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More "Extenuation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world,—as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... (now for a little extenuation, as you expect from me), I have some difficulty, whether I ought to take such pains to subdue myself in some instances, in the station to which I am raised, that otherwise it would have become me to attempt to do: for it is no easy task, for one in my circumstances, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... key-note of it all, I fear. I plead guilty. But I also plead, in extenuation, dat I have a vife to whom I owe ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... diminution among the English, by lessening the sound itself, especially of vowels, as there is a form of augmenting them by enlarging or even lengthening it; and that sometimes not so much by change of the letters, as of their pronunciation; as, sup, sip, soop, sop, sippet, where, besides the extenuation of the vowel, there is added the French termination et; top, tip; spit, spout; babe, baby; booby, [Greek: Boupais]; great pronounced long, especially if with a stronger sound, grea-t; little, pronounced long lee-tle; ting, tang, tong, imports a succession of smaller and then greater sounds; ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... the Mormons. The only argument in favor of them which can possibly be made is that their practice, not their preaching, offers the only solution of your own theory that all women should be married. But that theory has never been advanced in extenuation of their behavior. I offer it to you brand new, as a slight illustration of a ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... these questions with blushes; and they did not leave his face when he confessed that all he could say in extenuation of what he had done was to plead his youth, and having thought little on ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... or extenuation of this attitude it may be said that there is considerable danger in the adoption of either course. Vigorous repression means staking all on a single card, and if it were successful it could not do more than postpone the evil day, because the present antiquated form of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... in self-extenuation once for all, 'Lady Fareway, I have but to say for myself that I have tried to ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... blamed. It is not the first time that I have been compelled to interfere, for my pupil is of a very susceptible disposition, and has fancied himself in love with at least five young people since he has been under my charge. In this instance,' continued he, making me a bow, 'he has some extenuation to offer. Will you oblige me by informing me if he adheres to his promise? or do you wish that I ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... believing it will be frustrated by Marcellina's appeal, he promises to honor the bride, as requested, in due season. Cherubino has begged for the Count's forgiveness, and Susanna has urged his youth in extenuation of his fault. Reminded that the lad knows of his pursuit of Susanna, the Count modifies his sentence of dismissal from his service to banishment to Seville as an officer in his regiment. Figaro playfully inducts him into ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... aim is grandiose, because the supporters of the scheme proclaim their readiness and their capacity to regenerate the State and human nature, they are hailed as the prophets of a new order; they are allowed to plead the excellence of their motives in extenuation of all and any means; and they end by creating new evils without appreciably ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... his one—one drink with him, the other drink without him and of which he did not know. I STOLE that other drink, and, worse than that, I began the habit of drinking alone when there was a guest, a man, a comrade, with whom I could have drunk. But John Barleycorn furnished the extenuation. It was a wrong thing to trip a guest up with excess of hospitality and get him drunk. If I persuaded him, with his limited calibre, into drinking up with me, I'd surely get him drunk. What could I do but steal that every second drink, or else deny myself ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... associates in reference to his former career; some said that he was an escaped murderer from the South; others that he had been a pirate; while all united in bearing unqualified testimony as to the villainy of his character and the number and blackness of his crimes. He could not plead ignorance in extenuation of his manifold enormities, for he possessed an education that would have qualified him to move in a respectable sphere of society, had he been so disposed. Upon his right was seated no less a personage that "Sow Nance," the hideous girl who had that day entrapped poor Fanny Aubry into the power ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... succeeding generations have made, are making, and will make, continual additions, however, is Hume's fame as a philosopher; and, though I know that my plea will add to my offence in some quarters, I must plead, in extenuation of my audacity, that philosophy lies in the province of science, and ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... when one of the School Commissioners spoke indulgently of the burglars and highway robbers in the two prisons as probably guilty merely of "the theft of a top, or a marble, or maybe a banana," in extenuation of the continued policy of his department in sending truants there in flat defiance of the State law that forbade the mingling of thieves and truants, the police office had once more to be invoked with ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... In extenuation of the little that is known of the fresh-water fishes of Ceylon, it may be observed that very few of them are used at table by Europeans, and there is therefore no stimulus on the part of the natives to catch them. The burbot and grey mullet are ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... happen when such a soldier has been incensed by an act of treachery or is stirred to revenge by the death of a comrade to whom he is attached. Some cases of this kind appear in the evidence. Such things happen in a1l wars as isolated instances, and the circumstances may be pleaded in extenuation of acts otherwise shocking. We have made due allowance for these considerations and have rejected those cases in which there is a reasonable doubt as to whether those who killed the wounded knew that the latter ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... were laid out in the garden, for it was a beautiful warm autumnal day. We sat down about twenty, and a merrier party I never was at. Old Waghorn was the only one who got tipsy on the occasion, and it was very ridiculous to hear him quoting scraps of Scripture in extenuation, and then calling himself a poor blind old sinner. It was not till eight o'clock in the evening that the party broke up, and I had then some difficulty to persuade some to go away. As for the old man, he had been put to bed an hour before. I staid a ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... looked to Washington for counsel and decision they found neither. The conduct of President Buchanan moved men at the time to contemptuous impatience, and history has echoed the contemporary verdict. Just one fact may perhaps be urged in extenuation: if he was a weak man he was also in a weak position. A real and very practical defect, as it seems to me, in the Constitution of the United States is the four months' interval between the election of a President and his installation. ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... desertion: clothing, biscuit, and fishing-tackle being among the stores with which he had made off. This despicable wretch—for such must everyone consider the man who would steal his shipmates' provisions, when each had only his bare allowance—had nothing to say, either in extenuation or explanation of his conduct. Most fortunate for him was it that our humane exertions to discover his retreat were successful; he could not long have subsisted by himself, and even had he been so happy as to fall in with, and receive hospitable welcome from ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... planned a longer route, that should end in the Pyramids, when Fay was well and strong again. It would not matter then; but he was a brute, he confessed, to have left her just at that time. Then he added in self-extenuation that he was not ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was dead, the law would not regard her as a widow because she had never been married, and therefore refused to exempt her only son. "On ne peut-etre Jeune qu'une fois, n'est-ce pas, Monsieur?" she said, in extenuation of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... indicating utter despair of being able to explain matters so that they would seem no more than they really were,—a despair which not only relinquishes the hope of direct explanation, but wearily gives up all collateral chances of extenuation. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... chieftain the control of a county long inured to slavery? Verily, the Honorable Isaac had done much to encourage belief in the guileless that such were the facts. Even the "Courier" proved its sturdy independence by printing the result of the primary without extenuation or aught set down in malice. The Honorable Isaac Pettit undoubtedly believed in himself as the savior of Fraser. He had personally led the fight in the Fraser County primaries and had vanquished Bassett! "Bassett had fought gamely," the Republican organ averred, to make more glorious the Honorable ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... importance of retaining an area of country which still furnished supplies than of annihilating the Army of the Potomac, and relying on European intervention rather than on the valour of the Southern soldier, were responsible for the occupation of the Fredericksburg position. In extenuation of their mistake it may, however, be admitted that the advantages of concentration on the North Anna were not such as would impress themselves on the civilian mind, while the surrender of territory would undoubtedly have embarrassed both the Government and the ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... swept over His spirit in another foaming breaker, and again He sought solitude, and again He found tranquillity—and again returned to find the disciples asleep. 'They knew not what to answer Him' in extenuation of their renewed dereliction. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... to look among the dominant class for the injustice which is driving them away; but it would be unfair to conclude that the blame rests entirely upon the whites, and still more so to leave the impression that there is no extenuation for the mistakes and abuses for which the whites are responsible. Much of the intimidation of the blacks has been tolerated, if not suggested, by a fear of negro uprisings. The apprehension is a legacy from the days of slavery, and is more unreasonable now than ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... deserted—abandoned; and he would sooner have found thee a mangled and disfigured corpse in the forest than have adopted that belief. Nay—weep not now; it is all past; and if I recapitulate these incidents, it is but to convince thee how wretched the old man was, and how great is the extenuation for the course which he was so ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... joy I took from the recurring thought that I was particeps criminis with the Princess of Burgundy in the commission of a crime. At times I wished the crime had been greater and its extenuation far less. We hear much about what happens when thieves fall out, but my observation teaches me that thieves usually remain good friends. The bonds of friendship had begun to strengthen between Yolanda and me before she ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... first reward, and she did not stint herself in extorting it. To tell the truth, Clementina had many a bitter score of this kind to pay off; for, as she said in extenuation, it was impossible for her to allow herself to be in debt to ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... sides as their protectors. Lee draws a picture of his feelings on entering the camp which ought to be correct, even if circumstances lead one to attribute it to the pen of a man who naturally wished to find some extenuation for himself: "I doubt the power of man being equal to even imagine how wretched I felt. No language can describe my feelings. My position was painful, trying, and awful; my brain seemed to be on fire; my nerves were for a moment unstrung; humanity was overpowering as I thought ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... It had always been his fate to have women say such things of him: the fact should be set down in extenuation. What struck me now was that, for the first time, he resented the tone. I had seen him, so often, basking under similar tributes—was it the conjugal note that robbed them of their savour? No—for, ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... Swartz, the accuser of this lady, I can see but little in extenuation of his conduct. If his business is even illegitimate, there are so many speculators in the South that it should not cause surprise that his refusal to aid this woman necessitated her taking his money. The speculator cannot be ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... Diaz Paracho, and Pedro Mina were among those who were shot. General Mendez was one of the best and most brilliant officers in the imperial army, and it may be said in extenuation of his personal share in the tragedy that the cruelty of the mode of warfare carried on by Arteaga and his lieutenants seemed to warrant stern treatment. It is stated that only a short time before Arteaga had caused the father of Mendez to be shot, ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... stupid, ignorant thing you can't help from feeling sorry for her—nobody could." He hesitated a moment as though seeking for words of explanation and extenuation that were not in his regular vocabulary. "I got kids of my own, commissioner," he said suddenly, and stopped dead short for a moment. "I'm no Italian, but I got kids of my own!" he repeated, as though ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man once more to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None; unless it avail him somewhat, that he was broken down by long and exquisite suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the very remorse which harrowed it; that, between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... she had taken milk from the same place at other times. When asked what she had to say in extenuation, she held her child up and said, "I did not take it for myself, I took it for this!" She did not call it her child. The magistrate looked, shuddered, and ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... to have let such an over-statement stand and continue in his corrected and carefully finished work. The prophet Jeremiah, I feel satisfied, would not have subscribed to what is said in the Holy War in extenuation of the eye. That heart- broken prophet does not say that it has been his ear that has made his head waters. It is his eye, he says, that has so affected his heart. The Prophet of the Captivity had all the Holy ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... meet no more even as friends. I do not ask you either to forgive or to remember me. Look on me as one wholly unworthy even of resentment! Do not think that I write this in madness or in fever or excitement. Judge me not by my seeming illness this morning. I invent no excuse, no extenuation, for my broken faith and perjured vows. Calmly, coldly, and deliberately I write; and thus writing, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I can but tender my apologies. I am quite conscious, too, that I have taken full advantage of the privilege which I claimed in the first chapter, and that I have at times wandered wide from the track which I was following. I must plead in extenuation that the interminable straight roads of France seem to me less interesting than the winding country lanes of England. Indeed, I am unable to conceive of any one walking for pleasure along the endless vistas of the French poplar-bordered highways, where every objective is clearly visible for miles ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... surrender in extenuation of his sentence, and beseeching the intercession of the Lords with his Majesty, Lord Kilmarnock concluded—"It is by Britons only that I pray to be recommended to a British monarch. But if justice allow not of mercy, my lords, I will lay down my life ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... Nor liked him much the less when told he had been a robber! Cris supposed that in Mexico a robber may sometimes be an honest man, or at all events, have taken to the road through some supposed wrong—personal or political. Freebooting is less a crime, or at all events, more easy of extenuation in a country whose chief magistrate himself is a freebooter; and such, at this moment, neither more nor less, was the chief magistrate of Mexico, Don Antonio Lopez ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... His sagacity, boldness, and prudence, qualities so highly necessary to success in war, became in some degree vices, from the manner in which they were employed. The circumstances of his education, however, must be admitted as some extenuation of his habitual transgressions against the law; and for his political tergiversations, he might in that distracted period plead the example of men far more powerful, and less excusable in becoming the sport of circumstances, than ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... to the table and said, that although he had not been employed or deputed to appear for Mr. Boland and the young masters and misses, his fine sons and daughters, yet justice to the accused compelled him to come forward, and offer a few words in extenuation of the punishment, if any, which should be inflicted for their alleged misdeeds. "First, then," he asked, "was it possible that they, the men then present, should be angry or offended at seeing one of their own race and religion spring up from among them, ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... to excuse and vindicate himself impressed her as no attempt at extenuation could have done. Perhaps, in that moment, her quick instinct divined something of his case, something of the mental suffering he strove to conceal. Contrition shone ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... river, but of these I make small mention, for, in truth, one boasts little of one's deeds in piracy after the fact, or of inciting piracy and making accessories before the fact, the more especially if such accessories be small but bloodthirsty boys. These latter, let me plead in extenuation of my own sins, already were pirates, and set upon rapine. For my own part, seeing their resolution to take green corn and other vegetables, aye, even fowls, as part of the natural returns of their stern calling, ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... said in extenuation of Dickens that the blemish of obviousness is one which he shared with the world he lived in. It would be too much to say that all realities are obvious. There is a great deal that we do not see at the first glance; but there is a great ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... him beyond the scope of generally received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of them.... Were such a man once more to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None; unless it avail him somewhat, that he was broken down by long and exquisite suffering; that his mind was darkened and confused by the very ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... true that I might have pleaded in extenuation of these rather severe judgments that I was somewhat alone in the world, living in bachelor apartments, without the redeeming influences of home and family life. There were none whose love gave them the right or the motive to lay a restraining hand upon me, and my ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... fault with that sentence except that the "perhaps" is not strictly warranted. It should have been left out. In support—or shall we say extenuation?—of this opinion I submit that there is not sufficient evidence to warrant the uncertainty which it implies. The only "evidence" offered that Harriet was hard and proud and standing out against a reconciliation is a poem—the poem in which Shelley beseeches ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a political sympathiser and a personal friend, to treat him harshly in an obituary notice. There was no danger of his setting down aught in malice; but there might be thought to be a considerable danger of over-extenuation. The danger was the greater, inasmuch as Lockhart himself had certainly not escaped, and had perhaps to some extent deserved, one of Hook's reproaches. No man questioned his integrity; he was not a reckless ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... up understandingly into her father's kind eyes, "and I will be more careful in the future, Dad. But oh," she offered, in extenuation, "when mystery marches right up to you and begs to be looked into, what can you do? Oh, girls, if you could only have been there—if ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... excusable by the necessity of the time; and it was the general opinion, if he had not used that proceeding with the latter, it would have cost him his crown. Perhaps his injustice to the Empress might likewise admit a little extenuation. Four kings successively had sat on the throne without any regard to lineal descent; a period beyond the memory of most men then alive; whereby the people had lost much of that devotion they were used to bear towards an established succession: besides, the government of a woman was then a ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... dropp'd on a piece of White Paper appears, where any quantity of it is fallen, of a somewhat Crimson Colour, but being with ones finger spread thinly on the Paper does presently exhibit a fair Green, which seems to proceed only from its disclosing its Colour upon the Extenuation of its Depth into Superficies, if the change be not somewhat help'd by the Colours degenerating upon one or other of the Accounts formerly mention'd. Let me add, that having made divers Tryals with that Blew substance, which in Painters shops is call'd Litmase, ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... bad thing can be palliated by comparison with a worse, this may be said, in extenuation of these writers; that the mischief, which they can do even on the stage, is trifling compared with that stile of writing which began in the pest-house of French literature, and has of late been imported ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... her head, with an easy upward motion, as of a cork alighted in water, above the level of the looking-glass on her left hand—an action she repeated, with a solemn aspect, four times; at which point Gainsford gave way. The ladies accorded him every extenuation for the offence. They themselves, but for the heroism of exalted natures, must have succumbed to the gross temptation. "It is difficult, dear papa, to bring one's mind to religious thoughts in her company, even when she is quiescent," they said. Thus, by the prettiest exercise ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... God was an orphan," Hannah pleaded in extenuation. "But, what about God's papa?" she demanded with sudden inspiration. "You're so smarty, tell ...
— The Little Mixer • Lillian Nicholson Shearon
... betrayed you—they have shut their eyes and blindfolded others," objected Joseph Smith, as if in extenuation. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... that by his doctrine of the 'Mean' Aristotle 'obliterates the awful and absolute difference between right and wrong.' If we substitute, as Kant suggested, 'law' for 'mean,' some of the ambiguity is obviated. Still, after all extenuation is made it may be questioned whether any term implying quantity is a fit expression for a ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... resolved to defend the work of the National Assembly against the interference of strangers, were not disposed to have him at their head in the fearful struggle which was approaching? We have nothing to say in defence or extenuation of the insolence, injustice, and cruelty with which, after the victory of the republicans, he and his family were treated. But this we say, that the French had only one alternative, to deprive him of the powers of first magistrate, or to ground their arms and submit patiently to foreign ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... possessed himself of all her affections, she underestimated his chances of success. It is obvious that at about that time everybody was inclined to underestimate his chances. Strictly speaking he didn't seem to have any. I know this was Cornelius's view. He confessed that much to me in extenuation of the shady part he had played in Sherif Ali's plot to do away with the infidel. Even Sherif Ali himself, as it seems certain now, had nothing but contempt for the white man. Jim was to be murdered mainly on religious grounds, I believe. A simple act of piety (and so far infinitely meritorious), ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... are doing!' Fitzjames shouted to the warders to put him back; discovered by patient hearing that the man was meaning to refer to some circumstance in extenuation, and after calling the witnesses found that the statement was confirmed. 'Now, you silly fellow,' he said, 'if you had pleaded "not guilty," as I told you, all this would have come out. It is true that I did not know ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... fellahs, a moor cock doesn't fly that way," Willis drawlingly explained, in extenuation of the poor shooting. "He doesn't go right up and down, you 'now. He has wings, don't you 'now, and flies straight away, like a shot. I could hit a grouse without any trouble, but this kind of shooting! The best shot in England ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... daughter, whenever I am called hence, in full confidence to that Power whose mercy is over all his works. I ought to add a few words about your dear father, who seemed to think my extreme regular conduct and the punishment I had inflicted on myself, such an extenuation of my weakness that he ever behaved to me with the tenderest respect, I might almost say reverence, and till his death gave me every proof of the purest and the strongest friendship. By consent we avoided each other's presence ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... busy," said Harlan, in extenuation. "Will you come in?" She was evidently a friend of Dorothy's, and, as such, demanded ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... nothing to say to the charge against you, to which you are only to speak. If you have anything to offer in defence or extenuation of the charge, the court will hear you, but they beg you will ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... Church stoutly opposed the insetting tide, but as the waves of commercial life grew strong and swept around her, the power of resistance grew more feeble from year to year, until finally some of her own people began to plead extenuation and even tolerance. The conflict was now open, and the result seemed questionable. With the conscience of the Southern portion of the Church asleep or dormant, the anti-slavery side of the issue came finally to depend upon the Church in the North for ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... enter on the Subject of this without further Preface, and remark the several Defects which appear in the Fable, the Characters, the Sentiments, and the Language of Milton's Paradise Lost; not doubting but the Reader will pardon me, if I alledge at the same time whatever may be said for the Extenuation of such Defects. The first Imperfection which I shall observe in the Fable is that the Event of it ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the request of John Wilson, his fellow-editor, he had composed "some squibberies ... with as little malice as if the assigned subject had been the court of Pekin." The sincere regret he expressed for the pain which his "jokes" had inflicted ought perhaps to be counted in extenuation of his errors. It may be true, as his generous biographer suggests, that "his politics and his feud with many of these men was an affair of ignorance and accidental associations in Edinburgh," that under different circumstances "he might have been found inditing sonnets to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Elizabeth Barrett of the sorrows of the children of the mines and mills in those dismal days, and it must be said for the great heart of England that its beat was still true. The coal- owners made the pitiful plea in extenuation of all the misery and indecency of the mines that without the labor of women and children the collieries must shut down, not only for lack of profit, but for the cogent reason that the flexible vertebra of childhood were especially adapted to the ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... M. de Camors might have committed this base action under the menace of some great danger to save the fortune, the honor, probably the life of Madame de Campvallon. This, though a poor excuse in the mother's eyes, still was an extenuation. Probably also he had in his heart, while marrying her daughter, the resolution to break off this fatal liaison, which he had again resumed against his will, as often happens. On all these painful points she dwelt after the ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... I am going to relate I would much rather not tell about, as it concerns what I consider a very shameful episode in my life. The only thing I can urge in extenuation of my conduct is the lax manner in which my earlier life was looked after in my uncle's house, where my worse passions were allowed full play, without that judicious control which parental guidance would perhaps have exercised on my inherent disposition for giving ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... it I wish I could undo, Laura; an' there's a lot more of it I couldn't help, an' maybe some I—I—wasn't——" He paused. He couldn't bring himself to say anything in extenuation of himself and his acts in the presence of this girl. It might sound as if he were playing for her sympathy, he ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... not condoning his conduct, Levi. He has behaved as badly as a young man could, and not a word of extenuation will you hear from me. I'm not speaking of him as a part of the social order; I'm speaking of him as master of the Mill. As master here he may be a successful man and you'll do well to bear in mind that he must be judged by results. Morally, he's a failure, and you are ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... series of conventions. With a Republican mayor in every other city, there had been no attempt at official protection; and yet it may be remembered, in extenuation, that it is always easier for the party out of power than for the one in power to stand for principle; the former has nothing to lose. The Republicans at this time were panic-stricken and staggering under the weight of responsibility suddenly laid upon them; and the Abolitionists, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... this extenuation of what some persons may think an inexcusable and almost criminal ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... sought to render without extenuation the impressions received: of dignity, plenty, and peace at Malie, of bankruptcy and distraction at Mulinuu. And I wish I might here bring to an end ungrateful labours. But I am sensible that there remain two points on which it would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... N. vindication, justification, warrant; exoneration, exculpation; acquittal &c 970; whitewashing. extenuation; palliation, palliative; softening, mitigation. reply, defense; recrimination &c 938. apology, gloss, varnish; plea &c 617; salvo; excuse, extenuating circumstances; allowance, allowance to be made; locus paenitentiae [Lat.]. apologist, vindicator, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... this way before! I didn't know people ate raw fish at Parties! I.... This is the Very First Party I ever went to," she explained. It was surely extenuation enough for any ignorance of ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... Cumberland to grant no quarter to prisoners placed him foremost in the ranks of "British beasts" that have disgraced the pages of history, and earned for him the unenviable title of "The Butcher of Culloden." It has been suggested in extenuation of his fiendish conduct that His Grace was "deep in his cups" the night before the battle, and that the General to whom the order was given, realizing the condition of the Duke, insisted that his instructions should be reduced to writing. His Grace thereupon angrily seized a playing card from ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... had evaded responsibility and had found self extenuation the easiest thing in the world. But somehow all at once he seemed to have lost the power of letting himself off. He had no plea to offer even to himself except "guilty." Was he going to do as Doctor Hendricks commanded and let Madeline pay the price of her own folly alone or was he ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... whom it became known, but it nevertheless failed to shake the confidence of Marie de Medicis in the innocence of a courtier who had, in the short space of a few days, by his energy and devotion, rendered himself essential to her; while thus much must be admitted in extenuation of her conduct, reprehensible as it appeared, that every rumour relative to the death of her royal consort immediately reached her, and that two of these especially appeared more credible than the guilt of a noble, who could, apparently, reap no benefit from the commission of so ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... varied inclination), there are fortunately both auxiliaries to this scene (it had almost been said of enchantment). The verdant Lawns, dotted with rare plants, the scenic beauties, and the woodland scenery combined, plead in extenuation of this lofty tone. The whole is encompassed by rich meadows, wearing a park-like appearance; held with the freehold, which is limited to less than Five Acres. A truly beautiful Portico of carved Oak leads ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin
... reaction. This confirmed and augmented if possible Mr. Powell's good opinion of her as a "jolly girl," though it seemed to him positively monstrous to refer in such terms to one's captain's wife. "But she doesn't look it," he thought in extenuation and was going to say something more to her about the lighting of that flare when another voice was heard in the companion, saying some indistinct words. Its tone was contemptuous; it came from below, from the bottom of the stairs. It was a voice in the cabin. And the only other voice which could ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... garret to cellar, and Pope Alexander the Eighth seriously apprehended the fate of Bishop Hatto. The situation worried him sorely; he had but lately attained the tiara at an advanced age—the twenty-fourth hour, as he himself remarked in extenuation of his haste to enrich his nephews. The time vouchsafed for worthier deeds was brief, and he dreaded descending to posterity as the Rat Pope. Witty and genial, his sense of humour teased him with a full perception of the absurdity of his position. Peter and Pasquin concurred in forbidding him ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... easy to find in the Temple of Fame the precise niche in which to place the figure that would rightfully fill it, and the consequence is that the pedestal, as in some of our great public edifices, remains unoccupied. It may be said, however, in extenuation of any such omission, that it did not fall within the scope of this book to chronicle all the establishments which, in more humane methods of treatment, have been in advance of others, still less to complete the history up to the ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... my opinion that no such approbation or tolerance can be reasonably extended so as to cover or condone the offences of either the underplot or the upshot of the play. The one is repulsive beyond redemption by elegance of style, the other is preposterous beyond extenuation on the score of logical or poetical justice. Those who object on principle to solution by massacre must object in consistency to the conclusions of "Hamlet" and "King Lear"; nor are the results of Webster's tragic invention more questionable or less inevitable than ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... like everybody," he argued within himself, in extenuation of what he felt was an unreasonable mental attitude; "'And modern fashionable women are among the most unlikeable of all human creatures. Any one of them in such a village as this would be absurdly ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... know her education, Dr. John," said I. "Tossed about all her life from one foreign school to another, she may justly proffer the plea of ignorance in extenuation of most of her faults. And then, from what she says, I believe her father and mother were brought up much as she has ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... their physical necessities. The outcry which has been raised with threefold force within the last few years against the whole system, has induced its upholders and defenders to adopt, as measures of personal extenuation, some appearance of religious instruction (such as it is), and some pretence at physical indulgences (such as they are), bestowed apparently voluntarily upon their dependants. At Darien, a church is appropriated to the especial use of the slaves, who are almost all of them Baptists ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... citizen was bound to citizen with ties that had inherited too much of the tribal sanctity to admit of any extenuation ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... not denied that the suspension of the New York banks in 1837, which was followed in quick succession throughout the Union, was produced by an application of that power, and it is now alleged, in extenuation of the present condition of so large a portion of our banks, that their embarrassments have arisen from the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... a remarkable corroboration of this opinion in a current anecdote which is traditionary regarding the same learned judge. A case of some great offence was tried before him, and the counsel pleaded extenuation for his client in that he was drunk when he committed the offence. "Drunk!" exclaimed Lord Hermand, in great indignation; "if he could do such a thing when he was drunk, what might he not have done ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... necessities, but she dismissed it with the shadow of a smile—it was absurd for a woman of her age to dwell on such frivolous things. Yet she still lingered to wonder if men too kept intact among their memories the radiant image of their youth, if they ever thought of it with tenderness and extenuation. She decided in the negative, convinced that men, even at the end of many years, never definitely lost connection with their early selves, there was always a trace of hopefulness, of jaunty vanity—sometimes winning and sometimes ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... how many regiments the "old Nawth State, suh," had furnished to the "suhvice," and I had the names of some thirty colonels, in order. The young Captain gave me a sketch of General Branch, and was anxious that I should publish something in extenuation of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... addition to this open robbery of the rich, taxes of all sorts were laid and unlimited oppressions enforced. The new edicts of the emperor were written so small and posted so high as to be unreadable, yet no excuse of ignorance of the law was admitted in extenuation ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Royall ever since, he despised himself still more profoundly. If she had asked for a woman in the house it was far less for her own defense than for his humiliation. She needed no one to defend her: his humbled pride was her surest protection. He had never spoken a word of excuse or extenuation; the incident was as if it had never been. Yet its consequences were latent in every word that he and she exchanged, in every glance they instinctively turned from each other. Nothing now would ever shake her rule ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... that the criticism I have passed on things as they are in England is too pessimistic. I must say, in extenuation, that of optimists I am the most optimistic. But I measure manhood less by political aggregations than by individuals. Society grows, while political machines rack to pieces and become "scrap." For the English, so far as manhood and womanhood ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... no doubt in mild extenuation of the explosive that had preceded it, and as he turned and drew himself forward by his elbows to compass a new section of the room, which, by-the-way, seemed suddenly expanded in size, he began to realize that the plea was in itself most sinful—even more so than the outburst, perhaps, ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... consideration of a portion of the people sincere, inquiring, and emerging, though dimly enlightened, from the gloom of so dreary a scene, that is most apt to occur to our thoughts in extenuation of that gloom. Our unreflecting attention allows itself to be so engrossed by far different circumstances of that period of our history, that we are imposed upon by a spectacle the very opposite of mournful. For what is it but a splendid and animating exhibition that we behold in looking ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... his misguided associates, that they have, after all, only followed on the track of the Irish agitators, and no doubt consider that the preaching of sedition against the Government to whom they owe so much is the proper course to pursue when aiming at political power. And as an extenuation of their action it should also be considered that the members of the Congress, who at first were acting in a perfectly legitimate manner, eventually fell under the guidance of a retired member of the Indian Civil Service—a ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... in the face, and did not venture to utter a single word by way of extenuation. A servant, however, then announced that the Prince from the Pei mansion had sent a pair of scrolls ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... at sea all his life," said Mr. Tredgold, in extenuation, "You haven't seen him for a long ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... love of spinning out an infinite deal of nothing. Now, as "brevity is the soul of wit," their productions can be looked upon as little else than phantasmagorial skeletons, ridiculous from their extreme extenuation, and in appearance more peculiarly empty, from the circumstance of their owing their existence to false lights. This fault does not exist with all the master spirits, and, though "many a flower is born to blush unseen," we now proceed to rescue from obscurity the brightest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... be remembered in extenuation that Catrina Lanovitch had lived nearly all her life in the province of Tver. She was not modern at all. Deprived of the advantages of our enlightened society press, without the benefit of our decadent fictional literature, she had lamentably narrow views ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Gilton very well by sight, being in the first place small and not noticing, and in the second, filled with an unreasoning fear that caused her to flee whenever she had seen him approach. This is the only excuse for what she did; for while her mother was feebly murmuring, as if in extenuation, "We thought it was John coming in," Cora Cordelia clasped her hands in delirious delight, and cried aloud, "It's Santa Claus! Oh, it's Santa Claus!" Could anything more awful happen to a cross man, a very cross man, than to be taken ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... those days of her teens. He was no longer an idol; her worshipful hours were ended. Instead, he was a weak, cringing being in the guise of a strong attractive man; he had been even more false than Agatha, and he had not the excuse of love to offer in extenuation. Pity and loathing fought for supremacy. Something was shattered, and she felt lonely yet relieved. Strangely, she seemed content in ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... fined truants heavily. One case which is reported displays the grim and costly humor of the illegal tribunal which dealt with such cases. Poor Mr. Palmer of Sussex, a gay bachelor, being called upon to show cause why he had been residing in London, pleaded in extenuation that he had no house, his mansion having been destroyed by fire two years before. This, however, was held rather an aggravation of the offence, inasmuch as he had failed to rebuild it; and Mr. Palmer paid a penalty of one thousand pounds—equivalent to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... which absolutely demand scrupulous veracity, loyalty in a man's personal relations, or financial integrity. The politician who ruins his career in climbing down a waterspout, or the engineer who prevents his employers from trusting his judgment and conscience in money matters, cannot plead in extenuation any other sort of instrumental excellence. They have deserved to fail, because they have trifled with their job; and it may be added that serious moral delinquencies are usually grave hindrances to a ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... provision for prisoners of war, one thing ought to be taken into consideration, which may be offered as an extenuation of crime alledged against the British agents for prisoners; and that is, that the American soldier and sailor live infinitely better in America, than the same class of people do in Great Britain and Ireland. Generally speaking, ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... could not, for her life, be more cordial than that. The offence itself seemed a pinprick beside the rankle of the wound to her pride. This child had set up for herself, and was now returned—without extenuation, without plea for mercy. Mrs. Percival was one of those people who cannot be happy unless their right to rule be unquestioned. Had the girl humbled herself to the dust, grovelled at her feet, she would have taken her to her breast. But Sanchia stood upright, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... defense of his king and brother, all fled, setting the first example of that base emigration which eventually left the king defenseless in the midst of his enemies. The Baron de Breteuil and some of the ministers made similar provision for their own safety; though it may be said, as some extenuation of their ignoble flight, that they had no longer any official duties to detain them, since the king had already dismissed them, and on the evening of the 16th had written to Necker to beg him to return without delay and resume his office, claiming his instant obedience as a proof of the attachment ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... use fer Chinks," said the mucker, as though in extenuation of his suggestion that they murder the youth. For some unaccountable reason he had felt a sudden compunction because of his thoughtless remark. What in the world was coming over him, he wondered. He'd be wearing white pants and playing lawn ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... reserves and reticences of childhood, the things that offend, the things that bring agony, are forgotten by so many of those who have left childhood behind. In extenuation of this lively and kindly lady, it may be said that the manners and customs of her early youth were not those to which Larry was habituated. Yet, one might have thought that a glance at Larry's face would have ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... he cried, "what is this thing that I have done! Forgive me, and let the greatness and the purity of my love for you plead in extenuation of my act." ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... dozen men spoke up. "The fire tuk inside, an' the court-house war haffen gone 'fore 'twar seen," said one, in sulky extenuation. ...
— 'way Down In Lonesome Cove - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... periods and gentlemanly phrasings were like the educated thrusts and feints of an expert fencer who opposes his single rapier to the bludgeons and missiles of a furious mob. He saw in less than five minutes that the scheme of extenuation and conciliation was futile, that retort and retaliation would be returned in kind, that the stoppage of the pack-train from Blue Lick on the way to Charlestown was inevitable, and that the redcoats, invoked by both parties, would doubtless become embroiled with ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... enough," that travellers are likely to consume more time in reaching a place than they are apt to bestow upon it when found. And, I am ashamed to say, that even Louisburgh was not an exception to this general truth; although perhaps certain reasons might be offered in extenuation for our somewhat speedy departure from the precincts of the old town. First, then, the uncertainty of a sailing vessel, for the "Balaklava" was coquettishly courting any and every wind that could carry her out of our harbor of refuge. Next, the desire of seeing more of the surroundings of the ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... inherent right of her position. The Battle servants had always spoken their minds to their mistresses in a manner which caused them to become hopeless failures when they hired themselves into strange families, where the devotion of their lives could not be offered in extenuation of the freedom ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... on which they are based, had been known to be one in which the Phoenicians of the time indulged, at any rate occasionally. We must allow this blot on the Sidonian escutcheon, and can only plead, in extenuation of their offence, first, the imperfect morality of the age, and secondly, the fact that such deviations from the line of fair-dealing and honesty on the part of the Sidonian traders must have been of rare occurrence, or the flourishing and lucrative ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... we have agreed as to the only terms of compromise with the printers. I am determined that I will have an apology for their affidavits. The other men may pay their costs and get out of it, but I will stick to my friend the author." Two days later he wrote: "The farther affidavits put in by way of extenuation by the printing rascals are rather strong, and give one a pretty correct idea of what the men must be who hold on by the heels of literature. Oh! the agony of Talfourd at Knight Bruce's not hearing him! He had sat up till three in the morning, he says, preparing his speech; ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... be seen that Victoria, notwithstanding her widely-diffused material well-being, is just as much addicted to crimes against person and property as some of the poor and squalid States of Europe. It may be said in extenuation of this condition of things, that Victoria contains a larger grown-up population, and therefore a larger percentage of persons in a position to commit crime than is to be found in older countries. This is, to a ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... war-dance, waving the bloody scalp in the air with frenzied gestures as they circled around and around the lifeless body, and many of the drunken white men applauded heartily, although it must be set down in extenuation that they were so drunk as not really to understand ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... others followed him, but Cornelia could not speak. Some of the pictures she did not like; some she thought were preposterous; but there were some that she found brilliantly successful, and a few that charmed her with their delicate and tender poetry. He said something about most of them, in apology or extenuation; Cornelia believed that she knew which he liked by his not saying ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... me when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.[90] The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... other hand, he was the only one who had ever stood up and said a word of extenuation for me in the teeth of a family squall. Father did not count; my mother thought me bad from end to end; Gertie, in addition to the gifts of beauty and lovableness, possessed that of holding with the hare and running with ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... But Mr. Adams did not mention his relations with Jones's pistol. Let it be said, in extenuation of that performance, that Mr. Adams supposed Jones was going to Tucson, where he said he was going, and where a job and a salary were awaiting him. In Tucson an unloaded pistol in the holster of so handy a man on the drop ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... was born May 27, 1702; died April 17, 1774. He was a soldier and jurist, but his most prominent position (though now of painful notoriety) was as commander of that tragic disgrace in American history, the expedition against the Acadians. It is told in extenuation of his action that before the annihilation and dispersion of that unfortunate community he addressed them, saying that his duty was "very disagreeable to his natural make and temper as it must be grievous to them," but that he must obey orders,—and ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... gone." There was no one by at the moment to hear these injuries except Westover, but Whitwell called them out with a frankness which was perhaps more carefully adapted to the situation than it seemed. Westover made no attempt to parry them formally; but he offered some generalities in extenuation of the unworthiness of the Durgins, which Whitwell did not ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... my plea in extenuation of Boyce's conduct (if plea there can be), seeing that he raised not a shadow of one of his own. You may say that my plea is no excuse for his betrayal; that no man, even if he is tempted, can be pardoned for non-control ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... me, I shall not go any further into this lamentable love affair. I submit, in extenuation, that people do not care to be regaled with the heartaches of past affairs; they are only interested in those which appear to be in the process of active development or retrogression. Suffice to say, I was terribly cut up over the way my first serious ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... her education, Dr. John," said I. "Tossed about all her life from one foreign school to another, she may justly proffer the plea of ignorance in extenuation of most of her faults. And then, from what she says, I believe her father and mother were brought up much as she ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... him again. Before the lines of our lives crossed, I knew him for what he was, I knew the report of him that ran the countryside. Even then I found him detestable. You heard him allude last night to the unfortunate La Binet. You heard him plead, in extenuation of his fault, his mode of life, his rearing. To that there is no answer, I suppose. He conforms to type. Enough! But to me, he was the embodiment of evil, just as you have always been the embodiment ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... all Christians can feel themselves so inexcusably sinful, when it seems to me we all come into the world in such a way that it would be miraculous if we did not sin. Mr. Hawes always says in prayer, 'We have nothing to offer in extenuation of any of our sins,' and I always think when he says it, that we have everything to offer in extenuation. The case seems to me exactly as if I had been brought into the world with such a thirst for ardent spirits that there was just a possibility, though no hope, that I should resist, and ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... condoning his conduct, Levi. He has behaved as badly as a young man could, and not a word of extenuation will you hear from me. I'm not speaking of him as a part of the social order; I'm speaking of him as master of the Mill. As master here he may be a successful man and you'll do well to bear in mind that he must be judged by results. Morally, he's a failure, and you are right to condemn ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... 39, he wrote of this kind of control:—'It may be urged in extenuation of this crime which parents, not in any other respect to be numbered with robbers and assassins, frequently commit, that, in their estimation, riches and happiness are equivalent terms.' He wrote to Mrs. Thrale:—'There wanders about ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Her mother took it, drew her in, and kissed her forehead. "Good-bye, my child"; she could not, for her life, be more cordial than that. The offence itself seemed a pinprick beside the rankle of the wound to her pride. This child had set up for herself, and was now returned—without extenuation, without plea for mercy. Mrs. Percival was one of those people who cannot be happy unless their right to rule be unquestioned. Had the girl humbled herself to the dust, grovelled at her feet, she would have taken her ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... suggested by the author in the way of excuse or extenuation for this incompatibility of Falstaff with Falstaff—for the violation of character goes far beyond mere inconsistency or the natural ebb and flow of even the brightest wits and most vigorous intellects—will commend itself more readily to the moralist ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... squadrons had by this time arrived within gunshot of each other, and Harry and Roger, eager though they were for the fight to commence, were yet conscious of a peculiar feeling something akin to fright, in extenuation of which it must be remembered that neither of the boys had ever been in ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... their sort of humanity and the common article was absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my own attitude toward the misery of ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... all the Holmes stories with great attention, and had thought many times what an incompetent ass Doctor Watson was; but, now that he had started to handle his own first case, he was compelled to admit that there was a good deal to be said in extenuation of Watson's inability to unravel tangles. It certainly was uncommonly hard, he thought, as he paced the cricket field after leaving Sergeant Collard, to detect anybody, unless you knew who had really done the crime. As he brooded ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... amazed at Eve's extraordinary gift for putting him in the wrong, and for making him still more wrong when he was wrong. "This is the second time this morning that I've had to surrender to overwhelming force. Name your own terms of peace. But let me tell you in extenuation that I've discovered your offspring. The fact is, I got ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... antagonist to tell his story after his own fashion, and was too dispirited either to contradict him or seek to justify himself. He felt ashamed of himself, and in his self-humiliation saw neither defence nor extenuation for his conduct. ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... He picked up a paper but threw it down after only a casual glance at the paragraph. He saw enough to convince him that for the present, at any rate, Elizabeth seemed assured of a certain amount of sympathy. The career of poor Wenham Gardner was set down in black and white, with little extenuation, little mercy. His misdeeds in Paris, his career in New York, spoke for themselves. He was quoted as a type, a decadent of the most debauched instincts, to whom crime was a relaxation and vice a habit. Tavernake would ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I thought God was an orphan," Hannah pleaded in extenuation. "But, what about God's papa?" she demanded with sudden inspiration. "You're so smarty, ...
— The Little Mixer • Lillian Nicholson Shearon
... dealt harshly with the English clergy, and connived at their wholesale deprivation. We must own, in extenuation, that their lives and conduct had not been such as to do honour to God, that they were said to be the most ignorant clergy in Europe; and that the sins of the nation under their guidance were owned, even by the English, to have brought the heavy judgment of the Conquest ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... will allege in extenuation the modern improvements now in progress, the Suez Canal, the railroads, the steamboats on the Nile, the bridge across the Nile at Cairo, and the sugar ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... is, of course, a mixed one. His sagacity, boldness, and prudence, qualities so highly necessary to success in war, became in some degree vices, from the manner in which they were employed. The circumstances of his education, however, must be admitted as some extenuation of his habitual transgressions against the law; and for his political tergiversations, he might in that distracted period plead the example of men far more powerful, and less excusable in becoming the sport of circumstances, than the poor and desperate outlaw. On the ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... be no distinction made between the wealthy and aristocratic female thief and her less fortunate sister, for the crime is the same in both cases; the only difference being that the latter cannot claim the possession of riches in extenuation of her guilt. ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... which they have recourse in conducting a bargain are often exceedingly ingenious; and to be reputed rich might materially interfere with their success on such occasions. There is nothing more common than to hear a plea of poverty set up and most pertinaciously urged, in extenuation of the terms of a purchase, by persons whose outward condition, comfortable well-furnished houses, and large mercantile credits, indicate any thing ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... I am assured by men who are not so sustained and occupied by the worship of pure beauty, that a similar consecration is possible, is practised; that many men feel that no temptation can be too strong for the will of man, if he invokes the aid of the Spirit instead of seeking extenuation from the brute alliances of his nature. In short, what the child fancies is really true, though almost the whole world declares it a lie. Man is a child of God; and if he seeks His guidance to keep the heart with diligence, it will be so given that all the ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... [Footnote 1: In extenuation of the little that is known of the fresh-water fishes of Ceylon, it may be observed that very few of them are used at table by Europeans, and there is therefore no stimulus on the part of the natives to catch them. The burbot and grey mullet are ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... extenuation of the station agent's and the Double R manager's sins of omission, but without doubt the country was what she had termed it—an unfeatured wilderness. Her first sensation upon getting a view of the country had been one of deep disappointment. There was plenty of ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... justly plead the hacknied excuse of being urged by not a few of those friends to publish these Notes, in extenuation of the folly or presumption, or whatever else it may be termed, of obtruding them on the world, in these days of "making many books;" he feels that he can rest his vindication on higher grounds. Although several works of some merit have appeared in connexion with the subject, ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... scenes of outrage which had followed the capture of the Bastille and the overthrow of French absolutism thirty years before. [316] The gentler character of these southern movements proved, however, no extenuation in the eyes of the leading statesmen of Europe: on the contrary, the declaration of soldiers in favour of a Constitution seemed in some quarters more ominous of evil than any excess of popular violence. ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... certainly be mere folly,' says Prince Kraft, 'to advance artillery to within 600 or 800 yards of a position held by infantry unless the latter were under the fire of infantry from an even shorter range.' This 'mere folly' is exactly what Colonel Long did, but it must be remembered in extenuation that he shared with others the idea that the Boers were up on the hills, and had no inkling that their front trenches were down at the river. With the imperfect means at his disposal he did such scouting ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of her folly, and bitterly would the others upbraid her, telling again of the joys and wonders she had squandered. Then loudly would she bewail her weakness and plead in extenuation: "I seen the candy. Mouses from choc'late und Foxy Gran'pas from sugar—und I ain't never ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... with an easy upward motion, as of a cork alighted in water, above the level of the looking-glass on her left hand—an action she repeated, with a solemn aspect, four times; at which point Gainsford gave way. The ladies accorded him every extenuation for the offence. They themselves, but for the heroism of exalted natures, must have succumbed to the gross temptation. "It is difficult, dear papa, to bring one's mind to religious thoughts in her company, even when she is quiescent," they said. Thus, by the prettiest exercise ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her.' That is, in brief, what ails the Mormons. The only argument in favor of them which can possibly be made is that their practice, not their preaching, offers the only solution of your own theory that all women should be married. But that theory has never been advanced in extenuation of their behavior. I offer it to you brand new, as a slight illustration of a ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... 'in extenuation of thy country's fault, who it was that succeeded the good Valerian—then the brief reign of virtuous Claudius, who died ere a single purpose had time to ripen—and the hard task that has tied the hands of Aurelian on the borders of ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... appetite for pleasure—all these might, perhaps, be pleaded in extenuation—for virtue often survives honor—and many who once trod the paths of infamy have subsequently reconciled themselves to society by the performance of noble deeds, and have thus thrown a halo of glory round their evil doings—but if this were so, whence comes the monstrous extortion ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Here some repetition of ideas was found unavoidable, in a case where what is substantially a single theme has been treated in the various forms which it assumed in the light of constantly growing knowledge. If the critical reader finds this a defect, the author can plead in extenuation only the difficulty of avoiding it under the circumstances. Although mainly astronomical, a number of discussions relating to general scientific ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... there was nothing whatever to be advanced in extenuation of her folly in thus inviting indigestion—a passion for pastry is its own punishment no less than any other infatuation to which mortal flesh is prone. Sally was morally certain she would suffer, and that ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... withall, and grafted too, Accompanie the greatnesse of thy blood, And hold their leuell with thy Princely heart? Prince. So please your Maiesty, I would I could Quit all offences with as cleare excuse, As well as I am doubtlesse I can purge My selfe of many I am charg'd withall: Yet such extenuation let me begge, As in reproofe of many Tales deuis'd, Which oft the Eare of Greatnesse needes must heare, By smiling Pick-thankes, and base Newes-mongers; I may for some things true, wherein my youth Hath faultie wandred, and irregular, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... have made, are making, and will make, continual additions, however, is Hume's fame as a philosopher; and, though I know that my plea will add to my offence in some quarters, I must plead, in extenuation of my audacity, that philosophy lies in the province of science, and ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... exposed to the penalty of his law. What would have been thought of one of those mutinous seamen, if, when brought before the bar of his country, he had pleaded in his defence, that, after the revolt, he had been faithful to his new commander? Would any person have regarded that as an extenuation of his sin? No! He would at once have been led to the scaffold. And the voice of an indignant public would have said that he suffered ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... and in the second, filled with an unreasoning fear that caused her to flee whenever she had seen him approach. This is the only excuse for what she did; for while her mother was feebly murmuring, as if in extenuation, "We thought it was John coming in," Cora Cordelia clasped her hands in delirious delight, and cried aloud, "It's Santa Claus! Oh, it's Santa Claus!" Could anything more awful happen to a cross man, a very cross man, than to be taken for ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... upon Maria Braccio as a holy woman, cut off in her youth by a frightful death, the truth was overwhelmingly awful. She strove within herself to find something upon which she could throw the merest shadow of an extenuation, ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... kindnesses? Are they foolish, and wicked, and wayward in the use of their faculties? What is all this but what we ourselves are guilty of every day? Consider how much in our case the guilt of such conduct is aggravated by our superior knowledge. We shall not have ignorance to plead in its extenuation, as many of the people of Shelford may have. Now, instead of railing at the people of Shelford, I think the best thing which you and your schoolfellows could do would be to try to reform them. You can buy and distribute useful and ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... garden, for it was a beautiful warm autumnal day. We sat down about twenty, and a merrier party I never was at. Old Waghorn was the only one who got tipsy on the occasion, and it was very ridiculous to hear him quoting scraps of Scripture in extenuation, and then calling himself a poor blind old sinner. It was not till eight o'clock in the evening that the party broke up, and I had then some difficulty to persuade some to go away. As for the old man, he had been put to bed an hour before. I staid a few minutes ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... cycle of the revolving seasons, I went along deceiving myself, even though I deceived none else, coining new pleas in extenuation or outright contradictions to meet each new-arising element of confirmatory proof to a state of case which no unprejudiced person could fail to acknowledge. The original discoverer of the alibi was a fat man; indeed, it was named for him—Ali Bi-Ben Adhem, he was, a friend and companion of the Prophet, ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... of some great offence was tried before Lord Hermand (who was a great toper), and the counsel pleaded extenuation for his client in that he was drunk when he committed the offence. "Drunk!" exclaimed Lord Hermand, in great indignation; "if he could do such a thing when he was drunk, what might he not have done when he was sober?" evidently implying that the normal condition of human nature and ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... recognised and tacitly acknowledged as his conquerors and judges. And when the sentence of dethronement, separation from his family, and instant banishment for life from his country, was pronounced upon him, he offered no plea for pardon or mitigation of his punishment; he urged nothing in extenuation or justification of his conduct, but simply bowed his head in token of his submission to the inevitable, and begged a respite of a few minutes in which to bid farewell to his family before setting out upon his journey ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... evening newspaper—when the unhappy compiler tries to round up the broodings of the day and still get home in time for supper. And yet perhaps the will-to-live is in them, for are they not a naked exhibit of the antics a man will commit in order to earn a living? In extenuation it may be pleaded that none of them are so long that they may not be mitigated by an ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... unwitnessed, had been that none, not even his brother, might hearken to the reproaches he anticipated to receive, or say hereafter that he heard Warwick, returned as victor and avenger to his native land, descend, in the hour of triumph, to extenuation and excuse. So affronted, imperilled, or to use his own strong word, "so despaired," had he been in the former rule of Henry, that his intellect, which, however vigorous in his calmer moods, was liable ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the decay and min of a mind, the wreck of an immortal soul. What place could there be in heaven for the drunkard, who had dribbled away his reason, his power to discriminate between right and wrong, by perpetual doses of brandy? what could be pleaded in extenuation of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... and Herrera's squadron, no cavalry was forthcoming. Lopez remained unpardonably inactive, for want of orders, as he afterwards said; but, under the circumstances, this was hardly an extenuation. The position of the Carlists had been, in the first instance, from the nature of the ground, scarcely attackable by horse, at least with any prospect of advantage; but now the want of that arm was great and obvious. Cordova's conduct in leaving his squadrons so far in the rear, seems, at any rate, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... prove worthy," he said, earnestly. "You must remember, in extenuation, that I have not seen the ladies of our ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... capital city over the Union Pacific. It was a cowardly expedient, prompted wholly by the old, sharp-toothed fear of consequences if I should fall to obey the wire summons, and I knew it. I offer nothing in extenuation. ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... being resolved to defend the work of the National Assembly against the interference of strangers, were not disposed to have him at their head in the fearful struggle which was approaching? We have nothing to say in defence or extenuation of the insolence, injustice, and cruelty with which, after the victory of the republicans, he and his family were treated. But this we say, that the French had only one alternative, to deprive him of the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and there was nobody to set before Elizabeth any extenuation of the absent one's deceit. Even had he been present Henchard might scarce have pleaded it, so little did he value himself ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... a graphic description of the rage Lulu was thrown into at the sight of Rosie galloping away on the pony she had expected to ride, repeated her angry retort in reply to Aunt Dinah's reproof, and told, without any extenuation of the hard facts, how the baby girl, escaping from her nurse's watchful care for a moment, had toddled along to her sister, caught at her skirts for support, and received a savage kick, that sent her down the ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... troubled with scruples in political cases. He had been deeply concerned in those dark and atrocious parts of the Whig plot which had been carefully concealed from the most respectable Whigs. Nor is it possible to plead, in extenuation of his guilt, that he was misled by inordinate zeal for the public good. For it will be seen that after having disgraced a noble cause by his crimes, he betrayed it in order to escape from his well ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the chief murderers was a man named Jowe, who had formerly been a Sunday-school teacher in Sierra Leone. He pleaded in extenuation of his offence that he had been compelled to join the society. The others said they committed the murders in order to obtain certain parts of the body for ju-ju purposes, the leg, the hand, the heart, etc. The Mercury goes on to give the statement of the Reverend ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... character of Peters was reinstated; and as he had declared, at the time of his capture, that the unjust punishment which he had received had been the motive of his desertion, the captain was strongly urged by the officers to overlook an offence which had everything to be offered in its extenuation. But Captain A—- was fond of courts-martial; he imagined that they added to his consequence, which certainly required to be upheld by adventitious aid. Moreover, the feeling, too often pervading little minds, that of a dislike taken to a person because you ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... debased mien, a disgraced sensualist, not merely a deceiver of another woman's innocent confidence, and her tempter to dishonor and wretchedness, but a poltroon—a whipped coward who had not dared to lift voice or pen in denial or extenuation of his crime. ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... to motives, to reason and to passion, in their varieties, and all such considerations,—law ignores in the main question, however it may admit them in the imperfect form in which only they can be known, as circumstances in extenuation or aggravation. This large part of responsibility, it will seem to every reflective moralist, enters little into the law's survey; and its penalties, at best, are "the rack of this rude world." Death and imprisonment, as it inflicts them, are for the protection ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... likely to consume more time in reaching a place than they are apt to bestow upon it when found. And, I am ashamed to say, that even Louisburgh was not an exception to this general truth; although perhaps certain reasons might be offered in extenuation for our somewhat speedy departure from the precincts of the old town. First, then, the uncertainty of a sailing vessel, for the "Balaklava" was coquettishly courting any and every wind that could carry her out of our harbor of refuge. Next, the desire of seeing more ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... must sufficiently justify punishment, whether its end be to secure the innocent from wrong, or to deter guilt by example; and I believe every reader feels some indignation when he finds him spared. From what extenuation of his crime, can Isabel, who yet supposes her brother dead, form any plea in his favour. Since he was good 'till he looked on me, let him not die. I am afraid our varlet poet intended to inculcate, that women think ill of nothing that raises ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... anything like a graduated scale of responsibility. A very bad training in youth would be in a certain limited sense regarded as lessening the guilt of any wrong thing done; and you may remember, accordingly, how that magnanimous monarch, Charles II., urged to the Scotch lords, in extenuation of the wrong things he had done, that his father had given him a very bad education. But though human laws and judges may vainly and clumsily endeavor to fix each wrongdoer's place in the scale of responsibility, and though they must, in a rough way, do what is rough ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... Majesty, I would I could Quit all offences with as clear excuse As well as I am doubtless I can purge Myself of many I am charged withal: Yet such extenuation let me beg, As, in reproof of many tales devised By smiling pick-thanks and base news-mongers,— Which oft the ear of greatness needs must hear,— I may, for some things true, wherein my youth Hath faulty wander'd and irregular, Find pardon on my ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... certainly was not overcome and suffered from no reaction. This confirmed and augmented if possible Mr Powell's good opinion of her as a "jolly girl," though it seemed to him positively monstrous to refer in such terms to one's captain's wife. "But she doesn't look it," he thought in extenuation and was going to say something more to her about the lighting of that flare when another voice was heard in the companion, saying some indistinct words. Its tone was contemptuous; it came from below, from ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... Knight explained, and then wished he had not,—Blue Bonnet looked so grieved. "She killed a calf a few nights ago," he said in extenuation, "and Shady was 'laying for' her. She made for her hole after she was wounded and we followed,—that's how we came to find the pups. Lucky we did or they'd have had ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... by seemingly without regret. And if the topic, therefore, is one possessing an attractive personal interest, for that very reason it is felt that the present chapter falls far short of what might be achieved; yet it may be permissible to plead in extenuation thereof that its composition has not proved the easiest of tasks, and its shortcomings must consequently be condoned by an indulgent public. I shall begin, then, by saying that if ever there was a form of food which was intended for our semi-tropical ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... to commit this Sacriledge, in the straightnesse of your Lordship's leisure, to present a peece, for matter and model so unworthy, and in this scribbling age, wherein great persons are so pestered dayly with Dedications. All I can alledge in extenuation of so many incongruities, is the bequest of a deceased Man; who (in his lifetime) having offered some translations of his unto your Lordship, ever wisht if these ensuing were published they might onely bee addressed unto your Lordship, as the ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... strike my own name off the books at the buttery hatch, shall be prevented making a retreat to Cam roads.—You're out of the scrape, that's clear, and that affords me some hope; for as you are fresh, your word will pass for something in extenuation, or arrest of judgment." After some little time spent in anticipating the charges likely to be brought against him, and arranging the best mode of defence, it was agreed that Echo should proceed forthwith to Golgotha, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... suppose the reader will dub me a fool to have married Sylvia. Well, he or she may do so. My only plea in extenuation is that I loved her dearly and devotedly. My love might have been misplaced, of course, yet I still felt that, in face of all the black circumstances, she was nevertheless true to those promises made before the altar. I was hers—and she ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... had been waiting a most unreasonable time. Neither Mrs. Maylie, nor Harry, nor Rose (who all came in together), could offer a word in extenuation. ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... statement about the ear as against the eye; but it is not like him to have let such an over-statement stand and continue in his corrected and carefully finished work. The prophet Jeremiah, I feel satisfied, would not have subscribed to what is said in the Holy War in extenuation of the eye. That heart- broken prophet does not say that it has been his ear that has made his head waters. It is his eye, he says, that has so affected his heart. The Prophet of the Captivity had all the Holy War potentially in his imagination when he penned ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... yet it was quite impossible for Lockhart, a political sympathiser and a personal friend, to treat him harshly in an obituary notice. There was no danger of his setting down aught in malice; but there might be thought to be a considerable danger of over-extenuation. The danger was the greater, inasmuch as Lockhart himself had certainly not escaped, and had perhaps to some extent deserved, one of Hook's reproaches. No man questioned his integrity; he was not a reckless spendthrift; he was not given to excesses in living, or to hanging about great houses; ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Bertrade," he cried, "what is this thing that I have done! Forgive me, and let the greatness and the purity of my love for you plead in extenuation of my act." ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... supplication was not permanent. Again the anguish swept over His spirit in another foaming breaker, and again He sought solitude, and again He found tranquillity—and again returned to find the disciples asleep. 'They knew not what to answer Him' in extenuation of their ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... miserable about it, for he could see that she despised him more for being an informer than for having something to inform. He pleaded in extenuation: ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... that the masterpiece in question had escaped my research, but pleaded in extenuation that I came from England, where the rudiments of polite larnin' and the iliments of Oirish litherature have not yet permeated the barbarian population. Barbatus then ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the renegade; "but, in extenuation, your highness must call to mind that at that time I ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... I had not learned about them in the way God thinks best to teach us his abhorrence of them. I never read any book in which a sin was fully delineated that I did not feel some of the excitement of the sin—some extenuation, perhaps, some glossing over, some excuse for the sinner,—but in the record God gives I always intensely hate the sin and feel how abominable it is in his sight. The first book I ever cried over was the Bible and it was somebody's sin that brought the tears. I would like to talk to Mrs. Grey!" ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... John Crossthwaite held the victim-of-circumstance doctrine in theory, he did not allow Mike Kelly to plead it in practice, as an extenuation of his misdeeds. Very different from his Owenite "it's-nobody's-fault" harangues in the debating society, or his admiration for the teacher of whom my readers shall have a glimpse shortly, was his lecture that evening to the poor Irishmen on "It's ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the Indians in the canoe, as to lose somewhat of that self-possession, by which his character in general was eminently distinguished. Candour, however, requires, that I should relate what he hath offered in extenuation, not in defence, of the transaction; and this shall be done in his own words. "These people certainly did not deserve death for not choosing to confide in my promises, or not consenting to come on board my boat, even if they had apprehended no danger. ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... its author might be supposed to have written under a sense of peculiar responsibility, and to have tested, with especial care, the statements he ventured to promulgate. And even if this be expecting too much, hastiness, or want of opportunity for due deliberation, cannot now be pleaded in extenuation of any shortcomings; for the propositions cited were repeated two years afterwards in the Reade Lecture, delivered before so grave a body as the University ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... to his one—one drink with him, the other drink without him and of which he did not know. I STOLE that other drink, and, worse than that, I began the habit of drinking alone when there was a guest, a man, a comrade, with whom I could have drunk. But John Barleycorn furnished the extenuation. It was a wrong thing to trip a guest up with excess of hospitality and get him drunk. If I persuaded him, with his limited calibre, into drinking up with me, I'd surely get him drunk. What could I do but steal that every ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... his having all his wits about him, and is a stratagem, such as it is, not improper for a buffoon, whose fate would be singularly hard, if he should not be allowed to avail himself of his Character when it might serve him in most stead. We must remember, in extenuation, that the executive, the destroying hand of Douglas was over him: "It was time to counterfeit, or that hot termagant Scot had paid him scot and lot too." He had but one choice; he was obliged to pass thro' the ceremony of dying ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... I wish I could undo, Laura; an' there's a lot more of it I couldn't help, an' maybe some I—I—wasn't——" He paused. He couldn't bring himself to say anything in extenuation of himself and his acts in the presence of this girl. It might sound as if he were playing for her ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... and he frequently stutters into imagination; but the imp that controls his heart corrupts his taste and taints his sense of beauty, and the result is that he has a malicious satisfaction in deliberately choosing words whose uncouthness finds no extenuation in their expressiveness, and in forging elaborate metaphors which disgust rather than delight. His description of a storm at sea is among the least unfavorable specimens of this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... they never approached the truth. M. de Camors might have committed this base action under the menace of some great danger to save the fortune, the honor, probably the life of Madame de Campvallon. This, though a poor excuse in the mother's eyes, still was an extenuation. Probably also he had in his heart, while marrying her daughter, the resolution to break off this fatal liaison, which he had again resumed against his will, as often happens. On all these painful points she dwelt after the departure ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... a mob of persons. When brought into the presence of the magistrate, he learned, to his consternation, that the root upon which he had been experimentalizing was worth four thousand florins; and, notwithstanding all he could urge in extenuation, he was lodged in prison until he found securities for the payment ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... enter into any further extenuation of what was thought exceptionable in this play, but that it has been said, that the managers should have prevented some of the defects before its appearance to the public—and in particular the uncommon length of the piece as represented the first night. It were an ill return ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... said Harlan, in extenuation. "Will you come in?" She was evidently a friend of Dorothy's, and, as such, ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... for the keeping of the promises that an hysterical woman had made, struggling for the strength to go on,—on with this cheery, brave little bit of humanity in the next cabin, without a word in self-extenuation, without a hint to break the lack of estimation in which she held him, without a plea in his own defense. And some way, Houston felt that such a plea now would be cheap and tawdry; they were in a world where there were bigger things than ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... happy, having exactly fulfilled without change, bargain, or extenuation the task she had mapped out for herself in 1778, when she declared in the alliance treaty that the "direct and essential object of the same was efficaciously to maintain the freedom, sovereignty, and absolute and illimited independence of the United States." The joy ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... have avowed it, if all this be a proof of the justice of the charge brought against me by my accuser of having "turned round upon my Mother-Church with contumely and slander," in this sense, but in no other sense, do I plead guilty to it without a word in extenuation. ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... that belonged to it, passed out of my life. It had its faults, but it can at least be said of it, in extenuation, that it was very human. With them all it had a rude sense of justice that did not distinguish its early builders. When the work of tearing down had begun, I watched, one day, a troop of children having fun with a seesaw they had made of ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... consider this point in extenuation for her. It is almost certain that in moving to bring about the death of Overbury she had sanction, if only tacit, from the Earl of Northampton. By the time that the Great Oyer began Northampton ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... determined that I will have an apology for their affidavits. The other men may pay their costs and get out of it, but I will stick to my friend the author." Two days later he wrote: "The farther affidavits put in by way of extenuation by the printing rascals are rather strong, and give one a pretty correct idea of what the men must be who hold on by the heels of literature. Oh! the agony of Talfourd at Knight Bruce's not hearing him! He had sat up till three in the morning, he says, preparing his speech; ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... severely blamed: it is not the first time that I have been compelled to interfere, for my pupil is of a very susceptible disposition, and has fancied himself in love with at least five young people since he has been under my charge. In this instance,' continued he, making me a bow, 'he has some extenuation to offer. Will you oblige me by informing me if he adheres to his promise? or do you wish that I ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... de key-note of it all, I fear. I plead guilty. But I also plead, in extenuation, dat I have a vife to whom ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... because they think I'm strong," he pleaded, in extenuation of his acceptance of the nomination for Mayor ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... I am now so much a favourite, and have such a visible share in her confidence, and even in her affections, that I may do what I will, and plead for excuse violence of passion; which, they will have it, makes violence of action pardonable with their sex; as well as allowed extenuation with the unconcerned of both sexes; and they all offer their helping hands. Why not? they say: Has she not passed for my wife before them all?—And is she not in a fine way of being reconciled to her friends?—And was not the want of that reconciliation the pretence ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... make small mention, for, in truth, one boasts little of one's deeds in piracy after the fact, or of inciting piracy and making accessories before the fact, the more especially if such accessories be small but bloodthirsty boys. These latter, let me plead in extenuation of my own sins, already were pirates, and set upon rapine. For my own part, seeing their resolution to take green corn and other vegetables, aye, even fowls, as part of the natural returns of their stern calling, I made no ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... Chicago speech of 1858; and in the Cooper Union speech of 1860 he exhibited a familiarity with the theory and history of the Constitution which amazed the young lawyers who prepared an annotated edition of the address. "He has wit, facts, dates," said Douglas, in extenuation of his own disinclination to enter upon the famous joint debates, and, when Douglas returned to Washington after the debates were over, he confessed to the young Henry Watterson that "he is the greatest debater I have ever met, either here or anywhere ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... of conventions. With a Republican mayor in every other city, there had been no attempt at official protection; and yet it may be remembered, in extenuation, that it is always easier for the party out of power than for the one in power to stand for principle; the former has nothing to lose. The Republicans at this time were panic-stricken and staggering under the weight of responsibility suddenly laid upon them; and the Abolitionists, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... It was admitted that Gray had had a long talk with the prisoner, took him his overcoat, newspapers, etc., but, in extenuation, they were members of the same college society and their social standing was, outside the army, on the same plane. Gray deserved reprimand and caution—nothing more. As to the carriage, he had nothing to do with the one that drove to camp that ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... one who has even pretended to study the art of war is able to find an excuse, I have failed to find such an instance in the course of many years' reading, and shall be happy to have it pointed out to me. Hooker's wound cannot be alleged in extenuation. If he was disabled, his duty was to turn the command over to Couch, the next in rank. If he did not do this, he was responsible for what followed. And he retained the command himself, only using Couch ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... sound boots for her feet, we'll worry through without it." And they did. The extreme solicitude of the State Children's Department, as carried out by its zealous officers, for the life and the wellbeing of their babies serves them in Public extenuation, and the children are often so pretty and engaging that they win love all round. A grown-up son in the home was very fond of little Lily. "Mother will you get Lily a cream coat, such as I see other babies wearing, and I will ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... more even as friends. I do not ask you either to forgive or to remember me. Look on me as one wholly unworthy even of resentment! Do not think that I write this in madness or in fever or excitement. Judge me not by my seeming illness this morning. I invent no excuse, no extenuation, for my broken faith and perjured vows. Calmly, coldly, and deliberately I write; and thus writing, I ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IX • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... subject the former, in their turn, to the money power in Great Britain. It is not denied that the suspension of the New York banks in 1837, which was followed in quick succession throughout the Union, was produced by an application of that power, and it is now alleged, in extenuation of the present condition of so large a portion of our banks, that their embarrassments have arisen ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... moor cock doesn't fly that way," Willis drawlingly explained, in extenuation of the poor shooting. "He doesn't go right up and down, you 'now. He has wings, don't you 'now, and flies straight away, like a shot. I could hit a grouse without any trouble, but this kind of shooting! The best shot in England ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... Ralph, in a few words, related the occurrence. Though carefully avoiding the use of epithet or phrase which might color with an increased odium the connection and conduct of Forrester with the affair, the offence admitted of so little apology or extenuation, that the delicacy with which the details were narrated availed but little in its mitigation; and an involuntary cry burst from mother and daughter alike, to which the hollow groan that came from the lips of Forrester furnished ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... therefore, as is their condition, the consideration that it has thus far been occasioned by their own imprudence, is apt to detract from that unbounded commiseration which it would otherwise excite: if, on the other hand, we do not reflect in extenuation of their thoughtlessness and extravagance, that their former increased means of indulgence, were the result of their industry; that this industry was in the first instance called into activity by the encouragement of the government; that it has since been paralysed by ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... supporters of the scheme proclaim their readiness and their capacity to regenerate the State and human nature, they are hailed as the prophets of a new order; they are allowed to plead the excellence of their motives in extenuation of all and any means; and they end by creating new evils without ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... has been in all the history of murder and plunder. Liberty! the People! these are the sacred objects with which tyrants cloak their usurpations, and which assassins plead in extenuation of their brazen disregard of life, of virtue, of all that is dear and sacred to the race. The dagger of Brutus and the sword of Cromwell, were they not drawn in the name of Liberty—the People? The guillotine of the French Commune and the ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... tempt me to be less frank than I have been. I wish to make full confession. I know, I see now, I have been cruelly, brutally selfish—as selfish as Nature herself!—none knows that better than I. But remember, in extenuation, what I have told you of my origin and my growth. And I had not the suspicion of a thought of injuring any one. Fool! fool! egregious fool that I was! I who understood most things so clearly did not guess that no creature, no being in the universe—god, or man, or beast—can ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... have betrayed you—they have shut their eyes and blindfolded others," objected Joseph Smith, as if in extenuation. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... was worth that to him," she said to herself in extenuation, "and he's goin' to get two thousand dollars a year. I didn't want to lend the money, I'd rather have had it in the savings bank, but I did ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... furnished supplies than of annihilating the Army of the Potomac, and relying on European intervention rather than on the valour of the Southern soldier, were responsible for the occupation of the Fredericksburg position. In extenuation of their mistake it may, however, be admitted that the advantages of concentration on the North Anna were not such as would impress themselves on the civilian mind, while the surrender of territory would undoubtedly have embarrassed both the Government and the supply department. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... poetasters arises from their extreme love of spinning out an infinite deal of nothing. Now, as "brevity is the soul of wit," their productions can be looked upon as little else than phantasmagorial skeletons, ridiculous from their extreme extenuation, and in appearance more peculiarly empty, from the circumstance of their owing their existence to false lights. This fault does not exist with all the master spirits, and, though "many a flower is born to blush unseen," we now proceed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... judge of them so far as I can see; and if I am expected to judge of his purposes when they appear to be beneficent, I am in consistency obliged also to judge of them when they appear to be malevolent. And it can be no possible extenuation of the latter to point to the "final result" as "order and beauty," so long as the means adopted by the "Omnipotent Designer" are known to have been so revolting. All that we could legitimately assert in this case would be, that so far as observation can extend, "he cares for animal perfection" ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... compelled to interfere, for my pupil is of a very susceptible disposition, and has fancied himself in love with at least five young people since he has been under my charge. In this instance,' continued he, making me a bow, 'he has some extenuation to offer. Will you oblige me by informing me if he adheres to his promise? or do you wish that I should speak ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... plead this circumstance in partial extenuation. The intent had been plain, the deed was consummated. I had practically ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... having come to light since his trial, which had been humanely represented in the proper quarter. The other two had nothing to expect from the mercy of the crown; their doom was sealed; no plea could be urged in extenuation of their crime, and they well knew that for them there was no hope in this world. 'The two short ones,' the turnkey whispered, 'were ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... your sweet fraternal breath. How the Fates have since sundered us! How have you been going on, fattening and beautifying from one degree to another of poetical perfection, while I have, under the chilling shade of the Ochil Hills, been dwindling down from one degree of poetical extenuation to another, till at length I am become the very shadow and ghost of literary leanness! I should now wish to see you, and compare you as you are now with what you were in your 'Queen's Wake' days. For this purpose, I would be very fain you would condescend to pay us a visit. I see you indeed, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... but a writer on English literature within brief limits is forced to bow to it if he wishes his book to avoid the dreariness of a summary, and he can plead in extenuation the increased literary output of the later age, and the incompleteness with which time so far has done its work in sifting the memorable from the forgettable, the ephemeral from what is going to last. The main body of imaginative prose literature—the novel—is treated of in the next ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... oath in extenuation of my conduct, and that I was bound to return. This was not held in law to be any excuse. I had no business to take an oath of that nature, it was asserted by the counsel for the Government. The sentence of death against me was, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... very hard to forgive, and that is, that as the two went together under the flaming white lights towards Chiswick High Street, she turned to Frank a little nervously and asked him if he would mind walking just behind her. (Please remember, however, in extenuation, that Gertie's new pose was that of the ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... are anxious to procure the rare books mentioned in these bibliographical treatises, may be pretty safely taxed with being infected by the BIBLIOMANIA. What apology my friend Mr. Haslewood, the author of them, has to offer in extenuation of the mischief committed, it is his business, and not mine, to consider; and what the public will say to his curious forthcoming reprint of the ancient edition of Wynkyn De Worde on Hunting, Hawking, and Fishing, 1497 (with wood cuts), I ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... a-piece:' our indulgent poet, whenever he has spoken of any dirty or low work, constantly puts us in mind of the poverty of the offenders, as the only extenuation of such practices. Let any one but remark, when a thief, a pickpocket, a highwayman, or a knight of the post are spoken of, how much our hate to those characters is lessened, if they add a needy thief, a poor pickpocket, ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... and the meaning of the words Law and Right. He expatiated in the field of practical morals in his celebrated Instructions to his Son and to Posterity. The treatise makes an unpleasant impression with its hard, selfish, and somewhat sensual dogmatism. In extenuation it must be recollected that it was addressed to a hot and impetuous youth. He cultivated a taste for metaphysics. The Sceptic and A Treatise on the Soul are exemplifications of it. The former, as it stands, is an apology for 'neither affirming, nor denying, but doubting.' Probably the intention, ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... buildings to be actually razed, and fined truants heavily. One case which is reported displays the grim and costly humor of the illegal tribunal which dealt with such cases. Poor Mr. Palmer of Sussex, a gay bachelor, being called upon to show cause why he had been residing in London, pleaded in extenuation that he had no house, his mansion having been destroyed by fire two years before. This, however, was held rather an aggravation of the offence, inasmuch as he had failed to rebuild it; and Mr. Palmer paid ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... he parries these thrusts with weak, apologetic appeals, preserved in his Respuestas (Rhymed Answers). He claims his high-born foe's sympathy by telling him that he has sons, grandchildren, a poor, old father, and a marriageable daughter. In extenuation of his cowardice it should be remembered that Antonio di Montoro lived during a reign of terror, under Ferdinand and Isabella, when his race and his faith were exposed to most frightful persecution. All the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... this tree," and the master led the way to an umbrageous beech close by. There, still resting upon his horse, while China leaned against the enormous trunk, the story was told of the day's doings without exaggeration or extenuation. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... having administered the inhuman castigation, Landry (the owner of the girl) pleaded guilty, but urged in extenuation that the girl had dared to make an effort for that freedom which her instincts, drawn from the veins of her abuser, had taught her was the God-given right of all who possess the germ of immortality, no matter what the color of the casket in which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... England—whatever happens at home is but part of an orderly and an ordered scheme of things, whereas whatever happens beyond the British domains must necessarily be highly unusual and exceedingly disorganizing. If so be it happens on English soil he can excuse it. He always has an explanation or an extenuation handy. But if it happens elsewhere—well, there you are, you see! What was it somebody once called England—Perfidious Alibi-in', wasn't it? Anyhow that was what he meant. The party's intentions were good but his ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... and his Cabinet adopted the course which in the light of subsequent events seems to have been woefully ill-timed and hazardous in the extreme. They determined to sacrifice the army and navy. In extenuation of this decision, it may be said that the danger of war with France, which had forced the Adams Administration to double expenditures, had passed; and that Europe was at this moment at peace, though only the most sanguine and shortsighted could believe that continued ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... Baronet, holding out his hand, 'what have you to say in extenuation of your past conduct? You found it convenient, no doubt, to forget an ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... had taken milk from the same place at other times. When asked what she had to say in extenuation, she held her child up and said, "I did not take it for myself, I took it for this!" She did not call it her child. The magistrate looked, shuddered, and sentenced her to ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... The sole extenuation of Rachel's base worldliness was that during the previous six months she had almost continuously had the sensations of a person crossing Niagara on a tight-rope, and that now, on this very day, she had leaped to firm ground and was accordingly exultant. After Mrs. ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... afraid, hate my memory after this sad disclosure; but in my extenuation recall to mind how madly I loved, how cruelly I was deceived. Remember, also, that if not insane, I was little better at the time I was so criminal; and may it prove to you a lesson how difficult it is, when once you have stepped ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... germ of those vices, which like the Java tree shed a pestiferous vapour around—death is in the shade! and he perceives them without abhorrence, because he feels himself drawn by some cord of love to all his fellow creatures, for whose follies he is anxious to find every extenuation in their nature—in himself. If I, he may thus argue, who exercise my own mind, and have been refined by tribulation, find the serpent's egg in some fold of my heart, and crush it with difficulty, shall not I pity those who are ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
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