tim'rous

• “In one will sit a rosy cheek'd maiden with a fetching bonnet in a suitably rural setting; in others: a red, red rose; a horse with no tail and a tim'rous beastie that, on closer inspection, will bear a resemblance to a mouse.”

  The Guardian: Poor Robert Burns. He deserves better than this | Kevin McKenna

• “There are mice like Robert Burns described, a "wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie.”

  Forbes: Father Of '$100 Laptop' Thwacks Critics

• “As for the press and television, so tigerish when Bill Clinton presided, except for a few audacious malcontents (notable among them the artful female columnists Molly Ivins, Mary McGrory, and Maureen Dowd) they mostly turned into tim'rous beasties.”

  The Awful Truth

• “A rare sweet maid her be," they said of her in the village, "but terribul tim'rous, and I lay her ladyship du give she a rare time of it ....”

  The Imaginary Marriage

• “He had felt at the time that "Wee sleekit, cowrin ', tim'rous beastie" was but a poor rejoinder.”

  "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" Studies of Animal life and Character

• “There is the field mouse -- the "wee sleekit, * cow'rin ', tim'rous beastie," whose nest he turned up and destroyed in his November plowing.”

  English Literature for Boys and Girls

• “He disturbs a mouse's nest and finds in the "tim'rous beastie" a fellow-mortal doomed like himself to "thole the winter's sleety dribble," and draws his oft-repeated moral.”

  Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 "Bulgaria" to "Calgary"

• “The mouse of Scotland has been fortunate in her painters; another, and a still better portrait was to be made of the "wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie," by the great poet of the nation, Robert Burns.”

  A Literary History of the English People From the Origins to the Renaissance

• “Any more than they did when Sir JOHN SUCKLING apostrophised the "wee, sleekit, cow'rin ', tim'rous beastie.”

  Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 22, 1920

• “Nor tim'rous, sniff'd the spicy, cone-breath'd air;”

  Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's Katie, and other poems

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