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More "Wantonness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... churches, which must needs compel men to frequent them, though they be open to all without charge. Only when there is a matter of a murder, or a plot, or a pretty youth in petticoats, or some naughty tale of wantonness, will your subjects pay the great cost of good players and their finery, with a little profit to boot. To prove this I will tell you that I have written two noble and excellent plays setting forth the advancement of women of high nature and fruitful industry even ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... The wantonness of this generation was in a measure due to the ideal conditions under which mankind lived before the flood. They knew neither toil nor care, and as a consequence of their extraordinary prosperity they grew insolent. In their arrogance they rose up against God. A single ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... "good one." I have no slaves, and I owe this character to the propagation of a good name by the slaves of Zanzibar, who are anything but good themselves. I have seen slaves belonging to the seven men now with us slap the cheeks of grown men who had offered food for sale; it was done in sheer wantonness, till I threatened to thrash them if I saw it again; but out of my sight they did it still, and when I complained to the masters they confessed that all the mischief was done by slaves; for the Manyuema, on being insulted, lose temper and use their spears ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... them will tell me what he or she has been thinking relative to the motto. Most of the work in the country is of such a kind that, in doing it, the people are liable to think all sorts of things, and they get a lot of bad notions in their heads, which afterwards break out in the form of wantonness, lies, and deception. But when a man has such a motto to ponder over, he will not rest until he has extracted the moral from it, and meanwhile the time has elapsed without any evil thoughts having ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... tyranny and oppression, and thou avouches that I have done ill by one who did well by me. Who is this who hath guarded my honour while I garred his become dishonour? Who protected my Harim and whose Harim I wrecked?" "He is Ghanim son of Ayyub," replied she, "for he never approached me in wantonness or with lewd intent, I swear by thy munificence, O Commander of the Faithful!" Then said the Caliph, "There is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah! Ask what thou wilt of me, O Kut al-Kulub." "O Prince of the Faithful!", answered she, "I require ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... requisite strength being given to the motives that are to drive the driver, there has never, or hardly ever, been an instance of a man stopping his engine through wantonness. But such a case might occur; yes, and it might occur that the engine should break down: but if the train is stopped from some trivial motive it will be found either that the strength of the necessary influences has been miscalculated, ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... gave me another, gentler picture of myself—a fight here, a failure there, a hunger somewhere else, and Lord knows how many old shreds of cynicism and belief, of selfishness and ambition and wantonness and pride, and just a little bit of love and desire for beauty. I told him that madness of mine, about the Mater's letters that I told you to take to King George. He was interested in that—said it was ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... this collision between Milton, young and unknown, and the venerable prelate, whom he was assaulting with the rude wantonness of untempered youth, deserves to be mentioned here. Usher had incautiously included the Ignatian epistles among his authorities. This laid the most learned man of the day at the mercy of an adversary of less reading than himself. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... The 'man between two women' became a regular feature of the new domestic tragedy. In play after play we find a soulful, clinging, romantic creature—usually the title-heroine—set over against a full-blooded rival whose ways are ways of wantonness. Lessing himself repeated the group in 'Emilia Galotti', which in its turn became the mother of a new brood. The tragedy of lawless passion led by an easy step to the tragedy of social conflict, which portrayed ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... and hatred of me Sprang from your delusion that it was wantonness Of spirit and contempt of your soul's rights Which made me turn to Annabelle and forsake you. You really grew to hate me for love of me, Because I was your soul's happiness, Formed and tempered To solve your life for you, and would not. But you were my misery. If you had been My happiness ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... Higglesby-Browne. You now heard the voice of Violet in exhortation, mingled with Aunt Jane's sobs. I seemed to see that an ear of Mr. Tubbs was cocked attentively in that direction, He had indeed erred in the very wantonness of triumph, for a single glance would have kept Aunt Jane loyal and prodigal of excuses for him in the face of any treachery. Not even Violet could have clapped the lid on the up-welling fount of sentiment in ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... of bisons are killed annually—myriads of them in pure wantonness—and yet enormous droves may be encountered today in many portions of the west, where it is hard for the experienced hunters to detect any ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... suffered all that cruelty and rapacity could devise—indeed, the house and gardens bore evidence to the facts—window shutters pierced with bullets, broken doors, furniture gone, and above 800 francs' worth of honey destroyed out of pure wantonness—in short the poor people seemed quite ruined. I received a similar account in the town. Fontainebleau is a dull, melancholy-looking place, with a very extensive ugly palace—interesting only from the late events. Scarcely a soul appeared about; we crossed the large court in which ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... those shall be standing round the fount of mercy who play in idleness and wantonness with its waters, and let them not flow widely, nor take their natural course. Dutiful gallants may encompass it, and it may linger among the flowers they throw into it, and never reach the parched lip on ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... upon his breast who taught "Reverence thyself!" We looked down on the unpolished wretches, their impertinent wives, and clouterly brats, as the lordly bull does on the little dirty ant-hill, whose puny inhabitants he crushes in the carelessness of his ramble, or tosses in the air in the wantonness of his pride. ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... death. Certainly, despite her cold composure, she must be filled with rage against him for killing the animal. He might now have exhibited his arm, to confound her with the evidence of his innocence of wantonness, and very probably she would have been instantly remorseful. But he had no such intention; he was keenly alive to his opportunity to show her that he was answerable to no one for his conduct. He enjoyed her chagrin; he was moved ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... poor fare which I have to offer you," he said. "The best of the herd ever goes to the young lords who are wooing my mistress. Their wantonness and riot calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance. They are worse than the wildest band of robbers that ever lived by open pillage and violence. Such waste of good meat and wine was never seen before. For ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... In wantonness a shepherd's boy Alarm'd the neighbor's with his cry; "The wolf! the wolf!" And when they came, Of their lost labor made his game. At last the wolf when there indeed, His real cries they did not heed; He and his flock a prey were made, And for ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... the deeds of Cornwallis and his officers in Carolina! And while the churches in England were, everywhere, resounding with prayers to Almighty God, "to spare the effusion of human blood," those monsters were shedding it with the most savage wantonness! While all the good people in Britain were praying, day and night, for a speedy restoration of the former happy friendship between England and America, those wretches were taking the surest steps to drive all friendship from the American ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... everywhere. Men out of employment, excited by club orators, were ready for any violence. At Lyons they destroyed the hospitals and orphan asylums, out of mere wantonness. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... danger. If, with a little too much self-confidence, I let myself be induced to assume a less haughty and reserved manner, if I associated a little more familiarly with the bold tribe, I soon repented, for I was carried along by their wantonness and folly, I could no longer subdue the laughter and extravagances, nor could I, to my own disgrace and sorrow, restrain myself in my wrath ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... recalled, gave testimony as to other buried bodies, chiefly of children slaughtered in wantonness or jealousy, or ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... much suffice. And indeed not without reason do the multitudes of the servants of the Muse in this land of social policy avoid scenes of an inordinate wantonness, which detract from the dignity of our leaders and menace human nature with confusion. Sagacious are they who conduct the individual on broad lines, over familiar tracks, under well-known characteristics. What men will do, and amorously minded men will do, is less the question than ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... establishing economic equality. Just so in your day might the duty of the state to safeguard the lives of citizens from physical violence have been discharged after a nominal fashion if it had contented itself with preventing outright murders, while leaving the people to suffer from one another's wantonness all manner of violence not directly deadly; but tell me, Julian, were governments in your day content with so construing the limit of their duty to protect citizens from violence, or would the citizens have been content ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... on which an exasperated enemy could wreak his fury; that they had fire and sword at their command, and it was better that friendly and faithful hands should destroy what must necessarily perish, than that enemies should insult it with haughty wantonness. To these exhortations a dreadful execration was added against any one who should be diverted from this purpose by hope or faint-heartedness. Then throwing open the gates, they rushed out at a rapid pace and with the utmost impetuosity. Nor was there any guard sufficiently strong ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... carefully he drives carelessly against a carriage, you are liable for all damages resulting from the collision; and if the servant acts wantonly or mischievously, causing thereby additional bodily or mental injury, such wantonness or mischief will enhance ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... after some grim tiger-like creeping on his belly, he springs at last, with huge long spangs, on the woolly people, with bull-like growlings quailing their poor harmless hearts, and then fast throttling them, one after another—till, as it might seem rather in wantonness of rage than in empty pangs, he lies down at last in the midst of all the murdered carcasses, licking the blood off his flews and paws—and then, looking and listening round with his red turbid eyes, and sharp-pointed ears savagely erect, conscious of crime and fearful ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... above us the curtain of the rain exclude the view. The sky was clear, the sun strong overhead; around us, a thin growth of bushes and creepers glittered green in their black setting, like plants upon a ruinous pavement; all else was lava—wastes of lava, some of them enclosed (it seemed in wantonness) with dry-stone walls. But the bushes, when the rain descends often enough from its residential altitudes, flourish extremely; and cattle and asses, walking on these resonant slabs, collect a livelihood. Here and there, a prickly-pear came to the bigness of a standard tree and made ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... country its ancient laws, traditions, and privileges. Permit no longer, to your shame and ours, a band of Spanish landloupers and other foreigners, together with three or four self-seeking enemies of their own land, to keep their feet upon our necks. Let them no longer, in the very wantonness of tyranny, drive us about like a herd of cattle—like a gang ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Asgrim. "I think so all the more because these men fare with laughter and wantonness; but such kinsmen of Njal as Thorgeir is would not smile before some vengeance is taken for the burning, and I will make another guess, and maybe ye will think that unlikely. My meaning is that it must be Flosi and the burners with him, and they must mean to humble us with insults, ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... Avon have a dwelling place, Where I may see my quil or cork down sink, With eager bit of Pearch, or Bleak, or Dace; And on the world and my Creator think, Whilst some men strive, ill gotten goods t'imbrace; And others spend their time in base excess Of wine or worse, in war and wantonness. ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... her woman's instinct that he was at heart lonely and uncompanioned. Well, what wonder with that hard, mean little being for a wife! Had she captured him, or had he thrown himself away upon her in mere wantonness, out of that defiance of sentiment which appeared to be his favourite parti-pris? In any case, it seemed to this happy wife that he had done the one fatal and irreparable thing; and she was genuinely sorry for him. She felt him very young, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Opening to right and left, the well-trained troops Leave a large void for their retreating foes. Away they fly, on wings of fear upborne, To seek on distant hills their late abodes. Ye proud oppressors, whose vain hearts exult In wantonness of power, 'gainst the brute race, 520 Fierce robbers like yourselves, a guiltless war Wage uncontrolled: here quench your thirst of blood: But learn from Aurengzebe to ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... did they break to me what they had learned of the fate of Leatherhead. Two days after I was imprisoned it had been destroyed, with every soul in it, by a Martian. He had swept it out of existence, as it seemed, without any provocation, as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness of power. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... had sides by which it so resembled New York, Paris was like smart, neat prose—and her close correspondence with Madame Merle did much to stimulate such flights. She had never had a keener sense of freedom, of the absolute boldness and wantonness of liberty, than when she turned away from the platform at the Euston Station on one of the last days of November, after the departure of the train that was to convey poor Lily, her husband and her children to their ship at Liverpool. It had been good for her to regale; she was very conscious of ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... door and he alighted. How handsome he was, and how magnificent to look upon! How noble and proud his tall figure! How regularly beautiful his fresh, youthful face! How saucy the haughty smile about his mouth; and how his eyes flamed and flashed and shone in wantonness and youthful happiness. His look glanced for a moment at Elizabeth's window. He saluted her, and then entered the door leading to the wing of the palace of Whitehall occupied by the queen. Elizabeth's heart beat so violently that she felt almost suffocated. Now he must have reached the great ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... many of the old patriarchs traveling on donkeys, shows that the influence of Christians will be thrown against you in your selfish wantonness, causing you to ponder over the rights and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... consented to mask myself in the motley and assume the name of Boccadoro. I counted on the Lord Giovanni's generosity to let things continue thus, and, meanwhile, I provided for my mother out of the vails that were earned me by my shame. But there came a day when Giovanni in evil wantonness of spirit chose to make merry ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... arrived, he asked her how matters stood. The woman, seeing that he was so handsome, youthful, and well-bred, and was withal so loving and yet so little loved, took pity upon him and told him of his mistress's wantonness, thinking that on hearing this he would be cured of loving her so much. She related to him that the Bishop of Sees had but just arrived, and was now in bed with the lady, a thing which the latter had not expected, for he was not to have come until ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... as a feather, and he snapped his fingers in the very wantonness of joy as he repaired to Delmonico's, and ordered the first good French dinner that had gladdened his palate since ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... destroy us. They kill us because our feathers are beautiful. Even pretty and sweet girls, who we should think would be our best friends, kill our brothers and children so that they may wear plumage on their hats. Sometimes people kill us from mere wantonness. Cruel boys destroy our nests and steal our eggs and our young ones. People with guns and snares lie in wait to kill us, as if the place for a bird were not in the sky, alive, but in a shop window or under a glass case. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... a religion which Montaigne wanted, and which defends him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain spoken, his moral sentiment is ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... become known to him, and she said: "Be it not that I see the king angry." He said: "How should I not be angry? Thou, by craft, and trickery, and intrigue, and plotting, hast brought thy desire from Rome—what wantonness is this that thou hast done?" Then he thought to slay her, but he forbore, because of his great love for her. But he ordered the chamberlain to carry the youth to some obscure place, and straightway ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... comrade win. In fullness of young life he climbed the cliffs Where human foot had never trod before. He led the chase, but when soft-eyed gazelles Or bounding deer, or any harmless thing, Came in the range of his unerring dart, He let them pass; for why, thought he, should men In wantonness make ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... features of her character. If she was without love she was without hate. She cherished no petty resentments; she never stooped to envy or suspicion of the men who served her. She was indifferent to abuse. Her good humour was never ruffled by the charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the Jesuits filled every Court in Europe. She was insensible to fear. Her life became at last a mark for assassin after assassin, but the thought of peril was the thought hardest to bring home to her. Even when Catholic plots broke out in her very ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... free and unshackled in her loose draperies, quite unabashed in her state of semi-nudity—gay, reckless, wooing pleasure on the wing, surely she might have posed as the embodied archetype of France itself. So has this pagan among modern nations borrowed something of the antique spirit of wantonness. Along with its theft of the Attic charm and grace, it has captured, also, something of its sublime indifference; in the very teeth of the dull modern world, France has laughed ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... and the room smelt too cloyingly of be-drugging sweetness. Then on the walls were tapestries which depicted Merlin's Dream, so that everywhere recoiling women smiled with bold eyes; and here their wantonness ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the sick woman. "She is within you; she fills your head; from here I can see her. Once a thousand mad fancies occupied her place,—illusions of your taste, naked women, a wantonness that was your religion. Now it is she who fills it. It is your desire incarnated. Go on and be happy. I am going away—there is no place ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... observation, for 'although these people are kindly towards each other and their children, they have no sympathy for the suffering of animals, and little sympathy for pain when the person who feels it is not in danger.' I had thought it was in the wantonness of fancy Martin Dhoul accused the smith of plucking his living ducks, but a few lines further on, in this book where moral indignation is unknown, I read, 'Sometimes when I go into a cottage, I find all the women of the place down on their knees ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... paler, and less active and robust; a pettish, cowardly, capricious, selfish little fellow, only active in doing mischief, and only clever in inventing falsehoods: not simply to hide his faults, but, in mere malicious wantonness, to bring odium upon others. In fact, Master Charles was a very great nuisance to me: it was a trial of patience to live with him peaceably; to watch over him was worse; and to teach him, or pretend to teach ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... of this change of colour; and she had again, with it, her apparent way of subjecting herself, for explicit honesty and through her willingness to face him, to any view he might take, all at his ease, and even to wantonness, of the condition he produced in her. As soon as he perceived that emotion kept her soundless he knew himself deeply touched, since it proved that, little as she professed, she had been beautifully hoping. They stood there a minute while he took in from this sign that, yes then, certainly ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... officially reached the States-General until the 31st of March, so that this most dangerous crisis was protracted nearly five months long—certainly without necessity or excuse—and whether through design, malice, wantonness, or incomprehensible carelessness, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... thought of the measure with which I had meted to Catriona that same night; how I had prated of the two lives I carried, and had thus forced her to enjeopardy her father's; and how I was here exposing them again, it seemed in wantonness. A good conscience is eight parts of courage. No sooner had I lost conceit of my behaviour, than I seemed to stand disarmed amidst a throng of terrors. Of a sudden I sat up. How if I went now to Prestongrange, caught him (as I still easily might) before he slept, and made a full submission? Who ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... other people had been suffering in all the various quarters of France for many years—yes, decades of years. For the first time we saw wrecked and smoke-blackened homes, and in the lanes and alleys carcasses of dumb creatures that had been slaughtered in pure wantonness—among them calves and lambs that had been pets of the children; and it was pity to see the children ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... public good. If it be said that this scheme is chimerical and impracticable on ordinary occasions, and to the generality of mankind, well and good; but those who accuse the author of having trampled on the common feelings and prejudices of mankind in wantonness or insult, or without wishing to substitute something better (and only unattainable, because it is better) in their stead, accuse him wrongfully. We may not be able to launch the bark of our affections on the ocean-tide of humanity, we may be ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... o'er her sleeping innocence exhaled Voiceless thanksgiving. Children ceased to play, Feeling an awe they comprehended not, And stood, unconscious of their beauty's pose, As those Murillo's pencil glorifies. Upon the airy esplanade the steed No longer pawed the air in wantonness, But, like his compeer of the fabled song, Stood statued with his rider, while below The beggar ceased his cry importunate, And to a Higher Almoner than man Sent up a dumb appeal. In folly's court The laugh was hushed, and the half-uttered jest Fell witless into air, and burning ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... were alternately very enviable and very helpless. It was not the first time he had had a sense of Roderick's standing helpless in the grasp of his temperament. It had shaken him, as yet, but with a half good-humored wantonness; but, henceforth, possibly, it meant to handle him more roughly. These were not times, therefore, for a friend to ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... step, taken in the mere wantonness of tyranny, and in criminal ignorance or more criminal contempt of public feeling, England owes her freedom. The first performance of the foreign ceremonies produced a riot. The riot rapidly became ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... bear in mind, in order to do justice to Rabelais and Sterne, that by right of humoristic universality each part is essentially a whole in itself. Hence the digressive spirit is not mere wantonness, but in fact the very form and vehicle of their genius. The connection, such as was needed, is given by ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... whilst he suggests, "a careful abridgment of the tale of Omar the Son of No'man" (ii. 7,, etc.). Let me add that wittiest and most rollicking of Rabelaisian skits, "All the Persian and the Kurd Sharper" (iv. 149), struck-out in the very wantonness of "respectability;" and the classical series, an Arabian "Pilpay," entitled "King Jali'ad of Hind and his Wazir Shimas" (iv. 32). Nor must I omit to notice the failure most injurious to the work which destroyed in it half the "spirit of the East." Mr. Lane had no ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... world has heard more of the natural beauties of Naples than of the artificial ones of Venice, but when Naples is made the scene of a drama of any kind it seems that its attractions for librettist and composer lie in the vulgarity and vice, libertinism and lust, the wickedness and wantonness, of a portion of its people rather than in the loveliness of character which such a place might or ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... along a little distance ahead of us, the young dogs would gambol about him, leap on his neck, worry at his ears, and endeavor to tease him into a frolic. The old dog would keep on for a long time with imperturbable solemnity, now and then seeming to rebuke the wantonness of his young companions.... ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... proportion of the men lived in holes in the ground, in the utmost wretchedness. Some froze to death, others had their hands and feet frozen. The rebel guards would occasionally, and on the least pretence, fire into the prison from mere demonism and wantonness. All the horrors that can be named, starvation, lassitude, filth, vermin, despair, swift loss of self-respect, idiocy, insanity, and frequent murder, were there. Stansbury has a wife and child living in Newbern—has written to them from here—is in the U. S. light-house employ still—(had ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... saw them running along the shore as fast as their legs would carry them. My boys exerted their arms in a like manner. The Frenchmen, although they saw that we were beyond their reach, fired a shot at us. Another and another followed. It was done in mere wantonness, for they could not have known who we were. We were much too distant from them, however, for the shot to reach us. Heavily laden as was our boat, the boys urged her on fast, and in a short time we were alongside the schooner. Charley White, who had ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... fully exposed by another diametrically opposed theory propounded by Siun Tsz (Jun-shi) and his followers. 'Man is bad-natured,' says Siun Tsz, 'since he has inborn lust, appetite, and desire for wealth. As he has inborn lust and appetite, he is naturally given to intemperance and wantonness. As he has inborn desire for wealth, he is naturally inclined to quarrel and fight with others for the sake of gain.' Leave him without discipline or culture, he would not be a whit better than the beast. His virtuous acts, such as charity, honesty, propriety, chastity, truthfulness, ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... who write with a wink at you, which sets the wicked part of us on fire: I have known it myself, and I own it to my shame; and if I happened to be ignorant of the history of Countess Fanny, I could not refute his wantonness. He has just the same benevolent leer for a bishop. Give me, if we are to make a choice, the beggar's breech for decency, I say: I like it vastly in preference to a Nymney, who leads you up to the curtain and agitates it, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... been able to eradicate Jones from his bosom; but it was greatly injurious to him, and prepared Mr Allworthy's mind for those impressions which afterwards produced the mighty events that will be contained hereafter in this history; and to which, it must be confest, the unfortunate lad, by his own wantonness, wildness, and want of caution, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... be good friends." Then, having closed the door, holding Gabrielle with one hand and Rosny with the other, he said: "Good God, madame! What is the meaning of this? So you would vex me from sheer wantonness of heart in order to try my patience? By God, I swear to you that, if you continue these fashions of going on, you will find yourself very much out in your expectations! I see quite well that you have been put up to all this pleasantry in order to make me dismiss a servant whom I ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... such melodies, the praise of God dies upon their paled lips, and they cover their heads weeping. At times when the obligate goat's laugh bleated in among the melodious pangs, I caught a glimpse in the background of a crowd of small women-figures who nodded their odious heads with wicked wantonness. Then a rush of agonizing sounds came from the violin, and a fearful groan and a sob, such as was never heard upon earth before, nor will be perhaps heard upon earth again, unless in the valley of Jehoshaphat, when the colossal trumpets of doom shall ring out, and the naked corpses ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... isle, Which the fairies had built in the lonely sea, And the Surf Sprite's brow was bent with a smile, As we gazed through the mist on their revelry. The ripples that swept to the pebbly shore, O'er shells of purple in wantonness played, And the whispering zephyrs sweet odors bore, From roses that bloomed amid silence and shade. In winding grottos, with gems all bright, Soft music trembled from harps unseen, And fair forms glided on wings of light, 'Mid forests of fragrance, and valleys of green. There ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... follow the present prevailing fashion, I think they ought to give me a testimonial for the paper on Dinner-giving Snobs, which I am now writing. What do you say now to a handsome comfortable dinner-service of plate (NOT including plates, for I hold silver plates to be sheer wantonness, and would almost as soon think of silver teacups), a couple of neat teapots, a coffeepot, trays, &c., with a little inscription to my wife, Mrs. Snob; and a half-score of silver tankards for the little Snoblings, to glitter on ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the venerable compiler, "as, praised be God, we seldom meet in Scotland with these belly-gods and voluptuaries, whilk are unnatural enough to devour their patrimony bequeathed to them by their forbears in chambering and wantonness, so that they come, with the prodigal son, to the husks and the swine-trough; and as I have the less to dreid the existence of such unnatural Neroes in mine own family to devour the substance of their own house like brute ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... from such faults of taste, which few as they numerically are yet affect my liking and more repel my sympathy than do all the rude shocks of his purely artistic wantonness— apart from these there are definite faults of style which a reader must have courage to face, and must in some measure condone before he can discover the great beauties. For these blemishes in the poet's style are of such quality and magnitude as ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... which may be necessary or convenient for their several commands, for supplies, or for other Military purposes; and that while property may be destroyed for proper Military objects, none shall be destroyed in wantonness ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... He himself pressed a wicked, mischievous young blackguard, who was appointed the young gentleman's servant. Incredible as the fact may appear, my lord, he contrived, in a manner that Dr Thompson can best explain to you, to destroy all the clothes of his young master merely in the wantonness of his malice. I know that Mr Rattlin is well provided with money, and that he will take the first opportunity again to assume the garb of a gentleman; and I do assure your lordship that ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... filling the mind of Ralph Bastin, as he sat in his Editor's chair in the office of the "Courier." Allied to this thought there came another—an almost necessary corollary of the first—namely the new atmosphere of evil, of lawlessness, of wantonness that pervaded the city. ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... beautiful. So thinks everybody who has survived Puritanism unscathed, so thought the majority of Brineweald's visitors that year, so thought Mrs. Delarayne and her party of eager young swains and still more eager virgins. Wantonness was in the air,—wantonness and beauty; and when these two imps of passion come together August is ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... Tanna with muskets, attempted twice to shoot a man in sheer wantonness and display of malice. The Islanders met, and informed them that if man or woman was injured by them, the other men would load their muskets and shoot them dead in general council. This was a mighty step towards public order, and I greatly rejoiced before the Lord. His ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... great pilgrimage to Bubastis, during which the Egyptians forget their usual gravity, and the shores of the Nile look like a great stage where the wild games of the satyrs are being performed by choruses, hurried on in the unrestrained wantonness of intoxication. When she saw thus for the first time an entire people given up to the wildest and most unfettered mirth and enjoyment, she woke up from her silent brooding thoughts and began to weep again, as in the first days after ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... man!—but I must be careful, for Doctor Ormerod and Parson Dewhurst are within hearing, and may lecture me on the wantonness and profanity of swearing. By Saint Gregory de Northbury!—no, that's an oath too, and, what is worse, a Popish oath. By—I have several tremendous imprecations at my tongue's end, but they shall not out. It is a sinful propensity, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... determined to punish his son, and he therefore confined him, according to his usual mode of correction, in his own house. Astley was, however, but little disposed to remain passive in his imprisonment, and in the wantonness of his ever-active disposition amused himself by climbing up the chimney, and having at length reached the summit, endeavoured, by imitating the well-known tone of the chimney-sweeper, and calling out as ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... in one of the most noted of these cases, it was not without much delay and imminent hazard of war that the execution of the treaty was finally enforced. No one acquainted with these portions of our history, can hesitate to ascribe much of the wantonness and duration of the wrongs we endured, to a knowledge on the part of our assailants of the scantiness and inefficiency of ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... administration are alleged to be wilfully directed to the impoverishment, and even to the depopulation, of India; his social customs are traduced as depraved and corrupt; even his women-folk are accused of common wantonness. This systematized form of personal calumny is a scarcely less significant feature of the literature of Indian unrest than its appeals to the Hindu scriptures and to the Hindu deities and its exploitation ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Simonides), distinctly he will need them none the less. I know it is with certain human beings as with horses, some trick of the blood they have, some inborn tendency; the more their wants are satisfied, the more their wantonness will out. Well then, to sober and chastise wild spirits, there is nothing like the terror of your men-at-arms. (1) And as to gentler natures, (2) I do not know by what means you could bestow so many benefits upon them as by means ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... you one face, and you make yourselves another; you jig, you amble, you nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... Where I may see my quill, or cork, down sink With eager bite of Perch, or Bleak, or Dace; And on the world and my Creator think: Whilst some men strive ill-gotten goods t' embrace; And others spend their time in base excess Of wine. or worse. in war and wantonness ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... than the scientific fact of any kind; or again, on that yet more pregnant saying of Shelley, that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Gosson had denounced poetry as "the vizard of vanity, wantonness, and folly"; or, in Sidney's paraphrase, as "the mother of lies and the nurse of abuse". Sidney replies by urging that of all arts poetry is the most true and the most necessary ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... seen maternal fickleness and maternal constancy, maternal savagery; the end of mated bliss and its—renewal. She had seen the relentless catastrophes of storm. There had been starving winters and renewing springs, sad beautiful autumns, the riotous waste and wantonness of summer. These had all been objective experiences, but Joan's untamed and undistracted heart had taken them in deeply and deeply pondered upon them. There was no morality in their teachings, unless it was the morality of complete ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... by the Persians in wantonness, or in hatred of the Egyptian religion; and the priests now put upon it the name of Philip Arridaeus, for whom Ptolemy was ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... earth clave asunder, and forth from the chasm leaped a horse, such as never shall be seen again for strength and beauty. His body shone white all over as the driven snow, his mane streamed proudly in the wind as he stamped on the ground and scoured in very wantonness over hill and valley. "Behold my gift," said Poseidon, "and call the city after my name. Who shall give aught better than the horse to the sons ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... journey up to Chickaloosa, although still weak from his wounds and securely ironed besides, he made two separate efforts to assault his guards. In his cell, a few days later, he attacked a turnkey in pure wantonness seemingly, since even with the turnkey eliminated, there still was no earthly prospect for him to escape from the steel strong-box which enclosed him. That was what it truly was, too, a strong-box, for the storing of many living pledges held ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... not so forbidden me. On the contrary, there had been occasions when she had even INVITED me to speak. Of course, this might have been done out of sheer wantonness, for I well knew—I had remarked it only too often—that, after listening to what I had to say, and angering me almost beyond endurance, she loved suddenly to torture me with some fresh outburst of contempt and aloofness! Yet she must have known that I could not live without ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... elements which still exist in Anglo-Saxon thought and feeling generally, the Puritanic aspect of life has never received embodiment in the English or American drama. On the English stage it is never permitted to hint at the tragic side of wantonness; vice must always be made seductive, even though a deus ex machina causes it to collapse at the end of the performance. As Mr. Bernard Shaw has said, the English theatrical method by no means ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... together." Then, having shut the door quite close, and holding Gabrielle with one hand and Rosny with the other, he said, "Good God! madame, what is the meaning of this? So you would vex me for sheer wantonness of heart in order to try my patience? By God, I swear to you that, if you continue these fashions of going on, you will find yourself very much out in your expectations. I see quite well that you have been put up to all this pleasantry in order to make me ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... despair, and throw the handle after the hatchet. Say to yourself, that, after all Lust is not the most unpardonable of faults, that it is one of two sins for which the human being pays cash, and which are consequently expiated in part at least before death. Say to yourself that wantonness and avarice refuse all credit and will not wait; and in fact, whoever unlawfully commits a fleshly act is almost always punished in his lifetime. For some there are bastards to provide for, sickly wives, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... increase of a baneful habit on which I scarce can bring my tongue to dwell. (The Stage darker; blind at back illuminated.) Oh, CONRAD, there are children—think of it!—so lost to every sense of decency that, in mere wantonness or brainless sloth, they obstinately suck forbidden thumbs! (CONRAD starts with irrepressible emotion.) Forgive me if I shock your innocence! (Sadly.) Such things exist—but soon shall cease to be, thanks to the measure ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... encyclopaedic range of topic by this most voluminous and most versatile of modern writers [may we not say of all English writers?] there is not one line that is base, or coarse, or frivolous; not a sentence that was framed in envy, malice, wantonness, or cruelty; not one piece that was written to win money, or popularity, or promotion; not a line composed for any selfish end or in any trivial mood. Think what we may of this enormous library of print, we know that every word ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... down on a low block of gneiss to rest themselves, and then and there did the King of Borva recite his grievances and rage against the English smacks. Was it not enough that they should in passing steal the sheep, but that they should also, in mere wantonness, stalk them as deer, wounding them with rifle-bullets, and leaving them to die among the rocks? Sheila said bravely that no one could tell that it was the English fishermen who did that. Why not the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... think, if we shall tempt them to pride, that may do something; and if we tempt them to wantonness, that may help. But, in my mind, if we could drive them into desperation, that would knock the nail on the head; for then we should have them, in the first place, question the truth of the love of the heart of their Prince towards them, and that will disgust him much. This, if it works ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... would he bring it of his own accord to be tried at Westminster? We who write, if we want the talents [talent], yet have the excuse that we do it for a poor subsistence; but what can be urged in their defence, who, not having the vocation of poverty to scribble, out of mere wantonness take pains to make themselves ridiculous? Horace was certainly in the right where he said, "That no man is satisfied with his own condition." A poet is not pleased, because he is not rich; and the rich are discontented because the poets will not admit them of their number.' BOSWELL. Boswell, it ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... before Colonel Belford's house singing obstreperous and unseemly songs at the top of his voice; he would even rattle the ferrule of his cane against the palings of the fence, or throw a stone at Madam Belford's cat in the wantonness of ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... attributable in part to the peculiarities of the volunteer service—such as the lack of care and knowledge on the part of the officers, and the disposition of the men to break down their horses by improper riding, and sometimes out of mere wantonness, for the purpose of getting rid of animals they do not like, for the chance of obtaining better. A measure has recently been adopted to remedy these evils, by putting into the infantry cavalry officers and men who show themselves ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... unscathed through this fierce fire of temptation. Well, for myself, I fear not woman and her wiles; I know naught of them, and naught do I wish to know; and I still hold that this Caesar was a fool. Had I stood where Caesar stood, to cool its wantonness that bale of rugs should have been rolled down the palace ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... had no idea, madame, that your frivolity went so far as continually to wound the laws, the customs, and the hallowed order of things. You do it—you do it, scorning every thing established with the random wantonness of a child that plays with fire, and does not know that the waves will flare up and consume it. Madame, I have come here to warn you once more, and for ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... barbarous appropriations of the most precious monuments of art, that the columns and domes of earlier Rome were regarded by all classes but as quarries, from which every man was free to gather the materials, whether for his castle or his cottage,—a wantonness of outrage far greater than the Goths', to whom a later age would fain have attributed all the disgrace, and which, more perhaps than even heavier offences, excited the classical indignation of Petrarch, and made him sympathise with Rienzi in his ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... from the sale of it. He is like a poor trembling little mouse caught and held in the paws of a cruel cat. Sometimes Fate relaxes her grip on him, and he breathes freer and dares to hope for a larger liberty: then she puts her paw on him again, and tosses him and plays with him in very wantonness. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... make a speech, when you all approve more than anything else of the fact that I have been keeping silence. And now it seems to me that the response you give to that remark ought to justify me in closing just here. I have not kept silence since the Presidential election from any party wantonness, or from any indifference to the anxiety that pervades the minds of men about the aspect of the political affairs of this country. I have kept silence for the reason that I supposed it was peculiarly proper that I should do so until the time came when, according to the custom of the country, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... fears, with deadly fear, lest her lover be untrue. Plutina had never a doubt as to the faith of the absent one. A natural jealousy sometimes leaped in her bosom, at thought of him exposed to the wiles of women whom she suspected of all wantonness. But she had no cowardly thought that the fairest and most cunning of them could oust her from the shrine of Zeke's heart. Her great grief lay in the failure of any word from the traveler. The days became weeks; almost a month had gone since he held her in his arms, and still no message ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... wreck, and some priceless china vases and bowls that had been the glory of the drawing-room were lying on the floor, shivered to atoms. But a little closer inspection revealed that while an immense amount of damage had been done—much of it through pure wantonness and lust for destruction—the building itself was practically intact, the roof was still weatherproof, and some of the rooms were in quite inhabitable condition; while there were many articles of furniture and dress, as well as ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... be not frugal he will find it hard to continue to be honest. Some day when the butcher is knocking at the door he may be tempted, he may be obliged to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. If the obligation shall have arisen through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commended, for words cannot describe how far more necessary it is that a man should support his family than that he should attain to—or preserve—distinction ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... that his favours in jewelry given in sheer wantonness of pride to rich guests would be worth twenty-five thousand dollars. His plan was ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... conducted between the rows of name-boards, where we saw, in cells, many persons of each sex amusing themselves in such a manner) that it seemed to me that every one of them must have been drinking satyrion. (On catching sight of us, they attempted to seduce us with paederastic wantonness, and one wretch, with his clothes girded up, assaulted Ascyltos, and, having thrown him down upon a couch, attempted to gore him from above. I succored the sufferer immediately, however,) and having joined forces, we ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... practical in her material life as she had been light and audacious in her sentimental experiences. The story circulated of her infidelity to Steno with Werekiew at St. Petersburg, where the diplomatist was stationed, after one year of marriage, was confirmed by the wantonness of her conduct, of which she gave evidence as ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... with game, and it was killed from mere wantonness, such was their improvidence, that they were obliged to resort to their salt pork and other provisions; and as, in thirty days, forty large casks of whisky were consumed, it is easy to suppose, which was indeed the fact, that every night that they halted, the camp was a scene of drunkenness ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... in which it cherishes an inordinate pride, shut out the few rays of sunlight which penetrate its dusky atmosphere. They have not the excuse of narrow space which their rivals in New York may plead. They are built in mere wantonness, for within the City Limits, whose distance from the centre is the best proof of Chicago's hopefulness, are many miles of waste ground, covered only with broken fences and battered shanties. And, as they raise their heads through the murky ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... restoration, surely the "restoration" of this venerable ruin is the most grotesque and lamentable of all. The municipality of Caen have lately made themselves a spectacle to mankind by pulling down, seemingly out of sheer wantonness, one half of one of the most curious churches of their city.[10] We commend them not; but we do not place even them on a level with the subtler destroyers of Falaise. The savages of Caen are satisfied with simple, open destruction; what they cannot understand or appreciate they make away with. ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... of annexation characteristic of flirts, while all the time she was engaged to Victor Braithwaite. And having made mischief like this, she had run away. It was like a child who, having from sheer wantonness set fire to something, runs to a safe ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... nothing but what this confident creature Betty throws out in the wantonness of office. Now it is, Why, Miss, don't you look up your things? You'll be called upon, depend upon it, before you are aware. Another time she intimates darkly, and in broken sentences, (as if on purpose to tease me,) what one says, what another; with their inquiries how I dispose ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... because the sacrificing of these animals represented purity of heart. Because as the gloss says on Lev. 1, "We offer a calf, when we overcome the pride of the flesh; a lamb, when we restrain our unreasonable motions; a goat, when we conquer wantonness; a turtledove, when we keep chaste; unleavened bread, when we feast on the unleavened bread of sincerity." And it is evident that the dove denotes charity ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... shrouds, in the curtsy of the long sprit that caught the ridges of foam and lifted them in spray, even in the free streaming of that loose untidy end of line which played in the air from the leach, as young things play from wantonness, in the rush of the water, just up to and sometimes through the lee scuppers, and in the humming tautness of the sheet, in everything about me there was exuberance and joy. The sun upon the twenty million faces of the waves made, music rather than laughter, and the energy which ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... they had nothing now to think of but some safe retreat where they might give themselves up to all the pleasures that luxury and wantonness could bestow; and for the present pitched upon a place called the Devil's Islands in the river of Surinam, on the coast of Caiana, where they arrived, and found the civilest reception imaginable, not only from the governor and factory, but their wives, who exchanged wares, ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... who never gave any better reason for it, than that it was their fancy to support the idle complaint of one rival actress against another, in their several pretentious to the chief part in a new tragedy. But as this tumult seem'd only to be the Wantonness of English Liberty, I shall not presume to lay ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... day falling in love with Katys, but marrying Isabels, and Isabels the same, mutatis mutandis. We submit to it because there is no alternative; and we believe that good shall finally be wrought and wrested from evil. Don't, for heaven's sake, let us in mere wantonness introduce into our novel-world the work of our own hand, an abridged edition, a daguerreotype copy of the world without, of which we know so little and so much. I always do and always shall read the last page of a novel first; and if I perceive there any indications that matters are not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of blossoms, birds, and bowers, Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers; I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bride-grooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes. I write of Youth, of Love;—and have access By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness; I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece, Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris. I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write How roses first came red, and lilies white. I write of groves, of twilights, and ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... 'heaping fire upon an enemy's head,' and forgiving me too readily to permit me to forgive myself. The part applied to you is pert, and petulant, and shallow enough; but, although I have long done every thing in my power to suppress the circulation of the whole thing, I shall always regret the wantonness or generality of many of its attacks. If Coleridge writes his promised tragedy, Drury Lane will be set up." Though harassed with pecuniary difficulties of all kinds, Byron contrived to help Coleridge, who he had heard ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... took an opportunity again and again of pressing her not unwilling hand. And still at every pressure he caught that soft momentary glance, was it of love and passion, or of mere coquetry and girlish wantonness, succeeded by the fleeting blush pervading face, neck, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... the companionship they had so long held with the pleasant drawing-room, and the tasteful arrangements among which Fleda was so much at home; the easy chairs in whose comfortable arms she had had so many an hour of nice reading; the soft rug, where, in the very wantonness of frolic, she had stretched herself to play with King; that very luxurious bright grateful of fire, which had given her so often the same warm welcome home an apt introduction to the other stores of comfort which awaited her above and below stairs; the rich-coloured curtains and carpet, ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of her, the gracious charm, the quick sympathy, went through him, pierced him. He caught his breath as though he listened for the beloved sound of her voice. She had not been really angry with him for the wantonness of those stones. She had been very ready with her forgiveness, her kindly offer of friendship. She had never been other than kind to him ever since. She had awakened in him the deepest, most humble gratitude and devotion. She had even once or twice ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... government was thus tempered by Lycurgus, yet soon after it degenerated into an oligarchy, whose power was exercised with such wantonness and violence, that it wanted indeed a bridle, as Plato expresses it. This curb they found in the authority of the Ephori, about a hundred and thirty years after Lycurgus. Elatus was the first invested with this dignity, in the reign of Theopompus; who, when his wife upbraided him, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... Then some of the gentlemen remembered to have heard of cases when dogs addicted to sheep- killing had destroyed whole flocks, as if in sheer wantonness, scarcely deigning to taste a morsel of each ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... have been three such instances. The first was in 1827. Some men got an old ship—the Michigan—which had been used on lake Erie, and had been pronounced unseaworthy. For mere wantonness they put aboard a bear, a fox, a buffalo, a dog and some geese and sent it over the cataract. The bear jumped from the vessel before it reached the rapids, swam toward the shore, and was rescued by some humane persons. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... been against them, than could have happened in the case of a people who had neither their adhesion to a separate religion founded on historic memories, nor their characteristic family affectionateness. Tortured, flogged, spit upon, the corpus vile on which rage or wantonness vented themselves with impunity, their name flung at them as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred, and contempt, they have remained proud of their origin. Does any one call this an evil pride? Perhaps he belongs to that order of man who, while he has a democratic dislike to dukes ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... beauty. Seems he not The god of this fair scene? Those waves claim such a master as that boy; And these green slopes have waited till his feet Should wander them, to prove they were not spread In wantonness. What were this flower's prayer Had it a voice? The place behind his ear Would brim its cup with bliss and overbrim; Oh, to be worn and fade beside his cheek!'— 'In love and happy, Delphis; and the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... the corruption of their own hearts, mistake for wantonness that which is nothing more than the thoughtlessness ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Thomas Becket's life—whose names are Herbert Boseham, John Salisbury, William of Canterbury, Alen of Tewkesbury, Benet of Peterborough, Stephen Langton, and Richard Croyland—he bestoyed his youth in all kinds of lascivious lightness, and lecherous wantonness. After certain robberies, rapes, and murders, committed in the king's wars at the siege of Toulouse in Languedoc, and in other places else, as he was come home again into England, he gave himself to great study, not of the holy ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... who did not well avised it view Would surely deem it to be ivy true; Low his lascivious arms adown did creep That themselves dipping in the silver dew Their fleecy flowers they tenderly did steep, Which drops of crystal seemed for wantonness ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... horse was staggering, swaying—then down he crashed, Hobbs swinging clear barely in time to escape being pinioned to the ground. A stream of blood was pouring from the side of the poor beast. Aghast at this unheard of wantonness, the little interpreter knew not which way to turn, but stood there dazed until a third shot brought him to his senses. The bullet kicked up the dust near his feet. He scrambled for the heavy underbrush at the roadside and darted off into the forest, his revolver in his hand, ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... fleshy part. Nor was this all; he oft became the butt Of journeymen or 'prentice, who would glut Their hardened hearts by showing greatest spite 'Gainst him for following what he thought was right. Often that wicked youth, in wantonness, Would try all means to give him sore distress. And once, with all a dreadful demon's rage— In such acts none but demons would engage— He threw him down, and held him; then applied A lighted candle to his throat and tried To make him think it merely was a joke! Which was as ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... moral philosopher; there is no longer any estrangement between Ethics and Medical Practice. Medicine, sent from Heaven to be an angel of mercy to man, is now ever faithful to its beneficent mission; it never more performs the task of a destroying spirit, as—not in wantonness, but in ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... salutation of the gambler, the outcast, the reprobate,—then, then I swore that you should be mine, if I tore you from the sanctuary. Speak now, Jovita: if it was coquetry, speak now; I forgive you: if it was sheer wantonness, speak now; I shall spare you: ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... of shooting his companion. The natives assembled, and came to a resolution to avenge the murder, and literally stoned Thompson to death, and his skull was brought on board the Pandora. This horrible wretch had some time before slain a man and a child through mere wantonness, but escaped punishment by a mistake that had nearly proved fatal to young Heywood. It seems that the description of a person in Otaheite is usually given by some distinguishing figure of the tattoo, and Heywood, having the same ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... Rue Saint-Fiacre after the play to write his article. It was a piece of savage and bitter criticism, written in pure wantonness; he was amusing himself by trying his power. The melodrama, as a matter of fact, was a better piece than the Alcalde; but Lucien wished to see whether he could damn a good play and send everybody to see a bad one, as his ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... reasonable curiosity. Imagine what would be felt if a child were subjected to such a fate, or what could be answered if the present victims could tell their agonies as well as feel them! Byron speaks of the barbarians who, in the wantonness of power, were 'butchered to make a Roman holiday;' and verily the horrors exhibited in our public gardens and menageries are something akin to the fights of gladiators; it is the infliction of misery for mere sport. With reference also to lions, tigers, and other ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... in the dawn, were thickly carpeted with dead. The mob kicked and befouled the bodies, and the bravos in sheer wantonness spiked them with their swords. There were women there, and children, lying twisted on the causeway. Once a fugitive darted out of an entry, to be brought down by a ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... fitness of time and scene, and object to be snared. And now, before launching into my subject, one word in season. Observe as a golden rule—never to be broken—this: Do not snare, shoot, nor kill any more birds or animals than you absolutely want—in fine, do not kill for killing's sake, or snare in wantonness. Let all you do have reference to some object to be attained, either to procure specimens wanted for a collection, or, in cases of necessity, for food. Bear this in mind, for, without sympathy with creatures fashioned in ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... now am calm. I will live on; and though these simple folk Who call me sister understand me not, It matters little. There is one who does; And he shall have no liberty of love By any word of mine. 'Tis woman's lot, And man's most weak and wicked wantonness. Mine is like other husbands, I ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... improvidence or malice, and abandoned by man, or occupied only by a nomade or thinly scattered population, the task of the pioneer settler is of a very different character. He is to become a co-worker with nature in the reconstruction of the damaged fabric which the negligence or the wantonness of former lodgers has rendered untenantable. He must aid her in reclothing the mountain slopes with forests and vegetable mould, thereby restoring the fountains which she provided to water them; in checking the devastating fury of torrents, and bringing back the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... in this town, a Mosaic pavement discovered only a few years since, wonderfully beautiful indeed, and near ten feet square, though not quite perfect, being broken in the night by some malicious people, out of mere wantonness, soon after it ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... otherwise, seizing the coaches they met in the streets, and driving on in them. Others appropriated the eatables which hucksters carried about in baskets. But in all this wild tumult, nobody was killed; and only at Oranienbaum a few Holstein soldiers got wounded by some low Russians, in their wantonness. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... After we went west even the death penalty for wantonness was enforced, though at the time we did not ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... possession of it; would he bring it of his own accord, to be tried at Westminster? We who write, if we want the talent, yet have the excuse that we do it for a poor subsistence; but what can be urged in their defence, who, not having the vocation of poverty to scribble, out of mere wantonness take pains to make themselves ridiculous? Horace was certainly in the right, where he said, "That no man is satisfied with his own condition." A poet is not pleased, because he is not rich; and the rich are discontented, because the poets will not admit them of their number. Thus the case is hard ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of Murder he was thrust from the full tide of this world's interest, from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death. And he did not quail. Not alone for the one short moment in which, stunned and dazed, he could give up life, hardly ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... the word melee. In pursuit it was possible to plunge into the midst of the fugitives, but in combat every one had too much need for the next man, for his neighbor, who was guarding his flanks and his back, to let himself be killed out of sheer wantonness by a sure blow from within the ranks ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... is always an age of frivolity, of heartless levity, of dwarfish objects and pursuits, of dreadful contrasts—laughter amid mourning, rioting and wantonness amid judgments and executions; dancing and music at the hour of death. Such was the frivolity of the days of Nero; such was the mirth of the "death-dance" in the days of Robespierre. Nothing like this sickly and appalling ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... propagation of a good name by the slaves of Zanzibar, who are anything but good themselves. I have seen slaves belonging to the seven men now with us slap the cheeks of grown men who had offered food for sale; it was done in sheer wantonness, till I threatened to thrash them if I saw it again; but out of my sight they did it still, and when I complained to the masters they confessed that all the mischief was done by slaves; for the Manyuema, on ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... gleaming a brighter red beside their fellows. The tin box and its contents rattled under David's arm as he leapt and straddled across the bogs, choosing always the widest jump and the stiffest bit of climb, out of sheer wantonness of life and energy. Louie's thin figure, in its skimp cotton dress and red crossover, her long legs in their blue worsted stockings, seemed to fly over the moor, winged, as it were, by an ecstasy of freedom. If one ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The paling of the tastefully distributed garden was broken down in several places; the parterres and melon-beds were trampled and destroyed by the hoofs of the Carlist horses, which had seemingly been turned in there to feed, or perhaps been ridden through it in utter wantonness by their brutal owners. The ground in front of the house was strewed with broken furniture, and with articles of wearing apparel, the latter of which appeared to have belonged to the Carlists, and to have been exchanged by them for others of a better description found ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... woman. "She is within you; she fills your head; from here I can see her. Once a thousand mad fancies occupied her place,—illusions of your taste, naked women, a wantonness that was your religion. Now it is she who fills it. It is your desire incarnated. Go on and be happy. I am going away—there is no place for ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... by the earnestness in his voice. "You were at Doubler's cabin when I heard the shot—I met you on the trail. You killed that man, Blanca, over in Lazette, for nothing. You didn't need to kill him; you shot him in pure wantonness. But you killed Doubler for money. You would have killed my father had I not been there to prevent you. Perhaps you can't help killing people. You have my sympathy on that account, and I hope that in time you will do better—will reform. But ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... sustenance. Hetty was delighted with this proof of tenderness in an animal that has but a very indifferent reputation for the gentler feelings, and as a cub would quit its mother to frisk and leap about in wantonness, she felt a strong desire again to catch it up in her arms, and play with it. But admonished by the growl, she had self-command sufficient not to put this dangerous project in execution, and recollecting her errand among ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... think," said Bittridge, and suddenly, in the wantonness of his baffled effrontery, he raised his hand and rubbed the back of it ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wantonness this arrogance of royalty may lead me, I do not know: I will watch, and see. It is written: 'It is not good for man to be alone!' But good or no, the arrangement of One planet, One inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... to be inscribed upon glasses, I was honoured with the amorous professions of the gay Venustulus, a gentleman, who, being the only son of a wealthy family, had been educated in all the wantonness of expense, and softness of effeminacy. He was beautiful in his person, and easy in his address, and, therefore, soon gained upon my eye at an age when the sight is very little over-ruled by the understanding. He had not any power in himself of gladdening or amusing; but supplied his want of conversation ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... at once grotesque and lamentable, played by the mania for restoration, surely the "restoration" of this venerable ruin is the most grotesque and lamentable of all. The municipality of Caen have lately made themselves a spectacle to mankind by pulling down, seemingly out of sheer wantonness, one half of one of the most curious churches of their city.[10] We commend them not; but we do not place even them on a level with the subtler destroyers of Falaise. The savages of Caen are satisfied with simple, open ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... through her marriage with some deserving young nobleman. Truly she was worthy of being loved. She had "almond-shaped eyes, like the autumn waves, which, sparkling and dancing in the sun, seem to leap up in very joy and wantonness to kiss the fragrant reeds that grow upon the rivers' banks, yet of such limpid transparency that one's form could be seen in their liquid depths as if reflected in a mirror. These were surrounded by long silken lashes—now drooping in ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... priceless china vases and bowls that had been the glory of the drawing-room were lying on the floor, shivered to atoms. But a little closer inspection revealed that while an immense amount of damage had been done—much of it through pure wantonness and lust for destruction—the building itself was practically intact, the roof was still weatherproof, and some of the rooms were in quite inhabitable condition; while there were many articles of furniture and dress, ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... out his hoard or died under the infliction. Nothing was safe from the pursuit of Pindari lust or avarice; it was their common practice to burn and destroy what they could not carry away; and in the wantonness of barbarity to ravish and murder women and children under the eyes of their husbands and parents. The ordinary modes of torture inflicted by these miscreants were to apply red-hot irons to the soles of the feet; or to throw the victim on the ground ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... less popular, and are actually none the less readable. None, however, has pushed the foppery of style and intellect to such a point as Mr. Meredith. Not infrequently he writes page after page of English as ripe and sound and unaffected as heart could wish; and you can but impute to wantonness and recklessness the splendid impertinences that intrude elsewhere. To read him at the rate of two or three chapters a day is to have a sincere and hearty admiration for him and a devout anxiety to forget his defects and make much of his merits. But they are few who can take a novel on such terms ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... rest, when Mary Smith, living in her own fine house, the petted mistress of the wealthy Mr. Plowden, was unfaithful to him, it was not for love of fine clothes or fine society. It is not long since our whole country was shocked by the dire results of a similar abandonment to vanity and wantonness, about which the usual amount of commonplace and cant was uttered. It is time that the very truth was told about this matter, in sad earnestness and singleness of purpose. We hoped to find the whole truth in "Out of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... kind, has grown fierce; and his pale cheek has grown paler still. You have never loved him? and yet you have made him forget every duty and every tie. You have taken his heart from me, from his child, from his home, and you value it not. In wantonness you have taken his love and my happiness away—you have played with it and destroyed it. Oh, Ellen, God have mercy upon you, for you ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... true. You are not honest with me nor with yourself, and that is not like you. You know that no other man ever had, or could have, any favor from me, even the slightest. Wantonness is not among my thousand faults. It is not that which angers you. You are sure enough of me in that respect. In truth, I had almost come to believe you were too sure, that I had grown cheap in your eyes, and you did not care so much as I thought and hoped for what I had to give, for ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... so immediately pass away. Dr. Cooper determined to punish his son, and he therefore confined him, according to his usual mode of correction, in his own house. Astley was, however, but little disposed to remain passive in his imprisonment, and in the wantonness of his ever-active disposition amused himself by climbing up the chimney, and having at length reached the summit, endeavoured, by imitating the well-known tone of the chimney-sweeper, and calling out as lustily ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... movement and my own, in the dance of the boat and the noise of the shrouds, in the curtsy of the long sprit that caught the ridges of foam and lifted them in spray, even in the free streaming of that loose untidy end of line which played in the air from the leach, as young things play from wantonness, in the rush of the water, just up to and sometimes through the lee scuppers, and in the humming tautness of the sheet, in everything about me there was exuberance and joy. The sun upon the twenty million ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... he must be found!" As quickly as if carried by the winged thoughts they were in the great city, and from the walls the names of the deadly sins shone in flaming letters: pride, avarice, drunkenness, wantonness—in short, the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... humanity, we behold not the true and natural man, but a deformed and pitiable product, undone by the vices of those who have sought to improve on Nature by shaping his life to feed the vanity of a few and minister to their wantonness. In our plans for social betterment, let us hold in mind the healthy and unfettered man, and not the cripple that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the taint which is to be detected in nearly all French fiction. The mark of the beast is set on not a little of the work done by the strongest men in France. M. Meilhac is too clean and too clever ever to delve in indecency from mere wantonness: he has no liking for vice, but his virtue sits easily on him, and though he is sound on the main question, he looks upon the vagaries of others with a gentle eye. M. Halevy, it seems to me, is made of somewhat sterner stuff. He raises a warning voice now and then—in Fanny ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... ordered them to divert themselves with the prince, night and day, and to sing and dance before him, so as to draw his heart towards worldly enjoyments. But 'twas all of no avail, for none of those maidens could ever tempt the king's son to any wantonness, and he only abode the firmer in his chastity, leading a most holy life, after their manner thereof. And I assure you he was so staid a youth that he had never gone out of the palace, and thus ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... without oranges? Is it not the highest indignity to human nature, that men should be such poltroons as to suffer the kingdom and themselves to be undone, by the vanity, the folly, the pride, and wantonness of their wives,[93] who, under their present corruptions, seem to be a kind of animal, suffered, for our sins, to be sent into the world for the destruction of families, societies, and kingdoms; and whose whole study seems directed to be as expensive as ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... meridian as the wearied troops halted on the deep shadows of the Carse of Stirling. All around them was desolation; the sword and the fire had been there, not in open declared warfare, but under the darkness of midnight, and impelled by rapacity and wantonness; hence from the base of the rock, even to the foot of the Clackmannan Hills, all ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... thee counsel eighthly: that thou guard thee against evil, and eschew deceit. Entice no maiden, nor wife of man, nor to wantonness incite. ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... apparently, for the love of annexation characteristic of flirts, while all the time she was engaged to Victor Braithwaite. And having made mischief like this, she had run away. It was like a child who, having from sheer wantonness set fire to something, runs to a safe distance ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... upon the unsinning earth, But not in vengeance. God hath yoked to guilt Her pale tormentor, misery. Hence, these shades Are still the abodes of gladness; the thick roof Of green and stirring branches is alive And musical with birds, that sing and sport In wantonness of spirit; while below The squirrel, with raised paws and form erect, Chirps merrily. Throngs of insects in the shade Try their thin wings and dance in the warm beam That waked them into life. Even the green trees Partake the deep contentment; as they bend To the soft winds, the sun ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... sanctions of law was peculiarly necessary. There were in it many individuals whom neither lenity could touch, nor rigour terrify; who, with all sense of social duty, appeared to have lost all value for life itself, and with the same wantonness exposed themselves to the darts of the savages, and to the severe punishments which, however reluctantly, every society must inflict when milder methods have been tried without success. Towards the latter end of February a criminal court was convened, in which ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... his countenance that the occurrence of the night before had become known to him, and she said: "Be it not that I see the king angry." He said: "How should I not be angry? Thou, by craft, and trickery, and intrigue, and plotting, hast brought thy desire from Rome—what wantonness is this that thou hast done?" Then he thought to slay her, but he forbore, because of his great love for her. But he ordered the chamberlain to carry the youth to some obscure place, and straightway sever his head from his body. When the poor mother saw this she well-nigh ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... a contemporary chronicler, unreasonably excited on the starch question, "from farther luxury and wantonness, and abuse of His blessings and good gifts, that the punishment of Jeroboam, which followed upon Solomon's fortunate reign and the gold-ships of Ophir may not ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the wise aforetime knew, infinitely poor in mind, but rich in irresponsibility, in vanity, in wantonness. Like a child in many ways, but with nothing ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... which Montaigne wanted, and which defends him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain spoken, his moral ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the Apaches, in the very wantonness of their skillful horsemanship, threw themselves from side to side upon the backs of their steeds, firing under the neck or belly with as much accuracy as if from the saddle. None of them were furnished with the regulation saddle; some had blankets, while ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... allegorical paintings, and the floors of jasper and alabaster. But as the irate crowd dashed onward through the great tenantless chambers they tore down the rich silk hangings and trod them underfoot, broke up the tiny gold-inlaid tables, and out of sheer wantonness hacked the ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... bands wound cord-wise round their heads, and girdles bound with gold and silver, and daggers in pouches across their body. And thus they rode on choice coursers to the place of tourney; and so spent and wasted their goods and vexed their bodies with scurrilous wantonness that the murmurs of the people sounded everywhere. But they neither feared God nor blushed at the ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... boasted that his favours in jewelry given in sheer wantonness of pride to rich guests would be worth twenty-five thousand dollars. His ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... York paper remarked that "it is well known that many of the most obstinate turn-outs among workingmen and many of the most violent and lawless proceedings have been excited for the purpose of destroying newly invented machinery." Such acts of wantonness, however, were few, even in those first tumultuous days of the thirties. Striking became in those days a sort of mania, and not a town that had a mill or shop was exempt. Men struck for "grog or death," for "Liberty, Equality, and the Rights of Man," and even for the right to ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... ravages by fire, such as now happen, not unfrequently in the American woods, (but generally from carelessness in scattering the glowing embers of a fire, or even the ashes of a pipe,) were then occasionally the result of mere wantonness of mischief. Ovid accordingly notices, as one amongst the familiar images of daybreak, the half-burnt torch of the traveller; and, apparently, from the position which it holds in his description, where it is ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... preferment—at these Examination Grounds, most of the 8,500 cells had been stripped of their woodwork to cook the rations of the European armies, roofs had been torn off and even stone walls had been injured in sheer wantonness. ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... my salute,—the salutation of the gambler, the outcast, the reprobate,—then, then I swore that you should be mine, if I tore you from the sanctuary. Speak now, Jovita: if it was coquetry, speak now; I forgive you: if it was sheer wantonness, speak now; I shall ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... inexorable, and love has its laws as fixed as those which hold the stars in their course. And woe to the man or woman who transgresses! He who, ere it is ripe, deflowers the bud of blossoming love in wantonness and waste, in after years will watch and wait and water it with tears, in vain, for that bloom will ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... unabashed in her state of semi-nudity—gay, reckless, wooing pleasure on the wing, surely she might have posed as the embodied archetype of France itself. So has this pagan among modern nations borrowed something of the antique spirit of wantonness. Along with its theft of the Attic charm and grace, it has captured, also, something of its sublime indifference; in the very teeth of the dull modern world, France has laughed opinion ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... stall, On which, the crown, already o'er its state Suspended, holds thine eyes—or ere thyself Mayst at the wedding sup,—shall rest the soul Of the great Harry, he who, by the world Augustas hail'd, to Italy must come, Before her day be ripe. But ye are sick, And in your tetchy wantonness as blind, As is the bantling, that of hunger dies, And drives away the nurse. Nor may it be, That he, who in the sacred forum sways, Openly or in secret, shall with him Accordant walk: Whom God will not endure I' th' holy office long; but thrust him down To Simon Magus, where Magna's ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... eyes— Worship of promise-laden beauty. Seems he not The god of this fair scene? Those waves claim such a master as that boy; And these green slopes have waited till his feet Should wander them, to prove they were not spread In wantonness. What were this flower's prayer Had it a voice? The place behind his ear Would brim its cup with bliss and overbrim; Oh, to be worn and fade beside his cheek!'— 'In love and happy, Delphis; and the boy?'— 'Loves and is happy'— You hale from?'— 'AEtna; We ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... and the prosperity of their most Catholic majesties; and, above all, he hated the infidels with a pure and holy hatred. This worthy cavalier discountenanced all idleness, rioting, chambering, and wantonness among his soldiery. He kept them constantly to the exercise of arms, making them adroit in the use of their weapons and management of their steeds, and prompt for the field at a moment's notice. He permitted no sound of lute or harp ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... pamper little griefs into great ones, and bear great ones as well as we can. We can afford to dally and play tricks with the one, but the others we have enough to do with, without any of the wantonness and bombast of passion—without the swaggering of Pistol or the insolence of King Cambyses' vein. To great evils we submit; we resent little provocations. I have before now been disappointed of a hundred pound job and lost half a crown ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... inclination to plunder was insatiable, as was their zeal in searching the houses of the rich; and for the murdering of the men, and abusing of the women, it was sport to them. They also devoured what spoils they had taken, together with their blood, and indulged themselves in feminine wantonness, without any disturbance, till they were satiated therewith; while they decked their hair, and put on women's garments, and were besmeared over with ointments; and that they might appear very comely, they had paints under their eyes, and imitated not only the ornaments, but also the lusts ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... by the name of Christmas, of the Town of Superstition, in the County of Idolatry, and that thou hast, from time to time, abused the people of this Common-wealth, drawing and inticing them to Drunkenness, Gluttony, and unlawful Gaming, Wantonness, Uncleanness, Lasciviousness, Cursing, Swearing, abuse of the Creatures, some to one Vice, and some to another; all to Idleness: what sayest thou to thy Inditement, guilty or not guilty? He answered, Not guilty, and so put ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... down before Colonel Belford's house singing obstreperous and unseemly songs at the top of his voice; he would even rattle the ferrule of his cane against the palings of the fence, or throw a stone at Madam Belford's cat in the wantonness of his malice. ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... underlying and far-reaching hills. From out a cloudless sky—save where wreaths of vapour fringed the rounding blue—the sun put forth his golden arms towards the heathery sweeps that lay with their rounded bosoms greedy for his embrace, and gave himself in wantonness to his bride, kissing her fair face into blushing loveliness, and calling forth from the womb of the morning a myriad forms of life. Earth lay breathless in the clasp of heaven—they twain were one, perfect in union, ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... seed of Teucer's royal blood, whose wantonness of vengeance was so cruel? who was allowed to use thee thus? Rumour reached me that on that last night, outwearied with endless slaughter, thou hadst sunk on the heap of mingled carnage. Then mine own hand reared an empty tomb on the Rhoetean shore, mine own voice thrice ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... little more than a year younger than John, but much smaller, paler, and less active and robust; a pettish, cowardly, capricious, selfish little fellow, only active in doing mischief, and only clever in inventing falsehoods: not simply to hide his faults, but, in mere malicious wantonness, to bring odium upon others. In fact, Master Charles was a very great nuisance to me: it was a trial of patience to live with him peaceably; to watch over him was worse; and to teach him, or pretend to teach him, was inconceivable. At ten years old, he could not read correctly the easiest line in ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... core, Loosen the vital sap: yet where shall help be found? Who says 'How save it?'—nor 'Why cumbers it the ground?' Woman, that tree art thou! All sloughed about with scurf, Thy stag-horns fright the sky, thy snake-roots sting the turf! Drunkenness, wantonness, theft, murder gnash and gnarl Thine outward, case thy soul with coating like the marle Satan stamps flat upon each head beneath his hoof! And how deliver such? The strong men keep aloof, Lover and friend stand far, the mocking ones pass by, Tophet gapes wide for prey: lost soul, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... undefined,— The baulk'd confession that was like a sob— The sound of singing and the gurgling throb Of lute and viol,—meant for many things But most for misery; and a something clings Close to my heart that is not wantonness, Though, wanton-like, it warms ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay
... Pindar flourished in all the wantonness of literary riot. He was at the height of his flagrant notoriety. The novelty and the boldness of his style carried the million with him. The most exalted station was not exempt from his audacious criticism, and learned institutions trembled ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... cloak off, her head bare, stared forward after the fleeting murmurs and shadows we were pursuing. Sometimes she warned us, "More to the left "; or, "Faster!" We had to put forth our best, for Manuel, as if in the very wantonness of confidence, had set ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... connections with him were almost as intimate as those I had with Grimm, and in the end became as familiar; Grimm and he sometimes eat at my apartment. These repasts, a little more than simple, were enlivened by the witty and extravagant wantonness of expression of Klupssel, and the diverting Germanicisms of Grimm, who was not ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... feat soaring really is. The hawk does not always ascend in a spiral, but every now and then revolves in a circle—a flat circle—and suddenly shoots up with renewed rapidity. Whether this be merely sportive wantonness or whether it is a necessity, is impossible to determine; but to me it does not appear as if the hawk did it from necessity. It has more the appearance of variation: just as you or I might walk ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... get a stall, but the people to whom he applied were unable to accommodate him—they hadn't a single seat left. His actual attempt, at another library, was more successful: there was no question of obtaining a stall, but he might by a miracle still have a box. There was a wantonness in paying for a box at a play on which he had already expended four hundred pounds; but while he was mentally measuring this abyss an idea came into his head which flushed the extravagance with ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... king and his good wife, Sweetbine, were very much grieved at the foolish trifling of their daughter, Dewbell—for they were well assured that Dewbell loved the noble knight, Sir Timothy, and that it was only a spirit of mere wantonness that led her to vex and torment him. Long into the night did the royal couple converse, striving to devise some means of bringing their wayward daughter to her senses. They at last hit upon a plan, which they fondly hoped might be the means of securing ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... mother and is the elder and wiser goddess, and the other, the daughter of Zeus and Dione, who is popular and common. The first of the two loves has a noble purpose, and delights only in the intelligent nature of man, and is faithful to the end, and has no shadow of wantonness or lust. The second is the coarser kind of love, which is a love of the body rather than of the soul, and is of women and boys as well as of men. Now the actions of lovers vary, like every other sort of action, according to the manner of their performance. And in different ...
— Symposium • Plato
... to her life's golden, blessed dream. Added to all this, came the joys and raptures of a Parisian life—these new, unknown, diversified pleasures of society, these manifold distractions and entertainments of the great city. Josephine abandoned herself to all this with the joy and wantonness of an innocent, unsuspicious being. With all these glorious things round about her, she felt as if surrounded by a sea of blessedness and pleasure, and she plunged into it with the quiet daring of innocency, which ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... was the result either of calculated effect or a spontaneous modesty. Perhaps a sentiment of which women are never utterly divested prescribed to them the cloak of modesty to heighten and enhance the charms of wantonness. So the venerable Taillefer's designs seemed on the point of collapse, for these unbridled natures were subdued from the very first by the majesty with which woman is invested. There was a murmur of admiration, which vibrated like a soft musical note. Wine had not taken love for traveling ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... either the aspersions upon sovereigns and statesmen, or the strictures upon individuals, their wives, and their daughters, or the deeds of licentiousness and violence are too numerous to be computed. Indeed, there is one more kind of loose literature, the wantonness and pollution in which work most easy havoc ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the Alderman, when this extraordinary little usher presented himself, in answer to the summons of Tiller. "This is the very wantonness of cheap goods and an unfettered commerce! There is enough of Mechlin, Patroon, on the shoulders of that urchin, to deck the stomacher of the Queen. 'Fore George, goods were cheap in the market, when the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... already observed; for this wild Man I dissected was Carnivorous, and it may be Omnivorous, at least as much as Man is; for it would eat any thing that was brought to the Table. And if it was not their Hunger that drove them to it, their Wantonness, it may be, would make them apt enough to rob the Cranes Nests; and if they did so, no doubt but the Cranes would noise enough about it, and endeavour what they could to beat them off, which ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... expressed by the legislature. Such lawfully expressed and deliberate judgment should be given effect by the courts, save in the extreme and exceptional cases where there has been a clear violation of a constitutional provision. Anything like frivolity or wantonness in upsetting such clearly taken governmental action is a grave offense against the Republic. To protest against tyranny, to protect minorities from oppression, to nullify an act committed in a spasm of popular fury, is to render a service to the Republic. But for the courts ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... being given to the motives that are to drive the driver, there has never, or hardly ever, been an instance of a man stopping his engine through wantonness. But such a case might occur; yes, and it might occur that the engine should break down: but if the train is stopped from some trivial motive it will be found either that the strength of the necessary influences has been miscalculated, or that the man has been miscalculated, ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... carpenter is under the control of the person that is handling it, and moves as he moves it, similarly this universe, controlled by actions done in Time, moves as those actions move it. Seeing that the births and deaths of creatures take place without any (assignable) cause and in perfect wantonness, grief and joy are perfectly needless. Although this entanglement of thy heart is a mere delusion, still, if it pleaseth thee, O king, perform expiatory rites (for washing thyself free of thy so-called sin). It ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... and it shows you the head only of one of the larger figures in the center. Yet just observe how much design, how much wonderful composition, there is in this mere fragment of a building of the great times; a fragment, literally no larger than a school-boy could strike off in wantonness with a stick: and yet I cannot tell you how much care has been spent—not so much on the execution, for it does not take much trouble to execute well on so small a scale—but on the design, of this minute fragment. You see it is composed of a branch of wild roses, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... and heeded no more than the butterfly which lighted upon the engraven words, "Dust to dust," and poised gracefully, as it bathed in the sunshine, stretching its wings in wantonness of beauty. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... good. If it be said that this scheme is chimerical and impracticable on ordinary occasions, and to the generality of mankind, well and good; but those who accuse the author of having trampled on the common feelings and prejudices of mankind in wantonness or insult, or without wishing to substitute something better (and only unattainable, because it is better) in their stead, accuse him wrongfully. We may not be able to launch the bark of our affections on the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... wrote? Those men, indeed, act very well, but the orator acts better than the player, provided he be really an orator; but, then, they carry it on without passion, and with a composed mind. But what wantonness is it to commend lust! You produce Themistocles and Demosthenes; to these you add Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato. What! do you then call studies lust? But these studies of the most excellent and admirable things, such ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... which our authours have introduced by their knowledge of foreign languages, or ignorance of their own, by vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion or lust of innovation, I have registred as they occurred, though commonly only to censure them, and warn others against the folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... she so hot, or such a want of lovers, that she must doat upon afflictions? why does she not go romage all the prisons, and there bestow her youth, bewray her wantonness, and flie her honour, common both to beggery: did she speak ...
— Wit Without Money - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher • Francis Beaumont
... shall tempt them to pride, that may do something; and if we tempt them to wantonness, that may help. But, in my mind, if we could drive them into desperation, that would knock the nail on the head; for then we should have them, in the first place, question the truth of the love of the heart of their Prince towards them, and that will disgust him much. This, if it works well, ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... he moves like an avalanche, carrying destruction in his path. The peasantry sink before him. The country, too, is too poor for plunder, and too rough for a valuable conquest. Nature presents her eternal barrier on every side, to check the wantonness of ambition. And Switzerland remains with her simple institutions, a military road to climates scarcely worth a permanent possession, and protected by the jealousy of ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... spent three years at the garrison of Long Nawang among the fine Kenyahs and spoke the language. "As soon as one enters upon the subject of taking heads one no longer knows the Kenyah. Of his mild and pacific disposition little or nothing remains. Unbounded ferocity and wantonness, treachery and faithlessness, play a very great part; of courage, as we understand the meaning of the word, there is seldom a trace. It is a victory over the brua (soul) of the man who lost his head, and the slayer's own brua becomes stronger ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... She recalled his fiery love-making, and thrilled again to the eager insistence of his voice, the mastery of his touch. And then she remembered what they said of him, that women were his slaves, his playthings, the toys he broke in wantonness and carelessly tossed aside. She remembered how once in his actual presence she had overheard words that had made her shrink, a wonder as to who was his latest conquest, the cynical remark: "Anyone for a change and no one for long is his motto." What was he doing now, she asked ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... had her Aims in't, he's a very convenient Husband, I'll assure you, and that suits her Temper: he has Estate and Folly enough, and she has Youth and Wantonness ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... man might ask, out of what Commonwealth Plato doth banish them? In sooth, thence where he himself alloweth community of women. So, as belike this banishment grew not for effeminate wantonness, since little should poetical sonnets be hurtful, when a man might have what woman he listed. But I honour philosophical instructions, and bless the wits which bred them, so as they be not abused, which is likewise stretched ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... overmuch sorrow casteth a man in to bitterness and heaviness of kind,[98] for the which he is unable to receive ghostly comfort. And overmuch hope is presumption, and outrageous love is but flattering and faging,[99] and outrageous gladness is dissolution and wantonness, and untempered hatred of sin is woodness.[100] And on this manner, they are unordained and unmeasured, and thus are they turned in to vices, and then lose they the name of virtues, and may not be accounted amongst the sons of Jacob, ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... his fervid frequent sighs, whilst his hands convulsively squeezed, opened, pressed together again the lips and sides of that deep flesh wound, or gently twitched the over-growing moss; and all proclaimed the excess, the riot of joys, in having his wantonness thus humoured. But he did not long abuse my patience, for the objects before him had now put him by all his, and, coming out with that formidable machine of his, he lets the fury loose, and pointing it directly ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... looked down on the unpolished wretches, their impertinent wives and clouterly brats, as the lordly bull does on the little dirty ant-hill, whose puny inhabitants he crushes in the carelessness of his ramble, or tosses in the air in the wantonness of his pride. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the necessity for pain, we are still left to face those greater calamities and disasters which sweep away human lives by the hundred and thousand, catastrophes like the Sicilian {115} earthquakes, that are marked by an appalling wantonness of destruction; must not such events as these also be attributed to God, and how are they to be reconciled with His alleged benevolence? Certainly, no one would attempt to minimise the horrors of the Sicilian tragedy; the human mind is overwhelmed by the suddenness, no less ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Him, and He came through the trees to that bridal with the dawn of every day. He had foreseen the chalice, foreseen that it would be filled at every moon and every sun by the bitter gall of ingratitude and wantonness and hate, but He had pledged Himself—"Even so, Father"—and He was here to drink it. Small wonder, then, that the paving on which Peter Graham knelt seemed to swim before his eyes until it was in truth a moving ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... to the music of leaflets, By zephyrs in wantonness shook, To dream of the Skoodoowabskooksis, And, perhaps, of ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... thee to mourn that thy career has not been more profitable to thyself and the public," answered the judge; "one who can reason so-well, and who hath this clear insight into his own disposition, must err less from ignorance than wantonness!" ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... blazes and the flowers are beautiful. So thinks everybody who has survived Puritanism unscathed, so thought the majority of Brineweald's visitors that year, so thought Mrs. Delarayne and her party of eager young swains and still more eager virgins. Wantonness was in the air,—wantonness and beauty; and when these two imps of passion come together ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... told, thou sullen and yet faint-hearted slave," answered Varney, with bitterness, "that no MURDER as thou callest it, with that staring look and stammering tone, is designed in the matter? Wert thou not told that a brief illness, such as woman puts on in very wantonness, that she may wear her night-gear at noon, and lie on a settle when she should mind her domestic business, is all here aimed at? Here is a learned man will swear it to thee by the key of ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... been overthrown by the Persians in wantonness, or in hatred of the Egyptian religion; and the priests now put upon it the name of Philip Arridaeus, for whom Ptolemy ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... riot. The absurdity, barbarism, and grotesque quaintness of this monument to vanity cannot be laid exclusively at Maximilian's door; for the architecture, particularly of the fountains, in Altdorfer's or Manuel's designs, and in those of many others, reveals a like wantonness in delighted elaboration of the impossible and unstructural. The scholars and pedantic posturers who surrounded the emperor no doubt improved and abetted. Probably it was this Juggernaut element, inherited from the Gothic ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... prostrate myself in the dust, if your looks had not raised me to your hand. I fancied I understood your looks, I rose, and then, without having done anything more towards you than love you yet more devotedly, if that were possible—you, a woman without heart, faith, or love, in very wantonness, dashed me down again from sheer caprice. You are unworthy, princess of the royal blood though you may be, of the love of a man of honor; I offer my life as a sacrifice for having loved you too tenderly, and ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... upon you, yet you take it not in the least to heart, but continue to lead a merry, luxurious life, have balls and drinking bouts, spend a wild, heathenish life in eating, drinking, gambling, and other wantonness, deck yourselves out like peacocks, and those who have the least, and carry all their possessions upon their bodies, ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... orders, asking whether I had ever had difficulties, and I told you that I had probably never gone deep enough. It was profoundly true, though I didn't really mean it. But this year—— No, no, I have not been merely vain and hasty! I may be a shallow creature, but it has been natural growth, not wantonness.' ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in other words, that the profligate accusers first feigned for the most part the injuries they received, and next saw the figures and action of the persons who inflicted them, when they were invisible to every one else. Hence the miserable prosecutors gained the power of gratifying the wantonness of their malice, by pretending that they suffered by the hand of any one whose name first presented itself, or against whom they bore an ill will. The persons so charged, though unseen by any but the ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... and mine with but two: hers, powdered, gay, and saucy, kept only for show; mine, a couple of careful rogues that are good for something: I own I cannot bear that Clotilda should be in all the pride and wantonness of wealth, and I only in the ease and ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... with one of the flash young gentlemen of the town, who frequented the tavern for no other purpose but to make love to her, and brought her presents of rings and lockets and suchlike matters, which she never scrupled to accept. And when I upbraided her for this wantonness, she gave ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... admitted that, and yet stayed on, wondering at myself. I thought of the measure with which I had meted to Catriona that same night; how I had prated of the two lives I carried, and had thus forced her to enjeopardy her father's; and how I was here exposing them again, it seemed in wantonness. A good conscience is eight parts of courage. No sooner had I lost conceit of my behaviour, than I seemed to stand disarmed amidst a throng of terrors. Of a sudden I sat up. How if I went now to Prestongrange, caught him (as I still ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in my cause, which led me to the negligence or wantonness which I have been instancing, also laid me open, not unfairly, to the opposite charge of fierceness in certain steps which I took, or words which I published. In the Lyra Apostolica, I have said that before learning to love, we must "learn to hate;" though I had ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... free-for-anybody places, which I could just as easily have found and occupied without his assistance, he takes his departure, leaving me to the tender consideration of an overbearing, ragamuffin mob, in whom the spirit of wantonness is already aroused. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... they say that Evander, who belonged to the tribe of Arcadians,[10] that for many years before had possessed that country, appointed the observance of a feast, introduced from Arcadia, in such manner, that young men ran about naked in sport and wantonness, doing honour to Pan Lycaeus, whom the Romans afterwards called Inuus. That the robbers, through rage at the loss of their booty, having lain in wait for them whilst intent on this sport, as the festival was now well known, whilst Romulus ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... Old Traveler, Who say that thy delight Is to scatter ruin, far and wide, In thy wantonness of might: For not a leaf that falleth Before thy restless wings, But in thy flight, thou changest it To a ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... university of Utrecht, and of Marpurg, by the liberality of his friends; but when he returned home, in the midst of the ravages caused by the Spanish arms, instead of being received by his mother, he found that she, as well as her daughters, and all her family, had been sacrificed to the wantonness of the ferocious enemy. His distress was for a while inconsolable; but the thirst after distinction called him to the newly-founded university of Leyden, where his industry acquired him the protection of the magistrates of Amsterdam, at whose expense he ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... something of a grudge. For long the landward clans looked upon the incomers to it as foreign and unfriendly. More than once in fierce or drunken escapades they came into the place in their mogans at night, quiet as ghosts, mischievous as the winds, and set fire to wooden booths, or shot in wantonness at any mischancy unkilted citizen late returning from the change-house. The tartan was at those times the only passport to their good favour; to them the black cloth knee-breeches were red rags to a bull, and ill luck to the lad who wore the same anywhere outside the Crooked Dyke that marks ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... that country fatten themselves upon. I never in my life saw fatter beef than one I saw killed there, & the New England People vowed that the heiffers of the same breed that had a calf in Boston at 3 years old came in at 2 years at St. Johns, so much they improved in growth and Wantonness as they ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... would crowd into the cathedral, for it was not quite safe for anybody of mark to stay away from these manifestations of presidential piety. Having thus acknowledged the only power he was at all disposed to recognize as above himself, he would scatter acts of political grace in a sardonic wantonness of clemency. There was no other way left now to enjoy his power but by seeing his crushed adversaries crawl impotently into the light of day out of the dark, noisome cells of the Collegio. Their harmlessness fed his insatiable vanity, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... the taking of steps to preserve from destruction beautiful and wonderful wild creatures whose existence was threatened by greed and wantonness. During the seven and a half years closing on March 4, 1909, more was accomplished for the protection of wild life in the United States than during all the previous years, excepting only the creation of the Yellowstone National Park. The record includes the creation of five National Parks—Crater ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the chests, which she locked down, one by one, till all were shut. When all was done the eunuchs embarked the chests in the boat and made for the Lady Zubaydah's palace. With this, thought began to beset me and I said to myself, "Verily thy lust and wantonness will be the death of thee; and the question is after all shalt thou win to thy wish or not?" And I began to weep, boxed up as I was in the box and suffering from cramp; and I prayed Allah that He deliver me from ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... humanity for the poor, the slaves, the victims of oppression, in their universal philanthropy, and in their precepts of patience under suffering, forbearance, forgiveness, and returning good for evil. Epictetus, the deformed slave of a capricious and cruel master, beaten and crippled in mere wantonness, enfranchised in his latter years, only to be driven into exile and to sound the lowest depths of poverty, exhibited a type of heroic virtue which has hardly been equalled, perhaps never transcended by a mere mortal; and though looking, as has been already said, to annihilation as the goal of ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... story is preeminently the story of Morgan. I have striven to make it a character sketch of that remarkable personality. I wished to portray his ferocity and cruelty, his brutality and wantonness, his treachery and rapacity; to exhibit, without lightening, the dark shadows of his character, and to depict his inevitable and utter breakdown finally; yet at the same time to bring out his dauntless courage, his military ability, his fertility and resourcefulness, ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... sufficient reason to the proprietor for the occasional absence of Tom, Dick, or Harry: who, in the meanwhile, was, most probably, crying "stand" to a true man, or cutting a trunk from a sulkey, or, in mere wantonness, shooting down the traveller who had perhaps given him a long chase, yet yielded nothing by way of compensation for ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... "is the dread that my wild and tomboyish behavior may be as displeasing to the Goddess as coquettishness or wantonness. I am in terror for fear my ministrations may be unpleasant to her, may be sacrilegious, may not only fail to win her blessing upon Rome but may draw down her curse upon all of us. I never thought of that until I stood there all alone out in the arena, astraddle of that beautiful ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... but what this confident creature Betty throws out in the wantonness of office. Now it is, Why, Miss, don't you look up your things? You'll be called upon, depend upon it, before you are aware. Another time she intimates darkly, and in broken sentences, (as if on purpose to tease me,) what one says, what another; with their inquiries ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... honest and the virtuous are convertible according to Tully (De Offic. i, 27). Now shamefacedness is a part of honesty: for Ambrose says (De Offic. i, 43) that "shamefacedness is the companion and familiar of the restful mind, averse to wantonness, a stranger to any kind of excess, the friend of sobriety and the support of what is honest, a seeker after the beautiful." Therefore shamefacedness ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the Convent, and from sheer wantonness I was making my Waler plunge and curvet across the road as I tickled it with ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... want of early and deliberate purposes. Youth where the highest malice does not appear. Sex where the highest malice does not appear. Intoxication and levity, or mere wantonness ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... it. It usually impales its victim upon a thorn, or thrusts it in the fork of a limb. For the most part, however, its food seems to consist of insects,—spiders, grasshoppers, beetles, etc. It is the assassin of the small birds, whom it often destroys in pure wantonness, or merely to sup on their brains, as the Gaucho slaughters a wild cow or bull for its tongue. It is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Apparently its victims are unacquainted with its true character and allow it to approach ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... maternal savagery; the end of mated bliss and its—renewal. She had seen the relentless catastrophes of storm. There had been starving winters and renewing springs, sad beautiful autumns, the riotous waste and wantonness of summer. These had all been objective experiences, but Joan's untamed and undistracted heart had taken them in deeply and deeply pondered upon them. There was no morality in their teachings, unless it was the morality of complete suspension of any judgment whatsoever, the marvelous literal, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Troezenian, Laconian, and Amazonian maidens, besides their not being betrothed to him, were no worthier mothers for his children than the Athenian daughters of Erechtheus and Kekrops would have been, so we must suspect that these acts were done out of mere riotous wantonness. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... of us, the young dogs would gambol about him, leap on his neck, worry at his ears, and endeavor to tease him into a gambol. The old dog would keep on for a long time with imperturbable solemnity, now and then seeming to rebuke the wantonness of his young companions. At length he would make a sudden turn, seize one of them, and tumble him in the dust, then giving a {p.185} glance at us, as much as to say, 'You see, gentlemen, I can't help giving way to this nonsense,' would resume his gravity, and jog on as before. Scott amused ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... makes my case the stronger; I don't believe that the maddest man that ever lived would throw away a diamond worth more than a thousand pounds with such utter wantonness as seems to have characterized the action of the original owner of the stone which I found in your ninepenny ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... thee, Lovelace, to reflect, before it be too late (before the mortal offence be given) upon the graces and merits of this lady. Let thy frequent remorses at last end in one effectual remorse. Let not pride and wantonness of heart ruin the fairer prospects. By my faith, Lovelace, there is nothing but vanity, conceit, and nonsense, in our wild schemes. As we grow older, we shall be wiser, and looking back upon our foolish notions of the present hour, (our youth dissipated,) shall ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... play-houses and what-not. Even as adults we are moved by a desire to express ourselves through making or creating that which will represent our ingenuity and skill. The tendency of children to destroy is not from wantonness, but rather from ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... however, he would have found a check in the fact that the young girl herself tasted very soberly of the sweets of defiance. She was silent and grave; she had a manner which took the edge from the wantonness of filial independence. Yet, for all this, Bernard was pleased with his position; and, as he walked with her through the lighted and crowded rooms, where they soon detached themselves from their companions, he felt that peculiar satisfaction which best expresses itself in silence. ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... beauty begs? At his command Opening to right and left, the well-trained troops Leave a large void for their retreating foes. Away they fly, on wings of fear upborne, To seek on distant hills their late abodes. Ye proud oppressors, whose vain hearts exult In wantonness of power, 'gainst the brute race, 520 Fierce robbers like yourselves, a guiltless war Wage uncontrolled: here quench your thirst of blood: But learn from ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... mankind in the wantonness of a depraved ambition, and tyrannical cruelties have been committed in the gloomy hours of jealousy and terror; yet these demons are not necessary to the creation, or to the support of an arbitrary power. Although ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... dog's death. Certainly, despite her cold composure, she must be filled with rage against him for killing the animal. He might now have exhibited his arm, to confound her with the evidence of his innocence of wantonness, and very probably she would have been instantly remorseful. But he had no such intention; he was keenly alive to his opportunity to show her that he was answerable to no one for his conduct. He enjoyed her chagrin; ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... women wholly given over to worldly vanities. Your companion was one of your colleagues whom his years, if not the dignity of his office, ought to have reminded of his duty. We have heard that the dance was indulged in in all wantonness; none of the allurements of love were lacking, and you conducted yourself in a wholly worldly manner. Shame forbids mention of all that took place, for not only the things themselves but their very names are unworthy of your ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... that a traveller (though less wide a wanderer than thou) dissuadeth thee from a new-found novelty—the wanton misuse, or rather the misuseful wantonness, of the Indian herb. It is a blind goose that knoweth not a fox from a fern-bush, and a strange temerity that mistaketh smoke for provender. The sow, when she is sick, eateth the sea-crab and is immediately recovered: why, then, should man, being whole and sound, haste to that which maketh many sick? ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... admitted to the reception rooms by a dark, narrow entrance, or they made a long roundabout tour by way of the Queen's staircase across the Marble Court. The demolition of the stairway of honor was an irreparable loss. No other piece of wantonness equaled it in the ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... that grey king, whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak, And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's, one Touched by the adulterous finger of a time That hovered between war and wantonness, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... figure of the war—the whole world does her homage. We are not invaded—and so less tragic, less appealing. But we are fighting the fight which is the fight of all freemen everywhere—against the wantonness of military power, against the spirit that tears up treaties and makes peaceful agreement between nations impossible—against a cruelty and barbarism in war which brings our civilisation to shame. We have a right to your sympathy—you who are the heirs of Washington and Lincoln, ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... neither by help of man, neither by use of her own faculties, which were greater and clearer than ever before. She sank down upon the floor at the foot of that old toy, which had pleased her in the softness of her old age, to which she had trusted the fortunes of another; by which, in wantonness and folly she had sinned, she had sinned! And she thought she saw standing round her companions in the land she had left, saying, "It is impossible, impossible!" with infinite pity in their eyes; and the face of him who had given her permission ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
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