Sentence Examples:
The first discerns treason in every danger; the second, always placed between the necessity of conquest and the image of the scaffold, dares not raise himself to bold conception, and those heights of courage which electrify an army and insure victory.
The ceiling between the four pendants had become a blue heaven with filmy clouds, and Cupids scattering roses before a train of doves and a recumbent goddess, whom a little Italian, perched on a scaffolding and whistling shrilly, was varnishing for dear life.
This interest was the more unaccountable, that the man had an exceedingly unprepossessing countenance, but it was nevertheless so vivid as to induce the dreamer to ascend the scaffold, and address him, with a view to enable him to escape the impending catastrophe.
As he sits quietly producing a surprising quantity of good literature, he must sometimes feel very near those anonymous craftsmen of the Middle Ages who, lost in the scaffolding, struck out forms that would to-day make only too familiar the names of their creators.
Should the multitude be taught that there are conspiracies in those ranks which are the most interested in maintaining order, and the exhibition presented to them of a man well-known, influential, and highly esteemed, dragged to the scaffold like the vilest malefactor?
Not only were proscriptions frequent, and the scaffold crowded with many victims, but the legislation of 1641 was cancelled, Episcopacy was insolently restored, the authority of the Crown considerably increased, and Presbyterianism barely allowed to maintain a weak and inglorious existence.
The new religion was banished from all the cities, every conventicle was broken up by armed men, the preachers and leading members were hanged, their disciples beaten with rods, reduced to beggary, or imprisoned, even if they sometimes escaped the scaffold.
The royal, the noble, the illustrious, the pious passed under these frowning battlements, leaving behind grandeur, brilliancy of courts, dreams of glory, home, friends, all that makes life sweet, to receive in exchange, the dungeon, the scaffold, the block, the axe.
Where the councillors of the Departments or the municipal officers were good Jacobins, the Commissioners availed themselves of local machinery; where they suspected their principles, they sent them to the scaffold, and enforced their own orders by whatever means were readiest.
Lest pity for a courageous sufferer should make impression on the populace, drummers were placed under the scaffold, whose noise, as he began to launch out in reflections on the government, drowned his voice, and admonished him to temper the ardor of his zeal.
Whatever changes may take place in its scaffolding, the Law itself will stand out with greater beauty and clearness, if we could but see the perfected structure, apart from the props and helps which have assisted in its successful erection and completion.
As the crowd increased, so wholesale highway robberies were of more frequent occurrence; and victims in the hands of some two or three desperate ruffians were as far from help as though divided by a continent from the battalions of police surrounding the scaffold.
Still more, according to current belief, it was in the same prison chamber that a member of the council, on coming to interview him, was startled at finding the victim of intolerance calmly asleep immediately before he walked with quiet composure to the scaffold.
In this palace too originated the dreadful reverse of fortune which the queen experienced; and, indeed, when the cart in which her majesty was carried to the scaffold, passed before the gates of this edifice, she was unable to repress a sign of indignation.
Somewhere in the recesses of Fury's wild heart there must have been good concealed; for he confessed his worst crime in the interests of justice, and he went to the scaffold with a serious and serene courage which almost made of him a dignified person.
The meeting took place between the gaunt brick walls of a huge unfinished building, ten thousand black-clothed men and women packed around a scaffolding draped in red, people heaped on piles of lumber and bricks, perched high upon shadowy girders, intent and thunder-voiced.
In the center is a scaffolding for meat, from which all are supplied every morning, under the inspection of a chief, whose tent is conspicuously situated at the head of the encampment, and differs from all the rest, resembling a half cylinder inverted.
The unsupported assertion of the wretched culprits, who, to the latest hour of existence, evinced no penitent or religious feeling, and who, during their short passage to the scaffold, on the morning of their execution, execrated the jury who so justly condemned them.
The blood of the most eminent champions of liberty had been shed upon the scaffold; and such as by a timely flight avoided that fate, were wandering in misery far from their native land, while the obsequious slaves of despotism enjoyed their patrimony.
The offense with which she was charged had supplied the scaffold with numberless victims; and tradesmen were more than ever clamorous for the stern execution of a law which, spite of experience, they still regarded as the only safeguard of their property.
I do not myself feel the monstrosity; nevertheless I should regard these supposed appearances only in the light of a hypothetical scaffolding, to be used while the edifice of physics is being raised, though possibly capable of being removed as soon as the edifice is completed.
It consisted of a troop of mounted soldiers, equipped in all respects like those stationed at the scaffold, with their captain at their head, and followed by two of their number with hurdles attached to their steeds, on which were tied the unfortunate victims.
As the crowd increased, so wholesale highway robberies were of momentary occurrence; and victims in the hands of some two or three desperate ruffians were as far from help as though divided by a continent from the battalions of police that surrounded the scaffold.
I can understand the deadly rage of the victors, the sanguinary reaction of the vanquished, the political volcanoes which rumble in the bowels of the globe, shake the earth, topple over thrones, upset monarchies, and roll heads and crowns on the scaffold.
The superstructure or scaffolding of belief around which it is formed appears to them of comparatively little moment, and it is not uncommon to find men ardently devoted to a particular type long after they have discarded the tenets with which it was once connected.
He had accompanied some of his companions to the house of a fellow, who assumed the character of a fortune-teller, and having disobliged him, by expressing a contempt of his art, the fellow, out of revenge, prophesied, that this man should die on a scaffold.
These men, in whom every good instinct was awakened by the sight before them, might, had the schoolmistress's eye alighted on others, have plundered on with their fellows; and with the more luckless of those fellows have stood on the scaffold a month later!
Notwithstanding it was a cold gloomy day, one hundred gentlemen sat near the scaffold, and Sir Walter Raleigh secretly watched the execution from a window of the armory, little thinking that thirteen years later he would meet the same fate in the same place.
That night the king slept pretty well for about four hours, though during the evening before he could hear in his apartment the noise of the workmen building the platform, or scaffold as it was commonly called, on which the execution was to take place.
In the great square, a spacious scaffolding, like an amphitheater, was erected, where the sentences of the prisoners were to be read, and the sermon of faith to be preached; and close by were the stakes prepared, where the condemned were to be burnt to death.
They lacked intelligence or will or honesty or industry or ambition or something, so that in the struggle for existence they fell behind, became stragglers, dropped by the wayside, died in gutters; while many were destined to end their days either in dungeons or on scaffolds.
Place a meteorologist on the council, and, despite the authority of the nurses, a whole scaffolding of gratuitous suppositions will be crumbled to dust by these few categorical and strict words of science; the moon does not exert the action that is attributed to it.
They had seen the flames of martyr or heretic, heads which had worn a crown laid one after another on the block, controversies, not merely between rivals for power, but between the deepest principles and the most rooted creeds, settled on the scaffold.
It was proposed to employ their power of ascension as a mechanical force for raising water from mines, for transporting obelisks, and placing them on greater elevations, or for raising, without any scaffolding a cross or a vane to the top of a high spire.
A Russian criminal condemned to exile is sent away with very little ceremony; but when an officer of the army or other person of note has been sentenced to banishment for life, he is dressed in full uniform, and led to a scaffold in some public place.
"When two executioners approached him he warned them of their danger if they should lay hands on him," and when they insisted upon doing so he struggled with them so successfully that he flung them nine times upon the scaffold, before his strength gave way.
A "fatal impatience," as Bacon calls it, gave his rivals an advantage which, perhaps in self-defense, they could not fail to take; and that career, so brilliant, so full of promise of good, ended in misery, in dishonor, in remorse, on the scaffold of the Tower.
On the scaffold this woman, determining, as she said, to die "with the greatest shame possible," was with difficulty prevented from throwing off her clothes before the people, and with scarce less trouble was she flung from the ladder by the executioner.
After this they would spend half a day in dancing in some large cotton house or on a scaffold, the master providing fiddlers who came from other plantations if there were none on the place, and who received from fifteen to twenty dollars on these occasions.
She then arose, proceeded to the platform, where she devoutly kissed the stigmata; then leaving her slippers at the foot of the scaffold, she nimbly ascended the ladder, and instructed beforehand, promptly lay down on the plank, without exposing her naked shoulders.
He looked down from his scaffolding, away over the sunny gardens, where the discolored turf was rapidly changing to green velvet, and the young leaves, still folded in their opening buds, were only waiting for one drop of rain to burst forth full length.
By this time, the populace were not only masters of the area around, but had also gained the scaffold itself, from which many of them seemed endeavoring to harangue the mob; others contenting themselves with imitating the gestures of the commissary and his functionaries.
Scheduled as historic monuments, they receive annually a dole from the Government towards maintenance and restoration, but so miserable is this contribution, and so inadequate to the possibility of early completion of the work, that a generation may pass away before the scaffolding is finally removed.
Tupac Amaru was sentenced to lose his head; previous to the execution, the priests baptized him in the prison, from whence he was led on a mule to the scaffold, with his hands tied, and a halter about his neck, amid the tears of his people.
They were both consigned to the dungeon that he had quitted, and the scaffold, although it remained fixed for some days, it mourned for the loss of its victim, and the gaping multitude daily stared in vain for the consummation of the bloody sacrifice.
Climbing is a great delight to them, and one was seen to ascend a scaffolding, for his own pleasure; he at first proceeded cautiously, examining the strength of all the joists, and at last reached the summit, which was one hundred and twenty feet high.
When a subject which he proposed to treat had been well considered, he would cover thirty or forty sheets with a scaffolding of ideas and phrases, which he then sent off to the printer, who returned them in columns wired and centered on large placards.
While he was yet afar off he could see between the roofs the cathedral-like scaffolding clustering around the shape of a ship in the building; the rapid-fire of the hammers and riveting guns at work upon her, plates was loud above the noises of the street.
Sometimes the plays would be presented on a number of tiny stages or scaffolds grouped in a rectangle or a circle; more often they were acted on floats, called pageants, which were dragged through the streets and stopped for performances at several of the larger squares.
To argue that the Ghent treaty, loyally interpreted, strengthened ecclesiastical or royal despotism, was to contend that a maniac was more dangerous in fetters than when armed with a sword; it was to be blind to the difference between a private conventicle and a public scaffold.
Martyrs have gone to the stake; but amid the pomp and sounding psaltery of a choir, and above the flame, the fagot and the scaffold, they descried the immortal crown, and even the worldly and sensuous desire of canonization may not have been dead with them.
There was a voice even in the solemn stillness; and the blood, which yet reeked upon the scaffold beneath the very windows of the apartment where he sat, seemed crying up, through the silence of the universe, to the Judge enthroned above those eternal stars.
This building out from each side of the pier, without the necessity of relying upon any temporary scaffolding from below, is one great advantage of the cantilever system, as it is both easier and safer than a system which relies upon the temporary scaffolding raised from below.
When this composition was dry the whole was formed into a mass so that the wooden scaffolding could be removed and the vaulting, by virtue of the lightness of its material and the stability of its consolidation, exercised only an insignificant pressure on the walls.
It was a matter that required instant investigation, and it was not a little startling to find a party of stonemasons perched like birds upon a scaffolding exactly opposite our windows, manipulating monster blocks of the creamy stone out of which they build everything in these parts.
A light scaffolding was built behind a gaudy lace "drop" and to the steps of this scaffolding, from the wings on either side of the stage, the birds and butterflies flew in their brilliant costumes to group themselves back of the gauze of the painted drop.
He then requested that four persons might be appointed to receive the head when it was severed from the body, in a red cloth; that it might not, as he had heard was the case at other executions, "roll about the scaffold and be mangled and disfigured."
As sportive and adventurous schoolboys sometimes ascend a scaffolding in the absence of the builders, and continue to scale from tier to tier, until they pause for breath; so, I fear, that you this night, in her protector's absence, have soared in the affections of my ward.
In the building up of their nation, and giving it a status among the military and industrial Powers, the Japanese freely and extensively employed foreigners in all capacities, dispensing with their services when done with as naturally as a builder dispenses with his temporary scaffolding.
Shields Green behaved with equal heroism, ascending the scaffold with a firm and unwavering step, and died, as he had lived, a brave man, and expressing to the last his eternal hatred to human bondage, prophesying that slavery would soon come to a bloody end.
The telescopic doors clashed upon us, and we stood for a second or two silently expectant, feeling like a batch of condemned criminals on a gigantic scaffold waiting for the hangman to draw back the fatal lever that would launch them into the other world.
As soon as we reached the lodge, the bear's head was adorned with all the trinkets in the possession of the family, such as silver armbands and wristbands, and belts of wampum; and then laid upon a scaffold, set up for its reception, within the lodge.
He approached her and besought her in the gentlest accents not to persist in an accusation which might send him to the scaffold, not thus to avenge any sins he might have committed against her, although he could not reproach himself with any really serious fault.
He also dictated a letter to his youngest brother, faithfully warning him against following his own ways of wildness and drinking, also a note containing good advice to two young men who had been officers in the prison, and finally an address to be read on the scaffold.
While the headless corpse shot streams from the arteries, which were drunk up by the sawdust that strewed the scaffold, the executioner gracefully presented himself alternately at the four corners of the stage, modestly bowing, as the multitude greeted him with cheers of approbation.
Formerly the Muse of the historical romance was an independent and arbitrary personage, who could compress time, resuscitate the dead, give mighty deeds to imaginary heroes, exchange substitutes for popular martyrs on the scaffold, and make the most stubborn facts subservient to her purpose.
And therewith he dealt such a terrible blow at the cask that the strongest hoop sprang, rattling, and knocked Reinhold down from the narrow plank on the scaffolding; and it was further evident from the hollow echo that a stave had been broken as well.
The pleasing murmur of its waters became to his dreaming fancy the tumult of the congregated multitude, around the foot of the scaffold, on which, with that extraordinary certitude which sometimes accompanies the visions of disordered slumber, he thought he was about to suffer an ignominious death.
Her husband, a man of violent and ungovernable temper, was heard to utter certain obnoxious political opinions; and it being discovered that he was connected with a dangerous conspiracy against the existing government, a speedy flight alone saved him from the scaffold or perpetual imprisonment.
Concealed in the deep shadow I leaned over the parapet, and watching saw them make fast the boat to the scaffold platform on a level with the water, and then one man, clinging to the ladder, clambered up into the center of the arch beneath the roadway.
He plunged into extravagance, had recourse to gambling, became a bankrupt in his fortunes, perpetrated forgery, administered poison, and at last expiated his crimes upon the scaffold, the precincts of the prison receiving his strangled body, and hell, it is to be feared, receiving his lost soul.
A pellet of shot swinging at the end of a thread, a drop of dew trickling down a straw, a splash of water rippling under the kisses of the air, a mere trifle, after all, requires a titanic scaffolding when we wish to examine it with the eye of calculation.
The boys who were looking on grew listless: three of them, Gordon, Smith, and Hart minor, wandered off from the pavilion further up the slope of the hill, where there was a kind of wooden scaffolding raised for letting off fireworks on the 5th of November.
On occasions of this kind, the activity of the Government was most remarkable, and while the great question of national security was overlooked, no pains were spared to track out the narrow path where some insignificant treason was plodding, and bring the plotter to the scaffold.
As he did not ask for a confessor, the pile was lighted, and when the cords which held him were burnt, he darted to the top of the scaffold, from whence he could see that several of the condemned confessed, that they might avoid the flames.
The history of every boy or girl of ordinary make is one of robbery, murder, imprisonment, death sentence, filing of chains, scaling of prison walls, recapture, scaffold, reprieve, poison, and pistols; the difference between such a history and that in the authorized versions being merely circumstantial.
There many of them lie for years, without being brought to trial; and if they thus escape the scaffold, they perish more slowly, but not less surely, and much more miserably, by the pestilential air, the unwholesome food, and the horrible treatment of the jail.
The stems of bamboo not being sufficiently large and heavy to maintain the superstructure in the soft mud, a scaffold is constructed just under the top, which is loaded with blocks of large stone, and the outer piles are secured to anchors or rocks, with grass rope.
Every two minutes one of the fraternity left the ranks and ascended the ladder; but the chorus continued, uninterrupted either by the wild acclaim that greeted the appearance of each victim on the scaffold, or by the thundering shout that told of the severed head.
When all preparations were complete, the eastern gate of the city was thrown open, and huge crowds surged towards the fatal field, or pressed against the soldiers who guarded the route along which the condemned men were to journey from the citadel to the scaffold.
In the library of the college I afterwards saw the pastoral crook of the martyred Primate; the little staff which supported his tottering steps on the scaffold, and the cap which covered his venerable head only a few minutes before it fell from the block.
When conducted to the place of execution, and on coming near to the scaffold, he made a sudden halt, and momentarily shrunk at the sight; because he had, to the last, entertained hopes that his life would have been taken by the musket, and not by the halter.
It seems safe to look forward to the time when the conception of attractive and repulsive forces, having served its purpose as a useful piece of scientific scaffolding, will be replaced by the deduction of the phenomena known as attraction and repulsion, from the general laws of motion.
For many an Englishman was moved to the belief that surely there must be something wrong with a system which provoked such a movement, something not wholly bad about a cause for which men went with calm, proud confidence to the felon's cell or the scaffold.
The designer should not feel at all restricted or cramped by his geometric plan, but treat it as an aid and a scaffolding, working in as much variety and richness of detail as he likes, bound only by the necessity of repeating or counterbalancing his forms and lines.
The roof of the tunnel was of a peculiar rock which was liable at all times to disintegrate and tumble down; to remedy this, huge beams, supported by strong uprights, had been stretched horizontally across the tunnel, and a sort of scaffolding have been built upon these beams.
His dark swarthy countenance was not a shade paler than usual, and, with his hat and plume upon his head, he walked boldly forward with an erect and daring carriage; but as his eye first fell upon the scaffold, he paused a single instant, exclaiming, "Ha!"
All that was needed was that the inquisitors should ask leading questions and suggest satisfactory answers: the prisoners, to shorten the torture, were sure sooner or later to give the answer required, even though they knew that this would send them to the stake or scaffold.
Nothing can be quieter than the city, which has always been so notorious for bloodshed and turbulence: the shadow of the scaffold is over it, and not one among the ruffians who throng its narrow streets, and hide in its filthy purlieus, but feels its influence.
Step by step, like a soldier brought to bay with his back against a wall, she defends herself, refuting and defying advocates and judges, incapable of blenching or quailing, clear in mind, ready in word, amid insults and proofs, even menaced with death on the scaffold.
Its trunk was full six feet in diameter; on one side it was marked by a party of Indians with various inexplicable hieroglyphics, commemorating some warlike enterprise, and aloft among the branches were the remains of a scaffolding, where dead bodies had once been deposited, after the Indian manner.
Once he had seen a man walk to his death on the scaffold, and as the condemned had spoken his last farewell, with the noose about his neck, he had marveled at the clearness of his voice, at the fearlessness of this creature in his last moment on earth.
It was a gigantic circular scaffold, perhaps fifteen hundred feet in circumference, capable of containing four or five thousand persons, erected and held together without the use of a single nail, being made of rude poles, just as they were cut in the woods, and tied together with withes.
In the other banks the hall porters wore mulberry coats, brick-dust coats, brown coats, and what not, but here, behind the ladders and scaffold poles which obscured the entrance, he could see a man in a blue coat, with dull red piping and brass buttons.
Logic, like mathematics, is purely a formal process, and must, as the scaffolding to the building, be employed to arrange facts in the structure of a science, and not to form any portion of its groundwork, or to supply the materials of which the system is to be composed.
If Sidney and Russell died upon the scaffold, they had not the cruel mortification of falling by the hands of the people; ample justice was done to their memory, and the very sound of their names is still animating to every Englishman attached to their glorious cause.
Once a practiced locksmith contrived to remove the fastenings of his cell during the night, to get through the bars beyond and lower himself into the yard, where he found a scaffold pole, and raising it against the first wall climbed up by it to the top.
It would seem as if all the enmity of all the reformers, from Elizabeth to Cromwell, had in him found an exponent, and in directing his deadly malice against them, he was over-successful: he accomplished their ruin, but virtually consigned his patron and sovereign to the scaffold.
It may therefore serve some useful purpose if a few poles of scaffolding representing the dates and outline of conflicts and agreements between nations can be supplied in a very brief and easily intelligible form, a presentment of the bare record of facts which may be useful for reference.
The skull of a malefactor who had died on the scaffold or wheel, and which had been exposed in the open air long enough to make it perfectly dry and white, was considered a specific in epilepsy, being much superior for that purpose to the skulls obtained from graveyards.