Beggary

Poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice.

Happily some haplesse man hath conscience, And for his conscience lives in beggary.

Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail And say there is no sin but to be rich; And being rich, my virtue then shall be To say there is no vice but beggary.

1782, Frances Burney, Cecilia, London: T. Payne & Son and T. Cadell, Volume I, Book I, Chapter 9, p. 128, […] she does not come hither as a beggar, however well the state of beggary may accord with her poverty: she only sollicits the payment of a bill […]

The matter to be decided involved, in addition to the personal risks of life and liberty, the probable forfeiture of an immense estate, and the beggary, in consequence, of an only and beloved daughter.

There was, clearly, no future for him but beggary and a death in the workhouse.

[…] the landlady […] ushered them into a large garret where twenty or thirty people of all ages and both sexes lay and dozed away the day, choosing the evening and night for their trades of beggary, thieving, or prostitution.

[…] perhaps he would abandon beggary when there was no poor fool about to beg from.

[…] she looked back to the freedom and the beggary of the old studio in Soho with so much regret, that everybody, herself included, fancied she was consumed with grief for her father.

beggary counterfeits