"Coster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... himself was the more venerable. This heresy revived in Egypt after its suppression elsewhere, and its adherents claimed that Melchizedek was the Holy Ghost. The last time Melchizedek was heard of he was a London coster-monger's donkey, but whether this was a real incarnation of the original Melchizedek no one is able to decide, unless the Lord should again, as in the case of Balaam's companion, "open the mouth of the ass" and inform the world of the things ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... to say, in Mulliner's Rents; it was quite select in that one single respect. Nothing on wheels penetrated the unlovely quarter save a coster's barrow of fruit; unwholesome little yellow pears and cruelly green apples of the lowest type of apple-kind being the wares of the moment. It was truly a sad and sorrowful haunt, this of the man-made town; ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... as Dutchmen love; still, when we finished, daylight lingered. In the fantastic square with its crowding varieties of capricious Dutch architecture, the cathedral was cut black and sharp out of a sky of beaten gold, and Coster's statue wore a glittering halo. Under their archways of green, the canals were on fire with sunset, their flames quenched in the thick moss which clothed their walls; the red-brown color of paved streets, and the houses with their pointed facades in many steps, burned also, as if they were ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... work to carry out the plan he had cherished ever since. He owned the entire block on Broadway, between Vesey and Barclay streets, with the exception of one house, which was the property of a Mr. Coster, a merchant who had amassed a large fortune and retired from business. Mr. Astor made him many offers for his house, but the old gentleman was unwilling to remove. Mr. Astor offered him the full value of his house, which ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... value on himself. He lives in water perpetually, and is always bobbing mysteriously about in it with his four-fingered hands spread out before him. This seems to me to be nothing but a vulgar manifestation of the Smooth-clawed Frog's self-appreciation. He is like a coster conducting a Dutch auction, except that it is himself that he puts up for the bids of admiring visitors. With his double bunch of four fingers held eagerly before him he says—or means to say—"'Ere—eight! Ain't that cheap enough? Eight! Going ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... ladder. Hello! Where's the fire? Unless I'm much mistaken, young feller, there's a first-class row goin' on outside our bloomin' cafe. No, no, don't you butt in among Arabs as though you was strollin' down Edgware Road on a Saturday night, an' get mixed up in a coster rough-an'-tumble. These long-legged swine would knife you just for the fun of it. Keep full an' by, an' let any son of a gun who comes too near have it where ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... of the celebrated tree, with Napoleon's guide, De Coster, in the foreground, see Captain Arthur Gore's Explanatory Notes on the Battle of Waterloo, 1817; and for another view of the ragged old tree as it appeared the day before it was cut down, see Illustrated London News, ...
— A Week at Waterloo in 1815 • Magdalene De Lancey
... ten the State Attorney, Coster, took his seat, and, beginning with my husband's name, called ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... me in evil company, highkickers, coster picnicmakers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in fleshtights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... immortals, Faust, Coster, and Gutenberg, invented the Book, craftsmen as obscure as many a great artist of those times appropriated paper to the uses of typography. In the fifteenth century, that naive and vigorous age, names were given to the various formats as well as ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... every kind of annoyance, overlooked, without any thing to look at. How much, then, per fathom (or measure, if you please, by cable-lengths) is land worth fronting the noble, silent, uncontaminating, healthful sea? Whence can come no coster-mongers' cries, no agitating skir of bagpipes or the maddening hurdy-gurdy, no German band expecting half a crown for the creation of insanity; only sweet murmur of the wavelets, and the melodious whistle of a boatman catching your breakfast lobster. Where, again, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... aristocracy; where productive implements often took on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds often exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaic uses, that we can only parallel them by imagining armorial tabards, or even religious vestments, woven out of a navvy's corderoys or a coster's pearl buttons. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... years that ended with the Mid-Victorians the exclusiveness of Brighton gave way to the excursion train, and though still a fashionable place, it is now more than ever London-by-the-sea and caters with true courtliness for coster ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... be edifying to tell a duke that our public schools are all wrong in their constitution and methods, or a costermonger that children should be treated as in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister instead of as they are treated at the elementary school at the corner of his street; but what are the duke and the coster to do? Neither of them has any effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the schools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does not go to school, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... narrow, very tortuous and very crowded. Foot-passengers and vehicles of all sorts find their way along as best they may in one confused mass. It was there I saw the historic pair of wheels in question. They were attached to the barrow of a coster-monger, who was retailing a stock of onions, carrots and "cavolo Romano" which he had just purchased at the neighboring market of the "Campo de' Fiori." His wares, I fear, had been selected from the refuse of the market, and he and his barrow were in a state of dilapidated shabbiness that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... beach they could catch glimpses of an illumination, and it seemed as though some of the coast patrol might be burning coster lights to signal the vessel on ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... developed lips, it was large outside in proportion to her size. She had a soft, kind face, beautiful grey eyes, nearly black hair which draped naturally, and was altogether as nice a little woman as one could have wanted. I have wondered often how she could have settled down in a neighbourhood of coster-mongers, and taken five shillings for her person, when she might as well have been a two-sovereign woman, had she tried elsewhere. I put her up to trying at a future day, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... are next 'im are Irish also, Jack O'Donnell and Bill Ryan. When you get a good Irishman you can't better 'em, but they're dreadful 'asty. That little cove with the leery face is Caleb Baldwin the Coster, 'im that they call the Pride of Westminster. 'E's but five foot seven, and nine stone five, but 'e's got the 'eart of a giant. 'E's never been beat, and there ain't a man within a stone of 'im that could beat 'im, except only Dutch Sam. There's George Maddox, ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... let us address an arithmetical age—but my pen hesitates to bring down my subject to an argument fitted to "these coster-monger times."[16] On the present principle of literary property, it results that an author disposes of a leasehold property of twenty-eight years, often for less than the price of one year's purchase! How many living authors are the sad witnesses of this fact, who, like so many Esaus, have sold ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... costers, but old John told them that that was nothing to what it was fifty years ago. The year that Andover won the block began seven or eight miles from Epsom. They were often half-an-hour without moving. Such chaffing and laughing, the coster cracked his joke with the duke, but all that was done away ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... there were probably some thousands of "Scotts," and among them, some hundreds of "John Scotts," in all ranks of life, from the old landed proprietor with his town-house in Belgravia, to the poor coster-monger with his donkey-cart in Covent Garden, in this great city of London, there was little danger that the real rank of these ruined noblemen should be suspected, and no possibility that they should be recognized and identified. They were as completely ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... there was appointed as State Attorney Dr. Coster, a Hollander, who however declined to have anything to do with the organization of the police; and in Mr. Trimble's stead reappeared the individual whom he had superseded and whose services had been dispensed with.{15} The triumph of the back-door ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... was published a very curious, and now uncommon, octavo volume, of about 250 pages, by SEIZ; called "Annus Tertius Saecularis Inventae Artis Typographicae," Harlem, 1741—with several very interesting cuts relating to Coster, the supposed inventor of the art of printing. It is a little strange that Lysander, in the above account of eminent typographical writers, should omit to mention CHEVILLIER—whose L'Origine de l'Imprimerie de Paris, &c., 1694, 4to., is a work ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... like this. Lord —— comes to me a week or two before the Derby, and "Tom," he says, "I've got a notion. You and me," he says, "is goin' down to the Derby together," he says. "I've got a pair of snow-white mokes," he says, "and I've bought a coster's shallow. I'm having it painted white and picked out in gold," he says, "and it's going to be upholstered in white satin. Now, you and me, Tom," says his lordship—"you and me's going to get up in white shoes, white kickseys, white westcuts, white hats, white coats, ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... bazaars in India All glitter and spices and smells, But they don't compare With the naphtha flare And the herrings the coster sells; And the oranges piled like gold, The cucumbers lean and cold, And the red and white block-trimmings And the strawberries fresh and ripe, And the peas and beans, And the sprouts and greens, And the ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... sooner except for climbing across my neighbors. I suppose there are young popinjays who seriously affirm that Ziegfeld's Beauty Chorus is equal to the galaxy of loveliness that once pranced at Weber and Field's when we came down from college on Saturday night. At old Coster and Bial's there was once a marvelous beauty who swung from a trapeze above the audience and scandalously undressed herself down to the fifth encore and her stockings. And, really, are there plays now as exciting as the Prisoner of Zenda, with its great fight upon the stairs—three men ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... art of printing into the Low Countries, and the rival claim of Coster and Gutenberg, have proved a highly fruitful source of literary quarrels and disputations. It is not worth our while to enter, even briefly, into the merits of the arguments either for or against; and it will suffice for our ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... there; the Jews, especially, seemed to like me fine. One Sunday I was down Petticoat Lane, in Whitechapel, to see the sichts. I never thocht anyone there wad recognize me, and I stood quietly watching a young Jew selling clothes from a coster's barrow. But all at once another Jew came up to me, slapped me on the back, and cried oot: "Ach, Mr. Lauder, and how you vas to-day? I vish there vas a kilt in the Lane— you would ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder
... Bumstead operation is known under the title of Ricord's procedure. Lisfranc, Malapert, M. Coster, and Vidal all have operations which are not as useful as Ricord's, and have not, therefore, come into general use. M. Sedillot condemns the dorsal incision as leaving two unsightly-looking flaps. The reverse, or inferior incision of M. Jules Cloquet is likewise not in favor with either Malgaigne ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Virgin's eyes, and that lady delivered herself of a coster ballad with more art than she was aware. The chill of Frona's advent was quickly dissipated, and song and toast and merriment went round again. Nor was Frona above touching lips to the jelly glass in fellowship; and she contributed her quota by singing "Annie Laurie" and "Ben ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... talks slang as much as the democratic; this is true, and it strongly supports the view under consideration. Nothing is more startling than the contrast between the heavy, formal, lifeless slang of the man-about-town and the light, living, and flexible slang of the coster. The talk of the upper strata of the educated classes is about the most shapeless, aimless, and hopeless literary product that the world has ever seen. Clearly in this, again, the upper classes have degenerated. We have ample evidence that the old leaders of feudal war could speak ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... classes in which the constitution has been undermined by bad food, bad air, and unhealthy occupations; she had delicate features and large blue eyes, and a mass of dark hair done in the elaborate fashion of the coster girl. She and her husband ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... funeral march ceased to execute, discomfited by the persistent and overpowering violin; the banjo and the coster-songs were given over; even the collegians' music was defeated; and the neighborhood was forced to listen to the dauntless fiddle, but not without protest, for there came an indignant, spoken chorus from the quarter whence the college songs had issued: "Ya-a-ay! Wetherford, put it away! ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington |
