But I defy the basest tongue To prove I did my neighbour wrong; Or ever went to seek my food, By rapine, theft, or thirst of blood.' The Ass approaching next, confessed That in his heart he loved a jest: A wag he was, he needs must own, And could not let a dunce alone: Sometimes his friend he would not spare, And might perhaps be too severe:

So oft the northern wind with frozen wings Hath beat the flowers that in our garden grew, Thrown down the stalks of our aspiring youth; So oft hath winter nipp'd our trees' fair rind, That now we seem nought but two bared boughs, Scorn'd by the basest bird that chirps in grove.

And must the basest trade yield us relief?

He professes arms not for use, but ornament only, and yet makes the basest things in the world, as dogs' turds and women's spindles, weapons of good and worshipful bearings.

They knew all things, but might not reveal them to men; and ruled and domineered over us, as we do over our horses; the best kings amongst us, and the most generous spirits, were not comparable to the basest of them.

thus they reason, and are not ashamed to let mariners, apprentices, and the basest servants, be better qualified than themselves.

In life the basest of men he died most nobly.

These emigrants repaid his favours with the basest ingratitude; after being guilty of the grossest and most infamous concussions on the inhabitants of those parts of Germany where their jurisdiction extended, they had the hypocrisy after the restoration to declaim against the oppression of the Usurper's government and its system: but Napoleon richly deserved to meet with this ingratitude for employing such unprincipled fellows.

The exact meaning of these curious names is no longer intelligible to us, notwithstanding the terror which they formerly created, but their very strangeness gives us reason to suppose that the prison system was at that time subjected to the most odious refinement of the basest cruelty.

only let me know that it is a dreama hideous dream which the devil put into my wicked, wicked heartand let me know that I am the basest, meanest of daughters for harbouring such a thought a moment!

"He is guilty," the old man said, "of the basest treachery towards the best and kindest master in Russia, and he deserves to die.

She, who designates the rival party as false, and wicked, and vaintracing all their actions to the basest motives, declaring their worship of God to be only one general hypocrisy, their conduct at home one fearful scene of crime, is blind to the faults on her own side.

He was driven by a sort of implicit impulse, for the sake of avoiding one ungenerous action, to take refuge in another, the basest and most diabolical.

He is the best friend you have in the world, though you are the basest traitor to him.

who had forced the basest and most atrocious falsehoods, and urged them with a seriousness and perseverance which produced universal belief?

BALIVERSO, the basest knight in the Saracen army.

The famed original through Spain is known, Rodriguez' work, my celebrated son, Which yours, by ill-translating, made his own; Conceal'd its author, and usurp'd the name, The basest and ignoblest theft of fame.

Thus had he fallen, in his utter simplicity, into the attitude of a go-between protecting the advances of a young lover with the shadow of his monk's gown, and he became awkwardly conscious, that, if Elsie should find out the whole truth, there would be no possibility of convincing her that what had been done in such sacred simplicity on all sides was not the basest manoeuvring.

" He recalled old tales that were told in Nauvoo by wicked apostates and the basest of Gentile scandalmongers; how that Joseph in the day of his great power had suffered the purity of his first faith to become tainted; how his wife, Emma, had upbraided him so harshly for his sins that he, fearing disgrace, had put out this revelation as the word of God to silence her.

He himself disliked servants about, hated to abet a fellow-being in looking on himself or herself as an inferior; and he regarded as one of the basest, as well as subtlest poisons of snobbishness, the habit of telling others to do for one the menial, personal things which can be done with dignity only by oneself.

Can a classwhatever its pretense to culture may becan a class, that, in story and picture and music and play, counts greatest in art those who most effectively arouse the basest passions of which the human being is capable, be rightly judged sane?

"Many men have forgiven their wives even great crimes, and have taken them back after the basest desertion.

"O reason not the need: our basest beggars "Are in the poorest thing superfluous: "Allow not nature more than nature needs, "Man's life is cheap as beast's.

SIR, It is in vain to deny it, basest, falsest of Mankind; my Maid, as well as the Bearer, saw you.

Danny repeated this disgraceful trick of basest ingratitude at several other houses.

In the list of singers and musicians in the employ of Clemens Augustus, as printed in the Electoral Calendar for the years 1759-60, appears the name, "Ludwig van Beethoven, Bassist."