What is "beset"

Usage examples of "beset".

A certain positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the legends--a terror, of course, abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated force.

I had gone forth to visit Dame Clatworthy, who hath the tertian ague, and they did beset me on my return.

Its leadership was inexperienced, and its ideology was too vague to have any immediate relevance to the deep-seated problems besetting Iraq in the early 1960s.

The first salutary measure necessary to combat the evils besetting the city was to wipe out at once the inmates of all the prisons in Nantes.

Duchess Susan, of whom it might be said that her character was good, yet all the more alive to the temptations besetting the Spring season.

Chloe had left him, and he related how, summoned home to England and compelled to settle a dispute threatening a lawsuit, he had regretfully to abstain from visiting the Wells for a season, not because of any fear of the attractions of play-- he had subdued the frailty of the desire to play--but because he deemed it due to his Chloe to bring her an untroubled face, and he wished first to be the better of the serious annoyances besetting him.

But having started himself precipitately, he took rank among independent incomes, as they are called, only to take fright at the perils of starvation besetting one who has been tempted to abandon the source of fifty per cent.

The unspeakable folly of the English bishops in denouncing and silencing the most effective preachers in the national church had betrayed Whitefield into his most easily besetting sin, that of censorious judgment, and his sweeping counter-denunciations of the Episcopalian clergy in general as unconverted closed to him many hearts and pulpits that at first had been hospitably open to him.

Canowe, whilst himselfe by fowling sought them victuall, who finding he was beset with 200 Salvages, two of them hee slew, still defending himself with the ayd of a Salvage his guide, whom he bound to his arme with his garters, and used him as a buckler, yet he was shot in his thigh a little, and had many arrowes stucke in his cloathes but no great hurt, till at last they tooke him prisoner.

Ah, Rouletabille cursed his curiosity, for - he saw it now - it was the desire to approach the mystery revealed by Koupriane and to penetrate once more, through all the besetting dangers, an astounding and perhaps monstrous enigma, that had brought him to the threshold of the datcha des Iles, which had placed him in the trembling hands of Matrena Petrovna in promising her his help.

Have faith in the Light, for the dawn came again, even at Dier Kenton Vale and the maelstrom that beset the war fleet at Werepoint.

He beset Lady Hilden with the most earnest prayers, and protestations, and entreaties, reminding her that he loved and wooed her before the dawn of her prosperity, and appealed to her for the disinterestedness of his passion.

After our run-in with the respected Hoja Effendi and after walking from Konya to Sivas in three nights, through eight villages, begging all the way, one night we were beset by such cold and snow that we two dervishes, hugging each other tightly, fell asleep and froze to death.

He was greatly beloved by the humbler classes, who, days before his death, beset the chateau, praising and lamenting him.

On the terrace of the Dome, beset behind the clattering bastion of her own Sainte Chapelle, the young George Washington read with silently moving lips, broke wind pensively and looked around to see if she had attracted notice.