From the Fijian and Andaman islander who exhibits abject terror at seeing himself in a glass or in water, to the English or European peasant who covers up the mirrors or turns them to the wall, upon a death occurring, lest an inmate of the house should see his own face and have his own speedy demise thus prognosticated, the idea holds its ground.
Wessel, who up to that time had only been known as the president of a club of wits, immediately wrote Love without Stockings (1772), in which a plot of the most abject triviality is worked out in strict accordance with the rules of French tragedy, and in most pompous and pathetic Alexandrines.
He scarcely ever saw any of his colleagues though they repeatedly and urgently pressed for interviews with him, and even an offer from the king to visit him in person was declined, though in the language of profound and almost abject respect which always marked his communications with the court.
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The next three years he spent in the neighbourhood of Assisi in abject poverty and want, ministering to the lepers and the outcasts of society.
Many other pogroms have occurred, and the condition of the Jews has been reduced to one of abject poverty and despair.
Alexius, in order to escape such an ordeal, resorted to the abject expedient of disabling his right hand by a pistol-shot.
The situation created abject terror.
How pertinent it is to see the biggest stars reach such truly abject lows.
Doubtless the king's sore financial needs had much to do with the dissolution of the abbeys and the plundering of the shrines, but there is no reason to suppose that he was not fully convinced that the monks had long outlived their usefulness and that the shrines were centres of abject superstition and ecclesiastical deceit.
Nominally subjects of the khedive, they acted as free agents, reducing the country over which they terrorized to a state of abject misery.