your best to spill Lord S-L-SB-RY? Gave the Old Tory party quite a turn, And office with snug perquisites did spurn? And now you'd make Strong Drink to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... in the air?" thought Little John. "Some knavish business doubtless, or my friend Roger would not be in it. By my faith, ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... race is perfectly illiterate,' said the man in black; 'they are possessed, it is true, of a knavish acuteness, and are particularly noted for giving subtle and evasive answers—and in your answers, I confess, you remind me of them; but that one of the race should acquire a learned language like the Armenian, and have a general ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... thanked), and putting a piece of cloth into my hands, asked me, 'Sir, is there enough of this to make me a cap?' I, measuring the piece, answered Yes. Now he bade me view it again, and see if there was not enough for two. I guessed his drift, and told him there was. Persisting in his knavish intentions, my customer went on increasing the number of caps, and I still saying yes, till we came to five caps. A little time ago he came to claim them. I offered them to him, but he refuses to pay me for the making, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... nonplussed at such an adventure turning out so seriously, first of all flew into a terrible rage, rushed off to the lawyer's office and threatened to cut off his knavish ears for him. But when his access of fury was over, and he thought of it, he ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... but I can do some sort of a Lord, as some Lords are wiser than other-some; there is your witty Lord,—him I defie; your wise Lord, that is to say, your knavish Lord, him I renounce; then there's your Politick Lord, him I wou'd have hang'd; then there's your Foolish Lord, let him follow the Politician; then there's your brisk, pert, noisy Lord, and such a small insignificant Fiend I care not ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... asked Puck if he was not the knavish spirit that frightened the maidens of the villagery, that skimmed milk, and sometimes laboured in the green, and bootless made the housewife churn, and sometimes made the drink to bear no barm, and whether Puck did not mislead night wanderers, and then laugh ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... gear They spend the one half of the year; In gathering gear and knavish art They ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... was now setting in, and the situation of the embassy became more comfortless from day to day. Notes were written, and answers received from the monarch, but the royal interview was still postponed, partly by the artifice of the knavish governors, who kept a longing eye on the presents, and partly by the barbarian etiquette of showing the natives the scorn with which their king was entitled to treat all the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... monarchs, who, under an idea of working for the welfare of their subjects, have made it a sacred duty to torment, persecute, and destroy those, who thought differently from themselves. A bigot, at the head of an empire, is one of the greatest scourges. A single fanatical or knavish priest, listened to by a credulous and powerful prince, suffices to put ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... equal, villain? no, he is my friend; Thou, but a poor anatomy of bones, Cas'd in a knavish tawny withered skin. Wilt thou not stoop? ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... here, could he not object as to what you have said, saying, Go and teach your brethren, that are professors, this lesson, for they as I am are guilty of breaking; yea, I am apt to think, of that which you call my knavish way of breaking, to wit, of breaking before they have need to break. But if not so, yet they are guilty of neglect in their calling, of living higher, both in fare and apparel, than their trade or income ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the name of neither criminal was once mentioned; and Nick was compelled to infer that Venner might indeed be entirely ignorant of their true identity and knavish character. ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter
... and faring on their way, on the look out the while for time and place apt unto their knavish purpose, they came, late in the day, to a place a little beyond Castel Guglielmo, where, at the fording of a river, the three rogues, seeing the hour advanced and the spot solitary and close shut in, fell upon Rinaldo ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... he had lived with Gypsies so long. He was the man who said to the Spanish Prime Minister: "It is a pleasant thing to be persecuted for the Gospel's sake." He was the man of whom it was said by an enemy, after the affair of Benedict Mol, that Don Jorge was at the bottom of half the knavish ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... did not know of these new orders, going to hear a confession in his ministry outside the walls of Manila, encountered the patrol within his own village—at which he was surprised, as it was not customary for the patrols to enter the villages outside the walls, on account of the knavish acts which the soldiers are wont to commit under pretext of making the rounds. For this reason the said religious ordered them to depart from the said his ministry, and to patrol in their accustomed beat; but, although they did not ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... beating. The heroic penchant lay snugly latent in his heart, unchecked and unmodified. He flattered himself that he was achieving a capital imposition upon the world at large, that he was actually hoaxing mankind in general, and that such an excellent piece of knavish tranquillity had never been ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... expense of itself must have pressed heavily in London, where you pay half-a-crown at least for a bed that would cost only a shilling in the provinces. In the midst of his knaveries, and what were even more shocking to my remembrance, his confidential discoveries in his rambling conversations of knavish designs, (not always pecuniary,) there was a light of wandering misery in his eye at times, which affected me afterwards at intervals when I recalled it in the radiant happiness of nineteen, and amidst the solemn tranquillities ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... rogue the less in the world, although he was a brave one in his own knavish fashion," answered Godwin. "Moreover, my brother," he added, placing his arm about Wulf's neck, "I am glad it fell to you to fight him, for at the last grip your might overcame, where I, who am not so strong, should have failed. Further, I think you did well to show mercy, ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... Marry, how? Tropically.[82] This play is the image of a murder[83] done in Vienna: Gonzago is the Duke's name; his wife, Baptista: you shall see anon;—'tis a knavish piece of work: but what of that? your majesty, and we that have free souls, it touches us not: Let the galled jade wince,[84] our ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... He condemned those citizens as thieves. "They are," he said, "the strength of Anti-Christ; they are adversaries to Christ; they are an evil rabble; they are bold in wickedness; and though they pretend to follow the truth, they will sit at tables with wicked people and knavish followers of Judas." For true Christians, therefore, there was only one course open. Instead of living in godless towns, they should try to settle in country places, earn their living as farmers or gardeners, and thus keep as clear ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... failure of his plans came quickly to Philip's knavish ears, and he wrote in haste to his confederate, "the devil is loose; take care of yourself," an admonition which John was quite likely to obey. His hope of seizing the crown vanished. There remained to meet his placable brother with a show of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... feathered folk in Pleasant Valley said that old Mr. Crow was the noisiest person in the neighborhood. But they must have forgotten all about Mr. Crow's knavish cousin, Jasper Jay. And it was not only in summer, either, that Jasper's shrieks and laughter woke the echoes. Since it was his habit to spend his winters right there in Farmer Green's young pines, near the foot of Blue Mountain, on many a cold morning Jasper's ear-splitting ...
— The Tale of Jasper Jay - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... to be deeply vexed at anything. Had I intended it for the public, I should have been more exact and full. Many temperaments and explanations there would have been, if ever I had had a notion that it should meet the public eye." He was justly indignant at the knavish publisher, whose conduct surpassed that of the Dublin pirates, or Edmund Curll. But he was at a loss to know how the publisher obtained a copy. He did not suppose that the Duke of Portland had given up his, and he remembered only "the rough and incorrect papers" constituting the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... apes it about in the streets to court popularity; another consults his ease, and sticks to the confinement of a chimney-corner; many others are tugging hard at law for a trifle, and drive on an endless suit, only to enrich a deferring judge, or a knavish advocate; one is for new-modelling a settled government; another is for some notable heroical attempt; and a third by all means must travel a pilgrim to Rome, Jerusalem, or some shrine of a saint elsewhere, though he have no other business than the paying of a formal impertinent visit, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... London—six years ago. But I kept it to myself. I had to do my work under frightful disadvantages. Oliver, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas—he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I went on working; I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon the world with crushing ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... quit London, he travelled over Europe, with no other capital than his knavish audacity, deep depravity, and his skill ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... That is what I don't know; unless he wished to take credit to himself for the good result which fortunately has arisen from his knavish conduct. ...
— Minna von Barnhelm • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... in a similar style every card of the pack exposed some knavish scheme, and ridiculed the persons who were its dupes. It was computed that the total amount of the sums proposed for carrying on these projects was upwards of three hundred millions sterling, a sum so immense ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... nay, what is more, their Children, And seem'd like Fathers anxious for our Welfare. Whom see we now? their haughty Conquerors Possess'd of every Fort, and Lake, and Pass, Big with their Victories so often gain'd; On us they look with deep Contempt and Scorn, Are false, deceitful, knavish, insolent; Nay, think us conquered, and our Country theirs, Without a Purchase, or ev'n asking for it. With Pleasure I wou'd call their King my Friend, Yea, honour and obey him as my Father; I'd be content, ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... there's no soul at home except myself." "Indeed," replied the stranger (looking grave), "Then he's a double knave; He knows that rogues and thieves by scores Nightly beset unguarded doors: And see, how easily might one Of these domestic foes, Even beneath your very nose, Perform his knavish tricks; Enter your room, as I have done, Blow out your candles—thus—and thus— Pocket your silver candlesticks, And—walk off—thus!"— So said, so done; he made no more remark Nor waited ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... were perfectly in the right. At that time, the law against the traffic in ardent spirits (every now and then suspended and revived) happened to be in force; and finding a large quantity on the premises of Victor, a low, knavish adventurer from Marseilles, the ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... said he, with the familiar air of a privileged servant, "did you see that knavish-looking Gabinius following Madame Fabia all the way back to the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... loves me, it is true, but no persuasion of mine could ever induce her to break her promise. She belongs to Griffith Hawke, and she will marry him. And even if it were possible to win her, honor and duty, which I have always held sacred, would keep me from such a knavish trick. If I proved unfaithful to my trust, could I ever hold up my ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... was nonplussed at such an adventure, which was turning out so seriously, first of all, flew into a terrible rage, and nearly rushed off to the lawyer's office, and threatened to cut off his knavish ears for him, but when his access of fury was over, and thinking better of it, he shrugged his shoulders ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... good deal about that daemon in his "Phaedo"—that wonderful story to which I have just alluded, and which lives so vividly in my memory. Sometimes I think that Mr. Gladstone has the same superstition. He has moments—especially if there be the stress of the sheer brutality of obstructive and knavish hostility—when he seems to retire into himself—to transfer himself on the wings of imagination to regions infinitely beyond the reach, as well as the ken, of the land in which the Lowthers, the Chamberlains, and the Bartleys dwell. At such moments he gives one the impression of communing ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... opinion, father; if we could get together some thirty trusty fellows, and the means of carrying our provisions, we would march from one end of the country to the other, and compel those knavish Indians at the point of our swords to deliver up their prisoners," answered Roger; "we might then, perchance, fall in also with Captain Audley, if he is, as I trust, still in the land ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... strength of his emotions, drew small comfort from the sight. More than once it had occurred to me, and now it occurred to me again, to extricate myself by a blow. But a natural reluctance to strike an unarmed man, however vile and knavish, and the belief that he had not trusted himself in my power without taking the fullest precautions, withheld me. When he grudgingly, and with many dark threats, proposed to wait three days—and not an hour more—for my answer, I accepted; for I saw no other alternative ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... rise—your king secures you here; Your king, who scorns the haughty prelate's nod, Nor deems the voice of priests the voice of God. 600 Let me, (though lawyers may perhaps forbid Their monarch to behold what they wish hid, And for the purposes of knavish gain, Would have their trade a mystery remain) Let me, disdaining all such slavish awe, Dive to the very bottom of the law; Let me (the weak, dead letter left behind) Search out the principles, the spirit find, Till, from the parts, made master of the whole, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... stop, and the mirza and mudbake supplement his vocal exertions by gesticulating to the same purpose. Dismounting, and allowing them to approach, in reply to my query of "Chi mi khoi?" the khan's knavish countenance becomes overspread with a ridiculously thin and transparent assumption of seriousness and importance, and pointing to an imaginary boundary-line at his horse's feet he says: "Bur-raa (brother), Afghanistan." "Khylie koob, Afghanistan inja-koob, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... sources for Sterne in English letters, that is, for the strange combination of whimsicality, genuine sentiment and knavish smiles, which is the real Sterne. He is individual, exotic, not demonstrable from preceding literary conditions, and his meteoric, or rather rocket-like career in Britain is in its decline a proof of the insensibility of the English people to a large portion of his gospel. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... imbibed, in your great towns, the seeds of vices, which were unknown in the forest. They become discouraged and dissipated, —despised by the Indians, neglected by the whites, and without value to either,—less honest than the former, and perhaps more knavish than the latter." [Footnote: Washington had always been earnest in his desire to civilize the savages, but had little faith in the expedient which had been pursued, of sending their young men to our colleges; the true means he thought, ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... seen,[85] Nashe confounds elves with fairies in deriving all alike from fauns and dryads. Robin is "mad-merry," "jocund and facetious," "a cozening idle friar or some such rogue" [in origin], and so forth—simply described by Shakespeare as a "shrewd and knavish sprite." The forms of mischief in which he delights are described in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, II. i. 33-57, and all these "gests" may be found in the contemporary Robin Goodfellow literature;[86] though we have observed that some of the functions attributed to Queen Mab ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... England his Dream was the daily subject of the conversation of thousands, and was thought worthy to appear in the most superb binding. He had numerous admirers in Holland and among the Huguenots of France. With the pleasure, however, he experienced some of the pains of eminence. Knavish booksellers put forth volumes of trash under his name, and envious scribblers maintained it to be impossible that the poor ignorant tinker should really be the author of the book which ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... minutes' rest till the next man goes in! The tired arms lie with every sinew slack On the mown grass. Unbent the supple back, And elbows apt to make the leather spin Up the slow bat and round the unwary shin,— In knavish hands a most unkindly knack; But no guile shelters under the boy's black Crisp hair, frank eyes, and honest English skin. Two minutes only! Conscious of a name, The new man plants his weapon with profound Long-practised skill that no mere trick may scare. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... playing the same trick again, and trying who can keep silence longest? Remember that all tricks are either knavish or childish; and that it is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... figurines in flint, from Volosova, though the redoubtable M. de Mortillet denounced them as forgeries; they had the misfortune to corroborate other Italian finds against which M. de Mortillet had a grudge. But Dr. Munro thinks that the two plaques of Volosova may have been made for sale by knavish boys. In that case the boys fortuitously coincided, in their fake, with similar plaques, of undoubted antiquity, and, in some prehistoric Egyptian stones, occasionally inscribed with mere ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... beggar's bag, bottle and staff, suitable to their present condition, but so little satisfying, that Newfangle receives a terrible drubbing for his trick. Judge Severity arrives on the scene conveniently to lecture him severely and witness his second knavish device, which is no other than to hand over to the Judge the two fugitives from justice, Cutpurse and Pickpurse, for the piece of land of which he spoke is the gallows. Hankin Hangman takes possession of his victims, and the Devil, ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... has been abused by the malice of that knavish attorney, Potts, who has always manifested the greatest hostility towards Alizon," said Nicholas; "but he will not prevail, for she has only to show herself to dispel ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... a knavish lawyer named Vholes, who made him believe the great chancery suit must soon end in his favor, and who (when Richard had put the case in his hands) proceeded to rob him of all he had. He poisoned his mind, ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... me an affectionate farewell, with a plaintive reminder that a girl not likely to be proposed to every day might do worse than Tony Dalziel. I, in turn, reminded her that any knavish juggling with Captain March's faith would be dealt with severely by me; and so we parted, she to go her way to California en automobile, I to go mine to ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... an 'indiscreet letter'!" she protested almost resentfully. "You might call it a knavish letter. Or a foolish letter. Because either a knave or a fool surely wrote it! But 'indiscreet'? ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... reached the confines of the Kikuyu country, along which our further route to the Naivasha led. The evil reports of the knavish, hateful character of this people were repeated to us in a yet stronger form by the Kapte Masai, their immediate neighbours. But we had in the meantime received from another source a very different representation. ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... little neglected. In truth, he was an odd fish; ignorant of common life, fond of rudely opposing receiv'd opinions, slovenly to extream dirtiness, enthusiastic in some points of religion, and a little knavish withal. ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... trod softly with sandal'd feet— Ah! why are the stolen waters sweet?— And one crept stealthily after; I would I had taken him there and wrung His knavish neck when the dark door swung, Or torn by the roots his treacherous tongue, And ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... views are to a certain point explained. He has chosen an antiquated and desperate line of politics, and he claims, from some pretended tie of guardianship or relationship, which he does not deign to explain but which he seems to have been able to pass current on a silly country Justice and his knavish clerk, a right to direct and to control my motions. The danger which awaited me in England, and which I might have escaped had I remained in Scotland, was doubtless occasioned by the authority of this man. But what my poor mother might fear for me as a child—what ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... game at cards, called also blind hookey, apparently affording equal chances, but easily managed to his own advantage by a knavish adept. ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... suppression of the National Executive in 1649 after the occupation of Edinburgh by Argyll and the surrender of Colchester to Fairfax had put England at the mercy of Cromwell's 'honest' troopers, and of knavish fanatics like Hugh Peters, violently interrupted the making of Britain. It took England a century to recover her equilibrium. Between Naseby Field in 1645 and Culloden Moor in 1746 England had, except during the reign of Charles II., no better assurance of continuous ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... their schemes in behalf of Matthias, of Don John, of Anjou, into so many additional weapons for his own cause, can never be too often studied. It is instructive to observe the wiles of the Macchiavelian school employed by a master of the craft, to frustrate, not to advance, a knavish purpose. This character, in a great measure, marked his whole policy. He was profoundly skilled in the subtleties of Italian statesmanship, which he had learned as a youth at the Imperial court, and which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Gitanos such as they are, and to illustrate their character; and, on that account, we have endeavoured, as much as possible, to bring them before the reader, and to make them speak for themselves. They are a half-civilised, unlettered people, proverbial for a species of knavish acuteness, which serves them in lieu of wisdom. To place in the mouth of such beings the high-flown sentiments of modern poetry would not answer our purpose, though several authors have not shrunk from such ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... mistake your shape and making quite, Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite Called GRANDOLPH GOODFELLOW. Are you not he That did your best to spill Lord S-L-SB-RY? Gave the Old Tory party quite a turn, And office with snug perquisites did spurn? And now you'd make Strong Drink to bear no barm (Or proper profit.) You would do us harm. Those that Hobgoblin call you, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... rose which was on both the obverse and reverse of the coin. Beaumont and Fletcher, in the 'Scornful Lady,' show the difference between the penny and three-farthing piece, and inform us of a knavish trick then practised, to impose upon ignorant people the lesser as the greater coin. Lovelass, speaking of Morecraft, the usurer, says: 'He had a bastard, his own toward issue, whipt and thin cropt, for washing out the rose in three farthings ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... ashes lay. Honest he was, ingenuous, blunt, and kind; And dared do, what few dare do, speak his mind. PHILOSOPHY and History well he knew, Was versed in PHYSICK and in Surgery too. The best old STINGO he both brewed and sold, Nor did one knavish act to get his Gold. He played through Life a varied comic part, And knew immortal HUDIBRAS by heart. READER, in real truth, such was the Man, Be better, wiser, laugh more if ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... of vices, which were unknown in the forest. They become discouraged and dissipated, —despised by the Indians, neglected by the whites, and without value to either,—less honest than the former, and perhaps more knavish than the latter." [Footnote: Washington had always been earnest in his desire to civilize the savages, but had little faith in the expedient which had been pursued, of sending their young men to our colleges; the true means ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... the confines of the Kikuyu country, along which our further route to the Naivasha led. The evil reports of the knavish, hateful character of this people were repeated to us in a yet stronger form by the Kapte Masai, their immediate neighbours. But we had in the meantime received from another source a very different representation. Our two ladies had with them an ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... at anything. Had I intended it for the public, I should have been more exact and full. Many temperaments and explanations there would have been, if ever I had had a notion that it should meet the public eye." He was justly indignant at the knavish publisher, whose conduct surpassed that of the Dublin pirates, or Edmund Curll. But he was at a loss to know how the publisher obtained a copy. He did not suppose that the Duke of Portland had ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... thoroughly depraved, vain, cunning, and selfish, or still good-hearted and susceptible of better feelings; the simple and clownish, and the cunning slave who assists his young master in cheating his old father, and by all manner of knavish tricks procures him money for the gratification of his passions; (as this character plays a principal part, I shall shortly make some further observations on it;) the flatterer or accommodating parasite, who, for the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... and probably would come. Such a politician was a Greek to Barrington Erle, from whose hands he feared to accept even the gift of a vote. Parliamentary hermits were distasteful to him, and dwellers in political caves were regarded by him with aversion as being either knavish or impractical. With a good Conservative opponent he could shake hands almost as readily as with a good Whig ally; but the man who was neither flesh nor fowl was odious to him. According to his ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... has been lured by allowing her diplomatic agents to assist Germany's secret service, Mr. Punch would hardly go the length of saying that it justifies the revision of the National Anthem so as to read, "Confound their Scandi-knavish tricks." But he finds it hard to accept Sweden's professions of official rectitude, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... and Sir Launcelot went by themselves to the chamber of the former to make merry. And there, Sir Dolphus who counted the other's sympathy as beyond doubt, told more of his knavish plots. Until the listener sick with listening turned to him in the quiet and secrecy of the great chamber and ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... experiences of the old fighting and sporting days had passed away, and nothing was left but ceaseless toil, these essentially combative people, to whom violent and continuous excitement was the very breath of life, became, for a while at least, knavish and immoral, sunk almost to one dead social level, and totally uninteresting because, in their new life of peaceful tillage—a life far more suited to their English law-givers than to themselves—they were apparently incapable of maintaining that complete, vigilant interest in their ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... was an impostor. This lets us into the secret of many of De Foe's apparitions. They are the ghosts that frighten villagers as they cross commons late at night, or that rattle chains and display lights in haunted houses. Sometimes they have vexed knavish attorneys by discovering long-hidden deeds. Sometimes they have enticed highwaymen into dark corners of woods, and there the wretched criminal finds in their bags (for ghosts of this breed have good substantial luggage) nothing but a halter and a bit of silver (value exactly 13-1/2d.) to ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... House of Commons pledged to amend the Education Act of 1902: he does it in vain. The House of Lords—which is really not a political but a social body, the citadel of a class—will confound his politics, frustrate his knavish tricks. Can you wonder that he loses his temper, sometimes inelegantly? And when the rich Nonconformist tires of striving against all the odds—when he sets up his carriage and his wife and daughters find that it won't carry them where they had hoped—when he surrenders to their persuasions ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of Louisiana was widely different. In that State the corruption of the Republican managers was flagrant; it extended to the manipulation of election returns; and the Federal Government interfered freely, and with notable results. A knot of knavish adventurers were in control,—Henry C. Warmoth, William P. Kellogg, F. F. Casey, and United States Marshal S. B. Packard. Casey was the President's brother-in-law, and General Grant was almost as incapable of believing a relative of his to be a ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Edinburgh. They travelled in the Colonel's post-chariot, who, knowing his companion's habits of abstraction, did not choose to lose him out of his own sight, far less to trust him on horseback, where, in all probability, a knavish stable-boy might with little address have contrived to mount him with his face to the tail. Accordingly, with the aid of his valet, who attended on horseback, he contrived to bring Mr. Sampson safe to an inn in Edinburgh—for ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... whilst others, not less free upon the wire, were carefully packed up, and sent home safe. By seizing and boxing up in the Tower mere bystanders, wholly unconcerned in the sport, he made his 'little tin soldiers' fancy that he did not see their antics. The only hitch in his 'knavish piece of work' arose when, too assured, he placed upon the boards a real live judge, who refused to take the bench in the manager's sham Court of Justice. In every other respect the mystery play was ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... at all understand the furious resentment they rouse in the bosoms of the majority. Mistaken they may be; but why yell them down as knavish blasphemers? Our reverence, after all, is given not to an Elizabethan named William Shakespeare, who was born at Stratford, and married, and migrated to London, and became a second-rate actor, and afterwards returned to Stratford, and made ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... in his hand, he would leave the barber's booth and go up to him saying, "What seekest thou, O thou?"; and the man would reply, "Take and dye me this thing." So the dyer would ask, "What colour wilt thou have it?" For, with all his knavish tricks his hand was in all manner of dyes; but he was never true to any one; wherefore poverty had gotten the better of him. Then he would take the stuff and say, "Give me my wage in advance and come to-morrow and take the stuff." So the stranger would advance him the money and wend his way; whereupon ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... marriage-portion that went with Eleanor of Aquitaine; but he paved the way for them by petty victories and petty acquisitions, and by making more and more certain his superiority over his rival. When, after Richard's death, he had to do with John Lackland, cowardly and insolent, knavish and addle-pated, choleric, debauched, and indolent, an intriguing subordinate on the throne on which he made pretence to be the most despotic of kings, Philip had over him, even more than over his brother ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... on. No trick was too knavish or too despicable to prevent our guardian learning the truth concerning our plight. He very rarely walked about unaccompanied. Tongue in cheek, the Germans, who always were cognisant of the object of his visit, and who had always taken temporary measures to prove the grievance to be ill-founded, ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... than the accents of a human being. These two were the only individuals who, in the true spirit of hardened imposture, braved all the fury of the elements in carrying out their principles—so true is it, that a rogue will often advance farther in the pursuit of a knavish object, than an honest man will in the attainment of a just one. To them may be added the poor fool of the town, Joe Lockhart, who, from his childhood, was known to be indifferent to all changes of weather, and who now, elated by the festive spirit of a ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... man in office is in confederacy with the whole clan of his district or dependence, which in modern terms of art is called, "To live, and let live;" and yet their gains are the smallest part of the public's loss. Give a guinea to a knavish land-waiter, and he shall connive at the merchant for cheating the Queen of an hundred. A brewer gives a bribe to have the privilege of selling drink to the Navy; but the fraud is ten times greater than the bribe, and the public is at ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... be a new ground of triumph for his enemies, and that it was a foothold for a new attack. By the threat of prosecution they strove to drive him to fly, and when he refused to yield to their threats, they contrived to make the King the agent in their knavish schemes, and procured from him the peremptory message which made Clarendon quit the field. No sooner was he gone, than the very flight which they had contrived was made the ground of new accusations, and he was sentenced to perpetual banishment for avoiding a trial for ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... one Melanthius a goatherd, who covered them with insults. "In truth one churl is leading another, for the god ever bringeth like to like. Whither art thou taking this glutton, this evil pauper, a kill-joy of the feast? He hath learned many a knavish trick and is like to refuse to labour; creeping among the people he would rather ask alms to fill his insatiate maw." Leaping on Odysseus, he kicked at him, yet failed to stir him from the pathway. Swallowing the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... The credit which these knavish traders gave their customers, who could not conveniently pay their money down, was carried to an exorbitant charge; since, even in Elizabeth's reign, it was one of the popular grievances brought into Parliament—it is there called, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... pressed heavily in London, where you pay half-a-crown at least for a bed that would cost only a shilling in the provinces. In the midst of his knaveries, and what were even more shocking to my remembrance, his confidential discoveries in his rambling conversations of knavish designs, (not always pecuniary,) there was a light of wandering misery in his eye at times, which affected me afterwards at intervals when I recalled it in the radiant happiness of nineteen, and amidst ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... the confidence and good opinion of the multitude, by pretending to perform miracles in the public streets. This trade descends from father to son; and is so lucrative, that the most fertile parts of the country swarm with these knavish hypocrites. When they die, the neighbouring tribes erect a sort of mausoleum to their memory, consisting of a square tower, surmounted by a cupola of the most fantastical architecture. To these tombs, called likewise marabouts, the devout repair ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... perfectly illiterate," said the man in black; "they are possessed, it is true, of a knavish acuteness, and are particularly noted for giving subtle and evasive answers—and in your answers, I confess, you remind me of them; but that one of the race should acquire a learned language like the Armenian, and have a general knowledge ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... stupid vanity, he had fancied that his own personal attractions had won her heart and her allegiance, and that she, and not himself, was the victim. He had tried to use her in the accomplishment of outside purposes; to make a tool of her in carrying forward his mercenary or knavish ends. Other men had striven to hide their unlovely affairs from her, but the new lover had exposed his, and claimed her assistance in carrying them forward. This was a degradation that she could not submit to. It did not natter her, ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... beloved with my beloved?" He said, "Allah upon thee, O my lady, go back with me and look upon my mistress, and after I will with thee and look upon thy beloved." She answered, "It must needs be so, O accursed, for thou art a knavish devil; but I will not go with thee nor shalt thou come with me, save upon condition of a wager which is this. If the lover thou lovest and of whom thou boastest so bravely, prove handsomer than mine whom I mentioned and whom I love and of whom ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... alluded, and which lives so vividly in my memory. Sometimes I think that Mr. Gladstone has the same superstition. He has moments—especially if there be the stress of the sheer brutality of obstructive and knavish hostility—when he seems to retire into himself—to transfer himself on the wings of imagination to regions infinitely beyond the reach, as well as the ken, of the land in which the Lowthers, the Chamberlains, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... 'Went to Mr. Bridges's chambers, but could not see the three fine MSS. again, the Doctor his brother having locked them up. He openly bid for his own books, merely to enhance their price, and the auction proves to be, what I thought it would become, very knavish'; and on the 11th of February he adds: 'Yesterday at five I met Mr. Noel and tarried long with him; we settled then the whole affair touching his bidding for my Lord [Oxford] at the roguish auction of Mr. Bridges's books. The Reverend Doctor one of the brothers ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... by the malice of that knavish attorney, Potts, who has always manifested the greatest hostility towards Alizon," said Nicholas; "but he will not prevail, for she has only to show herself to dispel ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... souls. With such great show as they exhibit in their knavish life, as going through with mass, begging, singing, &c., do they allure and draw light-minded and unstable souls, who are without faith, to imagine that everything is spiritual; and all is shaped to this end, that men may think that in that estate every one shall ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world. Misanthropy arises out of the too great confidence of inexperience;—you trust a man and think him altogether true and sound and faithful, and then in a little while he turns out to be false and knavish; and then another and another, and when this has happened several times to a man, especially when it happens among those whom he deems to be his own most trusted and familiar friends, and he has often quarreled with them, he at ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... merchant who, with abundant resources and prosperous business, should devise a plan for throwing discredit on his own notes with the view of having them bought up at a discount, ruinous to the holders and immensely profitable to his own knavish pocket. This comparison may faintly illustrate the wrongfulness of the policy, but not its consummate folly—for in the case of the Government, unlike the merchant, the stern necessity would recur of making good ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... Tariff, and even there it would be difficult. The proper and only thing to do was to keep him in custody as long as possible. When he should be brought back to a region of law and justice, it might be that the Pole could be prevented, for a time, at least, from using the results of his knavish observations. ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... got a new 'boy' (all coloured servants are 'boys,'—a remnant of slavery), and he is the type of the nigger slave. A thief, a liar, a glutton, a drunkard—but you can't resent it; he has a naif, half-foolish, half-knavish buffoonery, a total want of self-respect, which disarms you. I sent him to the post to inquire for letters, and the postmaster had been tipsy over-night and was not awake. Jack came back spluttering threats ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... practitioner, and to the scientific student of mind and body and of the properties of the materia medica. Why, even here in Connecticut, it is impossible to get a law to protect the community from the imposition of knavish or ignorant quacks, and to require of a man some evidence of capacity and training and skill, before he is let loose to experiment upon suffering humanity. Our teachers must pass an examination—though the examiner sometimes does not know as much as the candidate,—for misguiding the youthful ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the shore, "I will pull into the channel, and land in yonder bay. If you feel disposed to follow, you may do so by giving the tiller to Mr. Blunt, on receiving a signal to that effect from me. Be steady, gentlemen, at your oars, and look well to the arms on landing, for we are in a knavish part of the world. Should any of the monkeys or ouran-outangs claim kindred with Mr. Saunders, we may find it no easy matter to persuade them to leave us ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... 'Knavish thou art, and no weakling {*} in wit, thou that hast conceived and spoken such a word. Let earth be now witness hereto, and the wide heaven above, and that falling water of the Styx, the greatest oath and the most terrible to the blessed gods, that I will ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... Tales from the French; and they have lost nothing in the translation, either of their wit or malice. I need not name them: but the one I like the most, is that of Cupid in search of Venus's doves. No one could insinuate a knavish plot, a tender point, a loose moral, with such unconscious archness, and careless raillery, as if he gained new self-possession and adroitness from the perplexity and confusion into which he throws scrupulous imaginations, and knew how to seize on all the ticklish parts of his ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... guests. The Devil, to whom the mayor confided the plan, highly approved of it; but Faustus murmured in the ear of Leviathan, "I command thee to play this rascal, who has prostituted his wife for ambition's sake, a thorough knavish trick; and to revenge me, at the same time, on all these sheep-headed magistrates, who so long forced me to pay my court ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Eulenspiegel, the hero of a popular German tale which relates his buffooneries and knavish tricks. ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... tragedy, red-heeled, patched, and be-periwigged, lies in the grave; and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess has raised. There are classical comedies in verse, too, wherein the knavish valets, rakish heroes, stolid old guardians, and smart, free-spoken serving-women, discourse in Alexandrines, as loud as the Horaces or the Cid. An Englishman will seldom reconcile himself to the roulement of the verses, and the painful recurrence of the rhymes; for my part, I had rather ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... setting in, and the situation of the embassy became more comfortless from day to day. Notes were written, and answers received from the monarch, but the royal interview was still postponed, partly by the artifice of the knavish governors, who kept a longing eye on the presents, and partly by the barbarian etiquette of showing the natives the scorn with which their king was entitled to treat all the nations ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... money from a second robber. This feature of the magic beating-stick seems to be borrowed from the preceding story. He now returns the cane to the old woman, and she sells him a magic guitar. The next adventure—with his former master, who is substituted for the knavish monk—contains a distorted reminiscence of the shooting of the bird, and ends with the dance among the thorns (here bamboo-spines). The hero is bought off by his master, who immediately rushes to town and accuses him of theft. ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... mean? The magnet appears to have a curious effect on my patient's system! What a fuss she makes! How terrified she is! The Bee seemed utterly distraught at losing her bearings under the influence of my knavish tricks. Let us go to the nests and see what happens. We have not long to wait: my insect returns, but rid of its magnetic tackle. I recognize it by the traces of gum that still cling to the hair of the thorax. It goes back to its ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... result of a bet made between myself and the constable, who shares it with the King. Both have wagered that they know who is the lady of my heart; and I have wagered to the contrary. No one more than myself hates the English, who took my estates in Piccadilly. Is it not a knavish trick to put justice in motion against me? Ho! Ho! my lord constable, a chamberlain is worth two of you, and I will beat you yet. My dear Petit, I give you permission to search by night and by day, every nook and cranny of my house. But ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... parliament, and the manifest growth of sympathy for the Americans in his metropolis, the king was desirous of making honorable concessions. Foolish ministers and ignorant and knavish politicians prated of British honor, and advised the adoption of rigorous measures for throwing back the swelling tide of rebellion in America. It was an easy thing to advise, but difficult to plan, and hard to execute the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... A KNAVISH attorney asking a very worthy gentleman what was honesty, "What is that to you?" said he; "meddle with those ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... to ask again why he had been willing to accept risks from which most men shrink from fear if not from conscience. He loved money, not as the spender loves it, openly and with luxurious instincts, but secretly and with a knavish dread of discovery which spoke of treasure ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... Your king, who scorns the haughty prelate's nod, Nor deems the voice of priests the voice of God. 600 Let me, (though lawyers may perhaps forbid Their monarch to behold what they wish hid, And for the purposes of knavish gain, Would have their trade a mystery remain) Let me, disdaining all such slavish awe, Dive to the very bottom of the law; Let me (the weak, dead letter left behind) Search out the principles, the spirit ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... that the world has ever seen. The English marvelled alike at both classes. There were indeed many stouthearted nonconformists in the South; but scarcely any who in obstinacy, pugnacity, and hardihood could bear a comparison with the men of the school of Cameron. There were many knavish politicians in the South; but few so utterly destitute of morality, and still fewer so utterly destitute of shame, as the men of the school of Lauderdale. Perhaps it is natural that the most callous and impudent vice should be found in the near neighbourhood of unreasonable ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fair leaves and flowers and sacred soil. Deep in the waves he plunges, and runs beneath the sea, and the salt water mingles not with the sweet. Nought knows the sea as the river journeys through. Thus hath the knavish boy, the maker of mischief, the teacher of strange ways—thus hath Love by his spell taught even ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... with the northern nations, an honest sincerity and persevering courage. We sometimes judge with tolerable correctness; at others are wholly mistaken, and not unfrequently run into such extremes, that having established a principle, that a particular people are knavish, or cowardly, or stupid, we are unwilling to admit any exceptions, but include the whole race in our sweeping censure. We are prejudiced at first sight against a Portuguese or Italian, and are careful of our communications with him, even though we meet him on the high road, or by mere accident ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... known. But in December 1513 he writes to an intimate friend that he has been badly treated about the Adagia by an agent—a travelling bookseller, who acted as go-between for printers and authors and public; that instead of taking them to Badius and offering him the refusal, the knavish fellow had gone straight to Basle and sold them, with some other work of Erasmus, to a printer who had only just completed an edition of the Adagia. Erasmus' indignation does not ring true. It is highly probable that he was in search of a printer ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... to my death, were it for the benefit of my country," said he. "But to fall a sacrifice to a cabal, to the jealousy of an insidious, knavish favorite, is what makes the death-hour fearful. Ah, I die for naught, I die that Munnich, Ostermann, and Biron may remain securely in power. It is ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... rank falsehood. Fear'st not thou death! Fie, there's a knavish itch In that salt blood, an utter foe to smarting. Had Jaffier's wife prov'd kind, he'd still been true. Faugh, how that stinks! thou die, thou kill my friend! Or thou! or thou! with that lean wither'd face. ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy • Thomas Otway
... Confound such knavish tricks! Yet know I five or six Smokers who freely mix Still with their neighbours; Jones—who, I'm glad to say, Asked leave of Mrs. J.) - Daily absorbs a ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... the conversation of thousands, and was thought worthy to appear in the most superb binding. He had numerous admirers in Holland and among the Huguenots of France. With the pleasure, however, he experienced some of the pains of eminence. Knavish booksellers put forth volumes of trash under his name, and envious scribblers maintained it to be impossible that the poor ignorant tinker should really be the author of the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... its radical sense shrew-ed, malicious, like a shrew. Comp. M. N. D. ii. 1, "That shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin Goodfellow." Chaucer has the verb shrew to curse; the ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... Mantinea. He's a knavish fellow; his backers are recalling their bets. But he hopes to win on a trick; beware, lest he trip you ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... in his amusing, half-knavish autobiography, has described his first introduction to the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... a person of great note in his way, he is frequently alluded to by the writers of the time. Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, in the curious play published by Mr. Pinkerton, from the Bannatyne MS., introduces a pardoner, or knavish dealer in reliques, who ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... for which he was striving by the strength of his emotions, drew small comfort from the sight. More than once it had occurred to me, and now it occurred to me again, to extricate myself by a blow. But a natural reluctance to strike an unarmed man, however vile and knavish, and the belief that he had not trusted himself in my power without taking the fullest precautions, withheld me. When he grudgingly, and with many dark threats, proposed to wait three days—and not an hour more—for my answer, I accepted; ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... observe here, that this lay Pharisee, Ananias, is we have seen he was, sect. 39, took upon him to appoint a fast at Tiberias, and was obeyed; though indeed it was not out of religion, but knavish policy.] ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... one trod softly with sandal'd feet— Ah! why are the stolen waters sweet?— And one crept stealthily after; I would I had taken him there and wrung His knavish neck when the dark door swung, Or torn by the roots his treacherous tongue, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... pretended plot was no other than a contrivance between himself and Lunt in order to procure money from the government. The prisoners were immediately acquitted, and the ministry incurred a heavy load of popular odium, as the authors or abettors of knavish contrivances to insnare the innocent. The government, with a view to evince their abhorrence of such practices, ordered the witnesses to be prosecuted for a conspiracy against the lives and estates of the gentlemen who had been accused; and at last the affair was brought into the house of commons. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... loved him. Even the common people—led as they were by hectoring preachers of sedition, of no more truth or honesty than the mountebanks that ply their knavish trade round Henry's statue on the Pont Neuf—even they, the very rabble, had their hours of loyalty. I rode with his Majesty from Royston to Hatfield, in '47, when the people filled the midsummer air with his name, from hearts melting ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... madpash bedlam, this hairbrained fop, and give him leave to rave and dose his bellyful with his private and intimately acquainted devils, who, if they were not the very worst of all infernal fiends, would never have deigned to serve such a knavish barking cur as this is. He hath not learnt the first precept of philosophy, which is, Know thyself; for whilst he braggeth and boasteth that he can discern the least mote in the eye of another, he is not able to see the huge block that puts out the sight of both his eyes. This is such ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... rancorous hatred than any which can now exist between the people of Boston and Charleston, between the Knickerbockers of New York and the Creoles of New Orleans. A Scotchman was to the South a comprehensive name for a greedy, beggarly adventurer, knavish and money-loving to the last degree, full of absurd pride of pedigree, clannish and cold-blooded, vindictive as a Corsican, and treacherous as a modern Greek. An Englishman was to the North a bullying, arrogant coward,—purse-proud, yet cringing to rank,—without loyalty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... cried "Go kill him! Stick him like a pig! You three can do it, if he is so big!" Unwilling, yet the knights went out to try, And light-of-love GAWAIN came riding by. "What ho!" he cried, "I'm in, if that fight's free; So here I come-ye knavish cowards three!" "For me," PELLEAS cried, "the fight she means," And charging, knocked them into smithereens. Now called she other knights, and cried out, "Once Again go bind and bring me here that dunce!" And when he heard, ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... spring, and readiness, learned in many a wrestling bout, that knavish trick must have ended me; but scarce was the word "fire!" out of his mouth ere I was out of fire, by a single bound behind the rocky pillar of the opening. In this jump I was so brisk, at impulse of the love of life (for I saw the muzzles set upon me from the darkness of the cavern), ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... The knavish fanatic closed his eyes and raised his face heavenwards. There was a rapturous look on it, and his lips moved. He was calling upon the Almighty to give them the sign which he obligingly indicated. The new head of the church ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... which has happened to me is Cardinal Salviati; for he sent to me immediately after your holiness' departure, and when I presented myself, he called my work a stew of onions, and told me he would send me to complete it in a galley; and such was the effect upon me of his knavish words, that in my passion I felt my face in flame, and so intolerable a heat attacked my eyes that I could not find my own way home. Two days afterwards, cataracts fell on both my eyes; I quite lost my sight, ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... Gypsy race is perfectly illiterate," said the man in black; "they are possessed, it is true, of a knavish acuteness; and are particularly noted for giving subtle and evasive answers—and in your answers, I confess, you remind me of them; but that one of the race should acquire a learned language like the Armenian, and have a general ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... The "coqui" were in the habit of standing in the market-place for hire by those who required their services. See the Pseudolus, the Aulularia, and the Mercator of Plautus, and the Notes to Bohn's Translation. See also a remark on the knavish character of the sausage-makers in the Truculentus of ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... without professional aid, are and ever will be defrauded, that, after all was finished, and the entire wood-work was to be measured and valued, each party, of course, needing to be represented by a professional agent, naturally the knavish builder was ready at earliest dawn with his agent; but, as regarded my mother's interest, the task of engaging such an agent had been confided to a neighboring clergyman,—"evangelical," of course, and ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... story is as alien from modern habits of life, as the manner in which it is developed from the modern fashion of composition. The lover remains in the country and the heroine in her chamber during the whole action, leaving their fate to be decided by a foolish father, a cunning mother, and two knavish servants. Machiavelli has executed his task with judgment and taste. He has accommodated the plot to a different state of society, and has very dexterously connected it with the history of his own times. The relation of the trick put on the doting old lover is exquisitely humorous. It is ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with the familiar air of a privileged servant, "did you see that knavish-looking Gabinius following Madame Fabia all the way back ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... Sir W. Batten and the Auditors of the Exchequer at the Dolphin by Mr. Wayth's desire, and after dinner fell to business relating to Sir G. Carteret's account, and so home to the office, where Sir W. Batten begins, too fast, to shew his knavish tricks in giving what price he pleases for commodities. So abroad, intending to have spoke with my Lord Chancellor about the old business of his wood at Clarendon, but could not, and so home again, and late ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Terence, after this, were engaged in several other expeditions on shore, in which, though successful, several officers and a large number of men lost their lives. At length the Maoris discovered, what they might have known from the first, had they not been instigated by the knavish foes of England, who kept well in the background, that it was useless to contend against the power of Britain. Most of the rebel chiefs losing heart, tendered their submission, and promised in future to be faithful subjects of ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... outward, he knew that these were not the spur of human energy. In striving restlessly to get plunder and power and joy, men wove the mysterious web of life for ends no human mind could know. Carson built his rickety companies and played his knavish tricks upon the gullible public, of whom Webber was one. Brome Porter rooted here and there in the industrial world, and fattened himself upon all spoils. These had to be; they were the tools of the hour. But indifferent ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... reason a little with my mad self. Now don't I transgress all Rules to venture upon a Man, without the Advice of the Grave and Wise; but then a rigid knavish Guardian who wou'd have marry'd me. To whom? Even to his nauseous self, or no Body: Sir George is what I have try'd in Conversation, inquir'd into his Character, am satisfied in both. Then his Love; who wou'd have given a hundred Pound only to have seen a Woman he had not infinitely ...
— The Busie Body • Susanna Centlivre
... a pillar, round which stood a set of men, some rough, some knavish-looking, with the blue coats, badges, short swords, and bucklers carried by serving-men. They were waiting to be hired, as if in a statute fair, and two or three loud-voiced bargains were going on. In the middle aisle, gentlemen in all the glory of ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to the steward that it did not please them to see him in that guise, in his jerkin; however, appeased by him, they stayed for a little without saying more. But at last, seeing him ever in the same guise, and doubting whether he was not some knavish boy for grinding colours, they had him told by the Abbess that they would have liked to see the master at work, and not always him. To which Buonamico answered, like the good fellow that he was, that as soon as the master was there, he would let them know; taking notice, none the less, of ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... rest till the next man goes in! The tired arms lie with every sinew slack On the mown grass. Unbent the supple back, And elbows apt to make the leather spin Up the slow bat and round the unwary shin,— In knavish hands a most unkindly knack; But no guile shelters under the boy's black Crisp hair, frank eyes, and honest English skin. Two minutes only! Conscious of a name, The new man plants his weapon with profound ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the corn-mill of Admetus; and watching him at his bondage there stood the slender, slight, wing-footed Hermes, with a slow, mocking smile upon his knavish lips, and a jeering scorn in his keen eyes, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... acquire renown, for I will be a poet, an author, and shall claim a place in the republic of genius. I shall not need a crown to preserve my name in history. The first step is taken. My 'Anti-Machiavel' is in press. I will tread under foot this monster of knavish and diabolic statecraft, and all Europe shall see that a German prince is the first to break a lance against this Machiavel, who is making the people the slaves of princes. By his vile principles, he is moulding princes into such monsters that all mankind ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... had annoyed him. He found one in Nozdrev, and you may be sure that the scapegoat in question received a good drubbing from every side, even as an experienced captain or chief of police will give a knavish starosta or postboy a rating not only in the terms become classical, but also in such terms as the said captain or chief of police may invent for himself. In short, Nozdrev's whole lineage was passed in review; and many of ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... her tribe,—was in the habit of visiting us, with her hopeful grandson, who had "a gift for preaching" as well as for many other things not exactly compatible with holy orders. He sometimes brought with him a tame crow, a shrewd, knavish-looking bird, who, when in the humor for it, could talk like Barnaby Rudge's raven. He used to say he could "do nothin' at exhortin' without a white handkercher on his neck and money in his pocket,"—a ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... isch (German), denotes a quality; like rakish, knavish, churlish, Danish. Ish is also ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... all praised her for her cunning and her son rejoiced and said, "May the Messiah never fail thee!" Then she took with her the Syrian Christians, and set out for the army of Baghdad. Now this accursed old woman was a witch of the witches, past mistress in sorcery and deception, knavish, crafty, debauched and perfidious, with foul breath, red eyelids, sallow cheeks, pale face, bleared eyes, mangy body, grizzled hair, humped back, withered complexion and running nostrils. She had studied the scriptures of Islam and made the pilgrimage to the Holy ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... that other and turns towards the moon the letters written in the glass. The other looking fixedly on the shining orb reads in it all that is written on the mirror as if it were written on the moon. [278] This is precisely the modus operandi by which the knavish have imposed upon the foolish in all ages. The manipulator of the doctrine stands behind his credulous disciple, writing out of sight his invented science or theology, and writing too often with the blood of some innocent victim. The poor patient student is meanwhile gazing on the moon in ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... folk in Pleasant Valley said that old Mr. Crow was the noisiest person in the neighborhood. But they must have forgotten all about Mr. Crow's knavish cousin, Jasper Jay. And it was not only in summer, either, that Jasper's shrieks and laughter woke the echoes. Since it was his habit to spend his winters right there in Farmer Green's young pines, near the foot of Blue Mountain, on many a cold morning Jasper's ear-splitting "Jay! ...
— The Tale of Jasper Jay - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... one. And there is no surer test of the quality of a nation than the quality of its servants, for they are their masters' shadows and distort their faults in a flattened mimicry. A wise nation will have philosophers in its servants'-hall, a knavish nation will have knaves there, and a kindly nation will have friends there. Only let it be remembered that 'kindness' means, as with your child, not indulgence, but care." Substitute "mistress" for "master" in this passage of John Ruskin's, and we have a little lesson which ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... he travelled over Europe, with no other capital than his knavish audacity, deep depravity, and his skill ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... approached on the other. It was attempting to rush the swale for the hill opposite, and making rather bad weather of the newly repaired road. A pile of loose soil that Newton had allowed to lie just across the path made a certain maintenance of speed desirable. The knavish Newton planted himself in the path of the laboring car, and waved its driver a command to halt. The car came to a standstill with its front wheels in the edge of the loose earth, and the chauffeur fuming ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... displays prudence, as your offense shows adventurous courage. Well then, and gave him the knight-stroke so I raise you to nobility, who begged for grace for your offense now kneels before me, rise as knight; knavish you have acted, and Knave of Bergen shall you be called henceforth, and gladly the Black knight rose; three cheers were given in honor of the Emperor, and loud cries of joy testified the approbation with which the Queen danced still once ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
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