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Beggarly

adjective
1.
Marked by poverty befitting a beggar.  Synonym: mean.  "A mean hut"
2.
(used of sums of money) so small in amount as to deserve contempt.  Synonym: mean.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Beggarly" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the revolutionary McSpadden rose to the occasion, and he replied with fervor, "Out of my house, the whole beggarly tribe of you! I was beguiled by the books, but shall never be beguiled again —once is sufficient for me." And turning to William he shouted, "Yes, you did save my, wife's life, and the next man that does it shall ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... up the coarse gray knitting which was the sole unanchored circumstance in the room and casting off her heel viciously. "What call had you to adopt a daughter—you with never a wife to mother her nor a house of your own to take her to? For I reckon nowt of your furnished houses here and your beggarly apartments there, as you know. And now you can do nothing better than bring her here to fash the life out of me before the week's over! But that's always the way with you men. You talk precious big, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... to most people unintelligible mysticism. With the splendid exception of Goethe, hardly any one saw at that time what Carlyle was. He was too transcendental for The Edinburgh Review, to which he had occasionally contributed, and the payment for Sartor in Fraser's Magazine was beggarly.* For some years after his marriage in 1826 Carlyle was within measurable distance of starvation. Jeffrey had to explain to him, or did explain to him, that he was unfit for any public employment. He could not dig. To beg he was ashamed. When his father died in 1832 he refused ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... is no resisting the frigate, I comply.—Lieutenant Blink, I am ready. Adieu! Don Sereno, and Madre de Dios protect you? You have been a most gentlemanly friend and captain to me. I hope you will yet thrash your beggarly foes." ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... represented by the Grei kaminoi of Homer. The old hag was in a pitiful bad plight and condition in matter of the outward state and complexion of her body, the ragged and tattered equipage of her person in the point of accoutrement, and beggarly poor provision of fare for her diet and entertainment; for she was ill apparelled, worse nourished, toothless, blear-eyed, crook-shouldered, snotty, her nose still dropping, and herself still drooping, faint, and pithless; whilst in this woefully ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... of this beggarly life, going about from pillar to post, living in wretched Continental hotels, with no ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... a kind of beggarly princes in Europe, not able to make war by themselves, who hire out their troops to richer nations, for so much a day to each man; of which they keep three-fourths to themselves, and it is the best part of their maintenance: such are those in many ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift

... the sleep, comes this little vagabond, may it please your highness, who while he pretends to offer me my coffee, takes him my finger, and slips off this precious ring, which he now wears upon his beggarly paw, and will not restore to me ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... dress had caught the old man's eye, and remembering that Gabinius the curiosity-dealer had that very morning been to him to enquire whether Arsinoe were not in fact one of his work-girls, and to repeat his statement that her father was a beggarly toady, full of haughty airs, whose curiosities, of which he contemptuously mentioned a few, were worth nothing, Plutarch was hastily asking himself how he could best defend his pretty protege against the envious tongues of her rivals; for many spiteful speeches of theirs had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... full revenge by letting his condition plead for him, intimating who had caused it. 'Take my colt, gipsy, then,' said young Earnshaw. 'And I pray that he may break your neck; take him and be damned, you beggarly interloper! and wheedle my father out of all he has: only afterwards show him what you are, imp of Satan. And take that; I hope he'll kick ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... of sympathy do I get from mortal. There, read that letter from Spens, and see what you make of it. Impudent? uncalled for? I should think so; but I really do wonder what these lawyers are coming to. Soon there'll be no distinctions between man and man anywhere, when a beggarly country lawyer dares to write to a gentleman like myself in that strain. But read the letter, Frances; you'll have to see Spens this afternoon. I'm ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade

... "and this thought has been a blessed inspiration to my life. When I come in contact with Christless prejudices, I feel that my life is too much a part of the Divine plan, and invested with too much intrinsic worth, for me to be the least humiliated by indignities that beggarly souls can inflict. I feel more pitiful than resentful to those who do not know how much they miss by living ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... but poorly furnished, and Mr. Farmiloe had engaged a very cheap general servant, who involved him in dirt and discomfort. It was a matter of talk among the neighbouring tradesmen that the chemist lived in a beggarly fashion. When the dismissed errand-boy spread the story of how he had been used, people jumped to the conclusion that Mr. Farmiloe drank. Before long there was a legend that he had been suffering from an acute attack of ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... you not see, Lady Agnes, it is the only way to free your house of this stumbling-block—this beggarly upstart Eustace—who, as long as he lives, will never acknowledge Fulk's rights, and would bring up his nephew to ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge

... "Cursed red-coat!—common, beggarly soldier! How can you, an Hidalgo of the best blue blood, whose ancestors were settled here before the English robbers stole the fortress—before the English?—before the Moors! You, an Hidalgo, to take up ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths

... impossible wholly to neutralize their effect. Some of the Mormons even took squaws for spiritual wives; and in all the settlements, from Provo to the Santa Clara, there are scores of half-breed children, acknowledging half-a-dozen mothers, some white, some red. The Utahs, though a beggarly, are a docile tribe. Several Government farms have now been established among them, and they display more than ordinary aptitude for work. But they require to be spurred to regular labor. None of the charges which have been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... painting have been employed on most ignoble objects—on scourgers and hangmen, on beggarly enthusiasts and base impostors. Look at the two masterpieces of the pencil; the Transfiguration of Raphael, and the St. Jerome of Correggio; [102] can any thing be more incongruous, any thing more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various

... heart of Burns failed him at last,—failed him because, enfeebled by disease and incapacitated from performing his excise duties, his salary, which had never exceeded seventy pounds a year, was reduced to half that beggarly sum; because he was so distressed for money that he was obliged to solicit a loan of a one-pound note from a friend: failed him, poor heart, because it was broken! He took to his bed for the last time on July 21st, 1796, and two days later, surrounded by his little family, he passed away in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... all about that, don't we, old boy? Not that any beggarly civilian is going to join this noble fellowship, is he? The more he keeps his distance the better we shall be pleased. And the lady of our ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier

... it that way. For you had the same sad, hungered look the first time I saw you—when you came into Milligan's in that beggarly disguise." ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand

... of their customers, as in Europe, they are continually running about the streets with the tools of their respective trades, offering their services, and, as it were, begging employment. The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton, many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing-boats upon the rivers and ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... the most wretched tone he could assume; "I mean that my cousin loves another fellow, an Englishman, who has not a single penny which he can call his own, a wretched cur, a beggarly fortune-hunter. I fancy I can see him. He is one of those fellows who walk bearing all their fortunes on their backs. He was dressed in faultless evening dress; light kid gloves, patent leather boots, and a tall silk hat." (This was all false.) "If ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel

... Bishop Burnet tells us, that the Presbyterians, in the fanatic times, professed themselves to be above morality; which, as we find in some of their writings, was numbered among the "beggarly elements"; and accordingly at this day, no scruples of conscience with regard to conformity, are in any trade or calling, inconsistent with the greatest fraud, oppression, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift

... Martin's mind she would have felt a considerable amount of surprise. The worthy grocer, although an excellent man of business, knew little or nothing about law. Maggie's words had made him distinctly uncomfortable. Suppose, after all, the girl could claim a right in her father's beggarly hundred and fifty pounds a year? Perhaps the child of the man who had settled that little income on his wife must have some sort of right to it? It would be horrible to consult lawyers; they ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade

... of the Indians, said to have numbered a hundred and fifty, into a swamp, leaving behind them guns, blankets, hatchets, spears, and other things, valued at forty pounds, old tenor,—which, says the chronicle, "was reckoned a great booty for such beggarly enemies." [Footnote: Saunderson, History of Charlestown, N. H., 29. Doolittle, Narrative of Mischief done by the Indian Enemy,—a ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman

... he did Hugh, he'll find he has made the biggest mistake of his life. It is nothing but a blackmailing scheme, and I've more than half a mind to sift the whole matter to the bottom and land that beggarly ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour

... rather hard, if such a contingency were possible," replied the surgeon, coolly; "but we don't mean to drop from forty thousand to two hundred. The generous old uncle may choose to draw his purse-strings, and cast us off to 'beggarly divorcement,' as Desdemona remarks; but we don't mean to let him have his own way. We must take things quietly, and manage matters with a little tact. You want my advice, I ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... with a beggarly feeling of having exhausted our adjectives is a large comfortable building not very much like one's idea of a castle. We drove up to the rear entrance—it is always prudent to take the lowest room—and waited on the car while a messenger was despatched ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall

... "Some beggarly two hundred pounds a year, I suppose. Not that I mean to say you should not be glad to have it," he added, thus correcting the impression which his words might otherwise have made. "As you have been so long getting it, it will be better to ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... is that we should only carry a beggarly little dirk," said Bob Roberts to himself, as he tried to look sneeringly at the young ensign before him; for the latter came across the deck with rather a swaggering stride, and ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn

... the New Zealand fleet on its way to explore the ruins of London, undertake, after fifty years of examination, to reconstruct in a catalogue the flora and fauna of our day, that is, from the close of the glacial period to the present time. With all the advantages of a surface exploration, what a beggarly account it would be! How many of the land animals and plants which are enumerated in the Massachusetts official reports would it ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... think 'tis but a beggarly inheritance I have here in the Blue Mountains," said she, and sitting down on a haycock, she began chatting with him. "But we've four such saetar[2] as this, and what I inherit from my mother is twelve times ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie

... to hear you, Mr. Chainmail, talking of the religious charity of a set of lazy monks and beggarly friars, who were much more occupied with taking than giving; of whom those who were in earnest did nothing but make themselves and everybody about them miserable with fastings and penances, and other such trash; ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... guidance! What had society to say to him? Be submissive and be honest. If you rebel I shall kill you. If you steal I shall imprison you. But if you suffer I have nothing for you—nothing except perhaps a beggarly dole of bread—but no consolation for your trouble, no respect for your manhood, no pity for the sorrows of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... Miss Verinder, for breaking your promise to my son! I know it as certainly as if you had confessed it in so many words. Your cursed family pride is insulting Godfrey, as it insulted ME when I married your aunt. Her family—her beggarly family—turned their backs on her for marrying an honest man, who had made his own place and won his own fortune. I had no ancestors. I wasn't descended from a set of cut-throat scoundrels who lived by robbery and murder. I couldn't point ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... nothing for you. Do you hear that, my man? Nothing! You taught me that blood is not thicker than water twelve years ago, when you married Tom Halliday's widow, and drew your purse-strings, after flinging me a beggarly hundred as you'd throw a bone to a dog. You made me understand that was all I should ever get out of your brotherly love, or your fear of my telling the world what I knew. You gave me a dinner now and then, because it suited you ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... its professors invite us to watch the breaking down of the middle wall of partition between matter and spirit, they have, in my opinion, ceased to be scientific, and are in reality hankering after the beggarly elements ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... exclaimed, "though you shut me in up-stairs to burrow out of sight. By Jove! as if I were not good enough to face your Carlingford patients. I've had a better practice in my day than ever you'll see, my fine fellow, with your beggarly M.R.C.S. And you'd have me shut myself up in my garret into the bargain! You're ashamed of me, forsooth! You can go spending money on that rubbish there, and can't pay a tailor's bill for your elder brother; and as for introducing me in this wretched hole of a place, and letting me pick up a little ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... for me;' for I tell thee, heaven is prepared for whosoever will accept of it, and they shall be entertained with hearty good welcome. Consider therefore, that as bad as thou have got thither. Thither, went scrubbed beggarly Lazarus, &c. Nay, it is prepared for the poor. "Hearken, my beloved brethren," saith James; that is, take notice of it, "Hath not God chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom?" Therefore, take heart, and ...
— The Heavenly Footman • John Bunyan

... herself so, as many highwaymen, after having no possibility of retrieving the character of honesty, please themselves with that of being generous, because, whatever they get on the road, they always spend at the next ale-house, and are still as beggarly as ever. Her history, rightly considered, would be more instructive to young women than any sermon I know. They may see there what mortifications and variety of misery are the unavoidable consequences of gallantries. I think there is no rational creature that would not prefer the ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville

... I lay it before you.—Now, sir, with these materials I set out a raw-boned stripling fra the north, to try my fortune with them here in the south; and my first step intill the world was, a beggarly clerkship in Sawney Gordon's counting house, here in the city of London, which you'll say afforded but a barren sort of ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin

... to any dispassionate thinker. The beauty of my procedure seemed to consist in its perfect quietness. There was no vulgar bullying, no bravado of any sort, no choleric hectoring, and striding to and fro across the apartment, jerking out vehement commands for Bartleby to bundle himself off with his beggarly traps. Nothing of the kind. Without loudly bidding Bartleby depart—as an inferior genius might have done—I assumed the ground that depart he must; and upon that assumption built all I had to say. The more I thought over my procedure, the more I was charmed with it. Nevertheless, next morning, ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville

... been peculiar to him, and which Jesus moreover appears to have planned with the express[5] purpose of assimilating himself to the lowly king here described. Yet such an isolated act is surely a carnal and beggarly fulfilment. To ride on an ass is no mark of humility in those who must ordinarily go on foot. The prophet clearly means that the righteous king is not to ride on a warhorse and trust in cavalry, as Solomon and the Egyptians, (see Ps. xx. 7. Is. xxxi. 1-3, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... me?" cried Thomas, his anger rising at his wife's opposition. "What has the drink done for us, I'd like to know? What's it done with my wage, with our Betty's wage, with our poor Sammul's wage? Why, it's just swallowed all up, and paid us back in dirt and rags. Where's there such a beggarly house as this in all the village? Why haven't we clothes to our backs and shoes to our feet? It's because the ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson

... to the station in writhing pain, as the police could not well be expected to wait until the invalids were cured of their chronic ailments. Eye-witnesses will never forget one bitterly cold night in January, 1892. Crowds of Jews dressed in beggarly fashion, among them women, children, and old men, with remnants of their household belongings lying around them, filled the station of the Brest railroad. Threatened by police convoy and transportation prison and having failed to obtain ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... think that flattering, but I confess it seems to me a beggarly compliment (as men's ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... such language for his disapproval as Johnson? "Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality: a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death." It is at once as devastating as a volcano and as neat as a formal garden. So, in a smaller way, is his criticism of a smaller man. Dr. Adams, talking of Newton, Bishop of Bristol, whom Johnson disliked, once said, "I ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey

... wrinkled and buttonless, his clothing frayed and unbrushed, he was an impersonation of failure. He had gone into the legislature with a desperate hope of somehow finding money in it, and as yet he had discovered nothing more than his beggarly three dollars a day, and he felt himself more than ever a failure. No wonder that he wore an air of profound depression, approaching to absolute wretchedness ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... to forsake the world and attach himself to His person and purposes, if any such consideration had entered his mind. No, the sorrow, the deep, deep sorrow and sadness, with which he went away to the beggarly elements of his houses and his lands, proves that he knew too well that this wonderful Being who was working miracles, and speaking words of wisdom that never man spake, had indeed authority and right to say to him, and to every other man, "Go and sell that thou hast, and ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... the old masters and let their schools go, rather than neglect any possible master of your own time. Above all, I would not have any one read an old author merely that he might not be ignorant of him; that is most beggarly, and no good can come of it. When literature becomes a duty it ceases to be a passion, and all the schoolmastering in the world, solemnly addressed to the conscience, cannot make the fact otherwise. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... merchants of the North, will do it. It is money, sir, money," he continued, unconsciously rattling the coin in his breeches pocket, "that settles every question at the present day, and our money will bring these beggarly rebels to their senses. They can't do without us, sir. They would be ruined in six months, if shut out from commercial intercourse with ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood

... to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured at the printing office, which pro ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... his countryman and superior, and begged that he would suffer the "head-man" of our caravan to dwell in a house alone. But the impudent parvenu sneered at my advice; "he knew no such person as Ali-Ninpha, and cared not a snap of his finger for a Fullah chief, or a beggarly white man!" ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... isn't it? I assure you I go on the most approved principles. I divide our available money among the greatest number of hungry claimants it will stretch to. But, after all, it goes a beggarly ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... overrun. New England was practically safe, although the British held Newport; and all the country south of the Delaware was free from them. The perplexities and discouragements of Washington were great indeed, while he stubbornly held the field with a beggarly makeshift for an army and sturdily continued his appeals to Congress and to the country for men, arms, and clothing; yet only New York City and New Jersey were really in the possession of the enemy. It was one thing for England to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... foot of Mount Carmel, Haifa, with its wall and Saracenic town in ruin on the hill above, grew more clear and bright in the sun, while Acre dipped into the blue of the Mediterranean. The town of Haifa, the ancient Caiapha, is small, dirty, and beggarly looking; but it has some commerce, sharing the trade of Acre in the productions of Syria. It was Sunday, and all the Consular flags were flying. It was an unexpected delight to find the American colors in this little ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... they made no part of his brother Moss's farm, strongly contributed to his dissatisfaction with that unlucky agriculturist. If this wasn't Moss's fallow, it might have been; Basset was all alike; it was a beggarly parish, in Mr. Tulliver's opinion, and his opinion was certainly not groundless. Basset had a poor soil, poor roads, a poor non-resident landlord, a poor non-resident vicar, and rather less than half a curate, also poor. If any one strongly ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... sane human being is to be happy. No one can have any other motive than that. There is no such thing as unselfishness. We perform the most "generous" and "self-sacrificing" acts because we should be unhappy if we did not. We move on lines of least reluctance. Whatever tends to increase the beggarly sum of human happiness is worth having; nothing else has ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... plundered for thee the earth of its treasures; thou hast sacrificed them to thy infamous pleasures, without once thinking of these wretches. Feel now thy folly; thou hast spun the web of their destiny, and thy hungry, beggarly, miserable brood will transmit to their remotest posterity the misery of which thou art the cause. Thou didst beget children—wherefore hast thou not been a father to them? Wherefore hast thou sought happiness where mortal never ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger

... the minister, Count Olivarez, the princes, the dwarfs, and the buffoons. We remember, too, how he thought that very ordinary personage, "The Water-Carrier of Seville," with his wrinkles, his joy, and his beggarly customers, a subject worth painting. Then we recall a goodly list of other commonplace subjects which he treated so truthfully that they will always stand among the great pictures of the world,—"The Spinners," ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor

... "and hur pay an halfpenny for hur seat, and hur hear the preacher talg, and hur talg very well, by gis[37]; but yet a cannot make her laugh: go to a theatre and hear a Queen's Fice, and he make hur laugh, and laugh hur belly full." So we come hither to laugh and be merry, and we hear a filthy, beggarly oration in the praise of beggary. It is a beggarly poet that writ it; and that makes him so much commend it, because he knows not how to mend himself. Well, rather than he shall have no employment but lick dishes, I will set him a work myself, to write in praise of the art of stooping, and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... observing of days, and giveth them two reasons against them; the one, ver. 3, They were a yoke of bondage which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear; another, ver, 8, They were weak and beggarly rudiments, not beseeming the Christian church, which is liberate from the pedagogical instruction of the ceremonial law. The other place is Col. ii. 16, where the Apostle will have the Colossians not to suffer themselves to be judged by any man ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie

... with my boy into the inner chamber. But they pursued me without compunction, repeating the extraordinary "conundrum," and dragging the Malay duenna along with them to interpret my answer. The intrusion provoked me; but, considering their beggarly poverty of true life and liberty, of hopes and joys, and loves and memories, and holy fears and sorrows, with which a full and true response might have twitted them, I was ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... being paid, even at starvation rates, for their labors. From $2.50 to $5.00 per column is the rate of payment with the most of the weeklies, and many men and women with whose names and labors the literary world is familiar, are glad to write for them at this beggarly price as a means of increasing their legitimate incomes. The number of writers is very much in excess of the demand, and literature offers a thorny road to the majority of its ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... replied Bambousse, what a lot of words! I shall keep my daughter, please understand it. All that's got nothing to do with me. That Fortune is a beggarly pauper, without a brass farthing. What an easy job, if one could marry a girl like that! At that rate we should have all the young things marrying off morning and night. Thank Heaven! I'm not worried about Rosalie: everybody knows what has happened; but it ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... Dancing Marston, Haunted Hillborough, and Hungry Grafton With Dadging Exhall, Papist Wixford Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford. ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson

... accounted of in any comparison or even relation to what man is in his higher style? While they of that higher style were revelling in their mental affluence, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the island were subsisting, and had always subsisted, on the most beggarly pittance on which mind could be barely kept alive. Probably they had at that time still fewer ideas than the people of the former age which we have been describing. For many of those with which popery had occupied the faith and fancy of that earlier generation, had ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster

... the river Mayne, that runs into the Rhine; thereabouts groweth strong and pleasant wine, the which Faustus well proved: the castle standeth on a hill on the north side of the town, at the foot thereof runneth the river. This town is full of beggarly friars, nuns, priests, and Jesuits; for there are five sorts of begging friars, besides three cloisters of nuns; at the foot of the castle stands a church, in the which there is an altar, where are engraven all the four elements, and all the ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... the true gold into which the beggarly matter of existence may be transmuted by spagyric art; a succession of delicious moments, all the rare flavors of life concentrated, purged of their lees, and preserved in a beautiful vessel. The moonlight ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... cannot you relieve the beggar when your fathers have made him such? If you are disposed to relieve him at all, cannot you do it without flinging your farthings in his face? As a contrast, however, to this beggarly benevolence, let us look at the Protestant Charter Schools; to them you have lately granted L41,000: thus are they supported; and how are they recruited? Montesquieu observes on the English constitution, that the model ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... a beggarly Bear, Who carefully curled his front hair; He said, "I would buy A red-spotted tie,— But I haven't a penny ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells

... I have not seen her these four days. But if this beggarly attorney's clerk document is to be believed," continued Allington, pulling a letter from his pocket, "she herself expressly commanded ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various

... gallery, but no fashionables! I peeped anxiously from behind the curtain, but the time passed away; the play was retarded until pit and gallery became furious; and I had to raise the curtain, and play my greatest part in tragedy to "a beggarly account ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... of pocket for top-dressing, and taxes, and expenses of all kinds; Government eats up everything, nearly all the profit goes to the Government. The poor growers have made nothing these last two seasons. This year things don't look so bad; and, of course, the beggarly puncheons have gone up to eleven francs already. We work to put money into the coopers' pockets. Why, are you going to marry ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac

... listened with excitement and admiration. She descanted on Lord Uxmoor's courage and chivalry, and congratulated Zoe that such a pearl of manhood had fallen at her feet. "Why, child," said she, "surely, after this, you will not hesitate between this gentleman and a beggarly adventurer, who has nothing, not even the courage of a man. Turn your back on all such rubbish, and be the queen of the county. I'd be content to die to-morrow if I could see you Countess ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... The ideas are the really decisive agencies. Only for ideas have men been ready to die, and for ideas have they killed one another. Give to the world the idea that earthly goods are useless and heavenly goods alone valuable, and in this kingdom of the religious idea the beggarly rags of the monk are more desired than the gold of the mighty. Religion and patriotism, honour and loyalty, ambition and love, reform ideals and political goals, aesthetic, intellectual, and moral ideas have turned the great wheel of history. Give to the workingman the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... and where and when I like, and act as I'm a mind to afterwards. I don't give because I see things are needed, but because I can't spend my income unless I do give. If I could have my way I'd buy you a good house in Buffalo, right side of mine; take your beggarly little income and manage it for you; build a six-foot barbed wire fence round the lot so 't the neighbors couldn't get in and eat you out of house and home, and in a couple of years I could make ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... D'Artagnan, at last, furious, "very well, since you wish it, let us leave our bones in this beggarly land, where it is always cold, where fine weather is a fog, fog is rain, and rain a deluge; where the sun represents the moon and the moon a cream cheese; in truth, whether we die here or elsewhere matters ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... money this quartette netted by its crooked work is not known to this day, but it has been proven that Devlin secured but a beggarly $100 as his share, as once the others had him in their power they could compel him to do just whatever they pleased ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson

... kingdom in your hopes, what were it in comparison of the everlasting kingdom? I can not but look upon all the glory and dignity of this world, lands and lordships, crowns and kingdoms, even as on some brain-sick, beggarly fellow, that borroweth fine clothes, and plays the part of a king or a lord for an hour on a stage, and then comes down, and the sport is ended, and they are beggars again. Were it not for God's interest in the authority of ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser

... was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... more uppermost in his mind, and when the Emperor, with a view to retaining him in Germany, appointed him Kammer-compositor at a salary of eight hundred gulden (about eighty pounds sterling), it must have occurred to many besides Mozart himself that such a 'beggarly dole' but poorly represented the value which his Majesty professed to set upon the composer's services to art. This feeling was accentuated in Mozart when he discovered how trivial were the requirements of his royal master in connection with the position. 'Too much for what I produce, ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham

... element of time, however, was not immediately important. The Morning Chronicle provided him an ample income. The money available for this investment was part of his wife's patrimony. It was invested in a local cotton mill, which was paying ten per cent., but this was a beggarly return compared with the immense profits promised by the offered investment,—profits which would enable his son, upon reaching manhood, to take a place in the world commensurate with the dignity of his ancestors, one of whom, only a few generations ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt

... with a scornful laugh. 'Fifty thousand doubloons for a Portuguese prince! Why, it is a beggarly sum! Take him away, gaoler, till he learns wisdom.' And the infante was led back to ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... rooms, one served as sleeping and dining room, the other for his Majesty's cabinet. The box of books, geographical maps, the portfolio, and a table covered with green cloth, were the entire furniture. This was also the council chamber; and from these beggarly huts were sent forth those prompt and trenchant decisions which changed the order of battle and often the fortunes of the day, and those strong and energetic proclamations which so quickly reanimated the discouraged army. When our ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... shore of which we were encamped, the heat had become so intense, that we were obliged to shift farther to the west. Except in the supply of arms and ammunition, we perceived that our booty was worth nothing. This Texan expedition must have been composed of a very beggarly set, for there was not a single yard of linen, nor a miserable worn-out pair of trousers, to be found in ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat

... at Kinlochaline was the most beggarly vile place that ever pigs were styed in, full of smoke, vermin, and silent Highlanders. I was not only discontented with my lodging, but with myself for my mismanagement of Neil, and thought I could hardly be worse off. But very wrongly, as I was soon to see; ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Everett, that this formidable objection, so emphatically announced, is after all a mere man in buckram; and I am almost sorry that in doing this, I shall be obliged to expose one more proof of Mr. Everett's having neglected the study of "the beggarly elements," in order to devote himself, without distraction, to the understanding of the delectable types and allegories of the New Testament. Mr. Everett certainly is a scholar and a man of talents, but he does ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English

... were proselytising at Rome, they were hated, says Jortin, "as beggarly impostors and hungry Greeks who seduced ladies of fortune and quality." Hated, yes; but what did the hatred avail? The women were won, and the game was over. Men growled, but they had to yield. The same holds good to-day. Watch the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote

... that beggarly fool would have spent on this feast all the money she got from that other fool, Raskolnikov. I was surprised just now as I came through at the preparations there, the wines! Several people are invited. It's beyond everything!" continued Pyotr Petrovitch, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... truly say that in the New Testament such beggarly works are loathsome compared to real and great sacrifices: "He that killeth an ox is as he that slayeth a man; he that sacrificeth a lamb, as he that breaketh a dog's neck; he that offereth an oblation, as he that offereth swine's blood; he that burneth frankincense, ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther

... sleeps, let us learn a little more of her history. Some five-and-twenty years previously, Alfred Redwing was a lecturer on Greek and Latin at a small college in the North of England, making shift to live on a beggarly stipend. Handsome, pleasing, not quite thirty, he was well received in such semblance of society as his town offered, and, in spite of his defects as a suitor, he won for his wife a certain Miss Baxendale, the daughter of a ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... liest, 'twas my stool: Bestow 't upon thy master, that will challenge The rest o' th' household-stuff; for Brachiano Was ne'er so beggarly to take a stool Out of another's lodging: let him make Vallance for his bed on 't, or a demy foot-cloth For his most reverend moil. Monticelso, Nemo me impune ...
— The White Devil • John Webster

... have turned yourself out, to begin with. Secondly, because Carnesecchi is a better match for my daughter than a beggarly chiseller. Thirdly, because I please; and fourthly, because I do not care a fig whether you like it or not. Are ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford

... fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, swung the book into the sea, vanished into his state-room. "And by Jove," said Phillips, "we did not see him for two months again. And I had to make up some beggarly story to that English surgeon why I did not return his ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... Dittfurt, who, during the winter of 1809, acted with extreme inhumanity in the Fleimserthal, where the conscription had excited great opposition, and who publicly boasted that with his regiment alone he would keep the whole of the beggarly mountaineers in subjection, drew upon himself the greatest share ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... of interposing Hindoo native states between us and the beggarly fanatical countries to the north-west no wise man can, I think, doubt; for, however averse our Government may be to encroach and creep on, it would be drawn on by the intermeddling dispositions and vainglory of local authorities; and every step would be ruinous, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman

... months he studied the situation as presented by his new guide and mentor, and then, having satisfied himself that he was reasonably safe, decided to sell some of the holdings which were netting him a beggarly six per cent, and invest in this new proposition. The first cash outlay was twenty thousand dollars for the land, which was taken over under an operative agreement between himself and Ross; this was run indefinitely—so ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... and this sanguine youth soared lark-high in soul under his happy circumstances. Will breathed out kindness to all mankind just at present, and now before that approaching welfare he saw writ largely in beggarly Newtake, before the rosy dawn which Hope spread over this cemetery of other men's dead aspirations, he felt his heart swell to the world. Two clouds only darkened his horizon then. One was the necessity ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... in the midshipman's berth towards the termination of a not over-luxurious dinner. "I should think not," responded Kennedy. "What can we expect to get out of these beggarly provincials? It's not likely they'll have any craft afloat which will be ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... been discharged by them in such a manner as to show that they knew God, but which they had never properly performed. "But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?"[642] To know God is, in reality, by faith to see God. As He promised to make himself known in a vision,[643] so he will give his people to know him in acceding to his Covenant. "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him; and he will ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham

... chuckled with a drunken leer, "if you're not as crazy over the beggarly scribbler as my young gallant is over the Fenton girl who lives in the Old Bailey—at a coffee house, forsooth! Why, to see the pother you're in one would think the hussy had put your nose out of joint. Perhaps she has. She's ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce

... "but it gnaws at my heart like the worm that dieth not, to see this beggarly foreigner betray the noblest blood in the land, not to mention the best athlete in the Palaestra, and move off not only without punishment for his treachery, but ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... as managed by its present superintendent, the unfortunate insane are in no other State cared for as they are in the Indiana asylum, and in no other State is the appropriation for running such a noble institution so beggarly as in ours. I have visited other asylums, and am now an inmate of this, and I know whereof ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson

... Europe, through contemporary books of travel in the early part of the last century, the landscape is awful—wretched wastes, beggarly and plundered; half-burned cottages and trembling peasants gathering piteous harvests; gangs of such tramping along with bayonets behind them, and corporals with canes and cats-of-nine-tails to flog them to barracks. By these passes my lord's gilt carriage floundering through the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... this appeal. 'Hem—-tush, man,' replied he; 'thou speak'st to us as if thou wert in presence of one of thine own beggarly justices—get downstairs—get something to eat, man (with permission of my friend to make so free in his house), and a mouthful to drink, and I warrant we get ye such justice ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... Percy Blakeney locked up in a common cell with some of the most scrubby and abject rogues which the slums of indigent Paris could yield, having apparently failed in some undertaking which had demanded for its fulfilment not only tattered clothes and grimy hands, but menial service with a beggarly and disease-ridden employer, whose very propinquity must have been positive ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... prince demanded an allowance of one hundred thousand a year to be secured to him independently of his father's power to recall or reduce it. The King had hitherto only given him what Frederick called a beggarly allowance of fifty thousand a year, and even that had not been made over to the prince unconditionally and forever. The prince argued that his father's civil list was now much larger than that of ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... church, saying they have splendid music. Long ago the Catholic Church was forced to go into partnership not only with music, but with painting and with architecture. The Protestant Church for a long time thought it could do without these beggarly elements, and the Protestant Church was simply a dry-goods box with a small steeple on top of it, its walls as bleak and bare and unpromising as the creed. But even Protestants have been forced to hire a choir of ungodly people who happen to have ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... "I dread the coming hour. I have a misfortune-prophesying heart, and this night, in a dream, I saw myself in a miserable hut, covered with beggarly rags, shivering with cold and ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... any rate, are slipping on! Here are three Letters of Friedrich, legible at last; which, with Wilhelmina's account from the other side, represent a small entirely human scene in this French-Austrian War,—nearly all of human we have found in the beggarly affair:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... pick-up-anything shop: it was a receptacle for a hideous collection of lumber, for old broken furniture, for garments past decent wear, for indescribable odds and ends, where the wreckage of human misery lay huddled cheek by jowl with the beggarly offscourings of ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... wind blows, the dust will be gone.... I had a silly idea in my head when I told you to come to-day; I wanted to find out from you about Mitya. If I were to hand him over a thousand or maybe two now, would the beggarly wretch agree to take himself off altogether for five years or, better still, thirty-five, and without Grushenka, and give her up ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... and marauding nobles assumed heroic mould and its kings and queens—rulers over a mere handful of turbulent people—were awakened into a majestic reality. Who would care aught for Prince Charlie or his horde of beggarly Highlanders were it not for the song of Burns and the story of Scott? Nor would the melancholy fate of Queen Mary have been brought so vividly before the world—but wherefore multiply instances ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy

... the Front. He might be killed. It doesn't bear thinking about. He has toiled all his life. Surely after all his self-sacrifice and self-denial he is not to be robbed of the one satisfaction he asks for, to know that the beggarly remains of his wealth shall be safe after his ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson

... is all this to be lighted up in the heart for a beggarly account of three or four louis d'ors, which is the most I can be overreached in?—Base passion! said I, turning myself about, as a man naturally does upon a sudden reverse of sentiment,—base, ungentle passion! thy hand is against every man, and every man's hand against thee.—Heaven ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne

... beggarly fellows as you speak of can be induced to go into the navy at all," said the colonel, who had been listening to the master's story, and was far from pleased at the interest Ada took in what he said. "For my part, I would as soon be a shoe-black; but you seem ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... servants, in the eyes of even the beggars at his door, such a man is a mean and despicable creature, though he may roll in wealth and possess great talents into the bargain. Such a man has, in fact, no property; he has nothing that he can rightly call his own; he is a beggarly dependent under his own roof; and if he have any thing of the man left in him, and if there be rope or river near, the sooner he betakes him to the one or the other the better. How many men, how many families, have I known brought to utter ruin only by ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett



Words linked to "Beggarly" :   beggar, stingy, ungenerous, poor, mean



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