For so it is, oaths as they commonly pass are mere excrescences of speech, which do nothing but encumber and deform it; they so embellish discourse, as a wen or a scab do beautify a face, as a patch or a spot do adorn a garment.

In many towns whose antiquity and picturesqueness are more popular than the attractions of Whitby, the railway deposits one in some distressingly ugly modern excrescence, from which it may even be necessary for a stranger to ask his way to the old-world features he has come to see.

Immediately afterwards he had seen the curious, bird-like excrescence upon a tree nearby.

After all, before this higher beauty, royal pomp even seems only a coarse excrescence, and all would be better if the accessories of the rendering were very simple.

The exuberant excrescence of his diction I have often lopped, his triumphant exultations over Pope and Howe I have sometimes suppressed, and his contemptible ostentation I have frequently concealed; but I have in some places shown him, as he would have shown himself, for the reader's diversion, that the inflated emptiness of some notes may justify or excuse the contraction of the rest.

SANDFORD You well-fed and unprofitable grooms, Maintained for state, not use; You lazy feasters at another's cost, That eat like maggots into an estate, And do as little work, Being indeed but foul excrescences,

Such extraordinary appreciation in an age that regarded mountains as frightful excrescences upon the face of nature, makes the connoisseur of the passions a pioneer of the coming age rather than a survival of the last.

In the centre of the wood (for such it seemed) rises the choir, a gaudy and tasteless excrescence added by the Christians.

By tapping also the knotty excrescences of trees they find the fluid, which they suck out.

I worshipped her immediately we met, the popeyed little excrescence.

It looked just like a lumpy excrescence on the landscape; at hame we would not even think of it as a foothill.

A dead failure, as we well remember them,miserable modern excrescences, which shame the noble edifice.

Beyond the limits of the Leman, the Alps shot up into still higher pinnacles, occasionally showing one of those naked excrescences of granite, which rise for a thousand feet above the rest of the rangea trifle in the stupendous scale of the vast pilesand which, in the language of the country are not inaptly termed Dents, from some fancied and plausible resemblance to human teeth.

Mr. Cox was the first to speak, and his remark, shorn of needless excrescences, was to the effect that Fotheringay was a fool.

Their faculty of changing color permitted them to take on that of their hard base and, disguised in this way like three rocky excrescences, they were treacherously awaiting the passing of their victim, just as though they were in the open sea.

On the morning of the 29th we anchored in Holdfast Road, in 4 1/2 fathoms, Mount Lofty,* a slight excrescence on the highest part of the range of hills eastwards, bearing North 80 degrees East; a flagstaff at a straggling village under it pointed out the township of Glenelg.

So quiet and motionless did she seem, that one, who had never been instructed in the matter, might readily have believed her a fixture in the sea, some symmetrical and enormous excrescence thrown up by the waves, with its mazes of lines and pointed fingers, or one of those fantastic monsters that are believed to exist in the bottom of the ocean, darkened by the fogs and tempests of ages.

There passed over its surface stripes of color, reddish clouds changing from crimson to green, circular spots that became inflated in the swelling, forming tremulous excrescences.

Procter has got a wen growing out at the nape of his neck, which his wife wants him to have cut off; but I think it rather an agreeable excrescence,like his poetry, redundant.

Mr. T. has a lean and scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname of chick-pea (Cicero) is said by some to be derived.

All the sap and nutriment of the state seemed to have been drawn to feed one bloated and unwholesome excrescence.

I soon found out, however, that the presence of one of the ugly creatures was the cause of the horse's trepidation, for, within six feet of us, I discerned a pair of eyes, set in huge brown excrescences, fixed intently on me and my horse, with malicious gaze.