"Libertine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all about me, so that now you find I am somewhat of a novelty. It is not your wife you are seeking now, but a woman with whom you have formerly had a rupture, and with whom you now desire to make up. To speak the truth you are simply playing the game of a libertine. ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... arguer, to whom it is a great misfortune that there are not three sides to a question—a libertine in argument; conviction, like enjoyment, palls him, and his rakish understanding is soon satiated with truth—more capable of being faithful to a paradox—'I love truth as I do my wife; but sophistry and paradoxes are my mistresses—I ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... revolted than if she had heard a libertine whispering shameful proposals in her ear. "Silence! I forbid you to add another word." To speak of another—what sacrilege! Poor girl. She was one of those whose life is bound up in one love alone, and if that fails them—it ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... mother-in-law make mention of Ameline, it was because they were on the worst possible terms with that young lady, who had lived, nearly from the period of her first appearance upon the boards, under the protection of the accomplished libertine, Count J——, over whom she was said to exercise extraordinary influence. When she formed this connexion, Madame Sendel, who—in spite of her suspicion of paint and artificial floriculture—had very strict notions of propriety, wrote her a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... charms, thou fanciest will redeem Yon aweless Libertine from rooted vice. Misleading thought! has he not paid the price, His taste for virtue?—Ah, the sensual stream Has flow'd too long.—What charms can so entice, What frequent guilt so pall, as not to shame The rash belief, presumptuous ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... dishonest people can never believe one can do an act of pure conscience. But here comes the Neapolitan.—Note the libertine, Gelsomina, and thou wilt feel for him ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... private character were morality and the love of truth. He had a character both grave and dignified, religious and poetic, friendly and polite, indulgent and sincere, which never allowed truth to be profaned by libertine frivolity, nor faith to be confounded with austere duplicity. He was a man of dignified simplicity, a child of Heaven, loving God with all his heart, all his soul, and all his mind, also loving as himself his ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... the King given by Thackeray, but a party politician in those days could scarcely be a faithful chronicler. He could see what he wished to see, but found it necessary to shut his eyes when the prospect became unpleasant. George was a heartless libertine, but Addison observes with great satisfaction that the women most eminent for virtue and good sense are in his interest. 'It would be no small misfortune,' he says, 'to a sovereign, though he had all the male part of ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... centrifugal, and you can make the centrifugal overcome the centripetal. As when there is a mighty tide of good in a family that may be overcome by determination to evil, as in the case of Aaron Burr, the libertine, who had for father President Burr, the consecrated; as in the case of Pierrepont Edwards, the scourge of New York society seventy years ago, who had a Christian ancestry; while on the other hand ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... this loss is well made up in that she is the more an object of reverence; albeit I have to confess that she would touch me rather more potently, if she had a little more of loveliness and a little less of awfulness. And it is remarkable that even Lucio, light-minded libertine as he is, whose familiar sin it is to jest with maids, "tongue far from heart," cannot approach her, but that his levity is at once awed into soberness, and he regards her as one "to be talk'd with in ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... guilty of enticing away from me the crown prince, and making the future ruler of my country an obscurer, a necromancer, and at the same time a libertine! I was obliged to overlook his youthful preference for Wilhelmine Enke, and wink at this amour, for I know that crown prince is human, and his affections are to be consulted. If he cannot love the wife which diplomacy chooses for him, then he must be permitted the chosen one of ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... libertine will think he has a right to insult her with his licentious passion; and should the unhappy creature shrink from the insolent overture, he will sneeringly taunt ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... was an unprincipled libertine, cold, selfish, and unfeeling. He was eminently successful too in his diabolical enterprise, although there was nothing prepossessing in his person or in his manners; but he had the reputation of ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... their ride along the vertiginous blade of the Gjende. In the second act, satire and fantasy become absolutely unbridled; the poet's genius sings and dances under him, like a strong ship in a storm, but the vessel is rudderless and the pilot an emphatic libertine. The wild impertinence of fancy, in this act, from the moment when Peer and the Girl in the Green Gown ride off upon the porker, down to the fight with the Boeig, gigantic gelatinous symbol of self deception, exceeds ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... reclaim her libertine husband, and to call him to a sense of his situation when he was on his death-bed. Louis XIV. sent the Marquis de Dangeau to convert him, and to talk to him on a subject little thought of by De Grammont—the world to come. After the Marquis had been ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... effect as a fact but no explanation of it. From the time of Alexander the Great that which is common, popular, realistic prevailed in politics and literature. The heroic and ideal-poetic declined and was made an object of satire in the mimus. "The trivial, prosaic, and libertine taste of the Macedonian princes of Egypt and Syria at last reigned alone in enslaved Greece." Then, under different forms and names, nothing remained but mimes, realistic representation of common life.[2030] The Olympian gods and Homeric heroes were burlesqued for ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... court, but whose acquaintance she had never made, and who had been absent when the scandalous occurrence which led to her disgrace came to light. He was a man of from twenty-five to twenty-six years of age, who idled his life away: his courage was undoubted, and being as credulous as an old libertine, he was ready to draw his sword at any moment to defend the lady whose cause he had espoused, should any insolent slanderer dare to hint there was a smirch on her virtue. Being deaf to all reports, he seemed ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... art of poetry he can mean nothing but the art of verse, an art of handicraft, and only comparable with the art of prose. For that heat and height of sane emotion which we agree to call by the name of poetry, is but a libertine and vagrant quality; present, at times, in any art, more often absent from them all; too seldom present in the prose novel, too frequently absent from the ode and epic. Fiction is in the same case; it is no substantive art, but an element which enters largely ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reformation! Persons who wish to study the motives of the executions ordered by Calvin will find, all relations considered, another 1793 in Geneva. Calvin cut off the head of Jacques Gruet "for having written impious letters, libertine verses, and for working to overthrow ecclesiastical ordinances." Reflect upon that sentence, and ask yourselves if the worst tyrants in their saturnalias ever gave more horribly burlesque reasons for their cruelties. Valentin Gentilis, condemned to death for ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... complete victory, and that banishment would be the mildest award of the law on the offender. Mark how different was the result! From the shifts and ambiguities of a wicked Bench, who had a fellow-feeling of iniquity with the defenders, my suit was lost, the graceless libertine was absolved, and I was incarcerated, and bound over to keep the peace, with heavy penalties, before I was ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... when he is seen the constant associate of a man whose name has become synonymous with vice, a dissolute and fearless assassin of private character, of domestic comfort, and of social happiness; when he is known to be the bosom friend and supporter of the profligate and abandoned libertine, who, from the vulgar debauches of night, hastens again to the invasion of private property. Who, through the robbery of the public revenue, and the violation of private seals, hurries down the precipice of deep ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... sex not knowledge, but a series of attitudes, the attitude of virtue, the attitude of pruriency, the attitude of good taste, the attitude of the theoretic libertine, the attitude of the satyr's vulgarity. All these poses, of course, have supplied not an iota to an understanding of the foundations of the problems of sex, biologically considered. Thus, a masculine master has coined that immortal ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... and keen in reckoning, and let itself criticise even great triumphators, even men whom it loved and respected. It was known that on a time they shouted during the entrance to Rome of Julius Caesar: "Citizens, hide your wives; the old libertine is coming!" But Nero's monstrous vanity could not endure the least blame or criticism; meanwhile in the throng, amid shouts of applause were heard cries of "Ahenobarbus, Ahenobarbus! Where hast thou put thy flaming beard? Dost thou fear that Rome might catch fire from it?" And those who cried ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... night Joe came to our meeting and told us that he was a gambler, a pickpocket, a drunkard, a libertine and worse—enticing girls from their homes and placing them in houses of infamy. He asked us to pray for him, which of course we did. Joe disappeared for an hour or so, but returned at midnight to our meeting, and at half-past twelve knelt in the street, with another ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... truth and soberness;" and then, turning to the royal stranger, vigorously pressed home his argument. "King Agrippa," he exclaimed, "believest thou the prophets? I know that thou believest." [140:3] The King, thus challenged, was a libertine; and at this very time was believed to be living in incestuous intercourse with his sister Bernice; and yet he seems to have been staggered by Paul's solemn and pointed interrogatory. "Almost," said he, "thou ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... years of womanhood, Eliza had given her affections to one who sought her love under the guise of a "gentleman of fortune." He proved to be what such characters usually are—a libertine, whose only motive in seeking to win her confidence and young affections was to gratify his hellish passions in the ruin of virtue and a good name. Under the most solemn assurances of deep, abiding, unalterable love for ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... such an act from me,' he replied, looking into the eyes of the libertine robber, 'that I refuse to discuss a proposition so odious ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... on the part of the young monarch to behold his bride than on that of his subjects. We will not say that he had exactly imbibed the principles of a libertine, but it is well known that he was a gallant in the most liberal signification of the term, and that his amours extended to all ranks. He had, therefore, until he had well nigh reached his thirtieth ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... bringing no other ideas either new or old to our minds, we went to the opera, and heard Morichelli sing: after which they gave us a new dramatic dance, made upon the story of Don John, or the Libertine; a tale which, whether true or false, fact or fable, has furnished every Christian country in the world, I believe, with some subject of representation. It makes me no sport, however; the idea of an impenitent ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... must tell the other everything; a common bond of suffering was between them and a common bond of love, though love so differing. "I knew, of course, that he was often unfaithful to me; he is a libertine; but I was the centre; he always came back to me.—I saw the end approaching about five years ago. I fought—oh how warily—so that he shouldn't dream I was afraid;—it is fatal for a woman to let a man know she is afraid,—the brutes, the cruel brutes,"—said Lady Elliston;—"how ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... letter. Your second calls me to a subject of greater seriousness and magnitude. My Rinaldo makes hasty strides indeed! Scarcely embarked in licentious and libertine principles, he seems to look forward to the last consummation of the debauchee. Seduction, my dear lord, is an action that will yield in horror to no crime that ever sprang up ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... career, for he had deserved well of his country, the devotion of the faithful lover. He would take her to his mother's house, where she would be welcomed like a princess. I have no doubt he was sincere, for he had many moods, and the libertine whom he had revealed to me at the Pink Chalet had given place to the honourable gentleman. He could play all parts well because he could believe in ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Francia's. He had given evidence of despotism, but also of an earnest spirit. No sooner had the reins of absolute power fallen to his lot than he altered entirely the mode of his life. From a comparative libertine he became a man of austere habits, displaying a most extraordinary industry in his attention to the matters of State. His manner, moreover, was affable to poor and rich alike, and the claims of the humblest met with ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered," said Solomon's libertine. Alas! he did not reflect that they withered in the very gathering. The roses of pleasure seldom last long enough to adorn the brow of him who plucks them; for they are the only roses which do not retain their sweetness after they ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... recovery of my books, I had recourse to the advice of my landlord, Mons. B—. He is a handsome young fellow, about twenty-five years of age, and keeps house with two maiden sisters, who are professed devotees. The brother is a little libertine, good natured and obliging; but a true Frenchman in vanity, which is undoubtedly the ruling passion of this volatile people. He has an inconsiderable place under the government, in consequence of which he is permitted to wear a sword, a privilege which he does ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... He adorned the city of Ujjayini with mansions, cloisters, parks, temples, pools, and fountains, and he should be mad enough to commit such a crime—and for a mere trifle? [Wrathfully.] You offspring of a loose wench, you brother-in-law of the king, Sansthanaka, you libertine, you slanderer, you buffoon, you gilded monkey, say it before me! This friend of mine does n't even draw a flowering jasmine creeper to himself, to gather the blossoms, for fear that a twig might perhaps be injured. How should he commit a crime like this, which heaven and earth call ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... Scandal. Nothing comes more into view than scandal. In a vast city, thousands of young men gain their livelihood laboriously, and devote themselves to the good of their families: no one speaks of them. A libertine loses other men's money at play, and blows out his brains: all the city knows it. Honest women live in retirement; the king's mistresses form the subject of general conversation. Crime and baseness hide themselves; but up to the limits of what ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... dreadful thoughts. Nevertheless, he arrived at last in the dark, cheerless little private office that looked out upon a yard, and found Camusot seated gravely there; this was not Coralie's infatuated adorer, not the easy-natured, indolent, incredulous libertine whom he had known hitherto as Camusot, but a heavy father of a family, a merchant grown old in shrewd expedients of business and respectable virtues, wearing a magistrate's mask of judicial prudery; this Camusot was the ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... from a celebrated poet, calling attention to the brevity of life, came into her mind, and she repeated them again and again, enjoying their bitterness. We like to meditate on death; even the libertine derives satisfaction from such meditation, and poets are remembered by their powers of expressing our great sorrow in stinging terms. "Our lives are not more intense than our dreams," Evelyn thought; "and yet our only reason for believing life to be reality is its intensity. Looked ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... his hand. He was very handsome and a very brave man, beloved and lamented by all who knew him. The third died a bachelor; I knew him not. The fourth is Sir Simon Fanshawe, a gallant gentleman, but more a libertine than any of his family; he married a very fine and good woman, and of a great estate; she was daughter and coheir to Sir William Walter, and widow to Knitton Ferrers, son to Sir John ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... familiarized with guilt, he was not as yet acquainted with it in its basest shapes—he had not yet acted with meanness, or at least with what the world terms such. He had been a duellist, the manners of the age authorized it—a libertine, the world excused it to his youth and condition—a bold and successful gambler, for that quality he was admired and envied; and a thousand other inaccuracies, to which these practices and habits lead, were easily slurred ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... nature, modelled by art to the usual rules of courtesy, yet so far frank and honest, that they seemed as if they disclaimed to conceal the natural workings of the soul. Such an expression is often mistaken for manly frankness, when in truth it arises from the reckless indifference of a libertine disposition, conscious of superiority of birth, of wealth, or of some other adventitious advantage, totally unconnected with personal merit. To those who did not think so deeply, and they were the greater number ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... interview between Sir Charles and Lady Easy (who thinks it the part of diplomacy to hide her knowledge of her master's peccadilloes), and hurry on to the entrance of Lord Morelove, our hero. Morelove, who must have been admirably played by the fiery, impetuous Powell, is neither a libertine, nor, on the other hand, a prig; he is simply a gentlemanly and essentially human fellow who is consumed with an honest passion for Lady Betty Modish. Nay, he would be glad to marry the fine creature, but she has quarrelled with him and ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... middle-aged person, fate; for is it not practically certain that what I have done for twenty years I shall repeat to-day? What are the chances for a man who has been lazy and indolent all his life starting in to-morrow morning to be industrious; or a spendthrift, frugal; a libertine, virtuous; a profane, foul-mouthed man, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... penetrate the soul. Her nose, of the finest aquiline development,—her lips, narrow, but red and pouting, with the upper one short and slightly projecting over the lower,—and her small, delicately rounded chin, indicated both decision and sensuality: but the insolent gaze of the libertine would have quailed beneath the look of sovereign hauteur which flashed from ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... seem a friend of the church rather than a foe, and in fact he retained the intimacy of Bossuet, in whose arms he died. We may be sure that he guarded himself with delicate care from the charge of being what was then called a "libertine," that is a man openly at war with the theory ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... bears herself becomingly never hears the tempter's tone or knows aught of any love but that of her rightful lord. Pure womanhood is a wondrous shield, more potent far than swords. If she has been approached by lawless libertine, he bids her, for the honor of his house, to set a seal upon her lips, instead of bruiting her shame abroad as women are wont to do whose vanity ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... attitude to Fielding was rather undecided, and seems to speak a mixture of intellectual admiration and moral dislike, or at least failure in sympathy), pronounces it "on the whole unpleasing," and regards it chiefly as a sequel to Tom Jones, showing what is to be expected of a libertine and thoughtless husband. But he too is enthusiastic over the heroine. Thackeray (whom in this special connection at any rate it is scarcely too much to call the greatest man of the third generation) overflows with predilection ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... glory as much as any man; but he desired to receive it only on his own terms. He profoundly appeals to writers endowed with "the artistic conscience" as "the martyr of literary style." In morals something of a libertine, in matters of art he exhibited the intolerance of weakness in others and the remorseless self-examination and self-torment commonly attributed to the Puritan. His friend Maxime Du Camp, who tried to bring him out ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... pounding in my brain. Why was Helen at the house? Had Frank Woods failed to keep his appointment, thinking better of eloping with another man's wife; or, had Helen come to her senses, seen through the thin veneer that covered the cad and the libertine in Frank Woods and returned to her husband for good? Over and above these questions and conjectures and hopes, there was thanksgiving in my heart that the irremediable step had not been taken; that something had intervened to keep scandal and ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... take all this with reserve. D'Aubigne, being artist and man of science, has a vivid imagination. But he understands Carville, and appreciates the difference between him and the average libertine. With Carville it is always a grande affaire. For the time, as D'Aubigne quaintly puts it, his love is like a red, red rose. And I relate my adventures to you because you have roused my interest in your neighbours and it is only ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... formerly lived (for he has been a man of pleasure), they gave me, by their behaviour on these tender occasions, reason to think they had more virtue than not to be very apprehensive for your safety; and my lord often exclaimed, that he could not have thought his brother such a libertine, neither. ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... painted, and one that he considers worthy of himself—a National Guard truly imposing when under arms. Oh, sacred private life, where art thou! Paris is a city ever ready to exhibit itself half naked, a city essentially libertine and devoid of modesty. For a person's life to be decorous in it, the said person should have a hundred thousand a year. Virtues are dearer ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... passion! The war had left havoc. The physical, the sensual, the violent, the simian—these instincts, engendering the Day of the Beast, had come to dominate the people he had fought for. Why not go out and deliberately kill a man, a libertine, a slacker? He would still be acting on the same principle that imbued him ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... not. I acknowledge nae king ower my conscience but the King o' Kings. As for that perjured libertine on the throne, for whom there's muckle need to pray, I tell ye plainly that I consider the freedom and welfare o' Scotland stands higher than the supposed rights o' king and lords. Ye misca' us rebels! If ye ken the history ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... the mature age of twelve was formally entered at the University of Kasi, where, without loss of time, the first became a gambler, the second a confirmed libertine, the third a thief, and the fourth a high Buddhist, or in other words ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... securely moored? Who the paddles and the rowlocks and the signal halyards, lost because of Neptune's whims and violence? Beachcombing is a nicely adjusted, if not quite an exact art. Not once but several times has the libertine Neptune scandalously seduced punts and dinghies from the respectable precincts of Brammo Bay, and having philandered with them for a while, cynically abandoned them with a bump on the mainland beach, and only once has ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... intrude even upon his hours of society: and when by an alteration of habits, the mind is cleared of these frightful ideas, it requires but the slightest renewal of the association to bring back the full tide of misery upon the repentant libertine. ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... eagerness common to strong and active natures when the heart is not at ease; and under all the light fascination of his converse; or the dissipation of his life, lurked the melancholic temperament of a man worthy of nobler things. Nor was the courtly vice of the libertine the only drawback to the virtuous character assigned to Hastings by Comines. His experience of men had taught him something of the disdain of the cynic, and he scrupled not at serving his pleasures or his ambition by means which his loftier nature could not excuse to his clear sense. [See ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the population, "mashes" the ladies through the confessional, worming out all their secrets, and making them as pliable as wax in his holy hands. Too often the professional son of God is a chartered libertine, whose amors are carried on under a veil of sanctity. What else, indeed, could be expected when a lot of lusty young fellows, in the prime of life, foreswear marriage, take vows of chastity, and undertake to stem the current of their natures by such ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... so throughout St. Mark) substitute for the preposition [Greek: en] the preposition [Greek: eis],—(a sufficient proof to me that they understand [Greek: EN] to represent [Greek: en], not [Greek: hen]): and are followed by Tischendorf, Tregelles, and the Revisers. As for the chartered libertine B (and its servile henchman L), for the first [Greek: en] (but not for the second and third) it substitutes the preposition [Greek: EIS]: while, in ver. 20, it retains the first [Greek: en], but omits the other two. In ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... was Thomas, called "Tad," a constant companion of his father's little leisure, now dead. An elder boy, Robert, has lived to be welcomed as Ambassador in this country, and was at this time a student at Harvard. Willie, a clever and lovably mischievous child, "the chartered libertine of the White House" for a little while, had died at the age of twelve in the early days of 1862, when his father was getting so impatient to stir McClellan into action. These and a son who had long before ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... a foreign country, where my past would be ignored, and where we might be married without regard to the opinion of the world. But my lover, though always full of projects and promises, had never once alluded to the subject of matrimony. People broadly hinted that my Tunicu was a libertine, like some of his companions and that he had no intention of making me his wife; but we were both favoured with rivals whose interest it was to speak in these terms. My rivals were the white ladies, who were jealous of Tunicu's attentions to me, and who never forgot to openly express ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... lust of liberty and overstimulated desire. The poor are growing poorer, and to "keep in the ring," to live and dress beyond their means as many do, it is necessary to have an unexacting standard of morals. In this way the promiscuous libertine is evolved,—the most insidious and dangerous product of present day civilization, and the most pernicious factor in the spread of immoral impulses ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... that every one thinks thoughts and feels impulses that would be startling if expressed in speech. Don't we all know how terrifying a thing speech is, and thought? a chartered libertine." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... de Pierre"—the Feast of the Statue—well known to the modern stage under the name of "Don Juan," was the next vehicle of Moliere's satire. The story, borrowed from the Spanish, is well known. In giving the sentiments of the libertine Spaniard, the author of "Tartuffe" could not suppress his resentment against the party, by whose interest with the king that piece had been excluded from the stage, or at least its representation suspended. "The profession of a hypocrite," says Don Juan, "has marvellous advantages. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... righteous Lot who was troubled greatly by the libertine course of the wicked. Was it not a great aggravation that they not only rushed publicly and shamelessly into whoredom and adultery, but into such sins as may not be mentioned,—insomuch that they did not even spare the ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... God," he said, "that however gross and innumerable my errors and backslidings, I am no libertine." (Here Endicott's eyes flashed, but he contented himself with stroking, in a musing manner, the long tuft of hair on his chin.) "The evil we are called upon by the united voice of the suffering saints in this wilderness to suppress," continued Dudley, ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... reckless selfishness! Here is the fair promise of an innocent girl's life blighted, and an old man's grey hairs brought down with sorrow to the grave, in order to gratify the passing fancy of a heartless libertine." He paused, and then continued, "I suppose one can do nothing in the matter, having no stronger grounds than mere ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... would amend his conduct, and they talked of appointing him Commander of the Order of Malta at Negroponte, or else Great Castellan at Amposta, but the incorrigible Don Priamo would not better his ways, and continued a libertine, crusty, fickle in disposition toward his companions, but a beloved hero to his brothers in arms, men of the ranks belonging to the Order, mere soldiers who could display over their cuirasses no other decoration than ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... selfishness were screamingly alive within him. To these was added the inordinate conceit of the habitual libertine, a combination than which there is nothing more sensitive in ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... natives Ouvidouve Jesero, the lake of Ovid. In this retirement, and the Euxine Pontus, he passed the remainder of his life, a melancholy period of seven years. Notwithstanding the lascivious writings of Ovid, it does not appear that he was in his conduct a libertine. He was three times married: his first wife, who was of mean extraction, and (185) whom he had married when he was very young, he divorced; the second he dismissed on account of her immodest behaviour; and the third appears to have survived him. He ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... General Agnew, an Englishman, and General Nash, an American, were killed. The Americans had some dragoons under Pulaski, the only one of the confederated Poles who had refused to accept a pardon. He was an intrepid knight, a libertine and devotee, and a better captain than general; he insisted on being a Pole on all occasions, and M. de Lafayette, after having contributed to his reception in the army, often exerted himself to effect a reconciliation betwixt ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... the door would exclaim, while he held the woman in his arms: "Open the door, woman, I know you're in there, and with whom. Just wait, wait!" Instantly, like a libertine stirred by fear of discovery in the open, he recovered his strength and hurled himself madly upon the ventriloquist whose voice continued to bluster outside the room. In this wise he experienced the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... of Bully West, notorious as a brawler and a libertine. Who in all the North did not know of it? Her heart fluttered a ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... as he failed in Tragedy, but here the failure sprang from the very force and vigour of his mind. He flung himself like the men of his day into the reaction against Puritanism. His life was that of a libertine; and his marriage with a woman of fashion who was yet more dissolute than himself only gave a new spur to his debaucheries. Large as was his income from the stage, and it equalled for many years the income of a country squire, he was always in debt and forced ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... devotes many consecutive pages of Billingsgate to him in the Second Part of his Gangraena, tells us that he held "many wicked opinions," being "an Hermaphrodite and a compound of an Arminian, Socinian, Libertine, Anabaptist, & c." From the same authority we learn that the Presbyterians had nicknamed him "the great Red Dragon of Coleman Street." What he really was we have already seen in part for ourselves, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... considerable change in the progress of the life of Wilton Brown. He found the young Lord Sherbrooke all that he had been represented to be in every good point of character, and less in every evil point. He did not, it is true, studiously veil from his new friend his libertine habits, or his light and reckless character; but it so happened, that when in society with Wilton, his mind seemed to find food and occupation of a higher sort, and, on almost all occasions, when conversing with him, he showed ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... will I satisfy him, and show him My salvation. We have seen a grey-headed libertine, and we have missed from among the clean-hearted and the faithful some brave young life that was giving itself vigorously to the holy service. But perhaps we have had the grace not to challenge the utter faithfulness of God. The measure ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... danger of a general conflagration and, applying Voltaire's epithet for ecclesiasticism to the republic, cried all abroad: Crush the Infamous! Conscious of her old age, distrusting all the possible successors to her throne: Paul the paranoiac, Constantine the coarse libertine, and the super-elegant Alexander, she refused a coalition with England and turned her activities eastward against the Cossacks and into Persia; but she consented to be the intermediary between Austria and Great Britain. Austria wanted the Netherlands, but only if she could secure with ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Quirk," he began, without further explanation, "I am a man of the world, and I know the utmost capabilities of human wickedness. I don't believe you are a real libertine. But I know Grey Town. Many a dog has been hanged here because of his bad name. You must ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... resumed Madame Ferailleur, "it is certain that he took a violent fancy to his sister's apprentice. This man, who has since become an infamous scoundrel, was then only a rake, an unprincipled drunkard and libertine. He fancied the poor little apprentice—she was then but thirteen years old—would be only too glad to become the mistress of her employer's brother; but she scornfully repulsed him, and his vanity was so deeply wounded that he persecuted the ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... for him no more than did the little girls and babies. Life changed its aspect entirely. Gone were the days of vagabondage, the lazy, the delicious even though cold and hungry hours of dreaming and reading in the brickfield; gone was the happy freedom of the chartered libertine of the gutter. He was bound, a little slave, like hundreds of other little slaves and thousands of big ones, to a relentless machine. He entered the hopeless factory gate at six in the morning and ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... was taken from their scenes. Even in that time of loose spelling his spelling is remarkably loose. He seems to spell without any particular principle in the matter, seldom rendering the same word a second time by the same combination of letters. He was at one period of his life a libertine of the loosest order, so far as morals were {25} concerned, but of the shrewdest kind as regarded personal gain and advancement. He would have loved any Lady Bellaston who presented herself, and who could have rewarded him for his ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... in a sonorous alto, without appearing to notice Gabou,—but smiling upon Fafa as she passes, with her great eyes turned full upon his face.... All the libertine blood of the man flames under that look;—he feels as if momentarily wrapped in ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... action. I pretend not to love you more at this moment than when I first saw you, when you entered the terrace-room at Cherbury and touched my cheek. From that moment I was yours. I declare to you, most solemnly I declare to you, that I know not what love is except to you. The world has called me a libertine; the truth is, no other woman can command my spirit for an hour. I see through them at a glance. I read all their weakness, frivolity, vanity, affectation, as if they were touched by the revealing rod of Asmodeus. You were born to be my bride. Unite yourself with me, ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... gambler—the austere would call her the chartered libertine—of the group of pretty country towns which encircle Paris; for Lacville is in the proud possession of a Gambling Concession which has gradually turned what was once the quietest of inland watering-places into a miniature ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... as we passed between them, with a fair wind and studding sails set alow and aloft. Their tropical charms seemed more glowing, the water bluer, the palm trees statelier, the vegetation more libertine than ever. On the south the land rises gradually from the shore to a range of lofty mountains. Immediately behind Honolulu - the capital - a valley with a road winding up it leads to the north side of the island. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... 'habit of his soul:' Heavy and phlegmatic he trod the stage, Too proud for tenderness, too dull for rage. When Hector's lovely widow shines in tears, Or Rowe's[75] gay rake dependent virtue jeers, With the same cast of features he is seen To chide the libertine, and court the queen. 970 From the tame scene, which without passion flows, With just desert his reputation rose; Nor less he pleased, when, on some surly plan, He was, at once, the actor and the man. In Brute[76] he shone unequall'd: all agree Garrick's not half so great a ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... libertine, the debauchee, the mastich- chewer, the too susceptible to amorous sights?' 'Yes; the lecher and whore-master. Well, Damasias fell down and worshipped the Goddess (they have an Artemis by Scopas in the middle of the court), he and his ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... seems no less necessary sometimes to deposit one's money with a usurer than to borrow from him. Now it seems altogether unlawful to deposit one's money with a usurer, even as it would be unlawful to deposit one's sword with a madman, a maiden with a libertine, or food with a glutton. Neither therefore is it lawful ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... world, gay, fashionable, and a libertine. He had scores of "lovers," but never loved till he saw the little rustic lass named Aura Freehold, a farmer's daughter, to whom he proposed matrimony.—John Philip Kemble, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... of Christian's apprehension, he was never visited by any long or permanent doubt that the virtue of his niece might prove the shoal on which his voyage should be wrecked. But he was an arrant rogue, as well as a hardened libertine; and, in both characters, a professed disbeliever in the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... and the modern french were antipodes, but they are now converging, under a government, which, in point of security, and even of mildness, has no resemblance, since the first departure from the ancient establishments. The french, like the libertine son, after having plunged in riot and excesses, subdued by wretchedness, are returning to order and civilization. Unhappy people, their tears have almost washed away their offences—they have suffered to their heart's core. Who will not pity them to see their change, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... and continued to load his gun. Corentin looked at Marthe with indifference, while his companion seemed charmed by her; but the young man noticed the signs of her inward distress, which escaped the old libertine, who had, however, noticed and feared the gun. The natures of the two men were disclosed in this ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... tree; as is the sheep, so is the lamb;" for had her father brought her up in the fear of God, in place of encouraging her in revenge, pride, and haughtiness, Sidonia might have been a good and honoured wife for her life long. But the libertine example of her father so destroyed all natural instincts of modesty and maidenly reserve within her, that she fell an easy prey ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... contented. He drew a deep breath of satisfaction as, looking above and beneath and all about him, he saw that they were folded in an almost impenetrable net of foliage, through which nothing could steal into their sanctuary, save "the chartered libertine, the air," and a few stray beams of the setting sun, filtering through the multitudinous leaves, from which they caught a green tint ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... teaching that they please. It has no punishment nor even a voice of disapprobation to its member who is a rationalist, an atheist, or a Christian so far as acceptance of such belief or non-belief is concerned. And, so far as conduct is concerned, a man may be a libertine, a robber or a murderer, and yet maintain his religious status. But when it comes to the violation of caste rules it is very different. Hinduism will tolerate anything but caste insubordination. So that when a man, in becoming ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... General, wheeling round upon his new antagonist, "Mr. Pendragon! And do you suppose, Mr. Pendragon, that because I have had the misfortune to marry your sister, I shall suffer myself to be dogged and thwarted by a discredited and bankrupt libertine like you? My acquaintance with Lady Vandeleur, sir, has taken away all my appetite for the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after a short time, that they could not well get on without Calvin. His rule might be rigid; but an authority even such as his was better than no settled authority at all; and the Libertine party seem to have been unable to construct any efficient and beneficent form of government. Accordingly, they invited Calvin to return; and, after some delay on his part, in order to test the spirit ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... the effect of this good lesson keep, As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother Do not as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, Whilst, like a puffed and wreckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads And ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... Even the gay libertine who sang "How happy could I be with either!" did not go so far as this. But we have already had occasion to remark on the laxity ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... part, my dear," said Mr. Ayrton. "I think that he's a bit of a fool to run his head into a hornet's nest because he has come to the conclusion that Abraham's code of morality was a trifle shaky, and that Samson was a shameless libertine. Great Heavens! has the man got no notion of the perspective ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... are now a young man of twenty-two years of age; here is none of that seriousness of years which may dissuade a youth, let his condition be what it may—an adventurer, a libertine, a deceiver—be he old or young, from courting your acquaintance, and drawing you into his society and his plans. One may fall into this danger unawares, and then not know how to recede. Of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... unshaken determination which were necessary to make him a leader of thought. He laboured at it all his life, and his mental qualifications enabled him to keep pace with the public desires in all their branches. The age was frivolous, and he excelled in fugitive pieces; it was libertine, and he had obscene verses at command; the esprits forts had a leaning to incredulity, and he put himself at the head of the movement, and made use of it to turn into ridicule all that men had been most accustomed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... without spot or stain; yes, he could have witnessed and borne all this, and the blessed memory of her virtues would have consoled him in his bereavement and his sorrow. But to reflect that she was trampled down into guilt and infamy by the foot of the licentious libertine, was an event that cried for blood; and blood he had, for he murdered the seducer, and that with an insatiable rapacity of revenge that was terrible. He literally battered the head of his victim out of all shape, and left him a dead and worthless ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... debauched and profligate wretch, having conceived a hatred against his wife, entered into a conspiracy with another brutal libertine and gambler, named Campbell of Burnbank (repeatedly mentioned in Pennycuick's satirical poems of the time), by which Campbell undertook to destroy the woman's character, so as to enable Muschat, on false pretences to obtain a divorce from her. The ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... proposition was the hope of seeing a few of these much vaunted beauties, and that I had been cruelly disappointed in not having seen the shadow of a woman. At this frank avowal the Emperor, who had expected it in advance, laughed heartily, and took his revenge on my ears, calling me a libertine: "You do not know then, Monsieur le Drole, that your good friends the Greeks have adopted the customs of those Turks whom they detest so cordially, and like them seclude their wives and daughters in order that they may never appear before ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... in those days she still had hopes of civilising you,' answered Maulevrier. 'Since then she has abandoned all endeavour in that direction, and has given you over to your own devices—and me. Since then you have become a chartered libertine. You have letters ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... it indeed a fact? Wherever woman owns property which she would relieve from unjust taxation; wherever she has a son whom she would preserve from the temptations of intemperance, or a daughter from the enticements of a libertine, or a husband from the conscriptions of war, she has a separate interest which she is entitled ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... I would not have come to you if I had not had evidence. You take exception to Lans and his ways of life, I have been informed that you have even called him a—a—libertine!" ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... glimpse into the life of that pure, good woman who has tried to be God's messenger to me to-night, I can find no words to express my loathing of the slough in which I and mine have mired. My only child, by the force of natural selection, bids fair to add to our number a drunkard and a libertine; and I am powerless to prevent it. The mother that should guard and guide her child, is blind to everything save that he is rich. Froth and mud! ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... this nature are very common in the annals of popular superstition. It is, for example, currently believed in Ettrick Forest, that a libertine, who had destroyed fifty-six inhabited houses, in order to throw the possessions of the cottagers into his estate, and who added to this injury, that of seducing their daughters, was wont to commit, to a carrier in the neighbourhood, the care of his ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... of a trader's wife in the Gilberts is, besides, unusually enviable. She shares the immunities of her husband. Curfew in Butaritari sounds for her in vain. Long after the bell is rung and the great island ladies are confined for the night to their own roof, this chartered libertine may scamper and giggle through the deserted streets or go down to bathe in the dark. The resources of the store are at her hand; she goes arrayed like a queen, and feasts delicately everyday upon tinned meats. And she who was perhaps of no regard or station ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shoulder held full well Her worldly riches, but the truth to tell She bore the chief herself; that nobler part. That beauteous gem, an uncorrupted heart. And then that native loveliness! that cheek! It bore the very tints her betters seek; At such a sight the libertine would glow, With all the warmth that he can ever know; Would send his thoughts abroad without control, The glimmering moon-shine of his little soul. "Above the reach of justice I shall soar, Her friends ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... say—it hath been all in all his study: List his discourse of war, and you shall hear A fearful battle rendered you in music. Turn him to any cause of policy, The Gordian knot of it he will unloose Familiar as his garter; that, when he speaks, The air, a chartered libertine, is still, And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears To steal ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... be despaired of. Do you remember M. de Rance? He lived in your favourite age;—M. de Rance. Well! before he became the reformer of La Trappe he had been a worldling like me, and a great sceptic—what people called a libertine. Still he became a saint! It is true he had a terrible reason for it. Do you know what ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Show me the steep and thorny way to Heaven, Whilst like a puff'd and reckless libertine Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And recks ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... far you are right—how far suitability is a question of rank. A gentleman may be, and frequently is, a drunkard, a gambler, a libertine, ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... in the forest. He who is at thy side is before thee and after thee. Thou travelest in darkness, but thou art cursed and blessed with the gift of sight. The worlds of women are seven: spirit, weed, flower, the blind, the visioned, libertine, and saint. None of these is for thee. For each child of love there is a woman that holds the seven worlds within a single breast. Hold fast to thy birthright, even though thou journey with thy back unto ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... themselves to reign alternate, sharing the individual in distinct halves, till he becomes like unto that hero of Gautier's witch story, who was a pious priest one-half of the twenty-four hours and a wicked libertine the other: all power of selection, of reaction gone in this passive endurance of conflicting tendencies; all identity gone, save a mere feeble outsider looking on at the alternations of intentions and lapses, of good and bad. And the soul of such a person—if, indeed, we can speak of ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... my sister, an incident occurred, to prove to me that the heart of a libertine is dead to natural affection; and to convince me, that the being who has appeared all tenderness, to gratify a selfish passion, is as regardless of the innocent fruit of it, as of the object, when the fit is over. I had casually observed an old, mean-looking ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... an intelligible kind, and require no highly-strung sensibility to give them keenness. The heroine is first bullied and then deserted by her family, cut off from the friends who have a desire to help her, and handed over to the power of an unscrupulous libertine. When she dies of a broken heart, the most callous and prosaic of readers must feel that it is the only release possible for her. And in the gradual development of his plot, the slow accumulation of horrors upon the head of a virtuous victim, Richardson ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... as a libertine, Even grown a master in the school of vice, One that doth nothing but invent deceit: For all the day he humours up and down, How he the next day might deceive his friend. He thinks of nothing but the present time: For one groat ready down, he'll pay a shilling, But then the lender ...
— The London Prodigal • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... mother of the young Orsini. There, likewise, Lucretia, who was several years younger, made her acquaintance. Like Lucretia, Giulia had golden hair, and her beauty won for her the name La Bella. It was in Adriana's house that this tender, lovely child became ensnared in the coils of the libertine Rodrigo. She succumbed to his seductions either shortly before or soon after her marriage to the young Orsini. Perhaps she first aroused the passion of the cardinal, a man at that time fifty-eight years old, when she stood before him in his palace a bride in the full bloom of youth. Be that as ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... wild, despairing look of some frightened young slave girl, passing under the lustful gaze of some lordly libertine, who declares himself "in search of a fancy article for ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... continue to roll on in the caravan. I belong to the meanderings of vagabond life. I shall dismiss these two women. I shall not keep even one of them. I have a tendency to become an old scoundrel. A maidservant in the house of a libertine is like a loaf of bread on the shelf. I decline the temptation. It is not becoming at my age. Turpe senilis amor. I will follow my way alone with Homo. How astonished Homo will be! Where is Gwynplaine? ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... against Burns. Nor is there, when we look at his literary work, any falling off in his powers as a poet. He sang as sweetly, as purely, as magically as ever he did; and this man, who has been branded as a blasphemer and a libertine, had nobly set himself to purify the polluted stream of Scottish Song. He was still continuing his contributions to Johnson's Museum, and now he had also begun to write for Thomson's ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... utterly unworthy of acceptance as being a representation of what people with blood in them think or do on such occasions." Thus am I crushed between the upper millstone of the Mr Redford, who thinks me a libertine, and the nether popular critic, who thinks me a prude. Critics of all grades and ages, middle-aged fathers of families no less than ardent young enthusiasts, are equally indignant with me. They revile me ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... cathedral, nor the music to Wilde's Salome that of Brahms' German Requiem, yet whatever of beauty there may be in the shapes will divert the attention from the meanness or vileness of the non-aesthetic suggestion. We do not remember the mercenary and libertine allegory embodied in Correggio's Danae, or else we reinterpret that sorry piece of mythology in terms of cosmic occurrences, of the Earth's wealth increased by the fecundating sky. Similarly it is a common observation that while unmusical Bayreuth-goers often attribute demoralising effects to ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... underhand crimes of such men were plainly exposed to view, and, when they were, an example ought to be made of the offender as a warning to his class. Ever since Cora had gained a hearing in the police-court at Hammersmith, Alan was set down as a heartless libertine, who had grown tired of his wife, or, at any rate, as one who wanted to wash his hands of her, and throw the burden of maintaining her upon the rates. Thus it became quite a popular pastime ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... heard of the fate of Don Juan, the famous libertine of Seville, who for his sins against the fair sex and other minor peccadilloes was hurried away to the infernal regions. His story has been illustrated in play, in pantomime, and farce, on every stage in Christendom; until at length it ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... Shaker village, and was said never to have clasped a woman's hand in his own, and to have no conception of a closer tie than the cold fraternal one of the sect. Old Father Ephraim was the most awful character of all. In his youth he had been a dissolute libertine, but was converted by Mother Ann herself, and had partaken of the wild fanaticism of the early Shakers. Tradition whispered at the firesides of the village that Mother Ann had been compelled to sear his heart of flesh with a red-hot iron ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... (said my aunt) of sketches of the society which has passed away. I wish I could describe to you Sir Philip Forester, the "chartered libertine" of Scottish good company, about the end of the last century. I never saw him indeed; but my mother's traditions were full of his wit, gallantry and dissipation. This gay knight flourished about the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century. He was the Sir Charles Easy and the Lovelace ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... was almost unbearable; it was blue with smoke, too, and Lester Armstrong always led us to believe that he had never smoked a cigar in his life; and, worst of all, from a gentleman he has suddenly turned into a libertine, if I ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... that his majesty, a most judicious prince, should not provide himself with a good number of such wise and able counsellors. Yet perhaps the virtue of those reverend sages was too strict for the corrupt and libertine manners of a court: and we often find by experience, that young men are too opinionated and volatile to be guided by the sober dictates of their seniors. However, since the king was pleased to allow me access to his royal person, I was resolved, upon the very first occasion, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... the camp they were accompanied by a little procession. Shabah, the Caid of Amara, a shortish man whose immense dignity made him almost gigantic, insisted upon attending them to the tents, with his young brother, a pretty, libertine boy of sixteen, the brother's tutor, an Arab black as a negro but without the negro's look of having been freshly oiled, and two attendants. To them joined himself the Caid of the Nomads, a swarthy potentate who not only looked, but actually was, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... to rob the eighteenth of the credit of originating the doctrine of equality. To mention only one of the early writers,—[For copious references to authorities on the spread of communistic and socialistic ideas and libertine community of goods and women in four periods of the world's history—namely, at the time of the decline of Greece, in the degeneration of the Roman republic, among the moderns in the age of the Reformation, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... I. as valet de chambre, and accompanied his master to the battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and made prisoner. Pursued by the Catholics as a heretic, and afterwards by the Genevan Calvinists as a libertine, he was protected as long as was possible by the King and by his sister. He died at Turin, a refugee to Italy, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Ed as hostler often furnished the major with a carriage, in which to make some of his private expeditions, and this was another and final disgrace which the cowman perceived and commented upon. To assist an old libertine like the major in concealing his night journeys was the nethermost deep of "self-discipline," but when the pretty young wife of his employer became the object of the major's attention Kelley was ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... most dissolute libertine dares not to disrespect our sex, unless we ourselves encourage him by advances. Prove what you are; make manifest your virtue and honor, and I will ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... if he took the ethical point of view. The gods, he would find, who should surely at least attain to the human standard, not only are capable of every phase of passion, anger, fear, jealousy and, above all, love, but indulge them all with a verve and an abandonment that might make the boldest libertine pause. Zeus himself, for example, expends upon the mere catalogue of his amours a good twelve lines of hexameter verse. No wonder that Hera is jealous, and that her lord is driven to put her down in terms better suited to the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... and almost in the fervour of the Revolution, she had imbibed some of its libertine opinions; among others, that marriage was a civil contract, and if entered into at all, might be broken at the pleasure of either party. This idea was strengthened and confirmed in her by the instances she had seen of matrimonial discord, ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... inherited; or (2), from a blazing material success, the cause of which was their own savage self-interested viewpoint. Hence a colder and in some respects a more critical group of men I have never known. Most of them had already seen so much of life in a libertine way that there was little left to enjoy. They sniffed at almost everything, Culhane included, and yet they were obviously drawn to him. I tried to explain this to myself on the ground that there is some iron power in some people ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... "I remember that day at Windsor, lady!" he cried. "The man of whom I afterward asked your name was a most libertine courtier, and he raised his hat when he spoke of you, calling you a lily which the mire of the court could not besmirch. I will believe all good, but no harm ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... not endure less vexation and insult, the libertine Jews having gone even into his house, and said to him insolently[710]—Manda, remanda; expecta, re-expecta; modicum ibi, et modicum ibi, as if to mock at ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Thomas, written only a few weeks before his death, warning her against the example of Mrs. Behn, he says, with remorseful sincerity: "I confess I am the last man in the world who ought in justice to arraign her, who have been myself too much a libertine in most of my poems, which I should be well contented I had time either to purge or to see them fairly burned." Congreve was less patient, and even Dryden, in the last epilogue he ever wrote, attempts ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... saturnine man, cool, insolently polite, and plentifully endowed with the judgmatical daring that is the necessary equipment of a society libertine—counseled patience, toleration, even silent recognition of Anstruther's undoubted claims for ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... here after you?" he sneered. "I've come to see the Squire." All the selfishness and cowardice latent in Sanderson's character were reflected in his face, at that moment, destroying its natural symmetry, disfiguring it with tell-tale lines, and showing him at his par value—a weak, contemptible libertine, brought ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... A libertine in his riper years, hardly regardful of appearances; and despising the sex in general, for the faults of particulars of it, who made themselves too cheap ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the kind with certainty. But the angles of resemblance are many between the groundwork of the "Tempest" and the earliest of Manx records. Mannanan-beg-Mac-y-Lear, the magician who surrounded the island with mists when enemies came near in ships; Maughold, the robber and libertine, bound hand and foot, and driven ashore in a wicker boat; and then Bridget, the virgin saint. Moreover, the stories of Little Man-nanan, of St. Patrick, and of St. Maughold were printed in Manx in the sixteenth century. Truly that is not enough, for, ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... they had been carefully devised and surrounded with safeguards, the heir managed to break into and improve several of them. The result was more money. After having gambled with fair luck, played the profuse libertine for a time, tried his hand at yachting, horse-racing, big-game hunting, and even politics, he successively tired of the first three, and was beaten at the last, but retained an unsatisfied hunger for it. To celebrate ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... brought to the Throne of Galavia all the libertine's irresoluteness, paced the floor in perplexed distress. He feared Jusseret. He dared not anger or disobey him. It appeared that being a King was not what he had conceived it, as he sat under the chestnut trees of the Paris boulevards ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... now to regard him as quite the reverse—a hot-blooded, reckless libertine: this is the sort of man to throw somersaults into knives, (12) or to leap into the ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... whilst I say mine. I believe I must tell you what I think of my new position. It strikes me very oddly that good and wise men at Cambridge and Boston should think of raising me into an object of criticism. I have always been—from my very incapacity of methodical writing—a 'chartered libertine,' free to worship and free to rail,—lucky when I could make myself understood, but never esteemed near enough to the institutions and mind of society to deserve the notice of the masters of literature ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... soar', are reprehensible. Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... received from him. Pities him. Writes to him that her rejection of Solmes is not in favour to himself; for that she is determined to hold herself free to obey her parents, (as she had offered to them,) of their giving up Solmes. Reproaches him for his libertine declarations in all companies against matrimony. Her notions of filial duty, notwithstanding the ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... But what did you want? Owing to your unfortunate habit—you now, I hope, feel its inconvenience—of not explaining yourself, I have had to discover this for myself. First, then, I have had to ask myself, what is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine. But your dislike of vulgarity is pushed to the length of a defect (universality of character is impossible without a share of vulgarity); and even if you could acquire the taste, you would find yourself overfed from ordinary sources without troubling me. So ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... her mother's, but which has a peculiarly high bred, refined expression, worthy of a royal princess, all combine to make me believe it must be so. Then, alas! alas! it is his own sister that this cursed libertine has so wronged, and he has been guilty of a horrible, horrible crime. Oh! I am cruelly punished for my ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... every point is made the occasion of minute decoration of the richest beauty. It was written for Faustina Mancina, a celebrated courtesan, whose empire lay till the day of her death over the papal city. The wealth of sensuality and wit that made a fatal seduction of Rome for Molza, scholar and libertine, is reflected as it were in the rich cadences and overwrought adornment of his verse. Such compositions as these had a powerful influence over the tone of idyllic poetry. I have mentioned only a few out of a considerable list. The ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... street, and watch your shadow— happy if only I could think that you were well and happy, my sweet little bird! Yet how are things in reality? Not only have evil folk brought you to ruin, but there comes also an old rascal of a libertine to insult you! Just because he struts about in a frockcoat, and can ogle you through a gold-mounted lorgnette, the brute thinks that everything will fall into his hands—that you are bound to listen to his insulting condescension! Out upon him! But ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... cause of policy, The Gordian knot of it he will unloose, Familiar as his garter: that when he speaks, The air, a chartered libertine, is still. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... there, Commandant of Artillery, a brave officer, but a bad man; Varin, a proud, arrogant libertine, Commissary of Montreal, who outdid Bigot in rapine and Cadet in coarseness; De Breard, Comptroller of the Marine, a worthy associate of Penisault, whose pinched features and cunning leer were in keeping with his important office of chief manager of the Friponne. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Fontenelle on one, and took it up with a strange uneasy dread and beating of the heart. She read it twice through, before entirely grasping its meaning, and then—as she realised that the man who had caused her so much pain and shame by his lawless and reckless pursuit of her in the character of a libertine, was now, with a frank confession of his total unworthiness, asking her to be his wife,—the tears rushed to her eyes, and a faint cry broke from ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... can judge of me! They have said of me all sorts of calumnies, all kinds of insinuations. I have been painted as black as the evil spirits. Men are here who will tell you 'Grandmoulin is a hypocrite; Grandmoulin is a robber, a liar, a libertine,'—that I have ruined my Province and sold my people and committed all the list of mortal sins. But, my brothers, I turn from those who assert these wicked falsehoods and I justify ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... woman whose beauty of person and dignity of character seemed so well to entitle her to both. The marriage was privately celebrated at Grafton; the secret was carefully kept for some time; no one suspected that so libertine a prince could sacrifice so much to a romantic passion; and there were, in particular, strong reasons which at that time rendered this step, to the highest degree, dangerous ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson |
