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More "Ruinous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the whole world have, in our day, been more or less opened to the ruinous character of the drink traffic, and The General and his forces, whilst keeping out of the political arena, have mightily helped the agitations that have ended in the exclusion of the drink traffic altogether from many states and cities, and ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... Then treasure is abused When misers keep it; being put to loan, In time it will return us two for one. Rich robes themselves and others do adorn; Neither themselves nor others, if not worn. Who builds a palace and rams up the gate Shall see it ruinous and desolate. Ah, simple Hero, learn thyself to cherish. Lone women like to empty houses perish. Less sins the poor rich man that starves himself In heaping up a mass of drossy pelf, Than such as you. His ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... my sixty-seven newspapers—and they the most important—notified me that they would no longer carry out their contracts to publish my daily letter. They gave as their reason, not the real one, fear of "The Seven," but fear that I would involve them in ruinous libel suits. I who had legal proof for every statement I made; I who was always careful to understate! Next, one press association after another ceased to send out my letter as news, though they had been doing so regularly for months. The public ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... won several victories on the frontier. But on the sea, the struggle was less successful for Louis, and a French expedition to Ireland in favor of James II proved disastrous. After many years of strife, ruinous to all the combatants, the Grand Monarch ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... go with me, but, poor old fellow, he has ruinous ideas about prices and quantities, and besides, now he is so hard worked-up and down all day—he wants a little more of ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ritualism of Laud on the one hand, the Puritan movement on the other, each in some measure a protest against this state of things, were at fierce variance with each other, and Milton's ear, from his youth upward, was "pealed with noises loud and ruinous." The age of Shakespeare was irrecoverably past, and it was impossible for any but a few imperturbable Cyrenaics, like Herrick, to "fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world." The large indifference ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... to think of one," continued Hiram, "and whenever I thought I'd found one, I'd see, on looking at all the facts, that it only seemed to be so. And I recalled nearly a hundred instances right here in Saint X where big inheritances or little had been ruinous." ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... of Stuart, to whom, indeed, the imbecility of the King and the ill regulated habits of Rothsay left no other choice of a leader. Were I, therefore, to break the bond which I have so lately formed with Albany, the consequence must be civil war, an event ruinous to poor Scotland while threatened by invasion from the activity of the Percy, backed by the treachery of March. No, Balveny, the punishment of Albany must rest with Heaven, which, in its own good time, will execute judgment on him ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... disappointment at seeing you earlier. So I thinks to myself, thinks I, now what is there that Leah would like? It must be something appropriate, of course, and it mustn't be of any value, because I can't afford it. It's a ruinous business getting engaged; the worst bit of business I ever did in all my born days." Here Sam winked facetiously at the company. "And I thought and thought of what was the cheapest thing I could get out of it with, and lo and behold I ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... put all your fortune on a game of cards. And you are not the only one to play; you have associates who may be much cleverer than you. Give your ball, remodel the house, spend ten thousand francs if you like,—it is useless but not ruinous. As to your speculations near the Madeleine, I formally object. You are perfumer: be a perfumer, and not a speculator in land. We women have instincts which do not deceive us. I have warned you; now follow your own lead. You have been judge in the department of commerce, you know ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... he passed daily with ease to his chambers, dedicated to business and study. His friends he enjoyed at home, and politic ones often found him out at his chambers." He rebuilt Serjeants' Inn Hall, which had become poor and ruinous, and improved all the dwellings in Chancery Lane from Jackanapes Alley down to Fleet Street. He also drained the street for the first time, and had a rate levied on the unwilling inhabitants, after which his at first reluctant neighbours thanked him warmly. This same Lord ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... part of the house where her presence might at all events be less certainly expected than where she was. Accordingly she was soon wending among all the intricacies and solemn grandeur of a huge and half-ruinous hotel. Descending, at last, a turret stair, she came to a small stone chamber, in which was a little grated window. Standing upon a block of stone, she looked through the strong bars of this little aperture, and perceived that it ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone by, the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to care for the converted savage. The church is roofless and ruinous, sea-breezes and sea-fogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily widening the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of missionary architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to preservation ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by the cultivation of the earth is in a very different situation. The husbandman is bound to the soil on which he labours. A long campaign would be ruinous to him. Still his pursuits are such as give to his frame both the active and the passive strength necessary to a soldier. Nor do they, at least in the infancy of agricultural science, demand his uninterrupted ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... hearing yesterday in the | |Government's suit to dissolve the | |Standard Oil Company ended with a | |dramatic incident. Mr. Kellogg sought to | |show that the Standard compelled a widow, | |Mrs. Jones, of Mobile, Ala., to sell out | |her little oil business at a ruinous | |sacrifice.—New York ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... parts that are absolutely ruinous: the walls battered by the Parliament artillery had better remain as they are, I suppose. But we have begun wrong; it is I who should ask you, not you me.... I fear,' she went on, in that low note which was somewhat difficult to catch at a distance, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... acquired; and the rest and greater portion, for the spoil and plunder of which they had a prospect. The armaments, fitted in no fewer than nine successive efforts, were mostly equipped with such haste and ignorance, and with so little choice, that ruinous delays, shipwrecks, and final discomfiture, were naturally to be expected. Still, the effect of such incredible numbers of people betaking themselves to foreign countries, advanced civilization, although vast means of forwarding its cause were buried ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... seeking to soften or remove, used his utmost endeavours to strengthen and encrease them, by artfully retracing her former way of life, and pointing out with added censures the change in it she had been lately compelled to make: "a change," he continued, "which though ruinous of your time, and detrimental to your happiness, use will, I fear, familiarize, and ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... outright, even at a high price," thought he; "but after the Signor repeated to me that disgusting talk of Bruteman's, there could be no mistake that he had his eye fixed upon them; and it would have been ruinous to enter into competition with such a wealthy roue as he is. He values money no more than pebble-stones, when he is in pursuit of such game. But though I have removed them from his grasp for the present, I can feel ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... very quiet that night, and very dark. The few loiterers who observed the procession must have shrugged their shoulders and turned aside, zealous only to keep out of trouble. Such sights were not uncommon in the Savoy. They entered a high ruinous house on the east side, and after threading various passages reached a door which opened on a flight of broken steps where it was hard for more than one to pass at a time. Lovel heard the carriers of the dead grunting as they squeezed up with their burden. At ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... generated by the insects. One very cold winter I wrapped up one of my hives with a shawl. Before long I noticed that the shawl was beginning to have a very torn and tattered appearance. On examination, I found that a native mouse had established itself in the top of the hive, and had levied a ruinous tax upon the shawl to make itself a nest. Never was a fabric more completely reduced into its original elements than were large sections of that shawl. It was a masterly piece of analysis. The work of the wheel and the loom was exactly reversed, and what was once shawl ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... entitled to free quarters in the Abbey. During Byron's brief tenure of Newstead, and for long years before, these "huge halls, long galleries, and spacious chambers" (stanza lxxvii. line 1) were half dismantled, and in a more or less ruinous condition. A few pictures remained on the walls of the Great Drawing-room, of the Prior's Parlour, and in the apartments of the south-east wing or annexe, which dates from the seventeenth century (see the account of a visit to Newstead in 1812, in Beauties of England and Wales, 1813, xii. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... heard of Annesley Hall, it was ruinous and desolate, and we knew not in what condition it might now be found. Passing through an avenue of ancient oaks, the road winds down to an old picturesque gate-house, and, leaving the carriage, we walked onward. Looking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... an exception to the beneficial law of migration, for habits of intemperance account for the short lives of these immigrants; and though their offspring is abundant, yet it is all tainted with an inheritance of disease, and too many of the children suffer the ruinous consequences of having drawn "still slops" from a mother's breast in infancy. For physically, and in the chain of generation, most truly are the sins of the fathers visited upon the children to the third and ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... another mother. The quarrels to which this stipulation gave rise led to the conquest of the country by the Marathas, at whose hands Mewar suffered more cruel devastation than it had ever been subjected to by the Muhammadans. Ruinous war also ensued between Jodhpur and Jaipur for the hand of the famous Udaipur princess Kishen Kumari at the time when Rajputana was being devastated by the Marathas and Pindaris; and the quarrel was only settled by ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... appearance at Aix-la-Chapelle it broke out at Cologne, and about the same time at Metz, the streets of which were said to have been filled with 1100 dancers. This rich city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder. Peasants left their plows, mechanics their shops, servants their masters, children their homes; and beggars and idle vagabonds, who understood how to imitate the convulsions, roved from place to place, inducing all sorts of crime and vice among the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... had steamed up from the foul marshes of the world, before man was at home in it, or yet acquainted with the beneficent laws of Nature. It was not merely a hopeless task to pray to a power which could not be entreated, because it did not exist; to believe in what was not, must be ruinous to the nature that so believed! He would give the lie no quarter! The best thing to do for his fellow, the first thing to be done before anything else could be done, was to deliver him from this dragon called ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... she came to Ullathorne, and when could she have a better opportunity of completing it? She had had almost enough of Mr. Slope, though she could not quite resist the fun of driving a very sanctimonious clergyman to madness by a desperate and ruinous passion. Mr. Thorne had fallen too easily to give much pleasure in the chase. His position as a man of wealth might make his alliance of value, but as a lover he was very second-rate. We may say that she regarded ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... distresses,—from distresses which we have stated, and which Mr. Hastings has not only fully admitted, but has himself proved in the clearest manner to your Lordships. The first was by taking away that wicked rabble, the British troops, represented by Mr. Hastings as totally ruinous to the Nabob's affairs, and particularly by removing that part of them which was called the new brigade. Another remedial part of the treaty regarded the British pensioners. It is in proof before your Lordships that Mr. Hastings agreed to recall ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... The ruinous old meeting-house was never so radiant with station and gentility as on that morning. A June sun shone brightly; the sea sparkled with a thousand little eyes; the birds sang all along the way; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... time of scarcity. The working people might not eat and drink of the good things they had helped to store away. Tears rose in the eyes of needy children, of old or weak people like children, as they woke up again and again to sunless, frost-bound, ruinous mornings; and the little hungry creatures went prowling after scattered hedge-nuts ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... accurate part of political philosophy; and yet, by the help of what has been laid down, I think we may travel back to a sort of 'pre-economic age,' when the very assumptions of political economy did not exist, when its precepts would have been ruinous, and when the very contrary precepts ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... asked, told them, that a ruinous turret, lang disused, next to the clock-house, only accessible by a ladder, for the opening was on the outside, and far above the battlements, was called ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... that he had hitherto accomplished, was compelled either to desist for want of ready money, and throw his labourers on the parish, or to have recourse to the pernicious system of discounting bills at a ruinous rate of interest. The manufacturer, in despair, was reduced to close his works, and the operatives went forth to combine, or starve, or burn; for the hand of the ministry was upon them likewise, and their burden was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... with each fresh debasement, passed out of the country or at any rate out of circulation, the base coins becoming the medium of exchange. Thus the foundations of commercial stability were sapped, while foreign trading operations were thrown into desperate and ruinous confusion. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... your principal, and you none the wiser until the crash. But here the difference ceases. For if little or no vital interest comes in, your generous scale of living is pinched. You may defer the catastrophe a little by borrowing short-time loans at a ruinous rate from usurious stimulants, giving many pounds of flesh as security. But soon Shylock forecloses and you are forced to move with your sufferings to the slums and ten-cent lodging-houses of Life. Moreover, you must face a brutal ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... to see the Colosseum by moonlight. It is the monarch, the majesty of all ruins; there is nothing like it. All the associations of the place, too, give it the most impressive character. When you enter within this stupendous circle of ruinous walls and arches, and grand terraces of masonry, rising one above another, you stand upon the arena of the old gladiatorial combats and Christian martyrdom; and as you lift your eyes to the vast ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... those bankers here. That is your job, Tarring. They need know only that it is of vital importance and that our meeting must be attended with the strictest confidence. Intimate that my object is the averting of ruinous runs which must follow unless we stop them—and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... of corn, although they should live upon chaff. Hence our increase of buildings in this City, because workmen have nothing to do but employ one another, and one half of them are infallibly undone. Hence the daily increase of bankers, who may be a necessary evil in a trading country, but so ruinous in ours, who for their private advantage have sent away all our silver, and one third of our gold, so that within three years past the running cash of the Nation, which was about five hundred thousand pounds, is now less than two, and must daily diminish ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... Pickett's column on the third of July, Lee had the choice of two courses—to either attack again or retire. Meade was evidently determined to remain on the defensive. To engage him, Lee must once more charge the Cemetery Heights. But a third failure might be ruinous; the Confederate ammunition was nearly exhausted; the communications with the Potomac were ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... of the Iland to be full of great rockie barren hils and mountains, litle inhabited by reason that it is molested with ships of war which might partly appeare by this towne of Santa Cruz (being one of their chiefe townes) which was all ruinous, and (as it were) but the reliques of the ancient towne which had bene burnt about two yeeres before by certaine English ships of war, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... the very first had been guilty of a fatal error in the education of his pupil. He had governed him throughout on the ruinous principle of concession. Nero was not devoid of talent; he had a decided turn for Latin versification, and the few lines of his composition which have come down to us, bizarre and effected as they are, yet display a certain sense ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... cultivated and enjoyed at the expense of morals, degrades and debases instead of purifying and elevating character. Men, who have accumulated wealth slowly by labor of mind or body, do not spend it extravagantly. If they use it liberally, that creates no envy in their poorer neighbor, no ruinous effort to equal what is recognized to be the due reward of industry and economy. The luxury, which corrupted and destroyed the republic of Rome, was the result of large fortunes suddenly acquired by the plunder of provinces, the conquests of unjust wars. The most fruitful source ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... summer of 1857 was beginning to cause him alarm, and soon after the new year came in he felt obliged to talk over his affairs and to advise his wife to loan the mill company money not elsewhere to be had except at ruinous interest. She wished simply to give him the sum needed, but he said no, and made clear to her why he required help. She was pleased to be consulted, and showing, as usual, notable comprehension of the business situation, at once ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... whose bonds he had handled. When he collapsed, overloaded with Northern Pacific securities, in which his confidence was enthusiastic, the panic was so acute that the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors for ten days, to prevent the ruinous prices that forced sales might have created. Thirty or more banking houses were drawn down by the crash within forty-eight hours. Others followed in all the business centers, while trade stood still through the paralysis ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... on the eve of commencing a war, which must have been ruinous to our settlement, a black servant of Adam Johnstone came to me, and said that I ought not to fight and kill his good chief, for that he had not the white woman. I was astonished, and asked the Kaffre what he meant, when he told me that he himself saw ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... riots, "plug-drawings," panics, and strikes of most disastrous kinds. Proud Preston—the town of the Stanleys and the Hoghtons, and of "many a crest that is famous in story"—the town where silly King Jamie disported himself a little, with his knights and nobles, during the time of his ruinous visit to Hoghton Tower,—Proud Preston has seen many a black day. But, from the time when Roman sentinels kept watch and ward in their old camp at Walton, down by the Ribble side, it has never seen so much wealth and so much bitter poverty together as now. ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... was more than he had in the bank, and Uncle Regie thinks the bankers will undertake part of the loss if he will let them. It is more inconvenient than ruinous.' ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... There were ruinous buildings on it: barracks and storehouses and offices, an airship dock and an air-traffic control tower from which all the glass had long ago vanished, a great steel telecast tower that had fallen, crushing ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... life could not be lived except at frightful and generally ruinous expense. Hyde was soon embarrassed. His pay was small and uncertain and the allowance which his brother William added to it, in order that the heir-apparent to the earldom might live in becoming style, had not ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... alike handled freely matters that to the fathers had seemed beyond question; encouraged what seemed impious questioning in the sons; had set "the hearts of the sons against the fathers"; and some instances there were in which the teaching of Socrates had been more conspicuously ruinous than theirs. "If you ask people at Athens," says Socrates in the Meno, "how virtue is to be attained, they will laugh in your face and say they don't so much as know what virtue is." And who was responsible for that? Certainly that Dialogue, proposing to discover the essential nature of virtue, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... recently made in Ohio up the Muskingum, had ever after their first establishment, continued apparently on the most friendly terms with the Indians; but on the part of the savages, friendship had only been feigned, to lull the whites into a ruinous security. When this end was attained, they too were made to feel the bitterness of savage enmity. On the 2d of January 1791, a party of Indians came to the Big Bottom, and commenced an indiscriminate murder of the inhabitants; ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... uncertain cut, with much plumage and fringing; amid numerous other human figures of the like; riding abroad with hawks; talking noisy nonsense;—tearing out the bowels of St. Edmundsbury Convent (its larders namely and cellars) in the most ruinous way, by living at rack and manger there. Jocelin notes only, with a slight subacidity of manner, that the King's Majesty, Dominus Rex, did leave, as gift for our St. Edmund Shrine, a handsome enough silk cloak,—or rather pretended to leave, for one of his retinue borrowed ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Burgoyne and their fine northern army, would soon have given up the contest, had it not been for the foothold they got in Carolina, which protracted the war at least two years longer. And as this two years' ruinous war in Carolina was owing to the encouragement the enemy got there, and that encouragement to toryism, and that toryism to ignorance, ignorance may fairly be debited to two millions ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... irritation and rancour seething in the breast of the new plantocracy, of whom the majority was of the type that then also flourished in Barbados, Jamaica, and Demerara, were nourished and kept acute in order to crush the African element. Harm was done, certainly; but not to the ruinous extent sometimes declared. It was too late for perfect success, as, according to the Negroes' own phrase, people of colour had by that time already "passed the lock-jaw"* stage (at which trifling misadventures ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... statement of the difficulty contains the potency of its solution; for evil, when understood, is on the way towards being overcome, and the good, when seen, contains the promise of its own fulfilment. It is ignorance which is ruinous, as when the cries of humanity beat against a deaf ear; and we can take a comfort, denied to Carlyle, from the fact that he has made us awake to our social duties. He has let loose the confusion upon us, and it is only natural that we should at first be overcome ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... illustration, which he borrows from some philosopher more ancient than himself:—"Should the body sue the mind before a court of judicature for damages, it would be found that the mind would prove to have been a ruinous tenant to its landlord." The sage of Cheronaea did not foresee the hint of Descartes and the discovery of Camus, that by medicine we may alleviate or remove the diseases of the mind; a practice which indeed has not yet been pursued by physicians, though the moralists have been often struck by ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... that all was ruinous, Here stood a shattered archway plumed with fern; And here had fall'n a great part of a tower, Whole, like a crag that tumbles from the cliff, And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers, And high above a piece of turret stair, ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... It was about four feet square at the base, and about twenty feet high. The four sides were composed of small poles interwoven with twigs and branches, thus forming an indifferent wicker-work, hollow or open within, from bottom to top. It seemed to be rather in a ruinous state; but there were sufficient remaining marks to shew that it had originally been covered with a thin light grey cloth, which these people, it would seem, consecrate to religions purposes, as we could see a good deal of it hanging in different parts of the morai, and some of it had ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... professors, who answer to the college tutors of Oxford and Cambridge, has always been degrading—equally degrading to them and to literature; whilst, in relation to all academic authority, such modes of payment were ruinous, by creating a systematic dependence of the teacher upon the pupil. To this account may be added, that in all countries, where great elementary schools are wanting, the universities are improperly used as their substitutes. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... women enough who would have supported a far worse and a far uglier man; Herrick never met or never knew them: or if he did both, some manlier feeling would revolt, and he preferred starvation. Drenched with rains, broiling by day, shivering by night, a disused and ruinous prison for a bedroom, his diet begged or pilfered out of rubbish heaps, his associates two creatures equally outcast with himself, he had drained for months the cup of penitence. He had known what it was to be resigned, what it was to break forth ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unavailing, his Grace resolved that this "pestilent Scotchman" must be got rid of. A bill in Chancery was filed against him on some pretext or other, with the view of putting an end to his tenancy. Years of irritating and ruinous litigation followed, the ultimate result of which was a decision in Mr. Gourlay's favour. But it was the old story of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. The protracted litigation had eaten up the substance of the successful litigant, and upon the promulgation of the ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... between Fort James and Crevecoeur, had been upraised: canoes passed over what was now dry. A second shock at 8.20 A.M., and a third about 10.45, completed the destruction, split every standing wall, and shook down the three forts into ruinous heaps. Nor did the seismic movements cease till July 15, when I made ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... indifference to finance on one side, and pampering the heart on the other, had proved very costly. To use his own expression, he had been "set back" almost eight thousand dollars. An average like that would be ruinous. ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... they themselves were bound to obey. The income of a Levite was about five times as great as an ordinary man, and this, of course, was derived from the tithes. But a greater part of the soil paid no tithes. The taxes to the leading class, as the Levites were, can not be called ruinous when compared with what the Egyptian priesthood received, especially when we remember that all the expenses connected with sacrifice and worship were taken from the tithes. The treasures which flowed into the sacerdotal treasury belonged to the Lord, and ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... king's, the knight rode him through the city, and as he rode, he looked everywhere for a certain beautiful face, which he had seen many times in his dreams, but never found. One day, as he went prancing down a quiet street, he saw at the window of a ruinous castle the lovely face. He was delighted, inquired who lived in this old castle, and was told that several captive princesses were kept there by a spell, and spun all day to lay up money to buy their liberty. The knight wished intensely that he could free them, but he was ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... Why, sir, many and many a time have I said to Mrs. Pompley, ''Tis a mercy we have no children. We could never live in this style if we had children—never make both ends meet.' Child—the most expensive, ravenous, ruinous thing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... scale upon which the operations of large factories are carried on, their returns admit of the expense of sending out agents to examine into the wants and tastes of distant countries, as well as of trying experiments, which, although profitable to them, would be ruinous to smaller establishments ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... foundation in the custom which obliges all the branches to be responsible for the debts contracted by any one of the kindred. When an extravagant and unprincipled spendthrift is running a career that appears likely to involve his family in ruinous consequences, they have the right of dissolving the connexion and clearing themselves of further responsibility by this public act, which, as the writ expresses it, sends forth the outcast, as a deer into the woods, no longer ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... there. In conformity thereto, I am inclined to believe, that the total amount of capital belonging to and employed in the trade of the Philippine Islands, does not at present exceed two and a half million dollars, with evident signs of rapid decline, if the merchants do not in time abandon the ruinous systems of chiefly carrying on their speculations with money ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... heart was buried below the high altar in Melrose Abbey. As for his body, it was laid in the sepulchre in the midst of the church of Dunfermline, under a marble stone. The church afterward becoming ruinous, and the roof falling down with age, the monument was broken to pieces, and nobody could tell where it stood. But when they were repairing the church at Dunfermline, and removing the rubbish, lo! they found fragments of the marble tomb of Robert Bruce. Then they began to dig ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... up and see if that really is a cave up there," she thought. Fired by this ambition, she started to work her way up the cliff; no easy task and ruinous to riding boots of soft leather. By the time she had discovered this last fact she had covered about one-third of the distance and was crouching beside a protruding rock to get her breath. "It's rather foolish to tear up a perfectly good pair ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... ruinous city, still exhibiting in almost every direction the vestiges of that terrific visitation of God, the earthquake which shattered it some eighty years ago. It stands on seven hills, the loftiest ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... extended career Mr. Wintermuth had been called upon to face many serious and unexpected crises. Conflagrations; rate wars; eruptions of idiotic and ruinous legislation adopted by state senates and assemblies composed of meddlesome agriculturalists, saloon keepers, impractical young lawyers, and intensely practical old politicians;—all these he had lived through ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... subject I will quote the just and striking observations of an excellent modern writer. "In whatever village," says he, "the fanatics get a footing, drunkenness and swearing,—sins which, being more exposed to the eye of the world, would be ruinous to their great pretensions to superior sanctity—will, perhaps, be found to decline; but I am convinced, from personal observation, that every species of fraud and falsehood—sins which are not so readily detected, but which seem more closely connected with worldly advantage—will ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... he continued the subject already opened at Manchester by showing, in the midst of that great toiling population, the deadly influence exerted by Slavery in bringing labor into contempt, and its ruinous consequences to the free working-man everywhere. In Edinburgh he explained how the Nation grew up out of separate States, each jealous of its special sovereignty; how the struggle for the control of the united Nation, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... which deform this Metropolis (and there are not a few) the most ruinous is that of Rouge et Noir gambling, for that is practised in the day time, and it is a matter of astonishment to think that it has remained undisturbed by the law, and hitherto unnoticed by the Press. At this moment no less than ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... end of this, God knows; but I am sure you will agree with me, that we cannot suffer a system to go on which is not only dishonourable to us, but evidently ruinous to the affairs of the country. In this instance, the mischief done by intercepting, as it were, the very useful information we expected through you from Franklin, is I fear in a great degree irremediable; but it is our business, and indeed our duty, ...
— 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
... point of honor, the policy of a merchant who, with abundant resources and prosperous business, should devise a plan for throwing discredit on his own notes with the view of having them bought up at a discount, ruinous to the holders and immensely profitable to his own knavish pocket. This comparison may faintly illustrate the wrongfulness of the policy, but not its consummate folly—for in the case of the Government, unlike the merchant, the stern necessity ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... said, he preferred the comfortable blaze of the fire he was then near. The hunters, however, commended the warmth of the other apartment, and pressed his removal with such seeming courtesy, that the Count, half doubting, and half fearful of betraying his doubts, consented to go. The long and ruinous passages, through which they went, somewhat daunted him, but the thunder, which now burst in loud peals above, made it dangerous to quit this place of shelter, and he forbore to provoke his conductors by shewing that he distrusted ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... slight, can be accomplished without the expenditure of force (nervous energy), even though it be only the winking of an eyelid; and the labor entailed upon the system, of raising the temperature of the stomach to normal figures, after deluging it with ice water, involves a ruinous waste of vital force, in addition to the other reasons urged against it. It cannot be doubted that this essentially American habit is responsible for a large proportion of the dyspepsia that sits like an incubus upon the nation. ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... to have the house remodeled this summer, and the bathrooms have all been tiled and fitted up afresh, from beginning to end. I know that, in the past, you have used acid, gritty soaps on the basins and tubs, Martha, and my plumber tells me you mustn't do it. He says it's ruinous. He recommends kerosene oil for the bath-tubs and marble slabs. He says it will take any stain out, and is much safer than the soaps. So please use kerosene ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... day, to tell you these things, that ere it be very long, the living shall not be able to bury the dead in thee, O Scotland; and many a mile shall ye walk, or ride, and shall not see a farm-house, but ruinous wastes, for the quarrel of a broken Covenant and wrongs done to the ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... the colony since the ghastly days of the Great Sickness. Charles II, far from showing gratitude to his Old Dominion, overwhelmed it with injustice and oppression. The Virginians were crushed with tremendous duties on their tobacco and with ruinous restrictions upon their trade. The titles to their plantations were threatened by a grant of the entire colony to two unworthy favorites of the King. Governor Berkeley, embittered by the humiliation of the Commonwealth period, and growing avaricious and crabbed with advancing years, soon ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... defeat of Witold's army might prove ruinous to the whole of Jagiello's empire. Nobody knew when the Tartars, encouraged by the victory over Witold, might now invade the lands and cities belonging to the grand dukedom. In that case the kingdom of Poland would be involved in ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... daughter a duchess, to become a princess later, or whether it was only the princess who coveted for her son the splendid dowry. Did the celebrated Diane court the noble provincial house? and was the daughter of the Cinq-Cygnes frightened by the celebrity of Madame de Cadignan, her tastes and her ruinous extravagance? In her strong desire not to injure her son's prospects the princess grew devout, shut the door on her former life, and spent the summer season at Geneva in ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... sunset long after it has faded from the rest of the landscape. A silver thread of streamlet, swift but shallow, runs noisily through the meadows beside the town and loses itself in the Chad, about a mile and a half farther eastward. Many a picturesque old wooden bridge, many a foaming weir and ruinous water-mill with weedy wheel, may be found scattered up and down the wooded banks of this little river Chad; while to the brook, which we call the Gipstream, attaches ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... become, earlier or later, the grave of the French armies: the allies had every where the choice of their operations; they were neither to be turned nor broken through. It was evident that the long and obstinate continuance of Napoleon at Dresden could not fail to prove ruinous to him. Of what service could the Elbe be to him, when Bohemia, the key to that river, was in the hands of his opponents? These had it in their power to turn his flank as far as the Saale, without hazard or any great impediment, as the event ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... summit of a rugged mountain with valleys surrounding its base, and on its sides let the surface of the soil be seen to slide, together with the small roots of the bushes, denuding great portions of the surrounding rocks. And descending ruinous from these precipices in its boisterous course, let it dash along and lay bare the twisted and gnarled roots of large trees overthrowing their roots upwards; and let the mountains, as they are scoured bare, discover the profound ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... we are young, life seems so spacious and so full of chances that we fetch a large compass round about such things, and wait for favoring fortuities, and hope for occasions precisely fit; we linger in dangerous delays, and take risks that may be ruinous. ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... merit." These aggressive wardens grazed the churchyard for profit, looked coldly upon a proposal to put up Tables of Benefactions in the church, and altogether acted in a manner so high-handed as to call forth this historic protest. Although the fabric of the church was in so ruinous a condition that the rain streamed through the roof upon the head of our clerical pamphleteer as he was preaching, all these complaints were to no purpose. When the absentee vicar was appealed to he declared his helplessness, ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... by which arrangements may be made for the more effectual and informal use of the Conciliation Boards. Meanwhile it savours of the absurd to talk and write—as certain fault-finders have done—as though every arbitration under the Act were a disturbance of industry as ruinous as a prolonged strike. Other critics have not stickled to assert that it has mischievously affected the volume of the Colony's industries, a statement which is simply untrue. It is the reviving prosperity of the Colony during the ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... into the ruins. They were standing in that one secluded corner under the ruinous gable, and she was gazing up at him very earnestly. "Tell me, judge," she entreated as he made no ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... are at cross-purposes," said I. "The spirit is precisely what I came in quest of. I bought the Flying Scud at a ruinous figure, run up by Mr. Carthew through an agent; and I am, in consequence, a bankrupt. But if I have found no fortune in the wreck, I have found unmistakable evidences of foul play. Conceive my position: I am ruined through this man, whom I never ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... children, without household responsibilities, and without interests of their own and without strong nervous constitution will soon lose the power of effort and their brain will succumb. A dreary monotony is dangerous even for the worker; for the non-worker it may be ruinous. ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... extent I have to; I don't want to appear to take so much for granted. And then, only you can measure what I have to offer. I believe what I have done is considered serious, if not ruinous; but that I can't help thinking is exaggerated. I haven't been struck down yet. I don't, candidly, now, expect to be. You ought to come to this through your head, and not the heart, which I'd naturally prefer you to use. What, in fact, I am asking you is to go away with ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... old building, with more gable ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day; huge zig-zag chimneys, out of which it seemed as though even smoke could not choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes, imparted to it in its tortuous progress; and vast stables, gloomy, ruinous, and empty. The place was said to have been built in the days of King Henry the Eighth; and there was a legend, not only that Queen Elizabeth had slept there one night while upon a hunting excursion, to wit, in a certain oak-panelled room ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... fathers' shops—whether they have "air" and "style," and are "so gentlemanly" and "so aristocratic," or not. Your shoemaker, your lawyer, your butcher, your clergyman—if they are simple and steady, and, whether rich or poor, are unseduced by the sirens of extravagance and ruinous display, help make up the "best society." For that mystic communion is not composed of the rich, but of the worthy; and is "best" by its virtues, and not by its vices. When Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Reynolds, and their friends, met at supper ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... impracticable in small households. In order to economize labor, and dignify the laborer, it is absolutely necessary that men should cease to work in the present isolated, competitive mode, and adopt that of coperative union or Association. It is as false and as ruinous to call any man "master," in secular business, as it is in theological opinion. Those persons, therefore, who congregate for the purpose, as it is called, of bettering their outward relations, on principles so high and universal as we have endeavored to describe, are not engaged in a ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... the partridges may be asleep then and there, but the katydids are awake, and, with the support of contralto and barytone tree-toads, manage to keep up a concert which cannot fail to impress on you a sense of familiar and friendly company. Don't talk of the loneliness of a deserted and ruinous castle;—the crickets have not left it, and, if you don't have a merry time with their shrill jokes, it will be your own fault. But if you would have a sense of being terribly alone, come from long residence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... possible to devise a scheme which, always assuming that the people took any interest in it, without enormous expense, ruinous dislocation of the administration and danger to the public peace, can satisfy the aspirations of Mr. Hume and his following, and yet safeguard the interests of the Mahommedans, the landed and wealthy classes, the Conservative Hindus, the Eurasians, Parsees, Sikhs, Rajputs, native ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... minister poor. There is nothing more ruinous than to pay a pastor too much salary. Let every board of trustees look over their books and see if they have erred in this direction; and if so, let them cut down the minister's wages. There are churches which pay their pastors eight hundred dollars per annum. What these good ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... not of so much importance. The names by which they were denominated show this. It is always the corte at Urbino, at Pesaro it is the palazzo, and at Gubbio the modest casa. Nevertheless, at this last place the intarsias were of almost as great importance, though now the palace is ruinous and the intarsias dispersed, some of them being at South Kensington. Dennistoun quotes descriptions from Sig. Luigi Bonfatti and Mr. F. C. Brooke, which are worth reproducing, as showing the care some times expended ...
— Intarsia and Marquetry • F. Hamilton Jackson
... I know it all and have seen it all, and this is good reason why more reliance should be placed on me than on any other. This same matter was discussed in Mexico among all the orders. When they saw that it was ruinous to them to be alone, they determined to establish houses where there should be at least four; and, in order that they might support themselves without being burdensome to the Indians, they decreed that the orders of St. Dominic and St. Augustine might have ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... the rocket, adjusted the angle of the nozzle again, and advanced the firing time slightly, even at the risk of a ruinous explosion. ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... another queen, has a range of comb given to it containing maturing brood, these poor motherless innocents, as soon as they are able to work, perceive their loss, and will proceed at once, if they have the means, to supply it! They have not yet grown so hardened by habit to unnatural and ruinous courses, as not to feel that something absolutely indispensable to their safety is ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... known character and honour, no idea of the sort can find place—but I will say thoughtlessly. If there be any hanging back, or appearance of it, it may call down unpleasant—indeed, to be quite frank, ruinous—consequences, which, I think, in the interest of your family, you would hardly be justified in invoking upon the mere speculation of your respected ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... both the transepts, is a circular chapel, as in the churches of St. Georges, of St. Taurin at Evreux, of Fecamp, of Cerisy, and in several other ancient religious buildings in Normandy. Nor is England altogether without specimens of the same kind: a similar chapel, now in a ruinous state, and called by Blomefield, "the sexterie or ancient vestry," is joined to the north transept of Norwich cathedral; and near the eastern extremity of the same church, are four others. But the principal characteristic of those at St. Nicholas', is the ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... reject all overtures from that quarter. We thus learn that the most desperate measures are in agitation—weak and preposterous too as they are desperate, and must in the end prove ruinous. Antiochus, we doubt not, is a tool in the hands of others, but he stands out as the head and centre of the conspiracy. There is a violent and a strong party, consisting chiefly of the disbanded ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... was green; but just here, in the centre of the sweet glen, Discord, broken loose in the night from control, had beaten the ground with his stamping hoofs, and left it waste and pulverized. The mill yawned all ruinous with unglazed frames; the yard was thickly bestrewn with stones and brickbats; and close under the mill, with the glittering fragments of the shattered windows, muskets and other weapons lay here and there. More than one deep crimson stain was visible on the gravel, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... gods! Is yond despised and ruinous man my lord? Full of decay and failing? O monument And wonder of good deeds evilly bestow'd! What an alteration of honour Has desperate want made! What viler thing upon the earth than friends Who can bring noblest minds to basest ends! How rarely does ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... after his job. But I never could learn to play the snare drum. You have to learn to "roll," and I couldn't make my left hand behave. I tried a year and would probably be trying yet but for the fact that when Ed Norton left town, he traded me his ruinous old alto horn for three dollars and a dog. There was about as much music left in it as there is in a fish horn, but I was as delighted as if it had been a pipe organ, and when the folks wouldn't let me practice at home on it, I took it out in the country and kept it in Smily ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... duty and a life of truthfulness. They are conditioned upon obedience to the matrimonial laws. It is not all the married that are happy. If you would find misery double-distilled, you may find it in awful and ruinous abundance among the married who entered their real life in the whirl of enthusiastic delight. There is every possible degree of anguish in the married life, from the unbreathed unrest of the thinly clouded soul to the terrible grief that breaks out in loud denunciations ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... strange place is this same Jaraicejo, a small ruinous town or village, situated on a rising ground, with a very wild country all about it. The road from Badajoz to Madrid passes through it; and about two leagues distant, in the direction of Madrid, is the famous mountain pass of Mirabete, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... his family. He sent his son Philip to Venice as security for a debt; he borrowed at enormous interest of the merchants of Italy; and when all else failed, and the money which he had raised at such ruinous sacrifices had melted away, and his soldiers were clamoring for pay, he remembered the holy relics yet remaining to the city, in spite of the cartloads carried off during the great sack of 1204, and resolved to raise more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... was to 'do for' the Vicar, who had taken solitary possession of the Vicarage, but would soon be joined there by one or more curates. He had been inducted into the ruinous chancel of the poor old church, had paid the architect of the Rat-house fifty pounds (a sum just equalling the proceeds of the bazaar) to be rid of his plans; had brought down a first-rate architect; and in the meantime was working ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... purpose. But the quarantine laws all over the world, with some rare exceptions, being the offspring of ignorance and terror, are not only the climax of absurdity, but act as an incubus on commerce, causing ruinous delays in mercantile operations, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... independent as possible of the glazier and the assessor of taxes. There is a little bridge, very much decayed, thrown across the narrow moat to what was, in former days, the main entrance; but now the door was nailed up, the bridge ruinous, and the path leading to it no longer distinguishable in the long rank grass that covered the wet meadows upon which the house looked out. It was a place that filled you involuntarily with melancholy feelings; it breathed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... "Yes, I am he: what dost thou want?" Quoth she, "Verily, folks of fair repute have directed me to thee. Look at yonder handsome girl, my daughter, and that comely beardless youth, my son; I brought them both up and spent much money on both of them. Now, thou must know that I have a big old ruinous house which I have shored up with wood, and the builder saith to me, 'Go and live in some other place, lest belike it fall upon thee; and when this is repaired return hither.' So I went forth to ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... not intended here to detail their proceedings or to describe at much length the squabbles and constant disorders, murders, and robberies which took place while they held possession of the Island. The speculation proved ruinous to the Adventurers, who in the end lost their estates, and were obliged to leave the islanders to their fate. A brief summary of it will suffice, and those who desire more information on the subject will find a full account ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... the contrivances which are used to free men from the servitude of their reason, and from the necessity of ordering their affairs according to their evident interests. These contrivances oblige them to run into a real and ruinous servitude, in order to avoid a supposed restraint that ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... Two males, one female. It was much celebrated in the mysteries of witchcraft, and for the purpose of raising the devil, as its name imports. It grows amid the mouldering bones and decayed coffins in the ruinous vaults of Sleaford-church in Lincolnshire. The superstitious ceremonies or histories belonging to some vegetables have been truly ridiculous; thus the Druids are said to have cropped the Misletoe with a golden axe or sickle; and the Bryony, or Mandrake, was said to utter ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... strange: I think, above five hundred miles before we get to Halle, within Prussian land; and then seven hundred more to our place there, in the utmost East. Men, women, infants and hoary grandfathers are here;—most of their property sold,—still on ruinous conditions, think of it, your Majesty. Their poor bits of preciosities and heirlooms they have with them; made up in succinct bundles, stowed on ticketed baggage-wains; "some have their own poor cart and horse, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... this night; and the 1st is, A bloody sword, a bloody sword, a bloody sword for thee, O Scotland, that shall pierce the hearts of many. 2dly, Many miles shall ye travel and see nothing but desolation and ruinous wastes in thee, O Scotland. 3dly, The fertilest places in Scotland shall be as waste as the mountains. 4thly, The women with child shall be ript up and dashed in pieces. And 5thly, Many a conventicle has God had in thee, O Scotland, but ere long God will make a conventicle ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... of his own observations on the ruinous effects of whiskey in society, and demanded ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... working hours, and in his cell during the remainder of the day. In this way his social instincts would not be so completely stifled as they are at present; he would not be so entirely left to the vacuity of his own mind; he would not be so readily led to the indulgence of disgusting vices ruinous to body and mind. In countries where prisons are on a large scale such a system as this might easily be adopted, and it would, if properly managed, be productive of beneficial results. In small prisons it would be applicable on a limited scale, the smallness ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... himself. During the military operations connected with this political manoeuvre, the Duke of Sung was guilty of the most ridiculous piece of ritual chivalry; highly approved, it is true, by the literary pedants of all subsequent ages, but ruinous to his own worldly cause. The Ts'u army was crossing a difficult ford, and the Duke's advisers recommended a prompt attack. "It is not honourable," said the Duke, "to take advantage even of an enemy ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... the town now presented a ruinous and desolate aspect; both parties were concentrating their efforts in this spot, and here the combat raged with the greatest violence. Again the blast swept along, bearing before it the masses of black suffocating vapour, but in a clearer interval the eagle glance of Alonso de ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... weakest of all his weaknesses, the fact, of which he was perfectly aware, that he probably might have lived within his means if he had never done anything for thrift. "It's the happy thoughts that do it," he said; "there's nothing so ruinous as putting in a cheap week." Maisie heard afresh among the pleasant sounds of the closing day that steel click of Ida's change of mind. She thought of the ten-pound note it would have been delightful at this juncture to produce for ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... metallurgist, with assistant assayers, etc., all highly qualified men. But it will be asked, how are many struggling mines in sparsely populated countries to obtain the services of all these eminent scientists? The reply is by co-operation. One of the most ruinous mistakes of the past has been that each little mining venture has started on an independent course, with different management, separate machinery, etc. Can it then be wondered at that our gold-mining is ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... 1870 and 1880 most of the railway managements were busy devising ways to stop a rate-cutting and competition that was ruinous. In many instances great trunk lines would have consolidated had not State laws prevented. They could not maintain rates because one or another of the weaker roads would be compelled to lower their rates in order to meet their operating expenses. Therefore they were ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... principal market that if the general anarchy had been prolonged in Timbuctoo all the sacrifices of human life and money France had made on her threshold would have remained sterile. The French Government decided that the sooner an end was put to the ruinous dominion of the Touaregs the better it would be. Up to the last moment England endeavoured to put her hand upon the commerce of Timbuctoo. Failing in her efforts from Tripoli and the Niger's mouth, she attempted to secure a footing by way of Morocco, and was installed towards 1890 at ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... bloody" government (these were Mr. Yorke's epithets). Madmen like Pitt, demons like Castlereagh, mischievous idiots like Perceval, were the tyrants, the curses of the country, the destroyers of her trade. It was their infatuated perseverance in an unjustifiable, a hopeless, a ruinous war, which had brought the nation to its present pass. It was their monstrously oppressive taxation, it was the infamous "Orders in Council"—the originators of which deserved impeachment and the scaffold, if ever public men did—that hung a ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... English affairs, but certainly not to be followed in Irish—every great English ruler and monarch governed Ireland under a distinct Irish Home Rule Parliament up to the year 1800. If Home Rule is so certain to be ruinous to Empire, how, we may well ask, did these rulers build up the British Empire? How did Marlborough and Clive, Chatham and Walpole, do their great world-work with an Irish Parliament behind them? The answer is, of course, that they did it better, ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... independence without which there can be neither political nor literary independence. That once secured, they would thereafter find no need for asking the establishment of a system of taxation which would prove so burdensome to our people as, in the end, to be ruinous to themselves. ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... fourth, or right side to the mountain, towards which quarter it is grassy and steep. Most of the houses are ancient, and are built of rude stone. By far the most remarkable-looking house is a large and dilapidated building, which has much the appearance of a ruinous Spanish posada or venta. There is not much life in the place, and you may stand ten minutes where the street opens upon the square without seeing any other human beings than two or three women seated at the house doors, or a ragged, bare-headed boy or two lying on the grass ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... muddiest rascal of them all, if his side sank in defeat. And yet I cannot help believing that, in some cases at least, a man might have had a happier end if he had abstained from acts of political turpitude, which were as irrational in their conception as they were ruinous in their effect; acts, that is, which, in the existing circumstances, no sane man could have undertaken unless the mere doing of these rogueries had been a supreme and a necessary pleasure to him. There was poor CHARLES THE FIRST. Surely, in spite of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... Right and Liberty," a poem by Matthew Hilson, is commendable in sentiment and clever in construction, but lacks perfection in several details of phraseology. In the third line of the third stanza the word ruinous must be replaced by a true dissyllable, preferably ruin'd. "For Their Country," a short story by Margaret Trafford, is vivid in plot and truly heroic in moral, but somewhat deficient in technique, particularly at the beginning. Miss ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... rise like ruinous towers in a soil of diorite. They are formed of a cavernous greyish green limestone of crystalline texture, mixed with some spangles of mica, and are destitute of shells. We see in them masses of hardened clay, black, fissile, charged with iron, and covered ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... are men in this city who have long time had ill will to me, not bowing their necks to my yoke; and they have persuaded these fellows with money to do this thing. Surely there never was so evil a thing as money, which maketh cities into ruinous heaps and banisheth men from their houses and turneth their thoughts from good unto evil. But as for them that have done this deed for hire, of a truth they shall not escape, for I say to thee, fellow, if ye bring not here ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... trotters, by his friend Sable, the travelling undertaker, is too good to be lost. In Lancashire the custom of hoaxing is called 255trotting, and in many instances, particularly at Bolton, is still continued, and has frequently been played off upon strangers with a ruinous success. Sable had, it would appear, taken up his quarters at a commercial inn, and, as is usual with travellers, joined the tradesmen in the smoking room at night to enjoy his pipe, and profit, perhaps, by introduction in the way of business. The pursuit of the undertaker ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... took a brisk walk into the city, and reached the Alamo Plaza before he knew where he was. Then, suddenly, he realized; for, half-hidden by a great ugly wooden building, used as a grocery-store, he discovered an antiquated, half-ruinous little structure of stone and stucco that he instantly recognized, from having seen it pictured over and over again. It was the world-renowned Alamo, one of the most famous monuments to liberty in America; and, hastening across the plaza, ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... lake, while they admired the beautiful scenery I have already described. Our uncle meantime was hunting about for birds and butterflies. The gap, when we were on the opposite side, had a curious appearance, being like a large gateway, fully one hundred feet in height, though broken and ruinous. The creepers also were seen to great advantage, some of them falling in the most beautiful luxuriance from the very summits of the surrounding heights down to the water's edge, many of them covered the whole length with ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... while leading the life of mingled amusement and intrigue which had brought him to his present state; and the mother, a hard-featured woman, evidently thought herself cheated and ill used. She railed at Babington and at my Lady Countess by turns; at the one for his ruinous courses and neglect of her daughter, at the other for having cozened her into giving her poor child to a treacherous Papist, who would be attainted in blood, and thus bring her poor daughter and grandchild to poverty. The old lady ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Calcutta had been invited to take shares in an institution which, to merchants, native and English, civilian and military men, was alike advantageous and indispensable. How many young men of the latter services had been crippled for life by the ruinous cost of agencies, of which the profits to the agents themselves were so enormous! The shareholders of the B. B. were their own agents; and the greatest capitalist in India as well as the youngest ensign ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and returned into his own land with a rich and valuable booty. He likewise took down the temple which Shamas-Vul, the son of Ismi-Dagon, had erected to the gods Asshur and Vul at Asshur, the Assyrian capital, because it was in a ruinous condition, and required to be destroyed or rebuilt. Asshur-dayan seems to have shrunk from the task of restoring so great a work, and therefore demolished the structure which was not rebuilt for the space of sixty years from its demolition. He was ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... lighted up his intelligent face, making him very handsome. He wore a turban, loose shirt with hanging sleeves and voluminous trousers, all of snowy whiteness. A blue jacket embroidered with gilt braid was in readiness to put on when he stopped rowing. It must have taken a ruinous amount of material to make those trousers. They were full at the waist and knee, and before seating himself to his oars he gracefully threw the extra amount of the fullness which drooped behind over the wide seat as a lady ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... 1455, John Arden, 1468-83, Thomas Arden, 1530, Edward Arden. But in the State Papers Edward's brother Francis was entered as "Francis Arden of Pedmore," in 1583, at the time of the attainder, so it may have been granted him as a second residence, or it may have been the ruinous old home in Warwickshire he held. The registers here prove that Robert, Edward's heir, was residing here, and already married, before 1578, an important point to be ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... following observations. At that time the advancement of the hierarchy was, in most countries, extraordinary; for the Church acquired treasures and large properties in land, even to a greater extent than after the crusades; but experience has demonstrated that such a state of things is ruinous to the people, and causes them to retrograde, as was evinced ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... house as much as his attendance rendered necessary without being pretty well aware of the spirit of the place; and while he grieved over the ruinous waste of health to which these young creatures were exposed, he was struck to the heart with horror at the idea of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... history of this unfortunate transaction in particular; the whole history was within the memory of man portrayed upon a glass window in the hall, where unfortunately it has not been preserved. Mab's Cross is still extant. An old ruinous building is said to have been the place where the Lady Mabel was condemned to render penance, by walking hither from Haighhall barefooted and barelegged for the performance of her devotions. This relic, to which an anecdote so curious is annexed, is now unfortunately ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... was only partially ruinous, but quite habitable. However, his father had built a comfortable house in the garden, at ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... Ullathorne, and when could she have a better opportunity of completing it? She had had almost enough of Mr Slope, though she could not quite resist the fun of driving a very sanctimonious clergyman to madness by a desperate and ruinous passion. Mr Thorne had fallen too easily to give much pleasure in the chase. His position as a man of wealth might make his alliance of value, but as a lover he was very second-rate. We may say that she regarded him somewhat as a sportsman ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... fortune which you so long ago set aside for me to accumulate until my marriage is at last at your disposal again. Because Gray told me that Acton was forced to borrow such frightful sums at such ruinous rates. And now you need ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... you." Dumont never would accept a favor from any one. He regarded favors as profitable investments but ruinous debts. ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... their land, and to have become all but slaves to rich nobles, who were grinding them down, not only by luxury and covetousness, but often by open robbery and bloodshed. The sight of the misrule and misery, as well as of the bloody and ruinous border inroads which were kept up by the Philistines and other neighbouring tribes, seems for years to have been the uppermost, as well as the deepest thought in David's mind, if we may judge from those psalms of his, of ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... health and grew in favor with his employer. He walked daily from his chamber to the library without the aid of a crutch. He took his meals with the family. And oh! ruinous extravagance, he wore his Sunday suit every day! There was no help for it, since he must sit in the judge's library and eat ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... There is nothing more ruinous than to pay a pastor too much salary. Let every board of trustees look over their books and see if they have erred in this direction; and if so, let them cut down the minister's wages. There are churches which pay their pastors eight hundred dollars per ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... in four acts, was acted in six. The first act consists of a single scene—an exterior, showing the environment of the chapel which is the burial place of the House of Ravenswood. A rockbound coast is visible, at some distance, together with the ruinous tower of Wolf's Crag—which is Ravenswood's sole remaining possession. This act presents the interrupted funeral of Alan Ravenswood, the father of Edgar,—introducing ten of the seventeen characters that are implicated in the piece, and skilfully laying the basis ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... was felt to be absurd also. Sudden nocturnal onfalls upon native boats could lead, it was felt, to no good end whether of peace or war; they could but exasperate; they might prove, in a moment, and when least expected, ruinous. To those who knew how nearly it had come to fighting, and who considered the probable result, the future looked ominous. And fear was mingled with annoyance in the minds of the Anglo-Saxon colony. On the 24th, a public meeting ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Newsham came to visit me, they were astonished at the ruinous condition of my ship, and could scarcely think it possible for her to have made so long a passage. The rottenness of her cordage, and the raggedness of her sails, filled them with surprise and pity for my condition. When I had given them ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... recommends the abandonment of Formosa and other unnecessary forts, and the concentration of the Spanish forces at Manila. The fort there is in fair state of defense, but the wall of the city is in ruinous condition, and the governor is having it repaired and strengthened. He recommends that some galleys be maintained at Oton or Cebu, to keep the Moro pirates in awe: and that a new commandant be sent to Ternate in place of Heredia, who has shown himself ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... worthless creatures; or, to sum it up in a word, they raise the value of the object which they pretend to pitch upon by their fancy; I say, raise the value of it at their own expense; give vast presents for a ruinous favour, which is so far from being equal to the price that nothing will at last prove more absurd than the cost men are at to ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... have only misery and failure to relate. The union of knights and cities resulted in a ruinous campaign of Franz von Sickingen against Treves. Sickingen's army was driven back by the Elector. His strong Castle of Landstuehl was besieged by the Catholic princes, and cannon was used in this siege for the first time in history. The walls of Landstuehl, twenty-five feet thick, were battered ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... in the collection before me concerns one of Newman's brothers. Perhaps most of us can count a "Charles Robert" in our environment. Someone whose "worm i' the bud" of their character has so completely spoilt its early flower on account of the "one ruinous vice" of "censoriousness," of perpetual nagging, and fault-finding developed to such a pitch that it has eaten out at last the fair heart of human forbearance and kindness which is the birthright of ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... how rotten and drearily mean it had become. The shore is lined with the shabbiest, blackest, and ugliest buildings that can be imagined, decayed warehouses with blind windows, and wharves that look ruinous; insomuch that, had I known nothing more of the world's metropolis, I might have fancied that it had already experienced the down-fall which I have heard commercial and financial prophets predict for it, within the century. And the muddy tide of the Thames, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... is the average charge made for these vehicles, the driver expecting, as in similar cases in Paris, Berlin, or elsewhere, a trifle as a pourboire at the end of the service for which he is engaged. Where these ruinous structures which pass for public carriages originally came from is a conundrum; but there can be no possible doubt as to their antiquity. Mexican fleas, like those of Naples and continental Spain, are both omnivorous and carnivorous, and these vehicles ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... truth about the whole squalid business. Almost any kind of amusement, not accompanied with betting, is, to an increasing number of people, as insipid as water is to the palate of a brandy-drinker. In the case of young men the habit does two things: it gives rise to false and ruinous impressions, and it murders the soul. As touching the former, it tempts a young man to think he can get a living, and a flourishing one, without working for it—a greatly coveted science in these days. It seems so much easier to put money in the pocket this way, than by honest ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... consequences of exposure, if he persisted in his venture. He saw distinctly how his capture would be a basis of vast bargaining with his father, or, if the sturdy old warrior preferred revenge to payment of a ruinous ransom, how the succession and throne might slip to another, leaving ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... carried on pillars, under which a semicircular flight of steps led up to the double door. A street-lamp which stood before it had been washed so clean in the rain that the light was shed with unusual brilliance, and showed even at night that the house was fallen from its high estate. It was not ruinous, but Ichabod was written on the paintless window-frames and on the rough-cast front, from which the plaster had fallen away in more than one place. The pillars of the porch had been painted to imitate marble, but they were marked with scabrous ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... free quarters in the Abbey. During Byron's brief tenure of Newstead, and for long years before, these "huge halls, long galleries, and spacious chambers" (stanza lxxvii. line 1) were half dismantled, and in a more or less ruinous condition. A few pictures remained on the walls of the Great Drawing-room, of the Prior's Parlour, and in the apartments of the south-east wing or annexe, which dates from the seventeenth century (see the account ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... to the growth of mind and the progress of righteous principles as the easy and general conquest of Fashion over our people. If it were only in matters of dress and equipage, of outward adornment, that it bore sway, it would not be so ruinous. But it goes into every department of thought and life, into opinions, principles, religion. It shapes the creed, prescribes the form of worship, and puts its excommunicating ban upon all heresy. It enters ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... been recently made in Ohio up the Muskingum, had ever after their first establishment, continued apparently on the most friendly terms with the Indians; but on the part of the savages, friendship had only been feigned, to lull the whites into a ruinous security. When this end was attained, they too were made to feel the bitterness of savage enmity. On the 2d of January 1791, a party of Indians came to the Big Bottom, and commenced an indiscriminate murder ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... he commanded, and thus they traveled till they came together to a waste and ruinous cottage, where the men proposed to dress some part of the sheep, which their companion was carrying. The king was glad to hear of food; but he insisted that there should be two fires kindled, one for himself and his foster brother at one end of the house, the other at the other ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... Preston—the town of the Stanleys and the Hoghtons, and of "many a crest that is famous in story"—the town where silly King Jamie disported himself a little, with his knights and nobles, during the time of his ruinous visit to Hoghton Tower,—Proud Preston has seen many a black day. But, from the time when Roman sentinels kept watch and ward in their old camp at Walton, down by the Ribble side, it has never seen so much wealth and so much bitter poverty together as ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... misgivings to the moment when I shall have no more money, so that perhaps I shall be thankful for being lodged and fed at the public expense. My banker has withdrawn from Paris, and his representative declines to look at my bill, although I offer ruinous interest. As for friends, they are all in a like condition, for no one expected the siege to last so long. At my hotel, need I observe that I do not pay my bill, but in hotels the guests may ring ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... framed, are in fact, whether they be true or false, at the very heart of the social philosophy of the world; we have in the third place to detect the fundamental character of the blunder involved in them—to see clearly and coldly wherein they are wrong and why they are ruinous; we have, finally, to trace, if we can, their deadly effects both in the course of human history and in the present ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... way the wardens of St. Alban's "implored the aid of the judge," because they wished divers persons who refused to pay their rates "co[m]pelled therunto by aucthoritye of this court," otherwise the unpaid workmen on their ruinous church would leave, and the half-finished structure sustain damage by winter weather.[137] The act-books teem with such presentments as the following: one Holaway refuses to give to the poor-box, "and is found able by the parish."[138] Thomas Arter will give but a half-penny to the poor. Arter ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... chemist, and metallurgist, with assistant assayers, etc., all highly qualified men. But it will be asked, how are many struggling mines in sparsely populated countries to obtain the services of all these eminent scientists? The reply is by co-operation. One of the most ruinous mistakes of the past has been that each little mining venture has started on an independent course, with different management, separate machinery, etc. Can it then be wondered at that our gold-mining is ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... "collected a numerous party from all the neighbouring islands to celebrate the christening of his eldest son." His hospitalities cost him dear. A storm arose; his guests could not get away; instead of enjoying their society for a few days, he was obliged to entertain them at a ruinous expense for many weeks. His larder, his cellar, and his barns, were by degrees exhausted. His ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... French ministry seemed in no haste to redeem their pledge with respect to the reduction of Dunkirk, and to his multiplied remonstrances uniformly opposed this unanswerable objection, that, in the opinion of Turenne, the best judge, the attempt in the existing circumstances must prove ruinous to the allies. At last he would brook no longer delay; the army marched into the neighbourhood of the town, and the fort of Mardyke capitulated[a] after a siege of three days. But the Spaniards lay strongly ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... army, it would be, above all, necessary that he should lay aside his name. We are in duty bound to consider the wishes of foreign governments: France is divided into so many parties, that a war could only be ruinous, and therefore your son must ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... of trades-unions is to keep up wages at the expense of the lower paid and unassociated working people. They endeavour to prevent poorer men learning their trade, and thus keep the supply of labour below the demand.[1] This system may last for a time, but it becomes ruinous in ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... desert-girdled Timbuctoo, we drove several miles over a rough road, passed the Devil's Den unmolested, crossed a fretful little streamlet noisily working its way into a valley, where it turned a lonely, half- ruinous mill, and climbing a steep hill beyond, saw before us a wide sandy level, skirted on the west and north by low, scraggy hills, and dotted here and there with dwarf pitch-pines. In the centre of this desolate ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... would boast descent, was not only a Talmudic writer; he also left historical and poetical works. Elias Wilna, the last in the list, had a subtle, delicately poised mind, and deserves special mention for his determined opposition to the Kabbala and its offspring Chassidism, hostile and ruinous to Judaism ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... attracted notice by a trenchant dissimilarity from all the rest. He was probably upwards of forty, but he looked fully ten years older; and Florizel thought he had never seen a man more naturally hideous, nor one more ravaged by disease and ruinous excitements. He was no more than skin and bone, was partly paralysed, and wore spectacles of such unusual power that his eyes appeared through the glasses greatly magnified and distorted in shape. Except the Prince and the President, he was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... external activity, because they are inactive within. Contrarily, if they are active within, they do not care to be dragged out of themselves; it disturbs and impedes their thoughts in a way that is often most ruinous ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... leader and his two companions, who now looked upon him with great respect as well as some fear, pursued their way to the chapel where dwelt the friar mentioned by Locksley. Presently they reached a little moonlit glade, in front of which stood an ancient and ruinous chapel and beside it a rude hermitage of stone half-covered with ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... for ever, and my deed to God! Once Venice guarded safe, let this vile clod Drift where fate will.' And then (the hideous laugh Of fiends in full possession, keen to quaff The wine of one new soul not weak with tears, Pealing like ruinous thunder in mine ears) I fell, and heard no more. The pale day broke Through lazar-windows, when once more I woke, Remembering I might no more ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... was written and its peculiar circumstances, was an encouragement to the Bible Society to proceed, although with secrecy and caution. Yet this article, sadly misunderstood in England, gave rise to communications from home highly mortifying to myself and ruinous to the Bible cause. ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... either side of the water. Some of the houses are old, others of no earlier date, apparently, than the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries; some large and well preserved, and some mere cottages, half ruinous, with low gables and faded yellow fronts, huddled together on the rough causeway, alongside of which are moored canal-boats with brown hulls and deck-houses gay with white and green paint. At the end of the Quai de la Potterie is the modern Bassin de Commerce, in which the Roya ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... have good cultivating tenants as it is that of the tenants to have good proprietors; and it is felt to be the interest of both to adjust their terms amicably among themselves, without a reference to a third and superior party, which is always costly and commonly ruinous.[6] ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... manner this lawless race had been as a law to itself throughout. From age to age came certain gifts and certain ways of management, which saved the family life from falling out of rank and land and lot. From deadly feuds, exhausting suits, and ruinous profusion, when all appeared lost, there had always arisen a man of direct lineal stock to retrieve the estates and reprieve the name. And what is still more conducive to the longevity of families, no member had appeared as yet of a power too large and an aim too lofty, whose eminence ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... will not think me ungracious, if I say that I cannot consent to let him enter the lists against Theodore Yorke. I know only too well that it would arouse all his bad passions. As I said before, rivalry in any case would not be best for him, but, against Theodore, it would be simply ruinous; and I would rather see him remain under Thomas's tuition, learning to be a thorough and efficient servant, and to control his temper because right is right, than to have him take the first honors in ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... been, from the middle of the eighteenth century, the scene of a succession of ruinous civil wars. Competitors, with more or less right to the throne, had carried fire and sword everywhere, and converted that rich and fertile province into a desert, where the remains of ruined cities alone bore witness ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... days was I borne by ruinous winds over the teeming deep; but on the tenth day we set foot on the land of the lotus-eaters, who eat a flowery food. So we stepped ashore and drew water, and straightway my company took their mid-day meal by the swift ships. Now when we had tasted meat and drink, I sent forth certain of my company ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... lived after the manner of their race when removed from civilization, which, as a rule, has proved a greater curse than boon to them. Fortunately they knew nothing of the ruinous "fire water" that was to await the coming of professing Christians and the claimants of a higher culture and civilization. They spent their time mainly in hunting and fishing, sometimes engaging in raids upon other tribes, several of whose grounds lay to the north of the boundary ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... military. The Athenian populace not only enjoyed no political rights, but were reduced to a condition only a little above servitude; and it appears to have been owing to the anarchy that arose from the ruinous extortions of the nobles on the one hand, and the resistance of the people on the other, that Dra'co, the most eminent of the nobility, was chosen to prepare the first written code of laws for the government ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... without the smallest likelihood that the event would change his nature. Hence the nut to crack: Given 'Arry, by what rapid process of discipline can he be prepared for a state in which the 'Arrian characteristics will surely prove ruinous not only to himself but to all with ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... handsome fortune, so that his sons would not be dependent on their own exertions for support. Gabriel unfortunately knew this circumstance too well, and on the faith of his father's fortune indulged in habits of extravagance and dissipation as ruinous as they were disgraceful. The captain did not live to witness the complete degradation of his favorite son. His vessel was wrecked on a homeward voyage, and the waves became the sailor's winding-sheet. His wife did ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Billie. "It's—it's ruinous! I just know that Amanda Peabody will do her best to spoil the term for ...
— Billie Bradley at Three Towers Hall - or, Leading a Needed Rebellion • Janet D. Wheeler
... see everything, although many knew he had been blind for a long time, for he had been there, before, going about among the houses of the neighbourhood. He said he first got his sight when he was coming out of a little ruinous hut which was all wet inside. "I groped in the water," said he, "and rubbed my eyes with my wet hands." He told where the hut stood. The people who heard him wondered much at this event, and spoke among themselves of what it could be that produced it: but Thorgils ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... intended here to detail their proceedings or to describe at much length the squabbles and constant disorders, murders, and robberies which took place while they held possession of the Island. The speculation proved ruinous to the Adventurers, who in the end lost their estates, and were obliged to leave the islanders to their fate. A brief summary of it will suffice, and those who desire more information on the subject will find a full account of it in the ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... the dryness of the soil and to the thin and sandy character which so often marks it, but also to the constant grass-fires. The grass is generally short, so that these fires do not kill the trees; nor does one hear of such great forest conflagrations as are frequent and ruinous in Western America and by no means unknown in the south of Cape Colony. But these fires doubtless injure the younger trees sufficiently to stunt their growth, and this mischief is, of course, all the greater ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... he upon whom a corner of the great Caliph's mantle has descended, spake with kindness and discretion, seeking to know what evil had come upon the other, disturbing his soul and driving him to such ill-considered and ruinous waste ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... an echo a voice returned the signal. Following the direction of the sound, her eyes discerned a dark shadow in the hollow forty rods away. She put Sunbeam into a canter, and as she approached the shadow, the outline defined itself, and she saw that it was a ruinous shed or hut. ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... who have the interests of this kingdom at heart, and are concerned in the councils thereof, ought not to make the most humble and earnest representations to his Majesty, that he may vouchsafe to grant us that favour, the want of which is ruinous to our domestic industry, and the having of which would interfere with no interest ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... by the Ogilvies, who thus sought revenge for the destruction, by the Marquis of Argyll, of the "bonnie house of Airlie." The castle is situated on a promontory of the Ochil hills, near the village of Dollar, in Clackmannanshire, and has long been in the ruinous condition described in the song. Two hill rivulets, designated Sorrow and Care, proceed on either side of the castle promontory. John Knox, the Reformer, for some time resided in Castle Gloom, with Archibald, fourth Earl of Argyll, and here ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... flower that finds a chink for itself, and a little earth to grow in, on whatever ancient wall its slender roots may fasten. Here she dwelt, in her tower, possessing a friend or two in Rome, but no home companion except the flock of doves, whose cote was in a ruinous chamber contiguous to her own. They soon became as familiar with the fair-haired Saxon girl as if she were a born sister of their brood; and her customary white robe bore such an analogy to their snowy plumage that the confraternity of artists called Hilda the Dove, and ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... woman to whom habitual excitement of any kind has become essential has taken the first step towards ruin. In the case of a woman, it leads to discontent, fretfulness, and dissatisfaction with the quiet duties of domestic life; in the case of a man, it leads almost invariably to animal stimulus, ruinous alike to the powers of body ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... The spiritual disturbance and pain thus suffered are the effort of Providence to readjust the inverted relation of his low self interest to the higher interest of the general public, and remove the threatened ruinous consequences of his sin by remedying the order it has ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... in a wide glade, where stood the shanty occupied by the miners, a shed for the donkeys employed in dragging out the coal, and, finally, the ruinous tunnel leading horizontally into a disused mine. The wooden tram-way on which the coal-car had formerly run still remained; and cautiously walking upon this causeway through the quagmire of mud, Miselle and Mr. Williams penetrated some distance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... to the seaward in a considerable peninsula: very bare and grassy; haunted by sheep and, at night and morning, by the piercing cries of the shepherds; wandered over by a few wild goats; and on its sea-front indented with long, clamorous caves, and faced with cliffs of the colour and ruinous outline of an old peat-stack. In one of these echoing and sunless gullies we saw, clustered like sea-birds on a splashing ledge, shrill as sea-birds in their salutation to the passing boat, a group of fisherwomen, stripped to their ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "style," and are "so gentlemanly" and "so aristocratic," or not. Your shoemaker, your lawyer, your butcher, your clergyman—if they are simple and steady, and, whether rich or poor, are unseduced by the sirens of extravagance and ruinous display, help make up the "best society." For that mystic communion is not composed of the rich, but of the worthy; and is "best" by its virtues, and not by its vices. When Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Reynolds, and their friends, met at supper ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... contrary, I give you my assurance, that if my claim for brokerage is not allowed, the transaction will prove absolutely ruinous ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Niksich and at Danilograd, and I saw one brought to the Prince's tent one day, during the siege, which weighed twenty-two pounds, shot by one of the men, for they refused all kinds of bait, and were only taken by shooting or the net; or, horrible to relate, by dynamite, the ruinous effects of which on the population of the river the Prince was too easygoing to forbid. I have seen one of the spring basins, from which the Zeta takes its rise, carpeted by tiny trout and other fishes, killed by the explosions of ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... left Shenton early, as we have seen, so Fred Hurst did not overtake her. He went all the way to Braley Brook, however, and right up to the ruinous old farmhouse where the Forests lived, and waited in the orchard some time, hoping that Nancy would come out to bring in some linen which hung to bleach among the bare apple trees. He knew that Nancy always helped her mother in the evenings. But on this evening ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 5, May, 1891 • Various
... than thunder in the hand of every village laborer, and found on the Messines Ridge the craters of the nineteen volcanoes that were let loose there at the touch of a finger that might have been a child's finger without the result being a whit less ruinous? Shakespeare may have seen a Stratford cottage struck by one of Jove's thunderbolts, and have helped to extinguish the lighted thatch and clear away the bits of the broken chimney. What would he have said if he had seen Ypres as it is now, or returned to Stratford, as French peasants are returning ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... Bonito, Fig. 35. This edifice is, in some respects, the most interesting of the series as well as the best preserved in certain portions. Its exterior development, including the court, is one thousand three hundred feet. Its corners are rounded, and the east wing, now the most ruinous part of the structure, appears to have had row upon row of apartments added, until nearly one-third of the area of the court was covered. "Its present elevation," General Simpson observes, "shows that it had at least four stories of apartments. The number of rooms ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... an infant, cast off his father, and only claims him in order to keep a disgraceful, ruinous secret hanging over his life for ever, in order to ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the return of prosperity, seem to have marked the commercial and financial history of this country during the last fifty years, more than that of any other nation under the sun, and given rise to the spirit of extravagant speculations, both disgraceful and ruinous. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... passed but Miss Carlyle, by dint of hints and innuendoes, contrived to impress upon Lady Isabel the unfortunate blow to his own interests that Mr. Carlyle's marriage had been, the ruinous expense she had entailed upon the family. It struck a complete chill to Isabel's heart, and she became painfully impressed with the incubus she must be to Mr. Carlyle—so far as his pocket was concerned. Lord Mount Severn, ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... am delighted to see the daily and hourly progress of madness and folly and wickedness in England. The consummation of these qualities are the true ingredients for making a fine narrative in history, especially if followed by some signal and ruinous convulsion—as I hope will soon be the case ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... since you were a little shaver. Well, George, I didn't want to bother you with it—today. It seems there's trouble in the shops,—in our shops, of all places,—it's been going on for some time, grumbling, dissatisfaction, and they're getting higher wages than ever before—ruinous wages. They want me ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... experiments, except that in the class in systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it, because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students. Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up. And moreover ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... writes, "the taxes, nor the lettres de cachet, nor any of the other abuses of authority; it is not the sins of the intendants, nor the long and ruinous delays of justice, that has most angered the nation; it is the prejudices of the nobility for which it has exhibited the greatest hatred. What proves this clearly is the fact that it is the bourgeois, the men of letters, the men of money, in fact all those who are jealous of the nobility, ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... but this was far from easy. The Curtises' unwillingness to part with land for building purposes enhanced the price of houses, and in autumn and winter the place was at its fullest, so that she could not even rent a house but at a ruinous price. It would be the best way to build on Homestead land, but this would be impracticable until spring, even if means were forthcoming, as Rachel resolved they should be, and in the meantime she was obliged to acquiesce in Mr. Mauleverer's assurance that a small ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the summit of a rugged mountain with valleys surrounding its base, and on its sides let the surface of the soil be seen to slide, together with the small roots of the bushes, denuding great portions of the surrounding rocks. And descending ruinous from these precipices in its boisterous course, let it dash along and lay bare the twisted and gnarled roots of large trees overthrowing their roots upwards; and let the mountains, as they are scoured bare, discover ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... the phenomena of the soul, and for the extension of our knowledge regarding this subject beyond the limits of experience—even to the condition of the soul after death—is convenient enough for the purposes of pure reason, but detrimental and even ruinous to its interests in the sphere of nature and experience. The dogmatizing spiritualist explains the unchanging unity of our personality through all changes of condition from the unity of a thinking substance, the interest which we ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... and State. But the opportunity was lost, and I have been obliged to content myself through life with saying what I mean in the plainest of plain language, than which, I suppose, there is no habit more ruinous to a man's prospects ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... the Campus Martius on the day of the election, where, turning towards the magistrates, they looked round at the countenances of their most eminent men, who were earnestly gazing at each other, and murmured bitterly, that their affairs were in so ruinous a state, and the condition of the commonwealth so desperate, that no one dared undertake the command in Spain. When suddenly Publius Cornelius, son of Publius who had fallen in Spain, who was about twenty-four years of age, declaring himself a candidate, took his station ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... consequences which the said coinage may have upon this kingdom: And lastly, whereas it is universally agreed, that the whole nation to a man (except Mr. Wood and his confederates) are in the utmost apprehensions of the ruinous consequences that must follow from the said coinage. Therefore we, whose names are underwritten, being persons of considerable estates in this kingdom, and residers therein, do unanimously resolve and declare that we will never receive one farthing or half-penny of the said Wood's coining, and that ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... put on three or four suits, and, not yet satisfied, took under their arms all they could lay their hands on. Others drove off in vehicles, carrying with them bags filled with loot.... The Christian population saved itself from the ruinous operations of the crowd by placing holy ikons in their windows and painting crosses on ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... person in their employ should differ from them boldly, and condemn their course openly, was an extraordinary event; that a young man in the outset of his career should dare so much was unprecedented. It would be a ruinous thing, they said among themselves, for so young a man to lose so important a position on the very threshold of his professional life, and they were convinced that his knowledge of this would restrain him. But they were astounded to find ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver, should be removed from their posts, and that such good men as the king might select, should be placed in their stead. The petition, eminently respectful, but drawn up in very forcible language, expressive of the ruinous consequences caused by the measures which these officials had recommended, was transmitted to Franklin, the latter part of the summer of 1773. He immediately forwarded it to Lord Dartmouth. With it he sent a very polite and conciliatory letter, in which he declared, that the Americans ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... castle, now ruinous, situated in the wilds of Cumberland, about seventeen miles north-east of Carlisle, amidst that mountainous and desolate tract of country, bordering upon Liddesdale, emphatically termed the Waste of Bewcastle. Conscouthart ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... did, that by so doing no good would be done to the country? Dissensions among their foes did, when properly used, give them power,—but such power they could only use by carrying measures which they themselves believed to be ruinous. But the ruin would be as certain should they abstain. Each individual might have gloried in standing aloof,—in hiding his face beneath his toga, and in remembering that Rome did once exist in her splendour. But a party cannot afford to hide its face in ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... his last words, was one of those people, of whom we see so many at every step we take through life, who ask advice when they need it, are convinced of its soundness when given, and yet, though their natural good sense assents to dispassionate reasoning, return to their old, foolish, absurd, and ruinous opinions and intentions. ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... by this time arrived at the remains of an old finger-post, which my host had formerly pointed out as a landmark. Here, a ruinous wooden bridge, supported by long posts resembling crutches, served me to get across the water, while my new friend sought a ford a good way higher up, for the stream was ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... night before. The last four days of indifference to finance on one side, and pampering the heart on the other, had proved very costly. To use his own expression, he had been "set back" almost eight thousand dollars. An average like that would be ruinous. ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... with the hope of working on. Many have worked more constantly, but few have worked more intensely. I found kindness on every hand always, but had I failed in a single instance I should have met with entire bankruptcy. The failure would have been ruinous.... I thank God for the struggle, but would not like to see a dog try it again. There are droves of lads in Wales that would creep up but they cannot. Poverty has too heavy ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... "But, man, it is ruinous, and they dare not injure us. Why, if the English people knew of our position troops would be sent ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... A generous expenditure may be incurred once even by poor people, but cannot possibly be maintained over a dozen years. Now she had taken the matter into her own hands and had done that which would be ruinous if not successful. She was venturing her all upon the die,—with the prospect of drowning herself on the way out to Patagonia should the chances of the game go against her. She forgot nothing. She could hardly hope for more ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... staggering bound Is made, when the last short, labouring breath Is breathed, when over, in shuddering death, The charger rolls, with a sickening crash, And responds no more to the spur or lash; And the gulf yawns close, sheer slope to air, Black, unavoidable, ruinous there— Then, gallant rider, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 5, 1892 • Various
... having either dispersed or destroyed the Christians, Vedast could not discover the least footsteps of Christianity, save only in the memory of some old people, who showed him without the walls a poor ruinous church, where Christians used to hold their religious assemblies. He sighed to see the Lord's field so overgrown with bushes and brambles, and become the haunt of wild beasts; whereupon he made it his most earnest supplication to God, that he would in his mercy vouchsafe to restore ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... range of old stabling at the doctor's house, with extensive lofts. The first part was partitioned off for a coachman's room, but this had not been in use for half a century, and the whole place was ruinous and decayed. Once upon a time some one with a love of horses must have lived there, for there were stalls for eight, and a coach-house as well, but the doctor only kept two horses, and they occupied a new stable built in front of ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... Nathalie Renton," he began, with mock gravity, "your professional father is losing some of his oldest patients. Everybody is in ruinous good health; and the grass ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... prefacing pages which enshrine Amelia; and where also are displayed Blear Eyed Moll in the prison yard of Newgate, as Newgate was twenty years before the prison reforms of Howard were heard of; Justice Thrasher and his iniquities; the 'diabolisms' of My Lord and of his tool Trent; the ruinous miseries of excessive gambling; and the abuses of duelling. Indeed the avowedly didactic purpose of the moralist seems at times to cloud a little the fine perception of the artist. There are passages, in this book which, much as they redound to the honour of their ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... of Witold's army might prove ruinous to the whole of Jagiello's empire. Nobody knew when the Tartars, encouraged by the victory over Witold, might now invade the lands and cities belonging to the grand dukedom. In that case the kingdom of Poland would be involved in a war. Therefore many knights, who like Zawisza, Farurej, ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... thing was too dreadful to her! The lantern itself must, she thought, have been made when the invention was in its infancy, and its pictured slides seemed the remnants of various outworn series. Those of the Rake's Progress were something too hideous and lamentable to be dwelt upon. And the ruinous, wretched old man did not merely seem to have taken to this as a last effort, but to have in his dotage turned back upon his life course, and resumed a half-forgotten trade—or perhaps only an accomplishment of which he had made use for the benefit of his people when he was a clergyman—to ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... I sit alone, vn-seene of any, And to the Nightingales complaining Notes Tune my distresses, and record my woes. O thou that dost inhabit in my brest, Leaue not the Mansion so long Tenant-lesse, Lest growing ruinous, the building fall, And leaue no memory of what it was, Repaire me, with thy presence, Siluia: Thou gentle Nimph, cherish thy forlorne swaine. What hallowing, and what stir is this to day? These ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... that her father's purpose, bent her mind to the secret love of the County Palurin: to whom (he being likewise inflamed with love of her) by a letter subtly enclosed in a cloven cane, she gave to understand a convenient way for their desired meetings, through an old ruinous vault, whose mouth opened directly under her chamber floor. Into this vault when she was one day descended (for the conveyance of her lover), her father in the mean season (whose only joy was in his daughter) came to her chamber, and not finding her there, supposing her to have been walked ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... the splendor of a ruinous glory Emblazoned, glitters our lost Statesman's name: The great deeds that have earned him deathless fame Will cost us merely thanks. Their inventory Of peaceful heroism will be a story, Of wise assertion of a rightful claim, And Commerce freed by sagely daring aim. Famine averted; Revolution ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... laboriously carted to the kitchen; and Morris, with a gentle sentiment of triumph, looked round upon the scene of his achievements. Yes, he could deny all knowledge of it now: the lobby, beyond the fact that it was partly ruinous, betrayed no trace of the passage of Hercules. But it was a weary Morris that crept up to bed; his arms and shoulders ached, the palms of his hands burned from the rough kisses of the coal-axe, and there was one smarting finger ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... their religion might suddenly combine them all into a formidable republic. What could he oppose to such an enemy, if the Protestant portion of his subjects deserted him? And would not both parties exhaust themselves in so ruinous a civil war? How much was at stake if he lost; and if he won, whom else would he ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... the manuscripts were reported to be in a state of decay, the place where they were kept not being suitable. In 1706, Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to fit up the study for public use, but he declared that Cotton House was in a ruinous condition; and in consequence of his report, in the following year, another Act of Parliament decreed that to increase the public utility of the library, Cotton House should be purchased of Sir John Cotton for 4500 pounds, ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... scandal! What a disgrace! Mr. Proctor, a member of a Christian Church, running after his wife, a member of the same Christian Church, with a fire-shovel in his hand! What is to be done? Surely, if this gets wind it will be ruinous to his character, if not to his business! And then, what effect will ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... to redress the wrongs of America. The councils of the arrogant and scornful prevailed; and instead of the proposed bill, further measures of a stringent nature were adopted, coercive of some of the middle and southern colonies, but ruinous to the trade and fisheries of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... kind, though quick and passionate, brooking no opposition; and the girls were really more attached to him and found more pleasure in his society than in their mother's. Zelica, the youngest, was his special favorite, and he humored and petted her at a ruinous rate, though often storming ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... of justice was convened in the great hall of the Convent of the Ursulines, which, in the ruinous state of the city after the siege and bombardment, had been taken for the headquarters of General Murray. Mere Migeon and Mere Esther, who both survived the conquest, had effected a prudent arrangement with the English general, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... suspected, for he kept Horatia near him, and waited for the curate, so as to leave her at liberty and unobserved. Her first object was that Owen should see his mother's grave. It was beside the parsonage path, a flat stone, fenced by a low iron border, enclosing likewise a small flower-bed, weedy, ruinous, and forlorn. A floriated cross, filled up with green lichen, was ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... oppressor. These are not our expectations. We have learnt that it is not with such visitations that God punishes us for our sinful indulgence or neglect, but that He does it with a punishment which may be less obvious but is often more ruinous than these. ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... tawdry swindling; but not even the most egoistic man would fail to sound the sentiment of his wife about taking a partner into his business, or about standing for public office, or about combating unfair and ruinous competition, or about marrying off their daughter. Such things are of massive importance; they lie at the foundation of well-being; they call for the best thought that the man confronted by them can muster; the perils hidden in a wrong decision overcome even ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Grant in his memorable message of December 7, 1875, are signally relevant to the present situation in Cuba, and it may be wholesome now to recall them. At that time a ruinous conflict had for seven years wasted the neighboring island. During all those years an utter disregard of the laws of civilized warfare and of the just demands of humanity, which called forth expressions of condemnation from the nations of Christendom, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... behoves her (says Videant Consules) to increase her forces by a superhuman effort. As matters stand, in spite of the Triple Alliance, in spite of the sympathy and support of Austria and Italy (ruinous for them) William II is by no means confident in the future success ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... around to the other side of my hulk and to look down into the west—and to feel all hope dying with the sight that I saw there. Far away, under the red mist, across the red gleaming weed and against a sunset sky bloody red, I seemed to see a vast ruinous congregation of wrecks; so far-extending that it was as though all the wrecked ships in the world were lying huddled together there in a miserably desolate company. And with sight of them the certain conviction was borne in upon me that my ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... amount of three thousand eight hundred and forty spindles, was ordered for Antunano from the United States, and a loan granted him of one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars, but of which he never received the whole. Meanwhile his project was sneered at as absurd, impossible, ruinous; but, firmly resolved not to abandon his enterprise, he contented himself with living with the strictest economy, himself and his numerous family almost suffering from want, and frequently unable to obtain credit for the provisions necessary ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... they lodged was in the lordly quartier of the Faubourg St. Germain; the neighbouring streets were venerable with the ancient edifices of a fallen noblesse; but their tenement was in a narrow, dingy lane, and the building itself seemed beggarly and ruinous. The apartment was in an attic on the sixth story, and the window, placed at the back of the lane, looked upon another row of houses of a better description, that communicated with one of the great streets of the quartier. The space between their abode and their opposite ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and a young man may make it quite ruinous. I hope the youth's friends have left him means enough of his own. I would not speak of such a matter," she added apologetically, "only the restoration of Lone seems so to swallow up all our resources as to leave us ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... enlargement and building of churches and chapels, we notice one by the vicar of Dorking, in Surrey, from which we extract the following:—"In many places of this country it is lamentable to behold the ruinous state of churches. If a man's dwelling-house be decayed, he will never cease till it be restored; if his barn, where he bestows all his fruits and his goods, be out of repair, what diligence doth he use to make it perfect? If the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... to lend them money, and have found truffles on the raft of the "Medusa." At need, too, they know how to practice abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite, but if a slice of fortune falls into their hands you will see them at once mounted on the most ruinous fancies, loving the youngest and prettiest, drinking the oldest and best, and never finding sufficient windows to throw their money out of. Then, when their last crown is dead and buried, they begin to dine again at that table spread by chance, ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... surrounded by cypress trees and looking forth on the great city which was mistress of the world. Even to-day the splendid columns which still remain and the impressive beauty of the crypt make the church, though in an almost ruinous condition, a striking object in Constantinople. The monastery first became famous as the home of the Akoimetai, or Sleepless Monks, (as they were called from their hours of prayer,) when they withstood the heresies ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... that coin has not left them richer: many, very many Germans know the Kultur War to be ruinous: but Berlin must play the Game still, and assume that the tricks and aims cannot be understood! It is lack of regard for other nations carried into German Finance; and all because the bureaucratic military ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... Association, contains the following amusing and instructive account of the memorable competition between the great London water-companies forty years ago, and of the close monopoly in which that reckless and ruinous struggle ended:— ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... if she were kept in ignorance, she would be at a loss how to act and speak in a sudden emergency. She might be surprised into saying something in the presence of a secret enemy that would be utterly ruinous. So he drew a chair to her side and told her everything that had passed between Kelsey and himself. He did not try to smooth it over, but repeated the conversation word for word; and when he came to the end, his mother was as much in the dark as Marcy was himself. ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... authority which he well knew how to assume, commanded the attendance of the leading citizens and spoke with them in private. Finding them eager for the arrival of the Goths, to whom they looked rather than to the distant Greeks for protection against ruinous disorder (already they had despatched messengers to Totila entreating his aid), he made known to them that he was travelling to meet the Gothic outposts, and promised to hasten the king's advance. At present, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... nearing the convent and the oldest and most ruinous part of the town. He did not disguise from himself the gloomy significance of this; even in the old days the crumbling adobe buildings that abutted on the old garden wall of the convent were the haunts of lawless Mexicans and vagabond ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... a reargument, and obtained one, but with the same result.[Footnote: Green v. Biddle, 8 Wheaton's Reports, 1.] The legislature at its next session discussed the opinion in the case and resolved "that they do most solemnly protest against the doctrines promulgated in that decision as ruinous in their practical effects to the good people of this commonwealth and subversive of their dearest and most valuable political rights."[Footnote: ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... Sir Arthur's favourite, Abimelech Henley, still less than you do. My fears indeed are rather strong. When once a taste for improvement [I mean building and gardening improvement] becomes a passion, gaming itself is scarcely more ruinous. I have no doubt that Sir Arthur's fortune has suffered, and is suffering severely; and that while that miserly wretch, Abimelech, is destroying the fabric, he is purloining and carrying off the best of the materials. I doubt ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... meeting future competition; but this only prepares the ground for new and still worse crises. After the crisis has lasted years, after the surplusage of goods has been gradually done away with through sales at ruinous prices, through retrenchment of production, and through the destruction of smaller concerns, society slowly begins to recover again. Demand rises, and production follows suit—slowly at first and cautious, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... debauch, repeating, as well as memory permitted, all his absurdities of speech and action. Defiant self-justification was now far to seek. On the other hand, he perceived very clearly how easy it would be for him to lapse by degrees of weakened will into a ruinous dissoluteness. Anything of that kind would mean, of course, the abandonment of his ambitions. All he had to fight the world with was his brain; and only by incessant strenuousness in its exercise had he achieved the moderate prominence declared ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of the day now presume to expect a continuance of support in this ruinous infatuation? Can Parliament be so dead to its dignity and its duty as to be thus deluded into the loss of the one and the violation of the other? To give an unlimited credit and support for the steady perseverance in measures not proposed for our parliamentary advice, but dictated and forced ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... a very gloomy person," she said. "Lawrence, don't let us fence with one another any longer. What you may decide to do politically may be ruinous to your career, to your chance of usefulness in the world, and to my hopes. But I want you to understand this. It can make no difference to me. I have had dreams perhaps of a great future, of being the wife of a Prime ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... says one of my Correspondents in those years, "is easily defined, and not very condemnable, but it is nevertheless ruinous to his task as Biographer. He takes up Sterling as a clergyman merely. Sterling, I find, was a curate for exactly eight months; during eight months and no more had he any special relation to the Church. But he was ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... is this same Jaraicejo, a small ruinous town or village, situated on a rising ground, with a very wild country all about it. The road from Badajoz to Madrid passes through it; and about two leagues distant, in the direction of Madrid, is the famous mountain pass of Mirabete, from the top of which you enjoy a ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... taught by the World's Fair in Chicago. There you had no choice between walking until you almost dropped from fatigue, or being wheeled about (at ruinous expense) in an invalid-chair by a stripling youth who would pant and perspire until stout and healthy passengers felt in duty bound to get out and walk to save ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 57, December 9, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... among the Eliots, Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, Johnstons, and other marauding clans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegiance to "the King of Lothian and Fife." Every owner of a half-ruinous "peel" or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like the nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall; and he could summon them at short notice, for a raid upon the English or a foray against some neighbouring ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... fallacy which is urging the electro-maniacs of the present time to their ruinous investments is the idea that electro-motors are novelties, and that electric-lighting is in its infancy; while gas-lighting is regarded as an old, or mature middle-aged business, and therefore we are to expect a marvelous growth of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... Derek, to dream of handicapping yourself at this vital stage of your career with a wife who not only will not be a help to you, but must actually be a ruinous handicap. I am not blaming you for imagining yourself in love in the first place, though I really should have thought that a man of your strength and character would . . . However, as I say, I am not blaming you for that. Superficially, ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... French scholars, have written of Moslem architecture and art in articles published either in "France-Maroc," as introductions to catalogues of exhibitions, or in the reviews and daily papers. Pierre Loti and M. Andre Chevrillon have reflected, with the intensest visual sensibility, the romantic and ruinous Morocco of yesterday, and in the volumes of the "Conferences Marocaines," published by the French government, the experts gathered about the Resident-General have examined the industrial and agricultural Morocco of tomorrow. Lastly, one striking book sums up, with ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... (whom Lycurgus in Plutarch calls morbos reipublicae, the boils of the commonwealth), many poor people in all our towns. Civitates ignobiles, as [540]Polydore calls them, base-built cities, inglorious, poor, small, rare in sight, ruinous, and thin of inhabitants. Our land is fertile we may not deny, full of all good things, and why doth it not then abound with cities, as well as Italy, France, Germany, the Low Countries? because their policy hath been otherwise, and we are not so thrifty, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
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