peculate

It would appear that many charges of the biographers were made upon the authority of a peculating servant whom Bront� had angered by dismissal.

He was once the Shah’s Prime Minister: he peculated, and was disgraced.

He is coarse, uneducated, and vulgar; he never picked up any semblance of the class from whom he peculated; and has lived on, as he began, a "low comedy villain," and no more.

He knows how pedants hoodwink people, how priests act the hypocrite, how physicians act the rake, how lawyers peculate.

Or shall I tell him the story of Davoust at Hamburg, when the Syndicate accused him of peculating, and mentioned some millions that he had abstracted from the treasury.