pickthank

• “I If I had not held you as so old an acquaintance, this should have gone to my Lady’s ears though I had been called pickthank and tale-pyet for my pains, as when I told of Roland Graeme shooting the wild swan.””

  The Abbot

• “A new-married man, when a pickthank friend of his, to curry favour, had showed him his wife familiar in private with a young gallant, courting and dallying,”

  Anatomy of Melancholy

• “It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain heroism away.”

  Virginibus Puerisque and other papers

• “The amateur cannot usually rise into the artist, some leaven of the world still clogging him; and we find Pepys behaving like a pickthank to the man who taught him composition.”

  Samuel Pepys

• “Miss Vernon, as she gave a glance after him; it is hard that persons of birth and rank and estate should be subjected to the official impertinence of such a paltry pickthank as that, merely for believing as the whole world believed not much above a hundred years ago --- for certainly our Catholic Faith has the advantage of antiquity at least. '”

  Rob Roy

• “Le Mercier was a pickthank, angling after the favor of La Pompadour, -- a pretentious knave, as hollow as one of his own mortars.”

  The Golden Dog

• “There he goes for a troublesome mischief-making tool," said Miss Vernon, as she gave a glance after him; it is hard that persons of birth and rank and estate should be subjected to the official impertinence of such a paltry pickthank as that, merely for believing as the whole world believed not much above a hundred years ago -- for certainly our Catholic”

  Rob Roy — Volume 01

• “I do not see what they can do better, and unless some pickthank intervene to insinuate certain irritating suspicions, I suppose Lord M. will make no objection.”

  The Journal of Sir Walter Scott From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford

• “Flatterers and toadies: scrapeshoe, clawback, and scratch-book, suckfist, pickthank (s), lickspittle (also-spit) and, possibly, flattercap, though perhaps only when he is gushing over millinery.”

  Verbatim: VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly Vol V No 1

• “[52] and be deaf unto the suggestions of tale-bearers, calumniators, pickthank or malevolent delators, who, while quiet men sleep, sowing the tares of discord and division, distract the tranquillity of charity and all friendly society.”

  Christian Morals

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