"Spendthrift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Kosciuszko's mother died, leaving her two daughters married, the eldest, spendthrift, and most beloved son out on his own, and Tadeusz still a cadet. With his mother's death Kosciuszko's financial troubles began. For the greater part of his life he never knew what it was to have a sufficiency of means. His brother held the estate and apparently ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... understanding, patience, dexterity, and an independent income." Equally judicious and equally well-expressed is the following passage upon the Penns:—"Thomas Penn was a man of business, careful, saving, and methodical. Richard Penn was a spendthrift. Both were men of slender abilities, and not of very estimable character. They had done some liberal acts for the Province, such as sending over presents to the Library of books and apparatus, and cannon for the defence of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... as a Tory, a spendthrift, and a bigot, which is the one I usually meet in society, mamma. But please do not let us quarrel. I always try to be polite to your mixtures. For Mr Gresham's sake, be ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... has the habit of drudging in sick rooms until she accumulates enough capital to lead a gay life for a month or so, after which she resumes nursing in order to replenish her purse. She's a good nurse and a wild spendthrift, but aside from the peculiarity mentioned there's nothing in her career of especial interest. The woman is pretty well known both in New York and Chicago, for she squanders in the first city and saves in the other, but of her early history there is no information available. In her wildest ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... that boy of mine a lecture," he said quickly; "he is a perfect spendthrift and prodigal with regard to the midnight oil, and burns both ends of his candle ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... that there was anything remaining to be seen of these miserable relics. This auction, however, the heirs of Lucius Rubrius prevented from proceeding, being armed with a decree of Caesar to that effect. The spendthrift was embarrassed. He did not know which way to turn. It was at this very time that an assassin sent by him was said to have been detected with a dagger in the house of Caesar. And of this Caesar himself complained in the senate, inveighing openly against you. Caesar ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... unprecedented. Then the British on the other side of the frontier began to murmur and "to consider whether it was possible to endure a neighbour who was so cruel and so unpopular." All doubts as to whether the limits of endurance had or had not been reached were removed when the impecunious and spendthrift king not only imposed a very unjust fine of some L150,000 on the Bombay-Burma Trading Corporation, but also had the extreme folly to "throw himself into the arms of France"—a scheme which was at once communicated by M. Jules Ferry ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... more I'll ask you to depart with me, I'll go alone: but this remember still— Gay have I been, a spendthrift and an idler, A brilliant fly that buzzed about the bloom. But I had that in me deep down, and still, Of which you, you alone, possess the key, A sullen nobleness to you disclosed E'en then with shame: and by no ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... the back of the chair she had vacated a vicious blow with his open hand. "No, you spendthrift! All there was TO your grandfather when you buried him was a basket full of distillery stock, I tell you! Old paper! Can't you hear ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... my Christian charity and forbearance to keep from actually twitting her on the spot. I can't help but pity the forlorn creature, though. She's married that little spendthrift, who was brought up in idleness to rely on his expectations. They don't either of them know anything about work, now they are thrown upon their own resources. That is not the worst of it. The boy has dissipated habits, that I fear will cause Cynthia yet to bitterly ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... sunshine, and the fact that the Duchessa was walking by his side, had gone to his head like wine. If the expenditure of coppers could impart one tenth of his happiness to others, he would fling them broadcast, he would be a very spendthrift with his gladness. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... sweetly. "Just talking. You're the original little spendthrift, Harry. I'm going to write home to your folks some time and warn 'em. Hold on, you chaps, don't hurry off. The night is still in its infancy. Wait and watch it grow up. ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... thief, the poet takes The golden spendthrift's trail among the blooms Where she stands tossing silver in the lakes, And twisting bright swift threads on airy looms. Her ring the poppy snatches, and the rose With laughter plunders all her gusty plumes. The poet gleans and gathers as she goes Heedless of summer's ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... the spendthrift heir of the Tractarians, which, with little of the intellectual force that gave so signal a power to the Oxford Movement, endeavours to make up for that sad if not fatal deficiency by an almost inexhaustible credulity, a marked ability in superstitious ceremonial, a not very modest assertion of the ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... abbey lands in the immediate vicinity were given to Shearman, the King's Physician. Spellman, in his book on sacrilege, cites Cullerne as an instance where church lands brought ruin to their new owner's family; for Shearman had a spendthrift son who squandered his patrimony, and then, caballing with Spanish intriguants, came to the block in Queen ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... like the spendthrift forsaken, By those whom his bounty had blest, All empty, and cold, and despairing, It shrinks in ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... in Turk and other Wars; with little profit to himself or others. Used to like his glass, they say; is still very poor, though now Duke in reality as well as title (succeeded two egregious Brothers, some years since, who had been spendthrift): he has still one other beating to get in this world,—from Friedrich next year. Died altogether, two years hence; and Wilhelmina heard no ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... especially that part of it called Grubb's Court, and had already dug up a few nuggets and diamonds, one of which latter she brought to her humble home in the back street, with the design of polishing it into a good servant-maid. Its name was Netta White. Mrs Stoutley had formerly been a spendthrift; now she was become covetous. She coveted the male diamond belonging to the same part of the moraine—once named the Spider, alias the Imp—but Captain Wopper had dug up that one for himself and would not part with it. Gradually the good lady conceived and carried out ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... to Congress from Alabama a roistering blade by the name of McConnell. He was something of a wit. During his brief sojourn in the national capital he made a noisy record for himself as an all-round, all-night man about town, a dare-devil and a spendthrift. His first encounter with Col. John W. Dade, of Virginia, used to be one of the standard local jokes. Colonel Dade was seated in the barroom of Brown's Hotel early one morning, waiting for someone to come in and invite him ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... this particular kiss was genuine. The parties in the case were Mrs. Phebe Mayflower, the newly-married wife of honest Tom Mayflower, gardener to Mr. Augustus Scatterly, and that young gentleman himself. Augustus was a good-hearted, rattle-brained spendthrift, who had employed the two or three years which had elapsed since his majority in "making ducks and drakes" of the pretty little fortune left him by his defunct sire. There was nothing very bad about him, ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... vegetables I could see, and made a bundle as large as I could carry on my back. I had come to the house in a four-horse wagon richly laden; with a bundle on my back I left it; and yet I had been neither wicked nor a spendthrift. But what if even that bundle were stolen goods? It is true that the contents were my own; but that I should carry them off, was it not theft? I hardly knew: notions of right and wrong, the legal or the illegal, were confused in my head. I fled with the ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... determination of the Imperial to make itself known. She had been brought up to believe that, gas being dear, no opportunity should be lost of turning a jet down, and that electricity was so dear as to be inconceivable in any house not inhabited by crass spendthrift folly. She now saw electricity scattered about as though it were as cheap as salt. She saw written in electric fire across the inner entrance the beautiful sentiment, "Our aim is to please YOU." The ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... Spendthrift—short of drink and dinners, Half-pay captain, younger son, Boldly throw while all are winners, Laugh henceforth at debt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Did you ever see me gloating over gold, or hoarding sixpences, or going stealthily in the dead of night to secret places for the purpose of counting over my wealth? Have I not rather, on the contrary, got credit among my friends for being somewhat of a spendthrift? But go on, old fellow, what more have you to say against gambling—for you have not yet ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... forces may be put at 42 divisions. But the story is incomparable! Everything contributed—the fame of the ancient fortress, the dynastic and political interests involved, the passion of patriotism which the struggle evoked in France, the spendthrift waste of life on the part of ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at a shadow, The child with his Santa Claus faith, The woman who worships Dame Fashion, Each man with his notions of death, The miser who hoards up his earnings, The spendthrift who wastes them too soon, The scholar grown blind in his delving, The lover who stares ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... "and a spendthrift. A man who would have his friends, and possibly his enemies, among a ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... from commenting upon this extravagant and spendthrift trait in his character, even to Uncle Amazon. Nor would she have spoken to anybody else upon ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... few pounds she carried about her person. In these circumstances prudence would have suggested leaving such a cipher as Khamoor in Syria, but that seems not to have occurred to her. It is probable, however, that the spendthrift was not she but her husband, for when she came to be a widow she not only proved herself an astute business woman, but accumulated wealth. On reaching London she found Burton "in one room in a very small hotel." ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... care of the old spendthrift's money, and not only then but as long as he lived. "The Secretary of the Treasury is my banker," said Steuben, years after. "My Hamilton takes care of my money when he cannot take ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... combative disposition. Most of them had found scope for their energies in wresting a few more barren acres from the grasp of moss and moor; but several times an eccentric genius had scattered to the winds what the rest had won, and Geoffrey seemed bent on playing the traditional role of spendthrift. There were, however, excuses for him. He was an ambitious man, and had studied mechanical science under a famous engineer. Perhaps, because the surface of the earth yielded a sustenance so grudgingly, a love of burrowing was born in the family. ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... a spendthrift glory of state and color, the water was as if translated to celestial climes, ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... may be a humanitarian given over to the kindliest solicitude for the common good, or a religious devotee hedged about in all his motions by the ever present fear of God, or taken up with artistic, scholarly or scientific pursuits; or, again, he may be a spendthrift devotee of profane dissipation, whether in the slums or on the higher levels of gentility, or he may be engaged on a rapacious quest of gain, as a businessman within the law or as a criminal without its benefit, or he may spend his best endeavors in advancing the interests of his class ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... to these spendthrift Irish Fitzgeralds through their grandmother, the last of an old ducal race. And two generations of Hibernian influence had curtailed the fine fortune which went with it, until Sir Patrick often felt it no easy matter to make both ends meet in the ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... to say? He is a timid, cautious man. They have frightened him about this trumpery necklace, and he is behaving badly. But he will make a good husband. He is not a spendthrift. He has rank. All his people are respectable. As Lady Fawn, any house in England will be open to you. He is not rich, but together you will ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... Slender expense for so vast a guerdon! This huge payment for a little poem exceeded the glory of Caesar's recompense; for it was enough for the divine Julius to pension with a township the writer and glorifier of those conquests which he had achieved over the whole world. But now the spendthrift kindness of the populace squandered a kingdom on a churl. Nay, not even Africanus, when he rewarded the records of his deed, rose to the munificence of the Danes. For there the wage of that laborious volume ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... been a scamp from his cradle, a spendthrift at Eton and Oxford, a blackleg in his manhood. False to men, false to women. Clever? Yes, undoubtedly, just as Satan is clever, and as unscrupulous as that very Satan. This was what his friends said of him over their wine. And now he was rumoured to have sold the British ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... mind, like some wild spendthrift, Has drawn upon my heart till it is bankrupt. God, how my soul is weary! I fear the sword Of that Don Felix may prevail against him. He is a man well knit in sinewy strength; Gaspar a boy. O spare him, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... there, because I did not care to pass by The Chequers in the procession. Most people had a good word for poor Bob, and many kind fellows could not mention him without the tears coming into their eyes. Only the spongers were indifferent; but they had, of course, to look around for another liberal spendthrift. Bob was so young, and bright, and brave; I never knew a straighter or a kinder man, and I have seen few who had so much ability. He drifted into drunkenness by accident, and the vice had him hard by the throat before he found out that he was really a prisoner. ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... the spendthrift, the gambler—the austere would call her the chartered libertine—of the group of pretty country towns which encircle Paris; for Lacville is in the proud possession of a Gambling Concession which has gradually turned what was once the quietest of inland watering-places into ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... the man himself was at least as important as his work. "As to his talk" — I quote again from Mr. Somerset — "he was a spendthrift. I mean that he never saved anything up as those writer fellows so often do. He was quite inconsequent and just rippled on, but was always ready to attack a careless thinker. On the other hand, he was extremely tolerant of fools, even bad poets who are the ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... be influenced by the importunity of every idle acquaintance, who may talk to her of the necessity of her daughter's being taken notice of in public, of the chances of an advantageous establishment, of the good fortune of Miss Y——, or lady Angelina X——, in meeting with a coxcomb or a spendthrift for a husband; nor will she be moved with maternal emulation when she is further told, that these young ladies owed their success entirely to the superiority of their accomplishments: she will consider, for one moment, what is meant by the ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... human affairs, had said a word or two—"I have heard a whisper about you and Lady Glencora McCloskie; nothing could be better." The result had been undoubtedly good. His Cora and all her money had been saved from a worthless spendthrift. He had found a wife who he now thought had made him happy. And she had found at any rate a respectable husband. The idea when picked to pieces is not a nice idea. "Let us look out for a husband for this girl, so that we may get her married,—out of ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... nameless terrors upon the soul of his victim. If he were abandoned by his powerful protector, what would become of him? His very desire of money, and the avarice which prompted him to grudge making any provision for his sisters, was, after all, not real avarice, but the spendthrift's longing for more to spend. The house which he was sentenced to give up represented not so much gold and silver, but so many pleasures, fine dinners, and bad company. He could order the dinners by himself, it is ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... so they all shook hands with the spendthrift and slapped him on the back in good fellowship, and said they knew all the time he had a heart of gold and they feel free to say now that once the money has passed he won't be let to go off the place till he has heard all about ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... province, more especially if he has conquered in himself the passions of jealousy and envy, which tear the covetous mind; why may not the man whose object is money, be understood to lead a life of amusement and pleasure, not only more entire than that of the spendthrift, but even as much as the virtuoso, the scholar, the man of taste, or any of that class of persons who have found out a method of passing their leisure without offence, and to whom the acquisitions ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... said, one day; The stage a world—was what he meant to say. The outside world's a blunder, that is clear; The real world that Nature meant is here. Here every foundling finds its lost mamma; Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa; Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid, The cheats are taken in the traps they laid; One after one the troubles all are past Till the fifth act comes right side up at last, When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... consecrated fruit At life's end for the Sabbath supper meet. I shall not sit beside you at that feast, For ere a seedling of my golden tree Pushed off its petals to get room to grow, I stripped the boughs to make an April gaud And wreathe a spendthrift garland for my hair. But mine is not the failure God deplores; For I of old am beauty's votarist, Long recreant, often foiled and led astray, But resolute at last to seek her there Where most she does abide, and crave with ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... mercantile cosmopolite, stable in statistics and learned in the leger, here interposes an erudite suggestion: "Man is a calculating animal." Surely, so he is, unless he be a spendthrift; but he still shares his quality with others; for the squirrel hoards his nuts, the aunt lays in her barley-corns, the moon knoweth her seasons, and the sun his going down: moreover, Chinese slates, multiplying rulers, and, as their ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... heartless villain!" she screamed. "Is this, the way you play upon people: bringing me from my home to console a maniac, and, instead of that, you are only what you always were, a spendthrift and a scamp? Finely ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... though my cargo prospered, yours outshines The best of it. Take it, my lad, and go; You're a rich man; and, if you use it well, Riches will make you richer, and the world Will prosper in your own prosperity. The miser, like the cold and barren moon, Shines with a fruitless light. The spendthrift fool Flits like a Jack-o-Lent over quags and fens; But he that's wisely rich gathers his gold Into a fruitful and unwasting sun That spends its glory on a thousand fields And blesses all the world. Take it ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... penury incurred By endless riot, vanity, the lust Of pleasure and variety, despatch, As duly as the swallows disappear, The world of wandering knights and squires to town; London engulfs them all. The shark is there, And the shark's prey; the spendthrift, and the leech That sucks him. There the sycophant, and he That with bare-headed and obsequious bows Begs a warm office, doomed to a cold jail And groat per diem if his patron frown. The levee swarms, as if in golden pomp Were charactered ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... allowance when his father passed away from the place in Lincolnshire, and young Sir Grant, reigning in the old baronet's stead, deemed himself generous in making the family scapegrace any provision at all. Yet such were the outlines of Mr. Musselwhite's history. Had he been the commonplace spendthrift, one knows pretty well on what lines his subsequent life would have run; but poor Mr. Musselwhite was at heart a domestic creature. Exiled from his home, he wandered in melancholy, year after year, round a circle of continental resorts, ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Mr. ROBERT HICHENS continues his present spendthrift course, whatever Board controls the consumption of paper will have to put him on half rations. I believe that his literary health would benefit enormously by such a regime. This was my first thought in contemplating the almost six hundred pages of In the Wilderness (METHUEN), ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 28, 1917 • Various
... her grief, she declares her business to be the discovery of an absconding husband. But near her is another and truer type of outraged womanhood, a wasted young wife, beautiful as ruins are beautiful, whom a rascal spendthrift has made a martyr to his selfishness until, patience and hope being exhausted, she is driven to the last extremity, and seeks by a means at which her nature revolts for a proof of but one of those numerous violations of the marriage ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... if prominent, indicates ability as an artist, generosity, courageousness, and a poetical nature, apt to be a spendthrift. When not well developed, it indicates cautiousness ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... Sah-luma!" he said smiling slightly, yet with a touch of sorrow in his voice. "But methinks the consolement thou wouldst offer to enamoured maids is far more dangerous than lasting! Thy love to them means ruin,—thy embraces shame,—thy unthinking passion death! What!—wilt thou be a spendthrift of desire?—wilt thou drain the fond souls of women as a bee drains the sweetness of flowers?—wilt thou, being honey- cloyed, behold them droop and wither around thee, and wilt thou leave them utterly destroyed and desolate? ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a lone man, for his wife was dead, and his son had turned out to be a rake and a spendthrift, spending all his substance upon ...
— Welsh Fairy-Tales And Other Stories • Edited by P. H. Emerson
... had paid her scot. She was free. She paid for what she had. There remained moreover thirty-two shillings of her own. She would not spend any, she who was naturally a spendthrift, because she could not bear to ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... they'll go to their mothers and ask, with tears in their eyes, why they ever were born. Or will it be worth while? No. They are hardly important enough; the public don't heed them. But the four hundred pounds is remarkably important—to any one looking forward to having an extravagant spendthrift of a wife on his hands, and so you see, Linn, everything promises well. And I will say good-night to you now—though I am not leaving the house yet—oh, no!—you can send the nurse for me if you ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... natural under the circumstances, but in no other way did she appear conscious of that clash on the Chilkoot trail. It was not a pleasant situation at best, and Joe especially was ill at ease, but Courteau continued his spendthrift role, keeping the waiters busy, and under the influence of his potations the elder McCaskey soon regained some of his natural sang-froid. All three men drank liberally, and by the time the lower floor had been cleared for dancing they were in a hilarious ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... C, the borrowing landlord, is a spendthrift, who burdens his land not to increase his fortune but to squander it, expending the amount in equipages and entertainments. In a year or two it is dissipated, and without return. A is as rich as before; he has no longer his ten thousand pounds, but he has a lien on the land, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... trivial, but redeemed by the lightness of his touch, the avoidance of redundancy, the inevitable epithets, the culminating point and finish. He illustrates the extravagance of the day by the spendthrift Clodius, who dissolved in vinegar a pearl taken from the ear of beautiful Metella (Sat. II, iii, 239), that he might enjoy drinking at one draught a million sesterces, near a thousand pounds. More than once he returns to castigation of the gluttony, which, though not yet risen ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... our own pitiable change! The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... away their money for safety, making use of the chimney, or the wainscot or skirting-board. There it frequently remained; and such depositories of the family wealth were occasionally, from death and other causes, completely forgotten. In one of Hogarth's well-known pictures, the young spendthrift, who has just come into his inheritance, is being measured by a fashionable tailor, when, from behind the panels which the builders are ripping down, is seen falling a perfect shower of ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... absent from Mr. Wells's work; the background of it is disagreeable. Hence its complete lack of magic, of charm. And without some touch of these qualities, the a peu pres of journalism, of that necessarily hurried and improvised work which is the spendthrift of talent, can never become literature, as it once did—under the golden ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... walked to the station in Kensington High Street could not help thinking that this way of putting it was lofty. Even Mrs. Arbuthnot, spendthrift of excuses for lapses, thought Mrs. Fisher might have used other words; and Mrs. Wilkins, by the time she got to the station, and the walk and the struggle on the crowded pavement with other people's umbrellas had warmed her blood, ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... kitchen in anticipation of our supper, she had been afraid to leave the cat alone in the house, lest we should find nothing left to eat when we returned. This was sufficiently prudent for a scatter-brained old spendthrift ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... reserve, resting as it did on the immense prestige of Leopardi, asserted itself even in the naturally exuberant and impetuous genius of Carducci. Without it we should not have had those reticences of an abounding nature, those economies of a spendthrift, which make him one of the first poets of the sonnet in the land of its origin, and one of the greatest writers of Odes among the 'barbarians'. With reason he declared in 1891, when most of his poetry had been written, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... me. (A little later, he opens the door and looks into the room, pen in hand.) Bought, did you say? All these things? Has my little spendthrift been ...
— A Doll's House • Henrik Ibsen
... "because it's so delightfully and beautifully and terribly like Ronicky to write such a letter and tell of such plans. He's given away a lot of money to help some spendthrift, and now he's gone to get more money by finding a lost mine!' But do you see what it means, Caroline? It means ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... curious to read the lectures which the wiser heads give to those who are meditating a change. They talk with them as we talk with a spendthrift, and ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... scattered their lavish gold to the foot of the hills, where the green billows of wild oats carried it on and upwards to the darker crests of pines. For two months she was dazzled and bewildered with color. She had never before been face to face with this spendthrift Californian Flora, in her virgin wastefulness, her more than goddess-like prodigality. The teeming earth seemed to quicken and throb beneath her feet; the few circuits of a plow around the outlying corral was enough to call out a jungle ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... painful contrast; and yet the soil is the same, being two portions of the same domain; he sees that the latter is the portion of the abbe-commendatory." "The abbatial manse." said Lefranc de Pompignan, "frequently looks like the property of a spendthrift; the monastic manse is like a patrimony whereon nothing is neglected for its amelioration," to such an extent that "the two-thirds" which the abbe enjoys bring him less than the third reserved by his monks.—The ruin or impoverishment of agriculture ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... threw their luxuriant branches around the elms. The grapes, overripe, had fallen on the ground, or hung purple, or burnished green, among the red and yellow leaves. The ears of standing corn winnowed to emptiness by the spendthrift winds; the fallen foliage of the trees, the weed-grown brooks, the dusky olive, now spotted with its blackened fruit; the chestnuts, to which the squirrel only was harvest-man; all plenty, and yet, alas! ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... many cases the work done was quite unsuitable for women. The employment of married women during long days of tiring work had inevitable results. Babies were neglected or births were deliberately prevented. This spendthrift folly will have to be ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... is what is usually called a managing woman. Doesn't make a bad thing, for instance, even out of the spendthrift habits of my eldest brother abroad. In short, a managing woman. This is ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... spendthrift so golden But its kinsman to Nature beholden, For raiment its beauty to fold in, Deep-dyed as of trogon or lory, How with parrot-bill fringes 'tis burning, One blood-red ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... given to too much precision, and the other disorderly in habits; if the one be spendthrift and the other oversaving; if the one be loquacious, and the other reticent, forbear. Especially, if you both have inflammable tempers, do not both get mad at once. Take turn about! William Cowper put it well when ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... must now tell you that my cousin, Count Melvil, was some time ago so much misrepresented to his mother by certain malicious informers, who delight in sowing discord in private families, that she actually believed her son an extravagant spendthrift, who had not only consumed his remittances in the most riotous scenes of disorder, but also indulged a pernicious appetite for gaming, to such a degree, that he had lost all his clothes and jewels at play. In consequence of such ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... and valuable possession, but not to the spendthrift, to whom it becomes a temptation to vice. Better be poor forever, and, by the sweat of the brow, eat your daily bread, maintaining, at the same time, a pure and unblemished character, than to have a fortune that only induces ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... Cicero, Quintilian, Valerius Maximus, and Pliny, seem to agree. And if, as the lecturer observes in a note, the painter is made to waste expression on inferior actors at the expense of a principal one, he is an improvident spendthrift, not a wise economist. The pertness of Falconet is unworthy grave criticism and the subject, though it is quoted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He assumes that Agamemnon is the principal figure. Undoubtedly Mr Fuseli is right—Iphigenia ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... you are just now. Make the fellow as useful to you as you please. He has a good manner and a frank countenance. He can lie with an assurance that I never saw surpassed, and fight, you say, on a pinch. The scoundrel does not want for good qualities; but he is vain, a spendthrift, and a bavard. As long as you have the regiment in terrorem over him, you can do as you like with him. Once let him loose, and the lad is likely to give you the slip. Keep on promising him; promise to make him a general, if you like. What the deuce do I care? There are ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hasn't got them at all. The only thing he's got is a million eggs and a sense of direction. If he had a spark of intelligence he'd lay one egg a year, like a hen, and thus live for a million years. But does he? Not on your Sarony! He's a spendthrift, and turns his eggs loose—a hatful at a time. He's worse than a shotgun. And then, too, he's as clannish as a Harvard graduate, and don't associate with nobody out of his own set. No, sir! Give me a warm-blooded ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... who thinks, as Taine thought, that sayings of this sort are mere commonplaces, will never understand Johnson: he may give up the attempt at once. The true commonplace is like the money of a spendthrift heir: his guineas come and go without his ever thinking for a moment where they came from or whither they go. But Johnson's commonplaces had been consciously earned and were {169} deliberately spent; he had made them himself, and when he handed them on to ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... have read," he said, "that the spendthrift evil was quite a serious one in your day. Our system has the advantage over yours that the most incorrigible spendthrift can not trench on his principal, which consists in his indivisible equal share in the capital of the nation. All he ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... return a proclaimed spendthrift, the mark of impertinent wonder, perhaps of scorn, and to encounter singly the reproaches or taunts of my fellow-citizens, was no alluring prospect. As a shield between me and censure, I invited some few ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... contrast to her handsome friend Olimpia Castaneve, who was really a beauty of the true Venetian mould. As sleek and sumptuous as a cat, as splendidly coloured as a sunburnt nectarine, crowned with a mass of red-gold hair, as stupid as she was sly, and as rich as she was spendthrift, the lovely Olimpia had been sent adventuring to the bees of Ferrara, not as lacking honey for Venice, but as being too great a treasure for her mother's house. Her mother was La Farfalla—a swollen butterfly in these days—and frankly said that she could ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the passage from Fungerus in a special paper on the subject in the Journal of Philology, vi., 189-95, points out that the same story occurs in the Masnavi of the Persian port Jalaluddin, whose floruit is 1260 A.D. Here a young spendthrift of Bagdad is warned in a dream to repair to Cairo, with the usual result ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... leer, and disgusting assumption of an air of gay abandon, emphasizes their hideousness and renders it more repulsive. Most of them have passed through the successive grades of immorality. Some of them have been the queenly mistress of the spendthrift, and have descended, step by step, to the foul, degraded beings of those human charnel-houses. In some instances fresh-looking girls will be seen, and careful inquiry will discover the fact that they were either emigrant or innocent country ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... the proceeds of the robbery in the remote corral, Chamorra exhibited the arrogance of a lion, granting his accomplice a few copper coins. This must be enough for the moment. He did this for Magdalena's own good, as Magdalena was such a spendthrift. Later he ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... some reluctance Louis consented that his brother should be appointed to the command of the army, desiring at the same time that he should receive fifty thousand crowns to defray the expenses of his equipment; and, although the spendthrift Prince lost the whole sum at the gaming-table during the course of a single evening, Richelieu did not venture upon further expostulation, the union of the two Queens, and the undisguised satisfaction of ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... arises from the shock of blasted hopes—or all together—that weight on the sinking heart, and make each vital throb like the last heavy thud of death. Then suicide has a charm and self-destruction a temptation. Many a turbulent wave has closed the career of a the beggared spendthrift and the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... Ida a hard-fisted miser before, but now she began to look like a slippery-palmed spendthrift. They began almost to suspect the probity of the poor old maid. Worse yet, they feared that a later will might turn up bequeathing all her money to some abominable charity or other. She had been addicted to occasional ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... that they had been away. They settled down into the quiet pool of Carthage without a splash, like a pair of mud-turtles slipping off a log into the water. Even the interest in Eddie's inheritance did not last long, for Uncle Loren's fortune did not last long—not that they were spendthrift, for they spent next to nothing; but money must be fed or it starves to death. Money ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... ginger-cakes. The dear boys grew from year to year. They outgrew their knickerbockers, and had trousers. They outgrew their jackets, and became men; and I felt that I had not lived in vain. I had conquered nature. Pompey, the little spendthrift, was the honored cashier of a savings-bank, till he ran away with the capital. Julius, the miser, became the chief croupier at the New Crockford's. One of those boys is now in Botany Bay, and the ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... the man got home he found the purse filled with dollars; and by virtue of its magical property he became the richest man in the parish. As soon as he found the purse always full, whatever he took out of it, he began to live in a spendthrift manner, and frequented the alehouse. One evening as he sat there he beheld the stranger, with a bottle in his hand, going round and gathering the drops which the guests shook from time to time out of their glasses. The rich peasant was surprised ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... young man of vain and shallow mind, of great profligacy of character, and perfectly prodigal in squandering, in ostentatious pomp, all the revenues within his reach. He had been sent an embassador to the court of Vienna. Surrounding himself with a retinue of spendthrift gentlemen, he endeavored to dazzle the Austrian capital with more than regal magnificence. Expending six or seven hundred thousand dollars in the course of a few months, he soon became involved in inextricable embarrassments. In the ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... Mis' Fire Chief fer the refusal of it,' he said. 'I ask' her when I took my flowers to Sum, to-day—they was wild flowers I'd picked myself,' he threw in, so's I wouldn't think spendthrift of him. 'An' I'm to let her know this ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... you wish to prevent this marriage; and why, pray? I have heard that Mademoiselle de Mussidan was formerly engaged to M. de Breulh-Faverlay. How comes it that the Count and Countess de Mussidan prefer a ruined spendthrift to a wealthy and strictly honorable man? It is for you to answer this question. It is perfectly plain to me that they hand over their daughter to De Croisenois under pressure of some kind, and that means that a terrible secret exists ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... heard others confess that only by "dearly bought experience" had they been induced to give up some bad or foolish course of conduct formerly pursued. Every one has heard, in the criticism passed on the doings of this spendthrift or the other schemer, the remark that advice was useless, and that nothing but "bitter experience" would produce any effect: nothing, that is, but suffering the unavoidable consequences. And if further proof be needed that the natural reaction ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... had fallen one morning when Phineas Everton came unannounced into my private office and asked me to send the stenographer away. The debacle had arrived, and I was no more ready to meet it than any other spendthrift of good repute caught ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... would not imagine that such conduct as will inevitably destroy what all are thus labouring to acquire, must generally be avoided? That he who spends more than he receives, must in time become indigent, cannot be doubted; but, how evident soever this consequence may appear, the spendthrift moves in the whirl of pleasure with too much rapidity to keep it before his eyes, and, in the intoxication of gaiety, grows every day poorer without any such sense of approaching ruin as is sufficient to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... life's morning, with disdainful laugh, Had quaffed the cup of pleasure to its dregs, And now, grown old, must pay the penalty In wrinkles and uncourted loneliness; The widow, who, but newly desolate, Would grasp a hand, then start to find it gone; The spendthrift and the sordid usurer, Who knew no sentiment save lust for gold; The bloated drunkard, sinking 'neath the weight Of wassail inclination dissolute; The youth, who, following his baleful steps, Reeled for the first time from intemperance; And she who had forgot her covenant, In brazen ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... successful work, usually precipitated the publication of another, relying on its crudeness being passed over by the public curiosity excited by its better brother. He called this getting double pay, for thus he secured the sale of a hurried work. But Churchill was a spendthrift of fame, and enjoyed all his revenue while he lived; posterity owes him ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... patience, and see your father To rifle up the treasure of my love, And play the spendthrift upon such an harlot! This same will make me ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... documents to carry out his nefarious designs. Be this as it may, from comparative poverty he speedily rose to wealth; and, as his means increased, so his avaricious schemes were multiplied and extended. His earlier days were passed in complete obscurity, none but the neediest spendthrift or the most desperate gambler knowing where he dwelt, and every one who found him out in his wretched abode near the Marshalsea had reason to regret his visit. Now he was well enough known by many a courtly prodigal, and his ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... true, he did not see him any more than I did. Drimdarroch, by all accounts, was a spendthrift, a player, a bavard, his great friends, Glengarry ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... spend whole nights in carding and dicing, in rioting and wantonness; thou that countest it a brave thing to swear as fast as the bravest, to spend with the greatest spendthrift in the country; thou that lovest to sin in a corner when nobody sees thee! O thou that for bye-ends dost carry on the hypocrite's profession, because thou wouldst be counted somebody among the children of God,[22] but art an enemy to the things of Christ in thine heart. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... moment; then he felt again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living and actual - it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune - that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for it; if he may ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hill-town gleam like snow. At such times Samminiato looms ghostly upon you and fades slowly out. The flush in the East faints and fails and the evening star shines like a gem. It is hot and still in the broad Piazza Santa Maria; they are lighting the lamps; the swarm grows of the eager, shabby, spendthrift crowd of young Italians, so light-hearted and fluent, and so prodigal of this old Italy of theirs—and ours. All this I have been watching as I might. Nature clings to the city, playing her rhythmic dance at the end ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... who sat with folded arms as the perfunctory motion was seconded and carried, was bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. Not a few there could recall his sturdy grandfather, a pioneer of Massachusetts birth, and everybody remembered his spendthrift father who had squandered the substance of three generations in drink. The man's own story was an open page which needed no thumbing of the Tuscarora County history to find. Born under the administration of Buchanan, the lad's palm was callous with work by the surrender of ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... At first it was a speechless delight to have as many novels as she pleased, and she thought Tom the very prince of bounty in not merely permitting her to read them, but bringing them to her, one after the other, sometimes two at once, in spendthrift profusion. The first thing that made her aware she was not quite happy was the discovery that novels were losing their charm, that they were not sufficient to make her day pass, that they were only dessert, and she had no dinner. When it came to difficulty in going on with a new one long enough ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... business sense, well along in any profession or occupation he might adopt. But it was and would have been a bagatelle to Eugene though ten times the amount, unless surrounded with conditions as impenetrable as chilled steel to a pewter chisel to resist the seductive ingenuity of his spendthrift nature. ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... follows Chopin's publications with the greatest attention and discusses them most fully is Rellstab, the editor of the Iris. Unfortunately, he is not at all favourably inclined towards the composer. He occasionally doles out a little praise, but usually shows himself a spendthrift in censure and abuse. His most frequent complaints are that Chopin strives too much after originality, and that his music is unnecessarily difficult for the hands. A few specimens of Rellstab's ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... young Blake, the son of the late Mathew Blake, and you are aware that he has been rather extravagant in his habits and ways of living, and although not exactly a spendthrift, undoubtedly spends more money than he ought to in many ways. The great trouble with him is his passion for race-horses, and that is what, one of these days, is going to break him financially, unless I am very ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... the world. In older times, when the Christian laborer was drained dry by the knightly spendthrift, and the spendthrift was drained by the Jewish usurer, Church and State, religion and law, seized on the Jew and drained him as a Christian duty. When the forces of lovelessness and greed had built ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... a miser, but after losing most of his money he became a spendthrift.—Beaumont and Fletcher, The ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... persons do in all their lives. He works all the year round: he thrashes in midwinter with the thermometer below zero. The hard times affect him no more than a fly would a rhinoceros. This is perfectly exasperating to the poor spendthrift, good-for-nothing, lazy part of the community. The tramp hired man is particularly mad about it; he declares the old farmer wants him to work all day for a sheep's head and pluck, and sleep under a cart at night. The tramp hired man entertains ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... Spendthrift of joy, his childish heart Danced to their wild outlandish bars; Then supperless he laid him down That night, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... have the eyes of one I used to know, But he died childless. Are you honest, boy? Then be not spendthrift of your honesty, But keep it to yourself; in Padua Men think that honesty is ostentatious, so It is not of the ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... each other in the streets. The homeless gamin, begging a sou with which to purchase a bed, and the spendthrift roue, scattering golden louis d'or, ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... so," he said, as soon as he had partially recovered breath; "I am the proprietor of the Holmford property—bought it for fifty-six thousand pounds of that young scant-grace and spendthrift, Palliser—fifteen thousand pounds less than what it cost him, with the outlay he has made upon it. Signed, sealed, delivered, paid for yesterday. Ha! ha! ho! Leave John Linden alone for a bargain! It's worth seventy thousand ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... clear, Beg the cold world to hear? Rather he sings for very rapture of singing, At dawn, or in the blue, mild Summer noon, Knowing that, late or soon, His wealth of beauty, and his high notes, ringing Above the earth, will make some heart rejoice. He sings, albeit alone, Spendthrift of each pure tone, Hoarding no single song, No cadence wild and strong. But one day, from a friend far overseas, As if upon the breeze, There came the teeming wonder of his words — A golden troop of birds, Caged in a little volume ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... the best robe, and put it on him.' That was the command. This detail, of course, like all the others, refers back to, and casts light upon, the supposed condition of the spendthrift when he came back. There he stood, ragged, with the stain of travel and the stench of the pig-sty upon his garments, some of them, no doubt, remains of the tawdry finery that he had worn in the world; wine-spots, and stains, and filth of all sorts on the rags. The father ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and elegant pages of Froissart, Hollinshed, Hooker, and Stowe. Infant as I was, I presumed to grapple with masses of learning almost beyond the strength of the giants of history. A spendthrift of my time and labor, I went out of my way to collect materials, and to build for myself, when I should have known that older and abler architects had already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice was built, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... limits of a banquet, for he squandered all the powers of soul and body in exhausting all the pleasures of earth. The table was in some sort earth itself, the earth that trembled beneath his feet. He was the last festival of the reckless spendthrift who has thrown all prudence to the winds. The devil had given him the key of the storehouse of human pleasures; he had filled and refilled his hands, and he was fast nearing the bottom. In a moment ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... metaphysical vein was much better fitted for the burlesque than the sublime. Yet the perpetual scintillation of Butler's wit is too dazzling to be delightful; and we can seldom read far in "Hudibras" without feeling more fatigue than pleasure. His fancy is employed with the profusion of a spendthrift, by whose eternal round of banqueting his guests are at length rather wearied out than regaled. Dryden was destined to correct this, among other errors of his age; to show the difference between burlesque and satire; and to teach his successors in that species of assault, rather to thrust than ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott |
