peculator

• “The conflict was carried through in a mood sometimes of brutish irritability and sometimes of lax slovenliness, the merry peculator plied his trade congenially in that asinine squabble, and behind these fooleries and masked by them, marched Fate — until at last the clowning of the booth opened and revealed — hunger and suffering, brands burning and swords and shame ....”

  In the Days of the Comet

• “The honest, respectable wife of a noted local citizen, or a thoroughly disreputable peculator like yourself?”

  The Time of the Transference

• “It is, at any rate, something in his favour that he remained in office till his death, unless he was kept there on the principle of setting a peculator to catch a peculator.”

  The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1

• “Among the former were Gregory, the primicerius of the Roman Church, a shameless peculator; his brother Stephen, the secundicerius, as deep in crime as himself, and his infamous son-in-law, the murderer and adulterer, George of the Aventine.”

  The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 8: Infamy-Lapparent

• “Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Vergil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate.”

  A Defence of Poetry

• “The conflict was carried through in a mood sometimes of brutish irritability and sometimes of lax slovenliness, the merry peculator plied his trade congenially in that asinine squabble, and behind these fooleries and masked by them, marched Fate -- until at last the clowning of the booth opened and revealed -- hunger and suffering, brands burning and swords and shame ....”

  In the Days of the Comet

• “One of these victims, questioned by Virgil, acknowledges he once held office in Navarre, but, rather than suffer at the hands of the demon tormentors, this peculator voluntarily plunges back into the pitch.”

  The Book of the Epic

• “As a fact, those knaves, by their extravagance, had pushed him to ruin and compelled him to do things for which he was indicted as a peculator.”

  The Queen Pedauque

• “He was notoriously poor; he was no less notoriously honest; it was perfectly certain that, in an age when a successful politician was for the most part a peculator, no shilling of public money had ever stuck to Pitt's fingers.”

  A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4)

• “I have seen her too, and I think that her image might be set up in the Stoa as a happy impersonation of the severest virtue: and yet children generally resemble their parents, and her father was the veriest peculator and the most cunning rascal that ever came in my way, and was sent off to the gold-mines for very sufficient reasons.”

  The Sisters — Volume 3

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