"Beggarly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passes, all does well, of course, All does very well till one flash of defiance. A great city is that which has the greatest men and women, If it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the world. How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed! How the floridness of the materials of cities shrivels before a ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... Johnson? "Sir, he was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality: a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half-a-crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger after his death." It is at once as devastating as a volcano and as neat as a formal garden. So, in a smaller way, is his criticism of a smaller man. Dr. Adams, talking of Newton, Bishop of Bristol, whom Johnson ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... condition that he shall battle it all himself, and that I shall only have to tend his person—I mean, look after his clothes and food; all which I will do with a hearty good-will; but if he expects I will lay hand to my sword, though it be only against beggarly wood-cutters with hooks and hatchets, he is very much mistaken. I, Signor Sampson, do not set up for being the most valiant, but the best and most faithful squire that ever served knight-errant; and if my lord Don Quixote, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... The beggarly troop took his advice, but the earl's son would have nothing to do with them. By way of a joke he told them to go back to Sverre and threaten to kill him if he would not be their leader. They did so, using persuasions and possibly threats, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... have plundered for thee the earth of its treasures; thou hast sacrificed them to thy infamous pleasures, without once thinking of these wretches. Feel now thy folly; thou hast spun the web of their destiny, and thy hungry, beggarly, miserable brood will transmit to their remotest posterity the misery of which thou art the cause. Thou didst beget children—wherefore hast thou not been a father to them? Wherefore hast thou sought happiness where mortal never yet found it? Look at them once more. ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... a year, and—though I hate prating of the beggarly elements—his proposal may be to your honour and profit, and, I am very sure, will be to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... Repealers would have announced some other gathering in some other place. You that say it is not at an end, tell us why did they forbear doing that? Secondly, Mr O'Connell has substituted for Repeal—what? The miserable, the beggarly petition, for a dependent House of Assembly, an upper sort of "Select Vestry," for Ireland; and that too as a bonus from the Parliament of the empire. This reminds us of a capital story related by Mr Webster, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... not seen her these four days. But if this beggarly attorney's clerk document is to be believed," continued Allington, pulling a letter from his pocket, "she herself expressly commanded him not ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... habit to attend early mass in the Cathedral; and one morning, as he was standing in the aisle, a young girl passed him with her father. Roberto knew the father, a beggarly Milanese of the noble family of Intelvi, who had cut himself off from his class by accepting an appointment in one of the government offices. As the two went by he saw a group of Austrian officers looking after the girl, and ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... Nausicaa, is to see the transformation of the beggarly wanderer, who, having taken his bath and put on his raiment, comes forth like a God. This is said to be the work of Pallas, "who caused him to appear taller and more powerful, with flowing locks, like the hyacinth." He ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... year '80, and I was twenty years of age. King Louis had then no especial Brigade of Irish Troops—that famous corps not being formed until after the Revolution—and his Scotch Guards, a pinchbeck, purse-proud set of beggarly cavaliers, would not have any Irishry among them. I scorned to deny my lineage, and indeed my tongue would have soon betrayed me, had I done so; and the name I listed under was that of James Moriarty. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... way; it was a leaden business altogether. For first, the wind blew so rudely that I had to hold on the pack with one hand from Cheylard to Luc; and second, my road lay through one of the most beggarly countries in the world. It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life. A road and some fences broke the unvarying waste, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... finished, and the two sides were complete for about three-fourths of their length; but that portion where the double rows of columns stand, and the pediment fronting Ratcliff Place, had not been built. The whole of that end was then red brick. Prom the corner of Edmund Street a row of beggarly houses, standing on a bank some eight feet above the level of the road, reached to within a few yards of the hall itself, the space between them and the hall being enclosed by a high wall. On the other side, the houses in Paradise Street came to within about the same distance, ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... contemptible, inferior, paltry, beggarly, despicable, lowly, undignified, commonplace, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... beggarly fellows as you speak of can be induced to go into the navy at all," said the colonel, who had been listening to the master's story, and was far from pleased at the interest Ada took in what he said. "For my part, I would as soon be a shoe-black; but you seem determined to give my niece a ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... parliaments cannot give you any breath of life, cannot find any wisdom for you; by long impiety, you have let the supply of noble human wisdom die out; and the wisdom that now courts your universal suffrages is beggarly human attorneyism or sham-wisdom, which is not an insight into the Laws of God's Universe, but into the laws of hungry Egoism and the Devil's Chicane, and can in the end profit ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... drive Friedrich mad, while the hours, at any rate, are slipping on! Here are three Letters of Friedrich, legible at last; which, with Wilhelmina's account from the other side, represent a small entirely human scene in this French-Austrian War,—nearly all of human we have found in the beggarly affair:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... "Hyperphon the beggarly hunchback, the laughing-stock of Athens! O Mother Hera!—but I see the villain's aim. You are weary of me. Then divorce me like an honourable man. Send me back to Polus my dear brother. Ah, you sheep, you are ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Queen said to him, "O Badr Basim, say me whether is the more pleasant, this place or the shop of thine uncle the grocer?" He replied, "By Allah, O Queen, this is the pleasenter, for my uncle is but a beggarly man, who vendeth pot-herbs." She laughed at his words and the twain lay together in the pleasantest of case till the morning, when King Badr Basim awoke from sleep and found not Queen Lab by his side, so he ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... spite of double pay, Are saucy, mutinous, and beggarly; So lavish of their money and their time, That want of forecast is the nation's crime. Good drunken company is their delight; And what they get by day they spend by night. Dull thinking seldom does their heads engage, But drink their youth away, and hurry on old age. Empty ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... radiance, to it she attributed all the light. But she felt bound to go on believing as she had been taught; for sometimes the most original mind has the strongest sense of law upon it, and will, in default of a better, obey a beggarly one—only till the higher law that swallows it up manifests itself. Obedience was as essential an element of her creed as of that of any purest-minded monk; neither being sufficiently impressed with this: that, while obedience is the law of the kingdom, it is of considerable importance that that ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... pacing up and down his study, distraught with the pangs of wounded self-interest; "I have been taking care of her money, when I ought to have taken care of her. It is her life that all hangs upon: and I have let that slip through my fingers while I have planned and contrived to save a few beggarly hundreds. Short-sighted idiot that I have been! Poor Pamela! And she has been so yielding, so compliant to my every wish! A month—a week, perhaps—and she will be gone: and that handsome spitfire ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... native states between us and the beggarly fanatical countries to the north-west no wise man can, I think, doubt; for, however averse our Government may be to encroach and creep on, it would be drawn on by the intermeddling dispositions and vainglory of local authorities; and every step would be ruinous, and lead to another still ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... could master civilization, and ought to master it, and will master it some day with a brush, a chisel, with words, ideas, theories, systems. Civilization is atrocious! It denies bread to the men who give it luxury. It starves them on sneers and curses, the beggarly rascal! My words may be strong, but I shall not retract them. Well, this great but neglected man comes to us; we recognize his greatness; we salute him with respect; we listen to him. He says to us: 'Gentlemen, ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it rather a sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility; while the whole materiel and imagery of the doze is supplied ab extra by a sort of mental camera obscura manufactured ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... had to, and he began to feel free and easy about it, and didn't try to cover up his tracks so much when he sent in a new lot. He was always working Lily. He began to consider himself master of the house. He intimated that a private carriage ought to be kept for them. He said it was beggarly that he should have to consider the rest of the family when he wanted to go out. When I got on to the situation, I began to enjoy it. I let him spread himself for a while just to see what he would do. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Richard, "a sturdy and faithful yeoman! It were better send such fellows their dinners, and then buffet it out with them for the castle, than to starve them as the beggarly Frenchmen ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... own terms, and then let him do his worst. What can he do? If he means to withdraw his beggarly two hundred and fifty pounds, of ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... breaking your promise to my son! I know it as certainly as if you had confessed it in so many words. Your cursed family pride is insulting Godfrey, as it insulted ME when I married your aunt. Her family—her beggarly family—turned their backs on her for marrying an honest man, who had made his own place and won his own fortune. I had no ancestors. I wasn't descended from a set of cut-throat scoundrels who lived by robbery and murder. I couldn't point to the time when the ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... egoist, a sluggard. Here I have been shuddering for the last three days at the thought of your coming. And do you know what has worried me particularly for these three days? That I posed as such a hero to you, and now you would see me in a wretched torn dressing-gown, beggarly, loathsome. I told you just now that I was not ashamed of my poverty; so you may as well know that I am ashamed of it; I am more ashamed of it than of anything, more afraid of it than of being found out if ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... their work-houses for the calls of their customers, as in Europe, they are continually running about the streets with the tools of their respective trades, offering their services, and, as it were, begging employment. The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton, many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing-boats upon the rivers and canals. The subsistence which they find there is so ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Chaplain, in speaking of her, "and though she hath so changed, hath scarce changed at all. Her black eye can flame as bright as ever under her long widow's veil. She visits the poor with her sister, and gives charities, but she will have no beggarly tricks, and can pick out a hypocrite at his first whining, howsoever clever he may be. One came to her last week with a lying tale of having loved the old Earl Dunstanwolde, and been his pensioner for years. And to see her mark the weak points of his ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... last, furious, "very well, since you wish it, let us leave our bones in this beggarly land, where it is always cold, where fine weather is a fog, fog is rain, and rain a deluge; where the sun represents the moon and the moon a cream cheese; in truth, whether we die here or elsewhere matters ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... although the British held Newport; and all the country south of the Delaware was free from them. The perplexities and discouragements of Washington were great indeed, while he stubbornly held the field with a beggarly makeshift for an army and sturdily continued his appeals to Congress and to the country for men, arms, and clothing; yet only New York City and New Jersey were really in the possession of the enemy. It was one thing for England to occupy a few cities, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... brief, is my plan, O'Dowd; nor is the least of its advantages that it gets rid of the Pension List, and that beggarly L1200 a-year by which wealthy England assumes to aid the destitute sons and daughters of letters. As for myself, I have fixed on my station. I mean to be swimming-master, and the prospectus shall announce that His Excellency the late Minister at the ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... were too many of us to find room in the divan, so we were scattered about as best we could light on places. The main difficulty was to get a place that looked clean enough to sit upon; for a dirtier palace I never saw, nor a more, beggarly. One cannot say whether the head governor had taken all his traps with him when he went a-soldiering; but if what we saw really was his establishment, it is likely enough that he had gone away to avoid exposing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... of which we were encamped, the heat had become so intense, that we were obliged to shift farther to the west. Except in the supply of arms and ammunition, we perceived that our booty was worth nothing. This Texian expedition must have been composed of a very beggarly set, for there was not a single yard of linen, nor a miserable worn-out pair of trousers, to be found in all ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... found unimportant letters. Every letter would have seemed unimportant, compared with that he carried in his pocket. Roach, M. P., invited him to dine. The man at the Home Office wanted him to go to a smoking concert. Lady Susan Harrop sent a beggarly card for an evening ten days hence. Like the woman's impudence! And yet, as it had been posted since her receipt of his mother's recent letter, it proved that Lady Susan had a sense of his growing dignity, which was good in its way. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... aristocrat!" stormed the young man. "A pampered, insolent aristocrat! A dog of an Englishman! A scelerat! Don't suppose you are to trample upon us for nothing! We are Frenchmen, you beggarly ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... careful survey, it was reported by them that they had found 25,929 oaks and 4,204 beeches, containing 121,572 cords of wood, fit for being converted into charcoal, as used at the iron furnaces, and 11,335 tons of ship timber suitable for the navy. They add, however, that "cabins of beggarly people, with goats, sheep, and swine, began to invade the same as formerly." A fresh agreement was forthwith entered into with Sir John Winter on the part of the Crown, who thereupon surrendered his former Patent, reserving the woods called Snead and Kidnalls, and nominated ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... simple moth doth blindly rush To reach the flame, its life oft pays the debt Of folly. Yet 'tis nobler thus to die Midst all the brightness of a waking life, Than from the world ooze out through darkened ways By beggarly instalments—none to feel Thy life but thine own poor ignoble self: And none to tell the moment of thy death Save ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... from me. I think you will kill me among you. It was my doing. Why do they attack him? I will write to the papers. I encouraged the man after Plantagenet had determined that he should not be assisted,—and, because I had done so, he paid the man his beggarly money. What is there to hurt him in that? Let me bear it. My ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... scholarship, my poetry, my divine dreams—what are these to a besotted, brutal congregation of Men-of-the-Earth? I sent Buckledorf, the rich banker, a copy of my little book, with a special dedication written in my own autograph in German, so that he might understand it. And what did he send me? A beggarly five shillings? Five shillings to the one poet in whom the heavenly fire lives! How can the heavenly fire live on five shillings? I had almost a mind to send it back. And then there was Gideon, the member of Parliament. I made one of the poems an acrostic on his name, so that he might ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... murmurs respecting the proceeds of Hiram's estate again became audible. He was aware that two of his old men had been heard to say that if everyone had his own, they might each have their hundred pounds a year, and live like gentlemen, instead of a beggarly one shilling and sixpence a day. One of this discontented pair, Abel Handy, had been put into the hospital by Mr. Harding himself; he had been a stonemason in Barchester, and had broken his thigh by a fall from a scaffolding. (Dr. Grantly had been very anxious to put into it instead an insufferable ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... equal temper of wisdom is attainable. Sit at home and the spirit-world will look in at your window with moonlit eyes; run out to find it, and rainbow and golden cup will have vanished and left you the beggarly child you were. The better part of wisdom is a sublime prudence, a pure and patient truth that will receive nothing it is not sure it can permanently lay to heart. Of our study there should be in proportion two-thirds of rejection to one of acceptance. And, amid the manifold infatuations ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... suffer. Thou shalt die as thy St. Edmund did—fit death it was, too, for a beggarly English saint. I ask thee for the ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Luggershall yesterday, a day later than I was in hopes to have come, for I was made to believe that the Court Leet, which was my object in going, would have been held on Wednesday; however I passed a day extraordinary better than I expected in that beggarly place. I made an acquaintance with a neighbouring gentleman, who has a very good estate, and a delightful old mansion, where I played at whist and supped on Wednesday evening. He is a descendant of the Speaker Smith, and son of that Mr. Ashton whom we saw at Trentham, or whom I saw ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... lived constantly in a sort of secret sensual delirium, and only his German training, stinginess and cowardice helped him to hold his constantly aroused desires in check. But two or three times a year, with incredible privations, he would cut five or ten roubles out of his beggarly budget, denying himself in his beloved evening mug of beer and contriving to save on the street cars, which necessitated his making enormous distances on foot through the town. This money he set aside for women and ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... shelves, A beggarly account of empty boxes, Green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds. Remnants of packthread, and old cakes of roses, Were thinly scattered to make ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... strange self idolizing humour, and a self glorying disposition, yet he is so poor and beggarly a creature, that he hath not sufficient matter within himself to give complacency to his heart, therefore he must borrow from all external things, and when there is any kind of propriety in, or title to them, then he glories in himself for them, as if they were truly in himself. ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... century. The mode in which the Greek dramas were transferred to Rome furnishes a picture, historically invaluable, of the diversity in the culture of the two nations; but in an aesthetic and a moral point of view the original did not stand high, and the imitation stood still lower. The world of beggarly rabble, to whatever extent the Roman editors might take possession of it under the benefit of the inventory, presented in Rome a forlorn and strange aspect, shorn as it were of its delicate characteristics: comedy no longer rested on the basis ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... all requests outside the pittance for household expense. She pleaded, exhorted, wailed. He invariably answered: "I haven't a cent by my soul." She pointed to the bare walls, the broken furniture, their beggarly attire. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... jolly shame it is that we should only carry a beggarly little dirk," said Bob Roberts to himself, as he tried to look sneeringly at the young ensign before him; for the latter came across the deck with rather a swaggering stride, and ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... said Hamilton, decidedly, "if we have to take up a collection—why not? If an object cannot be accomplished one way, try another." He stood up and emptied the contents of his pockets on the table. "Only five hundred beggarly continentals," he said ruefully. "However, who knows what treasures may line more careful pockets than mine? I know they will come forth as spontaneously. Have I your permission to ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... look you here, Miss Phoebe," he continued, losing his temper, "you see what your father will say to this when you get him into hot water with his people! There's more men with sons than me; and if the Crescent ain't too hot to hold him within a month—Do you think I'll stand it, a beggarly minister and his belongings coming in the way of a man that could buy you all up, twenty ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... came the delights of the rest of the fascinating Shakespeare villages. "Piping Pebworth", "Dancing Marston", "Drunken Bidford", "Haunted Hillborough", "Hungry Grafton", "Papist Wixford", and "Beggarly Broom" were visited and rejoiced over in turn; then the car wended its way from Warwickshire to sample the glories of Gloucestershire. Here, too, our pilgrims found plenty to arouse their enthusiasm: the richness of the landscape, with orchards just breaking into bloom; the slow winding rivers, with ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... coherence, it was only to ask: Is this work, this poem or this novel, in conformity with the traditional conventions of respectability, is it such as can be put into the hands of boys and girls? To them this was the one ground on which the matter of literature, as apart from the beggarly elements of its form, could come under the cognizance of the critic. And this narrowness, a narrowness which belonged at least in equal measure to the official criticism of the French, naturally ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... me as if there were only about a thousand people in the world, who keep going round and round behind the scenes and then before them, like the "army" in a beggarly stage-show. Suppose that I should really wish; some time or other, to get away from this everlasting circle of revolving supernumeraries, where should I buy a ticket the like of which was not in some of their pockets, or find a seat to which some one of them ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... his companion—"in those circumstances you are right; and, as they say in that beggarly assemblage of pettifogging rogues and traitors called the House of Commons, I must shape my motion in another way. The manner in which I will beg you to deal with the Duke, is this. Find an opportunity, before this night be over, of entreating him earnestly not to go ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... inventor of the cotton gin, but that some persons in Switzerland had invented something similar to it, and the substitution of teeth, cut in an iron plate, instead of wire, was claimed as superseding his invention. The Legislature of South Carolina granted him the beggarly sum of $50,000 for the use of his invention by the planters of that State; but it was only by going to law, and after several tedious and vexatious suits, that he was able to secure this sum. Tennessee ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... the vengeful sarcasm of Johnson, who said that Bolingbroke was a scoundrel and a coward;—a scoundrel, to charge a blunderbuss against Christianity; and a coward, because he durst not fire it himself, but left a shilling to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger after his death. Mallett ranked himself among the calumniators and, as it proved, murderers of Admiral Byng. He wrote a Life of Lord Bacon, in which, it was said, he forgot that Bacon was ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... which we subsequently carve half a dozen States, is found adhering to us. Mr. Wilson offered us a war in which, of course, we sought nothing and found, at the end of it, not the customary few trifles of territory, but the whole embarrassing, beggarly world adhering to us. The thumbscrew and the rack could not wring from Mr. Hughes the admission that we are after anything more ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... as they did of old, that Odin's choosers of the slain might lead me to Valhalla. There should I forever fight at dawn and be healed at noon, if wounded, to be ready for the feast and song. The world was not big enough for us two if we must stay apart. Life was not to be lived in a beggarly and ignoble compromise. War was its business, bravery its duty, and cowardice its greatest crime—above all, that ultimate, puling cowardice of accepting life empty for its own ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... government, and, at a vast distance, those of Louisiana, struggling and bankrupt. The French remedy for an unsuccessful colony has always been to annex more territory, and forestall a possible rival. Therefore the French government strove to unite the beggarly settlements in Canada and Louisiana by setting up posts all along the Ohio and the Mississippi, in order to confine the English between the Alleghanies and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... at two days' work: and I can have Men at a shilling each—without the meat— That's a great matter! Let them but to meat, 'Tis utter ruin. I'll give none their meat— That I'll beware of. Men now-a-days are cheap, Cheap, dogcheap, and beggarly fond of work. One shilling each a-day, without the meat. Mind that, and ask in reason; for I wish To have that matter settled to my mind."— "Sir, there's no man alive will do't so cheap As I shall do it for the ready cash," Says I, to put him ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 494. • Various
... bare subsistence. scarcity, dearth; want, need, lack, poverty, exigency; inanition, starvation, famine, drought. dole, mite, pittance; short allowance, short commons; half rations; banyan day. emptiness, poorness &c. Adj.; depletion, vacancy, flaccidity; ebb tide; low water; " a beggarly account of empty boxes " [Romeo and Jul.]; indigence &c. 804; insolvency &c. (nonpayment) 808. V. be insufficient &c. Adj.; not suffice &c. 639; come short of &c. 304 run dry. want, lack, need, require; caret; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... I assure you I go on the most approved principles. I divide our available money among the greatest number of hungry claimants it will stretch to. But, after all, it goes a beggarly short way." ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with wealth. Pictures, statuary, marbles, and precious metals, dazzle, and at last weary, the traveller, and form a strange contrast to the desolate fields, the undrained swamps, the mouldering tenements, and the beggarly population, that are collected around them. Of the churches of Ferrara, we may say as Addison of the shrine of Loretto, "It is indeed an amazing thing to see such a prodigious quantity of riches lie dead and untouched, in the midst of so much poverty and misery as reign on all sides of them. ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... let us understand how he proveth(239) that sometimes it is expedient and necessary to conform unto such burdensome and beggarly ceremonies, as are many ways inconvenient, and occasions of sundry evil effects. His principal reason is,(240) That the apostles, by direction of the Holy Ghost, and upon reasons of common and perpetual equity, did practise themselves, and caused others to practise, yea, advised and ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... fifteen, there was scarce a lad of twenty, for half-a-dozen miles round, that I had not beat for one cause or other. There were the vicar's two sons of Castle Brady—in course I could not associate with such beggarly brats as them, and many a battle did we have as to who should take the wall in Brady's Town; there was Pat Lurgan, the blacksmith's son, who had the better of me four times before we came to the crowning fight, when I overcame him; and I could mention a score more of my deeds of ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... three wives, they loitered about, fetched turtles' eggs, and caught fish and birds; in a word, any thing but labour, and they fared accordingly. The diligent lived well and comfortably and the slothful lived hard and beggarly; and so I believe, generally speaking, it is all over ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... beggarly little servant did it, did he? He stole that paper I had given you, did he? What do you imagine I brought you to this country for if you are to let two stupid fools play with you as though ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... understand, the Christian ordinance here referred to by Tylor, is traceable through many modifications back to those carnal ordinances, those weak and beggarly elements, which Paul says were imposed until the time of reformation.[56] It has no authority from Christ and is therefore ...
— Water Baptism • James H. Moon
... was a friend of mine,' said Fitz, turning up his delicately chiselled nose,—'the beggarly printer's devil!' ...
— Risen from the Ranks - Harry Walton's Success • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... seemed as if there were no longer any people about the place. A beggarly handful, she would have said, hardly enough to do the work of the house, or of the estate, sadly as the latter had dwindled. In the General's day, it had been a free-handed boast of his that never less than fifty persons, men, women and children, were fed within his gates each ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... humiliation, and to prove his obedience by suffering, she next directed him in his beggarly attire to go and present himself to his old herdsman Eumaeus, who had the care of his swine and his cattle, and had been a faithful steward to him all the time of his absence. Then strictly charging Ulysses that he should reveal himself to no man, but to his own son, whom she would ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... beggarly here, yet I have refused a fortune offered me by another that I might remain loyal to my masters at Condillac. But this thing that you tell me alters everything. By ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... low-minded, the slightest necessity becomes an invincible necessity. "The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way, and I shall be devoured in the streets." But when the necessity pleaded is not in the nature of things, but in the vices of him who alleges it, the whining tones of commonplace beggarly rhetoric produce nothing but indignation; because they indicate a desire of keeping up a dishonourable existence, without utility to others, and without dignity to itself; because they aim at obtaining the dues of labour without industry; and by frauds would draw from ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... must be talked to, how far her heart was engaged in the matter must be found out, and she must be made to see the folly, the madness of risking her chance of winning a coronet for the sake of a beggarly thousand-a-year captain. And, good heavens! the chaperons: what would they say of her, Mrs. Barton, were such a thing to occur? Mrs. Barton turned from the thought in horror; and then, out of the soul of the old coquette arose, full-fledged, the chaperon, the satellite whose light and glory is ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... Lipsius to affirm, Scio, poetam neminem praestantem fuisse, sine parte quadam uberiore divinae aurae. And hence it is that the coming up of good poets (for I mind not mediocres or imos) is so thin and rare among us. Every beggarly corporation affords the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but Solus rex, aut poeta, non quotannis nascitur. To this perfection of nature in our poet we require exercise of ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... and laws of surrounding nations, and of preceding ages, Judaism was glorious,—but compared with Christianity it is no longer glorious. Judaism compared with Paganism, was a wonder of wisdom, philosophy, and righteousness; but compared with Christianity it is a mass of rudiments, first lessons, beggarly elements. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... ready to die, and for ideas have they killed one another. Give to the world the idea that earthly goods are useless and heavenly goods alone valuable, and in this kingdom of the religious idea the beggarly rags of the monk are more desired than the gold of the mighty. Religion and patriotism, honour and loyalty, ambition and love, reform ideals and political goals, aesthetic, intellectual, and moral ideas have turned ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... latter, Bishop Burnet tells us, that the Presbyterians, in the fanatic times, professed themselves to be above morality; which, as we find in some of their writings, was numbered among the "beggarly elements"; and accordingly at this day, no scruples of conscience with regard to conformity, are in any trade or calling, inconsistent with the greatest fraud, oppression, perjury, or any ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... that he would willingly have taken yet another bath in the Danube to wash them away. Frau Sophie only scolded Timar indirectly, as she abused her husband for giving such a ragged, dirty fellow, such a tipsy, beggarly ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... plate, and a number of unpaid bills, which Madam flatly refused to take upon herself, and defied the unhappy tradesmen to impose upon Rhoda. She did, however, keep the plate and jewels; and by way of a sop to Cerberus, allowed the "beggarly craftsmen," whom she so heartily despised, to sell and divide the proceeds ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... finished, but I should not do justice to my subject did I omit to advert to the beggarly catch-penny system on which the whole concern is conducted. The convicts raise pork and vegetables in plenty, but they must not eat thereof; these things must be sent to market to balance the debit side of the prison ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... describe, the careless desolation which pervaded the whole place; the shaggy unkempt grounds we passed through to approach the house; the ruinous, rackrent, tumble-down house itself, the untidy, slatternly all but beggarly appearance of the mistress of the mansion herself. The smallest Yankee farmer has a tidier estate, a tidier house, and a tidier wife than this member of the proud southern chivalry, who, however, inasmuch as he ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... prisoners to serve the king of Spain. The arguments he used to induce them were these. Increase of pay to treble their present allowance; advancement to the better sort; and the free exercise of the true catholic religion, ensuring the safety of all their souls. For the first of these, the beggarly and unnatural behaviour of those English and Irish rebels that served the king of Spain in that action was a sufficient answer; for so poor and ragged were they, that, for want of apparel, they stripped the poor prisoners their countrymen of their ragged garments, worn out ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... as fast as we could throw the hooks. Mr. Greedy looked very solemn, and at last, unable to repress his selfishness longer, shouted: "I think we better share all alike!" "Too late," was the chorus, and while he carried home but a beggarly string, the rest ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... pick-up-anything shop: it was a receptacle for a hideous collection of lumber, for old broken furniture, for garments past decent wear, for indescribable odds and ends, where the wreckage of human misery lay huddled cheek by jowl with the beggarly ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... go now, with all your prospects, your ability, the opportunity presented you, and engage yourself in this fatal cause, in this unholy attack upon the king's majesty, connect yourself with this beggarly rabble who have been whipped and beaten every time they have come in contact with the royal troops,—I cannot bear it. You are a man now. You have grown away from your mother, Hilary, and I can no longer command, I must entreat." But she spoke very proudly, for, ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... friendship and affection were Virginia and Massachusetts. If we were to blot from the history or geography of the Nation the deeds or territory of the ancient dominions of John Smith, President of Virginia and Admiral of New England, a beggarly record of area would be left, in spite of the glorious records of other sections in ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... such a beggarly-looking hand at the mill as that young Bennett?" asked Archie Fairfax of the great mill-owner ...
— Archie's Mistake • G. E. Wyatt
... pronounce you, in the face of the world, right well prepared for it; but I see now who is the spy of the diocese—oh, oh, thank you, Misther Molony—I now remimber, that he is related to his lordship through the beggarly clan of the M——'s. But wait a little; if I have failed here, thank Heaven I have interest in the next diocese, the Bishop of which is my cousin, and we will yet ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... him in this calling, had quickly fallen to his present level, where he retained nothing of his old self but his boastfulness and his bile, and seemed to have no existence separate or apart from his friend Tigg. And now so abject and so pitiful was he—at once so maudlin, insolent, beggarly, and proud—that even his friend and parasite, standing erect beside him, swelled into a ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... shoulders disdainfully. "It is not worthy a ransom, senorita. I beg you, if you will pardon my presumption in offering so beggarly a gift, to deign ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... best friend, and has been the uncompromising enemy of all beggarly red-shanked Scotch rebels and intriguing Romish Jesuits who would take our liberty from us, and our religion, by George. His Royal Highness, my gracious master, is not a scholar neither, but he is one of the finest gentlemen in ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and butchers!" he said, with a scornful laugh. "By the drunken Semele, to what is Rome coming, when a Caesar sits o' nights waiting a turn of fortune to bring him but a beggarly denarius!" ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... of human wishes! the poor woman's ambition was never to be gratified. Her nephew is plain Caspar—Caspar Diderich; he has no title, no wand of office, no big wig—he is just an artist! and Dame Catherine has running in her head the old proverb, "Beggarly as an artist," which distresses her ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... the weevil despises the haricot; a very curious dislike if we consider how industriously the other vegetables of the same family are attacked. All, even the beggarly lentil, are eagerly exploited; whilst the haricot, so tempting both as to size and flavour, remains untouched. It is incomprehensible. Why should the Bruchus, which without hesitation passes from the excellent to the indifferent, and from the indifferent to the excellent, disdain ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... in bed, and listened with excitement and admiration. She descanted on Lord Uxmoor's courage and chivalry, and congratulated Zoe that such a pearl of manhood had fallen at her feet. "Why, child," said she, "surely, after this, you will not hesitate between this gentleman and a beggarly adventurer, who has nothing, not even the courage of a man. Turn your back on all such rubbish, and be the queen of the county. I'd be content to die to-morrow if I could ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... is about a mile and a half off, large, formerly rich, full of monks, and a fortress; also the scene of various miracles performed by St. Nilo, the founder and patron saint; now tenanted by a few beggarly friars, and part of it let to Prince Gagarin, the Russian Minister, as a villa. Domenichino sought and found an asylum there in consequence of some crime he had committed or debt he had incurred; he stayed there two years, and in return for the hospitality ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Christ, whose second coming they suddenly expected. The Antinomians even insisted, that the obligations of morality and natural law were suspended, and that the elect, guided by an internal principle more perfect and divine, were superior to the beggarly elements of justice and humanity. A considerable party declaimed against tithes and a hireling priesthood, and were resolved that the magistrate should not support by power or revenue any ecclesiastical establishment. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... ourselves not only above the opinions of men but above their modes of thinking, is a great height of philosophy. This dearly obtained freedom, however, we are not disposed to part with, or to allow him to build up in a new form the 'beggarly elements' of scholastic logic which he has thrown down. So far as they are aids to reflection and expression, forms of thought are useful, but no further:—we may easily have too ...
— Sophist • Plato
... little round-headed man, who seemed to have his wits about him, "I know very well that these are not your boots. I cleaned your grace's boots, and placed them at your door at four o'clock. It is some beggarly Welschers who have crept up stairs and exchanged for them, unawares, their old ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... remained as heretofore in their father's lonely house in Clare; but whether he had crossed the water or was still in Ireland was for some time unknown, even to them. In due course he was attainted, and his little estate forfeited. It was a miserable catastrophe—a tremendous and beggarly waking up from a life-long dream ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 2 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu |
