|
|
|
More "Mercenary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she merely replied, "And suppose we haven't any money, can't I make believe, and by looking at expensive instruments induce Mr. Hastings to think we are richer than we are? I don't accuse him of being at all mercenary, but I do think he would have proposed ere this, if he hadn't thought us ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... most. Mrs. Beaufort was a lady of high birth; and in marrying her, Robert had hoped much from the interest of her connections; but a change in the ministry had thrown her relations out of power; and, beyond her dowry, he obtained no worldly advantage with the lady of his mercenary choice. Mrs. Beaufort was a woman whom a word or two will describe. She was thoroughly commonplace—neither bad nor good, neither clever nor silly. She was what is called well-bred; that is, languid, silent, perfectly dressed, ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is often committed to narrow and mercenary minds, not qualified for the task of delighting or instructing; who are content to fill their paper, with whatever matter, without industry to gather, or ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... French Jacqueries, the Hussite wars, and the Peasant War in Germany. On the other hand, a commercial policy involved them in distant enterprises. Colonies were founded by the Italians in the south-east, by German cities in the east, by Slavonian cities in the far northeast. Mercenary armies began to be kept for colonial wars, and soon for local defence as well. Loans were contacted to such an extent as to totally demoralize the citizens; and internal contests grew worse and worse at each election, during which the colonial politics in the interest of a few families ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... in his chair and stared coldly at Captain Joe Mauser. He said, "At first I was moderately surprised that an old time mercenary like yourself should choose my uniform, rather than Zwerdling's. Now I am increasingly mystified about motivation. So all over again I ask you, captain: Why are you requesting a commission in my forces which you ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... "blotting-paper ekmek" and yaort, with a melon or a cucumber occasionally as a luxury; yet, the moment I approach, they assign me a place at their "table," and two of them immediately bestir themselves to make me a comfortable seat. Neither is there so much as a mercenary thought among them in connection with the invitation; these poor fellows, whose scant rags it would be a farce to call clothing, actually betray embarrassment at the barest mention of compensation; they fill my pockets with bread, apologize for the absence of coffee, and compare the ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... time saves nine,' says the proverbial wisdom of our forefathers, adding, 'One jilt makes many.' In the last chapter of the book of this chronicle, we told how the mercenary Mr. Jephson proved false to the beautiful Miss Willoughby, who supported existence by her skill in deciphering and transcribing the manuscript records of the past. We described the consequent visit of Miss Willoughby to the office of the Disentanglers, ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... decisive evidence of its existence, and almost supernatural power, is to be found in the fact, that without the aid of reinforcements, and scarce any remittances, from Carthage, he maintained the war in the heart of Italy with mercenary troops collected from every country of the earth, against the native soldiers of the bravest and most warlike people on the earth. We read of no mutinies or disobedience of orders among his followers. It were hard to say whether the fiery Numidian, the proud and desultory Spaniard, the brave but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... meddled with. Its treasures would be safe. Visitors would be free to come and go. He would give any security that Greece required that the wealth of Apollo should be safe and all go on as before. But he fortified the town, and invited mercenary soldiers till he had an army of five thousand men. As for the priestess of Apollo, from whose lips the oracles came, he demanded that she should continue to be inspired as before, and should give an oracle in his favor. The priestess ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... proved. That the patronage of the Crown was employed on an extensive scale for the purpose of influencing votes was matter of notoriety. A large proportion of those who gave away the public money in supplies received part of that money back in salaries; and thus was formed a mercenary band on which the Court might, in ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ever thought before that you were mercenary and suspicious, and I don't know what else besides? What has Jacob been doing to 'aggravate' you lately, that you should ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... old attachment to the countryside was weakened. In all this change of attitude, however, we see only one of those indirect results of the enclosure of the common which were spoken of above. If the villagers became more mercenary, it was not because the fencing in of the heaths immediately caused them to become so, but because it left them helpless to resist becoming so—left them a prey to considerations whose weight they had previously not so much felt. After all, the new order of things did but intensify the need ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... my honour'd, much respected friend! No mercenary bard his homage pays: With honest pride I scorn each selfish end, My dearest meed a friend's esteem and praise: To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays, The lowly train in life's sequester'd scene; The native feelings strong, the guileless ways; What Aiken in ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... and do not need to hire strangers to fight the foes we fear to face. Next time I come to attend to your wounds, O Prince, I trust that they will be in front, and not behind. One word more, if you will be advised by me you will not threaten that Captain whom you call a Gentile and a mercenary, lest you should learn that it is not always well to be a ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... "It has shown me my age. I declare I am trembling; I, whose nerves were iron. But I have a particular contempt for servants. Mercenary wretches! I think Heaven inspired me to talk to them. After all, who knows? perhaps we might find a way to their hearts, if we did not eternally shock their vanity, and forget that it is, and must be, far greater than our own. The women gave me their tears, and the men were earnest. Not ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... woman. Even when he was a baby she could not cuddle him and wonder at him and regard him as the most wonderful thing in creation.... She had never held him to her breast as God and nature meant mothers to hold their babies. A mercenary ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... him. How could she, in a week? Never had there been even a hint of sentiment between them. What would she think—this young girl, so tranquilly confident in her friendship for him—what would she think of him and his love? He knew there was nothing mercenary or material in her character; he knew she was young, sweet tempered, reticent concerning herself, clean hearted, and proud. How could he come blundering through the boundaries of her friendship with such an avowal, ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... sporting instinct of "backing your candidate" at elections as a horse is backed at race meetings, and of "shouting for your party" as men shout for their favourite football team, or sinks still lower to the mercenary speculation of personal gain or loss on election results, then another danger comes in—the indifference of the average honest citizen to all politics, and the cynical disbelief in ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... the few men whose minds had first given birth to the wonderful idea of a railroad from East to West. Neale found himself confronted by a singularly disturbing fact. However grand this project, its political and mercenary features could not be beautiful to him. Why could not all men be right-minded about a noble cause and work unselfishly for the development of the West and the future generations? It was a melancholy thing to learn that men of sincere and generous purpose ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... and contraband merchandise through the lines. Quinine among drugs, and percussion caps among ordnance stores were the things they most coveted, and dealers in these carried on their trade under pretence of being spies for each side in turn. But besides these who were merely mercenary, there were men and women who were honestly fanatical in their devotion to the Confederate cause. The women were especially troublesome, for they often seemed to court martyrdom. They practised on our forbearance to the last degree; for they knew our extreme unwillingness ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... unconsciously endangering the peace of her girlish heart, Lady Throckmorton was very silent, or very indifferent about the matter. But she was not moulded after the manner of the stern female guardians usually celebrated in love stories. She was not mercenary, and she was by no means authoritative. She had sent for Theo with the intention of extending to her the worldly assistance she had extended to Pamela, and, beyond that, the matter lay in the girl's ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... well-thumbed Bible still by his side, his well-used pipe still between his lips. Surely Napoleon the Third at Chislehurst, broken in health, broken in heart, was a scarcely more pathetic spectacle! Six or seven days later the old man saw special trains beginning to arrive, all crowded with mercenary fighting men from many lands, all bent only on following his own uncourageous example, seeking personal safety by the sea. First came 700; then on the 24th, the very day the Guards entered Koomati Poort, ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... ask her. Even if she cares—and I don't think she realises yet that she does—her sense of duty to the boys, and other things, will hold her back, and your title and possessions will tell against you. Jean is the least mercenary of creatures Ask her before you leave, and if she refuses you appear to accept her refusal. Don't say you will try again and that sort of thing: it gives a girl a caged feeling. Go away for a while and make no sign. I know what I'm talking about, Biddy ... ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... could take the same state of facts and reach no other conclusion. Suspicion had worked its way through narrow openings, and my doubts were giving way to convictions, so that soon I believed I would be as much against Hosley as the fiery Tescheron, when goaded by the mercenary Smith. ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... brought six thousand five hundred horse, three thousand foot, and four cannon of moderate size. His arrival did not, however, prove an occasion of unmingled satisfaction. The reiters, serving from purely mercenary motives, demanded the immediate payment of one hundred thousand crowns, promised as a first instalment on account of their wages, and were resolved to go no farther without receiving it. The Prince of Conde had but two thousand crowns ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... making the children rather mercenary, Clytie? They seem to want to be paid for everything they do. I'm just about drained ...
— The Blossoming Rod • Mary Stewart Cutting
... follow my own inclination. If Henry Muir fails, of course that ends the matter; and if he is to fail to-morrow it will be time enough to give Mr. Arnault my answer to-morrow night, as he asked that I would. If I give him a favorable one I prefer to do it in person, for I don't wish to appear mercenary. You, I hope, have the sense to keep this phase out ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... not condescended to cause an investigating committee, or other persons, to be sent to inquire into and ascertain the truth, as is customary in such cases. We know those aspersions to be false; but that avails us nothing. We are condemned unheard, and forced to an issue with an armed mercenary mob, which has been sent against us at the instigation of anonymous letter writers, ashamed to father the base, slanderous falsehoods which they have given to the public; of corrupt officials, who have ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... The mercenary never fell into the condition of the ordinary serf: he retained his rights as a man, and possessed in the person of the patron for whom he laboured, or whom he himself had selected, a defender of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... given is that "The white man will not accept bribes and will give justice." Indeed, it may be said that the chief difficulty which confronts the Government in its great work is that of saving the people from low, mercenary and unprincipled native officials—especially those of ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... through the centuries by a line of Earls, Viscounts, and Barons. Fortune had indeed strange experiences in store for the Suffolk youth; for, while she made a Knight and Lord Mayor of him, she consigned him on a life sentence to the Tower for resisting the extortions of the mercenary Henry VII. Sir William's son won his knightly spurs on French battlefields, wedded a daughter of the ancient house of Roos of Belvoir, and became the ancester of the Barons Capel, Viscounts Malden, ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... Dictionary, I suppose you will labour your present work con amore for your reputation." "No Sir," said Johnson, "nothing excites a man to write but necessity."' Walpole then relates the anecdote of the clergyman, and speaks of Johnson as 'the mercenary.' Walpole's sinecure offices thirty-nine years before this time brought him in 'near, L2000 a year.' In 1782 he wrote that his office of Usher of the Exchequer was worth L1800 a year. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Further, "a mercenary spirit and materialism" had to be fought in the village. There was not, however, much trouble due to drink, and there was no gambling now. There might still be impropriety between young people—formerly ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the rural districts were pinched with hunger. The starving peasantry began to flock in great numbers into the city, so that the misery increased. Terror was occasioned by a few cases of death from plague. Florence was at war with Pisa, but without success, for many of her mercenary soldiers were deserting and the forces besieging Pisa were dwindling for lack ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... honest, which is to say that he does not steal his neighbor's stock nor fail to pay his just debts if given plenty of time and the conditions have the explicitness of black and white. He knew them to be as mercenary as himself, with this only difference: Where he was frankly so, they pretended otherwise. They bothered him with their dinky deals, with their scrimping and scratching, and their sneaky attempts to hide their ugliness by the observance ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... large. There is a meretricious air over both; and there is apparent a popular inclination to condone rather than to take pride in these faits accomplis. The one excursion was a product of sportsmanlike bravado, fed on boyish exuberance, fomented for mercenary objects by certain business interests and place-hunting politicians, and incited by meretricious newspapers with a view to increase their circulation. The other was set afoot by interested businessmen, backed by politicians, seconded by newspapers, and borne by the community at large, in great ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... however, it shall not. He that has four limbs, and a French heart, can do spadework; and will! On the first July Monday, scarcely has the signal-cannon boomed; scarcely have the languescent mercenary Fifteen Thousand laid down their tools, and the eyes of onlookers turned sorrowfully of the still high Sun; when this and the other Patriot, fire in his eye, snatches barrow and mattock, and himself begins indignantly wheeling. Whom scores and then hundreds follow; and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... in love he saw now had been in shallow water; but it had not tended to strengthen his faith in the innate nobility of women. On the contrary, it had shown him that a woman who seemed sweet and loving could be hard and calculating, even mercenary. Innocence being a charming pose, why should it not be adopted by the cleverest actresses, professional sirens, specialists in enchantment, who wished to be admired by all men, even men for whom they cared nothing? How could he tell ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in which we have seen him at anchor in the Golden Horn. Leaving an order for the employment of a sailing-master and crew when the vessel was complete, he departed next for Rome. At Padua he procured the harness of a man-at-arms of the period, and recruited a company of condottieri— mercenary soldiers of every nationality. With all his sacerdotal authority, Nicholas V., the Holy Father, was sorely tried in keeping his States. The freebooters who unctuously kissed his hand to-day, did not scruple, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... national disposition to wandering and to adventure, all conduced to lead the Scots abroad into the military service of countries which were at war with each other. They were distinguished on the Continent by their bravery; but in adopting the trade of mercenary soldiers, they necessarily injured their national character. The tincture of learning, which most of them possessed, degenerated into pedantry; their good breeding became mere ceremonial; their fear of dishonour no longer kept them aloof from that which was really unworthy, but ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... girl." And then he took advantage of the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: "I this morning called for a certain woman. I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her;" and he accused her of "tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning." This was already in March; by the thirteenth of that month he was back in Edinburgh. On the 17th, he wrote to Clarinda: "Your hopes, your fears, your cares, my love, are mine; so don't mind ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... encouragement of poetry; and whose judgment of that art nothing but your commendation of my trifle[344] can give me any occasion to call in question. I do not doubt but you will look over this poem with another eye, and reward it in a different manner, from a mercenary bookseller, who counts the lines he is to purchase[345], and considers nothing but the bulk. I cannot help taking notice, that, besides what the authour may hope for on account of his abilities, he has likewise another claim to your regard, as he lies ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... cried, touched by his look and manner to an immediate unfolding of her scheme, "let us look at things again. Perhaps we shall not find them so hopeless as they look. If I am prudent, Everett, I am not mercenary. I only want to see Rosa happy. I don't care whether it is on hundreds a year, or thousands. And the fact is, I have not condemned your plans without having a more satisfactory one to offer to your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... their arts, their monuments, their country, at once antique and in the spring of youth;—a nation that stand equally aloof from the refined pleasures of luxury, as from the gross and sordid pleasures of a mercenary people." ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... knowledge by purchasing it from individual Mid[-e]. It is customary with Mid[-e] priests to exact payment for every individual remedy or secret that may be imparted to another who may desire such information. This practice is not entirely based upon mercenary motives, but it is firmly believed that when a secret or remedy has been paid, for it can not be imparted for nothing, as then its virtue would be impaired, if not entirely destroyed, by the manid[-o] or guardian spirit ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... good doctor's sermon and benediction, wishing to make enquiry of the rector touching the movements of his clerk, whose place was provisionally supplied by a corpulent and unctuous mercenary from Dublin, whose fat presence and panting delivery were in signal contrast with the lank figure and deep cavernous tones of the absent official, loitered in the church-yard to allow time for the congregation to disperse, and the parson to ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the brutes are turned mercenary, madam," said Mr. Touchwood, "I remember when a Scottishman would have scorned to touch a shilling that he had not earned, and yet was as ready to help a stranger as an Arab of the desert. And now, I did but drop my cane the other day as I was riding—a fellow who was working at the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the enemy as their natural game, and the trouble a city had given them as a cause for unmercifulness. The more time changed his army from the feudal gathering of English country gentlemen and yeomen to mercenary bands of men-at-arms, the mere greedy, rapacious, and insubordinate became their temper. Well knowing the greatness of the peril, and that the very best of his captains had scarcely the will, if they had ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... But the most shamefully mercenary engagement that I think Amenda ever entered into, was one with a 'bus conductor. We were living in the north of London then, and she had a young man, a cheesemonger, who kept a shop in Lupus Street, Chelsea. He could not come up to her because of the shop, so once a ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... contrast—he is a triton among minnows. But I think the responsibility of those who keep sending out here young fellows of sixteen and seventeen fresh from a private school or Addiscombe is quite awful. The stream is so strong, the society is so utterly worldly and mercenary in its best phase, so utterly and inconceivably low and profligate in its worst, that it is not strange that at so early an age, eight out of ten sink beneath it. ... One soon observes here how seldom one ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bridal presents was raining down. The determining cause of the catastrophe was never quite clear to the community—whether a lover's quarrel with disproportionate consequences, by reason of the marplot activities of a mercenary relative of the lady's, advocating the interests of a sudden opportunity of greater wealth and station; or her foolish revenge for a fancied slight; or simply her sheer inconstancy in a change of mind and heart. At all events, without a word of warning, ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... 'Tis night; the mercenary tyrants sleep As undisturb'd as Justice! but no more The wretched Slave, as on his native shore, Rests on his reedy couch: he wakes to weep! Tho' thro' the toil and anguish of the day No tear escap'd him, not one suffering groan Beneath the twisted thong, he weeps alone In ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... M. Lacheneur give his daughter to an uncultured peasant? From mercenary motives? Certainly not, since he had just refused an alliance of which he had been proud in his days of prosperity. Could it be in order to satisfy his wounded pride, then? Perhaps he did not wish it to be said that he owed anything to ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... Contessa watched her movements with a sudden pause in her own excitement. She stopped short in the eagerness of her own thoughts, and looked with keen curiosity at the young creature upon whom she had built so many expectations. She was not an ungenerous or mercenary woman, though she had many faults, and as she gazed a certain compunction awoke within her, mingled with amusement. She was sorry for the unworthy suggestion she had made, but the sight of the girl in her indignation was like a scene in a play to this woman of the world. Her youthful dignity and ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... sentiments of self-respect; noblesse oblige—the noblesse of a free people—was the motto of the one as of the other. It has been asserted that the Federal armies were very largely composed of foreigners, whose motives for enlisting were purely mercenary. At no period of the war, however, did the proportion of native Americans sink below seventy per cent.,* (* See Note at end of chapter.) and at the beginning of 1863 it was much greater. As a matter of fact, the Union army was composed of thoroughly staunch soldiers.* (* "Throughout ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... the most mercenary little creature you ever saw," she laughed dolefully. "I've got so I measure everything with a dollar bill, and I actually think in quarters and dimes. You see, Aunt Polly does ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... our nobles from our common men; For many of our princes (wo the while!) Lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood; So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs In blood of princes." (Henry V., Act 4, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... from Caius Antonius. Besides these, he expected two legions from Syria, with Scipio; from Crete, Lacedaemon, Pontus, Syria, and other states, he got about three thousand archers, six cohorts of slingers, two thousand mercenary soldiers, and seven thousand horse; six hundred of which, Deiotarus had brought from Gaul; Ariobarzanes, five hundred from Cappadocia. Cotus had given him about the same number from Thrace, and had sent his son Sadalis with them. From Macedonia there were two hundred, ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar
... world—their arms; and these arms, the source of all wealth, were monopolised by the wealthy. Thus we have seen those immense fortunes which are the characteristic feature of our age spring up on all sides. A king of the last century, "the great Louis the Fourteenth" of mercenary historians, would never have dreamed of possessing a fortune such as are held by those kings of the nineteenth century, the Vanderbilts and ...
— The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution - An Address Delivered in Paris • Pierre Kropotkin
... whose hair had the sheen of burnished brass and whose soft smooth skin was of that frog-belly whiteness which suggests an inheritance of some bleaching and blistering disease. She had small regular features, eyes that at once suggested looseness, good-natured yet mercenary too. She was dressed in the sleek tight-fitting trying-on robe of the professional model, and her figure was superb in ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... rather see you dead than brought to such a dilemma." "Mayhap thou wouldst," answered the uncle; "for then, my lad, there would be some picking—aha! dost thou tip me the traveller, my boy?" Tom assured him he scorned any such mercenary views. "I am only concerned," said he, "that you should take any step that might tend to the disgrace of yourself or your family; and I say again I had rather die than live to see you reckoned any otherwise than compos."—"Die and be d—ned! you shambling half-timber'd son of a——," ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... delight, was among the first to enter. He enquired of every one he met of the fate of Isabelle; but all turned from him with disgust. At length he found her out, but what was his grief and surprise—in a nunnery! Firm to the troth she had so solemnly plighted, she had rejected the proposition of her mercenary parent; and, having no idea but that her lover had shared the fate of all Christian captives, she had shut herself up from the world, and vowed to live the life of ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... repeated Piedro, thinking that he hesitated from merely mercenary motives. "You shall have what share of the ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... sheriff, or lieutenant of the county; so that, as a foreign ambassador of the time remarks with astonishment (we quote from memory), 'England is the strongest nation on earth, for though the King has not a single mercenary soldier, he can raise in three days an army of ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... other than as a degraded menial, to make men the slaves of her mercenary schemes, La Corriveau cared nothing. She never felt it, never inspired it. She looked down upon all her sex as the filth of creation and, like herself, incapable of a chaste feeling or a pure thought. Every better instinct of her ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... abuses of authority. All dread of a standing military force is looked upon as a superstitious panic. All shame of calling in foreigners and savages in a civil contest is worn off. We grow indifferent to the consequences inevitable to ourselves from the plan of ruling half the empire by a mercenary sword. We are taught to believe that a desire of domineering over our countrymen is love to our country, that those who hate civil war abet rebellion, and that the amiable and conciliatory virtues of lenity, moderation, and tenderness of the privileges of those who depend on this ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... stand a shame, When I exchange for crowns my love or fame! You might have found a mercenary son, To profit of the battles he had won. Had I been such, what hindered me to take The crown? nor had the exchange been yours to make. While you are living, I no right pretend; Wear it, and let it where you please descend. But from my love, 'tis sacrilege to part: There, there's ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... whether they be the tittle-tattle of the nursery or the lady's drawing-room, or the shameless combinations entered into by librarians.... In England as in France those who loved literature the most purely, who were the least mercenary in their love, were marked out for persecution, and all three were driven into exile. Byron and Shelley, and Swinburne, he, too, who loved literature for its own sake, was forced, amid cries of indignation and horror, to withdraw his book ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... militia, composed of gentlemen and yeomen, is the natural strength and only security of a free government; that such a militia in this colony would forever render it unnecessary for the mother country to keep among us for the purpose of our defence any standing army of mercenary forces, always subversive of the quiet and dangerous to the liberties of the people, and would obviate the pretext of taxing us ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... attention to the fact, which is brought to light by this relation, that the slave-holders have not only to contend with the honest and open-handed means which the abolitionists most righteously employ,[A] to facilitate the escape of slaves, but with the mercenary acts of members of their own community, who live by the manufacture and sale ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... battle, the business would be finished, for there is not a man in that whole kingdom who has an income of one hundred ducats or a palm's length of land; nor is there one who considers it a disgrace to be given two hundred lashes. They are a mercenary horde, ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... mercenary: perhaps that is too strong a word; but, in short, a mere man of the world. Might it not be that Grace Carden would wish him to learn your attachment either from your lips or from her own, and not detect it in an impetuous young man's conduct on the platform ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... sent for her Bruttian admirer and introduced him to her brother. He, by encouraging the stranger in his passion, and assuring him that he would induce his sister to look favourably on it, had no difficulty in inducing the man, who was a mercenary soldier, to break his faith in expectation of the great rewards which he was promised by Fabius. This is the account given of the transaction by most writers, though some say that the lady by whose means ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... the Northwest of Africa. Hated by the people of this great territory, both Moors and Arabs, menaced not only by their dissensions, but frequently attacked by the Christians from the North, there was but one method by which the Dey could maintain his power. He formed a large body of mercenary soldiers, drawn entirely from Turkey, united with himself and each other by a feeling of mutual dependence and common danger, and bound by no feeling of interest or affection to the inhabitants of the soil. Brave ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... greatness, declined any active participation. Most of the other powers of Europe also remained neutral. France had now no hope of placing Stanislaus upon the throne; she only sought revenge, determined to humble the house of Austria. The mercenary King of Sardinia, Charles Emanuel, was willing to serve the one who would pay the most. He first offered himself to the emperor, but upon terms too exorbitant to be accepted. France and Spain immediately offered him terms even more advantageous than ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... come"), Swann supposed that the Doctor recognised him from having met him already somewhere, probably in some house of 'ill-fame,' though these he himself very rarely visited, never having made a habit of indulging in the mercenary sort of love. Regarding such an allusion as in bad taste, especially before Odette, whose opinion of himself it might easily alter for the worse, Swann assumed his most icy manner. But when he learned that the lady next to the Doctor was Mme. Cottard, he decided that so young a husband would ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Eva," as I had last seen her, perspiring, loosely girdled, buying a catch of fish at a fair price from three mercenary natives adorned with shark's-tooth necklaces, rose ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... sackings that Rome has repeatedly suffered at the hands of Goth, Vandal, or Christian. This time it was the soldiery of the eldest son of the church—- Charles V—who did the sacking; it was in the year 1527, a soldier—probably some impious, heathenish mercenary—broke into the holy sanctuary of the church and stole therefrom the box that contained the holy relics, among them the holy prepuce. These impious wretches, as a rule, came to grief in short order; hence we are told that this mercenary ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... corruption. Far from it. But a division, not very unequal, had already taken place in the honest part of that body, between the parties styled republican and federal. The latter being monarchists in principle, adhered to Hamilton of course, as their leader in that principle, and this mercenary phalanx added to them, insured him always a majority in both Houses: so that the whole action of the legislature was now under the direction of the Treasury. Still the machine was not complete. The effect of the funding system, and of the Assumption, would be temporary; ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... it for himself, and was willing—so at least it was reported—to pay for it at the handsome figure of 4,000 pounds for a single couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, declined to gratify the alderman, who by his will left the poet a legacy of 100 pounds, possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could not be praised in his lifetime, at all events to escape ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Sweet Caps Kid just how it was—how right up to the very last minute I kept expecting the luck to turn and how even then I mighta got it all back if the game-keeper hadn't been so blamed unreasonable and mercenary. When my last chip is gone I holds up a finger for a marker and tells him I'll take another stack of fifty, all blues this time, but he only looks at me sort of chilly and distrustful and remarks in a kind of a bored way that there's ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... point of view. I see my daughter as an unusual person, ignorant of life, to whom it seems to me all things are possible. And I see you, a very nice young man. But what else? I ask to be told why you fulfil all possibilities. Don't misunderstand me. I am not mercenary. Mathilde will have plenty of money of her own some day. I don't want a millionaire. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... by a hostile garrison. Her spirit sank within her, and she bitterly felt the impoverishment of the always scanty means, which deprived her of the power of laying out sums of money on those rites which were universally deemed needful for the repose of souls snatched away in battle. It was a mercenary age among the clergy, and besides, it was the depth of a northern winter, and the funeral rites of the Lady of Whitburn would have been poor and maimed indeed if a whole band of black Benedictine monks had not arrived from Wearmouth, saying they had been despatched at special ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the authority of the State itself. The assumption is so general that the State invariably stands behind the private detective that few seem to question it, and even the courts frequently recognize them as quasi-public officials. Thus, the State itself aids and abets these mercenary anarchists, while it sends to the gallows idealist anarchists, such as Henry, Vaillant, Lingg, and their like. That the State fosters this "infant industry" is the only possible explanation for the fact that in every industrial conflict of the past the real provokers and ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... more than a cranky canoe hollowed out of a noble mvule tree of Ugoma—was an African Argo bound on a nobler enterprise than its famous Grecian prototype. We were bound upon no mercenary errand, after no Golden Fleece, but perhaps to discover a highway for commerce which should bring the ships of the Nile up to Ujiji, Usowa, and far Marungu. We did not know what we might discover on our voyage to the northern head of the Tanganika; we supposed that ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... of its possessor a profound sense of sin, a deep compassion for the sufferings of others, and a habit of dwelling on the thoughts of death, judgment, and eternity. Moreover, it is utterly opposed to anything of that mercenary or commercial spirit which exists among men of the world, who like to see some large practical result even in matters of devotion. We pray, and are sensible of no return; we spend our money in a Requiem Mass, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... studied with a kind of antiquarian interest, stimulating thought not otherwise than as warning examples! Clio has fallen from her pedestal. That radiant creature, in identifying her interests with those of theocracy, has become the hand-maiden of a withered and petulant mistress, a mercenary slut. So things will remain, till mankind has acquired a fresh body of ethics, corresponding to modern needs. It is useless, it is dangerous, to pour new wine into old bottles. . ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... greater attention," pursued the priest. "I objected to the coarseness of your tone in talking of our young pupil and your daughter; I object still more strongly to your insinuation that my desire to see them married (provided always that they are sincerely attached to each other) springs from a mercenary motive." ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... reclaimed pirates are associated with them, and thus habituated to all the forms of a civilized state. Mr. Brooke, with a rare courage and wisdom, has always trusted for his safety to the good-will of his native subjects. He has never been sustained by mercenary bands. At a time when piratical violence was most threatening, when disorders were yet rife in his own state, and when his subjects but poorly appreciated his benevolent purposes towards them, his whole English force was twenty-four men. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... this thing is this way: If something happens to you and by writing about it you can make a bit of money and at the same time be a benefactor to the race, then why not? Does not the philanthropic aspect of the proposition more than balance off the mercenary side? I hold that it does, or at least that it should, in the estimation of all fair-minded persons. It is to this class that I particularly address myself. Unfair-minded persons are advised to take warning and stop right here ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... money-changers are established even in the sanctuary, and by sanctuary I do not mean religious things alone, but whatever mankind holds sacred and inviolable. It is not gold that complicates, corrupts, and debases life; it is our mercenary spirit. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... kinks, it is golden, and its curls are three feet in length, moreover, a white rose is her emblem. And what a sad domestic tragedy have I not here unearthed. In reading between the lines of these verses we learn that what darkened the life of this true and loving woman was a mercenary husband, and that this husband survived her, and in his unhallowed greed sold her body, and this, too, at so exorbitant a price, that it required the united purses of three doctors to induce ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... stage of development so that such things as eclipses could be predicted with anything like accuracy, the occult knowledge of the astronomer would be unquestioned. Turning this apparently occult knowledge to account in a mercenary way would then be the inevitable result, although it cannot be doubted that many of the astrologers, in all ages, were sincere in ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the decent citizens, and drive them to adopt oligarchical methods; then the friend of the people appears; the protector, champion, and hero, by a familiar process becomes a military autocrat, who himself battens, as must also his mercenary soldiery, on the citizens; and our unhappy Demos finds that it has jumped out of the reek into the fire. Now our democratical man was swayed by the devices and moods of the moment; his son will be swayed by the most irrational and most bestial of his appetites; be bully and tyrant, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... sharply rebuked by foreigners who were not as hostile to his means as they were fearful of the end which he propounded. He advocated therefore the constitution of a strong Italian state, supported by the sacrifices and by the blood of the citizens, not defended by mercenary troops; well-ordered internally, aggressive and bent on expansion. "Weak republics," he said, "have no determination and can never reach a decision." (Disc. I. c. 38). "Weak states were ever dubious in choosing their course, and slow ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... before the bishop with a respectable appearance, and not like a beggar, I soon recovered my natural spirits, and congratulated myself upon having bought sufficient experience to insure me against falling a second time an easy prey to a Father Corsini, to thieving gamblers, to mercenary women, and particularly to the impudent scoundrels who barefacedly praise so well those they intend to dupe—a species of knaves very common in the world, even amongst people who form what ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... strength and only security of a free government; that such a militia in this colony would forever render it unnecessary for the mother country to keep among us for the purpose of our defence any standing army of mercenary forces, always subversive of the quiet and dangerous to the liberties of the people, and would obviate the pretext of taxing us for ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... themselves. The far-sighted reap rewards. Some day these baby twins would be old enough to marry. It was prudent to remember such details. A position as an old family friend might one day prove of thrifty advantage in this miserably mercenary world where dog eats dog, and dividends are sometimes passed. God knows and pities the sorrows of ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... are the only friends you possess. The Marshal, from personal considerations merely, remains neutral. Your army, excepting the cuirassiers, are traitors to your house. The wisest thing you have done was to surround yourself with this mercenary body, whom you call the royal cuirassiers, only, instead of three hundred, you should have two thousand. Self-interest will make them true to you. You might find some means to pay them, for they would ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... between two countries, by the same arts of double-dealing by which he caused dissensions among the commissioners in Paris, and distractions in America. But his life has been fraud, and his character has been that of a plodding, plotting, cringing mercenary, capable of any disguise that suited his purpose. His final detection has very happily cleared up those mistakes, and removed that uneasiness, which his unprincipled conduct occasioned. Every one now sees him in the same light; for towards friends or enemies he acted with the same ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... in Favour of mercenary Adventurers, who advanced Money to provide for a desperate regicide Army; in Favour of the Officers of this same Army, whom their Ringleader Cromwell, seared as his Conscience was, indulged with no more than temporary Grants of the Estates belonging ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... JONES said: The adoption of the plans now proposed would place woman above the necessity of any mercenary marriages. She could leave her father's home if she didn't like it, and engage in business and support herself. Who cared for the husband of Jenny Lind, or of Mrs. Norton? It was not necessary for Florence Nightingale, Harriet Hosmer, or Elizabeth Blackwell to marry to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labor, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good-night, or, neglected in some ostentatious hospital, breathes its last amidst the laugh of mercenary attendants." ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... provocation should be wanting to engage him to speak the truth, they asked him if he wanted any money. He with much art answered very indifferently, no; adding, he scorned to make such a discovery out of a mercenary view, but that he was resolved to be revenged of his captain. They then ordered him to the sign of the Boot, in St. Thomas's, Exeter, whither they soon followed him, having first sent to Mr. Eastwood, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... between the Mamelukes and the sultan Selim I., he considered it more prudent to transfer himself to Tunis. The incessant conflicts among the Berber princes of northern Africa gave him employment as a mercenary, which he varied by piratical raids on the trade of the Christians. At Tunis he was joined by Khizr, who took, or was endowed with, the name of Khair-ed-Din. Isaak soon followed his brothers. Arouj and Khair-ed-Din joined the exiled Moors of Granada in raids on the Spanish coast. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... Lord Ballindine (and they were related in some distant degree, at least so always said the Kellys, and I never knew that the O'Kellys denied it)—both the young men were, at the time, anxious to get married, and both with the same somewhat mercenary views; and I have fatigued the reader with the long history of past affairs, in order to imbue him, if possible, with some interest in the ways and means which they both ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... lady sent for her Bruttian admirer and introduced him to her brother. He, by encouraging the stranger in his passion, and assuring him that he would induce his sister to look favourably on it, had no difficulty in inducing the man, who was a mercenary soldier, to break his faith in expectation of the great rewards which he was promised by Fabius. This is the account given of the transaction by most writers, though some say that the lady by whose means the Bruttian was seduced from his allegiance was not a Tarentine, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... Kid just how it was—how right up to the very last minute I kept expecting the luck to turn and how even then I mighta got it all back if the game-keeper hadn't been so blamed unreasonable and mercenary. When my last chip is gone I holds up a finger for a marker and tells him I'll take another stack of fifty, all blues this time, but he only looks at me sort of chilly and distrustful and remarks in a kind of a bored ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... had nodded at intervals during the list. "I quite see all that. You are a dear, generous child and love to give pleasure; and your father refused you nothing. It's my fault, too. My more mercenary mind should have been near to keep watch. Because, as a, result, there's very ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... irresponsible control of their husbands, is not a protest against marriage. It is a vindication of marriage, against the barbarism of the law which degrades a noble and life-long partnership of equals into a mercenary and servile relation between ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... ostentatious expenditure by night. I have often heard, that their general voice, had it been raised, would have been hostile to the policy that has prevailed. But it was not raised; and now, when too late, and these mercenary and selfish beings are driven to some action by the loss of their accustomed gains, a large and violent party is forming among them, who loudly condemn the conduct of the Queen and her ministers, and advocate immediate submission to whatever terms ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... had already shown him (Jackeymo) many little delicate attentions—had greatly whetted the cupidity which was in the servant's Italian nature,—a cupidity the more keen because, long debarred its legitimate exercise on his own mercenary interests, he carried it all to the account of ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... though it be not true, yet I forbear to note any deficiences; for the Olympian games are down long since, and the mediocrity of these things is for use; as for the excellency of them it serveth for the most part but for mercenary ostentation. ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... OF THE TEN THOUSAND.—The Anabasis, the principal work of Xenophon, describes the retreat from the Tigris to the coast of Asia Minor, of a body of ten thousand mercenary Greek troops,—a retreat effected under his own masterly leadership. The Persian Empire, now in a process of decay, was torn with civil strife. Xerxes and his eldest son had been murdered (465 B.C.). The story ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... mean to say? I see, we Americans aren't the only mercenary nation in the world, though we get the credit for it sometimes. Well! I'll wait a while, before I judge. There comes a time in most men's lives when they forget their fine principles, and see just one thing ahead, and they've got to have it! Everything else goes ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... apparent incongruity of the handwriting and the text, and it was possible that for the purposes of disguise the poet might have employed an amanuensis. But how could he reconcile the incongruity of the mercenary and slangy purport of the missive itself with the mental habit of its author? Was it possible that these inconsistent qualities existed in the one individual? He smiled grimly as he thought of his visitor Bowers and his friend Jack. He ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... receiving the congratulations. The betrothed are then considered almost married. Engagements are, of course, frequently broken off, but such a thing as an action for 'breach of promise' is impossible, and would be considered most mercenary and mean. As a rule, engagements are not long, and as soon as the wedding-day is agreed upon, the preceding fortnight is filled with parties of various kinds, while there is another great reception just before the wedding day, in which, as before, the bride and bridegroom have to stand for hours ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... your opinion at all incredible," said Thorndyke, with a smile, "even if Mr. Walter were quite a mercenary young man—which, I ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... with careless kindness; my mother scarcely noticed me, though she had no children except me; other cares completely absorbed her. My father, a man still young and very handsome, had married her from mercenary considerations; she was ten years older than he. My mother led a melancholy life; she was for ever agitated, jealous and angry, but not in my father's presence; she was very much afraid of him, and he was severe, cold, and distant in his behaviour.... I have never seen a man more elaborately ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... the City Government at once gave their cordial assent to these articles. When the deputies returned, their constituents were not very well pleased with what had been done, declaring that they would not submit to be locked up at the mercy of any man, nor would they trust to mercenary troops for guarding their city. The Prince, hearing this, agreed that the burghers, Calvinists, Lutherans, as well as Romanists, should be employed to guard ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... ability making sacrifices, giving up their personal affairs in order to take places of honour in the government in which the salary was comparatively small, proving that even these were open to inducements other than merely mercenary ones. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the emperor's greatness, declined any active participation. Most of the other powers of Europe also remained neutral. France had now no hope of placing Stanislaus upon the throne; she only sought revenge, determined to humble the house of Austria. The mercenary King of Sardinia, Charles Emanuel, was willing to serve the one who would pay the most. He first offered himself to the emperor, but upon terms too exorbitant to be accepted. France and Spain immediately offered him terms even more advantageous ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... Venetian mercenary army, successfully conducted a series of campaigns between 1684 and 1687, but with terrible barbarity on both sides. The Venetian fleet entered the Piraeus on September 21, 1687. The city of Athens was immediately occupied by their army, and siege laid to the Acropolis. On ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... uniting with the other states of Germany, she had first abandoned them to be afterward deserted by them in her turn, and because, instead of arming her warlike people against every foreign foe, she had habituated her citizens to unarmed effeminacy and had rested her sole support on a mercenary army, an artificial and spiritless automaton, separated from and unsympathizing with the people. The idea that the salvation of Prussia could now alone be found in her reconciliation with the neighboring powers of Germany, in a general confederation, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... society. Mrs. Schreiber was the very person required. Intellectually she had no great pretensions; but these she did not need: her character was irreproachable, her manners were polished, and her own income placed her far above all mercenary temptations. She had not thought fit to accept the station of Colonel Watson's wife, but some unavowed feeling prompted her to undertake, with enthusiasm, the duties of a mother to the colonel's daughter. Chiefly on Miss Watson's account ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... with your soul to the devil, I doubt not," said Luke, fiercely stamping the ground. "Let us be gone. We need not his mercenary aid. ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... first kiss, which was to consecrate our engagement, and I knew not on what spot I should put my lips, that were madly thirsting for her beauty and her youth. Not on her forehead, that was accustomed to family caresses, nor on her light hair, which mercenary hands had dressed, nor on her eyes, whose turned up lashes looked like little wings, because that would have made me think of the farewell caress which closes the eyelids of some dead woman whom one has adored, nor her lovely mouth, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... to a paltry saving, unworthy the character of the nation, and subversive in a great measure of the philanthropic intentions with which the legislature were originally actuated. The alarming increase of crime that has taken place within the last few years, is the re-action of this pernicious and mercenary system, which has already been carried to such an extent as to endanger the lives and property of every honest and well disposed inhabitant of the colony. This system, so injurious of itself, has been powerfully seconded by the lax and indiscriminate manner in which convict servants have been ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... boot weren't on the other leg!" Rowsley muttered. He was not mercenary—none of Mr. Stafford's children were: he saw eye to eye with Val in Val's calm preference of six to eight hundred a year: but when Val carried his financial principles into the realm of sentiment Rowsley now and then ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... "I am certainly not entitled to preach worldly wisdom. I was as mercenary, speculative a little animal at your age as you could wish to see; and what came of it? I forgot all my prudent resolutions, fell over head and ears in love, married the 'Rip,' and have been the genteel pauper you see ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... to despair in this also. His very tenderness towards her was more unendurable than would have been his wrath. The pity of it! The pity of it! It was that which made him sore of heart and faint of spirit. If he could have reproached her as cold, mercenary, unworthy, heartless, even though he had still loved her, he could have supported himself by his anger against her unworthiness. But as it was there was no such support for him. Though she had been in fault, ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... to happen," remarked Bea, with a little mercenary expectation, "Congreve Hall would be Olive's; just think of it, girls, how grand! and Cousin Roger is immensely wealthy, and there would be no end of splendid things;" and Bea sighed a little, as she spoke, for she was not going to win any wealth or grand home by her wedding, and there ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... than a cranky canoe hollowed out of a noble mvule tree of Ugoma—was an African Argo bound on a nobler enterprise than its famous Grecian prototype. We were bound upon no mercenary errand, after no Golden Fleece, but perhaps to discover a highway for commerce which should bring the ships of the Nile up to Ujiji, Usowa, and far Marungu. We did not know what we might discover on our voyage to the northern head of the Tanganika; we supposed that we ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... presidential awe, To give the song-smit generation law; Who wield Apollo's delegated rod, And shake Parnassus with your sovereign nod; A pensive Pilgrim, worn with base turmoils, Plebian cares, and mercenary toils, Implores your pity, while with footsteps rude, He dares within the mountain's pale intrude; For, oh! enchantment through its empire dwells, And rules the spirit with Lethean spells; By hands unseen aerial harps are hung, And Spring, like Hebe, ever fair and young, On her broad ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... strength, under God, consisting in the bodies of their citizens, proper and stout men, who, if they come to fight pro aris et focis, for religion, liberty, wives and children, and estates, for their all, are full of courage; not like mercenary, unfixed, unfaithful men, whose trade is in blood, and who are pests ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... not very unequal, had already taken place in the honest part of that body, between the parties styled republican and federal. The latter being monarchists in principle, adhered to Hamilton of course, as their leader in that principle, and this mercenary phalanx added to them, insured him always a majority in both Houses: so that the whole action of the legislature was now under the direction of the Treasury. Still the machine was not complete. The effect of the funding system, and of the Assumption, would be temporary; it would ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... on with his arguments, that she had become to him an Ophelia, weakly led. Women in his lexicon of romance might be weak but never mercenary. I think he finally overthrew her in his mind with "Get thee to a nunnery!" I know that he burned her picture; he showed me the ashes ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... to respect it, with all its failings and defeats. If not all the men were "patriots;" if some lost faith in the cause; if others deserted it entirely and joined the enemy; if some entered the army from mercenary motives and proved cravens in the field; if still others who were honest enough in their intentions were found to be wretched material for the making of good soldiers—this was only the common experience of all popular struggles. As a body, it ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... Arabia—The Lost Opportunity of the Early Christian Sects and the Fatal Neglect of the Surrounding Nations—The Nomads of Arabia specially Prepared for Conquest by their Manner of Life and their Enlistment as Mercenary Soldiers—The Question of Mohammed's Real Character—The Growth of his Ambition and his Increasing Sensuality and Cruelty—Blasphemous Revelations in Behalf of the Prophet's Own Lust—Discriminating Judgment Required on his Career as a Whole—Mohammedan ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... life to serve her, then I am guilty— to love liberty and freedom of conscience, to hate tyranny and oppression, then I am indeed a criminal," he answered in an unshaken voice. "You call me a spy and load me with opprobrium. It was necessary to gain information as to the movements of your mercenary army: twice have I obtained that information and carried it to our noble general. My only regret is that I have not succeeded a third time in so doing; but understand that though I have thus laboured to injure you secretly, I have ever fought openly against you on the field of battle, and ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... birth; and in marrying her, Robert had hoped much from the interest of her connections; but a change in the ministry had thrown her relations out of power; and, beyond her dowry, he obtained no worldly advantage with the lady of his mercenary choice. Mrs. Beaufort was a woman whom a word or two will describe. She was thoroughly commonplace—neither bad nor good, neither clever nor silly. She was what is called well-bred; that is, languid, silent, perfectly dressed, and insipid. Of her two children, ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... patch up a drama in Italian, in order to introduce favourite airs, selected from different authors, the contrast has always been broken thereby, without every one's knowing the reason: and since ignorant mercenary prompters, though Italians, have been employed in hotch-potch, and in translating our dramas from Italian into English, how could such operas appear any other ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... up). After the house? Mercenary motive? I demand an explanation of those words. What ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... some impediment to Arran's appointment as Governor, "alleging that the King be his Testament nominat four Regentis: bot the same on no wise could be verefeit nor provin."—(Hist. p. 169.) Buchanan further confirms this by asserting, that Beaton "having bribed Henry Balfour, a mercenary priest, he, with his assistance, forged a false Will for the King," &c.—(Hist. lib. xv. 1.) This Henry Balfour is the Priest or Chaplain who is mentioned at the ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... in reality the tool of a schemer. Such unquestionable virtues as these visionaries may some of them have possessed cannot be fairly set down to the credit of the Church, which has used them all for mercenary or ambitious purposes, and infected them everywhere with a morbid character. Some of these mystics, floating down the great ecclesiastical current of the Middle Age, appear to me like the trees carried away by the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... unknown. Highly educated men, of more than princely wealth, spent their time in shops and counting-houses, and trained their sons to follow trades. Military service at this period was abandoned by the citizens; they preferred to pay mercenary troops for the conduct of their wars. Nor was there, as in Venice, any outlet for their energies upon the seas. Florence had no navy, no great port—she only kept a small fleet for the protection of her commerce. Thus ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities of which the kinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken. Strange places reminiscent of the legendary Sybaris, cities of art and beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile wonderful cities of motion and music, whither repaired all who profited by the fierce, inglorious, economic struggle that went on ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... movement, and, therefore, by implication against the individuals belonging to that movement. If I should charge that Mr. Henry Ford is engaged in this anti-Semitic propaganda for purely selfish and mercenary reasons, that he has become the spokesman and agent of great unscrupulous capitalist interests who seek to destroy their Jewish competitors and to profit thereby, he would find it difficult to establish the contrary by definite ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... test nobly. Never did a commercial company show itself so little mercenary; never was a sovereign more magnanimous and unselfish. With the opening of the province to settlement, the proprietors set forth a statement of their purposes: "We lay a foundation for after ages to understand their liberty as men and Christians, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... terms of communities, pure self-interest—all bound up with economic problems, with money. Does Admiral Mahan mean us to take him at his word when he would attach to such efforts the same discredit that one implies in talking of a mercenary individual? Would he have us believe that the typical great movements of our times—Socialism, Trades Unionism, Syndicalism, Insurance Bills, Land Laws, Old Age Pensions, Charity Organisation, Improved Education—bound up ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... was the injunction of his duty. It was questionless the conduct which selfish regards would dictate. Wallace was left to perish alone; or, perhaps, (which, indeed, was a supposition somewhat justified by appearances,) he had been left to the tendance of mercenary wretches; by whom, at this desperate moment, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... farewell, and at about nine o'clock of the night set out for Baltimore. How shall I describe my first experience of free life? Nothing can be greater than the contrast it affords to a plantation experience, under the suspicious and vigilant eye of a mercenary overseer or a watchful master. Day and night are not more unlike. The mandates of Slavery are like leaden sounds, sinking with dead weight into the very soul, only to deaden and destroy. The impulse of freedom lends wings to the feet, buoys up the spirit within, and the fugitive catches ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... temple and its oracles would not be meddled with. Its treasures would be safe. Visitors would be free to come and go. He would give any security that Greece required that the wealth of Apollo should be safe and all go on as before. But he fortified the town, and invited mercenary soldiers till he had an army of five thousand men. As for the priestess of Apollo, from whose lips the oracles came, he demanded that she should continue to be inspired as before, and should give an oracle in his favor. The priestess refused; whereupon he seized ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... in their mercenary tastes and in that loyalty which is so fine a feature of the Jewish race, and is here found in frequent conflict with their commercial instincts. The cruel wrench that their generosity always costs them is a true measure of its excellence. They quarrel alike over details of business policy; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... if France be still thy guardian care, Oh! spare these mercenary combats, spare! The thrones that now are reared but to be broke; The rights we render, and anon revoke; The muddy stream of laws, ideas, needs, Flooding our social life as it proceeds; Opposing tribunes, even when seeming one— Soft, yielding plaster put in place of stone; Wave chasing ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... indignation and scorn that I proceed once more to pollute my pen with the chronicles of a mercenary rabble. It had been thought that the remonstrances of the pure and high-minded among your readers would have sufficed to overcome the resolution of an infatuated, but not Criminal Editor. There was a time when the claims of a Certain Contributor ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... which he got perfectly furious and said he would not marry that certain person if she was the only woman left on earth; that she had treated him as no lady should treat a gentleman, and that she was vain and mercenary and ambitious, and he was mortified to think he had ever imagined he had loved so shallow and weak and ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... committed at that time, and asked her to take measures for the punishment of such a wrong. But she, with a woman's forwardness, and impelled by mental excitement, immediately gave orders to the prefects of the city and to certain of her own ruffians [mercenary body-guard] with all speed to go out of the city, under arms, and to punish the authors of the violence, sparing no one. Now as these armed men, who were prone to act cruelly at every opportunity, left the ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... on, 'I may as well say a word in vindication of my conduct lately, at the risk, too, of offending you. My actual motive in submitting to your order that I should send for my late wife, and live with her, was not the mercenary policy of wishing to retain an office which brings me greater comforts than any I have enjoyed before, but this unquenchable passion for Cytherea. Though I saw the weakness, folly, and even wickedness of it continually, it still forced ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... Napoleon offered to these bands the same reward which he had promised to the peasants. But to a man, they refused the gold. They had imbibed the spirit of their chief, his enthusiasm, and his proud superiority to all mercenary motives. "We are not toiling for money," said they, "but for your approval, and ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... ruined fields, her castles overthrown; Behold—But ah! more glaring than the rest, In me thy brightest trophy stands confess'd! Yes—prompt each fatal mandate to fulfil, Perpetual slave of thy tyrannic will, I stood, to sovereign infamy preferr'd, The meanest of thy mercenary herd: Thy crimes I copied—for thy worthless gold My monarch's life, my country's freedom sold! The cloud of wrath that veils in thickening gloom Thee and those partners of thy crimes and doom, In its black scope involv'd me—not a ray Shot thro' the ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... about him. "I must hasten," he said; "I cannot stop for explanations; but you will find me in my office at two o'clock to-morrow, if you care to call. Meantime, my young friend, I am not perhaps as mercenary as you think, and I may be able to be of great assistance to you," and with a final bow, the man hastily disappeared around a ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... government must quickly stagnate. It would be foolish to say that no selfish motive enters into this tremendous manifestation of energy and effort (until humanity assumes a higher form the moving power of the mercenary principle must be very great), but it is fair and it is accurate to ascribe to the men in affairs a much loftier and more honorable impulse—the aspiration to share in the conduct of their own government, the unwillingness to be ignored or excluded in the administration ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... zero. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the miserable creatures who came spying to this country never had a dog's chance from the word "Go." One cannot waste one's sympathy upon those who for mercenary motives consented to be spies, but I am glad that Mr. FELSTEAD pleads on behalf of such men as CARL LODY. "Some day," he writes, "when the nations of the world grow more sensible, there will be two methods of treating spies. Those who can prove patriotism as the inspiring motive will be dealt with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... made evident that the mercenary greed of the parties who were trading in the labor of this class of the Chinese population was proving too strong for the just execution of the law, and that the virtual defeat of the object and intent of both law and treaty was being fraudulently accomplished ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... overscrupulous, and any stick was good enough wherewith to beat Claverhouse, she would like to know, if only to gratify a woman's curiosity, whether Claverhouse was really going to marry this kinswoman of his, and, in passing, whether he was the mercenary ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... due to the pride of intellect, to the sense of manhood—who, praised, admired by men of all parties alike, repaid the public liberality by striking a secret and envenomed blow at the reputation of every one who was not the ready tool of power—who strewed the slime of rankling malice and mercenary scorn over the bud and promise of genius, because it was not fostered in the hotbed of corruption, or warped by the trammels of servility—who supported the worst abuses of authority in the worst spirit—who joined a gang of desperadoes ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... business, and that therefore there was no longer any occasion that I should be an expense to Captain Delmar. It must not, however, be supposed, from my grandmother stating this, that Captain Delmar was at all mercenary or stingy; on the contrary, considering that, as the second son of a nobleman, he had only 1,000 pounds per annum besides his pay, he was exceedingly liberal (although not extravagant) ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... but it only confirms what I have said; namely, that an artist's talent may be infinite, but that its mercenary claims are necessarily limited,—on the one hand, by its usefulness to the society which rewards it; on the other, by the resources of this society: in other words, that the demand of the seller is balanced by the ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... game, due on the 12th of August, breaking up the senate of the kingdom, and accessible only to the few whom wealth or privilege give the entree into the preserved regions, has, when even thrown into the market by the mercenary scions of the great, a considerable value; and perhaps it is only in the North that it is properly cooked and appreciated. A moor bird requires a particular sagacity in carving, which is a secret to the uninitiated. You may carve it like a common fowl; but the epicure alone knows ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... relating to the Duke, was yet of more importance. The greatest part of Her Majesty's forces in Flanders were mercenary troops, hired from several princes of Europe. It was found that the Queen's general subtracted two and a half per cent, out of the pay of those troops, for his own use, which amounted to a great annual sum. The Duke of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... in the heart, you see, Serena. There is not a more mercenary race under the sun than the clergy. They all marry for money. I can mention quite a dozen; his own uncle at the head of them. Now, you cannot suppose that he married Mrs Jonathan Prothero for anything but her fortune and ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... strange to say. It is sad to contemplate the number of people who think they can sing and are destined by talent and temperament for operatic careers, who have been led by misguided or foolish friends and too often by overambitious and mercenary singing masters into spending time and money on their voices in the fond hope of some day astonishing the world. Alas, they do not realize that the great singers who are heard in the New York opera houses have been picked from the world's supply ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... daily companions for their own sake in this world, whoever and wherever they are, you will fail to find love for your own sake in the next—and to love well, whatever you love you must love for itself, and not for any future and mercenary end." ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... followed her, having resigned his Governor-Generalship. The fortune which he now possessed was moderate, his opportunities considered, and had been honourably acquired; for his motives had never been mercenary, and the money which he had wrung from Indian princes had invariably been applied to the service of the Company or the necessities of his administration. He was received with honour by the Directors and with favour by the Court. There was ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... which in fact that wealth depended. The carcass was there, and the eagles as well as the vultures, the far-sighted as well as the mere carrion birds of prey, were gathering round it. "The spoil of Granada," said one of these mercenary chieftains, two centuries ago, "I count as naught beside the knowledge of the great Lake Nicaragua, and of the route between the Northern and Southern seas which ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... 1858, of Mary Seacole: 'I have witnessed her devotion and her courage; I have already borne testimony to her services to all who needed them. She is the first who has redeemed the name of 'sutler' from the suspicion of worthlessness, mercenary business and plunder; and I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some other illustrious dead.' England seems to have forgotten her, but it is hoped that this account of her life ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... Blanche, with just the faintest feeling of disgust—the first she had ever experienced toward Bob. "If you talk like that I shall leave you. I am disappointed in you; I should never have suspected you of being mercenary." ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... pay your bootmaker's bill. No, no, gentlemen. As courage was the first virtue that honor called forth, the first virtue from which all safety and civilization proceed, so we do right to keep that one virtue at least clear and unsullied from all the money-making, mercenary, pay-me-in-cash abominations which are the vices, not the virtues, of ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in the mind of the husband included his manner of viewing those peculiarities in the mental constitution of Janet to which we have alluded. Her desire to rule him was now rebellion; her devotion to "hussyskep" was nothing better than mercenary grubbing; her adhesion to her hodden-grey was vulgar affectation; and as to her monologues, they were evidence of insanity. Such changes in reference to other objects happen to every one of us every day in the year, only we don't look at and examine them; nor, if we did, could we reconcile ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... fallen heir to her father's property on the second marriage of her mother. The stepfather was an excellent Swiss, a Protestant from Basel, thoroughly educated, and interested in education, and for years a mercenary in the Genoese service. On his retirement he became a Roman Catholic in order to secure the woman of his choice. He was the father of Letitia's half brother, Joseph. The retired officer, though kindly disposed to the family he had entered, had little but his pension ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... "go with" Bessy Houghton regularly after that. In his single-mindedness he never feared that Bessy would misjudge his motives or imagine him to be prompted by mercenary designs. He never thought of her riches himself, and it never occurred to him that she ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... conditions as cold and business-like as ours, there's got to be some vestige of affection in it,—some vestige at least of the intelligence of affection,—else what gain is there for my little girl and me over the purely mercenary domestic service that has racked us up to this time with ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... of an obstacle to their objects. What these objects might ultimately be, I do not entirely know; and I do not feel myself authorized, by any thing which of my own knowledge I know, to load either of them with mercenary imputations. One of them (the younger) was, or fancied himself, in love with Mrs. Lee. It was impossible for him to marry her; and possibly he may have fancied that in some rustic retirement, where the parties were unknown, it would be easier than in London to appease the lady's scruples ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... instruction. Often an opponent will come over to your side if you just confess, honestly, that he is a better man than you are, and you need his help. What was the road I must take to achieve the same understanding he had achieved? His eyes glittered at that, and a mercenary expression underlay ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... them from the tyranny meditated against them. Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a freeman contending for liberty, on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... discontent, fights in its own cause, and one which, being discontented, fights to satisfy the ambition of others. For whereas the Romans were always victorious under the consuls, under the decemvirs they were always defeated. This helps us to understand why it is that mercenary troops are worthless; namely, that they have no incitement to keep them true to you beyond the pittance which you pay them, which neither is nor can be a sufficient motive for such fidelity and devotion as would make them willing to die in your behalf. But in ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... ve'ni al, pardonable. cor po're al, bodily. ve'nal, mercenary; base. du'al ist, a believer in two gods. ap'po site, suitable; fit. op'po site, over against. du'el ist, one who fights a duel ac cla ma'tion, a slout. ac cli ma'tion, inurement to climate. de scen'sion, descent. ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... affairs, I had clearly indicated who should be that man. I—of course! Such accusations of self-nepotism are a sign of the times. No one can speak disinterestedly about a subject now; we all must have a motive. We are all mercenary, we are automatic advertising machines of our own selves, we are always insincere. Charming! But for my own part, I wish to state it very plainly that I never have thought, or could think, of putting my own candidature forward if ever the academy should become a fact. I have no desire ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... with the progress of parliamentary venality. But nothing is more certain than that, while the legislature was becoming more and more venal, the courts of law and the public offices were becoming purer and purer. The representatives of the people were undoubtedly more mercenary in the days of Hardwicke and Pelham than in the days of the Tudors. But the Chancellors of the Tudors took plate and jewels from suitors without scruple or shame; and Hardwicke would have committed for contempt any ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that Theodora North was unconsciously endangering the peace of her girlish heart, Lady Throckmorton was very silent, or very indifferent about the matter. But she was not moulded after the manner of the stern female guardians usually celebrated in love stories. She was not mercenary, and she was by no means authoritative. She had sent for Theo with the intention of extending to her the worldly assistance she had extended to Pamela, and, beyond that, the matter lay in the girl's own hands. Lady Throckmorton ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... his eyes for a moment, then her own drooped and she grew pale. It was not that her father's eyes told her his thoughts, it was at the humiliation of her own position in being the object of mercenary scheming. "He has not enough money," she said at last distinctly, "and he wants more. That's what it means. And he dares to think—." She stopped short, and for a moment it seemed as if it would be impossible for her to go on; a hot flush came to her face ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... affectionate friendship for them, that attention to the most important duties at the last gasp, indicates that honesty without any thought of personal advantage was innate in the man; that it did not require the invitation of pleasure, or the allurements of mercenary rewards. For what greater evidence can we require that those things which are honourable and right are desirable of themselves for their own sake, than the sight of a dying man so anxious in the discharge of such important duties? But, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... indeed!' replied Lucy D——. 'The mystery of nature, of creation, of the communion of the creature with the infinitely bountiful Creator. Have you never wandered away from the beaten track, from tiresome dinners, with mercenary waiters and elaborate courses, from yawning, blase men, and over-dressed, artificial, weakly women, and, resting upon some quiet hillside, suffered the glories of external nature to fill your soul as you drained the cup of beauty, until sunrises and sunsets, storm clouds and ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... truly, but remembered what you said to me, and have done my very best. I can't help it if people like me. I don't try to make them, and it worries me if I don't care for them, though Jo says I haven't got any heart. Now I know Mother will shake her head, and the girls say, "Oh, the mercenary little wretch!", but I've made up my mind, and if Fred asks me, I shall accept him, though I'm not madly in love. I like him, and we get on comfortably together. He is handsome, young, clever enough, and very ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... he read a further disadvantage. The virtues he most honored were courage, courtesy, magnanimity,—all that he delighted to characterize as "chivalry." He was inclined to consider the North as materialistic and mercenary, and even its virtues as based largely on "honesty ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... here upon the character of the thrice renowned Ker. It is evident to all, he was a man of a great mind, far above a servile and mercenary disposition.—He was, for a number of years, hurried from place to place, and guarded from prison to prison. He endured all this with undaunted courage.—He lost a good estate then for the cause of Christ: and, though he got not the martyrs crown, yet he beyond all ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... actions were misrepresented with the same black malignity. They even made it a crime in me to have written to madame de Bearn, thanking her for her past kindnesses, and thus setting her at liberty to retire from the mercenary services she pretended to have afforded me. And who could blame me for seeking to render myself independent of her control, or for becoming weary of the tyrannical guidance of one who had taken it into her head that I had become her sole ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... his very superior knowledge, accuracy, and acuteness, enlarges upon this subject; and never takes any notice of the corrupt, mercenary, and degraded state into which Rome fell when it became as rich ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... thing is this way: If something happens to you and by writing about it you can make a bit of money and at the same time be a benefactor to the race, then why not? Does not the philanthropic aspect of the proposition more than balance off the mercenary side? I hold that it does, or at least that it should, in the estimation of all fair-minded persons. It is to this class that I particularly address myself. Unfair-minded persons are advised to take warning and stop right here with the contemporary paragraph. That which ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... lofty fabric does the sight invade, And stretches o'er the waves a pompous shade; Whence sudden shouts the neighbourhood surprise, And thundering claps and dreadful hissings rise. Here thrifty R——[16] hires monarchs by the day, And keeps his mercenary kings in pay; With deep-mouth'd actors fills the vacant scenes, And rakes the stews for goddesses and queens: 10 Here the lewd punk, with crowns and sceptres graced, Teaches her eyes a more majestic cast; And hungry monarchs with ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... purification of the men of his nation. After the seven vials of fiery wrath have been poured out upon the creed of Palestine, it is refreshing to find the creed of Arabia almost patronised and praised. The writer who could not have found in his heart to think Gregory the Great or Hildebrand other than a mercenary impostor, nor Cromwell other than an ambitious hypocrite, admits with exquisite blandness of Mahomet that he had the art of employing all the means of subjugating men avec adresse, mais avec grandeur.[65] Another reason, no doubt, besides his hatred of the Church, lay at the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... is that here, as elsewhere, poetry has reached the truth, while science and common sense have missed it. It has distinguished—as, in spite of all mercenary and feeble sophistry, men ever will distinguish—war from mere bloodshed. It has discerned the higher feelings which lie beneath its revolting features. Carnage is terrible. The conversion of producers into destroyers is a calamity. Death, and insults ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... neat little history in his mind that was reasonably near the truth, of a hard-up professional family, fatherless perhaps, of a mercenary marriage at seventeen ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... had brought up from Durango. His particular interest was in the almost unblemished whites, and these he had given especial care. He made a good deal of money selling this strain to friends among the ranchers back in Texas. No mercenary consideration, however, could have made him part with the great, rangy white horses he had gotten from the Durango breeder. He called them Blanco Diablo (White Devil), Blanco Sol (White Sun), Blanca Reina (White Queen), Blanca Mujer (White ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... muzzle of the gun, was not the desperate undertaking that it now is, when from the hedge of steel issues a rolling and continuous fire. The French regiment, once broken, had been cut down with scarce any resistance, while the mercenary cavalry had been defeated with the greatest ease. Thus, among the brigade of the Irish horse there were but few fallen friends to mourn, and nothing to mar the pride that every man felt, in the behaviour of the Irish ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... and began to pace the floor with excited eyes and with gesturing hands]—"something enormous going on in iron, without the shadow of a doubt, and here I sit mousing in the dark and never knowing anything about it; great heaven, what an escape I've made! this underhanded mercenary creature might have taken me up—and ruined me! but I have escaped, and I warrant me I'll not put ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... leading chiefs or "khans" of the Bakhtiyaris, and another chief was the self-styled Minister of War. These chieftains have always been a strange and changing mixture of mountain patriot and city intriguer—of loyal soldier and mercenary looter. The mercenary instincts, possibly aided by a sense of their own comparative helplessness against Russian Cossacks and artillery, led them to accept the stranger's gold and fair promises, and they ended their checkered but theretofore relatively honorable careers by selling ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... stub of his cigar towards the fire. It fell short in the grate. He picked it up and rammed it deep into the burning coals. He looked a poor, old, pitiful child, uttering embittered heresies. "All women are mercenary; all of them except my wife and daughters. Ah, yes, and ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... wretch to be wholly selfish and mercenary, from my experience of her on the raft—for that she was the same negress I had long ceased to doubt—and I determined, while I had an opportunity of doing so, to enter a wedge of confidence between us ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... restoring the rebel nations to the fold of the Church, and of stamping out heresy by fire and sword. To his fiery faith every means of warfare seemed hallowed by the sanctity of his cause. The despotism of the prince, the passion of the populace, the sword of the mercenary, the very dagger of the assassin, were all seized without scruple as weapons in the warfare of God. The ruthlessness of the Inquisitor was turned into the world-wide policy of the Papacy. When Philip ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... Carthage depended upon mercenary troops, which her great wealth enabled her to procure in abundance from Spain, Italy, and Greece, as well as from Libya. Sardinia and Corsica were among her earliest conquests, and Sicily was also one of the first objects of her military enterprise. The Phoenician colonies in this ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... thought we'd set up as packers, but in the meantime all is fish that comes to our net. I'm getting quite a mercenary character. You had a long journey—how ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... to you in childhood, that and much more it is my wish that the true Plays of Shakespear may prove to you in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach you courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... for he knew his Fearful position; but that which weighed heaviest upon his heart was a consciousness of the misinterpretations which the world might put upon the motives of his conduct in this elopement, imputing it to selfishness and a mercenary spirit. When about to be ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... that to-day you will find no man in our town as well liked, as jovial, and full of merry sayings as I. My jokes are again noised about and quoted; once more I take pleasure in my wife's confidential chatter without a mercenary thought, while Guy and Viola play at my feet distributing gems of childish humor without fear of the ghastly tormentor who used to dog their ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... only being used for food, although their flesh is equal to the Ox, and would have supplied the destitute settlers with animal food for a long while, had there been any effectual means at that time to restrain the waste of the mercenary hunter. So great was the destruction of those valuable animals, that in a few years they totally disappeared. A few have lately been seen, and a law has been enacted for their preservation; but they can scarcely be reckoned among the present animals of ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... Go it!' cried Malkin, slapping his companion's knee violently. 'Raise the tone! To the devil with mercenary considerations! Help the proletariat ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... distinguished Venetian; he was feared by the government; hated by the nobles whom he had out-stripped in honor, and was condemned to prison by men who were not worthy to loose the latchet of his shoes. Although he had often paid the mercenary soldiers to fight for Venice, in the War of Chioggia, from his own pocket, he was sent to jail for loaning money ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... how I made me some news, when there wasn't any. The news is, that Annabel will never forgive me, and as I'm here solely as her guest, my guesting-time will be brief—just long enough to find out what Mr. Gledware decides to do. I oughtn't to have told Annabel that she was mercenary, or that Mr. Gledware was as hard as a stone and as old as M— (I'm not sure how to spell him, but you remember: the oldest man). Yes, I know I oughtn't. If a woman can marry a man when she doesn't love him, it won't change her purpose to know what YOU think about it, because her own feelings ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... disarming of the population in Upper Silesia, conducted under French auspices, had taken the arms away from the Germans but left arms with the Poles. Added to that, guns, machine-guns, rifles, and ammunition, were run over into the plebiscite area, and a mercenary "insurrectionary" army was raised, partly from the local Polish population and partly from Poland proper. An army which the French Government held to be capable of intimidating the League of Nations garrison of ten thousand ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... James. The boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and you see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites, and freebooters, preachers, schoolmasters, mercenary soldiers, gipsies, and beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and place and parentage, he might have lived too. Indeed, no man can read Scott without being more of a public man, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... friend of the British agent, to be distributed among the different Lake Indians, to rouse them to war. One of their prisoners, an Irishman, they refused to surrender; but the other they gave to the agent. He proved to be a German, a mercenary who had originally been in Burgoyne's army. [Footnote: Canadian Archives, Duggan to Chew, February 3, 1794. inclosing his journal for the fall of 1793. American State Papers, IV., 361, Wayne to Knox, October 23, 1793. The Americans lost 13 men; ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... up into regular hours for work and recreation. Other good Quaker women from outside came in to help; and the taproom kept by a mercenary guard was done away with, and an order established that no spirituous liquors should be brought into Newgate. The women agreed to keep away from the grating on the street, except when personal friends came; to cease begging; to quit gambling. They were given pay for their labor. A woman ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... story of love for love, and how it came to naught. In it there shall be no marrying from mercenary motives; the manoeuvering mother-in-law is suppressed; Nature takes her course; and in the climax I strive to prove how sad a thing it is that men are modest and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... following morning a wagon was harnessed, and we left these simple countrymen and women—who refused everything like compensation, as a matter of course—and proceeded homeward. I have heard it said that we Americans are mercenary: it may be so, but not a man, probably, exists in the colonies, who would accept money for such assistance. We were two hours in reaching Albany, on wheels; and entered the place about ten, in a very different ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... been thinking," he remarked, "here we are—a group of people—all struggling like mad for one thing, but with different motives. Mine are plain enough and mercenary enough, although a certain red-haired girl with a fine loyalty to an old doctor and a sanatorium is carrying me along with her enthusiasm. And Van Alstyne's motives are clear enough—and selfish. Carter is merely trying to save his own skin—but ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wise, the just, the best of kings, Francis Augustus", who, if one were to believe Monti, "in war was a whirlwind and in peace a zephyr." But the heavy Austrian, who knew he was nothing of the kind, thrust out his surly under lip at these blandishments, said that this muse's favors were mercenary, and cut off Monti's pension. Stung by such ingratitude, the victim of his own honesty retired forever from courts, and thenceforward sang only the merits of rich persons in private station, who could afford to pay for ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the moral tissues tough in integrity; then it will hold a hook of obligations when once set in a sure place. There is nothing more vital. Shape all your experiments to preserve the integrity. Do not so reward it that it becomes mercenary. Turning State's evidence is a dangerous experiment in morals. Prevent deceit ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... apart the youngest and prettiest Faces for trading Girls; these are remarkable by their Hair, having a particular Tonsure by which they are known, and distinguish'd from those engag'd to Husbands. They are mercenary, and whoever makes Use of them, first hires them, the greatest Share of the Gain going to the King's Purse, who is the chief Bawd, exercising his Perogative over all the Stews of his Nation, and his own Cabin (very often) being the chiefest ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... immediately annoyed at her and disappointed in her. Was Mark right in his estimate of her character? Hetty had thought her a wonder of high-mindedness and independence of spirit, if very formal and cold. Was she now going to be proved mercenary ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... I was deeply touched to find that I had to deal with a young man who, in spite of being threatened by consumption, and being also exceedingly badly off, had come at my invitation, simply from a sense of duty and honour, and not with any mercenary motive. I saw from his knowledge and capacities that he would never be able to attain a position of great influence, but his kindness of heart and his extraordinarily receptive mind filled me with a feeling ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... stated above that one of the abuses which came into large practice from the middle period of the Tokugawa Bakufu was the adoption of children of ignoble birth into samurai families in consideration of monetary payments by their parents. This mercenary custom was strictly interdicted by the Matsudaira regent, who justly saw in it a danger to the solidity of the military class. But it does not appear that his ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... most experienced and boldest troopers in this chosen corps, induced him to wink at irregularities in Africa and Italy, that he would have been obliged to punish severely near Constantinople or in Greece. At Abydos, he had ordered two Huns of the mercenary cavalry to be hanged for committing a murder; at Rome, he ran the risk of being murdered himself in the midst of a council of war, by one of his generals, from having neglected too long to cheek the rapacity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered, is, that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are the dragon's teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... reply. This seemed a sadly mercenary view of work, and a little shocked her. But then Claudia had not to earn ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... Were Hebrew and Greek Women Coy? Masculine Coyness Shy but not Coy Militarism and Mediaeval Women What Made Women Coy? Capturing Women The Comedy of Mock Capture Why the Women Resist Quaint Customs Greek and Roman Mercenary Coyness Modesty and Coyness Utility of Coyness How ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of his nation. After the seven vials of fiery wrath have been poured out upon the creed of Palestine, it is refreshing to find the creed of Arabia almost patronised and praised. The writer who could not have found in his heart to think Gregory the Great or Hildebrand other than a mercenary impostor, nor Cromwell other than an ambitious hypocrite, admits with exquisite blandness of Mahomet that he had the art of employing all the means of subjugating men avec adresse, mais avec grandeur.[65] Another reason, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... confidence of the Treveri, who at this time were still smarting under the setback of Indutiomarus's death, raised a greater conspiracy in that quarter, and sent for a mercenary force from the Celtae. Labienus wishing to join issue with them before this last contingent should be added to their number invaded the country of the Treveri in advance. The latter did not defend themselves, as they were awaiting reinforcements, but put a river between ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... prove," he announced, "how entirely devoid my clients are of mercenary considerations, they agree, Mr. Bundercombe, to accept the sum of four ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Federalist, a friend of Mr. Humphrey Marshall, and, as you know, we are sadly in the minority in Kentucky now. I came here to-night to ask you to undertake a mission in behalf of myself and certain other gentlemen, and I assure you that my motives are not wholly mercenary." He paused, smiled, and put the tips of his fingers together. "I would willingly lose every crop for the next ten years to convict this Wilkinson of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... tried to commit suicide on February 9—and her attempted suicide, with its tragic consequences for Lydia Carr, is probably the reason Sprague gave up his movie star," Dundee mused. "Did Nita let him persuade her to go into the blackmail business, in order to hold his wandering, mercenary affections?... Lord! The men some ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... troubles occurred to further embarrass the executive, and the resources of the state were severely strained in coping with more than one serious rebellion, among which the most formidable was the mutiny of a mercenary force under the command of a Turk officer named Popai, who imagined that he was unjustly treated, and that the time was favorable to found an administration of his own. His early successes encouraged him to believe that he would succeed in his object; but when he found that all the disposable ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... your bridesmaid. I could never co-operate in the unhallowed scheme of wedding a man whom you despise. Oh, Olga! do not degrade yourself by such a mercenary traffic." ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... he went on, 'I may as well say a word in vindication of my conduct lately, at the risk, too, of offending you. My actual motive in submitting to your order that I should send for my late wife, and live with her, was not the mercenary policy of wishing to retain an office which brings me greater comforts than any I have enjoyed before, but this unquenchable passion for Cytherea. Though I saw the weakness, folly, and even wickedness of it continually, it still forced ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... mussels, and are of all shapes and sizes, out of which might be selected hundreds of perfect spheres, from the size of bird-shot to that of a cherry. What splendid necklaces must the latter have made! But, alas for the mercenary collector, all are ruined by fire,—a fact advantageous to science. Like nearly all the other objects, every pearl is perforated ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... society the character of what we call Shudra in India. In fighting a battle, the Kshatriya, the noble knight, followed his honour for his ideal, which was greater than victory itself; but the mercenary Shudra has success for his object. The name Shudra symbolises a man who has no margin round him beyond his bare utility. The word denotes a classification which includes all naked machines that have lost their completeness of humanity, be their work manual or intellectual. They are like walking ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... madam, if I am suspected of any mercenary motives, the liberal settlements which are now ready for your perusal, must immediately ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... indolent or mercenary creature, No one more cordially detested the life of dependence than he. He always thought that his father had discharged all the duties of that relation in nourishing his childhood and giving him a good education. ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... brought together the ends of the earth,—long- estranged human brethren sat down together in pleasant communion. It was a modern Babel, finished and furnished, and where there was almost a fusion, instead of, a confusion, of tongues. The "barbarous Turk" was there, the warlike Russ, the mercenary Swiss, the passionate Italian, the voluptuous Spaniard, the gallant Frenchman,—and yet foreboding English citizens did not find themselves compelled to go armed, or to lock up their plate, or their wives and daughters. In fact, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... Tales have been to you in childhood, that and much more it is my wish that the true Plays of Shakespear may prove to you in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach you courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... suspected. On the next day (January 25) the Governor devoted a despatch to Lord Hillsborough to remarks upon the press, and especially the "Boston Gazette" and Edes and Gill—"They may be said to be no more than mercenary printers," are the Governor's words,—"but they have been and still are the trumpeters of sedition, and have been made the apparent instruments of raising that flame in America which has given so much trouble and is still likely to give more to Great Britain and her Colonies"; and it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... chap enough, and he would have considerable money when the present business was completed, yet, somehow he did not appeal, even to her mercenary side. Moreover she no longer dealt in his sort. Time was when he would have served admirably, but she was done with plucking for plucking's sake. She plucked still, but neither so ruthlessly nor so omnivorously as of yore. She did not need; nor was she so gregarious in her tastes. She ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... peasants as though they were tramps, and addressed even the village elders and church wardens as inferiors, and considered they had a right to do so. And, indeed, can any sort of help or good example be given by mercenary, greedy, depraved, and idle persons who only visit the village in order to insult, to despoil, and to terrorize? Olga remembered the pitiful, humiliated look of the old people when in the winter Kiryak had been taken to be flogged.... And now she felt sorry ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... face for days together. My father treated me with careless kindness; my mother scarcely noticed me, though she had no children except me; other cares completely absorbed her. My father, a man still young and very handsome, had married her from mercenary considerations; she was ten years older than he. My mother led a melancholy life; she was for ever agitated, jealous and angry, but not in my father's presence; she was very much afraid of him, and he was severe, cold, and distant in his behaviour.... ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... said soberly. "I am not altogether mercenary, although I need money. I 'll say this, however, and you can take it for what it may be worth. I originally came into this game believing I was doing a kindness to a helpless man who was being defrauded of his rights. There is no necessity of my going into details, but Neale told me an apparently ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... welcomed as a public benefactor. The pensions of the councillors were so much additional wealth 15 poured into the Tartar exchequer; as to the ties of dependency thus created, experience had not yet enlightened these simple tribes as to that result. And that he himself should be the chief of these mercenary councillors was so far from being charged upon Zebek as any offence or any 20 ground of suspicion, that his relative the Khan returned him hearty thanks for his services, under the belief that he could have accepted this appointment ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... compliments, and I don't like them. But, if you will come, you will really be useful. You see I am mercenary in my wishes, after all. Here is Fred with a load of sketching materials; won't you take pity on him, and relieve him of my share ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... provided for. I promised your mother that, as far as lay in my power, I would shield you from wrecking your life as she wrecked hers. And money—a secure little income of her own—is a very good sort of shield for a women. Four hundred's not enough to satisfy a mercenary individual, but it's enough to enable a woman to marry for love—and not for a home!" He spoke with a kind of repressed bitterness, as though memory had stirred into fresh flame the embers of some burnt-out passion of regret, and Sara looked at ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... that the house of God and the depository of the dead, should be so shamefully assigned over to the influence of Mammon, and a price of admission as into a place of public amusement, exacted by those to whose mercenary government the ancient structure of Westminster Abbey had devolved. "Was it thus, always," asked he, "from the time of Henry IIId?" To this enquiry, the guide replied merely by a shrug of his shoulders, rather indicative of contempt than otherways, and ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the work of Mr. Streeter,' serjeant-painter to King Charles the Second. In February 1664, the Diarist saw Dryden's Indian Queen acted 'with rich scenes as the like had never been seen here, or haply, except rarely, elsewhere on a mercenary theatre.' Mr. Pepys—most devoted of playgoers—notes occasionally of particular plays, that 'the machines are fine and the paintings very pretty.' In October 1667, he records that he sat in the boxes for the first time in his life, and discovered that from that point of view 'the scenes ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... entirely inoffensive could expect to sojourn in the village without being a target for stones. The incursion of the artistic hordes has been a great factor in the demoralization of the village, for who would not be mercenary when besought at all hours of the day to stand before a canvas or a camera? Thus, the harmless stranger who strays on to the staith with a camera is obliged to pay for 'an afternoon's 'baccy' if he want ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... among the maxims of the world. The rules of attack and of self-defence are alike unknown to him; he can neither give nor take; he is attracted by women, and stands in awe of them; his very good qualities tell against him, he is all generosity and modesty, and completely innocent of mercenary designs. Pleasure and not interest is his object when he tells a lie; and among many dubious courses, the conscience, with which as yet he has not juggled, points out to him the right way, which he is slow ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... gentlemen and yeomen, is the natural strength and only security of a free government; that such a militia in this colony would forever render it unnecessary for the mother country to keep among us for the purpose of our defence any standing army of mercenary forces, always subversive of the quiet and dangerous to the liberties of the people, and would obviate the pretext of taxing ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... herself by mere accident had missed so narrowly. Her own life was done; Alan's death had made her task impossible; but if Dolly could fill her place for the sake of humanity, she would not regret it. Enough for her to have martyred herself; she asked no mercenary palm ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... dishonored by those who take it up from mercenary motives, for wealth and fame, or think to build a baseless fabric of their own on another's foundation. They cannot put the "new wine into old bottles;" they can never engraft Truth into error. Such students come to my College to learn a system ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... her, Bill," he said, beseechingly. "Don't let it hurt your love for her. There was nothing mercenary. She hesitated a moment—and then I saw that it had all been a dream of the impossible. I had always associated this money with myself. It turned back the whole current of her ideas, and upset everything, when I separated myself from ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... so many successful struggles, deemed themselves happy in the secure possession of their privileges, they were surprised in 1305 to find that Edward had secretly applied to Rome, and had procured from that mercenary court an absolution from all the oaths and engagements, which he had so often reiterated, to observe both the charters. There are some historians,[*] so credulous as to imagine, that this perilous step was taken by him for no other purpose than to acquire the merit ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... the mercenary spirit which introduced the infamous traffic in slaves, to show the degradation of negro slavery in our country. This system was imposed upon our colonial settlements by the mother country, and it is due to truth to say that the commercial colonies and States were chiefly engaged in the traffic. ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... come, when she should be a successful young actress, with an adoring Daddy to be proud of her. Now the dream was clouded; her father was an old man, self-absorbed; her mother—but Julia had always known her mother to be both selfish and mercenary. More than this, her little visit in Sausalito had altered her whole viewpoint. Ignorant of life as she was, and bewildered by the revelations of that visit, she was still intelligent enough to feel an acute discontent with her old world, an agonizing longing for that better and cleaner ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... she suspect him of mercenary motives? No; she suspected nothing. Her face expressed disappointment and bewilderment, so far as she allowed it to express anything. One more turn. Thank Goodness, she was not looking at him; she was giving ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... mind became poisoned; suspicions were engendered; his revilers were cherished; the few stout hearts that confided in his political integrity, and nobly clustered around him, were anathematized and proscribed. The mercenary, the selfish, and the timid united in the cry—down ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... Apollo. Taken to task and heavily fined for this act by the other members of the Delphian Amphictyony, the Phocians deliberately robbed the temple, and used the treasure in the maintenance of a large force of mercenary soldiers. The Amphictyons not being able to punish the Phocians for their impiety, were forced to ask help of Philip, who gladly rendered ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Henry de la Zouch was distinctly unfavourable to that knight; for, with the instinct of a woman, she had divined from the very beginning that his motives were more mercenary than genuine, and in spite of all his protestations of love towards her, he had failed to convince her that he loved her for herself alone. A little watching on her part had quickly convinced her that the dislike she felt for him was not without ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... wonderfully like Vrain, save that he had no scar on the cheek, and had a moustache, whereas Vrain was always clean-shaved. He had made the acquaintance of the actor—Michael Clear was his full name—and of his wife. They proved to be hard up and mercenary, so Ferruci had no difficulty in gaining over both for his purpose. For a certain sum of money (which was to be paid to Mrs. Clear when her husband was dead and the Count, married to Lydia, was possessed ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... money! I think about money morning, noon and night! I dare say it's mercenary of me, but ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... much prejudice me in their favour; and I should hesitate to agree to such a proposal from any other individual.' 'Do as you like, sir,' answered the physician; 'the employing me or not is entirely voluntary on your part; but as I am above the common mercenary views of gain, I never stake the reputation of so noble an art without a rational prospect of success; and what success can I hope for in so obstinate a disorder, unless the patient will consent to a fair experiment of what ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... embarrassing position," quickly retorted the former, with an offended air. "But should I wish to do so, I should hardly be deterred from it by either of the considerations you have just named, I think. And, indeed, if the mercenary and ambitious motives, which you would have actuate me, were alone to be my guide in such a step, I could see but little temptation for the sacrifice in the honors and wealth which are so much to depend on a triumph that, for all your boasts, I believe will never be accomplished; while the failure, ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... is, the man—is a gambler, a slanderer, a charlatan, a mercenary, a thief, a forger. . ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... not altogether unprepared for this, Mr. Lightmark. In fact, I may as well own that I have talked it over with my son, and we agreed that the whole question resolved itself into—ah—into settlements. You must not think me mercenary." This was said with a dignified calm, which made the idea preposterous. "If you can"—here she seemed to refer to some mental note-book—"ah—satisfy Charles on that point, I am sure that it will give me great pleasure to regard you as a prospective son-in-law. Of course, you know, I can't ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... always full of patients; his school had begun to come back to him again, for the gratitude of his warm-hearted Galician people, in return for his many services to their sick and suffering, sufficed to overcome their fear of the Polish priest, whose unpriestly habits and whose mercenary spirit were fast turning against him even the most loyal of his people. In the expressive words of old Portnoff, who, it is to be feared, had little religion in his soul, was summed up the general opinion: "Dat Klazowski bad man. He drink, drink all time, take money, ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... France. The disarming of the population in Upper Silesia, conducted under French auspices, had taken the arms away from the Germans but left arms with the Poles. Added to that, guns, machine-guns, rifles, and ammunition, were run over into the plebiscite area, and a mercenary "insurrectionary" army was raised, partly from the local Polish population and partly from Poland proper. An army which the French Government held to be capable of intimidating the League of Nations garrison ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... that came to him from the little piece of superstition that he carried about with him—every Cornishman carries it. Treliss was always a place of many customs, and, although now these ceremonies drag themselves along with all the mercenary self-consciousness that America and cheap trips from Manchester have given to the place, at this stage of Peter's history they were genuine and honest enough. To see from the top of the Grey Hill, the rising ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... so, let us take the lesson that that house, too, may be desecrated. There may be, as there were in the original Temple, the externals of worship, and yet, eating out the reality of these, there may be an inward mercenary spirit. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... of game, due on the 12th of August, breaking up the senate of the kingdom, and accessible only to the few whom wealth or privilege give the entree into the preserved regions, has, when even thrown into the market by the mercenary scions of the great, a considerable value; and perhaps it is only in the North that it is properly cooked and appreciated. A moor bird requires a particular sagacity in carving, which is a secret to the uninitiated. ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... confidence in the fidelity of the strangers; his growing strength enabled him to dismiss this unpopular aid, but he steadily professed the same gratitude and reverence to his adopted father; and till the death of Maurice, the peace and alliance of the two empires were faithfully maintained. [18] Yet the mercenary friendship of the Roman prince had been purchased with costly and important gifts; the strong cities of Martyropolis and Dara [1811] were restored, and the Persarmenians became the willing subjects of an empire, whose eastern limit was extended, beyond the example of former times, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... It was very hard of heart, to my mind, I remember. It was an old servant even then; and I felt as though it ought to show some sorrow; as though it wanted sympathy with us in our distress, and were a dull, heartless, mercenary creature. Ah! how soon I learnt to know that in its ceaseless going on, and in its being checked or stayed by nothing, lay its greatest kindness, and the only balm for grief ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... the King at the outset. In less than twenty years he had become another man. At the age of twelve he had married at his father's command, and solely for political and mercenary reasons, Catharine of Aragon, his brother Arthur's widow (S333), who was six years his senior. Such a marriage was forbidden, except in certain cases, by the Old Testament and by the ordinances ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... so anxious for the marriage beats me," cried Ernest. "It was not a particularly good match from a mercenary point of view." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... don't think you will," Mr. Stuart responded. "Young ladies like you, who set out on the search-matrimonial with lots of common-sense, worldliness, selfishness, and mercenary motives, generally reach the goal. It's a fair enough exchange—so much youth and good looks for so many thousand dollars. I wish you all success, Miss Darrell, in your laudable undertaking. It is well we should understand each other, at once and forever, or even I some day might ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... then I am guilty— to love liberty and freedom of conscience, to hate tyranny and oppression, then I am indeed a criminal," he answered in an unshaken voice. "You call me a spy and load me with opprobrium. It was necessary to gain information as to the movements of your mercenary army: twice have I obtained that information and carried it to our noble general. My only regret is that I have not succeeded a third time in so doing; but understand that though I have thus laboured to injure you secretly, I have ever fought openly against you on the ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... Chief! Once more, Welcome to this grateful shore; Now no mercenary foe Aims again the fatal blow— Aims at thee the ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... wrong of man still greater. It served as refuge from the heat, The showers, and storms which madly beat; It grew our gardens' greatest pride, Its shadow spreading far and wide, And bow'd itself with fruit beside: But yet a mercenary clown With cruel iron chopp'd it down. Behold the recompense for which, Year after year, it did enrich, With spring's sweet flowers, and autumn's fruits, And summer's shade, both men and brutes, And warm'd the hearth with ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... population, or naval power. As it was, Great Britain allowed the revolution to get under full headway before making a serious effort to suppress it. In 1776, however, a force of about 30,000 men, many of whom were mercenary German soldiers, commonly called "Hessians," was sent to occupy New York. Thenceforward, the British pursued aggressive tactics, and inasmuch as their armies were generally superior to those of the colonists in numbers, discipline, and equipment, and besides were ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... their caps: Rather Turkish than Popish Ever-swarming nurseries of mercenary warriors Weep oftener for her children than is the usual ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... been thought worth revising and transcribing; and these transcripts have been frequently lent to others. Hence copies have been multiplied, in their nature imperfect, if not erroneous; some of which have fallen into mercenary hands, and become the object of clandestine sale. Having therefore so much reason to apprehend a surreptitious impression, he chose rather to submit his own errors to the world, than to seem answerable for those of other men. And, ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... he give way. Geoffrey, the son of Rosamond, was devotedly attached to him, and had at his own expense raised an army of Brabancons, or mercenary soldiers, and defeated an inroad of the Scots, and he now brought his victorious force to the aid of his father. Rosamond was just dead in her nunnery, and at his first meeting with her son, Henry embraced him with tears, exclaiming, "Thou art my true ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Euxine. Considering both the numbers and the now-acquired discipline and self-confidence of the Cyreians, even Sinope herself could have raised no force capable of meeting them in the field. Yet they did not belong to any city, nor receive orders from any established government. They were like those mercenary armies which marched about in Italy during the fourteenth century, under the generals called Condottieri, taking service sometimes with one city, sometimes with another. No one could predict what schemes they might conceive, or in what manner they ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... nothing but your commendation of my trifle[344] can give me any occasion to call in question. I do not doubt but you will look over this poem with another eye, and reward it in a different manner, from a mercenary bookseller, who counts the lines he is to purchase[345], and considers nothing but the bulk. I cannot help taking notice, that, besides what the authour may hope for on account of his abilities, he has likewise another claim to your regard, as he lies at present under very disadvantageous ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... once possessed considerable property, but he had invested some in a newspaper of which he was editor, and he had squandered much in vague speculation. From the account he gave of his losses it was difficult to decide whether he had been moved by mercenary or charitable temptations. Now only the merest competence remained. He lived in a small garret where no solicitor had penetrated, studying uninteresting literatures, dimly interested in all that the world did not ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... rewards. Some day these baby twins would be old enough to marry. It was prudent to remember such details. A position as an old family friend might one day prove of thrifty advantage in this miserably mercenary world where dog eats dog, and dividends are sometimes passed. God knows and pities the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... of marriage, as women in your State and in the South are taught to think, as a thing irrevocable. There are men in New England who hold other views,—pure, good men, Grey. I've tried to put you from my mind, and look at society as it is, with its corrupt, mercenary marriages, and I believe their theory is the only feasible and just,—that only those bound by secret affinity to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... kingdoms of modern Europe had been transformed from limited into absolute monarchies? The States General of France, the Cortes of Castile, the Grand Justiciary of Arragon, what had been fatal to them all? History was ransacked for instances of adventurers who, by the help of mercenary troops, had subjugated free nations or deposed legitimate princes; and such instances were easily found. Much was said about Pisistratus, Timophanes, Dionysius, Agathocles, Marius and Sylla, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, Carthage besieged by her ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... unvarying daily fare is the "blotting-paper ekmek" and yaort, with a melon or a cucumber occasionally as a luxury; yet, the moment I approach, they assign me a place at their "table," and two of them immediately bestir themselves to make me a comfortable seat. Neither is there so much as a mercenary thought among them in connection with the invitation; these poor fellows, whose scant rags it would be a farce to call clothing, actually betray embarrassment at the barest mention of compensation; they fill my pockets with bread, apologize for the absence of ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... minnows. But I think the responsibility of those who keep sending out here young fellows of sixteen and seventeen fresh from a private school or Addiscombe is quite awful. The stream is so strong, the society is so utterly worldly and mercenary in its best phase, so utterly and inconceivably low and profligate in its worst, that it is not strange that at so early an age, eight out of ten sink beneath it. ... One soon observes here how seldom one meets a ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dread a mumbling bear without a claw? 220 Nor this, nor that, is standard right or wrong, Till minted by the mercenary tongue; And what is conscience but a fiend of strife, That chills the joys, and damps the scenes of life, The wayward child of Vanity and Fear, The peevish dam of Poverty and Care? Unnumber'd woes engender in the breast That entertains ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... half-armed rustics who had flocked at Harold's summons to the fight with the stranger. It was against the centre of this formidable position that William arrayed his Norman knighthood, while the mercenary forces he had gathered in France and Britanny were ordered to attack its flanks. A general charge of the Norman foot opened the battle; in front rode the minstrel Taillefer, tossing his sword in the air and catching it again while he chaunted the song of Roland. He was the ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... fearing lest they might again suffer what they did once before when their own allies took their city, decreed that they would keep four hundred mercenary soldiers, they made ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... European states against the French republican armies; but while the English fleets remained masters of the seas, the enthusiasm of the French soldiers, and the genius of their young generals, had thus far proved too strong for the mercenary battalions of despotism. In the closing month of the year 1800, Pitt's "Second Coalition" had been shattered by the defeat of the Allies at Hohenlinden. The Peace of Amiens which shortly ensued (March, 1802, to ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... deserving, punish offenders; let there be no pretenses or defaults on your own part for you can not harshly scrutinize the conduct of others, unless you have done what is right yourselves. Why, think you, do all the generals [Footnote: A system of employing mercenary troops sprang up at the close of the Peloponnesian war, when there were numerous Grecian bands accustomed to warfare and seeking employment. Such troops were eagerly sought for by the Persian satraps and ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... gratefully bestowed. She rejoiced that in no instance she had ever betrayed it, and she saw that his own behaviour prevented all suspicion of it in the family. Yet, in the midst of her mortification and displeasure, she found some consolation in seeing that those mercenary views of which she had once been led to accuse him, were farthest from his thoughts, and that whatever was the state of his mind, she had no artifice to apprehend, nor design to guard against. All therefore that remained was to imitate his example, ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... cents he had earned running an errand from the grocery that morning, and departed on important business. He had definitely decided to give up his thirty pieces of silver. No more blood money for him. His world was upside down and all he loved were suffering, and all because he had been mercenary. The only way to put things right was to get rid of any gain that might accrue to himself. Then he would be in a position to do something. And Pat was his first object now. He meant to give back the money to Pat! He had thought it all out, and he ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... nor the crowds nor anything could stop them; through thick and through thin they went to the front, for there was rivalry in those days and when the Aigles time after time got first water on, they won triumphs which we of this mercenary epoch cannot understand. The Aigles were in for glory, nothing else. So when we heard the roar of a rapid and sniffed the mist in the air, "Tirtaan Aigles dis ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... she bitterly felt the impoverishment of the always scanty means, which deprived her of the power of laying out sums of money on those rites which were universally deemed needful for the repose of souls snatched away in battle. It was a mercenary age among the clergy, and besides, it was the depth of a northern winter, and the funeral rites of the Lady of Whitburn would have been poor and maimed indeed if a whole band of black Benedictine monks had not arrived from Wearmouth, saying they had been despatched at special request and charge ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thing was to happen," remarked Bea, with a little mercenary expectation, "Congreve Hall would be Olive's; just think of it, girls, how grand! and Cousin Roger is immensely wealthy, and there would be no end of splendid things;" and Bea sighed a little, as she spoke, for she was not going to win any wealth or grand home ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... starving peasantry began to flock in great numbers into the city, so that the misery increased. Terror was occasioned by a few cases of death from plague. Florence was at war with Pisa, but without success, for many of her mercenary soldiers were deserting and the forces besieging Pisa were dwindling for lack ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous plunderings and burnings of the rich chateaux.[21] A partial peace with England was patched up in 1360; but the "free companies" of mercenary soldiers, who had previously been ravaging Italy, had now come to take their pleasure in the French carnival of crime, and so the plundering and burning went on until the fair land was wellnigh a wilderness, and the English troops ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... something different about her, too. Constance more than once was on the point of revising her estimate of the little actress. Was she, after all, wholly mercenary in her attitude toward Warrington? Was he merely a live spender whom she could not afford to lose? Or was she merely a beautiful, delicate creature caught in the merciless maelstrom of the life into which she had been thrown? Did she realize the perilous position this ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... closed the door behind her, and leaned for a moment against the wall. Mrs. Warren's idea of perfect happiness would have received a severe shock, could she have heard Nancy murmur, brokenly: "Dear old dad! Pray Heaven you don't know that your little Nance is a miserable, mercenary coward!" ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... A tedious half-hour—during which the lady had all the conversation to herself, for the curate answered only in monosyllabic compliance, and Rainscourt made no answer whatever—elapsed before dinner was announced by the German mercenary who ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was so violent as to dissipate at once the solemn impression which the man's excellent prayer had made. The heart-stricken wife could make no reply, except by tears. It was well that the dying man was unable to catch the mercenary drift of the religious exercises he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... trade-and-raid voyages into the Old Federation. He was supposed to be a fair astrogator. He had expected his uncle to give him command of the Enterprise, which had been ridiculous. Disappointed in that, he had recruited a mercenary company and was seeking military employment: It was suspected that he was in correspondence with his uncle's worst enemy, ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... you to listen. Is it not true—will you not bear witness to the fact that Barbarina has never put your liberality and magnanimity to the test; that she has never shown herself to be egotistical or mercenary? I ask nothing from my king but his heart, the happiness to sit at his feet, and in the sunshine of his eyes to bathe my being in light and gladness. Sire, you have often complained that I desired and ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... both emotions undoubtedly played a part. The premier was one of the leading chiefs or "khans" of the Bakhtiyaris, and another chief was the self-styled Minister of War. These chieftains have always been a strange and changing mixture of mountain patriot and city intriguer—of loyal soldier and mercenary looter. The mercenary instincts, possibly aided by a sense of their own comparative helplessness against Russian Cossacks and artillery, led them to accept the stranger's gold and fair promises, and they ended their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... source. A miser loves gold coins for their own sake, but most people love them only because of the things for which they may be exchanged. The poet loves the beauty and fragrance of flowers, the florist adds to this a mercenary interest. A snow-shovel may have no interest for us ordinarily, but just when it is needed, on a winter morning, it is an object of considerable interest. It is simply a means to an end. The kind of interest which we think is so valuable ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... courage was the first virtue that honor called forth, the first virtue from which all safety and civilization proceed, so we do right to keep that one virtue at least clear and unsullied from all the money-making, mercenary, pay-me-in-cash abominations which are the vices, not the virtues, of the civilization it ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... seize his castles, he sent the Earl of Pembroke and other faithful messengers to them, to let them know he would grant them the laws and liberties they desired." * * But after the charter had been granted, "the king's mercenary soldiers, desiring war more than peace, were by their leaders continually whispering in his ears, that he was now no longer king, but the scorn of other princes; and that it was more eligible to be no king, than such a one as he." * * He applied to the Pope, that ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... dancing girls, or two half-naked mountebanks engaging in pretended combats; a gaudily bedecked bride riding in a gorgeous palanquin borne by two camels, followed by camels carrying furniture and presents; a funeral procession with black-shawled professional mourners howling their mercenary grief—all this and more ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... German people in peaceful labor, their industry and uprightness, their sense of order and discipline, their reverence for intellectual work of every kind, and their profound love for sciences and arts. All of you who know that our army is no mercenary host but embraces the entire nation from first to last, that it is led by the country's best sons, and that, at this very hour, thousands from our midst, teachers as well as students, are shedding their life's blood as officers and ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... a fur coat in winter nor his seed begging bread. Nor do I expect to see such sights. Yet I have seen an author begging bread, and instead of bread, I gave him a railway ticket. Authors have always been in the wrong, and they always will be: grasping, unscrupulous, mercenary creatures that they are! Some of them haven't even the wit to keep their books from being burnt at the stake by the executioners of the National Vigilance Association. I wonder that publishers don't dispense with them altogether, and ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... to take measures for the punishment of such a wrong. But she, with a woman's forwardness, and impelled by mental excitement, immediately gave orders to the prefects of the city and to certain of her own ruffians [mercenary body-guard] with all speed to go out of the city, under arms, and to punish the authors of the violence, sparing no one. Now as these armed men, who were prone to act cruelly at every opportunity, left the gates of the city, they came upon a number of clerks busy just outside the city walls ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... a less Motive than Idleness to this kind of Mercenary Pursuit. A Fop who admires his Person in a Glass, soon enters into a Resolution of making his Fortune by it, not questioning but every Woman that falls in his way will do him as much Justice as he does himself. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... was a "Yankee" did not make her less beautiful, and it did not make her any the less the daughter of a millionnaire. No one could say that he was mercenary, however, and no one could say why he was not as deeply interested in the daughter of the planter, for she was hardly less beautiful, though her father was not considered a millionnaire, to say nothing of a ten-millionnaire. Major Pierson did not tell what ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... the order that debars such an army of men of the means of support, the Coal Magnates, at Purdy's suggestion, have massed three hundred of the Coal and Iron Police in the town of Hazleton. This mercenary force occupies the armory, built two years before by the benevolent multi-millionaire Iron King of Pennsylvania, whose immense mills and foundries are situated some ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... were blindly devoted to the Arian faction. The people regretted the loss of their faithful pastors, whose banishment was usually followed by the intrusion of a stranger into the episcopal chair; and loudly complained, that the right of election was violated, and that they were condemned to obey a mercenary usurper, whose person was unknown, and whose principles were suspected. The Catholics might prove to the world, that they were not involved in the guilt and heresy of their ecclesiastical governor, by publicly testifying their dissent, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... vast consignments for the use of liberal economic government. We had infused into our laws, our language, and our institutions new vigor for conquest and for human enlightenment. Venality, that dogs great efforts, undoubtedly there was. But the high tide of the conflict showed no mercenary taint. On both sides it was urged from the highest motives of patriotism and of honor and in defense of the popular principle. That principle with us means local self-government and representative union. The rebel yell was because they thought local government in peril. The Federal ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... fell, for he knew his Fearful position; but that which weighed heaviest upon his heart was a consciousness of the misinterpretations which the world might put upon the motives of his conduct in this elopement, imputing it to selfishness and a mercenary spirit. When about to be searched, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... sense of humour showed her the kind of lurid drama that Pamela no doubt was concocting about her—perhaps with the help of Beryl—the two little innocents! Elizabeth recalled the intriguing French 'companion' in War and Peace who inveigles the old Squire. And as for the mean and mercenary stepmothers of fiction, they can be collected by the score. That, no doubt, was how Pamela thought of her. So that, after her involuntary tears, Elizabeth ended in a laughter that was ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lash resounds on a slave's naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labor, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good-night, or, neglected in some ostentatious hospital, breathes its last amidst the laugh of mercenary attendants." ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... well-used pipe still between his lips. Surely Napoleon the Third at Chislehurst, broken in health, broken in heart, was a scarcely more pathetic spectacle! Six or seven days later the old man saw special trains beginning to arrive, all crowded with mercenary fighting men from many lands, all bent only on following his own uncourageous example, seeking personal safety by the sea. First came 700; then on the 24th, the very day the Guards entered Koomati Poort, 2000 more, who were mostly ruined burghers, and who thus arrived at Delagoa ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... make peace, to throw himself at your feet. He accused himself, more than was just. But you do not really think him mercenary and greedy, you know that he was neither! Mrs. Barnes, Roger ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... more certain than that, while the legislature was becoming more and more venal, the courts of law and the public offices were becoming purer and purer. The representatives of the people were undoubtedly more mercenary in the days of Hardwicke and Pelham than in the days of the Tudors. But the Chancellors of the Tudors took plate and jewels from suitors without scruple or shame; and Hardwicke would have committed for contempt any suitor who had dared to bring ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... glittering and strange, voluptuous, and in some way terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities of which the kinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken. Strange places reminiscent of the legendary Sybaris, cities of art and beauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile wonderful cities of motion and music, whither repaired all who profited by the fierce, inglorious, economic struggle that went on in the ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... Matilda, "and why not, Lady Griffin? There is no reason you should break your tea-cup, because Algernon asks a harmless question. HE is not mercenary; he is all candor, innocence, generosity! He is himself blessed with a sufficient portion of the world's goods to be content; and often and often has he told me he hoped the woman of his choice might come to him without a penny, that ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... see a girl of your age mercenary," was the answer. "Good gracious, when I was two-and-twenty I never gave money a thought. I should never have dreamed of bothering myself about the amount of my friends' incomes. I don't now for that matter. Always ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... that of the young heiress, with her money in her own right, is peculiarly dangerous. The truly worthy shrink often from a tender of their affection, for fear their motives may be thought interested; while the mercenary push forward, and by well-directed flattery, that does not seem like flattery, win the prize ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... in national affairs sinks to the merely sporting instinct of "backing your candidate" at elections as a horse is backed at race meetings, and of "shouting for your party" as men shout for their favourite football team, or sinks still lower to the mercenary speculation of personal gain or loss on election results, then another danger comes in—the indifference of the average honest citizen to all politics, and the ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... centuries by a line of Earls, Viscounts, and Barons. Fortune had indeed strange experiences in store for the Suffolk youth; for, while she made a Knight and Lord Mayor of him, she consigned him on a life sentence to the Tower for resisting the extortions of the mercenary Henry VII. Sir William's son won his knightly spurs on French battlefields, wedded a daughter of the ancient house of Roos of Belvoir, and became the ancester of the Barons Capel, Viscounts ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... found guilty of murder with mercenary motives. Yakov Ivanitch was sentenced to penal servitude for twenty years; Aglaia for thirteen and a half; Sergey Nikanoritch to ten; ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... been said (and the point is worth insisting on) that the Englishman cannot pretend that he goes into business with any other object than to make money. His motives are on the face of them mercenary if not sordid. The American is impelled primarily by quite other ambitions. Similarly, when the Englishman thinks of business, the image which he conjures up in his mind is of a dull commonplace like, on lines so long established and well-defined that they can embrace little ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... he said. 'Young people and beautiful people should not be mercenary. Poor child! you had better ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... Marian, a little indignantly. "Of course I might do worse; I might kill him, and I should be tempted to if I married him. You know that I do not care for him, and he knows it, too. Indeed, I scarcely respect him. You don't realize what you are saying, for you would not have me act from purely mercenary motives?" ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... was a dismal yesterday at least, perhaps it was to me! The genius of England might be a mere mercenary man of the world, and employed all his attention to turn aside cannonballs from my Lord Stair, to give new edge to his new Marlborough's sword: was plotting glory for my Lord Carteret, or was thinking of furnishing his own apartment in Westminster Hall ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... her; he turned coward whenever the English letters were delivered; he never dared to think about her, to wonder how she had taken this letter, what she had thought, said, or done. He was not happy. Proud, ambitious, mercenary, haughty as was the Countess of Lanswell, there were times when she felt grieved for her son. It was such a young face, but there was a line on the broad, fair brow; there was a shadow in the sunny eyes; the music had ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... though naturally careful of all put under her own hands, she was at heart very far from being either selfish or mercenary. In fact, the silver cup was at that hour of more real interest to her. It would be a part of her old home in her new home. It was connected with her life memories, and it made a portion of her future hopes and dreams. There was also something more tangible about it than about the bit of ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... fold, could win him for its own sake, one look of softened recognition from the defiant woman, linked to him, but arrayed with her whole soul against him. He might have read in that one glance that even for its sordid and mercenary influence upon herself, she spurned it, while she claimed its utmost power as her right, her bargain—as the base and worthless recompense for which she had become his wife. He might have read in it that, ever baring her own head for the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... ago, to the service of my country, that I have reserved them through the most adverse and trying circumstances, satisfied that at some future time I should prove my character to be above pecuniary considerations or mercenary motives. I have looked forward to the restoration of those honours, of which I was most unjustly bereaved, and to freedom from mental anguish, endured throughout an isolation from society of one-third of a century. I cannot contrast with such sufferings, nor with my plans, any sum that Government ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... soldiers strained every nerve as if rushing upon the foe. Napoleon offered to these bands the same reward which he had promised to the peasants. But to a man, they refused the gold. They had imbibed the spirit of their chief, his enthusiasm, and his proud superiority to all mercenary motives. "We are not toiling for money," said they, "but for your approval, and to ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... these worthless, glittering toys have they ruined the happiness of the dear innocent heart, and on them the guilt will fall if her soul is lost! I remark how she is changed in her letters since her shameful, mercenary marriage. She writes of nothing but the arrangement of her house, and speaks as if the beauty and costliness of things were only to be thought of, and there is not even a confidential, heart-felt word for her old Trude. It would seem as if she had forgotten all former objects of ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... divine wisdom. But he esteeming all kind of handicraft and invention to make engines, and generally all manner of sciences bringing common commodity by the use of them, to be but vile, beggarly, and mercenary dross: employed his wit and study only to write things, the beauty and subtlety whereof were not mingled anything at all with necessity. For all that he hath written, are geometrical propositions, which are without comparison ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... noble and an exact courtier. But if you look into their manner of life you'll find them mere sots, as debauched as Penelope's wooers; you know the other part of the verse, which the echo will better tell you than I can. They sleep till noon and have their mercenary Levite come to their bedside, where he chops over his matins before they are half up. Then to breakfast, which is scarce done but dinner stays for them. From thence they go to dice, tables, cards, or entertain themselves with jesters, fools, gambols, and ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... him somewhat too well to trust him. There were higher powers in France than Bishop Gaudri, which were known to be susceptible to the same mercenary argument. A deputation was therefore sent to King Louis the Fat at Paris, laden with rich presents, and praying for a royal confirmation of the commune. The king loved the glitter of cash; he accepted the presents, swore that the commune should ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... as often as not, begins as a mercenary and ends as a patriot. This, too, is all of a piece with human nature. A few years later, if Providence is good, comes the return for judicious investment. Perhaps the town has stood the test of boom, and that which was ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... he again told himself energetically. He considered it useless to bother about this interview, to encounter the mercenary smile of a familiar ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... her hands, and replied, "No, no, no; don't think of such a thing. I am not mercenary. I never serve a ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... young, slim, and spoke like a lady. Her hair was dyed; her breasts padded. She acted sentiment, but was less affectionate than E.B. I met her when she was out of a job. I gave her L2 whenever I met her. She was not mercenary. She was sensual. I became very much in love with her. I discovered her, however, writing letters to a fellow whom I had met one day when I was walking with her. He was only an acquaintance, but the brother ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... themselves in the higher walks of their art. Therefore the siege operations, in which all that had been invented by modern genius, or rescued from the oblivion which had gathered over ancient lore during the more vulgar and commonplace practice of the mercenary commanders of the day was brought into successful application, must always engage the special ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... refused to make the arrangement. The old chief's love for the young lady, growing stronger, in proportion to the difficulty of gaining her father's assent, he, subsequently, offered five or six horses for her. But even this munificent price was rejected by the mercenary father. Black Hawk now gave up the negociation, not a little surprised, at the high value which the white men place ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... which was soon granted—and before the end of the year he was safely landed in England. "These legs of mine," said he, clapping his hands upon them as he sat in his chamber at Margate, "shall never go again into Holland. Let the States get others to serve their mercenary turn, for me they shall not have." Upon giving up the government, he caused a medal to be struck in his own honour. The device was a flock of sheep watched by an English mastiff. Two mottoes—"non gregem aed ingratos," and "invitus desero"—expressed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... increasingly difficult. My uncle is furious with you, and since he discovered that we were talking over the telephone, to his own great inconvenience he has had the wires cut outside the house. That horrid letter of his to you saying that you had 'compromised' me in pursuance of a 'mercenary scheme' is all part and parcel of the same thing. How are you to stop here and submit to such insults? I went to see my friend the lawyer, and he tells me that of course we can marry if we like, but in that case my father's will, which he has consulted at Somerset ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... his stead. It looked as if he had made him praefectus urbi with the sole purpose of polluting the senate-house. And this pollution took place not only in virtue of the fact that he had served in the mercenary force and had performed the duties belonging to executioners, scouts, and centurions, but in that he had secured control of the city prior to fulfilling the demands of the consulship. In other words, he became city prefect before senator. Macrinus connived at his promotion with the definite ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... child!" murmured the old woman. "For these worthless, glittering toys have they ruined the happiness of the dear innocent heart, and on them the guilt will fall if her soul is lost! I remark how she is changed in her letters since her shameful, mercenary marriage. She writes of nothing but the arrangement of her house, and speaks as if the beauty and costliness of things were only to be thought of, and there is not even a confidential, heart-felt word for her old ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... introducing the succor of foreign arms. The Romans, to whom the invitation was made, eagerly embraced it. Philip was conquered; Macedon subdued. A new crisis ensued to the league. Dissensions broke out among it members. These the Romans fostered. Callicrates and other popular leaders became mercenary instruments for inveigling their countrymen. The more effectually to nourish discord and disorder the Romans had, to the astonishment of those who confided in their sincerity, already proclaimed universal liberty(1) ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... native to the Englishman. And the reason invariably given is that "The white man will not accept bribes and will give justice." Indeed, it may be said that the chief difficulty which confronts the Government in its great work is that of saving the people from low, mercenary and unprincipled native officials—especially those of ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... daughter, was always in a minority of one in our house of violent Dissent and Radicalism. She used to hear over again, delivered with authority, all the lectures I had been used to give her at school on despotic aristocracy, mercenary priesthood, &c. She had not energy to defend herself; sometimes she owned to a little truth in it, but generally said nothing. Her feeble health gave her her yielding manner, for she could never oppose any one ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... shines in Jaffeir's Part, And Roman Brutus speaks a Master's Art. But still we often Mourn to see their Phrase An Earthly Vapour, or at Mounting Blaze. A rising Meteor never was design'd, T'amaze the sober part of Human kind. Were I to write for Fame, I would not chuse A Prostitute and Mercenary Muse. Which for poor Gains must in rich Trappings go, Emptily Gay, magnificently Low, Like Ancient Rome's Religion, Sacrifice and Show. Things fashion'd for amusement and surprize, Ne'er move the Head, tho' they divert the Eyes. The ...
— Discourse on Criticism and of Poetry (1707) - From Poems On Several Occasions (1707) • Samuel Cobb
... occurrences he himself tells of, when Connecticut troops could "not be prevailed upon to stay longer than their term (saving those who have enlisted for the next campaign, and mostly on furlough), and such a dirty, mercenary spirit pervades the whole, that I should not be at all surprised at any disaster that may happen," and when he described how in his retreat through New Jersey, "The militia, instead of calling forth their utmost efforts to a brave and manly opposition in order to repair ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... swerve from the attack, and swoop aloft—dropping his next to last projectile as he did so—when the whirling shape zoomed past, swung round and once more charged. He saw, vaguely, two men sat in it. One was the pilot, a "Gray" or Cosmos mercenary. The other—could it be? Yes, there was no mistaking! The other was Slade himself, commander of the hireling ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... Bessy Houghton regularly after that. In his single-mindedness he never feared that Bessy would misjudge his motives or imagine him to be prompted by mercenary designs. He never thought of her riches himself, and it never occurred to him that she ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... or mercenary creature, No one more cordially detested the life of dependence than he. He always thought that his father had discharged all the duties of that relation in nourishing his childhood and giving him a good education. Whatever has ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... himself deserted, and fearing they would seize his castles, he sent the Earl of Pembroke and other faithful messengers to them, to let them know he would grant them the laws and liberties they desired." * * But after the charter had been granted, "the king's mercenary soldiers, desiring war more than peace, were by their leaders continually whispering in his ears, that he was now no longer king, but the scorn of other princes; and that it was more eligible to be no king, than such a one as he." * * ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... his patriotism upon every possible occasion, even when it would be better to refrain. It is an aggressive patriotism which sometimes is quite uncouth in its manifestations, but it is real patriotism, disinterested and devoid of any mercenary or personal motives. ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... being abandoned, when you looked so forlorn, my heart melted. And that night when you said you were dying, when you kept calling for me—'Flo, where is little Flo'—although I was there leaning over you, I couldn't endure to grieve you, and I gave my promise. And it was only that mercenary motive, after all!—to save me for a profitable marriage!" She gazes at her father with an expression so new to him on her face, that he moves about in his chair, ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... arranged. For I was very diffident as to the outcome of such a step. I have never written anything with the commercial idea of making it 'playable.' And I have always felt that anything done in a cold-blooded way for purely mercenary considerations somehow cannot be good. It cannot ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... down in his own heart knew that his motives were not unmixed. He could not accuse himself of being outrageously mercenary, yet he was ashamed to be forced to acknowledge even to himself that the desire of gain was present to his mind. His debts were enormous. He entertained in a manner and after a style far in excess of his modest allowance. His dinners were the most ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... the foes we fear to face. Next time I come to attend to your wounds, O Prince, I trust that they will be in front, and not behind. One word more, if you will be advised by me you will not threaten that Captain whom you call a Gentile and a mercenary, lest you should learn that it is not always well to be a coward, of ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Even if they had a language of their own, they would have no literature. Not one painter, not one musician, have they produced; only couriers, guides, waiters, and other parasites. A smug, tame, sly, dull, mercenary little race of men, they exist by and for the alien tripper. They are the fine flower of commercial civilisation, the shining symbol of international comity, and have never done anybody any harm. I cannot imagine why the King should not give ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... said Blanche, with just the faintest feeling of disgust—the first she had ever experienced toward Bob. "If you talk like that I shall leave you. I am disappointed in you; I should never have suspected you of being mercenary." ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... his own personal attractions had won her heart and her allegiance, and that she, and not himself, was the victim. He had tried to use her in the accomplishment of outside purposes; to make a tool of her in carrying forward his mercenary or knavish ends. Other men had striven to hide their unlovely affairs from her, but the new lover had exposed his, and claimed her assistance in carrying them forward. This was a degradation that she could not submit to. It did not natter her, ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... are ever ready to engage in any wild crusade against a neighboring people, regardless of the justice of the enterprise and without looking at the fatal consequences to ourselves and to the cause of popular government. Such expeditions, however, are often stimulated by mercenary individuals, who expect to share the plunder or profit of the enterprise without exposing themselves to danger, and are led on by some irresponsible foreigner, who abuses the hospitality of our own Government by seducing the young and ignorant to join in his scheme of personal ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore
... any other man while in my present embarrassing position," quickly retorted the former, with an offended air. "But should I wish to do so, I should hardly be deterred from it by either of the considerations you have just named, I think. And, indeed, if the mercenary and ambitious motives, which you would have actuate me, were alone to be my guide in such a step, I could see but little temptation for the sacrifice in the honors and wealth which are so much to depend on a triumph that, for all your boasts, ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... make him a little different from other people. I have known Gyuri for five years as a faithful and unassuming servant, always willing and ready for any duty, however difficult or dangerous. He has but one fault—if I may call it such—that is that he has a mistress who is known to be mercenary and hard-hearted. She lives in a ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... began to pace the floor with excited eyes and with gesturing hands]—"something enormous going on in iron, without the shadow of a doubt, and here I sit mousing in the dark and never knowing anything about it; great heaven, what an escape I've made! this underhanded mercenary creature might have taken me up—and ruined me! but I have escaped, and I warrant me I'll not put my ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the study of military discipline. Hence, during the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, they had that advantage over their neighbours which regular troops always possess over militia. This advantage they lost, when other states began, at a later period, to employ mercenary forces, who were probably as superior to them in the art of war as they had hitherto been to their antagonists.) Each pursuit therefore became first an art, and then a trade. In proportion as the professors of each became more ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of newspapers is often committed to narrow and mercenary minds, not qualified for the task of delighting or instructing; who are content to fill their paper, with whatever matter, without industry to gather, or ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... is represented by a figure drawn from the same source. In the book from which my text is selected, we are warned not to partake of the offered banquet of him who spreads his table by constraint, and with ostentatious or mercenary views, and not from the impulse of an hospitable spirit. Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats: For as he thinketh in his heart so is he: Eat and drink saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.[1] And again the character ...
— A Sermon Preached on the Anniversary of the Boston Female Asylum for Destitute Orphans, September 25, 1835 • Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright
... "I sounded mercenary!" she said, a little uncomfortably. "But I didn't mean to be. I suppose it is because I see so many things that money would do for my sister; I'd love so to have the children beautifully dressed and well educated. ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... art student, but somehow the experience did not equal his anticipations. What he had read in books—poetry and prose—had thrown a halo around the Latin Quarter, and he was therefore disappointed in finding the halo missing. The romance was sordid and mercenary, and after a few months of it he yearned ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... institutions, and we are only providing for our safety by seceding. It's quite time. Essentially we are a different people: we shall be the best friends in the world separate. It's all a question of difference of opinion about labor; the North prefers a system regulated by the mercenary dictates of traffic, ruled by capital, and subject to the chronic difficulties of strikes and starvation; the South, a simpler relation, binding master and slave together for their mutual benefit, abolishing pauperism, and dividing society into two unmistakable, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... geese: of the Biblical goose, that blew his bugle from the roof of Noah's Ark; the classical goose that picked his livelihood along the shores of the AEgean; of the historical goose, that squawked to save old Rome; the mercenary goose, laying the golden egg; and, finally, of ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... torturer? What being in that house had him so much in her power? Madame I believed to be in her chamber; the room whence he had stepped was dedicated to the portress's sole use; and she, Rosine Matou, an unprincipled though pretty little French grisette, airy, fickle, dressy, vain, and mercenary—it was not, surely, to her hand he owed the ordeal through which he ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... know, you mercenary little monkeys; come in the sitting-room if you want to hear ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... of his cigar towards the fire. It fell short in the grate. He picked it up and rammed it deep into the burning coals. He looked a poor, old, pitiful child, uttering embittered heresies. "All women are mercenary; all of them except my wife and daughters. Ah, yes, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... brought to every purpose the same forces of character and preternatural energy of intelligence; but Soult had no love for civil duties, but little capacity for them, and he accepted place as a gratification of vanity or a means of success in mercenary aims. We see in all his private and political life "the soilure of his revolutionary origin,"—proofs that he loved money and power far more than he loved honor, and himself far more than his country ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... closed up and sealed for De Quincey. But that was in the unseen future. To the child it was not permitted to look beyond the hazy lines that bounded his oasis of flowers into the fruitless waste abroad. Poverty, want, at least so great as to compel the daily exercise of his mind for mercenary ends, was stealthily advancing from the rear; but the sound of its stern steppings was wholly muffled by intervening years of luxurious opulence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... life while as yet completely careless of literature. After the impulse of Abelard and others had died down, the mass of students betook themselves to the Universities, no doubt, for quite ordinary, mercenary reasons. The University led to the Church, and the Church, in England at any rate, was the door to ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... have of late sunk in its credit, that misfortune is owing to the degenerate and Mercenary Pens, of some who have set up for the great Masters of it. No man I presume, is for exterminating that noble Art, no not even in the Dramatick part; provided it can be effectually reformed. But if the Reformation of the Stage be no longer practicable, reason ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... was too hurried, perhaps, and as to myself—well, she had taken my arm confidingly. As we were ascending the easy incline of the Corraterie, all the shops shuttered and no light in any of the windows (as if all the mercenary population had fled at the end of the day), ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... of Marriage.—Included here should be hasty marriages, mercenary marriages, marriages entered into unwillingly after pregnancy had occurred, as well as marriages where coercion was a factor for ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... Edith's suspicions and prejudices by being more friendly and intimate with Zell than ever, and the latter was happy and exultant in the fact, saying, with much elation, that her friend was "not a mercenary wretch, like Mr. Goulden, but remained just as true ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... last poems, which disgusted them, not only from the subservient spirit to Toryism which pervaded them, but also excited their laughter from their absurdity, Byron, in whose house they were, said to them, "It is satisfactory to see that a man who becomes mercenary, and traffics upon the independence of his character, loses at the same time his talent as ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... this upon the first intimation of the Federal advance. The Cherokees had proceeded only so far, the Creeks not at all, and the main body of the Choctaws and Chickasaws, into whose minds some unscrupulous merchants had instilled mercenary motives and the elements of discord generally, were lingering far in the background. Pike's white force was, moreover, ridiculously small, some Texas cavalry, dignified by him as collectively a squadron, Captain O.G. Welch in command. There had as yet not been even a pretense of giving him ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... Cottard styled "letting 'em all come"), Swann supposed that the Doctor recognised him from having met him already somewhere, probably in some house of 'ill-fame,' though these he himself very rarely visited, never having made a habit of indulging in the mercenary sort of love. Regarding such an allusion as in bad taste, especially before Odette, whose opinion of himself it might easily alter for the worse, Swann assumed his most icy manner. But when he learned that the lady next to the Doctor was Mme. Cottard, he ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... it isn't. I asked your opinion, but I knew what I was going to do. Only, I did think him personally possible—which made the expediency, the mercenary view ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... statement, on which you may rely. On the other hand, in private families, several instances have occurred where the illness of one individual has been followed by that of others: but, generally, only where the first case has proved fatal, and the survivors have given way to grief and alarm. Mercenary attendants have seldom been attacked, and, as mental agitation is proved to be one of the principal agents in propagating or generating the disease, these isolated cases are attributed to that cause ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... paid that is well satisfied; And I, delivering you, am satisfied, And therein do account myself well paid: My mind was never yet more mercenary. I pray you, know me when we meet again: I wish you well, and ...
— The Merchant of Venice • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... attempt the ungrateful task of endeavouring to deceive each other," that true-hearted girl replied, though she said this with so great an effort, that I was compelled to listen attentively to catch all she uttered. "Rupert has failings worse than these. He is mercenary; nor is he always a man of truth. Heaven knows, how I have wept over these defects of character, and the pain they have given me from childhood! But, my dear, dear father overlooks them all—or, rather, seeing them, he hopes all things; it is hard for a parent ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... are conferred—and a certain disposition to sneer at any chivalrous, or elevated feeling, from which few of our ladies are exempt—we shall find it easy to account for the cold, stiff, ungraceful, harsh, and mercenary habits which disfigure, to the astonishment of all foreigners, the patrician class of English society. Nothing, indeed, can be less graceful than the frivolity of an Englishman. Naturally grave, serious, contemplative, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... these bands the same reward which he had promised to the peasants. But to a man, they refused the gold. They had imbibed the spirit of their chief, his enthusiasm, and his proud superiority to all mercenary motives. "We are not toiling for money," said they, "but for your approval, and to share ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... light and fickle Monmouth began to take heart once more at the sight of their sturdy bearing, and at the sound of their hearty cheers. I heard him as I sat my horse beside his staff speak exultantly to those around him, and ask whether these fine fellows could possibly be beaten by mercenary half-hearted hirelings. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... something would come to you too; but I do not understand these matters. It is dreadful how mean and mercenary this terrible need for ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... a free state consists in its infantry; and, on the other hand, that when the infantry in a state become more valuable than the cavalry, the power of the aristocracy is diminished, and equal rights can no longer be withheld from the people. The employment of mercenary soldiers in modern times renders these observations no longer applicable; but in the military states of antiquity, where the citizens themselves served as soldiers, there are innumerable examples of this mutual ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... moral tissues tough in integrity; then it will hold a hook of obligations when once set in a sure place. There is nothing more vital. Shape all your experiments to preserve the integrity. Do not so reward it that it becomes mercenary. Turning State's evidence is a dangerous experiment in ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... Confederation, the mace and sword of state which are borne by the beadles to the Landsgemeinde. In a somewhat inaccessible corner, a few houses off, the beginnings of a museum have been made. Here is another portrait of interest—that of the giant Puentener, a mercenary whose valor made him the terror of the enemy in the battle of Marignano, in 1515; so that when he was finally killed, they avenged themselves, according to a writing beneath the picture, by using his fat to smear their weapons, and by feeding their horses ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... subterfuge, there was no deep and double subterfuge in all this. De Stancy took no particular interest in his ancestral portraits; but he was enamoured of Paula to weakness. Perhaps the composition of his love would hardly bear looking into, but it was recklessly frank and not quite mercenary. His photographic scheme was nothing worse than a lover's not too scrupulous contrivance. After the refusal of his request to copy her picture he fumed and fretted at the prospect of Somerset's return before any impression had been made on her heart by himself; he swore at Dare, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... of "Mam'selle Eva," as I had last seen her, perspiring, loosely girdled, buying a catch of fish at a fair price from three mercenary natives adorned with shark's-tooth necklaces, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Cabal commonly denotes a conspiracy of leaders. A gang is a company of workmen all doing the same work under one leader; the word is used figuratively only of combinations which it is meant to stigmatize as rude and mercenary; crew is used in a closely similar sense. A conclave is secret, but of larger numbers, ordinarily, than a cabal, and may have honorable use; as, the conclave ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Nimbus was transformed, first into the "contraband" and mercenary soldier George Nimbus, and then by ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... the heart of Dalila; she hates Samson more bitterly than the leader of his enemies. She is not mercenary, like the Biblical woman; she scorns the promise of riches which the High Priest offers so she obtain the secret of the Hebrew's strength. Thrice had she essayed to learn that secret and thrice ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... bed with an expression of exasperation on his face for days together. My father treated me with careless kindness; my mother scarcely noticed me, though she had no children except me; other cares completely absorbed her. My father, a man still young and very handsome, had married her from mercenary considerations; she was ten years older than he. My mother led a melancholy life; she was for ever agitated, jealous and angry, but not in my father's presence; she was very much afraid of him, and he was severe, cold, and distant in his behaviour.... I have never seen a man more elaborately ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... field in your dreams, denotes you will have poverty and misery to distress you. For a young woman to walk through a potter's field with her lover, she will give up the one she loves in the hope of mercenary gain. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... she had put out her light, which interferes with dreams by casting too bright an illumination upon reality, what schemes, what transports of delight! Georges loved her, Georges Fromont, the heir of the factory! They would marry; she would be rich. For in that mercenary little heart the first kiss of love had awakened no ideas save those of ambition and ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... said Sally. "You believe he'd think twice as much of me if I came to him in a mercenary spirit like that? And I thought you knew ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... want to speak about money; because, if a girl does not go into raptures about being willing to live on crusts and dress in calicos for love, people say she's mercenary. Well, then, I am mercenary. I want silk dresses and decent dinners and matinees, and I'm fond of having things regular; it's a habit of mine to like them all the time. Now I know literary people have spasms of riches, and then spasms ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... next birthday,' said Sarah. Having said it the intolerably mercenary spirit of her action seemed to strike her, and impulsively she turned away with a bright blush. Fire seemed to sparkle in the eyes of both men. Said Eric: 'A year so be! The man that wins ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... appearance, and not like a beggar, I soon recovered my natural spirits, and congratulated myself upon having bought sufficient experience to insure me against falling a second time an easy prey to a Father Corsini, to thieving gamblers, to mercenary women, and particularly to the impudent scoundrels who barefacedly praise so well those they intend to dupe—a species of knaves very common in the world, even amongst people who form what ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... part, spared no pains to make himself agreeable to the old lady, whom he had a mercenary object in pleasing. Finding that she was curious to hear about the great city, which to her was as unknown as London or Paris, be gratified her by long accounts, chiefly of as imaginative character, to which she listened greedily. ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... unbounded passion for you, which hurried me so far: I have loved you long and tenderly, and the goodness you have shown me hath innocently weighed down a wretch undone before. Acquit me of all mean, mercenary views; and, before I take my leave of you for ever, which I am resolved instantly to do, believe me that Fortune could have raised me to no height to which I could not have gladly lifted you. O, curst be Fortune!—"Do not," says she, interrupting me with the sweetest voice, "do not curse Fortune, ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... in safe hands, and so long as they remained unsubdued, no part of Louis' dominions was secure. The crown had used to the full its rights over minors and vacant fiefs. The subjection of the south-west was assured by the marriage of the mercenary leader, Falkes de Breaute, to the mother of the infant Earl of Devon, and by the grant of Cornwall to the bastard of the last of the Dunstanville earls. Though Isabella, Countess of Gloucester, John's repudiated wife, was as zealous as her new husband, the Earl of Essex, against ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... expired. He was a bachelor from choice. When young he had been very cruelly treated by the object of his admiration, who deserted him for a few lacks of rupees, which offered themselves with an old man as their appendage. This had raised his bile against the sex in general, whom he considered as mercenary and treacherous. His parties were numerous and expensive: but women were never to be seen in his house; and his confirmed dislike to them was the occasion of his seldom visiting, except with those who were like himself, in a state ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the Fair showed no mercenary temper. The architects, too, worked with public spirit and zeal which money never could have elicited. Notwithstanding the World's Fair was not financially a "success," this was rather to the credit of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... this allowed the use of the papers, and after repeated efforts during a period of several weeks, the matter ended in the purchase of the papers outright, with unreserved permission to show them for copying or explanation to anybody who might be selected. Wilnoti was not of a mercenary disposition, and after the first negotiations the chief difficulty was to overcome his objection to parting with his father's handwriting, but it was an essential point to get the originals, and he was allowed to copy some of the more important formulas, as he found it utterly out of ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... levee of Prince Kaunitz. Not personally known to him, he viewed in me a crawling insect. I thought somewhat more proudly; my actions were upright, and so should my body be. I quitted the apartment, and was congratulated by the mercenary Swiss porter on my good fortune of having obtained ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... lawyer, he said: "It is the most glittering, ostentatious, and displaying property in the world; and now, if a young man goes courting, the only inquiry is how many negroes he or his lady love owns. The love of slave property is swallowing up every other mercenary possession. Its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth, but indicated the gentleman of leisure who ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... not the common accusation against the Medici as a family, that they had but one motive—mercenary ambition and self-aggrandisement—is true, the fact remains that the crown did not reach their brows until one hundred and seventy years from the first appearance of old Giovanni di Bicci in Florentine affairs. The statue of Cosimo I in the Piazza della Signoria ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... departed on important business. He had definitely decided to give up his thirty pieces of silver. No more blood money for him. His world was upside down and all he loved were suffering, and all because he had been mercenary. The only way to put things right was to get rid of any gain that might accrue to himself. Then he would be in a position to do something. And Pat was his first object now. He meant to give back the money to Pat! He had thought it all out, and he meant to ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... Nuernberg); the old crude superstition, into a systematized magical theory of natural causes and effects; the old love of pageantry, into a lavish luxury and magnificence of which we have in the "field of the cloth of gold" the stock historical example; the old chivalry, into the mercenary bravery of the soldier, whose trade it was to fight, and who recognized only one virtue—to wit, animal courage. Again, all these exaggerated characteristics were mixed with new elements, which distorted them further, and which foreshadowed a coming change, the ultimate ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... of mending his deficiency in this respect by a rich marriage. Nor had it ever occurred to him that he would seek a marriage for that purpose. Such an idea would have been thoroughly distasteful to him. There had been no stain of premeditated mercenary arrangement upon him at any time. But circumstances had so fallen out with him, that as he won his spurs in Parliament, as he became known, and was placed first in one office and then in another, prospects of love and money together ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... the feats which they performed, from those of these days; one of the best of his histories is that which describes the life of Harald Haardraade, who, after manifold adventures by land and sea, now a pirate, now a mercenary of the Greek emperor, became king of Norway, and eventually perished at the battle of Stamford Bridge, whilst engaged in a gallant onslaught upon England. Now, I have often thought that the old Kemp, whose mouldering skull in the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... given them. And then they may think what accusation that was like to prove, when they that were the engineers feared to be the authors. Nor were they content to feign things against me, but to urge things, feigned by the ignorant, against my profession, which though, from their hired and mercenary impudence, I might have passed by as granted to a nation of barkers that let out their tongues to lick others' sores; yet I durst not leave myself undefended, having a pair of ears unskilful to hear lies, or have ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... more Welcome to this grateful shore; Now no mercenary foe Aims again the fatal blow,— Aims at thee the ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... battle, in council, in hair-breadth escapes from pursuing hosts, from famine, from perils of the sea, she showed the masterful authority, the impetuous daring, the pertinacity which she had inherited from her Norman ancestors. Stephen fell back on his last source—a body of mercenary troops from Flanders,—but the Brabancon troops were hated in England as foreigners and as riotous robbers, and there was no payment for them in the royal treasury. The barons were all alike ready to change sides as often as the shifting of parties gave ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... bargain. Oh, thou son of an animal, drive on!" "It is very cold," muttered my companion. "For the sake of God," he shouted, "go on!" But neither the allusion to the peddler's parentage nor the invocation of the Deity had the slightest effect upon the fellow's mercenary soul. ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... cannot be the choice of the mercenary, the envious, or the malicious. Its value is known only to persons of an opposite temper; and to their experience alone, we appeal. Guided by mere disposition, and without the aid of reflection, in business, in friendship, and in public life, they often acquit themselves well; and borne with ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... that we were not by any means fitted for one another, and begged me to consider myself henceforth quite free. The little wretch had the impertinence to send me a dozen boxes of cigars, which, she said, would console me for my lost love; as she was perfectly certain that I was not mercenary, and that I loved tobacco better than any ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... trade affords us too many instances of cruelties exercised against the harmless Africans. A trade, which, after it was abolished in Europe by the general introduction of Christianity, was again renewed about the fourteenth century by the mercenary Portuguese, and now prosecuted by the Spaniards, French and British, in defiance of every principle of justice, humanity ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... in his distresses, when an earldom was sold for L.6000; and so pro rata for one step higher or lower. Meantime, we all know in England how entirely false this is; and, on the other hand, we know also, and cannot but smile at the continental blindness to its own infirmity, that the mercenary imputation which recoils from ourselves, has, for centuries, settled upon France, Germany, and other powers. More than one hundred and thirty thousand French "nobles," at the epoch of the Revolution, how did most of them come by their titles? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... simile, that jackal;— I 've heard them in the Ephesian ruins howl By night, as do that mercenary pack all, Power's base purveyors, who for pickings prowl, And scent the prey their masters would attack all. However, the poor jackals are less foul (As being the brave lions' keen providers) Than human ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... express his wishes and his wants design'd Language, the means, distinguishes Mankind; For future works in Art's ingenious schools His hands unwearied form and finish tools; 440 He toils for money future bliss to share, And shouts to Heaven his mercenary prayer. Sweet Hope delights him, frowning Fear alarms, And Vice and Virtue court him ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... is a motive for the crime, and a very strong one. First, we will presume that you are in love with the wife of the man who is murdered. Secondly, supposing that you are mercenary, quite a considerable amount of money will come to you in case you marry Brenton's widow. Next, some one at that table poisoned him. It was not Mrs. Brenton, who poured out the cup of coffee. The ...
— From Whose Bourne • Robert Barr
... various departments of the arts. It is the commonest error to think of art as if it stood outside the other activities of life. Under the cloak of art much self-amusement and vulgar self-display tries to justify itself, and many mercenary interests are concerned in stinting its vitality. All living and valuable art is really communal. It must fit into its right place with all phases of human activities, and to do this it must have somewhere in it the ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... moods astride of a chair with his head down on his arms, as if the song suggested the attitude. Her heart quite softened to him as she looked, and she decided to forgive him if no one else, for she was sure that he had no mercenary plans about her ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... so un gratefully bestowed. She rejoiced that in no instance she had ever betrayed it, and she saw that his own behaviour prevented all suspicion of it in the family. Yet, in the midst of her mortification and displeasure, she found some consolation in seeing that those mercenary views of which she had once been led to accuse him, were farthest from his thoughts, and that whatever was the state of his mind, she had no artifice to apprehend, nor design to guard against. All therefore that remained ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... of their date of landing in Cuba, that being also the period of their term of contract. None have been introduced into the island for several years. This coolie importation, like the slave-trade with Africa, was a fraud and an outrage upon humanity, and never paid any one, even in a mercenary point of view, except the shipowners who brought the deceived natives from the coast of China. Slavery in Cuba and slavery in our country were always quite a different thing, and strange to say the laws of the Spanish government were far more favorable and humane towards ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... hunger. The starving peasantry began to flock in great numbers into the city, so that the misery increased. Terror was occasioned by a few cases of death from plague. Florence was at war with Pisa, but without success, for many of her mercenary soldiers were deserting and the forces besieging Pisa were ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... but just common. That in speaking of money he was protecting himself, proudly self-guarding his own honour and that of his mother, Lesbia Faircloth, never, in her innocence of what is mean and mercenary, occurred to Damaris. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... while native chiefs and even reclaimed pirates are associated with them, and thus habituated to all the forms of a civilized state. Mr. Brooke, with a rare courage and wisdom, has always trusted for his safety to the good-will of his native subjects. He has never been sustained by mercenary bands. At a time when piratical violence was most threatening, when disorders were yet rife in his own state, and when his subjects but poorly appreciated his benevolent purposes towards them, his whole English force was twenty-four men. It is pleasant to add, that this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... peacefully, effectually, as the meeting of conspirators at Clontarf on the 8th day of October 1843. Ireland is notoriously, by position and by imaginary grievances—grievances which, had they ever been real for past generations, would long since have faded away, were it not through the labours of mercenary traders in treason— Ireland is of necessity, and at any rate, the vulnerable part of our empire. Wars will soon gather again in Christendom. Whilst it is yet daylight and fair weather in which we can work, this open wound of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... convento. By this inertia with which it allows itself to be dragged from depth to depth, it becomes changed into a shadow, its integrity is impaired, and in a weak and incapable way it trusts everything to mercenary hands. But compare our system of government with those of the countries you ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... arbitrary lion must yield to the reins of love. For this purpose taste throws a veil over physical necessity, offending a free mind by its coarse nudity, and dissimulating our degrading parentage with matter by a delightful illusion of freedom. Mercenary art itself rises from the dust; and the bondage of the bodily, at its magic touch, falls off from the inanimate and animate. In the aesthetic state the most slavish tool is a free citizen, having the same rights as the noblest; and the intellect which shapes the mass to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... animosity against lawyers, whom they considered mercenary instruments in the hands of the nobles for oppressing them. They hung all the lawyers that they could get into their hands, and after burning the Savoy they went to the Temple, which was a spacious edifice containing the courts, the chambers of the barristers, ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... octavo, and printed for A. Moore, 1728, price 1s. Others of an elder date, having lain as waste paper many years, were, upon the publication of the Dunciad, brought out, and their authors betrayed by the mercenary booksellers (in hope of some possibility of vending a few), by advertising them in this manner:—"The Confederates, a Farce. By Captain Breval (for which he was put into the Dunciad). An Epilogue to Powell's Puppet Show. By Colonel Ducket (for which he is put into the Dunciad). Essays, &c. By Sir ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... anything to do with this. And you didn't, for I watched your eyes: you never would have thought of him but for me. It is I, his own sister, who have hinted it. He has nobody but me, and when his back is turned I accuse him of being so base, so cruel, so mercenary, that—" She stopped and tried to steady her voice. Suddenly she turned and pointed to the door: "And if he came in there now, this minute—oh, Bertie, my Bertie, if you would!—if he stood there now, I should have slandered him without a shadow of proof. Oh, it is odious, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... was not as pleased about this event as was Enid Biddell, who now saw her "title clear" to Harry Snell; for I had "bagged" Willis Bailey and Neill Sheridan for Sir Marcus in order to gain Kudos for myself: but Biddy, appealed to, consoled me by saying it served Bailey right if he were mercenary: and that both men would have come in ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... Rienzo, Renzo, or Lorenzo da Ceri, was a captain of adventurers or Condottiere, who hired his mercenary forces to paymasters. He defended Crema for the Venetians in 1514, and conquered Urbino for the Pope in 1515. Afterwards he fought for the French in the Italian wars. We shall hear more of him again during ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... I would never condescend to anything so low as to marry for money. I desire not to be kept by my wife, but to keep her, and that she may be sensible of it. But I do not want a poor girl either. Though I am a man of means, and am marrying not from mercenary motives, but from love, yet I cannot take a poor girl, for, as you know yourself, prices have gone up so, and there ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... pasty, the iris spongy in texture, and the pupil bulging with a lurid light. It stared at them with a steady stare—insolent and quizzical. Hamar and his friends stared back at it in fascinated horror, and would have continued staring at it indefinitely, had not Hamar's mercenary instincts come to their rescue. He recollected that time was pressing, and that unless he got into communication with the strange thing at once, according to the book, it would vanish—and he might ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... the river bank, are level places belonging to the several castes and leased to associations or individuals who have huge piles of wood in the background and attend to the business in a heartless, mercenary way. The cost of burning a body depends upon the amount and kind of fuel used. The lowest possible rate is three rupees or about one dollar in our money. When the family cannot afford that they simply throw the body into the sacred ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... this wretch to be wholly selfish and mercenary, from my experience of her on the raft—for that she was the same negress I had long ceased to doubt—and I determined, while I had an opportunity of doing so, to enter a wedge of confidence between us in the ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... to the countryside was weakened. In all this change of attitude, however, we see only one of those indirect results of the enclosure of the common which were spoken of above. If the villagers became more mercenary, it was not because the fencing in of the heaths immediately caused them to become so, but because it left them helpless to resist becoming so—left them a prey to considerations whose weight they had previously not so much ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... many young ladies who would be glad to accept the chance which you so recklessly reject. By accepting my hand you will gratify our excellent uncle, and make me the happiest of mortals. You will acquit me of mercenary motives, since you are now penniless, and your disobedience leaves me sole heir to Uncle John. I love you, and it will be my chief object, if you will permit ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... marry," said Jane, rather drearily. "It isn't easy to find some one with whom one would be willing to pass one's life. I've had several chances—one or two of them not entirely mercenary, I think. But not one that I could ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... monarchies? The States General of France, the Cortes of Castile, the Grand Justiciary of Arragon, what had been fatal to them all? History was ransacked for instances of adventurers who, by the help of mercenary troops, had subjugated free nations or deposed legitimate princes; and such instances were easily found. Much was said about Pisistratus, Timophanes, Dionysius, Agathocles, Marius and Sylla, Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, Carthage besieged by her own mercenaries, Rome put up to auction by her ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... readiness to return by whatever route I proposed. This is a point that I should like to make clear to all who may read this, for it is indicative of a trait often lost sight of by those accustomed to having, in novels and so forth, the more mercenary side of the Australian's character pointed out to them. A common subject of speculation is whether or no Australians would make good soldiers; as to that my belief is, that once they felt confidence in their officers none could make more loyal or willing troops; without ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... has been, and remains, an obsession with the partisans of law over liberty all the world over that the fettered community, wherever it may be and however composed, does not really want liberty, but that the majority of its sober citizens are dragged into an artificial agitation by mercenary scribes and sham patriots—a view which is always somewhat difficult to reconcile, as students of American and Irish history are aware, not only with the facts of prolonged and tenacious resistance, but with the other view, equally necessary to the argument for law, that the whole ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... not waste time or thought on commercial or mercenary craft. Here is not interest or adventure or much real return on the investment, unless your aim in life is to die merely a sea captain or a ship owner. Let us cruise where the currents are strong, where the rocks are dangerous: in the frozen North or in sight of coral island or low beach and palm ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... with deposition, and in return was excommunicated. He then sent a French knight named William de Nogaret, with Sciarra Colonna, a turbulent Roman, the hereditary enemy of Boniface, and a band of savage mercenary soldiers to Anagni, where the Pope then was, to force him to recall the sentence, apparently intending them to act like the murderers of Becket. The old man's dignity, however, overawed them at the moment, and they retired without laying hands ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... you without a salutation. Civil questions are always answered civilly. No propensity to jeer at strangers is exhibited—on the contrary, great solicitude is displayed to afford them any assistance that they may require; and displayed, moreover, without the slightest appearance of a mercenary motive. Thus, if you stop to ask your way, you are not merely directed for a mile or two on, and then told to ask again; but directed straight to the end of your destination, no matter how far off. Turnings to the right, and turnings to the left, short cuts across moors five ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... thousands of others, know neither, it strikes me that I would certainly prefer the place to the parson, however worthy. It is, indeed, gratifying to see that the Highest Representative of Law and Order in the realm, after HER GRACIOUS MAJESTY, is so utterly uninfluenced by any mercenary motives. I send this by Private Post, an old ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... dusky richness of decay. The autobiographical form imposes, to be sure, an increasing strain on the reader's credulity, as the plot thickens, and we find ourselves, half-unexpectedly, involved in a lurid tale of monks, priests, disguised revolutionists, cruel, mercenary fathers, etc., and the Danish author playing his favorite role of deus ex machina. Still more incredible is the part of benevolent Providence which he assigns to himself in "The Bride of Roervig," where he saves the heroine's life by restoring ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... letter of farewell had put it out. But the scar of the burn sometimes hurts. To-night was one of those times; and Max believed that his disappointment in Billie had had its influence in driving him to the Legion. She stood now as a type of what was mercenary, calculating, and false in womankind, just as (almost unknown to himself) Sanda DeLisle stood for what was gentle, yet brave and true. He felt that Billie Brookton had made him hard, with a hardness that was not good; and that not ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... Tales shall have been to the young readers, that and much more it is the writers' wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, his ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... practical turn, the thing which interests him most, the thing he asks at once and really wants to know is what you have to propose as a remedy. How are you going to make people less selfish and more considerate of others? Less mercenary and more honorable? Less immoral, or ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... is always of the militant, not of the triumphant party: so far he bears a gallant show of magnanimity; but his gallantry is hardly of the right stamp: it wants principle. For though he is not servile or mercenary, he is the victim of self-will. He must pull down and pull in pieces: it is not in his disposition to do otherwise. It is a pity; for with his great talents he might do great things, if he would go right forward to any useful object, make thorough-stitch work of any question, or join hand and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... married women to the irresponsible control of their husbands, is not a protest against marriage. It is a vindication of marriage, against the barbarism of the law which degrades a noble and life-long partnership of equals into a mercenary and servile relation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... themselves face to face with a will and a power stronger than their own; they lost in independence, but they gained far more than they lost. They were the basis on which the State was built up; they no longer wasted their military prowess in purposeless feuds or in mercenary service; in the Prussian army and administration they found full scope for their ambition, and when the victories of Frederick the Great had raised Prussia to the rank of a European Power, the nobles of Brandenburg were the most loyal of his ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... himself in front of dangers and difficulties in order that he may be a shield to others; for he is not a mercenary, taking care of none but himself when he sees the wolf coming; he is the right good shepherd, staking his own life in that of his flock, and knowing the faces of every one of them, just as they do ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... shoulders and carrying the future of the world beneath his robe, toiling with his hands for his living by the side of Aquila and Priscilla, in order that he might keep Christianity from being tarnished with the faintest suspicion of mercenary motives. ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... with a roar of laughter. "Don't! don't!" he pleaded, holding up a hand. "Why, Lafelle, you old fraud, I look upon your Church as a huge business institution, a gigantic trust, as mercenary and merciless as Steel, Oil, or Tobacco! Why, you and I are in the same business, that of making money! And I'd like to borrow some of your methods. You catch 'em through religion. I have to use other methods. But the end is the same. Only, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... natural and inevitable result is an overwhelming impulse toward illicit satisfaction in self-abuse or sexual immorality. Society in self-defense and the interest of its youth must wage war upon this mercenary exploiting of the sex impulse. Licentious thinking is the great foe of continence; the saying of Jesus may be paraphrased thus with physiological correctness: "He that looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath already committed the sexual act in ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... him with some wonder. It had never dawned upon him that this shiftless, thriftless, worthless, sponging parasite was yet, after and in spite of all, not mercenary in the issue of his thoughts; yet ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Allan Lyster's wife when she came of age. He told her he would rather forego all claim to her wealth, marry her at once, and leave her guardian to act as he thought best; but she, though delighted to find him free from the least taint of anything mercenary, refused to run the ...
— Marion Arleigh's Penance - Everyday Life Library No. 5 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... emotion. 'The loss of a few hundreds is of no real importance to me; and do you think that I could suffer that noble young woman to toil incessantly to pay the debt of an unprincipled parent? No, I am not so mercenary. Miss Beaufort refused me as a husband, but she must allow me the pleasure of becoming her friend. You need not be jealous, sir, of the title I am solicitous to assume, for it was for your sake that she rejected me; but whether as a maiden or wife, I shall deem myself ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... ladies employ their time in more charitable and useful actions than in filling the heads of poor children with stories so hurtful to the real interests of religion. However credulous our young guide was, he was not mercenary, being with difficulty persuaded to accept a franc or two for what he styled the pleasure of having conducted us. We next visited the castle of Tarascon, now used as the public prison, and in which 1500 English were confined during the war. The enormous ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... to recognize a fault, or by the fault itself which biases the judgment. The faculty, or passion, which misleads one becomes a part of his judging faculty, and cannot condemn itself. The miser cannot realize the baseness of his avarice, nor the mercenary soldier the enormity of war. Nor can a defective faculty assist in realizing the defect. The color-blind cannot appreciate painting, the thief cannot appreciate integrity, the brutal wife-beater cannot appreciate love, and a ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... THE TEN THOUSAND.—The Anabasis, the principal work of Xenophon, describes the retreat from the Tigris to the coast of Asia Minor, of a body of ten thousand mercenary Greek troops,—a retreat effected under his own masterly leadership. The Persian Empire, now in a process of decay, was torn with civil strife. Xerxes and his eldest son had been murdered (465 B.C.). The story of several reigns which follow is full of tales of treason ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... hostile to the show of feudal warfare, and herald of a new age of contests, in which the feudal levies would fall into the background. The invention of gunpowder in this century, the incapacity of the great lords, the rise of free lances and mercenary troops, all told that a new era had arrived. It was by the hand of Du Guesclin that Charles overcame his cousin and namesake, Charles of Navarre, and compelled him to peace. On the other hand, in the Breton war which ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
