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More "Rapacious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the gifts of God" to be their preacher; he offered Knox the post, and all present agreed. Knox wept, and for days his gloom declared his sense of his responsibility: such was "his holy vocation." The garrison was, confessedly, brutal, licentious, and rapacious, but they "all" partook of the holy ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... fourth, that referring to the time. If we suppose that a sea pirate of a thousand years ago, was permitted to return to earth, to prove that he had learned the lessons of gentleness so foreign to his rapacious modes of thought, and that, after a thousand years of cogitation in some disembodied state, he was allowed to reassume the flesh, to fight a different fight, to raise himself by battle with himself, we shall, perhaps, account for some of the strangely divergent qualities that met in ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... must remember, was precarious, the Forest itself being continually exposed to danger by its proximity to the Welsh border. Mahel was this lady's youngest brother, of whom Camden records that "the judgment of God overtook him for his rapacious ways, inhumane cruelties, and boundless avarice, always usurping other men's rights. For, being courteously treated at the Castle of St. Briavel's by Walter de Clifford, the castle taking fire, he lost his life by the fall of a stone on his head from the highest tower." It should be observed, ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... I fear the most," resumed the Earl, "is, not the enemy without, but the jealousy within. By the side of Harold stands Tostig, rapacious to grasp, but impotent to hold—able to ruin, strengthless ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... handsome, had they not been the marks of a physiognomy peculiar to a race, which, during those dark ages, was alike detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by the greedy and rapacious nobility, and who, perhaps, owing to that very hatred and persecution, had adopted a national character, in which there was much, to say the least, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... had better ask me. Well, her name is Musetta Her surname is Temptation. As to her vocation: Like a rose in the breezes, So she changes lover for lover without number. And like the spiteful screech owl, A bird that's most rapacious, The food that most she favors is the heart! Her food the heart is; Thus have I now none left! (to his friends, concealing his agitation) ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... and searching examination of the proceedings of this secretary, that the transfers were utterly unwarrantable; that he tampered with the public moneys to sustain the staggering credit of selected depositaries, and "scatter it abroad among swarms of rapacious political partisans." After stating and answering all the charges brought by the Secretary of the Treasury against the Bank of the United States, and showing their falsehood or futility, he declares all the proceedings of the directors of the bank to have been ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... not to be put by" Above the horizon of the general soul. Is inward reason shrunk to subtleties, And inward wisdom pining passion-starved?— The outward reason has the world in store, Regenerates passion with the stress of want, Regenerates knowledge with discovery, Shows sly rapacious self a blunderer, Widens dependence, knits the social whole In sensible relation ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... the dam over which the latter breaks, as over an upright wall. The sea thus plays with the land, holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows it, as a cat plays with a mouse; but the fatal gripe is sure to come at last. The sea sends its rapacious east-wind to rob the land, but before the former has got far with its prey, the land sends its honest west-wind to recover some of its own. But, according to Lieutenant Davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars and banks are principally determined, not by winds and waves, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... about in unquestionable Spanish territory, seizing towns and hanging people after his lawless, ignorant, energetic fashion. Mr. Adams's chief labor, therefore, was by no means of a promising character, being nothing less difficult than to conclude a treaty between enraged Spain and the rapacious United States, where there was so much wrong and so much right on both sides, and such a wide obscure realm of doubt between the two that an amicable agreement might well seem not only ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... General Feraud ran on, holding up his head, with owlish eyes and rapacious beak. A mere fighter all his life, a cavalry man, a sabreur, he conceived war with the utmost simplicity, as, in the main, a massed lot of personal contests, a sort of gregarious duelling. And here he had in hand a war of his own. He revived. The shadow ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... instrument"?[37]—and the gaps in the benches were filled by nightly raids among the neighbouring villages. It was ill sleeping around Toulon when the Corsair press-gangs were abroad. And to feed and pay these rapacious allies was a task that went near to ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... the Equitable Life exposed conditions far worse than I had indicated to the public, and it seemed probable that the usual whitewashing process would be utilized to conceal the guilt of the rapacious criminals who had been untrue to the most sacred trust that can be imposed on man. Since that time, however, the Governor of the State of New York has appointed a committee to investigate the affairs of the Big Three corporations, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... bread, some repining, others envying the blessed security of a counting-house, all agreeing they had rather have been tailors, weavers,—what not,—rather than the things they were. I have known some starved, some to go mad, one dear friend literally dying in a workhouse. You know not what a rapacious, dishonest set these booksellers are. Ask even Southey, who (a single case almost) has made a fortune by book-drudgery, what he has found them. Oh, you know not—may you never know!—the miseries ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... delight, Lose all the wing for flight, And, brooding deafly o'er the prey they tear, Hear never the low voice that cries, "depart, Lest with your surfeit you partake the snare!" Thus fixed by brooding and rapacious thought, Stood the dark chieftain by the gloomy stream, When, suddenly, his ear A far off murmur caught, Low, deep, impending, as of trooping winds, Up from his father's grave, That ever still some fearful echoes gave, ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... his depravity, while the former cloaks it beneath a mantle of hypocrisy not wholly unconnected with a knowledge of the white man and his methods. But every cloud has its silver lining, and it is comforting to think that even this rapacious and dissipated race can occasionally derive pleasure from the beauties of nature. While strolling round the settlement one day, I gathered a nosegay of wild flowers, including a species of yellow poppy, anent which Kingigamoot ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... of our cows, Our elephants have juiceless brows,(917) Nor can the sweetest pasture stay The charger's long unquiet neigh. Big tears from mules and camels flow Whose staring coats their trouble show, Nor can the leech's art restore Their health and vigour as before. Rapacious birds are fierce and bold: Not single hunters as of old, In banded troops they chase the prey, Or gathering on our temples stay. Through twilight hours with shriek and howl Around the city jackals prowl, And wolves and foul hyaenas wait Athirst for blood at every gate. One sole atonement still may ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... obliged to remain at Baltrum amongst their rapacious hosts until Saturday, the 16th, when they deemed that the ice was sufficiently cleared away to allow of their sailing for Cuxhaven; they accordingly secured the cutter and took their departure. As there was not the remotest chance of getting ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... dishonesty. At a stroke of the pen he had reduced the value of the paper currency by one-third—a reduction so violent and sudden that, whilst it impoverished many, it involved some in absolute ruin—and this that he might gratify his appetite for magnificence and enrich the rapacious favourites ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... a rapacious and licentious soldiery to the personal search of women, lest these unhappy creatures should avail themselves of the protection of their sex to secure any supply for their necessities; and he positively ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... deceased and only son of Mrs Charlton; they were single, and lived with their grand-mother, whose fortune, which was considerable, they expected to share between them, and they waited with eagerness for the moment of appropriation; narrow-minded and rapacious, they wished to monopolize whatever she possessed, and thought themselves aggrieved by her smallest donations. Their chief employment was to keep from her all objects of distress, and in this though they could not ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... advanced but slowly, and were sometimes restrained by correction; but afterward, when their infection had spread like a pestilence, the state was entirely changed, and the government, from being the most equitable and praiseworthy, became rapacious and insupportable. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... thus his boasted skill imparts: "At length 't is granted, what I long desir'd! This, this is what my frequent vows requir'd. Ye gods, I take your omen, and obey. Advance, my friends, and charge! I lead the way. These are the foreign foes, whose impious band, Like that rapacious bird, infest our land: But soon, like him, they shall be forc'd to sea By strength united, and forego the prey. Your timely succor to your country bring, Haste to the rescue, and redeem ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... The blade is longer and very much slimmer than the Bontoc blade, but its marked distinguishing feature is the shape of the cutting edge. The blade is ground on two straight lines joined together by a short curved line, giving the edge the striking form of the beak of a rapacious bird. The slender, graceful handle, always fitted with a long iron ferrule, has a process on the under side near the middle. The handle is also usually fitted with a decorated metal ferrule at the tip and frequently is decorated for its full length with bands of brass or tin, ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... growing light as the two canoes shoved out in the river and resumed their journey. The rapacious wolverines, enraged at the loss of their expected prey, followed them to the very edge of the stream, where their ear-splitting clamor grew more furious than ever. At one time, indeed, it looked us though they were about to jump into the water and swim out to them; and both the ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... feelings of the warmest benevolence, when she entreated Montoni to allow Morano the assistance in the castle, which his situation required. But Montoni, who had seldom listened to pity, now seemed rapacious of vengeance, and, with a monster's cruelty, again ordered his defeated enemy to be taken from the castle, in his present state, though there were only the woods, or a solitary neighbouring cottage, to shelter ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... but plundering, murder, and rapine; people trembled not only for their lives, but also for their property, and hastened to bury their treasures, their jewelry, their gold and silver, to secure it from the rapacious hands of the terrible Cossacks. Treasures were buried in cellars, or hid away in the walls of houses. The Duchess de Bassano caused all her valuable effects to be put in a hidden recess, and the entrance to the same to be walled up and covered with paper. There were among ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... dog, a roaring lion, a thieving fox, a robbing wolf, a dissembling crocodile, a treacherous decoy, and a rapacious vulture." This was the poet Cowley's opinion. "Of all the animals" scolds Boileau, "which fly in the air, walk on the ground, or swim in the sea, from Paris to Peru, from Japan to Rome, the most foolish animal, in my opinion, is man." ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... endured; and this spark of pity quickly warms and kindles into indignation when we think of the story of hapless Acadia—the grievous wrong done those simple-minded, harmless, honest people, by the rapacious, free-booting adventurers of merry England, and those ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... Departing, he planted a tree, and bade them watch it well, for when that tree should fall and the fire die out, then he would return from the far East, and lead his loyal people to victory and power. When the present generation saw their land glide, mile by mile, into the rapacious hands of the Yankees—when new and strange diseases desolated their homes—finally, when in 1846 the sacred tree was prostrated, and the guardian of the holy fire was found dead on its cold ashes, then they thought the hour of deliverance had come, and every morning at earliest ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... north, but west of Lufira, into the Lake of Kinkonza, so named after the chief. The East Lualaba becomes very large, often as much as six or eight miles broad, with many inhabited islands, the people of which, being safe from invasion, are consequently rapacious and dishonest, and their chiefs, Moenge and Nyamakunda, are equally lawless. A hunter, belonging to Syde, named Kabwebwa, gave much information gleaned during his hunting trips; for instance, the Lufira ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... the rearing of every young cuckoo means the destruction of the legitimate occupants of the nest. So far however as the farmer is concerned, this is probably balanced by the reflection that a single young cuckoo is so rapacious as to need ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... book, Un ete dans le Sahara, quickened the desire of primitive life; he sped away, and for nearly two years lived on the last verge of civilization, sometimes passing beyond it with the Bedouins into the interior, on slave-trading or rapacious expeditions. The frequentation of these simple people calmed the fever of ennui, which had been consuming him. Nature leads us to the remedy that the development of reason inflicts on the animal—man. And for ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... their lives. By means of things of the understanding they raise themselves aloft and even enter heaven at times and feign themselves angels of light. But when they are deprived of truths and are cast out, they fall down to hell. Eagles also signify rapacious men with intellectual acumen, and wings signify spiritual truths. Such, we said, are those who have not looked to God in their lives. To look to God in life means simply to think that a given evil is a sin against God, and for that reason not ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... carried him back to a rambling old grey mansion, clothed with a great magnolia and many roses, standing in old-time gardens, and shrubberies of laurel and ilex and Spanish chestnut, and rhododendron, upon the South Dorset cliffs, that are vanishing so slowly yet so surely in the maw of the rapacious sea. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... bills to an enormous amount; but her greatest, and far most congenial outlay, was in the relief of the distressed. She could not endure to deny the petition of any whom she believed to be suffering from want; and this tenderness of heart was often imposed on by the artful and rapacious. Those who, from interested motives, desired to separate her from Napoleon, felt a secret satisfaction in the uneasiness which her large expenditure occasionally gave him. To their misrepresentations may be ascribed the violent bursts of jealousy by which he was ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... other planets? We will not. You would get nowhere, even if you had an interstellar drive right now. You, personally, are a perfect example of what is wrong with this planet. Rapacious, insatiable; you violate every concept of ethics, common decency, and social responsibility. Your world's technology is so far ahead of its sociology that you not only should be, but actually are ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... be the fate of the Church, but of the whole realm, if the rapacious designs of the monarch and his heretical counsellors are carried forth," pursued the abbot. "Cromwell, Audeley, and Rich, have wisely ordained that no infant shall be baptised without tribute to the king; that no man who owns not above twenty pounds a year shall consume wheaten bread, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... part of the world, where rumours are afloat of how it covers ten acres of ground; how in hewing the stones for it a whole mountain was cut away; how it should have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, only that the money was never paid by the rapacious, wicked, bloodthirsty old earl who caused it to be erected;—and how the cement was thickened with human blood. So goes rumour with the more romantic of the ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... of Henry VII. had been prolonged to a good old age. For if ever there was a prince who could so have directed the Reformation as to have averted the evils wherewith that tremendous event was accompanied, and yet to have secured its advantages, he was the man. Cool, wary, far-sighted, rapacious, politic, and religious, or superstitious if you will (for his religion had its root rather in fear than in hope), he was peculiarly adapted for such a crisis both by his good and evil qualities. For the sake of increasing his treasures and his power, he would have promoted ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... theme They were not more than breath we drew Delighted with our world's embrace: The moss-root smell where beeches grew, And watered grass in breezy space; The silken heights, of ghostly bloom Among their folds, by distance draped. 'Twas Youth, rapacious to consume, That cried to have its chaos shaped: Absorbing, little noting, still Enriched, and thinking it bestowed; With wistful looks on each far hill For something hidden, something owed. Unto his mantled sister, Day Had given the secret things we sought ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he had attached himself might perhaps have reasonably considered him as a hostage sufficient to ensure the good faith of his father; for the Earl was approaching that time of life at which even the most ambitious and rapacious men generally toil rather for their children than for themselves. But the distrust which Sunderland inspired was such as no guarantee could quiet. Many fancied that he was,—with what object they never took the trouble to inquire,—employing the same arts which ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... blessings. It is the precise boon so frequently and earnestly implored by our ryots in India, and indeed by the cultivators all over the East. But when the empire was beset on all sides with enemies—only the more rapacious and pressing, that the might of the legions had so long confined them within the comparatively narrow limits of their own sterile territories—and disasters, frequent and serious, were laying waste the frontier provinces, it became ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... of hares: "lepus visa pericla fugit," and hearken to no chime but the "vociferations" of the hounds[619]; others trade. Knights are too fond of women "with golden locks"; peasants are slothful; merchants rapacious and dishonest; they make "false gems out of glass."[620] The king himself does not escape a lecture: let him be upright, pious, merciful, and choose his ministers with care; let him beware of women: "Thou art king, let one sole queen ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... subtle and solvent thinkers of the Middle Ages; pursued by the greatest theologians, crushed by two Councils, and remaining, in the popular fancy, as a sort of Friar Bacon, a forerunner of the wizard Faustus; a man whom Bernard of Clairvaux called a thief of souls, a rapacious wolf, a Herod; a man who reveals himself a Pagan in his attempts to turn Plato into a Christian; a man who disputes about Faith in the teeth of Faith, and criticises the Law in the name of the Law; a man, most enormous of all, who sees nothing as symbol or emblem (per speculum in aenigmate), ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... gray-coats, are safe in the hands of their masters. Again the smoke obscures the picture; again it clears away, and now the gray are in greater force than before, and the horseless batteries are again the prize of this rapacious grapple. Swarming in from three sides, the gray again hold the contested pieces. The blue vanish into the thick bushes. Another irruption, another pall of smoke, and Jack's heart bounds in exultant joy, for he sees the New York flag in the van. Sherman ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... scratched and breathless, and his shirt was torn when at last the rapacious Thomas was satisfied. Then he partook of a little refreshment himself, while ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... bent, shriveled down to her hull and bones, with her thin lips sucked in between her gums, came and tugged at my sleeve. I recognized Sister Glory White, wearing the same look of rapacious cheerfulness upon her bones that she used to wear upon her fat face when she had a "body" to prepare ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... sacrificed herself for honor; and for that, also, our English and Russian allies whose armies, while waiting till they can tread this unchained force under foot, oppose it with an invincible rampart. France is not a preying country; it does not stretch out rapacious hands to enslave the world. Since war has been forced upon her, she makes war. Soon the legitimate reparations will come which shall restore to the French hearth the souls that the brutality of arms separated from it. Associated in a work of human liberation we shall go on, allies and Frenchmen ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... saw the swiftly receding mass: the fleet of the Llotta diving headlong, drawn inexorably into the rapacious embrace of the vile creature of the heavens. An instant the awful whiteness of the thing closed in greedily about the many spheres of the fleet; swallowed them from sight and contorted madly and with seeming glee over the triumph. Then, in a burst of blinding incandescence, it was gone. The monster, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... Feofar now governed this corner of Tartary. Relying on the other khans—principally those of Khokhand and Koondooz, cruel and rapacious warriors, all ready to join an enterprise so dear to Tartar instincts—aided by the chiefs who ruled all the hordes of Central Asia, he had placed himself at the head of the rebellion of which Ivan Ogareff was the instigator. This traitor, ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... an unhappy consequence of their youthful pleasures; which, as he would have been delighted not to have had attended them, so was he no less pleased with any opportunity to rid himself of the incumbrance. He passed, in the world's language, as an exceeding good father; being not only so rapacious as to rob and plunder all mankind to the utmost of his power, but even to deny himself the conveniencies, and almost necessaries, of life; which his neighbours attributed to a desire of raising immense fortunes for his children: but in fact it was not so; he heaped up money ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... the slain. In Hugh Bwee O'Neil the only hope of the house of Tyrone seemed now to rest; and his energy and courage were all taxed to the uttermost to retain the place of his family in the Province, beating back rapacious neighbours on the one hand, and guarding against foreign enemies on the other. For twelve years, Hugh Bwee defended his lordship against all aggressors. In 1283, he fell at the hands of the insurgent chiefs of Oriel and Breffni, and a fierce contest for the succession arose between his son ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... expended. But if we suppose that estimate to be fraudulently calculated, this may contain the same fallacies in a lower degree, and the only merit that can be claimed by the authors of it, will be, that they are not the most rapacious plunderers of their country, that, however they may be charged with profusion of publick money, they are yet more modest ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... The deep-set, rapacious eyes of the Scotchman burned into hers for an instant. Without a word he released her hands and ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... unguarded by his ample shield, Admits the lance: he falls, and spurns the field; The nerves, unbraced, support his limbs no more; The soul comes floating in a tide of gore. Trojans and Greeks now gather round the slain; The war renews, the warriors bleed again: As o'er their prey rapacious wolves engage, Man dies on man, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... to be prepared for the worst. He unyoked his cattle, but instead of turning them loose, when they soon would have fallen a prey to the rapacious appetites of the natives, he grouped them around the cart, and chained them, to prevent their flight in case of an attack. By this method they served as a shield to us, and did not interfere with ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... foments jealousy and sows seeds of discord between the Italian states. His viceroys are elected from the cruelest, the most unjust, the most rapacious, and the most luxurious of the courtiers crawling round his throne. The College of Cardinals is bought and sold. No prince dares move a finger in his family or state without consulting the Iberian senate; still less can ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... inasmuch as among them are found none who eat their own kind, unless through want of sense (few indeed among them, and those being mothers, as with men, albeit they be not many in number); and this happens only among the rapacious animals, as with the leonine species, and leopards, panthers lynxes, cats and the like, who sometimes eat their children; but thou, besides thy children devourest father, mother, brothers and friends; ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... that beat about their ears nor wondered at the stopping of the fast express at a place where it had never stopped before. Far ahead the panting engine shed from its open fire-box an aureole of glaring red as the stoker fed coal into its rapacious maw. The unblinking head-light threw its rays into the thick of the blinding snow storm, fruitlessly searching for the rails through drifts denser than fog and ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... decisions of the Roman See found very many subscribers. The empire was in the greatest confusion when Anastasius died suddenly in the year 518, hated by the majority of his people, as perjured, heretical, and rapacious. Just before him died the heretical patriarchs, John II. of Alexandria and Timotheus ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... Sire," said De Luynes in his turn, when this officious but well-meaning counsellor had withdrawn; "your Majesty will not be obeyed so readily as many would lead you to anticipate. Concini is too rapacious willingly to leave the country while there remains one jewel to be filched from your royal crown; and he is too ambitious to abandon without a struggle the factitious power which he has been ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... starvation. The lord of the land was thus enabled to dictate his own terms, and therefore it has been that we have heard of the payment of five, six, eight, and even as much as ten pounds per acre. "Enormous rents, low wages, farms of an enormous extent, let by rapacious and indolent proprietors to monopolizing land-jobbers, to be relet by intermediate oppressors, for five times their value, among the wretched starvers on potatoes and water," led to a constant succession of outrages, followed by Insurrection ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... everything they could get hold of that was lying on the beach. To these robberies I attempted to put a stop, and made them some presents instead; but the savages must have known our helpless condition, and became every moment more daring and rapacious; and, to add to our tribulation, we observed two large canoes, each containing thirty or forty men, come round Possession Point, and heave to between the Castlereagh and the boats, as if with the intention of cutting off the latter. The Castlereagh could not ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... at last the cavalcade started away, with Rubens in the carriage and eleven velvet suits in his chest, as he himself has told us. It was a long, hard journey to Madrid. There were encounters with rapacious landlords, and hairbreadth escapes in the imminent deadly custom-house. But in a month the chromatic diplomat arrived and entered Madrid at the head of his company, wearing one of the velvet suits, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... crowded out the Indian, just as the latter evicted the mound builder—just as the mound builder overcame the people whose monuments of burned brick and cut stone now lie fifty feet below the surface. Only a few centuries have gone by since these happenings; can we number the years hence when rapacious hordes from another land shall drive out the effete descendants of the now ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... maternity, of disease, of prison. Thus, practically all the other girls had the advantage over Susan. Soon after they definitely abandoned respectability and appeared in the streets frankly members of the profession, they became bold and rapacious. They had an instinctive feeling that their business was as reputable as any other, more reputable than many held in high repute, that it would be most reputable if it paid better and were less uncertain. They respected themselves for all things, talk to the contrary in the search for the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... opportunity to make terms in the interest of the taxpayers. It made annual, not permanent, grants of money to pay official salaries and then insisted upon electing a treasurer to dole it out. Thus the colonists learned some of the mysteries of public finance, as well as the management of rapacious officials. The legislature also used its power over money grants to force the governor to sign bills which he ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... consequence of the success of the nearly unanimous application of the Scottish friends of Government in his favour. This had been so general and so powerful, that it was almost thought his estate might have been saved, had it not passed into the rapacious hands-of his unworthy kinsman, whose right, arising out of the Baron's attainder, could not be affected by a pardon from the crown. The old gentleman, however, said, with his usual spirit, he was more gratified by the hold he possessed in the good opinion of his neighbours, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... (one of its earliest gifts), the hospital estates at Edmonton, in the City of London, and in the various parishes in the suburbs; and in St. Giles's parish the actual ground it stood on, the Pittance Croft, and a few minor places. But even this remnant came into the possession of the rapacious King two years later, at the dissolution of the monasteries, when Burton St. Lazar itself fell into the tyrant's hands. Henry held these for six years, then granted both to John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, Lord High ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... in observing them. They see a bird of one kind diving and bringing to the surface a fish, which another, of a different species, snatches from it and bears aloft, in its turn to be attacked by a third equally rapacious winged hunter, that, swooping at the robber, makes him forsake his ill-gotten prey, while the prey itself, reluctantly dropped, is dexterously re-caught in its whirling descent long ere it reaches ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... of Trade, Chambers of Commerce and other ornamental organizations who, being entirely uninformed on the subject, permit themselves to become the conduits through which the misrepresentation and animosity of avaricious creditors and rapacious attorneys are discharged ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... dry land of a large part of the ocean bed. He erected what, in the locality, is commonly called a "cob," the great embankment which runs across the mouth of the former estuary, shut out the sea and recaptured 4,500 acres from its rapacious maw. Behind the shelter of this embankment (along the top of which the Festiniog Railway runs), the new line was comparatively easily carried over the marshy ground, and no greater gulf had to be bridged than the narrow channel in which the river, flowing down ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... death," answered Captain Van der Elst. "I myself visited the field of slaughter at night, when the Spaniards had withdrawn, in search of my beloved leader. His body, if it was there, lay among the heaps of slain, most of whom had been stripped by rapacious plunderers, and disfigured by the hoofs of the ...
— The Lily of Leyden • W.H.G. Kingston
... assemble from the experiences and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex. He was able ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hope—a vain one, as it proved—that when the resources of the pirates upon the high seas were cut off, their establishments would be necessarily broken up, and the freebooters themselves disperse. But far different was the event. No sooner had these rapacious and savage men ascertained that there were no more galleons of her bullion to be taken, than they concentrated their forces, with a determination to strike nearer the mines themselves. Powerful expeditions were therefore openly organized at Jamaica ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... this capped the climax of outrages. Were the cowardly villains afraid to murder me, and was this their plan of getting it done, and at the same time getting rid of the body? Great heavens! was I to be devoured piecemeal by a rapacious horde of the wild beasts that are said to infest the Russian beds! And utterly helpless, too, without the power to grapple with as much as a single flea—the least formidable, perhaps, of the entire gang! It was absolutely ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... and tolerant character, won for him a supreme place in Jewish life for half a century. Meir of Rothenburg was a poet and martyr as well as a profound scholar. He passed many years in prison rather than yield to the rapacious demands of the local government for a ransom, which Meir's friends would willingly have paid. As a specimen of Meir's poetry, the following verses are taken from a dirge composed by him in 1285, when copies of the Pentateuch were publicly committed ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... same noble that had visited Pizarro in the valley. He now came in more state, quaffing chicha—the fermented juice of the maize-from golden goblets borne by his attendants, which sparkled in the eyes of the rapacious adventurers.5 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... queen asked for some things she saw in the possession of king Solomon, is what surprises us. However, the practice is very common to this day in the East—it is not there looked upon as any degradation to dignity, or any mark of rapacious meanness. ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... very careful not to open the eyes of those who are so ready to let themselves be cheated. Moreover, the ill-treatment to which they were once subjected, and the imperfect knowledge they still have of what the British Protectorate means, renders them timid and too much afraid of these rapacious merchants to dare resent, in any way, ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... the plunder, and secretly set sail; leaving over half of his band, without food or shelter, in a hostile country. Many of the abandoned buccaneers starved, some were shot or hanged by the enraged Spaniards; but the leader of the rapacious gang reached Jamaica with a huge fortune, and was appointed governor of the island, and made a baronet by the reigning king ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... and the colony he founded was the parent of those large settlements that in the course of time stretched as far as the isthmus of Chignecto. He was accidentally drowned in the Annapolis River some time in 1650. French Canadian writers call him cruel, vindictive, rapacious, and arbitrary, but he has never been the favourite of historians. His plans of settlement had a sound basis and might have led to a prosperous and populous Acadia, had he not wrecked them by the malignity with which he followed La Tour and ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... of New France, was faithful to Bigot as a fierce bull-dog to his master. Cadet was no hypocrite, nay, he may have appeared to be worse than in reality he was. He was bold and outspoken, rapacious of other men's goods, and as prodigal of his own. Clever withal, fearless, and fit for any bold enterprise. He ever allowed himself to be guided by the superior intellect of Bigot, whom he regarded as the prince of good fellows, and swore by him, profanely enough, on all occasions, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... emigration being again introduced[573], Dr. Johnson said, that 'a rapacious chief would make a wilderness of his estate.' Mr. Donald M'Queen told us, that the oppression, which then made so much noise, was owing to landlords listening to bad advice in the letting of their lands; that interested and designed[574] people flattered them with golden dreams ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... to "eat up" those who annoyed them. Now, the instincts of clannishness and loyalty are so strong amongst the Kafirs, that even against what they well know to be their own vital interests, they will follow the most cruel and rapacious tyrant, so long as he is their ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... rapacious dame, we arrived at Phasis on the 27th of July, some on horseback and others in boats, where we again lodged with Martha the Circassian lady, whom I formerly mentioned. After having run many risks in our journey, we here learnt a piece of most afflictive news, that the Turks had taken possession ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... in the allotment of the proscribed, has fallen the head of the money trust, a multi-millionaire banker, a financial Magnate known throughout the civilized world as the most rapacious miser on record. This man has repeatedly shown that he has no regard for honesty of purpose, and his moral appreciation is imperceptible. To recount the deeds of cunning, of fraud, of gigantic robbery that he has committed in his relentless quest for wealth, would be to retell the story ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... Conductor, with his spans extended, Took of the earth, and with his fists well filled, He threw it into those rapacious gullets. ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... that triumphant time, When monarchs, after years of spoil and crime, Met round the shrine of Peace, and Heaven lookt on;— Who did not hope the lust of spoil was gone; That that rapacious spirit, which had played The game of Pilnitz o'er so oft, was laid; And Europe's Rulers, conscious of the past, Would blush and deviate into right at last? But no—the hearts, that nurst a hope so fair, Had yet to learn what men on thrones can dare; Had yet to know, of all earth's ravening ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... fabulous Zeros and Hellofagabaluses were respectable and delectable. This Mob (a foreigner, by-the-by), is said to have been the most odious of all men that ever encumbered the earth. He was a giant in stature—insolent, rapacious, filthy, had the gall of a bullock with the heart of a hyena and the brains of a peacock. He died, at length, by dint of his own energies, which exhausted him. Nevertheless, he had his uses, as ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... thou, my Son, the Helpless and the Poor, Nor in the chains of thine own indolence Slumber enervate, while the joys of sense Engross thee; and thou say'st, "I ask no more."— Wise Men the Shepherd's slumber will deplore When the rapacious Wolf has leapt the fence, And ranges thro' the fold.—My Son, dispense Those laws, that justice to the Wrong'd restore.— The Common-Weal shou'd be the first pursuit Of the crown'd Warrior, for the royal brows The People first enwreath'd.—They are ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... Machiavelli was not inclined to make little of what an unhampered ruler could do with his subjects; yet he saw in such passions as these a fixed limit to the power of the Prince. "It makes him hated above all things to be rapacious, and to be violator of the property and women of his subjects, from both of which he must abstain." And if Machiavelli's despotism meets its master in the undercurrents of human instinct, governments of less determined stripe, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... only legitimate basis for a treaty, if not on the part of the Continental Allies, at least for England herself [is] that she should conquer all she can, and keep all she conquers. This is not by way of retaliation, however just, upon so obdurate and rapacious an enemy—but as an indispensable condition of her own safety and existence." The letters were reviewed under the heading of "Illustrations of Vetus," in the Morning Chronicle, December 2, 10, 16, 18; 1813. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... may prevent us, Beric; we heard them howling several times as we came along this morning. The rapacious brutes have not been so bold for years, and it is high time that we hunted them down, or at any rate made our part of the country too hot to hold them. I told Borgon before I started that if we did not return by an hour after midnight it would be because we ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... first less confidently. "When I woke up it was as if, without my will, I had been thinking all this out in my sleep. I saw myself for the first time clearly, as I have been ever since I can remember—a crook, thoughtless, vain, rapacious, ruthless, skulking in shadows and thinking myself an amazingly fine fellow because, between coups, I would play the gentleman a bit, venture into the light and swagger in the haunts of the gratin! In my poor, perverted brain I thought there was something fine and thrilling and romantic in the career ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... person. They searched his apparel, and took from him his gold, amber, watch and a pocket compass. He had fortunately in the night buried another compass in the sand, and this, with the clothes he had on, was all that was now left him by this rapacious and ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... all the world like dogs after the waggon of cat's-meat; and where the frequent proposition, 'You my pleni (friend),' or (with more of pathos) 'You all 'e same my father,' must be received with hearty laughter and a shout. And perhaps everywhere, among the greedy and rapacious, a gift is regarded as a sprat to catch a whale. It is the habit to give gifts and to receive returns, and such characters, complying with the custom, will look to it nearly that they do not lose. But for persons of a different stamp ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... recognized, although determinations of varieties are not possible, as in many cases the forms are rude or greatly obscured by extraneous details. The example shown in Fig. 31 is of the simplest type and the rudest workmanship, and is apparently intended for some rapacious species, possibly a vulture. The body, wings, and tail are hammered quite thin and are left frayed and uneven on the edges. The material appears to be nearly pure copper plated with yellow gold. Specimens of this class are very numerous. One, presented ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... in his chariot round their fortifications, and the king of men counselled retreat, he declared he would remain, were it only with Sthenelus and his friends. So completely marked, so well defined are his characters, though they were all rapacious chiefs at first sight, little differing from each other, that it has been observed with truth, that one well acquainted with the Iliad could tell, upon hearing one of the speeches read out without a name, who was the chief ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... three hours watching Emmett bring over the rest of his party, which he did without accident, but at the expense of great effort. And all the time in my ears dinned the roar, the boom, the rumble of this singularly rapacious and purposeful river—a river of silt, a red river of dark, sinister meaning, a river with terrible work to perform, a river which never gave up ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... he seated in the Council when the edicts of oppression were renewed. The prelates became clamorous for his interference, and the penalties of the bonds of peace presented the means of supplying the inordinate wants of his rapacious wife. Steps were accordingly soon taken to appease and pleasure both. The court-contrived crime of hearing the Gospel preached in the fields, as it was by John in the Wilderness and Jesus on the Mount, was again ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... increase, consolidate, and secure their power, and to extend the territorial limits over which their peculiar Pro-Slavery and Pro-Free-Trade doctrines prevailed; and that their nature was so exacting, and their greed so rapacious, that it was impossible ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... who inherited it; he was ostentatious—the treasures of the nation were lavished at his feet; he was vindictive—the blood of the wise, the noble, and the beautiful, was shed, like water, to gratify his resentment; he was rapacious—the accumulations of ancient piety were surrendered to glut his avarice; he was arbitrary—and his proclamations were made equivalent to acts of Parliament; he was fickle—and the religion of the nation was changed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... of air Waged on a time a direful war. Not those, in budding groves who sing, To usher in the amorous spring; Nor those, with Venus' car who fly Through the light clouds and yielding sky But the rapacious vulture brood, With crooked beak that thirsts for blood, And iron fangs. Their war, 'tis said, For a dog's carrion corse was made. Shrill shrieks resound from shore to shore; The earth beneath is sanguin'd o'er; Versed in the science to destroy, Address and valor they employ. 'Twould take a hundred ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... "Here come the Genevese curs," exclaimed a cardinal as the reformers made their appearance. "Certainly," quietly retorted Beza, whose ear had caught the insulting expression, turning to the quarter whence it came, "faithful dogs are needed in the Lord's sheep-fold to bark at the rapacious wolves."[1116] ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... to become the central point in a network of intrigue; and I am bound to keep the secret so closely interwoven with her fate. I love her more truly, more purely than I thought myself capable of loving; yet I can only approach her as the tool of George Sheldon, a rapacious conspirator, bent on securing the hoarded thousands ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... death. Among the Moros is practiced the ordeal by fire, and the burial of the living for certain crimes; but some escape from these in safety, through their power as sorcerers. The authority and government of the chiefs is described; they are tyrannical and rapacious, and treat as slaves even chiefs who are subject to them. Combes makes special mention of some customs peculiar to the Subanos, or river-people. They are exceedingly rude and barbarous, without any government; and a ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... thou gladsome messenger of ill, And, joyful, feast thy fierce rapacious soul With Essex' sudden and accomplish'd fall. The trampled corse of all his envy'd greatness, Lies prostrate now beneath thy savage feet; But still th' exalted spirit moves above thee. Go, tell the queen thy own detested story: Full in her sight disclose the snaky labyrinths, ...
— The Earl of Essex • Henry Jones
... assembly gave a shout for joy; and Benefico holding in his hand the monster's yet grinning head, thus addressed his half-astonished companions: 'See here, my friends, the proper conclusion of a rapacious cruel life. But let us hasten from this monster's gloomy cave; and on the top of one of our highest mountains, fixed on a pole, will I set up this joyful spectacle, that all the country round may know themselves at liberty to pursue their rural business or amusements, ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... man. He was not inclined to be rapacious. He had an interest in a bank in Gibraltar, and two thousand pounds would establish him there. He had thought it might be worth the president's while to put him in the way of two thousand pounds—considering everything. Promotion was slow in Bermuda ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... him seem a simple and kindly being compared to the small critical creature who endured his homage. Yes, he would be kind—Lily, from the threshold, had time to feel—kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the predatory creature with his mate. She had but a moment in which to consider whether this glimpse of the fireside man mitigated her repugnance, or gave it, rather, a more concrete and intimate form; for at sight of her he was immediately on his feet again, the florid ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... feet o'er hills, and plains, and rocks, Speed the scared leveret and rapacious fox; On rapid pinions cleave the fields above The hawk descending, and escaping dove; With nicer nostril track the tainted ground The hungry vulture, and the prowling hound; Converge reflected light with nicer eye The midnight owl, and microscopic fly; 100 With finer ear pursue their nightly ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... the greatest danger in order to avert it from their progeny. Thus a partridge will tumble along before a sportsman in order to draw away the dogs from her helpless covey. In the time of nidification the most feeble birds will assault the most rapacious. All the hirundines of a village are up in arms at the sight of a hawk, whom they will persecute till he leaves that district. A very exact observer has often remarked that a pair of ravens nesting in the rock of Gibraltar, would suffer no vulture ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... was not to be. Rome cried for 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 in the arts of peace, unrivalled ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the war-cry of the Spanish hirelings, and bitterly did they execute their vengeance on all who were compromised. Don Pablo would have been a victim among others, had he not had timely warning and escaped; but as it was, all his property was taken by confiscation, and became the plunder of the rapacious tyrant. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... conjecturing from the strength of this one colony, which had been not very successfully attacked, what was the size of the city of Rome, turned aside into the territory of Picenum, which abounded not only with every species of grain, but was stored with booty, which his rapacious and needy troops eagerly seized. There he continued encamped for several days, and his soldiers were refreshed, who had been enfeebled by winter marches and marshy ground, and with a battle more successful in its result ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... fault-finding desert, was the outside colony of freedmen. I employed many of them to do the heavy work of clearing avenues, and the air resounded with their cheerful songs, and I had the pleasure, with much labor, to save from the rapacious white robbers, the farms which these colored men had received from generous Uncle Sam. One case will illustrate the many instances in which I ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... over the mouth of the funnel, the vibration of her wings, acting on the confined air, occasions a rumbling like thunder. It is not improbable that the dam submits to this inconvenient situation so low in the shaft, in order to secure her broods from rapacious birds; and particularly from owls, which frequently fall down chimneys, perhaps in attempting to get ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... energetic, but true metaphor, one that is terrifying, but symbolical of what is practised in all countries; as long as the folly, the avarice, the dissipation, the degradation, or the tyranny of the rulers, shall have rendered the treasury so much exhausted or rapacious, as to induce them to burn the harvest, in order the more speedily to collect the price ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... that the rascally landlord seized upon every chair and table that ought by rights to have belonged to the widow. The estate to which I was heir was in the hands of rapacious creditors; and the only means of subsistence remaining to the widow and child was a rent-charge of L50 upon my Lord Bagwig's property, who had many turf-dealings with the deceased. And so my dear mother's liberal intentions towards her brother were ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bountiful: he knows full well that the tree which is languishing without culture in the arid, sandy desert, that is stunted for want of attention, leafless for want of moisture, that has grown crooked from neglect, become barren from want of loam, whose tender bark is gnawed by rapacious beasts of prey, pierced by innumerable insects, would perhaps have expanded far and wide its verdant boughs from a straight and stately stem, have brought forth delectable fruit, have afforded from its luxuriant foliage under its lambent leaves an umbrageous ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... clever, and as unscrupulous as that very Satan. This was what his friends said of him over their wine. And now he was rumoured to have sold the British forces in the Carnatic provinces to one of the native Princes. Yes, to have taken gold, gold to an amount which Clive in his most rapacious moments never dreamt of, for his countrymen's blood. Tidings of dark transactions between the Governor and the native Princes had reached the ears of the Government, tidings so vague, so incredible, that the Government might ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... bed early that night, having concluded my bargain for the morrow with a rapacious Arab who spoke English. I went to bed early in order to escape the returning party, and was again on the quay at six the next morning. On this occasion, I stepped boldly into the boat the very moment that I came ...
— George Walker At Suez • Anthony Trollope
... and rapacious in her colonizing policy on the Black Sea and she left a record of exploitations which makes a black blotch on the ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... be observed that even the Hawk, rapacious as he undoubtedly is, is a useful bird. Sent for the purpose of keeping the small birds in bounds, he performs his task well, though it may seem to man harsh and tyranical. The Marsh Hawk is an ornament to our rural scenery, and a pleasing sight as he darts silently ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [May, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... been as selfish, as rapacious, as their Hohenzollern overlords. Nothing could be more sordid than their attitude in the recent campaign for financial reform. They have shifted the burden of taxation upon the weaker shoulders of the peasant and artisan. They have compelled ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... are to be accepted on such grounds, I must be allowed to put in a plea, for similar reasons, in favour of the Loup Garou, the Were-Tiger, and all their gruesome family. Wherever there are wild beasts to prey upon the sons of men, there also is found the belief that the worst and most rapacious of the man-eaters are themselves human beings, who have been driven to temporarily assume the form of an animal, by the aid of the Black Art, in order to satisfy their overpowering lust for blood. This belief, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... came to a vast desert," "frequented by none save those whom ill fortune had permitted to wander therein." Sir Tarquin, like the dragon of yore, entailed a desert round his dwelling: so fierce and rapacious was he that no man durst live beside him, save that he held his life and property of too mean account, and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... prisoners—or asked a large ransom? This last suggestion threw them into a cold perspiration of fear. The wealthiest were seized with the worst panic and saw themselves forced, if they valued their lives, to empty bags of gold into the rapacious hands of this soldier. They racked their brains for plausible lies to dissemble their riches, to pass themselves off as poor—very poor. Loiseau pulled off his watch-chain and hid it in his pocket. As night fell their apprehensions increased. The lamp was lighted, and as there were still ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Walcknaer, "so vast in comparison with those furnished by the African Society, were, to our thinking, partly the cause of his loss. The rapacious demands of the African kings grew in proportion to the riches they supposed our traveller to possess; and the effort to meet the enormous drain made upon him, was in great part the cause of the catastrophe which brought ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... was in a state of dammed convulsion. The wars, though always successful for France, had brought about no definite settlement of international affairs. Peace was transitory, and the dread of Napoleon's power and genius was the only check on rapacious designs on ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... grass and went to sleep. How long I lay I cannot tell, but suddenly waking up, I found to my alarm that several large vultures, having thought me dead, were contemplating me as their next meal! Had my sleep continued a few moments longer, the rapacious birds would have picked my eyes out, as they invariably do before tearing up their victim. All over the country these birds abound, and I have counted thirty and forty tearing up a living, quivering animal. Sometimes, for mercy's sake, I have alighted and put the suffering ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... Hardly had Olivier raised the cover of the hell of humanity than there rose to his ears the plaint of all the oppressed, the exploited poor, the persecuted peoples, massacred Armenians, Finland crushed and stifled, Poland rent in pieces, Russia martyred, Africa flung to the rapacious pack of Europe, all the wretched creatures of the human race. It stifled him: he heard it everywhere, he could no longer close his ears to it, he could no longer conceive the possibility of there being people with any other thought. He was for ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... family, pulled down the old chapel and tavern, and on the 11th of February in the year 1503, the first stone of the new structure was laid by Abbot Islip, at the King's command. It cost L14,000, an immense sum for that period, particularly considering the rapacious temper of the king. The exterior of the chapel is distinguished by the richness and variety of its form, occasioned chiefly by 14 towers, elegantly proportioned to the body of the edifice, and projecting in ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... and his accurate survey of the human race, enabled him to judge of the misery in which female youth was continually involved by a precipitate choice of the veil. He knew the successful arts by which the subtle and rapacious monks inveigled young women of opulent families into the cloister; and he exerted his lively and delicate wit in opposition to so pernicious ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... inducement, or with the least irritation, it will fly at its feeder. At other times it seeks perfect solitude, and can only be captured with the utmost skill and perseverance. It generally feeds three times a day, but its appetite is not rapacious; it sleeps little, is usually on the wing at sunrise, and proves that it slumbers but little in the night by its ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... grace, O Princess, and am reminded of the pressure of time. I must to the gate again with the Emperor.... This is my proposal. Instead of biding here to be taken by some rapacious hordesman, go with me to Sancta Sophia, and when the Sultan comes thither—as he certainly will—deliver yourself to him. If, before his arrival, the plunderers force the doors of the holy house, I will stand with you, not, Princess, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... the companies was the Great Fire. Hall after hall, replete with costly treasures bequeathed by departed brethren of the guilds, with all their archives and documents, perished in that hideous holocaust. All the wealth that rapacious kings and the troubles of the Civil War had spared was engulfed in that awful catastrophe. Again and again, when we try to read the history of a company, we meet with the distressing intelligence that all its records ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... misers, his passion for gold, the assimilation, as it were, of that metal with his own substance, became closer and closer, and age intensified it. His sister herself excited his suspicions, though she was perhaps more miserly, more rapacious than her brother whom she actually surpassed in penurious inventions. Their daily existence had something mysterious and problematical about it. The old woman rarely took bread from the baker; she appeared so seldom in the ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... give the landlord of the "George Inn," in the High Street, the benefit of his rapacious appetite, and about five o'clock (his latest London hour) they sat down to dinner. The "George" is neither exactly a swell house like the "Royal Hotel" or the "Plough," nor yet a commercial one, but something betwixt and between. The ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... made the universe, and we betray the weakness of fools! Go to—go to, ye proud and great of the earth—if we have taken life, it hath been at your bidding; but we have naught of this on our consciences. The deed hath been the work of the rapacious and violent—it is no ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... most popular taking the form of "biskeet" or "bully-boeuf." Both were given freely: with but little persuasion our open-handed warriors would have fain squandered their sacred "emergency ration" upon these rapacious infants. ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... fortifications, and the king of men counselled retreat, he declared he would remain, were it only with Sthenelus and his friends. So completely marked, so well defined are his characters, though they were all rapacious chiefs at first sight, little differing from each other, that it has been observed with truth, that one well acquainted with the Iliad could tell, upon hearing one of the speeches read out without a name, who was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... yes—even tho July 1st has come and gone—drafts to assuage our thirst; the divers stays and supports of our declining years—all these things come in bottles. From the time of its purchase to the moment of its consignment to the barrel in the cellar or the rapacious wagon of the rag-and-bone man the bottle plays a vital part in our lives. And as with most inconspicuous necessities, but little is known of its history. We assume vaguely that it is blown—ever since we saw the Bohemian ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... are abundant in the neighborhood, the tiger especially being hunted and feared, and not without abundant reason; for here, as at Singapore, men, women, and children are daily sacrificed to their rapacious appetites in some part of the district. It is said to be a fact that these animals, in their wild state, having once tasted human flesh, will be satisfied with no other food; but will leave the antelope and smaller ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... an enormous amount; but her greatest, and far most congenial outlay, was in the relief of the distressed. She could not endure to deny the petition of any whom she believed to be suffering from want; and this tenderness of heart was often imposed on by the artful and rapacious. Those who, from interested motives, desired to separate her from Napoleon, felt a secret satisfaction in the uneasiness which her large expenditure occasionally gave him. To their misrepresentations may be ascribed the violent bursts of jealousy by which he was ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... place had always caused my blood gently to tingle. It is carrying the feeling of race to quite inscrutable lengths when a vague American permits himself an emotion because more than five centuries ago, on French soil, one rapacious Frenchman got the better of another. Edward was a Frenchman as well as John, and French were the cries that urged each of the hosts to the fight. French is the beautiful motto graven round the image of the Black Prince, as he lies forever at rest in the choir ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... me for all the world like dogs after the waggon of cat's-meat; and where the frequent proposition, "You my pleni (friend)," or (with more of pathos) "You all 'e same my father," must be received with hearty laughter and a shout. And perhaps everywhere, among the greedy and rapacious, a gift is regarded as a sprat to catch a whale. It is the habit to give gifts and to receive returns, and such characters, complying with the custom, will look to it nearly that they do not lose. But for persons of a different ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sum, large though it was for a young fellow to find unexpectedly in his pocket, went but a very short step in satisfying the rapacious wolf I found at my mother's door when I reached the little cottage, where she lived with my sister Janet, in one of the ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... founded was the parent of those large settlements that in the course of time stretched as far as the isthmus of Chignecto. He was accidentally drowned in the Annapolis River some time in 1650. French Canadian writers call him cruel, vindictive, rapacious, and arbitrary, but he has never been the favourite of historians. His plans of settlement had a sound basis and might have led to a prosperous and populous Acadia, had he not wrecked them by the malignity with which he followed La Tour ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... great war between Holland and the Inquisition. These had, as a matter of course, been confiscated as the strife went on. The buildings, farms, and funds, once the property of the Church, had not, however, been seized upon, as in other Protestant lands, by rapacious monarchs, and distributed among great nobles according to royal caprice. Monarchs might give the revenue of a suppressed convent to a cook, as reward for a successful pudding; the surface of Britain and the continent ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... had arrived alone at Cropole's house. He had taken, without hesitation, without reflection even, the principal apartment which the hotelier had pointed out to him with a rapacious aim, very praiseworthy, some will say, very reprehensible will say others, if they admit that Cropole was a physiognomist and judged ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... ports, in the hope—a vain one, as it proved—that when the resources of the pirates upon the high seas were cut off, their establishments would be necessarily broken up, and the freebooters themselves disperse. But far different was the event. No sooner had these rapacious and savage men ascertained that there were no more galleons of her bullion to be taken, than they concentrated their forces, with a determination to strike nearer the mines themselves. Powerful expeditions were therefore openly organized at Jamaica ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... contemporary patriots; e.g. "the only legitimate basis for a treaty, if not on the part of the Continental Allies, at least for England herself [is] that she should conquer all she can, and keep all she conquers. This is not by way of retaliation, however just, upon so obdurate and rapacious an enemy—but as an indispensable condition of her own safety and existence." The letters were reviewed under the heading of "Illustrations of Vetus," in the Morning Chronicle, December 2, 10, 16, 18; 1813. The reviewer and Byron did not take ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... editions, published in Germany and France, from which the author received not a penny. Yet Froben went right on paying to Erasmus not only the fixed annual salary as a member of his consulting staff but also a generous share of the profits upon his books. In a greedy, unscrupulous, and rapacious age this wise and just, not to say generous, policy stands out as prophetic ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... return to what you say of France. Do you not think that a democratic republic, in which every citizen is striving to get all he can for his vote at the expense of the State, necessarily becomes the most rapacious and corrupt form of government? It is this which has raised the budgets of France for 1883 to 122 millions sterling; and if you add the communal expense, to 154 millions. It is this which compels them to persist in a reckless expenditure, and to invent new modes of spending money and creating places ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... reason why Alfred Fluette must needs help himself to Genevieve's patrimony. That rapacious monster, the Wheat Pit, had exhausted all of his legitimate resources, and so mad was his obsession that ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... were soon considered as the eyes of the monarch and the scourge of the people. Under the warm influence of a feeble reign they multiplied to the incredible number of ten thousand, disdained the mild though frequent admonitions of the laws, and exercised in the profitable management of the posts a rapacious and insolent oppression. These official spies, who regularly corresponded with the palace, were encouraged by favor and reward anxiously to watch the progress of every treasonable design, from the faint and latent symptoms of disaffection to the actual preparation ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... actors, the previous year, in an alligator adventure on the edge of the praia we had just left. The son, while bathing, was seized by the thigh and carried under water— a cry was raised, and the father, rushing down the bank, plunged after the rapacious beast, which was diving away with his victim. It seems almost incredible that a man could overtake and master the large cayman in his own element; but such was the case in this instance, for the animal was reached and forced ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... impunity and would make their lives miserable. All that would result, would be that the bad would oppress and outrage the good with impunity. And therefore the authority of government must not be suppressed till all the wicked and rapacious people in the world are extinct. And since this will either never be, or at least cannot be for a long time to come, in spite of the efforts of individual Christians to be independent of government authority, it ought to be maintained in the interests ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... long lease. But faint is the hope and scanty is the produce of those harvests which are raised by the reluctant toil of peasants and slaves condemned to a bare subsistance and careless of the interests of a rapacious master. If his granaries are full, his purse is empty, and the want of cities or commerce, the difficulty of finding or reaching a market, obliges him to consume on the spot a part of his useless stock, which cannot be exchanged for merchandise or money.... The entertainment ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... reticence for a not-impossible bigger. His apprehensions about the fate of a bigger of his acquaintance if its owner ever fell into the hands of this altogether too well-informed young person rose to a degree which almost induced him to cry out, "Really, you rapacious young creature, Arnold's is all any girl need ask, ample, well-invested, solid...." But instead he said, "Humph! Rather a derogatory ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... advantage of the fact that Bep was at an age when to bite into a hard red winter apple was to leave a shaky tooth behind) obligingly took the first bite, but made that bite include nearly half the apple—that rapacious betrayer of confiding helplessness deserved to be called a harpy. But she wasn't; she was ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Governor stimulates a rapacious and licentious soldiery to the personal search of women, lest these unhappy creatures should avail themselves of the protection of their sex to secure any supply for their necessities; and he positively orders ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... upon the farm which she at the time believed to be for the best.[637] The eldest son could not help her, for he required succour from Pitt. If, then, the farming experiments at Burton Pynsent failed, the loss fell upon Pitt. We may infer, then, that his debts were occasioned partly by rapacious servants and tradesmen in London, partly by farming and gardening at Holwood, but also by the needs of his mother and brother. The fact that Chatham paid not a shilling towards the discharge of Pitt's liabilities proves ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the success of the nearly unanimous application of the Scottish friends of government in his favour. This had been so general and so powerful that it was almost thought his estate might have been saved, had it not passed into the rapacious hands of his unworthy kinsman, whose right, arising out of the Baron's attainder, could not be affected by a pardon from the crown. The old gentleman, however, said, with his usual spirit, he was more gratified by the hold he possessed in the good opinion of his neighbours ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... it; but when nothing was given them, as would occasionally happen—for how could they receive from those who had nothing? and nobody was bound to give them anything, as they had certain wages from their employers—then what a scene would ensue! Truly the brutality and rapacious insolence of English coachmen had reached a climax; it was time that these fellows should be disenchanted, and the time—thank Heaven!—was not far distant. Let the craven dastards who used to curry favour with them, and applaud their brutality, lament ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... the principal Bugis and Patusan inhabitants had been summoned for a talk. Tamb' Itam himself hoped there would be some fighting. "What was it but the taking of another hill?" he exclaimed regretfully. However, in the town many hoped that the rapacious strangers would be induced, by the sight of so many brave men making ready to fight, to go away. It would be a good thing if they went away. Since Jim's arrival had been made known before daylight by the gun fired from the fort and the beating of the big drum there, the ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... were abundant indications of discontent in Germany, where a variety of parties inveighed against the rapacious policy of Prussia, and where Bismarck had sown a deep crop of hate. It was believed in France that the minor states would not support Prussia in a war. In Austria the defeat of 1866 rankled, and hostilities against ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... gave him a slightly disagreeable aspect, but somewhere in his face there was a quality of singular thoughtfulness, as of the absorbed student dealing in generalities, which was utterly in opposition to the rapacious keenness of the eyes ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... upright wall. The sea thus plays with the land, holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows it, as a cat plays with a mouse; but the fatal gripe is sure to come at last. The sea sends its rapacious east-wind to rob the land, but before the former has got far with its prey, the land sends its honest west-wind to recover some of its own. But, according to Lieutenant Davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... just growing light as the two canoes shoved out in the river and resumed their journey. The rapacious wolverines, enraged at the loss of their expected prey, followed them to the very edge of the stream, where their ear-splitting clamor grew more furious than ever. At one time, indeed, it looked us though they were about to jump into ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis
... Had not she herself been wrecked among the rocks, trusting herself to one who had been utterly unworthy,—loving one who had been utterly unlovely? Men so often are as ravenous wolves, merciless, rapacious, without hearts, full of greed, full of lust, looking on female beauty as prey, regarding the love of woman and her very life as a toy! Were she higher in the world there might be safety. Were she lower there might be safety. But how could she send her girl ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... my Son, the Helpless and the Poor, Nor in the chains of thine own indolence Slumber enervate, while the joys of sense Engross thee; and thou say'st, "I ask no more."— Wise Men the Shepherd's slumber will deplore When the rapacious Wolf has leapt the fence, And ranges thro' the fold.—My Son, dispense Those laws, that justice to the Wrong'd restore.— The Common-Weal shou'd be the first pursuit Of the crown'd Warrior, for the royal brows The People first enwreath'd.—They are the Root, The King ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... seen my first battle-field, in the condition I have just described to you, and returned home victorious, I will assist you to kill off your rapacious enemies. Until then keep bravely on the defensive. Come, let us go, I have only half an hour ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... and the city of Guamanga, at the head of two hundred men well equipped, and carrying with him a great sum of money which he had collected during his march; and at Guamanga he conducted himself in the same rapacious ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... revolutionary changes in France had quickened their ideas, and had given them a taste for stronger and more rapid measures. They now openly "resolved" that England was "a prey to an arbitrary King, a senile Peerage, a corrupt House of Commons, and a rapacious and intolerant Clergy." A third club, the Corresponding Society, was younger and more violent, with branches and affiliations all over England on the Jacobins' plan, and in active correspondence with that famous institution. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... and cried out to us to make haste. We pulled away as hard as we could lay our backs to the oars, old Barker steering. But just before we reached the man, his arms were thrown up, and down he sank. He, too, had become the prey of one of the rapacious monsters of the deep. We now returned on board, the boat remaining perfectly quit on the starboard side. No attempt had been made in the meantime to sound round the vessel. I offered to ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... New France, was faithful to Bigot as a fierce bull-dog to his master. Cadet was no hypocrite, nay, he may have appeared to be worse than in reality he was. He was bold and outspoken, rapacious of other men's goods, and as prodigal of his own. Clever withal, fearless, and fit for any bold enterprise. He ever allowed himself to be guided by the superior intellect of Bigot, whom he regarded as the prince of good fellows, and swore by him, profanely enough, on all occasions, as ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... something akin to fools. For twenty centuries the Germans had been swarming over the Rhine in preying, ravaging hordes, and France had been beating them back to save her national life. That they would swarm again, more insolent and more rapacious than ever after their triumph of 1870, was not to be doubted. Everyone in France who had the slightest knowledge of the spirit that has animated the Hohenzollern empire knew its envy of France, its cupidity of France's wealth, ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... upper Kearny. Everywhere the drinks flowed in covert streams, growing viler and more nauseous as the pilgrimage advanced. Near Jackson Street they came upon a bedraggled pavilion of dubious gayety which lured them downstairs with its ear-splitting jazz orchestra. A horde of rapacious females descended upon them like starving locusts. Suddenly everybody in the party seemed moved with a desire for dancing—except Fred. While the others whirled away he sank into a seat, staring vacantly ahead. He had reached the extreme point of his drunkenness and he ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... of the Equitable Life exposed conditions far worse than I had indicated to the public, and it seemed probable that the usual whitewashing process would be utilized to conceal the guilt of the rapacious criminals who had been untrue to the most sacred trust that can be imposed on man. Since that time, however, the Governor of the State of New York has appointed a committee to investigate the affairs of the Big Three corporations, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... restaurant in any town of Europe. I have lost my little pile. The eight five-franc pieces which I annually devote out of my scanty store to the tutelary god of roulette have been snapped up, one after another, in breathless haste, by the sphinx-like croupiers, impassive priests of that rapacious deity, and now I am sitting, cleaned out, by the edge of the terrace, on a brilliant, cloudless, February afternoon, looking across the zoned and belted bay towards the beautiful grey hills of Rocca-bruna and the gleaming white spit of Bordighera in the distance. 'Tis a ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... stayed five days at Manzanita; five days of ecstasy, of perfect communion, bought from the rapacious years at the price of his broken word. For that he was willing to pay any price exacted, asking only that he might pay it alone, that the woman of his long and self-denying love might not be called upon ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... funnel, the vibration of her wings, acting on the confined air, occasions a rumbling like thunder. It is not improbable that the dam submits to this inconvenient situation so low in the shaft, in order to secure her broods from rapacious birds; and particularly from owls, which frequently fall down chimneys, perhaps in attempting to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... The world never saw a more rapid retrogression in human rights, or a greater prostration of liberties. Taxes were imposed according to the pleasure or necessities of the government. Provincial governors became still more rapacious and cruel; judges hesitated to decide against the government. Patriotism, in its most enlarged sense, became an impossibility; all lofty spirits were crushed. Corruption in all forms of administration fearfully increased, for there was no ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... glorious hair, the true physique of the profession, an intoxicating grace, a seductiveness which drives men to folly, an unwholesome, irresistible charm! They conquer like the highwaymen of old. They are rapacious creatures; true birds of prey. I like ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... account would he take any step to harass the lady. It was simply against Sir John Ball that he wished to proceed. "Things would come out in that trial, Mr Walker," he said, "which would astonish you and all the legal world. A rapacious scheme of villainy has been conceived and brought to bear, through the stupidity of some people and the iniquity of others, which would unroll itself fold by fold as certainly as I stand here, if it were properly handled by a competent barrister in one of our courts of ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... from the experiences and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... head of his plunderers. Nothing was too small or great for his rapacious maw. He came up the marble steps of the studio of ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... more sick and sore than panic-stricken, "you will please settle matters with all these people and come to me at the hotel for whatever checks you need," and, hurt beyond measure at this one more instance that there were, really, rapacious schemers in the world, who sought loathsome advantage at the expense of decent folk, Bobby crept away, to hide ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... the heroic deeds of our race while fighting to save our firesides from a rapacious foe. Every character is a history in itself. Yet your race know it not; but still boast of ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... practiced the ordeal by fire, and the burial of the living for certain crimes; but some escape from these in safety, through their power as sorcerers. The authority and government of the chiefs is described; they are tyrannical and rapacious, and treat as slaves even chiefs who are subject to them. Combes makes special mention of some customs peculiar to the Subanos, or river-people. They are exceedingly rude and barbarous, without any government; and a perpetual petty warfare is waged ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... now deprived of their jurisdiction, have already lost much of their influence; and as they gradually degenerate from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords, they will divest themselves of the little ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... instituted lawsuits to get them back that he might destroy them. To boom a genius and cash his spiritual assets is a grave and delicate task—perhaps it is one of those things that should be left undone. Much anguish did these rapacious brothers cause the divinely gifted brown thrush, and when they began to quarrel over the receipts between themselves, he begged them to go away and leave him in peace. He finally had to adopt the ruse of going back to Bonn with them, where he got them established in the apothecary business, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... realize that these bare hills were once 'a land flowing with milk and honey,' producing 'grapes, pomegranates, and figs' in abundance. To-day I have been thinking of the changes that the tempests of a few short years have made in the hills of my own native state, New Hampshire, since the rapacious lumber-men have been denuding our mountains of the forests. There, the unprotected soil is being washed away by the heavy rains, gulleys have been formed, the brooks have diminished or dried up, and the part of our once beautiful White Mountains that has been cut over is desolate ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... sometimes, to the most honourable persons? who more a favourite to the most infamous? who, sometimes, appeared a braver champion? who, at other times, a bolder enemy to his country? who more dissolute in his pleasures? who more patient in his toils? who more rapacious in robbing? who more profuse in giving? Above all things, this was remarkable and admirable in him. The arts he had to acquire the good opinion and kindness of all sorts of men, to retain it with great complaisance, to communicate all things to them, to watch and serve all the occasions ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... Lady Bazelhurst, with the more energetic members of their party, spent the day in a so-called hunting excursion to the hills south of the Villa. Toward nightfall they returned successfully empty-handed and rapacious for bridge. Penelope, full of smouldering anger, had spent the afternoon in her room, disdaining every call of sociability. She had awakened to the truth of the situation in so far as she was concerned. She was at least seeing things from Shaw's point of view. Her resentment was not against ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... brown moustache trembled like a cat's, and his hands, behind his back, rubbed each other, pressing closely together their twisted and knotty fingers. Even here, among hundreds of his own kind, he attracted attention by his resemblance to a sparrow-hawk of the steppes, by his rapacious leanness, his easy stride, outwardly calm but alert and watchful as the flight of the bird ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... marshall'd force of Paris. Henriot, 225 Foul parricide—the sworn ally of Hbert, Denounced by all—upheld by Robespierre. Who spar'd La Valette? who promoted him, Stain'd with the deep dye of nobility? Who to an ex-peer gave the high command? 230 Who screen'd from justice the rapacious thief? Who cast in chains the friends of Liberty? Robespierre, the self-stil'd patriot Robespierre— Robespierre, allied with villain Daubign— Robespierre, the foul arch-tyrant ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... welfare should in no way be compromised by this bold and novel proceeding, he had obtained an express reservation to be made in his favour at Benares, overcoming, by means of considerable presents, the scruples of a rapacious ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... to the Chase, to place his wife and child in some place of safety; whilst your father's fear was all for the treasure in gold and plate and valuables stored up in the house, which might well fall an easy prey to the rapacious hands of spoilers, should such (as was but too likely) swoop down upon the house to strive to recover the jewels and gold taken from them when they were helpless to oppose ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Europe was in a state of dammed convulsion. The wars, though always successful for France, had brought about no definite settlement of international affairs. Peace was transitory, and the dread of Napoleon's power and genius was the only check on rapacious designs on ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... his destructive hands on. How he maltreated the Tannhaeuser overture we know from Josef Hofmann's recent brilliant but ineffectual playing of it. Wagner, being formless and all orchestral color, loses everything by being transferred to the piano. Then, sighing for fresh fields, the rapacious Magyar seized the tender melodies of Schubert, Schumann, Franz and Brahms and forced them to the block. Need I tell you that their heads were ruthlessly chopped and hacked? A special art-form like the song ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... before asking such questions." [Footnote: Though this story is very old, the incident of the church (sogmoye wigwam, or chief house) is manifestly modern.] Then a young man beckoned to him to come in, and he listened till the end to a long sermon on the wickedness of being vindictive and rapacious; and the preacher was a gray ancient, and his ears stood up over his little cap like the two handles of a pitcher, yet for all that the Wild Cat's heart was not moved one whit. And when it was all at an end he said to the ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... bottom of the river-valleys is decidedly, rich and includes aquatic birds. The destruction of the forests and the advance of wheat into the prairies are rapidly impoverishing the Steppe fauna. The various species of rapacious animals are disappearing, together with the colonies of marmots; the insectivores are also becoming scarce in consequence of the destruction of insects, while vermin, such as the suslik (Spermophilus), become ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... dead and crippled wolves lay as trophies around the bold soldier. In a hollow near the river they found a horse and man partly eaten up, and several cattle that had apparently been hotly pursued and torn to death by the rapacious beasts. They started out in search of the spot from whence the drover had heard the firing in the night. They soon discovered the place; at the foot of a large dead sycamore stump, some twelve feet high lay the ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... climbing the steep streets which are impossible for the jinrikisha. The bearers are low-class coolies from the country, whose rough gait makes riding in a chair the nearest approach to horseback exercise. The jinrikisha is also largely in evidence, but the bearers are a great contrast in their rapacious manners to the courteous and smiling Japanese in all the ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... in the remembrance of your fellow citizens. Could it be possible for men who have served and fought under you, to be now forgetful of that general, by whose prudent conduct their lives have been saved and their families preserved from being plundered by a rapacious enemy? We mean not to flatter you. At this time it is impossible for you to suspect it. Our present language is the language of free men expressing only sentiments of gratitude. Your achievements ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... Olympian throne Jove stooped to earth For ends inglorious in the god of gods! Leaving the beauty of celestial birth, To rob Humanity's less fair abodes: Oh, passion more rapacious than divine, That stole the peace of innocence away! So, when descend those tireless wings of thine, They stoop to make defenselessness ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... bitterness, "that you think I hunger for so empty a thing as this ducal pomp you clutch so fearfully? I tell you, man, that I prefer my liberty to an imperial throne. But I waste breath with you. Yet, some day, when your crown shall have passed from you and your power have been engulfed in the Borgia's rapacious maw, remember my offer which might have saved you and which with insults you disregarded, as you disregarded the advice your older counsellors ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... way of striking back at a commercial society whose lies and shams and hypocrisies he hated; he knew them all; he had practiced them himself. There is good reason to believe that alongside of his one personality, that of a rapacious miser, there lived another personality, that of ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... first who seemed willing, by a vigorous effort, to rescue his country and repel its insulting and rapacious conquerors.[70] The venality and corruption of the Roman praetors and officers, who were appointed to levy the contributions in Britain, served to excite the indignation of the natives and give spirit to his attempts. This rude soldier, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... portion of their population, who would rule and ruin without honesty or skill the actual property-holders and native inhabitants, making insecure life, liberty, and property, and still holding those States in their Federal relations subject to the most rapacious, fierce, and unrelenting despotism that ever existed, that of a vindictive and hostile party majority of a Congress in which they have no voice or representation, and by which irresponsible majority they would be mercilessly oppressed for that very reason; and this will ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... examination of the proceedings of this secretary, that the transfers were utterly unwarrantable; that he tampered with the public moneys to sustain the staggering credit of selected depositaries, and "scatter it abroad among swarms of rapacious political partisans." After stating and answering all the charges brought by the Secretary of the Treasury against the Bank of the United States, and showing their falsehood or futility, he declares all the proceedings ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... It is affirmed, on good authority, that he said more than this, and told them they were welcome to plunder and kill him. [Footnote: See Discovery of the Great West. La Barre denies the assertion, and says that he merely told the Iroquois that La Salle should be sent home.] The rapacious old man was playing with a ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... maiden quitted the balcony, and stood motionless to listen. The door, in truth, was opened, with singular caution, and, for an instant, Alida saw nothing but a confused area in the centre of which appeared the figure of a menacing and rapacious freebooter. ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... does it proclaim as to the character of the King? Purity is the very foundation of His royalty. Meekness and gentleness are the very weapons of His conquest and the sceptre of His rule. The dove will outfly all Rome's eagles and all rapacious, unclean feeders, with their strong wings, and curved talons, and sharp beaks. The lesson as to the true nature of the true Kingdom, which was taught of old when the prophet said 'Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion, thy King cometh unto thee, meek, riding ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... o'er hills, and plains, and rocks, Speed the scared leveret and rapacious fox; On rapid pinions cleave the fields above The hawk descending, and escaping dove; With nicer nostril track the tainted ground The hungry vulture, and the prowling hound; Converge reflected light with nicer eye The midnight owl, and microscopic fly; ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... owned, that this was rather a bold attempt for the man who had invaded Russia, ravaged its provinces, massacred its troops, and finished by leaving Moscow in flames. But he dexterously limited himself to explaining the seizure of the Duchy of Oldenburg, which was the commencement of the rapacious and absurd attempt to exclude English merchandise from the Continent. Oldenburg was one of the chief entrances by which those manufactures made their way into Germany. Its invasion, and the countless robberies which followed, had been among the first insolences of Napoleon, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the tomb of Becket at Canterbury, wished that the jewels with which it was loaded had been given to the poor; "for," said he, "those who have heaped up all this mass of treasure will one day be plundered, and fall a prey to rapacious tyrants in power." His prediction was literally fulfilled twenty years after it was uttered. Sir Walter Raleigh regarded omens, and from these predicted truly. Tacitus foresaw the calamities which long desolated Europe on the fall of the Roman ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... round towards the gate, saying he would carry the message to his chief faithfully and without alteration. At the end of about half an hour he reappeared. His chief would not see the white men, nor provide them with anything. He had heard that the children of the sun were cruel and rapacious, murdering and burning without mercy if they thought that thereby they might get any of the yellow metal their souls lusted after ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... in the tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven—well, these were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) passed by unbrightened ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... as the reformers made their appearance. "Certainly," quietly retorted Beza, whose ear had caught the insulting expression, turning to the quarter whence it came, "faithful dogs are needed in the Lord's sheep-fold to bark at the rapacious wolves."[1116] ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... eagerly attentive, obsequious, and rapacious; her eyebrows are closely shaven, her teeth carefully lacquered with black, as befits a lady of gentility, and at all and no matter what hours, she appears on all fours at the entrance of our apartment, to offer ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... on such grounds, I must be allowed to put in a plea, for similar reasons, in favour of the Loup Garou, the Were-Tiger, and all their gruesome family. Wherever there are wild beasts to prey upon the sons of men, there also is found the belief that the worst and most rapacious of the man-eaters are themselves human beings, who have been driven to temporarily assume the form of an animal, by the aid of the Black Art, in order to satisfy their overpowering lust for blood. This belief, which seeks to account for the extraordinary ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... cloaks it beneath a mantle of hypocrisy not wholly unconnected with a knowledge of the white man and his methods. But every cloud has its silver lining, and it is comforting to think that even this rapacious and dissipated race can occasionally derive pleasure from the beauties of nature. While strolling round the settlement one day, I gathered a nosegay of wild flowers, including a species of yellow poppy, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... and it must be confessed that, unless they are always considered to be ready to engage in it, they have very little chance of retaining their possessions on moderate terms, for these weak governments are generally the most rapacious when they have it ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... information concerning the doings of the greatest of all pirates; a man unique among his nefarious brethren, in that he played the piratical game so successfully that he received the honor of knighthood from King Charles II. A belted knight of England, who was also a brutal, rapacious, lustful, murderous villain and robber—and undoubtedly a pirate, although he disguised his piracy under the name of buccaneering—is certainly a striking ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... fickle and bloodthirsty race who claimed the lordship of the forests, these colonists, excepting only in the treacherous slaughter at Port Fortune, bore themselves in a spirit of kindness contrasting brightly with the rapacious cruelty of the Spaniards and the harshness of the English settlers. When the last boat-load left Port Royal, the shore resounded with lamentation; and nothing could console the afflicted savages but reiterated promises of a ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... against the worst dangers of our profession; and what was rare to be met with in those of her's, she contented herself with a moderate living profit upon her industry and good offices, and had nothing of their greedy rapacious turn. She was really too a gentlewoman born and bred, but through a train of accidents reduced to this course, which she pursued, partly through necessity, partly through choice, as never woman delighted ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... could reward be hoped? Could the robbed passenger expect a bounty From those rapacious hands, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... with a great magnolia and many roses, standing in old-time gardens, and shrubberies of laurel and ilex and Spanish chestnut, and rhododendron, upon the South Dorset cliffs, that are vanishing so slowly yet so surely in the maw of the rapacious sea. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... similar incidents showed me the Bulgarian national character as kind, honest, patient, courageous. They made it impossible for me to believe that by nature these people are invariably cruel, rapacious, murderous. That in cases of Balkan massacres and outrages the Bulgarian people have not been always the victims, and have not been always blameless, I know. It is impossible to shut one's eyes to the fact that something survives of the traditions of cruelty and reprisal existing in the Balkans ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... became inevitable; and even these sacrifices have, in general, been far from cancelling their bonds; so that they not only have ceased to be proprietors, but also still continue debtors to a large amount. Their creditors, in many instances, a set of rapacious, unprincipled dealers, availing themselves of the power which the law would give them over the personal liberty of these, their debtors, immediately took that advantage of their own commanding position, which might have been expected from their characters. They ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... undisturbed internal intrigue had accustomed them to play the game of forfeits with each other, and nothing warned them that the time was come at which diplomacy, finesse, and craft would stand them in ill stead against rapacious conquerors. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... the payment of a price to the bridegroom; while in order to retain the favour of the Bhats and avoid their sarcasm, lavish expenditure had to be incurred by the bride's father on presents to these rapacious mendicants. [469] Thus a daughter became in a Rajput's eyes a long step on the road to ruin, and female infanticide was extensively practised. This crime has never been at all common in the Central Provinces, where the rule of marrying a daughter into an equal or higher ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... military glory for the sake of strange women's charms. The founder of the Order of the Garter—the device of which enjoined purity even of thought as a principle of conduct—died in the hands of a rapacious courtesan. Thus, in England, as in France, the ascendancy is gained by ignobler views concerning the relation between the sexes,—a relation to which the whole system of chivalry owed a great part of its vitality, and on the view of which prevailing in the most ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the rascally landlord seized upon every chair and table that ought by rights to have belonged to the widow. The estate to which I was heir was in the hands of rapacious creditors; and the only means of subsistence remaining to the widow and child was a rent-charge of L50 upon my Lord Bagwig's property, who had many turf-dealings with the deceased. And so my dear mother's liberal intentions towards her brother were ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... polenta. She was a true daughter of the isle, and had never left it but once in her life, when she went to Naples. "Naples was beautiful, yes; but one always loves one's own country the best." She was very attentive and good, but at the end was rapacious of more and more buonamano. "Have patience with her, sir," said the blameless Antonino, who witnessed her greediness; "they do not understand certain ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... promotion for both the nephews; and, as a further compliment, Clostercamp, the name of the village which was the scene of the brave deed, was added forever to their family name. The pension is paid to this day. For a time, indeed, it was suspended while France was under the sway of the rapacious and insensible murderers of the king who had granted it; but Napoleon restored it; and, amidst all the changes that have since taken place in the government of the country, every succeeding ruler has felt it equally honorable and politic to recognize the eternal claims which patriotic ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... shocked the nation in the spring of 1861 has been increasing. The fitting out of each expedition by water as well as land is but a refinement upon the extortion and immense profits which preceded it. The freedom from punishment by which the first greedy and rapacious horde were suffered to run at large with ill-gotten gains seems to have demoralized too many of those who deal with the Government."— Appendix to The Congressional Globe, Third Session, Thirty-seventh Congress, 1862-63, Part ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... nights, when the gods are hastily making him a new meal, the ravenous Bim-bi calls to his need the stars; and you may watch, as every little boy of the Akasava has watched, clutching his father's hand tightly in his fear, the hot rush of meteors across the velvet sky to the rapacious and open ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... stand for any of the large rapacious birds, as the eagle or the condor. True, and yet the picture is a purely fanciful one, as no bird of prey SAILS with his burden; on the contrary, he flaps heavily and laboriously, because he is always obliged to mount. The stress of the rhyme and metre are of course ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... "Yes, because the more rapacious. And while they count on each side Dukes, Earls and Barons in their genealogy, the very wealth with which, through your means, they project the support of their insolence, and which they will grasp with all the greediness of ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... practically ruined; and the desire to avoid such obligations led to the general practice of female infanticide, formerly so prevalent in Rajputana. The importance of the bards increased their voracity; Mr. Nesfield describes them as "Rapacious and conceited mendicants, too proud to work but not too proud to beg." The Dholis [294] or minstrels were one of the seven great evils which the famous king Sidhraj expelled from Anhilwada Patan in Gujarat; the Dakans or witches were another. [295] ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... perceived a visible alteration in her behaviour; all her modesty and innocence vanished by degrees, till her mind became thoroughly tainted. She affected the company of rakes, gave herself all manner of airs, was never easy but abroad, or when she had a party at my chambers. She was rapacious of money, extravagant to excess, loose in her conversation; and, if ever I demurred to any of her demands, oaths, tears, and fits were the immediate consequences. As the first raptures of fondness were long since over, this behaviour ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... entering the courtyard of Apsley House? Great was the panic at Brookes', wild the hopes of Carlton Terrace; all the gentlemen who expected to have been made peers perceived that the country was going to be given over to a rapacious oligarchy. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... prey; he is a vulture, who feeds upon the prostrate, the dying, and the dead. As his cruelty is more shocking than his corruption, so his hypocrisy has something more frightful than his cruelty; for whilst his bloody and rapacious hand signs proscriptions, and now sweeps away the food of the widow and the orphan, his eyes overflow with tears, and he converts the healing balm that bleeds from wounded humanity into a rancorous and deadly poison to the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... in like manner, of Peruvian sheep. This was the same noble that had visited Pizarro in the valley. He now came in more state, quaffing chicha—the fermented juice of the maize-from golden goblets borne by his attendants, which sparkled in the eyes of the rapacious adventurers.5 ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... a much larger amount concealed elsewhere among the story-teller's clothing. "My followers are mostly outlawed Miaotze, who have been driven from their own tribes in Yun Nan for man-eating and disregarding the sacred laws of hospitality. They are somewhat rapacious, and in this way it has become a custom that they should have as their own, for the purpose of exchanging for money, persons such as yourself, whose insatiable curiosity has led them ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... cavalier of the first quality, and was evidently one who would have been at home in the fashionable Corso. His face was of the sweetest virile Italian beauty. The head was long, like a hawk's, not too lean, and not sharply ridged from a rapacious beak, but enough to show characteristics of eagerness and promptitude. His eyes were darkest blue, the eyebrows and long disjoining eyelashes being very dark over them, which made their colour precious. The nose was straight and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... there is a dish of herbs and vinegar. Then ensues a long wrangle, displaying much medical knowledge, on the physiology of herbs and vegetables, on the eating of flesh, much and fast. Enan makes sarcastic remarks on Joseph's rapacious appetite. He tells Joseph, he must not eat this or that. A joint of lamb is brought on the table, Enan says the head is bad, and the feet, and the flesh, and the fat; so that Joseph has no alternative but to eat it all. "I fear that what happened to the king, will befall thee," said Enan. ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... that the wall which stood on each side of her was wilder and more rapacious than the waves of the sea; she knew that it needed only a voice, a Moses, to set all this human sea in motion, hurling it irresistibly onward until it should sweep away all the glory of wealth and greatness in its ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... meant to trouble him by law, or any other annoyance! I'd like to see a stain removed from my family, and my name restored; but to touch his property, O, no!—O, no! that never entered my mind, by heaven! that never entered my mind, Mrs. Julaper. I'm not cruel; I'm not rapacious; I don't care for money; don't you know that, Mrs. Julaper? O, surely you won't think me capable of attacking the man whose bread I have eaten so long! I never dreamed of it; I should hate myself. Tell me you don't believe it; O, Mrs. Julaper, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... he should be re-instated, declared that he knew what were the King's private intentions, and should obey no public instructions. He sealed public acts with his own seal instead of the King's, kept a guard of fifteen hundred rapacious and disorderly mercenaries, plundered men of every rank, so that it was said "the knight could not keep his silver belt, the noble his ring, the lady her necklace, nor the Jew his merchandise." He travelled in great state, with a train ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... by Fromantin, and that painter's book, Un ete dans le Sahara, quickened the desire of primitive life; he sped away, and for nearly two years lived on the last verge of civilization, sometimes passing beyond it with the Bedouins into the interior, on slave-trading or rapacious expeditions. The frequentation of these simple people calmed the fever of ennui, which had been consuming him. Nature leads us to the remedy that the development of reason inflicts on the animal—man. And for more than a year Mike thought ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... its enemies, and far more deadly than if he had been openly enlisted under the banners of JEFFERSON DAVIS. Were we anything but the best-natured and most enduring public in the world, such revelations as have by the been made would long since have driven these rapacious traitors beyond sea or into the congenial Dixie for which they ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... equipment was that of one of the German adventurers, who were known by the name of lanzknechts, in English, spearmen, who constituted a formidable part of the infantry of the period. These mercenaries were, of course, a fierce and rapacious soldiery, and having an idle tale current among themselves, that a lanzknecht was refused admittance into heaven on account of his vices, and into hell on the score of his tumultuous, mutinous, and insubordinate disposition, they manfully acted as ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... empire prosperous, this fixity of impost would have been the greatest of all blessings. It is the precise boon so frequently and earnestly implored by our ryots in India, and indeed by the cultivators all over the East. But when the empire was beset on all sides with enemies—only the more rapacious and pressing, that the might of the legions had so long confined them within the comparatively narrow limits of their own sterile territories—and disasters, frequent and serious, were laying waste ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... specimen of such new owner had disclosed itself to their anxiously expecting but soon recoiling eyes—always, however, making due allowances for one or two cheering indications, on Mr. Titmouse's part, of a certain rapacious and litigious humor, which might hereafter right pleasantly and profitably occupy their energies! Their professional position, and their interests had long made them sharp observers; but when did ever before low and disgusting qualities force themselves into revolting prominence, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... localities in the interior where the peasants had organized to resist the rapacious Red Guard looters, there were little companies of good fighters, in their own way. These were usually referred to as Partisans or White Guards depending upon the degree to which they were authorized and organized by the local county governments. They always ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... hope, in that triumphant time, When monarchs, after years of spoil and crime, Met round the shrine of Peace, and Heaven lookt on;— Who did not hope the lust of spoil was gone; That that rapacious spirit, which had played The game of Pilnitz o'er so oft, was laid; And Europe's Rulers, conscious of the past, Would blush and deviate into right at last? But no—the hearts, that nurst a hope so fair, Had yet to learn what men ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... instance has been recorded by Bamscot in his great work, "Some Evil Civilizations." After the first of America's great intestinal wars the surviving victors formed themselves into an organization which seems at first to have been purely social and benevolent, but afterward fell into the hands of rapacious politicians who in order to preserve their power corrupted their followers by distributing among them enormous sums of money exacted from the government by threats of overturning it. In less than a half century after the war in which they had ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... Faults are ascribed to even a person of pure soul engaged in penances. With respect to even an ascetic living in the woods and employed in his own (harmless) acts, are raised three parties, viz., friends, neutrals, and foes. They that are rapacious hate them that are pure. The idle hate the active. The unlearned hate the learned. The poor hate the rich. The unrighteous hate the righteous. The ugly hate the beautiful. Many amongst the learned, the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... task of rescuing at this time this estate from threatened ruin, and of vindicating the good name of his father from undeserved censure. He had in this gigantic work to meet and thwart the plots of rapacious railroad wreckers, and schemers; but his thorough mental discipline united with his intensely practical business training, and coupled with his native energy, tact, good sense, and fertility of resources, stood him in good stead. He inspired capitalists with confidence, ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... brought with them from New Switzerland, which already had escaped so many perils, was, therefore, declared contraband, and seized by the French fisc—an institution that rarely permitted such a prize to quit its rapacious grasp. ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... unscrupulous, hard, rapacious, destructive. It foments all the evil passions; it is allied with all the vices; it is antagonistic to human welfare. It glories merely in strength; it worships only success. It raises wicked men to power; it prostrates and hides the good. It extinguishes ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... it seemed then. It would be simple folly and madness for the others to trust themselves near the rapacious current; yet how else could ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... there, sees china broken; squalling.]—All my fine porcelain destroyed! monster! vile, rapacious monster! A devil, indeed, has been in the cupboard, and that's you. The china, presented to me by my grand relations, which I set such store on, smashed into a thousand pieces; 'tis too much for ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... most," resumed the Earl, "is, not the enemy without, but the jealousy within. By the side of Harold stands Tostig, rapacious to grasp, but impotent to hold—able to ruin, strengthless ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Gervais, the church of the monastery to which William the Conqueror was carried, out of the noise and the feverish air of the great city, to die, and which witnessed the strange struggle, in his last moments, between his rapacious passions and his late-awakened remorse. So insecure was the state of society, that, when he whose iron hand had preserved order among his feudal nobles had expired, those about him fled to their strongholds in expectation of a general anarchy. Government was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... him over their wine. And now he was rumoured to have sold the British forces in the Carnatic provinces to one of the native Princes. Yes, to have taken gold, gold to an amount which Clive in his most rapacious moments never dreamt of, for his countrymen's blood. Tidings of dark transactions between the Governor and the native Princes had reached the ears of the Government, tidings so vague, so incredible, that the Government might naturally be slow ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... with an enemy of human liberty. They spoke of the court of Great Britain as the most faithless and corrupt in the world, and denounced the result of Jay's mission as a surrender of every just claim upon a rapacious enemy for restitution on ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... simply that any American ship which fell in with an English or French man-of-war or privateer, or was forced by stress of weather to seek shelter in an English or French port, was lost to her owners. The times were rude, evidence was easy to manufacture, captains were rapacious, admiralty judges were complaisant, and American commerce was rich prey. The French West Indies fell an easy spoil to the British, and at Martinique and Basseterre American merchantmen were caught in the harbor. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... with their tragic end, because "as printers they scrupulously abstained from publishing Haskalah literature." Maskilim were employed by the authorities as tax collectors, and these, as is ever the case with rapacious farmers of taxes, besides executing the harsh laws of the tyrant, looked also to their own aggrandizement, and harassed their pious coreligionists in all ways conceivable. Many of them even hindered the ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... liked her. The only members of the profession who hated her were the other lyric sopranos. Schreiermeyer, rapacious and glittering, had a photograph of her hideously enamelled in colours inside the cover of his watch, and the facsimile of her autograph was engraved across the lid of his silver cigarette-case. Pompeo Stromboli carried some of her hair in a locket ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... in the government of the province was William Kieft. He was as energetic as he was spiteful, and as spiteful as he was rapacious. His chief pleasure lay in quarrelling. He and his council made some useful reforms, but as a rule they greatly oppressed the people. During this administration agriculture was encouraged, the growing of fruit was undertaken, and several other things done ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... English and Russian allies whose armies, while waiting till they can tread this unchained force under foot, oppose it with an invincible rampart. France is not a preying country; it does not stretch out rapacious hands to enslave the world. Since war has been forced upon her, she makes war. Soon the legitimate reparations will come which shall restore to the French hearth the souls that the brutality of arms separated from it. Associated in a work of human liberation we shall ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... the ravens really sought for he knew all too well, for he had seen their knotted tracks by dead forms; yet somehow their passage conjured up thoughts in his brain which had never disturbed him before. They were birds of death, rapacious and evil-bringing, and they had cast ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... elephants have juiceless brows,(917) Nor can the sweetest pasture stay The charger's long unquiet neigh. Big tears from mules and camels flow Whose staring coats their trouble show, Nor can the leech's art restore Their health and vigour as before. Rapacious birds are fierce and bold: Not single hunters as of old, In banded troops they chase the prey, Or gathering on our temples stay. Through twilight hours with shriek and howl Around the city jackals prowl, And wolves and ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... miners, and governors were but too readily copied by the priests, many of whom were rapacious villains who had chosen the crucifix as their weapon instead of the sword. One priest, for instance, besides his regular dues and fees, received during the year as presents, which he exacted at certain festivals, 200 ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... pleasures; which, as he would have been delighted not to have had attended them, so was he no less pleased with any opportunity to rid himself of the incumbrance. He passed, in the world's language, as an exceeding good father; being not only so rapacious as to rob and plunder all mankind to the utmost of his power, but even to deny himself the conveniencies, and almost necessaries, of life; which his neighbours attributed to a desire of raising immense fortunes for his children: but in fact it was not so; he heaped up money for its own sake only, ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... luxuriant growth against the dark background of the woods; all these fairylike effects of summer suggested only prosaic and misanthropic reflections in Julien's mind. He thought of the tricks, the envy and hatred that the possession of these little squares of ground brought forth among their rapacious owners. The prolific exuberance of forest vegetation was an exemplification of the fierce and destructive activity of the blind forces of Nature. All the earth was a hateful theatre for the continual enactment of bloody and monotonous dramas; the worm consuming the plant; the bird ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... use of an energetic, but true metaphor, one that is terrifying, but symbolical of what is practised in all countries; as long as the folly, the avarice, the dissipation, the degradation, or the tyranny of the rulers, shall have rendered the treasury so much exhausted or rapacious, as to induce them to burn the harvest, in order the more speedily to collect the price of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... and influence was made by the "Drapier's Letters," in 1724. One Wood, of Wolverhampton, in Staffordshire, a man enterprising and rapacious, had, as is said, by a present to the Duchess of Munster, obtained a patent, empowering him to coin one hundred and eighty thousand pounds of halfpence and farthings for the kingdom of Ireland, in which there was a very inconvenient and embarrassing scarcity of copper coin, so that it was possible ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... the rapacious goddesses of the storms, residing near the Erinnyes, or the Ocean, before the jaws of hell. If any person was so long absent from home that it was not known what had become of him, and he was supposed ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... her, while I stooped to examine some scroll-work, and following, found her before one of the few images of the Buddha that the rapacious Museum had spared—a singularly beautiful bas-relief, the hand raised to enforce the truth the calm lips were speaking, the drapery falling in stately folds to the bare feet. As I came up, she had an air as if she had just ceased from movement, and I had a distinct feeling that she ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... looks like a marble statue," he muttered, "and I believe that he has no heart in his breast. Every thing in him is made of stone. If he had a heart, he would not dare to come hither and appropriate with a rapacious hand the sacred relics of our great king. I must really go and see whether his commands to that effect will be carried out or not." And he left the hall with youthful alacrity, hastening through the apartments back to ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... misgoverned. Many governors of the conquered lands were corrupt and grasping men. They tried to wring all the money they could from their helpless subjects. To the extortions of the governors must be added those of the tax collectors, whose very name of "publican" [14] became a byword for all that was rapacious and greedy. In this first effort to manage the world she had won, Rome had certainly made a failure. A city-state could not rule, with justice and efficiency, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... fear. Machiavelli was not inclined to make little of what an unhampered ruler could do with his subjects; yet he saw in such passions as these a fixed limit to the power of the Prince. "It makes him hated above all things to be rapacious, and to be violator of the property and women of his subjects, from both of which he must abstain." And if Machiavelli's despotism meets its master in the undercurrents of human instinct, governments of less determined stripe, whether of states or ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... with a rapacious movement darted upon her parasol. How her soul was in her possessions! I stood and watched her. Then she went into the road and under the trees, haughty, a demoiselle. She had on ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
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