Word: varlets
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...their lives been governed by the polity of this resonant sentiment were amazed at the impotent efforts of that angry septuagenarian, Viscount Gladstone, and his elder brother, Henry N. Gladstone, to refute the slurs cast upon the name of the celebrated statesman, their late father, by "an insolent varlet, a professional mud-spatterer, a cowardly bootlicker" named Captain Peter Wright in his recent book, Portraits and Criticisms (TIME, Aug. 3, COMMONWEALTH). "Why don't they sue the stinking reptile?" such people have exclaimed in the vehemence of their sympathy. "Why don't they put their foot...
...That he wound up in the Catholic Church argues, perhaps, a retarded outcropping of his Puritanical upbringing ; perhaps one last hypocrisy to ensure comfort in old age. The rhetorical, mock-modest manner of his memoirs, which he published to a wide audience in 1811, indicate the complete hypocrite -a varlet of guile and gusto to whom a naive generation quite naturally credited unnatural sins and the comradeship of Satan. Poet Frost, in a preface to the reissued memoirs, would place Burroughs beside Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin to complete the evidence that our young country grew all kinds of fine...