"Knavery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... didst find it? I never thought the wide circle of the world had within it another jot for thee. Well, Nol, I see no reason why shouldst stand before me with thy hat off, in the courtyard and in the sun, counting the stones in the pavement. Thou hast some knavery in thy head, I warrant thee. Come, put ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... are still in your knavery, but sith a I cannot have his life I will procure his banishment for ever. Come ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... up and saw a street-hawker who used to come to his shop for a drink, and with whom he had had a violent quarrel about a month previously, she having detected him in a piece of knavery, and abused him roundly in her own style, which was not lacking in energy. He had not seen her since. The crowd generally, and all the gossips of the quarter, who held Derues in great veneration, thought that the woman's cry was intended as an indirect insult, and threatened ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... land system confirmed some of the conditions as set forth by Randolph's report. Stating that the country was "ill peopled" despite the headright system, they explained that "The first great abuse of this design arose from the ignorance and knavery of surveyors, who often gave out drafts of surveys without even coming on the land. They gave their descripton [sic] by some natural bounds and were sure to allow large measure, that so the persons for whom they surveyed should enjoy much ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... upon the Kohong (a company of merchants possessing the monopoly of the European trade,) although the members of this body could have no concern in the transaction." Capt. K. is decidedly of opinion, that nothing but resolute conduct will overcome the fickleness and knavery of the Chinese. He pays a high compliment to our countrymen, especially Mr Drummond, president of the factory, who interfered in his behalf when at Whampoa, and with effect, when they could easily have thwarted his plan, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... Cardinal Duc de Rohan was the only distinguished person deluded by the artifices of the Countess de la Motte, it is certain that Joseph Balsamo, commonly called Alexandre, Count de Cagliostro, was capable of any knavery, however infamous. Guile was his element; audacity was his breastplate; delusion was his profession; immorality was his creed; debauchery was his consolation; his own genius—the genius of cunning—was the god of his idolatry. Had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... superficial contact with the person. How is it to penetrate within? The necessary conditions will be fulfilled when mechanical rigidity no longer requires for its manifestation a stumbling-block which either the hazard of circumstance or human knavery has set in its way, but extracts by natural processes, from its own store, an inexhaustible series of opportunities for externally revealing its presence. Suppose, then, we imagine a mind always thinking of what it has just done and never of what ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... everywhere for his probity; for many years he had been keeping the tavern, and no one either of the peasants or of the gentry had ever made complaint against him to his landlord. Of what should they complain? He had good drinks to choose from; he kept his accounts strictly, but without any knavery; he did not forbid merriment, but would not endure drunkenness. He was a great lover of entertainments; at his tavern marriages and christenings were celebrated; every Sunday he had musicians come from the village, including a bass viol ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... this contention, as well as the essential difference of the spirits animating the Diggers and their opponents, by relating how one of the Colonels of the Army told him—"That the Diggers did work upon Georges Hill for no other end than to draw a company of people into arms; and that our knavery was found out, because it takes not that effect": on which Winstanley ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... James will come in for his share of that, so we haven't much to count on anywhere. I don't know, though," the knitting needle was doing duty in the stocking again, "about taking your money. You were not his wife, you hadn't spent it or connived at his knavery." ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... chance. About the first there clung some flavour of good birth and training, as about a fallen angel; something long, lithe, and courtly in the person; something aquiline and darkling in the face. Thevenin, poor soul, was in great feather: he had done a good stroke of knavery that afternoon in the Faubourg St. Jacques, and all night he had been gaining from Montigny. A flat smile illuminated his face; his bald head shone rosily in a garland of red curls; his little protuberant stomach shook with silent chucklings as ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have, so fatally for their future, carried on this amazing mad war of theirs, in violation of all human instincts of self-respect and self-preservation, to say nothing of the obligations of religion and morality observed among mankind from the first dawnings of civilization. The knavery, the villainy, and the besotted bestiality of it can never be forgotten, and must never be forgiven, and Louis Raemaekers, gifted as he is with the rare dramatic genius that discriminates his Cartoons, has but discharged an obvious patriotic duty in publishing them to the world at large, as ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... folly of Calandrino, who had no call, in seeking to be made whole of the ailment in which his simplicity caused him believe, to publish the privy diversions of his wife; and this hath brought to my mind somewhat of contrary purport to itself, to wit, a story of how one man's knavery got the better of another's wit, to the grievous hurt and confusion of the over-reached one, the which it pleaseth ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... fought for Liberty, rather than Slavery! Well might you wish to be quit of that ill, But you were sold by political knavery, Meshed in diplomacy's spider-like skill: And you rejoice to see Slavery banished, While the free servant works well as before, Confident, though many fortunes have vanished, Soon to ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... age, [19] the man stands before us. We see the crisp, erect figure, bristling with aggressive vigour, the coarse, red hair, the keen, grey eyes, piercingly fixed on his opponent's face, and reading at a glance the knavery he sought to hide; we hear the rasping voice, launching its dry, cutting sarcasms one after another, each pointed with its sting of truth; and we can well believe that the dislike was intense, which could make an enemy provoke the terrible armoury ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... place I could safely revel in his friendship, and as an author I certainly found him a most charming companion. The adventures of his rogue of a hero, who began life as the servant and accomplice of a blind beggar, and then adventured on through a most diverting career of knavery, brought back the atmosphere of Don Quixote, and all the landscape of that dear wonder- world of Spain, where I had lived so much, and I followed him with all ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... return the bulk of the members stayed in the Great Chamber. I was informed that this was one trick among others concerted to ruin me, and, telling the Duc d'Orleans of it, he said that if the old buffoon, the Keeper of the Seals, was concerned in such a complication of folly and knavery, he deserved to be hanged by the side of Mazarin. But the sequel showed that I was not ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... immense capital divided among an immense number of proprietors. It was naturally to be expected, therefore, that folly, negligence, and profusion, should prevail in the whole management of their affairs. The knavery and extravagance of their stock-jobbing projects are sufficiently known, and the explication of them would be foreign to the present subject. Their mercantile projects were not much better conducted. The first trade which they engaged in, was that of ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... cozen; confederacy and dishonesty will doo't without wit. Ile iustifie it: do not you know the receit of Cozenage? take an ounce of knavery at the least,—and confederacie is but so many knaves put together,—then you must take a very fine young Codling heire and pound him as small as ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... devil: nay, 'tis the devil and all. It besets a man in every one of his senses. I lose my appetite at the sight of successful knavery, and sicken to loathing at the noise and nonsense of self-important folly. When the hollow-hearted wretch takes me by the hand, the feeling spoils my dinner: the proud man's wine so offends my palate that it chokes me in the gullet; and the pulvilised, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... only by scrupulous honesty that enduring success can be obtained. Trickery and sharp practice may earn wealth rapidly, but depend upon it they have their reward; for it is a curious fact in the history of man that wealth acquired by knavery rarely stays with its possessors for more than a generation, if ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... Narrative of the Plot; to produce it here would be to swell the volume far beyond its present dimensions. One point, however, must not be omitted. There have been two raids on the Public Record Office, two acts of abstraction and knavery with respect to these Gunpowder Plot papers; and it can be certainly stated, from the extracts made from them by Dr Abbott and Archbishop Bancroft, that the stolen papers were precisely those which proved Garnet's guilt most conclusively. A Manuscript letter from Dr Jardine ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... donation provided he would give me change for it. The object of my beneficence looked keenly in my face, and discerned that I had none of that abominable spirit, characteristic though it be, of a full-blooded Yankee, which takes pleasure in detecting every little harmless piece of knavery. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... should have perfect remedy. He did so, Aristagoras shaved him with his own hands, read his friend's letter, and when he had done, washed it out, that no man should perceive it else, and sent him home to buy him a nightcap. If I wist there were any such knavery, or Peter Bales's brachygraphy,[58] under Sol's bushy hair, I would have a barber, my host of the Murrion's Head, to be his interpreter, who would whet his razor on his Richmond cap, and give him the terrible cut like himself, but he would come as near as a quart pot to the construction of it. ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... red armor was disgusted. "Oh, you tall squinting villain knight of the silver stallion, I wonder from whose court you can be coming, where they teach no better behavior than woman-killing, and I wonder what foul new knavery you can ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... to name our terms, But, whatsoe'er the whims that seize you, This oldest of all mortal firms, Folly and Co., will try to please you. Or, should you wish a darker hue Of goods than we can recommend you, Why then (as we with lawyers do) To Knavery's shop next door we'll send ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... breath, and began again. "I don't see how you can forgive me, or how I can, so to speak, look myself in the face again. I have played the knave so long with you that it is perhaps the greatest knavery I can commit to be honest at last. But I am going to do it, Mary. I want to tell you the whole story. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... I mingle in the wordy war, Where Knavery takes in vice her sly degrees, As slip, away, not guilty, from the bar, Counsel, or client, as their Honors please. To breathe, in crowded courts, a pois'nous breath— To plead for life—to justify a death— To wrangle, ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... else, but practising his father's maxims upon him, and cheating him. JOHNSON. 'I am much pleased with this design; but I think there was no occasion to make the son honest at all. No; he should be a consummate rogue: the contrast between honesty and knavery would be the stronger. It should be contrived so that the father should be the only sufferer by the son's villainy, and thus there ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... white vapour from the cottage hearth, on a morning that is sunny and serene;—if to impart that sober sadness over the spirit, which inclines us to forgive our enemy, that calm philosophy which reconciles us to the ingratitude and knavery of the world, that heavenly contemplation whispering to us, as we look around, that "All is good;"—if these be merits, they are thine, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... tries to patch it up, and is getting the Ordnance for the Duke; but there are scarce any terms kept. Lord Sandwich, who governs the little Duke through the Duchess, is the chief object of the Newcastle hatred. Indeed there never was such a composition! he is as capable of all little knavery, as if he was not practising all great knavery. During the turnpike contest, in which he laboured night and day against his friend Halifax, he tried the grossest tricks to break agreements, when the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... one principle which cements men together in society, could only be upheld by alternate stratagem and force. The unhappy people of India, feeble and effeminate as they are from the softness of their climate, and subdued and broken as they have been by the knavery and strength of civilization, still occasionally start up in all the vigor and intelligence of insulted nature. To be governed at all, they must be governed with a rod of iron; and our empire in the East would, long since, have been lost to ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... then Nation Has made it a Fashion, Let's send for a Black Coat, whilst we're in the Mind. But it is damn'd Slavery, And Priestly Knavery, That Parsons must conjure e're Lovers ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... that assumed name, retired with his portion to a distant part of the New World; where, having quickly squandered it, he once more fell into his old courses, and, after undergoing a long confinement for some fresh act of fraud and knavery, at length sunk under an attack of his old disorder, and died in prison. As far from home, died the chief remaining members of his friend ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... to do it, and, with any good to her memory and fame, my own pain in the attempt would be turned into joy—I should do it at whatever cost: but it is not only unnecessary but absurdly useless—and, indeed, it shall not be done if I can stop the scamp's knavery ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... rules; For they are fops, the other are but fools. Who would not be as silly as Dunbar? As dull as Monmouth, rather than Sir Carr?[52] The cunning courtier should be slighted too, Who with dull knavery makes so much ado; Till the shrewd fool, by thriving too, too fast, Like AEsop's fox becomes a prey at last. 60 Nor shall the royal mistresses be named, Too ugly, or too easy to be blamed, With whom each rhyming fool keeps such a pother, They are as common that way as the other: Yet sauntering ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... me has run up and down mine Country and learn many fine thing, and mush knavery, now more and all dis me know you'll jumbla de fine vench and fill her belly with garsoone, her ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... over the rest of the human species, and one which will serve not only in the case of lovers, but of all others. From whence is it that the knave is generally so quick-sighted to those symptoms and operations of knavery, which often dupe an honest man of a much better understanding? There surely is no general sympathy among knaves; nor have they, like freemasons, any common sign of communication. In reality, it is only because they have the same ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... mention made of the Rover," returned the countryman; "but never to enter into any of the intricate particulars of his knavery." ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Ring. Of its timeless beginning he sang, of its fashioning by cosmic forces, and of its harmony with the stellar plan. Of horses he sang, of their strength, their swiftness, and their docility as to tricks. Of clowns again, of the glory of knavery, and of the eternal type that shall endure. Lastly he sang of Her—the Woman of the Ring—flawless, complete, untrammelled in each subtly curving limb; earth's highest output, time's noblest expression. At least, he doubtless sang all these things and more—he certainly seemed to; though all ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... blood of the Duvillards, after producing three magnificent beasts of prey, had, as if exhausted by the contentment of every passion, ended in this sorry emasculated creature, who was incapable alike of great knavery or great debauchery. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... opera-girl. She had danced herself. She had been a model to the painters. She was brought up as became her mother's daughter. She drank gin with her father, &c. &c. It was a lost woman who was married to a lost man; and the moral to be inferred from Mrs. Bute's tale was, that the knavery of the pair was irremediable, and that no properly conducted person should ever ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the "Third House," as the paid legislative agents were called. Most of the men who wormed their way here and there operated craftily and tried to be diplomatic. Spinney strove by effrontery. As usual, he made the country members his especial prey. The story of his knavery at the State Convention had been smothered in the interests of the party. He reappeared among men with as much assurance as ever. He even approached Harlan Thornton to solicit his support of one bill. It was a measure ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... apprehensions of Witches to a natural melancholique humour, any one that pleased physikally to consider upon the natural humour of Melancholy, according to all the physicians that ever writ thereupon, shall find that that will be over short a cloake to cover their knavery with."[47] ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... shunned me in my adversity, and now very forwardly renewed their acquaintance with me. In short, I had sufficiently seen that the pleasures of the world are chiefly folly, and the business of it mostly knavery, and both nothing better than vanity; the men of pleasure tearing one another to pieces from the emulation of spending money, and the men of business from envy in getting it. My happiness consisted entirely in ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... Riding Estates to Henry Tennant, of Gargrave. The acreage was three hundred and ninety-five acres one rood and the mortgage was concluded for L1,120 for one thousand years. The whole of the money was at once expended; and nearly L500 was appropriated by what Arthur Young called "the knavery ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... Simonist and eke a Courtisan, And here to every peasant and every common man My knavery will very well appear. I called and cried to all who'd give me ear, To nobleman and knight and all above me: "Behold me! And ye'll find ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... these words to the others, Jost Tetzel, Ursula's father, declared them to be sheer lies and knavery; even Uncle Conrad deemed them of little worth; and for this reason: that if the lad had indeed been the son of some grand Emir of Egypt the bear-leader would for certain have made profit of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Wickedness to the Eye at one view: Besides, they fancied some sort of Analogy in the Rotundity of the Figure, with the continued Circular Motion of all Court-Policies, in the stated Round of Universal Knavery. ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... about her game. Living round a college she must of tried her wiles on at least ten graduating classes of young men. Naturally she'd learned technique and feminine knavery. She was still flirty enough. She had a little short upper lip that she could lift with great pathos. And the party hadn't more than landed here when I saw that at last she did have a serious ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... and of his assistance. The committee, incensed by the treachery and appalled by the danger, knew not what course to take. But Clive was more than Omichund's match in Omichund's own arts. The man, he said, was a villain. Any artifice which would defeat such knavery was justifiable. The best course would be to promise what was asked. Omichund would soon be at their mercy; and then they might punish him by withholding from him, not only the bribe which he now demanded, but also the compensation ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... all," he replied. "'Wisdom cries in the streets, and no man regards her.' The small voice of Philosophy was unheard amid the blare of the trumpets that heralded successful knavery; the rabble ran headlong to the devil after gauds ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... dolt, and dizard [fool] of a Northumberland," cried Dr Thorpe in great indignation. "I would the whole Dudley race had never been born! Knavery runs in their blood—'twill not ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... Guy continued, "to shake off that past, reeking with loathsome and dishonorable crimes, but he brought his knavery within these respectable walls—he dared to pay his attentions to your ward, and speak words of forbidden love into her ears, while the crime of having enticed as young and respectable a girl from her comfortable home, to swindle her out of thousands of dollars, ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... out of every dollar that I put into his hands. It would take just about as much evidence to prove that young crows would be black when their feathers are grown, as it would to satisfy the community that these statements are true, especially where he is known. For knavery, untruthfulness, and wickedness, I have never seen anything, in all my business experience of forty years, that will compare with this. He would not have taken such a course with me once, but he took advantage of my age and misfortunes to commit these frauds, ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... of the immense drama which knavery plays in Paris. His lair was the green-room whence theft emerged, and into which roguery retreated. A tattered knave arrived at this dressing-room, deposited his thirty sous and selected, according ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... have been relaxed, and he has made popular speeches wherever he has gone. I hope good fruits will ensue. But he returns to find the people here almost in a state of starvation in the midst of plenty, brought on by the knavery or incompetency of ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... be without the knowledge of God: how miserable death must be without a Saviour. He comes to the man of business, and shows him visions of vast wealth. He whispers, "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me." And that implies false dealing, sharp practice, trickery, knavery. It implies loss of self-respect, loss of honour, the reproaches of an ever-accusing conscience. The tempter comes to the young man or woman, and shows them all the delights of a life of pleasure. They see the ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... which he had lowered himself more in his own eyes than he would have cared to acknowledge, had been so absolutely barren of results. That portion of his moral anatomy which he would have called his conscience pricked him shrewdly now and again, but such pricks had their origin in the fact of his knavery having been unsuccessful. Had his wrong-doing won for him such a prize as he had fondly hoped to gain by its means, Conscience would have let her rusted spear hang unheeded on the wall, and beyond giving utterance now and then to a faint whisper in the dead of night, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... law's labyrinth. At length the measure is filled up, and the malignant power of debt is known. It has opened in the heart every fountain of iniquity; it has besoiled the conscience; it has tarnished the honor; it has made the man a deliberate student of knavery; a systematic practitioner of fraud; it has dragged him through all the sewers of petty passions,—anger, hate, revenge, malicious folly, or malignant shame. When a debtor is beaten at every point, and the law will put her screws upon him, there ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... for human happiness, Alas! for human sorrow; Our Yesterday is nothingness, What else will be our Morrow? Still Beauty must be stealing hearts, And Knavery stealing purses; Still Cooks must live by making tarts, And Wits by making verses; While Sages prate and Courts debate, The same Stars set and shine; And the World, as it roll'd through Twenty-eight, Must roll ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... that after the expiration of the term agreed on, he demands the sum: I ask, What reason or motive have I to restore the money? It will, perhaps, be said, that my regard to justice, and abhorrence of villainy and knavery, are sufficient reasons for me, if I have the least grain of honesty, or sense of duty and obligation. And this answer, no doubt, is just and satisfactory to man in his civilized state, and when trained up according to a certain discipline and education. But ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... me it, I shall make a shift yet, old as I am, To find your knavery: you are sent here, Sirra, To discover certain Gentlemen, a spy-knave, And if ye find 'em, if not by perswasion To bring 'em back, by ...
— Beggars Bush - From the Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... oft useless wounds is giving. For 'tis full of brawls and knavery; Vainly many cats have fallen ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... phenomena] is one to be discussed on its merits, in order to arrive at a distinct opinion how far it may be connected with facts insufficiently appreciated and explained by science, and how far with superstition, delusion, and sheer knavery. Such investigation, pursued by careful observation in a scientific spirit, would seem apt to throw light ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... "the low knavery and the ferocious cruelty incidental to them, the plotting and the lying and the bribing, the blustering and bragging, the screaming egotism, the hurrying and worrying. Of course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of competition—they are but another form of the phrase 'to ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... now a cloak, now a hat, and now a doublet, till the unfortunate colonists were left half naked. In other respects the English treated their captives well,—except two of them, whom they flogged; and Argall, whom Biard, after recounting his knavery, calls "a gentleman of noble courage," having gained his point, returned to ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... near Saint Giles's and the desperate neighbourhood of Saffron Hill in our own time. And yet, on the very site of the sordid tenements and squalid courts we have mentioned, where the felon openly made his dwelling, and the fraudulent debtor laughed the object of his knavery to scorn—on this spot, not two centuries ago, stood the princely residence of Charles Brandon, the chivalrous Duke of Suffolk, whose stout heart was a well of honour, and whose memory breathes of loyalty and valour. Suffolk House, as Brandon's palace ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and friends of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant and the slave, the people linked with kings to rivet on the chains of despotism and superstition. I see folly join with knavery, and together make up public spirit and public opinions. I see the insolent Tory, the blind Reformer, the coward Whig! If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago. The theory ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... perfected, and the means of conveying secret and swift intelligence, by telegraphic science, had not in those days been practised. The art of begging was then only art without science: the native genius of knavery unaided by method or discipline. The consequence was, that the beggars fled before my father's beadles, constables, and overseers; and they were dispersed through other parishes, or led into captivity to roundhouses, or consigned to places called ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... spirit has left it. Perhaps you reply that the soul is there, but in a dormant condition. I answer that this is not so, otherwise how can one account for the condition of clairvoyance, which has fallen into disrepute through the knavery of certain scoundrels, but which can easily be shown to be an undoubted fact. I have been able myself, with a sensitive subject, to obtain an accurate description of what was going on in another room or another house. How can such knowledge be accounted ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Kingsley thinks it right to adopt. Observe this first:—He means by a man who is "silly" not a man who is to be pitied, but a man who is to be abhorred. He means a man who is not simply weak and incapable, but a moral leper; a man who, if not a knave, has everything bad about him except knavery; nay, rather, has together with every other worst vice, a spice of knavery to boot. His simpleton is one who has become such, in judgment for his having once been a knave. His simpleton is not a born fool, but a self-made ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... something earnest, something practical, is a fitful and fantastic and extravagant thing. How poorly prepared are that young man and woman for the duties of to-day who spent last night wading through brilliant passages descriptive of magnificent knavery and wickedness! The man will be looking all day long for his heroine in the tin-shop, by the forge or in the factory, in the counting-room, and he will not find her, and he will be dissatisfied. A man who gives himself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... made in the United States are (as Henry George has shown in his "Social Problems") the result of knavery on a large scale, assisted by the State. In Europe, nine-tenths of the fortunes made in our monarchies and republics have the same origin. There are not two ways ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... king is a proof that I am a fool, the wise men are deserting him. There is knavery in this desertion, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... did inform myself well in things relating to the East Indys; both of the country, and the disappointment the King met with the last voyage, by the knavery of the Portugall Viceroy, and the inconsiderableness of the place of Bombaim, [Bombay.] if we had had it. But, above all things, it seems strange to me that matters should not be understood before they went out; and also that such a thing as this, which ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... "Pardon me, my lord the cauzee, I have been mistaken, the wallet is not mine; but I must away and search for the thief who has stolen my valuable property." Having said this, he ran off, leaving the cauzee, myself, and the spectators bursting with laughter at his impudent knavery. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... effect of the divining rod may be attributed to knavery and credulity by philosophers who will not take the trouble of witnessing and investigating the operation, any one who will pay a visit to the Mendip Hills in Somersetshire, and the country round their base, may have abundant ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... that he will find no occasions of doing any good—the ill company will sooner corrupt him than be the better for him; or if, notwithstanding all their ill company, he still remains steady and innocent, yet their follies and knavery will be imputed to him; and, by mixing counsels with them, he must bear his share of all the blame ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... through that single want, had nearly perished)—they persued a long and dlifficult march through a dreary country, scantily peopled, dotted with robber clans, and exhibiting impediments of all kinds in the knavery and villany of the native authorities; until they reached the borders of Abyssinia. We had by no means been aware that volcanoes had made so large a share of this portion of Africa. The whole border seems to be volcanic, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Battle, And oft return'd with Victory and Triumph; Yet I'm not fond to fight without just Cause, Or shed the Blood of Men for my Diversion; But I have seen, with my own Eyes I've seen, High Provocations from our present Foes, Their Pride and Insults, Knavery and Frauds, Their large Encroachments on our common Rights, Which every Day increase, are seen by all, And grown so common, they are disregarded. What calls on us more loudly for Revenge, Is their Contempt and Breach of public Faith. When we complain, they sometimes promise fair; ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... accordance with the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, is one of two things—a fool who cannot understand the meaning of plain words, or a knave, who, for many reasons, which most of my hearers will understand, pretends to be that which he is not. I may remind you here that knavery is not by any means confined to the limits of what is conventionally termed criminality. For every crime that puts a man or a woman into prison, there are a hundred others committed in every-day life with ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... for the good air, and so much for the view of the country. Thus he built up a tidy fortune with other people's money, became as round as a butt, larded with fat, and was called Monsieur. At the time of the last fair three young fellows, who were apprentices in knavery, in whom there was more of the material that makes thieves than saints, and who knew just how far it was possible to go without catching their necks in the branches of trees, made up their minds to amuse themselves, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... are you going, Great-Heart? "To end the rule of knavery; To break the yoke of slavery; To give the world delivery." Then ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... colors. On their working days they line the principal streets, eyeing the passers-by with a cool, easy indifference, but never losing a chance of business. In Algeria this race is generally thought to present a picture of arrogance, knavery and rank cowardice not equaled on the face of the globe. An English traveler saw an Arab, after maddening himself with opium and absinthe, run a-mok among the shopkeepers who lined the principal street of Algiers. Selecting the Hebrews, he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... discontents, cares, woes, complaints, sickness, diseases, encumbrances, exclamations: "If thou look into the market, there" (saith [1752] Chrysostom) "is brawling and contention; if to the court, there knavery and flattery, &c.; if to a private man's house, there's cark and care, heaviness," &c. As he ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to Ireland and Mr. Moran, the vicious driver of vicious horses, the immediate consequence to him of this unexpected limitation to a pair of horses was, that all his knavery in one hour recoiled upon himself. The horses whom he had himself trained to vice and restiveness, in the hope that thus his own services and theirs might be less in request, now became the very curse of his life. Every morning, duly as an attempt was made to put them ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the more cause they should have stood like honest men. If a rogue be not to hang for deserting his captain and then maligning him, soon would knavery be ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... laughter of my heart that I tip-toed into his greasy privacy. I forced the strong-box at his ear while he sprawled beside his wife. He was my butt, my ape, my jumping-jack. And now . . . O fool, fool! [Duped by such knaves as are a shame to knavery, crime's rabble, hell's tatterdemalions!] Shorn to the quick! Rooked to my vitals! And I must thieve for my daily bread like any crawling blackguard in the gutter. And my sister . . . my kind, innocent sister! She will come smiling to ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... caps, and golden rings, With ruffs, and cuffs, and farthingales and things; With scarfs, and fans, and double change of bravery, With amber bracelets, beads, and all this knavery. Taming of the Shrew, Act iv. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... see that these things are properly done. (DAVUS goes into the house.) What's the meaning of this? What does this old rogue mean? But if there's any knavery here, why, he's sure to be the source of the mischief. ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... pounds and five shillings sterling; but Captain Baker refused to give me one farthing, although it was the hardest-earned money I ever worked for in my life. I found out Doctor Irving upon this, and acquainted him of the captain's knavery. He did all he could to help me to get my money; and we went to every magistrate in Kingston (and there were nine), but they all refused to do any thing for me, and said my oath could not be admitted against a white man. Nor was this all; for Baker threatened that he would ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... desires to know why he is here; but "science," as that word is now understood, does not profess or even seek to answer that question, although the false hope has been raised in ignorant minds, sometimes by knavery, sometimes by honest delusion, that it could do so. By knowledge of nature mankind can escape much suffering and gain the highest happiness, but that is all that we can hope for from it. We shall never satisfy our curiosity; we shall never know in the same way as we know the order ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... penniless youth to sue a lady with a fortune, even though it was (the Brithwoods took care to publish the fact) smaller than was at first supposed—would, in the eye of the world's honour, be not very much unlike knavery. ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... doubloons in his money-bags I think that La Chesnaye's servile nature would have bargained to send souls in job lots blindfold over the gangplank. But, as La Chesnaye said when Pierre Radisson remonstrated against the knavery, the gin was nine ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... payments given them, and for greater convenience and shortening of their own labors. Consequently, these people are not separated on account of their aforesaid customs, nor of the danger and opportunity offered them for connivance and knavery. They could burn the city in a night; and should they rise, they could before the blow was felt kill with their weapons many of the persons who keep and permit them to stay in their own houses, finding them asleep and unaware; and they know ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume IX, 1593-1597 • E. H. Blair
... sympathized with Louise's awful grief in being thrown adrift on Paris through the violent disappearance of her beloved sister. He trembled to think what knavery his wicked kinsfolk meant, though he himself was their helpless slave; the target of kicks, cuffs, and the ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... And it is, believe me, it is the miserable, wretched independence in small things, the paltry republicanism which recoils from honest service to an honest man, but does not shrink from every trick, artifice, and knavery in business, that makes these slaves necessary, and will render them so, until the indignation of other ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... have more to ask. Their faction is their religion; nor are those combinations ever entered into upon real and substantial motives of conscience, how erroneous so ever, but consist of many glutinous materials, of will, and humour, and folly, and knavery, and malice, and ambition, which make men cling inseparably together till they have satisfaction in all their pretences, or till they are absolutely broken and subdued, which may always be more easily done than the ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... those days when great men thought that what is falling in decay must be built afresh. Great contention arose therefrom, much knavery, much disillusion; finally the whole ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... arrangements, they were rather indignant at the whole movement, or else availed themselves effectively of the deaf-ear policy, which has now become the trusty weapon of all very superior opposition. But this proves that their animosity and knavery were ineffectual in destroying Wagner's spirit or in hindering the accomplishment of his plans; it proves even more, for it betrays their weakness and the fact that all those who are at present in possession of power will not be ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and his son, are subordinate but not uninteresting instruments in the development of the plot, and though last, not least, comes Autolycus, a very pleasant, thriving rogue; and (what is the best feather in the cap of all knavery) he escapes ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... let us rejoice, In peace and loyalty, And still despise the factious noise Of those that vainly try To undermine our happiness, That they may by it get; Knavery has great increase When ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... Against the lady I say nothing. Indeed, I have heard some things which appear to entitle her to compassion and respect. But as to Peschiera, all who prize honor suspect him to be a knave—I know him to be one. Now, I think that the longer we preserve that abhorrence for knavery which is the generous instinct of youth, why, the fairer will be our manhood, and the more reverend our age. You agree with me?" And Harley suddenly turning, his eyes fell like a flood of light upon ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... one man that may have been shot or hanged, there will have been a hundred who have gained the confidence of the British to betray it either to their own use or that of the enemy. No one could ever know or assess the extent of the knavery which has arisen, flourished, and grown fat in this long-protracted war. And what a field for sharps and knaves! Was not the control of the whole country in the hands of straightforward and fair-thinking English officers,—men whose word was their bond, and ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... that no keeper of a sailors' boarding house or hotel, and no runner or person interested in one, could board an incoming vessel until after it reached its dock. This to protect aliens from imposition and knavery. ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... all this. Here you may securely display your utmost rhetoric against mankind in the face of the world; tell them that all are gone astray; that there is none that doeth good, no, not one; that we live in the very dregs of time; that knavery and atheism are epidemic as the pox; that honesty is fled with Astraea; with any other common-places equally new and eloquent, which are furnished by the splendida bills {56c}; and when you have done, the whole audience, far from being offended, shall return you thanks as a deliverer of precious ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... of a London merchant, who was once very wealthy, but became bankrupt and died, leaving his daughter L200 a year. This annuity, however, she loses through the knavery of her man of business. When reduced to penury, her old lover, Henry Morland (supposed to have perished at sea), makes his appearance and marries her, by which she becomes the Lady Duberly.—G. Coleman, The ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... the fear of death, the parting from a tender wife, and all the gloomy solemnity of the last morning. But whose heart was to bleed at the thought that Charles Duncombe, who was born to carry parcels and to sweep down a counting-house, was to be punished for his knavery by having his income reduced to eight thousand a year, more than most ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful. The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander, he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth. An epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character does not good, but very great harm. The soul of ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... Occasions,' as Othello styles them—those 'rough and ready' to choke ideas, as the bud is bit by the venomous worm 'ere it can spread its sweet leaves to the air.' I was about to encounter the assailing eyes of knavery. A gentleman of the administration welcomed me in. 'Sir,' I said, coldly, 'I was invited to meet the prefect of the police. I wish to know what is deemed an outrage to the established government ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... their vulgar pietisms and their vulgar materialism, Sludge after all is less the wronger than the wronged. Who made him what he is? Who, keen and clear-sighted enough in fields which they had not selected as their special parade-ground for self-conceit, trained him on to knavery and self-degradation? Who helped him through his blunders with ingenious excuses—"the manifestations are at first so weak"; or "Sludge is himself disturbed by the strange phenomena"; or "a doubter is in the company, and the spirits ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... few hundred of poorly-paid and over-worked artisans. Education in the hands of the poor would be a powerful agent with which they would alleviate their own condition, and defend themselves against oppression and knavery. ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... a master hand we watch with bated breath the unfolding of a story of unparalleled interest. Ever the unexpected happens, surprise follows surprise, plot is succeeded by counterplot. Vice and virtue, honor and knavery, true love and duplicity, struggle desperately and incessantly for mastery until the mind is bewildered and the heart and soul are ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... thistles in a remote place and burned it; and what was left of the bones and ashes they threw into the Tiber. So perished Rienzi, a being who was not a man, but a strangely responsive instrument, upon which virtue, heroism, courage, cowardice, faith, falsehood and knavery played the grandest harmonies and the wildest discords in mad succession, till humanity was weary of listening, and silenced the harsh music forever. However we may think of him, he was great for a moment, yet however great we may think him, he was little in all but his first dream. Let him ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... logical protest from Grandier and the barefaced knavery of the exorcist, M. de Laubardemont prepared a report of the expulsion of the three devils, Asmodeus, Gresil, and Aman, from the body of sister Jeanne des Anges, through three wounds below the region of the heart; a report which was afterwards shamelessly used against Grandier, and of which the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... fooling Fleet-wood, in the deserting of Dick; by dissolving the honest Parliament, and bringing in the odious Rump? how cou'd I have flatter'd Ireton, by telling him Providence brought thingsabout, when 'twas mere Knavery all; and that the Hand of the Lord was in't, when I knew the Devil was in't? or indeed, how cou'd I now advise you to be King, if I had started at Oaths, or preferr'd Honesty or Divinity before Interest and the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... the captive's own fault that he was taken. Frequently he was serving on a vessel of a power then at war with Algiers. The system of passes for the Mediterranean opened the way to a good deal of knavery; ships sailed under false colours, or, being themselves at war with Algiers, carried passes purchased from her allies. The Algerines were shy of contracting too many alliances, lest there should be no nation to prey upon, and we read ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... of St. Jago, with those of the neighbouring islands, are mostly black, or of a mixed colour, very encroaching in their manners, and much addicted to knavery. The island is extremely rocky and uneven, but the vallies are fertile. The inhabitants raise cotton, and they have several sugar works; the quantity they raise of both, does not, however, much exceed their own consumption, but there is no doubt that it might be considerably ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... unsuccessful, when directed against partially developed truths, or even against such phenomena as we believe mesmerism presents, viz. novel and curious psychical truths, o'erclouded with the dense errors of sometimes enthusiasm, sometimes knavery. We shall soberly examine the subject, because we think that much good may be done by its investigation. The really skilful and judicious steer clear of it from a fear of compromising their credit for commonsense; and while the caution necessarily attendant upon habitual scientific ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... no more the cotton boll o'er fields of Carolina, And fills with snowy flosses the dusky hands of Dinah; Till war has dealt its final blow, and Mr. Seward's knavery Has put an end in all the land to ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... his pockets without ceremony, ridiculed him to his face, traduced his character, and exposed him in a thousand ludicrous attitudes for the diversion of the public; while at the same time he knew their knavery, saw their drift, detested their morals, and despised their understanding. He was so infatuated by indolence of thought, and communication with folly, that he would have rather suffered himself to be led into a ditch ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... in his pocket, runs with all speed to inform his brother of the success of his treachery. This was the old Beschadeddin, our acquaintance, who, though he pretended to be a Mussulman, had always remained an Infidel. It was he who had excited his brother to all this knavery, in order that he himself might if possible gain possession of Smaragdine. He now took his people with him, provided himself with gold, mounted his mule, and repaired directly to Alischar's habitation. His slaves seized Smaragdine by force, threatening her with instant ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... and Pretender Great Britain defend her, Foes let them fall; From foreign slavery, Priests and their knavery, And Popish ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... countries. His all, with the exception of one diamond, worth about five or six thousand pounds sterling, was invested in the French soil; and when he left that country, he left it almost a beggar. This fact alone ought to rescue his memory from the charge of knavery, so often and so unjustly ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... began to play at Vingt-et-un with the cards above described, which were certainly "free from dust and straw,"[12] as we say, but by no means free from grease and knavery; and after a few deals, Cortado could turn up an ace as well as Rincon his master. When things had attained this point, it chanced that a Muleteer came out at the porch, and, as Rincon had anticipated, he soon proposed to make a third ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... never saw his like either in Heaven Or upon earth for knavery or craft:— Out of the field my cattle yester-even, 445 By the low shore on which the loud sea laughed, He right down to the river-ford had driven; And mere astonishment would make you daft To see the double kind of footsteps strange He has impressed wherever ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of prosperous villany, with the paint and washes of a mercenary wit; never did he spare a sop for being rich, or flatter a knave for being great. He had a wit that was accompanied with an unaffected greatness of mind, and a natural love to justice and truth; a wit that was in perpetual war with knavery, and ever attacking those kind of vices most, whose malignity was like to be the most dissusive, such as tended more immediately to the prejudice of public bodies; and were a common nusance to the happiness of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... are the titles of some of his works, viz. Collections in Defence of the King. Toleration Discussed. Relapsed Apostate. Apology for Protestants. Richard against Baxter. Tyranny and Popery. Growth and Knavery. Reformed Catholic. Free-born Subjects. The Case Put. Seasonable Memorials. Answer to the Appeal. L'Estrange no Papist; in answer to a Libel, intitled L'Estrange a Papist, &c. with Notes and Animadversions upon Miles Prance, Silver-Smith, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... hail! Grant it that one of your political measures is rank imbecility, your acts in exposing the essential knavery of our phenomenal humbugs are beautiful and full of goodness and wisdom. And your worst, in the face of all jibes, is so incomparably superior to those of the "great statesmen" that they may be esteemed actually respectable. When the two parties had become Leaderless Mobs, because even their ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... indolence increases their propensity to stealing and cheating. They seek to avail themselves of every opportunity to satisfy their lawless desires. Their universal bad character, therefore, for fickleness, infidelity, ingratitude, revenge, malice, rage, depravity, laziness, knavery, thievishness, and cunning, though not deficient in capacity and cleverness, renders them people of no use in society. The boys will run like wild things after carrion, let it stink ever so much, and where a mortality happens among the cattle, there these wretched creatures ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... above the rest—calling in the Americaine tongue. Another man, big and red, named Joe, and a handsome little Creole in elegant dress and full of laughter, wish to stop him, but the flatboatmen, ha-ha-ing and cheering, will not suffer it. Ah, through some shameful knavery of the men into whose hands he has fallen, he is drunk! Even the women can see that; and now he throws his arms wildly and raises his voice until the whole great circle hears it. He ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... that you are my father's grandson, after a menace like that, I would take you out and cane you in the presence of your clerks. I repeat, sir, that I consider you guilty of treachery, falsehood, and knavery. And if I ever see you at Bays's Club, I will make the same statement to your acquaintance at the west end of the town. A man of your baseness ought to be known, sir; and it shall be my business to make men of honour aware of your character. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist quietly on the table. "I'll tell you why. Because you drummed nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the time they wore knickerbockers; because you carped away at them as you've been carping here tonight, holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their models, as our grandfathers held up George Washington and John ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... and Zacchias, Velchius, and Sinibaldus mention eases. Pare seemed to be well conversant with the possibility as well as the actuality of superfetation; and Harvey reports that a certain maid, gotten with child by her master, in order to hide her knavery came to London in September, where she lay in by stealth, and being recovered, returned home. In December of the same year she was unexpectedly delivered of another child, a product of superfetation, which proclaimed the crime that she ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The Iago of Bensley did not go to work so grossly. There was a triumphant tone about the character, natural to a general consciousness of power; but none of that petty vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any little successful stroke of its knavery—as is common with your small villains, and green probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow before its time. It was not a man setting his wits at a child, and winking all the while at other children who are mightily pleased at being let ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... and methods in a more guarded form, said the other side. Beyond question, there was in Louisiana, at all stages of reconstruction, some degree of terrorism, and occasional acts of cruelty and outrage. There was knavery among the Radicals, and there was violence among the Conservatives. At the 1874 election the Conservatives were successful at the polls; but the State returning-board at once began to juggle with the returns so palpably ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... many to ignore, a few to challenge or charm,—as we pass. And what lessons of fortune and of character are written thereon,—the blush of innocence and the hardihood of recklessness, the candid grace of honor and the mean deprecatory glance of knavery, intelligence and stupidity, soulfulness and vanity, the glad smile of friendship, the shrinking eye of fallen fortune, the dubious recognition of disgrace, the effrontery of the adventurer, and the calm, pleasant bearing of rectitude,—all that is beautiful and base in humanity, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... KNAVERY.—We may form habits of honesty, or knavery; truth, or falsehood; of industry, or idleness; frugality, or extravagance; of patience, or impatience; self-denial, or self-indulgence; of kindness, cruelty, politeness, rudeness, ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... principle of damned knavery and thieving," he cried, "and if I thought anyone ran my business on it, they'd go out of my employ at once! It's at the root of all the corruption that exists in modern trade. It salves the conscience of the psalm-singing ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... to get the ex-teller "in bad" by sending the cheque so soon? It would, thought Nelson, be perfectly in harmony with the Banfield manager's knavery. Probably Henty had quit, suddenly; and, angered, Penton had sought revenge on Henty's old associate. However, there was no harm done, thought Evan; and he dismissed the matter from his mind—the cash book ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... as in most large ships, we had a number of bad characters—runaway apprentices, lawyers' clerks, broken-down tradesmen, footmen dismissed for knavery, play-actors, tinkers, gipsies, pickpockets, thieves of all sorts; indeed, the magistrates on shore seemed to think nothing was too bad to send on board a man-of-war. These men were, of course, always ready for mischief of any sort. There is no denying it, ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston |
