"Dissolute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other-worldliness which we hardly feel with Shakespeare or Moliere. His muse moves along the high-road of comedy which is the Roman road, and she carries in her train types that have done service to many since the ancients fashioned them years ago. Jealous husbands, foolish pragmatic fathers, a dissolute son, a boastful soldier, a cunning slave—they all are merely counters by which the game of comedy used to be played. In England, since Shakespeare took his hold on the stage, that road has been stopped for us, that game ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... and his attendants, who had, with better success than heretofore, traced him to this wretched haunt. The back-ground of this print serves rather as a representation of night-cellars in general, those infamous receptacles for the dissolute and abandoned of both sexes, than a further illustration of our artist's chief design; however, as it was Mr. Hogarth's intention, in the history before us, to encourage virtue and expose vice, by placing the ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... two men personally there was a great contrast. In the favourite there was nothing of the precision, calmness, and moral behaviour of the King. Buckingham was dissolute, talkative, and vain. His appearance had made his fortune, and he endeavoured to add to it by a splendour of attire, which later times would have allowed only in women. Jewels were displayed in his ears, and precious stones served as buttons for his doublet. It ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... adepts in the arts of vice—a fear of being thought "green," "verdant," or being measured by some other adjective used in fast circles to caricature the innocence of a soul unsullied by contact with the vices and follies of the city. He half expected that some of the dissolute young wretches who were drinking, swearing, and pouring the filth of a poisoned mind from their lips, would ask him if "his mother knew he was out." He tried to maintain his self-possession, and to seem at home where ruin was rioting in the souls of young men. If he did not entirely ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... is known of the life of Mme. de Lambert. She was born in 1647, and, in spite of the unfavorable surroundings of her youth and of a dissolute, extravagant, and unrefined mother, the observance of decorum and honor became the actuating principle of her life. Until her marriage (in 1666) to Henri de Lambert, Marquis de Bris en Auxerrois, she was in the midst of the grossest licentiousness and freedom of manners; ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... impenetrable jungles, ridged by mile-high mountain ranges, seamed by mighty rivers, inhabited by the most savage beasts and the most bestial savages known to man. Lying squarely athwart the Line, the sun beats down upon it like the blast from an open furnace-door. The story is told in Borneo of a dissolute planter who died from sunstroke. The day after the funeral a spirit message reached the widow of the dear departed. "Please send down my blankets" it said. But it is the terrible humidity which makes the climate dangerous; a humidity due to the innumerable swamps, the ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... apothecaries and ladies' maids, or "acquire interest enough" to have an infirmary erected "by the voluntary subscriptions of his friends." Here Smollett denounces hospitals, which "encourage the vulgar to be idle and dissolute, by opening an asylum to them and their families, from the diseases of poverty and intemperance." This is odd morality for one who suffered from "the base indifference of mankind." He ought to have known that poverty is not a vice for which the ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Station, is more [a[1]] Hero than he who omits any worthy Action he is able to accomplish in a great one. It is not many Years ago since Lapirius, in Wrong of his elder Brother, came to a great Estate by Gift of his Father, by reason of the dissolute Behaviour of the First-born. Shame and Contrition reformed the Life of the disinherited Youth, and he became as remarkable for his good Qualities as formerly for his Errors. Lapirius, who observed his Brothers Amendment, sent him on ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... he was called, resolved to behave well and worthily to serve his protector, but he saw in this mysterious Council many men leading a dissolute life and yet not making less, nay —gaining more indulgences, gold crowns and benefices than all the other virtuous and well-behaved ones. Now during one night—dangerous to his virtue—the devil whispered into his ear that he should live more luxuriously, since every one ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... back, and said, "So, young sirs, have you seen enough of your doting kinsman? The sub-prior bids me say that we harbour no strange, idling, lubber lads nor strange dogs here. 'Tis enough for us to be saddled with dissolute old men-at- arms without all their idle kin making an excuse to come and pay their devoirs. These corrodies are a heavy charge and a weighty abuse, and if there be the visitation the king's majesty speaks of, they will be one of the first matters ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and tremble," and when he exclaims, "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." He insists on the necessity of a faith that evinces itself in good works and in all the virtues, as the means of acceptance with God. He compares life to a vanishing vapor, denounces terribly the wicked and dissolute rich men who wanton in crimes and oppress the poor. Then he calls on the suffering brethren to be patient under their afflictions "until the coming of the Lord;" to abstain from oaths, be fervent in prayer, and establish their hearts, "for the coming of the Lord draweth ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... you've plenty of ways of spending your money—not throwing it away upon a set of dissolute peace-breakers. It's all very well for you to say you haven't thrown away your money, but you will. He'll be certain to run off; it isn't likely he'll go upon his trial, and you'll be fixed with the bail. Don't tell me there's no trial in the ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... afterwards; a just judgment on such a heinous offender. Both these little structures were picturesque objects, being overgrown with ivy and woodbine. The chapel was completely in ruins, while the cell, profaned by the misdoings of the dissolute votaress Isole, had been converted into a cage for vagrants and offenders, and made secure by a grated window, and a strong door ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... physician than Lacordaire. If by affection you mean 'sustained, pure, disinterested emotion,' such as patriotism—well and good; but affection!—the two most affectionate persons I have ever known were thoroughly dissolute; and I mean by affection, not a slobbering sentimental passion of a purely sensual type, but an affection quite untainted, to all appearances leading them to make considerable sacrifices for the sake of it, and causing them the acutest misery when ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Elysees, although but thirty-two years old, was now virtually dictator of France, and the greatest orator in the Republic. What a striking example of the great reserve of personal power, which, even in dissolute lives, is sometimes called out by a great emergency or sudden sorrow, and ever after leads the life to victory! When Gambetta found that his first speech had electrified all France, his great reserve rushed to the front; ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... great thoughts and great acts were towering in the West, there were in Russia, after all his galvanizing, no great authors, or scholars, or builders, or inventors, but only those two main products of Russian civilization,—dissolute lords and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... houses have, in consequence, an uncomfortable aspect. At night we stopped at a pulperia, or drinking-shop. During the evening a great number of Gauchos came in to drink spirits and smoke cigars: their appearance is very striking; they are generally tall and handsome, but with a proud and dissolute expression of countenance. They frequently wear their moustaches, and long black hair curling down their backs. With their brightly coloured garments, great spurs clanking about their heels, and knives stuck as daggers (and often so used) at their waists, they look a very different ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... religious in the Bisayan province—a fine linguist, and one who added much to the sacristies, and was very discerning in things pertaining to the altar—was prior in the same village, he heard that a wretched mestizo woman in his district was leading a dissolute life; for on that occasion the encomendero Don Agustin Flores was there. This man came at the head of a number of blinded and unruly Spaniards. The religious had the woman seized and placed in a private house. A mestizo brother of hers grieved so sorely over this that, trusting in the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... the performance of church ceremonies, and preaching of soporific truth (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work, while we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amusement is fastening on us, as a feverous disease of parched throat and wandering eyes—senseless, dissolute, merciless. How literally that word DIS-Ease, the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expresses the entire moral state of our English Industry and ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... overturn, if it fails, it will not end, but pause. You hear it whispering now in the streets. Hungry men with hand-grenades. Ah, m'sieur, if you wish we will work together. I am a man of many acquaintances. I am von Stinnes, Baron von Stinnes of a very old, a very dissolute, a very worthless family. I am the last von Stinnes. The dear God Himself glows at the thought. I will work for you as secretary. How much do you offer for a scion ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... mentioned the peculiar darkness. It is provocative and insistent. It possesses you. For you know that in this street, or rather, back of it, there are the homes of the worst vices of the seagoing foreigner. It is the haunt of the dissolute and the indigent; not only of the normal brute, but also of the satyr. You know that behind those heights of houses, stretching over the street with dumb, blank faces, there are strangely lighted rooms, where ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... encouraged St. Augustine in his mission to England; she built hospitals and churches, earning by her zeal in such works a letter of panegyric from Pope Gregory the Great. But, old as she was, she at the same time gave herself up to a life of outrageous license. It was not, however, her dissolute life which proved fatal to her, but the design which she showed to erect a firm monarchy in Austrasia and Neustria, by putting down the overgrown power of the nobles. They raised an army to attack her; she was defeated, and with four of her great-grandchildren, the sons of her grandson, King ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... confident, provides himself with the requisites, store of bribe-money as the chief;—at Warsaw withal, he picks up one Poniatowski (airy sentimental coxcomb, rather of dissolute habits, handsomest and windiest of young Polacks): "Good for a Lover to the Grand-Duchess, this one!" thinks Hanbury. Which proved true, and had its uses for Hanbury;—Grand-Duchess and Grand-Duke (Catherine and Peter, whom we saw wedded twelve years ago, Heirs-Apparent ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... about Harry. Mr. Wolfe never spoke of cards, or horses' pedigrees; or bragged of his performances in the hunting-field; or boasted of the favours of women; or retailed any of the innumerable scandals of the time. It was not a good time. That old world was more dissolute than ours. There was an old king with mistresses openly in his train, to whom the great folks of the land did honour. There was a nobility, many of whom were mad and reckless in the pursuit of pleasure; there was a looseness of words and acts which we must note, as faithful historians, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... read," said the lady, a little indignant, "in some memoirs the other day, that our court was a corrupt and dissolute court. It was a court of pleasure, if you like; but of pleasure that animated and refined, and put the world in good humour, which, after all, is good government. The most corrupt and dissolute courts on the continent of ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... commenced, was followed up with zeal and energy, and crowned with great success. This narrative solves all those difficulties which rendered that remarkable event extremely mysterious. The question naturally arises why so debauched and dissolute a king should prefer such tight-laced Christians to be the peculiar objects of his mercy. The reason is perfectly obvious, he owed his life to one of their members, who, however poor as to this world, possessed those riches of piety which prevented his taking any personal ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... chance makes grim sport. Ah, well, the toughening of the wilderness is not to be undone by fickle fingers, however dainty, nor a strong life blown out by a girl's caprice! Riders went clanking past. I did not turn. Let those that honoured dishonour doff hats to that company of loose women and dissolute men! Hortense was welcome to the womanish men and the mannish women, to her dandified lieutenant and foreign adventuresses and grand ambassadors, who bought English honour with the smiles of evil women. Coming to ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... Luiz Sebastian. In the crowd of servants, now quite separated from the slaves, was noise and confusion, and behind the Turk, standing midway between the parties, was forming a phalanx of villainous white faces—the dissolute, the convict, the refuse of the plantation,—and at his side, suddenly as though sprung from the earth, appeared the evil face and red hair of the murderer of ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... virtue, condescended to the most effeminate employments to gratify a criminal weakness. Hannibal, who vanquished mighty nations, was himself overcome by the love of pleasure; and he who despised cold, and want, and danger, and death on the Alps, was conquered and undone by the dissolute indulgences of Capua. ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... love to do, feeling that for a woman to be thus silly is desirable, a counterpoise to the selfishness and want of feeling which are so common in the world. But how to make this spotless creature understand that a man might slip aside and yet not be a dissolute man, that he might be betrayed into certain proceedings which would not perhaps bear the inspection of severe judges, and yet be neither vicious nor heartless. This problem, after he had considered it in every possible way, Sir Tom finally gave up with a sort of despair. He must keep ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... Court Painter ranked with the Court Barber, and his allowance was the same. But Velasquez ruled the King, and the King knew it not. Like all wasteful, dissolute men, Philip the Fourth had spasms of repentance when he sought by absurd economy to atone ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... philosopher has traced all knowledge to sensation. What prolific sources of disease are not those mineral and vegetable poisons, that have been introduced for its extirpation! How many thousands have become murderers and robbers, bigots and domestic tyrants, dissolute and abandoned adventurers, from the use of fermented liquors, who, had they slaked their thirst only with pure water, would have lived but to diffuse the happiness of their own unperverted feelings! How ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... confused notion of the interior of a confectioner's shop, and young men therein getting tipsy and stealing kisses, and marvellously pretty girls submitting to the robbery with a nonchalance born of three hundred and fifty four similar experiences; and old men grotesque in a dissolute senility; and sudden bursts of orchestral music, and simpering ballads, and comic refrains and crashing choruses; and lights, lingerie, picture-hats and short skirts; and over all, dominating all, the set, eternal, mechanical, bored smile ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... he returned to the United States, and after passing a few months at an academy in Richmond, he entered the University at Charlottesville, where he led a very dissipated life; the manners which then prevailed there were extremely dissolute, and he was known as the wildest and most reckless student of his class; but his unusual opportunities, and the remarkable ease with which he mastered the most difficult studies, kept him all the while in the first rank for scholarship, and he would ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... years ago; though I devoutly hope and pray that none of my own immediate progenitors happened to be amongst the number there assembled. The smell of punch and other strong drink was, to the atmosphere of the place, exactly what the dissolute and swaggering air of a great number of the persons assembled there was to the natural expression of the human countenance. The noise, too, was very great; so that the ear of a new comer required to become ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Jerome said about this, which one can never repeat often enough, forbidding that widows should abound in daintiness, or keep their face anointed, or their garments choice or delicate. Nor should their conversation be with vain or dissolute young women, but in the cell: they should do like the turtle- dove, who, when her companion has died, mourns for ever, and keeps to herself, and wants no other company. Limit your intercourse, dearest and most beloved Sister, to Christ crucified; set your affection and desire on following ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... greatest immorality and license, while he attended strictly to his formal religious duties. Judged by any standard of the morals of more modern times, the verdict of average citizens would be against him. He was surrounded by dissolute men, and some, who ought to have protected him from the assaults of vice, placed him in its way. He was no worse in this respect than even Richelieu and Mazarin, not to mention his mother and many ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... submit to your wisdom the necessity of your deliberate reflection on the dissolute, intemperate, and ignorant condition of a large portion of the colored population of the United States. They would not, however, refer to their unfortunate circumstances to add degradation to objects already degraded and miserable; nor, with some others, improperly class the virtuous of our color ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... lest his friend, from his gay and pleasure-loving nature, and the temptations round him, should be carried away into the vices of an age, which, though very brilliant and high-tempered, was also a very dissolute one. He couches his counsels mainly in Latin; but they point to real danger; and he adds in English,—"Credit me, I will never lin [ cease] baiting at you, till I have rid you quite of this yonkerly and womanly humour." But ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... plots. The effort to expose them, as well as to thwart the attacks of the evil one on the king, led to the conception and spread of the monstrous story of the conspiracy of Dr. Fian. Dr. Fian was nothing less than a Scottish Dr. Faustus. He was a schoolmaster by profession. After a dissolute youth he was said to have given soul to the Devil. According to the story he gathered around him a motley crowd, Catholic women of rank, "wise women," and humble peasant people; but it was a crew ready for evil enterprise. It is not very ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... came by, arm in arm with his friend, the Duke of Wharton. It was a one-sided friendship. Lord Rotherby was but one of the many of his type who furnished a court, a valetaille, to the gay, dissolute, handsome, witty duke, who might have been great had he not preferred his vices to ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... Joseph, Duc d'Orleans (1747-1793). As the Duc de Chartres he pretended to the philosophical opinions of the eighteenth century, but followed the dissolute customs of the Regency. Marie Antoinette never attempted to overcome or conceal her aversion to him, which helped to divide the Court. On the death of his father in 1785 he came into the title of the Duc d'Orleans. ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... difficulty in predicting it, and in saying at this point in his story, that Milton might have known better than, with his puritanical connections, to have taken to wife a daughter of a cavalier house, to have brought her from a roystering home, frequented by the dissolute officers of the Oxford garrison, to the spare diet and philosophical retirement of a recluse student, and to have looked for sympathy and response for his speculations from an uneducated and frivolous girl. Love has blinded, and ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... fantasy: literally Flamboyant, it breathed away its strength into the air; but there is not more difference between the commonest doggrel that ever broke prose into unintelligibility, and the burning mystery of Coleridge, or spirituality of Elizabeth Barrett, than there is between the dissolute dulness of English Flamboyant, and the flaming undulations of the wreathed lines of delicate stone, that confuse themselves with the clouds of every morning sky that brightens above the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Salome, born of her first marriage, and like her ambitious and dissolute, entered into her designs. That year (probably the year 30) Antipas was at Machero on the anniversary of his birthday. Herod the Great had constructed in the interior of the fortress a magnificent palace, where the tetrarch frequently resided.[1] ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... admonitory sermon might well be preached to us dissolute Germans, in warning for our excesses and drunkenness. But where would be forthcoming a sermon forcible enough to restrain the shameful sottishness and the drink devil among us? The evil of overindulgence has, alas, swept in upon us like a torrent, overwhelming as a flood all classes. It daily ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... reign was followed by that of his brother Edgar, who succeeded to the Anglo-Saxon throne in the year 959, and was an unprincipled and dissolute king. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... that, and I'm not going to tell a lie and say I am. In conversation always think of your audience. It takes two to make a truth. If an honest man told an old lady he was an atheist, that would be a lie, for to her it would mean he was a dissolute reprobate. To call myself 'Abrahams' would be to live a daily lie. I am not a bit like the picture called up by Abrahams. Graham is a far truer ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... would have appeared to him in the likeness of a fair beautiful cherubim. For there is nothing, amongst mortal men, more fair and admirable than the chaste minds of this people. Know, therefore, that with them there are no stews, no dissolute houses, no courtezans, nor anything of that kind. Nay, they wonder, with detestation, at you in Europe, which permit such things. They say ye have put marriage out of office; for marriage is ordained a remedy for unlawful concupiscence; ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... most completely abandoned to dissolute manners are not, on that account, insensible to virtue in women. The Comtesse de Perigord was as beautiful as virtuous. During some excursions she made to Choisy, whither she had been invited, she perceived ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... obligations, a covenant with God, as well as with one another, which dare not be set aside at the dictate of a whim or passion. The positive principle underlying this declaration against divorce is the spirit of universal love that forbids that the wife should be treated, as was the case among the dissolute of our Lord's time, as a chattel or slave. Nothing could be more abhorrent to Christian sentiment than the modern doctrine of 'leasehold marriage' advocated by some.[10] It has been ingeniously suggested that the record of marital unrest and divorce in America, shameful as it is, may not be in many ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Tergawer,—and almost every reader was either priest or deacon,—brought his oldest daughter, then about twelve years of age, and begged for her admission to the Seminary. He was known as one of the vilest and most defiantly dissolute of the Nestorians, and Miss Fiske shrunk from receiving the daughter of such a man into her flock. Yet, on the ground that, like her Master, she was sent not to the righteous, but to the lost, she concluded to receive ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... indecent songs or words, and if any one wishes to sing Psalms or spiritual songs he shall make them do it in a decent and not in a dissolute way. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... and where they are taught the things which will make life in America more possible. Our early day nursery brought us into natural relations with the poorest women of the neighborhood, many of whom were bearing the burden of dissolute and incompetent husbands in addition to the support of their children. Some of them presented an impressive manifestation of that miracle of affection which outlives abuse, neglect, and crime,—the affection which cannot be ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Spaniards themselves, who, though they look upon the Roma with some degree of contempt as a low and thievish race of outcasts, nevertheless take a strange interest in all that concerns them, it having been from time immemorial their practice, more especially of the dissolute young nobility, to cultivate the acquaintance of the Gitanos as they are popularly called, probably attracted by the wild wit of the latter and the lascivious dances of the females. The apparition therefore of the Gospel of Saint Luke at Madrid in the peculiar jargon of these people was hailed ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... fingers—both these ladies take a dark pleasure in offering to view the dark side of life—but I questioned Mr. Yorke on the subject, and he said, 'Shirley, my woman, if you want to know aught about yond' James Helstone, I can only say he was a man-tiger. He was handsome, dissolute, soft, treacherous, courteous, cruel——' Don't cry, Cary; we'll say ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... seductive yet passionate. She was a beautiful young animal, her graces all unstudied, nature's gifts, a dangerous animal if roused, love concealing sharp claws ready to tear in pieces if love were spurned. Her personality might have raised her to power in the dissolute Court of the fifteenth Louis, even in this Paris of revolution she might play ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... Iland stood whiles Aruiragus reigned; the dissolute and loose gouernement of Petronius Turpilianus, Trebellius Maximus, and Victius Volanus, three lieutenants in Brltaine for the Romane emperours, of Iulius Frontinus who ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (4 of 8) - The Fovrth Booke Of The Historie Of England • Raphael Holinshed
... costume. They were industriously stigmatized as jailers; for which there was the more ground, as their duties did in reality associate them pretty often with the jailer; and in other respects they were a dissolute and ferocious body of men, gathered not out of the citizens, but many foreign deserters, or wretched runagates from the jail, or from the justice of the provost- marshal in some distant camp. Not a man, probably, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... almost by imperceptible degrees, into the father of his country, and of human kind. In that of Constantine, we may contemplate a hero, who had so long inspired his subjects with love, and his enemies with terror, degenerating into a cruel and dissolute monarch, corrupted by his fortune, or raised by conquest above the necessity of dissimulation. The general peace which he maintained during the last fourteen years of his reign, was a period of apparent splendor ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... Nur Jahan, the "Light of the World," wife of the dissolute Jahangir. Never forgetful, it would seem, of a childish adventure when the little Nur Jahan in temper and pride set free his two pet doves, twenty years later the Mughal Emperor won her from her soldier husband by those same swift ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... curious speech for a man who had been described as careless, extravagant, and dissolute; but he was getting too ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... than the cost incurred. Above all, such a method would do little to alleviate the sufferings and better the nutrition of the child. In most cases the school provides but one meal a day. Experience has shown that in the case of children of the dissolute the free meal at the school means less food at home. Were the cost deducted from the weekly wages of the parent, the result would be intensified. So great have been the difficulties felt in this matter that with one or two exceptions no foreign country has made the attempt to recover ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... noted that plays were privately performed here in Cromwell's time. In 1716, Addison married the dowager Countess of Holland and Warwick, and the estate passed to him, and he died at Holland House in 1719, having addressed to his stepson, the dissolute Earl of Warwick, the solemn words, "I have sent for you that you may see how a Christian can die." Two years later the young earl himself died. In 1762 the estate was sold to Henry Vassall Fox, Baron Holland, ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... Count. He resented every look that those dissolute eyes flashed at the girl, and he noticed many. He saw Opal wince sometimes, and then turn pale. Yet she did not resent ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... anguish of my heart I would become a bad and contemptible man. Without you, Charles Henry, there is no joy or peace in this world for me; you fire my good angel! Charles Henry Buschman, do you wish me to be a dissolute drunkard?" ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... business and social life. First-class white men must take hold of the reins of government throughout the Southland. The Negro is an imitative creature, and he takes on the color of his environment. If it be charged that he is frequently immoral, dishonest and shiftless, the dissolute whites with whom he has been closely identified have furnished a model that he has copied only too faithfully. Let the Christian element become a more prominent factor in state affairs, and the Negro will at once grow in character and address by virtue of the inspiring ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... vicar, petitioned against the bill, because they thought the canal and turnpike furnished sufficient accommodation between the two towns, and because they dreaded an incursion of the idle, drunken, and dissolute portion of the Sheffield people as a consequence of increasing the facilities of transit." For a time the opposition was successful but eventually the Lord's Committee yielded to the perseverance of the promoters ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... "Row" and "Jim." They kept one of those grocery stores in which everything salable on the frontier was sold, and which seem to have changed their occupants as rapidly as sentry-boxes. "Jim" sold his share to an idle and dissolute man named Berry, and "Row" soon transferred his interest to Lincoln. It was easy enough to buy, as nothing was ever given in payment but a promissory note. A short time afterwards, one Reuben Radford, who kept another shop of the same kind, happened one ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... non-plussed at evidences of his dissolute past and this unexpected fatherhood assumed on his account. "I haven't more luggage than what is contained in my bicycle bag. But don't let that concern you. I'll go over to Swansea one day or some nearer ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... it is rather embarrassing," he said, "but unfortunately my business cannot wait. I am a business man, you know," he smiled, "in spite of my dissolute habits." ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... brother; but he was resolute, and said Raby Hall should never be an appendage to a workshop. Sooner than that, he would settle it on his cousin Richard, a gentleman he abhorred, and never called, either to his face or behind his back, by any other name than "Dissolute Dick." ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... these assemblies as an idle life in comparison with the labor of the plowman and vine-grower in the country, and for a long time the industrious cultivators, the brave warriors, and the men of old-fashioned morality were opposed, among the citizens of Athens, to the loquacious, luxurious, and dissolute generation who passed their whole time in the market-place and courts of justice. The contests between these two parties are the main subject of the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... months I had been prepared to return to their Highnesses with the good news of the gold, and to escape from governing a dissolute people, who fear neither God, nor their King and Queen, being full of vices and wickedness. I could have paid the people in full with six hundred thousand,[374-4] and for this purpose I had four millions of tenths and somewhat ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... plunged boldly, No matter how coldly The rough river ran,— Over the brink of it, Picture it—think of it, Dissolute Man! Lave in it, drink of it, Then, if ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... those two hours spent in the theatre seemed to be a dream. The spell that held him had begun to work when he went behind the scenes; and, in spite of its horrors, the atmosphere of the place, its sensuality and dissolute morals had affected the poet's still untainted nature. A sort of malaria that infects the soul seems to lurk among those dark, filthy passages filled with machinery, and lit with smoky, greasy lamps. The solemnity and reality of life ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... your advice, father, rather than to confess the sins I have committed in the last week. Since I have come to live in London I have been drawn into the society of the dissolute and ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... in thought, word, and deed formed no small part of his ideal, his tastes in architecture, painting, sculpture, rhetoric, or poetry were severe. He had no patience with what was artistically dissolute, luscious, or decorated more than in proportion to its animating idea—wishy-washy or sentimental. The ornamental parts of his own rooms (in which I lived in his absence) were a slab of marble to wash upon, a ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... not cause either industry or vice to flourish? And whether a country, where it flowed in without labour, must not be wretched and dissolute like an ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... the least appearance of neglect or indifference, they become eager in pursuit of attention, while men always attribute that pursuit to motives of the coarsest kind. It is generally vanity alone which leads a married woman to receive the first disgraceful flattery of dissolute men. Probably nine out of ten of those American women who have trifled with honor and reputation, whose names are spoken with the sneer of contempt, have been led on, step by step, in the path of sin by vanity as the chief motive. Where one ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... probably inevitable, might have been delayed for at least a generation. But his choice had fallen upon a lady who had but one qualification for the position in which he had placed her—namely, extreme personal beauty. She was indeed kind-hearted and amiable, and among the temptations of a court as dissolute as was that of Louis XV. she preserved her reputation unspotted. But she was narrow-minded and unintellectual, a bigoted Catholic, and so blinded by national and religious prejudices that many of the most fatal mistakes of the Empire are directly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... allow them to go out long enough to settle up the loose ends of their affairs. Not having a J. Jervice in their service they had cached certain products of their toil in a cave the secret of which had been disclosed to them by a dissolute Indian. Shut up as they were their only recourse had been to commission the capable man who happened to lead the Jervice gang to recover for them the property for which they ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... sacristan to the Franciscan Friars of the place, to lend him a cope and a stole. Tickletoby refused him, alleging that by their provincial statutes it was rigorously forbidden to give or lend anything to players. Villon replied that the statute reached no further than farces, drolls, antics, loose and dissolute games.... Tickletoby, however, peremptorily bid him provide himself elsewhere, if he would, and not to hope for anything out of his monastical wardrobe.... Villon gave an account of this to the players as of a most abominable action; adding that God would shortly revenge ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... or savage from having lost large sums at the gambling table. Jean, the old and trusty retainer of the house of Champdoce, was deeply grieved, not so much at seeing his master so rapidly pursuing the path to ruin as at the fact that he was ever surrounded by dissolute and disreputable acquaintances. ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... dissolute conduct of his wife Julia, and the honors bestowed upon her sons by Agrippa, he withdrew to Rhodes, where he remained for seven years, a discontented exile. He returned to Rome in A.D. 2, and, two years after, was adopted by Augustus as his son. ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... the crowded theatre—Philip was too young to remember the old Chambers' Street box, where the serious Burton led his hilarious and pagan crew—in the intervals of the screaming comedy, when the orchestra scraped and grunted and tooted its dissolute tunes, the world seemed full of opportunities to Philip, and his heart exulted with a conscious ability to take any of its prizes ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the shop's clientele, mostly composed of society butterflies. One man hovered attentive about the most beautiful of these, and whispered entertainingly as she scanned the gowns submitted to her choice. He was a dissolute—looking man, although faultlessly arrayed. His hair was thin, his eyes were cruel, and his ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... quoted with much parade by the Tablet, says of France:—"The most exact picture of our epoch is drawn in the phrase, 'that not a woman is brought to bed in France who does not give birth to a Socialist.'" On this the Nation remarks:—"In what a dissolute condition la jeune France, with all its bibs and tuckers, must certainly be! Only imagine Madame de Montalembert brought to bed of twin Phalansteriens! The lady of M. Jules Gondou, redacteur de l'Univers, of a horrid little Fourierist! The nursery of M. de Falloux ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... enormities, in his epistle to Egbert. From this we learn that many young men who had no title to the monastic profession, got possession of monasteries; where, instead of engaging in the defence of their country, as their age and rank required, they indulged themselves in the most dissolute indolence. ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... tears doubtless from the poor rose-pink Mother, far away in Baireuth and childless otherwise; and also in a sense to the sorrow of Courland, which was hereby left vacant, a prey to enterprising neighbors. And on those terms it was that Saxons Moritz (our dissolute friend, who will be MARECHAL DE SAXE one day) made his clutch at Courland, backed by moneys of the French actress; rumor of which still floats vaguely about. Moritz might have succeeded, could he have done the first ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... signified to the chiefs of them the offers he had to make of free grace and pardon, the greater number of them came in and submitted very readily. Those who were determined to continue the same dissolute kind of life, provided with all the secrecy imaginable for their safety, and when practicable took their flight out of the island. The captain being made Governor, fitted out two sloops for trade, and having given proper directions to their commanders, manned them out of his own sailors with some ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... prove it strictly and undeniably that a man smally beneficed, must of necessity be dissolute and debauched. But when we consider how much he lies subject to the humour of all reprobates, and how easily he is tempted from his own house of poverty and melancholy: it is to be feared that he will be willing, too often to forsake ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... and Christian, who was a great stickler for old customs, had taken care not to drop this one. This feudal sign had probably acted upon the morals of the pack, for it was impossible to find, within twenty leagues, a collection of more snarly terriers, dissolute hounds, ugly bloodhounds, or more quarrelsome greyhounds. They were perfect hunters, but it seemed as if, on account of their being dogs of quality, all ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Surrey Street. If that could be proved, then the woman had been guilty of perjury, and her evidence would collapse altogether. Now there were some portions of her evidence which were most unsatisfactory. She had led a dissolute life, and was cursed with an ungovernable temper. But, on the other hand, she had told a consistent tale as to the occurrences of that fatal afternoon, and he could not go so far as to advise the jury to ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... or Poets!' said he, one night at supper, looking to right and left: the brightest fellow in the world, well fit to be Phoebus Apollo of such circles; and great things now ahead of him. Dissolute Regent d'Orleans, politest, most debauched of men, and very witty, holds the helm; near him Dubois the Devil's Cardinal, and so many bright spirits. All the Luciferous Spiritualism there is in France is lifting ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... the manner in which he dealt with this situation. Himself he led his boldly handsome favourite by the hand into his wife's presence, before the whole Court assembled, and himself presented her to Catherine, what time that Court, dissolute and profligate as it was, looked on in amazement at so outrageous a slight to the dignity of ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... smiths, engineers, editors, and every thing else are there, amply capable of reoerganizing the whole South—of tilling its fields to greater advantage, of developing its neglected resources, of making the old, desolate, lazy, dissolute Southland hum with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... in the utility of beauty, and in Paris at least they make it pay. The entire expenses of the municipal government, including police and public works, are met by the spendings of visitors. To their dissolute monarchs were due such creations as the Tuileries, the Louvre, and Versailles. Have we not dissolute millionaires enough to give us at least ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... in a more summary manner emancipated themselves, multiplied in poverty and wretchedness. Lastly, owing to the fashion for large households of retainers, great numbers of men were trained up in an idle and dissolute way of life, liable at any time to be cast off when age or accident invalided them, or when the master of the family died; and then if not ashamed to beg, too lewd to work, and ready for any kind of mischief. Owing to these co-operating ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... I've discharged him as sure as a gun! And now, Judy dear, what on earth I'm to do With myself and my appetite—both good as new— Without even a single traneen in my pocket, Let alone a good, dacent pound—starlin', to stock it— Is a mysht'ry I lave to the One that's above, Who takes care of us, dissolute sawls, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Viscous, glutinous. Glueyness. n. The quality of being gluey."—Webster's Dict. "Old Euclio, seeing a crow-scrat[129] upon the muck-hill, returned in all haste, taking it for an ill sign."—BURTON: Johnson's Dict. "Wars are begun by hairbrained[130] dissolute captains."—ID.: ib. "A carot is a well known garden root."—Red Book, p. 60. "Natural philosophy, metaphysicks, ethicks, history, theology, and politicks, were familiar to him."—Kirkham's Elocution, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... he found that the garrison consisted but of one thousand men, horse and foot. They were hardy troops, seasoned in rough mountain-campaigning, but reckless and dissolute, as soldiers are apt to be when accustomed to predatory warfare. They would fight hard for booty, and then gamble it heedlessly away or squander it in licentious revelling. Alhama abounded with hawking, sharping, idle ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... said," he replied. "I'm anything but self-controlled by nature; already," and Augustine looked calmly at his mother, "I'd have let myself go and been very dissolute unless I'd had this ideal of my own honour to help me. I'm of anything but ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... countries the first women who have taken prominent part in literature have been as bad as the men; as, for instance, Marguerite of Navarre and Mrs. Aphra Behn. This might indeed be explained by supposing that they had to gain entrance into literature by accepting the dissolute standards which they found prevailing. But it would probably be more correct to say that these standards themselves were variable, and that their variation affected, at certain periods, women as well as men. Marguerite of Navarre wrote religious books as well as merry ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... at evening fall were frequently resorted to by individuals widely differing in station from the inmates of these places - we allude to the young and dissolute nobility and hidalgos of Spain. This was generally the time of mirth and festival, and the Gitanos, male and female, danced and sang in the Gypsy fashion beneath the smile of the moon. The Gypsy ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... severe, and that he revolted against it. Certain it is that he took to evil courses and consorted with bad companions. Severity was unavailing. He would break out of the house at night and be away for days. He was drunken and dissolute. ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... melange that one could hardly recognize for one thing or another, certainly not as examples of any well-meaning styles which have lasted until to-day. The straight line now disappeared in favour of the most dissolute and irrational curves imaginable, and the sober majesty of the gardens of Louis XIV became a tangle of warring elements, fine in parts and not uninteresting, effective, even, here and there, but ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... with much self-satisfaction the reports made to him, in which it was stated that the churches were well frequented: Indeed, throughout the year 1802, all his attention wad directed to the reformation of manners, which had become more dissolute under the Directory than even ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... hadn't turned a hair, took half his supplies to save him the bother o' luggin' 'em back to the plains, and all the ammunition he could get at, and, consilio et auxilio Rutton Singhi, tramped back to his fort with all his Sikhs and his precious prisoners, and a lot of dissolute hangers-on that he and the prisoner had seduced into service. He had sixty men of sorts—and his brazen cheek. Mac nearly wept with joy when he went. You see there weren't any explicit orders to Stalky to come in before the passes were blocked: Mac is a great man ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... inserted in each nostril, and behind the lobes of his ears, and under his lip. Jimmie Dale stared into the mirror—the vicious, dissolute face of Larry the Bat leered back at him. And then, returning abruptly to the loosened section of the base-board, he restored the make-up box to its hiding place. He reached inside again, and procured a pistol and flashlight, which he stowed away in his pockets; there would be no ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... shillings per year for every five pounds they can so employ. It is however very difficult to convince the borrowers of the correctness of this calculation, and of the serious loss to which they subject themselves by a continuation of the system, since it is evident that this improvident and dissolute class of people have no other idea than that of making the day and the way alike long. Their profits 172(often considerably augmented by dealing in base money as well as the articles which they sell) seldom last over the day; for they never fail to have a luxurious dinner and a hot supper, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... building mania seems to have seized upon many of the monarchs of Europe, and innumerable public edifices were erected. It seems to me to have been the period in all history when society was the least natural, and perhaps the most dissolute; and I have always fancied that the bloated artificial forms of the architecture partake of the social disorganisation of the time. Who can respect a simpering ninny, grinning in a Roman dress and a full-bottomed wig, who is made to pass off for a hero? or a ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... in the popularity, but in the vulgarity of an English hall—I will not say the Pavilion, which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are heard there—for preference let us say the Royal. I shall not easily forget my first evening there, when I saw for the time a living house—the dissolute paragraphists, the elegant mashers (mark the imaginativeness of the slang), the stolid, good-humoured costers, the cheerful lights o' love, the extraordinary comics. What delightful unison of enjoyment, what unanimity of soul, what communality of wit; all knew each other, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... numerous vices which are so ordinary amongst the common sort of men, who betake themselves to a military employment. Then he came over into England and lived here, as he himself said, by working at his own trade; though certain it is, that he led a most debauched and dissolute life, associating himself with those of his countrymen who of all others were the most abandoned in their characters. In fine, in all the associations of his life he seemed to proceed without any other design than that of gratifying his ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... resulted from their collective mismanagement of the business of the mission, and from the want of vital piety evinced by some of their number, still the present deplorable condition of the Sandwich Islands is by no means wholly chargeable against them. The demoralizing influence of a dissolute foreign population, and the frequent visits of all descriptions of vessels, have tended not a little to increase the evils alluded to. In a word, here, as in every case where civilization has in any way been introduced among those whom we ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... persons in the greatest affluence of fortune are no happier than such as have only a competency; that the cares and disappointments of ambition for the most part far exceed the satisfactions of it; as also the miserable intervals of intemperance and excess, and the many untimely deaths occasioned by a dissolute course of life: these things are all seen, acknowledged, by every one acknowledged; but are thought no objections against, though they expressly contradict, this universal principle—that the happiness ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... five-and-twenty years ago, the most notorious person among my parishioners was a man of the name of Edmunds, who leased a small farm near this spot. He was a morose, savage-hearted, bad man; idle and dissolute in his habits; cruel and ferocious in his disposition. Beyond the few lazy and reckless vagabonds with whom he sauntered away his time in the fields, or sotted in the ale-house, he had not a single friend or acquaintance; ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... thraldom of Rome in Rome itself. He was sent there to represent seven convents of his own order, who were at variance with the Vicar-general. He had always imagined Rome to be the abode of sanctity. Ignorance, levity, dissolute manners, a profane spirit, a contempt for all that is sacred, a scandalous traffic in divine things. Such was the spectacle afforded by this unhappy city. Even when performing their most sacred ceremonies, the priests derided them. Some of ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... A great concourse of peaple who know him al weill are gathered to heir, amongs other, lead by meer curiosity, comes a Soger (Bruno) who had served in the Low Country wars against the Spaniard and had led a very dissolute, prophane, godless life. The preist in his sermon begins to extol the person deceased and amongs other expressions he had that, that undoubtedly he was in paradis at the present. Upon this the dead man lifted himselfe up in his coffin and cried ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... best flesh-meat, and a cat on a heap of fruit or corn, though both might very well support life with the food which they thus disdain, did they but bethink themselves to make a trial of it: it is in this manner dissolute men run into excesses, which bring on fevers and death itself; because the mind depraves the senses, and when nature ceases to speak, the will still ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... which could be figuratively expressed in marriage. The Bible speaks of "marrying the land."—"Thy land shall be called Beulah for thy land shall be married." Side by side in this country we have the lands which have been dishonored, degraded, abandoned, dissolute, and the lands husbanded, fertilized, ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... men; they punish themselves in their own natures and in the work of their hands. When Mirabeau, in the consciousness of the possession of the most masterful genius of his time, rose to speak in the States General, he became aware that his dissolute past was standing beside him and mocking him. His vast power, honestly put forth for great ends, was neutralised by a record which made belief in him almost impossible. In bitterness of soul he learned that genius and character are bound together ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... watching the hands of the clock as they neared the mark of twelve, and listening for thy footfall! Thou, trusting in thine own strength, but to learn thy weakness, lying senseless among thy drinking mates in the hall of dissolute festivity! ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... eighteenth year, and soon after composed a series of poems, entitled "Lays of the Covenanters," which appeared in one of the Glasgow newspapers. Of extreme political opinions, he upheld his peculiar views in a series of satirical compositions both in prose and verse, which, by leading dissolute persons to seek his society, proved the commencement of a most unfortunate career. Habits of irregularity were contracted; he ceased to engage in the duties of his calling: and leaving his wife and family of young children without ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sir, she being but lately come to this town, and so nearly watched by the jealous eyes of her friends, she being a rich heir,[406] lest she should be stolen away by some dissolute prodigal or desperate-estated spendthrift, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... woman defied a throng of men. Quite a few of the crowd had assisted the night before in lynching her husband, and this meeting occurred at the burying-ground the next afternoon. The woman's husband was a well-known horse-thief, a dissolute, dangerous character, and had been warned to leave the community. He lived in a little village, and after darkness the evening before, had crept up to a window and shot a man sitting at the supper-table with his family. The murderer had harbored a grudge against his victim, ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... mistresses of the King as the intimates of her circle, it was a result little to be anticipated from a pure-hearted wife, who saw herself the victim of every intriguing beauty whose novelty or notoriety sufficed to attract the dissolute fancy of her consort. Even at the very moment in which M. de Sully records this inferential reproach upon the Queen, he admits that Henry was once more in the thrall of the Marquise, and, moreover, the obsequious friend of Mademoiselle de Guise; ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... daughter in the literature of that country over which she was destined to reign. From that pleasure-loving metropolis two play actors were sent to take charge of her education, one of whom was a man of notoriously dissolute character. As the connection between Maria Antoinette and Louis, the heir apparent to the throne of France, was already contemplated, some solicitude was felt by members of the court of Versailles in reference to the impropriety of this selection, and the French embassador ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... Mrs. Margaret Coghlan made no inconsiderable noise in the court and fashionable circles of Great Britain and France. She was the theme of conversation among the lords, and the dukes, and the M. P.'s. Having become the victim, in early life, of licentious, dissolute, and extravagant conduct, alternately she was revelling in wealth, and then sunken in poverty. At length, in 1793, she published her own memoirs. Mrs. Coghlan was the daughter of Major Moncrieffe, of the British army. He was Lord Cornwallis's brigade ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... to worship God with him; this seemed more pleasant and convenient than to remain under restraint with the brethren, for there they saw "Christian" sailors who allowed themselves to follow every species of sinful dissolute conduct. On their return they said, the Europeans have meetings yonder as you have, and they have ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... dissoluteness, and, as it were, total forgetfulness of God (it being Sunday evening) which day se'nnight I was witness of, the king sitting and toying with his concubines, a French boy singing love-songs, in that glorious gallery, while twenty great courtiers and other dissolute persons were gaming at a large table, a bank of at least L2,000 in gold before them. Six days after ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton |
