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More "Usurer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him for his pithy analysis of character, I enlarged upon my theme. "He rebukes MacLachan for past drunkenness. He mourns for Schepstein, who occasionally helps out a friend at ten per cent, as a usurer. He once accused old Madame Tallafferr of pride, but he'll never do that again. He calls the Little Red Doctor, our local physician, to account for profanity, and gets a fresh sample every time. Even against the Bonnie Lassie, ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... wholesome horror, and merry was the prank which he played upon the extortionate money-lender of Warwick. Riding on an easy rein through the town, Hind heard a tumult at a street corner, and inquiring the cause, was told that an innkeeper was arrested by a thievish usurer for a paltry twenty pounds. Dismounting, this providence in jack-boots discharged the debt, cancelled the bond, and took the innkeeper's goods for his own security. And thereupon overtaking the usurer, 'My friend!' he exclaimed, 'I lent you late a sum of twenty pounds. Repay it ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... you played on Camilla?" he said to me. "I have a better scheme than that. Listen. As I was buying some provisions at a cook-shop, a man entered in a great rage and began abusing a certain Samuel Simon, a converted Jew and a cruel usurer. He had ruined many merchants at Xeloa, and all the towns-people would like to see him ruined in turn. Then, my dear Gil Blas, I remembered your clever trick, and brought these clothes so that we might visit this Jew dressed up as the officers of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... always a lucrative trade, for the paper had an existence of little more than a year. In the course of its brief career, however, Willis paid a flying visit to England, where he accomplished a great deal of literary business. He had written a play called The Usurer Matched, which was brought out by Wallack at the Surrey Theatre, and is said to have been played to crowded houses during a fairly long run, but neither this nor any of his other plays brought the author fame or fortune. During this season he published ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... often to be favoured reapers in the harvest of the world's success? You catch the common robber, or the man who steals, perhaps through starvation, penury, or through knowing no better, and you imprison him for years or for life; and is the rich usurer who has wrung the widow's farthing from her, is the fraudulent bankrupt, is the unjust judge, is the cruel spoiler of war to pass from a world that in millions and millions of cases gave them wealth and honours, and stars and garters, instead of ropes ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... our backwoods usurer, "I'll charge you twelve per cent. I do love a good interest. There is no Antonio about me. I'll lend no money gratis and bring down the ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... of a business interest subjected first to excommunication—literally—and then to outlawry, is that of the usurer, or, in modern parlance, the loan shark. To the mediaeval mind there was something distinctly immoral in an income from property devoted to the furnishing of personal loans. We need not stop to defend the mediaeval position or to attack it; all that ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... Avarice, lent their spurs to industry; Then one by one the numerous laws were made, Those to control, and these to succour trade; To curb the insolence of rude command, To snatch the victim from the usurer's hand; To awe the bold, to yield the wrong'd redress, And feed the poor with Luxury's excess." {3} Like some vast flood, unbounded, fierce, and strong, His nature leads ungovern'd man along; Like mighty bulwarks ...
— The Library • George Crabbe
... its expiration, when, half beside himself with perplexity, Mr. Tompkins advertised his property for sale. There were enough who understood its real value precisely, and were ready to come forward and offer to purchase. As soon as the miser and usurer saw the course events were taking, he very kindly informed Mr. Tompkins that he had just received, unexpectedly, a large sum of money, and should not want the ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... natural, over those triumphs against authority, but authority loses decorum and moral force. All this comes from the bad system established, for, since the governor from the moment that he becomes a merchant, must be a bad governor and a usurer and tyrant, the government of Manila is predisposed against his acts, and declares itself the protector of the Filipinos. In this way one evil is remedied by a worse. The supreme authority instead of supporting ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... ever been seen to have driven off Time from him. Ancient and eternal, and the embodiment of justice, Time is uniform in respect of all living creatures. Time cannot be avoided, and there is no retrogression in its course. Like a usurer adding up his interest, Time adds up its subtile portions represented by kalas, and lavas, and kashthas, and kshanas, and months, and days and nights. Like the current of a river washing away a tree whose roots are reached ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... was highly amused at the idea of his being seventeen criminals, and he would sit first in one cell and then in another, trying to look like a ferocious pirate, a hard-hearted usurer, or a mean-spirited chicken thief, and laughing heartily at his failures. But, after a time, he began to tire of this, and to have a strong desire to see what sort of a tunnel the Prince's miners and rock-splitters were making under his house. "I had hoped," he said to himself, ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton
... wisest and the most moral of men, Cicero treated as an usurer, and the pedant Athenaeus as illiterate; the latter points out as a Socratic folly our philosopher disserting on the nature of justice before his judges, who were so many thieves. The malignant buffoonery of Aristophanes ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Equality or Death conspire fourteen years afterwards with a Legitimist aristocracy to bring back Louis XVIII. And that same aristocracy, lording it to-day in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, has done worse—has been merchant, usurer, pastry-cook, farmer, and shepherd. So in France systems political and moral have started from one point and reached another diametrically opposed; and men have expressed one kind of opinion and acted on another. There has been no consistency in national policy, nor in the conduct of individuals. ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... manage matters, he shall be kept so bare of Money, that Twelve Holland Ships shall block up the River, or he shall be forced to cast himself upon a House of Commons, and to take Money upon their Terms, which will sure be as easie, as those of an Usurer to an Heir in want. These are part of the projects now afoot: and how Loyal and conscionable they are, let all ...
— His Majesties Declaration Defended • John Dryden
... built. The wise custom of Normandy was mooted on the spot where the law of Moses had once been taught; and, by a strange, perhaps an ominous, fatality, the judge held the scales of justice, where whilome the usurer had poised his balance. ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... Of course she can't. You know that as well as I do. She can have four hundred pounds, if she wants it. But seeing all she gets out of the concern, she has no right to press for it in that way. She is the —— old usurer I ever came across in ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... our span in general, but would fain contract the parts of which it is composed. The usurer would be very well satisfied to have all the time annihilated that lies between the present moment and next quarter day. The politician would be contented to loose three years of his life, could he place things in the posture which he fancies they will ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... yet," he added, with a conscious blush, "you may accuse me of deception in this instance. He has not asked me the sum I owe—and Heaven knows I could not go and thrust my bills in his face. I thought perhaps there was some usurer, whom you had heard of, who could let me have the money. They are debts of ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Trulliber, was thought to exist in the person of the Rev. Mr Oliver, the Dorsetshire curate under whose tutelage Fielding had been placed when a boy. Tradition also connects Mr Peter Pounce with the Dorsetshire usurer ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... for stripe." But it also says, "Ye shall neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child." "If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer." "If thou at all take thy neighbor's raiment to pledge, thou shalt deliver it unto him by that the sun goeth down, for that is his covering." "If thou meet thine enemy's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt surely bring it ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... in surprise and dismay. Is it possible that the Baron is in earnest? He is horribly in earnest. "The woman who will buy me," he says, "is in the next room to us at this moment. She is the wealthy widow of a Jewish usurer. She has the money I want to reach the solution of the great problem. I have only to be that woman's husband, and to make myself master of untold millions of gold. Take five minutes to consider what I have said to you, and tell me on my return which of us ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... the money well spent; those who had won would be the more lavish in the spending. They had simply won a few more pleasures. "Quick come; quick go!" sang the whirling wheels. "The niggard in pound and pence is a usurer in happiness; a miser driving a hard bargain with pleasure. Better burn the candle at both ends than not burn it at all! In one case, you get light; in the other nothing but darkness. Laughter is cheap at any price. A castle in the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... usurer's grasp released the forfeit land; The slanderer faltered at the witness-stand, And all men ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... besides. Debts contracted at play cannot remain unpaid for more than a couple of days. It was absolutely indispensable that I should procure these thousand florins somehow. I would not ask my husband for them and that was very foolish of me. I got the amount at last from a wretched usurer at an enormous rate of interest. When the amount plus interest became due again, I was still more afraid to tell my husband, and so kept on giving fresh bills, with the result that the amount of my indebtedness grew and grew as the years rolled on, till it resembled the egg of the widow in ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... Gillingham, Dorsetshire," which would make him a neighbour of the novelist. [Footnote: Lord Thurlow was accustomed to find a later likeness to Fielding's hero in his protege, the poet Crabbe.] Another tradition connects Mr. Peter Pounce with the scrivener and usurer Peter Walter, whom Pope had satirised, and whom Hogarth is thought to have introduced into Plate i. of Marriage a-la-Mode. His sister lived at Salisbury; and he himself had an estate at Stalbridge Park, which was close to East ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... several thousands of that country's cash. Levinsteins' are dye-makers, and in 1914-15 they made a profit of L80,000 on a capital of L90,000: a profit large enough to make the mouth of the deceased usurer Kirkwood dry with envy. But, while our legislature passed laws to restrain the usurer in his exactions, the "war profiteer" has no restriction placed on him. His workmen can, in certain cases, ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... obtained a decree, which, reviewing the accounts presented by Pierre, disallowed them, and condemned the dishonest guardian to pay his nephew four hundred livres for each year of his administration. The day on which this sum had to be disbursed from his strong box the old usurer vowed vengeance, but until he could gratify his hatred he was forced to conceal it, and to receive attempts at reconciliation with a friendly smile. It was not until six months later, on the occasion of a joyous festivity, that Martin again set foot in his uncle's ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... not some old usurer be drunk overnight with a bag of money, and leave it behind him on a stall? For God's sake, Syn, let's rise to-morrow by break of day, and see. I protest, la, if I had as much money as an alderman, I would scatter some on't i' the streets for poor ladies to find when their ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Antoine. I set off for Strasbourg yesterday, to see Destouches once again, and entreat him to accept the assignats in part-payment at least. He was not at home. Marguerite, the old servant, said he was gone to the cathedral, not long since reopened. Well, I found the usurer just coming out of the great western entrance, heathen as he is, looking as pious as a pilgrim. I accosted him, told my errand, begged, prayed, stormed! It was all to no purpose, except to attract the notice and comments of the passers-by. Destouches went his way, and I, with fury in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... thou spend Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy? Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend, And being frank she lends to those are free: Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse The bounteous largess given thee to give? Profitless usurer, why dost thou use So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live? For having traffic with thy self alone, Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive: Then how when nature calls thee to be gone, What acceptable audit canst thou leave? ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... Quid hominem occidere. What saie you to be a murderer? Soche a thyng saieth he, is [Fol. xxxvij.v] Usurie. A brief sentence againste Usurers, but wittely pro- nounced from the mouth of a godlie, sage, noble, and descrite persone, whiche sentence let the Usurer, ioigne to his Usury retourned, and repeate at the retourne thereof, this sentence [Sidenote: The sentence of Cato a dis- comfort to v- surers.] of Cato, I haue murthered. This one sentence will discou- rage any Usurer, knowyng hymself a murtherer. ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... therefore between the Calle San Geremia and the Calle San Girolamo along a narrow evil-smelling canal, the entrance of which was barred with chains every night, by order of the Senate. While hesitating to know which Usurer he should first apply to, he remembered to have heard speak of an Israelite named Eliezer, son of Eliezer Maimonides, who was said to be exceedingly rich and of a wondrous subtle spirit. Accordingly, inquiring out the house of the Jew Eliezer, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... to-day as far as Wallingford," he said, "and Simeon the usurer, who has a strong guard, will go ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... is giving his note to an usurer. The lean and hungry appearance of this cent. per cent. worshipper of the golden calf, is well contrasted by the sleek, contented vacancy of so well-employed a legislator of this great empire. Seated at the table, a portly gentleman, of whom ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... how much more ungrateful are you, if you force me to wish for it? Wait patiently; why are you unwilling to let my bounty abide with you? Why do you chafe at being laid under an obligation? why, as though you were dealing with a harsh usurer, are you in such a hurry to sign and seal an equivalent bond? Why do you wish me to get into trouble? Why do you call upon the gods to ruin me? If this is your way of returning a kindness, what would you do if you were ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... should be with the Hebrew tyrant. The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that. The village usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords. If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to questions of economy and expense. Their relationship had become purely a business one, like that between landlord and tenant. In her desire to indulge her boys she had unconsciously assumed a defensive and almost hostile attitude towards her husband. No debtor ever haggled with his usurer more doggedly than did Hester with her husband in behalf of her sons. The strategic contest had gone on so long that it had almost crowded out the memory of a closer relationship. This exchange of ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Usurer, for money lent, Making out his cent per cent - Widow plump or maiden rare, Deaf and dumb to suitor's prayer - Tax collectors, whom in vain You implore to "call again" - Cautious voter, whom you find Slow ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... fiercely, all the composed contempt with which he usually treated the usurer giving way, "say no more. How could I ever expect otherwise! You have foreseen my defeat, and have planned my destruction. Presume no reply! ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... state credits for peasants held out the promise, in spite of rather reduced interest rates, of important revenue. The peasants had never been in a position to pay back their private debts together with the usurious interest, but there were at least opportunities of coming to terms with a private usurer, whereas the state proved a merciless creditor. It could dispossess the peasant, and either turn his property into a state farm, convey it to another owner, or make the peasant a state slave. Thus this measure ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... II.i.195 (251,4) [usurer's chain] I know not whether the chain was, in our authour's time, the common ornament of wealthy citizens, or whether he satirically uses usurer and alderman ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... difference between the penny and three-farthing piece, and inform us of a knavish trick then practised, to impose upon ignorant people the lesser as the greater coin. Lovelass, speaking of Morecraft, the usurer, says: 'He had a bastard, his own toward issue, whipt and thin cropt, for washing out the rose in three ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... William Reeve, Prophet John Reeve's brother, at this time a "very zealous Puritan," with whom he talked of his prospects. "I loved the maid, and desired to be rich," he tells us; but these Puritan people were horrified at his deliberately intending to live the life of a usurer, and they "threatened great judgments, and danger ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... and so did not become a spendthrift, but he adopted the equally dangerous course of hoarding up all his savings, until it became a passion with him. After a while he retired from business, but the passion clung to him with all the tenacity of a long established habit, and he became a usurer. He was known to all the young profligates, the bad young men who throng our city, and became as necessary to them as the poor avaricious Jew was in former days to the spendthrifts and gamesters in London. He told me ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester
... accidents, or expenses incurred in afforestation, roads, etc.—but who to-day are compelled to live very poorly, from hand to mouth, the remainder having been taken from them by the State, the landlord, the priest, and the usurer. ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... corners of the earth, which unlocked the treasure houses of souls, and brought its own soul to each body. All came to life except one man, who, as God explained to the prophet, was excluded from the resurrection because he was a usurer. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... days. And a certain holy hermit, name not given, nor date of the vision, saw the ghosts of Boethius and Symmachus lead the Amal's soul up the cone of Stromboli, and hurl him in, as the English sailors saw old Boots, the Wapping usurer, hurled into the same place, for offences far more ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... strange is life, and how little do the fates of men resemble! To-morrow, at the hour when you will be so unspeakably happy, I shall be walking in a thorny, a cursed path; I shall be on my way to the usurer." ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... collect through the medium of several sub-renting classes. Hence the peasant suffers, and except a generally futile appeal to the Rajah, he has no redress. The law secures him tenure as long as he can pay his rent, and to do this he has recourse to the usurer; borrowing in spring (at 50, and oftener 100 per cent.) the seed, plough, and bullocks: he reaps in autumn, and what is then not required for his own use, is sold to pay off part of his original debt, the rest standing over ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... weird case to me," said T. X., as he came back to the table, "can't you see the unusual features yourself, Lexman! It isn't unusual for you to owe money and it isn't unusual for the usurer to demand the return of that money, but in this case he is asking for it before it was due, and further than that he was demanding it with threats. It is not the practice of the average money lender to go after his clients with a loaded ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... the subject of your conversation,' she said at last. 'The Marquis of Blair was endeavouring to impose usurer's terms upon you, while you, nobly scorning such mercenary considerations, had perhaps resolved to leave us at ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... oligarchy; and they encourage expensive habits in order that they may gain by the ruin of extravagant youth. Thus men of family often lose their property or rights of citizenship; but they remain in the city, full of hatred against the new owners of their estates and ripe for revolution. The usurer with stooping walk pretends not to see them; he passes by, and leaves his sting—that is, his money—in some other victim; and many a man has to pay the parent or principal sum multiplied into a family of children, and is ...
— The Republic • Plato
... money, my back was turned—and away! As for stooping to coax him as Mowbray would, when he had a point to gain, I could not have done it. To ask Jacob to lend me money, to beg him to give me more time to pay a debt, to cajole and bully him by turns, to call him alternately usurer and my honest fellow, extortioner and my friend Jacob—my tongue could not have uttered the words, my soul detested the thought; yet all this, and more, could Mowbray ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... room, and instead of the dwarf demon Le Sage described, I beheld a comely man seated at the table, with a high forehead, a sharp face, and a pair of spectacles on his nose. He was employed in reading the new novel of "The Usurer's Daughter." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... IOhan the usurer 28 A tant preste Hath lente so moche Quil ne scet le nombre That he knoweth not the nombre Del auoir quil a Of the good that he hath tout maisement assemble. Alle euyll gadred to gedyr. 32 Il preste la liure He leneth the pounde Pour quatre deniers. ...
— Dialogues in French and English • William Caxton
... past, vague and dim, arising in the deserted chapel, the memory of those two ladies, the one all piety, the other all idealism, aristocratic and dreamy, drove Febrer to distraction. To think that soon the rude hands of the usurer would profane so much that was old and venerable! He could not stay to ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... taxes!" stuttered the royal phantom in high dismay, while his subjects cheered vociferously, and every market-place roared approbation. "I deliver up the tax-gatherers to justice!" and in a trice every tax-gatherer, and Jew, and usurer, and fiscal agent was haled towards the bridge and there beheaded, till the Seine ran red beneath. "I deliver up your cruel Mayors to justice!" went on the quavering monarch, and forthwith five miserable men who had once been mayors of Rouen, fled from the Rue du Grand Pont, from ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... bad match. A bankrupt, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto; a beggar, that was us'd to come so smug upon the mart; let him look to his bond. He was wont to call me usurer; let him look to his bond. He was wont to lend money for a Christian courtesy; let him look ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... the years flit by And after them at headlong pace The evanescent fashions fly In motley and amusing chase. The world is ever altering! Farthingales, patches, were the thing, And courtier, fop, and usurer Would once in powdered wig appear; Time was, the poet's tender quill In hopes of everlasting fame A finished madrigal would frame Or couplets more ingenious still; Time was, a valiant general might Serve who could ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... relief and significance went round the circle. The fame of Eli or "Skinner" Hemmings, as a notorious miser and usurer, had ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... it?—the landed interest of a whole kingdom, of a kingdom to be compared to France, was set up to public auction! They set up (Mr. Hastings set up) the whole nobility, gentry, and freeholders to the highest bidder. No preference was given to the ancient proprietors. They must bid against every usurer, every temporary adventurer, every jobber and schemer, every servant of every European,—or they were obliged to content themselves, in lieu of their extensive domains, with their house, and such a pension as the state auctioneers ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... which ensue bring forward one of Balzac's great figures, the judge of instruction, Popinot; but to appreciate him the reader must go to the marvelous book itself. 'Gobseck' is a study of a Parisian usurer, almost worthy of a place beside the description of old Grandet; while 'Les Employes' is a realistic study of bureaucratic life, which, besides showing a wonderful familiarity with the details of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... of the Venetian people, and how they are all perfect in the faith of Jesu Christ and obedient to holy Church, and how they never disobey the commandment of holy Church. Within this noble Venice there dares to dwell neither heretic, nor usurer, murderer, thief nor robber. And I will tell you the names of all the Doges that have been in Venice, one after the other, and what they did to the honour of holy Church and of their noble City. And I will tell you the names of the noble captains whom the noble Doges sent ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... called it a lark? Do you think a great fortune will all of a sudden change such a chap as that into an honest man? No, what's ill got is ill spent, and old Giffrey Jenkins's money 'ill never turn to good account. He that grinds the poor, and goes against scripture as a usurer, 'ill never find his son do well. Howel shall never have my consent to marry Netta, and there's an ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... happen. These were the dusky angels that carried away the lamb's body of the day before; she had seen its little white bones down at the foot of the knoll. The present watcher, a stoop-shouldered, big, rusty-black bird, was quite indifferent to human presence; he sat on his post like a usurer on his high stool, calculating and immovable. Janet knew what was in his mind. She drew the lamb a little closer and tucked her skirt in around it. Again she fell to contemplating the prairie—and the sky. The birds above seemed connected with the machinery of Time. At unexpected moments ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... have described your fellow passengers; now for mine. There came down with me Blepsias, the Pisatan usurer, Lampis, an Acarnanian freelance, and the Corinthian millionaire Damis. The last had been poisoned by his son, Lampis had cut his throat for love of the courtesan Myrtium, and the wretched Blepsias is supposed to ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... bestowing Old Sarum on the Bank of England, Mr. Benfield has thrown in the borough of Cricklade to reinforce the county representation. Not content with this, in order to station a steady phalanx for all future reforms, this public-spirited usurer, amidst his charitable toils for the relief of India, did not forget the poor, rotten Constitution of his native country. For her, he did not disdain to stoop to the trade of a wholesale upholsterer for this House,—to furnish it, not with the faded tapestry figures ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... there are no millionaires—and therefore next to no Socialists. As to why there are no millionaires, it is a mystery, and best studied among the mysteries of the Middle Ages. By some of the dark ingenuities of that age of priestcraft a curious thing was discovered—that if you kill every usurer, every forestaller, every adulterater, every user of false weights, every fixer of false boundaries, every land-thief, every water-thief, you afterwards discover by a strange indirect miracle, or disconnected truth from heaven, that you have no millionaires. Without ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... myself to do his villainous work. I have done it for years. I have endured shame and agony unspeakable, that my darling's secret might be safe. I have been his tool and his scapegoat. I, an old man, on my way to the grave, have earned—and rightly earned—the names of usurer and thief. All this I have done and suffered that he should never blight my child's happiness by his presence. He has broken the contract. He came down here that night you went to Richmond, and, with his fiendish ways and threats, nearly killed her. Well, now his ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... the wolf. Amid these dainties, how it pleases one to see the well-fed sheep hastening home! to see the weary oxen, with drooping neck, dragging the inverted ploughshare! and slaves, the test of a rich family, ranged about the smiling household gods! When Alfius, the usurer, now on the point of turning countryman, had said this, he collected in all his money on the Ides; and endeavors to put it ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... Babbalanja, "what other discoveries have you made? Hast yet put a usurer under your lens, to find his conscience? or a libertine, to find his heart? Hast yet brought your microscope to bear upon a downy peach, or a ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... jewellers, stationers, printers, upholsterers and other artisans, each name being given in full with the professions, addresses and one of the following qualifications, "hypocrite (tartufe), immoral, dishonest, bankrupt, informer, usurer, cheat," not to mention others that I cannot write down. It must be noted that this slanderous list may become a proscriptive list, and that in every town and village in France similar lists are constantly ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... by Robson in the dramas I have named was extended, and was genuine. In Daddy Hardacre, a skilful adaptation of the usurer in Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless Overreach, foiled at last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... CACAFO'GO, a rich, drunken usurer, stumpy and fat, choleric, a coward, and a bully. He fancies money will buy everything and every one.—Beaumont and Fletcher, Rule a Wife and Have ...
— 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.
... who affects the saint—the prude!" said Crevel. "I tell you what, Hulot, do you go back to your wife; your money matters are not looking well; I have heard talk of certain notes of hand given to a low usurer whose special line of business is lending to these sluts, a man named Vauvinet. For my part, I am cured of your 'real ladies.' And, after all, at our time of life what do we want of these swindling hussies, who, to be honest, cannot help playing us false? You ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the dwelling of old Isaac Nabal, known to his people as Isaac the Moneylender, but styled by the Romans Isaac the Usurer. He was enormously rich and loaned his gold at exorbitant rates to the extravagant and impecunious Roman nobles. Isaac was wifeless and childless, but so eager for gain was he that he kept his house constantly filled with ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... we shall risk it. I'm sick of waiting. And it isn't fair to a girl—that's my view. Two years now; an engagement that lasts more than two years isn't likely to come to much good. You'll think my behaviour pretty cool, on one point. I don't forget, you old usurer, that I owe you something more ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... whose minds are much enslaved to earthly affairs all the week cannot disengage or break the chain of their thoughts so suddenly as to apply to a discourse that is wholly foreign to what they have most at heart. Tell a usurer of charity, and mercy, and restitution—you talk to the deaf; his heart and soul, with all his senses, are got among his bags, or he is gravely asleep and dreaming of a mortgage. Tell a man of business, that the cares ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... follows that this and other issues of German paper will filter right through the Empire. At the same time a German expert, Dr. Kautz, was appointed to start banks throughout Turkey in order to free the peasants from the Turkish village usurer, and in consequence enslave them to the German banks. Similarly a German was put at the head of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank. These new branches worked very well, but it is pleasant to think that one such was started by the Deutsche Bank ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... discharge the demands of government! What exhaustless fund of opulence could supply this destructive resource of wretchedness and misery? Accordingly, the husbandman ground to powder between the usurer below and the oppressor above, the whole crop of the country was forced at once to market; and the market glutted, overcharged, and suffocated, the price of grain fell to the fifth part of its usual value. The crop was then gone, but the debt remained. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of piety, all the principles of Machiavel. With the most sordid love of money he combined boorish manners. Lies [of the distilled kind chiefly] had so become a habit with him, that he had altogether lost notion of employing truth in speech. It was the soul of a usurer, inhabiting now the body of a war-captain, now transmigrating into that of a huckster. False oaths, and the abominablest basenesses, cost him nothing, so his object might be reached. He was miserly with his own, but ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... little more than is required to feed his family, once run short of seed, he has a very hard battle to fight with the soil before he is able to get that debt cleared off, should his neighbours be too poor to assist him, as he must then have recourse to the usurer. For although, through his greater efforts and improved cultivation, he may produce much more paddy than his land had done before, yet he is seldom able to save enough for seed from the moiety of the produce which his appetite ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... distinguished practitioners in the law, Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap. They, in common with Huckaback, had an intense desire to share in his anticipated good fortune, and determined to do so according to their opportunities. The excellent Huckaback (a model of an usurer on a small scale) had promptly and adroitly seized hold of the very first opportunity that presented itself, for securing a little return hereafter for the ten shillings, with which he had so generously parted when he could so ill afford it; while Messrs. Quirk, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... with the smallest cost afford; Though ne'er so mean the viands be, They well content my Prue and me: Or pea or bean, or wort or beet, Whatever comes, Content makes sweet. Here we rejoice, because no rent We pay for our poor tenement; Wherein we rest, and never fear The landlord or the usurer. The quarter-day does ne'er affright Our peaceful slumbers in the night: We eat our own, and batten more, Because we feed on no man's score; But pity those whose flanks grow great, Swell'd with the lard of other's meat. We bless our fortunes, when we see Our own beloved privacy; And like our living, ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... taking a very long time to make up her mind to prefer you to Monsieur de Griers. She may respect you, she may become your friend, she may open out her heart to you; yet over that heart there will be reigning that loathsome villain, that mean and petty usurer, De Griers. This will be due to obstinacy and self-love—to the fact that De Griers once appeared to her in the transfigured guise of a marquis, of a disenchanted and ruined liberal who was doing his best ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... instance of what may be effected by a man who devotes his whole heart and soul without reserve to one object. He was eaten up by ambition. His love of influence and authority resembled the avarice of the old usurer in the Fortunes of Nigel. It was so intense a passion that it supplied the place of talents, that it inspired even fatuity with cunning. "Have no money dealings with my father," says Marth to Lord Glenvarloch; "for, dotard as he is, he will make an ass of you." It was as ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thousands of brave fellows slaves to their vices; The Usurer to his gold, drunkards to Wine, Adulterers ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... there is an odd thing about which I cannot make up my mind; I do not know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is this. In Our Mutual Friend is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer. In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all that Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing justice to Judaism, which he was told he had ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... can, the evil which a country usurer exercises, armed against them with such burdensome rights; it is the feudal seigniory in the hands of Harpagon, or rather of old Grandet. When, indeed, a tax becomes insupportable we see, by the local complaints, that it is nearly always a fermier who enforces it.[1346] It ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... corner of the church was a tomb bearing the effigy of John O'Combe, who we thought might have hailed from the neighbourhood of the old abbey of that name which we passed the night before. In spite of his benefactions recorded in the church, he was looked upon as a usurer, because he charged 10 per cent, for his money. He was at one time a friend of Shakespeare, and often asked the poet, who was no doubt acquainted with his rate of interest, to write him an epitaph. When at length he acceded to his request he ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... another usurer or trader gets hold of the poor wretch, hailing either from Corinth, or Patrae, or Athens, till he gets set on to by them all, and torn to bits, and cut into mince-meat as it were for his interest. For as a person ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... without attaining this object, puts a complicated machine in motion. Here we have a lover of the daughter, who, disguised as a servant, flatters the avarice of the old man; a prodigal son, who courts the bride of his father; intriguing servants; an usurer; and after all a discovery at the end. The love intrigue is spun out in a very clumsy and every-day sort of manner; and it has the effect of making us at different times lose sight altogether of Harpagon. Several scenes of a good comic description are merely subordinate, and do not, in a ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... intellect meant for us, (a lesson, indeed, not all his own, but part of the old wisdom of humanity), in the tale of the Merchant of Venice; in which the true and incorrupt merchant,—kind and free beyond every other Shakspearian conception of men,—is opposed to the corrupted merchant, or usurer; the lesson being deepened by the expression of the strange hatred which the corrupted merchant bears to the pure one, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... burials, And always kept the sexton's arms in ure [3] With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells. And after that, was I an engineer, And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany, Under pretence of serving Charles the Fifth, Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems. Then after that was I an usurer, And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting, And tricks belonging unto brokery, I fill'd the jails with bankrupts in a year, And with young orphans planted hospitals, And every moon made some or other mad; And now and then one hang'd himself for grief, Pinning upon his breast a long great ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... thou wilt not, nor he will not be free, For thou art covetous and he is kind. He learn'd but surety-like to write for me, Under that bond that him as fast doth bind. The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take, Thou usurer, that putt'st forth all to use, And sue a friend came debtor for my sake; So him I lose through my unkind abuse. Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me; He pays the whole, and yet ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... impossible that, amongst her three sons, there should not be a man of superior intellect, who would enrich them all. She felt it, she said. Accordingly, she nursed the children with a fervour in which maternal severity was blended with an usurer's solicitude. She amused herself by fattening them as though they constituted a capital which, later on, would ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... at present spread over Europe would be disastrously torn by any considerable war; and that in consequence it is to the interest of the usurers to preserve peace. But here, it seems to me, we must make a clear differentiation. It may easily be to the interest of a particular usurer, or group of usurers, to provoke war; that very financial crisis which Mr. Angell anticipates may quite probably be a source of profit to them. That it would not be to the interest of a nation of usurers to ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... Whispered to us of peace in the plaintive breeze, Whispered of old dead faiths that the day had shattered, Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon; That was the urge that we knew and the language that mattered That was the debt that we paid to the usurer June. ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... hands. That appearance was without doubt little in keeping with what the father and the fiance of Fanny had expected; for there was, when the four men were seated, a pause which the Baron was the first to break. He began in his measured tones, in a voice which handles words as the weight of a usurer weighs ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... me watchfully through the tortuous passages winding between the piles of furniture, warding off with his hands the perilous swing of my coat tail, observing my elbows with the disquieting concern of an antiquarian and a usurer. ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... Lablache, usurer, scoundrel, smiled benignly at his companion as he pronounced his concluding words. The Hon. Bunning-Ford looked, thought, and looked again. He began to think that Lablache was meditating a more rascally proceeding than he had given him credit ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... His love! Talk not of love. Love has no thought of self! Love buys not with the ruthless usurer's gold The loathsome prostitution of a hand Without a heart? Love sacrifices all things To bless the thing it loves! He knows not love. Father, his love is hate—his hope revenge! My tears, my anguish, my remorse for falsehood— These are the joys ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... way of the world. In older times, when the Christian laborer was drained dry by the knightly spendthrift, and the spendthrift was drained by the Jewish usurer, Church and State, religion and law, seized on the Jew and drained him as a Christian duty. When the forces of lovelessness and greed had built up our own sordid capitalist systems, driven by invisible proprietorship, robbing the poor, defacing the earth, and forcing themselves as ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... To Fine Grand " Brainhardy " Doctor Empiric " Sir Samuel Fuller On Banks, the Usurer " Chevril the Lawyer Epigrammatic Verses by Samuel Butler Opinion Critics Hypocrisy Polish The Godly Piety Poets Puffing Politicians Fear The Law " " " " Confession Smatterers Bad Writers The Opinionative ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... the course taken by a train of incidents of which the issue is life or death, happiness or misery, to men and women perfectly unknown to them, and to whom they are unknown. Attorneys of all possible grades, law clerks of every conceivable kind, the copyist, the law stationer, the usurer, all sorts of money lenders, suitors of every description, haunters of the Chancery court and their victims, are for ever moving round about the lives of the chief persons in the tale, and drawing them on insensibly, but very certainly, to the issues that await them. Even the fits of the little law-stationer's ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... "The old usurer is at home, I know," muttered Stephano to himself; for the moment he had knocked a gleam of light, peeping through a crevice in an upper casement, had suddenly disappeared. He now rapped more loudly at the door with the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... like these the clutch of the usurer was relaxed and the general well-being promoted, measures were taken to crown the work by a stable system of finance. It will be recalled that two years before the Emperor had saved the public credit by the direct expenditure of the Austrian war indemnity. It was his fixed principle that France ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... To find yourself a usurer in your dreams, foretells that you will be treated with coldness by your associates, and your business ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... shop in Chinatown, belonging to a fat Chinese usurer, Willy for very little money came into possession of a quantity of Japanese prints. These were the next things he showed Frederick. There were most of Hiroshige's views of Lake Biwa; there were the thirty-six views of Fujiyama by Hokusai. One of ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... been corrupted by the fictions of loyalty to an uninspiring and alien Court, of national piety in an official Church, of freedom in a politician-rigged State, of justice in an economic system where the advertiser, the sweater and usurer had a hundred advantages over the producer and artisan, to maintain itself now steadily at any high pitch of heroic endeavour. It had bought its comfort with the demoralisation of its servants. It had no completely honest organs; its spirit ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... a Nobleman, gallant and bold; O was an Oysterman, who went about town; P was a Parson, and wore a black gown; Q was a Quack, with a wonderful pill; R was a Robber, who wanted to kill; S was a Sailor, who spent all he got; T was a Tinker, and mended a pot; U was an Usurer, a miserable elf; V was a Vintner, who drank all himself; W was a Watchman, who guarded the door; X was Expensive, and so became poor; Y was a Youth, that did not love school; Z was a Zany, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... rose the nameless words that slip From darkening soul to whitening lip. The snaky usurer,—him that crawls, And cheats beneath the golden balls, The hook-nosed kite of carrion clothes— I stabbed them deep with muttered oaths: Spawn of the rebel wandering horde That stoned the saints, ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... become humanized, solicit the attentions of their feathered ladies, and fly with gay inspirations amongst the neighbouring bushes. But though as much in love as a widow, the woodcock does not on that account forget its habitual prudence; like the usurer who lends his money, and takes every precaution, the woodcock is equally careful, and does not leave its nest till twilight has draped the earth in the gray mantle of evening. When the humid atmosphere descends slowly on the trees, when the cool breezes of night ascend the valleys, when distant ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... described as a set of robbers, provided I can get money." These were Mr. Hastings's views; and, in accordance with them, the jaghires were all confiscated, the jaghiredars with their families were all turned out, the possessions delivered up to the usurer, in order that Mr. Hastings might have the excuse of money to plead at the bar of the House of Commons, and afterwards at the bar of the House of Lords. If your Lordships, in your sacred character of the first tribunal in the world, should by your judgment justify those proceedings, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... then, justice, only justice. Listen, my young friend. Once upon a time, I was deprived of my money and in a disagreeable manner. When I wrote you a courteous letter, asking how much time you needed, you saw fit to answer with an uncourteous note—and treated me as if I were a usurer, a plunderer of widows and children—altho' I was really the one plundered, and you belonged to the plunderer's party. But as I was more judicious, I contented myself with answering your note courteously, but to the point. You know my blue paper, eh? I see you do. And I can ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... and then it will provoke laughter; but, before that, it had already alienated our sympathy: how can we put ourselves in tune with a soul which is not in tune with itself? In Moliere's L'Avare we have a scene bordering upon drama. It is the one in which the borrower and the usurer, who have never seen each other, meet face to face and find that they are son and father. Here we should be in the thick of a drama, if only greed and fatherly affection, conflicting with each other in the soul of Harpagon, had effected a more or less original combination. But such is ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... the son of David, the little Jew usurer of Bond Court, Whitecross Gutters, for his introduction to Venus, I O U Five ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he must have lost his senses!" said the usurer. "My dear young fellow, I speak to you of millions, of thirty thousand francs yearly, and ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... within a definition, and nothing ever breaks beyond it. To this type of mind (which is valuable when set to its special and narrow work) there is no such thing as an exception that proves the rule. If I vote for confiscating some usurer's millions I am doing, they say, precisely what I should be doing if I took pennies out of a blind man's hat. They are both denials of the principle of private property, and are equally right and equally wrong, according to our view of that principle. I should ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... my thunderbolt not always rattles, Remember, reader! you have had before, The worst of tempests and the best of battles, That e'er were brewed from elements or gore, Besides the most sublime of—Heaven knows what else; An usurer could scarce expect much more— But my best canto—save one on astronomy— Will turn upon ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... ship, it's a Leviathan!" remarked with a devout sigh the pock-marked and stooping Trofim Zubov, cathedral-warden and principal usurer in town. ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... his other attendants, faith, I think his gossip, the Hangman Marshal, with two or three of his retinue, and Oliver, his barber, may be the most considerable—and the whole bevy so poorly arrayed, that, by my honour, the King resembles most an old usurer, going to collect desperate debts, attended ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Fourth, whomsoever Ye meet in Sherwood ye shall bring to dine With Robin, saving carriers, posts and folk That ride with food to serve the market towns Or any, indeed, that serve their fellow men. Fifth, you shall never do the poor man wrong, Nor spare a priest or usurer. You shall take The waste wealth of the rich to help the poor, The baron's gold to stock the widow's cupboard, The naked ye shall clothe, the hungry feed, And lastly shall defend with all your power All that are trampled under by the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... house, with servants, such as they are, around me. It's all in appearance. In reality, I'm not the owner. I once was, as my father before me; but can't claim to be any longer. Even while we're sitting here, drinking this Catalan, the mortgagee—that old usurer Martinez—may step in ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... word unseal your eyes! But, if that does not suffice, learn that your notes have been protested at the instigation of a Sieur Lecuyer, formerly head-clerk to Maitre Solonet, a notary in Bordeaux. That usurer in embryo (who came from Gascony for jobbery) is the proxy of your very honorable mother-in-law, who is the actual holder of your notes for one hundred thousand francs, on which I am told that worthy woman doled out to you only seventy thousand. Compared ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... place of repasts, companies and balls. It has been said—"He who sleeps, dines;" but it has never been affirmed—He who sleeps, plays—or, He who sleeps, dances. Manicamp, reduced to this extremity of neither playing nor dancing, for a week at least, was, consequently, very sad; he was expecting a usurer, and saw Malicorne enter. A cry of distress ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Tub, Madam. He may lie a long in't, there's just room for an old join'd Stool besides the Bed, which one cannot call a Cabin, about the largeness of a Pantry Bin, or a Usurer's Trunk; there had been Dornex Curtains to't in the days of Yore; but they were now annihilated, and nothing left to save his Eyes from the Light, but my Landlady's Blue Apron, ty'd by the strings ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... long ago that you were an old usurer," Cabinska was thinking, tinkling her glass ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... the eyes of the country-folk pitied her as a sickly deformity? Why did Rigou, the old man, feel the passion of a young one for this girl? Which of the two men was young, and which was old? Was the young peasant as blase as the old usurer? Why did these two extremes of life meet in one common and devilish caprice? Does the vigor that draws to its close resemble the vigor that is only dawning? The moral perversities of men are gulfs guarded by sphinxes; ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... benefits is simple: so much is expenditure; if there is any return, that is clear gain; if there is no return, that is not a loss. I gave it for the sake of giving. No one registers his benefits in a ledger, or, like an exacting usurer, presses to the day and hour for repayment. An honourable man never thinks of such matters, unless reminded by someone returning a favour; otherwise they assume the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... every other branch of commercial industry was affected by the severity of the law. The honorable merchant of Alexandria, who imported the gems and spices of India for the use of the western world; the usurer, who derived from the interest of money a silent and ignominious profit; the ingenious manufacturer, the diligent mechanic, and even the most obscure retailer of a sequestered village, were obliged to admit the officers of the revenue into the partnership ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... in whom there is a foregone and profound horror of repairs and decoration, one of the men who regard their position as Paris house-owners as a business. In the vast chain of moral species, these people hold a middle place between the miser and the usurer. Optimists in their own interests, they are all faithful to the Austrian status quo. If you speak of moving a cupboard or a door, of opening the most indispensable air-hole, their eyes flash, their bile rises, they rear like a frightened horse. When the wind blows ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... convenient he seems to be a power. So soon as the State is intelligent enough and strong enough it can do without him. It can take what it wants, and tell him to go and hang himself. That is the melancholy ultimate of the usurer. That is the quintessence of "finance." All credit is State-made, and what the State has made the State can alter ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... The usurer foresaw the destruction of his oppressive extortion, and he resisted it with the vigor of his craft. The rich man foresaw his profits diminished on government contracts, and he vehemently and virtuously opposed it on all public principles. Loud therefore were the outcries and great the exertions ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... and he who would fain see her painted to the life, let him go to the Church of the Monastero Maggiore, and there will he behold her portrait." The Contessa di Cellant was the only child of a rich usurer who lived at Casal Monferrato. Her mother was a Greek; and she was a girl of such exquisite beauty that, in spite of her low origin, she became the wife of the noble Ermes Visconti in her sixteenth year. He took her to live with him at Milan, where she frequented ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... unlike the other little wooden houses. It was of stone, in the style of those formerly much affected by Genoese merchants, with irregular windows of various sizes, secured with iron shutters and bars. This usurer differed from other usurers also in that he could furnish any required sum, from that desired by the poor old beggar-woman to that demanded by the extravagant grandee of the court. The most gorgeous equipages often halted in front of his house, and from their windows sometimes ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... arose, as it were, a new era of liberty to the Roman commons; in this that a stop was put to the practice of confining debtors. This alteration of the law was effected in consequence of the lust and signal cruelty of one usurer. His name was Lucius Papirius. To him one Caius Publilius having surrendered his person to be confined for a debt due by his father, his youth and beauty, which ought to have excited commiseration, operated on the other's mind as incentives to lust and insult. ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... infected darkness. In this place Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts Of never-dying deaths; there damned souls Roar without pity, there are gluttons fed With toads and adders; there is burning oil Pour'd down the drunkard's throat, 'the usurer Is forced to sup whole draughts of molten gold'; There is the murderer for ever stabb'd, Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton On racks of burning steel, whilst in his soul He feels the torment ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... zealous Puritan," with whom he talked of his prospects. "I loved the maid, and desired to be rich," he tells us; but these Puritan people were horrified at his deliberately intending to live the life of a usurer, and they "threatened great judgments, and danger of ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... footsteps on the fast-whirling earth. But the family passions lived on in him under altered conditions: this descendant of the Bardi was not a man swift in street warfare, or one who loved to play the signor, fortifying strongholds and asserting the right to hang vassals, or a merchant and usurer of keen daring, who delighted in the generalship of wide commercial schemes: he was a man with a deep-veined hand cramped by much copying of manuscripts, who ate sparing dinners, and wore threadbare ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... carved marble of a monument, bellowed forth the news of the Dutch war, while another, not far from him, on a bench, announced in lugubrious accents the number of those who had died on the previous day of the pestilence. There, at the very font, was a usurer paying over a sum of money to a gallant—it was Sir Paul Parravicin—who was sealing a bond for thrice the amount of the loan. There, a party of choristers, attended by a troop of boys, were pursuing another gallant, who had ventured into the ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... had become purely a business one, like that between landlord and tenant. In her desire to indulge her boys she had unconsciously assumed a defensive and almost hostile attitude towards her husband. No debtor ever haggled with his usurer more doggedly than did Hester with her husband in behalf of her sons. The strategic contest had gone on so long that it had almost crowded out the memory of a closer relationship. This exchange of confidences to-night, when common recollections took them unawares ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... People live up to every cent of their incomes, and often beyond them. It is no uncommon occurrence for a fine mansion, its furniture, pictures, and even the jewels of its occupants, to be pledged to some usurer for the means with which to carry on this life of luxury. Each person strives to outdo his or her acquaintances. Those who have studied the matter find no slight cause for alarm in the rapid spread of extravagance among all classes of the city people, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... all evils, to borrow money is perhaps the worst. If of a friend, he ceases to be one the moment you feel that you are bound to him by the heavy clog of obligation. If of a usurer, the interest, in this country, soon doubles the original sum, and you owe an increasing debt, which in time swallows up all ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... his life? But once I was five-and-twenty, like everybody else, and even then I had seen some queer things. I ought to begin at the beginning by telling you about some one whom it is impossible that you should have known. The man in question was a usurer. ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... 1,000 florins besides. Debts contracted at play cannot remain unpaid for more than a couple of days. It was absolutely indispensable that I should procure these thousand florins somehow. I would not ask my husband for them and that was very foolish of me. I got the amount at last from a wretched usurer at an enormous rate of interest. When the amount plus interest became due again, I was still more afraid to tell my husband, and so kept on giving fresh bills, with the result that the amount of my indebtedness grew and grew as the years rolled on, ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... the sick yeoman whom thy fair daughter Rebecca redeemed from the gyves at York, and kept him in thy house till his health was restored, when thou didst dismiss him recovered, and with a piece of money?—Usurer as thou art, thou didst never place coin at better interest than that poor silver mark, for it has this day saved thee ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... another with his eyes not to be false and deceitful, a sailor and hangman to be pitiful, a poor man to build churches, a quack doctor to have a good conscience, a bailiff not to be a merciless villain, an hostess not to over-reckon you, and an usurer ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... to think of that garret, Will; thou art not so unconscionable to put me there? Why, 'tis a kind of little ease[B], to cramp thy rebellious prentices in; I have seen an usurer's iron chest would hold two on't: A penny looking-glass cannot stand upright in the window, that and the brush tills it: the hat-case must be disposed under the bed, and the comb-case will hang down, from the ceiling to the floor. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... not always rattles, Remember, reader! you have had before The worst of tempests and the best of battles That e'er were brew'd from elements or gore, Besides the most sublime of—Heaven knows what else: An usurer could scarce expect much more— But my best canto, save one on astronomy, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... little Max made out the way That Grootver pressed that poor harassed old man. His money he must have, too long delay Had turned the usurer to a ruffian. "But let me take my ship, with many bales Of cotton stuffs dyed crimson, green, and blue, Cunningly patterned, made to suit the taste Of mandarin's ladies; when my battered sails Open for home, such stores will ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... much enslaved to earthly affairs all the week cannot disengage or break the chain of their thoughts so suddenly as to apply to a discourse that is wholly foreign to what they have most at heart. Tell a usurer of charity, and mercy, and restitution—you talk to the deaf; his heart and soul, with all his senses, are got among his bags, or he is gravely asleep and dreaming of a mortgage. Tell a man of business, that the cares of the world choke the good seed; that we must not encumber ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... with a base, trading usurer?" he asked, still mocking me, though I thought that there ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... was surveyor of the roads; had been a kind of toad-eater to Sir Robert Walpole and Lord Godolphin; was a great frequenter of Newmarket, and a notorious usurer. His reputed wealth is stated, in the Gentleman's Magazine, at three hundred ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... in whose gay address and rattling conversation you could hardly recognise the sophistical defender of unauthorised invasion, and the subtle inventor of Holy Alliances and Imperial Leagues. Then came the rich usurer from Frankfort or the prosperous merchant from Hamburgh, who, with his wife and daughters, were seeking some recreation from his flourishing counting-house in the sylvan gaieties of a German bathing-place. Flirting with these was an adventurous dancing-master from Paris, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Britain, her ancient peers, must decide, if it is their will that a house, not the least noble of their members, shall be stripped of their possessions, the reward of the patriotism of generations, as the pawn of a wretched mechanic becomes forfeit to the usurer the instant the hour of redemption has passed away. If they yield to the grasping severity of the creditor, and to the gnawing usury that eats into our lands as moths into a raiment, it will be of more ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... Ratsei's Ghost (see p. 49), which, as Mr. Sidney Lee, in his "Life of William Shakespeare," p. 159, 1898 ed., confesses, refers to Shakespeare. Ratsei advises the young actor to copy Shakespeare, "and to feed upon all men, to let none feede upon thee" (meaning Shakespeare was a cruel usurer). As we shew, page 53, Grant White says: "The pursuit of an impoverished man for the sake of imprisoning him and depriving him both of the power of paying his debts and supporting himself and his family, is an incident in ...
— Bacon is Shake-Speare • Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence
... provoke laughter; but, before that, it had already alienated our sympathy: how can we put ourselves in tune with a soul which is not in tune with itself? In Moliere's L'Avare we have a scene bordering upon drama. It is the one in which the borrower and the usurer, who have never seen each other, meet face to face and find that they are son and father. Here we should be in the thick of a drama, if only greed and fatherly affection, conflicting with each other in the soul of Harpagon, had ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... window of the town. The news was working in every household, from the servants in the kitchens to the aged people helped to their food with bib and spoon, that the famed daughter of Daniel Custis was the prize of the junk dealer and usurer in "old town" by the bridge, who had enslaved a ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... you no failings?" Yes; Failings enough, but different, maybe less. One day when Maenius happened to attack Novius the usurer behind his back, "Do you not know yourself?" said one, "or think That if you play the stranger, we shall wink?" "Not know myself!" he answered, "you say true: I do not: so I take a stranger's due." Self-love like this is knavish and absurd, And well deserves ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... belonging to a fat Chinese usurer, Willy for very little money came into possession of a quantity of Japanese prints. These were the next things he showed Frederick. There were most of Hiroshige's views of Lake Biwa; there were the thirty-six views of Fujiyama by Hokusai. One of the ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... thought how easy it would be to buy up a part of Alphonse's liabilities and let them fall into the hands of a grasping usurer. But it would be a great injustice to suppose that Charles for a moment contemplated doing such a thing himself. It was only an idea he was fond of dwelling upon; he was, as it were, in ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... rather to fill the audience with horror than pleasure and mirth; and if in the conclusion their plots should be baffled, even this would come too late to prevent that ill impression. But in the Lawsuit this is admirably avoided: for the character chosen is a rich, avaricious usurer: the pecuniary distresses of such a person can never be looked upon with horror; and if he should be even handled unjustly, we always wait ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... categories: those who had become impoverished by the revolution and the wars of the Empire, and those who had made their fortunes thereby. Among the former was M. le Marquis de Firmin-Latour, a handsome young officer of cavalry; and among the latter was one Mauruss Mosenstein, a usurer of the Jewish persuasion, whose wealth was reputed in millions, and who had a handsome daughter biblically named Rachel, who a year ago had become Madame la ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the widow and the orphan. Moreover, he had robbed Florent Guillaume of his scrivenry at the sign of Our Lady. He was used to lend at high interest on sound security. Yet could no man infer he was a usurer, forasmuch as he was a Christian, and it was only the Jews practised usury,—the Jews, and, if you will, the Lombards and ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... Benfield has thrown in the borough of Cricklade to reinforce the county representation. Not content with this, in order to station a steady phalanx for all future reforms, this public-spirited usurer, amidst his charitable toils for the relief of India, did not forget the poor, rotten Constitution of his native country. For her, he did not disdain to stoop to the trade of a wholesale upholsterer for this House,—to furnish it, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... earth, which unlocked the treasure houses of souls, and brought its own soul to each body. All came to life except one man, who, as God explained to the prophet, was excluded from the resurrection because he was a usurer. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... in a troop to ensnare souls on earth. Lucifer left the minstrel in charge of the infernal regions, promising, if he let no souls escape, to treat him on the return with a fat monk roasted, or a usurer dressed with hot sauce. But while the fiends were away St. Peter came, in disguise, and allured the minstrel to play at dice, and to stake the souls which were in torture under his care. Peter won, and carried them off in triumph. The devils, coming back and finding the fires all out and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... "You must know," said she, "that my husband's birthday approaches, and I wish to surprise him with a gift. It is therefore necessary that I raise some money without troubling him. How much—abominable usurer!—could you ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... bad match: a bankrupt, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto; a beggar, that used to come so smug upon the mart.—Let him look to his bond: he was wont to call me usurer;—let him look to his bond: he was wont to lend money for a Christian courtesy;—let him look to ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... according to the needs of my body. Human beings and those creatures that spring from immobile objects have different enjoyments. In my former life I was a human being. O puissant one, I was a Sudra possessed of great wealth. I was not devoted to the Brahmanas. I was cruel, vile in conduct, and a usurer. I was harsh in speech. I regard cunning as wisdom. I hated all creatures. Taking advantage of pretexts in compacts made between myself and others. I was always given to taking away what belonged to others. Without feeding servants and guests arrived at my house, I used to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... you can, the evil which a country usurer exercises, armed against them with such burdensome rights; it is the feudal seigniory in the hands of Harpagon, or rather of old Grandet. When, indeed, a tax becomes insupportable we see, by the local complaints, that it ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... my back was turned—and away! As for stooping to coax him as Mowbray would, when he had a point to gain, I could not have done it. To ask Jacob to lend me money, to beg him to give me more time to pay a debt, to cajole and bully him by turns, to call him alternately usurer and my honest fellow, extortioner and my friend Jacob—my tongue could not have uttered the words, my soul detested the thought; yet all this, and more, could ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... the rest I'm forced to subscribe to myself, for I can lay it to no Body else." I shall only remark on this, that nearly the whole play is a mere paraphrasing of Moliere's Cocu Imaginaire, and several other of his plays. The scene between Leonora, the heroine, and Sterling, the old usurer and lover (Act I.), is imitated from Madelon's description in the art of making love in the Pretentious Young Ladies, and so are many others. The servant Crispin is a medley of Mascarille from The Blunderer, of Gros-Rene from The Love-Tiff, and ...
— Sganarelle - or The Self-Deceived Husband • Moliere
... [usurer's chain] I know not whether the chain was, in our authour's time, the common ornament of wealthy citizens, or whether he satirically uses usurer and alderman as ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... necessaries of life. But, in consideration of the outlay the Stopfer couple expected to make, they bargained for three months' residence and a month's payment in advance. Rub a Swiss ever so little, and you find the usurer. After breakfast, Rodolphe at once made himself at home by depositing in his room such property as he had brought with him for the journey to the Saint-Gothard, and he watched Leopold as he set out, moved by the spirit of routine, to carry out the excursion for himself ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... said. "What is the use of giving love? Love should be lent. Love is an usurer that asks high interest. Nay, not the interest only, but the capital and the interest to boot. Oh, Star! what happens to the man who is so mad as to ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... friend. Once upon a time, I was deprived of my money and in a disagreeable manner. When I wrote you a courteous letter, asking how much time you needed, you saw fit to answer with an uncourteous note—and treated me as if I were a usurer, a plunderer of widows and children—altho' I was really the one plundered, and you belonged to the plunderer's party. But as I was more judicious, I contented myself with answering your note courteously, but ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... You shall have a hundred thousand, this very day. Ptitsin, get the money, you gay usurer! Take what you like for it, but get it by the evening! I'll show that I'm in earnest!" cried Rogojin, working himself up into a frenzy ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... them in him, and to him in them. Antonio has scorned his religion, balked him of usurious gains, insulted his person: therefore he hates him as a Christian, himself a Jew; hates him as a lender of money gratis, himself a griping usurer; hates him as Antonio, himself Shylock. Moreover, who but a Christian, one of Antonio's faith and fellowship, has stolen away his daughter's heart, and drawn her into revolt, loaded with his ducats and his precious, precious jewels? Thus his religion, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... those proprietors in whom there is a foregone and profound horror of repairs and decoration, one of the men who regard their position as Paris house-owners as a business. In the vast chain of moral species, these people hold a middle place between the miser and the usurer. Optimists in their own interests, they are all faithful to the Austrian status quo. If you speak of moving a cupboard or a door, of opening the most indispensable air-hole, their eyes flash, their bile rises, they rear like a frightened horse. When the wind blows down a few chimney-pots they are ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... mind; I do not know whether it is unconscious observation or fiendish irony. But it is this. In Our Mutual Friend is an old patriarch named Aaron, who is a saintly Jew made to do the dirty work of an abominable Christian usurer. In an artistic sense I think the patriarch Aaron as much of a humbug as the patriarch Casby. In a moral sense there is no doubt at all that Dickens introduced the Jew with a philanthropic idea of doing justice to Judaism, which he was told he had affronted by the great gargoyle of Fagin. If ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... occidere. What saie you to be a murderer? Soche a thyng saieth he, is [Fol. xxxvij.v] Usurie. A brief sentence againste Usurers, but wittely pro- nounced from the mouth of a godlie, sage, noble, and descrite persone, whiche sentence let the Usurer, ioigne to his Usury retourned, and repeate at the retourne thereof, this sentence [Sidenote: The sentence of Cato a dis- comfort to v- surers.] of Cato, I haue murthered. This one sentence will discou- ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... had been exhausted by the delays of the court. He received a hint from some of the hangers-on of the Chancellor that a present of one hundred pounds would expedite matters. The poor man had not the sum required. However, having found out an usurer who accommodated him with it at high interest, he carried it to York House. The Chancellor took the money, and his dependants assured the suitor that all would go right. Aubrey was, however, disappointed; for, after considerable delay, "a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... money-lenders. In consequence of this, there has settled amongst them a particular class of usurers, who supply petty sums on satisfactory pledges, and at enormous interest. These pawnbrokers on a small scale are generally far more pitiless than the aristocratic usurer, whose customers drive to his door in their carriages. Compunction, humanity, a feeling of pity for the unfortunates upon whose need they fatten, never by any chance enter their breast. Amongst these callous extortioners there was one ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... disdainful laugh, Had quaffed the cup of pleasure to its dregs, And now, grown old, must pay the penalty In wrinkles and uncourted loneliness; The widow, who, but newly desolate, Would grasp a hand, then start to find it gone; The spendthrift and the sordid usurer, Who knew no sentiment save lust for gold; The bloated drunkard, sinking 'neath the weight Of wassail inclination dissolute; The youth, who, following his baleful steps, Reeled for the first time from intemperance; And she who had ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... outlandish way, So fine too, that they their own shadows woo, While he walks in the sad and pilgrim shoe; I'm mad at Fate, and angry ev'n to sin, To see deserts and learning clad so thin; To think how th' earthly usurer can brood Upon his bags, and weigh the precious food With palsied hands, as if his soul did fear The scales could rob him of what he laid there. Like devils that on hid treasures sit, or those Whose jealous eyes trust not beyond their nose, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... character of protector of the Jews, and Samuel Pfefferkorn, a Hebrew usurer, had just left the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... situation as usher in a Yorkshire school kept by one Squeers. But the young fellow's gorge rises at the sickening cruelty exercised in the school, and he leaves it, having first beaten Mr. Squeers,—leaves it followed by a poor shattered creature called Smike. Meanwhile Ralph, the usurer, befriends his sister-in-law and niece after his own fashion, and tries to use the latter's beauty in furtherance of his trade as a money-lender. Nicholas discovers his plots, frustrates all his schemes, rescues, and ultimately marries, a ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... a fat, flabby, middle-aged man whose nose would have roused the provisional hostility of those who have convinced themselves that Jews are not as other men. His nose did not definitely brand him as a usurer and a murderer of Christ, but it was suspicious. His clothes hung loose, and might have been anybody's clothes. He advanced with brisk assurance to the table, bowed, somewhat too effusively, to several people, and sat down next to Peel- Swynnerton. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... of relief and significance went round the circle. The fame of Eli or "Skinner" Hemmings, as a notorious miser and usurer, had passed ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the profession of the liberal arts: but every other branch of commercial industry was affected by the severity of the law. The honorable merchant of Alexandria, who imported the gems and spices of India for the use of the western world; the usurer, who derived from the interest of money a silent and ignominious profit; the ingenious manufacturer, the diligent mechanic, and even the most obscure retailer of a sequestered village, were obliged to admit the officers of the revenue into the partnership of their gain; and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... instructor's step, so that your art Deserves the name of second in descent From God. These two, if thou recall to mind Creation's holy book, from the beginning Were the right source of life and excellence To human kind. But in another path The usurer walks; and Nature in herself And in her follower thus he sets at nought, Placing elsewhere his hope. But follow now My steps on forward journey bent; for now The Pisces play with undulating glance Along the' horizon, and the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... his relation to the capitalist, whether it be a member of the landed gentry or a wealthy peasant, known as a Kulak, or a Jew who lends money at interest, or an Armenian or, for that matter, a usurer of the Orthodox faith. In order that the land be retained by the peasant it is far more essential that only members of the peasant class be allowed to attend the auction sales of land sold because of the owner's arrears. And yet our ...
— The Shield • Various
... famine where abundance lies; he tells him that he beguiles the world, unblesses some mother; that he is his mother's glass and calls back the April of her prime; asks him why he abuses the bounteous largess given him to give; calls him a profitless usurer; tells him that the hours that have made him fair will unfair him; that he should not let winter's rugged hand deface ere he has begotten a child, though it were a greater happiness should he beget ten. He asks if his failure to marry is because he ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... true when one considers nowadays the delicate and important functions of the world of banking and finance. The old-fashioned money-changer and the usurer of earlier periods were regarded as the very antithesis of men engaged in honorable mercantile life, and especially of those who possess a social spirit and the desire to be useful members of the community. But in these days the banks are not merely private money-making ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... he adopted the equally dangerous course of hoarding up all his savings, until it became a passion with him. After a while he retired from business, but the passion clung to him with all the tenacity of a long established habit, and he became a usurer. He was known to all the young profligates, the bad young men who throng our city, and became as necessary to them as the poor avaricious Jew was in former days to the spendthrifts and gamesters in London. He told me frightful stories, my children, of tyranny and fraud, of ruined young ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester
... is again marked by miracles. Rich men vied with each other in making funeral offerings. One gave him a magnificent stone coffin, but this man had been a usurer. Usury was a sin abhorred by Saint Bernard, and the people found that no force or persuasion could place his body within this coffin. So another tomb, less pretentious, but more worthy, was found. At the end Bernard's remains ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... "how many sonnets would you give for me? If you were a usurer in gold instead of in rhyme, I would ask how many dollars. But it is unjust to pay in a coin that we value little. To a man starving in gold mines, a piece of bread weighs more than all the treasures of the earth. To you, I warrant your poems are the standard of appreciation. How ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... visited by one of those worthies known among the Romans by the appellation of haeredipetae, who had amassed a large for-tune by a close attention to the immediate wants and weakness of raw, inexperienced heirs. This honourable usurer had sold an annuity upon the life of a young spendthrift, being thereto induced by the affirmation of his physician, who had assured him his patient's constitution was so rotten, that he could not live one year to an end. He had, nevertheless, made shift to weather ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... in Germany, as now constituted. Other walks of emolument are still more despised. Alfieri, a continental "noble," that is, a born gentleman, speaks of bankers as we in England should of a Jewish usurer, or tricking money-changer. The liberal trades, such as those which minister to literature or the fine arts, which, with us, confer the station of gentleman upon those who exercise them, are, in the estimate of a continental "noble," fitted to assign a certain ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... a very few dollars as a maximum, was probably the extent of Sonnino's ventures along this line. Sonnino himself was a crafty little man, but craftiness, if it did not transgress the law, was not a crime; he was undoubtedly a usurer in his petty way, and he was both feared and disliked, but beyond that no one pretended to know anything about him. Ordinarily, Sonnino's safe, then, might be expected to be rather a barren affair, hardly a lure for a Gentleman ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... instant forgot it, but she took little thought about her divine rights, if she had any,—and in fact Saint Bernard preferred her without them,—while she was scandalized at the greed of officials in her Son's Court. One day a rich usurer and a very poor old woman happened to be dying in the same town. Gaultier de Coincy did not say, as an accurate historian should, that he was present, nor did he mention names or dates, although it ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... decided to appeal to Glady he had hesitated between him and a usurer named Caffie, whom he did not know personally, but whom he had heard spoken of as a rascal who was interested in all sorts of affairs, preferring the bad to the good—of successions, marriages, interdictions, extortions; ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... disturbed in their work of Jew-baiting by the outcry of the civilized world gave full vent to their hatred in their conversations with Baron Hirsch's deputy. White reported afterwards that the functionaries of St. Petersburg had painted to him the Russian Jew as "a compound of thief and usurer." Pobyedonostzev delivered himself of the following malicious observation: "The Jew is a parasite. Remove him from the living organism in which and and on which he exists and put this parasite on a rock—and he will die." While thus justifying before the distinguished foreigner ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... contemptuously. A feeling of noble pride awoke within him for an instant, and he coldly withdrew his arm from the banker's hand. "You are only a usurer, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... mestizo, Andre Certa, became enamored of the beautiful Jewess. What would have appeared inexplicable to the public, was the hundred thousand piasters, the price of her hand; but this bargain was secret. And besides, Samuel trafficked in sentiments as in native productions. A banker, usurer, merchant, ship-owner, he had the talent to do business with everybody. The schooner Annonciation, which was hovering about the mouth of the Rimac, belonged ...
— The Pearl of Lima - A Story of True Love • Jules Verne
... nobles vying with one another in baseness; and the four jesters whom the contemptuous neglect of history permitted me to invent; and Cromwell's family, each member of which is as a thorn in his flesh; and Thurloe, the Protector's Achates; and the Jewish rabbi, Israel Ben-Manasseh, spy, usurer, and astrologer, vile on two sides, sublime on the third; and Rochester, the unique Rochester, absurd and clever, refined and crapulous, always cursing, always in love, and always tipsy, as he himself boasted to Bishop Burnet—wretched poet and gallant gentleman, vicious and ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... your position plain to you. Your wife has refused me her endorsement. May that one word unseal your eyes! But, if that does not suffice, learn that your notes have been protested at the instigation of a Sieur Lecuyer, formerly head-clerk to Maitre Solonet, a notary in Bordeaux. That usurer in embryo (who came from Gascony for jobbery) is the proxy of your very honorable mother-in-law, who is the actual holder of your notes for one hundred thousand francs, on which I am told that worthy woman doled out to you only ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... the enthusiastic usurer had said his say and had his audience, and was straightway pushed on one side. Then my usurer, not knowing me, though indeed I knew him, or not liking the looks of me, as indeed his looks were distasteful to me, for I think ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... your fellow passengers; now for mine. There came down with me Blepsias, the Pisatan usurer, Lampis, an Acarnanian freelance, and the Corinthian millionaire Damis. The last had been poisoned by his son, Lampis had cut his throat for love of the courtesan Myrtium, and the wretched Blepsias is supposed to have died ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... exclaimed Mr. Watchorn, returning his horn to its case, and eyeing Mr. Sponge and Miss Glitters sailing away with the again breast-high-scent pack. 'Oh, you exorbitant usurer!' continued he, gathering his horse to skate after them. 'Well now, that's the most disgraceful proceedin' I ever saw in the whole course of my life. Hang me, if I'll stand such work! Dash me, but I'll 'quaint the Queen!—I'll tell Sir George Grey! ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... before, since the hoods had gone out of fashion. The same woman had taken a contract to supply a large firm with wrappers, and employed many in the neighborhood, paying them the smallest possible prices. This woman was a usurer on a scale so pitiful and petty that it almost condoned usury. Sometimes a man on discovering the miserable pittance for which his wife toiled during every minute which she could snatch from her household duties and the care of her children, would inveigh against it. "That woman is cheating ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... last becomes lower than a chorus girl, for she prostitutes herself to her husband. In her sweetest kisses there is money; in all her words there is money. In playing this part her heart becomes like lead towards you. The most polished, the most treacherous usurer never weighs so completely with a single glance the future value in bullion of a son of a family who may sign a note to him, than your wife appraises one of your desires as she leaps from branch to branch like an escaping ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... loan had been made was within two days of its expiration, when, half beside himself with perplexity, Mr. Tompkins advertised his property for sale. There were enough who understood its real value precisely, and were ready to come forward and offer to purchase. As soon as the miser and usurer saw the course events were taking, he very kindly informed Mr. Tompkins that he had just received, unexpectedly, a large sum of money, and should not want the ten ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... illuminating instance of a business interest subjected first to excommunication—literally—and then to outlawry, is that of the usurer, or, in modern parlance, the loan shark. To the mediaeval mind there was something distinctly immoral in an income from property devoted to the furnishing of personal loans. We need not stop to defend the mediaeval position or to attack it; all that concerns us here is that an opportunity for ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... the paper had an existence of little more than a year. In the course of its brief career, however, Willis paid a flying visit to England, where he accomplished a great deal of literary business. He had written a play called The Usurer Matched, which was brought out by Wallack at the Surrey Theatre, and is said to have been played to crowded houses during a fairly long run, but neither this nor any of his other plays brought the author fame or fortune. During this season he published his Loiterings of Travel, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Venice. He was a usurer who had amassed an immense fortune by lending money at great interest to Christian merchants. Shylock, being a hard-hearted man, exacted the payment of the money he lent with such severity that he was much disliked ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... countries. Plato objects to usury because it tends to set one class, the poor or the borrowers, against another, the rich or the lenders; and goes so far as to make it wrong for the borrower to repay either the principal or interest of his debt. He further considers that the profession of the usurer is to be despised, as it is an illiberal and debasing way of making money.[1] While Plato therefore disapproves in no ambiguous words of usury, he does not develop the philosophical bases of his objection, but is content to condemn it rather for its probable ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... no money at all. Children, I have some. One may live without money in Hindostan, but in England even the Philosopher cannot meditate unless he can pay for food and shelter. I have money, Iris, and I have paid the usurer enough to satisfy him. Let ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... dost thou spend Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy? Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend, And being frank she lends to those are free: Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse The bounteous largess given thee to give? Profitless usurer, why dost thou use So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live? For having traffic with thy self alone, Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive: Then how when nature calls thee to be gone, What acceptable audit canst thou leave? Thy unused beauty must ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... in the night, and the beauty of mystery is everywhere; but still the plain truth remains, that mouth and purse must be filled. If, hitherto, you have supposed me a visionary, be undeceived. I am no one-ideaed one, either; no more than the seers before me. Was not Seneca a usurer? Bacon a courtier? and Swedenborg, though with one eye on the invisible, did he not keep the other on the main chance? Along with whatever else it may be given me to be, I am a man of serviceable knowledge, and a man of the world. Know me for such. And as for my disciple here," turning towards ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... our glasses again and again with its silvery foam. The surgeon was easily managed; but at the second glass which I offered to my neighbor the lawyer, he told me with the frigid politeness of a usurer that he ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... are a man of merit, and want money; you will starve on your merit; you can only get money from me. Come, my friend, how much is it? I ask the easiest interest in the world: old Mordecai, the usurer, has made you pay twice as heavily before now: nothing but the signature of a bond, which is a mere ceremony, and the transfer of an article which, in itself, is a supposition—a valueless, windy, uncertain property ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Antonio more than he valued money, and this hatred, though it may have its root in love of money, half redeems him in our eyes. Shakespeare could not imagine a man who loved money more than anything else; his hated and hateful usurer is more a man of passion than ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... guise of an usurious money-lender. It would be hard in the history of usury to come across the well-ascertained details of a more grasping, griping usurer. His practice had been of the kind which we may have been accustomed to hear rebuked with the scathing indignation of our just judges. But yet Brutus was accounted one of the noblest Romans of the day, only second, if second, to Cato ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... circumstances, the mine peon often has a deep-rooted hatred of the American, which vents itself chiefly in cold silence, unless opportunity makes some more effective way possible. Next on his black-list comes the Spaniard, who is reputed a heartless usurer who long enjoyed protection under Diaz. Third, perhaps, come the priests, though these are endured as a necessary evil, as we endure a bad government. The padre of Calderon drifted up to the mine one day to pay his respects and drink the mine health in good Scotch whisky. Gradually he ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... given to love than to charity or churchgoing, the fidalgo de ra[c,]a, the haughty fidalgo de solar with a page to carry his chair, the judge who through his wife accepts bribes from the Jews, the rhetorical goldsmith, the usurer (onzeneiro) with his heart in his cassette (arca)[127]. There too the pert servant-girl, the gossiping maidservant, the witch busy at night over a hanged man at the cross-roads, the faithless wife of the India-bound lisboeta, the Lisbon old woman copious in malediction, her ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... money-lender. Usury was not a less contemptible vocation in the seventeenth century than it is at the present time; and most young barristers of gentle descent and fair prospects would have preferred any lot to the degradation of marriage with the child of the most fortunate usurer in Charles II.'s London. But the Hon. Francis North was placed comfortably beneath the prejudices of his order and time of life. He was of noble birth, but quite ready to marry into a plebeian family; he was young, but loved money more than aught else. So his hearing was quickened and his ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... was in the hands of a money shark, for even little villages boast their loan offices, where some usurer expects to get ten per cent. on his money, and will not hesitate to foreclose ...
— Darry the Life Saver - The Heroes of the Coast • Frank V. Webster
... presentation to benefices, descended on the unhappy priesthood. The wholesale pillage kindled a wide spirit of resistance. Oxford gave the signal by hunting a Papal legate out of the city amid cries of "usurer" and "simoniac" from the mob of students. Fulk Fitz-Warenne in the name of the barons bade a Papal collector begone out of England. "If you tarry here three days longer," he added, "you and your ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... rest is usury. Think! To give fifty, and ask three hundred and fifty, is the part of an usurer." ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... yourself a usurer in your dreams, foretells that you will be treated with coldness by your associates, and your business will decline ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... there arose, as it were, a new era of liberty to the Roman commons; in this that a stop was put to the practice of confining debtors. This alteration of the law was effected in consequence of the lust and signal cruelty of one usurer. His name was Lucius Papirius. To him one Caius Publilius having surrendered his person to be confined for a debt due by his father, his youth and beauty, which ought to have excited commiseration, operated on the other's mind as incentives to lust and insult. He first attempted to seduce the young ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... his boat and in a rage commanded the boatman to pursue the insolent servant of the usurer. But he of the sheepskin wig threw down the cane, took an oar himself, and his men helped him so well that pursuit ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... out, called it a lark? Do you think a great fortune will all of a sudden change such a chap as that into an honest man? No, what's ill got is ill spent, and old Giffrey Jenkins's money 'ill never turn to good account. He that grinds the poor, and goes against scripture as a usurer, 'ill never find his son do well. Howel shall never have my consent to marry Netta, and ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... tuft-hunter—this dandy capitalist—this money-lender, whose whole fortune had been wrung from the wants and follies of an aristocracy, was naturally a firm supporter of things as they are—how could things be better for men like Baron Levy? But the usurer's burst of democratic spleen did not surprise his precocious and acute faculty of observation. He had before remarked, that it is the persons who fawn most upon an aristocracy, and profit the most by the fawning, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... great space of time that has passed since he flourished, yet his character can be very clearly deduced from the many literary fragments he has left, and that is found to be the character of a pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous enthusiasm—in matters of the Faith a prig or a doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in Letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
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