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More "Profligate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inheriting vicious instincts and master of an immense fortune which enabled him to purchase immunity, abandoned himself to all the evil passions of his fiery and passionate temperament. Five times during his profligate career imprisoned for abominable crimes, he only succeeded in procuring his liberation by the payment of two hundred thousand piastres, or about one million francs. It should be explained that popes at this time were in ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... word "signifer" seems to favour the reading I have preferred; and Dean Merivale and Hosius adopted it. (27) For the character and career of Curio, see Merivale's "History of the Roman Empire", chapter xvi. He was of profligate character, but a friend and pupil of Cicero; at first a rabid partisan of the oligarchy, he had, about the period of his tribuneship (B.C. 50-49), become a supporter of Caesar. How far Gaulish gold was the cause of this conversion we cannot tell. ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... remarkable harsh voice of Lindesay in reply to Sir Robert Melville, who appeared to have been using some soothing language—"No! no! no! I tell thee, no! I will place a petard against the door rather than be baulked by a profligate woman, and bearded ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... Burt, in his letters from the Highlands, written early in the eighteenth century, says that "soon after the wedding day the newly-married wife sets herself about spinning her winding sheet, and a husband that shall sell or pawn it is esteemed among all men one of the most profligate." And Dr. Jamieson says—"When a woman of the lower class in Scotland, however poor, or whether married or single, commences housekeeping, her first care, after what is absolutely necessary for the time, is to provide death linen for herself and those who look to her for that office, ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... clownish but faithful valet or the garrulous narrative of the heroine's fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servant's hall? Again, had my title borne 'Waverley, a Romance from the German,' what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors and dark lanterns? Or, if I had rather chosen to call my work, 'A Sentimental ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... son with this monstrous crime? I have had a dreadful presentiment, all along, that he had something to do with it. The end of his wrong career will be the gallows. I have dreamt of it for years. O God! that I should have begotten such a profligate and miscreant into ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... to the ears. "Does it serve any purpose to relate? He was very charming, very accomplished; how was my sister, at eighteen, to know that he was also very callous, very profligate, very cruel? These things happen every ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... driven with the profligate Danby to God alone knew what infamy—even she would return to act for me her part of sorrowing wonder—to weep and sigh. Oh, shameful hypocrisy! And with her would be my aunt and uncles to wonder also and shake grave heads over me, torturing me with their love ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... son of a magistrate of Plassans, whom he drove crazy by his profligate conduct. In the end he ran off with a music-hall singer under the pretext of going to Paris to follow the literary profession. Notwithstanding the fact that his profligacy went to even greater lengths in the city, he was successful in journalism, and soon earned between seven and ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... time of the Revolution, justified their conduct by all those profligate sophisms which are called Jesuitical, and which are commonly reckoned among the peculiar sins of Popery, but which, in fact, are everywhere the anodynes employed by minds rather subtle than strong, to quiet ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with Angelo for her brother's life, her horror of her brother's sin is so intense, and her perception of the justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would actually do so but that the warm-hearted profligate Lucio reproaches her for her coldness and urges her on. Cordelia's hatred of hypocrisy and of the faintest appearance of mercenary professions reminds us of Isabella's hatred of impurity; but Cordelia's ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... U.J.B. of the Catholic priest, who, sooner than break the seal of confession, suffered death, is John of Nepomuc, Canon of Prague. By order of the Emperor Wenceslas, he was thrown off a bridge into the Muldaw, because he would not tell that profligate prince the confession of his religious empress. This holy man is honoured as St. John Nepomucen on the 16th of May, in the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 50. Saturday, October 12, 1850 • Various
... spirit of lawlessness pervades the community which, if not repressed, threatens the dissolution of our present forms of society. Even in the old States, mobs are taking the government into their hands, and a profligate newspaper finds little difficulty in stirring up multitudes to violence. * * Add to all this the invasions of the rights of speech and of the press by lawless force, the extent and toleration of which oblige us to believe that a considerable portion ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... would have anything to do with him," said she, "because he is the greatest profligate in all England; and it's a pity," she added, "because ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... this inconsistent naval secretary liked to flit from flower to flower. He was vain, greedy, wanton, fond of the delight of the eye and the pride of life; he was loving and loose in his manners; he was pious, repentant, profligate; and he deliberately told the whole tale of all his many changes of mood and mistress, of piety and pleasure. One cannot open Pepys at random without finding him at his delightful old games. On the Lord's ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... windows presented views of a turmoiling sea of snow. The huge arms of the wind were making attempts—mighty, circular, futile—to embrace the flakes as they sped. A gate-post like a still man with a blanched face stood aghast amid this profligate fury. In a hearty voice Scully announced the presence of a blizzard. The guests of the blue hotel, lighting their pipes, assented with grunts of lazy masculine contentment. No island of the sea could be exempt in the degree of this little room with its humming ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... water-snakes. Even in her terror, as she dwelt upon his noble features, Eleanor could not help admitting that she beheld the undoubted descendant, and the living likeness of the handsomest and most distinguished of her house—the profligate and criminal Sir Reginald. As her eye, mechanically following this train of thought, wandered for an instant to the haughty portraiture of Sir Reginald, which formed part of the family pictures, and thence to those of his unfortunate lady, she was struck ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... every heathen land furnishes abundant proofs, that whenever the gracious promises of the Bible are gratefully received, the proud become humble, the disobedient dutiful, the drunkard sober, the dishonest, honorable; the profligate, prudent; and the miserable become happy. Nothing else has ever done this, but the gospel of Christ always does it, when ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... notorious, as belles of the first order, stars of fashion, and if not something indebted to fortune they would have escaped enrolment here. When beauty and poverty are allied, it must too often fall a victim to the eager eye of roving lust; for, even to the titled 55profligate, beauty, when arrayed in a simple garb of spotless ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... contribute to its political and material well-being. Congruously with this frame of mind, Russia has not the heart to deal with Bulgaria as she would deal under similar provocation with Roumania or Greece. Like the baby cripple, or the profligate son, this wayward little nation ever remains the spoiled child. Hence, do what harm she may to Russia, she is not merely immune from the natural consequences of her unfriendly acts, but certain to reap ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... planting of which 100 more men were sent; and what was now become absolutely necessary, there were no less than 90 young women, of a healthful constitution, and unspotted reputation, sent out to be married to the planters, instead of diseased and profligate strumpets, as is now the ridiculous practice.... Thus the company and colony began to be in a thriving way: but now they began to be oppressed by the Government here, for in November they were ordered to send over to Virginia, at their own charge, 100 felons or vagabonds, then it may be ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... described by Sir Walter Scott—the refuge of the destitute and criminal. Here are groups of the infected, the dying, the callous, the despairing—a miserable languor pervades them all. The young—the aged—the innocent—the profligate. One sedate and lovely female is seeking consolation from the sacred book, beside whom sits her father—a grand figure, in whose countenance is a fixed intensity of worldly care, that alone seems to keep life within his listless body, next him is a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... clear, if any evidence of that were necessary, that Anne had her brother in mind in writing the book. 'I could not be understood to suppose,' she says, 'that the proceedings of the unhappy scapegrace, with his few profligate companions I have here introduced, are a specimen of the common practices of society: the case is an extreme one, as I trusted none would fail to perceive; but I knew that such characters do exist, and if I have warned one rash youth from following ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... instructions, spread the delusion over the country, and established in all the principal towns of France, "Societies of Harmony," for trying experiments and curing all diseases by means of magnetism. Some of these societies were a scandal to morality, being joined by profligate men of depraved appetites, who took a disgusting delight in witnessing young girls in convulsions. Many of the pretended magnetisers were notorious libertines, who took that opportunity of gratifying their passions. An illegal increase of the number of French ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... upon the wrongdoer's head to wound him. It has been said for a man to betray his trust for money, is for him to stand on the same intellectual level with a monkey that scalds its throat with boiling water because it is thirsty. A drunkard is one who exchanges ambrosia and nectar for garbage. A profligate is one who declines an invitation to banquet with the gods that he may dine out of an ash barrel. What blight is to the vine, sin is to a man. When the first thief appeared in Plymouth colony a man was withdrawn ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... it is plain that a man will never learn God's will if he takes counsel from ungodly men who care nothing for God's will, and do not believe that God's will governs the world. Neither must he, as the Psalm says, 'stand in the way of sinners'—of profligate and dishonest men who break God's law. For if he follows their ways, and breaks God's law himself, it is plain that he will learn little or nothing about God's law, save in the way of bitter punishment. For let him but break God's law a little too long, and then—as the 2nd Psalm says—'God ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... wicked, iniquitous, immoral, unrighteous, wrong, criminal; naughty, incorrect; unduteous^, undutiful. unprincipled, lawless, disorderly, contra bonos mores [Lat.], indecorous, unseemly, improper; dissolute, profligate, scampish; unworthy; worthless; desertless^; disgraceful, recreant; reprehensible, blameworthy, uncommendable; discreditable, disreputable; Sadistic. base, sinister, scurvy, foul, gross, vile, black, grave, facinorous^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... presently.—A young creature of your virtuous and pious turn, she was pleased to say, cannot surely love a profligate: you love your brother too well, to wish to marry one who had like to have killed him, and who threatened your uncles, and defies us all. You have had your own way six or seven times: we want to secure ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... existing laws for the suppression of the African slave trade, and recommend all such alterations as may give to them greater force and efficacy. That the American flag is grossly abused by the abandoned and profligate of other nations is but too probable. Congress has not long since had this subject under its consideration, and its importance well justifies renewed ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... enemies did not fail to make the most of his well-known immorality. In his Notes to Macky's Characters Swift described Wharton as "the most universal villain that ever I knew." On his death in 1715 he was succeeded by his profligate son, Philip, who was created ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... the mercy of God and the methods of the Gospel. To the jaundiced eye of this sour-tempered pharisaic youth, it seemed that his father gave much to him that deserved least, and little to him that deserved most: to the profligate son, the fatted calf; to the eminently dutiful child, not even a kid. Here the hard, self-satisfied formalist, like Pilate and Caiaphas, preaches the Christ whom he did not know. The envious contrast portrayed by the elder son is ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... therefore self-evident that, instead of a reformed profligate making a good husband, he must make a very diseased one. It has therefore been suggested that the parents of the prospective bride should demand from the intended groom a certificate of freedom from ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... Crasey, and others. Conservative judges held that the right to own property did not entitle married women to convey it; therefore in 1858 the law was amended, giving further security to the wife to transact business in her own name, if her husband was profligate and failed to support her; but not until 1872 did the law protect a married woman in her right to transact business, make contracts, possess her separate earnings, and sue and be sued in her own ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... than by those who are considered models of virtue. The author of the "Philosophumena" (book ix., ch. 11) says that Commodus granted to Pope Victor the liberation of the Christians who had been condemned to the mines of Sardinia by Marcus Aurelius. Thus that profligate emperor was really more merciful to the Church than the philosophic author of the "Meditations," who, in the year 174, had witnessed the miracle of the Thundering Legion. The reason is evident. The wise rulers foresaw the destructive effect of the new doctrines on ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... daily becoming more bitter between the two nations so long as the question remained open. They have put the brand of confessed injustice upon that rankling and vindictive resentment with which the profligate and passionate part of the American press has been threatening us in the event of concession, and which is to be manifested by some dire revenge, to be taken, as they pretend, after the nation is extricated from its present difficulties. Mr. Lincoln has done what depended ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill
... affectionate and manly heart he bade the dark shadow of his spirit fall. "And, think not," he cried, "that you, Algernon Hurdlestone, shall triumph in my despair. That woman shall be mine, yet. Mine, though her brow has been polluted by your lips, and your profligate love has contaminated her for ever in my eyes. But I will bind you both with a chain, which shall render you my slaves for ever." Then, rising from the ground, he left the spot which had witnessed the only tender emotion ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... has given me just cause to hate him? What if he be a vicious man, and deserves the hatred of all mankind? What if he be a miser, and can make no use of what I would deprive him of? What if he be a profligate debauchee, and would rather receive harm than benefit from large possessions? What if I be in necessity, and have urgent motives to acquire something to my family? In all these cases, the original motive to justice would fail; and consequently the justice ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... Paris. She grew up beautiful and profligate; she coined her rare Italian charms, first into gold and velvet, then into silver and brocade, and at last into copper and rags. When her charms faded entirely, she began to practise the forbidden arts of her mother and father, but without ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... good man, or a Whig and a rascal, and vice versa. If you were a Tory and wanted a place, it was the duty of all good Tories to stand by you; if you were a Whig, your chance was small; but its feebleness was all the more a reason why you should be proclaimed a martyr, and all your opponents profligate mercenaries." But parties changed, and men changed with them. It was a Whig ministry which gave Wilson, in 1852, a pension of two ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... queen, with a mocking laugh. "Perhaps a Bible, with the marginal observations of his profligate ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... Ford's thin lips drew tightly together for the moment. "Joe Garland is dissolute and idle. He has always been a wastrel, a profligate." ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... the Great Elector for the last two hundred and fifty years, we do not find one single ruler who resembles his predecessor or his successor. Yet all these Hohenzollerns, whether capable or incapable, whether mad, half-mad, or sane, whether profligate or domesticated, whether extravagant or miserly, have certain common traits. They have all been inspired with the same dynastic policy. When we consider the individual variations from the family type, there can be here no question ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... were still numerous and powerful; and it is certain that she found no advocate in the heart of her sister. That able, but thoroughly profligate politician lord Paget, notwithstanding his serving the princess with "comfects," is reported to have said, that the queen would never have peace in the country till her head were smitten off; and Gardiner never ceased to look upon her with ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... to pay for armies of lackeys and employees and private servants of officers and trustees, and for debauches and banquets which vie with any given by the kings and queens of the most extravagant and profligate nations on earth; in addition, enough more to accumulate huge and unnecessary funds—which are juggled with for the enrichment of individuals. Such wicked exactions and shameful extravagances constitute an imposition of the most wanton and criminal character, and those responsible ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... a distinguished senator of our own country, "was rightfully killed for conspiring against his country; but it was not he that destroyed the liberties of Rome. That work was done by the profligate politicians without him, and before his time; and his death did not restore the republic. There were no more elections: rotten politicians had destroyed them; and the nephew of Caesar, as heir to his uncle, succeeded to the empire on the principle ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... subject of letting the cottage to Major Milroy instead of to himself, and it has helped to exasperate the feeling against you. It is roundly stated in so many words that you have been prying into Miss Gwilt's family affairs, with the most dishonorable motives; that you have tried, for a profligate purpose of your own, to damage her reputation, and to deprive her of the protection of Major Milroy's roof; and that, after having been asked to substantiate by proof the suspicions that you have cast on the reputation of a defenseless woman, you have maintained a silence ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... stigmatized. For that man, when he was Consul in Gaul, was prevailed on at a banquet by a courtezan to behead one of those who were in chains, condemned on a capital charge. He escaped in the censorship of his brother Titus, who had immediately preceded me; but so profligate and abandoned an act of lust could by no means be allowed to pass by me and Flaccus, since with private infamy it combined the disgrace of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... Agnes to place confidence in me, and allow me to withdraw her from a scene which her wild grief so unpleasantly interrupted; for I thought that were I then and there to announce myself as her brother, she might not believe me—she might suspect some treachery or snare in a city so notoriously profligate as Florence. But the subsequent explanations which took place between us cleared up ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... children as did this unlettered Gipsy. After having promised that the morals of the child should be watched over, she was confided to his care. And the author has known a Gipsy parent correct with stripes a grown daughter, for mentioning what a profligate ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... definite and well understood signification. When we speak of an immoral man, we are commonly understood to attack the foundations of his character; to designate some gross vice of which he is guilty, and to speak of him as profane, or licentious, or profligate, or dishonest, or as unworthy of our confidence and respect. Now, we by no means intend to use the word in such a wide sense, when we say that this business is immoral. We do not mean to intimate that in no circumstances a man may be engaged in it and be worthy of ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... explain these as in some way connected with the worship of Pantecatl, the male divinity who presided over profligate love, and of Tlazolteotl, the Venus Impudica of the Aztec pantheon; and it is not without significance that the cave-temple of Votan, whose contents were destroyed by the Bishop of Chiapas, in 1691 (see above, p. 39), was located at Tlazoaloyan, both ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... the recovery of my health; and, to avoid any other embarrassing offers, I withdrew. I shall go to no more of their sittings." (He attended only one after this.) "I am determined to join Sieyes' party. It includes a greater diversity of opinions than that of the profligate Barras. He proclaims everywhere that he is the author of my fortune. He will never be content to play an inferior part, and I will never bend to such a man. He cherishes the mad ambition of being the support of the Republic. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... a lively picture of the gayest and most profligate periods of the history of the English Court. The writer, Sir Ralph Esher, is an adventurer in the Court of our Second Charles, where he is introduced by luckily securing a feather that escapes from the hat of one of the ladies of the Court on horseback. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... told that he and his like were in great part to blame if culture made men hostile to religion. It cannot, nevertheless, be doubted that he felt a real anxiety about the pagan tendencies which surrounded him. And what, in truth, may not the humanists have allowed themselves at the court of the profligate pagan, Sigismondo Malatesta, How far these men, destitute for the most part of fixed principle, ventured to go, depended assuredly on the sort of influences they were exposed to. Nor could they treat of Christianity without ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... conscious that he is a knave? If such is the case—and alas! is it not the case?—they cannot be too frequently told that fine clothes, wealth, and titles adorn a person in proportion as he adorns them; that if worn by the magnanimous and good they are ornaments indeed, but if by the vile and profligate they are merely san benitos, and only serve to make their infamy doubly apparent; and that a person in seedy raiment and tattered hat, possessed of courage, kindness, and virtue, is entitled to ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... may at the onset be confined mostly to the frontal lobes. The very first change may be—and usually is—a change in character! The man hitherto kind and gentle becomes irritable, perhaps even brutal. One whose sex morals have been of the most conventional kind, a loyal husband, suddenly becomes a profligate, reckless and debauched, perhaps even perverted. The man of firm purposes and indefatigable industry may lose his grip upon the ambitions and strivings of his lifetime and become an inert slacker, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... there, declaring that her petition had been that she might come to see, not to be seen,—as if, she cried out tearfully, the two wishes must not necessarily exist together, like the masculine and the feminine in this world! Prince Hal, acting the most profligate period of his career, espied her behind the Mousquetaire's moustache, and did not fail to make much of his discovery. In a perilous moment for the reputation of the Ball, my father handed him over to Gascoigne, and conducted ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... remained in Perthshire. The letter that he had left on the table was full of expressions of love and remorse, to say nothing of excuses for his infamous behavior to me. He declared that he had been entrapped into a private marriage with a profligate woman when he was little more than a lad. They had long since separated by common consent. When he first courted me, he had every reason to believe that she was dead. How he had been deceived in this particular, and how she had discovered that he had married me, he had yet to find out. Knowing ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... by S.R. Maitland, D.D., F.R.S., and F.S.A. A very monument of ignorant perversity. The writer shamelessly distorts facts to show that Chatterton was an utterly profligate blackguard and declares finally that neither Rowley ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... offer of a situation in London for Fanny, which the unsuspicious Curate accepted immediately. As soon as he had committed himself, it was confided to the audience that the waggoner was a depraved villain, in the employ of that notorious profligate, Colonel Chartress, who had commissioned a second myrmidon (of the female sex) to lure Fanny from virtue and the country, to vice and the metropolis. By the time the plot had "thickened" thus far, the scene changed, and we got to ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... formerly a bailie of Edinburgh, was one of Sharp's favourites, and one of his numerous commissioners for suppressing conventicles in Fife. He was a licentious profligate, greedy of money, and capable of undertaking any job, however vile. This man's enormities were at last so unbearable that he became an object of general detestation, and his excessive exactions had ruined so many respectable lairds, owners, and tenants, that at last nine of these (who had been ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... lifeless. There is very little sex in George Sand's works, and they, too, have gone the way of sexless things. When I say that all art that lives is full of sex, I do not mean that the artist must have led a profligate life; I mean, indeed, the very opposite. George Sand's life was notoriously profligate, and her books tell the tale. I mean by sex that concentrated essence of life which the great artist jealously reserves for his art, and through ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... dissolve Parliament, and dismiss the judges. But to submit without a struggle, without even protest or remonstrance, was not like Englishmen, before or since. When Erasmus visited England he found that the laity were the best read and the best behaved in Europe, while the clergy were gluttonous, profligate, and avaricious. No historian ever prepared himself more thoroughly for his task than Froude. Sir Francis Palgrave, the Deputy Keeper of the Records under Sir John Romilly, offered to let him see the unpublished documents ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... height in the metropolis of the nation; is daily spreading through every part of it; and, bad in itself as any can be, must of necessity bring in others after it. Indeed it hath already brought in such dissoluteness and contempt of principle in the higher part of the world, and such profligate intemperance, and fearlessness of committing crimes, in the lower, as must, if this impiety stop not, become absolutely fatal. And God knows, far from stopping, it receives, through the ill designs of ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... seen life, and know what is what, are not to be fooled so. 'What will this babbler say?' was asked by the wise men of Athens, who were but repeating the scoffs of the prophets and priests of Jerusalem, and the same jeers are bitter in the mouth of many a profligate man to-day. It is the fate of all strict morality to be accounted childish by the people ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... woman with any delicacy of feeling could have sat complacently at her own table, while her husband entertained his company with prolonged and minute accounts of his attempts on her virtue. Can you fancy Fielding composing such a scene, Fielding whom Richardson scouts as a profligate? It is impossible not to laugh at the bare idea; and no less funny are Pamela's poetical flights, especially when, like Hamilton of Bangour in exile, she paraphrases the paraphrase of the 137th Psalm, about ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... The young Manichean and profligate in the fourth century, and the young monk in his convent in the fifteenth, passed through a similar experience;—different in form, identical in substance—with that of Paul the persecutor. And so Paul's Gospel, which was ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... claims of ecclesiastical power, engaged with his usual zeal against the bishop. In consequence of his aversion to the dominion of superstitious churchmen, he wrote a poem called The Progress of a Divine, in which he conducts a profligate priest thro' all the gradations of wickedness, from a poor curacy in the country, to the highest preferment in the church; and after describing his behaviour in every station, enumerates that this priest thus accomplished, found at last a patron in ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... of national importance. It was much more than this; it was the beginning of a new order of things in the relations of nations to each other. It is but a little while since any graceless woman who helped a crowned profligate to break the commandments could light a national quarrel with the taper that sealed her billets-doux to his equerries and grooms, and kindle it to a war with the fan that was supposed to hide her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... the innumerable instances in which profligate and idle men live upon the earnings of industrious wives; or if the wives leave them, and take with them the children, to perform the double duty of mother and father, follow from place to place, and threaten to rob them of the children, if deprived ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... persons also he directed his grim attention, Somers, Cowper, Godolphin, Marlborough, and Wharton were each drawn with iron stylus and acid. To Wharton he gave special care (he had some private scores to pay off), and in the character of Verres, he etched the portrait of a profligate, an unscrupulous governor, a scoundrel, an infidel to his religion and country, a reckless, selfish, low-living blackguard. In the Letter to Marcus Crassus, Marlborough is addressed in language that the simplest farm-labourer could understand. The letter is a lay sermon on ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... Mr, Thrale's sister's son, a young profligate who subsequently married, not Miss Burney, but a woman of the town! Dr. Johnson's satirical verses on his coming of age are printed near ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... John is introduced by Luke at this point of his narrative to prepare the way for his account of the ministry of Christ. It was actually some time after Jesus had begun his work that Herod the tetrarch arrested John and cast him into prison because he had rebuked the profligate king for his impurity and his sin. John had been a faithful messenger of God, but the world does not reverence its prophets; they are usually imprisoned, beheaded, burned, ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... for every drop of my beer. Fine times, if two sober, hard-working citizens are to be brought here to be made the sport of a graceless profligate. But we will manage his property for him, Mr. Currie; we will make him feel that trustees are not to ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... contumacy, they compelled him to flee, murdered the jurors and clerks of the commission, and, carrying their heads upon poles, claimed the support of the nearest townships. In a few days all the commons of Essex were in a state of insurrection, under the command of a profligate priest, who had assumed the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of triumph, and had induced many of the inhabitants of the country, who had fled before the fury of the Wolf of Plinlimmon, to return to their desolate habitations. Numbers also of the loose and profligate characters which abound in a country subject to the frequent changes of war, had flocked thither in quest of spoil, or to gratify a spirit of restless curiosity. The Jew and the Lombard, despising danger where there was a chance of gain, might be already seen ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Do you mean that you cannot yourselves see that you are holding out an indemnity to every profligate, male and female, throughout the land—that you would be handicapping, in the struggle for existence, every honest man and woman desirous of bringing up their children in honour and in love? ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome
... was wealthy as orphan heiress, and she should have been wealthy as widow. But her husband was profligate, and he wasted her substance. She turned out to be a thoroughly capable woman of affairs who managed her property well. During her long and stainless widowhood—her husband fell in a shameful duel when she was but twenty-five years old, and she lived to be seventy—she ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... excess of drunkenness, debauchery, and avarice; whereby every passion of corrupt nature being inflamed, they have been easily prevailed upon to make war, and captivate one another; as well to furnish means for the excesses they had been habituated to, as to satisfy the greedy desire of gain in their profligate employers, who to this intent have furnished them with prodigious quantities of arms and ammunition. Thus they have been hurried into confusion, distress, and all the extremities of temporal misery; every thing, even ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... for a moment how extensive a ground is covered by the celebrated "A.M.D.G." formula ("Ad majorem Dei gloriam"). The conscience of an elector may be supposed to speak to him thus: "It is true that I know A.B. to be a profligate and thoroughly worldly man, but his influence with such or such a statesman or monarch will probably be the means of saving the Church from a schism in this, that or the other country. And that assuredly is A.M.D.G. And he is the man, therefore, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... obtain in passing the examination. But the moment I entered Halle, the university town, all my resolutions came to nothing.—Being now more than ever my own master, and without any control as long as I did not fight a duel, molest the people in the streets, &c., I renewed my profligate life afresh, though now a student of divinity. When my money was spent, I pawned my watch and a part of my linen and clothes, or borrowed in other ways. Yet in the midst of it all I had a desire to renounce this wretched life, for I had no enjoyment in it, and had sense enough left to see, that ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... noted for their vicious and profligate manners are now as much noted for their piety and good order. Drunkards, profane swearers, liars, quarrelsome persons, etc., are remarkably reformed.... A number of families who had lived apparently without the fear of God, in folly and in vice, without any religious instruction ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... latter. To this request Mrs. Pedagog had gladly acceded, because she had a notion that therein at some time or another would be found a clew to the new boarder's past history—or possibly some evidence of such duplicity as the good lady suspected he might be guilty of. She had read that Byron was profligate, and that Poe was addicted to drink, and she was impressed with the idea that poets generally were bad men, and she regarded the waste-basket as a possible means of protecting herself against any such idiosyncrasies of her new-found genius as would operate ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... dignity, a commanding power in the eye and expression of a pure, high-minded, resolute woman, which will abash even the boldest and most unscrupulous men. That is their shield and buckler, their defence against the attacks of the profligate. It is like the steadfast gaze of a dauntless man, which is said to have the power of awing even the fiercest of the beasts of the forest; but let her beware how for an instant she withdraws it, how she allows the softer feelings of her woman's nature to shake her firmness; her opponent ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... particularly, that a man shall not marry his bastard sister or daughter[a]. The civil law therefore, when it denied maintenance to bastards begotten under certain atrocious circumstances[b], was neither consonant to nature, nor reason, however profligate and wicked the parents ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... who might be helped without hindering others as worthy, but sometimes it seems as if every dollar of my money carried a blight with it, and infected whoever touched it with a moral pestilence. It has reached a sum where the wildest profligate couldn't spend it, and it grows and grows. It's as if it were a rising flood that had touched my lips, and would go over my head before I could reach the shore. I believe I got it honestly, and I have tried to share it with those whose labor earned it for me. I have ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... he was committed to prison, where, with "much firmness of mind and nobility of soul," he endured a tedious captivity for many years, until Charles II. was recalled, when he ordered his old and faithful friend Seaforth to be released, after which he became a great favourite at his licentious and profligate Court. ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... witness against him was one Castars. Bishop Burnet, who was well acquainted with him, says, that when he heard who the witnesses were, he thought he was bound to do what he could to stop it: 'so I sent both to the lord chancellor and the attorney general to let them know what profligate wretches these witnesses were. Jones, the attorney general, took it ill of me that I should disparage the king's evidence. Duke Lauderdale, having heard how I had moved in this matter, railed at me with open mouth. He said I had studied ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... Considine doing his best to put the affairs of Roscarna in order, had realised the hopeless disorder in which they were involved. In the whole of Jocelyn's tenure of the estate the only stable period had been that of his bourgeois marriage. In youth he had been wildly profligate, in old age negligent, in neither caring for anything beyond his immediate needs. His tenants owed him thousands of pounds that he had never attempted to recover, for he had found it easier to borrow ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... are substantially three: that he is economical, that he is more or less wealthy, and that he has a secret. Now, surely it is obvious that there are the three chief marks of the kind of man who is blackmailed. And surely it is equally obvious that the faded finery, the profligate habits, and the shrill irritation of Mr Glass are the unmistakable marks of the kind of man who blackmails him. We have the two typical figures of a tragedy of hush money: on the one hand, the respectable man with a mystery; on the other, the West-end vulture with a scent ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... those of logic. And, as it has been variously asserted of him, that he was constant and inconstant, firm and fickle, guided by principle, yet giving way to every impulse; that he was both chaste and profligate, a sensual man and an anchorite; calumny alone can not be accused of all these contradictions. We must then seek out conscientiously whether there were not other causes for this inconsistency, so as to return back within due bounds, and bring contradiction in ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... approve'd his strains; And thought his Legend made as good a figure As naturalizing a dull German's brains, Which beget issues in the Heliconian stews, Upon a profligate Tenth Muse, In all ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... about her enticed to pleasure and voluptuousnesss; but the heart of Inez turned with distaste from this idle mockery. The tears would rush into her eyes, as her thoughts reverted from this scene of profligate splendour, to the humble but virtuous home from whence she had been betrayed; or if the witching power of music ever soothed her into a tender reverie, it was to dwell with fondness on the image of Antonio. But if Don Ambrosio, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... that Duchess de Longueville, whose beautiful picture we were looking at yesterday?—the heroine of the Fronde?—think of that woman—bold, intriguing, profligate, vain, ambitious, factious!—who made rebels with a smile; or if that were not enough, the lady was not scrupulous,—apparently without principle as without shame, nothing was too much! And then think of the same woman protecting the virtuous ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... that hapless land from ruin; While they who at the steerage stood, And reap'd the profit, sought his blood. "To save them from their evil fate, In him was held a crime of state, A wicked monster on the bench,[33] Whose fury blood could never quench; As vile and profligate a villain, As modern Scroggs, or old Tresilian:[34] Who long all justice had discarded, Nor fear'd he God, nor man regarded; Vow'd on the Dean his rage to vent, And make him of his zeal repent: But Heaven his innocence defends, The grateful people ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... seven years in exile, having been banished to Corsica by the emperor Claudius, on suspicion of an illicit intercourse with the profligate Julia. The islands in the Tuscan sea were the Tasmania of the Roman empire, places of transportation for political offenders, and those who fell under the imperial frown—which was the same thing. Some smaller islands ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... the chief basis of their authority. As soon as they had attained power, they were joined by men who professed their principles merely for selfish purposes; who vied with each other in presenting to the world the outward signs of Puritanism, and remained notoriously profligate in life and character. The kingdom of the saints, objectionable as a tyranny, and finally identified in the popular mind with a hated hypocrisy, came to its inevitable end in the reaction of the Restoration. But when the ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... and he should therefore 'speak them in words hard as rocks,' regardless of the contumely heaped upon him by little minds for having thus spoken them. What if the ridicule, the denunciations of the unthinking, the sensual, the profligate, the unreflecting fools of the world be poured upon him? What of that? To-day, may be one of darkness and storm. The cloud and the storm will pass away, and the brightness and glory of the sunlight will be all ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... management. The navy itself was split into factions by political bias and personal jealousies, and there was a saying that "if a naval officer were to be roasted, another officer could always be found to turn the spit." The head of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, was a man of much ability, but also of profligate character, as well public as private. He doubtless wished the success of his department,—under the terrible chances of war no chief can do otherwise, for the responsibility of failure must fall upon his own head; but ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... Langhorne's Plutarch, 1838, p. 498); Pompey's third wife, Mucia, intrigued with Caesar (vide ibid., p. 447); Mahomet's favourite wife, Ayesha, on one occasion incurred suspicion; Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, was notoriously profligate (see Gibbon's Decline and Fall, 1825, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... little thought of by the wise, seem to hit the taste of the vulgar."[17] And I have myself noticed that those who practise to speak acceptably and to the gratification of the masses promiscuously, for the most part become also profligate and lovers of pleasure in their lives. Naturally enough. For if in giving pleasure to others they neglect the noble, they would be hardly likely to put the lofty and sound above a life of luxury ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... girls "walking on" was Kate Rorke. This made me take a special interest in watching what she did later on. No one who saw her fine performance in "The Profligate" could easily forget it, and I shall never understand why the London public ever let ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... interpreted, it is a key to his whole system of belief as to the order of the universe and the relations between man and his Maker. Nothing sheds such light on the superstitions of an age as the prevailing interpretation and treatment of disease. When the touch of a profligate monarch was a cure for one of the most inveterate of maladies, when the common symptoms of hysteria were prayed over as marks of demoniacal possession, we might well expect the spiritual realms of thought to be peopled with still ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... states that Henry III. gave orders for the destruction of Skipsea Castle about 1220, the Earl of Albemarle, its owner at that time, having been in rebellion. When Edward II. ascended the throne, he recalled his profligate companion Piers Gaveston, and besides creating him Baron of Wallingford and Earl of Cornwall, he presented this ill-chosen favourite with the great ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... to be discovery, settlement, and the conversion of the Indians, who are described as "men without knowledge of God or use of reason,"—a pious design, held doubtless in full sincerity by the royal profligate, now, in his decline, a fervent champion of the Faith and a strenuous tormentor of heretics. The machinery of conversion was of a character somewhat questionable, since Cartier and Roberval were empowered ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... delayed by Charles II.'s very vices. Clarendon's fall had left him surrounded by profligate aides, too timid and too indolent to face the resolute men of Massachusetts. They often discussed the contumacy of the colony, but went no further than words. Massachusetts was even encouraged, in 1668, forcibly to reassert its authority in Maine, ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1761, through the influence of the Earl of Bute. He was the owner of Medmenham Abbey, on the Thames, and as such, the President of the profligate Club whose doings were made notorious by the proceedings against Wilkes, and who, in compliment to him, called themselves ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... in a faithless wife does not make her loyal and virtuous. A wife's confidence in a profligate husband does not make him stanch ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... it, to be misused and sacrificed hitherto by incapable leaders. One lesson they all learn,—to hate slavery, teterrima causa. But the issue does not yet appear. We must get ourselves morally right. Nobody can help us. 'T is of no account what England or France may do. Unless backed by our profligate parties, their action would be nugatory, and, if so backed, the worst. But even the war is better than the degrading and descending politics that preceded it for decades of years, and our legislation has made great strides, and if we can ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Red Indian, gambler and profligate, a man without morals, whose vengeance was never glutted and who stamped on the faces of all who opposed him—oh, yes, she knew all the hard names he had been called. Yet she was not afraid of him. There was more than ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... who has not acted well in this life; and he must have an uncommon share of courage indeed who does not shrink at the presence of his God. You see, my dear doctor, the apprehension of death will soon bring the most profligate to a proper use of their understanding. To what a situation am I now reduced? Is this odious little hut a suitable lodging for a prince? or is this anxiety of my mind becoming the characteristic of a Christian? ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... a wasteful thing in your life, Byam, I'll warrant," said the parson, smiling; "and yet some say that you have been a profligate." ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... second-rate performance," said she. "But really being unlaced by that Thing, that great fat profligate beery Prussian was almost too much for me. And the duet! But it was very polite of you to come, and I will do better next time. Siegfried! Brunnhilde! Siegfried! Miaou! Miaou! Bring on the next lot of cats! Darling Georgie, wasn't ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... pretend to be their superiors have no single virtue or good intention. I do not, however, mean to confound the inhabitants of Sarawak, or the other rivers, with those of Borneo Proper. The latter are thoroughly corrupt and profligate. The former are Malays, but have their good qualities, and certainly are not possessed with the spirit of intrigue which seems the life, the only moving principle of the Borneons. It may truly be said of the latter, ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... passion was the rudder of all his actions; of a liberal man, it made him a public thief to supply this bounty and profusion, and made him utter this vile and unjust saying, "That if the most wicked and profligate persons in the world had been faithful in serving him towards his advancement, he would cherish and prefer them to the utmost of his power, as much as the best of men." It intoxicated him with so excessive a vanity, as to dare to boast in the presence of his fellow-citizens, that he had made ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... of nonsense talked, and by very sensible people, too, about most drunken fools! He was a spender and a profligate, was old Marshall Langham; a tavern loafer, but a man of parts. Yes, he had a bit of a brain, when he was sober and of a ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... the accidental death of the soldier boy to the will of God; to declare all the Jews, against whom the charge of murder has been brought on mere surmises, free from all suspicion; to turn over the soldier woman Terentyeva, for her profligate conduct, to ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... experience—which are, in my opinion, radically and absolutely false, and yet no one takes the trouble to question them. I am always coming across them. Such as this: No one is more incapable of affection than a profligate. This, in my judgement, is a ludicrous error, though it is the statement of no less a moral physician than Lacordaire. If by affection you mean 'sustained, pure, disinterested emotion,' such as patriotism—well and good; but affection!—the two most affectionate ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... reasonable rate to such a company as you describe. I fully appreciate your reasons for desiring such a consummation, and, in addition to them, have others peculiar to my own position. Any one who has a valuable patent can profit by it only by a constant fight with some of the most profligate and, at the same time, most shrewd members of society. I have found myself not only the agent of yourself and the Messrs. Vail to sell your patent rights, but the soldier to fight your battles, as well in the country as in the courts of justice. Almost single-handed, with the deadly ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... "law established, with a grateful sense of your former concessions, and a patient reliance on the benignity of Parliament for the further mitigation of the laws that still affect them."—As to the low, thoughtless, wild, and profligate, who have joined themselves with those of other professions, but of the same character, you are not to imagine that for a moment I can suppose them to be met with anything else than the manly and enlightened energy of a firm government, supported by the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... regret, in my daily visits to Hanaruro, that the Wahuaners had lost the simplicity and innocence of character which formerly distinguished them. The profligate habits of the settlers of all nations among them, and of the numerous foreign sailors with whom they constantly associate, have most prejudicially affected their morals. Fraud, theft, and burglary, never heard ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... know that Shakespeare, the sweetest spirit and finest mind in all literature, should have degraded himself to pretend such an affection for the profligate Herbert as has given occasion for misconstruction. It is bad enough, I say, to know that Shakespeare could play flunkey to this extent; but after all, that is the worst that can be urged against him, and it is so much better than men have been led to believe that there ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... lodgings, with some of the pictures and finery, the wreck of her fortunes, before her eyes, without society, without a single friend, admired—and despised: she lives literally in spite, not in pity. Her cruelty in drawing a profligate character of the Queen after her execution, in the Chevaliers du Cygne, her taking her pupils at the beginning of the Revolution to the revolutionary clubs, her connection with the late Duke of Orleans and her hypocrisy about it, her insisting upon ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... estate had been to permit huts of miserable construction to be erected to the number of several hundreds by the poorest, and in many instances the most profligate, of the population. They were not regularly entered in the rental account, but had a nominal payment fixed upon them which was paid annually at the court leet. These cottages were built on the sides of the roads and on the lord's ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... gang do in the Beggar's Opera, who call themselves practical philosophers[1294], and may have as much sincerity as pernicious speculative philosophers, is not the less an object of just indignation. An abandoned profligate may think that it is not wrong to debauch my wife, but shall I, therefore, not detest him? And if I catch him in making an attempt, shall I treat him with politeness? No, I will kick him down stairs, or run him through the body; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... attended her in this manner was the gay, graceful, and profligate Duke of Buckingham, who became enamoured of her loveliness. Not only did he raise the most wonderful of card mansions for her delight, but having a good voice, and she possessing a passion for music, he invented songs and sung them to ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... this riot. This is the sum of all my miseries, If he, even he, a sober, hopeful lad, May be seduc'd into debaucheries. —But where shall I inquire for him? I warrant They have decoy'd him into some vile brothel. That profligate persuaded him, I'm sure. —But here comes Syrus; he can tell me all. And yet this slave is of the gang; and if He once perceives that I'm inquiring for him, He'll never tell me any thing; a rogue! I'll ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... enraptured, the final fortunes of that gallant quadrilateral of musketeers will forget the part which is played by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in that magnificent prose epic? There is little to be said for the real Villiers; he was a profligate and a scoundrel, and he did not show very heroically in his quarrel with the fiery young Ossory. It was one thing to practically murder Lord Shrewsbury; it was quite another thing to risk the wrath and the determined right hand of the Duke of Ormond's son. But the Villiers of Dumas' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... remarked the striking resemblance of Talma's countenance to the first busts of Nero; and this singular circumstance, along with the admirable manner in which he represents the impatient, headstrong, and profligate tyrant, rendered his acting in this character remarkably interesting. The opportunities Which he enjoyed of studying the character and the manner of Bonaparte,—who never forgot the assistance he received from Talma, when he first ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... a genius, and, after a lingering illness, died, to the great loss of the Independents of South America, whom he had intended to visit with an English epic poem, for the purpose of exciting them to liberty. But death, even the death of the radically presumptuous profligate, is a serious thing; and as we believe that Keats was made presumptuous chiefly by the treacherous puffing of his cockney fellow gossips, and profligate in his poems merely to make them saleable, we regret that he did not live long enough to acquire common sense, and ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... Very few men of profligate lives escape these diseases. They are alarmingly prevalent among the 'fast' youths of our cities. And some forms of them are incurable by any effort of skill. Even the approach of such men ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... self-respect made Pope obedient to these orders, except when there was an occasion of serving Savage. On his second visit to Bristol (when he returned from Glamorganshire,) Savage had been thrown into the jail of the city. One person only interested himself for this hopeless profligate, and was causing an inquiry to be made about his debts at the time Savage died. So much Dr. Johnson admits; but he forgets to mention the name of this long suffering friend. It was Pope. Meantime, let us not be supposed to believe the lying legend of Savage; he was doubtless ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... next issue of the county paper a full description of the contest, from which it appeared that his favourite son had been beaten in a public trial of skill by Jim Jarrocks, well-known all over the county as the most reckless poacher and unblushing profligate anywhere about, and had thus given encouragement to a man who was constantly before the magistrates for all sorts of minor breaches of the law. However, he felt that he must make the best of it, and he therefore spoke of it among his friends as a bit of foolish practical joking on his son's ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... or any other brutal sport, for the attraction and excitement of the spectacle; the other who make it a dry matter of business, and mix with the crowd solely to pick pockets. Add to these, the dissolute, the drunken, the most idle, profligate, and abandoned of both sexes— some moody ill-conditioned minds, drawn thither by a fearful interest—and some impelled by curiosity; of whom the greater part are of an age and temperament rendering the gratification of that curiosity highly dangerous to themselves and to society—and ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... England differs not only from marriage in France, but from marriage in Scotland. Marriage as modified by the divorce laws in South Dakota would be called mere promiscuity in Clapham. Yet the Americans, far from taking a profligate and cynical view of marriage, do homage to its ideals with a seriousness that seems old fashioned in Clapham. Neither in England nor America would a proposal to abolish marriage be tolerated for a moment; and yet nothing is more certain than that in both countries ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... "Profligate! You blaspheme!" Up started Bame, A little unsteady now upon his feet, And shaking his crumpled pamphlet over ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... his meanest servant, and that too on some very irritating provocation. As for me, he addressed me with the insolence of a basha to a Circassian slave; he talked to me with the loose licence in which the most profligate libertines converse with harlots, and which women abandoned only in a moderate degree detest and abhor. He often kissed me with very rude familiarity, and one day attempted further brutality; when a gentleman on board, ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... added to this injury, that of seducing their daughters, was wont to commit, to a carrier in the neighbourhood, the care of his illegitimate children, shortly after they were born. His emissary regularly carried them away, but they were never again heard of. The unjust and cruel gains of the profligate laird were dissipated by his extravagance, and the ruins of his house seem to bear witness to the truth of the rhythmical prophecies denounced against it, and still current among the peasantry. He himself died an untimely death; but the agent of his amours and ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... of our age to underrate parental dignity. In the easy-going world, preference is given to profligate celibacy over honorable wedlock; marriage itself is degraded to the level of a purely natural contract, its bond has lost its character of indissolubility and its obligations are shirked to meet the demands of fashion and convenience. When parents, unworthy ones, do not appreciate their ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... habits may rule him for a time; but the memory of your sweetness, and your beauty, and your firmness, and your gentleness, will come back upon his mind, even in the society of the gay, the light, and the profligate, and will seem like a ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... that moment Harry was seated outside the cook-house, dressed in a suit of spotless white duck, playing an accordeon; also he wore round his brown neck a thick wreath of white and scarlet flowers. Harry, I may remark, was a dandy and a notorious profligate, but against these natural faults was the fact that he could make ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... Captain Williamson. But I will not advert to such insignificant individuals, such are rare exceptions—I leave them out of the question—I reason on general principles. The life of an officer is not now a life of parade, of coxcombical or of profligate idleness—but of active service, of continual hardship and danger. All the descriptions which we see in ancient history of a soldier's life, descriptions which in times of peace appeared like romance, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... saw the look of pain which always came into the Master Builder's face when he thought of his profligate young son, cut off in the prime of his youthful manhood, and that without any assurance on the part of those about him that he had repented of the error of his ways. The carelessness and wickedness ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... ordeal in the witness-box or on the operating-table may be forcibly crushed down like a child's jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again the moment that effort ceases. Sir Arthur Pinero's play, The Profligate, was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed "The Sword of Damocles." That is, indeed, the inevitable symbol of dramatic tension: we see a sword of Damocles (even though it be only a farcical blade of painted ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Dialogue happen'd between two men of quality, and both men of wit too; and the effect was, that the Lord brought the reality of the Devil into the question, and the debate brought the profligate to be a penitent; so in short, the Devil was made a ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... existed as a rule only a holy, but indifferent and utterly unlyrical, love for the women, the equals of their husbands, wooed usually of the family and solemnly given in marriage without much consultation of their wishes; and a highly passionate and singing, but completely profligate and debasing, desire for mercenary though cultivated creatures like the Delias and Cynthlas of Tibullus and Propertius, or highborn women, descended, like Catullus' Lesbia, in brazen dishonour to their level, women towards whom there could not possibly exist on the part of their ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... selfishness of man. The inquiry is one of the most interesting which can occupy the thoughts of the far-seeing and humane; for it involves the temporal and eternal welfare of millions of their fellow-creatures;—it may well arrest the attention of the selfish, and divert for a few minutes the profligate from their pursuits; for on it depends whether the darling wealth of the former is to be preserved or destroyed, and the exciting enjoyments of the other ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... written an hour later, Wilberforce urges Pitt not to neglect this note. Williams some years ago sought to make a mutiny; he was skilled in intrigue, had "held Jacobinical language, and was going on in the most profligate and abandoned way." This is all the information that the Pitt MSS. yield upon this question. But in the private diary of Wilberforce there is the significant entry: "Pitt awaked by Woolwich artillery riot and ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... to commit, to a carrier in the neighbourhood, the care of his illegitimate children, shortly after they were born. His emissary regularly carried them away, but they were never again heard of. The unjust and cruel gains of the profligate laird were dissipated by his extravagance, and the ruins of his house seem to bear witness to the truth of the rhythmical prophecies denounced against it, and still current among the peasantry. He himself died an untimely death; but the agent of his amours and crimes survived ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... gone so far as to bribe Tip Scammon, worthless, profligate son of the honest old janitor of the High School, to commit a series of robberies from the locker rooms in the school basement while Dick carried the key as monitor there. The "plunder" had been found in Dick's own room at home, and the young man ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... to lose their individuality of conviction the moment they begin life's business. Many a young man has sacrificed his individuality on the altar that a profligate companion has built for him. Many a young man who knew right, has allowed some empty-headed street-corner loafer to lower his own high moral tone lest he should seem singular in the little world of society surrounding him. And many a lad whose life promised well at the ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... against themselves than against each other. Their principles may be more relaxed on some points than ours, but I doubt much whether a Frenchman would not be as much disgusted in England as an Englishman could possibly be in France; we call them a profligate race and condemn them in ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... deliberating, and Zarah praying, Lysimachus was carousing amidst boon companions in the city. The ruin and approaching execution of his rival gave unwonted zest to the revels of the profligate Syrian. ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... He took her hand and would have raised it to his lips; but she did not forget herself, and gently withdrew it, exclaiming, "O Gifted!" this time with a tone of tender reproach which made him feel like a profligate. He tore himself away, and when at a safe distance flung her a kiss, which she rewarded with ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of public commotion and civil war the invaluable blessings which are certainly in their power. I will not conceive it possible that men who have eternal fame within their grasp will place the rich inheritance on the cast of a die, and, losing the venture, be damned among the worst and most profligate adventurers ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... departed from the heart of another of earth's daughters. Vain were the tears of the repentant girl to induce a performance of the promises so solemnly made; false had been and still were the vows of the profligate; but he continued to make them all the more profusely; and hope, at first unwavering, then fainter and fainter, filled the heart of his victim. Once conquered, and the victory was ever after comparatively easy; and having taken something of a ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... spirit of the dead man called him, seeming to say: "Come and keep me company. Our old quarrel is over. You and I understand each other now. We are two of a kind, just as like as two hogs from one litter—you the sanctimonious psalm-singer and I the conscienceless profligate—we are brothers at last in ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... he may request a private interview. Every chance he gets, he wants to know when I mean to yield. I am, for the sake of business experience, resorting to all sorts of strategy; then, when I qualify, I can afford to snap my fingers in the face of this profligate. You've no idea how much the honor of business young ladies is menaced, Mrs. Roberts. I'm not by any means the only one. The trouble is, very few have the backbone to resist these propositions, which invariably come in one form or another to the working girls attractive of ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... outward guise of regal office, in his bearing, politeness, address, magnificence, and high-heeled dignity, but he was sensual, ferocious, ignorant, profligate, and superstitious. His greatness was fictitious, his splendor superficial, and his character false. The king was the state, but his mistresses governed. A court thus constituted led the fashions and formed the manners of the people. It stamped the age with ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... this country; and to the evidence which exists of the want of principle which characterised the Court of Charles the Second, these Memoirs are no slight addition. The monarch was heartless and profligate; his ministers, with very few exceptions, were intent alone on the promotion of their own interests; and services and sufferings were nothing in the balance against the influence of the royal mistresses. In such a state of things, merit availed but little; ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... Congressional plan of reconstruction be carried out, it will result in republicanizing the Southern States. This would be the political extinction of their party. In fighting against that plan, they are, therefore, fighting for life, and are accordingly more than usually profligate in the character of the stimulants they address to whatever meanness, baseness, dishonesty, lawlessness, and ignorance there may be in the nation. Taxation presses hard on the people, and they have not hesitated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... reason, though in a less degree, he who hopes for favour to his children, or to other surviving connections, is to be listened to with some caution; for the existence of one virtue does not necessarily prove that of another, and he who loves his children and friends may yet be profligate and unprincipled; or, deceiving himself, may think that while his ends are laudable, he ought not to hesitate concerning the means. Besides these more obvious temptations to prevarication, there is another which, though it may lie somewhat deeper, yet experience teaches us to be rooted in ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... is no better test of the popular opinion of a man than the character assigned to him on the stage; and till the close of the sixteenth century Sir John Oldcastle remained the profligate buffoon of English comedy. Whether in life he bore the character so assigned to him, I am unable to say. The popularity of Henry V., and the splendour of his French wars served no doubt to colour all who had opposed him with ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... Turk, poorly dressed like a marabout or santon of the desert—a sort of enthusiasts, who sometimes ventured into the camp of the Crusaders, though treated always with contumely, and often with violence. Indeed, the luxury and profligate indulgence of the Christian leaders had occasioned a motley concourse in their tents of musicians, courtesans, Jewish merchants, Copts, Turks, and all the varied refuse of the Eastern nations; so that the caftan and turban, though to ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... become a regular practitioner. However, he had taken orders in the Church of England, but he never regretted the time he had spent in walking the hospitals, for, biding his time, he had now a means of access, which he otherwise might have lacked, to even the most hardened and profligate. Those who would not have called him in as a Christian minister to advise them regarding their souls, were thankful to get him to attend to the ailments of their bodies. Once in a house he never left it without making himself beloved and respected by its inmates, and insuring for ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... be supposed that all the female Gypsies are of this high, talented and respectable order: amongst them are many low and profligate females, who sing at taverns or at the various gardens in the neighbourhood, and whose husbands and male connexions subsist by horse jobbing and like kinds of traffic. The principal place of resort of this class is Marina Rotche, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... heretofore. Her account of her brother was far less favourable, though she did not say anything directly to his disadvantage. From all that I could gather from her, I was led to suppose that he was a specimen of the idle, coarse-mannered, profligate "squirearchy"—a result which might naturally have followed from the circumstance of his being, as it were, outlawed from society, and driven for companionship to grades below his own—enjoying, too, the dangerous prerogative of spending a good deal of money. However, you may easily ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... unprofitable servant—he may not have committed either sin or crime, yet never have felt the pulsation of a single unselfish emotion. Another, meanwhile, shall have been hurried by an impulsive nature into fault after fault—shall have been reckless, improvident, perhaps profligate, yet be fitter after all for the kingdom of heaven than the Pharisee—fitter, because against the catalogue of faults there could perhaps be set a fairer list of acts of comparative generosity and self-forgetfulness—fitter, because to those who love much, much is forgiven. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... apart from experience, and with which none but a particular class had any concern. At such a time, when Europe lay desolate under the ravage and incessant menace of the French Empire,—when England had an insane King, a profligate Regent, an atrocious Ministry, and a corrupt Parliament,—when the war drained the kingdom of its youth, and every class of its resources,—when there was chronic discontent in the manufacturing districts, and hunger among the rural population, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... annals of legislation, and you will find no precedent for such a profligate act of tyranny, exercised by a majority over their fellow legislators, nor for such an impudent contempt of the rights of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... wanton. They swore, laughed, and talked obscenely. At the place of execution the scene grew still more shocking; and the clergyman who attended was more the subject of ridicule than of their serious attention. The psalm was sung amidst the curses and quarrelling of hundreds of the most abandoned and profligate of mankind. As soon as the poor creatures were half-dead, I was much surprised to see the populace fall to haling and pulling the carcases with so much earnestness as to occasion several warm rencounters and broken ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the coaches, and voted for Bung. The captain's arguments, too, had produced considerable effect: the attempted influence of the vestry produced a greater. A threat of exclusive dealing was clearly established against the vestry-clerk—a case of heartless and profligate atrocity. It appeared that the delinquent had been in the habit of purchasing six penn'orth of muffins, weekly, from an old woman who rents a small house in the parish, and resides among the original settlers; on her last weekly visit, a message was conveyed to her through the medium of the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... is just as likely to hang herself because she despairs of a fair hearing as because she is conscious of guilt. What weighs with me is that they were brought up in the dissolute times of Messalina and Nero and that their relatives were leaders of the most profligate set in Rome, cronies of Vitellius and his coterie. But although Cornelia was bred and raised in the same social atmosphere, I am quite as sure of her innocence as all the world was the day she was buried ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... death of the soldier boy to the will of God; to declare all the Jews, against whom the charge of murder has been brought on mere surmises, free from all suspicion; to turn over the soldier woman Terentyeva, for her profligate conduct, to a ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... it is to the illiberal strictures of a profligate press I now allude; among the London journalists, none (luckily for themselves) have dared to question the veracity of my statements: they know me, and they know that I am IN LONDON. If I can use the pen, I can ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the thing, the most essentially requisite; and much less certainly will they think it to be so with respect to this present World, if they find their pious Instructor not only to choose the Society of Persons Profligate and Debauch'd for his Friends and Companions; but also (on all occasions) to labour the promotion of the like Men to Employments of the highest Truth, in preference of others of acknowledg'd Integrity and Sobriety of Life: The avow'd Reason whereof being only ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... himself to witness the sincerity of my attachment to him. He is now in a place where he can neither deceive nor be deceived. I flatter myself that he pities my errors, especially when he recalls his own." St. Augustine had been somewhat profligate in his younger days. ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... It does not need the alleged contrast between his professions and his practice to enforce this conclusion. Many men have affected the religious habit and the religious bearing while their lives were privately profligate without deserving to be called insane except in the sense in which any criminal excess may be regarded pathologically as a proof of madness. Even if it were true that the long-haired and black-habited George Gordon were the debauched profligate that Hannah ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... sinning &c v.; wicked, iniquitous, immoral, unrighteous, wrong, criminal; naughty, incorrect; unduteous^, undutiful. unprincipled, lawless, disorderly, contra bonos mores [Lat.], indecorous, unseemly, improper; dissolute, profligate, scampish; unworthy; worthless; desertless^; disgraceful, recreant; reprehensible, blameworthy, uncommendable; discreditable, disreputable; Sadistic. base, sinister, scurvy, foul, gross, vile, black, grave, facinorous^, felonious, nefarious, shameful, scandalous, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... soul's conflicts and struggles with evil in its journey through life, it is unsurpassed. It is believed that no other book except the Bible has gone through so many editions or attained such a popularity in all languages. It has been generally understood that Bunyan's early life was a very profligate one, but some have thought that his terrible self-accusations in after years may have arisen from the height of his religious fervour and Puritan strictness, which made him look on dancing and bell-ringing as deadly sins. This idea is satisfactorily ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... refinement: the true, honest, patriotic heart of America? Here and there, were drops of its blood and life, but they scarcely coloured the stream of desperate adventurers which sets that way for profit and for pay. It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... that therein at some time or another would be found a clew to the new boarder's past history—or possibly some evidence of such duplicity as the good lady suspected he might be guilty of. She had read that Byron was profligate, and that Poe was addicted to drink, and she was impressed with the idea that poets generally were bad men, and she regarded the waste-basket as a possible means of protecting herself against any such idiosyncrasies of her new-found genius as would operate to ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... were justly objectionable to Mr. Grimshaw; they attracted numbers of profligate people to Haworth, and brought a match to the combustible materials of the place, only too ready to blaze out into wickedness. The story is, that he tried all means of persuasion, and even intimidation, to have the races discontinued, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... pass the rest of the evening, appeared hollow and improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the rich profligate, we doubted if she were any ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... supper—a cold fowl and a bottle of Burgundy—a profligate supper, fit for such abandoned characters; and over it you shall tell me how the world looked to you when you were ten ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... not less terrible man, struck him favorably, and his hopes rose as a sunbeam fell on her shining hair, which the lady Berenike had arranged with her own hand, twining it with strands of white Bombyx. She must appear, even to this ruthless profligate, as the very type ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... wife, "poor wretch," of whom he stood in some awe; and yet this inconsistent naval secretary liked to flit from flower to flower. He was vain, greedy, wanton, fond of the delight of the eye and the pride of life; he was loving and loose in his manners; he was pious, repentant, profligate; and he deliberately told the whole tale of all his many changes of mood and mistress, of piety and pleasure. One cannot open Pepys at random without finding him at his delightful old games. On the Lord's day he goes to church with Mr. Creed, and hears a good sermon from the red-faced parson. ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... changed the want, and have changed it by your power of imagination. There is no more effective way of destroying a vice than by deliberately picturing the ultimate results of its indulgence. Persuade a young man who is inclined to be profligate to keep in his mind the image of an old profligate; show him the profligate worn out, desiring without the power to gratify; and if you can get him to think in that way, unconsciously he will begin to shrink from that which before attracted him; the very hideousness of the ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... element, everywhere at sea, in the clouds, adrift, or by whatever word utter ignorance and incapacity are to be described. In society and in the work of life, he finds himself beaten by the youth whom at college he despised as frivolous or abhorred as profligate." ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... grasping spirit, it so happened, that wherever it was tithe-free the rents exacted were also enormous, and seen as—supposing tithe had not an existence—no country ever could suffer to become the basis of valuation, or to settle down into a system. In fact, such was the spirit, and so profligate the condition of the Established Church for a long lapse of time, both before and after the Union, that we may lay it down as a general principle, that everything was rewarded in ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... copy by him (Stiggins), in which case he might calculate on arriving, sooner or later at the comfortable conclusion, that, like him, he was a most estimable and blameless character, and that all his acquaintances and friends were hopelessly abandoned and profligate wretches. Which consideration, he said, could not but ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... and favorites staked fortunes at the gaming tables, outran each other in devising costly dresses, contrived novel equipages and unique dwellings. In his superb Court he found all the elements required to satisfy his pride, and glorify his reign. The Sun King was the most profligate host in all history. Determined to outdo the fabulous luxury of the feasts of Lucullus in early Roman times, and to outshine the storied splendor of Oriental princes, he entertained his Court and guests with lavish liberality, superbly indifferent ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... him with his rattan in public, bullied him for submitting to such treatment, and imprisoned him for trying to run away from it. He came at last out of purgatory; and Europe felt him to her farthest bounds. This bookish, philosophizing, verse-making cynic and profligate was soon to approve himself the first warrior of his time, and one of ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... alliance has already preserved the liberty of Piedmont. If it had been established sooner, it might have preserved that of Hesse, and have saved Europe from the revolting spectacle of the constitutional resistance of a whole people against an usurping tyrant and a profligate minister crushed by brutal, ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... has produced the most happy effects on multitudes of men. It has enlightened the most ignorant; softened the most hardened; reclaimed the most profligate; converted the most estranged; purified the most polluted; exalted the most degraded; and plucked the most endangered from hell to heaven. What was it that transformed the persecuting and blaspheming Saul ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... stuck-up young swell takes of me, I might be a block of wood! I'll make him listen to me. (Aloud.) Ahem! My Lord, I've just been telling my niece here the latest scandal in high-life. I daresay your Lordship has heard of that titled but brainless young profligate, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... such appointments to great trusts as might secure the persons intrusted from the temptations of unlawful emolument, and, what in all cases is the greatest security, given a lawful gratification to the natural passions of men. Matrimony is to be used, as a true remedy against a vicious course of profligate manners; fair and lawful emoluments, and the just profits of office, are opposed to the unlawful means which might be made use of to supply them. For, in truth, I am ready to agree, that for any man to expect a series of sacrifices without a return in ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... rest—check the sigh of envy; there is a ring at the bell—hurrying footsteps on the stairs—a jarring sound against the polished door, and in bursts the rich man's son, his brow haggard, his eyes fierce and red. He is a notorious profligate; gambling is his food and drink, debauchery his glory and his ruin. Would you be that father? Go back to your honest sons and look in their faces; throw the bright locks from their brows, and bless God that there the angel triumphs over the brute; ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... difference 'the Duchesse' ever found was, that her Sunday parties were less well attended; but this was because the world (which often grows religious, but never grows moral) had begun to take it into its head that it would keep holy the Sabbath night. The worst part of the story was, that this profligate blackguard bullied and plundered her without mercy or shame, and she had managed very nearly to ruin herself before her death. What she had left, she bequeathed to her husband, notwithstanding ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... confuse the situation, there occurred at this time the contest of John Wilkes, backed by the London mob, against the Grafton Ministry. This demagogue, able {45} and profligate, had already come into conflict with the Grenville Ministry in 1765, and had been driven into exile. Now, in 1768, he returned and was repeatedly elected to the Commons, and as often unseated by the vindictive ministerial majority. Riots and bloodshed ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... the siege and the pressure of want; while despair drove many of those who remained to courses of reckless vice. Godfrey, firm to his duty and strong in faith, aided the exertions of the clergy in encouraging the spirits of his troops, and restraining their profligate excesses. A timely supply of provisions from some of the Armenian monasteries, and a brilliant victory obtained by Bohemond and the Count of Toulouse over an army which the Sultans of Aleppo and Damascus had sent to the succor of Antioch, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... fashion go out for their shopping and their calls, and he related all the scandals of their conduct, false or true. He dwelt on all these stories and calumnies with a horrid pleasure, as though he rejoiced in the vileness of humanity. Did this mean the facile misanthropy of a profligate, accustomed to such conversations at the club, or in sporting circles, during which each man lays bare his brutal egotism, and voluntarily exaggerates the depth of his own disenchantment that he may boast more largely of his experience? Was this the cynicism ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... recreation-ground near the city, a view is obtained of the amusements of the rich and the profligate. We see a multitude seated around a cockpit intent on a cock-fight; but the cocks are quails, not barnyard fowls. Here, too, is a smaller and more exclusive circle stooping over a pair of crickets engaged in deadly ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... Let no mistaken girl fancy she gives a proof of her wit by her want of piety, or that a contempt of things serious and sacred will exalt her understanding, or raise her character even in the opinion of the most avowed male infidels. For one may venture to affirm, that with all their profligate ideas, both of women and of religion, neither Bolingbroke, Wharton, Buckingham, nor even Lord Chesterfield himself, would have esteemed a woman the ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... Now, the profligate is he who wishes to spread this crimson of conscious joy over everything; to have excitement at every moment; to paint everything red. He bursts a thousand barrels of wine to incarnadine the streets; and sometimes (in his last madness) he ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... over another's sin, and watched another's remorse with pangs as sharp as if the crime had been his own, has said it. Every parent has said it who ever received back a repentant daughter, and opened out for her a new hope for life. Every mother has said it who ever by her hope against hope for some profligate, protested for a love deeper and wider than that of society. Every man has said it who forgave a deep wrong. See then, why and how the church absolves. She only exercises that power which belongs to every son of man. If society were Christian—if society, by its forgiveness and its exclusion, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... and is fragmentary withal, the narrative of the child Samuel being the central theme, around which are grouped the tribulations of Elkanah and Hannah, the service of Eli the priest, the revels of his profligate sons, and the ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... this war, I have not failed a day to offer up my prayers, I have fasted strictly every Friday, I have watched with care over the morals and the conduct of my subjects, I have taken measures everywhere to prevent all profligate intercourse between the sexes";[20] thus nobly trying to recommend himself to the good Bishop, who had always believed in their capacity for temporal and spiritual elevation. He retired to a place named Boya, a dozen leagues from the capital. All the Indians ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... fancy by attempting to trace analogies in detail, where none are intended by the Holy Spirit. The true church of Christ is compared to a virtuous and fruitful woman, (ch. xii. 5;) and the apostate church is symbolized by a fruitful but profligate woman, (ch. xvii. 5.) Then both are also represented by two cities, which are equally contrasted. As the women differ in their outward adornment, (chs. xix. 8, xvii. 4,) so do the cities in the quality of population, ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... rank he occupies. The chevalier de Cressy, forgetful of his being your guest, and of respecting the honor of all beneath your roof, has dared to carry on a base intrigue with my woman, in whose apartment you will find him at this very minute. A conduct so profligate and insulting fills me with an indignation which I think that you, sir, after what you have heard, cannot but partake." The marquis de l'Hopital, who did not see the thing in the same serious light, sought to appease the ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... enough to know that Shakespeare, the sweetest spirit and finest mind in all literature, should have degraded himself to pretend such an affection for the profligate Herbert as has given occasion for misconstruction. It is bad enough, I say, to know that Shakespeare could play flunkey to this extent; but after all, that is the worst that can be urged against him, and it is so much better than ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... tact and mildness, however, Mary won the respect of the nobles and the admiration of the people, until a series of marital troubles and blunders—her marriage with a worthless cousin, Henry Darnley, and then her scandalous marriage with Darnley's profligate murderer, the earl of Bothwell—alienated her people from her and drove her into exile. She abdicated the throne of Scotland in favor of her infant son, James VI, who was reared a Protestant and subsequently became King James I of England, and ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... beseech you to have no dealing with the being whose vile accents I heard but a moment ago. A man of depraved instincts and profligate ways, he is no fit companion for a young and innocent girl. Moreover, viper-like, he bears malice towards us, who have shielded him ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... a zealot in politics of religion, the qualities of forbearance, candor, and veracity; to the enthusiast of science and philosophy; to the bigot of liberality and improvement; to the miser of benevolence and suffering; to the profligate of industry and frugality; to the misanthrope of philanthropy and patriotism; to the degraded sinner of virtue, truth, and heaven; but what do they know of your meaning? How are they the wiser for your instruction? You ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... did not look to be like a love-match, and I knew that M. d'Epernay had the reputation of a profligate in Quebec, where he was hand in glove with Philippe Lacroix, one of M. Leroux's aids. But a priest has no option when an expression of matrimonial consent is made to him in the presence of two witnesses. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... situation at the marble house. With the vise-like memory of an old soldier, Simpson had retained various anecdotes not entirely to the credit of the self-promoted Major Alan Hawke, and had partly supplied the hiatus between the sudden disappearance of the desperate lieutenant, a rake gambler and profligate, and the return of the prosperous and debonnaire Major en re'traite. "Don't let him work too long around Miss Nadine, Major Hardwicke," said the wary Simpson. "Sly and quiet as he seems, he's surely here for no good. I know him of old. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... that we kept good company. We were outcasts, and were thrown of necessity amongst those who had been cast out. But the standards of life vary with those who live, and I never could see that a man was less of a thief because he thieved from a throne, or less a profligate because he debauched a princess. I was, no doubt, in advance of my time; these are the ideas of Monsieur Voltaire. I believe that I saw a great deal of iniquity, for the taverns and gaming-dens to which I sometimes resorted for shelter or entertainment were filled with ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... to believe that the traffic is on the increase," and advocates "vigorous efforts."[45] His message in December of the same year acknowledges: "That the American flag is grossly abused by the abandoned and profligate of other nations is but too probable."[46] The special message of 1845 explains at length that "it would seem" that a regular policy of evading the laws is carried on: American vessels with the knowledge of the owners are chartered by notorious slave dealers in Brazil, aided by ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... evil fate, In him was held a crime of state. A wicked monster on the bench, Whose fury blood could never quench; As vile and profligate a villain, As modern Scroggs, or old Tressilian; Who long all justice had discarded, Nor feared he God, nor man regarded; Vowed on the Dean his rage to vent, And make him of his zeal repent: But Heaven his innocence ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... separation, there was the horrid dread of falling into the hands of Master Andrew. He was known to us all as being a most cruel wretch,—a common drunkard, who had, by his reckless mismanagement and profligate dissipation, already wasted a large portion of his father's property. We all felt that we might as well be sold at once to the Georgia traders, as to pass into his hands; for we knew that that would be our inevitable condition,—a condition ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... with cheaters or cozeners your life, Nor waste it on profligate beauty; And when you are wedded be kind to your wife, And ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... settled, and other officers chosen in the room of those who had fallen with Davis, it was resolved not to leave this place without revenging his death. Accordingly, thirty men, under the command of one Kennedy, a bold and profligate fellow, landed, and under cover of the fire of the ship, ascended the hill upon which the fort stood. They were no sooner discovered by the Portuguese, than they abandoned the fort, and took shelter in the town. The pirates then entered without opposition, ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... in baseball games from which all elements of honest, manly sport have been taken away; brutal slugging matches between professional pugilists; horseraces conducted by gamblers for gamblers; the sickening, details of the latest scandal among the profligate, idle rich? ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... Thou rememberest thy words to my adjutant during those maneuvers in Pi-Bailos? I will remind thee: Thou didst tell him that it was necessary to limit the abuses and license of the pharaohs. But today Thou art supporting the childish pretensions of the greatest profligate ever known to Egypt." ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... visits to the field of work, where the streets were full of misery and the slum life rampant. A few short blocks away was another world—a world of palaces. Jim had never before seen massed misery; he had never before seen profligate luxury, and the shock of contrast brought to him the sudden, overwhelming thought: "These people don't want preaching, they want fair play. This is not a religious question, it is an economic question." ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... to our existence, was, it was said, the chief hero and Saviour of the Mesopotamian ethical scheme. Then followed a paragraph giving other examples of such heroes and Saviours being born of some profligate intercourse between God and mortal. Then followed a paragraph—but Evan did not understand it. He read it again and then again. Then he did understand it. The glass fell in ringing fragments ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... exile, having been banished to Corsica by the emperor Claudius, on suspicion of an illicit intercourse with the profligate Julia. The islands in the Tuscan sea were the Tasmania of the Roman empire, places of transportation for political offenders, and those who fell under the imperial frown—which was the same thing. ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Pope obedient to these orders, except when there was an occasion of serving Savage. On his second visit to Bristol (when he returned from Glamorganshire,) Savage had been thrown into the jail of the city. One person only interested himself for this hopeless profligate, and was causing an inquiry to be made about his debts at the time Savage died. So much Dr. Johnson admits; but he forgets to mention the name of this long suffering friend. It was Pope. Meantime, let us not be supposed to believe the lying legend of Savage; he was doubtless ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... then alive, was Mr. Monkton's younger brother, Stephen. He was an unmarried man, possessing a fine estate in Scotland; but he lived almost entirely on the Continent, and bore the reputation of being a shameless profligate. The family at Wincot held almost as little communication with him as with ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... will now no longer be necessary to persons who desire to reside in the settled provinces of India. The power of arbitrary deportation is withdrawn. Unless, therefore, we mean to leave the natives exposed to the tyranny and insolence of every profligate adventurer who may visit the East, we must place the European under the same power which legislates for the Hindoo. No man loves political freedom more than I. But a privilege enjoyed by a few individuals, in the midst of a vast population who do not enjoy it, ought not to ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... impulse had suggested. Though so successful a gallant, he had not acquired the ruthless egotism of the sensualist; and his conduct to women often evinced the weakness of giddy youth rather than the cold deliberation of profligate manhood. Thus in his veriest vices there was a spurious amiability, a seductive charm; while in the graver affairs of life the intellectual susceptibility of his nature served but to quicken his penetration and stimulate ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the young profligate was applauded by several of his companions, and away they flew to the bay of Blawhooly, from whence they never returned. The two vessels were observed all at once to stop in the bosom of the bay, on the spot where their hulls ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... are inveterate drinkers of spirits, spending all their earnings on it. They have almost a monopoly as to burning corpses and handling all dead bodies. They eat all animals which have died a natural death, and are particularly fond of pork of this description. "Notwithstanding profligate habits, many of them attain the age of eighty or ninety; and it is not till sixty or sixty-five that their hair begins to get white." The Domarr are a mountain race, nomads, shepherds, and robbers. Travelers speak of them as "gypsies." A specimen which we have of ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... while things go on rightly, and governments, and clergy, and people do right, Christ is there then, filling them all with His Spirit and guiding them all to their duty; but that when evil times come, and rulers are idle, and clergy dumb dogs, and the rich tyrannous, and the poor profligate, and men are crying for work and cannot get it, and every man's hand is against his fellow, and no one knows what to do or think; and on earth is distress of nations with perplexity, men's hearts failing ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... only to the good, if it were known that the charms and attractions of beauty and wisdom, and wit, were reserved only for the pure; if, in one word, something of a similar rigor were exerted to exclude the profligate and abandoned of society, as is shown to those, who have fallen from virtue,—how much would be done to re-enforce the motives to moral purity among us, and impress on the minds of all a reverence for the sanctity and ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... antiquary, who was born in 1627, just twenty years after Popham's death. "For severall yeares," this collector says of the Chief Justice, "he addicted himself but little to the studie of the lawes, but profligate company, and was wont to take a purse with them. His wife considered her and his condition, and at last prevailed with him to lead another life and to stick to the studie of the lawe, which, upon her importunity, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... is not half their evil: they are filled with every corruption which poverty and wickedness can generate between them; with all the shameless and profligate enormities that can be produced by the impudence of ignominy, the rage of want, and the malignity of despair. In a prison the awe of the publick eye is lost, and the power of the law is spent; there are few fears, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... 'That dull profligate and parricide,' replied Varus, 'not content with killing himself with his vices, and his father by connivance, must needs destroy his country by his fatuity. I confess, that till that order be ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... when he was broken in means and character, he had married. The lady of his choice had been chosen as an heiress; but there had been some slip between that cup of fortune and his lip; and she, proud and beautiful, for such she had been—had neither relieved nor softened the poverty of her profligate old lord. ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... handsome woman, with a pale complexion, high solid forehead, regular features, thin, pinched, self-satisfied mouth. My interview was very short. I plunged into the middle of the affair, but had scarcely mentioned the word husband, when she interrupted me with, "I presume you have lent this profligate person money, and want me to pay you." She paused, and then said, "He shall not have a farthing." As she spoke, her white face ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... their own clique. They have never allowed their own profound ignorance of anything (Greek for instance) to throw even an air of hesitation into their oracular decision on the matter. They set an example of profligate contempt for truth, of which the success was in proportion to the effrontery; and when their prosperity had filled the market with competitors, they cried out against their own reflected sin, as if they had never committed it, or were entitled to a monopoly ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Carmichael, formerly a bailie of Edinburgh, was one of Sharp's favourites, and one of his numerous commissioners for suppressing conventicles in Fife. He was a licentious profligate, greedy of money, and capable of undertaking any job, however vile. This man's enormities were at last so unbearable that he became an object of general detestation, and his excessive exactions had ruined so ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... educated at Cambridge. Wrote Alphonsus, King of Arragon, James IV., George-a-Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and other plays. After leading a profligate life, he left behind him a pamphlet entitled, "A Groat's-worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance:" this is full of contrition, and of advice to his fellow-actors and fellow-sinners. It is mainly remarkable for its abuse ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... part of it; and, bad in itself as any can be, must of necessity bring in others after it. Indeed it hath already brought in such dissoluteness and contempt of principle in the higher part of the world, and such profligate intemperance, and fearlessness of committing crimes, in the lower, as must, if this impiety stop not, become absolutely fatal. And God knows, far from stopping, it receives, through the ill designs of some persons, and the inconsiderateness of ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... good-fellowship, under which his gross egoism lay concealed that it might be more securely mischievous when it went loose. His amiability was an imposture, a dangerous harlequinade; the man was bad. It was a plausible scoundrel, a vulgar profligate with a handsome face and a few cheap talents—had he not been reduced to stealing the picture of his friend?—whom these two women had loved, to whom one of them was married. Ah, the sting of it lay there! Good or bad, he was Eve's husband, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... his nose in the air towards the majestic moon,—"three pounds!—a fabulous sum! Who has three pounds to throw away? Dukes, with a hundred thousand a year in acres, have not three pounds to draw out of their pockets in that reckless, profligate manner. Three pounds!—what could I not buy for three pounds? I could buy the Dramatic Library, bound in calf, for three pounds; I could buy a dress coat for three pounds (silk lining not included); ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... man that had yet appeared in English politics; and his political enemies did not fail to make the most of his well-known immorality. In his Notes to Macky's Characters Swift described Wharton as "the most universal villain that ever I knew." On his death in 1715 he was succeeded by his profligate son, Philip, who was created Duke of Wharton ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... me?" said the old man, turning to his grandson. "Why do you bring your profligate companions here? I am poor. You have chosen your own path, follow it. Leave Nell and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... to entertain you with pictures of our decadent society, pictures that really do credit to the vividness and detail of his imagination. Meanwhile our press assures the respectable Briton that Berlin is the most profligate city in Europe, and that scurrilous German novels about the German army will show him what the rotten state of things really is in that much over-rated organisation. But these national amenities are misleading. The bulk of the nation in both countries is ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... Admonitions to him were like the falling rain on the back of the duck. He early acquired a passion for gambling. His father knew it, but hoped that time would work his cure. He, himself, I learned, had been somewhat of a profligate. ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... Shot's wife goes rumblin' out on the same stage. Monte starts to tell us what happens when he returns, but the old profligate ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... pathetic and classic elegance of Fenelon, the mildest of all enthusiasts; a race of men who towered above the genius of their country and of their religion; passed away without a successor. In the beginning of the 18th century, the most profligate man in France was an ecclesiastic, the Cardinal Dubois, prime minister to the most profligate prince in Europe, the Regent Orleans. The country was convulsed with bitter personal disputes between Jesuit and Jansenist, fighting even to mutual ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... better," said Hardy; "at any rate the youngsters there are marchers and fighters; besides, one would be in the ranks and know one's place. Here one is by way of being a gentleman—God save the mark! A young officer, be he never such a fop or profligate, must take his turn at guard, and carry his life in his hand all over the world wherever he is sent, or he has to leave the service. Service!—yes, that's the word; that's what makes every young red-coat respectable, though he mayn't think it. He is serving his Queen, his country—the devil, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... got one of these misguided cap-an'-ball six-shooters that's built doorin' the war; an' I cuts that hardware loose! This weepon seems a born profligate of lead, for the six chambers goes off together. Which you should have seen the Chevy Chasers dodge! An' well they may; that broadside ain't in vain! My aim is so troo that one of the r'armost dogs ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... night a young man, Charles de Kergrist,—a profligate, a gambler, crowning his scandalous life with the vilest and meanest act,—did come and kill himself under my window. The next day a great outcry arose against me. Three days later the brother of that wretched madman, a M. Rene de Kergrist, came and held M. Elgin to account. But do you know what ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... with frank agreeable manners, and a large amount of good sense and judgment. He had managed even to win the good opinion of Miss Sarah Pemberton, who was not in general inclined to think well of young men especially of officers in the army, whom she designated generally as an impudent, profligate set, with fluent tongues and insinuating manners, whose chief occupation in life was to break the hearts of young girls ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... William the Third revived the hopes of the Jacobite party; and to that centre of attraction the ruined and the restless, the aspiring and the profligate, alike turned their regards. Never was so great a variety of character, and so great a diversity of motives displayed in any cause, as in the various attempts which were made to secure the restoration of the Stuarts. On some natures those opinions, those schemes, which were ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... counsel of the ungodly." For it is plain that a man will never learn God's will if he takes counsel from ungodly men who care nothing for God's will, and do not believe that God's will governs the world. Neither must he, as the Psalm says, 'stand in the way of sinners'—of profligate and dishonest men who break God's law. For if he follows their ways, and breaks God's law himself, it is plain that he will learn little or nothing about God's law, save in the way of bitter punishment. For let him but break ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... exclaimed Lord Cadurcis, in a fury, stamping with passion; 'are these fit terms to use when speaking of the most abandoned profligate of his age? A man whose name is synonymous with infamy, and which no one dares to breathe in civilised life; whose very blood is pollution, as you will some day feel; who has violated every tie, and derided every principle, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... begun by getting deeply into debt, and had thus in fact bound himself to overthrow the republic. He fomented anarchy to prepare the way for his dictatorship. He shrank from no accomplice however tainted, not even from Catiline; from no act however profligate or even inhuman. Abusing his authority as a magistrate, for party purposes, he tries to put to a cruel and ignominious death Rabirius, an aged and helpless man, for an act done in party warfare thirty years before. The case of Vettius ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... his trust for money, is for him to stand on the same intellectual level with a monkey that scalds its throat with boiling water because it is thirsty. A drunkard is one who exchanges ambrosia and nectar for garbage. A profligate is one who declines an invitation to banquet with the gods that he may dine out of an ash barrel. What blight is to the vine, sin is to a man. When the first thief appeared in Plymouth colony a man was withdrawn from the fields to make locks for the houses; ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... who can't live by printing papers we would say, in the language of the profligate boarder when dunned for his bill, being told at the same time by the keeper of the house that he couldn't board people for nothing, "Then sell out to somebody who can!" In other words, fly from a business which don't ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... Quality—devote themselves. He is no Puritan; (for I did ever hate your sanctimonious Banbury-men); but he has a Proper Sense of what is due to the Honour and Figure of his family, and refrains from soiling his hands with bales of dice and worse implements among the profligate crew to be met with, not alone at Newmarket, or at the "Dog and Duck," or "Hockley Hole," but in Pall-Mall, and in the very ante-chambers of St. James's, no cater-cousin of the Groom-Porter he. He rides his hackney, as a gentleman should, nor have I prohibited him from occasionally ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... Europe, intelligible to each other, as unhappily we are not, by the universal knowledge and use of that mediaeval Latin, which might distress the Ciceronian ears of a pedant of the Renaissance, but was a good, useful, and adaptable language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate, and drunken world, for the students were as hard drinkers as the citizens, but it was animated, it was made alive by a true passion for knowledge, by an unwearied and never ...
— Progress and History • Various
... life-course reading has shown this entire evening. We do not gain the high art of holding the good which we gain, so profligate are we. Then we like to blame our friends or the fates for our poor judgment and our obtuseness. Until we begin to work as though we belong to and believe in an immortal life, as an inheritance, the great human family cannot enjoy that useful cohesion that belongs to mankind ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... in intertangled elf-locks, like a coil of wreathed water-snakes. Even in her terror, as she dwelt upon his noble features, Eleanor could not help admitting that she beheld the undoubted descendant, and the living likeness of the handsomest and most distinguished of her house—the profligate and criminal Sir Reginald. As her eye, mechanically following this train of thought, wandered for an instant to the haughty portraiture of Sir Reginald, which formed part of the family pictures, and thence to those of his ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... o'nights; not a silly man exactly, but a weak one. Now of all the idle persons of this town, Richard Houseman was the most inclined to this way of life. He had been a soldier—had wandered a good deal about the world—was a bold, talking, reckless fellow—of a character thoroughly profligate; and there were many stories afloat about him, though none were clearly made out. In short, he was suspected of having occasionally taken to the high road; and a stranger who stopped once at my little inn, assured me privately, that though he could not ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and equitably between the few who are most nearly of your own blood, and the many who in kinship are only a little farther removed. If you regard only those reared under your own roof, your cherished estate will soon be scattered, perhaps wasted by profligate heirs in riotous living, to their own ruin, and you and your fortune will quickly be forgotten. Give a share—pay a tithe to your more distant and more numerous kindred—to the general public, and you will be ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... millions against misery and hunger. Remember that China is reduced to the expedient of throwing its children into the water, according to the accounts of travelers. Now this production of two children is really the whole of marriage. The superfluous pleasures of marriage are not only profligate, but involve an immense loss to the man, as I will now demonstrate. Compare then with this poverty of result, and shortness of duration, the daily and perpetual urgency of other needs of our existence. Nature reminds ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... silly varlet here, this beardless young profligate? Ha, youngster, thou shalt pay for thy bold, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... however small, that has not its expiation. Nay, do not weep. Am I so ugly? Why should you dread me so, madame? I am a great admirer of your charms, desirous to know you better. Nay, have no suspicions as to my morality—I am no profligate. I came to the ball to-night ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... extent as to preclude his sharing prominently in the diplomatic part of his mission; Colonel George Cartwright, a soldier, well-meaning but devoid of sympathy and ignorant of the conditions that confronted him; Sir Robert Carr, the worst of the four, unprincipled and profligate and without control either of his temper or his passions; and, lastly, Maverick himself, opposed to the existing order in Massachusetts and convinced of the necessity of radical changes in the constitution of the colony. Nicolls was liked and respected; Cartwright ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... jealousies, and there was a saying that "if a naval officer were to be roasted, another officer could always be found to turn the spit." The head of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, was a man of much ability, but also of profligate character, as well public as private. He doubtless wished the success of his department,—under the terrible chances of war no chief can do otherwise, for the responsibility of failure must fall upon his own head; but through ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... began," he said, "I was one of the most abandoned and profligate young men living; before it ended I was a new creature. The world was ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... from fields ye have won, Your toils are not closed in the deeds ye have done; Touch the souls of each laggard and profligate son, The greed and the sloth, and the cowardice shame; Till we rise to complete the great work ye've begun, And with freedom make conquest ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... conduct. This unhappy lady, whom we have already mentioned as the daughter of Sir Thomas Lake, Secretary of State, had the misfortune to be sincerely attached to her handsome but profligate husband, whose neglect and frequent irregularities she had pardoned, until the utter estrangement, occasioned by his passion for the Countess of Exeter, filled her with such trouble, that, overpowered at length by anguish, she complained ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... some paramour; carrying off with her all the jewels and money on which she could lay her hands. It is possible madame may have heard or seen something of her; she was accompanied in her flight by a base, profligate woman from Paris, whom I, unhappy man, had myself engaged for my wife's waiting-maid, little dreaming what corruption I ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... Byng, Plummer, &c., for the noble, disinterested part he takes, while I am looked upon as a black sheep; of which I console myself, and have reason to console myself, when I see the views and motives of some great political characters to be so profligate and abandoned. Lord North and Charles Fox acting together in public life, is a new and extraordinary scene! Many people say it was only for last night; but I believe the arrangement has completely taken place, and the overthrow of the present Ministry is consequently certain. ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... eagerness to publish their right, took from them all consideration of what they might make her suffer. Mr Eggleston, she found, permitted himself to be wholly governed by his son; his son was a needy and profligate spendthrift, and by throwing the management of the affair into the hands of an attorney, craftily meant to shield himself from the future resentment of Delvile, to whom, hereafter, he might affect, at his convenience, to disapprove Mr Carn's behaviour, while Mr Carn ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... strongly convinced of the immense superiority of Pedro over any other young Prince even dans les relations journalistes, besides which the position is so infinitely preferable. The Austrian society is medisante and profligate and worthless—and the Italian possessions very shaky. Pedro is full of resource—fond of music, fond of drawing, of languages, of natural history, and literature, in all of which Charlotte would suit him, and would be a real benefit to the country. If Charlotte ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... When we speak of an immoral man, we are commonly understood to attack the foundations of his character; to designate some gross vice of which he is guilty, and to speak of him as profane, or licentious, or profligate, or dishonest, or as unworthy of our confidence and respect. Now, we by no means intend to use the word in such a wide sense, when we say that this business is immoral. We do not mean to intimate that in no circumstances a man may be engaged in ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... that in which William Rufus was found dead in the New Forest, 'with the arrow either of a hunter or an assassin in his breast.' According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, several 'prodigies' preceded the death of this profligate and extravagant monarch. Thus it is recorded that 'at Pentecost blood was observed gushing from the earth at a certain town of Berkshire, even as many asserted who declared that they had seen it. And after this, on ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... other, and were fools, traitors, and egotists generally, after the customary fashion of human pigmies, —that they set up a Sham to serve as Religion, Gold being their only god,—that the rich wantoned in splendid luxury, and wilfully neglected the poor,—that the King was a showy profligate, ruled by a treacherous courtesan, just like many other famous Kings and Princes, who, because of their stalwart, martial bearing, and a certain surface good-nature, manage to conceal their vices from the too lenient eyes of the subjects ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Order; yet checked by the rights and influences of the clergy and the native nobility, and by the customs and ancient laws of the island. This trust the Knights had, with the blackest treason and the most profligate perjury, betrayed and abandoned. The right of government of course reverted to the landed proprietors and the clergy. Animated by a just sense of this right, the Maltese had risen of their own accord, had contended for it in defiance ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... moneylenders' circulars, belladonna and cantharides. But most astounding of all were the contents of the widows' prie-Dieu. In this devotional article of furniture were stored all the inmost secrets of her profligate career. Affectionate letters from the elderly gentleman on whom she had imposed a supposititious child lay side by side with a black-edged card, on which was written the last message of a young lover who had killed himself on her ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... loathsome is a kind of pedantic and profligate literature, perfectly devoid of all natural sentiment, full of self-contradictions; and, in fact, the contrast to those maidens in my work, whom I have, during half my lifetime, seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. And though I will not presume to estimate them as superior ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... OF, son of the preceding; served under Charles I. in the Civil War, was at the battle of Worcester; became minister of Charles II.; a profligate courtier and an unprincipled ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... debas'd With vile impurities the comic muse, And made her delicate mouth pronounce such things As would disgust a Wilmot in full blood, Or shock an Atheist roaring o'er his cups[13] O shameful profligate abuse of powers, Indulg'd to you for higher, nobler purposes, Than to pollute the sacred fount of virtue, Which, plac'd by heaven, springs ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... call'd him by his name,) Courage! the day at length is ours; 725 And we once more, as conquerors, Have both the field and honour won: The foe is profligate, and run. I mean all such as can; for some This hand hath sent to their long home; 730 And some lie sprawling on the ground, With many a gash and bloody wound. CAESAR himself could never say He got two victories in a day, As I have done, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... performing acrobats, and conjurers. Sleek and pampered priests in yellow robes were met at every turn, a class who exercise a certain influence over the people through their superstition, but who command no personal respect. We were told that they are a profligate set, like too many of their class elsewhere, and enjoyed a certain immunity from the laws. Before the temples was seen in one or two instances a theatrical performance in progress, which seemed rather incongruous, but upon inquiry this ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... may be passed rapidly by, for it covers only the wasted years of a sinful and profligate youth and early manhood. It is of interest mainly as illustrating the sovereignty of that Grace which abounds even to the chief of sinners. Who can read the story of that score of years and yet talk of piety as the product of ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... all the outward guise of regal office, in his bearing, politeness, address, magnificence, and high-heeled dignity, but he was sensual, ferocious, ignorant, profligate, and superstitious. His greatness was fictitious, his splendor superficial, and his character false. The king was the state, but his mistresses governed. A court thus constituted led the fashions and formed the manners of the people. It stamped the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... all; the other from feebleness,—where he deliberates, but where the result of deliberation is too weak to countervail his appetite (VII.). Intemperance or profligacy is more vicious, and less curable than Incontinence. The profligate man is one who has in him no principle (archae) of good or of right reason, and who does wrong without afterwards repenting of it; the incontinent man has the good principle in him, but it is overcome ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... play-actors received the highest consideration, since their earnings were large. Scholars, poets, and philosophers—what few there were—pined in attics. Epictetus lived in a miserable cottage with only a straw pallet and a single lamp. Women had no education, and were disgracefully profligate; even the wife of Marcus Aurelius (the daughter of Antoninus Pius) was one of the most abandoned women of the age, notwithstanding all the influence of their teachings and example. Slavery was so great an institution that half of the population were slaves. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... bent upon the work of devastation in Duke Street and Warwick Street at night, were, in the mass, the same. Allowing for the chance accessions of which any crowd is morally sure in a town where there must always be a large number of idle and profligate persons, one and the same mob was at both places. Yet they spread themselves in various directions when they dispersed in the afternoon, made no appointment for reassembling, had no definite purpose or design, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... departed in peace, not trusting in her wisdom or virtue, like the philosophers of Greece and Rome; not even like Addison, calling on the profligate to see a good man die; but like Howard, afraid that her good works might have a wrong place in the estimate of her hope, her chief glory was that of "a sinner ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... seven- fold if possible: or, if it be not in thy power, and thy conscience accuse thee, surrender thyself to the magistrate, and make the only satisfaction thou art able.' 'I have taken no one's goods,' said I. 'Of what art thou guilty, then?' said he. 'Art thou a drunkard? a profligate?' 'Alas, no,' said I; 'I am neither of these; would that I ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... William Carmichael, formerly a bailie of Edinburgh, was one of Sharp's favourites, and one of his numerous commissioners for suppressing conventicles in Fife. He was a licentious profligate, greedy of money, and capable of undertaking any job, however vile. This man's enormities were at last so unbearable that he became an object of general detestation, and his excessive exactions had ruined so many respectable lairds, owners, and tenants, that at last nine of these (who ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... Archbishop Sharpe. The leader of this party was David Hackston, of Rathillet, a gentleman of ancient birth and good estate. He had been profligate in his younger days, but having been led from curiosity to attend the conventicles of the nonconforming clergy, he adopted their principles in the fullest extent. It appears, that Hackston had some personal ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... sayin' that every Sunday these ten year past," answered Jerry with the insolence of the ancient habitue. "Ere, one o' you kids, fetch me a bit o' chalk. I 'ate to see you idlin' your time away, gamblin' and dicin', like the Profligate Son when he broke the ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... a scene which her wild grief so unpleasantly interrupted; for I thought that were I then and there to announce myself as her brother, she might not believe me—she might suspect some treachery or snare in a city so notoriously profligate as Florence. But the subsequent explanations which took place between us cleared up ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... whole lot,' I argues onct when a profligate he's staked, an' who reports himse'f as jumpin' sideways for grub previous, goes careerin' over to the dance hall with them alms he's wrung, an' proceeds on a debauch. 'You oughter not allow them ornery folks to do ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... faithless wife does not make her loyal and virtuous. A wife's confidence in a profligate husband does not make ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... to the scanty dues willingly contributed to the hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident upper class—though we must allow for many honourable exceptions—was the Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the worst social system the modern civilized world has ever known. The slave-owning planters of Carolina were by no means devoid of similar faults, which are the invariable ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... The meditative mood still held her, and the present conversation offered much food for meditation. Her companion's confession of faith in true love, if you had the good fortune to be born that way, had startled her. That the speaker enjoyed the reputation of being something of a profligate lent singular point to that confession. She had not expected it from Lord Shotover, of all men. And, as coming from him, the sentiment was in a high degree arresting and interesting. Her own ideals, so far, had a decidedly anti-matrimonial tendency, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Wolfert and the doctor passed by the church-yard, and the watchman bawled in hoarse voice a long and doleful "All's well!" A deep sleep had already fallen upon this primitive little burgh; nothing disturbed this awful silence, excepting now and then the bark of some profligate night-walking dog, or the serenade of some romantic cat. It is true, Wolfert fancied more than once that he heard the sound of a stealthy footfall at a distance behind them; but it might have been merely the echo ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... are, in the midst of a city, and of market-places, and of broad streets, but far away from either road or path, on the rocky slopes of Libanus. It was dedicated to a shameful goddess, the goddess Aphrodite. A school of wickedness was this place for all such profligate persons as had ruined their bodies by excessive luxury. The men there were soft and womanish—men no longer; the dignity of their sex they rejected; with impure lust they thought to honour the deity. ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... bordering upon magnificent. Whether in compliance with the wishes of his lady, or owing to some whim of his own, his habits were henceforward strikingly altered; and from having moved among the gayest if not the most profligate of the votaries of fashion, he suddenly settled down into a quiet, domestic, country gentleman, and seldom, if ever, visited the capital, and then his sojourns were as brief as the nature of his business ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... affairs," dignity and self-respect made Pope obedient to these orders, except when there was an occasion of serving Savage. On his second visit to Bristol (when he returned from Glamorganshire,) Savage had been thrown into the jail of the city. One person only interested himself for this hopeless profligate, and was causing an inquiry to be made about his debts at the time Savage died. So much Dr. Johnson admits; but he forgets to mention the name of this long suffering friend. It was Pope. Meantime, let us not be supposed to believe the lying ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... lavished all my love, but who has abused my confidence, and fled from my house, doubtless to some paramour; carrying off with her all the jewels and money on which she could lay her hands. It is possible madame may have heard or seen something of her; she was accompanied in her flight by a base, profligate woman from Paris, whom I, unhappy man, had myself engaged for my wife's waiting-maid, little dreaming what corruption I was bringing into ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... &c., for the noble, disinterested part he takes, while I am looked upon as a black sheep; of which I console myself, and have reason to console myself, when I see the views and motives of some great political characters to be so profligate and abandoned. Lord North and Charles Fox acting together in public life, is a new and extraordinary scene! Many people say it was only for last night; but I believe the arrangement has completely taken ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... constantly preserved, while the produce of danger and ease is commonly spent as easily, and often as wickedly, as acquired. Thus we proportioned our expenses rather by what we had than what we wanted or even desired; and on obtaining a considerable booty we have even forced nature into the most profligate extravagance, and ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... executioner could not be found to carry the sentence of the law into effect upon a criminal, the innkeeper was compelled to perform his functions: therefore the innkeepers, like usurers and other persons, who follow a pursuit hostile to public opinion, were profligate and rapacious. Don Quixote teems with instances to this effect; and there are other allusions to the same circumstance in Gil Blas. It must be observed that if M. Le Sage stumbled by accident upon so great a peculiarity, he was fortunate; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... murder. To obtain a personal triumph at the expense of his enemy by the display of superior cunning, by rendering him ridiculous, by exposing him to mental as well as physical anguish, by wounding him through his affections or his sense of honor, was the end which he pursued."[2259] "However profligate the people might have been, they were not contented with grossness unless seasoned with wit. The same excitement of the fancy rendered the exercise of ingenuity, or the avoidance of peril, an enhancement ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Marwood, art thou false? My friend deceive me? Hast thou been a wicked accomplice with that profligate man? ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... Rome, the state had been endangered by the combination of democrats and anarchists in the conspiracy of Catiline. The well-contrived plot of this audacious and profligate man was detected and crushed by the vigilance and energy of the consul Cicero, whose four speeches on the subject, two to the Senate and two to the people, are among the most celebrated of all his orations. Catiline was forced to fly from Rome; and several of his prominent ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... at Strasburg, from which he delivered his lectures, or rather rolled the thunders of his anathemas against the monks. This stone pulpit was constructed under his own superintendence, and is covered with very indecent figures of monks and nuns, expressly designed by him to expose their profligate manners. We see Geyler doing what for ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... justice has never existed in Spain, as far at least as record will allow us to judge; not that the principles of justice have been less understood there than in other countries, but because the entire system of justiciary administration has ever been shamelessly profligate ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... to Rome, to teach rhetoric; and first, to gather some to my house, to whom, and through whom, I had begun to be known; when to, I found other offences committed in Rome, to which I was not exposed in Africa. True, those "subvertings" by profligate young men were not here practised, as was told me: but on a sudden, said they, to avoid paying their master's stipend, a number of youths plot together, and remove to another; -breakers of faith, who for love of money hold justice cheap. These also my heart hated, though not with a perfect ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... and profligate in the fourth century, and the young monk in his convent in the fifteenth, passed through a similar experience;—different in form, identical in substance—with that of Paul the persecutor. And so Paul's Gospel, which was the description ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... kitchen. At that moment Harry was seated outside the cook-house, dressed in a suit of spotless white duck, playing an accordeon; also he wore round his brown neck a thick wreath of white and scarlet flowers. Harry, I may remark, was a dandy and a notorious profligate, but against these natural faults was the fact that he could make very ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... the following account of a Persian prodigal son, who was not so fortunate in the end as his biblical prototype: The son of a religious man, who succeeded to an immense fortune by the will of his uncle, became a dissipated and debauched profligate, in so much that he left no heinous crime unpractised, nor was there any intoxicating drug which he had not tasted. Once I admonished him, saying: "O my son, wealth is a running stream, and pleasure revolves like a millstone; or, in other ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... tribe, in western Long Island. John Underhill, whose unctuous piety and profligate life have an important place in Winthrop and other New England historians. With Captain John Mason he had the leading part in the crushing of the Pequots in 1637. Banished from Massachusetts and restored, this amusing reprobate had gone to the Dutch, "having good offers made ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • J. F. Jameson, Editor
... entertain you with pictures of our decadent society, pictures that really do credit to the vividness and detail of his imagination. Meanwhile our press assures the respectable Briton that Berlin is the most profligate city in Europe, and that scurrilous German novels about the German army will show him what the rotten state of things really is in that much over-rated organisation. But these national amenities are misleading. The bulk of the nation in ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... eyes, and voice, and gesture. He compelled us scorn the gay, heartless selfishness of the young fool setting forth so jauntily from the broken home; he moved our pity and our sympathy for the young profligate, who, broken and deserted, had still pluck enough to determine to work his way back, and who, in utter desperation, at last gave it up; and then he showed us the homecoming—the ragged, heart-sick tramp, with hesitating steps, stumbling along the dusty road, and then the ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... a deep breath of relief. He was not married! He was only a profligate single man. A profligate single man is shocking—but reclaimable. It is possible to blame him severely, and to insist on his reformation in the most uncompromising terms. It is also possible to forgive ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... revenues and later Tory. In words nearly identical to Henry's, Corbin noted, "To Tax People that are not in Debt to lend to those that are is highly unjust, it is in Fact to tax the honest, frugal, industrious Man, in order to encourage the idle, the profligate, the Extravagant, and the Gamester". Council defeated the loan plan. With the tobacco laws revised and the loan scheme defeated and only routine legislation in committee, ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... return. You have become the possessor of wealth. How have you used it? What have you done for your neighbor? Have you ever thought of your tens of thousands of slaves? Have you helped them physically and morally? No! You have profited by their toil to lead a profligate life. That is what you have done. Have you chosen a post in which you might be of service to your neighbor? No! You have spent your life in idleness. Then you married, my dear sir—took on yourself responsibility for the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... about ours. None of the parents were lunatics, and the rest is mere likes and dislikes. Suppose Dr. Saleeby had gone up to Byron and said, "My lord, I perceive you have a club-foot and inordinate passions: such are the hereditary results of a profligate soldier marrying a hot-tempered woman." The poet might logically reply (with characteristic lucidity and impropriety), "Sir, I perceive you have a confused mind and an unphilosophic theory about other people's love affairs. Such ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Very little mention of them is made in the records of this period. They were not wanted in this city but were tolerated as a negligible factor. D. B. Warden, a traveler through the West in 1819, observed that the blacks of Cincinnati were "good-humoured, garrulous, and profligate, generally disinclined to laborious occupations, and prone to the performance of light and menial drudgery." Here the traveler was taking effect for cause. "Some few," said he, "exercise the humbler trades, and some appear to have formed a correct conception of the objects and value of property, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... dissipation is more easily led to extremes than one who has kept his body as it should be kept. This is, indeed, the horrible plan of those who destroy our youths, and that father of robbers must have known man well, who said, "We must destroy both body and soul." Catiline was a profligate before he became a conspirator, and Doria greatly erred when he thought he had no cause to fear a voluptuary like Fiesco. On the whole, it is very often remarked that an evil spirit dwells in a ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... gone, and as the prize had come in her own way, there was no good reason why it should be lost to the family altogether, because Arabella could not win it. When Arabella called her a treacherous vixen and a heartless, profligate hussy, she spoke out freely, and said that she wasn't going to be abused. A gentleman to whom she was attached had asked her for her hand, and she had given it. If Arabella chose to make herself a fool ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... not punished as might have been expected. Clarendon's power was gone, and he was an exile. A board of trade, projected in 1668, never assumed the administration of colonial affairs, and had not vitality enough to last more than three or four years. Profligate libertines gained the confidence of the king's mistresses, and secured places in the royal cabinet. While Charles II. was dallying with women and robbing the theatres of actresses; while the licentious ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... snatch it, if it please, away, As in elections it can mend mistakes, And whom it makes one year, the next unmakes. "Lay down the fasces," it exclaims; "they're mine:" I lay them down, and sullenly resign. Well now, if "Thief" and "Profligate" they roar, Or lay my father's murder at my door, Am I to let their lying scandals bite And change my honest cheeks from red to white? Trust me, false praise has charms, false blame has pains But for vain hearts, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... We observe here, as in other parts of his early letters, that sort of display and boast of rakishness which is but too common a folly at this period of life, when the young aspirant to manhood persuades himself that to be profligate is to be manly. Unluckily, this boyish desire of being thought worse than he really was, remained with Lord Byron, as did some other feelings and foibles of his boyhood, long after the period when, with others, they are ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... avenging Providence had conducted this unfortunate mother to take a step so fatal to her son. She told the viceroy that she had in vain attempted to check him, that his days and nights were spent with profligate companions in gambling-houses and in cock-pits, and that she feared some mischief would come some day from his fighting and swearing and drinking; that but a few days since he had come home late, and that she had observed that his stockings were dabbled in blood; that she had questioned ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... of Pisa deposed the popes of Rome and Avignon; the conclave was unanimous in the choice of Alexander the Fifth, and his vacant seat was soon filled by a similar election of John the Twenty-third, the most profligate of mankind. But instead of extinguishing the schism, the rashness of the French and Italians had given a third pretender to the chair of St. Peter. Such new claims of the synod and conclave were disputed; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... personified in The Purple Island (1633), by Phineas Fletcher, fully described in canto viii. (Greek, asotos, "a profligate.") ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... a time when the stage was so profligate that the Puritans were justified in tabooing it altogether. But that is not now the case. There are many theatres where plays are given that are not only pure in tone, but exert a refining and educating influence on all who hear them. ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... the heart-rending thing was the humble protests of the servants. "Your ladyship! Oh, your ladyship!"—as they came up one by one, or two by two, obeying orders of the Earl, to be incontinently boxed on the ears by a member of a profligate aristocracy. Probably any one of them was strong enough to throw the beldame out at a window. But such was not the manner of the time. One would think they would retreat upon the Earl and ask to be dismissed from his service. But this also was not the manner of the time. No; they marched ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... the present moment to destroy the future productiveness of the soil. Any rent which the landlord accepts more than this, or any system by which more rent than this is obtained, is to borrow money upon the most usurious and profligate interest—to increase the revenue of the present day by the absolute ruin of the property. Such is the effect produced by a middleman; he gives high prices that he may obtain higher from the occupier; more is paid by the actual occupier than is consistent ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... his brow with his clenched hand. 'What devil tempted me to my undoing?... My wife trusted to this profligate!... Horror! It ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... consequences of the cruel treatment of parents towards their children, and forcing their inclinations in marriage; and in the second part, we see a fine example of the pernicious effects of a young lady's reposing confidence or engaging in correspondence with a man of profligate and debauched principles. I do not at present recollect any composition which, view'd in this light, can be compared with the Iliad and Clarissa. The morals of the first are of the utmost importance in public life, and those of the last in private life. If the little states and republicks of Greece, ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... to Claude that Cazeneau had certain plans about Mimi. What he thought was this: that Laborde was rich, that Mimi was his heiress, and that Cazeneau was a man of profligate life and ruined fortunes, who was anxious to repair his fortunes by marrying this heiress. To such a man the disparity in their years would make no difference, nor would he particularly care whether Mimi loved him or not, so long as ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... my conviction,—my well-grounded conviction,—as to the gentleman's conduct. What I said to him I will say aloud to the whole county. It is notorious that the Vicar of Bullhampton is in the habit of visiting a profligate young woman in a low part of the city. That I say is disgraceful to him, to his cloth, and to the parish, and I shall give my opinion to the bishop to that effect. Who are you, sir, that you should question my words?" And again the Marquis eyed the Squire from head to foot, leaving ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... very acknowledgment almost forbids our speaking in such high terms as we otherwise should of the power with which Mr. MacCabe has worked up this striking narrative, which take its name from Bertha, the wife of the profligate Henry IV. of Germany; and of which the main incidents turn on Henry's deposition of the Pope, and his consequent excommunication by the inflexible Gregory the Seventh. But we the less regret this necessity of speaking ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... of one of the most gifted women who ever trod American soil,— she being of English birth,—that, before she obtained the divorce which separated her from her profligate husband, she once went for counsel to the wife of her pastor. She unrolled before her the long catalogue of merciless outrages to which she had been subject, endangering finally her health, her life, and that of her children born and to be born. When she turned at last for advice ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... band equally atrocious will not again spring up, and endanger the general peace and security? What guarantee, in fact, have they that this very ruffian, the soul and center of the late combination, will not serve as a rallying point to the profligate, and again collect around him a circle of robbers and murderers as desperate and bloody as the miscreants who have been annihilated? And can the pursuits of industry quietly proceed under the harassing ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... one but the heartless profligate whose portrait occupied the obverse of the medal, this appeal would have been irresistible, but it does not appear that the unfortunate artist was relieved. He probably died of grief and disappointment at the unjust preference shown ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... was humiliating to the child to reveal the parent's shame. Criminal he knew him to be, with regard to my mother, but Ernest had said, when gazing on her picture, he almost forgave the crime which had so much to extenuate it. The gambler, the profligate, the lost, abandoned being, who had thrown himself so abjectly on my compassion: in these characters, the high-minded Ernest would spurn him with withering indignation. Yet as the interview had been observed, and his suspicions ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... eighteenth century, says that "soon after the wedding day the newly-married wife sets herself about spinning her winding sheet, and a husband that shall sell or pawn it is esteemed among all men one of the most profligate." And Dr. Jamieson says—"When a woman of the lower class in Scotland, however poor, or whether married or single, commences housekeeping, her first care, after what is absolutely necessary for the time, is to provide death linen for herself and those who look to her for that office, and ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... Gracchus until the first consulship of Marius, Rome was governed by a venal and profligate oligarchy, formed from a coalition of the most powerful families. Shame was unknown to this body; the offices of state were openly sold to the highest bidder, redress of grievances was to be obtained ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... the brief, curt letters from our agent, the late Mr. Veitch, town-clerk of Leith, that never failed to fill my mother with terror and dismay, and very much resembled, in at least the narrative parts, jottings by the poet Crabbe, for some projected poem on the profligate poor. Two of our tenants made moonlight flittings just on the eve of the term; and though the little furniture which they left behind them was duly rouped at the cross, such was the inevitable expense of the transaction, that none ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... "Bob the Bucker," cleaned out at a monte-bank in Santa Cruz, penniless and profligate, had sold his mustang to Don Jose and recklessly thrown himself in with the bargain. Touched by the rascal's extravagance, the quality of the mare, and observing that Bob's habits had not yet affected his seat in the saddle, ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... sir," she cried. "Your tarrying here may, for aught I know, bring scandal upon my house;—I am sure it will be disagreeable to my husband. I am unacquainted with your name and condition. You may be a man of rank. You may be one of the profligate and profane crew who haunt the court. You may be the worst of them all, my Lord Rochester himself. He is about your age, I have heard, and though a mere boy in years, is a veteran in libertinism. But, whoever you are, and whatever your rank and station may be, unless your character will bear the ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of the most interesting which can occupy the thoughts of the far-seeing and humane; for it involves the temporal and eternal welfare of millions of their fellow-creatures;—it may well arrest the attention of the selfish, and divert for a few minutes the profligate from their pursuits; for on it depends whether the darling wealth of the former is to be preserved or destroyed, and the exciting enjoyments of the other arrested ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... all this, we have an instance in the Acts of the threefold conviction of conscience, when Paul before Felix "reasoned of righteousness, and temperance, and the judgment to come" (Acts 24: 25). Here the sin of a profligate life was laid bare as the apostle discoursed of chastity; the claims of righteousness were vindicated, and the certainty of coming judgment exhibited; and with the only effect that "Felix trembled." So it must ever be under the convictions of conscience,—compunction ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... noted illustrations of change in character than is furnished in St. John. His early life was not profligate like that of John Newton or John Bunyan. And yet the change in him was marked enough to furnish an exhibition of contrast, showing the power of Christ's teachings and example upon him, until he reached an unwonted degree of perfection. He combined ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... So large an expenditure as that required for the maintenance of the regular soldiery and militia must have made money plentiful, and such as were engaged in trade, whether in Quebec or Montreal, undoubtedly profitted by an expenditure almost necessarily profligate. On account of the militia alone, the province expended L121,366, and the expenditure of the commissariat department must have been enormous. But the grand source of wealth was the establishment of a kind of National Bank, with specie, to redeem its paper, in the vaults of the Bank ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... our profligate had written to his brother profligate, when a tap was heard at the entrance of his chamber. Thrusting the written papers into his portfolio, he rose, and opening the door discovered his ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... his own brother; for which latter crime, fearing to be prosecuted at law, he persuaded Sylla to set him down, as though he were yet alive, amongst those that were to be put to death by proscription. This man the profligate citizens choosing for their captain, gave faith to one another, amongst other pledges, by sacrificing a man and eating of his flesh; and a great part of the young men of the city were corrupted ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... by his name,) Courage! the day at length is ours; 725 And we once more, as conquerors, Have both the field and honour won: The foe is profligate, and run. I mean all such as can; for some This hand hath sent to their long home; 730 And some lie sprawling on the ground, With many a gash and bloody wound. CAESAR himself could never say He got two victories in a day, As I have done, that can say, Twice I 735 In one ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Rome, Pompey, whom Sulla had named the Great, Crassus, the rich, and Caesar, the shrewd and wise. Two of these had reached their utmost height. For Pompey there was to be no more greatness, for Crassus no more riches. But Caesar was the coming man of Rome. After a youth given to profligate pleasures, in which he spent money as fast as Crassus collected it, and accumulated debt more rapidly than Pompey accumulated fame, the innate powers of the man began to declare themselves. He studied oratory and made his mark in the Roman Forum; he studied the political ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... unlawful emolument, and, what in all cases is the greatest security, given a lawful gratification to the natural passions of men. Matrimony is to be used, as a true remedy against a vicious course of profligate manners; fair and lawful emoluments, and the just profits of office, are opposed to the unlawful means which might be made use of to supply them. For, in truth, I am ready to agree, that for any man to expect a series of sacrifices without a return in blessings, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... is not essential to our existence, was, it was said, the chief hero and Saviour of the Mesopotamian ethical scheme. Then followed a paragraph giving other examples of such heroes and Saviours being born of some profligate intercourse between God and mortal. Then followed a paragraph—but Evan did not understand it. He read it again and then again. Then he did understand it. The glass fell in ringing fragments on to the pavement, and Evan sprang over the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... there are who would be least easily believed by those who live in the same house with them, if they said that Jesus had cast their devils out of them. It is a great mistake to take recent converts, especially if they have been very profligate beforehand, and to hawk them about the country as trophies of God's converting power. Let them stop at home, and bethink themselves, and get sober and confirmed, and let their changed lives prove the reality ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the time of the Revolution, justified their conduct by all those profligate sophisms which are called Jesuitical, and which are commonly reckoned among the peculiar sins of Popery, but which, in fact, are everywhere the anodynes employed by minds rather subtle than strong, to quiet those internal twinges which they cannot but feel ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and the mildest character in his private connexions, though as a politician he was distinguished for his disregard of truth, his violence, and his use of any means to carry the ends which his party espoused. And on the other hand we hear men whose private vices are notorious—profane, profligate, unprincipled—commended for the consistency and purity of their political course. Is not this wrong, is it not deplorable? Shall we for a moment countenance this distinction between public and private character, as if ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett
... was a profligate Kite Who would haunt the saloons every night; And often he ust To reel back to his roost Too full to ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... when the lieutenants of Malek Shah got possession of Asia Minor, they profaned the churches, subjected Bishops and Clergy to the most revolting outrages, circumcised the youth, and led off their sisters to their profligate households;—how, when the Ottomans conquered in turn, and added an infantry, I mean the Janizaries, to their Tartar horse, they formed that body of troops, from first to last, for near five hundred years, of boys, all born Christian, a body of at first ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... sanction to dispose of the offspring even before it was born. At the time this committee was urging Congress to pass the bill, the public was horrified by a notorious case in the courts of the District in which a profligate father, who had never done anything to benefit his children, had disposed of them by will, debarring the mother from their custody and control. This cruelty and injustice was an object-lesson which especially evoked the sympathy ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... purport. When her dividends were become due this treachery was discovered, and Mrs Revel found herself reduced to a very narrow income, and wholly deserted by her husband, who knew that he had no chance of obtaining further means of carrying on his profligate career. His death in a duel, which we have before mentioned, took place a few months after the transaction, and Mrs Revel was attacked with that painful disease, a cancer, so deeply seated as to be incurable. Still she was ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... with the world not merely to gain a living, but to rescue a luckless family from a load of embarrassments and misfortunes. Her father was a drunkard, idle, improvident, moody and brutal, and as a girl she had often protected her mother from his violence. A sister had married a profligate husband, and Mary rescued her from a miserable home, in which she had been driven to temporary insanity. The sisters had attempted to live by conducting a suburban school for girls; a brief experience as a governess in a fashionable family had ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... good, if it were known that the charms and attractions of beauty, and wisdom, and wit, were reserved only for the pure; if, in one word, something of a similar rigor were exerted to exclude the profligate and abandoned of society, as is shown to those who have fallen from virtue,—how much would be done to re-enforce the motives to moral purity among us, and impress on the minds of all a reverence for the ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... just conditions than in baseball games from which all elements of honest, manly sport have been taken away; brutal slugging matches between professional pugilists; horseraces conducted by gamblers for gamblers; the sickening, details of the latest scandal among the profligate, idle rich? ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... from them to the uneducated but frank-hearted and generous woman,—tainted as she is to all history by the worse than imperfections arising out of her position, yet redeemed in a degree, by virtues, which, in that profligate court, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... Lordships, that there is law in these countries, that there is no delegation of power which exempts a governor from the law, then I say at any rate a British governor is to answer for his conduct, and cannot be justified by wicked examples and profligate practices. ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... London and was patronised by Horace Walpole, but in the full tide of success he was summoned to Dresden, where the Elector, disappointed at not having secured the services of the uncle, was fain to console himself with those of the nephew. The extravagant and profligate Augustus II., whose one idea was to extract money by every possible means from his subjects, in order to adorn his palaces, was consistently devoted to Belotto, who was in his element as a Court painter. He paints all his uncle's subjects, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... inflict punishment on such as had not the means or the inclination to bribe his clemency. An equal stranger to righteousness and temperance, he presented a fine subject for the eloquence of St. Paul, who it is presumed, however, made the profligate governor tremble, without either affecting his religious principles or ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... gradual evolution of a wild Irish boy, hot-headed in love and fighting, full of daring impetuosity and ignorant vanity, into the ruffianly soldier, the intrepid professional gambler, and finally into the selfish profligate, who marries a great heiress and sets up as a county magnate. Instead of the mere unadulterated villainy and meanness which were impersonated in his previous stories, we have here the complex strength and weakness of real human nature; we have the whole ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... she gives a proof of her wit by her want of piety, or that a contempt of things serious and sacred will exalt her understanding, or raise her character even in the opinion of the most avowed male infidels. For one may venture to affirm, that with all their profligate ideas, both of women and of religion, neither Bolingbroke, Wharton, Buckingham, nor even Lord Chesterfield himself, would have esteemed a woman the more for ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... did such a wasteful thing in your life, Byam, I'll warrant," said the parson, smiling; "and yet some say that you have been a profligate." ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... the daughter of Sir Charles Sedley, one of the most brilliant and profligate wits of the Restoration. The licentiousness of his writings is not redeemed by much grace or vivacity; but the charms of his conversation were acknowledged even by sober men who had no esteem for his character. To sit near him at the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... are denied, save occasionally, these profligate liberties. Occasionally, however, they range into the quarter assigned to the women. The males, accustomed in London to indiscriminate license, discover the greatest regret at the restraint of their passions in the grossest ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... do I conceive that one fragile part of 1000 that is here contained can be fully displayed) I will only add one remark more of the prementioned Wars, in lieu of a Corollary or Conclusion, and aver upon my Conscience, that notwithstanding all the above-named Injustice, profligate Enormities and other Crimes which I omit, (tho sufficiently known to me) the Indians did not, nor was it in their power to give any greater occasion for the Commission of them, than Pious Religioso's Living in a well regulated Monastic Life ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... A profligate so tempted as the Duc de Richelieu was from his earliest years, one can understand, however much we may condemn; but for the man who conducted his love affairs with such heartlessness and dishonour no language has words of execration and contempt to ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... morality of servants has not been improved by the wonderful revelations of Swift's "Directions," where the irony is too refined, while it plainly inculcates the practice. This celebrated tract, designed for the instruction of the masters, is more frequently thumbed in the kitchen, as a manual for the profligate domestic. Servants have acknowledged that some of their base doings have been suggested to them by ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... allay the animosity which was daily becoming more bitter between the two nations so long as the question remained open. They have put the brand of confessed injustice upon that rankling and vindictive resentment with which the profligate and passionate part of the American press has been threatening us in the event of concession, and which is to be manifested by some dire revenge, to be taken, as they pretend, after the nation is extricated from its present difficulties. Mr. Lincoln ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill
... 1592, Greene came to his miserable end, having sent to the press from his deathbed those two remarkable pamphlets, the "Groatsworth of Wit" and the "Repentance." For two years past, if we may believe Nash, the profligate atheism of the elder poet had estranged his friend, or at all events had kept him at a distance. But a feeling of common loyalty, and the anger which a true man of letters feels when a genuine poet is traduced by a pedant, led Nash to take up a very strong position ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... knowledge," Monsieur answered, "I have seen one case. You have heard me speak of Azuria. Well, many years ago a friend of mine, daughter of our King Christopher, fell to worrying about her cousin, a profligate who divided his time between the palace and Paris. As a punishment for various escapades the King had curtailed his allowance to a mere pittance, yet he seemed in spite of this to have as much money ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... with boyish ardour. And though the Doctor, when he did not know his Horace, or could not construe his Greek play, said that that boy Pendennis was a disgrace to the school, a candidate for ruin in this world, and perdition in the next; a profligate who would most likely bring his venerable father to ruin and his mother to a dishonoured grave, and the like—yet as the Doctor made use of these compliments to most of the boys in the place (which has not turned out an unusual number of felons and pickpockets), little Pen, at first uneasy and ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Boulogne; the situation of which is pleasing, and the fish there excellent. I was glad to see Boulogne, though I can scarcely tell why; but one is always glad to see something new, and talk of something old: for example, the story I once heard of Miss Ashe, speaking of poor Dr. James, who loved profligate conversation dearly,—"That man should set up his quarters across the water," said she; "why Boulogne would ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... not seem possible that this could ever end, that any act of nature could blot this from his mind as though it had never been. It was unthinkable that through an eternity he should never know again the meaning of blue sky, of blossoms, of such profligate pictures as now met his eye at every step, but above all, that he should be blind to the girl herself and all for which she stood. No matter how long the journey he was about to take, no matter through what new spheres, these things must remain ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... she said, on leaving me, 'I must turn to the left, Monseigneur, since the way on the right is closed against me.' The unhappy creature has kept her word but too well. She found means of establish a faro-table at her house, which is tolerated; and she joins to the most profligate conduct in her own person the infamous trade of a corrupter of youth; her house is the abode of every vice. Think, sir, after that, whether it was not an act of prudence, on my part, to grant the woman in question a pension, suitable to the rank in which I thought her ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... he forged his grandfather's name; that he is a profligate and a spendthrift, and that he has taken or borrowed from his grandfather whatever money he could get, and that—in short, he is a friend of ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... the salaries of several offices, though performing the duties of none—the fact that Ministers have maintained majorities by unblushing bribery in elections—that hardly one man in two hundred is an elector—the profligate arts of corruption by which every able man is bought by the Court—the disgraceful censorship of the press and the drama—the enormous appropriations for the civil list, wrung out by grinding taxes from the toil and sweat of millions—the absurd assumption, yet the monstrous ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... you abandoned profligate!" said the Judge. "You don't know any one in the Big Burgh, do you? Thought not. Without there! Ho, varlet!" He thumped on the table, demanding writing materials. "I'll fix you out. Give you a letter to a firm of mining experts I'm in ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... new voice thoughtfully, "I think he recognized the worthlessness of his profligate son, and planned to sink his whole fortune in this institution? Money has been the curse of Robson Danbury's life, and his father knew that the only hope of making anything like a man out of him was the cutting him off without a cent, but the Death ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... Peter the Great, was as weak a man as ever sat on a throne; Catharine a woman of unusual energy. For years of their married life these two had been enemies. Peter had the misfortune to have been born a fool, and folly on the throne is apt to make a sorry show. He had, besides, become a drunkard and profligate. The one good point about him, in the estimation of many, was his admiration for Frederick the Great, since he came to the throne of Russia at the crisis of Frederick's career, and saved him from utter ruin by withdrawing the Russian ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... A robber who reasons as the gang do in the Beggar's Opera, who call themselves practical philosophers[1294], and may have as much sincerity as pernicious speculative philosophers, is not the less an object of just indignation. An abandoned profligate may think that it is not wrong to debauch my wife, but shall I, therefore, not detest him? And if I catch him in making an attempt, shall I treat him with politeness? No, I will kick him down stairs, or run him through the body; that is, if I really love my wife, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Ranters. He was a man of great talent—fearless, devoted, and pious. He became extensively useful; and like thousands of most excellent men, was sacrificed at the shrine of that fanatical church over which the profligate and debauched Charles the Second was the supreme head. He died in the prime of life, receiving the crown of martyrdom, when his happy spirit ascended from Newgate in 1662: ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... St. Paul went to Corinth, and it was in this luxurious and profligate city that he founded a Church which became the centre of Christianity in Greece. [Sidenote: St. Paul turns from the Jews.] The obstinate unbelief and blasphemous opposition of the Corinthian Jews caused St. Paul, for the first time, to withdraw himself entirely from the services of the ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... at the worst, that there had been no enmity between them which would prompt him to revenge the misfortunes of his fathers on the State. Third, he should be virtuous and temperate in his private life, so that no profligate expense may lead him into taking bribes to the hurt of the people. Next, he should be sagacious and able to speak—since our ideal is that the best course should be chosen by the intelligence and then commended ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... evidence of that were necessary, that Anne had her brother in mind in writing the book. 'I could not be understood to suppose,' she says, 'that the proceedings of the unhappy scapegrace, with his few profligate companions I have here introduced, are a specimen of the common practices of society: the case is an extreme one, as I trusted none would fail to perceive; but I knew that such characters do exist, and if I have warned one rash youth from following in their ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Polycratia, was taken away and conveyed into Macedonia under the hope of a matrimonial connexion with royalty. After passing the time appointed for the celebration of the Nemaean games, and a few days more, in the commission of these profligate acts, he set out for Dymae to expel the garrison of the Aetolians, which had been invited by the Eleans, and received into the town. Cycliadas, who had the chief direction of affairs, met the king at Dymae, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... scale. Verena was full of suggestions which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens, the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very satisfactorily classified. If the influence of women in the past accounted for every act of virtue ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... later ages of the human career, the higher truths taught by an earlier race were lost, still a slight hint of the beauty and purity of the more ancient worship may be traced through most of the ages of the history of religion. Even among the profligate Greeks, the mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated in the temple of Ceres, were always respected. Care should be taken, however, not to confound these remnants of pure Nature-worship with that of the courtesan Venus, whose adoration, during the ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... dominions. Her mother was not of royal birth, and she was treated so cruelly by her husband and by the Electress Sophia that she resolved to escape from her misery by flight. In her despair she accepted the assistance of Count Konigsmarck, whom the envoy Stepney described as a profligate adventurer. The secret was betrayed; the princess was divorced, and spent the long remainder of her life at Ahlden, a remote country house which had belonged to her father. This was no more than had happened in many great families tried by ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... outcasts, and were thrown of necessity amongst those who had been cast out. But the standards of life vary with those who live, and I never could see that a man was less of a thief because he thieved from a throne, or less a profligate because he debauched a princess. I was, no doubt, in advance of my time; these are the ideas of Monsieur Voltaire. I believe that I saw a great deal of iniquity, for the taverns and gaming-dens to which I sometimes resorted ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... to sit continually languishing at the feet of some other woman, gives much less pain and scandal to others, or does much less mischief to himself and the objects of his adoration, than the thorough-going profligate; and I even feel tempted to risk the apparent paradox that, from the artistic point of view, Sterne lost rather than gained by the generally Platonic character of his amours. For, as it was, the restraint of one instinct of his nature implied the over-indulgence of another which stood in ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... vicious[1]; sinful; sinning &c.v.; wicked, iniquitous, immoral, unrighteous, wrong, criminal; naughty, incorrect; unduteous[obs3], undutiful. unprincipled, lawless, disorderly, contra bonos mores[Lat], indecorous, unseemly, improper; dissolute, profligate, scampish; unworthy; worthless; desertless[obs3]; disgraceful, recreant; reprehensible, blameworthy, uncommendable; discreditable, disreputable; Sadistic. base, sinister, scurvy, foul, gross, vile, black, grave, facinorous|, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... withdrawn, and there is nothing in the character of the Southern slaveholding aristocracy, and no other power on earth, to prevent their flocking in crowds and at the very first general election back to Washington, reuniting their forces with the old body of profligate political hacks at the North, and flaunting with increased presumption and activity the pretensions of slavery to dictate the whole policy of the land. In that event, a strong party, more distinctively proslavery ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... in choosing his own keenest weapon, was never better illustrated than on this occasion. We know now that in the negotiations for the repeal of the decrees, the French government tricked us into war with England by most profligate lying. It was apparent then that there was something wrong, and that either our government had been deceived, or had withheld the publication of the repealing decree until war was declared, so that England might not have a pretext for ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... indeed he was himself also a Jew by birth, he makes not the least mention of the appearance of Christ, or what things happened to him, or of the wonderful works that he did. He was the son of a certain Jew, whose name was Pistus. He was a man, as he is described by Josephus, of a most profligate character; a slave both to money and to pleasures. In public affairs he was opposite to Josephus; and it is related, that he laid many plots against him; but that Josephus, though he had his enemy frequently under his power, did only reproach ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... Teatro Sociale where we went to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Ranelagh is to the Bois de Boulogne. To get into the business of tavern-keeping, to manage the public balls, what a fine career for the marshal's baton of a ne'er-do-well! These morals, this life, this nature, were so plainly stamped upon the face of the low-lived profligate that the countess was betrayed into an exclamation when she beheld the pair, for they gave her the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... fraud, or robbery, I contend that the onus probandi lies on him who raises the question. It is for him to show, if he can, that a commercial fortune has, as Mr. Mill suggests, been built up by 'jobbing contracts, profligate loans, or other reprehensible practices.' But if this cannot be shown, the validity of the actual possessor's title must not be impugned. Property must be treated as of innocent acquisition and derivation until proved to be of guilty. And that not merely because there could otherwise be no rights ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... may very probably have done so. But the Renan-France method is to write like this: "When we consider Jack's curious and even perilous heredity, which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and a profligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven and a beanstalk came to be combined in his mind. Moreover, there is little doubt that he must have met some wandering conjurer from India, who told him about the tricks of the mango plant, and how t is sent up to the sky. We can imagine ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... and the not less terrible man, struck him favorably, and his hopes rose as a sunbeam fell on her shining hair, which the lady Berenike had arranged with her own hand, twining it with strands of white Bombyx. She must appear, even to this ruthless profligate, as the very type of pure ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Rohan probably needed purging by fire, for the order to burn them indicates that they contained evidence derogatory to his position as a dignitary of the church. The prince cardinal was a vain and profligate man, full of vicious inclinations, and credulous to a degree that had made him the victim of the unscrupulous schemer, Madame de La Motte Valois, a woman as adroit and unscrupulous as she was daring. Of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... hand for a few years out of the war prices, and had tried to go on living with greyhounds and yeomanry uniforms—"horse to ride and weapon to wear"—through the hard years which had followed. These were bad masters every way, unthrifty, profligate, needy, and narrow-minded. The younger men who were supplanting them were introducing machinery, threshing machines and winnowing machines, to take the little bread which a poor man was still able to earn ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... referable in no small degree to the absence of great motives,—the limited spheres and hopeless routine involved in arbitrary government, unsustained by any elevated sentiment. Such a rule makes literature servile, enterprise mercenary, and manners profligate: all history proves this. It is not, therefore, rational to infer, from the apparent want of ability in the nation to take care of its own affairs, that a military despotism is justifiable; when the truth is equally demonstrated, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Beauvais, that femme de chambre of the Queen-mother, a one-eyed creature, who is said to have first taught the King the art of intriguing. She was perfectly acquainted with all its mysteries, and had led a very profligate life; she lived several years ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... that evening, ought to have been reserved for times the most flagrantly profligate and abandoned. He never expected then to learn, that the everlasting laws of righteousness were to give way to imaginary, political, and commercial expediency; and that thousands of our fellow-creatures were to be reduced to wretchedness, that individuals ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... as much as she would from death itself. Rather that death would woo her than a man—if I may be permitted to honor him with that name—whose constitution is undermined, whose strength is sapped, and whose marrow and blood are poisoned. Rather an old maid than a profligate's nurse. Rather a life of single blessedness than the housekeeper of a wreck of a husband. Rather single and happy and stainless and conscience-free than a mother of an unfortunate offspring, that have the sins of their father visited upon them, and that shall ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... together by the hour, and make ballades and rondels better than Eustache Deschamps himself. He had seen a mad king who would not change his clothes, and a drunken emperor who could not keep his hand from the wine-cup. He had spoken a great deal with jesters and fiddlers, and with the profligate lords who helped his father to waste the revenues of France. He had seen ladies dance on into broad daylight, and much burning of torches and waste of dainties and good wine.[20] And when all is said, it was no very helpful preparation for the battle of life. "I believe Louis XI.," ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be done nohow. What between papers that don't come, and profligate bracket manufacturers who keep you waiting for months and then send the wrong things—and a general tendency of everybody to do nothing right or something wrong—it is as much as the two of us will do—to get in, and all in the course of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... To these persons also he directed his grim attention, Somers, Cowper, Godolphin, Marlborough, and Wharton were each drawn with iron stylus and acid. To Wharton he gave special care (he had some private scores to pay off), and in the character of Verres, he etched the portrait of a profligate, an unscrupulous governor, a scoundrel, an infidel to his religion and country, a reckless, selfish, low-living blackguard. In the Letter to Marcus Crassus, Marlborough is addressed in language that the simplest farm-labourer could understand. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... that the same man could not be every-thing; and to intimate to Ladies, that in chusing companions for life, they should rather prefer the honest heart of a Hickman, which would be all their own, than to risque the chance of sharing, perhaps with scores, (and some of those probably the most profligate of the Sex) the volatile mischievous one of a Lovelace: In short, that they should chuse, if they wished for durable happiness, for rectitude of mind, and not for speciousness of person or address: Nor make a jest of a good man in favour of a bad one, who would make ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... minister nullipotentiary, for all that his credentials showed—was an event of national importance. It was much more than this; it was the beginning of a new order of things in the relations of nations to each other. It is but a little while since any graceless woman who helped a crowned profligate to break the commandments could light a national quarrel with the taper that sealed her billets-doux to his equerries and grooms, and kindle it to a war with the fan that was supposed to hide her blushes. More and more, by virtue of advancing civilization ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... the love of St. John, and radiate the beams thereof on every man, woman, and child under their guardianship, and then, "measuring other people's corn by their own lovely bushel," they may well hesitate to believe in the existence of a profligate breeding Pandemonium within the precincts of their immediate country. Yet, alas! there can be little doubt that it ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... and to stand up for honest finance, or by our votes place the debt question of the old state into the hands of the plunderers and peculators. We were appealed to by General Hagood, through me, and my answer to him was in these words: 'General, our people have learned the difference between profligate and honest legislation. We have passed acts of financial reform, and with the assistance of God when the vote shall have been taken, you will be able to record for the thirty odd Negroes, slandered though ...
— The Disfranchisement of the Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6 • John L. Love
... the refusal of Bob Cratchit to enter the house of Gradgrind. An example of the second attitude can be found in the purple patches of fun in Mugby Junction; in which the English waitress denounces the profligate French habit of providing new bread and clean food for people travelling by rail. The point is, however, that in neither case has he the air of one suggesting improvements or sharing a problem with the people engaged on it. He does not go carefully with a ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... had said, that he did not wish to see the State become a great money lender; in reply to which Mr. Osborne expressed the opinion, that it would be much better for the State to become a great money lender than to continue a profligate spendthrift—dissipating the funds of the country on the highways of Ireland. "Had not," he asked, "the policy of the State always been to become a great money lender? Since the Union L18,000,000 of money had been lent to England and Scotland, of which L6,000,000 had been repaid, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... 1794, nearly eight hundred persons, the majority, principal individuals of the state, and all possessing some respectability of situation, were guillotined in Paris alone. In the midst of this horror, there were twenty-six theatres open, filled with the most profane and profligate displays in honor of the ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... mutinies and disorder, and to making extravagant demands of pay and gratuities; and in a rage, with their arms in their hands, they marched 20,000 of them towards Carthage, encamping within fifteen miles of the city; and chose Spendius and Matho, two profligate wretches, for their leaders, and imprisoned Gesco, who was deputed to them from the commonwealth. Afterwards they caused almost all the Africans, their tributaries, to revolt; they grew in a short time to ...
— Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic • Sir William Petty
... Romans were for a long time ignorant of this fact, and having been for many years involved in obscure difficulties, they were in deeper darkness and error than ever, when they gave the priests the power of intercalating, which they, in profligate subservience to the interests of the farmers of the revenue, or people engaged in lawsuits, effected by making additions or ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... heart and reflecting mind, a great share of sensibility, and a temper peculiarly formed for the enjoyments of social life. "But this gentleman, madam, who is her gallant this evening,—is his character unexceptionable? Will a lady of delicacy associate with an immoral, not to say profligate, man?" "The rank and fortune of Major Sanford," said Mrs. Richman, "procure him respect; his specious manners render him acceptable in public company; but I must own that he is not the person with ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... power to avoid it. With this way of thinking, my Louisa, you may imagine that I might be brought to believe it my duty to sacrifice my ease of mind, to the preservation of my character, but in my case, there is no choice; I must either add to the contamination of a very profligate world, or, in the face of Heaven, enter into the most solemn vows to love a man, whom the most I can do is not to hate. This is wilful perjury. In such an alternative duty cannot direct me, and misery must follow my decision, let ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... heart, was all transferred to this slight creature; when her face, constantly before him, reminded him, from hour to hour, of the too early change he had seen in such another—of all the sufferings he had watched and known, and all his child had undergone; when the young man's profligate and hardened course drained him of money as his father's had, and even sometimes occasioned them temporary privation and distress; it was then that there began to beset him, and to be ever in his mind, a gloomy ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... of doubt arose. 'It is, I daresay, in your recollection,'—this to his father,—'that at the time when Mr. Canning came to power, the Duke of Newcastle, in the House of Lords, declared him the most profligate minister the country had ever had. Now it struck me to inquire of myself, does the duke know the feelings I happen to entertain towards Mr. Canning? Does he know, or can he have had in his mind, my father's connection with Mr. Canning?' The duke had in fact been one of the busiest and ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... against them, to be sure but did not enter into real conflict. [Instead, he remained in a city of Moesia, rioting, as was his wont.] (Not only was he averse to physical labor and timorous in spirit, but also most profligate and lewd toward women and boys alike). But he sent others to officer the war and for the most part he got the worst ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... widows do I know, whom brutal, profligate, and savage husbands have brought to the brink of the grave,—as good, as bright, as innocent as, and far more forgiving than, Lady Byron. There they sit in their obscure, rarely-visited dwellings; for sympathy instructed by suffering knows ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that the Poor are vicious and profligate, and that THEREFORE nothing but force will answer to make them obedient, and keep them in order;—but, I should say, that BECAUSE the Poor are vicious and profligate, it is so much the more necessary to avoid the appearance of force in the management of them, to prevent their ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... is applied by Rabbi the Holy to Rabbi Eliezar, the son of Durdia, a profligate who recommended himself to the favor of heaven by one prolonged act of determined penitence, placing his head between his knees and groaning and weeping till his soul departed from him, and his sin and misery along with it; for at the moment of death a voice ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... in all the principal towns of France, "Societies of Harmony," for trying experiments and curing all diseases by means of magnetism. Some of these societies were a scandal to morality, being joined by profligate men of depraved appetites, who took a disgusting delight in witnessing young girls in convulsions. Many of the pretended magnetisers were notorious libertines, who took that opportunity of gratifying their passions. An illegal increase of the number of French ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself, however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... We expect that people who live in the ditch shall have the manners of the ditch; but how shocking when we find sin appended to superior education and to the refinements of social life. The accomplishments of Mary Queen of Scots make her patronage of Darnley, the profligate, the more appalling. The genius of Catharine II., of Russia, only sets forth in more powerful contrast her unappeasable ambition. The translations from the Greek and the Latin by Elizabeth, and her wonderful qualifications for a queen, made the more disgusting her capriciousness ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... undoubtedly a profligate and rapacious tyrant. In the course of a few months, he alienated his people, and offended a great number of his most powerful chiefs. The war which he undertook against the English, although at the ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... of the interests of their own clique. They have never allowed their own profound ignorance of anything (Greek for instance) to throw even an air of hesitation into their oracular decision on the matter. They set an example of profligate contempt for truth, of which the success was in proportion to the effrontery; and when their prosperity had filled the market with competitors, they cried out against their own reflected sin, as if they had never committed it, or were entitled ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... following year, and spent four months making collections. The village itself is a neglected, poverty- stricken place— the governor (Captain of Trabalhadores, or Indian workmen) being an old, apathetic, half-breed, who had spent all his life here. The priest was a most profligate character; I seldom saw him sober; he was a white, however, and a man of good ability. I may as well mention here, that a moral and zealous priest is a great rarity in this province— the only ministers of religion in the whole country who ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... indeed was it looked upon, that where an executioner could not be found to carry the sentence of the law into effect upon a criminal, the innkeeper was compelled to perform his functions: therefore the innkeepers, like usurers and other persons, who follow a pursuit hostile to public opinion, were profligate and rapacious. Don Quixote teems with instances to this effect; and there are other allusions to the same circumstance in Gil Blas. It must be observed that if M. Le Sage stumbled by accident upon so great a peculiarity, he was fortunate; and if it was suggested ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... footing. Amusements abounded, but they were all innocent. No merry-makings conduced to intoxication, to riot, to disease. Love existed, and was ardent in pursuit, but its object, once secured, was faithful. The adulterer, the profligate, the harlot, were phenomena so unknown in this commonwealth, that even to find the words by which they were designated one would have had to search throughout an obsolete literature composed thousands of years before. They who have been students of theoretical philosophies above ground, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... particularly kind to him. But his exertions were thrown away. The good-for-nothing youth read filthy romances on the sly. He fell asleep in church, or made eyes at the pretty girls. He made acquaintance with low companions. He became profligate, got drunk at alehouses, sold his master's property to get money, or stole it out of the cashbox. Thrice he ran away and was taken back again. The third time he was allowed to go. 'The House of Correction ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... activities during which prices, the cost of living, have been relatively stable—that is, inflation has been held in check. But it is clear that the danger is always present, particularly if the government might become profligate in its expenditures or private groups might ignore all the possible results on our economy of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... A retinue of profligate Normans completed the court, whom an English authority describes as "great quaffers, lourdens, proud, belly swains, fed with extortion and bribery." The Irish were looked upon by these worthies as a savage ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... as she entered the store and asked for the costume, and was somewhat reassured by the comportment of the saleswoman, who did not appear to think the request preposterous, to regard her as a spendthrift and a profligate. She took down the suit from the form and led Janet to a cabinet in the back of the shop, where ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... observes the reviewer, 'is an inflated jargon, composed of terms picked up in all countries, and wholly irreducible to any ordinary rules of grammar and sense. The sentiments are mischievous in tendency, profligate in principle, licentious and irreverent in the highest degree.' The first part of this accusation was only too well founded, but the licentiousness of which Lady Morgan's works were invariably accused in the Quarterly Review, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... be prejudiced against the constitutional clergy. Many of them are, I doubt not, liberal and well-meaning men, who have preferred peace and submission to theological warfare, and who might not think themselves justified in opposing their opinion to a national decision: yet are there also many of profligate lives, who were never educated for the profession, and whom the circumstances of the times have tempted to embrace it as a trade, which offered subsistence without labour, and influence without wealth, and which at once supplied a veil for licentiousness, and the means of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... 'To the club!' she muttered bitterly: 'you are not going to the club, profligate? You've no one at the club to give away my horses to—horses from my own stable—and the grey ones too! My favourite colour. Yes, yes, fickle-hearted man,' she went on raising her voice, 'you are not going to the club, As for you, Paul,' ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... showed in the presence of the ferocious brute, and the not less terrible man, struck him favorably, and his hopes rose as a sunbeam fell on her shining hair, which the lady Berenike had arranged with her own hand, twining it with strands of white Bombyx. She must appear, even to this ruthless profligate, as the very type ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... And how can the dear little girl have kept such a sunny look through it all! I could thrash myself like any school-boy to think that I—a fool among fools—should have directed the attention of Euergetes to this girl, and he, the most powerful and profligate man in the whole country. What can now be done to save Irene from him? I cannot endure the thought of seeing her abandoned to his clutches, and I will ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Christians, than the other and more rational kinds of heathen devotion; that is, if any at all had a right to be termed so. The brutal worship of Apis and Cybele was regarded, not only as a pretext for obscene and profligate pleasures, but as having a direct tendency to open and encourage a dangerous commerce with evil spirits, who were supposed to take upon themselves, at these unhallowed altars, the names and characters of these foul deities. Not only, therefore, the temple of Cybele, with its gigantic portico, its ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... that in the choice of magistrates a people will choose far more honestly than a prince; so that while you shall never persuade a people that it is advantageous to confer dignities on the infamous and profligate, a prince may readily, and in a thousand ways, be drawn to do so. Again, it may be seen that a people, when once they have come to hold a thing in abhorrence, remain for many ages of the same mind; which we do not find happen with princes. For the truth of both of which assertions ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... That GOLD, properly employ'd, May dispense Blessings, And promote the Happiness of Morals; But when hoarded up, Or misapply'd, Is but Trash, that makes Mankind miserable. Remember The unprofitable Servant, Who hid his Talent in a Napkin; And The profligate Son, Who squander'd away his Substance and fed with the Swine. As thou hast got the GOLDEN HEAD, Observe the Golden Mean, ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... pleased the God of Israel to give you a rough waking. Can you doubt that this plague, which has desolated a city, and filled many a yawning pit with the promiscuous dead, has been God's way of chastening a profligate people, a people caring only for fleshly pleasures, for rich meats and strong wines, for fine clothing and jovial company, and despising the spiritual blessings that the Almighty Father has reserved for ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... measure." "If legislation on this subject were impeded by the party of bigotry, if they chose not to wait for it, if they got married without it, and if you were to meet them on the boulevard at Paris during their wedding tour, should you go up to Bottles and say: 'Mr. Bottles, you are a profligate man!' Poor Mr. Matthew Arnold, upon this, emerged suddenly from his corner, and asked hesitatingly: 'But will any one dare to call him a man of delicacy?' The question was so utterly unpractical that I took no note of it whatever, and should not have ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... legislation, and you will find no precedent for such a profligate act of tyranny, exercised by a majority over their fellow legislators, nor for such an impudent contempt of the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... reference to the obtaining of Eternal Happiness, Vertue is not the thing, the most essentially requisite; and much less certainly will they think it to be so with respect to this present World, if they find their pious Instructor not only to choose the Society of Persons Profligate and Debauch'd for his Friends and Companions; but also (on all occasions) to labour the promotion of the like Men to Employments of the highest Truth, in preference of others of acknowledg'd Integrity and Sobriety of Life: The avow'd Reason whereof being only that ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... are sweet pretty words from your pen. But are they yours or his of her?—If she be so simple, if she have ease and nature in her manner, in her speech, and warbles prettily her wild notes, why, such a girl as that must engage such a profligate wretch, (as now indeed I doubt this man is,) accustomed, perhaps, to town women, and their confident ways.—Must deeply and for a long season engage him: since perhaps when her innocence is departed, she will endeavour by art to supply the loss of the natural ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... to confuse the situation, there occurred at this time the contest of John Wilkes, backed by the London mob, against the Grafton Ministry. This demagogue, able {45} and profligate, had already come into conflict with the Grenville Ministry in 1765, and had been driven into exile. Now, in 1768, he returned and was repeatedly elected to the Commons, and as often unseated by the vindictive ministerial majority. Riots and ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... their ministry and examples, as well with respect to our public as private duties. Nor shall the faults of a few make impression upon me to the disadvantage of the order; for I am afraid a very censorious temper, in this respect, is too generally the indication of an uncharitable and perhaps a profligate heart, levelling characters, in order to cover some inward pride, or secret enormities, which they are ashamed to avow, and will not ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... help to the warriors of northern France. She appealed at once to their superstition and to their cupidity. To the devout believer she promised pardons as ample as those with which she had rewarded the deliverers of the Holy Sepulchre. To the rapacious and profligate she offered the plunder of fertile plains and wealthy cities. Unhappily, the ingenious and polished inhabitants of the Languedocian provinces were far better qualified to enrich and embellish their country than to defend it. Eminent ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... foreign intervention. That alliance has already preserved the liberty of Piedmont. If it had been established sooner, it might have preserved that of Hesse, and have saved Europe from the revolting spectacle of the constitutional resistance of a whole people against an usurping tyrant and a profligate minister ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the consent of woman was never asked to a single statute, however nearly it affected her dearest womanly interests or happiness. In the despotisms of the old world, of ancient and modern times, woman, profligate, prostitute, weak, cruel, tyrannical, or otherwise, from Semiramis and Messalina, to Catherine of Russia and Margaret of Anjou, have swayed, unchallenged, imperial scepters; while in this republican and Christian land in the nineteenth century, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... I'm prepared. I've got one of these misguided cap-an'-ball six-shooters that's built doorin' the war; an' I cuts that hardware loose! This weepon seems a born profligate of lead, for the six chambers goes off together. Which you should have seen the Chevy Chasers dodge! An' well they may; that broadside ain't in vain! My aim is so troo that one of the r'armost dogs evolves a howl ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... generated. I say nothing about cases of unlikeness. I wish Panaetius could be here: he lived with Africanus. I would inquire of him which of his family the nephew of Africanus's brother was like? Possibly he may in person have resembled his father; but in his manners he was so like every profligate, abandoned man, that it was impossible to be more so. Whom did the grandson of P. Crassus, that wise and eloquent and most distinguished man, resemble? Or the relations and sons of many other excellent men, whose names there is no occasion to mention? But what are ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... many a feeble frame wasted with disease, may have been pointed out by these simple moralists to their awe-struck disciples as a fearful example of the fate that must sooner or later overtake the profligate who indulges immoderately in the seductive habit of mentioning his ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... which all elements of honest, manly sport have been taken away; brutal slugging matches between professional pugilists; horseraces conducted by gamblers for gamblers; the sickening, details of the latest scandal among the profligate, idle rich? ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... in his letters from the Highlands, written early in the eighteenth century, says that "soon after the wedding day the newly-married wife sets herself about spinning her winding sheet, and a husband that shall sell or pawn it is esteemed among all men one of the most profligate." And Dr. Jamieson says—"When a woman of the lower class in Scotland, however poor, or whether married or single, commences housekeeping, her first care, after what is absolutely necessary for the time, is to provide death linen for ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... words nearly identical to Henry's, Corbin noted, "To Tax People that are not in Debt to lend to those that are is highly unjust, it is in Fact to tax the honest, frugal, industrious Man, in order to encourage the idle, the profligate, the Extravagant, and the Gamester". Council defeated the loan plan. With the tobacco laws revised and the loan scheme defeated and only routine legislation in committee, most burgesses ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... minute investigation. I am not sure that the habitual male flirt, who neglects his wife to sit continually languishing at the feet of some other woman, gives much less pain and scandal to others, or does much less mischief to himself and the objects of his adoration, than the thorough-going profligate; and I even feel tempted to risk the apparent paradox that, from the artistic point of view, Sterne lost rather than gained by the generally Platonic character of his amours. For, as it was, the restraint of one instinct ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... passed by the church-yard, and the watchman bawled in hoarse voice a long and doleful "All's well!" A deep sleep had already fallen upon this primitive little burgh; nothing disturbed this awful silence, excepting now and then the bark of some profligate night-walking dog, or the serenade of some romantic cat. It is true, Wolfert fancied more than once that he heard the sound of a stealthy footfall at a distance behind them; but it might have been merely the echo of their own steps echoing along the quiet streets. He ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... mixed up with billets dous, paints and pomades, moneylenders' circulars, belladonna and cantharides. But most astounding of all were the contents of the widows' prie-Dieu. In this devotional article of furniture were stored all the inmost secrets of her profligate career. Affectionate letters from the elderly gentleman on whom she had imposed a supposititious child lay side by side with a black-edged card, on which was written the last message of a young lover who had killed ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... cases there are noble themes of art for whose appreciation no particular delicacy of moral or religious taste is required. There is no reason why such a subject as the Laocoon should make a different impression on a saint and on a profligate. It appeals to the tragic sense, which may be as highly developed in one as in the other. But if the Annunciation be the theme, we can well understand how differently it will impress a man of lively and cultured faith, a contemplative ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... dinner that day to intercede for her unfortunate son, who, unluckily, had the misfortune to be misunderstood by the Emperor Charles. Master Adrian had expected something of the kind, for the lady in waiting had more than once urged him also to obtain his Majesty's pardon for this ruined profligate, the shame of his noble race. He had persistently refused this request, and now enjoined it upon Barbara to follow his example. Before leaving her, he undertook to send her tidings of Wolf's health now and then by the violinist Massi, as he had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... have some supper—a cold fowl and a bottle of Burgundy—a profligate supper, fit for such abandoned characters; and over it you shall tell me how the world looked to you when ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... done nohow. What between papers that don't come, and profligate bracket manufacturers who keep you waiting for months and then send the wrong things—and a general tendency of everybody to do nothing right or something wrong—it is as much as the two of us will do—to get in, and all in the course of the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... however were still numerous and powerful; and it is certain that she found no advocate in the heart of her sister. That able, but thoroughly profligate politician lord Paget, notwithstanding his serving the princess with "comfects," is reported to have said, that the queen would never have peace in the country till her head were smitten off; and Gardiner never ceased to look upon her with an evil eye. Lord Williams, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... roughest tar on board. He was a sincere Christian too, and, what was more, was not ashamed of his Christianity. He exhibited his principles in his practice—in the daily duties of life,—till he taught the most profane and profligate to respect him, if not to adopt them. I wish there were more Basil Vernons in the service. Thank Heaven! there are some shining lights to lighten us in our darkness—leaven, which gradually, though slowly, may, by God's providence, leaven ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... other grew colorless and cold by comparison, and his hands twitched to pluck this fiery, vivid thing before him and carry it away out of reach of Lorimer's sodden, defiling touch. What had Sidney Lorimer, drunkard, profligate that he was, to do with this high-bred, high-spirited, heart-broken woman? Why not rather he, Cotton Mather Thayer—He thrust his hands into his pockets and lowered his eyes to hide the light ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... the negroes are treacherous, cunning, dishonest, and profligate. Let me ask you, candid reader, what you would be, if you labored under the same unnatural circumstances? The daily earnings of the slave, nay, his very wife and children, are constantly wrested from him, under the sanction of the laws; is this the way to teach a scrupulous regard to the property ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... civilised men living there, or should it be uninhabited. I had no wish to live among savages, as I had read enough of their doings to make me anxious to keep out of their way, and I was not influenced by motives which induce seamen to run from their ships for the sake of living an idle, profligate life, free from the ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... a moral man to become an accomplice in such wickedness," said Marcel. "My conscience forbids me to pay money to this old profligate. I shall not pay my rent, but my conscience will at any rate be clear. What morals, and in a bald headed ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... while despair drove many of those who remained to courses of reckless vice. Godfrey, firm to his duty and strong in faith, aided the exertions of the clergy in encouraging the spirits of his troops, and restraining their profligate excesses. A timely supply of provisions from some of the Armenian monasteries, and a brilliant victory obtained by Bohemond and the Count of Toulouse over an army which the Sultans of Aleppo and Damascus had sent to the succor of Antioch, rewarded ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... informer, who has been mentioned. See Life of Agricola, section 2. note a, and this tract, s. xii. note [b]. Messala, we are told by Tacitus, before he had attained the senatorian age, acquired great fame by pleading the cause of his profligate brother with extraordinary eloquence, and family affection. Magnam eo die pietatis eloquentiaeque famam Vipstanius Messala adeptus est; nondum senatoria aetate, ausus pro fratre Aquilio Regulo deprecari. Hist. lib. iv. s. 42. Since Messala has now ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... that stuck-up young swell takes of me, I might be a block of wood! I'll make him listen to me. (Aloud.) Ahem! My Lord, I've just been telling my niece here the latest scandal in high-life. I daresay your Lordship has heard of that titled but brainless young profligate, the Marquis ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... that Gold, properly employed, may dispense blessings, and promote the happiness of mortals; but when hoarded up, or misapplied, is but trash, that makes mankind miserable. Remember the unprofitable servant, who hid his talent in a napkin; and the profligate son who squandered away his substance, and fed with the swine. As thou hast got the Golden Head, observe the Golden Mean; ...
— The Story of the White Mouse • Unknown
... Sharpe. The leader of this party was David Hackston, of Rathillet, a gentleman of ancient birth and good estate. He had been profligate in his younger days, but having been led from curiosity to attend the conventicles of the nonconforming clergy, he adopted their principles in the fullest extent. It appears, that Hackston had some personal quarrel with Archbishop Sharpe, which induced him to decline the command ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... and ignorance in which they were kept before. Thee perhaps hast been surprised to see them at my table, but by elevating them to the rank of freemen, they necessarily acquire that emulation without which we ourselves should fall into debasement and profligate ways." Mr. Bertram, this is the most philosophical treatment of negroes that I have heard of; happy would it be for America would other denominations of Christians imbibe the same principles, and follow the same admirable rules. A great number of men would be relieved ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... But profligate and prodigal as was the Court, Somerset had to face the stern fact of an empty Exchequer. The debt was growing steadily. It had now risen to seven hundred thousand pounds, while, in spite of the impositions, the annual deficit had mounted to two ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... pretty deference that it pleased her to pay; she governed his household and his children; she learned, she wrote, she wore the crown. She might have a successor but no supplanter; an Egyptian of the dynasties before the Persian dominance could have but one wife at a time; none but kings could be profligate, openly. So, while Babylonia led her maidens to a market, while Ethiopia ruled hers with a rod, while Arabia numbered hers among her she-camels, Egypt gloried in national ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... especially in some crazy old vessel cruising in the tropics or rounding the Horn in winter. Of the relationship between the sea-rovers and the fair sex it would be best, perhaps, to draw a discreet veil. The pirates and the buccaneers looked upon women simply as the spoils of war, and were as profligate with these as with the rest of their plunder. I do not know if I am disclosing a secret when I mention that my friend Mr. Hyatt Verrill, who is an authority on the subject of the lives of the pirates, is about to publish a book devoted to the love affairs of these gentry. I confess to looking ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... be safe where he was. No danger, no difficulty could assail her while his strong arm was there to ward it off. She felt very much as Mary Stuart may have done about Bothwell; when, moved to scornful aversion by the silken boy-profligate Darnley, her heart acknowledged its master in the dark freebooter who had slain him. There had been no Darnley in Pamela Tempest's life; but this resolute, clear-brained soldier was her Bothwell. She had the Mary Stuart temperament, the love of compliments and fine ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... treachery was discovered, and Mrs Revel found herself reduced to a very narrow income, and wholly deserted by her husband, who knew that he had no chance of obtaining further means of carrying on his profligate career. His death in a duel, which we have before mentioned, took place a few months after the transaction, and Mrs Revel was attacked with that painful disease, a cancer, so deeply seated as to be incurable. Still she was the same frivolous, heartless ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... way on the right is closed against me: The unhappy creature has kept her word but too well. She found means of establishing a faro-table at her house, which is tolerated; and she joins to the most profligate conduct in her own person the infamous trade of a corrupter of youth; her house is the abode of every vice. Think, sir, after that, whether it was not an act of prudence, on my part, to grant the woman in question a pension, suitable to the rank ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... against misery and hunger. Remember that China is reduced to the expedient of throwing its children into the water, according to the accounts of travelers. Now this production of two children is really the whole of marriage. The superfluous pleasures of marriage are not only profligate, but involve an immense loss to the man, as I will now demonstrate. Compare then with this poverty of result, and shortness of duration, the daily and perpetual urgency of other needs of our existence. Nature reminds us every hour of our real needs; and, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... attention, as it increased in beauty, had the same tendency; and her anxiety to profit by the experience of others on one occasion inflicted a whimsical disappointment of the free-thinkers of the court. The profligate and sentimental infidel Rousseau had died a couple of years before, and had been buried at Ermenonville, in the park of the Count de Girardin. In the course of the summer the queen drove over to Ermenonville, and ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Man and Superman.... We have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. It is possible that Stevenson's words here are an unconscious reminiscence of Colley Cibber's letter to the novelist Richardson. This unabashed old profligate celebrated the Christmas Day of his eightieth year by writing to the apostle of domestic virtue in the following strain: "Though Death has been cooling his heels at my door these three weeks, I have not had time ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... picture of the gayest and most profligate periods of the history of the English Court. The writer, Sir Ralph Esher, is an adventurer in the Court of our Second Charles, where he is introduced by luckily securing a feather that escapes from the hat of one of the ladies of the Court on horseback. The work opens with some ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... in the face of any amount of oral and documentary testimony to the contrary. "Can a man take fire into his bosom and not be burned?" Can a man aid in executing such a law without defiling his own conscience? Yet does this profligate statute, with impious arrogance, command "ALL GOOD CITIZENS" to assist in enforcing it, when required so to do by an ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... so far off, we should have too much reason to fear, that many, in more civilized countries, have no very strong and clear impressions of a Deity upon their minds, and that the complaints of atheism made from the pulpit are not without reason. And though only some profligate wretches own it too barefacedly now; yet perhaps we should hear more than we do of it from others, did not the fear of the magistrate's sword, or their neighbour's censure, tie up people's tongues; ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... that was my name when I was your wife," she replied quickly, in a contemptuous voice; "but now that I am the pasha's wife, my name is Sarema. I do not suppose you ever expected to find me again, you wretch, when you sold me in Varna to an old Jewish profligate, who was only half alive. You see I have got into better hands, and I have made my fortune, as you said I should do. Well? What do you expect of me; what ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Youth, sunk in profligate waste, Lest no Comforts Life's evening to cheer; He must only it's bitterness taste, No Friend, no kind relative near. His Children by want forc'd to roam, Are aliens wherever they are: They have long left his desolate home; Have left ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... to be their superiors have no single virtue or good intention. I do not, however, mean to confound the inhabitants of Sarawak, or the other rivers, with those of Borneo Proper. The latter are thoroughly corrupt and profligate. The former are Malays, but have their good qualities, and certainly are not possessed with the spirit of intrigue which seems the life, the only moving principle of the Borneons. It may truly be ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... manhood. It is conditioned upon discernment and true faithfulness. Those too ignorant or uncaring to distinguish between rule and misrule, government and lawlessness, science and a juggle, supernal and infernal—those especially so profligate, who seek only to reach through government the sanction of law, the baptism of social order for their wickedness and misdeeds, have no business at any ballot-box, save that of recorded resolution to amend and repent. To put the ballot into the hands of the reckless, the besotted, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... affected. He took her hand and would have raised it to his lips; but she did not forget herself, and gently withdrew it, exclaiming, "O Gifted!" this time with a tone of tender reproach which made him feel like a profligate. He tore himself away, and when at a safe distance flung her a kiss, which she rewarded ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her my ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... agreeable manners, and a large amount of good sense and judgment. He had managed even to win the good opinion of Miss Sarah Pemberton, who was not in general inclined to think well of young men especially of officers in the army, whom she designated generally as an impudent, profligate set, with fluent tongues and insinuating manners, whose chief occupation in life was to break the hearts of young girls foolish ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... rehearsing the stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servants' hall? Again, had my title borne 'Waverley, a Romance from the German,' what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap-doors, and dark-lanterns? ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... differently did a Convent now appear from what I had supposed it to be! The holy women I had always fancied the nuns to be, the venerable Lady Superior, what were they? And the priests of the seminary adjoining, some of whom indeed I had had reason to think were base and profligate men, what were they all? I now learnt they were often admitted into the nunnery, and allowed to indulge in the greatest crimes, which ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... ignorant of this fact, and having been for many years involved in obscure difficulties, they were in deeper darkness and error than ever, when they gave the priests the power of intercalating, which they, in profligate subservience to the interests of the farmers of the revenue, or people engaged in lawsuits, effected by making additions or ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... came with me, was, from the time I saved his life, an altered man. He had been, as I was informed, a drunken profligate; but from the moment when I received him into my boat, his manners and habits seemed as completely changed as if he were a different being. He never drank more than was sufficient to quench his thirst—he never swore—he never used any offensive language. He read the Scriptures constantly, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the father, "did not allow me to finish. I was about to say that he whom your majesty has made your most illustrious subject, he who ought to give to all your subjects an example of moral conduct, is a profligate and libertine. That infamous school of Paris, where reigns the wanton Marquise de Pompadour, the ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... and the subject absolutely barred, the only result would be that Antony and Cleopatra, Othello (because of the Bianca episode), Troilus and Cressida, Henry IV, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, La Dame aux Camellias, The Profligate, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith, The Gay Lord Quex, Mrs Dane's Defence, and Iris would be swept from the stage, and placed under the same ban as Tolstoy's Dominion of Darkness and Mrs ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... breath of relief. He was not married! He was only a profligate single man. A profligate single man is shocking—but reclaimable. It is possible to blame him severely, and to insist on his reformation in the most uncompromising terms. It is also possible to forgive ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... ruling race of the tract of country called Rohilkhand, and are men of a taller stature, a fairer complexion and a more arrogant air than the general inhabitants of the district. Bishop Heber described them as follows:—"The country is burdened with a crowd of lazy, profligate, self-called sawars (cavaliers), who, though many of them are not worth a rupee, conceive it derogatory to their gentility and Pathan blood to apply themselves to any honest industry, and obtain for the most part a precarious livelihood by sponging ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... that he had left on the table was full of expressions of love and remorse, to say nothing of excuses for his infamous behavior to me. He declared that he had been entrapped into a private marriage with a profligate woman when he was little more than a lad. They had long since separated by common consent. When he first courted me, he had every reason to believe that she was dead. How he had been deceived in this particular, and how she had discovered that he had married me, he had yet to find out. Knowing ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... and when they advanced or slackened their pace, the stranger's was in proportion accelerated or diminished. The matter would have been of very little consequence had Simon Glover been alone; but the beauty of his daughter might render her the object of some profligate scheme, in a country where the laws afforded such slight protection to those who had not the ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... disinterested part he takes, while I am looked upon as a black sheep; of which I console myself, and have reason to console myself, when I see the views and motives of some great political characters to be so profligate and abandoned. Lord North and Charles Fox acting together in public life, is a new and extraordinary scene! Many people say it was only for last night; but I believe the arrangement has completely taken place, ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... see a young profligate squandering his fortune in bagnios, or at the gaming-table, I cannot help looking on him as hastening his own death, and in a ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... this and the adjoining parish for sixty pounds a year, preaches against his patron, whose pew is immediately under the pulpit, designating him by the general exemplary and illustrative title of the "abandoned profligate." The latter thus vaguely indicated individual is a middle-aged widower of perhaps not immaculate morals, but who, as lord of the manor and chief landed proprietor in these parts, is allowed to be charitable and kind enough,—which, however, will not, I am afraid, save him—at least in ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... efficiency, learned foreign tongues, and browsed in the musty archives, he would have discovered that there was much to unlearn. The early scribes piled fancy upon invention, believing or pretending that Rembrandt was a miser, a profligate, a spendthrift, and so on. "Houbraken's facts," we read, "are interwoven with a mass of those suspicious anecdotes which adorn the plain tale of so many artistic biographies. Campo-Weyermann, Dargenville, Descamps, and others added further ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... ignored in the correspondence. The preface in question makes it quite clear, if any evidence of that were necessary, that Anne had her brother in mind in writing the book. 'I could not be understood to suppose,' she says, 'that the proceedings of the unhappy scapegrace, with his few profligate companions I have here introduced, are a specimen of the common practices of society: the case is an extreme one, as I trusted none would fail to perceive; but I knew that such characters do exist, and if I have warned one rash youth from following ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... is any guilt in the case!" answered Allworthy warmly: "Are you then so profligate and abandoned a libertine to doubt whether the breaking the laws of God and man, the corrupting and ruining a poor girl be guilt? I own, indeed, it doth lie principally upon you; and so heavy it is, that you ought to expect ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... Percival Ford's thin lips drew tightly together for the moment. "Joe Garland is dissolute and idle. He has always been a wastrel, a profligate." ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... story is not very consistent in its outlines, and is fragmentary withal, the narrative of the child Samuel being the central theme, around which are grouped the tribulations of Elkanah and Hannah, the service of Eli the priest, the revels of his profligate sons, and the martial deeds ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... the cottage to Major Milroy instead of to himself, and it has helped to exasperate the feeling against you. It is roundly stated in so many words that you have been prying into Miss Gwilt's family affairs, with the most dishonorable motives; that you have tried, for a profligate purpose of your own, to damage her reputation, and to deprive her of the protection of Major Milroy's roof; and that, after having been asked to substantiate by proof the suspicions that you have cast on the reputation of a defenseless woman, you have ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... generation, the line becoming extinct. The most heart-rending spectacles we have ever met have been the children of parents suffering with the diseases mentioned. Their appearance is characteristic; no physician of experience can fail to detect the sins of a profligate parent in a syphilitic child. Every feature indicates the ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... a majesty and dignity, a commanding power in the eye and expression of a pure, high-minded, resolute woman, which will abash even the boldest and most unscrupulous men. That is their shield and buckler, their defence against the attacks of the profligate. It is like the steadfast gaze of a dauntless man, which is said to have the power of awing even the fiercest of the beasts of the forest; but let her beware how for an instant she withdraws it, how she allows the ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live here. It ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Girolamo Savonarola was a trifler, a spendthrift and a profligate. Yet he proved a potent teacher for his son, pressing his lessons home by the law of antithesis. The sons of dissipated fathers are ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... just why he took Scales along, unless with the design of making a match between one of the younger daughters of this neighboring ranchman and the Marylander, was not entirely clear. When he wanted to, Scales could make himself very agreeable, and had it not been for his profligate disposition, his being taken along on the hunt would have been no mystery. Every one on the ranch, including the master and mistress, were cognizant of the fact that for the past year he had maintained a correspondence with a girl in Florida—the ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... metropolis of the nation; is daily spreading through every part of it; and, bad in itself as any can be, must of necessity bring in others after it. Indeed it hath already brought in such dissoluteness and contempt of principle in the higher part of the world, and such profligate intemperance, and fearlessness of committing crimes, in the lower, as must, if this impiety stop not, become absolutely fatal. And God knows, far from stopping, it receives, through the ill designs of some persons, and the inconsiderateness ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Anglo-Saxon race was wearing out. The men of Wessex, priest-ridden, and enslaved by their own aristocracy, quailed before the free Norsemen, among whom was not a single serf. The God-descended line of Cerdic and Alfred was worn out. Vain, incapable, profligate kings, the tools of such prelates as Odo and Dunstan, were no match for such wild heroes as Thorkill the tall, or Olaf Trygvasson, or Swend Forkbeard. The Danes had gradually colonized, not only their own Danelagh and Northumbria, but great part of Wessex. Vast sums of Danegelt ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... the most happy effects on multitudes of men. It has enlightened the most ignorant; softened the most hardened; reclaimed the most profligate; converted the most estranged; purified the most polluted; exalted the most degraded; and plucked the most endangered from hell to heaven. What was it that transformed the persecuting and blaspheming Saul into a kind ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... rigorous provision was made to restrain Roman knights from the disgrace of appearing at the games in the arena.[361] Former emperors had paid, or more often compelled them to do this, and many of the provincial towns vied together in hiring the most profligate ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... success in the lofty art of letters and apply his mind to great things, he must first perfect his character by simplicity's stern law; he must care naught for the haughty frown of the fierce tyrant that lords it in his palace, nor seek client-like for invitations to the board of the profligate, nor deliver himself over to the company of debauchees and drown the fire of his understanding in wine, nor sit in the theatre the hired applauder of the mouthing actor. But whether the citadel of panoplied Minerva allure him with its smile, or the land where the Spartan exile ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... never a more openly profligate Italian despot than Alexander VI (1493-1503) of the notorious Spanish house of Borgia. He frankly set to work to advance the interests of his children, as if he were merely a secular ruler. For one of his ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... we wonder, then, if religion, which prescribes an abstinence from the pleasures of sin, which enjoins continence to the sensual, sobriety to the drunkard, reflection to the unheeding, gentleness to the irascible, restraint to the voluptuous, probity to the avaricious, punishment to the profligate, meets in such an age with very few votaries? Some, doubtless, will always be found, who, disgusted with the profligacy with which they are surrounded, are led only the more rapidly to a life of rectitude and duty by such vice; but how many are they amidst the crowd of sensual and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... surrounded her. What do you think preserved her pure from all danger? Bah! you will never guess! It was partly because, if example corrupts, it as often deters, but principally because she loved. A girl who loves one man purely has about her an amulet which defies the advances of the profligate. There was a handsome young Italian, an artist, who frequented the house—he was the man. I had to choose, then, between mother and daughter: ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... secure the persons intrusted from the temptations of unlawful emolument, and, what in all cases is the greatest security, given a lawful gratification to the natural passions of men. Matrimony is to be used, as a true remedy against a vicious course of profligate manners; fair and lawful emoluments, and the just profits of office, are opposed to the unlawful means which might be made use of to supply them. For, in truth, I am ready to agree, that for any man to expect a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... so he died, a firm and consistent member of the Roman church. In harmony with his general character, his religious views were always moderate, never betraying him into excesses, or into any merely partisan zeal. Born during the profligate, cruel, and perfidious reign of Charles IX., he was, perhaps, too young to be greatly affected by the evils characteristic of that period, the massacre of St. Bartholomew's and the numberless vices that swept along in its train. His youth and early manhood, covering ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... Industrious, giving no Scandal or Bad Example, at least by any Open and Public Vices. By which excellent Qualities they had much the Advantage of the Southern Colony, who thought their being Members of the Establish't Church sufficient to Sanctifie very loose and Profligate Morals. For this reason New England improved much faster than Virginia, and in Seven or Eight Years New Plymouth, like Switzerland, seemd too narrow a ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... heard that evening ought to have been reserved for times the most flagrantly profligate and abandoned. He never expected then to learn that the everlasting laws of righteousness were to give way to imaginary, political, and commercial expediency; and that thousands of our fellow-creatures were to be reduced to wretchedness, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... produce some excuse for having been betrayed into an act disgraceful to a man of honor. But when all these filial dreams were blasted by the conviction that he owed his being to the husband of Lady Tinemouth, that his mother was the victim of a profligate, that he had sprung from a man who was not merely a villain, but the most wanton, the most despicable of villains, he saw himself bereft of hope and ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... few that are my equals I am reckoned rather wise. For those who are little thought of by the wise, seem to hit the taste of the vulgar."[17] And I have myself noticed that those who practise to speak acceptably and to the gratification of the masses promiscuously, for the most part become also profligate and lovers of pleasure in their lives. Naturally enough. For if in giving pleasure to others they neglect the noble, they would be hardly likely to put the lofty and sound above a life of luxury and pleasure, and to prefer moderation to delights. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... to existing laws for the suppression of the African slave trade, and recommend all such alterations as may give to them greater force and efficacy. That the American flag is grossly abused by the abandoned and profligate of other nations is but too probable. Congress has not long since had this subject under its consideration, and its importance well justifies renewed and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... her struggle to keep her family from want,—this man now seeks to condone his offences—pardon me, sir, if I use your own legal phraseology—by offering me a home; by giving me part of his ill-gotten wealth, the association of his own hypocritical self, and the company of his shameless, profligate son— ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... hardly beautiful, but the outline excellent. She affected sensibility, but felt none—was artful; and no wonder, she had been trained in the Court of Naples—a fine school for an English woman of any stamp. Nelson was infatuated. She could make him believe anything, that the profligate queen was a Madonna. He was her dupe. She never had a child in her life."[72] As to this last assertion, Beckford was not in a position to have ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... seen Beauvais, that femme de chambre of the Queen-mother, a one-eyed creature, who is said to have first taught the King the art of intriguing. She was perfectly acquainted with all its mysteries, and had led a very profligate life; she lived several years after my arrival ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... reformation. We need just such a change as is here described—a radical one, not a superficial one. All need it. Those who are the most pure in heart and most blameless in character (spotless children, as they seem to us, of a heavenly world) feel their own need of this change no less than do the profligate and openly vicious. Parents and friends say, "We have no fault to find with them." They do not say they have no fault to find with themselves. They feel they have all kinds of fault to find with themselves, and nothing ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... low rates; and in other places have them for nothing. They are kept at perpetual labour, and are always chained, but with this difference, that their own natives are treated much worse than others; they are considered as more profligate than the rest, and since they could not be restrained by the advantages of so excellent an education, are judged worthy of harder usage. Another sort of slaves are the poor of the neighbouring countries, who offer ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... secretary of state and took the northern department, and Lord Hillsborough succeeded Lord Shelburne as president of the board of trade. Sandwich had official experience, and was neither idle nor incapable, though unprincipled and extremely profligate; Hillsborough was deficient in tact and judgment. Shelburne had been one of Bute's followers, and arranged his bargains with Fox, who accused him of having deceived him. He was employed in the late negotiations with Pitt, resigned office on their failure, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... one successively dying, one after another, more wicked than the former. They were intolerable in war, and vehement in robberies; and if any one were slow to murder people, yet was he bold in his profligate behavior, in acting unjustly, and doing ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... "Profligate!—bad!" exclaimed Riccabocca. "Well, calumnious as the world is, I should never have thought that such expressions would be applied to one who, though I knew him but little—knew him chiefly by the service he once ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... how, when the lieutenants of Malek Shah got possession of Asia Minor, they profaned the churches, subjected Bishops and Clergy to the most revolting outrages, circumcised the youth, and led off their sisters to their profligate households;—how, when the Ottomans conquered in turn, and added an infantry, I mean the Janizaries, to their Tartar horse, they formed that body of troops, from first to last, for near five hundred years, of boys, all ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... same persons, respecting the character of doctrines which, although in speculation they are fearful and appalling to the utmost, tend in reality to stupify the moral sense, and can be listened to by the profane and the profligate with complacency or apathy? While it explains their popularity, it is a ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... Paul began a second missionary journey, and crossed over into Europe, where he founded several Churches, including those of Philippi and Thessalonica. At Athens he seems to have made {121} but little impression, but at Corinth, the busy and profligate centre of Greek commerce, he was more successful. He stayed there for eighteen months, and during this stay he wrote the Epistles to the Thessalonians. They are marked by the attention given to eschatology, or doctrine of "the last things"—the second ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... This hero, whose name is not essential to our existence, was, it was said, the chief hero and Saviour of the Mesopotamian ethical scheme. Then followed a paragraph giving other examples of such heroes and Saviours being born of some profligate intercourse between God and mortal. Then followed a paragraph—but Evan did not understand it. He read it again and then again. Then he did understand it. The glass fell in ringing fragments on to the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... relation to this subject, is the manner in which a man's character is influenced by the particular motive or pursuit to which he has resigned the guidance of his conduct. One surrenders himself to the animal propensities, and becomes a selfish profligate, insensible to every right principle of action, while his depraved condition is obvious to all around him. A second devotes himself to ambition;—and a third to avarice:—These ruling passions, it may be, are found to be adverse to the selfish ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... too impulsive a whole lot,' I argues onct when a profligate he's staked, an' who reports himse'f as jumpin' sideways for grub previous, goes careerin' over to the dance hall with them alms he's wrung, an' proceeds on a debauch. 'You oughter not allow them ornery folks ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of the first Quality—devote themselves. He is no Puritan; (for I did ever hate your sanctimonious Banbury-men); but he has a Proper Sense of what is due to the Honour and Figure of his family, and refrains from soiling his hands with bales of dice and worse implements among the profligate crew to be met with, not alone at Newmarket, or at the "Dog and Duck," or "Hockley Hole," but in Pall-Mall, and in the very ante-chambers of St. James's, no cater-cousin of the Groom-Porter he. He rides his hackney, as a gentleman ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... of Buccleuch, married James Fitzroy, duke of Monmouth, eldest natural son of Charles II. They were afterwards created duke and duchess of Buccleuch. She was an accomplished and high-spirited lady, distinguished for her unblemished conduct in a profligate court. It was her patronage which first established Dryden's popularity; a circumstance too honourable to her memory to be ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... entertain my reader with historical remarks on this idle profligate people, who infest all the countries of Europe, and live in the midst of governments in a kind of commonwealth by themselves. But instead of entering into observations of this nature, I shall fill the ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... as the will of a great people, as mindful of its duty to its posterity as it is grateful for the labours of its ancestors. The English nation, therefore, rallies for rescue from the degrading plots of a profligate oligarchy, a barbarising sectarianism, and a boroughmongering Papacy round their hereditary leaders—the Peers. The House of Lords, therefore, at this moment represents everything in the realm except the Whig oligarchs, their tools—the Dissenters, and ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... most difficult service of all in setting the disordered finances of the country upon a sound footing. In early middle age he ended a life, not flawless but admirable and lovable, in a duel, murderously forced upon him by one Aaron Burr. This man, who was an elegant profligate, with many graces but no public principle, was a claimant to the Presidency in opposition to Hamilton's greatest opponent, Jefferson; Hamilton knowingly incurred a feud which must at the best have been dangerous to him, by unhesitatingly ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... you understand my feelings; I scarcely understand them myself; but of this sort they are, and I am really persuaded that I never felt in a better disposition to be a good man and a working man than just at the close of a career which has been equally profligate and idle." ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... of the first half of the eighteenth century; living in a coarse, drunken, ignorant, profligate, and altogether unheroic age. He is—and here the high art and the high morality of Mr. Thackeray's genius is shown—altogether a man of his own age. He is not a sixteenth-century or a nineteenth-century man born out of time. His information, his politics, his religion, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... and the methods of the Gospel. To the jaundiced eye of this sour-tempered pharisaic youth, it seemed that his father gave much to him that deserved least, and little to him that deserved most: to the profligate son, the fatted calf; to the eminently dutiful child, not even a kid. Here the hard, self-satisfied formalist, like Pilate and Caiaphas, preaches the Christ whom he did not know. The envious contrast portrayed by the elder son is a dark shadow which takes its shape from the Light of life. It is ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... impulsive a whole lot,' I argues onct when a profligate he's staked, an' who reports himse'f as jumpin' sideways for grub previous, goes careerin' over to the dance hall with them alms he's wrung, an' proceeds on a debauch. 'You oughter not allow them ornery folks to do you. If you'd ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... their own offended allies of the Peloponnesian League. Alcibiades had a private grudge against the Spartans, to whom he had made overtures of friendship and service at the time when the treaty was under discussion, only to be set aside as a profligate and frivolous youth, unfit to meddle with serious matters of state. He now placed himself at the head of the party hostile to Sparta, and it was not long before he had an opportunity of revenging the insult to his pride. He used all his influence to promote an alliance ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... him and prompted entirely by his strong feelings in the matter of his son. "He is a disgrace to his name! He always has been. When a boy, he was a liar and a thief, and had he had his deserts he had been lodged in Newgate long ago—or worse. Now that he's a man, he's an abandoned profligate, a brawler, a drunkard, a rakehell. So much I have long known him for; but to-day he has shown himself for something even worse. I had thought that my ward, at least, had been sacred from his villainy. ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... controlling or directing a policy of war; and the great struggle known as the Seven Years' War had now broken out. One lamentable event in the war has to be recorded, although it was but of minor importance. This was the capture of Minorca by the French under the romantic, gallant, and profligate Duc de Richelieu. The event is memorable chiefly, or only, because it was followed by the trial and execution of the unfortunate Admiral Byng. Admiral Byng, the son of a famous sailor, was sent in command of a small and a very poorly furnished squadron to the Mediterranean ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... little Teatro Sociale where we went to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... and formal cat, and, in his way, a personage. He was decorous to a degree, unbended in no confidences with strangers, and hated Mr. Fopling, whom he regarded as either a graceless profligate or a domestic animal of unsettled species who, through no merit and by rank favoritism, had been granted a place in the household superior to his own. At sight of Mr. Fopling, Ajax would bottle-brush his tail, arch his back, and explode into that ejaculation ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... beyond the power of man."—Idler, No. 72. "The nominative case follows the verb, in interrogative and imperative sentences."—Murray's Gram., 8vo, Vol. ii, p. 290. "Can the fig-tree, my brethren, bear olive berries? either a vine, figs?"—James, iii, 12. "Whose characters are too profligate, that the managing of them should be of any consequence."—Swift, Examiner, No. 24. "You that are a step higher than a philosopher, a divine; yet have too much grace and wit than to be a bishop."—Pope, to Swift, Let. 80. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... broken in means and character, he had married. The lady of his choice had been chosen as an heiress; but there had been some slip between that cup of fortune and his lip; and she, proud and beautiful, for such she had been—had neither relieved nor softened the poverty of her profligate old lord. ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... one of the most gifted women who ever trod American soil,— she being of English birth,—that, before she obtained the divorce which separated her from her profligate husband, she once went for counsel to the wife of her pastor. She unrolled before her the long catalogue of merciless outrages to which she had been subject, endangering finally her health, her life, and that of her ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... at Marly—"ill-omened Marly"—that the Duc de Berry, the younger grandson of Louis XIV., and husband of the profligate daughter of the Duc d' Orleans—afterward Regent, died, with great suspicion of poison, in 1714. The MS. memorials of Mary Beatrice by a sister of Chaillot, describe how, when Louis XIV. was mourning his beloved grandchildren, and that queen, whom he had always ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... at Bath, was always clean shaven; now he wears a long white beard, but that is neither here nor there. Clear had a moustache, but when that was shaved off he looked exactly like Vrain. For purposes of your own, which you can easily guess, you made the acquaintance of this man, a profligate and a drunkard, and proposed, for a certain sum of money to be paid to his wife, that he, Michael Clear, should personate Vrain and live in the Silent House in Geneva Square, under the name of Berwin. You knew that ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... though separated by justice from society, were not supposed to have lost the distinctive attribute of human nature: they were treated as rational beings, were operated upon by rational motives; and they repaid this treatment by improved habits, by industry, and submission. They had been profligate, they were now sober and decent in their behaviour; they had been idle, they were now actively and usefully employed; they had disobeyed the laws, they now submitted (armed as they were with all kinds of utensils) to the ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... as to preclude his sharing prominently in the diplomatic part of his mission; Colonel George Cartwright, a soldier, well-meaning but devoid of sympathy and ignorant of the conditions that confronted him; Sir Robert Carr, the worst of the four, unprincipled and profligate and without control either of his temper or his passions; and, lastly, Maverick himself, opposed to the existing order in Massachusetts and convinced of the necessity of radical changes in the constitution of the colony. Nicolls was liked and respected; Cartwright and Carr were distrusted ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... actors. The four principal characters, denominated masks, were Pantaloon, a merchant of Venice, a doctor of laws from Bologna, and two servants, known to us as Harlequin and Columbine. When we add to these a couple of sons, one virtuous and the other profligate; a couple of daughters, and a pert, intriguing chambermaid, we have nearly the whole dramatis personae of these plays. The extempore dialogue by which the plot was developed was replete with drollery and wit, and there was no end to the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the Charleston school was closed for reasons which it is difficult to determine. From one source we learn that one of the teachers died, and the other having turned out profligate, no instructors could be found to continue the work. It does not seem that the sentiment against the education of free Negroes had by that time become sufficiently strong to cause the school to be discontinued.[1] It is evident, ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... radiate the beams thereof on every man, woman, and child under their guardianship, and then, "measuring other people's corn by their own lovely bushel," they may well hesitate to believe in the existence of a profligate breeding Pandemonium within the precincts of their immediate country. Yet, alas! there can be little doubt that it ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... say nothing about cases of unlikeness. I wish Panaetius could be here: he lived with Africanus. I would inquire of him which of his family the nephew of Africanus's brother was like? Possibly he may in person have resembled his father; but in his manners he was so like every profligate, abandoned man, that it was impossible to be more so. Whom did the grandson of P. Crassus, that wise and eloquent and most distinguished man, resemble? Or the relations and sons of many other excellent men, whose names there ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... and with a just disdain Frown at effeminates, whose very looks Reflect dishonour on the land I love. How, in the name of soldiership and sense, Should England prosper, when such things, as smooth And tender as a girl, all essenced o'er With odours, and as profligate as sweet, Who sell their laurel for a myrtle wreath, And love when they should fight; when such as these Presume to lay their hand upon the ark Of her magnificent and awful cause? Time was when it was praise and boast enough In every clime, and travel where we might, That we were born ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... weeks before and on the days of election, in the most infamous intrigues, and that falsehood and bribery are so much in fashion, and are so universally resorted to, that success invariably attends the most impudent and the most profligate, while the man of modesty and virtue, though possessing the fairest claims to promotion, is abashed, confounded ...
— Count The Cost • Jonathan Steadfast
... who was born in 1627, just twenty years after Popham's death. "For severall yeares," this collector says of the Chief Justice, "he addicted himself but little to the studie of the lawes, but profligate company, and was wont to take a purse with them. His wife considered her and his condition, and at last prevailed with him to lead another life and to stick to the studie of the lawe, which, upon her importunity, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... professors there are who would be least easily believed by those who live in the same house with them, if they said that Jesus had cast their devils out of them. It is a great mistake to take recent converts, especially if they have been very profligate beforehand, and to hawk them about the country as trophies of God's converting power. Let them stop at home, and bethink themselves, and get sober and confirmed, and let their changed lives prove the reality of Christ's healing power. They can speak ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... of a king with the mind of a slave;" [136:6] and it is a remarkable proof, as well of the intrepid faithfulness, as of the eloquence of the apostle, that he succeeded in arresting the attention, and in alarming the fears of this worthless profligate. Drusilla, his wife, a woman who had deserted her former husband, [136:7] was a Jewess; and, as she appears to have been desirous to see and hear the great Christian preacher who had been labouring with so much zeal to propagate his principles throughout the Empire, Paul, to satisfy her ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... said for a man to betray his trust for money, is for him to stand on the same intellectual level with a monkey that scalds its throat with boiling water because it is thirsty. A drunkard is one who exchanges ambrosia and nectar for garbage. A profligate is one who declines an invitation to banquet with the gods that he may dine out of an ash barrel. What blight is to the vine, sin is to a man. When the first thief appeared in Plymouth colony a man was withdrawn from ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the sides we show are the sides seen by the world. There were people who could truly believe that Peter was a ward boss; a frequenter of saloons; a drunkard; a liar; a swearer; a murderer, in intention, if not in act; a profligate; and a compromiser of many of his own strongest principles. Yet there were people who could, say other things ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... afterwards. But if she was a gleam of sunlight in his lonely dwelling, like sunlight she came and went in it, and one day he found her near to the track leading up to the fondak in talk with a passing traveller by the way, whom he recognised for the grossest profligate out of Tetuan. Unveiled, unabashed, with sweet looks of confidence she was gazing full into the man's gross face, answering his evil questions with the artless simplicity of innocence. At one bound Israel was between them; and in a moment he had torn ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... that day, William Fullarton, the Provost of Kirkcudbright. It is interesting to know that Marion M'Naught was closely connected with Lady Kenmure, another of Rutherford's chief correspondents. Lord Kenmure was her mother's brother. Kenmure had lived a profligate and popularity-hunting life till he was laid down on his death-bed, when he underwent one of the most remarkable conversions anywhere to be read of—a conversion that, as it would appear, his niece Marion M'Naught had no little ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... remote nations of the earth. The terror of their arms added weight and dignity to their moderation. They preserved peace by a constant preparation for war. The soldiers, though drawn from the meanest, and very frequently from the most profligate, of mankind, and no longer, as in the days of the ancient republic, recruited from Rome herself, were preserved in their allegiance to the emperor, and their invincibility before the enemy, by the influences of superstition, inflexible discipline, and the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... men were landed, in order to make an attack upon the fort, which must be ascended to by a steep hill against the mouth of the cannon. These men were headed by one Kennedy, a bold, daring fellow, but very wicked and profligate; they marched directly up under the fire of their ship guns, and as soon as they were discovered, the Portuguese quitted their post and fled to the town, and the pirates marched in without opposition, set fire to the fort, and threw all ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... from London, where I have come, as a good, profligate, graceless bachelor, for a day or two; leaving my wife and babbies at the seaside.... Heavens! if you were but here at this minute! A piece of salmon and a steak are cooking in the kitchen; it's a very wet day, and I have had a fire lighted; the wine sparkles ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Lady Roos's conduct. This unhappy lady, whom we have already mentioned as the daughter of Sir Thomas Lake, Secretary of State, had the misfortune to be sincerely attached to her handsome but profligate husband, whose neglect and frequent irregularities she had pardoned, until the utter estrangement, occasioned by his passion for the Countess of Exeter, filled her with such trouble, that, overpowered at length by anguish, she complained to her mother Lady Lake,—an ambitious and imperious woman, ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... brought to Rome, and the still greater sums which were obtained by the sale of indulgences, and by various taxations, were all squandered in ornamenting the city, and in supporting a luxurious court, profligate cardinals, and superfluous ministers of a corrupted religion. Then was erected the splendid church of St. Peter, more after the style of Grecian temples, than after the model of the Gothic cathedrals of York and Cologne. Glorious ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Regulus, the vile informer, who has been mentioned. See Life of Agricola, section 2. note a, and this tract, s. xii. note [b]. Messala, we are told by Tacitus, before he had attained the senatorian age, acquired great fame by pleading the cause of his profligate brother with extraordinary eloquence, and family affection. Magnam eo die pietatis eloquentiaeque famam Vipstanius Messala adeptus est; nondum senatoria aetate, ausus pro fratre Aquilio Regulo deprecari. Hist. lib. iv. s. 42. Since Messala has now joined the company, ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... words, he told us what the story meant, holding us the while with eyes, and voice, and gesture. He compelled us scorn the gay, heartless selfishness of the young fool setting forth so jauntily from the broken home; he moved our pity and our sympathy for the young profligate, who, broken and deserted, had still pluck enough to determine to work his way back, and who, in utter desperation, at last gave it up; and then he showed us the homecoming—the ragged, heart-sick tramp, with hesitating steps, stumbling along the dusty road, and then the rush of the ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... secondly, that without a considerable knowledge of divinity I should never get a good living. But the moment I entered Halle, the university town, all my resolutions came to nothing. Being now more than ever my own master, I renewed my profligate life afresh, though now a student of divinity. Yet in the midst of it all I had a desire to renounce this wretched life, for I had no enjoyment in it, and had sense enough left to see that the end, one day or other, would be miserable. But I had no sorrow ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... Esq., of Carhais, in the county of Cornwall, by whom he had two sons and three daughters. John, the eldest, and the father of the poet, was born in 1751, educated at Westminster School, and afterwards placed in the Guards, where his conduct became so irregular and profligate that his father, the admiral, though a good-natured man, discarded him long before his death. In 1778 he acquired extraordinary eclat by the seduction of the Marchioness of Caermarthen, under circumstances which have few parallels in the licentiousness of fashionable ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... old ladies call a profligate young man. On the contrary, he was naturally a nice, steady young man; and only indulged in the vagaries we have described because they were indulged in by the high-born ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... benefices was to cease, and decency to be restored to the parish churches, where the grooms and gamekeepers should give way to competent ministers; economy, order, justice, and reverence were to heal the canker of profligate profanity which had eaten too long into the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... danger? Bah! you will never guess! It was partly because, if example corrupts, it as often deters, but principally because she loved. A girl who loves one man purely has about her an amulet which defies the advances of the profligate. There was a handsome young Italian, an artist, who frequented the house—he was the man. I had to choose, then, between mother and ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... ballades and rondels better than Eustache Deschamps himself. He had seen a mad king who would not change his clothes, and a drunken emperor who could not keep his hand from the wine-cup. He had spoken a great deal with jesters and fiddlers, and with the profligate lords who helped his father to waste the revenues of France. He had seen ladies dance on into broad daylight, and much burning of torches and waste of dainties and good wine. (6) And when all is said, it was no very helpful preparation for the battle of life. "I believe ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... against the wigs of the Chapter of Beauvais. And yet Monsieur Benoiston de Chateauneuf has proved that the mortality of these streets is double that of others! To sum up such theories by a single example: is not the rue Fromentin both murderous and profligate! ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... extirpate all such furious zealots as would sacrifice one half of their country to the passion and interest of the other; as also such infamous hypocrites, that are for promoting their own advantage, under colour of the publick good; with all the profligate immoral retainers to each side, that have nothing to recommend them but an implicit submission to their leaders; we should soon see that furious party-spirit extinguished, which may in time expose us to the derision and contempt of all the nations ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... elsewhere portrayed the personal characters of the hireling chiefs of these paper wars: the versatile and unprincipled Marchmont Needham, the Cobbett of his day; the factious Sir Roger L'Estrange; and the bantering and profligate Sir ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... case any inquiry should be made about him. This villanous trick was played off the more readily, from the fact that a steward had absconded at the time, and the difference in the name the cruel profligate accounted for by saying that, as he was hiding at the moment he married her, he ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... successor, Shaban, was an utter profligate, cruel, faithless, avaricious, immoral, and pleasure-loving. Gladiators played an important part at his court, and he often took part in their contests. Horse-racing, cock-fights, and such like amusements occupied him much more than state affairs, and the whole court followed his example. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... youngsters there are marchers and fighters; besides, one would be in the ranks and know one's place. Here one is by way of being a gentleman—God save the mark! A young officer, be he never such a fop or profligate, must take his turn at guard, and carry his life in his hand all over the world wherever he is sent, or he has to leave the service. Service!—yes, that's the word; that's what makes every young red-coat respectable, though he mayn't think it. He ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... if women had been able to press down the scale. Verena was full of suggestions which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens, the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very satisfactorily classified. If the influence ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... dressed like a marabout or santon of the desert—a sort of enthusiasts, who sometimes ventured into the camp of the Crusaders, though treated always with contumely, and often with violence. Indeed, the luxury and profligate indulgence of the Christian leaders had occasioned a motley concourse in their tents of musicians, courtesans, Jewish merchants, Copts, Turks, and all the varied refuse of the Eastern nations; so that the caftan and turban, though to drive both from the Holy Land was the professed object ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... the Third revived the hopes of the Jacobite party; and to that centre of attraction the ruined and the restless, the aspiring and the profligate, alike turned their regards. Never was so great a variety of character, and so great a diversity of motives displayed in any cause, as in the various attempts which were made to secure the restoration of the Stuarts. On some natures those opinions, those schemes, which were generally ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... however, to be supposed that all the female Gypsies are of this high, talented and respectable order: amongst them are many low and profligate females, who sing at taverns or at the various gardens in the neighbourhood, and whose husbands and male connexions subsist by horse jobbing and like kinds of traffic. The principal place of resort of this class is Marina ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Rakeshame. A common word for a profligate in the 17th century. cf. Bishop Montagu, Diatribae (1621), 'Such roysterers and rakeshames as Mars is ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... lobes. The very first change may be—and usually is—a change in character! The man hitherto kind and gentle becomes irritable, perhaps even brutal. One whose sex morals have been of the most conventional kind, a loyal husband, suddenly becomes a profligate, reckless and debauched, perhaps even perverted. The man of firm purposes and indefatigable industry may lose his grip upon the ambitions and strivings of his lifetime and become an inert slacker, to the amazement ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the institution could not be supported after such reform. The experiment was actually tried with the late Tremont Theatre, in Boston. Intoxicating drinks were not allowed to be sold, and no females were admitted unaccompanied by gentlemen, as the better class of people would not attend if profligate persons were admitted. But the theatre could not be supported on these principles, and the plan was abandoned. A report was published, in which it was stated, that if the rent of the building was free, it could not be sustained by the reform ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... his earldom swelled the alarmingly long roll of lapsed dignities. None of the few remaining earls could step into his place, nor give Edward the wise counsel which the creator of the middle party had always provided. Warenne was brutal, profligate, unstable, and distrusted; Arundel had no great influence; Richmond was a foreigner, and of little personal weight, and the successors of Humphrey of Hereford and Guy of Warwick were minors, suspected by reason ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... hope and trust it has been proved to your Lordships, that there is law in these countries, that there is no delegation of power which exempts a governor from the law, then I say at any rate a British governor is to answer for his conduct, and cannot be justified by wicked examples and profligate practices. ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... duchess had not superior parts, but was a bold frontless woman, who knew how to make the most of her opportunities in life. That Hooke got a LARGE sum of money for writing her Apology. That he wondered Hooke should have been weak enough to insert so profligate a maxim, as that to tell another's secret to one's friend, is no breach of confidence; though perhaps Hooke, who was a virtuous man, as his History shews, and did not wish her well, though he wrote her Apology, might see its ill tendency, and yet insert ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... England and of Europe. Abroad the greatest genius that the world has ever seen was wading through slaughter to a universal throne, and no effectual resistance had as yet been offered to a progress which menaced the liberty of Europe and the existence of its States. At home, a crazy king and a profligate heir-apparent presided over a social system in which all civil evils were harmoniously combined. A despotic administration was supported by a parliamentary representation as corrupt as illusory; a church, in ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... work on their lots, often situated many miles in the backwoods, and in distant and unsettled townships, presenting great obstacles to the poor emigrant, which it requires more energy and courage to encounter than is possessed by a vast number of them. Others, of idle and profligate habits, spend the money they received, and sell the land, for which they gave away their pensions, after which they remain miserable squatters ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the outward guise of regal office, in his bearing, politeness, address, magnificence, and high-heeled dignity, but he was sensual, ferocious, ignorant, profligate, and superstitious. His greatness was fictitious, his splendor superficial, and his character false. The king was the state, but his mistresses governed. A court thus constituted led the fashions and formed the manners of the people. It stamped the age with that type of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... often since then had occasion to make the remark, that, as a rule, drinking, swearing, profligate captains turn out officers of the same character. A brave, virtuous, and good commander cannot make all those under him like himself; but his example will induce imitation among some, and act as a curb ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... scores of things around her to be remedied, or, at least, bettered, by a little exertion, and not one which could be helped by a vain regret. For the loss of that old barbaric splendour and profuse luxury which her father mourned over, she had no regrets. She knew that these wasteful and profligate livers had done nothing for the people either in act or in example; that they were a selfish, worthless, self-indulgent race, caring for nothing but their pleasures, and making all their patriotism consist in a ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... custom on the estate had been to permit huts of miserable construction to be erected to the number of several hundreds by the poorest, and in many instances the most profligate, of the population. They were not regularly entered in the rental account, but had a nominal payment fixed upon them which was paid annually at the court leet. These cottages were built on the sides of the roads and on the lord's waste, which was gradually absorbed by the encroachment, which ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... his command. The gradations towards vice are almost imperceptible, and an experienced seducer can strew them with such enticing and agreeable flowers, as will lead the young sinner on insensibly, even to the most profligate stages of guilt. All therefore that can be done by virtue, unassisted with experience, is to avoid every trial with such a formidable foe, by declining and discouraging the first advances towards a particular correspondence with perfidious man, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... felt sure of catching him. And first, among the small folk under their protection, they stirred up two good souls to declare that they could no longer keep as vicar a profligate, a wizard, a devil, a freethinker, who bent one knee in church instead of two, who scoffed at rules and granted dispensations contrary to the rights of the Bishop. A shrewd accusation, which turned against him his natural defender, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... eyes and in those of other people, polluted and defiled by the baseness of the means through which he rose to it. Tho by the profusion of every liberal expense; tho by excessive indulgence in every profligate pleasure—the wretched but usual resource of ruined characters; tho by the hurry of public business, or by the prouder and more dazzling tumult of war, he may endeavor to efface, both from his own memory ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... the first Quality—devote themselves. He is no Puritan; (for I did ever hate your sanctimonious Banbury-men); but he has a Proper Sense of what is due to the Honour and Figure of his family, and refrains from soiling his hands with bales of dice and worse implements among the profligate crew to be met with, not alone at Newmarket, or at the "Dog and Duck," or "Hockley Hole," but in Pall-Mall, and in the very ante-chambers of St. James's, no cater-cousin of the Groom-Porter he. He rides his hackney, as a gentleman should, nor have I prohibited him from ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... the Doctor, when he did not know his Horace, or could not construe his Greek play, said that that boy Pendennis was a disgrace to the school, a candidate for ruin in this world, and perdition in the next; a profligate who would most likely bring his venerable father to ruin and his mother to a dishonoured grave, and the like—yet as the Doctor made use of these compliments to most of the boys in the place (which has not turned out an ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... deterring the rising generation, whom Providence may have blessed with earthly wealth, from entering into so iniquitous a course, exhibited the life of a young man, hurried on through a succession of profligate pursuits, for the few years Nature was able to support itself; and this from the instant he might be said to enter into the world, till the time of his leaving it. But, as the vice of avarice is equal to that of prodigality, and the ruin of children is often owing to the indiscretion of their ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... is also dull; so that you cannot, though you try, hate him cordially, merely for the wish to be offensive. He i did not know before—that he is a fool as well; so you forgive him. On the other hand, he may be a profligate public character, and may make no secret of it; but he gives you a hearty shake by the hand, speaks kindly to servants, and supports an aged father and mother. Politics apart, he is a very honest fellow. You are told that a person has carbuncles on his face; ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... skirts of the scarlet woman, or where the magistrates bear not the sword in vain? Good Mr. Landlord, are these your professions? Your bailmen should sleep ill to-night, for they are likely to answer roundly for this! And whom have we sparking it here? Brawling and swearing and turning into a profligate's tavern a place that should be for the sober entertainment of travellers? Whom have we here—eh! Let me see ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... never base or cowardly. Clinton is a convicted thief, and deserves the doom impending over such transgressors. He is an unprincipled and profligate young man, and unworthy the love of a pure-hearted woman. He has tempted your brother from the paths of virtue, repaid your confidence with the coldest treachery, violated the laws of God and man, and yet, unparalleled infatuation—you love him still, and ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... fair actress, and endeavored to lift her from the carriage. But the Signora Pisani was not an ordinary person; she had been before exposed to all the dangers to which the beauty of the low-born was subjected amongst a lawless and profligate nobility. She thrust back the assailant with a power that surprised him, and in the next moment the blade of a dagger gleamed before his eyes. "Touch me," said she, drawing herself to the farther end of the carriage, "and ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... iniquitous, arrant, corrupt, depraved, sinful, base, demoralized, sinister, licentious, unprincipled, abandoned, graceless, vicious, incorrigible, unscrupulous, miscreant, reprobate, disreputable, rascal, scoundrel, profligate, knavish, naughty, malevolent, malicious, unrighteous, degrading, dissolute, libertine, hardened, wanton; injurious, prejudicial, pernicious, detrimental, baneful, unwholesome, baleful, deleterious, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... reality of the occurrence. The year 1100 was, it will be remembered, that in which William Rufus was found dead in the New Forest, 'with the arrow either of a hunter or an assassin in his breast.' According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, several 'prodigies' preceded the death of this profligate and extravagant monarch. Thus it is recorded that 'at Pentecost blood was observed gushing from the earth at a certain town of Berkshire, even as many asserted who declared that they had seen it. And after this, on the morning after Lammas Day, King William was shot.' Now, it is ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... for himself and his bishops, coupled with his lawless overriding of justice and his profligate use of the national wealth, that undermined the king's throne and prepared the downfall of the House of Stuart. Notwithstanding the remonstrance of Parliament, James's insistence upon his divine right, by very force of reiteration, whether his own or that of the clergy who favored ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... allay. There are at least two passages in Shakspeare's plays where the word is used in this sense, but which appear to have been overlooked by his glossarists. The first is in All's Well that Ends Well, Act IV. Sc. 3., where the French locals are moralising upon Bertram's profligate pursuit ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... said to receive a tincture from the colour of the object that is nearest him; but the human mind in reality receives a bias from its connections. Link a man to the pulpit, and he cannot proceed to any great lengths in profligate life. Enter him into the army, and he will endeavour to swear himself into consequence. Make the man of humanity an overseer of the poor, and he will quickly find the tender feelings of commiseration hardened. Make him a physician, and he will be ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... in particular, which were founded upon the ruins of the Roman empire, the administration of justice appears for a long time to have been extremely corrupt; far from being quite equal and impartial, even under the best monarchs, and altogether profligate under the worst. ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... scamp, bustle through their little hour. Leandre, who has no notion of being married, says, "Le ciel n'est pas plus pur que mes intentions." And the artless Colombine replies, "Alors marions-nous!" To marry Colombine without a dowry forms, as a modern novelist says, "no part of Leandre's profligate scheme of pleasure." There is a sort of treble intrigue. Orgon wants to give away Colombine dowerless, Leandre to escape from the whole transaction, and Colombine to secure her dot and her husband. The strength of the piece is the brisk action in the scene when Leandre protests that ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... those with whom they chiefly converse, are pleased to call by the name of pleasure; and a man of pleasure in the vulgar acceptation of that phrase, means only, a beastly drunkard, an abandoned whoremaster, and a profligate swearer and curser. As it may be of use to you. I am not unwilling, though at the same time ashamed to own, that the vices of my youth proceeded much more from my silly resolution of being, what I heard called a man of pleasure, than from my own inclinations. I always naturally ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... meekness and beneficence as never failed to gain his very enemies. A lewd wretch, exasperated against him for his zeal against a wicked harlot, forged a letter of intrigue in the holy prelate's name, which made him pass for a profligate and a hypocrite with the duke of Nemours and many others: the calumny reflected also on the nuns of the Visitation. Two years after, the author of it, lying on his death-bed, called in witnesses, publicly justified ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Putkammer, after leading a wild and dissolute life, had expired within its walls. For years previously, many a mysterious story, fraught with dark hints of seduction and infanticide, had been whispered over the surrounding country; and when at last death arrested the Baron's profligate career, some reported that he had been strangled in requital of outrage committed,—others, that the Devil had taken home his own, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... when the Finches went to the Continent; and she thought Georgina deserved credit for not having again seen Mark, when, as it now appeared, there had lurked in her heart affection sufficient to induce her to bestow herself, and all her wealth, upon him, spendthrift and profligate as she must know him to be. Miserable must be her future life; and Theodora's heart ached as she thought of wretchedness unaided by that which can alone give support through the trials of life, and bring light out of darkness. She could ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pleased to save them, now ran headlong into the greatest extravagances; spending their whole time in debauched houses, and in swearing and drinking. This our author attributed to the bad example of those among whom they lived, all the lower people at Japara being as lewd and profligate as could be imagined; insomuch, that the first question they put to strangers from Europe is, if they have brought ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... with the profligate Danby to God alone knew what infamy—even she would return to act for me her part of sorrowing wonder—to weep and sigh. Oh, shameful hypocrisy! And with her would be my aunt and uncles to wonder also and shake grave ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... discouraged; indeed, my infatuation for Doto made me overlook much profligate behaviour that I do not care to mention in a tract which may fall into the hands of the young. One other example of the native ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... men begin to lose their individuality of conviction the moment they begin life's business. Many a young man has sacrificed his individuality on the altar that a profligate companion has built for him. Many a young man who knew right, has allowed some empty-headed street-corner loafer to lower his own high moral tone lest he should seem singular in the little world of society surrounding him. And many a lad whose life promised well at the beginning, ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... but at snail's pace. There followed five years of economy so rigid as to make the past seem profligate. Etta, the acid-tongued, the ferret-faced, was not the sort to go off without the impetus of a dowry. The man for Etta, the shrew, must be kindly, long-suffering, subdued—and in need of a start. He was. They managed a very decent trousseau and the miracle of five thousand dollars in ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... generous, I was told, but was embittered by one who had robbed him of everything; and so he became an enemy to all mankind. One of them got his antipathy for all prosperous people from the fact that his father was a profligate nobleman, and his mother a poor, maltreated, peasant woman. The impulse of anarchy starts high up in society. Chief among our blessings was an American instinct for lawfulness in the midst of lawless temptation. We were often reminded of this supreme ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... general Idleness among the People, and given Rise to almost infinite Places of Diversion in and about this Town; it were well if they were Places of Diversion only; but they are often Places for carrying on worse Business, and give Opportunities to the Profligate to seduce the Innocent, who often meet their Ruin, where they only came for Pleasure—While I was writing this I cast my Eye upon a News-Paper of the Day, and counted no less than fifteen Advertisements for ...
— A Letter from the Lord Bishop of London, to the Clergy and People of London and Westminster; On Occasion of the Late Earthquakes • Thomas Sherlock
... cherish and hold up the hands of the faithful ministers of the Church. To all which Charles II. "made as gracious an answer as we could expect," says Baxter, "insomuch that old Mr. Ash burst out into tears of joy." Who doubts that the profligate King avenged himself as soon as the backs of his unwelcome visitors were fairly turned, by coarse jests and ribaldry, directed against a class of men whom he despised and hated, but towards whom reasons of policy dictated a ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... perfidy, and sedition; that the democracy of Athens was a most absurd constitution, productive of anarchy and mischief, which must always happen when the government of a nation depends upon the caprice of the ignorant, hair-brained vulgar; that it was in the power of the most profligate member of the commonwealth, provided he was endowed with eloquence, to ruin the most deserving, by a desperate exertion of his talents upon the populace, who had been often persuaded to act in the most ungrateful and imprudent manner ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... material progress of all kinds mainly depends, not to mention other and higher advantages. No doubt wealth when very great tends to convert men into useless drones, but their number is never large; and some degree of elimination here occurs, for we daily see rich men, who happen to be fools or profligate, squandering away their wealth. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... concessions to this dangerous weakness. * * Among us a spirit of lawlessness pervades the community which, if not repressed, threatens the dissolution of our present forms of society. Even in the old States, mobs are taking the government into their hands, and a profligate newspaper finds little difficulty in stirring up multitudes to violence. * * Add to all this the invasions of the rights of speech and of the press by lawless force, the extent and toleration of which oblige us to believe that a considerable portion of our citizens have no ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... of the preacher, in the sunny hours of June, listening to his eloquence, or partaking of the mystic bread and wine; but in these our latter days, when discipline is relaxed, along with the sedate and the pious come swarms of the idle and the profligate, whom no eloquence can edify and no solemn rite affect. On these, and such as these, the poet has poured his satire; and since this desirable reprehension the Holy Fairs, east as well as west, have become more decorous, if ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... probably needed purging by fire, for the order to burn them indicates that they contained evidence derogatory to his position as a dignitary of the church. The prince cardinal was a vain and profligate man, full of vicious inclinations, and credulous to a degree that had made him the victim of the unscrupulous schemer, Madame de La Motte Valois, a woman as adroit and unscrupulous as she was daring. Of low birth, brought up by charity, married to a ruined nobleman, she had ended ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... the operating-table may be forcibly crushed down like a child's jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again the moment that effort ceases. Sir Arthur Pinero's play, The Profligate, was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed "The Sword of Damocles." That is, indeed, the inevitable symbol of dramatic tension: we see a sword of Damocles (even though it be only a farcical blade of painted lathe) impending ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... from their evil fate, In him was held a crime of state. A wicked monster on the bench, Whose fury blood could never quench; As vile and profligate a villain, As modern Scroggs, or old Tressilian; Who long all justice had discarded, Nor feared he God, nor man regarded; Vowed on the Dean his rage to vent, And make him of his zeal repent: But Heaven his innocence ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... But the moment I entered Halle, the university town, all my resolutions came to nothing.—Being now more than ever my own master, and without any control as long as I did not fight a duel, molest the people in the streets, &c., I renewed my profligate life afresh, though now a student of divinity. When my money was spent, I pawned my watch and a part of my linen and clothes, or borrowed in other ways. Yet in the midst of it all I had a desire to renounce this wretched life, for I had ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... wealthy as orphan heiress, and she should have been wealthy as widow. But her husband was profligate, and he wasted her substance. She turned out to be a thoroughly capable woman of affairs who managed her property well. During her long and stainless widowhood—her husband fell in a shameful duel when she was but twenty-five years ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the service of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the coarsest of the Restoration comedians. The profession of piety had become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the mark of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the witty young profligate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in virtue. His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour. Virtue was bourgeois—reserved for London trades-people. A ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... what manner they could best attempt to bring their mother over to their party, she, suspecting our meetings, taxed her children with them; taxed her fair daughter with deceit, and an unbecoming attachment for one whose only merit was being the son of the profligate favourite of her imprudent father; and who was doubtless as worthless as he from whom he boasted his descent. The eyes of Idris flashed at this accusation; she replied, "I do not deny that I love Verney; prove to me that he is worthless; and I will ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... future, and he should therefore 'speak them in words hard as rocks,' regardless of the contumely heaped upon him by little minds for having thus spoken them. What if the ridicule, the denunciations of the unthinking, the sensual, the profligate, the unreflecting fools of the world be poured upon him? What of that? To-day, may be one of darkness and storm. The cloud and the storm will pass away, and the brightness and glory of the sunlight will be all over the earth to-morrow. Let him 'speak his opinions then of ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... that the young man was an infamous profligate, was not at all disposed to incur the displeasure of Peter by apparently espousing the cause of the son against the father. He consequently gave the miscreant such a cold reception that he found the imperial palace any thing but a pleasant place of residence, and again he set out ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... that which had made them different from the mean, the savage, the drunken, the profligate beings around them? This at least. That they were of those of whom it is written, 'Let him that is athirst come.' They had been athirst for Life. They had had instincts and longings; very simple and humble, but very pure ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... IX. was guilty of such flagitious crimes that he became an object of public abhorrence, and he finally sold the Popedom. One of his infallible (?) successors in the Papal chair, Pope Victor III., pronounced this infallible (?) profligate a person "abandoned to all manner of vice. A successor of SIMON THE SORCERER, and NOT OF SIMON THE APOSTLE." I do not question the truth of this assertion, but what becomes of their boasted uninterrupted apostolical succession? Baronius, the Popish annalist, confesses that Pope ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... their contumacy, they compelled him to flee, murdered the jurors and clerks of the commission, and, carrying their heads upon poles, claimed the support of the nearest townships. In a few days all the commons of Essex were in a state of insurrection, under the command of a profligate priest, who had assumed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... him in her dressing-table drawer, under lock and key. It occurred to her that she could have no end of housewifely thrills if she doled them out to him in niggardly quantities, at stated times, instead of turning them over to him in profligate abundance. ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... be passed rapidly by, for it covers only the wasted years of a sinful and profligate youth and early manhood. It is of interest mainly as illustrating the sovereignty of that Grace which abounds even to the chief of sinners. Who can read the story of that score of years and yet talk of piety as the product of evolution? In his case, instead of ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... and dreads the scrutinizing eye of liberty, the freedom of the press, which pries into its secret recesses, discovering it in its lurking holes, and drags it forth to public detestation. If a tyrannically disposed prince, supported by an unprincipled, profligate minister, backed by a notoriously corrupt Parliament, were to cast about for means to secure such a triple tyranny, I know of no means he could devise so effectual for that purpose as the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
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