"Sinecure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the lives of the Tahitian shepherds in the Anti-Jacobin—the shepherds whose occupation was a sinecure, as there were no ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... Prince Peter Karagjorgjevi['c] was induced to accept the by no means enviable, easy, or profitable task of guiding Serbia's destiny. The Serbian throne in 1903 was a source neither of glory nor of riches, and it was notoriously no sinecure. ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... changed fortunes with philosophic composure. Technically he filled the position of overseer at The Oaks, but the judge's activity was so great that this position was largely a sinecure. The most arduous work he ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... be heard crossing the hall, and the raising of the drawing-room window and opening of the shutters were clearly audible. Winter, whose office had been a sinecure hitherto, ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... every possible proper way that she could. She put on one of her wonderful toilettes, and then went slowly down the broad stairs (thinking fast!)and flashed out upon Byrom like a young empress in her robes. And a sinecure he had of it for the next few hours. To stand at the carriage door and receive the most laconic of orders; to see her pass from carriage to store and from store to carriage, erect and tall and stately, and with no more ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... Indian enlistment and so they proved. Moreover, much was expected in that direction from the reassembling of the general council at Armstrong Academy, and much had to be; for the times were critical. Maxey's position was not likely to be a sinecure. As a ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... wildness of young ones. The ceremonious administration of oaths of secrecy and devotion over, she was enrolled in the hero's band, which now numbered three, and entered upon the duties with feminine energy, for there are no conspirators like women. Ripton's lieutenancy became a sinecure, his rank merely titular. He had never been married—he knew nothing about licences, except that they must be obtained, and were not difficult—he had not an idea that so many days' warning must be given ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... course. You may laugh, Miss Scott, but I can assure you that my duties are no sinecure. I never knew what work ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... still encamped here, I organized a football match and acted as referee, which in a tropical sun is no sinecure, I can tell you. On Wednesday I rode into Kroonstadt and had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Lowry, Mr. Lane, the Canadian chaplain, and Mr. Carey, the resident Wesleyan minister, and we had a ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... should have avoided Wales, for, having proved apt at itinerary doggerel, I was solemnly created, immediately on arrival, Mistress of Rhymes and Travelling Laureate to the party—an office, however honourable, that is no sinecure since it obliges me to write rhymed eulogies or diatribes on Dolgelly, Tan-y-Bulch, Gyn-y-Coed, Llanrychwyn, and other Welsh hamlets whose names offer breakneck fences to ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the appointment of a military attache. The position is by no means a sinecure. Our government must always feel the importance of receiving the latest information as to the armies and navies of the great powers of the world; and therefore it is that, very wisely, it has attached military and naval experts to various leading embassies. It is important that these ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... thing I was satisfied, my new occupation was likely to be no sinecure; there was evidently work enough to keep me constantly employed, and WAKOMETKLA would no doubt see to it that I wasted no time. For the remainder of the day I was kept hard at it, with the exception of the brief period allowed me for partaking of ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... with their home, and never leave it. They often look out from their perches upon wandering flocks of vagrant rooks, but are never tempted to new adventures. The old fellow is very wise. Like a fat old office-holder, he knows enough to appreciate a sinecure in which the rewards are liberal and the service nominal. His devoted follower never falters in his ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... comparison with the cost of horses and coachman! And, then, no demands for money were ever met so cheerfully by my mother as those which went to support Mr. Pitt's policy against Jacobinism and Regicide. At present, after five years' sinecure existence, unless on the rare summons of a journey, this dormant carriage was suddenly undocked, and put into commission. Taking with her two servants, and one of my sisters, my mother now entered upon a periplus, or systematic circumnavigation ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... beds, dust and sweep, and "do" the girls' hair. After school I had to mend clothes, sew, set the table again, take a turn at nursing the baby, and on washing-day iron. This sounds a lot, but in reality was nothing, and did not half occupy my time. Setting the table was a mere sinecure, as there was nothing much to put on it; and the only ironing was a few articles outside my own, as Mr M'Swat and Peter did not wear white shirts, and patronised paper collars. Mrs M'Swat did the washing and a little scrubbing, also boiled the beef and baked the bread, which formed our ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... in the new Hospital at Marlborough was filled to its utmost capacity and Evadne found her work no sinecure. The force of nurses was inadequate to the demand. Often she would be called from her rest to minister to the critical cases which were her special care, and she would go down to the ward saying softly, "The Master is come and calleth for thee," and bending ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... office were divided between the two parties: but the Whigs had the larger share. Some persons, indeed, who did little honour to the Whig name, were largely recompensed for services which no good man would have performed. Wildman was made Postmaster General. A lucrative sinecure in the Excise was bestowed on Ferguson. The duties of the Solicitor of the Treasury were both very important and very invidious. It was the business of that officer to conduct political prosecutions, to collect the evidence, to instruct the counsel for the Crown, to see that the prisoners ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be content with such a summer, Landis. No; I played nurse-girl to Mrs. Gleason's large family. I was busy, too. The place was no sinecure, I assure you." ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... properly, would require the almost undivided attention of a man in the vigour of youth. Nor would a superintendent of the Nautical Almanac, if he made a point of being acquainted with every thing connected with his subject, find his situation at all a sinecure. Slight as are the duties of the Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society, it might have been supposed that Mr. Brande would scarcely, amongst his multifarious avocations, have found time even for them. But ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... by the outsider that the coveted office of the President of the Royal Academy of Arts is, in a way, an ornamental one,—some such golden sinecure as that of the old High Chamberlains. Nothing could be more mistaken. "Not everybody," wrote the late Mr. Underhill, who for some time, as private secretary to Sir Frederic Leighton, had special opportunities of knowing, "is aware of ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... parish fourteen years, for twelve pounds per annum. The present rector was in the annual receipt of forty-three pounds, out of which he had to pay me, but with the aid of a little simony, this was easily avoided, and as I took no fees, I can hardly call it a lucrative appointment, and certainly not a sinecure. ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... of constant nervous weakness. Writing from a bed of sickness, he tells his employer almost pitifully, amid the strain of things, that he cannot complete his translations from Plutarch. Without a pension or a sinecure in some office of the State, literary life at that time was fraught with such incalculable difficulties that it demanded the maximum of prudence to achieve the minimum of subsistence. Men of letters lived, and by some miracle ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... birds were as sociably disposed as the little tomtit—for that is also one of his names—bird study would be a delight, and almost a sinecure. Trustful and fearless, he often comes within a few feet of you, and fixes you with his keen little eyes, which dart out innumerable interrogation points. Sometimes he calls his own name in a saucy way, "Chick-a-dee-dee, chick-a-dee-dee," ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... was a sinecure. The men knew what to do, and did it. With a roar and a rattle the chain cable rushed through the hawse- pipe, and the Aphrodite rested motionless on the green water ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... casting of that farce, wanting F.'s part therein! Having himself an excellent old man in it already, and a quite admirable part in the other farce." From which it will appear that my friend's office was not a sinecure, and that he was not, as few amateur-managers have ever been, without the experiences of Peter Quince. Fewer still, I suspect, have fought through them with such perfect success, for the company turned out at last would have done credit to any enterprise. They deserved the term applied ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... cheese, or hare, or rabbit, or eel, and I would have to be in the last stage of starvation before I could eat cold lamb or cold veal; so it will be seen by these confessions that my cook's berth is not a sinecure, and that these complimentary dinners, as dinners, are to a great extent wasted upon me. I once, in fact, was asked to a dinner at a club, and I could not touch one single dish! But my friends kindly provided some impromptu dishes without ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... Dr. John Barnard married the daughter of Heylin, when he lived at Abingdon, near Oxford. He afterwards became rector of the rich living of Waddington, near Lincoln, of which he purchased the perpetual advowson, holding also the sinecure of Gedney, in the same county. He was ultimately made Prebendary of Asgarby, in the church of Lincoln, and died at Newark, on a journey, in August, 1683. His rich and indolent life would naturally hold out few ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... time of much business and excitement set in, and the lengthening spring evenings were no sinecure to Wilmet, as the flitting day approached, being rather hurried on by the old bookseller, who wanted to be at Marshlands in time to admire his hyacinths and sow his annuals. Mr. Audley would take rooms at the ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unreasonable, for Pitt's health seems now to have been beyond doubt so shattered by his hereditary malady, that he was already in old age though only fifty-eight. It was natural, therefore, that he should choose a sinecure office, and the ease of the Lords. But a popular idol nearly always suffers by removal from immediate contact with the popular sympathy, be the motives for removal what ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... good Deacon Enos assumed the office of peace-maker for the village, Uncle Jaw's efficiency rendered it no sinecure. The deacon always followed the steps of Uncle Jaw, smoothing, hushing up, and putting matters aright with an assiduity that ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... I have been daily expecting some communication on the subject from de Volaski: but as yet he has made none. After coming to Paris for the purpose, (for of course his office in the embassy is a mere sinecure and a plausible excuse,) he betrays the bashfulness of a girl in pressing his suit; but some men, some of the best and purest of men, are just that way—in love affairs as ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... he put his hand on his heart, saying, "I am the trusty guardian of my own honour."—"Then," replied Sir Boyle Roche, "I congratulate my honourable friend in the snug little sinecure to ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... or sinecure; To feed from the superfluous taxes A friend of ours—a poet—fewer 660 Have fluttered tamer to the lure Than he.' His lordship stands and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... a pretty position for a man just promoted to the proud position of Corporal. As they rolled me about and yelled like Indians, I could see that an official position in that regiment was to be no sinecure. All official positions have more or less care and responsibility, but this one seemed to me to have too much. Finally they spilled me out of the barrel, and I was a sight to behold. My first idea was to order the whole two ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck
... was seated in the breakfast-room at her usual employment, mending and patching no sinecure now. Fleda opened the kitchen door and came in, folding up a calico apron she had just ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... willing to do him any good, that will do me no harm. Pray advise with Walls and Raymond, and a little with Bishop Sterne for form. Tell Raymond I cannot succeed for him to get that living of Moimed. It is represented here as a great sinecure. Several chaplains have solicited for it; and it has vexed me so, that, if I live, I will make it my business to serve him better in something else. I am heartily sorry for his illness, and that of the other two. If it be not necessary to let the tithes till a month hence, you may ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... This work was no sinecure. Dade and Malcolm, and even Bob, assisted in it—Malcolm and Bob attending to the heating of the branding irons while Calumet roped the steers and dragged them to the fire where Dade pressed the white-hot irons to their hips. But the work was done ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... they believed such a change would not be unacceptable to himself. The chair of the Law of Nature and Nations was one of the best endowed in the College, having a revenue of L150 a year independently of fees, but it had been founded as a job, and continued ever since to be treated as a sinecure. Not a single lecture had ever been delivered by any of its incumbents, in spite of repeated remonstrances on the part of the Faculty of Advocates, and Hume believed that if the Town Council, as administrators of the College, could be got to press for the delivery of the statutory lectures, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... was still sitting in the study, buried in a mass of papers. He looked as though he did not take his salary from the public company, whose servant he was, for a sinecure. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... hall, the doors labeled with neatly printed signs telling who and what is within. If you should come walking down the street outside at 3 A.M. you would probably see the lights in Hindenburg's office still burning, as I did. At 3:30 they went out, indicating that a Field Marshal's job is not a sinecure. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Otherwise she will have to be tremendously clever and say all sorts of brilliant things, and that puts a great burden on the author. If you proclaim boldly at the start that she's a beauty, the illustrator has got to look after her, and the author has a comparative sinecure." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to an end until Pope Eugenius the Fourth beheaded the last of the race for his misdeeds in the fifteenth century; after him the office was seized upon by the Barons and finally drifted into the hands of the Barberini, a mere sinecure bringing rich endowments to its ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... old man, a great lover of little girls, who combined the sinecure of his bishopric with that of almoner to a second-hand empress, whose name will remain celebrated in the annals of devout gallantry or of gallant devotion, the Bishop, a worthy pastor for such a sheep, passed the greater portion ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... force would have no sinecure and would have no room for "misfits or failures," Butler tells us in 1870 in that clause of his report in which he says, "As matters at present rest, the region of the Saskatchewan is without law, order or security for life ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... wish to tax his old servant with any labor at all. He wished his office to be as much of a sinecure as possible. And he continually urged the professor to go abroad and see the city sights, or to walk in the garden and enjoy his pipe, or rest himself in his own room, or visit his daughter, ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... "A sinecure, whose holder is in receipt of a salary of five thousand pounds per annum," was Mr. BONAR LAW'S description of his office as Lord Privy Seal. The House rewarded the modesty of its hard-working Leader with laughter ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... natural that, spending his whole political life as an advanced Whig, bent upon the destruction of abuses, he should have begun that life as a member for a pocket-borough and ended it as the holder of a sinecure. For a time his poverty was relieved by his marriage with a widow who had means of her own; but Mrs. Creevey died, her money went to her daughters by her previous husband, and Mr. Creevey reverted to a possessionless existence—without a house, without ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... frankly owned, had they been asked, that they detested work of any kind. Yet the chaplain had almost as much business on his hands as the bursar of a great college, in the administration of Carew's affairs, besides filling an office which was by no means a sinecure, in that of his master of the ceremonies. Many a rudeness in that house would have been bitterly avenged, and many a quarrel would have had a serious termination, but for the good offices of Parson Whymper. Nor would Mr. Byam Ryll have been considered by every ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... have had a "long foreground" we find after studying the man. Sailing a ship is no sinecure, and for Conrad a ship is something with human attributes. Like a woman, it must be lived with to be understood, and it has its ways and whims and has to be petted or humoured, as in The Brute—that monstrous personification of the treacherous ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... as he strongly disapproved of gambling. He was a strict Sabbatarian, and allowed the musicians to have a rest on the seventh day. This was as well, for the post of musician on a pirate ship was no sinecure, as every pirate had the right to demand a tune at any hour of the day or night. He used to place a guard to protect all his women prisoners, and it is sadly suspicious that there was always the greatest competition amongst the worst characters ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... knaves who, by joining the forces of militarism, had betrayed the Sacred Cause of the International Solidarity of Labour. His first ground for complaint was scarcely tenable; with his dwindling business the post of clerk had dwindled into a sinecure. To sit all day at the receipt of imaginary custom is not a part fitted for a sane and healthy young human being. Still, from Gedge's point of view her defection was a grievance; but that she could throw in her lot openly with the powers ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... answer cold prose when your arguments are those of warm poetry. Not that prose has power to conquer poetry, but that the languages are so hopelessly dissimilar. They need an interpreter and the post is not a sinecure. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... cities. He is said to have been royal proto-notary at Naples in 1490. Dissatisfied, according to his own account, with the corrupt administration of justice, he at length quitted the bar and devoted himself entirely to literary pursuits, especially to the study of philology and antiquities. A sinecure appointment, which he owed to the favour of the pope, enabled him to lead a life of learned leisure at Rome, where he died on the 2nd of October 1523. His work entitled Dies Geniales appeared at Rome in 1522, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... poches?"), have it put by their valets, to replace what was lost overnight, these proud and often honourable nobles would ante-chamber and cringe for sinecures, pensions, indemnities, privileges, importune and supplicate the King, the King's mistress, pandar or lacquey. And the sinecure, pension, indemnity or privilege was always deducted out of the bread—rye-bread, straw-bread, grass-bread—which those parched, prone human animals described by La Bruyere were extracting "with desperate obstinacy"—out of the ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... district in Ugogo must be very remunerative, besides being a delightful sinecure, so long as the Sultan has to deal with timid Arab merchants who fear to exhibit anything approaching to independence and self-reliance, lest they might be mulcted in cloth. In one day from one camp the sultan ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... saying?) thy definition is bomb-proof, thy fancy unscaleable, thy thought too deep for undermining; that notion is at the head of the poll, a candidate approved of Truth's most open borough; for, in spite of secretary-birds with pens stuck clerk-like behind their ears (as useless an emblem of sinecure office as gold keys, silver, and coronation armour)—in spite of whole flights of geese, capable enough of saving capitols, but impotent to wield one of their own all-conquering quills—in spite, also, (keen-eyed categorists, be to my faults in ratiocination ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Since the Restoration the Mint had, like every other public establishment in the kingdom, been a nest of idlers and jobbers. The important office of Warden, worth between six and seven hundred a year, had become a mere sinecure, and had been filled by a succession of fine gentlemen, who were well known at the hazard table of Whitehall, but who never condescended to come near the Tower. This office had just become vacant, and Montague had obtained it for Newton. [712] The ability, the industry and the strict ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fortune-tellers, collectors of money for charities, fencers, bearwards, minstrels, common players of interludes, jugglers, tinkers, peddlers, and many others, and adequate whipping of them and starting them in the direct route homeward must have been no sinecure. [Footnote: Lambarde, Duties ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... crowded scene. Through the piety of the formal cries, it is easy to see that Augustin's hearers were hard to manage. This flock, which he loved and scolded so much, was no easier to lead now than when he first became bishop. Truly it was no sinecure to rule and administrate the diocese of Hippo! The bishop was literally the servant of the faithful. Not only had he to feed and clothe them, to spend his time over their business and quarrels and lawsuits, but he belonged to them body ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... Lord Rectorship of the University of St Andrews. Next year he accepted the Honorary Presidency of the Five Associated Societies of Edinburgh. In 1886 he was appointed Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, a sinecure post rendered vacant by the death of Lord Houghton. Though so vigorous in talk, Browning could not make a public speech, or he shrank from such an effort; none of the honours which he accepted were ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... granting the valuable sinecure office of clerk of the pells to Barre in exchange for the pension secured to him by the whigs. His private means were only L300 a year, and, as such matters were then regarded, he might have taken the office himself without scandal; but uncertain as his position ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... the remote flame of her own being was fiercely alert in its readiness to leap upward at any suspicion that her duties were not worth the payment made for them and that for any reason which might include Lord Coombe she was occupying a position which was a sinecure. She kept her serious little room in order herself, dusting and almost polishing the reference books, arranging and re-arranging the files with such exactness of system that she could—as is the vaunt of the model of orderly perfection—lay her hand upon ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of a large congregation in the city of New York has no sinecure. The sermons to be written, the parochial visiting, once a year, at least, to each family, and weekly or daily to the sick and afflicted, my walks commonly extended to from four to seven miles a day, the calls of the poor and distressed, laboring under every kind of difficulty, the ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... verbal. He says: "To hold out treasures to a man who demands a small sum is but a polite mode of refusal." In fact, the Pope offered him some bishopric, knowing that he wanted only some benefice that should be a sinecure. ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... railroad influence should control these appointments, the power to suspend the long and short haul clause would be the chief and perhaps the only power exercised by the commission. There was great danger that the office of Interstate Commerce Commissioner might become a sinecure for servile railroad lawyers, as similar State officers had been before, and that a public trust might be turned into an additional corporation agency for evil. The selection of the commissioners, and especially ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... city uncle modified by Cheeryble. And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the proximate fall of the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is not my normal state; and being here among you all will very soon effect a transformation. In a very short time you will see that I shall refuse altogether to be treated as an invalid, and my nurse's post will be a sinecure." ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... Earl of the Palace, and has by right the power of restraining the King if he should commit an error." Either Earl Ranulph de Blundeville was very neglectful of his office, or else he must have found it anything but a sinecure. The Constable of Chester attended the Earl; his office was to restrain not the King, but the people, by keeping them off with his wand when they pressed too close. The Earl of Pembroke, husband of Princess Marjory of Scotland, ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... familiar with a round Of ladyships, a stranger to the poor; Ambitions of preferment for its gold, And well prepared by ignorance and sloth, By infidelity and love o' the world, To make God's work a sinecure; a slave To his own pleasures and his patron's pride.— From such apostles, O ye mitred heads, Preserve the Church! and lay not careless hands On skulls that cannot teach, and will ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... and equipped next year, adding, "It would be highly gratifying to us who have thrown aside our former occupations and the prospects that were fair for increasing our fortunes, with a view of serving our country, and who have no desire of being mere sinecure officers if we could at this moment embark and obey the commands of our country, in going in pursuit of a barbarous enemy, who now holds in chains and slavery so many of our unfortunate fellow-citizens; ...
— The Story of Commodore John Barry • Martin Griffin
... and women workers in this great metropolis is, indeed, a vast one, and work for them is no sinecure. If they cannot work so thoroughly or efficiently as men, at least it is for them greater toil than for the sterner sex. Of a more delicate organisation, of less robust frame, of smaller powers of endurance, the "buffets of fortune" meet with less resistance, ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... pocket, or rather to take out of his pocket, for he was very good-natured, my young Prince did not care for the loss of his crown and sceptre, being a thoughtless youth, not much inclined to politics or any kind of learning. So his tutor had a sinecure. Giglio would not learn classics or mathematics, and the Lord Chancellor of Paflagonia, SQUARETOSO, pulled a very long face because the Prince could not be got to study the Paflagonian laws and constitution; ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and wheels (for this was a revolving—in other words a flashing light), and clean the glasses and windows. As there were nine lights to attend to, and get ready for nightly service, it may be easily understood that the lamplighter's duty was no sinecure. ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... trenches, we saw them again, we knew they were to be greatly envied. Between standing waist-high in mud in a trench and being drowned in it, buried in it, blown up or asphyxiated, the post of crossing-sweeper becomes a sinecure. ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... readily be seen by the foregoing sketch that a clerkship in the Railway Mail Service is far from being a sinecure, either mentally or physically. As the country increases in population and the system becomes more complex, it is found to be important to the public that the clerks should be insured against removal except for the following ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... the superintendent's. They are both usually officers of high rank, who have made an honorable record for themselves. The latter has entire charge of the post, and the position is a very responsible one; nor is it by any means a sinecure, for when the papers have nothing else to find fault with they pick at ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... a quick murmur of assent ran through the crowd, telling me that the compromise was accepted. But the porterage was no sinecure for the delinquent elephant, who found it difficult at times to get along over African sands even without a burden. Still, no time was lost in further parley or remonstrance. The muskets and cannon were brought down and exploded; ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and down through all the occupations of life to the common laborer, what service monarchy is to him, he can give me no answer. If I ask him what monarchy is, he believes it is something like a sinecure." ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... with the spirit of strenuous effort which has invaded every corner of our national life that I am anxious to confer on the State or, failing that, some meritorious millionaire the privilege of providing for my modest needs. A snug sinecure with a commodious residence and a good car—cheap American motors are of course barred—represent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... turned to take up the receiver a foreboding possessed me that my trusteeship was no longer to be a sinecure. It was Bristol who had rung me up, and upon very ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... this criticism was true; also that Miss Betsy's task was no sinecure, and she therefore thought it best to ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... a deputy-governor. His position was indeed no sinecure. The two proprietaries, who appointed him, could at any time deprive him of office. The Assembly could refuse to vote his salary, and if he displeased the king of England, he might lose, not only his office, ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... sinecure of the American consulship with the ease that never left him even in such high places. The tintype establishment was soon to become a thing of the past, although its deadly work along the peaceful and helpless Spanish Main was never effaced. The ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... by a little legal business of a very mediocre nature. As his biographer says, he grew more and more "inclined by his temperament to a meditative existence." When he was in his thirtieth year, a crisis came. By some means or other, he secured a lucrative sinecure, that of treasurer of finances at Caen in Normandy. He hated the country and went down to Caen on the rarest occasions possible. La Bruyere, a Parisian to the marrow of his bones, says, "Provincials and fools are always ready ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... Birmingham, poor Campbell of Bath, burning mills, wheat ricks, destroying machinery, &c. &c., and the peaceable, sober, rational, constitutional, assemblies of the people in 1816, 1817, 1818, and 1819, deliberately petitioning the legislature to remove the burthens of the people, by abolishing sinecure places, and unnecessary pensions, and praying for a constitutional reform in the Commons' House of Parliament. My readers will excuse the digression I have made; this subject cannot be too often dwelt upon, but, as I shall have repeated opportunities of calling ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... Why, I wonder at a girl of your knowledge and talent asking a question like that! Is there a scoundrel in Gloria who is not his enemy? Is there a man who has succeeded in getting any sinecure office from the State who doesn't know that the moment Ericson comes back to Gloria out he goes, neck and crop? Is there a corrupt judge in Gloria who wouldn't, if he could, sentence Ericson to be shot the moment he landed on the coast of Gloria? Is there a perjured ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... played chaperon to her elder sister. It was a position for which she felt herself peculiarly fitted, even without the semi-official commission she held—a position which so conscientious a person could not regard in the light of a sinecure. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Tom had general orders to let everything else go, and attend to Miss Eva whenever she wanted him,—orders which our readers may fancy were far from disagreeable to him. He was kept well dressed, for St. Clare was fastidiously particular on this point. His stable services were merely a sinecure, and consisted simply in a daily care and inspection, and directing an under-servant in his duties; for Marie St. Clare declared that she could not have any smell of the horses about him when he came near her, and that he must positively not be put ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... said the Liberal tutor with emphasis. 'No one can say a living with 1200 souls, and no curate, is a sinecure. As for hard town work, it is absurd—you couldn't stand it. And after all, I imagine, there are some souls worth ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... administration, be sure he will mention the affair of the railway station which was built too far from the town, and this of the Sidi Mansur water. And who, you ask, was to blame for these follies? Oh, the controlleur, as usual; always the controlleur! It is no sinecure being an official of this kind in Tunisia, with precise Government instructions in one pocket, and in the other his countrymen's contrary lamentations and suggestions, often ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... late Majesty King William the Fourth, still announces to a heedless world the tolls to be paid for entry by the ships that never arrive; and a superannuated official in a wooden leg and a gold cap-band retains the honourable sinecure of a harbour-mastership, with a hypothetical salary nominally payable from the non-existent fees and port dues. The little river Cale, at the bottom of whose combe the wee town nestles snugly, has cut itself a deep valley in the soft sandstone hills; and the gap in the cliffs formed ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... found, it was rare indeed that there were any complaints of scarcity of work, except, indeed, on the part of the Rector, who declared that, what with the healthiness of the village and the absence of want, his occupation, save for the Sunday duty, was a sinecure. Mr. Bastow was more happy and much brighter than he had been for many years. The occupation of teaching suited him, and he was able to make the work pleasant to his pupil as well as to himself; indeed, ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... sarcasm to remonstrance, "that'll never do, Everett! You'll be getting into some precious scrape or other. You're not the fellow for a merchant's office, trust me. Now something in the way of a government appointment is much more like it. A pleasant, poetical sort of sinecure,—there are lots of them to be had. You just trundle down for an hour or two every day, write letters, or poems, or whatever you like, with the official stationery, and receive your salary quarterly. You can't do any mischief in a place like that. Now that's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... is the phrase Used in politest circles to express This supernumerary slave, who stays Close to the lady as a part of dress, Her word the only law which he obeys. His is no sinecure, as you may guess; Coach, servants, gondola, he goes to call, And carries fan and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... first actions upon record, consists in the high professions you made at the county meeting of Buckingham, in that ever-venerable aera of oeconomy and reform, the spring of 1780. My lord, there are certain offices of sinecure, not dependent upon the caprice of a minister, which this country has reserved to reward those illustrious statesmen, who have spent their lives, and worn out their constitutions in her service. No man will wonder, when he recollects from whom ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... as it should be. Now I am going to bed. Good night," said the Iron King, abruptly dismissing his son, then rising and ringing for his valet, whose office, since the patient old lady's death, was now no longer a sinecure. ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... into the mess cabin as Ah Sing rang the bell, and during the meal Mart revised his opinion of the mate to some extent. He saw that Swanson did not like him because he considered the wireless job a sinecure, and wanted to keep all the crew hard at work all the time. It was the usage of the sea, and the big mate himself was blunt and well-meaning. But Mart Judson had no mind to be ordered about by ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... with a clouded brow, but the man of the world knew whom he had to deal with. On Wednesday morning Jacobina was inducted into the comforts of the hearth of mine host;—and her four little kittens mewed hard by, from the sinecure of ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... establishment of an Astronomical Observatory, with a salary for an astronomer and assistant, for nightly observations and periodical publications; annual courses of lectures upon the natural, moral, and political sciences. Above all, no jobbing, no sinecure, no monkish stalls for lazy idlers. I urged the deep responsibility of the nation to the world and to all posterity worthily to fulfil the great object of the testator. I only lamented my inability to communicate half the solicitude ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... in that is that red weakens an hour. The change has come. There is no search. But there is, there is that hope and that interpretation and sometime, surely any is unwelcome, sometime there is breath and there will be a sinecure and charming very charming is that clean and cleansing. Certainly glittering is ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein
... to rules which must have been planned from the beginning; by which conception the function of the gods seemed to be limited to forming the plans, and setting the machinery in motion: their subsequent office appeared to be reduced to a sinecure, or if they continued to reign, it was in the manner of constitutional kings, bound by the laws to which they had previously given their assent. Accordingly, the pretension of philosophers to explain physical phaenomena by physical causes, or to predict their occurrence, was, ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... from the old days of sinecures. If there be now remaining places so pleasant, or gentlemen so happy, I do not know them. Thackeray's notion of his future duties was probably very vague. He would have repudiated the notion that he was looking for a sinecure, but no doubt considered that the duties would be easy and light. It is not too much to assert, that he who could drop his pearls as I have said above, throwing them wide cast without an effort, would have ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... said the Goblin; "it's YOUR function to feel sorry for them. If they were to leave off being poor you couldn't fulfil your functions. You'd be a sinecure." ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... inquire who the author was. On being told he was a poor man starving in a garret, she at once requested the Duc de Moray, President of the Corps Lgislatif, to offer him a post as secretary in his department, a sinecure, with a handsome salary attached. This gave him plenty of time to devote to literature, but hard work soon told on so delicate a frame. In 1861 he broke down owing to overwork, and went to Algeria and Corsica to recruit, collecting materials for future novels. In 1866, seized with a keen ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... of Chile was no sinecure. He had not only to attend to the organization of the new State, but also to employ to the utmost his judgment, tact, and diplomacy, with which qualities he was so well endowed, in allaying the disputes and jealousies between the patriot leaders. There is no doubt, ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... only a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, but more decidedly so of her successor in the queendom, Anne of Denmark. In the household of the latter he held the position of Groom of the Chamber, a sinecure of handsome endowment, so handsome, indeed, as to warrant an occasional draft upon his talents for the entertainment of her Majesty's immediate circle, which held itself as far as possible aloof from the court, and was disposed to be self-reliant for its amusements. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... nerves that I drop hairbrushes and things to make a little disturbance, and it gives her something to do to pick them up. I must at once learn some Hindustani words such as pink, blue, and green, and then I shall be able to tell Bella what dress to lay out, and her place won't be such a sinecure. I call her Bella because it is the nearest I can get to her name and ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... had been reckoning on. For, if it had been Gwenda she had been thinking of, she would have kept her instead of handing her over to Lady Frances. The companion secretaries of that distinguished philanthropist had no sinecure even at a ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... le Baron, I feel ashamed to accept your money for such a sinecure as this. I will tell the story to my friend Lupin. He ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... they would have taken years in Europe. The subject of the causes was frequently very trivial, yet the patience of the sovereign was by no means exhausted. I thought, in general, that the pleaders were satisfied with the Bey's decision. One sees, by this, that the Bey's place is no sinecure; and I am told that few monarchs in Christian countries have so much personally to do. The Bey sits every day in the court, from eight in summer, and from nine in winter, till mid-day; and illness, or absence from town, is his only excuse for non-attendance. His other governmental duties ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... youth and the strength of maturity met there. He would make a pattern colonel if he lived. Under the simple lines of his uniform one apprehended the ripple and play of unclogged muscles. If all men were like Stonor the tailor's task would be a sinecure. ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... Mademoiselle Benoite and her packages making part of their train. A whole fourgon could not have been sufficient to convey these packages from the French capital to the frontier. Phoeby, the simple country maid whom Sibylla had taken to Paris with her, found her place a sinecure since the engagement of Mademoiselle Benoite. She stood now on the opposite side of the room to Tynn, humbly ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... splendor and his desire to outdo all the other native princes in display have caused the government of India considerable anxiety, and the British resident at his capital, whose duty is to keep him straight, enjoys no sinecure. ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... neither pension nor sinecure. I intend to follow the army, and, if God calls me hence, then I shall be willing to rest; but before I go I hope to mow down a few Turks' heads to take to St. Peter, for him to use as balls when he plays ninepins. But, if your imperial ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... still by practice, is a beggar. From the seedy-looking rascal in the street, of whom you incautiously ask the way, and who piteously whines 'para zapatos' - for the wear and tear of shoe leather, to the highest official, one and all hold out their hands for the copper CUARTO or the eleemosynary sinecure. As it was then, so is it now; the Government wants support, and it is always to be had, at a price; deputies always want 'places.' For every duty the functionary performs, or ought to perform, he receives his bribe. The Government is too poor to keep him honest, but ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... body but those most concerned; viz. her own mother and Betts Shoreham. Although elderly ladies play cards very little, just now, in American society, or, indeed, in any other, they have their inducements for rendering the well-known office of matron at a ball, a mere sinecure. Mrs. Monson, too, was an indulgent mother, and seldom saw any thing very wrong in her own children. Julia, in the main, had sufficient retenue, and a suspicion of her want of discretion on this point, ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... cities and towns, had driven almost all other birds to flight or local extinction. The sparrow's urban doom might be read in the increasing number of automobiles, but the mina in Tahiti, as in Hawaii, had a sinecure. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... dogs' remaining strength. He very properly remained at One Ton Camp and made his depot on 10th March, and after satisfying himself that over a month's travelling rations were in the depot, Cherry-Garrard started homeward, but he had by no means a sinecure in this journey back—his dogs went wild at the start, smashed the sledge-meter adrift, fought, and would keep no definite direction, thick weather set in, and they had a fearful time ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... the French and Belgian armies is a corps of interpreters known as the liaison. As there are well over two million Englishmen in France, a very small percentage of whom have any knowledge of French, the liaison enjoys no sinecure. To assist in the billeting of British battalions in French villages, to conduct negotiations with the canny countryfolk for food and fodder, to mollify angry housewives whose menages have been upset ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... publication of this sheet he had remarked that life was altogether too short to permit of attempting anything worth while; and so he forthwith made no further assaults upon fame—assuming that he had ever done so—but settled comfortably down to the enjoyment of his sinecure. He had never married. And as justification for his self-imposed celibacy he pompously quoted Kant: "I am a bachelor, and I could not cease to be a bachelor without a disturbance that would be intolerable to me." Yet he was not a misogynist. He simply shirked responsibility ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... firm hand. Indeed, they generally needed not only a firm hand, but a firm hand grasping a serviceable walking-stick. Add to these Harrison himself, and others of a similar calibre, and it will be seen that Graham's post was no sinecure. It was Harrison's custom to throw off his mask at night with his other garments, and appear in his true character of an abandoned villain, willing to stick at nothing as long as he could do it strictly incog. In this ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... be sure how much I was pleased during this last week to hear that the place of the Master of St. Catherine's was given by her majesty to Mr. Fairly. It is reckoned the best in her gift, as a sinecure. What is the income I know not: reports differ from 400 ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... the Costume Committee was no sinecure. Coveted Saturday afternoon and evening leisure had to be given up to the stitching of long seams. Mathilde LeBrun, who was another Josephine in that her brain seemed to be in her fingers, was convener of the committee, and under her direction Judith sewed and cut out, and, it must ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... the lady moved away to commence her round of household duties, which in those days was no sinecure; whilst Wendot stood in the midst of the great hall with a strange shadow upon his face. Griffeth, who was eagerly discussing his ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... duties of kings are thus laid down in the Rajtarangini. It is evident, as Professor H. H. Wilson says, that the royal status was by no means a sinecure. But the rules are evidently the closet work of some pedantic, dogmatic Brahman, teaching kingcraft to kings. He directs his instructions, not to subordinate judges, but to the Raja as the chief magistrate, and through him to all appointed for the ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... 122: He was Joint Chief Clerk of the Pleas in the Queen's Bench, a sinecure conferred on him by his father, who was Lord Chief Justice of ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... the jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... under fire as sheriffs, marshals, and the like. As for the second in command, myself, I had served three years as captain in the National Guard; I had been deputy sheriff in the cow country, where the position was not a sinecure; I was accustomed to big game hunting and to work on a cow ranch, so that I was thoroughly familiar with the use both of horse and rifle, and knew how to handle cowboys, hunters, and miners; finally, I had studied much in the literature ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... have scored an equal number. As it was, he had got through twice, and also dropped a goal. The two were now having a late tea with Allardyce in his study. Allardyce had succeeded Trevor as Captain of Football at Wrykyn, and had found the post anything but a sinecure. ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... class, and clung to his early friends. It is not possible for a man to be the boon-companion of peasants and the associate of peers. Had he dissociated himself altogether from his past life, the doors of the nobility might have been still held open to him; and no doubt the cushioned ease of a sinecure's office would have been had for the asking. But in that case he would have lost his manhood, and we should have lost a poet. Burns would not have turned his back on his fellows for the most lucrative office in the kingdom; that, he would have considered as selling his ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... into a monomania. Perhaps Franklin was correct in charitably saying that at times he was "insane." He began by asserting that Franklin was old, idle, and useless, fit only to be shelved in some respectable sinecure mission; but he rapidly advanced from such moderate condemnation until he charged Franklin with being a party to the abstraction of his dispatches from a sealed parcel, which was rifled in some unexplained way on its passage ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... constitution' precisely in this state. He condemned political institutions worked for the benefit of a class, and leading, especially in legal matters, to endless abuses and chicanery. The abuses everywhere imply 'inequality' in some sense; for they arise from monopoly. The man who holds a sinecure, or enjoys a privilege, uses it for his own private interest. The 'matter of corruption,' as Bentham called it, was provided by the privilege and the sinecure. The Jacobin might denounce privileges simply as privileges, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... mistresses, a host of needy Germans, a Danish Queen banished for adultery, lived in England or abroad upon incomes drawn from the impoverished Irish Exchequer. Nor was it only a question of pensions. Quantities of valuable sinecure offices were habitually given to Englishmen who never came near the shores of Ireland. In short, the English policy towards Ireland was similar to Spain's policy towards her South American Colonies, minus the grosser forms of physical cruelty and oppression. Yet Ireland, like the American ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... because it was detrimental to the interests of the institution, but also because it might give offence to those who were acting as conductors at a lower salary, if they knew another man had been appointed to a sinecure. From these circumstances Mendelssohn derived not only the advantage of having the grant kept a secret, but also the satisfaction of allowing his friends to applaud him as a model of self-sacrificing zeal for going to Leipzig; which they ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... that wonderful house-place, where the only chance of collecting a few grains of dust would be to climb on the salt-coffer, and put your finger on the high mantel-shelf on which the glittering brass candlesticks are enjoying their summer sinecure; for at this time of year, of course, every one goes to bed while it is yet light, or at least light enough to discern the outline of objects after you have bruised your shins against them. Surely nowhere else could an oak clock-case and an oak table have ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... time of dessert, I can give no consecutive account, for as footman, under the orders of this enthusiastic parlour-maid, my place was no sinecure, and but few opportunities of observation through the crack of the door were afforded me. All that was clear to me was that the chief guest was a Mr. Teidelmann—or Tiedelmann, I cannot now remember ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... have acted in this capacity under each Praefect. When Lydus wrote, there were two Regendarii in each Praefecture, but, owing to the increasing influence of the Magister Officiorum over the Cursus Publicus[165], their office had become apparently little more than an ill-paid sinecure. As we hear nothing of similar changes in the West, the Cursus Publicus was probably a part of the public service which was directly under the control of Cassiodorus when Praetorian Praefect, and was administered at his bidding ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... willing to yield our executorships if Miriam desires it," she said. "I, for one, should be glad to lift such a yoke from my shoulders, unaccustomed to such a burden. Mr. Stanbury, desirable as you seem to think it, this post of mine is no sinecure. But spare Miriam this scene, I beg of you; she is much overcome—much exhausted; excitement in her case is very injurious, Dr. Pemberton says. Let me beg you, my dear sir, to retire. All shall be done properly and in order. Her interest is ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... go and see it at Charing Cross. Indeed, our officers, who are going to Flanders, don't quite like it; they are afraid it should grow the fashion to fight, and that a pair of colours should no longer be a sinecure. I am quite unhappy about poor Mr. Chute: besides, it is cruel to find that abstinence is not a drug. If mortification ever ceases to be a medicine, or virtue to be a passport to carnivals in the other world, who will be a self-tormentor ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... goes, "Pray as though everything depended on God, act as though everything depended on yourself". What wonder, when this advice is followed out to the letter, that we are overwhelmed with assurances that prayers have been answered, when a man is appointed to a sinecure or has obtained a life-pension? What one would like to ask is this: Do these credulous people suppose that the event would have been otherwise, had the young candidate not prayed? Do they suppose that the Deity would positively have snatched away the prize ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... had doubtless taken a heavy load upon himself but he felt that he was to labor for his race and his country. At least one half of his students were too wild to attend the ordinary public or private schools, or to profit by them if admitted. With such material, his work could not be a sinecure. But he had a taste for it, and he gave his whole heart and soul to the ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... and I ride about again. My office here is no sinecure, so many parties and difficulties of every kind; but I will do what I can. Prince Mavrocordato is an excellent person, and does all in his power; but his situation is perplexing in the extreme. Still we ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... doesn't he go up to Parliament, I'd be glad to know?" said Dulberry: "What the d—-l does he stay here for, like a ruminating beast chewing the cud of his youthful patriotism? Because he has got some pleasant sinecure for himself, I suppose—and some comfortable places for his sons, his grandsons, his ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... her) would have had a no more responsible duty, except for the size of it, than that of an electrician or a Standard Oil magnate. But to "enlighten" the world (as our learned civic guardians "Englished" it) requires abler qualities. And so poor Liberty, instead of having a sinecure as a mere illuminator, must be converted into a Chautauqua schoolma'am, with the oceans for her field instead of the placid, classic lake. With a fireless torch and an empty head must she dispel the shadows of the world and teach it its ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... Elder on the Green Bay District at this time was no sinecure. The long journeys, the great exposure and the meager accommodations among the people, were trying in the extreme. But it was found that Brother Sampson was equal to ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... abundance if we cared to have them. What other universities do by founding new chairs for new sciences, the colleges of Oxford could do to-morrow by applying the funds which are not required for teaching purposes, and which are now spent on sinecure fellowships, for making either temporary or permanent provision for ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... so good as to promise these two posts—the appointment of justice of the peace and the sinecure for my friend—I will undertake to bring you the property, almost intact.—Almost intact, I say, for the co-operation of the legatee and several other persons is absolutely indispensable, and some obligations will be incurred. ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... Brodrick,—so long one of the police magistrates,—a gentleman of large acquirements and sterling rectitude. Nearly as much may be said of Dubois, more than half a century ago the editor of a then popular magazine, "The Monthly Mirror." Dubois, in his latter days, enjoyed a snug sinecure, and lived in Sloane Street. He was a pleasant man in face and in manners, and retained to the last much of the humor that characterized the productions of his earlier years. To the admirable actor and estimable gentleman, Charles Mathews, I can merely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... my secretary, madame. We were at work as you came. I was on the point of inditing a letter to Her Majesty. The office of Seneschal in a province such as Dauphiny is helas!—no sinecure." He sighed like one whose brain is weary. "It leaves a man little time even to eat ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... precarious state of Schimmelpenninck's grandeur; that it not only depended upon the whim of Napoleon, but had long been intended as an hereditary sovereignty for Jerome. Another Dutchman asked him not to ruin his friend and his family for what he was well aware could never be called a sinecure place, and was so precarious in its tenure. "Foolish vanity," answered the Minister, "can never pay enough for the gratification of its desires. All the Schimmelpennincks in the world do not possess property enough to recompense me for the sovereign honours which ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... (with a barmaid) till 1773, when his father died. In January, 1774, he took his seat in the House of Lords. In November, 1779, Lyttelton went into Opposition. On Thursday, 25th November, he denounced Government in a magnificent speech. As to a sinecure which he held, he said, "Perhaps I shall not keep ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... it Is so strange a thing, that numbers imagine you may go (ind see it at Charing Cross. Indeed, our officers, who are going to Flanders, don't quite like it; they are afraid it should grow the fashion to fight, and that a pair of colours should be no longer a sinecure. I am quite unhappy about poor Mr. Chute: besides, it is cruel to find that abstinence is not a drug. If mortification ever ceases to be a medicine, or virtue to be a passport to carnivals in the other world, who will be a self-tormentor any longer-not, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... power, the appointment of librarian to the king at the chateau de Choisy, where she built him, at her own expense, a little cottage ornee, named by the poets of the time, the Parnassus of the French Anacreon. This appointment was a complete sinecure, for we know that the king never opened a book, and we are equally assured that Bernard never put ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... that Mr. Onslow would take a place before him, we must observe that it is not quite so generous as it may seem; for Mr. Walpole was already, by the provident care of his father, supplied with three sinecure places, and two rent-charges on two others, producing him altogether about 6300 pounds per annum. See Quarterly Review, Vol. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... comfort. The pleasant room adjoining is that of the general secretary, where he is usually to be found, and where each member is cordially welcomed for converse or advice. Beyond, again, is the office, where three men find it no sinecure to attend to the continuous stream of comers for welcome, membership, or information. The library is a large, handsome, sunnyroom, well furnished with shelves, but not these so well with books; and yet, ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... to villa, dining and supping, and flattering the ladies, and tapping the lid of his jeweled snuffbox in all fashionable companies. He was the cadet of a patrician family (when not the ambitious son of a low family), with a polite taste for idleness and intrigue, for whom no secular sinecure could be found in the State, and who obliged the Church by accepting orders. Whether in the palace on the Grand Canal, or the villa on the Brenta, this gentle and engaging priest was surely the most agreeable person to be met, and the most ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... risen, and Judge Merlin had little or no official business on hand, Ishmael's position in his office was almost a sinecure, and therefore the young man delicately hinted to his employer the propriety of a separation ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... is a very important functionary in Constantinople, and, though his office is lucrative, it is no sinecure. In former times the appearance of Franks in the streets of Constantinople was very likely to cause disturbance. Those were the great days of Turkey, when the Osmanli was master of the East, and regarded himself as the master of the world. A Frank—that is to say, a person from the ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... persons had private collections of books, the collegiate and corporate libraries were of great use to students. The librarians' duties were then no sinecure, and there was little opportunity for dust to find a resting-place. The Nineteenth Century and the Steam Press ushered in a new era. By degrees the libraries which were unendowed fell behind the age, and were ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... etiquette to an extent irritating to the ignorant, and gifted with a delicate complexion, pearly teeth, and a face that would have been Grecian but for a slight upward tilt of the nose and traces of a square, heavy type in the jaw. Her father was a retired admiral, with sufficient influence to have had a sinecure made by a Conservative government expressly for the maintenance of his son pending alliance with some heiress. Yet Gertrude remained single, and the admiral, who had formerly spent more money than he could comfortably afford on her education, and was still doing so upon her state and personal ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... for no literary class as yet existed, excepting it might be the priesthood. Chaucer, the father of English poetry, was first a soldier, and afterwards a comptroller of petty customs. The office was no sinecure either, for he had to write up all the records with his own hand; and when he had done his "reckonings" at the custom-house, he returned with delight to his favourite studies at home—poring over his books until his eyes were ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles |
