"Profligacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of which his daughter was the heiress, and as I fished her out of the water upon a pleasure-party, and swam with her to shore, we became naturally intimate, and Colonel M'Alister forgot, on account of the service rendered to him, the dreadful reputation for profligacy which I enjoyed ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the parabolani, a sort of organised guild of district visitors.... And in their company he saw that afternoon the dark side of that world, whereof the harbour-panorama had been the bright one. In squalid misery, filth, profligacy, ignorance, ferocity, discontent, neglected in body, house, and soul, by the civil authorities, proving their existence only in aimless and sanguinary riots, there they starved and rotted, heap on heap, the masses of the old Greek population, close to the great food-exporting ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... present count was a distant relation of the family; he resided constantly in Denmark, and his son follows his example. They have not been in possession of the estate many years; and their predecessor lived near the town, introducing a degree of profligacy of manners which has been ruinous to the inhabitants in every respect, their fortunes not being ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... comedy in which the filthiest subjects are discussed in the vilest language; to see all that is foolish or lascivious in your own sex exaggerated with a malignant licence, which makes a young and beautiful woman an epitome of all the vices, uniting the extreme of masculine profligacy with the extreme of feminine silliness. Will you encourage by your presence the wretches who libel your sex? Will you sit smiling to see your sisters in ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... and the sound of impoverished tattle. O misery of semi-provincial fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired of an existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being utterly vapid! How many fashionable women at the end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate monotony of dressing, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... therefore He loved to bind up the bruised and the broken-hearted; therefore His breath fanned the spark which seemed dying out in the wick of the expiring taper, when men thought that it was too late, and that the hour of hopeless profligacy was come. It was that feature in His character, that tender, hoping, encouraging spirit of His which the prophet Isaiah fixed upon as characteristic. "A bruised reed ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... this moment, bore no bad resemblance to the infernal regions. The tables, forms, and windows were crowded, and drunkenness, ruffianism, and profligacy, were revelling in all the demoniac delights of mischief. Shouts, roars, and yells, shook the house, for the Scot to accept the challenge. Ben's voice in the din, was like a ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... second occasion, Monsieur de la Chanterie arrived almost dying, and with what an illness! She nursed him and saved his life. Then she tried to bring him to better sentiments and a decent life. After promising all that angel asked, the jacobin plunged back into frightful profligacy, and finally escaped the hands of justice only by again taking refuge with his wife, in whose care ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... tour through England in a course remote from the great roads, and going to no inns, take such, entertainment only as he might find in the cottage of laborers, he would have as much cause to complain of the rudeness of the people, and more of their drunkenness and profligacy than in these backwoods: although in England the poor are a part of society whose institutions are matured by the experience of two thousand years. But in their manners and morals, but especially in their knowledge and proud independence of mind, they exhibit a contrast so ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... by making him his son-in-law. He accordingly induced him to divorce Marcella and marry his daughter Julia (21), the widow of Marcellus, equally celebrated for her beauty and abilities and her shameless profligacy. In 19 Agrippa was employed in putting down a rising of the Cantabrians in Spain. He was appointed governor of Syria a second time (17), where his just and prudent administration won him the respect and good-will of the provincials, especially the Hebrew population. His last public ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... can describe the inveterate tenacity with which a drunkard's habits cling to him through life? He may repent—he may reform—he may look with actual abhorrence upon his past profligacy; but amid all this reformation and compunction, who can tell the moment in which the base and ruinous propensity may not recur, triumphing over resolution, remorse, shame, everything, and prostrating its ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... in all parts of the world, men who, by profligacy and hard-drinking, have brought themselves to a goal; yet, if we consult the register of the prison, it does not appear that any of these habitual drunkards die by being forced to lead sober lives." And he contends, that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... Archdukes and the Medici spent Carnival there. Carlo II. died, like his father, with suspicions of poisoning, and undoubted evidences of debauchery. He was a generous and amiable prince; and, though a shameless profligate, was beloved by his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his profligacy was not a reproach. ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... local Legislature, for several successive years previous to 1834, to ameliorate the system of slavery, seconded by the labors of clergymen and missionaries, teachers and catechists, to improve the character of the slaves, failed to arrest the current of vice and profligacy. What few reformations were effected were very partial, leaving the more enormous immoralities as shameless and defiant as ever, up to the very day of abolition; demonstrating the utter impotence of all attempts to purify the streams while ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, and of no after consequence, with the severe ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... remarked, with a shake of the head. Master Hugh Calveley, he went on to say, was a strict Puritan, austere in his life, and morose in manner; an open railer against the licence of the times, and the profligacy of the court minions,—in consequence of which he had more than once got himself into trouble. He abhorred all such sports as were now going forward; and had successfully interfered with the parish priest, Sir Onesimus, who was somewhat of a precisian himself, to prevent the setting ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... Glasgow University, where he was apprenticed to Mr. Gordon, a surgeon. Gordon, again, was an excellent man, appreciated by Smollett himself in after days, and the odious Potion of "Roderick Random" must, like his rival, Crab, have been merely a fancy sketch of meanness, hypocrisy, and profligacy. Perhaps the good surgeon became the victim of that "one continued string of epigrammatic sarcasms," such as Mr. Colquhoun told Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Smollett used to play off on his companions, "for which no talents could compensate." Judging by Dr. Carlyle's Memoirs ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... of Malta—without fear, but (though, perhaps, the best of its class) not without reproach, has no place here. Its ethnology belongs to the different countries which it dignified by its valour, or dishonoured by its profligacy. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... a description of the state of the Roman Empire when the early Caesars were on the throne, and when it was undisputed mistress of the world. You pass down the line of the Emperors with their strange alternations of greatness and profligacy, descending occasionally to criminal lunacy. When the Empire went rotten it began at the top, and it took centuries to corrupt the man behind the spear. Neither did a religion of peace affect him much, for, in spite of the adoption of Christianity, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... whom the river had been heretofore a source of support, were neither slow in seeing the cause nor in publishing the consequences to the world. Thus stood matters: dissoluteness of life on the one hand, distress on the other; profligacy and poverty, extravagance and starvation, ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... clearer to his mind than the guilt of marrying without love. No man could have spoken more strongly, more solemnly than he, on the presumption, the dishonourableness, the profligacy, of such an act: but he was unaware how a man may be betrayed into it while he has neither presumption, nor treachery, nor profligacy in his thoughts. Hope went through a world of meditation during the days of his close retirement; some of ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... misconduct, the whole catalogue of our misfortunes? If such men as these are to unite for the detested purposes of ambition, what security can we have for any thing valuable, that yet remains to us? Is not this the very utmost reach of frontless profligacy? What dependence after this is to be placed in the man, who has thus given the lie to all his professions, and impudently flown in the face of that honest and unsuspecting virtue, which had hitherto given him credit for ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... spent thousands of dollars daily, he literally cast money to the winds. His notoriety spread to the furthermost limits of the country; the daily papers, the weeklies, the monthlies printed exaggerated accounts of his profligacy. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... cursing and crackling wit of the Rochesters and Sedleys: John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, and Sir Charles Sedley, were both friends of Charles II, and were noted for biting wit and profligacy. Green, in his Short History of the English People, thus describes them: "Lord Rochester was a fashionable poet, and the titles of some of his poems are such as no pen of our day could copy. Sir Charles Sedley was a fashionable wit, and the foulness of his words made even the porters in ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... ashamed of his conduct towards her, and hath spoken to me many times with sincere remorse for that, as with fond love for her many amiable qualities. He owned to having treated her very ill; and that at this time his life was one of profligacy, gambling, and poverty. She became with child of you; was cursed by her own parents at that discovery; though she never upbraided, except by her involuntary tears, and the misery depicted on her countenance, the author ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... listened intently, re-perused, throughout, this record of the stone; and finding that the general purport consisted of nought else than a treatise on love, and likewise of an accurate transcription of facts, without the least taint of profligacy injurious to the times, he thereupon copied the contents, from beginning to end, to the intent of charging the world to hand them down as ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... England largely fails in this function; as witness in India godless civilians; as witness on every palm-shaded coral beach in the South Seas, profligate beach-combers, drunken sailors, unscrupulous traders; as witness the dying out of races by diseases imported with profligacy and gin from this land. 'A dew from the Lord!'; say rather a malaria from the devil! 'By you,' said the Prophet, 'is the name of God blasphemed among the Gentiles.' By Englishmen the missionary's efforts are, in a hundred cases, neutralised, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... which Howel reports in one of his entertaining letters. This Pope, who, says the candid historian, Mosheim, "to a profound ignorance of all those things which it was necessary for a Christian bishop to know, joined the most shameless indolence and the most notorious profligacy," abandoned his person, his dignity, and his government to the disposal of Donna Olympia Maldachini, the widow of his brother. The portrait of the Pope may be seen in the Doria Gallery at Rome; for it is still esteemed an honor by the noble family to which the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Chinese with hatred and contempt,—it is no wonder that they are hated in return and that their conduct has done much to justify the Chinese distrust of the foreigner. The foreign settlements in the port cities of China are notorious for their profligacy. Intemperance and immorality, gambling and Sabbath desecration run riot. When after his return from a long journey in Asia, the Rev. Dr. George Pentecost was asked— "What are the darkest spots in ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... swollen with the pride of his long line of royal ancestry. It was not Vindex with a powerless province at his back, nor I with a single legion that freed Rome's shoulders of that burden: it was his own cruelty and profligacy. And that was before there was any precedent for the conviction ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... child of his daughter, born of fornication, and cast away by her, as living in adultery. I deeply lamented the circumstance, but felt the obligation to defer the administration of the sacrament, from the conviction that the profligacy of the case called for an example which might deter others among the Swiss from acting in the like manner; and at the same time be a public expression of disapprobation, on my part, of such unblushing depravity, in the eyes of a numerous young people ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... a person in seedy raiment, whilst to matters of much higher importance they are shamelessly indifferent. Not so Lavengro; he will do anything that he deems convenient, or which strikes his fancy, provided it does not outrage decency, or is unallied to profligacy; is not ashamed to speak to a beggar in rags, and will associate with anybody, provided he can gratify a laudable curiosity. He has no abstract love for what is low, or what the world calls low. He sees that many things which the world looks down upon are valuable, so he prizes ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... undeniable that much anger and distress is raised in many quarters by the least attempt to state plainly what every one well knows, of Burns's profligacy, and of the fatal consequences of his marriage. And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary reasons. For, first, there is, in our drunken land, a certain privilege extended to drunkenness. In ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tendency to profanity thus engendered afforded by the inexcusable nomenclature of the streets and avenues,—a nomenclature in which the resources of the alphabet, the arithmetic, the names of all the States of the Union, and the Presidents as well, are exhausted with the most unsystematic profligacy. A man not gifted with supernatural acuteness, in striving to get from Brown's Hotel to the General Post-Office, turns a corner and suddenly finds himself nowhere, simply because he is everywhere,—being at the instant upon three separate streets and two ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... they heard even to speak. They appear to have been enacted merely as a compliment to decency, and they remain in the statute-book as "idle as painted ships upon a painted ocean." The dens of debauch keep open doors night and day; the saloons of profligacy send out their cards of invitation; the gambler rattles his triumphant dice; but excursive policemen never see, and vigilant magistrates never hear! Some provision of nature has imparted a very singular quality ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... the breast, may win the faculties of the understanding to advance its purpose, and to direct to that object every thing that thought or human knowledge can effect; but, to succeed, it must maintain a solitary despotism in the mind;—each rival profligacy must stand aloof, or wait in abject vassalage upon its throne. For, the Power, that has not forbad the entrance of evil passions into man's mind, has, at least, forbad their union;—if they meet they defeat their object, and their conquest, or their attempt at it, is tumult. Turn ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... scandalize it. London, says Latimer, was never so full of ill; charity was waxen cold in it. "Oh, London, London," cries this earnest old man, "repent! repent! for I think God more displeased with London, than he ever was with the city of Nebo."[9] Such was the profligacy of its youth, that he marvels the earth gaped not to swallow it up. There were many that denied the immortality of the soul, and the existence of a heaven or a hell.[10] Manly sports and pastimes had been exchanged for the gaming-table. Divorces, even amongst the inferior classes of society, were ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... whose way was clear and easy in the struggles of his day, when reform and free trade in corn were obviously desirable and necessary—writes with contemptuous severity of the profligacy of politicians from the Restoration to the accession of the House of Hanover. "One who in such an age is determined to attain civil greatness must renounce all thought of consistency. Instead of affecting immutability in the midst of mutation, he must always be on the watch ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... what is called a character to lose. But as soon as he comes into a great city, he is sunk in obscurity and darkness. His conduct is observed and attended to by nobody; and he is, therefore, very likely to neglect it himself, and to abandon himself to every sort of low profligacy and vice. He never emerges so effectually from this obscurity, his conduct never excites so much the attention of any respectable society, as by his becoming the member of a small religious sect. He from that moment acquires a degree of consideration which he never had before. All his brother sectaries ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... man's comment as he talked with me. "The Rooshians were good fighters—fought 'and to 'and with the butt of their muskets—and if they 'ad 'ad good commanders the Japs would never have won," said an Englishman who had seen service in India. A railway man also told me of the debauchery and profligacy of the Russian officers, disreputable women travelling regularly with them to and fro, drunkenness being also common. About the same charges were reported to me by a Japanese officer. In fact, it is said that the Japanese contrived to get a very considerable ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... very unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of tranquillity and order. The factions,' he added with fierce sarcasm, 'were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission to the laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. They endeavoured to establish distinctions, by the belief of which they hoped to keep the spirit of murder safely bottled up and sealed for their own purposes, without endangering themselves ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... the eighteenth century moral conditions in this far southern colony might have been far better. Although Louis XIV, the Grand Monarch, had been dead practically a century, he had left as a heritage a passion for pleasure and merry-making that was causing the French nobility to revel in profligacy and vice. It must be admitted that many of the French colonists in America were apt pupils of their European relatives, while the Creole population, born of at least an unmoral union, was, to say the least, in no ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... purposes, they addressed a letter to Preston, remonstrating with him for his servile attachment to the minister; on which he confidently returned an answer, assuring them that he was as fully convinced of the vileness and profligacy of the Duke of Buckingham's character as any man could be, but that there was no way to come at him but by the lowest flattery, and that it was necessary for the glory of God that such instruments should be made use of as could be had; and for that reason, and that alone, he showed that ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... sensational tale reeks with vulgar portrayals of it. In the mean time, the reign of vice is thought daily to grow more common and more shameless; the demoralization of our great cities, in the flaunting openness of their profligacy, seems to be annually bringing them nearer to an equality with the debauched cities of pagan antiquity. The depravity of an abandoned life is supposed to gather constantly an enlarging class of victims, and to diffuse its undermining evils more ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... the bosom of a country like that, genius and character and talents [Muir, Margarot, &c.,] should be banished to a distant and barbarous soil, condemned to pine under the horrid communion of vulgar vice, and base-born profligacy, twice the period that ordinary calculation gives to the continuance of human life! But I will not further press any idea that is painful to me, and I am sure must be painful to you; I will only say, you have now an example of which neither ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... minds of his soldiers and to instil into them the high principles of chivalry. "A just war," he observed, "is often rendered wicked and disastrous by the manner in which it is conducted; for the righteousness of the cause is not sufficient to sanction the profligacy of the means, and the want of order and subordination among the troops may bring ruin and disgrace upon the best-concerted plans." But we cannot describe the character and conduct of this renowned commander in more ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... of the accuser. Her sentiments were espoused by all the company, except the French lady of pleasure, who, thinking the credit of the sisterhood concerned in the affair, bitterly inveighed against the profligacy of the age, and particularly the base and villainous attempts of man upon the chastity of the weaker sex; saying, with a look of indignation directed to the painter, that for her own part she should ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... one, sink into insignificance. God's hatred of sin, and his holy abhorrence of it in every form, when contemplated in the abstract, may have a response from the head of him who compares it with his own detestation of meanness, and fraud, and profligacy; but when this hatred of vice in the Almighty is viewed in connection with gospel truth, and is contemplated in its effects upon One to whom it was only imputed, it begins to wear a very different complexion; and, as a motive to beware of that which God is determined to punish, and ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... considered the state of manners at Athens just at the moment of his appearance upon the stage of public life, imagine what an impression such a phenomenon must have made upon a people so lost in profligacy and sensuality of all sorts. What wonder that the unprincipled though gifted Demades, the very personification of the witty and reckless libertinism of the age, should deride and scoff at this strange man, living as nobody else lived, ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... species of transgression; and had the Gentiles but followed the example of their own heavenly hierarchy, they might have felt themselves warranted in pursuing a course either of the most diabolical oppression, or of the most abominable profligacy. [9:2] ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... shamelessness among many in what is called high life that calls for vehement protest. The strife with many seems to be how near they can come to the verge of indecency without falling over. The tide of masculine profligacy will never turn back until there is a decided reformation in womanly costume. I am in full sympathy with the officer of the law who, at a levee in Philadelphia last winter, went up to a so-called lady, and because of her sparse and incompetent apparel, ordered her either ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... it no compensation also for the vices incident to slavery, that they are, to a great degree, secured against the temptation to greater crimes, and more atrocious vices, and the miseries which attend them; against their own disposition to indolence, and the profligacy which is its ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... one at a time the passions, which, spread among many, would have hurt only myself." This is vague and metaphysical enough; but it bears corroborative intimations, that the impression which he early made upon me was not incorrect. He was vain of his experiments in profligacy, but they never ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... discover so often in the general order of the divine government; namely, to be reserved as a reward and a stimulant to the growing progress of mankind? They may have been suffered to remain in a state of savage life as a penalty for the profligacy of their people, or they may have been condemned to their mysterious obscurity until the impress of British power on India and China should have been deeply made, and England should be led, by the possession of India and the opening ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... figures for 1875 and 1907 on financial matters and on the basis of these claims that the profligacy of Reconstruction finances is not proven. The manifest unfairness of taking figures for 1907 may be passed over; but the necessary basis of comparison must be wider than this. Nor do his conclusions agree with any others that I have seen, nor, which is more important, with other statistics. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... nothing of the notorious profligacy of his character; nothing of the reckless extravagance with which he has wasted an ample fortune; nothing of the disgusting intemperance which has sometimes caused him to reel in our streets;—but I aver that he has not been faithful to our interests,—has ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... kind. What I would have said to one of the other sex you know already. Her book too (as a she book) is not a bad one; but she evidently don't know the Italians, or rather don't like them, and forgets the causes of their misery and profligacy (Matthews and Forsyth are your men for truth and tact), and has gone over Italy in company—always a bad plan: you must be alone with people to know them well. Ask her, who was the 'descendant of Lady M.W. Montague,' and by ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... from Durie at Basel, Oct. 3, 1654:—"As regards Morus's vices and profligacy, Hotton does not seem to entertain that opinion of him; I know, however, that others speak very ill of him, that his hands are against nearly everybody and everybody's hands against him, and that many ministers even of the Walloon Synod are doing their best to have him ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... return for their obsequious servility, must be humoured and satisfied. Whenever such a usurpation occurs, all the maxims upon which the welfare and freedom of a community normally rest are annihilated, and the reign of profligacy and of tyranny inevitably supervenes: a regime born in party passion must live for purely ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... of one of the old noble houses, was consecrated pope as Benedict IX, A.D. 1033, according to some authorities, at the age of ten or twelve years. He became noted for his profligacy and was driven from his throne, the Romans electing, as Pope Sylvester III, John, Bishop of Sabina, who is said to have paid a high price for the dignity. Benedict, however, regained the papal seat shortly afterward, and drove Sylvester into a refuge, but later sold the office to John ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... the pace that kills. Society, which used to jog along comfortably, like the old Brighton stage, at ten miles an hour, now goes as fast as the Brighton express. In my mother's time poor Lord Byron was held up to the execration of respectable people as the type of cynical profligacy; in my own time people talked about Lord Waterford; but, my dear, the young men now are all Byrons and Waterfords, without the genius of the one or the generosity of the other. We are all going at steeplechase rate. Social success without ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the Borders, called Geordy Bourne, of somewhat subordinate rank, was a similar picture of profligacy. He had fallen into the hands of Sir Robert Carey, then Warden of the English East Marches, who gives the following account of his ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... profligate persons of the kingdom, without choice of rank or mind, and with whom the subjects of conversation are only horses, drinking-matches, bawdy houses, and in terms the most vulgar. The young nobility, who begin by associating with him, soon leave him, disgusted with the insupportable profligacy of his society; and Mr. Fox, who has been supposed his favorite, and not over nice in the choice of company, would never keep his company habitually. In fact, he never associated with a man of sense. He has not a single idea of justice, morality, religion, or of the rights ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... warehouses, replenished with merchandise—were reduced to ashes. The Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames and threatened destruction to our navy, and even to the government,—filling the court and country with terror. Still profligacy reigned in the court and country—a fearful persecution raged against all who refused to attend the church service. Thousands perished in prison, and multitudes were condemned to expatriate themselves. The timid and irresolute abandoned the faith,—desolation spread ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... endured with patience the wrongs that their misguided judgment led them to believe were salutary to their eternal welfare. But it ought to be observed, that the immorality of the Romans was greatly exaggerated. Individuals redeemed by their merits the reproach of universal profligacy; and strangers, by being on their guard against the moral contagion, suffered a less dangerous taint than in the Atheistical coteries of Paris. Many, in consequence, who came prepared to be disgusted with the degenerated Romans, often ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... Sarah, what is a fellow to do?" His profligacy was failing him rapidly. "What is the use of playing fast and loose with a ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... proceeding from precipitancy, where a man acts without deliberating at all; the other from feebleness,—where he deliberates, but where the result of deliberation is too weak to countervail his appetite (VII.). Intemperance or profligacy is more vicious, and less curable than Incontinence. The profligate man is one who has in him no principle (archae) of good or of right reason, and who does wrong without afterwards repenting of it; the incontinent man has the good principle in him, but it is ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... to that character which I wished to become. I know nothing which would so polish the manners as continental intercourse, were it not for the English debauches with which that intercourse connects one. English profligacy is always coarse, and in profligacy nothing is more contagious than its tone. One never keeps a restraint on the manner when one unbridles the passions, and one takes from the associates with whom the latter are indulged, the air and the ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... you had been born from my head, Clitipho, just as they say Minerva was from Jove's, none the more on that account would I suffer myself to be disgraced by your profligacy.[103] ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... same principles of feudal dependence were applied to its lands as to those of the nobles; and during the vacancy of a see or abbey its profits, like those of a minor, were swept into the royal hoard. William's profligacy and extravagance soon tempted him to abuse this resource, and so steadily did he refuse to appoint successors to prelates whom death removed that at the close of his reign one archbishoprick, four bishopricks, and eleven abbeys were found to ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... to do in two centuries, although your king was in her pay against you. She will instantly be our ally, and soon our scholar. Afterward she will sell her crown jewels and her church jewels, which cover the whole kingdom, and will derive unnatural strength from her vices and her profligacy. You ought to have conciliated us as your ally, and to have had no other, excepting Holland and Denmark. England could never have, unless by her own folly, more than one enemy. Only one is near enough to strike her; and that one is down. All her wars for six hundred years have not done this; ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... proceeding upon my errand, into the character of the heirs who had inherited the property of Elwood Henderson and Christopher Bigelow, and found that in each case there was one among the rest who was well known for his profligacy and reckless expenditure. It was a significant discovery, and increased, if possible, my interest in running down this nefarious trafficker in ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... pleasures and vicious luxuries. I say vicious, because all moral writers concur in calling those sensualities vices, as free indulgence in them leads to a state of total dissipation of mind under which scarcely any profligacy seems a crime. The writer continues: "There are a variety of other things which are heavily excised, the use of which might be prudently dropped; and which are not essential either to the health or comfort of mankind. Speaking for myself, I can say, I do not recommend ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... and I fell so readily into their ways, that though only a young lad of seventeen, I was the master of them all in daring wickedness; though there were some among them who, I promise you, were far advanced in the science of every kind of profligacy. I should have been under the provost-marshal's hands, for a dead certainty, had I continued much longer in the army: but an accident occurred which took me out of the English service ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... living images, as animated representatives of the Divinity? Are those monarchs, then, who are habitually unjust, who wrest without remorse the bread from the hands of a famished people, to administer to the profligacy of their insatiable courtiers—to pamper the luxury of the vile instruments of their enormities, atheists? Are, then, those ambitious conquerors, who not contented with oppressing their own slaves, carry desolation, spread misery, deal out death among the subjects of others, atheists? Do we ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... the only son of a wealthy man. Until he was twenty-one he was brought up in an atmosphere of such luxury as we in England can hardly imagine. Americans are fond of going 'one better' than the rest of the world. In some cases the extravagance of their moneyed classes amounts to profligacy. Hallett's father was a notorious example for many years, then—just as Edward came of age, there was a colossal smash; he lost everything, practically fretted himself to death, left the lad to fight ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... them all—they were called forth by a scornful indignation at the degeneracy of the age as represented by the rich and powerful, or even by certain leading individuals. The appearance of such a kind of literature denoted greater activity in society, an increase of profligacy among some, and of moral sensibility among others. Satire was a social scourge. It was not a philosophical investigation into the nature and origin of vice, but a denunciation of it as inimical to the interests of society. It was practical not theoretical—and sought to bring ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... a single page, does M. Merimee place before us a picture of the times, with their mixture of fanaticism and irreligion, their shameless political profligacy and private immorality. Bernard de Mergy cannot prevail with his brother to return to the conventicle: so he accompanies him to mass—not to pray, but hoping to obtain a glimpse of Madame de Turgis, whom he has already seen masked in the street, and whose graceful form and high reputation for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... silver. His guiding principle was embodied in a remark he made in his inaugural address, "He serves his party best who serves the country best." He and his accomplished wife had a social and moral influence in Washington of no mean value. The Civil War had been followed by a period of corruption, profligacy, and personal immorality. In politics, if a man were sound on the main question, which meant if he were a thorough-going Republican, all else was forgiven. Under Hayes account was again taken of character and ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... dutiful aspiration, we have much in the condition of the world around us to warn and rouse us to a vigorous and united effort to arrest the increasing tide of sin and crime. The developments of a grossly evil spirit at the present day fill us with horror and alarm; the profligacy and wanton cruelty of which we hear so many instances, make us tremble for our ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... moved. Nina but rightly judged him, when she distinguished the aspiring Spaniard from the barbarous and unrelenting voluptuaries of Italy. Despite the profligacy that stained his sacred robe—despite all the acquired and increasing callousness of a hard, scheming, and sceptical man, cast amidst the worst natures of the worst of times—there lingered yet in his soul much of the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... only for their benign influence on the happiness of life in all its stages and classes, and of society in all its forms, but as the only means of preserving our Constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, the profligacy of corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments; if a love of equal laws, of justice, and humanity in the interior administration; if an inclination to improve agriculture, ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... wickedness," commented Busy sententiously, "in spite of my Lord Protector, who of a truth doth turn his back on the Saints and hath even allowed the great George Fox and some of the Friends to languish in prison, whilst profligacy holds undisputed sway. Master Courage, meseems those mugs need washing a second time," he added, with sudden irrelevance. "Take them to the kitchen, and do not let me set eyes on thee until they shine like pieces of ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... other Arminian dogmas of creature-merit, had been almost universally propagated and stamped with the pretended infallible authority of Rome. By the translation and circulation of the Holy Scriptures among the people, the idolatries, impositions and profligacy of the priesthood were extensively discovered. And after years of deference to ecclesiastical authority, conditional proposals of submission to the Pope upon conviction of error in his theses, or conscientious belief, Luther in time arrived at the conclusion ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... in a low tone with the priest. From him he learned more of the evil name of this man whom they followed. His house at Shalford was a den of profligacy and vice. No woman could cross that threshold and depart unstained. In some strange fashion, inexplicable and yet common, the man, with all his evil soul and his twisted body, had yet some strange fascination for women, some mastery over them which compelled them ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... spirits that ever intrigued its way into eminent place and power. The abbe was of low origin and despicable exterior, totally destitute of morals, and perfidious in the extreme; but with a supple, insinuating address, and an accommodating spirit, tolerant of all kinds of profligacy in others. Conscious of his own inherent baseness, he sought to secure an influence over his pupil, by corrupting his principles and fostering his vices; he debased him, to keep himself from being despised. Unfortunately he succeeded. To the early precepts ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... Galen marks the beginning of the decline of medical science in ancient times, and this decline was contemporaneous with the overthrow of the Roman State. As everybody knows, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire resulted from the profligacy and incapacity of the emperors, luxurious living and vice among the people, tyranny of an overbearing soldiery at home, and the attacks of barbarian foes gradually increasing in strength. Rome fell ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... that science (some of whom, in the persons of our illustrious colleagues, Edwin Chadwick and William Fair, are with us in this place at this moment), ere yet these heralds had summoned the world to answer for its profligacy of life, the health and strength of mankind was undergoing improvement. One or two striking facts must be sufficient in the brief space at my disposal to demonstrate this truth. In England, from 1790 ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... found of growing wood. All this, and more, the gods have sent, And I am heartily content. Oh son of Maia, that I may These bounties keep is all I pray. If ne'er by craft or base design I've swelled what little store is mine, Nor mean, it ever shall be wrecked By profligacy or neglect; If never from my lips a word Shall drop of wishes so absurd As,—'Had I but that little nook Next to my land, that spoils its look! Or—'Would some lucky chance unfold A crock to me of hidden gold, As to the man whom Hercules ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... Curran, we must probe to the bottom the corruptions and baseness of that society, which deserves to be branded as among the most base and the most corrupt that history has hitherto described. The temptations which England employed, the horrible corruption and profligacy she fostered, must be fully known, if we desire to do justice to the men who came out ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... wish, however, to trace the course of my miserable profligacy here—a profligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded the vigilance of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and added, in a somewhat unusual degree, to my bodily stature, when, after a week of soulless dissipation, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... landholders, etc., in the colony, such steps as should be adjudged necessary would be instantly pursued. Such being the conduct of these people, even in a measure where their own personal interests were so essentially concerned, can it be wondered at, that so much profligacy prevailed in ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... cruise, its natural deformity became so apparent as to cause the rest of the officers to look with fear and astonishment upon one, in whom the gifts of extraordinary talents seemed to have been lavished, only to become blended with cunning, artfulness and licentious profligacy, whose disposition was mean and avaricious, and whose temper, though not violent, was cruel, ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker
... This led to their both being envied and belied; for it was said that Perikles, with the connivance of Pheidias, carried on intrigues with Athenian ladies, who came ostensibly to see the works. This accusation was taken up by the comic poets, who charged him with great profligacy, hinting that he had an improper passion for the wife of Menippus, his friend, and a lieutenant-general in the army. Even the bird-fancying of Pyrilampes, because he was a friend of Perikles, was misrepresented, and he was said to give peacocks to the ladies who granted their favours to Perikles. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... in all matters of consequence, the male sex must ever lead, and the other follow; but surely they have something in their power, were they to exert themselves. They ought never, by a silent approbation, to encourage looseness and profligacy among the men, and thus be accessary to the prostitution of numbers in the lower rank of their own sex; and if they have it not in their power to reform their gallants altogether, they can at least make them throw the mask of decency ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... at the close of the war had returned to the city. Petronius had for him a certain weakness bordering on attachment, for Marcus was beautiful and athletic, a young man who knew how to preserve a certain aesthetic measure in his profligacy; this, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... and by innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which were added anxious parents and relations, who came to look after those among the misguided multitude who belonged to their respective families. Imposture and profligacy played their part in this city also, but the morbid delusion itself seems to have predominated. On this account religion could only bring provisional aid, and therefore the town council benevolently took an interest in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... not, at once, perceive the effects which this weekly observance produces. Like most moral causes, it operates slowly; but it operates surely, and gradually weakens the power and breaks the yoke of profligacy and sin. No villain regards the Sabbath. No vicious family regards the Sabbath. No immoral community regards the Sabbath. The holy rest of this ever-memorable day is a barrier which is always broken down before men become giants in sin. Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... gained mostly by stock-jobbing; leaving at his death some three millions of francs. John Foster has cited a striking illustration of what this kind of determination will do in money-making. A young man who ran through his patrimony, spending it in profligacy, was at length reduced to utter want and despair. He rushed out of his house intending to put an end to his life, and stopped on arriving at an eminence overlooking what were once his estates. He sat down, ruminated for a time, and rose with the ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... principles were not likely to conciliate the favour of government; and as we wade onward in the history of the times, the scenes become yet darker. At length, one would imagine the parties had agreed to divide the kingdom of vice betwixt them; the hunters assuming to themselves open profligacy and legalized oppression; and the hunted, the opposite attributes of hypocrisy, fanaticism, disloyalty, and midnight assassination. The troopers and cavaliers became enthusiasts in the pursuit of the covenanters If Messrs Kid, King, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... and profligacy of the higher Scottish clergy (with notable exceptions) in Knox's youth, are not matter of controversy. They are as frankly recognised by contemporary Catholic as by Protestant authors. In the very year of the destruction of the monasteries ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... were polluted with vices that are common to men, and which had given themselves up entirely to unclean desires, and had become so blinded by them as to have habituated themselves to all manner of debauchery and profligacy, or to have laid detestable schemes for the ruin of their country, took a road wide of that which led to the assembly of the Gods; but they who had preserved themselves upright and chaste, and free from the slightest contagion of the body, and had always kept ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Papist, had sold his country for gold to England's hereditary foe, whose army he had engaged to come and crush the last remnants of national freedom, should his Protestant people dare to resist the monarch's traitorous proceedings. The profligacy and irreligion of the court was widely imitated by all classes, till patriots, watching with gloomy forebodings the downward progress of their country, began to despair of her future fate. Such was the state of things when, on the morning of the 14th of August, 1670, several sedate, grave-looking ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... the town through; so that now the lower classes have their scandal and ribaldry organs, as well as their betters (the rogues, they WILL imitate them!) and as their tastes are somewhat coarser than my lord's, and their numbers a thousand to one, why of course the prints have increased, and the profligacy has been diffused in a ratio exactly proportionable to the demand, until the town is infested with such a number of monstrous publications of the kind as would have put Abbe Dubois to the blush, or made Louis XV. cry shame. Talk of English morality!—the ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to judge you, since you ask me, sir, I should be merciful because of your misfortunes. And yet, Sir Crispin, your profligacy and the evil you have wrought in life must weigh heavily against you." Had this immaculate bigot, this churlish milksop been as candid with himself as he was with Crispin, he must have recognized that it was mainly Crispin's offences towards himself that his mind now dwelt on ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... the times were so great, that Alice did not see a stranger even of her own sex without some apprehension. Denaturalized women had as usual followed the camps of both armies during the Civil War; who, on the one side with open profligacy and profanity, on the other with the fraudful tone of fanaticism or hypocrisy, exercised nearly in like degree their talents, for murder or plunder. But it was broad daylight, the distance from the Lodge was but trifling, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Thoughtful Men is, we learn, the leading contributor to a newspaper of large circulation, and, under his signature of 'Locksley Hall,' rouses the sons of toil to a sense of the dignity and rights of labour, and exposes the profligacy and corruption of the rich to the extent of a column and a quarter every week. A shrewd, hard-headed man of business, with a perfect knowledge of what he had to do, and with a humorous twinkle of the eye, My Grand ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the child in his power, or has emancipated him. This enactment was made by the Senate because it was found that persons in power, when dragged down by the burden of loans which they had squandered in profligacy, often plotted against the lives of ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... the society of persons in the lowest state of profligacy, can be desirable for a man of family, for one who pretends to honour and integrity? Is it possible that they should not have some tendency to pollute his ideas, to debase his sentiments, and to reduce him to the same rank with themselves? If the women you have described irreclaimable, ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... as the condition of the people falls short of this high standard, blame is attached to the missionary, instead of credit for that which he has effected. They forget, or will not remember, that human sacrifices, and the power of an idolatrous priesthood—a system of profligacy unparalleled in any other part of the world—infanticide a consequence of that system—bloody wars, where the conquerors spared neither women nor children—that all these have been abolished; and that dishonesty, intemperance, and licentiousness have been greatly ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... and neither history nor contemporary society shews us a single amiable and respectable character capable of it. This has always been recognized in cultivated society: that is why poor people accuse cultivated society of profligacy, poor people being often so ignorant and uncultivated that they have nothing to offer each other but the sex relationship, and cannot conceive why men and women should associate ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... actress!" was his constant sneer. And his every action told that he did not intend to let Cornelia play with him a second time. With all his profligacy and moral worthlessness, he had a tenacity of purpose and an energy in this matter that showed that either Cornelia must in the end bow to his will, or their contest would end in something ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... good excuse for profligacy.—But tell me, Vapid, have you got any new characters since you ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... he, when he came, manifested no interest in rejoining her. Instead of that, he connected himself with a number of wicked associates, both male and female, whom he had known before he went to the Holy Land, and lived a life of open profligacy with them, leaving Berengaria to pine in neglect, alone and forsaken. She was almost heart-broken to be thus abandoned, and several of the principal ecclesiastics of the kingdom remonstrated very strongly with Richard for this wicked conduct. But these remonstrances ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... atrocity in the laws of his country, of which until then I was ignorant. It seems that any younger brother, next heir, might claim the estate by turning Protestant, or drive the incumbent to the same act. I was rejoiced to hear that there was hardly an instance of such profligacy known.[26] To what baseness will not the struggle for political ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... But we must still acknowledge the star's genius, and applaud it. Hence we conclude that the chronic weakness of actors no more affects the question of the propriety of patronizing theatrical representations, than the profligacy of journeymen shoemakers affects the question of the propriety of wearing boots. All of which ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... reason at present to expect, it would by no means follow that the mere removal of that great obstacle to regular industry and commerce, would in any very short space of time produce considerable or extensive improvements. The ignorance, the profligacy, the improvidence and the various other moral evils, which necessarily accompany the slave trade, will, it is to be feared, long survive the extinction of that traffic which produced and fostered them. The whole history of mankind shews that the progress of civilization ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... dangers from so artful, daring, and turbulent a leader, with a rash and devoted crew at his command. The example of this lawless horde, roving at large about the island, and living in loose revel and open profligacy, could not but have a dangerous effect upon the colonists newly arrived; and when they were close at hand, to carry on secret intrigues, and to hold out a camp of refuge to all malcontents, the loyalty of the whole colony ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... educating the seven hundred thousand children of that great state! Of fifty thousand of these paupers, the causes of whose destitution have been ascertained, nearly twenty thousand are attributable, directly or indirectly, to intemperance, profligacy, licentiousness, and crime! Had even half the amount that is now expended from year to year in their support been judiciously bestowed upon their early mental and moral culture, who can question that, instead of now being a tax upon the communities in which they reside, and a burden to themselves ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... Tindall Wildridge, author of several important local historical works, says that the great profligacy of Hull frequently gave rise in olden times to very stringent exercise of the magisterial authority. Not infrequently this was at the direct instigation and sometimes command of the Archbishop of York. Occasionally the cognisance of offences was retrospective. ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... Tuscany the holy friar had a sudden and strange recontre with the past. He fell in with one of those motley assemblages of patricians and plebeians, piety and profligacy, "a company of pilgrims;" a subject too well painted by others for me to ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... discretion, but kent what na sort of potatoes he was going to sell; and I was so disturbed by this open corruption, that I went to him, and expressed my great surprise. Hot words ensued between us; and I told him very plainly that I would have nothing further to say to him or his political profligacy. However, his potatoes were sold, and brought upwards of three guineas the peck, the nabob being the purchaser, who, to show his contentment with the bargain, made Mrs M'Lucre, and the bailie's three daughters, ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... historians invariably note the profligacy of the inhabitants of Byzantium. They are described as an idle, depraved people, spending their time for the most part in loitering about the harbour, or carousing over the fine wine of Maronea. In war they ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various |
