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More "Mercenary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but had not been previously denounced. I have limited my researches to the fifteenth century, leaving to others the task of studying those pictures of the Renaissance in which the Maid appears decked out in the German fashion, with the plumed hat and slashed doubtlet of a Saxon ritter or a Swiss mercenary.[144] I cannot say who served as a prototype for these portraits, but they closely resemble the woman accompanying the mercenaries in La Danse des morts, which Nicholas Manuel painted at Berne, on the wall of the Dominican Monastery, between 1515 and 1521.[145] In le Grand ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... are past, those noble days! The days When nations would imperil all to keep Their liberties, are only memories now. The common cause is lost,—and thou art brought, The captive of some mercenary raid, Some skirmish of a gold-begotten war, To serve within my ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... felt a special animosity against lawyers, whom they considered mercenary instruments in the hands of the nobles for oppressing them. They hung all the lawyers that they could get into their hands, and after burning the Savoy they went to the Temple, which was a spacious edifice containing ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... her, and she bitterly felt the impoverishment of the always scanty means, which deprived her of the power of laying out sums of money on those rites which were universally deemed needful for the repose of souls snatched away in battle. It was a mercenary age among the clergy, and besides, it was the depth of a northern winter, and the funeral rites of the Lady of Whitburn would have been poor and maimed indeed if a whole band of black Benedictine monks had not arrived ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... only putting the case), or an excessively generous one. After my experience of your honest character and your creditable conduct, it is only your due that I should absolve you at once of the mean motive. I believe you are as incapable as I am—I can say no more—of turning to mercenary account any discoveries you might make to Miss Gwilt's prejudice in Miss Gwilt's past life. Shall I go on any further? or would you prefer, on second thoughts, opening your mind frankly to ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Miss Wilfer, for bearing with the drawbacks of my position in the house we both inhabit. Believe that they are not all mercenary, although I have, through a series of strange fatalities, faded out of my place in life. If what you see with such a gracious and good sympathy is calculated to rouse my pride, there are other considerations (and those you do not see) urging ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... overwhelmed from the outset, have had no chance whatsoever of development. Even if they had a language of their own, they would have no literature. Not one painter, not one musician, have they produced; only couriers, guides, waiters, and other parasites. A smug, tame, sly, dull, mercenary little race of men, they exist by and for the alien tripper. They are the fine flower of commercial civilisation, the shining symbol of international comity, and have never done anybody any harm. I cannot imagine why the King should not give them ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... considerably avoided them: she had watched the girl, off and on, from her early childhood. Flora, just twenty, was extraordinarily alone in the world—so alone that she had no natural chaperon, no one to stay with but a mercenary stranger, Mrs. Hammond Synge, the sister-in-law of one of the young men I had just seen. She had lots of friends, but none of them nice: she kept picking up impossible people. The Floyd-Taylors, with whom she had been at Boulogne, were ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... duchess, "the whole world knows Prince Eugene to be above mercenary considerations, and it also knows that had Monsieur Louvois not driven him away from France, he would not now be the most distinguished officer in the army ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... Home, went to the Hotel Europe, in the Piazza di Spagna. There for two weeks he lived like a milordo. He formed many acquaintances among the resident colony of American artists, and was received by them with much kindness. Some of the mercenary ones of their number, having formed the opinion that he came there to buy paintings, ignorant of his profession, were excessively polite;—but their offers of services were declined. When Caper finally moved to private lodgings in Babuino Street and opened a studio, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... in that glance. Was it not likely to be genuine,—that feeling that she could not be to him what she had been to others? It must have been abundantly clear to her that had she chosen to accept from him what he had offered her, she might have amply satisfied any mercenary views, the most exorbitant. Therefore her views and her feelings were of ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... first season in London since her second marriage with Mr. Doll Loftus. After a very brief sojourn in that city of frivolity she had the acumen to discover that London society was hopelessly worldly and mercenary; that people only met to eat and to abuse each other; that the law of cutlet for cutlet was universal; that young men, especially those in the Guards, were garrisoned by a full complement of devils; that London girls lived only for dress and the excitement of husband-hunting. ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... double subterfuge in all this. De Stancy took no particular interest in his ancestral portraits; but he was enamoured of Paula to weakness. Perhaps the composition of his love would hardly bear looking into, but it was recklessly frank and not quite mercenary. His photographic scheme was nothing worse than a lover's not too scrupulous contrivance. After the refusal of his request to copy her picture he fumed and fretted at the prospect of Somerset's return ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... more Welcome to this grateful shore; Now no mercenary foe Aims again the fatal blow,— Aims at ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... easy to marry," said Jane, rather drearily. "It isn't easy to find some one with whom one would be willing to pass one's life. I've had several chances—one or two of them not entirely mercenary, I think. But not one that I could bring ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... to see a girl of your age mercenary," was the answer. "Good gracious, when I was two-and-twenty I never gave money a thought. I should never have dreamed of bothering myself about the amount of my friends' incomes. I don't now for that matter. Always keep your heart young, Carrissima! I am as disinterested ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... a half-humorous bitterness in his voice that Margaret noted silently. So (she thought) he had hoped for a moment that at the last Frederick R. Woods had relented toward him. It grieved her, in a dull fashion, to see him so mercenary. It grieved her—though she would have denied it emphatically—to see him so disappointed. Since he wanted the money so much, she would have liked for him to have had it, worthless as he was, for the sake of the boy ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... contrary, profound conviction that about ninety-nine hundredths of whatever at present is, is wrong: conviction making four of us, according to our several manners, leaders of revolution for the poor, and declarers of political doctrine monstrous to the ears of mercenary mankind; and driving the fifth, less sanguine, into mere painted-melody of lament over the fallacy of Hope and the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... hereditary, and domestic spiders, who have spun their webs over the lower division of my book-shelves (consisting chiefly of law and divinity) during the peaceful reign of her predecessor, fly at full speed before the probationary inroads of the new mercenary. Even so the Laird of Ellangowan ruthlessly commenced his magisterial reform, at the expense of various established and superannuated pickers and stealers, who had been his neighbours for half a century. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... clock points to the hour of eleven. Judging by the pile of money-bags lying at the foot of the president's chair, and the two members of the court who are busily engaged in counting coin, George would seem to insinuate that the fellows of the college of his time were a decidedly mercenary set. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... of the first antagonism to the Gospel in Europe was purely mercenary. The pythoness's masters had no horror of Paul's doctrines. They were animated by no zeal for Apollo. They only saw a source of profit drying up. Infinitely more respectable was Jewish opposition, which was, at all events, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... flashy coat, his sharp, mercenary face, hectic of night revels, and his small but wicked eyes wandering over Mr. McArthur's stock in trade, is seen in pursuit of his darling object. "I don't mind so much about the pay, old man! I'm up well in the world. The fact is, I am esteemed-and ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... management of the realm had been committed at that time, and asked her to take measures for the punishment of such a wrong. But she, with a woman's forwardness, and impelled by mental excitement, immediately gave orders to the prefects of the city and to certain of her own ruffians [mercenary body-guard] with all speed to go out of the city, under arms, and to punish the authors of the violence, sparing no one. Now as these armed men, who were prone to act cruelly at every opportunity, left the gates of the city, they came upon a number of clerks busy just ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... to doubt that any one understood the policy of the Polish Committee in Warsaw who should apply the epithet 'mercenary' to the Polish soldiers. We would not ask our author how much he gave per diem to those under his own command: we have no wish to rival the wit of a Russian proclamation which appeared last winter in Warsaw, in which the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... There also the opposite character of avarice and cruelty is represented by a figure drawn from the same source. In the book from which my text is selected, we are warned not to partake of the offered banquet of him who spreads his table by constraint, and with ostentatious or mercenary views, and not from the impulse of an hospitable spirit. Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats: For as he thinketh in his heart so is he: Eat and drink saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.[1] And again ...
— A Sermon Preached on the Anniversary of the Boston Female Asylum for Destitute Orphans, September 25, 1835 • Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright
... the object of his ambitious wishes appeared to bestow unusual favor. This individual was a young officer in the army, a sort of protege of the lady's father, who had been spending a furlough at Bellevue. In the matter of fortune Maxwell's rival was not to be dreaded, for he knew the lady was not mercenary in her views. The young captain was penniless; but his family was good, and he had the advantage of being a favorite with the father. He had won for himself a name on the fields of Mexico, which went far to enlist a lady's favor. He was a universal favorite both with the public ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... to confess, however, that with all its charms a mud floor (like a mercenary match) does certainly promote early rising. Long before daybreak we were up, and had breakfasted; after this there was nearly a whole tedious hour to endure whilst the horses were laden by torch-light; but this had an ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... bugle notes the soldiers strained every nerve as if rushing upon the foe. Napoleon offered to these bands the same reward which he had promised to the peasants. But to a man, they refused the gold. They had imbibed the spirit of their chief, his enthusiasm, and his proud superiority to all mercenary motives. "We are not toiling for money," said they, "but for your approval, and ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... forever?" The prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the fact that a great sea-monster, in the shape of a steamboat, takes him, sitting in the car, on its back, and swims across with him like Arion's dolphin,—also that mercenary men on board offer him canvas-backs in the season, and ducks of lower degree ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... religion. It is the doctrine of obedience. Therefore I shall revive religion, but it shall be a religion of obedience to the House of Hohenzollern. The God of the Hebrews declared them to be his chosen people. But they proved a servile and mercenary race. They traded their swords for shekels and became a byword and a hissing among the nations—and they were scattered to the four corners of the earth. I shall revive that God. And this time he shall chose ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... or mercenary creature, No one more cordially detested the life of dependence than he. He always thought that his father had discharged all the duties of that relation in nourishing his childhood and giving him a good education. Whatever has been since bestowed, he considered as voluntary and unrequited bounty; ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... that I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind was much disturbed by indecision whether or not to take the Avenger. It was tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his boots in the archway of the Blue Boar's posting-yard; it was almost solemn to imagine him casually produced in the tailor's shop, and confounding the disrespectful senses of Trabb's boy. ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... deputies and the City Government at once gave their cordial assent to these articles. When the deputies returned, their constituents were not very well pleased with what had been done, declaring that they would not submit to be locked up at the mercy of any man, nor would they trust to mercenary troops for guarding their city. The Prince, hearing this, agreed that the burghers, Calvinists, Lutherans, as well as Romanists, should be employed to guard ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... Mr. Humphrey Marshall, and, as you know, we are sadly in the minority in Kentucky now. I came here to-night to ask you to undertake a mission in behalf of myself and certain other gentlemen, and I assure you that my motives are not wholly mercenary." He paused, smiled, and put the tips of his fingers together. "I would willingly lose every crop for the next ten years to convict this Wilkinson of treason against the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to mutilate, curtail, and patch up a drama in Italian, in order to introduce favourite airs, selected from different authors, the contrast has always been broken thereby, without every one's knowing the reason: and since ignorant mercenary prompters, though Italians, have been employed in hotch-potch, and in translating our dramas from Italian into English, how could such operas appear any other ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... these arms, the source of all wealth, were monopolised by the wealthy. Thus we have seen those immense fortunes which are the characteristic feature of our age spring up on all sides. A king of the last century, "the great Louis the Fourteenth" of mercenary historians, would never have dreamed of possessing a fortune such as are held by those kings of the nineteenth century, the Vanderbilts ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... or "khans" of the Bakhtiyaris, and another chief was the self-styled Minister of War. These chieftains have always been a strange and changing mixture of mountain patriot and city intriguer—of loyal soldier and mercenary looter. The mercenary instincts, possibly aided by a sense of their own comparative helplessness against Russian Cossacks and artillery, led them to accept the stranger's gold and fair promises, and they ended their checkered but theretofore relatively honorable careers ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... little history in his mind that was reasonably near the truth, of a hard-up professional family, fatherless perhaps, of a mercenary marriage at ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... therefore, hold that the Negro teacher has acted along the method here described, and has thus been the means of enlightening the masses of the colored people that lay claim to any degree of education whatever. What the Negro teacher has accomplished has been done not from a selfish motive or a mercenary point of view, but primarily because he has endeavored to do his part toward elevating the race with which he is identified. If it is true that the salvation of the Negro lies in his being educated, then to the Negro teacher ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... as he walked along, worked both his fists closely in his energy. "If I can't be down on him other gait than that, I'll leave him alone. But, Waddle, by my sacred honour as a man, I'll not leave him alone!" Waddle started, and stood with his mouth open, looking up at his friend. "Base, mercenary, false-hearted loon! What is it that ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... and serenity of mind, which excels the other not only in duration, but in sense of pleasure too. As for the other sort of converse, that which consists in expression of itself to others, Pindar says very well, that it was not mercenary in old time, nor indeed is it so now; but by the baseness and ambition of a few it is made use of to serve their poor secular interests. For if the poets represent Venus herself as much offended with those ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Fatimites of Egypt and northern Africa, who claimed the caliphate, and who aimed at extending their rule over the Mahommedan world, at least in the west. Abd-ar-rahman subdued the nobles by means of a mercenary army, which included Christians. He repelled the Fatimites, partly by supporting their enemies in Africa, and partly by claiming the caliphate for himself. His ancestors in Spain had been content the the title of sultan. The ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... (and the point is worth insisting on) that the Englishman cannot pretend that he goes into business with any other object than to make money. His motives are on the face of them mercenary if not sordid. The American is impelled primarily by quite other ambitions. Similarly, when the Englishman thinks of business, the image which he conjures up in his mind is of a dull commonplace like, on ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... one end and the European Artillery at the other, separated by Native troops. This arrangement (which existed in almost every station in India) is another proof of the implicit confidence placed in the Native army—a confidence in mercenary soldiers of alien races which seems all the more surprising when we call to mind the warnings that for nearly a hundred years had been repeatedly given of the possibility of disaffection existing amongst ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... Arabs, menaced not only by their dissensions, but frequently attacked by the Christians from the North, there was but one method by which the Dey could maintain his power. He formed a large body of mercenary soldiers, drawn entirely from Turkey, united with himself and each other by a feeling of mutual dependence and common danger, and bound by no feeling of interest or affection to the inhabitants of the soil. Brave they were, as they proved in 1541, against ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Seacole: 'I have witnessed her devotion and her courage; I have already borne testimony to her services to all who needed them. She is the first who has redeemed the name of 'sutler' from the suspicion of worthlessness, mercenary business and plunder; and I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some other illustrious ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... the quickest Apprehension; the Master therefore should consider how much more Time is necessary for one that has not the same Quickness, and how much he is obliged to consult the Capacity of his Scholar. From a mercenary Teacher this necessary Regard is not to be hoped for; expected by other Scholars, tired with the Fatigue, and solicited by his Necessities, he thinks the Month long; looks on his Watch, and goes away. If he be but poorly paid for his Teaching,—a God-b'wy ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... Paris at a moment when the increasing and unmanageable deficit brought national bankruptcy and confusion to the very door of the state, a course of angry and mercenary pamphleteering on Finance, while connecting him with discontented men of wealth and influence, willing, jointly with the police, to hire or use his ready pen, forced on him education in another important, if unattractive, department of the great ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... night and day in a belt round his waist, as if he really loved them for their own mere sakes—dirty high-priced little baubles! Granville, for his part, couldn't bear to see such ingrained love of pelf. It was miserable; it was mercenary. ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... at the flexible form, and listens to the words that he would admire, only the cynical suspicion is in his mind that she is talking for effect. His general habit was to consider all women mercenary and untrustworthy. Deep in his heart—for he had a heart, though contracted from want of use—lay a hungry desire to be loved, really loved for himself; and the very keenness of the longing, and the anxiety not to be deceived, lessened his powers of penetration, and blinded him to ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... thought of her constantly. But what had he to do with the banker's wealthy heiress, the future mistress of Lone? If he were so unwise as to seek her acquaintance, the world would be quick to ascribe the most mercenary motives to his conduct. But like weaker minded lovers, he comforted himself by writing such transcendental poetry as "The Soul's Recognition," "The Meeting of the Spirits," "What Those Eyes Said," etc. He did not publish these. After having ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... knew his Fearful position; but that which weighed heaviest upon his heart was a consciousness of the misinterpretations which the world might put upon the motives of his conduct in this elopement, imputing it to selfishness and a mercenary spirit. When about ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... last hour when we had to be getting back a certain tenderness came into his somewhat mercenary look. He devoted himself more to his nephew; he took him aside, and, with some ceremony, gave him money. He offered us cigars. We took one each. His round French face became all wrinkles, like a cracked plate. ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... stated above that one of the abuses which came into large practice from the middle period of the Tokugawa Bakufu was the adoption of children of ignoble birth into samurai families in consideration of monetary payments by their parents. This mercenary custom was strictly interdicted by the Matsudaira regent, who justly saw in it a danger to the solidity of the military class. But it does not appear that ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... with some wonder. It had never dawned upon him that this shiftless, thriftless, worthless, sponging parasite was yet, after and in spite of all, not mercenary in the issue of his thoughts; ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had revolted both the army and the people. The rebellion began in the camp of the Janissaries, and the ringleader was one Halil Patrona, a poor Albanian sailor-man, who after plying for a time the trade of a petty huckster had been compelled, by crime or accident, to seek a refuge among the mercenary soldiery of the Empire. The rebellion was unexpectedly, amazingly successful. The Sultan, after vainly sacrificing his chief councillors to the fury of the mob, was himself dethroned by Halil, and Mahmud I. appointed Sultan in his stead. For the next six weeks the ex-costermonger ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... morning in her uncle's parlour, and a hasty flitting away of the young couple—away from ominous looks and cold politeness, out into their own bright world, where no dark shadows in the shape of grim mercenary uncles ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... expansion and economic independence, a series of frontiers was gradually thrust out toward the wilderness in successive waves of irregular indentation. The true leader in this westward advance, to whom less than his deserts has been accorded by the historian, is the drab and mercenary trader with the Indians. The story of his enterprise and of his adventures begins with the planting of European civilization upon American soil. In the mind of the aborigines he created the passion for the fruits, both good and evil, of the white man's civilization, and he ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... floor," said Marcel. "To me it is evident that Colline has been corrupted. He has already sold his vote for so many drinks. Don't interrupt me! (Colline was rising to protest.) You shall have your turn. Colline, mercenary soul that he is, has presented to you this stranger under an aspect too favorable to be true. I told you before; I see through this person's designs. He wants to speculate on us. He says to himself, 'Here are some chaps making their way. I must get ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... he complained that 'a spirit of business speculation, which has always more of cunning and chicane than of truth and righteousness in it,' was finding its way into the hearts of the people. The seigneurs in particular, he alleged, were becoming mercenary; they were taking advantage of technicalities to make the habitants pay more than their just dues. In many cases settlers had taken up lands on the merely oral assurances of the seigneurs; then when they got their deeds in writing these deeds contained various provisions ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... thing was to happen," remarked Bea, with a little mercenary expectation, "Congreve Hall would be Olive's; just think of it, girls, how grand! and Cousin Roger is immensely wealthy, and there would be no end of splendid things;" and Bea sighed a little, as she spoke, for she was not going to win any wealth ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... girls expect a man to mean business at the first look. No man when he first becomes interested in a woman has any definite scheme of engagement to marry her in his mind, unless he is meaning a vulgar mercenary marriage. However, I did at last mean an honourable engagement, as you call ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... have no right to do, having heard by accident what I had no business to hear—I may say generally, to show how serious the quarrel was, that my mistress charged my master with having married from mercenary motives, with keeping out of her company as much as he could, and with insulting her by a suspicion which it would be hard ever to forgive, and impossible ever to forget. He replied by violent language directed against herself, and by ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... "go with" Bessy Houghton regularly after that. In his single-mindedness he never feared that Bessy would misjudge his motives or imagine him to be prompted by mercenary designs. He never thought of her riches himself, and it never occurred to him that she would ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... You voluntarily entered into our service, and received our pay. You were one of us, with only this difference, that we have taken up the cause from principle and loyalty, and you joined us from mercenary motives. Still we kept our faith with you; for every service performed, you were well and honourably paid. But you received our money and turned against us; revealed our secrets, and gave information ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... a man [common soldier], who has been ordered to go upon the king's highway [for war] does not go, but hires a mercenary, if he withholds the compensation, then shall this officer or man be put to death, and he who represented him shall take possession ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... into evil company. His one ambition is, to break away, and redeem himself. I am so anxious to help him, and wish you could realize his purpose, as I do, and become his friend. Won't you, for my sake? Why, even in this affair he has not the slightest mercenary purpose—he has only thought of what was ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... feel much elation. His was not a mercenary nature, and he had all along thought his comrade too sanguine, though ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... him she expects me to back her up. The wish is doubtless natural, but for a proud girl it is rather an odd favor to ask. Oh yes, she 's a proud girl, even though she has been able to arrange it with her conscience to make a mercenary marriage. To expect me to help her is perhaps to treat me as a friend; but she ought to remember—or at least I ought to remember—that Gordon is an older friend than she. Inviting me to help her as against my oldest friend—is n't there a ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... who abandons his own proper occupation and betakes himself to that of a Sudra, should be considered as a Sudra and on no account should any food be accepted from him. Professors of the healing art, mercenary soldiers, the priest who acts as warder of the house, and persons who devote a whole year to study without any profit, are all to be considered as Sudras. And those who impudently partake of food offered at ceremonials in a Sudra's house are afflicted with a terrible calamity. In consequence ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of Ethelrida's speech. The line of the Tancreds should go on through her! But never, never! That should never be! If they were counting upon that they were counting in vain. The marriage was never intended to be anything but an empty ceremony, for mercenary reasons. There must be no mistake about this. What if Lord Tancred had such ideas, too? And she quivered suddenly and caught in her breath with the horror of ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... I don't pretend to be giving you good news; but I 'm telling the simple, literal truth, so that you may know why I have gone to the dogs. She pretended to care greatly for all this, and to be willing to make any sacrifice in return; she had a magnificent chance, for she was being forced into a mercenary marriage with a man she detested. She led me to believe that she would give this up, and break short off, and keep herself free and sacred and pure for me. This was a great honor, and you may believe that I valued it. It turned my head, and ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... very wrong to buy a stolen diamond, but he had done it from no mercenary motives, for he had given it to her. She supposed that he had loved the beautiful thing, and felt when it was offered to him that he could not bear to let it go.... Perhaps the Countess de Santiago had ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... of their dead. The war dance was probably the most elaborate in costume and other details, and of recent years the Indians have sometimes given public exhibitions of what purported to be war dances, but these performances, like everything else which they do from purely mercenary motives, are very poor imitations of the originals, and it is doubtful if they have ever allowed a genuine war dance to ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... tyrannical abuse of it—HE professes to love wisdom, yet in all his establishments for promoting it he sets up false standards of truth; and persecutes, even with religious intolerance, all attempts to swerve from them—HE makes laws, which, in the hands of mercenary lawyers, serve as snares to unwary poverty, but as shields to crafty wealth—HE renders justice unattainable by its costliness; and personal rights uncertain by the intricacy and fickleness of legal decisions—HE ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... though so many are for the use of persons placed in the most trying circumstances, and some of them are for persons writhing under a sense of intolerable injury, sweetness and light do ever reign. Even 'yours truly, Jacob Langton,' in his 'letter to his Daughter's Mercenary Fiance',' mitigates the sternness of his tone by the remark that his 'task is inexpressibly painful.' And he, Mr. Langton, is the one writer who lets the post go out on his wrath. When Horace Masterton, of Thorpe ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... thought of it since. But perhaps the moon, which was shining again as it had shone that night on the old market-place, had helped to recall it, or perhaps it satisfied him with a sense of appropriateness. For it was not a dismal, monotonous product of mercenary dryness to which the words were set, but the characteristic music of devotion by which the spirit of prayer is made audible when words fail, as they always do, to express it in all its force and fervour. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... cried, touched by his look and manner to an immediate unfolding of her scheme, "let us look at things again. Perhaps we shall not find them so hopeless as they look. If I am prudent, Everett, I am not mercenary. I only want to see Rosa happy. I don't care whether it is on hundreds a year, or thousands. And the fact is, I have not condemned your plans without having a more satisfactory one to offer to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... wretch to be wholly selfish and mercenary, from my experience of her on the raft—for that she was the same negress I had long ceased to doubt—and I determined, while I had an opportunity of doing so, to enter a wedge of confidence between us in the ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... in his own heart knew that his motives were not unmixed. He could not accuse himself of being outrageously mercenary, yet he was ashamed to be forced to acknowledge even to himself that the desire of gain was present to his mind. His debts were enormous. He entertained in a manner and after a style far in excess of his modest allowance. His dinners were the most sumptuous ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... spahi^, Cossack, Croat, Pandoz. irregular, guerilla, partisan, condottiere^; franctireur [Fr.], tirailleur^, bashi-bazouk; [guerilla organization names: list], vietminh, vietcong; shining path; contras; huk, hukbalahap. mercenary, soldier of fortune; hired gun, gunfighter, gunslinger; bushwhacker, free lance, companion; Hessian. hit man torpedo, soldier. levy, draught; Landwehr [G.], Landsturm [G.]; conscript, recruit, cadet, raw levies. infantry, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... is soon prescribed which though it be not true, yet I forbear to note any deficiences; for the Olympian games are down long since, and the mediocrity of these things is for use; as for the excellency of them it serveth for the most part but for mercenary ostentation. ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... and Romance, passionately. "Aunt Frances, a woman hasn't any right to marry just because she thinks it is her best chance. She hasn't any right to make a man feel that he's won her when she's just little and mean and mercenary." ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... calling, to-wit, that of an unscrupulous adventurer, whose object was to line his own pockets. A fashion has arisen of late of writing about soldiers of fortune as if they were noble, Quixotic persons. Those with whom the author has come in contact, however, have, without exception, been mercenary and cold-blooded men, to whom the name highway robber could be applied with far more justice than the higher sounding term. Such men were Jim Hickey and his two companions, who had flocked like buzzards to the border at the ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... man, she would smile on his suit? Could he think that she would accept his attentions more gladly because of his newly acquired wealth? The idea made her furiously angry. If Farnsworth thought her that mercenary—if he deemed her so utterly sordid—well, her respect ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... cowardly and mercenary Martinez has received the punishment his treachery so well deserved; during his flight he was met by some Indians and murdered. May divine Providence thus punish all traitors to ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... a mumbling bear without a claw? 220 Nor this, nor that, is standard right or wrong, Till minted by the mercenary tongue; And what is conscience but a fiend of strife, That chills the joys, and damps the scenes of life, The wayward child of Vanity and Fear, The peevish dam of Poverty and Care? Unnumber'd woes engender in the breast That entertains the ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... protested earnestly. "That's why I haven't mentioned His Majesty—whom God preserve. That would have been an exaggeration. . . However, the end is not yet. We were talking about the beginning. I have heard that some dealers in fine objects, quite mercenary people of course (my mother has an experience in that world), show sometimes an astonishing reluctance to part with some specimens, even at a good price. It must be very funny. It's just possible that the uncle and the aunt have been rolling ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... cheered; but, that no provocation should be wanting to engage him to speak the truth, they asked him if he wanted any money. He with much art answered very indifferently, no; adding, he scorned to make such a discovery out of a mercenary view, but that he was resolved to be revenged of his captain. They then ordered him to the sign of the Boot, in St. Thomas's, Exeter, whither they soon followed him, having first sent to Mr. Eastwood, an exciseman, to ask what he would have for dinner, and ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... some of the most famous professors of the science. But his prepossession for Cicero prevented him from much frequenting the dry and dusty walks of jurisprudence. In his epistle to posterity, he endeavours to justify this repugnance by other motives. He represents the abuses, the chicanery, and mercenary practices of the law, as inconsistent with every ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... and perspectives, the work of Mr. Streeter,' serjeant-painter to King Charles the Second. In February 1664, the Diarist saw Dryden's Indian Queen acted 'with rich scenes as the like had never been seen here, or haply, except rarely, elsewhere on a mercenary theatre.' Mr. Pepys—most devoted of playgoers—notes occasionally of particular plays, that 'the machines are fine and the paintings very pretty.' In October 1667, he records that he sat in the boxes for the first time in his life, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... to him begging for a king, and urging, as one reason for the change, the unfitness of his sons to succeed him. They were mercenary and open to bribery, and it is not strange that they were disliked by the people. It is one of many instances of departure by children from the counsels and prayers of the kindest parents, and choosing ...
— Half Hours in Bible Lands, Volume 2 - Patriarchs, Kings, and Kingdoms • Rev. P. C. Headley
... mercenary engagement that I think Amenda ever entered into was one with a 'bus conductor. We were living in the North of London then, and she had a young man, a cheesemonger, who kept a shop in Lupus Street, Chelsea. He could not come up to her because of the shop, so once a week ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... squatted a juggler from India. Under his white turban his glittering, beady eyes appraised the generosity of his audience as he arranged his flat baskets, his live rabbits and his hooded cobras for an exhibition of mercenary magic. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... of economy, and openly discuss and settle the most essential points. At the same time a father should not intimidate his son with the idea that nothing but rigid economy can win his parental favour; his parental favour should not be a mercenary object; he should rather show his son, that he is aware of the great temptations to which a young man is exposed in going first into the world: he should show him, both that he is disposed to place confidence in him, and that he yet knows the fallibility of youthful prudence. ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... interests in Mexico, and had gone there to look after them, leaving Miss Denman and her mother in New York. Cantor, who had first met the Denmans in Ohio, when on recruiting duty in that state, had planned to make Miss Denman his wife for purely mercenary reasons. He had struggled to overcome his gaming mania, and had planned that once Miss Denman became his wife her money should be used to pay his gaming debts and free him from the claims ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... noblesse oblige—the noblesse of a free people—was the motto of the one as of the other. It has been asserted that the Federal armies were very largely composed of foreigners, whose motives for enlisting were purely mercenary. At no period of the war, however, did the proportion of native Americans sink below seventy per cent.,* (* See Note at end of chapter.) and at the beginning of 1863 it was much greater. As a matter of fact, the Union army was composed ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... them, and affectionate friendship for them, that attention to the most important duties at the last gasp, indicates that honesty without any thought of personal advantage was innate in the man; that it did not require the invitation of pleasure, or the allurements of mercenary rewards. For what greater evidence can we require that those things which are honourable and right are desirable of themselves for their own sake, than the sight of a dying man so anxious in the discharge of such important duties? But, as I think that letter deserving of all commendation ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... The City Hall clock near by struck eleven. The time had come for returning to their mercenary guardian. Phil shook the sleeping form of Giacomo. The little boy stirred in his sleep, and murmured, "Madre." He had been dreaming of his mother and his far-off Italian home. He woke to the harsh realities of life, four thousand miles away ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... full tide of their prosperity, with none to succor, and with no hope from the first but that they must perish. Nor was this quite all. How could their sole companions, their servants, people of the country, and bound to their masters by none but the mercenary tie of a hireling, soothe their dying moments with any genuine sympathy, or supply in the dread travail of mortality the room of a friend, or even of a fellow-countryman? This is no baseless sketch ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... honored, much respected friend![1] No mercenary bard his homage pays; With honest pride I scorn each selfish end, My dearest meed, a friend's esteem and praise: To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays, 5 The lowly train in life's sequestered scene; ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... will be asked: Will such improvements pay? I respect that question. I do not sneer at it, and regard it, as some are too apt to do, as a sign of the mercenary and money-loving spirit of the present age. I look on it as a healthy sign of the English mind; a sign that we believe, as the old Jews did, that political and social righteousness is inseparably connected with wealth and prosperity. The old Psalms and prophets have taught us that ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Miss Matilda, "and why not, Lady Griffin? There is no reason you should break your tea-cup, because Algernon asks a harmless question. HE is not mercenary; he is all candor, innocence, generosity! He is himself blessed with a sufficient portion of the world's goods to be content; and often and often has he told me he hoped the woman of his choice might come to him without a penny, that he might show ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the year of Grace 1830 a new order of things was inaugurated. But with all this, a vastly different state of affairs existed then from that now prevailing. No one could accuse the preachers of those days of mercenary motives, for they were poorly paid, and carried their worldly possessions on their backs. Their labour was arduous and unremitting. They travelled great distances on foot and on horseback, at all seasons and in all weathers, to ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... of Florence, the kings of France and Spain agreed to withdraw their protection from Pisa, for a stipulated sum of money. There is nothing in the whole history of the merchant princes of Venice so mercenary and base, as this bartering away for gold the independence, for which this little republic had been so nobly contending for more than ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... France be still thy guardian care, Oh! spare these mercenary combats, spare! The thrones that now are reared but to be broke; The rights we render, and anon revoke; The muddy stream of laws, ideas, needs, Flooding our social life as it proceeds; Opposing tribunes, even ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... be that, the Vicomte de Berquin will be a vastly ingenious gentleman if he can either find our hiding-place, or delude me away from my men. To think that they should have chosen the first mercenary wretch they met on their way! Yet doubtless the perspicacious ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... it be A dashing damsel, gay and pert, A pattern of inconstancy; Or selfish, mercenary flirt? ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... our heavy overcoats and blankets and foot stoves and such other luxuries behind; that rather indicates that we are going to do something besides retreat; and I should like to get a whack at those mercenary Dutchmen before I freeze or ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... raised him above the Old Comedy turn for uproarious farce. He abused Socrates, but Xenophon, the disciple of Socrates, by his trained rhetoric saved the Ten Thousand. Aristophanes might say that if his warnings had been followed there would have been no such thing as a mercenary Greek expedition under Cyrus. Athens, however, was on a landslip, falling; none could arrest it. To gaze back, to uphold the old times, was a most natural conservatism, and fruitless. The aloe had bloomed. Whether right or wrong in his politics and his criticisms, and bearing in mind the instruments ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "there is every need. I am very mercenary, Mr. Knight," she added, smiling "I am determined to make all the money I can, so that my dear little girl may have every advantage ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Mr. Benton, "would you have me tear her from my heart, because her mercenary parent chooses to frown upon our love, and follow me ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... hundred dollars for that same Taminah only a few weeks ago; then he became suddenly aware that the canoe had drifted too far down during his meditation. He shook off the despondency caused by the certitude of Bulangi's mercenary disposition, and, taking up his paddle, in a few strokes sheered alongside the water- gate of the ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... not to say capriciousness, of this fair one about such an engagement? Do you know that she has had the choice of the best matches in England? The Duke of Richmond paid his addresses to her first; but though he was in love with her, still he was mercenary: however, the king, observing that want of fortune was the only impediment to the match, took that article upon himself, out of regard to the Duke of Ormond, to the merit and birth of Miss Hamilton, and to her father's services; but, resenting that a man, who pretended to ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... had gone on to ask whether you can have a sharp and also a dull knowledge, and whether you can know near, but not at a distance, or know the same thing with more or less intensity, and so on without end. Such questions might have been put to you by a light-armed mercenary, who argued for pay. He would have lain in wait for you, and when you took up the position, that sense is knowledge, he would have made an assault upon hearing, smelling, and the other senses;—he would have shown you no mercy; and while you were lost in envy and admiration of his wisdom, ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... talking of our young pupil and your daughter; I object still more strongly to your insinuation that my desire to see them married (provided always that they are sincerely attached to each other) springs from a mercenary motive." ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... to avoid it. Now they crossed athwart a bright feathery cloud, and now they were against the clear blue sky. I confess, being no sportsman, I was more interested for the poor bird that was striving for its life, than for the hawk that was playing the part of a mercenary soldier. At length the hawk got the upper hand, and made a rushing stoop at her quarry, but the latter made as sudden a surge downwards, and slanting up again, evaded the blow, screaming and making the best of his way for ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... our nobles from our common men; For many of our princes (wo the while!) Lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood; So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs In blood of princes." (Henry ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... unadvised into the meshes of an acquaintanceship which leads to her ruin. It is perhaps as useless to ask the men who are base enough to conceive these things to refrain from publishing them, as it is to urge the mercenary proprietors of certain newspapers to refrain from printing them in their columns. Yet it must be perfectly clear to all right-thinking minds, that it is in vain for parents to warn, parsons to preach, friends to advise, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... there was a feeling akin to despair in this also. His very tenderness towards her was more unendurable than would have been his wrath. The pity of it! The pity of it! It was that which made him sore of heart and faint of spirit. If he could have reproached her as cold, mercenary, unworthy, heartless, even though he had still loved her, he could have supported himself by his anger against her unworthiness. But as it was there was no such support for him. Though she had been ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... has told us that Girard's ship was loaded with "niggers," and that these were sold by the mercenary captain and the money pocketed by himself, "all being fair in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... him): "if only we do not ruin our lives. For some people marriage for love may be unhappiness; but not for you, with your calm temperament, and your clear soul; I beseech you, do not marry without love, from a sense of duty, self-sacrifice, or anything.... That is infidelity, that is mercenary, and worse still. Believe me,—I have the right to say so; I have paid dearly for the right. ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... and spoke like a lady. Her hair was dyed; her breasts padded. She acted sentiment, but was less affectionate than E.B. I met her when she was out of a job. I gave her L2 whenever I met her. She was not mercenary. She was sensual. I became very much in love with her. I discovered her, however, writing letters to a fellow whom I had met one day when I was walking with her. He was only an acquaintance, but the brother of my most intimate friend. What I objected ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... too glorious to be true. It can't be true! But if it could! It's no use saying I wouldn't be glad—for poor Mr. van Buren's sake; he's so much too nice for her—mercenary, conceited, ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... different about her, too. Constance more than once was on the point of revising her estimate of the little actress. Was she, after all, wholly mercenary in her attitude toward Warrington? Was he merely a live spender whom she could not afford to lose? Or was she merely a beautiful, delicate creature caught in the merciless maelstrom of the life into which she had been thrown? Did she realize the ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... of Asia and Africa. I have everywhere shown myself the friend of my fellow-creatures. My knowledge, my time, my fortune have ever been employed in the relief of distress! I have studied and practised medicine, but I have never degraded that most noble and most consoling of arts by mercenary speculations of any kind. Though always giving, and never receiving, I have preserved my independence. I have even carried my delicacy so far as to refuse the favours of kings. I have given gratuitously my remedies and my advice to the rich: the poor have received from me both remedies and money. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... him!" said Sir Norman, frowning; "she was forced into the marriage by her mercenary friends. Oh! if I had him here, wouldn't I make him wish the highwaymen had shot him through the head, and done for him, before I ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... altogether unprepared for this, Mr. Lightmark. In fact, I may as well own that I have talked it over with my son, and we agreed that the whole question resolved itself into—ah—into settlements. You must not think me mercenary." This was said with a dignified calm, which made the idea preposterous. "If you can"—here she seemed to refer to some mental note-book—"ah—satisfy Charles on that point, I am sure that it will give me great pleasure to regard you as a prospective son-in-law. ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... indignantly. "There is no helping them; the principal was right," said he. "He has squandered the money in golden bracelets for a mercenary danseuse, or at dice with his lawless comrades, and he now pays his usurer's bills with the hard earnings ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... their time in more charitable and useful actions than in filling the heads of poor children with stories so hurtful to the real interests of religion. However credulous our young guide was, he was not mercenary, being with difficulty persuaded to accept a franc or two for what he styled the pleasure of having conducted us. We next visited the castle of Tarascon, now used as the public prison, and in which ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... fantastic, but practical—not picturesque and mediaeval, but modern and lucrative—a world-wide commonwealth with a half-submerged metropolis, which should rule the ocean with its own fleets and, like Venice and Florence, job its land wars with mercenary armies—all these dreams were not the cloudy pageant of a poet but the practical schemes of a great creative mind. They were destined to become reality. Had the geographical conditions been originally more favourable than they were, had Nature been less ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... will rather agree with St. Bernard, that love, as such, desires nothing but reciprocation—"verus amor se ipso contentus est: habet praemium, sed id quod amatur." If the question had been simply whether religion is or is not in its nature mercenary, we should have felt no doubt on which side the truth lay. Self-regarding hopes and schemes may be schoolmasters to bring us to Christ; it seems, indeed, to be part of our education to form them, and then see them shattered one after another, that better and deeper ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... thought. But now, the slave power, with the aid of Daniel Webster and a band of lesser traitors, has enacted a law, which puts their dearly-bought liberties in the most imminent peril; holds out a strong temptation to every mercenary and unprincipled ruffian to become their kidnapper; and has stimulated the slaveholders generally to such desperate acts for the recovery of their fugitive property, as have never before been enacted in ...
— Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom • William and Ellen Craft
... my penetration was not long in scenting out who was the formidable rival to whom Daddy Mainspring alluded. Sacre! to think the mercenary old hunks could dream of sacrificing my lovely Lucy to such a hobgoblin of a fellow as a superannuated dragoon quartermaster, with a beak like Bardolph's in the play. But I had some confidence in my own qualifications; and as I gave a sly glance down at my nether person, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... who seemed to have been quite different men, if we may judge from the feats which they performed, from those of these days; one of the best of his histories is that which describes the life of Harald Haardraade, who, after manifold adventures by land and sea, now a pirate, now a mercenary of the Greek emperor, became king of Norway, and eventually perished at the battle of Stamford Bridge, whilst engaged in a gallant onslaught upon England. Now, I have often thought that the old Kemp, whose mouldering skull in the Golgotha of Hythe my brother ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... what to me seemed like wealth. I recalled the fact that my father had paid Ted exactly half this amount, and had found him quite willing to stay with us for half that again, or even for occasional tobacco money. Perhaps there was a mercenary vein in me at the time. I think it likely. The talk of my fellow orphans was largely of wages, and materialism dominated the atmosphere in which I lived. I know this refusal of twenty-five shillings a week and 'all found' struck me as tolerably reckless; splendid, in ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... all say that the State Department is merely captious, and they pay less and less attention to it and care less and less for American opinion—if only they can continue to get munitions. We are reducing English regard to this purely mercenary basis.... ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... respect—for that she now desired greatly. She saw him as he was, a big man, a strong man, a man whose respect was to be prized. Beside him she felt herself small and ordinary. That was all right, but she was determined he should not believe her insignificant, shallow, unworthy, mercenary. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... received baptism. Since Winckelmann turned renegade, and became a Roman Catholic merely that the expenses of his tour to Rome and his maintenance there might be paid, there have surely been few more mercenary converts. Tin-tun-ling was not satisfied with being christened into the Church, he was also married in Catholic rites, and here his misfortunes fairly began, and he entered on the path which has led ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... here, as elsewhere, poetry has reached the truth, while science and common sense have missed it. It has distinguished—as, in spite of all mercenary and feeble sophistry, men ever will distinguish—war from mere bloodshed. It has discerned the higher feelings which lie beneath its revolting features. Carnage is terrible. The conversion of producers into destroyers is a calamity. Death, and insults to women ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... you have finished your Dictionary, I suppose you will labour your present work con amore for your reputation." "No Sir," said Johnson, "nothing excites a man to write but necessity."' Walpole then relates the anecdote of the clergyman, and speaks of Johnson as 'the mercenary.' Walpole's sinecure offices thirty-nine years before this time brought him in 'near, 2000 a year.' In 1782 he wrote that his office of Usher of the Exchequer was worth 1800 a year. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... story of love for love, and how it came to naught. In it there shall be no marrying from mercenary motives; the manoeuvering mother-in-law is suppressed; Nature takes her course; and in the climax I strive to prove how sad a thing it is that men ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... to practice upon the fidelity of the garrison; and such was the Beg's influence that the Moghul portion of the Imperial troops joined him immediately, and left the unfortunate Emperor to be protected exclusively by unbelievers, under the general direction of the Gosain leader, Himmat Bahadur. This mercenary, not perhaps having his heart in the cause, terrified by the threats of the Pathan, and (it is possible) tampered with by traitors about the emperor's person, soon withdrew; and the confederate chiefs at once crossed the river, and took possession ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... the bounty of the community, is agreeable to the intentions of legislature, or the ideas of humanity, is a doubt. For in some parishes the unfortunate paupers have the additional misery of being sold to a mercenary wretch to starve upon twelve pence a head. It is matter of surprise that the magistrate should wink at this cruelty; but it is matter of pleasure, that no accusation comes within the verge of my historical ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... well as any of the fine Ladies how to make the most of myself and of my Man too. A Woman knows how to be mercenary, though she hath never been in a Court or at an Assembly. We have it in our Natures, Papa. If I allow Captain Macheath some trifling Liberties, I have this Watch and other visible Marks of his Favour to shew for it. A Girl who cannot ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... upon the foe. Napoleon offered to these bands the same reward which he had promised to the peasants. But to a man, they refused the gold. They had imbibed the spirit of their chief, his enthusiasm, and his proud superiority to all mercenary motives. "We are not toiling for money," said they, "but for your approval, ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... consideration the propriety of at once fixing the Chilian Government upon a base not to be shaken by the fall of the present tyranny in Peru, of which there are not only indications, but the result is inevitable—unless, indeed, the mischievous counsels of vain and mercenary men can suffice to prop up a fabric of the most barbarous political architecture, serving as a screen from whence to dart their weapons against the heart of liberty. Thank God, my hands are free from the stain of labouring in any such work; and having finished all you gave ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... to the fact, which is brought to light by this relation, that the slave-holders have not only to contend with the honest and open-handed means which the abolitionists most righteously employ,[A] to facilitate the escape of slaves, but with the mercenary acts of members of their own community, who live by the manufacture and ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... Southwest. He had before noticed the apparent incongruity of the handwriting and the text, and it was possible that for the purposes of disguise the poet might have employed an amanuensis. But how could he reconcile the incongruity of the mercenary and slangy purport of the missive itself with the mental habit of its author? Was it possible that these inconsistent qualities existed in the one individual? He smiled grimly as he thought of his visitor Bowers and his friend Jack. ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... troubles. A prisoner in the hands of his subjects, an exile among the enemies of Persia, he recovered his liberty by prostituting the honor of his wife, and regained his kingdom with the dangerous and mercenary aid of the Barbarians, who had slain his father. His nobles were suspicious that Kobad never forgave the authors of his expulsion, or even those of his restoration. The people was deluded and inflamed by the fanaticism of Mazdak, [38] who asserted the community of women, [39] and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... B.C. an eclipse of the Moon was seen in Mysia, according to Polybius.[123] The date of September 1 has been assigned for this eclipse which is said to have so greatly alarmed some Gaulish Mercenary troops in the service of Attalus, King of Pergamos, that he had to get rid of them as soon as he could—make terms with them to ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... of Prince Kaunitz. Not personally known to him, he viewed in me a crawling insect. I thought somewhat more proudly; my actions were upright, and so should my body be. I quitted the apartment, and was congratulated by the mercenary Swiss porter on my good fortune of having obtained ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... down in his own heart knew that his motives were not unmixed. He could not accuse himself of being outrageously mercenary, yet he was ashamed to be forced to acknowledge even to himself that the desire of gain was present to his mind. His debts were enormous. He entertained in a manner and after a style far in excess of his modest ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... enough that marriage was not always the blissful transformation it had been for her. There were unhappy marriages. There were such things in the world as unfaithful husbands and brutal drunken husbands, who had to be divorced. And equally, too, there were cold-blooded, designing, mercenary wives. (In the back of her mind was the unacknowledged notion that these people existed generally in novels. She knew, of course, that those characters must have real prototypes somewhere. Only, it hadn't occurred to her to identify them with ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... brought six thousand five hundred horse, three thousand foot, and four cannon of moderate size. His arrival did not, however, prove an occasion of unmingled satisfaction. The reiters, serving from purely mercenary motives, demanded the immediate payment of one hundred thousand crowns, promised as a first instalment on account of their wages, and were resolved to go no farther without receiving it. The Prince ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... will not calmly, nor cowardly suffer those who have no claims but their impudence, to storm their fortress and to capture them. They will defend it in all lawful ways.-Bishop and Wolcott, and a thousand other mercenary hirelings may attempt to subdue or terrify them—a proud and haughty leader who under the guise of patriotism, is attempting to undermine the happiness of the best regulated and freest State in the Union, with a thousand ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast
... heart was given to politics: and, in an age when heavy clouds were gathering over the independence and the civil grandeur of his country, he had a disinterested anxiety for drawing off the lightning of the approaching storms by pacific counsels. Compared, therefore, with the common mercenary orators of the Athenian forum—who made a regular trade of promoting mischief, by inflaming the pride, jealousy, vengeance, or the martial instincts of a 'fierce democracy,' and, generally speaking, with no views, high or low, sound or unsound, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... together. My father treated me with careless kindness; my mother scarcely noticed me, though she had no children except me; other cares completely absorbed her. My father, a man still young and very handsome, had married her from mercenary considerations; she was ten years older than he. My mother led a melancholy life; she was for ever agitated, jealous and angry, but not in my father's presence; she was very much afraid of him, and he was severe, cold, and distant in ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... fellow like that. Baron indeed! He's only a foreign mercenary; and here is your poor father sent out of the country, while my lord has apartments set aside for him in the Palace, and he's petted and pampered, and now at last he goes off in one of the King's carriages with ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... is a motive for the crime, and a very strong one. First, we will presume that you are in love with the wife of the man who is murdered. Secondly, supposing that you are mercenary, quite a considerable amount of money will come to you in case you marry Brenton's widow. Next, some one at that table poisoned him. It was not Mrs. Brenton, who poured out the cup of coffee. The cup of coffee was placed before Brenton, and my opinion ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... us take the lesson that that house, too, may be desecrated. There may be, as there were in the original Temple, the externals of worship, and yet, eating out the reality of these, there may be an inward mercenary spirit. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... duke started in his chair with a look of pain; but Pollyooly's deep blue eyes shone suddenly like bright stars, and she smiled a heavenly smile. It was not that she was mercenary. But it was the chief aim of her life to raise a wall of gold (it could not be too thick or too high) between ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... before that you were mercenary and suspicious, and I don't know what else besides? What has Jacob been doing to 'aggravate' you lately, that you should be down ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the meditated retreat of Bourbon became impossible, and the city was taken by assault. His favorite mottoes were, Kriegsrath mit der That, "Plan and Action," and Viel Feinde, viel Ehre, "The more foes, the greater honor." He was the only man who could influence the mercenary lancers, who were as terrible ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... hypochondriac, and made no secret of the fact that she regarded him as her especial property. Nothing is so flattering to the vanity as the preference of a child, that naive, spontaneous affection to which it is impossible to impute mercenary motives. And Joel had responded by becoming Celia's abject slave. He ignored the other children for the most part, seldom betraying, unless perhaps by an impatient gesture or a frown, that he was aware of their existence. But his eyes were always ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... in company with delegates from New York, Newark, and Paterson, the Trades' Union held a special meeting and resolved to stand by the "Boston House Wrights" who, "in imitation of the noble and decided stand taken by their Revolutionary Fathers, have determined to throw off the shackles of more mercenary tyrants than theirs." Many societies voted varying sums of money in aid ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... acquisition of additional knowledge by purchasing it from individual Mid[-e]. It is customary with Mid[-e] priests to exact payment for every individual remedy or secret that may be imparted to another who may desire such information. This practice is not entirely based upon mercenary motives, but it is firmly believed that when a secret or remedy has been paid, for it can not be imparted for nothing, as then its virtue would be impaired, if not entirely destroyed, by the manid[-o] or guardian ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... a thing was to happen," remarked Bea, with a little mercenary expectation, "Congreve Hall would be Olive's; just think of it, girls, how grand! and Cousin Roger is immensely wealthy, and there would be no end of splendid things;" and Bea sighed a little, as she spoke, for she was not going to ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... and Zozimus, and banished out of the West by the emperor Honorius, for Pelagianism. Theodosius obliged them to leave Constantinople, notwithstanding the protection of the bishop. Nestorius and his mercenary priests broached also new errors from the pulpit, teaching two distinct persons in Christ, that of God, and that of man, only joined by a moral union, by which he said the Godhead dwelt in the humanity merely as in its temple. Hence he denied the Incarnation, or that God was made man: and said ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... judgment of that art nothing but your commendation of my trifle[344] can give me any occasion to call in question. I do not doubt but you will look over this poem with another eye, and reward it in a different manner, from a mercenary bookseller, who counts the lines he is to purchase[345], and considers nothing but the bulk. I cannot help taking notice, that, besides what the authour may hope for on account of his abilities, he has likewise another claim to your regard, as he lies at present under very ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... seem, Be lost and forfeit to his own esteem? Will he, who may with heroes claim a place, Belie that fame, and to himself be base? Think how august and godlike you did look, When my defence, unbribed, you undertook; But, when an act so brave you disavow, How little, and how mercenary now! ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... Even if she cares—and I don't think she realises yet that she does—her sense of duty to the boys, and other things, will hold her back, and your title and possessions will tell against you. Jean is the least mercenary of creatures Ask her before you leave, and if she refuses you appear to accept her refusal. Don't say you will try again and that sort of thing: it gives a girl a caged feeling. Go away for a while and make no ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... service, and therefore these representations were judged necessary to spur them up to their duty and withal show the Ministry that the people would not behave so tamely as did their mean spirited mercenary representatives, who, perceiving they would lose all their interest and scarce dare venture to return home if they did not follow the instructions given them, made most humble applications to the Ministry, ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... doing?" Daisy asked, and he replied: "Making a fool of a boy, for mercenary purposes of your own. I have seen it ever since we left Liverpool and I tell you I will not allow it, and if you persist in luring Allen to your side on all occasions, and throw over him the glamour of your charms, the family ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... himself an entire page and a half is devoted to an elaborate peroration in one huge sentence, denouncing him in such terms as "pettifogging," "littleness," "pique," "secret and envenomed blows," "slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn," "trammels of servility," "lies," "garbage," etc. etc. The Duke of Wellington he always speaks of as a brainless noodle, forgetting apparently that the description does not make his idol's defeat more creditable to the vanquished. As for the character of Gifford, and the earlier "Letter ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... messengers. It was not till April 23rd that he left Rouen, and the stay for the next day was at Evreux, where he had a most untoward experience. It chanced that a company of English sailors, who appear to have been serving as a mercenary troop of artillery in the French army, heard of the Chancellor's arrival. The drunken crowd got out of hand, and vague memories of the naval pay of which they had been bilked prompted them to take vengeance for old arrears upon the luckless Chancellor, whom they deemed responsible ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... Hesitation" (inspired by the Shaw Monument in Boston, the work of Saint-Gaudens), "The Brute," "The Daguerreotype," and "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines." In this last poem throb and surge the mingled emotions of pride and shame which the best minds in the country felt at the time—shame at our mercenary course, and pride in the fine behavior of our soldiers. It is true we made some pretense of indemnifying Spain by paying her twenty million dollars, which was much like the course of a boy who throws another boy down and forcibly ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... half-humorous bitterness in his voice that Margaret noted silently. So (she thought) he had hoped for a moment that at the last Frederick R. Woods had relented toward him. It grieved her, in a dull fashion, to see him so mercenary. It grieved her—though she would have denied it emphatically—to see him so disappointed. Since he wanted the money so much, she would have liked for him to have had it, worthless as he was, for the sake of the boy ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... face. Next time I come to attend to your wounds, O Prince, I trust that they will be in front, and not behind. One word more, if you will be advised by me you will not threaten that Captain whom you call a Gentile and a mercenary, lest you should learn that it is not always well to be a coward, of ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... wishing me better health and a safe journey back to Toronto. No sooner had they left than I began to breathe more freely the air of liberty. I felt like a prisoner when liberated from his shackled bonds. I was no longer a mercenary. I was indeed exalted above the ranks, and felt myself once more as a man:—And wherefore, may I ask? Let ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... increased ardour,—"never, till I receive from your own lips the answer which is to make me the happiest or the most miserable of mankind. Hear me, adorable girl! You know not the extent of my devotion. No mercenary consideration influences me. Love—admiration for your matchless beauty alone sways me. Let your father—if he chooses, leave all his wealth to his adopted son. I care not. Possessed of you, I shall have a treasure such ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... its proportions as it was vast in its extent, and brought to every purpose the same forces of character and preternatural energy of intelligence; but Soult had no love for civil duties, but little capacity for them, and he accepted place as a gratification of vanity or a means of success in mercenary aims. We see in all his private and political life "the soilure of his revolutionary origin,"—proofs that he loved money and power far more than he loved honor, and himself far more ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... in the heart, you see, Serena. There is not a more mercenary race under the sun than the clergy. They all marry for money. I can mention quite a dozen; his own uncle at the head of them. Now, you cannot suppose that he married Mrs Jonathan Prothero for anything but her fortune and ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... backers of the Fair showed no mercenary temper. The architects, too, worked with public spirit and zeal which money never could have elicited. Notwithstanding the World's Fair was not financially a "success," this was rather to the credit of its unstinted magnificence ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... hospital was almost always full of patients; his school had begun to come back to him again, for the gratitude of his warm-hearted Galician people, in return for his many services to their sick and suffering, sufficed to overcome their fear of the Polish priest, whose unpriestly habits and whose mercenary spirit were fast turning against him even the most loyal of his people. In the expressive words of old Portnoff, who, it is to be feared, had little religion in his soul, was summed up the general opinion: ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... hand, that when the infantry in a state become more valuable than the cavalry, the power of the aristocracy is diminished, and equal rights can no longer be withheld from the people. The employment of mercenary soldiers in modern times renders these observations no longer applicable; but in the military states of antiquity, where the citizens themselves served as soldiers, there are innumerable examples of this mutual connection ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... a simpleton, and will remain a simpleton, gentlemen. What I have imagined on a big scale, he accomplishes on a small one in his petty, mercenary manner. It went to my heart when I saw him fidgeting about the machine, as if it were nothing more than a willow-pipe, and meanwhile the farm goes to ruin. Oh, gentlemen! you see me here a cripple, but ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... who still held Egypt. During the conflict between the Mamelukes and the sultan Selim I., he considered it more prudent to transfer himself to Tunis. The incessant conflicts among the Berber princes of northern Africa gave him employment as a mercenary, which he varied by piratical raids on the trade of the Christians. At Tunis he was joined by Khizr, who took, or was endowed with, the name of Khair-ed-Din. Isaak soon followed his brothers. Arouj and Khair-ed-Din joined the exiled Moors of Granada in raids on the Spanish coast. They also ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... the legislation initiated or supported by women in every country where women vote—and you will see one unbroken line of social service. Not self-interest—not mercenary profit—not competition; but one steady upward pressure; the visible purpose to ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... here should be hasty marriages, mercenary marriages, marriages entered into unwillingly after pregnancy had occurred, as well as marriages where coercion was a factor for ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... and demanded immense sums as the purchase of peace. Neither tyrant nor common wealth maintained a force sufficient to resist them; and if other northern mercenaries were engaged to oppose them, it was only to recruit the standards of the freebooters with deserters. Mercenary fought not mercenary—nor German, German: and greater pay, and more unbridled rapine, made the tents of the "Companies" far more attractive than the regulated stipends of a city, or the dull fortress and impoverished coffers of a chief. Werner, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... humanity. It had the effect which he no doubt intended it should, and that was to secure the same treatment for his soldiers when captured, that the civilized world acknowledged due to prisoners of war. He was in no sense mercenary. He expended nine-tenths of his fortune for his country's freedom, and when voted a million dollars by Congress he promptly declined it. He was always magnanimous, even to his bitterest enemies. He died comparatively poor. His remains sleep ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... reasonable to explain the motives of the present publication, and must rely for credit on the good nature of my readers. The project is not a mercenary one. Nobody relies for subsistence on its success, nor does the editor put anything but his reputation at stake. At the same time, he cannot but be desirous of an ample subscription, not merely because pecuniary profit is acceptable, but because this is the best ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... soul to the devil, I doubt not," said Luke, fiercely stamping the ground. "Let us be gone. We need not his mercenary aid. We will do ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Jacob) in this play, above the genius which generally appears in the other works of this author; but he has perverted the characters of Ovid, in making Daphne, the chaste favourite of Diana, a whore, and a jilt; and fair Syrene to lose her reputation, in the unknown ignominy of an envious, mercenary, infamous ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... late in history that with the discovery of the possibilities of coal there was a great boom in the demand for industrial machinery. At the same time there were thrown up the most marvelous advances in physics and chemistry. Recurring War became not the clashes of mercenary armies, but the catapulting of whole nations at each other. New destructive devices out of the laboratories were raised into the commandants of the course of history. Then science ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... a manor in Surrey, properly Fulke's. Hall, and so called from Fulke de Breaute, the notorious mercenary follower of King John. The manor house was afterwards known as Copped or Copt Hall. Sir Samuel Morland obtained a lease of the place, and King Charles made him Master of Mechanics, and here "he (Morland), anno 1667, built a fine room," says ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... be genuine,—that feeling that she could not be to him what she had been to others? It must have been abundantly clear to her that had she chosen to accept from him what he had offered her, she might have amply satisfied any mercenary views, the most exorbitant. Therefore her views and her feelings ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... opportunities offered to him, rather then by communicating it to others, make himself obnoxious to their discovery. But if he should communicate to others, 'tis more probable he would communicate it to meaner, and more Mercenary persons, as Apothecaries and Nurses, at a smaller rate and with more security, then reveal such secrets to Physicians, Men of Honour, and Honesty. Furthermore, if any mans life be suspected to be taken away with Poyson, and by opening the ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... indolent or mercenary creature, No one more cordially detested the life of dependence than he. He always thought that his father had discharged all the duties of that relation in nourishing his childhood and giving him a good education. Whatever has been since bestowed, he considered as ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... once. It was very hard of heart, to my mind, I remember. It was an old servant even then; and I felt as though it ought to show some sorrow; as though it wanted sympathy with us in our distress, and were a dull, heartless, mercenary creature. Ah! how soon I learnt to know that in its ceaseless going on, and in its being checked or stayed by nothing, lay its greatest kindness, and the only balm for grief and wounded peace ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... hounds that pass in full cry. So, when we talk of "the attitude of England," we have a tolerably defined idea, made up of the collective aspect of the unsympathetic Government, of the mendacious and insolent press, of the mercenary trading allies of the Rebels, of the hostile armaments which have sailed from British ports, of the undisguised enmity of many of her colonists, neighbors of the North as well as neighbors of the South; all of which shape themselves into an image having very much ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... cruel to you and to Edith that I should cause pain to your cousin, and make him think me insincere and mercenary?" ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... fault itself which biases the judgment. The faculty, or passion, which misleads one becomes a part of his judging faculty, and cannot condemn itself. The miser cannot realize the baseness of his avarice, nor the mercenary soldier the enormity of war. Nor can a defective faculty assist in realizing the defect. The color-blind cannot appreciate painting, the thief cannot appreciate integrity, the brutal wife-beater cannot appreciate love, and a Napoleon cannot ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... of his cigar towards the fire. It fell short in the grate. He picked it up and rammed it deep into the burning coals. He looked a poor, old, pitiful child, uttering embittered heresies. "All women are mercenary; all of them except my wife and daughters. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... young lady, growing stronger, in proportion to the difficulty of gaining her father's assent, he, subsequently, offered five or six horses for her. But even this munificent price was rejected by the mercenary father. Black Hawk now gave up the negociation, not a little surprised, at the high value which the white ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... ability, and fidelity could not be suspected. On the next day (January 25) the Governor devoted a despatch to Lord Hillsborough to remarks upon the press, and especially the "Boston Gazette" and Edes and Gill—"They may be said to be no more than mercenary printers," are the Governor's words,—"but they have been and still are the trumpeters of sedition, and have been made the apparent instruments of raising that flame in America which has given so much trouble and is still likely to give more to Great Britain and her Colonies"; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... little or no reward; and there being no political rank that a man of refinement would care for, men must live for money, or live altogether for another state of being. But I have told you, at the same time, Martha, that, notwithstanding all this, I believe the American a less mercenary being, in the ordinary sense of the word, than the European; that two men might be bought, for instance, in any European country, for one here. This last I suppose to be the result of the facility of making a living, ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... in dirty stalls, its ragged half-naked worshippers, its holy cesspool known as "The Well of Knowledge," its hideous, leprosy-smitten beggars, its numerous emblems of its lustful god Krishna, and its mercenary priests, {208} is a good illustration. And the famous Monkey Temple (dedicated like the Kalighat to Mother Kali) I found no more attractive. This temple is open to the sky and the most loathsome collection of dirty monkeys that I have ever ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... this dungeon, here within this same dungeon will she lie to the resurrection, and in that case her prison-doors have already closed upon her for ever. The man, who perhaps had some rough kindness in his nature, though tainted by the mercenary feelings too inevitably belonging to his situation, seemed to guess at the character of my ruminations by the change of my countenance, for he expressed some pity for my being 'in so much trouble;' and it seemed ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... or him. Still, as she knew her mother was not overscrupulous, and any stick was good enough wherewith to beat Claverhouse, she would like to know, if only to gratify a woman's curiosity, whether Claverhouse was really going to marry this kinswoman of his, and, in passing, whether he was the mercenary adventurer of her ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... military company, which followed after the music, and formed the honorary escort of the procession. This body of soldiery—which still sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honourable fame—was composed of no mercenary materials. Its ranks were filled with gentlemen who felt the stirrings of martial impulse, and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms, where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... greatest variety of strongly developed and contradictory qualities? For example, if it was Mildred's latent courage rescued her from Siddall, was it not her strong tendency to vacillation that saved her from a loveless and mercenary marriage to Stanley Baird? Perhaps the deep underlying truth is that all unusual people have in common the character that centers a powerful aversion to stagnation; thus, now by their strong qualities, now by their weaknesses, they ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... Louise Lambert, a girl for whom he had never had a spark of affection. Louise was good-looking, it was true, but could he sacrifice his happiness; could he ever cut himself adrift from Dorise for mercenary motives—in order to get back what was surely by right ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... is no need of specifying particulars in this class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and the examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to the reader's reflection, with the general remark, that this mercenary benefit is one which has respect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he may be fed, but that he ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... The mercenary, meanwhile, stood blandly smiling at the party, showing at least a fine array of teeth, and wearing the patient, attentive air of one who realizes himself to be under discussion, yet does not understand what is ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... always mercenary, though they have that reputation with some. I should like, by the way, to find out who ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - or, Jacob Marlowe's Secret • Horatio Alger
... attractions had won her heart and her allegiance, and that she, and not himself, was the victim. He had tried to use her in the accomplishment of outside purposes; to make a tool of her in carrying forward his mercenary or knavish ends. Other men had striven to hide their unlovely affairs from her, but the new lover had exposed his, and claimed her assistance in carrying them forward. This was a degradation that she could not submit to. It did not natter her, or minister ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... that a reflection on their former struggles must show them in what point of light the Americans are to be considered. The United Colonies ask no aid or alliances. Let Britain court every, even the most petty and mercenary power in Europe, the United Colonies only ask for what nature surely entitles all men to, a free and uninterrupted commerce and exchange of the superfluities of one country for those of another; and the first power in Europe, which takes advantage of the present favorable ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... this belief rest upon the fact that he seems never to have been estranged in faith from the Roman Catholic Church, but he objected only to certain political and mercenary abuses. The first retraction is written in his style and it certainly contains nothing he could not have signed in Dapitan. In fact, Father Obach says that when he wanted to marry Josefina on her first arrival there, Rizal prepared a practically ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... tattered clothing, their wan forms, here prostrate, there half-raised, were bathed in a steady red glow. High above them, at the windows of the tall houses, now tenanted in every floor by the dead, appeared a few figures (the mercenary guardians of the dying within) bending forward to look out upon the palace opposite—their haggard faces showing pale in the clear moonlight. Sometimes their voices were heard calling in mockery to the mass of people below to break ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... technique. I tried an appeal for instruction. Often an opponent will come over to your side if you just confess, honestly, that he is a better man than you are, and you need his help. What was the road I must take to achieve the same understanding he had achieved? His eyes glittered at that, and a mercenary expression underlay the tone ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... he fixed me with a cold and glittering eye, searching with the chill of space till my financial status stood before him shivering and ashamed. I communed with myself: By his brow he is a thinker, but his intellect has been prostituted to a mercenary exaction of toll from misery. His nerve centres of judgment and will have not been employed in solving the problems of life, but in maintaining his own solvency by the insolvency of others. He trades upon sorrow and draws a livelihood from misfortune. He transmutes ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Tigress, as has been said, was a mercenary and rapacious man, caring no more for a bleeding country than does a bird of prey for a bleeding dove. So long as he obtained the gold of his impoverished countrymen, and eluded the grasp of the blockading fleet that so vigilantly ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... vital force, when they are free to enter and to work in the various departments of the arts. It is the commonest error to think of art as if it stood outside the other activities of life. Under the cloak of art much self-amusement and vulgar self-display tries to justify itself, and many mercenary interests are concerned in stinting its vitality. All living and valuable art is really communal. It must fit into its right place with all phases of human activities, and to do this it must have somewhere in it ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Previously to that time, I am afraid I had counted a little more than was becoming on the ease of my own circumstances, and Lucy's comparative poverty. Not that I had ever supposed her to be in the least mercenary—this I knew to be utterly, totally false—but because the good town of Manhattan, even in 1803, was tant soit peu addicted to dollars, and Lucy's charms would not be likely to attract so many suitors, in the modest setting of a poor country clergyman's means, as in the ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... Fitzgerald, who knew that of all men her husband was usually most free from mercenary feelings and an over-anxiety as to increased wealth, either for himself or for his children; "and I think it would be such a comfort to you. Herbert, you see, is so fond of county business, and so little anxious for what young men generally ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... me a letter, which I destroyed at the time; and which, if I had it now, I should forbear from copying into these pages. Let it be enough for me to relate here, that he never forgave the action by which she thwarted him in his mercenary designs upon me and upon my family; that he diverted from himself the suspicion and disgust of his wife's surviving relatives (whose hostility he had some pecuniary reasons to fear), by accusing his daughter, as he had declared he would accuse her, of having been the real ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... as a book destined to last; he always respected his work, and the care given to it bore no relation to the price it was to fetch. He often expressed a wish that he might labor like the monks in the Middle Ages, without being disturbed by mercenary considerations; that simple shelter, food, and raiment should be provided for himself and for those dependent upon him—he did not foresee any other wants—so that he might devote the whole of his mental energy to subjects worthy of it. But I used to answer ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... afterward her father married again, and through misdirected kindness involved her in a lawsuit, in which she plead her own case and won it; but she left the property with her father, declaring that she cared nothing for it, but only for justice, and that her inheritance might not fall into mercenary hands. She subsequently traveled in Poland, Russia, the Germanic States, Holland, Belgium, France, and England; during which time she witnessed and took part in some interesting and important affairs. While in Berlin she had an interview with the King ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... back to a primitive decision since the war commenced. The decision is the same for both men and nations. They can choose the world or achieve their own souls. They can cast mercenary lots for the raiment of a crucified righteousness or take up their martyrdom as disciples. Those men and nations who have been disciples together can scarcely fail to remain friends when the tragedy is ended. What the fool says in his heart ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... was anxious, but for the good of the great country through which writings on such, important subjects were to be circulated, that they might have the benefit of his labors and best knowledge. Such arguments on the stupid and mercenary tempers of those addressed fell harmless as on a buffalo's hide might a gold-tipped arrow. The book, they thought, answered THEIR purpose sufficiently, for IT SELLS. Other purpose for a book they ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... once the Lombard republics, and had poisoned their vigorous life. The Ezzelinos, Carraras, Gonzagas, Scalas, had crushed the spirit of liberty in the neighborhood of Venice. All this had been accomplished by means of mercenary adventurers, guided only by the love of plunder; while those two luxurious and stately republics—the one an oligarchy, the other a democracy—looked on from their marble palaces, enjoying the refreshing bloodshowers in which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... of a legion, which was stationed in Capernaum. If we look at all the features of his character which come out in the story, we get a very lovable picture of a much more tender heart than might have been supposed to beat under the armour of a mercenary soldier set to overawe a sullen people. 'He loveth our nation,' say the elders of the Jews,—not certainly because of their amiability, but because of the revelation which they possessed. Like a great many others ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... A mercenary man. It is painful to see how rapidly the old simple spirit is dying out in rural districts. Twenty years ago a fisherman would have been charmed to do a little job ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... no deep and double subterfuge in all this. De Stancy took no particular interest in his ancestral portraits; but he was enamoured of Paula to weakness. Perhaps the composition of his love would hardly bear looking into, but it was recklessly frank and not quite mercenary. His photographic scheme was nothing worse than a lover's not too scrupulous contrivance. After the refusal of his request to copy her picture he fumed and fretted at the prospect of Somerset's return before any impression had been made ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... system of the United States was at first a bad one, in tended to secure immediate revenue from the sale of immense pieces at auction, on long credit, at very few points, the land to find its way into the hands of actual settlers only through mercenary speculators. The honest pioneer was therefore at the mercy of these land-sharks, greedy and unpatriotic in ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... shot one of his keen little glances in Austin's direction. "Why, no, not at all, as nearly as I can," he said. "My brother, Austin, made a most unfortunate match; his wife was a mean, mercenary, greedy woman, as hard as nails, and as tough as leather—but handsome, oh, very handsome, as a girl, and clever, I assure you. I have often been almost glad that my brother did not live long enough to see her in her real colors. She married, ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... can have no personal knowledge of the proceedings of the people in my employment at such a time. But I wish to assure you very earnestly, that they are all old servants, well acquainted with my principles and wishes, and that they are under the strongest injunction to avoid any approach to mercenary dealing; and to behave to all comers equally with as much consideration and politeness as they know I should myself display. The recent death of a much-regretted friend of mine, who managed this business for ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... circles, thinking but of accumulation by day, and of ostentatious expenditure by night. I have often heard, that their general voice, had it been raised, would have been hostile to the policy that has prevailed. But it was not raised; and now, when too late, and these mercenary and selfish beings are driven to some action by the loss of their accustomed gains, a large and violent party is forming among them, who loudly condemn the conduct of the Queen and her ministers, and advocate immediate submission to whatever terms Aurelian may impose. This party however, powerful ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... Philo Gubb said. "A fellow can tie a knot, or he can un-tie it, can't he? He can hitch a horse, or he can un-hitch it. And if a man can burgle, he can un-burgle. A mercenary burglar would naturally burgle things out of a house after he had burgled himself in, but a generous-hearted burglar would just as naturally un-burgle things into a house and then un-burgle himself out. That ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... not wait to hear what Zoe might say in reply, but starting up in a fury of indignation, "I would have you to understand, Miss Rosie Travilla," she said, "that I am not the mercenary creature you appear to believe me. I would scorn to apologize in order to secure a gift from Mr. Dinsmore or anybody else; and if he gives me one, I shall not ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... side of the story: The prime purpose of the privateer was to make money for its owners, its officers, and its crew. The whole design and spirit of the calling was mercenary. It inflicted damage on the enemy, but only incidentally to earning dividends for its participants. If Government cruisers had captured twenty-five hundred British vessels, those vessels would have been lost to the enemy ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... play; Correct your cravats, foretops, lock behind: The dress and breeding of the play ne'er mind; For the coarse dauber of the coming scenes To follow life and nature only means, Displays you as you are, makes his fine woman A mercenary jilt and true to no man, Shows men of wit and pleasure of the age Are as dull rogues ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... little Murphys in regular succession; and it had grown to be one of the legendary privileges of the school to furnish the babies with names and baptismal presents. Mrs. Murphy was not entirely mercenary in her yearly request. She appreciated the artistic quality of the names that the girls provided. They had a distinction, that she herself, with her lack of literary training, would never have been able to give. The choosing ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... less perilous position. As the best men of the crew had been sent away to capture the brig, the crews of the two boats were made up of the riff-raff of the crew. Many of them were Englishmen, mere mercenary sailors, who had shipped on the Richard, secretly intending to desert at the first opportunity. Therefore, when night fell, as they were still in the boats trying to pull the "Richard's" head around, they cut the ropes and made off for ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... City Hall clock near by struck eleven. The time had come for returning to their mercenary guardian. Phil shook the sleeping form of Giacomo. The little boy stirred in his sleep, and murmured, "Madre." He had been dreaming of his mother and his far-off Italian home. He woke to the harsh realities of life, four thousand miles away from ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... successor to Miss Overmore remained: it was composed frankly of the fact, of which Mrs. Beale granted the full absurdity, that she was too awfully fond of her stepdaughter to bring herself to see her in vulgar and mercenary hands. The note of this particular danger emboldened Maisie to put in a word for Mrs. Wix, the modest measure of whose avidity she had taken from the first; but Mrs. Beale disposed afresh and effectually of a candidate who would be sure to act in some horrible and insidious way for ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... growing strength enabled him to dismiss this unpopular aid, but he steadily professed the same gratitude and reverence to his adopted father; and till the death of Maurice, the peace and alliance of the two empires were faithfully maintained. [18] Yet the mercenary friendship of the Roman prince had been purchased with costly and important gifts; the strong cities of Martyropolis and Dara [1811] were restored, and the Persarmenians became the willing subjects of an empire, whose eastern ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... me still more now by the proofs of his application to military and political science. He would talk very learnedly of the disposition of armies in the field, of the advantages and disadvantages of the use of mercenary troops, and the best way to defend and the best way to assault a well-walled citadel, so that you would think, to listen to him, that he was some gray old generalissimo steeped in experience, and ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... the boy, Italian in origin and feeling, had almost no education. Throughout his wonderful career he was coarse, sullen, and greedy; nevertheless, as a soldier he was an inspired genius, ranked by many as the peer of Napoleon. Having served France for several years as an Italian mercenary, he resigned in 1789, settled in his native town of Nice, and married; but the stir of arms was irresistible and three years later he volunteered under the tricolor. His comrades at once elected him an officer, and in about a year he was head of a battalion, or colonel in our style. In the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... spirit sank within her, and she bitterly felt the impoverishment of the always scanty means, which deprived her of the power of laying out sums of money on those rites which were universally deemed needful for the repose of souls snatched away in battle. It was a mercenary age among the clergy, and besides, it was the depth of a northern winter, and the funeral rites of the Lady of Whitburn would have been poor and maimed indeed if a whole band of black Benedictine monks had not arrived from Wearmouth, saying they ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was, we may believe, made from no unworthy or mercenary motive, but because he thought that such an indemnity was his due. Some years after (in 1809) the chair of zooelogy, newly formed by the Faculte des Sciences in Paris, was offered to him. Desirable as the salary ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... happen to us Greeks; he was always our friend, and favored us whenever he could, while his son is our avowed enemy and will do his utmost to expel us from the country. If his father had allowed, and he himself had not felt so strongly the importance and value of our mercenary troops, he would have turned us hateful foreigners out long ago. Naukratis and its temples are odious to him. When Amasis is dead our town will hail Cambyses' army with delight, for I have had experience already, in my native town Miletus, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... elation. His was not a mercenary nature, and he had all along thought his comrade too sanguine, though he ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... may know why I have gone to the dogs. She pretended to care greatly for all this, and to be willing to make any sacrifice in return; she had a magnificent chance, for she was being forced into a mercenary marriage with a man she detested. She led me to believe that she would give this up, and break short off, and keep herself free and sacred and pure for me. This was a great honor, and you may believe that I valued it. It turned my head, and I lived only to see my happiness come to pass. She ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... said the maiden, frowning. "Were kindness not looking from thy face, I should think thee a mercenary ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... developing its resources under the protection and the control of its master, while still keeping alive its pride by a great display of luxury. The failure of the Ghent revolt marked the decline of the communal militias, which were no longer able to resist the well disciplined ducal mercenary army. The defeat of Gavere (1453) sealed the fate of citizen armies, just as the Battle of the Golden Spurs (1302) had revealed ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... utilitarianism should become universal, the sad consequence of it to our civilization would be incalculable. Fancy what would become of the virtue of patriotism if officers and men had no higher ambition than to make money! As a patriotic army is the strongest defence of a nation's rights, so a mercenary army is a dreadful danger to a people's liberty, a ready tool in the hand of a tyrant; as heroism with consequent glory is the noble attribute of a patriot, so a mercenary spirit is a stigma on the career of any public officer. ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... a moment when the increasing and unmanageable deficit brought national bankruptcy and confusion to the very door of the state, a course of angry and mercenary pamphleteering on Finance, while connecting him with discontented men of wealth and influence, willing, jointly with the police, to hire or use his ready pen, forced on him education in another important, if unattractive, department of the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... government. We had infused into our laws, our language, and our institutions new vigor for conquest and for human enlightenment. Venality, that dogs great efforts, undoubtedly there was. But the high tide of the conflict showed no mercenary taint. On both sides it was urged from the highest motives of patriotism and of honor and in defense of the popular principle. That principle with us means local self-government and representative union. The rebel yell was because they thought local government in peril. The ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... is the most glittering, ostentatious, and displaying property in the world; and now, if a young man goes courting, the only inquiry is how many negroes he or his lady love owns. The love of slave property is swallowing up every other mercenary possession. Its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth, but indicated the gentleman of leisure who ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... groom. Men who felt that the nation had desperate need of their services; men who voluntarily undertook the risks and perils of a soldier's life, not from any hope of preferment, not from love of adventure or mercenary advancement, but from true patriotism—a sacrifice to meet the nation's call in the hour of her need. But that day soon passed. The tide turned, and clash of arms ceased upon our own frontiers and within ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... domestic concern, and was held to foreshadow a recognition of the independence of the Confederacy. The angry taunts were soon returned. The ruling classes in Great Britain made the discovery that the war was a struggle between chivalrous gentlemen and mercenary counterhoppers and cherished the hope that the failure of the North would discredit, the world over, the democracy which was making uncomfortable claims in England itself. The English trading classes resented the shortage of ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... monarchs, as we do when Nero is condemned by the Senate to be punished more majorum; nor, when that monster was obliged to fly with his wife Sporus, and to drink puddle, were men affected in the same manner as when the venerable Galba, with all his faults and errors, was murdered by a revolted mercenary soldiery. With such things before our eyes, our feelings contradict our theories; and when this is the case, the feelings are true, and the theory is false. What I contend for is, that, in commending the destruction of an absolute monarchy, all the circumstances ought not ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... soldier, sternly. 'Inform me immediately: Are you a mercenary of the tyrant of England, or a friend to liberty? your life depends ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... camp-followers, and then, concentrating our forces and keeping a close watch on the enemy, contrive to snatch the victory. But we must avoid borrowing foreign soldiers to help us." He then quotes from Wei Liao Tzu, ch. 3: "The nominal strength of mercenary troops may be 100,000, but their real value will be not more ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... (Jackeymo) many little delicate attentions—had greatly whetted the cupidity which was in the servant's Italian nature,—a cupidity the more keen because, long debarred its legitimate exercise on his own mercenary interests, he carried it all to the account of ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... But the most shamefully mercenary engagement that I think Amenda ever entered into was one with a 'bus conductor. We were living in the North of London then, and she had a young man, a cheesemonger, who kept a shop in Lupus Street, Chelsea. He could not come ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... the thousand. It is all very pretty for a visitor to tell us that the charm of Cornwall is its primaeval calm, that it seems to sleep an enchanted sleep, and so on; but we who inhabit her wish (and not altogether from mercenary motives) to see her something better than a museum of a dead past. I temporised therefore with those who suggested that Cornwall might yet enrich herself by turning her natural beauty to account: yet even so I had the sense to ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... influences. In the temple of old the swallow found a nest for herself where she might lay her young; but this is the first time we ever knew of the conference of such honors on the Felis domestica. It could not have been anything mercenary that took the old cat into the pulpit, for "poor as a church mouse" has become proverbial. Nothing but lofty aspirations could have taken her there, and a desire that her young should have advantages of high birth. If in the "Historical Society" ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... the Cardinal made some impediment to Arran's appointment as Governor, "alleging that the King be his Testament nominat four Regentis: bot the same on no wise could be verefeit nor provin."—(Hist. p. 169.) Buchanan further confirms this by asserting, that Beaton "having bribed Henry Balfour, a mercenary priest, he, with his assistance, forged a false Will for the King," &c.—(Hist. lib. xv. 1.) This Henry Balfour is the Priest or Chaplain who is mentioned at ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... crime in me, that I stated something of the obscurity of Mr. Hastings's birth. The imputation has no foundation. Can it be believed that any man could be so absurd as to attack a man's birth, when he is accusing his actions? No, I have always spoken of the low, sordid, and mercenary habits in which he was bred; I said nothing of his birth. But, my Lords, I was a good deal surprised when a friend of his and mine yesterday morning put into my hands, who had been attacking Mr. Hastings's life ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... learn more quickly. The result was that I could not be contented with the small salary of my government office. I had to keep up appearances with my companions. So, I drifted into gambling, into sharp tricks—then became a mercenary soldier, an officer, in the continuous revolutions of the southeastern part of Europe. I sank deeper and at last, in one serious escapade, I managed to have myself reported dead, so as to quiet the heartaches of my mother, who believed I was killed on the battlefield. There is the miserable ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... alarms; whilst a good man enjoys an uninterrupted peace and serenity of mind, which excels the other not only in duration, but in sense of pleasure too. As for the other sort of converse, that which consists in expression of itself to others, Pindar says very well, that it was not mercenary in old time, nor indeed is it so now; but by the baseness and ambition of a few it is made use of to serve their poor secular interests. For if the poets represent Venus herself as much offended with those who make a trade and traffic of the passion of love, how much ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... between two countries, by the same arts of double-dealing by which he caused dissensions among the commissioners in Paris, and distractions in America. But his life has been fraud, and his character has been that of a plodding, plotting, cringing mercenary, capable of any disguise that suited his purpose. His final detection has very happily cleared up those mistakes, and removed that uneasiness, which his unprincipled conduct occasioned. Every one now sees him in the same light; for towards friends or enemies he acted with the same deception ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... spiritual establishment, but it was decorous, and Randall had such an affection and respect for the innocence of his sister's young son, that he could not bear to have him exposed to the company of one habituated to the licentiousness of the mercenary soldier. At first the jester hoped to remove the lads from the danger, for the brief remainder of their stay, by making double exertion to obtain places for them at any diversion which might be going on when their day's work was ended, and of these, of course, there ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date. Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something necessary which other people would always provide. She was not in the habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements were no direct clew to fact, why, they were not intended in that light—they were among ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... swiftly to its conclusion down in Vera Cruz. Alan Massey had found his cousin in a wretched, vermin haunted shack, nursed in haphazard fashion by a slovenly, ignorant half-breed woman under the ostensible professional care of a mercenary, incompetent, drunken Mexican doctor who cared little enough whether the dog of an American lived or died so long as he himself continued to get the generous checks from a certain newspaper in New York City. The ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... The professional medium, paid to display certain powers, which are in any case extremely uncertain in their response to the call for them, invariably begins to imitate them when they fail. The mediums are invariably persons of an inferior order of intellect, avid of notoriety, and mostly mercenary, so that the results of the consultations with them were almost sufficient to deter serious-minded people from dealing with them a second time, while the people who formed the regular circles and had made a sect with a devotional character in it, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... their beloved (if I may say element) woods. It would give me great pleasure to relate something more to the advantage of this gentleman who is, in many respects, possessed of several virtues, and particularly all the military ones, except prudence, and entirely free of all mercenary principles; but, as his conduct on this occasion is universally condemned by all those who are not immediately dependent on him, truth obliges me to state matters as I believe, they really stood; more especially as it is not said he advised with any of those who had a right to be consulted ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... finer country is nowhere to be found. The people are learned also, and skilful in the philosophy of the Greeks: but giving themselves up entirely to luxury, they eat and drink every man under his own vine, and under his own fig-tree. They have mercenary soldiers, hired from all nations, whom they call Barbarians, to fight against the soldan, king of the children of Togorma, who are commonly called Turks; for the Grecians themselves, through sloth and luxury, have become quite effeminate and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... not mere passive obedience and bravery; that, so far from this, no country is in a healthy state which has separated, even in a small degree, her civil from her military power. All states of the world, however great, fall at once when they use mercenary armies; and although it is a less instant form of error (because involving no national taint of cowardice), it is yet an error no less ultimately fatal—it is the error especially of modern times, of which we cannot yet know all the calamitous consequences—to take away the best blood and strength ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... a matter and the coarse mercenary nature of the woman jarred upon the poet's sensitive soul. The plain fact that he hadn't got twenty guineas in the world could not be gainsaid. But he had rich friends. If he could only interest them in this protegee of his something might be done. ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... not a good man; so do you, I will venture to say, Claudia. And I know that he marries you for some selfish or mercenary motive—your money, possibly. And so also do you know it, Claudia, I ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... our common men; For many of our princes (wo the while!) Lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood; So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs In blood of princes." (Henry ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... Marriage.—Included here should be hasty marriages, mercenary marriages, marriages entered into unwillingly after pregnancy had occurred, as well as marriages where coercion was a factor for ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... continual custom, which is soon prescribed which though it be not true, yet I forbear to note any deficiences; for the Olympian games are down long since, and the mediocrity of these things is for use; as for the excellency of them it serveth for the most part but for mercenary ostentation. ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... above that one of the abuses which came into large practice from the middle period of the Tokugawa Bakufu was the adoption of children of ignoble birth into samurai families in consideration of monetary payments by their parents. This mercenary custom was strictly interdicted by the Matsudaira regent, who justly saw in it a danger to the solidity of the military class. But it does not appear that his veto ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Before starting, they sent their booty back to Golden Island, under a guard of twelve men. Most of the Indians fell off at this time, for they had "got from us what knives, scissors, axes, needles and beads they could." Old King Golden Cap, and his son, were less mercenary, and stayed with the colours, being "resolved to go to Panama, out of the desire they had to see that place taken and sacked." They may have followed the buccaneers in order to kill the Spaniard who had raped the princess, for that worthy was ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... are associated with them, and thus habituated to all the forms of a civilized state. Mr. Brooke, with a rare courage and wisdom, has always trusted for his safety to the good-will of his native subjects. He has never been sustained by mercenary bands. At a time when piratical violence was most threatening, when disorders were yet rife in his own state, and when his subjects but poorly appreciated his benevolent purposes towards them, his whole English force ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... by those who take it up from mercenary motives, for wealth and fame, or think to build a baseless fabric of their own on another's foundation. They cannot put the "new wine into old bottles;" they can never engraft Truth into error. Such students come to my College to ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... by ancient writers that the strength of a free state consists in its infantry; and, on the other hand, that when the infantry in a state become more valuable than the cavalry, the power of the aristocracy is diminished, and equal rights can no longer be withheld from the people. The employment of mercenary soldiers in modern times renders these observations no longer applicable; but in the military states of antiquity, where the citizens themselves served as soldiers, there are innumerable examples of this mutual connection between political and military ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... baiting of Uncle Martin's philosophy died away, his heart sank with sorrowful thoughts of Phillida and her sufferings, and with indignant and mortifying thoughts of how she would inevitably be associated in people's minds with mercenary quacks and disciples of ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... shamefully mercenary engagement that I think Amenda ever entered into was one with a 'bus conductor. We were living in the North of London then, and she had a young man, a cheesemonger, who kept a shop in Lupus Street, Chelsea. He could not come up to her because of ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... the quarries, and also near the emerald mines on the borders of the Red Sea. Hundreds of hired labourers, slaves, and condemned criminals here led a wretched existence under the rule of some eight or ten overseers, and the brutal surveillance of a company of Libyan or negro mercenary troops. The least political disturbance in Egypt, an unsuccessful campaign, or any untoward incident of a troubled reign, sufficed to break up the precarious stability of these remote establishments. The Bedawin ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... narrowly. Her own life was done; Alan's death had made her task impossible; but if Dolly could fill her place for the sake of humanity, she would not regret it. Enough for her to have martyred herself; she asked no mercenary palm and crown ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... offenders; let there be no pretenses or defaults on your own part for you can not harshly scrutinize the conduct of others, unless you have done what is right yourselves. Why, think you, do all the generals [Footnote: A system of employing mercenary troops sprang up at the close of the Peloponnesian war, when there were numerous Grecian bands accustomed to warfare and seeking employment. Such troops were eagerly sought for by the Persian satraps and their king, by such men as Jason of Pherae, ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... I am guilty— to love liberty and freedom of conscience, to hate tyranny and oppression, then I am indeed a criminal," he answered in an unshaken voice. "You call me a spy and load me with opprobrium. It was necessary to gain information as to the movements of your mercenary army: twice have I obtained that information and carried it to our noble general. My only regret is that I have not succeeded a third time in so doing; but understand that though I have thus laboured to injure you secretly, I have ever fought openly ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... ardent assurance she had just now believed, that he had been forced to shed the blood of an impious wretch, in obedience to an overpowering fate, was capable of allowing the noblest of men to be beheaded, unjudged, merely to please a mercenary favorite! His confession, then, had been nothing but a revolting piece of acting! He had endeavored to vanquish the disgust she felt for him merely to ensnare her and her healing hand more surely—as his plaything, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... dreamt of that first kiss, which was to consecrate our engagement, and I knew not on what spot I should put my lips, that were madly thirsting for her beauty and her youth. Not on her forehead, that was accustomed to family caresses, nor on her light hair, which mercenary hands had dressed, nor on her eyes, whose turned up lashes looked like little wings, because that would have made me think of the farewell caress which closes the eyelids of some dead woman whom one has adored, nor her lovely mouth, which I will ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... not the death of a sinner, but that he be converted and live. If the man abode in fear alone, it would not suffice to give him life, nor would he attain to the perfect favour of his Lord; but he would be a mercenary servant. Nor ought he to remain only in the love of the fruit and the consolation which he might receive from his Lord, after he has been made a friend; for this kind of love would not be strong, ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... which guide your conduct; if you are patient because you expect to make something eventually out of Crimsworth, notwithstanding his tyranny, or perhaps by means of it, you are what the world calls an interested and mercenary, but may be a very wise fellow; if you are patient because you think it a duty to meet insult with submission, you are an essential sap, and in no shape the man for my money; if you are patient because your nature ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... signorina?' he said. 'Young people and beautiful people should not be mercenary. Poor child! you had ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... appearance, with all the gaiety, grace, and charm that, in spite our popular impression to the contrary, are not seldom found amongst the nobles of his country. His undoubted wealth and position redeemed his suit from any appearance of being inspired by a mercenary motive. Indeed, he was accustomed himself to be pursued, and Florence and he recognised in each other ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... rights of private citizens violated, and the titles of all landed property declared void; the voice of complaint stifled by restrictions on the press; and, finally, disaffection overawed by the first band of mercenary troops that ever marched on our free soil. For two years our ancestors were kept in sullen submission by that filial love which had invariably secured their allegiance to the mother country, whether its head chanced to be a Parliament, ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... permitted you to acquire. Remember that the men who wish to rule over you are they who, in pursuit of this plan of despotism, annulled the sacred contracts which they had made with your ancestors; conveyed into your cities a mercenary soldiery to compel you to submission by insult and murder; who called your ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... Mama, Mameluke; spahee[obs3], spahi[obs3], Cossack, Croat, Pandoz. irregular, guerilla, partisan, condottiere[obs3]; franctireur[Fr], tirailleur[obs3], bashi-bazouk; vietminh[guerilla organization names: list], vietcong; shining path; contras; huk, hukbalahap. mercenary, soldier of fortune; hired gun, gunfighter, gunslinger; bushwhacker, free lance, companion; Hessian. hit man[criminals specializing in violence: see bad man], torpedo, soldier. levy, draught; Landwehr[Ger], Landsturm[Ger]; conscript, recruit, cadet, raw levies. infantry, infantryman, private, private ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the pure love of Jesus, unmixed with any gain or love of self! Should not all they be called mercenary who are always seeking consolations? Do they not prove themselves lovers of self more than of Christ who are always seeking their own gain and advantage? Where shall be found one who is willing to ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... obscurely as a form of magnanimity; and that, in general, the gentler virtues, so prominent in Christianity, have little place in the list. The virtues are chiefly aristocratic. Favourable conditions are needed for their cultivation. They are not possible for a slave, and hardly for those engaged in 'mercenary occupations.'[4] Further, it may be remarked that habit of itself does not make a man virtuous. Morality cannot consist in a mere succession of customary acts. 'One good custom would corrupt the world,' ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... tried an appeal for instruction. Often an opponent will come over to your side if you just confess, honestly, that he is a better man than you are, and you need his help. What was the road I must take to achieve the same understanding he had achieved? His eyes glittered at that, and a mercenary expression underlay the ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... life, so many and so fierce, may sweep us asunder at any moment. I may become mercenary, and choose a richer wife even than yourself; or you may turn from me to some one more ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... proprietors or merchants. They are people of very temperate habits, but they are passionately fond of gaming, and in this respect they have bequeathed a dangerous inheritance to the Creoles. The pride and mercenary spirit which distinguished the Spaniards before the independence are now broken, if not entirely subdued. The intercourse between them and the natives, though still somewhat constrained, is every year becoming more and more friendly, as the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... the memory of a dead woman, for one who first hazarded her life and then gave it freely to save the lives of others—for such was the charge for which she died—is not a woman to restrict her gracious ministrations of mercy for mercenary motives. ...
— The Case of Edith Cavell - A Study of the Rights of Non-Combatants • James M. Beck
... show of reason for his political and military morality, for he only chose to execute the evil which had been practised upon himself. His father had been beggared, his mother had died of spite and despair, he had himself been reduced from the rank of a sovereign to that of a mercenary soldier, by spoliations made in time of truce. He was reputed a man of very decided abilities, and was distinguished for headlong bravery. His rashness and personal daring were thought the only drawbacks to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... during a period of several weeks, the matter ended in the purchase of the papers outright, with unreserved permission to show them for copying or explanation to anybody who might be selected. Wilnoti was not of a mercenary disposition, and after the first negotiations the chief difficulty was to overcome his objection to parting with his father's handwriting, but it was an essential point to get the originals, and he was allowed to copy some of the more important formulas, ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... own esteem? Will he, who may with heroes claim a place, Belie that fame, and to himself be base? Think how august and godlike you did look, When my defence, unbribed, you undertook; But, when an act so brave you disavow, How little, and how mercenary now! ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... the man before him was more mercenary and wicked than he thought could be possible. He buried both his sons almost at the same hour, but he still found time and opportunity to inquire about the legacy for which he had made ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... not feel much elation. His was not a mercenary nature, and he had all along thought his comrade too sanguine, though he meant to ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... Beg's influence that the Moghul portion of the Imperial troops joined him immediately, and left the unfortunate Emperor to be protected exclusively by unbelievers, under the general direction of the Gosain leader, Himmat Bahadur. This mercenary, not perhaps having his heart in the cause, terrified by the threats of the Pathan, and (it is possible) tampered with by traitors about the emperor's person, soon withdrew; and the confederate chiefs at once crossed the river, and ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... II., would have appointed him Commander-in-Chief of her fleet, and covered him with honours, even as she did her Scotch Admiral Gleig, and that other yet more famous sea-dog, king of corsairs, Paul Jones. It would be unjust to sneer at Hobart as a mercenary. His was no more a hired sword than were the blades of Schomberg and Berwick, of Maurice de Saxe and Eugene of Savoy. When there was fighting to be done Hobart liked to be in it—that is all. Of the fearless, dashing, adventurous Englishman, ready to go anywhere ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... of this report, relating to the Duke, was yet of more importance. The greatest part of Her Majesty's forces in Flanders were mercenary troops, hired from several princes of Europe. It was found that the Queen's general subtracted two and a half per cent, out of the pay of those troops, for his own use, which amounted to a great annual sum. The Duke of Marlborough, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... the mercenary reported to Rowlett what had occurred on that afternoon he omitted any mention of the knife, but much later he carelessly turned it over to its owner—and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... rotten, decaying; vitiated, depraved, dissolute, venal, unprincipled, unscrupulous, vicious, purchasable, mercenary. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... to ask whether you can have a sharp and also a dull knowledge, and whether you can know near, but not at a distance, or know the same thing with more or less intensity, and so on without end. Such questions might have been put to you by a light-armed mercenary, who argued for pay. He would have lain in wait for you, and when you took up the position, that sense is knowledge, he would have made an assault upon hearing, smelling, and the other senses;—he would have shown you no mercy; and while you were ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... "Only, look at the situation. She comes in, filled with the idea that it was Cornish who proposed this plan, and that he did it for her sake. I couldn't very well say, like a boy, ''Twasn't Cornish; 'twas me!', could I? And in showing her the purely mercenary character of the deal, I'm put in the position of backcapping Cornish, and she goes away with that impression! Oh, Al, what's the good of being able to convince and control every one else, if you are always further off than Kamschatka with the only ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... is a much better rendering of the famous ode than nine-tenths of its more pompous competitors; and the allusions to the perfidious qualities of Trinity Audit Ale and the mercenary conduct of the Fellows of Clare need no explanation for Cambridge readers, and little for others. But it may be fairly objected that this is not, in strictness, a parody. That is true, and indeed as a parodist Sir George Trevelyan ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... and took his eldest with him; but wanting somebody to keep his house and take care of his daughters, he took Marcia again, who was now a rich widow, Hortensius being dead, and having left her all his estate. Caesar afterward made use of this action also, to reproach him with covetousness, and a mercenary design in his marriage. "For," said he, "if he had need of wife, why did he part with her? And if he had not, why did he take her again? Unless he gave her only as a bait to Hortensius; and lent her when she was young, to have her again when she was ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... of the Court. In February, 1664, he saw acted "The Indian Queen" of Sir Robert Howard and Dryden—"a tragedy well written, so beautiful with rich scenes as the like had never been seen here, or haply (except rarely) elsewhere on a mercenary theatre." At a later date, one Robert Aggas, a painter of some fame, is known to have executed scenes for the theatre in Dorset Garden. Among other scene-painters of distinction, pertaining to a comparatively ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... that the house of God and the depository of the dead, should be so shamefully assigned over to the influence of Mammon, and a price of admission as into a place of public amusement, exacted by those to whose mercenary government the ancient structure of Westminster Abbey had devolved. "Was it thus, always," asked he, "from the time of Henry IIId?" To this enquiry, the guide replied merely by a shrug of his shoulders, rather indicative of contempt than ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... only take their proper place in the work of human development when, freed from all mercenary bondage, they will be exclusively cultivated by those who love them, and for ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... sing of geese: of the Biblical goose, that blew his bugle from the roof of Noah's Ark; the classical goose that picked his livelihood along the shores of the AEgean; of the historical goose, that squawked to save old Rome; the mercenary goose, laying the golden egg; and, finally, ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... under French auspices, had taken the arms away from the Germans but left arms with the Poles. Added to that, guns, machine-guns, rifles, and ammunition, were run over into the plebiscite area, and a mercenary "insurrectionary" army was raised, partly from the local Polish population and partly from Poland proper. An army which the French Government held to be capable of intimidating the League of Nations garrison of ten thousand fully equipped ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... Augereau in action was utterly uncertain, in morals pompous and wrong-headed; Murat knew where and how the great prizes were to be found, and was as dashing and venturesome as he was selfish and worldly-wise. The Russian generals were plodding disciples of routine. Bennigsen was an able Hanoverian mercenary, despising alike his Livonian colleague, Buxhoewden, and his chief, the servile Russian marshal, Kamenski. The Prussian general Lestocq was capable but inexperienced. The chief and his subordinate ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... taken a very minor part in light opera. She was American by birth, young, slim, and spoke like a lady. Her hair was dyed; her breasts padded. She acted sentiment, but was less affectionate than E.B. I met her when she was out of a job. I gave her L2 whenever I met her. She was not mercenary. She was sensual. I became very much in love with her. I discovered her, however, writing letters to a fellow whom I had met one day when I was walking with her. He was only an acquaintance, but the brother of my most intimate ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... peasantry to defend the state; it could only produce the riches which might attract its enemies. Hence the constant complaint, that Italy had ceased to be able to furnish soldiers to the legionary armies; hence the entrusting the defence of the frontier to mercenary barbarians, and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... to adopt oligarchical methods; then the friend of the people appears; the protector, champion, and hero, by a familiar process becomes a military autocrat, who himself battens, as must also his mercenary soldiery, on the citizens; and our unhappy Demos finds that it has jumped out of the reek into the fire. Now our democratical man was swayed by the devices and moods of the moment; his son will be swayed by the most irrational and most ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... grave? Hell stalks abroad: the lash resounds on a slave's naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labor, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good-night, or, neglected in some ostentatious hospital, breathes its last amidst the laugh of mercenary attendants." ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... He has vegetables for the table and plenty of flowers for cutting. The latter preclude any argument over whether his garden pays since, oddly enough, the subject of a flower garden never seems to take a mercenary turn. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... have found Cowardice in the number of his infirmities.—We will try if we cannot redeem him from this universal censure.—Let the venal corporation of authors duck to the golden fool, let them shape their sordid quills to the mercenary ends of unmerited praise, or of baser detraction;—old Jack, though deserted by princes, though censured by an ungrateful world, and persecuted from age to age by Critic and Commentator, and though never rich enough to hire one literary prostitute, shall find a ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... though naturally careful of all put under her own hands, she was at heart very far from being either selfish or mercenary. In fact, the silver cup was at that hour of more real interest to her. It would be a part of her old home in her new home. It was connected with her life memories, and it made a portion of her ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... received to his communion Celestius and Julian, who had been condemned by the popes Innocent and Zozimus, and banished out of the West by the emperor Honorius, for Pelagianism. Theodosius obliged them to leave Constantinople, notwithstanding the protection of the bishop. Nestorius and his mercenary priests broached also new errors from the pulpit, teaching two distinct persons in Christ, that of God, and that of man, only joined by a moral union, by which he said the Godhead dwelt in the humanity merely as in its temple. Hence he denied ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... accomplish the acquisition of additional knowledge by purchasing it from individual Mid[-e]. It is customary with Mid[-e] priests to exact payment for every individual remedy or secret that may be imparted to another who may desire such information. This practice is not entirely based upon mercenary motives, but it is firmly believed that when a secret or remedy has been paid, for it can not be imparted for nothing, as then its virtue would be impaired, if not entirely destroyed, by the manid[-o] or guardian ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... the introduction of slaves into this country, sacrificed the injunctions of Revelation to mercenary ambition, and for temporary interest bestowed a lasting disgrace upon posterity. Time and perseverance may eradicate the evil, which is increasing in importance, and which not only has brought obloquy upon our national character, but threatens to involve us in all disastrous results ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... noble stream that it "rolls mingling with his fame forever"? The prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the fact that a great sea-monster, in the shape of a steamboat, takes him, sitting in the car, on its back, and swims across with him like Arion's dolphin,—also that mercenary men on board offer him canvas-backs in the season, and ducks of lower degree at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... disappeared, the intense interest in menstruation vanished, and now, rather than being held in fear and awe, the physicians of to-day constantly see the results of copulation during this period. The uncontrollable desire of the husband and the mercenary aims of the prostitute furnish examples ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... mussels, and are of all shapes and sizes, out of which might be selected hundreds of perfect spheres, from the size of bird-shot to that of a cherry. What splendid necklaces must the latter have made! But, alas for the mercenary collector, all are ruined by fire,—a fact advantageous to science. Like nearly all the other objects, every pearl ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... discovered that Miss Pride accounted her a rival, thanks to a cherished delusion, wholly of independent inspiration, that dear Abigail was a forlorn widow-woman in sore want of some thoroughly unselfish friend—somebody whose devotion could not possibly be thought mercenary—somebody very much ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... their country's service, and therefore these representations were judged necessary to spur them up to their duty and withal show the Ministry that the people would not behave so tamely as did their mean spirited mercenary representatives, who, perceiving they would lose all their interest and scarce dare venture to return home if they did not follow the instructions given them, made most humble applications to the Ministry, who on the other hand being apprehensive the resentment might be carried to some height, ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson
... there wasn't any. The news is, that Annabel will never forgive me, and as I'm here solely as her guest, my guesting-time will be brief—just long enough to find out what Mr. Gledware decides to do. I oughtn't to have told Annabel that she was mercenary, or that Mr. Gledware was as hard as a stone and as old as M— (I'm not sure how to spell him, but you remember: the oldest man). Yes, I know I oughtn't. If a woman can marry a man when she doesn't love him, it won't change her purpose ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... their works, and harangued for diversion; the eleotesia, where the fragrant oils and ointments were kept for the use of the bathers; and the conisteria, where the wrestlers were smeared with sand before they engaged. Of the thermae in Rome, some were mercenary, and some opened gratis. Marcus Agrippa, when he was edile, opened one hundred and seventy private baths, for the use of the people. In the public baths, where money was taken, each person paid a quadrans, about the value of our halfpenny, as ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... bitterness in his voice that Margaret noted silently. So (she thought) he had hoped for a moment that at the last Frederick R. Woods had relented toward him. It grieved her, in a dull fashion, to see him so mercenary. It grieved her—though she would have denied it emphatically—to see him so disappointed. Since he wanted the money so much, she would have liked for him to have had it, worthless as he was, for the sake of the boy he ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... and the figure said to him, "Stay where thou art, and let thy troops proceed against the enemy." So the pious king, in obedience to this convenient vision, remained secure behind the walls of Memphis, and sent his forces, native and mercenary, into the nome of Prosopis against the Libyans. The two armies joined battle on the 3rd of Epiphi (May 18), and a desperate engagement took place, in which, after six hours of hard fighting, the Egyptians were victorious, and the confederates suffered a severe defeat. Menephthah charges ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... (Spanish national air), and he wept like a child. This air recalled to him the immortal defence of the heroic city, behind the falling walls of which he had fought against the French, and sounded to him, he said, like the voice of all the holy affections expressed by the word home. The mercenary Swiss troops, when in France and Naples, could not hear the "Ranz des Vaches" (the shepherd song of old and rude Helvetia) without being overcome by it. When from mountain to mountain the signal of revolt summoned to the cause ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... his most despondent moods astride of a chair with his head down on his arms, as if the song suggested the attitude. Her heart quite softened to him as she looked, and she decided to forgive him if no one else, for she was sure that he had no mercenary plans ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... intention, however, he was frustrated by Thady, who, as he thoroughly detested the knavish tyrant, resolved to caution the poor scholar against his dishonesty. Thady, indeed most heartily despised the mercenary pedagogue, not only for his obsequiousness to the rich, but on account of his severity to the children of the poor. About two o'clock the young wag went out for a few minutes, and immediately returned in great haste to inform the master, that Mr. Delaney, the parish priest, and ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... out of clothes-horses like G. P. R. James. The boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and you see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites, and freebooters, preachers, schoolmasters, mercenary soldiers, gipsies, and beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and place and parentage, he might have lived too. Indeed, no man can read Scott without being ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... to insist here upon the character of the thrice renowned Ker. It is evident to all, he was a man of a great mind, far above a servile and mercenary disposition.—He was, for a number of years, hurried from place to place, and guarded from prison to prison. He endured all this with undaunted courage.—He lost a good estate then for the cause of Christ: and, though he got not the martyrs crown, yet he beyond all ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... more than the lands would bear; but it was resented by the tacksmen, deeming it a wanton injury inflicted in the house of their dearest friend. They were hurt at the idea that the chief,—the father of his people—should be controlled by such a mercenary idea, and to exercise that power which gave him the authority to lease the lands to the highest bidder. This policy, which they deemed selfish and unjust, naturally cut them to the quick. They and their ancestors had occupied ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... court as well as the client; and he violates it when he consciously presses for an unjust judgment, much more so when he presses for the conviction of an innocent man.... The high and honorable office of a counsel would be degraded to that of a mercenary, were he compelled to do the biddings of his client against the dictates of his conscience."[18] The sentiment has been expressed in flowing numbers by our great commentator, ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... broadened in a smile. "Thank Heaven 'Young Ed' has the insides of a steel range, and so my pet client is safe from your mercenary schemes for some years. Just the same, if you ever do think of marrying—remember—I want you to come to ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... and Isabella, who deprecated the scandal it must bring upon the church, and who had little to hope for themselves, in a political view, from the elevation of one of their own subjects even, whose mercenary spirit placed him at the control of the highest ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... at a certain period of life, as the natural delicacy of taste and feeling is gradually worn away by the attrition of society, become willing to take up with any coxcomb or scoundrel, whom that merciless and mercenary gang of cold-blooded slaves and assassins, called, in the ordinary prostitution of language friends, may agree in designating as a prudent choice. Young men, on the other hand, are driven by the same vile superstitions from the company of the most amiable ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... to engage in any wild crusade against a neighboring people, regardless of the justice of the enterprise and without looking at the fatal consequences to ourselves and to the cause of popular government. Such expeditions, however, are often stimulated by mercenary individuals, who expect to share the plunder or profit of the enterprise without exposing themselves to danger, and are led on by some irresponsible foreigner, who abuses the hospitality of our own Government by, seducing the young and ignorant ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... alludes to a foolish proposal of marriage for mercenary considerations, which the gentleman here mentioned thought proper to recommend to her. The two letters which immediately follow, are addressed to ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... to play in America, and each time I come I discover how much you have grown. The musical development here is wonderful. This country is very far from being filled with a mercenary and commercial spirit. If Europeans think so it is because they do not know the American at home. Your progress in music is a marvel! There is a great deal of idealism here, and idealism is the very heart and soul ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... the Times, wrote, in 1858, of Mary Seacole: 'I have witnessed her devotion and her courage; I have already borne testimony to her services to all who needed them. She is the first who has redeemed the name of 'sutler' from the suspicion of worthlessness, mercenary business and plunder; and I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some other illustrious dead.' England seems to have forgotten her, but it is hoped that this account ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... nipped natures; and dwelling on it, they forgot to press their suggestion. Incidentally, he named the sum his Fredi would convey to her husband; with, as was calculable, the further amount his only child would inherit. A curious effect was produced on them. Though they were not imaginatively mercenary, as the creatures tainted with wealth commonly are, they talked of the sum over and over in the solitude of their chamber. 'Dukes have married for less.' Such an heiress, they said, might buy up a Principality. Victor had supplied them with something of an apology to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... straining every sinew to the last, for his rider's defeat is his own failure, his rider's success his own victory. And we have all seen the gallant response of the race-horse to every movement of his rider's body—a loyal gallantry that ennobles even the merely mercenary; and the sight of these two—now one—flying toward the goal, always makes the heart beat faster and grow warm with its brave showing of this magical bond. And above all, we have seen the trooper's ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... had written me a letter, which I destroyed at the time; and which, if I had it now, I should forbear from copying into these pages. Let it be enough for me to relate here, that he never forgave the action by which she thwarted him in his mercenary designs upon me and upon my family; that he diverted from himself the suspicion and disgust of his wife's surviving relatives (whose hostility he had some pecuniary reasons to fear), by accusing his daughter, as ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America, in the early periods of colonization, to be doubly wronged by the white men: they have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare, and their characters have been traduced by bigoted and interested writers. The colonist often treated them like beasts of the forest, and the author has endeavored to justify him in his outrages. The former found it easier to exterminate ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... was not merely mercenary motives that had made Emilia accept John Lambert; but what troubled him was a vague knowledge that it was not mere pique. He was used to dealing with pique in women, and had found it the most manageable of weaknesses. It was an element of spasmodic conscience ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... gentlemen and yeomen, is the natural strength and only security of a free government; that such a militia in this colony would forever render it unnecessary for the mother country to keep among us for the purpose of our defence any standing army of mercenary forces, always subversive of the quiet and dangerous to the liberties of the people, and would obviate the pretext of taxing ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... followers to its own level. A people without a lofty and ennobling object is sure to fall into decay. The grasping spirit which everywhere pervades our society is fast lowering our people to the level of a race of mercenary jobbers. Truth, justice, honor, purity, and even religion, are in a great measure lost sight of in the general scramble for gold, until the strictest integrity, the most self-sacrificing honesty, are beginning to be looked upon as marvels, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... world. We have been visited with no national calamity. Our people have been advancing in general intelligence, and, I will add, as great and alarming as has been the advance of political corruption among the mercenary corps who look to government for support, the morals and virtue of the community at large have been advancing in improvement. What, I again repeat, is ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... not fair for me," he sang to himself, "what care I how fair she be?" But he did care; he could not master that passion. She had been vile to him, unfeminine, untrue, coarsely abusive; she had shown herself to be mercenary, incapable of true love, a scold, fickle, and cruel. But yet he loved her. There was a gallant feeling at his heart that no misfortune could conquer him,—but one; that misfortune had fallen ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... been combating against his Catholic brethren in Dublin, with circular letters, edicts, proclamations, arrests, and dispersions;—all the vexatious implements of petty warfare that could be wielded by the mercenary guerillas of government, clad in the rusty armour of their obsolete statutes. Your Lordships will, doubtless, divide new honours between the Saviour of Portugal, and the Dispenser of Delegates. It is singular, indeed, to observe the difference between ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... exclusively, of Milesian race; and the Daer-Clanna, or unfree tribes, consisting of the descendants of the subjugated older races, or of clans once free, reduced to servitude by the sword, or of the posterity of foreign mercenary soldiers. Of the free clans, the most illustrious were those of whose Princes we have traced the record—the descendants of Nial in Ulster and Meath, of Cathaeir More in Leinster, of Oliold in Munster, and of Eochaid in Connaught. An arbitrary ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... enforcing the order that debars such an army of men of the means of support, the Coal Magnates, at Purdy's suggestion, have massed three hundred of the Coal and Iron Police in the town of Hazleton. This mercenary force occupies the armory, built two years before by the benevolent multi-millionaire Iron King of Pennsylvania, whose immense mills and foundries are situated some two hundred ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... would be both mercenary and irreverent; moreover, my bonnet has nothing to do with artistic rules. It is not a work of art or of science, of nature or of grace. It is a conventional signal by which I announce a friendly disposition toward the ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner
... every line. He hopes that Dumouriez will succeed in overthrowing the regicides at Paris. The backwardness of the Prussians in supporting Coburg does not deter him from ordering to Flanders all the available British and mercenary troops, in order to besiege Dunkirk, and otherwise help the Imperialists. As if this is not enough, on or just before 1st April he treats with Malouet, the French envoy from Hayti, for the transfer of that colony to the British Crown; he writes hopefully of finding a force large ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... subservient spirit to Toryism which pervaded them, but also excited their laughter from their absurdity, Byron, in whose house they were, said to them, "It is satisfactory to see that a man who becomes mercenary, and traffics upon the independence of his character, loses at the same time his talent ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... true? If young Dietrich had in him (and he shewed that he had in after years) a Teuton's heart, may not that strange interview have opened his eyes to his own folly, and taught him that the Teuton must be his own master, and not the mercenary of ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... that she was a "Yankee" did not make her less beautiful, and it did not make her any the less the daughter of a millionnaire. No one could say that he was mercenary, however, and no one could say why he was not as deeply interested in the daughter of the planter, for she was hardly less beautiful, though her father was not considered a millionnaire, to say nothing of a ten-millionnaire. Major Pierson did ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... protected the younger in the midst of battles, helped him to cross precipices, sponged the sweat of fevers from his brow, and stole food for him, and the weaker, a child perhaps, who had been picked up on the roadside, and had then become a Mercenary, repaid this devotion by a ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... political ethics, 'stuck thru.' But it is not the revolution wrought in the minds of men of great intelligence that is most to be deplored—for the powerful will of such men may compel their thoughts back again to a philosophy of peace; no, it is the mercenary and military interests created under Mr. Lincoln which are represented, the former by an estimated governmental outlay of above $100,000,000 this year, and the other by the 800,000 men, whose blood is thus to be bought and paid for; by the armies out of ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... Worldly-Wisdom, not mincing words, and back came Youth and Romance, passionately. "Aunt Frances, a woman hasn't any right to marry just because she thinks it is her best chance. She hasn't any right to make a man feel that he's won her when she's just little and mean and mercenary." ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... army marched rapidly to attack him. Both sides drew up their forces near the city of Mantinea, and both brought into the field not only nearly all their own countrymen, but also large bodies of foreign mercenary troops. Machanidas began the battle by a charge of his mercenaries, who routed the Tarentines and other light troops of the Achaeans, but then instead of moving at once to attack and overwhelm their main body, hurried away in pursuit, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... parts, such as those of infames Anglais, brutal Cossacks, and what not, and prefer to appear at a smaller salary, in their real characters as loyal Frenchmen. I set the two stories one against the other, so that you may see that it is not from mere mercenary motives that the present performer is desirous to show up and trounce his villains; but because he has a sincere hatred of them, which he cannot keep down, and which must find a vent in suitable abuse and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... strange tale, dealing with matters to him particularly strange, such as gambling, dishonoured mothers, horrors of men and mercenary marriages. It all struck him as very dreadful; it all sank into him; but it didn't oppress him in its strangeness; no outside fact, however dreadful, ever oppressed Franklin. What did oppress him was the thought of Helen in it all. This ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... as ten men. That burly giant pushed ever in the lead, and his hoarse call and strenuous action told of more than a mercenary rage ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... have a practical turn, the thing which interests him most, the thing he asks at once and really wants to know is what you have to propose as a remedy. How are you going to make people less selfish and more considerate of others? Less mercenary and more honorable? Less immoral, or ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... a volume of Verlaine in his hands, and he wandered off. He tried to read, but his passion was too strong. He thought of the stray amours to which he had been introduced by Flanagan, the sly visits to houses in a cul-de-sac, with the drawing-room in Utrecht velvet, and the mercenary graces of painted women. He shuddered. He threw himself on the grass, stretching his limbs like a young animal freshly awaked from sleep; and the rippling water, the poplars gently tremulous in the faint breeze, the blue sky, were ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... first introduction of the mercenary character, which actuates the hireling soldier; and, though civilization was not then far enough advanced, to make it very conspicuous, there were other elements mingled, which could not but depreciate the simple nobility ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... My knowledge, my time, my fortune have ever been employed in the relief of distress! I have studied and practised medicine, but I have never degraded that most noble and most consoling of arts by mercenary speculations of any kind. Though always giving, and never receiving, I have preserved my independence. I have even carried my delicacy so far as to refuse the favours of kings. I have given gratuitously my remedies and my advice to the rich: the poor have received ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... length to favour my design, and then appeared as a Persian dealer in jewels. As I could gain no satisfactory information touching myself in this country, had no purpose to pursue, and was extremely miserable among a people, who, being mercenary and unsocial, were very ill adapted to alleviate the horrors of my condition, I gratified my landlord for his important services, with the best part of my effects; and having, by his means, procured a certificate from the magistracy, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... think you are making the children rather mercenary, Clytie? They seem to want to be paid for everything they do. I'm just about drained out ...
— The Blossoming Rod • Mary Stewart Cutting
... "Mercenary;—of course he's mercenary. That is to say, he doesn't want to go to destruction quite at one leap. But he's awfully fond of falling in love, and when he is in love he'll do ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... out from his shaking his head and crying out, "nicht" and "Geld,"—the rest of his lingo was Greek to me,—did refuse to save the Gentleman unless he had more Money given him. For these Bathing-men were a most Mercenary Pack. In a much shorter time than it has taken me to put this on Paper I had off coat and vest, kicked off my shoes, and struck into the water. 'Twas of the shallowest, and I had but to wade towards him who ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... destined to last; he always respected his work, and the care given to it bore no relation to the price it was to fetch. He often expressed a wish that he might labor like the monks in the Middle Ages, without being disturbed by mercenary considerations; that simple shelter, food, and raiment should be provided for himself and for those dependent upon him—he did not foresee any other wants—so that he might devote the whole of his mental energy to subjects worthy of it. But I used to ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the people, after so many successful struggles, deemed themselves happy in the secure possession of their privileges, they were surprised in 1305 to find that Edward had secretly applied to Rome, and had procured from that mercenary court an absolution from all the oaths and engagements, which he had so often reiterated, to observe both the charters. There are some historians,[*] so credulous as to imagine, that this perilous step was taken by him for no other purpose than ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... swept that murmur of expectation which crowds know when the procession is coming at last. By some mysterious magnetism all were aware that the BRIDE herself—the poor hysteric bride—had left the paternal camp, was coming in person to plead with her mercenary lover. ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... show I believe he was simply radiant. He has died the death he would have chosen and in a good cause. Many a time he said to me that he was sure he would never survive the war, and that he did not, for himself, greatly care, for he was not built for a mercenary age. We may be sure that all is well with him ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... "that you admired her, and that she had a very pretty little income of her own. You coupled those two facts together in such a way as to make me think you were ready to contract a mercenary marriage." ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... disagreeable necessity." Upon this the lady sent for her Bruttian admirer and introduced him to her brother. He, by encouraging the stranger in his passion, and assuring him that he would induce his sister to look favourably on it, had no difficulty in inducing the man, who was a mercenary soldier, to break his faith in expectation of the great rewards which he was promised by Fabius. This is the account given of the transaction by most writers, though some say that the lady by whose means the Bruttian was seduced from his ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... confess I should not wish to be a great heiress; I should always be fancying that it was the "fine eyes of my casket," as the French say, which attracted my admirers, and I could not stand that. No, Frank was not mercenary, I was sure, and if even—why the competency I should be possessed of would be an agreeable surprise. If, indeed! Nothing was clear, nothing was settled. What a fool I was to dwell so upon an uncertainty, ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... mentioning in his wasted face, filled with wonder and pity. "If you'll be so kind," he said with great deference. But just as this perverted product of a liberal education was about to propel him across the threshold of the court he turned about, disengaged the mercenary hands, with one of his own, from the back of the chair, drew their owner alongside and turned to me. "While we're here, my dear fellow," he said, "be so good as to perform this service. You understand?" I gave our companion a glance of intelligence ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... follow closely the internal politics of Florence where his enemies and rivals abounded. And in all these years he was pushing forward and carrying through with unceasing and unspeakable vigour the great military dream of his life, the foundation of a National Militia and the extinction of Mercenary Companies. But the fabric he had fancied and thought to have built proved unsubstantial. The spoilt half-mutinous levies whom he had spent years in odious and unwilling training failed him at the crowning moment in ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... had, with reason, great confidence in his own powers of dealing with women—getting whatever it was that he wanted from them, and afterwards preventing their being a nuisance. But he did not much like the idea of this mercenary marriage, because he was not in the least tired of his romance with Valentia, and saw great difficulties in the way of keeping it up later on. He had worrying doubts as to her consenting to revive it ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... where the lawful and accustomed possessors of the she-savage have never yet been fortunate enough to elicit its display. Well, therefore, has Captain Cook remarked, that the motives which lead to their occasional connexion are selfish, by which must be understood, the mercenary nature of the principle which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... conquer a partiality so un gratefully bestowed. She rejoiced that in no instance she had ever betrayed it, and she saw that his own behaviour prevented all suspicion of it in the family. Yet, in the midst of her mortification and displeasure, she found some consolation in seeing that those mercenary views of which she had once been led to accuse him, were farthest from his thoughts, and that whatever was the state of his mind, she had no artifice to apprehend, nor design to guard against. All therefore that remained was to ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... Cincinnati the next morning, he then being the American Minister at Rome, they were given the cold shoulder for the first time during the trip, that gentleman declaring that he had never taken the slightest interest in athletics, and that he did not propose to lend the use of his name for mercenary purposes. There being no inclosed grounds in Rome this action of Jude Stallo's was in the nature of a gratuitous insult, and was looked upon as such by the members of our party. Mr. Charles Dougherty, the Secretary of the American Legation at Rome, proved, however, ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... natives. But the moving power with Pizarro and his followers was the lust of gold. This was the real stimulus to their toil, the price of perfidy, the true guerdon of their victories. This gave a base and mercenary character to their enterprise; and when we contrast the ferocious cupidity of the conquerors with the mild and inoffensive manners of the conquered, our sympathies, the sympathies even of the Spaniard, are necessarily thrown into the scale of ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... cannot be the choice of the mercenary, the envious, or the malicious. Its value is known only to persons of an opposite temper; and to their experience alone, we appeal. Guided by mere disposition, and without the aid of reflection, in business, in ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... there is no deceit in Peter's question; he thinks aloud, and his thought is one of intense and undisguised self-conceit. The spirit of the Pharisee was there, "Lord, I thank thee that I am not as other men." His heart at this moment was undisguisedly mercenary; his eye was on the main chance. We have done and suffered so much for God; what return may we expect for our services? That young rich man would not part with his portion in this world, in order ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Alaric, 'and a doosed fine girl, you know;' and he also laid great stress on the latter part of the offer, knowing how inflammable was Charley's heart, and at the same time how little mercenary was his mind. ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... bracelet of Runjeet Sing, and is now destined to adorn the hideous idol of Prista. The Afghan soon followed to complete the work of devastation which the Persian had begun. The warlike tribe of Rajpoots threw off the Mussulman yoke. A band of'mercenary soldiers occupied the Rohilcund. The Seiks ruled on the Indus. The Jauts spread terror along the Jumnah. The high lands which border on the western sea-coast of India poured forth a yet more formidable ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... was a dismal yesterday at least, perhaps it was to me! The genius of England might be a mere mercenary man of the world, and employed all his attention to turn aside cannonballs from my Lord Stair, to give new edge to his new Marlborough's sword: was plotting glory for my Lord Carteret, or was thinking of furnishing ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... not have meant that,' protested Basil. 'Child of a mercenary traitor, who opened Italy to his people's foe! Not that! Had you seen her, you would ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... notice, and in its perpetration he merely followed the example of his ancestors in obedience to African ferocity. Yet, of his intrepidity and nobler endurance, I will relate an anecdote which was told me by reliable persons. Some twenty years before my arrival at the Cape, large bands of mercenary bushmen had joined his enemies along the beach, and after desolating his territory, sat down to beleaguer the stockade of Toso. For many a day thirst and hunger were quietly suffered under the resolute command of the king, but at length, when their pangs ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... of them? If not, was there any trouble in adding to their store? Were there not railroads to be wrecked; stockholders to be fleeced; Wall Street lambs to be shorn? Surely a man married to please himself and not to make money. Ed. assured the old man that cases had been known where a suspicion of mercenary motives had hovered round a matrimonial alliance, but Druce expressed the utmost contempt for ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... very bad neighbours, and that our generals must needs be richer than our kings." He asked, what business we had out of our own islands, unless upon the score of trade, or treaty, or to defend the coasts with our fleet?" Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing army, in the midst of peace, and among a free people. He said, "if we were governed by our own consent, in the persons of our representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my opinion, whether a private ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... indeed!' replied Lucy D——. 'The mystery of nature, of creation, of the communion of the creature with the infinitely bountiful Creator. Have you never wandered away from the beaten track, from tiresome dinners, with mercenary waiters and elaborate courses, from yawning, blase men, and over-dressed, artificial, weakly women, and, resting upon some quiet hillside, suffered the glories of external nature to fill your soul as you drained the cup of beauty, until ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... stood or fell with the clergy: nor could I ever but hold it for a sordid and unworthy speech of any churchman who had a competency left him. If therefore ye be loath to dishearten utterly and discontent, not the mercenary crew of false pretenders to learning, but the free and ingenuous sort of such as evidently were born to study, and love learning for itself, not for lucre or any other end but the service of God and of truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuity ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... for—though I do not know the motive would make me enter into controversy with a fair or an 'unfair' literary critic—I may be well excused for a wish to clear my personal character from any tinge of mercenary or sordid feeling in the eyes of a contemporary of genius. Your Lordship will likewise permit me to add that you would have escaped the trouble of this explanation, had I not understood that the satire alluded to had been suppressed, not to be reprinted. For in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... in which it should be pursued. "Men have not been content," he says, "to show the natural advantages of honesty and virtue. They have rather lessened these, the better, as they thought, to advance another foundation. They have made virtue so mercenary a thing, and have talked so much of its rewards, that one can hardly tell what there is in it, after all, which can be worth rewarding. For to be bribed only or terrified into an honest practice, bespeaks little of real honesty ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... regard it himself. Hutter growled out his dissatisfaction, for the act led to no advantage, while it threatened to render the warfare more vindictive than ever, and none censure motiveless departures from the right more severely than the mercenary and unprincipled. Still he commanded himself, the captivity of Deerslayer rendering the arm of the offender of double consequence to him at that moment. Chingachgook arose, and for a single instant the ancient ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... scholarship are well-nigh impeccable. In considering the adjective "amateur" as applied to the press association, we must adhere to the more basic interpretation, regarding the word as indicating the non-mercenary nature of the membership. Our amateurs write purely for love of their art, without the stultifying influence of commercialism. Many of them are prominent professional authors in the outside world, but their professionalism never creeps ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... over a fellow like that. Baron indeed! He's only a foreign mercenary; and here is your poor father sent out of the country, while my lord has apartments set aside for him in the Palace, and he's petted and pampered, and now at last he goes off in one of the King's carriages with ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... peril and hardship, he tendered his services to the government to make one effort more, in order to reach the mouth of this mysterious river; his offer was accepted, but on terms which make it abundantly evident that the enterprise was not undertaken from any mercenary impulse. The manner in which he had acquitted himself of his trust, amidst the difficulties with which he had to contend after the death of Clapperton, bespoke him as being worthy to be sent out on such a mission, when scientific observations ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... your present work con amore for your reputation." "No Sir," said Johnson, "nothing excites a man to write but necessity."' Walpole then relates the anecdote of the clergyman, and speaks of Johnson as 'the mercenary.' Walpole's sinecure offices thirty-nine years before this time brought him in 'near, L2000 a year.' In 1782 he wrote that his office of Usher of the Exchequer was worth L1800 a year. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... nourish a bold peasantry to defend the state; it could only produce the riches which might attract its enemies. Hence the constant complaint, that Italy had ceased to be able to furnish soldiers to the legionary armies; hence the entrusting the defence of the frontier to mercenary barbarians, and the ruin of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... with another kind of hurting—not magnificent, not absorbing, but just common. That in speaking of money he was protecting himself, proudly self-guarding his own honour and that of his mother, Lesbia Faircloth, never, in her innocence of what is mean and mercenary, occurred to Damaris. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... opportunity, were scarcely less hampered by social prejudice, which forbade them to pursue manual avocations, even when adapted to them, and destined them, whether fit or unfit, to the professions, thus wasting many an excellent handicraftsman. Mercenary considerations, tempting men to pursue money-making occupations for which they were unfit, instead of less remunerative employments for which they were fit, were responsible for another vast perversion of talent. All these things now are changed. Equal ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... reproach of Demosthenes, that his eloquence was mercenary; that he privately made orations for Phormion and Apollodorus, though adversaries in the same cause; that he was charged with moneys received from the king of Persia, and condemned for bribes from Harpalus. And should we grant that all those (and they ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... ranc'rous libels to reform the State; Or if you choose more sun and readier ways, Spatter a minister with fulsome praise: Launch out with freedom, flatter him enough; Fear not, all men are dedication-proof. Be bolder yet, you must go farther still, Dip deep in gall thy mercenary quill. He who his pen in party quarrels draws, Lists an hired bravo to support the cause; He must indulge his patron's hate and spleen, And stab the fame of those he ne'er has seen. Why then should authors mourn their desp'rate case? Be brave, do this, and then demand a place. Why art ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... possessed too much of the same spirit that he did to yield tamely in a matter like this. His frequent letters strengthened her to resist all the attempts of her mother and brother to induce her to yield to their mercenary wishes. Finding that she was firm, a system of persecution, in the hope of forcing her to an assent, was commenced against her. As soon as Charles learned this, he went immediately to P—, and ...
— Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them • T. S. Arthur
... In beginning a battle, the business would be finished, for there is not a man in that whole kingdom who has an income of one hundred ducats or a palm's length of land; nor is there one who considers it a disgrace to be given two hundred lashes. They are a mercenary horde, accustomed to ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... a candidate for the governorship, and among the more mercenary class of politicians smiling often becomes a habit for the sake of popularity. Hawthorne might have added something to the judge's personale by representing him with a droll wit, like James Fiske, Jr., or some others that we have known, and he might have ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... economic government. We had infused into our laws, our language, and our institutions new vigor for conquest and for human enlightenment. Venality, that dogs great efforts, undoubtedly there was. But the high tide of the conflict showed no mercenary taint. On both sides it was urged from the highest motives of patriotism and of honor and in defense of the popular principle. That principle with us means local self-government and representative union. The rebel yell was because they thought ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... his communion Celestius and Julian, who had been condemned by the popes Innocent and Zozimus, and banished out of the West by the emperor Honorius, for Pelagianism. Theodosius obliged them to leave Constantinople, notwithstanding the protection of the bishop. Nestorius and his mercenary priests broached also new errors from the pulpit, teaching two distinct persons in Christ, that of God, and that of man, only joined by a moral union, by which he said the Godhead dwelt in the humanity merely as in its temple. Hence he ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... suffered the passage of Frundsberg's army unopposed, and afterwards hesitated to relieve Rome from the horrors of the sack. He was the last Italian Condottiere of the antique type; and the vices which Machiavelli exposed in that bad system of mercenary warfare were illustrated on these occasions. During his lifetime, the conditions of Italy were so changed by Charles V.'s imperial settlement in 1530, that the occupation of Condottiere ceased to have any meaning. Strozzi and Farnesi, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... Mameluke; spahee^, spahi^, Cossack, Croat, Pandoz. irregular, guerilla, partisan, condottiere^; franctireur [Fr.], tirailleur^, bashi-bazouk; [guerilla organization names: list], vietminh, vietcong; shining path; contras; huk, hukbalahap. mercenary, soldier of fortune; hired gun, gunfighter, gunslinger; bushwhacker, free lance, companion; Hessian. hit man torpedo, soldier. levy, draught; Landwehr [G.], Landsturm [G.]; conscript, recruit, cadet, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... for the courage, the nobility and philanthropy of the profession as a whole, and I do not want its honor tarnished by those who are mercenary and unworthy. ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... instance she had ever betrayed it, and she saw that his own behaviour prevented all suspicion of it in the family. Yet, in the midst of her mortification and displeasure, she found some consolation in seeing that those mercenary views of which she had once been led to accuse him, were farthest from his thoughts, and that whatever was the state of his mind, she had no artifice to apprehend, nor design to guard against. All therefore that remained was to imitate his example, be civil ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... pile of money-bags lying at the foot of the president's chair, and the two members of the court who are busily engaged in counting coin, George would seem to insinuate that the fellows of the college of his time were a decidedly mercenary set. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... will, if we mistake not, take a place of its own in modern missionary literature. To a world devoted so much to mercenary interests, and a Church too given to take things easily, the life is at once a rebuke and an appeal not easily ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... to be true. It can't be true! But if it could! It's no use saying I wouldn't be glad—for poor Mr. van Buren's sake; he's so much too nice for her—mercenary, conceited, selfish little creature." ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... be feared on the stones below from a maniac self-immured on the second story. But to break open that bedroom door was quite another thing. The stairs were like a shambles already—a chilling sight to the eyes of mercenary valour. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... be seriously jeopardized by any unfairness, and who, therefore, like the wife of his prototype, should be even above suspicion, was accused by rumours, of no slight noise or breadth, of unfaithfulness to his charge, and in the grossest and most mercenary of forms. Even with the clearest case it was anything but assuring to attack such a man in those days of authority. But Fawkner's bite was too deep for any laissez faire cure, and so, nolens volens, the Commissioner had to defend or retrieve his character. The verdict of a farthing damages, ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... it reasonable to explain the motives of the present publication, and must rely for credit on the good nature of my readers. The project is not a mercenary one. Nobody relies for subsistence on its success, nor does the editor put anything but his reputation at stake. At the same time, he cannot but be desirous of an ample subscription, not merely because pecuniary profit is acceptable, ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... bring into the field against them?—the divided, heterogeneous masses of a free and equal people. The vast class of the timid, mercenary and time-serving belong to the strongest. Slavery has had them. We shall never have them until we show ourselves the strongest. Will the trading and moneyed interests, so powerful in the Northern ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... was Mrs. Beale's own amusing word—a little duenna. The argument against a successor to Miss Overmore remained: it was composed frankly of the fact, of which Mrs. Beale granted the full absurdity, that she was too awfully fond of her stepdaughter to bring herself to see her in vulgar and mercenary hands. The note of this particular danger emboldened Maisie to put in a word for Mrs. Wix, the modest measure of whose avidity she had taken from the first; but Mrs. Beale disposed afresh and effectually ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... comfortably, knowing that you are provided for. I promised your mother that, as far as lay in my power, I would shield you from wrecking your life as she wrecked hers. And money—a secure little income of her own—is a very good sort of shield for a women. Four hundred's not enough to satisfy a mercenary individual, but it's enough to enable a woman to marry for love—and not for a home!" He spoke with a kind of repressed bitterness, as though memory had stirred into fresh flame the embers of some burnt-out ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... slave Nimbus was transformed, first into the "contraband" and mercenary soldier George Nimbus, and then by ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... she held out her hand. Miss Gwilt stood looking at her steadily, without taking it, and addressed her in these words: 'You are not Mrs. Armadale yet.' Gently, sir! Keep your temper. It's not at all wonderful that a woman, conscious of having her own mercenary designs on you, should attribute similar designs to a young lady who happens to be your near neighbor. Let me go on. Miss Neelie, by her own confession (and quite naturally, I think), was excessively indignant. She owns to having ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... Egypt. During the conflict between the Mamelukes and the sultan Selim I., he considered it more prudent to transfer himself to Tunis. The incessant conflicts among the Berber princes of northern Africa gave him employment as a mercenary, which he varied by piratical raids on the trade of the Christians. At Tunis he was joined by Khizr, who took, or was endowed with, the name of Khair-ed-Din. Isaak soon followed his brothers. Arouj and Khair-ed-Din joined the exiled Moors of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... emerges the more by contrast—he is a triton among minnows. But I think the responsibility of those who keep sending out here young fellows of sixteen and seventeen fresh from a private school or Addiscombe is quite awful. The stream is so strong, the society is so utterly worldly and mercenary in its best phase, so utterly and inconceivably low and profligate in its worst, that it is not strange that at so early an age, eight out of ten sink beneath it. ... One soon observes here how seldom one meets ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fallen heir to her father's property on the second marriage of her mother. The stepfather was an excellent Swiss, a Protestant from Basel, thoroughly educated, and interested in education, and for years a mercenary in the Genoese service. On his retirement he became a Roman Catholic in order to secure the woman of his choice. He was the father of Letitia's half brother, Joseph. The retired officer, though kindly disposed to the family he ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Tales shall have been to the young readers, that and much more it is the writers' wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... reverence. I am sorry the assertion of that man should prevail so much against the dead.' He need not have feared that it had prevailed, or would prevail, with the nation. That scarcely spared a thought to Manourie, unless to curse him as a mercenary liar. But in the emotion stirred by Ralegh's death it was soon evident that the people had grown indifferent to the degree of its hero's personal loyalty, or the reverse. The flood of enthusiasm for him swept away the interest in his guilt or innocence ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Even the exotic stephanotis failed to obliterate the harsh, mercenary intensity of the feminine cry ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... of the Restoration, when the question as to the disputed settlements was only at its first stage, overtures had been made to Hyde, which it was fancied might earn from him some mercenary favour for those who might be the intermediaries, It was proposed that a special grant of land might be made to him, or that a sale might be effected in his favour on nominal terms, which would make it almost ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... women to the irresponsible control of their husbands, is not a protest against marriage. It is a vindication of marriage, against the barbarism of the law which degrades a noble and life-long partnership of equals into a mercenary and servile ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... John concluded for her, "the mercenary millions on whose traffic in their trumpery values—when they're so lucky as to have any!—this isn't ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... when they that were the engineers feared to be the authors. Nor were they content to feign things against me, but to urge things, feigned by the ignorant, against my profession, which though, from their hired and mercenary impudence, I might have passed by as granted to a nation of barkers that let out their tongues to lick others' sores; yet I durst not leave myself undefended, having a pair of ears unskilful to hear lies, or have those things said of me which I could truly prove of them. ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... sent this wench hither? As if it were not sufficient plague to be harboured in a hovel that would hardly serve for a dog's kennel in England, baited by a rude peasant-boy, and dependent on the faith of a mercenary ruffian, but I cannot even have time to muse over my own mishap, but must come aloft, frisk, fidget, and make speeches, to please this pale hectic phantom, because she has gentle blood in her veins? By mine honour, setting prejudice ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... railroads to be wrecked; stockholders to be fleeced; Wall Street lambs to be shorn? Surely a man married to please himself and not to make money. Ed. assured the old man that cases had been known where a suspicion of mercenary motives had hovered round a matrimonial alliance, but Druce expressed the utmost contempt for ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... like the few men whose minds had first given birth to the wonderful idea of a railroad from East to West. Neale found himself confronted by a singularly disturbing fact. However grand this project, its political and mercenary features could not be beautiful to him. Why could not all men be right-minded about a noble cause and work unselfishly for the development of the West and the future generations? It was a melancholy thing to learn that men of sincere and generous purpose had spent their all trying to raise ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... welcome news of John Casimir's approach was announced. He brought six thousand five hundred horse, three thousand foot, and four cannon of moderate size. His arrival did not, however, prove an occasion of unmingled satisfaction. The reiters, serving from purely mercenary motives, demanded the immediate payment of one hundred thousand crowns, promised as a first instalment on account of their wages, and were resolved to go no farther without receiving it. The Prince of Conde had but ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... unanimously, they were no match for Great Britain in wealth, population, or naval power. As it was, Great Britain allowed the revolution to get under full headway before making a serious effort to suppress it. In 1776, however, a force of about 30,000 men, many of whom were mercenary German soldiers, commonly called "Hessians," was sent to occupy New York. Thenceforward, the British pursued aggressive tactics, and inasmuch as their armies were generally superior to those of the colonists in numbers, discipline, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... bowed to her, and picked up his hat. He was not really mercenary—or, if he was, he did not know it—and he was as intensely proud as she was. He felt that he had received the deadliest insult ever dealt him in his life, and one that he ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... arrested from you; you lavish the public money to scandalous and obscure uses; you suffer your allies to perish in time of peace, whom you preserved in time of war; and, to sum up all, you yourselves, by your mercenary court, and servile resignation to the will and pleasure of designing, insidious leaders, abet, encourage, and strengthen the most dangerous and formidable of your enemies. Yes, Athenians, I repeat it, you yourselves are the contrivers of your ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... with the deliberate murder of her friend—I may almost say her benefactress—with whom she had been living on terms of intimacy for a considerable time, and for no motive that has yet been suggested except a low and mercenary one, is calculated to arouse a natural repulsion in the mind, and to indispose it to believe that the charge is well-founded. But, gentlemen, these things, as they come before you, are matters of evidence. If the witnesses ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... there was once at Milan a German mercenary, Gulfardo by name, a doughty man, and very loyal to those with whom he took service; a quality most uncommon in Germans. And as he was wont to be most faithful in repaying whatever moneys he borrowed, he would have had no difficulty in ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... this intention, however, he was frustrated by Thady, who, as he thoroughly detested the knavish tyrant, resolved to caution the poor scholar against his dishonesty. Thady, indeed most heartily despised the mercenary pedagogue, not only for his obsequiousness to the rich, but on account of his severity to the children of the poor. About two o'clock the young wag went out for a few minutes, and immediately returned in great ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... He is always of the militant, not of the triumphant party: so far he bears a gallant show of magnanimity. But his gallantry is hardly of the right stamp. It wants principle; for though he is not servile or mercenary, he is the victim of self-will. He must pull down and pull in pieces: it is not in his disposition to do otherwise. It is a pity; for with his great talents he might do great things, if he would go right ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... spoke like a lady. Her hair was dyed; her breasts padded. She acted sentiment, but was less affectionate than E.B. I met her when she was out of a job. I gave her L2 whenever I met her. She was not mercenary. She was sensual. I became very much in love with her. I discovered her, however, writing letters to a fellow whom I had met one day when I was walking with her. He was only an acquaintance, but the brother of my most intimate friend. What ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... speaking, the horsemen behind him came on steadily. There was irresistible persuasion in the glitter of their spears; besides it was matter of universal knowledge that the steel panoply of each rider concealed a mercenary foreigner who was never so happy as when riding over a Greek. One yell louder and more defiant than any yet uttered—"The azymite, the azymite!"—and the mob broke and fled. At a signal from the officer, the guards, as they came on, opened right and left of ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... as an example of college playwriting, to include the text of Barnabas Bidwell's "The Mercenary Match," written at Yale, and played by the students of Yale.[2] Only one copy of that play is, thus far, known to be in existence, owned by Mr. Evert Jansen Wendell, and its inclusion in the present collection is ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists - 1765-1819 • Various
... her have it? There are so many ways he could make poor people happy, instead of throwing his wealth away on such a mercenary creature!" wailed Eleanor. ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Asia and Africa. I have every where shewn myself the friend of my fellow-creatures. My knowledge, my time, my fortune have ever been employed in the relief of distress. I have studied and practised medicine; but I have never degraded that most noble and most consoling of arts by mercenary speculations of any kind. Though always giving, and never receiving, I have preserved my independence. I have even carried my delicacy so far as to refuse the favours of kings. I have given gratuitously my remedies and my advice ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Three Estaites), has introduced Finlay of the Foot-Band, who after much swaggering upon the stage is at length put to flight by the Fool, who terrifies him by means of a sheep's skull upon a pole. I have rather chosen to give them the harsh features of the mercenary soldiers of the period, than of this Scottish Thraso. These partook of the character of the Adventurous Companions of Froissart, or ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... probably the most elaborate in costume and other details, and of recent years the Indians have sometimes given public exhibitions of what purported to be war dances, but these performances, like everything else which they do from purely mercenary motives, are very poor imitations of the originals, and it is doubtful if they have ever allowed a genuine war dance to be witnessed by ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... upon our civilization is easy to be seen. A low motive is sure to bring down its followers to its own level. A people without a lofty and ennobling object is sure to fall into decay. The grasping spirit which everywhere pervades our society is fast lowering our people to the level of a race of mercenary jobbers. Truth, justice, honor, purity, and even religion, are in a great measure lost sight of in the general scramble for gold, until the strictest integrity, the most self-sacrificing honesty, are beginning to be looked upon as marvels, and we have won for ourselves among the nations of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... an injustice, young gentleman: I am not so mercenary,—I do not always make terms. It is true, I served the Count for pay; that is what my company is for, and if he had not gone out of his chateau to hunt his wife, we might have defended the place till the enemy was tired out. ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... had children themselves. The far-sighted reap rewards. Some day these baby twins would be old enough to marry. It was prudent to remember such details. A position as an old family friend might one day prove of thrifty advantage in this miserably mercenary world where dog eats dog, and dividends are sometimes passed. God knows and pities ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... with eyes modestly lowered she swallowed the last fragment of the bread-and-butter and apple sauce and sugar which had been the constantly evanescent companion of their little walk together. She was not mercenary; she ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... this abuse of his name, the seignior is desirous of withdrawing the administration of his domains from these mercenary hands. In most cases he is unable to do it: he too deeply in debt, having appropriated to his creditors a certain portion of his land, a certain branch of his income. For centuries, the nobles are involved through their luxury, their prodigality, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and De Pancemont, one accepting a reward of 30,000 francs and the other the sum of 50,000 francs[51105] for the vile part they have played in the negotiations for the Concordat; a miserly, brutal cynic like Maury, archbishop of Paris, or an intriguing, mercenary skeptic like De Pradt, archbishop of Malines; or an old imbecile, falling on his knees before the civil power, like Rousseau, bishop of Orleans, who writes a pastoral letter declaring that the Pope is as free in his Savona prison as on his throne at Rome. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... glad if it serves to put the rising generation on their guard against specious, promiscuous acquaintance, and trains them on to the noble sport of hunting, to the exclusion of its mercenary, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... by his look and manner to an immediate unfolding of her scheme, "let us look at things again. Perhaps we shall not find them so hopeless as they look. If I am prudent, Everett, I am not mercenary. I only want to see Rosa happy. I don't care whether it is on hundreds a year, or thousands. And the fact is, I have not condemned your plans without having a more satisfactory one to offer to your choice. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... was, that Mr. Wright was the only resident sugar proprietor in all that region of country. He superintends his own estate, while the other large estates are generally left in the hands of unprincipled, mercenary men. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... said Philip. "It has shown me my age. I declare I am trembling; I, whose nerves were iron. But I have a particular contempt for servants. Mercenary wretches! I think Heaven inspired me to talk to them. After all, who knows? perhaps we might find a way to their hearts, if we did not eternally shock their vanity, and forget that it is, and must be, ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... favour) been thought worth revising and transcribing; and these transcripts have been frequently lent to others. Hence copies have been multiplied, in their nature imperfect, if not erroneous; some of which have fallen into mercenary hands, and become the object of clandestine sale. Having therefore so much reason to apprehend a surreptitious impression, he chose rather to submit his own errors to the world, than to seem answerable for those of other men. And, with this apology, he commits himself ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... her. Her beauty is incomparable, her fascinations are unparalleled, her intelligence is unique. She has only one blemish—she is mercenary.' ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... Winders, and Elzeys, who are really foreigners, since the men from their States are not liable to conscription (vide Judge Campbell's decision), are very obnoxious to the people. Virginians can never be reconciled to the presence of a mercenary Swiss guard, and will not submit to ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... two pretty children, honourable and legal gentlemen are straining their ability to reduce to property. There stands the blushing woman, calm and beautiful, a virtuous rebuke to curious spectators, mercenary slave dealers, the very learned gentlemen of the bar, and his enthroned honour, the Court! She will give testimony that makes nature frown at its own degradation. Not far from Franconia sits the very constitutional ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... ostentatious, and displaying property in the world; and now, if a young man goes courting, the only inquiry is how many negroes he or his lady love owns. The love of slave property is swallowing up every other mercenary possession. Its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth, but indicated the gentleman of leisure who was ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... his uses. The Guard is composed of the flower of our nobility—they are not to be tempted. At least that is my opinion, although I believe Count Sagan holds differently. But this Rallywood is a soldier of fortune, a mercenary. You perceive?' ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... Tyrtaeus, concerning whom another poet, Theognis the Sicilian, says that 'in a civil broil they are worth their weight in gold and silver.' For in a civil war, not only courage, but justice and temperance and wisdom are required, and all virtue is better than a part. The mercenary soldier is ready to die at his post; yet he is commonly a violent, senseless creature. And the legislator, whether inspired or uninspired, will make laws with a view to the highest virtue; and this is not brute courage, but loyalty in the hour of ...
— Laws • Plato
... very comprehensively, Miss Benham; but perhaps it would be better to say that I am the advance agent of prosperity—that sounds rather less mercenary. We must not allow the impression to get abroad that mere money is to be the motive power ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... upright and pious Puritan magistrates and these gentlewomen of Boston and Salem the only colonists who displayed such sordid and mercenary bargaining and stipulating in matrimonial ventures: numberless letters and records throughout New England prove the unvarying spirit of calculation that pervaded fashionable courtship. A bride's portion was openly discussed, her marriage ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... tale—personally congratulated her upon her success. The money was not available for a year, but the neighbors hastened to congratulate the family on its rise to wealth. Even Levi Jacob's visits became more frequent, though this could scarcely be ascribed to mercenary motives. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... much elation. His was not a mercenary nature, and he had all along thought his comrade too sanguine, though he meant to ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... which is unwilling to recognize a fault, or by the fault itself which biases the judgment. The faculty, or passion, which misleads one becomes a part of his judging faculty, and cannot condemn itself. The miser cannot realize the baseness of his avarice, nor the mercenary soldier the enormity of war. Nor can a defective faculty assist in realizing the defect. The color-blind cannot appreciate painting, the thief cannot appreciate integrity, the brutal wife-beater cannot appreciate ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... war as not only immoral, but as one of the greatest of crimes—murder on a large scale. Such are all wars of mere ambition, engaged in for the purpose of extending regal power or national sovereignty; wars of plunder, carried on from mercenary motives; wars of propagandism, undertaken for the unrighteous end of compelling men to adopt certain religious or political opinions, whether from the alleged motives of "introducing a more orthodox religion," or of "extending the area of freedom." ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... de la Zouch was distinctly unfavourable to that knight; for, with the instinct of a woman, she had divined from the very beginning that his motives were more mercenary than genuine, and in spite of all his protestations of love towards her, he had failed to convince her that he loved her for herself alone. A little watching on her part had quickly convinced her that the dislike she felt for him was not without sufficient reason, and as the evidence ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... people, regardless of the justice of the enterprise and without looking at the fatal consequences to ourselves and to the cause of popular government. Such expeditions, however, are often stimulated by mercenary individuals, who expect to share the plunder or profit of the enterprise without exposing themselves to danger, and are led on by some irresponsible foreigner, who abuses the hospitality of our own Government by, seducing the young and ignorant to join in his scheme of personal ambition or revenge ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... established in the Northwest of Africa. Hated by the people of this great territory, both Moors and Arabs, menaced not only by their dissensions, but frequently attacked by the Christians from the North, there was but one method by which the Dey could maintain his power. He formed a large body of mercenary soldiers, drawn entirely from Turkey, united with himself and each other by a feeling of mutual dependence and common danger, and bound by no feeling of interest or affection to the inhabitants of the soil. Brave they were, as they proved in 1541, against Charles the Fifth, whose forces they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... baseness, to whom, for nearly two years, this young woman had given her whole confiding love, might be dismissed from a heart like hers on the earliest summons of pride, simply because she herself had been dismissed from his, or seemed to have been dismissed, on a summons of mercenary calculation? Look! now that she is relieved from the weight of an unconfidential presence, she has sat for two hours with her head buried in her hands. At last she rises to look for something. A thought has struck her; and, taking a little golden key which hangs by a chain within ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... Mrs. Schreiber was the very person required. Intellectually she had no great pretensions; but these she did not need: her character was irreproachable, her manners were polished, and her own income placed her far above all mercenary temptations. She had not thought fit to accept the station of Colonel Watson's wife, but some unavowed feeling prompted her to undertake, with enthusiasm, the duties of a mother to the colonel's daughter. Chiefly on Miss Watson's ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... nothing more than a cranky canoe hollowed out of a noble mvule tree of Ugoma—was an African Argo bound on a nobler enterprise than its famous Grecian prototype. We were bound upon no mercenary errand, after no Golden Fleece, but perhaps to discover a highway for commerce which should bring the ships of the Nile up to Ujiji, Usowa, and far Marungu. We did not know what we might discover on our voyage to the northern head of the Tanganika; we supposed that we should find the Rusizi ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... saying thus much, you may consider me of a mercenary disposition; but I have received from Brazil no recompence whatever, beyond the honours conferred by His Imperial Majesty. If you will peruse the accompanying papers, you will find that when I left Chili I had ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... fellow-citizens, ever served their country with more entire exemption from every imputation of selfish and mercenary motives, than those to whose memory we are paying these proofs of respect. A suspicion of any disposition to enrich themselves or to profit by their public employments, never rested on either. No sordid motive approached them. The inheritance which they have left ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... perfunctory pomp and display, and gave not a suggestion of bereavement—and that it was, for every person in the cortege was hired for the occasion. Half the food had been left at the tomb for the departed in his spirit form; the remainder was to be devoured by the mercenary mourners when the procession broke up at the door of the home from which the corpse had ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... the emperor's greatness, declined any active participation. Most of the other powers of Europe also remained neutral. France had now no hope of placing Stanislaus upon the throne; she only sought revenge, determined to humble the house of Austria. The mercenary King of Sardinia, Charles Emanuel, was willing to serve the one who would pay the most. He first offered himself to the emperor, but upon terms too exorbitant to be accepted. France and Spain immediately ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... little better than buccaneers, the Dutch, who drove them out, were little better than hucksters—mean, mercenary traders, without redeeming qualities; content to suck the blood of their provinces and give nothing in return. I should think that the colony is glad to be finally rid of them. The English took possession of it in 1795, but restored it to ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... demoralizing the whole country; corrupting the very fountains of political power; and converting the ballot-box—that great palladium of our liberty—into an unmeaning mockery, where the rights of native-born citizens are voted away by those who blindly follow their mercenary and selfish leaders. The evidence of this is found not merely in the shameless chaffering for the foreign vote at every election, but in the large disproportion of offices which are now held by foreigners at home and abroad, as compared ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... beginning in 1791, furnished this rising movement with an irresistible argument. A wave of horror and fear swept over the South, which even the powerful slave-traders of Georgia did not dare withstand; the Middle States saw their worst dreams realized, and the mercenary trade interests of the East lost control of the ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... his tid-bits, such as the larger carnivora, may be described as glutenous. Much has been written of the creature, but a glance at his enormous volume will give a truer idea of him than anything that has ever issued from the press. He serves the body of an animal, before devouring it, as mercenary politicians serve the body politic—crushing it with many Rings. By the keepers of menageries he is often called the Boa Constructor, but the name more aptly applies to the Furrier who simulates his shape on a small scale; the creature having ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... therefore, with an unmistakable thrill of righteous satisfaction that Edinburgh society saw this 'mercenary girl' in so terrible ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... regiments to hurry to the help of McCulloch.[55] He had done this upon the first intimation of the Federal advance. The Cherokees had proceeded only so far, the Creeks not at all, and the main body of the Choctaws and Chickasaws, into whose minds some unscrupulous merchants had instilled mercenary motives and the elements of discord generally, were lingering far in the background. Pike's white force was, moreover, ridiculously small, some Texas cavalry, dignified by him as collectively a squadron, Captain ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... companions for their own sake in this world, whoever and wherever they are, you will fail to find love for your own sake in the next—and to love well, whatever you love you must love for itself, and not for any future and mercenary end." ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... seems to tend to this consummation. It has its graceful curves and crooks, indeed, and here and there a passionate tangent; but on the whole, if I were to unfold it here a la Hogarth, what better legend could I scrawl beneath the series of pictures than So-and-So's Progress to a Mercenary Marriage? ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... He never dared to ask any questions from his mother about her; he turned coward whenever the English letters were delivered; he never dared to think about her, to wonder how she had taken this letter, what she had thought, said, or done. He was not happy. Proud, ambitious, mercenary, haughty as was the Countess of Lanswell, there were times when she felt grieved for her son. It was such a young face, but there was a line on the broad, fair brow; there was a shadow in the sunny eyes; the music had gone ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... own heart knew that his motives were not unmixed. He could not accuse himself of being outrageously mercenary, yet he was ashamed to be forced to acknowledge even to himself that the desire of gain was present to his mind. His debts were enormous. He entertained in a manner and after a style far in excess of his modest allowance. His dinners ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... so too had they been used against English Chartists. A typical Englishman, William Cobbett, had suffered fine and long imprisonment because of his protest against the flogging of an English soldier by a German mercenary. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... discovery of the possibilities of coal there was a great boom in the demand for industrial machinery. At the same time there were thrown up the most marvelous advances in physics and chemistry. Recurring War became not the clashes of mercenary armies, but the catapulting of whole nations at each other. New destructive devices out of the laboratories were raised into the commandants of the course of history. Then ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... Boggs. "It's the contrast that's killing me. The only women who would look at me to-day are mercenary ones that wouldn't care if I was black as Othello or big as George IV. Why, I could show you a trunkful of letters, written me by the finest women in this country, when I was at my best. They breathe but one thing—love, love, love! I lived on it! It was the ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... venture in love he saw now had been in shallow water; but it had not tended to strengthen his faith in the innate nobility of women. On the contrary, it had shown him that a woman who seemed sweet and loving could be hard and calculating, even mercenary. Innocence being a charming pose, why should it not be adopted by the cleverest actresses, professional sirens, specialists in enchantment, who wished to be admired by all men, even men for whom they cared nothing? How could he tell even now that this girl was not a clever actress ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... never understand. Would Marion? Cold terror seized him at the thought of the coming, the inevitable scene with her. She, he realized vaguely, was different from—from all the others he had ever seen and looked down upon from his safe heights of cynical hatred and contempt. She was not selfish or mercenary—not consciously selfish or mercenary. And she was not vile. But she was all the more dangerous because her heart was pure. She was too high-bred, too fine, to demand payment of his debt; but her very reticence ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... loved, my honored, much respected friend![1] No mercenary bard his homage pays; With honest pride I scorn each selfish end, My dearest meed, a friend's esteem and praise: To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays, 5 The lowly train in life's sequestered scene; The native feelings strong, the guileless ways; What Aikin ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... profound conviction that about ninety-nine hundredths of whatever at present is, is wrong: conviction making four of us, according to our several manners, leaders of revolution for the poor, and declarers of political doctrine monstrous to the ears of mercenary mankind; and driving the fifth, less sanguine, into mere painted-melody of lament over the fallacy of Hope and the implacableness ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... thought your love of me had caused this transport in your soul; which, it seems, you only counterfeited, for mercenary ends and ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... came to me," says he, "was to go next morning very early to see his Majesty, and, after having briefly set before him my past services, to ask him for a pension, which up to that time I had not felt inclined to do. The king, surprised, and at the same time well pleased to observe a something mercenary behind all my proud spirit, embraced me, and granted on the spot what I asked of him." The next day D'Aubigne went to the Arsenal; Sully invited him to dinner, and took him to see the Bastille, assuring him that there was no ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... citizens to traffic in slaves, and declared all slaves found on its territory to be free. "Such traffic," it said, "is base and contrary to all humanity ... namely, that the human form, made after the image and similitude of our Creator, should be turned to mercenary profit and sold as ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... Herod stormed the walls, put to death Antigonus and his party, and established a harsher tyranny than even the Roman conqueror had imposed. For over thirty years he held the people down with the aid of Rome and his body-guard of mercenary barbarians. His constitution was an autocracy, supplemented by assassination. In the civil war between Antony and Octavian, he was first on the losing side, as his father had been in the struggle between Pompey and Caesar; but, like his father, he knew when to go over to the victor. The ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... wound me with that treacherous weapon, evading the question and giving a distorted meaning to my sentiments in order to offend my dignity, you are mistaken, dear aunt. Call me mercenary, if you choose. God ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... Tory and clergyman's daughter, was always in a minority of one in our house of violent Dissent and Radicalism. She used to hear over again, delivered with authority, all the lectures I had been used to give her at school on despotic aristocracy, mercenary priesthood, &c. She had not energy to defend herself; sometimes she owned to a little truth in it, but generally said nothing. Her feeble health gave her her yielding manner, for she could never oppose any one without gathering up ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... certainly, on his side, a mercenary match. He would have been incapable of marrying with so mean a motive. He is said, indeed, to have given, about this period, a substantial proof of very much the contrary disposition. This appears in the following anecdote, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... cried Miss Mercy, holding up her hands with the most winning giggle in the world, 'what a mercenary girl you are! oh you naughty, thoughtful, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... yours are one," she replied. "Bernard, between near relations as we are, mine and thine are words without meaning. I should never suspect you of being mercenary. I know that you love me, that you will work to give me proof of this, and that a day will come when your love will no longer make me fear, because I shall be able to accept it in the face ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... delightful! I particularly like your conception of independence. Doesn't it occur to you that at a pinch I might improve my fortune by some other means than by making a mercenary marriage or by currying favour with a rich old gentleman? Doesn't it occur to you ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... one grain of participation in it. He has some liking for Ahimaaz, and so does not wish him to run, but dissuades him on the ground (verse 22, Revised Version) that he will win no reward. That is the true spirit of the mercenary, who cannot conceive of a man taking trouble unless he gets paid for it somehow, and will fight and kill, all in the way of business, without the least spark of enthusiasm for a cause. Hard stolidity and brutal carelessness shielded him from any 'womanish' tenderness. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... his cigar towards the fire. It fell short in the grate. He picked it up and rammed it deep into the burning coals. He looked a poor, old, pitiful child, uttering embittered heresies. "All women are mercenary; all of them except my wife and daughters. Ah, yes, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... girlish heart, Lady Throckmorton was very silent, or very indifferent about the matter. But she was not moulded after the manner of the stern female guardians usually celebrated in love stories. She was not mercenary, and she was by no means authoritative. She had sent for Theo with the intention of extending to her the worldly assistance she had extended to Pamela, and, beyond that, the matter lay in the girl's own hands. Lady Throckmorton had no high views for ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... said Sally. "You believe he'd think twice as much of me if I came to him in a mercenary spirit like that? And I thought ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... her friends worked hard enough to induce her to, but when she found out the mercenary side of it, she saw at once ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... immediately set them all by the ears, for every one was hungrier than another, but the biggest god killed all the rest with this staff which thou now seest he still holds in his hands." Superstition, especially when combined with mercenary motives, knows neither reason nor human affection, therefore the father handed over his son Abraham to the inquisition of Nimrod, who threw him into the fiery furnace, as recorded elsewhere in this Miscellany. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... 'balled up' since you went away," he explained—"took a contract to produce a certain line of ornamental reliefs; it never pays to be mercenary. But there it is! I was greedy, I went out for money—now behold me in the grasp of a business agreement. Can't sleep, can't breathe country air—had to work ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... wife could be. Besides, Harry had, with reason, great confidence in his own powers of dealing with women—getting whatever it was that he wanted from them, and afterwards preventing their being a nuisance. But he did not much like the idea of this mercenary marriage, because he was not in the least tired of his romance with Valentia, and saw great difficulties in the way of keeping it up later on. He had worrying doubts as to her consenting to revive it afterwards ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... such a cause. True, thanks to the generosity of our supporters, we patriots receive a very comfortable stipend; I myself, of course, touch a salary which puts me quite beyond the reach of any peddling, mercenary thoughts; M'Guire, again, ere he joined our ranks, was on the brink of starving, and now, thank God! receives a decent income. That is as it should be; the patriot must not be diverted from his task by any base consideration; and the distinction between our position and that of the police ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Equally as mercenary as "the boss of the Senate," he lacked Peabody's iron nerve, determination, resourcefulness and daring. He needed many hours of sleep. Peabody could work twenty hours at a stretch. He had to have his meals regularly or else suffer from indigestion. Peabody sometimes did a ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... there ever were human beings, employed in the ordinary affairs of life, who would not take what wages or profits they could obtain; and as if labourers were like missionaries, and other devotees, who are not led by any mercenary motive. The statute then enacts, that every person able in body, and under the age of sixty, not having means of maintaining himself, is bound to serve whoever shall be willing to employ him, at the wages which were usually paid during the six years preceding ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... that she was French, although someone had told her that the French, though brave, were mercenary. Zahara admired the French for being brave, and thought it very sensible that they should be mercenary. For there was nothing that Zahara wanted of the world that money could not obtain (or so she believed), and she knew no higher philosophy ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... phlegmatic disposition. No wonder, then, that his pride was mortified at his own want of importance, which he did not fail to ascribe to their defect in point of judgment and taste. He conceived a disgust at the mercenary conduct, as well as the shallow intellects, of the ladies; and after he had spent some months, and a round sum of money, in fruitless attendance and addresses, he fairly quitted the pursuit, and consoled himself with the conversation of a merry fille de joie, whose good graces he acquired by an ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... that the cowardly and mercenary Martinez has received the punishment his treachery so well deserved; during his flight he was met by some Indians and murdered. May divine Providence thus punish all ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... were acting in alliance with the Carthaginians and hated them because their masters treated them ill, abandoned to the Romans for money a position with the guarding of which they had been entrusted. The Romans secured for mercenary service the Gauls and other of the Carthaginian allies who had revolted from their service; never before had they supported foreigners in their army. Elated at this accession and furthermore by the ravaging of Libya on the part of the private citizens who were managing ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... in New York. I thought I was happy at first, but lately we have been miserable. My marriage—er—they drove my husband to the wall, and killed him. He was sensitive and noble, but not practical, and he fell a victim to the mercenary despotism of our surroundings. When I tried to help him they became jealous of me, and shut their doors ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... he. "Are you mad, Jane? Pray," continued he, veiling his wrath in scornful words, "is it requisite, heroic, or judicious on the eve, or more correctly the morn, of affluence to deposit an unfinished work of art with a mercenary relation? Hang it, Jane! would you really have me pawn Mrs. ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... articles. When the deputies returned, their constituents were not very well pleased with what had been done, declaring that they would not submit to be locked up at the mercy of any man, nor would they trust to mercenary troops for guarding their city. The Prince, hearing this, agreed that the burghers, Calvinists, Lutherans, as well as Romanists, should be employed to guard ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... succor of foreign arms. The Romans, to whom the invitation was made, eagerly embraced it. Philip was conquered; Macedon subdued. A new crisis ensued to the league. Dissensions broke out among it members. These the Romans fostered. Callicrates and other popular leaders became mercenary instruments for inveigling their countrymen. The more effectually to nourish discord and disorder the Romans had, to the astonishment of those who confided in their sincerity, already proclaimed universal ...
— The Federalist Papers
... Signor of the Night! and you, ye hirelings, Who wield your mercenary staves in fear, It is your knell.—Swell on, thou lusty peal! Now, knaves, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... fearing to be frank, lest she might seem to be angling for his fortune, did not fully divine his cheerful readiness to offer it, if by so doing he could make amends for his infidelity to her family forty years back in the past. Time had not made him mercenary, and it had quenched his ambitions; and though his wish to wed Avice was not entirely a wish to enrich her, the knowledge that she would be enriched beyond anything that she could have anticipated was what allowed ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... was a "Yankee" did not make her less beautiful, and it did not make her any the less the daughter of a millionnaire. No one could say that he was mercenary, however, and no one could say why he was not as deeply interested in the daughter of the planter, for she was hardly less beautiful, though her father was not considered a millionnaire, to say nothing of a ten-millionnaire. Major Pierson ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... together. Why only yesterday Douglas came to me filled with delight. Mr. Minturn secured an appointment for him to make an investigation for the city which will be a great help to Douglas. It will bring him in contact with prominent men, give him big work and a sample of how mercenary I am—it will bring him big pay and he knows how to use the money in a big way. Douglas knows Mr. Minturn so well, and respects him so highly, yet no one can know him ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... which are borne by the beadles to the Landsgemeinde. In a somewhat inaccessible corner, a few houses off, the beginnings of a museum have been made. Here is another portrait of interest—that of the giant Puentener, a mercenary whose valor made him the terror of the enemy in the battle of Marignano, in 1515; so that when he was finally killed, they avenged themselves, according to a writing beneath the picture, by using his fat to smear their weapons, and by feeding ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... 4aab3b, 13: The lover offers the maiden in alternate quatrains various gifts to induce her to marry him. She replies in alternate quatrains, refusing him. Finally, he offers "the key of his chest." She accepts, but he scorns her mercenary love. ...
— A Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-Songs • Hubert G. Shearin
... of political possibilities. The great European States maintain standing armies in which all able-bodied citizens have to pass a longer or shorter period of military training. England alone keeps up a mercenary army, and by the side of it a territorial army, whose ranks are ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... entertainment, indeed, cannot be the choice of the mercenary, the envious, or the malicious. Its value is known only to persons of an opposite temper; and to their experience alone, we appeal. Guided by mere disposition, and without the aid of reflection, in business, in friendship, and in public life, they often ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... display certain powers, which are in any case extremely uncertain in their response to the call for them, invariably begins to imitate them when they fail. The mediums are invariably persons of an inferior order of intellect, avid of notoriety, and mostly mercenary, so that the results of the consultations with them were almost sufficient to deter serious-minded people from dealing with them a second time, while the people who formed the regular circles and had made a sect with a devotional character in it, rapidly degenerated into a credulity and materialism ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... very many, made the most of this catastrophe. One of them in Vienna was especially virulent; it called attention to the model of an American school-house in the exposition, and said that "it should be carefully observed as part of the machinery which trains up such mercenary wretches as have recently disgraced ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... on his side a part of the Macedonian army or some of the Greek mercenary soldiers. The Greeks were thus contending among themselves who should possess Asia. The inhabitants were indifferent in these wars as they had been in the strife between the Greeks and the Persians. When the war ceased, there remained but three generals; from ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... he said, more kindly,—"least of all toward you. But I cannot see how you should desire the friendship of one whom you regard as a mercenary hypocrite. When you can truthfully assure me that you disbelieve that charge, then, and not till then, will I forgive you and be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
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