United States or Georgia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If the sword is usually an overmatch for the long robe in political struggles, the cassock has often proved superior to both combined. But in the case now occupying our attention the cassock was in alliance with the sword. Clearly the contest was becoming a desperate one for the statesman.
"Had we formed a permanent army in the beginning, which, by the continuance of the same men in service, had been capable of discipline, we never should have to retreat with a handful of men across the Delaware in 1776, trembling for the fate of America, which nothing but the infatuation of the enemy could have saved; we should not have remained all the succeeding winter at their mercy, with sometimes scarcely a sufficient body of men to mount the ordinary guards, liable at every moment to be dissipated, if they had only thought proper to march against us; we should not have been under the necessity of fighting at Brandywine with an unequal number of raw troops, and afterwards of seeing Philadelphia fall a prey to a victorious army; we should not have been at Valley Forge with less than half the force of the enemy, destitute of every thing in a situation neither to resist nor to retire; we should not have seen New York left with a handful of men, yet an overmatch for the main army of these states, while the principal part of their force was detached for the reduction of two of them; we should not have found ourselves this spring so weak as to be insulted by five thousand men, unable to protect our baggage and magazines, their security depending on a good countenance, and a want of enterprise in the enemy; we should not have been, the greatest part of the war, inferior to the enemy, indebted for our safety to their inactivity, enduring frequently the mortification of seeing inviting opportunities to ruin them, pass unimproved for want of a force which the country was completely able to afford; to see the country ravaged, our towns burnt, the inhabitants plundered, abused, murdered, with impunity from the same cause."
I was obliged to make him according to the general standard of wit and acuteness, shrewd humour and sarcasm, of that class of unread natural geniuses, an overmatch for Sir Ulick, who is of a more cultivated class of acute and roguish Irish gentlemen.
Tibe'rius, having now no object of jealousy to keep him in awe, began to pull off the mask, and appear more in his natural character than before. 27. In the beginning of his cruelties, he took into his confidence Seja'nus, a Roman knight, who found out the method of gaining his affection by the most refined degree of dissimulation, and was an overmatch for his master in his own arts.
But, with all their exertions, they would have effected little against a power which was an overmatch for any single adversary, however powerful. At this period of imperfect policy, accidental circumstances alone could determine distant states to afford one another a mutual support.
The savage, perceiving their defenceless situation, without offering violence to the family, attempted to capture the negro, who happily proved an overmatch for him, threw him on the ground, and, in the struggle, the mother of the children drew an axe from a corner of the cottage, and cut his head off, while her little daughter shut the door.
Writing again a few days later to Jefferson, he says that "the fiscal party in Alexandria was an overmatch for those who wished to testify the American sentiment."
He proceeded to ask me whether I had turned upon him, in this debate, from the consciousness that I should find an overmatch, if I ventured on a contest with his friend from Missouri.
But if a good monkey be allowed to run about the ship, I defy any one to continue long in a bad humour. Jacko is an overmatch for the demon of idleness, at least if light hearts and innocent diversions be weapons against which he cannot long contend.
While we were drinking he talked of the trouble in the temple, and admitted that it baffled him completely. Strickland hates being mystified by natives, because his business in life is to overmatch them with their own weapons. He has not yet succeeded in doing this, but in fifteen or twenty years he will have made some small progress.
Word Of The Day