It might be the kindness he bore to his father, who is one of the schoolmaster's great cronies; it might be that secret sympathy which draws men of vagrant Propensities towards each other; for there is something truly magnetic in the vagabond feeling; or it might be, that he remembered the time when he himself had come back, like this youngster, a wreck, to his native place.
"Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists"
Washington Irving
As the superior excellence of these runs for fattening cattle is admitted on all hands, as compared with others more abundant in grass on the eastern side of the great range, would it not be advisable for the colonists to cultivate this salt-supplying bush, and thereby to produce a vegetable substitute for the rock salt, which is not only expensive, but only a very imperfect remedy for the clay-licking Propensities of sheep and cattle on many runs?
"Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia In Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria (1848) by Lt. Col. Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell Kt. D.C.L. (1792-1855) Surveyor-General of New South Wales"
Thomas Mitchell
As he felt a strong need to express, and had a happy facility in expressing his purest and brightest feelings, so he felt no shame in indulging, and knew no restraint in expressing, his coarsest Propensities and bitterest resentments: and he evidently regarded his worst moods no less than his best as legitimate material for his art.
"The Roman Poets of the Republic"
W. Y. Sellar