"Disreputable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... evokes a howl from an anonymous Christian in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette. He protests against the "grotesque indecency of such a scheme," and stigmatises Marlowe as "a disreputable scamp, who lived a scandalous life and died a disgraceful death." That Marlowe was "a scamp" we have on the authority of those who denounced his scepticism and held him up as a frightful warning. His fellow poets, like Chapman and Drayton, spoke of him with esteem. An anonymous eulogist ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... boating, battledore and archery, shinney and skating, fishing, hunting, shooting, and baseball mean, namely, that there is a joyous spontaneity in human beings; and thus Nature, by means of the sporting world, by means of a great number of very imperfect, undignified, and sometimes quite disreputable mouthpieces, is perpetually striving to say something deserving of far nobler and clearer utterance; something which statesmen, lawgivers, preachers, and educators would do well to lay to heart. My children, she would say, ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... but a certain proportion of this current cost should be covered by small entrance fees, exacted, not for any miserly helping out of the floor-sweepers' salaries, but for the sake of the visitors themselves, that the rooms may not be incumbered by the idle, or disgraced by the disreputable. You must not make your Museum a refuge against either rain or ennui, nor let into perfectly well-furnished, and even, in the true sense, palatial, rooms, the utterly squalid and ill-bred portion of the people. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... his last shirt in betting against one of his own prophecies. Others again aver, and probably with equal accuracy, that he was at no time other than what he is when the world first becomes aware of his existence—the blatant, cringing, insolent, able and disreputable wielder of a pen which draws much of its sting and its profit from the vanities and fears of his fellow-creatures. Be that as it may, he somehow becomes a power. He attaches himself to many journals, the editors of which he first ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... wonder how this is—why we, so fierce to one human being, possibly honest and well-meaning enough, should be as wax in the hand of the moulder, when another individual, perhaps utterly disreputable, refuses to ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... rich, as he possesses all the treasure-crocks buried in war-time. In the early part of this century, according to Croker, they used to show in Tipperary a little shoe forgotten by the fairy shoemaker. Then there are two rather disreputable little fairies—the Cluricaun, who gets intoxicated in gentlemen's cellars, and the Red Man, who plays unkind practical jokes. 'The Fear- Gorta (Man of Hunger) is an emaciated phantom that goes through the land in famine time, begging ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... might, as a moral romancer, pause, leaving the guilty, passionate girl eloped with her disreputable lover, destined to lifelong shame and misery, misunderstood to the last by a criminal, fastidious parent. But I am confronted by certain facts, on which this romance is based. A month later a handbill was posted on one of the sentinel pines, announcing that the property would be sold by ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... had been the close personal friend of the emperor in his exile, and took a prominent part in the abortive expedition to Boulogne. In his youth he had led a disreputable life, and was not a man of great intellect, but he was presumed to be devoted to his old comrade. His friendship, however, had not always a happy effect upon the fortunes of his master. In 1872 he made a miserable end of his adventurous life, after ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... "Brother Johann, the apothecary, was ill in the summer of 1823, and during that time his disreputable wife visited her lover, an officer, in the barracks, and was often seen walking with him in the most frequented places, besides receiving him in her own house. Her husband, though confined to bed, could see her adorning herself to go in search of amusement ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... and open places of the city, for two days, the brigands had been slaughtering every man his enemy among the Government officers, some of them indeed disreputable and sorry fellows, others respectable. They killed with musket-shot, and if the fallen gave signs of life they reloaded their arms in the sight of the people and the soldiers and fired them afresh, or else put an end to their victims ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... cheekbones were high, his nose flat, his lips thick and slobbery. He sported a wide, ferocious straggling mustache and long eye-brows, under which gleamed little fierce eyes. His forehead sloped back like a beast's, but was always hidden by a disreputable felt hat. Big Junko did not know much, and had the passions of a wild animal, but he was a reckless riverman and devoted to Thorpe. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... because it held the certitude that it was not a nightmare, but a waking misery. Mr. Bulstrode felt a shuddering nausea, and did not speak, but was considering diligently whether he should not leave Raffles to do as he would, and simply defy him as a slanderer. The man would soon show himself disreputable enough to make people disbelieve him. "But not when he tells any ugly-looking truth about you," said discerning consciousness. And again: it seemed no wrong to keep Raffles at a distance, but Mr. Bulstrode shrank from the direct falsehood of denying ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... never any tempting food; Tildy, that poor little faithful girl as servant—slavey was her right name; Tildy at every one's beck and call, always with a smut on her cheek, and her hair so untidy, and her little person so disreputable; and mother alone, wondering how she could make two ends meet. Talk of your knowing what the poor people in my ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... arrival, Lundi Druro disappeared from every-day life in Wankelo. It was a way he had of doing, and everyone who sought him at such times would find him at the Leopard in pants embroidered with great holes burned into them by cyanide and acids, a disreputable shirt without any buttons or collar, and face and hands blackened beyond recognition with the machine-oil and grime inseparable from a large mining plant. He always did his own assaying, taking both time and trouble over it. It must ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... succeed in business by that boldness which halts for no risks, that audacity which stakes all upon hazardous chances; by the shrewdness of the close dealer, the boldness of the unscrupulous operator, even by the knaveries of the stock-board and the gold-room; to crawl up into place by disreputable means or the votes of brutal ignorance,—these also are deemed to be among the great successes ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... be careful to snug down if need be in good time, until we again reach China, when we shall probably be able to get another man or two." So saying, I took the address from Forbes, and forthwith started in search of the men. I found them at length, after a somewhat tedious quest, in a most disreputable-looking boarding-house, situate in the most disreputable part of the town. And I am bound to admit that my first impression of the men was that their appearance was in perfect accord with their surroundings. They most undoubtedly ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... schemes as inevitably absurd because they were new and untried. One would not gather from his correspondence with Frances Wright that this was the notorious Fanny Wright whom the world chose to consider, as its way is, a disreputable and probably wicked woman, inasmuch as she proposed some radical changes in its social relations which she thought would be a gain. He gave much attention to popular education, and all the influence he could command was devoted, through all the later ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... the mirror, and without need of it, it appeared, when she stood before it at last, pulling a left-over winter tam over rebellious curls which she had made no attempt to subdue. She had buttoned herself hastily into the dress she had taken off last, a tumbled organdy, and thrown a disreputable polo coat over it, white like the cap, but of more prehistoric date, but on her slender person these incongruous garments had acquired a harmony of their own, and become a costume somehow. It might not have withstood ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... feet, discovering that he was in the land of the living with a joyful whinnying. If he had not been endowed with the suavity of a gentleman and the long-suffering of a saint, he would have walked off, for the yard was in a disreputable state of repair, and we were all shaky from the effects of nerve-shock. But no, in spite of abuse and misunderstanding, he was resolved at cost of whatever discomfort to himself to give us further ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... idea, was the sweetest creature in the whole world. They had also made some enemies, the worst of the number being Dan Baxter, a fellow who had been the bully of the school, but who was now a homeless wanderer on the face of the earth. Baxter came from a disreputable family, his father having at one time tried to swindle Mr. Rover out of a rich gold mine in the West. The elder Baxter was now in prison suffering the penalty ...
— The Rover Boys on Land and Sea - The Crusoes of Seven Islands • Arthur M. Winfield
... most likely have stopped to consider that the neighbourhood was lonely, the ground damp and marshy, the approach to this solitary cross-road through the most disreputable part of London. Captain Duncombe considered nothing, except two facts—first the river, then the view of the ships in ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... meanwhile rumours reached him that 'Reuben Grieve's nevvy' was beginning to be much seen in the public-houses; he had ceased entirely to go to chapel or Sunday school; and the local gossips, starting perhaps from a natural prejudice against the sons of unknown and probably disreputable mothers, prophesied freely that the tall, queer-looking lad would go to ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... buildings on either hand almost touching one another, and the way dark—were the haunts of masters and scholars and all those depending on them. Students, old and young, of high station and low, are crowded in lodging-houses, many of which are shabby, dirty, and disreputable. Hence they come forth to play their games or carry on their feuds. Some haunt taverns and worse places. Others eke out their means by begging at street corners. All get their teaching by gathering round masters whose rostrum is the church doorstep or the threshold of the lodging-house. ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... of divorce court proceedings now. But she's not that sort of woman at all. I had every opportunity of studying her character in the train, and I'm certain that she wouldn't mix herself up with anything of a disreputable kind. Whatever poor Lorimer may have had to complain of—and I don't in the least deny that he had a grievance—he'd have been the last man to accuse her of anything of that sort. I never met a woman who impressed me more strongly as being ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... tortured by thirst, it was decided to land on the mainland or the first island we sighted, and lay in a stock of water—if it was obtainable. Gladys and I welcomed the idea of landing, because by this time we were in quite a disreputable condition, not having washed for several days. It was our intention, while the crews were getting water and food, to retire to the other side of the island, behind the rocks, and there have a nice bath. The boat was ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... place where the local shall meet and the hour at which members shall assemble. The place is therefore often over a saloon, to which many girls naturally and rightly object. Sometimes it is even in a disreputable district. The girls may prefer that the meeting should begin shortly after closing time so that they do not need to go home and return, or have to loiter about for two or three hours. They like ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... restoring the woman, or even the child, into the society she has once outraged. I well remember our perplexity when we attempted to help two girls straight from a Virginia tobacco factory, who had been decoyed into a disreputable house when innocently seeking a lodging on the late evening of their arrival. Although they had been rescued promptly, the stigma remained, and we found it impossible to permit them to join any of the social clubs connected ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... rotten mat for my coverlid, by the light of a wretched winking lamp, while you are marching in state, with as many torches as one sees at the feast of Ceres, to thunder with your hatchet (See Theocritus; Idyll ii. 128.) at the doors of half the Ionian ladies in Peiraeus. (This was the most disreputable part of Athens. See Aristophanes: ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not even a new one—a dusty thing with a shapeless crown. "So, extraordinary, my dear—so odd," Aunt Hester, passing through the little, dark hall (she was rather short-sighted), had tried to 'shoo' it off a chair, taking it for a strange, disreputable cat—Tommy had such disgraceful friends! She was disturbed when it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... her, the telephone bell rang. Some unknown person asked me to convey a message to Barnes. When I had finished she was gone. I sat down and tried to make head or tail of the affair. I couldn't. Barnes was a disreputable little bounder! This girl was a lady. What connexion could there be between the two? I fancied what might happen if she were surprised by Barnes, and I determined not to go to bed until I heard her come down. I fell ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... occasion, for example, of the death of Pythonice, who was Harpalus's mistress, for whom he had a great fondness, and had a child by her, he resolved to build her a sumptuous monument, and committed the care of it to his friend Charicles. This commission, disreputable enough in itself, was yet further disparaged by the figure the piece of workmanship made after it was finished. It is yet to be seen in the Hermeum. as you go from Athens to Eleusis, with nothing in its appearance answerable to the sum of thirty talents, with which Charicles ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... with a pretty little gesture of deprecation. "Yes, of course, I can quite understand that a gentleman like you would be a bit disgusted to find a likeness between your son and a girl like me, for I suppose he told you all about me? I mean, you know the sort of disreputable ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... of a country squire, of old family, which once possessed large possessions and something of historical renown. We lived in an old country-place; my father was a convivial dog, a fox-hunter, a drunkard, yet in his way a fine gentleman,—and a very disreputable member of society. The first feelings towards him that I can remember were those of shame. Not much matter of family pride here, you will say! True, and that is exactly the reason which made me cherish family pride elsewhere. My father's house was filled with guests,—some high and some low; ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... some as yet undefined substitute. If indeed Nature thus works by illusions and justifies the lying means by the benevolent end, it is hard to believe in a moral government of the universe, or to hope that an "absolute morality"—righteousness for its own sake—will be the outcome of such disreputable methods. But till the illusion of "absolute morality" is strong enough to take care of itself, and has passed from the professors to the populace, it is plainly for the interest and happiness of individuals and of society to hold fast ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... which means swine, and several other things entirely unfit for publication. He was a big gross man, and he shook like a jelly when the parrot had the sentence correctly. Simmons, however, shook with rage, for all the room were laughing at him - the parrot was such a disreputable puff of green feathers and it looked so human when it chattered. Losson used to sit, swinging his fat legs, on the side of the cot, and ask the parrot what it thought of Simmons. The parrot would answer: "Simmons, ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... hundred pound—I'll have that and go to Swan River—that's mine, anyway, and your friend must have forged to cash it. Give me the eight hundred, here, upon this platform, or I go straight to Scotland Yard and turn the whole disreputable ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a friendly old fellow in his awkward fashion; honourable, and so forth. But a disreputable alliance of that sort sticks to a man. The world will talk. Yes, he was fortunate so far; he fell into the mire and got out of it. Were he to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Bat, vicious-faced, unkempt, disreputable, lay sprawled out on one of the dive's bunks, an opium pipe beside him. But Larry the Bat was not smoking; instead, his ear was pressed closely against the boarding that formed the rather flimsy partition at the side of the bunk. One heard many things in Chang Foo's if one cared to listen—if ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... generally passes under the name of scholarship, has likewise a share of modern knowledge, and has applied himself in some degree to the study of the law.' By way of payment he offers at once 'an income, which would neither be insufficient for him as a man of letters, or disreputable to him as a gentleman,' and hereafter 'a situation'—a post, that is to say, under government. (Wooll's Warton, i. 299.) Warton recommended Chambers. Chambers does not seem to have accepted the post, for we find him staying on at Oxford (post, ii. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... no use, Mackworth—this air of innocence! [Puffing himself out and strutting to and fro on the left.] It's simply wasted effort, I mean t'say. In five minutes I can have Dunning here with the whole disreputable story. He's close by—bottom of Chancery Lane. He'll be at his ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... absurd!" ordered Chris, colouring vividly "We never did anything so—so disreputable." She twined her arm impulsively in ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... of throwing the disreputable epic at my head, and I curved my arm in an attitude ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... anticipation. There was certainly a new 'influence' at work to-night. They even felt a touch of faint dread. The widow, her ruling passion strong even before the altar, looked down anxiously once or twice at her disreputable attire. It was vivid as that—this acute sense of another presence that pervaded the room, not merely hung about the little table. She could be 'invisible' to the Pension by the magic of old- established habit, but she ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... said, speaking in slow, deliberate tones, "have been proved guilty of such treason against their own race and the welfare of humanity as no men ever were guilty of before in all the disreputable history of state-craft. In view of the suffering and misery to millions of individuals, and the irreparable injury to the cause of civilisation that would have resulted from the success of their schemes, it would be impossible ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... drink there," said Scattergood, pointing to a little shanty in a clearing by the roadside. He stopped his horse, and they alighted and knocked. There was no reply. Scattergood pushed open the door and then stepped back suddenly, for within were three individuals of disreputable appearance, and one of them regarded Scattergood over the leveled barrels of ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... young authors into profitable publicity was shamefully abused,—as in the case of Maitland, an Englishman, who deliberately forged an absurdly distorted paraphrase of a note of Mr. Irving's, besides other disreputable use of the signature which he had enticed from him in answer to urgent appeals. But these were among the penalties of honorable fame and influence which he might naturally expect to pay. The sunny aspect ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... mistress know that he was come. She ran up, leaving Mr Vanslyperken alone in the dark passage. He waited for some time, when his naturally suspicious temper made him think he had been deceived, and he determined to wait outside of the house, which appeared very disreputable. He therefore retreated to the inner door to open it, but found it fast. He tried it again and again, but in vain, and he became alarmed and indignant. Perceiving a light through another keyhole, he tried the door, and it was open; a screen was close to the door as he entered, and he could not ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... called their orphan, and twice a year they received accounts of her progress. They sent her a Christmas present annually, and her neat little letter of thanks was handed round for everybody to read. Poor Susannah Maude was the daughter of very disreputable parents; she had been rescued from a travelling caravan at the age of ten, and the authorities at the Alexandra Home had done their best to obliterate her past life from her memory. When she reached school-leaving age the question of her future career loomed ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... easily conjecture that as the days dragged by Harriet's heart grew heavier and heavier under its two burdens—shame and resentment: the shame of being pointed at and gossiped about as a deserted wife, and resentment against the woman who had beguiled her husband from her and now kept him in a disreputable captivity. Deserted wives—deserted whether for cause or without cause—find small charity among the virtuous and the discreet. We conjecture that one after another the neighbors ceased to call; that one after another they got ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to which various additions had been made. One of Dave's companions uttered a peculiar whistle. The door of the place was opened, and a disreputable looking fellow ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... of disreputable living he was ashamed to apply to his guardian for money; and in his worst fits of illness he was, through fear, somewhat patient under his doctor's hands; but just at present he had nothing of which to be ashamed, and was not ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... with none—but all determined to get home on the enemy at all costs this time. There had been sixteen days' incessant work at the trenches and barricades with next to no sleep. Mud and brickwork clung to us all with an insistence which no amount of rough dusting would remove. We were a tattered and disreputable crowd. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... and leer that would have done credit to a real comedian. This particular bit of acting was heightened by the fact that even in the coldest weather he wears thin summer clothes, generally acid-worn and more or less disreputable. For protection he varies the number of his suits of underclothing, sometimes wearing three or four sets, according to ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... extraordinary—inexplicable to such simple folk as we are—yet it may be only the luxury of the present day. But the money for which he will give no account,—of which, indeed, we only heard through the squire's London agents, who found out that certain disreputable attorneys were making inquiries as to the entail of the estate,—oh! Molly, worse than all—I don't know how to bring myself to tell you—as to the age and health of the squire, his dear father'—(she ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... off from the shore and boarded us. He was a long, melancholy Chinaman, had thirty-five hairs of a beard, and, poor fellow, was dying of consumption. He told us the local news, and then I asked him about the cargo of saints, many more of whom were now visible on the after-deck of their disreputable old crate. ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... colony regulars, was a dull man of no education, of stuttering speech, unpleasing countenance, and doubtful character. He owed his place to the notorious Intendant, Bigot, who it is said, was in his debt for disreputable service in an affair of gallantry, and who had ample means of enabling his friends to enrich themselves by defrauding the King. Beausejour was one of those plague-spots of official corruption which dotted the whole surface ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... of Blinky Collins was on the third floor of a disreputable building in an equally unsavory part of Chicago. There were no tinted pictures of beautiful blondes nor of stern, square-jawed men of affairs in Blinky's reception room. His clients, who came furtively there, were strongly opposed to having their pictures taken—they came for other purposes. For ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... louder noise outside drew them all to the front porch. In front of the house was a hansom cab drawn by a disgusted-looking horse. He looked and acted like one who had been compelled against his will to mingle with disreputable associates. ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... see whether a pretty girl from the street could play the part of the Queen of France, and at the same time she wanted to avenge herself upon the cardinal because she knew that he once found fault with her before her mother the empress, on account of her light and disreputable behavior, and the bad manners which, as the dauphiness, she would introduce into this court. Since then she has with her glances, her smiles, and her apparent anger, so worked upon the cardinal as to make him fall over ears in love with the beautiful, pouting ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... letters of last winter, sent the following interesting account of an interview had between Manager Selee, of the Bostons, and a business man he met on a train last October. The B.M. asked the manager "whether ball-players, as a class, were a disreputable set of men, who made a practice of spending their money foolishly, and of saying and doing things on the ball field that were decidedly objectionable; also if, in consequence, the interest in the game had not to a very large degree been on the wane for a number of years ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... wondering "country cousin" and a "serious" companion. "Ay, friend," says the latter, anxious of course, in season and out of season, to turn the occasion to profitable account, "verily it is all vanity! What is this to the inward light?" Some more disreputable members of the community are expressing their fears that the new light will interfere with their own peculiar modes ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... human law. The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling and become at once if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land; nor, even in the full career of his reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to traffic or casually associate. Thus the Puritan elders in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamour and rude deportment of these jolly ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... who dressed with shameful shabbiness and carried pearls in his pocket. The picture might easily apply to The Tigress: outwardly disreputable, but richly and comfortably appointed below. The flush deck was without wells. The wheel and the navigating instruments were sternward, under a spread of heavy canvas, a protection against rain and sun. ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... perfect unconcern, telling her beads at the foot of the great reading-desk that stands out in the middle and is never used. Great ladies crowd in through the gate when Raimondi's hymn is to be sung, and disreputable artists make sketches surreptitiously during the benediction, without the slightest pretence at any devotion that I can see. The lights shine out more brightly as the day wanes, and the incense curls up as the little boys swing the censers, and the priests ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... conservative city of one hundred and fifty thousand go upon the street as a praying-band?' The liquor-dealers said: 'Send committees of two or three and we will talk with them; but coming in a body to pray with us brands our business as disreputable.' The time came when the Master seemed to call for a mightier power to bear upon the liquor traffic, and a company of heroic women, many of them the wives of prominent clergymen, led by Mrs. W.A. Ingham, said: 'Here am I; ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... drainage and gas- pipes come easier to such a shape, and that ground can be better economized. Nevertheless, I prefer a street that is forced to twist itself about. I enjoy the narrowness of Temple Bar and the misshapen curvature of Picket Street. The disreputable dinginess of Hollowell Street is dear to me, and I love to thread my way up the Olympic into Covent Garden. Fifth Avenue in New York is as grand as paint and glass can make it; but I would not live in a palace in ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... by her side. The outer door is closed, but unlatched. Presently the unkempt head of a man appears furtively at the window; then vanishes. The door is pushed stealthily open: and JIM BARRASFORD, ragged and disreputable (and some twenty years older than when he married PHOEBE MARTIN) stands on the threshold a moment, eyeing JUDITH's unconscious back in silence: then he speaks, ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... to Stephen himself, and Stephen felt a strange pleasure unknown before, like that of the shepherd who having brought the stray back to the fold cares little that its wool is torn by the bushes, and it looks a ragged and disreputable sheep. It was only Sara's wool that might seem disreputable, for she was a very good-faced sheep. He found the hymns for her, and they shared the same book. He did not know then that Sara could not ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... iniquitous, arrant, corrupt, depraved, sinful, base, demoralized, sinister, licentious, unprincipled, abandoned, graceless, vicious, incorrigible, unscrupulous, miscreant, reprobate, disreputable, rascal, scoundrel, profligate, knavish, naughty, malevolent, malicious, unrighteous, degrading, dissolute, libertine, hardened, wanton; injurious, prejudicial, pernicious, detrimental, baneful, unwholesome, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... taken us to perform the outward journey yesterday. On reaching Rosario at about ten o'clock, we found several friends waiting to receive us, with invitations to tea; but we felt too tired in body and too disreputable in appearance to accept them, and preferred going straight to ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... boys of her own, later on, and a more disreputable-looking crew it would be hard to find. I confess that I took a deal of grim satisfaction in their dilapidated ensemble, just for my aunt's benefit, of course. They were fine, wholesome, natural boys in spite of their parentage, ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... and foreign dangers pressed a ceaseless load. He had built himself a palace and laid out noble gardens, the remains of which still exist, at the foot of the Esquiline hill. It had been the foulest and most disreputable slum in Rome, given up to the burial of paupers, the execution of criminals, the obscene rites of witches, a haunt of dogs and vultures. He made it healthy and beautiful; Horace celebrates its salubrity, and Augustus, when an invalid, came ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... public sentiment protect her. If she will not choose wisely, she must suffer the consequences, and only under the impulse of love can a true choice be made. A girl must be sadly deficient in sense if she loves a weak, bad, disreputable man, or a vulgar, ignorant one. Such mesalliances are more in seeming than in reality, for the girl herself is usually near in nature to what she chooses. There are few things that I would more earnestly guard you against than a loveless ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... had gone a league and a half when I came to a village full of people. Half a dozen miserable houses placed streetwise, one of them a disreputable inn, formed a background to a motley assembly of tattered vagrants, of which peasants of the countryside of both sexes, children, pigs and turkeys formed a small part. The others were men and women of the most extravagant ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... "The Provost Marshal!" The crowd suddenly, he knew not how, seemed to melt away from around him, in different directions, and he found himself left, on horseback, in the midst of the little village green, amongst scattered groups of disreputable-looking yeomen, archers, and grooms, who were making what speed they could to depart, as from the other side the Provost, the archers of the guard, and Sir John ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... callings. She signs herself "a sufferer from reporters' unkindness," and tells me how in the hour of her deep affliction they have trodden upon her heart. Can I not, she asks, encourage a public sentiment that will make such reporting disreputable? All my life I have tried to do so, and, in spite of the evidence of yellow journalism to the contrary, I think we are coming nearer to that ideal; in other words, we are emerging from savagery. Striving madly for each other's scalps as we were, I do not think that ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... Marion increased his disreputable score to a brigade of more respectable proportions, with which he struck such quick and telling blows from all sides on the British and Tories, that no nest of hornets could have more dismayed a marauding party of boys. The swamps ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... who had always disapproved of him, and to unite at the same table persons who had to dissemble their annoyance at being invited together lest they should not be invited at all. Equally exhilarating was the capricious favouring of the dull and dowdy on occasions when the brilliant and disreputable expected his notice. It enchanted him, for example, to ask the old Duchess of Dunes and Violet Melrose to dine with the Vicar of Altringham, on his way to Switzerland for a month's holiday, and to watch the face of ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... Where were the pepper-and-salt trousers and the formal black coat and vest, which seemed somehow to symbolise the inflexible severity of Bulldog's reign? and the hat, and the gloves, and the stick—what had become of his trappings? Was there ever such a pair of disreputable old slippers, down at the heel, out at the sides, broken at the seams, as those that covered the feet of Bulldog in that garden. The very sight of those slippers, with their suggestion of slackness and unpunctuality and ignorance of all ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... aren't fit to look at a decent woman! Don't put on dog just because you belong to the white race. You're disreputable, and you know it. Don't speak to Miss Tuttle again; you ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... antiquity, and point with affected pride to the historical period of the American colonial revolution against the taxation and tyranny of England, as the date of their origin. Whatever may be the facts as to the precise date of the existence, respectively, of these disreputable cables, laid to undermine the greatness and glory of the National Union, cemented as it is by the blood of the sires and sages of the Revolution, is unimportant to the purpose of the author, while the great living fact ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... just about this time that a disreputable clerk—a lewd priest, as Hall calls him—a hanger-on of the house of Howard, was guilty of an insult to a citizen's wife as she was quietly walking home through the Cheap. Her husband and brother, who were nearer at hand than he guessed, avenged the outrage with such good wills that this disgrace ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... believe Tom, Jerry, and Logic, were married off at the end of the tale, as if they had been the most moral personages in the world. There is some goodness in this pity, which authors and the public are disposed to show towards certain agreeable, disreputable characters of romance. Who would mar the prospects of honest Roderick Random, or Charles Surface, or Tom Jones? only a very stern moralist indeed. And in regard of Jerry Hawthorn and that hero without a surname, Corinthian Tom, Mr. Cruikshank, we make little doubt, was glad in ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... watched him work. The taboo which so many of our righteous and Atkins-worshiping townspeople had put upon the Whittaker place and its occupants included her, and a number of children had been forbidden to play with her. This, however, did not prevent their tormenting her about her father and her disreputable guardian. ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... story opens had seen the busiest and merriest fair of the year, and the evening found the little town looking jaded and disreputable after its few hours of dissipation, the dusty High Street being littered with scraps of paper, orange-peel, and such like debris. The merry-go-rounds and the "shows" had departed, the last donkey-cart had rattled out of the town, ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... good wine yesterday." Afterwards she says thus her orisons: "My head aches, I shan't be comfortable until I have had a drink." Certes, such gluttony putteth a woman to shame, for from it she becomes a ribald, a disreputable person and a thief. The tavern is the Devil's church, where his disciples go to do him service and where he works his miracles. For when folk go there they go upright and well spoken, wise and sensible and well advised, and when ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... questioned and held. But as American bonds were sold in millions all over the Continent, and were passing freely from hand to hand, as a matter of fact, little or no attention was paid to such circulars, but, of course, had strangers of disreputable appearance offered bonds in large sums, the lists might have been scrutinized and awkward questions asked. Therefore I felt a trifle nervous, and determined to run no chance of losing my bonds—at least not all of them. So I resolved to go to Wiesbaden, some fifteen ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... They came across him at Pietrasanta; he was walking across Tuscany by himself, and came to the station, looking very dusty and disreputable, to put the book he had finished into his bag that travelled by ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... families habitually batten on the public patronage—their sons legitimate and illegitimate, their relatives and dependents of every degree, are provided for by the score. Besides the adventuring disreputable class of members of parliament, who make God knows what use of the patronage, a large number of borough members are mainly dependent upon it for their seats. What, for instance, are the members to do who have been ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... a "Jim-Crow" waiting-room? There are always exceptions, as at Greensboro—but usually there is no heat in winter and no air in summer; with undisturbed loafers and train hands and broken, disreputable settees; to buy a ticket is torture; you stand and stand and wait and wait until every white person at the "other window" is waited on. Then the tired agent yells across, because all the tickets and money are ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in the opinion of the people of his county. He was a black sheep, in fact. Very bad stories were told and believed of him. His marriage certainly was a disadvantage, you know, and the miserable scenes that went on in his disreputable house—all that predisposed people to ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... God-forsaken country," he succeeded in getting her into a lumber-wagon and headed for what he genially termed "the interior." At last he even succeeded in making her smile at his efforts to make the disreputable mule pack-team he had secured ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... now, thank God, these races are over. I have had all the trouble and excitement and worry, and have neither won nor lost; nothing but the hope of gain would induce me to go through this demoralising drudgery, which I am conscious reduces me to the level of all that is most disreputable and despicable, for my thoughts are eternally absorbed by it. Jockeys, trainers, and blacklegs are my companions, and it is like dram-drinking; having once entered upon it I cannot leave it off, though I am disgusted with the occupation all the time. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... woman, this deep plotter and conspirator, refused to join in the laughter when the flight was made and safety secured. They were like a couple of children with a mystification in hand, notwithstanding that they were planning an invasion so serious of all the proprieties, and meant to make so disreputable and revolting a bargain. But this was not in their ideas. Bice went out very early in the morning before any one was astir, to take needful exercise in the park, and gather early primroses and the catkins that hung upon the trees. On one of these occasions she met Mr. Derwentwater, of whom she was ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... did not die of it. Less than a year before his death he wrote to Temple:—'I thank you sincerely for your friendly admonition on my frailty in indulging so much in wine. I do resolve anew to be upon my guard, as I am sensible how very pernicious as well as disreputable such a habit is! How miserably have I yielded to it in various years!' Letters of Boswell, p. 353. In 1776 Paoli had taken his word of honour that he would not taste fermented liquor for a year, that he might recover sobriety. Ib. p. 233. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Disreputable ragamuffins as they appeared, the Yaquis were quick enough to put their captives in a position to render them almost helpless. Though the Mexican Indians do not seem to have the picturesqueness and skill of ...
— The Boy Ranchers Among the Indians - or, Trailing the Yaquis • Willard F. Baker
... the great and growing evil of smoking, the practical question arises; 'What shall be done?' The answer is—Render it unfashionable and disreputable. Do you ask, 'How is this to be accomplished?' Why, how has alcohol been rendered unpopular? Do you still say, 'One person alone cannot effect much?' But so might any person have said a few years ago, in regard to spirits. Individuals ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... moral indignation. And though Pierre Carlet (which was Marivaux's real name) and "Monsieur Nicolas" (which was as near a real name as any that Restif had) were, the one a quite respectable person on ordinary standards, and the other an infinitely disreputable creature, still the later novelist was perhaps ethically justified. Marivaux's successful rustic does not, so far as we are told, actually do anything that contravenes popular morality, though he is more than once on the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... a disreputable scramble for the public money, by the conflict which is inseparable from such a system between local and individual interests and the general interest of the whole. It is unjust to those States which have with their own means constructed their ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the black sheep of Las Palomas. Born of a rich, aristocratic family in Maryland, he had early developed into a good-natured but reckless spendthrift, and his disreputable associates had contributed no small part in forcing him to the refuge of a cattle ranch. He had been offered every opportunity to secure a good education, but during his last year in college had been expelled, and rather than face parental ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... unreservedly a religion which even in decrepitude could find place for such monstrosities, he should remember that the aberrations of Indian religion are due not to its inherent depravity, but to its universality. In Europe those who follow disreputable occupations rarely suppose that they have anything to do with the Church. In India, robbers, murderers, gamblers, prostitutes, and maniacs all have their appropriate gods, and had the Marquis de Sade been a Hindu ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... no doubt, take steps to have me excluded from the Press Gallery as a disreputable character. I don't particularly mind. What I do mind is that it isn't Wilbraham who's going to get run in for this business, but poor old Franchi. I like Franchi. He's delightful, however many delegates ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... Mr. Mavering," said Mrs. Saintsbury, with finality. "You will want a good three-quarters of an hour to make yourself as disreputable as you'll look at the Tree; and you'll have to take time for counsel and meditation. You may stay with us just half an hour, and then we shall part inexorably. I've seen a great many more Class Days than you have, and I know ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... passion for pardonable egotism in which there were elements of a desire for public service. The Family Compact at Ottawa must have interested him. Liberalism, as understood by the Laurier group, was emerging from the disreputable mess known as continentalism, fathered by Goldwin Smith, who was beginning to be estimated for what he really was, a brilliant philosophical pamphleteer bent upon ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... he took no steps to bring the offenders to justice. Unfortunately for his reputation he was not content with a neutral attitude, but openly protected and rewarded the three chief offenders Tichelaer, Verhoef and Van Bankhem, all of them men of disreputable character. ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson |
