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More "Wantonness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The wantonness of this generation was in a measure due to the ideal conditions under which mankind lived before the flood. They knew neither toil nor care, and as a consequence of their extraordinary prosperity they grew insolent. In their ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... there was an incendiary. But where? Who was the miscreant? Some man in the village? Impossible! In the village each man knows the other far too well, learns too well from his daily toil how hard it is to scrape together his little livelihood, for him out of sheer wantonness to afflict his neighbor. No, it must be somebody from a distance; somebody, perhaps, who had been a-roving in the world. To be sure, journeymen, beggars who—how can one tell?—already have one foot in the lock-up, did not pass through the village, which is situated apart from ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... to the studies in which your employer professed an interest when he engaged you, they are nothing to him. Shall an ass affect the lyre? Remove from these men's minds the gold and the silver, with the cares that these involve, and what remains? Pride, luxury, sensuality, insolence, wantonness, ignorance. Consuming must be their desire, doubt it not, for the wisdom of Homer, the eloquence of Demosthenes, the sublimity ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... liberties which astonished and disgusted me: and my mother not only permitted the revered scoundrel to do this, but actually seemed to encourage him. Soon they placed themselves upon a sofa, in full view of my gaze; and I was both mortified and enraged to observe the wantonness of my mother, and the lasciviousness of her pious friend. After indulging in the most obscene and lecherous preliminaries, the full measure of their iniquity was consummated, I being a witness to the whole disgraceful scene. Horrified, and sick at heart, I left the spot and repaired ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... from taking those steps necessary to conserve her limited resources for the purchase of necessaries and the discharge of Reparation. As a result of the existing distribution of wealth in Germany, and of financial wantonness amongst individuals, the offspring of uncertainty, Germany is threatened with a deluge of luxuries and semi-luxuries from abroad, of which she has been starved for years, which would exhaust or diminish her small supplies ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... Such wantonness seems to his maturer reflection a sacrilege, and even the boy was not insensible to the silent reproach of the ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... your thinking! I know! Think, then—think of all the times I've been cruel to you. Think of my wantonness—my wickedness—not of my poor, tormented attempts at happiness. My lovers, yes! Think hard, and save yourself from any more discomfort. . . . But no—you're in no ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... despair, is false. We read: "If any one presents the doctrine concerning the gracious election of God in such a manner that troubled Christians cannot derive comfort from it, but are thereby incited to despair, or that the impenitent are confirmed in their wantonness, it is undoubtedly sure and true that such a doctrine is taught, not according to the Word and will of God, but according to [the blind judgment of human] reason and the instigation of the devil. For, as the apostle testifies, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... recognized his worthlessness, loved him still. That he did not love her, and, perhaps, never had done so, did not count with him. It was in his nature to find pleasure in snatching her from a better man. Then some faint sense of the wantonness and cruelty of it came upon him, and by a tense effort he made her a little inclination that ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... story is preeminently the story of Morgan. I have striven to make it a character sketch of that remarkable personality. I wished to portray his ferocity and cruelty, his brutality and wantonness, his treachery and rapacity; to exhibit, without lightening, the dark shadows of his character, and to depict his inevitable and utter breakdown finally; yet at the same time to bring out his dauntless courage, his military ability, his fertility and resourcefulness, his mastery of his men, ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the fool Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave Even to the basest appetites—that man Heeds not the shriek of penury; he smiles At the deep curses which the destitute 35 Mutter in secret, and a sullen joy Pervades his bloodless heart when thousands groan But for those morsels which his wantonness Wastes in unjoyous revelry, to save All that they love from famine: when he hears 40 The tale of horror, to some ready-made face Of hypocritical assent he turns, Smothering the glow of shame, that, spite of him, Flushes his bloated cheek. Now to the meal ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... their ease in comparison. But along with riches and the ease of victory, the common bad consequences had ensued. Ritters given up to luxuries, to secular ambitions; ritters no longer clad in austere mail and prayer; ritters given up to wantonness of mind and conduct; solemnly vowing, and quietly not doing; without remorse or consciousness of wrong, daily eating forbidden fruit; ritters swelling more and more into the fatted-ox condition, for whom there is but one doom. How far they had carried it, here is one ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... Two or three days after, they took a ship coming from Rhode Island to St. Christophers, laden with provisions and some horses, and burnt ship, men, and horses: Since when Spriggs has not been heard of: though it is supposed he went to Madagascar, to spend, in rioting and wantonness, his ill gotten plunder; till by a letter from Jamaica, of the 2nd of March last, we understood, That he had been again at the Bay of ...
— Pirates • Anonymous
... could not eat his veal without oranges? Is it not the highest indignity to human nature, that men should be such poltroons as to suffer the kingdom and themselves to be undone, by the vanity, the folly, the pride, and wantonness of their wives,[93] who, under their present corruptions, seem to be a kind of animal, suffered, for our sins, to be sent into the world for the destruction of families, societies, and kingdoms; and whose whole study seems directed to be as expensive ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... Catherine Cree in the city where Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's effigy lies in the chancel, and somewhat distantly relates itself to our history through his daughter's elopement with Sir Walter Raleigh. But now for a mere pleasure, whose wantonness I shall not know how to excuse to the duteous reader, we turned aside to the church of St. Magnus at the end of the bridge, and I shall always rejoice that we did so, for there I made the acquaintance of three of the most admirable cats in London. One ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Saturday, the 25th inst., a tender and affectionate father, stuffed by so many cubic feet of cold wind, foul air, all resulting from extermination and the benevolence of a humane landlord, will in the very wantonness of repletion, feed upon, the dead body of his own child—for which entertaining performance he will have the satisfaction, subsequently, of enacting with success the interesting character of a felon, and be comfortably ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... quite safe for anybody of mark to stay away from these manifestations of presidential piety. Having thus acknowledged the only power he was at all disposed to recognize as above himself, he would scatter acts of political grace in a sardonic wantonness of clemency. There was no other way left now to enjoy his power but by seeing his crushed adversaries crawl impotently into the light of day out of the dark, noisome cells of the Collegio. Their harmlessness fed his insatiable vanity, and they could always be got hold of again. It was the rule ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... beauties of Naples than of the artificial ones of Venice, but when Naples is made the scene of a drama of any kind it seems that its attractions for librettist and composer lie in the vulgarity and vice, libertinism and lust, the wickedness and wantonness, of a portion of its people rather than in the loveliness of character which such a place might or ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... his care the strict enforcement of the sanctions of law was peculiarly necessary. There were in it many individuals whom neither lenity could touch, nor rigour terrify; who, with all sense of social duty, appeared to have lost all value for life itself, and with the same wantonness exposed themselves to the darts of the savages, and to the severe punishments which, however reluctantly, every society must inflict when milder methods have been tried without success. Towards the latter end of February a criminal court was convened, ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... fare which I have to offer you," he said. "The best of the herd ever goes to the young lords who are wooing my mistress. Their wantonness and riot calls aloud to Heaven for vengeance. They are worse than the wildest band of robbers that ever lived by open pillage and violence. Such waste of good meat and wine was never seen before. For a wealthy man was Odysseus, and his flocks and herds still ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... were playing with balls and counters, made a sport of the fortunes and the liberties of their fellow-creatures. Other acts of persecution have been acts of malice. This was a subversion of justice from wantonness and petulance. Look into the history of Bishop Burnet. He is a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... pitilessly with the woods about West Point in order to furnish timber for the redoubts and the floats for the great chain, he thought to warn his engineers to beware of waste caused by ignorance or wantonness. ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... unable to find a word inclusive enough for all the contempt she wished to crowd into it. He was learning things. She could have ignored a frank courtesan with disdainful aloofness, but discreetly veiled wantonness made her articulate. When she mentioned Ginger her voice took a soft pity, mixed with certain condescension. She was sympathetic, but there were still many ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... trail, each carrying a single log upon his back. Before we reached the village of Shing Lung-shan we came into an area of desolation. Thousands of splendid trees were lying in a chaos of charred and blackened trunks. It was the wantonness of it all that depressed and ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... my cause, which led me to the negligence or wantonness which I have been instancing, also laid me open, not unfairly, to the opposite charge of fierceness in certain steps which I took, or words which I published. In the Lyra Apostolica, I have said that before learning to love, we must "learn ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... short," he assured Will; "best brings tu many tears, if 't is awnly for wantonness; an' him as thinks he've been all he should be to his mother lies to himself; an' him as says he has, lies to ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Judas planned to kiss Him, and He came through the trees to that bridal with the dawn of every day. He had foreseen the chalice, foreseen that it would be filled at every moon and every sun by the bitter gall of ingratitude and wantonness and hate, but He had pledged Himself—"Even so, Father"—and He was here to drink it. Small wonder, then, that the paving on which Peter Graham knelt seemed to swim before his eyes until it was in truth a moving ocean of love that streamed from the altar and enclosed ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... whom made it their highest object to falsify his actions and misrepresent his motives; lastly, with a woman for his coadjutor who could not share with him the burden of the general execration—thus he stood exposed to the wantonness, the ingratitude, the faction, the envy, and all the evil passions of a licentious, insubordinate people. It is worthy of remark that the hatred which he had incurred far outran the demerits which could be laid to his charge; that it was difficult, nay ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... white; and none of these have been known to be caught with an angle, unless it were one that was caught by Sir George Hastings, an excellent angler, and now with God: and he hath told me, he thought that trout bit not for hunger but wantonness; and it is rather to be believed, because both he, then, and many others before him, have been curious to search into their bellies, what the food was by which they lived, and have found out nothing by which ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... keeper! How the poor creature fribbles in his gait, and scuttles from place to place to despatch his necessary affairs in painful daylight, that he may return to the constant twilight preserved in that scene of wantonness, Messalina's bedchamber. How does he, while he is absent from thence, consider in his imagination the breadth of his porter's shoulders, the spruce nightcap of his valet, the ready attendance of his butler! Any of all ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... people, who never gave any better reason for it than that it was their fancy to support the idle complaint of one rival actress against another, in their several pretensions to the chief part in a new tragedy. But as this tumult seemed only to be the wantonness of English liberty, I shall not presume to lay any ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... ourselves a sort of hut, by piling together, in a conical form, a number of large stakes and broad rails torn up from one of the fences; and a bright wooden fire was blazing at the door of it. In the wantonness of triumph, too, we had lighted some six or eight wax-candles; a vast quantity of which had been found in the store-rooms of the chateaux hard by; and having done ample justice to our luxurious supper, we were sitting ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... made me rash? Who drove me from my hearth, and sent me forth On the unkindred earth? With the dark spleen Goading injustice, that 'tis vain to quell, Entails on restless spirits. Yes, I married, As men do oft, from very wantonness; To tamper with a destiny that's cross, To spite my fate, to put the seal upon A balked career, in high and proud defiance Of hopes that yet might mock me, to beat down False expectation and its damned lures, And fix a bar betwixt me ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... this number of his Idler his spirits seem to run riot; for in the wantonness of his disquisition he forgets, for a moment, even the reverence for that which he held in high respect[997]; and describes 'the attendant on a Court,' as one 'whose business, is to watch the looks of a being, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... not answer, having that to speak of that put my mother's question out of her mind for all time; so that until the end no word concerning that other woman passed again between them. Twenty years later, nearly, I myself happened to meet her, and then long physical suffering had chased the wantonness away for ever from the pain-worn mouth; but in that hour of waning voices, as some trouble of the fretful day when evening falls, so she faded from their life; and if even the remembrance of her returned at times to either of them, I think it must have been in those moments when, for no seeming ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of Henry I of England, where he appears to have charmed everyone, and to have spent a year, probably 1111, in which Hakon seized all Orkney, and also Caithness, which then included Sutherland, and laid them under his rule with robbery and wantonness. Leaving Caithness, Hakon at once went to attack Magnus in Orkney where he had landed; but the "good men" intervened, and an equal division of Orkney and Shetland and Caithness was made between the jarls. After some winters, however, they met in battle array in ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... occupied by our people all the natives, both men and women, immediately went away. When I went on shore I found this branch tied to one of the posts of the house, although the effect it had on the natives was known. I was much displeased at this piece of wantonness and ordered the branch to be taken away; but the natives notwithstanding would not come near the place. They said the house was taboo, which I understand to signify interdicted, and that none of them ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... and with impotent rage, to shake his scimitar against the ship. Her men proved themselves as expert amidst the realities of war, as they had before shown themselves in exercise; and some of them were detected amusing themselves, in the wantonness of their skill, by firing at the ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... Thomas Becket's life—whose names are Herbert Boseham, John Salisbury, William of Canterbury, Alen of Tewkesbury, Benet of Peterborough, Stephen Langton, and Richard Croyland—he bestoyed his youth in all kinds of lascivious lightness, and lecherous wantonness. After certain robberies, rapes, and murders, committed in the king's wars at the siege of Toulouse in Languedoc, and in other places else, as he was come home again into England, he gave himself to great study, not of the holy scriptures, but of the bishop of Rome's ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... preach to the crowds, and give never an inch for all their curses and noise. They fear him too much, I believe, to attack him with aught but words. And I wonder not at it. A few days since, a large dog was in wicked wantonness, as I must allow, set upon a poor Christian boy. Macer, so he is called about the city, at the moment came up. Never tiger seized his prey as he seized that dog, and first dashing out his brains upon the pavement, pursued then the pursuers ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... gentleman, whom with pride she had taken for her lover. It was a knowledge that was to sear her presently with self-loathing and self-contempt. But for the moment her only consideration was that, as a direct result of her own wantonness, her father stood in mortal peril. If he should perish through the deletion of this creature, she would account herself ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... grandest features of her character. If she was without love she was without hate. She cherished no petty resentments; she never stooped to envy or suspicion of the men who served her. She was indifferent to abuse. Her good humour was never ruffled by the charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the Jesuits filled every Court in Europe. She was insensible to fear. Her life became at last a mark for assassin after assassin, but the thought of peril was the thought hardest to bring home to her. Even when Catholic plots broke out in her very ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... third class of generation into essence by the union of the finite and infinite, in which the finite gives law to the infinite;—under this are comprehended health, strength, temperate seasons, harmony, beauty, and the like. The goddess of beauty saw the universal wantonness of all things, and gave law and order to be the salvation of the soul. But no effect can be generated without a cause, and therefore there must be a fourth class, which is the cause of generation; for the cause or agent is not ...
— Philebus • Plato
... that she was badly hurt over the dog's death. Certainly, despite her cold composure, she must be filled with rage against him for killing the animal. He might now have exhibited his arm, to confound her with the evidence of his innocence of wantonness, and very probably she would have been instantly remorseful. But he had no such intention; he was keenly alive to his opportunity to show her that he was answerable to no one for his conduct. He enjoyed her chagrin; ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... down in several places; the parterres and melon-beds were trampled and destroyed by the hoofs of the Carlist horses, which had seemingly been turned in there to feed, or perhaps been ridden through it in utter wantonness by their brutal owners. The ground in front of the house was strewed with broken furniture, and with articles of wearing apparel, the latter of which appeared to have belonged to the Carlists, and to have been exchanged by them for others of a better ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... this evening. Miss Good will take you home, and explain to your parents the cause of your dismissal. You are not to see any of your schoolfellows again. Your meanness, your cowardice, your sin require no words on my part to deepen their vileness. Through pure wantonness you have cast a cruel shadow on an innocent young life. If that girl dies, you indeed are not blameless in the cause of her early removal, for through you her heart and spirit were broken. Miss Drummond, I pray God you may at least repent and ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... different sale-stables in town, and to look at horses with a view to buying at private sale. Every facility for testing them was offered him, but he could not make up his mind. In feeble wantonness he gave appointments which he knew he should not keep, and, passing his days in an agony of multitudinous indecision, he added to the lies in the world the hideous sum of his broken engagements. From time ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... though these simple folk Who call me sister understand me not, It matters little. There is one who does; And he shall have no liberty of love By any word of mine. 'Tis woman's lot, And man's most weak and wicked wantonness. Mine is like other husbands, I suppose; ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... They had brought all science to the feet of Darwin. The few benighted dissenters who still held out against the doctrine were looked upon as not worthy even of contempt. The whole world had adopted the creed of evolution. Was it wantonness then, or was it conscience, that prompted Huxley in what is now a historically famous speech, delivered at the unveiling of a statue to Darwin in the Museum at South Kensington, to openly declare that it would be wrong to suppose "that an authoritative ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... set for him. He is wonderfully expert in springing steel traps for the bait or prey there is in them, without getting caught himself. He will follow up a trap line for miles, springing all traps and devouring all baits as he goes. Sometimes in sheer wantonness he will throw a trap into a river, and again he will bury a trap in deep snow. Dead martens in traps are savagely torn from them. Those that can not be eaten on the spot are carried off and skilfully cached under two or three ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... invitation to banquets and balls and concerts, and "very earlies," and carpet dances—for our friend was a very fashionable young man—but what is the use of even being fashionable, if the person you love cares for you no more? And so out of very wantonness, instead of opening notes sealed or stamped with every form of coronet, he took up a business-like epistle, closed only with a wafer, and saying in drollery, "I should think a dun," he took out a script receipt for ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... a dark, narrow entrance, or they made a long roundabout tour by way of the Queen's staircase across the Marble Court. The demolition of the stairway of honor was an irreparable loss. No other piece of wantonness equaled it in the tumultuous ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... and a few of the crew, fought till they were overpowered by numbers, and were all cut down and disabled. How he had escaped I already knew. He supposed that the pirates, after rifling the ship and murdering the crew, had set her on fire to escape detection, or, perhaps, from a mere wantonness in cruelty. He said that he was very certain that he should be able to recognise the leader and several of his followers. Prior was unchanged from what he had been as a boy,—wise beyond his years, yet full of life and spirits, and possessing a vast ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... in every thousand uses half the possibilities of natural joy and delightful effort which lie in those years between seventeen and seven- and-twenty. All but all men have to look back upon beginnings of life deformed and discoloured by necessity, accident, wantonness. If a young man avoid the grosser pitfalls, if he keep his eye fixed steadily on what is called the main chance, if, without flagrant selfishness, he prudently subdue every interest to his own (by "interest" understanding only material good), he is putting his youth to profit, he is ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... any thing out of wantonness or vanity, the spirit which teaches me would immediately leave me. [2] Bade him use his cunning, for the sake of the bodies of those noble and wise Britons. [3] 'Kylar:' Kildare. [4] 'Habbet:' ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... she had her Aims in't, he's a very convenient Husband, I'll assure you, and that suits her Temper: he has Estate and Folly enough, and she has Youth and Wantonness enough to ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... contributions upon you, yet you take it not in the least to heart, but continue to lead a merry, luxurious life, have balls and drinking bouts, spend a wild, heathenish life in eating, drinking, gambling, and other wantonness, deck yourselves out like peacocks, and those who have the least, and carry all their possessions upon their bodies, ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... cherishes an inordinate pride, shut out the few rays of sunlight which penetrate its dusky atmosphere. They have not the excuse of narrow space which their rivals in New York may plead. They are built in mere wantonness, for within the City Limits, whose distance from the centre is the best proof of Chicago's hopefulness, are many miles of waste ground, covered only with broken fences and battered shanties. And, as they ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... anger, the sense of his uncontrolled power, spoils the frank and generous nature of the West Wind. It is as if his heart were corrupted by a malevolent and brooding rancour. He devastates his own kingdom in the wantonness of his force. South-west is the quarter of the heavens where he presents his darkened brow. He breathes his rage in terrific squalls, and overwhelms his realm with an inexhaustible welter of clouds. He strews the ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... fervid frequent sighs, whilst his hands convulsively squeezed, opened, pressed together again the lips and sides of that deep flesh wound, or gently twitched the over-growing moss; and all proclaimed the excess, the riot of joys, in having his wantonness thus humoured. But he did not long abuse my patience, for the objects before him had now put him by all his, and, coming out with that formidable machine of his, he lets the fury loose, and pointing it directly to the pouting-lip ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... a little too much self-confidence, I let myself be induced to assume a less haughty and reserved manner, if I associated a little more familiarly with the bold tribe, I soon repented, for I was carried along by their wantonness and folly, I could no longer subdue the laughter and extravagances, nor could I, to my own disgrace and sorrow, restrain myself in ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... a staid manner, on being released, runs, whisks his tail, kicks up his heels, lays back his ears, opens his mouth, and rushes with mock vicious-looking eyes at whomsoever he meets, and all this from mere wantonness, to enjoy his freedom; so the devil in the man, not perchance the theological one, but still the devil no less actually, as seen every day in the activity of the baser passions, on being released, by the abdication of reason and the substitution of feeling, begins to exercise his ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... find that mothers have many, many other things to do for their infants than to sit for portraits and give them picturesque nourishment—many, many other things. If Zada's child inherited its father's and mother's wantonness, laziness, wickedness, and violence of temper, there was going to be a lively nursery in ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... displeased at this imputation, and that when nursing the child among her attendants she was wont to call it Alkibiades instead of Leotychides. The same authority states that Alkibiades himself declared that he seduced Timaea, not out of wantonness, but with the ambitious design of placing his own family upon the throne of Sparta. In consequence of this, Alkibiades, fearing the wrath of Agis, left Sparta, and the child was always viewed with suspicion by Agis, and never treated as his own son, until in his last illness the boy ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... extricate herself by new arts, or to cover her error by dissimulation, became involved in meshes of her own weaving, and was forced to carry on, for fear of discovery, machinations which she had at first resorted to in mere wantonness. ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... very true, but far more wanton than true. Mrs. Maldon in her ignorance could not appreciate the truth, but she could appreciate its wantonness. She was wounded—silly, touchy old thing! She was wounded, and ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... The wave all roughened; with a swimmer's stroke Flinging the billows back from my drenched hair, And laughing from my lip the audacious brine, Which kissed it like a wine-cup, rising o'er The waves as they arose, and prouder still 110 The loftier they uplifted me; and oft, In wantonness of spirit, plunging down Into their green and glassy gulfs, and making My way to shells and sea-weed, all unseen By those above, till they waxed fearful; then Returning with my grasp full of such tokens As showed that I had searched the deep: exulting, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... can I do for you? They are starving you to death! You need food—and I have no food to give!" He raised his arms, in sudden wrath. "Bring forth the masters of this city, who starve the poor, while they themselves riot in wantonness!" ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... the informer and his evidence were disparaged, for that "he had run away from his masters the day before in consequence of a whipping, and that from an event which had happened by mere chance, he had fabricated this charge, from resentment and wantonness." But when they were charged by their accusers face to face, and the ministers of their villanies begin to be examined in the middle of the forum, they all confessed, and punishment was inflicted upon the masters and their accessory slaves. The informer ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... before Colonel Belford's house singing obstreperous and unseemly songs at the top of his voice; he would even rattle the ferrule of his cane against the palings of the fence, or throw a stone at Madam Belford's cat in the wantonness ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... of France for many years—yes, decades of years. For the first time we saw wrecked and smoke-blackened homes, and in the lanes and alleys carcasses of dumb creatures that had been slaughtered in pure wantonness—among them calves and lambs that had been pets of the children; and it was pity to see the children ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... extensive ravages by fire, such as now happen, not unfrequently in the American woods, (but generally from carelessness in scattering the glowing embers of a fire, or even the ashes of a pipe,) were then occasionally the result of mere wantonness of mischief. Ovid accordingly notices, as one amongst the familiar images of daybreak, the half-burnt torch of the traveller; and, apparently, from the position which it holds in his description, where it is ranked with the most familiar of all circumstances ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... their own corruption and wrong? 'Let every one,' say you, 'look to the disposition with which he comes thither: my care is only that of refreshing and washing my poor body.' That kind of defence does not clear you, nor does it excuse the crime of lasciviousness and wantonness. Such a washing defiles; it does not purify nor cleanse the limbs, but stains them. You behold no one immodestly, but you, yourself, are gazed upon immodestly; you do not pollute your eyes with disgraceful delight, but in delighting others you yourself ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in his native hue; For the rich metal was so colored That he who did not well avised it view Would surely deem it to be ivy true; Low his lascivious arms adown did creep That themselves dipping in the silver dew Their fleecy flowers they tenderly did steep, Which drops of crystal seemed for wantonness to weep. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... of painful, unrewarded effort. Each of the four pieces of which the sonata consists is full of vigour, originality, and interest. But whether they can be called a sonata is another question. Schumann, in his playful manner, speaks of caprice and wantonness, and insinuates that Chopin bound together four of his maddest children, and entitled them sonata, in order that he might perhaps under this name smuggle them in where otherwise they would not penetrate. Of course, this is a fancy of Schumann's. Still, one cannot help wondering whether ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... that the occurrence of the night before had become known to him, and she said: "Be it not that I see the king angry." He said: "How should I not be angry? Thou, by craft, and trickery, and intrigue, and plotting, hast brought thy desire from Rome—what wantonness is this that thou hast done?" Then he thought to slay her, but he forbore, because of his great love for her. But he ordered the chamberlain to carry the youth to some obscure place, and straightway sever his head from his body. When the poor mother saw this ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... person, by the 14th Charles Second, has this power as well as the custom-house officers. The words are: "it shall be lawful for any person or persons authorized," etc. What a scene does this open! Every man prompted by revenge, ill-humor, or wantonness to inspect the inside of his neighbor's house, may get a writ of assistance. Others will ask it from self-defence; one arbitrary exertion will provoke another, until society be involved ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... shilling one. I'll have a double quantity; for I am told Foote means to take me off, as he calls it, and I am determined the fellow shall not do it with impunity.' Davies took care to acquaint Foote of this, which effectually checked the wantonness of the mimick[881]. Mr. Macpherson's menaces made Johnson provide himself with the same implement of defence[882]; and had he been attacked, I have no doubt that, old as he was, he would have made his corporal prowess be felt as much as ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... books nothing more to us than such ancient writings, the literature of so noble a race, a literature intrinsically fine, to which our civilization owes so much of mental and of moral influence, they should win our reverence, and should shame the wantonness of liberalism, falsely ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... poetry for metaphysics and theology; he has been upbraided for winning only to lose the 'prize of his high calling'. Sir Walter Scott, one of his kindlier censors, rebukes him for 'the caprice and indolence with which he has thrown from him, as if in mere wantonness, those unfinished scraps of poetry, which like the Torso of antiquity defy the skill of his poetical brethren to complete them'. But whatever may be said for or against Coleridge as an 'inventor of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "at the sonettos, canzones, madrigals, rounds and roundelays, that these pensive patients pour out when their eyes are more full of wantonness, than their hearts of passions. Then, as the fishers put the sweetest bait to the fairest fish, so these Ovidians, holding amo in their tongues, when their thoughts come at haphazard, write that they be rapt in an endless labyrinth of sorrow, when walking in ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... returning farmers found their big, conical haystacks untouched, though nothing could be more tempting to the wantonness of an army on enemy soil. Strike a match and up goes the harvest! Perhaps the Germans as they advanced had in mind to save the forage for their own horses, and either they were running too fast to stop or the staff overlooked the ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... to beating every thing to pieces that fell in the way; and, carrying their intemperance to the greatest excess, broke open chests and cabins for plunder that could be of no use to them; and so earnest were they in this wantonness of theft, that one man had evidently been murdered on account of some division of the spoil, or for the sake of the share that fell to him, having all the marks of a strangled corpse. One thing in this outrage they seemed particularly attentive to, which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... caused did not so immediately pass away. Dr. Cooper determined to punish his son, and he therefore confined him, according to his usual mode of correction, in his own house. Astley was, however, but little disposed to remain passive in his imprisonment, and in the wantonness of his ever-active disposition amused himself by climbing up the chimney, and having at length reached the summit, endeavoured, by imitating the well-known tone of the chimney-sweeper, and calling out as lustily as he could, 'Sweep, sweep!' to attract the attention of the people below. Even ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... O love, out, alas! That it should come to this pass, And thou be even as I was In green youth, Whenas delight and solace Served I with wantonness, And burned anon like the grass ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... shows you the head only of one of the larger figures in the center. Yet just observe how much design, how much wonderful composition, there is in this mere fragment of a building of the great times; a fragment, literally no larger than a school-boy could strike off in wantonness with a stick: and yet I cannot tell you how much care has been spent—not so much on the execution, for it does not take much trouble to execute well on so small a scale—but on the design, of this minute fragment. You see it is composed of a branch of wild roses, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... plate with dainties, he took an opportunity again and again of pressing her not unwilling hand. And still at every pressure he caught that soft momentary glance, was it of love and passion, or of mere coquetry and girlish wantonness, succeeded by the fleeting blush pervading face, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... reasons which made a visit to Arlington anything but a pleasure to him; but Sybil would listen to no excuses, and so it came about that, one lovely March morning, when the shrubs and the trees in the square before the house were just beginning, under the warmer sun, to show signs of their coming wantonness, Sybil stood at the open window waiting for him, while her new Kentucky horse before the door showed what he thought of the delay by curving his neck, tossing his ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... perpetuating his name and fame through her marriage with some deserving young nobleman. Truly she was worthy of being loved. She had "almond-shaped eyes, like the autumn waves, which, sparkling and dancing in the sun, seem to leap up in very joy and wantonness to kiss the fragrant reeds that grow upon the rivers' banks, yet of such limpid transparency that one's form could be seen in their liquid depths as if reflected in a mirror. These were surrounded by ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world's interests, from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death—and he did not quail. Not alone for ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... is the opposite of all this; it is the dread of the unknown, the ghastly doubt as to whether there is any goal before us or not; when we fear, we are like the butterfly that flutters anxiously away from the boy who pursues it, who means out of mere wantonness to strike it down tattered ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... practice. Now you may tickle your fancies with the pleasures that were used there, by dansing, maskerading, Fire-works, playing upon Instruments, singing, leaping, and all other sort of gambals, that youth being back'd with Bacchus strength uses either for mirth or wantonness. ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... cuts to success, and even where the moral standard is low, as being in themselves creditable. It certainly was not necessity which made the Assyrians covenant-breakers; it seems to have been in part the wantonness of power—because they "despised the cities and regarded no man;" perhaps it was in part also their imperfect moral perception, which may have failed to draw the proper ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... To aggravate evil, on the contrary, is to darken counsel—already dark enough—and the want of truth to nature in this pessimistic sort of exaggeration is not compensated for by any advantage. The violence and, to my feeling, the wantonness of these invectives—for they are invectives in intention and in effect—may have seemed justified to Shelley by his political purpose. He was thirsting to destroy kings, priests, soldiers, parents, and heads ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... the moonlight hill, in their fairy fashion they sported, While unmov'd sat the gallant and fair young swain, whom they, in their wantonness, courted. ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... Pavilion de Marsan, not one stone is left on another. We remember it after its fiery purgation by the Commune in 1871, a gaunt shell blackened and ruined, fitting emblem of the wreck which the enthroned wantonness and corruption of the Second Empire had made ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils. The soot-coated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed; his monstrous dreams, peopled by ape-like creatures and by harlots with gleaming jewel eyes; the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... mistress of the wealthy Mr. Plowden, was unfaithful to him, it was not for love of fine clothes or fine society. It is not long since our whole country was shocked by the dire results of a similar abandonment to vanity and wantonness, about which the usual amount of commonplace and cant was uttered. It is time that the very truth was told about this matter, in sad earnestness and singleness of purpose. We hoped to find the whole truth in "Out of the Depths"; but, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... directly off the bay she hove to. "She has lowered a boat," he exclaimed. "The Frenchmen must have seen the lugger after all, and are coming in to ascertain what has become of her. We must decide how to act. If we hide our selves, they may in wantonness destroy our hut and our boat. What do you propose we ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... that a traveller (though less wide a wanderer than thou) dissuadeth thee from a new-found novelty—the wanton misuse, or rather the misuseful wantonness, of the Indian herb. It is a blind goose that knoweth not a fox from a fern-bush, and a strange temerity that mistaketh smoke for provender. The sow, when she is sick, eateth the sea-crab and is immediately recovered: why, then, should man, being whole and sound, haste to that ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... Castle, laid before her Majesty a fork of pure silver. I the more easily credit it, as Master Thomas Coriatt doth vouch for having seen the same monstrous sign of voluptuousness at Venice. We are surely the especial favourites of Providence, when such wantonness hath not melted us quite away. After this portent, it would otherwise have appeared incredible that we should ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... our infancy the rapid increase of a baneful habit on which I scarce can bring my tongue to dwell. (The Stage darker; blind at back illuminated.) Oh, CONRAD, there are children—think of it!—so lost to every sense of decency that, in mere wantonness or brainless sloth, they obstinately suck forbidden thumbs! (CONRAD starts with irrepressible emotion.) Forgive me if I shock your innocence! (Sadly.) Such things exist—but soon shall cease to be, thanks to the measure we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... not true. You are not honest with me nor with yourself, and that is not like you. You know that no other man ever had, or could have, any favor from me, even the slightest. Wantonness is not among my thousand faults. It is not that which angers you. You are sure enough of me in that respect. In truth, I had almost come to believe you were too sure, that I had grown cheap in your eyes, and you did not care so much as I thought and hoped ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... came when with her eyes closed, like a somnambulist, she sniffed the perfume and began to seek its source. In that seeking, there was both innocence and maddening wantonness. A fine quiver went through her body, like the quiver of a moth in its sultry love-play. At last she smelt of the flower itself, and her sudden rigidity showed that she had perceived the great ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... actions, never permitted her, even at her utmost intellectual development, to comprehend the equal rights of all men in the eye of the law. Unpitying in her stern policy, few were the occasions when, for high state reasons, she stayed her uplifted hand. She might in the wantonness of her power, stoop to mercy; ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... gentle pity then he changes; Thro' wantonness, thro' piques he ranges; But in whatever shape he move, He's still himself, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... "good one." I have no slaves, and I owe this character to the propagation of a good name by the slaves of Zanzibar, who are anything but good themselves. I have seen slaves belonging to the seven men now with us slap the cheeks of grown men who had offered food for sale; it was done in sheer wantonness, till I threatened to thrash them if I saw it again; but out of my sight they did it still, and when I complained to the masters they confessed that all the mischief was done by slaves; for the Manyuema, on being insulted, lose temper and use their spears on the nasty ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... curtsy of the long sprit that caught the ridges of foam and lifted them in spray, even in the free streaming of that loose untidy end of line which played in the air from the leach, as young things play from wantonness, in the rush of the water, just up to and sometimes through the lee scuppers, and in the humming tautness of the sheet, in everything about me there was exuberance and joy. The sun upon the twenty million ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... Destroyer, hints at the dreadful visitation of the yet untasted death; when Adah, entering, takes him at first for an angel, and then recognizes him as a fiend. Her invocation to Eve, and comparison of the "heedless, harmless, wantonness of bliss" in Eden, to the later lot of those girt about with demons from whose fascination they cannot fly, is one of the most striking in the drama; as is the line put into the mouth of the poet's most beautiful female character, to show that ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... might sometimes incite him to mention too ludicrously. A little knowledge of the world is sufficient to discover that such weakness is very common, and that there are few who do not sometimes, in the wantonness of thoughtless mirth, or the heat of transient resentment, speak of their friends and benefactors with levity and contempt, though, in their cooler moments, they want neither sense of their kindness, nor reverence for their virtue: the fault, therefore, of Mr. Savage was rather negligence ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... "libraries," to get a stall, but the people to whom he applied were unable to accommodate him—they hadn't a single seat left. His actual attempt, at another library, was more successful: there was no question of obtaining a stall, but he might by a miracle still have a box. There was a wantonness in paying for a box at a play on which he had already expended four hundred pounds; but while he was mentally measuring this abyss an idea came into his head which flushed the extravagance with the hue ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... in his path. The peasantry sink before him. The country, too, is too poor for plunder, and too rough for a valuable conquest. Nature presents her eternal barrier on every side, to check the wantonness of ambition. And Switzerland remains with her simple institutions, a military road to climates scarcely worth a permanent possession, and protected by the jealousy ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... it be admitted, for argument's sake, that mere wantonness and lust of domination would be sufficient to beget that disposition; still it may be safely affirmed, that the sense of the constituent body of the national representatives, or, in other words, the people of the several States, would control the indulgence of so extravagant an appetite. ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... Brinnaria, "is the dread that my wild and tomboyish behavior may be as displeasing to the Goddess as coquettishness or wantonness. I am in terror for fear my ministrations may be unpleasant to her, may be sacrilegious, may not only fail to win her blessing upon Rome but may draw down her curse upon all of us. I never thought of that until I stood there all alone ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... up a heart, and declared that all my daughter had said was true, and that the evening before I myself had heard, through the door, how his lordship had made offers to her, and would have done wantonness with her; item, that he had already sought to kiss her once at Coserow; item, the troubles which his lordship had formerly brought upon me in the matter ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... man used the gun, which he facetiously styled his "minister of justice," and, in mere wantonness, he was known to have committed murder again and again, yet no steps were taken by the authorities to restrain, much less to punish him. Men heard of his murders, but they shrugged their shoulders and did nothing. It was only a wild beast of a negro ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... that, all because recreant Israel committed adultery, I had dismissed her and given her the bill of her divorce; yet her sister treacherous Judah was not afraid, but also went and played the harlot. 9. And it came to pass that, through the wantonness of her harlotry, she polluted the land, committing adultery with stones and with stocks. 10. And yet, for all this, treacherous Judah(178) has not returned to Me with all her heart, but only in feigning.(179) 11. And the Lord ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... came to a resolution to avenge the murder, and literally stoned Thompson to death, and his skull was brought on board the Pandora. This horrible wretch had some time before slain a man and a child through mere wantonness, but escaped punishment by a mistake that had nearly proved fatal to young Heywood. It seems that the description of a person in Otaheite is usually given by some distinguishing figure of the tattoo, and Heywood, having the same marks as Thompson, was taken for him; and just as the club was ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... to your hand. I fancied I understood your looks, I rose, and then, without having done anything more towards you than love you yet more devotedly, if that were possible—you, a woman without heart, faith, or love, in very wantonness, dashed me down again from sheer caprice. You are unworthy, princess of the royal blood though you may be, of the love of a man of honor; I offer my life as a sacrifice for having loved you too tenderly, and ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... also to increase the duties on many of those articles in which Holland carried on a lucrative trade with France. The consequence of these errors, errors committed in defiance of repeated warnings, and, as it should seem, in the mere wantonness of selfwill, was that now, when the voice of a single powerful member of the Batavian federation might have averted an event fatal to all the politics of Lewis, no such voice was raised. The Envoy, with all his skill, vainly endeavoured to rally the party by the help ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... scaith a period of agricultural depression; and how infinitely more dangerous is the prospect, when the period appears to be without a limit! The longer we reflect upon this measure, the more are we convinced of its wantonness, and of the dangerous nature of the experiment upon every industrial class in this great ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... ever angry when he acted, or Accius was so when he wrote? Those men, indeed, act very well, but the orator acts better than the player, provided he be really an orator; but, then, they carry it on without passion, and with a composed mind. But what wantonness is it to commend lust! You produce Themistocles and Demosthenes; to these you add Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato. What! do you then call studies lust? But these studies of the most excellent and admirable things, such as ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Hercules was never carried out. Future guests were therefore admitted to the reception rooms by a dark, narrow entrance, or they made a long roundabout tour by way of the Queen's staircase across the Marble Court. The demolition of the stairway of honor was an irreparable loss. No other piece of wantonness equaled it in the ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... the whip, this man used the gun, which he facetiously styled his "minister of justice," and, in mere wantonness, he was known to have committed murder again and again, yet no steps were taken by the authorities to restrain, much less to punish him. Men heard of his murders, but they shrugged their shoulders and did nothing. It was only a wild beast of a negro that was killed, they said, ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... images of a playful mind, and are at least as frequently misrepresented as they are misunderstood. But thus the cunning Philistines are enabled to triumph over the strong and gifted man, because in the hour of confidence, and in the abandonment of the mind, he had laid his head in the lap of wantonness, and taught them how he might be shorn of his strength. Dr. JOHNSON appears often to have indulged this amusement, both in good and ill humour. Even such a calm philosopher as ADAM SMITH, as well as such a child of imagination as BURNS, were remarked for ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... necessary. There were in it many individuals whom neither lenity could touch, nor rigour terrify; who, with all sense of social duty, appeared to have lost all value for life itself, and with the same wantonness exposed themselves to the darts of the savages, and to the severe punishments which, however reluctantly, every society must inflict when milder methods have been tried without success. Towards the latter end of February a criminal court was convened, ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... of Songs Venetian, cheerful, With southern wantonness and color-wonders,— Rather "Two Shots" (although they make us fearful) Against our shallow breeding and ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... this power as well as the custom-house officers. The words are: "it shall be lawful for any person or persons authorized," etc. What a scene does this open! Every man prompted by revenge, ill-humor, or wantonness to inspect the inside of his neighbor's house, may get a writ of assistance. Others will ask it from self-defence; one arbitrary exertion will provoke another, until society be involved in tumult and ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... square with descending steps, and 'tis not amiss, for I would not have any one so nice as that Grecian Calis, sister to Nicephorus, emperor of Constantinople, and [2906]married to Dominitus Silvius, duke of Venice, that out of incredible wantonness, communi aqua uti nolebat, would use no vulgar water; but she died tanta (saith mine author) foetidissimi puris copia, of so fulsome a disease, that no water could wash her clean. [2907]Plato would not have a traveller lodge in a city that is not governed by laws, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... stayed on, wondering at myself. I thought of the measure with which I had meted to Catriona that same night; how I had prated of the two lives I carried, and had thus forced her to enjeopardy her father's; and how I was here exposing them again, it seemed in wantonness. A good conscience is eight parts of courage. No sooner had I lost conceit of my behaviour, than I seemed to stand disarmed amidst a throng of terrors. Of a sudden I sat up. How if I went now to Prestongrange, caught ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... After we went west even the death penalty for wantonness was enforced, though at the time we ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... monk, his voice growing lower and more gentle, as he continued: "Folly and wantonness without end! When will you learn discretion, Count Philipp? But as you did it unintentionally, I will let it ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... now come to pass, that women are become men, and men transformed into monsters; and those good gifts which Almighty God hath given unto us to relieve our necessities withal (as a nation turning altogether the grace of God into wantonness, for ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... the strictures upon individuals, their wives, and their daughters, or the deeds of licentiousness and violence are too numerous to be computed. Indeed, there is one more kind of loose literature, the wantonness and pollution in which work ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the life of the sufferer, the body rolled over on the back, and thus lay, exposing to the eyes of the lookers-on two gashes, wide and gory, on the breast, traced by a sharp knife and a powerful hand, and, as it seemed, in the mere wantonness of a malice and lust of blood which even death could not satisfy. The sight of these gashes answered the question Roland had asked of his own imagination; they were in the form of a cross; and as the legend, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... result has been found in constant slurs upon the sacred pages, lessening the beauty and often perverting the sense,—a source of sorrow to the keen scholar and reverent Christian, and reiterated indignity done in wantonness or heedlessness to the pure and easy flow of ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... thanksgiving. Children ceased to play, Feeling an awe they comprehended not, And stood, unconscious of their beauty's pose, As those Murillo's pencil glorifies. Upon the airy esplanade the steed No longer pawed the air in wantonness, But, like his compeer of the fabled song, Stood statued with his rider, while below The beggar ceased his cry importunate, And to a Higher Almoner than man Sent up a dumb appeal. In folly's court The laugh was hushed, and the half-uttered jest Fell witless into air, and burning thought ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... have heard of your paintings[30] too, well enough; Heaven hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another:[31] you jig, you amble, and you lisp,[32] and nickname Heaven's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.[33] Go to, I'll no more of't; it hath made ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... made, very easy, and very safe.[1224] It was cut smooth, and enclosed between parallel walls; the outer of which secures the passenger from the precipice, which is deep and dreadful. This wall is here and there broken, by mischievous wantonness.[1225] The inner wall preserves the road from the loose stones, which the shattered steep above it would pour down. That side of the mountain seems to have a surface of loose stones, which every accident may crumble. The old road was higher, and must have been very ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... marriage? The journey to London, and the return the next day without being married, and that there's enough disgrace in that to ruin a woman's good name far less light than yours? You may have: I have not. Fickleness towards a lover is bad, but fickleness after playing the wife is wantonness.' ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... themselves with the prince, night and day, and to sing and dance before him, so as to draw his heart towards worldly enjoyments. But 'twas all of no avail, for none of those maidens could ever tempt the king's son to any wantonness, and he only abode the firmer in his chastity, leading a most holy life, after their manner thereof. And I assure you he was so staid a youth that he had never gone out of the palace, and thus he had never seen a dead man, nor any one who was not hale and sound; for the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... all were shut. When all was done the eunuchs embarked the chests in the boat and made for the Lady Zubaydah's palace. With this, thought began to beset me and I said to myself, "Verily thy lust and wantonness will be the death of thee; and the question is after all shalt thou win to thy wish or not?" And I began to weep, boxed up as I was in the box and suffering from cramp; and I prayed Allah that He deliver me from the dangerous strait I was in, whilst the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... we bound to any anxious care to make this pain as little as may be. Brutes are as things in our regard: so far as they are useful to us, they exist for us, not for themselves; and we do right in using them unsparingly for our need and convenience, though not for our wantonness. If then any special case of pain to a brute creature be a fact of considerable value for observation in biological science or the medical art, no reasoned considerations of morality can stand in the way of man making the experiment, yet ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... staid manner, on being released, runs, whisks his tail, kicks up his heels, lays back his ears, opens his mouth, and rushes with mock vicious-looking eyes at whomsoever he meets, and all this from mere wantonness, to enjoy his freedom; so the devil in the man, not perchance the theological one, but still the devil no less actually, as seen every day in the activity of the baser passions, on being released, by the abdication of reason and the substitution of feeling, begins to exercise his ingenuity ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Al-Kyris!" and as the Prophet enunciated these words with majestic emphasis a visible thrill ran through the hushed assemblage.. "God saith: Get thee up, O thou City of Pleasure, from thy couch of sweet wantonness,—get thee up, gird thee with fire, and flee into the desert of forgotten things! For thou art become a blot on the fairness of My world, and a shame to the brightness of My Heaven!—thy rulers are corrupt,—thy teachers are proud of heart and narrow in judgment,—thy young men ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... above twenty sorts of other drinks: as brandy, coffee, chocolate, tea, aromatick, mum, sider, perry, beer, ale; many sorts of ales very different, as cock, stepony, stickback, Hull, North-Down, Sambidge, Betony, scurvy-grass, sage-ale, &c. A piece of wantonness whereof none of our ancestors ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... report, which chiefly wrote Thomas Becket's life—whose names are Herbert Boseham, John Salisbury, William of Canterbury, Alen of Tewkesbury, Benet of Peterborough, Stephen Langton, and Richard Croyland—he bestoyed his youth in all kinds of lascivious lightness, and lecherous wantonness. After certain robberies, rapes, and murders, committed in the king's wars at the siege of Toulouse in Languedoc, and in other places else, as he was come home again into England, he gave himself to great study, not of the holy scriptures, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... rifle. 'Hallo, hallo!' forward ran the count, and sat upon the prostrate deer triumphing. 'He bien, mon ami, vous etes mort, donc! Moi, je fais toujours des coups surs. Ah! pauvre enfant!' He then patted the sides of the animal in pure wantonness, and looked east, west, north, and south, for applause, the happiest of the happy; finally he extracted a mosaic snuff-box from his pocket, and with an air which nature has denied to all save the French nation, he held a pinch to the deer's nose—'Prends, ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... their hands, the men seemed only to delight in plunder and slaughter, and yet they were utter cowards. Their mouths were full of cursing and bitterness. The execrations they poured on each other were incredible. In very wantonness, when they met they would pelt each other with curses, and then perhaps burst into a fit of laughter. The women, like the men, went about in almost total nudity, and seemed to know no shame. So reckless were the chiefs of human life, that a man might be put to death for a single ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... took almost as long as the laying of a new line. For the marauder had done his work thoroughly and well. Hardly a trap was left unmolested. In some places the snow showed where he had eaten a marten, but in most instances the traps were simply destroyed apparently from sheer wantonness. Three or four martens and one lynx were recovered where they had been taken from the traps, carried off the line for some distance, and ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... world; dig wells then for their use and build road for them, so that thou mayest be judged worthy to share in the future world." But as Amalek had not been sufficiently instructed by his father, in his wantonness he undertook to destroy the whole world. God, who tries the reins and the heart, said to him: "O thou fool, I created thee after all the seventy nations, but for thy sins thou shalt be the first ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... good behaviour. Yet, curiously enough, good behaviour was just what he never obtained, for every kind of secret prank became the rule; and while, by day, there reigned restraint and conspiracy, by night there began to take place chambering and wantonness. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... be good friends." Then, having closed the door, holding Gabrielle with one hand and Rosny with the other, he said: "Good God, madame! What is the meaning of this? So you would vex me from sheer wantonness of heart in order to try my patience? By God, I swear to you that, if you continue these fashions of going on, you will find yourself very much out in your expectations! I see quite well that you have been put up to all this pleasantry ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... the apparent abandonment of all definite aim or end, and in the removal of all bounds in the exercise of the mind,—attaining its real end, as an entire contrast, most perfectly, the greater the display is of intellectual wealth squandered in the wantonness of sport without an object, and the more abundant the life and vivacity in the creations ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... in the very wantonness of their skillful horsemanship, threw themselves from side to side upon the backs of their steeds, firing under the neck or belly with as much accuracy as if from the saddle. None of them were furnished with the regulation ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... he suffers his house to be scattered with profane and wicked Books, such as stir up to lust, to wantonness, such as teach idle, wanton, lascivious discourse, and such as has a tendency to provoke to profane drollery and Jesting; and lastly, such as tend to corrupt, and pervert the Doctrine of Faith and Holiness. All these things will eat as doth a canker, and will quickly spoil, in Youth, &c. those ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... me that I must secure that bird. To shoot without obtaining were mere wantonness. Yes, I would have him, and justify myself to myself. To do it was difficult, even in Labradorian boy-eyes. Between me and the auk the upper half of the cliff made a deep recess, terminating in a right angle, with a platform of granite some seventy-five feet below. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... poem of Catullus to excuse the wantonness of his own verses, which he is sending to his friend Paternus; and Apuleius cites the passage in his Apology for the same purpose. "Whoever," says Lambe, "would see the subject fully discussed, should turn ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... He studied the lives of professing Christians, and found that those who claimed the greatest piety were the sorriest scoundrels in the land. "They drink and vomit," he said, "quarrel and fight, rob and pillage one another by cunning and by violence, neigh and skip from wantonness, shout and whistle, and commit fornication and adultery worse than any of the others." He watched the priests, and found them no better than the people. Some snored, wallowing in feather beds; some feasted till they became speechless; ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... for it was not quite safe for anybody of mark to stay away from these manifestations of presidential piety. Having thus acknowledged the only power he was at all disposed to recognize as above himself, he would scatter acts of political grace in a sardonic wantonness of clemency. There was no other way left now to enjoy his power but by seeing his crushed adversaries crawl impotently into the light of day out of the dark, noisome cells of the Collegio. Their harmlessness fed his insatiable ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... tastefully distributed garden was broken down in several places; the parterres and melon-beds were trampled and destroyed by the hoofs of the Carlist horses, which had seemingly been turned in there to feed, or perhaps been ridden through it in utter wantonness by their brutal owners. The ground in front of the house was strewed with broken furniture, and with articles of wearing apparel, the latter of which appeared to have belonged to the Carlists, and to have been exchanged by them for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... "I think so all the more because these men fare with laughter and wantonness; but such kinsmen of Njal as Thorgeir is would not smile before some vengeance is taken for the Burning, and I will make another guess, and maybe ye will think that unlikely. My meaning is, that it must be Flosi and the Burners with him, and ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... twenty-four hours had been made against him alone; at least, so Lablache understood it. Retief's efforts were only in his direction; the raider had robbed him of twenty thousand head of cattle; he had burnt his beautiful ranch out, in sheer wantonness it seemed to the despairing man; what then would be his next move if he were not stopped? What else was there of his—Lablache's—that the Breed could attack? His store—yes—yes; his store! That was all that was left of his property in Foss River. And then—what then? There was nothing after that, ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... last, and were conducted between the rows of name-boards, where we saw, in cells, many persons of each sex amusing themselves in such a manner) that it seemed to me that every one of them must have been drinking satyrion. (On catching sight of us, they attempted to seduce us with paederastic wantonness, and one wretch, with his clothes girded up, assaulted Ascyltos, and, having thrown him down upon a couch, attempted to gore him from above. I succored the sufferer immediately, however,) and having joined forces, we defied the troublesome wretch. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... the mere wantonness of insult," said one of the oldest and most important of Prince John's followers, Waldemar Fitzurse, "and if your Grace attempt it, cannot but prove ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... were disturbances everywhere. Men out of employment, excited by club orators, were ready for any violence. At Lyons they destroyed the hospitals and orphan asylums, out of mere wantonness. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... his name and fame through her marriage with some deserving young nobleman. Truly she was worthy of being loved. She had "almond-shaped eyes, like the autumn waves, which, sparkling and dancing in the sun, seem to leap up in very joy and wantonness to kiss the fragrant reeds that grow upon the rivers' banks, yet of such limpid transparency that one's form could be seen in their liquid depths as if reflected in a mirror. These were surrounded by long silken lashes—now drooping in coy modesty, anon rising in youthful gaiety and disclosing ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... attractive. The injured husband, for example, is invariably ridiculed, the adulterer glorified. The Hindu books, on the other hand, were written by professedly religious men whose aim was "not to encourage chambering and wantonness, but simply and in all sincerity to prevent the separation of husband and wife"—not to make them a married couple look afield, but "to lead them to love each other more by understanding each other better." Vatsyayan and Kullianmull, [394] indeed, though they poetized the pleasures ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... name first began to be inscribed upon glasses, I was honoured with the amorous professions of the gay Venustulus, a gentleman, who, being the only son of a wealthy family, had been educated in all the wantonness of expense, and softness of effeminacy. He was beautiful in his person, and easy in his address, and, therefore, soon gained upon my eye at an age when the sight is very little over-ruled by the understanding. He had not any power in himself of gladdening or amusing; but supplied his ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... daughter of Uranus, who has no mother and is the elder and wiser goddess, and the other, the daughter of Zeus and Dione, who is popular and common. The first of the two loves has a noble purpose, and delights only in the intelligent nature of man, and is faithful to the end, and has no shadow of wantonness or lust. The second is the coarser kind of love, which is a love of the body rather than of the soul, and is of women and boys as well as of men. Now the actions of lovers vary, like every other sort of action, according to the manner of their performance. And ...
— Symposium • Plato
... salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... king and his good wife, Sweetbine, were very much grieved at the foolish trifling of their daughter, Dewbell—for they were well assured that Dewbell loved the noble knight, Sir Timothy, and that it was only a spirit of mere wantonness that led her to vex and torment him. Long into the night did the royal couple converse, striving to devise some means of bringing their wayward daughter to her senses. They at last hit upon a plan, which they fondly hoped might be the means of securing the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... this movement of passion, since undoubtedly it broke and disturbed the else uniform stream of public indignation by investing the original aggressor with something like the character of an injured person; and therefore with some set-off to plead against his own wantonness of malice: his malice might now assume ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... speak to you both, and teach you to be good friends together." Then, having shut the door quite close, and holding Gabrielle with one hand and Rosny with the other, he said, "Good God! madame, what is the meaning of this? So you would vex me for sheer wantonness of heart in order to try my patience? By God, I swear to you that, if you continue these fashions of going on, you will find yourself very much out in your expectations. I see quite well that you have been put ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... about present conditions, and he neither came nor promised that he would appear. And yet what did I do that was unfair or unfitting or arrogant in summoning him as a friend and ally? What insolence and wantonness rather, has he omitted in refusing to come? Is it not inevitable that he did this from one of two reasons, either that he suspected he should suffer some harm or that he felt contempt for me? Well, if he had any suspicions he convicted himself most clearly of conspiring against us. For no one ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... disparaged, for that "he had run away from his masters the day before in consequence of a whipping, and that from an event which had happened by mere chance, he had fabricated this charge, from resentment and wantonness." But when they were charged by their accusers face to face, and the ministers of their villanies begin to be examined in the middle of the forum, they all confessed, and punishment was inflicted upon the masters ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... Government, and the Liberty of professing Opinions and Factions, which perhaps our Neighbours may have about them, but are forc'd to disguise, and thereby they may come in Time to be extinguish'd. Plenty begets Wantonness and Pride, Wantonness is apt to invent, and Pride scorns to imitate; Liberty begets Stomach or Heart, and Stomach will not be constrain'd. Thus we come to have more Originals, and more that appear what they are; we have more Humour, because every Man follows his own, and takes a Pleasure, ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... General Har-mar in 1779 had invited the Indians to come and make peace with him in the fort near where Marietta now stands. Wetzel and another Indian fighter lay in wait for the envoys who passed from the tribes to the general, and in pure wantonness, shot one. He then took refuge with his friends at Mingo Bottom, where the officer sent by Harmar to arrest him, dared not even attempt it. Wetzel was the hero and darling of the border, where the notion of punishing a man ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... and prepared Mr Allworthy's mind for those impressions which afterwards produced the mighty events that will be contained hereafter in this history; and to which, it must be confest, the unfortunate lad, by his own wantonness, wildness, and want of caution, too ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... endless pranks, at once grotesque and lamentable, played by the mania for restoration, surely the "restoration" of this venerable ruin is the most grotesque and lamentable of all. The municipality of Caen have lately made themselves a spectacle to mankind by pulling down, seemingly out of sheer wantonness, one half of one of the most curious churches of their city.[10] We commend them not; but we do not place even them on a level with the subtler destroyers of Falaise. The savages of Caen are satisfied with simple, open destruction; what they cannot understand or ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... decorum in our society. As he jogged along a little distance ahead of us, the young dogs would gambol about him, leap on his neck, worry at his ears, and endeavor to tease him into a frolic. The old dog would keep on for a long time with imperturbable solemnity, now and then seeming to rebuke the wantonness of his young companions. At length he would make a sudden turn, seize one of them, and tumble him in the dust; then giving a glance at us, as much as to say, "You see, gentlemen, I can't help giving way to this nonsense," ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... suffered at thought of the harpooner's tongue, as last I had seen it lying on the sand and covered with sand. O Kanaka Oolea, what animals young men are with the drink! Not until they have grown old, like you and me, do they control their wantonness of thirst and drink sparingly, ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... and hatred of me Sprang from your delusion that it was wantonness Of spirit and contempt of your soul's rights Which made me turn to Annabelle and forsake you. You really grew to hate me for love of me, Because I was your soul's happiness, Formed and tempered To solve your life for you, and would not. But you were my misery. If you ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... she finds him, fitting well her will, As he enjoys the pure and morning air Beside a brook, which trickled from a hill, Streaming towards a limpid lake and fair. His fine, soft garments, wove with cunning skill, All over, ease and wantonness declare; These with her hand, such subtle toil well taught, For him in silk and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Probable want of early and deliberate purposes. Youth where the highest malice does not appear. Sex where the highest malice does not appear. Intoxication and levity, or mere wantonness of any kind. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... sister Judah saw, yes she saw,(177) that, all because recreant Israel committed adultery, I had dismissed her and given her the bill of her divorce; yet her sister treacherous Judah was not afraid, but also went and played the harlot. 9. And it came to pass that, through the wantonness of her harlotry, she polluted the land, committing adultery with stones and with stocks. 10. And yet, for all this, treacherous Judah(178) has not returned to Me with all her heart, but only in feigning.(179) 11. And the Lord said to me, Recreant Israel hath justified herself more than ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... in court he really did have the appearance of a man, but everywhere else his actions and the quality of his voice showed the wantonness of youth. For instance, he used to dance not only in the orchestra but more or less also while walking, performing sacrifice, greeting ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... feelings, unique in the experience of both. In Jacobi's company Goethe became another man from what he had been in the company of Lavater and Basedow. "I was weary," he says, "of my previous follies and wantonness, which, in truth, only concealed my dissatisfaction that this journey had brought so little profit to my mind and heart. Now, therefore, my deepest feelings broke forth with irrepressible force." After a few days spent at Pempelfort, during which Georg Jacobi joined them, the two brothers ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... case the stronger; I don't believe that the maddest man that ever lived would throw away a diamond worth more than a thousand pounds with such utter wantonness as seems to have characterized the action of the original owner of the stone which I found ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... whereupon the latter went to the court of Henry I of England, where he appears to have charmed everyone, and to have spent a year, probably 1111, in which Hakon seized all Orkney, and also Caithness, which then included Sutherland, and laid them under his rule with robbery and wantonness. Leaving Caithness, Hakon at once went to attack Magnus in Orkney where he had landed; but the "good men" intervened, and an equal division of Orkney and Shetland and Caithness was made between the jarls. After some winters, however, they met in battle array in Mainland, and the ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... cause, which led me to the negligence or wantonness which I have been instancing, also laid me open, not unfairly, to the opposite charge of fierceness in certain steps which I took, or words which I published. In the Lyra Apostolica, I have said that before learning to love, we must "learn to hate;" though I had explained my words by ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... countenance that the occurrence of the night before had become known to him, and she said: "Be it not that I see the king angry." He said: "How should I not be angry? Thou, by craft, and trickery, and intrigue, and plotting, hast brought thy desire from Rome—what wantonness is this that thou hast done?" Then he thought to slay her, but he forbore, because of his great love for her. But he ordered the chamberlain to carry the youth to some obscure place, and straightway sever his head from his body. When the poor ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... by the name of Christmas, of the Town of Superstition, in the County of Idolatry, and that thou hast, from time to time, abused the people of this Common-wealth, drawing and inticing them to Drunkenness, Gluttony, and unlawful Gaming, Wantonness, Uncleanness, Lasciviousness, Cursing, Swearing, abuse of the Creatures, some to one Vice, and some to another; all to Idleness: what sayest thou to thy Inditement, guilty or not guilty? He answered, Not guilty, and so ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... mother's question out of her mind for all time; so that until the end no word concerning that other woman passed again between them. Twenty years later, nearly, I myself happened to meet her, and then long physical suffering had chased the wantonness away for ever from the pain-worn mouth; but in that hour of waning voices, as some trouble of the fretful day when evening falls, so she faded from their life; and if even the remembrance of her returned at times to either of them, I think it must ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... With eager bite of Perch, or Bleak, or Dace; And on the world and my Creator think: Whilst some men strive ill-gotten goods t' embrace; And others spend their time in base excess Of wine. or worse. in war and wantonness ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... Or do you think AEsopus was ever angry when he acted, or Accius was so when he wrote? Those men, indeed, act very well, but the orator acts better than the player, provided he be really an orator; but, then, they carry it on without passion, and with a composed mind. But what wantonness is it to commend lust! You produce Themistocles and Demosthenes; to these you add Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato. What! do you then call studies lust? But these studies of the most excellent and admirable things, such as those were which you bring ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... said that Booth frequently cut his adversaries upon the stage in sheer wantonness or bloodthirstiness. This is a mistake, and is attributable to his father, the elder Booth, who had the madness of confounding himself with the character. Wilkes was too good a fencer to make ugly gashes; his pride was his skill, not ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... satisfaction with sword and pistol, or dismiss him from the garrison, and renounce all friendship with him at once. But he had been so long accustomed to Jack's company, that he could not live without him; and upon more cool reflection, perceiving that what he had done was rather the effect of wantonness than malice, which he himself would have laughed to see take place upon any other person, he determined to devour his chagrin, and extended his forgiveness even to Pipes, whom, in the first sally of his passion, he had looked upon in a more criminal light than that of a simple ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... fury; that they had fire and sword at their command, and it was better that friendly and faithful hands should destroy what must necessarily perish, than that enemies should insult it with haughty wantonness. To these exhortations a dreadful execration was added against any one who should be diverted from this purpose by hope or faint-heartedness. Then throwing open the gates, they rushed out at a rapid pace and with the utmost impetuosity. ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... wood, or to artificial hedges: and extensive ravages by fire, such as now happen not unfrequently in the American woods (but generally from carelessness in scattering the glowing embers of a fire, or even the ashes of a pipe), were then occasionally the result of mere wantonness of mischief. Ovid accordingly notices, as one amongst the familiar images of daybreak, the half-burnt torch of the traveller; and, apparently, from the position which it holds in his description, where it is ranked with the most familiar ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... a place of want, woe, wantonness, an' wickedness, same as you claim, Maria, I don't see how a minister's wife can be too jolly!" was her husband's cheerful reply. "Look how she's melted up the ice in both congregations, so't the other church is most willin' we should prosper, so long ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... elders hear that I have been at the theatre of Drury Lane, in London, you must not think that I was there to see a carnal stage play, whether tragical or comical, or that I would so far demean myself and my cloth, as to be a witness to the chambering and wantonness of ne'er-du-weel play-actors. No, Mr. Micklewham, what I went to see was an Oratorio, a most edifying exercise of psalmody and prayer, under the management of a pious gentleman, of the name of Sir George Smart, ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... beauty in the other; he looks only at her earthly namesake, and instead of being awed at the sight of her, he is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and beget; he consorts with wantonness, and is not afraid or ashamed of pursuing pleasure in violation of nature. But he whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator of many glories in the other world, is amazed when he sees any one having a godlike ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... a wheel inside my head Of wantonness and wine, An old, cracked fiddle is begging without, But the wind with scents of the sea is fed, And the sun ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... while the sun blazes and the flowers are beautiful. So thinks everybody who has survived Puritanism unscathed, so thought the majority of Brineweald's visitors that year, so thought Mrs. Delarayne and her party of eager young swains and still more eager virgins. Wantonness was in the air,—wantonness and beauty; and when these two imps of passion come together August is ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... unless it were the religious bigot. And to him we must concede thus much, that Goethe was not that religious creature which by nature he was intended to become. This is to be regretted. Goethe was naturally pious, and reverential towards higher natures; and it was in the mere levity or wantonness of youthful power, partly also through that early false bias growing out of the Lisbon earthquake, that he falsified his original destination. Do we mean, then, that a childish error could permanently master his understanding? ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... conclusion was that moral suasion was of little purpose—that there must be more of example than precept. In this particular case how speedy and effective has been the result will be seen later on. Man destroys birds for sport, or in mere wantonness, and the increasing myriads of insect hosts lay such toll upon his crops and the fruit of the earth which by the exercise of high intelligence and noble perseverance he has improved and made plentiful, that the national loss is to be counted by hundreds of thousands. In ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... astonished and disgusted me: and my mother not only permitted the revered scoundrel to do this, but actually seemed to encourage him. Soon they placed themselves upon a sofa, in full view of my gaze; and I was both mortified and enraged to observe the wantonness of my mother, and the lasciviousness of her pious friend. After indulging in the most obscene and lecherous preliminaries, the full measure of their iniquity was consummated, I being a witness to the whole disgraceful scene. Horrified, and sick ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... the various quarters of France for many years—yes, decades of years. For the first time we saw wrecked and smoke-blackened homes, and in the lanes and alleys carcasses of dumb creatures that had been slaughtered in pure wantonness—among them calves and lambs that had been pets of the children; and it was pity to see the children lament ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... must not meet; but his fear is, lest the carkass should bleed.[13] Anatomies, and other spectacles of mortality, have hardened him, and he is no more struck with a funeral than a grave-maker. Noble-men use him for a director of their stomach, and ladies for wantonness,[14] especially if he be a proper man.[15] If he be single, he is in league with his she-apothecary; and because it is the physician, the husband is patient. If he have leisure to be idle (that is to study,) he has a smatch at alcumy, and is sick of the philosopher's stone; a disease uncurable, ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... as he lay on the sled. No one spoke to him. The men were too busy with songs and rough jests over the business of the evening. The engineer would not confess to himself that he was frightened, but the wantonness and alacrity with which the irresponsible men had destroyed valuable property impressed him with ominous apprehension of what they might do to him. He wondered what revenge Connick ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... dust, if your looks had not raised me to your hand. I fancied I understood your looks, I rose, and then, without having done anything more towards you than love you yet more devotedly, if that were possible—you, a woman without heart, faith, or love, in very wantonness, dashed me down again from sheer caprice. You are unworthy, princess of the royal blood though you may be, of the love of a man of honor; I offer my life as a sacrifice for having loved you too tenderly, and ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... not this occasion our carelessness in watching against sin; for that would be, to turn his grace into wantonness; but rather let it sharpen our diligence in watching against all occasions of sin, lest we ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... his desk and engaged in transferring certain imposing red-sealed documents to a green baize satchel which he held between his knees. He had regained his equanimity; his features wore their usual expression of judicial severity; nothing denoted his recent discomposure, except perhaps an additional wantonness in the stringy black hair falling over the high forehead,—that pallid high forehead which always wore the look of being ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... As to a common and most noisome sewer, The dregs and feculence of every land. In cities, foul example on most minds Begets its likeness. Rank abundance breeds In gross and pampered cities sloth and lust, And wantonness and gluttonous excess. In cities, vice is hidden with most ease, Or seen with least reproach; and virtue, taught By frequent lapse, can hope no triumph there, Beyond the achievement of successful flight. I do confess them nurseries of the arts, In which they flourish most; where, in the beams Of ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... the time of the Romans. There is also to be seen in this town, a Mosaic pavement discovered only a few years since, wonderfully beautiful indeed, and near ten feet square, though not quite perfect, being broken in the night by some malicious people, out of mere wantonness, ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... from the exercise of this sort of ministerial privilege: on one occasion particularly, I myself narrowly escaped unhurt, when a decent, elderly woman was thrown down, close by my feet, and had both her thighs broken through the unfeeling wantonness of the coachman of the Baron de Breteuil, at that time minister ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... rack the required answer must inevitably be obtained; and it is, besides, conformable to human nature that crimes which are in everybody's mouth may, in the end, be actually committed by some, either from wantonness, revenge, or desperate exasperation: yet crimes and accusations are, under circumstances like these, merely the offspring of a revengeful, frenzied spirit in the people; and the accusers, according to the fundamental principles of morality, which are ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... that custom, curiosity, or wantonness, supplies every art with patrons, and finds purchasers for every manufacture; the world is so adjusted, that not only bread, but riches may be obtained without great abilities or arduous performances: the most unskilful hand and unenlightened mind have sufficient ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... character, had they been obscure, would have been made clear by Adelaide Neilson's embodiment. The personality that she presented was typical and unusual. It embodied virtue, neither hardened by austerity nor vapid with excess of goodness, and it embodied seductive womanhood, without one touch of wantonness or guile. It presented a woman innately good and radiantly lovely, who amid severest trials spontaneously and unconsciously acted with the ingenuous grace of childhood, the grandest generosity, the most constant ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... kept his sheep upon a common, and in sport and wantonness would often cry out, "The wolf! the wolf!" By this means he several times drew the husbandmen in an adjoining field from their work; who, finding themselves deluded, resolved for the future to take no notice of his alarm. Soon after, the wolf came indeed. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... are made attractive by displays of gaudy luxuries, set out to tempt the purses of the self-made autocrats of wealth. Gambling houses here are outvying in richness, and utter wantonness of wasted expense, anything yet seen in America. They are open always. Haunts abound where, in the pretended seclusion of a few yards' distance, rich adventurers riot with the beautiful battalions of the fallen angels. It were gross profanation ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... albeit averse from engaging their proper persons into a matrimonial duty, like the pontifical flamens of Cybele in Phrygia, as if they were capons, and not cocks full of lasciviousness, salacity, and wantonness, who yet have, nevertheless, in the matter of conjugal affairs, taken upon them to prescribe laws and ordinances to married folks. I cannot goodly determine what I should most abhor, detest, loathe, and abominate,—whether the tyrannical presumption ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... especially the inclination to equality and frugality. While republics are destroyed by extravagance, lust, and self-seeking, a monarchy can dispense with civil virtue, patriotism, and moral disinterestedness, since in it false honor, luxury, and wantonness subserve the public good. Great states tend toward despotism; smaller ones toward aristocracy, or a democratic republicanism; for those of medium size monarchy, which is intermediate between the two former, is the best form of constitution. Although Montesquieu, in his Lettres Persanes, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau—and for what? It was the wantonness of ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... mountains, but sometimes when pursued hotly they will separate into small bands and scatter through the hills; these fellows are dangerous. They would have murdered any white men they might meet for their arms alone, without considering the spirit of wantonness or revenge that ...
— A Desperate Chance - The Wizard Tramp's Revelation, A Thrilling Narrative • Old Sleuth (Harlan P. Halsey)
... drenched hair, And laughing from my lip the audacious brine, Which kissed it like a wine-cup, rising o'er The waves as they arose, and prouder still 110 The loftier they uplifted me; and oft, In wantonness of spirit, plunging down Into their green and glassy gulfs, and making My way to shells and sea-weed, all unseen By those above, till they waxed fearful; then Returning with my grasp full of such tokens As showed that I had searched the deep: exulting, With a far-dashing stroke, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and the higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, "Sume, lege" (take and read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, "not in chambering and wantonness," etc., which seemed directly sent to his address, and laid the inner storm to rest forever. Augustine's psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a divided self which has never ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... sate down together to sup. Tall he was and comely of form and feature, debonair and gracious of mien and manner, and in his lusty prime. The lady had eyed him again and again to her no small satisfaction, and, her wantonness being already kindled for the Marquis, who was to have come to lie with her, she had let Rinaldo take the vacant place in her mind. So when supper was done, and they were risen from the table, she conferred with her maid, whether, after the ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... tents, not enough for 2000. A large proportion of the men lived in holes in the ground, in the utmost wretchedness. Some froze to death, others had their hands and feet frozen. The rebel guards would occasionally, and on the least pretence, fire into the prison from mere demonism and wantonness. All the horrors that can be named, starvation, lassitude, filth, vermin, despair, swift loss of self-respect, idiocy, insanity, and frequent murder, were there. Stansbury has a wife and child living in Newbern—has written to them from here—is in the U. S. light-house employ ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... down sink, With eager bite of pike, or bleak, or dace; And on the world and my Creator think: While some men strive ill-gotten goods t' embrace: And others spend their time in base excess Of wine; or worse, in war, or wantonness. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... anguish, whose swoln breast did break With anger at her goddess, that did touch Hero so near for that she us'd so much; And, thrusting her white neck at Venus, said: "Why may not amorous Hero seem a maid, Though she be none, as well as you suppress In modest cheeks your inward wantonness? How often have we drawn you from above, 280 T' exchange with mortals rites for rites in love! Why in your priest, then, call you that offence, That shines in you, and is[90] your influence?" With this, the Furies stopp'd Leucote's ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... are severely observed there; for in the whole of their manners is aught more praiseworthy than this: for they are almost the only Barbarians contented with one wife, excepting a very few amongst them; men of dignity who marry divers wives, from no wantonness or lubricity, but courted for the lustre of ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... is always an age of frivolity, of heartless levity, of dwarfish objects and pursuits, of dreadful contrasts—laughter amid mourning, rioting and wantonness amid judgments and executions; dancing and music at the hour of death. Such was the frivolity of the days of Nero; such was the mirth of the "death-dance" in the days of Robespierre. Nothing like this sickly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... street, to speculate on the wasted harlotry of the other. "Look you, Madam!" says Mr. Toddleworth, leaning on his stick and pointing towards Chatham street. "A desert, truly," replies the august old lady, nervously twitching her head. She sees to the right ("it is wantonness warring upon misery," says Mr. Toddleworth) a long line of irregular, wooden buildings, black and besmeared with mud. Little houses with decrepid door-steps; little houses with decayed platforms in front; little dens that seem crammed with rubbish; ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... for argument's sake, that mere wantonness and lust of domination would be sufficient to beget that disposition; still it may be safely affirmed, that the sense of the constituent body of the national representatives, or, in other words, the people of the several States, would control the indulgence ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... gave me another, gentler picture of myself—a fight here, a failure there, a hunger somewhere else, and Lord knows how many old shreds of cynicism and belief, of selfishness and ambition and wantonness and pride, and just a little bit of love and desire for beauty. I told him that madness of mine, about the Mater's letters that I told you to take to King George. He was interested in that—said it was symbolical of my love for the Mater. I think ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... had loved her once! She recalled his fiery love-making, and thrilled again to the eager insistence of his voice, the mastery of his touch. And then she remembered what they said of him, that women were his slaves, his playthings, the toys he broke in wantonness and carelessly tossed aside. She remembered how once in his actual presence she had overheard words that had made her shrink, a wonder as to who was his latest conquest, the cynical remark: "Anyone for a change and no one for long is his motto." What ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... last moment, when the victory was no longer doubtful, and all were in full retreat or in full pursuit, a Zouave, in wantonness, firing his weapon before he throw it away, sent a random-shot which struck Theodora, and she fell. Lothair, who had never left her during the battle, was at her side in a moment, and a soldier, who had also marked the fatal ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... as slowly it breaks, Hills, cupolas, fountains, called forth every one Out of darkness as if but just born of the Sun. When the Spirit of Fragrance is up with the day From his Haram of night-flowers stealing away; And the wind full of wantonness wooes like a lover The young aspen-trees,[280] till they tremble all over. When the East is as warm as the light of first hopes, And day with his banner of radiance unfurled Shines in thro' the mountainous portal[281] that opes, Sublime, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... on to the sacred laurel with one hand. Well now! Consider! that is a thing of which Euripides has never spoken. And when we bestow our favours on slaves and muleteers for want of better, does he mention this? And when we eat garlic early in the morning after a night of wantonness, so that our husband, who has been keeping guard upon the city wall, may be reassured by the smell and suspect nothing,[590] has Euripides ever breathed a word of this? Tell me. Neither has he spoken of the woman who spreads open a large cloak before her husband's eyes ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... a religion which Montaigne wanted, and which defends him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain spoken, his moral ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... thee out? Was't I that lured thee from thy father's house? Was't I that forced, ay, forced my love on thee? Was't I that wrenched thee from thy fatherland, Made thee the butt of strangers' haughty scorn, Or dragged thee into wantonness and crime? Thou nam'st me Wanton?—Woe is me! I am! Yet—how have I been wanton, and for whom? Let these pursue me with their venomous hate, Ay, drive me forth and slay me! 'Tis their right, Because I am in truth a dreadful thing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... traitor to myself. If my life has been vile my temptations have been sore, and the rest is in God's hands. But in my course I have sinned against many men; many a tall fellow's life have I wantonly wrecked; some, indeed, I have even taken in wantonness or anger. They are not by, nor, were they, could I now make amends. But you at least are here, and what little reparation may lie in asking pardon I can make. When I first saw you at Perth it was my wish to make you my friend—a feeling I have not had these twenty years ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... Worship of promise-laden beauty. Seems he not The god of this fair scene? Those waves claim such a master as that boy; And these green slopes have waited till his feet Should wander them, to prove they were not spread In wantonness. What were this flower's prayer Had it a voice? The place behind his ear Would brim its cup with bliss and overbrim; Oh, to be worn and fade beside his cheek!'— 'In love and happy, Delphis; and the boy?'— 'Loves and is happy'— You hale from?'— 'AEtna; ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... tears were sure to run in torrents down their silly, honest, burning cheeks. But this was not all; they had got a large tank in a flagged room, nominally for cleanliness and cure, but really for bane and torture. For the least offence, or out of mere wantonness, they would drag a patient stark naked across the yard, and thrust her bodily under water again and again, keeping her down till almost gone with suffocation, and dismissing her more dead than alive with obscene and insulting comments ringing in her ears, to get warm again in the ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... language as we do, we have not a more certain Measure of it, as they have in France: where they have an "Academy" erected for that purpose, and endowed with large privileges by the present King [LOUIS XIV.]. I wish, we might, at length, leave to borrow words from other nations; which is now a wantonness in us, not a necessity: but so long as some affect to speak them, there will not want others who will have the boldness to ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... of wantonness this arrogance of royalty may lead me, I do not know: I will watch, and see. It is written: 'It is not good for man to be alone!' But good or no, the arrangement of One planet, One inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely a natural and proper, but the only natural and ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... every condition of humanity, it might be considered as flowing at once from the dungeons of despairing convicts, the cellars and garrets of squalid poverty, the busy haunts of avarice, the waste of luxury, and the wantonness ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... of animals, and is attributable in part to the peculiarities of the volunteer service—such as the lack of care and knowledge on the part of the officers, and the disposition of the men to break down their horses by improper riding, and sometimes out of mere wantonness, for the purpose of getting rid of animals they do not like, for the chance of obtaining better. A measure has recently been adopted to remedy these evils, by putting into the infantry cavalry officers and men who show ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... one hundred and ten men in all. Many of them were without rifles, having given up their arms at Bloemfontein. Others were provided with serviceable achterlaaiers, but had little or no ammunition, because they had already fired off their cartridges in mere wantonness in the belief that they might have to give up their rifles any day. My handful of burghers were thus ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... stars came forth glowing over the blue sky. Between six and seven the moon rose; and I could not get my two prentices in from the door, where they were bickering one another with snow-balls, or maybe carhailling the folk on the street in their idle wantonness; so I was obliged for that night to disappoint Edie Macfarlane of the pair of black spatterdashes he was so anxious to get finished, for dancing in next day, at Souple Jack the ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... was thus tempered by Lycurgus, yet soon after it degenerated into an oligarchy, whose power was exercised with such wantonness and violence, that it wanted indeed a bridle, as Plato expresses it. This curb they found in the authority of the Ephori, about a hundred and thirty years after Lycurgus. Elatus was the first invested with this dignity, in the reign of Theopompus; ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... soaring really is. The hawk does not always ascend in a spiral, but every now and then revolves in a circle—a flat circle—and suddenly shoots up with renewed rapidity. Whether this be merely sportive wantonness or whether it is a necessity, is impossible to determine; but to me it does not appear as if the hawk did it from necessity. It has more the appearance of variation: just as you or I might walk fast ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... hands—perforce idle—buried in their torn and empty pockets, going from factory to factory asking for work, while the overseers would wave them off from afar to avoid a useless interchange of words. If, in the years of the French milliards, the workingman had turned socialist out of sheer envy and wantonness, he became so now under the sting of adversity, and in all the length and breadth of Berlin there was hardly one of the proletariat who was not a fanatical disciple of the new doctrine, with its slashing denunciations against all ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... Amid the general wantonness there was only one who remained morose and anxious, and this was Heideck, the newly-made captain ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
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