"Spleen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... depressed him at all; on the contrary, he was more cheerful than he had been for years. Scales had fallen from his eyes since that talk; he had regained his true bearings; he began to see the verities of life. How he had wasted his time! Why had he been so sour? why had he indulged his spleen? why had he taken such a jaundiced view of life? He would put aside all jealousies; he would have no enmities; he would be broader-minded—oh, so much broader-minded; he would embrace all mankind—yes, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... his part, was in a chronic state of rage. He was a solitary old bull, driven out, for his bad temper, from the comfortable herd of his fellows, and burning to find vent for his bottled spleen. The herd, in one of its migrations, had just arrived in the neighborhood of the great lagoons, and he, in his furious restlessness, was unconsciously playing the part of vanguard ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... funeral! Is this from fortune or from favouring stars? Dalica, look thou yonder, what a train! What weeping! Oh, what luxury! Come, haste, Gather me quickly up these herbs I dropped, And then away—hush! I must unobserved From those two maiden sisters pull the spleen: Dissemblers! how invidious they surround The virgin's tomb, where all but virgins weep." "Nay, hear me first," cried Dalica; "'tis hard To perish to attend a foreign king." "Perish! and may not then mine eye alone Draw out the venom drop, and yet ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... attempted to relate the "four temperaments" to the four great "humors" or fluids of the body. Thus the "sanguine" individual was one with a surplus of blood, the "choleric" had a surplus of bile, the "phlegmatic" a surplus of phlegm, and the "melancholic" a surplus of black bile or spleen; and any individual's temperament resulted from the balance of these four. Sometimes a fifth temperament, the nervous, was admitted, dependent ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Toobad. Evil, and mischief, and misery, and confusion, and vanity, and vexation of spirit, and death, and disease, and assassination, and war, and poverty, and pestilence, and famine, and avarice, and selfishness, and rancour, and jealousy, and spleen, and malevolence, and the disappointments of philanthropy, and the faithlessness of friendship, and the crosses of love—all prove the accuracy of your views, and the truth of your system; and it is not impossible that the infernal interruption ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... fearful sentence on the palace wall of recoiling tyrants. As an englishman, my expiring sigh should be breathed for its preservation; but as an admirer of social repose and national liberality, I regret to see its noble energies engaged in the degrading service of fretful spleen, and ungenerous animadversion. When the horizon is no longer blackened with the smoke of the battle, it is unworthy of two mighty empires to carry on an ignoble war of words. If peace is their wish, let them manifest the great and enlightened sentiment in all its purity, and disdain ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... Wit, sets up for Criticism; yet has so much ambition to be thought a Wit, that he lets his Spleen prevail against Nature, and turns Poet. In this Capacity he is as just to the World as in the other injurious. For, as the Critick wrong'd every Body in his Censure, and snarl'd and grin'd at their Writings, ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... returned, they were like old friends together. The quails in aspic and the sparkling hock had evidently opened their hearts to one another. As far as Malines they laughed and talked without ceasing. Lady Georgina was now in her finest vein of spleen: her acid wit grew sharper and more caustic each moment. Not a reputation in Europe had a rag left to cover it as we steamed in beneath the huge iron roof of ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... Maria went on with her knitting, the click-click of the needles sounding startlingly distinct in the silent room. Darsie sat shamed and miserable, now that her little ebullition of spleen was over, acutely conscious of the rudeness of her behaviour. For five minutes by the clock the silence lasted; but in penitence, as in fault, there was no patience in Darsie's nature, and at the end of the five minutes the needlework was thrown on the floor, and with a quick ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... rentallers," or "kindly tenants;" and a third describes, in language as vivid as the historical romance of Kenilworth, written years after, the manner in which Queen Elizabeth received the news of a check to her policy, and vented her spleen ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... relief against a rainy day, Beyond a tavern, or a tedious play, We take your book, and laugh our spleen away. If all your tribe, too studious of debate, 40 Would cease false hopes and titles to create, Led by the rare example you begun, Clients would fail, and lawyers ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... of a tigress I would have her be a prude, a scold, a scholar, a critic, a wit, a politician, and a Jacobite; and then, perhaps, eternal opposition would keep up our spirits; and, wishing one another daily at the devil, we should make a shift to drag on a damnable state of life, without much spleen or vapours." ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... Ford(32) desired me to sit with him at next door; which I did, like a fool, chatting till twelve, and now am got into bed. I am afraid the new Ministry is at a terrible loss about money: the Whigs talk so, it would give one the spleen; and I am afraid of meeting Mr. Harley out of humour. They think he will never carry through this undertaking. God knows what will come of it. I should be terribly vexed to see things come round again: it will ruin the Church and clergy for ever; but I hope for better. ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... the interior parts were found mortified such as the lungs, which were so changed that no natural fluid could be perceived in them. The spleen was serous and swollen. The liver was legueux? and spotted, without its natural color. The vena cava, superior and inferior, was filled with thick coagulated and black blood. The gall was tainted. Nevertheless, many arteries, in the middle as well as lower bowels, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... that a few other substances have the same peculiarity, when no good end, that we can see, is thereby accomplished. No man is so foolish as to deny that his eye was intended to enable him to see, because he cannot tell what the spleen was made for. It is, however, useless to dwell upon this subject. If a man denies that there is design in nature, he can with quite as good reason deny that there is any design in any or in all the works ever executed ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... hands of tribunes and capitalists; he had made promises which had raised hopes, definitely commercial and vaguely political. These hopes it must be his mission to fulfil. Before quitting Rome he found words[1086] which vented all the spleen of the classes screened out of office by the close-drawn ring of the nobility. The platitudes of merit, tested by honest service and approved by distinctions won in war, were advanced against the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Pope had not been in the spleen when he wrote, he would have remembered that humility is a moral virtue; and how, asks the writer, can you know that your moral life is above that of most of the wits 'since you tell me in the same letter that many of their names were ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... if you mean to cry and take on," said Rhoda, springing up and drinking off her tea, "you'll give me the spleen. I hate to be hipped. I shall be off to Mrs ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... of alchemists prevailed, the human body was considered as a microcosm, or an epitome of the universe, the heart representing the sun, and the brain the moon. The planets had each his proper influence: Jupiter presided over the lungs, Saturn over the spleen, Venus over the kidneys, and Mercury over the organs of generation. The term lunacy, which still designates unsoundness of mind, is a relic of these grotesque notions, and is defined by Dr. Webster as "a species of insanity or madness, formerly supposed to be influenced by the moon, or ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... Mr. Secretary, I come to the point. What old GILL DRYASDUST and JESSE GRANT think of you is what the people think; and when PUNCHINELLO shoots at you an arrow now and then, dipped in fun, and winged with satire, he does it in no spirit of surly bitterness or spleen, but with a heart full of hope and charity, and as much as says to the people of the United States, in your hearing: 'My good friends, keep on praying for brother FISH, and don't give him up because some think him ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 16, July 16, 1870 • Various
... goddess, hear! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend To make this creature fruitful! Into her womb convey sterility! Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her! If she must teem, Create her child of spleen; that it may live, And be a thwart disnatured torment to her! Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth; With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks; Turn all her mother's pains and benefits To laughter and contempt; that ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... will, I presume, continue to snarl at my heels like mongrel curs. Their miserable attempts to injure me will only rebound back upon themselves. I am above the reach of their malignity, and shall pursue my own independent course regardless of their spleen. ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... ptomaines, thus carried to all parts of the body, that are largely the immediate cause of the pyrexia and attending symptoms. The organisms which produce these poisons for the most part remain in the intestines, although they have been found in the spleen. ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... few— Of writers this age has abundance and plenty, Three score and a thousand, two millions and twenty, Three score of them wits who all sharply vie, To try what odd creature they best can belie, 50 A thousand are prudes who for CHARITY write, And fill up their sheets with spleen, envy, and spite[,] One million are bards, who to Heaven aspire, And stuff their works full of bombast, rant, and fire, T'other million are wags who in Grubstreet attend, 55 And just like a cobbler the old writings mend, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... owners, and to other interested persons, with whom I was confronted on one pretext or another, I told my tale as fully and as freely as I have told it here, though each telling hurt more than the last. That was necessary and unavoidable; it was the private intrusions which I resented with all the spleen the sea had left me in exchange for the ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... out, through having eaten too much roast goose. But Coupeau got angry and helped Virginie to the upper part of a leg, saying that, by Jove's thunder! if she did not pick it, she wasn't a proper woman. Had roast goose ever done harm to anybody? On the contrary, it cured all complaints of the spleen. One could eat it without bread, like dessert. He could go on swallowing it all night without being the least bit inconvenienced; and, just to show off, he stuffed a whole drum-stick into his mouth. Meanwhile, Clemence had got to the end of the rump, and was sucking it with her ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... wooed by the incurving and more hospitable coast of France, suddenly finds itself violently repulsed by the projecting Spanish peninsula; when, naturally angry, the current, like some folk who, on their not being able to vent their spleen on the people who may offend them, 'pass it on' to the nearest, tries to 'make it warm' for such unfortunate mariners as may cross ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... became the battle cry of reactionaries, who organized the American or "Know-Nothing" party and sought safety at the polls. While all foreign elements were grouped together, indiscriminately, in the mind of the nativist, the Irishman unfortunately was the special object of his spleen, because he was concentrated in the cities and therefore offered a visual and concrete example of the danger of foreign mass movements, because he was a Roman Catholic and thus awakened ancient religious prejudices that had long been slumbering, and because he ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... that now I care not to recall. Surely a little, in two hundred Years, One may neglect Contemporary Sneers:— Surely Allowance for the Man may make That had all Grub-street yelping in his Wake! And who (I ask you) has been never Mean, When urged by Envy, Anger or the Spleen? No: I prefer to look on POPE as one Not rightly happy till his Life was done; Whose whole Career, romance it as you please, Was (what he call'd it) but a "long Disease:" Think of his Lot,—his Pilgrimage ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... walked that it is no wonder Englishmen should suffer from the spleen. My own heart was heavy within me, and I sat upon a rock by the wayside looking out on the dreary view with my thoughts full of trouble and foreboding. Suddenly, however, as I glanced down the road, I saw a sight which drove everything else from my mind, and caused ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... perfection of polished malice and bitter sarcasm, but which seems more a caricature than a likeness. Whatever Addison's faults, his conduct to Pope did not deserve such a return. The whole passage is only one of those painful incidents which disgrace the history of letters, and prove how much spleen, ingratitude, and baseness often co-exist with the highest parts. The words of Pope are as true now as ever they were—"the life of a wit is a warfare upon earth;" and a warfare in which poisoned missiles and every variety of falsehood are still common. We may also ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... thought they were virtuous and only denouncing injustice, but when that charge was taken out of their mouths they would clack on out of jealousy at his success. It was envy that really poisoned their minds and made them spit forth spleen, envy and chagrin at their ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... that the figure of her lord here began walking up and down the room, as if to cool his spleen, and that she ran away; but that, as he did not issue forth when she had stood listening and trembling in the shadowy hall a little time, she crept up-stairs again, impelled as before by ghosts and curiosity, and once more cowered outside ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... hearty laugh is a bombshell exploding in the right place, while spleen and discontent are a gun that kicks over the man who ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... of temporary spleen. Nobody loved his old books and old opinions better. Hazlitt is speaking in the character of Timon, which indeed fits him rather too easily. But elsewhere the same strain of cynicism comes out in more ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... tide of his spleen invariably overtook him, and he abandoned exegesis for tirade. The bourgeois, limited scope of the art in vogue—this was the burden of his reiterated rabid attacks; art watered down to suit the public's insipid palate, and he quoted Chamfort furiously: ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... his Hypochondriasis in 1766.[1] For at least a century and a half medical writers as well as lay authors had been writing literature of all types (treatises, pamphlets, poems, sermons, epigrams) on this most fashionable of English maladies under the variant names of "melancholy," "the spleen," "black melancholy," "hysteria," "nervous debility," "the hyp." Despite the plethora of materia scripta on the subject it makes sense to reprint Hill's Hypochondriasis, because it is indeed a "practical treatise" and because it offers the modern student of neoclassical ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... skin, and the nervous irritation by symptoms of abdominal typhus; that the internal and external development of the disease is determined by a striking sympathetic derangement of the organic functions of the liver, and still more of the spleen, and likewise by a more striking prominence of the intermittent type of the fever; and that all these varied disturbances finally ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... gentleman, mam'selle," replied Mueller, "is an Englishman, and troubled with the spleen. You must not ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... the heat of a political quarrel, from the head-quarters of his foes, is a curious specimen of party spleen, and may be taken as the set-off to his own:—"Here lieth the body of James Ross, printer: formerly a negro driver: who spent the remainder of his days in advocating the cause of torture, triangles, and the gallows." Then follow couplets, among ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... know that I meet in any of my walks, objects which move both my spleen and laughter so effectually as those young fellows at the Greecian, Squire's, Searle's, and all other coffee-houses adjacent to the law, who rise early for no other purpose but to publish their laziness. One would think these young virtuosos take a gay cap and slippers, with a scarf and ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... to what she was, when she was of my age. She was even then a most splendid matron. But I had youth in my favour, which is more than half the battle. At all events, the remarks and attentions of the officers aroused my mother's spleen, and she was more harsh in language than ever, although I admit that it was but seldom ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... consecrated grain,[*] by observing how the sacrificial smoke curls upward, etc. The best way, however, is to examine the entrails of the victim after a sacrifice. Here everything depends on the shape, size, etc., of the various organs, especially of the liver, bladder, spleen, and lungs, and really expert judgment by an experienced and high-priced seer is desirable. The man who is assured by a reliable seer, "the livers are large and in fine color," will go on his trading voyage with ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... in speaking of the sacred disease (epilepsy), Hippocrates says: "Its origin is hereditary, like that of other diseases; for if a phlegmatic person be born of a phlegmatic, and a bilious of a bilious, and a phthisical of a phthisical, and one having spleen disease of another having disease of the spleen, what is to hinder it from happening that where the father and mother were subject to this disease certain of their offspring should be so affected also? As the semen comes from ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and adored son, the Leyden did battle. "You can both stay here, then," she retorted with more spleen than elegance, "and sniff sulphur until you're black in the face. I'm going ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... succeeding day brought with it some novelty to wonder at or admire. The sea is truly beautiful, and has many charms, notwithstanding a fresh-water poet, affecting to be disgusted with its monotony, has ill naturedly vented his spleen by describing the vanities of a sea ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... your Servant. —I hope you will pardon my Passion, when I was so happy to see you last. —I was so over-run with the Spleen, that I was perfectly out of myself. And really when one hath the Spleen, every thing is to be excus'd by ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... the Grasshopper's Feasts Excited the spleen of the Birds and the Beasts: For their mirth and good cheer—of the Bee was the theme, And the Gnat blew his horn, as he danced in the beam; 'Twas humm'd by the Beetle, 'twas buzz'd by the Fly, And sung by the myriads ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... fifty negroes. Any person having sick negroes, considered incurable by their respective physicians, and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for negroes affected with scrofula or king's evil, confirmed hypocondriasm, apoplexy, diseases of the liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach and intestines, bladder and its appendages, diarrhea, dysentery, &c. The highest cash price will be paid on ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... angrily at Johnson, and exclaiming in a bitter tone, 'TAKE IT.' When Toplady was going to speak, Johnson uttered some sound, which led Goldsmith to think that he was beginning again, and taking the words from Toplady. Upon which, he seized this opportunity of venting his own envy and spleen, under the ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... espoirs heureux, lgers caprices, Coupables passions, spleentique rancoeur, J'ai tout dit ces vers, tendres et srs complices. Qu'ils tmoignent pour moi, Fantme, ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... by which Athens was adorned, the people delighted, and the rest of the world astonished, and which now alone prove that the tales of the ancient power and glory of Greece are no fables, was what particularly excited the spleen of the opposite faction, who inveighed against him in the public assembly, declaring that the Athenians had disgraced themselves by transferring the common treasury of the Greeks from the island of Delos to their own custody. "Pericles himself," they urged, "has taken away the only possible ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... which, whenever attempted, always led to the same inevitable result. This direct assault upon the Cardinal produced a furious debate. His enemies were delighted with the opportunity of venting their long-suppressed spleen. They indulged in savage invectives against the man whom they so sincerely hated. His adherents, on the other hand—Bossu, Berlaymont, Courieres—were as warm in his defence. They replied by indignant denials of the charge ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... obesity remedy, and Jimmie criticises most "beauties" so severely that we have got to searching them out, when we are tired and cross, just to vent our spleen upon. ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... without warning, almost in a moment, with the most horrible of all ills, a cancer in the mouth. He endured it to the last with incredible patience and firmness, without complaint, without spleen, without the slightest repining; he was insupportable to himself. When he saw his illness somewhat advanced, he withdrew into a little apartment (which he had hired with this object in the interior of the Convent of the Petits Augustins, into which there was an entrance ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... very grey. His eyes, which are hazel, are remarkably bright: he has a sight keen as a hawk's. His frame is a little over the ordinary height; when walking, he has a firm but heavy tread, like that of an over-worked or fatigued man. I never observed any spleen or misanthropy about him. He has a fund of quiet humour, which he exhibits at all times when he is among friends. During the four months I was with him I noticed him every evening making most careful notes. His maps evince great care and industry. ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... might his soul proclaim: One eye was blinking, and one leg was lame; His mountain shoulders half his breast o'erspread, Thin hairs bestrew'd his long misshapen head; Spleen to mankind his envious heart possessed, And much he hated all—but most, the best. Ulysses or Achilles still his theme; But royal scandal his delight supreme. Long had he lived the scorn of every Greek, Vext when he spoke, yet still they heard him speak: Sharp was his voice; which, in the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... to thy thoughts, and ease to thy passions. What makes you so early abroad this morn? in contemplation, no doubt, of your Rosalynde. Take heed, forester; step not too far, the ford may be deep, and you slip over the shoes: I tell thee, flies have their spleen, the ants choler, the least hairs shadows, and the smallest loves great desires. 'Tis good, forester, to love, but not to overlove, lest in loving her that likes not thee, thou fold thyself in an ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... scurvy World, so many bad Men pass for good; so many Fools for wise; so many Ignorants for Learned; and so many Knaves for honest, and rewarded accordingly, that I was rather provok'd, than mortified. However, I never fretted, but rather diverted my Spleen, with the World's fine Mistakes; and I enjoyed in Petto, that just delight of a truely honest Mind, of either pitying, or contemning every worthless Animal, whose Advancement made him look down on me, with Insolence ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... you have heard how the grasshoppers' feasts "Excited the spleen of the birds and the beasts;" How the peacock and turkey "flew into a passion," On finding that insects "pretended to fashion." Now, I often have thought it exceedingly hard, That nought should be said of the beasts by the bard; Who, by some strange neglect, has omitted to state That the quadrupeds ...
— The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic • F. B. C.
... urged by perils and a Town Population who are Protestant, have signed the Surrender with good-will, at least with resignation, and a feeling of relief. The Ober-Amt Officials have likewise had to sign; full of all the silent spleen and despondency which is natural to the situation: spleen which, in the case of old Schaffgotsch, weak with age, becomes passionately audible here and there. He will have to give account of that injurious Proclamation, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... fellow-beings! Nay it is said the Circe is becoming much of a Hecate now; if the bewitched Duke could see it. She is getting haggard beyond the power of rouge; her mind, any mind she has, more and more filled with spleen, malice, and the dregs of pride run sour. A disgusting creature, testifies one Ex-Official gentleman, once a Hofrath under her, but obliged to run for life, and invoke free press in his defence: [ Apologie de Monsieur Forstner de Breitembourg, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... here. I had looked to say my mind to him as often as he came; and that it would be a sore thing to him to see his father's wife in the bar, I know beyond a doubt. I have often said to myself what a comfortable spleen I should experience when I might courtesy to him and say, 'What would you be pleased to take, sir?' But I think he is minded to rob me of that pleasure, for it is certain he must have ridden this way ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... cards receive; Rouge high, play deep, to lead the ton aspire, With nightly blaze set PORTLAND-PLACE on fire; Snatch half a glimpse at Concert, Opera, Ball, A Meteor, trac'd by none, tho' seen by all; And, when her shatter'd nerves forbid to roam, In very spleen—rehearse the girls at home. Last the grey Dowager, in antient flounces, With snuff and spectacles the age denounces; Boasts how the Sires of this degenerate Isle Knelt for a look, and duell'd for a smile. The scourge and ridicule of Goth and Vandal, Her tea she sweetens, as she sips, with ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... grown highly irascible during her illness, and as Bertha and her maid were the only ones upon whom she had a chance of venting her spleen, she spared neither. She experienced a sick longing for her native land; she more than ever detested the republican country in which she was sojourning, and she heaped upon Bertha the bitterest reproaches as the instigator of the exile which ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... slight curl of his lips; and, as if the girl's compliment to his countrymen had roused his spleen and changed his thoughts, he seated himself moodily by ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... them reciprocally jealous of what they were unacquainted with, and neither of them perhaps allowing the opposite system that real merit which is abundantly to be found in each. This appears on the one hand from the spleen with which the monastic writers[e] speak of our municipal laws upon all occasions; and, on the other, from the firm temper which the nobility shewed at the famous parliament of Merton; when the prelates endeavoured to procure ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... seems to be really a very nice woman, and were it not for the insurmountable feeling of spleen the sight of her garden produces on me, I would often go and see her. She has nothing in common with the mammas of Jonquille, Campanule or Touki: she is vastly their superior; and then I can see that she has been very good-looking and stylish. Her past life ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Ay, but between you and I, 'twas well he kick'd me first, and made me angry, or I had been lustily swing'd, by Fortune—But thanks to my Spleen, that sav'd my Bones that bout—But then I did well—hah, came briskly ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... The Dial—a Pantheon in which Carlyle had at once assigned to him a place. He meanwhile was busy in London making friends by his conspicuous, almost obtrusive, genius, and sowing the seeds of discord by his equally obtrusive spleen. To his visit of 1831-1832 belongs one of the worst of the elaborate invectives against Lamb which have recoiled on the memory of his critic—to the credit of English sympathies with the most lovable of slightly ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... the most amusing thing in the world. Never did Labiche or Meilhac make me laugh as I have laughed at the comical inscriptions on tombstones. Oh, how much superior to the books of Paul de Kock for getting rid of the spleen are these marble slabs and these crosses where the relatives of the deceased have unburdened their sorrow, their desires for the happiness of the vanished ones and their ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... muddy flats, and I said to Piloti, "Come, let us go within; there you will play for me some tiny questioning Chopin prelude, and forget this dolorous night." ... He had been staring hard at the moon when I aroused him. "As you will; let us go indoors by all means, for this moon gives me the spleen." Then we moved slowly ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... city raiders, The crew of submarine That sank the unarmed traders To vent the Kaiser's spleen. The wreckage of the nations, Ten million dwellings lost, Murders and mutilations, The ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... e'er he was before, Poor Puck doth yell, poor Puck doth roar, That waked Queen Mab, who doubted sore Some treason had been wrought her: Until Nymphidia told the Queen, What she had done, what she had seen, Who then had well-near cracked her spleen ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... this girl who awakened such strange emotions in his breast; sad that he was a loathesome thing in her eyes. But that it was pure happiness just to be near her, sufficed him for the time; of the morrow, what use to think! The little, grim, gray, old man of Torn nursed the spleen he did not dare vent openly, and cursed the chance that had sent Henry de Montfort to Torn to search for his sister; while the followers of the outlaw swore quietly over the vagary which had brought them on this long ride without either fighting ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... selected to witness the fray, And tell future ages the feats of the day; A bard who detested all sadness and spleen, And wish'd that Parnassus a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... in coach-hire more than save in wine. A coming shower your shooting corns presage, Old a-ches[2] throb, your hollow tooth will rage; Sauntering in coffeehouse is Dulman seen; He damns the climate, and complains of spleen. Meanwhile the South, rising with dabbled wings, A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings, That swill'd more liquor than it could contain, And, like a drunkard, gives it up again. Brisk Susan whips her linen from the rope, While the first drizzling shower is borne aslope; ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... and an invisible green," the gentleman answered, losing his momentary spleen in his natural love of the ludicrous—"but finding that the latter would be only too conspicuous in the droughts that sometimes prevail in this climate, I settled down into the yellowish drab, that is, indeed, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... with spleen beheld Her Favorite Toasts by ours excelled. Resolved to outvie Britannia's Fair By her own Beauties,—sent ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... Charles! Clare, you must know this is all a fit of spleen; your duty and your interest—marriage is ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... reproach cannot be denied. We have not yet reached the stage in Australia of noting the effect which climate has upon the system in general, much less of inquiring into the changes which occur in such organs as the liver, spleen, &c. But apart from investigating the phenomena of acclimatization, it is very plain that the people of Australia have never given any heed to their semitropical climate, or else the food-faults now universally practised would have been ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... sprang from the hasty ire of a peppery soldier increased, against his own will, into what appeared to all the world, and most of all to the victim, to be a piece of malevolent persecution. The ball kicked off in a fit of spleen rolled on and on ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... Margot was venting his spleen in a scarcely articulate mutter, we repaired to the lodge, knocked up the porter, communicated the accident, and procured the ladder. However, an observant eye had been kept upon our proceedings, and the window above was re-opened, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... side, and left on it the two tender ribs, above and below, and so he left it on the corresponding side. It follows that he left on the two sides, two and two ribs above, and two and two ribs below. He cut it off, and gave it to him who gained it for his lot, the backbone with it, and the spleen hanging upon it. And it was large, but the right side is called large, as the liver hangs upon it. He came to the tail; he cut it off and gave it to him who gained it for his lot, and the fat, and the finger of ...
— Hebrew Literature
... experiments. I put the bluebottle's eggs to hatch on a piece of meat and leave the worms to do their work as they please. The lean tissues, whether of mutton, beef or pork, no matter which, are not turned into liquid; they become a pea soup of a clarety brown. The liver, the lung, the spleen are attacked to better purpose, without, however, getting beyond the state of a semi-fluid jam, which easily mixes with water and even appears to dissolve in it. The brains do not liquefy either: they simply melt into a ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... at Zumbo, at the mouth of the Loangwa, on the 1st of November. The water being scarcely up to the knee, our land party waded this river with ease. A buffalo was shot on an island opposite Pangola's, the ball lodging in the spleen. It was found to have been wounded in the same organ previously, for an iron bullet was imbedded in it, and the wound entirely healed. A great deal of the plant Pistia stratiotes was seen floating in the river. Many ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... or in any of the most remote parts of England, Wales, or Scotland. There is a subject which dilates the heart of every true Briton, which relaxes his muscles, however rigid, to a smile,—which opens his lips, however closed, to conversation. There is a subject "which frets another's spleen to cure our own," and which makes even the angelic part of the creation laugh themselves mortal. For who can forbear to laugh at the bare idea ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... passion of a vegetable fashion must excite your languid spleen, An attachment E LA Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-too- French French bean. Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, If you walk down ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... your attention to be diverted for a few moments from the interest of the present events, and resume your acquaintance with that most deserving and ill-used cavalier. And here, by the way, I may perhaps be allowed to indulge my spleen, by manifesting my extreme dislike to interruptions in general, for there is nothing so vexatious and mortifying as the unpleasant necessity to which an author is obliged to submit of breaking the thread of a narration when it begins ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... bitterness of his heart had made him look pale and thin. For the first time in his life he had spoken harshly to his valet, and that meek Celestial wore an expression of grief and surprise, for Pedro Amaral, whatever his faults, did not have the vulgar one of venting his spleen upon his inferiors, so that his lifelong servant was at a loss to ...
— In Macao • Charles A. Gunnison
... the room, leaving Annie to scowl ominously at the new nurse, and vent her spleen by boxing her doll, because the inanimate little lady would not keep her blue-bead eyes open. Beulah loved children, and Johnny forcibly reminded her of earlier days, when she had carried Lilly about in her arms. For some time after ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... you surely don't let that worry you? Why, I've the same thing to put up with every day of my life. I smile at it." And Mahony believed what he said, forgetting, in the antagonism such spleen roused in him, the annoyance the false stressing of his own name could ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... many employers of labor. His denunciation of these folk might be traced back to the belief that none of them treated one fairly. A policeman, he averred, would arrest a man for next door to nothing, and any resistance offered to their spleen rendered the unfortunate prisoner liable to be man-handled in his cell until their outraged dignity was appeased. The three capital crimes upon which a man is liable to arrest is for being drunk, or disorderly, or for refusing to fight, and to these ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... the finer and more appreciative critic. The rancorous democrat who shared with Byron the infamy of sympathetic admiration for the enemy of England and the tyrant of France found for once an apt and a fair occasion to vent his spleen against the upper classes of his countrymen in criticism of the underplot of Heywood's most celebrated play. Lamb, thinking only of the Frankfords, Wincotts, and Geraldines, whose beautiful and noble characters are the finest and surest witnesses to the noble and ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a branch of spleen-wort, a species of fern, (Asplenium trichomanes) into the hand of a gnome as a protection from evil influences in ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... (the objective value of life). But if the rope becomes weak the puppet sinks; if it breaks the puppet must fall, for the ground beneath it only seemed to support it: i.e., the weakening of that love of life shows itself as hypochondria, spleen, melancholy: its entire exhaustion as the inclination to suicide. And as with the persistence in life, so is it also with its action and movement. This is not something freely chosen; but while everyone would really gladly rest, want and ennui are ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... union of the domestic circle. It is necessary for the exercise of all the affections; and even our weaknesses require the presence of other men. There would be no enjoyment of rank or wealth, if there were none to admire;—and even the misanthrope requires the presence of another to whom his spleen may be uttered. The abuse of this principle leads to the contracted ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... expression, and yet I feel the utmost pleasure in any such music as I can comprehend, learned pieces always excepted. I believe I may be about the pitch of Terry's connoisseurship, and that "I have a reasonable good ear for a jig, but your solos and sonatas give me the spleen." ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... must be noted in Holy Willie that the poet is not letting himself out in a burst of personal spleen. He is again girding at the rigidity of a lopped and maimed Calvinism, and attacking the creed through the man. The poem is a living presentment of the undiluted, puritanic doctrine of the Auld Light ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... months before, she proceeded with unwashed hands to arrange the stipulated bed-linen (alas, how different from Ailie Dinmont's!), and muttering to herself as she discharged her task, seemed, in inveterate spleen of temper, to grudge even those accommodations for which she was to receive payment. At length, however, she departed, grumbling between her teeth, that "she wad rather lock up a haill ward than be fiking ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... obliged," said Hart. "We'll disarm this bird and pack him back to the derrick." They did. Shorty almost wept with rage and pain and impotent malice. He cursed steadily and fluently. He might as well have saved his breath, for his captors paid not the least attention to his spleen. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... these altitudes, but keep along the terraced glades by the side of olive-shaded streams. The violets, instead of peeping shyly from hedgerows, fall in ripples and cascades over mossy walls among maidenhair and spleen-worts. They are very sweet, and the sound of trickling water seems to mingle with their fragrance in a most delicious harmony. Sound, smell, and hue make up one chord, the sense of which is pure and perfect peace. The country-people are kind, letting us pass everywhere, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... It occurs at a time of life when all the tissues are most stable and the nutrition of the body is at its best. Other physiologic changes which occur at the same time are decrease in the size of the spleen and lymphatic glands, the muscular coats of the intestine atrophy, and lessened peristalsis ensues; hence the increased tendency to constipation. These are not the degenerations of age, but the blood-supplying, blood-making, and blood-elaborating ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... mistakes of kings and bigots, he spoke out of an abundance of knowledge, instead of narrowness, and that he could look with a kind eye also at the mistakes of the people. If I still think he has too great a leaning to the former, and that his humanity is a little too much embittered with spleen, I can still see and respect the vast difference between the spirit which I formerly thought I saw in him, and the little lurking contempts and misanthropies of a naturally wise and kind man, whose blood perhaps has been somewhat ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... Puritans.... In the light, transparent atmosphere of the States, simplicity, the cheerful, alert spirit infects the foreigner, makes him a more frank, trustful, optimistic warrior for the truth, and causes him to forget what it means to be downcast in spirit, or what spleen and hypochondria are. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... disadvantage to which all preaching is subject; that those who, by the wickedness of their lives, stand in greatest need, have usually the smallest share; for either they are absent upon the account of idleness, or spleen, or hatred to religion, or in order to doze away the intemperance of the week; or, if they do come, they are sure to employ their minds rather any other way, than regarding or attending to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... up my 'ead, An' he plugged me where I bled, An' 'e guv me 'arf-a-pint o' water-green: It was crawlin' and it stunk, But of all the drinks I've drunk, I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din. It was "Din! Din! Din! 'Ere's a beggar with a bullet through 'is spleen; 'E's chawin' up the ground, An' 'e's kickin' all around: For Gawd's sake git ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... out a quantity of wine and drank it at a gulp. He refilled the glass and nearly emptied it a second time. But he touched not a morsel of meat or bread. Helen, fortunately, attributed the conduct of the men to spleen. She ate a sandwich, and found that she was far more ready for a ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... members of that powerful order by attentions which the Directory heard of with wonder, and would have heard of, had he been any other than Napoleon, with scorn and contempt.[12] Wherever he could have personal intercourse with the priesthood, he seems to have considerably softened their spleen. Meanwhile the clergy beyond the Apennines, and the nobility of Romagna, were combining all their efforts to rouse the population against him; and the Pope, pushed, as we have seen, to despair by the French Directory, had no reason ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... an eagerness equalling his former reluctance. The young man entered, and Sir John followed him. The jailer locked the gate carefully, then he turned, followed by Roland and the Englishman in turn. The latter was beginning to get accustomed to his young friend's erratic character. The spleen he saw in Roland was misanthropy, without the sulkiness of Timon or the ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the Unionists grow oranger, I mark the wigs upon the green, The rooted hairs of Ulster bristle And all men talk of CARSON'S gristle, Then why should this absurd epistle, Put down beside my little porringer, Provoke not England's spleen? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... to mind her). How you dress, madam! For shame! Pay more attention to your personal appearance! Have recourse to art where nature has been unkind. Put a little paint on those cheeks, which look so pale with spleen. Poor creature! Your puny face ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... infinite things are one distinctly, can also be seen, as in a mirror, from man. In man there are many and numberless things, as said above; but still man feels them all as one. From sensation he knows nothing of his brains, of his heart and lungs, of his liver, spleen, and pancreas; or of the numberless things in his eyes, ears, tongue, stomach, generative organs, and the remaining parts; and because from sensation he has no knowledge of these things, he is to himself as a one. The reason is that all these are ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... over!" cried the changed man. "O God! How powerful is virtue! How strong is the force of those qualities of the heart which we men often treat as weak baubles to toy with, and throw away in our fits of proud spleen—the softness, the gentleness, the fidelity and devotedness of woman! How strangely, how wonderfully formed is the heart of man, which, disdaining the terrors of the rope of the executioner, breaks and succumbs at the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... pleased to suppose that our spleen is excited, because he has interfered to snatch from us a victory over the administration. If he means by this any personal disappointment, I shall not think it worth while to make a remark upon it. If he means a disappointment at his quitting us while we ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... feet, appears to provoke little enthusiasm in him; he merely asks, Whether at that period the Maiden Queen 'was red-painted on the nose, and white-painted on the cheeks, as her tire-women, when from spleen and wrinkles she would no longer look in any glass, were wont to serve her?' We can answer that Sir Walter knew well what he was doing, and had the Maiden Queen been stuffed parchment dyed in verdigris, would have ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... drink," and various ill effects were attributed to it—the decay of the teeth, and even the loss of the mental faculties. But the Abbe Robin thought the ability of the Revolutionary soldiers to endure military flogging came from the use of tea. And others thought it cured the spleen and indigestion. ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on, but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or distorted. He wrote an account of them, but 'twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings." "I met Smelfungus," he wrote later on, "in the ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... be a Man naturally splenetic, and melancholy; is there any thing more offensive to one of such a DISPOSITION (where he uses the Word instead of Humour) than Noise and Clamour? Let any Man that has the Spleen (and there are enough in England) be Judge. We see common Examples of this HUMOUR in little every Day. 'Tis ten to one, but three Parts in four of the Company you dine with, are discomposed, and started at the cutting of a Cork, or scratching of ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... hayro iv th' Ph'lippeens who is at home with a large spleen which he got into him in our beautiful island possissions made a speech before th' Locoed club las' night. He said we shud niver give up th' Ph'lippeens which had been wathered be some iv th best blood in our land—he might say all. He didn't ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... the same number of political systems as there were refugees." The French sympathisers in America mingled with these emigres and were more or less concerned with their plans. The press offered the opportunity to vent much of their spleen on Washington and to express their opinions of the "British United States Government," ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... either for services rendered, or because of their appreciation of his abilities. But, however much he may have been disappointed at their inaction, it may not be argued, as it has been, that Swift's so-called change in his political opinions was the outcome either of spleen or chagrin against the Whigs for their ingratitude towards him. It is, indeed, questionable whether Swift ever changed his political opinions, speaking of these as party opinions. From the day of his entrance, it may be said, into the orders of the Church, his first ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... unfriendly to him. He had broken the code, and he knew it. In the outdoor West a man does not slander a good woman without the chance of having to pay for it. The puncher had let his bad bullying temper run away with him. He had done it because he had supposed Dillon harmless, to vent on him the spleen he could not safely empty upon Dud Hollister's ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... South Carolina and venting its spleen on the Secession State, the Federal Army, like a great forest fire, sweeping over vast areas, stops of its own accord by finding nothing to feed upon. The vandalism of the Union Army in North Carolina was confined mostly to the ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... about the destruction or suppression of Jewish books, afforded him a splendid opportunity of venting his spleen against the Church. A converted Jew of Cologne named Pfefferkorn advocated the suppression of all Jewish religious books except the Old Testament, as the best means of converting his former co-religionists. The Emperor, Maximilian, was not unwilling to listen ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... causes insalivation by paralysis of the secretory fibers of the chorda tympani; increases the flow of bile; has no action upon the spleen. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... given by the affrighted Gentlewoman was only laughed at and ridiculed as the Effect of Spleen-Vapours, or the Frenzy of a deluded Imagination, and was thought no more of, till one Night, when the Earl of Kilmarnock, sitting round a Bowl by the Winter Fire with my Lord Galloway,—and it is at such a Time that men are most prone to fall-to telling of Ghost Stories,—and their Lordships' ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... the morbid psychology of the mind which has attained the October of its sensations, recounted the symptoms of souls summoned by grief and licensed by spleen, and shown the increasing decay of impressions while the enthusiasms and beliefs of youth are enfeebled and the only thing remaining is the arid memory of miseries borne, intolerances endured and affronts suffered by intelligences ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... in his writings satires in which Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, was especially held up to ridicule. The Galileans were at the bottom of this as of all other contradictions, he declared, and continued to vent his spleen upon the Christians. It was the last stand of ancient paganism before ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... those who only reverence the past, while the halo which gilds the memories of youth is the cause of its ceaseless repetition. For it has been heard through every period. It was in the era when our greatest dramas were created that Ben Jonson, during a fit of the spleen, occasioned by the failure of "The New Inn," begat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... caze hit's a low-lifeted one, dat's what 'tis; en ef you'd a min' w'at I tell you, you'd be settin' up at home right dis minute wid ole Miss a-feedin' you on br'ile chicken. You may fit all you wanter—I ain' sayin' nuttin' agin yo' fittin ef yo' spleen hit's up—but you could er foun' somebody ter fit wid back at home widout comin' out hyer ter git yo'se'f a-jumbled up wid all de po' white trash in de county. Dis yer wah ain' de kin' I'se use ter, caze hit jumbles de quality en de trash tergedder des like dey ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... marquee, and as I approached it I could distinctly hear one of the bondsmen earnestly pleading for mercy. Listening for a moment, I heard this distinguished general exclaiming vociferously, and belabouring the poor negro heavily with a raw-hide whip; most likely venting the spleen he felt at his non-success against the Indians, the expedition having hitherto been unsuccessful. The poor negro had offended his master, by some trivial act, no doubt, and in southern style he was correcting him, without much ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... of his adoption; and on the single occasion heretofore when he had been before the public, in the School Board fiasco, the officials indicted on his supposed evidence had triumphantly been vindicated—, Guptill was gaining money and notoriety out of his spleen; Perry Blackwood was acting out of spite.... I returned to Krebs, declaring that he would be the boss of the city if that ticket were elected, demanding whether they wished for a boss an agitator itching ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
