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More "Profligacy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... foundations of his fortune— gained mostly by stock-jobbing; leaving at his death some three millions of francs. John Foster has cited a striking illustration of what this kind of determination will do in money-making. A young man who ran through his patrimony, spending it in profligacy, was at length reduced to utter want and despair. He rushed out of his house intending to put an end to his life, and stopped on arriving at an eminence overlooking what were once his estates. He sat down, ruminated for a time, and rose with the determination ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... creature-merit, had been almost universally propagated and stamped with the pretended infallible authority of Rome. By the translation and circulation of the Holy Scriptures among the people, the idolatries, impositions and profligacy of the priesthood were extensively discovered. And after years of deference to ecclesiastical authority, conditional proposals of submission to the Pope upon conviction of error in his theses, or conscientious belief, Luther ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... the Duke of Bourbon and the death of Fleury, a few years of frugal and moderate government intervened. Then recommenced the downward progress of the monarchy. Profligacy in the court, extravagance in the finances, schism in the church, faction in the Parliaments, unjust war terminated by ignominious peace,—all that indicates and all that produces the ruin of great empires, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lord; Deutsch, or Teutsch, comes from the Gothic word Thiudu, meaning nation, and a Deutscher, or Teutscher, meant one belonging to the nation), he tells his countrymen, "as a subject of raillery, nor is the profligacy of corrupting and being corrupted called the fashion of the age." With Rooseveltian enthusiasm he writes that the Germans consider it a crime "to set limits to population, by rearing up only a certain number of ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... of a multitude of men. There is a shamelessness among many in what is called high life that calls for vehement protest. The strife with many seems to be how near they can come to the verge of indecency without falling over. The tide of masculine profligacy will never turn back until there is a decided reformation in womanly costume. I am in full sympathy with the officer of the law who, at a levee in Philadelphia last winter, went up to a so-called lady, and because ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... indignation of depravity, and a generous desire to reform the degenerated manners of his fellow-creatures. This has been the cause of Aristophanes censuring the pedantry and superstition of Socrates; Horace, Persius, Martial, and Juvenal, the luxury and profligacy of the Romans; Boileau and Moliere the levity and refinement of the French; Cervantes the romantic pride and madness of the Spanish; and Dorset, Gldharn, Swift, Addison, Churchill, Stevens, and Foote, the variety of vice, folly, and luxury, which ...
— A Lecture On Heads • Geo. Alex. Stevens
... common men, may only be sources of temptation and danger. Burke has truly said that "the human system which rests for its basis on the heroic virtues is sure to have a superstructure of weakness or of profligacy." ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... ignorance and profligacy of the higher Scottish clergy (with notable exceptions) in Knox's youth, are not matter of controversy. They are as frankly recognised by contemporary Catholic as by Protestant authors. In the ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... proclamations of that melancholy period, was a gentleman of some fortune, and of good family, in the county of Fife, and had been a soldier from his youth upwards. In the younger part of his life he had been wild and licentious, but had early laid aside open profligacy, and embraced the strictest tenets of Calvinism. Unfortunately, habits of excess and intemperance were more easily rooted out of his dark, saturnine, and enterprising spirit, than the vices of revenge and ambition, which continued, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... worthy of attention—like comedy—may degenerate, and become subservient to licentiousness and profligacy; yet the shafts of ridicule judiciously aimed, like a well-directed artillery, do much execution. With what becoming severity does the bold Caricature lay open to public censure the intrigues of subtle Politicians, the 243chicanery of corrupted Courts, and the flattery ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... origin was no introduction of novel heresies. It was a revolt of the laity of Europe against the profligacy and avarice of the clergy. The popes and cardinals pretended to be the representatives of Heaven. When called to account for abuse of their powers, they had behaved precisely as mere corrupt human kings and aristocracies behave. They had intrigued; they ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... The lawless profligacy of Francesco Cenci first began seriously to attract public attention under the pontificate of Gregory XIII. This reign offered marvellous facilities for the development of a reputation such as that which this reckless ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... out of the water upon a pleasure-party, and swam with her to shore, we became naturally intimate, and Colonel M'Alister forgot, on account of the service rendered to him, the dreadful reputation for profligacy which I enjoyed in ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... duke of). There were two dukes of this name, father and son, both notorious for their profligacy and political unscrupulousness. The first (1592-1628) was the favorite of James I., nicknamed "Steenie" by that monarch from his personal beauty, "Steenie" being a pet corruption of Stephen, whose face at martyrdom was "as the face of ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... problem (though Shaw is certainly, as we shall see, nearer to pure doubt about it than about anything else) does not strike the critic as being such an exasperating problem after all. An artist of vast power and promise, who is also a scamp of vast profligacy and treachery, has a chance of life if specially treated for a special disease. The modern doctors (and even the modern dramatist) are in doubt whether he should be specially favoured because he is aesthetically important or specially disregarded ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... count was a distant relation of the family; he resided constantly in Denmark, and his son follows his example. They have not been in possession of the estate many years; and their predecessor lived near the town, introducing a degree of profligacy of manners which has been ruinous to the inhabitants in every respect, their fortunes not being equal to ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... proclaim my service, yet comprehending instantly that I dare not even trust this plain-spoken girl with the truth. She respected the men, sympathized with the sacrifices of Washington's little army, contrasted all they endured with the profligacy of the English and Hessian troops, and yet remained loyal to the King's cause. Even as I hesitated, ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... have to learn is, that freedom does not mean license and discord—does not mean every one doing that which is right in the sight of his own eyes. From that springs self-will, division, quarrels, revolt, civil war, weakness, profligacy, and ruin to the whole people. Without order, discipline, obedience to law, there can be no true and lasting freedom; and, therefore, order must be kept at all risks, the ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... describe the inveterate tenacity with which a drunkard's habits cling to him through life? He may repent—he may reform—he may look with actual abhorrence upon his past profligacy; but amid all this reformation and compunction, who can tell the moment in which the base and ruinous propensity may not recur, triumphing over resolution, remorse, shame, everything, and prostrating its victim once more in all that is ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... accounted himself a gentleman was moderately clean. She would not see in me—as did her mother—no more than a type of the best class in France, and having no more than the vices of my order. As a monster of profligacy might she behold me, and that—ah, Dieu!—I could not endure that she should do whilst ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... rest, I think, is just a question of will-power and mental hygiene. No, I have no patience with people who grow old; unless, of course, they really are very old in years. I think it argues either stupidity or a kind of profligacy—mental, nervous, and emotional, I mean—and in either case it is very unfair to those about them, for there is ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... higher importance they are shamelessly indifferent. Not so Lavengro; he will do anything that he deems convenient, or which strikes his fancy, provided it does not outrage decency, or is unallied to profligacy; is not ashamed to speak to a beggar in rags, and will associate with anybody, provided he can gratify a laudable curiosity. He has no abstract love for what is low, or what the world calls low. He sees that many things which the world looks down ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... awaken a proper ambition in the minds of his soldiers and to instil into them the high principles of chivalry. "A just war," he observed, "is often rendered wicked and disastrous by the manner in which it is conducted; for the righteousness of the cause is not sufficient to sanction the profligacy of the means, and the want of order and subordination among the troops may bring ruin and disgrace upon the best-concerted plans." But we cannot describe the character and conduct of this renowned commander in more forcible language than that of Fray Antonio Agapida, excepting ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... Such, we can solemnly assure the reader, would bring its reward in many ways—perhaps in another life, perhaps in this world, but it would tend to shorten the existence it is desired to preserve, as surely as self-indulgence and profligacy. That is why very few of the truly great men of the world (of course, the unprincipled adventurers who have applied great powers to bad uses are out of the question)—the martyrs, the heroes, the founders of religions, the liberators of nations, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Shakespeare himself, could have struck forth a finer conception than Junius, in the pride of rank, wealth, and dignities, raised to the Council table of the sovereign he had so foully slandered—yet sick at heart and deeply stained with every profligacy—terminating his career by deliberate self- murder, with every accompaniment of audacious charlatanry that ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... and perhaps rather too indulgent and tender towards individuals of all descriptions,—more full, at least, of kindness and veneration for genius and social virtue, than of indignation at baseness and profligacy. Altogether it is not much like the production of a mere man of letters, or a fastidious speculator in sentiment and morality; but exhibits throughout, and in a very pleasing form, the good sense and large toleration of a ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... morals; enphagy[obs3], dophagy[obs3], exophagy[obs3]; want of principle, want of ballast; obliquity, backsliding, infamy, demoralization, pravity[obs3], depravity, pollution; hardness of heart; brutality &c. (malevolence) 907; corruption &c. (debasement) 659; knavery &c. (improbity) 940[obs3]; profligacy; flagrancy, atrocity; cannibalism; lesbianism, Sadism. infirmity; weakness &c. adj.; weakness of the flesh, frailty, imperfection; error; weak side; foible; failing, failure; crying sin, besetting sin; defect, deficiency; cloven foot. lowest dregs of vice, sink of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... more agreeable to the pattern of our best laws, by lessening the number, to add to the weight and independency of our voters. And truly, considering the immense and dangerous charge of elections; the prostitute and daring venality, the corruption of manners, the idleness and profligacy of the lower sort of voters, no prudent man would propose to increase such an evil, if it be, as I fear it is, out of our power to administer to it any remedy. The author proposes nothing further. If he has any improvements that may balance or may lessen this inconvenience, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... cursing those who are in their employ, regarding the Chinese with hatred and contempt,—it is no wonder that they are hated in return and that their conduct has done much to justify the Chinese distrust of the foreigner. The foreign settlements in the port cities of China are notorious for their profligacy. Intemperance and immorality, gambling and Sabbath desecration run riot. When after his return from a long journey in Asia, the Rev. Dr. George Pentecost was asked— "What are the darkest spots in the ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... estimation in which he is held is but little lowered even though he may have been guilty, like Cato, of atrocious cruelty to his slaves, or, like some of the heroes of ancient times, of scandalous forms of private profligacy. ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... you don't like my way of living," he charged, thinking in his own mind of the sensational joyrides and general profligacy with which the newspapers had credited him—thinking this, and wondering whether or not, in maiden modesty, she would disclaim ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... was agog with speculation respecting the coming ball. The battle of Monmouth was accorded a second place. The disdain of the middle class, who had been embittered against such demonstrations by the profligacy displayed during the days of the British occupation, soon began to make itself felt. That it was the first official or formal function of the new republic mattered little. A precedent was about to be established. There was to be a continuation of the shameful extravagance which they had been ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... (1628-1687).—Dramatist, s. of the 1st Duke, who was in 1628 assassinated by Felton. His life was full of adventure and change of fortune. The Restoration gave him back his already twice lost estates, which he again squandered by a life of wild extravagance and profligacy at Court. He was a member of the "Cabal" and intrigued against Clarendon. He wrote pamphlets, lampoons, and plays, but his chief contribution to literature was The Rehearsal, a comedy, in which he satirised the heroic drama of Dryden and others. It is believed that S. Butler had ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... her in her determination to have a League of Nations' settlement and no other. It is the repudiation of Conscription, of war on Russia, of the permanent military occupation of Germany, of imperialism and grab, of war policy in Ireland, of repression in Egypt, of the reckless profligacy and corruption that are plunging Europe into Bolshevism and hurrying this country to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... between. That treasure was their fulcrum; the legacy, dictated by a dead, misguided hand, intended as a war reserve to stay the throne of Howrah in its need, and trebly locked to guard against profligacy, had placed the priests of Siva in the position of dictators of Howrah's destiny. A word from them, and a prince would slay his father—only to discover that the promises of Siva's priests were something ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... see, in all parts of the world, men who, by profligacy and hard-drinking, have brought themselves to a goal; yet, if we consult the register of the prison, it does not appear that any of these habitual drunkards die by being forced to lead sober lives." And he contends, that "whatever debility of the constitution exists, it is to be cured by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 575 - 10 Nov 1832 • Various
... and came back a Christian. There is no need for alarm; it is not my intention to repeat the story. Indeed the only reason for my alluding to it, is to introduce the remark that, at the present day, the Jew would have returned from Rome hardened in heart and unconverted. The flagrant profligacy, the open immorality, which in the Hebrew's judgment supplied the strongest testimony to the truth of a religion that survived such scandals, exist no longer. Rome is, externally, the most moral and decorous of European cities. In ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... this capital has, since the Revolution, decreased near two hundred thousand souls, is not to be lamented. This focus of corruption and profligacy is still too populous, though the inhabitants do not amount to six hundred thousand; for I am well persuaded that more crimes and excesses of every description are committed here in one year than are perpetrated in the same period of time in all other European capitals put together. From not reading ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... organic conditions which accompany the show of excessive piety and religious rapture in the insane, none are so frequent as disorders of the sexual organisation. Conversely, the frenzies of religious revivals have not unfrequently ended in gross profligacy. The encouragement of celibacy by the fervent leaders of most creeds, utilises in an unconscious way the morbid connection between an over-restraint of the sexual desires and impulses towards ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... was the most celebrated of all the earlier leaders of the Revolution. At the time of this letter he had connected himself closely with the Duc d'Orleans, in whose pay, in fact, he was, as his profligacy and extravagance had long before dissipated all the property which had fallen to his share as a younger son. Afterwards, on discovering the cowardice and baseness of the Duke, he broke with him, and exerted himself in the cause of the King, whom, indeed, he had originally desired to support, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the theory of powerlessness, are mistakes arising out of a false philosophy. They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by logic, the paralysis of the conscience is no more a proof that it is not a real power of perceiving real things, than blindness is a proof that sight is not a real power. The perceptions of worth and worthlessness are not conclusions of reasoning, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... great from the events and little from the character of the actors. Every month summons us to the spectacle of some new perfidy in the leaders of parties and the most conspicuous public servants; and the profligacy which we charge upon the statesmen of the seventeenth century has revolved in full measure ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... sight of so shocking a creature: thus despised is poverty and rags, though sometimes the veil of real merit; and thus caressed and flattered is finery, though perhaps a covering for shame, poverty of soul, and abandoned profligacy. One character alone vouchsafed to look upon this contemptible object; the good man looked upon him with an eye melting into tenderness and soft compassion, while at the same time the hand which was stretched out to relieve him, showed the heart felt all the pangs which it supposed ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... to Berlin, from Madrid and London to Constantinople and St. Petersburg; the 'vie intime' of the eighteenth century depicted by a man, who to-day sat with cardinals and saluted crowned heads, and to morrow lurked in dens of profligacy and crime; a book of confessions penned without reticence and without penitence; a record of forty years of "occult" charlatanism; a collection of tales of successful imposture, of 'bonnes fortunes', of marvellous escapes, of transcendent audacity, told with the humour of Smollett and the delicate ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova • David Widger
... reeks with vulgar portrayals of it. In the mean time, the reign of vice is thought daily to grow more common and more shameless; the demoralization of our great cities, in the flaunting openness of their profligacy, seems to be annually bringing them nearer to an equality with the debauched cities of pagan antiquity. The depravity of an abandoned life is supposed to gather constantly an enlarging class of victims, and to diffuse its undermining ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... disappearance of this evil if we do not guard against the equally great one of promoting the unnecessary accumulation of public revenue. No political maxim is better established than that which tells us that an improvident expenditure of money is the parent of profligacy, and that no people can hope to perpetuate their liberties who long acquiesce in a policy which taxes them for objects not necessary to the legitimate and real wants of their Government. Flattering as is the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... river had been heretofore a source of support, were neither slow in seeing the cause nor in publishing the consequences to the world. Thus stood matters: dissoluteness of life on the one hand, distress on the other; profligacy and poverty, extravagance ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... the secret profligacy of his life was at last exposed. Nothing, actually nothing, was left for his creditors. The unfortunate creature, whose ugly name has amused you, must get help somewhere, or must go ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... commented Busy sententiously, "in spite of my Lord Protector, who of a truth doth turn his back on the Saints and hath even allowed the great George Fox and some of the Friends to languish in prison, whilst profligacy holds undisputed sway. Master Courage, meseems those mugs need washing a second time," he added, with sudden irrelevance. "Take them to the kitchen, and do not let me set eyes on thee until they shine like pieces of ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... faithful to the cause of truth, must ever teem with the harrowing evidence of the depravity of our fellow-beings. And again turn to the scene that so frequently closes upon the career of the convict. Consider the helpless pauperism of improvidence; constitutions ruined by vice and profligacy; asylums and hospitals overflowing with degraded and wretched outcasts, descending to the grave without respect and without sympathy, quitting a world which they ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... at this moment, bore no bad resemblance to the infernal regions. The tables, forms, and windows were crowded, and drunkenness, ruffianism, and profligacy, were revelling in all the demoniac delights of mischief. Shouts, roars, and yells, shook the house, for the Scot to accept the challenge. Ben's voice in the din, was like a mite ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... gaining ground on the former. All experience testifies that regularity in domestic relations is almost in direct proportion to industrial civilization. Idle life, and military life with its long intervals of idleness, are the conditions to which, either sexual profligacy, or prolonged vagaries of imagination on that subject, are congenial. Busy men have no time for them, and have too much other occupation for their thoughts: they require that home should be a place of rest, not of incessantly renewed excitement and disturbance. ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... lost her one sole child, a fair-haired boy of most striking beauty and interesting disposition, at the age of seventeen, and by the worst of all possible fates; he lived (as we did at that time) in a large commercial city overflowing with profligacy, and with temptations of every order; he had been led astray; culpable he had been, but by very much the least culpable of the set into which accident had thrown him, as regarded acts and probable ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... atmosphere of such luxury as we in England can hardly imagine. Americans are fond of going 'one better' than the rest of the world. In some cases the extravagance of their moneyed classes amounts to profligacy. Hallett's father was a notorious example for many years, then—just as Edward came of age, there was a colossal smash; he lost everything, practically fretted himself to death, left the lad to fight ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... being met by courtesy, the question so momentous was passed over, and merged into trivialities. Perhaps the earl, who, as his pleasures palled, was understood to be fixing his keen wits upon the pet profligacy of old age, politics—saw, clearly enough, that in these chaotic days of contending parties, when the maddened outcry of the "people" was just being heard and listened to, it might be as well not to make an enemy of this young man, who, with a few more, stood ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... and caprices, and rapidly lost favor with the public, till at last he was regarded only as the husband of the popular actress,—then, merely tolerated for her sake. He fell, or rather flung himself, into a life of reckless dissipation and profligacy, and sunk so low that he scrupled not to accept from his wife, and squander on base pleasures, money won by the genius for which he hated her. Many were the nights when Zelma returned from the playhouse to her cheerless lodgings, exhausted, dispirited, and alone, to walk her chamber till ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... a severe but grossly indelicate satire upon the profligacy of Brahmans assuming the character of religious mendicants. It satirizes also the encouragement given to vice by princes, the inefficacy of ministers, and the ignorance of ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... The flippancy and profligacy of Philip the Handsome, the extortion and insolence of his Flemish courtiers, had not been forgotten in Spain, nor had Philip the Second forgiven his grandfather for having been a foreigner. And now his mad ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... with Lord Willoughby in a vessel trading to America; this vessel, or another, is among his assets recorded in his inventory. All his lands he sold—not that he was in debt, he was a large lender—for purposes of profligacy. These proceedings gave rise to gossip. The Laird must be selling his lands to evade forfeiture. He must have been engaged in the Gowrie mystery. Then Logan dies (July 1606). Bower is also dead (January 1606). It occurs to Sprot that there is money in all this, and, having lost Logan's business, ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... cut out of the good old rock, substantial English honesty? would one fear treachery among characters of their expression? or shall we call their honest mirth and seldom-returning relaxation by the hard names of vice and profligacy? That poor country fellow, that is grasping his staff (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves at home which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with since he came into the room), and is ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... understood, my dear Marquis, to speak of consequences, which may be produced in the revolution of ages, by corruption of morals, profligacy of manners and listlessness for the preservation of the natural and unalienable rights of mankind, nor of the successful usurpations, that may be established at such an unpropitious juncture upon the ruins of liberty, however providently guarded ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... under the papal jurisdiction, bore a general reputation for the utmost profligacy both of principles and conduct. This character has now passed away, and, with the exception of what is termed gallantry, the Avignonese seem a gay, moral, and harmless people. The poetry of Petrarch is perhaps too much read, and it is impossible to read him without inspiring a ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... the monkish lords, and others, as shown in the Journal of Eudes Rigault, lately published, make one shudder. It is a repulsive picture of profligacy at once savage and uncontrolled. The monkish lords especially assail the nunneries. The austere Rigault, Archbishop of Rouen, confessor of the holy king, conducts a personal inquiry into the state of Normandy. Every ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... missionaries employed by the Roman Catholic Church to convert the Indians, did everything in their power to counteract the profligacy caused and propagated by these men in the heart of the wilderness. The Catholic chapel might often be seen planted beside the trading house, and its spire surmounted by a cross, towering from the midst of an Indian village, on the banks of a river or a lake. The ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... witnessed as generation after generation of Scapegraces lived their short hour and went to their account, having done all the mischief they could, for they were a wild, wicked race from father to son. The present Baronet's childhood was nursed in profligacy and excess. Sir Gilbert had been a fitting sire to Sir Guy, and drank, and drove, and sinned, and turned his wife out-of-doors, and gathered his boon companions about him, and placed his heir, a little ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... that politesse de coeur—which marks the gentleman. They are poetic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic passion. But the Manlys and Homers of the Restoration comedy have a prosaic, cold-blooded profligacy that disgusts. Charles Lamb, in his ingenious essay on "The Artificial Comedy of the Last Century," apologized for the Restoration stage, on the ground that it represented a world of whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... she has been able to do in two centuries, although your king was in her pay against you. She will instantly be our ally, and soon our scholar. Afterward she will sell her crown jewels and her church jewels, which cover the whole kingdom, and will derive unnatural strength from her vices and her profligacy. You ought to have conciliated us as your ally, and to have had no other, excepting Holland and Denmark. England could never have, unless by her own folly, more than one enemy. Only one is near enough to strike her; and that one is down. All her wars for six hundred years have ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... years of the eighteenth century moral conditions in this far southern colony might have been far better. Although Louis XIV, the Grand Monarch, had been dead practically a century, he had left as a heritage a passion for pleasure and merry-making that was causing the French nobility to revel in profligacy and vice. It must be admitted that many of the French colonists in America were apt pupils of their European relatives, while the Creole population, born of at least an unmoral union, was, to say the ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... an atrocity in the laws of his country, of which until then I was ignorant. It seems that any younger brother, next heir, might claim the estate by turning Protestant, or drive the incumbent to the same act. I was rejoiced to hear that there was hardly an instance of such profligacy known.[26] To what baseness will not the struggle for ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... study of human folly and frailty to "point a moral or adorn a tale" from the events transpiring in our very midst. Such as these will view with alarm the sad example afforded the youth of our city by the dissolute career of a young lump of aristocratic affectation and patrician profligacy, recently arrived in this city. This young gentleman's (save the mark!) name is Lord William F. Beauvoir, the latest scion of a venerable and wealthy English family. We print the full name of this beautiful exemplar of "haughty Albion," although he first appeared among our ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... constantly that woman, the helpmate of man, who adorns, dignifies, and blesses our lives, that woman in this country is cheap; that vast numbers whose names ought to be synonyms for purity and virtue are plunged into profligacy and infamy. But do you not know that you sent 40,000 men to perish on the bleak heights of the Crimea, and that the revolt in India, caused, in part at least, by the grievous iniquity of the seizure of ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... without abusing it, who, without inflicting a wound, effected a great social reform, and who reconciled wit with virtue, after a long and disastrous separation, during which wit had been lead astray by profligacy, and virtue ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... a pleasure-loving, dissolute man, had surrounded his throne with all the attractions of fashionable indulgence and dissipation. There was one woman in his court, Madame du Barri, celebrated in the annals of profligacy, who had acquired an entire ascendency over the mind of the king. The disreputable connection existing between her and the monarch excluded her from respect, and yet the king loaded her with honors, received ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... deformity became so apparent as to cause the rest of the officers to look with fear and astonishment upon one, in whom the gifts of extraordinary talents seemed to have been lavished, only to become blended with cunning, artfulness and licentious profligacy, whose disposition was mean and avaricious, and whose temper, though not violent, was ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker
... family affections, all his tastes, all his feelings, were practised on with the utmost dexterity. His interior Cabinet was now composed of men such as that generation, and that generation alone, produced; of men at whose audacious profligacy the renegades and jobbers of our own time look with the same sort of admiring despair with which our sculptors contemplate the Theseus, and our painters the Cartoons. To be a real, hearty, deadly enemy of the liberties and religion ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and habits of the people of the Connexion in those days. I never met with anything in any society, that I recollect, more at variance with the principles of Christian temperance, and more likely to lead both preachers and people into drunkenness and profligacy, than the habits and customs of many of the members of the New Connexion in the Chester circuit. In the first place they were all users of intoxicating drinks, and all those that were in tolerable circumstances regularly kept spirits ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... personality has, in a sense, told against it; for men are prone to call the well-balanced nature cold and the well-regulated life Pharisaic. Addison did not escape charges of this kind from the wild livers of his own time, who could not dissociate genius from profligacy nor generosity of nature from prodigality. It was one of the great services of Addison to his generation and to all generations, that in an age of violent passions, he showed how a strong man could govern himself. In a time of reckless living, he illustrated the power ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of the Eatanswill Gazette, the Ballarat Star referred to the Ballarat Times as "our veracious contemporary and doughty opponent," and alluded to the "unblushing profligacy of its editorial columns." The proprietor of the United States Hotel and the solicitor for Lola Montez also sailed into the controversy and challenged Mr. Seekamp to "eat his words." That individual, however, not caring about ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... is a fellow to do?" His profligacy was failing him rapidly. "What is the use of playing fast and loose with ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... intellectual faculty will be rendered, in many instances, efficacious to the formation of a religious character. This obvious fact is, that a much greater proportion of the persons so educated do actually become the subjects of religion, than of a similar number of those brought up in ignorance and profligacy. Take collectively any number of families in which such an education prevails, and the same number in which it does not, and follow the young persons respectively into subsequent life. But any one who hears the suggestion, feels there is no need to ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... them dramatically enough to make his readers feel about them what men who witnessed them felt, he would be accused of a 'morbid love of horrors.' If any one, in order to show how the French Revolution of 1793 was really God's judgment on the profligacy of the ancien regirne, were to paint that profligacy as the men of the ancien regime unblushingly painted it themselves, respectability would have a right to demand, 'How dare you, sir, drag such disgusting facts from their merited oblivion?' Those, again, who are ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... dollars daily, he literally cast money to the winds. His notoriety spread to the furthermost limits of the country; the daily papers, the weeklies, the monthlies printed exaggerated accounts of his profligacy. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... took pains to inquire, before proceeding upon my errand, into the character of the heirs who had inherited the property of Elwood Henderson and Christopher Bigelow, and found that in each case there was one among the rest who was well known for his profligacy and reckless expenditure. It was a significant discovery, and increased, if possible, my interest in running down this nefarious trafficker in ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... yet to be decided by the electing voice of the Senabawdee, in whose judgment he may be ineligible, by reason of certain physical, mental, or moral disabilities,—as extreme youth, effeminacy, imbecility, intemperance, profligacy. Nevertheless, the election is popularly expected to result in the choice of the eldest son of the queen, though an interregnum or a regency is a contingency by no ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... of De Méré, and amidst all his dissoluteness, made pretensions to scientific knowledge and attainments as a writer. Desbarreaux was a companion of both, but of a still lower grade—a man of open profligacy, and a despiser of the rites of the Church. Along with Miton and other boon companions, he is spoken of as betaking himself to St Cloud for carnival during the Holy Week. {66} The truth would seem ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... principle of empire was created which had never before existed. The phenomenon could not be mistaken; and the Roman statesman saw he had to deal with a rival. Nor must we suppose, because on the surface of the history we read so much of the vicissitudes of imperial power, and of the profligacy of its possessors, that the fabric of government was not sustained by traditions of the strongest temper, and by officials of the highest sagacity. It was the age of lawyers and politicians; and they ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... if not brilliantly beautiful, at least brilliantly witty, Madame de Sevigne was virtuous—in that chief sense of feminine virtue—amid an almost universal empire of profligacy around her. Her social advantages were unsurpassed, and her social success was equal to her advantages. She had the woman courtier's supreme triumph in being once led out to dance by the king—her own junior by a dozen years—no vulgar king, remember, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... requested to make Armenia a province of his empire, and to place it under the government of a Persian satrap. The movement was resisted with all his force by Isaac, the patriarch, who admitted the profligacy of Artaxerxes and deplored it, but held that the role of a Christian, however lax he might be, was to be preferred to that of a heathen, however virtuous. The nobles, however, were determined; and the opposition of Isaac had no other result than to involve him in the fall of his ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... peculiar to himself, and to the highest degree interesting and attractive. No name was once held in greater detestation in England than that of Talleyrand. He was looked upon universally as a sink of moral and political profligacy. Born at the end of Louis XV.'s reign, and bred up in the social pleasures and corruptions of that polite but vicious aristocracy, he was distinguished in his early youth for his successful gallantries, for the influence he obtained over women, and the dexterity with which he ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... hated the light which would reveal their sins. God's law, the standard of righteousness, having been removed, they exercised power without limit, and practised vice without restraint. Fraud, avarice, and profligacy prevailed. Men shrank from no crime by which they could gain wealth or position. The palaces of popes and prelates were scenes of the vilest debauchery. Some of the reigning pontiffs were guilty of crimes so revolting that secular rulers endeavored ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... little: for they did not will anything much: they were like the enervated people of Thelema. They would complacently profess the freedom of their instincts: but their instincts were faded and faint; and their profligacy was chiefly cerebral. They delighted in feeling themselves sink into the great piscina of civilization, that warm mud-bath in which human energy, the primeval and vital forces, primitive animalism, and its blossom of faith, will, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... Durie at Basel, Oct. 3, 1654:—"As regards Morus's vices and profligacy, Hotton does not seem to entertain that opinion of him; I know, however, that others speak very ill of him, that his hands are against nearly everybody and everybody's hands against him, and that many ministers even of the Walloon Synod are doing their best to have him deprived of the ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... recapitulated the evidence, and declared that in the whole course of his professional duties he had never heard such a disclosure of profligacy and villainy, combined with every species of wickedness. In a strain of pointed animadversion he declared it to be an imperative duty,—however much his private feelings might be wounded in seeing a reputable tradesman of the town convicted of ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... large from remaining on the most sincere and friendly footing. In all their intercourse these youths were delicate and forbearing in a way that only very poor and very young men can be. However much I might detect in Zuchin's character and amusements an element of coarseness and profligacy, I could also detect the fact that his drinking-bouts were of a very different order to the puerility with burnt rum and champagne in which I had participated at ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... principle to Russia. This may be: though I think Russia is too unwieldly and rotten-ripe ever to make a huge progress in conquest. What is to be thought of a nation where the upper classes speak the language of another country, and have varnished over their honest barbarism with the poorest French profligacy and intrigue? Russia does not seem a whole to me. In the mean time, all goes on toward better and better, as is my firm belief: and humanity grows clear by flowing, (very little profited by any single sage or hero), and man shall have wings to fly ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... particular merit except a certain easy good-nature, which rendered him unwilling to do harm or to give pain to any one, unless some interest of his own should make it convenient. His neglected and unrestrained youth was abandoned to license and to profligacy. He was married in the twenty-second year of his age, against his own inclination, to the Princess Sophia Dorothea of Zeil, who was some six years younger. The marriage was merely a political one, formed with the object of uniting the whole of the Duchy of Lueneberg. George was attached ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... India godless civilians; as witness on every palm-shaded coral beach in the South Seas, profligate beach-combers, drunken sailors, unscrupulous traders; as witness the dying out of races by diseases imported with profligacy and gin from this land. 'A dew from the Lord!'; say rather a malaria from the devil! 'By you,' said the Prophet, 'is the name of God blasphemed among the Gentiles.' By Englishmen the missionary's efforts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... What morality is this, but that of men who offer themselves as living images, as animated representatives of the Divinity? Are those monarchs, then, who are habitually unjust, who wrest without remorse the bread from the hands of a famished people, to administer to the profligacy of their insatiable courtiers—to pamper the luxury of the vile instruments of their enormities, atheists? Are, then, those ambitious conquerors, who not contented with oppressing their own slaves, carry desolation, spread misery, deal out death among the subjects of ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... me. I was rich enough to be beyond the stage at which a man excites suspicion by frequenting race-tracks and gambling-houses; I was at the height where prodigalities begin to be taken as evidences of abounding superfluity, not of a dangerous profligacy. Jim Harkaway, who failed at playing the same game I played and won, said to me with a sneer one day: "You certainly do know how to get a dollar's worth of notoriety out of ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... Don't you shudder at such perjury? and this in a republic, and where there is no religion that dispenses with oaths! Pitt was the only one of this ominous band that opened his - mouth,(1182) and it was to add impudence to profligacy; but no criminal at the Place de Greve was ever so racked as he was by Dr. Lee, a friend of Lord Granville, who gave him the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... words, to which he had listened intently, re-perused, throughout, this record of the stone; and finding that the general purport consisted of nought else than a treatise on love, and likewise of an accurate transcription of facts, without the least taint of profligacy injurious to the times, he thereupon copied the contents, from beginning to end, to the intent of charging the world to hand them ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... small son to grasp. As a matter of fact Stephen had not grasped it then—but years afterward. It was not a pleasant story,—and yet there was much of credit in it to the young rake its subject,—of dash and courage and princely generosity beside the profligacy ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... go on quoting texts? Look for yourselves, you who fancy that it is only on the other side of the grave that God will trouble Himself about you and your meanness, your profligacy, your falsehood. Look for yourselves in the book of God, and see if there be any writer there,—lawgiver, prophet, psalmist, apostle, up to Christ the Lord Himself,—who does not warn men again and again, that here, on earth, their sins will ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... virtue by presenting attractive qualities in combination with vices which in real life harden the heart and coarsen the taste. We do not find in his pages those moral monsters in which the finest sensibilities, the richest gifts, the noblest sentiments are linked to heartless profligacy, or not less heartless misanthropy. He never palters with right; he enters into no truce with wrong; he admits of no compromise on such points. How admirable in its moral aspect is the character of Leatherstocking! he is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... she had been informed, had fallen victims to the malice of the accuser. Her sentiments were espoused by all the company, except the French lady of pleasure, who, thinking the credit of the sisterhood concerned in the affair, bitterly inveighed against the profligacy of the age, and particularly the base and villainous attempts of man upon the chastity of the weaker sex; saying, with a look of indignation directed to the painter, that for her own part she should never be able to manifest the acknowledgment ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... man.' It is difficult how to rank the two first Georges; both were detestable as men, and scarcely tolerable as monarchs. The foreign deeds of George I. were stained with the supposed murder of Count Konigsmark: the English career of George II. was one of the coarsest profligacy. Their ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... accusatore, speaking with a stern passion of emphasis, 'that these traitors to their country first cast off their natal ties in order to lead lives of unrestricted profligacy abroad, and having, in other lands, done all within them to disgrace the land of their birth, return to it to inflict a wound still deeper upon the national reputation; and thus it is that these villains, though they once did their country the honour to repudiate it, return ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... they are consistent with the circumstances of the case, like the tales of the Book of Sindibad, from which the frame of the Ten Wazirs was imitated, and in which the Wazirs relate stories showing the depravity and profligacy of women and that no reliance should be placed on their unsupported assertions, and to these the lady opposes equally cogent stories setting forth the wickedness and perfidy of men. Closely resembling the frame-story of the Ten Wazirs, however, is that of a Tamil romance entitled, "Alakeswara ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... mere wealth and aristocracy. Wealth and aristocracy come around the stage in abundance, and are welcome, as in the time of Elizabeth; but the stage is no longer a mere appendage of court-life, no longer a mere mirror of patrician vice hanging at the girdle of fashionable profligacy as it was in the days of Congreve and Wycherley. It is now the property of the educated people. It has to satisfy them or pine in neglect And the better their demands the better will be the supply with which the drama will respond. This being not only so, but seen to be so, the ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... of their mistake, and how were he the worse if they knew him for whom he is? 'Tis an unhappy family—a curse haunts it. Young in years, old in vice, the wretched nobleman who lies in the vault, by the coffin of that old aunt, scarcely better than himself, whose guineas supplied his early profligacy—alas! he ruined his ill-fated, beautiful cousin, and she died heart-broken, and her little child, both there—in that melancholy and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Procter (Barry Cornwall), 1787-1874 (Edinburgh Review, January, 1820, vol. 33, pp. 144-155), compares Diego de Montilla, a poem in ottava rima, with Don Juan, favourably and unfavourably: "There is no profligacy and no horror ... no mocking of virtue and honour, and no strong mixtures of buffoonery and grandeur." But it may fairly match with Byron and his Italian models "as to the better qualities of elegance, delicacy, and tenderness." See, too, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March, 1820, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... fervour and perseverance of her original character she qualified herself to subdue all the nations of mankind. Next, having conquered the earth by her virtue and by the spirit of liberty, she was able to maintain her ascendancy for centuries under the emperors, notwithstanding all her astonishing profligacy and anarchy. And, lastly, after her secular ascendancy had been destroyed by the inroads of the northern barbarians, she rose like the phoenix from her ashes, and, though powerless in material force, held mankind in subjection ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... the whole beauty and value of the system which he attempted to deface. He was the first of the Rats, the first of those statesmen whose patriotism has been only the coquetry of political prostitution, and whose profligacy has taught governments to adopt the old maxim of the slave-market, that it is cheaper to buy than to breed, to import defenders from an Opposition than to rear them in a Ministry. He was the first ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in evidence again, his profligacy and his piety hand in hand. Ascending the stairs, I reached the door just in time to see the landlord, manipulator of the musical machine, forcing Geordie to the door, one hand gripping his throat, the other buffeting the helpless wretch in the face. Two or three ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... especially that of Curran, we must probe to the bottom the corruptions and baseness of that society, which deserves to be branded as among the most base and the most corrupt that history has hitherto described. The temptations which England employed, the horrible corruption and profligacy she fostered, must be fully known, if we desire to do justice to the men who came out undefiled from ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... that the amount of immorality among what are known as the higher classes is every year increasing. Every now and then a scandal in high life comes to the surface; but the great mass of corruption is effectually hidden from the general public. Open profligacy is of course frowned upon in all respectable circles; and yet wealth and accomplishments will cover ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... neither history nor contemporary society shews us a single amiable and respectable character capable of it. This has always been recognized in cultivated society: that is why poor people accuse cultivated society of profligacy, poor people being often so ignorant and uncultivated that they have nothing to offer each other but the sex relationship, and cannot conceive why men and women should associate for any ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... of his indignation, and even contempt, it must be remembered that indignation and contempt may well have been real with him, while they were real with the soundest part of his countrymen; with that reforming middle class, comparatively untainted by French profligacy, comparatively undebauched by feudal subservience, which has been the leaven which has leavened the whole Scottish people in the last three centuries with the elements of their greatness. If, finally, he heaps up against the unhappy Queen charges which Mr. Burton thinks incredible, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... be seen, feeding on the sight of stereotyped toilets and the sound of impoverished tattle. O misery of semi-provincial fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired of an existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being utterly vapid! How many fashionable women at the end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate monotony ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... incident to slavery, that they are, to a great degree, secured against the temptation to greater crimes, and more atrocious vices, and the miseries which attend them; against their own disposition to indolence, and the profligacy which ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... the state of Mississippi, near the banks of the river, and about four hundred miles from its mouth. It contains about thirty dwellings, most of which are whiskey-shops, gambling, and other houses, where an excess of profligacy prevails, which is not usual in ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... feeling or a spark of generosity or humanity in his breast can read this book without being moved with compassion for Madame de Tourval and with horror and disgust towards Valmont and Madame de Merteuil. It raised in my mind a detestation of such cold-blooded, inhuman profligacy, and I felt that I would rather every pleasure that can flow from the intercourse of women were debarred me than run such a course. The moral effect upon my mind was stronger than any which ever resulted from the most didactic ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... an election which had been delayed should be completed within the days of the second or third interrex. There were three candidates, Milo, Hypsaeus, and Q. Metellus Scipio, by all of whom bribery and violence were used with open and unblushing profligacy. Cicero was wedded to Milo's cause, as we have seen from his letter to Curio, but it does not appear that he himself took any active part in the canvass. The duties to be done required rather the services of a Curio. Pompey, on the other hand, was ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... it. We may pity or censure the star. But we must still acknowledge the star's genius, and applaud it. Hence we conclude that the chronic weakness of actors no more affects the question of the propriety of patronizing theatrical representations, than the profligacy of journeymen shoemakers affects the question of the propriety of wearing boots. All ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... separate uniforms might have done. If the Puritan was affectedly plain in his dress, and ridiculously precise in his manners, the Cavalier often carried his love of ornament into tawdry finery, and his contempt of hypocrisy into licentious profligacy. Gay gallant fellows, young and old, thronged together towards the ancient Castle, with general and joyous manifestation of those spirits, which, as they had been buoyant enough to support their owners during the worst of times, as they termed Oliver's usurpation, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... nineteenth century a woman by the name of Lady Morgan, who was the author of several novels and books of travel. Although her record in intelligence and morals is good, John Croker, who regularly reviewed her books, accuses her works of licentiousness, profligacy, irreverence, blasphemy, libertinism, disloyalty and atheism. There are twenty-six pages of this in one review only, and any paragraph would be worth the quoting for its ferocity. After this attack it was Macaulay who said he hated Croker like ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... exact, the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics made an interesting investigation. This was an effort to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world, usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations of nearly four thousand fallen ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It has had a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but each man's innocence and his real liking ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... he responded, very suavely. "I knew I had dropped somewhere in Kent, and a glance at that well-kept grass of yours, at the rare profusion of early flowers, at the extreme fulness—er—profligacy—of your fruit-blossom, told me in a moment that the garden could belong to only one man in the county. Do you suppose I have been a horticultural enthusiast all these years without knowing Colonel Currie by name? Why, the—the dahlias you exhibit are alone sufficient to make your name ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... Russia, but in England and America, looked upon a hilarious night as the just reward of work well done by day. Brandy was debited to their account by the "bucket" (a bucket being a trifle less than two gallons), and they found little fault with life. But the profligacy gave a commanding spirit like Rezanov's an advantage which they did not under-estimate for a moment; and they ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... Italian race, and disdained to surrender themselves to the innovations of foreign fashions. Such persons began immediately to affect the Stoic precepts of life according to nature—an affectation all the more grateful, and, I may add, all the more noble, from its contrast with the unbounded profligacy which was being diffused through the imperial city by the pillage of the world and by the example of its most luxurious races. In the front of the disciples of the new Greek school, we might be sure, even if ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... inquiry into it is intolerable; and decency is virtue. Scandals, vulgarities, whatever shocks, whatever disgusts, are offences of the first order. Drinking and swearing, squalid poverty, improvidence, laziness, slovenly disorder, make up the idea of profligacy: poets may say any thing, however wicked, with impunity; works of genius may be read without danger or shame, whatever their principles; fashion, celebrity, the beautiful, the heroic, will suffice to force any evil upon the community. The splendours of a court, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... her, being resolved never to have her. To Sir W. Batten, to the Trinity House; and after dinner we fell a-talking, Mr. Batten telling us of a late triall of Sir Charles Sedley [Sir Charles Sedley, Bart., celebrated for his wit and profligacy, and author of several plays. He is said to have been fined 500l. for this outrage. He was father to James II.'s mistress, created Countess of Dorchester, and died 1701.] the other day, before my Lord Chief Justice Foster [Sir Robert ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... burned the tower and killed or dispersed the garrison, none of whom were ever discovered. It was in Caonabo's country that the gold mines were reported to exist, and it is probable that both the cupidity and the profligacy of the colonists were so gross as to draw down upon them the not unreasonable vengeance of the natives. Guacanagari, the friendly cacique, who had received the admiral amicably on his first voyage, declared that he and his tribe had done their utmost in defence ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... distinct advantage over the printers—they are not brought in contact with the manifold temptations to intemperance and profligacy which environ the votaries of the art preservative of arts. Horace Smith has said that "were there no readers there certainly would be no writers; clearly, therefore, the existence of writers depends upon the existence of readers: and, of course, since the ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... of this plot Beric found his position more and more irksome in spite of the favour Nero showed him. Do what he would he could not close his ears to what was public talk in Rome. The fabulous extravagances of Nero, the public and unbounded profligacy of himself and his court, the open defiance of decency, the stupendous waste of public money on the new and most sumptuous palace into which he had now removed, were matters that scandalized even the population of Rome. Senators, patricians, grave councillors, noble matrons were alike willingly ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... interest of the money now expended in prisons of approved structure is, for each cell, equal annually to the net income of a laboring man; and professional thieves, when at large, often gather by their art, and expend in profligacy, many thousand dollars a year. And here we see how much wiser it is, in an economical point of view, to save the child, or reform the man, than to allow the adult criminal to go at large, or provide for his safe-keeping at the ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... newspaper and take upon himself the editorial charge of it. For such an undertaking, his large experience in business, his resolute spirit, his sound judgment, his keen insight into character, his lofty scorn and detestation of meanness, profligacy, peculation and fraud, eminently fitted him. The paper, the Evening Bulletin, was first issued on the eighth day of October, 1855. From that day to the day of his death, he devoted all his faculties most faithfully and conscientiously to the exposure of guilt, ...
— A Sketch of the Causes, Operations and Results of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856 • Stephen Palfrey Webb
... echoed, in a tone of bitter irony; 'have you not had enough yet? Have you not squandered every penny I had from my father in your profligacy and evil companions? What more ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... had no such worthy object as Wolsey had. His pretext was that these institutions had sunk into a state of ingnorance, drunkenness, and profligacy. This may have been true of some of the smaller monasteries, though not of the large ones. But the vices of the monasteries the King had already made his own. It was their wealth which he now coveted. The smaller religious houses ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... his principles, religious and moral; his worldly prospects, and so forth. To all of which I replied by stating, that, with the exception of being addicted to flirting a little with the Muses, which old women might consider as only one step removed from absolute profligacy, he was a well-disposed young man, and would doubtless grow wiser as he increased in years; but that his fortune was very limited, and that all his expectations in that way wouldn't ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... come home from Rome a short time before her husband arrived, but he, when he came, manifested no interest in rejoining her. Instead of that, he connected himself with a number of wicked associates, both male and female, whom he had known before he went to the Holy Land, and lived a life of open profligacy with them, leaving Berengaria to pine in neglect, alone and forsaken. She was almost heart-broken to be thus abandoned, and several of the principal ecclesiastics of the kingdom remonstrated very strongly with Richard for this wicked conduct. But ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... yet comprehending instantly that I dare not even trust this plain-spoken girl with the truth. She respected the men, sympathized with the sacrifices of Washington's little army, contrasted all they endured with the profligacy of the English and Hessian troops, and yet remained loyal to the King's cause. Even as I hesitated, she ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... better!" he exclaimed; "the closer the preserve, the thicker the game." I had now a complete view of this hero of democracy. His figure was herculean; his countenance, which possibly, in his younger days, had been handsome, was now marked with the lines of every passion and profligacy, but it was still commanding. His costume was one which he had chosen for himself, and which was worn by his peculiar troop; a short brown mantle, an under-robe with the arms naked to the shoulder, a broad leathern belt loaded with pistols, a huge sabre ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... hard for God as the world does for itself? Look at the energy beneath us: how evil in every form is active; how lies and half-truths propagate themselves quick as the blight on a rose-tree; how profligacy, and crime, and all the devil's angels are busy on his errands. If we are sitting drowsy by our camp-fires, the enemy is on the alert. You can hear the tramp of their legions and the rumble of their artillery through the night as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... the convent, and especially those poor persons to whom the river had been heretofore a source of support, were neither slow in seeing the cause nor in publishing the consequences to the world. Thus stood matters: dissoluteness of life on the one hand, distress on the other; profligacy and poverty, extravagance ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... Character of the Duke of York and Earl of Clarendon General Election of 1661 Violence of the Cavaliers in the new Parliament Persecution of the Puritans Zeal of the Church for Hereditary Monarchy Change in the Morals of the Community Profligacy of Politicians State of Scotland State of Ireland The Government become unpopular in England War with the Dutch Opposition in the House of Commons Fall of Clarendon State of European Politics, and Ascendancy of France Character of Lewis XIV The Triple Alliance The Country Party Connection ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Complete Contents of the Five Volumes • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... St. Clair had even thought to trifle with the feelings of Snake le Vasquez, then to scorn him for his presumption. Although the beautiful New York society girl had remained unsullied in the midst of a city's profligacy, she still liked "to play with fire," as she laughingly said, and at the quiet words of Benson—Two-Gun Benson his comrades of the border called him—she had drawn herself to her full height, facing him in all her blond young beauty, and pouted adorably as she replied, "Thank you! But I can ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... followed up in a similar fashion the history of a family of vagrants. The full report may be found under the title of "The Zero Family," in the Archiv fuer Gesellschaft's-u. Rassenbiologie, 1905, Heft 4, page 494 et seq. It is sad to read of the untold misery, profligacy, and distress spread broadcast by this family, not to speak of the many crimes ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... family—a curse haunts it. Young in years, old in vice, the wretched nobleman who lies in the vault, by the coffin of that old aunt, scarcely better than himself, whose guineas supplied his early profligacy—alas! he ruined his ill-fated, beautiful cousin, and she died heart-broken, and her little child, both there—in that melancholy ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a work of time. The majority of the people are unstable, thriftless improvident and ignorant. Slavery left its blight of impotency and profligacy upon them. They come and go as did their fathers a hundred years ago. Their tools and utensils are the same their great-grandparents used, and they are content with them. We never worked harder and ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 38, No. 01, January, 1884 • Various
... Europe, and had become but a hypocritical principality, greedy for temporal power, and openly trafficking in ecclesiastical offices which were once supposed to belong by right to men of saintly lives; it is probable that this barefaced profligacy of the papal court was responsible for the widespread moral inertia which was characteristic of the time. The pontiff's chair at the dawn of this century was filled by Roderigo Borgia, known as Alexander VI., and it may well be said that his ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... more smoothly than had been anticipated. Generally speaking, in the most populous places, the polling was concluded within the two days allowed by the act. Less time and opportunity were allowed for bribery, and the disturbances which used to arise from drunkenness and profligacy in a great measure ceased. As regards the candidates which the machinery of the act produced, there was a great dislocation of old connexions and previous interests. There were three parties in the field: ministerial candidates; Tories, now called Conservatives; and the Radicals, who have ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Ordinary service must be secured by the motives to ordinary integrity. I do not hesitate to say, that that state which lays its foundations in rare and heroic virtues, will be sure to have its superstructure in the basest profligacy and corruption. An honourable and fair profit is the best security against avarice and rapacity; as in all things else, a lawful and regulated enjoyment is the best security against debauchery and excess. For as wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself by ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... lost, and the other thrown into a state of anarchy and confusion. After having spread corruption like a deluge through the land, until all public virtue was lost, and the people were inebriated with vice and profligacy, they were then taught in the paroxysms of their infatuation and madness to cry out for havoc and war. History could not show an instance of such an empire ruined in such a manner. They had lost a greater extent of dominion in the first campaign of a ruinous civil war, which was intentionally ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... meanness and private profligacy was drawing to a close. Alcibiades no longer—his frame wasted by vice—his spirits broken by pecuniary difficulties—Buckingham's importance visibly sank away. 'He remained, at last,' to borrow the words of Hume, 'as incapable of doing hurt as he had ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... in which Antony lived was calculated to attune the mind to the search after the unknown, and to serve as an excuse for his visions. The age of deep profligacy, it was also the age of lofty talents, of bold enterprises, of great discoveries. They dug into the bowels of the earth; they kept up in the laboratory an unextinguished fire; they united and separated elements; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... North Germany deems itself only reprieved, not secured,) may have some share in the general aversion with which they are regarded: yet I am deeply persuaded that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy, to their treachery and hardheartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families of their protectors. My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled to mind the stern yet amiable ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... There is good evidence that the amount of immorality among what are known as the higher classes is every year increasing. Every now and then a scandal in high life comes to the surface; but the great mass of corruption is effectually hidden from the general public. Open profligacy is of course frowned upon in all respectable circles; and yet wealth and accomplishments will cover a ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... and against the parent, whether he still retains the child in his power, or has emancipated him. This enactment was made by the Senate because it was found that persons in power, when dragged down by the burden of loans which they had squandered in profligacy, often plotted against ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... a bankrupt; the secret profligacy of his life was at last exposed. Nothing, actually nothing, was left for his creditors. The unfortunate creature, whose ugly name has amused you, must get help somewhere, or must ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... wish, however, to trace the course of my miserable profligacy here—a profligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded the vigilance, of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and added, in a somewhat unusual degree, to my bodily stature, when, after a week of soulless dissipation, ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... it be clearly understood that any indulgence whatever in these evil courses is attended with bad effects, especially because they create impure desires and thoughts, which will prepare the girl to be a willing victim to the arts of profligacy. There is no more solemn duty resting on those who have the charge of young females than to protect ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Religious do not wed; but, specifically, that is all there is in common between them. All celibates are not chaste; celibacy is not necessarily chastity, by a large majority. Unless something other than selfishness suggests this choice of life, the word is apt to be a misnomer for profligacy. And one who takes the vow of celibacy does not break it by sinning against the Sixth Commandment; he is true to it until he weds. The religious vow is something ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... revealed by the Messiah, in the fullest and clearest manner. Moses, in this book, directs the method in which the Israelites were to deal with the seven nations, whom they were appointed to punish for their profligacy and idolatry; and whose land they were to possess, when they had driven out the old inhabitants. He gives them excellent laws, civil as well as religious, which were after the standing municipal laws of that people. This book concludes with ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... being can suffer; she had lost her one sole child, a fair-haired boy of most striking beauty and interesting disposition, at the age of seventeen, and by the worst of all possible fates; he lived (as we did at that time) in a large commercial city overflowing with profligacy, and with temptations of every order; he had been led astray; culpable he had been, but by very much the least culpable of the set into which accident had thrown him, as regarded acts and probable intentions; and as regarded palliations from childish years, from total ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Ireland in the Dark Ages. Always, by the grace of God, the primary social unit, the family may, and frequently does, achieve and maintain both purity and beauty when the world without riots in ruin and profligacy. ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... men. In all general affairs, indeed, in all matters of consequence, the male sex must ever lead, and the other follow; but surely they have something in their power, were they to exert themselves. They ought never, by a silent approbation, to encourage looseness and profligacy among the men, and thus be accessary to the prostitution of numbers in the lower rank of their own sex; and if they have it not in their power to reform their gallants altogether, they can at least make them throw the mask of decency ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... was once his own, particularly with reference to cutting timber, the disadvantages of thus fettering the dominion will appear greatly to preponderate. At best, a settlement is a speculation; at worst, it is the occasion of distress, profligacy, and domestic discord, ending not unfrequently, as the Chancery Reports bear witness, in obstinate litigation, ruinous alike to the peace and to the property of the family. Sometimes the father effects an arrangement with his eldest son on his coming of age; the son stipulating ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... that dares set foot in this house, after what has come to pass? Is it not enough to have robbed me of my boy with thy arts and thy profligacy, but thou must come here to crow over me—me—his mother? Dost thou know where he is, thou bad hussy, with thy great blue eyes and yellow hair, to lead men on to ruin? Out upon thee with thy angel's ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... until within twenty feet of the street door. There Miss Norvell hesitated her anxious eyes searching the mixed crowd of dancers now for the first time fully revealed. Even as she gazed upon the riot, shocked into silence at the inexpressible profligacy displayed, and ashamed of her presence in the midst of it, a merry peal of laughter burst through the parted lips ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... extravagance. He spent thousands of dollars daily, he literally cast money to the winds. His notoriety spread to the furthermost limits of the country; the daily papers, the weeklies, the monthlies printed exaggerated accounts of his profligacy. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... Scatterbrains, and his deeds, as recorded in this history, prove he was no unworthy representative of that illustrious title. To return to his father—who had done the grievous wrong to the poor peasant girl: he lived his life of profligacy through, and in a foreign country died at last; but on his death-bed the scourge of conscience rendered every helpless hour an age of woe. Bitterest of all was the thought of the wife deceived, deserted, and unacknowledged. ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... determined by the boldness of the first movements. In such services the condottieri were eminent, and in these, where plunder always followed success, their characters acquired a mixture of intrepidity and profligacy, which awed even those whom ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... benign influence on the happiness of life, in all its stages and classes, and of society in all its forms, but as the only means of preserving our constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, profligacy, and corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments, if a love of equal laws, of justice and humanity, in the interior administration; if an inclination ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... than his own brothers or sons ever were; they go out, too, with greater pomp than they or any of the royal family can; and are ordered to be received with more honours as they pass through the different palaces. The profligacy that exists within the palace passes all belief, and these things excite more disgust among the aristocracy of the capital than all the misrule and malversation that arise from the King's apathy ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... of Malta—without fear, but (though, perhaps, the best of its class) not without reproach, has no place here. Its ethnology belongs to the different countries which it dignified by its valour, or dishonoured by its profligacy. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... or when, with generous enthusiasm, he felt the solemnity of life and the awfulness of duty, and asked God to help his insufficiency? Was not the dream truer and more real than the waking hours of profligacy ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... must be a time when the vista of the future, with all its possibilities of glory and of shame, first opens to the vision of youth. Then is he summoned to make his choice between truth and treachery; between honor and dishonor; between purity and profligacy; between moral life and moral death. And as he doubts or balances between the heavenward or hellward course; as he struggles to rise or consents to fall; is there in all the universe of God a spectacle of higher exultation or of deeper pathos? Within him are the appetites ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... you fancy such folly and such profligacy? The fact is, I really believe he has got ... or that she made him believe it, and therefore compelled him to marry her. There is nothing but this sort of gossip stirring in town. The debates are most tedious, and the Houses ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... thing!" she cried, but did not tell whether she meant his profligacy in purchasing or his wantonness in destroying. "And now, pray enlighten me. Are you swinging him just for fun or ...
— The Day of the Dog • George Barr McCutcheon
... "the danger and the folly of that weakness of mind, and that easiness to be led, which too often pass for good nature"; "The False Key" points out some of the evils to which a well-educated boy, on first going to service, is exposed from the profligacy of his fellow-servants; "The Mimic," the drawback of vulgar acquaintances; "Barring Out," the errors to which a high spirit and the love of party are apt to lead, and so forth. In the final paragraph stress is laid ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... born from my head, Clitipho, just as they say Minerva was from Jove's, none the more on that account would I suffer myself to be disgraced by your profligacy.[103] ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... blood to gush in an incessant flow—wished to reinstate the monarchy, and to place the Duke of Orleans upon the throne. The Duchess of Orleans, the child of one of the highest nobles, was not in sympathy with her husband in his democratic views. His boundless profligacy had also alienated her affections, so that there was no domestic happiness to be found in the gorgeous saloons ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... cannot go to the root of the moral disease of Rehoboth. If it were drink, or profligacy, or greed, I might; but self-righteousness beat Jesus, and ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... tended to arrest her incipient alienation from the Frate, and to rivet again her attachment to the man who had opened to her the new life of duty, and who seemed now to be worsted in the fight for principle against profligacy. For Romola could not carry from day to day into the abodes of pestilence and misery the sublime excitement of a gladness that, since such anguish existed, she too existed to make some of the anguish less bitter, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... however elevated.* Such, we can solemnly assure the reader, would bring its reward in many ways—perhaps in another life, perhaps in this world, but it would tend to shorten the existence it is desired to preserve, as surely as self-indulgence and profligacy. That is why very few of the truly great men of the world (of course, the unprincipled adventurers who have applied great powers to bad uses are out of the question)—the martyrs, the heroes, the founders of religions, the liberators of nations, the leaders of reforms—ever became members of ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... the fact that towards the close of the eighteenth century Religion was almost extinct in the highest and lowest classes of English society. The poor were sunk in ignorance and barbarism, and the aristocracy was honeycombed by profligacy. Morality, discarded alike by high and low, took refuge in the great Middle Class, then, as now, deeply influenced by Evangelical Dissent. A dissolute Heir-Apparent presided over a social system in which not merely religion but decency ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... destroys you by your own excess of paternal sympathy; murders you by means of the very love you bear him—has coiled round a father's heart to crush it. When you are laid beneath the turf he becomes lord of your possessions, and master of his own will. That barrier removed, and the torrent of his profligacy will rush on without control. Imagine yourself in his place. How often he must wish his father under ground—and how often, too, his brother—who so unmercifully impede the free course of his excesses. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... bottom the corruptions and baseness of that society, which deserves to be branded as among the most base and the most corrupt that history has hitherto described. The temptations which England employed, the horrible corruption and profligacy she fostered, must be fully known, if we desire to do justice to the men who came out ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... site of this Pound, which occupied a space of thirty feet, was the broad space where St. Giles's High Street, Tottenham Court Road, and Oxford Street meet. The vicinity of this spot was proverbial for its profligacy; thus in an ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... over the words, to which he had listened intently, re-perused, throughout, this record of the stone; and finding that the general purport consisted of nought else than a treatise on love, and likewise of an accurate transcription of facts, without the least taint of profligacy injurious to the times, he thereupon copied the contents, from beginning to end, to the intent of charging the world to hand them ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... which rendered him unwilling to do harm or to give pain to any one, unless some interest of his own should make it convenient. His neglected and unrestrained youth was abandoned to license and to profligacy. He was married in the twenty-second year of his age, against his own inclination, to the Princess Sophia Dorothea of Zeil, who was some six years younger. The marriage was merely a political one, formed with the object of uniting the whole of the Duchy of Lueneberg. George was ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... political party is a breed. When it is new it has marks of individuality; it means something. In a few years it reverts to type. Political parties grown old are all equally bad. They begin as radical and end as conservative. That which began in virtue is undone through profligacy. Among successful religions there is no choice—they all ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... a display of profligacy! So, gentlemen, are these your morals? Methinks you place a special example before the household; drinking and carousing thus after midnight, when all decent persons ought to be at rest within ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... of the terem—he was not cast in that dull mould which turned out so many idiots in the royal family. He "roamed at large, and wandered in the streets with his comrades." The streets of Moscow at that period were, according to M. Zabieline, the worst school of profligacy and debauchery that can be imagined; but they were, on the whole, less bad for Peter than the palace. He met there something besides mere jesters: he encountered new elements which had as yet no place in the terem, but contained the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... malignant as I was, I meant not to persuade the mother of her child's profligacy. Why should I have aimed at this? I had no reason to disesteem or hate you. I was always impressed with reverence for your character. In the letters sent directly to you, I aimed at nothing but to procure your interference, and make maternal authority declare itself against that ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... them the high principles of chivalry. "A just war," he observed, "is often rendered wicked and disastrous by the manner in which it is conducted; for the righteousness of the cause is not sufficient to sanction the profligacy of the means, and the want of order and subordination among the troops may bring ruin and disgrace upon the best-concerted plans." But we cannot describe the character and conduct of this renowned commander in more forcible language than that of ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... informed, had fallen victims to the malice of the accuser. Her sentiments were espoused by all the company, except the French lady of pleasure, who, thinking the credit of the sisterhood concerned in the affair, bitterly inveighed against the profligacy of the age, and particularly the base and villainous attempts of man upon the chastity of the weaker sex; saying, with a look of indignation directed to the painter, that for her own part she should never be able to manifest the acknowledgment she owed to Providence, for having protected her ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... instructions! A very great proportion of those children who attend Sabbath-schools would, but for them, be spending their time in running about the streets, and in profaning the Lord's day; and, by the unholy companionships which they must form, into how much of profligacy and vice would they be led! Is it true on the one hand, "train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it?" Then it is equally true, that if a child be trained up in the way in which he should not go, when he is old, he is not likely to depart ...
— The Village Sunday School - With brief sketches of three of its scholars • John C. Symons
... condition of the people falls short of this high standard, blame is attached to the missionary, instead of credit for that which he has effected. They forget, or will not remember, that human sacrifices, and the power of an idolatrous priesthood—a system of profligacy unparalleled in any other part of the world—infanticide a consequence of that system—bloody wars, where the conquerors spared neither women nor children—that all these have been abolished; and that dishonesty, intemperance, and licentiousness have been greatly reduced by the introduction of Christianity. ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... father, with suspicions of poisoning, and undoubted evidences of debauchery. He was a generous and amiable prince; and, though a shameless profligate, was beloved by his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his profligacy was ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... devices of a mysterious cuisine to the brilliant manoeuvres of the battle-field; infinite female tact, rare philosophic hardihood, inimitable bon-mots, exquisite millinery, consummate generalship, holy fortitude, refined profligacy, and intoxicating sentiment,—Ude, Napoleon, Madame Recamier, Pascal, Ninon de I'Enclos, and Rousseau. Casual associations and desultory reading thus predispose us to recognize something half comical and half enchanting in French life; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... once, perceive the effects which this weekly observance produces. Like most moral causes, it operates slowly; but it operates surely, and gradually weakens the power and breaks the yoke of profligacy and sin. No villain regards the Sabbath. No vicious family regards the Sabbath. No immoral community regards the Sabbath. The holy rest of this ever-memorable day is a barrier which is always broken down before men become giants in sin. Blackstone, in his Commentaries ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... this child of fortune are notorious both on the continent and in this country. It is very often the misfortune of great men to be degraded by great profligacy of conduct: the poor lady is ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... love for me ceased only with her life. Her faults, though not to be defended, may be palliated and deplored, because they were the defects of education. Her infant days were passed in scenes of domestic strife, profligacy, and penury; her maturer years, under the guidance of a weak mother, were employed in polishing, not strengthening, the edifice of her understanding, and the external ornaments only served to accelerate the fall of the fabric, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the same authority, and in the same name, excommunicate, and cast out of the true Church and deliver up to Satan, Sir George M'Kenzie, the King's Advocate, for his apostasy in turning into a profligacy of conversation, after he had begun a profession of holiness; for his constant pleading against, and persecuting unto the death, the people of God, and for alleging and laying to their charge things which in his conscience ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... rebel against my fetters; I had not to learn that liberty was desirable, but how to obtain it, and what use to make of it. All the disorder through which I have gone was a struggle towards self-knowledge and understanding of my time. You and others are wildly in error in calling it dissipation, profligacy, recklessness, and so on. You at least, Miriam, ought to have judged me more truly; you, at all events, should not have ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... histories and proclamations of that melancholy period, was a gentleman of some fortune, and of good family, in the county of Fife, and had been a soldier from his youth upwards. In the younger part of his life he had been wild and licentious, but had early laid aside open profligacy, and embraced the strictest tenets of Calvinism. Unfortunately, habits of excess and intemperance were more easily rooted out of his dark, saturnine, and enterprising spirit, than the vices of revenge ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... openness of his hostility so far as, during the Westminster election to drive about the streets with a carriage and all his servants profusely decorated with Fox's colors; and, still more discreditably, by most unmeasured profligacy of all kinds. The consequence was that he soon became deeply involved in debt, so deeply that, in 1787, a member of Fox's party gave notice of his intention to move that the Parliament should pay his debts and increase his income. Pitt, without specifying his ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... dophagy^, exophagy^; want of principle, want of ballast; obliquity, backsliding, infamy, demoralization, pravity^, depravity, pollution; hardness of heart; brutality &c (malevolence) 907; corruption &c (debasement) 659; knavery &c (improbity) 940 [Obs.]; profligacy; flagrancy, atrocity; cannibalism; lesbianism, Sadism. infirmity; weakness &c adj.; weakness of the flesh, frailty, imperfection; error; weak side; foible; failing, failure; crying sin, besetting sin; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... of the Borders, called Geordy Bourne, of somewhat subordinate rank, was a similar picture of profligacy. He had fallen into the hands of Sir Robert Carey, then Warden of the English East Marches, who gives the following account of his ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... and that he hoped to see the day when his dream would be found a true prophecy, and the commonwealth purged of all such rogues and vagabonds. But it could not be expected that the vulgar would be honest and conscientious, while the great were distinguished by profligacy and corruption. The squire was disposed to make a practical reply to this insinuation, when Mr. Ferret prudently withdrew himself from the scene of altercation. The good woman of the house persuaded his antagonist to take out his nap, assuring him that the eggs and bacon, with a mug of ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... it, sir," he responded, very suavely. "I knew I had dropped somewhere in Kent, and a glance at that well-kept grass of yours, at the rare profusion of early flowers, at the extreme fulness—er—profligacy—of your fruit-blossom, told me in a moment that the garden could belong to only one man in the county. Do you suppose I have been a horticultural enthusiast all these years without knowing Colonel Currie by name? Why, the—the dahlias you exhibit ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... only possible to a wretchedly narrow and jealous nature; and neither history nor contemporary society shews us a single amiable and respectable character capable of it. This has always been recognized in cultivated society: that is why poor people accuse cultivated society of profligacy, poor people being often so ignorant and uncultivated that they have nothing to offer each other but the sex relationship, and cannot conceive why men and women should associate for ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... brooding over the disorders by which its progress has been attended. They are filled with horror and compassion at the sight of poor men spending their blood in the quarrels of princes, and brutifying their sublime capabilities in the drudgery of unremitting labour. For all sorts of vice and profligacy in the lower orders of society, they have the same virtuous horror, and the same tender compassion. While the existence of these offences overpowers them with grief and confusion, they never permit themselves to feel the smallest indignation or dislike towards the offenders. The present vicious constitution ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... And it was natural to suppose that the more closely the mock marriage of the leaf-clad or flower-decked mummers aped the real marriage of the woodland sprites, the more effective would be the charm. Accordingly we may assume with a high degree of probability that the profligacy which notoriously attended these ceremonies was at one time not an accidental excess but an essential part of the rites, and that in the opinion of those who performed them the marriage of trees and plants could not be fertile without the real union of the human sexes. At the present day ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... figure than Faust—fortified though he is, and because he is, with the awful but malign, treacherous, and now impotent sovereignty of hell. To deaden his sensibility, destroy his conscience, and harden him in evil the Fiend leads him into a mad revel of boundless profligacy and bestial riot—denoted by the beautiful and terrible scene upon the Brocken—and poor Margaret is abandoned to her shame, her wandering, her despair, her frenzy, her crime, and her punishment. This desertion, though, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... with patience the wrongs that their misguided judgment led them to believe were salutary to their eternal welfare. But it ought to be observed, that the immorality of the Romans was greatly exaggerated. Individuals redeemed by their merits the reproach of universal profligacy; and strangers, by being on their guard against the moral contagion, suffered a less dangerous taint than in the Atheistical coteries of Paris. Many, in consequence, who came prepared to be disgusted ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... Leveller. He was a commissioner of the High Court of Justice and a regicide. At the Restoration he was imprisoned for life and died at Chepstow Castle, 1681, aged seventy-eight. He was notorious for profligacy and shamelessness, and kept a ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... and a finesse peculiar to himself, and to the highest degree interesting and attractive. No name was once held in greater detestation in England than that of Talleyrand. He was looked upon universally as a sink of moral and political profligacy. Born at the end of Louis XV.'s reign, and bred up in the social pleasures and corruptions of that polite but vicious aristocracy, he was distinguished in his early youth for his successful gallantries, for the influence ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... body, took different roads, for those which were polluted with vices, that are common to men, and which had given themselves up entirely to unclean desires, and had become so blinded by them as to have habituated themselves to all manner of debauchery and profligacy, or to have laid detestable schemes for the ruin of their country, took a road wide of that which led to the assembly of the Gods: but they who had preserved themselves upright and chaste, and free from the slightest contagion of the body, and had always kept themselves as far as possible ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... old-English fashion; but, not contented with celebrating that day of spring-time and flowers with innocent pastimes, they hung the pole with verses of an immoral and impious character, and, inviting the ignorant heathen to share in their festivities, they abandoned themselves to drunkenness and profligacy. ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... and profligacy of Philip the Handsome, the extortion and insolence of his Flemish courtiers, had not been forgotten in Spain, nor had Philip the Second forgiven his grandfather for having been a foreigner. And now his mad old grandmother, Joanna, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... real life—never, never. It's dreadful, horrible, revolting. To think that a son of mine, brought up from babyhood to calculate all his actions with mathematical precision, should be guilty of this profligacy! It's driving me mad, Simon; it really is. I don't know what to do. I've come to the end of my resources. It's your turn ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... the new ecclesiasticism. The bastard, whilom poor student and monk, become the familiar of bishops and princes, at home in all grades of society, could not fail to be aware of the gravity of the social position, of the dangers imminent from the profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no less than from the anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under their oppression. The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in England, in Italy, and who ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... of the old noble houses, was consecrated pope as Benedict IX, A.D. 1033, according to some authorities, at the age of ten or twelve years. He became noted for his profligacy and was driven from his throne, the Romans electing, as Pope Sylvester III, John, Bishop of Sabina, who is said to have paid a high price for the dignity. Benedict, however, regained the papal seat shortly afterward, and drove Sylvester ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... the breast, may win the faculties of the understanding to advance its purpose, and to direct to that object every thing that thought or human knowledge can effect; but, to succeed, it must maintain a solitary despotism in the mind;—each rival profligacy must stand aloof, or wait in abject vassalage upon its throne. For, the Power, that has not forbad the entrance of evil passions into man's mind, has, at least, forbad their union;—if they meet they defeat their object, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... scandal and ribaldry organs, as well as their betters (the rogues, they WILL imitate them!) and as their tastes are somewhat coarser than my lord's, and their numbers a thousand to one, why of course the prints have increased, and the profligacy has been diffused in a ratio exactly proportionable to the demand, until the town is infested with such a number of monstrous publications of the kind as would have put Abbe Dubois to the blush, or made Louis XV. cry shame. Talk of English morality!—the worst licentiousness, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... They appear to have been enacted merely as a compliment to decency, and they remain in the statute-book as "idle as painted ships upon a painted ocean." The dens of debauch keep open doors night and day; the saloons of profligacy send out their cards of invitation; the gambler rattles his triumphant dice; but excursive policemen never see, and vigilant magistrates never hear! Some provision of nature has imparted a very singular quality to the optic powers of the one, and the auditory ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... new moral fibre like that of steel. Except in the case of a few great lords, who joined the party without serious conviction, the high standard of the Huguenot morals was recognized even by their enemies. In an age of profligacy the "men of the religion," as they called themselves, walked the paths ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... and undemonstrative Scotch father, evangelical, a total abstainer, with a horror of tobacco—surely the austerest dealer in French wines that ever was—a puritanical hater of bar sinisters, and profligacy, and Rome, and rank, and the army, and especially the stage—he always lumped them together more or less—a despiser of all things French, except their wines, which he never drank himself—remained devoted to Barty till the day of his death; and so with my dear genial mother, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... dress in the costume of Tripoli. The neat appearance of the men in general is very striking, compared with that of the Arabs about the coast. The women are considered exceedingly handsome, indeed one or two were really so, and as fair as Europeans, but they are noted for their profligacy and ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... met by courtesy, the question so momentous was passed over, and merged into trivialities. Perhaps the earl, who, as his pleasures palled, was understood to be fixing his keen wits upon the pet profligacy of old age, politics—saw, clearly enough, that in these chaotic days of contending parties, when the maddened outcry of the "people" was just being heard and listened to, it might be as well not to make an ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... temporal and eternal damnation of a multitude of men. There is a shamelessness among many in what is called high life that calls for vehement protest. The strife with many seems to be how near they can come to the verge of indecency without falling over. The tide of masculine profligacy will never turn back until there is a decided reformation in womanly costume. I am in full sympathy with the officer of the law who, at a levee in Philadelphia last winter, went up to a so-called lady, and because of her sparse ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... certainly no exaggeration in Charles Auchester's treatment of his hero; for, reading the contemporaneous articles of musical journals, you will find them one and all speaking in even more unrestrained profligacy of praise, recognizing in the cloud of composers but nine worthy the name of Master, of whom Mendelssohn was one, and declaring that under his baton the orchestra was electrified. We all remember the solemnly pathetic and passionate beauty of Seraphael's burial by night, with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... choice of rank or mind & with whom the subjects of conversation are only horses, drinking matches, bawdy houses, and in terms the most vulgar. The young nobility, who begin by associating with him, soon leave him disgusted with the insupportable profligacy of his society; and Mr. Fox, who has been supposed his favorite, and not over nice in the choice of his company, would never ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... and illiberal extravagancies. They laid aside all decorum; became lewd, insolent, intemperate, and riotous. Their example was caught by the vulgar. All principle, and even decency, was gradually banished; talent lay uncultivated, and the land was deluged with a tide of ignorance and profligacy. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... for its merely animal gratifications—a marriage in which strength, health, usefulness, often life itself, are sacrificed to sensuality and lust—is a desecration of a holy institution, and somewhat worse in its consequences than promiscuous profligacy, for the consequences of that may not fall upon one's ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... this moment with his sisters May and Gracie, who were always getting up French plays for bazaars, or Chrissie, who played the violin, for the earth held nothing to vex the sturdiness of these young women except the profligacy with which it offered its people attractions competitive with bazaars and violin solos. But he thought it unlikely that any occasion would have evoked from them this serene despair, which was no more irritable than that which is known by the nightingale. It was impossible ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... altogether. The business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine playing his loose pranks of two hours' duration, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... presenting attractive qualities in combination with vices which in real life harden the heart and coarsen the taste. We do not find in his pages those moral monsters in which the finest sensibilities, the richest gifts, the noblest sentiments are linked to heartless profligacy, or not less heartless misanthropy. He never palters with right; he enters into no truce with wrong; he admits of no compromise on such points. How admirable in its moral aspect is the character of Leatherstocking! he is ignorant, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... of King Albert Edward. The restlessness and poverty of the masses; the agitations in Ireland, feebly, blindly protesting with dynamite and other rude weapons against foreign oppression; the shameful monopoly of land, the social haughtiness of the titled classes, the luxury and profligacy of the court—perhaps even at the opening of our story, poor England was hardly worse off. But then came the change. Gradually the bone and sinew of the country sought refuge in emigration. The titled classes, ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... unwarranted conclusions were correct, I took pains to inquire, before proceeding upon my errand, into the character of the heirs who had inherited the property of Elwood Henderson and Christopher Bigelow, and found that in each case there was one among the rest who was well known for his profligacy and reckless expenditure. It was a significant discovery, and increased, if possible, my interest in running down this nefarious trafficker in ...
— The Staircase At The Hearts Delight - 1894 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... but it is apt to do so at the expense of a complete inversion of the real issues. If, for instance, we call for Governmental retrenchment on what we deem extravagant policies of housing and education, we usually speak as though they represented the profligacy of a spendthrift as contrasted with the saving that is indispensable. The truth is rather that these policies represent a saving, an investment for future purposes, which may conceivably be greater (this must not be taken as representing my personal opinion) than the community ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... the clergy. In the nation at large appeared a new moral enthusiasm which, rigid and pedantic as it often seemed, was still healthy in its social tone, and whose power showed itself in a gradual disappearance of the profligacy which had disgraced the upper classes, and the foulness which had infested literature ever since the Restoration. A yet nobler result of the religious revival was the steady attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this, to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... the rest, I think, is just a question of will-power and mental hygiene. No, I have no patience with people who grow old; unless, of course, they really are very old in years. I think it argues either stupidity or a kind of profligacy—mental, nervous, and emotional, I mean—and in either case it is very unfair to those about them, for there is nothing ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... father once compared to a thinking flower, bore without complaint her sad destiny—her father's banishment, her mother's death, her sister Berenike's profligacy. Even to me, in whom she found a second brother and fully trusted, she spoke of these sorrowful things only in guarded allusions. I know that she understood what was passing fully and perfectly, and how deeply she ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... uncharted purlieus which shroud in mystery the source of the Cromwell Road. After four lean days your gluttonous instincts led you precipitately to withdraw to Paris, from whence, knowing your unshakable belief in the vilest forms of profligacy, I appreciate that lack of means must ere long ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... Evil-Merodach, and during the reign of his two successors, Daniel had retired to private life, and was but little spoken of at public places. This king, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, led a life of dissipation and profligacy. ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... the noble Romans that we hardly hate his dishonest greed when displayed in its ordinary course. But because Cicero's honesty was abnormal, we are first surprised, and then, suspecting little deviations, rise up in wrath against him, because in the midst of Roman profligacy he was not altogether a Puritan ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... offered him; an answer which was afterwards turned into a proverb. On this, he founded the city of Crotona, and another colony founded the city of Sybaris on the spot which he had preferred; a place which afterwards became infamous for its voluptuousness and profligacy. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... have read, with all the cardinal virtues arrayed as the evil destinies of humanity, and every wickedness paraded as that natural expansion of the heart which alone raises man above the condition of the brute! I ask, if proficiency must imply profligacy, would you not rather find a man break down in his verbs than in his virtue? Would you not prefer a little inaccuracy in his declensions to a total forgetfulness of the decalogue? And, lastly of all, what man of real eminence could have masqueraded—for ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... tattle. O misery of semi-provincial fashionable life, where wealth is at its wit's end to avoid being tired of an existence which has all the labor of keeping up appearances, without the piquant profligacy which saves it at least from being utterly vapid! How many fashionable women at the end of a long season would be ready to welcome heaven itself as a relief from the desperate monotony ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... tone with the priest. From him he learned more of the evil name of this man whom they followed. His house at Shalford was a den of profligacy and vice. No woman could cross that threshold and depart unstained. In some strange fashion, inexplicable and yet common, the man, with all his evil soul and his twisted body, had yet some strange fascination for ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... worthy object as Wolsey had. His pretext was that these institutions had sunk into a state of ingnorance, drunkenness, and profligacy. This may have been true of some of the smaller monasteries, though not of the large ones. But the vices of the monasteries the King had already made his own. It was their wealth which he now coveted. The smaller ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... trying to be free and great once more; and young Italian hearts are lighting up with the thoughts of her old fleets and her old victories, her merchants and her statesmen, whom John Bellini drew. Venice sinned, and fell; and sorely has she paid for her sins, through two hundred years of shame, and profligacy, and slavery. And she has broken the oppressor's yoke. God send her a new life! May she learn by her ancient sins! May she ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics made an interesting investigation. This was an effort to determine how far the entrance of women into the industrial world, usually under the disadvantage of low wages, was contributing to profligacy. The bureau gathered statistics of the previous occupations of nearly four thousand fallen ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... her against both Donnel and Sarah, but then Nelly herself was completely in the dark as to the character of the injury against which she warned her, so that her friendly precautions were founded more upon the general and unscrupulous profligacy of Donnel's principles, and his daughter's violence, than upon any particular knowledge she possessed of her intentions towards her. Mave's own serene and innocent disposition was such in fact as to render her not easily impressed by suspicion; and our ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... the schoolmaster, has mainly placed his reliance; habit, which makes everything easy, and cast the difficulties upon the deviation from a wonted course." Thus, make sobriety a habit and intemperance will be hateful; make prudence a habit, and reckless profligacy will become revolting to every principle of conduct which regulates the life of the individual. Hence the necessity for the greatest care and watchfulness against the inroad of any evil habit; for the character is always weakest at that ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... pleased. The common people were more like cattle than men. They tilled the ground and bore the yoke; the king and the aristocracy wielded the whip. Years of suffering ignorance for the many—years of riotous profligacy for the few! ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... considering the scared consciences of oriental princes in such matters, quite as little, perhaps, had the two other counts in his London impeachment. One imputed savage cruelty to him; the other, with a Johnny-rawness that we find it difficult to comprehend, profligacy and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... apologist for an unjust inequality. Malthus, he says, in classifying the evils of life, has 'allotted to the poor all the misery, and to the rich as much vice as they please.'[437] The check of starvation will keep down the numbers of the poor; and the check of luxury and profligacy will restrain the multiplication of the rich. 'The poor are to make a formal surrender of their right to provoke charity or parish assistance that the rich may be able to lay out all their money on their vices.'[438] The misery of the lower orders ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... disappointed intriguer and debauchee. He sold his lands, some to acquire a partnership with Lord Willoughby in a vessel trading to America; this vessel, or another, is among his assets recorded in his inventory. All his lands he sold—not that he was in debt, he was a large lender—for purposes of profligacy. These proceedings gave rise to gossip. The Laird must be selling his lands to evade forfeiture. He must have been engaged in the Gowrie mystery. Then Logan dies (July 1606). Bower is also dead (January 1606). It occurs to Sprot that ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... its progress. The principal characters are delineated in the piece with considerable skill. The part of Celestina, in particular, in which a veil of plausible hypocrisy is thrown over the deepest profligacy of conduct, is managed with much address. The subordinate parts are brought into brisk comic action, with natural dialogue, though sufficiently obscene; and an interest of a graver complexion is raised by the passion of the lovers, the timid, confiding ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... much a revolt against morals as it was against despotism." If that is his honest opinion, he must be singularly ignorant. The moral tone of the Revolutionists was purity itself compared with the flagrant profligacy of the court, the aristocracy, and the clergy, while Freethinkers were imprisoned, and heretics were broken on the wheel. We have really no time to give Mr. Watkinson lessons in French history, so we leave him to study it ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... Shakespeare, become a byword for self-devoted patriotism. This exalted opinion is now generally confessed to be unjust. Brutus was not a patriot, unless devotion to the party of the senate be patriotism. Toward the provincials he was a true Roman, harsh and oppressive. He was free from the sensuality and profligacy of his age, but for public life he was unfit. His habits were those of a student. His application was great, his memory remarkable. But he possessed little power of turning his acquirements to account; and to the last he was rather a learned man than a man ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... rotten-ripe ever to make a huge progress in conquest. What is to be thought of a nation where the upper classes speak the language of another country, and have varnished over their honest barbarism with the poorest French profligacy and intrigue? Russia does not seem a whole to me. In the mean time, all goes on toward better and better, as is my firm belief: and humanity grows clear by flowing, (very little profited by any single sage or hero), and man shall have wings to ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... moment, bore no bad resemblance to the infernal regions. The tables, forms, and windows were crowded, and drunkenness, ruffianism, and profligacy, were revelling in all the demoniac delights of mischief. Shouts, roars, and yells, shook the house, for the Scot to accept the challenge. Ben's voice in the din, was like a ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... description of the state of the Roman Empire when the early Caesars were on the throne, and when it was undisputed mistress of the world. You pass down the line of the Emperors with their strange alternations of greatness and profligacy, descending occasionally to criminal lunacy. When the Empire went rotten it began at the top, and it took centuries to corrupt the man behind the spear. Neither did a religion of peace affect him much, for, in spite of the ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... well to note that all the tales as to the dissipation and profligacy of Mark Antony in his early days come from the "Philippics" of Cicero, who made the mistake of executing Lentulus, the step-father of Mark Antony, and then felt called upon forever after to condemn the entire family. "Philippics" are ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... unexceptionable and praiseworthy, but, nevertheless, having a strange sound in the ears of those who recognized them as the utterances of one whose conversation was always flippant and puerile, and whose daily life, in the enormity and uninterrupted persistency of its profligacy, rendered him the acknowledged leader of all that was most disreputable and contaminating in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... monarchy seems evident, when at the most critical point, and at the moment calling for the most careful retrenchment and reform, fate had placed Louis XV., acting like a madman in the excesses of his profligacy; and, at the next stage, while the last opportunity still existed by main force to drag the nation back, and hold it from going over the brink, there stood the most excellent, the kindest-hearted but weakest gentleman ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... plot Beric found his position more and more irksome in spite of the favour Nero showed him. Do what he would he could not close his ears to what was public talk in Rome. The fabulous extravagances of Nero, the public and unbounded profligacy of himself and his court, the open defiance of decency, the stupendous waste of public money on the new and most sumptuous palace into which he had now removed, were matters that scandalized even the population of Rome. Senators, patricians, ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... held in older times; we rarely hear of violence for which there is so little occasion that it would hardly be credited, Yet such stories are common enough among the Jews and ancient Greeks; for such views belong to the simplicity of nature, and have only been uprooted by our profligacy. If fewer deeds of violence are quoted in our days, it is not that men are more temperate, but because they are less credulous, and a complaint which would have been believed among a simple people would only excite laughter among ourselves; therefore silence is the better course. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... wife, was presented with a hundred dollars. Haeberlin, the novelist, who had been justly condemned to twenty years' imprisonment with hard labor for his civil misdemeanors, was, on the other hand, liberated for publishing something in the duke's favor. Bitter conducted himself with the most open profligacy, sold all the demesnes, appropriated the sum destined for the redemption of the public debt, and at the same time levied the heavy imposts with unrelenting severity. The federative assembly passed judgment ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... audible throughout the whole of that vast abode, the stillness and cautious tread of those within, answering to the quiet town without; but a young man, in whose countenance and air were to be seen most of the usual signs of a well-bred profligacy, sauntering along the suite of chambers, at length caught the eye of the senator, ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... speculations, and profligacy in living, and not dishonesty, or any intentional wrong to us, as I ever believed; though your father, in his desperation when the blow came, would listen to no extenuation, but drove him from his presence with bitter reproaches ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... a profligate man, joined Caesar, and was raised by him to the consulship; joined Caesar's murderers after his death; was declared from his profligacy a public enemy; driven to bay by a force sent against him, ordered one of his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... good sort? do they not seem cut out of the good old rock, substantial English honesty? would one fear treachery among characters of their expression? or shall we call their honest mirth and seldom-returning relaxation by the hard names of vice and profligacy? That poor country fellow, that is grasping his staff (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves at home which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with since he came into the room), and is enjoying with a relish that seems to fit all the capacities of his soul the slender ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... they did not draw the regards of the million with such irresistible and congenial attraction as those of Aristophanes, had the power in some measure to rescue comedy from the unbridled licentiousness and profligacy which, for fifty years before, had rendered it a public nuisance. The multitude, however, he could not, during his lifetime reclaim; for a miserable cotemporary of his, named Philemon, a coarse writer of broad farce, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... the favourite sister of Napoleon, the ablest, but also the most wicked of the female Bonapartes. She had, almost from her infancy, passed through all the filth of prostitution, debauchery, and profligacy before she attained her present elevation; rank, however, has not altered her morals, but only procured her the means of indulging in new excesses. Ever since the wedding night the Prince Borghese has been excluded from her bed; for she declared frankly to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
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