"Scrivener" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hermits and solitaries, of minstrels, "japers and jinglers," bidders and beggars, ploughmen that "in setting and in sowing swonken (toil) full hard," pilgrims "with their wenches after," weavers and labourers, burgess and bondman, lawyer and scrivener, court-haunting bishops, friars, and pardoners "parting the silver" with the parish priest. Their pilgrimage is not to Canterbury but to Truth; their guide to Truth neither clerk nor priest but Peterkin the Ploughman, whom they find ploughing in his field. He it is who bids the knight no ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... learnt to write and cast accompts like a very scrivener, and the master trusts him more than any, except maybe Kit Smallbones, the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... courier in a noble family, and in the situation made many journeys and learned to know the world, and also to lay by some money. In September 1757 he married the daughter of the magistrate (Schultheiss) of Dotzheim, and he obtained appointment under him as scrivener. By his wife he had seven children. On the death of his father-in-law, and the appointment of a new magistrate, the aspect of his affairs changed. He was detected in attempts to appropriate trust-money to his ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... Gentleman's Magazine describes him as "late of Gillingham, Dorsetshire," which would make him a neighbour of the novelist. [Footnote: Lord Thurlow was accustomed to find a later likeness to Fielding's hero in his protege, the poet Crabbe.] Another tradition connects Mr. Peter Pounce with the scrivener and usurer Peter Walter, whom Pope had satirised, and whom Hogarth is thought to have introduced into Plate i. of Marriage a-la-Mode. His sister lived at Salisbury; and he himself had an estate at Stalbridge Park, which was close to East Stour. From references to Walter ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... fair one, to the scrivener. I do not know him or who he is, but he seems to me a sovereign poet, so cunning is he in his ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... A noble stout Scrivener that now shall be nameless, That in Day of Battle he might be found blameless, A War-horse of Wood from Duck Carver buys, To learn with more safety the ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... read at my school? At most, in French, a few selections from sacred history. Latin recurred oftener, to teach us to sing vespers properly. The more advanced pupils tried to decipher manuscript, a deed of sale, the hieroglyphics of some scrivener. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... the signature of Thomas Shakspeare) in my last {546} communication to "N. & Q.," Vol. vii., p. 405.), and from the nature of the transaction to which they relate, my impression is, that he was by profession a money scrivener in the town of Lutterworth; a circumstance which may possibly tend to the discovery of his family connexion (if any existed) with ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 188, June 4, 1853 • Various
... have accepted Father Mestienne's reversion. One gets to be a philosopher when one has nearly completed his classes. To the labor of the hand I join the labor of the arm. I have my scrivener's stall in the market of the Rue de Sevres. You know? the Umbrella Market. All the cooks of the Red Cross apply to me. I scribble their declarations of love to the raw soldiers. In the morning I write love letters; in the evening I dig graves. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... support you for a while in prison, until you get white-washed. In all this experience, and with such a long list of acquaintances, it will be hard if some will not give you a lift at getting over your difficulties. Then you start again as a nominal Land-surveyor, Money-scrivener, Horse-dealer, or as a Sleeping-partner in some mercantile concern—such, for instance, as coals, wine, &c. Your popularity and extensive acquaintance will get your Partner a number of customers, and then if you don't succeed, you have only to become a Bankrupt, secure your ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... indicates force of character. The poet's grandfather, who lived in the Oxford country, had adhered very definitely to Roman Catholicism and is said to have cast off his son for becoming a Protestant and something of a Puritan. The son went to London, set up in business as a scrivener, that is, as something like a modern solicitor, and prospered so much that by 1632 he was able to retire and live in the country. He had considerable musical talents, and his compositions are found in collections of tunes to which such {28} men as Morley, Dowland and Orlando Gibbons contributed. ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... Tamerton, prevails upon him to wager heavily on Smasher Mike, and undertakes to put him in the way of obtaining a loan of L5,000 for this purpose. Their conversation is overheard by an agent of Sir Ernest Scrivener, alias Marmaduke Moorsdyke, who is the mortal enemy of Wonderson and is plotting to get Lady ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... they were termed, had begun to set England in a blaze, and two of their burning torches were greeted in Ribblesdale in the persons of Morgan and Davies, the latter the village-schoolmaster, the former a low-minded money-scrivener, who had amassed a large fortune in "the godly city of Gloucester"; and retired to spend it in his native town, where he purchased an estate, acted as justice of the peace, and styled himself gentleman. Both were illuminated apostles of the new doctrines, but each had a peculiar department in the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... too, the scrivener poor, Of ease and comfort in my age secure, By Greece's noblest son in life's decline, Cimon, the generous-hearted, the divine, Well-fed and feasted hoped till death to be, Death which, alas! has taken him ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... ill Treatment he had met with from Friendly. They coo'd and bill'd as long as he was able; she (sweet Hypocrite) seeming to bemoan his Misfortunes; which he took so kindly, that when he left her, which was about three in the Afternoon, he caus'd a Scrivener to draw up an Instrument, wherein he settled a hundred Pounds a Year on Lucy for her Life, and gave her a hundred Guineas more against her Lying-in: (For she told him, and indeed 'twas true, that she was with child, and knew her self to be so from a very good ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... a varlet who has no fear of a larruping before his eyes: how the rapscallion gloried in taking advantage of his position! Taking-off his hat while putting his foot on my neck! If ever I can be even with you, my worthy scrivener, you'll pass a very bad quarter of an hour, I can ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... current as truths. The paper contained, moreover, charges of jobbery against 'great men,' though no one was named. It was at once voted a malicious and scandalous libel, and the author, William Cooley, a scrivener, was committed to Newgate. With him was sent the printer of the Daily Post, in which part of the Considerations had been published. After seven weeks' imprisonment in the depth of winter in that miserable den, 'without sufficient sustenance to support life,' Cooley ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Mrs Jemimah Crosby, I to ask her earnestly if her father the scrivener do teach the secret writing, and she replying that so it was, I after the mayde's cleaning the house, do forth and to his lodging behind Paternoster Row, he being a worthy olde Gentleman with a long white bearde, ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your mind as one of the self-same college—a votary of the desk—a notched and cropt scrivener—one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick people are said to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... compared another passage in Westward Hoe, 1607—"I, but when light wives make heavy husbands, let these husbands play mad Hamlet and crie, revenge." So, likewise, in Rowland's Night Raven, 1620, a scrivener, who has his cloak and hat stolen from him, exclaims, "I will not cry, Hamlet, revenge my greeves." There is also reason to suppose that another passage in the old tragedy of Hamlet is alluded to in Armin's Nest of Ninnies, 1608: "There are, as Hamlet ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... cabildo with two alcaldes-in-ordinary, twelve perpetual regidors, an alguacil-mayor [i.e., chief constable], a royal standard-bearer, the scrivener of the cabildo, and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... proof of his foresight of troublous times. This, however, goes too far, because, apart from the instances of such vicissitudes among the ancients, the King of Syracuse keeping school at Corinth, or Alexander, son of Perseus, becoming a Roman scrivener, he actually saw Charles Edward, the Stuart pretender, wandering from court to court in search of succour and receiving only rebuffs; and he may well have known that after the troubles of 1738 a considerable number of the oligarchs of his native Geneva ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... times Should pay the least attention to these rhymes, I bid them learn 'Tis not my own heart here That doth so often seem to break and burn— O no such thing!— Nor is it my own dear Always I sing: But, as a scrivener in the market-place, I sit and write for lovers, him or her, Making a song to match each lover's case— A trifling ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... arrive at a higher grade in the ranks of the witnesses, in the shape of 'l'honorable homme Nicolas Bailly.' Bailly was a man of sixty; he had been employed by the English in 1430, and by Cauchon—he was a scrivener (tabellion) by profession—to make investigations into the character of Joan ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... from the misprinting of mistakes, so that the corrections themselves are at times anything but correctly recorded. I assume also that the printers were not altogether above the mean passion, common to the day-labourers of Art, from Chaucer's Adam Scrivener down to the present carvers of marble, for modifying and improving the work of the master. The vain incapacity of a self-constituted critic will make him regard his poorest fancy as an emendation; seldom has he the insight of Touchstone to recognize, or his modesty to acknowledge, ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... Michaelmas. The money was unpaid at Shakespeare's death. In both purchase-deed and mortgage-deed Shakespeare's signature was witnessed by (among others) Henry Lawrence, 'servant' or clerk to Robert Andrewes, the scrivener who drew the deeds, and Lawrence's seal, bearing his initials 'H. L.,' was stamped in each case on the parchment-tag, across the head of which Shakespeare wrote his name. In all three documents—the two indentures ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... diplomatic communications sacred. But the judge observed, that in this case it was useless to affect secrecy, for two very good reasons; firstly, because he had been obliged to employ a common Leaphigh scrivener to copy what he had written—his government depending on a noble republican economy, which taught it that, if it did get into difficulties by the betrayal of its correspondence, it would still have the money that a clerk would cost, to help it out of the embarrassment; and, secondly, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the journey; they keep ahead of her a few posts, and, at every place where she rests for the night, they give her a little fete champetre disguised as villagers and in bourgeois attire, with bailiff and scrivener, and other masks all singing and reciting verses. A lady on the eve of Longchamp, knowing that the Vicomte de V—possesses two caleches, makes a request for one of them; it is disposed of; but he is careful not to decline, and immediately has one of the greatest elegance ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and to give him his clothes, saying, he would speak. This did not happen until he had suffered eight turns of the rope; and the executioner being then ordered to leave the room where they had used the torture, Perez remained alone with the licentiate Juan Gomez and the scrivener Antonio Marquez." ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... was born in February of the year 1775. His immediate descent was humble; for his father, though on one particular occasion civilly described as a "scrivener," was in reality a domestic servant to Mr. Salt—a bencher (and therefore a barrister of some standing) in the Inner Temple. John Lamb the father belonged by birth to Lincoln; from which city, being transferred to London whilst yet a boy, he entered the service of Mr. Salt without ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... sufficed for the first two divisions, the remaining thirty-five are devoted to Milton. They are dull and plodding, the punctuation and expression showing that the author was ill-educated and little accustomed to write; and, from the frequent use of scrivener- like or attorney-like phrases and illustrations, one soon comes to conjecture the pamphlet to have been written by some one in a small way of law-business. Occasionally there is a little hit of personal ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... long time carried on the business of a scrivener, and a trade in manuscripts in Paris. His travels, and his intimacy with the artists of that town, had made him acquainted with mechanical processes for working in metals, which he adapted, on his return to Mainz, to the art of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... scrivener in his cell, Sensing a chill along the stony crypt, Might labour yet more gorgeously to spell The final, splendid entries of his script,— So with bright rubrics has the Autumn writ A coloured chronicle of things that pass, Thumbing a yellow parchment that is lit With brief, ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... them to 'sand' our letters for us," said young Junot coolly, as an Austrian shell scattered earth over the dispatch he was writing at the dictation of his commander-in-chief. The remark attracted Napoleon's attention and led to the promotion of the scrivener. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... designate it by some emphatic mode of printing, as {The Wardour Manuscript}; giving it, thereby, an individuality as important as the Bannatyne MS., the Auchinleck MS., and any other monument of the patience of a Gothic scrivener. I have sent, for your private consideration, a list of the contents of this curious piece, which I shall perhaps subjoin, with your approbation, to the third volume of my Tale, in case the printer's devil should continue impatient for copy, when the whole ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... the more glad to have her in these quarters because Diccon told him that there was no doubt that Langston was lurking about the town, and indeed he was convinced that he had recognised that spy entering Walsingham's house in the dress of a scrivener. He would not alarm Cicely, but he bade her keep all her goods in a state ready for immediate departure, in case it should be needful to leave London at once after seeing ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that binds me by the laws of courtesy binds me more than that of civil constraint; I am much more at ease when bound by a scrivener, than by myself. Is it not reason that my conscience should be much more engaged when men simply rely upon it? In a bond, my faith owes nothing, because it has nothing lent it; let them trust to the security they have taken without ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... time before I could learn the cause of her distress. It was amazing enough. When Mr. Vetch unfolded the document which he believed to be my father's will, the paper inside was as clean as when it came from the scrivener's. There was not ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... said, "some orders for the arrest of prisoners. These are not sealed, but bear the signature of the president of the council. I shall go to a scrivener and shall get him to copy one of them exactly, making only the alteration that the persons of the Countess Von Harp, her daughter, and servant are to be handed over to my charge for conveyance to Brussels. Alone, this document might be suspected; but, fortified as I am by the other ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... Nun's priest, which is renewed with infinite life and gaiety, and sometimes we are half-inclined to say, with fidelity in the departure, by the same matchless pen. Good old father Chaucer! Can it be true that century rolling after century thickens the dust upon Adam Scrivener's vellum! Can it be true that proceeding time widens the gulf yawning betwixt thee and ourselves, thy compatriots of another day, thy poetical posterity! The supposition is unnatural—un-English—un-Scottish. Thou hast been the one popular poet of England. Shakspeare alone ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... scenarios for the ducal company of Pianura, to writing satirical sonnets for noblemen that desire to pass for wits. I've a pretty taste, too, in compiling almanacks, and when nothing else served I have played the public scrivener at the street corner; nay, sir, necessity has even driven me to hold the candle in one or two transactions I would not more actively have mixed in; and it was to efface the remembrance of one of these—for my ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... was the right kind of father, amiable, accomplished, and well-to-do. He was by business what was then called a scrivener, a term which has received judicial interpretation, and imported a person who arranged loans on mortgage, receiving a commission for so doing. The poet's mother, whose baptismal name was Sarah (his father was, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... hostel for his booth in the market, and had the door in his hand, there stood before him three mariners in the guise of his own country, and with them was one of clerkly aspect, whom he knew at once for his father's scrivener, Arnold Penstrong by name; and when Walter saw him his heart failed him and he cried out: "Arnold, what tidings? Is all well with the folk ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... a smith under his father; but, being ingenious, and encouraged in learning (as all my brothers were) by an Esquire Palmer, then the principal gentleman in that parish, he qualified himself for the business of scrivener; became a considerable man in the county; was a chief mover of all public-spirited undertakings for the county or town of Northampton, and his own village, of which many instances were related of him; and much taken notice of and patronized by the then Lord Halifax. He died in 1702, January ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... true born Spaniard, Eat as I were in England where the Beef grows, And I will drink abundantly, and then Talk ye as wantonly as Ovid did, 200] To stir the Intellectuals of the Ladies; I learnt it of my Father's amorous Scrivener. ...
— Rule a Wife, and Have a Wife - Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (3 of 10) • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... reader that can scan them in their nature, shall find it otherwise. And if a verse here and there fal out a sillable shorter or longer than another, I rather aret it to the negligence and rape of Adam Scrivener, that I may speak as Chaucer doth, than to any unconning or oversight in the Author. For how fearful he was to have his works miswritten, or his verse mismeasured, may appear in the end of his fifth book of Troilus and Cresside, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... "On the Happy Life," is serious, and even very serious. The best proof of their importance in Augustin's eyes is, that after taking care to have them reported in shorthand, he eventually published them. The notarii attended these discussions and let nothing be lost. The rise of the scrivener, of the notary, dates from this period. The administration of the Lower-Empire was frightfully given to scribbling. By contact with it, the Church became so too. Let us not press our complaints about it, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... take it, his lands are better than five thousand pounds. Now, if I can make a match between his son and my daughter, and so join his land and my money together—O, 'twill be a blessed union. Well, I'll in, and get a scrivener: I'll write to him about it presently. But stay, here comes Master Churms the lawyer; I'll desire him to do ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... was born in London—eight years before the greatest English poet, Shakespeare, died. His father followed the profession of a scrivener, in which he acquired a competence. As a boy, Milton was exceedingly studious, continuing his studies till midnight. He graduated at Christ's College, Cambridge, where his singular beauty, his slight figure, and his fastidious morality caused his companions to nickname him "the lady of Christ's." ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... log, Blackbeard's own journal, with a few entries in it, and most of the leaves torn out. I made a copy of what could be read, for the late Captain Teach was a better pirate than scrivener. Here, Jack, you are ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... upon the earth unless enforced by will power to overcome the obstacles that hedge about every one who would rise above the circumstances in which he was born, or become greater than his calling. Was not Virgil the son of a porter, Horace of a shopkeeper, Demosthenes of a cutler, Milton of a money scrivener, Shakespeare of a wool stapler, and Cromwell ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... of Mr. Philip Gray, a scrivener of London, was born in Cornhill, November 26, 1716. His grammatical education he received at Eton, under the care of Mr. Antrobus, his mother's brother, then assistant to Dr. George; and when he left school, in 1734, entered a pensioner ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... The king's standard itself had been taken, but this had been happily recovered, for two Royalist officers, putting on orange scarfs, rode into the middle of the Roundheads, and pretending that they were sent by Essex, demanded the flag from his secretary, to whom it had been intrusted. The scrivener gave it up, and the officers, seizing it, rode through the enemy and recovered their ranks. There was much confusion and no little angry discussion in the camp that night, the footmen accusing the horsemen of having deserted them, and the horsemen grumbling at the foot, because ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... packing Juries, banishing, hanging and beheading all his Enemies, sending immense Sums to foreign Courts, to support his Power at Home, bribing Senates, and carrying all before him without Controul, when he vanish'd. My English Friend told me, that Soul belong'd to the Body of a Money-Scrivener, who almost crack'd his Brain with Politicks, and thought of nothing less than being a prime Minister. I knew him while I was in the World; his whole Discourse always ran on Liberty, Trade, Free Elections, &c. and constantly inveigh'd against all corrupt and self-interested Practices. I saw Persons ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... was blest in her Cradle, that he never came in her bed; why, he has consumed all, pawnd his lands, and made his university brother stand in wax for him—There's a fine phrase for a scrivener! puh, he owes more then ...
— A Yorkshire Tragedy • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... says the fire happened after the return of the expedition of Newport, Smith, and Scrivener to the Pamunkey: "Good Master Hunt, our Preacher, lost all his library, and all he had but the clothes on his back; yet none ever heard him repine at his loss." This excellent and devoted man is the only one of these first pioneers of whom everybody speaks ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... old schoolfellow at Paul's, and since a bookseller in Paul's Church Yard: and it seems do forgive one man 6000l. which he had wronged him of, but names not his name; but it is well known to be the scrivener in Fleete-streete, at whose house he lodged. There is also this week dead a poulterer, in Gracious- street, which was thought rich, but not so rich, that hath, left 800l. per annum, taken in other men's names, and 40,000 ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys |
