"Scapegrace" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Ay, it was the scapegrace, Philip Tell, who assailed the cap of our sovereign with stones, till he struck it ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... she. "You are a little wretch—a scapegrace who does not think of that which I love—yourself! You do not know that I am with child, and that in a little while I shall be no more able to conceal it than my nose. Now, what will the abbot say? What will my lord say? ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... parents, nor would he learn a craft. His father sickened of his grief and chagrin for his son's perversity and died, whilst Alaeddin abode on that his wise. When his mother saw that her husband had departed this life [149] and that her son was a scapegrace and a good-for-nought, she sold the shop and all she found therein and fell to spinning cotton and feeding herself and her graceless son Alaeddin with her toil. The latter, seeing himself quit of his father's danger, [150] redoubled in his ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... corsair captors and slavery at Algiers, made his sorry company of knaves and fools acceptable by virtue of inexhaustible gaiety, bright fantasy, and the liveliest of comic styles. His Joueur (1696) is a scapegrace, possessed by the passion of gaming, whose love of Angelique is a devotion to her dowry, but he will console himself for lost love by another throw of the dice. His Legataire Universel, greedy, old, and ailing, is surrounded by pitiless rogues, yet ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... on the face of the rector as he finished the letter, so like its thoughtless, lighthearted writer, and wondered what the Widow Rider, across the way, would say of a clergyman who smoked cigars and rode after a race-horse with such a gay scapegrace as Thornton Hastings. Then the amused look passed away, and was succeeded by a shadow of pain as the rector remembered the real import of Thornton's letter, and felt that he had no right to say, "I have ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... master," she said, "it is your duty, of course, to keep your son in proper order, but you should also regard the relationship of husband and wife. I'm already a woman of fifty and I've only got this scapegrace. Was there any need for you to give him such a bitter lesson? I wouldn't presume to use any strong dissuasion; but having, on this occasion, gone so far as to harbour the design of killing him, isn't this a fixed purpose on your part to cut short ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Bullies, Mohocks, Corinthians, and Dandies, down to the last drunken clerk who wrenched off a knocker, or robbed his master's till to pay his losses at a betting-office. True; we of this generation can hardly afford to throw stones. The scapegrace ideal of humanity has enjoyed high patronage within the last half century; and if Monsieur Thomas seemed lovely in the eyes of James and Charles, so did Jerry and Corinthian Tom in those of some of the first gentlemen of England. Better days, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... as she might have spoken of the dead. Caroline sometimes referred to him in good round terms, sometimes with an indulgent laugh; and for Rose he had the charm of mystery, the fascination of the scapegrace. He was handsome, but good looks were a prerogative of the Malletts; he was married to a wife he had never introduced to his family and he had a little girl. What his profession was, Rose did not know. Perhaps his face ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... Owen. 'Men say, with all her free ways, they could not go the least bit farther with her than she pleases. You wouldn't suppose it, but she can keep out of scrapes better than Rashe can—never has been in one yet, and Rashe in twenty. Never mind, your Honor, there's sound stuff in the bonny scapegrace; all the better for being free and unconventional. The world owes a great deal to those who dare to act for themselves; though, I own, it is a trial when one's own domestic womankind ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... States between the more liberal element and a reactionary German priest, in which the latter came to grief, was displayed as an evidence that the American people were determined to drive out all German professors and to abjure German science. The doings of every scapegrace in an American university, of every silly woman in Chicago, of every blackguard in New York, of every snob at Newport, of every desperado in the Rocky Mountains, of every club loafer anywhere, were served up as ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... French from the time he could lisp, and, what was dangerous in his father's eyes, filled him with bits of poetry and fine language, so that he knew Heine, Racine and Beranger and many another. But this was made endurable to the father by the fact that, by nature, the boy was a warrior and a scapegrace, could use his fists as well as his tongue, and posed as a Napoleon with the negro children in the plantation. He was leader of the revels when the slaves gathered at night in front of the huts and made a joy of captivity and sang hymns which sounded ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... about. The girl sat entirely still, regarding the swimmer in a kind of fascinated silence. The irony of fate, indeed, that, at a moment when her whole mind and heart were toward the rose-pink future, this scapegrace ghost from her only "past" should have risen out of the sea upon her. To dream of a Canning, and be ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... towards his adoptive father is one full of delicacy; where a man lends his name he looks for great consideration. And this legacy of Villon's portion of renown may be taken as the mere fling of an unregenerate scapegrace who has wit enough to recognise in his own shame the readiest weapon of offence against a prosy benefactor's feelings. The gratitude of Master Francis figures, on this reading, as a frightful minus quantity. If, on the other ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inclination to work and much tendency to dissipation. The authorities of the college could not afford to expel or even offend a student. for its endowment was so small that it must have all the instruction fees possible, and must keep on good terms with the wealthy fathers of its scapegrace students. The scapegraces soon found this out, and the result was a little pandemonium. Only about a dozen of our number studied at all; the rest, by translations, promptings, and evasions escaped without ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Knight of the Order of Santiago, that was drowned at the Herradura—him there was that quarrel about years ago in our village, that my master Don Quixote was mixed up in, to the best of my belief, that Tomasillo the scapegrace, the son of Balbastro the smith, was wounded in.—Isn't all this true, master mine? As you live, say so, that these gentlefolk may not take me ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... muttered, thoughtfully, looking after the retreating figure; "she's going out to hunt for that drunken old scapegrace of a father, I'll warrant. It's dangerous for a fine young girl with a face like hers to be on the streets alone at this hour of the night. I've told the old basket-maker so scores of times, but somehow he does not seem ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... tried to think away the fat which had gradually disguised the outlines of youth, and to discern what one may call the elementary expressions of the face. He was sorry to see no absolute negative to his fears. Just as it was conceivable that this Ezra, brought up to trade, might resemble the scapegrace father in everything but his knowledge and talent, so it was not impossible that this mother might have had a lovely refined daughter whose type of feature and expression was like Mirah's. The eyebrows had a vexatious similarity of line; and who shall decide how far a face may ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Oldenbach! His father is a German count, his mother was an American. He was educated in England and afterward came to America and entered Cornell. That's where I met him. He was the cleverest scapegrace that ever lived. He could sing like an angel, draw like St. Peter, and knew more languages than an Ellis Island interpreter. He made friends wherever he went. To look at him and hear him talk you would never think he was a German; he's the picture of his American mother, and being in England ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... worth remarking, that you will find many persons who are very charitable to blackguards, but who have no charity for the weaknesses of really good people. They will hunt out the act of thoughtless liberality done by the scapegrace who broke his mother's heart and squandered his poor sisters' little portions; they will make much of that liberal act,—such an act as tossing to some poor Magdalen a purse filled with money which was probably not his own; and they will insist that there is hope for the blackguard ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... Mr. Belloc, on the other hand, laughter is a separate and relinquishable gift. He can at will lay aside the mirth of one who has broken bounds for the solemnity of the man in authority. He can be scapegrace prince and sober king by turns, and in such a way that the two personalities seem scarcely to be related to each other. Compared with Mr. Chesterton he is like a man in a mask, or a series of masks. ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... eyed him. There was a mark of dignity, of silent power, on this tall scapegrace of a son of Hilary Vane that the railroad president had missed at first—probably because he had looked only for the scapegrace. Mr. Flint ardently desired to treat the matter in the trifling aspect in which he believed he saw it, to carry it off genially. But an instinct not yet formulated ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... soon conquered great popularity. He is particularly clever in disguising himself, so as to be quite unrecognisable. With his dress he changes his voice, gait, and even his face; and will look the part of a decrepid old woman every bit as well as the more easily assumed one of a scapegrace student. His vivacity, good-humour, and fun, are inexhaustible. In the ludicrous extravaganzas, reviews of the past year, which nearly every carnival sees produced at the Palais Royal, he is perfectly irresistible. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... a dashing officer was there! It was only just now, that I was talking about him to my wife. He was the life of the house!—how well he could perform plays—particularly the character of a scapegrace. In the Two Edmonds, for instance, he would make you die with laughing, in that part of a drunken soldier—and then, with what a charming voice he sang Joconde, sir—better than they could sing it ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... came one day that Bob Clive, the wild boy who had terrorized the tradespeople, plagued his master, led the school in tremendous fights with the town boys, and suffered more birchings than any scholar of his time—Bob Clive, the scapegrace who had been packed off to India as a last resource, had turned out, as his father said, "not such a booby after all"—had indeed proved himself to be a military genius. How Desmond thrilled when the old schoolmaster ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... represents Anne of Denmark); and at great bonfires at the Temple gate the frenzied people burned effigies of the Pope, while thousands of squibs were discharged, with shouts that frightened the Popish Portuguese Queen, at that time living at Somerset House, forsaken by her dissolute scapegrace of a husband. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... had heard of the elder Jeffries' trouble with his scapegrace son, and he eyed, with some interest, this young man who had made such a ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... were tearing at his heart. Indeed, to give some idea of the depths of doubt, despair, and incredulity in which the boy was groveling; he who so clung to life—the life which the angel had made so fair—who so loved it, that he would have stooped to baseness merely to live; he, the pleasure-loving scapegrace, the degenerate d'Esgrignon, had even taken out his pistols, had gone so far as to think of suicide. He who would never have brooked the appearance of an insult was abusing himself in language which no man is likely to ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... had to console himself with a tu quoque, for the young scapegrace had found his way to Lyons in October, 1716, and then did the very thing his father's son should not have done. The Chevalier de St. George, the Old Pretender, James III., or by whatever other alias you prefer to call him, having failed in his ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... repeated all this to my wife she ran to the old gentleman's room and told him all the things that I should not have known how to say—that we cared for him; that we wanted him to stay with us; that he was far, far more our uncle than the brilliant, unprincipled scapegrace who had died years before, dead for almost a lifetime to the family who idolized him; and that we wanted him to stay with us as long as kind heaven would let him. But it was of no use. A change had come over our aromatic uncle which ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... solid with me?" cried Liza, with extreme vexation pictured on every feature as her scapegrace sweetheart tried to imprison her hands in order to kiss her. "I tell you—" and then there was some momentary whispering between them, which seemed to have the effect of sobering Robbie in an instant. His exuberant vivacity ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... first one wanted me and then another; and I couldn't go without money either, and I got very poor at times. Tom was a scapegrace, poor fellow, and always wanted help of one kind or another; and his wife (for I think scapegraces are always married long before steady folk) was but a helpless kind of body. She were always ailing, and he were always in trouble; so I had enough ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... emphasis. "Boy! what are you about? What have you done? What do you mean by such carelessness? Will you break everything in the house, you heedless fellow? I'd rather you had broken all on the table than that pitcher, you young scapegrace. Take that, and learn to mind what you are about, or I'll take measures to make you." And with a thorough shaking, and a sound box on the ear, the father quitted the room, took his hat, and marched to his office, there to explain ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... liked him myself, for all my fervent envy of his recognized depravity and of the hateful ease with which he thought of something to say in those uncomfortable moments when he and I and Stella were together. At most other times I could talk glibly enough, but before this seasoned scapegrace I was dumb, and felt my reputation to be hopelessly immaculate ... If only Stella would believe me to be just the tiniest bit depraved! I blush to think of the dark hints I dropped as to entirely fictitious women who "had ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... said he, "that's the man I knew once, and the sort of man that's been fighting with me for the Church and for the King these months past in the Vendee. Come, come, don't you know me, Pergot? Don't you remember the scapegrace with whom, for a jape, you waylaid my uncle the Cardinal and robbed him, then sold him back his jewelled watch for a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... men, who appear to chiefly frequent them; and we do not care to go to any of the boarding-houses, where parsons, missionaries, and people of that class mostly abound, and tincture the very air with a savour of godliness and respectability that is, alas! repugnant to our scapegrace youth. ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... protection. You may well say that. What other object can such a scapegrace have? The girl is handsome—well made—can show a pretty foot. How the upper story is furnished matters little. That's blinked in you women if nature has not played the niggard in other respects. Let this harum-scarum but turn over this chapter—ho! ho! his eyes will ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... mother's door. Her 'come in' was glad and eager, and a soft pink colour flushed into her cheeks when she saw it was really Johnnie. This good mother, so just and tender to all her sons, kept a special corner of her heart for the merry scapegrace who excelled the family cat in a talent for unintentional mischief, and almost equalled that luckless animal in a facility for getting into universal disgrace. In another minute Johnnie was squatted on a footstool ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... then, though he is a god, he is a dry, silent, uncongenial and uncomfortable god. It would have suited me much better to have married a sinner. But then the sinner that I would have married was so irredeemable a scapegrace." ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... "Oh! you young scapegrace," was the rejoinder, "if ever I forgive you, I'll—umph!—that I will"—then changing his tone to one of much feeling, he continued, "So you hadn't forgotten the old man then, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... him," replied the Major, loosening his high black stock. "But where do you suppose I saw him, ma'am? and how? Why, the young scapegrace has actually gone and hired himself out as a stagedriver—a common stagedriver. And, bless my soul, he had the audacity to tip his hat to me from the box—from the box with the ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... Quixotism, knight-errantry; fire eating. gaming, gambling; blind bargain, leap in the dark, leap of faith, fool's paradise; too many eggs in one basket. desperado, rashling[obs3], madcap, daredevil, Hotspur, fire eater, bully, bravo, Hector, scapegrace, enfant perdu[Fr]; Don Quixote, knight- errant, Icarus; adventurer; gambler, gamester; dynamitard[obs3]; boomer [obs3][U. S.]. V. be rash &c. adj.; stick at nothing, play a desperate game; run into danger &c. 665; play with fire, play ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... The scapegrace did not flinch. "I am telling the truth, sir," he retorted. "What interest could I possibly have ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... her had in it a gleam of poetry, a spice of fun, a touch of self-devotion, something even of hero-worship; but with it all there was a dash of devilry, and an aptitude almost for wickedness. She knew Burgo Fitzgerald to be a scapegrace, and she liked him the better on that account. She despised her husband because he had no vices. She would have given everything she had to Burgo,—pouring her wealth upon him with a total disregard ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope |
