"Penury" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spent beside my mother, watching the life ebb fast away, and thinking with grave sorrow of her past and my future. It pained me beyond measure to see her die thus, in a garret, without proper attendance or any but bare comforts; the existence which had once been bright and prosperous ending in penury and gloom, such as my mother's love and hope and self-sacrifice little deserved. Her state grieved me sharply on my own account too, seeing that I had formed none of those familiar relations which men of my age have commonly formed, and which console them for the loss ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... greater, my sister, than you can believe. For is there anything more cruel than this mean economy to which we are subjected? this strange penury in which we are made to pine? What good will it do us to have a fortune if it only comes to us when we are not able to enjoy it; if now to provide for my daily maintenance I get into debt on every side; if both you and I are reduced daily to beg the help of tradespeople ...
— The Miser (L'Avare) • Moliere
... Howland Street, whose landlady was daily abating in her respect, and the butcher daily abating in his punctuality; whose garments were getting threadbare, and his dinners hypothetical, and whose day-dreams of fame and fortune had faded into the dull-gray of penury and disappointment. I was broken-hearted, ill, hungry; so I accepted an invitation from a friend, a rich manufacturer in Birmingham, to go down to his house for the Christmas holidays. He had a pleasant ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... country a body duly constituted for any function will neglect to perform its duty and abdicate its trust? Such a presumption would go against all Governments in all nations. But in truth this dread of penury of supply, from a free assembly, has no foundation in nature. For first, observe that, besides the desire which all men have naturally of supporting the honour of their own Government, that sense of dignity, and that security to property, which ever attend freedom, have a tendency ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... cemetery.... The national debt was increasing in a fabulous manner, and recourse was had to the mediaeval remedy of debasing the currency, while even at that moment the troops had more than a year's pay in arrear, and absolute penury was augmenting ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... race, or turn back, teacheth thee a certain and sweet way of singular proficiency and progress in the ways of God. It may be, it is not thy work, nor mine, to write both against these soul-murdering, however magnified, methods of taking men off Jesus Christ; but our penury of parts for that, should first put us to seek plenty of tears, that we may weep, to see our master so wounded by the piercing pens of those who, to patronise their mock religion, wrest the Scriptures, and with wicked hands wring the word of the Lord, till it weep blood: this, I say, ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... country half naked, in the coldest weather; sufferings, almost without a parallel, were borne with patience and resignation. Despair there might be in the hearts of thousands, but those thousands were mute and passive in their misery; all was dark, all was hopeless; the wintry wind of penury blew untempered, keen upon them, but still they cried not; hunger preyed upon their very vitals, but they uttered no complaint. Let us not, even now, refuse a passing tribute of honour and respect to the passive heroism which in many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... by sixteen years of struggle in the Capital, and aged quite as much by pleasure as by penury, hard work, and disappointments, looked eight-and-forty, though he was no more than thirty-seven. He was already bald, and had assumed a Byronic air in harmony with his early decay and the lines furrowed in his face by over-indulgence in ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... naturally resort. They are in all ranks and occupations, of all ages and characters. They are very earnest people, and their purpose is bona fide the dissemination of their paradoxes. A great many—the mass, indeed—are illiterate, and a great many waste their means, and are in or approaching penury. But I must say that never, in any one instance, has the quadrature of the circle, or the like, been made a pretext for begging; even to be asked to purchase a book is of the very rarest occurrence—it has happened, and that ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... by a constant exchange of letters. But here, on Marie-Gaston's side, perfect confidence ceased, after a time, to exist. He was hiding something; his proud determination to depend wholly on himself was a sad mistake. Each day brought him nearer to penury. At last, staking all upon one throw, he imprudently involved himself in journalism. Assuming all the risks of an enterprise which amounted to thirty thousand francs, a stroke of ill-fortune left him nothing to look forward ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... victims of penury either abandon Christianity altogether, or find refuge in the bosom of their true Mother, the Catholic Church, who, like her Divine Spouse, claims the afflicted as her most cherished inheritance. The parables descriptive of this Church which our Lord employed also clearly teach us that the ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... his children for the fight into which he was sending them? They had begun their life in need and penury, which had, as far as possible, to be concealed; they had early learned the bitter lesson of the disparity between inward expectations and demands and outward circumstances; and from their slovenly ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... minds of clients was more like the rage of a passion for a youthful Roscius or an extraordinary preacher, than the result of deliberate consideration; and yet it prevailed, in questions not of an evening's amusement, but of penury or riches, honor or shame. Suitors were content, not only to make large sacrifices for the assured advantage of his advocacy, but for the bare chance— the distant hope— of having some little part (like that which Phormio desires to retain in Thais) of his faculties, with ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... under which human nature can start on its course." Has your agricultural laborer ever known anything but misery? He is born in a miserable hovel, which in mockery is termed a house or a home; he is reared in penury: he passes a life of hopeless and unrequited toil, and the jail or the union house is before him as the only asylum on this side of the pauper's grave. Is this the result of your protection to native industry? Have you cared for the laborer till, from a home of comfort, he has but a hovel for shelter? ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... destitute and sick. At the home they minister daily to the suffering and destitute sick wherever found; some requiring only temporary medical aid and nursing; others, whom God has chastened with more continuous suffering, requiring, in their penury, constant care and continual ministration." There is also under their charge a church school for vagrant children, and one also for the children of those comfortably situated ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... all the books of fate There is no page so pitiful as this— A cruel dungeon, and a monarch's hate, And penury and calumny were his; Robbed of his honors in his feeble age, Despoiled of glory, the old Genoese Withdrew at length from life's ungrateful stage, To try the ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... the farmers of the revenue, who enriched themselves by wringing the peasant on the one hand, and cheating the King on the other. A few great cities shone with all that is most brilliant in society, intellect, and concentrated wealth; while the country that paid the costs lay in ignorance and penury, crushed and despairing. Of the inhabitants of towns, too, the demands of the tax-gatherer were extreme; but here the immense vitality of the French people bore up the burden. While agriculture languished, and intolerable oppression turned peasants into beggars ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... at his feet, they all and euery of them made their humble sutes, yet he would haue compassion on them, as vpon his poore subiects, regarding themselues, their wiues, and children, and pitying their distres, and penury, and that he would graciously procure some redresse for them. And when he offred his letters vnto them, wishing them to prosecute their cause before your highnes, they answered that they were no way able to ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... pulpit or the platform, or to the inward experiences of the religious life, He is just as truly and properly concerned with the affairs of the shop and the street, the nursery and the kitchen, the chamber of suffering and the home of penury, as with preaching the Gospel or healing ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... minute distinctions of every day family conversation. This may arise, however, from a principle adverted to by Dr. Johnson, in speaking of the ancient languages, in which he says "nothing is familiar," and by the use of which "the writer conceals penury of thought and want of novelty, often from the reader, and often from himself." The Indian certainly has a very pompous way of expressing a common thought. He sets about it with an array of prefix and suffix, and polysyllabic strength, as if he were ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... child learns to hate school, to hate instruction, and all that is good. He soon becomes the practiced truant. In a few years he arrives at manhood; but, instead of being a blessing to his family and a useful member of society, he too frequently drags out a wretched life, in ignorance and penury, dividing it between the poor-house and jail, and terminating it, ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... gave all he had to the knights bound for the Holy Wars; his agent, Herbert de Burgh, was either faithless, or the fleets entrusted to him were lost; he never returned from his last voyage to the East, and the unfortunate merchant, reduced to penury and driven to despair, is said to have destroyed himself." As Anselm uttered these words the captain became convulsed with agony; his face was livid, his eyes rolled, his teeth were clenched. "Wretch that I am!" cried he; "who am ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Crowns, merely to get the fat and brains out of them: Thus the frequent and extraordinary Slaughter of their Sheep above a Hundred Thousand Head of Cattel were destroy'd. And upon this Account the Region was reduced to great penury and want, and at length perished with Hunger. Nay the Province of Quito, which abounded with Corn beyond Expression, by such proceedings as these, was brought to that Extremity that a Sextarie or small Measure or Wheat was sold for Ten Crowns, and a ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... gate. If sleeping, wake; if feasting, rise Before I turn away. It is the hour of fate, And those who follow me, gain every state Mortals desire, and conquer every foe Save Death, but those who doubt, or hesitate, Condemned to failure, penury, and woe, Seek me in vain, and uselessly implore. I answer not, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... and but few of them fail of a bitter disappointment. I cannot hope that my arguments will convince ye of this, but counsel with your parents, and ye'll find they bear me out. On the one side stands eventual penury and perhaps violence for ye all; on the other, marriage with a man who, whatever his faults, loves ye hotly, who will give ye a title and wealth, and who will see to it that your parents want for nothing. 'T is an alternative that few women would hesitate over, but ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... reformers (they had to do something more than talk in those days) who won for us our liberties; the men who gave their lives to science and art, when science and art brought, not as now, fame and fortune, but shame and penury—they sprang from the loins of the rugged men who had learned, on many a grim battlefield, to laugh at pain and death, who had had it hammered into them, with many a hard blow, that the whole duty of a man in this world is to be true to ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... the poor? Alas! is he not a daily tyrant, scourging with meanest wants—a creature that, with all its bounty to others, is to the poor and destitute more terrible than Death? Let Comfort paint a portrait of Life, and now Penury take the pencil. "Pooh! pooh!" cry the sage LAURIES of the world, looking at the two pictures—"that scoundrel Penury has drawn an infamous libel. That Life! with that withered face, sunken eye, and shrivelled ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... trustees on the marriage of Madame Phoebus, to accumulate, "and when the genius and vanity of her husband are both exhausted, though I believe they are inexhaustible," remarked Mr. Cantacuzene, "it will be a nest's-egg for them to fall back upon, and at least save them from penury." The duke had no doubt that Mr. Cantacuzene was of imperial lineage. But the latter portion of the letter was the most deeply interesting to Lothair. Bertram wrote that his mother had just observed that she thought ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... Goblins. If ever despondency and asperity could be excused in any man, they might have been excused in Milton. But the strength of his mind overcame every calamity. Neither blindness, nor gout, nor age, nor penury, nor domestic afflictions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor proscription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience. His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they were singularly equable. His temper was serious, perhaps ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Sunday to have on their arm a pretty girl who did them honor (Rigolette cared little for appearances), and who only cost the partaking of their modest pleasures, which her presence and sprightliness enhanced. Besides, the dear girl was so easily contented; in the days of penury she dined so well and so gayly on a piece of hot cake, nipped with all the force of her little white teeth; after which she amused herself so much with a walk on the boulevards ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... thoughts and desires. When the trumpet is sounded for action, the instincts rush in, the character hastens between; but the soul stands aloof: the soul, which is man's very highest, being like the princess who elects to live on in arrogant penury rather than soil her hands with ordinary labour." Yes, alas, all is useless till such time as we have learned to harden our hands; to transform the gold and silver of thought into a key that shall open, not the ivory gate of our dreams, but the very door of this our dwelling—into ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... affluent, And when the overplus of your fortunes disturb Your minds, think how little stops the lash of penury, And ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... how that desperate and fatal effort terminated. Soon after the martyrdom of the noble Emmet, young Dulan was arrested, tried, condemned, and followed his admired leader to the scaffold, leaving his heart-broken young wife and infant boy in extreme penury and destitution. As soon as she recovered from the first stunning shock of her bereavement, she wrote to her brother-in-law, soliciting protection for herself and child. To this the doctor, who, to great austerity of manners, united an excellent heart, ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... Artium;" for we find it has ever been so, even to the present enlightened age. A few favourites occupy the Goshen of patronage, who at their death are not remembered, and whose works do "follow them;" and then, the works of those who have lived neglected, lived, worked, and died in penury, are eagerly sought after at any price. Such men, whilst they lived, were yet teaching a lesson in taste which the world were slow to learn; for it is in the nature of genius to be before the age, and in some respects to teach a novelty, which the world in not prepared to receive. Genius works ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... hour had shone in flattering brightness, promising duration; (such is often the cunning flattery of nature), that light, which through half a century, had diffused its radiance and its warmth so widely; that light in which penury had been cheered, in which science had expanded; to whose orb poetry had brought all her images; before whose influence disease had continually retreated, and death so often "turned aside his levelled dart!"[95] That Dr. Darwin, as to his religious principles ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... unavailing, they made no resistance. The next day, Captain Mowat commenced a furious cannonade and bombardment; and a great number of people standing on the heights were spectators of the conflagration, which reduced many of them to penury and despair; 139 dwelling-houses and 278 stores were burnt. Other seaports were threatened with conflagration, but escaped; Newport, on Rhode Island, was compelled to stipulate for a weekly supply, to avert it." (Holmes' Annals, ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... maid turned very red. She had unfortunately seen many such certificates of penury, but all that was part of her private life, and she had been shocked beyond measure to be confronted with this too-familiar evidence of impecuniosity in the home of a lady who represented to her an assured income and ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... through destiny. Friends are not the cause of one's happiness. Foes are not the cause of one's misery. Wisdom is not competent to bring an accession of wealth; nor is wealth competent to bring an accession of happiness. Intelligence is not the cause of wealth, nor is stupidity the cause of penury. He only that is possessed of wisdom, and none else, understands the order of the world. Amongst the intelligent, the heroic, the foolish, the cowardly, the idiotic, the learned, the weak, or the strong, happiness comes to him for whom it is ordained. Among ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... meager resources to the least strain possible, Dennis at last succeeded in securing, in one of the more pretentious stores on Baxter Street, a contrivance for the relief of penury and threadbare gentility known at that time by the name ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... I am indeed no thief, Nor, O most bountiful of men, a highwayman am I. But the vicissitudes of fate overthrew me suddenly, And care and stress and penury full sorely did me try. It was not thou, but God who cast the fatal shaft at me, The shaft that made from off my head the crown of ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world; or to be worse than worst Of those, that lawless and incertain thoughts Imagine howling!—'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life, That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... of his existence to secure. Wealth became to his disordered imagination the desideratum of existence, and he attached inordinate value to it, in proportion as he felt the bitter stings of comparative penury. To guard his only child—whom he certainly loved better than anything else in the world, save himself—from this dreaded evil, the misguided man, during his latter days, extracted from her an inviolable assurance, never to become the wife of any individual who could not settle upon her, subject ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... of bone and dry skin, whose greed and penury had starved his own soul. He had brought her there and put burdens upon her, with the assurance that it would be only for a little while, until somebody could be hired to take the work off her hands. Then he had advanced the plea of hard times, when the first excuse ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... walking in a garret from absolute penury to find himself a millionaire. Such a person, were he normal, would feel what the girl felt as the message of that noxious odour struck home ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... cold Ear of Death! Perhaps in this neglected Spot is laid Some Heart once pregnant with celestial Fire, Hands that the Reins of Empire might have sway'd, Or wak'd to Extacy the living Lyre. But Knowledge to their Eyes her ample Page Rich with the Spoils of Time did ne'er unroll; Chill Penury repress'd their noble Rage, And froze the genial Current of the Soul. Full many a Gem of purest Ray serene, The dark unfathom'd Caves of Ocean bear: Full many a Flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its Sweetness on the desart Air. ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... and myself have lived for many years in Christchurch, Hants. We keep the inn there—not the principal inn, but a small public-house on the outskirts of the village. It will be a change for us both to come into five thousand a year after such penury. Of course, Mr. Pash, you will act ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... soft perfume! And Fancy, elfin form of gorgeous wing, [And Fancy hovering round on shadowy wing, 1794.] On every blossom hung her fostering dews, 15 That, changeful, wanton'd to the orient Day! But soon upon thy poor unshelter'd Head [Ah! soon, &c. 1794.] Did Penury her sickly mildew shed: And soon the scathing Lightning bade thee stand In frowning horror o'er ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... own head on a canvas. The price offered was such that Morewood could not refuse; but he had in the course of the sitting greatly annoyed Claudia by mentioning incidentally that her face did not interest him and was, in fact, such a face as he would never have painted but for the pressure of penury. ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... and his mother's dowry. But here, too, the same ill-fortune that had hitherto dogged his steps attended him. The lawsuit which he instituted, though it promised well at first, proved a will-o'-the-wisp, which lured him into the bog of absolute penury. His sister was dead; his mother's relatives, formerly hostile, were now, because of the lawsuit, doubly embittered against him. In his distress he sought refuge in the Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... lust of gold shall here annoy, Enslave the nation and its nerve destroy. No useles mine these northern hills enclose, No ruby ripens and no diamond glows; But richer stores and rocks of useful mould Repay in wealth the penury of gold. Freedom's unconquer'd race, with healthy toil, Shall lop the grove and warm the furrow'd soil, From iron ridges break the rugged ore, And plant with men the man-ennobling shore; Sails, villas, towers and temples round them heave, Shine o'er the realms and light the distant ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... servants. Being already in possession of his inheritance, and the head of a household, the law so arranged his relations, as a servant, as to alleviate as much as possible the calamity which had reduced him from independence and authority, to penury and subjection. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... not that the minstrel's art, The pleasant gift of verse, Though his hopes decay, though his friends depart, Can ever be a curse;— Though sorrow reign within his heart, And Penury hold ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... which he is thrown. The poor man may thus possess a capital of which none of the misfortunes and calamities of life can deprive him. We have known men who have been suddenly reduced from affluence to penury by misfortunes, which they could neither foresee nor prevent. A fire has swept away the accumulations of years; misplaced confidence, a flood, or some of the thousand casualties to which commercial men are exposed, have stripped them of their possessions. To-day they have been prosperous, ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... to the widow who cast her two mites into the treasury, and then to the rich men who had cast in much more. "This poor widow hath cast in more than they all. For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... despised of men, and, were it not that we know the inexhaustible bounty of the Everlasting Pity, we might almost think that he was forgotten of Heaven. Stand against idleness. Anything that age, aches, penury, hard trial may inflict on the soul is trifling. Idleness is the great evil which leads to all others. Therefore work while ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... glorious fever that desire To Know! And there are few sights in the moral world more sublime than that which many a garret might afford, if Asmodeus would bare the roofs to our survey—viz., a brave, patient, earnest human being, toiling his own arduous way, athwart the iron walls of penury, into the magnificent Infinite, which is luminous ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... certain Roman prince is bankrupt. The sale of his gallery would certainly relieve the pressure, and would possibly free him from debt altogether. But neither he nor his creditors can lay a finger upon the pictures, nor raise a centime upon them. This man, therefore, is permanently reduced to penury, and his creditors are large losers, while he is still de jure and de facto the owner of property probably sufficient to cover all his obligations. Fortunately, he chances to be childless, a fact consoling, perhaps, to the philanthropist, ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... went for aide and socour to the kynge of Tuscaye / whiche whan he [C.v.r] could by no menes entreat the Romains to receiue agayn theyr kyng / he cam with all his puissaunce against the citie / & there long space besieged the Romaynes / by rea[-] son wherof / great penury of whete was in the citie / & the kynge of Tuscay had great trust / that continuynge the siege / he shulde within a litle lenger space compell the Ro[-] maynes ...
— The Art or Crafte of Rhetoryke • Leonard Cox
... Spanish or French. He was a German by birth, and lived to rise to the rank of colonel in the Spanish army, where he subsequently greatly distinguished himself, but he at length fell in some obscure skirmish in New Granada; and my old ally Morillo, Count of Carthagena, is now living in penury, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... individuals of an inferior description, the common peasantry of the Highland country, who, although they did not allow themselves to be so called, and claimed often, with apparent truth, to be of more ancient descent than the masters whom they served, bore, nevertheless, the livery of extreme penury, being indifferently accoutred, and worse armed, half naked, stinted in growth, and miserable in aspect. Each important clan had some of those Helots attached to them: thus, the MacCouls, though tracing their descent from ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... would say right, provided I possessed now what I then carried about with me in my journeys—the spirit of youth. Youth is the only season for enjoyment, and the first twenty-five years of one's life are worth all the rest of the longest life of man, even though those five- and-twenty be spent in penury and contempt, and the rest in the possession of wealth, honours, respectability, ay, and many of them in strength and health, such as will enable one to ride forty miles before dinner, and over one's pint of port—for ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... of dismay, shriekings and blood, the city was in ashes, and the wretched victims of man's pride and revenge were conducted to the vicinity of Kief, where they reared their huts, and in widowhood, orphanage and penury, commenced life anew. Gleb himself in this foray was taken prisoner, conducted to Kief, and detained there a captive ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... a second nature. He considered them not only lawful, but praiseworthy employments. He could not help lying and cheating if he tried. By so doing, he had heaped up hoards of wealth—he had raised himself from abject penury, and how could he be expected to persuade his conscience, or what stood him in place of one, that he had not been acting rightly. True his gold was of no real use to him—he had no one to enjoy it with him—he had no relative to whom he could leave it. Some might say that it would ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... in no mood to listen to the dictates of squeamish principles from a man who lacked the spirit and power—the will to raise her out of the mire of penury into which he had helped to plunge her. The hours of dreary, hopeless labor; the weeks and months of dismal and grinding poverty had sunk deeply into her soul. No price was too high to pay to escape these ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... graduate its volume to the amount needed and which shall prevent times of artificial stringency that frighten capital, stop employment, prevent the meeting of the pay roll, destroy local markets, and produce penury ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... destiny, however, which pursued him fast, suffered him not again to breathe the Italian air. After struggling for many days with the adverse winds in the Ionian Sea, he was wrecked on the island of Zante, where he quickly breathed his last in such penury that unless a liberal goldsmith had defrayed the funeral charges, his remains must have been devoured by beasts of prey. At the time of his death he was scarcely ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... circumstances, she could have acquired sufficient courage to address the noble persons mentioned by her husband, the ill success of his own application caused her to banish the idea. She saw therefore no escape from dire penury: perpetual care, joined to sorrow for the loss of the wondrous being, whom she continued to contemplate with ardent admiration, hard labour, and naturally delicate health, at length released her from the sad continuity of want ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... this Jew befriended him, and gave him help and money out of his own store, which was but small. Now, after they had been awhile in the strange city, it happened that the poor Jew spent all his little money, and he too fell ill, and was in great penury. And now it was Laertes who befriended that Ebrew Jew. He fee'd doctors; he fed and tended the sick and hungry. Go to, Laertes! I know thee not. It may be thou art justly exul patriae. But the Jew shall intercede ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rhapsodized once more about her future she was thinking of her immediate penury. As she approached the street of her residence she realized that she must either starve till pay-day or borrow. It was a bad beginning, but better than a hopeless ending. After several gasps of hesitation she ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... of the opposite sex, to that of those miserable victims and outcasts of a world which dares to call itself virtuous, whom that very society whose pernicious institutions first caused their aberrations,—consigning them, without one tear of pity or one struggle of remorse, to penury, infamy, and disease,—condemns to bear the burden of its own atrocious absurdities! Thus, the youth of one sex is consumed in slavery, disappointment, and spleen; that of the other, in frantic folly and selfish ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... Justine Delande, to whom Alan Hawke left all his dearly bought bribes; and also the money he left hidden at Granville—jewels and notes to the value of ten thousand pounds more. The wages of sin, even death, was all he gained, and, strangely, through him, Justine will be shielded from penury; for she bears a broken heart. All that she knows is ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... glimpse of green curtains yellowed by the sun. He read the word "Offices," stamped in black letters on an oval copper-plate; he rapped, nobody answered, and he went in. The place, worse than humble, conveyed an idea of penury, or avarice, or neglect. No employe was to be seen behind the brass lattice which topped an unpainted white wooden enclosure, breast-high, within which were tables and desks in stained black wood. These deserted places were littered with inkstands, in which ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... years connected with its principal theatre, but writing nothing for its stage, not even as a "hack-writer." We respectfully dissent from this conclusion because it lacks support either in fact or probability. The man who, from utter penury, had in 1589 won his way to a lucrative share in the theatre he made illustrious, and who wrote "Romeo and Juliet," which first appeared, according to Ulrici's investigation, in 1592, was more capable of ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... therefore kindlier eyes. The enmity of Fortune is fairly disarmed by his patience; her shots are all wasted against his breast, garrisoned as it is with the forces of charity and peace: his soul is made storm-proof by gentleness and truth: exile, penury, the ingratitude of men, the malice of the elements, what are they to him? he has the grace to sweeten away their venom, and to smile the sting out of them. He loves to stay himself upon the compensations ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... them were dismissed also. When he came to the abolition of the pensions, he says,—"I proceeded with great pain, from the reflection that I was the instrument in depriving whole families, all at once, of their bread, and reducing them to a state of penury: convinced of the necessity of the measure, I endeavored to execute it with great impartiality." Here he states the work he was employed in, when he took this two hundred pounds a day for his own pay. "It was necessary to begin with reforming the useless ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... preacher, looking toward the Jew, paid a tribute to the antiquity and loyalty of the better class of Jews, and said that it was well known that one of his own forerunners in the Christian ministry, dying in penury from the consequences of a marital mistake, had been befriended in his death and in his posterity by a gallant follower of the House ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... of comfortable living, as already hinted, has been greatly raised, and is still rising. What would have satisfied the ancient would seem to us like penury. We have a domestic life of which the Greek knew nothing. We live during a large part of the year in the house. Our social life goes on under the roof. Our houses are not mere places for eating and sleeping, like the houses of the ancients. It therefore costs ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... riddle, quite a riddle!" said she.—"To chuse to remain here month after month, under privations of every sort! And now to chuse the mortification of Mrs. Elton's notice and the penury of her conversation, rather than return to the superior companions who have always loved her ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... variety. Some were stupid and ungracious, hardened and dulled with long penury as some in this world are hardened and dulled with long riches. Some were as fat as beggars; some were old and shrivelled; some were shrivelled and young; some were bold; some were frightened; and here and there ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... and none were found who, under all the strange circumstances would take upon them the charge of an infant, about to be immediately forsaken by its mother. At length, one of the maid-servants at the inn remembered to have heard Mrs Brandon say, that rather than live on among all her squalidness and penury, she would endeavour to suckle another child besides her own; and, as she was then in redundant health, and had two fine breasts of milk,—for a fine breast of milk would not have served my turn, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... roughly speaking, the use of mechanical power had increased it more than a hundredfold during the century; yet the result had been to create a limited upper class, living in unexampled luxury, while about one-fourth of the whole population existed in a state of fluctuating penury, often sinking below the margin of poverty. Many thousands were annually drawn into this gulf of destitution, and died from direct starvation and premature exhaustion or from diseases produced by ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... but they had been long since sold. The vicarage, still in their gift, might be worth a little more than L100 a year. The present incumbent had nothing else to live upon. He was a good man, and not originally a stupid one; but penury and the anxious cares for wife and family, combined with what may be called solitary confinement for the cultivated mind, when, amidst the two legged creatures round, it sees no other cultivated mind with which it can exchange an extra-parochial ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... inasmuch as his age is better suited for the enjoyment of them— him, poor {youth}, have I driven away from home by my severity! Were I to do this, really I should deem myself deserving of any calamity. But so long as he leads this life of penury, banished from his country through my severity, I will revenge his wrongs upon myself, toiling, making money, saving, and laying up for him." At once I set about it; I left nothing in the house, neither movables[27] nor clothing; every thing I scraped ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Magister Sententiarum, from his compilation of extracts relating to the doctrines of the Church, under the title of Sententiarum Libri IV. In the proem to his work he says that he desired, "like the poor widow, to cast something from his penury into the treasury of ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 3, Paradise [Paradiso] • Dante Alighieri
... upon content for the deficiencies of fortune.' As my eldest son was bred a scholar, I determined to send him to town, where his abilities might contribute to our support and his own. The separation of friends and families is, perhaps, one of the most distressful circumstances attendant on penury. The day soon arrived on which we were to disperse for the first time. My son, after taking leave of his mother and the rest, who mingled their tears with their kisses, came to ask a blessing from me. This I gave him from my heart, and which, added to five guineas, was all the patrimony I had ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... richest; but now it was old and threadbare. His hands were once white and elegantly shaped; now they were dirty, and blue with cold. His face once beamed with contentment; now it was worn with care and marked by the hard lines of penury. ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise, To what we fear ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... call out the clan in her husband's absence. Subsequently, when that Earl and his son were confined in the Tower of London for the part which they took on her advice, and when the Countess with ten children, and bearing another, were suffering the severest hardships and penury, the Rev. Colin, at great risk to himself and the interests of his family, collected the rents from the Cromarty tenants, giving his own receipt against their being required to pay again to the Forfeited Estates Commissioners, and personally carried the money to her ladyship in London. ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... is great and enduring, the Methodist Church had its beginning among the humble and lowly. Rocked in the cradle of penury and ignorance, it was firmly fixed in the foundations of society, whence it rose from its own purity of doctrine and simplicity of worship to command the respect, love, and adoption of the highest in the land, and to wield an influence ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... few obstacles that perseverance will not overcome; and penury and a parent's obstinacy were both surmounted by Kirke White's importunity. Finding it useless to chain him longer to the hosier's loom, he was placed in the office of Messrs. Coldham and Enfield, Town Clerk and attorneys of Nottingham, some time in May, 1799, when he was in ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... the angelic aspect of human nature displayed itself by preference in the house of poverty, as if those who possessed no other treasure, no other jewels with which to adorn themselves, were compensated for their penury in other ways by these priceless gems of the most unselfish virtue. Such conduct, of course, is not universal. There are abundant instances of the opposite. But the truth remains that it is the worth which those who seem to lead the least desirable lives display toward others that ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... sensibilities as they, as fine and flexible affections, as bright an imagination, beautifying every object on which its rainbow colours rest, and who have been equally tried by affliction and misconstruction, and equally tempted by brilliant opportunities of pleasure in the intervals of penury and pain—these, if they stand fast, may be allowed to speak, and they will seldom speak uncharitably, of their brethren who have fallen; or, if they fall, they may be heard to plead a somewhat similar excuse. But let ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... despise the acquisition of good repute and pleasure. They are only making grand pretensions, and they do not really despise these things. They go about in torn raiment and with solemn visage, and live the life of penury and hardship as a bait, to make people believe that they are lovers of good conduct, temperance, ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... they had been born and reared in rude settlements. They never indulged the delusion that this region was a land flowing with milk and honey. Before they came they knew that they were to wrest their living from an uncongenial soil, to struggle with penury and to conquer only by constant toil and self-denying thrift. The forest would supply them with the materials for shelter and fuel and to some extent with food and clothing. All the rest must depend upon their ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... ideas of plenty, satisfaction, cleanliness, warmth; a cheerful house, elegant furniture, ready service, and whatever is desirable in meat, drink, or apparel. On the contrary, when a poor man appears, the disagreeable images of want, penury, hard labour, dirty furniture, coarse or ragged clothes, nauseous meat and distasteful liquor, immediately strike our fancy. What else do we mean by saying that one is rich, the other poor? And as regard or contempt is the natural ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... Purposeless fairy tales and profitless ghost stories for the most part, with another class of legend, equally fatuous; but ah! how legitimately born of that auroral fancy which ceases not to play above the grave of homely ambition, penury—crushed and dead! Legends wherein the unvarying motif was a dazzling cash advance made by Satan in pre-payment for the soul of some rustic dead-beat; delivery being due in seven years from date. And a clever repudiation of covenant, with consequent non-forfeiture of ensuing clip, always ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... not know whether to smile or to drop a tear, as we contemplated these baits hung out to tempt the coins from the exiguous purses of ancient maidens, forlorn widows, withered annuitants, stranded humanity in every stage of shipwrecked penury. I am reminded of Thackeray's "Jack Spiggot." "And what are your pursuits, Jack? says I. 'Sold out when the governor died. Mother lives at Bath. Go down there once a year for a week. Dreadful slow. Shilling whist.'" Mrs. Gaskell's picture of "Cranford" is said to have ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... old Arthur Gride, in whose face there was not a wrinkle, in whose dress there was not one spare fold or plait, but expressed the most covetous and griping penury, and sufficiently indicated his belonging to that class of which Ralph Nickleby was a member. Such was old Arthur Gride, as he sat in a low chair looking up into the face of Ralph Nickleby, who, lounging upon the tall office stool, with his arms upon ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... the gloom of her prison into the streets of Paris, she found herself a widow, homeless, almost friendless, and in the extreme of penury. But for her children, life would have been a burden from which she would have been glad to be relieved by the executioner's axe. The storms of revolution had dispersed all her friends, and terror ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... a period of the most absolute penury; unpopular with most of his messmates for his melancholy taciturnity, despised by the more brutal as one who had as little stomach for a carouse as for a bloody fight, he left the ship without receiving, or even ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... sombre and mysterious figures enveloped in the gloom of the chilliest penury; these beings would dine there daily for a couple of years and then vanish, and the most inquisitive regular comer could throw no light on the disappearance of such goblins of Paris. Friendships struck ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... Life than what she was born and first brought up in, resolve to return to her primitive Poverty, rather than give up her Innocence.} I say, it is surprising, that a young Person, so circumstanced, could, in Contempt of proffer'd Grandeur on the one side, and in Defiance of Penury on the other, so happily and prudently conduct herself thro' such a Series of Perplexities and Troubles, and withstand the alluring Baits, and almost irresistible Offers of a fine Gentleman, so universally admired and esteemed, for the Agreeableness of his Person and good Qualities, among ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... lovely gardens are now only remembrances—your family circles are broken up—your bravest sons are sleeping in the dust of death, or weeping tears of bitterness in exile—your daughters, bowed down with penury and grief, are mourning beside their darkened firesides—your joyous households transferred to other and kindlier lands. The forms of my kindred faded into phantoms of the past—strangers sit now in the place that once was mine; but yet, thou art lovely, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... rose-tree blooms again After a night of rain. There are complacent widows clothed in crepe Who simulate a grief that is not real. Through paths of seeming sorrow they escape From disappointed hopes to some ideal, Or, from the penury of unloved wives Walk forth to opulent lives. And there are widows who shed all their tears Just at the first In one wild burst, And then go lilting lightly down the years: Black butterflies, they flit from flower to flower And live ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... friendship made to him that day—her suggestions of visits to be paid to Ashley and herself, with introductions to a greater world—he swept them aside. He quite understood that she was offering him the two mites that make a farthing out of the penury of her resources, and, while he was touched by the attempt to pay him, he didn't ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... word recurs again and again under his pen, the idea presents itself incessantly to his mind, under every shape, as though he were possessed by it: "fole," "frantyk," "ydiote!" He sees around him nothing but dismal spectres: Age, Penury, Disease. ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... conquer in softening the harshness of those beasts; and the sweat and labor that it would cost him to make them comprehend the dictates of reason (from which they were very far), while he was suffering extreme penury in all things necessary to life, can be imagined. His food was only wild herbs and some fruit, which was not on all occasions accompanied by a mouthful of biscuit, sent as a great treat, if possible, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... hands and hair were old, But neither time nor penury Could quench within Llewellyn's eyes The shine of ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... Browning paints through her, the idea of the full, the perfect man; and it is not the ideal of the cultivated, of the sensitive folk. It is more also a woman's than a man's ideal. For, now, suddenly, into the midst of the sorrow of the house, every one wailing, life full of penury and inactivity, there leaps the "gay cheer of a great voice," the full presence of the hero, his "weary happy face, half god, half man, which made the god-part god the more." His very voice, which smiled ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the man handed him a raged shirt over the top of it, while I sat in a chair and dreamed. What I reflected, would the School say if it but knew! I felt no remorce. I was there, and beyond the screan, changing into the garments of penury, was the only member of the Other Sex I had ever felt ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... follow with grim half-suppressed laughter as he speeds into the trap. The hoary cripple cannot hide his malicious glee, the "stiff blind horse" is as grotesque as he is woeful, the dreary day itself, as it sinks, shoots one grim red leer at the doomed knight as he sets forth; in the penury and inertness of the wasted plain he sees "grimace"; the mountains fight like bulls or doze like dotards; and the Dark Tower itself is "round and squat," built of brown stone, a mere anticlimax to romance; while round ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... movements set in and struggle to the front and go down when most was expected of them. You will see in the morning the crowd repent of its enthusiasm of the night before. You will find cowards where you expected heroes and see the best condemned to the suffering and penury that weaken the bravest. Your heart will ache and your stomach will hunger and your body will be bent and your head gray and then you may think that the world is not moving and that you have wasted your life and that none are grateful ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... gas-bags—fetid air-bubbles, who burst and are gone. Our men of wealth and character, of worth and power, have been early bound to some useful Employment. Many of them were unfortunate orphan boys, whom want compelled to work for bread—the children of penury and lowly birth. In their early boyhood they buckled on the armor of labor, took upon their little shoulders heavy burdens, assumed responsibilities, met fierce circumstances, contended with sharp opposition, ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... we found ourselves reduced to eighteen-pence a day, while the poor midshipmen had only sixpence—a sum on which they could barely exist. We did our best to help them out of our own pittance; but to all of us it was like falling from affluence to penury. Misfortunes, it is said, never come alone. Certainly at that time we experienced plenty of them. We were all sitting together discussing what was best under our circumstances to be done, when ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... complexion, what self-conceit, how little firmness in his features! he is made to write ballads. The man who is with him and looks like a match-hawker, is a great music celebrity—Gigelmi, the greatest Italian conductor known; but he has gone deaf, and is ending his days in penury, deprived of all that made it tolerable. Ah! here comes our great Ottoboni, the most guileless old fellow on earth; but he is suspected of being the most vindictive of all who are plotting for the regeneration of Italy. I cannot think how they ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... replied Borgert, coolly; "it is the only way out of all our difficulties, and it is not the first time I have had the thought. Is it not better to put an end to this dog's life than to die by inches in penury and distress?" ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... would find the same substantial goodness among the people, resulting (as you say) from the funded virtues of many good humble men gone by. I hope you will continue to teach us all, as you have done, to make some use and profit of all this: at least, not to let what good remains to die away under penury and neglect. I also hope you will have some mercy now, and in future, on the 'Hebrew rags' which are grown offensive to you; considering that it was these rags that really did bind together those virtues which have transmitted down to us all the good you noticed in Derbyshire. If the old creed was ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... would flame up in Ona sometimes—at night she would suddenly clasp her big husband in her arms and break into passionate weeping, demanding to know if he really loved her. Poor Jurgis, who had in truth grown more matter-of-fact, under the endless pressure of penury, would not know what to make of these things, and could only try to recollect when he had last been cross; and so Ona would have to forgive him and sob herself ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... crest to-day, the hero is in the trough to-morrow. Moses, yesterday a deserted slave child, to-day adopted by a king's daughter; David, but yesterday a shepherd boy with his harp, and to-day dwelling in the King's palace; men yesterday possessed of plenty, to-day passing into penury—these illustrate the extremes of life. These contrasts are as striking as those we find on the sunny slopes of the Alps. There the foothills are covered with vineyards, while the summits have everlasting snow. In Wyoming hot ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... in nine cases out of ten the inventor is limited in means,—if none can be found who are both able and willing to lend a helping hand to modest merit; for true genius is ever modest; and unfortunately the term is too often synonymous with penury and want. ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various
... divert her mind from death by grotesque tales, even throwing himself astride a chair and persuading her through subjective suggestion, that he is the forerider of a beautiful chariot in which she is seated, so that the poor woman, who all her life long has felt the pinch of penury, dies with a vision of wealth and glory before her eyes created for her by the son, worry over whom has hastened her death. In keeping with the lyric trend of his genius, Grieg has ignored the grotesque and ghastly humor of the ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... brokers, they create untold ravage and despair. Fearful cruelty is shown by them then. The law cannot reach it, though years of imprisonment would be far too good for it. Families are plunged into penury by their subtly circulated frauds; forgery and embezzlement in hundreds of individual cases result; banks are betrayed and shattered; disgrace and suicide are sown broadcast like seeds fecund in poison. One often marvels that assassination does not spring up in certain ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... and several billets-doux, to the great scandal of the weaker brethren. An anonymous note amongst them, the writer of which I thought I had guessed, let me into a mistake which I think better not to relate. This rich harvest, in my great penury, caused me to entertain serious thoughts of becoming a preacher, and I confided my intention to the parson, requesting his assistance to carry it into execution. This gave me the privilege of visiting at his house every day, and I improved the opportunity of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... September when he was liberated, and, by the further assistance of his benefactor, he was enabled to set up for himself in the fair then held in St. James's. Success crowned his undertaking, and in three days, instead of being in penury, he saw himself possessed of thirty pounds, English money. Let those who know the peasantry of Ireland, judge of his riches! He now commenced a regular exhibition of his person, which he continued until the last two years of his life, when, having realized a sufficient fortune to keep a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 20, No. 567, Saturday, September 22, 1832. • Various
... was as remarkable for its profusion as that of Wolf's Crag had been for its ill-veiled penury. The Lord Keeper might feel internal pride at the contrast, but he had too much tact to suffer it to appear. On the contrary, he seemed to remember with pleasure what he called Mr. Balderstone's bachelor's meal, and to be rather disgusted than pleaseed with the ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... his London constituents, urging them to clamour for the only remedy, "to unite to put an end to a system which has proved to be the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter divisions among classes, the cause of penury, fever, mortality, ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... days from the date of her widowhood been a tender woman; but no change made any alteration on the Christian contentment of her mind. She bore adversity with an honest pride; she toiled in the day of penury and affliction with thankfulness for her earnings, although ever so little. She bent her head to the Lord in resignation when her first-born fell in battle; nor was she puffed up with vanity when her daughters were married, as it was ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... were reserved to fates not less abortive and wretched. The first entered the navy as surgeon-mate, but was discharged for drunkenness. He died in penury, an outcast. Harman became a portrait painter in New York, but he lost his strength of body and mind, and finally perished in an almshouse on Blackwell's Island. His body lies buried beside that of his mother, in the family ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... family." When a member of the latter occupied the throne, the Court enjoyed opulence, owing to its possession of the extensive Chokodo estates; but when the sovereign was of the Daigaku-ji line comparative penury was experienced. There can be little doubt that, throughout the complications antecedent to this dual system, the Fushimi princes acted practically as spies for the Bakufu. After all, the two Imperial families were descended from a common ancestor and should have shrunk from the disgrace of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Correspondent I had met in the Transvaal led me to expect. Indeed, after six months of successful lecturing on the subject of the Boers before various lyceums in the country, I was reduced to a state of penury which actually drove me to thievery of the pettiest and most vulgar sort. There was little in the way of mean theft that I did not commit. During the coal famine, for instance, every day passing ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... speak of it! Who is to pay your debts? You know how your gambling on the turf has ruined us—brought us to the very verge of disgrace and penury, and now, when you can help to set the old name straight again, you refuse—refuse!" She ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... recognise the true meaning of that dreadful disclosure! Arthur was not angry with him—he felt too fully at that moment what depths of genuine silent hardship uncomplainingly endured were implied in the stoically calm frame of mind which could treat Edie Le Breton's penury of luxuries as a comparatively slight matter: after all, his father was right at bottom; such mere sentimental middle-class poverty is as nothing to the privations of the really poor; yet he could ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... besides the visible signs which we have mentioned, another symptom which was none the less significant for not being visible. This never deceives. When the population suffers, when work is lacking, when there is no commerce, the tax-payer resists imposts through penury, he exhausts and oversteps his respite, and the state expends a great deal of money in the charges for compelling and collection. When work is abundant, when the country is rich and happy, the taxes are paid easily and cost the state nothing. It ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... survived them all, and inherited from many of them; which had been a hard thing in its time. One day the lawyer had been more than ordinarily pressing. He had told her stories of men who had died intestate, and left trouble and penury behind them to those whom they would have most wished to preserve from all trouble. It would not have become Mr. Furnival to say brutally to Lady Mary, "This is how you will leave your godchild when you die." But he told her story after story, ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... father has more than once been compelled to pay his debts, and has angrily refused to do so again. In fact, he has lost a large part of his once handsome fortune, and bids fair to close his life in penury. Success has come to Ben because he deserved it, and well-merited retribution to Tom Davenport. Harvey Dinsmore, once given over to evil courses, has redeemed himself, and is a reputable business man in New York. Mrs. Hamilton still ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the housetops. He wanted all the world to hear. He wished that he might gather his wealth together and drop it piece by piece among the multitude. To give where he had been given, to blossom with abundance where he had withered with penury! ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... beasts of burden, for the purpose of conveying supplies to the garrison in Alhama. But the sovereigns experienced great embarrassment from the want of funds. There is probably no period in which the princes of Europe felt so sensibly their own penury, as at the close of the fifteenth century; when, the demesnes of the crown having been very generally wasted by the lavishness or imbecility of its proprietors, no substitute had as yet been found in ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... There were times when in his dreams he had even returned to the domestic ark, and in the result a day of welcome and comparative peace, then discord and jangling strife as before, and the ever weighing-down, depressing, crushing consciousness of squalid penury for the rest of his natural life. From such visions he had awakened, awakened with a start of exultant gratulation, to find the glow of the African sun streaming into the room; every nerve tingling with a consciousness of strength and braced-up vigour; his mind rejoicing to look ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... kings and parasites arose? Whence that unnatural line of drones, who heap Toil and unvanquishable penury On those who build their palaces, and bring Their daily bread? From vice, black, loathsome vice, From rapine, madness, treachery and wrong; From all that genders misery, and makes Of earth this thorny wilderness; from lust, Revenge ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... the Pennyless early in the spring of 1096, within a very few months after the Council of Clermont. Each man of that irregular host aspired to be his own master. Like their nominal leader, each was poor to penury, and trusted for subsistence on his journey to the chances of the road. Rolling through Germany like a tide, they entered Hungary, where, at first, they were received with some degree of kindness by the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... brother in it; the ardent young Corsican would be nearer his native land, and might, perhaps, be detached for service in his home. They were both nominated in September, but the appointment was not made until the close of October. Buonaparte was reduced to utter penury by the long delay, his only resource being the two hundred livres provided by the funds of the school for each of its pupils until they reached the grade of captain. It was probably, and according to the generally received account, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the domestic finance, while her face assumed a curious expression of contemptuous thrift. It was as if she was making her reckoning with scrupulous accuracy and at the same time ridiculing her own penury and promising herself that there would come a time when she should make calculations concerning the treasures of emperors. She was deluding herself with dreams of the time when she should have crowned herself queen or made herself the hidden tyrant-saviour of an industry. He detested her ambition: ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... futurity. They believed, with the wildest inconsistency, that this preternatural dominion of the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised, from the vilest motives of malice or gain, by some wrinkled hags and itinerant sorcerers, who passed their obscure lives in penury and contempt. [47] The arts of magic were equally condemned by the public opinion, and by the laws of Rome; but as they tended to gratify the most imperious passions of the heart of man, they were continually proscribed, and continually practised. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... it must be confessed, that they have not many allurements but to the mere lover of naked nature. The inhabitants are thin, provisions are scarce, and desolation and penury give little pleasure.' Johnson's Works, ix. 153. In an earlier passage (p. 138), in describing a rough ride in Mull, he says:—'We were now long enough acquainted with hills and heath to have lost the emotion that they once raised, whether ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... watched with her intent dark eyes; Constance Bride did not feel kindly disposed towards the Church of England as by law established. She had seen her mother sink under penury and humiliation and all unmerited hardship; she had seen her father changed from a vigorous, hopeful, kindly man to an embittered pessimist. As for herself, sound health and a good endowment of brains enabled her to make a way in the world. Luckily, she was a sole child: her ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... school-fellows together again, Lucien was weary of drinking from the rude cup of penury, and ready for any of the rash, decisive steps that youth takes at the age of twenty. David's generous offer of forty francs a month if Lucien would come to him and learn the work of a printer's reader came in time; David had no need whatever of a printer's reader, but he saved Lucien from despair. ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... poor man can abide Oppression, want, the scorn of pride, The curse of penury, Companion of his lonely state, He is no longer desolate, And still can brave an adverse fate, With honest worth ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... "I needed not. Talk for you is good discipline. You converse imperfectly. While you speak, there can be no oblivion of inferiority—no encouragement to delusion: pain, privation, penury stamp ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... hunger, beggary, and external wretchedness? These were an inevitable consequence. It was by the desertion of mankind that, in each successive instance, I was made acquainted with my fate. Delay in such a moment served but to increase the evil; and when I fled, meagreness and penury were the ordinary attendants of my course. But this was a small consideration. Indignation at one time, and unconquerable perseverance at another, sustained me, where humanity, left to itself, would probably ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... intelligent are aware that the zeal of devotion is warmed by good fare, and the sincerity of piety rendered more serene in a nicety of vesture; for it is evident what ardor there can be in a hungry stomach; what generosity in squalid penury; what ability of travelling with a bare foot; and what alacrity at bestowing from an empty hand:—Uneasy must be the night-slumbers of him whose provision for to-morrow is not forthcoming: the ant is laying by a store in summer that she may enjoy an abundance in winter. It is clear that ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... Nature's feelings newly flow; Yet tenderness and time may rob the tear Of half its bitterness for one so dear: A nation's gratitude perchance may spread A thornless pillow for the widow'd head; May lighten well her heart's maternal care, And wean from penury the soldier's heir." ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... for good, and hatred for His love,(19) He had steadfastly pursued His mission of mercy. Never were those repelled that sought His grace. A homeless wanderer, reproach and penury His daily lot, He lived to minister to the needs and lighten the woes of men, to plead with them to accept the gift of life. The waves of mercy, beaten back by those stubborn hearts, returned in a stronger tide of pitying, inexpressible love. But Israel ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... circumstances of his stay until the extraordinary day of the club festival may be passed over very cursorily. There were a number of skirmishes with Mrs. Hall on matters of domestic discipline, but in every case until late April, when the first signs of penury began, he over-rode her by the easy expedient of an extra payment. Hall did not like him, and whenever he dared he talked of the advisability of getting rid of him; but he showed his dislike chiefly by concealing it ostentatiously, and avoiding his visitor as much as possible. ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... I congratulated myself on this sort of indifference or literary penury; an indiscreet person, sustained by zeal or talent, might have wished to mortify me in a romance combined of satire ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... is nothing more Frequent in the Temptations of the Devil, then for our Adoption to be doubted, because of our Affliction. When our Lord was in his Penury, then says the Devil, If thou be the Son of God; he now makes an If, of it; What? the Son of God, and not be able to Command a Bit of Bread! Thus, when we are in very Afflictive Circumstances, this will be the Devils Inference, Thou art not a Child of God. The Bible ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather |
