"Bugbear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the bugbear of youthful vanity, and it is considered knowing to quarrel with existing institutions and established truths; our experienced reflection regrets this inclination and we become weary of distracting ourselves ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... thinking that in both places there was danger of Guy's being led into mischief by his musical connections. Therefore he did his best, for Amabel's sake, to turn them from their purpose, persuaded in his own mind that the fever was a mere bugbear, raised up by Arnaud; and, perhaps, in his full health and strength, almost regarding illness itself as a foible, far more the dread of it. He argued, therefore, in his most provoking strain, becoming more vexatious as the former annoyance was revived at finding the impossibility of making Guy swerve ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of the great bugbear and tyrant of printers—that infamous mockery of a legal tribunal, the Star Chamber—was another gigantic obstacle cleared away from the path of journalism. The Newes Bookes, which, in spite of all difficulties, had already become abundant, now issued forth ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... Undue attention was Miss Burkham's bugbear. She was always endeavoring to instill into the minds of her charges, that a lady never attracts undue attention. The word had been in use so frequently that it had become a by-word among ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... memory, that, I will confess, is always a task before which a sensitive man will hesitate. Yet it is also part of the test of a writer's courage; by his hesitation a soldier-author may know that he is in danger of failing in his duty. Yet the opinion of the public, which intimidates us, is no mere bugbear. It is very serious. People do not enjoy the destruction of their cherished illusions. They do not crown the defamers of their idols. What is it that balks a soldier's judgment when he begins to write about the War? He is astonished ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... with an air of pleasant detachment, "I see. You are in a first-rate fix. I was always prepared for that. Coke told me about Bulmer—warned me off, so to speak. I forgot his claims at odd times, just for a minute or so, but he is a real bugbear—a sort of matrimonial bogey-man. If all goes well, and we enter Pernambuco without being fired at, you will be handed over to the British Consul, and he will send a rousing telegram about you to England. Bulmer, ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line, whereas others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed people at Aricia, and they derived the name Manius from Mania, a bogey or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in wait for pilgrims on the Arician slopes. These differences of opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Aricia and Egerius Laevius of Tusculum, as ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... material. Her hands are always cold and seldom clean; and she has sundry uncomfortable notions about damping the spirits of youth and checking the exuberance of its gaiety which render her a perfect terror and bugbear to the rising generation. When I was a little thing, laughing, prattling, and giggling, as children will, an admonishing look from my aunt, with a gaunt finger held aloft, and a cold "Kate, don't be silly, my dear," was always sufficient ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... this to Lord Etherington?" said Mowbray; "wait until he propose such a terrible bugbear as matrimony, before you refuse to receive him. Who knows, the whim that he hinted at may have passed away—he was, as you say, flirting with Lady Binks, and her ladyship has a good deal of ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... don't believe you will find him to be the bugbear you imagine. He can take defeat like a man. He is devoted to you, he is devoted to me. Your decision no doubt wrecks his fondest hope in life, but it doesn't make a weakling ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... roasted at the stake,—to our country,—and I do not deem it too serious to say, to conscience and to God. We are answerable; and if duty be anything more than a word of imposture, if conscience be not a bugbear, we are preparing to make ourselves as wretched as our country. There is no mistake in this case; there can be none. Experience has already been the prophet of events, and the cries of our future victims has already reached us. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Universe was thus, glory to Robinson, arrested for that time. And now we have the same Robinson instructed to sharpen all his faculties to the cutting pitch, and do the impossible for this new and reverse face of matters. What a change from 1731 to 1741! Bugbear of dreadful Austrian-Spanish Alliance dissolves now into sunlit clouds, encircling a beautiful Austrian Andromeda, about to be devoured for us; and the Downfall of the Universe is again imminent, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that makes men "all their lifetime subject to bondage" (Heb 2:14,15). For though Christ will deliver thee indeed at last, thou having embraced him by faith, yet thy life will be full of trouble; and death, though Jesus hath abolished it, will be always a living bugbear to thee in all thy ways and thoughts, to break thy peace, and to make thee to draw thy loins ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... from time to time, for he had often been called to the farm or to the Dyers and had watched her at play. Once she had stopped him as he drove by to give him a little handful of blue violets, and this had gone straight to his heart, for he had been made too great a bugbear to most children to look for any favor at their hands. He always liked to see her come into church on Sundays, her steps growing quicker and surer as her good grandmother's became more feeble. The doctor was a lonely man in spite of his ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... the vizor up, disclosing a weather- beaten bronzed face, with somewhat wild dark eyes, and a huge grizzled moustache forming a straight line over his lips. Altogether he was a complete model of the lawless Reiter or Lanzknecht, the terror of Swabia, and the bugbear of Christina's imagination. The poor child's heart died within her as she perceived the mutual recognition between her uncle and the new comer; and, while Master Gottfried held out his hands with a cordial greeting of "Welcome, home, brother Hugh," she trembled from head to ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... or delicate, or properly behaved—these men of her imagination! What matter? She loved adventures! And moving like a king among the rest, she saw the thin, travel-beaten, eccentric form of Lord Philip—the hated, adored, pursued; Society's idol and bugbear all in one; Lord Philip, who shunned and disliked women; on whom, nevertheless, the ambitions and desires of some of the loveliest women in England were, on that account alone, and at this moment ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bugbear,—a bete noire. She does not even trouble herself to tolerate him, which is the one unwise step the wise Marcia took on ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... hath this dreamer, with his father's ark, The bugbear he hath built to scare the world, Shaken my sister? Are we not the loved Of Seraphs? and if we were not, must we Cling to a son of Noah for our lives? Rather than thus——But the enthusiast dreams The worst of dreams, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... marriage is such a bugbear to me! much might be if we could invent but any way to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... John better, and he freely revelled in the shops, purchasing the most useless and preposterous things in spite of that growing bugbear of the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... get it, and without delay. Although there was some grumbling among the marketmen, the provision stores were soon put through such a course of scrubbing and whitening as to make the old-fashioned "spring house-cleaning," which has been the bugbear of pater familias and one of the chief assets of the paragrapher for so many years, a process of incomparably mild flavor. At the abattoir it had not been so easy to effect a reform, but with such women as Mrs. Bateman, Mrs. Albert Turner and the ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... bugbear of two generations of Englishmen; and classical scholars, who interpreted modern politics by the light of ancient Greece, saw in the absorption of Athens by Macedon a convincing demonstration of the fate which the modern barbarian of the ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible. There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle of his ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a proud and happy man, and seemed to think the steps of the Pyramid too small for his elastic energy. But Fanny feared that her troubles were to come. There was papa—that terrible bugbear on all such occasions. What would papa say? She was sure her papa would not allow her to marry and go so far away from her own family and country. For herself, she liked the Americans—always had liked them; so she said;—would desire nothing better than to live among them. But papa! And Fanny ...
— An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids • Anthony Trollope
... death-bed, who is visited by some compunctions towards her, and she is absent a month. When she returns Thornfield Hall is quit of all its guests, and Mr. Rochester and she resume their former life of captious cordiality on the one side, and diplomatic humility on the other. At the same time the bugbear of Miss Ingram and of Mr. Rochester's engagement with her is kept up, though it is easy to see that this and all concerning that lady is only a stratagem to try Jane's character and affection upon ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Two hundred square miles of fertile Ohio lands were to be their reward. An invitation to other colonies to join in the assertion of English ownership met with scanty response, or none at all. The idea of a union was in the air, but it was complicated with that old bugbear of a regular revenue to be exacted by act of Parliament, which Shirley and the others still continued to press with hungry zeal; while the assemblies were not less set upon making all grants annual, with specifications as to person and object. While the matter hung in the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... woman's heart to such a pitch of indignation that this maligned name [Lowe] was an offence. We were to hold the owner in abhorrence. Speak to him, never! Look at him, sit in the same room with him, never! None were louder than I, more vehement; yet here was I beside my bugbear and perfectly satisfied with my position. It was a ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... tough. Never before have there been so many people in the world. In the past centuries the world's population has been smaller; in the future centuries it is destined to be larger. And this brings us to that old bugbear that has been so frequently laughed away and that still persists in raising its grisly head—namely, the doctrine of Malthus. While man's increasing efficiency of food-production, combined with colonisation of whole virgin continents, has for generations ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... come later, and won't be such a bugbear as you think. If you were not worried into a morbid condition over all this trouble, you would not look so seriously upon a thing which I regard as a piece of mere night prowling, with a ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... "The Immortals" were soon left far behind. At the end of the first twelve months he stood fifty-first in a class of seventy-two, but when he entered the first class, and commenced the study of logic, that bugbear to the majority, he shot from near the foot of the class to the top. In the final examination he came out seventeenth, notwithstanding that the less successful years were taken into account, and it was a frequent remark amongst his brother cadets that if the course had been a year ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... no truer, grander motive for his sustaining the position he has climbed to—when, in short, it is his own glory, not mankind's good, he has ever striven for—woe, woe, woe when the hour of success is come! I cannot stop to name and examine instances, but let me be allowed to refer to that bugbear who is called up whenever greatness of any kind has to be illustrated—Napoleon the Great; or let me take any of the lesser Napoleons in lesser grades in any nation, any age—the men who have had no star but self and self-glory before ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... banished by a general edict especially aimed at them supplemented by massacres in the northern provinces. [Sidenote: June 24, 1535] After the crisis at Muenster, though the Anabaptists continued to be a bugbear to the ruling classes, their propaganda lost its dangerously revolutionary character. Menno Simons of Friesland, after his conversion in 1536, became the leader of the movement and succeeded in gathering the smitten people ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Right or wrong, I have come to stand by you, Frank," said the Rector of Wentworth, rather mournfully. He had been waiting at Mrs Hadwin's for the last two hours. He had seen that worthy woman's discomposed looks, and felt that she did not shake her head for nothing. Jack had been the bugbear of the family for a long time past. Gerald was conscious of adding heavily at the present moment to the Squire's troubles. Charley was at Malta, in indifferent health; all the others were boys. There was only Frank to ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... tea has been a great bugbear with the ill-informed, bit it is not nearly so deleterious as some careless or unscrupulous writers would have us believe. In the first place there is a very insignificant quantity of tannin in properly ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... political management, and, instead of being dragged down, as was most feared, their enfranchisement has tended to elevate them. Under our system of the Australian ballot, they have found that the contaminating influence of which they had been told was but a bugbear, born of fright, produced by shadows. They learned that to deposit their vote did not subject them to anything like the annoyance which they often experienced from crowds on "bargain days," while their presence drove from the polls the ward ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... dog is a bugbear; we have walked many hundred times the diameter and the circumference of this our habitable globe—along all roads, public and private—with stiles or turnpikes—metropolitan streets and suburban paths—and at all seasons of the revolving year and day; but never, as we padded ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... proves is, that the defects of the system were even then admitted, while the remedies are still to be applied. At Harvard this has been done; and the question for other medical schools is whether they are to follow the example or to be deterred by a bugbear—whether, for example, the University of Pennsylvania, after raising her scientific and art departments to a higher level, shall be content to let her medical school remain stationary. It is the opinion of intelligent physicians who are not parties to this controversy that the experiment which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... 'What a bugbear that woman is!' I observed, rather irritably, as we retraced our steps in the direction of the Man and Plough, the little inn that stood at the junction of the four roads. Everything looked dark and eerie in the faint starlight. Our footsteps seemed to strike sharply against ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... house. There is a sad want of vinegar in her composition. She cannot scold her servants—the mildest approach to it that she ever makes is by saying, 'Mr. Brandon does not like such a thing,' or that 'Mr. Brandon would be displeased if they do not attend to such another.' The idea of making a bugbear of me is very ingenious, but I fear not very efficacious, for I know they see through it. As for me, a penitent recollection of a conversation in an English railway carriage has stopped her mouth for ever, and she never ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... Mr. Graham, who, true to his appointment with Durward, had come up to meet him, accompanied by Mrs. Graham. This lady, who could boast of having once been the bride of an English lord, to say nothing of belonging to the "very first family of Virginia," was a sort of bugbear to Mrs. Livingstone, who, haughty and overbearing to her equals, was nevertheless cringing and cowardly in the presence of those whom she considered her superiors. Never having seen Mrs. Graham, her ideas concerning her were quite elevated, and now when ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... all, for they meant one sort of thing by the word gentlewoman, and I meant quite another; for alas! all I understood by being a gentlewoman was to be able to work for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible bugbear going to service, whereas they meant to live great, rich and high, and ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... of the nation had remained true to their calling. But when to speak Latin was considered more learned than to speak German, when to amass vast information was considered more creditable than to digest and to use it, when popularity became the same bugbear to the professors which profanity had been to the clergy, and vulgarity to the knights, Luther's work was undone; and two more centuries had to be spent in pedantic controversies, theological disputes, sectarian squabbles, and political prostration, before a new national spirit ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... into statements as to the effects of caste which are actually contradicted by their own experience. And in Mr. Raikes's interesting work, "Notes of the North-Western Provinces," we find an instance of how people will always attribute everything to this universal bugbear. Observing on the pride of high caste, "which withers whatever it touches," Mr. Raikes informs us that the Brahmins and Rajpoots of the rich province of Benares will not touch the plough owing to pride of caste. He next tells us that caste is little ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... suitable to record. Discreet man that he was, Wendell Pemberton could not entirely conceal his wonder that Patricia should have remained so long in ignorance of her condition. He spoke concerning malformation and functional weaknesses and, although obscurely because of the bugbear of professional courtesy, voiced his opinion that Patricia had not received the most adroit medical treatment at the time of ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... more of revolutions and conspiracies. I am not made to sit upon a throne as the feared and thundering goddess of cowardly slaves, causing millions to tremble at every word and glance! I will not be empress, not the bugbear of a quaking, kneeling people, I will be a woman, who has nothing to do with the business and drudgery of men; I will not be plagued with labor and care, but will enjoy and rejoice in ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... coming fancies [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey^, whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest^, geste^, extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, man in the moon, castle in the air, pipe dream, pie-in-the-sky, chateau en Espagne [Fr.]; Utopia, Atlantis^, happy valley, millennium, fairyland; land of Prester John, kindgom of Micomicon; work of fiction &c (novel) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... forward on a staff of fifty ells' length, with a pace as swift as a bird's flight. Once when my father was out hunting he was charmed by an ogress who lived in a cave under a waterfall, and with her he begat this bugbear. The island is one-third of my father's realm, but his son finds it too small for him. My father had a ring the greatest gem, which each of us would have, sister and brother, but I got it, wherefore he has ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... efficiently, and able also to take their place with ease in high society? He was very well off certainly at Framley; but he could never hope for anything beyond Framley, if he allowed himself to regard Lady Lufton as a bugbear. Putting Lady Lufton and her prejudices out of the question, was there any reason why he ought not to accept the duke's invitation? He could not see that there was any such reason. If any one could be a better judge on such a subject than himself, it must be his bishop. And it was clear that the ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... said his wife, as if resenting the word. "But you make such a bugbear of the least little matter that there's no encouragement to ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... only the bugbear of little minds; it is also the trade-mark of them. Paine also detested monarchies. "Some talent is required to be a simple workman," he wrote; "to be a king there is need to have only the human shape." Of Burke, he said: "Mr. Burke's mind is above ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... denouncing the 'Darwinian School'[180] for theories about instinct incompatible with the doctrine of final causes. It might appear that a philosopher who has re-established the objective existence of space in opposition to Berkeley, was in danger of that materialism which had been Berkeley's bugbear. But Stewart escapes the danger by his assertion that our knowledge of matter is 'relative' or confined to phenomena. Materialism is for him a variety of ontology, involving the assumption that we know the essence of matter. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Quarantine, but in our favored country there are many untravelled persons who do not precisely know what it is, and who no doubt wonder why it should be such a bugbear to travellers in the Orient. I confess I am still somewhat in the same predicament myself, although I have already been twenty-four hours in Quarantine. But, as a peculiarity of the place is, that one can do nothing, however good a will he has, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... were a greater bugbear to American vessels than pirates, and Captain Parson kept ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... interests of her husband's niece, as the probate judge had told her she might if she listened to the seduction of immediate cash. And fortunately the bank officer did not ask for money to pay taxes and interest on the mortgages, which had been the bugbear of her married life. This was the next point touched upon by the ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated. Trades' Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as perfectly legitimate institutions, and as useful means ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... see," said Patty, as they started off in the car one morning, "why people make such a bugbear of Christmas shopping. I ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... where moral courage was required. A remarkable shyness, too, made him hesitate constantly in the utterance of a word which might explain away any difficulty in which he chanced to find himself; and this helped to keep his tongue tied in the matter where Larry Hogan had continued to make himself a bugbear. He had a horror, too, of being thought capable of doing a dishonourable thing, and the shame he felt at having peeped into a letter was so stinging, that the idea of asking any one's advice in the dilemma ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... and good soldiers; and as to the dogs, they were noble animals of the highest blood he ever saw. If, however, I and his friend Hammond, who seemed afraid of being eaten, in preference to the fine beef and venison which we had seen in such profusion on the plain, really felt alarmed at the bugbear legends of our vagabond Indians, before any demonstration of hostility had been made, we were welcome to take two-thirds of the men and mules and make our retreat as best we could, while he would advance with Antonio and the ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... there is no such secret;—it is a bugbear! But the moral perversion of the person who could soberly ask the question that Helwyse asked is not so easily disposed of. It met, indeed, with full recognition. As for the subtile voice, having accomplished its main purpose, it began now to evade the point and to run into digressions; ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... to fifteen thousand francs merely to win the suit,—but you will win it, if you care to. The suit will only increase the enmity of the Gravelots, for the expenses will be even heavier on them. You will be their bugbear; you will be called litigious and calumniated in every way; still, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... or a mad dog, or in a room full of those ornaments which belong, almost exclusively, to lodging-houses everywhere. Briefly, he is always there—ready to burst into flames at any moment, ready to misunderstand everything anybody does or says, a perpetual bugbear; and not even the emotional repentances, which are often the only partially saving grace of bad-tempered people, can atone for the atmosphere of disturbance which they always inflict. And the man or woman who loses his temper whenever anything goes in the ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... good as ever so far, sometimes for 30 or 40 yards we lose them under drifts, but then they reappear quite clearly raised above the surface. If the light is good there is not the least difficulty in following. Blizzards are our bugbear, not only stopping our marches, but the cold damp air takes it out of us. Bowers got another rating sight to-night—it was wonderful how he managed to observe in such a horribly cold wind. He has been on ski to-day whilst Wilson walked by the sledge or ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... Methodism, was just beginning to be the bugbear set up for those whom the world held to be ultra-religious, and my mother was so far disturbed at our interest in what was termed Oxford theology that the warning would have alarmed her if it had come from any other quarter. However, Lady ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... natural consequences of her folly. Would she have a rheumatic fever or consumption, like a child in a book?—and she tried breathing deep, and getting up a little cough, to see if it was coming! Or would the Lord Chancellor hear of it? He was new bugbear recently set up, and more haunting than even a gunpowder treason in the cellars! What did he do with the seals? Did he seal up mischievous heiresses in closets, as she had seen a door fastened by two seals and a bit of string? Perhaps the Court of ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... even as she grew older, had much time to spend outdoors, there were many tasks about the house and farm she had to perform. The chest was soon filled with quilts and that bugbear was gone from her life. But there was continual scrubbing, baking, mending, and other household tasks to be done, so that much practice caused the girl to develop into a capable little housekeeper. Aunt Maria frankly admitted that Phoebe worked cheerfully ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... apple-brandy, might march on to the capital, take it by storm, and annex the whole province to Connecticut. The name of Yankee became as terrible among the Nieuw Nederlanders as was that of Gaul among the ancient Romans, insomuch that the good wives of the Manhattoes used it as a bugbear wherewith to frighten ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... of living, the climacteric or change of life, has become the bugbear of womanhood. It seems to be universally assumed that this period in a woman's life must be fraught with manifold sufferings and dangers. It is taken as a matter of course that during these changes in her organism a woman is assailed by the most serious physical, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... Somewhere, from the first, in an obscure fold of consciousness, she had felt the stir of an unnamed, unacknowledged fear; and now the fear raised its head and looked at her. Well! She would look back at it, then: look it straight in the malignant eye. What was it, after all, but a "bugbear to scare children"—the ghost of the opinion of the many? She had suspected from the first that Wyant knew of her having shortened the term of Bessy Amherst's sufferings—returning to the room when he did, it was almost impossible that he should not have guessed ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... case was due almost entirely to this cause, and to the school of literalism in which he had been trained; but, however this may be, we both of us hated being made to say our prayers—morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid it, as indeed children generally will, by every artifice which we could employ. Thus we were in the habit of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer time, and would gratefully hear my father tell my mother that it was a shame to wake ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... carries on a dry goods business, he might gamble as much as should please him and the law would not take hold of him. He would ask anybody to read the law understandingly and then deny this round assertion. This act, said he, is bugbear—it is a disgrace as it now stands, for it smacks of cowardice. The legislators, he presumed, had a little sense, and they knew that some kind of a law must be passed, and they were ingenious enough to know how to frame ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... the public with persons who beat their breast, tear their hair, and declaim blood-curdling episodes. A decade or more ago, the drawing-room reciter was of this type, and was rapidly becoming the bugbear of social gatherings. The difference between the stilted reciter and the simple story-teller is perhaps best illustrated by an episode in Hans Christian Andersen's immortal "Story of the Nightingale." The real Nightingale ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... of Drake Was a Bugbear to fright Children; Nurses still'd Their little Spanish Nynnyes when they cryde "Hush! ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... from the dark-haloed indeterminate limbo where dwelt that bugbear of Charles Courtier, the great Half-Truth Authority, he himself had a couple of rooms at fifteen shillings a week. Their chief attraction was that the great Half-Truth Liberty had recommended them. They tied him to nothing, and were ever at his disposal when he was in London; for his landlady, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... government: a French invasion, the appearance of the French in London, is an old story almost worn out upon the imaginations of the good people of England; but now came a new if not a more plausible bugbear—the Pope! It was confidently affirmed that the Pope would soon be in London, he having been seen in disguise in a gold-flowered nightgown on St. James's parade at Bath. A poor gentleman, who appeared at his door in his nightgown, had been ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... to follow the traveller through every phase of his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice beyond repair as the supreme bugbear of literature; though for my own part I hold that to a fine healthy romantic appetite the subject can't be too diffusely treated. Meeting in the Piazza on the evening of my arrival a young American painter who told me that he had been spending the summer just ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... which are, so to say, the beginning and end of all things, the alpha and omega of human philosophy—viz., the grave and the womb;[179] the latter the bait as well as the portal of life, the former the bugbear and the goal of all things living. The idea, no less than the form, is manifestly Indian. Birth and death constitute the axis of existence; the womb is the symbol of the allurement that tempts men to forget their sorrows, to keep the Juggernaut wheel revolving and to supply it with fresh victims ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... broke on a deal like that." Tweet's indignation caused him to grab his off-center nose and impatiently correct its obstinate trend, but to no avail. "But le's forget it and get back to that bugbear of our young lives. When are ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... is your bugbear," laughed his wife. "Don't worry, Robert! It isn't like you. Winship isn't bothering ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... frowned and said, "Yes, yes. Guerchard is a good assistant in a business like this. A little visionary, a little fanciful—wrong-headed, in fact; but, after all, he IS Guerchard. Only, since Lupin is his bugbear, he's bound to find some means of muddling us up with that wretched animal. You're going to see Lupin mixed up with all this to ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... the 1st of July, Bressant sat at his table, with his books and papers about him. He was in an excellent humor, for he had just arrived at the conclusion that he might, and would, safely encounter his bugbear Cornelia. If the professor invited him to tea, and to spend the evening, he was resolved to accept; and, at that moment, he felt a hand laid upon his shoulder, and, turning quickly round, recognized the sombre figure ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... days Tom Staple was not a very happy man; University reform had long been his bugbear, and now was his bane. It was not with him as with most others, an affair of politics, respecting which, when the need existed, he could, for parties' sake or on behalf of principle, maintain a certain ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... don't know it; and I don't know that I understand it now you tell it me," replied the major, just a little crossly, for he did not like poetry; it was one of his bugbear humbugs. "But one thing is plain: you must not expose yourself to what in such a search ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... with which Mrs. Maverick will be met by these friends of the daughter, he trusts that the mother's interviews with the Doctor, and a knowledge of the kindly influences under which Adele has grown up, may lessen the danger of a religious altercation between mother and child, which has been his great bugbear in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... other two were doubtful. Still, by patience, conciliation, and subsidies, we might hope in the course of time that the wounds we had inflicted would gradually be healed, and a more stable condition ensue. For a short period it was so; but then the old bugbear of Russian advance over the dreary wastes of Central Asia again supervened, and exercised its malign ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... Anticipate no evil. I shall be firm; do not doubt me. I will cling with tenacity to that juste milieu under which we have hitherto so eminently prospered. Neither the Parcae and the Eumenides, nor Ixion and his friends, shall advance a point. I will keep each faction in awe by the bugbear of the other's supremacy. Trust me, ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... What a beast of a word that is—the detective's bugbear. I thought I had it, until you said—Great Scott! I'll tell you why. I see it all. I have him with the goods. His object in coming to see you about the letters was because Freddie wanted them back owing to his approaching marriage ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... with him. If you add to this Augustine's remaining doctrines, that all this does not depend on the man's own sins and omissions, but was already predestined to happen, one really is at a loss what to think. Our highly educated Rationalists say, to be sure, "It's all false, it's a mere bugbear; we're in a state of constant progress, step by step raising ourselves to ever greater perfection." Ah! what a pity we didn't begin sooner; we should ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... be, Returning to the barren womb of nothing, Whence first they sprung; then might the debauchee Untrembling mouth the heavens:—then might the drunkard Reel over his full bowl, and, when 'tis drain'd, Fill up another to the brim, and laugh At the poor bugbear Death: then might the wretch That's weary of the world, and tired of life, 390 At once give each inquietude the slip, By stealing out of being when he pleased, And by what way, whether by hemp, or steel. Death's thousand doors stand open.—Who could force ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Nonconformists, these were inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer. From the time of his joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a bugbear to his brethren in the faith. 'They that take the sword shall perish with the sword,' they told him; they gave him 'no rest'; 'his position became intolerable'; it was plain he must choose between his political and his religious tenets; and in the last ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not aware there were eavesdroppers,' muttered the detected villain. 'Worthy Mrs. Dean, I like you, but I don't like your double- dealing,' he added aloud. 'How could you lie so glaringly as to affirm I hated the "poor child"? and invent bugbear stories to terrify her from my door-stones? Catherine Linton (the very name warms me), my bonny lass, I shall be from home all this week; go and see if have not spoken truth: do, there's a darling! Just imagine your father in my place, and Linton in yours; then think how you would value your careless ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... called Malla, on the 8th he arrived at Kolor, a considerable town, near the entrance into which he saw hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees, which he was told belonged to Mumbo Jumbo. The account of this personage is thus narrated by Mr. Park: "This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection, for as the kafirs are not restricted in the number of their wives, every one marries as many as he can maintain, and, as it frequently happens, that the ladies ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... be a relief to you to know at once that there will not be any statistics in this series of talks. We want instead just now to get broad and general, but distinct, impressions. Statistics are burdensome to most people. They are a good deal of a bugbear to the common crowd of us every-day folks. They are absolutely essential. They are of immense, that is, immeasurable, value. You need to have them at hand where you can easily turn for exact information, as you need it, to refresh your memory. And an increasing amount of it will stick in your ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... to the house in a great panic. I shall never forget the crying of the children. Indians had long been the favorite bugbear of the border country. Many a winter's evening we had sat in the firelight, fear-faced, as my father told of the slaughter in Cherry Valley; and, with the certainty of war, we all looked for the red hordes of Canada to come, ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... journalists have had the wit to see and the energy to adopt the best feature of the American style; and the result has been a distinct advance in the raciness and readableness of some of our best-known journals. The "Americanisation of the British press" is no bugbear to stand in awe of, if only it be carried on with good sense and discrimination. We can most advantageously exchange lessons of sobriety and restraint for suggestions of candour, humour, and point; and America's share in the form of the ideal English ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... future threats of Ashanti invasion, and make security more secure. The political officers of the Protectorate will be the best judges of the steps to be taken; and, if they are active and prudent, we shall hear no more of the Kumasi bugbear. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... dear Cole, don't trouble to perjure yourself. I don't mind, believe me. They're easily shocked, these country clergy, and no doubt I'm a bugbear to 'em. Yet, I could have sworn I'd never seen this one before. Let's ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... is well worthy of your attention. Both you and this young man will undergo cruel suffering if you persist in your present relations. I will say no more. I have done my duty, and I am sure you will not think that I am actuated by old-maidish scruples, and have made a bugbear for myself. I love you, Redbud, as well as I love any one in the world, and all I have said is for your ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... are quite agreeable people, their only fault being the one common failing of the East: a disposition to charge whatever they think it possible to obtain for anything. The Circassians seem to be the great bugbear in Asiatic Turkey. I am told that once I get beyond the country that these people range over - who are regarded as a sort of natural and half-privileged freebooters - I shall be reasonably safe ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... moment to correct a popular error, viz., that snuff contains ground glass, put there for titillating purposes. What appears to be ground glass is only the little crystals or small particles of alkali that have not been dissolved. So that fastidious snuff-takers may dismiss this bugbear at once ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... house to enter. I used to feel that keenly as a boy, when, by a prophetic irony, burglars were my bugbear, and I looked under my bed every night in life. The bow-windows on the ground floor finished in inane balconies to the first-floor windows. These balconies had ornamental iron railings, to which a less ingenious rope-ladder than ours could have ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... and those among the newspapers that had resumed publication were howling for measures of extermination. A threatening crowd surrounded the prisoners and was particularly violent against the woman, in whom the excited bourgeois beheld one of those petroleuses who were the constant bugbear of terror-haunted imaginations, whom they accused of prowling by night, slinking along the darkened streets past the dwellings of the wealthy, to throw cans of lighted petroleum into unprotected cellars. This woman, was the cry, had been found bending over a coal-hole in the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... establishment, in the commercial production of my gelatine dry plates, it was but natural I should first have turned to this as a mode of obtaining the desired results; but, alas! all attempts in that direction signally failed—the ware most persistently refused to have anything to do with emulsion. The bugbear was the fixing agent or hypo., which not only left indelible marks, but, despite any amount of washing, the image on a finished plate vanished to nothing at the end of an hour's exposure in the show window. There was nothing left but to seek ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... allegiance to both seasons, spring had plunged headlong into summer, with no preparatory gradations from breezy coolness to sultry days and oppressive nights. Friendly Terrace wore an air of relaxation. School was over till September, and now that the bugbear of final examinations was disposed of, no one seemed possessed of sufficient energy to attempt anything more strenuous than wielding a ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... Habr Awal, was curious in his inquiries concerning me: the astute Senior had heard of our leaving the End of Time with the Gerad Adan, and his mind fell into the fancy that we were transacting some business for the Hajj Sharmarkay, the popular bugbear of Harar. Our fate was probably decided by the arrival of a youth of the Ayyal Gedid clan, who reported that three brothers had landed in the Somali country, that two of them were anxiously awaiting at Berberah the return of the third from ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... considerable town; near the entrance into which I observed, hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees, which I was told on inquiry belonged to MUMBO JUMBO. This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the Pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection; for as the Kafirs are not restricted in the number of their wives, every one marries as many as he can conveniently ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... that it would induce white immigration, relieve the congested overproduction of the staples of the Southern States, introduce a higher class of industries, and simplify the so-called problem by removing the bugbear of ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... so candidly, and with such an air of treating the whole business as the bugbear of a timid monarch, that I ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... completely faded from its original color. It had been broken here and there, but was pieced with different colored cloths, so as to appear a motley and strange garment; and her bony feet were bare and unprotected. Nanny, from different circumstances, was unanimously elected the witch or bugbear of the village; and though the brats were then so busy annoying her, at night, or in a lonesome place, they would fly like lightning even at her approach; and some of them actually trembled while shouting, though ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... not what the bourgeois and their organs pretend. We do not want to rob our neighbours; all we ask is, to keep the Prussians out of Paris." He said a good deal more which it is needless to repeat, but I willingly fulfil his request, to give my testimony that he, and thousands like him, who are the bugbear of the inhabitants of the richer districts of the city, are not by any means as black as they are painted. They are impulsive and somewhat inclined to exaggerate their own good qualities and the faults of others; they ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... went on. "Liver. All sailors suffer from it, more or less. It's the bugbear of the sea. I have a doctor on board because, with a score or so of crew, it's really a duty ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... bugbear," he groaned. "It ought to be indicted for a nuisance, waking people up o' mornings when they ought to be in the arms of Morpheus—I've a great mind to lie still. Half an ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... men united in a conspiracy to destroy various persons who were obnoxious to them in the province, some of them actuated by political motives, and others in order to get possession of the property of their victims. The bugbear of the Court is Carbonarism, and Matteis pretended that there was a Carbonari plot on foot, in which several persons were implicated. He employed the spies to seduce the victims into some imprudence of language or conduct, and ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... water is a worry! And doubtless, if the iron glove Should meet us here in Kent or Surrey, Its clasp might soften into love; We might despatch him with a grey grin, And all the German Scribes would vow "Our bugbear is the Montenegrin; We do ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... with the duchess, too," put in Fitzgerald, reaching for a bunch of yellow grapes. "With all due respect to your cause and beliefs, Madame the duchess, your mistress, is a bugbear to me. The very sound of the title arouses in my heart ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... a vote was taken related to the election for a borough. The ministers carried their point by six voices, [764] In an instant every thing was changed; the spell was broken; the Club, from being a bugbear, became a laughingstock; the timid and the venal passed over in crowds from the weaker to the stronger side. It was in vain that the opposition attempted to revive the disputes of the preceding year. The King had wisely authorised Melville to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to be urged against this mode of operating, the fear lest the thickened, brawny, and often ulcerated textures in the neighbourhood of a diseased knee-joint, would not make a good covering. This, however, is no longer a bugbear, as we see in cases of resection, where the diseased joint alone is taken away, how very soon all swelling and disease departs, ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... The great bugbear staring the amateur mechanic in the face when he contemplates making a small steam engine is the matter of boring the cylinder. To bore an iron cylinder on a foot lathe is difficult even when the lathe ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... and is consumed. Having only this abominable and hideous mask before its eyes, it is afraid of death. But its fear is only because of its lack of understanding. If it knew, it would by no means be afraid or shudder at death. Our reason is like a little child who has become frightened by a bugbear or a mask, and cannot be lulled to sleep; or like a poor man, bereft of his senses, who imagines when brought to his couch that he is being put into the water and drowned. What we do not understand we cannot ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... right at my ease. I was in the presence of a knight; but he was first and last a man. Straight to the point he went. He never puts a man through that bugbear of the soldier, a host of seemingly inconsequential questions; he has the particulars of each man who is likely to come under his direction long before he ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... too bad," sighed Zellerndorf; "though it may not be without its advantages after all, for now we still have this second bugbear to frighten Leopold with. So long, of course, as the American lives there is always the chance that he may return and seek to gain the throne. The fact that his mother was a Rubinroth princess might make it easy for Von der Tann to place him upon the throne without ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... stopped Eugene on the Cours Sauvaire, he had published, in the "Independant," a terrible article on the intrigues of the clergy, in response to a short paragraph from Vuillet, who had accused the Republicans of desiring to demolish the churches. Vuillet was Aristide's bugbear. Never a week passed but these two journalists exchanged the greatest insults. In the provinces, where a periphrastic style is still cultivated, polemics are clothed in high-sounding phrases. Aristide called his adversary "brother Judas," or ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... advantages—particularly after lunch; and sometimes, where an old house was empty, we would go over it, and stare at beams and chimneypieces and hear the haunted tale of its fortunes, with a faint half-memory in our breasts of that one-time bugbear we had known as "copy." But though more than once a flaccid instinct would move us to have out our pencils, we would only end by bunging our foolish mouths with them, as if they were cigarettes, ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... always been Susy Branch's bugbear; they were still, and more dangerously, to be Susy Lansing's. She detested them, detested them doubly, as the natural enemies of mankind and as the people one always had to put one's self out for. The greater part of her life having been passed among them, she knew nearly all that ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... with the T'ai-p'ing rebellion that we associate likin, a tax which has for years past been the bugbear of the foreign merchant in China. The term means "thousandth-part money," that is, the thousandth part of a tael or Chinese ounce of silver, say one cash; and it was originally applied to a tax of one cash per tael on all sales, said to have been voluntarily imposed on themselves ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... political economist. The fact is undeniable, but at the same time inexplicable. What they could have found in the doctrines of most modern political economists which should lead them to suppose that human life would be precious in their eyes, is unknown to the writer of these pages. Those whose bugbear has been over- population, whose motto has been an ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... he attended were not those at which the private designs of the party were discussed. It was plain that they belonged to some kind of secret association; and before he had been long in Pianura he learned that the society of the Illuminati, that bugbear of priests and princes, was supposed to have agents at work in the duchy. Odo had heard little of this execrated league, but that it was said to preach atheism, tyrannicide and the complete abolition of territorial rights; but this, being the report of the enemy, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... He wants none of thy rewards; behold also, he fears none of thy penalties. Thou canst not answer even by killing him: the case of Anaxarchus thou canst kill; but the self of Anaxarchus, the word or act of Anaxarchus, in no wise whatever. To this man death is not a bugbear; to this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... good tailoring. His income from the commercial house in which he held a post of responsibility would have permitted him to occupy better quarters than these; but here he had lived for ten years, and he preferred a few inconveniences to the trouble of moving. Trouble of any kind was Robert's bugbear. His progress up the commercial ladder seemed due rather to the luck which favours amiable and good-looking young fellows than to any special ability or effort of his own. The very sound of his voice had a drowsiness which soothed—if it did ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... chosen President of the Convention, warmly supported the candidacy of Mr. Jefferson Davis. New York, under the direction of Mr. Dean Richmond, gave its influence to Mr. Douglas. Of a combative temperament, Mr. Richmond was impressed with a belief that "secession" was but a bugbear to frighten the northern wing of the party. Thus he failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, and impaired the value of unusual common sense and unselfish patriotism, qualities he possessed to an eminent degree. The anxieties of Pennsylvania as to candidates were accompanied by a philosophic ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... ever since my conversation with Mr. T. about the Malstrom, to have called in at Loffoden Islands on our way south, and ascertain for myself the real truth about this famous vortex. To have blotted such a bugbear out of the map of Europe, if its existence really was a myth, would at all events have rendered our cruise not altogether fruitless. But, since leaving Spitzbergen, we had never once seen the sun, and to attempt to make so dangerous a coast in a gale ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... question of a "Call to the ministry," that bugbear of so many souls, The General constantly ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... you he wouldn't go, my friend! punishment or no punishment! Why, I can scarcely make my own fellows go! Bosh! I know boys; school is their bugbear." ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... possibly last. Withhold food from gossip, and it starves and dies. Carlisle simply stayed quiet and held her tongue; and as the days passed without more developments of any sort, she found her philosophical attitude thoroughly justified by events. Town-talk, that bugbear of the delicate-minded, shot off first to the Hoover divorce, and then to the somewhat public disagreement between the Governor of the State and Congressman Hardwicke, at the Chamber of Commerce luncheon for the visiting President; ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Fortnightly Review for June, 1900. Mr. Lilly complains bitterly that the infallible oracle in politics to-day is "the man in the street." He asserts that all issues are settled "by counting heads, in entire disregard of what the heads contain." His bugbear is the extension of the franchise. "Representative institutions, for example," he asks, "what do they represent? The true theory unquestionably is that they should represent all the features of national life, all the living forces of society, ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... to-morrow, and call upon her, and I will then invite Mr. Halcomb to bring his daughters and return the visit." My sister agreed to this, and, as she herself told me, she was prepared to dislike this lady, merely because my father had so often made such severe comparisons, that she had almost become a bugbear to her. Not so with me; I was already half in love with her from my father's description, although I had never seen her; and upon their return was eager to know when we should have the pleasure of seeing her and her family. The day, however, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... freeze. They are protected by the monstrous mountains, and the water is tempered by warm currents that flow in from the gulf stream. The national apprehension of both Norway and Sweden that Russia covets one of their seaports has existed a good many years. The bugbear has appeared at intervals for half a century, and a great deal of money has been expended in preparations to meet it. The people are, therefore, cordially patriotic in their support of the army, although many of them emigrate to the United States ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... 'ought' which should rule our lives and which we have broken thousands of times, come to each of us in many an hour of clear vision, and take us by the throat, and say, 'Pay us what thou owest!' And there is a Judgment Day before all of us; which is no mere bugbear to frighten children, but will be a fact of experience in our case. Friend! how are you going to meet your obligations? You owe God all your love, all your heart, will, strength, service. What an awful score of unpaid debts, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Only a word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects; a mere notice of the necessity for exertion; a bugbear to children and fools; only a ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... the principles of slavery in all your proceedings; you neglect in your conduct the foundation of all legitimate government, the rights of the people; and, setting up this bugbear, you spread a panic for the very purpose of sanctifying this infringement, while again the very infringement engenders the evil which you dread. One extreme naturally leads to another. Those who dread republicanism fly for shelter to the Crown. Those ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Continent, with their souls full of its shipwrecks and disasters—top-sails cautiously reefed, and everything guardedly snug—these strangers at first unexpectedly encountering a tolerably smooth sea, rashly conclude that the Cape, after all, is but a bugbear; they have been imposed upon by fables, and founderings and sinkings ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... woman in a remote hamlet, untouched by tourist or guide-book, has shown me the ash-tree under which Monmouth was seized after Sedgemoor; a Suffolk peasant, equally innocent of book-knowledge, has pointed Out "Bloody Mary's lane," through which that bugbear of Protestants passed three hundred years before on her way to Framlingham. The abbey immortalised in Carlyle's "Past and Present," and still the wonder of Eastern England, is surrounded now by the same villages that Jocelyn tells us of. The town named after St. Alban, with its memories of ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... "The bugbear of your life seems to be poverty, Edith," Charley answered. "I daresay these people eat and sleep, fall in love, marry, and are ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... had never known a sorrow, and in fact existence had but one bugbear for her—that was, the fates in the shape of her parents, had decreed that she should not marry, nor engage herself positively, until she had met a certain young gentleman, upon whom like commands had been imposed by his equally solicitous parents. The name, it must be confessed, impressed ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... of old! And now you are come, you shall save me from what has been my bugbear for the last week. ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... As for the bugbear of the] "logical consequences" [of this conviction,] "I may be permitted to remark [he says] that logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men." [And if St. Augustine, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards have held in substance the view ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... legislators; they know that when the fear of punishment is wanting, nothing else is of avail. And this is doubly so with us who are tyrants; whose power is based upon compulsion; who live in the midst of enmity and treachery. The bugbear terrors of the law would never serve our turn. Rebellion is a many-headed Hydra: we cut off one guilty head, two others grow in its place. Yet we must harden our hearts, smite them off as they grow, and—like lolaus—sear the wounds; thus only shall ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... me tell him once for all, through you, that I will come into and go out of this place as often as I like, so long as he keeps Nell here; and that if he wants to be quit of me, he must first be quit of her. What have I done to be made a bugbear of, and to be shunned and dreaded as if I brought the plague? He'll tell you that I have no natural affection; and that I care no more for Nell, for her own sake, than I do for him. Let him say so. I care for the whim, then, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... and a throne. His principles and his conduct were in opposition; he was honest, and yet seemed to betray; whilst he struggled with regret from duty to the monarchy, his heart was in the republic. Protector of the throne, he was at the same time its bugbear. One life can only be devoted to one cause. Monarchy and republicanism had the same esteem, the same wrongs in his mind, and he served for and against both. He died without having seen either of them triumphant, but he died virtuous ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... itself from the body so as to become indifferent to its action, and therefore non-responsible for it; and it was natural that all who defied the received laws of conduct, or were suspected of doing so, should be stigmatized as his followers. Molinism was a favourite bugbear among the orthodox Romanists of Innocent ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... out of my sunshine with your bugbear of a Charles Lamb! "I have heard you for some time with patience. I have been cool,—quite cool; but don't ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... thought that, if all were done and said that might be, it was possible that it would be expedient for the future of the New College that the present principal should resign. This was, of course, an extreme view of the results of Alec's interference; but Trenholme had accustomed himself to look at his bugbear in all lights, the most extreme as well as the most moderate. That for the future; and, for immediate agitation, there was his resolution to speak to Sophia. As he walked and talked, his heart ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... rave!" laughed Edith Carr. "How you would frighten me! What a bugbear you would raise! Be sensible and go find what keeps Phil. I was waiting patiently, but my patience is going. I won't look nearly so well as I do now when it ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... the great field of human government, and so demand it; or woman must arise and come forward as she never has, and take her place. I still think that one of the main hindrances is with women. The fact is, that the worst bugbear is the never-seen, ever-felt law of caste which has always walled woman around, and which few have the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... often in men's minds an exaggerated notion of some bit of truth, which proves a great assistance to falsehood. For instance, the shame of some particular small falsehood, exaggeration, or insincerity, becomes a bugbear which scares a man into a career of false dealing. He has begun making a furrow a little out of the line, and he ploughs on in it to try and give some consistency and meaning to it. He wants almost to persuade himself that it was not wrong, and ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... each evening, reminding us of the danger, inculcated strict vigilance on picket and on guard. So long did this last without any attack being made that the shadowy expectation of what never occurred became our bugbear, a chimera which haunted us ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... cannot love my enemy; for my enemy is not a man, but a beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat him." No equivocation here, surely. On superstition he comments,—"It has been long a bugbear, by reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthusiast in the path of holiness." Herein lies the germ ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various |
