Someone who deliberately foments trouble

Usage examples of firebrand.

But I could see Adena leaping at the beast, both hands gripping firebrands, and the bear cuffing her away.

No sooner did he see the Kachin with the torch reel back and drop the firebrand, than he swung his weapon on high and darted at the two men who had halted in the tunnel.

By now it was dark and a band of veteran comrades, serving as torchbearers, lit firebrands until the vestibule was flaming with a ruddy glow.

Shun it as you would a wild hyeny with a firebrand tied to his tale, and while you air abowt it you will do a first-rate thing for yourself and everybody abowt you by shunnin all kinds of intoxicatin lickers.

Dorg Seay and Tim Stanley, bunkies, engaged in a friendly scuffle, each trying to make the other get a firebrand for his pipe.

As many of the fighting burghers were men of no substance, the latter threat did not affect them much, but the other, though it had little result at the time, may be useful for the exclusion of firebrands during the period of reconstruction.

But fear not thou to use its virtues in the time of need, for the wise man warms him by the same firebrand with which the madman burneth the tent.

I think our Scheherezade has never had a lover in human shape, or she would not play so lightly with the firebrands of the great passion.

De Bono was alarmed and deeply chagrined to discover that the officer he had judged to be an ineffectual blowhard had indeed turned out to be a firebrand.

He cried out, for it was as if Caligo had pierced him with a firebrand.

Anish Balin, a twenty-three-year-old Granger firebrand of mixed Hindu and Jewish descent, maintains a datasite and conducts a live weekly datacast, both called Sounding the Alarm.

And therewithall she unclosed her apron, and bound all my feete together, to the end I might not help my selfe, then she tooke a great barre, which accustomed to bar the stable doore, and never ceased beating me till she was so weary that the bar fell out of her hands, whereupon she (complaining of the soone faintnesse of her armes) ran to her fire and brought a firebrand and thrust it under my taile, burning me continually, till such time as (having but one remedy) I arayed her face and eies with my durty dunge, whereby (what with the stinke thereof, and what with the filthinesse that fell in her eies) she was welnigh blinded : so I enforced the queane to leave off, otherwise I had died as Meleager did by the sticke, which his mad mother Althea cast into the fire.

Such is the reasoning of the peasantry, and, in Nivernais, Bourbonnais, Berri, and Touraine, electoral gatherings are the firebrands of the insurrections.

He had a worthy minister in his favourite, Ralph, nicknamed--for almost every famous person had a nickname in those rough days--Flambard, or the Firebrand.

Exposed for two years to ignominious dangers, to every species of outrage, to innumerable persecutions, to the steel of the assassin, to the firebrands of incendiaries, to the most infamous charges, 'to the denouncement of' their corrupted domestics, to domiciliary visits" prompted by the commonest street rumor, "to arbitrary imprisonment by the Committee of Inquiry," deprived of their civil rights, driven out of primary meetings, "they are held accountable for their murmurs, and punished for a sensibility which would touch the heart in a suffering criminal.