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More "Mercenary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and the figure said to him, "Stay where thou art, and let thy troops proceed against the enemy." So the pious king, in obedience to this convenient vision, remained secure behind the walls of Memphis, and sent his forces, native and mercenary, into the nome of Prosopis against the Libyans. The two armies joined battle on the 3rd of Epiphi (May 18), and a desperate engagement took place, in which, after six hours of hard fighting, the Egyptians were victorious, and the ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... you can have a sharp and also a dull knowledge, and whether you can know near, but not at a distance, or know the same thing with more or less intensity, and so on without end. Such questions might have been put to you by a light-armed mercenary, who argued for pay. He would have lain in wait for you, and when you took up the position, that sense is knowledge, he would have made an assault upon hearing, smelling, and the other senses;—he would have shown you no mercy; and while you were lost in envy and admiration of his wisdom, he ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... of laughter. "Don't! don't!" he pleaded, holding up a hand. "Why, Lafelle, you old fraud, I look upon your Church as a huge business institution, a gigantic trust, as mercenary and merciless as Steel, Oil, or Tobacco! Why, you and I are in the same business, that of making money! And I'd like to borrow some of your methods. You catch 'em through religion. I have to use other methods. But ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... thou into the joy of thy Lord." And that holy "prize" does, and must, prove a magnet to the Christian's will and hopes. What is he looking for? Not an accession of personal dignity in heaven, but a word from his beloved Master's heart. There is nothing mercenary in this. True, it "has respect unto the recompense of reward." But the "reward" is what only love can give, and only love can take. It is love's approval of the ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... the expenses of the little court, of the bodyguard, of the mercenary troops, and of the public buildings were met, as well as of the buffoons and men of talent who belonged to the personal attendants of the prince. The illegitimacy of his rule isolated the tyrant and surrounded ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... them with drink, and sought to win their favors by ribald jesting and talk as obscene as their condition of drunkenness would permit them, while the women accepted their attentions in the spirit in which they were offered, calculating, watching, with an eye trained to the highest pitch of mercenary motive, for the direction whence the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... the honey of the mouth; a handsome face is both a full moon and day; black hair is night; the waist is a willow-branch or a lance; the water of the face is self-respect: a poet sells the water of his face[FN309] when he bestows mercenary praises on a ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... person, property, earnings and children of married women to the irresponsible control of their husbands, is not a protest against marriage. It is a vindication of marriage, against the barbarism of the law which degrades a noble and life-long partnership of equals into a mercenary and servile ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... a refined or spiritual establishment, but it was decorous, and Randall had such an affection and respect for the innocence of his sister's young son, that he could not bear to have him exposed to the company of one habituated to the licentiousness of the mercenary soldier. At first the jester hoped to remove the lads from the danger, for the brief remainder of their stay, by making double exertion to obtain places for them at any diversion which might be going on when their day's work was ended, and of these, of course, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Miss Matilda, "and why not, Lady Griffin? There is no reason you should break your tea-cup, because Algernon asks a harmless question. HE is not mercenary; he is all candor, innocence, generosity! He is himself blessed with a sufficient portion of the world's goods to be content; and often and often has he told me he hoped the woman of his choice might come to him without a penny, that he ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... others, staunch Buonapartist. He is always of the militant, not of the triumphant party: so far he bears a gallant show of magnanimity. But his gallantry is hardly of the right stamp. It wants principle; for though he is not servile or mercenary, he is the victim of self-will. He must pull down and pull in pieces: it is not in his disposition to do otherwise. It is a pity; for with his great talents he might do great things, if he would go right forward to any useful object, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Fonseca, who was charged with the administration of affairs in the Indies, and the other was stout old Juan de la Cosa. These two men made a very efficient combination at the Spanish court, especially as La Cosa had some money and was quite willing to put it up, a prime requisite for the mercenary and ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... was something different about her, too. Constance more than once was on the point of revising her estimate of the little actress. Was she, after all, wholly mercenary in her attitude toward Warrington? Was he merely a live spender whom she could not afford to lose? Or was she merely a beautiful, delicate creature caught in the merciless maelstrom of the life into which she had been thrown? Did she realize ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... Buonaparte, being an only child, had fallen heir to her father's property on the second marriage of her mother. The stepfather was an excellent Swiss, a Protestant from Basel, thoroughly educated, and interested in education, and for years a mercenary in the Genoese service. On his retirement he became a Roman Catholic in order to secure the woman of his choice. He was the father of Letitia's half brother, Joseph. The retired officer, though kindly disposed to the family he had entered, had little ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Catholic reaction was due to genuine religious fervour; in Bohemia it was brought about by brute force; and even with all his money and his men King Ferdinand found the destruction of the Brethren no easy task. He had the whole house of Hapsburg on his side; he had thousands of mercenary soldiers from Spain; he was restrained by no scruples of conscience; and yet it took him six full years to drive the Brethren from the country. And even then he had not completed his work. In spite of his efforts, many thousands of the people ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... know how tenderly I adore you; if you don't marry me at once I'll break every bone in your body!' He then snatched my bonnet, a new one, from my head, and so acted on my nerves that I went off to the Registry Office and was married. That he was actuated by merely mercenary motives is proved by the fact that the gratuity (of half-a-crown), which he presented to the Registry Clerk, he actually borrowed from me! I knew him already to be unprincipled; but never until that moment had it flashed upon me that he was a fortune-hunter! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... meretricious air over both; and there is apparent a popular inclination to condone rather than to take pride in these faits accomplis. The one excursion was a product of sportsmanlike bravado, fed on boyish exuberance, fomented for mercenary objects by certain business interests and place-hunting politicians, and incited by meretricious newspapers with a view to increase their circulation. The other was set afoot by interested businessmen, backed by politicians, seconded by newspapers, and borne by ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... or mercenary creature, No one more cordially detested the life of dependence than he. He always thought that his father had discharged all the duties of that relation in nourishing his childhood and giving him a good education. Whatever ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... articles as much as a book destined to last; he always respected his work, and the care given to it bore no relation to the price it was to fetch. He often expressed a wish that he might labor like the monks in the Middle Ages, without being disturbed by mercenary considerations; that simple shelter, food, and raiment should be provided for himself and for those dependent upon him—he did not foresee any other wants—so that he might devote the whole of his ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the only being on earth who could have rendered their son happy. And for your own father, when State and Church intrigues allow him to bestow a thought upon you, will he not think that your happiness, your security, is better cared for when you are my wife, than were you to continue under the mercenary charge of yonder foolish woman? What could his pride desire better for you, than the establishment which will one day be mine? Come then, Alice, and since you condemn me to banishment—since you ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... strength of a free state consists in its infantry; and, on the other hand, that when the infantry in a state become more valuable than the cavalry, the power of the aristocracy is diminished, and equal rights can no longer be withheld from the people. The employment of mercenary soldiers in modern times renders these observations no longer applicable; but in the military states of antiquity, where the citizens themselves served as soldiers, there are innumerable examples of this mutual connection between political and military systems. It is further illustrated in the ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... broken, and their manners to a certain extent cultivated. He has no trouble whatever with pups when ordered, as he simply sends the address of customers and the farmer ships them. This, to me, is a very uninteresting and somewhat mercenary way of doing business, as one misses all the charm of breeding and the bringing up of the little tots, to many of us the most delightful part of the business. To those breeders who have newly started in, do not get discouraged ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... ready to engage in any wild crusade against a neighboring people, regardless of the justice of the enterprise and without looking at the fatal consequences to ourselves and to the cause of popular government. Such expeditions, however, are often stimulated by mercenary individuals, who expect to share the plunder or profit of the enterprise without exposing themselves to danger, and are led on by some irresponsible foreigner, who abuses the hospitality of our own Government by seducing the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore
... spell, the German mercenary pondered her with those slowly kindling eyes, that slowly spreading, indefinite smile. Then he stirred, and to ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... and drawers of water." The Slav is born a slave to be controlled by the Germans. The Serbian is born a serf to be controlled by the Austrians. The Bohemian is an outcast. The Pole is a drunkard. The Celt is a weakling. The Anglo-Saxon is a mercenary. The Russian is a Tatar and ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... after so many successful struggles, deemed themselves happy in the secure possession of their privileges, they were surprised in 1305 to find that Edward had secretly applied to Rome, and had procured from that mercenary court an absolution from all the oaths and engagements, which he had so often reiterated, to observe both the charters. There are some historians,[*] so credulous as to imagine, that this perilous step ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... still more now by the proofs of his application to military and political science. He would talk very learnedly of the disposition of armies in the field, of the advantages and disadvantages of the use of mercenary troops, and the best way to defend and the best way to assault a well-walled citadel, so that you would think, to listen to him, that he was some gray old generalissimo steeped in experience, and not the smooth-cheeked ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... half-humorous bitterness in his voice that Margaret noted silently. So (she thought) he had hoped for a moment that at the last Frederick R. Woods had relented toward him. It grieved her, in a dull fashion, to see him so mercenary. It grieved her—though she would have denied it emphatically—to see him so disappointed. Since he wanted the money so much, she would have liked for him to have had it, worthless as he was, for the sake of ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... lengths that it preferred to sit and nurse its contempt and hatred in solitude rather than mount to heights of hitherto unattainable splendour. To make matters worse, she was quite impervious to mercenary considerations, and could not be ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... would not hear of, and told him to have patience, for the sailor would be faithful to his word. When, too, he demanded the five silver dollars for Jimmy, the captain was unwilling to give them. But Toby insisted upon it, as he now began to think that Jimmy might be a mere mercenary, who would be sure to prove faithless if not well paid. Accordingly he not only gave him the money, but took care to assure him, over and over again, that as soon as he brought me aboard he would receive ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... much, you may consider me of a mercenary disposition; but I have received from Brazil no recompence whatever, beyond the honours conferred by His Imperial Majesty. If you will peruse the accompanying papers, you will find that when I left ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... little history in his mind that was reasonably near the truth, of a hard-up professional family, fatherless perhaps, of a mercenary marriage ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... had opportunities for knowing that Vanderbilt had pocketed millions of dollars in his fraudulent hold-up arrangement with various mail subsidy lines. He was known to be mercenary and unscrupulous. Yet he was selected by Secretary of War Stanton to act as the agent for the Government. At this time Vanderbilt was posing as a glorious patriot. With much ostentation he had loaned ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... a look at the two pretty children, honourable and legal gentlemen are straining their ability to reduce to property. There stands the blushing woman, calm and beautiful, a virtuous rebuke to curious spectators, mercenary slave dealers, the very learned gentlemen of the bar, and his enthroned honour, the Court! She will give testimony that makes nature frown at its own degradation. Not far from Franconia sits the very ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... said the maiden, frowning. "Were kindness not looking from thy face, I should think thee a mercenary from ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... prudence. All the letters of Pitt at that time exude confidence from every line. He hopes that Dumouriez will succeed in overthrowing the regicides at Paris. The backwardness of the Prussians in supporting Coburg does not deter him from ordering to Flanders all the available British and mercenary troops, in order to besiege Dunkirk, and otherwise help the Imperialists. As if this is not enough, on or just before 1st April he treats with Malouet, the French envoy from Hayti, for the transfer of that colony ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... national policy an inspiring aim or not? Yet they are, speaking in terms of communities, pure self-interest—all bound up with economic problems, with money. Does Admiral Mahan mean us to take him at his word when he would attach to such efforts the same discredit that one implies in talking of a mercenary individual? Would he have us believe that the typical great movements of our times—Socialism, Trades Unionism, Syndicalism, Insurance Bills, Land Laws, Old Age Pensions, Charity Organisation, Improved Education—bound up as they all are with economic problems—are not the sort ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... free tribes, chiefly, if not exclusively, of Milesian race; and the Daer-Clanna, or unfree tribes, consisting of the descendants of the subjugated older races, or of clans once free, reduced to servitude by the sword, or of the posterity of foreign mercenary soldiers. Of the free clans, the most illustrious were those of whose Princes we have traced the record—the descendants of Nial in Ulster and Meath, of Cathaeir More in Leinster, of Oliold in Munster, and of Eochaid in Connaught. ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... shall have been to the YOUNG readers, that and much more it is the writers' wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honorable thoughts d actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... yeomen, is the natural strength and only security of a free government; that such a militia in this colony would forever render it unnecessary for the mother country to keep among us for the purpose of our defence any standing army of mercenary forces, always subversive of the quiet and dangerous to the liberties of the people, and would obviate the pretext of taxing us ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... were famous, women of fashion, statues of marble and fair flesh, he must have them all. He collected, without any taste whatever, costly paintings, rare objects; he bought without love, girls who were not wholly mercenary. At a pinch he found them, taking pleasure in parading in his coupe, around the lake or at the races, some recruit in vice, and in watching the crowd that at once eagerly surrounded her, simply because she had been the mistress of the fat Molina. He ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... end, as to the boxer who endures bruises from the hope of honour. Death is painful, and most so to the man that by his virtue has made life valuable. Such a man is to be considered more courageous, as a soldier, than a mercenary ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... said, "if it be that, the Vicomte de Berquin will be a vastly ingenious gentleman if he can either find our hiding-place, or delude me away from my men. To think that they should have chosen the first mercenary wretch they met on their way! Yet doubtless the ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... all 'balled up' since you went away," he explained—"took a contract to produce a certain line of ornamental reliefs; it never pays to be mercenary. But there it is! I was greedy, I went out for money—now behold me in the grasp of a business agreement. Can't sleep, can't breathe country air—had to ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... amazing turn it shows for commonplaces! That life is short, that marriages from mercenary motives produce unhappiness, that different men are virtuous in different degrees, that advice is generally ineffectual, that adversity has its uses, that fame is liable to suffer from detraction;—these and a host of other such ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... ways—a woman young and beautiful certainly, but yet conversant with the convenances of society? Such a woman would rescue Adrian from the shoals and quicksands that surround him in the form of mercenary friends and scheming mothers. Such a woman might surely be found. Nay, I think I myself could put my hand upon her, if I ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... there were the members of her family, all radiant except the purchaser of the picture, who customarily showed traces of sobriety and skepticism. There were one or two prospective patrons lured to the trap; some ephemeral sycophants, volunteer or mercenary; a few idle fellow artists who enjoyed seeing a colleague make what they considered to be an exhibition of himself; some inevitable people who went everywhere they were asked, especially when there was a ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... to the fact, which is brought to light by this relation, that the slave-holders have not only to contend with the honest and open-handed means which the abolitionists most righteously employ,[A] to facilitate the escape of slaves, but with the mercenary acts of members of their own community, who live by the manufacture and sale of ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... wherein siege, in battle, in council, in hair-breadth escapes from pursuing hosts, from famine, from perils of the sea, she showed the masterful authority, the impetuous daring, the pertinacity which she had inherited from her Norman ancestors. Stephen fell back on his last source—a body of mercenary troops from Flanders,—but the Brabancon troops were hated in England as foreigners and as riotous robbers, and there was no payment for them in the royal treasury. The barons were all alike ready to change sides as often as the shifting of parties gave opportunity to make a gain of dishonour; ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... his twenty-first year, to Marguerite Justine d'Estrades, then only nineteen years of age, and whom he saw for the first time in his life only six weeks before they became husband and wife. Like most of the matches then made among the higher classes in France, this was one of a purely mercenary character. The father of the Marquis de Vermandois, and the father of Marguerite, as a means of joining their estates, contracted their children without deigning to consult the wishes of the parties, and obedience or disinheritance was the only alternative. ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... No, great king: I come to thee for charitable licence, That we may wander o'er this bloody field To book our dead, and then to bury them; To sort our nobles from our common men, For many of our princes (woe the while!) Lie drown'd and soak'd in mercenary blood; (So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs In blood of princes;) and their wounded steeds Fret fetlock deep in gore, and, with wild rage Yerk out their armed heels at their dead masters, Killing them twice. O, give us leave, great king, ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... during the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, they had that advantage over their neighbours which regular troops always possess over militia. This advantage they lost, when other states began, at a later period, to employ mercenary forces, who were probably as superior to them in the art of war as they had hitherto been to their antagonists.) Each pursuit therefore became first an art, and then a trade. In proportion as the professors of each became more expert in their particular ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the heart of Dalila; she hates Samson more bitterly than the leader of his enemies. She is not mercenary, like the Biblical woman; she scorns the promise of riches which the High Priest offers so she obtain the secret of the Hebrew's strength. Thrice had she essayed to learn that secret and thrice had he set her spell at naught. Now she will assail him ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... special animosity against lawyers, whom they considered mercenary instruments in the hands of the nobles for oppressing them. They hung all the lawyers that they could get into their hands, and after burning the Savoy they went to the Temple, which was a spacious edifice containing ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... chiefly aggravated him was, that Lucy should have given him up for the sake of marrying a man of rank. If it had been any one she was deeply attached to, he would not have so much minded; but it was nothing but a paltry ambition to be a peeress; she was mercenary, he knew it, and it was that which stung him ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... flexible form, and listens to the words that he would admire, only the cynical suspicion is in his mind that she is talking for effect. His general habit was to consider all women mercenary and untrustworthy. Deep in his heart—for he had a heart, though contracted from want of use—lay a hungry desire to be loved, really loved for himself; and the very keenness of the longing, and the anxiety not to be deceived, lessened his powers of penetration, ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... have come to nothing, and I have only mentioned them as showing Morse's willingness to part with his interest for much less than he knew it was worth, in order that he might not prove an obstacle in the expansion of the system by being too mercenary, and so that he might obtain some ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... modesty (Prag is not spoken of at all); and how the neighboring ravenous Powers, on-lookers hitherto, have opened their throats with one accord to swallow Prussia, thinking its downfall certain: "Poor mercenary Sweden, once so famous under its soldier Kings, now debased by a venal Senate;"—Sweden, "what say I? my own kindred [foolish Anspach and others], driven by perverse motives, join in the plot of horrors, and become satellites of the ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... foul fiend sent this wench hither? As if it were not sufficient plague to be harboured in a hovel that would hardly serve for a dog's kennel in England, baited by a rude peasant-boy, and dependent on the faith of a mercenary ruffian, but I cannot even have time to muse over my own mishap, but must come aloft, frisk, fidget, and make speeches, to please this pale hectic phantom, because she has gentle blood in her veins? By mine honour, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... hoped much from the interest of her connections; but a change in the ministry had thrown her relations out of power; and, beyond her dowry, he obtained no worldly advantage with the lady of his mercenary choice. Mrs. Beaufort was a woman whom a word or two will describe. She was thoroughly commonplace—neither bad nor good, neither clever nor silly. She was what is called well-bred; that is, languid, silent, perfectly dressed, and insipid. Of her two children, ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from Temple Bar to Guildhall was crowded from top to bottom, and many had scaffoldings besides; carpets and rich hangings were hung out on the fronts all the way along; and our friend notes that the citizens were not mercenary, but "generously accommodated their friends and customers gratis, and entertained them in the most elegant manner, so that though their shops were shut, they might be said to ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... it, signorina?' he said. 'Young people and beautiful people should not be mercenary. Poor child! you had better have ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... every nerve as if rushing upon the foe. Napoleon offered to these bands the same reward which he had promised to the peasants. But to a man, they refused the gold. They had imbibed the spirit of their chief, his enthusiasm, and his proud superiority to all mercenary motives. "We are not toiling for money," said they, "but for your approval, and to share ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... continual custom, which is soon prescribed which though it be not true, yet I forbear to note any deficiences; for the Olympian games are down long since, and the mediocrity of these things is for use; as for the excellency of them it serveth for the most part but for mercenary ostentation. ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... verging on the bounds of parliamentary eloquence, although he still spoke with bated breath, and to one solitary hearer. "Yes; we are becoming the slaves of a mercenary and irresponsible press—of one single newspaper. There is a man endowed with no great talent, enjoying no public confidence, untrusted as a politician, and unheard of even as a writer by the world at large, and ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... actuated by no hope of preferment or love of power, and therefore have established, even in the minds of your enemies, confidence in your disinterestedness. If you shall now array yourselves as a political party, and hold out mercenary rewards to induce men to rally under your standard, there is reason to fear that you will be regarded as those who have made the anti-slavery cause a hobby to ride into office, however plausible or sound may be your pretexts for such a course. You cannot, you ought ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... thing was to happen," remarked Bea, with a little mercenary expectation, "Congreve Hall would be Olive's; just think of it, girls, how grand! and Cousin Roger is immensely wealthy, and there would be no end of splendid things;" and Bea sighed a little, as she spoke, ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... in talking of our young pupil and your daughter; I object still more strongly to your insinuation that my desire to see them married (provided always that they are sincerely attached to each other) springs from a mercenary motive." ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... orange-wine, or a sip of cherry-brandy; he says it makes his head ache: he prefers the clear, cold water, or at most a dish of chocolate. Mother may jeer at him as unmanly; she has a fine spirit, mother: and she may think I might have done better; but mother has grown a little mercenary, and forgotten that she was once young herself, and would have liked to have served a great genius with such a loving heart and such blue eyes as Will's. Ah! the girls will all envy me, when they get a glance from Will's blue eyes: and let them, for he is too good a fellow to look ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... at her in astonishment. "What is this you are saying?" She slowly repeated the words. "Why, how could I dispossess her? It is yours to bequeath as you see fit, madam. Do you think I am a mercenary scoundrel,—that I would try to take it away from her? I know she is not my father's daughter, but—why, good heaven, I would never dream of fighting for ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... England's war-ships and her colonies for our own. "Long he cannot last," said my Professor, speaking of the War. "The French are a degenerate race, and we shall be in Paris in a month. The English are given up to games, and their mercenary army—I have it on the highest authority—cannot for a moment stand against our German heroes. The Russians are slow and disorganised and useless for war. For me you need not be afraid, my dear. In this war a man of my age will not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... wealthy bride; I would never condescend to anything so low as to marry for money. I desire not to be kept by my wife, but to keep her, and that she may be sensible of it. But I do not want a poor girl either. Though I am a man of means, and am marrying not from mercenary motives, but from love, yet I cannot take a poor girl, for, as you know yourself, prices have gone up so, and there will ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... States an attempt is made to secure national defence by a system of militia, and to take account of political possibilities. The great European States maintain standing armies in which all able-bodied citizens have to pass a longer or shorter period of military training. England alone keeps up a mercenary army, and by the side of it a territorial army, whose ranks are filled ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... produce no other evil, lead to the misspending of time, our own perhaps included. But we cannot refrain expressing our regret, that such formidable weapons in the cause of morality, should be suffered to be wielded by any indifferent or mercenary dealer, who undoubtedly will consult rather the public tastes than the private good: the evil may be remediless, yet we love to express our sentiments, though we should suggest nothing new or even profitable. Into one of these haunts of the idle, then, John Moseley entered with a lovely ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... Loughshane,—he had had no thought of mending his deficiency in this respect by a rich marriage. Nor had it ever occurred to him that he would seek a marriage for that purpose. Such an idea would have been thoroughly distasteful to him. There had been no stain of premeditated mercenary arrangement upon him at any time. But circumstances had so fallen out with him, that as he won his spurs in Parliament, as he became known, and was placed first in one office and then in another, prospects ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... generous encouragement of poetry; and whose judgment of that art nothing but your commendation of my trifle[344] can give me any occasion to call in question. I do not doubt but you will look over this poem with another eye, and reward it in a different manner, from a mercenary bookseller, who counts the lines he is to purchase[345], and considers nothing but the bulk. I cannot help taking notice, that, besides what the authour may hope for on account of his abilities, he has likewise another claim to your regard, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... simple intermediaries, claiming no wondrous powers, making use of no deceptive nor mercenary methods, as far as my observation goes, with no particular dress and little paraphernalia, having no political influence, but possessing, in all that concerns religion, paramount authority. Their title to priesthood is derived from violent manifestations, such as trembling, perspiring, belching, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... could I worship aught beneath the skies That earth hath seen or fancy could devise, Thine altar, sacred Liberty, should stand, Built by no mercenary vulgar hand, With fragrant turf, and flowers as wild and fair, As ever dressed a bank, or scented ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... mine for ransome? Com'st thou againe for ransome? Her. No great King: I come to thee for charitable License, That we may wander ore this bloody field, To booke our dead, and then to bury them, To sort our Nobles from our common men. For many of our Princes (woe the while) Lye drown'd and soak'd in mercenary blood: So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbes In blood of Princes, and with wounded steeds Fret fet-locke deepe in gore, and with wilde rage Yerke out their armed heeles at their dead masters, Killing them twice. O giue vs leaue great ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... I am!' she said to herself presently; 'what a despicable, mercenary creature! I don't care a straw for this man; and yet I am already thinking ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... public edifice, to dig public wells, or to plant shade or fruit-trees by the wayside. If they give alms, or treat animals kindly, or repeat prayers, or do any other good deed, they do it entirely with this mercenary view of obtaining merit. This "merit" is not so much to procure them happiness in another world, as to secure them from suffering in their future transmigrations in this; for they believe that the soul of one who dies without having laid up any merit, will have to pass into the body of some ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... as a degraded menial, to make men the slaves of her mercenary schemes, La Corriveau cared nothing. She never felt it, never inspired it. She looked down upon all her sex as the filth of creation and, like herself, incapable of a chaste feeling or a pure thought. Every better instinct of her nature had gone out like the flame of a lamp whose ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... than nothing, but I like the wetting best." Louisa laughed, and used afterwards to say to Hannah, "Has Jack given you a wetting?" Later on some other free ladies took up the joke, and Hannah's "wetting" became a bye-word among the circle of free, mercenary lovers. ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... Boissier, La religion romaine, i, 182. An illustration of religious ideas in the third century is afforded by the enrollment of Caracalla among the heroes, a divinizing decree of the Senate having been extorted by the turbulent and mercenary soldiery (Dio Cassius, ed. Boissevain [Eng. tr. by H. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... unnatural and wild, By Revolution's calculating sons! So leave the home of mercenary minds, And wing with me, in your uplifted thoughts, Away to our unyielding Canada! There to behold the Genius of the Land, Beneath her singing pine and sugared tree, Companioned with ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... masses of half-armed rustics who had flocked at Harold's summons to the fight with the stranger. It was against the centre of this formidable position that William arrayed his Norman knighthood, while the mercenary forces he had gathered in France and Britanny were ordered to attack its flanks. A general charge of the Norman foot opened the battle; in front rode the minstrel Taillefer, tossing his sword in the air and catching it again while he chaunted the song of Roland. He was the first of the host ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... "Gazette" with a humility and rancour that compensated for his lack of talent. The marquis, in entering on the campaign, had perceived immediately the advantage that might be derived from the co-operation of this insipid sacristan with the coarse, mercenary pen. After the February Revolution the articles in the "Gazette" contained fewer ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... know that European feminines in all ranks of society—alack, even in our own!—are immoderately attracted by anyone possessed of riches and a title—or of either of the two? As an au fait in the female temperament, I shall wager that it is nine out of ten that if you spoof this mercenary young minx into believing that you are merely a native impecunious nonentity, and not to be shot at with powder, she will instantaneously drop ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... draw up the deed, making over to you from me one half of the fortune of Claude de Buxieres. You will then be, by law, and in the eyes of all, one of the desirable matches of the canton, and you can demand the hand of Mademoiselle Vincart, without any fear of being thought presumptuous or mercenary." ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... to find in a wife a rational companion, an affectionate and trustworthy friend. No views of matrimony could be less romantic, more soberly sensible, than those which I conceived. Nor were my requirements mercenary or presumptuous. I cared not for fortune; I asked nothing from connections. My ambition was exclusively professional; it could be served by no titled kindred, accelerated by no wealthy dower. I was no slave to beauty. I did not seek in a wife the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Southwest. He had before noticed the apparent incongruity of the handwriting and the text, and it was possible that for the purposes of disguise the poet might have employed an amanuensis. But how could he reconcile the incongruity of the mercenary and slangy purport of the missive itself with the mental habit of its author? Was it possible that these inconsistent qualities existed in the one individual? He smiled grimly as he thought of his visitor Bowers and his friend Jack. He was startled as he remembered ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... you, for although we may be lawless, we will still be just. You voluntarily entered into our service, and received our pay. You were one of us, with only this difference, that we have taken up the cause from principle and loyalty, and you joined us from mercenary motives. Still we kept our faith with you; for every service performed, you were well and honourably paid. But you received our money and turned against us; revealed our secrets, and gave information to your government, by which that gentleman" (pointing to Ramsay) ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... for the men of commerce, with their mercenary talk about credit and market prices; and also for the scientists, doctors, engineers, and men of other professions, who spoke of things in books which he did not understand. Reading books was one of the faults of Turcas, his assistant. No bookish soldier, he knew, had ever been a great general. ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... of Isabelle; but all turned from him with disgust. At length he found her out, but what was his grief and surprise—in a nunnery! Firm to the troth she had so solemnly plighted, she had rejected the proposition of her mercenary parent; and, having no idea but that her lover had shared the fate of all Christian captives, she had shut herself up from the world, and vowed to live the life of ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... with evident emotion. 'The loss of a few hundreds is of no real importance to me; and do you think that I could suffer that noble young woman to toil incessantly to pay the debt of an unprincipled parent? No, I am not so mercenary. Miss Beaufort refused me as a husband, but she must allow me the pleasure of becoming her friend. You need not be jealous, sir, of the title I am solicitous to assume, for it was for your sake that she rejected me; but whether as a maiden or wife, I shall deem myself happy in being permitted ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... it is not the larger presentation,' said my lady, rather coldly; 'though I will not, Mr. Silverman, pay you the bad compliment of supposing that YOU are, because that would be mercenary, - and mercenary I am persuaded you ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... the other Starbrows; and I should be so glad if it could be the same as it was before this unhappy quarrel. For though I will never be dictated to by anyone about anything, it is a very good and pleasant thing to have someone in the world who is not actuated by mercenary motives to love and trust ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... make the terms with Farrington. The first glance aroused my suspicions of him. He was shifty-eyed, and his face had a hard and mercenary look. In spite of, perhaps rather because of, my repugnance we quickly came to an agreement, and as I left the apartment I mentally resolved to keep my ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... ladies, when old enough, into general society. Mrs. Schreiber was the very person required. Intellectually she had no great pretensions; but these she did not need: her character was irreproachable, her manners were polished, and her own income placed her far above all mercenary temptations. She had not thought fit to accept the station of Colonel Watson's wife, but some unavowed feeling prompted her to undertake, with enthusiasm, the duties of a mother to the colonel's daughter. Chiefly on Miss ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... in the heart, you see, Serena. There is not a more mercenary race under the sun than the clergy. They all marry for money. I can mention quite a dozen; his own uncle at the head of them. Now, you cannot suppose that he married Mrs Jonathan Prothero for anything but her fortune ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... stated above that one of the abuses which came into large practice from the middle period of the Tokugawa Bakufu was the adoption of children of ignoble birth into samurai families in consideration of monetary payments by their parents. This mercenary custom was strictly interdicted by the Matsudaira regent, who justly saw in it a danger to the solidity of the military class. But it does not appear that his veto ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... eighth] Cantos contain a full detail (like the storm in Canto Second) of the siege and assault of Ismael, with much of sarcasm on those butchers in large business, your mercenary soldiery.... With these things and these fellows it is necessary, in the present clash of philosophy and tyranny, to throw away the scabbard. I know it is against fearful odds; but the battle must be fought; and it will be eventually for the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... for the use of persons placed in the most trying circumstances, and some of them are for persons writhing under a sense of intolerable injury, sweetness and light do ever reign. Even 'yours truly, Jacob Langton,' in his 'letter to his Daughter's Mercenary Fiance',' mitigates the sternness of his tone by the remark that his 'task is inexpressibly painful.' And he, Mr. Langton, is the one writer who lets the post go out on his wrath. When Horace Masterton, of Thorpe Road, Putney, receives from Miss Jessica Weir, of Fir Villa, Blackheath, a letter 'declaring ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... philanthropic intentions with which the legislature were originally actuated. The alarming increase of crime that has taken place within the last few years, is the re-action of this pernicious and mercenary system, which has already been carried to such an extent as to endanger the lives and property of every honest and well disposed inhabitant of the colony. This system, so injurious of itself, has been powerfully seconded by the lax and indiscriminate manner in which convict servants have been assigned ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... in his warm pursuit." Aglauros bends on Mercury those eyes, Which yellow-hair'd Minerva's secret saw; And ponderous sums for her assistance claims; Driving the god meantime without the gates. With angry glare the warlike goddess view'd The mercenary nymph, and angry sighs, Which shook her bosom heav'd; the AEgis shook, On that strong bosom fix'd. Now calls to mind Minerva how with hands prophane, the maid Her strict behests despising, daring pry'd To know her secrets; and the seed beheld Of Vulcan, child without ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... might marry his rich cousin; but she did feel it to be an advantage that he should be on terms of intimacy with so large an income as that belonging to Lady Eustace. "Doan't thou marry for munny, but goa where munny is." Mrs. Greystock would have repudiated the idea of mercenary marriages in any ordinary conversation, and would have been severe on any gentleman who was false to a young lady. But it is so hard to bring one's general principles to bear on one's own conduct or in one's own ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... sustained a defeat. At length a calamity befel them which astonished all their neighbours. A division of the army of Agesilaus was cut off and destroyed almost to a man; and this exploit, which seemed almost portentous to the Greeks of that age, was achieved by Iphicrates, at the head of a body of mercenary light infantry. But it was from the day of Leuctya that the fall of Spate became rapid and violent. Some time before that day the Thebans had resolved to follow the example set many years before by the Argives. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Seacole: 'I have witnessed her devotion and her courage; I have already borne testimony to her services to all who needed them. She is the first who has redeemed the name of 'sutler' from the suspicion of worthlessness, mercenary business and plunder; and I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for some other illustrious dead.' England seems to have forgotten her, but it is hoped that this ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... the stub of his cigar towards the fire. It fell short in the grate. He picked it up and rammed it deep into the burning coals. He looked a poor, old, pitiful child, uttering embittered heresies. "All women are mercenary; all of them except my wife and daughters. Ah, yes, and ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... day, and of ostentatious expenditure by night. I have often heard, that their general voice, had it been raised, would have been hostile to the policy that has prevailed. But it was not raised; and now, when too late, and these mercenary and selfish beings are driven to some action by the loss of their accustomed gains, a large and violent party is forming among them, who loudly condemn the conduct of the Queen and her ministers, and advocate immediate submission to whatever terms Aurelian may impose. ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... not usually popular or to be encouraged, but Mark Twain had an especial weakness for compliments that came in that way. They were not mercenary compliments. The writer had nothing to gain. Two such letters follow—both written in England just at ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Suppose our mercenary impresario were unable to get into the concert hall of his famous rival. He would then listen outside the window and analyze the sound in this fashion: "Fifty per cent. of the sound is made by the tuba, 20 per ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... speech. "I don't think I'm very good at that kind of thing," he said. "When the father and mother came to ask of my house and my home I should break down. I don't say it as praising myself;—indeed, quite the reverse; but I fear I have not a mercenary tendency." ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... glanced nervously about him. "I must hasten," he said; "I cannot stop for explanations; but you will find me in my office at two o'clock to-morrow, if you care to call. Meantime, my young friend, I am not perhaps as mercenary as you think, and I may be able to be of great assistance to you," and with a final bow, the man hastily disappeared around a ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... already know, had been made for the purpose of marrying my fair cousin; for I did not, at the time I left Scotland, suppose I should need Sir George's protection against Elizabeth. When I met Dorothy at Rowsley, my desire to marry her became personal, in addition to the mercenary motives with which I had originally started. But I quickly recognized the fact that the girl was beyond my reach. I knew I could not win her love, even though I had a thousand years to try for it; and I would not accept her hand ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... which immediately set them all by the ears, for every one was hungrier than another, but the biggest god killed all the rest with this staff which thou now seest he still holds in his hands." Superstition, especially when combined with mercenary motives, knows neither reason nor human affection, therefore the father handed over his son Abraham to the inquisition of Nimrod, who threw him into the fiery furnace, as recorded elsewhere in this Miscellany. This is an historical ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... great part of Asia and Africa. I have everywhere shown myself the friend of my fellow-creatures. My knowledge, my time, my fortune have ever been employed in the relief of distress! I have studied and practised medicine, but I have never degraded that most noble and most consoling of arts by mercenary speculations of any kind. Though always giving, and never receiving, I have preserved my independence. I have even carried my delicacy so far as to refuse the favours of kings. I have given gratuitously my remedies ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... How Jove)—Ver. 584. Donatus remarks here that this was "a very proper piece of furniture for the house of a Courtesan, giving an example of loose and mercenary love, calculated to excite wanton thoughts, and at the same time hinting to the young lover that he must make his way to the bosom of his mistress, like Jupiter to Danae, in a shower of gold. Oh the avarice ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... She's the result of a mercenary mother's schemes. She's not as old as people think, you know. Her career has been eventful, which makes it seem long. But I was in the cast, playing a small part in the first play she ever appeared in, and that was only twelve years ago. She was ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... instruction. Often an opponent will come over to your side if you just confess, honestly, that he is a better man than you are, and you need his help. What was the road I must take to achieve the same understanding he had achieved? His eyes glittered at that, and a mercenary expression underlay the tone of ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... proprietors or merchants. They are people of very temperate habits, but they are passionately fond of gaming, and in this respect they have bequeathed a dangerous inheritance to the Creoles. The pride and mercenary spirit which distinguished the Spaniards before the independence are now broken, if not entirely subdued. The intercourse between them and the natives, though still somewhat constrained, is every year ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... motives other than mercenary. His cup was full when he could hear John's masterful voice addressed to Mrs. Rapp, Junior, ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... his own, and, never extravagant upon himself, was more liberal to the poor girl than ever she desired. But there was nothing mercenary in her. She was far more incapable of turpitude than he, for she was of a higher nature, and loved much where he loved only a little. She was nobler, sweetly prouder than he. She had sacrificed all to him for love—could accept nothing ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... Princess Elizabeth, and in January of the next year they were married. It seems to have been a matter of no consequence to her whether one man or another was her husband, provided he was only King of England, so that she could be queen. Henry's motive, too, in marrying her, was equally mercenary, his only object being to secure to himself, through her, the right of inheritance to her father's claims to the throne. He accordingly never pretended to feel any love for her, and, after his marriage, he treated her ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... chancellor are the only friends you possess. The Marshal, from personal considerations merely, remains neutral. Your army, excepting the cuirassiers, are traitors to your house. The wisest thing you have done was to surround yourself with this mercenary body, whom you call the royal cuirassiers, only, instead of three hundred, you should have two thousand. Self-interest will make them true to you. You might find some means to pay them, for they would be a good buffer between you and your enemies. The president of the Diet and the members are ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... enthusiastic, so that in a few seconds Mr. G. Bird stood pecking grains from her hand. The spectacle was so lovely that I was not at all troubled by twinges of jealousy, but enjoyed it, for even at that early moment I think I felt a mercenary interest in seeing the friendship between the Golden Bird and the Apple-Blossom sealed. In her I psychologically scented an ally, and I enjoyed the hug bestowed upon him fully as much or even more than he did. It was a lovely picture that the kiddie ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... harvest-home should not be forgotten. When labourers simply regard harvest-time as a season when they can earn a few shillings more than usual, and take no further interest in their work, or in the welfare of their master, all brightness vanishes from their industry: their minds become sordid and mercenary; and mutual trust, good-feeling, and ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... and I almost wonder her mother allowed her to marry. Fan hints that they were mercenary, but if they were they concealed the fact wonderfully well, and made me think it a great sacrifice on their part to give me Daisy. And so it was; such a lovely little darling, and so beautiful. What a sensation she created at Saratoga, and still I was glad to get away, for ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... the Town Hall, on days of election, distributing votes, and encouraging the timid and the doubtful, and their influence was effectively felt in the direction of public affairs, which now seem mostly to be left to the management of the least competent, and often the most ignorant, mercenary, and corrupt. I firmly believe that the equal, if not preeminent position long maintained by Massachusetts, among rivals vastly superior in territory and population, was owing to the active interest formerly taken by her leading men of all professions and occupations ...
— Old New England Traits • Anonymous
... mercenary are mankind. Again, dear brother, last Sunday, if you recollect, was very wet; accordingly I went to church in my neat black sabots, objects one would not indeed wear in a fashionable city, but which in the country I have ever been accustomed to use for walking in dirty roads. Believe ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... power in September 1841. Why the Repealers did not go to work instantly, is more than we can explain; but so it was. In March of 1843, and not sooner, Mr O'Connell opened a new shop of mercenary agitation, and probably for the last time that he will ever do so. The surveillance of Government, it now appears, commenced almost simultaneously; why not the reaction of Government? Upon that it is worth spending a few words. It is now made known to the public, that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... New York. I thought I was happy at first, but lately we have been miserable. My marriage—er—they drove my husband to the wall, and killed him. He was sensitive and noble, but not practical, and he fell a victim to the mercenary despotism of our surroundings. When I tried to help him they became jealous of me, and shut their ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... merely followed the example of his ancestors in obedience to African ferocity. Yet, of his intrepidity and nobler endurance, I will relate an anecdote which was told me by reliable persons. Some twenty years before my arrival at the Cape, large bands of mercenary bushmen had joined his enemies along the beach, and after desolating his territory, sat down to beleaguer the stockade of Toso. For many a day thirst and hunger were quietly suffered under the resolute ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... conqueror of sleep or he of the curly hair), by what he hath done, hath not insulted our family. He hath without doubt, rather enhanced our respect. Partha knoweth that we of the Satwata race are never mercenary. The son of Pandu also regardeth a self-choice as doubtful in its results. Who also would approve of accepting a bride in gift as if she were an animal? What man again is there on earth that would sell his offspring? I think Arjuna, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... that a "father" and "mother" should be found. On this subject "the Golden Shoemaker" had talked much with his minister. He shrank from the thought of advertising his need. He was afraid of bringing upon himself an avalanche of mercenary applications. His idea was to fix upon some excellent Christian man and woman who might be induced to accept the post as a sacred and delightful duty. They must be persons who loved children, and who were not in search of a living; and it would be none the worse if it were ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... tittle-tattle of the nursery or the lady's drawing-room, or the shameless combinations entered into by librarians.... In England as in France those who loved literature the most purely, who were the least mercenary in their love, were marked out for persecution, and all three were driven into exile. Byron and Shelley, and Swinburne, he, too, who loved literature for its own sake, was forced, amid cries of indignation and horror, to ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... never pride to have domination in thy wit, ne in thy word, that sin was the beginning of all perdition. Whosomever work to thee any thing, anon yield to him his meed and hire, let never the hire of thy servant ne meed of thy mercenary remain in no wise with thee. That thou hatest to be done to thee of other, see that thou never do to an other. Eat thy bread with the hungry and needy, and cover the naked with thy clothes. Ordain thy bread and wine upon the sepulture ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... unknown to him; he can neither give nor take; he is attracted by women, and stands in awe of them; his very good qualities tell against him, he is all generosity and modesty, and completely innocent of mercenary designs. Pleasure and not interest is his object when he tells a lie; and among many dubious courses, the conscience, with which as yet he has not juggled, points out to him the right way, which he is slow ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... their quantity and quality gradually sank to something very like zero. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the miserable creatures who came spying to this country never had a dog's chance from the word "Go." One cannot waste one's sympathy upon those who for mercenary motives consented to be spies, but I am glad that Mr. FELSTEAD pleads on behalf of such men as CARL LODY. "Some day," he writes, "when the nations of the world grow more sensible, there will be two methods of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... life. These young men, your forerunners, understood something of life while as yet completely careless of literature. After the impulse of Abelard and others had died down, the mass of students betook themselves to the Universities, no doubt, for quite ordinary, mercenary reasons. The University led to the Church, and the Church, in England at any rate, was the ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... tiles squatted a juggler from India. Under his white turban his glittering, beady eyes appraised the generosity of his audience as he arranged his flat baskets, his live rabbits and his hooded cobras for an exhibition of mercenary magic. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... occurrences he himself tells of, when Connecticut troops could "not be prevailed upon to stay longer than their term (saving those who have enlisted for the next campaign, and mostly on furlough), and such a dirty, mercenary spirit pervades the whole, that I should not be at all surprised at any disaster that may happen," and when he described how in his retreat through New Jersey, "The militia, instead of calling forth their utmost efforts to a brave and manly opposition in order ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... seldom deviates to pure or innocent subjects: no title is so envied by the men as that of libertine, and the women, also, are all ambitious of a like distinction: an "unfortunate" is not regarded as unfortunate there. The richest, the noblest, the highest in the land are profligates in love, or mercenary: more frequently both. Nothing is so disagreeable to an Abyssinian lady's ear as an insinuation that she is virtuous; for that would be taken to mean that she is either ill-looking or for some other reason is not favoured with ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... trade are the legitimate work in which a Vaisya may engage without fear of censure. The man who abandons his own proper occupation and betakes himself to that of a Sudra, should be considered as a Sudra and on no account should any food be accepted from him. Professors of the healing art, mercenary soldiers, the priest who acts as warder of the house, and persons who devote a whole year to study without any profit, are all to be considered as Sudras. And those who impudently partake of food offered at ceremonials in a Sudra's house are afflicted with a terrible ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... his history through the war would be tedious. What Washington and Jefferson really thought of him we shall never know. He was never mercenary, but his pride was wounded that so little recognition of his astounding services was forthcoming. The ingratitude of Kings was a commonplace; the ingratitude of peoples an unpleasing novelty. But Washington bestirred himself at last, and Paine was voted an ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... It puts mercenary selfishness as the motive power for political action in the place of public spirit, and organizes that selfishness ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... if I am suspected of any mercenary motives, the liberal settlements which are now ready for your perusal, must ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... too, spoken of with a proud modesty (Prag is not spoken of at all); and how the neighboring ravenous Powers, on-lookers hitherto, have opened their throats with one accord to swallow Prussia, thinking its downfall certain: "Poor mercenary Sweden, once so famous under its soldier Kings, now debased by a venal Senate;"—Sweden, "what say I? my own kindred [foolish Anspach and others], driven by perverse motives, join in the plot of horrors, and become satellites ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... is a candidate for the governorship, and among the more mercenary class of politicians smiling often becomes a habit for the sake of popularity. Hawthorne might have added something to the judge's personale by representing him with a droll wit, like James Fiske, Jr., or ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... In the temple of old the swallow found a nest for herself where she might lay her young; but this is the first time we ever knew of the conference of such honors on the Felis domestica. It could not have been anything mercenary that took the old cat into the pulpit, for "poor as a church mouse" has become proverbial. Nothing but lofty aspirations could have taken her there, and a desire that her young should have advantages of high birth. If in ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... is nothing for it but a speedy return to Frankfort. I do not regret the cloth, which has been paid for over and over again, but I am mercenary enough to grudge Stahleck ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... be for my cousin Sir Adrian to marry a sensible woman—a woman who understands the world and its ways—a woman young and beautiful certainly, but yet conversant with the convenances of society? Such a woman would rescue Adrian from the shoals and quicksands that surround him in the form of mercenary friends and scheming mothers. Such a woman might surely be found. Nay, I think I myself could put my hand upon her, if I dared, at ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... a story of love for love, and how it came to naught. In it there shall be no marrying from mercenary motives; the manoeuvering mother-in-law is suppressed; Nature takes her course; and in the climax I strive to prove how sad a thing it is that men ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... The Athenians, with a view to their own interests, had recently set up a democracy in Samos, which had hitherto been governed by an oligarchy. Incensed by this interference, the Samian nobles, who had been driven into exile, hired a mercenary force, and making a sudden attack from the mainland, overthrew the democracy and raised the standard of revolt. The crisis called for prompt and vigorous action on the part of Athens; for if Samos had been ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... there was genuine affection in that glance. Was it not likely to be genuine,—that feeling that she could not be to him what she had been to others? It must have been abundantly clear to her that had she chosen to accept from him what he had offered her, she might have amply satisfied any mercenary views, the most exorbitant. Therefore her views and her feelings were ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... with a roar of laughter. "Don't! don't!" he pleaded, holding up a hand. "Why, Lafelle, you old fraud, I look upon your Church as a huge business institution, a gigantic trust, as mercenary and merciless as Steel, Oil, or Tobacco! Why, you and I are in the same business, that of making money! And I'd like to borrow some of your methods. You catch 'em through religion. I have to use other methods. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... rather than his principles, guided his actions. He did not love his relatives, because he thought their attentions were venal, and resolved to adopt this beautiful boy, not so much from feelings of benevolence towards him, as a desire to disappoint his mercenary kindred. Bryant's natural affections were not strong enough to prove any impediment to the stranger's wish, and his parents were willing to sacrifice theirs, for the brilliant advantages offered to their son. Behold our young prodigy ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... From Plutarch's narrative one would imagine that the "enemy" must mean the Macedonians: but we find that they really were the native Euboeans, led by Kallias of Chalkis, with only a detachment of Macedonians and some Phokian mercenary troops.] ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... he said: "It is the most glittering, ostentatious, and displaying property in the world; and now, if a young man goes courting, the only inquiry is how many negroes he or his lady love owns. The love of slave property is swallowing up every other mercenary possession. Its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth, but indicated the gentleman of leisure who was above ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... American naval men were intent upon duty and their duty was merely to protect the dignity as well as the safety of our sea-borne commerce. The mercenary element was absent and that Mr. Daniels did well to emphasize this fact was the conviction of the navy as well as of the entire country; while, at the same time, as the secretary said, the spirit underlying ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... for all this, they came resolved to hiss it, right or wrong, and had gotten mercenary fellows, who were such fools they did not know when to hiss; and this was evident to all the audience. It was wonderful to see men of great quality, and gentlemen, in so mean a combination; but, to my great satisfaction, they came off as meanly as I could wish. I had so numerous ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... spiders, who have spun their webs over the lower division of my book-shelves (consisting chiefly of law and divinity) during the peaceful reign of her predecessor, fly at full speed before the probationary inroads of the new mercenary. Even so the Laird of Ellangowan ruthlessly commenced his magisterial reform, at the expense of various established and superannuated pickers and stealers, who had been his neighbours for half a century. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... obloquy. The Smiths, Winders, and Elzeys, who are really foreigners, since the men from their States are not liable to conscription (vide Judge Campbell's decision), are very obnoxious to the people. Virginians can never be reconciled to the presence of a mercenary Swiss guard, and will not submit ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... What! you are my paid subordinate, are you? Oh yes, I had forgotten the salary! Well then, on that mercenary ground, will you agree to let me hector ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... which disgusted them, not only from the subservient spirit to Toryism which pervaded them, but also excited their laughter from their absurdity, Byron, in whose house they were, said to them, "It is satisfactory to see that a man who becomes mercenary, and traffics upon the independence of his character, loses at the same time his ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... ——, of lawful age, and by occupation a ——, begs leave to state that, unbiassed by friends, and uninfluenced by mercenary motives, he freely and voluntarily offers himself a candidate for the mysteries of Masonry, and that he is prompt to solicit this privilege by a favorable opinion conceived of the institution, ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... added, But the hireling who is not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep and fleeth. He is called not a shepherd, but a hireling, who feeds the Lord's sheep not for inward love, but with a view to temporal wages. He is a mercenary who seeks indeed the place of shepherd, but seeks not ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... and with gesturing hands]—"something enormous going on in iron, without the shadow of a doubt, and here I sit mousing in the dark and never knowing anything about it; great heaven, what an escape I've made! this underhanded mercenary creature might have taken me up—and ruined me! but I have escaped, and I warrant me I'll not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... we may believe, made from no unworthy or mercenary motive, but because he thought that such an indemnity was his due. Some years after (in 1809) the chair of zooelogy, newly formed by the Faculte des Sciences in Paris, was offered to him. Desirable ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... to take upon their own shoulders the responsibility of real work. Their leaders had been selected from the outside,—clever, eager, pushing men, but of late had been hardly selected from among themselves. As used to be the case with Italian Powers, they entrusted their cause to mercenary foreign generals, soldiers of fortune, who carried their good swords whither they were wanted; and, as of old, the leaders were ever ready to fight, but would themselves declare what should be and what should not be the casus belli. There was not so ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... they are past, those noble days! The days When nations would imperil all to keep Their liberties, are only memories now. The common cause is lost,—and thou art brought, The captive of some mercenary raid, Some skirmish of a gold-begotten war, To serve within my ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... altogether unprepared for this, Mr. Lightmark. In fact, I may as well own that I have talked it over with my son, and we agreed that the whole question resolved itself into—ah—into settlements. You must not think me mercenary." This was said with a dignified calm, which made the idea preposterous. "If you can"—here she seemed to refer to some mental note-book—"ah—satisfy Charles on that point, I am sure that it will give me great pleasure to regard you as a prospective ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... The deputies and the City Government at once gave their cordial assent to these articles. When the deputies returned, their constituents were not very well pleased with what had been done, declaring that they would not submit to be locked up at the mercy of any man, nor would they trust to mercenary troops for guarding their city. The Prince, hearing this, agreed that the burghers, Calvinists, Lutherans, as well as Romanists, should be employed to guard ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... Once more, Welcome to this grateful shore; Now no mercenary foe Aims again the fatal blow— Aims ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... been Muhammadans, who are intensely averse to us on both religious and political grounds. Under the influence of friendly intercourse and good offices performed to each other, a kindly feeling often sprung up between officers and men; but as a body they were mercenary troops fighting for strangers, and the history of the world furnishes abundant instances of such an army being as formidable to their employers as to those against whom they have been employed. In the ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... Care of, and furnish'd with all the Necessaries of Life by that venerable, and loyal Priest. In the mean Time, his Apothecary enter'd at Break of Day into my Apartment, with a Potion in his Hand, compos'd of Opium, black Hellebore, Aconite, and other Ingredients still more baneful. Whilst this mercenary Officer of the King's Vengeance was thus employ'd, another as inhuman as himself, went to your Lodgings with the silken Cord. Both, however, were disappointed, as both of us were fled. Cador, very officious, flew to the ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... The City Hall clock near by struck eleven. The time had come for returning to their mercenary guardian. Phil shook the sleeping form of Giacomo. The little boy stirred in his sleep, and murmured, "Madre." He had been dreaming of his mother and his far-off Italian home. He woke to the harsh realities of life, four thousand miles away ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... that, in general, the gentler virtues, so prominent in Christianity, have little place in the list. The virtues are chiefly aristocratic. Favourable conditions are needed for their cultivation. They are not possible for a slave, and hardly for those engaged in 'mercenary occupations.'[4] Further, it may be remarked that habit of itself does not make a man virtuous. Morality cannot consist in a mere succession of customary acts. 'One good custom would corrupt the world,' and habit is frequently ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... said Jane, rather drearily. "It isn't easy to find some one with whom one would be willing to pass one's life. I've had several chances—one or two of them not entirely mercenary, I think. But not one that I could ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... rushing upon the foe. Napoleon offered to these bands the same reward which he had promised to the peasants. But to a man, they refused the gold. They had imbibed the spirit of their chief, his enthusiasm, and his proud superiority to all mercenary motives. "We are not toiling for money," said they, "but for your approval, and to share ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... abroad: the lash resounds on a slave's naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labor, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good-night, or, neglected in some ostentatious hospital, breathes its last amidst the laugh of mercenary attendants." ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... free under a limited kingship as in a commonwealth, and it is to this good form of our government that we partly owe that doubling of the people which has probably happened here in the 435 years last past. And if the ambition of some, and the mercenary temper of others, should bring us at any time to alter our constitution, and to give up our ancient rights, we shall find our numbers diminish visibly and fast. For liberty encourages procreation, and not only keeps our own inhabitants ...
— Essays on Mankind and Political Arithmetic • Sir William Petty
... over against Exeter Hall, I mentally apostrophise the Christian British people. "Ladies and Gentlemen," I say, "you are Christian in name, but I discern little of Christ in your ideals, your institutions, or your daily lives. You are a mercenary, self-indulgent, frivolous, boastful, blood-guilty mob of heathen. I like you very much, but that is what you are. And it is you—you who call men 'Infidels.' You ridiculous creatures, what do ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... further desire, as an example of college playwriting, to include the text of Barnabas Bidwell's "The Mercenary Match," written at Yale, and played by the students of Yale.[2] Only one copy of that play is, thus far, known to be in existence, owned by Mr. Evert Jansen Wendell, and its inclusion in the present collection is ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists - 1765-1819 • Various
... gold and silver shower of the bridal presents was raining down. The determining cause of the catastrophe was never quite clear to the community—whether a lover's quarrel with disproportionate consequences, by reason of the marplot activities of a mercenary relative of the lady's, advocating the interests of a sudden opportunity of greater wealth and station; or her foolish revenge for a fancied slight; or simply her sheer inconstancy in a change of mind ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... slight. I should be much hurt if I thought it was. So would he. (To Luiz.) Where are the halberdiers who were to have had the honour of meeting us here, that our visit to the Grand Inquisitor might be made in becoming state? LUIZ. Your Grace, the halberdiers are mercenary people who stipulated for a trifle on account. DUKE. How tiresome! Well, let us hope the Grand Inquisitor is a blind gentleman. And the band who were to have had the honour of escorting us? I see no band! LUIZ. Your Grace, the band are sordid ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... curtail, and patch up a drama in Italian, in order to introduce favourite airs, selected from different authors, the contrast has always been broken thereby, without every one's knowing the reason: and since ignorant mercenary prompters, though Italians, have been employed in hotch-potch, and in translating our dramas from Italian into English, how could such operas appear any other ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... you don't marry me at once I'll break every bone in your body!' He then snatched my bonnet, a new one, from my head, and so acted on my nerves that I went off to the Registry Office and was married. That he was actuated by merely mercenary motives is proved by the fact that the gratuity (of half-a-crown), which he presented to the Registry Clerk, he actually borrowed from me! I knew him already to be unprincipled; but never until that moment had it flashed upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... Millicent protested, unwilling to be suspected of a mercenary mind, and Mrs. Keith's ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... hostile garrison. Her spirit sank within her, and she bitterly felt the impoverishment of the always scanty means, which deprived her of the power of laying out sums of money on those rites which were universally deemed needful for the repose of souls snatched away in battle. It was a mercenary age among the clergy, and besides, it was the depth of a northern winter, and the funeral rites of the Lady of Whitburn would have been poor and maimed indeed if a whole band of black Benedictine monks had not arrived from Wearmouth, ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... usually popular or to be encouraged, but Mark Twain had an especial weakness for compliments that came in that way. They were not mercenary compliments. The writer had nothing to gain. Two such letters follow—both written in England just at the time ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... againe for ransome? Her. No great King: I come to thee for charitable License, That we may wander ore this bloody field, To booke our dead, and then to bury them, To sort our Nobles from our common men. For many of our Princes (woe the while) Lye drown'd and soak'd in mercenary blood: So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbes In blood of Princes, and with wounded steeds Fret fet-locke deepe in gore, and with wilde rage Yerke out their armed heeles at their dead masters, Killing them twice. O giue vs leaue great King, To view the field in safety, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... game, due on the 12th of August, breaking up the senate of the kingdom, and accessible only to the few whom wealth or privilege give the entree into the preserved regions, has, when even thrown into the market by the mercenary scions of the great, a considerable value; and perhaps it is only in the North that it is properly cooked and appreciated. A moor bird requires a particular sagacity in carving, which is a secret to the uninitiated. You may carve it like a common fowl; but the epicure alone ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... faine wrest A new expence of complement from me: If you delight to heare your praise, Ile hire Some mercenary [poet][102] to comend In lofty ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... certainly, on his side, a mercenary match. He would have been incapable of marrying with so mean a motive. He is said, indeed, to have given, about this period, a substantial proof of very much the contrary disposition. This appears in the following anecdote, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... a happiness—for surely a father would not have the heart to sell his own child to ambition and mercenary hopes! And thy mother?" ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... with some wonder. It had never dawned upon him that this shiftless, thriftless, worthless, sponging parasite was yet, after and in spite of all, not mercenary in the issue of his thoughts; ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... All the letters of Pitt at that time exude confidence from every line. He hopes that Dumouriez will succeed in overthrowing the regicides at Paris. The backwardness of the Prussians in supporting Coburg does not deter him from ordering to Flanders all the available British and mercenary troops, in order to besiege Dunkirk, and otherwise help the Imperialists. As if this is not enough, on or just before 1st April he treats with Malouet, the French envoy from Hayti, for the transfer of that colony ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... together in pleasant communion. It was a modern Babel, finished and furnished, and where there was almost a fusion, instead of, a confusion, of tongues. The "barbarous Turk" was there, the warlike Russ, the mercenary Swiss, the passionate Italian, the voluptuous Spaniard, the gallant Frenchman,—and yet foreboding English citizens did not find themselves compelled to go armed, or to lock up their plate, or their wives and daughters. ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... grace, and charm that, in spite our popular impression to the contrary, are not seldom found amongst the nobles of his country. His undoubted wealth and position redeemed his suit from any appearance of being inspired by a mercenary motive. Indeed, he was accustomed himself to be pursued, and Florence and he recognised in each ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... [26] however, the most important of the Greek colonies, held jealously to her independence. Unable single-handed to face the Romans, Tarentum turned to Greece for aid. She called on Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, the finest soldier of his age. Pyrrhus led twenty-five thousand mercenary soldiers into Italy, an army almost as large as Alexander's. The Romans could not break the bristling ranks of the Greek phalanx, and they shrank back in terror before the huge war elephants which Pyrrhus had brought with him. The invader won the first battle, but ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the prize of the high calling she herself by mere accident had missed so narrowly. Her own life was done; Alan's death had made her task impossible; but if Dolly could fill her place for the sake of humanity, she would not regret it. Enough for her to have martyred herself; she asked no mercenary palm and ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... and military spirit fostered by their institutions that the Romans were indebted for their grandeur; and when they lost these virtues, and when, no longer regarding the military service as an honor as well as a duty, they relinquished it to mercenary Goths and Gauls, the fall of the empire became inevitable. It is doubtless true that whatever increases the prosperity of the country should be neither neglected nor despised; it is also necessary to honor the branches of industry which ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini
... difficult person,' she wrote. 'The least error of taste on your dear girl's part would have froissed him. Men with that immense wealth are always suspicious, ready to imagine mercenary motives, on their guard against being trapped. But Lesbia had me at her back, and she managed him perfectly. He is positively her slave; and you will be able to twist him round your little finger in the matter of settlements. You may do what you like with him, for ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... young, and I almost wonder her mother allowed her to marry. Fan hints that they were mercenary, but if they were they concealed the fact wonderfully well, and made me think it a great sacrifice on their part to give me Daisy. And so it was; such a lovely little darling, and so beautiful. What a sensation she created at Saratoga, and still I was glad to get away, for ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... he said. 'There is one of his experiments which the doctor has withheld from you. You will find it neither mean nor mercenary, but it is very terrible. I do not know whether the account of it is true, but it would be of extraordinary interest to ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... own honour, and do not need to hire strangers to fight the foes we fear to face. Next time I come to attend to your wounds, O Prince, I trust that they will be in front, and not behind. One word more, if you will be advised by me you will not threaten that Captain whom you call a Gentile and a mercenary, lest you should learn that it is not always well to be a coward, of ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... third* she was a thief and a common mercenary. She had no respect of persons: a prince or a porter was all one, according as they paid; yea, she would leave the finest gentleman in the world to go to an ugly fellow for sixpence more. In the practice of her profession she had amassed vast magazines of all sorts of things: she ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... literature, and all human learning should speak with unmistakable accents for the elevation, evangelization, and liberation of the oppressed. In a future day, the historian cannot purge our political history from the shame of wanton and mercenary oppression. But there is not, I believe, a book in the literature of our country that will be alive and known a hundred years hence, in which can be found the taint of despotism. The literature of the world is on the ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... of eagerness leaped into the young man's face. Mr. Randolph looked at him sharply. "I did not know that you were so mercenary, John." ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... without effort or responsibility, with every physical need luxuriously gratified. But these hotels nevertheless represent democracy, it may be urged, for the reason that every one may there buy board and lodging and mercenary service if he has the price. The exceeding greatness of that price, however, makes of it a badge of nobility which converts these democratic hostelries into feudal castles, more inaccessible to the Long Denied than as though ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... brought six thousand five hundred horse, three thousand foot, and four cannon of moderate size. His arrival did not, however, prove an occasion of unmingled satisfaction. The reiters, serving from purely mercenary motives, demanded the immediate payment of one hundred thousand crowns, promised as a first instalment on account of their wages, and were resolved to go no farther without receiving it. The Prince of ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... millions of men? Our writer proposes a solid gold collar testimonial for the "good" dog Tiny, to be raised by public subscription. But that would be a paltry return for such great services. Tiny's renown lifts him above such mercenary rewards. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Moldavia, and Siebenbuergen. With this view he commenced negotiations with the Porte, which were eagerly welcomed; and he also approached the German emperor, from whom he needed money to pay his mercenary troops. Indeed, for the purpose of accomplishing his ends, he at one and the same time did homage and acknowledged himself the vassal of both powers. For a long time he temporised and contented himself with strengthening and drilling ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... that this poor boy, who was so cruelly treated, was the unfortunate son of his friend, the hermit, who ought to be enjoying the comforts of a luxurious home. As it was, he was the victim of a cruel and unscrupulous relative, influenced by the most mercenary motives. ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... dolt to be pointed out as a clever fellow, when, the next turn of the market proving unsuccessful, he is despised and insulted: so much are the frequenters of 'Change influenced by the most sordid and mercenary feelings, that almost all of them are the willing dupes of riches and good fortune. However, as you are strangers here, gentlemen, I will introduce you, entre nous, to a few of the characters who thrive by the destruction of thousands of their fellow-creatures. ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the scar of the burn sometimes hurts. To-night was one of those times; and Max believed that his disappointment in Billie had had its influence in driving him to the Legion. She stood now as a type of what was mercenary, calculating, and false in womankind, just as (almost unknown to himself) Sanda DeLisle stood for what was gentle, yet brave and true. He felt that Billie Brookton had made him hard, with a hardness that was not ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... never did he laugh in the wrong place, or prostitute his sense to serve his luxury; never did he stab into the wounds of fallen virtue, with a base and a cowardly insult, or smooth the face of prosperous villany, with the paint and washes of a mercenary wit; never did he spare a sop for being rich, or flatter a knave for being great. He had a wit that was accompanied with an unaffected greatness of mind, and a natural love to justice and truth; a wit that was in perpetual war with knavery, and ever attacking those ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... serjeant-painter to King Charles the Second. In February 1664, the Diarist saw Dryden's Indian Queen acted 'with rich scenes as the like had never been seen here, or haply, except rarely, elsewhere on a mercenary theatre.' Mr. Pepys—most devoted of playgoers—notes occasionally of particular plays, that 'the machines are fine and the paintings very pretty.' In October 1667, he records that he sat in the boxes for the first time in his life, and discovered that from that point of view 'the scenes ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... property, but he had invested some in a newspaper of which he was editor, and he had squandered much in vague speculation. From the account he gave of his losses it was difficult to decide whether he had been moved by mercenary or charitable temptations. Now only the merest competence remained. He lived in a small garret where no solicitor had penetrated, studying uninteresting literatures, dimly interested in all that the world did not care for. He lived in the gloom of present failure, embittered by the memory ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... influence can be traced in the tendencies towards monotheism which became marked at various periods, believed in a Heaven for the just and good. If they did, their teachings must have been suppressed by the mercenary priests. It was extremely profitable for these priests to perpetuate the belief that the spirits of the dead were consigned to a gloomy Hades, where the degree of suffering which they endured depended on the manner in which their bodies were ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... insinuation. In all of them, though so many are for the use of persons placed in the most trying circumstances, and some of them are for persons writhing under a sense of intolerable injury, sweetness and light do ever reign. Even 'yours truly, Jacob Langton,' in his 'letter to his Daughter's Mercenary Fiance',' mitigates the sternness of his tone by the remark that his 'task is inexpressibly painful.' And he, Mr. Langton, is the one writer who lets the post go out on his wrath. When Horace Masterton, of Thorpe Road, Putney, receives from Miss Jessica ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... Temple Bar to Guildhall was crowded from top to bottom, and many had scaffoldings besides; carpets and rich hangings were hung out on the fronts all the way along; and our friend notes that the citizens were not mercenary, but "generously accommodated their friends and customers gratis, and entertained them in the most elegant manner, so that though their shops were shut, they might be said to have ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... said Blanche, with just the faintest feeling of disgust—the first she had ever experienced toward Bob. "If you talk like that I shall leave you. I am disappointed in you; I should never have suspected you of being mercenary." ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... well-regulated militia, composed of gentlemen and yeomen, is the natural strength and only security of a free government; that such a militia in this colony would forever render it unnecessary for the mother country to keep among us for the purpose of our defence any standing army of mercenary forces, always subversive of the quiet and dangerous to the liberties of the people, and would obviate the pretext of taxing us ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... was it, signorina?' he said. 'Young people and beautiful people should not be mercenary. Poor child! you had better have stood ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... this community. As you well know, I have and could have no sympathy with the motives by which he may be presumed to have been actuated. Why, then, this sudden feeling in his behalf? Not, I assure you, from mercenary motives. His acquittal or his condemnation will make no difference in the compensation I receive for my services. The overpowering interest I feel in this case originates in the fact that it places at stake the reputation of this District, and, in some respects, of the country itself, of which ...
— Personal Memoir Of Daniel Drayton - For Four Years And Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) In Washington Jail • Daniel Drayton
... uncertain, in morals pompous and wrong-headed; Murat knew where and how the great prizes were to be found, and was as dashing and venturesome as he was selfish and worldly-wise. The Russian generals were plodding disciples of routine. Bennigsen was an able Hanoverian mercenary, despising alike his Livonian colleague, Buxhoewden, and his chief, the servile Russian marshal, Kamenski. The Prussian general Lestocq was capable but inexperienced. The chief and his subordinate were ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... induce her to remain, but when she looked at the pale thin face, and thought how many weary nights the lady had voluntarily sat up with the raving child, she ceased to urge the request, and at once set out for a mercenary to replace her. ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... to London unto Sainte Paul's, To seek himself a chantery for souls, Or maintenance with a brotherhood to hold; But dwelt at home, and kepte well his fold, So that the wolf ne'er made it to miscarry; He was a shepherd and no mercenary. And though he holy were, and virtuous, He was to sinful man not despitous, And of his speech nor difficult nor digne, But in his teaching discreet and benign. For to draw folk to heaven by fairness, By good ensample, this was his business: But were there any person obstinate, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... was unscrupulous, and the probability is that he was mercenary; but such charges may be brought against some of the ablest men who have figured in history. When all is said, the fact remains that Alexander McGillivray was one of the most accomplished and ingenious of the politicians of his time. If he had been on the side of the whites, and had managed ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... had no argument to put forward to justify his belief; it was one of those beliefs which are rooted in something finer and truer than circumstantial evidence. His only argument in her favour was that he had never found her mercenary, but, as Abdul had answered him, a woman will sell her ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... and unadvised into the meshes of an acquaintanceship which leads to her ruin. It is perhaps as useless to ask the men who are base enough to conceive these things to refrain from publishing them, as it is to urge the mercenary proprietors of certain newspapers to refrain from printing them in their columns. Yet it must be perfectly clear to all right-thinking minds, that it is in vain for parents to warn, parsons to preach, friends to advise, for the good to deplore, and the ignorant ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... Point d'argent, point de Suisse, is a proverbial expression which the Swiss twist into a historical compliment, asserting that it arose in early mercenary times, from the fact that they were too virtuous to accept the suggestion of the general who hired them, and wished them to take their pay in kind from the defenceless people of ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... to the young readers, that and much more it is the writers' wish that the true Plays of Shakspeare may prove to them in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... speaking: he is diligent, clean, and pleasing; we all owe him periods of entertainment, and he has achieved an amiable popularity which he has adequately deserved. But the truth is, he does not, or did not when he first embraced it, regard his profession from this purely mercenary side. He went into it, I shall venture to say, if not with any noble design, at least in the ardour of a first love; and he enjoyed its practice long before he paused to calculate the wage. The other day an author was complimented ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the young ladies, when old enough, into general society. Mrs. Schreiber was the very person required. Intellectually she had no great pretensions; but these she did not need: her character was irreproachable, her manners were polished, and her own income placed her far above all mercenary temptations. She had not thought fit to accept the station of Colonel Watson's wife, but some unavowed feeling prompted her to undertake, with enthusiasm, the duties of a mother to the colonel's ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... in Germany. On the other hand, a commercial policy involved them in distant enterprises. Colonies were founded by the Italians in the south-east, by German cities in the east, by Slavonian cities in the far northeast. Mercenary armies began to be kept for colonial wars, and soon for local defence as well. Loans were contacted to such an extent as to totally demoralize the citizens; and internal contests grew worse and worse at each election, during ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... always mercenary, though they have that reputation with some. I should like, by the way, to find out ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - or, Jacob Marlowe's Secret • Horatio Alger
... fouling at the highest fence; straining every sinew to the last, for his rider's defeat is his own failure, his rider's success his own victory. And we have all seen the gallant response of the race-horse to every movement of his rider's body—a loyal gallantry that ennobles even the merely mercenary; and the sight of these two—now one—flying toward the goal, always makes the heart beat faster and grow warm with its brave showing of this magical bond. And above all, we have seen the trooper's horse, which comes closer to him than the comrade fighting by his side; for it is to his horse ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... pictures, the world shall pay to have them," says he, with a smile; then turning to her he adds very tenderly: "I will owe all my happiness to you, sweetheart; yet guard my independence in more material matters. No mercenary question shall ever cast ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... year, and retired with his deaf old housekeeper to the Clints of Drumore. Yet forty years before, the Reverend Fergus Symington was counted the luckiest young minister in the Stewartry; and many were the jokes made in public-house parlours and in private houses about his mercenary motives. He had married money. He had been wedded with much rejoicing to the rich daughter of a Liverpool merchant, who had made a fortune not too tenderly in the West Indian trade. Sophia Sugg was ten years the senior of her husband, and her temper was uncertain, but ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... I have set upon my catalogue, has been represented by the booksellers as an avaricious innovation; and, in a paper published in the Champion, they, or their mercenary, have reasoned so justly, as to allege, that, if I could afford a very large price for the library, I might, therefore, afford ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... head ache: he prefers the clear, cold water, or at most a dish of chocolate. Mother may jeer at him as unmanly; she has a fine spirit, mother: and she may think I might have done better; but mother has grown a little mercenary, and forgotten that she was once young herself, and would have liked to have served a great genius with such a loving heart and such blue eyes as Will's. Ah! the girls will all envy me, when they get a glance from Will's blue eyes: and let them, for he is too good ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... that to-day you will find no man in our town as well liked, as jovial, and full of merry sayings as I. My jokes are again noised about and quoted; once more I take pleasure in my wife's confidential chatter without a mercenary thought, while Guy and Viola play at my feet distributing gems of childish humor without fear of the ghastly tormentor who used to dog their steps, notebook ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... he astonished me still more now by the proofs of his application to military and political science. He would talk very learnedly of the disposition of armies in the field, of the advantages and disadvantages of the use of mercenary troops, and the best way to defend and the best way to assault a well-walled citadel, so that you would think, to listen to him, that he was some gray old generalissimo steeped in experience, and not the smooth-cheeked fellow whom we knew, as we thought, so ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... friendship for them, that attention to the most important duties at the last gasp, indicates that honesty without any thought of personal advantage was innate in the man; that it did not require the invitation of pleasure, or the allurements of mercenary rewards. For what greater evidence can we require that those things which are honourable and right are desirable of themselves for their own sake, than the sight of a dying man so anxious in the discharge ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... special meeting and resolved to stand by the "Boston House Wrights" who, "in imitation of the noble and decided stand taken by their Revolutionary Fathers, have determined to throw off the shackles of more mercenary tyrants than theirs." Many societies voted varying sums of money in ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... particulars of her history. Percy is not her real name, but she is the daughter of an English peer of very ancient family. Her father having married a second time, Dorothea was exposed to the persecutions of a low-minded vulgar woman, whose whole ideas were of that mean and mercenary description which characterise the Caucasian race. Naomi Shekles was the offspring of a Jew, and she hated, whilst she envied, the superior charms of the noble Norman maiden. But she had gained an enormous supremacy over the wavering intellect of the elderly Viscount; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the first to enter. He enquired of every one he met of the fate of Isabelle; but all turned from him with disgust. At length he found her out, but what was his grief and surprise—in a nunnery! Firm to the troth she had so solemnly plighted, she had rejected the proposition of her mercenary parent; and, having no idea but that her lover had shared the fate of all Christian captives, she had shut herself up from the world, and vowed to live the life ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... is such a mortal sin to think of money in this dirty world, where we cannot live without it, that they actually discourage him, and make it a point of honour to snub him daily, to prove their superiority to mercenary considerations. What weak things your strong-minded people sometimes do! and what horrors arise from acting upon principle! I, who have none, fancy I sometimes stumble into right by just doing what I please, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... both parties, Maurice, representing the States-General, pronounced for the Calvinists or Contra-Remonstrants, and took possession of one of the great churches, as an assertion of his authority. Barneveld, representing the Arminian or Remonstrant provinces, levied a body of mercenary soldiers in several of the cities. These were disbanded by Maurice, and afterwards by an act of the States-General. Barneveld was apprehended, imprisoned, and executed, after an examination which was in no proper sense a trial. Grotius, who was on the ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... perhaps encourage him," he said to himself, "especially now that his income is doubled. She might even accept him as a husband— women are so mercenary. But her heart will ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... guilty— to love liberty and freedom of conscience, to hate tyranny and oppression, then I am indeed a criminal," he answered in an unshaken voice. "You call me a spy and load me with opprobrium. It was necessary to gain information as to the movements of your mercenary army: twice have I obtained that information and carried it to our noble general. My only regret is that I have not succeeded a third time in so doing; but understand that though I have thus laboured to injure you secretly, I have ever ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... against my integrity,—in this long management of your affairs, whatever errors have been committed,—and doubtless there have been many,—have you found in me anything selfish, anything personal, anything mercenary? In the simple language of an ancient seer, I say, 'Behold, here I am; witness against me. Whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed? At whose hands ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... great classes—the free tribes, chiefly if not exclusively Celtic, and the unfree tribes, consisting of the descendants of the subjugated races, or of clans once free, reduced to servitude by the sword, and the offspring of foreign mercenary soldiers. 'The unfree tribes,' says Mr. Darcy Magee, 'have left no history. Under the despotism of the Milesian kings, it was high treason to record the actions of the conquered race, so that the Irish Belgae fared as badly in this respect at the hands of the Milesian historians ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... wants me to speak well of her; if she intends to deceive him she expects me to back her up. The wish is doubtless natural, but for a proud girl it is rather an odd favor to ask. Oh yes, she 's a proud girl, even though she has been able to arrange it with her conscience to make a mercenary marriage. To expect me to help her is perhaps to treat me as a friend; but she ought to remember—or at least I ought to remember—that Gordon is an older friend than she. Inviting me to help her as against my oldest friend—is n't there a grain ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... process with the curate or village doctor it is a success, and her friend will always think so. And when a girl marries a gentleman, and a Member of Parliament, instead of well, I'm not going to say anything personal her friends will congratulate her upon his position. It may be very wicked, and mercenary, and all that; but it's the way ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... replied Lucy D——. 'The mystery of nature, of creation, of the communion of the creature with the infinitely bountiful Creator. Have you never wandered away from the beaten track, from tiresome dinners, with mercenary waiters and elaborate courses, from yawning, blase men, and over-dressed, artificial, weakly women, and, resting upon some quiet hillside, suffered the glories of external nature to fill your soul as you drained the cup of beauty, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... they were no match for Great Britain in wealth, population, or naval power. As it was, Great Britain allowed the revolution to get under full headway before making a serious effort to suppress it. In 1776, however, a force of about 30,000 men, many of whom were mercenary German soldiers, commonly called "Hessians," was sent to occupy New York. Thenceforward, the British pursued aggressive tactics, and inasmuch as their armies were generally superior to those of the colonists in numbers, discipline, and equipment, and besides were supported by powerful fleets, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... it in a breath at sight of my poor wan face, for I was called a pretty girl, Mr. Talboys, when I sailed for Sydney, fifteen years ago; or he may be so changed by the world as to have grown selfish and mercenary, and he may welcome me for the sake of my fifteen years' savings. Again, he may be dead. He may have been well, perhaps, up to within a week of our landing, and in that last week may have taken a fever, and died an hour before our vessel anchors in the Mersey. ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... something akin to a grunt, which might by courtesy be taken for a groan: "Oh, how mercenary you women are! Well, if you marry a man for his money, Horace has the best of it—if he behaves himself. Yes, I admit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... love he saw now had been in shallow water; but it had not tended to strengthen his faith in the innate nobility of women. On the contrary, it had shown him that a woman who seemed sweet and loving could be hard and calculating, even mercenary. Innocence being a charming pose, why should it not be adopted by the cleverest actresses, professional sirens, specialists in enchantment, who wished to be admired by all men, even men for whom they cared nothing? How could he tell even now that this ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... what are ye not, when duly protected and left to the almost divine impulses of your generous natures! What may ye not become, when rendered mercenary and envious by too close a contact with those worldly interests which are never admitted to an ascendancy without ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... OF THE TEN THOUSAND.—The Anabasis, the principal work of Xenophon, describes the retreat from the Tigris to the coast of Asia Minor, of a body of ten thousand mercenary Greek troops,—a retreat effected under his own masterly leadership. The Persian Empire, now in a process of decay, was torn with civil strife. Xerxes and his eldest son had been murdered (465 B.C.). The story of several reigns which follow is full of tales of treason and fratricide. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... face, as she thought of the draft, but she merely replied, "And suppose we haven't any money, can't I make believe, and by looking at expensive instruments induce Mr. Hastings to think we are richer than we are? I don't accuse him of being at all mercenary, but I do think he would have proposed ere this, if he hadn't thought us so ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... was no indolent or mercenary creature, No one more cordially detested the life of dependence than he. He always thought that his father had discharged all the duties of that relation in nourishing his childhood and giving him a good education. Whatever has been ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... Will he, who may with heroes claim a place, Belie that fame, and to himself be base? Think how august and godlike you did look, When my defence, unbribed, you undertook; But, when an act so brave you disavow, How little, and how mercenary now! ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... chief! once more Welcome to this grateful shore! Now no mercenary foe Aims again the fatal blow. Aims at thee ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... richer than our kings. He asked what business we had out of our own islands, unless upon the score of trade or treaty, or to defend the coasts with our fleet. Above all, he was amazed to hear me talk of a mercenary standing army in the midst of peace and among a free people. He said if we were governed by our own consent, in the persons of our representatives, he could not imagine of whom we were afraid, or against whom we were to fight; and would hear my opinion, whether a private man's house ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... the Carthaginians consisted in their alliances with kings; in tributary nations, from which they drew both men and money; in some troops raised from among their own citizens; and in mercenary soldiers purchased of neighbouring states, without being themselves obliged to levy or exercise them, because they were already well disciplined and inured to the fatigues of war; they making choice, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... animosity against lawyers, whom they considered mercenary instruments in the hands of the nobles for oppressing them. They hung all the lawyers that they could get into their hands, and after burning the Savoy they went to the Temple, which was a spacious edifice containing the courts, the chambers of the barristers, and a vast ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... account the sum of five thousand dollars. We had never invited him to visit us or made any overtures in the way of communication with him, lest he should think we were cultivating his acquaintance from mercenary motives. ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... been to the young readers, that and much more it is the writers' wish that the true Plays of Shakespeare may prove to them in older years—enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for of examples, teaching these virtues, his pages ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... who laughingly replied, "It would be funny if you should make this Maude my cousin instead of Nellie. Let me see—Cousin Nellie—Cousin Maude. I like the sound of the latter the best, though I am inclined to think she is altogether too good for a mercenary dog like you." ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... vindictive," he said, more kindly,—"least of all toward you. But I cannot see how you should desire the friendship of one whom you regard as a mercenary hypocrite. When you can truthfully assure me that you disbelieve that charge, then, and not till then, will I forgive you and be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind was much disturbed by indecision whether or not to take the Avenger. It was tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his boots in the archway of the Blue Boar's posting-yard; it was almost solemn to imagine him casually produced in the tailor's shop, and confounding the disrespectful senses of Trabb's boy. On the other hand, Trabb's ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Ireland did not constitute a nation or possess any common interest or bond of union. There was no trace of an organization by which the Irish tribes could be united into one people. The ceaseless civil wars had indeed supplanted the original tribesmen by the mercenary followers of another set of rival chiefs; but there had been no union; and the mass of the people, still under the influence of their native customs, were probably in a more wretched condition than they had ever ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... man enjoys an uninterrupted peace and serenity of mind, which excels the other not only in duration, but in sense of pleasure too. As for the other sort of converse, that which consists in expression of itself to others, Pindar says very well, that it was not mercenary in old time, nor indeed is it so now; but by the baseness and ambition of a few it is made use of to serve their poor secular interests. For if the poets represent Venus herself as much offended with those who make a trade and traffic of the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... other persons, to be sent to inquire into and ascertain the truth, as is customary in such cases. We know those aspersions to be false; but that avails us nothing. We are condemned unheard, and forced to an issue with an armed mercenary mob, which has been sent against us at the instigation of anonymous letter writers, ashamed to father the base, slanderous falsehoods which they have given to the public; of corrupt officials, who have brought false accusations against us to screen themselves in their own infamy; and of hireling ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... The mercenary never fell into the condition of the ordinary serf: he retained his rights as a man, and possessed in the person of the patron for whom he laboured, or whom he himself had selected, a defender of his interests. When ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... whole country; corrupting the very fountains of political power; and converting the ballot-box—that great palladium of our liberty—into an unmeaning mockery, where the rights of native-born citizens are voted away by those who blindly follow their mercenary and selfish leaders. The evidence of this is found not merely in the shameless chaffering for the foreign vote at every election, but in the large disproportion of offices which are now held by foreigners at home and abroad, as ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... one or two or three others, staunch Bonapartist. He is always of the militant, not of the triumphant party: so far he bears a gallant show of magnanimity; but his gallantry is hardly of the right stamp: it wants principle. For though he is not servile or mercenary, he is the victim of self-will. He must pull down and pull in pieces: it is not in his disposition to do otherwise. It is a pity; for with his great talents he might do great things, if he would go right forward to any ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... power hath the pure love of Jesus, unmixed with any gain or love of self! Should not all they be called mercenary who are always seeking consolations? Do they not prove themselves lovers of self more than of Christ who are always seeking their own gain and advantage? Where shall be found one who is willing to ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... love other than as a degraded menial, to make men the slaves of her mercenary schemes, La Corriveau cared nothing. She never felt it, never inspired it. She looked down upon all her sex as the filth of creation and, like herself, incapable of a chaste feeling or a pure thought. Every better instinct of her nature had gone out like the flame of a ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... absent, D'Aunay mustered all his vessels and men, and laid siege to the fort, but he met with most determined resistance from the garrison, nerved and stimulated by the voice and example of the heroic wife. The besiegers were almost disheartened, when a traitor within the walls—a "mercenary Swiss," according to a contemporary writer—gave them information which determined them to renew the assault with still greater vigour. D'Aunay and his men again attempted to scale the walls, but were forced to retire ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... provocation, and only the entirely inoffensive could expect to sojourn in the village without being a target for stones. The incursion of the artistic hordes has been a great factor in the demoralization of the village, for who would not be mercenary when besought at all hours of the day to stand before a canvas or a camera? Thus, the harmless stranger who strays on to the staith with a camera is obliged to pay for 'an afternoon's 'baccy' if he ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... imputation. He constantly resumes the moralising attitude; and his pungent persiflage is poured out, as if from an apocalyptic vial, upon worldliness and fashionable insolence. Sir Barnes Newcome's divorce from the unhappy Lady Clara furnishes a text for sad and solemn anathema upon the mercenary marriages in Hanover Square, where 'St. George of England may behold virgin after virgin offered up to the devouring monster, Mammon, may see virgin after virgin given away, just as in the Soldan of Babylon's time, but with never a champion to come to the rescue.' We ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... and suffer not thyself to know that sin; and suffer never pride to have domination in thy wit, ne in thy word, that sin was the beginning of all perdition. Whosomever work to thee any thing, anon yield to him his meed and hire, let never the hire of thy servant ne meed of thy mercenary remain in no wise with thee. That thou hatest to be done to thee of other, see that thou never do to an other. Eat thy bread with the hungry and needy, and cover the naked with thy clothes. Ordain thy bread and wine upon ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... both principle and interest in the business of life. That's why we look to them to keep up the moral standard. That's why we feel it to be unworthy of her when a girl makes a mercenary marriage." ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... affairs. The most that I should expect from them, were all the facts published to-morrow, would be the secret assent of the wise and good, the expressed censure of the vapid and ignorant (a pretty numerous clan, by the way), the surprise of the mercenary and the demagogue, and the secret satisfaction of the few who will come after me, and who may feel an interest in my conduct or my name. I have openly predicted bad consequences, in a political light, from the compliance of our agents here, and we shall yet see how far this ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... him, rather then by communicating it to others, make himself obnoxious to their discovery. But if he should communicate to others, 'tis more probable he would communicate it to meaner, and more Mercenary persons, as Apothecaries and Nurses, at a smaller rate and with more security, then reveal such secrets to Physicians, Men of Honour, and Honesty. Furthermore, if any mans life be suspected to be taken away ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... not be your bridesmaid. I could never co-operate in the unhallowed scheme of wedding a man whom you despise. Oh, Olga! do not degrade yourself by such a mercenary traffic." ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... repeat, I am not mercenary. Of course, if I should marry, I should like, for my wife's sake, to live as well as a married man as I have lived ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... and I was deeply touched to find that I had to deal with a young man who, in spite of being threatened by consumption, and being also exceedingly badly off, had come at my invitation, simply from a sense of duty and honour, and not with any mercenary motive. I saw from his knowledge and capacities that he would never be able to attain a position of great influence, but his kindness of heart and his extraordinarily receptive mind filled me with a feeling of profound respect for him. A few years later I was very ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... 'em all come"), Swann supposed that the Doctor recognised him from having met him already somewhere, probably in some house of 'ill-fame,' though these he himself very rarely visited, never having made a habit of indulging in the mercenary sort of love. Regarding such an allusion as in bad taste, especially before Odette, whose opinion of himself it might easily alter for the worse, Swann assumed his most icy manner. But when he learned that the lady next to the Doctor was Mme. Cottard, he decided that so young a ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... exacted black mail, and held prisoners for ransom.[231] But their barbarities were insignificant, when compared with those commonly perpetrated by wandering companies of adventure before the days of Alberigo da Barbiano; nor did brigands cost Italy so much as the mercenary troops, which, after the Condottiere system had been developed, became a permanent drain upon the resources of the country. The raids of Tunisian and Algerian Corsairs were more seriously mischievous; since the whole sea-board from Nice to Reggio lay open to the ravages of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... upon their own shoulders the responsibility of real work. Their leaders had been selected from the outside,—clever, eager, pushing men, but of late had been hardly selected from among themselves. As used to be the case with Italian Powers, they entrusted their cause to mercenary foreign generals, soldiers of fortune, who carried their good swords whither they were wanted; and, as of old, the leaders were ever ready to fight, but would themselves declare what should be and what should not be the casus belli. There was not ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... trinket, as a mark of consideration; because he himself had such a particular value for the fellow, on account of his attachment and fidelity, that he should be sorry to see him treated on the footing of a common mercenary domestic. There was not one jewel in the possession of this grateful young lady, that she would not have gladly given as a recompense, or badge of distinction, to her rescuer; but his master pitched upon a seal ring of no great value that hung at her watch, and Pipes, being ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... throughout to the English taste, than Coleridge's criticism (3lst Dec. 1799) on the new constitution established by Bonaparte and Sieyes on the foundation of the Consulate, with its eighty senators, the "creatures of a renegade priest, himself the creature of a foreign mercenary, its hundred tribunes who are to talk and do nothing, and its three hundred legislators whom the constitution orders to be silent." What a ludicrous Purgatory, adds he, "for three hundred Frenchmen!" Very vigorous, moreover, is he on the ministerial rejection of the ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... which are in any case extremely uncertain in their response to the call for them, invariably begins to imitate them when they fail. The mediums are invariably persons of an inferior order of intellect, avid of notoriety, and mostly mercenary, so that the results of the consultations with them were almost sufficient to deter serious-minded people from dealing with them a second time, while the people who formed the regular circles and had made a sect with a devotional character in it, rapidly degenerated into a credulity and materialism ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... confess I should not wish to be a great heiress; I should always be fancying that it was the "fine eyes of my casket," as the French say, which attracted my admirers, and I could not stand that. No, Frank was not mercenary, I was sure, and if even—why the competency I should be possessed of would be an agreeable surprise. If, indeed! Nothing was clear, nothing was settled. What a fool I was to dwell so upon an uncertainty, to anchor my hopes upon a dream! I was not at all ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... pause. Hugh was already inclined to think that he had raised an obstacle to the immediate celebration of the marriage. A speedy disappointment was in store for him. Lord Harry was too fond of Iris to be influenced, in his relations with her, by mercenary considerations. ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... liking. After her engagement with Captain Fizgig, and after Mr. Tidd had paid his 20,000l. and Fizgig's great relations had joined in some of our Director's companies, Mr. Brough declared he believed that Captain Fizgig's views were mercenary, and put him to the proof at once, by saying that he must take Miss Brough without a farthing, or not have her at all. Whereupon Captain Fizgig got an appointment in the colonies, and Miss Brough became more ill-humoured ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... or more than one hundred and sixty millions of men? Our writer proposes a solid gold collar testimonial for the "good" dog Tiny, to be raised by public subscription. But that would be a paltry return for such great services. Tiny's renown lifts him above such mercenary rewards. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... usually accepted as a sufficient qualification, or if he has ever seen the person write whose writing is in question, he is deemed competent. With such limited qualification it is no matter of surprise that expert testimony is sometime made to appear at very great disadvantage. Incompetent and mercenary witnesses will seek employment, and since there are always two sides to a case, and on each side lawyers who spare no efforts for victory, there is a chance for every kind of witness, as there is ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... are not so mercenary, Stofflet," said Bonchamps, "I do not think they have shewn any great ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... he might avoid much obloquy. The Smiths, Winders, and Elzeys, who are really foreigners, since the men from their States are not liable to conscription (vide Judge Campbell's decision), are very obnoxious to the people. Virginians can never be reconciled to the presence of a mercenary Swiss guard, and will not ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... seven vials of fiery wrath have been poured out upon the creed of Palestine, it is refreshing to find the creed of Arabia almost patronised and praised. The writer who could not have found in his heart to think Gregory the Great or Hildebrand other than a mercenary impostor, nor Cromwell other than an ambitious hypocrite, admits with exquisite blandness of Mahomet that he had the art of employing all the means of subjugating men avec adresse, mais avec grandeur.[65] Another reason, no doubt, besides his ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... reproach of Demosthenes, that his eloquence was mercenary; that he privately made orations for Phormion and Apollodorus, though adversaries in the same cause; that he was charged with moneys received from the king of Persia, and condemned for bribes from Harpalus. And should we grant that all those (and they are ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... were laughing at some of Wordsworth's last poems, which disgusted them, not only from the subservient spirit to Toryism which pervaded them, but also excited their laughter from their absurdity, Byron, in whose house they were, said to them, "It is satisfactory to see that a man who becomes mercenary, and traffics upon the independence of his character, loses at the same time his talent as ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... wandered off. He tried to read, but his passion was too strong. He thought of the stray amours to which he had been introduced by Flanagan, the sly visits to houses in a cul-de-sac, with the drawing-room in Utrecht velvet, and the mercenary graces of painted women. He shuddered. He threw himself on the grass, stretching his limbs like a young animal freshly awaked from sleep; and the rippling water, the poplars gently tremulous in the faint breeze, the blue sky, were almost more than he could bear. He was ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... deposition, and in return was excommunicated. He then sent a French knight named William de Nogaret, with Sciarra Colonna, a turbulent Roman, the hereditary enemy of Boniface, and a band of savage mercenary soldiers to Anagni, where the Pope then was, to force him to recall the sentence, apparently intending them to act like the murderers of Becket. The old man's dignity, however, overawed them at the moment, and they retired without laying ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... letters were found too short, too cold. He replied to the remonstrance by a reference of extreme coarseness. His correspondents wrote from the neighbourhood of the Palais Royal, then and for long after the haunt of mercenary women. "You belong to your quarter more than I thought," he said brutally.[37] The vulgarity of the lackey was never quite obliterated in him, even when the lackey had written Emilius. This was too much for the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... emerges the more by contrast—he is a triton among minnows. But I think the responsibility of those who keep sending out here young fellows of sixteen and seventeen fresh from a private school or Addiscombe is quite awful. The stream is so strong, the society is so utterly worldly and mercenary in its best phase, so utterly and inconceivably low and profligate in its worst, that it is not strange that at so early an age, eight out of ten sink beneath it. ... One soon observes here how seldom ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... save you. Believe me, if you cannot love your daily companions for their own sake in this world, whoever and wherever they are, you will fail to find love for your own sake in the next—and to love well, whatever you love you must love for itself, and not for any future and mercenary end." ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... B.C. an eclipse of the Moon was seen in Mysia, according to Polybius.[123] The date of September 1 has been assigned for this eclipse which is said to have so greatly alarmed some Gaulish Mercenary troops in the service of Attalus, King of Pergamos, that he had to get rid of them as soon as he could—make terms ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... duke started in his chair with a look of pain; but Pollyooly's deep blue eyes shone suddenly like bright stars, and she smiled a heavenly smile. It was not that she was mercenary. But it was the chief aim of her life to raise a wall of gold (it could not be too thick or too high) between ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... of sailing, I would retire to my island,—the position of which, in a beautiful semi-tropic ocean, would be known only to myself and to my crew,—and there I would pass happy days in the company of my books, my works of art, and all the various treasures I had taken from the mercenary vessels ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... "It has shown me my age. I declare I am trembling; I, whose nerves were iron. But I have a particular contempt for servants. Mercenary wretches! I think Heaven inspired me to talk to them. After all, who knows? perhaps we might find a way to their hearts, if we did not eternally shock their vanity, and forget that it is, and must be, far greater than our own. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... her, and leaned for a moment against the wall. Mrs. Warren's idea of perfect happiness would have received a severe shock, could she have heard Nancy murmur, brokenly: "Dear old dad! Pray Heaven you don't know that your little Nance is a miserable, mercenary coward!" ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... really live," Stuart broke in, "not merely exist. You don't live. You are engaged in an endless fight, desperate, cruel, mercenary—for what? The superfluous, ambitions you never exploit, privileges you don't know how to use, caprices without the genius to express them, pleasures when you don't know ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... afterwards, "seeing himself deserted, and fearing they would seize his castles, he sent the Earl of Pembroke and other faithful messengers to them, to let them know he would grant them the laws and liberties they desired." * * But after the charter had been granted, "the king's mercenary soldiers, desiring war more than peace, were by their leaders continually whispering in his ears, that he was now no longer king, but the scorn of other princes; and that it was more eligible to be no king, than such a one as he." * * He applied to the Pope, that he might by his apostolic authority ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... on my next birthday,' said Sarah. Having said it the intolerably mercenary spirit of her action seemed to strike her, and impulsively she turned away with a bright blush. Fire seemed to sparkle in the eyes of both men. Said Eric: 'A year so be! The man that wins ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... wrong. A dozen times in the last three days her hand had gone out to the telephone and the will had been there to confess to Cranbourne that her allegiance to his side existed no longer, but even in this her honesty had broken down. She saw herself, as she hesitated on the threshold, a wretched mercenary creature—the sport of greed and jealousy—self-centred and governed by thought of gain. It was not a pleasant reflection. For the doubtful blessing of being wife to an unscrupulous millionaire she had deafened her ears to the call ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... what it was when the paper first claimed public attention and support. "When we are impecunious," says Mr. du Maurier, "we must needs be democratic." And democratic Punch was in Jerrold's era, although from no mercenary or unworthy motive. Later on, the club and the drawing-room frankly recognised the power wielded by the paper, and, by that very acknowledgment, influenced it to an obvious degree. Then came the sentiment of Church and State, and the Palmerston patriotic pose ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... "thy mercenary demand alone proves the vanity of thy pretence of being initiated into the secrets of the Gods. Depart my ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... of my fellow-creatures. My knowledge, my time, my fortune have ever been employed in the relief of distress! I have studied and practised medicine, but I have never degraded that most noble and most consoling of arts by mercenary speculations of any kind. Though always giving, and never receiving, I have preserved my independence. I have even carried my delicacy so far as to refuse the favours of kings. I have given gratuitously my remedies and my advice to the rich: ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... courtier. But if you look into their manner of life you'll find them mere sots, as debauched as Penelope's wooers; you know the other part of the verse, which the echo will better tell you than I can. They sleep till noon and have their mercenary Levite come to their bedside, where he chops over his matins before they are half up. Then to breakfast, which is scarce done but dinner stays for them. From thence they go to dice, tables, cards, or entertain themselves with jesters, fools, gambols, and horse tricks. ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... bred a hundred or more horses from the original stock he had brought up from Durango. His particular interest was in the almost unblemished whites, and these he had given especial care. He made a good deal of money selling this strain to friends among the ranchers back in Texas. No mercenary consideration, however, could have made him part with the great, rangy white horses he had gotten from the Durango breeder. He called them Blanco Diablo (White Devil), Blanco Sol (White Sun), Blanca Reina (White Queen), Blanca Mujer (White Woman), and El Gran Toro Blanco (The Big ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... suppose, that we are to leave our heavy overcoats and blankets and foot stoves and such other luxuries behind; that rather indicates that we are going to do something besides retreat; and I should like to get a whack at those mercenary Dutchmen before I freeze or starve," ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... nature," it would be recognized by the affections of all of them to be a true sentiment. Why it would be disgraceful, great God, that birth and travail and procreation should be gratis and mere nature among the beasts, while among mankind they should be merely mercenary transactions! ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... condition, and openly sanctions that fearful abuse which dooms the poor man's unborn children to the mundane perdition of poverty's thousand penalties. Is God's will so done in heaven? While the Church teaches you to pray, "Thy Kingdom come," she strikes with mercenary venom at the first principle of that kingdom, namely, elementary equality in citizen privilege. Better silence than falsehood; better no religion at all—if such lack be possible—than one which concedes equal rights beyond the grave, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... more serious than these mercenary meannesses. Bettina Caroline died in the arms of her younger sister, who had nursed her with the devotion of girlhood, and the curiosity of an untainted imagination. In the silence of long nights the sisters exchanged many a confidence. With what dramatic ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... will come over to your side if you just confess, honestly, that he is a better man than you are, and you need his help. What was the road I must take to achieve the same understanding he had achieved? His eyes glittered at that, and a mercenary expression underlay the tone of ...
— Sense from Thought Divide • Mark Irvin Clifton
... surprise that the house of God and the depository of the dead, should be so shamefully assigned over to the influence of Mammon, and a price of admission as into a place of public amusement, exacted by those to whose mercenary government the ancient structure of Westminster Abbey had devolved. "Was it thus, always," asked he, "from the time of Henry IIId?" To this enquiry, the guide replied merely by a shrug of his shoulders, rather indicative of contempt than otherways, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Mind-healing is dishonored by those who take it up from mercenary motives, for wealth and fame, or think to build a baseless fabric of their own on another's foundation. They cannot put the "new wine into old bottles;" they can never engraft Truth into error. Such students come to my College to learn a system which they go away ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... I will not endure it any longer. Ladies, I beseech you, help me. This is such a wrong as never was offered to poor bride before: upon her marriage day, to have her husband conspire against her, and a couple of mercenary companions to be brought in for form's sake, to persuade a separation! If you had blood or virtue in you, gentlemen, you would not suffer such ear-wigs about a husband, or scorpions to ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... of the quickest Apprehension; the Master therefore should consider how much more Time is necessary for one that has not the same Quickness, and how much he is obliged to consult the Capacity of his Scholar. From a mercenary Teacher this necessary Regard is not to be hoped for; expected by other Scholars, tired with the Fatigue, and solicited by his Necessities, he thinks the Month long; looks on his Watch, and goes away. If he be but poorly paid for ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... the brutes are turned mercenary, madam," said Mr. Touchwood, "I remember when a Scottishman would have scorned to touch a shilling that he had not earned, and yet was as ready to help a stranger as an Arab of the desert. And now, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... these worthless, glittering toys have they ruined the happiness of the dear innocent heart, and on them the guilt will fall if her soul is lost! I remark how she is changed in her letters since her shameful, mercenary marriage. She writes of nothing but the arrangement of her house, and speaks as if the beauty and costliness of things were only to be thought of, and there is not even a confidential, heart-felt word for her old Trude. It would seem as ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... 276 votes against 194. Majority 82. House of Lords by common consent passed second reading of useful little Bill for protection of grey seals threatened with extinction by mercenary sportsmen. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... without plan, without rhyme or reason. I take that last back, he has reasons all right—some of the screwiest. Religious reasons, racial reasons, idealistic reasons, political reasons, altruistic reasons and mercenary reasons. ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... that the Negro teacher has acted along the method here described, and has thus been the means of enlightening the masses of the colored people that lay claim to any degree of education whatever. What the Negro teacher has accomplished has been done not from a selfish motive or a mercenary point of view, but primarily because he has endeavored to do his part toward elevating the race with which he is identified. If it is true that the salvation of the Negro lies in his being educated, then to the Negro teacher must be attributed the greater ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... adoption of the plans now proposed would place woman above the necessity of any mercenary marriages. She could leave her father's home if she didn't like it, and engage in business and support herself. Who cared for the husband of Jenny Lind, or of Mrs. Norton? It was not necessary for Florence Nightingale, Harriet Hosmer, or Elizabeth Blackwell ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... another young person just because she was at present engaged to him. At which he got perfectly furious and said he would not marry that certain person if she was the only woman left on earth; that she had treated him as no lady should treat a gentleman, and that she was vain and mercenary and ambitious, and he was mortified to think he had ever imagined he had loved so shallow and weak and changeable a ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... misunderstood me," she said, not knowing how to excuse her mercenary hopes. "I wish only for your happiness!" And then, conscious that this was not her sole aim, and that she was not perfectly ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... caudal throat, guttural lung, pulmonary bone, osseous hair, hirsute tearful, lachrymose early, primitive sweet, dulcet, sweet, saccharine young, juvenile bloody, sanguinary deadly, mortal red, florid bank, riparian hard, arduous wound, vulnerable written, graphic spotless, immaculate sell, mercenary son, filial salt, saline meal, farinaceous wood, ligneous wood, sylvan cloud, nebulous glass, vitreous milk, lacteal water, aquatic stone, lapidary gold, aureous silver, argent iron, ferric honey, mellifluous ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... passed sentence of death on him, and bade the officers carry him to the Dechas, as it is called, a place in the prison where they strangle malefactors. And when the officers would not venture to lay hands on him, and the very mercenary soldiers declined it, believing it an illegal and a wicked act to lay violent hands on a king, Damochares, threatening and reviling them for it, himself thrust him ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... and moving chair.] And I must say I think you are very hard on modern life, Lady Windermere. Of course there is much against it, I admit. Most women, for instance, nowadays, are rather mercenary. ...
— Lady Windermere's Fan • Oscar Wilde
... fools, by fools mistook for pride; From thee whatever virtue takes its rise, Grows a misfortune, or becomes a vice; Such were thy rules to be poetically great: "Stoop not to interest, flattery, or deceit; Nor with hired thoughts be thy devotion paid; Learn to disdain their mercenary aid; Be this thy sure defence, thy brazen wall, Know no base action, at no guilt turn pale;[4] And since unhappy distance thus denies T'expose thy soul, clad in this poor disguise; Since thy few ill-presented graces seem To breed contempt where thou hast hoped esteem—" Madness ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... needed, and that she needed rest; Mrs. Riddell at first tried hard to induce her to remain, but when she looked at the pale thin face, and thought how many weary nights the lady had voluntarily sat up with the raving child, she ceased to urge the request, and at once set out for a mercenary to ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... man could work in such a hodge-podge. Even inspiration was likely to be chaotic and futuristic. Small blame to Brian if he resented it all. To-morrow, if Reynolds deigned to appear with his check, he would summon Mrs. Haggerty, and the studio should have a cleaning that the mercenary old beldame would remember. Kenny vaguely coupled Mrs. Haggerty with the present disorder and resented both, his defiant eyes lingering with new interest upon a jumble of musical ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Traffic has invaded the world. The money-changers are established even in the sanctuary, and by sanctuary I do not mean religious things alone, but whatever mankind holds sacred and inviolable. It is not gold that complicates, corrupts, and debases life; it is our mercenary spirit. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... and sell, and, as it were, create; but these irrepressible tokens themselves float and glitter in the foam-crests upon those very billows. It cannot, then, be doubted that the instruments and accompaniments of most of the pomp and luxury, the war, treasons, and varied mercenary crimes of the world, are still acting their part ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... loved, my honored, much respected friend![1] No mercenary bard his homage pays; With honest pride I scorn each selfish end, My dearest meed, a friend's esteem and praise: To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays, 5 The lowly train in life's sequestered scene; The native feelings strong, the guileless ways; What Aikin in a cottage would have been; ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... anything to do with this. And you didn't, for I watched your eyes: you never would have thought of him but for me. It is I, his own sister, who have hinted it. He has nobody but me, and when his back is turned I accuse him of being so base, so cruel, so mercenary, that—" She stopped and tried to steady her voice. Suddenly she turned and pointed to the door: "And if he came in there now, this minute—oh, Bertie, my Bertie, if you would!—if he stood there now, I should have slandered him without a shadow of proof. Oh, it is odious, horrible! The one in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep and fleeth. He is called not a shepherd, but a hireling, who feeds the Lord's sheep not for inward love, but with a view to temporal wages. He is a mercenary who seeks indeed the place of shepherd, but seeks not the gain ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... appear not only hateful, but contemptible too. All the officers of government, also, in the Alexandrian court had turned against her, because they had supposed that they could control her brother more easily if she were away. Thus she had always been surrounded by selfish, mercenary, and implacable foes. Now, for the first time, she seemed to have a friend. A protector had suddenly arisen to support and defend her,—a man of very alluring person and manners, of a very noble ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... popular histories! Certain general notions of the character of nations we, indeed, distinctly and correctly attain: that Chinese civilization is stationary, the French instinctively a military race, the Swiss mercenary, and adventurous in engineering and religious reform,—that modern German literature was as sudden as simultaneous in its development,—that Holland redeemed her foundations from the sea,—that Italy owes to art, and England ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... it for himself, and was willing—so at least it was reported—to pay for it at the handsome figure of 4,000 pounds for a single couplet. Pope, however, who was not mercenary, declined to gratify the alderman, who by his will left the poet a legacy of 100 pounds, possibly hoping by this benefaction, if he could not be praised in his lifetime, at all events to escape posthumous abuse. If this were his wish it was gratified, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... readiness to return by whatever route I proposed. This is a point that I should like to make clear to all who may read this, for it is indicative of a trait often lost sight of by those accustomed to having, in novels and so forth, the more mercenary side of the Australian's character pointed out to them. A common subject of speculation is whether or no Australians would make good soldiers; as to that my belief is, that once they felt confidence ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... Trumbull, "but I call this will eccentric. I was always willingly of service to the old soul; and he intimated pretty plainly a sense of obligation which would show itself in his will. The gold-headed cane is farcical considered as an acknowledgment to me; but happily I am above mercenary considerations." ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... I was not disposed to be mercenary; though I did think you were not worldly-wise. Now that I am destitute, you can see that to marry a man not worth a dollar, and with a precarious profession, is not what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... conventional after-character, for in 1725 he was but a boy fresh from Eton, and could scarcely have established any reputation as a rake. Nor is there anything in our whole knowledge of him to justify us in supposing that he was at any time a mere mercenary fortune-hunter. Finally, according to one of Mr. Roberts's letters to Mr. Keightley, timorous Mr. Tucker of Lyme had a very different reason from his personal shortcomings for objecting to Fielding as a suitor ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... consequences sprung? We have been involved in no war. We have been at peace with all the world. We have been visited with no national calamity. Our people have been advancing in general intelligence, and, I will add, as great and alarming as has been the advance of political corruption among the mercenary corps who look to government for support, the morals and virtue of the community at large have been advancing in improvement. What, I again repeat, ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... propose would aid manifestly in the due classification of all assistants at a ball. It is not to be thought that the sex is governed by any mercenary motive; but in the present organization of society a certain degree of attention to the mode in which matrimonial establishments are to be sustained ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... George IV. were sad, and for a king he was left comparatively alone. He had neither wife nor children to lean upon and to cheer him,—only mercenary courtiers and physicians. His tastes were refined, his manners affable, and his conversation interesting. He was intelligent, sagacious, and well-informed; yet no English monarch was ever more cordially ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... is rather mercenary: perhaps that is too strong a word; but, in short, a mere man of the world. Might it not be that Grace Carden would wish him to learn your attachment either from your lips or from her own, and not detect it in an ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... easy to marry," said Jane, rather drearily. "It isn't easy to find some one with whom one would be willing to pass one's life. I've had several chances—one or two of them not entirely mercenary, I think. But not one that I could bring myself ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... sapphires. It evidently brings her happy thoughts, as, after gazing at it for a moment or two, she stoops and presses her lips eagerly to it. It is his first gift (though not his last), and therefore the most precious. What girl does not like receiving a present from her lover? The least mercenary woman on earth must feel a glow at her heart and a fonder recognition of her sweetheart's worth when he lays a love-offering ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... man, a strong man, a man whose respect was to be prized. Beside him she felt herself small and ordinary. That was all right, but she was determined he should not believe her insignificant, shallow, unworthy, mercenary. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... will say that to-day you will find no man in our town as well liked, as jovial, and full of merry sayings as I. My jokes are again noised about and quoted; once more I take pleasure in my wife's confidential chatter without a mercenary thought, while Guy and Viola play at my feet distributing gems of childish humor without fear of the ghastly tormentor who used to dog their steps, ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... talking of our young pupil and your daughter; I object still more strongly to your insinuation that my desire to see them married (provided always that they are sincerely attached to each other) springs from a mercenary motive." ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... time saves nine,' says the proverbial wisdom of our forefathers, adding, 'One jilt makes many.' In the last chapter of the book of this chronicle, we told how the mercenary Mr. Jephson proved false to the beautiful Miss Willoughby, who supported existence by her skill in deciphering and transcribing the manuscript records of the past. We described the consequent visit of Miss Willoughby ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... Napoleon offered to these bands the same reward which he had promised to the peasants. But to a man, they refused the gold. They had imbibed the spirit of their chief, his enthusiasm, and his proud superiority to all mercenary motives. "We are not toiling for money," said they, "but for your approval, and to ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... not constitute a nation or possess any common interest or bond of union. There was no trace of an organization by which the Irish tribes could be united into one people. The ceaseless civil wars had indeed supplanted the original tribesmen by the mercenary followers of another set of rival chiefs; but there had been no union; and the mass of the people, still under the influence of their native customs, were probably in a more wretched condition than ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... much, if he had ordered his conduct otherwise. But you seem to have a notion, at least you represent your heroes acting as if nothing could be done with women, but by down-right bribery and corruption, and by teazing and terrifying them out of their senses. You are however mistaken; women are never mercenary in their amours, until they are totally debauched, and prostitution has become their trade, and many not even then, where they like their man. The youngest and most artless of them all know, that when money is offered ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... Potter Dog and Pony Show was exhibiting in a banlieue not far away. So, thither he bent his steps—the plentiful funds in his pocket burning hot holes all the way. He had paid twenty-two cents for the accordion, and fifteen for candy; he had bought the mercenary heart of Mitchy-Mitch for two: it certainly follows that there remained to him of his dollar, sixty-one cents—a ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... was in the unseen future. To the child it was not permitted to look beyond the hazy lines that bounded his oasis of flowers into the fruitless waste abroad. Poverty, want, at least so great as to compel the daily exercise of his mind for mercenary ends, was stealthily advancing from the rear; but the sound of its stern steppings was wholly muffled by intervening years ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the case with her. She would trample upon a hecatomb of hearts to arrive at the object of her ambition. I think she might have made more than one brilliant marriage since she has been out—something like ten years, you know—only she was too cold, too obviously mercenary. I am ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... one he met of the fate of Isabelle; but all turned from him with disgust. At length he found her out, but what was his grief and surprise—in a nunnery! Firm to the troth she had so solemnly plighted, she had rejected the proposition of her mercenary parent; and, having no idea but that her lover had shared the fate of all Christian captives, she had shut herself up from the world, and vowed to live the life ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... practice. Traffic has invaded the world. The money-changers are established even in the sanctuary, and by sanctuary I do not mean religious things alone, but whatever mankind holds sacred and inviolable. It is not gold that complicates, corrupts, and debases life; it is our mercenary spirit. ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... aliment that feeds and guides The daring spirit to its high emprise— A nation's moral energies, by him Directed, found a nobler end and aim. He gave that high discriminating tone That marks the Brave from mercenary tools— Features that separate a British Crew From hireling bravoes, and from pirate hordes. And yet no marble marks the spot where lies The dust of DIBDIN;—no inscription speaks A Nation's ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... Besides, Harry had, with reason, great confidence in his own powers of dealing with women—getting whatever it was that he wanted from them, and afterwards preventing their being a nuisance. But he did not much like the idea of this mercenary marriage, because he was not in the least tired of his romance with Valentia, and saw great difficulties in the way of keeping it up later on. He had worrying doubts as to her consenting to revive it afterwards if ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... All dread of a standing military force is looked upon as a superstitious panic. All shame of calling in foreigners and savages in a civil contest is worn off. We grow indifferent to the consequences inevitable to ourselves from the plan of ruling half the empire by a mercenary sword. We are taught to believe that a desire of domineering over our countrymen is love to our country, that those who hate civil war abet rebellion, and that the amiable and conciliatory virtues of lenity, moderation, and tenderness of the privileges of those who depend on this kingdom are ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... Mantinea, Philopoemen with his army marched rapidly to attack him. Both sides drew up their forces near the city of Mantinea, and both brought into the field not only nearly all their own countrymen, but also large bodies of foreign mercenary troops. Machanidas began the battle by a charge of his mercenaries, who routed the Tarentines and other light troops of the Achaeans, but then instead of moving at once to attack and overwhelm their ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... 'Mercenary little woman!' said Darton to himself with a smile. 'Then that was the secret of her refusal this time—she thought ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... with reverence. I am sorry the assertion of that man should prevail so much against the dead.' He need not have feared that it had prevailed, or would prevail, with the nation. That scarcely spared a thought to Manourie, unless to curse him as a mercenary liar. But in the emotion stirred by Ralegh's death it was soon evident that the people had grown indifferent to the degree of its hero's personal loyalty, or the reverse. The flood of enthusiasm for him swept away the interest in his guilt or innocence in respect of particular ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... to prove," he announced, "how entirely devoid my clients are of mercenary considerations, they agree, Mr. Bundercombe, to accept the ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... calendula, marigolds and so forth. His garden is a colorful, attractive spot. He has vegetables for the table and plenty of flowers for cutting. The latter preclude any argument over whether his garden pays since, oddly enough, the subject of a flower garden never seems to take a mercenary turn. ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... ranks of society—alack, even in our own!—are immoderately attracted by anyone possessed of riches and a title—or of either of the two? As an au fait in the female temperament, I shall wager that it is nine out of ten that if you spoof this mercenary young minx into believing that you are merely a native impecunious nonentity, and not to be shot at with powder, she will instantaneously drop pursuing ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... feathery cloud, and now they were against the clear blue sky. I confess, being no sportsman, I was more interested for the poor bird that was striving for its life, than for the hawk that was playing the part of a mercenary soldier. At length the hawk got the upper hand, and made a rushing stoop at her quarry, but the latter made as sudden a surge downwards, and slanting up again evaded the blow, screaming and making the best of his way for a dry ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... devotion and her courage; I have already borne testimony to her services to all who needed them. She is the first who has redeemed the name of "sutler" from the suspicion of worthlessness, mercenary baseness, and plunder; and I trust that England will not forget one who nursed her sick, who sought out her wounded to aid and succour them, and who performed the last offices for ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... consequence is, that it is fast demoralizing the whole country; corrupting the very fountains of political power; and converting the ballot-box—that great palladium of our liberty—into an unmeaning mockery, where the rights of native-born citizens are voted away by those who blindly follow their mercenary and selfish leaders. The evidence of this is found not merely in the shameless chaffering for the foreign vote at every election, but in the large disproportion of offices which are now held by foreigners at home and ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... like the few men whose minds had first given birth to the wonderful idea of a railroad from East to West. Neale found himself confronted by a singularly disturbing fact. However grand this project, its political and mercenary features could not be beautiful to him. Why could not all men be right-minded about a noble cause and work unselfishly for the development of the West and the future generations? It was a melancholy thing to learn that men of sincere and ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... not reply. This seemed a sadly mercenary view of work, and a little shocked her. But then Claudia had not to earn her ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... bundles, bade some of our friends farewell, and at about nine o'clock of the night set out for Baltimore. How shall I describe my first experience of free life? Nothing can be greater than the contrast it affords to a plantation experience, under the suspicious and vigilant eye of a mercenary overseer or a watchful master. Day and night are not more unlike. The mandates of Slavery are like leaden sounds, sinking with dead weight into the very soul, only to deaden and destroy. The impulse of freedom lends wings to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... gallant "Tirtaan," the rocks nor the ruts nor the crowds nor anything could stop them; through thick and through thin they went to the front, for there was rivalry in those days and when the Aigles time after time got first water on, they won triumphs which we of this mercenary epoch cannot understand. The Aigles were in for glory, nothing else. So when we heard the roar of a rapid and sniffed the mist in the air, "Tirtaan Aigles ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... responsibility, with every physical need luxuriously gratified. But these hotels nevertheless represent democracy, it may be urged, for the reason that every one may there buy board and lodging and mercenary service if he has the price. The exceeding greatness of that price, however, makes of it a badge of nobility which converts these democratic hostelries into feudal castles, more inaccessible to the Long Denied than as though entered by a drawbridge ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... don't think you will," Mr. Stuart responded. "Young ladies like you, who set out on the search-matrimonial with lots of common-sense, worldliness, selfishness, and mercenary motives, generally reach the goal. It's a fair enough exchange—so much youth and good looks for so many thousand dollars. I wish you all success, Miss Darrell, in your laudable undertaking. It is well we should understand each other, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... interested spectators stretch their persons anxiously, to get a look at the two pretty children, honourable and legal gentlemen are straining their ability to reduce to property. There stands the blushing woman, calm and beautiful, a virtuous rebuke to curious spectators, mercenary slave dealers, the very learned gentlemen of the bar, and his enthroned honour, the Court! She will give testimony that makes nature frown at its own degradation. Not far from Franconia sits the very ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... woman. Even when he was a baby she could not cuddle him and wonder at him and regard him as the most wonderful thing in creation.... She had never held him to her breast as God and nature meant mothers to hold their babies. A mercenary ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... course, difficult to disprove such an accusation brought against a great movement, and, therefore, by implication against the individuals belonging to that movement. If I should charge that Mr. Henry Ford is engaged in this anti-Semitic propaganda for purely selfish and mercenary reasons, that he has become the spokesman and agent of great unscrupulous capitalist interests who seek to destroy their Jewish competitors and to profit thereby, he would find it difficult to establish the contrary by definite and concrete proof. As a ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... hardship in a pecuniary point of view, as he lays out scarcely any thing on them: he does not even expend his own labour on their improvement; and his time, which might be profitably occupied in this way, is wasted in useless idleness, in swelling the train, or cheering the ferocious sentiments, of some mercenary agitator. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... affairs with great ladies who offered to leave home and husband to follow them to Milan. They exaggerate the salaries they received on their trip, and frown haughtily when some unfortunate "colleague" solicits a drink at the nearby Biffi. And when the new contracts come in, the mercenary nightingales again take wing, indifferently, they care not whither. Once more, trains and steamers distribute them, with their conceits and their petulances, all over the globe, to gather them in again some months later and bring them back to the Gallery, ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... but most miserable associations, by the accounts of my fine inheritance that found me abroad, I came back, shrinking from my father's money, shrinking from my father's memory, mistrustful of being forced on a mercenary wife, mistrustful of my father's intention in thrusting that marriage on me, mistrustful that I was already growing avaricious, mistrustful that I was slackening in gratitude to the two dear noble honest friends who had made ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the chancellor are the only friends you possess. The Marshal, from personal considerations merely, remains neutral. Your army, excepting the cuirassiers, are traitors to your house. The wisest thing you have done was to surround yourself with this mercenary body, whom you call the royal cuirassiers, only, instead of three hundred, you should have two thousand. Self-interest will make them true to you. You might find some means to pay them, for they would be a good buffer ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... who remembered her father in the bloom and glory of early youth; that this faithful servant should be thrust out at the bidding of an interloper—a paltry schemer, who, in Vixen's estimation, had been actuated by the basest and most mercenary motives when he married her mother;—that these things should be, moved Violet Tempest with ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... darling, you know how tenderly I adore you; if you don't marry me at once I'll break every bone in your body!' He then snatched my bonnet, a new one, from my head, and so acted on my nerves that I went off to the Registry Office and was married. That he was actuated by merely mercenary motives is proved by the fact that the gratuity (of half-a-crown), which he presented to the Registry Clerk, he actually borrowed from me! I knew him already to be unprincipled; but never until that moment had it flashed upon me that he was a fortune-hunter! However, as he had the drawing-room ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are forever vain and impotent—doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely; for it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies, to overrun them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... English words that were common in the Southwest. He had before noticed the apparent incongruity of the handwriting and the text, and it was possible that for the purposes of disguise the poet might have employed an amanuensis. But how could he reconcile the incongruity of the mercenary and slangy purport of the missive itself with the mental habit of its author? Was it possible that these inconsistent qualities existed in the one individual? He smiled grimly as he thought of his visitor Bowers and his friend Jack. He was startled ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... separately to a skillful interrogatory, had managed to keep inviolate the secret of their mercenary labor. The servant, shrewdly questioned, had said nothing that could in any way cause the ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... perpetual alarms; whilst a good man enjoys an uninterrupted peace and serenity of mind, which excels the other not only in duration, but in sense of pleasure too. As for the other sort of converse, that which consists in expression of itself to others, Pindar says very well, that it was not mercenary in old time, nor indeed is it so now; but by the baseness and ambition of a few it is made use of to serve their poor secular interests. For if the poets represent Venus herself as much offended with those who make a trade and traffic of the passion of love, how ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... find your opinion at all incredible," said Thorndyke, with a smile, "even if Mr. Walter were quite a mercenary young man—which, I take it, ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... a sort of atonement, he took them formally into his pay, to assist him in his wars against the infidel. But from this day forward the Uzcoques gradually declined in valour and in moral worth. From a race of heroes they degenerated into a horde of mercenary adventurers, and finally, of cruel and cowardly pirates. Their primitive customs and simple virtues were exchanged for the vices of refugees and criminals from Venice and other neighbouring states, who came in crowds to fill up the frequent vacancies ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... shaking his head and crying out, "nicht" and "Geld,"—the rest of his lingo was Greek to me,—did refuse to save the Gentleman unless he had more Money given him. For these Bathing-men were a most Mercenary Pack. In a much shorter time than it has taken me to put this on Paper I had off coat and vest, kicked off my shoes, and struck into the water. 'Twas of the shallowest, and I had but to wade towards him who struggled. When I came anigh him, he must even catch hold of me, clinging ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... a fellow like that. Baron indeed! He's only a foreign mercenary; and here is your poor father sent out of the country, while my lord has apartments set aside for him in the Palace, and he's petted and pampered, and now at last he goes off in one of the King's ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... With one chance of victory, fight, say I! But not when defeat is a certainty. If Rudiger joins us with his free-lances, Our chance will be equal to many chances; For Rudiger is both prompt and wary; And his men are gallant though mercenary; But the knave refuses to send a lance Till half the money is paid ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... and mercenary Martinez has received the punishment his treachery so well deserved; during his flight he was met by some Indians and murdered. May divine Providence thus punish all ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... lord," said Hymbercourt, ignoring the Italian and addressing Charles. "I receive no pay for my fealty. I am not a foreign mercenary, and I need not defend my loyalty to one who knows me as he knows his ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... respected his work, and the care given to it bore no relation to the price it was to fetch. He often expressed a wish that he might labor like the monks in the Middle Ages, without being disturbed by mercenary considerations; that simple shelter, food, and raiment should be provided for himself and for those dependent upon him—he did not foresee any other wants—so that he might devote the whole of his mental energy to subjects worthy of it. But I used to answer that if he had such ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... be not fair for me," he sang to himself, "what care I how fair she be?" But he did care; he could not master that passion. She had been vile to him, unfeminine, untrue, coarsely abusive; she had shown herself to be mercenary, incapable of true love, a scold, fickle, and cruel. But yet he loved her. There was a gallant feeling at his heart that no misfortune could conquer him,—but one; that misfortune had fallen upon ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... redemption. The too credulous admirer can do no less than accommodate her secretly with a sufficient sum to prevent her from being taken to task by her husband; and thus the disinterested lady proves, in the end, a greater drain to the gallant's pocket than the most mercenary courtesan. ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... the Sweet Caps Kid just how it was—how right up to the very last minute I kept expecting the luck to turn and how even then I mighta got it all back if the game-keeper hadn't been so blamed unreasonable and mercenary. When my last chip is gone I holds up a finger for a marker and tells him I'll take another stack of fifty, all blues this time, but he only looks at me sort of chilly and distrustful and remarks in a kind of a bored way that there's ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... expose oneself and one's goods to its mercy, has remarked, with much reason, that it is infinitely preferable to be poor on shore than to be rich at sea. In which saying he mocks indeed at those ambitious, avaricious, and mercenary men who, in order to gain false glory and the things of this world, expose themselves rashly to the manifest perils which are most of the time the inevitable lot of the seaman. This same consideration causes him also to utter these remarkable words: that he repents himself ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... this abuse of his name, the seignior is desirous of withdrawing the administration of his domains from these mercenary hands. In most cases he is unable to do it: he too deeply in debt, having appropriated to his creditors a certain portion of his land, a certain branch of his income. For centuries, the nobles are involved through their luxury, their prodigality, their carelessness, and through ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... is the other side of the story: The prime purpose of the privateer was to make money for its owners, its officers, and its crew. The whole design and spirit of the calling was mercenary. It inflicted damage on the enemy, but only incidentally to earning dividends for its participants. If Government cruisers had captured twenty-five hundred British vessels, those vessels would have ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... provisions from the Florentines, but in order to frustrate their hopes of the future harvest, upon the approach of spring, attacked them with a large army, trusting that being famished and unarmed, he should find them an easy conquest. He might perhaps have been successful, had not his forces been mercenary and faithless, and, therefore, induced to abandon the enterprise for the sum of 130,000 florins, which the Florentines paid them. People may go to war when they will, but cannot always withdraw when they like. This contest, commenced ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... of game, due on the 12th of August, breaking up the senate of the kingdom, and accessible only to the few whom wealth or privilege give the entree into the preserved regions, has, when even thrown into the market by the mercenary scions of the great, a considerable value; and perhaps it is only in the North that it is properly cooked and appreciated. A moor bird requires a particular sagacity in carving, which is a secret to the uninitiated. You may carve it like ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... joking. "That's better than nothing, but I like the wetting best." Louisa laughed, and used afterwards to say to Hannah, "Has Jack given you a wetting?" Later on some other free ladies took up the joke, and Hannah's "wetting" became a bye-word among the circle of free, mercenary lovers. ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... further the infelicity of these arms. The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... thought of mending his deficiency in this respect by a rich marriage. Nor had it ever occurred to him that he would seek a marriage for that purpose. Such an idea would have been thoroughly distasteful to him. There had been no stain of premeditated mercenary arrangement upon him at any time. But circumstances had so fallen out with him, that as he won his spurs in Parliament, as he became known, and was placed first in one office and then in another, prospects of love and money ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... distinctions—the manner in which, in our as in all free countries, those distinctions are conferred—and a certain disposition to sneer at any chivalrous, or elevated feeling, from which few of our ladies are exempt—we shall find it easy to account for the cold, stiff, ungraceful, harsh, and mercenary habits which disfigure, to the astonishment of all foreigners, the patrician class of English society. Nothing, indeed, can be less graceful than the frivolity of an Englishman. Naturally grave, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... of war as I have done, you will learn to put up quietly with what is not to be avoided. I remember on such another occasion when the rearguard or nachhut of the Imperial troops was followed by Croats, who were in the pay of the Grand Turk, I lost half my company before the mercenary renegades came to close fighting. Ha, my brave boys, they are mounting! We shall not have ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... unambitious Muse Affected ever but t'eternise thee; All other honours do my hopes refuse, Which meaner prized and momentary be. For God forbid I should my papers blot With mercenary lines with servile pen, Praising virtues in them that have them not, Basely attending on the hopes of men. No, no, my verse respects not Thames, nor theatres; Nor seeks it to be known unto the great; But Avon, poor in fame, and poor in waters, Shall ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... all radiant except the purchaser of the picture, who customarily showed traces of sobriety and skepticism. There were one or two prospective patrons lured to the trap; some ephemeral sycophants, volunteer or mercenary; a few idle fellow artists who enjoyed seeing a colleague make what they considered to be an exhibition of himself; some inevitable people who went everywhere they were asked, especially when there ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... not vindictive," he said, more kindly,—"least of all toward you. But I cannot see how you should desire the friendship of one whom you regard as a mercenary hypocrite. When you can truthfully assure me that you disbelieve that charge, then, and not till then, will I forgive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... not what you mean. Think you so meanly of me as to believe I would sell myself for wealth and a title? Proud I may be—but not, I thank God, mercenary nor mean. And what a lofty, noble spirit is that of your friend! What lord or duke could match the height of his intellect or the gorgeousness of his imagination. Oh, too soon my beautiful dream ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... of Marriage.—Included here should be hasty marriages, mercenary marriages, marriages entered into unwillingly after pregnancy had occurred, as well as marriages where coercion was a factor ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... you think she likes the other man? or is it anything else than one of those mercenary attachments that you young ladies understand better, far better, than the most worldly-minded father or ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... under French auspices, had taken the arms away from the Germans but left arms with the Poles. Added to that, guns, machine-guns, rifles, and ammunition, were run over into the plebiscite area, and a mercenary "insurrectionary" army was raised, partly from the local Polish population and partly from Poland proper. An army which the French Government held to be capable of intimidating the League of Nations garrison of ten thousand fully ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... take up the burden of my father and mother, and let us diminish and be frugal, instead of cowardly flying into the protection of our creditor, by a union which the world, at least, would pronounce mercenary. My father might come ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... a hundred times a day. During the whole period of his acquaintance with Lucetta he had never wished to claim her as his own so desperately as he now regretted her loss. It was no mercenary hankering after her fortune that moved him, though that fortune had been the means of making her so much the more desired by giving her the air of independence and sauciness which attracts men of his composition. It had given her servants, house, and fine clothing—a setting that invested ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... composed of gentlemen and yeomen, is the natural strength and only security of a free government; that such a militia in this colony would forever render it unnecessary for the mother country to keep among us for the purpose of our defence any standing army of mercenary forces, always subversive of the quiet and dangerous to the liberties of the people, and would obviate the pretext of ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... have I seen the publisher without a fur coat in winter nor his seed begging bread. Nor do I expect to see such sights. Yet I have seen an author begging bread, and instead of bread, I gave him a railway ticket. Authors have always been in the wrong, and they always will be: grasping, unscrupulous, mercenary creatures that they are! Some of them haven't even the wit to keep their books from being burnt at the stake by the executioners of the National Vigilance Association. I wonder that publishers don't dispense with them altogether, and carry on unaided the great tradition of English literature. ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... the history of a struggle between brutal violence and the judicial authority of the United States. Commencing in a mercenary raid upon a rich man's estate, relying wholly for success on forgery, perjury, and the personal fear of judges, and progressing through more than six years of litigation in both the Federal and the State courts, it eventuated in a ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... Sicilian, says that 'in a civil broil they are worth their weight in gold and silver.' For in a civil war, not only courage, but justice and temperance and wisdom are required, and all virtue is better than a part. The mercenary soldier is ready to die at his post; yet he is commonly a violent, senseless creature. And the legislator, whether inspired or uninspired, will make laws with a view to the highest virtue; and this is not brute courage, but loyalty in the hour ...
— Laws • Plato
... she had just now believed, that he had been forced to shed the blood of an impious wretch, in obedience to an overpowering fate, was capable of allowing the noblest of men to be beheaded, unjudged, merely to please a mercenary favorite! His confession, then, had been nothing but a revolting piece of acting! He had endeavored to vanquish the disgust she felt for him merely to ensnare her and her healing hand more surely—as his plaything, his physic, his sleeping draught. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of strongly developed and contradictory qualities? For example, if it was Mildred's latent courage rescued her from Siddall, was it not her strong tendency to vacillation that saved her from a loveless and mercenary marriage to Stanley Baird? Perhaps the deep underlying truth is that all unusual people have in common the character that centers a powerful aversion to stagnation; thus, now by their strong qualities, now by their weaknesses, they are swept inevitably on and on and ever on. Good to-day, bad to-morrow, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... think of this, the stronger becomes my conviction that I have not been the dupe of a heartless or mercenary woman. Margaret has not acted as a free agent. She has paid the penalty of her determination to force herself into the presence of Henry Dunbar. By some inexplicable means, by some masterpiece of villany and cunning, this man has induced his victim's daughter to become the champion ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... most venomous fights between Burrites and Bucktails. Clinton organized a compact machine in the city. A biased contemporary description of this machine has come down to us. "You [Clinton] are encircled by a mercenary band, who, while they offer adulation to your system of error, are ready at the first favorable moment to forsake and desert you. A portion of them are needy young men, who without maturely investigating the consequence, have sacrificed principle to self-aggrandizement. Others are mere parasites, ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... to believe that she had cheated and tricked him. He had no argument to put forward to justify his belief; it was one of those beliefs which are rooted in something finer and truer than circumstantial evidence. His only argument in her favour was that he had never found her mercenary, but, as Abdul had answered him, a woman will sell ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... patch up a drama in Italian, in order to introduce favourite airs, selected from different authors, the contrast has always been broken thereby, without every one's knowing the reason: and since ignorant mercenary prompters, though Italians, have been employed in hotch-potch, and in translating our dramas from Italian into English, how could such operas appear ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... round with her, and run your chance about the money." "Mrs. Neefit," said Ontario, laying his hand upon his heart, "all the bullion in the Bank of England don't make a feather's weight in the balance." "You never was mercenary, Mr. Ontario," said the lady. "My sweetheart is to me more than a coined hemisphere," said Ontario. The expression may have been absurd, but the feeling ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... Hotel Europe, in the Piazza di Spagna. There for two weeks he lived like a milordo. He formed many acquaintances among the resident colony of American artists, and was received by them with much kindness. Some of the mercenary ones of their number, having formed the opinion that he came there to buy paintings, ignorant of his profession, were excessively polite;—but their offers of services were declined. When Caper finally moved to private lodgings in Babuino ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... democratic inclination without which our form of government must quickly stagnate. It would be foolish to say that no selfish motive enters into this tremendous manifestation of energy and effort (until humanity assumes a higher form the moving power of the mercenary principle must be very great), but it is fair and it is accurate to ascribe to the men in affairs a much loftier and more honorable impulse—the aspiration to share in the conduct of their own government, the unwillingness to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... jumping up from the piano in wild excitement. "Then a musician's reputation is really at the mercy of a mercenary crew of singers, who respect neither art nor themselves. Oh, yes, we are ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... being an only child, had fallen heir to her father's property on the second marriage of her mother. The stepfather was an excellent Swiss, a Protestant from Basel, thoroughly educated, and interested in education, and for years a mercenary in the Genoese service. On his retirement he became a Roman Catholic in order to secure the woman of his choice. He was the father of Letitia's half brother, Joseph. The retired officer, though kindly disposed ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... for which purpose he was by him sent as commissioner to both the general assemblies 1608 and 1610. He brought some English doctors to persuade, a strong guard to intimidate the faithful, and money to bribe those of a contrary disposition; which he distributed to these mercenary creatures for their votes. He so far succeeded, as to get a new set of bishops erected, and then returned to England, where, with the wages of iniquity, he built a sumptuous palace at Berwick. When he intended to keep ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... even than that which had engulfed the empire. The unhappy peasantry, driven by starvation into frenzied revolt, avenged their agony upon the nobility by hideous plunderings and burnings of the rich chateaux.[21] A partial peace with England was patched up in 1360; but the "free companies" of mercenary soldiers, who had previously been ravaging Italy, had now come to take their pleasure in the French carnival of crime, and so the plundering and burning went on until the fair land was wellnigh a wilderness, and the English troops ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... sense astray, And for their sakes, see all and hear no play; Correct your cravats, foretops, lock behind: The dress and breeding of the play ne'er mind; For the coarse dauber of the coming scenes To follow life and nature only means, Displays you as you are, makes his fine woman A mercenary jilt and true to no man, Shows men of wit and pleasure of the age Are as dull rogues as ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... which the lady had all the conversation to herself, for the curate answered only in monosyllabic compliance, and Rainscourt made no answer whatever—elapsed before dinner was announced by the German mercenary who ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... literature the means of tyranny are not wanting, whether they be the tittle-tattle of the nursery or the lady's drawing-room, or the shameless combinations entered into by librarians.... In England as in France those who loved literature the most purely, who were the least mercenary in their love, were marked out for persecution, and all three were driven into exile. Byron and Shelley, and Swinburne, he, too, who loved literature for its own sake, was forced, amid cries of indignation and horror, to withdraw his book from the reach of a public that was rooting ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... magnificent, not absorbing, but just common. That in speaking of money he was protecting himself, proudly self-guarding his own honour and that of his mother, Lesbia Faircloth, never, in her innocence of what is mean and mercenary, occurred to Damaris. ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... my father is not so mercenary,—such an idea never entered his head. But the squire himself has indeed said, 'Why, if anything happened to Frank, you would be next heir to my lands, and therefore we ought ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he. "Are you mad, Jane? Pray," continued he, veiling his wrath in scornful words, "is it requisite, heroic, or judicious on the eve, or more correctly the morn, of affluence to deposit an unfinished work of art with a mercenary relation? Hang it, Jane! would you really have ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... of New South Wales to a state of consequence and independence, its interests must be entrusted to a governor who has no private or mercenary views, and will seek after nothing but the welfare of the colony; who will thoroughly support the trust and honour reposed in him, as the representative of our most gracious Sovereign; who will not treat, nor suffer others to treat, the officers serving under him with indignity; who ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... insinuations have been cast against my integrity,—in this long management of your affairs, whatever errors have been committed,—and doubtless there have been many,—have you found in me anything selfish, anything personal, anything mercenary? In the simple language of an ancient seer, I say, 'Behold, here I am; witness against me. Whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed? At whose hands have I received ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... caught at last, and put "in Lob's pound," and speaking of him as "the vilest of all the writers that have prostituted their pens either to encourage faction, oblige a party, or serve their own mercenary ends." But that the Court of Queen's Bench, before whom Defoe was brought—with some difficulty, it would appear, for he had fortified his house at Newington like Robinson Crusoe's castle—should have unanimously declared his pamphlets to be treasonable, and that ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... step-mother as a mother. He filled his home with loving-kindness, and was most liberal in giving help to friends. When he was told that he often threw away his bounty on ungrateful persons, he playfully told his advisers they were mercenary and that he saw they sold their gifts, since they expected so great a return ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... bride and his beloved. With indescribable scorn, and a wonderful fertility of derisive epithets, he held me up, as on the point of a scalpel, and proved the utter impossibility of his having been influenced by any other than the most grossly mercenary motives; while, between the bursts of invective against me, he lavished upon her a hundred fond, tender, passionate phrases of endearment that had never been applied to me. Pressing one hand on her head, he raised the other, and called Heaven to witness, that, although ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... of members and publications whose polish and scholarship are well-nigh impeccable. In considering the adjective "amateur" as applied to the press association, we must adhere to the more basic interpretation, regarding the word as indicating the non-mercenary nature of the membership. Our amateurs write purely for love of their art, without the stultifying influence of commercialism. Many of them are prominent professional authors in the outside world, but their professionalism never creeps into their ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... seceding. It's quite time. Essentially we are a different people: we shall be the best friends in the world separate. It's all a question of difference of opinion about labor; the North prefers a system regulated by the mercenary dictates of traffic, ruled by capital, and subject to the chronic difficulties of strikes and starvation; the South, a simpler relation, binding master and slave together for their mutual benefit, abolishing pauperism, and dividing society into two unmistakable, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... before her. Captain Wragge noticed these signs of heart-sickness and discontent with herself, after the effort she had made, and saw the importance of rousing her by speaking, for once, plainly and directly to the point. She had set a new value on herself in his mercenary eyes. She had suggested to him a speculation in her youth, her beauty, and her marked ability for the stage, which had never entered his mind until he saw her act. The old militia-man was quick at his shifts. He and his plans had both turned right ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... hostile to the show of feudal warfare, and herald of a new age of contests, in which the feudal levies would fall into the background. The invention of gunpowder in this century, the incapacity of the great lords, the rise of free lances and mercenary troops, all told that a new era had arrived. It was by the hand of Du Guesclin that Charles overcame his cousin and namesake, Charles of Navarre, and compelled him to peace. On the other hand, in the Breton war which followed just after, he was defeated by Sir John Chandos and the partisans ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... money of his own, and, never extravagant upon himself, was more liberal to the poor girl than ever she desired. But there was nothing mercenary in her. She was far more incapable of turpitude than he, for she was of a higher nature, and loved much where he loved only a little. She was nobler, sweetly prouder than he. She had sacrificed all to him for love—could accept nothing ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... you enough. I never loved you; I've no faith in love. I never loved you at all, and—you must have seen, lately, that I have changed—that I've become a very—a very mercenary woman. I can't afford to ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... abandons his own proper occupation and betakes himself to that of a Sudra, should be considered as a Sudra and on no account should any food be accepted from him. Professors of the healing art, mercenary soldiers, the priest who acts as warder of the house, and persons who devote a whole year to study without any profit, are all to be considered as Sudras. And those who impudently partake of food offered at ceremonials in a Sudra's house are afflicted with a terrible calamity. In consequence ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... was a "Yankee" did not make her less beautiful, and it did not make her any the less the daughter of a millionnaire. No one could say that he was mercenary, however, and no one could say why he was not as deeply interested in the daughter of the planter, for she was hardly less beautiful, though her father was not considered a millionnaire, to say nothing of ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... wretched small stones, and wear them night and day in a belt round his waist, as if he really loved them for their own mere sakes—dirty high-priced little baubles! Granville, for his part, couldn't bear to see such ingrained love of pelf. It was miserable; it was mercenary. ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... enough, into general society. Mrs. Schreiber was the very person required. Intellectually she had no great pretensions; but these she did not need: her character was irreproachable, her manners were polished, and her own income placed her far above all mercenary temptations. She had not thought fit to accept the station of Colonel Watson's wife, but some unavowed feeling prompted her to undertake, with enthusiasm, the duties of a mother to the colonel's daughter. Chiefly ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... idle, and unable to take upon their own shoulders the responsibility of real work. Their leaders had been selected from the outside,—clever, eager, pushing men, but of late had been hardly selected from among themselves. As used to be the case with Italian Powers, they entrusted their cause to mercenary foreign generals, soldiers of fortune, who carried their good swords whither they were wanted; and, as of old, the leaders were ever ready to fight, but would themselves declare what should be and what should not be the casus belli. There was not so much meanness as Mr. Ratler supposed in ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... above that one of the abuses which came into large practice from the middle period of the Tokugawa Bakufu was the adoption of children of ignoble birth into samurai families in consideration of monetary payments by their parents. This mercenary custom was strictly interdicted by the Matsudaira regent, who justly saw in it a danger to the solidity of the military class. But it does not appear that his veto received ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... papa;—the sort of match that you mean. Indeed I was mercenary enough in what I believed to be my views of life. I meant to marry a rich man,—if I could, and did not think much whether I should love him or not. But when the rich ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... profound conviction that about ninety-nine hundredths of whatever at present is, is wrong: conviction making four of us, according to our several manners, leaders of revolution for the poor, and declarers of political doctrine monstrous to the ears of mercenary mankind; and driving the fifth, less sanguine, into mere painted-melody of lament over the fallacy of Hope and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... wait to hear what Zoe might say in reply, but starting up in a fury of indignation, "I would have you to understand, Miss Rosie Travilla," she said, "that I am not the mercenary creature you appear to believe me. I would scorn to apologize in order to secure a gift from Mr. Dinsmore or anybody else; and if he gives me one, I shall ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... and people of England. In theory this contribution was at all events creditable to the generosity and zeal of the Irish people, and no discredit to O'Connell himself. Nor can it be alleged with truth that he accepted it from mercenary motives, or used it selfishly. His fortune was small; his position required large expenditure; and it is notorious that the money he received was not hoarded, nor used to enrich his family, but employed for political and often charitable purposes which had the entire approbation ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... heroine; she cannot only make "a wow," but she can "keep it strong;" she feels all the dignity of truth and love swelling in her bosom. With the view of possessing herself of the real state of Lord Bateman's affections, and with no sordid or mercenary motives, she has enquired of that nobleman what are his means of subsistence, and whether all Northumberland belongs to him. His Lordship has rejoined, with a noble regard for truth, that half Northumberland is his, and that he ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
... freedom of conscience, to hate tyranny and oppression, then I am indeed a criminal," he answered in an unshaken voice. "You call me a spy and load me with opprobrium. It was necessary to gain information as to the movements of your mercenary army: twice have I obtained that information and carried it to our noble general. My only regret is that I have not succeeded a third time in so doing; but understand that though I have thus laboured to injure you secretly, I have ever fought openly against you ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... markets, and you have taught me too well to judge of, and to value beauty, to dare to bid so cheaply for it: I found the toy was gay, the work was neat, and fancy new; and know not any thing they would so well adorn as Sylvia's lovely hands: I say, if after this I should have been the mercenary fool to have dunned you for return, you might have used me thus——Condemn me ere you find me sin in thought! That part of it was yet so far behind it was scarce arrived in wish. You should have stayed till it approached more near, before you damned it to eternal ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... posts, and the clouds of dust flying from the driven lintels, the screams of maids, the crying of women, a stray corpse or two flung on to the street, and then the procession as before, arms and legs, with a mercenary soldier between each pair, fore and aft. All this was repeated and repeated, till the dull monotony of tyranny began to wear through the long Teutonic patience to the under-quick ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... perhaps not unfair to suppose that at any rate for a short time in the year 1822 she was his mistress. Be that as it may, after Shelley's death they parted, and doubtless it will be said she treated her lover ill. To us it appears that he gave as good as he got. She was mercenary, and he was inconstant. If we read Letter XX aright, when she did offer, after some months of prudent dalliance, to live with him at Florence, he replied that he had but L500 a year, which was not enough for two. An establishment on the confines of respectability ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... was not long in scenting out who was the formidable rival to whom Daddy Mainspring alluded. Sacre! to think the mercenary old hunks could dream of sacrificing my lovely Lucy to such a hobgoblin of a fellow as a superannuated dragoon quartermaster, with a beak like Bardolph's in the play. But I had some confidence in my own qualifications; and as I gave a sly glance ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... egregious. The most interesting thing in life seemed to him to be what might lie just around the next corner. Sometimes his willingness to tempt fate led him into strange paths. Twice he had spent the night in a station-house; again and again he had found himself the dupe of ingenious and mercenary tricksters; his watch and money had been the price of one flattering allurement. But with undiminished ardour he picked up every glove cast before him into the ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... was a prisoner like himself, "As for you, Count Narischkin," said he, "I have nothing to upbraid you with; you are a Russian, you are doing your duty; but how could a man of one of the first families in Russia become the aide-de-camp of a foreign mercenary? Be the aide-de-camp of a Russian general; that employment ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... from individual Mid[-e]. It is customary with Mid[-e] priests to exact payment for every individual remedy or secret that may be imparted to another who may desire such information. This practice is not entirely based upon mercenary motives, but it is firmly believed that when a secret or remedy has been paid, for it can not be imparted for nothing, as then its virtue would be impaired, if not entirely destroyed, by the manid[-o] or guardian spirit under whose special protection it may be supposed to ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... daring and imaginative organizer of Puritanism, the baron of moral endeavour, the invincible prophet of new austerities. And, by the same token, it has issued its letters of marque to the Puritan mercenary, the professional hound of heaven, the moral Junker, the Comstock, and out of his skill at his trade there has arisen the whole machinery, so complicated and so effective, of the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
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