"Shrew" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "The little shrew!" Don Pedro exclaimed, who, like an amiable old man, was always on the side of the young folk. "But my friends," he added, "you are but poor Lotharios to be flouted by a young girl; you must follow her and bring ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a contented personage in his early married life. His wife, while not a shrew, had undoubted force of character, but there was not much attrition; and his little daughter was, in John's estimation, the fairest child upon the continent. Personally, he was content with all the world, though his wife was somewhat less so. John had his failings. He was not counted ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... that he might be in time to preach his first sermon at St. Paul's. And was not this, the hastier of his journeys, the most unlucky in his life, seeing that it brought him acquainted with that foul shrew, Joan, his wife, who made his after-days as bitter to him, patient and godly though he were, as wormwood and coloquintida? Are not these goodly examples, Christian and Heathen? Let the Train rush along, you and I will travel at ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... up to Guy Hall, when I was a barn, that two Irish reapers coom down, and murthered her for the money—and if you lost aught she'd vind it, so sure as the church—and a mighty hand to cure burns; and they two villains coom back, after harvest, seventy mile to do it—and when my vather's cows was shrew-struck, she made un be draed under a brimble as growed together at the both ends, she a praying like mad all the time; and they never got nothing but fourteen shilling and a crooked sixpence; for why, the devil carried off all the rest of her ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... scanty patch Of primroses too faint to catch A weary bee. And scarce it pushes Its gentle way through strangling rushes Where the glossy kingfisher Flutters when noon-heats are near, Glad the shelving banks to shun Red and steaming in the sun, Where the shrew-mouse with pale throat Burrows, and the speckled stoat; Where the quick sandpipers flit In and out the marl and grit That seems to breed them, brown as they: Naught disturbs its quiet way, Save some lazy stork that springs, Trailing it with legs and wings, Whom the shy fox from the hill Rouses, creep ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... piece of furniture several times; are attached to houses, and are extremely fond of scents, especially certain kinds emanating from plants. They seldom eat the rats which they kill, although they devour mice. If they should swallow a shrew, which is very rare, they almost immediately reject it. They will sit hour after hour watching at the mouth of a hole, and after seizing their prey, bring it to their favourites in the house to show their prowess, and strut about with ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... miseries. Wesley held patriarchal views on household matters, the proper subordination of the wife being a prime article of his faith. Mrs. Wesley, however, entertained different views. She is therefore described as a frightful shrew, and rated for her inordinate jealousy, although her husband's attentions to other ladies certainly gave her ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... guard, singing a perfect ecstasy of love to his silent little mate, that sits upon the nest if no danger threatens; but both rush with passionate malice upon the first intruder, for it must be admitted that Jenny wren is a sad shrew. ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... clouds. Clouds, like the plains, come and water the earth. Sun, embrace the earth that she may be fruitful. Moon, lion of the north, bear of the west, badger of the south, wolf of the east, eagle of the heavens, shrew of the earth, elder war hero, younger war hero, warriors of the six mountains of the world, intercede with the Cloud People for us that they may water the earth. Medicine bowl, cloud bowl, and water vase give us your hearts, that the earth ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... in its radical sense shrew-ed, malicious, like a shrew. Comp. M. N. D. ii. 1, "That shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin Goodfellow." Chaucer has the verb shrew to curse; the current verb ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... second day after the wedding her evil nature began to manifest itself. Thou art well aware, O Prince of True Believers, that by Moslem custom none may look upon the face of his betrothed before the marriage contract? nor after wedlock can he complain should his bride prove a shrew or a fright: he must needs dwell with her in such content as he may and be thankful for his fate, be it fair or unfair. When I saw first the face of my bride and learnt that it was passing comely, I joyed with exceeding joy and gave thanks to Almighty ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... afford a holiday. I long for bodily sloth, for the ragged intellectual companionship that only Paris can give me, for the resumption of study of the philosophy of the excellent Henri Bergson, for the absinthe that brings forgetfulness, for the Tanagra figured, broad-mouthed, snub-nosed shrew that fills every ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... to smile, pinning and unpinning, making grimaces and striking attitudes. Many a coy wench was there who knew not how to open her lips to speak, much less to eat, or from very ceremony, how to look under foot; and many a ragged shrew who would contend that she was equal to the best lady in the street, and many an ambling fop who might winnow beans by the wind ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... fell with him a gay and hardly human figure; it fell, perhaps finally, for English drama. That manner of man—Arlecchino, or Harlequin—had outlived his playmates, Pantaleone, Brighella, Colombina, and the Clown. A little of Pantaleone survives in old Capulet, a little in the father of the Shrew, but the life of Mercutio in the one play, and of the subordinate Tranio in the other, is less quickly spent, less easily put out, than the smouldering of the old man. Arlecchino frolics in and out of the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare, until ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Jonson returned from abroad penniless. Soon after he married, almost as early and quite as imprudently as Shakespeare. He told Drummond curtly that "his wife was a shrew, yet honest"; for some years he lived apart from her in the household of Lord Albany. Yet two touching epitaphs among Jonson's "Epigrams," "On my first daughter," and "On my first son," attest the warmth of the poet's ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail, Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter cricket thou; Braved in my own house by a skein of thread! Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant!" (Taming of the Shrew, Act 4, Sc. 3.) ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... see. The little shrew mole, which I know is active at night, I have never seen but once. I once set a trap, called the delusion trap, in the woods by some rocks where I had no reason to suspect there were more mice than elsewhere, and two ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... three windows, whose shutters, always closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts, aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... An eye that shows no vestige of the deep And stained thoughts that in her bosom sleep: By day a vestal, but by night a bawd; Her ways a riddle, her whole life a fraud; At church an angel, but at home a shrew, Cheating her mother, to her sire untrue; Vain without talent, without merit proud; By all who see her, still a fool allow'd; Without all love, with but the show of truth, She stares and simpers at the scornful ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... their tails behind them in the most aggressive fashion, exactly reproducing the threatening action of an angry scorpion. Now, as a matter of fact, the devil's coach-horse is quite harmless, but I have often seen, not only little boys and girls, but also chickens, small birds, and shrew-mice, evidently alarmed at his minatory attitude. So, too, the bumble-bee flies, which are inoffensive insects got up in sedulous imitation of various species of wild bee, flit about and buzz angrily ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... no doubt about the little shrew being thoroughly game, and yet her act was less striking as evidence of her bravery, than as testifying her confidence in the chivalry of the rough men before her. And, indeed, it was comical to see the dumbfoundered and chop-fallen expression on their flushed and excited faces, ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... so, Ramsden, so don't attempt to dissuade me; we are not married yet, and I must not be thwarted in my short supremacy. Surely you ought not to be displeased at my desire to 'tame a shrew.' I give a fair promise not to fall into an error which I so ardently detest: now, send for the chaise, write a letter to Doctor Beddington, and leave me to arrange ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... beau, the musk-Ox, with his long scented hair, And John Bull just arrived on his travels, were there; Messrs. Martin, Hare, Squirrel, the Ermine, and Stoat, And the rock-mountain sheep, with his cousin, the goat; Then the sociable marmot, and tiny shrew mouse, The raccoon and agouti from hollow-tree house. Chinchilla the soft, musk and Canada rats, Hounds, mastiffs, wolves, foxes, and wild tiger cats; Jerboa just roused from his long winter nap, Opossum, with four little ...
— The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic • F. B. C.
... of changes and disasters. I was sold to a pastrycook, and broiled by standing over the oven. I grew obstinate and was punished by blows, but for those I cared not. The pastry was burnt, and I was resold to a barber, whose wife was a shrew, and half-killed me; fortunately the barber was accused of shaving a criminal, who had escaped from prison, and one morning was stretched out before his own door, with his head under his arm. His wife and I were both sold ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... never any knowing where it will break out, or what dance it will lead him, especially when it comes to this love-making business. You are just as likely as not to lose your head over some little fool or shrew for the sake of her outward favour and make yourself miserable for life. When you pick you a wife please remember that I shall reserve the right to pass a candid opinion ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of his predecessors. There is a great deal of information in his books about his own life. He was born at Pergamos in A.D. 130 in the reign of Hadrian. His father was a scholar and his mother somewhat of a shrew. Galen, in his boyhood, learned much from his father's example and instruction, and at the age of 15 was taught by philosophers of the Stoic, Platonist, Peripatetic, and Epicurean schools. He became initiated, ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... whereas; for as much as, in as much as; in point of, as far as; on the part of, on the score of; quoad hoc[Lat]; pro re nata[Lat]; under the head of &c. (class) 75 of; in the matter of, in re. Phr. " thereby hangs a tale " [Taming of the Shrew]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... her Sabbath face, putting off the mask of the shrew, which hid not from him the angel countenance. To-night he could in very truth call his wife (as the Rabbi in the Talmud did) "not wife, but home." To-night she would be in very truth Simcha—rejoicing. A cheerful warmth glowed at his heart, love for all the wonderful Creation dissolved him ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... face, with a black stripe on each cheek. This made the third species of marsupial rat I had so far obtained— but the number of these animals is very considerable in Brazil, where they take the place of the shrews of Europe; shrew mice and, indeed, the whole of the insectivorous order of mammals, being entirely absent from Tropical America. One kind of these rat-like opossums is aquatic, and has webbed feet. The terrestrial species ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... such scolds as they sound," answered Uncle Blair gaily. "If they would but 'tak a thought and mend' their shrew-like ways they would ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... deadly even than the great carnivorous dinosaurs. Among such theories the most ingenious is that of the late Professor Cope, who suggested that some of the small, inoffensive, and inconspicuous forms of Jurassic mammals, of the size of the shrew and the hedgehog, contracted the habit of seeking out the nests of these dinosaurs, gnawing through the shells of their eggs, and thus destroying the young. The appearance, or evolution, of any egg-destroying ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... old croakers. Old Plain Talk had a shrew for a wife, and that's made him shrewish; and Old Prudence, when a boy, broke down in an apple-stall, and that discouraged him for life. No better sport for a knowing spark like me than to hear Old Plain Talk wheeze out ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... series is occupied with the Deluge. After a lamentation by Noah on the sinfulness of the world, God is introduced repenting that he made man, telling Noah how to build the Ark, and blessing him and his. Noah's wife is an arrant shrew, and they fall at odds in the outset, both of them swearing by the Virgin Mary. Noah begins and finishes the Ark on the spot; then tells his spouse what is coming, and invites her on board: she stoutly refuses to embark, which brings on another flare-up; he ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... afraid, a shrew of a wife—shrill, vehement, and fluent. 'Rogue,' 'old miser,' 'old sneak,' and a great many worse names, she called him. Good Mrs. Irons was old, fat, and ugly, and she knew it; and that knowledge made her natural jealousy the fiercer. He had ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... everything. In making me a slave, and making yourself a laughing-stock. Its not fair. You get me the name of being a shrew with your meek ways, always talking as if butter wouldn't melt in your mouth. And just because I look a big strong woman, and because I'm good-hearted and a bit hasty, and because you're always driving me to do things I'm sorry for afterwards, people say "Poor man: what a life his ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... wrong this time, you clever shrew! I wormed nothing from you,' said he. 'I knew you kept particular letters in that receptacle of things of price: Aminta can't conceal. The man has worried you. Why not have ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... time has written plays that are remembered. The John Lacy whom Charles II. admired so much that he had his picture painted in three of his characters, died in 1681, leaving four comedies and an alteration of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. He was a handsome man: first dancing-master, then quarter-master, then an admired comedian. Henley would hardly have used a blank in referring to a well-known writer who died thirty years before. There was another John Lacy advertising ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... sailors caught one, but it got away again. The mole here is larger than in Europe; the upper part of the body is of a greyish brown, the lower part an ash grey; the legs are covered with a white fur, and the taper tail is one-fifth of the length of the body. A shrew-mouse also was caught. Two or three kinds of large cats are said to have been seen; a mustela, something of the nature of the Lutreola, was shot near the Rio Sacramento. The sea-otter still abounds here, but its hair is brownish, and not black. The Cervus Wapiti is found in great ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... on dishes and tasted them, Shaft-mon, handbreadth, Shaw, thicket, Sheef, thrust, Sheer-Thursday, Thursday in Holy Week, Shend, harm, Shenship, disgrace, Shent, undone, blamed, Shour, attack, Shrew, rascal, Shrewd, knavish, Sib, akin to, Sideling, sideways, Siege, seat, Signified, likened, Siker, sure, Sikerness, assurance, Sith, since, Sithen, afterwards, since, Skift, changed, Slade, valley, Slake, glen, Soil (to ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... my mind leaping backwards over the hard years to my childhood, and the sound of my mother's voice. No wonder; I had scarce once heard the mellow sound of a good woman's voice since I ran away to sea five years before, only the hard voices of hard men, and, now and then, the shrill voice of some shrew ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... habits give rise to a repugnance which often changes into fear. It is quite wrong to have any dread of them; as a matter of fact, the bird you have just seen is, like all its species, more useful than injurious to man, for it destroys a vast number of small mammals—jerboas, shrew-mice, dormice, and field-mice, which ravage the farmer's crops. You will recollect that the owl, among the ancient Greeks, was the bird of Minerva; with the Aztecs it represents the ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... "The muckle shrew!" quoth Master Jonson. "Why, I'll have this out with him! By Jupiter, I'll read him reason with a vengeance!" With a clink of his rapier he made as if to be off ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... what I have sought for so long," he exclaimed, at last. "Hither! thou treasure, thou dear, defiant little shrew! Thou art more to me than all the wealth of Pithom. Hither, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... find them ready at his hand as Ariel was ready to serve Prospero? Lear, Prospero, Brutus, Cassius, Falstaff, Iago, Macbeth, Hamlet, are as crowning creations as Cleopatra, Miranda, Lady Macbeth, Katharine the Shrew, Imogen, or Cordelia. We know not which to choose, as one who looks through a mountain vista to the sea, declaring each view fairer than the last, yet knowing if he might choose any one for a perpetual possession he could not make ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... took all opportunities of excepting Mrs. Grizzle, by name, from the censures he liberally bestowed upon the rest of her sex. "She is not a drunkard, like Nan Castick, of Deptford," he would say; "not a nincompoop, like Peg Simper, of Woolwich; not a brimstone, like Kate Koddle, of Chatham; nor a shrew, like Nell Griffin, on the Point, Portsmouth" (ladies to whom, at different times, they had both paid their addresses); "but a tight, good-humoured, sensible wench, who knows very well how to box her ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... last? Where's Edward? Edward, Edward! Kiss me, you minx! Fair, I wish that my dear friend, your father, were alive. Well, well, patience does it, and the Lord knows, Unity, he's been patient! Oh, you black-eyed piece, you need a bit and bridle! Here's Edward! Edward, the shrew's tamed at last! Such a wedding ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... drops. Sometimes it would brawl and fret along a ravine in the matted shade of a forest, filling it with murmurs; and, after this termagant career, would steal forth into open day, with the most placid, demure face imaginable; as I have seen some pestilent shrew of a housewife, after filling her home with uproar and ill-humour, come dimpling out of doors, swimming and courtesying, and smiling upon all ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... I will never get a clean shirt to my back; how my coat will always be out at the elbows; and how I never will get my breeches to stay up. I am thinking how I will be married to a shrew of a wife, who will beat me every evening and morning, and sometimes in the middle of the day. I am thinking what a d——d w—— she will be, and how my children will be most of them hanged, and whipped through towns, and burnt in the hand. I am thinking of what execrable ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... papers all right! That's all you've brought! Try and eat them, will you?" said the owner, an insolent old shrew with an enormous scar on her cheek, who told them she had already lain with a dead man, "to cure her ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... correspondence were redeemed by Elinor with very long letters at uncertain intervals, and by Marian with shorter epistles notifying all her important movements. Marian, often called upon to defend her cousin from the charge of being a little shrew, was led to dwell upon her better qualities. Elinor found in Marian what she had never found at her own home, a friend, and in her uncle's house a refuge from that of her father, which she hated. She ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... rat found only in the Cinnamon Gardens at Colombo, Mus Ceylonus, Kelaart; and a mouse which Dr. Kelaart discovered at Trincomalie, M. fulvidiventris, Blyth, both peculiar to Ceylon. Dr. TEMPLETON has noticed a little shrew (Corsira purpurascens, Mag. Nat. Hist. 1855, p. 238) at Neuera-ellia, not ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... judgment is that episode in Njla, where Kari has to trust to the talkative person whose wife has a low opinion of him. It begins like farce: any one can see that Bjorn has all the manners of the swaggering captain; his wife is a shrew and does not take him at his own valuation. The comedy of Bjorn is that he proves to be something different both from his own Bjorn and his wife's Bjorn. He is the idealist of his own heroism, and believes in himself as a hero. His wife knows better; but the beauty of it all is that his wife is wrong. ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... does not know he is there. Probably my own is the only eye that has ever penetrated his secret, and mine never would have done so had I not chanced on one occasion to see him leave his retreat and make a raid upon a shrike that was impaling a shrew-mouse upon a thorn in a neighboring tree, and which I was watching. I was first advised of the owl's presence by seeing him approaching swiftly on silent, level wing. The shrike did not see him till the owl was almost within the branches. He then dropped his game, ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... seems almost, like Shakespeare's moonlight, to 'sleep upon the bank,' I can hardly conceive how so gentle-looking a dwelling can continue to send forth such an incessant clatter of obstreperous sound through its honeysuckle-fringed windows. It really reminds me of a pretty shrew, whose amiable smiles would hardly allow a casual observer to suspect the possibility of so fair a surface ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... a Grecian Dame—they say she was the wife Of Socrates, and history shows she led him a life! They say she was a virago, a vixen and a shrew, Who scolded poor old Socrates ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... sides of every story are told, Henry VIII. may establish an alibi or two, Shylock and the public-school system meet over and melt that too, too solid pound of flesh, and Xantippe, herself the sturdier man than Socrates, give ready, lie to what is called the shrew in her. Landladies, whole black-bombazine generations of them—oh, so long unheard!—may rise in one Indictment of the Boarder: The scarred bureau-front and match-scratched wall-paper; the empty trunk nailed to the floor in security for the unpaid bill; cigarette-burnt sheets and ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... Well,' which may be tentatively assigned to 1595. Meres, writing three years later, attributed to Shakespeare a piece called 'Love's Labour's Won.' This title, which is not otherwise known, may well be applied to 'All's Well.' 'The Taming of The Shrew,' which has also been identified with 'Love's Labour's Won,' has far slighter claim to the designation. The plot of 'All's Well,' like that of 'Romeo and Juliet,' was drawn from Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure' (No. xxxviii.) The original source is Boccaccio's 'Decamerone' (giorn. iii. nov. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... horns; which are so placed as to become his own. The hopes of the family, with a cockade in his hat, and riding upon papa's cane, seems much dissatisfied with female sway. A face with more of the shrew in embryo than that of the girl, it is scarcely possible to conceive. Upon such a character the most casual observer pronounces with the ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... clinging to him with hands that trembled. "It's because if I let myself get cross-grained and ugly now, p'r'aps someone else—some day—will be cross-grained and ugly too. And I should never forgive myself for that. I should always feel it was my fault. Fancy if it turned out a shrew like me, Bertie! ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... is a golden rule worth all in Pythagoras. The ladies of Bubastis, my dear,—a place in Egypt where the cat was worshipped,—always kept rigidly aloof from the gentlemen in Athribis, who adored the shrew-mice. Cats are domestic animals, your shrew-mice are sad gadabouts: you can't find a better model, any Kitty, than the ladies ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Gareth drew (And there were none but few goodlier than he) Shining in arms, 'Damsel, the quest is mine. Lead, and I follow.' She thereat, as one That smells a foul-fleshed agaric in the holt, And deems it carrion of some woodland thing, Or shrew, or weasel, nipt her slender nose With petulant thumb and finger, shrilling, 'Hence! Avoid, thou smellest all of kitchen-grease. And look who comes behind,' for there was Kay. 'Knowest thou not me? thy master? I am Kay. We ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... birds, a few insects, a few animals, a few flowers. But for the most part there is no finding her population without seeking for it. Hundreds of her flowers are hidden from the lazy eye, and we may pass a lifetime without seeing so common a bird as a tree-creeper or so common an animal as a shrew-mouse. How seldom it is one sees even a rat! There are human beings who will never discover an early flower, however many miles they cover in their country walks. They take no pleasure in finding a wild-strawberry flower in January or a campion blossom in the first week in ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... bear or rhinoceros, on the ground of Man being a species of more modern date, I ought equally to doubt the co-existence of all the other living species, such as the red deer, roe, wild cat, wild boar, wolf, fox, weasel, beaver, hare, rabbit, hedgehog, mole, dormouse, field-mouse, water-rat, shrew, and others, the bones of which he had found scattered everywhere indiscriminately through the same mud with the extinct quadrupeds. The year after this conversation I cited Schmerling's opinions, and the facts bearing on the antiquity of Man, in the 3rd edition of my ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... had I, rather I lay that I might watch her (furtively, beneath my arm) where she sat head aloft, cheeks flushed and bosom tempestuous. And (despite her beauty) a very termagant shrew I thought her. Then, all at once, I saw a tear fall and another; and she that had sung undaunted to the tempest and outfaced its fury, sat bitterly weeping like any heart-broke maid, yet giving due heed to our course none the less. Presently, chancing ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... during his lifetime, but that displayed an originality and a resource for which it would be vain to look in the multifarious compositions of the Kapellmeisters of the period. 'Der Widerspaenstigen Zaehmung' follows the incidents of 'The Taming of the Shrew' very closely. The action begins at night. Lucentio is serenading Bianca, but his ditty is interrupted by a riot among Baptista's servants, who refuse to submit any longer to Katharine's ill-treatment. Peace is restored, and Lucentio resumes his song. A second interruption ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Goetz's opera "The Taming of the Shrew" given in New York City (in English) by the American Opera Company, Theodore Thomas conductor, at the Academy of Music. At this performance Pauline Allemand made ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... possible that the companionship would continue as harmoniously as it had begun. In the store he found Tom Spade and his wife—an angular, strong-featured woman, in purple calico, who carried off the reputation of a shrew with noisy honours. When he asked for Will, the storekeeper turned from the cash-drawer which he was emptying and nodded toward the half-open ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the production of bees from dead meat (both of which puerilities are repeated unquestioningly by Virgil), the custom of wolves plunging swine into cold water to cool their flesh which is so hot as to be otherwise quite uneatable, and of shrew mice occasionally gnawing a nest for themselves and rearing their young in the hide of a fat sow, &c. [43] He also attempts one or two etymologies; the best is via which he tells us is for veha, and villa for vehula; capra ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... of the agricultural labours of spring, a Shrew-mouse, Field-mouse, Mole, Frog, Adder, or Lizard, will provide us with the most vigorous and famous of these expurgators of the soil. This is the Burying-beetle, the Necrophorus, so different from the cadaveric ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... country side, this mountain, this road, and these old maples, and that rock yonder, appear to me to be things I have imagined, and that you, and the Niafer whom you have just disposed of so untidily, and Miramon and his fair shrew, and all of you, appear to me to be persons I have imagined; and all the living in this world appears to me to be only a notion ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... broken. The person of the house was the person of a house full of sordid shames and cares, with an upper room in which that abased figure was infecting even innocent sleep with sensual brutality and degradation. The doll's dressmaker had become a little quaint shrew; of the world, worldly; of the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... happy thing to do, When twenty years united to a shrew. Released, he hopefully for entrance cries Before the ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... obtain a wider reverence if the nome they belonged to rose to greater power. Animals of every size and kind were worshipped in Egypt. Besides the large animals we have mentioned, the ape, the dog, the little shrew-mouse, each had its local sacredness; also snakes, frogs, and various kinds of fishes. The beetle (scarab) can by no means be left without mention; and a number of trees and shrubs were also sacred,[1] but, ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... magnificence of its public edifices, we found more than the usual amount of Galician filth and misery. The posada was one of the most wretched description, and to mend the matter, the hostess was a most intolerable scold and shrew. Antonio having found fault with the quality of some provision which she produced, she cursed him most immoderately in the country language, which was the only one she spoke, and threatened, if he attempted to breed any disturbance in her house, to turn the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... and family head, unlike most Malaitans, was fat. And of his fatness it would seem had been begotten his good nature with its allied laziness. But as the fly in his ointment of jovial irresponsibility was his wife, Lenerengo—the prize shrew of Somo, who was as lean about the middle and all the rest of her as her husband was rotund; who was as remarkably sharp-spoken as he was soft-spoken; who was as ceaselessly energetic as he was unceasingly idle; and who had been born ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... or other!" he muttered at last, and walked away from the hotel, filled with wholesale rage and indignation. "The little shrew! Who asked her to take me, I wonder? Or for her opinions on my ways of living? Of all the cheeky monkeys! Pitching into me like that—just because she missed her blessed waltz! Certainly it was rotten of me—I don't say it wasn't. But I forgot. I told ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... to have his daughter remain, but the shrew was determined to be rid of her, and gave him no peace. At last, when he could gainsay her no longer, he placed his daughter in a sledge and drove her to the open fields. Here he left her, with nothing to shield her from the bitter cold. Kissing her good-by, he drove away, not ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... who is master, O! shrew!" observed her master, as he surveyed his handiwork. "Thou wilt not walk, then shall thy sisters force thee to run; thou wilt lie down, then shall they drag thee until thy mouth ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... against her! But this beats all the rest! Why, I have it from my maid, who is sister to one of the servants at the boarding-school in Queen Square, whither they have sent the Lady Belle, that she is a regular little shrew. She flew at one of the young ladies like a wild cat, because she did not yield place to her at once, and scratched her cheeks till the blood ran down, and tore out whole handfuls of her hair. She ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... couldn't have left New York; but now, now that I am safe, why should I stay here, flatting with a shrew, provoking the Van Dams, to whom I owe some gratitude, wasting my life for a man who—who said he ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... in the season of light operas, and one ballet, the latter Delibes's "Sylvia." The operas were Goetz's "Taming of the Shrew" (five times), Gluck's "Orpheus" (thirteen times), Wagner's "Lohengrin" (ten times), Mozart's "Magic Flute" (six times), Nicolai's "Merry Wives of Windsor" (nine times), Delibes's "Lakm" (eleven times), Wagner's ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... other servants, but in intelligence and in mental qualities their superior. Hira had been known in Govindpur from childhood as a widow, but no one had ever heard anything of her husband, neither had any one heard of any stain upon her character. She was something of a shrew. She dressed and adorned herself as one whose husband is living. She was beautiful, of brilliant complexion, lotus-eyed, short in stature, her face like the moon covered with clouds, her hair raised in ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... grandiloquent advertisements take up so much space in our newspapers. Plato, in the "Laws," says that "The Gods, pitying the toils which our race is born to undergo, have appointed holy festivals in which men rest from their labors." Lucentio, in "The Taming of the Shrew," advances the same opinion in more definite and ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... woman's bairn, Maggie?" answered the peace-officer, smiling and shaking his head with an ironical emphasis on the adjective, and a calmness calculated to provoke to madness the furious old shrew. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... hag wouldn't hear of the whipster; Not merely because, as a shrew, he eclipst her, And nature had given him, to keep him still young, Much tongue in his head and no head in his tongue; But because she well knew that, for change ever ready, He'd not even to mischief keep properly steady: That soon even the wrong side would cease to delight, And, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Lost; Two Gentlemen of Verona; Comedy of Errors; Merchant of Venice; Taming of the Shrew; A Midsummer Night's Dream; All's Well that Ends Well; Merry Wives of Windsor; Much Ado About Nothing; As You Like It; Twelfth Night; Troilus and Cressida; Measure for Measure; Pericles; Cymbeline; The ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... pointed processes. Their feet are divided into toes, which are armed with sharp, hooked claws. This tribe is predacious, living almost entirely upon animal food; and consists of the seal, dog, cat, weasel, otter, bear, opossum, kangaroo, mole, shrew, and hedgehog genera. ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... awful it is to behold; for betwixt those forces it filleth all the mountain ghyll, and there is no foothold for man, nay for goat, save at a hundred foot or more above the water, and that evil and perilous; and is the running of a winter millstream to the beetles and shrew-mice that haunt the greensward beside it, so is the running of that flood to the sons of Adam and the beasts that serve them: and none has been so bold as to strive to cast a ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... it had pierced thy heart, and thou hadst died! So had the Trojans respite from their toils 465 Enjoy'd, who, now, shudder at sight of thee Like she-goats when the lion is at hand. To whom, undaunted, Diomede replied. Archer shrew-tongued! spie-maiden! man of curls![14] Shouldst thou in arms attempt me face to face, 470 Thy bow and arrows should avail thee nought. Vain boaster! thou hast scratch'd my foot—no more— And I regard it as I might ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... if the truth was known, I know where the blame would lie—your daughter will not be the shrew and scold to him that my blister was to me—upon my credit ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... about and thought there was nothing on the land as lively as the fish in the water, so he made the shrew-mice, for he said, "They will skip about and enliven the ground and prevent it from looking dead and barren, even if they are ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... collections of English Mysteries Noah's wife is an untamed shrew, who refuses to enter the ark. In the York collection, Noah being ordered by "Deus" to build his boat, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... not the transient breath of poetic incense that women want; each can receive that from a lover. It is not life-long sway; it needs but to become a coquette, a shrew, or a good cook, to be sure of that. It is not money, nor notoriety, nor the badges of authority which men have appropriated to themselves. If demands, made in their behalf, lay stress on any of these particulars, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... great variety of rats in Ceylon, from the tiny shrew to the large "bandicoot". This is a most destructive creature in all gardens, particularly among potato crops, whole rows of which he digs out and devours. He is a perfect rat in appearance, but he would rather astonish one of our English tom-cats if ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... my ecstasies, do, Kind critic, your "tongue has a tang" But—a sage never heeded a shrew In the ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... thing not less extraordinary than what you have related," said I, "for in Arcadia I saw with my own eyes a hog which was so fat that not only was it unable to get up but a shrew mouse having eaten a hole in its back had there made its nest and was rearing a family. I have heard that this same thing happened in the ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... I'd like to see you do it. But the part of Katherine would be the thing for you—fascinating shrew that ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... EPHESUS. Good Lord, you use this dalliance to excuse Your breach of promise to the Porcupine: I should have chid you for not bringing it, But, like a shrew, ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... "Let the world slide," in the "Taming of the Shrew."—Halliwell. But the latter saying occurs in the "Towneley ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... use this dalliance to excuse Your breach of promise to the Porpentine. I should have chid you for not bringing it, 50 But, like a shrew, you ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... was not good, and she did not see his lips pucker as for a long whistle. But he did not whistle. He replied very humbly; and so sweetly that Murguia quailed for the little shrew. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... that "La Vida es Sueno", is founded on a story which turns out to be substantially the same as that with which English students are familiar as the foundation of the famous Induction to the "Taming of the Shrew". Calderon found it however in a different work from that in which Shakespeare met with it, or rather his predecessor, the anonymous author of "The Taming of a Shrew", whose work supplied to Shakespeare the ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... that it is appropriate," he rejoined. "I think on the whole I would rather love a Juliet than tame a shrew." ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... the agricultural labours of spring—a Shrew-mouse, Field-mouse, Mole, Frog, Adder, or Lizard—will provide us with the most vigorous and famous of these expurgators of the soil. This is the Burying-beetle, the Necrophorus, so different from the cadaveric mob in dress and habits. In honour ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... of kings and emperors. What famous beauty embellished the court of Elizabeth or either Mary? Even Anne's Mrs. Masham was not a shining personality, and her Sarah of Marlborough was only a brilliant shrew. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... pack to the back than the biggest heifer in Smithfield and, if I can prevent one of you from marrying, the 'Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.' will not be written in vain. Not that my Lady was a scold or a shrew, as some wives are; I could have managed to have cured her of that; but she was of a cowardly, crying, melancholy, maudlin temper, which is to me still more odious: do what one would to please her, she would never be happy or in good-humour. I left her alone ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... wrath, rage, indignation, ire, frenzy; virago, termagant, shrew, vixen, beldame, Xantippe; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... you tell us, Emperor Jurgen," said they all, "your wife was an acidulous shrew, and the sort of woman who believes that whatever she ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... varying the program by choosing first a Shakespeare drama and then a modern play. Each act is cast separately, so that all the girls may have a chance to take part, and in this way we read "Twelfth night," "Romeo and Juliet," "The taming of the Shrew," "Macbeth," "The bluebird," "The ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... would not endure from Sir Griffin,—just at present; and, on behalf of Mrs. Carbuncle, even Lizzie was long-suffering. It cannot, however, be said that this Petruchio had as yet tamed his own peculiar shrew. Lucinda was as savage as ever, and would snap and snarl, and almost bite. Sir Griffin would snarl too, and say very bearish things. But when it came to the point of actual quarrelling, he would become sullen, and in his ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... conceited Historie, called the Taming of the Shrew, as acted by the Earle of Pembroke's Servants. First Edit. 4to. inlaid on large paper, ib., printed by V.S. 1607. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... through her tears, "I am the daughter of a poor man in the castle town. My mother died when I was seven years old, and my father has now wedded a shrew, who loathes and ill-uses me; and in the midst of my grief he is gone far away on his business, so I was left alone with my stepmother; and this very night she spited and beat me till I could bear it no longer, and was on my way to my aunt's, who dwells ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... in peace." "The great difficulty was to compel them to pay their debts." "To strengthen our virtue God bids us trust in him." "I made no bargain with you to live always drudging." "To sum up all her tongue confessed the shrew." "To proceed my own adventure was ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... thick their tracks were, that of the white-footed mouse being most abundant; but occasionally there was a much finer track, with strides or leaps scarcely more than an inch apart. This is perhaps the little shrew-mouse of the woods, the body not more than an inch and a half long, the smallest mole or mouse kind known to me. Once, while encamping in the woods, one of these tiny shrews got into an empty pail standing in camp, and died before morning, either ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... There is no supremer test of character. Eleven years of hotel housekeepership guarantees a knowledge of human nature that includes some things no living being ought to know about her fellow men. And inevitably one of two results must follow. You degenerate into a bitter, waspish, and fault-finding shrew; or you develop into a patient, tolerant, and infinitely understanding woman. Martha Foote dealt daily with Polack scrub girls, and Irish porters, and Swedish chambermaids, and Swiss waiters, and Halsted Street bell-boys. Italian tenors fried onions ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... Mary Acton, she was miraculously meek and dumb; all the scold was quelled within her; the word "blood" was the Petruchio that tamed that shrew; she could see a plenty of those crimson spots, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Irish Channel, to graze anew over deposits in which the bones and horns of their remote ancestors had been entombed long ages before, the feat would have been surely far beyond the power of such feeble natives of the soil as the mole, the hedgehog, the shrew, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... seem to be the production, as they are the heritage, not of man but of humanity. It is essential to the permanence of humour that it should refer to large classes, and awaken emotions common to many. If Socrates and Xantippe, the philosopher and the shrew, had not represented classes, and an ordinary connection in life, we should have been ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... hopes thereby to get me some relief, I heard, methought, his voice say, "Cease to mourn: I live; and though the veil of flesh once worn Be now stript off, dissolved, and laid aside, My spirit's with thee, and shall so abide." This satisfied me; down I shrew my quill, Willing to be resigned to God's ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... a foole, thar't a foole, bee rulde by mine host, shew thy self a brave man, of the true seede of Troy, a gallant Agamemnon; tha'st a shrew to thy wife, if shee crosse thy brave humors, kicke thy heele at ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... with a sweetheart, means an early marriage and fidelity. To row on rough waters you will have to tame a shrew before you attain connubial bliss. Affairs in the business world will prove disappointing after you dream of rowing in muddy waters. If the waters are shallow and swift, a hasty courtship or stolen pleasures, from which there can be no lasting ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... on womanhood are admirably symbolized in their theology. Of their four principal goddesses—using the more familiar Latin names—Juno is a shrew, Venus a wanton, while Minerva and Diana are Amazons or hermaphrodites—masculine minds in female bodies. In Juno, as Gladstone has aptly said, the feminine character is strongly marked; but, as he himself is obliged to admit, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... morning a shadow stretches to a bridge across the brook, and in that shadow my trout used to lie. The bank under the drooping boughs forms a tiny cliff a foot high, covered with moss, and here I once observed shrew mice diving and racing about. But only once, though I frequently passed the spot; it is curious that I did not ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... type of Action Picture gives us neither the quality of Macbeth or Henry Fifth, the Comedy of Errors, or the Taming of the Shrew. It gives us rather that fine and special quality that was in the ink-bottle of Robert Louis Stevenson, that brought about the limitations and the nobility of the stories of Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... confidence in any race, and if it had been permissible would have implored the Creator for a new one, but not daring to trouble Him about such trifles, did not know whom to choose, and was thinking that his wealth would be a great trouble to him, when he met in his path a pretty little shrew-mouse of the noble race of shrew-mice, who bear all gules on an azure ground. By the gods! be sure that it was a splendid animal, with the finest tail of the whole family, and was strutting about in the sun like a brave shrew-mouse. It was proud of having been in this ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... dunderhead!" Skipper John scolded. "I believes ye! Dang if I don't! Go to! Shift them wet clothes, sir, an' come t' supper. I hopes a shrew hooks ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... calls thee shrew; Would'st thou, girl, prove the charge untrue, Marry the fool who long hath wooed, And all will swear ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various |
