"Rabble" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the high church, for which reason the magistrates assigned them a place on the Wollgraben, where they built their present quarter. This was surrounded by high walls, the gate of which was held by iron chains to keep out the rabble. For here, too, the Jews lived in misery and anxiety, and with far more vivid memories of previous suffering than they have at present. In 1240 the unrestrained populace had caused awful bloodshed among them, which people called the first Jewish ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... well to cheer them. They are gallant youngsters these. The game they play is 'Polo,' and though the expense be great, the contempt of danger and pain is also great. They play it well, but I doubt not we could match them at Hurlingham. But see," he added, "on our left. What rabble is that?" As he spoke a panting deer flew past them hard pressed by a pack of yelping hounds. Close behind came a mob of riders, two or three of them glittering in scarlet and gold, the rest in ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... of the work, and have been obliged to make use of wooden clamps for most of it, while battens also have not been forthcoming; and, this being so, it was through no remissness of mine that the work could not be finished by sunset tonight. I suspect, too, that, to eke out its wages, that rabble has been thieving, with the eldest leading the rest. And that, again, is not a thing for which I can be held responsible. True, this is a Government job, and some of those fellows are young, and young, hungry fellows such as they will (may they be forgiven!) steal, since everyone hankers ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Retreat continues in the snow without, now in the form of a file of ox-carts, followed by a mixed rabble of English and Spanish, and mules and muleteers hired by English officers to carry their baggage. The muleteers, looking about and seeing that the French dragoons gave been there, cut the bands which hold on the heavy packs, and ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... also, and the right use of sacraments and prayer; and have given us of their own to play withal in the meanwhile, salt, water, oil, boxes, spittle, palms, bulls, jubilees, pardons, crosses, censings, and an endless rabble of ceremonies, and, as a man might term with Plautus, "pretty games to make sport withal." In these things have they set all their religion, teaching the people that by these God may be duly pacified, spirits be driven away, and men's consciences ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... rabble of either sex That hung around the wretches as they writhed, Till thrust back by our spears, one held my eye - A weeping woman, whose strained countenance, Sharpened against a looming livid cloud, Was mocked by the crude rays of afternoon - The mother of one ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... fertile land; at the end of the valley, toward Dan, as much as half the land is solid and fertile, and watered by Jordan's sources. There is enough of it to make a farm. It almost warrants the enthusiasm of the spies of that rabble of adventurers who captured Dan. They said: "We have seen the land, and behold it is very good. * * * A place where there is no want of any thing that is in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the "Quaker City" than had been witnessed there since the preceding Presidential election. The party-leaders began to lay their plans early, and the wire-pullers on both sides were unusually busy in their vocation. At the head of the rabble upon which one of the parties depended for many votes, was a drunken and profane fellow, whom we will call Tom Simmons. Tom was great at electioneering and stump-spouting in bar-rooms and rum-caucuses, and his party always looked to him, at each election, to stir up the subterraneans "with ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... never liked the French all my days," said his Lordship, "but now I hate them." And yet a little further on: "A government in any country should be like a corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented. As for the rabble who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? They may pack up their property on their backs, and leave the country in the twinkling of an eye." After having made profession of sentiments ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and I both know that Wordsworth would not deign to notice such an accusation. Through good and evil report, the brave man persevered in his ascent to the mountain-top, without ever even turning round to look upon the rabble that was hooting him from its base; and he is not likely now to heed such a charge as this. But his friends may now ask, on what authority it is published? Was it to you, Mr. Walter Landor, whom Southey (in his strange affection for the name of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... material condition than savages, and their spiritual opportunities are infinitely greater; for their eye and fancy are fed with visions of human greatness, and even if they cannot improve their outward estate they can possess a poetry and a religion. It suffices to watch an Oriental rabble at prayer, or listening in profound immobility to some wandering story-teller or musician, to feel how much such a people may have to ruminate upon, and how truly Arabian days and Arabian Nights go together. The ideas evolved may be wild and futile and the emotions savagely sensuous, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... this case the actors would have the spectators in a circle around them. Inn-yards, however—those of that day were constructed with galleries along three sides—proved to be more convenient for the audience, inasmuch as the galleries provided comfortable seats above the rabble for those who cared to pay for them. The stage was then erected either in the midst or at the fourth side, projecting out into the yard. In such surroundings the popular Morality-Interludes ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... boys still stared. It was as if two leaders or generals were meeting for the first time, and the rabble, looking on, wondered what would come ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of fact in great measure allayed in January 1915, owing to the Osmanlis pressing forward to the Suez Canal, sustaining a severe rebuff near its banks at the hands of the defending force, and disappearing eastwards as a beaten and disorganized rabble. ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... that he had done no more than his duty to his King, who was almost a republican monarch, and to his country, which was the freest in the world. As for the visionaries and their visions, a few refugees in Zuerich, cheered on by the rabble abroad, might dream of constructing a universal republic out of the various nations and races, with Rome as their capital, but these were the delirious dreams ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... man resolv'd and steady to his trust, Inflexible to ill, and obstinately just, May the rude rabble's insolence despise, Their senseless clamours, and tumultuous cries; The tyrant's fierceness he beguiles, And the stern brow, and the harsh voice defies, ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... doubt we shall take a certain amount of muskets and ammunition with us, but the power of England is more assuredly fixed in Ireland now than it was then—the influence of the old Irish families is broken, and even if we armed all who joined us, it would be but an armed rabble and not ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... came to him, the fighting blood in his veins leaped at the sight of it—the pretended effect of the shots from sea, the sham confusion, the disorderly flight, the wonderful quickness and precision with which the rabble of armed men had thrown itself ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... horses, and barking of dogs. On our joining the party at the rendezvous in front of the caffè, we found some twenty horsemen, carrying guns,—rough and ready fellows, looking as if a dash into the forest, whether against hogs or gendarmes, would equally suit them. We were followed by a rabble on foot, attended by dogs of a variety of species, some of them strong and fierce. After winding through the narrow lanes among the vineyards, our cavalcade was joined by one of the gentlemen on whom we had called with a letter of introduction, and his son, who mixed ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... are some troublesome people of the city rabble at the door. Bid the guard turn out, and thrust them away. Tell them to strike not too gently with the flats of their swords and the butts ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... city with the principal persons of my company, and the grand master of the Bishop's household. This reverend personage, who was eighty years of age, and wore a beard as white as snow, which reached down to his girdle, this venerable old man, I say, was no sooner recognised by the drunken and armed rabble than he was accosted with the grossest abuse, and it was with difficulty they were restrained from laying violent hands upon him. At length I got him into my lodgings, but the mob fired at the house, the walls of which were only of plaster. Upon being thus attacked, I inquired for the master of ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... tribute to the artist's power of rendering the repulsive. His Messalina, Lassatta, La Femme au Cochon, and La Femme au Pantin should be studied. He has painted scissors grinders, flower girls, "old guards," incantations, fishing parties, the rabble in the streets, broom-riding witches, apes, ivory and peacocks, and a notable figure piece, An Interment in the Walloon Country, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... right side. In the time of his high-chancellorship, being but an ale-brewer's son of London, John Capgrave saith that he took upon him as he had been a prince. He played the courtier altogether, and fashioned himself wholly to the king's delights. He ruffled it out in the whole cloth with a mighty rabble of disguised ruffians at his tail. He sought the worldly honour with him that sought it most. He thought it a pleasant thing to have the flattering praises of the multitude. His bridle was of silver, his saddle of velvet, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... persons quickly disgust their audiences, and have a brief life upon the list. They ought never to be introduced to the public as lecturers; and any momentary augmentation of receipts that may be secured from the rabble by the patronage of such mountebanks is more than lost by the disgrace they bring and the damage they do to what is called "The Lecture System." It is an insult to any lyceum-audience to suppose that it can have a strong and permanent interest in a trifler; and it is a gross ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... be justified. In all the brown faces which he saw directed towards him Heideck clearly read detestation and menace. They naturally regarded him as an Englishman, and it was only his decided manner and the naked sword in his hand that prevented the rabble from venting in a personal attack their rage against one of the hated race ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... army was composed of men "whose condition ... was such that a change could not make worse." The men who fought so valiantly against the Indians and Berkeley's forces, braved the King's anger, faced death on the gallows were called in contempt "the bases of the people," "the rabble," the "scum of the people," "idle and poor people," "rag, tag, and bobtail." The Council reported that there were "hardly two amongst them" who owned estates, or were persons of reputation. Berkeley complained that his was a miserable task to govern a people "where six parts of seven ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... grow I think is Tousell; grain of hardy fame; The imp rejoined, I never heard its name; What is it. Tousell, say'st thou?—I agree, If good return, 'twill be the same to me; Work fellow, work; make haste, the ground prepare; To dig and delve should be the rabble's care; Don't think that I will ever lend a hand, Or give the slightest aid to till the land; I've told thee I'm a gentleman by birth, Designed for ease: not doomed to turn the earth. Howe'er I'll now the diff'rent ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... recollections of their moral abandonment. One of the groups is a chain gang at work—breaking stones for the road—or, a last effort at self-improvement, by mending the ways of others. How different would these worthies appear in a rabble rout at a London fire, or in all the sleekness of civilization, as exhibited in the sundry avocations of picking a pocket, in easing a country gentleman of his uncrumpled or bright dividend, or studying our ease and comfort by helping themselves to all our houses contain without the rudeness of disturbing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... soon arranged whatever there was to arrange; and, after some charmingly spoken words of farewell from the gentle lady, we took our departure. Again the mummified negro hobbled before us, to open the gate,—followed by all his callow rabble of chickens. As we resumed our places in the carriage we could still hear the chippering of the creatures, ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... hundred yards or so beyond the royal lodgings; but after a short parley, the horsemen were permitted to pass. The device on the banneret was new to Aymer, and, knowing it belonged to none of those now with the army, and curious as to what could have attracted the rabble, he waited. ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... declared that he would not leave a single village girl on his estate unnoticed, that that was his DROIT DE SEIGNEUR, and that if the peasants dared to protest he would have them all flogged and double the tax on them, the bearded rascals. Our servile rabble applauded, but I attacked him, not from compassion for the girls and their fathers, but simply because they were applauding such an insect. I got the better of him on that occasion, but though Zverkov was stupid he was lively and impudent, and so laughed ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to future investigators, who ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... he announced abruptly, waving his hand at the crowds. "They don't know that something important's happening in Russia." He pronounced it Rooshia. Dorn saw his eyes kindle with a kindliness as he denounced the rabble ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... the Herowdys scaffald xal unclose, shewyng Herowdes in astat, alle the Jewys knelyng except Annas and Cayaphas."[792] Chaucer speaks of the "scaffold hye" on which jolif Absolon played Herod; king Herod in fact was always enthroned high above the common rabble. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... not been advertised in the papers, so as to draw together a rabble of betting men and ill-conditioned lookers-on, there was a considerable gathering, made up chiefly of the villagers and the students of the two institutions. Among them were a few who were disposed to add to their interest in the trial by small wagers. The bets were rather in favor of the "Quins," ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... philosophizing journeyman who from every capital of Europe pours forth his lyrico-cosmic effusions, and the hero of his historical novel The Messenger of God (1911) is a Swiss dominic who at the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War collects a motley rabble about him for new works of peace and single-handed makes of himself the restorer of a devastated community. But with all the scope of the theme there is a lack of genuine historical color; and compared with the great historical novel of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... to the appearance of great actors before an empty house. When the conflagration broke out, every effort was made to stop it, and eight hundred fire fiends were summarily punished. But as the burning walls of the storehouses fell, the rabble seized the barrels of spirits thus revealed, and drank themselves into blind fury; the French soldiery pillaged with little restraint, not sparing even the Kremlin. Finally, the flames were checked and order was restored, but not until three quarters of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... he replied. "'Wisdom cries in the streets, and no man regards her.' The small voice of Philosophy was unheard amid the blare of the trumpets that heralded successful knavery; the rabble ran headlong to the devil after gauds ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... of the scenes allotted to Coriolanus for fine touches and delicate shading. During much of the action the spectator is aware only of an imperial figure that moves with a mountainous grace through the fleeting rabble of Roman plebeians and Volscians, dreadful in war, loftily calm in peace, irradiating the conscious superiority of power, dignity, worth, and honourable renown. McCullough filled that aspect of the part as if he had been ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... and sanest of workaday worlds. It was to rediscover England, and find solid ground for the faith of those who still believed in her. But a necessary condition of this efficiency was that those who were efficient should give all their time to their business and leave the rabble raving to its heart's content. Indeed the raving was useful to the efficient, because, as it was always wide of the mark, it often distracted attention very conveniently from operations that would ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... Conspiracies were got up everywhere to bring about my removal. All the princes of the royal house—nay, the queen herself, united against me.[10] But you see, my dear, that they did not succeed after all in undermining my position; and the howling rabble outside will have no better success. Indeed, the fellows seem to be in earnest. Their blows shake ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... seated upon a throne of ivory. The crown of Agrippa glittered upon his forehead with an unnatural brightness—it was of the purest gold, radiating from the brow in spikes, and flecked with pearls of an uncommon size. Silent—erect—inflated with pride at his own grandeur, and the adulation of the rabble, sate the King of Palestine. Silent—awe-stricken—uncovered before the majesty of the representative of Claudius, stood the people of Samaria and Phenicia. Extreme beauty of an elevated and heroic character ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... army after army being hurled against him only to be thrown back, beaten and in disorder. The Government at Washington were kept in constant alarm by the near vicinity of his troops, and witnessed more than once the entry into their intrenchments of a defeated and disorganized rabble, which a few days previous had left them a confident host. Twice he entered the Northern States at the head of a successful army, and twice indecisive battles alone preserved from destruction the Federal Government, and turned the fortune of the war. He impressed his character on those who ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... master of this School, A. D. 1749." The house has but two sitting rooms, one on each side of the door, that to the right being the kitchen; and in one of them the dissolute father of the Poet is said by Dix to have "often passed the whole night roaring out catches, with some of the lowest rabble of the parish." He was succeeded in the office of Schoolmaster by Edmond Chard, who held it for five years; and he was followed in 1757 by Stephen Love, who was master twenty-one years, and to whom ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... all, the artistic tendencies of the Prince and his mother which had conquered the Hickses. There was fascination in the thought that, among the rabble of vulgar uneducated royalties who overran Europe from Biarritz to the Engadine, gambling, tangoing, and sponging on no less vulgar plebeians, they, the unobtrusive and self-respecting Hickses, should have had the luck to meet this cultivated ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... 'Clear out this rabble, or come back to the hotel and wait for the bus. We shall have the whole town round us soon, and I can't stand it,' said Amanda, who had no romantic admiration ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... a circuitous path, reached and entered the city. Here all was the wildest tumult and contention. A small party of men, clad in garments half-Indian, half-European, and officered by gentlemen in a uniform partly British, were engaged, at great odds, with the swarming rabble of the alleys. I joined the weaker party, arming myself with the weapons of a fallen officer, and fighting I knew not whom with the nervous ferocity of despair. We were soon overpowered by numbers, and driven to seek refuge in a species of kiosk. Here we barricaded ourselves, and, for the present ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... ruins of Ap Gauvon. In confidence therefore let me tell you that the funeral train will direct its course upon a different point. Take any convenient opportunity for leaving this rabble, and pursue your route to the Abbey through the valley which branches off on the left. You will easily reach it by nightfall; and you will there receive a ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... I exclaim, that in Old Times, when this Kingdom flourished, (as many appear by our Money coined of pure fine Gold) there was a plain and easy Way of doing Justice; there were few Law-suits, and those not of long Continuance, or indeed Eternal, as now they are; for then this Rabble-Rout of pretended Interpreters of the Law had not invaded the Publick: neither was the Science of the Law stretched out to such an unlimited Extent; but Truth and Equity, and a prudent Judge, endued with Integrity ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... evening I strolled in the antelope parks, enjoying the scenery and sport excessively. A noble buck nsunnu, standing by himself, was the first thing seen on this side, though a herd of hertebeests were grazing on the Usoga banks. One bullet rolled my fine friend over, but the rabble looking on no sooner saw the hit than they rushed upon him and drove him off, for he was only wounded. A chase ensued, and he was tracked by his blood when a pongo (bush box) was started and divided the party. It also brought me to another single buck nsunnu, which was ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Lincoln's Inn, with some hundreds of the mob at their heels, as soon as the seeming adversaries were got into Lincoln's Inn Fields, they both fell a running as fast as they could, with their swords drawn, up towards Lord Powis's house, which was then building, and leaped into a saw-pit. The rabble presently ran after them, to part them again, and feared mischief would be done before they could get up to them, but when they arrived at the saw-pit, they saw Chevalier at one side of it and Ogle at the other, sitting together as lovingly as if they had never fallen out at all. And then ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... quality neglected by most of our orators, who, charmed by the applause of a rabble brought together by chance, or even bribed to applaud with admiration every word and period, can neither endure the attentive silence of a judicious audience, nor seem to themselves to be eloquent unless they make everything ring about them with tumultuous clamor. ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... message with which he had been intrusted. "Up, gallants," exclaimed the martial monarch, "don your harness, and ride as lightly as you may to the relief of the Countess of Clare, she lies in peril of her life and honour, beleaguered by a rabble of unnurtured Welsh savages, who, lacking respect for beauty, have directed their arms against a woman. Swollen with vain pride at their late victory, (the fiend hang the coward loons who fled before them,) they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... of Vienna," said Saurau. "I want to ask him why he permits this nonsense, and order him to disperse the rabble in the ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... and mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise. Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their forecastle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to future investigators, who may complete what ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... be easy now to laugh at the frustrated designs of the Chartist leaders and at the sort of panic they aroused in London: the vast procession, which was to have marched in military order to overawe Parliament, resolving itself into a confused rabble easily dispersed by the police, and the monster petition, that should have numbered six million signatures, transported piecemeal to the House, and there found to have but two million names appended, many fictitious; the Chartist leader, completely cowed, thanking ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... organization. A fair balance was maintained among the leading members of the political body, so that the English kings could invade France with united national armies which easily defeated the incoherent rabble of knights and serfs whereby they were opposed. Nevertheless, when the English, after the manner of other efficient states, tried to conquer France, they were wholly unable to extinguish French resistance, as the similar resistance of conquered peoples had so frequently been extinguished ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... 'Do as you please, Mr. Loftus. I have been deceived in your character; the friend of the Baroness Surowkoff must be consistent; he must be as willing to fight for the cause he espouses as to speak for it: in this case, the sword must follow the oration, else we shall see Poland in the hands of a rabble.' ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the pitcher, making that great man the richer by a ton of adulation, in a red-hot fervor flung; and the poet, in a pickle, mused upon the false and fickle plaudits of the heartless rabble, till ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... formed a line across the avenue, and that such battered remnants of the invalid corps as had escaped were limping off behind their cover as fast as possible. The presence of the city's guardians had caused a brief hesitation in the approaching and broken edge of the rabble. Seeing this the brave sergeant ordered a charge, which was promptly and swiftly made, the mob recoiling before it more and more slowly as under pressure it became denser. There was no more effort to carry out the insane, rather than humane, tactics of the invalid corps, who had either ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... West Indies and Mexico, with one branch in the Rocky Mountains. My bird was M. obscurus, and came from Mexico. I found him in a New York bird-store, where he looked about as much at home among the shrieking and singing mob of parrots and canaries as a poet among a howling rabble ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... grew up under the influences of such a directress, and of books so light and frothy, with the inflaming additions of music, concerts, operas, plays, assemblies, balls, and the rest of the rabble of amusements of modern life, it is no wonder that, like early fruit, she was soon ripened to the hand of ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... public, or mob, in all ages, have been a set of blind, deaf, obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius, in his senses, would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful rabble. That the only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick their pockets, and, that failing, we are at full liberty to vilify and abuse them as much as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... have looked upon the burlesque grievances and the profitable privations? what an instructive lesson must not his powerful scorn of charlatanry have given to us, on the display of the whole system of sleight-of-hand, the popular cups and balls, the low dexterity and the rabble plunder? or, to sum all in one word, the reduction of all the claims, the rights, and the efforts of a party pronouncing itself national, to the collection of an annual tribute; the whole huge and rattling machinery of popular agitation, grinding simply for the "rint." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... there can be no government in future that will not be determined by our insistance on our fair and practicable demands. It is only by disorder that our demands will be choked, that we shall find ourselves lost among a brutal rabble, with all the intelligence of the country opposed to us, and see government in the shape of guns that will sweep us down in the ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... into an explosive bellow of delight, while the other ran off squeaking with excitement to find other devils who should share the treasure-trove. But, unlike his infamous predecessor, he was not content with seven. When he returned, it was but as the van of a fast-swelling rabble. His erstwhile companion, who had been backing steadily in front of me ever since he left, and had, after a hurried consideration of the respective merits of the booth and the box under Judy's arm, rejected them both in favour of my ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... of the crowd was curiosity, not sympathy. Notwithstanding all that had passed before their eyes, there was but little sympathy in the hearts of that rabble. ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... if I can stop it, lass. You don't want to be the talk of the town, do you? But whether you do or not, you're not going to have your way. There'll be scandal enough without Mark Clay's daughter adding to it by going marching through the town with the rabble that have just burnt her father's barns,' said Mr Howroyd; and he quickened his steps to avoid being caught up by the rabble, as he ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... it, Kory-Kory, wading up to his hips in the water, carried me half way across, and deposited me on a smooth black stone which rose a few inches above the surface. The amphibious rabble at our heels plunged in after us, and climbing to the summit of the grass-grown rocks with which the bed of the brook was here and there broken, waited curiously ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... reckless faction," says the heathen Caecilius, in the passage above referred to, "who collect together out of the lowest rabble the thoughtless portion, and credulous women seduced by the weakness of their sex, and form a mob of impure conspirators, of whom nocturnal assemblies and solemn fastings and unnatural food, no sacred rite but pollution, is the bond. A tribe lurking and light-hating, dumb for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... Round her throat she had a slender chain with a locket to it. She was brown as a berry, but she looked as though the hot weather dealt gently with her. As she sat down by me and took Dido's head into her lap, to the great discomfort of a rabble of jealous dogs who sat round watching her and whining, it struck me that her eyes were the very colour of ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... "there would be plenty to do, but I would not mind wagering that we should not wait for him; and after all, I am not sure if it would not be the best thing to do, for these Germans with us are little better than a rabble." ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... rubbish as it is now possible to unearth can we rebuild in imagination so much of the rough and crumbling walls that fell before the trumpet-blast of Tamburlaine as may give us some conception of the rabble dynasty of rhymers whom he overthrew—of the citadel of dramatic barbarism which was stormed and sacked at the first charge of the young conqueror who came to lead English audiences and to ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... their enthusiasm, or had there been any correspondent feelings in the higher ranks, Naples might have set a glorious example to Europe, and have proved the grave of every Frenchman who entered it. But the vices of the government had extinguished all other patriotism than that of the rabble, who had no other than that sort of loyalty which was like the fidelity of a dog to its master. This fidelity the French and their adherents counteracted by another kind of devotion: the priests affirmed that St. Januarius had declared ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... though he toiled to establish our fortunes, scarcely had he left empty that supreme seat which we occupy to-day, when we were cast down from the pinnacle whereon we had climbed, abandoned to the fury of the rabble and the vindictive hatred of the Roman barons, who chose to feel offended by our goodness to their enemies. Thus, not only, we tell you, Caesar, not only did we plunge headlong from the summit of our grandeur, losing the worldly goods and dignities which our uncle had heaped at ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... adventures in the earlier part of this day. 'The morning of the 29th,' he says, 'was ushered in by the dismal ringing of bells, the groans of distant guns, and the savage shouts of the populace; and I arose from a long train of dreams, which defied recollection as well as interpretation. The rabble, headed by a few beardless boys just let loose from the Polytechnic School and other seminaries, had been pleased to fix their head-quarters in our street. About half-past eleven, however, those of them who were collected here having heard that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... king's book; and you are right; for it is a wicked book, a work of hell, and the devil is the king's sponsor!' Ah, I see well we must again show our earnest and angry face to this miserable, traitorous rabble, that it may again have faith in the king. It is a wretched, disgusting, and contemptible mob—this people! They are obedient and humble only when they tremble and feel the lash. Only when they are trampled ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... that his pretty young wife spent it very fast. She has been a widow these six or eight years, and has lived, I imagine, in rather a hand-to-mouth fashion. I suppose she is some six or eight and thirty years of age. In winter one hears of her in Berlin, giving little suppers to the artistic rabble there; in summer one often sees her across the green table at Ems and Wiesbaden. She's very clever, and her cleverness has spoiled her. A year after her marriage she published a novel, with her views on ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... was shown, In which one man, alone, Upon the ground had thrown A lion fully grown. Much gloried at the sight the rabble. A lion thus rebuked their babble:— "That you have got the victory there, There is no contradiction. But, gentles, possibly you are The dupes of easy fiction: Had we the art of making pictures, Perhaps our champion had ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... hunter, thoughtless of his delicate bride, Whether the trusty hounds a stag have eyed, Or the fierce Marsian boar has burst the snare. To me the artist's meed, the ivy wreath Is very heaven: me the sweet cool of woods, Where Satyrs frolic with the Nymphs, secludes From rabble rout, so but Euterpe's breath Fail not the flute, nor Polyhymnia fly Averse from stringing new the Lesbian lyre. O, write my name among that minstrel choir, And my proud head ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... MacNab types, had nothing but their prejudices to distinguish them, but two of their number were of outstanding capacity. John Beverley Robinson, Attorney General from 1819 to 1829 and thereafter for over thirty years Chief Justice, was a true aristocrat, distrustful of the rabble, but as honest and highminded as he was able, seeking his country's gain, as he saw it, not his own. A more rugged and domineering character, equally certain of his right to rule and less squeamish about the means, was John Strachan, afterwards Bishop of Toronto. Educated a Presbyterian, ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... the reflections of all the Indians. Besides the Portuguese do their best to persuade them that we have no forces, that we are but a rabble, who scarcely have fixed habitations in our own country, and quite far from being able to make lasting settlements in the Indias. As for them, they are established there with men who wish to live there. Therefore ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... street scene in Rome filled with working, rabble citizens who have turned out to give Caesar a great triumph on his ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... as condescension to notice a man of condition!" said the marquis, violently. "When my king was driven away by the rabble the ocean was not too broad to separate me from a swinish civilization. I will never go back; I will live ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... absurd sort of popularity it would be more advisable to rely on the nobility and the higher classes of society. "Gentlemen," replied he, "you may say what you please, but in the situation in which I stand my only nobility is the rabble of the faubourgs, and I know of no rabble but the nobility whom I have created." This was a strange compliment to all ranks, for it was only saying that they ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... art a hereditary trait? the son of a celebrity? then his essays in design were unworthy of his name. Abashed, inclined to despair, having a glimpse of a tumultuous rabble shouting: "At last he is here!" before the ruddy guillotine on a raw morning, a pale, prim man between the executioner's aids, the young Clemenceau listened to the girl, who probably resembled the Lovely Iza, but looked at the dead ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... English forms; our very manners and conversation are traditional, and sometimes the life seems dying out of all literature, and this enormous paper currency of Words is accepted instead. I suppose the evil may be cured by this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the country, heedless of English and of all literature—a stone cut out of the ground without hands;—they may root out the hollow dilettantism of our cultivation in the coarsest ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... written from a new town in Tennessee, a cheerful place—no better, though, for being built on speculation with my money: a few wooden cottages, half of them taverns, filled to the roof with a dirty and outcast emigrant rabble, half of whom are lying ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... of the scene are portrayed, though not in a material sense wrong, must be open to much aesthetic dispute; must mar the success and the action of reflex thought, the spiritual contest waging and recoiling between the Divine, meek victim and the surging rabble. At all events, it is sad to trace no direct or secret hint at new or transcendental methods conspicuous or even dimly apparent in the painter's art. Little there is in the effort to draw our finer instincts to spiritual truths. The utmost mechanical skill of the diligent artist is discernible, ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... buried there. As we passed down the street my friend went into a shop to buy some chocolates. While I was waiting, I heard the stirring notes of the Marseillaise, and looking round saw a band coming up the street followed by three Italian flags, a number of soldiers, and a rabble of men, women and children. I called to my companion to come out quickly and salute the Italian colours. As they passed, we stood on the curb and saluted with strict military precision. In fact we saluted so well that ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... was also stolen and destroyed. The military quickly came up, and a regular engagement took place. Stones were firing in all directions—several soldiers were struck; Mr. Fosberry received a blow of a stone in the leg, and it was not until some time had elapsed that this lawless rabble were subdued, and thirteen of them taken prisoners and brought into our gaol. Nothing could exceed the coolness of our magistrates, officers, and soldiers during this rencontre, and we are happy to say that a portion ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... we shall be unmolested for a while," replied Osterberg. "The place was visited early by the rabble soldiery and they took all that was worth taking, so now I don't suppose they will ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... complains, and with very good reason, that, in the character of the Mufti, Dryden has seized an opportunity to deride and calumniate the priesthood of every religion; an opportunity which, I am sorry to say, he seldom fails to use with unjustifiable inveteracy. The rabble scenes were probably given, as our author himself says of that in Cleomenes, "to gratify the more barbarous part of the audience." Indeed, to judge from the practice of the drama at this time, the representation of a riot upon the stage seems to have had the same charms for ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... clothing, all were wantonly destroyed; while the procession from the prison to the convict ship was one of brutal, debasing riot. The convicts were conveyed to Deptford, in open wagons, accompanied by the rabble and scum of the populace. These crowds followed the wagons, shouting to the prisoners, defying all regulations, and inciting them to more defiance of rules. Some of the convicts were laden with irons; others were ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... thought of this before; and that is what they finally did, and at last we got to sleep. In the morning no landlord could still be found, and we had no coffee, but presently he arrived accompanied by two gendarmes and goodness knows what other rabble armed with sticks, and they wanted to proceed upstairs. We heard every sort of "Sacres!" going on between them and Hippolyte, and eventually the landlord almost crawled up apologising, and opened ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... two hours' halt, a forced march of thirty-five miles—making over fifty miles in all—without eating or drinking, only as could be "caught up" on the march or run. Up the valley this routed, disorganized rabble (it could not be called an army) marched, every man as he saw fit, here a General at the head of a few squads called regiments, or a Colonel or Captain with a few men at his heels, some with colors and some without; here a Colonel without a man, there a score or two of men ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... Shakespeare would be but a sulphur match the more at carnival time. Indeed, Shakespeare criticism has been such a pageantry of spluttering candle-ends and sniffing wicks that it is well that one or two tallow dips leave the rabble and illuminate the adjacent alleys. It is down such an alley that Bell's ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... political convictions having prompted him to be among one of the leading opponents to the Reform Bill, he narrowly escaped serious injury at the hands of the London rabble. On the 18th of June, 1832, having occasion to pay a visit to the Mint, a crowd of several hundred roughs collected on Tower Hill to await his return; and on making his appearance at the gate he was hissed and hooted by the crowd, who followed him along the Minories ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... determination of the South in high colours, and was a bit doubtful of similar virtues in the North. The battle of Bull Run itself he did not see, but he rode out from Washington to meet the defeated army, and his description of the routed rabble, jostling and pushing, in frenzy toward the Capitol, so ridiculed Northern fighting spirit as to leave a permanent sting behind it. At the same time it convinced the British pro-Southern reader that the Northern effort was doomed to failure, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... the churches. The sad and shameful story was told of how it grew and was fostered by avarice that saw in the homeless crowds from over the sea only a chance for business, and exploited them to the uttermost; how Christianity, citizenship, human fellowship, shook their skirts clear of the rabble that was only good enough to fill the greedy purse, and how the rabble, left to itself, improved such opportunities as it found after such fashion as it knew; how it ran elections merely to count its thugs in, and fattened at the public crib; and how the whole evil thing ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... power of Shaddai, and his wisdom, he was preserved in being amongst them. Besides, his house was as strong as a castle, and stood hard to a stronghold of the town. Moreover, if at any time any of the crew or rabble attempted to make him away, he could pull up the sluices, and let in such floods, as would drown all round ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... attached, and whose creation he always considered as one of the eternal glories of his race? Did not the Divine Majesty think it fit then to communicate with the most humble of its creatures, with the fishermen of Galilee, with the rabble of Corinth, with the slaves, the women, the criminals of the Roman Empire? As I wish to be honest about Disraeli, I must point out here, that his genius, although the most prominent in England during his lifetime, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... these persistent crimes against grandchildren that the human race as a whole is still such a miserable rabble, and that recruiting offices and insurances companies tell such startling tales of degeneracy. Love would cure this, if there were more of the right kind. Until there is, much good may be done by accepting it as a guide, and building up a sentiment ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... a number of workmen in blouses and peaked caps came trooping out of a side street and obstructed her progress. She had Carissimo on the lead, and she at once admitted to me that at first she never thought of connecting this pushing and jostling rabble with any possible theft. She held her ground for awhile, facing the crowd: for a few moments she was right in the midst of it, and just then she felt the dog straining at the lead. She turned round at once with the intention of picking him up, when to her horror she saw that there ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... added by the Wittenbergers, he in the same year (April, 1552) wrote his Refutation (Widerlegung) of the Unfounded, Unprofitable Answer of Philip Melanchthon. In this immoderate publication Osiander boasted that only the Philippian rabble, dancing according to the piping of ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... doors, and others joined with those that were about him, calling out as they did, "A madman;" but not knowing for what. In this perplexity the affrighted young man happened to come before a pastry-cook's shop, and went into it to avoid the rabble. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... time to cut down these beautiful trees, to convert the garden where he had breathed the air of Truth and Heaven for near half a century into a paltry Chreistomathic School, and to make Milton's house (the cradle of Paradise Lost) a thoroughfare, like a three-stalled stable, for the idle rabble of Westminster to pass backwards and forwards to it with their cloven hoofs. Let us not, however, be getting on too fast—Milton himself taught school! There is something not altogether dissimilar between Mr. Bentham's appearance, and the portraits of Milton, the same silvery tone, a few dishevelled ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... fellow-scramblers a cuff or two, he was set upon by the boys and country fellows, and compelled to make an inglorious retreat with his table, which had been flung down in the scuffle, and had one of its legs broken. As he retired, the rabble hooted, and Jack, holding up in derision the pea with which he had outmanoeuvred him, exclaimed, "I always carry this in my pocket in order to be a match ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... of European folk-lore have nothing in common with the rebellious angels of Miltonic theology beyond their vague denomination; nor can any but a nominal resemblance be traced between their chiefs or "grandfathers" and the thunder-smitten but still majestic "Lucifer, Son of the Morning." The demon rabble of "Popular Tales" are merely the lubber fiends of heathen mythology, beings endowed with supernatural might, but scantily provided with mental power; all of terrific manual clutch, but of weak intellectual grasp. And so the hardy mortal who measures his powers against theirs, even in those ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... any of the rabble come into this barn for the present," directed Hal's company commander. "Come, Guarez, ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... old Harry to pay here. Men whose position and interests lie in retaining the old order of things are catering to the rabble for a little temporary advantage. You see, the past few years, the Scotch-Irish immigrants have been pouring into the northwestern part of the colony. By nature and education they are hostile to rightful authority, are Dissenters and ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... to dress up the principles of the Presbyterians in a frightful shape; but let me tell you, Sir, in my turn, that the principles of your party have been burnt, not by a rude and lawless rabble, but by the common hangman, in broad day-light, before the Royal Exchange in London, and by authority of Parliament. Perhaps," he continues, "you never heard of this contemptuous treatment of the Oxford principles, and therefore I will give it you from the Parliamentary ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... crowd swayed forward and began to move. They followed slowly in its wake, hemmed in by the rabble that streamed towards Ridgmount Gardens, to lose itself in the black slums of Bloomsbury. On the pavement the reeling girl was swept on with the crowd, still singing her hideous song. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was leaning back now, with her ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... wouldn't be for my sake. I don't wish you to go, and wouldn't let you. If you should let the Oakville rabble drive you away, I WOULD be in danger, and so would others, for I'd be worse on 'em than an earthquake. After the lesson they've had tonight, they'll let us alone, and I'll let them alone. You know I've tried to be honest with you from the first. ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... plundering in some of the downtown streets without any discrimination—simply yielding to an uncontrollable desire for destruction. As a result a regular battle ensued between this mob, which consisted chiefly of Russian and Italian rabble, on one hand, and Irish workingmen who were defending their homes, on the other. The Russian contingent seemed to consist largely of the riff-raff which had found such a ready refuge in New York during the Russian Revolution, and some of these undesirable citizens ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... patriciate, nobility, patrician order. Antonyms: commonalty, yeomanry, proletariate, bourgeoisie, peasantry, rabble. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... criminals for the spoliation of the well-to-do. And if Bingham had pushed him too hard, he might have precipitated the blunt declaration that a man's best use for his own money was to protect himself and his interests from the depredations of an alien and rabble populace. ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... carpets, or curtains, or tapestry, or ottoman coverings, all upholstery of this nature should be rigidly Arabesque. As for those antique floor-cloth & still occasionally seen in the dwellings of the rabble—cloths of huge, sprawling, and radiating devises, stripe-interspersed, and glorious with all hues, among which no ground is intelligible—these are but the wicked invention of a race of time-servers and money-lovers—children ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... non-slaveholding, but most active secession merchants, are moving seriously in the great project of establishing a "SOUTHERN CANDLE-FACTORY"—a thing much needed in the "up-country;" while our graver statesmen (who don't get the State out of the Union fast enough for the ignorant rabble, who have nothing but their folly at stake) are pondering over the policy of spending five hundred thousand dollars for the building of another war-ship-one that "will go over the bar;" and while curiously-written letters ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... being condemned to the torture if he is guilty, but that in order to accomplish one's mission as accuser, and to discover a criminal, false witnesses who can give no evidence should be brought a hundred leagues, that the rabble should be roused up, that divers faces and imaginary names should be bestowed on an innocent man, in order to turn a movement of surprise or an indignant gesture to his disadvantage, all this is iniquitous, and goes beyond the right ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... original splendour. Mettre le Roy hors de page, became a sort of watchword. And it was constantly in the mouths of all the runners of the Court, that nothing could preserve the balance of the constitution from being overturned by the rabble, or by a faction of the nobility, but to free the Sovereign effectually from that Ministerial tyranny under which the Royal dignity had been oppressed in the ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... few years later (or under Edward I.?), advised Leslie to make a turning movement behind Linglie Hill. This is not evidence. Though Leslie may have made such a movement, he describes his victory as very easy: and so it should have been, as Montrose had only the remnant of his Antrim men and a rabble ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... and permission was given to a certain number of officers to serve under him. The emperor was overjoyed—much more so than Gordon, who was promptly created a mandarin. He foresaw many difficulties in store before he could get his 'rabble' of four thousand men into order, and at the outset he had much trouble with Burgevine, Ward's successor in command of the Ever-Victorious Army, but a very different man from Ward himself. However, by the help of the famous Li Hung Chang, Burgevine was ultimately ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... rationalism: the forms of religion tend to gain more consistency than the essence, and public worship to be placed above doctrine. Some of the extreme sects of the Raskol have actually reached this point. A perfect carnival of wild interpretation prevailed among this ignorant rabble, and crazy doctrines and grotesque tenets were not slow in following ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... which still bore its weather-stained head so conspicuously aloft, and, resolving to humble it with the dust, they got a stout hawser from a vessel in the adjoining harbour, which a sailor lad, climbing up, coiled round the body of the little turret, and the rabble seizing the rope by both ends tugged and pulled, and laboured long to strangle and overthrow the poor old turret, but in vain, for it withstood all their endeavours. Now that is exactly the condition ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... a coarser kind of clay; Not stung with envy, nor with spleen diseased, A poor dull creature, still with Nature pleased: Hence to thy praises, Garrick, I agree, And, pleased with Nature, must be pleased with thee. 1070 Now might I tell how silence reign'd throughout, And deep attention hush'd the rabble rout; How every claimant, tortured with desire, Was pale as ashes, or as red as fire; But loose to fame, the Muse more simply acts, Rejects all flourish, and relates mere facts. The judges, as the several parties came, With temper heard, with judgment ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... campaign of 1809, these hopes were brilliantly fulfilled. Wellesley moved against Soult at Oporto, and, by a dextrous crossing of that river in his rear, compelled him to beat a calamitous retreat on Spain, with the loss of all his cannon and stores. The French reached Lugo an armed rabble, and were greeted there with jeers and execrations by the men of Ney's corps. The two Marshals themselves took up the quarrel, and so fierce were the taunts of Ney that Soult drew his sword and a duel was barely averted.[212] An appearance of concord was restored during their operations ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... made was a blow upon his heart. As the attack went on, he grew more wild and frantic in his terror; tried to pull away the bars that guarded the chimney and prevented him from climbing up; called loudly on the turnkeys to cluster round the cell and save him from the fury of the rabble, or put him in some dungeon underground, no matter of what depth, how dark it was, or loathsome, or beset with rats and creeping things, so that it hid him and was ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... like working in a nightmare. From time to time would come a rush, a stampede, of deer or tapirs, along the strip of beach between the water and the cliff. The toiling men would draw aside till the rabble went by, ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... prisoners was a respectable old colored minister. They had found a few parcels of shot in his house, which his wife had for years used to balance her scales. For this they were going to shoot him on Court House Green. What a spectacle was that for a civilized country! A rabble, staggering under intoxication, assuming to be the administrators ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... whose courage returned with despair. "I will not live to kiss the ground before young Malcolm's feet to be baited with the curses of the rabble. Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane, and thou opposed to me, who wast born of woman, yet will I ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to discriminate between the careful opinions of mature and deliberate judgment, and the headlong assertions of rash busy-bodies and amateurs. They understand, because they feel, the inevitable esoterism that must persist at the kernel of all democracies, unless these degenerate into mere rabble and intellectual mob: they are the last, therefore, to maintain that one person's word is as good as another's; that common sense is competent to solve all questions; that freedom of thought means the right of all to think ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... set up, a great crowd fought for coigns of vantage—a joyous, good-humored tussle. The great fountain sent its flashing silver spirts towards a blue heaven. As the death-cart lumbered into the Piazza ribald songs from the rabble saluted the criminal's ears, and his wild, despairing eyes lighted on many a merry face that but a few hours before had followed him to testify to righteousness; and, mixed with theirs, the faces of his fellow-Jews, sinister with malicious ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... which I passed the night. At day-break, my tormentor, called up by his honest comrades, joined them in drinking and shouting, and the three strangers, taking their guns, departed. Left alone by the departure of the vile rabble, I passed another unpleasant hour, calling in vain for someone. At last a young boy came in, I gave him some money and he went for a surgeon. The doctor examined my foot, and assured me that three or four days would set me to rights. He advised me to be removed to an inn, and I most willingly ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... finally put in its appearance, about three miles south of the Reservation. The Skilkan regulars had been marching in formation, some on the road and some along parallel lanes and paths. They had the look of trained and disciplined troops, but they had made the same mistake as the rabble that had been shot up on the north side of the Reservation. Unused to attack from the air, they had all halted in place and were gaping open-mouthed, their opal teeth gleaming in the ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... are present. The people having shaken off their anxieties, are prosperous under a bright image, and the land flourishing under law. While thou art ruler, the useless things which had been done by an ill-advising mind will not return at thy appearance. Therefore, all the people, even the rabble, will see that thou hast removed the yoke clinging to their necks, and the ills which the guiltless island has formerly endured with dreadful tortures. The burden would have been excessively painful did not thy victorious hand, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... the card-playing was not thrust on her as a round-about form of plunder, and the stories told were more those derived from the spicy columns of the sporting papers, in words of double meaning, than the outspoken, stable obscenity characteristic of the race-course rabble. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... multiply. You have no choice; either you must help furnish this race from within its own ranks with thoughtful men of trained leadership, or you must suffer the evil consequences of a headless misguided rabble. ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... of government, The rabble rule their great oppressors' fate; Do sovereign justice, and ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... Mrs. White, but her husband was gone. Two or three hundred men and boys pass the place at a rapid walk straight down the broad, new street, toward the hated house of ghosts. The din was terrific. She saw little White at the head of the rabble brandishing his arms and trying in vain to make himself heard; but they only shook their heads laughing and hooting the louder, and so passed, bearing him ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... ministers of different departments like the American cabinet, was composed of citizens of the middle classes—lawyers, professors of the universities, land-owners, merchants were represented—and at the head of the ministry was a prince. This arrangement did not satisfy the rabble. The radical socialists, most of whom owned no property and wanted all wealth divided up among all the people, were not much happier to be ruled by the moderately well-to-do than they were to submit to the rule of the nobles. ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... for the conclave. At that instant (inauspicious omen!) a terrible flash of lightning, followed by a stunning peal of thunder, struck through the hall, burning and splitting some of the furniture. The hall of conclave was crowded by a fierce rabble, who refused to retire. After about an hour's strife, the Bishop of Marseilles, by threats, by persuasion, or by entreaty, had expelled all but about forty wild men, armed to the teeth. These ruffians rudely and insolently searched the whole building; they looked under the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... (ptarmigan). They were harassed from post to post, from island to island; their hunting and fishing stations were unscrupulously seized by the invading English. They were shot down without the least provocation, or captured to be exposed as curiosities to the rabble at the fairs of the western towns of Christian England ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... might fancy the most high born and athletic of Achilles's Myrmidons in the full "tug of war;" whereas the swarms of crawling pigmies which burlesque the triumph of Severus might be supposed the original Myrmidon rabble, just hatched, as the fable reports, from their native ant-hills, and basking in the sun like ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... walled in by the main structure and its two wings and a wooden fence some fifteen feet high. There was a ragged, dirty rabble of "rebel" prisoners, among whom was Solomon Binkus, all out for an airing. The old scout had lost flesh and color. He held Jack's hand and stood for a ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... a name? There is little difference, after all, between the names of the nobility and the rabble." ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... you may know it didn't pass off So quietly as was wont? That Galilee carpenter's son Who boasted he was king, incensed the rabble to scoff: I heard the noise from my garden. This piece is the one he was on . . . Yes, it blazes up well if lit with a few dry chips and shroff; And it's worthless for much else, what with cuts ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... was up, the entire population of Carcajou Point gathered on the shore to witness Hooliam's departure. Stonor was there, too, of course, standing grimly apart from the rabble. Of what they thought of this summary deportation he could not be sure, but he suspected that if the whisky were all gone, they would not care much one way or the other. Hooliam was throwing his belongings in a dug-out of a different style from that used by ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... gulp, and began again from the very beginning. She had been too quick, too eager. It was so easy to miss a number. One by one she conned them over, but it was not there. The long Pass List lay below, and she looked at it with dreary indifference. To scramble through with the rabble was a sorry attainment, or it seemed so for one moment, but at the next it became, suddenly, a wild, impossible dream, for—the number was not there! No fear of overlooking this time, for the figures stood out as if printed in fire, and burned themselves into her brain. ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that nature had denied them every inborn mark of distinction; and furthermore, that their external assumptions were derided by so many in Mardi, these selfsame Tapparians, poor devils, resolved to secede from the rabble; form themselves into a community of their own; and conventionally pay that homage to each other, which universal Mardi could not be prevailed ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... wanter hurt ye, sis, but ye muss git aout o' the way," said a burly fellow to Eliza, who, with her mother, had thrown herself between the mob and Justice Dwight, his undaunted aspect appearing to excite the special animosity of the rabble. The other three justices were ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... be by Lowell and many another American writer since, depends upon what the special person's innate taste is. The thrones and altars have become more and more magnificent in beauty, costliness, and splendor, with the progress of civilization; but not so the mob, the rabble, the "underworld," whose stirrings have rent the walls. Christ's taste, it would seem, was not primarily aesthetic. But then not every one is a son of Mary, and not every carpenter's son sides with the class to which his ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... him a rabble, accompanied the Shawnee belt bearers to the edge of the woods, and there the aged chief said ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... face the world and ask no favor; You stand where you have stood before, The old salt hasn't lost its savor. You now can laugh with friends, at foes' Ne'er heeding Mrs. Grundy's tattle; You've dealt and taken sturdy blows, Regardless of the rabble's prattle. ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... the innkeeper. "All the rabble in the country would not venture within miles of where ye are; and, notwithstanding bad reports, there's not a loyaler barony in the county. Faith! Colonel, although it may look very like seeking custom, I would advise you to keep your ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... like ghosts along the quays in search of food. The great quantities of food-stuffs and other provisions which had been taken from the captured German vessels at the beginning of the war had been stored in hastily- constructed warehouses upon the quays, and it was not long before the rabble, undeterred by the fear of the police and willing to chance the shells, had broken in the doors and were looting to their hearts' content. As a man staggered past under a load of wine bottles, tinned goods and cheeses, our boatman, who by this time had become reconciled ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell |
