master-wheel

You will consider yourself as the task-mistress, and the common herd of female servants as so many negroes directing themselves by your nod; or yourself as the master-wheel, in some beautiful pieces of mechanism, whose dignified grave motions is to set a-going all the under-wheels, with a velocity suitable to their respective parts.

Pamela 2006

When they were in the very deepest place of all the ford, a little above the master-wheel of the water-mill, he asked if he had any coin about him.

Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002

When they were in the very deepest place of all the ford, a little above the master-wheel of the water-mill, he asked if he had any coin about him.

Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel 2002

Rome would not be Rome; even a product of Rome would not be legitimate; even an offshoot from Rome would be of suspicious derivation, which _could_ find that great master-wheel of the state machinery a secondary force in its system.

The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2 Thomas De Quincey 1822

When they were in the very deepest place of all the ford, a little above the master-wheel of the water-mill, he asked if he had any coin about him.

Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 3 Fran��ois Rabelais 1518

[whatever you think of your Anna Howe, I would not have her be the master-wheel,] and every body would love her; as every body did you, before your insolent brother came back, flushed with his unmerited acquirements, and turned all things topsy-turvy.

Clarissa Harlowe; or the history of a young lady — Volume 3 Samuel Richardson 1725

She also promised herself the reward of witnessing Mr. Willoughby’s delighted approbation on such a display of his wife’s imaginative talents, for as Mrs. Nesbitt herself had been the master-wheel of the whole machine, she had not a doubt but that its movements would secure the most animated applause.

Isabella. A Novel 1823