"Dissolute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... instinctive shrinking when she saw that the women, also, were to recline, after the manner of the dissolute Greeks, instead of sitting, as she had been taught to consider the only decent posture for a Roman maid or matron. Then the thought of her mission brought the blush surging to her cheeks, whence it receded, leaving them pale with ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... real, as you and I know very well, will cost the dear girl but a few tears, and she is happy again. Take the case of your own daughter, the young lady downstairs, who is your breathing image'—Mrs Varden coughed and simpered—'there is a young man (I am sorry to say, a dissolute fellow, of very indifferent character) of whom I have heard Ned speak—Bullet ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... derives the means of an inglorious and frequently dissolute existence from the periodical receipt of money sent out to him ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... I guard you from all mean things; From the dwarfing of wealth, and from poverty's stings. And from silly mothers of fuss and show, And from dissolute fathers whose aims are low, I would take you, and shield you, and set you free, Dear little Mothers, of ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... honoured, and the individual professors, when they attained to eminence, were often richly rewarded, and treated with distinction, the order of minstrels, as such, was held in low esteem, being composed chiefly of worthless and dissolute strollers, by whom the art was assumed, in order to escape from the necessity of labour, and to have the means of pursuing a wandering and dissipated course of life. Such, in all times, has been the censure upon the calling of those ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... dreamer and doer, at the very door of his success, that which arrested him even upon his entering in. There came the preliminary blow which in a flash his far-seeing mind knew was to mean ultimate ruin. In a word, the loose principles of a dissolute man were to ruin France, and with it one who had once saved ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... was shocked and withdrew; But I grieve to relate, When he next met my view Injin Dick was his mate; And the two around town was a-lying In a frightfully dissolute state. ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... have clasped a woman's hand in his own, and to have no conception of a closer tie than the cold fraternal one of the sect. Old Father Ephraim was the most awful character of all. In his youth he had been a dissolute libertine, but was converted by Mother Ann herself, and had partaken of the wild fanaticism of the early Shakers. Tradition whispered at the firesides of the village that Mother Ann had been compelled to sear his heart of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dignity. The new tendency which manifested itself so vividly in our country was reflected by their impetuous and susceptible natures with all its noble yearnings, its virtues and excesses exaggerated. The frivolous pastimes, the senseless or dissolute amusements that were so fashionable in those days were abandoned for serious reading, gathering of information and investigation of current events. They had already opinions of their own, which not rarely they could ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... now rendered gloomy by the absence of her whom I had so tenderly loved, and going to Leavenworth I entered upon a dissolute and reckless life—to my shame be it said—and associated with gamblers, drunkards, and bad characters generally. I continued my dissipation about two months, and was becoming a very "hard case." About this time the Seventh Kansas regiment, known ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... had assumed it in order to enjoy its privileges: he was a kind of wit, writing madrigals and 'bouts-rimes' [Bouts-rimes are verses written to a given set of rhymes.] on occasion, a handsome man enough, though in moments of impatience his eyes would take a strangely cruel expression; as dissolute and shameless to boot, as though he had really belonged to ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Francis' sometime throne; and these Sir Jollys were his subjects all—Marot, Caillette, Brusquet, Villot, and the lesser lights, jesters of barons, cardinals and even bishops! Rabelais, too, that poor, dissolute devil of a writer, learned as Homer, brutish as Homer's swine—all subjects of his, the king of jesters, save one; one whom he eyed with certain fear and wonder; fear, because she was a woman—and Triboulet esteemed all the sex but "highly perfected ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... sorry to know. He is a dissolute fellow, who has broken the hearts of two wives, and thrown his children for maintenance on their maternal relations. 'Tis the same who carried your ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... this he seemed rather studiously to disclaim it, pointing out Diphilus as his original—he might insist that Syrus could only have been the slave of a Roman master, that Sannio corresponded exactly with our notions of a Roman pander, that AEschinus was the picture of a dissolute young patrician—in short, that through the transparent veil of Grecian drapery it was easy to detect the sterner features of Roman manners and society; nay more, he might insist on the marriage of Micio at the close of the drama, as Neufchateau does upon the drunkenness of Guyomar, as alluding ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... them by discipline and costume. They were industriously stigmatized as jailers; for which there was the more ground, as their duties did in reality associate them pretty often with the jailer; and in other respects they were a dissolute and ferocious body of men, gathered not out of the citizens, but many foreign deserters, or wretched runagates from the jail, or from the justice of the provost- marshal in some distant camp. Not a man, probably, but was liable ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... casting aspersion On Omar, that awfully dissolute Persian, Though secretly longing to join ...
— An Alphabet of Celebrities • Oliver Herford
... is the idea of many that sailors have little or no religion: and their dissolute conduct, when thrown on shore, is certainly a strong argument in support of this opinion; but they must not be so partially judged. Those who are constantly mixed with the world, and exposed to its allurements, are subject to ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... London, and away from the restraining responsibilities of his command, Wolfe, according to his own account, lapsed into debauchery. "In that short time I committed more imprudent acts than in all my life before I lived in the idlest, [most] dissolute, abandoned manner that could be conceived, and that not out of vice, which is the most extraordinary part of it. I have escaped at length and am once more master of my reason, and hereafter it shall rule my conduct; at least I hope so." Perhaps the lapse may have been worse ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... made to her father, and usually by letter. Her music teacher was her first devotee. He was followed by her dancing master, who, as a propitiatory preparation had a wen cut out of his cheek; then came a wealthy butcher; then a man of rank; then a dissolute physician, from marrying whom she narrowly escaped; then a jeweler, and many others. The merits of these gentlemen—particularly those of the energetic butcher—-were warmly commended by their female friends, who, in France, are brokers ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... allayed the suspicion directed against the dissolute Englishman and the young men made an ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... bargained as in the churchyard outside or Chepe beyond. Servants stood for hire; bravoes lurked behind the gray stone columns in dark corners, ready to take the price of blood from any hand that offered it. Broken men, needy adventurers, dissolute women—all had their regular stations in the sacred building, which was fair, market, and general rendezvous for every class and trade, legitimate or illegitimate, that had its ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... not know whether this lady, if indeed a daughter of a Lord Ranelagh, would be the daughter or sister of the Lord Ranelagh living in 1680, who was the first Earl of Ranelagh and third Viscount, and who is described by Burnet as a very able and very dissolute man, and a great favourite of Charles II. (Hist. of his own Time, i. 462., ii. 99., ed. 1823); and who, having held the office of Vice-Treasurer in Ireland during three reigns, was turned out of it in disgrace in 1703. He died in 1711, leaving no son, but three ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... main of empty buildings, the windows boarded up, the snow drifted high about the doors. One store now serves all ends of trade, one liquor shop serves all the desire for drink of the whites, and slops over through the agency of two or three dissolute squaw men and half-breeds to the natives up ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... which could be figuratively expressed in marriage. The Bible speaks of "marrying the land."—"Thy land shall be called Beulah for thy land shall be married." Side by side in this country we have the lands which have been dishonored, degraded, abandoned, dissolute, and the lands husbanded, ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... immensely popular in England. Evelyn, in his famous description of 'the inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming, and all dissoluteness' on the Sunday se'nnight before the death of Charles II, specially noted that 'about twenty of the great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at Basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2000 ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... in Paradise Lost. In the later poem he adopts strict practices with regard to elision, which, with some trifling exceptions, he permits only in the case of contiguous open vowels, and of short unstressed vowels separated by a liquid consonant, in such words, for instance, as "dissolute," or "amorous." By a variety of small observances, which, when fully stated, make up a formidable code, he mended the shambling gait of the loose dramatic blank verse, and made of it a ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... says that a licence-holder or supervisee shall produce a license when called upon, shall not habitually associate with persons of bad character, shall not lead an idle or dissolute life, shall report themselves monthly to the nearest police station (this regulation does not apply to women), and ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... in fact, that we know of her; but this is enough. The term "sinner," in this instance, as in many others, does not refer to the general apostasy in Adam; it is distinctive of race and habit. She was probably of heathen extraction, as she was certainly of a dissolute life. The poetry of sin and shame calls her the Magdalen, and there may be a convenience in permitting this name to stand. The depth of her depravity Christ clearly intimates in his allusion to the debtor who owed five hundred pence, and the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... thing of the region where he had dwelt. He soon became a star-scholar, from the brilliancy of his talents, and a favorite, too, from the graceful pliancy of his manners, and apparent sweetness of his disposition. But with all his grace and sweetness, he was unprincipled and dissolute, and exerted the commanding influence he had acquired over the minds of his companions, to lead them into temptation, and lure them to sin. Yet he had the art to appear himself the tempted, as well as they. His agency was as ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Irishman her counsels respecting his domestic troubles. Sir Cresswell Cresswell, she had told him, was his refuge. "Why should his soul submit to bonds which the world had now declared to be intolerable? Divorce was not now the privilege of the dissolute rich. Spirits which were incompatible need no longer be compelled to fret beneath the same couples." In short, she had recommended him to go to England and get rid of his wife, as she would with a little encouragement have recommended ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... when, finding it useless to continue the mission, or struggle any longer with superstition and vice, they burned down their College and Chapel, and returned to Quebec. The governor, alarmed at this step, at last promised to enforce the laws against the dissolute French, and prevailed on Father Marest to return. Soon after the Ottawas, discontented at Detroit, a French post, which was served by the Recollects, and where the blood of a Recollect had been shed in a riot, began to move back to Mackinaw, and the mission was renewed. ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... she followed him on a campaign, and was discovered with his baggage disguised as a horse-boy. But no princess, no beauty, no female blandishments had any charms for Ivanhoe: no hermit practised a more austere celibacy. The severity of his morals contrasted so remarkably with the lax and dissolute manner of the young lords and nobles in the courts which he frequented, that these young springalds would sometimes sneer and call him Monk and Milksop; but his courage in the day of battle was so ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of June, 1675, a cannon ball struck Turenne, and closed in an instant his earthly career. His renown filled Europe. He was a successful warrior, a dissolute man; and few who have ever lived have caused more wide-spread misery than could be charged to his account. Such is not the character which best prepares one to stand before ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... liquor and drinking one another's healths, some drinking as they marched along, while others sat by the roadside. Everywhere might be heard the sound of flutes and pipes, and women singing and dancing; while with all this dissolute march the soldiers mingled rough jokes, as if the god Dionysus himself were amongst them and attended on their merry procession. At the capital of Gedrosia, Alexander again halted his army, and refreshed them with feasting and revelry. It is said that he himself, after having ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... thus nursed on the fields of France found at last scope for action in England itself. Even before the outbreak of the War of the Roses the nobles had become as lawless and dissolute at home as they were greedy and cruel abroad. But with the struggle of York and Lancaster and the paralysis of government which it brought with it, all hold over the baronage was gone; and the lawlessness and brutality of their temper showed ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... Yorkshire, and for the most part in the narrow confines of a grim gray stone parsonage. There she had lived a pinched and meagre little life, full of sadness and self-denial, with two sisters more delicate than herself, a dissolute brother, and a father her only parent,—a stern and forbidding father. This was no genial environment for an author, even if helpful to her vivid imagination. Nor was it a temporary condition; it was a permanent one. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, was born 30th January, 1627. Lord Orford observes, "When this extraordinary man, with the figure and genius of Alcibiades, could equally charm the presbyterian Fairfax and the dissolute Charles; when he alike ridiculed that witty king and his solemn chancellor: when he plotted the ruin of his country with a cabal of bad ministers, or, equally unprincipled, supported its cause with bad patriots,—one laments that such parts should have been devoid of every ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... have been a dissolute criminaloid whose unbridled passions and connection with Gabrielle Bompard caused him to develop into an habitual criminal. This diagnosis is confirmed by ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... deductions would be claimed are now over-looked. Carts are sent round to the villages and hamlets with work for the weavers, so that time may not be lost in going to the warehouses to take back or carry home work. Then comes the ebb: 'the immediate effect is that all the less skilful workmen, the dissolute and disorderly, are denied work; the third and fourth looms, those worked by the sons and daughters of the weavers, are all thrown out of use'. The intensiveness of cultivation has been reduced in the towns, the ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... truly benevolent, and to the pious christian, they have always been, and must ever be, objects of deep interest. Other charities may be perverted in some degree to evil purposes. Their effect may be to encourage idle and dissolute conduct, and to increase the evil they would remedy, by operating as a bounty upon pauperism. To some extent this has been the effect of alms-houses, and of many of those societies which, with the best intentions, have been administered ...
— A Sermon Preached on the Anniversary of the Boston Female Asylum for Destitute Orphans, September 25, 1835 • Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright
... they have just cause to annull the contract and permit them to obtain another employee. All Indians must be required to obtain service and not be permitted to wander about the country in idleness in a dissolute manner. If found doing so they will be liable to arrest and punishment by labor on the public works at the direction of the Magistrate. All officers, Civil or Military under my command are required to execute the terms of this order and take notice of every violation thereof.—Given ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... the faith of their fathers, and become atheistic or indifferent. I'm speaking the truth! This is a fact which will be realised. That's why all of you and all of us now are either beastly atheists or careless, dissolute imbeciles, and nothing more. And you too, Stepan Trofimovitch, I don't make an exception of you at all! In fact, it is on your account I am speaking, let me tell ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... outside the walls, lest reports adverse to His Majesty's health should reach the party of the Princes, his sons, who caught eagerly at any facts they might distort in a way to gain the Regency for the dissolute Prince of Wales, and cast the Queen completely into his power. It so happened that one day I was seated to my knotting behind the Japan screen in the parlour apportioned by the Prince to Her Majesty ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... tale of her misfortunes. Her father, though of high rank, had in the end dissipated his fortune, and even destroyed his reputation and influence through a course of dissolute indulgence. His health was impaired beyond hope of cure; and it became his earnest wish, before he died, to preserve his daughter from the poverty which would be the portion of her orphan state. He therefore accepted for her, and persuaded her to accede to, a proposal of marriage, from ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... well. The careless and in many respects dissolute life he had been leading had more than begun to tell on a constitution by no means strong, but he had never become aware of his weakness nor had ever felt ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... time and talent, so openly and ostentatiously exhibited, is compensated in secret by longer and intenser application to the true object of their pursuit, and by acts of atonement and self-denial, of which the conscious stars of heaven are the only created witnesses. The worst operation of dissolute indulgences on genius is not, perhaps, in producing depravity of heart or habits, for its pure plumes have a virtue about them that is a preservative against pollution; but in wearing out the frame, ruffling the temper, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... accept without question the dictum of their modistes. La Belle Hamilton, the famous beauty of the reign of Charles the Second, so delicately modest and pure that she passed unbreathed upon by scandal through that most dissolute court, is painted in a costume that the fastest of New York belles would not venture to wear at the most fashionable of receptions. The gracious and self-sacrificing and womanly women of our revolution, wore dresses cut lower than those of their great-grand-daughters, as ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... would be few upon the earth, and that his Mary would soon follow him; but their darling Jennie would be sheltered and taught, and that by a true disciple of their Lord and Master. No more anguish lest his precious child should become a prey to the wary and dissolute; no more grief at her withered, cheerless youth; no more sorrowings for the wants that he could not appease. "Oh! too much! too much mercy and goodness hast thou shown toward Thine unworthy servants, my Saviour and my God!" murmured he, and a violent hemorrhage ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... silex. Ils ont, pour l'ordinaire, dans leur interieur une cavite, mais pas toujours au centre, et qui vient apparemment de la consommation de cette partie calcaire qui y resta la derniere, et n'en fut changee ou dissolute et separee, que lorsque le reste du silex etoit deja entierement fini. Ces cavites sont toujours, ou enduites de calcedoine en couche concentriques recouverte de petits cristaux fort brillans et durs de quartz, ou bien seulement de ces derniers-ci. Par-fois il y a aussi ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... like a rocket. The base and feeble remains of legitimacy seemed to die away of its own weakness, and the despised younger son of the king-making vizier soon reigned supreme at Cabool. Let us note that this was in 1826. The new king, says Mr Kaye, 'had hitherto lived the life of a dissolute soldier. His education had been neglected, and in his very boyhood he had been thrown in the way of pollution of the foulest kind. From his youth, he had been greatly addicted to wine, and was often to be seen in public reeling along ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... no means the swashbuckling, bullying, dissolute companions painted by those who know nothing about them. They may drink more beer than we deem necessary for health, or even for comfort; and they may take their exercise with a form of sword practice that we do not esteem, they may ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... lady, having unhappily failed, is enabled to set her foot in the new-made breach, while yet it is possible to stop it, and to say, with little variation in the language of that power, which only could enable her to say it. Hither, ye proud waves of dissolute love, although you HAVE come, yet no farther SHALL ye come; is such an instance of magnanimous resolution and self-conquest, as is very rarely to be ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... rough fellows who fairly devoured her with their eyes), who had charge of putting up the booths for the great fair for the benefit of destitute working women; a call on the president of the Cabinet, a somewhat dissolute old gentleman, in spite of his gravity, who received her with the airs of an old-fashioned gallant, kissing her hand, as they used ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... drawing-room, but His Majesty and Lady ——. She entered but a minute before him, like a queen. Her reception was that of a queen; young, unmarried females kissed her hand. Now, all this might happen in France, even now: but Louis XV. the most dissolute of our monarchs, went no farther. At Windsor, I saw the husband, sons, and daughters of the favourite, in the circle! Le parc des Cerfs was not as bad ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... have no claims—But let me draw the picture, dear Chevalier. Here was a discredited, dissolute fellow whose life was worth a pin to nobody. Tired of the husks and the swine, and all his follies grown stale by over-use, he takes the advice of a good gentleman, and joins the standard of work ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... women whom he had met, he had certainly loved her the most sincerely, with an absolute love, unreflecting, passionate and half-mad. She was not dissolute but merely turbulent, independent and impatient of restraint. Too poor to be married, too proud to be a courtesan, too rebellious to accept ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... had passed a trading captain bound to the Gambier Islands had given him a small stock of trade goods, and the thought of Doris had been his salvation. Only for her he would have sunk to the life of a mere idle, gin-drinking, and dissolute beach-comber. As it was, his steady, straightforward life among the people of the island was a big factor to his business success. And so every year he sent money to Doris by some passing whaler or ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... never disputing, polite in the extreme—giving seldom, but with choice and purpose—Joshua, without inspiring sympathy, commanded generally that cold respect, which is always paid to the rigid moralist; for instead of yielding to the influence of lax and dissolute colonial manners, he appeared to live with great regularity, and his exterior had something of austerity about ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... bootmakers, brush-makers, cabinet-makers, turners, shoemakers, tailors, blacksmiths; there are cab-drivers, young women living alone, and female pedlers, laundresses, old-clothes dealers, money- lenders, day-laborers, and people without any definite employment; and also beggars and dissolute women. ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... palace where he had brought up the Duke of Burgundy, in order to inspire the education of his descendant. What was nearest the crowned vice upon the throne was perhaps the most pure of any thing in France. If the age had not been as dissolute as the king, it would have directed his love in that direction. He had reached that point of corruption in which purity appears ridiculous, and modesty was ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... Nab, and limped ever afterwards; a just judgment on such a heinous offender. Both these little structures were picturesque objects, being overgrown with ivy and woodbine. The chapel was completely in ruins, while the cell, profaned by the misdoings of the dissolute votaress Isole, had been converted into a cage for vagrants and offenders, and made secure by a grated window, and a strong door studded with ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to see anything more, but came down to the foot of the stairs, that I might learn if Roland took his money to his dissolute comrades. He came out, and once more I followed him, and once more he led me to the Rheingold cellar. On this occasion, however, I took step by step with him until we entered the large wineroom at the foot of the stairs, he less than an ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... English hall—I will not say the Pavilion, which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are heard there—for preference let us say the Royal. I shall not easily forget my first evening there, when I saw for the time a living house—the dissolute paragraphists, the elegant mashers (mark the imaginativeness of the slang), the stolid, good-humoured costers, the cheerful lights o' love, the extraordinary comics. What delightful unison of enjoyment, what unanimity of soul, what communality of wit; all knew each other, all ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... cheap negroes gave the several families in Virginia, for three generations, a showy, delusive prosperity, which produced a considerable number of dissolute, extravagant men, and educated a few to a high degree of knowledge and wisdom. Of these families, the Randolphs were the most numerous, and among the oldest, richest, and most influential. The soldiers of the late army of the Potomac ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... its amusing side, of course. To Zorzi, who knew the people well, it was very laughable to think that a score of dissolute young patricians should first fancy themselves able to raise a revolution against the most firmly established government in Europe, and should then squander the privacy which they had bought at a frightful risk in mere gambling and dice-playing. But there was nothing humorous about the oath ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... workers with her succeeded in having the law amended. Up till then a married woman might wash all day at the washtub, and at night the law required that her employer should, upon demand, hand over her hard-earned money to her husband, however dissolute he ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... sounding varying notes. If the South really means forcible resistance, said the Times, it is doomed to quick suppression. "A few hundred thousand slave-owners, trembling nightly with visions of murder and pillage, backed by a dissolute population of 'poor whites,' are no match for the hardy and resolute populations of the Free States[39]," and if the South hoped for foreign aid it should be undeceived promptly: "Can any sane man believe that England and France will consent, as is now suggested, to stultify the policy ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... Restoration. The deterioration of men and of humour in the last reign is marked by the fact that ridicule was mostly directed not against vice as in Roman satire, but against undeserved misfortunes. Even virtue and learning did not afford immunity; Bishop Warburton writes: "This weapon (in the dissolute times of Charles II.) completed the ruin of the best minister of that age. The historians tell us that Chancellor Hyde was brought into his Majesty's contempt by this court argument. They mimicked his walk and gesture with a fire-shovel and bellows ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... curtains to parade before the shop's clientele, mostly composed of society butterflies. One man hovered attentive about the most beautiful of these, and whispered entertainingly as she scanned the gowns submitted to her choice. He was a dissolute—looking man, although faultlessly arrayed. His hair was thin, his eyes were cruel, and his face ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... of grave importance was held. The Naumkeag leader reported that a man named Morton had opened his settlement at Mount Wollaston, Mass. to all discontented servants and lawless people. He had changed the name to Merrie Mount and there he allowed reckless, dissolute living. Upon hearing of the loss of the cook, he suggested that he might ...
— Some Three Hundred Years Ago • Edith Gilman Brewster
... is noted that plays were privately performed here in Cromwell's time. In 1716, Addison married the dowager Countess of Holland and Warwick, and the estate passed to him, and he died at Holland House in 1719, having addressed to his stepson, the dissolute Earl of Warwick, the solemn words, "I have sent for you that you may see how a Christian can die." Two years later the young earl himself died. In 1762 the estate was sold to Henry Vassall Fox, Baron Holland, the famous Whig, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... these misdemeanours with wonderful tolerance when the culprits were from time to time brought before them, and the nuisance went on practically unchecked—the people being used to wild and dissolute ways and much brawling—and looking on it as one of ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... near an irresponsible power, coupled with the natural indifference with which the principal regards the dependant, had caused the English Ministry to fill too many of their posts of honor and profit, in the colonies, with needy and dissolute men of rank, or of high political connexions at home. The Province of New-York had, in this respect, been particularly unfortunate. The gift of it by Charles to his brother and successor, had left it without the protection of those charters and ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... "No more the dissolute opera dancers will dance to your fiddling, Stefani, while we starve in the town. Fiddler, valet, tutor, the rivers and seas of Russia are red. We roll east and west, and our emblem is red. Stem and branch! ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... a mere farce together, and the people were always stringing together lampoons in rhyme, and singing them in the streets. One still rings in my head, about a dissolute impoverished Marquis d'Elbeuf, one of the house of Lorraine, whom the prospect of pay induced to offer his ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... conversation. "It doesn't quite follow," he suggested. "You people don't, I regret to say, understand the destiny of this child. The fact is that even the old Hanlin scholar Mr. Cheng was erroneously looked upon as a loose rake and dissolute debauchee! But unless a person, through much study of books and knowledge of letters, so increases (in lore) as to attain the talent of discerning the nature of things, and the vigour of mind to fathom the Taoist reason as well as to comprehend the first principle, he is not in ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... claim it, "Row" and "Jim." They kept one of those grocery stores in which everything salable on the frontier was sold, and which seem to have changed their occupants as rapidly as sentry-boxes. "Jim" sold his share to an idle and dissolute man named Berry, and "Row" soon transferred his interest to Lincoln. It was easy enough to buy, as nothing was ever given in payment but a promissory note. A short time afterwards, one Reuben Radford, who kept another shop of the same kind, happened one evening to attract the dangerous attention ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... well, the toughening of the wilderness is not to be undone by fickle fingers, however dainty, nor a strong life blown out by a girl's caprice! Riders went clanking past. I did not turn. Let those that honoured dishonour doff hats to that company of loose women and dissolute men! Hortense was welcome to the womanish men and the mannish women, to her dandified lieutenant and foreign adventuresses and grand ambassadors, who bought English honour with the smiles of evil women. Coming to a high stone wall, I saw two riders galloping across the open field ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... I should say nah, Sir," the Scotch station-master made answer, with a grin, while he pulled off his cap of office and put on a dissolute Glengary. "They are a veery fine young kail, that always pays ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... one of the mechanics, who had acquired the rudiments of an education, applied to this dissolute mistress for permission to teach the children of her "servants." She readily consented, and, accordingly, a night- School was opened in the very woodshop in which he worked by day. Here young Flipper was initiated into the first of the three mysterious R's, viz., "reading ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... of nature to put a new man in his place. He had become a fixture that only dissolution could remove. Be it said, however, that dissolution did not have its common and accepted meaning when applied to Anderson Crow. For instance, in discoursing upon the obnoxious habits of the town's most dissolute rake—Alf Reesling—Anderson had more than once ventured the opinion that "he was carrying ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... the nearest being a dissolute uncle who outraged his vitals with inordinate quantities of the white man's whisky. He strove daily to walk with the gods, and incidentally, his feet sought shorter trails to the grave. When sober he suffered exquisite ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... had been avoided by the birth of this child, as there was no possible heir at all, and immense complications would ensue upon the death of the present ruler—the scurrilous rag even gave a resume of this ruler's dissolute life, and a broad hint that the child could in no case be his; but, as they pithily remarked, this added to the little prince's welcome in Ministerial circles, where the lady was greatly beloved and revered, ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... at him). If I had been the woman I ought, I would have taken Oswald into my confidence and said to him: "Listen, my son, your father was a dissolute man"— ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... and substituted the articles she had removed with the tin box that contained the dark compound Gypsy Nan, and she herself, as Gypsy Nan, had used to rob her face of youthfulness, and give it the grimy, dissolute and haggard aspect which was so simple and yet ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... wrath, and crying out, 'I know you, gentlemen, I know you!' were wont to reply, 'We beseech thee to hear us, good Lort'—'Good Lort deliver us!' (Lort was his Christian name.) As he was very free in his speculations upon all kinds of subjects, although by no means either dissolute or intemperate in his conduct, and as I was no less independent, our conversation and correspondence used to alarm our friend Hobhouse to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... them we saw many specialized types that had been lacking to the old city of a few months ago—sharp, keen, businesslike clerks whom one could not imagine at the rough work of the mines; loafers whom one could not imagine at any work at all; dissolute, hard-faced characters without the bold freedom of the road agents; young green-looking chaps who evidently had much to learn and who were exceedingly likely to pay their little fortunes, if not their lives, in ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... to the beat of drum and chant of "Te Deum" receives, one {42} afternoon, twenty naked converts into the folds of the church. Membertou is baptized Henry, after the King, and all his frowsy squaws renamed after ladies of the most dissolute court in Christendom. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... now possible to us—the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey. We have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must either now betray, or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... for reward; and that breaches of conjugal fidelity, even in the wife, should not be otherwise punished than by a few hard words, or perhaps a slight beating, as indeed is the case: But there is a scale in dissolute sensuality, which these people have ascended, wholly unknown to every other nation whose manners have been recorded from the beginning of the world to the present hour, and which no imagination could ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... a plot to try that; and we will yet have more tricks with Falstaff: his dissolute disease will scarce obey ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... some short time past, many fires have broke out within the town of Boston, and divers buildings have thereby been consumed: which fires have been designedly and industriously kindled by some villanous and desperate negroes, or other dissolute people, as appears by the confession of some of them (who have been examined by the authority), and many concurring circumstances; and it being vehemently suspected that they have entered into a combination to burn ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... came his inevitable laughter, and as he leant against the fence post, surrounded by the shattered marrow, he sat hopelessly gurgling, and choking, and shaking, and hugging his bottle, the very picture of a dissolute old Bacchanalian. (Cheon would have excelled as a rapid change artist). And as Cheon gurgled, and spluttered, and shook, the homestead rocked with yells of delight, while Brown of the Bulls rolled and writhed in a canvas lounge, gasping between his shouts: "Oh, chase ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... into foure parts. The first, the Castle of delight: Wherin is reported, the wretched end of wanton and dissolute liuing. The second, the Garden of Vnthriftinesse: Wherein are many sweete flowers, (or rather fancies) of honest loue. The thirde, the Arbour of Vertue: Wherein slaunder is highly punished, and vertuous Ladies and Gentlewomen, worthily commended. The fourth, the Ortchard ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... known of this interview except the general impression in the family that Mrs. Catron had successfully resisted a vague attempt at blackmail from one of her husband's former dissolute companions. Yet it is only fair to say that Mrs. Catron snapped up, quite savagely, two male sympathizers on this subject, and cried a good deal for two days afterward, and once, in the hearing of her sister-in-law, to that ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... in the likeness of a fair beautiful Cherubim. For there is nothing amongst mortal men more fair and admirable, than the chaste minds of this people. Know therefore, that with them there are no stews, no dissolute houses, no courtesans, nor anything of that kind. Nay they wonder (with detestation) at you in Europe, which permit such things. They say ye have put marriage out of office: for marriage is ordained a remedy for unlawful concupiscence; and natural concupiscence ...
— The New Atlantis • Francis Bacon
... come to ask your advice, father, rather than to confess the sins I have committed in the last week. Since I have come to live in London I have been drawn into the society of the dissolute and the impure." ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... "Ha!" exclaimed the dissolute Aristocrat, "whom have we here? Stay, pretty one, and let me see the fair countenance that I ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... in arm with his friend, the Duke of Wharton. It was a one-sided friendship. Lord Rotherby was but one of the many of his type who furnished a court, a valetaille, to the gay, dissolute, handsome, witty duke, who might have been great had he not preferred his vices ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... state down to the humble clerk. In this list of casualties, too, a friend and pupil turns up. Dr. Itowo Gambono was a fussy fellow, something of a politician and courtier, and never mindful of professional etiquette when it stood in the way of his advancement. His Imperial Majesty the Tycoon, a dissolute youth of nineteen, with three wives, is subject, of course, to various maladies. The court physician administered a prescription so nauseous that the royal patient kicked against the whole materia medica; and great was the consternation ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... nothing of this. He was wholly modern; dissolute enough for any epoch, but possessed of virtues that his contemporaries could not spell. A slave tried to poison him. Suetonius says he merely put the slave to death. The "merely" is to the point. Cato would have tortured him first. After Pharsalus he forgave everyone. ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... had been a man in years long before his uncle had acknowledged him as one; and that from his school-days to that hour, his uncle's roof has been a sanctuary to him from the contagion of the irreligious and dissolute. When, within a twelvemonth of our marriage, I found my husband, at that time when my father spoke of him, to have sinned against the Lord and outraged me by holding a guilty creature in my place, was I to doubt that it had been appointed to me to make the discovery, and that it was appointed ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... [11] popular address, and imagined virtues, attracted the public favor; the honorable peace which he had recently granted to the barbarians, diffused a universal joy; [12] his impatience to revisit Rome was fondly ascribed to the love of his country; and his dissolute course of amusements was faintly condemned in a prince of nineteen ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... lady, a little indignant, "in some memoirs the other day, that our court was a corrupt and dissolute court. It was a court of pleasure, if you like; but of pleasure that animated and refined, and put the world in good humour, which, after all, is good government. The most corrupt and dissolute courts on the continent of ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... Aureataland; but the peculiar position in which I stood gave to my mind an unusual activity of perception. Among this band of careless, drunken revelers I sat vigilant, restless, and impatient; feigning to take a leading part in their dissolute hilarity, I was sober, collected, and alert to my very finger-tips. I anxiously watched their bearing and expression. I led them on to speak of the President, rejoicing when I elicited open murmurs and covert threats at his base ingratitude ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... about, so as to keep himself always between them. 'Is it not enough, sir, that you come into my house like a thief in the night, or I should rather say, for we can never be too particular on the subject of Truth, like a thief in the day-time; bringing your dissolute companions with you, to plant themselves with their backs against the insides of parlour doors, and prevent the entrance or issuing forth of any of my household'—Mark had taken up this position, and held it quite unmoved—'but would you also strike at venerable ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... avenge the thievery and insults of the Agents who had for years systematically cheated them out of the greater part of their promised annuities, for which they had been induced to part with their lands; that now was the time to avenge the debauchery of their wives and daughters by the dissolute hangers-on who, as employees of the Indian Agents and licensed traders, had for years hovered around them like buzzards around the carcasses of ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... many a gay delight. The Goths of Essex-street may groan,{58} Turn up their eyes, and inward moan, They dare not here intrude; Dare not attack the rich and great, The titled vicious of the state, The dissolute and lewd. Vice only is, in some folks' eyes, Immoral, when in rags she lies, By poverty subdued; But deck her forth in gaudy vest, With courtly state and titled crest, She's every thing that's good. "Doth Kalpho break the Sabbath-day? Why, Kalpho hath no funds to pay; How ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... multimillionaires may wax still greater. Think of the great institution to whose hundreds of millions' income you contribute your hard-earned dollars, being farmed, milked, and squeezed by a pack of dissolute and greedy schemers and robbers more conscienceless and oppressive than any band of thugs in ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... was fast asleep when some warm fur softly caressed me, and waking up I understood that the dissolute rodent—almost bigger than a cat—had returned home in the small hours, just as if he had been provided ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... in their gift, or dishonestly retained the cures of souls in their own hands, careless whether the duties of the parishes could or could not be discharged; and that, finally, the vast majority of the monks themselves were ignorant, self-indulgent, profligate, worthless, dissolute. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... tainted atmosphere of Atheism which is slowly and insidiously spreading itself through all ranks, particularly among the upper classes, who, while becoming every day more lax in their morals and more dissolute of behavior, consider themselves far too wise and 'highly cultured' to believe in anything. It is a most unwholesome atmosphere, charged with the morbidities and microbes of national disease and downfall; ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of Fenton Johnson describes Ford as 'a clergyman at that time too well known, whose abilities, instead of furnishing convivial merriment to the voluptuous and dissolute, might have enabled him to excel among the virtuous and the wise.' Johnson's Works, viii. 57. Writing to Mrs. Thrale on July 8, 1771, he says, 'I would have been glad to go to Hagley [close to Stourbridge] ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... before. Such scenes are of too frequent occurrence to provoke comment. Observe that couple descending the steps; a handsome, almost noble-looking man, but upon whose countenance is stamped the mark of a dissolute life—upon his arm, a female, her face hidden from view by a dark veil. They advance to the bar. The gentleman whispers a word in the ear of one of the girls, a meaning smile flickers over her face as she ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... mother of Blanco, deeply distressed at the dissolute courses of her son, took the resolution (which proves more than anything else Revillagigedo's goodness, and the confidence which all classes had in him) to consult the viceroy as to the means of converting the young man to better habits. It seems as if ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... for no relygyous wymen [that] ben cladde in costlyous araye or in a wanton & pynched habytes but he calleth them in latyn. Pessimas meretrices et storta. Wherfore desyre ye to go in vyle & vnshapely vesture. that wanton & dissolute persones may rather be prouoked to scorne & laughe at you than to thynke euyl or desyre you / for they say not trouthe that do ensure themself with a glorye to kepe chastyte in a costely or ony shapely ...
— A Ryght Profytable Treatyse Compendiously Drawen Out Of Many and Dyvers Wrytynges Of Holy Men • Thomas Betson
... this is acknowledged by all his Countrymen, contradicted by none. Briefly, what is recounted of him, is, that when he first appeared to the World, and a Youth, he had a very fine treble Voice, admired and encouraged universally, but by a dissolute Life lost it, and his Fortune. Being reduced to the utmost Misery, he entered into the Service of a Composer, as a Copyist, where he made use of the Opportunity of learning the Rules of Composition, and became a good Proficient. After some Years, he recovered ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... impossible to trace back any circumstance which could, to speak advisedly, have led to such a course of deception as was practised by this boy; born of obscure parents, his father, a man of dissolute habits, was sub-chanter of the Cathedral, and also master of the free school in Pyle-street; this clever, but harsh, and dissolute man died in August, 1752, and the poet was born on the 20th of the following November.[3] ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... Bees there are Encomiums upon Stews, which I can assure you, Sir, is not true. What might have given a Handle to this Charge, must be a Political Dissertation concerning the best Method to guard and preserve Women of Honour and Virtue from the Insults of dissolute Men, whose Passions are often ungovernable. As in this there is a Dilemma between two Evils, which it is impracticable to shun both, so I have treated it with the utmost Caution, and begin thus: I am far from encouraging Vice, and should think it an unspeakable Felicity for ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... see her married, being themselves old, and not liking to leave a comparatively young widow alone in the world with so many children to look after. Their choice fell first upon a very undesirable person called Santagnolo, a young man of dissolute habits, ruined constitution, bad character, and no estate. She refused, with spirit, to sign the marriage contract; and a few months later wrote again to inform her guardian that a suitable match had been found in the person of ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... belongs to this last act of his life. Dissolute, treacherous, and inhuman as he was, the tyrant of Rimini had always encouraged literature, and delighted in the society of artists. He who could brook no contradiction from a prince or soldier, allowed the pedantic scholars of the sixteenth century to dictate to him in matters ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... only took part in all public entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he held a most luxurious and gallant court of his own; and all night long his palace was the scene of theatrical representations by dissolute women, with music and banqueting, so that he had a worse name than Sardanapalus of old." He sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700, while the Emperor was at war with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess (a brave and noble woman, the daughter of Ferrante ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Macko invited the Esquimaux to worship God with him; this seemed more pleasant and convenient than to remain under restraint with the brethren, for there they saw "Christian" sailors who allowed themselves to follow every species of sinful dissolute conduct. On their return they said, the Europeans have meetings yonder as you have, and they have ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... And the church is builded in the same place whereas our Lord appeared to St. Austin. Also in the same country was a young man that was lame, dumb, and deaf, and by the prayers of St. Austin he was made whole, and then soon after he was dissolute and wanton, and noyed and grieved the people with jangling and talking in the church. And then God sent to him his old infirmity again, because of his misguiding, and at the last he fell to repentance, and asked God forgiveness and St. ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... connection with certain families in New York, added to a good address, polished manners, and an unblushing assurance, had given him access to society at certain points, and of this facility he had taken every advantage. Too idle and dissolute for useful effort in society, he looked with a cold, calculating baseness to marriage as the means whereby he was to gain the position at which he aspired. Possessing no attractive virtues—no personal merits of any kind, his prospects of a connection, such as he wished to form, through the ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... youth, like Themistocles, his conduct had been wild and dissolute [143]; and with his father from a child, he had acquired, with the experience, something of the license, of camps. Like Themistocles also, he was little skilled in the graceful accomplishments of his countrymen; he cultivated neither the art of music, nor the brilliancies of Attic conversation; ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... very intimate friendship with another young man named Piers Gaveston. This Gaveston was a remarkably handsome youth, and very prepossessing and agreeable in his manners, and he soon gained a complete ascendency over the mind of young Edward. He was, however, very wild and dissolute in his habits, and the influence which he exerted upon Edward was extremely bad. As long as the common people only were injured by the lawless behavior of these young men, the king seems to have borne with them; but at ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the habits and taste of Sir James Turner, who appears, says Sir Walter Scott, ("Tales of a Grandfather," vol. ii. p. 211. Edin. 1829), by the account he gives of himself in his Memoirs to have been an unscrupulous plunderer, and other authorities describe him as a fierce and dissolute character. On coming to Glasgow, the way he took, as he himself tells us with considerable gusto, "to make the hardest headed Covenanter in the toune to forsake the kirk and side with the Parliament," was to quarter on suspected persons "two or three ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... of those who for a few years have presided over some distant province, but in that brief time, Verres-like, have used their opportunities so well as to return home oppressed with a wealth which life proves not long enough to spend, notwithstanding the aid of dissolute and spendthrift sons. Here have we a single source of evil equal to the ruin of any people. The morals of no community could be protected against such odds. It is a mountain torrent tearing its way through the fields of the husbandman, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... like an artist's or a woman's, and he knew the parts of that intricate mechanism known as a watch from the jewel to the finishing room. It was said he had a wife or two. He was forty-six, good-looking in a dissolute sort of way, possessing the charm of the wanderer, generous with his money. It was known that Tessie's barbs were permitted to prick him without retaliation because Tessie herself appealed ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... almost worthless rags, and pass out to seek the gin-shop; little houses with eagle-faced men peering curiously out at broken windows, or beckoning some wayfarer to enter and buy from their door; little houses piled inside with the cast-off garments of the poor and dissolute, and hung outside with smashed bonnets, old gowns, tattered shawls; flaunting-red, blue, and yellow, in the wind, emblematic of those poor wretches, on the opposite side, who have pledged here their last offerings, and blazed down into that stage of human degradation, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... enables us to effect a great saving of thought. The change is made to explain itself. History becomes a record of oscillations; we are always swinging backwards and forwards, pendulum fashion, from one extreme to another. The courtiers of Charles II. were too dissolute because the Puritans were too strict; Addison and Steele were respectable because Congreve and Wycherley were licentious; Wesley was zealous because the Church had become indifferent; the Revolution of 1789 was ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... before them to show them the road. He blamed his countrymen for often electing the same men to public offices. "You will appear," said he, "either to think that the office is not worth much, or else that there are not many worthy to fill it." Alluding to one of his enemies who led a dissolute and discreditable life, he said: "That man's mother takes it as a curse rather than a blessing if any one hopes that her son will survive her." When a certain man sold his ancestral estate, which was situated by the seashore, Cato pretended to admire him, as being more powerful ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... brawler!" "And thou, my young coxcomb of Orleans," he continued, addressing that dissolute Prince: "How dare you, sir, lead such a throng of revellers into the King's own gardens? Is not your own house of debauchery sufficient for Your Grace? Have a care, young sir, I am yet the King, and thou mayest ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... understanding and good qualities, by an ungoverned and diseasing love of unbecoming pleasures. It is strange, that in so old a world of the same continuing system always repeating the same lesson, any one should be ignorant that the dissolute vices are the destroyers of personal health, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... him so wide a notoriety. He received the rudiments of his education at the monastery of Caltagirone in Sicily, but was expelled from it for misconduct and disowned by his relations. He now signalized himself by his dissolute life and the ingenuity with which he contrived to perpetrate forgeries and other crimes without exposing himself to the risk of detection. Having at last got into trouble with the authorities he fled from Sicily, and visited in succession Greece, Egypt, Arabia, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... to the place by his brother, who took advantage of the occasion to point out to the youth the beauties of a country life, away from the temptations of cities. Also he remarked upon the folly of a young man spending the bloom of his years among the dissolute natives of the South Seas; and then casually inquired if the women down there were pretty. Then the younger Denison began to talk, and the elder brother immediately pulled up the horse from a smart trot into a ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... I that brother's keeper? He is not an Abel, Is strange to my roof, and no guest at my table: I know not his mates, we are not near each other, He swills in the pothouse, that dissolute brother!— But there's your example?—The drunkards can't see it, And if they are told of it, scorn it and flee it; Example?—Your children!—No doubt it is right To be to them always a law and a light; But moderate temperance ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... drank much deeper draughts of sack, than of the Heliconian stream; he was amongst the first of our poets who writ for bread, and in order the better to support himself, tho' he lived in an age far from being dissolute, viz. in that of the renowned Queen Elizabeth; yet he had recourse to the mean expedient of writing obscenity, and favouring the cause of vice, by which he no doubt recommended himself to the rakes about ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... I did not set about to wilfully deceive. The name I gave that night was the first that came into my thought,—the name of one whom I thought dead,—the dissolute companion of my shame. And when you questioned further, I used the knowledge that I gained from him to touch your heart to set me free; only, I swear, for that! But when you told me who you were, and I first saw the opening of another life before me—then—then—O, sir, if I was hungry, homeless, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of this city is decidedly hostile to color, and the daily acts of persecution in this city are manifest in the number of arrests and false imprisonment made where no shadow of criminality exists, while gangs of idle rebel soldiers and other dissolute rowdies insult, rob, and assault the helpless ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... and mortifications of the flesh. The younger Voss declared that Werner's religion was nothing but a poetic coquetting with God, Mary, the wounds of Christ, and the holy carbuncle (Karfunkelstein). He had been a man of dissolute life and had been divorced from three wives. "His enthusiasm for the restoration of the Middle Ages," says Heine, "was one-sided; it applied only to the hierarchical, Catholic phase of mediaevalism; feudalism did not so strongly appeal to his fancy. . . . Pater Zacharias ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... corrupt, depraved, sinful, base, demoralized, sinister, licentious, unprincipled, abandoned, graceless, vicious, incorrigible, unscrupulous, miscreant, reprobate, disreputable, rascal, scoundrel, profligate, knavish, naughty, malevolent, malicious, unrighteous, degrading, dissolute, libertine, hardened, wanton; injurious, prejudicial, pernicious, detrimental, baneful, unwholesome, baleful, deleterious, mischievous, noisome, malign, malignant, noxious, unpropitious, disadvantageous; offensive, serious, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... had been prepared to return to their Highnesses with the good news of the gold, and to escape from governing a dissolute people, who fear neither God, nor their King and Queen, being full of vices and wickedness. I could have paid the people in full with six hundred thousand,[374-4] and for this purpose I had four millions of tenths and somewhat ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... effigies of the illustrious and the great,—kings, rulers, statesmen, poets, patriots, explorers, and scientists; I trampled upon the graves of some; I stood before the tombs of kings, some dead twelve centuries; there the wisest and merriest of monarchs and the most pious and dissolute of kings slept side by side. As illustrating the vanity of triumphs of personal glory, on one side of the Chapel of Henry VII, rests Mary, Queen of Scots, and almost directly opposite, all that remains of Elizabeth, ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... ghastly revellers they were that sat round that table!—My gudesire kend mony that had long before gane to their place, for often had he piped to the most part in the hall of Redgauntlet. There was the fierce Middleton, and the dissolute Rothes, and the crafty Lauderdale; and Dalyell, with his bald head and a beard to his girdle; and Earlshall, with Cameron's blude on his hand; and wild Bonshaw, that tied blessed Mr Cargill's limbs till the blude sprang; and Dunbarton Douglas, the twice-turned traitor ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... the glories of their last dance more fully described; strange ladies rustle in and say, "I want a hundred lady's cards printed at once, please," which is manifestly part of an Editor's duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for employment as a proof-reader. And, all the time, the telephone-bell is ringing madly, and Kings are being killed on the Continent, and Empires are saying, "You're another," and Mister ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... the want of vital piety evinced by some of their number, still the present deplorable condition of the Sandwich Islands is by no means wholly chargeable against them. The demoralizing influence of a dissolute foreign population, and the frequent visits of all descriptions of vessels, have tended not a little to increase the evils alluded to. In a word, here, as in every case where civilization has in any way been ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... into Cooktown humping his swag, smoking a clay pipe, and looking exceedingly tired, dirty, and disreputable generally. However, all might have gone well even then had not Mrs. Aubrey Denison, the brother's wife, unduly interfered and lectured Tom on his "idle and dissolute life," as she called it, and made withering remarks about the low tastes of sailors other than captains of mail steamers or officers in the Navy. Tom, who intended to borrow L10 from his brother to pay his passage back to Sydney to look for a ship, ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... spend fortunes on those who pleased him and did him nothing but injury, and would let his faithful lovers and servants go starve. He lived always, you would say, only for the flesh and the pride of the eyes; he was careless and selfish and ungrateful; in short, he was as dissolute as a man could be, or, rather, as dissolute as a king could be, and that is much more. Yet for all this, he was a man of an extraordinary power, if he had cared to use it. It was said of him that "he could, ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson |
