Broke

“ It was evident from the general tone of the whole party, that they had come to regard insolvency as the normal state of mankind, and the payment of debts as a disease that occasionally broke out. ”

“ Suddenly a blue rocket shot into the calm sky, and broke in a million glittering fragments over the camp; the deep roar of a cannon boomed out; and then the music of a thousand bands swelled high and full, and in an instant the whole plain was in motion, and the turf trembled beneath the tramp of marching men. Regiment followed regiment, squadron poured after squadron, as they descended the paths towards the beach; while a long, dark line wound through the glittering mass, and marked the train of the artillery, as with caissons and ammunition wagons they moved silently over the grassy surface. ”

“ Failing health, broken spirits, a very sad home, and many uncertainties are hard to bear, but I believe I could face them all better than the thought of ‘Brain bankruptcy.’ To draw on my intellect and get for answer ‘no assets’ would, I feel, overwhelm me utterly. ”

“ Upon all ordinary things, breakage comes as the climax of disaster; upon a select few, breakage comes as the climax of destiny. The fountain-pen that I hold in my hand—the pen with which, without so much as a change of nib, all my books have been written—will lie broken before me one of these days. ”

“ There was no court, no levee, no military parade, no ball, no opera. A small household of the Emperor’s chosen servants quietly kept house there. The gloomy walls re-echoed to no music; the dark alleys of the dreary garden seemed the very impersonation of solitude and decay. Nothing broke the dull monotony of the tiresome day, except when occasionally, near sunset, the clash of the guard would be heard turning out, and the clank of presenting arms, followed by the roll of a heavy carriage into the gloomy courtyard. ”

“ Together to roam from our drought-stricken home— It seems hard that such things have to be, And its hard on a “hogs” when he’s nought for a boss But a broken-down squatter like me! Chorus For the banks are all broken, they say, And the merchants are all up a tree. When the bigwigs are brought to the Bankruptcy Court, What chance for a squatter like me. No more shall we muster the river for fats, Or spiel on the Fifteen-mile plain, Or rip through the scrub by the light of the moon, Or see the old stockyard again. ”

“ The Verneys who hold the barony of Willoughby de Broke descend from the Rev. Robert Barnard, prebendary of Winchester, who married in 1793 the Hon. Louisa Verney Peyto, daughter of John Peyto, 14th Baron Willoughby de Broke, and co-heiress of her brother Henry, 16th baron. The Peytos inherited the Verney estates in Warwickshire through Margaret Greville (d. 1631) , sister and heiress of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (q.v.) , who married Sir Richard Verney of Compton Murdac, Warwickshire. ”

“ The rich are damned, beyond all cure, To taunt, and starve, and trample on The weak and wretched; and the poor Damn their broken hearts to endure 235 Stripe on stripe, with groan on groan. 19. Sometimes the poor are damned indeed To take,—not means for being blessed,— But Cobbett's snuff, revenge ”

“ Breakage is a bad dream. To dream of breaking any of your limbs, denotes bad management and probable failures. To break furniture, denotes domestic quarrels and an unquiet state of the mind.
To break a window, signifies bereavement. To see a broken ring order will be displaced by furious and dangerous uprisings, such as jealous contentions often cause. ”

“ We watch the poor old broken-down merchant, who has impoverished himself to provide his daughters' dowries, and has gradually stripped himself, first of comfort, and then of the necessaries of life to satisfy the demands of their folly and luxury, as222 we might watch a man clinging to the edge of a cliff and gradually dropping lower and lower, catching feebly at every point of support till his strength is exhausted, and the inevitable catastrophe follows. ”

“ The column moves on, and already reaches the middle of the bridge, when eighteen guns throw their fire into it: the blue smoke rolls down the rocky heights and settles on the bridge, broken here and there by flashes, like the forked gleam of lightning; the cloud passes oyer; the bridge is empty, save of dead and dying: the Grenadiers of the Guard are no more! ”

“ Oh! what a gift is beauty, and how powerful its influence, when strengthened by the rich eloquence of a spotless nature, beaming from beneath long-lashed lids, when two men like these, seared and hardened by the world's ills—broken on the wheel of fortune—should feel a glow of long-forgotten gladness in their chilled hearts as they looked upon her? ”

“ Parting with life inch by inch; enduring days of mortal agony, till the overburthened soul, cursing its Maker, dies despairing. I took out my pocket-book, to pencil a short note to the owner of my wretched home, begging her to accept my small stock of worldly goods as a remuneration for her slight pecuniary loss, when, as I opened it to tear from it a leaf, a letter fell upon the ground. ”

“ Till, desperate, he staked all on one cast,
And lost—was ruined—and fell down as slain,
Life, fortune, seeming at a moment past,
Like gambling pledges raked from Earth's rich hoard
By Death's strong hand, whose gains are ne'er restored. ”

“ The poor victim with an empty pocket book, and finding his hopes and dreams of great wealth all shattered, frequently the battle ended in a tragedy. The stories of those days, as sometimes related by the pioneers, are sad indeed. ”

“ Though now to Death I yield, and am his due, All that of me can die, yet, that debt paid, Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave His prey, nor suffer my unspotted soul For ever with corruption there to dwell ”

“ Here is the home of many a human wreck, cast upon the shores of mental oblivion in the strenuous struggle of life—the man who, during the gold fever of '49, found fortune to lose all else, he who sacrificed everything and gained nothing, and hundreds of others, men and women, who have proved unequal to the strain on nerve and brain imposed by the stress of an unkindly Fate. ”

“ They cry: Stand, stand, but there is none that will return back.
9 Take ye the spoil of the silver, take the spoil of the gold: for there is no end of the riches of all the precious furniture.
10 She is destroyed, and rent, and torn: the heart melteth, and the knees fail, and all the loins lose their strength: and the faces of them all are as the blackness of a kettle. ”

“ Some were crowding with sharp, eager faces round a rag merchant, bargaining with the most absorbing passion for his wretched wares, and then separating to quarrel and fight over their purchases, or bartering their rags again as eagerly for a draught of the intoxicating drinks which had made so many of them the lost creatures they were. Not a rag or a burning drop was to be had except for money, and often for a price which to them was life itself. ”

“ The debt of the borrower loads his heart, cramps his hands, and dulls his labour. The gain of the lender hardens his heart, fouls his brain, and puts every means of mischief into his otherwise clumsy and artless hands. ”

“ Not only sobs and sighs, but moaning and beating of little fists together, and outcries of soul-felt agony stifled against the bedside, and temples pressed into knitted palms, because of one who "sought not to be acquainted," but offered money—money!—in pity to a poor—shame on her for saying that!—a poor nigresse. ”

“ Ah, hold! the heart is prone to fall away,
⁠Her high and cherished visions to forget,
And if thou takest, how wilt thou repay
⁠So vast, so dread a debt?
How will the heart, which now thou trustest, then
⁠Corrupt, yet in corruption mindful yet,
Turn with sharp stings upon itself! ”

“ And though it may seem strange to you that one in the terrible position in which I am situated, should find a difference between one disgrace and another, still I frankly admit that the folly of throwing away all this money on you, and letting you squander my fortune to your own hurt as well as to mine, gives to me and in my eyes a note of common profligacy to my bankruptcy that makes me doubly ashamed of it. ”

“ Peers were impoverished, and estates mortgaged, in a single night, and the men who had entered the room in a state of affluence, rushed madly into the streets at night, penniless, and probably in debt to a large amount. ”

“ Go to, now, ye rich men, weep, and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. ”

“ Staggering under a load of debt and labour, tracked by bailiffs and reproachful creditors, running from a hundred poor dependants, whose appealing looks were perhaps the hardest of all pains for him to bear, devising fevered plans for the morrow, new histories, new comedies, all sorts of new literary schemes, flying from all these into seclusion, and out of seclusion into pleasure—at last, at five and forty, death seized him and closed his career. ”

“ But whether there was scarcity or plenty, the failures went on with a continuous ruin that nothing could check, while our larger economic life proceeded in a series of violent shocks, which we called financial panics, followed by long periods of exhaustion and recuperation. ”

“ There is a general rustle and turning away of faces, stooping forward, a marking of paper, and the four fatal rakes begin sweeping in greedily gold and notes and silver—all in confusion, a perfect rabble—while, this fatal work over, two skilful hands begin to spout money, as it were, to the ends of the earth. ”

“ And what is worse than all, you plunder and are grasping, not impelled to it by poverty, without any hunger to necessitate you, but that your horse’s bridle may be spattered over with gold enough, or the ceiling of your house, or the capitals of your pillars. ”

“ Is not the miser's hidden treasure like this deep well, where, thanks to his obstinate and courageous savings, riches accumulate drop by drop, forming a reservoir from which may spring luxury, splendors, magnificence and prodigalities of all sorts? ”

“ And how we sorrow over our losses – losses which fall heavily upon us, and yet seem still more heavy! And finally, though Fortune may leave our property intact, whatever we cannot gain in addition, is sheer loss! ”

“ It was in one of these moments as, rising high in his stirrups, he bore down upon the unflinching ranks of the British infantry, the shrill whistle of a ball strewed the leaves upon the roadside, the exulting shout of a Guerilla followed it, and the same instant Lefebvre fell forward upon his horse’s mane, a deluge of blood bursting from his bosom. A broken cry escaped his lips,—a last effort to cheer on his men; his noble charger galloped forward between our squares, bearing to us our prisoner, the corpse of his rider. ”

“ Into the vacuum of wasted life rush the moaning winds of grief and desolation; in to the vacuum of wasted property rushes the goblin of debt. The wasted life is transformed at length into a reminiscent glory; the wasted property becomes a hideous nightmare. The heroes fallen rise from their bloody cerements into everlasting fame ”

“ My gold has opened a way for me and wheresoever I have beheld greed in the most execrable forms, sometimes hypocritical, sometimes shameless, sometimes cruel, fatten on the dead organism, like a vulture on a corpse, I have asked myself—why was there not, festering in its vitals, the corruption, the ptomaine, the poison of the tombs, to kill the foul bird? ”

“ It is very hard, when they have disposed of their wares, and begin to enjoy the lightness of their load, and the goodly look of the gold and silver they carry in their bosoms, to be stopped in the dark and robbed, or to wake in the morning and find their pouch as empty as their packs. ”

“ Our mill was grinding mortgages.
I do not expect that any one will say that this course was justified or justifiable; but, if anything can excuse it, the terrible difficulty of our position ought to be considered in mitigation, if not excuse. Pressed upon from without, and wounded by blows dealt in the dark from within; with dreadful failure threatening, and with brilliant success, and the averting of wide-spread calamity as the reward of only a little delay, we used the only expedient at hand, and fought the battle through. ”

“ So, once more, with redoubled energy, we resumed our tense, unremitting round of toil. Now, however, it was vastly different. Every bucket of dirt meant money in our pockets, every stroke of the pick a dollar. Not that it was all like the first rich pocket we had struck. It proved a most erratic and puzzling paystreak—one day rich beyond our dreams, another too poor to pay for the panning. We swung on a pendulum of hope and despair. ”

“ We go a-groaning of our aches, of damaged feet or backs, and nearly all our pains are fakes, when we come down to tacks. We talk about financial ills when we have coin to burn—and if we wish for dollar bills, there’s lots of them to earn. We cherish every little grief, when we should blithely smile; and if a woe’s by nature brief, we string it out a mile. ”

“ Then the lights go out, the voices stop, and only the dark tumultuous streets surround us, and the grime of life is ours again. Whereupon we go heavily to hard beds of despair, having eaten the cake we bought, and now must pay for unto Penalty, the dark inordinate creditor. And anon the morning comes, and then, at last, the evening when the triste bazaars open again, and the strong of heart and nerve move not from their doorways, but sit still in the dusk to watch the grim world go by. ”

“ The day that succeeded this disaster, was memorable for the rebuke it gave the rapacious longing for wealth. Men who had set their hearts on gold, and who prided themselves on their possession, and on that only, were made to feel its insanity; and they who had walked abroad as gods, so lately, began to experience how utterly insignificant are the merely rich, when stripped of their possessions. ”