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The grievances and protests of the workers aroused no response save the ever-active one of contumely, coercion and violent reprisals. The treasury of Nation, States and cities, raised by a compulsory taxation falling heavily upon the workers, was at all times at the complete disposal of the propertied interests, who emptied it as fast as it was filled.

All freaks must not be indulged; admonition is salutary, and that the pupil should be awakened by his instructor to sober reflection and to masculine exertion. Every Telemachus should have his Mentor. But through the whole it is necessary that the spirit of the pupil should not be broken, and that he should not be treated with contumely.

The chorus, which consists of native virgins, endeavours to console her; and, interchanging hymn and speech with the chorus, Electra discloses her unabatable sorrow, the contumely and oppression under which she suffers, and her hopelessness occasioned by the many delays of Orestes, notwithstanding her frequent exhortations; and she turns a deaf ear to all the grounds of consolation which the chorus can suggest.

Jesse, whom they had entertained some vague hope of chasing away by angry looks and scornful words, had been so much accustomed all his life long to taunts and contumely, that it was a great while before he became conscious of their unkindness; and when at last it forced itself upon his attention, he shrank away crouching and cowering, and buried himself in the closest recesses of the coppice, until the footstep of the reviler had passed by.

The gaudy dirt, the squalid plenty, the contumely of familiarity, the absence of all good words and all good things, the banishment from honest labour, the being compassed round with lies, the flaunting glare of fictitious revelry, the weary pavement, the horrid slavery to some horrid tyrant, and then the quick depreciation of that one ware of beauty, the substituted paint, garments bright without but foul within like painted sepulchres, hunger, thirst, and strong drink, life without a hope, without the certainty even of a morrow's breakfast, utterly friendless, disease, starvation, and a quivering fear of that coming hell which still can hardly be worse than all that is suffered here!

It is not in man to bear always aggression, nor can it be required of him ever to endure contumely." "What has befallen Bell?" said his mother to him; but instead of making her any answer, he uttered a dreadful sound, like the howl of madness, and hastily quitted the house.

She gives a description of one of these gatherings at Easton: That Sunday meeting was the most impressive I ever attended. Aaron and I had spoken, Charles Remond followed, picturing the contumely and opprobrium everywhere heaped upon the black man and all identified with him, the ostracism from social circles, etc.

"Well," said Lord Palmerston in reply, with the sarcasm of a schoolboy's debating society, "there are many people in this country who think that the party to which he belongs should go immediately into a hospital of a different kind, and which I shall not mention." This refined irony was a very gentle specimen of the insult and contumely which was poured upon Cobden and Mr. Bright at this time....

"Laura!" exclaimed he, "what can this signify?" Laura wept on for a time in silence; then, when she had recovered herself sufficiently to speak, she replied: "It signifies that I bow down before the magnanimity of him who, to shield me from the world's contumely, would relinquish that which he holds most dear on earth, his hopes of glory." "Laura, give me an answer to my prayer.

As traveller and storyteller, the beggar was admitted in the halls of chieftains, and often treated like a guest; though sometimes, also, no doubt, with contumely. Ulysses charged his son not to betray, by any display of unusual interest in him, that he knew him to be other than he seemed, and even if he saw him insulted, or beaten, not to interpose otherwise than he might do for any stranger.