United States or Indonesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The stress of the times had told on Raphael; he was thirty-five, rich beyond all Umbrian dreams of avarice, on an equality with the greatest and noblest men of his time, honored above all other living artists. But life began to pall; he had won all and thereby had learned the worthlessness of what the world has to offer. Dreams of rest, of love and a quiet country home, came to him.
It was against such deep-seated habits of thought that Odo had to struggle. Centuries of fierce individualism, or of sullen apathy under a foreign rule, had left the Italians incapable of any concerted political action; but suspicion, avarice and vanity, combined with a lurking fear of the Church, united all parties in a kind of passive opposition to reform.
The sums of gold and silver, which had been painfully collected, or liberally transmitted, for the payment of the troops, were intercepted by the avarice of the commanders; discharges, or, at least, exemptions, from the military service, were publicly sold; the distress of the soldiers, who were injuriously deprived of their legal and scanty subsistence, provoked them to frequent desertion; the nerves of discipline were relaxed, and the highways were infested with robbers.
This is a discordant world: even vices will not always pull the same way. Here was a sinister villain distracted between avarice and revenge, and sore puzzled which way to turn. Of course he could expose the real parentage of Mary Bartley, and put both Bartley and Hope to shame, and then the Cliffords would make Bartley disgorge the £20,000.
The whole air and attitude of the form was one of stealthy cat-like obsequiousness; the whole expression of the face was concentrated in a wrinkled leer, compounded of cunning, lecherousness, slyness, and avarice.
The graces of earth, the virtues of heaven, were made to minister to the lust, and to conceal the demon behind the brightness and the beauty of their forms. There is no limit to the moral baseness of the man of avarice. There was none with Mr Clayton. He lived to accumulate.
His ardor was quickened by the desire of grasping the virgin treasures of Ecbatana, a well-known name, under which the Byzantine writer has concealed the capital of the Abbassides. The consternation of the fugitives had already diffused the terror of his name; but the fancied riches of Bagdad had already been dissipated by the avarice and prodigality of domestic tyrants.
Even the high standard of sexual morality which prevails in the country is attacked as being merely the result of early marriages, inculcated by a priesthood thirsting for marriage fees, and virtue itself is in this way depicted as being nothing but the bye-product of grasping avarice.
I see vultures, harpies, ravens, cormorants, and, among many other feathered creatures, several little winged boys, that perch in great numbers upon the middle arches. These, said the genius, are envy, avarice, superstition, despair, love, with the like cares and passions that infest human life.
"There are authors," he says, "who crave the privileges of authors, and who for that purpose point out the power of the melodrama. They speak of the niece of Corneille, begging at the door of a theatre which the works of her uncle had enriched.... To satisfy the avarice of literary people, it would be necessary to create literary majorats, and make a whole code of exceptions."
Word Of The Day