"Prepense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it,' said Barizy. 'If he was killed accidentally, there will be negotiations, but the business will be compromised; the English want Cyprus, and they will take it as compensation. If it is an affair of malice prepense, there will be war, for the laws of England require war if ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... what, sir," said he; "if there be law in England, I'll make you smart for this here assault." You think you have screened yourself from a prosecution by sending all your servants out of the way; but that circumstance will appear upon trial to be a plain proof of the malice prepense with which the fact was committed; especially when corroborated by the evidence of this here letter, under your own hand, whereby I am desired to come to your own house to transact an affair of consequence. So he produced the writing, and read ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... blemishes, and very serious ones. The grounds on which one can fairly object to the criticism are that its tone is purposely ill-natured; its recognition of merits scanty out of all proportion to its censure of defects; and its spirit that of prepense disparagement founded not so much on the poetical errors of Keats as on the fact that he was a friend of Leigh Hunt, the literary and also the political antagonist of the Quarterly Review. The editor, Mr. Gifford, seems always to have been regarded as the author ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... of-thumb way of steering between iconoclasm on the one hand and credulity on the other; who cut Gordian knots as a matter of course when it suited their convenience; who shrank from no conclusion in theory, nor from any want of logic in practice so long as they were illogical of malice prepense, and for what they held to be sufficient reason. The conclusions were conservative, quietistic, comforting. The arguments by which they were reached were taken from the most advanced writers of the day. All that these people contended ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... poetry of the prepense and formal kind is exceptionally liable to incur and to deserve the charge of dulness: it is unnecessary to emphasise or obtrude the personal note, the presence or emotion of a spectator, but it is necessary to make it felt and keep it perceptible if the poem is to have life in it ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... and similar censures are to be found in the pages of Mr. Froude, and he has been accused by Carlyle's devotees of having supplied this material of malice prepense. No accusation was over more ridiculously unjust. To the mind of every impartial reader, Froude appears as one of the loyallest if one of the most infatuated of friends. Living towards the close in almost daily communion with his master, and in inevitable contact with his numerous frailties, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... up. So Dinky-Dunk recounted the story of Andrew Cochrane's death. And it was noticeable that poor old Olie betrayed visible signs of distress at this tale of a young ranchman being frozen to death alone in his shack in mid-winter. So Dinky-Dunk, apparently with malice prepense, enlarged on his theme, describing how all young Cochrane's stock had starved in their stalls and how his collie dog which had been chained to a kennel-box outside the shack had first drawn attention ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... till this road-ditch was formed. But it must have taken centuries to do it. Many of these hollow lanes, especially those on flat ground, must be as old or older than the Conquest. In Devonshire I am sure that they are. But there many of them, one suspects, were made not of malice, but of cowardice prepense. Your indigenous Celt was, one fears, a sneaking animal, and liked to keep when he could under cover of banks and hill-sides; while your bold Roman made his raised roads straight over hill and dale, as 'ridge-ways' from which, as from an eagle's eyrie, he ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... possible—a desire which I have heard you say tormented you in your childhood; for, whenever you were admonished to be remarkably good, you were invariably remarkably bad. So I yield to the temptation, and voluntarily, and with "malice prepense" throw myself into the wickedness of translating (somewhat modernizing I own) the "Tabooed" ode, in defiance of, and purposely to offend, the Parisian, or other editor or editors, who shall ever show themselves such incomparable ninnies as ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... him, though, of course, she wouldn't say so for the world before any of the parents, or do anything to injure the poor young fellow's future prospects if she could possibly help it. But Mrs. Greatrex felt sure that Ernest had come to Pilbury of malice prepense, as part of a deep-laid scheme to injure and ruin the doctor by his horrid revolutionary notions. 'He does it on purpose,' she used to say; 'he talks in that way because he knows it positively shocks and annoys us. He pretends to be very innocent all the time; but at heart he's ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Macaulay's genuine eloquence is marred by the symptoms of malice prepense. When he sews on a purple patch, he is resolved that there shall be no mistake about it; it must stand out from a radical contrast of colours. The emotion is not to swell by degrees, till you find yourself ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... knew perfectly well that the aunt of whom I spoke WAS Lady Tepping; so I felt sure that she had played this card of malice prepense, to ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy, or the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to abstract terms. Such are the Odes to jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... get of a secret yet hidden beneath the veil, and waiting to be revealed—is a sufficient justification of those tentative efforts of science which often result in the attainment of some grand discovery. Let no timid religionist charge upon scientific men that they are conspiring with malice prepense to undermine the popular creeds and overthrow the Bible. This is sheer nonsense. They follow where nature beckons them. If man has had a high antiquity on this earth, science will find it out and prove it beyond a doubt. If he has not had ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... that I should have thought this milder species of charge was demanded in the case supposed, notwithstanding the statute of James I. cap. 8, which takes the case of slaughter by stabbing with a short weapon, even without MALICE PREPENSE, out of the benefit of clergy. For this statute of stabbing, as it is termed, arose out of a temporary cause; and as the real guilt is the same, whether the slaughter be committed by the dagger, or by sword or pistol, the benignity of the modern law places them all on the same, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... only a personable person in those days, with a suggestion of devil-may-care in his air that measurably lifted the curse of his superficial foppishness, but he was putting a spoke in Prince Victor's wheel. And whosoever did that, by chance, out of sheer voluptuousness, or with malice prepense, won immediate title to Sofia's favourable regard. If she couldn't thwart Victor herself, she would be much obliged to anybody who could and did; and she was nothing loath to betray her bias by looking kindly upon her ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... do to give way to impulse," Phillotson resumed, feeling more and more every minute the necessity of acting up to his position. "I flew in the face of the Church's teaching; but I did it without malice prepense. Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness. However, I know myself better now. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Walter Map, and fusing the different motives, holding to this method even in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows, Map cannot have meddled. Before him this legend consisted of half a dozen great divisions—a word which may be used of malice prepense. These were the story of Merlin, that of Arthur's own origin, and that of the previous history of the Graal for introduction; the story of Arthur's winning the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriage with Guinevere, also endless branchings of special knights' adventures, and of ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Masters would be a misfortune to him. Finding that Farnsworth was out, Millard went to the president's room under color of showing him a letter of importance. A man of dignity doesn't like to seem to bear tales with malice prepense. When he was about to ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... I shall not add it afterwards but insert it in a parenthesis. I will make a new tongue for my poetry." And the result was the style and the strange manner in which Sordello was written. This partly excuses its obscurity, if deliberation can be an excuse for a bad manner in literature. Malice prepense does not excuse a murder, though it makes it more interesting. Finally, the manner in which Sordello was written did not please him. He left it behind him, and Pippa Passes, which followed Sordello, is as clear and simple as its predecessor is ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... of falsehood prepense, for he was not in fact thinking of what he was saying. It did not occur to him at the moment that he had truly found Griselda's going a great relief, and that he had been able to do more in the way of conversation with Lucy Robarts in one hour than with Miss Grantly ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope |
