"Profligate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that gallant quadrilateral of musketeers will forget the part which is played by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, in that magnificent prose epic? There is little to be said for the real Villiers; he was a profligate and a scoundrel, and he did not show very heroically in his quarrel with the fiery young Ossory. It was one thing to practically murder Lord Shrewsbury; it was quite another thing to risk the wrath and the determined right hand of the Duke of Ormond's son. But the Villiers ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... therefore, we are bound to trace back the responsibility for the present crisis even to the Reformation itself, as well as to the tyranny and absolutism of government, and the sordid and profligate ordering of society, which followed on ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... notice as he had been wont to take of the coloured servants who tended him when he was with his regiment in India. Horatio Paget had been a night-brawler and a gamester, a duellist and a reprobate, in the glorious days that were gone; but he had never been a profligate; and he did not know that the girl who brought him his breakfast and staggered under the weight of his coal-scuttle was one of the most beautiful women ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... diligently to the best of my ability, I found every moment I could spare from refreshment and sleep hardly sufficient for the claims which the Comfortless, whom I had to console, the Sick, whom I had to succour, the Profligate, to reclaim, the Sceptic, to convince, made upon my time. Wholesome and profitable to my spirit, I trust, was this discipline! It seems to me a thing inexplicable, how a man can advocate the interests, the benefits of religion—can ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... law of reaction is stringent and strong, A youth in extremis is sure to go wrong, For the pendulum swings with a multiplied force When sloped from its even legitimate course. I have known—who has not?—that a profligate son Has been through his fanatic father undone; Restrained till the night of free licence arrives, And then he breaks out to the wreck of ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... are held by all mankind, shows that they are not natives of the human heart. Even the unhappy partner of our kind, who is undone, the bitter consequence of his follies or his crimes, who but sympathizes with the miseries of this ruined profligate brother? We forget the injuries and feel ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... brow with his clenched hand. 'What devil tempted me to my undoing?... My wife trusted to this profligate!... Horror! It ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... thirteen years of struggle for existence: "During all this war, I have not failed a day to offer up my prayers, I have fasted strictly every Friday, I have watched with care over the morals and the conduct of my subjects, I have taken measures everywhere to prevent all profligate intercourse between the sexes";[20] thus nobly trying to recommend himself to the good Bishop, who had always believed in their capacity for temporal and spiritual elevation. He retired to a place named Boya, a dozen leagues from the capital. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... up into a fanciful imaginative youth, a lover of books rather than of games, with an old head upon his young shoulders. After such a training it was only natural that he should be transformed from a nervous hysterical child into an embittered, cross-grained man, profligate and superstitious at the same time. Abundant light is thrown upon every stage of his career, for few men have left a clearer picture of themselves in their written words, and nowhere is Cardan, from the opening to ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... little to the operation of particular dispositions or private opinions. Two men of personal characters more opposite than those of Wharton and Addison could not easily be brought together. Wharton was impious, profligate, and shameless; without regard, or appearance of regard, to right and wrong. Whatever is contrary to this may be said of Addison; but as agents of a party they were connected, and how they adjusted their other sentiments ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens, the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very satisfactorily classified. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... which could be stricken out without a certainty of inflicting legal cruelty in the future. Of all our divorces nearly seventy per cent, are upon petition of the wife; and it can be safely said that nearly all will agree that to compel a woman to submit to the cruelty and brutalities of a drunken or profligate husband, is not only inflicting upon her legal cruelty, but has an influence which extends beyond the individual and is powerful for evil upon those who are ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... to the corner for prayer, and poured forth a confession of sin for them and for herself, such as left little that could have been added by her own profligate son, had he joined in the prayer. Either there are no degrees in guilt, or the Scotch language was equal only to the confession of children and holy women, and could provide no more awful words for the contrition of the prodigal or the hypocrite. But the words ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... colorless and cold by comparison, and his hands twitched to pluck this fiery, vivid thing before him and carry it away out of reach of Lorimer's sodden, defiling touch. What had Sidney Lorimer, drunkard, profligate that he was, to do with this high-bred, high-spirited, heart-broken woman? Why not rather he, Cotton Mather Thayer—He thrust his hands into his pockets and lowered his eyes to hide the light burning ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... shortly afterward to deal with booksellers, and I wondered how a bank clerk aged twenty could put into my hands with a profligate abundance of detail, all given with absolute assurance, the story of extravagant and bloodthirsty adventure, riot, piracy, and death in unnamed seas. He had led his hero a desperate dance through revolt against the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... well kept, the journal duly posted, the cash monthly balanced; but the poor man found after that, that things went wrong, that he went backwards, and that all went down-hill, and he hated to look into his books. As a profligate never looks into his conscience, because he can see nothing there but what terrifies and affrights him, makes him uneasy and melancholy, so a sinking tradesman cares not to look into his books, because the prospect there is dark and melancholy. 'What signify the accounts ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... 1592: educated at Cambridge. Wrote Alphonsus, King of Arragon, James IV., George-a-Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and other plays. After leading a profligate life, he left behind him a pamphlet entitled, "A Groat's-worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance:" this is full of contrition, and of advice to his fellow-actors and fellow-sinners. It is mainly remarkable for its abuse of Shakspeare, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... county paper a full description of the contest, from which it appeared that his favourite son had been beaten in a public trial of skill by Jim Jarrocks, well-known all over the county as the most reckless poacher and unblushing profligate anywhere about, and had thus given encouragement to a man who was constantly before the magistrates for all sorts of minor breaches of the law. However, he felt that he must make the best of it, and he therefore spoke of it among his friends as a bit of foolish practical joking on his son's ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... was Kate Rorke. This made me take a special interest in watching what she did later on. No one who saw her fine performance in "The Profligate" could easily forget it, and I shall never understand why the London public ever ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... dare," said Peter. "We have no wish to get our brains knocked out by all the profligate young ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Giants, defeated by Hercules on the plains of Thessaly, the Poet means the Armies of Brutus, and Cassius, defeated by Augustus, almost in the same place, at the Battle of Philippi. He concludes also that by Hylaeus is meant Mark Antony, who assumed the name of Bacchus, and ruined himself by his profligate passion for Cleopatra. Another Commentator observes, that as the Giants, and Lapithae, are said to have made the Palace of Saturn shake, so also did Brutus, and Cassius, and afterwards Mark Antony, make all ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... man shall not marry his bastard sister or daughter[a]. The civil law therefore, when it denied maintenance to bastards begotten under certain atrocious circumstances[b], was neither consonant to nature, nor reason, however profligate and wicked the parents ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... Surely profligate infidels do not so die; and these poor souls, whatever were their sins or their confusions, must be numbered among the heroes of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... situation, there occurred at this time the contest of John Wilkes, backed by the London mob, against the Grafton Ministry. This demagogue, able {45} and profligate, had already come into conflict with the Grenville Ministry in 1765, and had been driven into exile. Now, in 1768, he returned and was repeatedly elected to the Commons, and as often unseated by the vindictive ministerial majority. Riots and bloodshed accompanied the agitation; and Wilkes ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... death of the soldier boy to the will of God; to declare all the Jews, against whom the charge of murder has been brought on mere surmises, free from all suspicion; to turn over the soldier woman Terentyeva, for her profligate conduct, to ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... expresses more clearly the joy of curves as opposed to the severity of straight lines than that voluptuous period of Louis XV known as Rococo. It was a profligate era, an era of pleasure, and the appended illustration of part of a frieze is in no way exaggerated, but a true example of a ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... China is reduced to the expedient of throwing its children into the water, according to the accounts of travelers. Now this production of two children is really the whole of marriage. The superfluous pleasures of marriage are not only profligate, but involve an immense loss to the man, as I will now demonstrate. Compare then with this poverty of result, and shortness of duration, the daily and perpetual urgency of other needs of our existence. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... scanty dues willingly contributed to the hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident upper class—though we must allow for many honourable exceptions—was the Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the worst social system the modern civilized world has ever known. The slave-owning planters of Carolina were by no means devoid of similar faults, which are the invariable products of arbitrary control over human beings, ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... earth. The terror of their arms added weight and dignity to their moderation. They preserved peace by a constant preparation for war. The soldiers, though drawn from the meanest, and very frequently from the most profligate, of mankind, and no longer, as in the days of the ancient republic, recruited from Rome herself, were preserved in their allegiance to the emperor, and their invincibility before the enemy, by the influences of superstition, inflexible discipline, and the hopes of reward. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... entered Halle, the university town, all my resolutions came to nothing.—Being now more than ever my own master, and without any control as long as I did not fight a duel, molest the people in the streets, &c., I renewed my profligate life afresh, though now a student of divinity. When my money was spent, I pawned my watch and a part of my linen and clothes, or borrowed in other ways. Yet in the midst of it all I had a desire to renounce this wretched life, for I had no enjoyment in it, and had sense enough left to see, that ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... did Hamilton combat these points, insisting that Burr was a man of extreme and irregular ambition, selfish to a degree which even excluded social affection, and decidedly profligate. He admitted that he was far more artful than wise, far more dexterous than able, but held that artfulness and dexterity were objections rather than recommendations, while he thought a systematic statesman ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... the presence of the ferocious brute, and the not less terrible man, struck him favorably, and his hopes rose as a sunbeam fell on her shining hair, which the lady Berenike had arranged with her own hand, twining it with strands of white Bombyx. She must appear, even to this ruthless profligate, as the very type ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... unlikeness. I wish Panaetius could be here: he lived with Africanus. I would inquire of him which of his family the nephew of Africanus's brother was like? Possibly he may in person have resembled his father; but in his manners he was so like every profligate, abandoned man, that it was impossible to be more so. Whom did the grandson of P. Crassus, that wise and eloquent and most distinguished man, resemble? Or the relations and sons of many other excellent men, whose names there is no occasion to ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... the profligate use of this dishonest process is that general rise in prices, which is in effect an indirect tax on the necessaries of life, involving all the injustice and ill-feeling which arises from such a measure. It is inevitable that the working classes, ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... ever think ill? And who is there, whatever might be their former conduct, that she would think capable of such an attempt, till it were proved against them? But Jane knows, as well as I do, what Wickham really is. We both know that he has been profligate in every sense of the word; that he has neither integrity nor honour; that he is as false and deceitful ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... the profligate, the daring. There is old age, watching the play, with its voice like a baby's cry; and the paper whereon it keeps tremulous tally swimming upon eyes ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... remarks, "This is a noble declaration, worthy of any Prince who rules over a free people. It is lamentable to reflect how little it comports with the domestic persecutions authorized by the same monarch during his profligate reign. It is still more lamentable to reflect how little a similar spirit of toleration was encouraged, either by precept or example, in other of the New England Colonies." (Commentaries, etc., Vol. I., ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... took her hand and would have raised it to his lips; but she did not forget herself, and gently withdrew it, exclaiming, "O Gifted!" this time with a tone of tender reproach which made him feel like a profligate. He tore himself away, and when at a safe distance flung her a kiss, which she rewarded with ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... difference. Of the two evils, James was to be preferred. Charles ascends the throne with flattering promises, attends prayers and listens to sermons, pays his father's debts and promises to reform the Court. Let us see what he does. The brilliant but profligate Buckingham is retained as prime minister. Charles marries the beautiful Henrietta Maria, the Roman Catholic princess of France. He fits out fleets against Spain and other quarters, and demands heavy taxes to meet his heavy expenses. Parliament ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. 1, Issue 1. - A Massachusetts Magazine of Literature, History, - Biography, And State Progress • Various
... on Chatterton by S.R. Maitland, D.D., F.R.S., and F.S.A. A very monument of ignorant perversity. The writer shamelessly distorts facts to show that Chatterton was an utterly profligate blackguard and declares finally that neither Rowley ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... female spy in the service of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the coarsest of the Restoration comedians. The profession of piety had become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the mark of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Wycherley or Etherege was the witty young profligate, who had seen life, and learned to disbelieve in virtue. His highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good-natured readiness to back up a friend in a quarrel, or an amour. Virtue was bourgeois—reserved ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... suspicious, he sought to shackle public opinion—the fearful hydra to all ambitious aspirants—to know all secrets of the time and states, and render one half of the great nations he held in his grasp spies upon the other! The most profligate principles of Machiavel sink into obscurity when contrasted with the Imperial Espionage of Napoleon. When no longer moving squadrons in the tented field—whole armies, like so many pieces of chess in the hands of a ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... out, this one night, to enter at the midnight door, left open for welcome! A poor welcome truly!—just an open door, a clean-swept floor, and a fire to warm your rain-sodden limbs! The household asleep, and the house-place swarming with the ghosts of ancient times,—the miser, the spendthrift, the profligate, the coquette,—for the good ghosts sleep, and are troubled with no waking like yours! Not one man, sleepless like yourselves, to question you, and be answered after the fashion ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... them, the laws of the society compelled its murder, or the expulsion of the mother. The men were all warriors, and stood in high estimation among the people. The Ehrioi themselves were proud of the title, and even the King O Tu belonged to this profligate institution, to which, fortunately, the ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... only remains to wish that the citizens may take example by the fate of Holmeby, and not expose them to an attack to which they will assuredly be found unequal. It is not altogether owing to their wisdom that this has not already taken place. For twenty years they were chained to the car of a profligate buffoon, who dragged them through every species of ignominy to the verge of rebellion; and their hall is even yet disgraced with the statue of a worthless negro-monger, in the act of insulting their sovereign with a ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... the Exchequer in 1761, through the influence of the Earl of Bute. He was the owner of Medmenham Abbey, on the Thames, and as such, the President of the profligate Club whose doings were made notorious by the proceedings against Wilkes, and who, in compliment to him, called themselves ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... This is the sum of all my miseries, If he, even he, a sober, hopeful lad, May be seduc'd into debaucheries. —But where shall I inquire for him? I warrant They have decoy'd him into some vile brothel. That profligate persuaded him, I'm sure. —But here comes Syrus; he can tell me all. And yet this slave is of the gang; and if He once perceives that I'm inquiring for him, He'll never tell me any thing; a rogue! I'll ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... incapable leaders. One lesson they all learn,—to hate slavery, teterrima causa. But the issue does not yet appear. We must get ourselves morally right. Nobody can help us. 'T is of no account what England or France may do. Unless backed by our profligate parties, their action would be nugatory, and, if so backed, the worst. But even the war is better than the degrading and descending politics that preceded it for decades of years, and our legislation has made great strides, and if we can stave off that fury of trade which rushes ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... away from a profligate young husband, who had decoyed me into an illegal marriage—illegal for me, but sufficiently binding to have put you in the penitentiary for ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Scholars, poets, and philosophers—what few there were—pined in attics. Epictetus lived in a miserable cottage with only a straw pallet and a single lamp. Women had no education, and were disgracefully profligate; even the wife of Marcus Aurelius (the daughter of Antoninus Pius) was one of the most abandoned women of the age, notwithstanding all the influence of their teachings and example. Slavery was so great an institution that half of the population were slaves. There were ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... spot came and went on the cheek of the profligate Cornbury. Ashamed of his weakness, he affected to laugh at what he had heard, and continued ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... Mayster Frank, and he'll lead you into sin again here; and he's just cutting you off from your best friends and your brightest hopes; and I've just come over once more to beg and beseech you, by all as you holds dear, to have nothing no more to do with yon drunken profligate. I'd rayther have said this to yourself alone, but you've forced me to say it now, and it's better said so nor left unsaid altogether. And now I'll bid you good evening, for it's plain I can do little good if I tarry longer." He turned and left them: as he did so, Frank's last look was ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... the son of small laboring folks, who are still tillers of the ground in our country." "Ah!" said Charles; "is there nothing more? Assuredly, fair brother, we should prize more highly the poor man of wisdom than the profligate ass;" and he maintained in the office him whom ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... objects he, who loved his books so well, collected for his especial gratification. Mrs. Damer again! how proud he was of her genius—her beauty, her cousinly love for himself; the wise way in which she bound up the wounds of her breaking heart when her profligate husband shot himself, by taking to occupation—perhaps, too, by liking cousin Horace indifferently well. He put her models forward in every place. Here was her Osprey Eagle in terra-cotta, a masterly production; there ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... of envy; for by this means, whoever was offended at the growing greatness of another, discharged his spleen, not in anything cruel or inhuman, but only in voting a ten years' banishment. But when it once began to fall upon mean and profligate persons, it was for ever after entirely laid aside; Hyperbolus being the last that was exiled ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... where I have come, as a good profligate, graceless bachelor, for a day or two; leaving my wife and babbies at the seaside. . . . Heavens! if you were but here at this minute! A piece of salmon and a steak are cooking in the kitchen; it's a very ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... other Chinese may account to some extent for the facility with which this aboriginal people engaged, a little later, in the trade in women and girls brought from the mainland to meet the demands of profligate foreigners. ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... as judicious liberality is to be lauded. Saadi gives the following account of a Persian prodigal son, who was not so fortunate in the end as his biblical prototype: The son of a religious man, who succeeded to an immense fortune by the will of his uncle, became a dissipated and debauched profligate, in so much that he left no heinous crime unpractised, nor was there any intoxicating drug which he had not tasted. Once I admonished him, saying: "O my son, wealth is a running stream, and pleasure revolves ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... comments, 'I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who married Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.' This is just. Bertram is atrocious. With Helena before him ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... sum. He also accused the chancellor of the exchequer and his colleagues with violating the public faith, by taking money to which they had no right in order to pay the difference. He thought the house would fail in its duty to the public, if it did not call for an examination into the profligate extravagance of this affair: and he concluded with a proposal for a committee for such purpose, and more especially to inquire by what authority the sum of L138,000 had been applied to the coronation expenses without the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... field of literature all who stood in the way of the interests of their own clique. They have never allowed their own profound ignorance of anything (Greek for instance) to throw even an air of hesitation into their oracular decision on the matter. They set an example of profligate contempt for truth, of which the success was in proportion to the effrontery; and when their prosperity had filled the market with competitors, they cried out against their own reflected sin, as if they had never committed it, or were entitled to a monopoly of it. The ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... The profligate and pusillanimous John is well known to have exposed his own rights, and the liberties of his people, to all the evils of protracted civil wars, and foreign invasion. At the period of his decease, the capital and the southern counties were in the hands of Louis, ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... to indulge in the same excesses. The result of so many annoyances and debaucheries, so much vexation, was an illness; as soon as she became convalescent, she returned to her mother at court where she speedily gained the ill will of the king by her profligate habits, her quarrels with both Catholics and Protestants, her intimacy with the Duke of Guise, her plottings with her younger brother, her ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... consciences to serve their lusts? To call him the Moses, the Man of God, the Joshua, the Saviour of Israel; and after all this, to treat the Thing his son with addresses no lesse then blasphemous, whose Father (as themselves confess to be the most infamous Hypocrite and profligate Atheist of all the Usurpers that ever any age produc'd) had made them his Vassalls, and would have intaild them so ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... sowing of their grounds: a circumstance which, but for the timely interference of the governor, would have ended in their ruin. Immediately on hearing their situation, he forbade the sending any more spirits to that profligate corner of the colony, as well as the retailing what had been already sent thither, under pain of the offenders being prosecuted for ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... upon the vagaries of popular votes, and it would have been well for the repute of British statesmen if they had not had the occasion or the temptation to indulge in the hectic misrepresentation and profligate promises of which their ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... cheated at cards. He was, notoriously, one of the most worthless men of his day; which circumstance never prevented his being perfectly well received by the men and women of the best English society. That he was an unprincipled profligate made him none the less welcome to his male associates, or their wives, sisters, and daughters; but when Lord de Ros cheated his fellow-gamblers at the Club, no further toleration of his wickedness was, of course, possible; and then every infamous story, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... it will be folly to expect peace or tranquillity while that pestilent body is in existence; smite it "hip and thigh," and you at once cut off the fruitful sources of discontent and crime. Stop the rent, and at one blow you annihilate the profligate press, which turns the minds of the people from their legitimate avocations, which panders to their prejudices, and excites them to outrage. Of what use will it be to confine the peasant to his house by night, if you allow him to be beset ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... the most happy effects on multitudes of men. It has enlightened the most ignorant; softened the most hardened; reclaimed the most profligate; converted the most estranged; purified the most polluted; exalted the most degraded; and plucked the most endangered from hell to heaven. What was it that transformed the persecuting and blaspheming Saul into a kind and devoted man? It was religion. ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... (degrade) 659. Adj. vicious[1]; sinful; sinning &c.v.; wicked, iniquitous, immoral, unrighteous, wrong, criminal; naughty, incorrect; unduteous[obs3], undutiful. unprincipled, lawless, disorderly, contra bonos mores[Lat], indecorous, unseemly, improper; dissolute, profligate, scampish; unworthy; worthless; desertless[obs3]; disgraceful, recreant; reprehensible, blameworthy, uncommendable; discreditable, disreputable; Sadistic. base, sinister, scurvy, foul, gross, vile, black, grave, facinorous|, felonious, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... very well. The introduction of the cook, to quote an old novelist, 'had formed no part of his profligate scheme of pleasure.' To elope from a hospitable roof, with a married lady, accompanied by her maid, might be an act not without precedent. But that a cook should come to form une partie carree, on such an occasion, that a lover should be squeezed with three women in ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... infidelity with Clodius (see Langhorne's Plutarch, 1838, p. 498); Pompey's third wife, Mucia, intrigued with Caesar (vide ibid., p. 447); Mahomet's favourite wife, Ayesha, on one occasion incurred suspicion; Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, was notoriously profligate (see Gibbon's Decline and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... her own small energies. Camilla argued that as her sister's chance was gone, and as the prize had come in her own way, there was no good reason why it should be lost to the family altogether, because Arabella could not win it. When Arabella called her a treacherous vixen and a heartless, profligate hussy, she spoke out freely, and said that she wasn't going to be abused. A gentleman to whom she was attached had asked her for her hand, and she had given it. If Arabella chose to make herself a fool she ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... London, where I have come, as a good, profligate, graceless bachelor, for a day or two; leaving my wife and babbies at the seaside.... Heavens! if you were but here at this minute! A piece of salmon and a steak are cooking in the kitchen; it's a very wet day, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... heroes, ascended from fields ye have won, Your toils are not closed in the deeds ye have done; Touch the souls of each laggard and profligate son, The greed and the sloth, and the cowardice shame; Till we rise to complete the great work ye've begun, And with freedom make ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... punish their contumacy, they compelled him to flee, murdered the jurors and clerks of the commission, and, carrying their heads upon poles, claimed the support of the nearest townships. In a few days all the commons of Essex were in a state of insurrection, under the command of a profligate priest, who had assumed the name ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... for it was a pleasure to run across a chap so different from the usual type of selfish, envious and profligate drifters. ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... successor, Shaban, was an utter profligate, cruel, faithless, avaricious, immoral, and pleasure-loving. Gladiators played an important part at his court, and he often took part in their contests. Horse-racing, cock-fights, and such like amusements occupied him much more than ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... done?" said Lafayette. "France was bankrupt—the treasury was empty—the profligate reign of Louis XV. had at once wasted the wealth, dried up the revenues, and corrupted the energies of France. Ministers wrung their hands, the king sent for his confessor, the queen wept—but the nation groaned. There was but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... which is a great Absurdity. For he might as well have imagin'd a grave majestick Jack-Pudding, as a Buffoon in a Roman Senator. Aufidius the General of the Volscians is shewn a base and a profligate Villain. He has offended against the Equality of the Manners even in his Hero himself. For Coriolanus who in the first part of the Tragedy is shewn so open, so frank, so violent, and so magnanimous, is represented in the latter part ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... secondly, that without a considerable knowledge of divinity I should never get a good living. But the moment I entered Halle, the university town, all my resolutions came to nothing. Being now more than ever my own master, I renewed my profligate life afresh, though now a student of divinity. Yet in the midst of it all I had a desire to renounce this wretched life, for I had no enjoyment in it, and had sense enough left to see that the end, one day or other, would be ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... the story meant, holding us the while with eyes, and voice, and gesture. He compelled us scorn the gay, heartless selfishness of the young fool setting forth so jauntily from the broken home; he moved our pity and our sympathy for the young profligate, who, broken and deserted, had still pluck enough to determine to work his way back, and who, in utter desperation, at last gave it up; and then he showed us the homecoming—the ragged, heart-sick tramp, with hesitating steps, stumbling along the dusty road, and then the rush of the ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... retained the cures of souls in their own hands, careless whether the duties of the parishes could or could not be discharged; and that, finally, the vast majority of the monks themselves were ignorant, self-indulgent, profligate, worthless, dissolute. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... however, a terrible public event convulsed Florence, and revolutionized Baccio della Porta's life. He had been employed to paint in that notable Dominican convent of St Mark, where Savonarola, its devoted friar, was denouncing the sins of the times, including the profligate luxury of the nobles and the degradation of the representatives of the Church. Carried away by the fervour and sincerity of the speaker, Baccio joined the enthusiasts who cast into a burning pile the instruments of pride, vanity, and godless ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... England and of Europe. Abroad the greatest genius that the world has ever seen was wading through slaughter to a universal throne, and no effectual resistance had as yet been offered to a progress which menaced the liberty of Europe and the existence of its States. At home, a crazy king and a profligate heir-apparent presided over a social system in which all civil evils were harmoniously combined. A despotic administration was supported by a parliamentary representation as corrupt as illusory; a church, in which spiritual religion was all but extinct, had sold herself as ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... ragged schools,—the institutions for reclaiming the youthful vagrants of London, and teaching the idle and profligate the sublime morality ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... him, if I can do better. Still, I will think on what thou hast said; but I must have your assistance to persuade the good Sir Hugh to make me his commissioner and fiduciary in this matter, for it is in his name I must speak, and not in my own. Since she is so far changed as to dote upon this empty profligate courtier, he shall at least do her the justice which is yet ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... young creature of your virtuous and pious turn, she was pleased to say, cannot surely love a profligate: you love your brother too well, to wish to marry one who had like to have killed him, and who threatened your uncles, and defies us all. You have had your own way six or seven times: we want to secure you against a man so vile. Tell me (I have a right to know) whether ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... family, who was then alive, was Mr. Monkton's younger brother, Stephen. He was an unmarried man, possessing a fine estate in Scotland; but he lived almost entirely on the Continent, and bore the reputation of being a shameless profligate. The family at Wincot held almost as little communication with him as ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... written to his brother profligate, when a tap was heard at the entrance of his chamber. Thrusting the written papers into his portfolio, he rose, and opening the door discovered his hostess ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... his grandfather's name; that he is a profligate and a spendthrift, and that he has taken or borrowed from his grandfather whatever money he could get, and that—in short, he is a friend of ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... fail to make the most of his well-known immorality. In his Notes to Macky's Characters Swift described Wharton as "the most universal villain that ever I knew." On his death in 1715 he was succeeded by his profligate son, Philip, who was created Duke of Wharton ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... third generation, the line becoming extinct. The most heart-rending spectacles we have ever met have been the children of parents suffering with the diseases mentioned. Their appearance is characteristic; no physician of experience can fail to detect the sins of a profligate parent in a syphilitic child. Every feature indicates the ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... of sublime and serious art only. It is true of cynical, profligate, and concupiscent art as well. It is true of Congreve as it is true of Sophocles; it is true of Mademoiselle de Maupin as it is true of Measure for Measure. This art differs from the former in that the end presented in it as the object ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... first employment being to lead coals from behind the screen to the pitmen's houses. His Scotch accent, and perhaps his awkwardness, exposed him to much annoyance from the "pit lads," who were a very rough and profligate set; and as boxing was a favourite pastime among them, our youth had to fight his way to their respect, passing through a campaign of no less than seventeen pitched battles. He was several times on the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... from society and giving nothing in return. You have become the possessor of wealth. How have you used it? What have you done for your neighbor? Have you ever thought of your tens of thousands of slaves? Have you helped them physically and morally? No! You have profited by their toil to lead a profligate life. That is what you have done. Have you chosen a post in which you might be of service to your neighbor? No! You have spent your life in idleness. Then you married, my dear sir—took on yourself responsibility for the guidance ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Eternal Happiness, Vertue is not the thing, the most essentially requisite; and much less certainly will they think it to be so with respect to this present World, if they find their pious Instructor not only to choose the Society of Persons Profligate and Debauch'd for his Friends and Companions; but also (on all occasions) to labour the promotion of the like Men to Employments of the highest Truth, in preference of others of acknowledg'd Integrity and Sobriety of Life: The avow'd Reason ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... two men of quality, and both men of wit too; and the effect was, that the Lord brought the reality of the Devil into the question, and the debate brought the profligate to be a penitent; so in short, the Devil was ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... but as I was saying, a good man he never is. For he who receives money unjustly as well as justly, and spends neither justly nor unjustly, will be a rich man if he be also thrifty. On the other hand, the utterly bad man is generally profligate, and therefore poor; while he who spends on noble objects, and acquires wealth by just means only, can hardly be remarkable for riches any more than he can be very poor. The argument, then, is right in declaring that the very ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... insensible to the ghost's appeal, until the audience, entering into the fun, unanimously shouted, "Wake up, Mother!" Some of you, I know, he goes on, will listen, even as Polemon did (Sat. II, iii, 254). Returning from a debauch, the young profligate passed the Academy where Xenocrates was lecturing, and burst riotously in. Presently, instead of scoffing, he began to hearken; was touched and moved and saddened, tore off conscience-stricken his effeminate ornaments, long sleeves, purple leggings, cravat, the garland from his head, ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... To the two workwomen there (erased, and replaced by: "To the shoemaker, Anna Loder, in Vienna"),........200 Should she presume to make any written claims, I declare them to be null and void, having already paid for her and her profligate husband, Joseph Lungmayer, ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... particularities of the Marquesas. It rests upon no authority; it is in no sense, like "Rahero," a native story; but a patchwork of details of manners and the impressions of a traveller. It may seem strange, when the scene is laid upon these profligate islands, to make the story hinge on love. But love is not less known in the Marquesas than elsewhere; nor is there any cause of suicide more common in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 1: The scene is a low London inn, to which Mellefont, a sentimental profligate, has brought Sara Sampson under promise of marriage. Marwood is Mellefont's former mistress, by whom he has ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... wish to live among savages, as I had read enough of their doings to make me anxious to keep out of their way, and I was not influenced by motives which induce seamen to run from their ships for the sake of living an idle, profligate life, free from the restraints ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... be not in thy power, and thy conscience accuse thee, surrender thyself to the magistrate, and make the only satisfaction thou art able." "I have taken no one's goods," said I. "Of what art thou guilty, then?" said he. "Art thou a drunkard? a profligate?" "Alas, no," said I; "I am neither of these; would that ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Fanny, which the unsuspicious Curate accepted immediately. As soon as he had committed himself, it was confided to the audience that the waggoner was a depraved villain, in the employ of that notorious profligate, Colonel Chartress, who had commissioned a second myrmidon (of the female sex) to lure Fanny from virtue and the country, to vice and the metropolis. By the time the plot had "thickened" thus far, the scene changed, and we ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins |
