"Scaffold" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doubt whether resistance to tyrants can often be promoted by putting about a general conviction that the tyrant has a thumping big stick in his hand, and may be relied upon to use it. Even Tom Paine had the wit to see that it was his "good heart" which brought Louis XVI. to the scaffold. ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... impossible to hear anything, as all present were talking at the tops of their voices. M. Roque wanted "an iron hand" to govern France. Nonancourt even regretted that the political scaffold was abolished. They ought to have all these scoundrels ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... who clamored for instant punishment, and finally succeeded in forcing the doors of the jail and overcoming the officers. The prisoner was hurried forth, amid the shouts and execrations of the multitude, a scaffold was erected, and at nine o'clock the same evening he was hung, with the ceremonies usually observed. An attempt at lynching was made in San Francisco about the same time. Two ruffians, having attempted to rob and murder a merchant of that city, the people assembled ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... been killed, it was known that he had been threatened by some secret society, supposed to have lurking-places in various parts of London, he having a year or two before been mainly instrumental in the breaking up of a Nihilist society in Russia, and in bringing to the scaffold its chief and most active member, a young Russian of noble birth. The second explosion, which had done less damage, and was happily unattended by any serious results beyond the partial wrecking of the house, was at the private residence of a well-known English Detective. The ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... away!" he kept exclaiming with hysterical delight; insolent delight it might have been called, if it had not been so spontaneous. "So the other one called her tigress! And a tigress she is! So she ought to be flogged on a scaffold? Yes, yes, so she ought. That's just what I think; she ought to have been long ago. It's like this, brother, let her be punished, but I must get better first. I understand the queen of impudence. That's her all over! You saw her all over in that hand-kissing, the she-devil! She's magnificent ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... as I was walking home with him, we were stopped in the street by a crowd, which had gathered round a poor man, who had fallen from a scaffold, and had broken his leg. Dr. Frumpton immediately said, 'Send for Bland, the surgeon, who lives at the corner of the street.' The poor man was carried into a shop; we followed him. I found that his leg, besides being broken, was terribly bruised and cut. The surgeon ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... approved; but, as he had not yet acquired a name of sufficient importance, the execution of it was committed to two architects of renown, Giacomo della Porta and Bartolomeo Ammanati.—These immediately commenced a scaffold in the centre of the square where the obelisk ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... all the different kinds of battering-ram; the hand variety, which was merely a beam tipped with iron, worked by some score of men; the fixed ram, in which the beam was suspended from a scaffold and moved by means of ropes; and lastly, the movable ram, running on four or six wheels, which enabled it to be advanced or withdrawn at will. The military engineers of the day allowed full rein to their fancy in the many curious shapes ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... are no more fit to die than I am, and a condemned cell, with the thought of the scaffold before him, are not exactly the most favorable circumstances under which a man might experience sincere ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... another huge placard headed REPRIEVE, he would quickly fill it in and sign it. He would then hand it to the Private Secretary, who would instantly start post-haste for Cork. As the condemned man was being actually conducted to the scaffold, the Private Secretary would appear, brandishing the liberating document. All then would be joy, except for the executioner, who would grind his teeth at being baulked of his prey at the ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... child's aspiration in vain? Could I tell him God did not want his help to paint the sky? True, he could mount no scaffold against the infinite of the glowing west. But might he not with his little palette and brush, when the time came, show his brothers and sisters what he had seen there, and make them see it too? Might he not thus come, after long trying, to help God to ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... rode a horse I called la Joie through the It was at the worst era of the revolution, and I went to see Mr. Prot to obtain a passport which, probably, might save me from prison or the scaffold. ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... to pay her an allowance, as Queen Dowager of England, which, no doubt, she had a right to demand; but to demand it, nay worse, to be obliged to beg it of a man who shed her Husband's blood upon a scaffold, is an affliction, so excessively heightened, that few of the human race ever ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... of the Park, the King[5] went up the stairs leading to the long gallery, and so into the Cabinet Chamber of the Palace of Whitehall. Being delayed here in consequence of the scaffold not being ready, he offered up several prayers, and entered into religious discourse with the Bishop. About twelve he ate some bread, and drank a glass of claret, declining to dine after ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... exercises by pausing to make long and irrelevant speeches from the scaffold, or to sing depressing Methodist hymns; and from medical examiners who forget their stethoscopes, and clamor for waits while messenger boys are sent for them; and from official witnesses who faint at the last ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... crushed, and doubtless the whole scene was to her like an evil dream—the poor broken-down body could not discriminate what words she was forced to repeat. A troubled, horrible dream must that have seemed to the hapless maiden, standing on that scaffold, with all the shouting mob about, and all her deadly enemies at hand. She made her mark on the parchment—a little cross—and ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... the human soul, he selects Hugo as his guide. If he would laugh, he reads Tam O'Shanter; if he would weep, he reads of the death of Little Nell. If he would see real heroism, he follows Sidney Carton to the scaffold, or Esther into the presence of the King. He goes to Shelley's Skylark to find beauty, Burns's Highland Mary to find tenderness, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter to find tragedy, and the Book of Job to find sublimity. Through his books he comes to know Quasimodo ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... well, whose great overhanging sweep offered a convenient scaffold, Ortez paused to look at his victim. My breath came slow, I could hardly ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, is an example of the extremity to which this craving for notoriety may go in a pathological case. The newspapers bounded his mental horizon; and in the poor wretch's prayer on the scaffold, one of the most heartfelt expressions was: "The newspaper press of this land has a big bill to settle with ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... before I left Rome I saw three robbers guillotined. The ceremony—including the masqued priests; the half-naked executioners; the bandaged criminals; the black Christ and his banner; the scaffold; the soldiery; the slow procession, and the quick rattle and heavy fall of the axe; the splash of the blood, and the ghastliness of the exposed heads—is altogether more impressive than the vulgar and ungentlemanly dirty 'new drop,' and dog-like agony of infliction ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... news soon spread through the city, and men and women never tired of calling Gilguerillo an impostor, and prophesying that the end of the three days would see him in prison, if not on the scaffold. But Gilguerillo paid no heed to their hard words, and no more did the king, who took care that no hand but his own should put ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... accomplishments. Consequently his family had a right to have high hopes of him. The great statesman, Kei-ying,—who has very recently terminated a life of devoted patriotism and heroic virtues by a sublime death on the scaffold,—undertook his instruction in Chinese politics. One lesson completed his education. "Lie, cheat, steal, and honor your parents," were the elementary principles which Kei-ying inculcated. The readiness with which Mien-yaun mastered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... who passed that way, Jesus put the question to his critic, "Who was neighbor to him that fell among thieves?" And the answer came even from unwilling lips, "He that showed mercy." When Nathan Hale on the scaffold regretted that he had but one life to lose for his country, we realize better what patriotism is. On the other hand it is natural to condemn wrong deeds when presented clearly and objectively in the ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... 'You must submit; you are a prince, and I am your king!' I have long since acknowledged that my father was right in his conduct to me. I was not only a disobedient son, but a rebellious subject. I richly deserved to mount the scaffold with Katte." ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... his character as a soldier, to the age in which he lived, and at which he died, as it is to the truth of history. I know no justification; at any distance of time, for calumniating a historical character: surely truth belongs to the dead, and to the unfortunate; and they who have died upon a scaffold have generally had faults enough of their own, without attributing to them those which the very incurring of the perils which conducted them to their violent death render, of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Marechal Ney had been shot; and there were seven hundred thousand foreign soldiers in France when that piece of judicial butchery was resolved upon. The army might not be ready to join a Bonaparte, but it could not be relied upon to guard the scaffold on which he should be sent to die. The people might not be ready to overthrow Louis Philippe, to give his place to Louis Napoleon, but it did not follow that they would have seen the latter's execution ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... tempted him to Pride, the Bitternes in his bozome-comforts was a Cooler & a Bridle to him." Truly the whirligig of time brings about strange revenges. Peter had been driven from England by the persecutions of Laud; a few years later he "stood armed on the scaffold" when that prelate was beheaded, and now we find him installed in the archiepiscopal lodgings. Dr. Palfrey, it appears to me, gives altogether too favorable an opinion both of Peter's character and abilities. I conceive him to have been a vain and selfish man. He may ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Paris was talking of the affair of a captain in the army who in a paroxysm of libertine jealousy had killed a woman. Diard, on coming home to dinner, told his wife that the officer was dead. He had killed himself to avoid the dishonor of a trial and the shame of death upon the scaffold. Juana did not see at first the logic of such conduct, and her husband was obliged to explain to her the fine jurisprudence of French law, which does not ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... though I will forbear to mention the injustice of his death, and the barbarous usage of him, both then and before it; yet my desire is that what follows may be noted, because it does now, or may hereafter, concern us; namely, that in his last sad sermon on the scaffold at his death, he having freely pardoned all his enemies, and humbly begged of God to pardon them, and besought those present to pardon and pray for him; yet he seemed to accuse the magistrates of the City, for suffering ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... helephant-shelter, like this, only quite new and good, at the end of that there left path; and right away beyond that, in a sort of clearing where the jungle has been cut down—if I didn't tell you before—there's some big trees and a sort of scaffold of bamboos that looks like a shelter such as any one would climb up to shoot tigers, and under it some bones, just as if a buffalo had been ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... disinherited; the coup d'etat achieved this wonderful feat of adding misfortune to misery. Bonaparte, it seems, took the trouble to hate a mere peasant; the vine-dresser was torn from his vine, the laborer from his furrow, the mason from his scaffold, the weaver from his loom. Men accepted this mission of causing the immense public calamity to fall, morsel by morsel, upon the humblest walks of life. Detestable task! To crumble a catastrophe upon the little and ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... Highlanders because recruited chiefly from that ancient and powerful Scottish clan. In the rising of 1745 the Frasers had supported the Stuart cause and they suffered when that cause was lost. In 1747 the head of the clan, Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, an old man of 80, perished on the scaffold for his treason. The details of Lovat's career are amazing. In one aspect he was a wild, half barbarous Highland chieftain, in another one of the polished gentlemen and courtiers of his time. He was devoured by the ambition to be the most powerful man in Scotland. ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... for thee, coyest of maidens— Long, long have we worshipped thee, queen of the brave! Steadily sought for thee, readily fought for thee, Purpled the scaffold and ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... In the background to the right the keep of Uri, with the scaffold still standing, as in the third scene of the first Act. To the left, the view opens upon numerous mountains, on all of which signal fires are burning. Day is breaking, and distant bells are heard ringing in ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... its study so unpromising that it is a pleasure to turn to France, where the works of JEAN GOUJON show that he had the true idea of sculpture in relief. From 1555 to 1562 this sculptor was employed on the works at the Louvre, and during the massacre of St. Bartholomew he was shot while on a scaffold quietly working at ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... the master, "this letter," waving it in his hand, "is like a reprieve to a man on the scaffold." Maclise stood gazing ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... principles which they professed, and never intended to do so; they believed in them, and were willing to risk their lives in endeavouring to carry them out. The writer wishes to speak in particular of two of these men, both of whom perished on the scaffold—their names were Thistlewood and Ings. Thistlewood, the best known of them, was a brave soldier and had served with distinction as an officer in the French service; he was one of the excellent swordsmen ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... are angry. Why, Sir Everard!" catching for the first time a glimpse of his deathly white face, "I didn't think you felt like this. Oh! I beg your pardon with all my heart for laughing. I believe I should laugh on the scaffold. It's dreadfully vulgar, but it was born with me, I'm afraid. Did I gallop right into your heart's best affections at the fox-hunt? Why, I thought I shocked you dreadfully. I know I tried to. Won't you shake hands, ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... named Francis Horry, at Lincoln, who murdered his wife at Boston, in 1872; his last was to hang a man, James Burton, at Durham, who murdered his young wife, aged only 18, from jealousy. On this occasion the man fainted on the scaffold, and got entangled with the rope under his arm, and Marwood had to lift him in his arms to get him disentangled, and then drop the unconscious man down—a painful scene. {155} This was only about a fortnight before his own death. Among ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... and were hanged in Montreal. Some of these had been pardoned once for their part in the rising of the previous year; some were implicated in plain murder; all were guilty; but the chill deliberate formalities of the gallows, the sufferings of the wretched men, their bearing on the scaffold, the vain efforts to obtain reprieve, produced a strong revulsion of popular feeling in their favour. By the common law of nations they were traitors; but they are still ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... farewell to my pious and liberal entertainers, I returned to the settlement, to prepare for the opening of the drama, which would lead some of us either to absolute power or to the scaffold. ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... they confide in us? Oh! they know, well they know that our hearts love them better than life—well they know that to-morrow, if 'twould serve, we would be ready to die by their side in battle; but we are not ready to be their accomplices in crime—we would not be unsteady on the scaffold, so we honestly died for them, but we have no ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... the gallows, and though they charged him with savage threats not to follow them with his eyes, he turned round and continued to warn them of the consequences of a life like theirs. In a few months' time they were captured, and it did actually fall to his lot to attend them to the scaffold. ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... me safe up, but for my coming down I can shift for myself," were the last words of Sir Thomas More when ascending the scaffold. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... the Royal actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn: While round the armed bands Did ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... a sore winter for Thomas, and he had had plenty of leisure for prayer. For, having gone up on a scaffold one day to see that the wall he was building was properly protected from the rain, he slipped his foot on a wet pole, and fell to the ground, whence, being a heavy man, he was lifted terribly shaken, besides having one of his legs broken. Not a moan escaped him—a murmur was out of the question. ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... idiot must have put a scaffold pole on it and cracked it right down the middle, and it's thick enough you'd think to stand hanythink.' Geoffrey was silent for quite a minute, and then said in a constrained voice and ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... apiece after the manner of New-York workwomen. But once indignation and excitement took possession of us all as we caught sight of a bare-footed, slight young girl toiling up a ladder and carrying mortar along a scaffold to men laying bricks on the second story of a new building. The girl had a complexion like a rose-leaf, her uncovered hair gleamed like gold in the sunshine, her head was exquisitely set on her shoulders. The curate sighed deeply, Samayana uttered a strong word in Hindoostanee, and there was a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... the centre of the group of huts, a rude sort of scaffold, four or five feet high, and surrounded by a rustic railing, served for the speaker's stand. It would seat about a dozen persons, and was protected by a roof of pine-boughs, interlaced together so as to keep off the sun, without affording protection from the rain. In the rear of this ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... said that the society made a pretence of play in order to conspire against the State," said Zorzi. "It seems to me that this is making a pretence of conspiracy, with the chance of death on the scaffold, for the ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... arrived for the hanging and the prisoners were led to the scaffold, each dispatch carrier was mounted and standing on the outer edge of the crowd, ready at the moment he received the dispatch to be off at once. When the four Indians were led upon the scaffold to meet their ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... West-End livery-yard. Miss McCroke had an ever-present dread of the ubiquitous hind-legs of strange horses: but she followed her charge into the stable, with the same heroic fidelity with which she would have followed her to the scaffold or the stake. ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... evidence that he was in the habit of walking in his somnambulic fits through crowded thoroughfares. He was a plasterer by trade, and it was stated in court that it was not an uncommon thing for him to fall asleep while at work on the scaffold, yet he never met with any accident, and would answer questions put to him as if he were awake. In like manner, we are informed that Dr. Haycock, the Professor of Medicine at Oxford, would, in a fit of somnambulism, preach ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... associations, cannot be found in the whole range of European travel. Imagine this memorable square, on the afternoon of a great Christmas festival;—fair faces at every window,—the adjacent roofs crowded with spectators,—an Austrian regiment drawn up around a scaffold,—the Viceroy, brother of the Emperor, standing in the large balcony of the Palace,—two cannon placed between the columns of San Marco and San Teodoro,—every inch of the vast Piazza, without the circle of soldiery, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... name of a Frenchman was unmusical in the ears of any Englishman of that period, and it sounded harshly in the ears of the British soldier. It was France that had prostituted liberty to lust. It was France that had dragged public opinion to the scaffold and the guillotine. It was France that held the axe uplifted over all that was good and holy. It was France that was making all Europe a charnel-house. It was General Buonaparte of France, who only sought to subdue England, the more easily to ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... conquered Saracen; some had monuments of oak and brass, and some had no monuments at all, for the Puritans had ruthlessly destroyed them. But they were nearly all there, nearly twenty generations of the bearers of an ancient name, for even those of them who perished on the scaffold had been borne here for burial. The place was eloquent of the dead and of the mournful lesson of mortality. From century to century the bearers of that name had walked in these fields, and lived in yonder Castle, and looked upon the familiar swell of yonder ground and the silver flash ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... short-lived joy. He remembered that he was about to lose happiness, just as he had tasted it for the first time, and rebelled against his fate. He did not remember that he had sought that conspiracy which now bound him, and which forced him to pursue a path leading to exile or the scaffold, while he had in sight another path which would lead ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... I answered. 'She, and my father also, went by the same road to heaven as so many others of the fair and brave: they followed their queen upon the scaffold. So, you see, I am not so much to be pitied in my prison,' I continued: 'there are none to wait for me; I am alone in the world. 'Tis a different case, for instance, with yon poor fellow in the cloth cap. His bed is next to mine, and in the night ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from Fouquet, a single proof formally advanced, and before the youthful loyalty of feeling which guided Louis XIV., Colbert's favor would disappear at once; the latter trembled, therefore, lest so daring a blow might not overthrow his whole scaffold; in point of fact, the opportunity was so admirably suited to be taken advantage of, that a skillful, practiced player like Aramis would not have let it slip. "Sire," said Fouquet, with an easy, unconcerned air, "since you have had the kindness to forgive ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... all questions of importance. Yet at this time he undertook a service to the state, more invidious, and perhaps more perilous, than any in which his politics ever involved him. On the very day of the king's execution, and even below the scaffold, had been sold the earliest copies of a work admirably fitted to shake the new government, and for the sensation which it produced at the time, and the lasting controversy which it has engendered, one of the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... burgess, that no man in that town was ware what they were. And so they reposed them there till our Lady Day, Assumption, as the great feast should be. So then trumpets blew unto the field, and King Arthur was set on high upon a scaffold to behold who did best. But as the French book saith, the king would not suffer Sir Gawaine to go from him, for never had Sir Gawaine the better an Sir Launcelot were in the field; and many times was Sir Gawaine rebuked when Launcelot ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... until the Palazzetto Borgia should be as beautiful as the Palazzo Braccio itself, though of course it was much smaller. Then she scrawled on the walls again, trying to explain to him, in childishly futile sketches, her ideas of decoration, and he would come down from his scaffold and do his best with a few broad lines to show her what she had really imagined, till she clapped her small, dusty hands with delight and was ultimately carried off by her governess to be made presentable for her daily drive in the Villa Borghese ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... inn, and hopes for one night's respite from his terror, but suddenly feels the touch, and hears the voice, of the stern officer, saying, "Sir, you are wanted." Yet that summons is but too intelligible; it shocks, but it bewilders not; and the utmost of its malice is bounded by the scaffold. "Deep," says the unhappy man, "is the downward path of anguish which I am called to tread; but it has been trodden by others." For dipus there was no such comfort. What language of man or trumpet of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... placing himself before the last cannon? No! emphatically, no! With Napoleon he might have cried, 'It is finished,' but then with the same calm brow yet bursting heart, he would have resigned his sword to his conquerors; and if the scaffold were his fate, met it with quiet dignity; or if the dungeon, there calmly await the Almighty's time when he might again raise his right arm for his country; still as great in the prison or on the scaffold, as when he was at the head of conquering armies. Napoleon's intellectual character was ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... the scaffold after the affair of Savenay; she went to Mans to save her brother the Prince de Loudon," returned his mother, ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... the Musketeers, remembering the rigor of the cardinal's antipathy to duelling, made a vain effort to put some distance between them and the king's justice. They were arrested in their flight, brought back to Paris, and perished miserably on the scaffold by the pointless sword of the executioner. Each of these events proved in its degree that Monsieur de Richelieu had very little respect for tradition, and that if he disliked an institution, no matter how time-hallowed and admired by gentlemen, he did away with it in the most uncompromising ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,— Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... get up with the lark—Oh, no doubt —you'll get up with the hangman one of these days. But you ought to be ashamed to be jawing here like this, in a red blanket, on a forty-foot scaffold on top of the Alps. And no end of people down here to boot; this isn't any place for an ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... condemned to travel to Tyburn in a cart, he will petition for the favour to be the first man that ever was driven thither in a wheelbarrow. And now, John, you must stand close and draw in your elbows [the fancy is of Milton standing on the scaffold pinioned], that Needham, the Commonwealth didapper, may have room to stand beside you ... He [Needham] was one of the spokes of Harrington's Rota, till he was turned out for cracking. As for Harrington, he's but a demi-semi in the Rump's music, and should be good at the cymbal; for he is ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... years he believed it necessary to enforce conformity. King Henry VIII., stiff in his own opinions, had always believed that; and because More would not say that he was of one mind with him in the matter of the divorce of Katherine he sent him to the scaffold. ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... again be tumbling into the grotesque; and you would, further, be leaving to your successors a legacy of evil which no man is justified in leaving to his successors. No! Your case is in practice irremediable. Like the murderer on the scaffold, you are the victim of circumstances. And not one human being in a million will pity you. You are a living tragedy ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... haste with Brilliant, whither this seaman will conduct thee, whom I have hired to set us on some shore of safety; bring what news you can learn of Cesario; I would not have him die poorly after all his mighty hopes, nor be conducted to a scaffold with shouts of joys, by that uncertain beast the rabble, who used to stop his chariot-wheels with fickle adorations whenever he looked abroad—by heaven, I pity him; but Sylvia's presence will chase away all thoughts, but those ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... are docks and docks. The ugliness of some docks is appalling. Wild horses would not drag from me the name of a certain river in the north whose narrow estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks are like a nightmare of dreariness and misery. Their dismal shores are studded thickly with scaffold-like, enormous timber structures, whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by the infernal gritty night of a cloud of coal-dust. The most important ingredient for getting the world's work along is distributed there under the circumstances of the greatest ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... rather, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that thou wouldst mount a scaffold in order to see ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... evil smile and orders the gendarmes to take him away to his death. Tosca tries to follow him, but Scarpia detains her. Remaining alone with him, she offers him all her treasures and at last kneels to him imploring him to save her lover. But the villain only shows her the scaffold which is being erected on the square below, swearing that he will only save her lover if she will be his. Tosca turns shuddering from him. Spoletta now enters to announce that Angelotti being found and taken has killed himself; and that Mario is ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... commissions after that. "Nathan Hale" stands in City Hall Park, New York City, the very embodiment of that devoted young patriot. The artist has shown him at the supreme moment when, facing the scaffold, he uttered the memorable words which still thrill the American heart, and expression and sentiment were never more perfectly in accord. He struck the same high note with his famous fountain at Chicago Exposition, where hundreds of ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... because they hold diverse opinions which they cannot disguise? (55) What, I say, can be more hurtful than that men who have committed no crime or wickedness should, simply because they are enlightened, be treated as enemies and put to death, and that the scaffold, the terror of evil-doers, should become the arena where the highest examples of tolerance and virtue are displayed to the people with all the marks of ignominy that authority ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part IV] • Benedict de Spinoza
... ostensible instrument, who was to be treated with every species of indignity, till the moment when he was conveyed from the palace of contempt to the dungeon of horror, and thence led by a brewer of his capital, through the applauses of an hired, frantic, drunken multitude, to lose his head upon a scaffold. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... lovely heads in Picadilly or Valparaiso or Montreal: or woven into a cord which will fly a kite for some tousle-headed boy in Michigan or for a slant-eyed urchin on the banks of the Yang-Tse Kiang: or, somewhere, it may be looped into ugliest knot by a grim figure standing on a scaffold—though I hope not!" ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... therefore, it was necessary that Jacques Rollet should die; so the affair took its course; and early one morning the guillotine was erected in the court-yard of the jail, three criminals ascended the scaffold, and three heads fell into the basket, which were presently afterward, with the trunks that had been attached to them, buried in a corner ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... against her inclination, for she was naturally tender- hearted; and as for myself, although I abhorred such kind of spectacles, yet my curiosity tempted me to see something that I thought must be extraordinary. The malefactor was fixed on a chair upon a scaffold erected for that purpose, and his head cut off at one blow, with a sword of about forty feet long. The veins and arteries spouted up such a prodigious quantity of blood, and so high in the air, that the great fountain at Versailles was not equal for ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... to fancy the girl's evil face scowling at the unconscious Queen, before she leaves to pen those inflammatory pamphlets which are to prove the Sovereign's undoing and her own. For by some whim of fate Madame Roland was executed on the very scaffold to which her envenomed writings had driven ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... and limitations, but she had the grand common sense of a clean heart and a clear mind. She could tell a lie with a good conscience in a good cause, but to hide even a small fault of her own, the threat of death on the scaffold would not have ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... when you make your dying speech from the scaffold you're going to say something original and funny. You can't help it. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... timber-merchant was dead or had lost his memory and forgotten all about his business; for his stacks of floorboards, set criss-crosswise to season (you know how they pile them up) were grimy with soot, and nobody ever disturbed the rows of scaffold-poles that stood like palisades along the walls. The entrance was from the street, through a door in a billposter's hoarding; and on the river not far away the steamboats hooted, and, in windy weather, the floorboards hummed to ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... scene without in reality giving the unhappy victim a more painful exit. The Dutch have a mode of execution which is well calculated to inspire terror, without putting the sufferer to extraordinary pain. The criminal is placed on a scaffold, opposite to the gigantick figure of a woman, with arms extended, filled with spikes, or long sharpened nails, and a dagger pointed from her breast, she is gradually moved towards him by machinery for the purpose, till he gets within her embrace, when her ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... spirits by whose providential art Succeeding motives turn the changeful heart, Keep, keep the best in view to Curio's mind, And watch his fancy, and his passions bind! Ye shades immortal, who by Freedom led, Or in the field or on the scaffold bled, Bend from your radiant seats a joyful eye, And view the crown of all your labours nigh. See Freedom mounting her eternal throne! The sword submitted, and the laws her own: 150 See! public Power chastised beneath her stands, With eyes intent, and uncorrupted hands! See ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... from this Cape of St. Anthony the 13th of May. And proceeding about the Cape of Florida, we never touched anywhere; but coasting alongst Florida, and keeping the shore still in sight, the 28th of May, early in the morning, we descried on the shore a place built like a beacon, which was indeed a scaffold upon four long masts raised on end for men to discover to the seaward, being in the latitude of thirty degrees, or very near thereunto. Our pinnaces manned and coming to the shore, we marched up alongst the river-side to see what place the enemy held there; for ...
— Drake's Great Armada • Walter Biggs
... into a sitting position, and the next minute he had out his glass, and was watching with the actor apparently close at hand, drawing himself up a few inches at a time, as one would mount a scaffold-pole, and his wrinkled forehead, compressed lips, and determined eyes so plain that Jack could have fancied that ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... chaos of bright, yet incomplete images which oppressed Tsiganok by their impetuosity, a new image came—how good it would be to become a hangman in a red shirt. He pictured to himself vividly a square crowded with people, a high scaffold, and he, Tsiganok, in a red shirt walking about upon the scaffold with an ax. The sun shone overhead, gaily flashing from the ax, and everything was so gay and bright that even the man whose head was soon to be chopped ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... say no more. Brief words are best on such burning matters. To-morrow at six in the afternoon I will send for you. Be ready! Till then—try to rest—try to sleep without dreaming of a scaffold!" ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... flares; 'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour, 560 The transient gulf-dream of a startling sleep. For what thou art shall perish utterly, But what is thine may never cease to be; Death is no foe to virtue: earth has seen Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom, 565 Mingling with freedom's fadeless laurels there, And presaging the truth of visioned bliss. Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene Of linked and gradual being has confirmed? Hopes that not vainly thou, and living fires 570 Of mind as radiant and as pure as thou, Have shone upon ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... disclosed? Then if they could not fly from the testimony of His works, if they could not evade even their fellow-man, why did they not first turn to Him? Why, from the penitent child at his mother's knee to the murderer on the scaffold, did they only at THE ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Addison climbed on a scaffold and thrust the lantern close up to the one with the turkey's head in its mouth. The bear struck at the lantern with one paw, started back, but lost its claw-hold on the beam and fell, turkey and all, eighteen or twenty feet ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... prototype of noble leaders who have scattered everywhere the seeds of civilization, and left others to reap the harvests; he was the forerunner of innumerable reformers and inventors, to whom it was never given to enter into the fruit of their labors; of soldiers and heroes who perished on the scaffold that others might be emancipated; of men like Huss and Cranmer, whose overthrow and defeat paved the way for others' victories. Dying, no other man has left behind influences that have wrought so powerfully or so continuously ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... to compromise with events, and not follow impulse to the ruthless end—as did St. Just, for instance, who in his admirable and ardent desire for universal peace, happiness, justice, in all good faith sent thousands to the scaffold—in the life of thought it is our unvarying duty to pursue our thought ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... kinsmen. Today experts agree that Riel was insane and should have been spared the gallows on this if on no other account. But at the moment the plea of insanity was rejected. The Government made up for its laxity before the rebellion by severity after it; and in November, 1885, Riel was sent to the scaffold. Bitterness rankled in many a French-Canadian heart for long years after; and in Ontario, where the Orange order was strongly entrenched, a faction threatened "to smash Confederation into its original fragments" rather ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... Theroigne de Mericourt, on La Belle Bouquetiere. Yet De Sade played a very peaceful part in the events of that time, chiefly as a philanthropist, spending much of his time in the hospitals. He saved his parents-in-law from the scaffold, although they had always been hostile to him, and by his moderation aroused the suspicions of the revolutionary party, and was again imprisoned. Later he wrote a pamphlet against Napoleon, who never forgave him and had him shut up ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... wish to conciliate the aid of that same genius, and beg you to extend your arm over his head, well assured, monsieur le cardinal, that your hand, by touching him only, would know how to replace upon his brow the crown which fell at the foot of his father's scaffold." ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... peopled with ghastly memories—for it was here the Revolution set up its guillotine, and it was here that some four thousand men and women, high and low, looked their last upon this earth, mounted the scaffold and passed under the knife. Surely, if any spot on earth be haunted, it ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... of my camp, and laid me down to rest, in full security, as I thought, than I felt myself seized by an indistinguishable number of hands, and was immediately pinioned, as if about to be led to the scaffold for execution. To have attempted to be refractory would have proved useless and dangerous to my life; and I suffered myself to be removed from my camp to theirs, a few miles distant, without uttering even a word of complaint. You are aware, ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... with a grand new stock of courage and endurance. We are led by it, with the abandoned Ariadne, through the Isle of Naxos, and we descend the Tower of Starvation in Ugolino; we ascend the terrible scaffold, and we are present at the awful moment of execution. Things remotely present in thought become palpable realities now. We see the deceived favorite abandoned by the queen. When about to die, the perfidious Moor is abandoned by his own sophistry. Eternity reveals the secrets of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... as if they had been run up in the night; there were buildings in course of erection that looked as if they would tumble down before they were finished; and there were other buildings in process of being planned, but of which not much was to be seen saving a forest of scaffold poles. ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... me to get to Vienna; I was lucky enough to find work with a man who used to decorate churches. We went about the country together. Once when he was ill I painted the roof of a church entirely by myself; I lay on my back on the scaffold boards all day for a week—I was proud of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... but now the house of Stuart is gone; the new king occupies the throne undisputed, and our allegiance is due to him. These unfortunate people who are fighting here strive to create a republic where all men shall be equal! Said the sainted martyr Charles on the scaffold, ''T is no concern of the common people's how they are governed.' A common man equal to a Talbot! Fight, my son, if you must; but oh, fight for the king, even an usurper, before a republic, a mob in which so-called equality stands in very unstable equilibrium,—fight for the rightful ruler ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... subtle agent; exhibiting the most signal instance I ever beheld of the power of that hope which seems to be consistent with life itself. Already an eighth part of the apparent period of his sojourn upon earth had passed. Seven quarters more would, in all likelihood, bring him to the scaffold, and, by resisting my energies to counteract the effects of the poison, he might have eluded the grim arm of the law, by a death a thousand times less dreadful. Every now and then, as the men dragged ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... therefore constrained to silence, and had no argument to combat the tears of two innocent creatures at his feet exclaiming, 'Do not abandon our mother; she will break her heart! and ought injustice to take from us, poor orphans, whose natural protector the scaffold has already deprived us of, the support of one whom Providence has sent to ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... newspapers,—and with some shining black portraits on the walls, which my unartistic eye regarded as a composition of hardbake and sticking-plaster. Here, in a corner my indentures were duly signed and attested, and I was "bound"; Mr. Pumblechook holding me all the while as if we had looked in on our way to the scaffold, to have ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... sister by a lie. It was a very little lie, a mere glossing over of the truth. The slightest deviation from actual veracity, and her sister's life, which was dearer to her than her own, would be saved from the scaffold, and her family honor would be vindicated. But Jeanie could not, and would not, believe that there could be salvation in a lie. With her gentle heart reproaching her, but with her conscience applauding her, she told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... ridicule you please. One Prince, a piper to the play, Was rather noted in his way, As call'd upon to show his art, Whene'er Bathyllus did his part. He being at a certain fair, (I do not well remember where,) While they pull'd down the booth in haste, Not taking heed, his leg displaced, He from the scaffold fell so hard— (Would he his pipes had rather marr'd! Though they, poor fellow! were to him As dear almost as life and limb). Borne by the kind officious crowd, Home he's conducted, groaning loud. Some months elapsed before he found Himself recover'd of his wound: Meantime, according ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... bound unto death eternal I solemnly take leave of you. Be careful of your health, for when your respiration gives out all your good times will have ended. Be careful in walking near a scaffold, for one falling brick or stone might usher you into the great eternity for which you have no preparation. A few months, or weeks, or days, or hours will pass on, and then you will see the last light, and hear the last music, and have the last pleasant emotion, and a destroyed ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... had seen me three times at the spectacle, they would no longer look at me." Another day Bourienne could not help congratulating him on some noisy demonstration of popular favour. "Bah!" he answered, "they would rush as eagerly about me if I were on my way to the scaffold." ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... occasionally throw on extra logs. Only round the two new pyres not yet quite finished was anything approaching a crowd assembled, and there a priest was officiously directing the laying of the logs. It was the manner of their laying and the careful building of a scaffold on each side of either pyre that held Rosemary McClean's attention—called all the rebellious womanhood within her ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... Sixteen times she was brought out and shut up again, and worried, and entrapped, and argued with, until she was heart-sick of the dreary business. On the last occasion of this kind she was brought into a burial-place at Rouen, dismally decorated with a scaffold, and a stake and faggots, and the executioner, and a pulpit with a friar therein, and an awful sermon ready. It is very affecting to know that even at that pass the poor girl honoured the mean vermin ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... ad Deen, at that moment, looking round upon the people, "Will no charitable body," cried he, "bring me a little water to quench my thirst?" Which immediately they did, and handed it up to him upon the scaffold. The vizier Saouy perceiving this delay, called out to the executioner from the king's closet window, where he had planted himself, "Strike, what dost thou stay for?" At these inhuman words the whole place echoed with loud imprecations against him; ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... for us to carry our share of the moose flesh with us, we had arranged with the chief that he should build what is called a "sunjegwun," a high scaffold, on the top of which it was to be deposited and then securely covered over, so that no birds of prey could reach it, while, from its height, even bears would not be able to climb up to the top. This is an ordinary method ...
— Snow Shoes and Canoes - The Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson Bay Territory • William H. G. Kingston
... of the whole circle, as one maliciously disposed to speak 'anger-exciting or factions truths'. Poor Cromwell and Anne Boleyn were obliged to talk of love and duty toward their brutal murderer, Henry VIII, and tell 'peace-making lies' on the scaffold to save their poor children from his resentment. European gentlemen in India often, by their violence surround themselves with circles of the same kind, in which the 'point of honour' demands that every member shall be prepared ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... worth noting, perhaps, save in so far as it is typical of the trite utterances of people striving to recover from some tremendous ordeal. Epigrams delivered at the foot of the scaffold have always been ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... said, "I do not think that he means it kindly. Mathers took me up into his room. He has made something there which looks like a scaffold. The doll was hanging by a piece of string from the gallows. Elizabeth!—my God, but it was like you!" he cried, suddenly dropping ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... this grey solitude with their torches; it was very pretty and solemn, and nothing like it had happened to me in my life before. They had built an orchestra in front of my house in the Zeltweg, and at first I thought they were erecting a scaffold for me. They played and sang, we exchanged speeches, and I was cheered by an innumerable multitude. I almost wish you had heard the speech of the evening; it was very naive and sincere; I was celebrated as a perfect saviour. The next morning I left in company with St. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... very kind. Somebody—an uncle, I think—left me a packet of sandwiches and a little something in a flask, in case, as he said, I should feel peckish on the scaffold. ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... Adelantado was at the head of a strong force when summoned to San Domingo, he returned unattended, and was treated as his brother had been. Columbus had expected to have suffered on the scaffold, and was greatly relieved when he found himself conducted on board a caravel commanded by a worthy captain—Alonzo de Villejo—who told him that he had orders to ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... upon you, and rebuke at once all hope of escape. Entreaties, tears, and the offer of gold and silver have been tried, but in vain. Effort and means have given place to horror and despair. The prospect before you is the scaffold, the block, a yawning grave, and a dread eternity. In this extremity a friend appears, and offers to be substituted in your place. The offer is accepted. You, pale, emaciated, and horror-stricken, are brought from your dungeon ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... gone out of him, and then, if man coveted vengeance, let him take it on the silent dust. But no sooner was it known to the Queen—to her, a woman and a mother!—than she gave command to have the scaffold run up with all speed, and that dying man drawn of an hurdle through the city that all men might behold, with trumpets going afore, and at last hanged of the gallows till he were dead. Oh, the pity of it! ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... Joshua. All kinds of criminals, except infidels, meet death with reasonable serenity. As a rule, there is nothing in the death of a pirate to cast discredit upon his profession. The murderer upon the scaffold smilingly exhorts the multitude to meet him in heaven. The Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... those of Man. Its idea of happiness did not rise beyond outward enjoyment, unobstructed by the tyranny of others. The title it gave was "citoyen," "citoyenne;" and it is not unimportant to Woman that even this species of equality was awarded her. Before, she could be condemned to perish on the scaffold for treason, not as a citizen, but as a subject. The right with which this title then invested a human being was that of bloodshed and license. The Goddess of Liberty was impure. As we read the poem addressed to her, not long since, by Beranger, we can ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... few wounded and bandaged, the whole melancholy procession threading its way through long lines of khaki soldiers—but downhearted? No; and as they passed, I heard just for a couple of seconds the subdued strains of that scaffold-song of many an Irishman before them—'God ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... was Marie Antoinette's turn to ascend the scaffold, which she did October 16, 1793. Her daughter, Marie Theresa, was then left alone with ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... Hecla at the Surrey Zoological Gardens classed by Bateman in his work upon skin diseases—if so, what kind of eruption did it come under? Where was the greatest irritation produced—in the scaffold-work of the erection, or the bosom of the gentleman who lived next to the gardens, and had a private exhibition of rockets every night, as they fell through his skylight, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the year 1627, while the Queen and Princess of England lived in weary exile at Paris,—while the slow tide of events was drawing their husband and father to his scaffold,—while Sir John Eliot was awaiting in the Tower of London the summoning of the Third Parliament,—while the troops of Buckingham lay dying, without an enemy, upon the Isle of Rhe,— while the Council of Plymouth were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... Ayesha that in England "blasting" was not an amusement that could be indulged in with impunity, and that any such attempt would meet with the consideration of the law and probably end upon a scaffold. ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... From scattered notices in Seneca and Quintilian, we should infer that the philosopher was employed as a repository of spiritual confidences—almost a father- confessor—at least as much as an intellectual teacher. When Kanus Julius was condemned to death, his philosopher went with him to the scaffold and uttered consoling words about the destiny of the soul; [5] and Seneca's own correspondence shows that he regarded this relation as the noblest philosophy could hold. Of such moral directors the most influential was ANNAEUS CORNUTUS, both from his varied learning and his consistent rectitude ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... be better for the law to hang him, if you've got the proof, Buck? A year or so in jail, an' a long time to think over what's going round his neck on the scaffold—wouldn't that suit you, if ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... thoughts and feelings would be attributed to him by a gaping, vulgar crowd, and he must suffer it. And this was to be the end of life. A few weeks more and the end would come, and he, Paul Stepaside, who had such hopes of a brilliant future, would end his life on the scaffold. A hangman's cord would be around his neck, and he would drop into Eternity, reviled and spurned despite ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... indeed, delivered Greece from the Persian invader, expelled the Tarquins from Rome, emancipated Switzerland and Holland, restored the Prince to his throne, and brought Charles to the scaffold. And the sword redeemed the pledge of the Congress of '76 when they plighted to each other "their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor." And yet, what would the redemption of that pledge have availed towards the establishment of our present government, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... had thy desolated Queen, sir, No blue eyes ever known, nor had she beauteous been, sir, The envy of our old rival hag she might have baffled, sir, Nor with her guiltless blood have crimson'd o'er the scaffold, sir. Detested be, &c. ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... the dead, who were supposed to have gone on a journey to a spirit land. Every one had such a separate scaffold or grave, generally speaking, as Champlain saw among the Ottawas, but it was the strange custom of the Hurons to collect the bones of their dead every few years and immure them in great pits or ossuaries with weirdlike ceremonies very minutely described in the Relations. ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... partisans—the curses of the people—confiscation, flight, exile—the insolence of the English, the quarrels of the Germans—shame, nakedness, hunger—and, what is worse, to suffer all this in your children? Are you prepared to see your husband branded as a rebel and dragged to a scaffold; while your children, disgraced and ruined, are begging their bread at the hands of their enemies? I give you eight days to reflect upon it, and when you shall be well prepared for such reverses, I will be ready to set forward, and perish with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... and Mathieu. And there the frightful scene which had been enacted at La Rouche's at the time of Valerie's death was repeated. Reine, too, was dead—dead like her mother! And Morange, in a first outburst of fury threatened both Seraphine and Sarraille with the scaffold. For half an hour there was no mastering him, but all at once he broke down. To lose his daughter as he had lost his wife, it was too appalling; the blow was too great; he had strength left only to weep. Sarraille, moreover, defended himself; he swore that he had known ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... sitting idly on the porch steps. At sight of the mountain girl the man knew all at once that there was one thing he must do. He must make sure that there was no mistake. He was already sure, of course; but still, as a condemned man at the scaffold hopes against hope for a stay of sentence, so he caught at the shadowy ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... whose gentle sweetness and shy delicacy, in the rather oppressive glare of her surroundings, suggest a modest wild flower astray among the pretentious beauties of the hothouse, and whose untimely death on the scaffold has left her fragrant memory entwined with a garland of cypress. But we cannot dwell upon the intimate phases of this friendship, whose fine quality is shown in the few scattered leaves of a correspondence overflowing with the wealth of two rare though ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... Caftans and glittering Turbans bustled through the Throng, and trampled over the Bodies of those they threw down; till to my great Surprize I found that the great Pace they went only hastened them to a Scaffold or a Bowstring. Many beautiful Damsels on the other Side moved forward with great Gaiety; some danced till they fell all along; and others painted their Faces till they lost their Noses. A Tribe of Creatures with busie Looks falling into a Fit of Laughter at the Misfortunes ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... was—looked upon Essex in the same light, hated Raleigh as the cause of his death, and accused him of glutting his eyes with Essex's misery, puffing tobacco out of a window, and what not—all mere inventions, so Raleigh declared upon the scaffold. He was there in his office as captain of the guard, and could do no less than be there. Essex, it is said, asked for Raleigh just before he died: but Raleigh had withdrawn, the mob having murmured. What had Essex to say to him? Was it, asks Oldys, shrewdly enough, ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... is—when the rebellion had passed, Canada had overthrown a system of government by oligarchy. She had ousted special interests forever from her legislative halls. In a blood and sweat of agony, on the scaffold, in the chain gang, penniless, naked, hungry and in exile, her patriots had fought the dragon of privilege, cast out the accursed thing and founded national life on the eternal rocks of justice to all, special privileges to none. Her patriots had themselves learned on the scaffold that law ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... of the footman who received Anthony's coat and hat gave a disconcerting fillip to the latter's uneasiness. As a respectful butler preceded the party upstairs, he felt as if he were being conducted to a scaffold. ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... personage being clearly convicted of unmilitary conduct, and having failed in the end which would have justified the means in the eyes of the voluptuous tyrant, was ruthlessly abandoned to his fate, and actually died on the scaffold with a gag in his mouth, as did the gallant Lally a few years afterward, to prevent his revelation of the orders which he had received, and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... belong the inviolability of human life, liberty, peace; and nothing that is indissoluble, irrevocable, or irreparable. To Law belong the scaffold, sword, and sceptre; war itself; and every kind of yoke, from divorceless marriage in the family to the state of siege in the city. Right is to come and go, buy, sell, exchange; Law has its frontiers and its custom-houses. Right would have free and compulsory education, without ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various |
