"Canting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... waste of good liquor I'd pour some of this down your gullet," he exclaimed, shaking a half-filled bottle in his fist. "Then maybe you could answer when I spoke to you. Now, see here, you canting old hypocrite, I'm Red Fagin, an' I guess you know what that means. I'm pisen, an' I don't like your style. Now you're goin' to do just what I tell you, or the boys will have a hangin' bee down in the ravine. Speak up, an' tell me what you propose ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... nothing to put on the other side, except our word of honor as gentlemen. Neither my comrade nor I are going to plead for our lives, though we don't fancy being hung. But perhaps of your courtesy, if we write our names, you will allow a letter to go to General MacKay, and that canting Puritan will be vastly amused when he learns that he had hired us to assassinate my Lord Dundee. He will be more apt to consider our execution an act of judgment for joining the Malignants. We got our passes ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... come to molest us. Now go. You can't walk? There's a stick for you. I ought to break your thick skull with it, but I'm going to be weak enough to give it to you to walk home. Go home and tell your wife and children that you are one of the most treacherous, canting, hypocritical scoundrels in Arrowfield, and that you have only got your deserts if you are ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... intensity of his bitterness. Although he did not hope for a renewal of the strife, he trusted that if it were renewed, he might have the opportunity of laying the country in waste, and of exterminating the canting, hypocritical, puritanical, independents. He soon perceived the folly of the Seat of Government being situated on the very frontier, the more especially as Detroit was to be surrendered to the very people whom he most detested. York, from ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... that most puritanical of Puritans, the praying, cheating, canting, hypocritical, long-faced Master Spikeman?" cried Arundel. "I wonder what new mischief he hath now on foot, for it ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... savage, heathenish custom they have adopted here, of tearing up and down the streets from morning till night. I wish, by Jove! they would ride over their canting Padre! I think he would find some other ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... calm survey of Laura's pure and angelic expression of face reassured her. This girl had no mind to entrap the king, and if Louis had not courage enough to dance with HER (De Montespan), in presence of that canting hypocrite De Maintenon, perhaps it was quite as well that he had provided himself with a partner sans coquetterie, ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... Keelin called this pedlar's French, saying, that I must leave off my canting. The ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... happen'd on a winter night, As authors of the legend write, Two brother hermits, saints by trade, Taking their tour in masquerade, Disguis'd in tatter'd habits, went To a small village down in Kent; Where, in the strollers' canting strain, They begg'd from door to door in vain, Try'd ev'ry tone might pity win; But not a soul would let them in. Our wand'ring saints, in woful state, Treated at this ungodly rate, Having thro' all the village past, To a small cottage came at last Where dwelt a good old honest ye'man, Call'd in ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... unscrupulous are termed swindlers, and eventually stand in the dock," he went on. "What are your successful politicians but successful liars? What are your great South African magnates, before whom even Royalty bows, but successful adventurers? And what are your millionaire manufacturers but canting hypocrites who have got their money by paying a starvation wage and giving the public advertised shoddy, a quack medicine, or a soap which smells pleasantly but is injurious to the skin? No, my dear Ewart," he laughed, ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... Rushton, kicking his horse, and cramming his cocked hat down on his forehead. "I'll show you how little you know of human nature and character. I'll take this wild Indian boy, brought up in the woods, and as free and careless as a deer, and in six months I'll change him into a canting, crop-eared, whining pen-machine, with quills behind his ears, and a back always bending humbly. I'll take this honest barbarian and make a civilized and enlightened individual out of him—that is to say, I'll change him into a ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... rail by the life-boat davits, he saw at once that the ship was canting far over. The life-boat, which in the drills swung close to the vessel's side, now hung far away. It was already filled and ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... hesitates to 'bell the cat.' What is more, the select aristocrats and monarchists are the least bold in acting frankly, and in saying openly what they think; leaving that office to be discharged, as it ever will be, by the men who—true democrats, and not canting democrats—willing to give the people just as much control as they know how to use, or which circumstances will allow them to use beneficially to themselves, do not hesitate to speak with the candour and manliness of their principles. These men call things ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... little mention here. The perfidious friend of the Pilgrims,—perhaps originally true to them,—he sunk everything for hope of gain. He was treasurer of the Adventurers, one of their most active and intelligent men, but proved a rascal and a canting hypocrite. He was a "citizen ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... disposition; and, after desiring me to sit, inquired into the particulars of my leaving the house of Potion; which when I had related, he said, with a malicious grin, "There's a sneaking dog! I always thought him a fellow without a soul, d—n me, a canting scoundrel, who has crept into business by his hypocrisy, and kissing the a—e of every body."—"Ay, ay," says another, "one might see with half an eye that the rascal has no honesty in him, by his ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... party has been unclean and vicious all its life.... Some of these worthies masquerade as reformers. Their vocation and ministry is to lament the sins of other people. Their stock in trade is rancid, canting self-righteousness. They are wolves in sheep's clothing. Their real object is office and plunder. When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word reform.... Some of these new-found party ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... canting heraldry?" she asked. "There is no country so rich in it as Italy. These are the arms of the Farfalla, the original owners of this property. Or, seme of twenty roses gules; the crest, on a rose gules, a butterfly or, with wings displayed; and the motto—how could the heralds ever have sanctioned ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... last and fullest of the two Narratives which have been published (the former being a mere transcript of the newspapers), which I would send you if I did not suppose that you would receive more pain from the unfeeling canting way in which it is drawn up, than satisfaction from its contents; and what relates to your brother in particular is very short. It states that your brother was seen talking to the First Mate but a few minutes before the ship sank, with apparent cheerfulness, and it contradicts the newspaper ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... and perhaps piping a little aria at intervals, congratulating himself on having found a pleasant, quiet place, when, lo! a gang of English sparrows crowd around him, peering at him now with one eye, now with the other, canting their heads in their impertinent way, bowing and scraping and blinking, and for all the world seeming to make such derisive remarks as, "Oh, what a fine fellow! Quite stuck-up, ain't he? Isn't that a stylish topknot, though? He! he! he! Look! he wears a rose on his shirt bosom! Isn't ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... renounce this canting strain! What would'st thou have a good great man obtain? Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain? Or throne of corses which his sword had slain? 10 Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... which cool reason cannot approve and they were fit causes for grief to the municipal authorities, who desired to preserve the good order of the roads and streets. But, what was sadder for a man of heart was the sight or the canting humbugs, who, from fear of blows, kept at an equal distance from the two camps, and who, although they allowed their selfishness and cowardice to be visible, claimed admiration for the generosity of their sentiments and the nobility of their souls. They rubbed ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... they did not so much as look on the faces of the people more than once a-year. The ecclesiastical historian, too, looking into parliamentary reports of that period, finds honourable members zealous for the Church, and untainted with any sympathy for the "tribe of canting Methodists," making statements scarcely less melancholy than that of Mr. Roe. And it is impossible for me to say that Mr. Irwine was altogether belied by the generic classification assigned him. He ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... over it just to show you that I understand. You were within a mile of Mablethorpe, when you saw a little fishing smack come riding in, and you made straight for it. Who should be in the smack but Solby, the canting Baptist, who was no friend to you or my uncle, or any of us. You had no time for bargaining or coaxing, and so, at the musket's mouth, you drove him from the boat, and pushed it out just as Lancy and his men came riding up. Your sail was up, and you turned the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... occasions, takes his trifling acts For wonders, and his words for oracles. The fellow knows his dupe, and makes the most on't, He fools him with a hundred masks of virtue, Gets money from him all the time by canting, And takes upon himself to carp at us. Even his silly coxcomb of a lackey Makes it his business to instruct us too; He comes with rolling eyes to preach at us, And throws away our ribbons, rouge, and patches. The wretch, the other day, tore up a kerchief That he ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... with such very different speakers; it has such a terrible canting sound. I hope you will not get into the habit of using it—for your ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... continuous rain kept down the waves, and the surface of the sea was comparatively smooth, but after a while a curious phenomenon began to be noticed; immense billows would suddenly appear, rushing upon the Ark now from one direction and now from another, canting it over at a dangerous angle, and washing almost to the top of the huge ellipsoid of the dome. At such times it was difficult for anybody to maintain a footing, and there was great terror among the passengers. But Cosmo, ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... cants that are canted in this canting world," wrote Sterne, "kind Heaven defend me from the cant of Art!" We have no intention of tapping our little cask of cant, soured by the thunder of great men's fame, for the refreshment of our readers: its freest ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... sail that stretches wide, A sea that's running strong, A boat that dips its laving side, The forefoot's rippling song. A flaming sky, a crimson flood, Here's joy for body and mind, As in our canting crafts we scud With a ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... He observes truly the statutes, and therefore had rather steal than beg. He is so strong an enemy of idleness, that in mending one hole he would rather make three than want work; and when he hath done, he throws the wallet of his faults behind him. His tongue is very voluble, which, with canting, proves him a linguist. He is entertained in every place, yet enters no farther than the door, to avoid suspicion. To conclude, if he escape Tyburn and Banbury, he ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... them! and I knew you would go into hysterics. She didn't tell you the necessity for it, I suppose, nor the good it is doing; but I will; so just listen to me, then you'll see perhaps that I know more about it than these canting sentimentalists." ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... into the Smoking-room Three plagues will thee befall,— The chloride of lime, the tobacco smoke, And the Captain who's worst of all, The canting Sea-captain, The prating Sea-captain, The Captain who's ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... confess, my dear mother," he said, in a canting tone, looking at Monsieur and Madame Hochon who accompanied her, "that my uncle's way of life is not becoming; he could, however, make Mademoiselle Brazier respected by the community if he chose. Wouldn't it be far better for her ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is indeed of the brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain jolly humours - of the hope and spirit with which the march begins ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... writer did not touch on the firmer peace of those whose belief dispenses with purgatory altogether: but I thought of this; and, on the whole, preferred the latter doctrine as the most consolatory. The little book amused, and did not painfully displease me. It was a canting, sentimental, shallow little book, yet something about it cheered my gloom and made me smile; I was amused with the gambols of this unlicked wolf-cub muffled in the fleece, and mimicking the bleat of a guileless lamb. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... from poisoned cant, was that the most shocking crimes were being openly advocated by Philip, King of Spain, against all European Protestants, rich or poor, who came within the clutches of the savages that administered the cruelties of the Inquisition. The canting crowd shrieked against the monstrous impiety of such notions, but their efforts to prove purity ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... Wifeless, childless, living solitary, dying alone, unregretled, unmourned. What is the wickedness you are plotting? Your father is dead, you can do him neither good nor harm. This girl is alive. She loves you. Love her. Let the canting hypocrites prate ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... and rifled the pockets of the sheriff with a dexterity which proved him an adept in the business. A teacher of music would have envied his fingering. Having caused the pockets of the sheriff to disgorge, he thus, in the canting language, enumerated ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... type of a canting hypocrite "in the ministry." He calls himself "a vessel," is much admired by his dupes, and pretends to despise the "carnal world," but nevertheless loves dearly its "good things," and is most self-indulgent.—C. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... was but petulantly to interrupt them, to call him a man of great words and small deeds. All that he did she found ill done, and told him of it. His sober, godly garments of sombre hue afforded her the first weapon of scorn wherewith to wound him. A crow, she dubbed him; a canting, psalm-chanting hypocrite; a Scripture-monger, and every other contumelious epithet of like import that she should call to mind. ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... your canting tongue!" cried I. "Tell me where my mistress is, or, by my soul, I'll shake every tooth out of ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... wall. Near the school is a quaint pack-horse bridge ("Bruton Bow") spanning the river (cp. Allerford). In High Street (S. side) will be noticed the old Abbey Court-house (now a private residence), bearing on its wall the "canting" device of Prior Henton (1448). On the same side of the street is Sexey's Hospital, an asylum for a few old men and women, founded in 1638 by Hugh Sexey, a Bruton stable-boy, who in the "spacious days" of Good Queen Bess rose to be auditor in the royal household. ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... canting hypocrite!" Julian declared. "Try your delirium. That packet happens to be in the one place where neither you nor one of your ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and all who have got rich by pilfering, canting, and cheating, those you may beat and bind, and hold captive for ransom. And chiefly the Sheriff of Nottingham—look you, ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... Yet why should not the fair her text pursue? Can she more decently the doctor woo? 'Tis hard, too, she who makes no use but chat Of her religion, should be barr'd in that. Isaac, a brother of the canting strain, When he has knock'd at his own skull in vain, To beauteous Marcia often will repair With a dark text, to light it at the fair. O how his pious soul exults to find Such love for holy men in woman-kind! Charm'd with her learning, with what rapture he Hangs on her bloom, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... situation, infused a bitterness into the letters in which he first made known to his western friends that he had fixed his abode in Nithsdale. "I am here," said he, "at the very elbow of existence: the only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity and canting; prose they only know in graces and prayers, and the value of these they estimate as they do their plaiden-webs, by the ell: as for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet." "This is an ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... reason," said Mirabeau; "I am attached to him too; but I never saw you so much moved." "Ah!" said. Quesnay, "I think of what would follow." "Well, the Dauphin is virtuous." "Yes; and full of good intentions; nor is he deficient in understanding; but canting hypocrites would possess an absolute empire over a Prince who regards them as oracles. The Jesuits would govern the kingdom, as they did at the end of Louis XIV.'s reign: and you would see the fanatical Bishop of Verdun Prime Minister, and La ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... who got it hot too—that old chap Bowles—I dare say you've seen him. Aye, he's a snake, is Helbeck!" the young man repeated. Then he reddened still more deeply, and added with vindictive emphasis—"and an interfering,—hypocritical,—canting sort of party into t' bargain. He'd like to lord it over everybody aboot here, if he was let. But he's as poor as ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gloomed on him a moment. "Art more like a snivelling, canting Jack Presbyter. I tell you, man, I can smell a Presbyterian ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... the canting falsehood that the women of all other religions are degraded and immoral. Through tyranny and falsehood alone is Christianity able to hold woman in subjection. To tell her the truth would rend the temple of faith in twain and strike terror to the heart of the priest at ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... know the sort you are: no mercy for yourself or anyone else. I know. My experience has done that for me anyhow: I can tell the pious, canting, hard, selfish woman when I meet her. Well, keep yourself to yourself: I don't want you. But listen to this. Do you know what I would do with you if you were a baby again? aye, as sure as there's a Heaven ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... over the winding, white ribbon of road—through Brodnyx village, past the huge barn-like church which had both inspired and reproached her faith, with its black, caped tower canting over it, on to Walland Marsh, to the cross roads at the Woolpack—My, how they would talk at the Woolpack!... but she would be far away by then ... where?... She didn't know, she would think of that later—when she had told Ellen. Oh, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... places he had no right to. It is delightful to see the great, generous poet going upon grounds of reason and justice in the teeth of the trumped-up rights of the "pious AEneas," that shabby deserter of Dido, and canting prototype of Augustus. He turns the tables, also, with brave candour, upon the tyrannical claims of the stronger sex to privileges which they deny the other; and says, that there are more faithless men in Hell than faithless women; which, if personal infidelity sends people ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... to real worth, to high, and noble, and strong manhood and womanhood, with the scorn we have for the canting weakling, is but part of our discrimination between a living, deep religion expressed in conduct and a mask or pretense adopted ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... striving to foment discord in your community or cast oil upon the troubled waters? Are you striving to establish on earth the universal brotherhood of Man and common fatherhood of God, or Throwing Stones at Christ and the Christian Cause from the cover of a canting hypocrisy? ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 1819, describes the Gipsies as "impostors and jugglers forming a kind of commonwealth among themselves, who disguise themselves in uncouth habits, smearing their faces and bodies, and framing to themselves a canting language, wander up and down, and under pretence of telling fortunes, curing diseases, &c., abuse the common people, trick them of their money, and steal all that ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... ante, i. 458. In Humphry Clinker, in the Letter of June 11, the turnkey of Clerkenwell Prison thus speaks of a Methodist:—'I don't care if the devil had him; here has been nothing but canting and praying since the fellow entered the place. Rabbit him! the tap will be ruined—we han't sold a cask of beer nor a dozen of wine, since he paid his garnish—the gentlemen get drunk with nothing but your ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... canting rogue and half a dozen oaths and one boot at his head, and was preparing to add a tumbler, when his mentor whipped into the lobby. Robinson could not have fallen to a worse master than this, whose irregularities were ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... was "up and down," and the sail-trimmers were sent to the sheets and halliards to sheet home and hoist away. Five minutes later the anchor was out of the ground and the Cristobal Colon was adrift and canting. ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... here no longer. If I do, I fear I shall sink down into something almost as pitiful as one of these canting, gossiping people myself. I can do them no good—they do not like or trust me. I will accept this call and go ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... can be said to exist in these Twelve Hundred? Belief in high-plumed hats of a feudal cut; in heraldic scutcheons; in the divine right of Kings, in the divine right of Game-destroyers. Belief, or what is still worse, canting half-belief; or worst of all, mere Macchiavellic pretence-of-belief,—in consecrated dough-wafers, and the godhood of a poor old Italian Man! Nevertheless in that immeasurable Confusion and Corruption, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, 'Be damned!' It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours." CARLYLE ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... wounded, had got possession of the wheel. The seamen who had gone aloft loosed the foretop sail, the carpenters cut the stern cable, the best bower was cut at the same moment, just in time to prevent the ship from canting ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... come to me, and their very faces flash past with looks of tragic significance. By their own fault they were ruined; they were shut out of the garden of their gifts; their city of hope was ploughed and salted. The past cannot be retrieved, let canting optimists talk as they choose; what has been has been, and the effects will last and spread until the earth shall pass away. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill; our fatal shadows that walk by us still. The thing done lasts for eternity; the lightest act of man or woman ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... ship, or if she runs into an iceberg or a derelict, she can endure a certain intake of water, and lists at a moderate angle far more readily than a warship, whose guns are rendered nearly useless if the ship is heavily canting. A warship must be built so as to withstand, without sinking, the injury caused by a number of gun holes even beneath the water line, where the inner part of the ship must necessarily be subdivided into many ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... But canting knave of pen and sword, nor sanctimonious fool, Shall never win this Southern land, to cripple, bind, and rule; We'll muster on each bloody plain, thick as the stars of night, And, through the help of God, the Wrong shall perish by ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... immateriate graphic representation of visible objects and qualities which, invested with substance, has become familiar to us as the rebus, and also appears in the form of heraldic blazonry styled punning or "canting." ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... knew the Macdonalds," he said—"of them. The uncle was a damn rebellious, canting, planting Scotchman. Horton Pen was the centre of the Separation Movement. We could have hung him if we'd wanted to. The nephew was the writer of an odious blackmailing print. He calumniated all ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... siccarly. "Oratory," properly a private chapel or closet for prayer; here a canting term for brothel: cf. abbess bawd; nun whore, and so forth. "Siccarly," certainly, surely "Thou art here, sykerlye, Thys churche to robb with felonye," MS. Cantab Ff. ii., 38, ...
— The Choise of Valentines - Or the Merie Ballad of Nash His Dildo • Thomas Nash
... clay here lies: Ye canting zealots, spare him! If honest worth in heaven rise, Ye'll mend ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... deceitful, mendacious, unveracious, fraudulent, dishonest, faithless, truthless, trothless; unfair, uncandid; hollow-hearted; evasive; uningenuous, disingenuous; hollow, sincere, Parthis mendacior; forsworn. artificial, contrived; canting; hypocritical, jesuitical, pharisaical; tartuffish; Machiavelian; double, double tongued, double faced, double handed, double minded, double hearted, double dealing; Janus faced; smooth-faced, smooth spoken, smooth tongued; plausible; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... "Still, you are not quite without gifts. You sing in tune, and you have a pretty fair organ. But you produce your notes badly; and that music which you sing is beneath you. It is a form of melody which expresses a puerile state of culture—a dawdling, canting, see-saw kind of stuff—the passion and thought of people without any breadth of horizon. There is a sort of self-satisfied folly about every phrase of such melody; no cries of deep, mysterious passion—no conflict—no sense of the universal. It makes ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... cordially for that. He's a villain in disguise; that's my opinion of him. A low, canting hypocrite. Buy him off ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... man could be a decent and comfortable human being, although he was a minister, and had so gained his confidence and good-will that he could say anything to him at their next interview. Captain Duncan finished his remarks by a decided expression of his disapproval of the canting regulation phrases so frequently employed by religious people, which are perfectly nauseous ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... he had left behind him the ornate Imperialism of Disraeli, on the one hand, and the cultured Imperialism of Tennyson, on the other. He sang of Imperialism as it was, or was about to be—vulgar and canting and bloody—and a world that was preparing itself for an Imperialism that would be vulgar and canting and bloody bade him welcome. In one breath he would give you an invocation to Jehovah. In the next, with a dig in the ribs, he would be getting round the roguish ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... paused for a moment, and three revolver shots rang out upon the quiet summer air. "Keep your seats, damn ye!" roared our preacher, as his audience rose in excitement. "If a man of ye moves down he goes! The door's locked on the outside, so ye can't get out anyhow. Your seats, ye canting, chuckle-headed fools! Down with ye, ye dogs, ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... "There goes your faith—your canting trash about your love for the Saviour! I might have known that one of your kind could not rise above the grossness in you. I hope you will be as miserable and as unhappy as I am.... I hope ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... bright; all the easier then to direct him in the way that he should go, and throw his forces into the right direction. People said that he cared more for his hunting and his whist than for his work—well, he was young and, at any rate, there was none of the canting hypocrite about him. The ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... all feelings, and of all stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps (if allowed to me to attain it) he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of Life. Without canting, and yet without neglecting, religion, he has assembled all that a good and great man can gather together of moral wisdom clothed in consummate beauty. Sir William Temple observes, 'That of all the members of mankind that live within the compass of a thousand years, for one man that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... kind of literature, sir, that sells at the present day! It is not the Miller of the Black Valley—no, sir, nor Herder either, that will suit the present taste; the evangelical body is becoming very strong, sir; the canting scoundrels—' ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... property and a good bit besides are coming to Isobel, and you want to collar the sag, like you did that of the old woman out in Lucerne. Well, you don't do it, my boy. I've other views for Isobel. Do you think I want to see her married to—to—the son of a fellow like that—a canting snuffler who prigs letters and splits on his own son?" and swinging the fat finger round he thrust it almost into the ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... expressed a doubt himself as to whether Dodd had really composed a certain prayer on the night before his execution. "Sir, do you think that a man the night before he is to be hanged cares for the succession of the royal family? Though he may have composed this prayer then. A man who has been canting all his life may cant to the last; and yet a man who has been refused a pardon after so much petitioning, would hardly be praying thus fervently ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... can ran low, and in canting it over in the dark, something beside the molasses slipped out. How long it had been there, kind Providence never revealed; nor were we over anxious to know; for we hushed up the bare thought as quickly as possible. The creature certainly died a luscious death, quite equal to Clarence's ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... Next comes canting Hypocrisy, with his Bible in his hand, telling us that "every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving." What does he mean; that ardent spirit is the gift of God? Pray, in what stream of his bounty, from what mountain and hill does it flow ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... care about dignity, and womanliness, and right, and all the rest of the canting words! I want him. I want his kisses and his arms about me. He is mine! He loved me once! I have only given him up because I thought it a fine thing to play the saint. It is only an acted lie. I would rather be evil, ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... magnitude? Give these people the most perfect political constitution and the soundest political program that benevolent omniscience can devise for them, and they will interpret it into mere fashionable folly or canting charity as infallibly as a savage converts the philosophical theology of a Scotch missionary ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees. Considering that statistics had not yet embraced a calculation as to the number of ignorant or canting doctors which absolutely must exist in the teeth of all changes, it seemed to Lydgate that a change in the units was the most direct mode of changing the numbers. He meant to be a unit who would make a certain amount of difference towards ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... stung her and wrung her, The venom is working;— And if you had hung her With canting and quirking, She could not be deader than she will be soon;— 255 I have driven her close to you, under the moon, Night and day, hum! hum! ha! I have hummed her and drummed her From place to place, till at last I have dumbed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... "Canting bigotry and carping criticism," says Magoon, "are usually the product of obtuse sensibilities and a pusillanimous will. Plutarch tells us of an idle and effeminate Etrurian, who found fault with the manner in which Themistocles had conducted a recent campaign. 'What,' said the hero, in reply, ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... there was plenty of chat, Of canting, and flenching, and cutting up fat; And how gun-harpoons into fashion had got, And if they were meant for the ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... We have caught the whole tabernacle of the Lord in a net at last. There they are, praising God among the stones of the river Mouse. These are the Cartland Craigs. A noble cathedral!" "Fling the lying sentinel over the cliffs. Here is a canting Covenanter for you, deceiving honest soldiers on the very Sabbath day. Over with him, over with him; out of the gallery into the pit." But the shepherd had vanished like a shadow, and, mixing with the tall, green broom and bushes, was making his unseen way toward a wood. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... ours—and the others of our kind. I hear the plain folk of the country speak ill of us for the free life we lead at home—I mean the Palatines and the canting Dutch, not our tenants, though what even they may think of the manor house and of us I can only suspect, for they are all rebels at heart, Sir John says, and wear blue noses at the first run o' ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... on a winter night, As authors of the legend write, Two brother hermits, saints by trade, Taking their tour in masquerade, Disguised in tattered habits, went To a small village down in Kent; Where, in the strollers' canting strain, They begged from door to door in vain; Tried every tone might pity win, But not a soul would let ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... from God!" I exclaimed, holding the arquebuse up to view. Then I kneeled on the prostrate wretch and clutched his throat. Anger gathered in my brain as lightning clusters about a mountain top. I threw aside the arquebuse and proceeded to kill the canting mendicant. I do not know that I killed him; I hope I did. I cannot speak with certainty on that point, for I was quickly thrown away from him by the avenging mob that rushed upon us and tore the fellow limb from limb. The other friars ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... often used by the hoppers as a cradle. Another favourite cradle is made from a trug basket, the handle cut off. It is then like half a large eggshell, with cross pieces underneath to prevent it from canting aside. This cradle is set on the bare ground in the garden; when they move one woman takes hold of one end and a second of the other, and thus carry the infant. If you ask them, they will find you a 'hop-dog,' a handsome green caterpillar marked with ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... however, crumbled to the dilapidations of time, and the pious thefts of visiters; but, proud are we to reflect that the poetry of the great genius who dictated its erection—LIVES; and his fame is untarnished by the canting reproach of the critics of our time. True it is that the best, or ripest fruit, is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... yet—certainly not yet. She had the instinctive sense that during the next few weeks she should want all her dignity with Aldous, that she could not afford to put herself at a disadvantage with him. To be troubled about her own sins at such a moment would be like the meanness of the lazy and canting Christian, who whines about saving his soul while he ought to be rather occupied with feeding the bodies of ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are these I hear, Fiddling, fluting, rhyming, ranting, Piping, scraping, whining, canting? Fly, scurvy ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... variety, for instance, which we saw in the Boer war—exultant over a small nation of farmers defending their homes, and whipped up deliberately by a commercial gang for their own purposes; or the narrow-minded, lying, canting variety which blinds a people to its own faults, and credits itself with all the moral virtues, while at the same time it gloats over every defamation of the enemy. There is a good deal of that variety in the present war. And it is easy to understand that many people, sick of that sort of ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... last, in a harsh, choking voice, taking a step towards his father with a gesture as though he would have struck him. "You have brought us to this with your canting and scheming and plotting. What are we to do now—eh? Answer me that!" He caught the old man by the coat and shook ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and we stole into this cover as they approached. The foremost bore the light, was armed at all points, and mounted on a fresh horse. I started with exultation where I lay—he was her father. His companion's black breeches and canting seat proclaimed a priest. They were conversing as they passed. "Another month, good father, and we will be behind the bastions of Belle Isle; were it not for my Madeline's sake, I would make it six; but this bloodhound having been slipped upon us."—The sounds were here lost in ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various |
