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More "Bugbear" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mamma's dinner party. But the weariness and anxiety afterwards were increased also. She was still getting away from our friend Time present, and forecasting into some future delight. "The good time coming, Boys," was her, as well as many other people's bugbear. She never could feel that (with God's blessing) the ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... "Tut, tut, that bugbear Love!" he said shortly. "And so you'd lose a good friend for a dead lover? I' faith, I'd befriend thee well if thou wert my ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Caucasus tells me that the Persians are quite agreeable people, their only fault being the one common failing of the East: a disposition to charge whatever they think it possible to obtain for anything. The Circassians seem to be the great bugbear in Asiatic Turkey. I am told that once I get beyond the country that these people range over - who are regarded as a sort of natural and half-privileged freebooters - I shall be reasonably safe from molestation. It is a common thing in Constantinople when two men are ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... been a great bugbear with the ill-informed, bit it is not nearly so deleterious as some careless or unscrupulous writers would have us believe. In the first place there is a very insignificant quantity of tannin in properly ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... wench! alas, poor devil! Has not slept to-night? would a'not, a naughty man, let it sleep one twinkle? A bugbear take him! ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... flings himself forward on a staff of fifty ells' length, with a pace as swift as a bird's flight. Once when my father was out hunting he was charmed by an ogress who lived in a cave under a waterfall, and with her he begat this bugbear. The island is one-third of my father's realm, but his son finds it too small for him. My father had a ring the greatest gem, which each of us would have, sister and brother, but I got it, wherefore he ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... 'What a pity is it,' said he to me, 'that Campbell does not give full sweep to his genius. He has wings that would bear him up to the skies, and he does now and then spread them grandly, but folds them up again and resumes his perch, as if afraid to launch away. The fact is, he is a bugbear to himself. The brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his future efforts. He is afraid of the shadow that his own fame ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... walked away, both commenting, after each other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I said nothing ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... you mean? My dear Cole, don't trouble to perjure yourself. I don't mind, believe me. They're easily shocked, these country clergy, and no doubt I'm a bugbear to 'em. Yet, I could have sworn I'd never seen this one before. Let's have ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... suggestion act, till the central figure himself plays his part in the scene, of which he feels himself the controller and director, and climbs to bed. But if there has been a hitch anywhere, if the bugbear of negativism has appeared, if he has been scolded or coaxed or repressed too much and there have been tears and struggles, then going to bed is a poor preparation for instant ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... there were eavesdroppers,' muttered the detected villain. 'Worthy Mrs. Dean, I like you, but I don't like your double- dealing,' he added aloud. 'How could you lie so glaringly as to affirm I hated the "poor child"? and invent bugbear stories to terrify her from my door-stones? Catherine Linton (the very name warms me), my bonny lass, I shall be from home all this week; go and see if have not spoken truth: do, there's a darling! Just imagine your father in my place, and Linton ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... much deeper contemplations and maturer ponderings, only tend, in the long run, to bring us back to our original starting-point. It is just this very bugbear of Responsibility which in the consciences and mouths of grown-up persons sends the bravest of our youth post-haste to confusion—so impinging and inexorable are the thing's portentous horns. It is indeed after these maturer considerations that we ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... someone had sent his mother a long anonymous letter to warn her that he was "ruining himself with a married woman," and the good lady at once conjuring up the eternal bugbear of families, the vague pernicious creature, the siren, the monster, who dwells fantastically in depths of love, wrote to Lawyer Dubocage, his employer, who behaved perfectly in the affair. He kept him for three quarters of an hour trying to open his eyes, to warn him of the abyss into which ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... a leading white paper in Jackson, Mississippi, made the remark that he feared that the result of the first winter's experience in the North would prove serious to the South, in so far as it would remove the bugbear of the northern climate. The returned migrants were encouraged to speak in disparagement of the North and to give wide publicity to their utterances, emphasizing incidents of ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... let's reconnoiter and try to spot our bugbear. I wonder if it wouldn't be appropriate to call her by another name? We've got to share our rooms with her even if we haven't got to share our bed. Why didn't the Empress tell us her name? the stubborn old thing! Just 'a girl from Sprucy Branch will share your suite this year. ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... mother would expect it, because she had always thought of it as a thing understood; her father would expect it, because Pete's prosperity had given him a new view of Pete's piety and pedigree; and Nancy Joe would expect it, too, if only because she was still haunted by her old bugbear, the dark shadow of Ross Christian. There was only one way to break down these expectations, and that was to speak out. But how was a girl to speak? ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... Dyers and had watched her at play. Once she had stopped him as he drove by to give him a little handful of blue violets, and this had gone straight to his heart, for he had been made too great a bugbear to most children to look for any favor at their hands. He always liked to see her come into church on Sundays, her steps growing quicker and surer as her good grandmother's became more feeble. The doctor was a lonely man in spite of his many friends, and he found himself watching for the little ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Universe was thus, glory to Robinson, arrested for that time. And now we have the same Robinson instructed to sharpen all his faculties to the cutting pitch, and do the impossible for this new and reverse face of matters. What a change from 1731 to 1741! Bugbear of dreadful Austrian-Spanish Alliance dissolves now into sunlit clouds, encircling a beautiful Austrian Andromeda, about to be devoured for us; and the Downfall of the Universe is again imminent, from Spain and others joining AGAINST Austria. Oh, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... administration, From the bench and bar judicial, In the governor's chair of power, Comes in heraldry unsullied, On the banner of the contest, Of the pen and diction contest, Mightier than the sword of battle. He reduced the annual bugbear, The state debt, so long amassing, And devoted all his efforts To the Commonwealth's advantage. In eighteen hundred two and sixty, He laid down his useful manhood, In the dust of lasting greatness, At his home in Boyle county. Long his psalm of life be chanted, Long ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... needs take its time to happen. No doubt was left upon Mr. Britling's mind, though a whole-page advertisement in the Daily News, in enormous type and of mysterious origin, implored Great Britain not to play into the hands of Russia, Russia the Terrible, that bugbear of the sentimental Radicals. The news was wide and sweeping, and rather inaccurate. The Germans were said to be in Belgium and Holland, and they had seized English ships in the Kiel Canal. A moratorium had been proclaimed, ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Frank," said the Rector of Wentworth, rather mournfully. He had been waiting at Mrs Hadwin's for the last two hours. He had seen that worthy woman's discomposed looks, and felt that she did not shake her head for nothing. Jack had been the bugbear of the family for a long time past. Gerald was conscious of adding heavily at the present moment to the Squire's troubles. Charley was at Malta, in indifferent health; all the others were boys. There was only Frank to give the father a little consolation; and now Frank, it ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... imagination! What matter? She loved adventures! And moving like a king among the rest, she saw the thin, travel-beaten, eccentric form of Lord Philip—the hated, adored, pursued; Society's idol and bugbear all in one; Lord Philip, who shunned and disliked women; on whom, nevertheless, the ambitions and desires of some of the loveliest women in England were, on that account alone, and at this moment of his political triumph, the more intently and ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not ready with peremptory refusal, as she had been on the other occasion; she had met the bugbear of Rickety Dick and had prevailed over the old man's suspicions. As Latisan averred, her presence might help matters; she would entertain strange and acute regrets if her absence should allow the split ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... ever since my conversation with Mr. T. about the Malstrom, to have called in at Loffoden Islands on our way south, and ascertain for myself the real truth about this famous vortex. To have blotted such a bugbear out of the map of Europe, if its existence really was a myth, would at all events have rendered our cruise not altogether fruitless. But, since leaving Spitzbergen, we had never once seen the sun, and to attempt to make so dangerous a coast in a gale of wind and a ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... all this to Lord Etherington?" said Mowbray; "wait until he propose such a terrible bugbear as matrimony, before you refuse to receive him. Who knows, the whim that he hinted at may have passed away—he was, as you say, flirting with Lady Binks, and her ladyship has a good deal of ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... man or state upon another is either absolute or limited by some certain terms of agreement. The dependence of these Colonies, which Great Britain calls constitutional, as declared by acts of Parliament, is absolute. If the contrary of this be the bugbear so many have been disclaiming against, I could wish my countrymen would consider the consequence of so stupid a profession. If a limited dependence is intended, I would be much obliged to any one who will show me the Britannico- ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... rebellion that we associate likin, a tax which has for years past been the bugbear of the foreign merchant in China. The term means "thousandth-part money," that is, the thousandth part of a tael or Chinese ounce of silver, say one cash; and it was originally applied to a tax of one cash per tael on all sales, said ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... too bad," sighed Zellerndorf; "though it may not be without its advantages after all, for now we still have this second bugbear to frighten Leopold with. So long, of course, as the American lives there is always the chance that he may return and seek to gain the throne. The fact that his mother was a Rubinroth princess might make it easy for Von der Tann to place him upon the throne without much opposition, and if he ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... from the dark-haloed indeterminate limbo where dwelt that bugbear of Charles Courtier, the great Half-Truth Authority, he himself had a couple of rooms at fifteen shillings a week. Their chief attraction was that the great Half-Truth Liberty had recommended them. They tied him to nothing, and were ever at his disposal when he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Baptists. Like other Nonconformists, these were inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer. From the time of his joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a bugbear to his brethren in the faith. 'They that take the sword shall perish with the sword,' they told him; they gave him 'no rest'; 'his position became intolerable'; it was plain he must choose between his political and his religious tenets; ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... horrible Prophaneness, and says he does me no wrong in't; now if he insists that Hell is too serious a thing to ridicule, why, perhaps, I think so too, in its Intense quality; but to act a Goblin, a Ghost, a Frog, or a Fury, and to sing to a Country Clown of such Bugbear matters, only to cause a little Diversion in a Noblemans House, has always been very customary, especially at Festivals, and far from being thought to ridicule the main matter. The Absolver, to turn back a little, affirms indeed, That those that bring Devils ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... denouncing the 'Darwinian School'[180] for theories about instinct incompatible with the doctrine of final causes. It might appear that a philosopher who has re-established the objective existence of space in opposition to Berkeley, was in danger of that materialism which had been Berkeley's bugbear. But Stewart escapes the danger by his assertion that our knowledge of matter is 'relative' or confined to phenomena. Materialism is for him a variety of ontology, involving the assumption that we know the essence of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... condition of Western Europe; and their temporary allies, though they habitually scoffed at the Slavophil jeremiads, had no reason for the moment to contradict them. Very soon the Proletariat became, for the educated classes, a species of bugbear, and the reading public were converted to the doctrine that the Communal institutions should be preserved as a means of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Fables, No. 121. Halme. [Greek: Drapetes] is the title. All readers of Plautus and Terence know what a bugbear to slaves the threat of being sent to the mill was. They would have to turn it instead of horses, or ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... 4th February, the two vessels were able to resume their voyage, prepared to face all the dangers of the South Sea, and to double Cape Horn, that bugbear of all navigators. As far as Staten Island the weather was uniformly fine, but beyond it the explorers had to contend with extremely violent gales, storms of hail and snow, dense fogs, huge waves, and a swell in which the vessels laboured heavily. On the 24th March, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... belong, almost exclusively, to lodging-houses everywhere. Briefly, he is always there—ready to burst into flames at any moment, ready to misunderstand everything anybody does or says, a perpetual bugbear; and not even the emotional repentances, which are often the only partially saving grace of bad-tempered people, can atone for the atmosphere of disturbance which they always inflict. And the man or woman who loses his temper whenever anything goes in the ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... thrilling thought—his very dream, too; and the lot of shillings, and the shawl—ay, and the inquest, and the rumours how that Mrs. Quarles had come to her end unfairly, and no hoards found—and—and the honey-pots missing. Ha! at any rate he'd have a search to-morrow. No bugbear now should hinder him; money's money; he'd ask no questions how it got there. His own bit of garden lay the nearest to Pike Island, and who knows but Ben might have slung a crock this way? It wouldn't do to ask him, though—for Burke might look himself, and ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... lacked nothing for words, though it might perhaps be proved that they were short in numbers. It was considered that the speech in which Mr. Daubeny reviewed the long political life of Mr. Mildmay, and showed that Mr. Mildmay had been at one time a bugbear, and then a nightmare, and latterly simply a fungus, was one of the severest attacks, if not the most severe, that had been heard in that House since the Reform Bill. Mr. Mildmay, the while, was sitting with his hat low ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... (Discourse, chap. xxi.) Hudgin is more usually spelled Hodeken, the German familiar fairy. Cf. the French Hugon, a bugbear used to frighten children. ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... interests in its different sections, the State organizations and semi-sovereignty, and the consequent lack of that strong centralization of administrative powers and functions which, however much of a bugbear to many people's imaginations, is indispensable to a complete nationality—has threatened us in the past and may be expected to threaten us in the future. The latter evil ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... prominence given to punishment by all constitutional legislators; they know that when the fear of punishment is wanting, nothing else is of avail. And this is doubly so with us who are tyrants; whose power is based upon compulsion; who live in the midst of enmity and treachery. The bugbear terrors of the law would never serve our turn. Rebellion is a many-headed Hydra: we cut off one guilty head, two others grow in its place. Yet we must harden our hearts, smite them off as they grow, and—like lolaus—sear ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... inexplicable. What they could have found in the doctrines of most modern political economists which should lead them to suppose that human life would be precious in their eyes, is unknown to the writer of these pages. Those whose bugbear has been over- population, whose motto has been an ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... refreshment, and the poor fellow had been ill for twenty-four hours at Luckie Sma'trash's, in consequence of dining upon "saut saumon and sour drink." So that the existence of a correspondence betwixt the Marquis and his distressed kinsman, which Sir William Ashton had sometimes treated as a bugbear, was proved beyond the possibility of ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... secret favourites of government: a French invasion, the appearance of the French in London, is an old story almost worn out upon the imaginations of the good people of England; but now came a new if not a more plausible bugbear—the Pope! It was confidently affirmed that the Pope would soon be in London, he having been seen in disguise in a gold-flowered nightgown on St. James's parade at Bath. A poor gentleman, who appeared at his door in his nightgown, had been actually taken by the Bath mob for the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... fumes of fancy; thick coming fancies [Macbeth]; creation of the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey^, whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest^, geste^, extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, man in the moon, castle in the air, pipe dream, pie-in-the-sky, chateau en Espagne [Fr.]; Utopia, Atlantis^, happy valley, millennium, fairyland; land of Prester John, kindgom of Micomicon; work of fiction &c (novel) 594; Arabian ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... will hesitate. Yet it is also part of the test of a writer's courage; by his hesitation a soldier-author may know that he is in danger of failing in his duty. Yet the opinion of the public, which intimidates us, is no mere bugbear. It is very serious. People do not enjoy the destruction of their cherished illusions. They do not crown the defamers of their idols. What is it that balks a soldier's judgment when he begins to write about the War? He is astonished by the reflection ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... we have M. Fouquet left us still, of whom we have no reason to complain; but, as he is no procureur-general without his gown, we agree with M. de la Fontaine and pronounce the gown to be nothing but a bugbear." ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... entering Koloa, a considerable town, he observed hanging on a tree a masquerading habit, made of bark, which he was told belonged to Mumbo Jumbo, a sort of wood demon, held greatly in awe, especially by the female part of the community. This strange bugbear is common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the pagan negroes in keeping their women in subjection. As the Kaffirs, or pagan Africans, are not restricted in the number of their wives, every one marries as many as he can conveniently maintain; and it frequently ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... positively whether or not our purpose is according to "the will of God." Therefore so long as we work within the scope of this generic "will of the Father" we need have no fear of the Divine Providence, as an agency, acting adversely to us. We may dismiss this bugbear, for we ourselves are manifestations of the very power which we call "the Father." The I am is one; and so long as we preserve this unity by conforming to the generic nature of the I am in the universal, it will certainly never destroy the unity by entering ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... residence and carries on a dry goods business, he might gamble as much as should please him and the law would not take hold of him. He would ask anybody to read the law understandingly and then deny this round assertion. This act, said he, is bugbear—it is a disgrace as it now stands, for it smacks of cowardice. The legislators, he presumed, had a little sense, and they knew that some kind of a law must be passed, and they were ingenious enough to know how to frame it to sound well, and yet be comparatively powerless. They knew by such a ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... said his wife, as if resenting the word. "But you make such a bugbear of the least little matter that there's no ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... end, although some took longer than others, and would win only to backseats. Man's place in the ever-fluxing chaos of the world was definite and pre-ordained—if by no other token, then by denial that there was any ever-fluxing chaos. This was a mere bugbear of mankind's addled fancy; and, by stinging audacities of thought and speech, by vivid slang that bit home by sheerest intimacy into his listeners' mental processes, he drove the bugbear from their brains, showed them the loving clarity ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... tell him once for all, through you, that I will come into and go out of this place as often as I like, so long as he keeps Nell here; and that if he wants to be quit of me, he must first be quit of her. What have I done to be made a bugbear of, and to be shunned and dreaded as if I brought the plague? He'll tell you that I have no natural affection; and that I care no more for Nell, for her own sake, than I do for him. Let him say so. I care for ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... The bugbear and slander, raised and kept alive by that section of the land south of the imaginary line, to wit: that the Negro was ambitious for "racial equality," only is entitled to reference in these pages for the purpose of according it the contempt due it. That the whites of the country have not ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... steady progress. "The Immortals" were soon left far behind. At the end of the first twelve months he stood fifty-first in a class of seventy-two, but when he entered the first class, and commenced the study of logic, that bugbear to the majority, he shot from near the foot of the class to the top. In the final examination he came out seventeenth, notwithstanding that the less successful years were taken into account, and it was a frequent remark amongst his brother cadets that if the course had ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... name of altar, while the officiating minister resumed the name of priest. The people, now become thoroughly Protestantised, murmured, and thought they saw indications of a return to Rome.** Some protested that all this superabundant care for externals was eating the life out of Protestantism; the bugbear of others was the appeal, now becoming customary, to the Fathers of the Church, rather than to the Protestant divines of the continent.*** St. Augustine was suspect, Calvin they knew to ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... alleviations of his lot. In the first place he must dine with the colleagues with whom his whole waking life is passed—excellent fellows and capital company—but nature demands an occasional enlargement of the mental horizon. Then if by chance he has one special bugbear—a bore or an egotist, a man with dirty hands or a churlish temper—that man will inevitably come and sit down beside him and insist on being affectionate ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... in a great panic. I shall never forget the crying of the children. Indians had long been the favorite bugbear of the border country. Many a winter's evening we had sat in the firelight, fear-faced, as my father told of the slaughter in Cherry Valley; and, with the certainty of war, we all looked for the red hordes of Canada to come, in paint ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... have my house run on any Hurly-Burly plan, Miss Pattikins, so if you expect to secure the position of housekeeper, you must be prepared to keep things right up to the mark. We will have an exact proportion of methodical regularity, without having so much of it that it will be a bugbear. Oh, I tell you, my lady, our home is going to be a veritable Paradise on earth, and I am impatient to get it started You have only one more visit to make, and then I will come and kidnap my own daughter and carry her off with me for a ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... his butler! Any of all whom he knows she admits, and professes to approve of. This, alas! is the gallantry; this the freedom of our fine gentlemen: for this they preserve their liberty, and keep clear of that bugbear, marriage. But he does not understand either vice or virtue, who will not allow, that life without the rules of morality is a wayward uneasy being, with snatches only of pleasure; but under the regulation of virtue, a reasonable and uniform habit ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... indifferent to its action, and therefore non-responsible for it; and it was natural that all who defied the received laws of conduct, or were suspected of doing so, should be stigmatized as his followers. Molinism was a favourite bugbear among the orthodox Romanists ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... Minnesota in the winter is like a wine, so exhilarating is its effects on the system; while its extreme dryness and elasticity prevents any discomfort from the cold which is such a bugbear to many. The extreme cold does not last but for a few days, and should the invalid choose to be domiciled during this brief interval, no great harm would come; but we apprehend that, once there, they could not ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... The other bugbear which alarmed them was a report that the English intended either to take possession of Berbera, or that they would give it to Shermarky—a native chief and ally of ours who lives at Zeylah. In short, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... us) "danced nobly." Pride swells us To think our young guest is a true ATTA TROLL; No Bugbear, though shaggy, a trifle breech-baggy, And not altogether a dandyish doll; No Afghan intrigue, dear, or shy Native league, dear, Has brought Bruin's foot o'er our frontier to dance: He comes freely, boldly—don't look on him coldly, Or make ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... bugbear," he groaned. "It ought to be indicted for a nuisance, waking people up o' mornings when they ought to be in the arms of Morpheus—I've a great mind to lie still. Half an hour's sleep ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... do no harm. It became a fixed sentiment when she alone survived to uphold it, and one demonstration of it amused the whole neighborhood in a good-natured way. "People from Birthwaite" were the bugbear—Birthwaite being the end of the railway. In the Summer of 1857, Mrs. Wordsworth's companion told her (she being then blind) that there were some strangers in the garden—two or three boys on the mount, looking at the view. "Boys from Birthwaite," said the old lady, in the well-known ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... says Mr. Park, "I arrived at Kolor, a considerable town; near the entrance into which I observed, hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees; which, I was told on inquiry, belonged to MUMBO JUMBO. This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the Pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection; for as the Kafas are not restricted in the number of their wives, every one marries as many as he can conveniently maintain; and as ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... of the patriot hero, the stubborn inflexibility of the mere savage, he is looked upon far less flatteringly. By all, however, is he admitted to be formidable without parallel, in the history of Indian warfare. His deeds are familiar to all, and his name is much such a bugbear to American childhood, as Marlborough's was in France, and Napoleon's is in England. It is a source of much regret to our Government never to have been enabled to ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... Cours Sauvaire, he had published, in the "Independant," a terrible article on the intrigues of the clergy, in response to a short paragraph from Vuillet, who had accused the Republicans of desiring to demolish the churches. Vuillet was Aristide's bugbear. Never a week passed but these two journalists exchanged the greatest insults. In the provinces, where a periphrastic style is still cultivated, polemics are clothed in high-sounding phrases. Aristide called his adversary "brother Judas," or "slave of Saint-Anthony." Vuillet gallantly ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... became a problem to successive chiefs of scouts, a bugbear to the reservation Indians, and a terror to Arizona. If a man was killed or a woman missed, the Indians came galloping and the scouts lay on his trail. If he met a woman in the defiles, he stretched her dead if she did not please his errant fancy. He took pot-shots at the men ploughing ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... also I looked about for a book. I did not have to look far. Books were my extravagance—almost my only one. They filled the shelves to the ceiling on three sides of the study and overflowed in untidy heaps on the floor. They were Hephzy's bugbear, for I refused to permit their being ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... at Lansdowne House, presents with a vividness of detail and verisimilitude that leaves nothing to be desired the outlines of the first twenty years of his life. The Second George had been ten years on the throne, the Young Pretender, alike the bugbear and the consolidator of the House of Hanover, was a stripling of seventeen, when, in the summer of 1737, William Fitzmaurice, afterward earl of Shelburne (the name by which history best knows him) and marquis of Lansdowne, was born in Dublin. "I spent the four first years, of my life" (he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... scientific procedure to life we see extending to the control of the energies of the human factor. We have already spoken of guarantees that affect the spirit and the morale of labor. We hear of the prevention of unemployment, the removal of the bugbear of "losing the job." Most advance of all is being made in the application of the principles of mental and physical hygiene and of scientific management to the actual details of movement and the whole process of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... she grew older, had much time to spend outdoors, there were many tasks about the house and farm she had to perform. The chest was soon filled with quilts and that bugbear was gone from her life. But there was continual scrubbing, baking, mending, and other household tasks to be done, so that much practice caused the girl to develop into a capable little housekeeper. Aunt ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... to you. Brevity and sincerity will succeed. Be brief and select, omit much, give each subject its proper proportionate space; and be exact without caring to round off the edges of what you have to say." Later, he declines Bamford's offer of verses, saying "verse is a bugbear to booksellers at present. These are prosaic, earnest, practical, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... monstrous mountains, and the water is tempered by warm currents that flow in from the gulf stream. The national apprehension of both Norway and Sweden that Russia covets one of their seaports has existed a good many years. The bugbear has appeared at intervals for half a century, and a great deal of money has been expended in preparations to meet it. The people are, therefore, cordially patriotic in their support of the army, although many of them emigrate to the United States to ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... its brow,— He has past it,—and now Having once gained the summit, and managed to cross it, he Rolls down the side with uncommon velocity; But, run as he will, Or roll down the hill, That bugbear behind ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... constantly in the utterance of a word which might explain away any difficulty in which he chanced to find himself; and this helped to keep his tongue tied in the matter where Larry Hogan had continued to make himself a bugbear. He had a horror, too, of being thought capable of doing a dishonourable thing, and the shame he felt at having peeped into a letter was so stinging, that the idea of asking any one's advice in the dilemma in which he was placed made him recoil from the thought of such aid. Now, Father ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... say! Was it Christian Science? Did you dare, Eloise Evringham, did you dare spoil your life—my life—our future, by scaring Dr. Ballard with that bugbear?" The ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... the barren womb of nothing, Whence first they sprung; then might the debauchee Untrembling mouth the heavens:—then might the drunkard Reel over his full bowl, and, when 'tis drain'd, Fill up another to the brim, and laugh At the poor bugbear Death: then might the wretch That's weary of the world, and tired of life, 390 At once give each inquietude the slip, By stealing out of being when he pleased, And by what way, whether by hemp, or steel. Death's thousand doors stand open.—Who could force ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... mountains, spreading consternation as they went. From Lake Champlain to the New England coast, there was not a village which did not believe itself to be the especial object of Burgoyne's vengeance. Indeed, his name became a bugbear, to ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... cannot love my enemy; for my enemy is not a man, but a beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat him." No equivocation here, surely. On superstition he comments,—"It has been long a bugbear, by reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthusiast in the path of holiness." Herein lies the germ of a truth. Again, Lavater says,—"A great ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... face concerning the declaration of war, and told with approval how the Royal hand had trembled in committing itself to the form of signature to which its action is limited. If there was money to be paid, there was a bugbear to be slain for it; and a bugbear is as obnoxious to the repose of commercial communities as rivals are ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Thou Bugbear of the law stand up and speak, Thy long misconstru'd silence break, Tell us, who 'tis upon thy ridge stands there, So full of fault, and yet so void of fear; And from the paper in his hat. Let all ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... fanciful dreams in the mind of Bonaparte; they cannot arise in it, nor find access to it; his aversion to the unsubstantial phantoms of political abstraction extends beyond disdain, even to disgust.[1152] That which was then called ideology, is his particular bugbear; he loathes it not alone through calculation, but still more through an instinctive demand for what is real, as a practical man and statesman, always keeping in mind, like the great Catherine, "that he is operating, not on paper, but on the human hide, which is ticklish." ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... liberty, that they become insensible to the nicer feelings. The grossest enormities are constantly committed in this good republic of ours, under the pretence of being done by the public, and for the public. The public have got to bow to that bugbear, quite as submissively as Gesler would have wished the Swiss to bow to his own cap, as to the cap of Rodolph's substitute. Men will have idols, and the Americans have merely set ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... happiest people that I saw. They appeared to me to be as well fed and clothed, as the labouring poor at the North. Here I was told, that the cruelty and brutality were not here, but among the great planters down the Mississippi. So strongly is this idea inculcated, that it is held up to the slave, as a bugbear over his head to bind him to good behaviour, that if he does not behave well, he will be carried down the river, and be sold. When I descended to this country, I had prepared myself to witness cruelty on the one part, and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... gives in to them and embraces them, and throws off as so much prejudice what it has hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its imagination that there is now no such thing as law and the transgression of law, that sin is a phantom, and punishment a bugbear, that it is free to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still further, when it does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think and hold just what it will, that "the world is all before it where to choose," and what system to build up as its own private persuasion; when ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... and seeing him receive prizes. Dr. London, of Hamilton, the medical attendant and much-valued friend of the Livingstones, furnishes us with a reminiscence of this occasion. He had great difficulty in persuading Livingstone to go. The awful bugbear was that he would be asked to make a speech. Being assured that it would be thought strange if, in a gathering of the children's parents, he were absent, he agreed to go. And of course he had to speak. What he said was pointed and practical, and in winding up, he said he had just ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... auxiliaries which the Revolution of 1688 marshalled on the side of the Throne, the bugbear of Popery has not been the least convenient and serviceable. Those unskilful tyrants, Charles and James, instead of profiting by that useful subserviency which has always distinguished the ministers of our religious establishment, were so infatuated ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... is little sign of life on the high road. The bright sunlight flashes upon the horse's polished brass harness, and upon the elaborate erection of charms placed thereon, with the avowed object of averting the dreaded Evil Eye, that everlasting bugbear of all dwellers upon these southern shores. On his poor drooping head the worn-out old steed carries a large bell with four jingling clappers and two brazen crescents, the horns of one of which point upwards ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... North. Here I was told, that the cruelty and brutality were not here, but among the great planters down the Mississippi. So strongly is this idea inculcated, that it is held up to the slave, as a bugbear over his head to bind him to good behaviour, that if he does not behave well, he will be carried down the river, and be sold. When I descended to this country, I had prepared myself to witness cruelty on the one part, and misery on the other. I found the condition of the slaves in the lower country ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... still pave London causeways. A poor woman in a remote hamlet, untouched by tourist or guide-book, has shown me the ash-tree under which Monmouth was seized after Sedgemoor; a Suffolk peasant, equally innocent of book-knowledge, has pointed Out "Bloody Mary's lane," through which that bugbear of Protestants passed three hundred years before on her way to Framlingham. The abbey immortalised in Carlyle's "Past and Present," and still the wonder of Eastern England, is surrounded now by the same villages that Jocelyn tells us of. The town named after ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... said he to me, 'that Campbell does not give full sweep to his genius. He has wings that would bear him up to the skies, and he does now and then spread them grandly, but folds them up again and resumes his perch, as if afraid to launch away. The fact is, he is a bugbear to himself. The brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his future efforts. He is afraid of the shadow that his own fame ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... safety given to him by the governor. At last, having had an interview at Santiago with the Captain-General Eguia, the latter succeeded in tranquillizing his fears, and the marines came out of their stronghold, looking very like a parcel of children whose nurse has threatened them with a bugbear. Notwithstanding the absurdity of Chacon's demonstration, it attracted the attention of the Christino party, then in power; and as at that period all the officers of rank known to entertain Royalist opinions were deprived, one after the other, of their commands, there was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... once for all, through you, that I will come into and go out of this place as often as I like, so long as he keeps Nell here; and that if he wants to be quit of me, he must first be quit of her. What have I done to be made a bugbear of, and to be shunned and dreaded as if I brought the plague? He'll tell you that I have no natural affection; and that I care no more for Nell, for her own sake, than I do for him. Let him say so. I care for the whim, then, of coming ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... As for the bugbear of the] "logical consequences" [of this conviction,] "I may be permitted to remark [he says] that logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men." [And if St. Augustine, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards have held ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... his reputation. Few have read his Pilgrim of Glencoe; and all who have, are pained by its manifestation of his failing powers. In fact, his was an unfinished fame—a brilliant beginning, but no continuance. Sir Walter Scott has touched it with a needle, when he says, "Campbell is in a manner a bugbear to himself; the brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his after efforts. He is afraid of the shadow which his own fame casts before him." Byron placed him in the second category of the greatest living English poets; but ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the gods, fear supports their empire over the minds of mortals. So early are men accustomed to shudder at the mere name of the Deity, that they regard him as a spectre, a hobgoblin, a bugbear, which torments and deprives them of courage even to wish relief from their fears. They apprehend, that the invisible spectre, will strike them the moment they cease to be afraid. Bigots are too much in fear of their God to love him sincerely. ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... from the magnitude of the country, the conflict of interests in its different sections, the State organizations and semi-sovereignty, and the consequent lack of that strong centralization of administrative powers and functions which, however much of a bugbear to many people's imaginations, is indispensable to a complete nationality—has threatened us in the past and may be expected to threaten us in the future. The latter evil threatens ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... picture that the reformers have drawn of their power and resources—power which is really derived only from intermarriages among the few remnants of the earliest loyalist settlers, or from admiration of their private conduct and abilities. In short, "the family compact" is a useful bugbear; it is kept up constantly before the Canadians, to deter them from looking too closely into other compacts, which, to say the truth, are sometimes neither so national, so loyal, nor ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... politicians who knew the tricks of the trade. It would be far better for them to wait till the present generation of honest mediocrities died out, and a new and differently educated generation were ready to take hold. University-trained Labour—that bugbear of Barnes'—if there is any hope for the British Constitution, which probably there is not, I believe it lies there. It is a very small one, at the best. Anyhow, it certainly did not, at this period, lie in the parliamentary Labour Party, that body of incompetents ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... confidence. Right or wrong, I have come to stand by you, Frank," said the Rector of Wentworth, rather mournfully. He had been waiting at Mrs Hadwin's for the last two hours. He had seen that worthy woman's discomposed looks, and felt that she did not shake her head for nothing. Jack had been the bugbear of the family for a long time past. Gerald was conscious of adding heavily at the present moment to the Squire's troubles. Charley was at Malta, in indifferent health; all the others were boys. There was only Frank to give the father a little consolation; and ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... published, in the "Independant," a terrible article on the intrigues of the clergy, in response to a short paragraph from Vuillet, who had accused the Republicans of desiring to demolish the churches. Vuillet was Aristide's bugbear. Never a week passed but these two journalists exchanged the greatest insults. In the provinces, where a periphrastic style is still cultivated, polemics are clothed in high-sounding phrases. Aristide ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... Amy—there is nothing to look at," or when in a bad humor, "Don't make such faces, child—you have no beauty to spare," and I can very well remember how both would endeavor to persuade me that I was the most veritable little fright that ever existed, and quite a bugbear ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... maliciously so, not a man. I cannot love my enemy; for my enemy is not a man, but a beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat him." No equivocation here, surely. On superstition he comments,—"It has been long a bugbear, by reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthusiast in the path of holiness." Herein lies the germ of a truth. Again, Lavater says,—"A great woman ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... property's so dear, They scorn their laws or governors to fear; So bugbear'd with the name of slavery, They can't submit to their own liberty. Restraint from ill is freedom to the wise! But Englishmen do all restraint despise. Slaves to the liquor, drudges to the pots; The mob are statesmen, ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... with her jibboom pointing in the right direction, and every mile that she now travelled was so much to the good, increasing our chances of getting across the Line and making our escape from the awful region of equatorial calms which constitute such a ghastly bugbear to those who go down to the sea in sailing-ships. Our self-congratulations proved, however, to be premature, for the breeze lasted only about half an hour when it died away again, leaving us as completely becalmed as before. But during ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... living, the climacteric or change of life, has become the bugbear of womanhood. It seems to be universally assumed that this period in a woman's life must be fraught with manifold sufferings and dangers. It is taken as a matter of course that during these changes in her organism a woman is assailed by the most serious physical, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... assembly. There was a distinct impression 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 ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... see," said Patty, as they started off in the car one morning, "why people make such a bugbear of Christmas shopping. I ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... countess; yet nothing more than a merchant-captain's wife; and she reared that commander's children in a suburban villa, with the manners which adorn a palace. When they happen to be there. She had a bugbear; Slang. Could not endure the smart technicalities current; their multitude did not overpower her distaste; she called them "jargon"—"slang" was too coarse a word for her to apply to slang: she excluded many a good "racy idiom" along with ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... history and the movement of civilisation. I don't mean a romantic view of it, with the pomps and shows and battles in the foreground; but a real view—how people lived, and what they were driving at. The thing could be done, if it were not for the bugbear of inaccuracy. To know a little perfectly isn't enough; of course, people ought to be able to write their own language accurately, and to do arithmetic. Outside of that, you want a lot of general ideas. It is no good teaching everything as if ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the superintendent-inspector of police, and sat down in his cabinet to concert with him on the best way to suppress, without scandal, the dangerous emissary from ever-restless Poland, lodged in consultation with the Jew, the bugbear of the ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... that when the fear of punishment is wanting, nothing else is of avail. And this is doubly so with us who are tyrants; whose power is based upon compulsion; who live in the midst of enmity and treachery. The bugbear terrors of the law would never serve our turn. Rebellion is a many-headed Hydra: we cut off one guilty head, two others grow in its place. Yet we must harden our hearts, smite them off as they grow, and—like lolaus—sear the wounds; thus only shall we hold our ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... you to enjoy yourself," returned Mrs. Cheyne, quietly, as she drew the girl's face down to hers. "I have given you such a bad impression that you look on me as a sort of moral bugbear. I can be very different, when I like, and I have liked to be agreeable to-night." And then this strange woman took up a rich cashmere shawl from the couch where she was lying, and folded it around Phillis's shoulders. ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... Staple was not a very happy man; University reform had long been his bugbear, and now was his bane. It was not with him as with most others, an affair of politics, respecting which, when the need existed, he could, for parties' sake or on behalf of principle, maintain a certain amount of necessary zeal; it was not with him a subject ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... medicine (senna, which they can get easily), but I question if they try either. I recommended them to send him to Tripoli, to the English doctor there, but they heard of the proposal with horror. None of these Berkat people have ever visited Tripoli. The Turks are their bugbear. They were not extremely friendly; rude and ignorant villagers as they were, they could not understand why I wanted to go to Soudan. I observed they were all well clothed and seemed to live in Saharan affluence. The term Berkat, ‮بركت‬, signifies "a lake" or "lagoon," and probably the site of the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... of the 1st of July, Bressant sat at his table, with his books and papers about him. He was in an excellent humor, for he had just arrived at the conclusion that he might, and would, safely encounter his bugbear Cornelia. If the professor invited him to tea, and to spend the evening, he was resolved to accept; and, at that moment, he felt a hand laid upon his shoulder, and, turning quickly round, recognized the sombre figure of the ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... province to Connecticut. The name of Yankee became as terrible among the Nieuw Nederlanders as was that of Gaul among the ancient Romans, insomuch that the good wives of the Manhattoes used it as a bugbear wherewith to ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... was an easier house to enter. I used to feel that keenly as a boy, when, by a prophetic irony, burglars were my bugbear, and I looked under my bed every night in life. The bow-windows on the ground floor finished in inane balconies to the first-floor windows. These balconies had ornamental iron railings, to which a less ingenious rope-ladder than ours could have been hitched with equal ease. Raffles had ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... movement, as if to shake off the yoke of the enchantress. He reminded himself instinctively of his brother's falsehood and ingratitude. After throwing himself a most distasteful burden on Edward's charity for five long dreary months, the bugbear of the doctor's dreams, and heavy ever-recurring climax of his uncomfortable thoughts, here had Fred departed without a word of explanation or thanks, or even without saying good-bye. The doctor thought himself quite justified in being angry. He began to feel that the suspicious ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... case was due almost entirely to this cause, and to the school of literalism in which he had been trained; but, however this may be, we both of us hated being made to say our prayers. Morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid it, as indeed children generally will, by every ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... make a bugbear of aunt Shaw' said Margaret, laughing. 'Edith picked up all sorts of military slang from Captain Lennox, and aunt Shaw never took any ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... thought was that now, indeed, the time for making all the crooked things straight had come; but, oh Margery, you cannot imagine, one like you never could imagine anything so wickedly weak as I am. The old bugbear of our family disgrace, the old terror of Arthur's throwing me off in disgust, rose up again with all their former strength, and I came here torn by conflicting feelings. You saw my meeting with John. The next day, when he came here to dine, ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... her composition. She cannot scold her servants—the mildest approach to it that she ever makes is by saying, 'Mr. Brandon does not like such a thing,' or that 'Mr. Brandon would be displeased if they do not attend to such another.' The idea of making a bugbear of me is very ingenious, but I fear not very efficacious, for I know they see through it. As for me, a penitent recollection of a conversation in an English railway carriage has stopped her mouth ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... outside her own bounds, either by land or sea; and England looked with scorn on the threats of a state which possessed neither army nor fleet. "America," Lord Sidmouth wrote at this time, "is a bugbear: there is no terror in her threats!" Canning indeed saw in the embargo only a carrying out of his policy by the very machinery of the American Government. The commerce of America ceased to exist. Her seamen were driven to seek employment under the British flag; and Britain again ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... spirit was untouched by his sentence he wrote A Hymn to the Pillory. This was bought and read and shouted in the ears of his enemies by thousands of the people. It was a more daring satire than even The Shortest Way. In the end of it Defoe calls upon the Pillory, "Thou Bugbear of the Law," to speak and say why he ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... worthy a special chronicle during the day. The men were drilled in various exercises, and gave excellent satisfaction to their officers. The next morning the St. Regis was off Cape Hatteras, and though it is a greater bugbear than it generally deserves, it gave the ship a taste of its quality. The wind had hauled around to the south-west, and was blowing a lively gale. The sails had been furled in the morning watch, and off the cape the course had ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... conqueror. Here, then, we may raise a strong barrier against future threats of Ashanti invasion, and make security more secure. The political officers of the Protectorate will be the best judges of the steps to be taken; and, if they are active and prudent, we shall hear no more of the Kumasi bugbear. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... inspired universal terror with his gloomy character, his eccentricities, and more especially by the fearful appearance of his face. The children were quite panic-stricken in his presence. Parents and nurses used him as a bugbear to ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... the mind, even when other matters are objectively more in evidence,—that subject is the one that holds the center of the inner attention. That is the controlling idea or purpose. Ordinarily, it is some diversion; occasionally, the haunting bugbear of some unfinished work or obligation. If the mind is dominated by such ideas or any other than the real problem in hand, ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... that he was nephew to Aunt Priscilla's bugbear has swallowed up all others; but now, as he himself reveals this other truth to her, she feels that her cup is ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... Instinct is the bugbear of psychology and does more to retard investigation than any other factor. As long as people of the creationist stamp wield the instinct-club, just so long will they be unable to grasp the idea of intelligent ratiocination in the lower animals. A company of men rebuilding a wall ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... inherited opinion, into statements as to the effects of caste which are actually contradicted by their own experience. And in Mr. Raikes's interesting work, "Notes of the North-Western Provinces," we find an instance of how people will always attribute everything to this universal bugbear. Observing on the pride of high caste, "which withers whatever it touches," Mr. Raikes informs us that the Brahmins and Rajpoots of the rich province of Benares will not touch the plough owing to pride of ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... Crust is the bugbear of all runners and is out and away the most difficult to tackle. It may be hard, and then with nothing apparent on the surface to warn you, the Skis break through and catch in the crust and down you go. When crust is about, let someone else lead, and ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... No. 121. Halme. [Greek: Drapetes] is the title. All readers of Plautus and Terence know what a bugbear to slaves the threat of being sent to the mill was. They would have to turn it instead of horses, or ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... to discover the transcendent merits discovered by thousands (or at least proclaimed by them), there is every likelihood of my incurring the contempt of connoisseurs, and of being reproached with want of taste in art. This is the bugbear which scares thousands. For myself, I would rather incur the contempt of connoisseurs than my own; the repreach of defective taste is more endurable than the reproach of insincerity. Suppose I am deficient in the requisite knowledge and sensibility, ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... leave to observe, that this Anglomania bugbear, by which her ladyship pretends to have been so much distressed, is the merest piece of nonsense and affectation in the world. We will not be so ungallant as to suppose that Lady Morgan has intentionally ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... some of its owner's adherents. Perhaps it was a forgotten and repented sin; but Mr. Montague's opponents made the most of it. Now, this gentleman, from certain circumstances which need not be explained, was satisfied that Mr. Medway had trotted out this skeleton and held it up as a bugbear to the people, and he hated his rival with all his mind, ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... was most feared, their enfranchisement has tended to elevate them. Under our system of the Australian ballot, they have found that the contaminating influence of which they had been told was but a bugbear, born of fright, produced by shadows. They learned that to deposit their vote did not subject them to anything like the annoyance which they often experienced from crowds on "bargain days," while their presence drove from the polls the ward workers ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... Philip, with an air of pleasant detachment, "I see. You are in a first-rate fix. I was always prepared for that. Coke told me about Bulmer—warned me off, so to speak. I forgot his claims at odd times, just for a minute or so, but he is a real bugbear—a sort of matrimonial bogey-man. If all goes well, and we enter Pernambuco without being fired at, you will be handed over to the British Consul, and he will send a rousing telegram about you to England. Bulmer, ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... salt is added.) Next day, cut out the soap, melt it, and cool it again; this takes out all the lye, and keeps the soap from shrinking when dried. A strict conformity to these rules, will banish the lunar bugbear, which has so long annoyed soap makers. Should cracknels be used, there must be one pound to each gallon. Kitchen grease should be clarified in a quantity of water, or the salt will prevent its incorporating with the lye. Soft soap is made in the same ...
— The Virginia Housewife • Mary Randolph
... been our nursery bugbear, to apprehend a Russian invasion on the Indus. This, by testimony from every quarter (the last being that of Sir Roderick Murchison, who had travelled over most of the ground), is an infinitely impossible chimera; or at least until the Russians have colonized ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the Three Degree Depot. The tracks seem as good as ever so far, sometimes for 30 or 40 yards we lose them under drifts, but then they reappear quite clearly raised above the surface. If the light is good there is not the least difficulty in following. Blizzards are our bugbear, not only stopping our marches, but the cold damp air takes it out of us. Bowers got another rating sight to-night—it was wonderful how he managed to observe in such a horribly cold wind. He has been on ski to-day whilst Wilson walked by the sledge ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... to freshmen, a still alarming period to sophomores, but no very great bugbear to the two upper classes, came and went. During that strenuous week the usual amount of midnight oil was burnt, the usual amount of feverish reviewing done, and the usual amount of celebrating indulged in ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm our will against it, to know the worst we have to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... through the rock. The water we pumped out was fresh, not salt. There, my dear Jollivet, pray don't raise a bugbear that might scare the men and make them nervous. They are bad enough with what they fancy about goblins and evil spirits haunting the mine. Even Hardock can't quite divest himself of the idea that there is danger from gentry of that kind. ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... advantages—particularly after lunch; and sometimes, where an old house was empty, we would go over it, and stare at beams and chimneypieces and hear the haunted tale of its fortunes, with a faint half-memory in our breasts of that one-time bugbear we had known as "copy." But though more than once a flaccid instinct would move us to have out our pencils, we would only end by bunging our foolish mouths with them, as if they were cigarettes, and then vaguely wondering at them for that, being ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... are scoundrels who are convinced to this day that I committed murder—no one will dare accuse me of cowardice, no one will dare say that I could not perform my painful duty to the end. From the beginning till the end I remained firm and unbribable; and though a bugbear, a fanatic, a dark horror to some people, I may awaken in others a heroic dream of the ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... attention was Miss Burkham's bugbear. She was always endeavoring to instill into the minds of her charges, that a lady never attracts undue attention. The word had been in use so frequently that it had become a ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... upon the principles of slavery in all your proceedings; you neglect in your conduct the foundation of all legitimate government, the rights of the people; and, setting up this bugbear, you spread a panic for the very purpose of sanctifying this infringement, while again the very infringement engenders the evil which you dread. One extreme naturally leads to another. Those who dread republicanism fly for shelter to the Crown. Those who desire Reform ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... is a bugbear,—a bete noire. She does not even trouble herself to tolerate him, which is the one unwise step the wise Marcia took on her ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... had been at the time of Maddox's treason, the Colonel began to doubt if her imagination had not raised a bugbear, and he questioned her, "My dear, why are you so much afraid, of this person? What do you ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... many Manii at Aricia." This proverb some explained by alleging that Manius Egerius was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line, whereas others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed people at Aricia, and they derived the name Manius from Mania, a bogey or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in wait for pilgrims on the Arician slopes. These differences of opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Aricia and Egerius Laevius of Tusculum, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... instance, there are only five full vowels and three[1] diphthongs, which can be explained to every speaker in terms of his own language. All the modified vowels, closed "u's" and "e's," half tones, longs and shorts, open and closed vowels, etc., which form the chief bugbear in correct pronunciation, and often render the foreigner ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... to the dark ages offers a specious argument to the atheists—the true and irredeemable atheists—who deny the reality of progress. Specious, but quite insubstantial; for we can analyze the terrestrial conditions which led to that catastrophe, and assure ourselves that the bugbear of their recurrence is nothing more than a bugbear. The printing-press alone is an inestimable safeguard. If the Greeks had hit upon the idea of movable types—and it is little to the credit of the Invisible King that they did not—the onrush of barbarism and Byzantinism would not have been ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... and as to the dogs, they were noble animals of the highest blood he ever saw. If, however, I and his friend Hammond, who seemed afraid of being eaten, in preference to the fine beef and venison which we had seen in such profusion on the plain, really felt alarmed at the bugbear legends of our vagabond Indians, before any demonstration of hostility had been made, we were welcome to take two-thirds of the men and mules and make our retreat as best we could, while he would advance with Antonio and the remainder of the party, to the ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... ground and is consumed. Having only this abominable and hideous mask before its eyes, it is afraid of death. But its fear is only because of its lack of understanding. If it knew, it would by no means be afraid or shudder at death. Our reason is like a little child who has become frightened by a bugbear or a mask, and cannot be lulled to sleep; or like a poor man, bereft of his senses, who imagines when brought to his couch that he is being put into the water and drowned. What we do not understand we cannot intelligently deal with. If, for ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... of this method is that the pupils should have all the French they have learned at the tip of their tongues. If this collection of stories helps to make the study of French more of a pleasure and less of a bugbear than it has heretofore proved, I shall feel that one part of my aim has ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... said Dr. Latimer, "is only a bugbear which frightens well-meaning people from dealing justly with the negro. I know of no place on earth where there is perfect social equality, and I doubt if there is such a thing in heaven. The sinner who repents on his death-bed ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... to make inquiries about army nurses—what they ought to do, how they ought to do it, and all that—she ran up against that terrible bugbear of control. Everywhere was control, control, control; and she really began to despair. There were examinations, and training, and applications to the surgeon-general, and to the assistant surgeon, and to ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... prepared to do our dooty, Outspell the rest an' set 'em down, an' carry home the booty. 'T was then the merry times began, the blunders, an' the laffin', The nudges an' the nods an' winks an' stale good-natured chaffin'. Ole Uncle Hiram Dane was there, the clostest man a-livin', Whose only bugbear seemed to be the dreadful fear o' givin'. His beard was long, his hair uncut, his clothes all bare an' dingy; It wasn't 'cause the man was pore, but jest so mortal stingy; An' there he sot by Sally Riggs a-smilin' an' a-smirkin', An' all his children lef' to home a diggin' an' a-workin'. ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... sent his mother a long anonymous letter to warn her that he was "ruining himself with a married woman," and the good lady at once conjuring up the eternal bugbear of families, the vague pernicious creature, the siren, the monster, who dwells fantastically in depths of love, wrote to Lawyer Dubocage, his employer, who behaved perfectly in the affair. He kept him for three quarters of an hour trying to open his eyes, to ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... at a village called Malla, (or Mallaing;) and on the 8th about noon I arrived at Kolor, a considerable town; near the entrance into which I observed, hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees, which I was told on inquiry belonged to MUMBO JUMBO. This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the Pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection; for as the Kafirs are not restricted in the number of their wives, every one marries as many as he can conveniently maintain; and as it frequently happens that the ladies disagree ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... confessed the intellectual advantages he had reaped from frequent compulsory communion with the Bible, and he many times declared that his children should not be brought up to regard religion and the Sabbath as a bugbear. What evolution was going on in his mind at the turning point in his life who can say? Who shall look into the silent soul of the poet and see the hope and confidence and joy that have come from out the chaos of strife and doubt? Yet who ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... strange and startling contrasts, both of hues and material. Her hands are always cold and seldom clean; and she has sundry uncomfortable notions about damping the spirits of youth and checking the exuberance of its gaiety which render her a perfect terror and bugbear to the rising generation. When I was a little thing, laughing, prattling, and giggling, as children will, an admonishing look from my aunt, with a gaunt finger held aloft, and a cold "Kate, don't be silly, my dear," was always sufficient to make me dull and gloomy ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... of fact, much deeper contemplations and maturer ponderings, only tend, in the long run, to bring us back to our original starting-point. It is just this very bugbear of Responsibility which in the consciences and mouths of grown-up persons sends the bravest of our youth post-haste to confusion—so impinging and inexorable are the thing's portentous horns. It is indeed after ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... said that "inconsistency is the bugbear of little minds." The Spanish politician has evidently not a little mind, for he has no fear whatever of inconsistency, nor, in fact, of making a volte-face whenever he sees any reason for doing so. There are Conservatives, Liberals, Republicans, Radicals, Socialists, ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... she said: Babhru, thou art ill, and thy unfortunate affection not only makes thee overestimate my value, but even leads thee to alarm thyself and me, by creating imaginary fears. And moreover, come what may, the mischief, if any mischief is, is done, and the tongue that is thy bugbear is safe and at a distance in its owner's head, talking, very probably, of anything but me. But now, while we ourselves are talking, time has fled, and it is nearly noon; for the shadows are at shortest; and now, I dare not let thee stay here any longer; as indeed, I was to blame, in allowing ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... which he said that if a man has a fixed place of residence and carries on a dry goods business, he might gamble as much as should please him and the law would not take hold of him. He would ask anybody to read the law understandingly and then deny this round assertion. This act, said he, is bugbear—it is a disgrace as it now stands, for it smacks of cowardice. The legislators, he presumed, had a little sense, and they knew that some kind of a law must be passed, and they were ingenious enough ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... Luther, the leaders of the nation had remained true to their calling. But when to speak Latin was considered more learned than to speak German, when to amass vast information was considered more creditable than to digest and to use it, when popularity became the same bugbear to the professors which profanity had been to the clergy, and vulgarity to the knights, Luther's work was undone; and two more centuries had to be spent in pedantic controversies, theological disputes, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... rewards; behold also, he fears none of thy penalties. Thou canst not answer even by killing him: the case of Anaxarchus thou canst kill; but the self of Anaxarchus, the word or act of Anaxarchus, in no wise whatever. To this man death is not a bugbear; to this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... examination of Oswell's school, with Anna Mary, and seeing him receive prizes. Dr. London, of Hamilton, the medical attendant and much-valued friend of the Livingstones, furnishes us with a reminiscence of this occasion. He had great difficulty in persuading Livingstone to go. The awful bugbear was that he would be asked to make a speech. Being assured that it would be thought strange if, in a gathering of the children's parents, he were absent, he agreed to go. And of course he had to speak. What he said was pointed and practical, and in winding up, he said he had just two ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... by it," said the priest; "that Capuchin is an ass, and he taught your son rather to bray than to talk. You'll act wisely by throwing into the fire that 'Life of St Catherine,' that prayer for the cure of chilblains and that history of the bugbear, with which that monk poisoned your son's mind. For the same price you paid for Friar Ange's lessons, I'll give him my own; I'll teach him Latin and Greek, and French also, that language which Voiture ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... not mean the professional elocutionist. The name, wrongly enough, has become associated in the mind of the public with persons who beat their breast, tear their hair, and declaim blood-curdling episodes. A decade or more ago, the drawing-room reciter was of this type, and was rapidly becoming the bugbear of social gatherings. The difference between the stilted reciter and the simple story-teller is perhaps best illustrated by an episode in Hans Christian Andersen's immortal "Story of the Nightingale." The real Nightingale and the artificial Nightingale ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... terrifying experience in the French capital, and not knowing when the Apache band might, knowing her part in the affair, avenge themselves upon her for the failure of the snare of "The Red Crawl," residence in France became a bugbear to Ailsa Lorne. Despite the pleadings of Athalie and the baron, whom she had served so well in giving help to Cleek, she was steadfast in her determination to leave it and to return to her native land. She therefore packed up her belongings, journeyed ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... possessed of that pride which one likes to see and so heartily respects, and which, alas! is so fast dying out among us,—the pride of honourable independence, which would willingly work day and night rather than receive charity from strangers. The bugbear of her life, since ever she had been left a widow with five helpless little ones to support, had been the Union Poor's-house; and now want, starvation, and the Union seemed staring her in the face. It was pitiful to see the spasm of positive pain which crossed ...
— Catharine's Peril, or The Little Russian Girl Lost in a Forest - And Other Stories • M. E. Bewsher
... aware there were eavesdroppers,' muttered the detected villain. 'Worthy Mrs. Dean, I like you, but I don't like your double- dealing,' he added aloud. 'How could you lie so glaringly as to affirm I hated the "poor child"? and invent bugbear stories to terrify her from my door-stones? Catherine Linton (the very name warms me), my bonny lass, I shall be from home all this week; go and see if have not spoken truth: do, there's a darling! Just imagine your father in my place, and Linton in yours; then think how you ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... of energy which, as we have seen, is practically illimitable. If the immense electrical energy in the interior of the atom can ever be liberated and controlled, then our steadily decreasing coal supply will no longer be the bugbear it now ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... word masculine is only a bugbear: there is little reason to fear that women will acquire too much courage or fortitude; for their apparent inferiority with respect to bodily strength, must render them, in some degree, dependent on men in the various relations of life; but why should it be increased by prejudices that give a sex ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... in the winter is like a wine, so exhilarating is its effects on the system; while its extreme dryness and elasticity prevents any discomfort from the cold which is such a bugbear to many. The extreme cold does not last but for a few days, and should the invalid choose to be domiciled during this brief interval, no great harm would come; but we apprehend that, once there, they could not be kept in-doors in consequence of it. Why, laboring men in the lumber districts ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... energetic workmen. Else they could not go. They go because here so many indifferent ones are weighing down their shoulders. And where do most of them go to? Not to strengthen and develop our colonies, but the United States—a not always friendly people, and just now your free-trader's bugbear!" ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... one in ten thousand. Cui bono, then I ask—where is this moral machinery which I sometimes dreaded? I cannot perceive its operations. It has no existence; it is a mere chimera; like many another bugbear, the foul offspring of credulity and fear on the one side—of superstition and hypocrisy on the other. No; life is merely a thing of chances, and its incidents the mere combinations that result from its ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... having been the custom of all cathedrals since the Reformation, it is not to be altered without a law.'[1178] Exaggerated dread of Popery suspected latent evils, it scarcely knew what, lurking in this kind of worship. Perhaps, too, it was thought to border upon 'enthusiasm,' that other religious bugbear of the age. A paper in the 'Tatler' speaks of it not with disapproval, but with something of condescension to weaker minds, as 'the rapturous way of devotion.'[1179] In fact, cathedrals in general were almost unintelligible to the prevalent sentiment of the eighteenth century. Towards ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... to tell unless it be that a bland silence is a good thing to cultivate. There's no use in making so much of a bugbear of these people who seem to oppose, and the best way to lead them into the green pastures is to let them nibble along the outside until they want to jump the fence and get over in spite of you. Now Leon is really quite hungry to know some things, especially about the practical ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... had the pleasure of five minutes' conversation alone with her. Oddly, it came out that she had a fine picture in the room, given to her by Mr. Legge, who inherited Aston Hall, which Mr. Legge I used to hear of continually ages ago as a sort of bugbear, being the heir-at-law to Sir Thomas Holte and Lady Holte's property. "Very natural they could never bear the name of Legge," said Mrs. Howley, "but he was my relative and excellent friend;" and she pointed to an ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... he, sardonically; "and will you miss this splendid opportunity of giving a sop to your Cerberus? Of conciliating your bugbear? your bete noire? ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... attested the rapid celebrity of the work. The edition of Antwerp - the one used by me in this compilation - is in the duodecimo form, exceedingly well printed, and garnished with wood-cuts, in which Satan, - for the author had a full measure of the ancient credulity, - with his usual bugbear accompaniments, frequently appears in bodily presence. In the Preface, Cieza announces his purpose to continue the work in three other parts, illustrating respectively the ancient history of the country under the Incas, its conquest by the Spaniards, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... your charge, Lady Carfax. I can see you're a capable woman. I'm coming back in September to perform that operation. You will have a willing patient ready for me—by willing I mean something gayer than resigned—and my bugbear, Nap—that most lurid specimen of civilised devilry—hunting scalps on the other ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... water for the women. From Antwerp they were banished by a general edict especially aimed at them supplemented by massacres in the northern provinces. [Sidenote: June 24, 1535] After the crisis at Muenster, though the Anabaptists continued to be a bugbear to the ruling classes, their propaganda lost its dangerously revolutionary character. Menno Simons of Friesland, after his conversion in 1536, became the leader of the movement and succeeded in gathering ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... higher platform. The people in their jealousy and anxiety to protect themselves have, in some sections of the country, run into the adoption of extreme measures. They are already preparing to retrace their steps, and for several reasons. They are discovering that they have been fighting a bugbear; also, that their legislation against the bugbear cannot legislate. Also, that money stays away from radical communities, that many possible advantages are lost; that combinations properly controlled have, within themselves, the capabilities of accomplishing much ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... neighbours; all we ask is, to keep the Prussians out of Paris." He said a good deal more which it is needless to repeat, but I willingly fulfil his request, to give my testimony that he, and thousands like him, who are the bugbear of the inhabitants of the richer districts of the city, are not by any means as black as they are painted. They are impulsive and somewhat inclined to exaggerate their own good qualities and the faults of ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... T'ai-p'ing rebellion that we associate likin, a tax which has for years past been the bugbear of the foreign merchant in China. The term means "thousandth-part money," that is, the thousandth part of a tael or Chinese ounce of silver, say one cash; and it was originally applied to a tax of one cash ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... who long ago had served as the model for E.T.A. Hoffmann's fantastic pictures. Here J.P. Lyser, a painter by profession, but a poet as well, and a musician besides. Here Carl Bauck, the indefatigable, yet unsuccessful composer of songs,—now, in his capacity of critic, the paper bugbear of the Dresden artists. He had just returned from Italy, and believed himself in possession of the true secret of the art of singing, the monopoly of which every singing-master is wont to claim for himself. C.F. Becker, too, the eminent organist and industrious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... us again about an outbreak and civil war—a ridiculous bugbear which is regularly revived every time the House protests against these abuses, as it was under Craig, under Dalhousie, and still more persistently under the present governor. Doubtless the honourable gentleman, having studied military ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... were a greater bugbear to American vessels than pirates, and Captain Parson kept ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... water is a worry! And doubtless, if the iron glove Should meet us here in Kent or Surrey, Its clasp might soften into love; We might despatch him with a grey grin, And all the German Scribes would vow "Our bugbear is the Montenegrin; We do not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... don't know it; and I don't know that I understand it now you tell it me," replied the major, just a little crossly, for he did not like poetry; it was one of his bugbear humbugs. "But one thing is plain: you must not expose yourself to what in such a search ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... my sunshine with your bugbear of a Charles Lamb! "I have heard you for some time with patience. I have been cool,—quite cool; but don't put ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... meanness of persecuting a mere boy: one whose foot was not yet firmly fixed on the second round of the great ladder upon which he himself towered so securely and so high!—And yet—had not this same belittling blemish been the bugbear of his own, generous existence? Was anything impossible in one whom he had known again and again to stoop to the pettiest forms of ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... presence of this body in cotton put upon the market in an unripe condition may account for certain dark stains sometimes appearing in the finished calicoes. The tannin matter forms dark stains with any compound or salt of iron, and is a great bugbear to the manufacturer. Some years ago there was quite a panic because of the prevalence of these stains, and people in Yorkshire began to think the spinners were using some new or inferior kind of oil. Dr. Bowman made inquiries, and found that in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... which a vote was taken related to the election for a borough. The ministers carried their point by six voices, [764] In an instant every thing was changed; the spell was broken; the Club, from being a bugbear, became a laughingstock; the timid and the venal passed over in crowds from the weaker to the stronger side. It was in vain that the opposition attempted to revive the disputes of the preceding year. The King had wisely authorised Melville ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... house in a great panic. I shall never forget the crying of the children. Indians had long been the favorite bugbear of the border country. Many a winter's evening we had sat in the firelight, fear-faced, as my father told of the slaughter in Cherry Valley; and, with the certainty of war, we all looked for the red hordes of Canada to come, in paint ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... does stop," grumbled Phil. Rain was Phil's great bugbear when he was on any kind of ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... men died, at once they ceased to be, Returning to the barren womb of nothing, Whence first they sprung; then might the debauchee Untrembling mouth the heavens:—then might the drunkard Reel over his full bowl, and, when 'tis drain'd, Fill up another to the brim, and laugh At the poor bugbear Death: then might the wretch That's weary of the world, and tired of life, 390 At once give each inquietude the slip, By stealing out of being when he pleased, And by what way, whether by hemp, or steel. Death's thousand doors stand open.—Who could force ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... proved that they were short in numbers. It was considered that the speech in which Mr. Daubeny reviewed the long political life of Mr. Mildmay, and showed that Mr. Mildmay had been at one time a bugbear, and then a nightmare, and latterly simply a fungus, was one of the severest attacks, if not the most severe, that had been heard in that House since the Reform Bill. Mr. Mildmay, the while, was sitting ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... word indicating the degree of strength requisite for accomplishing particular objects; a mere notice of the necessity for exertion; a bugbear to children and fools; only a ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... don't believe you will find him to be the bugbear you imagine. He can take defeat like a man. He is devoted to you, he is devoted to me. Your decision no doubt wrecks his fondest hope in life, but it doesn't ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... is our only bugbear; and yet I may affirm, without suspicion of flattery, that he now speaks better, and that his character is maintained with much more vigour in the fourth and fifth acts, than it was by Fletcher in the three ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... will be taught on that method. What now chiefly hinders its immediate introduction is not so much the real difficulty of providing a good simple system, as the false fear that all our literature may take on the phonetic dress; and this imagination is frightful enough to be a bugbear to reasonable people, although, so far as one can see, there is no more danger of this result than there is of all music appearing ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... of doors, Mr. Dan never ventured to play them, in. Polly Dawson stared. Susan Peckaby, forgetting New Jerusalem for once, sprang off her stool and stared. But that his terror was genuine, and Mrs. Duff saw that it was, Dan had certainly been treated then to that bugbear of ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... best you may—this is what Dr. Johnson meant by private liberty. Fleet Street open day and night—this is what he meant by public order. Give a sensible man these, and take all the rest the world goes round. Tyranny was a bugbear. Either the tyranny was bearable, or it was not. If it was bearable, it did not matter; and as soon as it became unbearable the mob cut off the tyrant's head, and wise men went home to their dinner. To views of this sort he gave emphatic utterance ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Effingham, that men can get to be so saturated with liberty, that they become insensible to the nicer feelings. The grossest enormities are constantly committed in this good republic of ours, under the pretence of being done by the public, and for the public. The public have got to bow to that bugbear, quite as submissively as Gesler would have wished the Swiss to bow to his own cap, as to the cap of Rodolph's substitute. Men will have idols, and the Americans ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... Shelburne papers at Lansdowne House, presents with a vividness of detail and verisimilitude that leaves nothing to be desired the outlines of the first twenty years of his life. The Second George had been ten years on the throne, the Young Pretender, alike the bugbear and the consolidator of the House of Hanover, was a stripling of seventeen, when, in the summer of 1737, William Fitzmaurice, afterward earl of Shelburne (the name by which history best knows him) and marquis ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... shyness, too, made him hesitate constantly in the utterance of a word which might explain away any difficulty in which he chanced to find himself; and this helped to keep his tongue tied in the matter where Larry Hogan had continued to make himself a bugbear. He had a horror, too, of being thought capable of doing a dishonourable thing, and the shame he felt at having peeped into a letter was so stinging, that the idea of asking any one's advice in the ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... hands. To instance in one particular: among all the daemon herd what one is there of a form, and character, so odious, and contemptible as Priapus? an obscure ill-formed Deity, who was ridiculed and dishonoured by his very votaries. His hideous figure was made use of only as a bugbear to frighten children; and to drive the birds from fruit trees; with whose filth he was generally besmeared. Yet this contemptible God, this scarecrow in a garden, was held in high repute at Lampsacus, and esteemed the same as [502]Dionusus. He was likewise ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... experience of his military prowess. Many others had grown familiar with his exploits in the exaggerated reports of their country-men. They had been taught to regard him with mingled feelings of fear and hatred, and could scarcely credit their senses, as they beheld the bugbear of their imaginations distinguished above all others for "the majesty of his presence, the polished elegance of his discourse, and manners in which dignity was blended with ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... induce white immigration, relieve the congested overproduction of the staples of the Southern States, introduce a higher class of industries, and simplify the so-called problem by removing the bugbear of ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... guide-book, has shown me the ash-tree under which Monmouth was seized after Sedgemoor; a Suffolk peasant, equally innocent of book-knowledge, has pointed Out "Bloody Mary's lane," through which that bugbear of Protestants passed three hundred years before on her way to Framlingham. The abbey immortalised in Carlyle's "Past and Present," and still the wonder of Eastern England, is surrounded now by the same villages that Jocelyn tells us of. The town named after St. Alban, with its memories of ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... some certain terms of agreement. The dependence of these Colonies, which Great Britain calls constitutional, as declared by acts of Parliament, is absolute. If the contrary of this be the bugbear so many have been disclaiming against, I could wish my countrymen would consider the consequence of so stupid a profession. If a limited dependence is intended, I would be much obliged to any one who will show me the Britannico- American Magna Charta, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... evil—resulting from the magnitude of the country, the conflict of interests in its different sections, the State organizations and semi-sovereignty, and the consequent lack of that strong centralization of administrative powers and functions which, however much of a bugbear to many people's imaginations, is indispensable to a complete nationality—has threatened us in the past and may be expected to threaten us in the future. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... her opportunities. What would some mammas—Lord Ormersfield's bugbear, for instance, Lady Conway—give for such a chance! Three months of a lame young Lord, and such a lame young Lord as ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 1st of July, Bressant sat at his table, with his books and papers about him. He was in an excellent humor, for he had just arrived at the conclusion that he might, and would, safely encounter his bugbear Cornelia. If the professor invited him to tea, and to spend the evening, he was resolved to accept; and, at that moment, he felt a hand laid upon his shoulder, and, turning quickly round, recognized the sombre figure of ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... like Luther, the leaders of the nation had remained true to their calling. But when to speak Latin was considered more learned than to speak German, when to amass vast information was considered more creditable than to digest and to use it, when popularity became the same bugbear to the professors which profanity had been to the clergy, and vulgarity to the knights, Luther's work was undone; and two more centuries had to be spent in pedantic controversies, theological disputes, sectarian squabbles, and political prostration, before a new national spirit could ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... 'What a bugbear that woman is!' I observed, rather irritably, as we retraced our steps in the direction of the Man and Plough, the little inn that stood at the junction of the four roads. Everything looked dark and eerie in the faint starlight. ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... costs will be heavy and the expenses ruinous. You will have to spend from twelve to fifteen thousand francs merely to win the suit,—but you will win it, if you care to. The suit will only increase the enmity of the Gravelots, for the expenses will be even heavier on them. You will be their bugbear; you will be called litigious and calumniated in every ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... woman's heart to such a pitch of indignation that this maligned name [Lowe] was an offence. We were to hold the owner in abhorrence. Speak to him, never! Look at him, sit in the same room with him, never! None were louder than I, more vehement; yet here was I beside my bugbear and perfectly satisfied with my position. It was a ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... should be taught that "he alone is great, who, by a life heroic, conquers fate;" that "diligence is the mother of good luck;" that, nine times out of ten, what we call luck or fate is but a mere bugbear of the indolent, the languid, the purposeless, the careless, the indifferent; that the man who fails, as a rule, does not see or seize his opportunity. Opportunity is coy, is swift, is gone, before the slow, the unobservant, the indolent, or ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... joy. He had thought up till now that he would be sent to the auction, away from the happy life in the parsonage, but now this threatening bugbear was done away with forever. When Erick entered the sitting-room he found old Marianne sitting there. They had sent word, the evening before, that Erick would not come back for the night, but Marianne could not have gone away without taking leave of him. With many tears she bade him good-bye, ...
— Erick and Sally • Johanna Spyri
... and, when it pleased him, more discernment, grace, politeness, and nobility. But then no man had ever before so many useless talents, so much genius of no avail, or an imagination so calculated to be a bugbear to itself and a plague to others. Abjectly and vilely servile even to lackeys, he scrupled not to use the lowest and paltriest means to gain his ends. Unnatural son, cruel father, terrible husband, detestable master, pernicious neighbour; without friendship, without friends—incapable ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of 'bug' in the general sense of a disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of 'bug' is "A frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to 'bugbear', a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... this to Lord Etherington?" said Mowbray; "wait until he propose such a terrible bugbear as matrimony, before you refuse to receive him. Who knows, the whim that he hinted at may have passed away—he was, as you say, flirting with Lady Binks, and her ladyship has a good deal of ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... contradicted by their own experience. And in Mr. Raikes's interesting work, "Notes of the North-Western Provinces," we find an instance of how people will always attribute everything to this universal bugbear. Observing on the pride of high caste, "which withers whatever it touches," Mr. Raikes informs us that the Brahmins and Rajpoots of the rich province of Benares will not touch the plough owing to pride of ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... Wentworth, rather mournfully. He had been waiting at Mrs Hadwin's for the last two hours. He had seen that worthy woman's discomposed looks, and felt that she did not shake her head for nothing. Jack had been the bugbear of the family for a long time past. Gerald was conscious of adding heavily at the present moment to the Squire's troubles. Charley was at Malta, in indifferent health; all the others were boys. There was only Frank to give the father a little consolation; and now Frank, it appeared, ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... Discreet man that he was, Wendell Pemberton could not entirely conceal his wonder that Patricia should have remained so long in ignorance of her condition. He spoke concerning malformation and functional weaknesses and, although obscurely because of the bugbear of professional courtesy, voiced his opinion that Patricia had not received the most adroit medical treatment at the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... adherents. Perhaps it was a forgotten and repented sin; but Mr. Montague's opponents made the most of it. Now, this gentleman, from certain circumstances which need not be explained, was satisfied that Mr. Medway had trotted out this skeleton and held it up as a bugbear to the people, and he hated his rival with all his ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... opening medicine (senna, which they can get easily), but I question if they try either. I recommended them to send him to Tripoli, to the English doctor there, but they heard of the proposal with horror. None of these Berkat people have ever visited Tripoli. The Turks are their bugbear. They were not extremely friendly; rude and ignorant villagers as they were, they could not understand why I wanted to go to Soudan. I observed they were all well clothed and seemed to live in Saharan affluence. The term Berkat, ‮بركت‬, signifies "a lake" or "lagoon," ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... and were learning more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated. Trades' Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were now petted and patronised as ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... in which he said that if a man has a fixed place of residence and carries on a dry goods business, he might gamble as much as should please him and the law would not take hold of him. He would ask anybody to read the law understandingly and then deny this round assertion. This act, said he, is bugbear—it is a disgrace as it now stands, for it smacks of cowardice. The legislators, he presumed, had a little sense, and they knew that some kind of a law must be passed, and they were ingenious enough to know how to frame it to sound well, and yet be comparatively powerless. They knew by such ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... included; such a pardon, I understood, would restore to them all their rights of citizenship. But he insisted that the officers and men of the Confederate army were unnecessarily alarmed about this matter, as a sort of bugbear. He then said that Mr. Breckenridge was near at hand, and he thought that it would be well for him to be present. I objected, on the score that he was then in Davis's cabinet, and our negotiations should be confined strictly to belligerents. ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... his wife, as if resenting the word. "But you make such a bugbear of the least little matter that there's no encouragement to tell ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... carefully exchanged glances of understanding with him. He went straight to the superintendent-inspector of police, and sat down in his cabinet to concert with him on the best way to suppress, without scandal, the dangerous emissary from ever-restless Poland, lodged in consultation with the Jew, the bugbear of the ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportunity to wreak a lifelong abhorrence upon the poor, blameless man, for the sake of that dreary picture of Lear, an explosion of frosty fury, that used to be a bugbear to me in the Athenaeum Exhibition. Would fire burn ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to that balance of interests and sentiments without which, as he believed, free governments should not exist. This work, which reproduced more at length and in a more obnoxious form the fundamental ideas of his 'Defence of the American Constitution,' made Adams a great bugbear to the ultra-democratic supporters of the principles and policy of the French revolutionists; and at the second presidential election in 1792, they set up as a candidate against him George Clinton, of New York, but Mr. Adams was re-elected ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... have M. Fouquet left us still, of whom we have no reason to complain; but, as he is no procureur-general without his gown, we agree with M. de la Fontaine and pronounce the gown to be nothing but a bugbear." ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Still, by patience, conciliation, and subsidies, we might hope in the course of time that the wounds we had inflicted would gradually be healed, and a more stable condition ensue. For a short period it was so; but then the old bugbear of Russian advance over the dreary wastes of Central Asia again supervened, and exercised its malign influence ...
— Indian Frontier Policy • General Sir John Ayde
... feeling, which comes more directly home to the affectionate compassion of the human heart, than the pitiable and touching condition of helpless little beings left to the tender mercies of a stepmother; who, with her traditional severity, may be called a kind of standing bugbear of the popular imagination. The Danes have a beautiful ballad, in which the ghost of a mother is roused by the wailings and sufferings of her deserted offspring, to break with supernatural power the gravestone, and to re-enter, in the stillness of ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... Battle of Tannenberg. He won it because the ground was exceedingly difficult, and because he knew the ground far better than any other man on earth. He was entitled to very high credit. He got it. He became the idol of the German populace, and the bugbear of the Allied countries. But he has done nothing since. Soon after Tannenberg he made a fool of himself on the Russian frontier, and showed that success had got into his head. He subsequently initiated several terrific attempts, all of which were excessively costly ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... me right at my ease. I was in the presence of a knight; but he was first and last a man. Straight to the point he went. He never puts a man through that bugbear of the soldier, a host of seemingly inconsequential questions; he has the particulars of each man who is likely to come under his direction ...
— Through St. Dunstan's to Light • James H. Rawlinson
... Jackson policy must be either a knave or a fool. He could not place himself in the position from which the other fellow was thinking or acting. He believed that it was his duty to maintain what he held to be the popular cause against the "schemes of the aristocrats," the bugbear of that day. He was a fighter from his youth up and his theory of government was that of enforcing the control of the side for which he was the partisan. Such a man could never be accepted as the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... pair of clear eyes, that never seemed to be removed from my face, embarrassed me beyond expression. Their owner was a perfect bugbear. Such a formidable memory I never encountered; and in her recitations, which were long and frequent, I do not think she ever misplaced a letter. That girl had algebra written on her face; and when, in a slow, deliberate way, she approached me with slate, pencil, and book, I felt sure ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... infancy, than all the theories and arguments that are brought to convince the mass of this fact. As soon as it became known among the students that my youth was the new objection, they treated it in such a manner that the whole thing was transformed into a ridiculous bugbear, growing out of the imagination ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... we death? Did Brutus fear it? or the Grecian friends Who buried in Hipparchus' breast the sword, And died triumphant? Caesar should fear death, Brutus must scorn the bugbear. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... misgivings—why these idle qualms, This shrinking backwards at the bugbear conscience; In early life I heard the phantom nam'd, And the grave sages prate of moral sense Presiding in the bosom of the just; Or planting thongs about the guilty heart. Bound by these shackles, long my lab'ring mind, Obscurely trod the lower walks of ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... candidly, and with such an air of treating the whole business as the bugbear of a timid monarch, that ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... and is consumed. Having only this abominable and hideous mask before its eyes, it is afraid of death. But its fear is only because of its lack of understanding. If it knew, it would by no means be afraid or shudder at death. Our reason is like a little child who has become frightened by a bugbear or a mask, and cannot be lulled to sleep; or like a poor man, bereft of his senses, who imagines when brought to his couch that he is being put into the water and drowned. What we do not understand we cannot intelligently deal with. If, for instance, ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... accompanies it. Sometimes there is neuralgia of the stomach. The sexual organs are seemingly affected, many men are "almost scared to death" and they use all sorts of quack remedies to restore their sexual vigor. Spermatorrhea is their bugbear. They usually get well if they stop worrying. In women there is the tender ovary and the menstruation may be painful or irregular. The condition of the urine in these patients is important. Many cases are complicated with lithaemia (sand-stone in ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... No, speak no more of revolutions and conspiracies. I am not made to sit upon a throne as the feared and thundering goddess of cowardly slaves, causing millions to tremble at every word and glance! I will not be empress, not the bugbear of a quaking, kneeling people, I will be a woman, who has nothing to do with the business and drudgery of men; I will not be plagued with labor and care, but will enjoy and rejoice in ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... 'Do you wish to set everybody to talking about us?' Ah! 'talking about us,' was the bugbear I most dreaded, and he knew it. But I wanted to seem brave; so I said that in private matters we were at liberty to do as ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... Fay running after him, for she had made friends with him during her days of solitude, being a fearless child, and not having been taught to make a bugbear of him. "The soot won't come off," ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Franklins, Walkers, and Cresaps were men of varied descent and nationality. They had the cunning, the boldness, and the resources to undertake successfully the task of conquering commercially the Great West. They were the first men of the colonies to be unafraid of that bugbear of the trader, Distance. We may aptly call them the first Americans because, though not a few were actually born abroad, they were the first whose plans, spirit, and very life were dominated by the vision of an ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... the house in a great panic. I shall never forget the crying of the children. Indians had long been the favorite bugbear of the border country. Many a winter's evening we had sat in the firelight, fear-faced, as my father told of the slaughter in Cherry Valley; and, with the certainty of war, we all looked for the red hordes of Canada to come, ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... was the influence of the much paraded bugbear of social equality forced upon the whites. To use the inns, hotels, and parks, established by authority of the government and the places of amusement authorized as the necessary stimulus to progress, to buy a railroad ticket at the same window, ride in the same comfortable car on a limited ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... stress upon two which are, so to say, the beginning and end of all things, the alpha and omega of human philosophy—viz., the grave and the womb;[179] the latter the bait as well as the portal of life, the former the bugbear and the goal of all things living. The idea, no less than the form, is manifestly Indian. Birth and death constitute the axis of existence; the womb is the symbol of the allurement that tempts men ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... beyond measure if they failed to observe any of the little gentilities of life, while the larger consideration of their visitor's disregard of the matter, would entirely escape them. To such people, social intercourse is a perpetual worry and bugbear. They are on the watch every moment, and if a visitor fails to say, "Pardon me," at the proper place, or stands with his back to his hostess for a moment, or does any other of the things that natural men and women often do, they ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... him once for all, through you, that I will come into and go out of this place as often as I like, so long as he keeps Nell here; and that if he wants to be quit of me, he must first be quit of her. What have I done to be made a bugbear of, and to be shunned and dreaded as if I brought the plague? He'll tell you that I have no natural affection; and that I care no more for Nell, for her own sake, than I do for him. Let him say so. I care for the whim, then, of coming to and fro and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... I have been thrust out of active life and forced to make up my mind to perfect passiveness, I have become a bugbear to myself. I cannot endure the thought of ever being the peevish egotist, the exacting tyrant, which men are apt to become when they are thrown upon woman's love and long-suffering, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... with the duchess, too," put in Fitzgerald, reaching for a bunch of yellow grapes. "With all due respect to your cause and beliefs, Madame the duchess, your mistress, is a bugbear to me. The very sound of the title arouses in my heart all ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... hath this dreamer, with his father's ark, The bugbear he hath built to scare the world, Shaken my sister? Are we not the loved Of Seraphs? and if we were not, must we Cling to a son of Noah for our lives? Rather than thus——But the enthusiast dreams The worst of dreams, the fantasies engendered By hopeless love and heated vigils. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... as long as people were careful, it was all right, and Agatha had already assisted in some experiments at Rock Quay, which had shown her to be thoroughly understanding and trustworthy, and capable of keeping off the amateur—the great bugbear. ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... death-bed, who is visited by some compunctions towards her, and she is absent a month. When she returns Thornfield Hall is quit of all its guests, and Mr. Rochester and she resume their former life of captious cordiality on the one side, and diplomatic humility on the other. At the same time the bugbear of Miss Ingram and of Mr. Rochester's engagement with her is kept up, though it is easy to see that this and all concerning that lady is only a stratagem to try Jane's character and affection upon the most approved Griselda precedent. Accordingly an opportunity for ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... is the greatest terror that Russian tyranny knows. He is a bugbear; but why should he be ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... the T'ai-p'ing rebellion that we associate likin, a tax which has for years past been the bugbear of the foreign merchant in China. The term means "thousandth-part money," that is, the thousandth part of a tael or Chinese ounce of silver, say one cash; and it was originally applied to a tax of one ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... paradise for young betrothed couples who would wed with light purses. One sees love in a cottage on a national scale here. That terrible lion of expense, the furnishing of a house, that stands ever in the way of so many loving pairs desirous of marriage and a home of their own, is a bugbear not known in Japan. A chest of drawers for clothing, a few mats, two or three quilts for a bed on the floor, some simple kitchen utensils, and the house is furnished. Why should we litter these neatly matted rooms, why ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... there is no use in attempting to ignore necessity; no use in exclaiming with Professor Huxley: 'Fact I know, and Law I know; but what is Necessity but an empty shadow of the mind's own throwing?'[24] A shadow it most certainly is not, though it is a bugbear, and the veriest that was ever suffered to torment a morbid imagination. It is an indisputable reality, a substantial, but at the same time perfectly harmless, or rather salutary reality, whose terrors need only to be boldly confronted in ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... their turn and gave their visitors a radio concert that was wonderful in its variety and beauty. The night happened to be unusually free of the annoying static that is the bugbear of the wireless, and every note of the music was as clear and sweet as though the performers were only a few yards away. Tim and Larry listened as though they were entranced, and when the concert was finished they were as enthusiastic "fans" as the ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman
... slip-back from antiquity to the dark ages offers a specious argument to the atheists—the true and irredeemable atheists—who deny the reality of progress. Specious, but quite insubstantial; for we can analyze the terrestrial conditions which led to that catastrophe, and assure ourselves that the bugbear of their recurrence is nothing more than a bugbear. The printing-press alone is an inestimable safeguard. If the Greeks had hit upon the idea of movable types—and it is little to the credit of the Invisible King that they did not—the onrush of barbarism and Byzantinism would not have ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... protected by the monstrous mountains, and the water is tempered by warm currents that flow in from the gulf stream. The national apprehension of both Norway and Sweden that Russia covets one of their seaports has existed a good many years. The bugbear has appeared at intervals for half a century, and a great deal of money has been expended in preparations to meet it. The people are, therefore, cordially patriotic in their support of the army, although many of them emigrate to the United ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... dooty, Outspell the rest an' set 'em down, an' carry home the booty. 'T was then the merry times began, the blunders, an' the laffin', The nudges an' the nods an' winks an' stale good-natured chaffin'. Ole Uncle Hiram Dane was there, the clostest man a-livin', Whose only bugbear seemed to be the dreadful fear o' givin'. His beard was long, his hair uncut, his clothes all bare an' dingy; It wasn't 'cause the man was pore, but jest so mortal stingy; An' there he sot by Sally Riggs a-smilin' ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... discover the transcendent merits discovered by thousands (or at least proclaimed by them), there is every likelihood of my incurring the contempt of connoisseurs, and of being reproached with want of taste in art. This is the bugbear which scares thousands. For myself, I would rather incur the contempt of connoisseurs than my own; the repreach of defective taste is more endurable than the reproach of insincerity. Suppose I am deficient in the requisite knowledge and sensibility, shall I be less so by pretending ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... and won't be such a bugbear as you think. If you were not worried into a morbid condition over all this trouble, you would not look so seriously upon a thing which I regard as a piece of mere night prowling, with a ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... complete bugbear," he groaned. "It ought to be indicted for a nuisance, waking people up o' mornings when they ought to be in the arms of Morpheus—I've a great mind to lie still. Half an ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... went on. "Liver. All sailors suffer from it, more or less. It's the bugbear of the sea. I have a doctor on board because, with a score or so of crew, it's really a ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... for none. He was appointed major in the National Guard, although he was utterly incapable of giving the word of command. In 1815 Napoleon, always his enemy, dismissed him. During the Hundred Days Birotteau was the bugbear of the liberals of his quarter; for it was not until 1815 that differences of political opinion grew up among merchants, who had hitherto been unanimous in their desires for public tranquillity, of which, as they knew, business affairs stood ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... tells me that the Persians are quite agreeable people, their only fault being the one common failing of the East: a disposition to charge whatever they think it possible to obtain for anything. The Circassians seem to be the great bugbear in Asiatic Turkey. I am told that once I get beyond the country that these people range over - who are regarded as a sort of natural and half-privileged freebooters - I shall be reasonably safe from molestation. It is a common thing in Constantinople ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... themselves able to perform their clerical duties efficiently, and able also to take their place with ease in high society? He was very well off certainly at Framley; but he could never hope for anything beyond Framley, if he allowed himself to regard Lady Lufton as a bugbear. Putting Lady Lufton and her prejudices out of the question, was there any reason why he ought not to accept the duke's invitation? He could not see that there was any such reason. If any one could be a better judge on such a subject than himself, it must be his bishop. And it ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... beaten bronzed face, with somewhat wild dark eyes, and a huge grizzled moustache forming a straight line over his lips. Altogether he was a complete model of the lawless Reiter or Lanzknecht, the terror of Swabia, and the bugbear of Christina's imagination. The poor child's heart died within her as she perceived the mutual recognition between her uncle and the new comer; and, while Master Gottfried held out his hands with a cordial greeting of "Welcome, home, brother Hugh," she trembled from head to foot, as she ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was pretty general, as far as the criers went. They put on their Sabbath face concerning the declaration of war, and told with approval how the Royal hand had trembled in committing itself to the form of signature to which its action is limited. If there was money to be paid, there was a bugbear to be slain for it; and a bugbear is as obnoxious to the repose of commercial communities as rivals are ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... invasion, and make security more secure. The political officers of the Protectorate will be the best judges of the steps to be taken; and, if they are active and prudent, we shall hear no more of the Kumasi bugbear. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... the service would gain in efficiency if the change made it less aristocratic, by throwing it open to men without private fortunes, who must live on their pay." Mr. Anderson has persistently, both in season and out of season, kept "pegging away" at the bugbear of Army Reform, and on the 2d August, 1870, he attacked the abuse of sinecure Colonels, and abuses in the higher branches of the army; such as the Colonelcies held by the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Cambridge, the chief military secretary, and others. Mr. Cardwell, in his reply, alleged that ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... believe you will find him to be the bugbear you imagine. He can take defeat like a man. He is devoted to you, he is devoted to me. Your decision no doubt wrecks his fondest hope in life, but it doesn't make a weakling ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... detrimental to the interests of her husband's niece, as the probate judge had told her she might if she listened to the seduction of immediate cash. And fortunately the bank officer did not ask for money to pay taxes and interest on the mortgages, which had been the bugbear of her married life. This was the next point touched upon by ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... stopped Eugene on the Cours Sauvaire, he had published, in the "Independant," a terrible article on the intrigues of the clergy, in response to a short paragraph from Vuillet, who had accused the Republicans of desiring to demolish the churches. Vuillet was Aristide's bugbear. Never a week passed but these two journalists exchanged the greatest insults. In the provinces, where a periphrastic style is still cultivated, polemics are clothed in high-sounding phrases. Aristide called his adversary "brother Judas," or "slave of Saint-Anthony." ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... value of proper preventives. The horn of the unicorn, the claw of the griffin, and other relics of equal verity and value, were sought eagerly by those rich enough to procure them, and when obtained were believed to ensure much good fortune to the possessor. A fear of the "evil eye"—that bugbear which still disturbs the happiness of the lower class Italians and of the Eastern nations generally—was carefully provided against. One great preservative was the wearing of a ring with the figure of a cockatrice upon it. This imaginary creature was supposed to be ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... political management, and, instead of being dragged down, as was most feared, their enfranchisement has tended to elevate them. Under our system of the Australian ballot, they have found that the contaminating influence of which they had been told was but a bugbear, born of fright, produced by shadows. They learned that to deposit their vote did not subject them to anything like the annoyance which they often experienced from crowds on "bargain days," while their presence drove from the polls the ward workers who had been so obnoxious ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... courage and elevated talents of the patriot hero, the stubborn inflexibility of the mere savage, he is looked upon far less flatteringly. By all, however, is he admitted to be formidable without parallel, in the history of Indian warfare. His deeds are familiar to all, and his name is much such a bugbear to American childhood, as Marlborough's was in France, and Napoleon's is in England. It is a source of much regret to our Government never to have been enabled to conciliate ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... me with that bugbear; but I am not so easily frightened. We have met for the first time by chance, but our next meeting ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... the mind of Bonaparte; they cannot arise in it, nor find access to it; his aversion to the unsubstantial phantoms of political abstraction extends beyond disdain, even to disgust.[1152] That which was then called ideology, is his particular bugbear; he loathes it not alone through calculation, but still more through an instinctive demand for what is real, as a practical man and statesman, always keeping in mind, like the great Catherine, "that he is operating, not on paper, but on the human ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... they could have found in the doctrines of most modern political economists which should lead them to suppose that human life would be precious in their eyes, is unknown to the writer of these pages. Those whose bugbear has been over- population, whose motto has been an ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... without erection, with or without voluptuous sensation, is called spermatorrhea. This is often a result of onanism, nervousness or constipation. Too much importance has been attached to it. In hypochondriacs spermatorrhea becomes a bugbear, which often makes them the dupes of charlatans. The less attention is paid to it the quicker it disappears; especially when it is of purely nervous origin, as is ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... single change to make it more airy or more like captured sea-foam in its fluttering draperies. It belonged with Arethusa's hair and her greenish eyes. She would never find another frock, if they looked all day, which would be half so becoming. But there was no slightest use in buying it if this bugbear of Miss Eliza's disapproval would continue to rear its serpent head ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... there's nothing to tell unless it be that a bland silence is a good thing to cultivate. There's no use in making so much of a bugbear of these people who seem to oppose, and the best way to lead them into the green pastures is to let them nibble along the outside until they want to jump the fence and get over in spite of you. Now ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... in Philadelphia. The editor of a leading white paper in Jackson, Mississippi, made the remark that he feared that the result of the first winter's experience in the North would prove serious to the South, in so far as it would remove the bugbear of the northern climate. The returned migrants were encouraged to speak in disparagement of the North and to give wide publicity to their utterances, emphasizing incidents of suffering reported through ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... irresponsible, smiling pleasure in noting these advantages—particularly after lunch; and sometimes, where an old house was empty, we would go over it, and stare at beams and chimneypieces and hear the haunted tale of its fortunes, with a faint half-memory in our breasts of that one-time bugbear we had known as "copy." But though more than once a flaccid instinct would move us to have out our pencils, we would only end by bunging our foolish mouths with them, as if they were cigarettes, and ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... prejudice what it has hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its imagination that there is now no such thing as law and the transgression of law, that sin is a phantom, and punishment a bugbear, that it is free to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still further, when it does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think and hold just what it will, that "the world is all before it where to choose," and what system to build up as its own private persuasion; ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... termed the minor morals, the small proprieties, and lesser virtues that lie on the surface of things and give life its polish, Audrey was for ever riding full-tilt against prejudices or raising a crusade against what she chose to term 'the bugbear ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... "Jauz al-Hindi": our word cocoa is from the Port. "Coco," meaning a "bug" (bugbear) in allusion to its caricature of the human face, hair, eyes and mouth. I may here note that a cocoa-tree is easily climbed with a bit of rope ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... of final causes. It might appear that a philosopher who has re-established the objective existence of space in opposition to Berkeley, was in danger of that materialism which had been Berkeley's bugbear. But Stewart escapes the danger by his assertion that our knowledge of matter is 'relative' or confined to phenomena. Materialism is for him a variety of ontology, involving the assumption that we know ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... and 5th, two spies. These men united in a conspiracy to destroy various persons who were obnoxious to them in the province, some of them actuated by political motives, and others in order to get possession of the property of their victims. The bugbear of the Court is Carbonarism, and Matteis pretended that there was a Carbonari plot on foot, in which several persons were implicated. He employed the spies to seduce the victims into some imprudence of language or conduct, and then to inform against them; in ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... admission into a mind like yours: such as the fear, or pretence of fear, that, in spite of your own power and the trifling power of Great Britain, you may be conquered by the Pope; or that this commodious bugbear (who is of infinitely more use to those who pretend to fear than to those who love him) will absolve his Majesty's subjects from their allegiance, and send over the Cardinal of York to rule you as his viceroy; or ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... arm and drew him to a distant window. "Now, lad," he said, "let me hear all about this bugbear. I'll see if it can be in any way lightened ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Supreme Court at Washington against the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 has had its effect, and to-day we find the Negro more discriminated against in his civil than in any other class of rights. Then, too, the social bugbear has had much to do with this discrimination. However, progress has been made. It has been slow, of course, because of the channel (public opinion) through which it has been compelled to come. In many sections ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... liberty and property's so dear, They scorn their laws or governors to fear; So bugbear'd with the name of slavery, They can't submit to their own liberty. Restraint from ill is freedom to the wise! But Englishmen do all restraint despise. Slaves to the liquor, drudges to the pots; The mob are statesmen, and ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... intended, ever since my conversation with Mr. T. about the Malstrom, to have called in at Loffoden Islands on our way south, and ascertain for myself the real truth about this famous vortex. To have blotted such a bugbear out of the map of Europe, if its existence really was a myth, would at all events have rendered our cruise not altogether fruitless. But, since leaving Spitzbergen, we had never once seen the sun, and to attempt to make so dangerous a coast in a gale of wind and ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... however, has for many years been the most terrible bugbear, and to prevent its introduction into the seaports of Europe and the United States has been the chief end and aim of the absurd and ridiculous quarantine regulations to which I have referred. It has never been regarded ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... Russia was the bugbear of two generations of Englishmen; and classical scholars, who interpreted modern politics by the light of ancient Greece, saw in the absorption of Athens by Macedon a convincing demonstration of the fate which the modern barbarian of the north was to inflict upon the ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... telling himself that this was the last time he would handle it, for they would— they must—escape; and he wondered now that he could have hesitated so long, and have let the notion that Humpy Dee was quietly trying to undermine them act like a bugbear. ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... of fertile Ohio lands were to be their reward. An invitation to other colonies to join in the assertion of English ownership met with scanty response, or none at all. The idea of a union was in the air, but it was complicated with that old bugbear of a regular revenue to be exacted by act of Parliament, which Shirley and the others still continued to press with hungry zeal; while the assemblies were not less set upon making all grants annual, with specifications ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... a glance from head to foot, rapid as an instantaneous exposure. "Tramps" were a permanent bugbear to the ladies of Cullerne, and a proper dread of such miscreants had been instilled into Anastasia Joliffe by her aunt. It was, moreover, a standing rule of the house that no strange men were to be admitted on any pretence, unless there was some man-lodger at home, to grapple ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... astonishment of the rough mariners and warriors when they saw their stern mistress, whose name was used by mothers and nurses all over the kingdom, as a bugbear, with which to frighten naughty children, now comforting and caressing this stolen child; when she fed him with her own hands, and then took him in her arms and hushed him to sleep—singing to him a wild, childish ditty, which she ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm our will against it, to know the worst we have ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... full sweep to his genius. He has wings that would bear him up to the skies, and he does now and then spread them grandly, but folds them up again and resumes his perch, as if afraid to launch away. The fact is, he is a bugbear to himself. The brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his future efforts. He is afraid of the shadow that his own fame casts ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Whigs were reminded that those same soldiers had taken the mace from the table of the House of Commons. From such evils, it was said, no country could be secure which was cursed with a standing army. And what were the advantages which could be set off against such evils? Invasion was the bugbear with which the Court tried to frighten the nation. But we were not children to be scared by nursery tales. We were at peace; and, even in time of war, an enemy who should attempt to invade us would probably be intercepted by ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... were years of steady progress. "The Immortals" were soon left far behind. At the end of the first twelve months he stood fifty-first in a class of seventy-two, but when he entered the first class, and commenced the study of logic, that bugbear to the majority, he shot from near the foot of the class to the top. In the final examination he came out seventeenth, notwithstanding that the less successful years were taken into account, and it was a frequent remark amongst his brother cadets ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... mutinous 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 us ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... not want to rob our neighbours; all we ask is, to keep the Prussians out of Paris." He said a good deal more which it is needless to repeat, but I willingly fulfil his request, to give my testimony that he, and thousands like him, who are the bugbear of the inhabitants of the richer districts of the city, are not by any means as black as they are painted. They are impulsive and somewhat inclined to exaggerate their own good qualities and the faults of others; ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... in his head, having received a scratch, was frighted: it gave him first a puke, then a fever, and then he died, that was all. And how could Belton help that? —But sickness, a long tedious sickness, will make a bugbear of any thing to a languishing heart, I see that. And so far was Mowbray a-propos in the verses from Nat. Lee, which ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... you with matters that can as little obtain admission into a mind like yours: such as the fear, or pretence of fear, that, in spite of your own power and the trifling power of Great Britain, you may be conquered by the Pope; or that this commodious bugbear (who is of infinitely more use to those who pretend to fear than to those who love him) will absolve his Majesty's subjects from their allegiance, and send over the Cardinal of York to rule you as his viceroy; or that, by ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Undue attention was Miss Burkham's bugbear. She was always endeavoring to instill into the minds of her charges, that a lady never attracts undue attention. The word had been in use so frequently that it had become a by-word among ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... any reason why they should. Listen, dear"—he let go her hands and sat up very straight. "Let's go over it carefully and sensibly, and lay this bugbear of pain once and for all. Before you knew me or I knew you, you loved somebody else. Perhaps you only thought you loved him; anyway, I hope so; I am jealous enough of him as it is. Dear, I don't ask you to explain ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... first have turned to this as a mode of obtaining the desired results; but, alas! all attempts in that direction signally failed—the ware most persistently refused to have anything to do with emulsion. The bugbear was the fixing agent or hypo., which not only left indelible marks, but, despite any amount of washing, the image on a finished plate vanished to nothing at the end of an hour's exposure in the show window. There was nothing left but to seek other means for the attainment of my object. I ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... entirely to this cause, and to the school of literalism in which he had been trained; but, however this may be, we both of us hated being made to say our prayers—morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid it, as indeed children generally will, by every artifice which we could employ. Thus we were in the habit of feigning to be asleep shortly before prayer time, and would gratefully hear my father ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... let it not trouble you! What it may lead to is a bugbear to you. You can't think how much younger and more agreeable you will be when you have learnt that there can be passages that lead ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... exchanged glances of understanding with him. He went straight to the superintendent-inspector of police, and sat down in his cabinet to concert with him on the best way to suppress, without scandal, the dangerous emissary from ever-restless Poland, lodged in consultation with the Jew, the bugbear of ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... right direction, and every mile that she now travelled was so much to the good, increasing our chances of getting across the Line and making our escape from the awful region of equatorial calms which constitute such a ghastly bugbear to those who go down to the sea in sailing-ships. Our self-congratulations proved, however, to be premature, for the breeze lasted only about half an hour when it died away again, leaving us as completely ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... had extended the same principle to all the officers, General Lee included; such a pardon, I understood, would restore to them all their rights of citizenship. But he insisted that the officers and men of the Confederate army were unnecessarily alarmed about this matter, as a sort of bugbear. He then said that Mr. Breckenridge was near at hand, and he thought that it would be well for him to be present. I objected, on the score that he was then in Davis's cabinet, and our negotiations should be confined strictly to belligerents. ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... speaking the latent though unavowed ideals of an evil generation of public men, was rewarded by being openly vilified and secretly studied. He became the manual of statesmen and the bugbear of moralists. While Catharine de' Medici, Thomas Cromwell and Francis Bacon chewed, swallowed and digested his pages, the dramatist had only to put in a sneer or an abusive sarcasm at the expense of the Florentine—and there were very many such ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... when he stopped Eugene on the Cours Sauvaire, he had published, in the "Independant," a terrible article on the intrigues of the clergy, in response to a short paragraph from Vuillet, who had accused the Republicans of desiring to demolish the churches. Vuillet was Aristide's bugbear. Never a week passed but these two journalists exchanged the greatest insults. In the provinces, where a periphrastic style is still cultivated, polemics are clothed in high-sounding phrases. Aristide called his adversary "brother Judas," or "slave of Saint-Anthony." Vuillet ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... those at which the private designs of the party were discussed. It was plain that they belonged to some kind of secret association; and before he had been long in Pianura he learned that the society of the Illuminati, that bugbear of priests and princes, was supposed to have agents at work in the duchy. Odo had heard little of this execrated league, but that it was said to preach atheism, tyrannicide and the complete abolition of territorial rights; but this, being the report of the enemy, was to be received with ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... bright colours, affecting strange and startling contrasts, both of hues and material. Her hands are always cold and seldom clean; and she has sundry uncomfortable notions about damping the spirits of youth and checking the exuberance of its gaiety which render her a perfect terror and bugbear to the rising generation. When I was a little thing, laughing, prattling, and giggling, as children will, an admonishing look from my aunt, with a gaunt finger held aloft, and a cold "Kate, don't be silly, my dear," was always sufficient to make ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... good soldiers; and as to the dogs, they were noble animals of the highest blood he ever saw. If, however, I and his friend Hammond, who seemed afraid of being eaten, in preference to the fine beef and venison which we had seen in such profusion on the plain, really felt alarmed at the bugbear legends of our vagabond Indians, before any demonstration of hostility had been made, we were welcome to take two-thirds of the men and mules and make our retreat as best we could, while he would advance with Antonio and the remainder of the party, to the gates of the ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... be dangerous, but as long as people were careful, it was all right, and Agatha had already assisted in some experiments at Rock Quay, which had shown her to be thoroughly understanding and trustworthy, and capable of keeping off the amateur—the great bugbear. ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... "The bugbear of your life seems to be poverty, Edith," Charley answered. "I daresay these people eat and sleep, fall in love, marry, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... available for sugar. It is by no means probable that it will increase materially in its sugar production. American laws will militate against the importation of contract labor, and will therefore prevent any undue competition. As the New York Sun very justly observes, the bugbear of the Louisiana sugar planter is not territorial expansion, but the war taxes and the possibility of their permanent adoption, bringing with it the reopening of the old tariff agitation, which ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... said the Rector of Wentworth, rather mournfully. He had been waiting at Mrs Hadwin's for the last two hours. He had seen that worthy woman's discomposed looks, and felt that she did not shake her head for nothing. Jack had been the bugbear of the family for a long time past. Gerald was conscious of adding heavily at the present moment to the Squire's troubles. Charley was at Malta, in indifferent health; all the others were boys. There ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... there were 2,000 of them sick in Philadelphia. The editor of a leading white paper in Jackson, Mississippi, made the remark that he feared that the result of the first winter's experience in the North would prove serious to the South, in so far as it would remove the bugbear of the northern climate. The returned migrants were encouraged to speak in disparagement of the North and to give wide publicity to their utterances, emphasizing incidents of ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... home the booty. 'T was then the merry times began, the blunders, an' the laffin', The nudges an' the nods an' winks an' stale good-natured chaffin'. Ole Uncle Hiram Dane was there, the clostest man a-livin', Whose only bugbear seemed to be the dreadful fear o' givin'. His beard was long, his hair uncut, his clothes all bare an' dingy; It wasn't 'cause the man was pore, but jest so mortal stingy; An' there he sot by Sally Riggs a-smilin' an' a-smirkin', ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... being anthropomorphic. Some one has said, "Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is." This means, as you know, that we look at things from the point of view of ourselves. We see things as men, as anthropoi. This has been erected in certain quarters into a good deal of a bugbear in the way of thinking. We are told we can never know the universe really, because we shape everything into our own likeness, we are anthropomorphic, we look at everything from the point of ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... on board worthy a special chronicle during the day. The men were drilled in various exercises, and gave excellent satisfaction to their officers. The next morning the St. Regis was off Cape Hatteras, and though it is a greater bugbear than it generally deserves, it gave the ship a taste of its quality. The wind had hauled around to the south-west, and was blowing a lively gale. The sails had been furled in the morning watch, and off the cape the course ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... experience might have given him, he felt that native and original horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible. There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle of his ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... throughout the district. In cases of genuine need he could be extremely kind and generous; but he did not lavish these qualities on the first comer, nor did he wear his heart upon his sleeve. His informal ways and unconventional dress were a bugbear to some critics; his old waywardness and love of adventure was still alive in him, and he thoroughly enjoyed the more irregular sides of his work. Mr. Bosworth Smith has preserved some capital stories of the crimes with which he had to deal, and how the ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... and property's so dear, They scorn their laws or governors to fear; So bugbear'd with the name of slavery, They can't submit to their own liberty. Restraint from ill is freedom to the wise! But Englishmen do all restraint despise. Slaves to the liquor, drudges to the pots; The mob are statesmen, and their ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... for theories about instinct incompatible with the doctrine of final causes. It might appear that a philosopher who has re-established the objective existence of space in opposition to Berkeley, was in danger of that materialism which had been Berkeley's bugbear. But Stewart escapes the danger by his assertion that our knowledge of matter is 'relative' or confined to phenomena. Materialism is for him a variety of ontology, involving the assumption that we know the essence of matter. To speak with Hartley of 'vibrations,' ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Proserpine. Anticipate no evil. I shall be firm; do not doubt me. I will cling with tenacity to that juste milieu under which we have hitherto so eminently prospered. Neither the Parcae and the Eumenides, nor Ixion and his friends, shall advance a point. I will keep each faction in awe by the bugbear of the other's supremacy. Trust me, ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... Three Degree Depot. The tracks seem as good as ever so far, sometimes for 30 or 40 yards we lose them under drifts, but then they reappear quite clearly raised above the surface. If the light is good there is not the least difficulty in following. Blizzards are our bugbear, not only stopping our marches, but the cold damp air takes it out of us. Bowers got another rating sight to-night—it was wonderful how he managed to observe in such a horribly cold wind. He has been on ski to-day whilst Wilson walked ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... languages. For instance, there are only five full vowels and three[1] diphthongs, which can be explained to every speaker in terms of his own language. All the modified vowels, closed "u's" and "e's," half tones, longs and shorts, open and closed vowels, etc., which form the chief bugbear in correct pronunciation, and often render the foreigner ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... patronage, precisely because he had asked for none. He was appointed major in the National Guard, although he was utterly incapable of giving the word of command. In 1815 Napoleon, always his enemy, dismissed him. During the Hundred Days Birotteau was the bugbear of the liberals of his quarter; for it was not until 1815 that differences of political opinion grew up among merchants, who had hitherto been unanimous in their desires for public tranquillity, of which, as they knew, business ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... in Minnesota in the winter is like a wine, so exhilarating is its effects on the system; while its extreme dryness and elasticity prevents any discomfort from the cold which is such a bugbear to many. The extreme cold does not last but for a few days, and should the invalid choose to be domiciled during this brief interval, no great harm would come; but we apprehend that, once there, they could not be kept in-doors in consequence of it. Why, ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... equality," said Dr. Latimer, "is only a bugbear which frightens well-meaning people from dealing justly with the negro. I know of no place on earth where there is perfect social equality, and I doubt if there is such a thing in heaven. The sinner who repents on his death-bed ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... weariness and anxiety afterwards were increased also. She was still getting away from our friend Time present, and forecasting into some future delight. "The good time coming, Boys," was her, as well as many other people's bugbear. She never could feel that (with God's blessing) the good ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... papists were secret favourites of government: a French invasion, the appearance of the French in London, is an old story almost worn out upon the imaginations of the good people of England; but now came a new if not a more plausible bugbear—the Pope! It was confidently affirmed that the Pope would soon be in London, he having been seen in disguise in a gold-flowered nightgown on St. James's parade at Bath. A poor gentleman, who appeared at his door in his nightgown, had been actually ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... national question, had learnt, and were learning more and more, that the middle-class can never obtain full social and political power over the nation except by the help of the working-class. Thus a gradual change came over the relations between both classes. The Factory Acts, once the bugbear of all manufacturers, were not only willingly submitted to, but their expansion into acts regulating almost all trades, was tolerated. Trades' Unions, hitherto considered inventions of the devil himself, were ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... somewhere else," said Anne cheerfully, "abroad if possible; but I have become a bugbear to Daisy, and it is best that I ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... Why, there is no such secret;—it is a bugbear! But the moral perversion of the person who could soberly ask the question that Helwyse asked is not so easily disposed of. It met, indeed, with full recognition. As for the subtile voice, having accomplished its main purpose, it began now to ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... its eyes, it is afraid of death. But its fear is only because of its lack of understanding. If it knew, it would by no means be afraid or shudder at death. Our reason is like a little child who has become frightened by a bugbear or a mask, and cannot be lulled to sleep; or like a poor man, bereft of his senses, who imagines when brought to his couch that he is being put into the water and drowned. What we do not understand we cannot intelligently deal with. If, for instance, a man has a penny and imagines it ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... this position, except the last clause, in which he uses something of the scholastick language, there is nothing but what every man has heard, and imagines himself to know. But who would not believe that some wonderful novelty is presented to his intellect, when he is afterwards told, in the true bugbear style, that "the ares, in the former sense, are things that lie between the have-beens and shall-bes. The have-beens are things that are past; the shall-bes are things that are to come; and the things that are, in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Zellerndorf; "though it may not be without its advantages after all, for now we still have this second bugbear to frighten Leopold with. So long, of course, as the American lives there is always the chance that he may return and seek to gain the throne. The fact that his mother was a Rubinroth princess might make it easy for Von der Tann ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bowed, and withdrew, Fay running after him, for she had made friends with him during her days of solitude, being a fearless child, and not having been taught to make a bugbear of him. "The soot ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... What a beast of a word that is—the detective's bugbear. I thought I had it, until you said—Great Scott! I'll tell you why. I see it all. I have him with the goods. His object in coming to see you about the letters was because Freddie wanted them back owing to his approaching marriage with Miss ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... later, and won't be such a bugbear as you think. If you were not worried into a morbid condition over all this trouble, you would not look so seriously upon a thing which I regard as a piece of mere night prowling, with a possible spice ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... there was danger of Guy's being led into mischief by his musical connections. Therefore he did his best, for Amabel's sake, to turn them from their purpose, persuaded in his own mind that the fever was a mere bugbear, raised up by Arnaud; and, perhaps, in his full health and strength, almost regarding illness itself as a foible, far more the dread of it. He argued, therefore, in his most provoking strain, becoming more vexatious as the former annoyance ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it is not suitable to record. Discreet man that he was, Wendell Pemberton could not entirely conceal his wonder that Patricia should have remained so long in ignorance of her condition. He spoke concerning malformation and functional weaknesses and, although obscurely because of the bugbear of professional courtesy, voiced his opinion that Patricia had not received the most adroit medical treatment at the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... a great bugbear with the ill-informed, bit it is not nearly so deleterious as some careless or unscrupulous writers would have us believe. In the first place there is a very insignificant quantity of tannin in properly drawn teas, say in those drawn for ...
— Tea Leaves • Francis Leggett & Co.
... 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 Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... like this last remark, and he walked down the pier. The state prison was only a bugbear then; but his father meant to do something. He was about to get into his skiff to visit the ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... punishment by all constitutional legislators; they know that when the fear of punishment is wanting, nothing else is of avail. And this is doubly so with us who are tyrants; whose power is based upon compulsion; who live in the midst of enmity and treachery. The bugbear terrors of the law would never serve our turn. Rebellion is a many-headed Hydra: we cut off one guilty head, two others grow in its place. Yet we must harden our hearts, smite them off as they grow, and—like ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... smiling pleasure in noting these advantages—particularly after lunch; and sometimes, where an old house was empty, we would go over it, and stare at beams and chimneypieces and hear the haunted tale of its fortunes, with a faint half-memory in our breasts of that one-time bugbear we had known as "copy." But though more than once a flaccid instinct would move us to have out our pencils, we would only end by bunging our foolish mouths with them, as if they were cigarettes, ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... thoughts; so, to divert them, he took the book. He happened to open it at these words: "My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not." For a moment his heart failed him. "If this admonition should be sent on purpose," said he; "but no, 'tis a bugbear. My master told me that if I went to the bounds, I should get over the hedge. Now I went to the utmost limits, and did not get over." Here conscience put in, "Yes, but it was because you were watched." ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... on to the capital, take it by storm, and annex the whole province to Connecticut. The name of Yankee became as terrible among the Nieuw Nederlanders as was that of Gaul among the ancient Romans, insomuch that the good wives of the Manhattoes used it as a bugbear wherewith to frighten their ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... said Adelaide. "I have been hearing of him as a sort of bugbear all my life. I don't think I ever saw him but once, and then he gave me a kiss and a pair of earrings. He never paid any attention to us at all, but we were taught to think that Providence had been very good to us in ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... balance of interests and sentiments without which, as he believed, free governments should not exist. This work, which reproduced more at length and in a more obnoxious form the fundamental ideas of his 'Defence of the American Constitution,' made Adams a great bugbear to the ultra-democratic supporters of the principles and policy of the French revolutionists; and at the second presidential election in 1792, they set up as a candidate against him George Clinton, of New York, but Mr. Adams was ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... admitted to hear mass, showing their dark profiles to the curious and fearful crowd, like wild beasts crouched against the loopholes in the wall. Francoise well remembered having seen in the village where she had been brought up the leper, the bugbear of her infancy, hearing mass from his stone cage, lost in the shade and in isolation. Now, seeing her son seated, his head in his hands, alone, up there away from the others, this memory came to her mind. "One might think it ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... reformers have drawn of their power and resources—power which is really derived only from intermarriages among the few remnants of the earliest loyalist settlers, or from admiration of their private conduct and abilities. In short, "the family compact" is a useful bugbear; it is kept up constantly before the Canadians, to deter them from looking too closely into other compacts, which, to say the truth, are sometimes neither so national, so ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... darling shall be free as air; his duties shall be made to seem like pleasures, or, better still, he shall have no duty but his pleasure. He shall do only what he wills, that his will may grow strong, and he can but choose the right, for he knows no evil. We will hold up before him no bugbear of future punishment, for doubtless there is no such thing; and if there be, it will not be meted out to such a child. He will love and obey his parents because they have devoted themselves to his happiness, and because they have never ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... matter in your charge, Lady Carfax. I can see you're a capable woman. I'm coming back in September to perform that operation. You will have a willing patient ready for me—by willing I mean something gayer than resigned—and my bugbear, Nap—that most lurid specimen of civilised devilry—hunting scalps on the other side of ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... tailoring. His income from the commercial house in which he held a post of responsibility would have permitted him to occupy better quarters than these; but here he had lived for ten years, and he preferred a few inconveniences to the trouble of moving. Trouble of any kind was Robert's bugbear. His progress up the commercial ladder seemed due rather to the luck which favours amiable and good-looking young fellows than to any special ability or effort of his own. The very sound of his voice had a drowsiness which soothed—if it did ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... purses. One sees love in a cottage on a national scale here. That terrible lion of expense, the furnishing of a house, that stands ever in the way of so many loving pairs desirous of marriage and a home of their own, is a bugbear not known in Japan. A chest of drawers for clothing, a few mats, two or three quilts for a bed on the floor, some simple kitchen utensils, and the house is furnished. Why should we litter these neatly matted rooms, why cover with paint and gilding ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... political life. The former evil—resulting from the magnitude of the country, the conflict of interests in its different sections, the State organizations and semi-sovereignty, and the consequent lack of that strong centralization of administrative powers and functions which, however much of a bugbear to many people's imaginations, is indispensable to a complete nationality—has threatened us in the past and may be expected to threaten us in the future. The latter evil ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... this marriage is such a bugbear to me! much might be if we could invent but any way to make ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... Mrs. Howley ready in her beautiful drawing-room, and I had the pleasure of five minutes' conversation alone with her. Oddly, it came out that she had a fine picture in the room, given to her by Mr. Legge, who inherited Aston Hall, which Mr. Legge I used to hear of continually ages ago as a sort of bugbear, being the heir-at-law to Sir Thomas Holte and Lady Holte's property. "Very natural they could never bear the name of Legge," said Mrs. Howley, "but he was my relative and excellent friend;" and she pointed to an inscription in grateful honour of him under the picture. How oddly connections come ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... now, indeed, the time for making all the crooked things straight had come; but, oh Margery, you cannot imagine, one like you never could imagine anything so wickedly weak as I am. The old bugbear of our family disgrace, the old terror of Arthur's throwing me off in disgust, rose up again with all their former strength, and I came here torn by conflicting feelings. You saw my meeting with John. The next day, when he came here to dine, I found an ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... but in our favored country there are many untravelled persons who do not precisely know what it is, and who no doubt wonder why it should be such a bugbear to travellers in the Orient. I confess I am still somewhat in the same predicament myself, although I have already been twenty-four hours in Quarantine. But, as a peculiarity of the place is, that one can do nothing, however good a will he has, I propose to set down my experiences ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... husband's niece, as the probate judge had told her she might if she listened to the seduction of immediate cash. And fortunately the bank officer did not ask for money to pay taxes and interest on the mortgages, which had been the bugbear of her married life. This was the next point touched ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... another, nor so happy as one in ten thousand. Cui bono, then I ask—where is this moral machinery which I sometimes dreaded? I cannot perceive its operations. It has no existence; it is a mere chimera; like many another bugbear, the foul offspring of credulity and fear on the one side—of superstition and hypocrisy on the other. No; life is merely a thing of chances, and its incidents the mere combinations that result from ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the nation had remained true to their calling. But when to speak Latin was considered more learned than to speak German, when to amass vast information was considered more creditable than to digest and to use it, when popularity became the same bugbear to the professors which profanity had been to the clergy, and vulgarity to the knights, Luther's work was undone; and two more centuries had to be spent in pedantic controversies, theological disputes, sectarian squabbles, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... pattern must not be ascribed to superior beauty or cheapness, for to the eye of taste surely a pure plain white plate is infinitely superior to an unfeeling copy of a Chinese pagoda, bridge, and willow-tree "in blue print." The fact is that the bugbear of a vulgar mind—"fashion"—long rendered it imperative upon every good housewife and substantial householder to keep up a certain dinner-set of earthenware, consisting of two soup-tureens and a relative proportion of dishes and ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... acquainted with the real nature of this arrogant and peculiar South-land. It was said that the Crimean struggle did much good by dispelling the cloudy hobgoblin mystery which hung over Russia, and, while it destroyed its prestige as a bugbear, more than compensated for this, by giving it a proper place abreast of civilized nations in the great march of industry and progress. Just so we are learning that the South is perfectly capable of receiving white labor, that it is not strangely and peculiarly different ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... is your bugbear," laughed his wife. "Don't worry, Robert! It isn't like you. Winship isn't bothering you about it, ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... "Yes, yes. Guerchard is a good assistant in a business like this. A little visionary, a little fanciful—wrong-headed, in fact; but, after all, he IS Guerchard. Only, since Lupin is his bugbear, he's bound to find some means of muddling us up with that wretched animal. You're going to see Lupin mixed up with all this to ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... Thou bugbear of the law, stand up and speak, Thy long misconstrued silence break; Tell us who 'tis upon thy ridge stands there, So full of fault and yet so void of fear; And from the paper in his hat, Let all mankind be told for what. Tell them ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... to terrify me with that bugbear; but I am not so easily frightened. We have met for the first time by chance, but our next meeting ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... Here, then, we may raise a strong barrier against future threats of Ashanti invasion, and make security more secure. The political officers of the Protectorate will be the best judges of the steps to be taken; and, if they are active and prudent, we shall hear no more of the Kumasi bugbear. ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... spelling no one would have dreamed of confusing the totally unrelated bodies, cacao and the milky coconut. (You note that I spell it "coconut," not "cocoanut," for the name is derived from the Spanish "coco," "grinning face," or bugbear for frightening children, and was given to the nut because the three scars at the broad end of the nut resemble a grotesque face). To make confusion worse confounded the old writers referred to cacao seeds as cocoa nuts (as for example, in The ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... could be thought of could call forth either the depth of enthusiasm in his supporters or the depth of antagonism in his opponents which is called forth by every public appearance of Mr. Gladstone. No other man has, in the same measure as he has, won the glory of being the bugbear of cultivated "society" and the object of the reverence and affection of thinking men. But, apart from this, the issues were different. Mr. Smith and Mr. Stuart stood directly as Liberal candidates. Mr. Gladstone, at least in his earlier elections, was still in party nomenclature counted among ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... method. What now chiefly hinders its immediate introduction is not so much the real difficulty of providing a good simple system, as the false fear that all our literature may take on the phonetic dress; and this imagination is frightful enough to be a bugbear to reasonable people, although, so far as one can see, there is no more danger of this result than there is of all ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... all who have, are pained by its manifestation of his failing powers. In fact, his was an unfinished fame—a brilliant beginning, but no continuance. Sir Walter Scott has touched it with a needle, when he says, "Campbell is in a manner a bugbear to himself; the brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his after efforts. He is afraid of the shadow which his own fame casts before him." Byron placed him in the second category of the greatest living English poets; ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... his entourage gave themselves a free rein; that old bugbear Mother Goose was resuscitated, and many a child, on reading the newspaper, might have recognized the ogre of Goodman Perrault in the disguise of a socialist; they surmised, they invented; the press being suppressed, it was quite easy; it is easy to lie when the tongue ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... this, though many try to make themselves miserable by endeavouring to find it out. It seems as though there were some power somewhere which mercifully stays us from putting that sting into the tail of death, which we would put there if we could, and which ensures that though death must always be a bugbear, it shall never under any conceivable circumstances be more ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... said Mrs. Easterfield, "I can not send anybody to find out what he supposed. But I am as certain as I can be certain of anything that there is nothing at all in this bugbear you have conjured up. No doubt the young man dropped in quite accidentally, and it was his bad luck that prevented him from ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... an air of pleasant detachment, "I see. You are in a first-rate fix. I was always prepared for that. Coke told me about Bulmer—warned me off, so to speak. I forgot his claims at odd times, just for a minute or so, but he is a real bugbear—a sort of matrimonial bogey-man. If all goes well, and we enter Pernambuco without being fired at, you will be handed over to the British Consul, and he will send a rousing telegram about you to England. ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... moment, and to earn your living as best you may—this is what Dr. Johnson meant by private liberty. Fleet Street open day and night—this is what he meant by public order. Give a sensible man these, and take all the rest the world goes round. Tyranny was a bugbear. Either the tyranny was bearable, or it was not. If it was bearable, it did not matter; and as soon as it became unbearable the mob cut off the tyrant's head, and wise men went home to their dinner. To views of this sort he gave emphatic utterance on the well-known occasion ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Was it Christian Science? Did you dare, Eloise Evringham, did you dare spoil your life—my life—our future, by scaring Dr. Ballard with that bugbear?" The angry woman was ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... that I have often thought the habit of debt to be our national inheritance—from that bugbear of out-of-place men, the Sinking Fund, to the parish-clerk, who mortgages his fees at the chandler's; and that my countrymen seem to have resolved to increase their own enjoyments at the expense of posterity, with whose provision, even Swift thinks we have no concern. Again; I have thought ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... the bugbear of youthful vanity, and it is considered knowing to quarrel with existing institutions and established truths; our experienced reflection regrets this inclination and we become weary of distracting ourselves ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... Foreign-loving, Catholic admirers of the Locofoco school of politics, everywhere seek to frighten native Protestant citizens with the bugbear cry of religious proscription. But let Americans and Protestants watch with increased vigilance both the Roman and Locofoco Jesuits around them. To call the damnable and accursed system of political intrigue practised for past centuries by ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... Spite of this bugbear, she had gone with a light free step all along her road, walking rather quick; for other thoughts had kept her company, and the image of her little flying packet shot once and again through her mind. ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... had as yet shown no military power outside her own bounds, either by land or sea; and England looked with scorn on the threats of a state which possessed neither army nor fleet. "America," Lord Sidmouth wrote at this time, "is a bugbear: there is no terror in her threats!" Canning indeed saw in the embargo only a carrying out of his policy by the very machinery of the American Government. The commerce of America ceased to exist. Her seamen were driven to seek employment under ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... fear we death? Did Brutus fear it? or the Grecian friends Who buried in Hipparchus' breast the sword, And died triumphant? Caesar should fear death, Brutus must scorn the bugbear. ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... problem to successive chiefs of scouts, a bugbear to the reservation Indians, and a terror to Arizona. If a man was killed or a woman missed, the Indians came galloping and the scouts lay on his trail. If he met a woman in the defiles, he stretched her dead if she did not please his errant ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... texts of Scripture ('Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing?' etc.), but the truth is that we are only filling up the void of another world with our own fancies. Again, we often talk about the origin of evil, that great bugbear of theologians, by which they frighten us into believing any superstition. What answer can be made to the old commonplace, 'Is not God the author of evil, if he knowingly permitted, but could have prevented it?' Even if we assume that the inequalities of this life are rectified by some ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... was not a very happy man; University reform had long been his bugbear, and now was his bane. It was not with him as with most others, an affair of politics, respecting which, when the need existed, he could, for parties' sake or on behalf of principle, maintain a certain amount of necessary zeal; it was not with ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... of living, the climacteric or change of life, has become the bugbear of womanhood. It seems to be universally assumed that this period in a woman's life must be fraught with manifold sufferings and dangers. It is taken as a matter of course that during these changes in her ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... himself into a prophetic fury, raving through the length and breadth of the dwelling, snatching firebrands and flinging them about him, to the terror of the squaws, with whom, in their combustible tenements, fire was a constant bugbear. ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... she said, as soon as her mirth allowed her to speak. "My uncle the canon seems the bugbear of the whole family. Is ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... the Revolution of 1688 marshalled on the side of the Throne, the bugbear of Popery has not been the least convenient and serviceable. Those unskilful tyrants, Charles and James, instead of profiting by that useful subserviency which has always distinguished the ministers of our religious establishment, were so infatuated as ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... to give to a poor little devil's gushing vehemence. He was expecting to be a sort of hero—the creator of a wild panic—and here everybody sat and smiled a mocking smile, and an old woman made fun of his bugbear. I turned and crept away—for I was that boy—and never even cared to discover whether I had dreamed the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... saw this Coppelius, therefore, the fearful and hideous thought arose in my mind that he, and he alone, must be the Sand-man; but I no longer conceived of the Sand-man as the bugbear in the old nurse's fable, who fetched children's eyes and took them to the half-moon as food for his little ones—no! but as an ugly spectre-like fiend bringing trouble and misery and ruin, both temporal and ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... two which are, so to say, the beginning and end of all things, the alpha and omega of human philosophy—viz., the grave and the womb;[179] the latter the bait as well as the portal of life, the former the bugbear and the goal of all things living. The idea, no less than the form, is manifestly Indian. Birth and death constitute the axis of existence; the womb is the symbol of the allurement that tempts men to forget their sorrows, ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... it has been our nursery bugbear, to apprehend a Russian invasion on the Indus. This, by testimony from every quarter (the last being that of Sir Roderick Murchison, who had travelled over most of the ground), is an infinitely impossible chimera; or at least until the Russians have ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... town, near the entrance into which I observed, hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees, which I was told, on inquiry, belonged to Mumbo Jumbo. This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection; for as the kafirs are not restricted in the number of their wives, every one marries as many as he can conveniently maintain—and as it ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... to be left alone in the dark. We would beg you to let your light shine into a few dark corners out of which we cannot clearly see our way. Do not despise us if we still secretly believe a little in the black man. We will not forget that he is merely a bugbear; but it will pacify us to hear from your own mouths what the true and natural facts of the case are. In the first place, what are, in your opinion, the means employed by nature, in the struggle for the existence of species, to keep the growth of numbers from reaching the limit of the food-supply? ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Fortnightly Review for June, 1900. Mr. Lilly complains bitterly that the infallible oracle in politics to-day is "the man in the street." He asserts that all issues are settled "by counting heads, in entire disregard of what the heads contain." His bugbear is the extension of the franchise. "Representative institutions, for example," he asks, "what do they represent? The true theory unquestionably is that they should represent all the features of national life, all the living forces of society, all that ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... Egerius was the ancestor of a long and distinguished line, whereas others thought it meant that there were many ugly and deformed people at Aricia, and they derived the name Manius from Mania, a bogey or bugbear to frighten children. A Roman satirist uses the name Manius as typical of the beggars who lay in wait for pilgrims on the Arician slopes. These differences of opinion, together with the discrepancy between Manius Egerius of Aricia and Egerius Laevius of Tusculum, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... sight of my best pupil yet," said I, "though she were born of beggars and lodged in a cellar; for the rest, it is absurd to make a bugbear of her origin to me—I happen to know that she was a Swiss pastor's daughter, neither more nor less; and, as to her narrow means, I care nothing for the poverty of her purse so long as her heart ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... and so heartily respects, and which, alas! is so fast dying out among us,—the pride of honourable independence, which would willingly work day and night rather than receive charity from strangers. The bugbear of her life, since ever she had been left a widow with five helpless little ones to support, had been the Union Poor's-house; and now want, starvation, and the Union seemed staring her in the face. It was pitiful ...
— Catharine's Peril, or The Little Russian Girl Lost in a Forest - And Other Stories • M. E. Bewsher
... we walked away, both commenting, after each other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... states in the Union. Although small, in proportion to the size it produces more grain and fruit than any other state in the country, and they are unexcelled as regards quality and flavor. Crime is kept in awe by that best of institutions, the whipping post and pillory! These are the bugbear of all the northern newspapers, and they can say nothing too harsh or severe against them. The whipping-post in Kent County is situated in the yard of the jail, and is about six feet in height and three feet in circumference; ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... two vessels were able to resume their voyage, prepared to face all the dangers of the South Sea, and to double Cape Horn, that bugbear of all navigators. As far as Staten Island the weather was uniformly fine, but beyond it the explorers had to contend with extremely violent gales, storms of hail and snow, dense fogs, huge waves, and a swell in which the vessels laboured ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... there is neuralgia of the stomach. The sexual organs are seemingly affected, many men are "almost scared to death" and they use all sorts of quack remedies to restore their sexual vigor. Spermatorrhea is their bugbear. They usually get well if they stop worrying. In women there is the tender ovary and the menstruation may be painful or irregular. The condition of the urine in these patients is important. Many cases are complicated with lithaemia ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... month. When she returns Thornfield Hall is quit of all its guests, and Mr. Rochester and she resume their former life of captious cordiality on the one side, and diplomatic humility on the other. At the same time the bugbear of Miss Ingram and of Mr. Rochester's engagement with her is kept up, though it is easy to see that this and all concerning that lady is only a stratagem to try Jane's character and affection upon the most approved ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... erection, with or without voluptuous sensation, is called spermatorrhea. This is often a result of onanism, nervousness or constipation. Too much importance has been attached to it. In hypochondriacs spermatorrhea becomes a bugbear, which often makes them the dupes of charlatans. The less attention is paid to it the quicker it disappears; especially when it is of purely nervous origin, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... expedient for the future of the New College that the present principal should resign. This was, of course, an extreme view of the results of Alec's interference; but Trenholme had accustomed himself to look at his bugbear in all lights, the most extreme as well as the most moderate. That for the future; and, for immediate agitation, there was his resolution to speak to Sophia. As he walked and talked, his heart was wrestling ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... they try either. I recommended them to send him to Tripoli, to the English doctor there, but they heard of the proposal with horror. None of these Berkat people have ever visited Tripoli. The Turks are their bugbear. They were not extremely friendly; rude and ignorant villagers as they were, they could not understand why I wanted to go to Soudan. I observed they were all well clothed and seemed to live in Saharan affluence. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... rest of them did not understand me at all, for they meant one sort of thing by the word gentlewoman, and I meant quite another; for alas! all I understood by being a gentlewoman was to be able to work for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible bugbear going to service, whereas they meant to live great, rich and high, and ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... the devil dost appear Blacker than really thou art far, A wild chimeric notion of reproach Too little for a crime, for none too much, Let none the indignity resent, For crime is all the shame of punishment. Thou bugbear of the law stand up and speak Thy long misconstrued silence break, Tell us who 'tis upon thy ridge stands there So full of fault, and yet so void of fear, And from the paper on his hat, Let all ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... "He's tried, And we—well, we're deceived. If we're permitted in this Square To muster there, why should we care? The game has lost its beauty! Licence unfettered is our plan. Who cares a cuss for Rights of Man, Checked by that bugbear Duty?" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... ventured on, and which my friends of the 22nd Regiment discovered and (very wisely) drank up.—It may surprise honest fanatics and annoy others to hear that, despite the cheapness and abundance of their bugbear, there was no serious crime of any kind in Guernsey during the six years I knew it, and no disorder worth speaking of, even among sailors and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... as they started off in the car one morning, "why people make such a bugbear of Christmas shopping. I think ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... not have sufficient funds on hand to pay them ten dollars per acre spot cash, so I shall turn over to them their signed contracts and thus relieve them of that bugbear, and for these three- dollar contracts they shall credit me with a payment of four dollars and twenty-five cents per acre on the land! I will secure them for the balance by a first mortgage on the property! And with that accomplished, I court ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... beyond any other limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportunity to wreak a lifelong abhorrence upon the poor, blameless man, for the sake of that dreary picture of Lear, an explosion of frosty fury, that used to be a bugbear to me in the Athenaeum Exhibition. Would fire burn ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... energy to adopt the best feature of the American style; and the result has been a distinct advance in the raciness and readableness of some of our best-known journals. The "Americanisation of the British press" is no bugbear to stand in awe of, if only it be carried on with good sense and discrimination. We can most advantageously exchange lessons of sobriety and restraint for suggestions of candour, humour, and point; and America's share in the form of the ideal English reading journal of the future will possibly ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... interest on it had not been paid, and latterly Mrs Codleyn had been obliged to foreclose, thus becoming the owner of some seventy cottages. Mrs Codleyn, though they brought her in about twelve pounds a week gross, esteemed these cottages an infliction, a bugbear, an affront, and a positive source of loss. Invariably she talked as though she would willingly present them to anybody who cared to accept— "and glad to be rid of 'em!" Most owners of property talk thus. She particularly hated ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... there is often in men's minds an exaggerated notion of some bit of truth, which proves a great assistance to falsehood. For instance, the shame of some particular small falsehood, exaggeration, or insincerity, becomes a bugbear which scares a man into a career of false dealing. He has begun making a furrow a little out of the line, and he ploughs on in it to try and give some consistency and meaning to it. He wants almost to persuade himself that it was not wrong, and entirely to hide the ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... nothing to tell unless it be that a bland silence is a good thing to cultivate. There's no use in making so much of a bugbear of these people who seem to oppose, and the best way to lead them into the green pastures is to let them nibble along the outside until they want to jump the fence and get over in spite of you. Now Leon is really quite hungry ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... first, in an obscure fold of consciousness, she had felt the stir of an unnamed, unacknowledged fear; and now the fear raised its head and looked at her. Well! She would look back at it, then: look it straight in the malignant eye. What was it, after all, but a "bugbear to scare children"—the ghost of the opinion of the many? She had suspected from the first that Wyant knew of her having shortened the term of Bessy Amherst's sufferings—returning to the room when he did, it was almost impossible that he should not have guessed what ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... you constantly reassure me? Home grows less and less a bugbear when you speak of it. How strange! It seems as if I had known you a year, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... too, there was the influence of the much paraded bugbear of social equality forced upon the whites. To use the inns, hotels, and parks, established by authority of the government and the places of amusement authorized as the necessary stimulus to progress, to buy a railroad ticket at the same window, ride in the same comfortable ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... insolence could do no harm. It became a fixed sentiment when she alone survived to uphold it, and one demonstration of it amused the whole neighborhood in a good-natured way. "People from Birthwaite" were the bugbear—Birthwaite being the end of the railway. In the Summer of 1857, Mrs. Wordsworth's companion told her (she being then blind) that there were some strangers in the garden—two or three boys on the mount, looking at the view. "Boys from Birthwaite," said the old lady, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... come to stand by you, Frank," said the Rector of Wentworth, rather mournfully. He had been waiting at Mrs Hadwin's for the last two hours. He had seen that worthy woman's discomposed looks, and felt that she did not shake her head for nothing. Jack had been the bugbear of the family for a long time past. Gerald was conscious of adding heavily at the present moment to the Squire's troubles. Charley was at Malta, in indifferent health; all the others were boys. There was only Frank to give the father a little consolation; and now Frank, it appeared, ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... able also to take their place with ease in high society? He was very well off certainly at Framley; but he could never hope for anything beyond Framley, if he allowed himself to regard Lady Lufton as a bugbear. Putting Lady Lufton and her prejudices out of the question, was there any reason why he ought not to accept the duke's invitation? He could not see that there was any such reason. If any one could be a ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... curse for being the cause of my misfortune. Let us to the ban dog's kennel, and explain to him what is to be done in every view of the question. If we can persuade him to stand the bier ordeal, it may be a mere bugbear, and in that case we are safe. If he take the combat, he is fierce as a baited bear, and may, perchance, master his opponent; then we are more than safe, we are avenged. If Bonthron himself is vanquished, we will put thy device ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and 'bug' in the sense of an disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of 'bug' is "A frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to 'bugbear', a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... of the Supreme Court at Washington against the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875 has had its effect, and to-day we find the Negro more discriminated against in his civil than in any other class of rights. Then, too, the social bugbear has had much to do with this discrimination. However, progress has been made. It has been slow, of course, because of the channel (public opinion) through which it has been compelled to come. In many sections of the country the Negro enjoys the most of his civil rights. He is admitted to the hotels, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Munich, thinking that in both places there was danger of Guy's being led into mischief by his musical connections. Therefore he did his best, for Amabel's sake, to turn them from their purpose, persuaded in his own mind that the fever was a mere bugbear, raised up by Arnaud; and, perhaps, in his full health and strength, almost regarding illness itself as a foible, far more the dread of it. He argued, therefore, in his most provoking strain, becoming more vexatious as the former annoyance was revived at ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... frowned and said, "Yes, yes. Guerchard is a good assistant in a business like this. A little visionary, a little fanciful—wrong-headed, in fact; but, after all, he IS Guerchard. Only, since Lupin is his bugbear, he's bound to find some means of muddling us up with that wretched animal. You're going to see Lupin mixed up with all this to ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... those ornaments which belong, almost exclusively, to lodging-houses everywhere. Briefly, he is always there—ready to burst into flames at any moment, ready to misunderstand everything anybody does or says, a perpetual bugbear; and not even the emotional repentances, which are often the only partially saving grace of bad-tempered people, can atone for the atmosphere of disturbance which they always inflict. And the man or woman who loses his temper whenever ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... never had that long hold on the national imagination in England, either as an idol or a bugbear, which is essential to keep the poet who sings it in effective harmony with new generations of readers. More than this, the Byronic conception was as transitional and inadequate as the methods and ideas of the practical movers, who were to a man left stranded in every ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... Some other pleasures: these to me are none. Why do I prate Of women, that are things against my fate! I never mean to wed That torture to my bed: My Muse is she My love shall be. Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone And that great bugbear, grisly Death, Shall take this idle breath, If I a poem leave, that poem is ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... freeze. They are protected by the monstrous mountains, and the water is tempered by warm currents that flow in from the gulf stream. The national apprehension of both Norway and Sweden that Russia covets one of their seaports has existed a good many years. The bugbear has appeared at intervals for half a century, and a great deal of money has been expended in preparations to meet it. The people are, therefore, cordially patriotic in their support of the army, although many of them emigrate to the United States ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... people were careful, it was all right, and Agatha had already assisted in some experiments at Rock Quay, which had shown her to be thoroughly understanding and trustworthy, and capable of keeping off the amateur—the great bugbear. ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... that bugbear Love!" he said shortly. "And so you'd lose a good friend for a dead lover? I' faith, I'd befriend thee well if thou wert my ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... plates, it was but natural I should first have turned to this as a mode of obtaining the desired results; but, alas! all attempts in that direction signally failed—the ware most persistently refused to have anything to do with emulsion. The bugbear was the fixing agent or hypo., which not only left indelible marks, but, despite any amount of washing, the image on a finished plate vanished to nothing at the end of an hour's exposure in the show window. There was nothing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... only bugbear; and yet I may affirm, without suspicion of flattery, that he now speaks better, and that his character is maintained with much more vigour in the fourth and fifth acts, than it was by Fletcher in the three former. I have always acknowledged the wit of our predecessors, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... doctrine of final causes. It might appear that a philosopher who has re-established the objective existence of space in opposition to Berkeley, was in danger of that materialism which had been Berkeley's bugbear. But Stewart escapes the danger by his assertion that our knowledge of matter is 'relative' or confined to phenomena. Materialism is for him a variety of ontology, involving the assumption that we know the essence of matter. To speak with Hartley of 'vibrations,' animal spirits, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Italy; would to God it never came into the mind of the French kings to try their strength in this country! Should they ever do so, Italy is lost.' For the other princes, the King of France was alternately a bugbear to themselves and their enemies, and they threatened to call him in whenever they saw no more convenient way out of their difficulties. The Popes, in their turn, fancied that they could make use of France without any danger to themselves, and even Innocent VIII imagined that he could withdraw to ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... or drunk, Slave to a wife, or vassal to a punk, A Switz, a High Dutch, or a Low Dutch bear; All that we ask is but a patient ear. 'Tis the first virtue, vices to abhor; And the first wisdom, to be fool no more. But to the world no bugbear is so great, As want of figure, and a small estate. To either India see the merchant fly, Scared at the spectre of pale poverty! See him, with pains of body, pangs of soul, Burn through the Tropic, freeze beneath the pole! Wilt thou do nothing for a nobler end, Nothing, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... he, 'Campbell is, in a manner, a bugbear to himself. The brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his further efforts. He is afraid of the shadow that his own fame casts ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... memory, that it did artistic service in the way of a foil to the loveliness of the rectory garden. This garden was the rector's delight, but to my restless seven years it was a sort of gay-colored and ever-threatening bugbear. ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... her servants—the mildest approach to it that she ever makes is by saying, 'Mr. Brandon does not like such a thing,' or that 'Mr. Brandon would be displeased if they do not attend to such another.' The idea of making a bugbear of me is very ingenious, but I fear not very efficacious, for I know they see through it. As for me, a penitent recollection of a conversation in an English railway carriage has stopped her mouth for ever, and she never gives me a hard word, ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... were secret favourites of government: a French invasion, the appearance of the French in London, is an old story almost worn out upon the imaginations of the good people of England; but now came a new if not a more plausible bugbear—the Pope! It was confidently affirmed that the Pope would soon be in London, he having been seen in disguise in a gold-flowered nightgown on St. James's parade at Bath. A poor gentleman, who appeared at his door in his nightgown, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... were too patriotic to do this, fled over the mountains, spreading consternation as they went. From Lake Champlain to the New England coast, there was not a village which did not believe itself to be the especial object of Burgoyne's vengeance. Indeed, his name became a bugbear, to frighten unruly ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... were inclined to the Liberal side in politics, and, at least in the beginning, regarded Buonaparte as a deliverer. From the time of his joining the Spearmen, Thomas Smith became in consequence a bugbear to his brethren in the faith. 'They that take the sword shall perish with the sword,' they told him; they gave him 'no rest'; 'his position became intolerable'; it was plain he must choose between his political and his religious tenets; and in the last years of his life, about 1812, ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... complications," said his wife, as if resenting the word. "But you make such a bugbear of the least little matter that there's no encouragement to tell ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... Monarch ("knight" was diplomat for "dog"), "There is something in your Treaty, that I relish—like roast hog. Know Morocco is no home for Factories and Colossal Stores; And the omnipresent Bagman is a bugbear to my Moors! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 30, 1892 • Various
... been speaking about do partially explain the terrible fact that we go away from God, their explanation is only partial, and this grimmer truth underlies them. There are modern theories, as there were ancient ones, that say: 'Oh! sin is a theological bugbear. There is not any such thing. It is only indifference, ignorance, error.' And then there are other theorists that say: 'Sin! There is no sin in following natural laws and impulses. Circumstances shape men; heredity shapes them. The notion that their actions are criminal ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... latter days Tom Staple was not a happy man; university reform had long been his bugbear, and now was his bane. It was not with him, as with most others, an affair of politics, respecting which, when the need existed, he could, for parties' sake or on behalf of principle, maintain a certain amount of necessary zeal; it ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... movement would be mutually beneficial, that it would induce white immigration, relieve the congested overproduction of the staples of the Southern States, introduce a higher class of industries, and simplify the so-called problem by removing the bugbear of Negro ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... be a relief to you to know at once that there will not be any statistics in this series of talks. We want instead just now to get broad and general, but distinct, impressions. Statistics are burdensome to most people. They are a good deal of a bugbear to the common crowd of us every-day folks. They are absolutely essential. They are of immense, that is, immeasurable, value. You need to have them at hand where you can easily turn for exact information, as you need it, to refresh ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... though many try to make themselves miserable by endeavouring to find it out. It seems as though there were some power somewhere which mercifully stays us from putting that sting into the tail of death, which we would put there if we could, and which ensures that though death must always be a bugbear, it shall never under any conceivable circumstances be more ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... of my sunshine with your bugbear of a Charles Lamb! "I have heard you for some time with patience. I have been cool,—quite cool; but don't put ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... to Cecil Linton was duly dispatched, and the fact of his impending arrival broken to Mrs. Brown, who sniffed portentously, and gave without enthusiasm directions for the preparation of his room. "Mrs. Geoffrey" was rather a bugbear to Brownie, who had unpleasant recollections of a visit in the past from that majestic lady. During her stay of a week, she had attempted to alter every existing arrangement at Billabong—and when she finally ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... honour—for there are scoundrels who are convinced to this day that I committed murder—no one will dare accuse me of cowardice, no one will dare say that I could not perform my painful duty to the end. From the beginning till the end I remained firm and unbribable; and though a bugbear, a fanatic, a dark horror to some people, I may awaken in others a heroic dream of the infinite power ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... he toiled away with his hoe, telling himself that this was the last time he would handle it, for they would— they must—escape; and he wondered now that he could have hesitated so long, and have let the notion that Humpy Dee was quietly trying to undermine them act like a bugbear. ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... Miss Burkham's bugbear. She was always endeavoring to instill into the minds of her charges, that a lady never attracts undue attention. The word had been in use so frequently that it had become a by-word ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... rent to old Mr. Henry did not occur to me then— no, nor for years afterward. On the other hand, all that I thought of was this,—that here was as good a chance as there was in Kansas to live without rent, and that rent had been, was still, and was likely to be my bugbear, unless I hit on some such scheme as ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... "and we have M. Fouquet left us still, of whom we have no reason to complain; but, as he is no procureur-general without his gown, we agree with M. de la Fontaine and pronounce the gown to be nothing but a bugbear." ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... make inquiries about army nurses—what they ought to do, how they ought to do it, and all that—she ran up against that terrible bugbear of control. Everywhere was control, control, control; and she really began to despair. There were examinations, and training, and applications to the surgeon-general, and to the assistant surgeon, and to special heads of departments and districts and States and ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... side was Pompey, the then rising man, who, being of the same age with Cicero, had already pushed himself into prominence, who was surnamed the Great, and who "triumphed" during these very two years in which Cicero began his career; who through Cicero's whole life was his bugbear, his stumbling-block, and his mistake. But on that side were the "optimates," the men who, if they did not lead, ought to lead the Republic; those who, if they were not respectable, ought to be so; those who, if they did not love their ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... decay of beggars, "the all sweeping besom of societarian reformation—your only modern Alcides' club to rid time of its abuses—is uplift with many-handed sway to extirpate the last fluttering tatters of the bugbear Mendicity. Scrips, wallets, bags, staves, dogs and crutches, the whole mendicant fraternity with all their baggage are fast hasting out of the purlieus of this ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... they were noble animals of the highest blood he ever saw. If, however, I and his friend Hammond, who seemed afraid of being eaten, in preference to the fine beef and venison which we had seen in such profusion on the plain, really felt alarmed at the bugbear legends of our vagabond Indians, before any demonstration of hostility had been made, we were welcome to take two-thirds of the men and mules and make our retreat as best we could, while he would advance with Antonio and the remainder of the ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... and withdrew, Fay running after him, for she had made friends with him during her days of solitude, being a fearless child, and not having been taught to make a bugbear of him. "The soot won't ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... poor devil! Has not slept to-night? would a'not, a naughty man, let it sleep one twinkle? A bugbear take him! ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... it; and I don't know that I understand it now you tell it me," replied the major, just a little crossly, for he did not like poetry; it was one of his bugbear humbugs. "But one thing is plain: you must not expose yourself to what in such ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... journalists have had the wit to see and the energy to adopt the best feature of the American style; and the result has been a distinct advance in the raciness and readableness of some of our best-known journals. The "Americanisation of the British press" is no bugbear to stand in awe of, if only it be carried on with good sense and discrimination. We can most advantageously exchange lessons of sobriety and restraint for suggestions of candour, humour, and point; and America's share in the form of the ideal English reading journal ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the wretched bugbear of English spelling was dealt with by a method which, so long as our present monstrous orthography continues, seems to me the best possible. During the last half-hour of every day, each scholar was required to have before him a copy- book, of which each page was ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Maverick will be met by these friends of the daughter, he trusts that the mother's interviews with the Doctor, and a knowledge of the kindly influences under which Adele has grown up, may lessen the danger of a religious altercation between mother and child, which has been his great bugbear in view of their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... I the mark; I'm the bugbear—him with whom Every wicked child you frighten In the silence ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... said Anne cheerfully, "abroad if possible; but I have become a bugbear to Daisy, and it is best that ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... cried; but Panoria, not having before her eyes the fear of the Bonapartes' bugbear, "their ...
— The Boy Life of Napoleon - Afterwards Emperor Of The French • Eugenie Foa
... of God! Believe it, fellow-creature, There's no such bugbear: all was made by Nature. We know all came of nothing, and shall pass Into the same condition once it was By Nature's power, and that they grossly lie That say there's hope of immortality. Let ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... AEsop's Fables, No. 121. Halme. [Greek: Drapetes] is the title. All readers of Plautus and Terence know what a bugbear to slaves the threat of being sent to the mill was. They would have to turn it instead of horses, or ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... habit also I looked about for a book. I did not have to look far. Books were my extravagance—almost my only one. They filled the shelves to the ceiling on three sides of the study and overflowed in untidy heaps on the floor. They were Hephzy's bugbear, for I refused to permit their being ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... you he wouldn't go, my friend! punishment or no punishment! Why, I can scarcely make my own fellows go! Bosh! I know boys; school is their bugbear." ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... (senna, which they can get easily), but I question if they try either. I recommended them to send him to Tripoli, to the English doctor there, but they heard of the proposal with horror. None of these Berkat people have ever visited Tripoli. The Turks are their bugbear. They were not extremely friendly; rude and ignorant villagers as they were, they could not understand why I wanted to go to Soudan. I observed they were all well clothed and seemed to live in Saharan affluence. The term Berkat, ‮بركت‬, signifies "a lake" or "lagoon," and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... very high patronage, precisely because he had asked for none. He was appointed major in the National Guard, although he was utterly incapable of giving the word of command. In 1815 Napoleon, always his enemy, dismissed him. During the Hundred Days Birotteau was the bugbear of the liberals of his quarter; for it was not until 1815 that differences of political opinion grew up among merchants, who had hitherto been unanimous in their desires for public tranquillity, of which, as they knew, business affairs stood much ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... was awfully sweet of her. Evidently she'd been bullied about her unseemly behaviour when she was small, till you, and I, and Brockhurst, had been made into a perfect bugbear. She's quite amusingly afraid of you still. But she's no notion what really happened. Of course she can't have, or she could not have mentioned the subject to me." Richard shrugged his shoulders. "Obviously it would ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the brain, coinage of the brain; imagery. conceit, maggot, figment, myth, dream, vision, shadow, chimera; phantasm, phantasy; fantasy, fancy; whim, whimsey^, whimsy; vagary, rhapsody, romance, gest^, geste^, extravaganza; air drawn dagger, bugbear, nightmare. flying Dutchman, great sea serpent, man in the moon, castle in the air, pipe dream, pie-in-the-sky, chateau en Espagne [Fr.]; Utopia, Atlantis^, happy valley, millennium, fairyland; land of Prester John, kindgom of Micomicon; work of fiction &c (novel) 594; Arabian nights^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... climbed to—when, in short, it is his own glory, not mankind's good, he has ever striven for—woe, woe, woe when the hour of success is come! I cannot stop to name and examine instances, but let me be allowed to refer to that bugbear who is called up whenever greatness of any kind has to be illustrated—Napoleon the Great; or let me take any of the lesser Napoleons in lesser grades in any nation, any age—the men who have had no star but self and self-glory before them—and let me ask if any one can be named ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... to scout at me! Nay the very go-between, the convenient chamber-maid herself, forgetting the lightness of her own heels, would bless herself and claim her share in the miraculous virtue of the sex! What! Become the scoff of the tea-table, the bugbear of the bed-chamber, and the standing jest of the tavern?—I will return this instant, Fairfax, and put her boasted strength and courage to the proof—Madness!—I forget that nothing less than depriving her of sense can be effectual. She knows her strong ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... he soon divined that the gatherings he attended were not those at which the private designs of the party were discussed. It was plain that they belonged to some kind of secret association; and before he had been long in Pianura he learned that the society of the Illuminati, that bugbear of priests and princes, was supposed to have agents at work in the duchy. Odo had heard little of this execrated league, but that it was said to preach atheism, tyrannicide and the complete abolition ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the principles of slavery in all your proceedings; you neglect in your conduct the foundation of all legitimate government, the rights of the people; and, setting up this bugbear, you spread a panic for the very purpose of sanctifying this infringement, while again the very infringement engenders the evil which you dread. One extreme naturally leads to another. Those who dread republicanism fly for shelter ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... often to see her in the garden, saying that she must find it lonely in the cottage, and that the open air would be good for her also. Aunt Ninette was much gratified by this courtesy, and accepted it with pleasure; quite forgetting the noise of the children, which had been so great a bugbear to her. ...
— Uncle Titus and His Visit to the Country • Johanna Spyri
... were certain to pick out the tiniest blot in her fellow man or woman, and Lady Dasher's stately, albeit melancholy presence, satisfy you? Thus, the "convenances," that horrid Anglo-French pseudonym, of the still more horrible bugbear "society," had no cause to consider themselves neglected and find an excuse for taking umbrage. From this point, our acquaintanceship naturally and gradually ripened. We got intimate: it was our fate, I suppose—what more or less would ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... be, it was possible that it would be expedient for the future of the New College that the present principal should resign. This was, of course, an extreme view of the results of Alec's interference; but Trenholme had accustomed himself to look at his bugbear in all lights, the most extreme as well as the most moderate. That for the future; and, for immediate agitation, there was his resolution to speak to Sophia. As he walked and talked, his heart was wrestling with ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... colleagues with whom his whole waking life is passed—excellent fellows and capital company—but nature demands an occasional enlargement of the mental horizon. Then if by chance he has one special bugbear—a bore or an egotist, a man with dirty hands or a churlish temper—that man will inevitably come and sit down beside him and insist on being affectionate ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... without delay. Although there was some grumbling among the marketmen, the provision stores were soon put through such a course of scrubbing and whitening as to make the old-fashioned "spring house-cleaning," which has been the bugbear of pater familias and one of the chief assets of the paragrapher for so many years, a process of incomparably mild flavor. At the abattoir it had not been so easy to effect a reform, but with such women as Mrs. Bateman, Mrs. Albert Turner and the ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... ground was exceedingly difficult, and because he knew the ground far better than any other man on earth. He was entitled to very high credit. He got it. He became the idol of the German populace, and the bugbear of the Allied countries. But he has done nothing since. Soon after Tannenberg he made a fool of himself on the Russian frontier, and showed that success had got into his head. He subsequently initiated several terrific attempts, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... Imminent Downfall of the Universe was thus, glory to Robinson, arrested for that time. And now we have the same Robinson instructed to sharpen all his faculties to the cutting pitch, and do the impossible for this new and reverse face of matters. What a change from 1731 to 1741! Bugbear of dreadful Austrian-Spanish Alliance dissolves now into sunlit clouds, encircling a beautiful Austrian Andromeda, about to be devoured for us; and the Downfall of the Universe is again imminent, from Spain and others joining AGAINST Austria. Oh, ye ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... by his academic learning, Theobald walked over to the Rectory one Sunday morning early in December—a few weeks only after he had been ordained. He had taken a great deal of pains with his sermon, which was on the subject of geology—then coming to the fore as a theological bugbear. He showed that so far as geology was worth anything at all—and he was too liberal entirely to pooh-pooh it—it confirmed the absolutely historical character of the Mosaic account of the Creation as given in Genesis. Any phenomena ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... life we see extending to the control of the energies of the human factor. We have already spoken of guarantees that affect the spirit and the morale of labor. We hear of the prevention of unemployment, the removal of the bugbear of "losing the job." Most advance of all is being made in the application of the principles of mental and physical hygiene and of scientific management to the actual details of movement and the whole process of expenditure ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... number of the priests of Italy are infidels. They no more believe in the Pope than they believe in the pagan Jupiter. But then, were they to speak out their disbelief, and to say that purgatory is a mere bugbear for frightening men and getting their money, they know that a dungeon would instantly be their lot; and infidelity has little of the martyr spirit in it. These men, like Leo the Tenth, as thorough an infidel as ever lived, hold ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... however, to follow the traveller through every phase of his initiation, at the risk of stamping poor Venice beyond repair as the supreme bugbear of literature; though for my own part I hold that to a fine healthy romantic appetite the subject can't be too diffusely treated. Meeting in the Piazza on the evening of my arrival a young American painter who told me that he had been spending the summer just where I found him, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... ever been the bugbear of youthful vanity, and it is considered knowing to quarrel with existing institutions and established truths; our experienced reflection regrets this inclination and we become weary of distracting ourselves ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 532. Saturday, February 4, 1832 • Various
... the hope of catching sight of some passing sail. It must be owned that the whole party were far from sorry to be relieved of his presence; his uncomely figure and repulsive countenance was a perpetual bugbear. He had given out in plain terms that he did not intend to part with any of his property, except for current money, and Servadac, equally resolute, had strictly forbidden any purchases to be made, hoping to wear out ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... his life: but the fellow, more sensible in his skin than in his head, having received a scratch, was frighted: it gave him first a puke, then a fever, and then he died, that was all. And how could Belton help that? —But sickness, a long tedious sickness, will make a bugbear of any thing to a languishing heart, I see that. And so far was Mowbray a-propos in the verses from Nat. Lee, ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... 140, l. 8. (Discourse, chap. xxi.) Hudgin is more usually spelled Hodeken, the German familiar fairy. Cf. the French Hugon, a bugbear used to frighten children. ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... produces more grain and fruit than any other state in the country, and they are unexcelled as regards quality and flavor. Crime is kept in awe by that best of institutions, the whipping post and pillory! These are the bugbear of all the northern newspapers, and they can say nothing too harsh or severe against them. The whipping-post in Kent County is situated in the yard of the jail, and is about six feet in height and three feet in circumference; the prisoner is fastened to it by means ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... radicalism especially bears on its 'horrid front' that bugbear of all conservatism, the world over—abolition. There is no word so abused as that. The thing itself is as old and inevitable as the relation of cause and effect, as the existence of sin and righteousness, as the contest between God and Satan. Just as if there could help being an abolition ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... necessity also. For there is no use in attempting to ignore necessity; no use in exclaiming with Professor Huxley: 'Fact I know, and Law I know; but what is Necessity but an empty shadow of the mind's own throwing?'[24] A shadow it most certainly is not, though it is a bugbear, and the veriest that was ever suffered to torment a morbid imagination. It is an indisputable reality, a substantial, but at the same time perfectly harmless, or rather salutary reality, whose terrors need only to be boldly confronted in order to disappear and to transform themselves ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... thicken it, after the incorporation is complete; this must be done before the salt is added.) Next day, cut out the soap, melt it, and cool it again; this takes out all the lye, and keeps the soap from shrinking when dried. A strict conformity to these rules, will banish the lunar bugbear, which has so long annoyed soap makers. Should cracknels be used, there must be one pound to each gallon. Kitchen grease should be clarified in a quantity of water, or the salt will prevent its incorporating with the lye. ...
— The Virginia Housewife • Mary Randolph
... for the last thirty years; we get them regularly every spring and summer; just bullying and sabre-rattling." People did not believe in war, no one wanted it; war had been proved to be impossible,—it was a bugbear that must be got out of the heads of free democracies ... and he enlarged on this theme. The night was calm and sweet; all around familiar sounds and sights; the chirp of crickets in the fields, a glow-worm shining ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... wandering bodies of mutinous 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
... The Reformation did in his eyes determine that men were responsible to God alone, and not to priests or Churches, for their opinions and their deeds. It also decided that the Church must be subordinate to the State, not the State to the Church. This is called Erastianism, and is the bugbear of High Churchmen. But there is no escape from the alternative, and the Church of Rome has never abandoned her claim to universal authority. Against it Henry VIII. and Cromwell, Elizabeth and Cecil, set up the supremacy of the law, made and administered by ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... termination of our Continent, with their souls full of its shipwrecks and disasters—top-sails cautiously reefed, and everything guardedly snug—these strangers at first unexpectedly encountering a tolerably smooth sea, rashly conclude that the Cape, after all, is but a bugbear; they have been imposed upon by fables, and founderings and sinkings hereabouts are all ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... served as the model for E.T.A. Hoffmann's fantastic pictures. Here J.P. Lyser, a painter by profession, but a poet as well, and a musician besides. Here Carl Bauck, the indefatigable, yet unsuccessful composer of songs,—now, in his capacity of critic, the paper bugbear of the Dresden artists. He had just returned from Italy, and believed himself in possession of the true secret of the art of singing, the monopoly of which every singing-master is wont to claim for himself. C.F. Becker, too, the eminent organist and industrious collector, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... with peremptory refusal, as she had been on the other occasion; she had met the bugbear of Rickety Dick and had prevailed over the old man's suspicions. As Latisan averred, her presence might help matters; she would entertain strange and acute regrets if her absence should allow the split that Latisan ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... in that is the aim of wisdom. Visit the gaols, the slaughter-houses, and the market-places; for the presence of the governor is of great importance in such places; it comforts the prisoners who are in hopes of a speedy release, it is the bugbear of the butchers who have then to give just weight, and it is the terror of the market-women for the same reason. Let it not be seen that thou art (even if perchance thou art, which I do not believe) covetous, a follower of women, or a glutton; for when the people and those ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Pilgrim of Glencoe; and all who have, are pained by its manifestation of his failing powers. In fact, his was an unfinished fame—a brilliant beginning, but no continuance. Sir Walter Scott has touched it with a needle, when he says, "Campbell is in a manner a bugbear to himself; the brightness of his early success is a detriment to all his after efforts. He is afraid of the shadow which his own fame casts before him." Byron placed him in the second category of the greatest living English poets; but Byron ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... which Luther again recommended should not be bluntly refused. A refusal, he said, would exactly please the Pope, who wished for nothing so much as obstacles to the Council; it was for this reason that, in speaking of the extirpation of heresy, he held up the Evangelicals as a 'bugbear,' in order to frighten them from the project. Good people might likewise object, on the ground that the troubles with the Turks and the Emperor's engagement in the war with France, were made use of by the Evangelicals to refuse the Council, whilst in reality the knaves at Borne ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... Germany is a decisive force working for peace. It would be more true to say that it is a force working for war, simply because it is a force working for reaction. Prussian reaction would not be so strong if it were not for the bugbear of Social Democracy. If Social Democracy attracts a considerable section of the lower middle class, it repels and frightens the bulk of the middle classes as well as of the upper classes. Many Liberals who would otherwise oppose the Government ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... is my brother Grim so good a fellow. [They fall to the cream. I love a mess of cream as well as they; I think it were best I stepp'd in and made one. [Aside.] Ho, ho, ho,[476] my masters! No good fellowship! Is Robin Goodfellow a bugbear grown, [ROBIN falleth to eat. That he is not worthy ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... the Perth paper had had a bad time of it, for further on we find him still more bitter against any communication being opened up with the sister colony. It must he remembered that Western Australia was a free colony, and consequently the bugbear of convict contamination was one that was always raised when the subject of opening up a stock route with the older colonies ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... then came across Parley's thoughts; so, to divert them, he took the book. He happened to open it at these words: "My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not." For a moment his heart failed him. "If this admonition should be sent on purpose," said he; "but no, 'tis a bugbear. My master told me that if I went to the bounds, I should get over the hedge. Now I went to the utmost limits, and did not get over." Here conscience put in, "Yes, but it was because you were watched." "I am sure," continued ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... pointing in the right direction, and every mile that she now travelled was so much to the good, increasing our chances of getting across the Line and making our escape from the awful region of equatorial calms which constitute such a ghastly bugbear to those who go down to the sea in sailing-ships. Our self-congratulations proved, however, to be premature, for the breeze lasted only about half an hour when it died away again, leaving us as completely becalmed as ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... present war will have a beneficial result in making us acquainted with the real nature of this arrogant and peculiar South-land. It was said that the Crimean struggle did much good by dispelling the cloudy hobgoblin mystery which hung over Russia, and, while it destroyed its prestige as a bugbear, more than compensated for this, by giving it a proper place abreast of civilized nations in the great march of industry and progress. Just so we are learning that the South is perfectly capable of receiving white labor, that it is not ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... I have, from the first, steadily refused to look upon spiritualism in this bugbear fashion. The thing was either true or false—or, more probably still, partly true and partly false: and I must bring to bear on the discovery of its truth or falsehood, just the same critical faculties ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... as little obtain admission into a mind like yours: such as the fear, or pretence of fear, that, in spite of your own power and the trifling power of Great Britain, you may be conquered by the Pope; or that this commodious bugbear (who is of infinitely more use to those who pretend to fear than to those who love him) will absolve his Majesty's subjects from their allegiance, and send over the Cardinal of York to rule you as his ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... him. Two hundred square miles of fertile Ohio lands were to be their reward. An invitation to other colonies to join in the assertion of English ownership met with scanty response, or none at all. The idea of a union was in the air, but it was complicated with that old bugbear of a regular revenue to be exacted by act of Parliament, which Shirley and the others still continued to press with hungry zeal; while the assemblies were not less set upon making all grants annual, with specifications as to person and object. While the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... law.'[1178] Exaggerated dread of Popery suspected latent evils, it scarcely knew what, lurking in this kind of worship. Perhaps, too, it was thought to border upon 'enthusiasm,' that other religious bugbear of the age. A paper in the 'Tatler' speaks of it not with disapproval, but with something of condescension to weaker minds, as 'the rapturous way of devotion.'[1179] In fact, cathedrals in general were almost unintelligible to the prevalent sentiment of the eighteenth ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... grew older, had much time to spend outdoors, there were many tasks about the house and farm she had to perform. The chest was soon filled with quilts and that bugbear was gone from her life. But there was continual scrubbing, baking, mending, and other household tasks to be done, so that much practice caused the girl to develop into a capable little housekeeper. Aunt Maria frankly admitted ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... supported the candidacy of Mr. Jefferson Davis. New York, under the direction of Mr. Dean Richmond, gave its influence to Mr. Douglas. Of a combative temperament, Mr. Richmond was impressed with a belief that "secession" was but a bugbear to frighten the northern wing of the party. Thus he failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, and impaired the value of unusual common sense and unselfish patriotism, qualities he possessed to an ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... Hymn to the Pillory. This was bought and read and shouted in the ears of his enemies by thousands of the people. It was a more daring satire than even The Shortest Way. In the end of it Defoe calls upon the Pillory, "Thou Bugbear of the Law," to speak and ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... necessary to that balance of interests and sentiments without which, as he believed, free governments should not exist. This work, which reproduced more at length and in a more obnoxious form the fundamental ideas of his 'Defence of the American Constitution,' made Adams a great bugbear to the ultra-democratic supporters of the principles and policy of the French revolutionists; and at the second presidential election in 1792, they set up as a candidate against him George Clinton, of New York, but Mr. Adams was re-elected by ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... 'Dear W. W., let it not trouble you! What it may lead to is a bugbear to you. You can't think how much younger and more agreeable you will be when you have learnt that there can be passages that ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Mallaing), and on the 8th about noon I arrived at Kolor, a considerable town, near the entrance into which I observed, hanging upon a tree, a sort of masquerade habit, made of the bark of trees, which I was told, on inquiry, belonged to Mumbo Jumbo. This is a strange bugbear, common to all the Mandingo towns, and much employed by the pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection; for as the kafirs are not restricted in the number of their wives, every one marries as many as he can conveniently maintain—and as ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... ties which unite the confederate states are strengthened by the increasing manufactures of the Americans; and the union which began to exist in their opinions, gradually forms a part of their habits: the course of time has swept away the bugbear thoughts which haunted the imaginations of the citizens in 1789. The federal power is not become oppressive; it has not destroyed the independence of the states; it has not subjected the confederates to monarchical institutions; and the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... I! But let's reconnoiter and try to spot our bugbear. I wonder if it wouldn't be appropriate to call her by another name? We've got to share our rooms with her even if we haven't got to share our bed. Why didn't the Empress tell us her name? the stubborn old thing! Just 'a girl from Sprucy Branch will share your suite this year. She arrived last ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... seeing him receive prizes. Dr. London, of Hamilton, the medical attendant and much-valued friend of the Livingstones, furnishes us with a reminiscence of this occasion. He had great difficulty in persuading Livingstone to go. The awful bugbear was that he would be asked to make a speech. Being assured that it would be thought strange if, in a gathering of the children's parents, he were absent, he agreed to go. And of course he had to speak. What he said was pointed and practical, and in winding up, he said he had just two things ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
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