Citations:scapegrace

English citations of scapegrace

1. • 1840, Washington Irving, Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography,

     The next that Goldsmith heard of the poor shifting scapegrace, he was on his deathbed, starving with want, upon which, forgetting or forgiving the trick he had played upon him, he sent him a guinea.

   • 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables,

     According to this version of the story, Judge Pyncheon, exemplary as we have portrayed him in our narrative, was, in his youth, an apparently irreclaimable scapegrace.

   • 1885, Richard Francis Burton (translator), The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night,

     But, as Alaeddin was a scapegrace and a ne'er-do-well and wont to play at all times with the gutter boys of the quarter, he would not sit in the shop for a single day; ...

   • 1887, Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost,

     The Minister could not help smiling at the handsome young scapegrace, and was a good deal touched at his devotion to Virginia, so leaning down from his horse, he patted him kindly on the shoulders, and said, 'Well, Cecil, if you won't go back I suppose you must come with me, but I must get you a hat at Ascot.'

   • 1893, Ambrose Bierce, A Baby Tramp, in Can Such Things Be?,

     She married in Boston a young scapegrace named Parlow, and like a good Brownon brought him to Blackburg forthwith and made a man and a town councillor of him.

   • 1911, Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de, article in 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica,

     He at once began love-making, and in spite of his ugliness succeeded in winning the heart of the lady to whom his colonel was attached; this led to such scandal that his father obtained a lettre de cachet, and the young scapegrace was imprisoned in the isle of Ré.

   • 1931, Frank Wadleigh Chandler (editor), Modern Continental Playwrights,

     Still another scapegrace, in The Love Potion, is tutor in the family of a Russian count, and, posing as magician, plays upon his master's credulity ...

   • 1992, Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright, translating Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, Folio Society 2005, p. 148:

     And this lad, who was rightly regarded as a scapegrace, was so abounding in that spirit which had served to decorate the porch of Saint-André-des-Champs [...], that when he bent down to raise my aunt's head from her pillow, he wore the same naïve and zealous mien as the little angels in the bas-reliefs [...].