taskmaster

And man, subservient to interests he has persuaded himself are greater than his own, makes himself a slave to his taskmaster. He sits him in a seat of honour.

Life, for most of us, is not so much a hard as an exacting taskmaster.

But now and then he gave us a sermon of a different order--what some would call a very good one; but sunless and severe: representing the Deity as a terrible taskmaster rather than a benevolent father.

She was a hard taskmaster, too, for she looked down with loathing and contempt upon the misshapen creatures amongst which cruel Fate had thrown her and to some extent vented upon them her dissatisfaction and her thwarted love.

A sentiment of keen pleasure accompanied this first effort to earn my own living--a sentiment neither poisoned nor weakened by the presence of the taskmaster, who stood and watched me for some time as I wrote.

A better proof of the severity of my bondage to that taskmaster could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him employment.

Nor are you the first to learn what a taskmaster is yours.

It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was one in a semi-clerical costume, who now represented what had once been the free-and-easy Alec d'Urberville.

He had entitled the story "Adventure," and it was the apotheosis of adventure - not of the adventure of the storybooks, but of real adventure, the savage taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of reward, faithless and whimsical, demanding terrible patience and heartbreaking days and nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight glory or dark death at the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag and monstrous delirium of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and stinging insects leading up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts to royal culminations and lordly achievements.

Tell me what it is; and I will be your taskmaster, instead of being a hindrance.'

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others!

So, even while he was their griping taskmaster and never gave them a good word, he had written their names down in his will.