"Coster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... best part of five years since Tabs had driven a car. He hadn't yet regained his old dexterity. He wasn't expert enough to attend to the wheel and at the same time to carry on a conversation. As he left the bridge he had to pass a coster's barrow which was drawn up beside the curb. The coster was dressed in the soiled khaki of a man recently released from the Army; his barrow was piled high with narcissi and daffodils, and a drowsy donkey drooped between the shafts. In avoiding a suicidal ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... has been reality," he continued. "That is what we have not always been able to achieve. Tonight I offer you reality. There are two men here, one an East End coster, the other an Italian until lately associated with an itinerant vehicle of musical production. These two men have not outlived sensation as I fancy so many of us have. They hate one another to the death. I forget their surnames, but ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... called by Strype "Lither" Lane. Even in his day he reviles it as of no reputation, and this character it retains. It is one of the open street markets of London, lined with barrows and coster stalls, and abounding in low public-houses. The White Hart, the King's Head, and the Nag's Head, are mentioned by Strype, and these names survive amid innumerable others. At the south end a house with overhanging stories remains; this curtails ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... or inscriptions for gables or institutions were needed and when wedding-parties, births and deaths, necessitated the scarcely ever failing poems. Nevertheless highly meritorious and lasting work was produced by the popular poets, such as Brederode and Starter, and Samuel Coster, who founded in 1617 the first permanent theatre (de Duytsche Akademie, i.e. the Dutch Academy), the more refined and classically educated Hooft, who, like Gerard Brandt, also produced excellent prose, the genial and universal Vondel, the greatest ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... the enterprising burglar isn't burgling, When the cut-throat isn't occupied in crime, He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, And listen to the merry village chime. When the coster's finished jumping on his mother, He loves to lie a-basking in the sun: Ah, take one consideration with another, The policeman's lot is not a ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... A coster, however, taking his girl for a Sunday airing, seemed to have the same impression about himself. This person had flogged his donkey into a gallop alongside, and sat, upright as a waxwork, in his shallopy chariot, his chin settled pompously on a red handkerchief, like Swithin's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of which I certainly cannot see the advantage, in the substitution of "yep," or "yup" for "yes," and of "nope" for "no." No doubt we have in England the coster's "yuss;" but one hears even educated Americans now and then using "yep," or some other corruption of "yes," scarcely to be indicated by the ordinary alphabetical symbols. It seems to me ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... the Rev. Canon Mecklin, sub-dean of the Chapel Royal, officiating. The honeymoon will be spent at the town-house of the groom, in York Terrace. Lord Casselthorpe has long been known as the blackest sheep of the British Peerage, being called the 'Coster Peer' on account of his unconventional language, his coarse manner, and slovenly attire. Two years ago he was warned off Newmarket Heath and the British turf by the Jockey Club. He is eighty-eight years old. The bride, like some other lights ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... present eminence, or to advance still higher, without the envy of his green-room fellows, and the nibbling of their admirers. But, if he don't beat them all, why then—merit hath no purchase in 'these coster-monger days.' ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... It included a washerwoman with very red arms; a care-taker who had obviously failed to take care of herself; a couple of chimney-sweeps with partially washed faces; a charwoman with her friend the female greengrocer, who had been burned out of the opposite side of the court; two or three coster-mongers, a burglar, several thieves, a footman in resplendent livery, a few noted drunkards, and chimney-pot Liz with her teapot—not the original teapot of course—that had perished in the flames—but one indistinguishably like it, which ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the musical programme. I do not approve of this demoralising instrument except to a very limited extent. The cylinders usually gyrate with records of fatuous music-hall songs, unedifying coster-airs and farcical speeches. The vox humana interpreting national melodies is infinitely better. What vigour and illustrative expression the islanders can throw into their songs! I have but to shut my eyes to see the policeman of Staffin interpreting ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... prejudice on this point is not without a basis; the real feeling is this, that the most masculine pleasures have a quality of the ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for a diamond necklace; but there is the necklace. A coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer; and where is the beer? The duchess quarrels with another duchess in order to crush her, to produce a result; the coster does not argue with another coster in order ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... letters have done!" exclaimed a delighted boy, as he picked up the piece of parchment in which Grandfather Coster had carried the bark letters cut from the trees in the grove, for the instruction and amusement of his ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... that first time. Nothing happened of course. There was no killing, but it was nervy work. Later, in common with other fellows, I was able to go on listening-post with the same nonchalance as my first coster friend. It lies in whether one is used to the thing or not. Nothing comes easy at first, especially in the trenches. Later on, it is all ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... that ended with the Mid-Victorians the exclusiveness of Brighton gave way to the excursion train, and though still a fashionable place, it is now more than ever London-by-the-sea and caters with true courtliness for coster and duke. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... 1746, 4to. About this period was published a very curious, and now uncommon, octavo volume, of about 250 pages, by SEIZ; called "Annus Tertius Saecularis Inventae Artis Typographicae," Harlem, 1741—with several very interesting cuts relating to Coster, the supposed inventor of the art of printing. It is a little strange that Lysander, in the above account of eminent typographical writers, should omit to mention CHEVILLIER—whose L'Origine de l'Imprimerie de Paris, &c., 1694, 4to., is a work ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... place there was appointed as State Attorney Dr. Coster, a Hollander, who however declined to have anything to do with the organization of the police; and in Mr. Trimble's stead reappeared the individual whom he had superseded and whose services had been dispensed with.{15} The triumph of ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... Elizabeth had on a great picture-hat with light-blue ostrich plumes; it was almost the shape of her lavender one that Charles Edward said made her look like a coster's bride. When she bent over me and put both arms around me the plumes tickled my ear. I think that was why I was so cross. I wriggled away ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... habits of mind. There has been too much of the impersonal way of writing of our British Expeditionary Force as though it were a great human machine impelled with one idea and moving with one purpose. In its ranks was the coster with his cockney speech and cockney wit, his fear of great silences and his sense of loneliness and desolation away from the flare of gas-lights and the raucous shouts of the crowds in Petticoat Lane—so that when I met him in a field of Flanders ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... dispute, however, has turned rather on words than facts; and seems to have arisen from the different definitions of the word "Printing." If we estimate the discovery from the invention of the principle, the honour is unquestionably due to Laurence Coster, a native of Haerlem, who first found out the method of impressing characters on paper, by means of carved blocks of wood. If moveable types be considered as a criterion, the merit of the discovery is due ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... places. There are between thirty and forty bookstalls or barrows here, and the place has what we may describe as a bibliopolic history, which goes back for a period of twenty years. The first person to start in the bookselling line was a coster of the name of Roberts, who died somewhat suddenly either in December of 1894 or early in January of the present year. Roberts appears to have been a fairly successful man at the trade, and had a fairly good knowledge of cheap books. The doyen ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... the printed information on the subject the London coster wears clothes covered up with pearl buttons and spends his time swapping ready repartee with his Donah or his Dinah. The costers I saw were barren of pearl buttons and silent of speech; and almost invariably they had left ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... and is always bobbing mysteriously about in it with his four-fingered hands spread out before him. This seems to me to be nothing but a vulgar manifestation of the Smooth-clawed Frog's self-appreciation. He is like a coster conducting a Dutch auction, except that it is himself that he puts up for the bids of admiring visitors. With his double bunch of four fingers held eagerly before him he says—or means to say—"'Ere—eight! Ain't that cheap enough? Eight! Going at ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... only of the order of Melchizedek, and therefore that Melchizedek himself was the more venerable. This heresy revived in Egypt after its suppression elsewhere, and its adherents claimed that Melchizedek was the Holy Ghost. The last time Melchizedek was heard of he was a London coster-monger's donkey, but whether this was a real incarnation of the original Melchizedek no one is able to decide, unless the Lord should again, as in the case of Balaam's companion, "open the mouth ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... another, till the girl found for them the man they wanted, a shabby, sodden-visaged fellow, with a would-be jaunty air of conscious shrewdness and vanity, who stood before the bar, his thumbs in his armholes, and laying down the law to a group of coster-boys, for want of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... imperishable fame; be displayed for ever on the highest pyramid of mind; and his country would receive an additional beam of splendor to its previous blaze of renown. But who, for a certainty, knows the inventor of printing? or the country of its origin? Was it Holland in the person of Coster of Haarlem? Or Germany in the person of Mentel, the nobleman, of Strasburg? Or Guttenberg, the goldsmith, of Mayence? Was it neither of these countries? or none of these men? And why this uncertainty? Because a few men possessing the secret, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... classes in which the constitution has been undermined by bad food, bad air, and unhealthy occupations; she had delicate features and large blue eyes, and a mass of dark hair done in the elaborate fashion of the coster girl. She and ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... you'll show me any "Poet" more prolific, If you'll point to any "patterer" more smart, One whose "patriotic" zeal is more terrific, Who can give me at snide slang the slightest start, Who can fit a swell, a toff, a cad, a coster, At the very shortest notice, as I can, Why, unless he is a swaggering impostor, I will gladly hail him as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... life-like nose made of bread, representing one of the race that hopes to return to Palestine. Sweet, a monkey (tail and all); J.W. Parr lived again one of his days as an A.B. at the Crystal Palace. Colonel Gibbons of the 7th and his Adjutant, Blair, were not recognised for long in their coster costumes. Colonel Anderson of the 6th arrived as a pirate mounted on a donkey. His fierce mustachios, jersey, boots and cutlass made him a terrifying sight, while his Adjutant, Speirs, made a most fascinating young girl, with whom even Generals showed a disposition ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... while I was at home, a costermonger came to the door with walnuts. The girl answered the bell, and presently I saw the coster and his cart go past the dining-room window. I don't know why it was, or how it was, but a suspicion came over me. I stepped sharply to the door, and looked out into the passage. There was no one there. The front door was open, and the kitchen door was open, and in a position between the two, against ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... about, but the traffic and pleasure of Como was passing along planks laid on trestles over the water here and there like bridges; and for those who were in haste, and could afford it (such as take cabs in London), there were wheelbarrows, coster carts, and what not, pulled about by men for hire; and it was a sight to remember all one's life to see the rich men of Como squatting on these carts and barrows, and being pulled about over the water by the poor men of Como, being, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... a thread of land fronting on a highway, open to every kind of annoyance, overlooked, without any thing to look at. How much, then, per fathom (or measure, if you please, by cable-lengths) is land worth fronting the noble, silent, uncontaminating, healthful sea? Whence can come no coster-mongers' cries, no agitating skir of bagpipes or the maddening hurdy-gurdy, no German band expecting half a crown for the creation of insanity; only sweet murmur of the wavelets, and the melodious whistle of a boatman catching your breakfast lobster. Where, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... chattering before the call of "time." The result of the fight was that, even if "Dizzy" was not thoroughly respected from that day forth, no one ever called, "Old clo'! Old clo'!" within his hearing. Of course it was not generally advertised that the lad had been taking boxing lessons from "Coster Joe" for three years, with the villainies of a boys' school in view. In fact, boxing was this young man's diversion, and the Coster on several occasions expressed great regret that writing and politics had robbed the ring of one who showed promise ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... very tortuous and very crowded. Foot-passengers and vehicles of all sorts find their way along as best they may in one confused mass. It was there I saw the historic pair of wheels in question. They were attached to the barrow of a coster-monger, who was retailing a stock of onions, carrots and "cavolo Romano" which he had just purchased at the neighboring market of the "Campo de' Fiori." His wares, I fear, had been selected from the refuse of the market, and he and his barrow were in a state of dilapidated ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... human, wheel and hoof, rose high for all the lateness of the hour: sidewalks groaning with the restless contact of hundreds of ill-shod feet; the roadway thundering—hansoms, four-wheelers, motor-cars, dwarfed coster-mongers' donkey-carts and ponderous, rumbling, C.-P. motor-vans, struggling for place and progress. For St. Pancras ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the House and the debate developed into a farce. Idiot after idiot got up and made some infantile qualification of an earlier statement—all of them talked off the point. So much so, in fact, that Turner was beginning a tale of a fight he had had with a coster down Cheap Street when Christy ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... the customers were few and far between. A stray coster or carman came in from time to time, but mostly the shop was silent and desolate. But this did not distress me. I had various preparations to make and a plan of campaign to settle. There were the cellar stairs, for instance; a steep flight of stone steps, ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... humour. Irony is the very air that they breathe. A joke comes suddenly from time to time into the head of a politician or a gentleman, and then as a rule he makes the most of it; but when a serious word comes into the mind of a coster it is almost as startling as a joke. The word "chaff" was, I suppose, originally applied to badinage to express its barren and unsustaining character; but to the English poor chaff is as sustaining as grain. The phrase that leaps to their lips is the ironical phrase. I ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... full-chested song to the indiscriminate cat-call. In front of each section of seats stood a separate youth, who at very short intervals, and at the slightest provocation, invoked cheers upon cheers for everything and everybody, from the captain of the team to the college coster-monger. An hour before the game began the benches were crowded, and I seemed to have recognized in the passing throng every person of consideration among my acquaintance. Mrs. Willoughby Walton and her party were among the last to arrive. I ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... day one of our most solid, imposing, and respectable structures. The ground on which the hotel stands was covered with substantial three-story brick houses, one of which Astor himself occupied; and it was thought at the time a wasteful and rash proceeding to destroy them. Old Mr. Coster, a retired merchant of great wealth, who lived next door to Mr. Astor's residence, was extremely indisposed to remove, and held out long against every offer of the millionaire. His house was worth thirty thousand ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... east, and west every man who had a shade of red in his hair had tramped into the City to answer the advertisement. Fleet Street was choked with red-headed folk, and Pope's Court looked like a coster's orange barrow. I should not have thought there were so many in the whole country as were brought together by that single advertisement. Every shade of color they were—straw, lemon, orange, brick, Irish setter, liver, clay; but, as Spaulding said, there were not many who had the ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... Narrator further saith That whilst Captain Kidd lay with his Sloop at Gardners Island, there was a New Yorke Sloop, whereof one Coster is Master, and his Mate was a little black man, unknown to the Narrator by name,[4] who, as it was said, had been formerly Captain Kidds Quarter Master, and another Sloop belonging to New-Yorke, Jacob Fenick[5] Master, both which lay near to Kidds Sloop three dayes together, ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... B. J. Verselewel de Witt Hamer, had been made a prisoner; the Commandant of the German corps, Captain A. Schiel, fell wounded into British hands, while among the officers who were killed in action I should mention Dr. H. J. Coster, the bravest Hollander the Transvaal ever saw, the most brilliant member of the Pretoria Bar, who laid down his life because in a stupid moment Kruger had taunted him ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... "Advocate Coster was State Attorney at the time of the Reform trials, but resigned owing to President Kruger having insulted him at a meeting of the Executive. He was an accomplished man, a member of the Inner Temple, and was very popular with the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... is a verb conjugated daily by the street seller of any pretensions. The coster needs less of it than most vendors, his wares speaking for themselves; but the general seller of small-wares, bootlaces, toys, children's books, and what not, must have a natural gift, or acquire it as fast as possible. To patter is to rattle off ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... scholar? The same terrible indictment has been preferred against Dickens, and Mr. Henry James says that Balzac failed to prove he was a gentleman. It might be well to remind Mr. James that the artist who would avoid the fashion plate would do well to turn to the coster rather than the duke for inspiration. Keene's genius saved him from the drawing-room, never allowing his gaze to wander from where English characteristics may be gathered most plentifully—the ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... ten the State Attorney, Coster, took his seat, and, beginning with my husband's name, called ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... anciend brinters From Himmel look down oopon, Und allowed dat in a chapel Dere was nefer soosh carryins on. Dere was Lorenz Coster mit Gutemberg, Und Scheffer mit der Fust, Und Sweynheim mit Pannartz trop deers, Oopon dis ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... so to say, in Mulliner's Rents; it was quite select in that one single respect. Nothing on wheels penetrated the unlovely quarter save a coster's barrow of fruit; unwholesome little yellow pears and cruelly green apples of the lowest type of apple-kind being the wares of the moment. It was truly a sad and sorrowful haunt, this of the man-made town; and so it seemed to the two travellers fresh ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... much mistaken, young feller, there's a first-class row goin' on outside our bloomin' cafe. No, no, don't you butt in among Arabs as though you was strollin' down Edgware Road on a Saturday night, an' get mixed up in a coster rough-an'-tumble. These long-legged swine would knife you just for the fun of it. Keep full an' by, an' let any son of a gun who comes too near have ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... containing the New Method of operating, devised by Lisfranc; followed by two Synoptic Tables of Natural and Instrumental Labours. By J. Coster, M. D. and Professor of the University of Turin. The Translation and Notes by John D. Godman, M. D. 12mo. pp. ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... of the celebrated tree, with Napoleon's guide, De Coster, in the foreground, see Captain Arthur Gore's Explanatory Notes on the Battle of Waterloo, 1817; and for another view of the ragged old tree as it appeared the day before it was cut down, see Illustrated London News, ...
— A Week at Waterloo in 1815 • Magdalene De Lancey |
