ne'er-do-well

The ne'er-do-well blew, like seed before the wind, to distant places, but mankind at large stayed at home.

He's a chap named Hyson, the local ne'er-do-well, who was almost starving when Mr. Glenthorpe came to the district.

A gambler probably; a ne'er-do-well certainly; and one to break his mother's heart in the end.

Here was a means of at once swelling the man-power of his country and ridding himself of a pestilent ne'er-do-well.

Some of his neighbors pity him as a ne'er-do-well, while others devoutly attribute to him a sort of superhuman faculty.