"Rapacious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the revolutionary changes in France had quickened their ideas, and had given them a taste for stronger and more rapid measures. They now openly "resolved" that England was "a prey to an arbitrary King, a senile Peerage, a corrupt House of Commons, and a rapacious and intolerant Clergy." A third club, the Corresponding Society, was younger and more violent, with branches and affiliations all over England on the Jacobins' plan, and in active correspondence with that famous institution. The middle and lower classes in manufacturing towns, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... fine clothes became, and glistering hair, Whom Cinara welcomed, that rapacious fair, As well you know, for his own simple sake, Who on from noon would wine in bumpers take, Now quits the table soon, and loves to dream And drowse upon the grass beside ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... rapacious animals, with your spirit of enterprize, and your nonsense: ever wanting more land than you can cultivate, and more money than you ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... and proper Remedies are sought by the chief Men of the Nation against the present Mischiefs; Which we know has been done upon like Accidents. A King, either through Infirmities of Age, of Levity of Mind, may not only be missed by some covetous, rapacious or lustful Counsellor; may not only be seduced and depraved by debauch'd Youths of Quality, or of equal Age with himself; may be infatuated by a silly Wench, so far as to deliver and fling up the Reins of Government ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time has passed when ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... of the abbe Troubert ('Le Cure de Tours') absorb us as completely as the career of Caesar himself in Mommsen's famous chapter. The woes of the little orphan subjected to the tyranny of her selfish aunt and uncle ('Pierrette'), the struggles of the rapacious heirs for the Mirouet fortune ('Ursule Mirouet,') a story which gives us one of Balzac's purest women, treats interestingly of mesmerism (and may be read without fear by the young), the siege of Mlle. Cormon's mature ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... marked in his daring chariot entering the courtyard of Apsley House? Great was the panic at Brookes', wild the hopes of Carlton Terrace; all the gentlemen who expected to have been made peers perceived that the country was going to be given over to a rapacious oligarchy. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... draw a sword for the common defence. At this period, the Counts of Flanders, of Holland, and other Netherland sovereigns, issued decrees, forbidding clerical institutions from acquiring property, by devise, gift, purchase, or any other mode. The downfall of the rapacious and licentious knights-templar in the provinces and throughout Europe, was another severe blow administered at the same time. The attacks upon Church abuses redoubled in boldness, as its authority declined. Towards the end of the fourteenth ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... domineering, ruthless and his victims are powerless to retaliate. Love is the greatest tyrant in all the world, Mr. Schmidt, and we poor wretches can never hope to conquer him. We are his prey, and he is rapacious. Do you ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... dreams of color by which we know Turner emanated from an apparently sour, prosaic cockney. A bachelor implicated in low intrigues, dying under the assumed name of "Puggy Booth" in a dreary lodging in Chelsea, after a long career of miserly observance and rapacious bickering—of his life naught became him like the leaving. He died December 19, 1851. His will directed that his pictures—three hundred and sixty paintings and nearly two thousand drawings—should become the property of the nation, the only condition attached ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... for three hours watching Emmett bring over the rest of his party, which he did without accident, but at the expense of great effort. And all the time in my ears dinned the roar, the boom, the rumble of this singularly rapacious and purposeful river—a river of silt, a red river of dark, sinister meaning, a river with terrible work to perform, a river which never gave up ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... foreign nations behave? I wish I may be misguided by my political anglophobia, but England, envious, rapacious, and the Palmerstons and others, filled with hatred towards the genuine democracy and the American people, will play some bad tricks. They will seize the occasion to avenge many humiliations. Charles Sumner, Howe, and a great many others, rely on England,—on her anti-slavery feeling. ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... set them in motion; seeking indeed their fortunes, but seeking them on no plan; like a flight of locusts, or a swarm of angry wasps smoked out of their nest. They would seek for immediate gratification, and let the future take its course. They would be bloodthirsty and rapacious, and would inflict ruin and misery to any extent; and they would do tenfold more harm to the invaded, than benefit to themselves. They would be powerful to break down; helpless to build up. They would in a ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... 'grapes, pomegranates, and figs' in abundance. To-day I have been thinking of the changes that the tempests of a few short years have made in the hills of my own native state, New Hampshire, since the rapacious lumber-men have been denuding our mountains of the forests. There, the unprotected soil is being washed away by the heavy rains, gulleys have been formed, the brooks have diminished or dried up, and the part of our once beautiful White Mountains that has been cut over is desolate indeed. ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... What they had hitherto done was bad enough, but this capped the climax of outrages. Were the cowardly villains afraid to murder me, and was this their plan of getting it done, and at the same time getting rid of the body? Great heavens! was I to be devoured piecemeal by a rapacious horde of the wild beasts that are said to infest the Russian beds! And utterly helpless, too, without the power to grapple with as much as a single flea—the least formidable, perhaps, of the entire ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... devoted by many infatuated persons in some countries to this unhappy practice. In the middle of the day, while the wife directs with prudence and economy the administration of her husband's house, he abandons himself to become the prey of rapacious midnight and mid-day robbers. The result is, that he contracts debts, is stripped of his property, and his wife and children are sent to the alms-house, whilst he, perhaps, ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... strategic position. They profited, moreover, by the wish of their neighbors that such an important transit region between semi-tropical and temperate Europe should be held by a power too weak to obstruct its routes. The Amir of Kabul, backed by the rapacious Afridi tribes of the Suleiman Mountains, has been able to play off British India against Russia, and thereby to secure from both powers a degree of consideration not usually shown to inferior nations. Similarly in colonial America, the Iroquois of the Mohawk ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... The sight of these adventurers, slowly and cautiously mounting the rigging, acted very much, on the scattered topmen, in the manner that the appearance of so many flies, in the immediate vicinity of a web, is known to act on their concealed and rapacious enemies. The sailors aloft saw, by expressive glances from them below, that a soldier was considered legal game. No sooner, therefore, had the latter fairly entered into the toils, than twenty topmen rushed out upon them, in order to make sure of ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... a man of finer temperament during eight years passed amidst scene of rapacious ferocity, something must be admitted to explain the callousness of men of fewer sensibilities and lower moral standards, who found themselves far removed from the usual restraint of civilised society and confronted ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... indomitable. When Hector was careering in his chariot round their fortifications, and the king of men counselled retreat, he declared he would remain, were it only with Sthenelus and his friends. So completely marked, so well defined are his characters, though they were all rapacious chiefs at first sight, little differing from each other, that it has been observed with truth, that one well acquainted with the Iliad could tell, upon hearing one of the speeches read out without a name, who was the chief who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... affray, now came forward into the corridor, and pleaded a cause of common humanity, with the feelings of the warmest benevolence, when she entreated Montoni to allow Morano the assistance in the castle, which his situation required. But Montoni, who had seldom listened to pity, now seemed rapacious of vengeance, and, with a monster's cruelty, again ordered his defeated enemy to be taken from the castle, in his present state, though there were only the woods, or a solitary neighbouring cottage, to ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... the madness for horses, a most rapacious evil; but teach me one of your two methods of reasoning, the one whose object is not to repay anything, and, may the gods bear witness, that I am ready to pay ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... there were abundant indications of discontent in Germany, where a variety of parties inveighed against the rapacious policy of Prussia, and where Bismarck had sown a deep crop of hate. It was believed in France that the minor states would not support Prussia in a war. In Austria the defeat of 1866 rankled, and hostilities ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... The deep-set, rapacious eyes of the Scotchman burned into hers for an instant. Without a word he released her hands and ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... Clostercamp, the name of the village which was the scene of the brave deed, was added forever to their family name. The pension is paid to this day. For a time, indeed, it was suspended while France was under the sway of the rapacious and insensible murderers of the king who had granted it; but Napoleon restored it; and, amidst all the changes that have since taken place in the government of the country, every succeeding ruler has felt it equally honorable and politic to recognize ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... pitchers are answering the double purpose, of being a reservoir to retain a fluid, however produced, for the nourishment of the plant in the exigency of a dry season, as also a repository of food for rapacious insects, as in sarracenia, or the American pitcher-plant; it is also probable that the air, disengaged by these drowned ants, may be important and beneficial to the life of the Australian plant, as Sir James E. Smith has suggested, in respect to the last-mentioned ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... these poor refugees without a feeling of pity for the sufferings they have endured; and this spark of pity quickly warms and kindles into indignation when we think of the story of hapless Acadia—the grievous wrong done those simple-minded, harmless, honest people, by the rapacious, free-booting adventurers of merry England, and those ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... on all who were compromised. Don Pablo would have been a victim among others, had he not had timely warning and escaped; but as it was, all his property was taken by confiscation, and became the plunder of the rapacious tyrant. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... He was troubled, a little embarrassed, but quite determined that I shouldn't bother him. Since then it has been another woman. I know her; I meet her everywhere; very beautiful; very young; only married for three years; a heartless, rapacious creature. Hugh has nearly ruined himself in paying her jeweller's bills and her debts at bridge. And already she has thrown him over. It happened only the other day. I knew it was happening when I saw him here. I was glad, Amabel; I longed for ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the tree which is languishing without culture in the arid, sandy desert, that is stunted for want of attention, leafless for want of moisture, that has grown crooked from neglect, become barren from want of loam, whose tender bark is gnawed by rapacious beasts of prey, pierced by innumerable insects, would perhaps have expanded far and wide its verdant boughs from a straight and stately stem, have brought forth delectable fruit, have afforded from its luxuriant foliage under its lambent leaves an umbrageous refreshing retreat from ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... rapacity of their landlords—on whom were poured the full phials of Anti-corn-law wrath. The following are some of the scalding drops let fall upon their devoted heads—"Monster of impiety!" "inhuman fiend!" "heartless brutes!" "rapacious harpies!" "relentless demons!" "plunderers of the people!" "merciless footpads!" "murderers!" "swindlers!" "insatiable!" "insolent!" "flesh-mongering!" "scoundrel!" "law-making landlords!" "a bread-taxing oligarchy!"[29] Need we say that the authors of these very choice and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... comparison with which those of the fabulous Zeros and Hellofagabaluses were respectable and delectable. This Mob (a foreigner, by-the-by), is said to have been the most odious of all men that ever encumbered the earth. He was a giant in stature—insolent, rapacious, filthy, had the gall of a bullock with the heart of a hyena and the brains of a peacock. He died, at length, by dint of his own energies, which exhausted him. Nevertheless, he had his uses, as every thing has, however vile, and taught mankind a lesson which to this day it is in no danger ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... seemed to me the crown and goal of all human felicity. Conscript of the city as I was, drilled and driven daily in the grim barrack-yard of despotic civilisation, yet I was a deserter at heart; an earth-hunger as rapacious and intense as that of any French or Irish peasant burned in my bones, and, like the peasant conscript that I truly was, my dreams were all of green pastures and running streams, and the happy loneliness of open spaces under ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... injustice; demolished many beautiful things and many valuable libraries; destroyed numbers of paintings, stained glass windows, fine pavements, and carvings; and that the whole court were ravenously greedy and rapacious for the division of this great spoil among them. The King seems to have grown almost mad in the ardour of this pursuit; for he declared Thomas a Becket a traitor, though he had been dead so many years, ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... perhaps the most destructive of the beasts of prey. Although not so large or strong as bears, they were far more fierce and rapacious. Bears could be tamed, but wolves not. Bears were not dangerous, unless provoked, or suffering from hunger, or alarmed for the safety of their young. It was thought that kind treatment would awaken strong attachment in them, but wolves ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... luxuriant growth against the dark background of the woods; all these fairylike effects of summer suggested only prosaic and misanthropic reflections in Julien's mind. He thought of the tricks, the envy and hatred that the possession of these little squares of ground brought forth among their rapacious owners. The prolific exuberance of forest vegetation was an exemplification of the fierce and destructive activity of the blind forces of Nature. All the earth was a hateful theatre for the continual enactment of bloody and monotonous dramas; the worm consuming ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... peoples are frankly degenerate. The animistic superstitions wildly based on the belief in the soul have not soiled him, and the social conditions of aristocracy, agriculture, architecture, have not made him one in a polytheistic crowd of rapacious gods, nor fettered him as a Baal to his estate, nor localised him in a temple built with hands. He cannot appear as a 'God of Battles;' no Te Deum can be sung to him for victory in a cause perhaps ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... cruel, adventurous and rapacious in her colonizing policy on the Black Sea and she left a record of exploitations which makes a black blotch on ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... that his eternal welfare should in no way be compromised by this bold and novel proceeding, he had obtained an express reservation to be made in his favour at Benares, overcoming, by means of considerable presents, the scruples of a rapacious and ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... boast of: so would a vulture, could it speak, with the entrails of its prey upon its rapacious talons. Of this you'll judge from ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... to themselves; and something in his attitude made him seem a simple and kindly being compared to the small critical creature who endured his homage. Yes, he would be kind—Lily, from the threshold, had time to feel—kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the predatory creature with his mate. She had but a moment in which to consider whether this glimpse of the fireside man mitigated her repugnance, or gave it, rather, a more concrete and intimate form; for at sight of her he ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... not gone long, but returned to stand beside the bunk, looking down upon Essie with eyes that in the dimness of the illy-lighted cabin shone with the baleful gleam of some rapacious feline. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... e.g. "the only legitimate basis for a treaty, if not on the part of the Continental Allies, at least for England herself [is] that she should conquer all she can, and keep all she conquers. This is not by way of retaliation, however just, upon so obdurate and rapacious an enemy—but as an indispensable condition of her own safety and existence." The letters were reviewed under the heading of "Illustrations of Vetus," in the Morning Chronicle, December 2, 10, 16, 18; 1813. The reviewer and Byron did not take the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... when explained, turned out to be simply this—The good housewife, when she knew that a docket had been struck against her husband, had taken care to conceal some of her choice cherry brandy, from the rapacious gripe of the messenger to the Commissioners of Bankrupts, on some shelves in a closet up stairs, which also contained, agreeably to the ancient architecture of the building, the trunk of the pump below; and, in trying to move ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... together with fornicators," ver. 9, 11; and explaining what he meant by not being mingled together, saith, "If any named a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or drunkard, or rapacious, with such an one not to eat together," ver. 11. "Therefore take away from among yourselves that wicked ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... like shadowy actors in a remote drama to the American at home, absorbed in the humdrum activities of trade and commerce. Through all these dreary years of intermittent war, other matters engrossed the President and Congress and caught the attention of the public. Not the rapacious Pasha of Tripoli but the First Consul of France held the center of the stage. At the same time that news arrived of the encounter of the Enterprise with the Corsairs came also the confirmation of rumors current all winter in Europe. Bonaparte had secured from ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... garden the King eats a pear, His servants rapacious the tree will uptear; For every five eggs he gives bounteously, more Than five hundred fowls ...
— Little Engel - a ballad with a series of epigrams from the Persian - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... their whole substance, by an incursion of the English, on a sudden breach of truce, they cared little to waste their time in cultivating crops, to be reaped by their foes. Their cattle was, therefore, their chief property; and these were nightly exposed to the southern borderers, as rapacious and active as themselves. Hence, robbery assumed the appearance of fair reprisal. The fatal privilege of pursuing the marauders into their own country, for recovery of stolen goods, led to continual skirmishes The warden also, himself frequently the chieftain of a border ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... incrusted with stockades, and intrenched to the chin in mud batteries. He was a gigantic Swede, who, had he not been rather knock-kneed and splay-footed, might have served for the model of Samson or a Hercules. He was no less rapacious than mighty, and withal as crafty as he was rapacious, so that there is very little doubt that had he lived some four or five centuries since he would have figured as one of those wicked giants who took a cruel pleasure in pocketing ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a rapacious and licentious soldiery to the personal search of women, lest these unhappy creatures should avail themselves of the protection of their sex to secure any supply for their necessities; and he positively orders that no stipulation ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... distance, saw his companion's fate, and cried out to us to make haste. We pulled away as hard as we could lay our backs to the oars, old Barker steering. But just before we reached the man, his arms were thrown up, and down he sank. He, too, had become the prey of one of the rapacious monsters of the deep. We now returned on board, the boat remaining perfectly quit on the starboard side. No attempt had been made in the meantime to sound round the vessel. I ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... came, looking as nearly like a dangerous old eagle as a human being well could. Rapacious, merciless, tyrannical; a famous philanthropist. Stingy to pettiness; a giver away of millions. Rigidly honest, yet absolutely unscrupulous; faithful to the last letter of his given word, yet so treacherous where his ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... my Son, the Helpless and the Poor, Nor in the chains of thine own indolence Slumber enervate, while the joys of sense Engross thee; and thou say'st, "I ask no more."— Wise Men the Shepherd's slumber will deplore When the rapacious Wolf has leapt the fence, And ranges thro' the fold.—My Son, dispense Those laws, that justice to the Wrong'd restore.— The Common-Weal shou'd be the first pursuit Of the crown'd Warrior, for the royal brows The People first ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... an empty shop. The shop had been tenanted by her father, one of whose frequent bankruptcies had happened there; after which his stock of the latest novelties in inexpensive furniture had been seized by rapacious creditors, and Mr Earp had migrated to Birmingham, where he was courting the Official Receiver anew. Ruth had remained solitary and unprotected, with a considerable amount of household goods which had been her mother's. (Like all professional bankrupts, Mr Earp had invariably ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... be observed that even the Hawk, rapacious as he undoubtedly is, is a useful bird. Sent for the purpose of keeping the small birds in bounds, he performs his task well, though it may seem to man harsh and tyranical. The Marsh Hawk is an ornament to our rural ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... acting as a powerful cement for a time, is no guarantee of durability. Napoleon and the French were hated by the nations, as Wilhelm and the Germans are hated to-day. Rapacious designs for hegemony have always brought about a corresponding amount of defensive unity on the part of those whose independence was threatened. Whether it is Spain or France or Germany that dreams of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... clever, and as unscrupulous as that very Satan. This was what his friends said of him over their wine. And now he was rumoured to have sold the British forces in the Carnatic provinces to one of the native Princes. Yes, to have taken gold, gold to an amount which Clive in his most rapacious moments never dreamt of, for his countrymen's blood. Tidings of dark transactions between the Governor and the native Princes had reached the ears of the Government, tidings so vague, so incredible, that the Government ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... esteem and influence was made by the "Drapier's Letters," in 1724. One Wood, of Wolverhampton, in Staffordshire, a man enterprising and rapacious, had, as is said, by a present to the Duchess of Munster, obtained a patent, empowering him to coin one hundred and eighty thousand pounds of halfpence and farthings for the kingdom of Ireland, in which there was a very inconvenient and embarrassing scarcity of copper coin, so ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... stretch out an arm through Basutoland to the sea.[249] Here even weak neighbors were effective to curtail the seaward growth of these inland states, because they were made the tools of one strong, rapacious neighbor. A central position teaches always the lesson of vigilance and preparedness for hostilities, as the Boer equipment in 1899, the military organization of Germany, and the bristling fortresses on the Swiss Alpine ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Accordingly, he granted a number of monopolies both of necessaries and luxuries. This created a system of the grossest oppression; since the great monopolists not only made as much as they could at the expense of the people, but sold portions of their monopolies to grasping, rapacious underlings, who conveyed the grievance into every corner of the land. These people became a hated and oppressive class, like the farmers of the revenue in France. According to a well-known anecdote, Voltaire, when in a company, each member of which had to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... tools at hand they could not supply the rapacious fires fast enough to keep up steam, and the engines slowed to a five-knot rate. As this would not maintain a sufficient tension on the dragging schooner to steer by, they were forced to sacrifice the best item in ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... largely towards my moral or physical welfare. In other words, and in very colloquial language, I never had useless friends hanging about me. From this crude statement of a signal fact, the thoughtless reader will at once judge me rapacious, egotistical, false, fawning, mendacious. Well, I may be all this and more, but not because all who have known me have rendered me eminent services. I can say that no one ever formed relationships ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... drawn up by Wanley for Bagford, but to wade through forty-two folio volumes, in which Bagford's materials for a History of Printing are incorporated, in the British Museum: and from these, I think I have furnished myself with a pretty fair idea of the said Bagford. He was the most hungry and rapacious of all book and print collectors; and, in his ravages, spared neither the most delicate nor costly specimens. His eyes and his mouth seem to have been always open to express his astonishment at, sometimes, the most common and contemptible productions; and his paper ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the expense of a small fortune in presents to captious and rapacious chiefs, he succeeded in making his way from point to point along a course roughly corresponding to that of the St. Paul's River. The route lay through dense forests, along paths worn by many generations of native feet. The ascent was steady; at 100 miles from the coast the elevation was 1,311 feet, ...
— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson
... leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven—well, these were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... his destructive hands on. How he maltreated the Tannhaeuser overture we know from Josef Hofmann's recent brilliant but ineffectual playing of it. Wagner, being formless and all orchestral color, loses everything by being transferred to the piano. Then, sighing for fresh fields, the rapacious Magyar seized the tender melodies of Schubert, Schumann, Franz and Brahms and forced them to the block. Need I tell you that their heads were ruthlessly chopped and hacked? A special art-form like the song that needs the co-operation of poetry is ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... parsimoniae. Adeo enim sacerdotes erant illius temporis ab avaritia immunes, ut nec territoria nisi coacti acciperent.—Hen. Hunting. apud Decem. l. iii. page 333. Bed. Hist. Eccl. l. iii. c. 26.), who had a considerable share in the conversion of all the northern parts, did not show that rapacious desire of riches, which long disgraced, and finally ruined, their successors. Not only did they not seek, but seemed even to shun, such donations. This prevented that alarm, which might have arisen from ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... his hands, behind his back, rubbed each other, pressing closely together their twisted and knotty fingers. Even here, among hundreds of his own kind, he attracted attention by his resemblance to a sparrow-hawk of the steppes, by his rapacious leanness, his easy stride, outwardly calm but alert and watchful as the flight of the bird ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... these city evils of environment, Mr. Sargent says: "So far as the overcrowding in city tenements is concerned, municipal ordinances in our large cities prescribing the amount of space which rapacious landlords should, under penalties sufficiently heavy to enforce obedience, be required to give each tenant, would go far toward attaining the object in view. Whether such a plan could be brought into existence through the ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... forever on the horizon, and why the very name of the place had always caused my blood gently to tingle. It is carrying the feeling of race to quite inscrutable lengths when a vague American permits himself an emotion because more than five centuries ago, on French soil, one rapacious Frenchman got the better of another. Edward was a Frenchman as well as John, and French were the cries that urged each of the hosts to the fight. French is the beautiful motto graven round the image of the Black ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... attentive, obsequious and rapacious; her eye-brows are closely shaven, her teeth carefully lacquered with black as befits a lady of gentility, and at all and no matter what hours, she appears on all fours at the entrance of our apartment, to offer us ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... and empowered the new governor, whom he appointed, to exercise his authority with the most undisguised usurpation of those rights which the colonists had heretofore enjoyed. Harvey's disposition was congenial with the rapacious and cruel system which he pursued, and he acted more like the satrap of an Eastern prince than the representative of a constitutional monarch. The colonists remonstrated and complained; but their appeals to the mercy and justice of the king were disregarded, and Harvey continued his ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... justice a free people can claim we have at least an equal title to it with our brethren in England, and whatever grace a good prince can bestow on the most loyal subjects, we have reason to expect it: Neither hath this kingdom any way deserved to be sacrificed to one "single, rapacious, obscure, ignominious projector." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... specially terrible to one so friendless as her child? Had not she herself been wrecked among the rocks, trusting herself to one who had been utterly unworthy,—loving one who had been utterly unlovely? Men so often are as ravenous wolves, merciless, rapacious, without hearts, full of greed, full of lust, looking on female beauty as prey, regarding the love of woman and her very life as a toy! Were she higher in the world there might be safety. Were she lower there might be safety. But how could she send her girl forth into ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... character were the principals. Here they acted a secondary part. Elsewhere worldliness was the tool of zeal. Here zeal was the tool of worldliness. A King, whose character may be best described by saying that he was despotism itself personified, unprincipled ministers, a rapacious aristocracy, a servile Parliament, such were the instruments by which England was delivered from the yoke of Rome. The work which had been begun by Henry, the murderer of his wives, was continued by Somerset, the murderer of his brother, and completed by Elizabeth, the murderer of her guest. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... bridle, and Ilderim advanced alone. He was a magnificent man, of middle age, with the noblest type of the eagle-eyed, aquiline desert beauty. He was a superb specimen of his race, without the lean, withered, rapacious, vulture look which often mars it. His white haik floated round limbs fit for a Colossus: and under the snowy folds of his turban the olive-bronze of his bold forehead, the sweep of his jet-black beard, and the piercing luminance ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... as the two canoes shoved out in the river and resumed their journey. The rapacious wolverines, enraged at the loss of their expected prey, followed them to the very edge of the stream, where their ear-splitting clamor grew more furious than ever. At one time, indeed, it looked us though they ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... knew that at the last there would be no waiting—no delay. The very minute he sank exhausted into the snow they would be upon him—the great white leader and her rapacious horde—and in his imagination he could feel the viselike clench of iron jaws and the tearing rip with which the quivering flesh would ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... remote from the scene of conflagration. But in spite of all their caution, much property was carried off by the depredators, and amongst others by Chowles and Judith, who contrived to secure a mass of plate, gold, and jewels, that satisfied even their rapacious souls. While this was passing in the heart of the burning city, vast crowds were streaming out of its gates, and encamping themselves, in pursuance of the royal injunction, in Finsbury Fields and Spitalfields. Others crossed the ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the same noble that had visited Pizarro in the valley. He now came in more state, quaffing chicha—the fermented juice of the maize-from golden goblets borne by his attendants, which sparkled in the eyes of the rapacious adventurers.5 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... Further, some irrational animals have wicked dispositions by nature: thus the fox is naturally sly, and the wolf naturally rapacious; yet they are God's creatures. Therefore, although the demons are God's creatures, they may be ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... breast Marphisa griped amain, And lifted up the losel from the ground; As is rapacious eagle wont to strain The pullet, in her talons circled round; And bore him where the sons of King Troyane Heard the two knights their jarring claims propound. He who perceives himself in evil hands, Aye weeps, and mercy of that ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... would be faithfully copied, and that all his good and bad offices, his justice and injustice, were equally put to sale. He had the power, with the king's consent, to exact talliages even from the free citizens who lived within his barony; and as his necessities made him rapacious, his authority was usually found to be more oppressive and tyrannical than that of the sovereign [a]. He was ever engaged in hereditary or personal animosities or confederacies with his neighbours, and often gave protection to all desperate adventurers and criminals, who could be useful ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... fresh in the remembrance of your fellow citizens. Could it be possible for men who have served and fought under you, to be now forgetful of that general, by whose prudent conduct their lives have been saved and their families preserved from being plundered by a rapacious enemy? We mean not to flatter you. At this time it is impossible for you to suspect it. Our present language is the language of free men expressing only sentiments of gratitude. Your achievements ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... which have befallen the companies was the Great Fire. Hall after hall, replete with costly treasures bequeathed by departed brethren of the guilds, with all their archives and documents, perished in that hideous holocaust. All the wealth that rapacious kings and the troubles of the Civil War had spared was engulfed in that awful catastrophe. Again and again, when we try to read the history of a company, we meet with the distressing intelligence that all its records were destroyed in the Great Fire. Very few escaped. The leather-sellers, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... and their owners home, with entire self-control and good sense; and, anchored in the tide of traffic, the ubiquitous beggar-women, their filthy hands proffering matches, green apples, bootlaces, their strident tongues mastering the noises of the street, their rapacious, humorous eyes observant of all things. All these did Dr. Mangan encounter and circumvent, frustrating their apparent determination to commit suicide by those diverse methods of abuse, cajolery, and, on the part of the ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... while he admitted that idleness was productive of these effects, he could not see how one occupation encouraged them more than another. That the tailor, for example, whom he had been speaking of, though purse-proud, overbearing, and rapacious, was not more immoral or depraved than his neighbours, and had probably less of the libertine than most of them. He admitted that evil thoughts would enter the mind in any situation, and could not reasonably be expected to be kept out ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... station in society of M. Tchitchikof, his means or his idiosyncrasy, the mere fact of his being a stranger had been enough to make the good people of Nikolsk pounce down upon him like a hawk on its quarry, and morally tear him to pieces with rapacious analysis to satiate their ravenous curiosity. But as to the fact of his being a stranger, was added the piquancy of a reputation for eccentricity, and the irresistible recommendation of wealth, the Tchitchikof mania spread over all ranks of society, and raged ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... the upper courses of the river. Each at its mouth flows through a rich, fertile plain occupied by a progressive, prosperous people. But the Rio de la Plata takes its rise in one of the world's most backward plains, the home of uncivilized Indians, heartless rubber adventurers, and the most rapacious of officials. Not infrequently, the degenerate white men of these regions, yielding to the subtle and insidious influence of the tropics, inflict the most outrageous abuses upon the natives, and even kill them on slight provocation. The natives in turn hate ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... an English or French man-of-war or privateer, or was forced by stress of weather to seek shelter in an English or French port, was lost to her owners. The times were rude, evidence was easy to manufacture, captains were rapacious, admiralty judges were complaisant, and American commerce was rich prey. The French West Indies fell an easy spoil to the British, and at Martinique and Basseterre American merchantmen were caught in the harbor. Their crews were impressed, their cargoes, not yet discharged, ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... pleasures; which, as he would have been delighted not to have had attended them, so was he no less pleased with any opportunity to rid himself of the incumbrance. He passed, in the world's language, as an exceeding good father; being not only so rapacious as to rob and plunder all mankind to the utmost of his power, but even to deny himself the conveniencies, and almost necessaries, of life; which his neighbours attributed to a desire of raising immense fortunes for his children: but in fact it was not ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... Ieyasu was a mild and temperate man, who, while he could act with firmness, was most considerate of the feelings and motives of others. After the decisive victory of Sekigahara he readily and cordially made terms with his enemies, and did not show himself rapacious in exacting from them undue penalties for their hostility. To the daimyo of Satsuma, as we have already seen, he restored the entire territory which Taiko Sama had given him. The daimyo of Choshu was allowed to keep two of the provinces ...
— Japan • David Murray
... portion of their population, who would rule and ruin without honesty or skill the actual property-holders and native inhabitants, making insecure life, liberty, and property, and still holding those States in their Federal relations subject to the most rapacious, fierce, and unrelenting despotism that ever existed, that of a vindictive and hostile party majority of a Congress in which they have no voice or representation, and by which irresponsible majority they would be mercilessly oppressed for that very reason; and this will be continued, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... and many roses, standing in old-time gardens, and shrubberies of laurel and ilex and Spanish chestnut, and rhododendron, upon the South Dorset cliffs, that are vanishing so slowly yet so surely in the maw of the rapacious sea. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... eminence," and the husband of the Herodian princess Drusilia, who had become a pagan in order to marry him. Tacitus, the Roman historian, says[1] that "with all manner of cruelty he exercised royal functions in the spirit of a slave." Under his rapacious tyranny the people were goaded to fury. Bands of assassins, Sicarii (so called by both Romans and Jews because of the short dagger, sica, which they used), sprang up over the country. Now they struck down Romans and Romanizers, and now they were employed by the governor himself ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... leaves his palace, and is seldom seen abroad in the streets of Kelat except on Fridays, when he goes to the mosque on foot, attended by an escort armed to the teeth. He is said to live in constant dread of assassination, for his cruel, rapacious character has made him universally detested in and around the capital. His one thought in life is money and the increase of his income, which, with the yearly sum allowed him by the British Government, may be put down at considerably over L30,000 per annum. A thorough ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... and soon became exhausted by fatigue and hunger. In this condition they were attacked by a number of sharks. Destitute of a knife or any other weapon of defence, they fell an easy prey to these rapacious monsters. One after another was seized and devoured, or carried away by them, and the survivors, who with dreadful anguish beheld their companions thus destroyed, saw the number of their assailants ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... experiences and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex. He was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... unheroically by a brickbat flung wildly in some street brawl; jurists trying to hammer together some constitution that will not be blown to pieces by the first explosion of gunpowder;—and all failing! With pugnacious Prussia on the North, with rapacious Austria on the South, with insolent Bavaria hanging off on the Southwest, and the others fighting tooth and nail for the land, that will eventually fall to the strongest—the German problem became an exhibition over many ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Equitable Life exposed conditions far worse than I had indicated to the public, and it seemed probable that the usual whitewashing process would be utilized to conceal the guilt of the rapacious criminals who had been untrue to the most sacred trust that can be imposed on man. Since that time, however, the Governor of the State of New York has appointed a committee to investigate the affairs of the Big Three corporations, and the resulting disclosures ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... by the criminal bigotry of their popish predecessors, subjected at first to a foreign exaction, were afterwards, when that yoke was shaken off, liable to a like misapplication of their revenues, through the rapacious disposition of the then reigning monarch: till at length the piety of queen Anne restored to the church what had been thus indirectly taken from it. This she did, not by remitting the tenths and first-fruits entirely; but, in a spirit of the truest equity, by ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... coolness in time of heat; yes—even tho July 1st has come and gone—drafts to assuage our thirst; the divers stays and supports of our declining years—all these things come in bottles. From the time of its purchase to the moment of its consignment to the barrel in the cellar or the rapacious wagon of the rag-and-bone man the bottle plays a vital part in our lives. And as with most inconspicuous necessities, but little is known of its history. We assume vaguely that it is blown—ever since we saw the Bohemian Glass Blowers at the World's Fair we have known that glass is blown ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... desert, was the outside colony of freedmen. I employed many of them to do the heavy work of clearing avenues, and the air resounded with their cheerful songs, and I had the pleasure, with much labor, to save from the rapacious white robbers, the farms which these colored men had received from generous Uncle Sam. One case will illustrate the many instances in which I appeared ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... nothing as yet of Clara's opinions. As he sauntered away to find Garcia, he queried whether he had best torment him with this unauthorized babble of Mrs. Stanley. On the whole, yes; it might bring him down to reasonable terms; the rapacious old man was expecting too large a slice of the dead Munoz. So he told his tale, giving it out as something which could be depended on, but increasing the thirty thousand dollars to fifty thousand, on his own responsibility. To his alarm Garcia broke out in a venomous rage, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... belly of this country!' Everard continued. 'So long as Manchester flourishes, we're a country governed and led by the belly. The head and the legs of the country are sound still; I don't guarantee it for long, but the middle's rapacious and corrupt. Take it on a question of foreign affairs, it 's an alderman after a feast. Bring it upon home politics, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... taking offence at some imperious order of his commander, he threw up his commission in disgust, and retired to his native village near the river Hudson. Here, collecting about him a few choice spirits like himself, he kept the inhabitants in a continual state of alarm by his plundering and rapacious conduct. Acting, as he pretended, under the orders of the king, the tories durst not oppose him, and the whigs were too few in numbers to resist his foraging excursions with any prospect ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... even a person of pure soul engaged in penances. With respect to even an ascetic living in the woods and employed in his own (harmless) acts, are raised three parties, viz., friends, neutrals, and foes. They that are rapacious hate them that are pure. The idle hate the active. The unlearned hate the learned. The poor hate the rich. The unrighteous hate the righteous. The ugly hate the beautiful. Many amongst the learned, the unlearned, the rapacious, and the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... old woman, bent, shriveled down to her hull and bones, with her thin lips sucked in between her gums, came and tugged at my sleeve. I recognized Sister Glory White, wearing the same look of rapacious cheerfulness upon her bones that she used to wear upon her fat face when she had a "body" to prepare ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... Gritz was a short, massive man with hard, puffy eyes and thin black hair, rather curly and oily, and a rapacious nose. He appeared (having been induced to come down by the commissary) in a richly embroidered blue-silk house garment, and his efforts at affability were obviously based ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... about their own future, cannot help being interested in observing them. They see a bird of one kind diving and bringing to the surface a fish, which another, of a different species, snatches from it and bears aloft, in its turn to be attacked by a third equally rapacious winged hunter, that, swooping at the robber, makes him forsake his ill-gotten prey, while the prey itself, reluctantly dropped, is dexterously re-caught in its whirling descent long ere it reaches its own element—the whole incident forming a very chain of tyranny ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... home is beyond his reach in some cleft of a rock that he cannot scale or in some fork of a tree that he cannot climb. He is a cannibal—even the young and the sick of his own kind become the victims of his rapacious hunger—and he will eat almost anything, living or dead, from the refuse in a garbage heap to the dainty egg of a willow-wren in the tiny, domed nest amid the briars at the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... of the proceedings of this secretary, that the transfers were utterly unwarrantable; that he tampered with the public moneys to sustain the staggering credit of selected depositaries, and "scatter it abroad among swarms of rapacious political partisans." After stating and answering all the charges brought by the Secretary of the Treasury against the Bank of the United States, and showing their falsehood or futility, he declares ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... forcibly taken possession of, upon pretences the most frivolous and unjust, and planters were compelled to give bonds for large sums of money, to procure from him liberty to remain in posession of their property. These, and many more acts of the like atrocious nature, did this rapacious governor commit, during the short time of his administration, to increase his fees as governor and proprietor. At length the people, weary of his grievous impositions and extortions, agreed to take him by force, and ship him ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... moments it seemed as if night tried to cover the scene with her mantle. The death-angel shrieks and laughs and old Father Time is busy with his sickle, as he gathers in the last harvest of death, crying, More, more, more! while his rapacious maw ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... rapacious movement darted upon her parasol. How her soul was in her possessions! I stood and watched her. Then she went into the road and under the trees, haughty, a demoiselle. She had on white ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... commandant in their quarrel. Jolter, who knew and dreaded the power of the French governor, began to shake with apprehension, when he heard their repeated threats, but they durst not apply to this magistrate, who, upon a fair representation of the case, would have punished them severely for their rapacious and insolent behaviour. Peregrine, without further molestation, availed himself of his own attendants, who shouldered his baggage and followed him to the gate, where they were stopped by the sentinels until their names ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... church (sogmoye wigwam, or chief house) is manifestly modern.] Then a young man beckoned to him to come in, and he listened till the end to a long sermon on the wickedness of being vindictive and rapacious; and the preacher was a gray ancient, and his ears stood up over his little cap like the two handles of a pitcher, yet for all that the Wild Cat's heart was not moved one whit. And when it was all at an end he said to the obliging young man, "But ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... more than once to be shown the way to the door, but the path of retreat had never yet seemed to him so unpleasant. He was naturally amiable, but it had not hitherto befallen him to be made to feel that he was not—and could not be—a factor in contemporary history: here was a rapacious woman who proposed to keep that favourable setting for herself. He let her know that she was right-down selfish, and that if she chose to sacrifice a beautiful nature to her antediluvian theories and love of power, a vigilant daily press—whose business ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... together, and had not reached that point where the high road bifurcates, and the diverging branches of success and failure lead old comrades so very far apart. Ah, what a camaraderie and fellowship, knit close by the urgency of making both ends meet, strengthened by the necessity of withstanding rapacious, or negligent, or tyrannous landladies, sweetened by kindnesses and courtesies which cost the giver little, but mean much to the receiver! Did sickness of a transitory sort (for grievous illness is little ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... part of the dam over which the latter breaks, as over an upright wall. The sea thus plays with the land, holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows it, as a cat plays with a mouse; but the fatal gripe is sure to come at last. The sea sends its rapacious east-wind to rob the land, but before the former has got far with its prey, the land sends its honest west-wind to recover some of its own. But, according to Lieutenant Davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... air Waged on a time a direful war. Not those, in budding groves who sing, To usher in the amorous spring; Nor those, with Venus' car who fly Through the light clouds and yielding sky But the rapacious vulture brood, With crooked beak that thirsts for blood, And iron fangs. Their war, 'tis said, For a dog's carrion corse was made. Shrill shrieks resound from shore to shore; The earth beneath is sanguin'd o'er; Versed in the science ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... combat alert, all these months, and, if they'd only known, they could have gone to Xochitl and looted it clean long ago. The Gram party were outraged. Angus of Wardshaven had been bad enough, with the hereditary taint of the Mad Baron of Blackcliffe, and Queen Evita and her rapacious family, but even he was preferable to a murderous villain—some even called him a fiend in ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... latter evicted the mound builder—just as the mound builder overcame the people whose monuments of burned brick and cut stone now lie fifty feet below the surface. Only a few centuries have gone by since these happenings; can we number the years hence when rapacious hordes from another land shall drive out the effete descendants of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... Dhapar, in the district of Puraniya. All these were petty independent chiefs, whose territories now form Pergunahs in the Subah of Saptari, belonging to Gorkha, or in the adjacent parts of the Company’s territory. The rapacious chief now made an attack on the hill Gidha, but here he was opposed by a devil, (Dano,) who killed a number of his troops, and prevailed, until the holy man Ramanath ordered the god Ramkrishna to cut off the devil’s ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton |
