"Plague" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that to the public mind there is a more lurid and spectacular menace in such diseases as small-pox, yellow fever and plague, medical men and public health workers are beginning to realize that, with the warfare against such maladies well organized, it is now time to give attention to the heavy loss from lowered physical efficiency ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... foreign ambassadors, under pain of death! The terror inspired by this was such, that not only the ministers of the court, but their secretaries and domestics, fled from the ambassadors as if they were infected with the plague. This decree had numerous results, and among others, one that was attended ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 369, Saturday, May 9, 1829. • Various
... enough to take care of myself I went to Silver Bayou. . . . Many people in that town had died; some still survived. I found the parish records. I found one of the camp doctors who remembered that accursed year of plague—an old man, withered, indifferent, sleeping his days away on the rotting gallery of his tumble-down house. He knew. . . . And I found some of the militia still surviving; and one among them retained a ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... reals, reached the price of twelve pesos. In La Estacada there was a great conflagration on Good Friday, in the night, which destroyed many houses. In the following year the scarcity of food was increased by a plague of locusts, which swept away all [vegetation]; and a caban of rice came to be worth twenty and twenty-four reals. But what caused the most suffering was the havoc made by the catarrh, in the year 1687-88; it was a sort of epidemic sickness, which killed many persons, especially ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... pitiful coward—unjustly, because, nurtured as she had been on the proprieties, surrounded all her days by men and women of a class most sensitive to public opinion, who feared the breath of scandal worse than a plague, confession for her must mean a shame unspeakable. What! Admit that she, Dorothea Westcote, had loved a French prisoner almost young enough to be her son! that she had given him audience at night! that he had been shot ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Kirk o' Field. It has a fine garden, and is in a position that is deemed the healthiest about Edinburgh. I need good air; good air and baths have been prescribed me to cleanse me of this plague. Kirk o' Field will serve, if it ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... vourteen men, zome years agoo, A-kept a-drashen half the winter drough; An' now, woone's drashels be'n't a bit o' good. They got machines to drashy wi', plague teaeke em! An' he that vu'st vound out the way to meaeke em, I'd drash his busy zides vor'n if I could! Avore they took away our work, they ought To meaeke us up ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... soul liveth I will not receive A gift from thee, my son! Give all to Him Whose mercy hath redeemed thee from thy plague. ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... terrible. Nation against nation plotting and deceiving; internal strife and outward dangers. These are of a kind to appal one in reading them. Then come the temporal or physical evils. These are to be a horrible train of ills in the form of pestilence, famine, and earthquakes. The plague of yellow fever is as nought to some of the scourges that will then go forth. Gibbon, the historian, tells of a plague that swept away two-thirds of Europe and Asia. At that time the dead lay unburied by thousands. In Constantinople, for three months, five and even ten thousand persons ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... Heresy was a plague-spot, an ulcer to be eradicated with fire and the knife, and this foul abomination was infecting the shores which the Vicegerent of Christ had given to the King of Spain, and which the Most Catholic King had given to the ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the jungle scene there appeared a picture of a man in a dark undress uniform, beside a great bay, in which were ships of war. Wooden huts, as in a plague district, were on shore. Mr. Bissett asked, 'What is the man's expression?' 'He looks as if he had been giving a lot of last orders.' Then appeared 'a place like a hospital, with five or six beds—no, berths: it is a ship. Here is the man again.' He was minutely described, one peculiarity ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... instrument in Eleanor's living-room. Most of the day she spent answering that telephone. People of whom she had never even heard, made anxious inquiries about the condition of Mr. Chester. Before night the newspapers became a plague. For in the afternoon, winged reporters, shot out in volleys for a "second day story," had called at 2196 Valencia and found there no Sadie Brown. Hurrying down the back trail to the Emporium, they did discover ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... from the pained sympathy of friendship to the scientific zeal of character study. "Girls, have you noticed Mary Winchester lately? It is the strangest thing! She seems more alone and alien than ever. The girls avoid her as if she had the plague. In the library and the corridor to-day it was as plain as could be. They stop talking when she comes around. They watch her all the time though they try not to let her know it. Of course, she couldn't help feeling it. They ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... made up his mind that it must be the Firepan, and he could feel his pulse quicken as he started up it with Baree. He must be quite near to Tavish's cabin, if it had not been destroyed. Even if it had been burned on account of the plague that had infested it, he would surely discover the charred ruins of it. It was three o'clock when he started up the creek, and he was—inwardly—much agitated. He grew more and more positive that he was close to the end of his adventure. He would soon ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... between the English and French, England was visited by the Black Death, a plague that came from Asia and bade fair to depopulate the country. London lost fifty thousand people, and at times there were hardly enough people left to bury the dead or till the fields. This contagion occurred in 1349, and even attacked ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... wife; he, who had always until then deferred so to her will, now swayed only by his passion for this gay young widow, lighter than thistle-down! She had promised herself to keep watch over the present, and there was the past coming back to plague her. But ought she to speak? Her life in the household was one of silent reproach and protest; she kept herself almost constantly imprisoned in her chamber, devoting herself rigidly to the observances of her austere religion. Now, however, the wrong ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... tailor makes me wait a long time on a day like this, when I have so much business to attend to. I am furious. May the deuce fly away with the tailor! May the plague choke the tailor! May the ague shake that brute of a tailor! If I had him here now, that rascally tailor, that wretch of ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... I know that I am answerable. I am a sick man, sick to death, sir, of the horrible life I have been forced to lead for the past two years, and I come to you ready to render you every assistance I can give in clearing away this plague spot." ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... This plague is so common that instances of the first form of dishonoring are very seldom seen. This is due to the fact that the parents are blinded, and neither know nor honor God according to the first three Commandments; hence ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... the waves, the louder rang the warning bell, until it was cut off and sunk by wicked Ralph the Rover. One fine day, as the story goes, when the bell was ringing gently, the pirate put out to the rock, saying, "I'll sink that bell and plague the Abbot of Aberbrothok." So he cut the rope, and down went the bell "with a gurgling sound; the bubbles rose and burst around," etc. Then "Ralph the Rover sailed away; he scoured the seas for many a day; and now, grown rich with plundered ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... the sea for the good of his health, having sadly overworked himself; and that none but a poor devil like himself, who never had handling of money, would stay in London this foul, hot weather; which was likely to bring the plague with it. Here was another new terror for me, who had heard of the plagues of London, and the horrible things that happened; and so going back to my lodgings at once, I opened my clothes and sought for spots, especially as being so long at a hairy fellmonger's; but finding none, I fell down ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Dying myriads are around you. As a member of the Christian priesthood, it becomes you to rush in with your censer and incense between the living and the dead, "that the plague may ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... the other hand, the divine Litany of our English Church, when breathing forth supplications, as if in some representative character for the whole human race prostrate before God, places such a death in the very van of horrors. "From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death,—Good Lord, deliver us." Sudden death is here made to crown the climax in a grand ascent of calamities; it is the last of curses; and yet, by ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... flight. His partisans forsook their arms, and took refuge at the altars. Seduced from this security by fallacious promises, they were brought to judgment and all of them put to death. The Gods were said to be offended with this violation of the sanctions of religion, and sent a plague upon the city. All things were in confusion, and sadness possessed the whole community. Prodigies were perpetually seen; the spectres of the dead walked the streets; and terror universally prevailed. The sacrifices ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... too hot For the French and Bavarians, who had all gone to pot, But that they thought best in great haste to retire, And leap into the water for fear of the fire. But says the good river, Ye fools, plague confound ye, Do ye think to swim through me, and that I'll not drown ye? Who have ravish'd, and murder'd, and play'd such damn'd pranks, And trod down the grass on my much-injured banks? Then, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... famine. Sometimes they determined to starve me, or at least to shoot me in the face and hands with poisoned arrows, which would soon despatch me: but again they considered that the stench of so large a carcase might produce a plague in the metropolis, and probably ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... admitted that while nations may be destroyed by conquest, or by conquering too much and becoming absorbed by the conquered, and that ancient buildings may be pulled down or restored, so, too, conventions in literature and schools of art have been brought to an end by war, plague, or death—ostensibly brought to an end. But it is an error to suppose that art or literature, because their development was artificially arrested, were ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... Aurengzebe,—palaces of the Mogul and the Kathayan Khan,—pigmies, monkey-gods, mummies, Fakeers, dancing-girls, tattooed warriors, Thugs, cannibals, Fetishes, human sacrifices, and the Evil Eye,—Chinese politeness, Bedouin honor, Bechuana simplicity,—the plague, the amok, the bearding of lions, the graves of hero-travellers, flowers in the desert, and the universal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Apollo. She was famed for her beauty and her embroidery. During the Trojan war Chryseis was taken captive and allotted to Agamemnon king of Argos, but her father came to ransom her. The king would not accept the offered ransom, and Chryses prayed that a plague might fall on the Grecian camp. His prayer was answered, and in order to avert the plague Agamemnon sent the lady back to her father not only without ransom but ...
— 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 towns of the equinoctial continent it does not attach itself to certain streets; and that immediate contact* does not augment the danger, any more than seclusion diminishes it. (* In the oriental plague (another form of typhus characterised by great disorder of the lymphatic system) immediate contact is less to be feared than is generally thought. Larrey maintains that the tumified glands may be touched or cauterized without danger; but he thinks ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... instance," Zhmuhin went on. "We had the Siberian plague here, you know—the cattle die off like flies, I can tell you—and the veterinary surgeons came here, and strict orders were given that the dead cattle were to be buried at a distance deep in the earth, that lime was to be thrown ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... been vitally affected by natural calamities. The former of these calamities was inevitable by human prudence, and uncontrollable by human skill; the latter was to be foreseen at any distance by the most ignorant, and to be avoided by the most unwary. I mean in the first the Plague of the Athenians; in the second the starvation of the French. The first happened under the administration of a man transcendently brave; a man cautious, temperate, eloquent, prompt, sagacious, above all that ever guided ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... abhorred the gods of mankind, and by their absence and melancholy on these solemn festivals, seemed to insult or to lament the public felicity. If the empire had been afflicted by any recent calamity, by a plague, a famine, or an unsuccessful war; if the Tyber had, or if the Nile had not, risen beyond its banks; if the earth had shaken, or if the temperate order of the seasons had been interrupted, the superstitious ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... a rucktious one from their cradles up, and the plague of nusses. You may cosset and cordial 'em up as you will; though you calls 'em "blessings", you finds 'em cusses. Many a monthly they've worritted out of her life, almost, with their fractious snarlings, Though it's most as much as your place is worth to aggerawate 'em—the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... after the completion of the picture, a terrible plague overran the good city, and how could we expect that the afflicted monks, forsaken by all the world and in fear of death, should think of the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... bringing his truck to a stand. 'Well, yes, something like it. Now-a-days the soldiers are the worst plague, and it was one of them that put an end to the miller's ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... it worth to direct public attention to the dangers of a practice which threatens to develop into an epidemical kind of plague, and carry the deteriorating trails of a serpent over our household families, unless promptly scotched by benevolent firmness ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... A PLAGUE OF ANTS. A correspondent has suffered for years from annual raids of ants that literally swarm over everything and everywhere. "Last year," says this lady, "they killed ever so many plants, from Pansies ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... of theories were advanced regarding this worm plague. Some said they had rained down in cell or germ form; others, that they had developed with the sudden moisture from some peculiar embryo in the dry soil. Finding from my own further observation that they were segregated in the damper sections where the soil had ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... first visit to India, and my first impression was certainly not a good one. The heat was intense, and signs of the plague were discernible everywhere. The streets were deserted and the hotels bad and dirty for want of servants, who had abandoned the town in fear ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... mystery—no charm for the detective's mind. I was thinking that naughty boys who plague little girls often become wicked men. Now, what do ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... for not kissing the two godmothers presently after the christening, before I kissed the mother, which made good mirth; and so anon away, and my wife and I took coach and went twice round Bartholomew fayre; which I was glad to see again, after two years missing it by the plague, and so home and to my chamber a little, and so to supper and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... other note will have told you when the change began—I think I took too violent a shower bath, with a notion of getting better in as little time as possible,—and the stimulus turned mere feverishness to headache. However, it was no sooner gone, in a degree, than a worse plague came. I sate thinking of you—but I knew my note would arrive at about four o'clock or a little later—and I thought the visit for the quarter of an hour would as effectually prevent to-morrow's meeting as if the whole two hours' blessing had been laid to heart—to-morrow I shall ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... whether your prayers are heard, and a good old saint, though a little in your way, is yet in Heaven. But remember, Matt., you can never be without plague, and when one gets out of the way, a worse, very often, supplies its place; so, I tell you again, be content, and hope ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... began to lead a new life, for it was cleaned up, newly leathered and suckered, and kept in a barn, from which it was dragged year after year to put out a plague as ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... Earthquake and plague, storm, fight and fray, portents and curses man must deem Since he regards his self alone, nor cares to trace the ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... forms of life—so gay, kindly, and suggestive—I saw some thirty years ago, just before they sank under the mammonism, commonplace, critical apery, and cold material self-seeking, which have hitherto been the plague of the present generation. We have become more practical and knowing than our forefathers, but not so wise. We are now a "fast people;" but we miss the true goal of life—that is, sober happiness. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... feel that there is no longer any room in the world for the German. Society has organized itself against the rattlesnake and the yellow fever. Shepherds have entered into a conspiracy to exterminate the wolves. The Boards of Health are planning to wipe out typhoid, cholera and the Black Plague. Not otherwise, lovers of their fellow man have finally become perfectly hopeless with reference to the German people. They have no more relations to the civilization of 1918 than an orang-outang, a ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... by Moses, Exodus 30:12, sufficiently satisfy the reason here given by Josephus for the great plague mentioned in this chapter:—"When thou takest the sum of the children of Israel after their number, then shall they give a ransom for his soul unto the Lord, when thou numberest them; that there be no plague amongst them, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... set at any hour. Merchants who purchased quarried and dressed stones prayed that there might be as many criminals in the quarries as possible, while provision contractors lay on their stomachs, sighing for the plague to kill laborers, and make their own profits as large ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... diseases caused by insects, an affection of the eyes called pink-eye is carried by very tiny flies, and the dreaded bubonic plague is supposed to be transferred from sick people to well ones by the bites of fleas, which in turn are brought ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... those who preach dissent, And at the stake teach wretches to repent. Clad cap-a-pie in mail we'll face our foes, And arm our British soldiery with bows. Dirt and disease shall rule us as of yore, The Plague's grim spectre stalk from shore to shore. Proceed, brave BALFOUR, whom no flouts appal, Collect stupidities and do them all. Uneducate our men, unplough our land, Bid heathen temples rise on every hand; Unmake our progress ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... "Plague take that gong! how it does belabor and thrash one's tympanum!" said the judge irritably, as he slowly arose ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... unavoidable. Both instinctively dreaded with a pleasurable dread the shock of speech. In a way this was the first time the two had been alone with any chance of a seclusion protracted beyond a very few minutes. In the house was Aunt Harriet Eustace, who feared a rose, as she might have feared the plague, and, moreover, as Annie comfortably knew, had imparted the knowledge to Von Rosen as they had walked down the pergola, that ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... death of Caleb Price, was not so valuable as to plague the patron with many applications. It continued vacant nearly the whole of the six months prescribed by law. And the desolate parsonage was committed to the charge of one of the villagers, who had occasionally ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... conceptions, by suggesting comparison with strange notions. This aspect of the work led the rabbis of Palestine and Babylon in later days, when the spread of Hellenized Judaism was fraught with misery to the race, to regard it as an awful calamity, and to recount a tale of a plague of darkness which fell upon Palestine for three days when it was made;[22] and they observed a fast day in place of the old Alexandrian feast on the anniversary of its completion. They felt as the old Italian proverb has it, Traduttori, traditori! ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... least as difficult to stay a moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignity and rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed in the most unlikely constitutions: is a fact as firmly established by experience as that we human ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... of the same humour I will not pity you, lame as you are; and to speak truth, if you did like it, you should not have it, for you do not deserve it. Would any one in the world, but you, make such haste for a new cold before the old had left him; in a year, too, when mere colds kill as many as a plague used to do? Well, seriously, either resolve to have more care of yourself, or I renounce my friendship; and as a certain king (that my learned knight is very well acquainted with), who, seeing one of his confederates in so happy a condition as it was not likely to last, sent ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... Ferdinand, King of Spain, was eight years older than her husband, whom she married in the first year of his reign. She had been previously married to his brother Arthur, who died of the plague in 1502. For several years after her marriage with Henry VIII., her domestic happiness was a subject of remark; and the emperor, Charles V., congratulated her on her brilliant fortune. She was beautiful, sincere, accomplished; religious, and disinterested, and every way ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... EXPOSURE.—I hear some of you say, cannot some influence be brought to bear upon this plague-spot? Will the legislature or congress do nothing? Is the law and moral right to continue to be trodden under foot? Are the magistrates and the police powerless? The truth is the harlots and whoremongers are master of the situation; the moral sense of the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... "Plague take him! I am no longer Monsieur de Bonfons," thought the magistrate ruefully, his face assuming the expression of a judge ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... Syer (1500-1501), was translated to Canterbury shortly after his appointment to Salisbury. He is believed to have been one of the victims of the Great Plague, and to have ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... you see it so at last!' cried Gilbert. 'Aunt Maria has been the plague of my life, and I'm glad I told her a ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... brought it him back on the point of my lance; I bled him behind the ear. I bled a dolt of a boy, and now he is the only one who can tell his right hand from his left in a whole family of idiots. When the plague was here years ago, no sham plague, such as empyrics proclaim every six years or so, but the good honest Byzantine pest, I blooded an alderman freely, and cauterized the symptomatic buboes, and so pulled him out of the grave; whereas our then chirurgeon, a most pernicious ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... box proved a plague to the whole world, Jack had his individual portion of it, when he was summoned to box the compass by his worthy uncle Sir Theophilus Blazers; who in the course of six months discovered that he could not make his nephew box it in the ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... that ring I so loved, and gave thee as the ring of my heart; the allegiance you took to be faithful, when it was presented; the kisses and smiles with which you honored it. You became tired of the donor, despised it as a plague, and finally gave it to Malos, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... been proved to be due to protozoa are malaria, amoebic dysentery, and syphilis; while among the much larger number which are due to bacteria, bacilli, or other vegetable parasites, are cholera, typhoid fever, the plague, pneumonia, ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... piece of work poor Milo did not at all like. The monkeys would scratch and plague him; and, if he resented it, he would be whipped. His worst enemy was a little monkey named Jocko, who delighted to ...
— The Nursery, No. 109, January, 1876, Vol. XIX. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Unknown
... systematic lying as any with which I am acquainted. Now don't look so hurt, my boy, of course you meant no harm—you had no intention to deceive us, it was merely a thoughtless speech, but be advised by me and avoid that particular species of thoughtlessness as you would the plague, nothing is much easier to acquire than a reputation for untruthfulness, and certainly nothing is more difficult to get ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... glancing at the morning papers, to get a first impression that the whole world was almost asleep. There was, for example, a heading called INDIAN INTELLIGENCE that showed, on close examination, that two thousand Parsees had died of the blue plague, that a powder boat had blown up at Bombay, that some one had thrown a couple of bombs at one of the provincial governors, and that four thousand agitators had been sentenced to twenty years hard labour each. But the whole thing was just called "Indian Intelligence." ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... you may fancy, he was driven to climb upon the bed and wrap himself in the public covering. There, then, he lay upon the verge of shivering, plunged in semi-darkness, wound in a garment whose touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a spirit far removed from resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just received. These are not circumstances ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who, through greediness of gain, have brought infected goods into a nation, which bred a plague, whereof the owners and their families perished first. Let those among us consider this and tremble, whose houses are privately stored with those materials of beggary and desolation, lately brought over to be scattered like a pestilence among ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... "Thou's coom to plague me, that's what thou's coom for. I know thee. I've seen thee o' neights, aye, an' i' t' daytime too; an' if it's revenge thou wants, I tell thee thou's gotten it already, capital ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... Bonaparte, however, delivered Portugal from this plague; but what did it obtain in return?—another grenadier Ambassador, less brutal but more cunning, as abandoned but ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... 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, pernicious ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... parade of humility, but his looks and walk belied him. A Royal Commission once approached him with a summons to give evidence as to a plague of voles which was desolating the fertile fields of the south-west, and his opinion was valuable because he had recently acquired by purchase the great, barren ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... (1554-1624).—Poet, actor, and satirist, b. in Kent, and ed. at Oxf., he went to London, and wrote plays, which are now lost, and pastorals; but, moved by a sermon preached at Paul's Cross in 1577 during a plague, he deserted the theatre, and became one of its severest critics in his prose satire, The School of Abrose (1579), directed against "poets, pipers, players, jesters, and such-like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth." Dedicated to Sir P. Sidney, it was not well received by him, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... acquiesced dryly. Then the devil of mischief stirred in me to plague him. "There's all the difference of bad and a vast deal worse between them. It's a matter of comparisons," ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... gardens, is the old garden wall of Normand House, with some curious brick gates (now closed in): the house is very old; the date, 1661, is in the centre arch, over the principal gateway, and it is said to have been used as a hospital for persons recovering from the Great Plague in 1665. [Picture: Bartolozzi's House] Sir E. Bulwer Lytton has resided here. In 1813 "it was appropriated for the reception of insane ladies" (Faulkner), and it is now a lunatic asylum for ladies, with the name of "Talfourd" on a brass ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... Bishop. l. 435. In the year 1720 and 1722 the Plague made dreadful havock at Marseilles; at which time the Bishop was indefatigable in the execution of his pastoral office, visiting, relieving, encouraging, and absolving the sick with extream tenderness; and though perpetually ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... since he came to Middlemarch. The Vincys had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certain suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived in the provinces. At the Vincys' there was always whist, and the card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly impatient of the music. Before it ceased Mr. Farebrother ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Britons rose with one accord, Purged the plague-spot from our nation, Negroes to their rights restored; Slaves no longer, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... greatly diminished in wealth and consequence. Winchelsea was once so large and handsome, that Elizabeth, during one of her progresses, bestowed upon it the appellation of Little London. Hythe formerly contained seven parish churches, now reduced to one. Rye and Romney look as if the plague had been raging through their dull and gloomy streets, and had carried off nearly all the population. Hastings, though still flourishing as a town, owes its prosperity to its having become a fashionable sea-bathing-place; for as to a port or haven, there is not a vestige ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... somewhere out of town; and though the fragrance had a long way to come, and many counter fragrances to contend with among the dwellings of the poor (may God reward the worthy gentlemen who stickle for the Plague as part and parcel of the wisdom of our ancestors, and who do their little best to keep those dwellings miserable!), yet it was wafted faintly into Princess's Place, whispering of Nature and her wholesome air, as such things will, even unto prisoners ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... cannot support themselves. Formerly a soldier could live on 15 or 20 pesos a year; now that sum will maintain him only one month. Many of the natives have died in the expeditions made to Maluco, Borneo, and elsewhere; and a plague of locusts has added to the distress in the islands. Sadornel is thirty-one years of age, and has spent ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... fear checks trade, throws the labourer out of employment, and leaves the poor of the cities without wages and without food. Famine is followed by disease; and Egypt and Alexandria were visited in the reign of Gallus by a dreadful plague, one of those scourges that force themselves on the notice of the historian. It was probably the same disease that in a less frightful form had been not uncommon in that country and in the lower parts of Syria. The physician ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... the town and district were invaded by a plague of rats, travelling from north-east to south-west in ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... cholera (Drasch and Porker) have their own odors. Older observers, confirmed by Doppner, say that all the plague-patients at Vetlianka diffused an odor of honey. In diabetes there is a marked odor of apples. The sweat in dysentery unmistakably bears the odor of the dejecta. Behier calls the odor of typhoid that of the blood, and Berard says that it attracts flies even before death. Typhus ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see that blood, I will pass over you, and the plague not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Pitt ever said a word to me on the subject, which I think unhandsome and unkind. He must be the best judge, whether such personal inattentions can ensure the continuance of zeal and activity in his interests of those who plague ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... much the better, though even here absolute certainty is not attained. Granting Godfrey's constitutional hereditary melancholy, and the double quandary in which he stood, he certainly had motives for suicide. He was a man of humanity and courage, had bravely faced the Plague in London, had withstood the Court boldly on a private matter (serving a writ, as Justice, on the King's physician who owed him money in his capacity as a coal dealer), and he was lenient in applying the laws ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... build vessels without the express permission of the Governor, so the Americans were only asked to obey the existing law. The proclamation ended with a clause ordering that all vessels coming from the State of New York should do fourteen days quarantine in consequence of the plague having broken out there. Just about this time news reached Sydney that the crew of an American sealer lying in Kent's Bay among Cape Barren Islands (Bass's Straits) were building a schooner from the wreck of an East ...
— The Americans In The South Seas - 1901 • Louis Becke
... "Oh, plague take Bedelia!" snapped Mary V. But she nevertheless spent precious minutes wiping the butcher knife on Bedelia's clean dish towel, and putting away the butter and the bread, and mopping up the splatters of loganberry jam. Getting her "Desert Glimpses" through the kitchen window formed no part ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... you shall find strange mention of witches, warlocks, succubae, spirits, daemons, and a thousand other powers of darkness, whose pronounced vocation was the plague of poor humanity. Within these books you may read (if you will) divers wondrous accounts, together with many learned disquisitions upon the same, and most minute and particular descriptions of ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... he took Ferris into his machine and they whirled over to the waterworks site, where the work had stopped as abruptly as if that scene of animation had suddenly been stricken of a plague and died. On the way Bobby explained to Ferris ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... amusement in the yard; twelve cats on the fence to plague, and no end of snow to make balls and pelt the cook with; beside, the gingerbread was just baked, and I got a brown corner! So! there! while I was eating it, and it was so hot that it almost sizzled, all at once I heard a ...
— Neighbor Nelly Socks - Being the Sixth and Last Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... served only to consolidate the victor's successes. A calamity of European extent came as an addition to the distresses of France. From 1347 to 1349 a frightful disease, brought from Egypt and Syria through the ports of Italy, and called the black plague or the plague of Florence, ravaged Western Europe, especially Provence and Languedoc, where it carried off, they say, two thirds of the inhabitants. Machiavelli and Boccaccio have described with all the force of their genius the material ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of England three years. From Paris the plague drove him to Angers, where the appearance of the handsome English youth caused such commotion in the heart of the Queen Mother, Marie de Medicis, that she evidently lost her head. His narrative of her behaviour had to be ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby
... Doodle." He wrote of him: "Little doggy improves rapidly and now jumps over my stick at the word of command." "Timber," travelled with us in all our foreign wanderings, and while at Albaro the poor little fellow had a most unfortunate experience—an encounter of some duration with a plague of fleas. Father writes: "'Timber' has had every hair upon his body cut off because of the fleas, and he looks like the ghost of a drowned dog come out of a pond after a week or so. It is very awful to see him sidle into a room. He knows the change upon him, ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... and pillaged, as if they had been taken by the enemy. I thought I was following a routed army. Ten thousand horses were killed by the cold stormy rains and the green rye, which is their only food, and new to them. They lie on the roads and encumber them; their bodies exhale a poisonous smell—a new plague, which some compare to famine, though the latter is much more terrible. Several soldiers of the young guard have already ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... throng, as the jackal and the raven cross the desert in the lion's track. And the roads by which they had marched, and the lands wherein they had camped, lay waste as lie the wheat-fields of Palestine in June, when the plague of locusts has eaten its way ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... as they were to France. England was despoiled by her own victories; luxury and poverty increased at the extremes of society; and, by a process more proper to an ensuing chapter, the balance of the better mediaevalism was lost. Finally, a furious plague, called the Black Death, burst like a blast on the land, thinning the population and throwing the work of the world into ruin. There was a shortage of labour; a difficulty of getting luxuries; and the great lords did what one would expect them to do. They became lawyers, and upholders of the ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... only claimed a few victims in the city, now began to make fearful progress; and every day enlarged the catalogue of the dead, and those who were labouring under this awful disease. People seemed unwilling to name the ravages of the plague to each other; or spoke of it in low, mysterious tones, as a subject too dreadful for ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... that which was carried in procession by the Bianchi at the time of the plague of 1348, and afterwards placed in the Church of Santa Croce, at Florence. He also made for love of her a drawing of a Jesu Christ on the Cross, not as if dead, as is the common use, but with a Divine gesture. Raising His face to the Father He seems to say, "Eli, Eli." The body does not hang ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... tell you of our wooing. She came to love me even as I loved her. I learned that Parmes had seen her before I did, and had shown her that he too loved her, but I could smile at his passion, for I knew that her heart was mine. The white plague had come upon the city and many were stricken, but I laid my hands upon the sick and nursed them without fear or scathe. She marvelled at my daring. Then I told her my secret, and begged her that she would let me ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he is safe from the disorder and almost restored to his former health. But we are still under a sort of quarantine, for, although people pretend to believe in vaccination, they avoid the house as if the plague were in it, and stop their carriages at the end of the village and send inquiries and cards, and in my mind they are right. To say nothing of Reading, there have been above thirty severe cases, after vaccination, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... is the affluence of water. Every rocky glen has its gurgling rill, every ravine its stream, which, at an hour's notice almost, may become a mountain torrent, should a storm break over the watershed. A plague of waters is no unfrequent occurrence, as the farmer in the valley knows to his cost. Fields are laid under water, and the turbulent streams often bring down great masses of earth and rock in a way that becomes "monotonous" for the man who has to clear his land or his roads of the debris. ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... tongue of men. And in this way also Thou commandest us continence. Give what Thou enjoinest, and enjoin what Thou wilt. Thou knowest on this matter the groans of my heart, and the floods of mine eyes. For I cannot learn how far I am more cleansed from this plague, and I much fear my secret sins, which Thine eyes know, mine do not. For in other kinds of temptations I have some sort of means of examining myself; in this, scarce any. For, in refraining my mind from the pleasures of the flesh and idle curiosity, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... hath brought me low. It is a plague nearer than the skin, it overwhelms my soul as an earthquake, it is farther than the height of the sky, and harder to win than the treasures of the Fairy Folk. If I contend with it, it is like a combat with ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... thing. I have nothing but his signature. Plague pestilence and famine, battle murder and sudden death upon him," says the old man, making a curse out of one of his few remembrances of a prayer and squeezing up his velvet cap between his angry hands, "I have half a million of his signatures, I think! But you," breathlessly recovering ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... if her anger, too, was vicious enough to do as the hornet would. But she turned to get the hot water and when she returned to deluge the plague, lo! it was there ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... found the disease truly alarming, far beyond the reach of human aid, much deeper than bilious fever, although it might have assumed a typhoid grade. The blister that you were immediately to apply on the back of the patient could not extract that dark, deep plague-spot of slavery, too ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... no Remedy. When the Hand of the Almighty is visibly lifted against the Impious, the Heart of mortal Man cannot withstand him. We have this Passion sublimely represented in the Punishment of the Egyptians, tormented with the Plague of Darkness, in the Apocryphal Book. of Wisdom ascribed ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... fowle incestious lust, That very Nature greatly doth abhorre, Some plague will fall vpon all such I trust, If in this world there can be any more. I hope this little world well free-ed is Of Giants, and such monstrous beasts ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... use in having fathers and mothers, anyhow? They only plague the life out of one. They don't ever think of letting a fellow alone once in a ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... think, my dear Rivers, that marriage, on prudent principles, is a horrid sort of an affair? It is really cruel of papas and mammas to shut up two poor innocent creatures in a house together, to plague and torment one another, who might have ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... eleven and twelve years old, she sickened of the plague, in which she behaved with admirable patience and sweetness, and did what she could with Scripture arguments to support and encourage her relations to part with her, who was going to glory, and to prepare themselves to meet her in ...
— Stories of Boys and Girls Who Loved the Saviour - A Token for Children • John Wesley
... Middlesex and the Brompton Consumption hospitals. When diphtheria appeared in England in 1858 he was sent to investigate the disease at the different points of outbreak, and in subsequent years he carried out a number of similar inquiries, e.g. into the cattle plague and into cholera in 1866. He became first principal of the Brown Institution at Lambeth in 1871, and in 1874 was appointed Jodrell professor of physiology at University College, London, retaining that post till 1882. When the Waynflete chair of physiology ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... capacity for writing. Her spelling was unconventional at times, but there was never any doubt about her meaning. She expressed herself strongly on many subjects, and one of these was arithmetic. "I am now going to tell you the horrible and wretched plaege (plague) that my multiplication gives me you cant conceive it the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itself cant endure." Yet "if you speak with the tongues of men and angels and make not mention of arithmetic it profiteth you nothing," ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... like brothers amongst themselves, dividing all goods alike, so that they were called Like-dealers; and no beggar was found amongst them, for they had all things in common. [Footnote: These Like-dealers were the communists of the Middle Ages, and were for a number of years the plague of the northern seas; until at the beginning of the fifteenth century they were subdued, and many of them captured by the Dutch, who nailed them up in barrels, leaving an aperture for the head, at top, and then decapitated them. The best account of them is found in "Raumer's Historical Note-book," ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... it! I know that everything can be lost—but a spring, how can that be lost?" Hripsime stooped and began to scratch about with her stick. "Look here," she said suddenly, "bad boys have filled up the beautiful spring with earth and stones. Plague take it! Well, if one's head is cut off, he weeps not for his beard. For the spring I care not, but for poor Sarkis and his family ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... "This cart was brought here no further back than yesterday. It smells of the meadow, and the flowers hold their colour. No, the fowl was sent. To- morrow it will return, and the next, and the next, until the plague be stayed and I go hence. But that is not all. A while later a second hen appeared, and I thought it would lay in the same nest. But it made a new one, on the side on which you lie and not far from your foot. Then I knew that I was ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... angry, tone against the burrs. He did not see, he said, what in the world chestnuts were made to grow so for. They ought to grow right out in the open air, like apples, and not have such vile porcupine skins on them, just to plague the boys. So saying, he struck with all his might a fine large burr, crushed it to pieces, and then jumped up, using at the same time profane and wicked words. As soon as he turned round he saw the master standing ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... of "your money or your life," into that of "your money and your life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives of its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra per week to its landlords;[8] and then debate, with driveling tears, and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought not piously to save, and nursingly cherish, the lives of its murderers. Also, a great nation having made ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... digging corpses out of the shallow graves, and devouring bodies. I once came across the body of a child in the vicinity of a jungle village which had been unearthed by one. At Seonee we had, at one time, a plague of mad jackals, which did much damage. Sir Emerson Tennent writes of a curious horn or excrescence which grows on the head of the jackal occasionally, which is regarded by the Singhalese as a potent charm, by the instrumentality of ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... following a venerable tradition, say that the three first lines were the composition of angels, and the fourth, Ora pro nobis Deum, alleluia, was added by Pope Gregory. The legend tells us that when in the year 596 Rome was desolated by the plague, Pope Gregory the Great exhorted his people to penance and prayer, and carrying in his hands the picture of the Blessed Virgin, said to be painted by St. Luke, he led them in procession to the church, Afa Coeli, on Easter morn. When the procession was passing Adrian's ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... a regular pitched battle—the old gal, I thought she would 'a screamed herself to death! I don't know but she would, but just then poor Sukey came in, and looked so frightened and scarey—Sukey is a pretty gal, and looks so trembling and delicate, that it's kinder a shame to plague her, and so I took and come away for ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... all womankind were dead, Or banished o'er the sea; For they have been a bitter plague These last six weeks to me: It is not that I'm touched myself, For that I do not fear; No female face has shown me grace For many a bygone year. But 'tis the most infernal bore, Of all the bores I know, To have a friend who's lost his heart ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... 1. They write from Italy, that the Plague is no longer observ'd at Marseilles, Aix, & several other Places; and that at Toulon it is very much decreas'd: But alas! how should it be otherwise, when the Distemper hath hardly any Objects left to work upon? At Arles it is likewise abated, we fear for the same Reason. Mean ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... it, with a morsel of starch to make it stand out and show itself off, and stitched it on again as proud as could be. It was to be a surprise for Bridgie, and, me dears, it was a surprise! Mother and Bridgie screeching at the top of their voices, and looking as if the plague was upon us. Would ye believe it, it was just what they liked, to have the lace that colour, and it was the bad turn Esmeralda had done them, starching it up like new! Off it all came, and mother found an old lace scarf, ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey |
