"Insidiously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about it. Frances Burney and her Evelina (1778), not to mention her subsequent works and her delightful Diary, have been the subject of a great deal of writing: but though more than a hundred years—more indeed than a century and a quarter—have passed since the book insidiously took London by gradual storm, it may, without too much presumption, be questioned whether either book or author has yet been finally or satisfactorily "placed." The immense advantage of not having a history, positively illustrated once for all in Shakespeare, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... distinctly sick all over. The second day the patient feels somewhat better, the fever is lower and the prostration and pain are not so marked. The third day he feels better still, and but for a little weakness would feel well. Diphtheria begins slowly and insidiously, with very little prostration and a very low fever the first day. The patient scarcely feels sick. The second day more prostration is present, the fever climbs upward a little more, and the patient begins to feel ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... pretty leetle seat!" he exclaimed in a tone of pleased discovery, just as though he had not been leading her insidiously towards it ever since ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... open frankness, Luther was thus meekly committing himself to the powers at Rome, they were meditating his destruction. Insidiously they sought to deprive him of the Elector's protection, and answered his humble and confiding appeal with a citation to appear before them ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... poultry, produce, &c. which they carried to the Island. The counterfeit money they purchased by merely paying for the printing; the British having obtained copies of the American emission, struck immense quantities of it in New-York, and insidiously sent it out into the country, in order to ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... clay, across the channel. The Boy noted, with keenest admiration, that these were all laid with the greatest regularity parallel with the flow of the current, butts up stream, brushy tops below. In this way, the current took least hold upon them, and was obstructed gradually and as it were insidiously, without being challenged to any violent test of strength. Already it was lingering in some confusion, backing up, and dividing its force, and stealing away at each side among the bushes. The Boy had heard that the beavers were accustomed to begin their dams by felling a tree across the ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... will recognise the significance, the protective competence, the keen and reliable instinct which enable untutored believers to discern and detect doctrinal leaven insidiously concealed in the garb ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... all. He is not the man to joke. He said in these little fellows the National representatives were insidiously mimicked, that in particular one could discover caricatures of Couthon, Saint-Just and Robespierre, and he seized the lot. It is a dead loss to me, to say nothing of the grave risks ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... discerned in him the evident cause of her husband's animosity against her, and all her woe, and had made up her mind that he should not escape with impunity. She therefore feigned to be much interested by this story, consorted frequently and very familiarly with Ambrogiuolo, and insidiously captured his confidence, insomuch that at her suggestion, when the fair was done, he, taking with him all his wares, accompanied her to Alexandria, where she provided him with a shop, and put no little of her own money in his hands; so that he, finding it very profitable, was glad ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... never entirely shook it off before his marriage at 26, so deeply rooted was the hold it had on him. Especially at the time between sleeping and waking, or while lying sleepless at night—when the monks prayed 'ne polluantur corpora'—did its attacks come insidiously upon him. He would struggle for weeks and then would come a relapse. On one occasion he slept with a young uncle who amused himself, thinking he was asleep, by playing with his penis until he had an emission. A.N. hailed the occasion with keen ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... stealing upon her so gradually and insidiously that she had never realized it until this moment,—the moment when it had taken ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... inward voice by dwelling on his joy in his wife and child. But it returned insidiously and haunted his ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... getting more and more embittered, brain sometimes reeling with the shock of the constantly recurring fevers—though I knew how the malaria, rising out of that very fairness, was slowly undermining my constitution, and insidiously sapping the powers of mind and body—I regarded the alluring face of the land with a fatuous love, and felt a certain sadness steal over me as each day I was withdrawing myself from it, and felt disposed to quarrel with the fate that seemed to ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... much?" "Too small," "Oh, my, kitchen's too dark," "What awful paper," "You don't call that closet a room, I hope," and the like. It seemed a harmless game, and we did not suspect that in a more serious form its fascinations were insidiously rooting themselves in our own lives. It is true we often found ourselves pausing in front of new apartments and wondering what they were like inside, and urged by the Precious Ones entered, now and then, to see ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... offence." But he referred the matter to his council, and was advised to cross over to England immediately with the ships which had brought the reenforcement under the Duke of Albemarle. That nobleman, however, insidiously, as it was afterward pretended, diverted him from this intention. The Earl of Salisbury received orders to sail immediately with his own retainers, a body of one hundred men, and to summon to the royal standard the natives of Wales. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... original poem is thus inscribed: "To Mademoiselle de Longueville, now Duchess of Namur, on her Quartan Fever." The conceit of the sonneteer is that the fever is an enemy luxuriously lodged in the lovely person of its victim, and there insidiously plotting against her life:— ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... but a very different question from the one-sided suicidal abolition of all protection. It may pass under review hereafter. In the mean time, let us hope that neither Government nor Legislature will be insidiously betrayed, or openly bullied, into any unsafe tampering with, or rash experiments upon, a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... and villainous; his every act and thought centred on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... red in the sun glow and riding huge red horses. Then the colors mixed and faded and a long red bridge for a short time spanned the water, ending at their feet. The gulls hunted the last scrap thrown them and went home. The swallows sought their high cliffs. The insidiously alluring perfume of sand verbena rose like altar incense around them. Gilman spread a blanket, piled the beach fire higher, and sitting beside Eileen, he drew her head to his shoulder and put his arm around her. Possibly ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... reached Southampton. The essential fact, stated on this best of authority, is, that "Mr. Weston and the chiefe of them [their sponsors, i.e. Weston and Lord Warwick, both in league with Gorges] begane to incline to Gorges's new Council for New England." Such an attitude (evidently taken insidiously) meant, on Weston's part, of necessity, no less than treachery to his associates of the Adventurers; to the (London) Virginia Company, and to the Leyden company and their allied English colonists, in ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... a farmer who wishes to sell some distant and inaccessible portion of his land, and is compelled to spend part of the proceeds in constructing roads to it in order to sell the remainder. Regardless of the soundness or folly of such philosophy, the mischief was done. Insidiously the internal-improvement precedent had been allowed to creep into the strict-construction fold. How it grew until one veto after another was required to bring the people back to their senses remains ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... True, he had said no more to her than that there was no news of the ship, and that he feared the worst; but how he came to know that she was interested in the ship, and why he had the right to signify his knowledge to her, so insidiously and darkly, troubled Florence ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... reviewed the past, she perceived to have been her theoretical attitude toward marriage. It was unconsciously, insidiously, that her ten years of happiness with Westall had developed another conception of the tie; a reversion, rather, to the old instinct of passionate dependency and possessorship that now made her blood revolt at the mere hint of change. Change? Renewal? Was that what they had called it, ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... delectability by the potent agency of music? It used to be said that things too silly to be spoken might be sung; is it also true that things too vile, too foul, too nauseating for contemplation may be seen, so they be insidiously and wickedly glorified by the musician's art? As a rule, plays have not been improved by being turned into operas. Always their dramatic movement has been interrupted, their emotional current clogged, their poetry emasculated by the transformation. Things are better now than they were ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... in such a bed, there will be no appeal against him. Think, and speak, and act, for once, like an accountable creature. Is any control put upon your inclinations? Are you forced into this match? Are you insidiously advised or tempted to contract it, by any one? I will not ask ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... gallant of visitors. She smiled and talked and gave herself up to charming gayety, so that there was nothing for Bernard to say but that now at least she was off her guard with a vengeance. Happily he was on his own! He flattered himself that he remained so on occasions that were even more insidiously relaxing—when, in the evening, she strolled away with him to parts of the grounds of the Conversation-house, where the music sank to sweeter softness and the murmur of the tree-tops of the Black Forest, ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... other things hinging on Jane's home-staying which made me think that, from the standpoint of economy, I had made a mistake in not sending her back to Farmington. It was not long before the dog proposition was sprung upon me; insidiously at first, until I had half committed myself, and then with such force and sweep as to take me off my prudent feet. My own faithful terrier, which had dogged my heels for three years, seemed a member of ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... of it was in Urbino. His name would awaken suspicion, and any story of disgrace and banishment might be accounted the very mask to fit a spy. There was this sleek, venomous Gonzaga, whom she trusted and relied on, to whisper insidiously into her ear. ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... a sight of the matter, she traced his unhappy perversion through reaches of its course into which he could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt, but, besides knowing that, she knew how he looked as well; he knew each of the things of importance he was insidiously kept from doing, but she could add up the amount they made, understand how much, with a lighter weight on his spirit, he might have done, and thereby establish how, clever as he was, he fell short. Above all she was in the secret of the difference ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... dead. They insidiously seized an unguarded moment. Remiss in watchfulness, and formal in prayer, Carnal-security invade the mind. Your ardent love is cooled—intercourse with heaven is slight—and by slow degrees, and almost unperceived, Emmanuel leaves Heart-castle; and the prince ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... than ever before. I needed him. Something deep within me, something undivined hitherto, called out into life by his presence, could not do without him. This new craving, breakingly wild and sweet, awoke in my blood and cried for him. His presence nourished it in me. Most insidiously it attacked me. It stirred deep down among the roots of my being. It 'threatened my personality' seems the best way I can put it; for, turning a critical analysis upon it, I discovered that it was an undermining and revolutionary change going steadily forward in my character. Its growth had ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... a slovenly habit will gradually, insidiously fasten itself upon the individual and so change his whole mental attitude as to thwart absolutely his life-purpose, even when he may think he is doing his best to carry ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... camped upon began to crumble away, too, for the heat was insidiously melting the ice under the morainial deposit. At the time which should be high noon—when the sun was directly overhead in its course—one end of the patch of soil, forest and all, slumped into the water with a loud crash, ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... be blind enough to allow it, an Irish university could only become a hot-bed of treason, and practically all educated members of the Roman Catholic community would avoid sending their sons to such a seminary of sedition, where the influence would be insidiously directed to make the undergraduates even more hostile to England than they already are by inherited instincts and by all they have been told in ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... Hastings and the Council-General, not being satisfied with having instructed the Resident to make the representation aforesaid, to remove all suspicion that by the new grants any attempt should insidiously be made to change his former tenure, did resolve that a letter should be written by the Governor-General himself to the Rajah of Benares, to be delivered to Mr. Fowke, the Resident, together with his credentials; in which letter they declare "the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of diplomatists, I cannot forbear giving you a short sketch of one whose weight in the scale of politics entitles him to particular notice: I mean the Count von Haugwitz, insidiously complimented by Talleyrand with the title of "The Prince of Neutrality, the Sully of Prussia." Christian Henry Curce, Count von Haugwitz, who, until lately, has been the chief director of the political conscience of His Prussian Majesty, as his Minister of the Foreign Department, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... been some more. Kliment Blagonravov had evidently chosen Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, as the seat of operations in a suspicion that the wave of unrest spreading insidiously throughout the Soviet Complex owed its origins to the West. Thus far, there had been no evidence of this but the suspicion refused to die. If not the West, then who? The Cold War was long over but the battle for men's minds ...
— Freedom • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... were equally subject to the same corrupting influence,—"the evil heart of unbelief,"—and that the same cause which produced practical Atheism in some, and abject Superstition in others, may also have operated, but more insidiously, in producing Speculative Infidelity in the minds of those who are more addicted to abstruse philosophical inquiries. We must seek to get down to the root of the evil, if we would suggest or apply an effectual remedy; we must not ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... was in full posture of defense, all were inside the walls and every man had gone to his post. They now awaited the attack, and yet there was some distrust of Henry Ware. Braxton Wyatt, a clever youth, had insidiously sowed the seeds of suspicion, and already there was a crop of unbelief. By indirection he had called attention to the strange appearance of the returned wanderer, the Indianlike air that he had acquired, his new ways unlike their ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... suffering tumult in his soul, Yet fail'd to seek the sure relief of prayer, Went forth,—his course surrendering to the care Of the fierce wind, while midday lightnings prowl Insidiously, untimely thunders growl; While trees, dim-seen, in frenzied numbers tear The lingering remnants of their yellow hair." Mis. Son., Pt. ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... mounting tide of dinginess against which her mother had so passionately warned her. And now a new vista of peril opened before her. She understood that Rosedale was ready to lend her money; and the longing to take advantage of his offer began to haunt her insidiously. It was of course impossible to accept a loan from Rosedale; but proximate possibilities hovered temptingly before her. She was quite sure that he would come and see her again, and almost sure that, if he did, she could bring him to the point of offering to marry ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... first Eden the inevitable trail of the serpent has been over all, and too often it comes in its halcyon hours. Insidiously and surely came the stealthy trail of our serpent in the declining health of my husband, and the impending danger to the dear ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... the Western world have been brought into juxtaposition. Slavery was a rich soil for the production of a mixed race, and one need only read the literature and laws of the past two generations to see how steadily, albeit slowly and insidiously, the stream of dark blood has insinuated itself into the veins of the dominant, or, as a Southern critic recently described it in a paragraph that came under my eye, the "domineering" race. The Creole stories of Mr. Cable and other writers ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... it? No, it was only two. He had been going to say that in so long a time it would have been singular he should not have heard of it. He had been away from New York for ages; but one always heard of marriages and deaths. This was a proof, though two years was rather long. He led Mrs. Percival insidiously into a further room, in advance of the others, to whom the cicerone returned. She was delighted to talk about her "connections," and she supplied him with every detail He could trust himself now; his self-possession was complete, or, so far as it was wanting, the fault was that of ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... eventually get them clean out of the harbour, and convey them back to their own country. We do not ask for reprisals upon these people, but simply restitution of the fruits of our labours in the service of Your Majesty, of which they have insidiously despoiled us, and that no impediment to this act of justice may arise, or be pretended by the individuals in question, we are willing to wait for a still further period—retaining, however, what remains of the prizes in our own custody—until our claims are settled; when ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... all this, notwithstanding she was handicapped by negro slavery, insidiously introduced by Dutch traders. And when it was known that Africans had sense enough to set plants and worm tobacco, New England sagacity and enterprise were quick to supply the demand for slaves and to stock the market until Virginia cried, Hold! Enough! Negro slavery held her on ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... afterwards could always be relied upon to render decisions in their favor. Will the people profit by their experience, or will they be indifferent to the danger which surrounds them, until nothing short of a political upheaval can restore to them these rights of sovereignty, of which they have so insidiously been deprived? ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... in his surmise, I am much beholden to the relaxing influences of the night. I have been warned of perils that encompass me: perils that would infest the base and insidiously scale the sides of the most inaccessible tower that man could build on the edge of the Regent's Park. A woman with a Matrimonial Purpose would be quite capable of gaining access by balloon to my turret window. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... daring to keep him near Mazowsze, they would send him to some distant castle, where perhaps he would have to groan until his life's end under ground, but they would liberate Danusia. Even if it should prove that they had got him insidiously and by oppression, neither the grand master nor the assembly would blame them very much for that, because Jurand was actually very hard on the Teutons, and shed more of their blood than did any other knight in the world. But that same ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... protect ourselves from ourselves; for the worst enemies of a people are always found in their own midst, in their passions and vanities. And the most dangerous foes of a nation do not advance with drums beating and colors flying, but creep upon it insidiously, with the noiseless feet of ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... Vera, you look natural"—but the words almost petered out on her lips. Much of Vera's slender prettiness was gone. She had gone hippy, as the saying is, even her face insidiously ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... said I, half pettishly, to provoke a disclaimer if possible. To this insidiously put quere I received, as I deserved, no answer, and again we sauntered on ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... fly from this decision, to shrink from the great resolve, to temporize, to waver, have at such moments ever presented themselves to men and to nations. Even now they present themselves, manifold, subtly disguised, insidiously persuasive, as exhortations to humility, for instance, as appeals to the deference due to the opinion of other States. But in the faith, the undying faith, that it, and it alone, can perform the fate-appointed task, dwells the virtue of every imperial race that ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... his influence with the King proving vain—for Charles was as well aware of its inspiration as of the Chancellor's value to him—that crew of rakes went laboriously and insidiously to work upon the public mind, which is to say the public ignorance—most fruitful soil for scandal against the great. Who shall say how far my lady and the Court were responsible for the lampoon affixed one day ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attorneys, agents, and trustees for the people; and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed, and to constitute abler and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... whose prerogative yields only to ours. You have questioned his right upon a point of all others the most decided—the right of a father to dispose of his child in marriage. You have even fled from his protection—and you have dared—insidiously, and meanly have dared, to screen your disobedience beneath this sacred roof. You have prophaned our sanctuary with your crime. You have brought insult upon our sacred order, and have caused bold and impious defiance ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... They are against the employment of officers who served under the old regime. They are against the employment of responsible technicians and commercial experts in the factories. They believe that officers and experts alike, being ex-bourgeois, must be enemies of the people, insidiously engineering reaction. They are opposed to any agreement with the Allies, exactly as they were opposed to any agreement with the Germans. I heard them describe the Communists as "the bourgeois gendarmes of the Entente," on the ground that ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... faithful, sparing nothing of what had dropped from the persecuted defendant relative to his majesty's ministers. I thought official accounts might be less detailed there than against the managers, who, as open enemies, excite not so much my "high displeasure" as the friends of government, who so insidiously elected and panegyrised him while they wanted his assistance, and betrayed and deserted him when he was no longer in a capacity to serve them. Such, at least, is the light in which the defence ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... animalism. Now, by what means did the sculptor—the sculptor, too unacquainted with sculptural beauty (witness his ugly ideal statues), to be able, like the man who turned the successors of Alexander into a race of leonine though crazy demi-gods—to insidiously idealize these ugly and insignificant features; by what means did he turn these dead men into things beautiful to see? I have said that he took up art where Graeco-Roman Antiquity had left it. Remark that I say Graeco-Roman, and I ought to add much ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... leaving in a few days river towns far in the interior, and suddenly giving a water frontage to some plantation whose owner had for years mourned over his distance from the river bank. Capricious and irresistible, working insidiously night and day, seldom showing the progress of its endeavors until some huge slice of land, acres in extent, crumbles into the flood, or some gully or cut-off all at once appears as the main channel, the Mississippi, even now when the Government is at all times ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... up in buckets that they might gasp in the scarcely less hot air on deck. From bad, this state of things came to worse—men succumbed to its influence, the sick list swelled, and, finally, death stalked insidiously in our midst. ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... the most illiberal reflections on all contemporaries, have found it expedient entirely to abandon their own boasted performances, or to wait the completion of the very work which they have thus meanly and insidiously laboured to depreciate, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... honest, but it is without foundation. Already those earlier symptoms are constantly appearing, which, if not sternly checked, must in time grow into hopeless deformity of character. There is nothing that undermines all virtuous and noble qualities more surely or more insidiously than the indulged vice of envy. Its unresisting victims become, by degrees, capable of every species of detraction, until they lose even the very power of perceiving that which is true. They become, too, incapable of all generous self-denial and self-sacrifice; feelings ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... the fire; it would be jumping into the fire for fear of the frying-pan. The danger from the alarm is, that the pride and resentment exerted by them may be an overmatch for the dictates of prudence, and favor the project of a Southern Convention, insidiously revived, as promising, by its councils, the best securities against grievances of every sort from ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... the meantime the expectant Florentines had another matter of interest to consider and to discuss. Through all the noise and babble and brawling of that agitated morning there came a whisper, at first of the very faintest, which breathed insidiously and with much mystery a very amazing piece of news. Men passed the whisper on to men, women to women, till in a little while it had swelled into a voice as loud as the call of a public crier, carrying into every corner of the quarter where Messer Folco lived, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... liked that slangy slacker Sandy; he could not bear to give anyone pain, or to appear shabby or ungrateful. Of course he ought to have taken a firm stand weeks ago, and repelled advances that had stolen upon him so insidiously. He saw this now; yet how can you refuse to accept a flower from a girl, or be such a brute as to leave her notes and telephones unanswered, or rise and desert her when she nestles down beside you ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... the Messiah, but who still continued to observe the law of Moses, could possibly hope for salvation!"[35] While, on the other hand, the most learned and the most wealthy of the Christian name, under the generally recognised title of "knowing" (Gnostic), had more insidiously effaced the authority of the Evangelists by dividing themselves, during the course of the third century, "into more than fifty numerably distinct sects, and producing a multitude of histories, in which the actions ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... custom! Our next-door neighbor, the doctor, waits till we are really thin, and then begins to feed and grow fat on our ills! In our day, through the continuous process of self-poisoning we take on no flesh from puny, peaked childhood, or we insidiously lose what little flesh we had, and when our bones are well exposed, become alarmed, realize that we are sick, rush for the doctor, and dispossess ourselves ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... gallant prince by whose means our civil and religious liberties have been secured on a basis which can never be undermined unless by our own folly and supineness, although treacherous enemies within are insidiously making the attempt. ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... a steady roar. The plane started, ran along the sand for a shorter distance than before, smoothed suddenly as it left the ground, climbed insidiously. The beat in Johnny's throat lessened. He forgot the suffocated feeling in his chest. He glanced to the right and looked down on the ridge that held the hangar in its rocky face. A perfect assurance, a tranquil exaltation possessed him. Godlike he was riding the air—and it was as though ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... by the general consent, and suppressed by many judicial decisions, this will be only equivalent to saying, that it has been sometimes violently rejected through the influence and power of its adversaries, and sometimes insidiously and fraudulently oppressed by falsehoods, artifices, and calumnies. Violence is displayed, when sanguinary sentences are passed against it without the cause being heard; and fraud, when it is unjustly accused ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... worthy Judge, and advising him to prepare for war, for I was determined upon retaliation. Unfortunately for me, my attorney was a most artful, plausible, cunning fellow; and at the same time that he openly professed to advise me not to go to law, he insidiously held out the most luring baits to draw me into the meshes of his net, in which he was too successful. I was a rare pidgeon, and he never ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... him with even more than usual friendliness, and after a few polite preliminaries drew him insidiously towards the far side of the platform. An intelligent, inveterate and persevering curiosity was Mr. MacAlister's dominating characteristic, and as soon as he had got his distinguished kinsman out of earshot of the herd, he inquired in ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... look ahead, we shall fail now at a vital point of the social development of man. The result at which we aim is the socialisation of the motives of industry. We make work voluntary by bringing into it persuasively and insidiously deep motives and interests which represent social purposes and ideals. Given these motives and the beginning of a change from the relatively more individualistic to the relatively more social spirit in industry, the actual means of cooeperation would ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... chosen to be more patient under petty insults, and less resentful of her husband's well-meant though clumsy efforts for harmony, the older woman could have effected real little mischief. But this Emily refused to be, and the breach between husband and wife widened insidiously. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... ear like a spirit of consolation, speaking of peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper these things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon the spirit—that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first listened as one who listens to learn, or as one who, fainting on the hot road, hears, far in the ferny deeps ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... joined their passengers in strolling over the pleasant paths and trying to make out what bird it was singing somewhere in the trees. We made out an almond-tree in bloom, after some dispute; and, in fact, the climate there was much softer than at the landing, so insidiously soft that it required great force of character to keep from buying the flowers which some tasteful boys gathered from the public beds. There is a mild monument or two in this garden, to what memories I promptly failed to remember afterward; ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... whole Kingdom at a Blow? Absurd and impossible! 'Tis not only reflecting on our Governors, basely and falsely; but in some Measure on the best of Princes too; since it is impossible we cou'd be subtily and insidiously betray'd by the one, without being secretly doom'd to Ruin by the other. Now this, Mr. Dean, is a Conduct so utterly opposite to his royal Nature and Character, who now gives Glory to the British Throne; that I am persuaded, he is incapable of acting ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... and showed that the fire had gained a foothold. Soon a hole appeared, close to the eaves, which gradually enlarged towards the centre of the roof and along the surface of the earth. With blankets the fire was beaten out on the sides, but it crept insidiously along between the timber and ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... of childhood. As it is important she should learn a great deal of poetry, she is taught to read (and with this object in view she is sometimes sent to the mission school, if there is one near her home). The poetry is almost entirely of a debased character; and so most insidiously, by story and allusion, the child's mind is familiarised with sin; and before she knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the instinct which would have been her guide is tampered with and perverted, till the poor little mind, thus bewildered and deceived, ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... round the brig by the lights on her poop. Air bubbles sparkled, lines of darkness, ripples of glitter appeared, glided, went astern without a splash, without a trickle, without a plaint, without a break. The unchecked gentleness of the flow captured the eye by a subtle spell, fastened insidiously upon the mind a disturbing sense of the irretrievable. The ebbing of the sea athwart the lonely sheen of flames resembled the eternal ebb-tide of time; and when at last Lingard looked up, the knowledge of that noiseless passage of the waters produced ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... the free use of my hands, and protect my face by covering it with my veil, at the risk of being smothered. But the next band were so minute and active, and secret in their movements, that I never knew where to expect them. But the last slow, heavy legion which came crawling insidiously on, were the most tormenting and sickening of all. To be tortured by such a crowd of little fiends was enough to produce delirium. But I will not recall the visions of the night. It was worse than ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... pure in soul, as fervid lovers of truth, as this world ever possessed. On the other hand it would be nothing short of a miracle in human nature, if all that dreadful tangle of economies and reserves, so largely practised and for a long time so insidiously defended, did not familiarise a vein of subtlety, a tendency to play fast and loose with words, a perilous disposition to regard the non-natural sense of language as if it were just as good as the natural, a willingness to be satisfied with a bare ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... that they were steadily and insidiously influencing mother against me. We were drifting apart. Mother had through them acquired the belief that I was a rude and untrustworthy fellow, and she feared my boatmen companions were weaning me from her. Whereas I kept away from the house because ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... spent an afternoon hour at the little Protestant cemetery close to St. Paul's Gate, where the ancient and the modern world are insidiously contrasted. They make between them one of the solemn places of Rome—although indeed when funereal things are so interfused it seems ungrateful to call them sad. Here is a mixture of tears and smiles, of stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... by the late appeal to their humanity, the awe is strong upon them. Insidiously returning as they took their seats in the boat, it increases as they draw farther from the frigate and nearer to the barque. Less than half-an-hour has elapsed, and they are now within a cable's length ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... married seven brethren; (Matt. xxii. 28.) and more especially in his reply to those who demanded from him an explanation of the authority by which he acted, which reply consisted in propounding a question to them, situated between the very difficulties into which they were insidiously endeavouring to draw him. ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... please. Scott, for example, appealed not only to those who relished romance and enjoyed excitement, but also to those who appreciated his honest portrayal of sturdy characters. Thackeray is preferred by ambitious youths who are insidiously flattered by his tacit compliments to their knowledge of the world, by the disenchanted who cannot help seeing the petty meannesses of society, and by the less sophisticated in whom sentiment has not gone to seed in sentimentality. Dickens in his ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... of the ideas and usages, religious, legal, moral, or social, of this civilized world, and for her tearing herself from its communion with such studied violence, but from a formed resolution of keeping no terms with that world. It has not been, as has been falsely and insidiously represented, that these miscreants had only broke with their old government. They made a schism with the whole universe, and that schism extended to almost everything, great and small. For one, I ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the ComWeb, feeling a little shaken. All she'd done was to say she wanted to apply for a transfer! Undersecretary Rozan was one of Precol's Big Four. For a moment, Trigger had an uncanny notion. Some strange madness was spreading insidiously through the Hub. ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... testified when a brief silence had fallen on the trio, "I am ready to praise your wine. I feel the glow in my veins and the glow is insidiously grateful." ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... at this point in his suggestion: tinkers are accused (often calumniously, for tinkers have enemies as well as other people) of insidiously enlarging holes, making simple into compound fractures, and sometimes of planting two holes where they find one. But I have it on the best authority—namely, the authority of three tinkers who were unanimous—that, if sometimes there is a ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... ambassador retreated to his study, and evoked a fiend, in the shape of a huge black horse, mounted upon his back, and forced him to fly through the air towards France. As they crossed the sea, the devil insidiously asked his rider what it was that the old women of Scotland muttered at bedtime. A less experienced wizard might have answered, that it was the Pater Noster, which would have licensed the devil to precipitate him from his back. But Michael sternly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... have me tell you how you look to me, now?" said Harry Underwood's voice, softly, insidiously in ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... structures of the body and deteriorate vital parts and organs so slowly and insidiously that the superficial observer does not trace and ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... Temperance Society should reproach me for breaking my bond, which I would not have done except in case of necessity. But the evil effect of breaking one's bond upon any occasion whatever, was witnessed in the present case; for it insidiously opened the way to subsequent breaches of it, which though very slight, yet carried ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... [Sidenote: Slowly, insidiously, there stole over Allen Parker something uncanny. He could no longer control his hands—even ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... common and comes on so insidiously that the sufferers do not realize that they are eating to excess. The resultant discomforts are blamed on other things. Babies are fed every two hours or oftener. They should be fed but three or at most four times ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... metamorphose the object, render it necessary to take an accurate view of its real nature and form: in order as well to ascertain its true aspect and genuine appearance, as to unmask the disingenuity and expose the fallacy of the counterfeit resemblances which have been so insidiously, as ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... he might know fairly what means he took in preparing the accusation. He that was set upon Cato by Murena, at first followed and observed him strictly, yet never found him dealing any way unfairly or insidiously, but always generously and candidly going on in the just and open methods of proceeding. And he so admired Cato's great spirit, and so entirely trusted to his integrity, that meeting him in the forum, or going to his house, he would ask him, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... has somewhat insidiously laid a trap for his correspondents, the question put appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so deep. It is not, indeed, until after some reconnaissance and review that the writer awakes to find himself engaged upon something in the nature ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dark, either owning or influencing newspapers, the great munition and arms factory of the Krupp's insidiously poisoned the minds of the people with the ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... defense of bribery is as clever as it is cynical. It amounts to this: that universal suffrage is such a peril to the commonweal that having been given prematurely, it must insidiously be nullified in practice, even at the cost of universal corruption; in short, if the old society is to be preserved, universal franchise must be transformed into universal corruption. What an ironic commentary on the constitution ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... since Dickens has given us the impression of London in all its multitudinous, dismal-gay activities as Mr. Wells gives it us. But it is no longer the London of Dickens. It is a "great, stupid giantess," a "city of Bladesover ... parasitically occupied, insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic, and irresponsible elements." It was a chaotic mass of houses built for the middle-class Victorian families. And even while these houses were ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... way, does Mr. Dudley live out in the country?" he asked insidiously. She flushed and then ...
— The Purple Parasol • George Barr McCutcheon
... tachi,tu 'to go away from,' as in tocoro vo tatu 'I go away from this place,' tomurai, 'to make a funeral for the dead,' ucagai, 'to inquire with hesitation,' voximi,u 'to value,' urami,u 'to enquire,' xinobi,u 'to wait in hiding, almost insidiously,' as in fito no me vo xinobu 'I am careful lest someone see me.'[184] A few of these verbs which require the accusative of location admit to the use of the ablative with the particles cara or iori; e.g., tocoro ...
— Diego Collado's Grammar of the Japanese Language • Diego Collado
... type of government, the stubborn fact remains that absolute equality, from a representative point of view, is a fiction unsupported by fact. The notorious incapacity and apathy of the masses is always, in the end, directed by central powers, exercised insidiously or openly as you please, but exercised nevertheless. In every political party we find a coterie, men of little wisdom it may be but leaders of the crowd; in every city commission is always one masterful man to whom the other members defer; in every banking house, one deciding voice; ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... been—remember how ignorantly I had passed the precious days of my youth, how insidiously a sudden accession of wealth and importance had encouraged my folly and my pride—and try, like good Christians, to make some allowance ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... carefully for his opportunity, and then left the room. He felt like a man who has received a silent shock. Something fresh had come into his life, noiselessly, insidiously, without effort. He pressed on his hat, and passed down the steps out into the street, scarcely conscious ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
