"Venal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... democratic papers, using his summer journeyings to try to attach not abilities in the countries he passed through, and his stay at the waters to draw up a great speech, with which he toured on his return. And now a new cry! The cowardly venal Press must be swept away. "As true as you are here, hanging on my lips, eager and transported, as true as my soul trembles with the purest enthusiasm in pouring itself wholly into yours, so truly does the certainty penetrate me that a day will come when we shall launch the thunderbolt which will ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... second, you must have good men to carry them out, after they are made. Bad men can abuse the best of laws, the best of constitutions. Look at the working of our parliaments during the reigns of William III and Anne, and see how powerless good constitutions are, when the men who work them are false and venal. Look, on the other hand, at the Roman Empire from the time of Vespasian to that of the Antonines, and see how well even a bad constitution will succeed, when good men are ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... from his penetrating glance. Without great vision or imagination, he knew criminals as did few other men; could reason from cause to effect within certain channels, unerringly. He was heartless, ruthless—some said venal. But he caught and convicted felons, solved the problems of his office by a dogged perseverance that ignored defeat. For, with a mind essentially tricky, he anticipated tricksters—unless their operations were ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... me." She wrote him letters of tearful protest. They were ignored. She protested by word of mouth. Ludwig, in unbrotherly fashion, told her to "mind her own business." Caroline's next move was to take clerical counsel. "These creatures are always venal," said the Jesuits. "They only care for cash." An emissary was accordingly despatched to the Barerstrasse mansion, to convey an offer. Unfortunately, however, he had not advanced beyond "Gnaedige Frau, erlauben," when ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Conquest, and the lawyers are now fighting tooth and nail over the costs. The judges gave me one hundred and sixty pounds damages, but, as I lost the demurrer with costs, the balance will doubtless be small. But, if the pecuniary result is small, the victory over the pirates and the venal part of the press ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... Namby Pamby Pilli-pis, Rhimy pim'd on Missy-Miss; Tartaretta Tartaree From the Navel to the Knee; That her Father's Gracy-Grace Might give him a Placy-Place. He no longer writes of Mammy Andromache and her Lammy Hanging panging at the Breast Of a Matron most distrest. Now the Venal Poet sings Baby Clouts, and Baby Things, Baby Dolls, and Baby Houses, Little Misses, Little Spouses; Little Play-Things, Little Toys, Little Girls, and Little Boys: As an Actor does his Part, So the Nurses get by Heart Namby ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... from succour, by sheer force of character makes felt the weight of British influence in favour of just and cleanly government. And acting thus honourably they were naturally detested by the lower class of venal rulers, whose idea of government was, and is at all times and on all occasions, by persuasion, force, or oppression, to squeeze dry the people committed to their charge. Ready to the hand of a discontented satrap, sighing for the illicit gains of a less austere rule, ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... inutility of the hermitage. Very little praiseworthy would LORD BOLINGBROKE have seemed among his haymakers and ploughmen, if among haymakers and ploughmen he had looked with an indifferent eye upon a profligate minister and a venal Parliament. Very little interest would have attached to his beans and vetches, if beans and vetches had caused him to forget that if he was happier on a farm he could be more useful in a Senate, and made him forego, in the sphere of a bailiff, all care for re-entering ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... will be easily bribed to forgive sins. Here then is, ethically speaking, a flaw in the strata of religion, a flaw found in the creeds of ghost-worshipping barbarians, but not of non-ghost-worshipping savages. A crowd of venal, easy-going, serviceable deities has now been evolved out of ghosts, and Animism is on its way to supplant or overlay a rude early form of theism. Granting the facts, we fail to see how they are explained by the current theory which makes the highest god ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... you, as you have used your advantages unworthily, have incurred the greater disgrace. This topic, then, I shall pass over. Indeed, Athenians, a correct observer will find the source of his greatness here, [Footnote: In this assembly, by the contrivance of venal orators, or through the supineness of the people. In the first Philippic there is a more pointed allusion to the practices of Philip's adherents, who are charged with sending him secret intelligence of what passed at home. Such men as Aristodemus, Neoptolemus, perhaps Demades ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... the same course; and two circumstances contributed to make that course easy. One was the great length of coast line on both the Atlantic and Pacific slopes over which a surveillance had to be exercised, making it difficult to catch the interlopers. The other was the venal connivance of the governors of the ports, who often tolerated and even encouraged the traffic on the plea that the colonists demanded it.[36] The subterfuges adopted by the interlopers were very simple. When a vessel wished to enter a Spanish port to trade, the captain, pretending that ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... the anxieties, and, too often, the peculations of a life. Our ears have rung with the noisy frothiness of those who have bought their fellow-men as beasts in the market-place, and found their reward in the sycophancy of a degraded constituency, or the patronage of a venal ministry—no matter of what creed, for party must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... was for a time extremely popular, and was distinguished for his firmness and even-handed justice. He succeeded in putting an end to slavery, and to the practice of slave-killing in the island, which at that time was of very common occurrence, and deemed by the planters a venal offence punishable only by a small fine of 15. In consequence of his humane proceedings in this matter he became obnoxious to many of the colonists, and, in 1806, he finally left the island. In 1808 he ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... they will publish it at all, and at their own risk, I should not stand out for any other terms. 'Nothing great,' said Dryden, 'ever came from a venal pen!'" ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... our own right-hands it must be wrought; That we must stand unprop'd, or be laid low. O dastard! whom such foretaste doth not cheer! We shall exult, if they who rule the land Be men who hold its many blessings dear, Wise, upright, valiant, not a venal band, Who are to judge of danger which they fear, And honour which ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Poverty his honest Muse Walks forth Vindictive through a venal land; In vain Corruption sheds her golden dews, In vain Oppression lifts her iron hand; He scorns them both, and arm'd with Truth alone, Bids Lust and ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... hear of venal doctors?" inquired Morris. "They're as common as blackberries: you can pick 'em up for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... friend, nor thou refuse This from no venal or ungrateful Muse. Whether thy hand strike out some free design, Where life awakes, and dawns at every line; Or blend in beauteous tints the colour'd mass, And from the canvas call the mimic face: Read these instructive leaves, in which conspire Fresnoy's close ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... is the enormous army of young women who, outside of the marriage relation altogether, lead a professional sex life, venal, furtive, ignoble, and debasing; an army which has existed since the beginning of time but which every postponement of the age of marriage causes to increase in relative numbers and to gain new strength for ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... me but the liberty of the press, and I will give to the minister a venal House of Peers—I will give him a corrupt and servile House of Commons—I will give him the full sway of the patronage of office—I will give him the whole host of ministerial influence—I will give him all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... opium by his people, issued an edict forbidding its introduction into China. This did not check the trade, its only effect being to convert legitimate into smuggling traffic. The trade went on as briskly as before, the smugglers being openly aided by venal officials not only at Canton but at other points along the coast. By 1838 the disregard of the law, and the quantity of opium smuggled into the empire by small boats on the Canton River, had become so great that the Peking government determined ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Green were fragrant of rain and the rain-sodden earth gave forth its mortal odour, a faint incense rising upward through the mould from many hearts. The soul of the gallant venal city which his elders had told him of had shrunk with time to a faint mortal odour rising from the earth and he knew that in a moment when he entered the sombre college he would be conscious of a corruption other than that of Buck Egan ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... matters? A scapegoat, belike, to suffer for higher scoundrels. The mob is loudest against the Chancellor, who I doubt is not to blame for our unreadiness, having little power of late over the King. Oh, there has been iniquity upon iniquity, and men know not whom most to blame—the venal idle servants, or the ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... repinings. Sidonie told her of Georges, of their relations, attempting to palliate her offence by blaming the cruelty of her parents in marrying her by force to a man much older than herself. Madame Dobson at once showed a disposition to assist them; not that the little woman was venal, but she had a passion for passion, a taste for romantic intrigue. As she was unhappy in her own home, married to a dentist who beat her, all husbands were monsters in her eyes, and poor Risler especially seemed to her a horrible tyrant whom his wife was quite justified ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... like—are desirable, but shade off into mere want of pluck; while the active virtues—courage, charity, clemency, cheerfulness, helpfulness—are ever those upon which the elect and noble souls in history have laid the greater stress. I frankly detest Blank, M.P., because I believe him to be a venal person, a colourable (and no doubt self-deceiving) imitation of the type. But, supposing him to be the real thing, I still think that, if you want a model for your son, you will do better with Sir Philip Sidney. If ever a man illustrated the beauty ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... upon as we have, but they went at things in a sort of rule-of-thumb, rough-and-ready style, and when one party had dragged the country into the mire, the other dragged it out again. It was customary for the party that was out of office to say that the party that was in was corrupt and venal—that every man of it was a liar, was a thief, was taking bribes, would soon be kicked out, etc. Then the party that was in had to say that the party that was out should look to its own sins and remember that everyone of its men when they were in proved himself ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... fate intended Sir Oliver by Lionel was to be fulfilled; and it was to be shared by Master Leigh himself, which had not been at all in that venal fellow's reckoning. ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... praise attending pomp and power, The incense given to kings, Are but the trappings of an hour — Mere transitory things! The base bestow them: but the good agree 10 To spurn the venal gifts as flattery. But when to pomp and power are join'd An equal dignity of mind — When titles are the smallest claim — When wealth and rank and noble blood, 15 But aid the power of doing good — Then all their trophies last; and flattery turns ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... frequently exist (and these are characteristically feminine, unstable, and liable to betrayal), love-attachments are less common, and when they occur must naturally be based upon considerable self-deception. Venal gratifications are always, of course, as possible as they are unsatisfactory, and here perhaps some of the peculiarities of taste accompanying inversion may admit of elucidation. In considering the peculiar predilection shown by inverts for youths of inferior ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... another attraction in his profession: it wanted reform, and gave a man an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject its venal decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine though undemanded qualifications. He went to study in Paris with the determination that when he provincial home again he would settle in some provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the irrational severance between ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... for the safety of their country. In the present times, money has taken the place of this spirit; it has become the universal lever, and you are in want of it. A spirit of finance affects every department of the state; it reigns triumphant at Court; all have become venal; and all distinction of rank is broken up. Your Ministers are without genius and capacity since the dismissal of MM. d'Argenson and de Machault. You alone cannot judge of their incapacity, because they lay before you what has ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... I have, but in his happier hour, Of social pleasure, ill exchanged for power; Seen him uncumbered with the venal tribe, Smile without art, and ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... even the opposing counsel, even the judge on the bench, abstained from their prey because he was a member of Parliament. It was notorious to all the world that Griffenbottom had debased the borough; had so used its venal tendencies as to make that systematic which had before been too frequent indeed, but yet not systematized; that he had trained the rising generation of Percycross politicians to believe in political corruption;—and yet he escaped that utter turning inside out of which ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... about men's pantings, an' DoesannyoneknowwhereIcangeta biscuit, an' In th' spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to Pocohontas plug, not made be th' thrusts. Th' editor left thim sacrilegious advertisements f'r his venal contimp'raries. His was pious an' nice: 'Do ye'er smokin' in this wurruld. Th' Christyan Unity Five-Cint See-gar is made out iv th' finest grades iv excelsior iver projooced in Kansas!' 'Nebuchednezzar grass seed, f'r man an' beast.' 'A handful iv meal in ...
— Mr. Dooley's Philosophy • Finley Peter Dunne
... followed by captains and lieutenants, whose journeymen were the prisoners of the crown, and who, beside the emoluments of office, engrossed the profits of smiths and carpenters—of tailors and shoemakers. Those settlers, excluded from participation in the loan labor, denounced the venal partiality of its distribution. Long lists were published of workmen allotted to the relatives and confidants of the Governor, to display ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... of the principal agents in promoting his downfall had been the most famous rover of them all. After robbing his companions of most of their legitimate proportion of the spoils of Panama, Sir Henry had bought his knighthood at the hands of the venal Charles, paying for it in treasure, into the origin of which, with his usual careless insouciance, his easy-going majesty had not inquired any too carefully. And the old pirate had settled down, if not to live cleanly at least ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... alike; whose genius ne'er confines Her flight to garnish Greenwood's gay designs, Nor sleeps with 'sleeping beauties' but anon In five facetious acts comes thundering on, While poor John Bull, bewildered with the scene, Stares, wondering what the devil it can mean; But as some hands applaud—a venal few— Rather than sleep, John Bull ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... Hurons confessed that none of them had had the good hap to find the monster and break his horn, nor indeed had they any idea of his whereabouts; but their neighbors, the Algonkins, furnished them at times small fragments for a large consideration.[114-4] Clearly the myth had been taught them for venal purposes by their trafficking visitors. Now among the Algonkins, the Shawnee tribe did more than all others combined to introduce and carry about religious legends and ceremonies. From the earliest times they seem to have had peculiar aptitude for the ecstasies, deceits, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... extension and consolidation of their admirable and wonderful national prosperity, abandoned the government of their noble country and the preservation of its nobler institutions to the slaveholding aristocracy of the South—to a mob of politicians by trade, the vilest and most venal class of men that ever disgraced and endangered a country—to foreign emigrants, whose brutish ignorance did not prevent the Democratic party from seizing upon them as voters, and bestowing on the Irish and ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... justifiable; as, I think, under those circumstances, his action was excusable. Protestants do not recognize the distinction between venial and mortal sins. Venial must not be confounded with the very different word VENAL. Compare VENAL. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... he, clasping his hands together with intensity of fervour, 'when all is rotten to the core, venal, unjust, tyrannical, how endure without an endeavour at a remedy? Yet it may be that an imposing attitude will prevail! ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... been the most unhappy rascal upon earth, for I should have always suspected that every woman liked me for my wealth—I should have had no pleasure in the smiles of an angel—angels, or their mothers, are so venal now-a-days, and so fond of the pomps and vanities ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... whose divine right was the imperial brain, and who found their strength in a national virtue which individualized itself in every citizen. The wind that moans among the columns of the Parthenon, or rustles through the weeds on the palaces of the Caesars, whimpers no truer prophecies than that venal breath which, at a signal from the patron in the White House, bends all one way the obsequious leaves of a partisan press, ominous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... cocksure, ambitious, leftist politician, who knows what is best for everybody better than anybody else does, and who is convinced that he is inescapably right and that whoever differs with him is not only an ignoramus but a venal scoundrel as well. One was a beefy man in a gold-laced cream-colored dress tunic; he had thick lips and a too-ready laugh. Another was a rather monkish-looking young man who spoke earnestly and rolled his eyes upward, as though at some ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... destroyed my talents, which were less in my pen than in my heart, and solely proceeded from an elevated and noble manner of thinking, by which alone they could be cherished and preserved. Nothing vigorous or great can come from a pen totally venal. Necessity, nay, even avarice, perhaps, would have made me write rather rapidly than well. If the desire of success had not led me into cabals, it might have made me endeavor to publish fewer true and useful works than those which might be pleasing ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... advice may perhaps be called coyness, but it is only a coarse primitive phase of that attitude, based on sordid, mercenary motives, whereas true modern coyness consists in an impulse, grounded in modesty, to conceal affection. The germs of Greek venal coyness for filthy lucre may be found as low down as among the Papuan women who, as Bastian notes (Ploss, I., 460) exact payment in shell-money for their caresses. Of the Tongans, highest of all Polynesians, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... routine, had twice given the order for retreat, and it was Bennigsen's disobedience which made the conflict so indecisive that Russia claimed it as a victory. If a victory, it was a barren one, because a weak and venal administration of the commissary department had deprived the soldiers of sustenance at the critical moment. Kamenski, who was seventy-six years old, was retired on the ground of his health, and Bennigsen succeeded him, but the bad ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Then Penfentenyou, venal and adaptable politician of the type that survives at the price of all the higher emotions, appeared at the window of the house on my right, broken and congested with mirth, the woman beside him, and the child in his arms. I saw ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... The king's aversion to decisive measures, and well-known horror of civil war, made him the worst of colleagues for the only policy his tool could wield with effect; and the great demagogue himself, when obliged to discard the mask of democratic hypocrisy that still partly hid the subtle and venal traitor of his party, would have lost, like Strafford, many of the elements of his potency; and despoiled, especially, of the miraculous resources of his eloquence, must have contented himself with that lucid, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... large and pour'd abroad Her unrelenting Train; Informers - Spies - Hateful Projectors of aggrieving Schemes To sell the starving many to the few, And drain a thousand Ways th' exhausted Land... And on the venal Bench Instead of Justice, Party held the ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... might almost say that she was venal. She had received money for simply committing this crime. She would receive money again for perpetuating it in a more flagrant form. So much down on the awful day of publication; a half-yearly revenue as long as the abominable work endured. There might be a great deal of money ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... prayer to God, he fearlessly presented his breast to the cowardly assassin. Montsoreau did not complete the extermination of the Huguenots of Angers, and Puigaillard soon after arrived to prosecute it; but the Protestant prisoners whom he was to have murdered knew his venal disposition, and found little difficulty ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... that a weak-walled native town lying right against the northern wall of Fort St. George was a serious danger. The houses offered convenient cover for any enemies that might attack the Fort; and, moreover, any disaffected or venal townsman was in a position to give the assailants valuable help. The French Governor set himself, therefore, to the deliberate destruction of Black Town. He first destroyed the Town Wall, and then—for a distance of 400 yards from the ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... breeds corruption inevitably. Venal men aspiring to place, avow themselves the friends of the Secretary, and if through such avowals they secure appointments, the offices will be used ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... mothers; their unborn children were being molded to the long roll of your hexameters. There came to be manuscripts of you in every city: corrupt enough, many of them, forgeries, many of them; lays fudged up and fathered on you by venal Rhapsodoi, to chant in princely houses whose ancestors it was a good speculation to praise. You were everywhere in Greece: a great and vague tradition, a formless mass of literature: by the time Solon was making laws for Athens, and Pisistratus was laying ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... entirely too cheap. We permit every creature that can poise on its hind legs and call itself a man, to sway the scepter of American Sovereignty—to become an important factor in the formation of our public polity; and then, with this venal vote on the one hand, eager to be bought, and the plutocrat on the other anxious to buy, we wonder why it is that the invariable tendency of our laws is to make the rich man a prince and the poor man a Populist—why we are "great only ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... pray send the lady to me; she can't be all stone, and my misery might melt a stone." He listened for an answer, he prayed for an answer. There was none. Once in a mad-house, the sanest man is mad, however interested and barefaced the motive of the relative who has brought two of the most venal class upon the earth to sign away his wits behind his back. And once hobbled and strapped, he is a dangerous maniac, for just so many days, weeks, or years, as the hobbles, handcuffs, and jacket happen to be left upon him by inhumanity, economy, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... but timid in its apprehensions as to protection, was ready to acquiesce in the most extravagant opinions; in other words, like trade and commerce every where, too much disposed to make merchandise of its politics. The balance of the non-slaveholding population, if we except a venal pulpit and press, had not even a specious motive, pecuniary or political, moral or social, that should have drawn it into rebellion. It was a part and portion of the great brother-hood of free labor, and could not by any possibility raise up a plausible pretense of jealousy against its natural ally—free ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... hand Hath thus made desolate all my company, And left me a poor, childless man—behold They who once felt it pride to call me friend, Make of my name a by-word, which was erst Like harp or tabret to their venal lip. Mine eye is dim with grief, my wasted brow Furrow'd with wrinkles. Soon I go the way Whence I shall not return. The grave, my house, Is ready for me. In its mouldering clay My bed I make, and say unto the worm Thou art my sister." With unpitying voice ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... unmarried, though in the meridian of life, and of course, uncontrolled master of all his movements. He was very peculiar in character, and his impulses, rather than his principles, guided his actions. He did not love his relatives, because he thought their attentions were venal, and resolved to adopt this beautiful boy, not so much from feelings of benevolence towards him, as a desire to disappoint his mercenary kindred. Bryant's natural affections were not strong enough to prove ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... everything. They are horror-stricken at the prospect of a return to his light railways and heavy sentences. Hence this attempt to damage his prestige. Unhappy Mr. Balfour! To be protected by one hundred and fifty mounted police, and not to know of it! And the venal English press which conceals the fact, what shall be said of it? Where would England be but for Irish ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... fonder still of what money could buy; he now hankered after revenge as the sweetest morsel that his hoarded ducats could procure for him. That the Sultan was well disposed to him he had every reason to think; none the less did he spend royally among the venal favourites of the Court in order that nothing might be left undone to inflame the ardour of Soliman against those whom he considered to ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... That the East India Company, by exporting their tea from England to America, whilst subject to a tax imposed thereon by the British Parliament, have evidently designed to fix on the Americans those chains forged for them by a venal ministry, and have thereby rendered themselves odious and detestable throughout all America. It is, therefore, the unanimous opinion of this meeting not to purchase any tea or other East India commodity whatever, imported after the first ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... degrees of complacency and panegyric, "Paris", and "Woman", and a "Syrian Tale", and Mrs. Lefanu, and Mr. Barrett, and Mr. Howard Payne, and a long list of the illustrious obscure? Are these the men who in their venal good nature presumed to draw a parallel between the Reverend Mr. Milman and Lord Byron? What gnat did they strain at here, after having swallowed all those camels? Against what woman taken in adultery dares the foremost of these literary prostitutes to cast his opprobrious stone? ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... settlement, it would have been humiliating enough to have had to exult over it as a victory of Freedom. With what depth of shame, then, should we contemplate the compassing of their end by the Slavocrats, through the venal surrender of the rights so long and so manfully asserted, for so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... when his tight-pursed lips unclenched themselves and he drew in great breaths even of Ghetto air with the huge contentment of one who has known suffocation. "One can breathe here," he seemed to be saying. The atmosphere, untainted by spies, venal officials, and jeering soldiery, seemed fresh and sweet. Here the ground was stable, not mined in all directions; no arbitrary ukase—veritable sword of Damocles—hung over the head and darkened the sunshine. In such a country, where faith ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... heavily; but their president declared that such bargains were not got at Washington for nothing. Members of Congress had to be paid to assist in such things. At least he could not reduce his little private bill for such assistance below 1600l. He had, he said, positively paid out so much to those venal members of Congress, and had made nothing for himself to compensate him for his own exertions. When this president came to be examined, he admitted that he had really made no payments to members of Congress. His own capacity had been so great that no such ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... venal maxim of those who understand the nature of philosophic prudence. The worth of money is to be estimated by the number of real pleasures which it can procure: there are many which are not to be bought by gold;[110] these will ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... congregation, she can not act well her part in the family circle. As I listened to what was said here, the words called to my mind the image of a woman of America, known as a religious and moral teacher, who bears a name of which this nation will one day be proud, but now slandered by a venal press, scorned by an arrogant pulpit, little appreciated by the mass of men and women, for whom the bearer of it is laboring night and day. The image of that woman rose before me. The world regards her as a public woman, as out of her ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... formidable wizard! Antonia, the mother of seven children, is to be—like the unchaste vestal—immured! Oh Heaven! whilst Druso the Informer, receiving at the same time the portion of a prince for his venal treachery, will celebrate his union with Phaedera, amidst the shrieks and groans of his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... one place alone. The progress of judicial venality and of official venality would have kept pace with the progress of parliamentary venality. But nothing is more certain than that, while the legislature was becoming more and more venal, the courts of law and the public offices were becoming purer and purer. The representatives of the people were undoubtedly more mercenary in the days of Hardwicke and Pelham than in the days of the Tudors. But the Chancellors of the Tudors ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tribunes, and so it will be proved in almost every instance: the reason why the excess of power is more destructive when in the hands of the people is, that either they, by retaining the power in their own hands, exercise a demoralising despotism, or if they have become sufficient venal, they sell themselves to be ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... you pant for glory, If you sigh to live in story, If you burn with patriot zeal; Seize this bright, auspicious hour, Chase those venal tools of power, Who ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Soft were my numbers; who could take offence While pure description held the place of sense? Like gentle Fanny's was my flowery theme, A painted mistress, or a purling stream. Yet then did Gildon draw his venal quill;— I wished the man a dinner, and sat still. Yet then did Dennis rave in furious fret; I never answered—I was not in debt. If want provoked, or madness made them print, I waged no war with Bedlam ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... nature, which never betray their existence until the outward chord to which they vibrate in response sends its message to stir them. But was she not already pledged to that other,—that cold-blooded, contriving, venal, cynical, selfish, polished, fascinating man of the world, whose artful strategy would pass with nine women out of ten ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... left us no choice, they were to treat us as the lowest and vilest of all mercenaries,—if they were to send us far from the aid of our king and our suffering country, to squander us away in the most pestilential climates for a venal enlargement of their own territories, for the purpose of trucking them, when obtained, with those very robbers and murderers they had called upon us to oppose with our blood? What would be our sentiments, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... reward save such as may be reckoned in the number of palkis and pletnis (whips and lashes); sons, whether rich or poor, to be exposed to cavil, cunning, and vindictiveness, to the practices of gambling judges and a profligate soldiery, to a venal police, to fraudulent employes, themselves badly paid for service, but whose extortions and abuses always meet with approval, a single complaint against whom would expose the complainant to be sent through that hopeless ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... language and sentiment which becomes a free people, claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their Chief Magistrate. Let those flatter, who fear: it is not an American art. To give praise where it is not due, might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. They know, and will, therefore, say, that Kings are the servants, not the proprietors of the people. Open your breast, Sire, to liberal and expanded thought. Let not the name of George the Third be a blot on ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... precipice on which they are disporting! Debt is the prolific mother of folly and of crime; it taints the course of life in all its dreams. Hence so many unhappy marriages, so many prostituted pens, and venal politicians! It hath a small beginning, but a giant's growth and strength. When we make the monster we make our master, who haunts us at all hours, and shakes his whip of scorpions for ever in our sight. The ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... for his encroachments, but unfortunately for the nation, that the English parliament, at that period, was more corrupt, venal, base, and sycophantic than at any period under the Tudor kings, or at any subsequent period under the Hanoverian princes. The House of Commons made no indignant resistance; it sent up but few spirited remonstrances; but tamely acquiesced in the measures of ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... where there is the most and the finest beauty to be sold, how it is necessitated to have recourse to extrinsic means and other artifices to render itself charming, and yet, in truth, whatever it may do, being venal and public, it remains feeble and languishing. Even so in virtue itself, of two like effects, we notwithstanding look upon that as the fairest and most worthy, wherein the most trouble and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... express to the world what they had not in their own souls. They deified their light and Wandering affections, and were continually playing off the tremendous jest, alluded to above, of offering the features of some venal beauty to be enshrined in the holiest places. A deficiency of earnestness and absolute truth is generally discoverable in Italian pictures, after the art had become consummate. When you demand what is deepest, these painters have not wherewithal to respond. They substituted a keen ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... enough as a corrective in the days of hired advocates, and a bench sometimes venal, and often with a tenure that made it dependent, but is needless now. No conceivable motive but justice could ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... realization, and that is the secret of its vitality and power, and that is also what makes it so essentially different from that mystical and violent anarchism, which class prejudices or the exigencies of venal journalism assert is nothing but a consequence of socialism, while in fact it is ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... shocked that gentleman's prejudices.' This did not appear to me at that time quite the thing and this happened in the year 1794.—Twice has the iron entered my soul. Twice have the dastard, vaunting, venal Crew gone over it: once as they went forth, conquering and to conquer, with reason by their side, glittering like a falchion, trampling on prejudices and marching fearlessly on in the work of regeneration; once again when they returned with retrograde steps, like Cacus's oxen dragged backward ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... which the name of the owner of the bakery was set forth was added in smaller letters the words "Cafe Nuernberger." Gottlieb and Aunt Hedwig and the man who made the sign (this last, however, for the venal reason that more letters would be required) had stood out stoutly for the honest German "Kaffehaus;" but Minna, whose tastes were refined, had insisted upon the use of the French word: there was more style about it, she said. And this was a case in which style was wedded to substantial ...
— A Romance Of Tompkins Square - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... creditors being in general servants of the Company renders my task, on the part of the Company, difficult and invidious." "I have freed the sanction of this government from so corrupt a transaction. It is in my mind the most venal of all proceedings to give the Company's protection to debts that cannot bear the light; and though it appears exceedingly alarming, that a country on which you are to depend for resources should be so involved ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... about Milton's venal pen is no less false than his other gibes. The places of those who served the Commonwealth, were places of "hard work and short rations." Milton never received for his Defensio a sixpence beyond his official salary. It has indeed been asserted that he was paid 1000 l.. for it by order ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... indignantly. Did I think justice was to be bought in Switzerland? It was the law I had outraged, not an individual merely. Besides—money is all powerful in this venal country—how could I pay, a poor devil like me, the necessary price? what could I produce in cash on the nail? My bond would not be worth the paper it was ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... performers on the stage of the Theatre Francais, and to a multiplicity of other causes which it would be too tedious to discuss, or even to mention. Notwithstanding the encomiums daily lavished on the performers by the venal pen of newspaper writers, the truth is well known here on this subject. Endeavours are made by the government to repair the mischief by forming pupils; but how are they to be formed without good masters ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... him to the homes of decent, semi-educated families, and for such society he was altogether unfitted. The licence of the streets but seldom allured him. After his twenty-fourth year he was proof against the decoys of venal pleasure, and lived a life of asceticism exceedingly rare in young and lonely men. When Christian Moxey returned to London and took the house at Notting Hill, which he henceforth occupied together with his sister, a possibility of social intercourse at length appeared. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... debased, impure, spurious, alloyed, counterfeit; low-minded, unworthy, ignoble, mean, servile, groveling; despicable, discreditable, disgraceful, venal; plebeian, obscure, untitled, unhonored. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... to be a ball for the tenantry in the evening of the wedding-day, in a marquee on the lawn. The gardens were to be illuminated in a style worthy of the chateau of Vaux, when Fouquet was squandering a nation's revenues on lamps and fountains and venal friends. Lady Mabel protested against all ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... joined to superiority of talent, ignores the art of cringing; it is even impossible that merit can lead to fortune in a corrupted and venal country: on the contrary, it becomes a cause of exclusion. Virtue elevates the soul, and can neither fawn nor buy credit, nor flatter vice and incapacity. "If such is the military constitution of a State," says M. Gaubert, in his Treatise of Tactics, ...
— The Campaign of 1760 in Canada - A Narrative Attributed to Chevalier Johnstone • Chevalier Johnstone
... requires virtue to execute them. The Spanish sovereigns were more humane than their subjects, but the latter were ready with expedients for evading laws whose execution would have hindered their avaricious undertakings in the distant colonies, while venal officials lent their connivance to these violations, instead of administering the laws in the spirit in which their authors had conceived them. The statute books of the worst despotisms are adorned with the wisest and most liberal ordinances. From the irades of the Ottoman ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... of the wisdom of mankind. It is a story that will never grow old. That is why Charles Gould in his deep, dumb way has countenanced the Ribierist Mandate, the first public act that promised him safety on other than venal grounds. Ribierism has failed, as everything merely rational fails in this country. But Gould remains logical in wishing to save this big lot of silver. Decoud's plan of a counter-revolution may be practicable or not, it may have ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... harness, we shall receive her again as a sister, and recollect her wanderings among the crimes only of the parricide party, which would have basely sold what their fathers so bravely won from the same enemy. Let us look forward, then, to the act of repentance, which, by dismissing her venal traitors, shall be the signal of return to the bosom and to the principles of her brethren; and if her late humiliation can just give her modesty enough to suppose that her southern brethren are somewhat ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... conceited Cynic, he preferred darkness for his time of search, and a scanty and feeble light of his own carrying, to the bounteous assistance of the sun in heaven? How this might be with Diogenes, I know not; but assuredly thus it fares with our Reformers:—The Journal of some venal or factious scribbler is the black and smoky lantern they are guided by; and the sunshine spread over the face of a happy country is of no use in helping them to find any object they are in search of.—The plea of the degraded state of the Representation of Westmoreland has ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... temper to employ, so full was her heart of yearning pity for the hardly-used babe, and displeasure at the mother's weak selfishness. It was easier to forgive and forget Rosa's sins; to lessen, in the retrospect, her worst faults into foibles, than it would have been to overlook the more venal failings of one less mercurial, and whose personal fascinations did not ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... across each of the old vaulted windows. We arrived at the high portal of the ancient manor, a genuine Roman construction of Aurelius Aquensis—a gateway with a round arch: it was obstructed by hired cabs, by whole herds of venal donkeys saddled and bridled, and by holiday-makers of Baden in Sunday clothes preserved for ten or fifteen years. The old pile itself is transformed into a hostelry. Gray was wrong: the paths of glory lead not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... apply to * * * * to compose, or rather to compound, something very clever on my remarkable frugality; that I write to one of my most esteemed friends on this wretched paper, which was originally intended for the venal fist of some drunken exciseman, to take dirty notes in a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... and its equivalents a life-purpose—the aim and end of our earthly hopes—our service becomes idolatry, and a blight falls upon the nobler self. Money is the equivalent of what is venal,—of all that may be bought or sold; but the best, the godlike, the distinctively human, cannot be bought or sold. A rich man can buy a wife, but not a woman's love; he can buy books, but not an appreciative mind; he can buy a pew, but not a pure conscience; he can buy men's votes and flattery, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... the nominal leader," replied Dunkirk. "Roebuck is far too shrewd for that. No, he has put forward as the decoy my colleague, Croffut,—perhaps you know him? If so, I needn't tell you what a vain, shallow, venal fellow he is, with his gift of gab that ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... sincerely sympathize with you in all that you have suffered, and we consider the persecution with which you have been pursued by a venal Court and an imperious and uncharitable priesthood, as an illustrious proof of your personal merit, and a lasting reproach to that Government from the grasp of whose tyranny you are ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith |
