It is one of the bitterest apportionments of a lot of slavery, that the negro, sympathetic and assimilative, after acquiring, in a refined family, the tastes and feelings which form the atmosphere of such a place, is not the less liable to become the bond-slave of the coarsest and most brutal,--just as a chair or table, which once decorated the superb saloon, comes, at last, battered and
defaced, to the barroom of some filthy tavern, or some low haunt of vulgar debauchery.
This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at them and distributed three
defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had been unskilfully cut off the chump-end of something), more illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of literature I have since met with, speckled all over with ironmould, and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between their leaves.
They were canopied, alter-shaped, and plain; their carvings being
defaced and broken; their brasses torn from the matrices, the rivet-holes remaining like martin-holes in a sandcliff.
The faces, shriveled and
defaced, bore no likeness to the faces of men.
At length they came back into the town; and, turning into an old public-house with a
defaced sign-board, ordered some dinner by the kitchen fire.
This was the trunk of a large wooden doll, which once stared with the roundest of eyes above the reddest of cheeks; but was now entirely
defaced by a long career of vicarious suffering.
He bore on a white shield a black bull's head, half
defaced by the numerous encounters which he had undergone, and bearing the arrogant motto, Cave, Adsum.
The invaders, on their march back to the sea, consoled themselves for their repulse by setting fire to every house and temple in their route; and a long line of smoking ruins
defaced the once-smiling bosom of the valley, and proclaimed to its pagan inhabitants the spirit that reigned in the breasts of Christian soldiers.
That gravel page upon which I might have read so much has been long ere this smudged by the rain and
defaced by the clogs of curious peasants.
Day after day and night after night we have wandered among the crumbling wonders of Rome; day after day and night after night we have fed upon the dust and decay of five-and-twenty centuries--have brooded over them by day and dreampt of them by night till sometimes we seemed moldering away ourselves, and growing
defaced and cornerless, and liable at any moment to fall a prey to some antiquary and be patched in the legs, and "restored" with an unseemly nose, and labeled wrong and dated wrong, and set up in the Vatican for poets to drivel about and vandals to scribble their names on forever and forevermore.
A PIECE of graffiti commemorating a Welsh valley drowned to make a reservoir has been
defaced with swastikas.
The warped vandals
defaced the monument in Motherwell's Duchess of Hamilton Park by scrawling "cowards", "scum" and "rats" over it.