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More "Profligate" Quotes from Famous Books



... and dignity, a commanding power in the eye and expression of a pure, high-minded, resolute woman, which will abash even the boldest and most unscrupulous men. That is their shield and buckler, their defence against the attacks of the profligate. It is like the steadfast gaze of a dauntless man, which is said to have the power of awing even the fiercest of the beasts of the forest; but let her beware how for an instant she withdraws it, how she allows the softer feelings of her woman's nature to shake her firmness; her opponent ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... time of the Revolution, justified their conduct by all those profligate sophisms which are called Jesuitical, and which are commonly reckoned among the peculiar sins of Popery, but which, in fact, are everywhere the anodynes employed by minds rather subtle than strong, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... vice. He gave himself up to such prolonged carousals, that one night was sometimes protracted through the following day into another. The administration of his government was left wholly to his ministers, and every personal duty was neglected, that he might give himself to the most abandoned and profligate indulgence of his appetites ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... fitted to allay the animosity which was daily becoming more bitter between the two nations so long as the question remained open. They have put the brand of confessed injustice upon that rankling and vindictive resentment with which the profligate and passionate part of the American press has been threatening us in the event of concession, and which is to be manifested by some dire revenge, to be taken, as they pretend, after the nation is extricated from its present ...
— The Contest in America • John Stuart Mill

... interview with her, and the effect it had produced on him, he now felt an invincible aversion even to mention to him her name. He had seen Ione, bright, pure, unsullied, in the midst of the gayest and most profligate gallants of Pompeii, charming rather than awing the boldest into respect, and changing the very nature of the most sensual and the least ideal—as by her intellectual and refining spells she reversed ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... now removed with his son to Dublin where he appears to have entered upon a career of the most dissipated and profligate conduct. We find him reduced to extreme pecuniary embarrassment, and his property became a prey to low and abandoned associates; one of whom, a Miss Kennedy, he ultimately endeavored to introduce to society as his wife. This worthless woman must have obtained great ascendancy over his Lordship, as ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... A retinue of profligate Normans completed the court, whom an English authority describes as "great quaffers, lourdens, proud, belly swains, fed with extortion and bribery." The Irish were looked upon by these worthies as a savage race, only created to be plundered and scoffed at. ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... committed to prison, where, with "much firmness of mind and nobility of soul," he endured a tedious captivity for many years, until Charles II. was recalled, when he ordered his old and faithful friend Seaforth to be released, after which he became a great favourite at his licentious and profligate Court. ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... parts to which they trade, whom they sometimes redeem at low rates, and in other places have them for nothing. They are kept at perpetual labour, and are always chained, but with this difference, that their own natives are treated much worse than others: they are considered as more profligate than the rest, and since they could not be restrained by the advantages of so excellent an education, are judged worthy of harder usage. Another sort of slaves are the poor of the neighbouring countries, who offer of their own accord to come and serve them: they treat these better, ...
— Utopia • Thomas More

... away shortly afterward to deal with booksellers, and I wondered how a bank clerk aged twenty could put into my hands with a profligate abundance of detail, all given with absolute assurance, the story of extravagant and bloodthirsty adventure, riot, piracy, and death in unnamed seas. He had led his hero a desperate dance through revolt against the overseas, to command ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... to be remedied, or, at least, bettered, by a little exertion, and not one which could be helped by a vain regret. For the loss of that old barbaric splendour and profuse luxury which her father mourned over, she had no regrets. She knew that these wasteful and profligate livers had done nothing for the people either in act or in example; that they were a selfish, worthless, self-indulgent race, caring for nothing but their pleasures, and making all their patriotism consist in a ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... The profligate must be lured from his emotional excesses and debaucheries, not by moralizings, but by showing him just how these things fritter his energies and ...
— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton

... on it. They have almost a monopoly as to burning corpses and handling all dead bodies. They eat all animals which have died a natural death, and are particularly fond of pork of this description. "Notwithstanding profligate habits, many of them attain the age of eighty or ninety; and it is not till sixty or sixty-five that their hair begins to get white." The Domarr are a mountain race, nomads, shepherds, and robbers. Travelers speak of them as "gypsies." A specimen which we have of their language would, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland

... and, to avoid any other embarrassing offers, I withdrew. I shall go to no more of their sittings." (He attended only one after this.) "I am determined to join Sieyes' party. It includes a greater diversity of opinions than that of the profligate Barras. He proclaims everywhere that he is the author of my fortune. He will never be content to play an inferior part, and I will never bend to such a man. He cherishes the mad ambition of being the support of the Republic. What would he do with ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... captain, who came with me, was, from the time I saved his life, an altered man. He had been, as I was informed, a drunken profligate; but from the moment when I received him into my boat, his manners and habits seemed as completely changed as if he were a different being. He never drank more than was sufficient to quench his thirst—he never swore—he never used any offensive language. He read the Scriptures constantly, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... great stretch of the imagination I could picture a gouty, morose old lord with a secret sorrow and a brandy breath; I could picture a profligate heir going deeper and deeper in debt, but refusing to the bitter end to put the ax to the roots of the ancestral oaks. I could imagine these parties readily, because I had frequently read about both of them in the standard English ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... seems as if the hand of an avenging Providence had conducted this unfortunate mother to take a step so fatal to her son. She told the viceroy that she had in vain attempted to check him, that his days and nights were spent with profligate companions in gambling-houses and in cock-pits, and that she feared some mischief would come some day from his fighting and swearing and drinking; that but a few days since he had come home late, and ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... reference to a letter of vital importance which he had received from Sir Alured. The reader may perhaps remember that Sir Alured's heir,—the heir to the title and property,—was a nephew for whom he entertained no affection whatever. This Wharton had been discarded by all the Whartons as a profligate drunkard. Some years ago Sir Alured had endeavoured to reclaim the man, and had spent perhaps more money than he had been justified in doing in the endeavour, seeing that, as present occupier of the property, he was bound ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... sought to shackle public opinion—the fearful hydra to all ambitious aspirants—to know all secrets of the time and states, and render one half of the great nations he held in his grasp spies upon the other! The most profligate principles of Machiavel sink into obscurity when contrasted with the Imperial Espionage of Napoleon. When no longer moving squadrons in the tented field—whole armies, like so many pieces of chess in the hands of a dexterous player—he sat upon his throne, reclined upon his ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... a certain degree of morality is presupposed in the reception of Christianity; it is the 'substratum' of the moral interest which substantiates the evidence of miracles. The instance of a profligate suddenly converted, if properly sifted, will be found but ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... in case any inquiry should be made about him. This villanous trick was played off the more readily, from the fact that a steward had absconded at the time, and the difference in the name the cruel profligate accounted for by saying that, as he was hiding at the moment he married her, he ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... Carhais, in the county of Cornwall, by whom he had two sons and three daughters. John, the eldest, and the father of the poet, was born in 1751, educated at Westminster School, and afterwards placed in the Guards, where his conduct became so irregular and profligate that his father, the admiral, though a good-natured man, discarded him long before his death. In 1778 he acquired extraordinary eclat by the seduction of the Marchioness of Caermarthen, under circumstances which have few parallels in the licentiousness of ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... uncorrupted—or I will say the uninterrupted—Hatborian has none of those aristocratic predilections of yours, Annie. He grows up in a community where there is neither poverty nor richness, and where political economy can show by the figures that the profligate shop hands get nine-tenths of the profits, and starve on 'em, while the good little company rolls in luxury on the other tenth. But you've got used to something different over there, and of course Brother Peck's ideas startled you. Well, I ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... that the negroes are treacherous, cunning, dishonest, and profligate. Let me ask you, candid reader, what you would be, if you labored under the same unnatural circumstances? The daily earnings of the slave, nay, his very wife and children, are constantly wrested from him, under the sanction of the laws; is this the way to teach a scrupulous regard to the property ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... in those seas at a time when the south of France would willingly have formed itself into a separate republic, under the protection of England. But good principles had been at that time perilously abused by ignorant and profligate men; and, in its fear and hatred of democracy, the English Government abhorred whatever was republican. Lord Hood could not take advantage of the fair occasion which presented itself; and which, if it had been seized with vigour, might have ended ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey

... excellent heart and reflecting mind, a great share of sensibility, and a temper peculiarly formed for the enjoyments of social life. "But this gentleman, madam, who is her gallant this evening,—is his character unexceptionable? Will a lady of delicacy associate with an immoral, not to say profligate, man?" "The rank and fortune of Major Sanford," said Mrs. Richman, "procure him respect; his specious manners render him acceptable in public company; but I must own that he is not the person with whom I wish my cousin to be connected ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster

... but in the end Wilson and not Lodge would win by such a trick. The one greatest of vices is smart-aleckism. Sometime I shall write an essay on that subject. The burglar and the confidence operator and the profiteer and the profligate and the defaulting bank cashier are all victims of that disease—smart-aleckism. They will do a trick, to prove how clever they are. I believe that is the way ninety per cent of the boys and girls go wrong, and instead of teaching them the Bible, why not try reducing ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... night a young man, Charles de Kergrist,—a profligate, a gambler, crowning his scandalous life with the vilest and meanest act,—did come and kill himself under my window. The next day a great outcry arose against me. Three days later the brother of that wretched ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau

... my reader with historical remarks on this idle profligate people, who infest all the countries of Europe, and live in the midst of governments in a kind of commonwealth by themselves. But instead of entering into observations of this nature, I shall fill the remaining part of my paper with a story ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others

... was offended at the growing greatness of another, discharged his spleen, not in anything cruel or inhuman, but only in voting a ten years' banishment. But when it once began to fall upon mean and profligate persons, it was for ever after entirely laid aside; Hyperbolus being the last that ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous

... would be well if all others felt for their children as did this unlettered Gipsy. After having promised that the morals of the child should be watched over, she was confided to his care. And the author has known a Gipsy parent correct with stripes a grown daughter, for mentioning what a profligate person had talked about. ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb

... "did not allow me to finish. I was about to say that he whom your majesty has made your most illustrious subject, he who ought to give to all your subjects an example of moral conduct, is a profligate and libertine. That infamous school of Paris, where reigns the wanton Marquise de Pompadour, the ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... turtle, while the modest drudge, whose name never appeared to the world, broke in patience his daily bread! The craft of authorship has many mysteries.[48] One of the great patriarchs and primeval dealers in English literature was Robert Green, one of the most facetious, profligate, and indefatigable of the Scribleri family. He laid the foundation of a new dynasty of literary emperors. The first act by which he proved his claim to the throne of Grub-street has served as a model to his numerous successors—it was an ambidextrous trick! Green sold his "Orlando Furioso" ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... caution in their gladness; some shook their heads and smiled, meaning thereby to let all men know that, in case Foster should not persevere in his new career, they, at any rate, had never been over- sanguine as to the genuineness of his reformation; some simply looked grave; while the profligate and the profane gnashed their teeth with envy hatred, and malice, and exchanged vehement asseverations of "how they'd pay off the sneaking humbug of a deserter, ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson

... notion that therein at some time or another would be found a clew to the new boarder's past history—or possibly some evidence of such duplicity as the good lady suspected he might be guilty of. She had read that Byron was profligate, and that Poe was addicted to drink, and she was impressed with the idea that poets generally were bad men, and she regarded the waste-basket as a possible means of protecting herself against any such idiosyncrasies of her new-found ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs

... claims of ecclesiastical power, engaged with his usual zeal against the bishop. In consequence of his aversion to the dominion of superstitious churchmen, he wrote a poem called The Progress of a Divine, in which he conducts a profligate priest thro' all the gradations of wickedness, from a poor curacy in the country, to the highest preferment in the church; and after describing his behaviour in every station, enumerates that this priest thus accomplished, found at last a patron in the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber

... had they been in the hands of good and industrious characters, they would have produced abundant crops, and enriched their owners. But every day's experience evinced, that the people thus fortunately situated were, unluckily, some of the most profligate wretches in the colony; and their distance from the immediate seat of government added much to the inconvenience. Such of these farms as were situated on the low grounds were often overflowed after very heavy falls of rain; but this circumstance was in no way injurious to the farmer, unless ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... a number of unbelieving and profligate persons who expected nothing new; they had assembled themselves in the catacombs and ruins, where they celebrated Bacchanalian feasts and orgies. In the ruins of Nero's Golden House a banquet on a large scale had been arranged. In the ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg

... Dialogue happen'd between two men of quality, and both men of wit too; and the effect was, that the Lord brought the reality of the Devil into the question, and the debate brought the profligate to be a penitent; so in short, the Devil was made a ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... themselves almost as much as fairy-land. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure of political justice. The atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live here. It has got into a moral world, ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... even those plays which were translated from the French and Spanish, were carefully seasoned with as much indelicacy, and double entendre, as was necessary to fit them for the ear of the wittiest and most profligate of monarchs. ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... either weak or credulous. But she did more than this. A pupil of Exili, like La Croix, she, like him, concocted the same subtle poison that killed and left no trace behind it; and so she helped in this way profligate sons to get early possession of their inheritance, and depraved wives to another and younger husband. Desgrais wormed his way into her secret; she confessed all; the Chambre Ardente condemned her to be burned alive, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... country, and established in all the principal towns of France, "Societies of Harmony," for trying experiments and curing all diseases by means of magnetism. Some of these societies were a scandal to morality, being joined by profligate men of depraved appetites, who took a disgusting delight in witnessing young girls in convulsions. Many of the pretended magnetisers were notorious libertines, who took that opportunity of gratifying their ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... all this, we have an instance in the Acts of the threefold conviction of conscience, when Paul before Felix "reasoned of righteousness, and temperance, and the judgment to come" (Acts 24: 25). Here the sin of a profligate life was laid bare as the apostle discoursed of chastity; the claims of righteousness were vindicated, and the certainty of coming judgment exhibited; and with the only effect that "Felix trembled." So it must ever be ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon

... Rocheford, in particular, who was married to the queen's brother, but who lived on bad terms with her sister-in-law, insinuated the most cruel suspicions into the king's mind; and as she was a woman of a profligate character, she paid no regard either to truth or humanity in those calumnies which she suggested. She pretended that her own husband was engaged in a criminal correspondence with his sister; and not content with this imputation, she poisoned every action of the queen's, and represented ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume

... thing breathes not, ruthless and fell As woman once resolv'd on such a deed 520 Detestable, as my base wife contrived, The murther of the husband of her youth. I thought to have return'd welcome to all, To my own children and domestic train; But she, past measure profligate, hath poured Shame on herself, on women yet unborn, And even on the virtuous of her sex. He ceas'd, to whom, thus, answer I return'd. Gods! how severely hath the thund'rer plagued The house of Atreus even from the first, 530 ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... want the fellow. He looks down upon us country people as so many blackamoors. He's never content unless he gets my yellow-sealed wine, which costs me ten shillings a bottle, hang him! Besides, he's such an infernal character—he's a gambler—he's a drunkard—he's a profligate in every way. He shot a man in a duel—he's over head and ears in debt, and he's robbed me and mine of the best part of Miss Crawley's fortune. Waxy says she has him"—here the Rector shook his fist at the moon, with something very like an oath, and added, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... which rushed through the mind of Charles, at his first quitting the Lodge of Woodstock, and plunging into the forest that surrounded it. His profligate logic, however, was not the result of his natural disposition, nor received without scruple by his sound understanding. It was a train of reasoning which he had been led to adopt from his too close intimacy with the witty and profligate youth of quality by whom he had been surrounded. It arose ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... could buy to lay on her cottage- wall were equally silly and ugly: then there were great excuses for the poor, if they forgot whatsoever things were lovely and of good report; if they were often coarse and brutal in their manners, and cruel and profligate in their amusements. ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley

... and profligate in the fourth century, and the young monk in his convent in the fifteenth, passed through a similar experience;—different in form, identical in substance—with that of Paul the persecutor. And so Paul's Gospel, which was ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... sanctimonious Banbury-men); but he has a Proper Sense of what is due to the Honour and Figure of his family, and refrains from soiling his hands with bales of dice and worse implements among the profligate crew to be met with, not alone at Newmarket, or at the "Dog and Duck," or "Hockley Hole," but in Pall-Mall, and in the very ante-chambers of St. James's, no cater-cousin of the Groom-Porter he. He rides his hackney, as a gentleman should, nor have I prohibited him from occasionally taking ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... Lord's own picture of His own glorious salvation; you are invited to come, "without one plea," in all your poverty and want, your weakness and unworthiness. Remember the Redeemer's saying to the woman of Samaria. She was the chief of sinners—profligate—hardened—degraded; but He made no condition, no qualification; simple believing was all that was required,—"If thou knewest the gift of God," thou wouldst have asked, and He would ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff

... also at Marly—"ill-omened Marly"—that the Duc de Berry, the younger grandson of Louis XIV., and husband of the profligate daughter of the Duc d' Orleans—afterward Regent, died, with great suspicion of poison, in 1714. The MS. memorials of Mary Beatrice by a sister of Chaillot, describe how, when Louis XIV. was mourning his beloved grandchildren, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... bring me into the society of a devil, who would prove a fixed source of anxiety and misery to me. Was it conceivable that the others should be worse than, or even as bad as, this creature? His hair showed him hoary in vice. The Italian was a handsome man, and let him have been as profligate as he would, as cruel and fierce a pirate as Tassard had painted him, he would at all events have proved a sightly companion, and harmless as being blind, though to be sure for that reason of no use to me. Yet though his ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... this true of sublime and serious art only. It is true of cynical, profligate, and concupiscent art as well. It is true of Congreve as it is true of Sophocles; it is true of Mademoiselle de Maupin as it is true of Measure for Measure. This art differs from the former in that ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock

... city in a single month. But the vast sums they brought to Rome, and the still greater sums which were obtained by the sale of indulgences, and by various taxations, were all squandered in ornamenting the city, and in supporting a luxurious court, profligate cardinals, and superfluous ministers of a corrupted religion. Then was erected the splendid church of St. Peter, more after the style of Grecian temples, than after the model of the Gothic cathedrals of York and Cologne. Glorious was that monument of reviving ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... character of the Southern slaveholding aristocracy, and no other power on earth, to prevent their flocking in crowds and at the very first general election back to Washington, reuniting their forces with the old body of profligate political hacks at the North, and flaunting with increased presumption and activity the pretensions of slavery to dictate the whole policy of the land. In that event, a strong party, more distinctively proslavery and Southern than ever before, will be organized; more openly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... and spent much of her time in the kitchen. At that moment Harry was seated outside the cook-house, dressed in a suit of spotless white duck, playing an accordeon; also he wore round his brown neck a thick wreath of white and scarlet flowers. Harry, I may remark, was a dandy and a notorious profligate, but against these natural faults was the fact that he could ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke

... Arabs, for these sons of the desert at least address their flatteries to the girls whom they are eager to marry, whereas the Greek and Roman poets sought merely to beguile a class of women whose charms were for sale to anyone. One of these profligate men might cringe and wail and cajole, to gain the good will of a capricious courtesan, but he never dreamed of bending his knees to win the honest love of the maid he took to be his wife (that he might have male offspring.) Roman love was not romantic, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... repeated intrigues with Argos, and with their own offended allies of the Peloponnesian League. Alcibiades had a private grudge against the Spartans, to whom he had made overtures of friendship and service at the time when the treaty was under discussion, only to be set aside as a profligate and frivolous youth, unfit to meddle with serious matters of state. He now placed himself at the head of the party hostile to Sparta, and it was not long before he had an opportunity of revenging the insult ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell

... poor play was a creation that is common in modern English drama. He represented one idea at least that the English playwright has certainly not borrowed from the French stage. Moral worth is best indicated by a sullen demeanor. The man who has a pleasant manner is dangerous and a profligate; the virtuous man—the true-hearted Englishman—conducts himself as a boor, and proves the goodness of his nature by his silence and his sulks. The hero of this trumpery piece was of this familiar type. He saw the gay fascinator coming about his house; but he was too proud and dignified ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... sedition; that the democracy of Athens was a most absurd constitution, productive of anarchy and mischief, which must always happen when the government of a nation depends upon the caprice of the ignorant, hair-brained vulgar; that it was in the power of the most profligate member of the commonwealth, provided he was endowed with eloquence, to ruin the most deserving, by a desperate exertion of his talents upon the populace, who had been often persuaded to act in the most ungrateful and imprudent manner ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... the bad consequences of the cruel treatment of parents towards their children, and forcing their inclinations in marriage; and in the second part, we see a fine example of the pernicious effects of a young lady's reposing confidence or engaging in correspondence with a man of profligate and debauched principles. I do not at present recollect any composition which, view'd in this light, can be compared with the Iliad and Clarissa. The morals of the first are of the utmost importance in public life, and those of the last in private life. If ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous

... remarking, that it was not upon the virtuous, reduced to indigence by the misfortunes attendant even upon virtue, that he bestowed his alms;—these were sent from the door with hardly suppressed sneers; but when the profligate came to ask something, not to relieve his wants, but to allow him to wallow in his lust, or to sink him still deeper in his iniquity, he was sent away with rich charity. This was, however, attributed by him to the greater importunity of the ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori

... afterward the Earl of Shaftesbury, will ever be remembered for the part he bore in establishing the writ of habeas corpus as a part of the British Constitution. He was a bold, able and profligate man, who marred great abilities by greater vices. He combined within himself all that is dangerous and detestable ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore

... this resolution, about thirty men were landed, in order to make an attack upon the fort, which must be ascended to by a steep hill against the mouth of the cannon. These men were headed by one Kennedy, a bold, daring fellow, but very wicked and profligate; they marched directly up under the fire of their ship guns, and as soon as they were discovered, the Portuguese quitted their post and fled to the town, and the pirates marched in without opposition, set fire to the fort, and threw all the guns off the hill into the sea, which ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various

... real interest in retaining it, and is not driven by the distresses of the present moment to destroy the future productiveness of the soil. Any rent which the landlord accepts more than this, or any system by which more rent than this is obtained, is to borrow money upon the most usurious and profligate interest—to increase the revenue of the present day by the absolute ruin of the property. Such is the effect produced by a middleman; he gives high prices that he may obtain higher from the occupier; more is paid by the actual occupier than is consistent with the safety and ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith

... the notice that stuck-up young swell takes of me, I might be a block of wood! I'll make him listen to me. (Aloud.) Ahem! My Lord, I've just been telling my niece here the latest scandal in high-life. I daresay your Lordship has heard of that titled but brainless young profligate, the Marquis ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various

... be strong where she is weak.—Your friend, sir, must at least strip his proposals of their fine gilding. I will satisfy Mr. Mowbray of St. Ronan's of his false pretences, both to rank and fortune; and I rather think he will protect his sister against the claim of a needy profligate, though he might be dazzled with the alliance of ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... understanding and integrity, that will suffer no man to be falsely accused or defamed; nor the lives of any to be put in jeopardy, by the malicious conspiracies of great or small, or the perjuries of any profligate wretches. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... without staying for the Qualification bill. You said it did not signify—No! What if you intended to speak on it? Am I indifferent to hearing you? More-Am I indifferent about acting with you? Would not I follow you in any thing in the world?—This is saying no profligate thing. Is there any thing I might not follow you in? You even did not tell me yesterday that you had spoken. Yet I will tell you all I have heard; though if there was a Point in the world in which I could not wish you to succeed where you wish yourself, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... counted them over mentally with a groan. 'What was to become of them?' Then Nutter would be down upon him, without mercy, for the rent; and Dangerfield, if, indeed, he cared to do it [curse it, he trusted nobody], could not control him; and Lord Castlemallard, the selfish profligate, was away in Paris, leaving his business in the hands of that bitter old botch, who'd go any length to be ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... Landlord, are these your professions? Your bailmen should sleep ill to-night, for they are likely to answer roundly for this! And whom have we sparking it here? Brawling and swearing and turning into a profligate's tavern a place that should be for the sober entertainment of travellers? Whom have we here—eh! ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... the ears. "Does it serve any purpose to relate? He was very charming, very accomplished; how was my sister, at eighteen, to know that he was also very callous, very profligate, very cruel? These things happen every day ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... himself.' And the most subtle teacher of our century, or of any century, has said: 'What is a hypocrite? We are apt to understand by a hypocrite one who makes a profession of religion for secret ends without practising what he professes; who is malevolent, covetous, or profligate, while he assumes an outward sanctity in his words and conduct, and who does so deliberately, deceiving others, and not at all self-deceived. But this is not what our Saviour seems to have meant by a hypocrite; ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte

... and heir-apparent of Spain, the Netherlands, and all the Indies. A short sickly boy of sixteen, with a bull head, a crooked shoulder, a short leg, and a brutal temper, he will not be missed by the world if he should die. His profligate career seems to have brought its own punishment. To the scandal of his father, who tolerated no one's vices save his own, as well as to the scandal of the university authorities of Alcala, he has been scouring the streets at the head of the most profligate students, insulting women, even ladies ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... be a father, in every thing but in his authority:—'be assured,' said be, 'I shall take sure measures to prevent you from bringing either ruin or disgrace upon a family of which you are the first profligate:—this chamber must be your prison, till I have considered in what fashion I ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood

... superior cunning, by rendering him ridiculous, by exposing him to mental as well as physical anguish, by wounding him through his affections or his sense of honor, was the end which he pursued."[2259] "However profligate the people might have been, they were not contented with grossness unless seasoned with wit. The same excitement of the fancy rendered the exercise of ingenuity, or the avoidance of peril, an enhancement of pleasure to the Italians. This is perhaps the reason why ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... Sunday these ten year past," answered Jerry with the insolence of the ancient habitue. "Ere, one o' you kids, fetch me a bit o' chalk. I 'ate to see you idlin' your time away, gamblin' and dicin', like the Profligate Son when he broke the bank at ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant

... Dead Shot's wife goes rumblin' out on the same stage. Monte starts to tell us what happens when he returns, but the old profligate don't get far. ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis

... lives and discourses of people not so far off, we should have too much reason to fear, that many, in more civilized countries, have no very strong and clear impressions of a Deity upon their minds, and that the complaints of atheism made from the pulpit are not without reason. And though only some profligate wretches own it too barefacedly now; yet perhaps we should hear more than we do of it from others, did not the fear of the magistrate's sword, or their neighbour's censure, tie up people's tongues; which, were ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... most pure; Castitate venerandi. And among the uncivilized people coldness and cruelty go often together. The less passionate and sensitive the nature, the less open to pity. The Caribs of the West Indies were famed for both, in contrast to the profligate and gentle inhabitants of Cuba and Hispaniola; and in double contrast to the Red Indian tribes of North America, who combined, from our first acquaintance with them, the two vices of cruelty and profligacy, to an extent which has done more to ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... say they seemed rather against themselves than against each other. Their principles may be more relaxed on some points than ours, but I doubt much whether a Frenchman would not be as much disgusted in England as an Englishman could possibly be in France; we call them a profligate race and condemn them in toto—something like ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... matter of course, and fashionably proper for a minister representing the moneyless and homeless saint of Jerusalem, to spend in various ways ten or twenty times the average income of an American citizen. But has any man a right to indulge in needless and therefore profligate expenditure for himself, while misery unrelieved surrounds him?[14] Could he, if he had an occasional throb of the sentiment of brotherhood, the divine love enforced by Jesus? Suffering, intense suffering of mind and body, is ever present in society, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... or injured a conquered city. He gave his well-known mistress, Lucia, the mother of Francesco, in marriage to another, in order to be free for a princely alliance. Even the marriages of his relations were arranged on a definite plan. He kept clear of the impious and profligate life of his contemporaries, and brought up his son Francesco to the three rules: 'Let other men's wives alone; strike none of your followers, or, if you do, send the injured man far away; don't ride a hard-mouthed horse, or one that drops his shoe.' But his chief source of influence ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... the offer of a wandering prince, without purse or crown. Very soon after Charles II. ascended the throne of England, Mazarin hastened to inform him that he was ready to confer upon him his niece. Charles, a profligate fellow, declined the proffered alliance, to the great chagrin of the ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott

... convinced of the immense superiority of Pedro over any other young Prince even dans les relations journalistes, besides which the position is so infinitely preferable. The Austrian society is medisante and profligate and worthless—and the Italian possessions very shaky. Pedro is full of resource—fond of music, fond of drawing, of languages, of natural history, and literature, in all of which Charlotte would suit him, and would be a real benefit to the country. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... people to whom one is closely attached, and this sense of estrangement from other Chinese may account to some extent for the facility with which this aboriginal people engaged, a little later, in the trade in women and girls brought from the mainland to meet the demands of profligate foreigners. ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... the thing, the most essentially requisite; and much less certainly will they think it to be so with respect to this present World, if they find their pious Instructor not only to choose the Society of Persons Profligate and Debauch'd for his Friends and Companions; but also (on all occasions) to labour the promotion of the like Men to Employments of the highest Truth, in preference of others of acknowledg'd Integrity and Sobriety of Life: The avow'd Reason whereof being only ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham

... time when I felt the same prejudices, and reasoned from the same errors; but experience, sad and painful experience, has taught me better. What the conduct of former armies was, I know not, but what the conduct of the present is, I well know. It is low, cruel, indolent and profligate; and had the people of America no other cause for separation than what the army has occasioned, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... led them to the corner for prayer, and poured forth a confession of sin for them and for herself, such as left little that could have been added by her own profligate son, had he joined in the prayer. Either there are no degrees in guilt, or the Scotch language was equal only to the confession of children and holy women, and could provide no more awful words for the contrition of the prodigal or the hypocrite. But the words did little harm, for ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... test of the popular opinion of a man than the character assigned to him on the stage; and till the close of the sixteenth century Sir John Oldcastle remained the profligate buffoon of English comedy. Whether in life he bore the character so assigned to him, I am unable to say. The popularity of Henry V., and the splendour of his French wars served no doubt to colour all ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... immediately set to work at the colliery, his first employment being to lead coals from behind the screen to the pitmen's houses. His Scotch accent, and perhaps his awkwardness, exposed him to much annoyance from the "pit lads," who were a very rough and profligate set; and as boxing was a favourite pastime among them, our youth had to fight his way to their respect, passing through a campaign of no less than seventeen pitched battles. He was several times on the point of abandoning the work altogether, rather than undergo the buffetings and insults ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... next to his brother, the most powerful and important personage in the realm. He had, besides, as has already been stated, the custody and care of Elizabeth, who lived in his house; though, as he was a profligate and unprincipled man, this position for the princess, now fast growing up to womanhood, was considered by many persons as of doubtful propriety. Still, she was at present only fourteen years old. There was another young lady likewise in his family, a niece of King ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... Scribonia never forgave Augustus. She became the center of a faction in society that hated him, hated Livia, loathed and detested the whole Claudian line. There must have been bad blood in Scribonia. Her daughter Julia became profligate. Of Julia's five children, Agrippa Postumus went mad through his vices; Julia inherited her mother's tendencies, and came to a like end. Agrippina, a bitter and violent woman, became the evil genius of the next reign. Of this Agrippina's ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... faction allow little to the operation of particular dispositions, or private opinions. Two men of personal characters more opposite than those of Wharton and Addison could not easily be brought together. Wharton was impious, profligate, and shameless, without regard, or appearance of regard, to right and wrong: whatever is contrary to this may be said of Addison; but, as agents of a party, they were connected, and how they adjusted their other ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... Verena was full of suggestions which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens, the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very satisfactorily classified. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James

... profligate earl, of whom the best-known anecdote is that he once pinned to the door of the King's ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey

... respectable but indifferent to the glory and shame of their country; while Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale were profligate, unprincipled, and dishonest to a great degree. They aided Charles to corrupt the parliament and deceive the nation. They removed all restraints on his will, and pandered to his depraved tastes. It was by their suggestion that the king shut up the Exchequer. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... whom Sulla had named the Great, Crassus, the rich, and Caesar, the shrewd and wise. Two of these had reached their utmost height. For Pompey there was to be no more greatness, for Crassus no more riches. But Caesar was the coming man of Rome. After a youth given to profligate pleasures, in which he spent money as fast as Crassus collected it, and accumulated debt more rapidly than Pompey accumulated fame, the innate powers of the man began to declare themselves. He studied oratory and made his mark in the ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... the better rank, avoid contracting marriage in the month of May, which genial season of flowers and breezes might, in other respects, appear so peculiarly favourable for that purpose. It was specially objected to the marriage of Mary with the profligate Earl of Bothwell, that the union was formed within this interdicted month. This prejudice was so rooted among the Scots that, in 1684, a set of enthusiasts, called Gibbites, proposed to renounce it, among a long list ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... son," said Alasco to Foster, as soon as Varney had left them, "that whatever this bold and profligate railer may say of the mighty science, in which, by Heaven's blessing, I have advanced so far that I would not call the wisest of living artists my better or my teacher—I say, howsoever yonder reprobate may scoff at things too holy to be apprehended by men merely of carnal ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott

... had occasion to make the remark, that, as a rule, drinking, swearing, profligate captains turn out officers of the same character. A brave, virtuous, and good commander cannot make all those under him like himself; but his example will induce imitation among some, and act as a curb to vice among others. Great, indeed, is the responsibility of a captain of a man-of-war; ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston

... promises, and returned to his Sunday pleasures. The swearer allowed his tongue to move as unchecked in insulting his Maker as before. The drunkard thirsted for his intoxicating cups and returned to the scenes of his former dissipations; and the profligate, who avowed himself a 'changed man,' when health was fully restored, laughed at religion as a fancy, and hastened to wallow in the mire of pollution. He had scarcely a particle of faith in sick-bed ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock

... acts promptly and wisely, make such terms with this young state as to raise it up as a barrier against the profligate ambition of America. Texas was a portion of Mexico, and Mexico abolished slavery; the Texians are bound (if they are Texians and not Americans) to adhere to what might be considered a treaty with the whole Christian world; if not, they can make no demand upon its sympathy or protection, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... pleased her to pay; she governed his household and his children; she learned, she wrote, she wore the crown. She might have a successor but no supplanter; an Egyptian of the dynasties before the Persian dominance could have but one wife at a time; none but kings could be profligate, openly. So, while Babylonia led her maidens to a market, while Ethiopia ruled hers with a rod, while Arabia numbered hers among her she-camels, Egypt gloried in national chivalry and ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... even Louis XIV., notorious for his open and profligate as well as habitual adulteries, had a confessor, and complied with the duties of confession and communion in the presence of his whole court. In Spain, robbers, assassins, and the most corrupt of the people, pursued by justice ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous

... VILLIERS, DUKE OF, son of the preceding; served under Charles I. in the Civil War, was at the battle of Worcester; became minister of Charles II.; a profligate courtier ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... possible: or, if it be not in thy power, and thy conscience accuse thee, surrender thyself to the magistrate, and make the only satisfaction thou art able." "I have taken no one's goods," said I. "Of what art thou guilty, then?" said he. "Art thou a drunkard? a profligate?" "Alas, no," said I; "I am neither of these; would that I were ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... is very often only a beautiful work of art). A beautiful woman is the most attractive, charming, and lovely being that a man can imagine. I never saw a male being who could lay any claims to manly vigour, strength or courage, who was not an admirer of woman. Only a profligate, a coward or a sneak would hate women; a hero and a man admires woman, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... general reader. The conduct of Lucretia Borgia has been the subject of much obloquy, which her defenders maintain rests chiefly on inferences from her living in a flagitious court, where she witnessed the most profligate scenes. It is asserted that some of the accusations have no better foundation than the epigrams of Pontano, and other Neapolitan poets, the natural enemies of her family.—Transl.] The Pope went in a coach, with his daughter, the Devil, ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger

... Valley," Harper's Magazine, 100:419, February, 1900.] or from four to seven times its present population. It has been tilled with "luxurious carelessness." A peasant in Brittany or a forester in Normandy would be scandalized by the extravagant, profligate use of its patrimony. That it is likely to have at least the 250,000,000 by the year 2100, and with intensive cultivation will be able to support them, is allowed by estimates of reliable statisticians. Europe ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... most profligate and abandoned life, whose praying mother followed him like a shadow into and out of his drinking saloons and gambling houses, at last absented himself from home, whenever he was in port. Her burden, finally, seemed too great to bear, ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various

... said a new voice thoughtfully, "I think he recognized the worthlessness of his profligate son, and planned to sink his whole fortune in this institution? Money has been the curse of Robson Danbury's life, and his father knew that the only hope of making anything like a man out of him was the cutting him off without a cent, but the Death Angel claimed ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown

... estate had been to permit huts of miserable construction to be erected to the number of several hundreds by the poorest, and in many instances the most profligate, of the population. They were not regularly entered in the rental account, but had a nominal payment fixed upon them which was paid annually at the court leet. These cottages were built on the sides of the roads and on the lord's ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... of the enemy, with constant intelligence of our naval and military force and preparation, ... but the same traffic, intercourse, and intelligence is carried on with great subtlety and treachery by profligate citizens, who, in vessels ostensibly navigating our own waters, from port to port [coasters], find means to convey succors or intelligence to the enemy, and elude the penalty of law."[172] Officers were therefore instructed ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... offers, I withdrew. I shall go to no more of their sittings." (He attended only one after this.) "I am determined to join Sieyes' party. It includes a greater diversity of opinions than that of the profligate Barras. He proclaims everywhere that he is the author of my fortune. He will never be content to play an inferior part, and I will never bend to such a man. He cherishes the mad ambition of being the support of the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... friends, or spoilt by a mistaken education, are thrown on an unfeeling world without the least power to defend themselves from the snares not only of the other sex, but from the more dangerous arts of the profligate ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson

... dressed like a marabout or santon of the desert—a sort of enthusiasts, who sometimes ventured into the camp of the Crusaders, though treated always with contumely, and often with violence. Indeed, the luxury and profligate indulgence of the Christian leaders had occasioned a motley concourse in their tents of musicians, courtesans, Jewish merchants, Copts, Turks, and all the varied refuse of the Eastern nations; so that the caftan ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott

... and the doctor passed by the church-yard, and the watchman bawled in hoarse voice a long and doleful "All's well!" A deep sleep had already fallen upon this primitive little burgh; nothing disturbed this awful silence, excepting now and then the bark of some profligate night-walking dog, or the serenade of some romantic cat. It is true, Wolfert fancied more than once that he heard the sound of a stealthy footfall at a distance behind them; but it might have been merely the echo ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... arguments in his power to defend the cause he has adopted, and to leave the effects of those arguments to the judgment of others. However useful this practice may be for the promotion of public justice, it is not without danger to the individual whose practice it becomes. It is apt to produce a profligate indifference to truth in higher occasions of life, where truth cannot for a moment be trifled with, much less callously trampled on, much less suddenly and totally yielded up to the basest of human motives. It is astonishing what unworthy and inadequate notions ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... of Europe in particular, which were founded upon the ruins of the Roman empire, the administration of justice appears for a long time to have been extremely corrupt; far from being quite equal and impartial, even under the best monarchs, and altogether profligate under ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... and trust it has been proved to your Lordships, that there is law in these countries, that there is no delegation of power which exempts a governor from the law, then I say at any rate a British governor is to answer for his conduct, and cannot be justified by wicked examples and profligate practices. ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... Surely profligate infidels do not so die; and these poor souls, whatever were their sins or their confusions, must be numbered among the heroes of ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... unsurpassed. It is believed that no other book except the Bible has gone through so many editions or attained such a popularity in all languages. It has been generally understood that Bunyan's early life was a very profligate one, but some have thought that his terrible self-accusations in after years may have arisen from the height of his religious fervour and Puritan strictness, which made him look on dancing and bell-ringing as deadly sins. This idea is satisfactorily ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home

... letter, written an hour later, Wilberforce urges Pitt not to neglect this note. Williams some years ago sought to make a mutiny; he was skilled in intrigue, had "held Jacobinical language, and was going on in the most profligate and abandoned way." This is all the information that the Pitt MSS. yield upon this question. But in the private diary of Wilberforce there is the significant entry: "Pitt awaked by Woolwich artillery riot and went out to Cabinet." The cool bearing of Lord Harrington, commander of the forces in ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... judges held that the right to own property did not entitle married women to convey it; therefore in 1858 the law was amended, giving further security to the wife to transact business in her own name, if her husband was profligate and failed to support her; but not until 1872 did the law protect a married woman in her right to transact business, make contracts, possess her separate earnings, and sue and be sued in her own name. The legislature of 1878 reenacted all the former laws; and married women may now hold, convey ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... from their evil fate, In him was held a crime of state. A wicked monster on the bench, Whose fury blood could never quench; As vile and profligate a villain, As modern Scroggs, or old Tressilian; Who long all justice had discarded, Nor feared he God, nor man regarded; Vowed on the Dean his rage to vent, And make him of his zeal repent: But Heaven his innocence defends, The ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... himself generally respected. How had it come about that they were now in this pitiable condition? Had the man been idle and neglectful of his business? By no means; he had been diligent and hard-working. Was he a drunken profligate? Not at all; he was, for the age, unusually sober. Had he committed some terrible crime which had brought ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... other and higher advantages. No doubt wealth when very great tends to convert men into useless drones, but their number is never large; and some degree of elimination here occurs, for we daily see rich men, who happen to be fools or profligate, squandering away their wealth. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... that Shelter and Security on the Continent, which the barbarous Hostilities, and impious Manners of those Northerns, denied them at Home; had made such frequent lamentable Breaches in the antient, wise Constitution of the Kingdom; had, by the fatal Example of their profligate dissolute Lives, so vitiated the national Morality; and finally, had left behind them so many noxious Seeds of Faction and Anarchy, as, in less than two Centuries, gave up a Kingdom, of above 2000 Years Establishment, the unaccountable Prey ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke

... habits. It seems as if the hand of an avenging Providence had conducted this unfortunate mother to take a step so fatal to her son. She told the viceroy that she had in vain attempted to check him, that his days and nights were spent with profligate companions in gambling-houses and in cock-pits, and that she feared some mischief would come some day from his fighting and swearing and drinking; that but a few days since he had come home late, and that she had ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... admiral, which gave him the command of the fleet, and made him, next to his brother, the most powerful and important personage in the realm. He had, besides, as has already been stated, the custody and care of Elizabeth, who lived in his house; though, as he was a profligate and unprincipled man, this position for the princess, now fast growing up to womanhood, was considered by many persons as of doubtful propriety. Still, she was at present only fourteen years old. There was another ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... me to withdraw her from a scene which her wild grief so unpleasantly interrupted; for I thought that were I then and there to announce myself as her brother, she might not believe me—she might suspect some treachery or snare in a city so notoriously profligate as Florence. But the subsequent explanations which took place between us cleared up all doubts ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... early in the eighteenth century, says that "soon after the wedding day the newly-married wife sets herself about spinning her winding sheet, and a husband that shall sell or pawn it is esteemed among all men one of the most profligate." And Dr. Jamieson says—"When a woman of the lower class in Scotland, however poor, or whether married or single, commences housekeeping, her first care, after what is absolutely necessary for the time, is to provide death linen for herself and those who ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier

... "dying Aristophanes" discourses on his alleged conversion to religion, in a strain which settles the question, so much discussed for the past two or three years, whether such a conversion has actually taken place or not. He declares that he has "returned to God, like the profligate son, after having long kept swine among the Hegelians. Was it suffering that drove me back? Perhaps a less miserable reason. The celestial home-sickness came over me, and urged me forth through woods and ravines, over the dizziest ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... never a more openly profligate Italian despot than Alexander VI (1493-1503) of the notorious Spanish house of Borgia. He frankly set to work to advance the interests of his children, as if he were merely a secular ruler. For one of his sons, Csar ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... contained can be fully displayed) I will only add one remark more of the prementioned Wars, in lieu of a Corollary or Conclusion, and aver upon my Conscience, that notwithstanding all the above-named Injustice, profligate Enormities and other Crimes which I omit, (tho sufficiently known to me) the Indians did not, nor was it in their power to give any greater occasion for the Commission of them, than Pious Religioso's Living in a well regulated Monastic Life did afford for any Sacrilegeous ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas

... 296.).—The name asked for by U.J.B. of the Catholic priest, who, sooner than break the seal of confession, suffered death, is John of Nepomuc, Canon of Prague. By order of the Emperor Wenceslas, he was thrown off a bridge into the Muldaw, because he would not tell that profligate prince the confession of his religious empress. This holy man is honoured as St. John Nepomucen on the 16th of May, in ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 50. Saturday, October 12, 1850 • Various

... men begin to lose their individuality of conviction the moment they begin life's business. Many a young man has sacrificed his individuality on the altar that a profligate companion has built for him. Many a young man who knew right, has allowed some empty-headed street-corner loafer to lower his own high moral tone lest he should seem singular in the little world of society ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.

... dynasts who have reigned in Prussia since the Great Elector for the last two hundred and fifty years, we do not find one single ruler who resembles his predecessor or his successor. Yet all these Hohenzollerns, whether capable or incapable, whether mad, half-mad, or sane, whether profligate or domesticated, whether extravagant or miserly, have certain common traits. They have all been inspired with the same dynastic policy. When we consider the individual variations from the family type, there can be here no question of physical heredity, like the lip of the Habsburg ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... they are not Brave because they rush into danger when goaded on by pain and mere Spirit, without any view of the danger: else would asses be Brave when they are hungry, for though beaten they will not then leave their pasture: profligate men besides do many bold actions by reason of their lust. We may conclude then that they are not Brave who are goaded on to meet danger by pain and mere Spirit; but still this temper which arises from Animal Spirit appears to be most natural, and would be Courage of the true kind if it could ...
— Ethics • Aristotle

... enviously, to this light-hearted profligate's babble, as we sat by my rude fireside,—I, sombre man of science and sorrow, he, smiling child of idleness and pleasure, so much one of Nature's courtier-like nobles, that there, as he smoked his ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... that at the present day the remnants of that same aristocracy exhibit a certain severity of morals; whilst laxity of morals appears to have spread amongst the middle and lower ranks. So that the same families which were most profligate fifty years ago are nowadays the most exemplary, and democracy seems only to have strengthened the morality of the aristocratic classes. The French Revolution, by dividing the fortunes of the nobility, by forcing them to attend assiduously to their affairs and ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... his real errand. His experience thus far had been that Duncan, either to evade pursuit, to gratify bestial passion, or to endeavor by such excitements to drive away the haunting fear that oppressed him, had invariably sought the companionship of the harlot and the profligate. Being possessed of plenty of money, it may be imagined that he experienced no difficulty in finding associates willing to minister to his appetites, and to assist him in forgetting the dangers that threatened him, by dissipation and debauchery. ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton

... parts, but was a bold frontless woman, who knew how to make the most of her opportunities in life. That Hooke got a large sum of money for writing her Apology[515]. That he wondered Hooke should have been weak enough to insert so profligate a maxim, as that to tell another's secret to one's friend is no breach of confidence[516]; though perhaps Hooke, who was a virtuous man[517], as his History shews, and did not wish her well, though he wrote her Apology, might see its ill tendency, and yet insert it at her desire. He ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... the sentence of the law into effect upon a criminal, the innkeeper was compelled to perform his functions: therefore the innkeepers, like usurers and other persons, who follow a pursuit hostile to public opinion, were profligate and rapacious. Don Quixote teems with instances to this effect; and there are other allusions to the same circumstance in Gil Blas. It must be observed that if M. Le Sage stumbled by accident upon so great a peculiarity, he was fortunate; and if ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various

... conditions than in baseball games from which all elements of honest, manly sport have been taken away; brutal slugging matches between professional pugilists; horseraces conducted by gamblers for gamblers; the sickening, details of the latest scandal among the profligate, ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo

... of Milan, the ascetic and profligate, libertine and dreamer, hearing of him and sending straightway for Leonardo because he is "the most accomplished ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... peace or tranquillity while that pestilent body is in existence; smite it "hip and thigh," and you at once cut off the fruitful sources of discontent and crime. Stop the rent, and at one blow you annihilate the profligate press, which turns the minds of the people from their legitimate avocations, which panders to their prejudices, and excites them to outrage. Of what use will it be to confine the peasant to his house by night, if you allow him to be beset during the day by the noxious publications ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various

... every conceivable kind of business, to pay for armies of lackeys and employees and private servants of officers and trustees, and for debauches and banquets which vie with any given by the kings and queens of the most extravagant and profligate nations on earth; in addition, enough more to accumulate huge and unnecessary funds—which are juggled with for the enrichment of individuals. Such wicked exactions and shameful extravagances constitute an imposition of the most wanton and criminal character, ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... know he has any rights to be restored to?" returned Jackson, with a grin. "Judging from what you tell me, I've no doubt he's the illegitimate offspring of some handsome, but lowborn profligate; in which case, he'll neither have name, nor wealth for his inheritance. The assassination, as you call it, was, obviously, the vengeance of a kinsman of the injured lady, who no doubt was of good family, upon her seducer. The less said, therefore, on this point the better; ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... wrest from the hard hands of his friends a sufficient profit upon his labour to maintain himself. How often did he look back, with regret, to the days when he stood behind the counter, in his father's shop! Then he had in Allen a real friend; but now he had in Lewis only a profligate and unfeeling associate. Lewis cared for no one but himself; and he was as avaricious as he was extravagant; "greedy of what belonged to others, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... all claims of ecclesiastical power, engaged with his usual zeal against the bishop. In consequence of his aversion to the dominion of superstitious churchmen, he wrote a poem called The Progress of a Divine, in which he conducts a profligate priest thro' all the gradations of wickedness, from a poor curacy in the country, to the highest preferment in the church; and after describing his behaviour in every station, enumerates that this priest thus accomplished, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber

... the priests." But, although the subjects of these works of Lessing were small, his object in writing was always great and national. He never condescended to amuse a provincial court by masquerades and comedies, nor did he degrade his genius by pandering, like Wieland, to the taste of a profligate nobility. Schiller, again, was a poet truly national and truly liberal; and although a man of aspirations rather than of actions, he has left a deeper impress on the kernel of the nation than either Wieland or Goethe. These considerations, however, must not ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... did not, however, reduce morality to bestial self-indulgence. If profligate pleasures could be had free from mental apprehensions of another world and of death and pain and disease in this, and if they brought with them guidance as to their own proper restriction, there would be no reason whatever to blame a man for filling himself to the ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall

... personal expenses were mixed up with billets dous, paints and pomades, moneylenders' circulars, belladonna and cantharides. But most astounding of all were the contents of the widows' prie-Dieu. In this devotional article of furniture were stored all the inmost secrets of her profligate career. Affectionate letters from the elderly gentleman on whom she had imposed a supposititious child lay side by side with a black-edged card, on which was written the last message of a young lover who had killed himself on her account. "Jeanne, in the flush ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... asked the king. "Because he is a poor man, the son of small laboring folks, who are still tillers of the ground in our country." "Ah!" said Charles; "is there nothing more? Assuredly, fair brother, we should prize more highly the poor man of wisdom than the profligate ass;" and he maintained in the office him whom ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... observed between gluttony and absolute starvation, and "medio tutis-simus ibis," saith the proverb; and I do beg to tell those over cautious ladies and gentlemen, who seem to know no medium between the cloistered nun and the abandoned profligate, that Nature will prevail in their spite, or, as Obadiah wisely and truly said, "When lambs meet they will play." And now, reader, kind, courteous, gentle, or whatever thou art, I bid thee adieu, with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various

... advert to such insignificant individuals, such are rare exceptions—I leave them out of the question—I reason on general principles. The life of an officer is not now a life of parade, of coxcombical, or of profligate idleness—but of active service, of continual hardship and danger. All the descriptions which we see in ancient history of a soldier's life—descriptions which, in times of peace, appeared like romance—are now realised; military exploits fill every day's newspapers, every ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth

... result of his observation, "This is no time of night, sirrah smith," he said, "for thee, or such as thou, to be abroad. Thy daily work done, thou shouldst be at home with thy wife and children, not seeking profligate adventures, or breeding foul sedition in the streets. Go home! go home! for shame on thee! thou ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... the Finches went to the Continent; and she thought Georgina deserved credit for not having again seen Mark, when, as it now appeared, there had lurked in her heart affection sufficient to induce her to bestow herself, and all her wealth, upon him, spendthrift and profligate as she must know him to be. Miserable must be her future life; and Theodora's heart ached as she thought of wretchedness unaided by that which can alone give support through the trials of life, and bring ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the government almost wholly to Dunstan, his primate, and spent his time in gayety, pleasure, and ease. He was unstable, profligate, and vicious. He once broke into a convent and carried off a beautiful nun, named Editha. For this violation of the sanctuary, Dunstan commanded him not to wear his crown for seven years, which was no great punishment, ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth

... away either—that while things go on rightly, and governments, and clergy, and people do right, Christ is there then, filling them all with His Spirit and guiding them all to their duty; but that when evil times come, and rulers are idle, and clergy dumb dogs, and the rich tyrannous, and the poor profligate, and men are crying for work and cannot get it, and every man's hand is against his fellow, and no one knows what to do or think; and on earth is distress of nations with perplexity, men's hearts failing ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... imaginative youth, a lover of books rather than of games, with an old head upon his young shoulders. After such a training it was only natural that he should be transformed from a nervous hysterical child into an embittered, cross-grained man, profligate and superstitious at the same time. Abundant light is thrown upon every stage of his career, for few men have left a clearer picture of themselves in their written words, and nowhere is Cardan, from the opening to the closing scene, so plainly ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... that has not its expiation. Nay, do not weep. Am I so ugly? Why should you dread me so, madame? I am a great admirer of your charms, desirous to know you better. Nay, have no suspicions as to my morality—I am no profligate. I came to the ball ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... contumacy, they compelled him to flee, murdered the jurors and clerks of the commission, and, carrying their heads upon poles, claimed the support of the nearest townships. In a few days all the commons of Essex were in a state of insurrection, under the command of a profligate priest, who had assumed the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... moral and physical wreck. But the prodigal was gathered to the reformer's heart, and taken to his home where in memory of a mother long dead, whose darling was James, he was nursed and watched over with deep and pious love. There were sad lapses of the profligate man even in the sanctuary of his brother's home. The craving for liquor was omnipotent in the wretched creature, and he was attacked by uncontrollable desire for drink. But William's patience was infinite, and his yearning and pity at such times were as sweet ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... Violet; "but the matter will not be allowed to drop. They were brought to the meet by that young profligate, Lord Frederic Westcote." ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various

... equity, but likewise those of logic. And, as it has been variously asserted of him, that he was constant and inconstant, firm and fickle, guided by principle, yet giving way to every impulse; that he was both chaste and profligate, a sensual man and an anchorite; calumny alone can not be accused of all these contradictions. We must then seek out conscientiously whether there were not other causes for this inconsistency, so as to return back within due bounds, and bring contradiction in accord with truth. It is, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... see it,—she does feel it. A spirit is silently and gradually working its way beneath the surface of society, which must, erelong, break forth either for good or for evil. Between a profligate and servile nobility, and a degraded and enslaved populace, a middle class has lately sprung up; the men of letters, the artists, the professors in the sciences, who have obtained property, or distinction ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... give us any information? Let us admit that these are trifles. Very well! All right! But remember their relations. She detested her brother. She never forgave him for living apart from his wife. She of the Old Faith, while in her eyes he is a godless profligate. There is where the germ of her hate was hatched. They say he succeeded in making her believe that he was an angel of Satan. He even went in for spiritualism ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various

... entertain my reader with historical remarks on this idle profligate people, who infest all the countries of Europe, and live in the midst of governments in a kind of commonwealth by themselves. But instead of entering into observations of this nature, I shall fill the remaining ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others

... You will not want it. You have changed the want, and have changed it by your power of imagination. There is no more effective way of destroying a vice than by deliberately picturing the ultimate results of its indulgence. Persuade a young man who is inclined to be profligate to keep in his mind the image of an old profligate; show him the profligate worn out, desiring without the power to gratify; and if you can get him to think in that way, unconsciously he will begin to shrink from that which ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant

... upon his character. He became the butt of contemporary satire. Horace Smith, Moore, Shelley, Byron, lampooned him savagely. The latter made him the hero of his wicked "Vision of Judgment," and to him dedicated his "Don Juan." The dedication was suppressed; but no chance offered in the body of that profligate rhapsody to assail Bob Southey, that was not vigorously employed. The self-content of the Laureate armed him, however, against every thrust. Contempt he interpreted as envy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... to deal with booksellers, and I wondered how a bank clerk aged twenty could put into my hands with a profligate abundance of detail, all given with absolute assurance, the story of extravagant and bloodthirsty adventure, riot, piracy, and death in unnamed seas. He had led his hero a desperate dance through revolt against the overseers, to command ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... themselves than against each other. Their principles may be more relaxed on some points than ours, but I doubt much whether a Frenchman would not be as much disgusted in England as an Englishman could possibly be in France; we call them a profligate race and condemn them in toto—something ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... to indulge in one of his most declamatory rhapsodies upon the life, "so dear to the gods," of this "pious and holy poet." But Sophocles, in private life, was a profligate, and in public life a shuffler and a trimmer, if not absolutely a renegade. It was, perhaps, the very laxity of his principles which made him thought so agreeable a fellow. At least, such is no uncommon cause of personal popularity nowadays. People lose much of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... together some of the more striking particularities of the Marquesas. It rests upon no authority; it is in no sense, like "Rahero," a native story; but a patchwork of details of manners and the impressions of a traveller. It may seem strange, when the scene is laid upon these profligate islands, to make the story hinge on love. But love is not less known in the Marquesas than elsewhere; nor is there any cause of suicide more common in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the sides seen by the world. There were people who could truly believe that Peter was a ward boss; a frequenter of saloons; a drunkard; a liar; a swearer; a murderer, in intention, if not in act; a profligate; and a compromiser of many of his own strongest principles. Yet there were people who could, say ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford

... habits of thought and living are so entirely different, and the difference becomes so much more striking the more you live intimately with them, that I know not how to make you comprehend a people who are at once temperate and profligate, serious in their characters and buffoons in their amusements, capable of impressions and passions, which are at once sudden and durable (what you find in no other nation), and who actually have no society (what we would call so), as you may see by their comedies; they ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... Sheridan:—on the abrogation of Parliaments, he entered into a closer connection than ever with Fox and a few others of lesser note, forming together as desperate and profligate a gang as ever disgraced a civilized country. They were guilty of every species of enormity, and went so far as even to commit robberies on the highway, with a degree of audacity that could be equalled ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore

... four years of prosperous activities during which prices, the cost of living, have been relatively stable—that is, inflation has been held in check. But it is clear that the danger is always present, particularly if the government might become profligate in its expenditures or private groups might ignore all the possible results on our economy of unwise struggles for ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower

... better test of the popular opinion of a man than the character assigned to him on the stage; and till the close of the sixteenth century Sir John Oldcastle remained the profligate buffoon of English comedy. Whether in life he bore the character so assigned to him, I am unable to say. The popularity of Henry V., and the splendour of his French wars served no doubt to colour all who had opposed him with a blacker shade than they deserved: but it is almost certain ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... technical execution. A critical examination will show that the composition is on the pyramidal principle, and the arrangement of groups principally in threes. In the central portion of the canvas, where the marble pillars of the porch fall off in perspective, the Profligate stands holding up a golden cup in his right hand, as in the act of proposing a toast. His red costume and commanding figure attract the eye, and the attention falls at once and equally on him and on the magnificent woman ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various

... her afterwards. But if she was a gleam of sunlight in his lonely dwelling, like sunlight she came and went in it, and one day he found her near to the track leading up to the fondak in talk with a passing traveller by the way, whom he recognised for the grossest profligate out of Tetuan. Unveiled, unabashed, with sweet looks of confidence she was gazing full into the man's gross face, answering his evil questions with the artless simplicity of innocence. At one bound Israel was between them; and in a moment he had torn Naomi away. And that night, while she wept ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine

... who stood in the way of the interests of their own clique. They have never allowed their own profound ignorance of anything (Greek for instance) to throw even an air of hesitation into their oracular decision on the matter. They set an example of profligate contempt for truth, of which the success was in proportion to the effrontery; and when their prosperity had filled the market with competitors, they cried out against their own reflected sin, as if they had never committed it, or were entitled to a monopoly of it. The latter, ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... justice from society, were not supposed to have lost the distinctive attribute of human nature: they were treated as rational beings, were operated upon by rational motives; and they repaid this treatment by improved habits, by industry, and submission. They had been profligate, they were now sober and decent in their behaviour; they had been idle, they were now actively and usefully employed; they had disobeyed the laws, they now submitted (armed as they were with all kinds of utensils) ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley

... corrupt age, in a nation marked for its degeneracy; nursed and reared in a church, as profligate as the world in which it was embedded; persecuted at every step of her career; groping as she did in spiritual desolation and ignorance, nevertheless, she arose to the highest pinnacle of pre-eminence in ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon

... as by a process which is seldom missed free-thinking does and will end in free-acting, he who has cast off one yoke also casting off the other, so a 'libertine' came in two or three generations to signify a profligate, especially in relation to women, a licentious and debauched person. [Footnote: See the ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... pert in company, but he is also dull; so that you cannot, though you try, hate him cordially, merely for the wish to be offensive. He i did not know before—that he is a fool as well; so you forgive him. On the other hand, he may be a profligate public character, and may make no secret of it; but he gives you a hearty shake by the hand, speaks kindly to servants, and supports an aged father and mother. Politics apart, he is a very honest fellow. You are ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... ascended from fields ye have won, Your toils are not closed in the deeds ye have done; Touch the souls of each laggard and profligate son, The greed and the sloth, and the cowardice shame; Till we rise to complete the great work ye've begun, And with freedom ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... he found it necessary to move higher, lest he should not be able to keep that. The Earl of Wharton, now Marquis, both hated and despised him. His large estate, the whole income of which was spent in the service of the party and his own parts, made him considerable, though his profligate life lessened that weight that a more regular conduct would ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville

... desk paused in his task of checking a list of typewritten names, and motioned Durkin to a seat. The visitor could see that he was with an official who would countenance no profligate waste of time. So he plunged straight into the heart ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... infidelity with Clodius (see Langhorne's Plutarch, 1838, p. 498); Pompey's third wife, Mucia, intrigued with Caesar (vide ibid., p. 447); Mahomet's favourite wife, Ayesha, on one occasion incurred suspicion; Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, was notoriously profligate (see Gibbon's Decline and Fall, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... of the unprofitable servant—he may not have committed either sin or crime, yet never have felt the pulsation of a single unselfish emotion. Another, meanwhile, shall have been hurried by an impulsive nature into fault after fault, shall have been reckless, improvident, perhaps profligate, yet be fitter after all for the kingdom of Heaven than the Pharisee—fitter, because against the catalogue of faults there could perhaps be set a fairer list of acts of comparative generosity and self-forgetfulness—fitter, because to those who love much, much is forgiven. Fielding ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... felt honored by the affection of this man, and was entirely susceptible to the compliment of his poetry, and in spite of the current notions of duty and fidelity, which were far from exacting, she had a better self which triumphed. The profligate Madame du Deffand, who occupies so conspicuous a place in the annals of the French court in the days of its greatest corruption, has little sympathy with a situation of this kind, and is led to exclaim: Le fade personnage que votre Petrarque! que sa Laure etait sotte et precieuse! But Petrarch ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... third generation, the line becoming extinct. The most heart-rending spectacles we have ever met have been the children of parents suffering with the diseases mentioned. Their appearance is characteristic; no physician of experience can fail to detect the sins of a profligate parent in a syphilitic child. Every feature indicates the presence of a ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... matter of very common observation, that those who receive a large legacy and have been brought up in idleness, become prodigal in their expenditure, and squander their fortune by dissipation more rapidly than their parents amassed it by industry and frugality; and then, ignorant and helpless and profligate, they eke out a wretched existence in abject poverty, resorting to illegitimate means for a living, until the last fruits of their improper training may be seen in the state's prison or ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... is a dramatic quality in this scene of the President-to-be seated between two men who are to cause him more vexation of spirit than any others in public life. Burr, brilliant, gifted, ambitious, and profligate; Marshall, temperamentally and by conviction opposed to the principles which seemed to have triumphed in the election of this radical Virginian, to whom indeed he had a deep-seated aversion. After a short pause, Mr. Jefferson rose and read his Inaugural Address in a tone so low that it could ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... it did not seem possible that this could ever end, that any act of nature could blot this from his mind as though it had never been. It was unthinkable that through an eternity he should never know again the meaning of blue sky, of blossoms, of such profligate pictures as now met his eye at every step, but above all, that he should be blind to the girl herself and all for which she stood. No matter how long the journey he was about to take, no matter through what new spheres, these things must remain if anything at all of him remained. So his one thought ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... collections. The village itself is a neglected, poverty- stricken place— the governor (Captain of Trabalhadores, or Indian workmen) being an old, apathetic, half-breed, who had spent all his life here. The priest was a most profligate character; I seldom saw him sober; he was a white, however, and a man of good ability. I may as well mention here, that a moral and zealous priest is a great rarity in this province— the only ministers of religion in the whole country who appeared sincere ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... kitchen. At that moment Harry was seated outside the cook-house, dressed in a suit of spotless white duck, playing an accordeon; also he wore round his brown neck a thick wreath of white and scarlet flowers. Harry, I may remark, was a dandy and a notorious profligate, but against these natural faults was the fact that he could make very ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke

... Bit by bit, the truth of the conspiracy had leaked, and he knew that his usefulness was ended, and that well-lined pocketbooks would no longer open to his profligate demands. The bravo and plotter whose measure has been taken is a broken reed. Farbish made no farewells. He had come from nowhere and his going was ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... and what was now become absolutely necessary, there were no less than 90 young women, of a healthful constitution, and unspotted reputation, sent out to be married to the planters, instead of diseased and profligate strumpets, as is now the ridiculous practice.... Thus the company and colony began to be in a thriving way: but now they began to be oppressed by the Government here, for in November they were ordered to send over to Virginia, at their own charge, 100 felons or vagabonds, then it may ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... wronged a girl at home, and to ask if there was any hope for him. The last man, Bob A——, serving at present with a British regiment, tells us he was a Christian in Cleveland, Ohio, before the war. He lay all last night drunk in the fields, but, convicted of his profligate life, he repented and turned back again to God. There was another boy who stopped to tell us that ever since a previous meeting he had knelt in prayer every night before ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy

... rolling sound (which Mr Glowry immediately recognised to be the same which had excited his curiosity,) disclosed an interior apartment, in the entrance of which stood the beautiful Stella, who, stepping forward, exclaimed, 'Married! Is he going to be married? The profligate!' ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock

... in the next issue of the county paper a full description of the contest, from which it appeared that his favourite son had been beaten in a public trial of skill by Jim Jarrocks, well-known all over the county as the most reckless poacher and unblushing profligate anywhere about, and had thus given encouragement to a man who was constantly before the magistrates for all sorts of minor breaches of the law. However, he felt that he must make the best of it, and he therefore spoke of ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... do not wish to control the wages they earn—to own the land they buy—the houses they build? to have at their disposal their own children, without being subject to the constant interference and tyranny of an idle, worthless profligate? Do you suppose that any woman is such a pattern of devotion and submission that she willingly stitches all day for the small sum of fifty cents, that she may enjoy the unspeakable privilege, in obedience to your laws, of paying for her husband's ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... closely attached, and this sense of estrangement from other Chinese may account to some extent for the facility with which this aboriginal people engaged, a little later, in the trade in women and girls brought from the mainland to meet the demands of profligate foreigners. ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell

... my power to avoid it. With this way of thinking, my Louisa, you may imagine that I might be brought to believe it my duty to sacrifice my ease of mind, to the preservation of my character, but in my case, there is no choice; I must either add to the contamination of a very profligate world, or, in the face of Heaven, enter into the most solemn vows to love a man, whom the most I can do is not to hate. This is wilful perjury. In such an alternative duty cannot direct me, and misery must follow my decision, let me determine as ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott

... was an utter profligate, cruel, faithless, avaricious, immoral, and pleasure-loving. Gladiators played an important part at his court, and he often took part in their contests. Horse-racing, cock-fights, and such like ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... nullipotentiary, for all that his credentials showed—was an event of national importance. It was much more than this; it was the beginning of a new order of things in the relations of nations to each other. It is but a little while since any graceless woman who helped a crowned profligate to break the commandments could light a national quarrel with the taper that sealed her billets-doux to his equerries and grooms, and kindle it to a war with the fan that was supposed to hide her blushes. More ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... far from disagreeing with me, my London visits have just lately taken to suit my stomach admirably; I begin to think that dissipation, high-living, with lots of claret, is what I want, and what I had during the last visit. We are going to act on this same principle, and in a very profligate manner have just taken a pair of season-tickets to see the Queen open the Crystal Palace. (37/1. Queen Victoria opened the Crystal Palace at Sydenham on June 10th, 1854.) How I wish there was any chance of your being there! The last grand thing we were at together answered, I am sure, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... sword in vain? Good Mr. Landlord, are these your professions? Your bailmen should sleep ill to-night, for they are likely to answer roundly for this! And whom have we sparking it here? Brawling and swearing and turning into a profligate's tavern a place that should be for the sober entertainment of travellers? Whom have we here—eh! Let ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... out. Friends who knew his noble nature could not sit by and hear him denounced as a heartless and eccentric profligate. Ladies whose beauty and popularity were beyond dispute thought it a touching and tender thing for him to have done; but every woman to whom he had ever addressed a kind word wanted to wring ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... fully conscious, which was on her way to business, she realized she was worried. She had been made a party to a secret without her wish—and the drunken Mr. Beale, that youthful profligate, had really forced this confidence upon her. Only, and this she recalled with a start which sent her chin jerking upward (she was in the bus at the time and the conductor, thinking she was signalling him to stop, pulled the bell), only Mr. Beale was ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... and you will find no precedent for such a profligate act of tyranny, exercised by a majority over their fellow legislators, nor for such an impudent contempt of the rights of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... enough at the close of the seventeenth and in the commencement of the eighteenth centuries, and which has not even yet entirely disappeared from Europe. He threw the pass with unconcealed aversion towards the profligate, who, recovering his document, assumed unasked his station by the side of the three who had been selected to decide on the fitness of those who were ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... the century, is born the second Charlemagne, who is to unite Spain and the Netherlands, together with so many vast and distant realms, under a single sceptre. Six years afterwards (Sept. 25, 1506), Philip dies at Burgos. A handsome profligate, devoted to his pleasures, and leaving the cares of state to his ministers, Philip, "croit-conseil," is the bridge over which the house of Habsburg passes to almost universal monarchy, but, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... churches; others to the taverns. Here prayers went up; there wine went down. The petitions of the pious were matched by the ribaldry of the profligate. Some made their wills; others wasted their wealth in revelry, eager to get all the pleasure out of life that remained for them. Many freely gave away their property, hoping, by ridding themselves of the goods of this earth, to establish a claim ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... When a young profligate finds his courtship so gravely repressed by an admonition of his duty, he very naturally desires the girl not to take upon her ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... representing the moneyless and homeless saint of Jerusalem, to spend in various ways ten or twenty times the average income of an American citizen. But has any man a right to indulge in needless and therefore profligate expenditure for himself, while misery unrelieved surrounds him?[14] Could he, if he had an occasional throb of the sentiment of brotherhood, the divine love enforced by Jesus? Suffering, intense suffering of mind and body, is ever present in society, and we cannot ignore it or disregard it. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... brimming with the modern passion for efficiency, learned foreign tongues, and browsed in the musty archives, he would have discovered that there was much to unlearn. The early scribes piled fancy upon invention, believing or pretending that Rembrandt was a miser, a profligate, a spendthrift, and so on. "Houbraken's facts," we read, "are interwoven with a mass of those suspicious anecdotes which adorn the plain tale of so many artistic biographies. Campo-Weyermann, Dargenville, ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes

... time "valets mixed up with royal plots" were kept in the Bastille. Again, in 1701, in this "noble prison," the Mask was turned out of his room to make place for a female fortune-teller, and was obliged to chum with a profligate valet of nineteen, and a "beggarly" bad patriot, who "blamed the conduct of France, and approved that of other nations, especially the Dutch." M. Funck-Brentano himself publishes these facts (1898), in part published earlier (1890) by M. Lair.[1] Not much noblesse ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne

... save of style and temper; nor was any of his expenditure a profligate squandering of money. It all went in giving employment or disseminating kindness. He sent the painter Barry to study art in Italy. He saved the poet Crabbe from starvation and despair, and thus secured to the country one who owns the unrivalled distinction of having been ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... of profligate lives escape these diseases. They are alarmingly prevalent among the 'fast' youths of our cities. And some forms of them are incurable by any effort of skill. Even the approach of such men should ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... along, unless with the design of making a match between one of the younger daughters of this neighboring ranchman and the Marylander, was not entirely clear. When he wanted to, Scales could make himself very agreeable, and had it not been for his profligate disposition, his being taken along on the hunt would have been no mystery. Every one on the ranch, including the master and mistress, were cognizant of the fact that for the past year he had maintained a correspondence with a girl in Florida—the one whose letter and photograph ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams

... success in the lofty art of letters and apply his mind to great things, he must first perfect his character by simplicity's stern law; he must care naught for the haughty frown of the fierce tyrant that lords it in his palace, nor seek client-like for invitations to the board of the profligate, nor deliver himself over to the company of debauchees and drown the fire of his understanding in wine, nor sit in the theatre the hired applauder of the mouthing actor. But whether the citadel of panoplied Minerva allure him with ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... hands of good and industrious characters, they would have produced abundant crops, and enriched their owners. But every day's experience evinced, that the people thus fortunately situated were, unluckily, some of the most profligate wretches in the colony; and their distance from the immediate seat of government added much to the inconvenience. Such of these farms as were situated on the low grounds were often overflowed after very ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... a whole lot,' I argues onct when a profligate he's staked, an' who reports himse'f as jumpin' sideways for grub previous, goes careerin' over to the dance hall with them alms he's wrung, an' proceeds on a debauch. 'You oughter not allow them ornery folks to do you. If you'd cultivate the habit of lettin' every gent go a-foot till he can ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... evolution of a wild Irish boy, hot-headed in love and fighting, full of daring impetuosity and ignorant vanity, into the ruffianly soldier, the intrepid professional gambler, and finally into the selfish profligate, who marries a great heiress and sets up as a county magnate. Instead of the mere unadulterated villainy and meanness which were impersonated in his previous stories, we have here the complex strength and weakness of real human nature; we have the whole action lifted above the platform ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... time the three felt sure of catching him. And first, among the small folk under their protection, they stirred up two good souls to declare that they could no longer keep as vicar a profligate, a wizard, a devil, a freethinker, who bent one knee in church instead of two, who scoffed at rules and granted dispensations contrary to the rights of the Bishop. A shrewd accusation, which turned against him his natural defender, the Bishop ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... Proxenets.—Under the pretext of avoiding the dangers of prostitution in the streets, brothels were organized. These are generally managed by an elderly female profligate, often in partnership with a "husband," who is only a superior kind of protector. Officially, the prostitutes are free lodgers in the brothel, but in reality they are often prisoners or slaves. They are well fed and ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... fallen into the habit of remembering and fitting together with others, and of having her theories and interpretations of, kept up before her their long procession and rotation. What twisted the knife in her vitals was the way the profligate rich scattered about them, in extravagant chatter over their extravagant pleasures and sins, an amount of money that would have held the stricken household of her frightened childhood, her poor pinched mother and tormented father and lost brother and starved sister, together for ...
— In the Cage • Henry James

... to look haughty and insulted, but it would not answer. Her pale face, full of earnest, tearful entreaty, touched his heart, not altogether indurated by profligate associations. He knew she had not given an exaggerated account; he had imagined that she would not hear of his revels; but certainly she told only the truth. Yet he resolved not to admit the charge, and, shaking off ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... pragmatic, preamble, precarious, precocious, precursor, predatory, predestination, predicament, preemptory, prelate, preliminary, preposterous, prerequisite, prerogative, presentiment, primogeniture, probation, probity, proclivity, procrastinate, prodigal, prodigious, prodigy, profligate, progenitor, proletarian, prolific, prolix, promiscuous, promissory, propaganda, propensity, prophylactic, propinquity, propitiatory, propitious, proprietary, prorogue, proselyte, prototype, protuberant, provender, proximity, prurient, psychical, psychological, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... iniquitous, arrant, corrupt, depraved, sinful, base, demoralized, sinister, licentious, unprincipled, abandoned, graceless, vicious, incorrigible, unscrupulous, miscreant, reprobate, disreputable, rascal, scoundrel, profligate, knavish, naughty, malevolent, malicious, unrighteous, degrading, dissolute, libertine, hardened, wanton; injurious, prejudicial, pernicious, detrimental, baneful, unwholesome, baleful, deleterious, mischievous, noisome, malign, malignant, noxious, unpropitious, disadvantageous; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... great favourite among the women in my time, Tom," said the profligate old debauchee; "hundreds of fine women have sat in my lap for hours together. What do you think of that, you dog, eh!" The old gentleman was proceeding to recount some other exploits of his youth, when he was seized with such a violent fit of creaking ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... society. If all the favor of woman were given only to the good, if it were known that the charms and attractions of beauty, and wisdom, and wit, were reserved only for the pure; if, in one word, something of a similar rigor were exerted to exclude the profligate and abandoned of society, as is shown to those who have fallen from virtue,—how much would be done to re-enforce the motives to moral purity among us, and impress on the minds of all a reverence for the sanctity and ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... Napoleon's opening speech, and the confession, that although once rebuked, he, the dissolute, the profligate, with his corrosive breath still intends to pollute the virginity of our country; for such is the indelible stain to any nation, to any people which accepts or submits to any, even the most friendly, foreign mediation or arbitration. Never, never any ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... to Claude that Cazeneau had certain plans about Mimi. What he thought was this: that Laborde was rich, that Mimi was his heiress, and that Cazeneau was a man of profligate life and ruined fortunes, who was anxious to repair his fortunes by marrying this heiress. To such a man the disparity in their years would make no difference, nor would he particularly care whether Mimi loved him or not, so long as he could make her his ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille

... as incumbents of civil offices, one man being often in receipt of the salaries of several offices, though performing the duties of none—the fact that Ministers have maintained majorities by unblushing bribery in elections—that hardly one man in two hundred is an elector—the profligate arts of corruption by which every able man is bought by the Court—the disgraceful censorship of the press and the drama—the enormous appropriations for the civil list, wrung out by grinding taxes from the toil and sweat of millions—the absurd assumption, ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg

... passed one day were two fine young men, Wedig von Schwetzkow, and Johann Appelmann, son of the burgomaster at Stargard. They were both handsome; but Johann was a dissolute, wild profligate, and Wedig was not troubled with too much sense. Still he had not fallen into the evil courses which made the other so notorious. "Who is that handsome youth?" asked Sidonia as Johann passed; and when they told her, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold

... Byron, the sixth of the name, was born in London, January 22d, 1788, and died at Missolonghi, Greece, April 19th, 1824. His father, John Byron, a captain in the Guards, was a heartless profligate with no redeeming traits of character. He eloped with Amelia D'Arcy, wife of the Marquis of Carmarthen, and after her divorce from her husband married her and treated her like a brute. One daughter of this union was Augusta, Byron's half-sister, who married Colonel Leigh, and who ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... where the magistrates bear not the sword in vain? Good Mr. Landlord, are these your professions? Your bailmen should sleep ill to-night, for they are likely to answer roundly for this! And whom have we sparking it here? Brawling and swearing and turning into a profligate's tavern a place that should be for the sober entertainment of travellers? Whom have we here—eh! Let me see ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... little brown woman she. Man of the world and profligate he, Hard and conscienceless, cynical, yet, Somehow, when he and the woman met, He learned what other there is in life Than passion-feeding and careless strife. There came resolve and a sense of shame, For she made as his motto ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... "Adam Bede" are sexless, and therefore lifeless. There is very little sex in George Sand's works, and they, too, have gone the way of sexless things. When I say that all art that lives is full of sex, I do not mean that the artist must have led a profligate life; I mean, indeed, the very opposite. George Sand's life was notoriously profligate, and her books tell the tale. I mean by sex that concentrated essence of life which the great artist jealously reserves for his art, and through which it pulsates. Shelley deserted ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore

... me, 'I must turn to the left, Monseigneur, since the way on the right is closed against me.' The unhappy creature has kept her word but too well. She found means of establish a faro-table at her house, which is tolerated; and she joins to the most profligate conduct in her own person the infamous trade of a corrupter of youth; her house is the abode of every vice. Think, sir, after that, whether it was not an act of prudence, on my part, to grant the woman in question a pension, suitable to ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various

... bondage and ignorance in which they were kept before. Thee perhaps hast been surprised to see them at my table, but by elevating them to the rank of freemen, they necessarily acquire that emulation without which we ourselves should fall into debasement and profligate ways." Mr. Bertram, this is the most philosophical treatment of negroes that I have heard of; happy would it be for America would other denominations of Christians imbibe the same principles, and follow ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... the boat upon which I was to work being ready, I went on board to commence. This employment suited me better than living in the city, and I remained until the close of navigation; though it proved anything but pleasant. The captain was a drunken, profligate, hard-hearted creature, not knowing how to treat himself, or any ...
— The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave • William Wells Brown

... throughout the whole South, church members are not only found on the Vigilance Committees, (tribunals organized in opposition to the laws of the states where they exist,) but uniting with the merciless and the profligate in passing sentence consigning to infamous and excruciating, if not extreme punishment, persons, by their own acknowledgment, innocent of any unlawful act. Out of sixty persons that composed the vigilance committee which condemned Mr. Dresser to be scourged in ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... Pharsalus. When he had just entered the city, Alexander, the tyrant, appeared before it with an army; but Pelopidas and his friends, thinking that he came to clear himself from those crimes that were laid to his charge, went to him; and though they knew very well that he was profligate and cruel, yet they imagined that the authority of Thebes, and their own dignity and reputation, would secure them from violence. But the tyrant, seeing them come unarmed and alone, seized them, and made himself master of Pharsalus. Upon this his subjects were much intimidated, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... vices, save of style and temper; nor was any of his expenditure a profligate squandering of money. It all went in giving employment or disseminating kindness. He sent the painter Barry to study art in Italy. He saved the poet Crabbe from starvation and despair, and thus secured ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... a young man, Charles de Kergrist,—a profligate, a gambler, crowning his scandalous life with the vilest and meanest act,—did come and kill himself under my window. The next day a great outcry arose against me. Three days later the brother of that wretched ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau

... law, in 1580, during which period it was occupied by Lord Chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton, the fine dancer, one of the celebrated favorites of Elizabeth, the lascivious daughter of King Henry the Eighth—a woman as fickle as profligate, as cruel and hard-hearted, so far as regarded her numerous paramours, as her brutal father was in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... season begins in May and ends in September. In March and April the clerks and superintendents engage their laborers, paying a part of their wages in advance. The wages are not high, and only those in straitened circumstances, the dissolute, and profligate, who have no homes of their own, are inclined to let themselves to labor ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox

... were landed, in order to make an attack upon the fort, which must be ascended to by a steep hill against the mouth of the cannon. These men were headed by one Kennedy, a bold, daring fellow, but very wicked and profligate; they marched directly up under the fire of their ship guns, and as soon as they were discovered, the Portuguese quitted their post and fled to the town, and the pirates marched in without opposition, set fire to the fort, and threw all the guns off the hill into ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various

... a thousand pities a young fellow, blessed with an allowance of brains as his neighbour obviously was, should waste his valuable time with profligate women who might present him with a nice dose to last him his lifetime. In the nature of single blessedness he would one day take unto himself a wife when Miss Right came on the scene but in the interim ladies' society was a conditio ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... rose upon a squalid scene—a wide flat area where stakes and floors and frames mingled with all the flotsam and jetsam left by a hurried and profligate populace, moving on to another camp. Daylight found no man there nor any living creature. And all day the wind blew the dust and sheets of sand over the place where had reigned such strife of toil and gold and lust and blood and death. A train passed that day, out of which engineer and fireman gazed ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey

... intelligible to each other, as unhappily we are not, by the universal knowledge and use of that mediaeval Latin, which might distress the Ciceronian ears of a pedant of the Renaissance, but was a good, useful, and adaptable language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate, and drunken world, for the students were as hard drinkers as the citizens, but it was animated, it was made alive by a true passion for knowledge, by an unwearied ...
— Progress and History • Various

... triumph at the expense of his enemy by the display of superior cunning, by rendering him ridiculous, by exposing him to mental as well as physical anguish, by wounding him through his affections or his sense of honor, was the end which he pursued."[2259] "However profligate the people might have been, they were not contented with grossness unless seasoned with wit. The same excitement of the fancy rendered the exercise of ingenuity, or the avoidance of peril, an enhancement of pleasure to the Italians. This is perhaps ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... twelve near a big dam, and unharnessed, but only for a rest, resuming the march at about three, and halting for the night about ten miles farther on. A profligate issue of rations—five biscuits, four ounces of sugar (instead of two or three), duff and rum again. A lovely, frosty night, the moon full, delicate mists wreathing the veldt, hundreds of twinkling camp-fires, and the sound of psalms from ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... headquarters processed twenty-two separate staff actions involving black troops.[11-12] To avoid the supposed danger of large-scale social integration, the Air Forces, like the rest of the Army during World War II, had been profligate in its use of material resources, inefficient in its use of men, and destructive of the morale ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... to confuse the situation, there occurred at this time the contest of John Wilkes, backed by the London mob, against the Grafton Ministry. This demagogue, able {45} and profligate, had already come into conflict with the Grenville Ministry in 1765, and had been driven into exile. Now, in 1768, he returned and was repeatedly elected to the Commons, and as often unseated by the vindictive ministerial majority. Riots and bloodshed ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith

... respectably), produced its ordinary results—envy and enmity: and insults were heaped upon him. He was not tardy of reply, but Wilkes and Churchill were in strong health when nature was giving way with the great painter; an advantage they did not fail to use with their accustomed malignity. The profligate Churchill, turning the poet's nature into gall, infested the death-bed of Hogarth with unfeeling sarcasm, anticipating the grave, and exulting over a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... the Allies that it did not depend upon the vagaries of popular votes, and it would have been well for the repute of British statesmen if they had not had the occasion or the temptation to indulge in the hectic misrepresentation and profligate promises of which their ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard

... is unsurpassed. It is believed that no other book except the Bible has gone through so many editions or attained such a popularity in all languages. It has been generally understood that Bunyan's early life was a very profligate one, but some have thought that his terrible self-accusations in after years may have arisen from the height of his religious fervour and Puritan strictness, which made him look on dancing and bell-ringing as deadly sins. This idea is ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home

... have known, and you likewise have known, those who have been brought to an untimely and disgraceful end, and who have dated their ruin from this one evil, the profanation of the Lord's day. Instead of spending it in the manner which he has enjoined, they kept bad and profligate company. By this practice, all serious impressions (if they formerly had any) have been driven from their minds. Their hearts have become more and more hardened and insensible; till at length, lost to all prudent reflection, they have regarded neither the tender ...
— An Address to the Inhabitants of the Colonies, Established in New South Wales and Norfolk Island. • Richard Johnson

... every Sunday these ten year past," answered Jerry with the insolence of the ancient habitue. "Ere, one o' you kids, fetch me a bit o' chalk. I 'ate to see you idlin' your time away, gamblin' and dicin', like the Profligate Son when he broke the bank at ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant

... repay the Fuggers their loan. Behind the preacher of indulgences, who announced God's mercy to the paying believers, stood the agents of that commercial house, who collected their share for their principals. The Dominican monk, John Tetzel, a profligate man, whom the Archbishop had appointed his sub-commissioner, drove the largest trade in this business with an audacity and a power of popular declamation well suited to ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... sinfulness. He breaks down the wall that has been shutting his soul out of its highest life. He has been a drunkard, and he becomes a sober man. He has been a cheat, and becomes a faithful man. He has been a liar, and becomes a truthful man. He has been a profligate, and he becomes a pure man. What has happened to that man? Shall he simply think of himself as one who has crushed this passion, shut down this part of his life? Shall he simply think of himself as one who has taken a course of self-denial? ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks

... property. The one other member of this, the elder branch of the family, who was then alive, was Mr. Monkton's younger brother, Stephen. He was an unmarried man, possessing a fine estate in Scotland; but he lived almost entirely on the Continent, and bore the reputation of being a shameless profligate. The family at Wincot held almost as little communication with him ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins

... they brought to Rome, and the still greater sums which were obtained by the sale of indulgences, and by various taxations, were all squandered in ornamenting the city, and in supporting a luxurious court, profligate cardinals, and superfluous ministers of a corrupted religion. Then was erected the splendid church of St. Peter, more after the style of Grecian temples, than after the model of the Gothic cathedrals of York and Cologne. Glorious was that monument of reviving art; ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... quality in Barrington, the base lover of Honoria Longleat; or in George Brand, who deserts Esther Hagart in her poverty and loneliness, and years afterwards, on finding her recognised as the niece of an English baronet, persuades her into an unhappy marriage; or in Brian Gilmore, the profligate in Moloch, who seeks to rejuvenate his jaded passions with the love of an innocent girl, after abandoning another woman whose life he has spoiled. Sir Bruce Carr-Gambier forsakes Christina Chard ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... shown that some of the citizens of New York, even a number of the profligate women of the town, did their best to relieve the wants of the perishing prisoners. But the guards were very strict, and what they could do was inadequate to remove the distresses under which these victims of cruelty and oppression died. As we are attempting to make this ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... godliness, support the true exercise of Church discipline and cherish and hold up the hands of the faithful ministers of the Church. To all which Charles II. "made as gracious an answer as we could expect," says Baxter, "insomuch that old Mr. Ash burst out into tears of joy." Who doubts that the profligate King avenged himself as soon as the backs of his unwelcome visitors were fairly turned, by coarse jests and ribaldry, directed against a class of men whom he despised and hated, but towards whom reasons of policy dictated a ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... him, he deserved, to my mind, some tribute of regret. It is not to be denied that he was profligate in his habits and violent in his temper. But it is equally true that he was affectionate in the domestic circle, and, when moved by wisely applied remonstrance, sincerely penitent for sins committed under temptation that overpowered him. If his ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins

... every heathen land furnishes abundant proofs, that whenever the gracious promises of the Bible are gratefully received, the proud become humble, the disobedient dutiful, the drunkard sober, the dishonest, honorable; the profligate, prudent; and the miserable become happy. Nothing else has ever done this, but the gospel of Christ always does it, ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... jealousies, and there was a saying that "if a naval officer were to be roasted, another officer could always be found to turn the spit." The head of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, was a man of much ability, but also of profligate character, as well public as private. He doubtless wished the success of his department,—under the terrible chances of war no chief can do otherwise, for the responsibility of failure must fall ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... later ages of the human career, the higher truths taught by an earlier race were lost, still a slight hint of the beauty and purity of the more ancient worship may be traced through most of the ages of the history of religion. Even among the profligate Greeks, the mysteries of Eleusis, celebrated in the temple of Ceres, were always respected. Care should be taken, however, not to confound these remnants of pure Nature-worship with that of the courtesan Venus, whose ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... Moore, Shelley, Byron, lampooned him savagely. The latter made him the hero of his wicked "Vision of Judgment," and to him dedicated his "Don Juan." The dedication was suppressed; but no chance offered in the body of that profligate rhapsody to assail Bob Southey, that was not vigorously employed. The self-content of the Laureate armed him, however, against every thrust. Contempt he interpreted as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... of separation, there was the horrid dread of falling into the hands of Master Andrew. He was known to us all as being a most cruel wretch,—a common drunkard, who had, by his reckless mismanagement and profligate dissipation, already wasted a large portion of his father's property. We all felt that we might as well be sold at once to the Georgia traders, as to pass into his hands; for we knew that that would be our inevitable condition,—a ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass

... land in Massachusetts, and sent over sixty men to cultivate it, in two ships, which he placed under the command of his brother-in- law. The arrival of this fresh band of emigrants had proved a fruitful source of trouble and annoyance to the first settlers, for they were chiefly idle and profligate vagabonds, who had no settled occupation at home, and no characters to sustain. Weston himself described them in a letter to Bradford, as 'tolerably rude and profane.' And a friend of the Pilgrims wrote from England to warn them against having ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... faithless wife does not make her loyal and virtuous. A wife's confidence in a profligate husband does not make him ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... hostile to the French interest in Italy. Salicetti, prime minister of Naples, was vainly pondering on the capture of Capri; when it occurred to him to employ Cipriani, to put it into his power by surprise or treachery. Among the Corsicans under Sir H. Lowe's command, was one Suzanelli, a profligate, who had reduced himself by his debaucheries to acting as a spy. Cipriani soon ascertained that they had been fellow-students ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... opposite in nearly every particular, except height and angularity. She was bony and red-faced and opinionated. A few sallow years with a rapid, profligate nobleman had brought her, in widowhood, to a fine sense of appreciation of the slow-going though tiresomely unpractical men of the Odell-Carney type. It mattered little that he made poor investment of the money she had sequestered from his lordship; he had kept her in the foreground by associating ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon

... dispense blessings, and promote the happiness of mortals; but when hoarded up, or misapplied, is but trash, that makes mankind miserable. Remember the unprofitable servant, who hid his talent in a napkin; and the profligate son who squandered away his substance, and fed with the swine. As thou hast got the Golden Head, observe the Golden Mean; be ...
— The Story of the White Mouse • Unknown

... might come to see, not to be seen,—as if, she cried out tearfully, the two wishes must not necessarily exist together, like the masculine and the feminine in this world! Prince Hal, acting the most profligate period of his career, espied her behind the Mousquetaire's moustache, and did not fail to make much of his discovery. In a perilous moment for the reputation of the Ball, my father handed him over to Gascoigne, and conducted Jenny in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Nor will it be contested that at the present day the remnants of that same aristocracy exhibit a certain severity of morals; whilst laxity of morals appears to have spread amongst the middle and lower ranks. So that the same families which were most profligate fifty years ago are nowadays the most exemplary, and democracy seems only to have strengthened the morality of the aristocratic classes. The French Revolution, by dividing the fortunes of the nobility, by forcing them to attend assiduously to their affairs and to their families, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... more openly profligate Italian despot than Alexander VI (1493-1503) of the notorious Spanish house of Borgia. He frankly set to work to advance the interests of his children, as if he were merely a secular ruler. For one of his sons, Csar Borgia, he proposed to form a duchy east of Florence. ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... them to the corner for prayer, and poured forth a confession of sin for them and for herself, such as left little that could have been added by her own profligate son, had he joined in the prayer. Either there are no degrees in guilt, or the Scotch language was equal only to the confession of children and holy women, and could provide no more awful words for the contrition of the prodigal or the hypocrite. But ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... vices of pagans and image-worshippers, it has pleased the God of Israel to give you a rough waking. Can you doubt that this plague, which has desolated a city, and filled many a yawning pit with the promiscuous dead, has been God's way of chastening a profligate people, a people caring only for fleshly pleasures, for rich meats and strong wines, for fine clothing and jovial company, and despising the spiritual blessings that the Almighty Father has reserved for them that love Him? Oh, my afflicted Brethren, bethink you that this pestilence is a chastisement ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... suspicious, he sought to shackle public opinion—the fearful hydra to all ambitious aspirants—to know all secrets of the time and states, and render one half of the great nations he held in his grasp spies upon the other! The most profligate principles of Machiavel sink into obscurity when contrasted with the Imperial Espionage of Napoleon. When no longer moving squadrons in the tented field—whole armies, like so many pieces of chess in the hands of a dexterous ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley

... happen'd between two men of quality, and both men of wit too; and the effect was, that the Lord brought the reality of the Devil into the question, and the debate brought the profligate to be a penitent; so in short, the Devil was made a preacher ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... make ballades and rondels better than Eustache Deschamps himself. He had seen a mad king who would not change his clothes, and a drunken emperor who could not keep his hand from the wine-cup. He had spoken a great deal with jesters and fiddlers, and with the profligate lords who helped his father to waste the revenues of France. He had seen ladies dance on into broad daylight, and much burning of torches and waste of dainties and good wine.[20] And when all is said, it was no very helpful preparation for the battle of life. "I believe Louis XI.," writes ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... very consistent in its outlines, and is fragmentary withal, the narrative of the child Samuel being the central theme, around which are grouped the tribulations of Elkanah and Hannah, the service of Eli the priest, the revels of his profligate sons, and the martial deeds ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton

... use it with WISDOM; For know, That GOLD, properly employ'd, May dispense Blessings, And promote the Happiness of Morals; But when hoarded up, Or misapply'd, Is but Trash, that makes Mankind miserable. Remember The unprofitable Servant, Who hid his Talent in a Napkin; And The profligate Son, Who squander'd away his Substance and fed with the Swine. As thou hast got the GOLDEN HEAD, Observe the Golden Mean, ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous

... imperial tyrant? It abandoned Brutus, as he sorrowfully confessed, in his greatest need, and it forced Cato, as his panegyrist strangely boasts, into the false position of defying heaven. How few can be counted among its professors, who, like Polemo, were thereby converted from a profligate course, or like Anaxagoras, thought the world well lost in exchange for its possession? The philosopher in Rasselas taught a superhuman doctrine, and then succumbed without an effort to ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... London for Fanny, which the unsuspicious Curate accepted immediately. As soon as he had committed himself, it was confided to the audience that the waggoner was a depraved villain, in the employ of that notorious profligate, Colonel Chartress, who had commissioned a second myrmidon (of the female sex) to lure Fanny from virtue and the country, to vice and the metropolis. By the time the plot had "thickened" thus far, the scene changed, and we got to London ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins

... that are my equals I am reckoned rather wise. For those who are little thought of by the wise, seem to hit the taste of the vulgar."[17] And I have myself noticed that those who practise to speak acceptably and to the gratification of the masses promiscuously, for the most part become also profligate and lovers of pleasure in their lives. Naturally enough. For if in giving pleasure to others they neglect the noble, they would be hardly likely to put the lofty and sound above a life of luxury and pleasure, and to prefer moderation to delights. Yet what better advice could we give ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... all his accounts well kept, the journal duly posted, the cash monthly balanced; but the poor man found after that, that things went wrong, that he went backwards, and that all went down-hill, and he hated to look into his books. As a profligate never looks into his conscience, because he can see nothing there but what terrifies and affrights him, makes him uneasy and melancholy, so a sinking tradesman cares not to look into his books, because the prospect there is dark and melancholy. 'What signify the accounts to ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... wealthy, receiver-general of royal revenues and later Tory. In words nearly identical to Henry's, Corbin noted, "To Tax People that are not in Debt to lend to those that are is highly unjust, it is in Fact to tax the honest, frugal, industrious Man, in order to encourage the idle, the profligate, the Extravagant, and the Gamester". Council defeated the loan plan. With the tobacco laws revised and the loan scheme defeated and only routine legislation in ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... "out of our scientific method of transportation, which very soon I will show you. We are a scientific people. Hah!" He laughed ironically. "The workers say that we princes are profligate—that we think only of women and music. But that is not so. Once, many generations ago, we were a tremendous nation, and skilled in science far beyond your own world—and with a population a hundred ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings

... is applied by Rabbi the Holy to Rabbi Eliezar, the son of Durdia, a profligate who recommended himself to the favor of heaven by one prolonged act of determined penitence, placing his head between his knees and groaning and weeping till his soul departed from him, and his sin and misery along with it; for at the moment of ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various

... present with his brother at this riot. This is the sum of all my miseries, If he, even he, a sober, hopeful lad, May be seduc'd into debaucheries. —But where shall I inquire for him? I warrant They have decoy'd him into some vile brothel. That profligate persuaded him, I'm sure. —But here comes Syrus; he can tell me all. And yet this slave is of the gang; and if He once perceives that I'm inquiring for him, He'll never tell me any thing; a rogue! I'll not ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer

... essential to our existence, was, it was said, the chief hero and Saviour of the Mesopotamian ethical scheme. Then followed a paragraph giving other examples of such heroes and Saviours being born of some profligate intercourse between God and mortal. Then followed a paragraph—but Evan did not understand it. He read it again and then again. Then he did understand it. The glass fell in ringing fragments on to the pavement, and ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... clung to Paris. She grew up beautiful and profligate; she coined her rare Italian charms, first into gold and velvet, then into silver and brocade, and at last into copper and rags. When her charms faded entirely, she began to practise the forbidden ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... county paper a full description of the contest, from which it appeared that his favourite son had been beaten in a public trial of skill by Jim Jarrocks, well-known all over the county as the most reckless poacher and unblushing profligate anywhere about, and had thus given encouragement to a man who was constantly before the magistrates for all sorts of minor breaches of the law. However, he felt that he must make the best of it, and he therefore spoke of it among his friends as a ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... their wanderings were the bad roads or the effects of song and log-cabin upon the "amusement world," the greatest being a temperance orator who thundered forth denunciations of rum and the theater with the bitterness of a Juvenal inveighing profligate Rome. The people crowded the orator's hall, upon the walls of which hung the customary banners: a serpent springing from the top of a barrel; the steamboat, Alcohol, bursting her boiler and going to pieces, and the staunch craft, Temperance, safe and sound, sailing away ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... closing of the congressional session, Mr. Adams thus expressed his opinion of the state of public affairs: "The late session of Congress has been painful to me beyond all former experience, by the demonstration it has given of degenerating institutions. Parties are falling into profligate factions. I have seen this before; but the worst symptom now is the change in the manners of the people. The continuance of the present administration will, if accomplished, open wide all the floodgates of corruption. Will a change produce ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... exhorted both houses to consider seriously of some effectual provisions to suppress those audacious crimes of robbery and violence, grown so frequent about the capital, proceeding in a great measure from that profligate spirit of irreligion, idleness, gaming, and extravagance, which had of late extended itself in an uncommon degree, to the dishonour of the nation, and the great offence and prejudice of the sober and industrious part of the people. The paragraphs of this ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... birth, he makes not the least mention of the appearance of Christ, or what things happened to him, or of the wonderful works that he did. He was the son of a certain Jew, whose name was Pistus. He was a man, as he is described by Josephus, of a most profligate character; a slave both to money and to pleasures. In public affairs he was opposite to Josephus; and it is related, that he laid many plots against him; but that Josephus, though he had his enemy ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus

... passed by the church-yard, and the watchman bawled in hoarse voice a long and doleful "All's well!" A deep sleep had already fallen upon this primitive little burgh; nothing disturbed this awful silence, excepting now and then the bark of some profligate night-walking dog, or the serenade of some romantic cat. It is true, Wolfert fancied more than once that he heard the sound of a stealthy footfall at a distance behind them; but it might have been merely the echo of their own steps echoing along the quiet streets. He thought also at one time ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... income from capital or from property that is theirs by reason of years of frugality, industry, and thrift are penalized by being denied the right to vote. They are placed in the class with criminals, while the profligate, the tramp who works enough to obtain the means by which he can hold body and soul together, is able to qualify under the constitution of Russia and is entitled to a vote. Under that system in the United States the loyal men and women who bought Liberty Bonds, ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore

... your attention to existing laws for the suppression of the African slave trade, and recommend all such alterations as may give to them greater force and efficacy. That the American flag is grossly abused by the abandoned and profligate of other nations is but too probable. Congress has not long since had this subject under its consideration, and its importance well ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... that stuck-up young swell takes of me, I might be a block of wood! I'll make him listen to me. (Aloud.) Ahem! My Lord, I've just been telling my niece here the latest scandal in high-life. I daresay your Lordship has heard of that titled but brainless young profligate, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various

... there was a time when the stage was so profligate that the Puritans were justified in tabooing it altogether. But that is not now the case. There are many theatres where plays are given that are not only pure in tone, but exert a refining and educating ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck

... after-life, or that any excuse can be found in it for the faults of his character. Speaking of his own love of money, he would sometimes say apologetically, 'Dad never praised me for anything but saving a halfpenny.' A disappointment in love is more likely to make a man a profligate than a miser; if it affects him at all seriously, it will more likely produce a reckless waste than a sordid passion for money-making. The painter was prospering. He taught in schools, first charging five shillings a lesson, then raising his terms ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook

... were wasted. Admonitions to him were like the falling rain on the back of the duck. He early acquired a passion for gambling. His father knew it, but hoped that time would work his cure. He, himself, I learned, had been somewhat of a profligate. ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane

... are a world of themselves almost as much as a fairyland. Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous indignation shall rise against the profligate wretch as warmly as the Catos of the pit could desire; because in a modern play I am to judge of right and wrong, and the standard of police is the measure of poetical justice. The atmosphere will blight it. It cannot thrive here. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... has produced the most happy effects on multitudes of men. It has enlightened the most ignorant; softened the most hardened; reclaimed the most profligate; converted the most estranged; purified the most polluted; exalted the most degraded; and plucked the most endangered from hell to heaven. What was it that transformed the persecuting and blaspheming Saul into a kind and devoted man? It was religion. What was it which brought the woman who was ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... at Rome, the state had been endangered by the combination of democrats and anarchists in the conspiracy of Catiline. The well-contrived plot of this audacious and profligate man was detected and crushed by the vigilance and energy of the consul Cicero, whose four speeches on the subject, two to the Senate and two to the people, are among the most celebrated of all his orations. Catiline was forced to fly from ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... overcome, and the jewel of purity departed from the heart of another of earth's daughters. Vain were the tears of the repentant girl to induce a performance of the promises so solemnly made; false had been and still were the vows of the profligate; but he continued to make them all the more profusely; and hope, at first unwavering, then fainter and fainter, filled the heart of his victim. Once conquered, and the victory was ever after comparatively ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison

... call tyrants, than by those who are considered models of virtue. The author of the "Philosophumena" (book ix., ch. 11) says that Commodus granted to Pope Victor the liberation of the Christians who had been condemned to the mines of Sardinia by Marcus Aurelius. Thus that profligate emperor was really more merciful to the Church than the philosophic author of the "Meditations," who, in the year 174, had witnessed the miracle of the Thundering Legion. The reason is evident. The wise rulers ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani

... hedges or divisions of any sort. They were kind to each other, and required no magistrates nor laws to keep them in order. Alas! how soon was this happy state of existence to be destroyed by the cruel, avaricious, and profligate Spaniards. Unlike their pious, high-minded, and sagacious chief, they resembled the bloodhounds they were wont to let loose ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith

... and the pressure of want; while despair drove many of those who remained to courses of reckless vice. Godfrey, firm to his duty and strong in faith, aided the exertions of the clergy in encouraging the spirits of his troops, and restraining their profligate excesses. A timely supply of provisions from some of the Armenian monasteries, and a brilliant victory obtained by Bohemond and the Count of Toulouse over an army which the Sultans of Aleppo and Damascus had sent to the succor of Antioch, rewarded Godfrey's ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... a land-tax and malt-tax. The commons having despatched the supply, took into consideration a grievance arising from protections granted by foreign ministers, peers and members of parliament, under which profligate persons used to screen themselves from the prosecution of their just creditors. The commons resolved, That all protections granted by members of that house should be declared void, and immediately withdrawn. The lords made a declaration to the same purpose, with an exception ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... information? Let us admit that these are trifles. Very well! All right! But remember their relations. She detested her brother. She never forgave him for living apart from his wife. She is of the Old Faith, while in her eyes he is a godless profligate. There is where the germ of her hate was hatched. They say he succeeded in making her believe that he was an angel of Satan. He even went in for spiritualism ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... set a fictitious value upon virtue. He mistook her artfulness for innocence, and thought he had made a conquest. Moreover, the girl was pretty, and when dressed properly, would look well. Only one obstacle stood in the way of their loves—the dashing profligate was poor. He had been living in London above his means, and his father was not ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... that required for the maintenance of the regular soldiery and militia must have made money plentiful, and such as were engaged in trade, whether in Quebec or Montreal, undoubtedly profitted by an expenditure almost necessarily profligate. On account of the militia alone, the province expended L121,366, and the expenditure of the commissariat department must have been enormous. But the grand source of wealth was the establishment of a kind of National ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger

... induce any one to believe that the Minister of State had any share in the guilt. Yet Stanhope was one of the first victims of the crisis. The Duke of Wharton, son of the late Minister, had just come of age. He was already renowned as a brilliant, audacious profligate. He was president of the Hell-fire Club; he and some of his comrades were the nightly terror of London streets. Wharton thought fit to make himself the champion of public purity in the debates on the South ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... imbruted pagan in the fiery centre of Africa, who never saw a Bible, or heard of the Redeemer; the equally imbruted man, woman, or child, who dwells in the slime of our own civilization, not a mile from where we sit, and hear the tidings of mercy; the filthy savage, and the yet filthier profligate, are both of them alike with ourselves possessed of these awful powers of self-knowledge and ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... Madame to her daughter. Madame was smiling, as if begging his consent; for, profligate though he was, his position, and more than all, his personal distinction, made him a welcome guest at most homes in Quebec. Alixe met his look without a yes or no in her eyes—so young, yet having such control and wisdom, as I have had reason beyond all ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... of the world, who have seen life, and know what is what, are not to be fooled so. 'What will this babbler say?' was asked by the wise men of Athens, who were but repeating the scoffs of the prophets and priests of Jerusalem, and the same jeers are bitter in the mouth of many a profligate man to-day. It is the fate of all strict morality to be accounted childish by the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... is no better test of the popular opinion of a man than the character assigned to him on the stage; and till the close of the sixteenth century Sir John Oldcastle remained the profligate buffoon of English comedy. Whether in life he bore the character so assigned to him, I am unable to say. The popularity of Henry V., and the splendour of his French wars, served no doubt to colour all who had opposed ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... earnest, and was insensible to the ghost's appeal, until the audience, entering into the fun, unanimously shouted, "Wake up, Mother!" Some of you, I know, he goes on, will listen, even as Polemon did (Sat. II, iii, 254). Returning from a debauch, the young profligate passed the Academy where Xenocrates was lecturing, and burst riotously in. Presently, instead of scoffing, he began to hearken; was touched and moved and saddened, tore off conscience-stricken his effeminate ornaments, long sleeves, purple leggings, cravat, the garland from his head, ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell

... journey, and crossed over into Europe, where he founded several Churches, including those of Philippi and Thessalonica. At Athens he seems to have made {121} but little impression, but at Corinth, the busy and profligate centre of Greek commerce, he was more successful. He stayed there for eighteen months, and during this stay he wrote the Epistles to the Thessalonians. They are marked by the attention given to eschatology, or doctrine of "the last things"—the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of mankind, ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... And reap'd the profit, sought his blood. "To save them from their evil fate, In him was held a crime of state, A wicked monster on the bench,[33] Whose fury blood could never quench; As vile and profligate a villain, As modern Scroggs, or old Tresilian:[34] Who long all justice had discarded, Nor fear'd he God, nor man regarded; Vow'd on the Dean his rage to vent, And make him of his zeal repent: But Heaven his innocence defends, The grateful people stand his ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... possibly the legend was invented by way of comment. He drove away all the Persian swordsmiths, and from his day no 'Damascus blade' has been made at Damascus. I have found these French colonies perfectly casual and futile. The men take months before making up their minds to do anything. A most profligate waste of time! My prime object in visiting Tunis was to obtain information concerning The Scented Garden, to consult MSS. &c. After a month's hard work I came upon only a single copy, the merest compendium, lacking also Chapter 21, my chief Righah (the absurd French ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... civilised men living there, or should it be uninhabited. I had no wish to live among savages, as I had read enough of their doings to make me anxious to keep out of their way, and I was not influenced by motives which induce seamen to run from their ships for the sake of living an idle, profligate life, free ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston

... Roland distinguished the remarkable harsh voice of Lindesay in reply to Sir Robert Melville, who appeared to have been using some soothing language—"No! no! no! I tell thee, no! I will place a petard against the door rather than be baulked by a profligate woman, and bearded by ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... believe it implicitly; it does not appear to me either amusing, or credible, or creditable to the man who retailed it. The Florentine society of the early years of this century was, if we may trust the keen observation of Stendhal, almost as naively and openly profligate as that of a South Sea Island village; and such a society, which could talk of the things and in the way which it did, which could permit certain poetical compositions (found highly characteristic by Stendhal) to be publicly performed before the ladies and gentlemen celebrated ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... the profligate nobles and the criminals who had nothing to lose and every thing to gain by revolution, Catiline plotted to murder the consuls and seize the government; but his attempt was foiled, and he waited for a more favorable opportunity. ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... interests of their own clique. They have never allowed their own profound ignorance of anything (Greek for instance) to throw even an air of hesitation into their oracular decision on the matter. They set an example of profligate contempt for truth, of which the success was in proportion to the effrontery; and when their prosperity had filled the market with competitors, they cried out against their own reflected sin, as if they had never committed it, or were entitled to a monopoly of it. The latter, I rather think, was ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... a great height in the metropolis of the nation; is daily spreading through every part of it; and, bad in itself as any can be, must of necessity bring in others after it. Indeed it hath already brought in such dissoluteness and contempt of principle in the higher part of the world, and such profligate intemperance, and fearlessness of committing crimes, in the lower, as must, if this impiety stop not, become absolutely fatal. And God knows, far from stopping, it receives, through the ill designs of some persons, and the inconsiderateness of others, a continual increase. Christianity is now ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... converting the young man to better habits. It seems as if the hand of an avenging Providence had conducted this unfortunate mother to take a step so fatal to her son. She told the viceroy that she had in vain attempted to check him, that his days and nights were spent with profligate companions in gambling-houses and in cock-pits, and that she feared some mischief would come some day from his fighting and swearing and drinking; that but a few days since he had come home late, and that she had observed that his stockings were dabbled in blood; that she had questioned him upon ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... our preservation wholly to our best endeavours: his interference in our favour was so very conspicuously manifested in various instances, in the course of that night, as I believe not to leave a shadow of doubt, even in the minds of the most profligate on board, of ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter

... murderer's right to life, and thus to sacrifice the smaller number of comparatively worthless lives for the security of the larger number of lives that may be valuable to the community. Or again if, by the profligate use of the pardoning power, the murderer sentenced to perpetual imprisonment will probably be let loose upon society unreformed, and with passions which may lead to the repetition of his crime, it is immeasurably more ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody

... thronged with mountebanks, peep-shows, performing acrobats, and conjurers. Sleek and pampered priests in yellow robes were met at every turn, a class who exercise a certain influence over the people through their superstition, but who command no personal respect. We were told that they are a profligate set, like too many of their class elsewhere, and enjoyed a certain immunity from the laws. Before the temples was seen in one or two instances a theatrical performance in progress, which seemed rather incongruous, but upon ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... ever since the Restoration. A yet nobler result of the religious revival was the steady attempt, which has never ceased from that day to this, to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physical suffering, the social degradation of the profligate and the poor. It was not till the Wesleyan impulse had done its work that this philanthropic impulse began. The Sunday Schools established by Mr. Raikes of Gloucester at the close of the century were ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green

... contending factions, ravaged its-fair territory, butchered its peasantry, and changed its fertile plains to a wilderness. The unhappy creature who wore the crown of Charlemagne and of Hugh Capet, was but the tool in the hands of the most profligate and designing of his own subjects, and of foreigners. Slowly and surely the net, spread by the hands of his own mother, of his own prime minister, of the Duke of Guise, all obeying the command and receiving the stipend ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... rebel Irish, shall pass off their petty and selfish schemes of personal aggrandisement as the will of a great people, as mindful of its duty to its posterity as it is grateful for the labours of its ancestors. The English nation, therefore, rallies for rescue from the degrading plots of a profligate oligarchy, a barbarising sectarianism, and a boroughmongering Papacy round their hereditary leaders—the Peers. The House of Lords, therefore, at this moment represents everything in the realm except ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli

... of the nobles and the admiration of the people, until a series of marital troubles and blunders—her marriage with a worthless cousin, Henry Darnley, and then her scandalous marriage with Darnley's profligate murderer, the earl of Bothwell—alienated her people from her and drove her into exile. She abdicated the throne of Scotland in favor of her infant son, James VI, who was reared a Protestant and subsequently became King James I of England, and she then (1568) threw herself ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... anyone—no, not an angel from heaven, to come into our houses without knocking at the door, and say: "I hear you are very ill off—I will lend you a hundred pounds. I think you are very careless of money, I will take your accounts into my own hands;" and still less again: "Your son is a very bad, profligate, disgraceful fellow, who is not fit to be mentioned; I intend to take him out of your hands and reform him myself." Neither do the poor like such unceremonious mercy, such untender tenderness, benevolence ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... and fled from my house, doubtless to some paramour; carrying off with her all the jewels and money on which she could lay her hands. It is possible madame may have heard or seen something of her; she was accompanied in her flight by a base, profligate woman from Paris, whom I, unhappy man, had myself engaged for my wife's waiting-maid, little dreaming what corruption I ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell

... leading a most profligate and abandoned life, whose praying mother followed him like a shadow into and out of his drinking saloons and gambling houses, at last absented himself from home, whenever he was in port. Her burden, finally, seemed ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various

... demoralize, brutalize; corrupt &c (degrade) 659. Adj. vicious; sinful; sinning &c v.; wicked, iniquitous, immoral, unrighteous, wrong, criminal; naughty, incorrect; unduteous^, undutiful. unprincipled, lawless, disorderly, contra bonos mores [Lat.], indecorous, unseemly, improper; dissolute, profligate, scampish; unworthy; worthless; desertless^; disgraceful, recreant; reprehensible, blameworthy, uncommendable; discreditable, disreputable; Sadistic. base, sinister, scurvy, foul, gross, vile, black, grave, facinorous^, felonious, nefarious, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... Carmichael, formerly a bailie of Edinburgh, was one of Sharp's favourites, and one of his numerous commissioners for suppressing conventicles in Fife. He was a licentious profligate, greedy of money, and capable of undertaking any job, however vile. This man's enormities were at last so unbearable that he became an object of general detestation, and his excessive exactions had ruined so many respectable ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne

... citizens, as before agreed, fled from the Bishop's banner, and he was left with his own handful of adherents. At this moment De la Marck charged at the head of his banditti with the expected success. The Bishop was brought before the profligate Knight, who first cut him over the face, then murdered him with his own hand, and caused his body to be exposed naked in the great square of Liege ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... that is neither here nor there. Clear had a moustache, but when that was shaved off he looked exactly like Vrain. For purposes of your own, which you can easily guess, you made the acquaintance of this man, a profligate and a drunkard, and proposed, for a certain sum of money to be paid to his wife, that he, Michael Clear, should personate Vrain and live in the Silent House in Geneva Square, under the name of Berwin. You knew that Clear was slowly dying of consumption and drink, so you trusted that ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume

... expected to last, with no prospect of reward save such as may be reckoned in the number of palkis and pletnis (whips and lashes); sons, whether rich or poor, to be exposed to cavil, cunning, and vindictiveness, to the practices of gambling judges and a profligate soldiery, to a venal police, to fraudulent employes, themselves badly paid for service, but whose extortions and abuses always meet with approval, a single complaint against whom would expose the complainant to be sent through that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... this declaration of the Royal Charter, justly remarks, "This is a noble declaration, worthy of any Prince who rules over a free people. It is lamentable to reflect how little it comports with the domestic persecutions authorized by the same monarch during his profligate reign. It is still more lamentable to reflect how little a similar spirit of toleration was encouraged, either by precept or example, in other of the New England Colonies." (Commentaries, etc., Vol. I., Chap, viii., ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson

... the very basis in which infidelity grounds itself." It will not be denied that this opinion seems, at first view, to be inconsistent with the free agency and accountability of man, and that it appears to impair our idea of God by staining it with impurity. Hence it has been used, by the profligate and profane, to excuse men for their crimes. It is against this use of the doctrine that we intend to direct ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe

... that we can see and understand, Nature has but one desire, and that is the preservation and perpetuation of life. This is its purpose or, rather, its strongest urge not only with men but with all animal life. Sometimes to create one fish a million eggs are spawned. Nature is profligate both in spawning life and compassing its destruction. In the human species the capacity for life is immeasurably beyond its fruition. A large portion of those who are born die an early death. And that human life shall not be extinct, Nature plants the life-giving desire deep in the ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow

... his own little nest and brood. Lift these figures up but a story from the basement to the ground-floor, and the fun is gone. We may be en pleine tragedie. Ellen may breathe her last sigh in blank verse, calling down blessings upon James the profligate who deserts her. Henry is a hero, and epaulettes are on his shoulders. Atqui sciebat, &c., whatever tortures are in store for him, he will be at his ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Shakespear's. At the present moment marriage in England differs not only from marriage in France, but from marriage in Scotland. Marriage as modified by the divorce laws in South Dakota would be called mere promiscuity in Clapham. Yet the Americans, far from taking a profligate and cynical view of marriage, do homage to its ideals with a seriousness that seems old fashioned in Clapham. Neither in England nor America would a proposal to abolish marriage be tolerated for a moment; and yet nothing is more ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw

... not only those of justice and equity, but likewise those of logic. And, as it has been variously asserted of him, that he was constant and inconstant, firm and fickle, guided by principle, yet giving way to every impulse; that he was both chaste and profligate, a sensual man and an anchorite; calumny alone can not be accused of all these contradictions. We must then seek out conscientiously whether there were not other causes for this inconsistency, so as to return back within due bounds, and bring contradiction in accord with truth. It is, of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli

... was first lighted up and disseminated over the Provinces; it is therefore greatly to be wished that Parliament may rescue the loyal inhabitants of that town and Province from the merciless hand of an ignorant mob, led on and inflamed by self-interested and profligate men."] ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... persons intrusted from the temptations of unlawful emolument, and, what in all cases is the greatest security, given a lawful gratification to the natural passions of men. Matrimony is to be used, as a true remedy against a vicious course of profligate manners; fair and lawful emoluments, and the just profits of office, are opposed to the unlawful means which might be made use of to supply them. For, in truth, I am ready to agree, that for any man to expect a series of sacrifices without a return in blessings, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... some of the more striking particularities of the Marquesas. It rests upon no authority; it is in no sense, like "Rahero," a native story; but a patchwork of details of manners and the impressions of a traveller. It may seem strange, when the scene is laid upon these profligate islands, to make the story hinge on love. But love is not less known in the Marquesas than elsewhere; nor is there any cause of suicide more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... been expected. Clarendon's power was gone, and he was an exile. A board of trade, projected in 1668, never assumed the administration of colonial affairs, and had not vitality enough to last more than three or four years. Profligate libertines gained the confidence of the king's mistresses, and secured places in the royal cabinet. While Charles II. was dallying with women and robbing the theatres of actresses; while the licentious Buckingham, who had succeeded in displacing Clarendon, ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick

... their edification at seeing how heartily she had sought baptism, and how our Lord accomplishes more in one moment than we in many days. In the village of Paet our Lord moved the hearts of two women who were a cause of offense and stumbling on account of their dissolute lives. Protected by certain profligate men, these women, although they were slaves, had become so arrogant that they despised the other women; and all the village felt ashamed to have among them so evil a company. These women came with deep grief to make their confession, and remained thoroughly reformed, to the great satisfaction of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson

... to go to Strawberry on Friday without staying for the Qualification bill. You said it did not signify—No! What if you intended to speak on it? Am I indifferent to hearing you? More-Am I indifferent about acting with you? Would not I follow you in any thing in the world?—This is saying no profligate thing. Is there any thing I might not follow you in? You even did not tell me yesterday that you had spoken. Yet I will tell you all I have heard; though if there was a Point in the world in which I could not wish ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... possessor of wealth. How have you used it? What have you done for your neighbor? Have you ever thought of your tens of thousands of slaves? Have you helped them physically and morally? No! You have profited by their toil to lead a profligate life. That is what you have done. Have you chosen a post in which you might be of service to your neighbor? No! You have spent your life in idleness. Then you married, my dear sir—took on yourself responsibility for the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... discrowned king. Others never found it out, but there must have been something precious hid in a dark corner of his wayward heart near which Agnes nestled so long. We look leniently on Otho—parasite and profligate—when we see him lingering on his last march, on the very verge of the death-struggle, in the teeth of Galba's legions, to decorate Popaea's grave. More in pity than in scorn, be sure, did Tacitus, the historic epigrammatist, write "Ne ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence

... your great opportunity. Divide wisely and equitably between the few who are most nearly of your own blood, and the many who in kinship are only a little farther removed. If you regard only those reared under your own roof, your cherished estate will soon be scattered, perhaps wasted by profligate heirs in riotous living, to their own ruin, and you and your fortune will quickly be forgotten. Give a share—pay a tithe to your more distant and more numerous kindred—to the general public, and you will be gratefully remembered, and ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard

... produce of danger and ease is commonly spent as easily, and often as wickedly, as acquired. Thus we proportioned our expenses rather by what we had than what we wanted or even desired; and on obtaining a considerable booty we have even forced nature into the most profligate extravagance, and have ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding

... coaches, and voted for Bung. The captain's arguments, too, had produced considerable effect: the attempted influence of the vestry produced a greater. A threat of exclusive dealing was clearly established against the vestry-clerk—a case of heartless and profligate atrocity. It appeared that the delinquent had been in the habit of purchasing six penn'orth of muffins, weekly, from an old woman who rents a small house in the parish, and resides among the original settlers; on her last weekly visit, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... censorship can stem, and, worst of all, a confusion of virtue with the mere morality that steals its name until the real thing is loathed because the imposture is loathsome. Literary traditions spring up in which the libertine and profligate—Tom Jones and Charles Surface are the heroes, and decorous, law-abiding persons—Blifil and Joseph Surface—are the villains and butts. People like to believe that Nell Gwynne has every amiable quality ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... a cause of much trouble. Very little mention of them is made in the records of this period. They were not wanted in this city but were tolerated as a negligible factor. D. B. Warden, a traveler through the West in 1819, observed that the blacks of Cincinnati were "good-humoured, garrulous, and profligate, generally disinclined to laborious occupations, and prone to the performance of light and menial drudgery." Here the traveler was taking effect for cause. "Some few," said he, "exercise the humbler trades, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... not one single woman resided here. The sunset of a fine day will generally cast an air of happy contentment on any scene; but here, at this retired farm-house, the brightest tints on the surrounding woods could not make me forget that forty hardened, profligate men were ceasing from their daily labours, like the slaves from Africa, yet without their holy ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... something more," he declared. "What I have said is either too much or too little. You ask me whether I saw your pearls. When I first spoke to you—a child with all autumn's glory blazing at your back, did I have eyes for trees and skies and landscapes; though they were splendid and profligate in their beauty? No. I saw you—only you! If you had stood against a drab curtain it would have been the same. You were a child, too young to stir an adult heart to love or passion.... What was it then that fixed you from that moment ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... never departed from 'the age of faith' Neither doubt nor free-thinking in regard to spiritual affairs ever perplexed the people, but in all religious matters they accepted the words of the fathers as the unquestionable truth. Unfortunately, the priests were, with scarcely an exception, lazy and profligate; yet the people were so superstitious and credulous that they feared to disobey them, or reserve anything which they might be required to confess." [Footnote: Washburn's "History ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... depicting of real life. The stage on which he raved and fought became as historic as the actual decks of battle ships, and his small and brawny figure comes down to us in those paroxysms of delirious art, like that of Harold, or Richard, or Prince Rupert. He drank to excess, was profligate but not generous, required but not reliable, and licentious to the bounds of cruelty. He threw off the wife of his bosom to fly from England with a flower-girl, and, settling in Baltimore, dwelt with his younger companion, and brought up many children, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... believe any thing that his mother said, nor to trust to her in any way. "It is all," said they, "an artful device on her part to get you into her power; and no young man of pride and spirit will submit to the disgrace of being under his mother's management and control." The young profligate listened to the counsels of his associates, and rejected the overtures which his mother had made him. He continued his attachment to Acte, but kept as much ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott

... of Absalom and Achitophel, is meant for Lord Howard, a profligate, who laid claim to great piety. As Nadab offered incense with strange fire and was slain, so Lord Howard, it is said, mixed the consecrated wafer with some roast apples and sugar.—Pt. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... the operating-table may be forcibly crushed down like a child's jack-in-the-box; but we are always conscious of the effort to compress it, and we know that it will spring up again the moment that effort ceases. Sir Arthur Pinero's play, The Profligate, was written at a time when it was the fashion to give each act a sub-title; and one of its acts is headed "The Sword of Damocles." That is, indeed, the inevitable symbol of dramatic tension: we see a sword of Damocles (even though it be only a farcical blade of painted lathe) ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... make the most of his well-known immorality. In his Notes to Macky's Characters Swift described Wharton as "the most universal villain that ever I knew." On his death in 1715 he was succeeded by his profligate son, Philip, who was created Duke of ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... brother's life, her horror of her brother's sin is so intense, and her perception of the justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would actually do so but that the warm-hearted profligate Lucio reproaches her for her coldness and urges her on. Cordelia's hatred of hypocrisy and of the faintest appearance of mercenary professions reminds us of Isabella's hatred of impurity; but Cordelia's position is infinitely more difficult, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... is always symptomatic of a total decay of morals, where female reputation neither confers dignity, nor excites pride, in its possessor; but is consistent with her mingling in the society of the libertine and the profligate. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... way. Thus these poets are below the Arabs, for these sons of the desert at least address their flatteries to the girls whom they are eager to marry, whereas the Greek and Roman poets sought merely to beguile a class of women whose charms were for sale to anyone. One of these profligate men might cringe and wail and cajole, to gain the good will of a capricious courtesan, but he never dreamed of bending his knees to win the honest love of the maid he took to be his wife (that he might have male offspring.) Roman love was not romantic, nor was Greek. It was ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... hungry man without any tobacco. Maybe he was a profligate and had used it all up on himself. Very good; he had a pair of suspenders. I exchanged half a dozen rations of bread for it—or a dozen rations if the suspenders were very good. Now I never wore ...
— The Road • Jack London

... Puir, profligate Londoners, having heard tell That the De'il's got amang ye, and fearing 'tis true, We ha' sent ye a mon wha's a match for his spell, A chiel o' our ain, that the De'il himsel Will be glad to keep clear of, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... meetings but their own, but some of the clergy of most ranks, and some others too who were overmuch bigoted to that party, bestirred themselves with might and main to find out and encourage the most profligate wretches to turn informers, and to get such persons into parochial offices as would be most obsequious to their commands, and ready at their beck to put it into the most rigorous execution. Yet it took not alike in all places, but ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood

... convicts: and perhaps a tax upon intoxicating liquors is no bad mode of procuring the means of erecting them, for thus the sober and industrious are not heavily taxed to provide for the support and punishment of the profligate and wicked. Nevertheless, if Christ's religion be true, there is a surer and better way of checking crime, than by trusting to gaols and police alone; but, unhappily, this more excellent way of reforming the morals of mankind, has, in modern times, found little ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... the case?—they cannot be too frequently told that fine clothes, wealth, and titles adorn a person in proportion as he adorns them; that if worn by the magnanimous and good they are ornaments indeed, but if by the vile and profligate they are merely san benitos, and only serve to make their infamy doubly apparent; and that a person in seedy raiment and tattered hat, possessed of courage, kindness, and virtue, is entitled to more respect from those to whom his virtues are manifested ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow

... in an age notoriously pleasure-loving, profligate, and irreligious, she deliberately and whole-heartedly cast in her lot with the despised people of God, "accounting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt." She was tried by repeated bereavements, and she had to bear the ...
— Excellent Women • Various

... to me, and you shall better understand that which you have heard. Some years ago, it matters not the number, on a stormy night, towards the autumn of the year, two men sat alone in poverty, and that species of distress which beset the haughty, profligate, daring man, who has been accustomed all his life to its most enticing enjoyments, but never to that industry which alone ought to produce them, and ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest

... to try and win one from her. But, no! she would have none of him, but set her heart on Jack Rose, a sailor in a whale-ship. And so they were married at last, though all her own folks were against it. And he was a profligate sinner, and went after other women, and drank, and beat her. She turned as stiff and as grey as thou seest her now within a year of Hester's birth. I believe they'd have perished for want and cold many a ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell

... conflicts and struggles with evil in its journey through life, it is unsurpassed. It is believed that no other book except the Bible has gone through so many editions or attained such a popularity in all languages. It has been generally understood that Bunyan's early life was a very profligate one, but some have thought that his terrible self-accusations in after years may have arisen from the height of his religious fervour and Puritan strictness, which made him look on dancing and bell-ringing as deadly sins. This idea is satisfactorily ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home

... evil fate, In him was held a crime of state. A wicked monster on the bench, Whose fury blood could never quench; As vile and profligate a villain, As modern Scroggs, or old Tressilian; Who long all justice had discarded, Nor feared he God, nor man regarded; Vowed on the Dean his rage to vent, And make him of his zeal repent: But Heaven his innocence defends, The grateful people stand his friends; Not strains of law, nor ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... the Achaeans, his wife, named Polycratia, was taken away and conveyed into Macedonia under the hope of a matrimonial connexion with royalty. After passing the time appointed for the celebration of the Nemaean games, and a few days more, in the commission of these profligate acts, he set out for Dymae to expel the garrison of the Aetolians, which had been invited by the Eleans, and received into the town. Cycliadas, who had the chief direction of affairs, met the king at Dymae, together with the Achaeans, who were inflamed with ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius

... emotions. When she witnessed one of his tragedies she felt persuaded that she was witnessing an episode in real life. 'Indeed,' she concludes, 'Shakespeare had a clear judgment, a quick wit, a subtle observation, a deep apprehension, and a most eloquent elocution.' The profligate Sedley, in a prologue to the 'Wary Widdow,' a comedy by one Higden, produced ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... love of St. John, and radiate the beams thereof on every man, woman, and child under their guardianship, and then, "measuring other people's corn by their own lovely bushel," they may well hesitate to believe in the existence of a profligate breeding Pandemonium within the precincts of their immediate country. Yet, alas! there can be little ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... frightened, for she saw that she was in the profligate court of Charles II. She tried to hide behind the tapestry by the window, but a rollicking nobleman, whom she recognized by his portraits as the Earl of Rochester, caught sight of her, and sprang forward, to drag her out into the midst of the hall! She flung his hand off, with a scream, and lo, ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood

... opinion seems, at first view, to be inconsistent with the free agency and accountability of man, and that it appears to impair our idea of God by staining it with impurity. Hence it has been used, by the profligate and profane, to excuse men for their crimes. It is against this use of the doctrine that we intend to direct the force of ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe

... M—— told me that the ambassador would be obliged to me if in the future I would come to the casino two hours later. I understood that the good-natured and witty profligate had a very natural prejudice against indulging his amorous feelings except when he ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... decoyed into the coaches, and voted for Bung. The captain's arguments, too, had produced considerable effect: the attempted influence of the vestry produced a greater. A threat of exclusive dealing was clearly established against the vestry-clerk—a case of heartless and profligate atrocity. It appeared that the delinquent had been in the habit of purchasing six penn'orth of muffins, weekly, from an old woman who rents a small house in the parish, and resides among the original settlers; ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... (see Langhorne's Plutarch, 1838, p. 498); Pompey's third wife, Mucia, intrigued with Caesar (vide ibid., p. 447); Mahomet's favourite wife, Ayesha, on one occasion incurred suspicion; Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, was notoriously profligate (see Gibbon's Decline and Fall, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... She grew up beautiful and profligate; she coined her rare Italian charms, first into gold and velvet, then into silver and brocade, and at last into copper and rags. When her charms faded entirely, she began to practise the forbidden arts of her mother and father, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... instead of consulting their own taste and inclinations, they blindly adopt whatever those with whom they chiefly converse, are pleased to call by the name of pleasure; and a man of pleasure in the vulgar acceptation of that phrase, means only, a beastly drunkard, an abandoned whoremaster, and a profligate swearer and curser. As it may be of use to you. I am not unwilling, though at the same time ashamed to own, that the vices of my youth proceeded much more from my silly resolution of being, what I heard called a man of pleasure, than from my own inclinations. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... for having been betrayed into an act disgraceful to a man of honor. But when all these filial dreams were blasted by the conviction that he owed his being to the husband of Lady Tinemouth, that his mother was the victim of a profligate, that he had sprung from a man who was not merely a villain, but the most wanton, the most despicable of villains, he saw himself bereft of hope and overwhelmed with ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... of the field of literature all who stood in the way of the interests of their own clique. They have never allowed their own profound ignorance of anything (Greek for instance) to throw even an air of hesitation into their oracular decision on the matter. They set an example of profligate contempt for truth, of which the success was in proportion to the effrontery; and when their prosperity had filled the market with competitors, they cried out against their own reflected sin, as if they had never committed it, or were entitled to ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... understanding is not less believed than hoped for: cases have been stated, more desperate than the present, wherein the recovery hath been perfect. Yet much mischief is already done, or rather the basis of mischief is already and irremoveably laid. In future times, designing, ambitious and profligate men may start the idea that what has been may be, and in the desperate effort of factious opposition, even venture to arraign the temper and health of mind, though it shows its perfect state, and the wise measures of Government should put such ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham

... of Girolamo Savonarola was a trifler, a spendthrift and a profligate. Yet he proved a potent teacher for his son, pressing his lessons home by the law of antithesis. The sons of dissipated ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... distinguished for his disregard of truth, his violence, and his use of any means to carry the ends which his party espoused. And on the other hand we hear men whose private vices are notorious—profane, profligate, unprincipled—commended for the consistency and purity of their political course. Is not this wrong, is it not deplorable? Shall we for a moment countenance this distinction between public and private character, as if they were not subject to the same principles of moral judgment? Shall ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett

... predestination, predicament, preemptory, prelate, preliminary, preposterous, prerequisite, prerogative, presentiment, primogeniture, probation, probity, proclivity, procrastinate, prodigal, prodigious, prodigy, profligate, progenitor, proletarian, prolific, prolix, promiscuous, promissory, propaganda, propensity, prophylactic, propinquity, propitiatory, propitious, proprietary, prorogue, proselyte, prototype, protuberant, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... We were outcasts, and were thrown of necessity amongst those who had been cast out. But the standards of life vary with those who live, and I never could see that a man was less of a thief because he thieved from a throne, or less a profligate because he debauched a princess. I was, no doubt, in advance of my time; these are the ideas of Monsieur Voltaire. I believe that I saw a great deal of iniquity, for the taverns and gaming-dens to which I sometimes resorted for shelter or entertainment were filled ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... be passed rapidly by, for it covers only the wasted years of a sinful and profligate youth and early manhood. It is of interest mainly as illustrating the sovereignty of that Grace which abounds even to the chief of sinners. Who can read the story of that score of years and yet talk of piety as the product of evolution? In his case, instead of evolution, there ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson

... superstition and asceticism of the monks of his day wore a hair shirt next his skin, and schooled himself by penances for the cell he desired among the Carthusians. It was characteristic of the man that among all the gay, profligate scholars of the Italian Renascence he chose as the object of his admiration the disciple of Savonarola, Pico di Mirandola. Free-thinker as the bigots who listened to his daring speculations termed him, his eye would brighten and his tongue falter as he spoke with friends of ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green

... himself also by the title. The offer made to her was not ungenerous. The family owed her nothing, but were willing to sacrifice nearly half of all they had with the object of restoring to her the money of which the profligate had robbed her,—which he had been enabled to take from her by her own folly and credulity. In this terrible emergency of her life, Mrs. Vincent sent over to her a solicitor from London, between whom and the Italian man of business a bargain was struck. The young wife undertook ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope

... mode of pursuing his claim it is plain that Savage felt it to be a false one. It seems, also, to be forgotten by most readers, that at this day real sons—not denied to be such—are continually banished, nay, ejected forcibly by policemen, from the paternal roof in requital of just such profligate conduct as Savage displayed; so that, grant his improbable story, still he was a disorderly reprobate, who in these days would have been consigned to the treadmill. But the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... believed not that virtue and true nobility were there; could he but find them. He looked at the blow his happiness had sustained, and thought it afforded a fair sample of human nature. Oliver Delancey became a selfish and a profligate man. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... did such a wasteful thing in your life, Byam, I'll warrant," said the parson, smiling; "and yet some say that you have been a profligate." ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... a large legacy and have been brought up in idleness, become prodigal in their expenditure, and squander their fortune by dissipation more rapidly than their parents amassed it by industry and frugality; and then, ignorant and helpless and profligate, they eke out a wretched existence in abject poverty, resorting to illegitimate means for a living, until the last fruits of their improper training may be seen in the state's prison or upon ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... but they were all innocent. No merry-makings conduced to intoxication, to riot, to disease. Love existed, and was ardent in pursuit, but its object, once secured, was faithful. The adulterer, the profligate, the harlot, were phenomena so unknown in this commonwealth, that even to find the words by which they were designated one would have had to search throughout an obsolete literature composed thousands of years before. They ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... the trust of such inquisitions should be put into the hands of persons of understanding and integrity, that will suffer no man to be falsely accused or defamed; nor the lives of any to be put in jeopardy, by the malicious conspiracies of great or small, or the perjuries of any profligate wretches. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... is charged with the poaching of deer in his youth is too bad to write good poetry, therefore Bacon wrote Shakspere. Was Bacon an angel? By the same process of reasoning Burns could not have written the Cotter's Saturday Night. But I deny that Shakspere was profligate, and in making this denial I need not prove the impeccability of Shakspere. But his life was essentially pure, his heart good, because the influence of the life is sane ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... eleventh canto a new hero, Ahti, or Lemminkainen, and a new cycle of adventures, is abruptly introduced. Lemminkainen is a profligate wanderer, with as many loves as Hercules. The fact that he is regarded as a form of the sea-god makes it strange that his most noted achievement, the seduction of the whole female population of his island, should correspond with a like feat of Krishna's. 'Sixteen thousand and ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... his interference in our favour was so very conspicuously manifested in various instances, in the course of that night, as I believe not to leave a shadow of doubt, even in the minds of the most profligate on board, ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter

... either to evade pursuit, to gratify bestial passion, or to endeavor by such excitements to drive away the haunting fear that oppressed him, had invariably sought the companionship of the harlot and the profligate. Being possessed of plenty of money, it may be imagined that he experienced no difficulty in finding associates willing to minister to his appetites, and to assist him in forgetting the dangers that threatened him, by dissipation and debauchery. All ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton

... your own blood, and the many who in kinship are only a little farther removed. If you regard only those reared under your own roof, your cherished estate will soon be scattered, perhaps wasted by profligate heirs in riotous living, to their own ruin, and you and your fortune will quickly be forgotten. Give a share—pay a tithe to your more distant and more numerous kindred—to the general public, and you will be gratefully remembered, and ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard

... passionate so much as voluptuous. By one of her lovers, and by mistake, a child was conceived, and though attempts were made to get rid of the mistake, a boy was born, fairly healthy. The father, a modern tired profligate, refused to accept the responsibilities of his fatherhood, though he did not deny the child was his, and continued as one of the lovers of its mother. The mother showed no sign of maternal love; the little one was much neglected and probably would have died, but, when about ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... sacrilege, perfidy, and sedition; that the democracy of Athens was a most absurd constitution, productive of anarchy and mischief, which must always happen when the government of a nation depends upon the caprice of the ignorant, hair-brained vulgar; that it was in the power of the most profligate member of the commonwealth, provided he was endowed with eloquence, to ruin the most deserving, by a desperate exertion of his talents upon the populace, who had been often persuaded to act in the most ungrateful and imprudent manner against the greatest patriots that their country ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... honest, patriotic heart of America? Here and there, were drops of its blood and life, but they scarcely coloured the stream of desperate adventurers which sets that way for profit and for pay. It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs, to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked. ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... description of the contest, from which it appeared that his favourite son had been beaten in a public trial of skill by Jim Jarrocks, well-known all over the county as the most reckless poacher and unblushing profligate anywhere about, and had thus given encouragement to a man who was constantly before the magistrates for all sorts of minor breaches of the law. However, he felt that he must make the best of it, and he therefore spoke of it among his friends as a bit of foolish practical joking on his ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... you, Marcel," he said gently. "Were you my own son I could not love you more. You are a profligate, dissolute knave, and your scandals have rung in my ears more than once; yet you are different from these other fools, and at least you have never wearied me. To have done that is to have done something. I would not lose you, Marcel; as lose you I shall if you marry this rose of ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini

... evidence of that were necessary, that Anne had her brother in mind in writing the book. 'I could not be understood to suppose,' she says, 'that the proceedings of the unhappy scapegrace, with his few profligate companions I have here introduced, are a specimen of the common practices of society: the case is an extreme one, as I trusted none would fail to perceive; but I knew that such characters do exist, and if I have warned one rash ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... of Thessaly, the Poet means the Armies of Brutus, and Cassius, defeated by Augustus, almost in the same place, at the Battle of Philippi. He concludes also that by Hylaeus is meant Mark Antony, who assumed the name of Bacchus, and ruined himself by his profligate passion for Cleopatra. Another Commentator observes, that as the Giants, and Lapithae, are said to have made the Palace of Saturn shake, so also did Brutus, and Cassius, and afterwards Mark Antony, make all Italy ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward

... the most happy effects on multitudes of men. It has enlightened the most ignorant; softened the most hardened; reclaimed the most profligate; converted the most estranged; purified the most polluted; exalted the most degraded; and plucked the most endangered from hell to heaven. What was it that transformed the persecuting and blaspheming ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... death. Captain Burt, in his letters from the Highlands, written early in the eighteenth century, says that "soon after the wedding day the newly-married wife sets herself about spinning her winding sheet, and a husband that shall sell or pawn it is esteemed among all men one of the most profligate." And Dr. Jamieson says—"When a woman of the lower class in Scotland, however poor, or whether married or single, commences housekeeping, her first care, after what is absolutely necessary for ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier

... misused and sacrificed hitherto by incapable leaders. One lesson they all learn,—to hate slavery, teterrima causa. But the issue does not yet appear. We must get ourselves morally right. Nobody can help us. 'T is of no account what England or France may do. Unless backed by our profligate parties, their action would be nugatory, and, if so backed, the worst. But even the war is better than the degrading and descending politics that preceded it for decades of years, and our legislation has made great strides, and if we can stave off that fury of trade ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... kind of pedantic and profligate literature, perfectly devoid of all natural sentiment, full of self-contradictions; and, in fact, the contrast to those maidens in my work, whom I have, during half my lifetime, seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears. And though ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... remarkable epistle once or twice, in a state of mind bordering on stupefaction. Robert Ratman, cad, sharper, blasphemer, insolent profligate, his brother! The notion was ludicrous. And yet, when he tried to laugh, the laugh died on his lips. He walked over to the portrait on the wall and looked at the wild, mocking boy's face there. For a moment, as he met its gaze, it seemed to grow older ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed

... death of Gracchus until the first consulship of Marius, Rome was governed by a venal and profligate oligarchy, formed from a coalition of the most powerful families. Shame was unknown to this body; the offices of state were openly sold to the highest bidder, redress of grievances was to be obtained only by paying a heavier sum for vengeance than the oppressor would give for impunity: advocacy of ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... persons also he directed his grim attention, Somers, Cowper, Godolphin, Marlborough, and Wharton were each drawn with iron stylus and acid. To Wharton he gave special care (he had some private scores to pay off), and in the character of Verres, he etched the portrait of a profligate, an unscrupulous governor, a scoundrel, an infidel to his religion and country, a reckless, selfish, low-living blackguard. In the Letter to Marcus Crassus, Marlborough is addressed in language that the simplest farm-labourer could understand. The letter is a lay sermon on the vice ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... such widows do I know, whom brutal, profligate, and savage husbands have brought to the brink of the grave,—as good, as bright, as innocent as, and far more forgiving than, Lady Byron. There they sit in their obscure, rarely-visited dwellings; for sympathy instructed by suffering knows well that the deepest and most hopeless ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... by the church-yard, and the watchman bawled in hoarse voice a long and doleful "All's well!" A deep sleep had already fallen upon this primitive little burgh; nothing disturbed this awful silence, excepting now and then the bark of some profligate night-walking dog, or the serenade of some romantic cat. It is true, Wolfert fancied more than once that he heard the sound of a stealthy footfall at a distance behind them; but it might have been merely the echo of their own steps echoing along the quiet streets. ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... bore. She had married him, not loving him—nay, plucking another love out of her heart in order that she might give herself to him. She had married him for position and fortune; and now by his follies, by his extravagance, and by that greed of gold which is inevitable in the spendthrift and profligate, he had gone near to cheat her out of both name and fortune. Yet she so commanded herself as to receive him with a friendly air when he arrived at the Dolphin, on a dull grey autumn afternoon, after she had waited for him ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... Telegraph at any reasonable rate to such a company as you describe. I fully appreciate your reasons for desiring such a consummation, and, in addition to them, have others peculiar to my own position. Any one who has a valuable patent can profit by it only by a constant fight with some of the most profligate and, at the same time, most shrewd members of society. I have found myself not only the agent of yourself and the Messrs. Vail to sell your patent rights, but the soldier to fight your battles, as well in the country as in the courts of justice. Almost single-handed, ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... was not wholly discouraged; indeed, my infatuation for Doto made me overlook much profligate behaviour that I do not care to mention in a tract which may fall into the hands of the young. One other example of the native barbarity, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... The holy women I had always fancied the nuns to be, the venerable Lady Superior, what were they? And the priests of the seminary adjoining, some of whom indeed I had had reason to think were base and profligate men, what were they all? I now learnt they were often admitted into the nunnery, and allowed to indulge in the greatest crimes, which they and others ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk

... the spirit of the dead man called him, seeming to say: "Come and keep me company. Our old quarrel is over. You and I understand each other now. We are two of a kind, just as like as two hogs from one litter—you the sanctimonious psalm-singer and I the conscienceless profligate—we are brothers at last ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... forensic skill or professional duty. His it was to help to apply the first impulse to the movement which eventually broke down the strong bulwarks of territorial oligarchy. His it was to wear the political martyr's crown; his to beard a profligate Court, and a despotic, tyrannical, and corrupt Government; his to win, or to help to win, far nobler victories than were ever gained by Marlborough or Wellington: victories of which we reap the benefits now, in liberty of thought and speech, ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards

... clouds, adrift, or by whatever word utter ignorance and incapacity are to be described. In society and in the work of life, he finds himself beaten by the youth whom at college he despised as frivolous or abhorred as profligate." ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands

... impossible for her to wait upon him in his illness and hold any repugnance toward this big, elemental man. The thing he had done might be wrong, but the very openness and frankness of his relation to Meteetse redeemed it from shame. He was neither a profligate nor a squawman. ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine

... public, bullied him for submitting to such treatment, and imprisoned him for trying to run away from it. He came at last out of purgatory; and Europe felt him to her farthest bounds. This bookish, philosophizing, verse-making cynic and profligate was soon to approve himself the first warrior of his time, and one of the first ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... that, instead of a reformed profligate making a good husband, he must make a very diseased one. It has therefore been suggested that the parents of the prospective bride should demand from the intended groom a certificate of freedom from all venereal diseases by a physician of their ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... nature has ever power over the imaginative and the impassioned), was at hand to ridicule the impression produced by Zicci, and the notion of delicacy and honor towards an Italian actress. It is true that Merton, who was no profligate, advised him to quit all pursuit of Isabel; but then the advice was precisely of that character which, if it deadens love, stimulates passion. By representing Isabel as one who sought to play a part with him, he excused to Glyndon ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... house, and the companion of the lowest of the low. So much, then, for gambling and a jovial life. Notwithstanding his education, and the good society in which he must have moved, there was yet nothing of the remains of a gentleman about him; a considerable share of the fool and profligate was naturally engrafted in his character. A large black mark, in the shape of a half-moon, appeared to have been strongly indented by hard knuckles, below the left visual organ,—ornaments that are as frequently to be seen upon the inhabitants of St. Giles's, ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown

... King's death, with the legitimate heir, Arthur Duke of Brittany, son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, the elder brother of John. This usurpation, it is well known, he afterwards effected. His own character being light, profligate, and perfidious, John easily attached to his person and faction, not only all who had reason to dread the resentment of Richard for criminal proceedings during his absence, but also the numerous class of "lawless resolutes," whom the crusades had ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... pastor; and secondly, that without a considerable knowledge of divinity I should never get a good living. But the moment I entered Halle, the university town, all my resolutions came to nothing. Being now more than ever my own master, I renewed my profligate life afresh, though now a student of divinity. Yet in the midst of it all I had a desire to renounce this wretched life, for I had no enjoyment in it, and had sense enough left to see that the end, one day or other, would be miserable. But I had no sorrow of heart ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller

... in the sunny hours of June, listening to his eloquence, or partaking of the mystic bread and wine; but in these our latter days, when discipline is relaxed, along with the sedate and the pious come swarms of the idle and the profligate, whom no eloquence can edify and no solemn rite affect. On these, and such as these, the poet has poured his satire; and since this desirable reprehension the Holy Fairs, east as well as west, have become more ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... two hundred and fifty years, we do not find one single ruler who resembles his predecessor or his successor. Yet all these Hohenzollerns, whether capable or incapable, whether mad, half-mad, or sane, whether profligate or domesticated, whether extravagant or miserly, have certain common traits. They have all been inspired with the same dynastic policy. When we consider the individual variations from the family type, there can be here no question of physical heredity, like the lip of the Habsburg or the ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... diseases rarely extend beyond the third generation, the line becoming extinct. The most heart-rending spectacles we have ever met have been the children of parents suffering with the diseases mentioned. Their appearance is characteristic; no physician of experience can fail to detect the sins of a profligate parent in a syphilitic child. Every feature indicates the presence of ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... middle-class morality. The impartial old Wraxall, the memorialist of the times of George III, having described a noble as a gambler, a drunkard, a smuggler, an appropriator of public money, who always cheated his tradesmen, who was one and sometimes all of them together, and a profligate generally, commonly adds, "But he was a perfect gentleman." And yet there has always been a standard that excludes George IV from the rank of gentleman, as it excludes Tupper ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... more and more of her attention, as it increased in beauty, had the same tendency; and her anxiety to profit by the experience of others on one occasion inflicted a whimsical disappointment of the free-thinkers of the court. The profligate and sentimental infidel Rousseau had died a couple of years before, and had been buried at Ermenonville, in the park of the Count de Girardin. In the course of the summer the queen drove over to Ermenonville, and the admirers of the versatile ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... disinterested part he takes, while I am looked upon as a black sheep; of which I console myself, and have reason to console myself, when I see the views and motives of some great political characters to be so profligate and abandoned. Lord North and Charles Fox acting together in public life, is a new and extraordinary scene! Many people say it was only for last night; but I believe the arrangement has completely taken place, and the overthrow of the present Ministry is consequently certain. The Amendment in ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... minister would rather preserve peace than gain a victory, because he knows that even the most successful war leaves nations generally more poor, always more profligate, than ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... people, but in books—good and sensible books, written by people of experience—which are, in my opinion, radically and absolutely false, and yet no one takes the trouble to question them. I am always coming across them. Such as this: No one is more incapable of affection than a profligate. This, in my judgement, is a ludicrous error, though it is the statement of no less a moral physician than Lacordaire. If by affection you mean 'sustained, pure, disinterested emotion,' such as patriotism—well and good; but affection!—the two most affectionate ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson

... Branthwait, a sergeant at law, in 1580, during which period it was occupied by Lord Chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton, the fine dancer, one of the celebrated favorites of Elizabeth, the lascivious daughter of King Henry the Eighth—a woman as fickle as profligate, as cruel and hard-hearted, so far as regarded her numerous paramours, as her brutal father was in respect ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... expected. Very far from disagreeing with me, my London visits have just lately taken to suit my stomach admirably; I begin to think that dissipation, high-living, with lots of claret, is what I want, and what I had during the last visit. We are going to act on this same principle, and in a very profligate manner have just taken a pair of season-tickets to see the Queen open the Crystal Palace. (37/1. Queen Victoria opened the Crystal Palace at Sydenham on June 10th, 1854.) How I wish there was any ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... my cares. Tenderest, gentlest of dispositions, where ever burned a love whose flame was pure as thine? Where ever was truth that could vie with the truth of Matilda? Hereafter when the worthless and the profligate exclaim upon the artifices of thy sex, when the lover disappointed, wrung with anguish, imprecates curses on the kind, name but Matilda, and every murmur shall be hushed; name but Matilda, and the universal voice of nature ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin

... proposals of their fine gilding. I will satisfy Mr. Mowbray of St. Ronan's of his false pretences, both to rank and fortune; and I rather think he will protect his sister against the claim of a needy profligate, though he might be dazzled with the ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... is very unknightly, as the times of the Knights were times of Love, Honour, and so forth.[6] Now it so happens that the good old times, when "l'amour du bon vieux tems, l'amour antique," flourished, were the most profligate of all possible centuries. Those who have any doubts on this subject may consult Sainte-Palaye, passim, and more particularly vol. ii. p. 69.[7] The vows of chivalry were no better kept than any other vows whatsoever; and the songs of the Troubadours were not more decent, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... ardour in a new poem, called by him, the Progress of a Divine; in which he conducts a profligate priest, by all the gradations of wickedness, from a poor curacy in the country to the highest preferments of the church; and describes, with that humour which was natural to him, and that knowledge which was extended to all the diversities of human life, his behaviour ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... support of the Governor, for the planting of which 100 more men were sent; and what was now become absolutely necessary, there were no less than 90 young women, of a healthful constitution, and unspotted reputation, sent out to be married to the planters, instead of diseased and profligate strumpets, as is now the ridiculous practice.... Thus the company and colony began to be in a thriving way: but now they began to be oppressed by the Government here, for in November they were ordered ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... "You old profligate," cried Lisbeth, "you have not even asked me how your children are? What are you going to do for Adeline? I, at any rate, will take her ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... all mankind, shows that they are not natives of the human heart. Even the unhappy partner of our kind, who is undone, the bitter consequence of his follies or his crimes, who but sympathizes with the miseries of this ruined profligate brother? We forget the injuries ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... never encouraged me. 'Never encouraged him!' screamed out the old fury; 'didn't you encourage the wretch at Spa, during Sir Charles's own life? Didn't you marry a dependant of yours to one of this profligate's bankrupt cousins? When he set off for England, didn't you follow him like a mad woman the very next day? Didn't he take lodgings at your very door almost—and do you call this no encouragement? For shame, madam, shame! You might have married my son—my dear and noble George; but that ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... proper for a minister representing the moneyless and homeless saint of Jerusalem, to spend in various ways ten or twenty times the average income of an American citizen. But has any man a right to indulge in needless and therefore profligate expenditure for himself, while misery unrelieved surrounds him?[14] Could he, if he had an occasional throb of the sentiment of brotherhood, the divine love enforced by Jesus? Suffering, intense suffering of mind and body, is ever present in society, and we cannot ignore it or disregard it. Has ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... stage in 1847, her fortunes at Manchester and in London, her return to America, her public readings of Shakspeare here, her divorce, and the very curious and unexplained circumstance of her translation of a profligate French play, and disposal of it as a piece of her own original composition, are all matters of too late occurrence ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... better rank, avoid contracting marriage in the month of May, which genial season of flowers and breezes might, in other respects, appear so peculiarly favourable for that purpose. It was specially objected to the marriage of Mary with the profligate Earl of Bothwell, that the union was formed within this interdicted month. This prejudice was so rooted among the Scots that, in 1684, a set of enthusiasts, called Gibbites, proposed to renounce it, among a long list of stated festivals, fast-days, popish relics, not forgetting the profane names ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... of common-sense and common integrity can deny that Bunyan, the tinker of Elstow, was a practical atheist, a worthless contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate. Now be astonished, O heaven, to eternity; and wonder, O earth and hell, while time endures. Behold this very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness, holiness, truth, and love. See his polluted soul cleansed and adorned ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin

... masters or seniors who were kind to him, he loved with boyish ardour. And though the Doctor, when he did not know his Horace, or could not construe his Greek play, said that that boy Pendennis was a disgrace to the school, a candidate for ruin in this world, and perdition in the next; a profligate who would most likely bring his venerable father to ruin and his mother to a dishonoured grave, and the like—yet as the Doctor made use of these compliments to most of the boys in the place (which has ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... poem may be regarded as a sort of companion poem to 'The Palace of Art'; the one traces the effect of callous indulgence in mere intellectual and aesthetic pleasures, the other of profligate indulgence in the grosser forms of sensual enjoyment. At first all is ecstasy and intoxication, then comes satiety, and all that satiety brings in its train, cynicism, pessimism, the drying up of the very springs of life. ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... a little exertion, and not one which could be helped by a vain regret. For the loss of that old barbaric splendour and profuse luxury which her father mourned over, she had no regrets. She knew that these wasteful and profligate livers had done nothing for the people either in act or in example; that they were a selfish, worthless, self-indulgent race, caring for nothing but their pleasures, and making all their patriotism consist in ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... of Abdera, notwithstanding Democritus lived there, trying all the powers of irony and laughter to reclaim it, was the vilest and most profligate town in all Thrace. What for poisons, conspiracies, and assassinations,—libels, pasquinades, and tumults, there was no going there by day—'twas worse ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne

... impulsive a whole lot,' I argues onct when a profligate he's staked, an' who reports himse'f as jumpin' sideways for grub previous, goes careerin' over to the dance hall with them alms he's wrung, an' proceeds on a debauch. 'You oughter not allow them ornery folks to do you. If you'd cultivate the habit of lettin' every gent go a-foot till he can ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... letter, which had ensued when the Finches went to the Continent; and she thought Georgina deserved credit for not having again seen Mark, when, as it now appeared, there had lurked in her heart affection sufficient to induce her to bestow herself, and all her wealth, upon him, spendthrift and profligate as she must know him to be. Miserable must be her future life; and Theodora's heart ached as she thought of wretchedness unaided by that which can alone give support through the trials of life, and bring light out of darkness. ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... thus passed by the fair penitent in speaking to her Father Confessor with the utmost freedom on matters which would rank her among the most profligate and lost women, if it were only suspected by her friends and relatives. A single word of those intimate conversations would be followed by an act of divorce on the part of the husband, if it were ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy

... have been a scene of dissolute idleness into a hive of orderly industry. Newly-admitted prisoners were sometimes refractory, but her persistent gentleness eventually won their respect and co-operation. Men old in years and crime, pert London pickpockets, depraved boys and dissolute sailors, profligate women, smugglers, poachers, and the promiscuous horde of criminals which usually fill the gaol of a seaport and county town, all submitted to the benign influence of this good woman; and under her eyes they might be seen, for the first time in their lives, striving ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... friend, sir, must at least strip his proposals of their fine gilding. I will satisfy Mr. Mowbray of St. Ronan's of his false pretences, both to rank and fortune; and I rather think he will protect his sister against the claim of a needy profligate, though he might be dazzled with the alliance ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... middy, as with the sorrow or suffering of the roughest tar on board. He was a sincere Christian too, and, what was more, was not ashamed of his Christianity. He exhibited his principles in his practice—in the daily duties of life,—till he taught the most profane and profligate to respect him, if not to adopt them. I wish there were more Basil Vernons in the service. Thank Heaven! there are some shining lights to lighten us in our darkness—leaven, which gradually, though slowly, may, by God's providence, leaven ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... Remember that China is reduced to the expedient of throwing its children into the water, according to the accounts of travelers. Now this production of two children is really the whole of marriage. The superfluous pleasures of marriage are not only profligate, but involve an immense loss to the man, as I will now demonstrate. Compare then with this poverty of result, and shortness of duration, the daily and perpetual urgency of other needs of our existence. Nature reminds us every hour of our real needs; and, on the other hand, refuses absolutely ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac

... Massachusetts was not punished as might have been expected. Clarendon's power was gone, and he was an exile. A board of trade, projected in 1668, never assumed the administration of colonial affairs, and had not vitality enough to last more than three or four years. Profligate libertines gained the confidence of the king's mistresses, and secured places in the royal cabinet. While Charles II. was dallying with women and robbing the theatres of actresses; while the licentious Buckingham, who had succeeded ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick

... Hercules on the plains of Thessaly, the Poet means the Armies of Brutus, and Cassius, defeated by Augustus, almost in the same place, at the Battle of Philippi. He concludes also that by Hylaeus is meant Mark Antony, who assumed the name of Bacchus, and ruined himself by his profligate passion for Cleopatra. Another Commentator observes, that as the Giants, and Lapithae, are said to have made the Palace of Saturn shake, so also did Brutus, and Cassius, and afterwards Mark Antony, make all Italy tremble, and that it is Rome itself that Horace would have to ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward

... interpreter to beware of indulging his vain fancy by attempting to trace analogies in detail, where none are intended by the Holy Spirit. The true church of Christ is compared to a virtuous and fruitful woman, (ch. xii. 5;) and the apostate church is symbolized by a fruitful but profligate woman, (ch. xvii. 5.) Then both are also represented by two cities, which are equally contrasted. As the women differ in their outward adornment, (chs. xix. 8, xvii. 4,) so do the cities in the quality of population, commerce and employment, (ch. xviii. ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele

... sides we show are the sides seen by the world. There were people who could truly believe that Peter was a ward boss; a frequenter of saloons; a drunkard; a liar; a swearer; a murderer, in intention, if not in act; a profligate; and a compromiser of many of his own strongest principles. Yet there were people who could, say other things ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford

... and scrutinizing gaze; and then, shaking his head sternly, as if dissatisfied with the result of his observation, "This is no time of night, sirrah smith," he said, "for thee, or such as thou, to be abroad. Thy daily work done, thou shouldst be at home with thy wife and children, not seeking profligate adventures, or breeding foul sedition in the streets. Go home! go home! for shame on thee! thou art ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... principles may be more relaxed on some points than ours, but I doubt much whether a Frenchman would not be as much disgusted in England as an Englishman could possibly be in France; we call them a profligate race and condemn them in toto—something like Hudibras' ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... recompense, of service, or of gratitude. It is only in one way that I am able to heighten the gratification which must flow from reflection on your conduct:—by showing that the being whose life you have prolonged, though uneducated, ignorant, and poor, is not profligate and worthless, and will not dedicate that life which your bounty has given, to ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... makes it quite clear, if any evidence of that were necessary, that Anne had her brother in mind in writing the book. 'I could not be understood to suppose,' she says, 'that the proceedings of the unhappy scapegrace, with his few profligate companions I have here introduced, are a specimen of the common practices of society: the case is an extreme one, as I trusted none would fail to perceive; but I knew that such characters do exist, and if I have warned one rash ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... cause he has adopted, and to leave the effects of those arguments to the judgment of others. However useful this practice may be for the promotion of public justice, it is not without danger to the individual whose practice it becomes. It is apt to produce a profligate indifference to truth in higher occasions of life, where truth cannot for a moment be trifled with, much less callously trampled on, much less suddenly and totally yielded up to the basest of human motives. It is astonishing what unworthy and inadequate notions men are ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell

... it strongly. His mother, too, turned round and blamed him for it. Only the Sitt Hilda still was kind, comforting him in secret, till his love leapt up. And then came outer darkness. Iskender was a profligate, ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall

... retiring is foremost to glory in early depravity; he whose hand was ever ready to relieve the poor, while his heart sympathized in their sorrows, becomes the wanton spoiler and marauder for the sake of a bold vaunt; he who shrunk from the approach of profligate misleaders, now volunteers to harden new comers in the ways of sin. The youth who with noiseless step trod the courts of the Lord's house, and bent with lowly reverence in prayer, and listened with ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth

... Scott, the representative of Pickle in Scott's generation, was a Highlander, and Pickle was not only a traitor, a profligate, an oppressor of his tenantry, and a liar, but (according to Jacobite gossip which reached 'King James') a forger of the King's name! Moreover he was, in all probability, one fountain of that reproach, true or false, which still clings to the name ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang

... an aged peer. She was as pure and noble as she was fair and lovely. She was sought in marriage by many attractive suitors; but in vain, for she would not bestow her hand where she could not bestow her heart. Among the most persevering of these suitors was a profligate fortune-hunter, who, as the near relative of her late husband, had ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... dous, paints and pomades, moneylenders' circulars, belladonna and cantharides. But most astounding of all were the contents of the widows' prie-Dieu. In this devotional article of furniture were stored all the inmost secrets of her profligate career. Affectionate letters from the elderly gentleman on whom she had imposed a supposititious child lay side by side with a black-edged card, on which was written the last message of a young lover who had killed himself on her account. "Jeanne, in the flush of my youth I die because of you, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... at this riot. This is the sum of all my miseries, If he, even he, a sober, hopeful lad, May be seduc'd into debaucheries. —But where shall I inquire for him? I warrant They have decoy'd him into some vile brothel. That profligate persuaded him, I'm sure. —But here comes Syrus; he can tell me all. And yet this slave is of the gang; and if He once perceives that I'm inquiring for him, He'll never tell me any thing; a rogue! I'll not ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer

... these points, insisting that Burr was a man of extreme and irregular ambition, selfish to a degree which even excluded social affection, and decidedly profligate. He admitted that he was far more artful than wise, far more dexterous than able, but held that artfulness and dexterity were objections rather than recommendations, while he thought a systematic statesman should have a theory. "No general principles," he said, "will work ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... Oude, who now disturb the peace of the country; and I give a brief sketch of his history, as a specimen of the sufferings inflicted on the people by the wild licence which such landholders enjoy under the weak, profligate, ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman

... main, he called old-fashioned. I believed a laborer who was thrifty, efficient and industrious did not need a union to help him, arguing the union only helped the inefficient, lazy and profligate. ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... added to this injury, that of seducing their daughters, was wont to commit, to a carrier in the neighbourhood, the care of his illegitimate children, shortly after they were born. His emissary regularly carried them away, but they were never again heard of. The unjust and cruel gains of the profligate laird were dissipated by his extravagance, and the ruins of his house seem to bear witness to the truth of the rhythmical prophecies denounced against it, and still current among the peasantry. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... you persecute me?" said the old man, turning to his grandson. "Why do you bring your profligate companions here? I am poor. You have chosen your own path, follow it. Leave Nell and me to toil ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... sometimes redeem at low rates; and in other places have them for nothing. They are kept at perpetual labour, and are always chained, but with this difference, that their own natives are treated much worse than others; they are considered as more profligate than the rest, and since they could not be restrained by the advantages of so excellent an education, are judged worthy of harder usage. Another sort of slaves are the poor of the neighbouring countries, who offer of their ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... on him, for a moment, in speechless surprise; she looked back again at the bed. "Are you going to leave me by myself?" she asked wonderingly. Not the faintest suggestion of immodesty—nothing that the most profligate man living could have interpreted impurely—showed itself in her look or manner, as ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins

... private duties. Nor shall the faults of a few make impression upon me to the disadvantage of the order; for I am afraid a very censorious temper, in this respect, is too generally the indication of an uncharitable and perhaps a profligate heart, levelling characters, in order to cover some inward pride, or secret enormities, which they are ashamed to avow, and will not be ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... the result, for it seems that Miss Blandy's affection for this profligate man—almost double her age—was violent. As might be expected, Captain Cranstoun not only worked upon her feelings, but imposed on her credulity. He sent her from Scotland a pretended love powder, which he enjoined ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer

... thoughtless but affectionate and manly heart he bade the dark shadow of his spirit fall. "And, think not," he cried, "that you, Algernon Hurdlestone, shall triumph in my despair. That woman shall be mine, yet. Mine, though her brow has been polluted by your lips, and your profligate love has contaminated her for ever in my eyes. But I will bind you both with a chain, which shall render you my slaves for ever." Then, rising from the ground, he left the spot which had witnessed the only tender emotion he had ever felt, with ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie

... himself with plunder, the Pope being attended by the whole College of Cardinals with all their luxurious equipage. For it could not be supposed that he was withheld by any promptings of goodness or scruples of conscience; because in the breast of a profligate living in incest with his sister, and who to obtain the princedom had put his nephews and kinsmen to death, no virtuous impulse could prevail. So that the only inference to be drawn was, that men know not how to be splendidly wicked or wholly good, and shrink ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli

... weak, the profligate, the daring. There is old age, watching the play, with its voice like a baby's cry; and the paper whereon it keeps tremulous tally swimming upon eyes of ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... conveying to Sir Thomas Charleys my conviction,—my well-grounded conviction,—as to the gentleman's conduct. What I said to him I will say aloud to the whole county. It is notorious that the Vicar of Bullhampton is in the habit of visiting a profligate young woman in a low part of the city. That I say is disgraceful to him, to his cloth, and to the parish, and I shall give my opinion to the bishop to that effect. Who are you, sir, that you should question my words?" And again the Marquis ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... powerfully upon the thought and feeling of his contemporaries, he was himself, after all, but a sort of quintessence of them, and gave them back only an intensified, individual extract of themselves. The selfish vanity and profligate vice which he combined with his extraordinary intellectual gifts were as peculiar to himself as his great mental endowments; and though fools may have followed the fashion of his follies, the heart of all Europe was not stirred by a fashion of which he set the example, but by a passion ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... this girl}. This sorrow {still} remains for unhappy me, should {AEschinus} be able to seduce him, even him, who promises so fair, to a course of debauchery. Where am I to inquire for him? I doubt he has been carried off to some bad house; that profligate has persuaded him, I'm quite sure. But look— I see Syrus coming {this way}, I shall now know from him where he is. But, i'faith, he is one of the gang; if he perceives that I am looking for him, the rascal will never tell me. I'll not let him ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence

... John Underhill, whose unctuous piety and profligate life have an important place in Winthrop and other New England historians. With Captain John Mason he had the leading part in the crushing of the Pequots in 1637. Banished from Massachusetts and restored, this amusing reprobate had gone to the Dutch, "having good ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various

... three felt sure of catching him. And first, among the small folk under their protection, they stirred up two good souls to declare that they could no longer keep as vicar a profligate, a wizard, a devil, a freethinker, who bent one knee in church instead of two, who scoffed at rules and granted dispensations contrary to the rights of the Bishop. A shrewd accusation, which turned against him his natural ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... as in other parts of his early letters, that sort of display and boast of rakishness which is but too common a folly at this period of life, when the young aspirant to manhood persuades himself that to be profligate is to be manly. Unluckily, this boyish desire of being thought worse than he really was, remained with Lord Byron, as did some other feelings and foibles of his boyhood, long after the period when, with ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore

... all. Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous ambition is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they partake with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... particular, which were founded upon the ruins of the Roman empire, the administration of justice appears for a long time to have been extremely corrupt; far from being quite equal and impartial, even under the best monarchs, and altogether profligate under the worst. ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... her heart in order that she might give herself to him. She had married him for position and fortune; and now by his follies, by his extravagance, and by that greed of gold which is inevitable in the spendthrift and profligate, he had gone near to cheat her out of both name and fortune. Yet she so commanded herself as to receive him with a friendly air when he arrived at the Dolphin, on a dull grey autumn afternoon, after she had waited for him ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... opportunity. Divide wisely and equitably between the few who are most nearly of your own blood, and the many who in kinship are only a little farther removed. If you regard only those reared under your own roof, your cherished estate will soon be scattered, perhaps wasted by profligate heirs in riotous living, to their own ruin, and you and your fortune will quickly be forgotten. Give a share—pay a tithe to your more distant and more numerous kindred—to the general public, and you will be gratefully remembered, and mankind ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard

... aspect under which he will treat them. Obviously in many cases there are noble themes of art for whose appreciation no particular delicacy of moral or religious taste is required. There is no reason why such a subject as the Laocoon should make a different impression on a saint and on a profligate. It appeals to the tragic sense, which may be as highly developed in one as in the other. But if the Annunciation be the theme, we can well understand how differently it will impress a man of lively and cultured faith, a contemplative and mystic, with an appreciative and ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... that period of time mankind were more profligate than usual, or whether there was a more than ordinary demand for men in his majesty's colonies, cannot by us be determined. Mr. Carew was not, as is most commonly the case, deserted by his friends in adversity, for ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown

... the sap of life in their members. In France not even the judiciary, usually the last to part from its ancient roots, was sound and quick. 'The administration of justice,' says Arthur Young, 'was partial, venal, infamous. The conduct of the parliament was profligate and atrocious. The bigotry, ignorance, false principles, and tyranny of these bodies were generally conspicuous.'[7] We know what the court was, we know what the noblesse was, and this is what the third great leading order in the realm was. We repeat, then, that the historic doctrine could ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley

... to serve their lusts? To call him the Moses, the Man of God, the Joshua, the Saviour of Israel; and after all this, to treat the Thing his son with addresses no lesse then blasphemous, whose Father (as themselves confess to be the most infamous Hypocrite and profligate Atheist of all the Usurpers that ever any age produc'd) had made them his Vassalls, and would have intaild them so ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn

... piece of gossip believe it implicitly; it does not appear to me either amusing, or credible, or creditable to the man who retailed it. The Florentine society of the early years of this century was, if we may trust the keen observation of Stendhal, almost as naively and openly profligate as that of a South Sea Island village; and such a society, which could talk of the things and in the way which it did, which could permit certain poetical compositions (found highly characteristic by Stendhal) to be publicly performed before the ladies and gentlemen celebrated therein, such ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... on their lots, often situated many miles in the backwoods, and in distant and unsettled townships, presenting great obstacles to the poor emigrant, which it requires more energy and courage to encounter than is possessed by a vast number of them. Others, of idle and profligate habits, spend the money they received, and sell the land, for which they gave away their pensions, after which they remain miserable squatters on the ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill

... Middle Ages, there existed as a rule only a holy, but indifferent and utterly unlyrical, love for the women, the equals of their husbands, wooed usually of the family and solemnly given in marriage without much consultation of their wishes; and a highly passionate and singing, but completely profligate and debasing, desire for mercenary though cultivated creatures like the Delias and Cynthlas of Tibullus and Propertius, or highborn women, descended, like Catullus' Lesbia, in brazen dishonour to their level, women towards whom there could not possibly ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee

... observation, that those who receive a large legacy and have been brought up in idleness, become prodigal in their expenditure, and squander their fortune by dissipation more rapidly than their parents amassed it by industry and frugality; and then, ignorant and helpless and profligate, they eke out a wretched existence in abject poverty, resorting to illegitimate means for a living, until the last fruits of their improper training may be seen in the state's prison or ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... children as did this unlettered Gipsy. After having promised that the morals of the child should be watched over, she was confided to his care. And the author has known a Gipsy parent correct with stripes a grown daughter, for mentioning what a profligate person had talked about. ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb

... plunged into debts and obligations—it requires both courage and virtuous determination to meet and discharge them. It requires a terrible effort to free one's self from evil companions, whose interest it is, that you should still remain as profligate as themselves. But I was resolved; and, thanks to the counsels of my Mary, I succeeded ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... confuse the situation, there occurred at this time the contest of John Wilkes, backed by the London mob, against the Grafton Ministry. This demagogue, able {45} and profligate, had already come into conflict with the Grenville Ministry in 1765, and had been driven into exile. Now, in 1768, he returned and was repeatedly elected to the Commons, and as often unseated by the vindictive ministerial majority. Riots and bloodshed accompanied the ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith

... saves twice as much as he ought, receiving where he ought not and not spending where he ought, will be at least twice as rich as he who makes money where he ought, and spends where he ought. On the other hand, an utterly bad man is generally profligate and poor, while he who acquires honestly, and spends what he acquires on noble objects, can hardly be very rich. A very rich man is therefore not a good man, and therefore not a happy one. But the object of ...
— Laws • Plato

... was increased by the timely publication of a Hymn to the Pillory, in which Defoe boldly declared the iniquity of his sentence, and pointed out to the Government more proper objects of their severity. Atheists ought to stand there, he said, profligate beaux, swindling stock-jobbers, fanatic Jacobites, and the commanders who had brought the English fleet into disgrace. As for him, his only fault lay in his not being understood; but he was perhaps justly punished for being such a fool as to trust ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto

... crimes and frauds. The conflict between the Mormons and the Missourians resulted in the migration of the former to Nauvoo in Illinois, where a community was organized in which Smith exercised supreme power. In 1843 Smith, who was as profligate as he was knavish, professed to receive a revelation sanctioning polygamy. His bad conduct, and that of his adherents, brought on a conflict with the civil authorities. Smith, with his brother, was killed in the jail ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... the work of devastation in Duke Street and Warwick Street at night, were, in the mass, the same. Allowing for the chance accessions of which any crowd is morally sure in a town where there must always be a large number of idle and profligate persons, one and the same mob was at both places. Yet they spread themselves in various directions when they dispersed in the afternoon, made no appointment for reassembling, had no definite purpose or design, and indeed, for anything they knew, were ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens

... Egbert had opportunities of displaying his natural and acquired talents. Brithric, King of Wessex, had married Eadburga, natural daughter of Offa, King of Mercia, a profligate woman, equally infamous for cruelty and for incontinence. Having great influence over her husband, she often instigated him to destroy such of the nobility as were obnoxious to her; and where this expedient failed, she scrupled not being herself active in traitorous attempts against ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... 1621, was succeeded by his son Philip IV. As in the reign of his father worthless favorites ruled, while a profligate king squandered the money of the people in lavish entertainments and luxuries. Much has been written about the visit of Charles, Prince of Wales (afterward Charles I.), accompanied by the Duke of Buckingham, at his court; whither the young Prince had ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele

... Very few men of profligate lives escape these diseases. They are alarmingly prevalent among the 'fast' youths of our cities. And some forms of them are incurable by any effort of skill. Even the approach of such men ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... where spread abroad with all alacrity of triumph, and had induced many of the inhabitants of the country, who had fled before the fury of the Wolf of Plinlimmon, to return to their desolate habitations. Numbers also of the loose and profligate characters which abound in a country subject to the frequent changes of war, had flocked thither in quest of spoil, or to gratify a spirit of restless curiosity. The Jew and the Lombard, despising danger where there was a chance of ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... said of one of the most gifted women who ever trod American soil,— she being of English birth,—that, before she obtained the divorce which separated her from her profligate husband, she once went for counsel to the wife of her pastor. She unrolled before her the long catalogue of merciless outrages to which she had been subject, endangering finally her health, her life, and that of her children born and to be born. When she turned at last for advice to her confessor, ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... a most profligate and abandoned life, whose praying mother followed him like a shadow into and out of his drinking saloons and gambling houses, at last absented himself from home, whenever he was in port. Her burden, ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various

... distinguished the name of Pandaenus joined with his own; and having heard the particulars of the story, had no difficulty in understanding that Milza was directed to apply to them for assistance. He readily promised to intercede with his profligate kinsman, and immediately sent messengers in search ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child

... guileful betrayer! Hadst thou not seemed beyond the possibility of forgiveness, I might have been induced to think of taking a wretched chance with a man so profligate. But it would be criminal to bind my soul in covenant to a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various

... hostile; and while the one was detained in Italy by insurrection against his authority, the other was plunged in luxury and dissipation, enjoying the first delights of a lawless passion, at the Egyptian capital. The nations of the East were, moreover, alienated by the recent exactions of the profligate Triumvir, who, to reward his parasites and favorites, had laid upon them a burden that they were scarcely able to bear. Further, the Parthians enjoyed at this time the advantage of having a Roman officer of good position in ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson

... time when the stage was so profligate that the Puritans were justified in tabooing it altogether. But that is not now the case. There are many theatres where plays are given that are not only pure in tone, but exert a refining and educating influence on all who hear them. And as for operas, there is hardly ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck

... very particular to do, he strolled in the direction of her lodging, and saw Gibbie go into the house. Having seen him in, he was next seized with the desire to see him out again; having lain in wait for him as a beneficent brownie, he must now watch him as a profligate baronet forsooth! To haunt the low street until he should issue was a dreary prospect—in the east wind of a March night, which some giant up above seemed sowing with great handfuls of rain-seed; but having made up his mind, he stood his ground. For two hours he ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... Osborne. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had said, that he did not wish to see the State become a great money lender; in reply to which Mr. Osborne expressed the opinion, that it would be much better for the State to become a great money lender than to continue a profligate spendthrift—dissipating the funds of the country on the highways of Ireland. "Had not," he asked, "the policy of the State always been to become a great money lender? Since the Union L18,000,000 of money had been lent to England and Scotland, of which L6,000,000 had been repaid, whilst ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... workwomen there (erased, and replaced by: "To the shoemaker, Anna Loder, in Vienna"),........200 Should she presume to make any written claims, I declare them to be null and void, having already paid for her and her profligate husband, Joseph Lungmayer, more than ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden

... and irresponsible officers were in command. It was then learned that a great part of the time the Emperor was either drunk or doped, that the Empress was hysterical and on the verge of a mental breakdown, and that they were assisted by senile Sturmer, mentally unbalanced Protopopov, and profligate Rasputin, none of whom could read a compass nor lay out a course and steered the ship as they willed. All the passengers, first, second, and third class, grand dukes, intelligentsia, and laborers saw the danger and shouted warning but the officers neither saw nor heard. In order to save themselves ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,

... whose possibly suspicious readiness to attack the vices of others with a view to diverting attention from his own was signally exemplified in the well-known fact that, even while putting on a feint of respect and tenderness for his memory, he had exposed the profligate haunts and habits of Christopher Marlowe under the transparent pseudonym of Christopher Sly. To the first of these plays attention had long since been drawn by a person of whom it was only necessary to say that he had devoted a long life to the study and illustration ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... lively picture of the gayest and most profligate periods of the history of the English Court. The writer, Sir Ralph Esher, is an adventurer in the Court of our Second Charles, where he is introduced by luckily securing a feather that escapes from the hat of one of the ladies of the Court on horseback. The work opens ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various

... examination. But the moment I entered Halle, the university town, all my resolutions came to nothing.—Being now more than ever my own master, and without any control as long as I did not fight a duel, molest the people in the streets, &c., I renewed my profligate life afresh, though now a student of divinity. When my money was spent, I pawned my watch and a part of my linen and clothes, or borrowed in other ways. Yet in the midst of it all I had a desire to renounce this wretched life, for I had no enjoyment ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller

... charity are not simply the offspring of deceased parents, but such other children, also, as have been left unprovided for, by the desertion of those whose duty it was to foster them, or from the circumstance of their being found to be worthless and profligate characters, or by their having betrayed a carelessness and indifference as to the moral improvement of their children; where such a disposition displayed itself, the offspring were taken from them, and their subsequent ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann

... the three reprobates, as I justly call them, though they were much civilized by their new settlement compared to what they were before, and were not so quarrelsome, having not the same opportunity, yet one of the certain companions of a profligate mind never left them, and that was their idleness. It is true, they planted corn and made fences; but Solomon's words were never better verified than in them: "I went by the vineyard of the slothful, and it was overgrown ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... vicious and profligate manners are now as much noted for their piety and good order. Drunkards, profane swearers, liars, quarrelsome persons, etc., are remarkably reformed.... A number of families who had lived apparently without the fear of God, in folly ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... him the profligate nobles and the criminals who had nothing to lose and every thing to gain by revolution, Catiline plotted to murder the consuls and seize the government; but his attempt was foiled, and he waited for a more favorable opportunity. Two years later he was defeated by Cicero as candidate for the ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman

... to whose standard they flocked was, for all his sweet and taking manners, but a profligate at best; he had no true religion in his heart—nothing but a desire, indeed, for his own aggrandisement, whatever he might say to the unhappy maid that handed a Bible to him at Taunton. But of this the people were ignorant, and so it came to pass that they ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various

... with great ardour in a new poem, called by him, the Progress of a Divine; in which he conducts a profligate priest, by all the gradations of wickedness, from a poor curacy in the country to the highest preferments of the church; and describes, with that humour which was natural to him, and that knowledge which was extended to all the diversities of human life, his behaviour in every station; and insinuates, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... in me, and allow me to withdraw her from a scene which her wild grief so unpleasantly interrupted; for I thought that were I then and there to announce myself as her brother, she might not believe me—she might suspect some treachery or snare in a city so notoriously profligate as Florence. But the subsequent explanations which took place between us cleared up ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... the danger of its example. Nor have I the confidence to petition for impunity; but humbly hope, that publick security may be established, without the spectacle of a clergyman dragged through the streets, to a death of infamy, amidst the derision of the profligate and profane; and that justice may be satisfied with irrevocable exile, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... suggestions which stimulated discussions; it was she, oftenest, who kept in view the fact that a good many women in the past had been entrusted with power and had not always used it amiably, who brought up the wicked queens, the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very satisfactorily classified. If the influence of women in the past accounted for every ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James

... rather wise. For those who are little thought of by the wise, seem to hit the taste of the vulgar."[17] And I have myself noticed that those who practise to speak acceptably and to the gratification of the masses promiscuously, for the most part become also profligate and lovers of pleasure in their lives. Naturally enough. For if in giving pleasure to others they neglect the noble, they would be hardly likely to put the lofty and sound above a life of luxury and pleasure, and to prefer moderation to ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... Quakers, many of the charges made against them, as connected with the Ranters. He was a man of great talent—fearless, devoted, and pious. He became extensively useful; and like thousands of most excellent men, was sacrificed at the shrine of that fanatical church over which the profligate and debauched Charles the Second was the supreme head. He died in the prime of life, receiving the crown of martyrdom, when his happy spirit ascended from Newgate in 1662: aged ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... him for submitting to such treatment, and imprisoned him for trying to run away from it. He came at last out of purgatory; and Europe felt him to her farthest bounds. This bookish, philosophizing, verse-making cynic and profligate was soon to approve himself the first warrior of his time, and one of the first ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... named William Carmichael, formerly a bailie of Edinburgh, was one of Sharp's favourites, and one of his numerous commissioners for suppressing conventicles in Fife. He was a licentious profligate, greedy of money, and capable of undertaking any job, however vile. This man's enormities were at last so unbearable that he became an object of general detestation, and his excessive exactions had ruined so many respectable ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne

... G.F. has entered upon a pretty minute account of this strange society, and does his best to palliate the enormities of which, there seems no reason to doubt, its really profligate members are almost habitually guilty. That gentleman is certainly liberal in his views of the natives in general, and on the whole appears disposed to give more credit to human nature than, perhaps, it will be found on the closest inspection to deserve. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... it. Governors nowadays get so dreadfully conceited and dictatorial—they know best—and they will have this—and they won't have that. It's no joke to be a son, I can tell you.—'Latchkey, sir! only let me hear of your daring to introduce that profligate modern invention into my house, and I'll cut you off with ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... equalled this author. But he could not shape out the image of a perfect gentleman, or of that winning gaiety of soul, which may indeed be exemplified, but can never be defined, and never be resisted. His profligate is a man without taste; and his coquettes are insolent and profoundly revolting. He has no resemblance of the art, so conspicuous in Fletcher and Farquhar, of presenting to the reader or spectator an hilarity, bubbling and spreading forth from a perennial spring, which we love as surely as we ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... gave him the command of the fleet, and made him, next to his brother, the most powerful and important personage in the realm. He had, besides, as has already been stated, the custody and care of Elizabeth, who lived in his house; though, as he was a profligate and unprincipled man, this position for the princess, now fast growing up to womanhood, was considered by many persons as of doubtful propriety. Still, she was at present only fourteen years old. There was another young lady likewise in his family, a niece of King Henry, and, ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... be a piker, Bill," he said, with the air of a profligate young millionaire escapading in the columns of the press. "You can't go to parties and things ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen

... courtiers and favorites staked fortunes at the gaming tables, outran each other in devising costly dresses, contrived novel equipages and unique dwellings. In his superb Court he found all the elements required to satisfy his pride, and glorify his reign. The Sun King was the most profligate host in all history. Determined to outdo the fabulous luxury of the feasts of Lucullus in early Roman times, and to outshine the storied splendor of Oriental princes, he entertained his Court and guests with lavish liberality, ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne

... century, says that "soon after the wedding day the newly-married wife sets herself about spinning her winding sheet, and a husband that shall sell or pawn it is esteemed among all men one of the most profligate." And Dr. Jamieson says—"When a woman of the lower class in Scotland, however poor, or whether married or single, commences housekeeping, her first care, after what is absolutely necessary for the time, is to provide ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier

... rivals. It was in vain that poor Lady Lyndon pleaded her entire innocence and vowed she had never encouraged me. 'Never encouraged him!' screamed out the old fury; 'didn't you encourage the wretch at Spa, during Sir Charles's own life? Didn't you marry a dependant of yours to one of this profligate's bankrupt cousins? When he set off for England, didn't you follow him like a mad woman the very next day? Didn't he take lodgings at your very door almost—and do you call this no encouragement? For shame, madam, ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... up and ennobling human destiny in the future, and he should therefore 'speak them in words hard as rocks,' regardless of the contumely heaped upon him by little minds for having thus spoken them. What if the ridicule, the denunciations of the unthinking, the sensual, the profligate, the unreflecting fools of the world be poured upon him? What of that? To-day, may be one of darkness and storm. The cloud and the storm will pass away, and the brightness and glory of the sunlight will be all over the earth to-morrow. Let him 'speak ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond

... tact and mildness, however, Mary won the respect of the nobles and the admiration of the people, until a series of marital troubles and blunders—her marriage with a worthless cousin, Henry Darnley, and then her scandalous marriage with Darnley's profligate murderer, the earl of Bothwell—alienated her people from her and drove her into exile. She abdicated the throne of Scotland in favor of her infant son, James VI, who was reared a Protestant and subsequently became ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... offices, one man being often in receipt of the salaries of several offices, though performing the duties of none—the fact that Ministers have maintained majorities by unblushing bribery in elections—that hardly one man in two hundred is an elector—the profligate arts of corruption by which every able man is bought by the Court—the disgraceful censorship of the press and the drama—the enormous appropriations for the civil list, wrung out by grinding taxes from the toil and sweat of millions—the absurd assumption, yet the monstrous power, over the press ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg

... hands of persons of understanding and integrity, that will suffer no man to be falsely accused or defamed; nor the lives of any to be put in jeopardy, by the malicious conspiracies of great or small, or the perjuries of any profligate wretches. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... devout, seated before the tent of the preacher, in the sunny hours of June, listening to his eloquence, or partaking of the mystic bread and wine; but in these our latter days, when discipline is relaxed, along with the sedate and the pious come swarms of the idle and the profligate, whom no eloquence can edify and no solemn rite affect. On these, and such as these, the poet has poured his satire; and since this desirable reprehension the Holy Fairs, east as well as west, have become more decorous, if ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... age, in a nation marked for its degeneracy; nursed and reared in a church, as profligate as the world in which it was embedded; persecuted at every step of her career; groping as she did in spiritual desolation and ignorance, nevertheless, she arose to the highest pinnacle of pre-eminence ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon

... my daily visits to Hanaruro, that the Wahuaners had lost the simplicity and innocence of character which formerly distinguished them. The profligate habits of the settlers of all nations among them, and of the numerous foreign sailors with whom they constantly associate, have most prejudicially affected their morals. Fraud, theft, and burglary, never heard ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

... renounced the worship of the living God, "the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity," it was only a little time till she descended to degrading idolatry, by the worship of the Goddess of Reason, in the person of a profligate woman. And this in the representative assembly of the nation, and by its highest civil and legislative authorities! Says the historian: "One of the ceremonies of this insane time stands unrivaled for absurdity combined with impiety. The doors of the Convention were thrown ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... did ever hate your sanctimonious Banbury-men); but he has a Proper Sense of what is due to the Honour and Figure of his family, and refrains from soiling his hands with bales of dice and worse implements among the profligate crew to be met with, not alone at Newmarket, or at the "Dog and Duck," or "Hockley Hole," but in Pall-Mall, and in the very ante-chambers of St. James's, no cater-cousin of the Groom-Porter he. He rides his hackney, as a gentleman should, nor have I prohibited ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... supper—a cold fowl and a bottle of Burgundy—a profligate supper, fit for such abandoned characters; and over it you shall tell me how the world looked to you when ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... field of work, where the streets were full of misery and the slum life rampant. A few short blocks away was another world—a world of palaces. Jim had never before seen massed misery; he had never before seen profligate luxury, and the shock of contrast brought to him the sudden, overwhelming thought: "These people don't want preaching, they want fair play. This is not a religious question, it is an economic question." And in a flash: "The religious ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton

... apply his mind to great things, he must first perfect his character by simplicity's stern law; he must care naught for the haughty frown of the fierce tyrant that lords it in his palace, nor seek client-like for invitations to the board of the profligate, nor deliver himself over to the company of debauchees and drown the fire of his understanding in wine, nor sit in the theatre the hired applauder of the mouthing actor. But whether the citadel of panoplied Minerva allure him with its smile, or the land where ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... children, and forcing their inclinations in marriage; and in the second part, we see a fine example of the pernicious effects of a young lady's reposing confidence or engaging in correspondence with a man of profligate and debauched principles. I do not at present recollect any composition which, view'd in this light, can be compared with the Iliad and Clarissa. The morals of the first are of the utmost importance in public life, and those of the last in private life. If the little states and republicks of Greece, ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous









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