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More "Motley" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not faze the strangers. One of them, an American, was a man of about thirty years, clean-shaven, square-jawed, with light, steely, secretive gray eyes, and a look of intelligence and assurance that did not harmonize with his motley garb. His companion was a foreigner, small of stature, with eyes like a ferret and deep ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... to Austria, whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—John Lothrop Motley. ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... significance of Christianity, and made no such mistake. His Supper at Emmaus is the simple evening meal of three peasant pilgrims precisely as it is represented in the Gospel. His Christ Preaching includes a motley company of humble folk, such as the great Teacher loved to ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... conspicuous: some recline in groups, Scanning the motley scene that varies round; There some grave Moslem to devotion stoops, And some that smoke, and some that play, are found; Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground; Half whispering there the Greek is heard to prate; Hark! from the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... recognition of 'vested interests' for which we may look in vain from the motley mob of the 'National Assembly' into which the States-General of 1789 so rapidly resolved, or—to speak more exactly—dissolved, themselves! With men of the Tiers-Etat, in a province like Artois, who could see things so plainly ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... up with her companions, loving Phoebe like a parent, and the other two like a nurse, and really liking the brother. All took delight in the winter paradise of Hyeres, that fragment of the East set down upon the French coast, and periodically peopled with a motley multitude of visitors from all the lands of Europe, all invalids, or else ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the rows of benches were packed with a motley crowd of Poles, Russians, Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians—a crowd made up of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, neighbors, friends, and enemies of the boys and girls whose fate was in the hands of ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... with face elaborately decorated in every color of the rainbow. He was distributing printed announcements to the gaping citizens of Everdoze. Not so much as a frankfurter or a glass of lemonade did the people of this motley caravan buy. ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... A motley crowd they seemed; and yet not a hostile one, he believed, as he swept a hungry glance around—an anxious look, ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... do with innocent laughter that can harm no one; these pages are not for you. Clap to the leaves and go no farther than this, for I tell you plainly that if you go farther you will be scandalized by seeing good, sober folks of real history so frisk and caper in gay colors and motley that you would not know them but for the names tagged to them. Here is a stout, lusty fellow with a quick temper, yet none so ill for all that, who goes by the name of Henry II. Here is a fair, gentle lady before whom all the others bow and call her Queen Eleanor. Here is a fat ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... the three generations of men who issued from the three subdivisions of the diligence, and presented that motley and mixed assemblage of ranks, ages, and countries, which forms so very amusing a ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... indeed a motley array. We see true sportsmen beside ordinary gunners, game-hogs and meat hunters; handsome setter dogs are mixed up with coyotes, cats, foxes and skunks; and well-gowned women and ladies' maids are jostled by half-naked "poor-white" and ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... men and boys trotted curiously along with us, for all the world as if the bus were a circus parade cage filled with striped tigers. What a rustic, motley crowd massed about in and on that ball ground. There must ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... me—that same pride which sends men into battle for foolish causes. I wanted to hurry the fall of the blow. I even protested against my parents and Mr. Pound driving with me to the railroad, and they did not understand. I had to meet their last embraces under the eyes of the motley crowd who had come to the station to see the train, and under such conditions I dared not show emotion. Again they did not understand and were a little hurt by my coldness. I sprang up the car steps jauntily. To show my independence I stood by the smoker door and waved a smiling farewell to the ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... An extra blunder in the conduct of Irish affairs is only like an additional mask in a fancy ball—the whole thing is motley; and asking for consistency would be like requesting the company ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... I have watched the seasons come and go around Dreamthorp, and each in its turn interests me as if I saw it for the first time. But the other week it seems that I saw the grain ripen; then by day a motley crew of reapers were in the fields, and at night a big red moon looked down upon the stocks of oats and barley; then in mighty wains the plenteous harvest came swaying home, leaving a largess on the roads for every bird; then the round, yellow, comfortable-looking stacks stood ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... the witches hie, The stubble is yellow, the corn is green; Thither the gathering legions fly, And sitting aloft is Sir Urial seen: O'er stick and o'er stone they go whirling along, Witches and he-goats, a motley throng. ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... agile creatures required connecting bridges between the trees, but later when I saw the motley aggregation of half-savage beasts which they kept within their village I realized the necessity for the pathways. There were a number of the same vicious wolf-dogs which we had left worrying the dyryth, and many goatlike animals whose distended ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fire the wet and steaming garments of the murderers were hung on convenient stalagmites to dry; upon the other side of the red blaze the four men, dressed in strange motley, gleaned from their "swags," wrangled over the ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... in company with Jingle, talking very earnestly, and not bestowing a look on the groups who were congregated on the racket-ground; they were very motley groups too, and worth the looking at, if it were ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... loose, Cal!" cried Eddring, suddenly. "Open the gates! Let 'em out! I want to hear 'em holler!" The pack poured out, motley, vociferous, eager for the chase, filling the air with their wild music, with a riot of primeval, savage life. "Get me a horse saddled, Cal, quick," cried Eddring. "I want to feel leather under me again. I want to feel the air ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... to enumerate the numberless laws found on the motley map of German common rights. Let ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... triumphant passage. I think of the sentences with which Isaak Walton ends his life of Donne. I think of the last pages of Motley's "Dutch Republic," with its eulogy on William ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... sections. During the second half of 1848 and all through 1849 thousands of Southerners, Easterners, and Westerners rushed pell-mell into the new Eldorado, bent on making hasty fortunes and oblivious of the anxious thoughts of statesmen. The motley gold-diggers needed government. They asked Polk to provide it. He failed to grant it. Congress could not do so because of the deadlock over slavery. Benton wrote a public letter to the Californians advising them to form a government for themselves, and his son-in-law, John C. Fremont, went to ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... motley but splendid assemblage Judge Merlin led his beautiful daughter. At first her entrance attracted no attention; but when one, and then another, noticed the dazzling new star of beauty that had so suddenly risen above their horizon, a whisper arose that soon grew into a general buzz ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... that abound in many of my poorest friends, and in some of the chapters that are to follow I shall tell more fully of them, but just now I am amongst neither sinners nor saints, but with my friends "in motley." I mean the men and women who have occupied so much of my time and endeavours, but whose ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... are stationed,—and still another at the opposite end, for the same purpose. The logge which flank the pavilion are sold by ticket, and filled with the richer classes. Three great stagings show the numbers as they are drawn. The pit of the amphitheatre is densely packed with a motley crowd. Under the ilexes and noble stone-pines that show their dark-green foliage against the sky, the helmets and swords of cavalry glitter as they move to and fro. All around on the green slopes are the people,—soldiers, contadini, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... perceiving in this conduct only a further proof of the hypocrite's villainy, breaks out once more into a tempest of agonised despair. Upon her cry for immediate revolt against the scoundrelly tyrant, the people collect together and form a motley and passionate crowd. Luzio, who also returns, counsels the people with stinging bitterness to pay no heed to the woman's fury; he points out that she is only tricking them, as she has already tricked him—for he still believes in her shameless infidelity. Fresh confusion; ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... at the Count Governor's, which, of course, comprises the best society, and is very much like other gregarious meetings in every country,—as in ours,—except that, instead of the Bishop of Winchester, you have the Patriarch of Venice, and a motley crew of Austrians, Germans, noble Venetians, foreigners, and, if you see a quiz, you may be sure he is a Consul. Oh, by the way, I forgot, when I wrote from Verona, to tell you that at Milan I met with a countryman of yours—a Colonel * * * ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... to grant, and—never being repulsed by their officer—they speedily knew and loved their friend. Thus it was that the two men standing at a little distance, watching the proceeding, were greatly amused at the motley drafts made upon his attention in the shape of tents, shoes, coats, letters to be sent or received, books borrowed and lent, a man sick, or a chicken captured. They brought their interests and cares to him,—these ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... hunting parties—were riding northward, but the great mass was facing the City whither they were pressing to warm themselves in the glow of the Coronation. On foot, on horseback, in wagons and on crutches, they were as motley a throng as had ever trod the Roman stones; and the respectable element among them was by no means large enough to leaven the lump. Sometimes a group of merchants was to be seen, conducting loaded wagons; sometimes, a ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... chief actor, and the source from which the dramatist must cull his choicest beauties, painting up to nature the varied scenes which mark the changeful courses of her motley groups. Here she opes her volume to the view of contemplative minds, and spreads her treasures forth, decked in all the variegated tints that Flora, goddess of the flowery mead and silvery dell, with many coloured hue, besprinkles the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... foregathered yesterday afternoon in the shipping office, are lashed together for another four months. A motley group, my friend. Outside I stood, note-book in hand, trying to find a spare fireman who wanted a job. A mob of touts, sharks, and pimps crowded round me, hustling each other, and then turning away from my call, "Any firemen here?" ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... had its fatigues. This was to be a raid EN MASSE and on horseback. The whole country-side was to assemble at Shingle Hut and proceed thence. It assembled; and what a collection! Such a crowd! such gear! such a tame lot of horses! and such a motley swarm of lean, lank, ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... said he of the motley, as the dwarf came slowly down the ladder. "Thou art now the first descendant of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... tongue, lick the whole labor flat" The work has prospered so far only because nobody but its promoters has taken it seriously. It has not engaged attention from those having the knowledge and the insight to discern beneath its cap-and-bells and the motley that is its only wear a serious menace to all that civilized men hold precious in woman. It is of the nature of men—themselves cheerful polygamists, with no penitent intentions—to set a high value upon chastity ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... professor and who was probably night clerk in a drug store, and lastly a chunky and well-fed person who, from his turning at once to the cotton reports, could probably be put down as holding some responsible position in a Wall Street house. The farther the eye strayed, the more motley became the array, the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... and Ocean Grove. These great summer settlements are separated by a sheet of fresh water three-quarters of a mile long; its sloping banks are studded with pretty cottages, its surface is alive with boats gay with awnings of red and blue and green, and seats of motley color, and is altogether a fairy spectacle. Asbury Park is the worldly correlative of Ocean Grove, and esteems itself a notch above it in social tone. Each is a city of small houses, and each is teeming with life, but Ocean Grove, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the town. They were, indeed, under arms a little longer than usual, and a few more sentries were placed and the theatre not open that Evening, but that single evening was the only exception, and the next day the Palais Royal was as brilliant and more cheerful than ever, with its motley groups of visitors. The Cossacks were not quartered in the Palais Royal, they were in the Ch. Elysees, the trees of which bear visible marks of their horses' teeth, but a good many came in from curiosity and hung their horses in the open space of the ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... Most of the people of that town were true patriots, though by promises of plunder he induced some of the lower class of whites to join him, and also brought in many negro slaves from the country around. With this motley crew he committed many acts of violence, rousing all Virginia to resistance. A "Committee of Safety" was appointed and hundreds of men eagerly enlisted and were sent to invest Norfolk. But their enemy was not easy to find, as they kept out of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... squares seemed to be full of motley, ill-clad, ill-nourished, but formidable multitudes. Towards evening the tradesmen began to shut up their shops, and a regiment of cavalry paraded the principal streets with a band that played ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... said, "Where is the life which late we led?" That motley clown in Arden wood, Whom humorous Jaques with envy viewed, Not even that clown could amplify, On this trite text, so long as I. Eleven years we now may tell, Since we have known each other well; Since, riding side by side, our hand, First drew the voluntary ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... oak chest in which spare shawls, rugs, and coats were kept was soon ransacked, and the mummers' gay dresses hidden by motley wrappers. But no sooner did Darkie and Pax behold the coats, &c., than they at once began to leap and bark, as it was their custom to do when they saw any one dressing to go out. Robin was sorely afraid that this would betray them; but though the Captain and his wife ...
— The Peace Egg and Other tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... ten-minutes-out-of-an-hour halts were shortened to five minutes. During one of these rests Jackson came down the line. The men cheered him. "Thirty miles to-day. You must do thirty miles to-day, men." He went by, galloping forward to the immense and motley convoy. The men laughed, well pleased with themselves and with him. "Old Jack's got to see if his lemons are all right! If we don't get those lemon wagons through safe to Staunton there'll be hell to pay! Go 'way! we know ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... in the afternoon. That evening he was engaged by the captain of the vessel to keep tally on the sacks at five francs per diem. A few days later an order was issued from the Hotel de Ville that all foreign volunteers should assemble there. A hundred and twelve responded to the call and a motley group mustered from all quarters of the globe, representing every branch of the French service and wearing every conceivable kind of a uniform. Notwithstanding the fact that some of them were from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... opportunity at the Cedars of meeting some friends in her former profession, for Mr. Vigo liked to be surrounded by genius and art. "I must have talent," he would exclaim, as he looked round at the amusing and motley multitude assembled at his splendid entertainments. And to-day upon his lawn might be observed the first tenor of the opera and a prima-donna who had just arrived, several celebrated members of the English stage of both sexes, artists of great reputation, whose principal works ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... chief American historians, yet it is not deficient in ease, grace, or vigor. He is almost always careful, always unambitious, always in good taste. To complain that the style is not equal to Mr. Motley's, simply on the ground that the book is large and the subject historical, is grossly unfair. Mr. Gillett has not been eager for a place as a writer; his story has more merit in the thing told than in the telling. Even with his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... be better guessed than described when the return of Mudie's box was hastened that he might have Motley's Dutch Republic. She thought this studiousness mere affectation; but it was indisputable that Terry's soul was in books, and that he never was so happy as when turned loose into the library, ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to remain at peace with them. I wish the newspapers were blameless; but there was a sneering, exulting tone in many of them after the military disasters of the North which was likely to irritate. Mr. Motley said long ago that the Times would, if possible, work up a war between the two countries, and though I can't speak from my own knowledge, as I have seldom looked at its articles, I have no doubt from what John and others say that he was right.... There can be no doubt that we have ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... as he spoke, the crowding footsteps of many men were heard at both entrances to the wide hall-way which ran through the house. At the same moment the door was violently thrown open, and the dining-room was filled with an irregular mass of motley, ragged, red-coated men, whose reckless demeanor and hardened faces indicated that they had been recruited from the lowest and most depraved classes of the inhabitants of the colony. They were led by a middle-aged ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... will take the command, whatever his position. Hope, as well as timidity and fear, is infectious, and one cheery voice will revive the drooping spirits of a multitude. Paul had already established his personal ascendency in that motley company of Roman soldiers, prisoners, sailors, and disciples. Now he stands forward with calm confidence, and infuses new hope into them all. What a miraculous change passes on externals when faith looks at them! The circumstances were the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... able to do that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest?" I got my worsted and sat down stairs at my work, to be ready to see the doctor when he should come. Mrs. Sandford took post at the window; and so we waited. The weather to-day was clear and bright; the street full yet of motley groups, returned soldiers and gathered civilians, looking however far less dismal than the day before. Mrs. Sandford from the window detailed all she saw; while my worsted needle went in and out to an interrupted refrain - "He shall not be afraid ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... was passing along the footpath through a part of Whitehall Wood, called “the Wilderness,” he was attacked by, as was supposed at the time, two men against whom he had given information of their poaching. They were accompanied by a female named Sophy Motley, still remembered by some of my informants as a big, masculine woman. After a desperate struggle for his life, a track being trampled down round the tree, by which he tried to elude them (the grass, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... said the King [Footnote: The Duke of Clarence now became William IV] intended to appear in uniform, so the Duke, Lord Bathurst, Rosslyn, and Sir J. Murray, who were there, put on their uniforms. The group at the Council was most motley. Lords Grey, Lansdowne, Spencer, Tankerville, Sir J. Warrender, and some others being in black full dress. Lord Camden and some more in uniform, which several sent for after they arrived, as Salisbury and Hardinge. The mass, ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... cost of subsequent departure. A dozen raucous-voiced policemen were employed to keep back the hundreds that thronged the sidewalk and blocked the street. Curiosity was rampant. Ever since the moment that the body of Challis Wrandall was carried into the house of his father, a motley, varying crowd of people shifted restlessly in front of the mansion, filled with gruesome interest in the absolutely unseen, animated by the sly hope that something sensational might happen if ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... concerned to show is that the search for consistency and connection in the manifold impressions of the moment is a deeply rooted habit of the mind, and one which is retained in a measure during sleep. When, in this state, our minds are invaded by a motley crowd of unrelated images, there results a disagreeable sense of confusion; and this feeling acts as a motive to the attention to sift out those products of the dream-fancy which may be made to cohere. When once the foundations of a dream-action ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... Drake to have been "as famous in Europe and America as Tamburlaine was in Asia and Africa." The high-sounding names and quests which seem to us to give the play an air of unreality and romance were to the Elizabethans real and actual; things as strange and foreign were to be heard any day amongst the motley crowd in the Bankside outside the theatre door. Tamburlaine's last speech, when he calls for a map and points the way to unrealised conquests, is the very epitome ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... dampness, dirt, and confusion, as it well could be; but the crowd from the gold-fields of California had just arrived, having made the journey from Panama on mules, and the street was filled with motley groups in picturesque variety of attire. The hotels were also full of them, while many lounged in the verandahs after their day's journey. Rude, coarse gold-diggers, in gay-coloured shirts, and long, serviceable boots, elbowed, in perfect equality, keen Yankee ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... only wear, my son," he cried gaily. "In this cap and bells, I see life under a different aspect. Never has it appeared to me sweeter and more irresponsible. Don't you feel it? But I forgot. You haven't any motley. I apologise for my want of tact. Blanquette," he added in French, "why haven't you found a ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Then, suddenly there was a dreadful noise on the stairs, a song shouted out in chorus by twenty mouths and a regular march like that of a Prussian regiment. The whole house was shaken by the steady tramp of feet. The door flew open, and a motley throng appeared—men and women in file, two and two holding each other by the arm and stamping their heels on the ground to mark time, advanced into the studio like a snake uncoiling ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... together on board The Queen. Muir was vastly amused by the motley crowd of excited men, their various outfits, their queer equipment, their ridiculous notions of camping and life in the wilderness. "A nest of ants," he called them, "taken to a strange country and stirred up with ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... from its commencement, in crimson morocco. "Nimrod" and "The Druid," "Assheton Smith's Memoirs," and many others of the same class. Books on farming and farriery, on dogs and guns. Here were the Squire's guns and whips, a motley collection, all neatly arranged by his own hands. The servants had done nothing but keep them free from dust. There, by the low and cosy fireplace, with its tiled hearth, stood the capacious crimson morocco chair, in which the master of the Abbey House ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... the clown had, at first, pretended to join in the pursuit of the nimble runaways, but only pretended. Then he suddenly perceived that they were growing breathless and had almost fallen beneath the feet of a mighty Norman horse. The man beneath his motley uniform rose to the emergency. Catching the bridle of a near-by pony, he flung the monkey from its back, scooped the babies up from the ground, set them in the monkey's place and, mounting behind them, triumphantly fell ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... Alexandria, with four or five Orientals on board. They come on shore, and proceed to saunter along the Riva toward the Grand Piazza, while their dark faces and brightly-colored garments add an element to the motley scene which is perfectly in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... greeted these welcome sounds. As he vaulted over the rail of his own ship to the deck of the stranger, a motley crew of half-wild sea-savages swarmed behind him. They had cutlasses and boarding-pikes, and their faces were blackened with powder. Their eyes were reddened with sulphurous fumes and their clothes torn with ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... new and original idea of the celebrated Ladvocat, was just beginning to blossom out upon the walls. In no long space Paris was to wear motley, thanks to the exertions of his imitators, and the Treasury was to discover ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Hermit, the hallucinated dwarf whose sobbing eloquence had led an innumerable motley host of unnamed peasants to certain disaster in the deserts of the East, went the hundred Gruyerian soldiers led by Guillaume, but with the knights and priests of Romand Switzerland, the Burgundian French and Lombard nobles ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... and a lawn neckcloth of many folds. His hair was innocent of powder, and cut short in what the period supposed to be the high Roman fashion. It was his chief touch of the Republican. In the matter of dress he had not his leader's courage. Abhorring slovenliness and the Jacobin motley, he would not affect them. He was dressed in his best for this evening; and if his attire was not chosen as Ludwell Cary would have chosen, it was yet the dress of a gentleman, and it ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... she concealed her distrust and did her best to get on with the new head of the family. Only one thing she did, and that against Motley's and her father's protest. She withdrew her own little fortune, left her by her mother, from Captain Barnabas's care and deposited it in the Ostable savings bank and in equally secure places. Of course she told the Captain of her determination to do this before she did it and the telling was the ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... 37:1) "Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased" (Psa. 49:16). But go thou into the sanctuary of thy God, read His Word, and understand the end of these men-(Mason). Often, as the motley reflexes of my experience move in long processions of manifold groups before me, the distinguished and world-honoured company of Christian mammonists appear to the eye of my imagination as a drove of camels heavily laden, yet all at full speed; and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... not have to fire at my friends," he thought to himself, "and now the sooner they come on the better for me." Scarcely had these words passed through his mind than he observed a great commotion among the motley garrison of the fort, and, looking through the embrasure at which his gun was placed, he caught sight of several boats just rounding the point at the other end of the reach. He could not make out who ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... minutely the appearance of the motley crowd, through which our adventurers elbowed their way, gazing curiously on the strange scene, which seemed to them more like a dream than reality, after their long sojourn in the solitudes of the forest. Processions headed by long-robed priests with flambeaux and crucifixes; ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... communism we do not find this infinite variety of opinion. We find, on the contrary, a definite and irreconcilable duality of thought. Human souls are divided on this matter not, as they are on other matters, into a motley variety of convictions but into two opposite and irreconcilable convictions, unfathomably hostile to ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... attention to this relation between religious and sexual feeling in psycho-pathological states. "It suffices," says he, "to recall how intense sensuality makes itself manifest in the clinical history of many religious maniacs; the motley mixture of religious and sexual delusions that is so frequently observed in psychoses (e. g., in maniacal women who think they are or will be the mother of God), but particularly in masturbatic insanity; ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... of each country, at least of the important nations. For compendious short histories, the "Story of the Nations" series, by various writers, should be secured, and the more extensive works of Gibbon, Grote, Mommsen, Duruy, Fyffe, Green, Macaulay, Froude, McCarthy, Carlyle, Thiers, Bancroft, Motley, Prescott, Fiske, Schouler, McMaster, Buckle, Guizot, etc., should be acquired. The copious lists of historical works appended to Larned's "History for Ready Reference" will be ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... once took its slow and solemn way, rouged processions pass, tinsel heroes strut, and vapour. Thousand-tinted garlands supplant the pale immortelles that decked the graves; the sable cloak is doffed, and motley's the only wear. Surely actors must be bold men to tread a stage covering so many mouldering relics of mortality. Not for Potosi, and the Real del Monte to boot, would we do it, lest, at the witching hour, some ghastly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... historians, Bancroft, Motley, Prescott, Sparks, Palfrey, Parkman, and John Fiske, are Unitarians. Educators, like Horace Mann, like the last seven presidents of Harvard University, Unitarians. Great scientists, like Agassiz, Peirce, Bowditch, Professor Draper, Unitarians. Statesmen ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... would have done Na-tee-kah's proud heart good to have seen him in particular, and it would have been well worth the while of almost anybody else to have had a good look at the whole affair, as the motley array poured out into the moonlight from under the shadowy cover of the ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... light-hearted sketchers? I often recall those homely Saturday evening concerts; the long, shabby saal with its faded out-of-date decorations; its rows of small tables with the well-known groups around them; the mixed and motley audience. How easy, after a little while, to pick out the English, by their look of complacent pleasure at the delightful ease and unceremoniousness of the whole affair; their gladness at finding a public entertainment where one's clothes were not obliged ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... mountain path See the long-drawn column go; Himalayan aftermath Lying rosy on the snow. Motley ministers of wrath Building better than they know, In the rosy aftermath Trailing upward ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the quaint old French and Spanish city, with its motley population, were carefully jotted down in her note-book. These first descriptions she afterwards rewrote, discarding weakening detail, elaborating the occasional triviality which seemed to reflect the true local tint—a nice distinction, involving conscientious hard work. ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... of this so-called Empire were, however, a multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria, combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second order, such ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... room Like lofty and powerful capitals. Lice-ridden boys giggle nastily. And shining girls give painfully beautiful looks. And distant women are so very excited... They have hundreds of red, round hands, Still, large, without end Placed around their high, motley bellies. Most people are drinking yellow beer. Grocers, their cigarettes burning, gape. A fine young woman sings vulgar songs. A young Jew plays ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... attire, but she looked delightfully trim and business-like, and her young brothers and sisters were proud of her and made favourable comparisons between her and the other lady riders assembled in the square. It was a picturesque sight to see the motley collection of vehicles drawn up by the kerbstones, the riders pacing to and fro, greeting fresh arrivals, who kept trotting in from every direction, the pink coats of the men making welcome touches of colour, and ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and Dublin could boast of three or four hells doing a brisk trade. The most frequented and longest established was called "The Coal Hole," being situated on the coal quay. Here, at any hour after midnight, a motley company might be seen, each individual, however, well known to the porter, who jealously scanned his features before drawing back the noiseless bolts which secured the door. The professional gambler trying to live by his winnings, the fashionable swell finishing ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... and gathered in knots under the porticoes, eagerly discussing the questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With Plato, "philosophy was only ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... rising for some time, now gave very unequivocal notice of an approaching storm. The rain began to fall, and the decks were quickly cleared of their motley groups. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... venturesome mind, must needs attempt all manner of tricks upon this motley company of soldiers. He would dig a pit with Little John and Much, and hide it up with branches and earth, so that Master Carfax might stray into it ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... people did not agree with John Adams that Attucks led "a motley rabble," but a band of patriots. Their evidence of the belief they entertained was to be found in the annual commemoration of the "5th of March," when orators, in measured sentences and impassioned eloquence, praised the hero-dead. In March, 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren, who a few months ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... towered a couple of huge elephants, surrounded by camels, horses, and mules, while on trollies stood cages of wild beasts, lions, tigers, jackals; one of the elephants was trumpeting, the camels were groaning, the carnivora roaring; mixed with their din were the voices of a motley crew, men and women, having the same appearance in dress and manner as that of the two men he had followed. Dene saw that it was a travelling menagerie and circus, and he looked on it with an amusement which predominated over his self-interest. Presently there darted ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... been communicated when it was found that the expedition was surrounded by a large body of armed men, who instantly began an attack. The assailants, a motley crowd of Kakhyens and Chinese border men, were soon repulsed; but as reports came streaming in that large bodies of Chinese train bands were advancing to their aid, it was thought best to beat a retreat. This ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... silver, made up the currency in use, circulating sometimes by weight and sometimes by tale, at rates that were constantly shifting. The position of the colonies as a link between Great Britain and the United States, was curiously illustrated in the currency system. The motley jumble of coins in use were rated in Halifax currency, a mere money of account or bookkeeping standard, with no actual coins to correspond, adapted to both English and United States currency systems. The ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... ascribed to the great Catholic revival." It would be pleasant, {718} were there space, to quote similar enthusiastic appreciations from the French scholars Quinet and Thierry, the Englishman Herbert Spencer and the Americans Motley and Prescott. They all regarded the Reformation as at once an enlightenment and enfranchisement. Even the philosophers rushed into the same camp. Carlyle worshipped Luther as a hero; Emerson said that his "religious movement was the foundation of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... gazeth evermore at the stage below; Noteth well the players as they quickly come and go; Queens and kings and maidens fair, motley fools and friars, Lords and ladies, stately dames, mounted ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... conflict than these two has been her never-ending war with the sea. Holland has been called a land enclosed in a fortress reared against the sea. For generations her people have warred with angry waves; but, as Motley has said, they gained an education for a struggle "with the still more savage despotism of man." Let me not forget here Holland's great school of art—comparable only to that of Spain, or even to that of Italy. F. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... University of Berlin. Since his return to America he has been connected with the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons. His first volume, "The Human Fantasy", 1911, attracted attention by the faithfulness with which it depicted the motley life of New York. His second was "The Beloved Adventure", 1912; followed by "Love and Liberation", 1913, and "Dust and Light", 1919. The last volume, from which the selections in this anthology are taken, contains ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... introduced by his transcribers, and particularly by a simpleton who is called Samuel, or his master Beulanus, or both, who appear to have lived in the ninth century, that it is difficult to say how much of this motley production is original and authentic. Be that as it may, the writer of the copy printed by Gale bears ample testimony to the "Saxon Chronicle", and says expressly, that he compiled his history partly from the records of the Scots and Saxons (8). At the end is a confused but ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... necessary permission. We were to be received on a Saturday at eleven. We went in the prescribed costume, black silk, with the picturesque Roman veil thrown over the head. From the foot of the Scala Regia, (Royal Staircase) one of the papal guard, in a motley suit which seemed one glare of black and yellow, escorted us to the door of a long corridor, known as the Loggia of Raphael, where we were received by a higher official in rich array of crimson velvet. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... long in his memory. He stood with his hand resting on the rail of the gangway, and when presently it was raised to the side of the steamer, he still kept his position, so that he could instantly catch sight of his father as he passed down. I stood close behind him, and watched the motley procession of passengers; most of them had the dull colourless skin which bespeaks long residence in India, and a particularly yellow and peevish-looking old man was grumbling loudly as he slowly made his ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... of Bristol, by William Barrett:" Bristol, 1789, quarto; a Work which Mr. Park described as " a motley compound of real and ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... myself that I was equally admirable in my own metier. I was assorting a motley collection of guide-books, novels, maps, smelling-salts, and kodaks when he came in, and was dying to look up, but I remained as sweetly expressionless as ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... several houses in Catherine Street on fire (sixteen houses), and, though it was three in the morning, the streets filled by an immense multitude. Nothing could be more picturesque than the scene, for the flames made it as light as day and threw a glare upon the strange and motley figures moving about. All the gentility of London was there from Princess Esterhazy's ball and all the clubs; gentlemen in their fur cloaks, pumps, and velvet waistcoats mixed with objects like the sans-culottes in the French Revolution—men and women half-dressed, covered with rags and dirt, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... distinguished guests finally got upon the stage and began to look about them, the spectacle that met their eyes was as unexpected as it was bewildering. From the reporters' tables to the remotest recesses of the gallery the hall was packed tight with a motley mob, in which the element of born cut-throats largely predominated. It was the kind of crowd that could only have been gathered from the three-cent lodging-houses in Chatham Street. A dense volume of tobacco smoke, produced from pipes and demoralized cigar-stumps, ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... feast concluded with a basin of bread and milk for every person, all of them having likewise as much beer and cider as they could drink. The dinner, as may naturally be supposed, lasted from three to four hours; and it will also not be difficult to imagine, that the entertaining of such a motley throng on such a day, could not fail to be attended with great annoyance to the nuns, and with various inconveniences. The convent had therefore, from a very early date, endeavored to free themselves from the obligation, by the payment of a sum of money; and, in times ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... disappeared. Hornsey Wood House has a name not unknown in the simple annals of tea-drinking. It is now part of Finsbury Park, but in the middle of the last century its long-room 'on popular holydays, such as Whit Sunday, might be seen crowded as early as nine or ten in the morning with a motley assemblage eating rolls and butter and drinking tea at an extravagant price.' 'Hone remembered the old Hornsey Wood House as it stood embowered, and seeming a part of the wood. It was at that time kept by two sisters—Mrs. Lloyd and Mrs. Collier—and these aged dames were usually to be found before ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... was tall and stately, and the low room was too short for her soaring bonnet, but she bent her head, and sat down near Josiah Crawford, and set the candle in the shining candlestick, and cast a glance of conscious superiority over the motley company. ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... distaste the cost of subsequent departure. A dozen raucous-voiced policemen were employed to keep back the hundreds that thronged the sidewalk and blocked the street. Curiosity was rampant. Ever since the moment that the body of Challis Wrandall was carried into the house of his father, a motley, varying crowd of people shifted restlessly in front of the mansion, filled with gruesome interest in the absolutely unseen, animated by the sly hope that something sensational might happen if they waited ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... favourite of the Duchess for the time, and had, at her instance, promised to remain there for some further days. He had hardly spoken to the Duke since he had been in the house,—but then but few of that motley assembly did talk much with the Duke. Gunner and Pountney had gone away,—the Captain having declared his dislike of the upstart Portuguese to be so strong that he could not stay in the same house with him any longer, and the Major, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... that moment it happened that the Court Tailor came into the room to measure the King for a new mantle of ermine. Forthwith the grinning Jester began shrieking with laughter, so that the bells upon his motley cap were ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... habiliments, making grotesque imitations of the spectacles upon the boards. Piggy Pennington rolled his trousers far above his knees for tights, and galloped his father's fat delivery horse up and down the alley, riding sideways, standing, and backwards, with much vainglory. To simulate the motley of the tight-rope-walking clown, Jimmy Sears wore the calico lining of his clothes outside, when he was in the royal castle beyond his mother's ken. Mealy donned carpet slippers in Pennington's barn, and wore long pink-and-white ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... the initiative. A number of papers editorially called for a convention, which was really a mass meeting, for there were no accredited delegates, and could be none. This met in Decatur on Washington's birthday, 1856. It was a motley assembly, from a political standpoint. It included whigs, democrats, free-soilers, abolitionists, and know-nothings. Said Lincoln: "Of strange, discordant, even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds." Politicians ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... the Hetairai, and the most wonderful luxuriance of black curls I have ever seen falling in dense masses to her knees. After a conversation of amorous banter, he gives her a golden chain, which she assumes, well pleased, and gives him her name, La Magdalena. A motley crowd of street loafers here rushed upon the scene, and I am sure there was no one of Northern blood in the theatre that did not shudder for an instant at the startling apparition that formed the central figure of the group. The world has long ago agreed upon a typical face and figure ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... day after the flood he was offering $1,000 for enough wood alcohol to heat malted milk for his infant grandchild. Monday he was no more successful in buying provisions. He appeared with a basket on his arm, rubbed elbows with those nearest in the motley line and apparently none was more grateful than he when his basket was filled with beans, potatoes, canned vegetables, rice and other staples. He was eager to pay for his supplies, but money is refused at the supply depots. It was arranged to change ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... the colors of the rainbow, of all manner of colors; kaleidoscopic. iridescent; opaline[obs3], opalescent; prismatic, nacreous, pearly, shot, gorge de pigeon, chatoyant[obs3]; irisated[obs3], pavonine[obs3]. pied, piebald; motley; mottled, marbled; pepper and salt, paned, dappled, clouded, cymophanous[obs3]. mosaic, tesselated, plaid; tortoise shell &c. n. spotted, spotty; punctated[obs3], powdered; speckled &c. v.; freckled, flea-bitten, studded; flecked, fleckered[obs3]; striated, barred, veined; brinded[obs3], brindled; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... whose generous sympathies with popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—John Lothrop Motley. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a motley crowd collected on the pier and on the beach when Joe and his friend landed. Rough, bearded men, in Mexican sombreros and coarse attire—many in shirt-sleeves and with their pantaloons tucked in their boots—watched the ...
— Joe's Luck - Always Wide Awake • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... that was one way of seeing Venice: but I would much rather sit at a little table on the Riva degli Schiavoni, with a plate of bread and cheese and a mezzo of Chianti before me, watching the motley crowd in the street and the many-coloured sails in the harbour; or spend a lazy afternoon in a gondola, floating through watery alley-ways that lead nowhere, and under the facades of beautiful palaces whose names ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... pages could be seen. The patients wore costumes designed and made by themselves, in marked contrast to their stylish keepers. Among the guests the county families were well represented, and garrison officers from a neighbouring depot formed a motley group which a looker-on, viewing the scene as in a kaleidoscope, would laugh at. One turn, and the next moment some incident might occur which an imaginative brain could easily work into a romance too ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... were no railroads in Andalusia, nor carriages either. Majos and Majas (Goya's Majos and Majas still existed in those days) arrived on horseback from all quarters under the burning September sun, and no words of mine can give any idea of the motley crowd in the most brilliant costumes, the perfect orgie of colour presented by the neighbourhood of the plaza, on which, as a finishing touch to the quaintness of the scene, a squadron of yellow dragoons did duty as police! From Cadiz we sailed in company with the frigates ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... partitions into several small compartments, each of which contains a table and two benches. The restaurateur, usually a zambo or a mulatto, prides himself in the superiority of his picantes and his clicha. The most motley assemblages frequent these places in the evening. The Congo negro, the grave Spaniard, the white Creole, the Chino, together with monks and soldiers, may be seen, all grouped together, and devouring with evident relish refreshments, served out ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... Sunday morning, July 21st, the English ships commenced their attacks upon their unwieldy antagonists. "The Spanish ships," says Motley, "seemed arrayed for a pageant in honor of a victory won. Arranged in the form of a crescent whose horns were seven miles asunder, those gilded towers and floating castles, with their brilliant standards and martial music, ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... series of satires, however, The Holy Fair is the most remarkable. It is in a sense a summing up of all the others that preceded it. The picture it gives of the mixed and motley multitude fairing in the churchyard at Mauchline, with a relay of ministerial mountebanks catering for their excitement, is true to the life. It is begging the question to deplore that Burns was provoked to such an attack. The scene ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... Sir,' replied the biggest boy, who was a very well-spoken lad, and looked as happy, though he made less noise than the rest. 'Merry Christmas—Merry Christmas,' was echoed from a number of little voices around him; and with another joyous shout, the motley group proceeded onwards through ...
— Christmas, A Happy Time - A Tale, Calculated for the Amusement and Instruction of Young Persons • Miss Mant
... front with three other men, Flynn, Christopher and a large colored man, while from the other car, a hired machine, by the look of it, four other figures descended—all unloading suit-cases upon the terrace steps—a motley crowd in flannel shirts and sweaters, with cropped heads, thick necks and red hands, all talking loudly and staring up at the towers of the house as though they expected them to fall on them. This then was Jerry's house-party—! ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... accompanied with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, wives of his father. Joseph complained on his brethren, and accused them to their father of the most evil sin. Israel loved Joseph above all his sons for as much as he had gotten him in his old age, and made for him a motley coat. His brethren then seeing that he was beloved of his father more than they were, hated him and might not speak to him a peaceable word. It happed on a time that Joseph dreamed, and saw a sweven [dream], and told it to his ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... blackness outside, and in his mind the warm breath of summer lands, the gay crowds, the throng of motley dressed foreigners, the marvellous city of white palaces by the ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... crowded with folks in motley garments showing signs of wear and tear. Their possessions were done up in bags and shapeless bundles, rolled in pieces of sacking, old shawls, red-and-white-checkered table-cloths. The men, with drawn and heavy faces, ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... but the work ascribed to him is so full of interpolations and corruptions, introduced by his transcribers, and particularly by a simpleton who is called Samuel, or his master Beulanus, or both, who appear to have lived in the ninth century, that it is difficult to say how much of this motley production is original and authentic. Be that as it may, the writer of the copy printed by Gale bears ample testimony to the "Saxon Chronicle", and says expressly, that he compiled his history partly from the records of the Scots and Saxons (8). At the end is ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... grey surface of my mind Glib, motley rumours zig-zag without rest, While deep within the darkness of my breast Monstrous desires, lean, sinister and blind, Slink through unsounded night and stir the slime And ooze ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... in the gallery giving the signal and their friends on the lawn joining in enthusiastically. They were a motley crowd—over a hundred I should think—ranging from the municipal councillor of La Ferte, in his high hat and black cloth Sunday coat, to the humpbacked daughter of the village carpenter and the idiot boy who lived in a cave on the road and frightened ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... with projecting additions, and other land-craft beyond classification or description. And the people—the American Southerners; rich whites, whites well-to-do, poor white trash; good country folks, valley farmers; mountaineers—darkies, and the motley feminine horde that the soldier draws the world over—all moving along the road as far as he could see, and interspersed here and there in the long, low cloud of dust with a clanking troop of horse or a red rumbling battery—all coming ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... the funeral of Taylor, at Cedarcroft, a little more than ten years ago. We rode to the grave, on a hillside, and we rode back to the house. And now he has gone to the great majority!" Boker died in Philadelphia, January 2, 1890. "He takes place with Motley on our roll of well-known authors," George Parsons Lathrop has written, "and it is even more remarkable that he should have cultivated poetry in Philadelphia, where the conditions were unfavourable, than that Motley should have ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... certain degree really become so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one nation to another, and with the progress of refinement this diction became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of tricks, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... and its caution in equal proportions; and, like a wise man, he did not choose to trust his money by risking it to strangers. In such a motley company it would not be safe to do so now a-days; but it would have been much less so then. For, at that time, and especially on the Borders, the law of mine and thine was still imperfectly understood. But Andrew's determination to humble the champion was well-nigh ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... Mrs Cutts is a most kind motley woman," Harry said. "But it isn't the Back Kitchen, neither," he added, with a ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... charming egotism took literary America by storm; the "Professor" and the "Poet at the Breakfast-Table" followed in after years, and remain his most widely popular works; "Elsie Venner," a novel dealing with the problem of heredity, "The Guardian Angel," "Songs of Many Seasons," "Memoirs of Motley and of Emerson," are some of his many works, all of which have the impress of his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... men with technical knowledge was doubtfully supplied by the enlistment of a 'Railway Battalion' 800 strong. These men were drawn from many tribes and classes. Their only qualification was capacity and willingness for work. They presented a motley appearance. Dervish prisoners, released but still wearing their jibbas, assisted stalwart Egyptians in unloading rails and sleepers. Dinkas, Shillooks, Jaalin, and Barabras shovelled contentedly together at the embankments. One hundred ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... success in war, and thereafter an Imperial decree deprived Yoshitoki of his offices and declared him a rebel. The die was now cast. Troops were summoned from all parts of the Empire to attack Kamakura, and a motley ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... "I can assure your mightiness," wrote the State's Ambassador, Caron, "that no promulgation was ever received in London with more coolness—yes, with more sadness.... The people were admonished to make bonfires, but you may be very sure not a bonfire was to be seen."—Motley, "United Netherlands," iv, 223, 224. For payments made by the city chamberlain to heralds on the occasion of proclamation of the peace, see Repertory 26, pt. ii, ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... and Law; on the line of demarcation between the theatres and Lincoln's Inn; a sort of debateable ground between the spouters and ranters of the stage, and the eaters of commons, by either of which party it was frequented. Around a large table in the parlour sat a motley group. There were ragged wits, well-dressed students, new-fledged actors, a hackney writer or so, an Irish barrister named Shuter, a Scotch reporter, and a hodge-podge of most discordant materials congregated under ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... was presiding justice, with an alderman of the city, a black man, as his associate. At a table below them sat the superintendent of police, a white man, and two white attorneys, with their huge law books and green bags before them. The bar was surrounded by a motley assemblage of black, colored, and white faces, intermingled without any regard to hue in the order of superiority and precedence. There were about a dozen cases adjudged while we were present. The court was conducted with order and dignity, and the justices ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the similarity of Aerssens position to that of Motley 250 years later, in the biographical sketch of Motley by Oliver ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... but rather a desire for fresh air, I mounted to the cupola that adorned the roof of our house, and for a couple of hours I sat there, enjoying the delicious breeze and the picturesque panorama that lay beneath my feet, and the motley groups that swarmed to early prayers ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... should reach Georgetown, British Guiana, on the north coast of South America. This would be their first stop. Somehow the townspeople quickly guessed their identity, and they were followed from store to store as they shopped by a curious and motley throng of dark-skinned natives, among whom were noticed quite a few white children, presumably belonging to American employees of ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... railway station. The sleighs shot forward with clinking harness, the snow under wheels squeaked complainingly, the drivers uttered brief shouts. The hats of men and women, various kinds of furs, the liveries of coachmen, the horses puffing steam, covered here and there with colored nets, formed a motley, changing line, moving forward with a rattle and an outcry along the white snow, in an atmosphere glittering from ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... entered the Kalitines' house, Agafia did not get on well with her. The austere earnestness of the former "wearer of the coarse petticoat." [Footnote: The Panovnitsa, or wearer of the Panovna, a sort of petticoat made of a coarse stuff of motley hue.] did not please the impatient and self-willed old lady. Agafia obtained leave to go on a pilgrimage, and she never came back. Vague rumors asserted that she had retired into a schismatic convent. But the impression left by her on Liza's ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... of the narrative, an old, comical looking man, not over well dressed, had entered the room, unnoticed; and seating himself in one corner, he pulled a pipe from his pocket, lighted it, and began to smoke, at the same time taking a keen and intelligent survey of the motley assembly. Jew Mike, having quenched his thirst, resumed his story. [The reader will be good enough to observe, that while we give the substance of this worthy gentleman's narrative, we pretend not to give his precise words. It is highly probable that he adapted ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... the gate and rattled the latch. Within arose the barking of dogs; but the motley-haired pack ran back, wagging their tails when they saw the well-known face. Ivan Ivanovitch traversed the courtyard, in which were collected Indian doves, fed by Ivan Nikiforovitch's own hand, melon-rinds, ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... discussing the questions of the day, were the philosophers, in the garb of their several sects, ready for any new question on which they might exercise their subtlety or display their rhetoric." If there were any in that motley group who cherished the principles and retained the spirit of the true Platonic school, we may presume they felt an inward intellectual sympathy with the doctrine enounced by Paul. With Plato, "philosophy was only another name for religion: philosophy ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... magician?" the thought occurred to her.—But when he set to calling out tame snakes from a covered basket by whistling on a small flute,—when, wiggling their fangs, their dark, flat heads made their appearance from beneath the motley stuff, Valeria became frightened and begged Muzio to hide away those horrors ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... is a motley assemblage of different characters, and contains, under any political form, some examples of that variety, which the humours, tempers, and apprehensions of men, so differently employed, are likely ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... raid EN MASSE and on horseback. The whole country-side was to assemble at Shingle Hut and proceed thence. It assembled; and what a collection! Such a crowd! such gear! such a tame lot of horses! and such a motley swarm of lean, ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear close to himself and he did so no doubt—would have heard some jarring note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is wholly and throughout but patch and motley. Even the laws of justice themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra's head, who pretend to clear the law of ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... made the rounds of the metropolitan newspapers and had again been refused encouragement by a motley of office boys, telephone girls, and city editors. The word was: "We're keeping any vacancies open for our own men who are still in France." Then, late in March, his eye fell on an advertisement in the morning paper ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... their conquests in Mexico and Peru, as told with so much skill and taste by our own Prescott; or read of the grandeur of her national character, and the wonderful valor of her troops, and the almost marvelous skill of her Alexander of Parma, and her Spinola, as described by our great Motley, and you will see something of the moral and national glory of that Spain which under Charles V and Philip II awed the world ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... a distance would have found it difficult to believe that this was the fleet which had just fought the greatest sea fight in the history of the world. Yet the decks of the seaplane carrier Engadine were covered with men in motley clothes, a grim reminder of the severity of the ordeal, for they were the survivors from the thousands who had manned the Princess Royal and Invincible. On the high poop a fleet chaplain was surrounded by figures in borrowed duffel suits giving thanks to the ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... Colonel, who had taken command of it. The united regiments had been formed up under cover of a line of ridges, on the summit of which the watchful scouts stood out against the sky, looking north. The sun was already shining on the motley picture formed by the light uniforms of the dismounted troopers and the motionless rows of horses. They were all ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... recline in groups, Scanning the motley scene that varies round. There some grave Moslem to devotion stoops, And some that smoke, and some that play, are found. Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground Half-whispering, there the Greek is heard to prate. Hark! from the mosque the nightly solemn sound; The Muezzin's ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... the Doxology rolled out on the summer air through the open church windows, followed by a brief silence, and then the great doors swung open and the motley congregation thronged ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... defiles of Varennes, with very inferior forces. Against this mighty invasion the French nation rose as one man. Recruits poured to the borderland singing the Marseillaise, their newly adopted national hymn. Rapidly reducing this motley force to order, Kellermann, with 22,000 men, marched from Metz, on September 4th, for Chalons with the utmost celerity, reached Bar before the Prussians, saved the magazines on the upper Saone and Marne, and put himself in a situation to communicate with Dumouriez. The latter general ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... cemetery less remarkable in its way. It is an ugly, disagreeable bit of road, between high walls, deep with mud in wet, and with dust in dry weather, as was the case on the present occasion, and without the smallest vestige of a pathway for foot-passengers; so that the motley crowd, with their lights and chaplets and flowers, had to make their way amid a cloud of dust and among the carriages of those bound for the "Pincetto" as best they might. But it was the general apparent mood and temper of mind in which these pilgrims, bound on so sad an errand, seemed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... beeches swept right down to the road, shining in beautiful death; once a pheasant rose and flew through the polished trunks towards the yellow underwood. Sprays trembled on naked rods, ferns and grasses fell about the gurgling watercourses, a motley undergrowth; and in the fields long teams were ploughing, the man labouring at the plough, the boy with the horses; and their smock-frocks and galligaskins recalled an ancient England which time has not touched, and which lives in them. And the farm-houses of gables and weary brick, ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... still one gen'ral cry[g] the skies assails, And gain and grandeur load the tainted gales: Few know the toiling statesman's fear or care, Th' insidious rival, and the gaping heir. [h]Once more, Democritus, arise on earth, With cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth, See motley life in modern trappings dress'd, And feed with varied fools th' eternal jest: Thou, who could'st laugh where want enchain'd caprice, Toil crush'd conceit, and man was of a piece; Where wealth, unlov'd, without a mourner died; And ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... Sabbath: there was no God, and there was no sin. And I ran out to play, pleased to find that I was free, like other little girls in the street, instead of being hemmed about with prohibitions and obligations at every step. And yet if the golden truth of Judaism had not been handed me in the motley rags of formalism, I might not have been so ready to put away ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... drew near, they were seen to be nine in number and they formed a motley company. Their pack mules were so cumbrously loaded as to suggest country wagons piled with hay. The wonder was how the tough little animals could carry such enormous burdens, consisting of blankets, picks, shovels, guns, cooking utensils, including ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... imposing City Hall was an ancient red marble Gothic cross about which were clustered hundreds of what looked like canvas toadstools, but which were, in reality, immense white umbrellas, sheltering countless market stalls. Here were gathered a motley collection of all sorts of things for sale, ranging from boots and shoes to many ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... throne. We now know that the common opinion on this subject, like the common opinion respecting some other crises, was all wrong, a delusion and a sham, and based on nothing but plausible lies. Mr. Motley has put men right on this point, as on some others; and it is impossible to read his brilliant and accurate narrative of the events of 1588 without coming to the conclusion that Elizabeth was in the summer of that year in the way to receive punishment for the cowardly butchery which had been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Bay Company to Mr. James Fraser, the factor, and we received a most cordial welcome, being made at home at the Big House. We found the surroundings and people unique and interesting. There were lumbermen, trappers, and fishermen—a motley gathering of Newfoundlanders, Nova Scotians, Eskimos and "breeds," the latter being a comprehensive name for persons whose origin is a mixture in various combinations and proportions of Eskimo, Indian, and European. All ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... Council, Caucus, Causerie, there's an aim Which many know and some might even name; But see yon motley muster, Like shades in Eblis wandering up and down! Types there of every 'Show Class' in the Town ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, or incline his attention to such motley ragged discourse; that without nauseating he scarce should endure to observe men lavishing time, and squandering their breath so frivolously. 'Tis an affront to good company to pester ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... wrote you," he said, "and stayed there twenty days, and during that time the army swelled and many nobles and gentlemen joined us. We were, however, it must be owned, but a motley throng. The foot soldiers, indeed, were mostly armed with muskets; but many had only sticks and cudgels. On the 12th we moved to Wolverhampton, and so on through Birmingham and Kenilworth. We saw nothing of the rebels till we met at Edgecot, a little hamlet ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... Meanwhile a motley army of office seekers, personal friends, and sightseers—to the number of ten or fifteen thousand—poured into Washington to see the old regime of Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts go out and the new ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... by daily contact with man, were gradually tamed, and formed about his dwelling a motley flock, kept partly for his pleasure and mostly for his profit, and becoming in case of necessity a ready ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of the situation. It was the intention of the mate and crew to murder him and the Captain and put the vessel about for a piratical cruise in the Indian Ocean. They were a motley gang of foreigners, low bred and capable of any crime when led by a man like the mate, fresh from a career of lawlessness on the ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... sets on the weary diamond-digger of the South, the crazed perfume-hunter in the East, the stifled hemp-curer in the fetid swamps of Russia, the shriveled iron-worker in the scorching furnaces of England. Here, in Paris, amid that motley herd who feed on virtue, the moon shines down calmly on purblind embroiderers and peerless beauties, on worn-out roues and squalid beggars. The breeze that wafts to heaven the pure prayer of the maiden witnesses the fierce ribaldry of the ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... the poor soprano's tongue, and as soon as the canonesses' litter was a safe distance ahead he began to beguile the way with fragments of reminiscence and adventure. Though few of his allusions were clear to Odo, the glimpse they gave of the motley theatrical life of the north Italian cities—the quarrels between Goldoni and the supporters of the expiring commedia dell' arte—the rivalries of the prime donne and the arrogance of the popular comedians—all these peeps ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... Pudding to the company, whose business it was to crack the best joke, and sing the best song,—he could. Unluckily, however, this functionary was for the present obliged to absent himself from St. Ronan's; for, not recollecting that he did not actually wear the privileged motley of his profession, he had passed some jest upon Captain MacTurk, which cut so much to the quick, that Mr. Meredith was fain to go to goat-whey quarters, at some ten miles' distance, and remain there in a sort of concealment, until the affair ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... German retirement the Americans abandoned their positions facing west and rushed down to safety below. It cannot be said that the Americans are afraid; they have merely realised from the beginning what a few of us have understood. The motley crowd gathered in the British Legation, as well as our commander-in-chief, were much stirred by the American retirement, for they already saw themselves directly bombarded from the menacing height of the city walls—a prospect which ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... columned fane That from the height gleamed seaward many-hued, Something more friendly with their ruder skies: The gray spire, molten now in driving mist, Now lulled with the incommunicable blue; The carvings touched to meaning new with snow, Or commented with fleeting grace of shade; The statues, motley as man's memory, Partial as that, so mixed of true and false, 290 History and legend meeting with a kiss Across this bound-mark where their realms confine; The painted windows, freaking gloom with glow, Dusking the sunshine which they seem to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... aye loudest rings, and whose The maddest cranks and quips— Who mints his soul to laughter's coin And wastes it with his lips— Has grown too sad for sighs and seeks To cheat himself with mirth; We fools self-doomed to motley are ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... of one other Englishman, the young British subaltern, with the sage intrepidity of ripest experience, hastily summoned the chiefs of the Derajat and Bannu districts to his aid, and assembled their motley followings under his banner. He sent messengers to the friendly chief of Bhawulpore, and called on him to join in the crusade against Mooltan. Then after much feinting and fencing, and greatly assisted by the stout Van Cortlandt, Edwardes threw his army across the Indus, at this season a roaring ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... replied Mick, with a broad grin, as he cuddled the monkey up to him in his arms; Jocko taking off Mick's cap the while, and carefully scattering its motley contents to the winds. "Oi call him, sure, a ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... of vast wealth got without exertion, which had decoyed the strange, motley crowd, in which peers and churchmen rubbed shoulders with the scum of Norfolk Island, to exile in this outlandish region. And the intention of all alike had been: to snatch a golden fortune from the earth and then, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... resumed his breathless pace to the rear. At Newtown I was obliged to make a circuit to the left, to get round the village. I could not pass through it, the streets were so crowded, but meeting on this detour Major McKinley, of Crook's staff, he spread the news of my return through the motley throng there. ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... As the motley crowd of passions followed the banners of their four leaders so specific forms of feeling sanctioned by reason were severally ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... sentry-group. There are men, again, with initiative but no endurance, and others with endurance but no initiative. Lastly, there are men, and a great many of them, who appear to be quite incapable of coherent thought, yet can handle machinery or any mechanical device to a marvel. Yes, we are a motley organisation. ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... late beheld, in mingled train, Twelve mortals ape twelve deities in vain; Caesar assumed what was Apollo's due, And wine and lust inflamed the motley crew. At the foul sight the gods avert their eyes, And from his ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... himself and the drama of his own existence, he was not wholly unmindful of the progress of the opera and the charm of the graceful and fluent music which saluted his ears. He was aware of the entrance of the hero, of his greeting by his motley-clad followers. He felt kindly, just off the surface of his emotion so to speak, towards this impersonator of Ernani. The young actor's appearance was attractive, his voice fresh and sympathetic, his bearing modest. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... never held a more motley crowd of revelers than on the night of the Famous Fiction masquerade. The faculty, who had been particularly interested in the idea of the masquerade, declared that for originality it was in line with 19—'s usual efforts. They occupied seats in the gallery and amused ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... Rye; for the conviviality of Washington sets in at an early hour, and, so far as I had an opportunity of observing, never terminates at any hour, and all these drinks are continually in request by almost all these people. A constant atmosphere of cigar-smoke, too, envelopes the motley crowd, and forms a sympathetic medium, in which men meet more closely and talk more frankly than in any other kind of air. If legislators would smoke in session, they might speak truer words, and fewer of them, and bring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... tender hearts behind those hardened faces, and tears glistened on the tanned cheeks of many in that motley assemblage of eager listeners, while the good elder was paying the last tribute of earth to the sweet and patient memory of his departed friend of ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... sallies of those of their comrades who fill the after-deck of the steamer. The village mayor in a braided jacket, the wharfmaster in semi-military uniform, and the agent of the steamboat company, who appears to have a remarkable penchant for gold lace and buttons, render the throng still more motley. There is also, in nine cases out of ten, a band of tooting musicians, and as the boat moves away national Hungarian and Austrian airs are played. He would be indeed a surly fellow who should not lift his cap on these occasions, and he would be repaid for his obstinacy by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... crowder to the Mermaid Inn, One dark May night, Fiddling a tune that quelled our motley din, With quaint delight, It haunts me yet, as old lost airs will do, A phantom strain: Look for me once, lest I should look for you, And ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... were of as motley a character as his conduct; and seemed to waver, during this whole reign, between the ancient and the new religion. The queen, engaged by interest as well as inclination, favored the cause of the reformers: Cromwell, who was created ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... than a barn, as Mr. Charles had said—built in a lane leading out of the principal street. This lane was almost blocked up with play-goers of all ranks and in all sorts of equipages, from the coach-and-six to the sedan-chair, mingled with a motley crowd on foot, all jostling, fighting, and screaming, till the place ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... rebels streamed unresisted into the town, a motley crew of many sorts and conditions: Rough, weather-beaten, determined frontiersmen, bent on having the commission for their leader; poor planters, sunk deep in debt, denouncing the government and demanding relief from their taxes; freedmen whose release from bondage had brought them ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... the day following the encounter in Bloomsbury Square, a little group of excited loiterers filled the entrance and passage way at 59 Bradwell Street, the former lodgings of the two young gentlemen from Scotland. The motley assemblage seemed for the most part to make merry at the expense of a certain messenger boy, who bore a long wicker box, which presently he shifted from his shoulder to a more convenient resting ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... late so volatile and gay, Like a trade-wind must now blow all one way, Bend all my cares, my studies, and my vows, To one dull rusty weathercock—my spouse! So wills our virtuous bard—the motley Bayes Of crying epilogues and laughing plays! Old bachelors, who marry smart young wives, Learn from our play to regulate your lives: Each bring his dear to town, all faults upon her— London will prove the very source of ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... with tables round which sat a motley gathering of gangsters, fools, pretty iniquities and others by no stretch of the imagination to be termed pretty, confidence men, gambling touts, and the sprinkling of drunkards—plain, common, transient, ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... and like him one of Henry I's new men who had been given important trusts in the north, but who had earlier in the year been deprived by Stephen of the custody of Bamborough Castle on suspicion, joined King David with his forces, and arranged to give up his other castles to him. David with his motley host came on through Northumberland and Durham, laying waste the land and attacking the strongholds in his usual manner. On their side the barons of the north gathered in York at the news of this invasion, the ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... attire, affording ample scope for the caricaturist; and the pensive figure of Augustus Tomlinson (who, by the by, was exceedingly like Liston) standing apart from the rest, on the brow of the hill where Clifford had left him, and moralizing on the motley procession, with one hand hid in his waistcoat, and the other caressing his chin, which slowly and pendulously with the rest of his ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Noricum and the fluvial plains of Pannonia. Two centuries later the names of these non-Lombard tribes still survived in certain villages of Italy which had formed their centers.[146] The army which Attila the Hun brought into Gaul was a motley crowd, comprising peoples of probable Slav origin from the Russian steppes, Teutonic Ostrogoths and Gepidae, and numerous German tribes, besides the Huns themselves. When this horde withdrew after ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... of no avail. Each day Harry was getting farther away from Wilton; more lost than ever; settling down deeper and deeper into that strange and motley mass of wanderers on the face of the earth, whose individuality nobody recognises, or cares ...
— Wilton School - or, Harry Campbell's Revenge • Fred E. Weatherly
... party had now assumed a very motley and brigandish appearance, every individual having discarded from time to time, such articles of his civilised dress as proved to be inconvenient or uncomfortable, and adopted various picturesque substitutes, which filled more nearly the requirements of a barbarous life. Dodd had thrown away ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... huge wallet o'er my shoulders slung, [4] A nutting-crook in hand; and turned [5] my steps Tow'rd some far-distant wood, [6] a Figure quaint, Tricked out in proud disguise of cast-off weeds Which for that service had been husbanded, 10 By exhortation of my frugal Dame—[7] Motley accoutrement, of power to smile At thorns, and brakes, and brambles,—and, in truth, More ragged than need was! O'er pathless rocks, Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets, 15 Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook [8] Unvisited, where ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... he wanted to shoot buffalo while there were still buffalo left to shoot, and Gorringe had suggested that he go to Little Missouri. That villainous gateway to the Bad Lands was, it seems, the headquarters for a motley collection of guides and hunters, some of them experts,[1] the majority of them frauds, who were accustomed to take tourists and sportsmen for a fat price into the heart of the fantastic and savage country. The region was noted for game. It had been a great winter range for buffalo; and ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... with "Jury" on their papers obeyed. They were a motley crew, some being Fifth-form boys, some Shell-fish, and some Babies. And by the odd irony of fate, the one who had drawn the "foreman's" ticket ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... poem, or a play; How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie, How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry, 60 Maggots half-form'd in rhyme exactly meet, And learn to crawl upon poetic feet. Here one poor word an hundred clenches makes, And ductile Dulness new meanders takes; There motley images her fancy strike, Figures ill pair'd, and similes unlike. She sees a mob of metaphors advance, Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance; How Tragedy and Comedy embrace; How Farce and Epic[252] get a jumbled race; 70 How Time himself stands still at her command, Realms shift their ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... latter, leaped on Hurry, and fled away in front of us. Before we had accomplished one-quarter of the distance, we heard the thundering tread of many feet galloping down the avenue, and presently espied our motley troop of steeds being driven furiously toward us. Storm, Lightfoot, Swift, Grumble, Stentor, Arrow and Dart were there, with Jack, on his fleet two-legged courser, at their heels. At his saddle-bow hung a cluster of saddles and bridles, the bits all jangling and clanking, adding to the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of success, had certainly given the lady's complexion a fine tint. Her dainty profile offered a striking contrast to the motley crew of negroid Arabs who surrounded her. And she came to meet them in a buoyant spirit, though the fierce sun was scorching her delicate skin through the thin fabric ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... lookers-on, or merely to breathe the salt air and enjoy the ocean view. When she came to scrutinize the bathers, whether they were disporting themselves in the sea or standing or lying about on the sand, she found it would be almost impossible to recognize anybody in that motley crowd. ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... me. To be sure, I found Cruces as like Gorgona, in its dampness, dirt, and confusion, as it well could be; but the crowd from the gold-fields of California had just arrived, having made the journey from Panama on mules, and the street was filled with motley groups in picturesque variety of attire. The hotels were also full of them, while many lounged in the verandahs after their day's journey. Rude, coarse gold-diggers, in gay-coloured shirts, and long, serviceable boots, elbowed, in perfect ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... flung open, and there burst in upon us a motley crew of grotesque and hideous masks, each one bearing a basket or bucket or sack, and all singing and shouting in every key ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... and instead of approaching the object of their journey by the old-time way, along the beautiful hills of Surrey and Kent, they use the iron road which rushes them all unprepared into the city of the saint-martyr. But who will maintain that all those who formed the motley throng of the medieval pilgrimages came with their minds properly attuned, and who is prepared to say that because the majority of modern pilgrims consummate their aim by using the convenience of the railway they are less devout than ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... transcribe their Opera-loves On Iv'ry Tablets, or in clean white Gloves: Some of Platonic, some of carnal Taste, Hoop'd, or un-hoop'd, ungarter'd, or unlac'd. Thus thick in Air the wing'd Creation play, When vernal Phoebus rouls the Light away, A motley race, half Insects and half Fowls, Loose-tail'd and dirty, May-flies, ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... at the table within the recess, his chin resting on his hand, and his face cast down in abstracted revery, was a young man. So still was his attitude, so calmly mournful the expression of his face, so estranged did he seem from all the motley but brilliant assemblage which circled around the solitude he had made for himself, that he might well have been deemed one of those visitants from another world whose secrets the intruder had wished to learn. Of that intruder's presence ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Cowgate with a motley assortment of pallbearers. There was a good-tempered Irish laborer from a near-by brewery; a decayed gentleman, unsteady of gait and blear-eyed, in greasy frock-coat and broken hat; a flashily dressed bartender who found the task distasteful; a stout, bent-backed fagot-carrier; a drunken fisherman ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... ringers were ringing in the one service of the year at which the parishioners supplanted the Vicar, and appropriated the old parish church. In spite of the weather, the church was crowded with a motley throng, chiefly of young folks, the young men being in the nave, and the girls (if I remember rightly) in the little loft at the west end. Most of the men carried tallow dips, tied about with bits of ribbon in the shape of rosettes, duly lighted, and guttering grease at intervals on ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... Art Patrons discovered applying their eyes to peepholes, through which a motley collection of coloured lithographs of the Crimean Campaign, faded stereoscopic-views, Scriptural engravings, and daubed woodcuts from the "Illustrated Police News," is arranged ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... the feast concluded with a basin of bread and milk for every person, all of them having likewise as much beer and cider as they could drink. The dinner, as may naturally be supposed, lasted from three to four hours; and it will also not be difficult to imagine, that the entertaining of such a motley throng on such a day, could not fail to be attended with great annoyance to the nuns, and with various inconveniences. The convent had therefore, from a very early date, endeavored to free themselves from the ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... first, had already put out for the scene of trouble, rowing lustily. Nobody could beat him to his garlands now; that was clear; clear, too, that there really wasn't much peril, after all. So the motley gathering of idlers became content to stand upon the edge of the boat pavilion, gazing most ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... feet, I glanced here and there into the crowd, hoping to catch a sight of Agnes, But I was not very much surprised at not seeing her, because she would naturally shrink from forcing herself into the midst of this motley company; but I felt that I must go and look for her without the loss of a minute, for if she should return to her father's house I might not be able ...
— My Terminal Moraine - 1892 • Frank E. Stockton
... Persian prayer-rugs, partially hid the groundwork of dusty matting, taken over with the bungalow from its former occupant, and in places revealing the stone floor beneath. The broad mantel-shelf was given over to books, a motley crowd in divers stages of dilapidation. 'The Master of Ballantrae' shouldered 'The Queen's Regulations,' one would fancy with a swaggering hint of scorn; a battered copy of the 'Pilgrim's Progress' stood resignedly between Bogle's 'Mission to Thibet' and a technical ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... men alike lose all self-control. They run to escape the fearful storm. They leave arms, ammunition, tents, blankets, trunks, clothes, books, letters, papers, pictures,—everything. They pour out of the intrenchments into the road leading to Dover, a motley rabble. A small steamboat lies in the creek above the fort. Some rush on board and steam up river with the utmost speed. Others, in their haste and fear, plunge into the creek and sink to rise no more. All fly except a brave little ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... house of Kantor. Attuned to the intimate atmosphere of the tenement which is so constantly rent with cry of child, child-bearing, delirium, delirium tremens, Leon Kantor had howled no impression into the motley din of things. There were Isadore, already astride his chair, leaning well into center table, for first vociferous tear at the four-pound loaf; Esther, old at chores, settling an infant into the high chair, careful of tiny fingers in lowering ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... claim Claudio's life. Isabella, perceiving in this conduct only a further proof of the hypocrite's villainy, breaks out once more into a tempest of agonised despair. Upon her cry for immediate revolt against the scoundrelly tyrant, the people collect together and form a motley and passionate crowd. Luzio, who also returns, counsels the people with stinging bitterness to pay no heed to the woman's fury; he points out that she is only tricking them, as she has already tricked him—for he still ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... was necessary: in internal and in external affairs. To strengthen the state internally a complete revolution of its administration was begun under the auspices of Count F. W. Haugwitz (1700-1765); the motley system which had survived from the middle ages was gradually replaced by an administrative machinery uniformly organized and centralized; and the army especially, hitherto patched together from the quotas raised ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Denis Quirk in those days that his only pleasure was in his work. He was lonely for Desmond O'Connor, now a student at Manly. The flat was still frequented by the representatives of motley and variegated talent, as in the old days. Jests were made, good stories told, and songs sung by well-trained voices; but these were mere acquaintances. Denis longed for the intimate companionship ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... has been urged to such extreme measures and such motley self-stultification by the pressure of the South, if every downward step has been only the more likely to be taken because it seemed impossible six months before, what are we not to look for, now that its leaders are emboldened by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... and, as the fog broke away before the waving plume, he saw that the sun was rising. Issuing with its bright beams through the passes of the snowy mountains beyond appeared a strange and motley crew. Instead of the dark and romantic visages of his last phantom train, the Father beheld with strange concern the blue eyes and flaxen hair of a Saxon race. In place of martial airs and musical utterance, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the next lid, scratched and worn, And within a motley store Of headless dolls, of schoolbooks torn, Birds and beasts that speak no more, Spoils brought home from the fairy ground Only trod by youthful feet, Dreams of a future never found, Memories of a past still sweet, Half-writ poems, stories wild, April letters, warm and cold, Diaries of a wilful ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... future Bancroft or Motley writes with philosophic brain and poet's hand the story of the Great Civil War, he will find the transition to a new era in our nation's history to have been fitly marked by one festal day,—that of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... the carriages drew up in double ranks around the broad green meadow in which it stood, and the occupants, descending, filed in motley array into the building. Just in front of the altar two tressels were prepared for the coffins, which were not brought in until the whole congregation, which filled the pews to overflowing, was seated. Then the measured tramp of men was heard, and amid general weeping and lamentation the pall-bearers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... by a crowd of old and young in motley array. Behind came the alcalde, the municipal guard officers, the monks, and the Spanish Government clerks. Ibarra was talking with the alcalde; Captain Tiago, the alferez, the curate and a number of the rich country ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... up and halted at the pit edge. My outfit were whites—Russians, French, Germans. But the others were black, brown, yellow—all the motley aggregation of races that formed the Red cohorts, the backbone of the Great Uprising. As the "At ease" order snapped out a babel of tongues rose on the air. Every language of Earth was there save English. The Anglo-Saxons had chosen tortured death rather ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... hitherto unnoticed man of prompt decision, resource, and confidence, will take the command, whatever his position. Hope, as well as timidity and fear, is infectious, and one cheery voice will revive the drooping spirits of a multitude. Paul had already established his personal ascendency in that motley company of Roman soldiers, prisoners, sailors, and disciples. Now he stands forward with calm confidence, and infuses new hope into them all. What a miraculous change passes on externals when faith ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... had been concealed from view. The butterflies, while naturally the most conspicuous element, were now seen to be in a small minority among the insect gathering, the bramble leaves being peopled with a most motley and democratic assemblage of insects. Class distinctions were apparently forgotten in the common enthusiasm; the plebeian bluebottle and blowfly now consorted with Aphrodite and sipped at the same drop. Many a leaf was begemmed with the blue bodies closely set side ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... Capua, and took the command of the motley besieging force. One thousand of the best men in the fleet were sent to assist in the siege. Just at this time Nelson received a peremptory order from Lord Keith to sail with the whole of his force for the protection of Minorca; or, at least, to retain no more than was absolutely necessary at Sicily. ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... steady tramp of men and horses, the rattling of tumbrels, and the heavy rumbling of artillery, unexpectedly burst upon the senses of the startled maidens. Baum's select and finely-equipped regiment of Germans and British occupied the front, and Peter's motley corps of tories and Indians the rear of the long-extended column. As the head of the detachment in possession of the fair prisoners reached the road, they came to a halt, when, after waiting till the corps to which they belonged ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... They shouldn't have faced each other. But how very, very superior to all the lot Mr. Walden looks!—he really IS handsome!—he has such an intellectual head. There's Gigue chattering away to poor old Miss Fosby!—oh dear! Miss Fosby will never understand him! What a motley crew! And I shall have to sing to them all after they've dined! Saint Moses! It will be a sort of 'first appearance in England.' A good test, too, because all the English eat nearly to bursting before they go to ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... warrior had taken his seat on his cross-legged, round-backed chair, and a boy of some twelve years old stood before him, in a sullen attitude, one foot over the other, and his shoulder held fast by a squire, while the motley ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself, at Edmonton Fair, in one of those vulgar vehicles called swings: he was highly delighted with the novelty of the exercise, which he enjoyed amidst the rude stare and boisterous grins of the motley group around him; "this is life," said he, upon getting out of the swing, "what shall we see next?" In his poem of Hypocrisy, he has beautifully eulogized General Graham, who showed his sense of this intellectual ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... marvel of beauty and convenience for a mountain cabin; but time had played strange pranks with it, till now it was uneven and sloped off in a jerky fashion toward the back door. On one wall was fastened a rude set of shelves, on which was perched a motley collection of pickle bottles and tin cans. Stretched along one wall stood a crude, home-made table, and in one corner stood the remains of a little, old-fashioned stove. A wooden chest stood under the shelves, and had probably been ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... been drawn so freely to Montcalm's banner by his success, thinking anew of slaughter and untold spoil, such as they had known at William Henry and such as they might have had at Ticonderoga. The gigantic Tandakora, painted hideously, led them, and in all that motley array there was no soul more eager than ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... over his brows. His right hand holds a stiletto, his pockets bulge with weapons or plunder, his left hand is raised with the air of a priest encouraging his flock. And his words are the words of religion—"God with us." At the sign the motley crew will get ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... woman, at their heels a motley following of brats and curs, trailed disconsolately by. They came to a halt beyond the house, and, after much irresolution, sat down in the sand. A few minutes later another family trailed in from ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... acquaintance as long as he and they lived, and was ever ready to show them acts of kindness. He for a considerable time used to visit the green room, and seemed to take delight in dissipating his gloom by mixing in the sprightly chit-chat of the motley circle then to be found there. But at last—as Mr. David Hume related to me from Mr. Garrick—he denied himself this amusement from ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... flattened her finely-modeled nose into shapelessness against the cold pane. Back of them in the candle-lighted room, the motley crew of Baldpate's winter guests stood about in various attitudes of waiting. In front of the fire the holder of the Chair of Comparative Literature quoted poetry to Mrs. Norton, and probably it never occurred to the old man that the woman to whom he talked was that nightmare of his ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... that wished to, came right into the presence of the dying man. No obstacle was put in anybody's way, so a strange and motley crowd filled the count's room: well-to-do people, poor people, and children, were all anxious to see the fallen man, now that he was about to fall into the dark bosom of death, the oblivion of eternity. The ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... one man. And this little Nepenthe domain, though he saw it for only a few weeks in the year, was the apple of his eye. He guarded it jealously, troubled at the thought that its chaste recesses might be profaned, if but for one day, by the presence of a motley assemblage of nonentities. But a man of his income is expected to do something to amuse his fellow-creatures. One owes certain duties to society. Hence this gathering, which had become a regular feature in the spring calendar of the island. Having once ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... March 2. We have a rather motley-looking set. A good many look like broken-down schoolmasters or ministers who have excellent dispositions but not much talent. As the kind of talent required where we are going is rather peculiar, the men may be useful, but I don't believe there will be a great deal of cotton raised ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... rose. She was wearing a curious dress of dark silk splashed and spattered with different colours, a curious motley effect. She was thinner, her eyes were perhaps hotter, more disintegrated. Otherwise she was just the same. Gerald watched her with the same steady twinkle in his eyes as she came across. She held out her ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... hubbub, we hear the Indictment which Poverty and Vice bring against lazy Wealth, that it has left them there cast-out and trodden under foot of Want, Darkness and the Devil,—then is Monmouth Street a Mirza's Hill, where, in motley vision, the whole Pageant of Existence passes awfully before us; with its wail and jubilee, mad loves and mad hatreds, church-bells and gallows-ropes, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... water into a mess-tin to make tea with out of tablets. In early morning a train disgorged a crowd of men who had been prisoners with the Boers at Pretoria, some ever since the first battle. When Roberts came they all escaped, under shell-fire from the Boers as a final conge. They were a most motley crew, dressed in all manner of odd clothes. At 7 P.M. coffee and porridge, and at 7.30 orders came to detrain and harness up sharp, the sections to separate again. Then followed a whole series of contrary orders, but we ultimately harnessed up and hooked in; the right section marched away, ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... on the populace was most magical. They all fell back and opened a space for the approach of a motley ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... life as Rousseau and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, one such demonstration of the same moral in fiction as Werther, were enough to discourage the man of feeling. Therefore, when he still exists, he takes to motley, the only wear for the human race in troublesome circumstances which beset it with unpleasant recurrence. When you cannot exactly believe anything in religion, in politics, in literature, in art, and yet neither wish nor know how ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... getting on, both in years and in folly. What are you doing in a monk's robe? Where is your motley, gay fool?" ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... 'twere, his private mind, Unhindered by repression, To make his motley life a kind, Of Midas' ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... layer of coal dust on their pretentious, freshly-painted names, tied to the pier and rocking to the slightest motion of the water. From her windows Sidonie could see the restaurants on the beach, silent through the week, but filled to overflowing on Sunday with a motley, noisy crowd, whose shouts of laughter, mingled with the dull splash of oars, came from both banks to meet in midstream in that current of vague murmurs, shouts, calls, laughter, and singing that floats without ceasing up and down the Seine on holidays ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... him. Harry Headlong of Headlong Hall, Esquire, a young Welsh gentleman of means, and of generous though rather unchastened taste, finding, as Peacock says, in the earliest of his gibes at the universities, that there are no such things as men of taste and philosophy in Oxford, assembles a motley host in London, and asks them down to his place at Llanberis. The adventures of the visit (ending up with several weddings) form the scheme of the book, as indeed repetitions of something very little different form the scheme of all the other books, with the exception of The Misfortunes ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... from their posts retired, And Julius in a general hiss expired; Sage Booth to Cibber cried, "Compute our gains! These dogs of Egypt, and their dowdy queans, But ill requite these habits and these scenes, To rob Corneille for such a motley piece: His geese were swans; but zounds! thy swans are geese!" Rubbing his firm invulnerable brow, The bard replied—"The critics must allow 'Twas ne'er in Caesar's destiny TO RUN!" Wilks bow'd, and ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... conspicuous: some recline in groups,[157] Scanning the motley scene that varies round; There some grave Moslem to devotion stoops, And some that smoke, and some that play, are found; Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground; Half-whispering there the Greek is heard ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Quite a motley collection of various things that were apt to prove useful rattled on the rough board table as he held the ...
— In Camp on the Big Sunflower • Lawrence J. Leslie
... left the cabins and the intolerable red sands upon which they were situated. It was not the first time she had seen the uncouth faces and forms of the motley group who had been vengefully regarding her; but their appearance had seemed doubly appalling when viewed in the light of being her associates for life. Out of their sight she breathed freely again, and coming ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... "My motley troop, apparently composed of every tribe from the Caspian to the Red Sea, displayed no less variety in arms and accoutrements than in their personal appearance, varying from the sturdy-looking Kourd, mounted on his strong powerful steed, to the swarthy, spare, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... admitting at times even Latin and French terms, such as res scibilis and citrouille. The mixture startled the critics and carpers to whom its object had not been explained; but my conviction still remains that it represents, with much truth to nature, the motley suit of the Arabo-Egyptian. And it certainly serves one purpose, too often neglected by writers and unnoticed by reviewers. The fluent and transparent styles of Buckle and Darwin (the modern Aristotle who has transformed the face of Biological Science) ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Sensibility, properly so called, is separated by a clear enough line. Two such examples in real life as Rousseau and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, one such demonstration of the same moral in fiction as Werther, were enough to discourage the man of feeling. Therefore, when he still exists, he takes to motley, the only wear for the human race in troublesome circumstances which beset it with unpleasant recurrence. When you cannot exactly believe anything in religion, in politics, in literature, in art, and yet neither wish nor know how to do without ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... matter here?" demanded a tall, strongly-built woman, pressing forward. She spoke with a foreign accent, and in a tone of command. The motley crowd, above whom she towered, gave way for her as she approached. Everything about the woman showed her to be superior in mind and moral force to the unsightly wretches about her. She had the fair skin, blue eyes and light ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... head, with jerkin of green, striped with yellow; hose of different colours, the left leg being yellow, with a red pantoufle, and the right blue, terminated with a yellow shoe; with bells hung upon various parts of his motley attire, so that he could not move without producing a jingling sound, Jack Roby looked wonderful indeed; and was constantly dancing about, and dealing a blow with his bauble. Next came Will Scarlet, Stukely, and Little John, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... everywhere visible. Since Goethe no one has been able to say with so much truth, "My writings are my confessions." Her biography lies there, presented, indeed, in a fragmentary shape and under wayward disguises, but nevertheless giving to the motley groups the strong and uumistakable charm of reality. Her grandmother, by whom she was brought up, disgusted at her not being a boy, resolved to remedy the misfortune as far as possible by educating her like a boy. We ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Stanton, and admire his rude—others call it coarse—contempt of all that is said about him. That impure, lying, McClellan-Copperhead motley crew, accuse Stanton of all the numberless criminal mistakes committed in the conduct of the war—committed by the generals, etc. Stanton never interferes with Mr. Lincoln nor with Halleck in matters that exclusively relate to pure warfare, as where and how to march the respective ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... our party, who were younger and lighter of foot than we sober married folks, ran on before; so that when the blanket, that served the purpose of a door, was unfastened, we found a motley group of the dark skins and the pale faces reposing on the blankets and skins that were spread round the ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... leader carries a sword, on the point of which is generally impaled a cake; during the dancing slices of this cake are distributed to the lookers on, who are supposed to make a contribution to the 'Treasury,' a money-box carried by an individual called the Squire, or Clown, dressed in motley, and bearing in the other hand a stick with a bladder at one end, and a ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... sleighs shot forward with clinking harness, the snow under wheels squeaked complainingly, the drivers uttered brief shouts. The hats of men and women, various kinds of furs, the liveries of coachmen, the horses puffing steam, covered here and there with colored nets, formed a motley, changing line, moving forward with a rattle and an outcry along the white snow, in an atmosphere glittering from frost ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... then we ate, and we drank, and we ate again; with no thought of nutrition, nor of reasonableness, nor of the morrow, nor of dyspepsia. We ate and drank without fear and without shame, in the sheer, abandoned ecstasy of celebration. And by means of motley paper headgear, fit only for a carnival, we disguised ourselves in the most absurd fashions, and yet did not make ourselves seriously ridiculous; for ridicule is in the vision, not in what is seen. And we danced ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... in, the sweeps being worked by the motley crew of scoundrels on board with a regularity which drew rough compliments from the men, and made ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... the locked closet amounted to anti-climax. For when I had broken the rusty padlock open with a hatchet, and had opened doors with nervous fingers, nothing more startling appeared than a number of books. The shelves were piled high with them, a motley crew of all colors, but ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... The motley forces drawn up on the bank of the Cumberland for review and instruction made up in fantastic variety for what they lacked in number. There was much of the grotesque and somewhat of the pitiful in the spectacle presented by the straggling ranks of boatmen and backwoods ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... Dodo, with Ellen stalking at their side, the very picture of a duenna. Somewhat in the rear Gilbert and two other maids, Kate and Thyrza—this latter from the Bonnivel house—followed with dubious looks, feeling probably that they were neither "fish flesh, nor good red herring," in this motley assemblage, which offered no such companionship as they ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me. The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Law; on the line of demarcation between the theatres and Lincoln's Inn; a sort of debateable ground between the spouters and ranters of the stage, and the eaters of commons, by either of which party it was frequented. Around a large table in the parlour sat a motley group. There were ragged wits, well-dressed students, new-fledged actors, a hackney writer or so, an Irish barrister named Shuter, a Scotch reporter, and a hodge-podge of most discordant materials ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... themselves kings, and living in squalid dignity with large seraglios of native women. Captain Woodes Rogers, who touched at Madagascar for slaves, sixteen years after Every's time, described those he met as having been on the islands above twenty-five years, with a motley crowd of ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... scarlet, Lascars with their curly black hair, and dark handsome features, yellow men, sickly women, and half-caste children, with their Hindoo Ayahs, tigers, lions, turtles, cows, sheep, goats, and pigs, on the booms and main deck, the vessel was in a strange motley of confusion. ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... sat there—a grotesque, misshapen figure in gaudy motley—an ungovernable rage possessed him. What was to become of them now? Without the Count of Aquila's stern support the garrison would have forced her to capitulate a week ago. What would betide, now that the restraint of his ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... This motley play was never acted; at least the author says: "for the Acting it, those who have the Governing of the Stage, have their Humours, and wou'd be intreated; and I have mine and won't intreat them; and were all Dramatick Writers of my mind, they shou'd wear their ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... free," so the bill of lading read, and further, that the ship should "not be responsible for leakage, breakage, or rust." This clause was well for the ship, as one of those wild pampeiros overtook her, on the voyage, throwing her violently on her beam-ends, and shaking the motley cargo into a confused and mixed-up mess. The vessel remaining tight, however, no very serious damage was done, and she righted herself after a while, but without her lofty topgallant-masts, which went with a crash at the first blast ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... of men, or one more united by personal relations and intellectual aims, it would have been difficult to find. In connection with these names, those of Prescott, Ticknor, Motley, and Holmes also arise most naturally, for the literary men and scholars of Cambridge and Boston were closely united; and if Emerson, in his country home at Concord, was a little more withdrawn, his influence was powerful in the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... apartments directly above. It was a monstrous ugly building, constructed entirely of wood most hastily prepared; the stage was utilized both night and day for continuous variety entertainments of the kind naturally demanded by the motley gathering. These, however, were occasionally suspended to make room for some adventurous travelling company to appear in the legitimate drama, but at the close of every evening performance the main floor was promptly cleared, the rows of chairs pushed hastily back ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... A.O., Elise sent her book flying across the room, and the next moment was groping under the bed for a dress-box which she had hidden there. A blond wig that she had bought while in Washington for next week's tableaux tumbled out first, with a motley collection of borrowed articles, which she had been at great pains ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... filled at this hour with a motley variety of people of all the races known in the islands, from the Tagal Indian up to the native-born of Spain. Some of them were disposed to laugh at the strangeness, not to say the absurdity, of some of the costumes which confronted them; but all of them were too well bred to ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... which is more emphatically marked as being so, by the mention of the 'bad' before the good among the guests. God's offer is for all, and, in a very real sense, is specially sent to the worst, just as the doctor goes first to the most severely wounded. So the motley crew, without the least attempt at discrimination, are seated at the table. If the Church understands its business, it will have nothing to do in its message with distinctions of character any more than of class, but, if it makes any difference, will give ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Belfast. The Dublin Botanical Gardens are wholly supported by Government. Further examples are needless, the facts being simple as they are undeniable. Dublin gets everything. Belfast gets absolutely nothing. Disloyalty is at a premium. Motley's the only wear. The screamers are always getting something to stop their mouths, a sop, not a gag. Steady, quiet, hard-working folks are of no account. The Belfast men ask for nothing, and get it. They want no pecuniary aid, being used to ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... ridges—contesting stubbornly every inch of position lost. And gray Roger knew that the planetoid was doomed. His supposedly impregnable screen was failing in spite of its utmost measure of energy, and, that defense down, the citadel would not last a minute. Therefore he summoned a chosen few of his motley crew of renegade scientists and issued brief instructions. For minutes a host of robots toiled mightily, then a portion of the shield bulged out, extended into a tube beyond the attacking layers of force, and ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... character that nothing ever repeats, flash before me again with the vividness of yesterday; and a flight of birds—ah! if I could express what they recall! The dead years pass again in a great procession, a motley company—some like emperors, crowned and richly dowered, with the sound of trumpets and the tramping of many obsequious feet; and others like beggars, despoiled and hungry, trudging along a dusty high road, or like grey pilgrims bound, with bleeding ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... (were that possible) the prime epistolary merit of spontaneity. From the brain of the writer to the sheet before him flows an unbroken Pactolian stream. Lamb, at his best, ranges with Shakspearian facility the gamut of human emotion, exclaiming, as it were at one moment, with Jaques, "Motley's the only wear!"—in the next probing the source of tears. He is as ejaculatory with his pen as other men are with their tongues. Puns, quotations, conceits, critical estimates of the rarest insight and suggestiveness, chase each other over his pages like clouds over a summer sky; and the whole ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... toys, shells, sugar-cane, and various other commodities; but to enumerate the extraordinary diversity of goods exposed for sale, or to describe the Babel of tongues which confound the visitor as he wanders through the motley crowd, would be impossible. ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... went upstairs. The refreshment-parlour was a spacious place, with trees and illumination of electric globes that hung from thick cables. Seated at the tables was a motley crowd, speaking at the top of their voices, clapping their ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... 'Tis a motley company, you see, which comes and goes by the half-penny boat. Here is a Temple barrister, with his red-taped brief under his arm, and at his heels follows a plasterer, and a tiler's labourer with a six-foot chimney-pot upon his shoulders. There ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... The population is a motley assortment of races, nationalities and creeds. About 38 per cent being Ottomans or Turks. The Slavic and Rouman races come next in importance, then the Arabs, the remaining population consisting of Moors, Druses, Kurds, Tartars, Albanians, Circassians, ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... been rising for some time, now gave very unequivocal notice of an approaching storm. The rain began to fall, and the decks were quickly cleared of their motley groups. ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... up Hell to those that Baal adore, Yet make't Damnation to oppose his pow'r. So far this Paradox of Conscience run, Till Israels Faith pulls Israels Altars down. Grant Heav'n they don't to Baal so far make way, Those fatal Wands before their Sheepfolds lay. Such Motley Principles amongst them thrown, Shall nurse that Py-ball'd Flock that's half his own. Nor may they say, when Molocks Hands draw nigher, We built the Pile, whilst Baal but gives ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... settlement on the western waters, Daniel Boone, left this memorial of his orthography on a tree in Kentucky: "C-I-L-L-E-D A B-A-R." They did not dress alike, they did not spell alike, they did not think alike. It was a great, and it must have seemed a hopeless, motley of men who were all unconsciously to lay the foundations ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... could not see, but it must have been dolorous from the headlong terror of their flight. Soon by the thinning of the crowd through the doors I saw the cause. It was a motley and a moving spectacle. For by some mischance a flock of sheep had broken into the ball-room, and frightened out of their shallow senses by the lights and music, they rushed pell-mell here and there, upsetting without discrimination whatever ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... discovered in a land whose volcanic peaks rose two miles in the air, and here a town duly laid out with canals and bridges, and trim gardens and stagnant pools, was baptized by the ancient and well-beloved name of Good Meadow, or Batavia, which it bears to this day" (Motley, ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... has lost an ardent supporter in Mrs. Browning; and did we dare rebel against God's will, we should grieve deeply that she was not permitted to glorify the Right in America as she has glorified it in Italy. Among the last things that she read were Motley's letters on the "American Crisis," and the writer will ever hold in dear memory the all but final conversation had with Mrs. Browning, in which these letters were discussed and warmly approved. In referring to the attitude taken by foreign nations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... every direction, to get hold of original letters, where he could, copies, where he could not, certificates and journals, catching at every gossipping story he could hear of in any quarter, supplying by suspicions what he could find no where else, and then arguing on this motley farrago, as if established on gospel evidence. And while expressing his wonder, 'at the age of eighty-eight, the strong passions of Mr. Adams should not have cooled '; that on the contrary, 'they had acquired the mastery of his soul,' ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Literature:—would your Lordship much like to march through Coventry with them? The immortal gods are there (quite irrecognizable under these disguises), and also the lowest broken valets;—an extremely miscellaneous regiment. In fact the regiment, superficially viewed, looks like an immeasurable motley flood of discharged play-actors, funambulists, false prophets, drunken ballad-singers; and marches not as a regiment, but as a boundless canaille,—without drill, uniform, captaincy or billet; with huge over-proportion of drummers; you would say, a regiment gone wholly ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... the Guard that the motley caravan in the avenue was made up of loyal, representative citizens from the important villages of the realm. They were admitted ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Motley's The Siege of Leyden. Edited by William Elliot Griffis. With nineteen illustrations from old prints and photographs, and a map. Paper, ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... So the motley band came streaming into town. "Now tag, rag and bobtail carry a high hand." Bacon drew up a double line before the State House and demanded that some members of the Council come out to confer with him. When Colonel Spencer and Colonel Cole appeared ...
— Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 • Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker
... village street, surrounded by a company whom their chief has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, 'I have come to speak to your people,' I do not need to begin by telling them that there is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,—the bold, gaunt cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... the base of the cliffs for a considerable distance. The ground was rolling and tree-dotted and covered with grazing animals, alone, in pairs and in herds—a motley aggregation of the modern and extinct herbivore of the world. A huge woolly mastodon stood swaying to and fro in the shade of a giant fern—a mighty bull with enormous upcurving tusks. Near him grazed an aurochs bull with a cow and a ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... may be imagined that there is a motley and considerable crowd; but it will scarcely be imagined that there is only one regulation, which is, that no persons may enter or depart till the mail-bags have been landed. The wharf is small and at night unlighted, and the scene which ensued ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... as an actor stirred in him only the bitterness of self-contempt. He chides with Fortune "that did not better for my life provide than public means that public manners breed"; he writhes at the thought that he has "made himself a motley to the view" of the gaping apprentices in the pit of Blackfriars. "Thence comes it," he adds, "that my name receives a brand, and almost thence my nature is subdued to that it works in." But the application of the words is ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... Franciscan is understood to have a fastidiousness and to overcome it. And yet, if choice were, one might wish rather to make use of one's fellow men's old shoes than put their old secrets to use, and dress one's art in a motley of past passions. Moreover, to utilize the mental experience of many is inevitably to use their verse and phrase. For the rest, all the traits of this love-poetry are familiar enough. One of them is the absence ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... asters in Autumn, are found The tents all bestrewing the carpeted ground; The din of a camp, with its stir and its strife, Its motley and strange, multitudinous life, Floats upward along the brown slopes, till it fills The echoing hollows afar ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... our adventurers were now associated was composed of a motley crew of Red River half-breeds, out for the great spring buffalo hunt. It consisted of nearly 700 hunters, as many women, more than 400 children, and upwards of 1000 carts, with horses and draught oxen, besides about 700 buffalo-runners, or trained hunting-horses, ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... the swelling of his heart! The long three-week ride had ended. The stage had rolled down a main street the like of which Pan had never even imagined. It was crude, rough, garish with lights and stark board fronts of buildings, and a motley jostling crowd of men; women, too, were not wanting in the throngs streaming up and down. Again it was Saturday night. Always it appeared Pan hit town on this of all nights. Noise and dust filled the air. Pan pulled down ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... fulfilment of spring's promise of plenty, with fruit in abundance. Autumn lingers in red and yellow motley, stoutly resisting winter's attack until boisterous winds from east and north send the last leaves shivering to the ground and spread out the city's winter garb. Then Prague assumes a severer aspect; reds and warm greys have vanished, castle, churches, ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... regiment showed a kindly spirit of comradeship by sending their band from Colberg. Otherwise, as is usually the case in the country, we were confined to our family circle; only Motley, the former American Ambassador in London, a friend of my early youth, happened to be here on a visit. Besides her Majesty the Queen, his Majesty the King of Bavaria, and their Royal Highnesses Prince Carl and Friedrich Carl, and his Imperial Highness the Crown Prince, honored ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... to thy irreverend sophistries,' said I, 'and say what company is this a coming.' 'Bohemians,' cried he, 'Ay, ay, this shall be the rest of the band.' With that came along so motley a crew as never your eyes beheld, dear Margaret. Marched at their head one with a banner on a steel-pointed lance, and girded with a great long sword, and in velvet doublet and leathern jerkin, the which stuffs ne'er saw I wedded afore on mortal flesh, and a gay feather in his lordly ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... written for older readers. It does not strike one as being a history at all,—that is, a straightforward, logical, and continuous narrative coinciding with those exemplar types of historical writing bequeathed to us by Macaulay or by Motley. The book ends, as we have said, with the close of Jackson's administration; but we glean very little concerning the administration and we are told ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... Murphy's gang, a motley crew, mostly French Canadians and Irish, just out of the woods and ready for any devilment that promised excitement. Most of them knew by sight, and all by reputation, Macdonald and his gang, for from ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... think I am presuming on your patience when I lead you into a nursery, or a boarding school; but the life of Louisa Mancel was so early chequered with that various fate which gives this world the motley appearance of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, that it is not in my power to pass over the events of her infancy. I shall, however, spare you all that is possible, and recommend her to your notice only when she attracted the observation ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... secret for the camp of the Arabian Emir, Muza ben Nozier. The camp was spread out in one of those pastoral vallies which lie at the feet of the Barbary hills, with the great range of the Atlas mountains towering in the distance. In the motley army here assembled were warriors of every tribe and nation, that had been united by pact or conquest in the cause of Islem. There were those who had followed Muza from the fertile regions of Egypt, across the deserts of Barca, and those who ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... were sunk in sleep, but not all; in their camp some kept up their revels till late. All the luxuries which fancy could devise or wealth could purchase were gathered together at Emmaus to hide the grim front of war, so that the camp by daylight presented the motley appearance of a bazaar with the gay magnificence of a court. There sherbet sparkled in vases of silver, and the red wine was poured into golden cups, chased and embossed, in tents stretched out with silken cords. Garments bright with ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... room, and covers were laid for 200 guests. The Prince of Wales acknowledged the toast of his health and that of the Princess, the Duke of Cambridge responded to the toast of the army, Mr. Childers to the navy, Lord Elcho to the volunteers, Mr. Motley to "The Prosperity of the United States," Mr. Gladstone to "Her Majesty's Ministers," the Archbishop of York to, "The Guests," and Mr. Dickens to "Literature." The last toast having been proposed in a highly eulogistic speech, Mr. ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... of volunteers came hurrying from farms and caves, bringing such weapons probably as they had been able to keep in hiding. They were willing to respond. It was a motley crowd, no doubt. There were thirty-two thousand of them. These four tribes had once numbered as many as one hundred and eighty-four thousand five hundred fighting men. And at another, later, enumeration ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... life with grave dignity like Arab chiefs or caliphs of Bagdad. He sees their actions conditioned and to some extent controlled by the influences of majestic inhuman powers, the genii of eastern tales, huge, cloud-girt spirits of oppressive solemnity. In reality most people wear motley all day long and the fairy powers are leprechauns, tricksy, irresponsible sprites, willing enough to make merry with those who can laugh with them; but players of all Puck's tricks on ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... continued their walk up the street until they came into the motley stream of people who were wending their way down to the piers, where the steamers were constantly coming in and going out with passengers from and to ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... think, will tax My intellectual organ till it cracks; The Association British isn't wanted to be skittish, Wear the motley, nor to run a race in sacks; But 'twas getting awkward rather when my youngest asked his father What the President ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 29, 1891 • Various
... regarded force, file up. They number some forty men. Nothing more than fair bodily strength, willingness and obedience being required in their case, they are more easy to get and to replace than shearers. They are a varied and motley lot. That powerful and rather handsome man is a New Yorker, of Irish parentage. Next to him is a slight, neat, quiet individual. He was a lieutenant in a line regiment. The lad in the rear was a Sandhurst cadet. Then came two navvies and a New Zealander, five Chinamen, a Frenchman, two Germans, ...
— Shearing in the Riverina, New South Wales • Rolf Boldrewood
... he was called—though only behind his back—yet it might better have been Vulture. Big and gross, with thick unstable lips and stubby, hairy fingers, more than once he and his motley gang of hi-jackers had painted a crimson splash across the far corners of the frontiers, and daubed it to the tortured groans of the crews of honest trading ships. Often they had plunged on isolated trading ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... aquatic van drew up to the sandy landing-beach, I looked at the motley array of paddlers, and my mind went back hundreds of years to the first Spanish crew which landed here, and I wondered whether these pirates of early days had any fewer sins to their credit than Case's convicts—and ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... train get up speed again and disappear at a great pace. Then out of the tunnel burst the pursuing engine, roaring and whistling, her motley crew waving their various weapons and shouting, "Stop! stop! stop!" When they were past, the Toad had a hearty laugh—for the first time since he was thrown ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... street in which Joanna lived was thronged with the faithful, who, undeterred by sarcasm, fully credited her prediction. They bivouacked on the side-walks in motley crowds of men, women, and children; and as the hours wore on, and their interest increased, burst forth into spontaneous psalmody. The adjacent thoroughfares were as densely jammed with curious and incredulous spectators, ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... Armored in smiles, a motley Britomart— Her lance is high adventure, tipped with scorn; Her banner to the suns and winds unfurled, Washed white with laughter; and beneath her heart, Shrined in a garland of laborious thorn, Blooms the unchanging ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... the later events have been submitted. However, Rizal himself may be called in to prove that the record and policy is what has been asserted, for otherwise he would hardly have disregarded, as he did, the writings of Motley and Prescott, historians whom he could have quoted with great advantage to support the attacks he would surely have not failed to make had they seemed to him warranted, for he never was wanting in knowledge, resourcefulness ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... depended much upon the excellent work by Mr. Clement Markham entitled the Fighting Veres. In this full justice is done to the great English general and his followers, and it is conclusively shown that some statements to the disparagement of Sir Francis Vere by Mr. Motley are founded upon a misconception of the facts. Sir Francis Vere was, in the general opinion of the time, one of the greatest commanders of the age, and more, perhaps, than any other man—with the exception of the Prince of Orange—contributed ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... therein kindly said of me personally." Luckily Lincoln never saw an earlier letter in which Lowell thought that "an ounce of Fremont is worth a pound of long Abraham." The fact is that Lowell, like most men of the "Brahmin caste," came slowly to a recognition of Lincoln's true quality. Motley, watching events from Vienna, had a better perspective than Boston then afforded. Even Mr. Norton, Lowell's dear friend and associate upon the North American Review, thought in 1862 that the President was timid, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... closely the exercise of his almost preternatural powers of language, served but to deepen the wonder with which he was regarded. The extent, the variety, and the solidity of his attainments, and, still more, his complete and ready command, for the purposes of conversation, of all the motley stores which he had laid up, were so far beyond all example, whether in ancient or modern times, as not only to place him in the very first rank of the celebrities of our generation, but to mark him out as one of the most extraordinary personages ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... was on the look-out for the missing child. At the same time, an officer was told off to accompany the anxious father on a personal search for his little girl. First of all, they visited the casual ward at the workhouse, and astonished its motley and dilapidated occupants by waking them to ask if they had fallen in with a strayed child on any of the roads by which they had severally approached the town. When they had recovered from their first alarm beneath the gleam ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... character of the Monteros is at the Central Market, where they come daily by hundreds from the country in the early morning to sell their produce, accompanied by long lines of mules or horses with well-laden panniers. It is a motley crowd that one meets there, where purchasers and salesmen mingle promiscuously. From six to nine o'clock, A. M., it is the busiest place in all Havana. Negroes and mulattoes, Creoles and Spaniards, Chinamen and Monteros, men and women, beggars, purchasers, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... arrogant, this foolish age, Which feeds itself on empty hopes, Absorbed in trifles, virtue's enemy, Which idly clamors for utility, And has not sense enough to see How useless all life thenceforth must become, I feel beneath me, and its judgments laugh To scorn. The motley crew, The foes of every lofty thought, Who laugh at thee, I trample ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... range of its fanciful vagaries; nor have geometrical measurements or refutations of the arguments used in rhetoric anything to do with it; nor does it mean to preach to anybody, mixing up things human and divine, a sort of motley in which no Christian understanding should dress itself. It has only to avail itself of truth to nature in its composition, and the more perfect the imitation the better the work will be. And as this piece of yours aims at nothing more than to destroy the authority and influence which books of chivalry ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... big-hearted man took it into his head to celebrate his successful trading ventures with a moonlight dance given without reserve to all the inhabitants of Vincennes. It was certainly a democratic function that he contemplated, and motley ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... social and political conditions had not gained the stability that is needed before contracts can be entered into extending over many years. International moneylending took place, of course, in the middle ages, and everybody knows Motley's great description of the consternation that shook Europe when Philip the Second repudiated his debts "to put an end to such financiering and unhallowed practices with bills of exchange."[3] But though there were moneylenders in those days ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to .. cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me acquainted with, still I ascribed this —and rightly ascribed it —to the fierce uniqueness of the very ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... age of progress, and ours is a progressive land. A great and glorious land, too—a land which has developed a Washington, a Franklin, a Wm. M. Tweed, a Longfellow, a Motley, a Jay Gould, a Samuel C. Pomeroy, a recent Congress which has never had its equal (in some respects), and a United States Army which conquered sixty Indians in eight months by tiring them out which ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... along the narrow paths now, past the little company of grave-stones, graves that were bearing their barbaric burdens of mortuary wreaths, of beaded crosses, and the motley assemblage, common to all French graveyards, of hideous shrines encasing tin saints and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... nursed and wrapped him are all-too sternly contrasted with this day! Danton, Camille, Herault, Westermann, and the others, very strangely massed up with Bazires, Swindler Chabots, Fabre d'Eglantines, Banker Freys, a most motley Batch, 'Fournee' as such things will be called, stand ranked at the Bar of Tinville. It is the 2d of April 1794. Danton has had but three days to lie in ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... mentioned, the more conciliatory grew the countenance of the magistrate, and, as though into the jaws of a hungry beast, he continued unconcernedly throwing him bit after bit. He probably recalled other nights spent in the motley company, and it struck him that the person of the veiled lady would be an addition which might enhance his credit. Monsieur Jausion found, however, that an important figure was lacking, and he asked in a stern ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... proof of the hypocrite's villainy, breaks out once more into a tempest of agonised despair. Upon her cry for immediate revolt against the scoundrelly tyrant, the people collect together and form a motley and passionate crowd. Luzio, who also returns, counsels the people with stinging bitterness to pay no heed to the woman's fury; he points out that she is only tricking them, as she has already tricked him—for he still believes in her shameless infidelity. Fresh confusion; increased ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... the Place d'Armes looking at the sights, the five themselves began to attract much attention. Their height and strength, their long, sender barreled rifles, and their deerskin attire made them highly picturesque figures. The motley population of New Orleans was used to all kinds of people, armed or unarmed, but generally armed. These, however, were different. They bore themselves with dignity, there was about them an air ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... know a great deal both about the fishing and the books, though of these not the most edifying; he spoke five or six languages, though chiefly the slang of each. He had evidently lived in varied cities and very motley societies, for some of his cheerfullest stories were about gambling hells and opium dens, Australian bushrangers or Italian brigands. Father Brown knew that the once-celebrated Saradine had spent his last few years in almost ceaseless travel, ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... strewn with tables round which sat a motley gathering of gangsters, fools, pretty iniquities and others by no stretch of the imagination to be termed pretty, confidence men, gambling touts, and the sprinkling of drunkards—plain, common, transient, periodical, suburban, habitual, ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... time Caesar had been serving his apprenticeship as a soldier. The motley forces which Mithridates had commanded had not all submitted on the king's surrender to Sylla. Squadrons of pirates hung yet about the smaller islands in the Aegean. Lesbos was occupied by adventurers who were fighting for their own hand, and the praetor Minucius ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... in London, when he was very genuine, she had been attracted by him. Now, in New York, when he was dressed up in motley, with painted face and eyes that strove, though sometimes in vain, to be false, he fascinated her. The new Claude, harder, more dominant, secretly unhappy, feverish with a burning excitement of soul and brain, appealed ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... contempt which she had seen in the faces of the young men whilst they spoke of Mrs. Stanhope, the match-maker. Belinda's mind, however, was not yet sufficiently calm to reflect; she seemed only to live over again the preceding night. At last, the strange motley figures which she had seen at the masquerade flitted before her eyes, and she sunk into an ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... expectation of another life, mingled with cold and suffocating doubts—the children born of long delay. He has walked the ways of mighty Rome, has seen the great Caesar with his legions in the field, has stood with vast and motley throngs and watched the triumphs given to victorious men, followed by uncrowned kings, the captured hosts and all the spoils of ruthless war. He has heard the shout that shook the Coliseum's roofless ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... upon the busy highways,—an endless procession that went and came. Pack-horses, war chariots, slaves and soldiers, nobles, merchants, and artificers, men with goods to sell and men without,—a motley throng from many lands. Nicanor, shy and fierce-eyed and of shaggy hair, tramping steadily southward in the wake of the swift-footed soldiers, felt that the world was a very mighty place, and never had he dreamed of such great people. As he drew nearer Londinium, the traffic and the bustle ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... time of which the history is required. The historians of this day write of the past; and the historian of our present civil war is not yet born, who shall emulate the completeness and conciseness of Irving's Columbus, or Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, or Motley's Dutch Republic. Nor can we expect an early solution to the 'Fremont question,' which shall be full and satisfactory, though the length of time involved be but one hundred days. But it is different with Gen. Patterson. It is true that his ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... drinking-place I drank up close to the right side of the handle of the cup, as I thought that would be the spot least contaminated. In order not to breathe any more germs than I could possibly avoid, I kept away from theatres and places where motley crowds assemble and shunned dust and impure air as I would a leper. I had read that there was on the market a sanitary mask to be worn when going to places where there was the greatest danger of coming into contact with germs, ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... an essential feature in our discussion. The audience of Plautus was not of a high class. Terence, even in later times, when education had materially progressed, often failed to reach them by over-finesse. Plautus with his bold brush pleased them. Surely a turbulent and motley throng they were, with the native violence of the sun-warmed Italic temperament and the abundant animal spirits of a crude civilization, tumbling into the theatre in the full enjoyment of holiday, scrambling for vantage points on the sloping ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view, about which all of us must some day or other be speculating. O brother wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells? This, dear friends and companions, is my amiable object—to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should all come home ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... salute." If we are tempted to laugh at this naive idealism, we Americans will do well to remember that it was an American statesman-idealist who believed that we could raise an army of a million men overnight, and that a shrewd American capitalist-idealist sent forth a "peace ship" with a motley crew of dreamers and disputers to end ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... sunset. Far down the garden, Uncle Thomas was holding Edward in the air reversed, and smacking him. Edward, gurgling hysterically, was striking blind fists in the direction where he judged his uncle's stomach should rightly be; the contents of his pockets—a motley show—were strewing the lawn. Somehow, though I had been put through a similar performance an hour or two ago, myself, it all seemed very far away and cut ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... to the fair and our station on the parapets at Grotta-Ferrata. Opposite us is a penthouse, (where nobody peaks and pines,) whose jutting fraschi-covered eaves and posts are adorned with gay draperies; and under the shadow of this is seated a motley set of peasants at their lunch and dinner. Smoking plates come in and out of the dark hole of a door that opens into kitchen and cellar, and the camerieri cry constantly, "Vengo subito" "Eccomi qua"—whether they come or not. Big-bellied flasks of rich Grotta-Ferrata wine are filled and emptied; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Latin classics, dreaming of immortality. We know less about his early years in London, where there were wider and better opportunities of gaining an insight into "all seemly and generous arts and affairs." London was a great centre of traffic, a motley crowd of adventurers and traders even in those days, and the boy Milton must often have wandered down to the river below London Bridge to see the ships come in. His poems are singularly full of figures drawn ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... frontiersman, I felt no danger in joining others of my class, lounging listlessly about in small groups discussing the situation, and gazing with awe upon those strange ships of war, swinging by their cables in the broad stream. It was a motley crew among whom I foregathered, one to awaken interest at any other time—French voyageurs from the far-off Illinois country, as barbarian in dress and actions as the native denizens of those northern plains, commingling ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... the idea of communism we do not find this infinite variety of opinion. We find, on the contrary, a definite and irreconcilable duality of thought. Human souls are divided on this matter not, as they are on other matters, into a motley variety of convictions but into two opposite and irreconcilable convictions, unfathomably hostile ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... clustered that motley assembly on the north bank of the Silver Lea. While on the other side the stream was a little group of judges, ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... warrior with the tip of his wing, and hurled him into the ocean. At the noise of his fall, the dying Powers sat up in their beds of pain; and stealthily advancing with furtive tread, the royal spiders made partition of Europe, and the purple of Caesar became the motley ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... face—that also not yet fully formed—was overshadowed by a flapping decorated hat obviously constructed less for a woman's head—less still for a maiden's—than for a cash draper's window. Her chest was plastered with a motley collection of cheap jewellery and lace. Her boots ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... at this motley crew would have convinced us, had we not been quite sure of it already, that we had no favour to expect. There was not a countenance among them that exhibited the slightest trait of grace or mercy. No such expression could be seen around us, and we felt satisfied ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... short time in her motley history, an old-clothesman, one Domenico— he and his "Compagnia del Bruco," his Company of the Worm[1]— reigned over Siena and gave to her people a taste for blood. It was bloodshed on easy terms they had; for surely no small nation (except that tiger-cat Perugia) has achieved so much massacre ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... that no President was ever confronted with such a motley crowd of visitors as the members of that delegation—between seventy and eighty in number—as they formed in line around three sides of the East Room in the White House. Their garments were a sight! Some of the men were in full ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... of food which people eat recklessly with the natural results,—dyspepsia, inertia, mental vacuity, and general uselessness. A few Court 'functions,' some picture shows, and two or three great races—and—that's all. Some unfortunate marriages are usually the result of each year's motley." ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... student of life as Hamlet is, with lightning-quick intelligence and heavy heart, and these are the Hamlet qualities which were not brought into prominence in the youthful Romeo. Passages taken at haphazard will suffice to establish my contention. "Motley's the only wear," says Jaques, as if longing to assume the cap and bells, and Hamlet plays the fool's part with little better reason. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... were no women and children on the Sarah Constant, nor on the Goodspeed, nor on the Discovery. The story of these ships is not like that later one of the Mayflower. The colour dies out of the picture; and there remains only the worn, motley band of men—men who have taken possession of the country by the sign of the cross, fit omen of ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... think in the first mile the last one went overboard, all having their covers burnt off from the frames, when a general melee took place among the deck passengers, each whipping his neighbour to put out the fire. They presented a very motley appearance on arriving at the first station." Here, "a short stop was made, and a successful experiment tried to remedy the unpleasant jerks. A plan was soon hit upon and put into execution. The three links in the couplings of the cars were stretched to their utmost tension, a rail from a fence ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... Ferdinand Lopez had manifestly become the favourite of the Duchess for the time, and had, at her instance, promised to remain there for some further days. He had hardly spoken to the Duke since he had been in the house,—but then but few of that motley assembly did talk much with the Duke. Gunner and Pountney had gone away,—the Captain having declared his dislike of the upstart Portuguese to be so strong that he could not stay in the same house with him any longer, and the Major, who was of stronger mind, having resolved ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... everything. The soul of goodness in things evil was visible to him. He had thought, felt, and suffered so much, that, as Leigh Hunt says, he literally had intolerance for nothing. Though he could see but little religion in many professing Christians, he nevertheless saw that the motley players, "made up of mimic laughter and tears, passing from the extremes of joy or woe at the prompter's call," were not so godless and impious as the world ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... the fence-posts, which barely keep it from sinking, and manage to navigate it successfully across. The village of Be-o-wa-we is full of cowboys, who are preparing for the annual spring round-up. Whites, Indians, and Mexicans compose the motley crowd. They look a wild lot, with their bear-skin chaparejos and semi-civilized trappings, galloping to and fro in and about the village. "I can't spare the time, or I would," is my slightly un-truthful answer to an invitation to stop over for the day and have ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... day from nine o'clock until twelve. Suddenly a commotion was perceptible among the crowd, and a pressure was felt toward the door which led to the cabinet of the emperor. The ears of those who have suits to urge are keen; and every one of that motley throng heard the footsteps of him who held their destinies in ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... south wall of the church, on the other the arcades of the Parliament House, inclose this irregular bight of causeway and describe their shadows on it in the sun. At either end, from round St. Giles's buttresses, you command a look into the High Street with its motley passengers; but the stream goes by east and west, and leaves the Parliament Close to Charles the Second and the birds. Once in a while, a patient crowd may be seen loitering there all day, some eating fruit, some reading a newspaper; and to judge by their quiet demeanour, you would think they ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by the Sikh army, which had been moving up from Bugurrarah while he was gaining the passage. This was a terrible engagement. The sun had hardly risen upon river, and swamp, and undulating plains, when the Mooltanee forces fell upon the motley crowd of the British levies, and in such superior numbers that victory seemed certain. For nine hours the English lieutenant resisted the onslaught, and by his valour, activity, presence of mind, and moral influence, kept his undisciplined forces in firm front to the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... agony," all for one thing—to teach the oppressor that his cause must fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered that the heritage of priceless liberty should be their children's pride. But read Motley, or the recent and remarkably well-written volumes of Douglas Campbell, and you will see that every atrocity that Spanish hatred, religious intolerance, and mediaeval bigotry could invent, every horror that ever followed in the train of war, swept over and desolated Holland. And ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... inaction and solitude our imaginations begin to work. Then we recall our regiment in full gallop over field and plain; we hear the clank of swords and bits; we see once more the flash of the blades, the motley line of the horses; we evoke the well-known figures of our chiefs on their chargers. That night my mind became more restless than ever before; it broke loose, it leapt away, and lived again the ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... my custom invites A stroll in old London for curious sights, I am likely to stray by a devious way Where goodies are spread in a motley array, The things which some eyes would appear to despise Impress me as pathos in homely disguise, And my battered waif-friend shall have pennies to spend, So long as I've got 'em (or chums that will lend); And the urchin shall share in my joy and declare That ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... Causerie, there's an aim Which many know and some might even name; But see yon motley muster, Like shades in Eblis wandering up and down! Types there of every 'Show Class' in the Town Elbow and glide ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... night of ages strike the gleams, And leading on the gilded host appears An old man writing in a book of dreams, And telling tales of lovers for the years; Still Troilus hears a voice that whispers, Stay; In Nature's garden what a mad rout sings! Let's hear these motley pilgrims wile away The tedious hours with stories of old things; Or might some shining eagle claim These lowly numbers ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... private mind, Unhindered by repression, To make his motley life a kind, Of Midas' ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... of the prayers and ejaculations which issued from the lips of the motley group that scrambled, and crushed, and screamed, on their knees around the well. In the midst of this ignorance and absurdity, there were visible, however, many instances of piety, goodness of heart, ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... young a soldier was selected to conduct such an undertaking proved how surely he had deserved and won the confidence of his superior officers. In those days railroad travelling was far from pleasant. The train upon which Lieutenant Chalaron embarked at Knoxville was a motley affair,—perhaps a single passenger-car, rough and dilapidated (crowded with those who, though ill, made shift to sit up or recline upon the seats), box-cars and cattle-cars filled with suffering men helplessly sick. In order ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... Along the street a motley of colour took itself like a sea of shades and tints. Green, crimson, lemon yellow, lapis-lazuli, royal purple, intermingled with the naked brown bodies of coolies clad only in loin-cloths, for every race and class emerged ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... back again, this time as king, with a motley army of mercenaries gathered to crush the two brothers De Lacy, who for the moment dominated all Ireland—the one, Hugo, being Earl of Ulster, and Viceroy; the other, Walter, Lord of ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... the luggage of the fur-clad gentleman, sat and reclined four travellers, whom the owner of the vehicle had gradually picked up, and who formed a motley company. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... smoking; the other was the one from which Trenholme had descended. Its seats, upholstered in red velvet, were dusty from the smoke and dirt of the way; its atmosphere, heated by a stove at one end, was dry and oppressive. It would have been impossible, looking at the motley company lounging in the lamplight, to have told their relations one to another; but it was evident that an uncertain number of young people, placed near the lady who held the baby, were of the same party; they slept ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... us a branch road ran into that along which we and our motley assemblage of companions-in-arms were travelling. This road curved down the side of a well-wooded hill, and then over the level for a quarter of a mile or so before opening on the other. Just at the brow of the rising ground there stood a thick bristle ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ball. Numbers of artists had arranged to go, accompanied by a whole cohort of models and pupils, who, by midnight, began to create a tremendous din. Raoul climbed the grand staircase at five minutes to twelve, did not linger to look at the motley dresses displayed all the way up the marble steps, one of the richest settings in the world, allowed no facetious mask to draw him into a war of wits, replied to no jests and shook off the bold familiarity of a number of couples who had already become a trifle too gay. Crossing the big crush-room ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... his country's courage and its caution in equal proportions; and, like a wise man, he did not choose to trust his money by risking it to strangers. In such a motley company it would not be safe to do so now a-days; but it would have been much less so then. For, at that time, and especially on the Borders, the law of mine and thine was still imperfectly understood. But Andrew's determination to ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... day from that, he commanded him to be brought out and beheaded on the scaffold at Wollin. He wore a white shroud, bordered with black gauze, over his motley jacket, and a priest and melancholy music accompanied him all the way; but Master Hansen had directions that, when the fool was seated in the chair with his eyes bound, he should strike the said fool on the neck with a sausage ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... up their household in the old Penn mansion (long since torn down) on a scale of magnificence in no way warranted by Arnold's means. Their great coach-and-four was seen thundering back and forth through the streets of the quiet little town, and a motley throng of guests, Whig and Tory, were entertained at a table where nothing was thought too choice and costly for their delectation. Matters were carried with such extravagance that debt soon pressed upon the thoughtless pair, and prudent ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... of Europe are, and have been for many years, as it is hardly necessary to state, a very motley and heterogeneous crowd. The same thing may be said of American travelers now, but it was not so much the case at the time of which I am writing. It is not so with the people of any other nation; and foreigners are apt to sneer on occasion at the unkempt and queer specimens of humanity which often ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... Hornsey Wood House has a name not unknown in the simple annals of tea-drinking. It is now part of Finsbury Park, but in the middle of the last century its long-room 'on popular holydays, such as Whit Sunday, might be seen crowded as early as nine or ten in the morning with a motley assemblage eating rolls and butter and drinking tea at an extravagant price.' 'Hone remembered the old Hornsey Wood House as it stood embowered, and seeming a part of the wood. It was at that time kept by two sisters—Mrs. Lloyd and Mrs. Collier—and ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... mystified; and they ventured to assert that he would not find so free a country when the devil became his keeper. "Mas'r tink 'e carry 'e plantation t' t'oder world wid him, reckon," Uncle Sparton grumblingly concludes, joining the motley conclave of property about ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... few of the expressions that came from a motley assemblage of persons as they stood in a train shed in Hoboken, one June morning. Motley indeed was the gathering, and more than one traveler paused to give a second look at the little group. Perhaps a brief list of them may ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... the pain—amazement and a feeling of an inexplicable incongruity when he saw the leather-winged creatures that had him in their grip. And again there were figures high overhead—white, floating figures on pinions of pure white; their faces, kindly and serene, looked down upon the motley throng. ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin
... land of Moab for refuge, and himself took up his abode in the caves of the wild limestone hills that had become familiar to him when he was a shepherd. Brave captain and Heaven-destined king as he was, his name attracted around him a motley group of those that were in distress, or in debt, or discontented, and among them were the 'mighty men' whose brave deeds won them the foremost parts in that army with which David was to fulfill the ancient promises to his people. There were his three nephews, Joab, ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... man of prompt decision, resource, and confidence, will take the command, whatever his position. Hope, as well as timidity and fear, is infectious, and one cheery voice will revive the drooping spirits of a multitude. Paul had already established his personal ascendency in that motley company of Roman soldiers, prisoners, sailors, and disciples. Now he stands forward with calm confidence, and infuses new hope into them all. What a miraculous change passes on externals when faith looks at them! The circumstances were the same ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... It was a motley crowd of young men of all ages from seventeen to thirty or more. Students of the everlasting type, sent here by their parents as a last resource, for—"he can always be an engineer"; young sparks who paid more attention to their toilet than their books, and ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... arrived at Quebec. In the colony of New York Sir William Johnson, the rough and cheery Irishman, much loved of the Iroquois, was gathering forces to attack Canada. Early in July, 1755, Johnson had more than three thousand provincial troops at Albany, a motley horde of embattled farmers, most of them with no uniforms, dressed in their own homespun, carrying their own muskets, electing their own officers, and altogether, from the strict soldier's point of view, a rabble rather than an army. To meet this force ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... he had noted so many times before, the motley appearance of the army, but with involuntary motion he began to straighten and smooth his own shabby uniform. He was about to enter the presence of a woman and he was ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... was seen advancing toward them, who, observing their approach, fell back a few steps, and threw himself on the ground at the foot of a large old apple-tree. Around this were clustered a motley group of men, women, and boys, who opened and made way for the stranger. He advanced, and bowing gracefully took off his forage cap, from beneath which a quantity of soft curling flaxen hair fell over his brow ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... gems with icicles the sheltering eaves; —Thy muffled friend his nectarine-wall pursues, What time the sun the yellow crocus wooes, Screen'd from the arrowy North; and duly hies [Foonote 4] To meet the morning-rumour as it flies; To range the murmuring market-place, and view The motley groups that faithful TENIERS drew. When Spring bursts forth in blossoms thro' the vale, And her wild music triumphs on the gale, Oft with my book I muse from stile to stile; [Footnote 5] Oft in my porch the listless noon beguile, Framing loose numbers, till declining day Thro' the green trellis ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... studying during 1909 at Gottingen and during 1910 at the University of Berlin. Since his return to America he has been connected with the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons. His first volume, "The Human Fantasy", 1911, attracted attention by the faithfulness with which it depicted the motley life of New York. His second was "The Beloved Adventure", 1912; followed by "Love and Liberation", 1913, and "Dust and Light", 1919. The last volume, from which the selections in this anthology are taken, contains some of Mr. Wheelock's finest lyrical work, work ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... eyes, and carried their swords drawn. Three had hatchets. Fitzurse, with the axe he had taken from the carpenters, was foremost, shouting as he came, "Here, here, king's men!" Immediately behind him followed Robert Fitzranulph, with three other knights, and a motley group—some their own followers, some from the town—with weapons, though not in armour, brought up the rear. At this sight, so unwonted in the peaceful cloisters of Canterbury, not probably beheld since the time when the monastery had ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... is a small full-length figure of a girl, balancing an empty pitcher upon her head, at the time of moonrise. Anticipating the Eastern subjects which future years produced, we may note a picture of Old Damascus, showing the Jews' quarter in that fabled city, in all its motley picturesqueness, and the delightful Moorish Garden,—A Dream of Granada, which were exhibited in 1874. A powerful picture, shown in 1875, of the Egyptian Slinger,[4] is illustrated later in this volume, but no reproduction can quite suggest the striking colouring ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... your eye; Bring all your items up to date, And do your best to multiply Your sheep by next subtracting votes From over-suffraged Tory goats. By Registration Law perplexed, Take "qualifying periods" next, And at one swoop reduce with glee Twelve months, or more, to only three. Add labour to your motley crew, Subtract (from life) a church or two. Produce, with geometric skill, The lines of many a promised bill. But state—the Unionists to vex— That Home Rule always equals x. Raise, in a rash, disastrous hour, Campaigning Ireland to a power. And ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... rust-eaten nail, had been wrought into a fantastic shape. As they drove through the gateway, a green lizard scampered down from the top of one of the posts, where he had been sunning himself, and a rattlesnake lying in the path lazily uncoiled his motley brown length, and sounding his rattle, wriggled slowly off into the rank grass and weeds ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... swoln, and legs whose monstrous size disgraced The human form divine, their caterer, Hight GLUTTONY, set forth the smoaking feast. And by his side came on a brother form, With fiery cheek of purple hue, and red And scurfy-white, mix'd motley; his gross bulk, Like some huge hogshead shapen'd, as applied. Him had antiquity with mystic rites Ador'd, to him the sons of Greece, and thine Imperial Rome, on many an altar pour'd The victim blood, with godlike titles graced, BACCHUS, or DIONUSUS; son of JOVE, Deem'd falsely, for ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... and from the mainland. The insignia of royalty were ostentatiously displayed, and the captains and leaders within the fortress fulfilled the duties of this mimic and motley court in honour of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... at Musselburgh or Shinnecock, In motley Hose or humbler motley Sock, The Cup of Life is ebbing Drop by Drop, Whether the Cup be filled ...
— The Golfer's Rubaiyat • H. W. Boynton
... also weigh with me, And one of more especial gravity; Say that there lurked among our motley band Some sneaking, sly pretender to her hand; Say, his attentions became undisguised,— We should be ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... street, surrounded by a company whom their chief has courteously summoned at my request, when I say to him, 'I have come to speak to your people,' I do not need to begin by telling them that there is a God. Looking on that motley assemblage of villagers,—the bold, gaunt cannibal with his armament of gun, spear, and dagger; the artisan with rude adze in hand, or hands soiled at the antique bellows of the village smithy; women who have hasted from their kitchen fire with hands white with the manioc dough or still grasping ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... does not enhance, ought not, we think, to diminish from the reputation of its author; but as a mannerism becomes increasingly disagreeable by repetition, we suspect that, without having less merit, this work will have less popularity than its predecessors. The style is the same "motley wear," and has the same jerking movement—seems at times a thing of shreds and patches hung on wires—and is so full of brief allusions to his own previous writings, that to a reader unacquainted with these it would be scarce intelligible. With all this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... be received on a Saturday at eleven. We went in the prescribed costume, black silk, with the picturesque Roman veil thrown over the head. From the foot of the Scala Regia, (Royal Staircase) one of the papal guard, in a motley suit which seemed one glare of black and yellow, escorted us to the door of a long corridor, known as the Loggia of Raphael, where we were received by a higher official in rich array of crimson velvet. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... the friendliest feeling to the United States, and the strongest wish to remain at peace with them. I wish the newspapers were blameless; but there was a sneering, exulting tone in many of them after the military disasters of the North which was likely to irritate. Mr. Motley said long ago that the Times would, if possible, work up a war between the two countries, and though I can't speak from my own knowledge, as I have seldom looked at its articles, I have no doubt from what John and others say that he was right.... There can be no doubt that we have done deeds very ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... been able to say with so much truth, "My writings are my confessions." Her biography lies there, presented, indeed, in a fragmentary shape and under wayward disguises, but nevertheless giving to the motley groups the strong and uumistakable charm of reality. Her grandmother, by whom she was brought up, disgusted at her not being a boy, resolved to remedy the misfortune as far as possible by educating her like a boy. We may say ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... of old New York reads like a romance. There is scarcely a plot of ground below Fourteenth Street without its story and its associations, its motley company of memories and spectres both good and bad, its imperishably adventurous savour of the past, imprisoned in the dry prose of registries and records. Let us just take a glance, a bird's-eye view as it were, of that region which we now know as Washington Square, as it was when ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... after the time of which the history is required. The historians of this day write of the past; and the historian of our present civil war is not yet born, who shall emulate the completeness and conciseness of Irving's Columbus, or Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, or Motley's Dutch Republic. Nor can we expect an early solution to the 'Fremont question,' which shall be full and satisfactory, though the length of time involved be but one hundred days. But it is different with Gen. Patterson. It is true that his loyalty ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... junks, flags flying from every mast. On the dark green, which is the dominant shade around, stand out these thousand scraps of bunting, emblems of the different nationalities, all displayed, all flying in honor of far-distant France. The colors most prevailing in this motley assemblage are the white flag with a red ball, emblem of the Empire of the Rising Sun, ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... of her unsteadiness; anger and fear and relief in quick succession had left her rather weak. Once through the motley crowd of loungers, she saw an old gray stage-coach and four lean horses. A grizzled, sunburned man sat on the driver's seat, whip and reins in hand. Beside him was a younger man with rifle across his ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... last correspondence with Mr. Motley, including telegraphic dispatches, etc., relative to his recall as minister to the Court ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... Germany, and working like a German. Emerson was a Junior in College. Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and Poe were school-boys; Mrs. Stowe was a school-girl; Whipple and Lowell were in the nursery, and Motley and the younger Dana had not long been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... permitted to go in the gondola, in which we oldsters proceeded, to the same destination by water. It was arranged that the "'buses" should meet us at Richmond, where both descriptions of conveyances were to disgorge their motley contents; and, the several and hitherto-severed parties, joining issue, would set about making as pleasant a day of it as could be effected under ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... of bigots, this artistic sorcerer, had made my flesh creep first in the gallery at Madrid with a work representing a horrible army of living skeletons scattered about an immense space, in conflict with a motley crowd of desperate and confused men and women, whom they were dragging into an abyss where Death awaited them. Only from the diseased imagination of a man alarmed by the terrors of damnation could such an extravagant conception have ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... the whole of the time, in the motley-coloured crowd, of one of the diabolical trio ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... whose white face is so deeply seared with the small-pox, and whose dirty shirt-front is inlaid with open-work, and embossed with coral studs like ladybirds, is the low comedian and comic singer of the establishment. The remainder of the audience—a tolerably numerous one by this time—are a motley group of ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... After examination of the great fortresses in the Duchy of Luxembourg, he went into Germany, tarrying at Heidelberg, Nuremberg, Munich, and Vienna. He then passed down "the beautiful blue Danube" to Buda-Pesth, where, having been given letters and commendations from J. L. Motley, the historian of the Netherlands and our minister at Vienna, he saw the glittering pageant which united the crowns of Austria and Hungary. This was performed in the parish church in Buda, an edifice built over six hundred years ago. It had been captured ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... in real life as Rousseau and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, one such demonstration of the same moral in fiction as Werther, were enough to discourage the man of feeling. Therefore, when he still exists, he takes to motley, the only wear for the human race in troublesome circumstances which beset it with unpleasant recurrence. When you cannot exactly believe anything in religion, in politics, in literature, in art, and yet neither wish nor know how to do without it, the safe way is to make ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... taken command of it. The united regiments had been formed up under cover of a line of ridges, on the summit of which the watchful scouts stood out against the sky, looking north. The sun was already shining on the motley picture formed by the light uniforms of the dismounted troopers and the motionless rows of horses. They were all half ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... comparison to that of private interests, which so crossed each other and in so many different ways, which turned with such mobility, that, in the ignorance which prevailed of the secret motives of the principal actors in that drama so vivid, motley, and turbulent, nothing could be predicated of what they would do, and a looker-on might have been disposed at times to have pronounced them as insensates, who were rather their own enemies than those ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... safe issue from the situation was to take part in and shape the action of that gathering. Under his lead a committee from the Pittsburgh meeting, followed by a large body of the citizens, went out to the rendezvous. Here they found a motley assemblage, arrayed in the picturesque campaign costume which the mountaineers wore when they equipped themselves to meet the Indians,—yellow hunting-shirts, handkerchiefs tied about their heads, and rifles on the shoulder; the militia were on foot, and the light horse of the counties ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... the emigrants formed rather a motley band. Among them, besides those of our friends already mentioned, there were our hero's mother and all the Leather family. Captain Stride's daughter as well as his "Missus," and Mr Crossley's housekeeper, Mrs Bland. That good woman, however, had been much subdued and rendered harmless by the ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... and into the room rushed a motley crowd of men. Most of them were young students, but here and there I saw older men, and at the head of the mob was a white-bearded individual, wearing an astrachan cap, who brandished a copy of some Russian periodical ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... the street in which Joanna lived was thronged with the faithful, who, undeterred by sarcasm, fully credited her prediction. They bivouacked on the side-walks in motley crowds of men, women, and children; and as the hours wore on, and their interest increased, burst forth into spontaneous psalmody. The adjacent thoroughfares were as densely jammed with curious and incredulous spectators, and the mutton pie and ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... guillotined four days before Robespierre, whose death would have saved him. His young widow left prison, reduced to extreme want, and took refuge with her father-in-law, at Fontainebleau; then she made her appearance in the motley society which, first showed itself in the drawing-room of Madame Tallien, then at the Luxembourg under Barras. Rivalling Madame Tallien and Madame Recamier in popularity, she smiled through her tears, like Andromache in Homer. ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... but it must be recollected that De Tisnacq lived in dangerous times, and may have found it necessary to walk warily in them; that through him had been sent, only the year before, that famous letter from William of Orange, Horn, and Egmont, the fate whereof may be read in Mr. Motley's fourth chapter; that the crisis of the Netherlands which sprung out of that letter was coming fast; and that, as De Tisnacq was on friendly terms with Egmont, he may have felt his head at times somewhat ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... captain, having been elected to succeed himself the previous fall. At this moment, attired in the Crimson sweater, moleskin trousers, and black and crimson stockings that made up the school uniform, he looked every inch the commander of the motley array that ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... of them was a motley crowd of Russian officers all talking and gesticulating together. I came nearer to Vera and at once I said to myself, "Lawrence is here somewhere." She was standing, her head up, watching the doors, her eyes glowed with anticipation, her lips were a little parted. She never moved at all, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... and a masquerade—all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... see any three men tackle this crowd, that's what!" he went on to remark, as he swept his eye proudly over the motley array of weapons; for even Allan had armed himself, having a stout stick, with which he doubtless felt able to render a good account of ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... forms its proper foundations," the other Vedas being devoted to the soma sacrifice.(2) The Yajur-Veda has two divisions, known as the Black and the White Yajur, which have common matter, but differ in arrangement. The Black Yajur-Veda is also called the Taittirya, and it is described as "a motley undigested jumble of different pieces".(3) Last comes Atharva-Veda, not always regarded as a Veda properly speaking. It derives its name from an old semi-mythical priestly family, the Atharvans, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... a curtain of thin silk for the chair, so that I, when I was set therein, had great privacy, though I knew by the sounds that I was attended by the motley crowd which usually is in following at such affairs, beside the little troop of horse which was my escort, and my brother and Parson Downs riding on either side. Parson Downs, though some might reckon ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... Caesar had been serving his apprenticeship as a soldier. The motley forces which Mithridates had commanded had not all submitted on the king's surrender to Sylla. Squadrons of pirates hung yet about the smaller islands in the Aegean. Lesbos was occupied by adventurers who were fighting ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... stage, which was supposed to connect with the passenger train and carry forward its human freight to Superior City was filled to overflowing, I determined to take advantage of the construction train, and travel on it as far as it would take me. A very motley group of lumberers, navvies, and speculators assembled for breakfast at five o'clock a.m. at Tom's table, and although I cannot quite confirm the favourable opinion of my friend the express agent as to the quality of the viands which graced it, I can at least testify to the ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... themselves to the theory of an accomplished break-up of the Union and berating the North for continuing, through pride alone, a bloody conflict doomed to failure. Meanwhile in midsummer attention was diverted from the ethical causes at issue by the publication in the Times of Motley's letter analysing the nature of the American constitution and defending the legal position of the North in its resistance to secession. Motley wrote in protest against the general British press attitude: "There is, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... future of every person presented was to be. Well pleased the little magician hastened away to prove the powers of the spectacles in the theatre; no place seeming to him more fitted for such a trial. He begged permission of the worthy audience, and set his spectacles on his nose. A motley phantasmagoria presents itself before him, which he describes in a few satirical touches, yet without expressing his opinion openly: he tells the people enough to set them all thinking and guessing; but in order to hurt nobody, he wraps his witty oracular judgments in a transparent ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... the country, perhaps without knowing it, and who saw no way to get back to it. I advertised my wants in a morning paper, and asked my son, who was on vacation, to interview the applicants. From noon until six o'clock my ante-room was invaded by a motley procession—delicate boys of fifteen who wanted to go to the country, old men who thought they could do farm work, clerks and janitors out of employment, typical tramps and hoboes who diffused very naughty smells, and a few—a very few—who seemed to know what they ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... my hearties," roared the leader, turning to his motley crew, "fine pickings here indeed. A swine of God fattened upon the sweat of such poor, honest devils as we, and a young shoat who, by his looks, must have pieces ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... friend as a student at Goettingen, and the man of whom he spoke with warm affection all his life, was the American historian Motley. ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... throng outside the gate covers the road leading off to Joppa. Turning from the Pharisee, we are attracted by some parties who, as subjects of study, opportunely separate themselves from the motley crowd. First among them a man of very noble appearance—clear, healthful complexion; bright black eyes; beard long and flowing, and rich with unguents; apparel well-fitting, costly, and suitable for the season. He carries a staff, and wears, suspended by a cord from his ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... pantomime and a masquerade—all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me often into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... Cockneyisms and Parisian argot, with constant reminiscences of the authorised version of the Old Testament, and with chips off Molie're, and with shreds and tags of what-not snatched from a hundred-and-one queer corners. It was, in fact, an Autolycine style. It was a style of the maddest motley, but of motley so deftly cut and fitted to the figure, and worn with such an air, as to become a gracious harmony for ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... seated. Say no more. My kinswoman's introduction is all-sufficient. I am happy in having caught your attention in so motley ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... have thronged the sight to greet, And motley figures throng the spacious street; Majestical and calm through all they stride, Wearing the blanket with a monarch's pride; The gazers stare and shrug, but can't deny Their noble forms and blameless symmetry. If the ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... literature to find the wisest and most poignant utterances thus laid in the mouths of poor men clad in motley. Some of the most daring things in Shakespeare, the newest heresies of the Renaissance, are voiced by irresponsibles. Of all dramatic figures, that of the fool is most suited to the expression of concentrated feeling. ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... not whether I am proud, But this I know, I hate the crowd, Therefore pray let me disengage My verses from the motley page, Where others, far more sure to please Pour forth their choral song ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... name and forms of the Holy Roman Empire. The members of this so-called Empire were, however, a multitude of independent States; and the chief of these States, Austria, combined with its German provinces a large territory which did not even in name form part of the Germanic body. The motley of the Empire was made up by governments of every degree of strength and weakness. Austria and Prussia possessed both political traditions and resources raising them to the rank of great European Powers; but the sovereignties of the second order, such as Saxony ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... impart. The sliding roof had rarely been known to close entirely. There was always a pair of giraffe-legs sticking out, or an elephant-trunk, taking from the stiffness of its outline, and reminding us that our motley crowd of friends inside were uncomfortably cramped for room and only too ready to leap in a cascade on the floor and browse and gallop, flutter and bellow and neigh, and be their natural selves again. I think that none ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... every one of these dens, what a crowd of victims were collected! "A motley company indeed—black-legs, and would-be-gentlemen—the cheater and the cheated." The widow parting with her last trinkets, or, perchance, her last disposable article of dress, to procure one more meal for her famishing children! ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... Moor had with difficulty waited this licence to utter such sentiments as death only could banish from that unconquerable heart. He rose, descended from the couch, and, standing a little below the king, and facing the motley throng of all of wise or brave yet ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... system was necessary: in internal and in external affairs. To strengthen the state internally a complete revolution of its administration was begun under the auspices of Count F. W. Haugwitz (1700-1765); the motley system which had survived from the middle ages was gradually replaced by an administrative machinery uniformly organized and centralized; and the army especially, hitherto patched together from the quotas raised ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Morley sauntered across Union Square with a pitying look at the hundreds that lolled upon the park benches. They were a motley lot, he thought; the men with stolid, animal, unshaven faces; the women wriggling and self-conscious, twining and untwining their feet that hung four inches above the ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... exemplified in the individual instance of him from whom the manuscript was obtained, of which a somewhat modernized version is printed on these pages. He has been dead some years, leaving no kin; and under his will, such of his motley treasures as it cared to accept went to a local museum, while the rest and his other property were sold for the benefit of a mystical brotherhood, for the old fellow was a kind of spiritualist. Therefore, there is no harm in giving his plebeian ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... with the sinner proud, And the priest in his gloomy cowl, And Dives walks in the motley crowd With Lazarus, cheek by jowl; And the daughter of toil with her fresh young heart As pure as her spotless fame, Keeps step with the woman who makes her mart In the haunts of sin ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... the choice of a subject and the method of its treatment, has been signally illustrated by a countryman of our own. The interest of the general reader and the approbation of historical scholars were at once enlisted by Motley's "Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic." That work differs from and is superior to any American historical composition by virtue of a certain fluent animation, a certain decided and sustained tone, such as can be derived only from an absolute relation between the author's mind and heart and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... our people; it would be difficult to imagine a company composed of experiences which differed so completely. We find one hut contains an experience of every country and every clime! What an assemblage of motley knowledge! ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... after the flood he was offering $1,000 for enough wood alcohol to heat malted milk for his infant grandchild. Monday he was no more successful in buying provisions. He appeared with a basket on his arm, rubbed elbows with those nearest in the motley line and apparently none was more grateful than he when his basket was filled with beans, potatoes, canned vegetables, rice and other staples. He was eager to pay for his supplies, but money is refused at the supply depots. It was arranged ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—John Lothrop Motley. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... city's most perfect beauty. The sun was setting, and flung a mellowing glow over the great golden domes and minarets of the mosques, the bazaars glittering with trifles and precious with elements of Oriental luxury, the tortuous thoroughfares with their motley throng, the quiet streets with their latticed windows, and their atmosphere heavy with silence and mystery, the palaces whose cupolas and towers had watched over so many centuries of luxury and intrigue, pleasure and crime, the pavilions, groves, gardens, kiosks which ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the motley, looking neither to right nor left, came Scotchman McPherson; but though he passed fair before the leader's eyes and not a yard away, no number was spoken; no hint of recognition, of cognisance, crossed the latter's face. Implacable, relentless as time, he ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... were younger and lighter of foot than we sober married folks, ran on before; so that when the blanket, that served the purpose of a door, was unfastened, we found a motley group of the dark skins and the pale faces reposing on the blankets and skins that were spread round ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... few general actions has the personality of the commander counted for so much, after the battle joined. In a letter of July 26 to Chauncey, he had written: "The men that came by Mr. Champlin are a motley set, blacks, soldiers, and boys. I cannot think you saw them after they were selected."[75] Chauncey replied, somewhat testily, "I regret you are not pleased with the men sent you; for, to my knowledge, a part of them are not surpassed by any seamen we have in the fleet; ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... Suddenly in eerie harmonies of newest French or oldest Tartar, here are the tricks and traits where meet the extremes of latest Romantic and primeval barbarian. In this motley cloak sounds the typical Yankee tune, first piping in piccolo, then grunting in tuba. Here is Uncle Sam disporting himself merrily in foreign garb and scene, quite as if at home. If we wished, we might see a political ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... lingers with one, as the market is left, and one passes on and out to the Strand and its motley stream of life, lingering through Fleet Street and the winding ways into the City, past St. Paul's, and still on till London Bridge is reached and the Borough is near. Fare as one may, north or south, west or east, ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... I once saw him, in the company of the above mentioned Mr. Tucker, seat himself, at Edmonton Fair, in one of those vulgar vehicles called swings: he was highly delighted with the novelty of the exercise, which he enjoyed amidst the rude stare and boisterous grins of the motley group around him; "this is life," said he, upon getting out of the swing, "what shall we see next?" In his poem of Hypocrisy, he has beautifully eulogized General Graham, who showed his sense of this intellectual tribute by sending the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... Genoa, the violet in granite of Catalonia, the mourning-hued corridor veined black and white in slate of Murviedro, the pink corridor in cipolin of the Alps, the pearl corridor in lumachel of Nonetta, and the corridor of all colours, called the courtiers' corridor, in motley. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of John L. Motley may wish to see if their favorite passages are listed in this selection. The eBook editor will be glad to add your suggestions. One of the advantages of internet over paper publication is the ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... North America, John Quincy Adams was succeeded by Andrew Jackson. Calhoun was re-elected Vice-President. A motley crowd of backwoodsmen and mountaineers, who had supported Jackson, crushed into the White House shouting for "Old Hickory." For the first time the outgoing President absented himself from the inauguration ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... doubtless have been pleasant to behold, but Priscilla garbed in a "blew Mohere peticote," a "tabby bodeys with red livery cote," and an "immoderate great rayle" with "Slashes," with a laced neckcloth or cross cloth around her fair neck, and a scarlet "whittle" over all this motley finery; with a "outwork quoyf or ciffer" (New England French for coiffure) with "long wings" at the side, and a silk or tiffany hood on her drooping head,—Priscilla in ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... essential feature in our discussion. The audience of Plautus was not of a high class. Terence, even in later times, when education had materially progressed, often failed to reach them by over-finesse. Plautus with his bold brush pleased them. Surely a turbulent and motley throng they were, with the native violence of the sun-warmed Italic temperament and the abundant animal spirits of a crude civilization, tumbling into the theatre in the full enjoyment of holiday, scrambling for vantage points on the sloping ground, if such ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... the story of my early life, he will remember that the tale of the death of a certain Isabella de Siguenza is pieced into its motley. He will remember how this Isabella, in the last moments of her life, called down a curse upon that holy father who added outrage and insult to her torment, praying that he might also die by the hands of fanatics and in ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... of the day following the encounter in Bloomsbury Square, a little group of excited loiterers filled the entrance and passage way at 59 Bradwell Street, the former lodgings of the two young gentlemen from Scotland. The motley assemblage seemed for the most part to make merry at the expense of a certain messenger boy, who bore a long wicker box, which presently he shifted from his shoulder to a more convenient resting ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... becomes a swollen torrent. But they subside as quickly as they rise, and the particular river which barred our road had lost its menace before the sun had risen in a cloudless morning sky. All the valley seemed in motion. We joined the motley throng of camels, carts, and horsemen; and even the motor car coughed and wheezed its way to Urga under the stimulus of two ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... had spent in India I had seen a good deal of both sides of that motley, amazing fabric which we call life. I had felt the throbbing of its great loom. I had touched with my own shrinking hand the closeness of the texture, had marked the interweaving of the alien strands, had marvelled and been dismayed, had marvelled and been ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... was a motley crowd of farmers, labourers and visitors, with a Welsh choir from a neighbouring village, singing hymns and patriotic songs. The bonfire was to be fired on the stroke of ten, by a neighbouring landowner, whose white head and beard flashed hither and thither through the crowd ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... direction, to get hold of original letters, where he could, copies, where he could not, certificates and journals, catching at every gossipping story he could hear of in any quarter, supplying by suspicions what he could find no where else, and then arguing on this motley farrago, as if established on gospel evidence. And while expressing his wonder, 'at the age of eighty-eight, the strong passions of Mr. Adams should not have cooled '; that on the contrary, 'they had acquired the mastery of his soul,' ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Ryder glowered mockingly through his mask holes at the motley. It was so exactly as he had foreseen. He was bored—and he was going to be more bored. He was jostled—and he was going to be more jostled. He was hot—and he was going to ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... at length in the great court-yard, where most of the inhabitants of the fortress, and those who, under recent circumstances, had taken refuge there, were drawn up, in order to look, for the last time, on their departed lord. Among these were mingled a few of the motley crowd from without, whom curiosity, or the expectation of a dole, had brought to the castle gate, and who, by one argument or another, had obtained from the warder permission to ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Take David's advice, "Fret not thyself because of evil-doers" (Psa. 37:1) "Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased" (Psa. 49:16). But go thou into the sanctuary of thy God, read His Word, and understand the end of these men-(Mason). Often, as the motley reflexes of my experience move in long processions of manifold groups before me, the distinguished and world-honoured company of Christian mammonists appear to the eye of my imagination as a drove of camels heavily laden, yet all at ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... it the three generations of men who issued from the three subdivisions of the diligence, and presented that motley and mixed assemblage of ranks, ages, and countries, which forms so very amusing a ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... the unfortunate sisterhood, of what is sardonically called the life of pleasure. Upon the whole, I am afraid there is a good deal in common between the political life and the life of the streets. Certainly, the camp followers in political warfare are a motley crew of mercenaries, and they take their tone from quite a number of ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... of sketches, "A Motley," is now in process of being reviewed, is just finishing another novel, which will no doubt be published in the autumn. That novels have to be finished is the great disadvantage of the novelist's career—otherwise, as every ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... saeculorum, amen.' Such was the celebrated Sistine service. The chapel blazed with light, and very strange did Michelangelo's Last Judgment, his Sibyls, and his Prophets, appear upon the roof and wall above this motley ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... demanded a tall, strongly-built woman, pressing forward. She spoke with a foreign accent, and in a tone of command. The motley crowd, above whom she towered, gave way for her as she approached. Everything about the woman showed her to be superior in mind and moral force to the unsightly wretches about her. She had the fair skin, ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... were present at the same motley gathering was the third distinguished personage whose acquaintance Goethe made during these memorable weeks. This was Fritz Jacobi, one of the interesting figures in the history of German thought, alike by his personal character and the nature ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... hastened back to the city in great disorder. But, instead of following up their victory, the half-resolute rioters camped near Guadalupe for the night. At 5 a.m. on April 4 they marched upon the city. Peaceful inhabitants fled before the motley, yelling crowd of men, women and children who swarmed into the streets, armed with bowie-knives and sticks, demanding food and other trifles. The terrified Spanish volunteers, after their defeat, took refuge in the Cotta de ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... the border of obscurity that surrounded a centre of almost intolerable brightness into which his mental images glided as into a brilliantly lighted chamber. Into this brightness a troop of hallucinations darted suddenly like a motley and ill-assorted company of players. He saw first a grotesque and indistinct figure, which he discerned presently to be the goblin his nurse had used to frighten him in his infancy; then the face of his uncle, the elder Jonathan Gay, with his restless and suffering look; and after this the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... membership, as we shall afterward see, almost all sorts of men except atheists. Being composed of Jews, Turks, Mohammedans, Mormons, and infidels, as well as of believers in Christianity, they endeavor to establish such forms as will be acceptable to their mongrel and motley membership. Hence their prayers and other forms of worship are such as may be consistently used by the irreligious and by infidels, and only by them. We do not say that no Christian prayers are offered up in Masonic ...
— Secret Societies • David MacDill, Jonathan Blanchard, and Edward Beecher
... as the brown; the eighteenth is with us the yellow; and the nineteenth we term the black century. I am asked my opinion of the twentieth. It is motley. It has seen the apotheosis of colour. Yet in worshipping colour we do not confound the order of things. As is the twentieth, so ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... The beasts feared the fires, and feared the human beings who leaped and screamed and smote from among the fires. But still more they seemed to fear some unknown thing behind them. For a time, however, the crackling flames and the biting shafts proved a sufficient barrier, and the motley but terrifying invaders went sheering off irresolutely ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... consisting of the deaths of dram-drinking landladies, and dropsical landlords, he pathetically relaxes the rotundity of his cheeks, and exclaims, "Poor Tom! he was a good un." But we must to the beach, and glance at the motley concourse assembled to behold ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... 2. We have a rather motley-looking set. A good many look like broken-down schoolmasters or ministers who have excellent dispositions but not much talent. As the kind of talent required where we are going is rather peculiar, the men may be useful, but I don't believe there will be ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... for them; his relatives had seen little of him, and had scarce heard as much about him as the outside world. No man is a prophet in his own country, and, even if he migrates, it is advisable for him to leave his family at home. His friends were a motley crew; friends of the same friend are not necessarily friends of one another. But their diversity only made the congruity of the tale they had to tell more striking. It was the tale of a man who had never made an enemy even by benefiting him, nor lost a friend even by ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... easy to keep a large body of men under arms for any long time without fighting. It was still harder to keep them at once without fighting and without plundering. What William had done in this way in two invasions of Normandy, he was now called on to do on a greater scale. His great and motley army was kept during a great part of August and September, first at the Dive, then at Saint Valery, waiting for the wind that was to take it to England. And it was kept without doing any serious damage to the lands where they were encamped. In a holy war, ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... fourteen competitors presented themselves—a motley group, clad for the most part in trousers, horse-rug, and wide-awake, or, more simply still, in Ulster frieze coat only. The group of spectators had by this time grown to some hundreds, nearly all directly interested in the noble art; and ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... could deny the beauty of the scene—the harbour full of craft of all sorts down to the tiny native skiff, and crowned by the old Castle of St Angelo, the picturesque town, the palm trees, and the motley crowd of natives swimming and diving, and hawking fruit and cigarettes from their boats. Some of us got ashore to see the historical old town, full of memories of the Templars—St John's Cathedral, the Governor's Palace, the Armoury—but most had to stay ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... the King [Footnote: The Duke of Clarence now became William IV] intended to appear in uniform, so the Duke, Lord Bathurst, Rosslyn, and Sir J. Murray, who were there, put on their uniforms. The group at the Council was most motley. Lords Grey, Lansdowne, Spencer, Tankerville, Sir J. Warrender, and some others being in black full dress. Lord Camden and some more in uniform, which several sent for after they arrived, as Salisbury and Hardinge. The mass, however, in plain black, some in colours. The Royal Dukes ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... insurance policy prescindir de, to dispense with regadio, irrigation rieles, rails tal cual (of goods), as they are, as they were tomar en consideracion, to take into consideration, to entertain turba, crowd (motley) virtualmente, practically, virtually ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... would have seen the light, though Queen Joan had withheld her encouragement. He had probably been long meditating it, and gathering materials for it, and we may well suppose that the outbreak of the plague in 1348, by furnishing him with a sombre background to heighten the effect of his motley pageant, had far more to do with accelerating the composition than aught that ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... disastrous to ocean-going craft than is the ocean itself in its violent moments. The waters of the bay contain all manner of fish, wherefore its surface is ploughed by the keels of all manner of fishing boats manned by all manner of fishermen. To protect the fish from this motley floating population many wise laws have been passed, and there is a fish patrol to see that these laws are enforced. Exciting times are the lot of the fish patrol: in its history more than one dead patrolman has marked defeat, and more often dead fishermen across their illegal ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... undressing. The fellow bringing in a pewter dish, as part of the apparatus of this elegant and Attic entertainment, a blind harper, a trumpeter, and a ragged ballad-singer, roaring out an obscene song, complete this motley group. ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... luxuriates in the beautiful garden of Europe; the queer inflections of the American's quiet drawl are heard everywhere as he strolls round the tables; Roumanian boyards, Parisian swindlers, Austrian soldiers, Hungarian plutocrats, flashy and foolish young Englishmen—all gather in a motley crowd; and the British bookmaker's interesting presence is obtrusive. His very accent—strident, coarse, impudent, unspeakably low—gives a kind of ground-note to the hum of talk that rises in all places of public resort, and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... stern headsmen's bloody hand,— The dungeon, block, and nameless tomb Prepare—for Douglas seeks his doom! But hark! what blithe and jolly peal Makes the Franciscan steeple reel? And see! upon the crowded street, In motley groups what masquers meet! Banner and pageant, pipe and drum, And merry morrice-dancers come. I guess, by all this quaint array, The burghers hold their sports to-day. James will be there; he loves such show, Where the good yeoman bends his bow, And the tough wrestler foils his foe, As ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... leading woman in the village, and, incidentally, the wife of its chief citizen, who also owned a small lumber yard, was of a lukewarm character. She had much more interest in the building itself, and the motley collection of individuals in whose hands ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... every bit of it. But how are you going to win her in the guise of a chauffeur? I always knew you possessed a large amount of self-confidence, but allow me to inform you, sir, there are some things your natural qualifications can't overshadow. Come, Jack, do strip off your motley and court her as a naval officer—you see I, at least, have kept track of you—and a gentleman should; I ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... pike were strewn with discarded blankets, tent flies, oilcloths and clothing, the men being forced to free themselves of all surplus incumbrances in order to keep up with the moving mass. At one place we passed General Early, sitting on his horse by the roadside, viewing the motley crowd as it passed by. He looked sour and haggard. You could see by the expression of his face the great weight upon his mind, his deep disappointment, his unspoken disappointment. What was yesterday a proud, well-disciplined army that had ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... it, there will be no disorder," Trueman assures her. He walks with Ethel at the head of the motley crowd that only an hour ago was clamoring for the body of Purdy; this same crowd is now transformed into an orderly procession. The absence of music, or of any sound other than the tramp of feet on the smooth hard roadway, makes the procession unusual. There is deep silence, save for the occasional ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... G. Wells. It would be very unfair to a man like Mr. Wells to suggest that in his vision the Englishman and the American are to embrace only in the sense of clinging to each other in terror. He is a man who understands what friendship is, and who knows how to enjoy the motley humours of humanity. But the political reconstruction which he proposes is too much determined by this old nightmare of necessitarianism. He tells us that our national dignities and differences must ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the length of the beach, shaded by trees, and crossing a gentle stream. Along this avenue was all the life and commerce of Tai-o-hae. Two traders' shops, empty offices, a gendarme, a handful of motley half-castes lounging under the trees—this was all that was left of former greatness. Only nature had not changed. It flung over the broken remnants of the glory and the dream its lovely cloak of verdure and of flower. Man had almost ceased to ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... divided by partitions into several small compartments, each of which contains a table and two benches. The restaurateur, usually a zambo or a mulatto, prides himself in the superiority of his picantes and his clicha. The most motley assemblages frequent these places in the evening. The Congo negro, the grave Spaniard, the white Creole, the Chino, together with monks and soldiers, may be seen, all grouped together, and devouring with evident relish refreshments, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... Here we bid good-bye to the Danube and follow the Morava valley upwards. The Servian villages of low white houses, with pyramidal roofs of tiles or thatch, are very pretty and picturesquely built; and above them, green heights, wooded slopes, flocks and herds, and peasants in bright-coloured motley clothes following the plough. Small murmuring brooks dance in merry leaps down to the Morava, and the Morava itself flows to the Danube. We are still in the drainage basin of this river, and, when we have crossed the whole of Servia, ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... now and then a gorgeously dressed official may be seen, with a long line of attendants, wending his steps towards the river's front. Infirm old men and little children, crazy-looking devotees and comely youths, boys and girls, people of all ages and degrees, are represented in the motley groups who come to these muddy waters for moral purification. There is a singular mingling of races also, for these people do not all speak one tongue. They are from the extreme north and the extreme south of India, while the half-starved vagrants ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... Miss Sedgwick's Linwoods, Paulding's Old Continental, Mrs. Child's Rebels, Motley's Morton's Hope, Herman Melville's Israel Potter, Kennedy's Horse Shoe Robinson. There is an account of the battle of Bunker Hill in Cooper's Lionel Lincoln. Thompson's Green Mountain Boys gives interesting descriptions of many of the events in that region. ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... and one hundred and eighty pounds were more noticeable there, and it was part of his plan to attract attention to himself. No one, however, appeared to notice him. The pool-players were noisily intent on their game, the same crowd of motley-robed Mexicans hung over the reeking bar. Gale's roving glance soon fixed upon the man he took to be Rojas. He recognized the huge, high-peaked, black sombrero with its ornamented band. The Mexican's face was ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... had been serving his apprenticeship as a soldier. The motley forces which Mithridates had commanded had not all submitted on the king's surrender to Sylla. Squadrons of pirates hung yet about the smaller islands in the Aegean. Lesbos was occupied by adventurers ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... become so. Abuses of this kind were imported from one nation to another, and with the progress of refinement this diction became daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... appeared so very serious about the matter, that Jupp could not help trying to be serious too; but it required the exercise of all the self-command he possessed to refrain from laughing when the motley contents of the ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... drink with him into the verandah outside, he seated himself in a long chair and proceeded to sip it slowly, as if it were some elixir whose virtue would be lost by haste. Some people might have been amused by the motley crowd that passed along the street beyond the verandah-rails, but Gideon Hayle, for such was his name, took no sort of interest in it. He had seen it too often to find any variety in it. As a matter of fact ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... alarming the fears of Plautianus, [681] threatened to produce a revolution, and obliged the emperor, who still loved him, to consent with reluctance to his death. [69] After the fall of Plautianus, an eminent lawyer, the celebrated Papinian, was appointed to execute the motley office of Praetorian Praefect. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... "'A motley crew' we are!" cheerfully announced Doctor George, and all the children radiantly clapped their hands at his joke. Even the White House baby, which had been carried to the feast, gurgled and crowed loudly on its ...
— A Big Temptation • L. T. Meade
... on the elevation of his fellow-men, and this presumption even a career of philanthropy and the composition of the "Principia" would not in many minds suffice to overthrow. We believe it is authentic that General Grant never got over the impression produced on him by seeing that Mr. Motley parted his hair in the middle, and it is said—and if not true is not unlikely,—that Mr. R. H. Dana's practice of wearing kid gloves told heavily against him in his memorable contest with Butler in the Essex district. We may all remember, too, the gigantic ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... face of the German as he walked down the garden behind the slim ascetic figure of the overseer of meeting in his broad hat and drab clothes. On the way the German plucked a dozen scarlet roses, a late geranium or two and a few leaves of motley Poinsetta. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... of progress, and ours is a progressive land. A great and glorious land, too—a land which has developed a Washington, a Franklin, a Wm. M. Tweed, a Longfellow, a Motley, a Jay Gould, a Samuel C. Pomeroy, a recent Congress which has never had its equal (in some respects), and a United States Army which conquered sixty Indians in eight months by tiring them out which is much better than uncivilized slaughter, God knows. We have a criminal ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... held a more motley crowd of revelers than on the night of the Famous Fiction masquerade. The faculty, who had been particularly interested in the idea of the masquerade, declared that for originality it was in line with 19—'s usual efforts. They occupied seats in the gallery and amused themselves with ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... the hauptmann, grasping the hand of the motley-garbed man, "of course I have. Ulrich, ten thousand pardons, but in two years a man is apt to alter, especially in these strenuous times. Has anything happened that you have been compelled to drop your Scottish name? Let me think. Ach! I have it. ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... grand days, there will occur—what will also apply, perhaps, occasionally to grand operas—very heavy operations. Large numbers of the speculators will collect, forming themselves into knots and groups on the pavement, and even in the roadway contiguous to the office. Here they appear a motley congregation, a curious agglomeration of seediness. Seediness is the prominent feature of the betting mass, as they are on such occasions collected—seediness of dress and of character. Yet amongst the groups are some better-looking kine, some who ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... entertain, unless it be the new fool 'is lordship sent down 'ere to-day, who has been mopin' and moonin' in the corridors, as is ever the way of these wittol creatures when they are not heeded. He was 'ere in a rare motley of his own choosing, with which he thinks to raise a laugh, a moment ago. Ye see him not—not 'avin' the gift that belongs by right to my dread office. 'Tis a weird privilege I have—and may not be imparted ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... in these halcyon days. His back and flanks were like the surface of a well-upholstered sofa. His coat of motley told its own story of daily rubbings and good feeding. The white was dazzlingly white and the carrot-red patches glowed like the inside of a well-burnished copper kettle. So shiny was he that you could see reflected on his sides the black, gold-spangled tights and fluffy ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade,—all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impells me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life.—All these emotions must be strange to you. So are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... conversation, but meaneth to sputter and prate anything without judgment or wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, or incline his attention to such motley ragged discourse; that without nauseating he scarce should endure to observe men lavishing time, and squandering their breath so frivolously. 'Tis an affront to good company to pester it with ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... should read this, the story of my early life, he will remember that the tale of the death of a certain Isabella de Siguenza is pieced into its motley. He will remember how this Isabella, in the last moments of her life, called down a curse upon that holy father who added outrage and insult to her torment, praying that he might also die by the hands of fanatics and in a worse ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... the morning of Neykia's wedding, a motley mass of natives clothed in many colours crowded about the little church, which, for lack of space, they could not enter. Presently the crowd surged back from the door and formed on either side of the path, leaving an opening down the ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... first storm of the early fall Breed pulled down a yearling mountain sheep on a high plateau. A motley crew answered the meat call. Breed, the yellow hybrid, Shady, the half-blood renegade, and four pairs of coyotes born in Sand Coulee Basin; the dog coyote with his timber-wolf mate and several of Breed's ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... these men, numbering between sixty and seventy, advanced upon Red River Colony. They were a motley crew, all mounted on horseback and armed with guns, spears, tomahawks, bows, and scalping-knives, besides which they were painted and plumed a la sauvage, and were in the habit when rushing to battle, ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... me an extravagant Fancy, I will here set it down. I could not but fancy, if my Soul had at that Moment quitted my Body, and descended to the poetical Shades in the Posture it was then in, what a strange Figure it would have made among them. They would not have known what to have made of my motley Spectre, half Comick and half Tragick, all over resembling a ridiculous Face, that at the same time laughs on one side and cries o tother. The only Defence, I think, I have ever heard made for ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... back with a start and an exclamation of amaze. Seated at the table within the recess, his chin resting on his hand, and his face cast down in abstracted revery, was a young man. So still was his attitude, so calmly mournful the expression of his face, so estranged did he seem from all the motley but brilliant assemblage which circled around the solitude he had made for himself, that he might well have been deemed one of those visitants from another world whose secrets the intruder had wished to learn. Of that intruder's presence he was evidently ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... their comrades who fill the after-deck of the steamer. The village mayor in a braided jacket, the wharfmaster in semi-military uniform, and the agent of the steamboat company, who appears to have a remarkable penchant for gold lace and buttons, render the throng still more motley. There is also, in nine cases out of ten, a band of tooting musicians, and as the boat moves away national Hungarian and Austrian airs are played. He would be indeed a surly fellow who should not lift his cap on these occasions, and he would be repaid ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... other sweat-streaked, motley-dressed homeseekers would straggle up to this end of the long trail. Their thoughts went back to their old homes, or to the loved ones that they had laid away tenderly in the shifting sands of the Plains. Most of them faced the future with fortitude; the difficulties they ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... Brother Shoveller conducted his young companions between the overhanging houses, with stalls between serving as shops, till they reached the open space round the Market Cross, on the steps of which women sat with baskets of eggs, butter, and poultry, raised above the motley throng of cattle and sheep, with their dogs and drivers, the various cries of man and beast forming an incongruous accompaniment to the bells of the churches ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... creation of the fifteenth century. Whether it had its origin in a laicising of the irreverent celebration of the Feast of Fools, or in that parade of fools which sometimes preceded a Mystery, it was essentially a farce, but a farce in which the performers, arrayed in motley, and wearing the long-eared cap, distributed between them the several roles of human folly. Associations of sots, known in Paris as Enfants sans Souci, known in other cities by other names, presented the unwisdom or madness of the world in parody. The sottie at times rose from a mere diversion ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... represent him. Neither would he probably come as carpenter, or mason, or gardener. He would come in such form and condition as might bear to the present England, Scotland, and Ireland, a relation like that which the form and condition he then came in, bore to the motley Judea, Samaria, and Galilee. If he came thus, in form altogether unlooked for, who would they be that recognized and received him? The idea involves no absurdity. He is not far from us at any moment—if the old story be indeed more than the best ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... from the days of Strafford downwards, there was none more industrious, none more loyal, and none less selfish than he. It was all to his credit that he was unlikely to consort on easy terms with the motley crew ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... there's an aim Which many know and some might even name; But see yon motley muster, Like shades in Eblis wandering up and down! Types there of every 'Show Class' in the Town Elbow ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... on them, without horse or bowmen, and scanty in numbers, they thought them a set of madmen rushing upon certain destruction." They began, however, to prepare to receive them, and the Eastern chiefs arrayed, as quickly as time and place allowed, the varied races who served in their motley ranks. Mountaineers from Hyrcania and Afghanistan, wild horsemen from the steppes of Khorassan, the black archers of Ethiopia, swordsmen from the banks of the Indus, the Oxus, the Euphrates and the Nile, made ready against the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... tourney was held, at night the mazy dance was trod by quaint maskers. The scene of this night outshone all others. The dazzling lights hanging from the galleries, displayed the grace of lords and ladies of the court. The "motley fool" retailed his jest, the juggler performed his feat, the minstrel plied his harp, and the lady touched a ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... continued their voyage with delightful May weather. The prairies bordering on the river were gayly painted with innumerable flowers, exhibiting the motley confusion of colors of a Turkey carpet. The beautiful islands, also, on which they occasionally halted, presented the appearance of mingled grove and garden. The trees were often covered with clambering grapevines ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... two hours was employed in clearing the lists, and preparing the ground for the juego de la sortija,[9] which was peculiarly gratifying to the queen. This intermediate time was devoted by the assembled and motley crowd, to the rational, and provident ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... Rochester, Roscommon and Dorset (2. vols. 1756), there is a rough cut of Rochester as a charlatan delivering a speech to the assembled crowd. On the platform also stands his attendant, a figure dressed in the diamonded motley of Harlequin. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... down the coast, and on we went, steaming, smoking, and splashing, after the most orthodox fashion of fire-boats in general. I had now time and opportunity to look around me. Every available spot of the deck and paddle-boxes of the small, flat-bottomed iron steamer, was crowded with as motley a set of passengers as ever sailed since the days of Captain Noah. Sepoys returning from furlough to join their regiments; lascars, or enlisted workmen belonging to the different civil branches of the army; and camp-followers in all their varieties, were everywhere squatted on ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... matchless art and whim, He gave the power of speech to every limb; Tho' mask'd and mute, conveyed his quick intent, And told in frolic gestures what he meant: But now the motley coat and sword of wood Require a tongue ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... great amusement of the latter, leaped on Hurry, and fled away in front of us. Before we had accomplished one-quarter of the distance, we heard the thundering tread of many feet galloping down the avenue, and presently espied our motley troop of steeds being driven furiously toward us. Storm, Lightfoot, Swift, Grumble, Stentor, Arrow and Dart were there, with Jack, on his fleet two-legged courser, at their heels. At his saddle-bow hung a cluster ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... would incontinently go down with all hands. A fool is generally the wisest person out. The wise man must shut his eyes to all the perils and horrors that lie round him; but the cap and bells can go bobbing along the most slippery ledges and the bauble will not stir up sleeping lions. Hurray! for motley, for a good sound insouciance, for a healthy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is impossible in so brief an account to relate the heroic deeds of the Dutch, such, for example, as the famous defence of Leyden. The American historian Motley gives a vivid description of this in his well-known Rise of the Dutch Republic, Part IV, Chapter II. The most recent and authoritative account of the manner in which the Dutch won their independence is to be ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... the wandering, very late at night, or, rather, early morning, Harlson became hungry, and insisted upon entrance to a restaurant where were gathered the very refuse of the reckless and non-law-abiding, and I went with him, perforce, and saw a motley gathering. There were all sorts of people there, from thief to pander, all save those who might retain a claim to faint respectability. Harlson demanded comparative cleanliness at our table, and the food was fairly decent. We ate, then smoked, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... little party had now assumed a very motley and brigandish appearance, every individual having discarded from time to time, such articles of his civilised dress as proved to be inconvenient or uncomfortable, and adopted various picturesque substitutes, which filled more nearly the requirements ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... was as picturesque and motley a crowd as well could be imagined. I only wished at the moment the pencil of some artist had been there to have painted the Kafirs in their showy turbans and half-naked bodies, the women with babies ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... dream, or fear of agony," all for one thing—to teach the oppressor that his cause must fail. It is difficult, sitting around a comfortable board at a public dinner, to make men realize what their forefathers suffered that the heritage of priceless liberty should be their children's pride. But read Motley, or the recent and remarkably well-written volumes of Douglas Campbell, and you will see that every atrocity that Spanish hatred, religious intolerance, and mediaeval bigotry could invent, every horror that ever followed in the train of war, swept over and desolated Holland. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... by the murmuring of voices. Above and below he perceives nothing but painted faces, motley garments, and plates of worked gold; and the sand of the arena, perfectly white, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... that, that stood before him now—that golden-haired woman beside an empty wheel-chair, whose face was radiant, who cried aloud that she was cured! And who were these others of later days, this motley crowd of old and young, that passed before him in procession, that cried out the same words that golden-haired woman by the wheel-chair had cried—and cried out: ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... mandarins, harlequins, shepherdesses, and much-translated pagan divinities jostled each other through Armida's gardens, where the pink of fashion and the plain citizen, the patrician lady and the plebeian waiting-maid made merry together in a motley rout of Comus, and marvelled at the brilliancy of the illuminations and the many-colored glories ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and the one massive hinge, hanging by a slender rust-eaten nail, had been wrought into a fantastic shape. As they drove through the gateway, a green lizard scampered down from the top of one of the posts, where he had been sunning himself, and a rattlesnake lying in the path lazily uncoiled his motley brown length, and sounding his rattle, wriggled slowly off into the rank grass and weeds that ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... comical pair driving into the hurly burly of the new city of Chicago. It had recently received a charter. But what a motley of buildings it was! Frame shacks wedged between more substantial buildings of brick or wood. Land speculators swarmed everywhere; land offices confronted one at every turn; lawyers, doctors, men of all professions ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... Charlemagne and his champions, of Achilles, AEneas, and Alexander, in their modern dress, were imported by French and Provencal knights, who, on their way to Jerusalem, came to stay at the castles of their German allies, the first poets who ventured to imitate these motley compositions were priests, not laymen. A few short extracts from Konrad's "Roland" and Lamprecht's "Alexander" are sufficient to mark this period of transition. Like Charlemagne, who had been changed into a legendary hero by French poets before he became again the subject of German ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... beer and vile liquor. A sloppy bar extends along one side, and opposite is a long table, with indescribable viands littered over it, interspersed with empty glasses, battered hats, and cigar stumps. A motley crowd of men and women jostle in the narrow space. Em speaks to the soberest looking of the lot. He listens to her words, others crowd about. Many accept the slips we offer, and gradually as the throng separates to make way, we gain the further end ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... and rights of a French citizen were bestowed upon a number of foreigners who had 'consecrated their arms and their vigils to defending the cause of the people against the despotism of kings'. A motley band of heroes had been selected for this honor,—the names of Washington and Wilberforce and Kosciusko being put to pickle in the same brine with those of Pestalozzi, J. H. Campe, Klopstock and Anacharsis Cloots,—and the bill was ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... But went not far before delirium came, With endless repetitions, hurryings forward, Recoverings like a hound at fault. The past Was running riot in her conquered brain; And there, with doors thrown wide, a motley group Held carnival; went freely out and in, Meeting and jostling. But withal it seemed As some confused tragedy went on; Till suddenly the light sank, and the pageant Was lost in darkness; the chambers of ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... before been a guest, and she was full of lively curiosity about the people she was to meet there. The hostess was fond of collecting together all sorts of stray oddities, and of trying to further a scheme of universal brotherhood by mixing up in her drawing-room a most motley crowd, including all classes, from the ultra fine lady to the emancipated slave. It was not, perhaps, very amusing to the portion of her guests who found themselves lost in a sea of unknown faces, through which no pilot guided them; yet people went to her, partly because ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... abandoned their positions facing west and rushed down to safety below. It cannot be said that the Americans are afraid; they have merely realised from the beginning what a few of us have understood. The motley crowd gathered in the British Legation, as well as our commander-in-chief, were much stirred by the American retirement, for they already saw themselves directly bombarded from the menacing height of the city walls—a prospect which can enchant no one, as the confusion already reigning would ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... boat in utter darkness. To that slowly moving mass, for she was now drifting ahead under quarter-speed, this obliteration of light imparted a sense of stealthiness. This note of suspense, of watchfulness, of illicit adventure was reflected in the very tones of the motley deckhands who brushed past him ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... a little longer than usual, and a few more sentries were placed and the theatre not open that Evening, but that single evening was the only exception, and the next day the Palais Royal was as brilliant and more cheerful than ever, with its motley groups of visitors. The Cossacks were not quartered in the Palais Royal, they were in the Ch. Elysees, the trees of which bear visible marks of their horses' teeth, but a good many came in from curiosity and hung their horses in the open space of the Palais.... The Russian discipline ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... rich, and great, From Levite, Pharisee and Priest, Down to the lowest dregs of fate, From mightiest even to the least; Yes, in this motley throng we find The palsied, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... hard work of the world Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here More zeal than knowledge in it Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men Most journalists would have been literary men if they could Motley Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps Nearly nothing as chaos could be Neatness that brings despair Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it Never paid in anything but hopes of paying Never ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Democrats a formidable array of Republicans. Although the entering wedge was a difference of policy growing out of conditions in the Southern States, other reasons contributed to the rupture. The removal of Motley as minister to England, coming so soon after Sumner's successful resistance to the San Domingo scheme, was treated as an attempt to punish a senator for the just exercise of his right and the honest performance of his duty. Nine months ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... decidedly. He was rushing around the small room; the corners devoted to David being neatness itself, which couldn't truthfully be said of Joel's quarters. "I'm after his new tennis racket. Where in thunder is it?" tossing up the motley array of balls, dumb-bells, and such treasures, that showed on their surface they belonged to ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... rather a desire for fresh air, I mounted to the cupola that adorned the roof of our house, and for a couple of hours I sat there, enjoying the delicious breeze and the picturesque panorama that lay beneath my feet, and the motley groups that swarmed to early prayers up ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hearties," roared the leader, turning to his motley crew, "fine pickings here indeed. A swine of God fattened upon the sweat of such poor, honest devils as we, and a young shoat who, by his looks, must have pieces ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his Shadow spoke, that, as a matter of fact, he had observed the men who usually wore the red and white feather cloaks among the motley crowd of grovelling natives who lay flat on their faces in the mud of the cleared space the night before, and prayed hard for mercy. Only they were not wearing their robes of office at the moment, in accordance with a well-known savage ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... the first time this young gentleman's name had been mentioned, and it made my blood run cold to see how many side-long looks and expressive shrugs it caused in the motley assemblage. But I had no time for sentiment; the inquiry was ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... administration and treat the task of the moment as though it were the one nearest to his heart. Even those who hated and feared Gracchus were struck with amazement at the practical genius which he revealed; while the sight of the leader in the midst of his countless tasks, surrounded by the motley retinue which they involved, roused the wondering admiration of the masses.[668] At one moment he was being interviewed by a contractor for public works, at another by an envoy from some state eager to secure ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... strangely grouped in the quaint old streets with the peculiar people of the city, and add another to the many types already there. The New Orleans market furnishes, perhaps, the best opportunity for the ethnological student, for there strange motley groups are always to be found. Even the cries are in the quaint voices of a foreign city, and it seems almost impossible to imagine that one ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... history, and that will be rare fun, too. In the nine hundred hours I shall certainly be able to read all of Fiske, Mommsen, Rhodes, Bancroft, McMaster, Channing, Bryce, Hart, Motley, Gibbon, and von Holst not to mention American statesmen. About the Ides of December I shall hold a levee and sit in state as the characters of history file by. I shall be able to call them all by name, to tell of the ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... and, so far as I had an opportunity of observing, never terminates at any hour, and all these drinks are continually in request by almost all these people. A constant atmosphere of cigar-smoke, too, envelopes the motley crowd, and forms a sympathetic medium, in which men meet more closely and talk more frankly than in any other kind of air. If legislators would smoke in session, they might speak truer words, and fewer of them, and bring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the spirited horses fretted in their curbed ardour. I saw the occupants of that carriage well: me they could not see, or, at least, not know, folded close in my large shawl, screened with my straw hat (in that motley crowd no dress was noticeably strange). I saw the Count de Bassompierre; I saw my godmother, handsomely apparelled, comely and cheerful; I saw, too, Paulina Mary, compassed with the triple halo of her beauty, her youth, and her happiness. In looking on her countenance ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... food. In that case poor REVERDY JOHNSON would have been compelled to have passed a Lenten season at Halifax, until he had eradicated from his system the rich English dinners, before he could have entered this favored land. And MOTLEY—bless me, he has eaten so much that I don't believe he could get it out of his body if he fasted for the remainder of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... Louvier took it as such,—laughed complacently and rubbed his hands. "Ay, ay, millionnaires are the real aristocrats, for they have power, as my beau Marquis will soon find. I must bid you good night. Of course I shall see Madame Gandrin and yourself to-morrow. Prepare for a motley gathering,—lots of democrats and foreigners, with artists and authors, and ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Grant and finally said as he reached his hands across the table and grasped Grant's big flinty paw, "Grant—let me tell you something—it's Margaret. I'm a fool—a motley fool i' the forest, Grant, but I can't help it; I can't help it," he cried. "So long as she lives—she may need me. I don't trust that damn scoundrel, Grant. She may need me, and I stand ready to go ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Saturday at eleven. We went in the prescribed costume, black silk, with the picturesque Roman veil thrown over the head. From the foot of the Scala Regia, (Royal Staircase) one of the papal guard, in a motley suit which seemed one glare of black and yellow, escorted us to the door of a long corridor, known as the Loggia of Raphael, where we were received by a higher official in rich array of crimson velvet. About seventy persons were seated in rows, facing each ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... perils of the heroine. But the tribulations of Mary White have left no imprint on English literature. Chaucer's pilgrims have, and so long as the mere name of the Tabard survives, its recollection will bring in its train a moving picture of that merry and motley company which set out for the shrine of Becket so many ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... were complete. The Santa Maria was to lead the way with the Admiral on board; she was but one hundred tons' burden, with a high poop and a forecastle. It had been difficult enough to find a crew; men were shy about venturing with this stranger from Genoa on unknown seas, and it was a motley party that finally took service under Columbus. The second ship, the Pinta, was but half the size of the flagship; she had a crew of eighteen and was the fastest sailer of the little squadron, while the third, the Nina of forty tons, also ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... way to where the crowd was gathered, to play his pretty part on the village green, before the sober citizens of Centerville and Hilltown, as he had played it hundreds of times before, under the canvas, to the motley crowd drawn together by the ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... the author evidently believing that bad spelling and bad grammar are the legitimate sources of New England humor. This shows that he mistakes means for ends,—just as one who supposes that Mr. Merryman, in the circus, must, of necessity, be funny, because he wears the motley and his nose is painted red. The Yankee dialect is Mr. Jonathan Slick's principal element of wit; his second is the onion. The book is redolent of onions. That odorous vegetable breathes from every page. A woman weeps, and onions are invoked to lend aromatic fragrance to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... and comedy of actual life portrayed in The Waverley Novels. The tyrannical marquises, vindictive stepmothers, dark-browed villains, scheming monks, chattering domestics and fierce banditti are thrust aside by a motley crowd of living beings—soldiers, lawyers, smugglers, gypsies, shepherds, outlaws and beggars. The wax-work figures, guaranteed to thrill with nervous suspense or overflow with sensibility at the appropriate moments, are replaced by real folk ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... writers now began to make great reputations. Cooper, Irving, and Bryant were already well known. They were soon joined by a wonderful set of men, who speedily made America famous. These were Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Hawthorne, Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, and Sparks. In science, also, men of mark were beginning their labors, as Pierce, Gray, Silliman, and Dana. Louis Agassiz before long began his wonderful lectures, which did much to make science popular. In short, Jackson's administration marks the time when American life began ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... the interior—the loin-cloth, with or without a long upper garment: while in tiring the hair they adopted certain refinements, specially a series of curls which the men arranged in the form of an aigrette above their foreheads. This motley collection of races was ruled over by an oligarchy of merchants and shipowners, whose functions were hereditary, and who usually paid homage to a single king, the representative of the tutelary god, and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... man to-day. Throw off your motley. When I met you that night so oddly, you had been acting like a worthy fellow, trying to earn your bread in the best way ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was spent in the open, before coming to the scattered huts of Ngumbu's, where a motley group of stragglers, for the most part Wabisa, were busy felling the trees and clearing the land for cultivation. However, the little community gave them a welcome, in spite of the widespread report of the fighting ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... talked, they passed along the streets of the iron-works laid with rails, crowded at this hour, the working day just at an end, with a concourse of men of all kinds and sizes and trades; a motley of blouses, pilot jackets, the coats of the designers mixing with the uniforms of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... there is just now a great demand for agricultural and domestics, so that settlers are actually bidding against each other for the individuals they want to engage. Our ship-load was no special body of people, but a motley collection of men, women, and children from all parts of the old country. Among them are natives of Kent and of Cornwall, of Yorkshire and of Wales, ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to scholars has ever spoiled; our fellow-citizen, the historian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its life into our own,—John Lothrop Motley. ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... burst open, and into the room rushed a motley crowd of men. Most of them were young students, but here and there I saw older men, and at the head of the mob was a white-bearded individual, wearing an astrachan cap, who brandished a copy of some ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
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