"Bugbear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... get easily), but I question if they try either. I recommended them to send him to Tripoli, to the English doctor there, but they heard of the proposal with horror. None of these Berkat people have ever visited Tripoli. The Turks are their bugbear. They were not extremely friendly; rude and ignorant villagers as they were, they could not understand why I wanted to go to Soudan. I observed they were all well clothed and seemed to live in Saharan affluence. The term Berkat, بركت, signifies "a lake" ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... paper setting forth the reasons which had moved him to this enterprise. He then proceeded to Nottingham, which soon became the head quarters of the Northern insurrection. Here a proclamation was put forth couched in bold and severe terms. The name of rebellion, it was said, was a bugbear which could frighten no reasonable man. Was it rebellion to defend those laws and that religion which every King of England bound himself by oath to maintain? How that oath had lately been observed was a question on which, it ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... from the dark-haloed indeterminate limbo where dwelt that bugbear of Charles Courtier, the great Half-Truth Authority, he himself had a couple of rooms at fifteen shillings a week. Their chief attraction was that the great Half-Truth Liberty had recommended them. They tied him ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... always intended, ever since my conversation with Mr. T. about the Malstrom, to have called in at Loffoden Islands on our way south, and ascertain for myself the real truth about this famous vortex. To have blotted such a bugbear out of the map of Europe, if its existence really was a myth, would at all events have rendered our cruise not altogether fruitless. But, since leaving Spitzbergen, we had never once seen the sun, and to attempt to make so dangerous a coast in a gale of wind and a thick ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... to any station. My dear, you are young, and know so little about this world, which is such a bugbear to you. Why, there is very little that will be greatly unlike this. At first you might be a little bewildered, but I shall be by you all the time, and you shall feel and fear nothing, and gradually you will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... made the victim of superstition. Were you to enact before my very eyes some of those feats which, to the senses of others, would stamp you as the preternatural being you assume to be, I would doubt the evidence of my own senses ere I permitted such a bugbear to ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... mistaken your natural calling. What it can be I don't know; but we must put our two heads together, and see what we can do for you before the end of the quarter. Now, go up to the combe to your wife, and try to get that terrible bugbear of a German out of Pilbury as quickly and as quietly as possible. Good-bye for to-day, Le Breton; no coolness between us, for this, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... have sufficient funds on hand to pay them ten dollars per acre spot cash, so I shall turn over to them their signed contracts and thus relieve them of that bugbear, and for these three- dollar contracts they shall credit me with a payment of four dollars and twenty-five cents per acre on the land! I will secure them for the balance by a first mortgage on the property! And with that accomplished, I court an official investigation. Come on, you secret service ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... should be taught that "he alone is great, who, by a life heroic, conquers fate;" that "diligence is the mother of good luck;" that, nine times out of ten, what we call luck or fate is but a mere bugbear of the indolent, the languid, the purposeless, the careless, the indifferent; that the man who fails, as a rule, does not see or seize his opportunity. Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or the careless ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... make themselves miserable by endeavouring to find it out. It seems as though there were some power somewhere which mercifully stays us from putting that sting into the tail of death, which we would put there if we could, and which ensures that though death must always be a bugbear, it shall never under any conceivable circumstances ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... expenses ruinous. You will have to spend from twelve to fifteen thousand francs merely to win the suit,—but you will win it, if you care to. The suit will only increase the enmity of the Gravelots, for the expenses will be even heavier on them. You will be their bugbear; you will be called litigious and calumniated in every way; ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... ought now to be manifest to everyone who studies it, that up to the commencement of the present century the progress of science in general, and of natural history in particular, was seriously retarded by what may be termed the Bugbear of Speculation. Fully awakened to the dangers of web-spinning from the ever-fertile resources of their own inner consciousness, naturalists became more and more abandoned to the idea that their science ought to consist in a mere observation of facts, or tabulation of phenomena, without attempt ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... morning of the 1st of July, Bressant sat at his table, with his books and papers about him. He was in an excellent humor, for he had just arrived at the conclusion that he might, and would, safely encounter his bugbear Cornelia. If the professor invited him to tea, and to spend the evening, he was resolved to accept; and, at that moment, he felt a hand laid upon his shoulder, and, turning quickly round, recognized the sombre figure of ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... recreation, eight hours of refreshing sleep for all! What a vision to dangle before the eyes of a hungry people! If it is great art and fine life that you want, you must renounce this religion of safe mediocrity. Comfort is the enemy; luxury is merely the bugbear of the bourgeoisie. No soul was ever ruined by extravagance or even by debauch; it is the steady, punctual gnawing of comfort that destroys. That is the triumph of matter over mind; that is the last tyranny. For how are they better than slaves who must stop ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Philip, with an air of pleasant detachment, "I see. You are in a first-rate fix. I was always prepared for that. Coke told me about Bulmer—warned me off, so to speak. I forgot his claims at odd times, just for a minute or so, but he is a real bugbear—a sort of matrimonial bogey-man. If all goes well, and we enter Pernambuco without being fired at, you will be handed over to the British Consul, and he will send a rousing telegram about you to England. Bulmer, of course, will cause a ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... time. It was well that there was no spectator there,—for the American would have blushed to have it known how much this old traditionary wonder had affected his imagination. But, indeed, it was as old as any bugbear of his mind—as any of those bugbears and private terrors which grow up with people, and make the dreams and nightmares of childhood, and the fever-images of mature years, till they haunt the deliriums of the dying bed, and ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the defeat of the Armada: and one of our younger poets; Mr Alfred Noyes, acting on this hint has since given us an epic poem on "Drake," in twelve books. But Froude probably overlooked, as Mr Noyes has not overcome, this difficulty of the flat interval which, while ever the bugbear of Epic, is magnified tenfold when our action takes place on the sea. For whereas the verse should be rapid and the high moments frequent, the business of seafaring is undeniably monotonous, as the intervals between port and port, sea-fight and sea-fight, must be long and lazy. Matters move more ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... now having a very perceptible effect upon the snow, even when the black rocks began to peep up through the surface, and great patches of moss could be seen completely bare. The great bugbear of sledge travelling is stony ground, or a hidden rock beneath a thin layer of snow that cuts through and sweeps the ice from the runners before the sled can be stopped. When the ice is gone from the runners all comfort has gone with it. The sled that the dogs would drag without ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... our Continent, with their souls full of its shipwrecks and disasters—top-sails cautiously reefed, and everything guardedly snug—these strangers at first unexpectedly encountering a tolerably smooth sea, rashly conclude that the Cape, after all, is but a bugbear; they have been imposed upon by fables, and founderings and sinkings hereabouts are all ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... entourage gave themselves a free rein; that old bugbear Mother Goose was resuscitated, and many a child, on reading the newspaper, might have recognized the ogre of Goodman Perrault in the disguise of a socialist; they surmised, they invented; the press being suppressed, it was quite easy; it is easy to lie when the ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... I! But let's reconnoiter and try to spot our bugbear. I wonder if it wouldn't be appropriate to call her by another name? We've got to share our rooms with her even if we haven't got to share our bed. Why didn't the Empress tell us her name? the stubborn ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the leaders of the nation had remained true to their calling. But when to speak Latin was considered more learned than to speak German, when to amass vast information was considered more creditable than to digest and to use it, when popularity became the same bugbear to the professors which profanity had been to the clergy, and vulgarity to the knights, Luther's work was undone; and two more centuries had to be spent in pedantic controversies, theological disputes, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... person, she was little less elegant than a countess; yet nothing more than a merchant-captain's wife; and she reared that commander's children in a suburban villa, with the manners which adorn a palace. When they happen to be there. She had a bugbear; Slang. Could not endure the smart technicalities current; their multitude did not overpower her distaste; she called them "jargon"—"slang" was too coarse a word for her to apply to slang: she excluded many ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... 3rd, Matteis's secretary; and 4th and 5th, two spies. These men united in a conspiracy to destroy various persons who were obnoxious to them in the province, some of them actuated by political motives, and others in order to get possession of the property of their victims. The bugbear of the Court is Carbonarism, and Matteis pretended that there was a Carbonari plot on foot, in which several persons were implicated. He employed the spies to seduce the victims into some imprudence of language or conduct, and then to inform ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... felt the stir of an unnamed, unacknowledged fear; and now the fear raised its head and looked at her. Well! She would look back at it, then: look it straight in the malignant eye. What was it, after all, but a "bugbear to scare children"—the ghost of the opinion of the many? She had suspected from the first that Wyant knew of her having shortened the term of Bessy Amherst's sufferings—returning to the room when he did, it was almost impossible that he should not have guessed what had ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... conqueror. Here, then, we may raise a strong barrier against future threats of Ashanti invasion, and make security more secure. The political officers of the Protectorate will be the best judges of the steps to be taken; and, if they are active and prudent, we shall hear no more of the Kumasi bugbear. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... said that if a man has a fixed place of residence and carries on a dry goods business, he might gamble as much as should please him and the law would not take hold of him. He would ask anybody to read the law understandingly and then deny this round assertion. This act, said he, is bugbear—it is a disgrace as it now stands, for it smacks of cowardice. The legislators, he presumed, had a little sense, and they knew that some kind of a law must be passed, and they were ingenious enough to know how to frame it to sound well, and yet be comparatively powerless. ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... that he was nephew to Aunt Priscilla's bugbear has swallowed up all others; but now, as he himself reveals this other truth to her, she feels that her cup is ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... of the gallows," said Turpin to Peter. "More fools they. A mere bugbear to frighten children, believe me; and never yet alarmed a brave man. The gallows, pshaw! One can but die once, and what signifies it how, so that it be over quickly. I think no more of the last leap into eternity than clearing a five-barred gate. A rope's end for it! So let us be merry, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... having received a scratch, was frighted: it gave him first a puke, then a fever, and then he died, that was all. And how could Belton help that? —But sickness, a long tedious sickness, will make a bugbear of any thing to a languishing heart, I see that. And so far was Mowbray a-propos in the verses from Nat. Lee, ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... she began to make inquiries about army nurses—what they ought to do, how they ought to do it, and all that—she ran up against that terrible bugbear of control. Everywhere was control, control, control; and she really began to despair. There were examinations, and training, and applications to the surgeon-general, and to the assistant surgeon, and to special heads of departments ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... in the general sense of a disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of 'bug' is "A frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to 'bugbear', a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... in Vendemiaire won him very high patronage, precisely because he had asked for none. He was appointed major in the National Guard, although he was utterly incapable of giving the word of command. In 1815 Napoleon, always his enemy, dismissed him. During the Hundred Days Birotteau was the bugbear of the liberals of his quarter; for it was not until 1815 that differences of political opinion grew up among merchants, who had hitherto been unanimous in their desires for public tranquillity, of which, as they knew, business affairs stood ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... that, to my taste, the long article on the New Testament is very tedious, and that the progress of Socinianism is, to my apprehension, a bugbear which we have no immediate reason to be scared by; but it may alarm some people, and what I think a dull prosing piece of orthodoxy may have its admirers, and ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... T'ai-p'ing rebellion that we associate likin, a tax which has for years past been the bugbear of the foreign merchant in China. The term means "thousandth-part money," that is, the thousandth part of a tael or Chinese ounce of silver, say one cash; and it was originally applied to a tax of one cash per ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... with her jibboom pointing in the right direction, and every mile that she now travelled was so much to the good, increasing our chances of getting across the Line and making our escape from the awful region of equatorial calms which constitute such a ghastly bugbear to those who go down to the sea in sailing-ships. Our self-congratulations proved, however, to be premature, for the breeze lasted only about half an hour when it died away again, leaving us as completely becalmed as before. But during that half-hour we had succeeded ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... more ability of all kinds, extending even to the arts and mechanics more valour, and, when it pleased him, more discernment, grace, politeness, and nobility. But then no man had ever before so many useless talents, so much genius of no avail, or an imagination so calculated to be a bugbear to itself and a plague to others. Abjectly and vilely servile even to lackeys, he scrupled not to use the lowest and paltriest means to gain his ends. Unnatural son, cruel father, terrible husband, detestable master, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... be mutually beneficial, that it would induce white immigration, relieve the congested overproduction of the staples of the Southern States, introduce a higher class of industries, and simplify the so-called problem by removing the bugbear of Negro domination by ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... social equality," said Dr. Latimer, "is only a bugbear which frightens well-meaning people from dealing justly with the negro. I know of no place on earth where there is perfect social equality, and I doubt if there is such a thing in heaven. The sinner who repents on ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... his brother's face. "In that case no one is any the worse. I'm sorry you've carried that bugbear about with you for so long. What an ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... Right or wrong, I have come to stand by you, Frank," said the Rector of Wentworth, rather mournfully. He had been waiting at Mrs Hadwin's for the last two hours. He had seen that worthy woman's discomposed looks, and felt that she did not shake her head for nothing. Jack had been the bugbear of the family for a long time past. Gerald was conscious of adding heavily at the present moment to the Squire's troubles. Charley was at Malta, in indifferent health; all the others were boys. There was only Frank to give the father a little consolation; and now Frank, it appeared, was most deeply ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... entirely to this cause, and to the school of literalism in which he had been trained; but, however this may be, we both of us hated being made to say our prayers—morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid it, as indeed children generally will, by every artifice which we could employ. Thus we were in the habit of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer time, and would gratefully hear my father tell my ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... Patty, as they started off in the car one morning, "why people make such a bugbear of Christmas shopping. I think ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... servants—the mildest approach to it that she ever makes is by saying, 'Mr. Brandon does not like such a thing,' or that 'Mr. Brandon would be displeased if they do not attend to such another.' The idea of making a bugbear of me is very ingenious, but I fear not very efficacious, for I know they see through it. As for me, a penitent recollection of a conversation in an English railway carriage has stopped her mouth for ever, and she ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... should live together from infancy, than all the theories and arguments that are brought to convince the mass of this fact. As soon as it became known among the students that my youth was the new objection, they treated it in such a manner that the whole thing was transformed into a ridiculous bugbear, growing out of the imagination of the ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... anxiety to protect themselves have, in some sections of the country, run into the adoption of extreme measures. They are already preparing to retrace their steps, and for several reasons. They are discovering that they have been fighting a bugbear; also, that their legislation against the bugbear cannot legislate. Also, that money stays away from radical communities, that many possible advantages are lost; that combinations properly controlled have, within ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... thrust out of active life and forced to make up my mind to perfect passiveness, I have become a bugbear to myself. I cannot endure the thought of ever being the peevish egotist, the exacting tyrant, which men are apt to become when they are thrown upon woman's love ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... the car's musical siren, though; a fascinating bugbear, supposed to warn children, chickens, and other light-minded animals that something important is coming, and they'd better look alive. It has two tunes, one grave, one gay. I suppose we would use the grave one if the ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... a problem to successive chiefs of scouts, a bugbear to the reservation Indians, and a terror to Arizona. If a man was killed or a woman missed, the Indians came galloping and the scouts lay on his trail. If he met a woman in the defiles, he stretched her dead if she did not please his errant fancy. He took pot-shots at the men ploughing in their ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... resources—power which is really derived only from intermarriages among the few remnants of the earliest loyalist settlers, or from admiration of their private conduct and abilities. In short, "the family compact" is a useful bugbear; it is kept up constantly before the Canadians, to deter them from looking too closely into other compacts, which, to say the truth, are sometimes neither so national, so loyal, ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... boys took their turn and gave their visitors a radio concert that was wonderful in its variety and beauty. The night happened to be unusually free of the annoying static that is the bugbear of the wireless, and every note of the music was as clear and sweet as though the performers were only a few yards away. Tim and Larry listened as though they were entranced, and when the concert was finished ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... What, hath this dreamer, with his father's ark, The bugbear he hath built to scare the world, Shaken my sister? Are we not the loved Of Seraphs? and if we were not, must we Cling to a son of Noah for our lives? Rather than thus——But the enthusiast dreams The worst of dreams, the fantasies engendered By hopeless love and heated vigils. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... and withdrew, Fay running after him, for she had made friends with him during her days of solitude, being a fearless child, and not having been taught to make a bugbear of him. "The soot won't ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... men were responsible to God alone, and not to priests or Churches, for their opinions and their deeds. It also decided that the Church must be subordinate to the State, not the State to the Church. This is called Erastianism, and is the bugbear of High Churchmen. But there is no escape from the alternative, and the Church of Rome has never abandoned her claim to universal authority. Against it Henry VIII. and Cromwell, Elizabeth and Cecil, set up the supremacy of the law, made ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... have had the wit to see and the energy to adopt the best feature of the American style; and the result has been a distinct advance in the raciness and readableness of some of our best-known journals. The "Americanisation of the British press" is no bugbear to stand in awe of, if only it be carried on with good sense and discrimination. We can most advantageously exchange lessons of sobriety and restraint for suggestions of candour, humour, and point; and America's share in the form of the ideal English reading ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... 'Dear W. W., let it not trouble you! What it may lead to is a bugbear to you. You can't think how much younger and more agreeable you will be when you have learnt that there can be passages that ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the impulsion toward others? May not the intense thrill of a moment more than counterbalance "four lukewarm hours?" Are we not, if we take such things into consideration, back again face to face with something very like the calculus of pleasures—that bugbear of the ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... forward during the progress of these negotiations. In Echo Canon, it had an opportunity to inspect the bugbear of the previous autumn,—the Mormon fortifications. As the canon—which is more than twenty miles long—approaches the Weber River, it dwindles in width from five or six hundred yards to as many feet. Its northern side becomes a perfect wall of rock, which rises perpendicularly to the height ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... remarkable old ale, which one small brewery had ventured on, and which my friends of the 22nd Regiment discovered and (very wisely) drank up.—It may surprise honest fanatics and annoy others to hear that, despite the cheapness and abundance of their bugbear, there was no serious crime of any kind in Guernsey during the six years I knew it, and no disorder worth speaking of, even among sailors ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... was the policy of the time to pacify the merchants, whose bugbear was a negro insurrection in the West Indies; and whether the genius or the fears of Pitt gave way to the impression, the consequence was equally lamentable—the mighty power of England was wasted on the capture of sugar islands, which we did not want, which we could not cultivate, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... was untouched by his sentence he wrote A Hymn to the Pillory. This was bought and read and shouted in the ears of his enemies by thousands of the people. It was a more daring satire than even The Shortest Way. In the end of it Defoe calls upon the Pillory, "Thou Bugbear of the Law," to speak and ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... many cases. The digestion is poor and slow and constipation accompanies it. Sometimes there is neuralgia of the stomach. The sexual organs are seemingly affected, many men are "almost scared to death" and they use all sorts of quack remedies to restore their sexual vigor. Spermatorrhea is their bugbear. They usually get well if they stop worrying. In women there is the tender ovary and the menstruation may be painful or irregular. The condition of the urine in these patients is important. Many cases are complicated with ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... was Miss Burkham's bugbear. She was always endeavoring to instill into the minds of her charges, that a lady never attracts undue attention. The word had been in use so frequently that it had become ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... organs pretend. We do not want to rob our neighbours; all we ask is, to keep the Prussians out of Paris." He said a good deal more which it is needless to repeat, but I willingly fulfil his request, to give my testimony that he, and thousands like him, who are the bugbear of the inhabitants of the richer districts of the city, are not by any means as black as they are painted. They are impulsive and somewhat inclined to exaggerate their own good qualities and the faults of others; they seem to think that anyone who ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... too; and the lot of shillings, and the shawl—ay, and the inquest, and the rumours how that Mrs. Quarles had come to her end unfairly, and no hoards found—and—and the honey-pots missing. Ha! at any rate he'd have a search to-morrow. No bugbear now should hinder him; money's money; he'd ask no questions how it got there. His own bit of garden lay the nearest to Pike Island, and who knows but Ben might have slung a crock this way? It wouldn't do to ask him, though—for Burke might look himself, and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... bugbear Love!" he said shortly. "And so you'd lose a good friend for a dead lover? I' faith, I'd befriend thee well if ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... rabble themselves, in town and country, vied with each other in "burning rumps" of beef, which were hung by chains on a gallows with a bonfire underneath, and proved how the people, like children, come at length to make a plaything of that which was once their bugbear. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... can be dreadful to the bad;* To innocence 'tis like a bugbear dress'd To frighten children. Pull but off the mask, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... talked so candidly, and with such an air of treating the whole business as the bugbear of a timid monarch, that I ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... up the present system, with Cocker,[299] and Walkingame,[300] and always looks down the proposed system. The word decimal is obstinately associated with fractions, for which there is no need. Hence it becomes so much of a bugbear, that, to parody the lines of Pope, which probably suggested one ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... the booty. 'T was then the merry times began, the blunders, an' the laffin', The nudges an' the nods an' winks an' stale good-natured chaffin'. Ole Uncle Hiram Dane was there, the clostest man a-livin', Whose only bugbear seemed to be the dreadful fear o' givin'. His beard was long, his hair uncut, his clothes all bare an' dingy; It wasn't 'cause the man was pore, but jest so mortal stingy; An' there he sot by Sally Riggs a-smilin' an' a-smirkin', An' all his children ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... to do "the correct thing." The fear of not doing it, or the dread of having done it unknowingly, was constantly before her—the bugbear that troubled her daily. Perhaps the daughter inherited the mother's dread, and her fear of doing or saying something that was not just "the correct thing" made her put all the responsibility of conversation on her mother's shoulder. Dexie ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... on board worthy a special chronicle during the day. The men were drilled in various exercises, and gave excellent satisfaction to their officers. The next morning the St. Regis was off Cape Hatteras, and though it is a greater bugbear than it generally deserves, it gave the ship a taste of its quality. The wind had hauled around to the south-west, and was blowing a lively gale. The sails had been furled in the morning watch, and off the cape the course had been ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... indeed a vital need, but it should not be made a bugbear to be greatly feared. The young student imagines he must inflate the lungs almost to bursting, in order that he may take a breath long enough to sing a phrase. Then, as soon as he opens his lips, he allows half the air he has taken in to ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... loitering at Munich, thinking that in both places there was danger of Guy's being led into mischief by his musical connections. Therefore he did his best, for Amabel's sake, to turn them from their purpose, persuaded in his own mind that the fever was a mere bugbear, raised up by Arnaud; and, perhaps, in his full health and strength, almost regarding illness itself as a foible, far more the dread of it. He argued, therefore, in his most provoking strain, becoming more vexatious as the former annoyance was revived at finding ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of my sunshine with your bugbear of a Charles Lamb! "I have heard you for some time with patience. I have been cool,—quite cool; but don't ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... ha! Alas, poor wretch! a poor capocchia! hast not slept to-night? Would he not, a naughty man, let it sleep? A bugbear take him! ...
— The History of Troilus and Cressida • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... had her promise; her mother would expect it, because she had always thought of it as a thing understood; her father would expect it, because Pete's prosperity had given him a new view of Pete's piety and pedigree; and Nancy Joe would expect it, too, if only because she was still haunted by her old bugbear, the dark shadow of Ross Christian. There was only one way to break down these expectations, and that was to speak out. But how was a girl to speak? What ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... plate without spoiling the composition of the picture. This is assuming, of course, that the operator has composed a picture and not put his camera down anywhere. There is no great difficulty in making lantern slides by reduction; the exposure is the only bugbear, as usual. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... bugbear returned next morning, as the Frank emerged from breakfast, claiming praise for his devotion in coming through such weather. The wady to the north of the town was now a raging torrent, he informed them. With his own eyes he ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... lamented over the decay of beggars, "the all sweeping besom of societarian reformation—your only modern Alcides' club to rid time of its abuses—is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity. Scrips, wallets, bags, staves, dogs and crutches, the whole mendicant fraternity with all their baggage are fast hasting out of the purlieus ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... driven me back—would not have received my passing notice; whilst it lasted it prevailed. So, afterwards, when all was calm and over, a crushing sense of wrong and guilt magnified the smallest offence, until it grew into a bugbear to scare me night and day. Leaving Miss Fairman, I rushed into the garden, preparatory to running away from the parsonage altogether. This, in the height of remorseful excitement, presented itself to my mind ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... February, the two vessels were able to resume their voyage, prepared to face all the dangers of the South Sea, and to double Cape Horn, that bugbear of all navigators. As far as Staten Island the weather was uniformly fine, but beyond it the explorers had to contend with extremely violent gales, storms of hail and snow, dense fogs, huge waves, and a swell in which the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... of her husband's niece, as the probate judge had told her she might if she listened to the seduction of immediate cash. And fortunately the bank officer did not ask for money to pay taxes and interest on the mortgages, which had been the bugbear of her married life. This was the next point touched upon ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... the officiating minister resumed the name of priest. The people, now become thoroughly Protestantised, murmured, and thought they saw indications of a return to Rome.** Some protested that all this superabundant care for externals was eating the life out of Protestantism; the bugbear of others was the appeal, now becoming customary, to the Fathers of the Church, rather than to the Protestant divines of the continent.*** St. Augustine was suspect, Calvin ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... theories about instinct incompatible with the doctrine of final causes. It might appear that a philosopher who has re-established the objective existence of space in opposition to Berkeley, was in danger of that materialism which had been Berkeley's bugbear. But Stewart escapes the danger by his assertion that our knowledge of matter is 'relative' or confined to phenomena. Materialism is for him a variety of ontology, involving the assumption that we know the essence of matter. To speak with Hartley of 'vibrations,' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... that long hold on the national imagination in England, either as an idol or a bugbear, which is essential to keep the poet who sings it in effective harmony with new generations of readers. More than this, the Byronic conception was as transitional and inadequate as the methods and ideas of the practical movers, who were to ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... say! Was it Christian Science? Did you dare, Eloise Evringham, did you dare spoil your life—my life—our future, by scaring Dr. Ballard with that bugbear?" The ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... maliciously so, not a man. I cannot love my enemy; for my enemy is not a man, but a beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat him." No equivocation here, surely. On superstition he comments,—"It has been long a bugbear, by reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthusiast in the path of holiness." Herein lies the germ of a truth. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... presently I went away." I think that this species of retaliation is perfectly fair in the case of experimental entertainments. Social gatherings must be conducted on a basis of perfect equality, and the idea of duty in connection with them is a bugbear invented in the interests of those who are greedy of society, and not in a position to contribute any pleasure ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... put on their Sabbath face concerning the declaration of war, and told with approval how the Royal hand had trembled in committing itself to the form of signature to which its action is limited. If there was money to be paid, there was a bugbear to be slain for it; and a bugbear is as obnoxious to the repose of commercial communities as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Regicide. * * * * * But if, to crown the labours of my Muse, Thou, inauspicious, should'st the wreath refuse, Whoe'er attempts it in this scribbling age Shall feel the Scottish pow'rs of Crilic rage. Thus spurn'd, thus disappointed of my aim, I'll stand a bugbear in the road to Fame, Each future author's infant hopes undo, And blast the budding honours of his brow.' He said,—and, grown with future vengeance big, Grimly he shook his scientific wig. To clinch the cause, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... of the atom, a source of energy which, as we have seen, is practically illimitable. If the immense electrical energy in the interior of the atom can ever be liberated and controlled, then our steadily decreasing coal supply will no longer be the bugbear it now is ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... with a Jackson policy must be either a knave or a fool. He could not place himself in the position from which the other fellow was thinking or acting. He believed that it was his duty to maintain what he held to be the popular cause against the "schemes of the aristocrats," the bugbear of that day. He was a fighter from his youth up and his theory of government was that of enforcing the control of the side for which he was the partisan. Such a man could never be accepted as the father of ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... Lee's army, had extended the same principle to all the officers, General Lee included; such a pardon, I understood, would restore to them all their rights of citizenship. But he insisted that the officers and men of the Confederate army were unnecessarily alarmed about this matter, as a sort of bugbear. He then said that Mr. Breckenridge was near at hand, and he thought that it would be well for him to be present. I objected, on the score that he was then in Davis's cabinet, and our negotiations should be confined strictly to belligerents. He then said Breckenridge ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... statement of a monk—of a man who resembles an echo—repeating simply what he hears. I understand that Mazarin is at this very moment extremely uneasy as to the state of affairs; that his orders are not respected like those of our former bugbear, the deceased cardinal, whose portrait as you see hangs yonder—for whatever may be thought of him, it must be ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for many years been the most terrible bugbear, and to prevent its introduction into the seaports of Europe and the United States has been the chief end and aim of the absurd and ridiculous quarantine regulations to which I have referred. It has never ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... need he could be extremely kind and generous; but he did not lavish these qualities on the first comer, nor did he wear his heart upon his sleeve. His informal ways and unconventional dress were a bugbear to some critics; his old waywardness and love of adventure was still alive in him, and he thoroughly enjoyed the more irregular sides of his work. Mr. Bosworth Smith has preserved some capital stories of the crimes with which he had to deal, and how the young collector took an active part in ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... him once for all, through you, that I will come into and go out of this place as often as I like, so long as he keeps Nell here; and that if he wants to be quit of me, he must first be quit of her. What have I done to be made a bugbear of, and to be shunned and dreaded as if I brought the plague? He'll tell you that I have no natural affection; and that I care no more for Nell, for her own sake, than I do for him. Let him say so. I care ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... into the immortal Sellers, Orion became Washington Hawkins, Squire Clemens the judge, while Mark Twain's own personality, in a greater or lesser degree, is reflected in most of his creations. As for the Tennessee land, so long a will-o'the-wisp and a bugbear, it became tangible property at last. Only a year or two before ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the core Who, beckoned by the forward-leaning wave, First left behind him the firm-footed shore, And, urged by every nerve of sail and oar, Steered for the Unknown which gods to mortals gave. Of thought and action the mysterious door, 250 Bugbear of fools, a summons to the brave: Strength found he in the unsympathizing sun, And strange stars from beneath the horizon won, And the dumb ocean pitilessly grave: High-hearted surely he; But bolder they who first off-cast Their moorings from the habitable Past And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... political management, and, instead of being dragged down, as was most feared, their enfranchisement has tended to elevate them. Under our system of the Australian ballot, they have found that the contaminating influence of which they had been told was but a bugbear, born of fright, produced by shadows. They learned that to deposit their vote did not subject them to anything like the annoyance which they often experienced from crowds on "bargain days," while their presence drove from the polls the ward workers ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... jumped on him and pinched and cudgelled him till he roared, the mirth of the honest audience knew no bounds. For there were in the Middle Age two sides to the popular idea of the devil and of all appertaining to him. He was a soul harrowing bugbear or a rib shaking jest according to the hour ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... understanding with him. He went straight to the superintendent-inspector of police, and sat down in his cabinet to concert with him on the best way to suppress, without scandal, the dangerous emissary from ever-restless Poland, lodged in consultation with the Jew, the bugbear of ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... to be their reward. An invitation to other colonies to join in the assertion of English ownership met with scanty response, or none at all. The idea of a union was in the air, but it was complicated with that old bugbear of a regular revenue to be exacted by act of Parliament, which Shirley and the others still continued to press with hungry zeal; while the assemblies were not less set upon making all grants annual, with specifications as ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... believe you will find him to be the bugbear you imagine. He can take defeat like a man. He is devoted to you, he is devoted to me. Your decision no doubt wrecks his fondest hope in life, but it doesn't make ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... this marriage is such a bugbear to me! much might be if we could invent but any way to make ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... the bugbear of two generations of Englishmen; and classical scholars, who interpreted modern politics by the light of ancient Greece, saw in the absorption of Athens by Macedon a convincing demonstration of the fate which the modern barbarian of the north was to inflict ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... it lonely in the cottage, and that the open air would be good for her also. Aunt Ninette was much gratified by this courtesy, and accepted it with pleasure; quite forgetting the noise of the children, which had been so great a bugbear ...
— Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country • Johanna Spyri
... joins us, he will have the animal intended for her. When this bargain was struck between them I thought his eyes looked dangerous, but she didn't notice or didn't care. Fenton tells me he has dreamed again of the red-faced man with the purple moustache. I laughed at his bugbear and flung Colonel Corkran in his teeth. By the way, nothing has been heard of C. by any of us since the day he handed in his resignation. Suppose he has gone back to ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... so as to become indifferent to its action, and therefore non-responsible for it; and it was natural that all who defied the received laws of conduct, or were suspected of doing so, should be stigmatized as his followers. Molinism was a favourite bugbear among the orthodox Romanists of Innocent ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... should they covenant to give no aid to the whilom?? Governor against this new general and army, but if ships should bring the Red Coats they were to withstand them. There is little wonder that "this bugbear did marvellously startle" that body of Virginia horsemen, those progressive gentlemen planters, and others. Yet in the end, after violent contentions, the assembly at Middle Plantation drew up and signed a remarkable paper, ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... won't be such a bugbear as you think. If you were not worried into a morbid condition over all this trouble, you would not look so seriously upon a thing which I regard as a piece of mere night prowling, with a possible spice ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... protected by the monstrous mountains, and the water is tempered by warm currents that flow in from the gulf stream. The national apprehension of both Norway and Sweden that Russia covets one of their seaports has existed a good many years. The bugbear has appeared at intervals for half a century, and a great deal of money has been expended in preparations to meet it. The people are, therefore, cordially patriotic in their support of the army, although many of them emigrate to the United States to ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... proper preventives. The horn of the unicorn, the claw of the griffin, and other relics of equal verity and value, were sought eagerly by those rich enough to procure them, and when obtained were believed to ensure much good fortune to the possessor. A fear of the "evil eye"—that bugbear which still disturbs the happiness of the lower class Italians and of the Eastern nations generally—was carefully provided against. One great preservative was the wearing of a ring with the figure of a ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... roughs will say. "He's tried, And we—well, we're deceived. If we're permitted in this Square To muster there, why should we care? The game has lost its beauty! Licence unfettered is our plan. Who cares a cuss for Rights of Man, Checked by that bugbear Duty?" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... abundantly true, that these persons in all circumstances fare best, and live most comfortably; as first, they are void of all fear, which is a very great privilege to be exempted from; they are troubled with no remorse, nor pricks of conscience; they are not frighted with any bugbear stories of another world; they startle not at the fancied appearance of ghosts, or apparitions; they are not wracked with the dread of impending mischiefs, nor bandied with the hopes of any expected enjoyments: in short, ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... this matter, he procured his recall and subjected him to a State prosecution. In fact, Bismarck believed that under a Republic France would be powerless in war, and, further, that she could never form that alliance with Russia which was the bugbear of his later days. A Russian diplomatist once told the Duc de Broglie that the kind of Republic which Bismarck wanted to see in France was "une ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... needed; and, in our own day, there is on record an instance of a woman commanding a vessel during a long voyage over exceedingly dangerous seas, and bringing it successfully into the desired port. But apart from this, the fact is, the argument is simply used as a bugbear to frighten the timid and deter them from claiming their just position, both social and civil. By law, certain classes of men are exempt from war, except in extreme cases, so that by no means all who vote, now, are expected to fight. Then, women render an equivalent to the State, and risk ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... empire was a mere blank to be filled up by the imaginings of prejudice and hostility. Was it not a task worth setting before oneself, worth pursuing for a lifetime, that of trying to make known to English folk their bugbear ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... else," said Anne cheerfully, "abroad if possible; but I have become a bugbear to Daisy, and it is best ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume |
