"Prepense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... notable device of a celebrated improver, for giving greatness of character to a place, and showing an undivided extent of property, by placing the family arms on the neighbouring milestones, the improver retorted on him with a charge of misquotation, misrepresentation, and malice prepense. Mr Knight, in the preface to the second edition of his poem, quotes the improver's words:—"The market-house, or other public edifice, or even a mere stone with distances, may bear the arms of the family:" and adds:—"By a mere stone with ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... though I am but a foolish old priest, my coming here to-day has been unusually well timed. I have a request to make of you. Your putting Tokutaro to death won't bring your daughter to life again. I have heard his story, and there certainly was no malice prepense on his part to kill your daughter. What he did, he did thinking to do a service to your family; and it would surely be better to hush the matter up. He wishes, moreover, to give himself over to me, and to ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... clown, Ill dressed, with a lingering smell of the shop— Should appear as her escort at party or hop. Some swore he had cooked up some villainous charm, Or love philter, not in the regular Pharm- Acopoeia, and thus, from pure malice prepense, Had bewitched and bamboozled the young lady's sense; Others thought, with more reason, the secret to lie In a magical wash or indelible dye; While Society, with its censorious eye And judgment impartial, stood ready to damn What wasn't ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... him of the charge of appealing to a limited circle of specially chosen witnesses and advocates in a matter which lay between himself and his wife, but the aggravated offence of rushing into print may well be attributed to "the injudicious zeal of a friend," or the "malice prepense" of an enemy. If he had hoped that the verses would slip into a newspaper, as it were, malgre lui, he would surely have taken care that the seed fell on good ground under the favouring influence of Perry of the Morning Chronicle, or Leigh Hunt of the Examiner. As it turned ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... B.," at the foot of the editorial, did not mean "K. B.," but Karl Benson; and hence he ingeniously argued that Mr. Benson's signing himself "K. B.," when he was not "K. B.," was a fraud on the community. Having thus exposed the malice prepense of the unfortunate Benson, he intimated that the English participle in "ing" often had the meaning of the perfect; and hence that translating a Greek verb in the perfect by the participle aforesaid, was not such a very heinous offence after all. This bomb-shell was not, however, thrown into ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... quiet people's lives. One is tempted to believe from what one has read of the condition of those districts in the nineteenth century, that those who had them under their power worried, befouled, and degraded men out of malice prepense: but it was not so; like the mis-education of which we were talking just now, it came of their dreadful poverty. They were obliged to put up with everything, and even pretend that they liked it; whereas we can now deal with things reasonably, and ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... even done of malice prepense (especially, for obvious reasons, if a hare is in any way concerned) in scorn, not in ignorance, by persons who are well acquainted with the real meaning of the word and even with its Sanscrit origin. The truth is that an incredulous Western world puts no faith ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... justification of those tentative efforts of science which often result in the attainment of some grand discovery. Let no timid religionist charge upon scientific men that they are conspiring with malice prepense to undermine the popular creeds and overthrow the Bible. This is sheer nonsense. They follow where nature beckons them. If man has had a high antiquity on this earth, science will find it out and prove it beyond a doubt. If he has not had such ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... with his wonted dishonesty, has without the slightest foundation, and so effectually, blackened his fame, that almost every subsequent writer on this period has reproduced the calumnies set forth with malice prepense in the Acts ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... she wouldn't say so for the world before any of the parents, or do anything to injure the poor young fellow's future prospects if she could possibly help it. But Mrs. Greatrex felt sure that Ernest had come to Pilbury of malice prepense, as part of a deep-laid scheme to injure and ruin the doctor by his horrid revolutionary notions. 'He does it on purpose,' she used to say; 'he talks in that way because he knows it positively shocks and annoys us. He pretends to be very innocent all the time; but at heart he's a malignant, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... nerves. He is conscious that, as a great master of language, he can play what tricks he pleases, without danger of remonstrance. And therefore, he every now and then plunges into slang, not irreverently, as a vulgar writer might do, but of malice prepense. The shock is almost as great as if an organist performing a solemn tune should suddenly introduce an imitation of the mewing of a cat. Now, he seems to say, you can't accuse me of being dull and pompous. Let me quote an instance or two from his graver writings. He wishes ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... formed. But it must have taken centuries to do it. Many of these hollow lanes, especially those on flat ground, must be as old or older than the Conquest. In Devonshire I am sure that they are. But there many of them, one suspects, were made not of malice, but of cowardice prepense. Your indigenous Celt was, one fears, a sneaking animal, and liked to keep when he could under cover of banks and hill-sides; while your bold Roman made his raised roads straight over hill and dale, as 'ridge-ways' from which, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley |
