"Dregs" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and brag, and pretend to be young, but my life is really over now, I kiss my hand to the sixty-eight years that have gone by; I'll never see them again! I have drained the bottle, only a few little drops are left at the bottom, nothing but the dregs. Yes, yes, that's the case, Vasili, old boy. The time has come for you to rehearse the part of a mummy, whether you like it or not. Death is on its way to you. [Stares ahead of him] It is strange, though, that I have been on the stage now for forty-five ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... passion's strife We suffer and we feel. 'Tis when wild tears Can flow and hearts can break, or 'neath the gaze Of loved eyes beat. 'Tis when on eager wing Of Hope we soar, and Past and Future bring Within the Present's grasp. Ay, we live then, But when that cup is quaffed what doth remain? The dregs of ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... is a deep philosophy, too, in showing how carefully we should sift misfortune to the dregs, and ascertain what of benefit we might rescue from the dross, is not to be denied; and the more we reflect on it, the more should we see that the germ of all real consolation is intimately ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... vast survey of human knowledge, included even its humbler provinces, and condescended to form a collection of apophthegms: his lordship regretted the loss of a collection made by Julius Caesar, while Plutarch indiscriminately drew much of the dregs. The wits, who could not always comprehend his plans, ridiculed the sage. I shall now quote a contemporary poet, whose works, for by their size they may assume that distinction, were never published. A Dr. Andrews ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Field of Ardath he drained the cup of humility to the dregs,—the cup which like that offered to the Prophet of Holy Writ was "full as it were with water, but the color of it was like fire"—the water of tears.. the fire of faith, . . and with that prophet he might have said.. "When I had drunk of it, my heart uttered understanding, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... found a dozen seamen dressed and armed as they were. The lieutenant having given them directions, they followed him and his guide to that part of Dublin known as the "Liberties," inhabited by the dregs of the population. The night was dark; no lamps illumined that part of the town. The lantern carried by Larry Flynn, the coxswain, enabled the party to thread their way through several narrow streets till they reached a house, at the door of which ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... introduced this tale among his Readings, how beautifully he related it! After recounting how Private Doubledick was clearly going to the dogs, associating himself with the dregs of every regiment, seldom being sober and constantly under punishment, until it became plain at last to the whole barracks that very soon indeed he would come to be flogged, when the Reader came at this point to the words—"Now the captain of Doubledick's company was a young ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... much, Sir, in the Isle of France, and the uncertainty in which I have ever been kept has been one of the bitterest ingredients in the cup; I thought it exhausted when you favoured me with the copy of the letter from His Excellency the minister; but the dregs remained, and it seems as if I must swallow them to the ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... decency paid in full, and the keen edge of hunger somewhat dulled, I was free to think of my sweet lady's loving-kindness to one she hated—and to wonder what she would do and be for one she loved. As you would guess, there were dregs of bitterness in that cup; and I was once again set sharp upon relieving her of the ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... when one's young it's no easy matter! You, a wench in full bloom, to be living with the dregs of a man like that husband ...
— The Power of Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... she was alone. The weed-killer, properly labelled, but also in a beer bottle, was kept with other miscellaneous liquids in the same cupboard as the beer but on a high shelf. When he found that it had miscarried he poured away the mixture, washed out the bottle and put in the dregs from another. There is no doubt in my mind that if he had come back and found Millicent dead or dying he would have contrived it to appear that she had made a mistake in the dark and drunk some of the poison before she ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... her wit, as it drops its laughing venom or its sneering sophisms of worldly wisdom,—even she, when the lights are fled, when the music has ceased from its own desecration, when the frenzy of wine and laughter mock her in their dead dregs, when the men who flattered and the women who envied are all gone,—she recalls one calm eye in the crowd, that stung her with its pure contemptuous pity, a look not to be shut out with draperies as the stars are; and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... pillow as it were to hide from them, as well as to stifle the groans that could not have been wrung from her by bodily pain. 'Oh, my sin has found me out! I thought I had been punished, but these are the very dregs! His blood is on my head! My brother! my brother! whom I loved above all! He was learning to love his home and children; she was weaning him from those pursuits! What might he not have been? I led him away! When he shrank from the temptation, I dragged him to it! I gave him back to the tempter! ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thinking, no doubt, and of all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all these miserable people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he uttered this mysterious saying: "Fex urbis, lex orbis,"—the dregs of the city, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... executioner, lurking, Waits, with brutal thirst, his hour, Tool of bloodier men and bolder, Drunken with the dregs of power. ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... types of women with hollow cheeks, and full lips, and wide cheek-bones, a da Vinci smile, rather depraved, while the coarse language and shrill laughter destroyed this harmony that was in their faces when in repose. Even in the dregs of the people, in those large-headed, beady-eyed creatures with their bestial faces, their thick-set, squat bodies, those degenerate descendants of the most noble of all peoples, even in that thick, fetid muddiness there were strange phosphorescent gleams, like will-o'-the-wisps ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... before you confessed it with your lips. Oh, Edward, we have both tasted, in the last few hours, a bitterer cup than has yet been placed to our lips. May we not be called upon to drink it to the very dregs!" ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... of dawn upon the horizon. A new Yankee Congress comes in on the fourth of March next. What sort of body is it? Wild lunatics. They come into power flushed with success, and are themselves the very dregs of radicalism. Every one of them are drunken mobocrats and bloody Puritans of the deepest dye. What will they not do and say? Can Lincoln control them? Can Seward control them? We think not. In their very violence and brutality lies our hope. ...
— The Flag Replaced on Sumter - A Personal Narrative • William A. Spicer
... dignity, "To guard from error is not the instructor's duty, but to lead the erring pupil; nay, let him quaff his error in deep, satiating draughts; he who only tastes his error will long dwell with it; he who drains it to the dregs will, if he be not ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... hand of each comrade in turn, after hugging a bottle and draining it in a long draught, emptying it to the dregs, Beard flung ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Napoleon she seized the continental hegemony, and will fight to keep it. But what does her energy amount to? . . . As our Bernhardi says, the English people are merely a nation of renters and sportsmen. Their army is formed from the dregs of the nation. The country lacks military spirit. We are a people of warriors, and it will be an easy thing for us to conquer the English, debilitated by ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... said, when he did not know what he meant, and the vow was noble though it was ignorant, 'we can drink of the cup that Thou drinkest.' And all honour to him! he stuck to his vow; and when the cup was proffered to him he manfully, and like a Christian, took it and drank it to the dregs; and, I suppose, went silently to his grave. But the change between his ardent anticipations and his calm resignation, and between his foolish dream and the stern reality, may well teach us that, whether our wishes he fulfilled or disappointed, they all need to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... but thy sweet strain. O who can tell in hours of ease, Of fancies wild, and strange as these? When health gushes through each vein, Who paint the fever of the brain? Who picture half the grief and pain That follows pale sickness in her train? With bitterest dregs she fills her cup, And makes her victims drink them up: Binds them to thorny pillows down, And frightens sleep with her stern frown; Or if perchance the eyelids close, She gives her victim no repose, But hurries round and madly screams, And conjures up ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... her handsome, reckless husband six short months; and, bereaved of both my natural protectors, I was doomed at the early age of eight years to drink the bitter cup of poverty and dependence to its very dregs. ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... grouped together, all of them tinged with wine, and one of them containing some dregs of beeswing. The bottle stood near them, two-thirds full, and beside it lay a long, deeply stained cork. Its appearance and the dust upon the bottle showed that it was no common vintage which the ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... roundly assert, at any rate in words, that observation of the mind is a thing inherently impossible in itself, and that psychology is a chimera—a phantasm generated by the fermentation of the dregs of theology. Nevertheless, if M. Comte had been asked what he meant by "physiologic cerebrale," except that which other people call "psychology;" and how he knew anything about the functions of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... life she'd seized with eager arms, And deeply she had tasted of the world's alluring charms— Yea, to the dregs had drained them and only this to find; All was vanity of spirit and vexation of the mind. So repentant, saddened, humbled, on her hassock she sat down, And this little Quaker sinner ripped the tuck out ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... the cup of joy to the dregs and then shatter it," cried the young chief. "I will shatter it ere my lips have ...
— The Corsair King • Mor Jokai
... lb. of sal-soda with 1/4 lb. of chloride of lime in 2 quarts of boiling water. When the substances have dissolved as much as they will, and become cool and settled, pour off the clear liquid and bottle it for use. Be careful not to allow any of the solid portions to pass into the bottle. Use the dregs for scouring unpainted woodwork, or to cleanse waste pipes. When a spot is found on a white tablecloth place under it an inverted plate. Apply Javelle water with a soft tooth brush (the use of the brush protects the skin and the nails). ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... and the popes most dexterously seized the occasion of judging the claims and merits of the candidates, and of bestowing on the most obsequious, or most liberal, the Imperial office of advocate of the Roman church. The dregs of the Carlovingian race no longer exhibited any symptoms of virtue or power, and the ridiculous epithets of the bard, the stammerer, the fat, and the simple, distinguished the tame and uniform ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... the statute book to no purpose? and why this pernicious trade is carried on with confidence and security, in opposition to the law? It will not surely be confessed, that the government has wanted authority to execute its own laws; that the legislature has been awed by the populace, by the dregs of the populace, the drunkards and the beggars! Yet when the provisions made for the execution of a law so salutary, so just, and so necessary, were found defective, why were not others substituted of greater efficacy? Why, when one informer was torn ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... the lowest dregs of such a race would have been lawyers spending their span of life on this mysterious earth studying the long dusty records of dead and gone quarrels. We simians naturally admire a profession full of wrangle and chatter. But that is a monkeyish ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... and adventure. I am about to lift the veil from the most voluptuous scenes. I shall disguise nothing, conceal nothing, but shall relate everything that has happened to me just as it occurred. I am what is called a woman of pleasure, and have drained its cup to the very dregs. I have the most extraordinary scenes to depict, but although I shall place everything before the reader in the most explicit language, I shall be careful not to wound his or her sense of decency by the use of coarse words, feeling satisfied there is ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... savages had a few fine souls to lead them, to shield them from the dregs of civilization heaped on them for a century, they might have developed into a wonder race to set a pace in beauty, courage, and natural power that would have ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... he could keep the students in order, watch his assistants draw beer, the Rhine wine, and the scum (dregs of the cask, muddy and strong), and eye the accumulating accounts on the slate. This slate was wiped out once the month; that is to say, when remittances came from home. The night following remittances was a glorious one both to ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... the saints, was set up, crowned with chaplets of flowers, and with waxen tapers burning in its honor. Around this object of devotion were collected at all hours a crowd of porters, water-carriers, and the very dregs of the populace, boisterously singing the praises of the saint. Woe to the unlucky wight who, purposely or through negligence, failed to doff his hat or drop a coin into the box placed in convenient proximity! He was an impious man, a heretic, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... reaching his arm down into it as far as he could, his arm-pit tight down on the rim. After some straining he held up his hand, all dripping with dregs, and, between his thumb and forefinger, exhibited an unmistakable gold coin. How many there were in that jar we never knew; there were too many to count. We turned the jar over on its side, with some labor, and ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... that their Queen mourned with them as only a fellow-sufferer can mourn. [Footnote: "The Queen wrote my mother, Lady Normanby, such a beautiful letter after Normanby's death, saying that having drunk the dregs of her cup of grief herself, she knew how to sympathise with others."—LADY BLOOMFIELD.] All hearts went out to her in the day of her bitter sorrow. Prayers innumerable were put up for her, and she believed they ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... "without you will allow me to pay for it." "That will never do," cried all of them. Another of a smaller size was ordered, out of which I drank his success. I remained nearly half an hour, during which time the large bowl was drained to the last dregs in spite of its parchment flavour, and the parchment was, what the mids called, returned high and dry to the owner of it, with the writing on it nearly effaced. I remarked they ought certainly to have a patent for wetting commissions, and ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... since, and even pancake-frying had palled upon him. What had he to do, after forty years of reign;—after having exhausted everything? Every pleasure that Dubois could invent for his hot youth, or cunning Lebel could minister to his old age, was flat and stale; used up to the very dregs: every shilling in the national purse had been squeezed out, by Pompadour and Du Barri and such brilliant ministers of state. He had found out the vanity of pleasure, as his ancestor had discovered the vanity of glory: indeed it was high time ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Auxiliaries or slaves of every nation. With Hengist, Saxons; Danes with Sueno came; In search of plunder, not in search of fame. Scots, Picts, and Irish from th' Hibernian shore, And conquering William brought the Normans o'er. All these their barbarous offspring left behind, The dregs of armies, they of all mankind; Blended with Britons, who before, were here. Of whom the Welsh ha' blessed the character. From this amphibious ill-born mob began That ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... man is still a white man even if he has committed all the crimes in the calendar. The Chief Justice very seriously pointed out that it would disgrace them all to confine Satterlee in the stockade, and force him to mix with the dregs of the native population. Surely Mr. Skiddy could not consider such a thing for a moment. Mr. Skiddy wanted to know, then, what the deuce he was to do? The Chief Justice benignantly shook his head. He had no answer to that ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... burst of fury from her denouncer. In all the coarsest invective his education could supply, in all the hideous vulgarities of his untutored dialect, in that uncurbed licentiousness of tone, look, and manner which passion, once aroused, gives to the dregs and scum of the populace, Beck poured forth his frightful charges, his frantic execrations. In vain Captain Greville strove to check him; in vain Walter Ardworth sought to draw him from the room. But while the poor wretch—maddening not more with ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I have abjured absinthe and forsworn cafes. I have broken my new porcelain pipe and have cut my finger-nails. As I enter on the path of happiness, I scatter the dregs and shreds and clippings of the past behind me. I divest myself of ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... interesting personality, Miss Clairville, threw him altogether on the society of the village, but, apart from Poussette, who had become mysteriously friendly again, the two individuals most in need of his ministrations were Mme. Poussette and the shambling guide, Edmund Crabbe, in whom were the dregs of a being originally more than the preacher's equal. Old world distinctions would seem to be of small account in such a hamlet as St. Ignace and yet questions of caste were ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... good men who have blundered into ruin over the path of petty vanity, save this man! But no, Dorothy must drink the bitter cup of knowledge to the dregs. ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... to your sadness? I asked myself, and I hesitated to write to you; but my silence would have wounded the religion of the heart; and the deeper a grief the more it needs, before it can be blotted out, to drain to the dregs its cup of bitterness. Forth from my agonised breast, then; forth, long and cruel torment of a last conversation, which alone, however, when sincere, can ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... me, And do after my bidding. Go, purvey us a dinner even of the most Of all manner of dishes both sod and roast, That thou canst get: spare for no cost, If thou make three course. TA. Then ye get neither goose nor swan, But a dish of dregs, a dish of bran, A dish of draff, and I trow then Ye cannot get three worse! HU. What, whoreson! wouldst thou purvey Bran, draff, and stinking dregs, I say; I hold thee mad, I trow. TA. Gog's passion! ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... the most favourite place of resort, while our people there were melting some seal blubber. No Greenlander was ever fonder of train-oil than our friends here seemed to be. They relished the very skimmings of the kettle, and dregs of the casks; but a little of the pure stinking oil was a delicious feast, so eagerly desired, that I suppose it ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... lost, alike to action and repose! Unknown, unpitied in the worst of woes! With all that conscious, undissembled pride, Sold to the insults of a foe defied! With all that habit of familiar fame, Doomed to exhaust the dregs of life in shame! The sole sad refuge of thy baffled art To act a stateman's dull, exploded part, Renounce the praise no longer in thy power, Display thy virtue, though without a dower, Contemn the giddy crowd, the vulgar wind, And shut thy eyes ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Portheni lived with consuls and proconsuls long before the house of Vanno began to rise from the dregs and become a house at all. And the imperator knows it, and is jealous of the fact, too, or else he would the better acknowledge it. What, now, is that?' he added, pointing to the central fresco ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy; and, at my desire, M. sometimes read to me chapters from more recent works, or parts of parliamentary debates. I saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus-heads to powder with ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... the mistake of dull minds only, to suppose that every thing has been said, that human wit is exhausted, and that we, who have unfortunately fallen upon the dregs of time, have no alternative left, but either to be silent, or to say over and over again, what has been well ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... their trysting place. He went in search of them in Wandsworth and Battersea and whereever they were to be found, from Notting Hill to Epsom Downs, though they were corrupted by loss of liberty and, in his opinion, were destined soon to disappear, "merged in the dregs of the English population." With them, as with others, his vocabulary was "rich in picturesque words of the high road and dingle." Once he consented to join a friend in trying Matthew Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy" on Gypsy taste. The Gypsy girl was pleased ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... in England or any highly-civilized country. There are no dodging vagrants, no slatternly women, no squalid, starving babies. In fact, our civilization has not yet mounted to effervescence, so we have no dregs. Every white person on the ground was well clad, well fed, and apparently well-to-do. The "lower orders" were represented by a bright fringe of coolies and Kafirs, sleek, grinning and as fat as ortolans, especially the babies. Most of the Kafirs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... Wutzler came shambling in, held a bottle against the light, and squinted ruefully at the yellow dregs. "I will gif you a kong ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... goods I had nothing to fear, but my bad temper cost me two weary hours of delay. The joys of vengeance were depicted on the features of the exciseman. At the time of which I am writing these gaugers were the dregs of the people, but would become tractable on being treated with a little politeness. The sum of twenty-four sous given with good grace would make them as supple as a pair of gloves; they would bow to the travellers, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... them, which would insure her going straight to heaven, and no doubt seriously annoy my father and mother. How much of all this was a lingering desire for the distinction of a public execution of guillotine (the awful glory of which still survived in my memory), how much dregs of "Gypsy Curses" and "Mountain Hags," and how much the passionate love of exciting a sensation and producing an effect, common to children, servants, and most uneducated people, I know not. I never did poison my sister, and satisfied my desire ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... to shout, and he began another story as Dad sucked the dregs of beer off his moustache. Dad recognized the opening sentence. It was one of the interminable stories out of the Decameron of the bar-room, realistic and obscene, that circulate among drinkers. Dad knew it by heart. He looked at his glass, and remembered that it was ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... went in the general ruin. Naught was reserved save enough to purchase a diminutive cottage not many miles from the scene of her former prosperity, and thither she departed, taking with her Arthur and Gulian, who had never before tasted the bitter dregs of poverty ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... off him without penetrating or causing him the least discomfort. The word 'buffoon' went home, right up to the hilt. And, to borrow from Mr Jabberjee for positively the very last time, he had observed (mentally): 'Henceforward I will perpetrate heaps of the lowest dregs of vice.' He had, in fact, started a perfect bout of breaking rules, simply because they were rules. The injustice of the thing rankled. No one so dislikes being punished unjustly as the person who ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... similar instance. His manners were little agreeable or acceptable to the people, and he received very slender marks of their favor; witness his repulse when he sued for the consulship, which he lost, as Cicero says, for acting rather like a citizen in Plato's commonwealth, than among the dregs of Romulus's posterity, the same thing happening to him, in my opinion, as we observe in fruits ripe before their season, which we rather take pleasure in looking at and admiring, than actually use; so much was his old-fashioned virtue out of the present mode, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... FOLLIOTT. In some years, sir, not one. Mud, filth, gas- dregs, lock-weirs, and the march of mind, developed in the form of poaching, have ruined the fishery. But, when we do catch a salmon, happy the ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... I am worn to the poetical dregs, condescending to Acrostics, which are nine fathom beneath Album verses—but they were written at the request of the Lady where our Emma is, to whom I paid a visit in April to bring home Emma for a change of air after a severe illness, in which she had been treated like a daughter ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... But when men have had their ideas, passions, and interests profoundly agitated and made to clash, the wisest decisions and the most honest counsels in the world are not sufficient to re-establish peace; the cup of experience has to be drunk to the dregs; and the parties are not resigned to peace until on or the other, or both, have exhausted themselves in the struggle and perceive the absolute necessity of accepting either defeat compromise. In spite of the arbitration of the King of France the civil war continued in England; but Louis ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... of the relations of literature to life. Every great writer has a new note; hers was—defiance. All the aspects in which life presented itself to her were distressing, not so much in themselves as in herself. She rebelled against the outrages of poverty, and she drank to its dregs the cup of straitened circumstances. She was proud, as proud as Lucifer, and she was forced into positions which suppleness and cheerfulness might have made tolerable, if not agreeable. She wrung from these ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... done nothing else, he had drained the bitter cup to the dregs. When he looked back, he saw nothing but the life that he had wasted. When his thoughts turned to the future, they confronted a prospect empty of all promise to a man still in the prime of life. Wife and child were as completely ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... head quite dazed from the churchyard wall And I doubted not that it warned I should soon have my call. But—" . . . Then in the ashes he emptied the dregs of his cup, And onward he went, and the darkness ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... and for him though the utter day be nigh, Not yet, not yet we give him leave to die; We give him grace not yet that men should say He is dead, wiped out, perished and past away. Till the last bitterness of life go by, Thou shalt not slay him; till those last dregs run dry, O thou last lord of life! thou shalt not slay. Let the lips live a little while and lie, The hand a little, and falter, and fail of strength, And the soul shudder and sicken at the sky; Yea, let him live, though God nor man would let Save for the curse' sake; then at bitter length, ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... two years, the poor gentlewoman hung round the scene of her former glories, wearing garments that were out of fashion, and otherwise drinking to its very dregs the cup of bitterness which a heartless society holds to the lips of its deposed queen. The elegancies of life were necessities to her; but those elegancies would cost—to put it tangibly— the balance of profit ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... stood the fugitive!—grinning weakly. Boden beheld a tottering and ghastly figure. Distress—mortal fatigue—breathed from the haggard emaciation of face and limbs. Round the shoulders was folded a sack, from which the dregs of some red dipping mixture it had once contained had dripped over the youth's chest and legs, his tattered clothes and broken boots, in streams of what, to Boden's startled sense, looked like blood. And under the slouched hat, a pair of sunken eyes looked out, expressing the very uttermost ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... old authors and turned them to account in a way which exposed him to the charge of plagiarism. He valued them for their quaintness. They enabled him to satisfy his propensity for being deliberately eccentric which made Horace Walpole call Tristram Shandy the 'dregs of nonsense,' and the learned Dr. Farmer prophesied that in twenty years it would be necessary to search antiquarian shops for a copy. Sterne's great achievement, however, was not in the mere buffoonery but in the passages where he continued the Addison tradition. ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... strength, would be able to push his foot through the strongest part of their walls, without any great exertion of his muscles. All these absurdities arise from the general tide of luxury, which hath overspread the nation, and swept away all, even the very dregs of the people. Every upstart of fortune, harnessed in the trappings of the mode, presents himself at Bath, as in the very focus of observation — Clerks and factors from the East Indies, loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces; planters, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... friend, and when I presented them to him, he said he was the person whom he should suppose you meant to address, if you had a particular person in view; but he had too much understanding of the world, though much abstracted from the dregs of it, not to conceive it more probable that you meant your Letters to be perused by thinking men in general, Believers and Unbelievers, to confirm the former in their creed, and to convert the latter from their error. You shall speedily know the effect they ...
— Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever • Matthew Turner
... cross in silence and darkness; or, if he spoke, there was none there to record his words. But toward the close of that time his anguish culminated, and, emptied to the very uttermost of that glory which he had since the world began, drinking to the very deepest dregs the cup of humiliation and bitterness, enduring not only to have taken upon him the form of a servant, but also to suffer the last infamy which human hatred could impose on servile helplessness, he uttered that mysterious cry, of which the full significance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... silly superannuated flirt, Who nursed her waning beauty day by day, And still essayed to act the role of youth; The gay coquette and belle of other days, Who in life's morning, with disdainful laugh, Had quaffed the cup of pleasure to its dregs, And now, grown old, must pay the penalty In wrinkles and uncourted loneliness; The widow, who, but newly desolate, Would grasp a hand, then start to find it gone; The spendthrift and the sordid ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... years earlier, in an Italian ilex-grove. That day his life had brimmed over—so he had put it at the time. He saw now that it had brimmed over indeed: brimmed to the extent of leaving the cup empty, or at least of uncovering the dregs beneath the nectar. He knew now that he should never hereafter look at his wife's hand without remembering something he had read in it that day. Its surface-language had been sweet enough, but under the rosy lines he had seen ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... when directed to pure and elevated objects, and accustoming itself to travel in lofty paths! The mind cannot attain the necessary refinement, nor have its sight cleared of the film of earthly grossness, unless the heart throws off the dregs of coarser feeling, and keeps its wings afloat on a lighter and airier atmosphere. It may be said, that there have been bad men who have been great poets: but this position remains to be proved. The dissolute men who have written verses have not been great poets. Were ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... the tender strain Revived an old, long-conquered pain, And as in depths of many seas, My heart was drowned in memories. The tears came welling to my eyes, Nor could I ask it otherwise; For, oh! a sweetness seems to last Amid the dregs of sorrows past. ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... try to bear it—as long as one is not crippled for one's every-day duties—but to give way to sorrow, utterly and freely. Perhaps sorrow is sent that we may give way to it, and, in drinking the cup to the dregs, find some medicine in it itself which we should not find if we began doctoring ourselves, or letting others doctor us. If we say simply, "I am wretched, I ought to be wretched;" then we shall perhaps hear a voice, "Who made thee wretched but God? Then what can He ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... breath away. Rex loved her so madly, so passionately, so blindly, he vowed to himself he would search heaven and earth to find her. And in that terrible hour the young husband tasted the first draught of the cup of bitterness which he was to drain to the very dregs. ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... Guerchi had hitherto succeeded in controlling her indignation, and had tried to force herself to drink the bitter cup of humiliation to the dregs; but now she could bear it no longer. Having thrown a look expressive of her suffering at the young chevalier, who continued to ogle her with great pertinacity, she decided on bursting into tears, and in a voice broken by sobs she exclaimed ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... article to trace the fortunes of the sons of Marblehead through the long and cruel war. Their experience, however, was not unlike that of thousands who suffered and died for the nation. With patient endurance and the fortitude of martyrs, they drank to the dregs the bitter cup of war. Through the long and fatiguing marches, in the many hard fought battles, and in the hopeless agony of life in the prison-pens, they were manly and true. It is unnecessary to say more. By the self-sacrificing devotion of heroes like ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... the usual thing to say that it is boring here. People live quite happily in dull holes like Bieliev or Zhidra, but as soon as they come here they say: 'How boring it is! The very dregs of dullness!' One would think ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... which is strong enough to lie in wait for their tidal chances. When Roguin first confided his troubles to du Tillet, the latter had vaguely foreseen the possibility of destroying Cesar, and he was not mistaken. Forced at last to give up his mistress, the notary drank the dregs of his philter from a broken chalice. He went every day to the Champs Elysees returning home early in the morning. The suspicions of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... Clancey's George found a crumpled copy of the Evening Journal almost afloat on the high-tide of the dregs-drenched bar. Rescuing the sheet, he smoothed it out, examined (grinning) its daily meed of comics, read every word on the "Sports Page," ploughed through the weekly vaudeville charts, scanned the advertisements, and at length reviewed ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... all-devouring guillotine. Those who did survive seem almost to have survived by chance, delivered by some caprice of fortune or by the criminal levity of "les tricoteuses," vile women who degraded the very dregs ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... the muddied dregs which were left of it—began to be perversely amusing at Quest's expense. Epigrams slightly frayed, a jest or two a trifle stale, humorous inversions of well-known maxims, a biting retort, the originality of which was not entirely free from suspicion, were his contributions ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... finished, but the guests still sat round the table with wine-reddened faces. The Prussian King loved to drink deep; he said he abhorred the milksop who could not follow him to the dregs of a tankard, and that was indeed no paltry measure. The Erbprincessin sat to the King's right, his Highness himself was on his Majesty's left. The Erbprinz, white and weary, sat opposite. The holders of important court charges were grouped around ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... throb with joy! The President intends great changes in his policy, and has telegraphed for——Thurlow Weed, that prince of dregs, to get from him light about the ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... sixth and last, The fairest of them all; awhile she gazed Down on the child, and then her hand she raised, And made the one side of her bosom bare; "Ogier," she said, "if this be foul or fair Thou know'st not now, but when thine earthly life Is drunk out to the dregs, and war and strife Have yielded thee whatever joy they may, Thine head upon this bosom shalt thou lay; And then, despite of knowledge or of God, Will we be glad upon the flowery sod Within the happy country where I dwell: Ogier, my love that is ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... him, all other hotels in London would do the same. Then he remembered the shelter which he had himself established for the undeserving poor. The humiliation of that moment was terrible. But no matter! He would drink the cup of God's anger to the dregs. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... brothers in blood and in lust, twin horror begotten of hell, Suck'd all the life of the land to themselves, like Lofoden in flood, One in his pride, in his subtlety one, mocking England and God. Then tyranny's draught—once only—we drank to the dregs!—and the stain Went crimson and black through the soul of the land, for all time, not in vain! We bore the bluff many-wived king, rough rival and victor of Rome; We bore the stern despot-protector, whose ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... at embarking on the sea. I said in myself, "If I am the dregs of the earth, the scorn and offscouring of nature, I am now going to embark on the element which above all others is the most treacherous; if it be the Lord's pleasure to plunge me in the waves, it shall be mine to perish in them." ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... sure you will agree with my view of the matter, and I surmise that already you have found yourself in a very awkward position towards the Grand Duchess on my account. My wife, who still thinks it necessary to live on amongst the dregs of Dresden vulgarity, tells me a thousand unpleasant things which in the eyes of miserable creatures make me appear much more compromised by the revolution than I really am. This feeling towards me is probably spread far and wide, and therefore may have affected the ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... on his deathbed, "has been the most glorious war and the most triumphant peace that England ever knew." Not all were so well pleased, and many held with Pitt that the House of Bourbon should have been forced to drain the cup of humiliation to the dregs. Yet the fact remains that the Peace of Paris marks an epoch than which none in modern history is more fruitful of grand results. With it began a new chapter in the annals of the world. To borrow the words of a late eminent ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... was the reply, sufficiently audible for his master's ear; the remainder escaped in a sort of grumble, the dregs of his ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... profitable, the captains of the woods formed a peculiar class of adventurers, principally composed of freedmen and deserters—of not very enviable reputation. The slave hunters in fact belonged to the dregs of society, and we shall not be far wrong in assuming that the man with the cryptogram was a fitting comrade for his fellow "capitaes do mato." Torres—for that was his name—unlike the majority ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... Some painter once said that Nature put him out. The theologian can say the same about the intellect—it puts him out. Out of a great deal of temperament and a minimum of intellect he gets a precipitate, if I may be permitted to drop into the parlance of the chemist, for dregs would be an impolite word to use, and the precipitate always delights in the fetich. There will always be men and women, the cleric has discovered, who will barter their souls for the sake of rosaries and scapulars and the Pope's indulgences. The two great ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Montanism; The later Montanism as the dregs of the movement and as the product of a compromise; The opposition to the demands of the Montanists by the Catholic Bishops: importance of the victory for the Church; History of penance: the old practice; The ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... over the frontier, but we were not yet in the real Montenegro. This is not the black mountain where the last dregs of old Serbian aristocracy defied the Turk, this is still the Sanjak, three years ago Turkish, and with pleasant pasturages spreading on ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... fault, yet hath he drunk Death's cup, though not to the dregs; and his accusers, less innocent than ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... poorest and most trivial arrangements are striving to attain to a something artistic and agreeable. This is still confined to the educated classes; but as good and bad alike have to begin on the surface, and gradually filter through to the dregs of society, we may hope that the women who wore the last chignon and the last crinoline may yet solace their sordid lives in flowing or tight woollen garments, adorned with their own needlework; and that the dark-stained floor of the cottage ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... so near Hilda that she got the very dregs of the glance of consternation his little wife gave him as she replied, a trifle red and stiff, that she was sure she ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... William the Third. A band of Jacobites was commissioned to attack the Prince of Orange in his winter quarters. The meaning latent under this specious phrase was that the Prince's throat was to be cut as he went in his coach from Richmond to Kensington. It may seem strange that such fallacies, the dregs of the Jesuitical casuistry, should have had power to seduce men of heroic spirit, both Whigs and Tories, into a crime on which divine and human laws have justly set a peculiar note of infamy. But no sophism is too gross to delude minds distempered ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... don't remember getting up, and coming out here?" continued the scout-master, who always probed things to the very dregs, or until he had extracted all ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... his command, drained my glass to the dregs, and returned. "What is your mission?" I asked, when I had made myself as comfortable as ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... the said milke so long till the thickest part thereof descend right downe to the bottome like the lees of white wine, and that which is thin and pure remaineth aboue, being like vnto whay or white must The said lees or dregs being very white, are giuen to seruants, and will cause them to sleepe exceedingly. That which is thinne and cleare their masters drinke: and in very deed it is marueilous sweete and holesome liquor. Duke Baatu hath thirty cottages or granges ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... three years more they had gleaned enough to set up their fourth son as a master-tailor, and their eldest daughter as a robemaker, in Tergou. Here were two more provided for: their own trade would enable them to throw work into the hands of this pair. But the coffer was drained to the dregs, and this time the shop too bled a little in goods if ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... King and aristocracy at Versailles had food in plenty, and the contrast was heightened by a lavish display in the palace. The royal family was betrayed by one of its own house, the despicable Philip "Egalite," who sought to stir up the basest dregs of society, that in the ferment he might rise to the top; hungry Paris, stung to action by rumors which he spread and by bribes which he lavished, put Lafayette at its head, and on October fifth marched ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... two went. The master was alone! He bowed his splendid head, and perhaps tasted, for the first time, the dregs of desolation. ...
— Then Marched the Brave • Harriet T. Comstock
... their armies: our master calleth upon his own, and that with vehemency, that they may depart from Babylon, yea he threateneth death and damnation to such as either in their forehead or right-hand have the mark of the beast, and a portion of this mark are all these dregs of papistry, which are left in your great book of England (viz. crossing in baptism, kneeling at the Lord's table, mumbling or singing of the litany, &c. &c.) any one jot of which diabolical inventions will I never counsel ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... and most credulous of men," continued Vladimir, "how could you think that I would empty the cup of sorrow and of shame to the very dregs, and not revenge myself upon him who smiled as he made ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... strike," is the way in which a newspaper I have just bought deals with the question. It is precisely this sort of nonsense which makes the Prussians determined that the Parisians shall drink the cup of humiliation to its last dregs. ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... this strange. The majority of fashionable people have never known any of the arts and refinements of civilization except those which mere wealth can purchase. Money raised them from the dregs of life, and they are firm believers in it. Without education, without social polish, they see themselves courted and fawned upon for their wealth, and they naturally suppose that there is nothing else ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... complexity. To most persons nothing can be more solemn than the thought of death, except its actual presence; but Theramenes was light-hearted when the hemlock bowl was presented to him, and drinking it off could not, as he threw out the dregs, resist exclaiming "To the health of the lovely Critias."[23] Sir Thomas More was jocose upon the scaffold. Baron Goerz, when being led to death, said to his cook—"It's all over now, my friend, you will never cook me a ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... now this, thou afflicted, and drunken, but not with wine: Thus saith thy Lord Jehovah, and thy God that pleadeth the cause of His people, Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of My fury; thou shalt no more drink it again: but I will put it into the hand of them that afflict thee; which have said to thy soul, Bow down, that we may go over: and thou hast laid thy body as the ground, and as the street, to ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... think of those to whom a victory in the Olympic games seemed almost on a par with the ancient consulships of the Roman people? What wounds will the gladiators bear, who are either barbarians, or the very dregs of mankind! How do they, who are trained to it, prefer being wounded to basely avoiding it! How often do they prove that they consider nothing but the giving satisfaction to their masters or to the people! for when covered with wounds, they send to their masters to learn their ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... yellow fever. Temperance is a good thing in its way; but the man who is temperate in love is not to be trusted. The true man or woman can no more love moderately than a powder magazine can explode on the installment plan. When the cup once touches their lips it is drained to the very dregs. The chalice is not passed by human hands—the gods give and the gods withhold. Hence it is that we ever find Love's bacchanals beating against the social bars. We laugh at the man who flushed with wine disregards the peace and dignity of the state; but we frown upon the ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann |
