"Dissolute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... witness, that one of them deserves more credit than ten ear-witnesses of professions,—Plus valet oculatus testis unus, quam auriti decem. Now, I may ask of you, what would ye do, how would ye walk, if ye believed there were no God? Would ye be more dissolute and profane, and more void of religion? Would not human laws bind you as much in that case as they now do? For that is almost all the restraint that is upon many,—the fear of temporal punishment, or shame among men. Set your walking ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... who derives the means of an inglorious and frequently dissolute existence from the periodical receipt of money sent out to ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... being diminished, is frequently, perhaps, increased by the tax. It is the sober and industrious poor who generally bring up the most numerous families, and who principally supply the demand for useful labour. All the poor, indeed, are not sober and industrious; and the dissolute and disorderly might continue to indulge themselves in the use of such commodities, after this rise of price, in the same manner as before, without regarding the distress which this indulgence might bring upon their families. Such disorderly ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... water-colors, had been once an artist's model, and that she smoked. From the top floor back, in turn, we discovered that the woman across the way, now a writer of more or less impossible plays, had been formerly a ballet girl and still did a turn now and then to aid in the support of a dissolute and absent husband. ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... almost every reader was either priest or deacon,—brought his oldest daughter, then about twelve years of age, and begged for her admission to the Seminary. He was known as one of the vilest and most defiantly dissolute of the Nestorians, and Miss Fiske shrunk from receiving the daughter of such a man into her flock. Yet, on the ground that, like her Master, she was sent not to the righteous, but to the lost, she concluded to receive her. Still the father, during his short stay, showed such ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... peace. The conquered also, and enslaved by war, Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose And fear of God; from whom their piety feigned In sharp contest of battle found no aid Against invaders; therefore, cooled in zeal, Thenceforth shall practice how to live secure, Worldly or dissolute, on what their lords Shall leave them to enjoy; for the earth shall bear More than enough, that temperance may be tried: So all shall turn degenerate, all depraved; Justice and temperance, truth and faith, forgot; One man except, the only son of light In a ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... appearance of traffic has ceased. And then, what are the signs of immorality that meet the eye? Churches are well filled, and Dissenters' chapels are crowded to suffocation. There is no preaching to empty benches, while the drunken and dissolute populace run riot in ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... innocent and disgusted fellow-citizens. There might be a hope that the well-intentioned portion of these people, and it is both numerous and respectable, could be induced to adopt a wiser mode of procedure, were it not that dissolute politicians, who care only for the success of parties, and who make a stalking-horse of philanthropy, as they would of religion or patriotism, or any other extended feeling that happened to come within their influence, interpose their sinister ...
— New York • James Fenimore Cooper
... o' luggin' 'em back to the plains, and all the ammunition he could get at, and, consilio et auxilio Rutton Singhi, tramped back to his fort with all his Sikhs and his precious prisoners, and a lot of dissolute hangers-on that he and the prisoner had seduced into service. He had sixty men of sorts—and his brazen cheek. Mac nearly wept with joy when he went. You see there weren't any explicit orders to Stalky ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... favourite authors. He also read many books of physic; for long before thirty his constitution was so broken by his life, that he turned his attention to remedies, and to medical treatment; and it is remarkable how many men of dissolute lives take up the same sort of reading, in the vain hope of repairing a course of dissolute living. As a writer, his style was at once forcible and lively; as a companion, he was wildly vivacious: madly, perilously, did he outrage decency, insult virtue, profane religion. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... James's English army was at Salisbury. It was at this critical period that Lord Wharton, who has been described as "a political weathercock, a bad spendthrift, and a poet of some pretensions," joined the Prince of Orange in the Revolution, and published this famous song. He seems to have been a dissolute man, and ended badly, although he was a visitor at the "Dolphin" at that time, with many distinguished personages. In the third edition of the small pamphlet in which the song was first published Lord Wharton was described "as a Late Viceroy of Ireland who has ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... disposition, which inclined him to cruelty, and his political views, made him, from his first entrance upon office, a severe disciplinarian. The well known enormities of the neighboring Daphne gave him ample opportunities for the exercise of his harsh propensities in reforming the dissolute soldiery. He amputated heads, arms, feet, and hams: he turned out his mutilated victims, as walking spectacles of warning; he burned them; he smoked them to death; and, in one instance, he crucified a detachment of his army, together with their centurions, for having, unauthorized, gained ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... that the great minister Sully feared was that of Gabrielle, whom the King had promised to marry when the tie that bound him to his beautiful, wilful, dissolute cousin, Marguerite of Valois, should be annulled by the Pope. Sully, however, had other ambitions for Henry and for France, as he was already entering into negotiations with the Medici with a view to a marriage with a daughter of their house, which would swell ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... Mala, as he was called, resolved to behave well and worthily to serve his protector, but he saw in this mysterious Council many men leading a dissolute life and yet not making less, nay —gaining more indulgences, gold crowns and benefices than all the other virtuous and well-behaved ones. Now during one night—dangerous to his virtue—the devil whispered ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... may find the reason why this band of dissolute and rapacious nobles has enlisted the passionate sympathy of democratic writers. For it will be noticed that these same writers who attribute the King's condemnation of the Order to envy of their wealth ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... was a mere farce together, and the people were always stringing together lampoons in rhyme, and singing them in the streets. One still rings in my head, about a dissolute impoverished Marquis d'Elbeuf, one of the house of Lorraine, whom the prospect of pay induced to offer his services to ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... whatever about him," replied Birney, "except that he is a fellow of dissolute appearance, with sandy hair, not ill-looking, setting aside what is called a battered look, and a face of the ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... and blood from the English shore. Properly understood, Godwin's whole life was one protracted agony for the salvation of his country. He had to contend with every species of deleterious influence,—ferocious, drunken, dissolute, and imbecile kings, the reckless intrigues of monasticism at the instigation of Rome, and the unprincipled and infamous ambition of the Norman Bastard, who crept into England during this great man's exile, and fled in all haste at his return. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... in English. Mistral evidently wishes to believe her innocent, and he makes out a pretty good case. He approves the remark of Scipione Ammirato, that she contracted four successive marriages through a desire to have direct heirs. Another notices that had she been dissolute, she would have preferred the liberty of remaining a widow. The poet cites Pope Innocent VI, who gave her the golden rose, and sets great store upon the expression of Saint Catherine of Siena, who calls her "Venerabile madre in Gesu ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... arm in arm with his friend, the Duke of Wharton. It was a one-sided friendship. Lord Rotherby was but one of the many of his type who furnished a court, a valetaille, to the gay, dissolute, handsome, witty duke, who might have been great had he not preferred his vices to ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... which one can never repeat often enough, forbidding that widows should abound in daintiness, or keep their face anointed, or their garments choice or delicate. Nor should their conversation be with vain or dissolute young women, but in the cell: they should do like the turtle- dove, who, when her companion has died, mourns for ever, and keeps to herself, and wants no other company. Limit your intercourse, dearest ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... conception of the two hostile brothers, and this he had from Schubart, although other writers, notably Klinger and Leisewitz, had already made use of it in dramatic productions. In the Schubart story[19] we hear of a nobleman with two sons, of whom the elder, Karl, is high-minded but dissolute, while the younger, Wilhelm, is a hypocritical zealot. Karl plays the role of the prodigal son and his excesses are duly reported at home by his brother. After a while the sinner repents and writes his father a remorseful letter, which ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Rawbon's purpose to allow his rival, Hare, to depart in peace. The chastisement which he had received at Harold's hands added a most deadly hate to the jealousy which his knowledge of Oriana's preference had caused. He had considerable influence with several of the dissolute and lawless characters of the vicinity, and a liberal allowance of Monongahela, together with sundry pecuniary favors, enabled him to depend upon their assistance in any adventure that did not promise particularly ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... have means for their necessities, most of the neglected are infants and children. Orphans and foundlings for whom homes must be found, children who are over-worked or abused, or who are living with dissolute parents, all of these must be given proper guardianship and a chance for healthful growth and education, or they are likely to become delinquent and thus become a permanent liability to society. It is true that in the country the home is at its best (see chapter II), but it is also unfortunately ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... Lippis, which is an interesting circumstance when we remember that that dissolute brother was the greatest influence on Botticelli. The largest is the Coronation of the Virgin with its many lilies—a picture which one must delight in, so happy and crowded is it, but which never seems to me quite what ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... churches, earning by her zeal in such works a letter of panegyric from Pope Gregory the Great. But, old as she was, she at the same time gave herself up to a life of outrageous license. It was not, however, her dissolute life which proved fatal to her, but the design which she showed to erect a firm monarchy in Austrasia and Neustria, by putting down the overgrown power of the nobles. They raised an army to attack her; she was defeated, and with four of her great-grandchildren, the sons ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... when Mr. Willard spoke to me, and inquired, if I knew the man. I told him I had simply been introduced to him, and he said, 'He is a person whose acquaintance is very undesirable; he is a drunkard and a gambler; he belongs to a good family, but he is their thorn in the flesh, because of his dissolute ways.' Perhaps this sounds harsh, even unkind to you, but I am trying to do by you as I would by my own sister if I had one. I don't want you to ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... trace back any circumstance which could, to speak advisedly, have led to such a course of deception as was practised by this boy; born of obscure parents, his father, a man of dissolute habits, was sub-chanter of the Cathedral, and also master of the free school in Pyle-street; this clever, but harsh, and dissolute man died in August, 1752, and the poet was born on the 20th of the following November.[3] Such a parent could not be a loss; he would have been, in all human probability, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... liquors sold to these Indians, in the places of their residence, and during their hunting season, have increased to an inconceivable degree, so as to keep these poor creatures continually under the force of liquors, that they are thereby become dissolute, enfeebled and indolent when sober; and untractable and mischievous in their liquor, always quarreling, and often murdering one another." Some of the chiefs at this treaty said, "these wicked whisky-sellers, when ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... an Englishman, and a cadet of an ancient family, who, after having spent a dissolute youth and early manhood, had come to Canada. Here he became acquainted with an old, half-pay Highland officer of Wolfe's Army, who for his signal services rendered during the operations of the British force before Quebec, had been rewarded with a grant of land in that vicinity. Like others of ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... afeared that yonder is a dissolute island," (meaning a desolate island), "and if no help comes to us from the shore we may be blown out to sea, and be worse off than ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... to see anything more, but came down to the foot of the stairs, that I might learn if Roland took his money to his dissolute comrades. He came out, and once more I followed him, and once more he led me to the Rheingold cellar. On this occasion, however, I took step by step with him until we entered the large wineroom at the foot of the stairs, he less than an arm's length in front of me, still under ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... and she hesitated shyly as she did so, but her modest timidity was so charming that the dissolute courtier at Barbara's side felt a throb of sympathy, and gazed down at her like a benevolent fatherly friend as she held out her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... falsehoods to the skies!—WHO WILL BELIEVE THE TALE OF PROBABILITY? Brethren! behold the man whose cause I pleaded with you—for whom my feelings had well-nigh mastered my better judgment. Behold him, and learn how hard it is to pierce the stony heart of him whose youth has passed in dissolute living, and in adultery. Shall I approach thy ear with the voice of her who cries from the grave for justice on her seducer? Look, my beloved, on the man whom I found discarded by mankind, friendless and naked whom I clothed and fostered, and whom I brought in confidence amongst you. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... crude storehouse. He had not come out of any curiosity. He had not come to contemplate the havoc wrought on the bodies of this flotsam of dissolute life. He had come for the simple purpose of offering some cheer in the ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... Frank resided, was a deep stone cellar, originally designed as a wine vault; it was built in the most substantial manner, the only entrance being protected by a massive iron door—the said door having been attached in order to prevent dishonest or dissolute servants from plundering the wine. In the course of the day upon which he had sent the letter to Nero, Frank paid a visit to this cellar, and having examined it with great care, said to himself—'This will answer ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... debauchee, the murderer, may be transformed to a meek and sincere Christian. Millions of the heathen, with thousands of years of savage and bestial heredity behind them, have become pure and loyal disciples of the spotless Redeemer. The fierce heathen Africaner, as well as the dissolute Jerry McCauley, have illustrated ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... had already made some inquiries on the subject of this young man. The result, so far, has not been at all favorable. Mr. Jay's habits are irregular; he frequents public houses, and seems to be familiarly acquainted with a great many dissolute characters; he is in debt to most of the tradespeople whom he employs; he has not paid his rent to Mr. Yatman for the last month; yesterday evening he came home excited by liquor, and last week he was seen talking to a prize-fighter. In short, though ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... trunk. No; the seared wood is the fitter for the use of the workmen—the hardened and the dried-up heart is that which can best bear the task imposed by these dismal times. God and man will no longer endure the unbridled profligacy of the dissolute—the scoffing of the profane—the contempt of the divine laws—the infraction of human rights. The times demand righters and avengers, and there will be ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the early years of the present. "Le Nozze di Figaro," "Don Giovanni," and "Il Barbiere di Siviglia" are the most familiar works in which it is employed, and in the second of these it is used only by the bearers of the comedy element. The dissolute Don chatters glibly in it with Zerlina, but when Donna Anna and Don Ottavio converse, it is ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... gone northward across the Guai river into what was in those days a practically unknown land. In a little over a year's time Bridges had returned alone—his companion having been, so he stated, killed by the Matabele, and for six months or so he led a dissolute life in Bulawayo and the district, which ended ultimately in his execution for murder. There was no doubt whatever about the murder, or the various thefts and forgeries that he was accused of, as he had made a confession at his trial, and we seemed to be on a wild-goose chase of the worst variety ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... and, being governed by ecclesiastical laws, were not like other English subjects amenable to the civil code. The king's power was thus endangered; a proud and encroaching spirit was fostered, and the clergy became dissolute in their lives. In the words ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... surprising inconsistencies, and it seems incredible that she should have grudged one whom she called the gem of her Court the honour which she actually wished conferred on Count Hohenlo, a man who, though a brave soldier, was known for his drunken, dissolute habits. ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... same time, in periods of moral decline, complete freedom may degenerate so as to produce evils equally great. The wealthy Boeotians, in the later days of Hellenic history, were wont to form themselves into dissolute drinking companies; and not only the childless, but even fathers of families made over their property to these companies, limiting their offspring to a portion which it was made their duty to let them have. It was so in Rome, also, in Cicero's time, when every acquaintance of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... side, was a glorification of the British race; it was a foreshadowing of the happy time when this governing and triumphant people would give the world the blessing of the pax Britannica. "We are not yet," said Ruskin in his inaugural address, "dissolute in temper but still have the firmness to govern and the grace to obey." In this address he preached that if England was not to perish, "she must found colonies as fast and far as she is able," while for the residents ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... in the character, there is hardly an action in the life of this exemplary personage, that does not mark him as a true servant of CHRIST. And may we not presume the blessed Author of our faith, in supplying us in these dissolute times with a recent example of such astonishing and unlimited beneficence, is graciously pleased to afford us a new motive to prize and to cherish that animating faith, which could form, in an age like the present, a character so wonderfully entitled to the veneration of ...
— The Eulogies of Howard • William Hayley
... Government official at Vienna, an accomplished violinist, born in 1798; became a member of the Schuppanzigh Quartets in 1824, and afterwards director of the Concerts Spirituels in that capital; a Viennese of somewhat dissolute habits, by whom even the grave master himself ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... brawler!" "And thou, my young coxcomb of Orleans," he continued, addressing that dissolute Prince: "How dare you, sir, lead such a throng of revellers into the King's own gardens? Is not your own house of debauchery sufficient for Your Grace? Have a care, young sir, I am yet the King, and thou mayest never ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... Augustine, pleaded with God that her dissolute son might not go to Rome, that sink of iniquity; but he was permitted to go, and thus came into contact with Ambrose, bishop of Milan, through whom he was converted. God fulfilled the mother's ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... thinking of her as defiled in her father's defilement. The creeping things—those which God hath not yet cleansed—call the pure things unclean. But it was better to be so judged than to run the risk of growing after the pattern of her judges. I suspect the man who leads a dissolute, and the man who leads a commonly selfish life, will land from the great jump pretty nearly in the same spot. What if those who have despised each the other's sins, are set down to stare at them together, until each finds his own iniquity to ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of the last Visconti. On the death of Francesco Sforza, in 1466, he left two sons, Galeazzo Maria and Lodovico, surnamed Il Moro, both of whom were destined to play a prominent part in history. Galeazzo Maria, dissolute, vicious, and cruel to the core, was murdered by his injured subjects in the year 1476. His son, Giovanni Galeazzo, aged eight, would in course of time have succeeded to the duchy, had it not been for the ambition of his uncle Lodovico. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... my fellow-student, inquired the cause of the palpable change in my bearing and disposition. Would that my lips had been sealed to him forever! I knew that he was honest and generous by nature, but I knew not to what extent his dissolute habits (gradually acquired by having ample means, and yielding by degrees to the temptations of vice) had perverted his good qualities. I told him of my love, and while describing the charms of Laura, I was pleased ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... declined his services. Parker then joined the provincial strolling companies, and was engaged for one season with Digges, then manager of the Edinburgh Theatre. At Edinburgh he married an actress named Heydon, from whom, however, he was soon obliged to part on account of her dissolute life. Returning again to London, he set up as wandering lecturer on elocution, and in this character travelled with varying success through England. In November 1776 he set out on a visit to France, and lived at Paris for upwards ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... pleased, although the strictest inquisition followed all that was allowed to pass outside the walls, lest reports adverse to His Majesty's health should reach the party of the Princes, his sons, who caught eagerly at any facts they might distort in a way to gain the Regency for the dissolute Prince of Wales, and cast the Queen completely into his power. It so happened that one day I was seated to my knotting behind the Japan screen in the parlour apportioned by the Prince to Her Majesty at Kew. My knotting had fallen on my knee as I gazed pensively at the prospect ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... fluctuating inclination of the people; or, with their public resolution-brethren, the Seceders, exchanging the clear scriptural and covenanted basis of civil government, with the obscure foundation of the law and light of nature, or the more dissolute basis of mere election and acknowledgment of whomsoever the primores regni, though never so wicked and licentious, choose and set up as magistrates. Which notion contains an injurious and impious impeachment of divine revelation, as a rule ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... was gone, lost for good and all. She had made herself a Lady Godiva; by this night of conspicuous revelry she had undone everything. Not only had she condoned the sins and the shortcomings of her dissolute husband, but also she had put herself on a level with him and with the fallen women of the town—his customary associates. Courteau had done this to her. It had been his proposal. She could have ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... to see her married, being themselves old, and not liking to leave a comparatively young widow alone in the world with so many children to look after. Their choice fell first upon a very undesirable person called Santagnolo, a young man of dissolute habits, ruined constitution, bad character, and no estate. She refused, with spirit, to sign the marriage contract; and a few months later wrote again to inform her guardian that a suitable match had been found in the person of Giulio ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... forced to sell his all—to leave the peasant without a horse, and therefore without the means to labour, even though the loss of a single day's work may take years of labour to rectify. Meanwhile it is plain that the local peasant has become a mere dissolute, lazy drunkard. Give a muzhik enough to live upon for twelve months without working, and you will corrupt him for ever, so inured to rags and vagrancy will he grow. And what is the good of that piece of pasture there—of that piece on the further ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... say," answered Clarenham, "that it might have been those early-won honours that turned the head of such a mere youth, so entirely without guidance, or rather, with the guidance of that dissolute Squire, who, I grieve to observe, still haunts his footsteps. Knighthood, with nought to maintain it, ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... have the face to come here with their religion, when the dissolute white man is in every port manifesting a lust and greed and brutality which Chinese are accustomed to associate with the citizenship and religion attributed to Christianity. No wonder it is hard for them to make converts among the people who have business dealings with these ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... representation, even of vice and brutality. There would certainly be no difficulty in finding flesh and blood originals for the rakes and the fine ladies in the memoirs of Grammont or the diaries of Pepys. The moral atmosphere is precisely that of the dissolute court of Charles II., and the 'privation of moral light' required is a delicate way of expressing its characteristic feeling. In the worst performances we have not got to any unreal region, but are breathing for the time the atmosphere of the lowest resorts, where reference to pure or ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... dissolute youth: aping the man of intrigue and levity: over-dressed, over-confident, inordinately vain of his personal appearance: distinguished as to his hair, cane, snuff-box, and singing-voice: and unhappily the son of a working shoemaker. Bent on loftier flights than such a poor house- swallow ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... gifts as he was magnificent in his tastes. His offerings to the oracle at Delphi were unprecedented in their value, when he sought advice as to the wisdom of engaging in war with Cyrus. Of the three great Asian empires, Croesus now saw his father's ally, Babylon, under a weak and dissolute ruler; Media, absorbed into Persia under the power of a valiant and successful conqueror; and his own empire, Lydia, threatened with attack by the growing ambition of Persia. Herodotus says he "was led to consider whether it were possible to check the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... taste. Shapes and forms were complicated and indeed inexplicably mixed into a melange that one could hardly recognize for one thing or another, certainly not as examples of any well-meaning styles which have lasted until to-day. The straight line now disappeared in favour of the most dissolute and irrational curves imaginable, and the sober majesty of the gardens of Louis XIV became a tangle of warring elements, fine in parts and not uninteresting, effective, even, here and there, but as ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... Philomelus got together an army of ten thousand men,—reckless, dissolute characters, the impious scum of Greece, for no pious Greek would enlist in such a cause. The war was ferocious. The allies put their prisoners to death. Philomelus followed their example. This was a losing game, and both sides gave it up. At length Philomelus and ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Subsequently to this transaction, Chatterton acquired other patrons more credulous than Walpole, and proceeded with his forgeries. In April 1770 he came to London, and committed suicide in August of that year; a fate which befell him, it is to be feared, more in consequence of his own dissolute and profligate habits, than from any want of patronage. However this may be, Walpole clearly had nothing ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... pupil of Xenocrates, and succeeded him as the head of his school. There is a story that he had been a very dissolute young man, and that one day, at the head of a band of revellers, he burst into the school of Xenocrates, when his attention was so arrested by the discourse of the philosopher, which happened to be on the subject of ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... of the opening out of a muddy river, a bordering of dingy green mangroves—tree cripples, Mark Vandean called them, because they all looked as if standing up on crutches. A few boats lay in the mouth of the river, a dissolute-looking brig with its yards unsquared was at anchor higher up, and a sharp eye could detect a figure or two about the beach. On either side, as far as eye could reach, there ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... the shelter of some friends of his at Bedford. Gifford had studied medicine before he entered the army, and as soon as he thought it safe he began to practise his old art in the town of Bedford. Gifford had been a dissolute man as a soldier, and he became, if possible, a still more scandalously dissolute man as a civilian. Gifford's life in Bedford was a public disgrace, and his hatred and persecution of the Puritans in that town made his very name an infamy ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... labour have not been provided in their gaol, that no time will be lost in providing those means by which imprisonment may be made a real punishment, by which offenders may be reformed during their imprisonment, and by which the idle and dissolute may be prevented from ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... appearance of reason, in particular Dr. Lardner, have maintained that the common notion respecting the dissolute life of Mary Magdalen is erroneous, and that she was always a person of excellent character. Charles Taylor, the editor of "Calmet's Dictionary of the Bible" takes the ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... bloud on the one side, as they are zealous on the other side of a due Reformation both in Church and State. In which work, whilest they were labouring, they have been interrupted by the plots and practises of a malignant party of Papists, and ill affected persons, especially of the corrupt and dissolute Clergy, by the incitement and instigation of Bishops and others, whose avarice and ambition being not able to bear the Reformation endeavoured by the Parliament, they have laboured (as we can expect little ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... disdainful of his intellectual superiors, and brazenly foul-mouthed. It was as though he was shouting: "I don't have to fear or respect anybody now! I have got a lot of money. I can do as I damn please." More than one pure man became dissolute in the riot of easily gotten wealth. A real-estate speculator once hinted to me, in a fit of drunken confidence, that his wife, hitherto a good woman and a simple home body, had gone astray through the new vistas of life that had suddenly been flung open to her. One fellow ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... mimicked beasts and their voices, ball-players and buffoons. Only a few persons looked at them, however, since wine had darkened the eyes of the audience. The feast passed by degrees into a drunken revel and a dissolute orgy. The Syrian damsels, who appeared at first in the bacchic dance, mingled now with the guests. The music changed into a disordered and wild outburst of citharas, lutes, Armenian cymbals, Egyptian sistra, trumpets, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Philipp Emanuel, was soon to eclipse it for the next hundred years, "The art has advanced to great heights: the old style of music no longer pleases our modern ears." But it would have broken his heart if he had forseen that Friedermann Bach was to attain a disreputable old age after a dissolute and unproductive life. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... the youth, and remembered that at dawn he was to die in his company, he realized that he had used him ill, that his behaviour towards him had been that of the dissolute ruffler he was become, rather than of the gentleman he had once ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... manifested against the re-establishment of worship. He read with much self-satisfaction the reports made to him, in which it was stated that the churches were well frequented: Indeed, throughout the year 1802, all his attention wad directed to the reformation of manners, which had become more dissolute under the Directory than even during the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... quitting time he was strangely down at the place with his own car to fetch his father home. 'I'll trust you this once,' says the old man, getting in and looking more then ever like a dissolute working man. On the way they passed this here yellow-haired daughter of the old train-robber that there had been talk of the boy making a match with. She was driving her own car and looked ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... made every effort to destroy Tarracina, where he had shut up the gladiators and sailors, who would not venture to leave the shelter of the walls or to face death in the open. The gladiators were commanded, as we have already seen,[209] by Julianus, and the sailors by Apollinaris, men whose dissolute inefficiency better suited gladiators than general officers. They set no watch, and made no attempt to repair the weak places in the walls. Day and night they idled loosely; the soldiers were dispatched in all directions to find them luxuries; that beautiful ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... of the worst-regulated habits are constantly engaged in this exciting and precarious trade; and serious demoralisation is engendered amongst the villagers by the idle and dissolute adventurers who resort to Saffragam. Systematic industry suffers, and the cultivation of the land is frequently neglected whilst its owners are absorbed in these speculative ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... blue-eyed, roughly-clad man of about fifty years of age appeared from the house, yawning. I threw my eye over him as he advanced with a peculiar rolling gait, and formed certain conclusions. A drunkard who has once been a gentleman, I reflected to myself, for there was something peculiarly dissolute in his appearance, also one who has had to do with the sea, a diagnosis ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... say, he daily doth frequent With unrestrained loose companions, Even such, they say, as stand in narrow lanes And beat our watch and rob our passengers; Which he, young wanton and effeminate boy, Takes on the point of honour to support So dissolute a crew. ...
— The Tragedy of King Richard II • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... for all the other profligates of his day, who seem to have been neither better nor worse than himself. I rather suspect that he had a human heart which never quite died out of him, and the warmth of which is still faintly perceptible amid the dissolute ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... warnings of his brother he only replied that he wished to know everything by experience, not by hearsay—that he felt within him two men, one an actor, the other a spectator, and if the former did a foolish thing the latter profited by it. On this pernicious reasoning he pursued for three years a dissolute mode of life, which, thanks to the remarkable strength and elasticity of his constitution, did not prevent his carrying on his studies and going with great zest into society, where he became more and more welcome, besides writing occasionally. He ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... to cause any sensation, even in the small community where it obliterated one of the principal members of the society. If the accounts given by these ladies of the character of the planters in this part of the south may be believed, they must be as idle, arrogant, ignorant, dissolute, and ferocious as that mediaeval chivalry to which they are fond of comparing themselves; and these are southern women, and should know the people among whom ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... the white feather. Mr. Lockhart says that "he returned to Scotland a dishonoured man; and though he found shelter and compassion from his mother, his brother would never see him again. Nay, when, soon after, his health, shattered by dissolute indulgence, ... gave way altogether, and he died, as yet a young man, the poet refused either to attend his funeral or to wear mourning for him, like the rest of his family."[36] Indeed he always spoke of him as his "relative," not as his brother. Here again Scott's severity was due to his ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... deal of wild faculty,—running to waste, nearly all. There, with his black arched eyebrows, black swift physically smiling eyes, stands Monseigneur le Comte, one of the strongest-bodied and most dissolute-minded men now living on our Planet. He is now turned of forty: no man has been in such adventures, has swum through such seas of transcendent eupepticity determined to have its fill. In this new Quasi-sacred French Enterprise, under the Banner of Belleisle and the Chateauroux, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Martin was far from enlightened. He was to obtain full emancipation from the thraldom of Rome in Rome itself. He was sent there to represent seven convents of his own order, who were at variance with the Vicar-general. He had always imagined Rome to be the abode of sanctity. Ignorance, levity, dissolute manners, a profane spirit, a contempt for all that is sacred, a scandalous traffic in divine things. Such was the spectacle afforded by this unhappy city. Even when performing their most sacred ceremonies, the ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... this with imperturbable gravity, as if unconscious of satirical meaning; but some of the guests could scarcely repress a smile, as they recollected the dissolute life ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... himself Lord Ruthven, an idle and dissolute sybarite, who under the circumstances promised to push his devotion so far as to wear a cuirass; then, sure of this important accomplice, he busied himself ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... fishery, attracted their avarice; [6] and as Britain was viewed in the light of a distinct and insulated world, the conquest scarcely formed any exception to the general system of continental measures. After a war of about forty years, undertaken by the most stupid, [7] maintained by the most dissolute, and terminated by the most timid of all the emperors, the far greater part of the island submitted to the Roman yoke. [8] The various tribes of Britain possessed valor without conduct, and the love of freedom ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... with the Patria potestas of the Romans, at the same time that she fell under the marital despotism which desired her seclusion, she found herself tempted to take the only reprisals which were within her power. Then she became a dissolute creature, as soon as men ceased to be intently occupied in intestine war, for the same reason that she was a virtuous woman in the midst of civil disturbances. Every educated man can fill in this outline, for we seek from movements like these the lessons and not the poetic ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... If a dissolute husband deserts his wife, certainly the wronged, and perchance impoverished, woman should be 63:30 allowed to collect her own wages, enter into business agreements, hold real estate, deposit funds, and own her ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... thus nursed on the fields of France found at last scope for action in England itself. Even before the outbreak of the War of the Roses the nobles had become as lawless and dissolute at home as they were greedy and cruel abroad. But with the struggle of York and Lancaster and the paralysis of government which it brought with it, all hold over the baronage was gone; and the lawlessness and brutality of their temper showed itself without a check. The disorder ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... murmurs of freedom or fanaticism attested the reluctance of the Arabs, and four citizens of Medina refused the oath of fidelity; but the designs of Moawiyah were conducted with vigor and address; and his son Yezid, a feeble and dissolute youth, was proclaimed as the commander of the faithful and the successor on the apostle ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... Master of Misrule, named the Kesar, the authority of which disorderly officer lay in riot, as after dinner he would neither salute his friends, nor understand the laws of reason, those who ought to have been most respectful being both lawless and witless. We spent three days in this dissolute manner, and then shaped our course for the Cape of Good Hope, sailing towards the coast of Bacchus, to whom this idolatrous sacrifice ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... and this one got alimony, and that one got a limited divorce, and this mother kept the children on condition that the father could sometimes come and look at them, and these went into poorhouses, and those went into an insane asylum, and those went into dissolute public life, and all went to destruction. The mightiest war ever made against the marriage institution was that free-love campaign, sometimes under one ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... of the seventeenth century.... It encouraged ignorance, and instituted a censorship even for works on jurisprudence, philosophy, and politics, and for novels that reflected on the avarice and rapacity of the priests, their dissolute conduct, and their hypocricy." [Weiss, vol. 2, pp. 319 to 321.] "Lastly, if it be asked what has corrupted the morals both of the clergy and the laity of the former times and of the present day, the answer is still, Catholic superstition!" ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... that brother's keeper? He is not an Abel, Is strange to my roof, and no guest at my table: I know not his mates, we are not near each other, He swills in the pothouse, that dissolute brother!— But there's your example?—The drunkards can't see it, And if they are told of it, scorn it and flee it; Example?—Your children!—No doubt it is right To be to them always a law and a light; But moderate temperance is the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of the game, it foretells that you will be much courted and admired by certain dissolute characters, bringing you selfish pleasures, but much distress to ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... strictness in religion, to which he was bred under his father, who was a very popular minister of the Tolbooth Church, not acting in restraint of his convivial humour, he was held to be excellent company even by those of dissolute manners; while, being a five-bottle man, he could lay them all under the table. This had brought on him the nickname of Dr. Bonum Magnum in the time of faction. But never being indecently the worse of liquor, and a love ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... but dissolute old lawyer said to me, "You need no act of Congress to protect your news service. There are at least two, and I think four or five, English rulings that cover the case. Let me show them to you." He did so and I went no further with ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... during the time that the Romans held possession of the island of Britain was the visit of one of the emperors to this northern extremity of his dominions. The name of this emperor was Severus. He was powerful and prosperous at home, but his life was embittered by one great calamity, the dissolute character and the perpetual quarrels of his sons. To remove them from Rome, where they disgraced both themselves and their father by their vicious lives, and the ferocious rivalry and hatred they bore to each other, Severus planned an excursion to Britain, taking them with him, ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... short visit to London, and away from the restraining responsibilities of his command, Wolfe, according to his own account, lapsed into debauchery. "In that short time I committed more imprudent acts than in all my life before I lived in the idlest, [most] dissolute, abandoned manner that could be conceived, and that not out of vice, which is the most extraordinary part of it. I have escaped at length and am once more master of my reason, and hereafter it shall rule my conduct; at least I hope so." Perhaps the lapse ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... occasion, we are told, at the play-house the whole audience was scandalized by a loose drunken frolic, in which Mr. William Pleydell, a gentleman of Hampshire, played a disgraceful part. What was worse, he carried his dissolute habits into the countryside, and at one time his way of living at the family seat White Ladies was so openly outrageous that the incumbent of Bilberry actually denounced the squire from the pulpit, referring to him as 'a ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... night, as a woman does her hair. His white teeth looked factory-made. His skin was red and rough, as if from perpetual sunburn; he often went away to hot springs to take mud baths. He was notoriously dissolute with women. Two Swedish girls who had lived in his house were the worse for the experience. One of them he had taken to Omaha and established in the business for which he had fitted ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... with the kitchen and so constructed that, by moving a clock-hand, the corresponding dial abandoned the non-committal elusiveness of "Please call me at——" for "Please call me at 8.00 (or 9.00 or 9.30)." There was something calculatedly dissolute about the invention (which cost L17.10 and had struck work four times in three weeks). After a long night of work or frolic, the sybarite moved the hand on for twelve hours—his last conscious act before collapsing into bed; if, again, he ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... manners! I always found that young men who had been bred at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge were the most difficult to keep within the bounds of decorum. The life which these men lead at college is so dissolute that few of them ever know how to relish the sweets of domestic virtuous society. This is the greatest drawback upon the religion of the country, and I blush for the name of religion while I relate it. I have, in one hour, heard more ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... now possible to us—the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern, and the grace to obey. We have been taught a religion of pure mercy, which we must either now betray, or learn to defend by fulfilling. And we are rich in an inheritance of honour, bequeathed to us through a thousand years of noble history, which ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... from my story. I was now left alone with one of the robbers, the confidential companion of the chief. He was the youngest and most vigorous of the band, and though his countenance had something of that dissolute fierceness which seems natural to this desperate, lawless mode of life, yet there were traits of manly beauty about it. As an artist I could not but admire it. I had remarked in him an air of abstraction and reverie, and at times a movement of inward ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... your mother is right, Chris," Amos replied, with a laugh. "We shall all get the reputation of being very dissolute lads if the meetings at the Liberty Tree are continued many weeks longer. As a matter of fact, I think you ...
— Under the Liberty Tree - A Story of The 'Boston Massacre' • James Otis
... anywhere. In his more serious intervals, he talks philosophy and deism, and preaches obedience to the law of reason and morality; which law he says (and I believe him) he has so well observed, that, notwithstanding his residence in dissolute countries, he has never yet been sinful. He wishes me, eight or nine weeks hence, to accompany him on foot to Quebec, and then to Niagara and New York. I should like it well, if my circumstances and other considerations would permit. What pleases much in Mons. S——— is the simple and childlike ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... left like a goose, in the street. Ah, you're a dissolute fellow! But that's not the point," the steward went on, "I've something to tell you. Our lady . . ." here he paused a minute, "it's our lady's pleasure that you should be married. Do you hear? She imagines you may be steadier when ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... the crowded theatre—Philip was too young to remember the old Chambers' Street box, where the serious Burton led his hilarious and pagan crew—in the intervals of the screaming comedy, when the orchestra scraped and grunted and tooted its dissolute tunes, the world seemed full of opportunities to Philip, and his heart exulted with a conscious ability to take any of its ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... of openly dissolute character were seen, such as occupy particular parts of the theatre in England and America. Indeed, they never appear on the streets of Rome in that unblushing manner as in London, and even in New York and Philadelphia. It must not from hence be inferred that vice is ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... seemed a natural one. But his popularity, although great in New Salem, had not spread far enough over the district, and he was defeated. Then the wretched hand-to-mouth struggle began again. He "set up in store-business" with a dissolute partner, who drank whiskey while Lincoln was reading books. The result was a disastrous failure and a load of debt. Thereupon he became a deputy surveyor, and was appointed postmaster of New Salem, the business ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... innocence and unattractiveness of the nautch girls to a missionary lady who sat in the next seat, she looked horrified, and admonished me in a whisper that, while there was nothing immodest in the performance, they were depraved, deceitful and dissolute creatures, arrayed in gorgeous raiment for the purpose of enticing men. And it is certainly true that they were clad in the most dazzling costumes of gold brocades and gauzy stuffs that floated like clouds around their heads and shoulders, and their ears, noses, arms, ankles, necks, fingers ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... three shillings. The Lady's Library ("Spectator" No. 37) containing beside numerous romances "A Book of Novels" and "The New Atalantis, with a Key to it," which last Lady Mary Montagu also enjoyed, and the dissolute country-gentleman's daughters ("Spectator" No. 128) who "read Volumes of Love-Letters and Romances to their Mother," a ci-devant coquette, give us perhaps a more accurate idea of the woman novelist's ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... I well remember.—He was one who owned No common soul. In youth by science nursed, And led by nature into a wild scene Of lofty hopes, he to the world went forth 15 A favoured Being, knowing no desire Which genius did not hallow; 'gainst the taint Of dissolute tongues, and jealousy, and hate, And scorn,—against all enemies prepared, All but neglect. The world, for so it thought, 20 Owed him no service; wherefore he at once With indignation turned himself away, [4] And with the food of pride sustained his soul In solitude.—Stranger! these ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... no claims—But let me draw the picture, dear Chevalier. Here was a discredited, dissolute fellow whose life was worth a pin to nobody. Tired of the husks and the swine, and all his follies grown stale by over-use, he takes the advice of a good gentleman, and joins the standard of work and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... question or limitation, the yearly expense hath swelled into a national grievance, and the humane purposes of the original institution are, in a great measure, defeated. Instead of an asylum for poor forlorn orphans and abandoned foundlings, it is become a general receptacle for the offspring of the dissolute, who care not to work for the maintenance of their families. The hospital itself is a plain edifice, well contrived for economy and convenience, standing on the north side of the city, and a little detached from it, in an agreeable ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Ophi—Phallo—Solar devotees who then covered every land and sea, from the sources of the Nile and Euphrates to all over the Mediterranean coasts and isles. These impure faiths seem to have been very strictly maintained by Jews up to Hezekiah's days, and by none more so than by dissolute Solomon and his cruel, lascivious bandit-father, the brazen-faced adulterer and murderer, who broke his freely volunteered oath, and sacrificed six innocent sons of his king to ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... me in such affliction, endeavoured to console me. He told me that he had never understood my history, as I just now related it; he had of course known that I led a dissolute life, but he had imagined that M. G—— M——'s interest about me was the result of his esteem and friendship for my family; that it was in this sense he had explained the matter to him; that what I had now told him should assuredly ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... part automatic. 'Whatsoever a man soweth, that'—and not some other crop—'will he also reap.' The wages of sin are paid in ready money; and it is as just to lay them at God's door as it would be to charge Him with inflicting the disease which the dissolute man brings upon himself. It is no arbitrary appointment of God's that 'he that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption'; nor is it His will acting as that of a jealous despot which makes it inevitably ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... worthless and dissolute ruler, never commanded the confidence of his people as his great predecessors had done, nor had he the same confidence in them. This want of mutual trust was not confined to his Chinese subjects only. In 1799, Ho-shen, a high ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... as a horse-boy. But no princess, no beauty, no female blandishments had any charms for Ivanhoe: no hermit practised a more austere celibacy. The severity of his morals contrasted so remarkably with the lax and dissolute manner of the young lords and nobles in the courts which he frequented, that these young springalds would sometimes sneer and call him Monk and Milksop; but his courage in the day of battle was so terrible and admirable, that I promise you the youthful libertines did not sneer ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... no relygyous wymen [that] ben cladde in costlyous araye or in a wanton & pynched habytes but he calleth them in latyn. Pessimas meretrices et storta. Wherfore desyre ye to go in vyle & vnshapely vesture. that wanton & dissolute persones may rather be prouoked to scorne & laughe at you than to thynke euyl or desyre you / for they say not trouthe that do ensure themself with a glorye to kepe chastyte in a costely or ony shapely vesture / ye shal be called ladyes / for bycause that ye shall be spoused to the kyng of all kynges. ...
— A Ryght Profytable Treatyse Compendiously Drawen Out Of Many and Dyvers Wrytynges Of Holy Men • Thomas Betson
... training. His father went with him to all his classes, and, being himself a man of shrewd observation and natural humour, he gave the boy's studies a practical bearing by directing his attention to the follies and vices of the luxurious and dissolute society around him, showing him how incompatible they were with the dictates of reason and common-sense, and how disastrous in their consequences to the good name and happiness of those who yielded to their seductions. The method he pursued is thus described ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... her head-dress arranged to hide her face as much as might be, she saw the rich lords of Rome go by in chariots, on horseback, in litters, all sorts and conditions of them, fat, proud men with bold eyes; hard-faced statesmen or lawyers; war-worn, cruel-looking captains; dissolute youths with foppish dress and perfumed hair, and shuddering, wondered whether she was appointed to any one of these. Or was it, perhaps, to that rich and greasy tradesman, or to yon low-born freedman ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... profaneness, gaming and all dissoluteness, and, as it were, total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which day se'nnight I was witness of, the king sitting and toying with his concubines, a French boy singing love-songs, in that glorious gallery, while twenty great courtiers and other dissolute persons were gaming at a large table, a bank of at least L2,000 in gold before them. Six days after all was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... present dulness of sensation, a sob rose in his throat. Madame de Vallorbes, resplendent in crocus-yellow brocade, costly lace, and seed pearls, the young man, her companion—the young man of the light, forked beard, domed skull, vain eyes and peevish mouth—the young man of holy and dissolute aspect—were good enough instruments for the Eternal Justice to employ in respect of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... weaver in Paisley, and continued, with occasional intermissions, to prosecute the labours of the loom. His life was much chequered by misfortune. Fond of society, he was led to associate with some dissolute persons, who professed to be admirers of his genius, and was enticed by their example to neglect the concerns of business, and the duties of the family-hearth, for the delusive pleasures of the tavern. From his ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... alligator," a contemporary styled them. Rough fellows, much given to fighting, and drunkenness, and ribaldry, with a genius for coarse drollery and stinging repartee. The river towns suffered sadly at the hands of this lawless, dissolute element. Each boat carried from thirty to forty boatmen, and a number of such boats frequently traveled in company. After the Indian scare was over, they generally stopped over night in the settlements, and the arrival of a squadron ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... the barbarous Hostilities, and impious Manners of those Northerns, denied them at Home; had made such frequent lamentable Breaches in the antient, wise Constitution of the Kingdom; had, by the fatal Example of their profligate dissolute Lives, so vitiated the national Morality; and finally, had left behind them so many noxious Seeds of Faction and Anarchy, as, in less than two Centuries, gave up a Kingdom, of above 2000 Years Establishment, the unaccountable Prey of ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... places, Harry was at home, reading some good book, writing a letter to Rockville, or employed in some other worthy occupation. While Harry was at church or at the Sunday school, Edward, in company with some dissolute companion, was riding about ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... late hour, the distant carousals of Montoni and his companions—the loud contest, the dissolute laugh and the choral song, that made the halls re-echo. At length, she heard the heavy gates of the castle shut for the night, and those sounds instantly sunk into a silence, which was disturbed only by the whispering steps of persons, passing through ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... Nor would my cousin venture himself again among them, if he took my advice. His majesty, however, is no more given to the taking of advice than was his father before him, unless it be of Buckingham and Wilmot, and other dissolute young lords, whose counsel and company are alike evil ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... singular incidents, I discovered that a dissolute, drunken man about town was my father—which I regarded at the time as the greatest mishap that could possibly befall me. But I took him to my boarding-house, where good—I might even say blessed—Mrs. Greenough took care of him, giving to his body the nursing he needed, ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... since the death of Alexander, had become dissolute, licentious, and effeminate princes, with all the vices of Eastern despots. They perpetually intrigued and quarrelled with one another, while they courted the Macedonians by profuse liberality, providing them with magnificent banquets and unlimited wine, until they entirely ruined ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... he could depend, proper inducement being offered, for almost any sort of service. Among these were five or six superior spirits whom he knew to be tried and true. There was young Teach, the singer of the evening, a drunken, dissolute vagabond, who had been discharged from his last ship for insubordination and a quarrelsome attack upon one of his officers, for which he had narrowly escaped hanging as a mutineer. The man was as bold as a lion, though; he could be trusted. There, too, was Rock Braziliano, a Portuguese ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... purity of morals enjoined by the court of George III., the early period of his reign presents a picture of dissolute manners as well as of furious party spirit. The most fashionable of our ladies of rank were immersed in play or devoted to politics; the same spirit carried them into both. The Sabbath was disregarded, spent often in cards or desecrated by the meetings of partisans of both factions; moral ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... of whom we have heard much, and are sufficiently ashamed; who spend their time in taverns, tippling-houses and debauches; giving no other evidence of their affection to us but in drinking our health, and inveighing against all others who are not of their own dissolute temper; and who, in truth, have more discredited our cause, by the license of their manners and lives, than they could ever advance it by their affection or courage. We hope all persons of honour, or in place and authority, will so far assist ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... First-class white men must take hold of the reins of government throughout the Southland. The Negro is an imitative creature, and he takes on the color of his environment. If it be charged that he is frequently immoral, dishonest and shiftless, the dissolute whites with whom he has been closely identified have furnished a model that he has copied only too faithfully. Let the Christian element become a more prominent factor in state affairs, and the Negro will at once grow ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Constance Mortlake, and fairly enjoyed the consternation visible upon the bright satisfied countenance of her Maria. Lady Hunsdon, indeed, thought it a great pity that Anne had not spared her son by selecting one of the beaux of Bath House instead of the dissolute poet. ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... limped ever afterwards; a just judgment on such a heinous offender. Both these little structures were picturesque objects, being overgrown with ivy and woodbine. The chapel was completely in ruins, while the cell, profaned by the misdoings of the dissolute votaress Isole, had been converted into a cage for vagrants and offenders, and made secure by a grated window, and a strong door ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and, perhaps, the most formidable, part of those who now opposed the court, were the remnants of the old fanatics, whose religious principles were shocked by the dissolute manners of Charles and his courtiers. These, of course, added little to the force of the party in the theatres, which they never frequented. Shadwell seems to acknowledge this disadvantage in the epilogue to "The ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... possible—deeds in which the souls of men meet like the jewels in the windows of Aladdin's palace, the little gems and the large all equally pure, needing no cement but the fitting of facets; while the associative work of immodest men is all jointless, and astir with wormy ambition; putridly dissolute, and forever on the crawl: so that if it come together for a time, it can only be by metamorphosis through a flash of volcanic fire out of the vale of Siddim, vitrifying the clay of it, and fastening the slime, only to end in wilder ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... costume. They were industriously stigmatized as jailers; for which there was the more ground, as their duties did in reality associate them pretty often with the jailer; and in other respects they were a dissolute and ferocious body of men, gathered not out of the citizens, but many foreign deserters, or wretched runagates from the jail, or from the justice of the provost- marshal in some distant camp. Not a man, probably, but was liable to be reclaimed, in some or other quarter of Germany, as a capital ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... could not conceal his wrath. [Sidenote: L. Cornelius Sulla.] In Sulla he perhaps already recognised by instinct one who would outrival him in the end. He was the very antipodes of Marius in everything except bravery and good generalship, and faith in his star. He was an aristocrat. He was dissolute. He was an admirer of Hellenic literature. War was not his all in all as a profession. If he had a lion's courage, the fox in him was even more to be feared. He, like Marius, owed his rise partly to a woman, but, characteristically, to a mistress, ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... crossing by the ferry, walked over to Netley Abbey, and lay down idly in the shade of the old grey walls. Not a breath of wind stirred the great masses of ivy which were wreathed about the ruined church, and the place looked so lovely in its decay, that we felt disposed to judge the dissolute monks very leniently for having behaved so badly that their church and monastery had to be opened to the four winds of heaven. After all, when is a church so beautiful as when it has the green grass for its floor and the sky for ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... the foemen of Boh Da Thone Was Captain O'Neil of the "Black Tyrone", And his was a Company, seventy strong, Who hustled that dissolute Chief along. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... man on the stage. As an actor he made no impression, although he continued to appear in subordinate parts, and played in Ben Jonson's "Sejanus" at its production in 1603, when he was forty years old. The first public notice he received was in 1592, in a letter of Robert Greene, a dissolute writer, who accuses Shakespeare and Marlowe of plagiarism, conceit, and ingratitude. Chettle, the publisher, soon afterward printed a retraction so far as Shakespeare was concerned, and eulogized his manners, his honesty, and his art. Our acquaintance with his life of twenty years in London, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... will enable the reader to appreciate Addison's charming humour and sane grasp of character. The high moral tone of his work, the common-sense and broad culture and literary insight which caused the Spectator to exert a profound influence over a dissolute age, these can only be seen by a more extended reading of the Essays, and those who are interested cannot do better than obtain some general selection ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... all too well attested. As to the priests, when we find King Manuel joining with King Ferdinand of Spain in a protest to the Pope to the effect that the whole of Christendom was scandalized by the dissolute life of the clergy and by the traffic in Bulls[123], and grave ecclesiastics in Spain and friends of grave ecclesiastics, like Franco Sacchetti[124] earlier in Italy, using language even more violent than that of Vicente, we need not ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... persons have been assigned and appointed Commissioners, with power and authority to proceed within the land, according to the justice of martial law, against such soldiers or mariners, or other dissolute persons joining with them, as should commit any murder, robbery, felony, mutiny, or other outrage or misdemeanour whatsoever, and by such summary course and order as is agreeable to martial law, and is used in armies in time of ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... chastity of Bensalem, it would have appeared to him in the likeness of a fair beautiful cherubim. For there is nothing, amongst mortal men, more fair and admirable than the chaste minds of this people. Know, therefore, that with them there are no stews, no dissolute houses, no courtezans, nor anything of that kind. Nay, they wonder, with detestation, at you in Europe, which permit such things. They say ye have put marriage out of office; for marriage is ordained a remedy for unlawful concupiscence; and ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various |
