"Extravagance" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... earlier, had introduced in one of his Debates (Works, xi. 349). He makes one of the speakers say:—'Our expenses are not all equally destructive; some, though the method of raising them be vexatious and oppressive, do not much impoverish the nation, because they are refunded by the extravagance and luxury of those who are retained in the pay of the court.' See post, March 23, 1783. The whole argument is nothing but Mandeville's doctrine of 'private vices, public benefits.' See post, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... are concerned, being settled (which it can be, and shall be, when I see you tomorrow), I have no further delicacy about the matter. This is about the tenth execution in as many months; so I am pretty well hardened; but it is fit I should pay the forfeit of my forefathers' extravagance as well as my own; and whatever my faults may be, I suppose they will be pretty ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... open, to find a solid lump mysteriously arranged in the top of every one. The teasing she had to endure when the truth was known, was only equalled by that which fell to her lot a week later when, as if to make amends for past extravagance, she forgot to put any sugar at all in her sponge cake. Even Alan's appetite failed to compass the ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... by one, certain ladies of particularly elastic virtue, who fondly dreamed that they 'managed' him; and among these, to her infinite rage and despair, went Madame Vantine, wife of Vantine the winegrower, a yellow-haired, sensual "femelle d'homme," whose extravagance in clothes, and reckless indecency in conversation, combined with the King's amused notice, and the super- excellence of her husband's wines, had for a brief period made her 'the rage' among a certain set of exceedingly ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... and thorns. Great bunches of the same expensive ornament swung from the ceiling, and the piano was covered with a quilt of them deftly woven together. The pale green drawing-room was as lavishly decorated with pink and white orchids and lilies of the valley. Lady Mary felt that she could vie in extravagance with the most ambitious in her husband's ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... the country averting much of the danger; but I anticipate a terrible blow, and that the day is not remote when this town will awake to a sense of its illusion. What you see here is but a small part of the extravagance that exists, for it pervades the whole community, in one shape or another. Extravagant issues of paper-money, inconsiderate credits that commence in Europe; and extend throughout the land, and false notions as to the value of their possessions, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... and deep solemnity was suddenly diffused upon the assembly of world-worn people, to most of whom the things that mattered were those which gave them diversion. They were wont to swim with the tide of indolence, extravagance, self-seeking, and sordid pleasure now flowing through the hardy isles, from which had come much of the strength of the Old World and the vision and spirit of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Godwin, and the movement of emancipation of which Mary Wollstonecraft was the leader. The period of social and political ferment during which "Alcuin" was put forth was not unlike that which may be said to have reached its height in extravagance and millennial expectation in 1847-48. In "Alcuin" are anticipated most of the subsequent discussions on the right of women to property and to self-control, and the desirability of revising the marriage relation. The injustice of any more enduring union than that founded upon the inclination of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... still more indefensible causes, however, which too frequently drive the independent farmer out of the country. In too many cases it happens that the rapacity and dishonesty of the agent, countenanced or stimulated by the necessities and reckless extravagance of the landlord, fall, like some unwholesome blight, upon that enterprise and industry which would ultimately, if properly encouraged, make the country prosperous and her landed proprietors independent men. We allude to the nefarious and monstrous custom of ejecting tenants ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... years. According to a rather nebulous story, for which Johnson is the popular authority, Addison, or Addison's lawyer, put an execution for L. 100 in Steele's house by way of reading his friend a lesson on his extravagance. This well-meant interference seems to have been pardoned by Steele, but his letters show that he resented the favour shown to Tickell by Addison and his own ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... do not see that all this machinery amounts to taking away ten in order to return eight, without counting the fact that liberty will succumb under the operation." He tried to stem the tide of extravagance; he published a journal, the Republique Francaise, for the express purpose of promulgating his views; he entered the Constituent and then the Legislative Assembly, as a member for the department of Landes, and spoke eloquently from the tribune. He was a constitutional "Mugwump": ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the only points in which our city is worthy of admiration. We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it. Our public men have, besides politics, their private affairs to attend to, and our ordinary citizens, ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... tell me, then, which of us gives his health the same attention that he gives to his business? Do you economize your strength as you economize your money? Do you avoid excess and imprudence in the one case with the same care as extravagance or foolish speculations in the other? Do you keep as regular accounts of your mode of living as you do of your income? Do you consider every evening what has been wholesome or unwholesome for you, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... let you drag me into a quarrel," said Venetia; "you are putting things into my mouth. I think mad extravagance is worse than intoxication, inasmuch as it is committed by reasonable people uninfluenced by drugs or alcohol. I think insults levelled at inoffensive people are worse than the wildest deeds committed under the influence of ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... gentility, while luxury is its main prop and stay. Furthermore, that improvidence is a virtue of such lustre, that itself or its likeness is essential to the very existence of respectability; and, by carrying out this proposition, that in order to make the least amount of extravagance produce the utmost admiration and envy, it is desirable to be improvident as publicly as possible; the means for such expenditure being gleaned from retrenchments in the home department. Thus, by a system of domestic alchemy, the education of the children is resolved into a vehicle; a couple of maids ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... mirrored partition and got his topcoat and hat; said good night to such clerks as came in his way, and went out and bought a dozen daffodils from the Greek flower-vendor. All day he had been arguing with himself because of this small extravagance which tempted him, but now that it was settled and the flowers were in his hand, he was glad that he had bought them. Helen May loved all growing things. He set off briskly in spite of his aching back, thinking how Helen May would hover ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... saith to me, "Verily, that which our lord the Khalif hath done this night is beyond measure extravagant, never saw I any do the like of his fashion in any country; for he hath rent four dresses, each worth a thousand dinars, and this is surely excessive extravagance."' 'O man,' replied the youth, 'the money is my money and the stuff my stuff and this is by way of largesse to my servants and followers; for each suit that is rent belongeth to one of my boon-companions here present and I appoint him, in exchange therefor, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... Grain is scarce, the flour is spoilt, and the army bread, which was bad, has become worse. The administration, worm-eaten by old abuses, is deranged through the new disorder, the soldiers suffering as well through its dissolution as through their extravagance.—They think themselves robbed and they complain, at first with moderation; and justice is done to their well-founded claims. Soon they exact accounts, and these are made out for them. At Strasbourg, on these being verified before Kellermann and a commissioner of the National Assembly, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... That the Legislature of Iowa, as a police regulation, should put the power in some hands, carefully and wisely guarded from abuse and wasteful extravagance, to arrest by isolation and destruction, if necessary, any contagious disease which may suddenly be developed in any neighborhood. This, however, not to include any of doubtful contagious character, such as hog cholera; and ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... diamonds By their wives and their daughters, and leave them for days Unsupplied with new jewelry, fans or bouquets, Even laugh at their miseries whenever they have a chance, And deride their demands as useless extravagance. One case of a bride was brought to my view, Too sad for belief, but alas! 'twas too true, Whose husband refused, as savage as Charon, To permit her to take more than ten trunks to Sharon. The consequence was, that when she got there, At the end of three weeks she had nothing to wear; And when ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... loud-vaunted German system of espionage, had come fresh from his reading into contact with the actual agents. Their habit of lining their pockets at the expense of their Government, their unfulfilled pretensions, their vanity and extravagance, and, above all, their unimaginative stupidity in their estimation of men—these things were apt in the early years of the war to bewilder the man who had been so often told to fall down before the great ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... his father said, 'you know you have been bothering me for a new watch, but I told you I could not manage such a piece of extravagance now, and you would have to wait ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... all extravagance and mannerism, and be not over-timid at the outset. Be discreet and sparing of your words. Awkwardness is a great misfortune, but it is not an unpardonable fault. To deserve the reputation of moving in good society, something more is requisite than the avoidance of blunt rudeness. ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... be no doubt. We have many teachers who have never seen a truth in their lives. There are many who have never felt the impact of an idea. There are many who have lost their own orientation in their youth, and who have never since been able to point out the sunrise to others. It is no extravagance of language to say that diacritical marks lead to the cocaine habit; nor that the ethics of metaphysics points the way to the Higher Foolishness. There are many links in the chain of decadence, but its finger-posts ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... steps were taken by Ferdinand de Lesseps in 1879; two years later work was begun; the cost was estimated at L24,000,000, but on January 1, 1889, the company was forced into liquidation after spending over L70,000,000, and accomplishing but a fifth of the work. Extravagance and incapacity were alleged among the causes of failure; but the apparently insurmountable difficulties were marshes, quicksands, and the overflow of the Chagres River, the prevalence of earthquakes, the length of the rainy season, the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of all these blunders Necker was liked by the nation. He recognized the need of economy and honestly tried to reduce expenses. He succeeded in cutting off a little of the extravagance of the court and in simplifying the collection of the revenue. He tried to establish provincial assemblies and to equalize the incidence of the salt-tax. And above all, in order to sustain the ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... comparing the Timon of Athens of Shakespeare (which I have just mentioned) and Hogarth's Rake's Progress together. The story, the moral, in both is nearly the same. The wild course of riot and extravagance, ending in the one with driving the Prodigal from the society of men into the solitude of the deserts, and in the other with conducting the Rake through his several stages of dissipation into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the play and ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... 'An impossibility! a monstrous extravagance! a thing unheard of! mania! mania!' he muttered. 'You are aware, sir, that you have been doing your worst to destroy the settled arrangements of my family? What does it mean? In common reason you cannot indulge any legitimate hope of succeeding. Taking you as a foreigner, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... restrictions are in force in the N.W.F. Province. The Act is popular with those for whose benefit it was devised, and has effected its object of checking land alienation and probably to some extent discouraged extravagance. It has been supplemented by a still more valuable measure, the Co-operative Credit Societies Act. The growth of these societies in the Panjab has been very remarkable, a notable contrast to the very slow advance of the similar movement in England. In 1913-14 there ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... an ass," he ejaculated. "I'll give the things up; pay the duties; go to prison, if you like. The punishment is fine or imprisonment." He intended to be sincere in his offer of self-humiliation, though his speech savored of extravagance. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... same as those in Upper Canada: control of the purse, the independence of the judges, an elective Legislative Council, and a curtailment of the arbitrary powers and privileges of the Executive, which led to gross jobbery, favouritism, and extravagance. As in Upper Canada, the greatest practical grievance, though it assumed a somewhat different form, was the disposal of the public lands. Here, too, there were extensive and undeveloped Clergy Reserves for the Episcopalian Church, as well as free grants on ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... republics, those to whom power was delegated, being the servants of the people, acting solely for their benefit, ought to transact all national affairs in open day. This doctrine was not too absurd for the extravagance ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift. For economy is far more romantic than extravagance. To them stars were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... was a bitter disappointment in another quarter. He had an uncle in England, who was very rich, and who intended to leave him all his property. Some kind friend, to whom M—- had confided his expectations, wrote to England, informing the old man of his nephew's extravagance and hopes. The uncle there-upon cast him off, and left his property, when ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... atmosphere of Romano's loosened his tongue. After she had ordered supper, with every whit of the appetite and extravagance which he remembered as her chief characteristic, next to her beauty, and after each had been stimulated by a cocktail, he was conscious that he wanted to confide in her, not so much because she was Roselle, but because she was a woman, would ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... by the general people to whom they sung, or claimed by the peculiar tribe whose literature they ought to have immortalized? If everything else were wanting to prove the unity of Homer, this prodigious extravagance of assumption, into which a denial of that unity has driven men of no common learning and intellect, would be sufficient ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... reference to the ancestry of his opponent, and a suggestion that "this renegade Jew is descended from the impenitent thief, whose name was doubtless Disraeli." It was a home-thrust—a picture so exaggerated and overdrawn that all England laughed. The very extravagance of the simile should have saved the allusion from resentment; but it touched Disraeli in his most ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the twilight to the rectory. Miss Deborah Woodhouse had a genius for economy, which gave her great pleasure and involved but slight extra expense to the household, and she would have felt it a shocking extravagance to have kept on the dress she had worn to the wedding. Miss Ruth, who was an artist, the sisters said, and fond of pretty things, reluctantly followed ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... in the end, and we manufactured one out of an old chest protector. It had a really charming effect, and gave a delightfully warm tone to the room. The blue velvet we put in the kitchen. I deemed this extravagance, but Ethelbertha said that servants thought a lot of a good carpet, and that it paid to humour them ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... let it suffice to say that Nucingen and I have separate rooms, and that I would fling myself out of the window sooner than consent to any other manner of life. I suffered agonies when I had to confess to my girlish extravagance, my debts for jewelry and trifles (for our poor father had never refused us anything, and spoiled us), but at last I found courage to tell him about them. After all, I had a fortune of my own. Nucingen flew into a rage; he said that I should be the ruin of him, and used ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... Hawthorne was able to tread in that magic circle only by an exquisite refinement of taste, and by a delicate sense of humour, which is the best preservative against all extravagance. Both qualities combine in that tender delineation of character which is, after all, one of his greatest charms. His Puritan blood shows itself in sympathy, not with the stern side of the ancestral creed, but with the feebler ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... are two ways in which fashionable dress leads to unchastity; viz., 1. By its extravagance; 2. By its abuse ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... girl,' said the old man, pushing his spectacles up on his brow, and gazing at her, 'what is it now—some new extravagance?' ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... how "Robert, Duke of Normandy, the son of the Duchess Bertha by a fiend who donned the shape of man to prosecute his amour, arrives in Sicily to compete for the hand of the Princess Isabella, which is to be awarded as the prize at a magnificent tournament. Robert's dare-devil gallantry and extravagance soon earn him the sobriquet of 'Le Diable,' and he puts the coping-stone to his folly by gambling away all his possessions at a single sitting, even to his horse and the armour on his back. Robert has an ame damnee in the shape of a knight named Bertram, ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... white emerald is yet unknown; but this adds only to the Oriental-extravagance of the picture. I do not think with Lane (ii. 426) that "abyaz" here can mean "bright." Dr. Steingass suggests a clerical-error ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... forty-eight years of age on his accession to the throne. He was a man of a character very different from that of his father. Amiable, accessible, easily influenced, liberal-handed even to extravagance, he was deservedly popular. He had shown himself in the Peninsula, at Quatre Bras and Waterloo and later in the Ten Days' Campaign, to be a capable and courageous soldier, but he possessed few of the qualities either of a statesman or a financier. He had married in 1816 ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... "They'll take up more room than they're worth, and I doubt they'll fetch next to nothing if I leave 'em behind for the sale. My old man got 'em off a pedlar fellow for two-and-threepence apiece, back-along when we first set up house. A terrible extravagance, as I told 'en at the time; but he took such a fancy to the things, I never had the heart to say what I thought ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... contemporaries in the later seventeenth century. Claverhouse, with his powerful character and indomitable will, with his Titanic daring and relentless cruelty, has the face of a singularly beautiful young girl. Judge Jeffreys, whose delight in blood was only equalled by the foulness and extravagance of his profanity, looks in his picture the very type of spiritual wistfulness. Samuel Pepys, whose large oval eyes and clear-cut profile suggest a somewhat voluptuous and very fastidious aristocrat, was really a man ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... love of truth untinged by severity; his industry constant, without impatience; his workmanship accurate, without formalism; his temper serene, and yet playful; his imagination exhaustless, without extravagance; and his faith firm, without superstition. I do not know, in the annals of art, such another example of happy, ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... composition, written without regularity, and differing from comedy chiefly in the grotesqueness, extravagance and improbability of its characters ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... prospered in the family, whom I had the honour of serving in the capacity of confidential housekeeper. Mr Dacre became morose and careless of his affairs; his sons were a source of great misery to him, pursuing a course of reckless extravagance and heartless dissipation; while the five young ladies—the youngest of whom, however, had attained the age of twenty-four—cared for little else than dress, and visiting, and empty show. These five young ladies had not amiable dispositions or gentle manners; but they ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... whole, it cannot be denied that our table-service, simple as it was, has its advantages: it involved no necessity for any washing of dishes, no anxiety on the score of broken crockery, and we could indulge in the extravagance of a new dinner set every day, or even at every meal, for that ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... family had formerly large possessions in Cranbrook, but in the reign of Edward VI. great misfortunes fell on them; by extravagance and dissipation, they gradually lost all their lands, until an old house in the village (now used as the poor-house) was all that remained to them. The sole representative of the family remaining at the accession of Queen Mary, was Sir ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... by the want of money or credit; my pride was never insulted by the visit of an importunate tradesman; and my transient anxiety for the past or future has been dispelled by the studious or social occupation of the present hour. My conscience does not accuse me of any act of extravagance or injustice, and the remnant of my estate affords an ample and honourable provision for my declining age. I shall not expatiate on my oeconomical affairs, which cannot be instructive or amusing to the reader. It is a rule ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... victory of the tribunes and people was well nigh terminating in an extravagance of a by no means salutary tendency, a conspiracy being formed among the tribunes to have the same tribunes re-elected, and in order that their ambition might be the less conspicuous, to continue their office ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... that the royal Boz lives close to us, three doors from Mr. Kenyon in Harley Place? The new numbers appear to me admirable, and full of life and blood—whatever we may say to the thick rouging and extravagance of gesture. There is a beauty, a tenderness, too, in the organ scene, which is worthy of the gilliflowers. But my admiration for 'Boz' fell from its 'sticking place,' I confess, a good furlong, when I read Victor Hugo; and my creed is, that, not in his tenderness, which is as much his own ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... society we see extravagance keeping pace with prosperity, and indeed outstripping it, realizing Archbishop Whately's paradox: "The larger the income, the harder it is to ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... embellishment of his house-top. The parapet ordered by Moses became a potter's triumph; above that, later, arose towers, plain and fantastic; still later, kings and princes crowned their roofs with summer-houses of marble and gold. When the Babylonian hung gardens in the air, extravagance could push ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... England. In many parts, the recent restorations are quite evident; but other, and much the larger portions, can scarcely have been touched for centuries: for there are still the gargoyles, perfect, or with broken noses, as the case may be, but showing that variety and fertility of grotesque extravagance which no modern imitation can effect. There are innumerable niches, too, up the whole height of the towers, above and around the entrance, and all over the walls: most of them empty, but a few containing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... became terrible to all men, by tearing and rending those that came near him; and all this in order to raise himself, and out of an ambitious desire of the royal dignity; and he hoped to obtain that as the reward not of his virtuous skill in war, but of his extravagance in doing injuries. ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... which Horace commends as the sole specific for making men happy and keeping them so. For, as a matter of fact, and with special reference to the work we have undertaken to discuss, Mr. Froude, though cynical in his general utterances regarding Negroes-of the male sex, be it noted-is, in the main, all extravagance and self-abandonment whenever he [29] brings an object of his arbitrary likes or dislikes under discussion. At such times he is no observer, much less worshipper, of proportion in his delineations. Thorough-paced, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... the civic consciousness. It would have required a philosopher, and a detached philosopher at that, to have connected cause and effect, to have forecast the inevitable trend of events. If there were any philosophers they were not detached! Nobody had discovered the simple truth that extravagance, graft, waste, cost money; and that the money must come from somewhere. Realization on its property and taxes were the twin sources of the city's revenues. The property was now about all sold or swindled away. Remained the taxes. And it is a self-evident truth that people will pay high taxes cheerfully ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... back his left sleeve and, whipping out a knife, nicked himself therewith on the wrist and squeezed thence a few drops of blood into the wine; which done, he passed the knife to me and I (though misliking the extravagance of the ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... by any means a rich man, although he had a little property besides his benefice; but he managed to send me to Oxford. Inheriting, as I suspect, a little tendency to extravagance; having at least no love of money except for what it would bring; and seeing how easily money might be raised there for need true or false, I gradually learned to think less and less of the burdens grievous to be borne, which a subjection to Mammon will accumulate ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... Pepys's musical setting in recitative of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy. If we accept the reasonable theory that that piece of music preserves something of the cadences of Betterton's enunciation, it is no extravagance to suggest that a note here or there enshrines the modulation of the voice of Shakespeare himself. For there is the likelihood that the dramatist was Betterton's instructor at no more than two removes. Only the lips of D'Avenant, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... intaglios, Abraxoids, whose "erudition" would have filled Mnesarchus with envy, and challenged the admiration of the Samian lapidary who engraved the ring of Polycrates; these and numberless articles of vertu testified to the universality of what St. Elmo called his "world-scrapings," and to the reckless extravagance and archaistic taste of the collector. On a verd-antique table lay a satin cushion holding a vellum MS., bound in blue velvet, whose uncial letters were written in purple ink, powdered with gold-dust, while the margins were stiff ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... very well wear such a watch; and you are a lady in every sense of the word, and so you need have no scruples on that account. As for the means, you will not misunderstand me if I remind you that it will be bought with my means, and there can be no extravagance in the purchase." ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... a treacherous scheme, he got possession of the town of Gabii. He waged war against the Volscians, a powerful people on the south of Latium. He adorned Rome with many buildings, and lived in pomp and extravagance, while the people were impoverished and helpless. The inspired Sibyl of Cumae offered him, through a messenger, nine books of prophecies. The price required excited his scorn, whereupon the woman who brought them destroyed three. She came back with the remaining six, which ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... mother," replied Aladdin, "that I am not mad, but in my right senses; I foresaw that you would reproach me with folly and extravagance; but I must tell you once more, that I am resolved to demand the ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... periods of time prefixed, which may be collected and foreknown from the position of the stars at their first foundation. But these and the like relations may perhaps not so much take and delight the reader with their novelty and curiosity as offend him by their extravagance. ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... Similar extravagance appears in another story of a crawling train. The conductor demanded a ticket from a baldheaded old man whose face was mostly hidden in a great mass ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... "Philura Rice certainly did not become engaged to be married during her stay in Boston. Neither has she been the recipient of funds from myself, nor, to the best of my knowledge, from any other member of the family. Personally, I have always been averse to the encouragement of extravagance and vanity in those destined by a wise Providence to pass their lives in a humble station. I fear exceedingly that Philura's visits to Boston have failed to benefit her ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... very year when the piece was represented, (Olymp. lxxx. 1.) a certain Ephialtes excited the people against the Areopagus, which was the best guardian of the old and more austere constitution, and kept democratic extravagance in check. This Ephialtes was murdered one night by an unknown hand. Aeschylus received the first prize in the theatrical games, but we know that he left Athens immediately afterwards, and passed his remaining years in Sicily. It is possible that, although the theatrical ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... or illustrator, this book is a jewel rarely to be found nowadays. Not a whit inferior to its predecessor In grand extravagance of imagination, ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... of all in her home. When she spent a morning in her kitchen, the work there was perfectly done. The dinner was ready at the right time, properly cooked, good and wholesome. She allowed no waste and no extravagance. Her bread was light and beautifully baked, and when she had finished her morning's work her kitchen was as neat as when she began. She finished everything, and put it straight as ...
— Catherine Booth - A Sketch • Colonel Mildred Duff
... fortitude which is the fortitude of fatalism. While the trial was progressing he told a dear friend that he found much consolation in a certain Oriental tale. The story was of an Indian king whose temper never knew a medium, and who in prosperity was hurried into extravagance by his joy, while in adversity grief overwhelmed him with despondency. Having suffered many inconveniences through this weakness, he besought his courtiers to devise a sentence, short enough to be engraved ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... creating, became the constant amusement of my mind; or if I took a fancy to any new companion, that individual was metamorphosed into something equally unreal, and was soon looked upon in the light, not of sober reality, but of fanciful extravagance. Of course my estimate alike of persons and of things was egregiously false; and with a fair portion of common-sense naturally belonging to me, I became most emphatically a fool. Even when employed at the pencil, which I dearly loved, I could not trace a figure on the paper or a ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... new winter finery and went forth to meet him. Janet, also, had recently been self-convicted of sharing with Lise the same questionable tendency toward self-adornment to please the eye of man. The very next Saturday night after she had indulged in that mad extravagance of the blue suit, Lise had brought home from the window of The Paris in Faber Street a hat that had excited the cupidity and admiration of Miss Schuler and herself, and in front of which they had stood languishing on three successive evenings. In its acquisition ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... flock of other human sheep for a better look at the ruined portico wherein Mark Antony stood when he delivered his justly popular funeral oration over the body of the murdered Caesar. I never did admire the character of Mark Antony with any degree of extravagance, and since this experience I have felt ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... much involved in debt, through the boundless extravagance of his expenditures, that something must be done to replenish his exhausted finances. He had, however, by this time, risen so high in official influence and power, that he succeeded in having Spain assigned to him as ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... seventeenth century. On the contrary, in all the comedies of the age, the principal character for gaiety and wit is a young heir, who has totally altered the establishment of the father to whom he has succeeded, and, to use the old simile, who resembles a fountain, which plays off in idleness and extravagance the wealth which its careful parents painfully ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... impulsiveness, her waywardness, and improvidence were a legacy from her grandfather, "Jack" Spencer, the grandson and special favorite of the beautiful Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. Her "Torismond," she called him. His was a career of profligacy, a course of error and extravagance. His mother was Lady Sunderland, known in society as "the little Whig," from her small stature and her persistent politics. Her party badge was always worn,—the black patch on the left side of the face, as distinguished from the Tory fashion of wearing ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... were young men of birth, who (their means not answering to their extravagance) had been put in prison by creditors, and redeemed thence by lord Timon; these young prodigals thenceforward fastened upon his lordship, as if by common sympathy he were necessarily endeared to all such spendthrifts and loose livers, who not being ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... letter with a little homily. He had warned Philip time after time, and Philip had never paid any attention to him; he could not honestly say he was surprised; he had long expected that this would be the end of Philip's extravagance and want of balance. Philip grew hot and cold when he read this. It had never occurred to him that his uncle would refuse, and he burst into furious anger; but this was succeeded by utter blankness: if his uncle would not help him he could not go ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... well guarded by his gray eyes and straight lips. He was a born financier, with almost limitless ambition, though only he himself knew how far this ambition reached. He had not brought prosperity to Ehrenstein, but he had fortified and bastioned it against extravagance, and this was probably the larger feat of the two. He loved his country, and brooded over it as a mother broods over her child. Twice had he saved Ehrenstein from the drag-net of war, and with honor. So he was admired by fathers and revered ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... the beautiful country in which it lay, the speech and characteristics of rural labour as compared with that of the town,—he had heard her talk of all these things with a freshness, a human sympathy, a freedom from conventional phrase, and, no doubt, a touch of egotism and extravagance, which rivetted attention. The egotism and extravagance, however, after a first moment of critical discomfort on his part, had not in the end repelled him at all. The girl's vivid beauty glorified them; made them seem to him a mere special fulness of life. So that in his new preoccupation ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... only is usually better served and with less friction than where more are employed. Rarely can three servants get on harmoniously. The more servants there are, unless there is a housekeeper, the more shirking there is, and the more waste and extravagance. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... the streets of the quiet little town, and a motley throng of guests, Whig and Tory, were entertained at a table where nothing was thought too choice and costly for their delectation. Matters were carried with such extravagance that debt soon pressed upon the thoughtless pair, and prudent people began to inquire curiously into Arnold's administration of public affairs. Whispers soon grew into loud complaints, and a court-martial was presently convened to investigate certain charges brought against him by the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... for it is stronger than that prose. It certainly has not the undisciplined aspect of Elizabethan writing. It has the exactitude without the occasional finickingness of the best French work, and it has the breadth of English, but never falls into confusion, clumsiness or extravagance. Mr. Belloc does not experience difficulties with his relative pronouns or bog himself in a mess of parentheses. The habit of exposition has taught him to disentangle his sentences and disengage ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... investment. Yet if we once begin to give the party, we must have everything that is given at the other parties, or wherefore do we live? And caterers and waiters rack their brains to devise new forms of expense and extravagance; and when the bill comes in, one is sure to feel that one is paying a great deal of money for a great deal of nonsense. It is, in fact, worse than nonsense, because our dear friends are in half the cases, not only no better, but a great deal worse, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... dramatist of the new movement, while he does not reproduce the average Irishman, is just as natively Irish in his extravagance and irony as the old folk-tale of the "Two Hags"; Lady Gregory in her farces is in a similar way representative of the riot of West-Country imagination; and Mr. Yeats, if further removed from the Irishmen of to-day, is very like, ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... almost wholly free from that extravagance of expression and recklessness of all established codes of taste which have diverted attention from her purpose, and led to a false estimate of the character and tendency of her writings. It has none of the hindrances, for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... massy stem of a tree 'fort gros et fort prs'—the sarcasm of a Roman emperor applies, that to miss under such conditions implied an original genius for stupidity, and to hit was no trial of the case. After all, the sentimentalist had youth to plead in apology for this extravagance. He was hypochondriacal; he was in solitude; and he was possessed by gloomy imaginations from the works of a society in the highest public credit. But most readers will be aware of similar appeals to the mysteries of Providence, made in ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... deal of interest. In the first place his income was enormous, larger, it was said, than the income of any other living man. In the next place he spent it very splendidly. There were no entertainments given in London during the years 1909, 1910, and 1911, equal in extravagance to those which Conroy gave. He outdid the "freak dinners" of New York. He invented freak dinners of his own. His horses—animals which he bought at enormous prices—won the great races. His yachts flew the white ensign of the Royal Yacht Squadron. His gifts to fashionable charities were ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... years of the contract, of no less a sum than two hundred and thirty-five thousand pounds. Now, as the former contract was, without doubt, sufficiently advantageous, a judgment may be formed of the extravagance of the present. The terms, indeed, pass the bounds of all allowance for negligence and ignorance ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... unusually keen, and accomplished miracles of cunning, sagacity, and logic! Why is it that when you awake to the world of realities you nearly always feel, sometimes very vividly, that the vanished dream has carried with it some enigma which you have failed to solve? You smile at the extravagance of your dream, and yet you feel that this tissue of absurdity contained some real idea, something that belongs to your true life,—something that exists, and has always existed, in your heart. You search your dream for some prophecy that you were expecting. It has left a deep impression ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... an eager whisper. While he spoke his cigar had ceased to burn, and to light it, from a vase on the mantel he took a spill, one of those spirals of paper that in English hotels, where the proprietor is of a frugal mind, are still used to prevent extravagance in matches. Ford lit the spill at the coal fire, and with his cigar puffed at the flame. As he did so the paper unrolled. To the astonishment of Cuthbert, Ford clasped it in both hands, blotted out the tiny ...
— The Lost House • Richard Harding Davis
... to be to abolish imprisonment for debt, the abolishment of litigation, and in lieu thereof the settlement of disputes by reference to neighbors; to establish some more equal and universal system of public education; to diminish the salaries and extravagance of public officers; to support no men for offices of public trust, but farmers, mechanics, and what the party call "working men"; and to elevate the character of this class by mental instruction and mental improvement.... Much is said against the wealth and aristocracy of ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... apologized as it were to Molly to-day, in the same words she had often used to Mr. Gibson,—'It's no extravagance, for we need not eat it—I never do. But it looks well, and makes Maria understand what is required in the daily life of every ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... about her own affairs, was not so engrossed by them as to behold with indifference a scene of such unjustifiable extravagance; it contributed to render her thoughtful and uneasy, and to deprive her of all mental power of participating in the gaiety of the assembly. Mr Arnott was yet more deeply affected by the mad folly of the scheme, and received ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... note that Vauvenargues is almost entirely free from that favourite trick of the aphoristic person, which consists in forming a series of sentences, the predicates being various qualifications of extravagance, vanity, and folly, and the subject being Women. He resists this besetting temptation of the modern speaker of apophthegms to identify woman and fool. On the one or two occasions in which he begins the maxim with the fatal words, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... ambuscade of five hundred men, under Sir John Norris, was held sufficient to intercept the convoy. About fifty young officers volunteered to add their services. This gallant band was composed of the flower of the English army.... It was indeed "an incredible extravagance to send a handful of such heroes against such an army," but Leicester can scarcely be blamed for failing to restrain the impulsive ardor which animated his entire staff. Sidney's characteristic magnanimity ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... soul, all for utility, economy, diligence and efficiency, transplated to Butterfly Center, with its keynote of careless idleness, waste motion and extravagance. ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... so disconcerted by this little extravagance, that he forced the passage, and himself opened the door to admit the comte and his son. Truechen was quite dressed: costume of the shopkeeper's wife, rich and coquettish; German eyes attacking French eyes. She ceded the apartment after two curtseys, and went down ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... Europe can compare with them in length of pedigree or the dimensions of their family trees, and while there have been bad men as well as good men in the lists of native rulers; while the people have been crushed by tyranny, ruined by extravagance and tortured by the cruelty of their masters, the rajahs of India have averaged quite as high as the feudal lords of Germany or the dukes and earls of ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... starin' at him. 'What else d'you s'pose? Think I'd let seventy-five hundred dollars' wuth of gilt-edged extravagance go to the bottom? What did you cal'late I was tryin' to save—the clam flat? Give me that dory rope; I'm goin' after them anchors. Sufferin' snakes! Where IS the dory? What have ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln
... adjusted to the meridian of Paris. We must remember this always in reading it, and also remember that a Frenchman does not think English any more than he talks it. We sometimes flatter ourselves with the idea that we as a people are original in our tendency to extravagance of thought and language. It is a conceit of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... changed the whole aspect of his life, and later one stood beside him who taught him how to fight. But until those events took place, the town of Links knew him for what he was, a reckless, dare-devil youth, without viciousness or malice, but ripe for any extravagance or adventure. His pranks were always begun in fun though it was inevitable that they should lead to serious consequences. It was admitted by his severest critics that he had never done a cruel or a cowardly thing, yet the constant escapades ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... luxurious living. Until then Americans had travelled abroad and seen elaborately served meals and properly appointed stables without the ambition of copying such things at home. Colonial and revolutionary state had died out, and modern extravagance had not yet appeared. In the interregnum much was neglected that might have added to the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... This extravagance also characterized his first efforts as a composer, when he at last turned to music, at the age of sixteen. One of his first tasks, when he had barely mastered the rudiments of composition, was to write an overture which he intended to be more complicated than ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... secured a parlor and suite for his brother in the retired end of the structure, commanding a view of Newspaper Row upon one side and of the Treasury facade on the other. The long, tarnished mirrors, the faded tapestry, and the heavy, soiled, damask curtains impressed Jabel Blake as parts of the wild extravagance of official society, and gave him many misgivings as to the amount of his bill. He retained enough of his Scotch temperament, however, to make no ceremony about a glass of punch, which the General ordered up for the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... in full retreat towards the dining-room, caught this last geographic extravagance of Gallic fancy, and laughed, and with this mirth still in her face made her re-entry on the veranda. She had not been away three minutes from the group there, and she was to the eye as merely flushed and gay when she came back as when ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... bright and characteristic letter which Miss Desborough left for her host,—a letter which mingled her peculiar shrewd sense with her humorous extravagance of expression,—the consul spent a somewhat uneasy evening under the fire of questions that assailed him in reference to the fair deserter. But he kept loyal faith with her, adhering even to the letter of her instructions, and ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... right in the world, by marrying that rich heiress, Miss Dunstable. I fear my friend Sowerby does not, at present, stand high in the estimation of those who have come on with me thus far in this narrative. He has been described as a spendthrift and gambler, and as one scarcely honest in his extravagance and gambling. But nevertheless there are worse men than Mr. Sowerby, and I am not prepared to say that, should he be successful with Miss Dunstable, that lady would choose by any means the worst of the suitors who are continually throwing themselves at ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... in the public store was occasioned by the unbounded extravagance of the labouring people, who had, in consequence of the last unproductive season, reduced those who supported themselves to very great distress; and several persons, who some time since would gladly have sent their wheat to the store at the established price, had now refused it, when ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... she bore. She had married him, not loving him—nay, plucking another love out of her heart in order that she might give herself to him. She had married him for position and fortune; and now by his follies, by his extravagance, and by that greed of gold which is inevitable in the spendthrift and profligate, he had gone near to cheat her out of both name and fortune. Yet she so commanded herself as to receive him with a friendly ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... characteristic of the change that had come over the Church since the post-apostolic period. That Papias was not to be regarded as a man of small power simply because he held chiliastic ideas is sufficiently refuted by the fact that Justin Martyr falls but little behind Papias in extravagance ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... Westmore—to give a real start to the work that Bessy and I planned together—some pretext is found to stop it: to pack us off to the ends of the earth, to cry out against reducing her income, to encourage her in some new extravagance to which the work at the mills must ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... o'clock. At this meal he ate heartily, but was not particular in his diet with the exception of fish, of which he was excessively fond. Touching his liking for fish, and illustrative of his practical economy and abhorrence of waste and extravagance, an anecdote is told of the time he was President and living in Philadelphia. It happened that a single shad had been caught in the Delaware, and brought to the city market. His steward, Sam Fraunces, pounced upon the fish with the speed of an ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... period. The danger was that, instead of freeing himself in this fashion, Beauchene might yield to the temptation of selling the other parts one by one, now that he was gliding down a path of folly and extravagance. ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... hold. In the change of opinion over the better way to spend Sunday, or in the decay of the doctrine of eternal damnation, we have the same point illustrated. Right through history it has been the social instincts that have acted as a corrective to religious extravagance. And it is worth noting that with the exception of a little gain from the practice of casuistry, religions have contributed nothing towards the building up of a science of ethics. On the contrary it has been a very potent cause of confusion and obstruction. Fictitious vices and virtues have ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... by the indignation excited among creditors. The Bakufu owed much of the stability of their influence to the frugality of their lives and to their unsullied administration of justice. But now the Kwanto bushi rivalled the Kyoto gallants in extravagance; the Kamakura tribunals forfeited the confidence of the people, and the needy samurai began to wish for the return of troublous times, when fortunes could be won with the sword. Amid such conditions Sadatoki took the tonsure in 1300, and was succeeded nominally by his cousin Morotoki, who, however, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... we are undone!—not at all; if folly and extravagance are symptoms of a nation's being at the height of their glory, as after-observers pretend that they are forerunners of its ruin, we never were in a more flourishing situation. My Lord Rockingham and my nephew Lord Orford have made a match of five hundred pounds, between five turkeys and five ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... honour to better men. Enough was not as good as a feast, and since their income was always uncertain, the only way to get any real enjoyment out of life was to feast recklessly while they could, though only for a few days, and then to pay for extravagance with the strictest asceticism, till a rain of gold once more gladdened the garret to which ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... of riches in the hands of a few brought its natural consequence in luxury and extravagance. The palaces of the wealthy, with their gardens, baths, picture galleries, and other features, were costly to build and costly to keep up. The money not lavished by a noble on his town house could be easily sunk on his villas in the country. All Italy, from the bay ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... his eye-glass and held his knee and rocked it to and fro. He was shrewd enough to see that if he resigned the whole committee would break up, and he knew that this dreadful eventuality was in Clara's mind also. He liked Charles's extravagance: it made him feel wicked, but also he was kind and could not bring himself to hurt Clara. He had never in his life felt that he was of the slightest importance to any one. Clara felt that sense stirring in him and she fed it; let him into the ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... an Irish country squire, who used, with hardly any means, to give entertainments to the militia, &c., in his neighborhood; and when a friend expostulated with him, on the extravagance of giving claret to these fellows, when whiskey punch would do just as well, he answered, "You are very right, my dear friend; but I have the claret on tick, and where the devil would I get credit for the lemons?" Douglas mentioned the story of some rich grazier, in Ireland, ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... know mankind. Blindly prodigal, because he is confiding and generous—in everything, everywhere, and always truly noble. I fear he is abused. If you knew what a noble heart he has! I have never dared to lecture him on the subject of his expense and extravagance; in the first place, because I am at least as foolish as he is; and then for other reasons; but you ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... of heart in the 'middleman,' extravagance in the land-owner, and extreme poverty in the peasant. The poor-law commission of 1839 reported that two million three hundred thousand of the agricultural laborers of Ireland were 'paupers;' that those immediately above the lowest rank were ' the worst-clad, worst-fed, and worst-lodged ' ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... home, sick of the companionship of gentle sisters, the love of a fond mother, and wishing to be back again at the old uproarious wine-parties, the drunken orgies, the card-playing and prize-fighting, the extravagance and debauchery of the bad set in which he ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... born.' Did ever tailor's bill, though for the most resplendent scarlet liveries bespangled with golden roses, inspire a like rhapsody! By one writer on Ralegh it has been characterized, so various are tastes, as 'tawdry and fulsome.' To most it will seem a delightful extravagance. To contemporaries the extravagance itself would appear not very glaring. Elizabeth aroused both fascination and awe in her own period which justified high flights. After her goodness and wrath were become ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... treated; and, monstrous as the absurdities found in them are, we may be well assured that the authors were quite unconscious of their existence."[120] There are, however, some places in which one is moved to doubt whether the extravagance is the product of pure simplicity, and without ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... less grotesquely clad. Some wore men's shirts, white or striped as the case might be, others a mere piece of cloth; but all had European hats. The wives of the Areois[3] wore coloured robes, a piece of great extravagance, but with them the dress ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... at once pleasure, gratitude, and bashfulness, Lucy curtsied to Hazlewood, but to Dinmont she frankly extended her hand. The honest farmer, in the extravagance of his joy, carried his freedom farther than the hint warranted, for he imprinted his thanks on the lady's lips, and was instantly shocked at the rudeness of his own conduct. 'Lord sake, madam, I ask your pardon,' he said. 'I forgot but ye had been a bairn o'my ain; ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... interpreter, the original delineator with the actual impersonator of character, the same old stage gossip remarks, how men would read Shakspere with higher rapture could they but conceive how he was played by Betterton! "Then might they know," he exclaims, with a delightful extravagance of emphasis and quaint-ness of phraseology, "the one was born alone to speak what the other only knew to write!" The simple truth of the matter being that for the making of a consummate actor, reader, or impersonator, not only is there required, to begin with, a certain histrionic instinct or dramatic ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... extravagance, let it be so, to say that Comfort's account of his childhood has seldom been rivaled in literature. It amounts to revelation. Really the only parallels that will suggest themselves in our letters are the great ones that occur in Huckleberry Finn.... This man Comfort's gamut is long and ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... fitted his frontier home with an extravagance and comfort that was surprising, and had in a cabin near several as fine horses as could be found among the mining-camps, with a Chinese servant to look after them ...
— Buffalo Bill's Spy Trailer - The Stranger in Camp • Colonel Prentiss Ingraham
... With the timid obstinacy peculiar to their race, they stuck to their point and refused to be enticed into purposeless extravagance. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... same restaurant as before the city's fall! Again the big grapes which are a luxury of the rich man's table or an extravagance for a sick friend with us! The hothouses still grew them. What else was there for he hothouses to do, though the export of their products was impossible? A shortage of the long, white-leafed chicory that we call endive in New York restaurants? ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... pleased that she yielded to the pressure and conceded a sum which her judgment told her was a foolish extravagance —a thousand dollars. Sally kissed her half a dozen times and even in that way could not express all his joy and thankfulness. This new access of gratitude and affection carried Aleck quite beyond the bounds of prudence, and before she could restrain herself ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... my silly fingers tingled as they touched her hair. It is a good thing for a boy of nineteen to be romantically in love with Joanna. He can thus live spiritually beyond his means, without much danger of bankruptcy, and his extravagance shall be counted to him for virtue. Also if he is painting the princess of his dreams, he has such an inspiration as is given but to the elect, and what skill he is possessed of must succeed ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... limit public expenditures to the actual needs of the Government economically administered, because this bounds the right of the Government to exact tribute from the earnings of labor or the property of the citizen, and because public extravagance begets extravagance among the people. We should never be ashamed of the simplicity and prudential economies which are best suited to the operation of a republican form of government and most compatible with the mission of the American people. Those who are selected for a limited time to ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... intellectual world; and from interests which are immediately selfish to those which relate to the past, the future, and the remote. These effects have sometimes been produced by the worst superstitions that ever existed; but the Catholic religion, even in the time of its utmost extravagance and atrocity, never wholly lost the spirit of the Great Teacher, whose precepts form the noblest code, as His conduct furnished the purest example, of moral excellence. It is of all religions the most poetical. The ancient superstitions furnished the fancy with beautiful ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Dogs' Home. For a shilling he gave to a beggar, because he was poorer than himself, I can find no receipt, but hope it is filed in heaven. An eight-shilling meal stands out, among eightpenny teas, as a rare extravagance.... ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... dust in other places, oppressed him more than usual; so he rose and removed it, getting a clean one out of a drawer. This was an unusual thing for him, for he usually slept in the same shirt which he wore in his day's work; but it was Saturday night, and he felt justified in the extravagance. ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... last half hour, has been trying to question the palace servants, day before yesterday ordered fifty oxen to be slaughtered to Ares, Nike, and the great Isis, as the Queen's goddess, and when I met him in the temple he exclaimed that this was the greatest piece of extravagance he had ever committed; for even without the cattle Cleopatra and Antony would be sure of victory. But now the wind of rumour has swept away his beautiful confidence also. They are not permitted to see me. The doorkeepers ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... could be seen running along the rails and licking the blood-red beams of the long wooden bridges, giant monuments of American extravagance in the use of wood. Clouds of smoke crept towards the train, hiding the rails from view, and soon the engine rolled into a veritable sea of flames and smoke. Forster screamed to his companion: "They've poured ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... have within their oratories, They would have writ of men more wickedness Than all the mark of Adam may redress The children of Mercury and of Venus, Be in their working full contrarious. Mercury loveth wisdom and science, And Venus loveth riot and dispence.* *extravagance And for their diverse disposition, Each falls in other's exaltation. As thus, God wot, Mercury is desolate In Pisces, where Venus is exaltate, And Venus falls where Mercury is raised. Therefore no ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... weakness as well as of strength. It must be added that this irritability of the sexual centers is, in a considerable proportion of inverts, associated with marked emotional tendencies to affection and self-sacrifice. In the extravagance of his affection and devotion, it has been frequently observed, the male invert ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... indicated a total absence of any saccharine principle. But then, what do we climb mountains for, if not to see something out of the common course? On the whole, if this department of our national government is ever on trial for extravagance in the matter of high living, I shall be moved to offer myself as a ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... wonder-vendors would have it, being either log, bamboo, or mud huts. To take the settlers generally, there cannot be much fault found with their style of living, except perhaps in some instances, rather a little too much extravagance. Caldwell, Clay-Ashland, and Millsburg on the St. Paul, are pleasant and prospectively promising villages, and deserve a notice in this place. Clay-Ashland is the residence of Judge Moore, to whom I am indebted ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... Every form of wastefulness and extravagance prevailed in town and country,—nowhere more than at Philadelphia, under the very eyes of Congress,—luxury of dress, luxury of equipage, luxury of the table. We are told of one entertainment at which eight hundred pounds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... historical novel in local fields, of which Winston Churchill (born 1871) in Richard Carvel (1899) is the leading exponent, and together with it the sword and dagger tale of the Dumas type, the special contemporary plot invented by Anthony Hope, and romance in its utmost forms of adventure and extravagance, came in like a flood at the close of the Spanish War. There were during the period from 1870 to 1900 many other writers of fiction, who often proceeded in conventional and time-honoured ways to tell their tale, but none of them is especially significant for the general view or ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Emily muttered more than once, as her sharp grey eyes peered here and there, now into drawers and closets, now at the many unpaid bills. "When that cook of yours wasn't grafting she must have been getting drunk on your wine." As the record was unfolded of years of careless extravagance, Ethel would frown and turn away, for it seemed disloyal to pry so deep. Poor ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... it was much more pleasant to send a man to the booking- office than to elbow one's own way through the crowd. Dick put her into a Pullman,—solely on account of the warmth there; and she regarded the extravagance with grave scandalised eyes as the train moved out into ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling |
