Definition of "timorous"

Wee sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie,Oh, what a panic's in thy breastie!

1785, Robert Burns, To a Mouse

[H]e was one of those weak creatures full of a shifty cunning - who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves, void of pride, timorous, anæmic, hateful souls.

1898, H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, page 219

He turned a long you are wrong gaze on Stephen of timorous dark pride at the soft impeachment with a glance also of entreaty for he seemed to glean in a kind of a way that it wasn't all exactly.

1922 February, James Joyce, “Episode 16”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […]

The suspect was a man of forty, with a grey, timorous face, dressed only in a ragged longyi kilted to the knee, beneath which his lank, curved shins were specked with tick-bites.

1934, George Orwell, Burmese Days