"Rancorous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... happen to differ from me in difficult scenes of public action; they would entirely cure me of the spirit of party, and make me think that as in the Church, so also in the State, no evil is more to be feared than a rancorous and enthusiastical zeal. ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... their treasonable sentiments. But let the patriotic woman not go too far—let her not forget that when human beings give, as it were, a moral sanction to feelings of hatred or contempt, they unchain a demon in their breasts. We are all oftentimes shocked by anecdotes illustrative of the rancorous spite, and vulgar, unwomanly malignity, cherished by many Southern females against the Union and its defenders. Now were it not well for us, on the other side, to take warning, and, for the sake ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a slim, slight, dark-haired young man, devoured with that blind rancorous hatred of England that only reaches its full growth across the Atlantic. He had sucked it from his mother's breast in the little cabin at the back of the northern avenues of New York; he had been taught his rights and his wrongs, in German and Irish, on the canal fronts ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... after the convocation of the council of Nice the peace and harmony of the several churches were disturbed by the rancorous discussion of the same old questions of Trintarianism and Unitarianism, the Western church adhering to the former while a majority of the Eastern congregations maintained their faith in the latter; but ultimately the Trinitarian party, gaining the ascendency, and persecuting the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... hat!" cried Billy Kinzey, derisively, and with a palpably rancorous twinge of envy in his heart; for Billy was the bad boy of our town, and would doubtless have enjoyed the strange boy's sudden notoriety in thus being able to convert disaster into positive fun. "Wo! what a hat!" reiterated Billy, making a feint to knock it from the boy's head as the still capering ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... gave a strong grip to depression on a brooding mind which had always a proneness to melancholy, which was now linked with a sick body, and which lived among disappointments and grief and the sense of rancorous dislike in men who once thought it a privilege to cheer him ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... Gitano has occasion to speak of some business in which his interest is involved, he redoubles his gestures in proportion as he knows the necessity of convincing those who hear him, and fears their impassibility. If any rancorous idea agitate him in the course of his narrative; if he endeavour to infuse into his auditors sentiments of jealousy, vengeance, or any violent passion, his features become exaggerated, and the vivacity of his glances, and the contraction of his lips, show clearly, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... caused bewilderment in the theatrical profession. The older dramatists awoke to the fact that their popularity was endangered by the young stranger who had set up his tent in their midst, and one veteran uttered without delay a rancorous protest. Robert Greene, who died on September 3, 1592, wrote on his deathbed an ill-natured farewell to life, entitled 'A Groats-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance.' Addressing three brother dramatists—Marlowe, ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... appearance than he cared to show. The generous action of this beautiful girl, her frankness, her ease of manner, her cleverness in repartee, were likely to attract the attention of a man of his character. He reproached himself already for having allowed himself to be influenced by the rancorous hostility of the Desvanneaux, and, as always happens with just natures, the sudden change of his mind was the more favorable as his ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... so. Had the prosecutor even been satisfied on that point, no jury would have regarded it as other than a delicate question in the casuistry of political metaphysics. But the offence of combining, by means of tumultuous meetings, and by means of connecting with this obscure question rancorous nationalities or personalities, so as to make that a matter of agitating interest to poor men, which else they would have regarded as a pure scholastic abstraction—this was a crime well understood by the jury; and thence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... trembled beneath the rumbling wheels of heavy artillery, ready to belch forth their storm of grape-shot upon any opposing foe. Long lines of infantry, with loaded muskets and glittering bayonets, guarded all the avenues to the tribunal, where rancorous passion sat enthroned in mockery ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... to repress the rancorous feelings which the sight of the Spanish noble aroused in him, filled the latter with a ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... a rancorous look around—"I'll tell 'ee, since you'm so set 'pon hearin'. Afore you came in, the good folks here present was for drummin' you out o' the country. 'Shockin' behayviour!' 'Aw, very shockin' indeed!' was the words I heerd flyin' about, an' ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... social rivalries of young girls. Nor was he particularly incensed against her mother, being offended chiefly by the ostentatious and invidious go'od-will shown her by Mrs. Bates. But against Truesdale Marshall he nourished a hot and rancorous grievance. He did not apprehend Truesdale's attitude towards the town at large, and the young man's manner in his own house (regardless of his insolent utterance) seemed to have carried a half-contemptuous curiosity beyond all ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... the embroiling of social order. It is in such a state of things that those who were before at the bottom of society, rise to the surface. From causes already considered, they are peculiarly apt to consider their sufferings the result of injustice and misgovernment, and to be rancorous and embittered accordingly. They have every excitement, therefore, of resentful passion, and every temptation which the hope of increased opulence, or power or consideration can hold out, to urge them to innovation and revolt. Supposing the same disposition ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the Dragon's tale, and my nativity was under Ursa Major: so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. I should have been what I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.'—The whole character, its careless, light-hearted villany, contrasted with the sullen, rancorous malignity of Regan and Gonerill, its connexion with the conduct of the under-plot, in which Gloster's persecution of one of his sons and the ingratitude of another, form a counterpart to the mistakes and misfortunes of Lear—his double amour with the ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... and if the sun were shining on the uplands near Boulogne, one might catch the flash of its gleam upon the bayonets of manoeuvring veterans. No wonder that a fear of the French power lay deeply in the hearts of the most gallant men, and that fear should, as it always does, beget a bitter and rancorous hatred. ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... me! what words to accost him can I find? What cause has he to trust me? In the past I have bee proved his rancorous enemy. ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... said she, "hath a great wit and much learning; but in law showeth to the utmost of his knowledge, and is not deep." The Cecils, we suspect, did their best to spread this opinion by whispers and insinuations. Coke openly proclaimed it with that rancorous insolence which was habitual to him. No reports are more readily believed than those which disparage genius, and soothe the envy of conscious mediocrity. It must have been inexpressibly consoling to a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... political eminence he had been unfortunate enough to make for himself a good many bitter enemies. His political course seems to have been somewhat arbitrary and uncompromising, insomuch that his opponents regarded him with more rancorous feelings than are commonly entertained among public men where there are no personal grounds for enmity. Whether such personal grounds existed in the case of Barnabas Bidwell cannot now be readily ascertained. It is however certain that he was regarded by a host of clever ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... of course, and at the end of two days the court banished her from the colony; but as it was winter she was committed to the temporary care of Mr. Joseph Welde, of Roxbury, brother of the Rev. Thomas Welde, who afterwards wrote a rancorous account of these difficulties, entitled A Short Story. While in his house, Mrs. Hutchinson was subjected to many exhortations by anxious elders, till her spirits sank under the trial and she made a retraction. ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... stimulus of danger, in one shape or other, was at that time of life perhaps essential to his comfort, he soon substituted another scheme, which at this day might be accomplished with ease and safety enough, but in the year 1809 (under the rancorous system of Bonaparte) was full of hazard. In this scheme he was so good as to associate myself as one of his travelling companions, together with an earlier friend of his own—an Englishman, of a philosophical turn of mind, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... which would bring him in dangerous vicinity to the enemy, is a proof of cowardice! His free expression of opinion as to the conduct of the campaign in the Jerseys—made before the seal of success had certified to its wisdom—was rancorous hostility to Washington, if not absolute conspiracy against him; and so on to the end of the chapter. As this volume only brings the history of the Republic, as contained in that of Hamilton, then in the twenty-second year of his age, to 1779, we tremble to think of what yet awaits the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... figures and the most animated language. It is perfectly intelligible to persons of all ranks, and it speaks with energy to the sturdy feelings of uncultivated nature. The sentiments of the writer are stern, and we think even rancorous to the mother country. They may be the sentiments of a patriot, they are not certainly those ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... speech, which is little suggested in his to-be-published writing, or even in his private letters. The Oregon embroilment had led certain British journals into gross speech about America. Irving was much disturbed. What he wrote was, "A rancorous prejudice against us has been diligently inculcated of late years by the British press, and it is daily producing its fruits of bitterness." What he said was: "Bulwer,"—then English minister to Spain,—"I should deplore exceedingly a war with England, for depend upon ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... he, with a harsh and unpleasant accent, "I am come to humble the haughtiness of thy triumph, and to pull down thy aspiring thoughts. Impotent and rancorous mortal! Know, that innocence is defended with too strong a shield for thee to pierce! Boast not thyself of the immensity of thy walls, and put no confidence in the subtlety of thy enchantments. Before the mightiness that waits ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... desperate. "Let it be proved against me, sir, if you please, before you punish. I don't think even Bywater, rancorous as he is, ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... these odious persecutions. One must have read the biography of the honest and laborious Germanist Wackernagel to be able to credit the fact that that quiet searcher after knowledge was pursued far into middle life by the most bitter persecution and rancorous injuries, because as a schoolboy—whether in the third or fourth class I do not know—he had written a letter in which was set forth some new division, thought out in his childish brain, for the united German Empire ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... his companions met as usual—all who were not seriously wounded of them. But, as they strolled about the city, the rancorous eye and the finger of scorn was pointed against them. None of them was at first aware of the reason; but it threw a damp over their spirits and enjoyments, which they could not master. They went to take a forenoon game at their old play of tennis, not on a match, ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... system has not diminished the destructiveness of war, it has, at least, very much abated the rancorous feelings with which it was originally carried on. It has converted it from a contest of fierce and vindictive passions into an exercise of science. We have still, doubtless, to lament that the game of blood ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... But it would be far better to share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest like the Bishop in Victor Hugo's Miserables, than to hold those good opinions of Chaumette as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our natures that lies out of the immediate domain of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Tutt,' says Boggs; 'an' cut her short, 'cause it's the opinion of our gent this rancorous Thompson infests the earth too long, an' he's hungerin' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... that he would thus lower Fletcher in his wife's eyes. It was not that he was jealous,—not jealous according to the ordinary meaning of the word. His wife's love to himself had been too recently given and too warmly maintained for such a feeling as that. But there was a rancorous hatred in his heart against the man, and a conviction that his wife at any rate esteemed the man whom he hated. And then would he not make his retreat from the borough with more honour if before ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... fought under the Restoration, and who ostensibly repudiated the liberals by trying to be elected as a ministerial royalist (without ever being able to conquer the aversion of the administration),—this rancorous republican, mad with ambition, resolved to rival the royalism and aristocracy of Alencon at the moment when they once more had the upper hand. He strengthened himself with the Church by the deceitful appearance of a well-feigned piety: he accompanied his wife to mass; he gave money ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... half mad, half imbecile, who was once my father's servant in Greece, and who has a rancorous hatred towards me because I got him dismissed for theft. Now you have the whole mystery, and the further satisfaction of knowing that I am again in danger of assassination. The fact of my wearing the armour, about which you seem to have thought ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... to pray for their return, though he would firmly have refused to compromise himself by any effort in their favor. He belonged to that class of royalists who ceaselessly remembered that they were beaten and robbed; and who remained thenceforth dumb, economical, rancorous, without energy; incapable of abjuring the past, but equally incapable of sacrifice; waiting to greet triumphant royalty; true to religion and true to the priesthood, but firmly resolved to bear in silence the shocks of fate. Such an ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... him who shot him, if he had not been bent upon killing—an attempt to stab a second person immediately after, infers a total want of remorse at the shedding of human blood; and such a temper of mind afterwards discovers the rancorous malice before, especially if it be proved that the same man had declated that he would never miss an opportunity so to do: If this does not imply malice at first, I do not see but he might have gone on stabbing people in his furor brevis, till he had killd an hundred; and after ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... more lively, and more unkind things are said, in a sultry than in a temperate season. In the restless night-watches people have time to brood over small wrongs, and wax indignant over tiny slights and unoffered invitations. Perhaps politics, too, are apt to be more rancorous in a "heated term." Man is very much what his ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... power. Authority of religion and cruelty of will—these Mormon attributes constituted that power. And Shefford suffered a transformation which must have been ordered by demons. That sudden flame seemed to curl and twine and shoot along his veins with blasting force. A rancorous and terrible cry leaped ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... her chagrin was employed in the strict discharge of what are called the duties of religion, which she performed with the most rancorous severity, setting on foot a persecution in her own family, that made the house too hot for all the menial servants, even ruffled the almost invincible indifference of Tom Pipes, harassed the commodore himself out of all patience, and spared ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... regularly, to a man of color. These men were sometimes, to say no more, of high character and ability. Such a one in Louisiana was Oscar J. Dunn, the first of them. He was of unmixt African origin. His signal ability and high integrity were acknowledged by his political enemies in the most rancorous days of his career, and his funeral was ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... to the Lesser Arts at the expense of the Greater, and confused the old State-system by enlarging the democracy. The net result of these events for Florence was, first, that the city became habituated to rancorous party-strife, involving exiles and proscriptions; and, secondly, that it lost its primitive social ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... He had gone to his chamber the night before to think over what he should say next day to the people about the position of the country class, and, if he was murdered, it is almost as probable that he was murdered by some rancorous foe in the Senate as by Carbo or any other Gracchan. It was well for his reputation that he died just then. Without Sulla's personal vices he might have played Sulla's part as a politician, and his atrocities in Spain as ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... perhaps, by the inefficiency of courts or the prejudice of jurors. It is undoubtedly true that these evils have been much increased and aggravated, North and South, by the demoralizing influences of civil war and by the rancorous passions which the contest has engendered. But that these people are maintaining local governments for themselves which habitually defeat the object of all government and render their own lives and property insecure is in itself utterly improbable, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... that the universal fame of Sir Isaac Newton was brought about by his rancorous enemies, and not by his loving friends. Gentle, honest, simple and direct as was his nature, he experienced ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... fame that day When even the serpent soul of Kay Was kindled toward the fiery play As might a lion's be for prey, And won him fame that might not die With passing of his rancorous breath But clung about his life and death As fire that speaks in cloud, and saith What strong men hear ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... when left to themselves during the temporary British evacuation of Bechuanaland were unable to do it. Notwithstanding this fact, the newspapers, especially the Rand Sunday Press, seem always to have open spaces for rancorous appeals to colour prejudice, perhaps because such appeals, despite their inherent danger, suit the colonial taste. Preceding the introduction of the Natives' Land Act, the clamour of a section of the colonists and most of the Transvaal Boers for more ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... here and there and yonder through the mists of history and legend and tradition—and, oh, all the darling tribe are clothed in mystery and romance, and we read about them with deep interest and discuss them with loving sympathy or with rancorous resentment, according to which side we hitch ourselves to. It has always been so with the human race. There was never a Claimant that couldn't get a hearing, nor one that couldn't accumulate a rapturous following, no matter how ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to the devotee, little Asian made sundry belligerent demonstrations; but he confronted her with the two words she had learned here, Willoughby and the town's name. The dwarf became livid, seemed always after haunted by a dreadful fear of him, pursued him with a rancorous hate, but could not hinder his marriage. The Willoughbys are a cruel race. Her only revenge was to take away the amber beads, which had long before been blessed by the Pope for her young mistress, refusing herself to accompany my mother, and declaring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... letter to me which I received last summer, and of my answer. I answered Mr. Calhoun's letter immediately, rigorously confining myself to the direct object of his inquiries. This is a new bursting out of the old and rancorous feud between Crawford and Calhoun, both parties to which, after suspending their animosities and combining together to effect my ruin, are appealing to me for testimony to sustain themselves each against the other. This is one of the occasions upon which ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... soul and heartless heart, No slave, no traitor—nought of all thou art. A thing like thee, made big with braggart breath, Whose tongue shoots fire, whose promise poisons trust, Would cast a shieldless soldier forth to death And wreck three realms to sate his rancorous lust With ruin of them who have weighed and found him dust. Get thee to Wales: there strut in speech and swell: And thence betimes God speed thee safe to hell. ...
— Locrine - A Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Ne Hercules contra duos, gone through the whole string of charges brought against me by Mr. Darwin and Professor Whitney; and while trying to show them that I was not entirely unprepared for their combined attack, Ihope I have not been wanting in that respect which is due even to a somewhat rancorous assailant. Ihave not returned evil for evil, nor have I noticed objections which I could not refute without seeming to be offensive. Is it not mere skirmishing with blank cartridge, when Professor Whitney assures me that I have never fathomed "the theory of the antecedency of the idea to the word ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... mankind, and when he became, comparatively, a well-to-do man he went on doing generous deeds as though nothing had happened. With humbugs and pretenders he would have no dealings; but no genuine young artist ever asked his help in vain. He spared even that rancorous decadent Nietzsche; he owned his obligations to that soul of chivalry, Liszt. He spared that mediocre person Meyerbeer; he treated Mendelssohn with almost exaggerated courtesy. He fought a terrific fight with ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... accusers. He had been her tutor, her pensioner. She had heaped him with favours; and, after all, she was his queen, and a defenceless woman: and yet he returned her kindness, in the hour of her fall, by invectives fit only for a rancorous and reckless advocate, determined to force a verdict by the basest ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... "the whiff of grapeshot," though Napoleon, to do him justice, took a deeper view of it, and would fain have had it forgotten. And since the Duke of Argyll was not a demon, but a man of like passions with ourselves, by no means rancorous or cruel as men go, who can doubt that all over the world proletarians of the ducal kidney are now revelling in "the whiff of dynamite" (the flavor of the joke seems to evaporate a little, does it not?) because it was aimed at the class they hate even as our argute duke hated what ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... The rancorous ill-treatment which they experienced at the hands of their fanatical oppressors, was without doubt increased by the fact that these found themselves a small and isolated band, all-powerful upon the immediate spot they occupied, but surrounded by ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... not. No—do you understand? I will not do it, and I forbid you to do it." Then, carried away by the rancorous feeling which had seethed within him so long, ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... Wazir; and presently he resumed, "Thou knowest also that when Prince Ahmad would end his three days' visits he never asketh thy leave nor farewelleth thee nor biddeth adieu to any one of his family. Such conduct is the beginning of rebellion and proveth him to be rancorous of heart. But 'tis for thee in thy wisdom to decide." These words sank deep in the heart of the simple-minded Sultan and grew a crop of the direst suspicions. He presently thought within himself, "Who knoweth ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... on such of the Egyptians as passed to and fro along the street on their affairs. He muttered, spicing his comments with profanity. The girl's disclaimer of personal interest in Britt's ambitions did not soften his rancorous determination to make the voters of Egypt suffer for the stand they had taken—suffer to the bitter limit to which unrelenting persecution could drive them. He gritted his teeth and raved aloud. "From now on! From now on! Anything short of murder to show 'em! And as for that girl—if ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... arguments of justification. I am sorry it so happened on many accounts. I forgive him, but I cannot hear him mentioned without giving vent to my opinion of him, which is, that he is a very bad fellow, with a very rancorous heart." ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... entered into the struggle, and how in the end the effect upon the politics and prosperity of the country would have been nearly the same had the winner and the loser exchanged places. In each of them patriotism was a passion. There never was a moment in their prolonged enmity and their rancorous contests when a real danger to the country would not have united them as heartily as in 1812, when Clay in the House and Jackson on the field co-operated in defending the national honor against the aggressions of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... do one of the parties, at least, the justice to say, that, in different circumstances, I should have beheld their departure with regret. Dey and McGillivray carried on the contest longer than the others, and did so without showing any of that rancorous feeling which the other petty traders manifested towards the Company. MacGillivray and myself, when travelling together, often shared the same blanket, and the same kettle; and found, that while this ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... trial which might never end. Nor could the English Court, with its obsolete provisions on this head, have regarded Muhlen otherwise than as her legal husband—the child of her later union as illegitimate. Bastardy: a taint for life! How well she had done to put herself beyond a rancorous letter of the law; to protect her child and family according to the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... excuses for error which may fairly be put forward on Middleton's behalf, should be slow indeed in blaming him for an occasional mistake, seeing how he has relieved our labors by infinite toil on his part; but De Quincey, who has been very rancorous against Cicero, has risen to a fury of wrath in his denunciation of Cicero's great biographer. "Conyers Middleton," he says, "is a name that cannot be mentioned without an expression of disgust." The cause of this was that Middleton, a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, and ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... you may be sure there was a heart sickness about his disappointment far beyond the mortification of mere self-love. When a rainy day stops a pic-nic, or mars the enjoyment of it, although the disappointment is hardly a serious one, still it is sure to cause so much real suffering, that only rancorous old ladies will rejoice in the fact. It is curious how men who have known disappointment themselves, and who describe it well, seem to like to paint lives which in the meantime are all hope and success. There is Mr. Thackeray. With what sympathy, with what enjoyment, he shows us the healthy, wealthy, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... and the host was an orchestral conductor well known to Davos. There was no alternative. He took a chair. He was introduced as the celebrated pianoforte-virtuoso to men and women he had never seen before, and hoped—so rancorous was his mood—never to see again. A red-headed girl from Brooklyn, who confessed that she thought Maeterlinck the name of some new Parisian wickedness, further bothered him with questions about piano teachers. No, he didn't give lessons! He never would! She dropped out of the conversation. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... is yonder," said Gervase Buckley, "on the hill-top there before us? Beshrew me, Grace, but it hath an evil and a rancorous look." ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... nursed the babies with a solicitude that put to shame the male parents of these youthful hopes of Troy. I take leave, as a reasonable person, to doubt whether it can lie in the heart of a family to hate a man who has dandled its baby and whether a man can be rancorous against a family whose baby he has nursed. But fashion's sway is omnipotent in emotion as in dress. Ever since the war, journalists, authors, and public opinion generally had hammered it into the French ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... parallel opposition found vent, as did the other, in a political pamphlet. On the subject of conscription Davis and the Governor of Georgia—that same Joseph E. Brown who had seized Fort Pulaski in the previous year—exchanged a rancorous correspondence. Their letters were published in a pamphlet of which Pollard said scornfully that it was hawked about in every city of the South. Brown, taking alarm at the power given the Confederate Government by the ...
— The Day of the Confederacy - A Chronicle of the Embattled South, Volume 30 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... They were acquitted, and the people were furious. There is excitement enough in that wretched country, and every effort is made to keep it up at its highest pitch; the press on each side teems with accusations and invectives, and the Protestants strain every nerve to inflame the spirit of rancorous fury which distinguished the Brunswickers before the Catholic question was carried, and to provoke the Catholics to overt acts of violence. Both sides are to blame, but the Protestants the most. George Villiers wrote me word of a crime that has been perpetrated, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... willing to destroy. Keppel evidently feared an intention to ruin him by the command of the Channel Fleet, and the public discussion of the Courts-Martial which followed his indecisive action with D'Orvilliers, in July, 1778, assumed a decided and rancorous party tone. His accuser then was his third-in-command, Vice-Admiral Palliser, who had left his place on the Admiralty Board to take this position in the fleet; and popular outcry charged him with having betrayed his ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... objects of detestation;—first, in perverting truth; and, secondly, in propagating falsehood, to the prejudice of that community of which they have professed themselves members. One of these is well known by the name of Ferret, an old, rancorous, incorrigible instrument of sedition. Happy it is for him that he has never fallen in my way; for, notwithstanding the maxims of forbearance which I have adopted, the indignation which the character of that ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... pleasing, demanding, and obtaining; there is not a lady at court who does not bestow regiments and benefices. Through this right the wife has her personal retinue of solicitors and proteges, also, like her husband, her friends, her enemies, her own ambitions, disappointments, and rancorous feeling; nothing could be more effectual in the disruption of a household than this similarity of occupation and this division of interests.—The tie thus loosened ends by being sundered under the ascendancy of opinion. "It looks well not to live together," to grant ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... protestant brethren,) which will never be extinguished until a friendly alliance and extensive commercial intercourse be established with them; which alone can soften this rancour and animosity into peace and amity. This animosity has been increased also by the rancorous anti-christian disposition manifested towards these people by the writings of Roman catholic priests and others.[179] If these uncharitable opinions of each other could be eradicated, the blessings that would result to the Africans ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... bigot. He had been a Girondist, a good citizen, and active in the formation of the new constitution; but he lacked practical common sense, and hated the Church with as much narrow bitterness as the most rancorous modern agnostic,—seeking, however, not merely its destruction, but, like Robespierre, to substitute for it a cult of reason and humanity. The fourth member of the Directory, Letourneur, was a plain ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... my Actions, nay, all my Life, my very Existence itself, are a protest against Slavery. Despotism cannot happily advance unless I am silenced. It is very clear logic which indicts me. Private personal malice, deep, long cherished, rancorous, has doubtless jagged and notched and poisoned too the public sword which smites at my neck. Still it is the public sword of Slavery which is wielded against me. Against ME? Against YOU quite as much—against your children. For as Boston could not venture to kidnap a negro woman, ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... strike away the first, the rest are wind. Which signifies, that if you do not take his estimate of himself, you will think little of his: negative virtues. He is not eminently, that is to say, not saliently, selfish; not rancorous, not obtrusive—tata-ta-ta. But dull!—dull as a woollen nightcap over eyes and ears and mouth. Oh! an executioner's black cap to me. Dull, and suddenly staring awake to the idea of his honour. I "rendered" him ridiculous—I had ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of blossoms, line the banks, scattering their fragrance far and near. The rancorous cry of the catbird, and the rattling call of the kingfisher, that feathered spirit of the stream, are left behind; the clear flutelike notes of the meadow lark take their place, and the hills, covered with wild flowers, roll ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... Wedderburn had wormed himself into favour with Lord North and won the office of Solicitor-General (1778). Two years later he became Lord Loughborough, a title which Fox ascribed to his rancorous abuse of the American colonists. Figuring next as a member of the Fox-North Administration, he did not long share the misfortunes of his colleagues, for he alone of his colleagues contrived not to offend either the King or Pitt. This sleekness had ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Hazlitt was given by the Quarterly in connection with a review of The Round Table, Hazlitt's first book. The contents of this volume were characterized as "vulgar descriptions, silly paradox, flat truisms, misty sophistry, broken English, ill humour and rancorous abuse."[25] A little later, when the Characters of Shakespeare's Plays seemed to be finding such favor with the public that one edition was quickly exhausted, the Quarterly extinguished its sale by "proving that ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... know a dirty blood-tracker like you," said Lawson, hotly. He did not seem to have a deliberate intention to rouse Duane; the man was simply rancorous, jealous. "I'll call you right. You cheap bluffer! You four-flush! You damned ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... heart—anger against fate, envy of Roderick Vawdrey, who had won the prize. If evil wishes could have killed, neither Violet nor her lover would have outlived that summer. Happily the Captain was too cautious a man to be guilty of any overt act of rage or hatred. His rancorous feelings were decently hidden under a gentlemanly iciness of manner, to which ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... wings of flies. It is such a mouth as we can imagine some remorseless inquisitor to have had—that is, not an inquisitor filled with holy zeal for what he mistakenly thought the cause of Christ demanded, but a spleeny, envious, rancorous shaveling, who tortured men from hatred of their superiority to him, and sheer ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... disgracefully stingy in bestowing honors on rising barristers who belonged to his own party, but his injustice and downright oppression to brilliant advocates in the Whig ranks merit the warmest expressions of disapproval and contempt. The most notorious sufferers from his rancorous intolerance were Henry Brougham and Mr. Denman, who, having worn silk gowns as Queen Caroline's Attorney General and Solicitor General, were reduced to stuff attire on that ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... they possessed great influence for the services which they had rendered. When the writer next visited his friend he found him very much altered; his opinions were by no means so exalted as they had been—he was not disposed even to be rancorous against the Duke of Wellington, saying that there were worse men than he, and giving him some credit as a general; a hankering after gentility seeming to pervade the whole family, father and sons, wife and daughters, all of whom talked ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... house and faction of York know this. They know that their power would be secure were King Henry and his queen alone in the matter; but there is still one more—the Prince of Wales, against whom no man speaks evil, even the most rancorous enemies of the House of Lancaster. All who have seen him love him; all speak of his noble person, his graces of body and mind, his aptness ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... right to thwart it, to tell her heart that it should beat so many times in each minute and no more. She was perfectly well aware that she was accepting social ruin with her freedom, but she had long nourished a rancorous hatred for the society which had seemed to accept her under protest, for Francesca's sake, and she was ready enough to turn her back on it before it should finally make up its polite mind to relegate her to the ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... blood, imbrue one's hands in blood; have no mercy &c 914.1. Adj. malevolent, unbenevolent; unbenign; ill-disposed, ill-intentioned, ill-natured, ill-conditioned, ill-contrived; evil-minded, evil- disposed; black-browed^. malicious; malign, malignant; rancorous; despiteful, spiteful; mordacious, caustic, bitter, envenomed, acrimonious, virulent; unamiable, uncharitable; maleficent, venomous, grinding, galling. harsh, disobliging; unkind, unfriendly, ungracious; inofficious^; invidious; uncandid; churlish ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... her dreadful hair, The infernal worm that with a cruel bite, Has fiercely fastened on my soul, And of my senses, torn the chief away, Leaving the intellect without its guide. In vain the soul some consolation seeks. That spiteful, rabid, rancorous jealousy Makes me go stumbling along the way. If neither magic spell nor sacred plant, Nor virtue hid in the enchanter's stone, Will yield me the deliverance that I ask: Let one of you, my friends, be pitiful, And put me out, as are put out my ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... that "there is a time when it is clearly demonstrable that men cease to be representatives. That time is now arrived. The House of Commons do not represent the people." Meanwhile a writer who styled himself Junius attacked the Government in letters, which, rancorous and unscrupulous as was their tone, gave a new power to the literature of the Press by their clearness and terseness of statement, the finish of their style, and the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... powerful adversary, or for notorious dissatisfaction with the existing government. Thus Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, once lord-keeper the favorite of King James, the possessor for a season of the power that was turned against him, experienced the rancorous and ungrateful malignity of Laud, who, having been brought forward by Williams into the favor of the court, not only supplanted by his intrigues, and incensed the King's mind against his benefactor, but harassed his retirement by repeated ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... way past the Olenia, roweling the yacht's glossy paint and smearing her with tar and slime. It was as if the rancorous spirit of the unclean had found sudden opportunity to ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... avoided it, is the real question, and it is practically the only question that concerns M. Ollivier. In the final pages of his book, which touch in dignified and pathetic words upon the injustice of the reproaches that have been heaped upon him and the rancorous calumnies by which he has been pursued, his readers are told that, having done his best to defend the cause of his nation, he will terminate his work without taking up his personal justification, though on one point he desires not to be misunderstood. It ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... proof of the rancorous enmity of the ancient factions. A merchant of the Ben Welleed, who wished to visit me, said, "I must come round the city, for I don't know the streets of the Ben Wezeet. Thank God! I never went through them in my life." ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... man to trick a woman in that way, without the smallest damage to his self-respect, that sticks so in my throat. What does it imply as regards his attitude towards all women? Ah! it is that which makes me feel so rancorous. And I resent Hubert's calm assumption that he had a right to judge what was best for me, and even to force me, by fraud, into following his view, leaving me afterwards to adjust myself with circumstance as best I might: to make my bitter choice between unconditional surrender, and the ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... merely for the salvation of the Colonies to the mother country, but even more for the salvation of the Colonies to themselves. Separation merely meant mediocrity for Great Britain, but for the Colonies it meant ruin. There would no longer be any check on the spirit of rancorous and virulent faction which was always inseparable from small democracies. The coercive power of the mother country had hitherto prevented the colonial factions from breaking out into anything worse than brutality and insult, but if that coercive power were entirely ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... and master: the carver, house-steward, and humble husband of the occupier of the dingy throne. I have seen men of good brains and breeding, and of good hopes and vigour once, who feasted squires and kept hunters in their youth, meekly cutting up legs of mutton for rancorous old harridans and pretending to preside over their dreary tables—but Mrs. Sedley, we say, had not spirit enough to bustle about for "a few select inmates to join a cheerful musical family," such as one reads of in the Times. She was content to lie on the shore where fortune had ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... punishment of those Loyalists who applied for compensation. At the close of the war, therefore, instead of witnessing, as in the case of all other civilized nations at the termination of a civil war, however rancorous and cruel, a general amnesty and the restoration of all parties to the rights and property which they enjoyed at the commencement of the strife, the Loyalists found themselves exiled and impoverished, and their enemies in possession of their homes and domains. It is true about 3,000 of the ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... primacy by uniting journalism and literature in the same personality. They were often the owners as well as the writers of their respective papers, and they indulged for the advantage of the community the rancorous rivalries, recriminations, and scurrilities which often form the charm, if not the chief use, of our contemporaneous journals. Apparently, however, notarially authenticated boasts of circulation had not yet been made the delight of their readers, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... its bloated bulk, and rot. But gluttony the abortive nuisance saw; It roused his ravenous, undiscerning maw: Gulp'd down the tasteless throat, the mess abhorr'd Shot fiery influence round the maddening board. O had thy verse been impotent as dull, Nor spoke the rancorous heart, but lumpish scull; Had mobs distinguish'd, they who howl'd thy fame, The icicle from the pure diamond's flame, 120 From fancy's soul thy gross imbruted sense, From dauntless truth thy shameless insolence, From elegance confusion's monstrous mass, And from the lion's spoils ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... extricated him from the consequences of his disasters. His successors did not merely inherit his errors; they exaggerated, they caricatured them. They rode into power on a springtide of all the rampant prejudices and rancorous passions of their time. From the King to the boor their policy was a mere pandering to public ignorance. Impudently usurping the name of that party of which nationality, and therefore universality, is the essence, these pseudo- Tories made Exclusion the principle of their political constitution, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... phrenzy, unknown to former ages, or rather degenerated to a total extinction of honesty and candour — You know I have observed, for some time, that the public papers are become the infamous vehicles of the most cruel and perfidious defamation: every rancorous knave every desperate incendiary, that can afford to spend half a crown or three shillings, may skulk behind the press of a newsmonger, and have a stab at the first character in the kingdom, without running the least hazard ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett |
