"Splenetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... without, running often over to see her Father; who, even after his accession to the English crown, was generally for some months every year to be met with in those favorite regions of his. He himself did not much visit, being of taciturn splenetic nature: but this once he had agreed to return a visit they had lately made him,—where a certain weighty Business had been agreed upon, withal; which his Britannic Majesty was to consummate formally, by treaty, when the meeting in Berlin took effect. His Britannic Majesty, accordingly, is come; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... necessity of any labours but those of national undoing. Holding but an inferior and struggling rank in all the manlier provinces of the mind, in science, poetry, and philosophy; he was the prince of scorners. The splenetic pleasantry which stimulates the wearied tastes of high life; the grossness which half concealed captivates the loose, without offence to their feeble decorum; and the easy brilliancy which throws what colours it will on the darker features ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... sensibility; but still I have studied it with pains—I believe I can thoroughly appreciate Dante; I can perceive much in Petrarch that is elevated and tender; and I approach the subject unconscious of the slightest splenetic prejudice. ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... returned them uncut and unread; and so far from knitting the bonds of acquaintance, we at last thought our plan served to estrange the members, by affording the little aristocracy frequent opportunities for venting their splenetic pride; the books were like disjunctive conjunctions, and when we left the place, the "society" did not promise ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 376, Saturday, June 20, 1829. • Various
... irritability was at its height. He would scarcely bear any observations, even if made in his favour, and I am convinced that it is to this uncontrollable irritability that he owed the reputation of having been ill-tempered in his boyhood, and splenetic in his youth. My father, who was acquainted with almost all the heads of the military school, obtained leave for him sometimes to come out for recreation. On account of an accident (a sprain, if I recollect rightly) Napoleon once spent a whole week at our house. To this day, whenever I pass ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... the use of it is known to every one; and even the lazy monks who take it, are no longer splenetic. In the west of England, the rocks are stripped of it with diligence; and every old woman tells you how charming that leaf is for bookish men: in Russia they use a plant of this kind in their malt liquor: it came into fashion there for ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... apparent during their intercourse in Strassburg, and in the end, after many years of uneasy relations, their alienation became complete. Be it said that the traits in Herder which estranged Goethe from him were equally recognised and felt by others. Naturally querulous, splenetic, and inconsiderate of others' feelings, the adverse circumstances of his early life had made him something of a Timon among his fellows.[74] His favourite author was Swift, and from this preference and from the peculiarities of his own temper he was known among his acquaintances ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... indifference, enervation, this lazy and splenetic humor of the king, she succeeded in distracting, in soothing, and amusing. She understood him perfectly—therein lie the great secret of the favor of Mme. de Pompadour and the great reason of her long domination which only death could end. She had the patience and genius ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... intended For nothing else but to be mended. A sect whose chief devotion lies In odd perverse antipathies: In falling out with that or this, And finding somewhat still amiss More peevish, cross, and splenetic, Than dog distract, or monkey sick That with more care keep holiday The wrong, than others the right way: Compound for sins they are inclin'd to, By damning those they have no mind to. Still so perverse and opposite, As if they worshipp'd God for spite. The self-same thing ...
— English Satires • Various
... a sensible observation in the old "Biographia Britannica" on Brooke. "From the splenetic attack originally made by Rafe Brooke upon the 'Britannia' arose very great advantages to the public, by the shifting and bringing to light as good, perhaps a better and more authentic account of our ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... rising from his seat, and slapping his forehead with his hand; and then he stalked backwards and forwards through the small room, driven almost to madness by the misery of his position. "I am not splenetic and rash," he said; "yet have I something in me dangerous. I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand Briskets could not, with all their quantities of ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... court, than the disgrace of the papists; and the gentlemen of those parts, being great and hot protestants (almost before by policy discredited and disgraced), were greatly countenanced." The letter writer afterwards mentions in a splenetic style the envoy from Monsieur, one Baqueville a Norman, "with four or five of Monsieur's youths," who attended the queen and were "well entertained and regarded." After them, he says, came M. Rambouillet from the French ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... of a slight splenetic oppression, and felt that he was behaving boorishly. He brightened and grew cordial, admitted a superfluous sensitiveness, assured his companion that he prized her sympathy, counted seriously upon her advice; in short, was as amiable as he ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... hands; the individual happiness of thousands depended upon him; but this power, which had devised great schemes, and which was the rock of support to so many, could itself be shaken and overthrown in a moment, by the splenetic humour of an angry ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... occasion for a splenetic and unjust tirade from an anonymous writer in the United Service Journal for 1831: "When this boat with a midshipman and several men (four) had been inhumanely ordered from alongside, it was known that there was nothing in her ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards
... sheer contempt. Destiny gave him eighty years of existence, that he might slowly decompose the decayed age; he had the time to combat against time, and when he fell he was the conqueror. His disciples filled courts, academies, and saloons; those of Rousseau grew splenetic and visionary amongst the lower orders of society. The one had been the fortunate and elegant advocate of the aristocracy, the other was the secret consoler and beloved avenger of the democracy. His ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... therefore fetched by belum. You were poled down the creek to the river, and rowed through the maze of traffic to Ashar creek. Turning out of the broad swift river, up the noisy creek you came on the river-side cafes, built on piles and filled with splenetic-eyed Arabs sipping coffee and various coloured sweet drinks. A cheap gramophone playing a thin Eastern music, may be sounding. The conversation is animated and guttural, constantly interspersed with that hollow, metallic rasp that is like the ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... is more commonly known as Texas fever, and sometimes as splenetic fever, is a specific fever communicated by cattle which have recently been moved northward from the infected district; it is also contracted by cattle taken into the infected district from other parts of the world. It is characterized by the peculiarity among animal diseases that the animals ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... my foot. That anguish set me free: It dashed me on the iron side of life: I woke, a man. My people too shall wake: They shall have icy crags for myrtle banks, Sharp rocks for couches. Strength! I must have strength; Not splenetic sallies of a woman's courage, But hearts to which self-pity is unknown: Hard life to them must be as mighty wine Gladdening the strong: the death on battle fields Must seem the natural, honest close of life; Their fear must be to die without a wound And miss Life's ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... Bethmann-Hollweg's splenetic phrase, is a complete delusion of the German mind. I was in Rome and saw the real piazza at work. I was on the streets all hours of day and night, and what I saw was nothing like the trite imaginings of the German Chancellor. As I have said in a previous ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... indeed he seems to have taken his father's place in the home; and with Hallam and other friends he continued on the same affectionate terms. He had not Dickens's buoyant temper and love of company, nor did he indulge in the splenetic outbursts of Carlyle. He could, when it was needed, find time to fulfil the humblest duties and then return with contentment to his solitude. But his thoughts seemed naturally to lift him above the level of others, and he was most truly himself when he was alone. Apart from his ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... there was much plate missing; being caught with a couple of silver spoons in his pocket, with their handles wrenched off, he said he was only going to carry them to the goldsmiths to be mended: that the said Timothy was hated by all the honest servants, for his ill-conditioned, splenetic tricks, but especially for his slanderous tongue; traducing them to their mistress as drunkards and thieves: that the said Timothy, by lying stories, used to set all the family together by the ears, taking delight to make them fight and quarrel; **particularly ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... to me as a noteworthy specimen of what an artful literary genius can do in the way of argumentative cantankerousness. His chief grievance is British diplomacy as represented by Sir Edward Grey, upon whose devoted head he empties the vials of his splenetic humor. ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... country where splenetic Maladies are prevailing and pernicious, perhaps above any other, hath afforded numberless instances, of even pious people, who have contracted those Melancholy Indispositions, which have unhinged them from all service or comfort; yea, not a few persons have been hurried thereby to lay Violent ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the general maxims of the world, I still feel such remains of my former disposition, that I am ready to throw all my books and papers into the fire, and resolve never more to renounce the pleasures of life for the sake of reasoning and philosophy. For those are my sentiments in that splenetic humour, which governs me at present. I may, nay I must yield to the current of nature, in submitting to my senses and understanding; and in this blind submission I shew most perfectly my sceptical disposition and principles. But does it follow, ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... which has been often attributed to the Stuart family, and which is the natural effect of the principles of divine right in which they were brought up, were now generally considered as dissatisfied and splenetic persons, who, displeased with the issue of their adventure and finding themselves involved in the ruins of a falling cause, indulged themselves in undeserved reproaches against their leader. Indeed, such censures were by no means frequent among those of his followers who, if what was alleged ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... evidently knew that company was coming. At the appointed time our two friends, Dr. Butterfield and Mr. Givemfits, arrived. As already intimated, they were opposite in temperament—the former mild, mellow, fat, good-natured and of fine digestion, always seeing the bright side of anything; the other, splenetic, harsh, and when he swallowed anything was not sure whether he would be the death of it, or it would ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... have fireworks; which will be no less rural. I was in a splenetic humour, and indulged myself in an exclamation against such an abominable waste of gunpowder; for which I got reproved by my angelic monitress, who told me that, of all its uses and abuses, this was ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... properly himself; but he was obdurate, and the child died in a convent near Venice in 1822. Shelley's association with Byron, of whom, in 'Julian and Maddalo' (1818), he has drawn a picture with the darker features left out, brought as much pain as pleasure to all concerned. No doubt Byron's splenetic cynicism, even his parade of debauchery, was largely an assumption for the benefit of the world; but beneath the frankness, the cheerfulness, the wit of his intimate conversation, beneath his careful cultivation of the graces of a Regency buck, he was fundamentally ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... familiarly and irreverently call it; or, again, "The Maiden Who Never Sleeps," or "The Single-breasted Virgin"—these last, however, always in the musical Malay equivalent. He had no end of names—romantic, splenetic, of opprobrium, or outright endearment—to suit, I imagine, Lakalatcha's varying moods. In one respect they puzzled me—they were of conflicting genders, some feminine and some masculine, as if in Leavitt's loose-frayed imagination the mountain that beguiled his days and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... two Goncourts, and in particular their great work on "L'Art du XVIIIe Siecle," which began to be published in 1859, although not completed until 1882. All this while, moreover, they were secretly composing their splenetic "Journal." On the 20th of June, 1870, the fair companionship was broken by the death of Jules de Goncourt, and for some years Edmond did no more than complete and publish certain artistic works which had been ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... FOR splenetic reasons which none but the Buttons of this world can appreciate, Paul was forbidden, under pain of ghastly tortures, to go near the Sunday school again, and, lest he should defy authority, he was told off on Sunday afternoons to ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Disappointments had made him splenetic, but he was not, as represented by his opponents on the two extremes, either a charlatan or a miscreant, though possibly not wholly exempt from charges against him in either respect. In many of his ultra radical and it may be truly said revolutionary views—revolutionary because ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... and say: "Good-bye, I am going." You say: "Where are you going?" "Oh," says Good Health, "I am going to take a vacation!" It is a poor rule that will not work both ways, and your good health will leave you choleric and splenetic and exhausted. You coquetted with your good health in the summer-time, and your good health is coquetting with you in the winter-time. A fragment of Paul's charge to the jailer would be an appropriate inscription for the hotel-register ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... him to embrace any desperate measures. Shaftesbury, who was, in most particulars, of an opposite character, was removed by the king from the office of president of the council; and the earl of Radnor, a man who possessed whimsical talents and splenetic virtues, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... given it to her unhappy vapourish lady. Vapourish people are perpetual subjects for diseases to work upon. Name but the malady, and it is theirs in a moment. Ever fitted for inoculation.—The physical tribe's milch-cows. —A vapourish or splenetic patient is a fiddle for the doctors; and they are eternally playing upon it. Sweet music does it make them. All their difficulty, except a case extraordinary happens, (as poor Mrs. Fretchville's, who has realized her ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... listened to these outpourings of a full and oppressed heart. In truth, Apaecides himself was softened much beyond his ordinary mood, which to outward seeming was usually either sullen or impetuous. For the noblest desires are of a jealous nature—they engross, they absorb the soul, and often leave the splenetic humors stagnant and unheeded at the surface. Unheeding the petty things around us, we are deemed morose; impatient at earthly interruption to the diviner dreams, we are thought irritable and churlish. For as there is no chimera vainer than the hope that one human heart shall find sympathy in another, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... led to believe that Livingstone possessed a splenetic, misanthropic temper; some have said that he is garrulous; that he is demented; that he is utterly changed from the David Livingstone whom people knew as the reverend missionary; that he takes no notes or observations but such as those which no other person could read but himself, and it was ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... malarious districts, and this results in chronic disease of the spleen. I have already described the general protuberance of the abdomen among the children throughout the Messaria and the Carpas districts, all of whom are more or less affected by splenetic diseases. On the mountains a marked difference is observed, as throughout the numerous villages at high altitudes the children are as healthy as those of England, although poorly clad in the home-made cotton-stuffs ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... disheartened; desponding; chapfallen[obs3], chopfallen[obs3], jaw fallen, crest fallen. sad, pensive, penseroso[It], tristful[obs3]; dolesome[obs3], doleful; woebegone; lacrymose, lachrymose, in tears, melancholic, hypped[obs3], hypochondriacal, bilious, jaundiced, atrabilious[obs3], saturnine, splenetic; lackadaisical. serious, sedate, staid, stayed; grave as a judge, grave as an undertaker, grave as a mustard pot; sober, sober as a judge, solemn, demure; grim; grim-faced, grim-visaged; rueful, wan, long-faced. disconsolate; unconsolable, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... shifted me from my birth, or first looked on me in a mood as splenetic as that of nature, when she produced that most sombre and unpleasing of trees, the olive; to pursue the simile; I may have conduced to the comfort of others, nay, even to their convenience and luxury, but it never availed aught to my own appearance or circumstances; I went ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 265, July 21, 1827 • Various
... species of claim upon him, which forbade to him the right of thinking of another woman. I believe it was the image of Miss Audley presented to him in this light that goaded the young barrister into those outbursts of splenetic rage against the female sex which he was liable to at certain times. He was strictly honorable, so honorable that he would rather have immolated himself upon the altar of truth and Alicia than have done her the remotest wrong, though by so doing he might ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... have, egad, for I adore 'em all in your ladyship. Let me perish, I don't know whether to be splenetic, or airy upon't; the deuce take me if I can tell whether I am glad or sorry that your ladyship has ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... it: I might also name the invective of Ovid against Ibis, and many others. But these are the underwood of satire rather than the timber-trees; they are not of general extension, as reaching only to some individual person. And Horace seems to have purged himself from those splenetic reflections in those odes and epodes before he undertook the noble work of satires, which were properly ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... pitiful alms by singing doleful ditties under people's windows? Or will you be sworn at the drumhead—and then comes the question, whether anybody would trust your hang-dog visages—and so under the splenetic humor of some despotic sergeant serve your time of purgatory in advance? Would you like to run the gauntlet to the beat of the drum? or be doomed to drag after you, like a galley-slave, the whole iron store of Vulcan? Behold your choice. You have before you the complete catalogue of all that you ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... resigned his task to the splenetic little Knight, and only smiled at his resentment when he added, that, to be but a mortal of middle stature, Julian was as stupid as a giant. Leaving the dwarf to prepare the meal after his own pleasure, Peveril employed himself in measuring the room with his eyes on every side, and in endeavouring ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... health when the very hot spell in May tempted him out on May 18th, with his agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swinbrook, a beautiful village on his Oxfordshire property, of which he was particularly fond. He was not successful, and in a splenetic mood he flung himself at full length upon a bank of wet grass. He was not allowed to remain there long, but the mischief was done, and in a few hours he was suffering from a bad cold. Even now, the result might not ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... to avoid this misfortune told by the old splenetic and malicious fairy, caused immediately his royal proclamation to be issued forth, whereby every person was forbidden, upon pain of death, to spin with a distaff or spindle; nay, even so much as to have a spindle in any of ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... in 1702, was four-and-twenty years of age. He was a smart, soldier-like Irishman, of "a splenetic and amorous complexion," half an actor, a quarter a poet, and altogether a very honest and gallant gentleman. He had taken to the stage kindly enough, and at twenty-one had written Love and a Bottle. ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... depreciate the merit of their friends. The spirit of party is too soon alarmed. The Abbe Barral undertook a dictionary devoted to their cause. In this labour, assisted by his good friends the Jansenists, he indulged all the impetuosity and acerbity of a splenetic adversary. The Abbe was, however, an able writer; his anecdotes are numerous and well chosen; and his style is rapid and glowing. The work bears for title, "Dictionnaire Historique, Litteraire, et Critique, des Hommes Celebres," ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... some weeks past, I have been forced in my own defence, to follow a proceeding that I have so much condemned in others. But several of my acquaintance among the declining party, are grown so insufferably peevish and splenetic, profess such violent apprehensions for the public, and represent the state of things in such formidable ideas, that I find myself disposed to share in their afflictions, though I know them to be groundless ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... Levant convinced every well-informed man that peace was impossible; and the rupture was accompanied by acts and insults to the "nation of shopkeepers" that could be avenged only by torrents of blood. Diatribes against perfidious Albion filled the French Press and overflowed into splenetic pamphlets, one of which bade odious England tremble under the consciousness of her bad faith and the expectation of swift and condign chastisement. Such was the spirit in which these nations rushed to arms; and the conflict was scarcely to cease until Napoleon was flung ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... clangor in the firmly struck octaves of the opening pages. No hesitating, morbid view of life, but rank, harsh assertiveness, not untinged with splenetic anger. The chorale of the trio is admirably devised and carried out. Its piety is a bit of liturgical make-believe. The contrasts here are most artistic—sonorous harmonies set off by broken chords that deliciously tinkle. There is a coda of frenetic ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker |
