Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Spendthrift   Listen
adjective
Spendthrift  adj.  Prodigal; extravagant; wasteful.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Spendthrift" Quotes from Famous Books



... making use of the chimney, or the wainscot or skirting-board. There it frequently remained; and such depositories of the family wealth were occasionally, from death and other causes, completely forgotten. In one of Hogarth's well-known pictures, the young spendthrift, who has just come into his inheritance, is being measured by a fashionable tailor, when, from behind the panels which the builders are ripping down, is seen falling a perfect ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... would be well for young people generally to set themselves to grow in a carrotty or turnippy manner, and lay up secret store, not caring to exhibit it until the time comes for fruitful display. But they must not, in after-life, imitate the spendthrift vegetable, and blossom only in the strength of what they learned long ago; else they soon come to contemptible end. Wise people live like laurels and cedars, and go on mining in the earth, while they adorn and ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... "Oh, Mumsy, what a spendthrift you are with your breath! I'm going to dance my dress to a rag. Did you ever think that Cinderella may have just danced her dress to rags by twelve o'clock and after all the fairy godmother had nothing to do with it? Cinderella danced every dance with the prince and perhaps he was ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson

... leaving her two daughters married, the eldest, spendthrift, and most beloved son out on his own, and Tadeusz still a cadet. With his mother's death Kosciuszko's financial troubles began. For the greater part of his life he never knew what it was to have a sufficiency of means. His brother held the estate and apparently the control of the family money, ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner

... gait—the laird with Mrs. Jardine a little before him. The Jardine fortune was not a great one, but there was enough for an heir who showed no inclination to live and to travel en prince, who in certain ways was nearer the ascetic than the spendthrift.... Before Strickland's mind, strolling dreamily, came pictures of far back, of years ago, of long since. A by-wind had brought to the tutor then certain curious bits of knowledge. Alexander, a student in Edinburgh, had lived for some ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... so tenacious of their ancient habits of industry and frugality, that if any of them were to be seen with a long coat made of English cloth, on any other than the first-day (Sunday), he would be greatly ridiculed and censured; he would be looked upon as a careless spendthrift, whom it would be unsafe to trust, and in vain to relieve. A few years ago two single- horse chairs were imported from Boston, to the great offence of these prudent citizens; nothing appeared to them more culpable than the use of such gaudy painted vehicles, in contempt of the more ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... conduct as will inevitably destroy what all are thus labouring to acquire, must generally be avoided? That he who spends more than he receives, must in time become indigent, cannot be doubted; but, how evident soever this consequence may appear, the spendthrift moves in the whirl of pleasure with too much rapidity to keep it before his eyes, and, in the intoxication of gaiety, grows every day poorer without any such sense of approaching ruin as is sufficient to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... the unhoped-for light, That now illumed this morning's heaven! Up sprung Iaenthe at the sight, Tho'—hark!—the clocks but strike eleven, And rarely did the nymph surprise Mankind so early with her eyes. Who now will say that England's sun (Like England's self, these spendthrift days) His stock of wealth hath near outrun, And must retrench his golden rays— Pay for the pride of sunbeams past, And to mere ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... prodigious battles which only lulled down at times during two and a half years more, when our British armies fought with desperate sacrificial valor beyond all previous reckoning; when the flower of our youth was cast into that furnace month after month, recklessly, with prodigal, spendthrift haste; when those boys were mown down in swaths by machine-guns, blown to bits by shell-fire, gassed in thousands, until all that country became a graveyard; when they went forward to new assaults or fell back in rearguard actions with a certain knowledge that they had in their ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... in this position won public favor by proposing some highly popular laws. After his year as consul he was made governor of Gaul, and now began an extraordinary career. The man who had by turns shown himself a dissolute spendthrift, an orator, and a political leader, suddenly developed a new power, and proved himself one of the greatest soldiers the ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave, a spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative, and at times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best fellow possible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesale blusterer, that ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... tell us, is the parable of Germany and Prussia. The Germans are the gifted, generous, and spendthrift heirs to an illustrious domain. Prussia is the alien, upstart, unpopular, unsympathetic, bullying factor and manager. But to this bullying factor Germany owes the consolidation and ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... rested on the wealth Timar left behind him. The only son Timea bore to the major was a great spendthrift, and in his hands the fabulous wealth vanished as quickly as ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... all the quest of the superfluous on the part of those who have the greatest need of taking thought for the necessary. The lavishness of a Maecenas could not have the same effect in a society as that of a common spendthrift who astonishes his contemporaries by the magnificence of his life and the folly of his waste. In these two cases the same term means very different things—to scatter money broadcast does not say ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner

... was a speechless delight to have as many novels as she pleased, and she thought Tom the very prince of bounty in not merely permitting her to read them, but bringing them to her, one after the other, sometimes two at once, in spendthrift profusion. The first thing that made her aware she was not quite happy was the discovery that novels were losing their charm, that they were not sufficient to make her day pass, that they were only dessert, and she had no dinner. When it came to difficulty in going ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... exclaimed. "There is a client of mine, a young spendthrift, who has lived much in Italy, and many of whose acquaintance I know. Stay, I have a letter by me from his friend the Count Montebello of Florence. He shall be your introducer. Do you ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... made up my mind to put my foot down I just casually mentioned to the old lady—say, she's got an eye that would make liquid air shiver—that cold blue like an army overcoat—well, I mentioned to her that Henry was a spendthrift and that he wasn't ever going to get another cent from me that he didn't earn just the same as if he wasn't any relation of mine. I made it plain, you bet; she found just where little Henry-boy stood with his kind-hearted, ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... needed all my Christian charity and forbearance to keep from actually twitting her on the spot. I can't help but pity the forlorn creature, though. She's married that little spendthrift, who was brought up in idleness to rely on his expectations. They don't either of them know anything about work, now they are thrown upon their own resources. That is not the worst of it. The boy has dissipated ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock

... "and I'll meet you in Lancaster"—a form of wit appreciated only by watchmakers. For there is a certain type of watch hand who is as peripatetic as the old-time printer. Restless, ne'er-do-well, spendthrift, he wanders from factory to factory through the chain of watchmaking towns: Springfield, Trenton, Waltham, Lancaster, Waterbury, Chippewa. Usually expert, always unreliable, certainly fond of drink, Nap Ballou was typical of his kind. The steady worker had a mingled admiration and contempt ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber

... was the decent wife of the spendthrift tradesman, when forced by stern necessity, and the cries of her children, to seek her husband in the public house, of a Saturday night, anxious as she was to secure what was left unspent of his week's wages, in order to procure to-morrow's food—no more was she to be wheedled into the bar, ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... drunkard threw thee there— Some husband spendthrift of his weekly hire; One who for wife and children takes no care, But sits and ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings

... did not realise the calamity of her father's tragedy—a tragedy at once sublime and miserable. To the people of Douai he was not a scientific genius wrestling with Nature for her hidden mysteries, but a wicked old spendthrift, greedy like a miser for the Philosopher's Stone. Everybody in Douai, from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie to the people, knew all about old Claes, "the alchemist." His home was called the "Devil's House." People pointed at him, shouted after him ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... of being the Kaiser's tool; he wanted more land; the Armenian was in his way; the Turk was lazy, shiftless and a spendthrift. The Armenian was industrious and hard-working. The Turk's method of living made him poor. The gifts of the Armenian tended towards wealth. Once in twenty years the Turk found himself a pauper and found the ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis

... No more I'll ask you to depart with me, I'll go alone: but this remember still— Gay have I been, a spendthrift and an idler, A brilliant fly that buzzed about the bloom. But I had that in me deep down, and still, Of which you, you alone, possess the key, A sullen nobleness to you disclosed E'en then with shame: and by no other guessed. This you well know: betray not that at least; ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips

... property, then he became an army contractor, speculated on defeat as well as victory, and does not know now what to do with his money. But the millionaire is timid, dull and always bored, the ruined spendthrift amuses him by his impertinent ways, and his libertine jokes; he prompts him when he is at a loss for an answer, extricates him out of his difficulties, serves as his guide in the great forests of Paris which is strewn with so many pit-falls, and helps him to avoid those vulgar adventures ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... chosen captain of his company. Jefferson Davis also served as an officer in this war. In the fall of 1832 he was a candidate for the legislature, but was defeated. He then opened a store with a partner named Berry. Lincoln was made postmaster, but Berry proved a drunkard and spendthrift, bringing the concern to bankruptcy, and soon after died, to fill a drunkard's grave, leaving Lincoln to pay all the debts. But during all this time Lincoln had been improving his spare moments learning surveying, and for the next few years he ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis

... useless to repeat her story here. It was only the same old story—of the young girl of fortune marrying a spendthrift, who dissipated her property, estranged her friends, alienated her affections, and then left her penniless, to struggle alone with all the ills of poverty to bring up her three little girls. By her own unaided efforts she had fed, clothed, and educated her ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... she hasn't the money to spare just now. You know it's near the end of the month, and they've all spent their allowances except Louise, and she says she'll not lend her money to such a spendthrift as I am." ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley

... about the brother," he thought to himself; "a bad business no doubt, or the father would never have turned him out of doors—something very queer perhaps. A strange set these Lovels evidently. The father a spendthrift, the ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... It's only two years. I am altered because of Baby. That does change a woman. Of course I'm thinking always of what he will do in the world; whether he'll be a master of hounds or a Cabinet Minister or a great farmer;—or perhaps a miserable spendthrift, who will let everything that his grandfathers and grandmothers have done for him go ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... greenback and the glittering dollar, each scrimping the other down to the finest point above starvation and freezing, and finally dying, to be forgotten as soon as dead by their fellow-men, and sent among the goats at the great assizes. A shiftless spendthrift must choose for a helpmeet (?) an equally slovenly, thriftless wife. A man with a crotchet should select a partner with the same morbid fancy. A man whose whole mental composition gravitates behind his ears, must find ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... various characters and talked to them. Humor lies also in the real lively surprises which Drakesbill so effectively gave during his visit to the King. One can see how this tale might have been a satire reflecting upon a spendthrift King. ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... he, "what's two hundred and fifty dollars, after all? We've got the money. One more night of this kid will send me to a bed in Bedlam. Besides being a thorough gentleman, I think Mr. Dorset is a spendthrift for making us such a liberal offer. You ain't going to let the chance ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... recovery he made excursions about the island, noticing its soil, productions, fortifications, public works, and the manners of its inhabitants. While admiring the productiveness of the sugar plantations, he was shocked at the spendthrift habits of the planters, and their utter ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving

... London merchants dreamed of wealth in store for them in Virginia. A company was formed to colonize the country. Many of the merchants had spendthrift sons, who were also idle and given to bad habits. These young fellows thought it degrading to work. In those Western woods across the ocean, along the great rivers and upon the blue mountains, they saw in imagination a wild, roving, reckless life. They could hunt the wild ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin

... great deal of wild dissipation and profligacy, united, of course, to the inevitable improvidence. And though dissipation and improvidence are quite compatible with intelligence in the first generation, they are sure always to part company from it in the second. The family of the unsteady spendthrift workman is never a well-taught family. It is reared up in ignorance; and, with evil example set before and around it, it almost necessarily takes its place among the lapsed classes. In the third generation the descent is of course still greater and more hopeless than in the second. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... stood, saw a Swallow one fine day in early spring. Thinking that summer had come, and that he could now do without his coat, he went and sold it for what it would fetch. A change, however, took place in the weather, and there came a sharp frost which killed the unfortunate Swallow. When the Spendthrift saw its dead body he cried, "Miserable bird! Thanks to you I ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... for the sum of the affronts he had endured. It was to them he attributed the whispered gibes about his illiteracy; his shady business methods; the awful story of his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley, the spendthrift brother of the Misses Perley. Once, too, when he had so well manipulated the district delegates that he was sure of nomination in the convention, Senator Sprague had hurried home from Washington and defeated him just as the prize was in his grasp. The Senator ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... O spendthrift haste! await the Gods; The nectar crowns the lips of Patience; Haste scatters on unthankful sods The immortal gift in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... no question of my wife's honour," said my lord; "we can quarrel on plenty of grounds beside. If I live, that villain will be punished; if I fall, my family will be only the better: there will only be a spendthrift the less to keep in the world: and Frank has better teaching than his father. My mind is made up, Harry Esmond, and whatever the event is I am easy about it. I leave my wife and you as ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... incurred By endless riot, vanity, the lust Of pleasure and variety, despatch, As duly as the swallows disappear, The world of wandering knights and squires to town; London engulfs them all. The shark is there, And the shark's prey; the spendthrift, and the leech That sucks him. There the sycophant, and he That with bare-headed and obsequious bows Begs a warm office, doomed to a cold jail And groat per diem if his patron frown. The levee swarms, as if in golden pomp Were charactered on every statesman's door, 'BATTERED ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... that the grave of the careful, the hoarder, differeth not from the grave of the debauched, the spendthrift: A hillock of earth covers this and that, with a few flat ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... gone mad! You good-for-nothing scamp! You spendthrift!" shouted the real Capuzzi at intervals, growing more and more enraged the higher the cost of this the most nonsensical of ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living and actual—it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune—that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for it; if he may ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... of housewifely economy which maintains that labor saved is time and strength earned. Moreover, the deluded seeker after bed beauty who wastes her precious hours in hemstitching sheets and pillowcases—cotton ones at that—is a reckless spendthrift, and needs a course in the economics of common sense. Nothing is more desirable than the simple elegance of the plain, broad hem, nor more disheartening than hemstitching which has broken from its moorings while the rest of the ...
— The Complete Home • Various

... where are you going to draw the line? Everything tends to lose its hallowed meaning; it becomes degraded, bestialized. Still, the roots of the idea are sound. In giving sensual attributes to a garden god the ancients had in mind the recklessness, the spendthrift abundance, of all nature—not excluding our own. They tried to explain how it came about that the sanest man is liable, under the stress of desire, to acts of which he vainly repents at leisure. I don't suppose they meant to justify those acts. If they had, they would have given a less equivocal ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... at any price were the sole ends and aims of life; where, in the confusion of the times, the insecurity of conditions, and the ruthless despotism of the government, the sole watchword of existence, from high to low, was 'Apres moi, le deluge!'" The Prince Ludwig was a great spendthrift, and was continually appealing to his brother for funds. It was poor Weber's pleasant task to be the go-between, and to receive on his head the rage of Behemoth. Again to quote the vivid language of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes

... success of so flagrant a falsehold—answered: 'Why inquire? Know that, even if your tale were true, I have no heir, no representative, no descendant in the child of Jasper—the grandchild of William-Losely. I can at least leave my wealth to the son of Charles Haughton. True, Charles Haughton was a spendthrift, a gamester; but he was neither a professional ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... said her mother petulantly. "It's something new every day. I never saw such a spendthrift. It's a good thing my wants ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... the thing is identical with the element that is noisy and glaringly coloured. One is much less likely to hear of the broad plans and the quality of the wise, strong and constructive individuals in a class than of their foolish wives, their spendthrift sons, their mistresses, and their moments of ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... because I did not care to pass by The Chequers in the procession. Most people had a good word for poor Bob, and many kind fellows could not mention him without the tears coming into their eyes. Only the spongers were indifferent; but they had, of course, to look around for another liberal spendthrift. Bob was so young, and bright, and brave; I never knew a straighter or a kinder man, and I have seen few who had so much ability. He drifted into drunkenness by accident, and the vice had him hard by the throat ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman

... burlesque than the sublime. Yet the perpetual scintillation of Butler's wit is too dazzling to be delightful; and we can seldom read far in "Hudibras" without feeling more fatigue than pleasure. His fancy is employed with the profusion of a spendthrift, by whose eternal round of banqueting his guests are at length rather wearied out than regaled. Dryden was destined to correct this, among other errors of his age; to show the difference between burlesque and satire; and ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... to carry on the government. The fall in the value of gold and silver and the consequent rise of prices, and other economic changes, had reduced the income of the government just at a time when its necessary expenses were increasing, and when a spendthrift king was making profuse additional outlays. Finances were therefore a constant difficulty during his reign, as in fact they remained during the whole of the ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney

... B.C.—-when Cicero tells us that he was advanced in years—on the occasion of the splendid games given by Pompey at the dedication of his theatre. In spite of his somewhat extravagant living, he left an ample fortune to his spendthrift son, who did his best to squander it as soon as possible. Horace (Sat. iii. 3. 239) mentions his taking a pearl from the ear-drop of Caecilia Metella and dissolving it in vinegar, that he might have the satisfaction of swallowing eight thousand ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... on amid the general glad feeling that always prevails when some spendthrift has ordered for the house, Leonard Wales gets Buck Devine to one side and says how did Sandy do it? So Buck tells him and Cora that Sandy took eleven stitches in Jerry's hide yesterday afternoon and he was playing this hunch, which he had reason ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... pardon for having intruded upon your family at these hours, I must now tell you that my cousin, Count Melvil, was some time ago so much misrepresented to his mother by certain malicious informers, who delight in sowing discord in private families, that she actually believed her son an extravagant spendthrift, who had not only consumed his remittances in the most riotous scenes of disorder, but also indulged a pernicious appetite for gaming, to such a degree, that he had lost all his clothes and jewels at play. In ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... human creatures had never intruded there before. The swinging grape-vines, the grassy nooks and vistas glimpsed as we swept by, the flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks, and all the spendthrift richness of the forest foliage, were wasted and thrown away there. The chutes were lovely places to steer in; they were deep, except at the head; the current was gentle; under the 'points' the water was absolutely dead, and the invisible banks so bluff that where the tender willow thickets ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... life, in simply worded sketches, with a quiet colouring of humour. These sketches were collected, as "Our Village," into five volumes, between 1824 and 1832. Miss Mitford was born Dec. 16, 1787, at Alresford, Hampshire, England, the daughter of a foolish spendthrift father, to whom she was pathetically devoted, and lived in her native county almost throughout her life. In her later years she received a Civil List pension. She died on January 10, 1855. The quietness of the country is in all Miss Mitford's ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... prominent, indicates ability as an artist, generosity, courageousness, and a poetical nature, apt to be a spendthrift. When not well developed, it indicates cautiousness ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... the other hand, is a fatuous spendthrift of his fortune. He reminds us how close we are of kin to the frolicsome chimpanzee. His attitude was expressed on election night by a young man of Manhattan who shouted hoarsely to ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... commenting upon this extravagant and spendthrift trait in his character, even to Uncle Amazon. Nor would she have spoken to ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper

... disposition. In England a father need not do more for his children than keep them out of the work-house unless he has brought himself under Divorce Jurisdiction; in Germany he is obliged to maintain them in a suitable manner. In England a spendthrift or dipsomaniac can only be controlled when he has spent all his money. In Germany such persons are protected from themselves by the family council. In England an illegitimate child can never be legitimated by the subsequent marriage of the parents. In ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... authorities had charge of it. They doled it out to the growing boy and youth in amounts that could neither spoil nor starve him. It was good for Orville that the guardian had been thus wise and the college authorities thus prudent. He himself was generous and kind-hearted; by nature a spendthrift, but by training just a bit of a miser. He had learned a little about values during these school ...
— The City and the World and Other Stories • Francis Clement Kelley

... man thought he gave good advice to the spendthrift, when he said, "Live like me," who ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... but this inversion of life would not escape the woes of mortality. And there are other considerations, unless it should turn out that a universal tax on land should absolutely change human nature. There are some who would be as idle and spendthrift going towards youth as they now are going away from it, and perhaps more, so that half the race on coming to immaturity would be in child asylums. And then others who would be stingy and greedy and avaricious, and not properly spend their allotted fortune. And we should have the anomaly, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... orgy confined within the limits of a banquet, for he squandered all the powers of soul and body in exhausting all the pleasures of earth. The table was in some sort earth itself, the earth that trembled beneath his feet. He was the last festival of the reckless spendthrift who has thrown all prudence to the winds. The devil had given him the key of the storehouse of human pleasures; he had filled and refilled his hands, and he was fast nearing the bottom. In a moment he had felt all that that enormous ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne

... hour. Shortly after this my uncle, George Gawtrey, the captain, returned from abroad; he took a great fancy to me, and I left my father's house (which had grown insufferable) to live with him. He had been a very handsome man—a gay spendthrift; he had got through his fortune, and now lived on his wits—he was a professed gambler. His easy temper, his lively humour, fascinated me; he knew the world well; and, like all gamblers, was generous ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... world—was what he meant to say. The outside world's a blunder, that is clear; The real world that Nature meant is here. Here every foundling finds its lost mamma; Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa; Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid, The cheats are taken in the traps they laid; One after one the troubles all are past Till the fifth act comes right side up at last, When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and all, Join hands, SO ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... not have begun the day better. She is never the spendthrift that summer is, but once in a while she plunges recklessly into her treasure-store and scatters it broadcast. On this last day of April she was prodigal with her sunshine; out countryward she garnished every field and wood and ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer

... who had first supported Swift had died, a second uncle and his son took up the burden. At one time this cousin sent Swift quite a large sum of money, a fact which seemed to change the nature of the wild young spendthrift, who thereafter remained economical; in fact, he became niggardly in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... is the man who has been tried and found strong and sound? Where is the friend of reason and of knowledge? I see only sceptics and weaklings. I see only prisoners in the durance of the senses, And every fool and every spendthrift Thinks himself as great a master as Aristotle. Think'st thou that they have written poems? Call'st thou that a Song? I call it the cackling of ravens. The zeal of the prophet must free poesy From the embrace of wanton youths. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... profession or occupation he might adopt. But it was and would have been a bagatelle to Eugene though ten times the amount, unless surrounded with conditions as impenetrable as chilled steel to a pewter chisel to resist the seductive ingenuity of his spendthrift nature. ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... virtues he may have; his vices are known to all the world. He is a libertine, a gambler, a rake, a spendthrift. They say he is one of the King's favourites, and that his monstrous extravagances have earned for him the title of 'Magnificent'." He uttered a short laugh. "A fit servant for such a master ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini

... seat. "You've got a heart as big as a house, and I'm proud of you, but no—not a penny of your money. Think a moment! Your father didn't leave the property to me—not any part of it—he left it to you, you spendthrift! When I get too old to work I am going up to Felicia's and pick out an easy-chair and sit in a corner and dry up gradually and be laid away in lavender. No, my lad, not a penny! Gift money should go to cripples and hypochondriacs, ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith

... himself and of his way of life at this time is not one to enlist sympathy for him entirely; but it is not wanting in a note of pathetic sincerity. "For a long time the College at Milan refused to admit me, and during these days I was assuredly a spendthrift and heedless. In body I was weakly, and in estate plundered by thieves on all sides, yet I never grudged money for the buying of books. My residence at Gallarate brought me no profit, for in the ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... heartless longing for profit. Hurry had felt angered at his sufferings, when first liberated, it is true, but that emotion soon disappeared in the habitual love of gold, which he sought with the reckless avidity of a needy spendthrift, rather than with the ceaseless longings of a miser. In short, the motive that urged them both so soon to go against the Hurons, was an habitual contempt of their enemy, acting on the unceasing cupidity of prodigality. The additional chances of success, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... their works, than Charles Churchill. The cleric who first became famous for most unclerical assaults upon the stage, the satirist who could be the most devoted friend, the seducer who could be so loyal to his victim, the spendthrift who could be generous, the cynic who could feel and obey the principles of the purest patriotism, was one of those strangely compounded natures in which each vice was as it were effaced or neutralized by some compensating virtue. It may be fairly urged that while Churchill's virtues were his own, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... of Erebus. He leads us through a haunted world in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of the darkness. Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer who exalts rather than dispirits. His genius moves enlargingly among us, a very spendthrift of treasure—treasure of recollection, observation, imagery, tenderness, and humour. It is a strange thing that it was not until he published Chance that the world in general began to recognize how great a writer was enriching our time. Perhaps his own reserve was partly to blame ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... ease. New thoughts have occurred, other prospects have been contemplated, and my dissatisfaction has increased. You cannot but have remarked that, in the course of human life, most men undergo more than one remarkable change. The sober man becomes a drunkard, the drunkard sober, and the spendthrift sometimes a rational economist: though ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... fair record of the history of nurse Orme. She has the habit of drudging in sick rooms until she accumulates enough capital to lead a gay life for a month or so, after which she resumes nursing in order to replenish her purse. She's a good nurse and a wild spendthrift, but aside from the peculiarity mentioned there's nothing in her career of especial interest. The woman is pretty well known both in New York and Chicago, for she squanders in the first city and saves in the other, but of her early ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum

... I know more than I know now," said Colonel Churchill. "If it's George Lee, Jacqueline, I'll not say a word, sorry as I am for Cary. But if it's Will Allen, I'll see you dead before I give my consent! He's a spendthrift ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... Vernor's natural son were verified, and this discovery tended to account for a considerable deficiency in Clara's fortune, the unhappy father having been tempted to appropriate large sums of money to relieve his spendthrift son's embarrassments. This also served to explain his inflexible determination that Clara should marry Cumberland, such being the only arrangement by which he could hope to prevent ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... that boy of mine a lecture," he said quickly; "he is a perfect spendthrift and prodigal with regard to the midnight oil, and burns both ends of his candle in the ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and elegant pages of Froissart, Hollinshed, Hooker, and Stowe. Infant as I was, I presumed to grapple with masses of learning almost beyond the strength of the giants of history. A spendthrift of my time and labor, I went out of my way to collect materials, and to build for myself, when I should have known that older and abler architects had already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice was built, the quarry exhausted, and that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... their faith in the credit of France unimpaired as they lived on the income of the savings of their industry before they retired. You asked gardeners about business, which you knew was good with that ever-hungry and spendthrift British Army "bulling" the market. One day while taking a walk, Beach Thomas and I saw a diver preparing to go down to examine the abutment of a bridge and we sat down to look on with a lively interest, when we might have seen hundreds of ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... Albany in comfort and safety, or are we really a nation of princes in disguise? Well, I shall never be satisfied with less hereafter," he added. "I am spoilt for ordinary paint and upholstery from this hour; I am a ruinous spendthrift, and a humble three-story swell-front up at the South End is no longer the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... father, you know," Dick went on. "Such rot, to hold a girl responsible for her ancestors! Isn't it rot, now? Father says they're a bad stock, dissipated and arrogant and spendthrift and shiftless and weak—oh, and a lot more! He's not stingy with his adjectives, bless you! Picture to yourself Madge being dissipated and arrogant and—have you seen Madge?" ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... acquaintance there had been transmitted the secret of a drug, capable of altering a man's whole temperament until the antidote was administered. It would turn a coward into a bravo, a miser into a spendthrift, a rake into a fakir. Then, having delivered his manifesto he got up abruptly and ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... cried. "I should have to be a very reckless spendthrift indeed to do that. You forget how dreadfully rich I am. Why these paltry notes are a mere nothing to such a wealth-encumbered unfortunate as I. But I thought the money would be a help to you. And you must take it, ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth

... known. Such a criminal thought does not originate by chance; it is the blossom of a poisonous tree with trunk and branches. Valentine had to tell him all that had happened since Apollonius' return home. It was the story of a wanton, inordinate, pleasure-seeking spendthrift who in spite of the efforts of his better brother had sunk to the level of an ordinary libertine and drunkard; of a faithful brother who, compelled by the necessity of rescuing the honor of business and home, had shouldered the care of everything and as a reward was ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various

... arrest him, if he attempts to leave the state—that is, unless I'm prepared to pay a debt of seven hundred and fifty dollars. I," added the rector, in a broken voice, "a man without a penny in the world—a spendthrift, a muddler, a borrower, a man dependent upon the ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley

... all," commanded my Uncle, the General Robert. "Get vouchers for what you spend and pay with State Department checks. Don't blow in a fortune, you young spendthrift, you, but also remember that the State of Harpeth is one of the richest in America and knows how to show France ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess

... in a bucket, and kept him there six hours, while a malignant mob was storming the tower. I need not say that our ancestor himself scorned to hide from such a rabble, for he was a grown man. The boy lived to be a sad spendthrift, and used the well for cooling his wine. He drank up a great many ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... publications with the greatest attention and discusses them most fully is Rellstab, the editor of the Iris. Unfortunately, he is not at all favourably inclined towards the composer. He occasionally doles out a little praise, but usually shows himself a spendthrift in censure and abuse. His most frequent complaints are that Chopin strives too much after originality, and that his music is unnecessarily difficult for the hands. A few specimens of Rellstab's criticism may not be out of place here. Of the "Mazurkas," ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... in course of time proves to be anything but an assurance of support. Early widowed, the young mother herself may have to earn her children's bread. Or the husband may become crippled, or an invalid, or he may turn out a drunkard and a spendthrift. In any of these circumstances, the responsibility and the burden of supporting the entire family usually falls upon the wife. Is it strange that the group so often drift into undeserved pauperism, sickness and misery, perhaps later on, even ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... won't do to spend your time like Mr. Micawber, in waiting for something to "turn up." To such men one of two things usually "turns up:" the poorhouse or the jail; for idleness breeds bad habits, and clothes a man in rags. The poor spendthrift vagabond says ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum

... was the way in which the ordinary Roman farm was cultivated in the earliest times. The next heirs had no protection against bad management except the right of having the spendthrift who squandered his inherited estate placed under wardship as if he were a lunatic.(12) Women moreover were in substance divested of their personal right of disposal, and, if they married, a member of the same clan was ordinarily assigned as husband, in ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... now, like the spendthrift forsaken, By those whom his bounty had blest, All empty, and cold, and despairing, It shrinks in ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... most important point of English introduction, and I would fain hope that you may take some interest in this person as we proceed, you should be told, that he is the second son of the only brother of a bachelor squire of very large estate in Yorkshire; his father, a profligate and spendthrift living at Boulogne, while he and his brother are adopted by the uncle. His poor broken-hearted mother has slept sweetly for many years near the village church where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... The spendthrift does not take into consideration the fact that good sense, thrift and industry, must aid his mental assertion of wealth, and the miracle lover does not understand that something greater and more difficult is required ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... the best of sons, Roland," she replied, "and a good husband, and a good father. Only one little fault in my good son: too spendthrift, too lavish. You are not a fine, rich lord, with large lands, and much, very much money, my boy. I do my best in the house; but women can only save pennies, while men fling ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... back of the chair she had vacated a vicious blow with his open hand. "No, you spendthrift! All there was TO your grandfather when you buried him was a basket full of distillery stock, I tell you! Old paper! Can't you hear ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington

... elaborate; no ristorante could have equaled it, no one but a spendthrift lover like Martel would have furnished it. But it was not until darkness came and the trees began to twinkle and glow with their myriad lights that the fun reached its highest pitch. Then there was true Sicilian ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... have been vastly accelerated by his civil wars and those which followed them. And, while the honest country class was dying out, the town class was ever plunging deeper into frivolity and voluptuousness. To defray the cost of the sumptuous life of the capital the fashionable spendthrift was forced to resort to extortion in the provinces, which, as we have seen, became so crying an evil that a permanent court existed for dealing with it before the time of Sulla. The greedy throve on usury, or involved the State in war, to fill their own purses. The fortunes ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley

... typical evening of a spendthrift in a city to (a) a poor man, (b) a miser, (c) the spendthrift's mother, (d) his employer, (e) a detective who suspects him ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... London in 1788. His father was a reckless, dissipated spendthrift, who deserted his wife and child. Mrs. Byron convulsively clasped her son to her one moment and threw the scissors and tongs at him the next, calling him "the lame brat," in reference to his club foot. Such treatment drew neither respect nor obedience ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... and gave him ginger-cakes. The dear boys grew from year to year. They outgrew their knickerbockers, and had trousers. They outgrew their jackets, and became men; and I felt that I had not lived in vain. I had conquered nature. Pompey, the little spendthrift, was the honored cashier of a savings-bank, till he ran away with the capital. Julius, the miser, became the chief croupier at the New Crockford's. One of those boys is now in Botany Bay, and the other is ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... I to say? He is a timid, cautious man. They have frightened him about this trumpery necklace, and he is behaving badly. But he will make a good husband. He is not a spendthrift. He has rank. All his people are respectable. As Lady Fawn, any house in England will be open to you. He is not rich, but together ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... to unnecessary words. My mother's vileness and Aegisthus' waste, Draining and squandering with spendthrift hand Our patrimony, tell me not anew. Such talk might stifle opportunity. But teach me, as befits the present need, What place may serve by lurking vigilance Or sudden apparition to o'erwhelm Our foes in the adventure of to-day. And, when we pass within, ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles

... what the rest of the world does not seem to see so clearly; viz., that the piling up of increased forces opposite entrenched positions is a spendthrift, unscientific proceeding. He wishes to know if I mean to do this. To draw me out he assumes if I get the troops, I would at once commit them to trench warfare by crowding them in behind the lines of Helles or Anzac. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton

... "O you spendthrift!" she cries and tears the flowers from my hand in order to pirouette with them before the mirror. And then she assumes a solemn expression and takes me by a coat button, draws me nearer and says: "So, and now you may kiss ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann

... dangerous woman, monsieur," added his companion; "a fearful spendthrift, but with no inclination to return generously what is done for her. I can speak knowingly of that; when she first arrived here from Berlin, six months ago, she was very ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... already shown by his refusal to take a province, after his praetorship and consulship, was increased by the inclination of his daughter Tullia, then a widow, to marry again.[5] During his absence she married the profligate spendthrift, P. Cornelius Dolabella. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... he did not see him any more than I did. Drimdarroch, by all accounts, was a spendthrift, a player, a bavard, his great friends, Glengarry and ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... counteracted in his mind the effects of his late study. All the generous feelings which were so congenial to his own nature, and which he had seen combined in Tom Jones, as if necessarily, with the habits of an adventurer, a spendthrift, and a rake, he now saw united with high moral and religious principles, in the character of a man of virtue, as well as a man of honour; a man of cultivated Understanding, and accomplished manners. In Sir Charles Grandison's history, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... no difference, because you know you would have chosen me anyhow; but most girls would make a nice business of it. How are they to know what men really are? They might be gamesters, drunkards, brutal and cruel by nature, idle and spendthrift. What can maidens know of a man's disposition? Of course they only see him at his best. Wise parents can make careful inquiries, and have means of knowing what a man's disposition and habits ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... the orator must step backward. In the opposite state he moves forward. Let us apply this law: A spendthrift officer meets his landlord, whom he has not yet paid, and greets him with an—"Ah, good day, sir!" What will be his movement? It must be retroactive. In the joy of seeing a friend again, as also in fright, we start back from the object loved or ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... is sublime. Trees, as Jefferies says, "throw away handfuls of flower; and in the meadows the careless, spendthrift ways of grass and flower and all things are not to be expressed. Seeds by the hundred million float with absolute indifference on the air. The oak has a hundred thousand more leaves than necessary, and never hides a single acorn. Nothing utilitarian—everything on a scale of splendid waste. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... authority than the smell of roast meat, and reckoning happiness by the blood of Lacedaemonian sea-snails! There was Gniphon the usurer, too, bitterly reproaching himself for having died without ever knowing the taste of wealth, leaving all his money to his nearest relation and heir-at-law, the spendthrift Rhodochares, when he might have had the ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... perdition. And rank? I never smelt anything like it. It withered a cactus that stood lifting its prickly hands aloft beside the trail. It even woke up my horse. I said I would take that. It cost me a franc, a Russian kopek, a brass button, and a slate pencil; and my spendthrift lavishness so won upon the son of the desert that he passed over his pouch of most unspeakably villainous tobacco to me as a free gift. What a pipe it was, to be sure! It had a rude brass-wire cover to it, and a little ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... travelled on for miles, but no village nor one human face did we see. Far in the distance a thin wreath of smoke curled upward; but it came from no hearth; it arose from one of those field-fires by which spendthrift husbandry cultivates the ground. It was, indeed, sad; and yet, I know not how, it spoke more home to my heart than all the brilliant display and all the voluptuous splendor I had witnessed in London. By degrees some traces of wood made their appearance, and as we descended ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... proper to be done, and guiding himself only by sudden inspirations. In other respects, a general in the field of battle alone, he was destitute of foresight in the management of any affairs, either public or private, a notorious spendthrift, and, what is rare, not less upright ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... the poet takes The golden spendthrift's trail among the blooms Where she stands tossing silver in the lakes, And twisting bright swift threads on airy looms. Her ring the poppy snatches, and the rose With laughter plunders all her gusty plumes. The poet gleans and gathers as she goes Heedless ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... presentation, is a sine qua non. Aiming primarily at this, the mountaineer says of an impudent man, "He has as much shame as an egg has hair;" of a garrulous one, "He has no bone in his tongue" or "His tongue is always wet;" of a spendthrift, "Water does not stand on a hillside;" and of a noble family in reduced circumstances, "It is a decayed rag, but it is silk." All these metaphors are clear, vivid and forcible, and the list of such ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... continued to increase with the appearance of morning; and here might be seen the abandoned profligate, with his licentious female companion, completing the night's debauch by the free use of intoxicating liquors—the ruined spendthrift, fresh from the gaming-table, loudly calling for wine, to drown the remembrance of his folly, and abusing the drowsy waiter only to give utterance to his irritated feelings. In a snug corner might be seen a party of sober, quiet-looking gentlemen, taking their lobster ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... the man himself was at least as important as his work. "As to his talk" — I quote again from Mr. Somerset — "he was a spendthrift. I mean that he never saved anything up as those writer fellows so often do. He was quite inconsequent and just rippled on, but was always ready to attack a careless thinker. On the other hand, he was extremely ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke

... Stillinghast, looking annoyed. "One sister ran off—married a papist—died, and left you on my hands. I was about sending you off again, when news came that your father had died on his voyage home from Canton, and been buried in the deep: so here you stayed. Brother—spendthrift, shiftless, improvident—marries a West Indian papist; turns one; dies with his wife, or, at least, soon after her leaving another ne'er-do-weel on my hands. I wish you'd all gone to purgatory together. To be shut up in my old days with two wild ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey

... Sheridan, however, still questioned the correctness of the figures; and on the 3rd of June he moved forty resolutions, calculated to discredit the management of the finances, and to show that he could have taken—spendthrift as he was—better care of the public money. These resolutions were all rejected; and ministers brought forward sixteen counter resolutions, which went to prove that the finances had never been so well managed before, and that there was every prospect, not only ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... the students of Bryn Mawr College with the justifiable ambition to see this great actress in all her finer roles. Those who had money spent it royally. Those who had none offered their possessions,—books, ornaments, tea-cups, for sale. "Such a chance to buy bargains," observed one young spendthrift, who had been endeavouring to dispose of all she needed most; "but unluckily everybody wants to sell. We know now the importance of the consuming classes, and how useful in their modest way some idle rich ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... paper on the subject in the Journal of Philology, vi., 189-95, points out that the same story occurs in the Masnavi of the Persian port Jalaluddin, whose floruit is 1260 A.D. Here a young spendthrift of Bagdad is warned in a dream to repair to Cairo, with the usual result of being ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various

... honest, and with a strict regard for the rights of others, living moreover on a mere pittance, for the greater part of his life, this conscientious divine never contracted a debt he could not pay. What rendered this caution more worthy of remark, was the fact that he had a spendthrift son; but, even Rupert could never lure him into any weakness of this sort. I question if his actual cash receipts, independently of the profits of his little glebe, exceeded $300 in any one year; yet, he and his children were ever well-dressed, ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper

... to himself, they who have once been justly celebrated, imagine that they still have the same pretensions to regard, and seldom perceive the diminution of their character while there is time to recover it. Nothing then remains but murmurs and remorse; for if the spendthrift's poverty be embittered by the reflection that he once was rich, how must the idler's obscurity be clouded by remembering ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... defrayed. This Mr. Hodge boggled at for awhile; but, seeing me Resolute he gave way, and at last said that there was no need for me to trouble with going to the Goldsmith in London to get the Draft changed—"If, indeed," says he, "the unhappy young spendthrift be not proclaimed a Bankrupt before I get this slip of paper cashed;" and that having a small store of Gold by him, he would give me the Ten Pound down, together with a couple of Pieces to bear my Expenses to the Town. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... of the robbery in the remote corral, Chamorra exhibited the arrogance of a lion, granting his accomplice a few copper coins. This must be enough for the moment. He did this for Magdalena's own good, as Magdalena was such a spendthrift. Later he would ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... three who amused the company particularly; the festive mob followed them as they moved, and their bon-mots were applauded and repeated by all the best, that is to say, the most fashionable male and female judges of wit. The three distinguished characters were a spendthrift, a bailiff, and a dun. The spendthrift was supported with great spirit and truth by Colonel Pembroke, and two of his companions were great and correct in the parts of the bailiff and the dun. The happy idea of appearing in these characters this ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... Party, the spendthrift heir of the Tractarians, which, with little of the intellectual force that gave so signal a power to the Oxford Movement, endeavours to make up for that sad if not fatal deficiency by an almost inexhaustible credulity, a marked ability in superstitious ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... seemed to increase each time that she passed before a table on which were displayed a number of jewel-boxes and caskets, all open, and nearly all empty. Since the Easter festival of the preceding year, the caprices and necessities of this spendthrift beauty had abstracted one by one the rich kernels from these now worthless husks, and the recollection of the follies, or worse, in which their value had been squandered, now came to aggravate the vexation which the want of the jewels occasioned her. So absorbed was she in the consideration ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... the noon sets in! Gentlemen even in jollity— Certainly people of quality!— Waifs and estrays no less, Roofless and penniless, They are the wayside strummers Whose lips are man's renown, Those wayward brats of Summer's Who stroll from town to town; Spendthrift of life, they ravish The days of an endless store, And ever the more they lavish The heap of the hoard is more. For joy and love and vision Are alive and breed and stay When dust shall hold in derision The misers of ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey

... "and a spendthrift. A man who would have his friends, and possibly his enemies, among a ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... from Gunter's. Adulation!—why, the people who come to you give as good parties as you do. Respect!—the very menials, who wait behind your supper-table, waited at a duke's yesterday, and actually patronise you! O you silly spendthrift! you can buy flattery for twopence, and you spend ever so much money in entertaining your equals and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... wealthy days, while he was spending his money, was a man of this sort a whit more good to the State for the purposes of citizenship? Or did he only seem to be a member of the ruling body, although in truth he was neither ruler nor subject, but just a spendthrift? ...
— The Republic • Plato

... Fontainebleau roaming the midnight forest with Alfred de Musset, or wintering with her dying musician among the mountains of Palma; Gerard de Nerval, wanderer, poet, and suicide; Alfred de Musset flaming into verse at dead of night amid an answering and spendthrift blaze of wax candles; Baudelaire's blasphemies and eccentricities—these characters and incidents Barbier wove into endless highly coloured tales, to which ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the late King, came to the throne in his fifty-eighth year; but, owing to his father's insanity, he had virtually been King for nearly ten years (S567). His habits of life had made him a selfish, dissolute spendthrift, who, like Charles II, cared only for pleasure. Though while Prince of Wales he had received for many years an income upwards of 100,000 pounds, which was largely increased at a later period, yet he was always ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... the throstle pour his heart away, A happy spendthrift of uncounted gold, Swinging upon a blossomed briar With soft throat lifted in a wild desire To make the world his may. Ever the pageant through the gates is rolled Further away; in vain the rich notes throng Flooding the mellow noon with wave ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... young Sir Grant, reigning in the old baronet's stead, deemed himself generous in making the family scapegrace any provision at all. Yet such were the outlines of Mr. Musselwhite's history. Had he been the commonplace spendthrift, one knows pretty well on what lines his subsequent life would have run; but poor Mr. Musselwhite was at heart a domestic creature. Exiled from his home, he wandered in melancholy, year after year, round a circle of continental resorts, never seeking relief in dissipation, never discovering ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing

... replied Dr. Leete. "But if extraordinary expenses should exhaust it, we can obtain a limited advance on the next year's credit, though this practice is not encouraged, and a heavy discount is charged to check it. Of course if a man showed himself a reckless spendthrift he would receive his allowance monthly or weekly instead of yearly, or if necessary not be permitted to ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... surface it would appear that unselfishness was the key to her character. That was impossible; she had lived too long alone. Yet Geraldine was clearly not acquisitive; though, when she did buy, her careless extravagance worried Kathleen. Spendthrift—in that she cared nothing for the money value of anything—her bright, piquant, eager face was a welcome sight to the thrifty metropolitan shopkeeper at Christmas-tide. A delicate madness for giving obsessed her; she ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... cast yourself, as you call it, at that good-for-nothing young spendthrift's head fast enough ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron

... was anything remaining to be seen of these miserable relics. This auction, however, the heirs of Lucius Rubrius prevented from proceeding, being armed with a decree of Caesar to that effect. The spendthrift was embarrassed. He did not know which way to turn. It was at this very time that an assassin sent by him was said to have been detected with a dagger in the house of Caesar. And of this Caesar himself complained in the senate, inveighing openly against you. Caesar departs ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... aware that I should only squander it upon some new Blanche, and spend another three weeks in Paris after buying a pair of horses which had cost sixteen thousand francs. No, I never believed myself to be a hoarder; in fact, I knew only too well that I was a spendthrift. And already, with a sort of fear, a sort of sinking in my heart, I could hear the cries of the croupiers—"Trente et un, rouge, impair et passe," "Quarte, noir, pair et manque." How greedily I gazed upon the gaming-table, with its scattered louis d'or, ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... Sebastian Serrano Shakespeare Sheridan Sibbern Sickness unto Death Signe's Story Sigurd Slembe Slesvig Snoilsky, Carl Snorre Socrates Sofus Sommer, Major Sophocles Soul after Death, A Spang, Pastor Spang, The Sisters Spencer, Herbert Spendthrift, A Spinoza Stebbins Steen, Bookseller Stockholm Stuart, Mary Student, The Studies in Aesthetics Style, Le Subjection of Women Supplice d'une Femme, Le Swiss Peasant ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... the dinner the padre had watched and listened. Faces were generally books to him, and he read in this young man's face many things that pleased him. This was no night rover, a fool over wine and women, a spendthrift. He straightened out the lines and angles in a man's face as a skilled mathematician elucidates an intricate geometrical problem. He had arrived at the basic knowledge that men who live mostly out of doors are not volatile and irresponsible, but are more inclined to reserve, to reticence, to ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath

... clumsy hand which now unlocked the dyke; and like a flood, tall and resistless, came the recollection of their far-off past and of its least dear trifle, of all the aspirations and absurdities and splendors of their common youth, and found him in its path, a painted fellow, a spendthrift king of the mode, a most notable authority upon the set of a peruke, a penniless, spent connoisseur ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... should be common knowledge: they are (with Du Bellay's) the evident original upon which the author of Shakespeare's Sonnets modelled his work: they are the late and careful effort of Ronsard's somewhat spendthrift genius. ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... depart.' When the man got home he found the purse filled with dollars; and by virtue of its magical property he became the richest man in the parish. As soon as he found the purse always full, whatever he took out of it, he began to live in a spendthrift manner, and frequented the alehouse. One evening as he sat there he beheld the stranger, with a bottle in his hand, going round and gathering the drops which the guests shook from time to time out ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... mastery over language? They are introduced to a vocabulary of some hundred thousand words, which quiver through a million of meanings; the wealth is theirs for the taking, and they are encouraged to be spendthrift by the very excess of what they inherit. The resources of the tongue they speak are subtler and more various than ever their ideas can put to use. So begins the process of assimilation, the edge put upon words by the craftsman is blunted by the rough treatment of the ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh

... which special customs and rules prevail. Little bread is eaten, the Abyssinian preferring a thin cake of durra meal or teE, kneaded with water and exposed to the sun till the dough begins to rise, when it is baked. Salt is a luxury; "he eats salt'' being said of a spendthrift. Bars of rock-salt, after serving as coins, are, when broken up, used as food. There is a general looseness of morals: marriage is a very slight tie, which can be dissolved at any time by either husband or wife. Polygamy is by no means uncommon. Hence there is ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Nemours, they were seized (in spite of the political events which were just then weighing so heavily on Brie and on the Gatinais) with a devouring curiosity, which was not surprising. Was he rich? Economical or spendthrift? Would he leave a fine fortune or nothing? Was his property in annuities? In the end they found out what follows, but only by taking infinite pains and employing ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac

... not misjudge you, Jurgen. Instead, for the first time I judge both of us. You I forgive, because I love you, but myself I do not forgive, and I cannot ever forgive, for having been a spendthrift fool." ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... Italy. Mingled grass and corn grew in her plains, the unpruned vines threw their luxuriant branches around the elms. The grapes, overripe, had fallen on the ground, or hung purple, or burnished green, among the red and yellow leaves. The ears of standing corn winnowed to emptiness by the spendthrift winds; the fallen foliage of the trees, the weed-grown brooks, the dusky olive, now spotted with its blackened fruit; the chestnuts, to which the squirrel only was harvest-man; all plenty, and yet, alas! all poverty, painted in wondrous hues and fantastic groupings ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... the criticism of Weber's edition of Ford, and another of those critical surveys of the course of English literature which Jeffrey was so fond of doing, and which he did so well, together with some remarks on the magnificently spendthrift style of our Elizabethan dramatists which would deserve almost the first place in an anthology of his critical beauties. The paper on Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare (Hazlitt was an Edinburgh reviewer, and his biographer, not Jeffrey's, has chronicled a remarkable piece ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... skylark, singing sweet and clear, Beg the cold world to hear? Rather he sings for very rapture of singing, At dawn, or in the blue, mild Summer noon, Knowing that, late or soon, His wealth of beauty, and his high notes, ringing Above the earth, will make some heart rejoice. He sings, albeit alone, Spendthrift of each pure tone, Hoarding no single song, No cadence wild and strong. But one day, from a friend far overseas, As if upon the breeze, There came the teeming wonder of his words — A golden troop of birds, Caged in a little volume ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse



Words linked to "Spendthrift" :   scattergood, squanderer, extravagant, prodigal, wasteful, big spender, high roller, profligate, spendthrift trust, spend-all, spender



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com