"Sprat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strife of the time indeed aided in directing the minds of men to natural inquiries. "To have been always tossing about some theological question," says the first historian of the Royal Society, Bishop Sprat, "would have been to have made that their private diversion, the excess of which they disliked in the public. To have been eternally musing on civil business and the distresses of the country was too melancholy a reflection. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... According to M. J. J. Jusserand ('English Essays from a French Pen', 1895, pp. 160-1), the originator of this conceit was M. Samuel de Sorbieres, the traveller in England who was assailed by Bishop Sprat. Considering himself inadequately rewarded by his patrons, Mazarin, Louis XIV, and Pope Clement IX, he said bitterly — 'They give lace cuffs to a man without a shirt'; a 'consolatory witticism' which he afterwards remodelled into, 'I wish they would send me bread for the butter they kindly ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... such, for her to back her topsails and await the coming of the gang, already tumbling in ordered haste into the armed boat prepared for them under the tender's quarter. And yet it was not always easy for the sprat to catch the whale. A variety of factors entered into the problem and made for failure as often as for success. Sometimes the tender's powder was bad—so bad that in spite of an extra pound or so added to the charge, the shot ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... class to No. 6, who has on his post representations of the following fishes, viz., whale, sword fish, white shark, sturgeon, skate, John Dorey, salmon, grayling, porpoise, electrical eel, horned silure, pilot fish, mackerel, trout, red char, smelt, carp, bream, road goldfish, pike, garfish, perch, sprat, chub, telescope carp, cod, whiting, turbot, flounder, flying scorpion, sole, sea porcupine, sea cock, flying fish, trumpet fish, common eel, turtle, lobster, crab, shrimp, star fish, streaked gilt head, remora, lump fish, holocenter, ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... scope or purpose of the Spirit | of God is not to express matters of | nature in the Scriptures, otherwise | than in passage, and for application | to man's capacity and to matters | moral or divine" (ut 485-6). If we | take Thomas Sprat at his word, the | Royal Society was founded on | generally similar principles. The | first corruption of knowledge, he | argues, resulted from the Egyptians' | concealment of wisdom "as sacred | Mysteries." The current age of | inquiry benefitted from "the | dissolution of the ABBYES, ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... James instituted to try all ecclesiastical cases, were, with one or two exceptions, notoriously the most venal and tyrannical of all his agents—Jeffreys, the Chancellor; Crewe, Bishop of Durham; Sprat, Bishop of Rochester; the Earl of Rochester, Lord Treasurer; Sunderland, the Lord President; and Herbert, Chief Justice of the King's Bench. This court summoned Compton, the Bishop of London, to its tribunal, because he had not suspended Dr. Sharp, one of the clergy of London, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... poetical imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has, indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes' tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble, which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every capital in Europe for the last fifty years. We cast that badly, and give luster to the ill-cast fish ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... then," laughs Ben, in high feather, "let the first be that little Jack Sprat of a half-frozen Battle! He's ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... he want most in life? I think his distinctive craving is best expressed as fun—fun in companionship. He had already spent a pound or two upon three select feasts to his fellow assistants, sprat suppers they were, and there had been a great and very successful Sunday pilgrimage to Richmond, by Wandsworth and Wimbledon's open common, a trailing garrulous company walking about a solemnly happy host, to wonderful cold meat and salad at the Roebuck, a bowl of punch, punch! and a bill ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Ibid. Burnet. Sprat had studied a polite style much: But there was little strength in it: He had the beginnings of learning laid well in him: But he has allowed himself in a course of some years in much sloth and too many liberties.—Swift. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... for your voluminous and delightful collections. Baxter—so soon as it is ready—will let you see a proof of my introduction, which is only sent out as a sprat to catch whales. And you will find I have a good deal of what you have, only mine in a perfectly desultory manner, as is necessary to an exile. My uncle's pedigree is wrong; there was never a Stevenson of Caldwell, of course, but they were tenants of the Mures; the farm held by them is in my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the greatest mischief a man can do to those whom he loves, to raise men's expectations of them too high by undue and impertinent commendations.—SPRAT. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... She is the Reverend Mother-Superior of the Convent to all of you. But I was at school with her, and I can't forget she used to be Biddy. She was one of the great girls, and I was a sprat of ten, but she condescended to let me adore her, and I did, like everybody else. To be adored is her metier. The Sisters swear by her, and that girl worships the ground under her feet. If I had a daughter I should ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... and vegetables is great, that of fish scarcely less so. On the muddy shore in the background, the fishing canoes are drawn up on their arrival to discharge their cargoes, chiefly at this time consisting of a kind of sprat and an anchovy with a broad lateral silvery band. Baskets of land crabs covered with black slimy mud, of handsome Lupeae, and the large well-flavoured prawns, called Cameroons, are scattered about, and even small sharks (Zygaenae, etc.) and cuttlefish ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray |
