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Beggary   Listen
noun
Beggary  n.  
1.
The act of begging; the state of being a beggar; mendicancy; extreme poverty.
2.
Beggarly appearance. (R.) "The freedom and the beggary of the old studio."
Synonyms: Indigence; want; penury; mendicancy.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Beggary" Quotes from Famous Books



... staining the sky, at the hurrying crowd of men and women and children going into the mines, the mills, the shops, hurrying to work with the prod of fear ever in their backs—fear of the disgrace of want, fear of the shame of beggary, fear to hear some loved one ask for food or warmth or shelter and to have it not. When the great motherly body had ceased its paroxysms, he went to Mrs. Bowman and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... was, how to act with regard to Sophia. The thoughts of leaving her almost rent his heart asunder; but the consideration of reducing her to ruin and beggary still racked him, if possible, more; and if the violent desire of possessing her person could have induced him to listen one moment to this alternative, still he was by no means certain of her resolution to indulge his wishes at so high an expense. The resentment ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... "Beggary is a word I repudiate, Evelyn, in any case," I said, firmly; "and we, it seems, if this frightful thing be true, are not alone in ruin. Be calm, dear Evelyn! Learn to bear with dignity our fate. We must sustain each other now—be all in all to one another, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... opposed to more than twenty thousand Indians, and the subjugation of the latter, without help from abroad, is impossible. The troops of Yucatan are destitute of clothing and supplies, and as most of the wealthy citizens of the State have been reduced to beggary by these reverses, the threatened extermination of the Spanish race seems near at hand. A conspiracy to burn the city of Merida, formed by some of the soldiers, in conjunction with the convicts in the city prison, was discovered but ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... where, lingers —, she walks in —, a thing of Beaux, where none are Bedfellows, strange Beer, chronicle small Bee, how doth the little busy Bees, innumerable Beetle, that we tread on Beggar, dumb, may challenge double pity Beggary in the love Bell, silence that dreadful —, sullen, sounds as a Bell, church-going Belle, 't is vain to be a Dells jangled, out of tune Bent, fool me to the top of my Bezonian? under which king Bigness which you ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various

... part, as things stand, I have but little regret to find myself out of the number, and therefore I shall continue in all humility to exhort and warn my fellow-subjects never to receive or utter this coin, which will reduce the kingdom to beggary by much quicker and larger steps than have ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... accepting Secession with an enthusiasm (or rather self-exaltation) and confidence astounding to witness. There would be no collision; the North could not and dared not push it to the extreme issue; she must endure the punishment due to her 'fanaticism' in inevitable bankruptcy and beggary, while the South, the seat of 'a great, free, and prosperous people, whose renown must spread throughout the civilized world, and pass down to the remotest ages' (I quote from the ordinance of Secession), had infinite possibilities ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... some mystery to the present writer that Bernard Shaw should have been so long unrecognised and almost in beggary. I should have thought his talent was of the ringing and arresting sort; such as even editors and publishers would have sense enough to seize. Yet it is quite certain that he almost starved in London for many years, writing occasional columns for an advertisement ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... result that to avoid a scandal he was compelled to marry her to a rascal who now preyed upon her and even beat her. And the prelate was now passing through a fearful crisis, weary of reducing himself to beggary, and indeed no longer having the money necessary to extricate his nephew by marriage from a very nasty predicament, the result of cheating at cards. So the idea was to save the young man by a considerable pecuniary payment, and then to procure him employment without asking aught of his uncle, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... destruction was inevitable should they continue any longer in the territory of the pasha, who would not fail to seize this opportunity of levying fines and exactions, and reducing them to want and beggary. They were assembled in the men's tent, to the number of ten persons; the place of honour, the corner, being given to my father's uncle, the elder of the tribe, an old man, whose beard, as white as snow, descended to ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... that one day at the Paschal feast, another beggar wishing to rent his profit from him, Vieux par-Chemins refused ten crowns for it; in fact, the same evening he spent fourteen crowns in drinking the health of the alms-givers, because it is the statutes of beggary that one should show one's gratitude to donors. Although he carefully got rid of that of which had been a source of anxiety to others, who, having too much wealth went in search of poverty, he was ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... going to Riobamba, and a young Quito merchant, with his mother—the mother of only twenty-five children. This merchant had traveled in the United States, and could not help contrasting the thrift and enterprise of our country with the beggary and laziness of his own, adding, with a show of sincerity, "I am sorry I have Spanish blood in my veins." The suburbs of Bodegas reminded us of the outskirts of Cairo; but the road soon entered a broad savannah instead of a sandy desert. At 3 P.M. we passed ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... Sufficient wages; thou may'st there collect 440 Stones for my fences, and may'st plant my oaks, For which I would supply thee all the year With food, and cloaths, and sandals for thy feet. But thou hast learn'd less creditable arts, Nor hast a will to work, preferring much By beggary from others to extort Wherewith to feed thy never-sated maw. Then answer, thus, Ulysses wise return'd. Forbear, Eurymachus; for were we match'd In work against each other, thou and I, 450 Mowing in spring-time, when the days are long, I with my well-bent sickle in my hand, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... going to talk of beggary!" Mrs. Chump threw up her hands. "My lady, I naver could abide the name of 't. I'm a kind heart, ye know, but I can't bear a ragged friend. I hate 'm! He seems to give ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... by the body, formed the centre. It was a semicircle of rags, tatters, tinsel, pitchforks, axes, legs staggering with intoxication, huge, bare arms, faces sordid, dull, and stupid. In the midst of this Round Table of beggary, Clopin Trouillefou,—as the doge of this senate, as the king of this peerage, as the pope of this conclave,—dominated; first by virtue of the height of his hogshead, and next by virtue of an indescribable, haughty, fierce, and formidable air, which ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... mixing with bad company, strangers that nobody knew. He drank and gambled away the whole of his property, and when this became known to his mother and father they died, one shortly after the other, of sorrow. The younger brother, who was also reduced to beggary, went off in his anger, no one knew whither, while Uncle himself, having nothing now left to him but his bad name, also disappeared. For some time his whereabouts were unknown, then some one found out that he had gone to Naples as a soldier; ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri

... desperation, fools gold away with such idiocy as you do. You conduct yourself as if you were a millionaire, sir; and what are you? A pauper on my bounty, and on your brother Montagu's after me—a pauper with a tinsel fashion, a gilded beggary, a Queen's commission to cover a sold-out poverty, a dandy's reputation to stave off a defaulter's future! A pauper, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... The poor woman one day met Jack with tears in her eyes; her distress was great, and for the first time in her life she could not help reproaching him, saying, "Oh! you wicked child, by your ungrateful course of life you have at last brought me to beggary and ruin. Cruel, cruel boy! I have not money enough to purchase even a bit of bread for another day—nothing now remains to sell but my poor cow! I am sorry to part with her; it grieves me sadly, but we must not starve." For a few minutes, Jack felt a degree of remorse, but it was soon over, and ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... admitted, suspiciously enough, by the landlady, who ushered them into a large garret where twenty or thirty people of all ages and both sexes lay and dosed away the day, choosing the evening and night for their trades of beggary, thieving, ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... conscientiously? The point of honour had been centred in his condition of beggary. Something still was in his way. A quick spring of his blood for air, motion, excitement, holiday freedom, sent his thoughts travelling whither they always shot away when his redoubtable ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... leaving the country, for to this I had already made up my mind. In a foreign climate, being unknown, I might, with some probability of success, endeavor to conceal my unhappy calamity—a calamity calculated, even more than beggary, to estrange the affections of the multitude, and to draw down upon the wretch the well-merited indignation of the virtuous and the happy. I was not long in hesitation. Being naturally quick, I committed to memory the entire tragedy of "Metamora." ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... course. Your bankruptcy would have meant your downfall. That dressmaker woman was inexorable. You would have been sued by your stock-broker, and—who knows what wretchedness was awaiting us?—perhaps absolute beggary in obscure lodgings, and our daily bread purchased with money begged from our friends. You know what father is: you know how he hates both you and me, how he would rub salt into our wounds, and gloat over our humiliation. If—if Dick hadn't ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley

... attention of all men of philanthropic minds, it may be worth while to give place in your pages to the following order addressed by the Lord Mayor of London to his aldermen in 1650-51, which applies, amongst other things, to that very subject. It will be seen that some of the artifices of beggary in that day were very similar to those with which we are now but too familiar. The difference of treatment between vagrant children over and under nine years of age, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various

... Satanic faction, was a bankrupt staymaker, and a notorious profligate: his pamphlet had only the effect of making the public protest against its abominations; he was prosecuted, was forced to leave the country, and finally died in beggary in America. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... been all powerful rose vividly before his eyes. Did he repent now that he was certain of the greatness of the sacrifice? Again from the bottom of his heart he answered, No. But even while Hardwicke read the words which doomed him to beggary it almost seemed to young Thorne as if the wrinkled waxen face and shrunken figure must suddenly become visible in the background to protest—as if a dead hand must be laid on that lying will which was itself more dead than the newly-buried corpse. Even in that bitter moment Percival ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... seized the unenclosed lands of the country and fenced them in for sheep pastures, thus driving into beggary many who had formerly got a good part of their living from these commons. At the same time farm rents rose in somee cases ten and even twenty fold,[1] depriving thousands of the means of subsistence, and reducing to poverty many who had been ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... mother fled to England with my father, de Garcia persecuted my grandmother and his aunt with lawsuits and by other means, till at last she was reduced to beggary, in which condition the villain left her to die. So poor was she indeed, that she was buried in a public grave. After that the old woman, my informant, said she had heard that de Garcia had committed some crime and been forced to flee the country. What the crime was she ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard

... castles, and lands (for his daughter Clara was already dead, and had left no children). Nothing should his daughter Sidonia have but two farm-houses in Zachow, [Footnote: A small town near Stramehl, a mile and a half from Regenwalde.] just to keep her from beggary, and to save the ancient, illustrious name of their house from falling into further contempt. Yet should his son think proper to give her further alimentum, he was at liberty so to do. Lastly, for the second and third time, he cursed his daughter, to whom he owed all his misery, from ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold

... bake. And if a plumber wants a crumb, He may unto the baker come And plumb. A joker needing hats or cloaks Can go and pay for them with jokes, And so on: what a fellow's got Shall pay for things that he has not. If beggars' rags were cash, you'd see No longer any beggary; In short, there'd be no poverty." "A splendid scheme," quoth I; "but stay! What of the nation's credit, pray?" "Ha-ha! ho-ho!" he loudly roared. "We'll leave that problem to the Lord. And if He fails to keep us straight Once ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs

... Law, was generally accused of suggesting this decree out of malice, already foreseeing all the evils that must arise from it. The uproar was general and frightful. There was not a rich person who did not believe himself lost without resource; not a poor one who did not see himself reduced to beggary. The Parliament, so opposed to the new money system, did not let slip this fine opportunity. It rendered itself the protector of the public by refusing to register the decree, and by promptly uttering the strongest remonstrance against it. The public even believed that to the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... were farmers, living in comfortable circumstances. By the order of General Weyler they were reduced to beggary. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 30, June 3, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... became a familiar sight; and when the people began to be oppressed by hunger, they gradually overcame their early fear of us, and followed her to our door for food. We had never turned any away, for beggary was rare enough in Kem, and no sane person ever resorted to it except in the sorest ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass

... as much. That is beggary, you know. Your father was a very imprudent man. And you have a fellowship? I thought you broke down in your degree." Whereupon Arthur again had to explain the facts ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... Prince' glided out by some intricate passage, and got safely off. If one of the poor landsmen offended any of the gang, away he was dragged to Coppinger's vessel, and there made to serve until he was ransomed, and as the people were almost reduced to beggary by the rogues, there was very little chance of the poor fellow's ever ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... but his relations were so powerful, that the victor was obliged to fly his country, was tried and condemned in his absence; his goods were confiscated; his wife broke her heart; his children were reduced to beggary; and he himself is now starving in exile. In England we have not yet adopted all the implacability of the punctilio. A gentleman may be insulted even with a blow, and survive, after having once hazarded his life against the aggressor. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... conveniently detached from it, its vale of rich land lying all around, its lofty hills in the back ground, its views across the Frith;—I think little of its streets and rows of fine houses, though all built of stone, and though everything in London and Bath is beggary to these; I think nothing of Holyrood House; but I think a great deal of the fine and well-ordered streets of shops—of the regularity which you perceive everywhere in the management of business; and I think still more of the absence of all that foppishness, and that affectation of carelessness, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various

... to lose by the downfall of the empire. Their personal interest in its prolongation was clear. With them it was a matter, if not of life and death, at least of comparative dignity and prosperity at home, or of exile and beggary abroad. ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson

... of monasteries, and the pickings of earl and churl, of folkland and bookland, sticking to his fingers, instead of finding its way to their coffers. This was far from their meaning in setting him up in the high places of Mercia. So they strip him and thrust him out, and he dies in beggary. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... if the daughter married him. They went at her, poor creature, those two, with all the mercilessness of a couple of wolves. Her father would be disgraced, kicked out of the army, barred from all the clubs, reduced to beggary, and all that, if she did not yield; and in the end they so played upon her feelings, that to save him she gave in; Stavornell took out a special license, and they were married. Of course, the man never ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew

... commerce, depend upon the treaty. The treaty offers the only prospect of indemnity. Such redress is promised as the merchants place some confidence in. Will you interpose and frustrate that hope, leaving to many families nothing but beggary and despair? It is a smooth proceeding to take a vote in this body; it takes less than half an hour to call the yeas and nays and reject the treaty. But what is the effect of it? What, but this? The very men formerly so loud for redress, such fierce champions that even to ask for justice ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... into eternity so near their own homes, under such aggravated circumstances. And then what a terrible disappointment to survivors! Many families as well as individuals were by this calamity not only bereft of friends, but of their property—some reduced to a state of comparative beggary. ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... me wither and wear out mine age in a discomfortable, in an unwholesome, in a penurious prison, and so pay my debts with my bones, and recompense the wastefulness of my youth with the beggary of mine age; let me wither in a spittle under sharp, and foul, and infamous diseases, and so recompense the wantonness of my youth with that loathsomeness in mine age; yet, if God withdraw not his ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... quietly in corners and died. And here it may be noted, as a fact nationally characteristic, that however desperately reduced at times, even to the sewers, Israel, the American, never sunk below the mud, to actual beggary. ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... falling on the grandmother's bed and the little children's cradles. The roof and walls were repaired; we supplied the materials and paid the workmen; but no more money for gaudy aprons. In another case, an old woman had been reduced to beggary because she had listened too well to her heart, and given all she had to her children, who had turned her out of doors, or made her life so unbearable that she preferred to be a tramp. We took up the old woman's cause, and threatened that we would bring the matter before ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... countrymen; indeed they were the bulls at which every satirist hurled his shafts, and blunt must have been that one which did not pierce some potent folly of language or manner. The town rang with anecdotes of their rags, beggary, and quarrels; ballad-singers made merry at their expense, and the stage resounded with uncomplimentary allusions. Indeed, in one of the most popular plays of that period, the king himself was not spared, and the actors ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings

... slave? nay, worse; dost thou maintain my man, And this my maid? 'tis I maintain them both. I am thy wife; I will not be dress'd so, While thy gold lasts; but then most willingly I will bequeath thee to flat beggary. I do already hate thee; do thy worst; [He threatens her. Nay, touch me, if thou dar'st; what, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various

... queen Mary, the devil would." Cooper denied all such words, but Cooper was a protestant and a heretic, and therefore he was hung, drawn and quartered, his property confiscated, and his wife and nine children reduced to beggary. The following harvest, however, Grimwood of Hitcham, one of the witnesses before mentioned, was visited for his villany: while at work, stacking up corn, his bowels suddenly burst out, and before relief could be obtained he died. Thus was deliberate ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... John," said Lablache, with a contemptuous shrug. "You know the inevitable result of such a hasty decision. It means ruin to you—beggary to that poor child." His teeth snapped viciously. Then he smiled with his mouth. "I can only put your de—refusal down to utter, ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... I commit against God, my family, and society, but have not courage to live dishonoured. The generous confidence you placed in me I have basely violated; I have robbed you, and though not to enrich myself, the consciousness of it destroys me. Bankruptcy, poverty, beggary, and want I could bear—conscious integrity would support me: but the ill-fated acquaintance I formed led me to those earthly hells—gambling houses; and then commenced my villainies and deceptions to you. My losses were not large at first; and the stories that were told me of gain made ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... carried on and finished by him. If the mill were not kept at work, the old man could not live, and no rent would be paid. At any rate, it would be better that this great sorrow should not be allowed so to cloud everything as to turn industry into idleness, and straitened circumstances into absolute beggary. But the Squire found it very difficult to deal with the miller. At first old Brattle would neither give nor withhold his consent. When told by the Squire that the property could not be left in that way, he expressed ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... was out, I am sorry to say, the Triplets were reduced to a state of beggary. Mrs. Triplet's health had long been failing; and, although her duties at her little theater were light and occasional, the manager was obliged to discharge her, since she could ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... affair? or his friend Shallow, who was induced to borrow privately of his employers in hopes of making a fortune in the Cheetamall Copper; but lost both fortune and name thereby? Might it be the dying glare of his friend Needy, who hung himself after the Greenipluck expose, which reduced him to beggary? Or is it the eye of Society which he knows looks on his span, and his Newport house, and his wife's jewels, with the flash of contempt? How is it, Mrs. Grundy? which candle is best to sit beside,—Mr. Skinflint's, or the one you thought shone on a Godiva I was spying? Do you think S.'s candle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... him go, though it be utterly My death, or flight from Thebes in beggary. 'Tis thy sad lips, not his, that make me know Pity. Him I shall ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles

... was ruining the provinces. But the medals struck at the time and worn by nobles and bourgeois suffice to explain the incident. These medals bore, on one side, the effigy of the king, and on the other, two hands joined over a wallet, with the inscription: "Faithful to the king even to beggary." ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... in a doubtful tone. Something of old Nelson's dread of the authorities had rubbed off on the girl since she had to live with it day after day. "I don't know. Papa's afraid of being reduced to beggary, as he says, in his old days. Look here, kid, you had better clear ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad

... beggars!" she said to herself—"beggars!"—when the door of her own room had closed upon her. And there are few people in the world who held such beggary in less esteem than did the Countess of Desmond. It may almost be said that she hated herself on account of her ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... twenty years will see the great majority of the Indians on the plains mixed up with white settlements, wandering in small camps from place to place, shifting sores upon the public body, the men resorting for a living to basket-making, beggary, and hog-stealing, the women to fortune-telling, beggary, and harlotry; while a remnant will seek to maintain a little longer, in the mountains, their savage independence, fleeing before the advance of settlement when they can, fighting in sullen despair when they must. It is doubtless ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker

... Christians. They were accordingly executed in form of law. This was the last trial at Selkirk. The people of Liddesdale, who (perhaps not erroneously) still consider the sentence as iniquitous, remarked, that—, the prosecutor, never throve afterwards, but came to beggary and ruin, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott

... fairly opened, the people on the coast would double or triple their present incomes, and Zanzibar would soon swell into a place of real importance. All hands would then be employed, and luxury would take the place of beggary. ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke

... suppose, that it was thus they treated those unfortunate poor, whose indigence was occasioned by infirmities, by age, or unforeseen calamities. Every family constantly assisted its branches to save them from being reduced to beggary; which to them appeared worse than death. The magistrates protected those who were destitute of friends, or incapable of labour. When Ulysses was disguised as a mendicant, and presented himself to Eurymachus, this prince observing him, to be robust and healthy, offered to give him employment, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... through the female line of Poltrot de Mere, the assassin of the Due de Guise. He had been originally destined to follow the profession of his father, but the loss of a lawsuit having reduced his parents to beggary, he took refuge in the monastery of the Feuillants, where he entered upon his novitiate. His weakness of intellect and extreme irritability caused him, however, to be rejected by that community; and he ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... loom Of the Three Sisters yield you grace. Soon must you leave the woods you buy, Your villa, wash'd by Tiber's flow, Leave,—and your treasures, heap'd so high, Your reckless heir will level low. Whether from Argos' founder born In wealth you lived beneath the sun, Or nursed in beggary and scorn, You fall to Death, who pities none. One way all travel; the dark urn Shakes each man's lot, that soon or late Will force him, hopeless of return, On board the ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace

... our substance. It has entered the houses of our unsuspecting inhabitants as a friend, and taken the food from their tables, and the clothing from their beds, and the fuel from their fire, and turned their lands over to others, and drove them from their dwellings to subsist on beggary and crime, or drag out a miserable existence in penitentiaries and almshouses. Two-thirds, or 150,000 of the wretched tenants of these abodes of poverty in the United States, were reduced by intemperance. So themselves confess. It was rum, ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... to retire from Congress," he said. "It is no place for me in times so insubstantial. There is darkness and beggary ahead for all your Southern race. There is a crisis coming which will be followed by desolation. The generation to which your parents belong is doomed! I open my arms to you, dear girl, and offer you a ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... beggary of courtiers, The discontent of churchmen, want of soldiers, And all the creatures that hang manacled, Worse than strappadoed, on the lowest felly Of fortune's wheel, be taught, in our two lives, To scorn that world which ...
— The White Devil • John Webster

... we are again. And there—good God!—to see the arrogance of ignorance! To listen to the vapid joke of his worship on the crime of beggary! To see the punishment of the poor—to mark the sweet impunity of the rich! And then are we not in the Old Bailey—in all the criminal courts! Have we not seen trials after dinner—have we not heard sentences in which the bottle spoke more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various

... learning and waiting," cried Burgsdorf, beside himself, "and meanwhile your land is going wholly to ruin; the people are hungry and in despair; the noblemen are reduced to beggary or have, in their desperation, gone over to Schwarzenberg—that is to say, to the Emperor—who pays a rich annuity to each one who adheres faithfully to him. And when your grace has waited and learned enough, then will come the day ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach

... was thine endeavor, My body from my soul to sever, Of pride and courage to deprive me, And into beggary to drive me. Begone, where thousand devils burn— Begone, nor evermore return! Begone, most wretched thou of creatures, And hide for aye thine hateful features! —Beloved, ope ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld

... him a headache, sitting up all night shaking bits of bone together for the mere purpose of giving somebody a chance of winning all his money, or offering bets on racehorses to afford himself and family an opportunity of changing opulence for beggary! He has the popular ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various

... national life was a growing light. Let the central fire be kindled again, and the light will reach afar. The degraded and scorned of our race will learn to think of their sacred land not as a place for saintly beggary to await death in loathsome idleness, but as a republic where the Jewish spirit manifests itself in a new order founded on the old, purified, enriched by the experience our greatest sons have gathered from the life of the ages. How long is it?—only two centuries since a vessel earned over ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... deny himself and children necessaries, and not to use the bath to save three farthings, dying suddenly, left his money all hid and buried where his children could never find it, who by that means were all reduced to beggary. "The usurers answer me," says he, "then we will not lend; and what will the poor do? I bid them give, and exhort to lend, but without interest; for he that refuses to lend, and he that lends at usury, are equally criminal;" viz. if the necessity of another be extreme. His sermon On the ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... is interesting only for its ruins of ancient monasteries and convents, where a few lazy half-breeds alone remain to tell the tale of multitudes over whom the Catholic priests reigned supreme, reducing their dupes to beggary by their extortions. Once these mountains were covered with vast flocks of sheep, but the foolish reduction of the tariff on wool by the Wilson bill, destroyed all profits, and the flocks disappeared into the hungry mouths of ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... and we filed out into the dusty street, at the corner of which sat another of our visible tokens of the coming of the season of flowers; a dirty, shrivelled old Irishwoman, full of benedictions and beggary, who, all through the summer, sold "posies" to the passers-by. We school-girls were good customers to her. We were all more or less sentimental, more or less homesick, and had more or less of that susceptibility to the influence of scents which ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... the earth, is none like unto thee.' Thou art an original figure in this creation, a denizen in Mayfair alone. One monster there is in the world: the idle man. What is his 'religion?' That nature is a phantasm, where cunning, beggary, or thievery, may sometimes find ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... case of many a younger brother of a great family, who had rather see their children starve like gentlemen, than thrive in a trade or profession that is beneath their quality. This humour fills several parts of Europe with pride and beggary. It is the happiness of a trading nation, like ours, that the younger sons, though uncapable of any liberal art or profession, may be placed in such a way of life, as may perhaps enable them to vie ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various

... may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live? With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation? ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... with its old ferocious glare on shop and bazaar. Grave merchants lolled over their priceless treasures of gold and silver work, heaped up jewels and bullion-threaded shawls for princely wear. Under the awnings lingered the familiar polyglot groups, while beggary and opulence jostled each other on ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... twice, thrice, growing whiter and whiter with each perusal, and then sunk on a chair, hiding his face in his hands, with a groan. "Oh! my darling," he gasped, "I have ruined you; my darling, for whom I would willingly have died, I have ruined and brought you to beggary." ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... thrift under our feet? It was not known till the iron age, donec facinus invasit mortales, as the poet says; and the Scythians always detested it. I will prove it that an unthrift, of any, comes nearest a happy man, in so much as he comes nearest to beggary. Cicero saith, summum bonum consists in omnium rerum vacatione, that is, the chiefest felicity that may be to rest from all labours. Now who doth so much vacare a rebus, who rests so much, who hath so little to do as the beggar? who can sing so merry a ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various

... as a reward for their obedience; although to civil and religious liberty, law, order, and a thriving commercial and manufacturing existence, such as had been rarely witnessed in the world, had succeeded the absolute tyranny of Jesuits, universal beggary, and a perennial military mutiny—setting Government at defiance and plundering the people—there was one faithful never deserted Belgica, and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... us in want, and, but for their license to destroy, in beggary. Yet when they returned to their wild homes among the distant hills, they were laden as with the household wealth of a realm, in so much that they were rendered defenceless by the weight of their spoil. At the bridge of Glasgow ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt

... the flower of his manhood, a victim of the drink curse; for rum had broken his constitution, robbed him of his intellectual vigor, reduced him and his family almost to beggary, and he was finally murdered by one of its vendors. He was endowed by his Maker with a bright intellect and a loving heart. In his early manhood he fell heir to an ample fortune, and was blessed ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter

... refer to much the same period as that we have been considering; and, in fact, we come upon the "Old Tom of Bedlam," or Cranke or Abram man, who "would swear he had been in Bedlam, and would talk frantickly of purpose," so notorious in connection with the beggary which endeavoured to make capital out of the asylum most familiar to our ancestors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this light the Bedlam ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... in every schedule in bankruptcy in the land. Clothes will also breed rags, for without clothes to grow threadbare and frayed, it is clear that the raw material of rags and tatters would be lacking, and many a scene of beggary would be avoided. ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... I were to give you a free hand, you'd bring us to beggary. Aren't you aware of our position? We are going as fast as ever we can to ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola

... named Fan of the village of Southern Springs. He came from a once wealthy clan, now reduced through opium smoking to comparative poverty. He had not yet reached the stage of positive want, but that condition is never far from the habitual heavy smoker, and should he continue a few years longer, beggary will be the ultimate fate ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable

... years of outlawry had made the Frochard clan a wolfish breed; battening on crime, thievery and beggary. The head of the house had suffered the extreme penalty meted out to highwaymen. The precious young hopeful, Jacques, was a chip of the old block—possibly a shade more drunken and a shade ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... trust you as I trust the stars; Nor cruel loss, nor scoff, nor pride, Nor beggary, nor dungeon bars, Can move ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various

... but shortly afterwards such a host of rats took up their abode in the farmer's house that it was impossible for him to defend himself against them. The rats gnawed everything in the house, and whatever was brought into it. In time the farmer was reduced to beggary, and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... but they all died before their mother. We had been reduced to beggary by misfortunes, and I had become too weak and ill to work. I buried my poor wife's bones by the side of the road where she died; raised the little shrine over them, planted the trees, and there have I sat ever since ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... true. There is no doubt of that. But as I was saying,—then he fell to talking about the books, and I was angered. I was very sore in my heart. From the moment in which the words of beggary had passed from my lips, I had repented. And he had laughed and had taken it gaily. I turned upon him and told him that I had changed my mind. I was grateful, but I would not have his money. And so I prepared to go. But he argued with me, ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... fired a few taunts, prompted by envy of Augustine, who was marrying an artist and a man of rank; adding, with a sort of dismay, that if the Guillaumes were ambitious, there was an end to the business. An old fan-maker having remarked that such a prodigal would soon bring his wife to beggary, father Guillaume prided himself in petto for his prudence in the matter of marriage settlements. In the evening, after a splendid ball, followed by one of those substantial suppers of which the memory is dying out in the present generation, Monsieur and Madame Guillaume ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac

... mother went over to consult Mr. Burton, she and Jack planned out for the dear culprit a dramatic trial which would have convulsed the soberest of judges. His sentence was ten years' imprisonment, and such heavy fines that the family would have been reduced to beggary but for the sums made by Jill's fancy work and Jack's ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott

... the situation of the peasantry be improved, we must not forget, on the other hand, that to effect this improvement, the nobility, gentry, yeomanry, and, we might almost add, farmers, have been very generally reduced to beggary. The restraint which the existence of these orders ever opposed to the power of a bad king, of a tyrant, or of an adventurer, might have remained, and all have been happier, better, and richer ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... conspiracy will not succeed; and I understand your father well enough to know that he will not survive its defeat. And if Maurice and your brother should both be killed, what would become of you? Oh, my God, would you not be reduced to beggary? ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau

... even though what he doth, be well. Yet neither did they well who forced me, but what was well came to me from Thee, my God. For they were regardless how I should employ what they forced me to learn, except to satiate the insatiate desires of a wealthy beggary, and a shameful glory. But Thou, by whom the very hairs of our head are numbered, didst use for my good the error of all who urged me to learn; and my own, who would not learn, Thou didst use for ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... Jersey, the Patent of the Wine Office, the Wardenship of the Stannaries, the Rangership of Gillingham Forest, and the Lieutenancy of Portland Castle. He besought that he might not be reduced to utter beggary, and he did his best to retain the Duchy of Cornwall and his estates at Sherborne. The former, as he might have supposed, could not be left in the charge of a prisoner. It was given to a friend, to the Earl of Pembroke, and ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse

... leads impotent and snail-paced beggary: Then fiery expedition be my wing, Jove's Mercury, and herald for a King. —SHAKESPEARE, King Richard ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... miseries of the poor in New York were not owing to the rich, but mainly to themselves; that there was ordinarily remunerative labor enough for them; and that, but in exceptional cases of sickness and especial misfortune, those who fell into utter destitution and beggary came to that pass through their idleness, their recklessness, or their vices. That was always my opinion. They besieged our door from morning till night, and I was obliged to help them, to look after them, to go to their houses; my family ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey

... in the forcible abolition of these manufactories, created by necessity, and still rendered indispensable by the same irresistible law, that the condition of the colony is to be ameliorated or redressed. So long as the same pernicious disabilities which have already reduced the colonists to beggary and despair, and rendered unavailing the resources of a country that might rival in the number and value of its exports, the most favoured of the globe are enforced, this manufacturing system is a lamentable but necessary evil. After putting it out ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth

... I, because I was a girl, was not allowed to carry a gentleman's parcel or black his boots, or shovel the snow off a shopkeeper's pavement, or put in coal, or do anything that I could do just as well as they. And so because I was a girl there seemed to be nothing but starvation or beggary before me!" ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... Switzerland which resulted in her death. Ralph being again alone in the world, as it were, entered into all the wild dissipations of Vienna and Paris, which ended in his ruin; and he returned to England with only a five pound note between him and beggary. As the cousin and only male relative of Sir Jasper Coleman, he was heir to the Baronetcy but not to the property. This was unentailed, and at the will of the Baronet; but should he die intestate the whole would ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest

... the purchase of an estate, in the cultivation of which I had resolved to employ myself till heaven should allow me to join my wife and child in another world, when this dreadful outbreak commenced, and reduced me to beggary. By a strange fate, though all my companions have been destroyed, I still am bound to life, which I would gladly ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston

... and builders who are dismissed (the remaining thirty out of every hundred) being without work and without houses, are at once in a state of beggary. Only by betaking themselves to some new industry will they be able to get a livelihood, and it rests with them to devise their new industries. Meanwhile they can only subsist on charity, which is doled out to them chiefly by the fellow feeling of those of their class ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... tragedy; have thrown his ink-stand into the Thames; have taken the carrier's cart to Stratford, and there finished his days in writing epitaphs in the churchyard, laughing at Sir Thomas Lucy, and bequeathing deathless scoffs, to the beggary of mankind. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... dictum, that no man could be honest without being rich, it is hard to believe in a virtuous beggar. The abundance, also, of lotteries shakes one's faith in Roman morality. A population amongst whom gambling and beggary are encouraged by their spiritual and temporal rulers is not likely in other respects to be a virtuous or a moral one. The frequency of violent crimes is in itself ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey

... attendant on good fortune, of whose power the Roman conquerors were also reminded by certain symbols attached to their cars of triumph. The symbols were the whip and the crotalo, which were discovered in the Nemesis of the Vatican. The attitude of beggary made the above statue pass for that of Belisarius: and until the criticism of Winckelmann[665] had rectified the mistake, one fiction was called in to support another. It was the same fear of the sudden termination of prosperity, that made Amasis ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting: and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal so compact and comprehensive that he should never hunger any more; suppose him at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... virgin-souled, overgrown schoolboys who fill Henry Kingsley's exceedingly trashy and misleading novel with their insufferable twaddle. There was a squatter of the Sam Buckley type, but he, in the strictest sense of the word, went to beggary; and, being too plump of body and exalted of soul for barrow-work, and too comprehensively witless for anything else, he was shifted by the angels to a better world—a world where the Christian gentleman is duly recognised, and ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... private use, as the Nabob conceived, so bountiful a present as 100,000l.; what motive, then, could he have had in February to offer him another 100,000l.? This man, at the time, was piercing heaven itself with the cries of despondency, despair, beggary, and ruin. You have seen that he was forced to rob his own family, in order to satisfy the Company's demands upon him; and yet this is precisely the time when he thinks proper to offer 100,000l. to Mr. Hastings. Does not the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke

... snapped at him; "you lily-livered fool! Are you indeed my son? Are you—by God!—that you talk so lightly of yielding?" She advanced a step in his direction. "Through your cowardice you may be content to spend your days in beggary; not so am I; nor shall I be, so long as I have an arm and a voice. You may go hence if your courage fails you outright; but I'll throw up the bridge and entrench myself within these walls. Florimond de Condillac sets no foot in here while I live; and if he should come within range ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... household. She, and she alone, could ever induce her father to look into the state of his worldly concerns. She, and she alone, could in any degree control the absurdities of her sister. She, and she alone, prevented the whole family from falling into utter disrepute and beggary. It was by her advice that they now found themselves very unpleasantly situated ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... place suffocated her; the prayers and meals, the lessons and the walks, which were arranged with the regularity of a convent, oppressed her almost beyond endurance; and she looked back to the freedom and the beggary of her father's old studio with bitter regret. She had never mingled in the society of women: her father, reprobate as he was, was a man of talent; his conversation was a thousand times more agreeable to her than the silly chat and ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser



Words linked to "Beggary" :   indigence, begging, beg, pauperism, mendicancy, penury, pauperization, solicitation, mendicity, need



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