"Bugbear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enact before my very eyes some of those feats which, to the senses of others, would stamp you as the preternatural being you assume to be, I would doubt the evidence of my own senses ere I permitted such a bugbear ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... of fear, though a vague notion as to its cause—a sort of extempore superstition—a power which hath most hold on the mind in proportion as its limits and operations are least known or understood. The bugbear owing its magnitude and importance to obscurity and misapprehension, becomes divested of its terrors when it can ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... sepoys. The order-book each evening, reminding us of the danger, inculcated strict vigilance on picket and on guard. So long did this last without any attack being made that the shadowy expectation of what never occurred became our bugbear, a chimera which haunted ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... diplomatists and statesmen like Longlee, Stafford, and Walsingham, were beginning to lose their fear of the great bugbear by which England had so long been haunted. It was, therefore no deep stain on the Queen's sagacity that she, too, was willing to place credence in the plighted honour of Alexander Farnese, the great prince who prided himself on his sincerity, and who, next to the King ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... each other in "burning rumps" of beef, which were hung by chains on a gallows with a bonfire underneath, and proved how the people, like children, come at length to make a plaything of that which was once their bugbear. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
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