"Bungling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said, last night, after dinner, as he bent and graciously kissed Alice de Breville's hand, "forgive an old savage who pays you homage and the assurance of his profound respect." The next moment my courtyard without rocked with his reprimand to a bungling lieutenant. ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... you partickerlerlery to do it," said David, bungling dreadfully over the long word in his anxiety—"you more than ...
— The Hawthorns - A Story about Children • Amy Walton
... bold intruding guests, And took them unprepared to give us welcome. Their scouts we killed, then found their body sleeping; And as they lay confused, we stumbled o'er them, And took what joint came next, arms, heads, or legs, Somewhat indecently. But when men want light, They make but bungling work. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... his patience, whether it was in bungling, in harvesting his graft, or whether it was a form of slackness. Nor could they help doing so, for patience, a wonderful purposeful patience, was his greatest characteristic. Every other feature of his personality was subservient ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... hemorrhage. The nut issued spontaneously from the right side. In the afternoon the auditory canal was found excoriated and red, and deep in the meatus the kernel was found, covered with blood. The patient had been so excited and pained by the bungling attempts at extraction that the employment of instruments was impossible; prolonged employment of injections was substituted. Discharge from the ear commenced, intense fever and delirium ensued, and the patient had to be chloroformed to facilitate the operation of extraction. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... thee, wretch! I recalled a crowd of scoundrels who were not a patch upon me, and yet were rolling in money. There was I in serge, and they in velvet; they leaned on gold-headed canes, and had fine rings on their fingers. And what were they? Wretched bungling strummers, and now they are a kind of fine gentlemen. At such times I felt full of courage, my soul inflamed and elevated, my wits alert and subtle, and capable of anything in the world. But this happy turn did not last, it would seem, for so far I have not been able to make much ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... embarrassed phantoms was established in office to enable the king to evade the demands of the Allies. They increased in severity from the surrender of the fleet to that of the army's batteries and then to its disbandment; but they were backed by inadequate force and bungling diplomacy. On 1 December detachments of Allied troops, landed at the Piraeus, were driven back with bloodshed, and well into the new year the King continued to defy the Entente and push Greece deeper ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... loves a man whom her father wishes her to lure to his death by her singing, and she sings entrancingly enough to bring about the meeting between her lover's back and her father's knife. That she does not warble herself into the position of "particeps criminis" in a murder she owes only to the bungling of the old man. Having done this, however, she turns physician and nurse and brings the wounded man back to health, thus sacrificing her love to the duty which her lover thinks he owes to the invaders of her country and oppressors of her people. After ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... related. General McClernand was appointed to this command by President Lincoln in person, who had no knowledge of what was then going on down the river. Still, my relief, on the heels of a failure, raised the usual cry, at the North, of "repulse, failure, and bungling." There was no bungling on my part, for I never worked harder or with more intensity of purpose in my life; and General Grant, long after, in his report of the operations of the siege of Vicksburg, gave us all full credit for the skill of the movement, and described ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... little liquor in a bungling masculine fashion between her lips as she leaned back, with closed eyes. She choked, ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... portraits of the King and various members of the Royal Family. This was not only by way of compliment, but also to give assurance that the machine was in proper working order. Edestone proposed to run no chances of a bungling or incomplete ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... most exquisite torments, shall at the same time not early, assail that which is a vital part, but, you observe, prolong life to the utmost. Some, of an old-fashioned structure, with a clumsy and bungling machinery—here are some sent to me as useless—long before the truth could be extracted, or much more pain inflicted than would accompany beheading, destroyed the life of the victim. Those which I build—and I build for the State—are not to be complained ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... of mind when the captain proposed that we should land upon the island. I saw he had something to say, and only feared it might be consolation; for I could just bear my grief, not bungling sympathy; and yet I had no choice but to accede to ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... evaporated—surged up in him now. His fear was lest the charged atmosphere of the banker's presence might deflect his own hitherto clear perception of true worth. He dreaded, once in the midst of those disturbing currents, a bungling presentation of the cause which inspired him, and which he knew ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to grow fast or cause sores in the vagina. There are the ring support and the stem variety and others. The stem variety can be taken out and replaced by wearer at any time. They are made to buckle around the abdomen. They are bungling but effective. The ring kind should be introduced by a competent person who should see that it is of correct size and shape, and worn with comfort. Sometimes these supports fail to cure when adhesions and other diseases exist; it may ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... sincere admiration for the British form of government, the people of Holland cannot easily overcome a feeling of vague distrust that the nation which in the past has so often abused them cannot entirely be counted upon to treat them justly this time. Incidentally, I may say that the bungling of Mr. Churchill in Antwerp, which we know much better than do the people of England, is another reason why we are a bit afraid of the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... returned Mr. Hamlin, sententiously, "tells me that's the only way you can trust anybody. ONCE doesn't make a habit, nor show a character. I could see by his bungling that he had never tried this on before. Just now the temptation to wipe out his punishment by doing the square thing, and coming back a sort of hero, is stronger than any other. 'Tisn't everybody that gets that chance," he ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... to take him as chief), he might secure to himself a long and honourable possession of power. Then it is said he can't whistle off these men merely because it is convenient, but he had better do that than keep them on bungling through all the business of the country. Besides, I have some doubts of his tender-heartedness in ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... cultivated by the hands of others; and when once they have taken root they will extinguish every other vegetable that grows around them. The fortunes they daily acquire in every province, from the misfortunes of their fellow-citizens, are surprising! The most ignorant, the most bungling member of that profession, will, if placed in the most obscure part of the country, promote litigiousness, and amass more wealth without labour, than the most opulent farmer, with all his toils. They have so dexterously ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... not the point," insisted Davies, with a sense of giddy bungling. "That's really not the point. I just mentioned it because I—because I couldn't help thinking of it, that's all. I couldn't help thinking of myself from the moment I saw you out there, free, with the game at stake, making for the Yale goal. It was just like looking at a moving picture of myself—twenty ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... been gone a week, Mrs. Grant was milking the cows, of which they kept twenty. Ethan was helping her, and Fanny, not yet a proficient in the art, was doing what she could to assist. Doubtless she was rather bungling in the operation, for the cow was not ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... himself, "the old mole left out the very chief thing in tracing the likeness—the expression! See her now as she listens to his awkward attempt at compliment. She is looking at him with the same scornful, laughing face that the girl in the picture wears toward the bungling admirer at her feet. He is right in one thing though, she ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... friend Ellis, a distinguished traveller and naturalist:—'As for your pretty little seed-cups, or vases, they are a sweet confirmation of the pleasure Nature seems to take in superadding an elegance of form to most of her works, wherever you find them. How poor and bungling are all the imitations of Art! When I have the pleasure of seeing you next, we will sit down, nay, kneel down if you will, and ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... purpose, the two prime causes of misfits, have many different ways of bungling people into the wrong ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... Their geometrical truthfulness was admirable. With the same tools not one in a thousand of our skilled mechanics could do as good work. Compared with it the bravest work of civilized backwoodsmen is feeble and bungling. The completeness of form, finish, and proportion of these timbers suggested skill of a wild and positive kind, like that which guides the woodpecker in drilling round holes, and the bee in making ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... when the wind howls; it gets into my imagination. I'd rather talk. The thing I have to tell you—is what I shall tell Farwell if I ever see him again. It's rather a bungling thing I've done. I'll receive my reward, doubtlessly, but I would do the same, were I placed in the same position, over and ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... clear. There should be no hesitation in our witness; nothing uncertain in the sound that we give. There are plenty of so-called Christian people whose lives, if they bear any witness for the Master at all, are like the notes that some bungling learner will bring out of a musical instrument: hesitating, uncertain, so that you do not know exactly what note he wants to produce. How many of us, calling ourselves Christian people, testify on both sides; sometimes bearing witness for Christ; and alas! alas! oftener bearing witness against Him. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... shall be said of him if he accepts the office with a smiling face? Yet must he not put on a face of distress. It is as well to attempt to excuse oneself from performing the duty. There is no heroism in cutting a man's head off well, and it is a disgrace to do it in a bungling manner; yet must not a man allege lack of skill as a pretext for evading the office, for it is an unworthy thing that a Samurai should want the skill required to behead a man. If there are any that advocate ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... asserted confidently. "We are at least beyond reach of these bungling English spies. There is no further fear of eavesdroppers. We are entirely alone. Each may speak his own mind. There is nothing to be feared in the way of interruption. I trust, Monsieur Douaille, that ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... manager, scratching his head with an air of some vexation; 'three is not enough, and it's very bungling and irregular not to have more, but if we can't help it we can't, so there's no use in talking. A novelty would be very desirable. You couldn't sing a comic song on ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... it's because you go coolly to work, for you are negotiatin' for another. If you don't succeed, it's the fault of the mission, of course, and defeat won't break your heart; if you do carry your point, why, in the natur of things, it is all your own skill. I have done famously for you; but I made a bungling piece of business for myself, I assure you. What my brother, the lawyer, used to say is very true: 'A man who pleads his own cause has a fool for his client.' You can't praise yourself unless it's a bit of brag, and that I can do as well as any one, I do suppose; but you ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... at his companion, and laughed. Honorable Patches showed the effect of his strenuous and bungling efforts to learn the rudiments of the apparently simple trick of roping a calf. His face was streaked with sweat and dust, his hair disheveled, and his clothing soiled and stained. But his eyes were bright, and his ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... been given her. She was letting it slip away. She had her reward in her hand for the mere pulling of a trigger and no incrimination for the result. For a bit of human sentiment she was bungling the situation unpardonably, fatally. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Cesar is a mutilated tragedy: it ends with the speech of Antony over the dead body of Caesar, borrowed from Shakspeare; that is to say, it has no conclusion. And what a patched and bungling thing is it in all its parts! How coarse-spun and hurried is the conspiracy! How stupid Caesar must have been, to allow the conspirators to brave him before his face without suspecting their design! That Brutus, although he knew Caesar to be his father, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... inasmuch as he interwove Roman examples and references, and sometimes digressed to subjects irrelevant but more familiar to the writer and the reader, such as the treatment of the deportment of the orator in the -De Officiis-; and to exhibit that sort of bungling, which a man of letters, who has not attained to philosophic thinking or even to philosophic knowledge and who works rapidly and boldly, shows in the reproduction of dialectic trains of thought. In this way no doubt a multitude of thick tomes might very quickly ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... time death relieved him from two other encumbrances: his sons Rocco and Cristoforo were killed within a year of each other; the latter by a bungling medical practitioner whose name is unknown; the former by Paolo Corso di Massa, in the streets of Rome. This came as a relief to Francesco, whose avarice pursued his sons even after their death, for he intimated ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... beginning to see how perfectly insane your scheme was," she said. "You have to support your act with a whole series of bungling lies. Possibly Marcus, like a fool, has mentioned it in Monte Carlo, and we shall have the detectives out here asking why you have not reported ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... Boehme, however, shows this fascination for the super-empirical at its height and culmination. It was an attempt, though a bungling attempt, to pass from an abstract God to a God of character, and it was a circuitous way of getting round ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... felt all over the country. Never was nation in a more tractable humour; La France, like a tired woman, was ready to agree to anything; never was mismanagement so clumsy; and La France, like a woman, would have forgiven wrongs more easily than bungling. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... into her range-trained brain. She stared and stared. Blue looked around at her inquiringly, reproachfully. Billy Louise sent him slowly forward and stirred up the huddled little bunch. She read the brand on each one; read the story they shouted at her, of bungling theft. She could not believe it. Yet she did believe it, and she went hot with anger and disappointment and contempt. She sat and thought for a minute or two, scowling at the cattle, while ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... subjects as are discussed in these romances be not an offence against good sense and good taste; but it is as unreasonable to deny the vigour and originality of their author's conceptions, as to deny that the execution is imperfect, and, at times, bungling and absurd. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Crass thought that the principal piece of bungling in this affair was Hunter's failure to secure possession of the Coroner's certificate after the inquest, but he ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... was never a fish at the end of it, only the hook and the bait. If he had known how to fish properly, he would have been able to catch plenty of fish, but although he was the greatest hunter in the land he could not help being the most bungling fisher. ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... de Grost," he said, placing them upon the table. "If a bungling amateur may make such a request of a professor, may I inquire how you escaped from your bonds, passed through the door of a locked warehouse and reached ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... M. Richefort persisted in saying that they were in one hundred fathoms. At that very moment only six fathoms were found; and the vessel struck three times, being in about sixteen feet water, and the tide full flood. At ebb-tide, there remained but twelve feet water; and after some bungling manoeuvres, all hope of getting the ship ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... of Cruelty to Animals, a patron of sport in many forms, a traveller in many countries, and a recipient of the honour of knighthood from His Majesty, in recognition of my services for various philanthropic works. These facts, however, have availed me nothing now that the bungling amateur investigator into crime has pointed the finger of suspicion towards me. My servants and neighbours have alike been plagued to death with cunning questions as to my life and habits. I have been watched in ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... jerked his watch back and forth from his pocket, while Westlake wasted fifteen precious minutes in waddling up to the house and hunting for his hat and returning with it, and two minutes more in bungling his awkward way into the buggy; then Sam started the grays at such a terrific pace that, until they came to the steep hill midway of the course, there was no chance for conversation. While the horses pulled up this steep hill, however, Westlake had ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... hundred of them, scattered over a radius of two hundred miles. Sisters of the one that had murdered his family—the hellish spawn of that accursed Number Eleven vortex that that damnably incompetent bungling ass had tried to blow up.... Into his mind there leaped a picture, wire-sharp, of Number Eleven as he had last seen it, and simultaneously an idea hit him like a blow from ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... carrying off the honors and being appointed to the team. The despatch with which the aspirants were made up into squads and tried out against each other was a joy to witness. The energetic director weeded out the defective players in short order. His searching eyes missed not a movement, clever or bungling. The five girls finally picked to play on the official freshman team were a survival of the fittest. Among them was Phyllis Moore. Further, she was given the position of center and roundly complimented by the director for ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... position, and the old soldier attacked him very slowly, cutting at his neck on either side, then down straight at his head, next at his arms and legs; and in every case, though in a bungling way, Roy interposed his blade after the fashion shown by ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... collecting the taxes; the interior customs lines, preventing the easy passage of goods from one part of France to another; the extravagance of the king's household; the pensions granted to undeserving persons; every evil of the bungling, iniquitous old rgime was brought under the scrutiny of the new thinkers, who tested the existing system by the light of reason and the welfare of the great mass of ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... diploma from one of our best medical colleges. He might have obtained a competency by honest practice. But when Madame Killer, already enriched through her nefarious business, hinted that she was disposed to marry him, Bungling eagerly took the hint, ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... the trial and his knowledge of Maslova, Nekhludoff was convinced that she was innocent, and at first was confident that the other jurors would so find her, but when he saw that because of the merchant's bungling defense of Maslova, evidently prompted by his undisguised liking for her, and the foreman's resistance which it caused, but chiefly because of the weariness of the jury, there was likely to be a verdict of guilty, he wished to make objection, but feared ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... happiness had led her to this collapse. This man was Nigel. He thought he had saved her from her worst self. But really he had stirred this worst self from sleep. In London she had been almost a good woman, compared to the woman she was now. His bungling search after nobility of spirit had roused the devil within her. She longed to let him know what she really was. Often and often, while they two had been isolated together on the Loulia, she had been on the edge of telling him at least some fragments of the truth. Her nerves had nearly betrayed ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... shown for JOANNA's freak. Her husband had slain her. That was all. She with her flashes, her gaiety, her laughter, was consigned to dust. But in Sir JOHN's note-book it was written that, "The hob-nailed boot is but a bungling weapon. The ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 18, 1890 • Various
... our troops deliberately and slowly evacuated part of Hill 72, but most of it we unexpectedly managed to hold, and are likely now to stick to. Had we thoroughly defeated the Turks, as we should have done had there been no bungling, the end of this part of the campaign might have been in sight, but now we are held up, and how we are to get out of the fix ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... afraid of it, and is never sure of his aim till he is quite close to his object. I have mentioned this fact to several Europeans who had accompanied various tribes to battle, and they all informed me they made a sad bungling use of the musket; their aim would be surer if they had large and ferocious animals to hunt or contend with. There is another circumstance that operates against their acquiring skill in the use of the gun: they are so ...
— A Narrative of a Nine Months' Residence in New Zealand in 1827 • Augustus Earle
... pars parva su—who without any reserve can declare that they were turned from materialism to a belief in future life, with all that that implies, by the study of this subject. If this be the devil's work one can only say that the devil seems to be a very bungling workman and to get results very far from what he ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as to the final outcome of your aerial squabble: but to the poor men who had to bear the wrongs, Inquisitions, rack-rents, Waterloos, unspeakable horrors, it was hard earnest, you know! Oh the wretchedness—the deep, deep pain—of that bungling ant-hill, happily wiped out, my God! My sweetheart Clodagh ... she was not an ideal being! There was a man called Judas who betrayed the gentle Founder of the Christian Faith, and there was some Roman king named ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... through. But I should feel as much disposed to knock a man down who took my words out of my mouth, as one who stole my money out of my pocket. Such a habit may be a credit to one's powers, but not to one's modesty or good feeling. What is it but saying, 'My dear sir, you are making a very bungling piece of work with that sentence of yours; allow me to finish it for you in proper style.'" Tho one is inclined to feel that this author could well have reserved his verbal scourging for more irritating forms of impertinent interruption, it is nevertheless ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... mold of his father's features. It was a coincidence of physiognomic intentions rather than actual resemblance—or a resemblance, such as might exist between a Vandyck portrait and the same face portrayed by some bungling village artist. ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the first fifteen years of his life, on a rocky Connecticut farm not far from Cos Cob. His father was an ignorant, violent man, a bungling farmer and a brutal husband. The farmhouse, dilapidated and damp, stood in a hollow beside a marshy pond. Oliver had worked hard while he lived at home, although he was never clean or warm in winter and had wretched food all the year round. His spare, ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... their gear. By the time he returned they would have half their garments on wrong; waist and trousers front side to rear; right shoes on left feet; buttons hopelessly mismated to buttonholes; shoelacings oddly zigzagged. It was far more trouble to permit their ambitious bungling, which must be undone and painstakingly reassembled, than to have clad them all himself, swiftly revolving and garmenting them like dolls. But in these early hours of the day, patience still is robust. It was his pedagogy to encourage ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... He was evidently doing his utmost, with a kind of jovial tenderness, to make life agreeable to Valentin to the last, and help him as little as possible to miss the Boulevard des Italiens; but what chiefly occupied his mind was the mystery of a bungling brewer's son making so neat a shot. He himself could snuff a candle, etc., and yet he confessed that he could not have done better than this. He hastened to add that on the present occasion he would have made a point of not ...
— The American • Henry James
... was one of the chief matters of difference between the President and myself, it will be treated later. The case of Fiume is different. As to the merits of the question I was very much in accord with the President, but to the bungling way in which it was handled I was strongly opposed believing that secret interviews, at which false hopes were encouraged, were at the bottom of all the trouble which later developed. But for this secrecy ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... them," I said, "I don't care. I don't care about anything. Why did he ever try to paddle across in all that rain? That was the beginning of all the trouble. A couple of bungling tenderfeet—" ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... so. I acknowledge my negligence. I should have done better, the chances are, had I thought it would have been of interest to you—pardon me. Just my bungling wit. The truth is, I was too much of a greenhorn to hold my own and ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... Definite outlines, cleanly cut edges, exact apprehension of volume and weight, nice measurement of relations, were matters outside of their observation and experience. They had broad minds, but bungling; and their language was no better than their apprehensions—usually it was worse, because language is rarely as definite as apprehension. Men rarely do their work to suit them, because ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... latter was in his grave he took occasion to cast imputations upon the motives of the historian, and asperse the honesty of his statements. Parsons added nothing new of moment to the discussion, for what he said was merely a rehash, made in a very bungling way, of the old facts and assertions. But the spirit in which he wrote and the insinuations in which he indulged furnish ample justification for the low opinion which Cooper held of the ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... beside Pocahontas's bright fire. She was far too clever a diplomatist to introduce her subject hastily; she approached it gradually from long range—stalked it delicately with skillful avoidance of surprise or bungling. The game must be brought down; on that she was determined; but there should be no bludgeon blows, no awkward carnage. The death-stab should be given clean, with scientific skill and swiftness, and the blow once given, she would retire to her own room and let her victim find what ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... into his bedroom to wrestle once more with the tie. He must be ready to receive Miss O'Reilly at the door, and his waistcoat and coat were yet to put on. But it could be managed. The suite was on the fifteenth floor, and a full minute's walk from the lift for an old person like Miss O'Reilly. Bungling everything in his haste, he tried to think what it might mean. It looked as if she must have changed her mind, and be ready to sell him her house, the dear old house on which he had set his heart. Perhaps she would demand ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... considered not that the contrary inference was much juster. If Somerset was so great a novice in this detestable art, that, during the course of five months, a man who was his prisoner and attended by none but his emissaries, could not be despatched but in so bungling a manner, how could it be imagined, that a young prince, living in his own court, surrounded by his own friends and domestics, could be exposed to Somerset's attempts, and be taken off by so subtile a poison, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... our dearth of great prose. With the exception of Henry James and Hawthorne, Poe is our only master of pure prose. We lament our dearth of poets. With the exception of Lowell, Poe is our only great poet. Poe found short story writing a bungling makeshift. He left it a perfect art. He wrote the first perfect short stories in the English language. He first gave the short story purpose, method, and artistic form. In a careless reading one can not realize the wonderful ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... and trudged beside her, hoping very much that she would not talk. For though for my own comfort I would walk far to avoid treading on a nest, or a worm, or a magenta flower (and I loathe magenta), yet I am often blameful enough to wound through the sheerest bungling those who talk to me when I ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... when I think of it,' said Joshua, the elder. 'And here we work and work in our own bungling way, and the utmost we can hope for is a term of years as national schoolmasters, and possible admission to a Theological college, ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... veiled some absurdity or rashness of his author, the more profound reader has been known to detect a meaning and a charm, which "the English language had failed adequately to convey;" and he has, perhaps, shown a sovereign contempt for "the bungling translator," at the very time when that discreet workman had most displayed his skill and judgment. The idea has sometimes occurred to us—Suppose one of these foreign books were suddenly proved to be of genuine home production—suppose the German, or the Dane, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... disarming as I could manage. It did not reach my ears till nearly too late. What a risk to take! What an expense to incur! And for how poor a gain! Apart from the treachery of it. My dear fellow, politics is a vile and a bungling business. I used to think meanly of the plumber; but how he shines beside ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... call Almighty God in His construction of our unhappy selves. Design?—There's not a trace of design in the whole show. Bodies, souls, gifts, superfluities, deficiencies, just pitched together anyhow. The most bungling of human artists would blush ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... each man cut his quill, With little Perryan skill, What horrid, awkward, bungling tools of trade Appeared the writing implements home-made! What Pens were sliced, hewed, hacked, and haggled out, Slit or unslit, with many a various snout, Aquiline, Roman, crooked, square, and snubby. Stumpy ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... they occur, and it is only by reading works where they are lacking that we realize all their importance. But here, as soon as we reflect, we are astonished to perceive that this great emotion is expressed in language strong, confident, and correct, with no hesitation and no bungling. The lively sequence of these complaints implies that they were poured forth all at once, in a single outburst; and yet the perfection of the style seems impossible of attainment without some study and some retouching. It is sometimes said that a strong passion at once creates the language ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... opinion, the remaining books injure the symmetry of this plot by unnecessarily prolonging the duration of the Wrath, while the embassy to Achilleus, in the ninth book, unduly anticipates the conduct of Agamemnon in the nineteenth, and is therefore, as a piece of bungling work, to be referred to the hands of an inferior interpolator. Mr. Grote thinks it probable that these books, with the exception of the ninth, were subsequently added by the poet, with a view to enlarging the original Achilleis into a real ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... task. The men had to go by the boiler in single file, passing on to the table to receive the bread, where serving was carried out so dexterously that the moving line never paused—until it got to my table. But there was method in my bungling. I was zealously striving to double the bread ration to the British prisoners. Consequently the pieces of bread persisted in tumbling to the ground, thereby hindering and upsetting the steady progress and rhythm of serving. But each man as he ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... had been in love with Norah since he had worn knickerbockers, and Norah held her own head higher in the air. And she let Mr. Williamson, the new book-keeper at Conner's (he who would have mortgaged two farms for her), take her to the ice-cream table, leaving the bungling lover (christened Patrick Maurice, his surname being Barnes), to jostle dismally over to the apron table, ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... absurd and bungling practice, which obtains in our political life, the Administration elected in November does not take office until the following March, an interval which permits the old Administration, often beaten and discredited, to continue in office for four months after the people have turned it ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... appeals to us now most strongly, and though we think we can see what they missed in their opportunities, yet they were not the followers of any great man of their own time, and they chose their own way freely, not as bungling imitators of a greater artist. It is a disappointment to find that romance is rarely at its finest in the works that technically have the best right in the world to be called by that name. Nevertheless, the work that is actually found there is interesting in its own way, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... Even as a boy his head was always in the clouds. He has not seen much society save that of his mother and an old-maid sister. Moreover, he is so dreadfully pious, and life with him such a solemn thing, that unless we are very bungling he will not even imagine such frivolity, as he would call it, until the truth is forced upon him. Then there will be a scene. You will shock him then, Lottie, to your heart's content. He will probably ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... I must know what my criminal bungling has amounted to, first. When I have seen the flood go down, then it will be time to go. I want ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... French say, indicate his sources—possessed the copy now before me. In giving this anecdote I give a specimen of the book, which is exceedingly rare. Should another edition ever appear, which is not very probable, he would be but a bungling Bungus who should forget the fifteen of the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... forged letter with a full knowledge of all the circumstances will see that it was at best, from the literary and dramatic point of view, a bungling composition. But style was not called for so long as the statements were coherent. For what did the forger's wife know of what her father's style would be under these or any abnormal circumstances? Had she ever had a letter at all from him before? Even that is doubtful. The shock, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... never forget it. My cheeks burned with shame. I said, "Oh! my God, if these are the leaders, we need not wonder at the people." A man occupying such a position to dare to say it! The Lord have mercy on him. No wonder the Lord's work is done in such a bungling way! I say those who want to be successful in winning souls require to watch not only days but nights. They want much of the Holy Ghost, for it is true still, "This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... with a certain percentage of native malcontents, who hated the war and sneered among themselves at the other dupes who believed that it was a war for freedom. It was a capitalists' war. They considered the state as an instrument of oppression, as a bungling interference with liberty and labor; they felt that wealth inevitably brought depravity. They committed both open and overt acts against discipline, and found in their arrest and imprisonment renewed grievances, additional oppression, tyranny. And ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wait with timid phlegm Till some illustrious pedant hum or hem. 179 The lords who starv'd old Ben were learn'dly fond Of Chaucer, whom with bungling toil they conn'd, Their sons, whose ears bold Milton could not seize, } Would laugh o'er Ben like mad, and snuff and sneeze, } And swear, and seem as tickled as you please. } Their spawn, the pride of this sublimer age, 185 Feel to ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... was important that it should not do so. The same was true of Kentucky and Maryland. It is easy to see, upon reading Fremont's proclamation, that it is the work not of a soldier, but of a politician, and a bungling politician at that. ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... bottom of it," said Craven. "That's no news to us. If it weren't for them, we wouldn't have this trouble now, despite your bungling. But that doesn't help us any. With this new discovery of mine I have shielded this building from their observation. They can't spy on us any more. But that's ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... production, exchanges, and consumption, a mediocre administrator of the province and the commune, an undiscerning philanthropist, an incompetent director of the fine arts, of science, of instruction, and of worship.[2208] In all these offices its action is either dilatory or bungling, according to routine or oppressive, always expensive, of little effect and feeble in returns, and always beyond or apart from the real wants it pretends to satisfy. The reason is that it starts from too high a point therefore extending over too vast a field. Transmitted ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Indian always expected a night attack. They further testify that after Reno made his attack with a portion of his men, thus depleting his effective fighting force by one half and in desperation made his bungling retreat, had he later come to the aid of Custer with the added reinforcements of Benteen, French, and Weir, who begged him to hear the appeal of Custer's rapid volleys, Custer would have broken the Indian camp. Reno remained on the hill until every gun was silent. Reno failed. Custer was ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... that is partly responsible for the clamour of the economists and sociologists in the publishers' announcements, almost drowning there the drone of the cataract of new novels. But it is too late now. The wrath will come. After mischievously bungling with the magic which imprisoned the Djinn, we may wish we had not done it; but once he is out there is nothing for it but to be surprised and sorry. The lid is off; and it is useless for the clever reconstructionists to press in upon us with their little ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... ruined by bad mill management probably than by bad mining, though every experienced man must have seen in his time many most flagrant instances of bungling in the latter respect. Shafts are often sunk on the wrong side of the lode or too near or too far away therefrom, while instances have not been wanting where the (mis) manager has, after sinking his shaft, driven in the opposite direction to that where the lode should ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... received your confidential letter of yesterday, informing me of the bungling scheme which has been worked out without your help. I presume it would be fruitless to attempt any opposition to the species of mania which manifests itself in such action. It may be best to let it run its course during the short ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... took up from the desk the office knife used for cutting string. It was keen-bladed as a razor. Unsteady and bungling as was his stroke, he severed the rope partly, and ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... many men—the value of knowledge of one's own capacities. 'Frisco Kid knew what he was able to do, and because of this he had confidence in himself. He was cool and self-possessed, working hurriedly but not carelessly. There was no bungling. Every reef-point was drawn down to stay. Other accidents might occur, but the next squall, or the next forty squalls, would not carry one of those ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... the management of parties, be they in-door or out-door, morning or evening, city or country, is to endeavor to find out the wishes of the majority of the guests and act upon that knowledge. To force a large party of people to listen to awkward, bungling charades, because two or three amateur actors desire to "show off," proves a want of tact in the hostess; to allow a few young people to guide the entertainments in a large assembly of older and graver ones, is in equally bad taste; it is, of course, better to assemble ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... woman's eyes a man need only do his stupid bungling best. But it is doubtful whether Wentworth had a best of any kind ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... to the horrors of uncertainty," the girl soliloquized. "How very, very stupid you are, Mrs. Daney, to warn me to protect him! As if I wouldn't lay down my life to uphold his honor! Nevertheless, you dear old bungling busybody, you are absolutely right, although I suspect no altruistic reason carried you forth on this ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... any transient wish for revenge. The reader has been told that Chingachgook could scarcely be said to know how to manage the oars of the Ark at all, however expert he might be in the use of the paddle. Perhaps there is no manual labor at which men are so bungling and awkward, as in their first attempts to pull oar, even the experienced mariner, or boat man, breaking down in his efforts to figure with the celebrated rullock of the gondolier. In short it is, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... her little best according to orders, for she dared not offend Dick's father. None of the Challoners were accomplished girls. Dulce sang a little, and so did Nan, but Phillis could not play the simplest piece without bungling and her uncertain little warblings, which were sweet but hardly true, ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... time, or talking in English to my compatriots, it might not unnaturally have been different. At Turin and at Genoa there are no such stoppages at all; but in any other part of Italy, give me an Austrian in preference to a native functionary. At Naples it is done in a beggarly, shambling, bungling, tardy, vulgar way; but I am strengthened in my old impression that Naples is one of the most odious places on the face of the earth. The general degradation oppresses me like ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of this remarkable clock well deserves the almost endless praise which he receives for his skill and patience; for his work is certainly wonderful; but the great clock, with its curious and complicated mechanism, is a coarse and bungling affair when compared with the human body. The clock doubtless contains thousands of delicate wheels and springs, and is constructed with all the skill imaginable; and yet the structure of the human body is infinitely more delicate. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Colin hotly; "and more disgraceful still was it that the fire came from our own side—from the Seminary scholars, who had gone in advance; a thing they had no business to do. But this was not the worst—at least it was not the end of the bungling; for if you will believe me, the same thing happened three distinct times. Twice more after we had got the men formed up again, and were leading them up the hill behind the English guns, did those wretched Seminary scholars mistake ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... atrocity; and Lord Cobham and two others were pardoned on the scaffold. His Sowship thought it wonderfully knowing in him to surprise the people by pardoning these three at the very block; but, blundering, and bungling, as usual, he had very nearly overreached himself. For, the messenger on horseback who brought the pardon, came so late, that he was pushed to the outside of the crowd, and was obliged to shout and roar out what he came for. The miserable Cobham ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... light—they carried it out artistically, with a completeness, a skill, worthy of a better cause. Several days had they been hatching this, laying their plans, arranging the details; it would be their own bungling fault if it miscarried. But the college boys were ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... peribolus or inclosure bear the traces of some bungling repairs made between the earthquake of 63 and the eruption of 79. They were Doric, but the attempt was to render them Corinthian, and, to this end, they were covered with stucco and topped with capitals that are not becoming to them. Against one of these ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... headlong—dropped and missed again! As he rushed past he saw the face of Ostrog's aeronaut confident and cool and in Ostrog's attitude a wincing resolution. Ostrog was looking steadfastly away from him—to the south. He realized with a gleam of wrath how bungling his flight must be. Below he saw the Croyden hills. He jerked upward and once more he gained on ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... Salvator, "Ho! ho! Antonio, weigh well what you are about to do. You are a clever chirurgeon, and perhaps will never be anything more than a bungling painter all your life long; for, with your permission, as young as you are, you are decidedly too old to begin to use the charcoal now. Believe me, a man's whole lifetime is scarce long enough to acquire a knowledge of ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... back and tail at every light bound of the athletic little creature. He never moves abruptly or jerks himself impatiently, as the red squirrel is continually doing. On the contrary, all his movements are measured and deliberate, but swift and sure. He never makes a bungling leap, and his course is marked by a number of sinuous curves almost equal to those of a snake. He is here one minute, and the next he has slipped away almost beyond the ability of our eyes ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... had been any bungling on your part, Gibbons, there might be something in what you say, but no one could have foreseen that before we had been on shore two minutes we should have been attacked in that way. You both did all that men could do, as was shown ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... Johnson had made a bungling attempt to carry out the policies of Lincoln and had gone down in the strife. The Democratic Party had reached the ebb tide of its ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the tempting of this soaring heart, Which might have made me, scarcely less than thou, A god among my brethren weak and blind,— 210 Scarce less than thou, a pitiable thing To be down-trodden into darkness soon. But now I am above thee, for thou art The bungling workmanship of fear, the block That awes the swart Barbarian; but I 215 Am what myself have made,—a nature wise With finding in itself the types of all,— With watching from the dim verge of the time What things to be are visible ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... closely with the divine ones of music during his excruciating performance, than many a listener at a splendid concert. Mozart, for whom he had a special cultus, would surely have felt satisfied, if his clairvoyant spirit had been abroad, with my friend's marvellous bungling over that first finale of "Don Giovanni." The soul, the whole innermost nervous body (which felt of the shape of the music, fluid and infinitely sensitive) of the poor creature at the piano would draw itself up, parade grandly through that minuet, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... of the night had taught her a new humility. She came to Jacqueline as a suppliant, begging to be forgiven not only for her moment of cruel anger but for her stupid and bungling interference in her child's life. Nothing was very clear in her mind except that Philip must be told the truth, and that, whatever happened, she and her child would bear ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... the street, against the wall, a queue of waiting women. They would be there until the early morning, many of them, and it was possible that then the bread would not be sufficient. And this not from any real lack, but simply from the mistakes of a bungling, peculating Government. No wonder ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... herb-tea as she sweetened it. Crimes which escape social vengeance are many enough, and as a rule they are of this order—to wit, murders committed without any startling sign of violence, without bloodshed, bruises, marks of strangling, without any bungling of the business, in short; if there seems to be no motive for the crime, it most likely goes unpunished, especially if the death occurs among the poorer classes. Murder is almost always denounced by its ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... war there is a right side and a wrong side; sometimes, perhaps, more frequently, there is right and wrong on both sides, due to bungling diplomacy and the blindness of prejudice. But in every case justice demands the triumph of one cause and the defeat of the other. To determine in any particular case the side of right and justice is a very difficult matter. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... then, skinning my birds pretty readily from old practice, and after a little bungling I managed to make of ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... any characteristic series of pictures or incidents from Madame Bovary: take Bovary's bungling and gruesome operations on the club-footed ostler's leg, with the entire village clustering agape; take the picture of the eyeless, idiotic beggar on the road to Rouen; or the scene in which Emma offers herself for three thousand francs to Rodolphe; or the following bit, only a bit, from ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... engaged a boat with two cabins of matting, one in the prow and the other in the stern. She was built of planks sewn together in a very bungling manner. ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... his rival—and he never put forth the claim that he did so—Columbus, by his voyages of 1492 and 1493, led the way thither. If Vespucci, as some have asserted, claimed to have sailed in 1497, in order to establish a priority of discovery, he did it in a very bungling manner, and at a time when it might easily have been refuted, so many of his companions were then living. Besides, though his name was bestowed upon the newly discovered continent—perhaps as a consequence of the writing of this ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... either. You must excuse me, Miss Knowles. There was something about your voice and face—rather threw me off my balance. If you'll kindly overlook the bungling start-off! I'm greatly pleased to meet you. My wife will be, too. May I ask you to step aboard the car?—No, ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... continuous energy. During the eighteenth century the British empire spread round the world. Under Chatham it had been finally decided that the English race should be the dominant element in the new world; if the political connection had been severed by the bungling of his successors, the unbroken spirit of the nation had still been shown in the struggle against France, Spain, and the revolted colonies; and whatever may be thought of the motives which produced the great revolutionary wars, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... don't like to see you wasting your time on coarse work. You have the root of the matter in you, and with a little coaching I could put a polish on you. I wouldn't do this for everyone, but I hate to see a man bungling who might do better! I want to see you at work. Come right along, and we'll go up-town, and you shall start in. Don't get nervous. Just work as you would if I were not there. I shall not expect too ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... number of this type who had been brought into this unnecessary state by bungling doctors who were treating them for typhoid ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... could not but regard with a jealous and distrustful eye. From time to time, by way of giving him a piece of his mind, he would cast side-long at his master a look of severe reproach, unqualified disapprobation. Plain was it that to his dogship's way of thinking it was a very bungling fashion of doing business, thus to suffer this red barbarian to pass from under their hands, untouched by tomahawk or tooth—betraying, as it did, a weakness of feeling altogether unbeseeming warriors of the ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... Indian to talk. Casey was beginning to understand why no one had wormed the secret from Jim. When you are hundreds of miles and many months distant from a problem, it is easy to decide that you will do so and so, and handle the matter differently from the bungling men you have heard about. To find Injun Jim and get him to tell where his gold mine was had seemed fairly easy to Casey when he was driving stage elsewhere, and could only think about it. But when he sat on his ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... demeanour throughout debate. The wilder the storm of interruption rages round JOSEPH, the more urbane he becomes, and the more dangerous. Mr. G., standing on the commanding eminence he has built for himself in the House of Commons, is the sport of most inconsiderable Member. Anyone, with whatever bungling hand, can "draw" him. To-night, whilst JOSEPH smiled his way through all the spiteful things he had stored up for gratification of old friends, Mr. G. sat restless, with clouded brow, face pale with anger, every now and then springing up with hot correction. Which was just what JOSEPH ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... the copy. You burned only the copy. Mr. Vanringham, it develops, knew well enough what that bungling Degge had been deputed to do, and he preferred to treat directly with Lord Humphrey's principal. Mr. Vanringham is an intelligent fellow. I dare make this assertion, because I am fresh from an interview with Mr. Vanringham," his Grace of Ormskirk ended, and ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... THE. Bungling writers sometimes write sheer nonsense, or say something very different from what they have in their minds, by the simple omission of the definite article; thus, "The indebtedness of the English tongue to the French, Latin ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... hypocrisy, the pride and selfishness, the upstart and arrogant exclusiveness, the insular prejudices and weaknesses, which form a part of our national character; but doing this, he loved his countrymen and countrywomen for their finer qualities, and hated the bungling foreigners who presume to caricature them without the barest knowledge of their subject. This is the secret of the hearty abhorrence which Leech always testified for Frenchmen. The ignorance of his countrymen on the subject of English women has been amusingly ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... my advice and don't." And so when such a declaration is made by a man as influential amongst his people as General De Wet, it is not surprising that the crowd shouted in response, "We won't go. Let the authorities adjust the result of their own bungling. Ninety-two men in Parliament voted for the expedition without consulting their constituents, and we are not satisfied." Thereupon some one shouted, "Where is Mr. Van der Merwe?" Others said, "Call him; perhaps he is in the crowd." So the stentorian ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... in the forenoon went up with his new class. He felt rather ashamed at finding himself among so many little boys, and still more at the bungling, hesitating way in which they said their lessons. They were just beginning Caesar. He found that he could quickly turn it into English, but he took his dictionary that he might ascertain the exact meaning of each word. The Doctor ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... extent, The first affords us life, the second nourishment. And if he can, why all this frantic pain To construe what his clearest words contain, And make a riddle what he made so plain? 140 To take up half on trust, and half to try, Name it not faith, but bungling bigotry. Both knave and fool the merchant we may call, To pay great sums, and to compound the small: For who would break with Heaven, and would not break for all? Rest, then, my soul, from endless anguish freed: Nor sciences ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... lived there. She had never known anyone by the name of Weltz. This was just what I had expected. The man for whom we are searching is shrewd almost beyond belief, and if we succeed in finding him it will not, we may be assured, be the result of any bungling on ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... gibbet two beings stand, Whose foreheads are smirched with the murder-brand, Whose lives, by the lawgivers bungling and bland, Declared are to justice forfeit. Below, like a statue stark and still, A legion of faces, in brutish will, Gaze up to the gallows with many a thrill, And thirst for the ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... tacit intimacy between them which would not otherwise have occurred in a fortnight, perhaps never. But he had done it with an assurance almost, if not quite, hypnotic, and he had removed his hand—a move, she recognized, which offered more opportunities for bungling than the initial venture—with the exact degree of insouciance, of abstraction, but at the same time not without a slight lighting of the eyes expressive alike of humility and gratitude. Lurking in her mind was an irritation over the ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... Pack old Dame Jellicot into the embrasure of yonder window," said the knight, "on that side of the door, and we will ensconce ourselves on this, and we shall have time to finish my explanation, for they have bungling engineers. We had a clever French fellow at Newark would have done the job in the firing of ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... venerable chapeau was uniformly of the same cock. The principal feat, however, in which this fervent votary of Plutus appeared before the public, was his nearly fatal affair with Mary Benson, otherwise Mrs. Maria Theresa Phepoe. In April 1795, this ill-fated-woman projected a rather bungling scheme, in order to frighten her old acquaintance and visitor, Courtois, out of a considerable sum of money. One evening, when she was certain of his calling, she had her apartment prepared for his reception ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... I drew my revolver from my belt as I spoke, and saw that, it was apparently in good order, although I thought that the caps looked as though they had been put on in a bungling manner. The work did not look like mine, and I had a faint suspicion that the pistol ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... kill me. He acknowledged that it was bad enough to kill a dog, but that a reefer could stand it. He also advised me not to have my uniforms altered by the ship's tailors, as it would be done in a bungling manner; but to get leave to go on shore, and that he would introduce me to a very honest tradesman, who would do me justice. I expressed my hopes to him, in a dry manner, that he did not belong to ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... abode, building her hopes on Mademoiselle Kayser's beauty as on some temporary profitable investment. As the old woman looked at her, she shook her head. Marianne had to be quick. She was pale, already weary, and her beauty, heightened by this weariness, was "in full blast," as the former bungling artiste said in her capacity of ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... in Rome and saw the real piazza at work. I was on the streets all hours of day and night, and what I saw was nothing like the trite imaginings of the German Chancellor. As I have said in a previous chapter, the "demonstrations" did not begin in any perceptible form until the bungling hand of Prince von Buelow betrayed his intrigue with Giolitti and the politician's intention of defeating the Salandra Government in its preparations for war became evident. At no time did the rioting in the streets equal the violence of what a third-class strike ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... prefer not to be quoted against him," said Davies, quietly. And mentally kicking himself, as he expressed it, for making such a "break" as in his bungling half allusion to the exception, Gray hastened away to tell of it. His story ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... transformed. Doffing his habit, Sir John Finett stood confessed before them. He knelt penitently before the king, humbly assuring his Majesty that he had been preparing this device, and many others, to please and surprise him; but that, through the bungling of some, and the bashfulness of others, he was obliged to enact the parts himself. This excuse the king was graciously pleased to accept, commending him for ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... a period of bungling and robbery, was placed in the same financial position as the United States after a period of war. In one case, as in the other, taxation was the only remedy. But the Heligolanders did not like their medicine, and, like children, protested that they were quite ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... and she closed the door. So carefully that he did not hear it, she locked the door; no more than in Hannigan's case did she want Barlow to come bungling into a scene before it had ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... the case with the instruments I have examined, in which his signature, written probably by his secretary, or his title of Marques, in later life substituted for his name, is garnished with a flourish at the ends, executed in as bungling a manner as if done by the hand of a ploughman. Yet we must not estimate this deficiency as we should in this period of general illumination,—general, at least, in our own fortunate country. Reading and writing, so universal now, in the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... them. Excitement makes me content to be, and careless about doing. My truest and best life is in myself, and I can only live it in circumstances of tranquil monotony. People talk so much about making the most of life, but their attempts are curiously bungling. What they call living is for the most part more pain than pleasure to them; for the truth is, that life should not be lived by men of mind, but contemplated; it is the spectator, not the actor, who enjoys and profits. The actor has his moment of applause, but all the rest is ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the force of the blow was not greater than the surprise at the sudden knowledge of the fact that the "Yankee Spy" was no bungling amateur, but that he had all the ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... him looking amused, terrified and helpless, all at once, while three men reporters and one woman special writer bombarded him with questions. The woman had brought a staff artist with her, and he was now engaged in making a bungling sketch of Theodore's face, with its ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... the labours of Parliament was a tissue of legislative bungling, involving enormous loss to the public. Railway Bills were granted in heaps. Two hundred and seventy-two additional Acts were passed in 1846. Some authorised the construction of lines running almost parallel to existing railways, in ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... worked up about it. He said the man had suffered death the first time to "all intents and purposes," so that fulfilled the requirements of the law, and they were wrong when they hanged him again. Laddie said it was a piece of bungling sure enough, but the law said a man must be "hanged by his neck until he was dead," and if he weren't dead, why, it was plain he hadn't fulfilled the requirements of the law, so they were forced to hang him again. Father said that law was wrong; the man never should ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... bound his arms to his side. Again and again he repeated this operation till Cameron stood swathed in the coils of the rope like a mummy, inwardly raging, not so much at his captor, but at himself and his stupid bungling of his break for liberty. His helpless and absurd appearance seemed to restore ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor |
