"Toper" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... further, may read at their leisure the pleasant paper in which an agreeable writer, Fontenelle, describes Aristotle and Anacreon contending for the prize of wisdom; and may decide with the essayist, giving the prize to the generous old toper of Scios, as we should have done, or to the beetlebrowed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... of the romances appears already in Kulhwych, while in Geoffrey he is Arthur's seneschal.[440] Nobler traits are his in later Welsh poetry; he is a mighty warrior, fighting even against a hundred, though his powers as a toper are also great. Here, too, his death is lamented.[441] He may thus have been a god of war, and his battle-fury may be poetically described in a curious passage referring to him in Kulhwych: "His breath ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... first he adventures on wheels, Has little control of his head or his heels. With knees on the shake, and arms shrinking, He scrambles about on the slippery floor, Like a toper at large, or a mad semaphore, Half wishing he hadn't ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... in your accidence yet, Sir Traveller, if you call on your host for help for such a sipping matter as a quart of sack; Were it a gallon, you might lack some neighbouring aid at my hand, and yet call yourself a toper." ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Barrel, in the Gallery of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, contains in the chief figure a pronounced reminiscence of Titian's picture; while the unconventional attitude of the amorino, or Bacchic figure, in attendance on the god, is imitated without alteration from that of the little toper whose action Vasari ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... it!" said the toper to the shepherd with much satisfaction. "When I walked up your garden before coming in, and saw the hives all of a row, I said to myself, 'Where there's bees there's honey, and where there's honey there's ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... suffice for many a day to come; the evening is scarce over before elfin suggestions of possible rides for the morrow are floating about in the air, and when morning comes the automobile is taken out,—very much as the toper who has sworn off the night before takes his morning dram,—it just ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... Droop," said the delighted old toper, leaning back against the wall as he beamed across the table at his companion, "look you! An you have a butt of this same brew, Sir Percevall Hart is your slave, your scullion, your foot-boy! Why, man, 'tis the elixir of life! It warms a body like a maid's ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... "I caught a toper alone, over his magnum of port," said a very dark Shadow; "and didn't I give it him! I made delirium tremens first; and then I settled into a funeral, passing slowly along the length of the opposite wall. I gave him plenty of plumes and mourning coaches. And then I gave him a ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... drinking. Hayes kept up his reputation as a toper, and swallowed one, two, three bottles without wincing. He grew talkative and merry, and began to sing songs and to cut jokes; at which Wood laughed hugely, and Billings after him. Mrs. Cat could not laugh; ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Twelfth Century, Walter Mapes, "The Jovial Toper." His famous drinking song, "Meum est prepositum ..." has been translated by Leigh ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... turning out a terrible tea toper," said Colville, stirring his cup in front of the old lady whom his relations to the ladies at Palazzo Pinti had interested so much. "I don't think I drink less than ten cups a day; seventy cups a week is a low average for me. I'm really ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... old toper," cried Clenk delightedly, waxing jocose in his relief, "ye been swindling me! Ye hev been playin' sick to trick me out ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... who skillfully mixes the Surrentine wine with Falernian lees, collects the sediment with a pigeon's egg: because the yelk sinks to the bottom, rolling down with it all the heterogeneous parts. You may rouse the jaded toper with roasted shrimps and African cockles; for lettuce after wine floats upon the soured stomach: by ham preferably, and by sausages, it craves to be restored to its appetite: nay, it will prefer every thing ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... obscure corner of the saloon, there was a little Picture excellently done, moreover of a ragged, bloated, New England toper, stretched out on a bench, in the heavy, apoplectic sleep of drunkenness. The death-in-life was too well portrayed. You smelt the fumy liquor that had brought on this syncope. Your only comfort lay in the forced ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... screaming with alarm and laughter; if one of them lost her balance and fell she was captured with shrieks of merriment and forced to mount her insecure eminence again. Presently the car of Dionysus came to wreck over the body of an unconscious toper, but no one stopped to set it right; and though the hapless representative of the god howled loudly to them to stop while he extricated himself from the machine, in which he had stuck, it was in vain; the score or so of youths ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in a tavern to die, Place to my dying lips the flowing bowl, May choirs of angels coming from on high Sing, 'God be gracious to the toper's soul.'[42] ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... he exclaims, 'at the Evangelical people, have they become any better? Do they yield less to luxury, lust and greed? Show me a man whom that Gospel has changed from a toper to a temperate man, from a brute to a gentle creature, from a miser into a liberal person, from a shameless to a chaste being. I will show you many who have become even worse than they were.' Now they have thrown the images out of the churches and abolished mass ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... in their cups. Among the ancient northern nations, it was customary to drink out of large horns, in which were placed small pins, like a scale of distances, and he who quaffed most was considered as a toper of the first magnitude, and respected accordingly. The merry pin was that which stood pretty far from the mouth of the horn, and he who, at a draught, reduced the liquor to that point, was a man of no ordinary prowess ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... of various kinds,—a painting of a premium ox, a lithograph of a Turk and of a Turkish lady, . . . . and various showily engraved tailors' advertisements, and other shop-bills; among them all, a small painting of a drunken toper, sleeping on a bench beside the grog-shop,—a ragged, half-hatless, bloated, red-nosed, jolly, miserable-looking devil, very well done, and strangely suitable to the room in which it hangs. Round the walls ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Feeble Fainwou'd, a doting old alderman and his rival, having procured his pardon from the King to prevent it being granted if applied for a second time, and keeping this stratagem secret, next forges a letter as if from the Hague which describes in detail Bellmour's execution for killing a toper during a tavern brawl. He then plies his suit with such ardour that Leticia, induced by poverty and wretchedness, reluctantly consents to marry him. On the wedding morning Bellmour returns in disguise ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... ailments, and a brief life, mainly depend upon ourselves. There are thousands who practice errors day after day, and whose pervading thought is, that everything which is agreeable and pleasing cannot be hurtful. The slothful man loves his bed; the toper his drink, because it throws him into an exhilarative and exquisite mood; the gourmand makes his stomach his god; and the sensualist thinks his delights imperishable. So we go on, and at last we stumble and break down. We then begin to reflect, and the truth stares us in the face ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... with contempt of claret,—'A man would be drowned by it before it made him drunk,' adding, 'Poor stuff! No, sir, claret is the liquor for boys: port for men: but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy!' Most toper sentiments! But Ramsay did not stint his guests. And these were constantly of a noble order. Lord Bute, the Duke of Newcastle, Lord Bath, Lord Chesterfield, and the Duke of Richmond were often at the painter's table, discussing ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... a ship Left without a sailor, Like a bird that through the air Flies where tempests hale her; Chains and fetters hold me not, Naught avails a jailer; Still I find my fellows out, Toper, ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... extraordinary receipt for "hot coppers" was intended satirically, or else given seriously as the only advice that a confirmed toper was likely to follow in any case. But the use of classical adjuncts to adorn Christian tombs, which to-day appears so incongruous to us, was popular enough at the time of the Renaissance, and readers of Robert Browning's ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan |
