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More "Degenerate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great-great-grandmother. It was currently reported that every forest had one within its precincts, who ruled over the woodmen, and exacted tribute from them in the shape of little blocks of wood ready hewn for the fire of his underground palace,—such blocks as are bought at shops in these degenerate days, and ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... was murdered in his own cathedral, to which we shall hereafter refer at length. The comparison will impress us with the difference between religion and superstition, between the purity of primitive Christian worship, and the unhappy corruptions of a degenerate age. "To God and the Blessed Mary, and Saint Dionysius, and the holy patrons of this Church, I commend ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... my adored master! O greatest of kings, greatest in valour, in virtue, in wisdom, with what indignation must thy soul, enthroned in heaven, have looked down on thy unworthy, thy degenerate daughter! With what shame must thou have seen her rambling about from court to court deprived of her royal dignity, debased into a pedant, a witling, a smatterer in sculpture and painting, reduced to beg or buy flattery from each needy rhetorician or hireling poet! I weep ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... sole takes place, and the arch of the sole bends down under the pressure until the ground surface of the hoof becomes flat or convex, bulging down even lower than the cruel iron that clamps its edge. This is the condition of a drop sole. This degenerate state of the foot has other complications. Active inflammation is often present and all the wretchedness of a pumiced foot—the despair of owner and veterinary—is experienced. The smith, whose clumsy contrivance has been the cause of all the ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... of all trouble, when these two interests came into ill-tempered controversy, was the conduct of the coureurs de bois. These roving traders taught the savages all the vices of French civilization in its most degenerate days. They debauched the Indian with brandy, swindled him out of his furs, and entered into illicit relations with the women of the tribes. They managed in general to convince the aborigines that all Frenchmen were dishonest and licentious. That the representatives of the Most Christian King should ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... it verified my own judgment. While it might be true, as Miss West had said, that every ship's crew contained several lunatics and idiots, it was a foregone conclusion that our crew contained far more than several. In fact, and as it was to turn out, our crew, even in these degenerate sailing days, was an unusual crew in so far as its helplessness and ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... aisle a slender mother was holding a crying baby, two small children huddling beside her. In the seat in front of him slouched a mulatto of the new era—the degenerate descendant of two races that mix only to decay. Further off there were several men returning from business trips, and across from them sat a pretty girl, asleep, her hand resting on a gilded cage containing a startled canary. At intervals she ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... the first glance to invest it, and takes rank, without any straining, among the other processes of selection. It seems to me that, from the facts that sterile animal forms can adapt themselves to new vital functions, their superfluous parts degenerate, and the parts more used adapt themselves in an ascending direction, those less used in a descending direction, we must draw the conclusion that harmonious adaptation here comes about without the cooeperation of the Lamarckian principle. This ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... class is liable to the peculiar illusion of overesteeming the sanctity of its ancestral creed. It is as much our duty to beware of this illusion, as of any other. All know how easily our patriotism may degenerate into an unjust repugnance to foreigners, and that the more intense it is, the greater the need of antagonistic principles. So also, the real excellencies of our religion may only so much the more rivet us in a wrong aversion to those who do not acknowledge its authority ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... That is the Hellenic work of the degenerate Greeks in Italy: all that was to be seen ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... observed Green, "that we should be spending our energies on the West and East Coasts of Africa, and all the time that these degenerate descendants of Spaniards out here in the Pacific should be endeavouring to drag our fellow-creatures into a far worse slavery than the Africans have to endure. These poor islanders, accustomed to the perfect freedom of the breezes of the ocean, must perish miserably in the course ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... application of an old idea. All down the centuries, whatever their varying phases of cosmogonic thought, there had been ever present the idea that past times were not as recent times; that in remote epochs the earth had been the scene of awful catastrophes that have no parallel in "these degenerate days." Naturally enough, this thought, embalmed in every cosmogonic speculation of whatever origin, was appealed to in explanation of the destruction of these hitherto unimagined hosts, which now, thanks to science, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of to-day is the degenerate son of the conquering warriors of a thousand years ago. Once his name carried terror to the shores of the Midland Sea. Now those who do not like him can say with some truth that he lives the life of an animal, mating rather than marrying, his warlike spirit ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... forest and the tangle of the degenerate apple-trees they could see the concrete walls, with here or there a bit of white still gleaming through the enlacements of ancient vines that had enveloped the whole structure—woodbine, ivy, wisterias, and the maddest jungle ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the proud delight of living, in these degenerate times, to see it. As if I were the hero of some high achievement! The light in the doleful vaults was typical of the light that has streamed in, on all persecution in God's name, but which is not yet at its noon! It can not look more lovely to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... naught remains but an ill-conducted herd of stunted, torpid creatures, limited to their daily wants and animal instincts, indifferent to the public welfare and to their own prospective interests, so degenerate as to have lost sight of their own discoveries, unlearned their own sciences, arts and industries, and, in short, and worse than all, base, false, corrupted souls entirely wanting in honor and conscience. Nothing ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... will grow out of her little heretic prejudices, and learn to love her mother's staunch friends, the champions of Holy Church, and the representatives of true knighthood in these degenerate days. Ah, child! couldst thou but see a true Spanish caballero, or again, could I but show thee my noble cousin of Guise, then wouldst thou know how to rate these gross clownish English mastiffs who now turn thy silly little brain. ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the curious observation that the beavers of the present day seem to be a degenerate race, as they neither fell huge trees not construct great dams, while their progenitors cut down trees two feet in diameter and dammed up rivers a hundred feet in width. The change in the habits of the beaver is probably due to the diminution ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... to roam in undisputed possession of the forest, and lead an indolent life. Of course I do not assign this as a valid reason for their not being identified with the Mound-builders. An ancient race may have a degenerate offspring. ...
— Mound-Builders • William J. Smyth
... stamp-boxes, penknives, gold toothpicks, thermometers, and what not—that within twenty-four hours after he had donned new clothes all the artistic merits of the garments were obliterated; they were, from every point of view, hopelessly degenerate. ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... accuracy, patience, and perseverance by long scientific research; and at the moment when I ought to find them useful as philosophers, as seekers after eternal Truth, as lovers of imperishable Wisdom, they degenerate into seekers after eyes and hair and cheeks, and I know not what nonsense, lovers of frail, perishable women, who appear to preserve an astonishing longevity on purpose to plague and thwart ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... And many a flower and medicinal weed— Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys. At ninety—six I had lived enough, that is all, And passed to a sweet repose. What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, Anger, discontent and drooping hopes? Degenerate sons and daughters, Life is too strong for you— It takes life to ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... beginning of this stage, and the air can not enter the air cells. This period lasts several days. Resolution marks the beginning of recovery or convalescence. Toward the end of the second period, the inflammatory exudate in the air cells has begun to degenerate. In the last stage, these exudates undergo liquefaction and are absorbed, or expelled by coughing, in from seven days to two weeks, depending on the extent of the inflammation and the ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... particular reference to Basque women, in which I maintained that they sacrificed natural kindliness and sympathy on the altars of honour and religion, whereupon the Daughters of Mary of San Sebastian made answer, charging that I was a degenerate son of their city, who had robbed them of their honour, which was absolutely contrary to the fact. In passing, they suggested to the editor of the Nuevo Mundo that he should not permit me to write again ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... young men live together: one endeavoring by the aid of religion, and by studying the wisdom of the past, to exalt and purify his fallen nature; the other by grovelling in the dust, and mingling with beings yet more sinful and degraded, rapidly debased his mind to a more degenerate and ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... opinion of many grave divines concerning the gospel's fleeting westward. Sometimes I have had such thoughts, Why may not that be the place of the New Jerusalem? But you have handsomely and fully cleared me from such odd conceits. But what, I pray? Shall our English there degenerate, and join themselves with Gog and Magog? We have heard lately divers ways, that our people there have no hope of the conversion of the natives. And, the very week after I received your last letter, I saw a letter, written from New England, discoursing ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... degenerate. His removal may have been desirable. But not even in Dahomey could it have been accomplished with more repulsive savagery. And the Russian Minister, whose house was opposite the Konak, calmly watched the events ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... How exceedingly dissimilar in style are the Revelation of S. John and the Gospel of S. John! Moreover, practically, the promised remarks on "style," when the Authorship of some portion of Scripture is to be discussed, are commonly observed to degenerate at once into what is really quite a different thing. Single words, perhaps some short phrase, is appealed to, which (it is said) does not recur in any part of the same book; and thence it is argued that the Author can no longer be ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... too glad to consent to it," he said, "is the sodden depravity of that Floud chap. Really he's a menace to the community. I saw from the degenerate leer on his face this morning that he will not be able to keep silent about that little affair of ours back there. Mark my words, he'll talk. And fancy how embarrassing had you continued in the office for which ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... ensued owes its historical significance wholly to the fact that it illustrated conspicuously, and in more than one detail, the degenerate condition of the official staff of the British navy; the demoralization of ideals, and the low average of professional competency.[3] That there was plenty of good metal was also shown, but the proportion of alloy was dangerously great. That the machinery of the organization was likewise ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... very brave man himself, said now in great anger: The more base and degenerate in you to take such means for her as you have done, and leave her on such slight conditions.' Then turning to Valentine, he said: 'I do applaud your spirit Valentine, and think you worthy of an empress's love. You shall have Silvia, for you have well deserved her.' Valentine ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... emptying thy store of ballads, Grete: so much shall be said of thee. Yes; times are changeing: We're growing degenerate. Look at the men of Linz now to what they were! Would they have let the lads of Andernach float down cabbage-stalks to them without a shy back? And why? All because they funk that brigand-beast Werner, who gets ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sort, had represented herself as a sister of my own to whom a maternal uncle had left a fabulous fortune. She herself had suggested her being sheltered under my aunt's roof as a singularly welcome "paying guest." She herself, too, had suggested the visit to Paris and had hired the house from a degenerate Duc de Luynes who preferred the delights of an appartement in the ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... refer to ancient history, and to the writings of Xenophon, Cicero, Horace, or Virgil, for evidence of the value they have all attached to the encouragement of manly, active, and hardy pursuits, and the evils produced by a degenerate and effeminate life on the manners and characters of a people (cheers). Many of the most eminent literary characters of this and of other countries have been ardently attached to field sports; and who, that has experienced ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... an interesting way with this ennoblement of life that is the mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodox code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Luttrell came over for the day; he was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of veal soup. I took him aside, and reasoned the matter with him, but in vain; to speak the truth, Luttrell is not steady in his judgments on dishes. Individual failures with him soon degenerate into generic objections, till, by some fortunate accident, he eats himself into better opinions. A person of more calm reflection thinks not only of what he is consuming at the moment, but of the soups of the same kind he has met with ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... For ME, degenerate, modern wretch, Though in the genial month of May, My dripping limbs I faintly stretch, And think I've done a ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... So fleet and fierce and strong are these Who limb them as their fancies please. Away with grief and sad surmise That mar the noblest enterprise, And with their weak suspicion blight The sage's plan, the hero's might. Come, this degenerate weakness spurn, And bid thy dauntless heart return, For each fair hope by grief is crossed When those we love are dead or lost. Arise, O best of those who know, Arm for the giant's overthrow. None in the triple world I see Who in the fight may equal thee; None who before ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... delivering a very high note. Tenors sometimes reach for their high notes with their arms and legs, and if the high note comes out all right, we forget the effort in the thrill over the result, provided effort does not degenerate into contortion. Similarly in an unusually powerful, explosive fortissimo, a momentary use of pure abdominal breathing may be excusable. But these are exceptions that prove the rule, and very rare exceptions they ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... of college, Those liberal helluos of knowledge, Who, e'en in these degenerate days, Deserve the world's unceasing praise; Who, friends of science and of men, Stand forth Gomorrah's righteous ten; On them I naught but thanks bestow, For, like my cash, my credit's low; So I can give nor clothes nor wines, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... the extent of the Union gives it the most palpable advantage. The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other ...
— The Federalist Papers
... ways would be studied. The science of evasion, already tolerably understood, would then be brought to the greatest perfection. It is no inconsiderable part of wisdom, to know how much of an evil ought to be tolerated; lest, by attempting a degree of purity impracticable in degenerate times and manners, instead of cutting off the subsisting ill practices, new corruptions might be produced for the concealment and security of the old. It were better, undoubtedly, that no influence at all could affect the mind of a Member of Parliament. But ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... almost poison to an entirely different and lower order of human beings. The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk. There are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health according as ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... not space to follow M. Thierry in his account of the progress and fall of that strange Gaulish kingdom of Galatia. From the year 241 to the year 190 B.C., it maintained its independence unshaken, amidst the degenerate sons of Greece and the effeminate Asiatics. But the Roman power, beneath which the Gaulish race was ever doomed to bend, overtook them even amidst the mountains of Asia Minor. The Galatians had furnished ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... divine succour, anxious to sublime his nature by disengaging it from worldly soil, and prompt to sympathise with the sorrows, and out of his scanty means, to relieve the necessities of others; but such is the imperfection of man, that his piety was apt to degenerate into superstition; his abstinence yielded to slight temptations, and his charity was often not proof against a discrepancy of opinion either ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... personal corruption or of sordidly interested motives. His great private wealth enabled him the other day to find bail, at a moment's notice, to the amount of L40,000. On the other hand, his enemies diagnose him after the manner of Lombroso, and find him to be a degenerate and an epileptic, ungovernably irritable, vain, mendacious, arrogant, sometimes quite irresponsible for his actions. A really strong man he can scarcely be; scarcely a man of true political insight, else he would not have tried to play the despot with no plausible ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... of his sister and her husband. But I must not distress you with sordid details. Suffice it to say, I turned at last like the proverbial worm. I applied for a divorce ten months ago. It was granted, provisionally as I say. He is a degenerate. He was unfaithful to me in every sense of the word. But in spite of all that, the court in granting me the separation, took occasion to placate national honour by giving him the child during the year, pending the final disposition of the case. Of course, everything depends ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... lamented in vain their misfortune and decline. The reign of Philip IV. was the most disastrous in the annals of the country. The Catalan insurrection, the loss of Jamaica, the Low Countries, and Portugal, were the results of his misrule and imbecility. So rapidly did Spain degenerate, that, upon the close of the Austrian dynasty, with all the natural advantages of the country, the best harbors and sea-coast in Europe, the richest soil, and the finest climate, and with the possession of the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Sarawak River, where the Borneo Company, whose guest I was, have a gold mine (the clay being treated by the "cyanide" process), I collected specimens for some time in the beautiful forests at the foot of the limestone mountains of Poak. Here I saw something of the Land Dayaks, but they are a poor degenerate breed, and not to be compared to the Sea Dayaks, who are born fighters, and whose predatory head-hunting instincts give a great deal of trouble to the government. These latter were the Dayaks I was anxious to meet, and I soon made arrangements to visit their country, which is a good way from Kuching, ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... birth-rate of their own country that they have in view; for they are "patriots," which means that the fall of the birth-rate in all other countries but their own is a source of much gratification. "Woe to us," they exclaim in effect, "if we follow the example of these wicked and degenerate peoples! Our nation needs men. We have to populate the earth and to carry the blessings of our civilised culture all over the world. In executing that high mission we cannot have too much cannon-fodder in defending ourselves ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... were, of course, aware that in the insect world the ocelli served the same purpose that the degenerate pituitary body once served ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... the propriety of this order of things, yet we would not have you imagine that we underestimate the value of a respectable lineage, but it is better to be the originator of a great family than to be the degenerate descendant of one. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... very wise—than to be warm and dry, and dull, and dead-alive, in the most comfortable office. And Wick itself had in those days a note of originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate times, for an hour and a half upon the clock. The gipsies must be gone from their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the women tending their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off their coarse ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are on a wrong tack there. There is nothing weak-minded or degenerate about Miss Howard. She is an excellent specimen of well-balanced English beef and brawn. She is ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... to reply to the charge of mordacity. It has ever been the privilege of wits to satirize the life of society with impunity, provided that licence does not degenerate into frenzy. Wherefore the more do I marvel at the fastidiousness of men's ears in these times, who by now can scarce endure anything but solemn appellations. Further, we see some men so perversely religious that they will suffer the most hideous revilings against ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... is recent in the general chronology of creatures, as it takes rank among the last comers, as the geological strata are mute concerning it, it is possible that these horn-like processes, which always degenerate before they reach completion, may be not a reminiscence but a promise, a gradual elaboration of new organs, timid attempts which the centuries will harden to a complete armour, AND IF THIS WERE SO THE PRESENT WOULD TEACH US WHAT THE ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... solitary wisdom; I could not reconcile it with her former appeal to me as my child-wife. I resolved to do what I could, in a quiet way, to improve our proceedings myself, but I foresaw that my utmost would be very little, or I must degenerate into the spider again, and be for ever lying ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... words of the wise man, "He that loveth pleasure shall be a poor man;" he that indulges himself in "wine and oil," that is, in drinking, in feasting, and in sensual gratifications, "shall not be rich." It is one of St. Paul's characters of a most degenerate age, when "men become lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God." And that "fleshly lusts war against the soul," is St. Peter's caveat to the ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... humanity of the Allies, we realize through these pictures what the human race has to face and endure once peace be broken. Is "Christendom After Twenty Centuries" to be even as Christianity was in the first century—an excuse for the perpetration of mad cruelties by degenerate Caesars or Kaisers (spell it as you will) at their games? Cannot the higher and finer attributes of mankind be developed and strengthened without this apparently needless waste of agony and life? Is human nature only to be redeemed through the Cross, and must ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... possibility had never entered his head as that they could be defeated. They were changing everything in these degenerate days, even to the manner of fighting; had not those fellows a right to remain on their own side of the valley and wait for the French to go and attack them? There was no use killing them; as fast as they were killed ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... in his Characters too, and drew Men often more Vicious, more Covetous, more Foolish, &c. than generally they were; and this to set the People a gazing and wondering. With these sort of Characters many of our modern Comedies abound, which makes 'em too much degenerate into Farce, which seldom fail of pleasing the Mob. But our Author had not many of these; for a great part of 'em were very true and natural, and such as may stand the Test of the severest Judges. His two most remarkable ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... you to employ punishments? Have virtue and the people will be virtuous." If Thoreau had made the first sentence read: "If all men were like me and were to live as simply," etc., everyone would agree with him. We may wonder here how he would account for some of the degenerate types we are told about in some of our backwoods and mountain regions. Possibly by assuming that they are an instance of perversion of the species. That the little civilizing their forbears experienced rendered these people more susceptible ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... simply Nature recovering herself. Proserpine blushes self-indignantly thereat. "Degenerate soul!" she calls herself, "why this weakness? You came hither with the firm desire of doing nought but evil. Is this your master's lesson? How he will laugh at ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... tears? The vast majority of women bear the discomforts of gestation and the actual perils and pangs of birth with exemplary fortitude: and it is a gross slander for anyone to maintain that a few cowardly and degenerate individuals really represent that devoted sex. But these writers are indeed well out of the ruck of ordinary humanity, because they tell us that "whatever the means employed, and whether righteous or not, the propensity to limit the highest ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... difficult to seperate from the Minds of the People the Idea of unfortunate from that of the Want of some necessary soldierly Quality. At best the unfortunate General has Pity only as the Reward of his Services; and how soon does Pity degenerate into Contempt. Cicero if I mistake not some where tells us, that when a General is fortunate it matters not whether it is ascribd to his being a Favorite of the Immortal Gods, or to certain good Qualities in him which others are incapable ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... be capable of ending in such vermiculate results as too often appear, is no more against the loveliness of the divine idea, than that the forms of man and woman, the spirit gone from them, should degenerate to such things as may not be looked upon. There is no plainer sign of the need of a God, than the possible fate of love. The celestial Cupido may soar aloft on seraph wings that assert his origin, or fall down on the belly of a ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... University. Hence a Wykehamist took his degree with no examination but that of his own college, both under the Laudian Statute and after the great statute of 1800, which set up the modern system of examinations. What the founder had intended as an encouragement for industry was made by his degenerate disciples an excuse ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... rams should be separated from them again, because it injures ewes to be teased while they are pregnant. Ewe lambs should never be bred before they are two years old, as they cannot earlier produce strong lambs, but will themselves degenerate: indeed, it is better to keep them until the third year. To this end some shepherds protect their ewe lambs from the ram by tying baskets made of rushes or something of that kind over their rumps, but it is better to feed them apart from ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... the general organism of dejection and resentment at meals. Prisoners more than men in any other condition need abundance to eat and good cheer while eating; but the food they get, and the circumstances in which they get it, causes them to degenerate physically, and the body affects the mind. Physical disease breeds the disease of evil thoughts and impulses. Criminals might be generated by prison food alone, without taking account of their ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... much," Lea said. "A brain would be of absolutely no use to it. So even if it originally possessed reasoning powers they would be gone by now. Symbiotes or parasites that live internally like this always degenerate to an ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... clay utilizes them in its own peculiar way, giving to them a great variety of expression. They are copied in clay from various models, but owing to the inadequate capacities of the material, often lose their function and degenerate into mere ornaments, which are modified as such to please the potter's fancy. Thus, for example, the series of handles placed about the neck of the vessel become, by modification in frequent copying, a mere band of ornamental figures ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... black on the distant hills, and the silent stars were slowly coming into view. Clean, health-giving Baden-Baden, in the Valley of the Oos, with its beauty and its pure air, was holding out her arms to all the disease and filth that degenerate riches produce. ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... Or, boudoir-bred degenerate, If ne'er he knew the nobler state, The birk-clad brae, the roaring spate, The tod's dark lair, Too spiritless to grin ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... look forward. It did more than this: it gave her a self-reliance quite unusual—indeed not very desirable—in one so young; and there was danger, all the greater because she was quite unconscious of it, that it might degenerate into something different from an humble yet earnest self-reliance. But there was nothing of that as yet, and all the little household ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... or lifeless trees; on the contrary, I followed the dusty road and examined the telegraph poles, for the woodpecker of these latter days has departed from the ways of his fathers, deserted the cool and fragrant woods, and taken up his abode in degenerate places, a fitting change of residence to follow his change of habit from digging his prey out of the tree-trunks to catching ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... throne, till their morals and manners had infected those of all the people. The state was distracted, and apparently on the eve of dissolution. The public taste, like the general conscience, was perverted. The fountains of education were poisoned. Degenerate Grecian masters were inspiring their Roman pupils with a relish for a false science, a frivolous literature, a vitiated eloquence, an Epicurean creed, and a ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... of land, and none to domineer over another. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, I reconcile my principles very well, because mankind are happier in a state of inequality and subordination[641]. Were they to be in this pretty state of equality, they would soon degenerate into brutes;—they would become Monboddo's nation[642];—their tails would grow. Sir, all would be losers were all to work for all:—they would have no intellectual improvement. All intellectual improvement ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... could scarcely have been fifty—went calmly about the house looking to the packing of the thousand and one things, and not only looking, but using her tongue in language expressing utter contempt for all "lazy niggers" of these degenerate days—referring to the temporary "help." The eldest sister was deputed to approach and sound Mammy on ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... counting to Chopin's playing, the latter admitted the correctness of the observation, and laughing said that this was national. Lenz reports a similar dispute between Chopin and Meyerbeer. In short, we may sum up in Moscheles' words, Chopin's playing did not degenerate into Tactlosigkeit [lit., timelessness], but it was of the most charming originality. Along with the above testimony we have, however, to take note of what Berlioz said on the subject: "Chopin supportait mal le frein de la mesure; il a ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... every day, the demands of the body multiply, but we are still a long way from the truth and man still remains the most rapacious and unseemly of animals, and everything tends to make the majority of mankind degenerate and more and more lacking in vitality. Under such conditions the life of an artist has no meaning and the more talented he is, the more strange and incomprehensible his position is, since it only amounts to his working for the amusement ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... subject have gathered round the minds of the people I live among. I do not know whether they ever think or read about it, and my arguments, though founded in this case on pretty sound reason, are apt to degenerate into passionate appeals, the violence of which is not calculated to do much good in the way of producing convictions in the minds ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... are most scrutable, are surely of man's devising and not of God's. Or we invent a fire-new science, known as Eugenics, to treat the disease by new naming of symptoms: and prattle of the well born, when we mean well fed; or the degenerate, when we might more truly ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... have never seen them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar so quickly become ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... majorities, general opinions, an independence that nothing can supply. The independence within is always translated without; he who is independent of men, in the domain of beliefs and of thoughts, will be equally so in the domain of public affairs. Thus democracy itself will not degenerate into socialism. No one has been able to point out the slightest symptom of socialism in the United States. Notwithstanding, democracy is fully complete there, and the election of Mr. Lincoln, once ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... ill-omened opening to a wedded life which brought nothing but unhappiness with it and which gave to the world some of the most degenerate women (in addition to a son who was almost an idiot) who ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... and part owner, was a man of enterprise. He believed it would pay to handle a better class of cattle and horses on the range, and one of his ventures was ten half-blooded mares, tall, clean-limbed, deer-eyed creatures that made the scrub cow-ponies look like pitiful starvelings of some degenerate and quite different species. ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... himself in her eyes. But so headlong was he in the attempt, and so misguided, that presently he overshot his mark by dropping an unflattering word concerning Crispin, whereby he attributed to the Tavern Knight's influence and example the degenerate change that had of late been wrought ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... place among your countrymen again, you must accustom yourself to fatigues, and strengthen your body in every way; or you will be regarded with contempt as one who, although of their blood, has grown degenerate and unworthy ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... and forgetting, Dull-eared, dim-sighted, slow of speech and thought, Still o'er the sad, degenerate present fretting, Where all goes wrong, and ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... smothered—with vines whose flowers are all white, pink, blue or light purple. About the base of the porch and of all the house's front, bloom flowers of these same delicate tints, the tallest nearest the house, the lesser at their knees and feet. The edges of the beds—gentle waves that never degenerate to straightness—are thickly bordered with mignonette. Not an audacious thing, not a red blossom nor a strong yellow one, nor one broad leaf, nor any mass of dense or dark foliage, comes into view until one reaches a side of the ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... than fever and delirium express a normal manhood. Though king and court and high society arouse our disgust or pity, records are not wanting to show that private life in England remained honest and pure even in the worst days of the Restoration. While London society might be entertained by the degenerate poetry of Rochester and the dramas of Dryden and Wycherley, English scholars hailed Milton with delight; and the common people followed Bunyan and Baxter with their tremendous appeal to righteousness and liberty. Second, the king, with all his pretensions to divine right, remained ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... advance. Were there no improvement to be hoped for, life would not be the less an unceasing struggle against causes of deterioration, as it even now is. Politics, as conceived by the ancients, consisted wholly in this. The natural tendency of men and their works was to degenerate, which tendency, however, by good institutions virtuously administered, it might be possible for an indefinite length of time to counteract. Though we no longer hold this opinion; though most men in the present age profess the contrary creed, believing ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... the faithful narrator, degenerate into the partial eulogist. Well, full well, do I know that Dr. John was not perfect, anymore than I am perfect. Human fallibility leavened him throughout: there was no hour, and scarcely a moment of the time I spent ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... championship of the world at New York. The distinguished part taken by Irishmen or sons of Irishmen in all departments of the Olympic games is so recent and so well known as to call for no comment. Ireland is far indeed from being degenerate in her athletes. ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... thing to be done was to appoint a chairman, who mostly retained his post of honour during the journey. At the breakfast or dinner there was none of that indecorous hurry in eating and drinking which marks our degenerate days. Had the travellers affected such thin potations as tea and soup, there was ample time for them to cool. But they preferred the sirloin and the tankard; and that no feature of a generous reception might be wanting, the landlord would not fail to recommend his crowning cup of sack ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... reason, fairest lady, you will soon be reconciled to this wise regulation of his Majesty. If not, it will be your own loss. But," he added in a lowered tone, "this is no fitting place for a conversation which might easily degenerate into a quarrel. It can be completed better in your ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Dinah—"and it was when I was a young woman—a man in whom I was interested shipped as passenger on a whaling vessel. This friend was what is called a degenerate. Physically and morally he had yielded his claim to any share in that province of the sun, that his race had conquered and annexed only to find it antipathetic to its needs. Combative effort was grown impossible to him, as in time it will grow to you all. You drop from the world like dead flies ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... approaching the stage from the outside, in the light of prejudice and misrepresentation, believe the calling of the actor to be one morally dangerous and intellectually contemptible; one in which it is equally easy to succeed as an artist and degenerate as an individual. She begins by telling me that she has a "fancy for the stage," and has "heard a great many things about it." Now, for any man or woman to become an actor or actress because they have a "fancy for the stage" is in itself the height of folly. There is no calling, ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... was not the absolutism inherent in every form of government; it was the inability to alter the forms of their legality, grown narrow and oppressive with the march of time. Every form of legality is bound to degenerate into oppression, and the legality in the forms of monarchical institutions sooner, perhaps, than any other. It has not been the business of monarchies to be adaptive from within. With the mission of uniting and consolidating ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Forest, he must spend the winter if he would see the Indian at his best. There he is a beggar no longer. There, escaped from the civilization which the white man is ever forcing upon the red—a civilization which rarely fails to make a degenerate of him—he proves his manhood. There, contrary to the popular idea, he will be found to be a diligent and skilful worker and an affectionate husband and father. There, given health and game, no toil and no hardship will hinder him from procuring fur enough ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... the magnitude of my possessions. I had large estates in England; and in one of the remote maritime counties of Ireland, I was lord over an immense territory, annexed to the ancient castle of Glenthorn;—a noble pile of antiquity! worth ten degenerate castles of modern days. It was placed in a bold romantic situation: at least as far as I could judge of it by a picture, said to be a striking likeness, which hung in my hall at Sherwood Park in England. I was born in Ireland, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... different toes. There are no associated constitutional symptoms, no tendency to similar morbid changes in other parts, and no infiltration elsewhere. There is little or no edema with ainhum. In ainhum there is, first, simple hypertrophy, then active hyperplasia The papillae degenerate when deprived of blood supply, and become horny. Meanwhile the pressure thus exerted on the nervi vasorum sets up vascular changes which bring about epithelial changes in more distant areas, the process advancing anteriorly, that ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the authors of this period may be mentioned Everaert and Machet. The refrain was much cultivated, and not, like the drama, for the expression of dissatisfaction. Anna Byns, an oracle with the Catholic party, wrote when the language was in its most degenerate state, under Margaret of Austria. She was styled the Sappho of Brabant, though her poems are all religious. They were translated into Latin, and were read as masterpieces till the middle ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... especially in the domain of education and relief, the Liberals for the supremacy of a nominally neutral State in all public matters. It is easy to realize how this purely political quarrel could degenerate into a conflict of ideals, some ultramontanes distrusting the motives of "atheists" and ignoring the public spirit of men who did not share their creed, while some agnostics, steeped in the narrow doctrines of Voltaire ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... eloquence." So runs the complaint of Joseph Warton.[38] The distrust was not without ground. The danger that the method of Longinus in the hands of ungifted writers would become a cloak for critical ignorance and degenerate into empty bluster was already apparent.[39] Only rarely was there a reader who could distinguish between the false and the true application of the method. Gibbon did it in a passage which impressed itself upon ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... minded to carry out the comparison properly, it is far more exact to liken the timid to these degenerate flowers, which are indebted to the shade in which they hide for their puny and ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... the Doge and Senate, which lost nothing in its recital before that august body. At the close a few senators called out, "Let us fight": but the spirit of the Dorias flickered away with these protests; and the degenerate scions of mighty sires submitted to the insults of an aide-de-camp and ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the oppressed and the law-abiding poor; and it is natural that, as social conditions altered (for better or for worse) with the national prosperity under Elizabeth, and classes and masses reconsidered their relative positions, Robin should fall from the popular pantheon, and should degenerate, as we find him degenerated in the broadsides of the Reformation hacks, into a swashbuckler unheroic enough to be defeated in quarter-staff bouts and so undemocratic as to find for himself a noble title and a ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... common complaint in these degenerate days that we live harder than our fathers did. Whatever we do we rush at. We bolt our food, and run for the train; we jump out of it before it has stopped, and reach the school door just as the bell rings; we "cram" for our examinations, and "spurt" for our prizes. We have no time to read books, ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... are temperate and equable of themselves; if otherwise, they degenerate into seditious and unlawful. This is it which makes me walk everywhere with my head erect, my face and my heart open. In truth, and I am not afraid to confess it, I should easily, in case of need, hold up one candle ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... decline; and in every case the decline is due to a failure to imitate the living models. In painting, we have the exaggerated foreshorteners and muscle-makers who copied Michael Angelo; the lovers of theatrical decorations who succeeded Titian and Giorgione and the degenerate boudoir-painters who followed Claucle and Poussin. In literature, we have the versifiers, epigrammatists, and rhetors of the Latin decadence; the sensual and declamatory dramatists who represent the last stages of old English comedy; and the makers of sonnets and madrigals, or conceited euphemists ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... realistic work is impossible in a country where the buildings are to be discoloured by coal-smoke; but so is all fine sculpture, whatsoever; and the whiter, the worse its chance. For that which is prepared for private persons, to be kept under cover, will, of necessity, degenerate into the copyism of past work, or merely sensational and sensual forms of present life, unless there be a governing school addressing the populace, for their instruction, on the outside of buildings. So that, as I partly warned you in my third lecture, you can simply have no ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... more zealously than himself. In some things he was a pattern man, and when once his servant John announced his intention of withdrawing from the Episcopalians and joining himself to the Methodists, who held their meetings in the schoolhouse, he was greatly shocked, and labored long with the degenerate son of Ethiopia, who would render to him no reason for his most unaccountable taste, though he did to Matty, when she questioned him ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... same success, as none can have the same range of subjects before them. The scene is changing with each year, and the past, with respect to the Savages, does not recur. They fall back with no hope to recover lost ground; they diminish with no hope to increase again; they degenerate with no hope to revive in physical or moral strength. Those who have seen them most during the last few years, have seen them best. After observers will find mere fragments, or a heterogeneous mass, in which all original identity ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... store! Even here, in Mantles, where we get a commission, the weak ones go to the wall. We must be like wolves to make anything we can save for a rainy day. But any girl or man who'll consent to act the spy on others—there's a way to earn money, lots of it. A few are tempted. They must degenerate more and more, I think! And there are other things that drive some of us—the women, I mean—to desperation. But I can't tell you about them. You must find out ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... evidence of both sides. Every right-minded person readily acknowledges that far greater weight ought to be attached to the finding of this Commission than to the declarations of the complainants, who contradicted one another in nearly every particular, and who caused the whole enquiry to degenerate into ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... right, whose tops are so dense and even as to resemble at a distance growing grain, may have been an open spot over which Washington followed his hounds in ante-revolutionary days. The land abounds in memories. The very names of the degenerate families who eke out a scanty subsistence on some corner of what was once an extensive family seat, remind one of the old Colonial aristocracy. Reclamation of the soil, as well as deliverance of the enslaved, must result from this civil war. ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... about the vanishin' leddy." And with this the policeman strolled off into the fog, his suspicions in nowise removed. He knew many rich young bachelors like Hillard. If it wasn't a chorus lady, it was a prima donna, which was not far in these degenerate days from being the ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... large amount of information as to the land and its inhabitants. He stopped me in speaking of the priests by saying, 'I know all that. You cannot exaggerate their immorality. Everybody knows it—but the Latin race is a degenerate race. Nothing can be done with it. The Roman Church has had four centuries of trial and has made a ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... part of our astral organization connected with the limb system. Whereas eye-impressions stimulate us in the first place to think, ear-impressions stimulate us to ... dance. The whole art of dancing, from its original sacred character up to its degenerate modern forms, is based upon the limb system being ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... would always be of the highest value, and that the young would like it as well as the old; but when it is mere gossip about people long dead the young have a right to be restless. There is always danger that chat will degenerate into gossip, so it is not generally best to have too many evenings ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... accustomed to the horse as a slave, cannot know him as a freeman. That docked thing standing by the curb is a long bred-out degenerate. In the Hills a horse was born and bred up to be a freeman. When the time came, he yielded to a sort of human suzerainty, but he yielded as a cadet of a noble house yields to the discipline of a commandant, with the spirit in him and as one ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... more degenerate in the fourth than in the third century (which is the next position) we have indubitable proof. One of the first facts, that strikes us, is an extraordinary one related by Lactantius, in his "Death of the persecuted," that there were Christians at this time, who, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... hold their heads under the influence of sudden riches. They immediately begin to degenerate. They have become so used to humble circumstances that wealth is a curse. ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... conspicuous conquerors, originated in violations of the Decalogue, and those nations and kingdoms which have been founded upon strictly ecclesiastical ideas, have all sunk beneath the shifting sands of time, or have become so degenerate as to be bywords and ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... the earth which will have you give before you receive. Thus they will ultimately spring up in new and beautiful shapes. Clung to with constancy, they stain your knife and napkin, impart a bad odor to your dining-room, and degenerate into something that is neither pleasant to the eye nor good for food. I believe in a rotation of crops, morally and socially, as well as agriculturally. When you have taken the measure of a man, when you have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... character at home. The best people in the mother-country will generally be the worst in the colonies; the worst at home will be the best abroad. Or, perhaps, I may state it less offensively thus:—The colonists of a well governed-country will degenerate; those of an ill-governed country will improve. I am now considering the natural tendency of such colonists if left to themselves; of course, a direct act of the legislature of the mother-country will break in upon this. Where this tendency is exemplified, the cause is ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... possible to say?" returned the gentleman. "What is to be said? Who can take any interest in a fellow like this," meaning Trotty, "in such degenerate times as these? Look at him! What an object! The good old times, the grand old times, the great old times! Those were the times for a bold peasantry, and all that sort of thing. Those were the times for every sort of thing, in fact. ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... speak with what she considered undue severity to one of the parties, she would immediately apologise with tears, and in the humblest manner entreat forgiveness. This extreme sweetness of disposition, however, did not degenerate into weakness; and she could testify the utmost displeasure, and reproved with energy when offences were committed against God. It was intolerable to her that His Divine Majesty should be insulted in her abode; and she, the gentlest and most unassuming of women, ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... improvement; they have a natural grace and ease in their manner, and make excellent wives and mothers. This character must not, however, be taken in an unlimited sense, for we cannot expect this rule to be without its exceptions, and it is true that some of these females do degenerate, and copy after the manners of the creoles, or white natives; but this is only the case when, by their intercourse with the whites, their Indian blood is merged and lost in the European. That part of the population in which is blended the blood of the Chinese ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... longer with two such learned and philosophical scholars, I shall inevitably degenerate into an ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and comes only occasionally to the Koldagi Heive mountains on the borders of Kordofan. This, it must be acknowledged, is a sad falling off from the rival of the lion, that we have honoured so long in the arms of England. But we sincerely hope, that by the next arrival, it will not degenerate into a cow, or worse, a goat. But he tells us, that to our knowledge of the giraffe he has added considerably. He obtained in Nubia and Kordofan five specimens, two of which were males and three females. He regards ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... While damned Casca, like a cur behind,/Struck Caesar on the neck] Casca struck Caesar on the neck, coming like a degenerate cur ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... suddenly, "I will pronounce his panegyric. He was a man of a great gentleness, of an inevitable nobility, of an invariable courtesy. Where, in this degenerate age, shall we find the like!" He stopped to breathe ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... that he had no income "except errant sixpences." And printers' bills had to be paid. Moreover in the first number the editor Lucian Oldershaw confessed frankly that one reason for the paper's existence was "that the Society may not degenerate into the position of a mutual admiration Society by totally lacking the admiration of outsiders." The staff were able immediately to note, "Any apprehensions we may have felt on the morning of the publication ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... rank, without any straining, among the other processes of selection. It seems to me that, from the facts that sterile animal forms can adapt themselves to new vital functions, their superfluous parts degenerate, and the parts more used adapt themselves in an ascending direction, those less used in a descending direction, we must draw the conclusion that harmonious adaptation here comes about without the cooeperation of the Lamarckian principle. This conclusion once established, ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... field of pines that you see on our right, whose tops are so dense and even as to resemble at a distance growing grain, may have been an open spot over which Washington followed his hounds in ante-revolutionary days. The land abounds in memories. The very names of the degenerate families who eke out a scanty subsistence on some corner of what was once an extensive family seat, remind one of the old Colonial aristocracy. Reclamation of the soil, as well as deliverance of the enslaved, must result from this civil war. Both worth fighting for. ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... back with him to Norway, was one of this breed. But it was supposed by many to have become extinct soon after the disappearance of the last wolf in Ireland, and it was the endeavour of Captain Graham to demonstrate that specimens, although admittedly degenerate, were still to be found, and that they were capable of being restored to a semblance ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... in great abundance, and of superior quality, throughout the year; but lemons degenerate much in their growth, and in a few years are scarcely to be distinguished from the latter. Guavas, pumpkins, or pumpions, squash water mellons, musk mellons, and cucumbers, grow in the greatest perfection. The pumpkins grow in wild ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... sea then entered my mind, and its degenerate inhabitants, but that was across a wide channel that would be hard to cross even if I had infinite time, freedom, and materials to make a boat which would withstand the waves, and I had none of the three. What little hope I had, then, was ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... in vain to try to persuade him that seed-time and harvest were the same thing, and that he had nothing to do but to rest in what he had done; show his bright colours and flutter like a moth in the sunshine, or sit down like a degenerate bee in the summer time and eat his own honey. The power of action which he knew in himself could not rest without something to act upon. It longed ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... what we early read in the works of Mr. Burke, that it is the propensity of degenerate minds to admire or worship splendid wickedness; that, with too many persons, the ideas of justice and morality are fairly conquered and overpowered by guilt when it is grown gigantic, and happens to be associated ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the race can rise no higher than its women. For a while the men absorbed and reflected the intellectual life, for there still ran in their veins the good red blood of their sturdy grandmothers. But the race was doomed by the indolent, self-indulgent and parasitic females. The women did not all degenerate. Here and there were found women on whom wealth had no power. There was a Sappho, and an Aspasia, who broke out into activity and stood beside their men-folk in intellectual attainment, but the other women did not follow; they were too comfortable, too well fed, too well housed, to be ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... been taken to speak the author's mind, and keep as close as possible to the meaning of the original. For the design, I think there is nothing need be said in vindication of that. Here is a dumb philosopher introduced to a wicked and degenerate generation, as a proper emblem of virtue and morality; and if the world could be persuaded to look upon him with candour and impartiality, and then to copy after him, the editor has gained his end, and would think himself ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... puceron[obs3]; vinefretter[obs3], vinegrub[obs3]. wreck, mere wreck, honeycomb, magni nominis umbra[Lat]; jade, plug, rackabones [obs3][U. S.], skate [U. S.]; tackey[obs3], tacky [U. S.]. V. be worse, be deteriorated, become worse, become deteriorated &c. Adj.; have seen better days, deteriorate, degenerate, fall off; wane &c. (decrease) 36; ebb; retrograde &c. 283- decline, droop; go down &c. (sink) 306; go downhill, go from bad to worse, go farther and fare worse; jump out of the frying pan into the fire. run to seed, go to seed, run to waste swale|, sweal|; lapse, be the worse for; sphacelate: ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... virtually admits that this was owing to the importation of foreign influences. It was not due to any natural process of evolution; and it was followed by hopeless corruption and decline. The last days of both Greece and Rome were degenerate and full of depression ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... the frantic celebration of the festival of St. John, A.D. 1374, only served to bring to a crisis a malady which had been long impending; and if we would further inquire how a hitherto harmless usage, which like many others had but served to keep up superstition, could degenerate into so serious a disease, we must take into account the unusual excitement of men's minds, and the consequences of wretchedness and want. The bowels, which in many were debilitated by hunger and bad food, were precisely the parts which in most cases were ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... when the celluloid stud was opened was that the inducive oxidised and became active. Then the surface of the Carolinum began to degenerate. This degeneration passed only slowly into the substance of the bomb. A moment or so after its explosion began it was still mainly an inert sphere exploding superficially, a big, inanimate nucleus wrapped in flame and thunder. Those that were thrown from aeroplanes fell in this state, they ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... statements which accord with themselves and with other statements; when we ask, which are the persons we trust? we answer, those persons whose feelings and actions are congruous with themselves and with the feelings and actions of others. And, on the contrary, it is in the worthless, in the degenerate creature, that we note moods which are destructive to one another's object, ideas which are in flagrant contradiction; and it is in the idiot, the maniac, the criminal, that we see thoughts disconnected among themselves, perceptions disconnected ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... made it the calling of the young, strong, and handsome men to look after the propagation of the human race; so that the species may not degenerate. This is the firm will of Nature, and it finds its expression in the passions of women. This law surpasses all others in both age and power. Woe then to the man who sets up rights and interests in such a way as ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... inherited a taste for music and literature, like many of the family of the Georges. He formed an intimate friendship with Voltaire, the French infidel writer, and interested himself in the French infidelity of the period, which was a reaction against the corrupt and degenerate French church. ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... tooke upon them farr viages by sea, and other some worse courses, tending to dissolutnes & the danger of their soules, to y^e great greefe of their parents and dishonour of God. So that they saw their posteritie would be in danger to degenerate ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... reputable name. The man was cold-blooded enough to see that her gentle weakness was of value because it could be bullied, her money was to be counted on because it could be spent on himself and his degenerate vices and on his racked and ruined name and estate, which must be rebuilt and restocked at an early date by someone or other, lest they tumbled into ignominious collapse which could not be concealed. Bettina of the accusing eyes did not know ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... possible for belief to degenerate into mere conventionality, while sincere doubters at least must have a realization of the mystery and the awe ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... would have amused a man whose mind was in a healthy condition. Just as soon as we were permitted to leave our cells in the morning and meet in the hall, the most animated discussions, upon all sorts of topics, would begin. These would occasionally degenerate into clamorous and angry debates. The disputants would become as earnest and excited over subjects in which perhaps they had never felt the least interest before, as if they had been considering matters of vital and immediate importance. A most heated, and ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... a very refreshing one," he says, in an interested and deeply amused tone, "more especially in these degenerate days when most young ladies can tell one to a turn the precise age, price, and retailer of one's wines. May I ask when was this ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... A lanky and degenerate youth (who before the war had been unlovingly known throughout Europe as the "White Rabbit" and who now was mentioned in dispatches as the "Crown Prince") had succeeded in leading some half-million fellow-Germans into a "pocket" that had lately ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... the other hand (Mantis superstitiosa. Fab.[1]), little justifies by its propensities the appearance of gentleness, and the attitudes of sanctity, which have obtained for it the title of the "praying mantis." Its habits are carnivorous, and degenerate into cannibalism, as it preys on the weaker individuals of its own species. Two which I enclosed in a box were both found dead a few hours after, literally severed limb from limb in their encounter. The formation of the foreleg enables the tibia to be so closed ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... present century the property or farm on the opposite side of the Almond, above Caerlowrie, was designated by a name, having apparently the Celtic "battle" noun as a prefix in its composition—viz., Cat-elbock. This fine old Celtic name has latterly been changed for the degenerate and unmeaning term Almond-hill.] ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... notwithstanding the denomination they assume. But these last cannot stand the touch-stone of truth; there are mean plebeians, who sweat and struggle to maintain the appearance of gentlemen; and, on the other hand, there are gentlemen of rank who seem industrious to appear mean and degenerate; the one sort raise themselves either by ambition or virtue, while the other abase themselves by viciousness or sloth; so that we must avail ourselves of our understanding and discernment in distinguishing those persons, who, though they bear the same appellation, are yet so different ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... corrupted through the rust of time, That doth all fairest things on earth deface, Or through unnoble sloth, or sinfull crime, 435 That doth degenerate the noble race, Have both desire of worthie deeds forlorne, And name ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... the countries in that district are fierce and warlike, and they are so fond of war and battle that he who is slain in battle is accounted the happiest of men, while those who die a natural death are reproached as degenerate and cowardly. ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... for loving as men are often as unfit themselves. Physically unfit for motherhood, mentally unfit to cherish the monogamic idea that once was sacred with our people, sexually unfit to rouse true sex-passion—such women are being bred by the million in crowded cities and by degenerate country life. They match well with the slaves who 'move on' at the bidding of a policeman, or with the knaves who only see in Woman the toy of a ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... a rude child as the woman slowly, with shapeless red fingers, untied her bonnet-strings and revealed herself as something at once agelessly primitive and most modernly degenerate. The frizzed thicket of coarse hair which broke into a line of tiny, quite circular curls round her low forehead made Ellen remember side-streets round Gorgie and Dalry, which the midday hooters filled with factory girls ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... welfare of the whole of which the thing is a part (bonum suitatis—bonum communionis). The second is not only the nobler but also the stronger; this holds of the lower creatures as well as of man, who, when not degenerate, prefers the general welfare to his individual interests. Love is the highest of the virtues, and is never, as other human endowments, exposed to the danger of excess; therefore the life of action is of more worth than the life of contemplation. By this principle ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... In this degenerate time there arose two men of the most diverse traits and descent, whose lives, running parallel for many years, furnish at once instructive studies and involve graphic pictures of public affairs. The elder of them was with Scipio when Numantia fell ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... died only a Viscount! But the house of Marney had risen to high rank; counted themselves ancient nobility; and turned up their noses at the Pratts and the Smiths, the Jenkinsons and the Robinsons of our degenerate days; and never had done anything for the nation or for their honours. And why should they now? It was unreasonable to expect it. Civil and religious liberty, that had given them a broad estate and a glittering coronet, to say nothing of half-a-dozen close seats in parliament, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... righteous daring may not have been crowned with victory; and suspect that on such events were gradually built up the dragon-slaying legends which charmed all Europe, and grew in extravagances and absurdities, till they began to degenerate into the bombast of the "Seven Champions," and expired in the immortal ballad of the "Dragon of Wantley," in which More of More Hall, on the morning of his battle with the monster, invoked ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... find in this letter an outline of what Professor James would suggest as steps toward vivisection reform? In perfunctory inspection of laboratories or supervision by State inspectors, he has no confidence; such inspection would probably degenerate into a sham. A well-known experimentor once said to the rwiter: "Your inspectors of laboratories must be either well-educated and competent men, or else officials of the grade of the average policemen. If the belong to the first class, do you think they will become detectives and spies? ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... scarify them when bark-bound, brushing them over with the composition. It is also advised to plant quince trees at a proper distance from apple and pears, as bees and the wind may mix the farina, and occasion the apples and pears to degenerate. These trees may be raised from the kernels of the fruit sown in autumn; but there is no depending on having the same sort of good fruit from seedlings, nor will they soon become bearers. But the several varieties may be continued the same by cuttings ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... philosophic study. He claims Philosophy as his mistress in The Fisher, and in a case where he is in fact judge as well as party, has no difficulty in getting his claim established. He is for ever reminding us that he loves philosophy and only satirizes the degenerate philosophers of his day. But it will occur to us after reading him through that he has dissembled his love, then, very well. There is not a passage from beginning to end of his works that indicates any real comprehension of any philosophic system. The external ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... a man intent upon immediate physical enjoyment; an idle drifter without spiritual ideals. From his character and that of the Edomites, his descendants, there is taught the lesson that such an unambitious man or nation will always become degenerate and prove a failure. God himself cannot make a man ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... the beginning's of these various degenerate and illiterate attempts at book-work we have only to watch the last expiring gleams of classic art beneath the ruthless footsteps of the barbarian invaders of the old ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... for the most part, the sons of the bolder barbarians of the North; and, contaminated by the craft of Italy, rather than imbued with its national affections, they retained the disdain of their foreign ancestors for a conquered soil and a degenerate people. While the rest of Italy, especially in Florence, in Venice, and in Milan, was fast and far advancing beyond the other states of Europe in civilisation and in art, the Romans appeared rather to recede than to improve;—unblest by laws, unvisited ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... "chattel" (cattle, land, buildings, places of worship, or "stock") in common. All brothers took the oath of abandoning all feuds of old; and, without imposing upon each other the obligation of never quarrelling again, they agreed that no quarrel should degenerate into a feud, or into a law-suit before another court than the tribunal of the brothers themselves. And if a brother was involved in a quarrel with a stranger to the guild, they agreed to support him for bad and for ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... Doris seemed to perceive, the traditions of his birth and breeding had returned upon him; something instinctive and inherited had reappeared; and the gentlemanly, easy-going father, who yet, as Doris remembered, when matters were serious "always got his way," was there—strangely there—in the degenerate son. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... start, "Why, I'm seeing and hearing all this!" It is such a book as an historian of the modern school would delight in, more engrossing than fiction of the most realistic type. There is incident in it too—as of the degenerate KUROLYESSOFF, a cousin-in-law of MIHAILOVITCH, who used to flog his serfs, sometimes to death, for the pleasure of seeing them suffer; while the opening pages, describing the trekking of the family out of far-eastern Orenburg into the adjoining province of Ufa, and the building of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... of this same subject, that "the current opinion of Indian character is too apt to be formed from the miserable hordes which infest the frontiers, and hang on the shirts of settlements. These are too commonly composed of degenerate beings, corrupted and enfeebled by the voice of society, without being benefited by ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... dozen,—and in the doorway, with arms akimbo and hands on massive hips, gaped Jap's mulatto wife, for of such measure was the man. Graves crossed the alley, suppressing such of his five senses as he could shift without, and ascertained that the degenerate Jasper, true to prophecy, was fishing from the dock in ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... quarter of Cairo," Margaret said. "It seems to me so vulgar and degenerate. The native quarter is just what it sets out to be, no ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... himself, as we shall soon see, has specified one link large and strong enough to answer for a chain in holding together British sailors at least, and New Zealanders, or, indeed, any other savages, however degenerate and abominable, to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... open, as if to convey the idea that it was an office rather than a young lady's boudoir—a place of business and not a drawing-room. It was a very pretty room, as Sarrasin saw at a glance when he entered it with a grand and old-fashioned bow, such as men make no more in these degenerate days. It was very quietly decorated with delicate colours, and a few etchings and many flowers; and Dolores herself came from behind her writing desk, smiling and blushing, to meet her tall visitor. The old soldier scanned her as he would have scanned a new recruit, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... improvement of the New Leicester sheep, effected by Bakewell and his successors, says, "It would seem as if they had first drawn a perfect form, and then given it life." Youatt[447] urges the necessity of annually drafting each flock, as many animals will certainly degenerate "from the standard of excellence, which the breeder has established in his own mind." Even with a bird of such little importance as the canary, long ago (1780-1790) rules were established, and a standard of perfection was fixed, according to which the London fanciers tried to breed ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... all the Indians, and their degenerate children no longer dwell in garrisoned houses nor hear any war-whoop in their path. It would be well, perchance, if many an "English Chaplin" in these days could exhibit as unquestionable trophies of his valor ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... against the bold highwaymen, the border moss-troopers or the ranting Highlandmen of song and story, but against a plain, Twentieth Century police trap which was being worked very successfully along this road. Such was our approach in these degenerate days to "Merrie Carlile," which figured so largely in the endless border warfare between the Scotch and English. But why the town should have been famed as "Merrie Carlile" would be hard to say, unless more than a thousand years of turmoil, bloodshed and almost ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... while I must differ from you? That is too disgracefully easy. Indeed, Adam, that riddle of yours brings back every doubt, for they say—scientists and ologists and learned people, you know—that there is hope for delinquents and defectives, but none for degenerates, and that is an awfully degenerate joke." ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... whose guest I was, have a gold mine (the clay being treated by the "cyanide" process), I collected specimens for some time in the beautiful forests at the foot of the limestone mountains of Poak. Here I saw something of the Land Dayaks, but they are a poor degenerate breed, and not to be compared to the Sea Dayaks, who are born fighters, and whose predatory head-hunting instincts give a great deal of trouble to the government. These latter were the Dayaks I was anxious to meet, ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... come over to see my father, according to the courtesy of the country, as Mr. Rowe's probable successor; but in the meantime I had gone to hear him preach the Sunday after his arrival. A poet and a philosopher getting up into a Unitarian pulpit to preach the Gospel, was a romance in these degenerate days, a sort of revival of the primitive spirit of Christianity, which was ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... vicious outlaw of wide and evil repute? The renegade thief? The persecutor of women? The pitiless butcher of defenseless men? Were those fine, clean-cut features but a mask that covered an abyss of black evil? Did that broad forehead actually conceal the crafty, degenerate brain that planned and executed the bloody and treacherous piracy upon ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... avoid their company, and from that time have never seen them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Samuel possessed a primordial talent that is rather rare in these physically degenerate days. He said nothing, but stood quietly in the middle of the road. The eyes of the crowd on either side of the road began to bulge, the lips of all opened with wonder, and a simultaneous burst of laughter rose around the Hon. Samuel Budd. A dozen men sprang to their feet ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... astounding truth about the young blackleg who, having boarded and upset her daughter's boat, turned coward and scuttled off, ignoring her frightened cries. Nor would she fail to express her sincere sympathy for Colonel Dalhousie, whose heart (she understood) the behavior of his degenerate ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the left nor to the right. His eyes were fixed and yet unseeing, his features were pale and bony. There was no gleam of life, not even in the stone-cold eyes. Like some machine-made man of a new and physically degenerate age, he took his exercise under the eye of his doctor, a ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... published an article about Spanish women, with particular reference to Basque women, in which I maintained that they sacrificed natural kindliness and sympathy on the altars of honour and religion, whereupon the Daughters of Mary of San Sebastian made answer, charging that I was a degenerate son of their city, who had robbed them of their honour, which was absolutely contrary to the fact. In passing, they suggested to the editor of the Nuevo Mundo that he should not permit me to write ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... President, a cripple, a degenerate, responsible for his actions, certainly, but a man in whom the doctors will find every form of wasting illness: disease of the spinal cord, tuberculosis, and all the rest ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... incomprehensible pair. Let me say at once that it was singularly successful. Perhaps the wisdom of the ages in which Oro flourished had overlooked so small a matter as electric torches, or perhaps he did not expect to meet with them in these degenerate days. At any rate for the first and last time in my intercourse with him I saw the god, or lord—the native word bears either meaning—Oro genuinely astonished. He started and stepped back, and for a moment or two seemed a little frightened. Then muttering something as to the cleverness ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... Pachyphyllum, Chonophyllum, Acervularia, Spongophyllum, Smithia, Endophyllum, and Cystiphyllum, have now disappeared; and the great masses of Favosites which are such a striking feature in the Devonian limestones, are represented but by one or two degenerate and puny successors. On the other hand, we meet in the Carboniferous rocks not only with entirely new genera—such as Axophyllum, Lophophyllum, and Londsdaleia—but we have an enormous expansion of certain types which ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... propriety of this order of things, yet we would not have you imagine that we underestimate the value of a respectable lineage, but it is better to be the originator of a great family than to be the degenerate descendant ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... power, the other typifies the sordid ignorance and fearful superstition of the credulous masses which maintains the power of the first. High in the streets of Moscow, where one may see the pallid, long-haired, degenerate-looking venders of holy lies and pious impositions shuffle along like spectres from a remoter age, there hangs a woven streamer of scarlet hue with huge white lettering, which defiantly proclaims that religion is the ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... at night upon the second of August—the most terrible August in the history of the world. One might have thought already that God's curse hung heavy over a degenerate world, for there was an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air. The sun had long set, but one blood-red gash like an open wound lay low in the distant west. Above, the stars were shining ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... blast, Unfurls, in proud array, Its glittering width of splendour unsurpassed,— For England's sake, For our dear Sovereign's sake,— We cry all shame on traitors, high and low, Whose word let no man take, Whose love let no man seek throughout the land,— Traitors who strive, with most degenerate hand, To ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... nevertheless, Rene Dumesnil has proved that his sudden decease was caused not by apoplexy but by hystero-neurasthenia. Eye strain played hob with the happiness of Carlyle, and an apostle of sweetness and light declared that Ibsen was a "degenerate"—Ibsen, who led the humdrum exterior life of a healthy bourgeois. Lombroso has demonstrated—to his own satisfaction—that Dante's mystic illumination was due to some brand of mental disorder. In fact, this self-styled psychologist mapped anew ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... certain set of men until the moment they lost their power, and who never agreed with them in a single instance afterwards? Would not such a coincidence of interest and opinion be rather fortunate? Would it not be an extraordinary cast upon the dice, that a man's connexions should degenerate into faction, precisely at the critical moment when they lose their power, or he accepts a place? When people desert their connexions, the desertion is a manifest FACT, upon which a direct simple issue lies, triable by plain men. Whether a MEASURE of government be right ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... been so, that what the chiefs of the Up-Swedes have resolved among them, to this the other men of the land have listened. Our fathers needed not to receive advice from the West Gauts about their ruling of the land. Now are we not so degenerate that Emund need teach us counsel; I would have us bind our counsel together, kinsmen ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... the distant hills, and the silent stars were slowly coming into view. Clean, health-giving Baden-Baden, in the Valley of the Oos, with its beauty and its pure air, was holding out her arms to all the disease and filth that degenerate riches produce. ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... effort of friendship as this of Fireblood's should too violently surprize the reader in this degenerate age, it may be proper to inform him that, beside the ties of engagement in the same employ, another nearer and stronger alliance subsisted between our hero and this youth, which latter was just departed from the arms of the lovely Laetitia when he received ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... equally heroic achievements in the drinking line, but, alas! I have only heard of one old man who was wont habitually to en-gulph twenty-two litres of wine a day; eight are spoken of as "almost too much" in these degenerate days. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... fly of self must always poison this young man's ointment, and to-night there was some excuse from his degenerate point of view. He must give it up. Stingaree was right; it was only one man in thousands who could do unerringly what he had done that night. Oswald Melvin was not that man. He saw it for himself at last. But it was a bitter hour for him. Life in the music-shop would ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... moreover, in the language of Montaigne, of one substance with the author, being the author himself. And yet one could hardly say that this style breaks with tradition. He stops short just at the point at which his idiosyncrasies would degenerate into faults.—From PETIT DE JULLEVILLE, Histoire de la littrature ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... of the God's interference with the course of events—what does it mean? This is unquestionably the fundamental problem with the earnest student of Homer. Let us observe, then, first, that the poet's principle is not to allow a divine intervention to degenerate into a merely external mechanical act; himself full of the spirit of the God, he puts the divine influence inside the individual as well as outside, and thus preserves the latter's freedom in the providential order. ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... nipples of the Cows in the form of irregular pustules. At their first appearance they are commonly of a palish blue, or rather of a colour somewhat approaching to livid, and are surrounded by an erysipelatous inflammation. These pustules, unless a timely remedy be applied, frequently degenerate into phagedenic ulcers, which prove extremely troublesome[2]. The animals become indisposed, and the secretion of milk is much lessened. Inflamed spots now begin to appear on different parts of the hands of the domestics employed in milking, and sometimes on the wrists, which quickly run on to ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... time Cornelio Felizardo had an American in his gang. This degenerate, Luis A. Unselt, was fortunately captured and sentenced, on April 6, 1904, to twenty-five years' imprisonment as a deserter ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color—wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenia and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... indolence), dulls the edge of all industry, and is one of the most powerful ingredients in the Circean potion which transforms many of the most promising young men into the beastly forms which, in sluggish idleness, feed upon the labors of others. The degenerate sentiment, I hope, will never obtain admission in my mind; and, if my mind should be loitered away in stupid laziness, it will be under the full conviction of my conscience that I am basely bartering the greatest benefits with which human beings can be indulged, for the miserable gratifications ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... the stranger both in his outward seeming and his converse, melted by the warmth of a romantic devotion almost unknown in these degenerate days, though common enough of yore, Miss Almira paused a moment in the proud compliance of one about to gladly bestow an inestimable, but hardly hoped-for gift, and crying, "It can be done, it shall be done," threw herself ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... can, therefore, claim from us no further consideration; it is mere naked rudeness and selfishness, ill-disguised by the gaudy rays of outward decency; a mere cherishing of the sensual nature which, left to itself, would soon degenerate into monstrous barbarism, of which we already ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... such an education are not counteracted by the life of the battle-field or the laborious sport of hunting. And if the laws of etiquette and Court manners can act on the spinal marrow to such an extent as to affect the pelvis of kings, to soften their cerebral tissue, and so degenerate the race, what deep-seated mischief, physical and moral, must result in schoolboys from the constant lack of ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... feeling: wise, modest, unenvious, and unambitious. Meaner men, their contemporaries or successors, raved of high art with incoherent passion; arrogated to themselves an equality with the masters of elder time, and declaimed against the degenerate tastes of a public which acknowledged not the return of the Heraclidae. But the two great—the two only painters of their age—happy in a reputation founded as deeply in the heart as in the judgment of mankind, demanded no higher function ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... well as privilege to perfect our constitution, and see that it does not wear out too soon, that we are not prematurely called away from our duties. And I bring it as serious charge against modern systems of education, that they tend to degenerate mankind, to impair the constitution and to shorten life. That we should not submit to this, but should all aspire to live a century or longer, if we have a fair opportunity, I seriously maintain, and that my readers may be inspired with a like determination, I take ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... Serbia, and would-be murderers of Russia and Rumania, the murderers of tens of thousands of civilians and soldiers of our blood, and the accomplices in numberless unspeakable crimes committed in this war against humanity by the two degenerate and irresponsible dynasties. We will not remain a part of a State which has no justification ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... of beauty, but beauty which had power and much masculine strength; nowhere did it degenerate into flaccidity, nowhere lose strength in grace. His hair was long, and I wondered at it. My small experience in our delightful home and village circle had not acquainted me with that flowing style; the young ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... reduction of the wings during the many generations in the course of which it was being effected, and who can testify that all, or the overwhelming majority, of the beetles born with fairly well-developed wings got blown out to sea, while those alone survived whose wings were congenitally degenerate. Who saw them go, or can point to analogous cases so conclusive as to compel ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... of it, he does not continue the same through an whole sentence, if it happens to be of any sweep or compass. In the very womb of this last sentence, pregnant, as it should seem, with a Hercules, there is formed a little bantling of the mortal race, a degenerate, puny parenthesis, that totally frustrates our most sanguine views and expectations, and disgraces the whole gestation. Here is this destructive parenthesis: "Unless some adequate compensation be secured ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... supremer test of character. Eleven years of hotel housekeepership guarantees a knowledge of human nature that includes some things no living being ought to know about her fellow men. And inevitably one of two results must follow. You degenerate into a bitter, waspish, and fault-finding shrew; or you develop into a patient, tolerant, and infinitely understanding woman. Martha Foote dealt daily with Polack scrub girls, and Irish porters, and Swedish chambermaids, and Swiss waiters, and Halsted Street bell-boys. ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... temperate and equable of themselves; if otherwise, they degenerate into seditious and unlawful. This is it which makes me walk everywhere with my head erect, my face and my heart open. In truth, and I am not afraid to confess it, I should easily, in case of need, hold up one candle to St. Michael and another to his dragon, like the old woman; I will ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... himself to Colonel Morley, but finding that degenerate son of America indisposed to get cent. per cent. for his money when offered by a Parisian, he very soon took his leave. The other visitors followed his example, except Rameau, who was left alone with the Venosta ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Queen is a princess of as many and great virtues as ever filled a throne: How would it brighten her character to the present and after ages, if she would exert her utmost authority to instil some share of those virtues into her people, which they are too degenerate to learn only from her example! And, be it spoke with all the veneration possible for so excellent a sovereign, her best endeavours in this weighty affair are a most important part of her duty, as well as of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours and ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... while in the region adjoining the Guianga they have intermarried with that people and have adopted many of their customs as well as dress. On the headwaters of the Lasan river we are told that they are known as Dugbatang or Dugbatung; that they are a timid degenerate branch having no fixed habitations and very little clothing; they are small, with crispy hair, and often decorate their bodies with tattooed designs. About twenty miles up the Tuganay river Governor Bolton encountered a similar group of Ata whom he describes as being very wild. ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... blasphemous toast will show the animus of the assembly, and of its orators. It was delivered by M. Saint Just:—"To the men strong, courageous, and valiant in the cause of humanity. To those whose names serve as a guide, a support, and an example to the degenerate beings—to all those whom history calls heroes!... To Brutus, to Catiline, to Jesus Christ, to Julian the Apostate, to Attila!... To all the thinkers of the middle age.... To unfortunate thinkers!... To Jean Jacques Rousseau, and his pupil, Maximilian ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... nay, we must resist unto death their malign influence and power. But alas, what are we doing to-day? Instead of looking up to the pure and lofty souls of Europe for guidance, we welter in the mud with the lowest and most degenerate. We are beginning to know and appreciate English whiskey, but not English freedom; we know the French grisettes, but not the French sages; we guzzle German beer, but of German wisdom we taste ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... imbecile, or tuberculous, everybody would cry out with horror, and she would become a social outcast. But if she inflicts these injuries on her granddaughter, by marrying her daughter to a drunkard, in the hope of reforming him, or to a wealthy degenerate, or an imbecile baron, no one says a word, provided the marriage law ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... an inverse ratio of excellence to their character at home. The best people in the mother-country will generally be the worst in the colonies; the worst at home will be the best abroad. Or, perhaps, I may state it less offensively thus:—The colonists of a well governed-country will degenerate; those of an ill-governed country will improve. I am now considering the natural tendency of such colonists if left to themselves; of course, a direct act of the legislature of the mother-country will break in ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... posture, dress, grimace, and affectation, 10 Though foes to sense, are harmless to the nation. Our last redress is dint of verse to try, And Satire is our Court of Chancery. This way took Horace to reform an age, Not bad enough to need an author's rage: But yours,[19] who lived in more degenerate times, Was forced to fasten deep, and worry crimes. Yet you, my friend, have temper'd him so well, You make him smile in spite of all his zeal: An art peculiar to yourself alone, 20 To join the virtues of ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... These latter have often been aware of such sexual manifestations in their children for a long time, but a false shame has prevented them from asking the advice of the physician. They have been afraid lest he should regard the child as intellectually or morally deficient, or as the offspring of a degenerate family. In addition, we have to take into account self-deception on the part of the parents, who, indeed, often deceive themselves willingly, saying to themselves that the matter is of no importance, and that the ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... and simplicity of his confession: A sinner: I am a sinner; "God be merciful to me a sinner." This indeed he was, and this indeed confesses; and this, I say, he doth of godly simplicity. For, for a man to confess himself a sinner, it is to speak all against himself that can be spoken. And man, as degenerate, is too much an hypocrite, and too much a self-flatterer, thus to confess against himself, unless made simple and honest about the thing through the power of conviction upon his heart. And it is yet worth your noting, that he doth not say he was, or had been, but that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... means of violence of one against the other and of State against State, we shall, first, keep subjecting ourselves more and more, transferring the major portion of our productiveness to armaments; and, secondly, by killing in mutual wars the best physically developed men, we must become more and more degenerate and ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... over-emphasis upon competitive games. Play is necessary for the growing boy and play that engages many participants has the most value. America today is suffering from highly specialized, semi-professional athletics and games. "When athletics degenerate into a mere spectacle, then is the stability of the nation weakened. Greece led the world, while the youth of that great country deemed it an honor to struggle for the laurel leaf, and gymnasiums ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... mind, and fills a niche in our literary annals. The works of the scholastics, with the debates of these Quodlibetarians, at once show the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect; for though they often degenerate into incredible absurdities, those who have examined the works of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus have confessed their admiration of the Herculean texture of brain which they exhausted in demolishing their ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... unwillingness to yield to each other's peculiarities, to a weakening of the family ties, to a lax morality. Carry it a trifle farther than it now is in some of the Western States, and marriage will lose all its sacredness, and degenerate into a physical union, not nobler than the crossing of flies in ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... King, most Holy Father, that this Lady, His spouse, sends her children whom you see here, who are not of a lower condition than those who came long before them. They do not degenerate; they have the comeliness both of their Father and their mother, since they make profession of the most perfect poverty. There is, therefore, no fear of their dying of poverty, being the children and heirs of the Immortal King, born of a poor mother, of the ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... no worse. Often many of our poor fellows had not the bare necessaries of life, and it was only by great exertion that I was able to procure them, as I have described, for myself and a few of my more intimate friends. I had not supposed that so degenerate a race of Frenchmen existed, for when they saw us all rapidly sickening and advancing towards the grave, instead of relaxing their system of tyranny, they only increased their ill-treatment, and made us believe that they really wished to put us to ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... emotion of his subject, but his emotion, his pathos, are invariably tempered and restrained by the calm moderation of the quattrocento. The golden mean still has command of Bellini, and never allows his feelings, however poignant, to degenerate into ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... further for victims. I believe that only a small proportion of the women who are in the houses of ill-fame—only a small proportion—make their way there of their own volition, and that small proportion are of the degenerate class who are born with a screw loose somewhere. From their babyhood they who are born with this taint—and we could, perhaps, trace that taint back—but born with that taint, they gradually go into that life—but they make a small proportion. The rest of them are either ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... eyes—eyes that saw everything except the small modicum of good which is in all human things, and to this they were persistently blind. Taking into consideration the small, set mouth, it was eminently a pugnacious face—a face that might easily degenerate to the coarseness of passion in the trough of a losing fight. But, fortunately, Luke's lines were cast upon the great waters, and he who fights the sea must learn to conquer, not by passionate effort, but by consistent, ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... making so much of such a common thing as a wheel. Idiots! Solomon's court fool would have scoffed at the thought of the young Galilean who dared compare the lilies of the field to his august master. Nil admirari is very well for a North American Indian and his degenerate successor, who has grown too grand to admire anything but himself, and takes a cynical pride in his stolid indifference to everything worth ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of veal soup. I took him aside, and reasoned the matter with him, but in vain; to speak the truth, Luttrell is not steady in his judgments on dishes. Individual failures with him soon degenerate into generic objections, till, by some fortunate accident, he eats himself into better opinions. A person of more calm reflection thinks not only of what he is consuming at the moment, but of the soups of the same kind he has met with in a long course of dining, and which have gradually ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... only shake her head, and use her handkerchief, and moan over degenerate Dombeys, who are no Dombeys. But whether Florence has been inculpated in the flight of Edith, or has followed her, or has done too much, or too little, or anything, or nothing, she has not ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... Virtue, and Abhorrence of Vice, are carefully avoided by this Set of Shame-faced People, as what would disparage their Gayety of Temper, and infallibly bring them to Dishonour. This is such a Poorness of Spirit, such a despicable Cowardice, such a degenerate abject State of Mind, as one would think Human Nature incapable of, did we not meet with frequent Instances of it in ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... or a country may degenerate! The Grecian people, at one time the first in the world, are now the furthest behind! I was told by everyone that in Greece it was neither safe to trust myself with a guide nor to wander about alone, as I had done in other ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Within one year Corfu, in two years Malta, were rent away from the state that could not support them by its ships. Nay, more: had Bonaparte not taken the latter stronghold out of the hands of its degenerate but innocuous government, that citadel of the Mediterranean would perhaps—would probably—never have passed into those of his chief enemy. There is here also ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... begun to read a lovely passage in "Christ's Victory and Triumph," had gone into what I can only call an intellectual rage, at the impudence of the editor, who had altered innumerable words and phrases to suit the degenerate taste of his own time,—when a knock came to the door, and Charlie entered, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... harvest of strange taxes sprang up on every hand. The list of excisable articles was increased. The tax on houses and windows, that had been so unpopular in the preceding reign, was again introduced, and a new appraisement was made of all the real estate in the kingdom. A degenerate age might take exceptions to some of the other taxes now instituted. An act was passed placing a tax upon bachelors and widowers, fixing, at the same time, 'certain rules and duties on marriages, births, and burials, for the term ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... difficulty to sheep and goats, and cattle seem to be entirely immune. It runs a variable course and usually produces the death of the animal affected with it. It is characterized by the formation of neoplasms, or nodules, of connective tissue, which degenerate into ulcers, from which exude a peculiar discharge. It is accompanied with a variable degree of fever, according to the rapidity of its course. It is subject to various complications of the lymphatic glands, of the lungs, of the testicles, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... questions; the one thing needful to be understood both by the leaders of thought and the rulers of men. Unless correct and rational views are entertained on this subject, internal legislation will be perpetually at fault, external policy in a false direction. Reform will degenerate into revolution, conquest into desolation. The greatest calamities, both social and foreign, recorded in the history of the last half century, have arisen from a neglect of the maxims of Montesquieu, as to the indelible influence of race and external circumstances on human character, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... an important era in Roman history. Large treasures were obtained from this and other Greek cities in Southern Italy. Luxury became more fashionable; morals began to degenerate. Greed for wealth obtained by plunder began to get possession of the Romans. From now on the moral tone of the people continued to degenerate in proportion as their ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... for his work. But, not content with this, he began to ordain young men who knew no Latin, and even criminals, setting forth the view that ordination was a sort of second baptism, which purged all crimes — a most convenient theory, and one which is not half enough insisted on in these degenerate days. ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... and crime had filled the throne, till their morals and manners had infected those of all the people. The state was distracted, and apparently on the eve of dissolution. The public taste, like the general conscience, was perverted. The fountains of education were poisoned. Degenerate Grecian masters were inspiring their Roman pupils with a relish for a false science, a frivolous literature, a vitiated eloquence, an Epicurean ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... intercourse with gospel Christians; I was convinced that such there were, because the Saviour had promised "that the powers of hell should never prevail against his church." But not finding them in the Roman Catholic church, which presented to me nothing but a religion of tradition, equally degenerate in doctrine and worship, I was greatly at a loss where to find the real Christians for whom ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... frieze of simplicity, thou mayest finely couch the wrought velvet of knavery;" and in his Father Hubburd's Tales, we find "like an old cunning bowler to fetch in a young ketling gamester:" see Middleton's Works, v. 543, 589, ed. Dyce. Keistrels are hawks of a worthless and degenerate breed. ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of office by his poverty, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... he loves to show the strength of false reasoning, of sophistry antagonistic to truth, and of cold expediency in opposition to the natural feelings of humanity. From a similar reason, his occasional attempts at comedy degenerate into mere farce. We question whether the scene between Death and Apollo in the "Alcestis," could be surpassed in vulgarity, even by the modern school of English dramatists, while his exaggerations in the minor characters are scarcely to be surpassed by the ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... perhaps Wagner, if he could finish his rehearsal of "Lohengrin" in time, he was not sorry to see his table relieved of the dull pomposity and brilliant watch-chain of the pillar of Prague society. How mean to hide one's Judaism! What a burden to belong to such a race, degenerate sons of a great but long-vanished past, unable to slough the slave traits engendered by centuries of slavery! How he had yearned as a boy to shake off the yoke of the nations, even as he himself had shaken off the yoke of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and Mr. Addison[4] have joined in giving testimony against our author, as to the choice of his verse, which they condemn as boyish and being apt to degenerate into the doggrel; but while they censure his verse, they applaud his matter, and Dryden observes, that had he chose any other verse, he would even then have excelled; as we say of a court favourite, that whatever his office be, he still makes it uppermost, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... aspire to a perfect life should set before themselves. In medio tutissimus ibis is eminently true of the cultivation of character, and some of its best elements become pernicious in their extremes. Thus prudent forethought, which is one of the first conditions of a successful life, may easily degenerate into that most miserable state of mind in which men are perpetually anticipating and dwelling upon the uncertain dangers and evils of an uncertain future. How much indeed of the happiness and misery of men may be included under those ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... from which you have degraded yourself, you shall be scourged. For a subsistence, therefore, betake yourself to cultivation; or other drudgeries for which alone you are now fit, and do not bring a disgrace on the character of the sacred order.” In these degenerate days perhaps there is not one Brahman out of fifty who either does not do what he ought to shun, or who does not omit to do what he ought to perform; and all will admit that degraded Brahmans are unworthy of holding such ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... Violence, distain'd with crimes, Rousing elate in these degenerate times; View unsuspecting Innocence a prey, As guileful Fraud points out the erring way; While subtle Litigation's pliant tongue The life-blood equal sucks of ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... account, and her most cherished notions disputed. What was the lady of the manor to do but to superintend the church, parsonage, and parish generally? Not her duty? She had never heard of such a thing, nor did she credit it. Papa would come home, make these degenerate Charnocks hear reason, and ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... answerable to their cause. A fleet and an army were sent to America to dislodge the enemies from the settlements which they had so perfidiously made, and so insolently maintained, and to repress that power which was growing more every day by the association of the Indians, with whom these degenerate Europeans intermarried, and whom they secured to their party by presents ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... impressions lose their influence on the moral feeling only because the respect for the law is more powerful than all of them together. It is only the apparent strength of a fever patient that makes even the lively sympathy with good rise to an emotion, or rather degenerate into it. Such an emotion is called enthusiasm, and it is with reference to this that we are to explain the moderation which is usually recommended ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant
... through patience, hope and resignation to serenity, and beyond to temperance, purity, goodness, and self-devotion and self-sacrifice. Always and everywhere, for the past eighteen hundred years, as soon as these wings grow feeble or give way, public and private morals degenerate. In Italy, during the Renaissance, in England under the restoration, in France under the Convention and Directory, man becomes as pagan as in the first century; the same causes render him the same as in the times of Augustus and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... been left us. What a man of uncommon gifts and high position can be made by the passion of fear, is here shown with what may be called a mathematical completeness. All the resources of the State were devoted to the one end of securing his personal safety, though happily his cruel egotism did not degenerate into a purposeless thirst for blood. He lived in the Citadel of Milan, surrounded by magnificent gardens, arbors, and lawns. For years he never set foot in the city, making his excursions only in the country, where lay several ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... goin' to be 'ung. I've never seen that look but once before when they chucked the gun-sights overboard in the Fantastic.' Throwin' gun-sights overboard, Mr. Hooper, is the equivalent for mutiny in these degenerate days. It's done to attract the notice of the authorities an' the Western Mornin' News—generally by a stoker. Naturally, word went round the lower deck an' we had a private over'aul of our little consciences. But, barrin' a ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... immediate day is weak and weary, because it is no longer young; yet it possesses one noble attribute—it has an acute and almost universal sympathy, which does indeed often degenerate into a false and illogical sentiment, yet serves to redeem an age of egotism. We have escaped both the gem-like hardness of the Pagan, and the narrowing selfishness of the Christian and the Israelite. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... that a man of so abandoned a character should be the choice of a sister of Lord Orville! and how strange, that, almost at the moment of the union, he should be so importunate in gallantry to another woman! What a world is this we live in! how corrupt! how degenerate! well might I be contented to see no more of it! If I find that the eyes of Lord Orville agree with his pen,-I shall then think, that of all mankind, the only virtuous individual resides at ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... salaried position in a great combine, instead of work for one's self in an independent business, tends to magnify the value of mere money-income gained through smartness rather than by ability. If life is made too easy, men will settle into indolent sterility, just as animals and plants degenerate with ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... book-shelf, and desk, of a dark West Indian wood, were just visible. There was but one picture,—a sad-eyed, beautiful Fate. It was the type of her nation. I think she worshipped it—And how apt is misfortune! to degenerate into Fate!—not that the girl had ever experienced the former, but, dissatisfied with life, and seeing no outlet, she accepted it stoically and waited till it should be over. She needed to be aroused;—the station ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... Mr. Gleason. "Oh! Louis, had your mother lived, how would her heart have been wrung by the knowledge of your aberration from rectitude! And how will the kind and noble being who fills that mother's place in our affections and home, mourn over her weak and degenerate boy." ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the sky above us. Civilized warfare itself, the only field remaining where undying fame may be purchased, seems likely to lose its hold on men, and soon the arbitrator will everywhere replace the commander-in-chief and the noble art of war will degenerate into the ignoble lawsuit. So even universal peace may ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... brave men, some of them more accustomed to Paris salons than to Canadian forest warfare on snow-shoes, with spruce boughs and snow-drifts for beds. But let us not anticipate. We must be content to accompany them on that day to the Sillery settlement, a march quite sufficient for us degenerate Canadians of ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... for rum and such strong liquors. They kindly received me as well as the English, who were few before the people concerned with me came among them. I must needs commend their respect to authority, and kind behaviour to the English. They do not degenerate from the old friendship between both kingdoms. As they are people proper and strong of body, so they have fine children, and almost every house full: rare to find one of them without three or four boys and as many girls; some six, seven, ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... among the mountains of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would degenerate into a race ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... derive a Heraldry which we may rightly consider to be our own, and which we may transmit with honour to our successors. Ido not suggest the adoption, for present use, of an obsolete system. But, while I earnestly repudiate the acceptance and the maintenance amongst ourselves of a most degenerate substitute for a noble Science, Ido aspire to aid in restoring HERALDRY to its becoming rank, and consequently to its early popularity, now in our own times. This is to revive the fine old Heraldry of the past, to give to it a fresh animation, and to apply it under existing ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... a snare and a delusion!" continues Miss Majendie, who has now mounted her hobby, and will ride it to the death. "Who can tell the age of any man in this degenerate age? We look at their faces, and say he must be so and so, and he a few years younger, but looks are vain, they tell us nothing. Some look old, because they are old, ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... claim'st in this exhausted age? Thou givest our lyres a theme, that might engage Those that could send thy name o'er sea and land, While sea and land shall last; for Homer's rage A theme; a theme for Milton's mighty hand - How much unmeet for us, a faint degenerate band! ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... to that, I should distinguish,' returned the doctor. 'The mother is; not so the children. The mother was the last representative of a princely stock, degenerate both in parts and fortune. Her father was not only poor, he was mad: and the girl ran wild about the residencia till his death. Then, much of the fortune having died with him, and the family being quite extinct, the girl ran wilder than ever, until at last she married, Heaven ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deceived her. I should like also to omit all reference to the conversation which ensued between them, but for the sake of true art I am constrained to state that Lucifer descended to commonplace. M. Renan tells us that since he left Saint Sulpice he did nothing but degenerate, and the inference is obvious, that he ought to have gone back to Saint Sulpice, despite the literary splendours of the Vie de Jesus. Since he last broke a lance with Michael, the devil has debilitated mentally, and the substance of his causerie ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... I will answer. Hubert, thou fatal keeper of poor babes, That are appointed hostages for John,[323] Had I a son here, as I have not one, (For yesterday I sent him into Wales), Think'st thou I would be so degenerate, So far from kind, to give him unto thee? I would not, I protest: ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... and of the nobility is, taken all round, a very lazy one. Exercise is considered a degenerate habit, fit only for people who have to earn a living; and, as for manual labour, a Corean nobleman would much prefer suicide to ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... his surroundings uninteresting. In the record of his adventures and experiences there is enough of wit and character and invention to make the fortune of a score or more of such novels as the public of these degenerate days would hail with enthusiasm. But his function is to vitiate them all. He is a bore of the first magnitude, and of his eminence in that capacity his history is at once the monument and ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... peace, may it not be well for us to pause a moment and take full account of the idea, Arbitration, on the right hand and on the left? Noble and beneficent in its true outlines, it too may share, may even now be sharing, the liability of the loftiest conceptions to degenerate into catchwords, or into cant. "Liberty, what crimes have been wrought in thy name!" and does not religion share the same reproach, and conscience also? Yet will we not away with any ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... what used to be described in satirical writings of the first half of the century as "an aristocratic drawl," and his pronunciation was archaic. Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of "cowcumbers" and "laylocks," called a woman an "'ooman," and was "much obleeged" where a degenerate age is content to be obliged. The frigidity of his address and the seeming stiffness of his manner, due really to an innate and incurable shyness, produced even among people who ought to have known him well a totally erroneous notion of his character and temperament. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... the expense of man is one of the most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all succeeding generations The tendencies and natural purpose of the individual science become degenerate, and science itself is finally shipwrecked: it has made progress, but has either no effect at all on life ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... detestation of flattery; and you know, from long experience, that a British seaman hath a spirit too brave to stoop to so degenerate ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... legislation, except in war, is to an over-degree to strike at the roots of individual initiative. We have secured its execution during the war as to the willing cooeperation of ninety-five per cent of the trades of the country, but under peace conditions it would degenerate into an harassing ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... seperate from the Minds of the People the Idea of unfortunate from that of the Want of some necessary soldierly Quality. At best the unfortunate General has Pity only as the Reward of his Services; and how soon does Pity degenerate into Contempt. Cicero if I mistake not some where tells us, that when a General is fortunate it matters not whether it is ascribd to his being a Favorite of the Immortal Gods, or to certain good Qualities in him which others ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... winter's cold, when the voice of his son, a tall stripling, who had managed affairs during his illness, recalled him to the present, which certainly to him I thought might wear no unfavourable aspect. He had literally caused the wilderness to blossom as the rose, and saw rising around him not a degenerate but an improving race, gifted far beyond himself with bright mental endowments, the spontaneous growth of the land they lived in, and which never flourish more fairly than when engrafted on the old English stem; that is, the children of emigrants, or the Anglo-bluenoses, ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... and a few other instances, the polemical zeal natural to men who had sacrificed their worldly all for the sake of religion, was observed to degenerate among the refugees into personal quarrels disgraceful to themselves and injurious to their noble cause, it ought on the other hand to be observed, that some of the firmest and most affectionate friendships of the age were formed amongst ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... were communities, scarce known by name In these degenerate days, but once far-famed, Where liberty and justice, hand in hand, Ordered the common weal; where great men grew Up to their natural eminence, and none Saving the wise, just, eloquent, were great; Where power was of God's gift to whom he gave ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... you suspect that we are some of those that degenerate from the Institutions of our Founder; we ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... jovial where it meets the robustness of temperament which I have pointed out, a ferocity which gives them a reality more exact still because the half-civilized person is often impulsive and, in consequence, the physical easily predominates. There, as elsewhere, the degenerate is everywhere a degenerate who gives the impression of being ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... poetry is not to be encouraged. Indeed, poetry may be said to need far more self-restraint than prose. Its conditions are more exquisite. It produces its effects by more subtle means. It must not be allowed to degenerate into mere rhetoric or mere eloquence. It is, in one sense, the most self-conscious of all the arts, as it is never a means to an end but always an end in itself. Sir Edwin Arnold has a very picturesque or, perhaps we should say, a very pictorial style. He knows India better than any living ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... rites pleased, why did Rome also take up foreign ones? I pass over the ground hidden with costly buildings, and shepherds' cottages glittering with degenerate gold. Why, that I may reply to the very matter which they complain of, have they eagerly received the images of captured cities, and conquered gods, and the foreign rites of alien superstition? Whence, then, is the pattern of Cybele washing her chariots in a stream counterfeiting the ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... ... It always wants the same things at the back of its head. The Turk and the Arab came out of big spaces, and they have the desire of them in their bones. They settle down and stagnate, and by the by they degenerate into that appalling subtlety which is their ruling passion gone crooked. And then comes a new revelation and a great simplifying. They want to live face to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priestcraft. They want to prune life of its foolish fringes and get back to the ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... a shock, as if cold water had been dashed over him. Somehow it had not once occurred to him that the man could be one of the educated degenerate vicious for whom no power to help lay in any hands— yet he was not the common vagrant—and he was plainly on the point of producing an ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... must not, from the faithful narrator, degenerate into the partial eulogist. Well, full well, do I know that Dr. John was not perfect, anymore than I am perfect. Human fallibility leavened him throughout: there was no hour, and scarcely a moment of the time I spent with him that in act or speech, or look, he did not betray something that was ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... now some years beyond sixty, but had that tremendous vigor of frame and constitution that distinguished the pioneers—an attribute strangely lacking in their puny and degenerate sons. This short and chunky old man, with his round, thick head, bristling hair and beard, and huge red neck, had still a fiber as tough as oak. He looked coarse, uncouth, and stupid, but in his small gray eyes shone the alert and ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... his moral depravity with the mantle of the philosopher, he placed another canvas before her—something so unrefined, so animal, so destructive of womanly modesty and of all reserve, that any one looking upon it would instantly know that the man who had painted it was a degenerate demon—an associate of dissolute models, an anarchist in the world of women. It was fit only for ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... I heard the terrible news. Poor Torrijos! And yet I suppose it is better so: he would only have lived to bitter disappointment, and the despairing conviction that the spirit he appealed to did not animate one human being in his deplorable and degenerate land. A young Englishman, of the name of Boyd, John's sometime friend and companion, was taken and shot with the rest: it choked me to think of his parents, his brothers and sisters. Surely God has been most merciful to us in sparing us such an anguish, and bringing ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... modern descendants of some Norman knightling who took Verbicaro for himself one morning in the old days, and kept it; or perhaps even the far-off progeny of one of those bright-eyed, golden-locked Goths who made slaves of the degenerate Latins some thirteen centuries ago or more, and treated their serfs indeed more like cattle than slaves until almost the last of them were driven into the sea with their King Teias by Narses. But a few were left in the southern fastnesses and in the Samnite hills, and northward through ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... away what the phrenologists call combativeness, we could doubtless stop prize-fight, but we might have a springless society. The only safe way is that taught by horticulture, to feed a fruit-tree generously, so that it has vigor enough to throw off its degenerate tendencies and its enemies, or, as the doctors say in medical practice, bring up the general system. That is to say, there is more hope for humanity in stimulating the good, than in directly suppressing the evil. It is on something ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... general, with biting suavity, "your frankness does you credit,—'an honest man's the noblest work of God,'—but we cannot carry on politics in these degenerate times without a certain amount of diplomacy. In the good old days when your father was alive, and perhaps nowadays in the discipline of convicts, direct and simple methods might be safely resorted to; but this is ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!" Such are the compliments bandied between my great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the more satisfied with herself because she had never for an instant forgotten her dignity so far as to degenerate into the vehemence of passion or to falter with ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... phosphorescent colors of the skeletons and long, fuzzy, exaggerated lines of the accompanying worms. The effect was thrilling. Every sound save the soft swish of the ghastly robes and the delicate footfall of ghostly feet ceased. Not a whisper from a sap-headed youth or a yap from an aged degenerate or a giggle from a silly woman broke the ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... storm, but first Shall fall, thou and thy brother, blood-imbrued. Such curse I lately launched against you twain, Such curse I now invoke to fight for me, That ye may learn to honor those who bear thee Nor flout a sightless father who begat Degenerate sons—these maidens did not so. Therefore my curse is stronger than thy "throne," Thy "suppliance," if by right of laws eterne Primeval Justice sits enthroned with Zeus. Begone, abhorred, disowned, no son of mine, Thou vilest of the vile! and take with thee This curse I ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... chair before he got his deserts. His mind had passed through innumerable phases since he left his sister's house in Washington, and now as he shamelessly flirted with Miss Seebrook he knew himself for an unmoral creature, a degenerate who was all the more dangerous for being able to pass muster among decent folk. He had always imagined that citizens of the underworld were limited in their social indulgences to cautious meetings in the back rooms of low saloons, but this he had found to be a serious mistake. It ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... recorded the facts as they occurred, and the impressions as they arose, without attempting to make a case against any person or any policy. Indeed, I fear that assailing none, I may have offended all. Neutrality may degenerate into an ignominious isolation. An honest and unprejudiced attempt to discern the truth is my sole defence, as the good opinion of the reader has been throughout my chief aspiration, and can be in ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... a Persian is, in the greater percentage of cases, the ear of a degenerate. It is coarse and lumpy, and somewhat shapeless, with animal qualities strongly marked in it. Occasionally one does come across a good ear in Persia, but ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... all risk. We see no reason, either, why their righteous daring may not have been crowned with victory; and suspect that on such events were gradually built up the dragon-slaying legends which charmed all Europe, and grew in extravagances and absurdities, till they began to degenerate into the bombast of the "Seven Champions," and expired in the immortal ballad of the "Dragon of Wantley," in which More of More Hall, on the morning of his battle with the monster, invoked the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... suggested the prolongation of earthly life by artificial means; hence the search for an elixir, carried on through many centuries by degenerate disciples of Taoism. But here we must pass on to consider some of the speculations on God, life, death, and immortality, indulged in by Taoist philosophers and others, who were not fettered, as the Confucianists were, by traditional reticence ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... can you bring me," began Mr. Arp, deliberately, "that we folks, modernly, ain't more degenerate than the ancient Romans?" ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... faithful character of this young gentleman, in a more particular manner, whose virtues and extraordinary qualities, the former not lost, the latter acquired with much travels at few years, do no whit degenerate from the nobility of his blood, and active loyalty of his progenitors; my duty to your Majesty, as well as my affection to his person, obliging me ex officio to this short testimony of his merits unrequested, to the end so hopeful a branch of that house may not want ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... principle of individualism into its home, its school, its market-place and forum. By reason of the increase in gold, books, travel and personal luxuries, some now feel that selfness is beginning to degenerate into selfishness. The time, therefore, seems to have fully come when the principle of self-care should receive its complement through the principle of care for others. These chapters assert the debt of ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... for their wealth, hated because they had dared to keep their rights and treaties and sell goods to the enemies of Germany, and despised because the Germans believed them too rich and cowardly, too fat and degenerate, to fight in the great war for the mastery of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... parents, or that parents be, Depart a space, and giue not eare at all To the foule tale that here shall vttered be: Some filthy shame let on all other fall, If possibly there can be any such, From nature to degenerate so much. ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... otherwise be neglected; and when, as does sometimes happen, those who come to see a contest remain to think. It is necessary, when the interests of truth and of justice are at stake. It is an evil, in so far as controversy always tends to degenerate into quarrelling, to swerve from the great issue of what is right and what is wrong to the very small question of who is right and who is wrong. I venture to hope that the useful and the necessary were more conspicuous than ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... more essentially requisite; there being nothing eminent, in that case, to compensate for the want of them, or preserve the person from our severest hatred, as well as contempt. A high ambition, an elevated courage, is apt, says Cicero, in less perfect characters, to degenerate into a turbulent ferocity. The more social and softer virtues are there chiefly to be regarded. These are always good and amiable [Cic. de Officiis, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... advantageous ground of no little value, to such instructors as still adhere to the good old principles of the Church of England; in short, daily shaming us, by preserving a living representation of the opinions and habits of better times, as some historical record, which reproaches a degenerate posterity, by exhibiting the worthier deeds of their progenitors. In such a state of things, to what a depth public morals might sink, may be anticipated by those who consider what would then be the condition of society; who reflect how bad principles and vicious conduct mutually ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... perfection of which they are capable. Philosophy and the intellectual sciences, on the contrary, stand like statues, worshiped and celebrated, but not moved or advanced. Nay, they sometimes flourish most in the hands of the first author, and afterwards degenerate. For when men have once made over their judgments to others' keeping, and (like those senators whom they called Pedarii) have agreed to support some one person's opinion, from that time they make no enlargement of the sciences themselves, but fall to the servile office of embellishing certain ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... simply acting all that scorn in an attempt to appeal to my instinct for the preservation of my social self, I can face them without flinching. When that pompous old boy with the sandy mustache who has always looked upon me as a member of the degenerate Juke family tries to tell me that if I don't take the five-dollar cravat he won't be responsible for the way in which decent people will receive me when I go out on the street, I will reach across the counter and playfully pull ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... Mrs. Robinson, the lady for whom he conceived that insane and unlawful passion which has been made to loom so large in the lives of the Brontes. After all the agony and indignation that has gathered round this episode, it is clear enough now, down to the last sordid details. The feverish, degenerate, utterly irresponsible Branwell not only declared his passion, but persuaded himself, against the evidence of his senses, that it was returned. The lady (whom he must have frightened horribly) told her husband, who ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... birth and breeding had returned upon him; something instinctive and inherited had reappeared; and the gentlemanly, easy-going father, who yet, as Doris remembered, when matters were serious "always got his way," was there—strangely there—in the degenerate son. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... news this morning of that Pass! And have you seen these? [Reading from the newspaper] "We will have no truck with the jargon of the degenerate who vilifies his country at such a moment. The Member for Toulmin has earned for himself the contempt of all virile patriots." [He takes up a second journal] "There is a certain type of public man who, even at his own expense, cannot ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... classes of men are hopeless: those who think to prevail by fraud and the contrivances of indirection, and those whose minds and characters have begun to disintegrate, or degenerate, if you like the latter word better. There is every reason why character should each day get a truer bearing, why the mind each day should become more ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... precisely because it seemed unattainable,—from a sort of morbid craving for whatever had become as unattainable as my mother's presence. I loathed action, even for the realization of my dreams, and over-concentrated thought threatened to degenerate into a sickly reverie that should presently exhaust the forces of my life, like an unnaturally prolonged sleep. New influence added in this direction might have driven me insane, while the diversion afforded by Valeria's counter-enthusiasm ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... have done anything so like a washerwoman as to wring my hands; though I might, like some heroines, have fallen to work in a regular blacksmith-way, by examining the lock of the door, and perhaps have succeeded in picking it; but, alas! I live in degenerate days. Oh that I had been born the persecuted daughter of some ancient baron bold instead of the spoiled child of a good natured modern earl! Heavens! to think that I must tamely, abjectly submit to be married in the presence of all my family, even in the very parish church! Oh, what detractions ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... and delicate and highly perfumed, and now takes the lead in the market. But honey is honey the world over; and the bee is the bee still. "Men may degenerate," says an old traveler, "may forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactories may fail, and commodities be debased, but the sweets of the wild-flowers of the wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will continue ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... hands. "That any reputable woman should have nocturnal appointments with gentlemen in the back garden, and beguile her own grandmother into an odious marriage! I protest, Captain Audaine, the degenerate world of to-day is no longer a suitable residence for ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... a cripple, a degenerate, responsible for his actions, certainly, but a man in whom the doctors will find every form of wasting illness: disease of the spinal cord, tuberculosis, and all ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... the chief was to hinder its falling to a minor, or some one unfit to take up the chieftainship, and this continued to prevail for centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion, and was even adopted by many owners of English descent who had become "meere Irish," as the phrase ran, or "degenerate English." ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... "Americanism" to degenerate into a mere "protective coloration" for politicians who want to hide their reaction and ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... girls fall for a bankclerk—when we are made of the very stuff their own brothers are made of. Most of us came from a farm or a village. The bank has fitted us out with a shine and a shave, also has made us more useless year after year, and when we degenerate sufficiently the girls begin to adore us. I used to correspond with ten girls ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... other organs depend upon it: it provides them with nourishment for preservation and improvement, and it punishes them—if they do not mind the laws of normality—by withholding its gifts, or by presenting these gifts in the form of poisons that impoverish, hinder and degenerate the system of organs. Uncleanliness is surely one of the chief ways in which physiological thoughtlessness is exhibited, and due punishment will inevitably ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... more dangerous than Jackson's doctrine, for it tended to take the power of patronage still more from a single and responsible person and vest it in a large and therefore wholly irresponsible body which has always been too much inclined to degenerate into an office-broking oligarchy, and thus degrade its high and important functions. Mr. Webster argued his proposition with his usual force and perspicuity, but the speech is strongly partisan and exhibits the disposition of an advocate to fit the Constitution ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... obvious enjoyment of the cultivated smoker. "In every country of the world, the animal world as well as the human world, the male resents his female being taken from him. Directly he ceases to resent it, he becomes degenerate. Surely you must agree with me, ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... be remembered, that these ladies with "squirrels brains," are the "grandmothers" whose degenerate descendants we are daily accused of being. It is an old tune, but the generations have danced to it since the world began, each with a profound conviction of its newness, and their own success in following its lead. Nor was he alone in his indignation, for even in ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... highwaymen, the border moss-troopers or the ranting Highlandmen of song and story, but against a plain, Twentieth Century police trap which was being worked very successfully along this road. Such was our approach in these degenerate days to "Merrie Carlile," which figured so largely in the endless border warfare between the Scotch and English. But why the town should have been famed as "Merrie Carlile" would be hard to say, unless more than ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... physiology has already to a great extent demonstrated the localisation of the various activities of mind, and their connection with definite parts of the brain; psychiatry has shown that those psychical processes are disturbed or destroyed if these parts of the brain become diseased or degenerate. Histology has revealed to us the extremely complicated structure and arrangement of the ganglion-cells. But, for the settlement of this momentous question, the discoveries of the last ten years with regard ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... anatomists, and have made one of the corner-stones of our modern idea of the arrangement of the animal kingdom. With the exception of sponges, concerning the exact relations of which there is still dispute, and of a few sets of parasitic and possibly degenerate creatures, all animals, the bodies of which are multicellular, from the simple fresh-water hydra up to man, are divided into two great groups. The structure of the simpler of these groups is exactly what Huxley found to be of importance in the Medusae. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... Florence. In the church of Santa Croce a monument was erected to his memory, which is contemplated with reverence by all who can distinguish the virtues of a great mind through the corruptions of a degenerate age, and which will be approached with still deeper homage when the object to which his public life was devoted shall be attained, when the foreign yoke shall be broken, when a second Procida shall avenge the wrongs of Naples, when a happier Rienzi ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to protest aloud against a rule which he did not approve. In our days there are so many cowardly and degenerate characters, that we cannot too greatly admire those who have the courage to proclaim their opinion in the presence of the mob, especially when those opinions shock the brutalized mob; for my part I admire this man; but what I admire still ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... which has been built out across the beach into four or five feet of water, and you have to step gingerly lest you slip on the slime. At the end of the wall a solid stairway cut in the hillside leads up to the temple. It was formerly used daily by thousands of worshipers, but in this degenerate age nobody but tourists ever climb it. Every boat load that lands is greeted by a group of bright-eyed children, who follow the sahibs (gentlemen) and mem-sahibs (ladies) up the stairs, begging for backsheesh and offering for sale curios beetles and other ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... to be founded in East Anglia by Felix.[9] It is an interesting question whether these were the missionary schools, or whether they were schools which kept up the traditions of Roman education in a degenerate form like the schools in Gaul. On the ground that our oldest document is a Code of the first converted king, it has been too easily inferred, that before this time the Saxons were wholly destitute of literary appliances. Were ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... and strode away without another word. Long after he was out of sight the chaplain stood fixed in the same attitude of panic-stricken, helpless despondency. By my faith! even in these degenerate days, we have petrifying influences left that may match ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... working-man with his flatteries of either party. He blundered and blustered at home, while the Empire, its services and its defences, by which alone all this pullulating "street folk" existed for a day, were in danger of starvation and hindrance abroad, to meet the unreasonable fancies of a degenerate race. A deep hatred of mob-rule rooted itself in Tressady, passing gradually, during his last three months in India, into a growing inclination to return and take his place in the fight—to have his say. "Government to the competent—not to the many," might have been the summary ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said: "Master Pike, have you caught him yet?" and Pike only answered: "Wait a bit." If ever this fortitude and perseverance is to be recovered as the English Brand (the one thing that has made us what we are, and may yet redeem us from niddering shame), a degenerate age should encourage the habit of fishing and never despairing. And the brightest sign yet for our future is the increasing demand for ...
— Crocker's Hole - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... to admire most, the man or his muscle. One doesn't often see such vigor, size and comeliness in these degenerate days," said Randal, mentally booking the fine figure in ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... importance. Handel's incomparable genius infused so much dramatic power into this meagre form, that even now the truth and sincerity of his songs charm us no less than their extraordinary melodic beauty. But it is easy to see that in the hands of composers less richly endowed, this form was fated to degenerate into a mere concert upon the stage. The science of vocalisation was cultivated to such a pitch of perfection that composers were tempted, and even compelled, to consult the tastes of singers rather than ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... I have been talking religion all the way home: we are both mighty good girls, as girls go in these degenerate days; our grandmothers to be sure—but ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... triumph of Paris and of Dr. Price. I tremble for the cause of liberty, from such an example to kings. I tremble for the cause of humanity, in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind. But there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of mind that they look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who know how to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their subjects, to assert their prerogative, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... exaggerating this wild and amazing prodigality of nature. The best-conducted hives will, as a rule, contain four to five hundred males. Weaker or degenerate ones will often have as many as four or five thousand; for the more a hive inclines to its ruin, the more males will it produce. It may be said that, on an average, an apiary composed of ten colonies will at a given moment send an army of ten thousand males ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... hisses.] I do not say that you ought not to be in the most friendly alliance with France or with Germany; but I do say that your own children, the offspring of England, ought to be nearer to you than any people of strange tongue. [A voice: "Degenerate sons," applause and hisses; another voice: "What about the Trent?"] If there had been any feelings of bitterness in America, let me tell you that they had been excited, rightly or wrongly, under the impression that Great Britain was going to intervene ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... my lord," answered Herode in his deep, bass voice, "and many there be in these degenerate days who hold their heads very high because of their riches, who would not like to have to confess how they came in ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... virtue and the people will be virtuous." If Thoreau had made the first sentence read: "If all men were like me and were to live as simply," etc., everyone would agree with him. We may wonder here how he would account for some of the degenerate types we are told about in some of our backwoods and mountain regions. Possibly by assuming that they are an instance of perversion of the species. That the little civilizing their forbears experienced rendered these people more susceptible to the physical than to the spiritual influence ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... was the honoured servitor of the noble and illustrious" (here he heaved a sigh, and passed his hairy hand across his eyes) "but in these degenerate days I am become the slave of quack doctors and newspapers. I am driven from pillar to post and hurried up and down, sometimes with stencil-plate and paste-brush to defile the fences with cabalistic legends, and sometimes in grotesque and extravagant character at the behest ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... verified my own judgment. While it might be true, as Miss West had said, that every ship's crew contained several lunatics and idiots, it was a foregone conclusion that our crew contained far more than several. In fact, and as it was to turn out, our crew, even in these degenerate sailing days, was an unusual crew in so far as its helplessness and ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... develop until they have been fertilised. In the males, when mature, reduction takes place in the gametes, so that two kinds of sperms are formed, those with N chromosomes and those with N-l chromosomes. The latter degenerate and die, the former fertilise the ova, and the fertilised ova develop only into females. The chief difference in this case then is that the reduction in the male to the N or simplex condition takes place in two stages, one in the parthenogenetic ovum, one ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... do in the thought that man has fallen from a higher estate. But the facts do not support the brute theory. Even if the "missing links" could be found, it would be as reasonable—though not so flattering to man's pride—to believe that the monkey is a degenerate man as that ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... instructive theme; it enters into the history of the human mind, and fills a niche in our literary annals. The works of the scholastics, with the debates of these Quodlibetarians, at once show the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect; for though they often degenerate into incredible absurdities, those who have examined the works of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus have confessed their admiration of the Herculean texture of brain which they exhausted in demolishing their ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... you have a heavy hand!" exclaimed one of the least important of beards, one of those that degenerate into side-whiskers as they become conservative. ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... with the oysters, others instinctively use their powers of secretion to better purpose. Remember also that in Elizabethan times school-boy study was a far more strenuous matter than it is in these degenerate days, and that it was not ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... possible. The committee, if unchecked, would have out-Heroded the War Office itself in multiplying regulations. I am inclined to think that it is a mistake to run institutions on purely democratic lines, not because reasonable liberty would degenerate into licence, but because there would be no liberty at all. If democracy ever comes to its own, and the will of the people actually prevails, we may all find ourselves so tied up with laws regulating our conduct that we will wish ourselves ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... princess of as many and great virtues as ever filled a throne: How would it brighten her character to the present and after ages, if she would exert her utmost authority to instil some share of those virtues into her people, which they are too degenerate to learn only from her example! And, be it spoke with all the veneration possible for so excellent a sovereign, her best endeavours in this weighty affair are a most important part of her duty, as well as of her interest and ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... all trouble, when these two interests came into ill-tempered controversy, was the conduct of the coureurs de bois. These roving traders taught the savages all the vices of French civilization in its most degenerate days. They debauched the Indian with brandy, swindled him out of his furs, and entered into illicit relations with the women of the tribes. They managed in general to convince the aborigines that all Frenchmen were dishonest and licentious. That the ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... to degenerate after the captivity, and it continued to do so. It leaned upon the past more and more, having an external and formal character with little of the living soul. The independence of their religious literature disappeared with the national ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... only things worth while, in this world, and I purpose to write briefly of a man, who, though living in these, our own, so-called, degenerate days, would have found a perfect setting in "the spacious times of great Elizabeth." He would have been a worthy companion of Raleigh, half-pirate and half-poet. He had in his time but one soul-kinsman, and that ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... beginning's of these various degenerate and illiterate attempts at book-work we have only to watch the last expiring gleams of classic art beneath the ruthless footsteps of the barbarian invaders of ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... and earnest in his petitions for the divine succour, anxious to sublime his nature by disengaging it from worldly soil, and prompt to sympathise with the sorrows, and out of his scanty means, to relieve the necessities of others; but such is the imperfection of man, that his piety was apt to degenerate into superstition; his abstinence yielded to slight temptations, and his charity was often not proof against a discrepancy of opinion ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... same. How exceedingly dissimilar in style are the Revelation of S. John and the Gospel of S. John! Moreover, practically, the promised remarks on "style," when the Authorship of some portion of Scripture is to be discussed, are commonly observed to degenerate at once into what is really quite a different thing. Single words, perhaps some short phrase, is appealed to, which (it is said) does not recur in any part of the same book; and thence it is argued that the Author can no longer be the ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... friend Egerton. But I grant he is an example that it is never too late to follow. Why, who that had seen you both as youths, notwithstanding Audley had the advantage of being some years your senior—who could have thought that he was the one to become distinguished and eminent, and you to degenerate into the luxurious idler, averse to all trouble and careless of all fame? You, with such advantages, not only of higher fortunes, but, as every one said, of superior talents; you, who had then so much ambition, so keen a desire for glory, sleeping with Plutarch's Lives under ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fault, But his who fills it basely, he besought, No dispensation for commuted wrong, Nor the first vacant fortune, nor the tenth), That to God's paupers rightly appertain, But, 'gainst an erring and degenerate world, Licence to fight, in favour of that seed, From which the twice twelve cions gird thee round. Then, with sage doctrine and good will to help, Forth on his great apostleship he far'd, Like torrent bursting from a lofty vein; And, dashing 'gainst the stocks of ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... shall be esteemed a present deity the Britons and terrible Parthians being added to the empire. What! has any soldier of Crassus lived, a degraded husband with a barbarian wife? And has (O [corrupted] senate, and degenerate morals!) the Marsian and Apulian, unmindful of the sacred bucklers, of the [Roman] name and gown, and of eternal Vesta, grown old in the lands of hostile fathers-in-law, Jupiter and the city being in ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... into another? Are not his discussions and monologues too long? Does not his own exuberant genius become a fatigue to himself and to his readers? Are not, perhaps, his characters too real? and do they not often degenerate, without motive, from the sublime into the ridiculous? Would Hamlet have appeared less interesting or less mad had he not spoken indelicate and cruel words to Ophelia? Would Laertes have seemed less grieved on hearing of the death of his sister had ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Louis Botha was still near Ladysmith with the rearguard, most of the other chiefs were coming by road, and there was no one on the spot to back up General Joubert in his attempts to reorganise the confused and ever-growing mass of undisciplined men. The retreat, in fact, threatened to degenerate into a reckless flight. ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... spite of herself. She remembered the visit so well, and Lady Augusta's loftily resigned air of discovering, in the passively degenerate new arrival, the culminating point of the ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... now. Before they left for the Murchison Pass they had laid in a comfortable supply, but apparently Allister had cached a quantity of the stuff at the Twin Eagles shack. Of one thing Andrew was certain, that four such practiced whisky drinkers would never let their party degenerate into a drunken rout; and another thing was even more sure—that Scottie Macdougal would keep his head better than the best of the others. But what the alcohol would do would be to cut the leash of constraint and dig up ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... Eleusinian family of the Kerykes, and held the offices of archon basileus and eponymus in Athens. When the Heruli overran Greece and captured Athens (269), Dexippus showed great personal courage and revived the spirit of patriotism among his degenerate fellow-countrymen. A statue was set up in his honour, the base of which, with an inscription recording his services, has been preserved (Corpus Inscrr. Atticarum, iii. No. 716). It is remarkable that the inscription is silent as to his military achievements. Photius (cod. 82) mentions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... religious benefits, were the only social bonds that might have inspired them with some degree of emulation in neatness. Is it then surprising to see men thus situated, immersed in great and heavy labours, degenerate a little? It is rather a wonder the effect is not more diffusive. The Moravians and the Quakers are the only instances in exception to what I have advanced. The first never settle singly, it is a colony of the society which emigrates; they ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... as their pupil, that I endeavored to avoid their company, and from that time have never seen them. The vilest inclinations, the basest actions, succeeded my amiable amusements and even obliterated the very remembrance of them. I must have had, in spite of my good education, a great propensity to degenerate, else the declension could not have followed with such ease and rapidity, for never did so promising a Caesar so quickly become ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... lasting impression upon my mind, and I began to think that my own partial indulgence in the practice of drinking so freely after dinner was an act of great weakness and folly, which, if not checked, was likely to degenerate into one of ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... had exported legions; she had imported slaves, who heaped up vast riches for their masters, while their competition reduced the free peasantry to starvation. And now a splendid aristocracy claimed to rule a subject world, while the "Roman people" that had conquered that world were a degenerate mob, whose suffrages in the elections were purchasable—almost openly—by the highest bidder. The way was not clear before Drusus; he only saw, with his blind, Pagan vision, that no real liberty existed under present conditions; that Pompeius and his allies, the Senate party, were ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... selected, were all ordered to repair to the imperial palace, and the magnificent Youantee entered the hall of delight, which was illumined with ten thousand lanterns, and cast his eyes over the portraits of the hundred beauties, but not one feature touched his heart, he turned away in disgust at the degenerate countenances of the age. "Is this all," exclaimed he, "that the world can lay at the feet of its lord?" And the committee of taste prostrated themselves when they beheld his indignation. "And this," exclaimed he, pointing to the supposed portrait ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... are represented as thus related by descent or cognation, do not always agree in sense; for it is incident to words, as to their authours, to degenerate from their ancestors, and to change their manners when they change their country. It is sufficient, in etymological enquiries, if the senses of kindred words be found such as may easily pass into each other, or such as may both be referred to ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... bodily organs will enable them to be photographed, will bring all such morbid growths as tumors and cancers into the photographic field, to say nothing of vital organs which may be abnormally developed or degenerate. How much this means to medical and surgical practice it requires little imagination to conceive. Diagnosis, long a painfully uncertain science, has received an unexpected and wonderful assistant; and how ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... infallible standard; while most men, misled by pleasure, choose what is not truly good. In like manner, Aristotle affirms, that those substances are truly and absolutely wholesome, which are wholesome to the healthy and well-constituted man; other substances may be wholesome to the sick or degenerate. Aristotle's Absolute is thus a Relative with its correlate ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... of belles and beaux, Of powdered wigs and wondrous hose, Of stately airs and careful grace, Look you at our degenerate race. ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... awry; and in one ancient garden the imagination of a child found wings for many an airy flight. The town itself bore the name of the English nobleman, well known in Revolutionary days. Not far away his mansion sturdily defied the touch of time and decay, and admonished the men of a degenerate present to remember their glorious past. The house that sheltered me that summer was known in colonial days as the Black-Horse Tavern. Its walls had echoed to the tread of patriot and tory, who gathered here to ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... proportions of the skeleton generally, while in the small, dry preparation of the head the likeness was ridiculous. It was most regrettable that he should have refused my invitation to come in. As a companion preparation, illustrating the physical resemblances in degenerate families, he would have ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... and strong are these Who limb them as their fancies please. Away with grief and sad surmise That mar the noblest enterprise, And with their weak suspicion blight The sage's plan, the hero's might. Come, this degenerate weakness spurn, And bid thy dauntless heart return, For each fair hope by grief is crossed When those we love are dead or lost. Arise, O best of those who know, Arm for the giant's overthrow. None in the triple world ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... distinguished ornithologist has said that little birds have two ways of making themselves attractive—by melody and by bright plumage; and that most species excel in one or the other way; and that the acquisition of gay colours by a species of a sober-coloured melodious family will cause it to degenerate as a songster. He is speaking of the redstart. Unfortunately for the rule there are too many exceptions. Thus confining ourselves to a single family—that of the finches—in our own islands, the most modest coloured have the least melody, while those ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... with limbs for locomotion on the land. Most of the Carboniferous amphibians were shaped like the salamander, with weak limbs adapted more for crawling than for carrying the body well above the ground. Some legless, degenerate forms ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... varieties can be improved by bud selection. There is, however, but little in either theory or fact to substantiate the belief of those who say that varieties once established can be improved; or, on the other hand, that they degenerate. Present knowledge and experience indicate that heredity is all but complete in varieties propagated from parts of plants. The multitude of grapes in any variety, all from one seed, are morphologically one individual. A few kinds of grapes go back ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... some cherished plan, he will seek refuge in the bosom of the grave; he will voluntarily return to his ancestors whom he has worshipped as gods. In the late war between China and Japan, in which China was vanquished, some of her generals committed suicide. It presents, alas, a degenerate side of human nature. It is most pathetic. Better far to live under the smart of defeat and bear its shame, carry the cross, endure the stings of conscience, and meet the frowns of the world, than flee from the path of duty, than ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... cold, Frosen and impotent, and so report me? That I had Nestor's hernia, thou wouldst think. I do degenerate, and abuse my nation, To play with opportunity thus long; I should have done the act, and then have parley'd. ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." But this seems to be a description of the state of the world at that particular time, not of its character in all ages. It is not a description of man's natural condition, but of an extremely degenerate condition. If the state of the world here described was its natural state, it would rather be a reason for not having created the race at first; or, if it was a reason for destroying it, it would, at best, seem to be as strong a one against creating it again. If a man plants a ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... might put in claims to the same privilege, and society would become a chaos. Marriage vows, duties, affections, and all our nearest and dearest interests would be unhinged, and this pleasant state of being would degenerate into a moral, or rather an immoral pandemonium. Keeping in view these all-important considerations, and more especially the imperativeness of the law, which does not admit of discretion, the court sentences you to be carried hence, without delay, to the centre of the great square, where ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Epi was rather uninteresting. Owing to the dense French colonization there the natives have nearly all disappeared or become quite degenerate. We spent our time in visits to the different French planters and then sailed for ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... in subdued colours, in the Italian manner. A great improvement has lately taken place in internal decoration in Vienna, which corresponds with that of external architecture. A few years ago, most large apartments were fitted up in the style of Louis XV., which was worthy of the degenerate nobles and crapulous financiers for whom it was invented, and was, in fact, a sort of Byzantine of the boudoir, which succeeded the nobler and simpler manner of the age of Louis XIV., and tormenting every straight line into meretricious curves, ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... strong, as sadly patient as a mother with a degenerate child, kept steady watch on him, with enough other women close at hand to prevent an outbreak. He had no weapons, and well knew that all his strength was of small avail against ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... function of Art; standing midway between theory and practice; inspired by thought, and stimulating action. Only the social artist has to look to it that his thoughts be not merely true but adequate, lest he degenerate into a mere decorator. How far will a series of "regional surveys," like those of [Page: 143] Mr. Booth in London and Mr. Rowntree in York, carry us! Not so far, I fear, as Professor Geddes seems ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... bridge touch the farther shore, So fleet and fierce and strong are these Who limb them as their fancies please. Away with grief and sad surmise That mar the noblest enterprise, And with their weak suspicion blight The sage's plan, the hero's might. Come, this degenerate weakness spurn, And bid thy dauntless heart return, For each fair hope by grief is crossed When those we love are dead or lost. Arise, O best of those who know, Arm for the giant's overthrow. None in the triple world I see Who in the fight may equal thee; None who before ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... relative value. It is no absolute end, lying beyond all other aims of existence and valued above life itself. In this view, there will be nothing to applaud in the forced and extravagant conduct of a Lucretia or a Virginius—conduct which can easily degenerate into tragic farce, and produce a terrible feeling of revulsion. The conclusion of Emilia Galotti, for instance, makes one leave the theatre completely ill at ease; and, on the other hand, all the rules of female honor cannot prevent a certain sympathy with Clara in Egmont. ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the delirious Pacific of whom you have read and dreamed—Arab, Hindoo, Malayan, Chink, Jap, South Sea Islander—a mere catalogue of the names is a romance. Here are pace and high adventure; the tang of the East; fusion of blood and race and creed. A degenerate dross it is, but, do you know, I cannot say that I don't prefer it to the well-spun gold that is flung from the Empire on boat-race nights. Place these fellows against our blunt backgrounds, under the awful mystery of the ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... with love and pride, and the father was a gentleman, like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken in ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... he has only had clumsy imitators, his style being, moreover, in the language of Montaigne, of one substance with the author, being the author himself. And yet one could hardly say that this style breaks with tradition. He stops short just at the point at which his idiosyncrasies would degenerate into faults.—From PETIT DE JULLEVILLE, Histoire de la littrature franaise, ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... patriotism may degenerate into a vice is shown by the invention of a name for the vice: chauvinism. It is a name for boastful and truculent group self-assertion. It overrules personal judgment and character, and puts the whole group at the mercy of the clique which is ruling at the moment. It produces the dominance ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... selection until that which was once peculiar and unique becomes common. White pigeons are simply albinos. But all breeds in time "run out" and form a type, just as a dozen kinds of pigeons in a loft will in a few years degenerate into a flock, where all the members so closely resemble each other that you can not tell one ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... poor man prolongs his walk then is he in danger from the law of trespass. On weekdays, however, this is the most secluded spot on the estate, and I regret to say that my lordly uncle does not trouble it even on Sundays. I fear we are a degenerate race, Monsieur Valmont, for doubtless a fighting and deeply religious ancestor of mine built this church, and to think that when the useful masons cemented those stones together, Madame la Marquise de Bellairs ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... Nay, each degenerate race hath fled Its shameful rites and orgies dread: Grim Baal in glowing furnace cast Sinks to the earth, ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... not the hour gone by? The mystic strain, Degenerate once, may never spring again. What long-forsaken gods shall we invoke To grant such ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... science of evasion, already tolerably understood, would then be brought to the greatest perfection. It is no inconsiderable part of wisdom, to know how much of an evil ought to be tolerated; lest, by attempting a degree of purity impracticable in degenerate times and manners, instead of cutting off the subsisting ill-practices, new corruptions might be produced for the concealment and security of the old. It were better, undoubtedly, that no influence at all could affect the mind of a member of Parliament. But of all modes ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... be of no possible advantage to us. Do you expect us to settle down here? Do you suppose I have the least inclination to degenerate out ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... I could describe to you in fitting words the wonderful nature of this advancement. All the pride and selfishness, so common to all hearts in our degenerate days, were now driven out and replaced by the spirit of self-denial. Love, the living principle in the gospel, had conquered all its foes and was now enthroned in ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... not mind of further progress? They think, if they keep that stance, they are well, and so have few designs or endeavours after more communion with God, or purification from sin. Now this makes them degenerate to formality. They wither and become barren, and are exposed by this to many temptations which overcome them. But, my beloved, is not this really and indeed to say, "we have no sin?" Do not your walking and ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... No mystery couched in this excess of kindness? Were kings e'er known, in this degenerate age, So passionately fond of noble acts, Where interest shared not more ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... declamation which had no reference to realities. Attempts had been made—the last, only a few years ago, by Cassiodorus—to establish Christian schools in Rome, but without success, so profoundly were the ancient intellectual habits rooted in this degenerate people. The long resistance to the new religion was at an end, but Romans, even while confessing that the gods were demons, could not cast off their affection for the mythology and history of their glorious time. Thus Basil had spent his schooldays mostly in the practice of sophistic argument, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... Morel persisted the more because his children hated it. He seemed to take a kind of satisfaction in disgusting them, and driving them nearly mad, while they were so irritably sensitive at the age of fourteen or fifteen. So that Arthur, who was growing up when his father was degenerate and elderly, ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... a complete system of allusions similar to the allegories of our own classics but superior in that they never degenerate into frozen symbols, but on the contrary keep in close touch with nature, investing her with a vibrant life, in which human consciousness vanishes making way for the dawning consciousness ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... affair of 1830 deprived that great event of a portion of its purity. The Revolution of July had been a fine popular gale, abruptly followed by blue sky. They made the cloudy sky reappear. They caused that revolution, at first so remarkable for its unanimity, to degenerate into a quarrel. In the Revolution of July, as in all progress accomplished by fits and starts, there had been secret fractures; these riots rendered them perceptible. It might have been said: 'Ah! this is broken.' After the Revolution of July, one was sensible only of deliverance; ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... beggars' shoulders out off the shore, and we found ourselves again in the great stalwart roast-beef world; the stout British steamer bearing out of the bay, whose purple waters had grown more purple. The sun had set by this time, and the moon above was twice as big and bright as our degenerate moons are. ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Such is thy boast, Refinement. But deep dyes Oft mar the splendour of thy noontide skies: 230 Then Fancy, sick of follies that deform The face of day, and in the sunshine swarm; Sick of the fluttering fopperies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age; Sick of smooth Sophistry's insidious cant, Or cold Impiety's defying rant; Sick of the muling sentiment that sighs O'er its dead bird, while Want unpitied cries; Sick of the pictures that pale Lust inflame, And ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen: who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... St. Helena dwelt in a worn-out body, a fat, degenerate perversion of the Napoleon ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... regarding Berlin and all that which, according to your previous preparations and suggestions, is going on there. Great cities always contain within themselves the image of whole empires, and even though distorted by exaggerations which degenerate into caricature, they nevertheless present the nation in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of men are hopeless: those who think to prevail by fraud and the contrivances of indirection, and those whose minds and characters have begun to disintegrate, or degenerate, if you like the latter word better. There is every reason why character should each day get a truer bearing, why the mind each day should become more luminous, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Salamanca but which exercised a very considerable influence on the Jesuit teachers in Rome, Ingolstadt, and Prague, was the Dominican, Francis of Vittoria (1480-1546). Realising the necessities of the age better than most of his contemporaries he put to an end the useless discussions and degenerate style of his immediate predecessors, re-introduced the /Summa/ of St. Thomas, insisted on supplementing it by a close study of the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers, and inaugurated a new style of theological Latinity freed both from the barbarisms of the later Scholastics ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... physical system, in the mean while, deprived as it is of the forest atmosphere, in which it was alone fitted to exist and reach its greatest perfection, suffers even more than his mental one. And his whole man, both mental and physical, begins to degenerate, and soon dwindles into insignificance. Yes, it is only in his native forests that the Indian appears in his wild and peculiar dignity of character. There only can he become a being of romance, and there only a hero. And there, in conclusion, we would say, in view of the unsatisfactory results ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... does Heaven degrade The manly frame, for health, for action made? Break down the sinews, rack the brow with pains, Blanch the right cheek and drain the purple veins, To clothe the mind with more extended sway, Thus faintly struggling in degenerate clay? ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... worthiest predecessors. The tendency of the age is to lower, not to elevate, the standard set up by our ancestors for the attainment of preeminence. That our giants may not be stunted in their growth—that the legal stock may not hopelessly degenerate—Chief Justice Campbell does well to impress upon his brethren the patient and laborious course—the high and admirable qualities—by which Chief Justice Mansfield secured ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... for food or mate, or from enemies. But Attaphilas cannot all live in a single nest, and we realize that there must come a crisis, when they pass out into a strange world of terrible light and multitudes of foes. For these pampered, degenerate roaches to find another Atta nest unaided, would be inconceivable. In the big nest which I excavated I observed them on the back and heads not only of the large soldiers, but also of the queens which swarmed in one portion ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... pardon me if I have done wrong, yet I cannot see my wrong except in serving a degenerate people. The little, the very little I left behind to clear my name, the Government will not allow to be printed. So ends all. For my country I have given up all that makes life sweet and holy, brought misery upon my family, and am sure there is no pardon for me in Heaven since ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... outside, in the light of prejudice and misrepresentation, believe the calling of the actor to be one morally dangerous and intellectually contemptible; one in which it is equally easy to succeed as an artist and degenerate as an individual. She begins by telling me that she has a "fancy for the stage," and has "heard a great many things about it." Now, for any man or woman to become an actor or actress because they have a "fancy for the stage" is in itself the height of folly. There is no calling, ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... and of nine-dollar-a-week humanity in the unwashen raw—the odour of misery that permeated the lodgings to which his lack of means had introduced him. He could see again, and with a painful vividness of mental vision, the degenerate "brownstone fronts" that mask those haunts of wretchedness, with their flights of crumbling brownstone steps leading up to oaken portals haggard with flaking paint, flanked by squares of soiled note-paper upon which inexpert hands had traced the warning, not: ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... the heathen; and that heathen learning was preserved, amid Scythian and Saracen invasions, in the sacred bosom of the Church. And in our own day, when God has called the Roman Church to account for degenerate manners and obnoxious doctrines. He has also ordained a renovation of all other knowledges; and, on the other side, the Jesuits, by quickening the state of learning, have done notable service to the Roman ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... dear Ned, but there are needles and thread in the chest: why didn't you mend your knicks, as you call them? Don't let's degenerate into scarecrows because we are obliged to live this Robinson Crusoe-like life. It's many years since I read that book, Chris, but if I recollect right he used not only to mend his own clothes, but make new ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... laughed at for making so much of such a common thing as a wheel. Idiots! Solomon's court fool would have scoffed at the thought of the young Galilean who dared compare the lilies of the field to his august master. Nil admirari is very well for a North American Indian and his degenerate successor, who has grown too grand to admire anything but himself, and takes a cynical pride in his stolid indifference to everything ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... daring may not have been crowned with victory; and suspect that on such events were gradually built up the dragon-slaying legends which charmed all Europe, and grew in extravagances and absurdities, till they began to degenerate into the bombast of the "Seven Champions," and expired in the immortal ballad of the "Dragon of Wantley," in which More of More Hall, on the morning of his battle with the monster, invoked the saints ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Godless, is unworthy of the name and can, therefore, claim from us no further consideration; it is mere naked rudeness and selfishness, ill-disguised by the gaudy rays of outward decency; a mere cherishing of the sensual nature which, left to itself, would soon degenerate into monstrous barbarism, of which we already see ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... forms exist in comparatively few churches, generally in portions of the church only, and are always connected, and that closely, either with the massy forms out of which they have emerged, or with the enervated types into which they are instantly to degenerate. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... allow that the ordinary changes and chances of time will place this fine country in the hands of the latter race. The negro will be fit to cultivate the soil, and will thrive beneath the tropical sun of the Brazils. The enfeebled white man grows more enfeebled and more degenerate with each succeeding generation, and languishes in a clime which nature never designed him to inhabit. The time will come when the debased and suffering negroes shall possess this fertile land, and when some share of justice shall be awarded to their ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... she must preside at the table, and act the part of a mother, so far as she can; she must watch the characters of the men who approach her charge, and endeavor to save the inexperienced girl from the dangers of a bad marriage, if possible. To perform this feat, and not to degenerate into a Spanish duenna, a dragon, or a Mrs. General—who was simply a ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... much longer with two such learned and philosophical scholars, I shall inevitably degenerate into ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... earth, and lift your oppressed fellow-Christians from the depths into which they have been trampled. The sepulchre of Christ is possessed by the heathen, the sacred places dishonoured by their vileness. Oh, brave knights and faithful people! offspring of invincible fathers! ye will not degenerate from your ancient renown. Ye will not be restrained from embarking in this great cause by the tender ties of wife or little ones, but will remember the words of the Saviour of the world himself, 'Whosoever loves father and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... the marriage will certainly be so. We moderns bedeck and bedrape us in all sorts of meretricious togas, till a pair of fine eyes and a dashing manner pass for beauty; but when life tries the metal—when nature applies her inevitable test—the degenerate or neurotic ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... manner. The modern Indians give no such evidence of labor. For wherever they are found they love to roam in undisputed possession of the forest, and lead an indolent life. Of course I do not assign this as a valid reason for their not being identified with the Mound-builders. An ancient race may have a degenerate offspring. ...
— Mound-Builders • William J. Smyth
... not exaggerating this wild and amazing prodigality of nature. The best-conducted hives will, as a rule, contain four to five hundred males. Weaker or degenerate ones will often have as many as four or five thousand; for the more a hive inclines to its ruin, the more males will it produce. It may be said that, on an average, an apiary composed of ten colonies will at a given moment ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Madison treated you. We mean to leave you alone, and in no way to interfere with your institutions; to abide by all and every compromise of the Constitution, and, in a word, coming back to the original proposition, to treat you so far as degenerate men, if we have degenerated, may, according to the example of those noble ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... he, you have but to tap the surface of the munificent earth. One thing only, he confessed, was lacking, and that need a few years would make good. "Wait," said he, with an assured if immodest boastful-ness,—"wait until we get a bit degenerate, and then we will produce a Shakespeare"! I had not the heart to suggest that the sixteenth century in England was a period of birth, not of decay. I could only accept his statement in awful appreciation. And emboldened ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... Sturlungs is the last great work of the classical age of Icelandic literature, and after it the end comes pretty sharply, as far as masterpieces are concerned. There is, however, a continuation of the old literature in a lower degree and in degenerate forms, which if not intrinsically valuable, are yet significant, as bringing out by exaggeration some of the features and qualities of the older school, and also as showing in a peculiar way the encroachments of new ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... as a class stands for dignified scientific presentation of facts, and obscenity will soon be tabooed in medical and all other reputable literature. Save for occasional emanations privately printed by and for degenerate persons, public obscenity will soon be unknown. Its complete disappearance will have a vast influence upon the problem ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... forty-two pieces of gold, to which it was reduced, ascertains the exorbitant price of volunteers, and the reluctance with which the government admitted of this alterative. Such was the horror for the profession of a soldier, which had affected the minds of the degenerate Romans, that many of the youth of Italy and the provinces chose to cut off the fingers of their right hand, to escape from being pressed into the service; and this strange expedient was so commonly practised, as to deserve the severe animadversion of the laws, and a peculiar name ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the defence of religious interests, more especially in the domain of education and relief, the Liberals for the supremacy of a nominally neutral State in all public matters. It is easy to realize how this purely political quarrel could degenerate into a conflict of ideals, some ultramontanes distrusting the motives of "atheists" and ignoring the public spirit of men who did not share their creed, while some agnostics, steeped in the narrow doctrines of Voltaire ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... slow, half-crippled groping for financial readjustment in the teeth of a snarling and vindictive Congress, mean in its envy, meaner in revenge—a domestic brand of sectional Bolsheviki as dirty and degenerate as any anarchist ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... purpose in mind, devotes some pages to proving that an Anglican clergyman was socially a mere upper servant in the seventeenth century. He is probably right; but he does not guess that this was but the degenerate continuity of the more democratic priesthood of the Middle Ages. A priest was not treated as a gentleman; but a peasant was treated as a priest. And in England then, as in Europe now, many entertained the fancy that priesthood was ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... must keep his eye steadily to that. He seeks, perhaps, rather to differentiate than truly to characterise. The proportions of the sitter must be sacrificed to the proportions of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the shadows overcharged; the chosen expression, continually forced, may degenerate at length into a grimace; and we have at best something of a caricature, at worst a calumny. Hence, if they be readable at all and hang together by their own ends, the peculiar convincing force of these brief representations. They take so little a while to read, and yet in that little while ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... together, he would be ten hours of the day half asleep on a bench at the tavern-door where he quartered, or drunk within the house. Though this wicked life he led sometimes moved me to pity him, and to wonder how so well-bred, gentlemanly a man as he once was could degenerate into such a useless thing as he now appeared, yet at the same time it gave me most contemptible thoughts of him, and made me often say I was a warning for all the ladies of Europe against marrying ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... father, the very thought of Beth herself seemed to make the relationship grotesque. This Jim Coast, this picturesque blackguard who had told tales on the Bermudian that had brought a flush of shame even to Peter's cheeks—this degenerate, this scheming blackmailer—thief, perhaps murderer, too, the father of Beth! Incredible! The merest contact with such a man must defile, defame her. And yet if this were the fact, Coast would have a father's right to claim her, to drag her down, ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... reproduced in Powers's Greek Slave. The great masters had innumerable imitators, not merely in the representation of man but of animals. What a study did these artists excite, especially in their own age, and how honorable did they make their noble profession even in degenerate times! They were the school-masters of thousands and tens of thousands, perpetuating their ideas to remotest generations. Their instructions were not lost, and never can be lost in a realm which constitutes one of the proudest features of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... wounds, or solutions of the continuity of the part, bruises, fractures, inflammations from local irritation, &c. Hence it is evident that the treatment of general diseases is the province of the physician; and of local ones of the surgeon. But there are some general diseases which are apt to degenerate into local, and therefore require the attention both of the physician and the surgeon. Among these we may reckon suppuration and gangrene, ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... example of the growth of his liberal views in matters of conscience. Lord John Russell proposes further relief upon the matter of oaths to be taken by members of Parliament. Mr. Gladstone said that the civil political claims of the Jew should not be barred, and he deprecated the tendency to degenerate formalism in oaths, but he was glad that the words, "on the true faith of a Christian" in respect to all Christian members of the House of Commons had been retained. He also, later in the session, favored correcting the ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... that scorn in an attempt to appeal to my instinct for the preservation of my social self, I can face them without flinching. When that pompous old boy with the sandy mustache who has always looked upon me as a member of the degenerate Juke family tries to tell me that if I don't take the five-dollar cravat he won't be responsible for the way in which decent people will receive me when I go out on the street, I will reach across the counter and playfully pull his own necktie out from his waistcoat and scream, ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... in the sky attracted the lake tribes from their lodges. Indians, half-breeds and shaggy-haired whites—degenerate traders, who had lost all taste for civilization and retired with their native wives after the fashion of the north country—came from the Nipissangue encampments and joined our motley throng. Presently the natives drew off to a fire by ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... great Imperial question. I have recorded the facts as they occurred, and the impressions as they arose, without attempting to make a case against any person or any policy. Indeed, I fear that assailing none, I may have offended all. Neutrality may degenerate into an ignominious isolation. An honest and unprejudiced attempt to discern the truth is my sole defence, as the good opinion of the reader has been throughout my chief aspiration, and can be in the end ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... kafer 'pagans.' These names are used in Binh-Thuan to make a distinction, but Banis and Kaphirs alike are all Chams.... In Cambodia all Chams are Mussulmans." (E. Aymonier, Les Tchames, p. 26.) The religion of the pagan Chams of Binh-Thuan is degenerate Brahmanism with three chief gods, Po-Nagar, Po-Rome, and Po-Klong-Garai. (Ibid., p. 35.)—H.C.] The books of their former religion they say (according to Dr. Bastian) that they received from Ceylon, but they were converted ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... are longer and more ambitious; the confusion of the Catilinarian conspirators after detection; [55] the character of Catiline; [56] the debauchery of Antony in Varro's villa; [57] the scourging and crucifixion of Gavius; [58] the grim old Censor Appius frowning on Clodia his degenerate descendent; [59] the tissue of monstrous crime which fills page after page of the Cluentius. [60] These are pictures for all time; they combine the poet's eye with the stern spirit of the moralist. His power ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... v. Environment: Genetics and Heredity; Heredity and Environment, Aspects reviewed; Degenerate Families, Life-histories; Dr. Macgregor, Deductions from his Report; Degenerate Stocks imported, Effect of; Environmental Factor, Importance of; Pre-natal and Post-natal Care, Value of; Housing Problem; Relationship of Impaired Nutrition, Debility, and Disease to Impaired Control; Dietetics ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... the citizen. One must belong to the race of the invincible and the indomitable, to persevere now in the rugged path of renunciation and of duty. An indescribable gangrene of material prosperity threatens to cause public honesty to degenerate into rottenness. Oh! what happiness to be banished, to be disgraced, to be ruined,—is it not, brave workmen? Is it not, worthy peasants, driven from France, who have no roof to shelter you, and no shoes to your feet? What happiness to eat black bread, to lie on a mattress thrown ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... cozy scene Conservation cast his gaunt shadow. It was in June, the year of America's Great Step, that Emma, examining her household, pronounced it fattily degenerate, with complications, and performed upon it a severe and skilful surgical operation. Among ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... concerning the gospel's fleeting westward. Sometimes I have had such thoughts, Why may not that be the place of the New Jerusalem? But you have handsomely and fully cleared me from such odd conceits. But what, I pray? Shall our English there degenerate, and join themselves with Gog and Magog? We have heard lately divers ways, that our people there have no hope of the conversion of the natives. And, the very week after I received your last letter, I saw a letter, written from New England, discoursing of an impossibility ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... which, in the baldest of literal versions, are full of eloquence and pathos. The "great law" has become old, and has lost its force. Its authors have passed away, and have carried it with them into their graves. They have placed it as a pillow under their heads. Their degenerate successors have inherited their names, but not their mighty intellects; and in the flourishing region which they left, naught but a desert remains. A trace, and not a slight one, of the mournful sublimity which we admire in the Hebrew prophets, with a similar cadence ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... Her brother Charles—a degenerate, pettifogging barrister, with all his father's faults and none of his grandfather's virtues—for whom Mary had advanced money so that he could go to college, came to her in her dire extremity and proffered ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... together: one endeavoring by the aid of religion, and by studying the wisdom of the past, to exalt and purify his fallen nature; the other by grovelling in the dust, and mingling with beings yet more sinful and degraded, rapidly debased his mind to a more degenerate and ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... be asked in ridicule whether I suppose that the megatherium and other allied huge monsters, which formerly lived in South America, have left behind them the sloth, armadillo, and anteater, as their degenerate descendants. This cannot for an instant be admitted. These huge animals have become wholly extinct, and have left no progeny. But in the caves of Brazil there are many extinct species which are closely ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... turned to address himself to Colonel Morley, but finding that degenerate son of America indisposed to get cent. per cent. for his money when offered by a Parisian, he very soon took his leave. The other visitors followed his example, except Rameau, who was left alone with the Venosta and Isaura. The former had no liking for Rameau, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... therefore any way to degenerate from the hereditary mildness and clemency of my parents, I do now forgive you, deliver you from all fines and imprisonments, fully release you, set you at liberty, and every way make you as frank and free as ever you were before. Moreover, at ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... the traditions of his birth and breeding had returned upon him; something instinctive and inherited had reappeared; and the gentlemanly, easy-going father, who yet, as Doris remembered, when matters were serious "always got his way," was there—strangely there—in the degenerate son. ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... We all know what that aim was; we also know that it was never given to any man to succeed more fully. With less conviction or less firmness, it is probable that, notwithstanding his natural genius, his degenerate works would not have long survived those of his mediocre rivals now completely forgotten. But truth of expression, purity of style, and grandeur of form belong to all time. Gluck's fine passages will always be fine. Victor Hugo is right: ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... chair which, in former days, was more generous to the righteous poor, not because it has grown degenerate in itself, but because of the degeneracy of him who sits upon it, Dominic begged not to be allowed to dispense to the poor only two or three where six was due, nor sought the first vacant benefice, the tithes of which belong to God's poor. He begged rather for leave to fight against ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... only because the respect for the law is more powerful than all of them together. It is only the apparent strength of a fever patient that makes even the lively sympathy with good rise to an emotion, or rather degenerate into it. Such an emotion is called enthusiasm, and it is with reference to this that we are to explain the moderation which is usually recommended in ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant
... le President, a cripple, a degenerate, responsible for his actions, certainly, but a man in whom the doctors will find every form of wasting illness: disease of the spinal cord, tuberculosis, and all the ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... appeared seldom before the public and published no compositions; his object being to free himself from a narrow subjectivity and to give scope to his wide human sympathies and to his passion for perfection of utterance. It seemed to him that a plausible originality might degenerate into mere idiosyncrasy, and that universality of appeal should be a musician's highest goal. When he resigned his post and came before the public with his first large work, a concerto for pianoforte and orchestra, the gain made in increased power and resources ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... cow,[58] that seems to discharge the mighty river, whose source is far distant among the mountains of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would degenerate into a race ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... he did not let any nonsense about fair play stand in his way. In spite of the clean-cut look of him—he was broadshouldered and tall, with an effect of decision in the square cleft chin that would some day degenerate into fatness—Ned Merrill played the game of business without ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... numerous wild ducks and swamp-hens, and perhaps a bittern or two, by these conflagrations. On the whole, I like burning the hill-sides better than the swamp—you get a more satisfactory blaze with less trouble; but I sigh over these degenerate days when the grass is kept short and a third part of a run is burned regularly ever spring, and long for the good old times of a dozen years ago, when the tussocks were six feet high. What a blaze they must have made! The ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... home, while the Empire, its services and its defences, by which alone all this pullulating "street folk" existed for a day, were in danger of starvation and hindrance abroad, to meet the unreasonable fancies of a degenerate race. A deep hatred of mob-rule rooted itself in Tressady, passing gradually, during his last three months in India, into a growing inclination to return and take his place in the fight—to have his say. "Government to the competent—not to the many," ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Slavophilism asks, for the degenerate justice of the west? None! Away with Europe then!—the Europe of competition and gruesome factories! The Europe of destructive forces, of greedy land grabbers, of capital and labor wars, where society is held together, not as in Russia by the ties of affection, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... whereas the natural pour forth into the world all things of the will and understanding, covetously and fraudulently acquiring wealth, and regarding no other use therein and thence but that of possession. The above-mentioned adulteries change men in these degenerate degrees, one into this, another into that, each according to his favorite taste for what is pleasurable, in which taste his ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... a few other instances, the polemical zeal natural to men who had sacrificed their worldly all for the sake of religion, was observed to degenerate among the refugees into personal quarrels disgraceful to themselves and injurious to their noble cause, it ought on the other hand to be observed, that some of the firmest and most affectionate friendships of the age were formed amongst these ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... We must be like wolves to make anything we can save for a rainy day. But any girl or man who'll consent to act the spy on others—there's a way to earn money, lots of it. A few are tempted. They must degenerate more and more, I think! And there are other things that drive some of us—the women, I mean—to desperation. But I can't tell you about them. You must find out for yourself—if ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... quite determined," she answered, gaily, for she was before her time inasmuch as she was what is known in these days of degenerate speech as cock-sure. ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... skeletons and long, fuzzy, exaggerated lines of the accompanying worms. The effect was thrilling. Every sound save the soft swish of the ghastly robes and the delicate footfall of ghostly feet ceased. Not a whisper from a sap-headed youth or a yap from an aged degenerate or a giggle from a silly woman ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... contemporary political life cannot but degenerate into the most sterile bysantinisme and the most corrupt strife for bribes and spoils, when it is confined to the superficial skirmishes between individualist parties, which differ only by a shade and in their formal names, but whose ideas are so similar ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... (November 1), also seems to have been a survival of a heathen celebration. On this night witches and fairies were supposed to assemble. Hallow Eve does not appear to have been a season for pranks and jokes, as is its present degenerate form. Even the festival of Christmas, coming at the winter solstice, kept some heathen features, such as the use of mistletoe with which Celtic priests once decked the altars of their gods. The Christmas tree, however, is not a relic of heathenism. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... irregular oval; a cabbage patch where the arena had been; and various tumble-down farmsheds built into the shattered masonry —this was the Circus of Romulus. However, it was not the circus of the original Romulus, but of a degenerate successor of the same name who rose suddenly and fell abruptly after the Christian era was well begun. Old John J. Romulus would not have stood for ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... our Lancashire peasants are not sentimental; in fact, degenerate south-countrymen frequently take exception to their blunt ways and terrible plain-speaking. But occasionally they display an astonishing impressibility, and at all times know how to appreciate a bit ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... themselves. Physically unfit for motherhood, mentally unfit to cherish the monogamic idea that once was sacred with our people, sexually unfit to rouse true sex-passion—such women are being bred by the million in crowded cities and by degenerate country life. They match well with the slaves who 'move on' at the bidding of a policeman, or with the knaves who only see in Woman the toy ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters. If a people, like a star, has the right of eclipse, the light ought to return. The eclipse should not degenerate into night. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... foundations of a new one," said a Parliamentary Report of July 28, 1785. But they could do so, and did do so. Ruskin's saying, a propos of Australia, that "under fit conditions the human race does not degenerate, but wins its way to higher levels," comes nearer the truth. In an amazingly short time after the transportation policy was reversed the taint disappeared. We must remember, however, that, sheer refuse as some of the convicts were, especially in the later period, a large number of the earlier convicts ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... they are at any one time pursued, is the measure of a national spirit. When those objects cease to animate, nations may be said to languish; when they are during a considerable time neglected, states must decline, and their people degenerate. ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... anticipates the ideas of physiology of the present time. He believed that the functions are performed by the various organs of the bodies of animals and men as a mechanism, to which in man was added the soul. This soul he located in the pineal gland, a degenerate and presumably functionless little organ in the brain. For years Descartes's idea of the function of this gland was held by many physiologists, and it was only the introduction of modern high-power microscopy that reduced this also to a mere mechanism, and ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... a minor, or some one unfit to take up the chieftainship, and this continued to prevail for centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion, and was even adopted by many owners of English descent who had become "meere Irish," as the phrase ran, or "degenerate English." ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... should be shortened for the sake of the elect believers, otherwise no flesh of Israel would be saved alive. Multitudes were to fall by the sword; other hosts were to be led away captive, and so be scattered amongst all nations; and Jerusalem, the pride and boast of degenerate Israel, should be "trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled." In every frightful detail was the Lord's prediction brought to pass, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... cold at the calm pride of this degenerate fiend, had it not been boiling at the reference to Helene. He crept nearer to them, along the wall. He lay down on the floor, below the level of the first bullet paths. Then he drew his automatic and the bulb light, ready for ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... in man, constituted as he is, it is so highly dangerous to indulge it, that self-denial here is a duty from mere prudence. It is almost impossible for a man to be angry only so far as he ought to be; he will exceed the right limit, his anger will degenerate into pride, sullenness, malice, cruelty, revenge, and hatred. It will inflame his diseased soul, and poison it. Therefore, he must abstain from it, as if it were in itself a sin (though it is not), for it is practically such ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... cultivated plantations. I had previously visited many portions of the island, and saw wherever I went, the same evidences of misrule and indolence; but, the negroes, who hold the western portion of it or Hayti, are physically, at least, a finer race of people than the degenerate, puny hybrids of the eastern part, who have "miscegenated" to an extent that would satisfy the most enthusiastic admirer of our sable "friends and fellow-citizens." I have never seen finer specimens of stalwart manhood than in "Solouque's" army years ago, although the "tout ensemble" ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... limits, and always require careful watching; for they may easily become excessive or even betray an animus; and in either case they pass at once into quite a different category. From cases of excusable oscitancy they degenerate, either into instances of inexcusable licentiousness, or else into cases of ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... in the face of the most desperate assault upon them; your civilized man is forever yielding to them. Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the best rider among them, and the deadliest shot; and he soon became an oracle at the billiard-table, and a hero in the racquet-court. His refined education, however, fortunately preserved him from the fate of many other lively youths: he did not degenerate into a mere hero of sports and brawls, the genius of male revels, the arbiter of roistering suppers, and the Comus of a club. His boyish feelings had their play; he soon exuded the wanton heat of which a public school would have served as ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... presumptuous, but I think you are scarcely doing the family justice. One can see the salient characteristics of the male line in this example, but they're too strongly marked. Good qualities, such as resolution and courage, may degenerate through being developed to exaggeration at the expense of others, and after all Captain Challoner strikes me as a much finer type. I'm afraid you undervalue ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... plants are an inch high, thin them out, leaving spaces proportioned to their sizes. Seeds of a similar species, such as melons and squashes, should not be planted very near to each other, as this causes them to degenerate. The same kinds of vegetables should not be planted in the same place, for two ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... same time I clung to it the more intensely, precisely because it seemed unattainable,—from a sort of morbid craving for whatever had become as unattainable as my mother's presence. I loathed action, even for the realization of my dreams, and over-concentrated thought threatened to degenerate into a sickly reverie that should presently exhaust the forces of my life, like an unnaturally prolonged sleep. New influence added in this direction might have driven me insane, while the diversion ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... against their still unsubdued brethren. The shameful subjection of millions of once free-born Germans will ere long be completed. Austria exhorts you to raise your humbled necks, to burst your slavish chains!" And in another address was said: "How long shall Hermann mourn over his degenerate children? Was it for this that the Cherusci fought in the Teutoburg forest? Is every spark of German courage extinct? Does the sound of your clanking chains strike like music on your ears? Germans, awake! shake off your ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of office by his poverty, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... meeting in ten years where there was no contention or bitterness of feeling. For once these good people were all of the same mind, and a "barrill of W. I. Rum," which in these days gives rise to such excited controversy, in the presumably degenerate days of 1796 acted like oil upon ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... lessons from two undistinguished professors named Gegenbauer and Finsterbusch. But it all amounted to very little. There was the regular drilling for the church services, to be sure: solfeggi and psalms, psalms and solfeggi—always apt to degenerate, under a pedant, into the dreariest of mechanical routine. How many a sweet-voiced chorister, even in our own days, reaches manhood with a love for music? It needs music in his soul. Haydn's soul withstood the numbing influence of pedantry. He realized ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... tradition, education, or precedent, she had the Western girl's confidence in all things being possible, which made them so often probable. Mr. Mulrady looked at his daughter with mingled sentiments of pride and awe. Was it possible that this delicate creature, so superior to him that he seemed like a degenerate scion of her remoter race, was his own flesh and blood? Was she the daughter of her mother, who even in her remembered youth was never equipped like this? If the thought brought no pleasure to his simple, ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... doubted that her sister had often been with Burke Lawson in the Hollow. When he disappeared, she believed Nella-Rose was with him, but she had supported and embellished her father's story concerning them because it secured her own self-respect and covered the tracks of the degenerate pair with a shield that they in no wise deserved, but which put their defenders in a truly ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... words to great advantage, deserves admiring comment. At their best, it is almost impossible to reproduce in English the peculiar effects of their melodic artifices. But there is another side to the matter. At their worst, these Latin lyrics, moulded on a tune, degenerate into disjointed verbiage, sound and adaptation to song prevailing over sense and satisfaction to the mind. It must, however, be remembered that such lyrics, sometimes now almost unintelligible, have come down to us with a very mutilated ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... day in that brutish manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common power to fear, by the manner of life which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government used to degenerate ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... the good old sense of the Spanish costumbristas, furnishes a background for his plays, but only a background. A picture of Spanish society does emerge from the dramas, indeed. It is a society in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty, in which the old titled families are generally degenerate and slothful, and the middle classes display admirable spiritual qualities, but are too often unthrifty and inefficient. Of the laboring classes, Galds has little to say. Bitter religious and political intolerance creates an atmosphere of hatred which a few exceptional characters strive ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... the northern extremity of the island of Ceylon in the beginning of the year 1819, when one morning my servant called me an hour or two before the usual time with, 'Master! master! people sent for master's dogs; tiger in the town!' Now my dogs chanced to be very degenerate specimens of a fine species called the Poligar dogs. I kept them to hunt jackals, but tigers are very different things. This turned out to be a panther; my gun chanced not to be put together, and while my servant was doing it the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... be made of Mammy. The old lady—for old we deemed her, though she could scarcely have been fifty—went calmly about the house looking to the packing of the thousand and one things, and not only looking, but using her tongue in language expressing utter contempt for all "lazy niggers" of these degenerate days—referring to the temporary "help." The eldest sister was deputed to approach and sound Mammy on ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... the world, and the game has to be played over again. Lucy Morris, no doubt, had lived a life too retired for the learning of such useful forbearance, but Frank Greystock was quite a proficient. He still considered himself to be true to Lucy Morris, with a truth seldom found in this degenerate age,—with a truth to which he intended to sacrifice some of the brightest hopes of his life,—with a truth which, after much thought, he had generously preferred to his ambition. Perhaps there was found some shade ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... error as much as possible when we are speaking of things unseen, the principal terms which we use should be few, and we should not allow ourselves to be enslaved by them. Instead of seeking to frame a technical language, we should vary our forms of speech, lest they should degenerate into formulas. A difficult philosophical problem is better understood ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... period psychically approximates to the true sexual act, and passes insensibly into it. If, however, continued on into adult age, it becomes morbid, passing into erotic fetichism; what in the inexperienced youth is the natural auxiliary and stimulus to imagination, in the degenerate onanist of adult age is a sign of arrested development. Thus, onanism," the author concludes, "is not always a vice such as is fiercely combated by educators and moralists. It is the natural transition by which we reach the warm and generous ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... for I do not wish my honest memorial to degenerate into panegyric.—Among her latest known acts were her gifts to the Sicilian cause, and her manifestations on behalf of the antislavery cause in the United States. Her kindness to William and Ellen Craft must be well known there; and it is also related in the newspapers ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... found settled on the Lower Mississippi may have been a degenerate remnant of the Mound-Builders. They differed in language, customs, and condition from all other Indians in the country; and their own traditions connected them with Mexico. Like the Mexicans, they had temples or sacred buildings in which the "perpetual ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... follow. Why, who that had seen you both as youths, notwithstanding Audley had the advantage of being some years your senior—who could have thought that he was the one to become distinguished and eminent, and you to degenerate into the luxurious idler, averse to all trouble and careless of all fame? You, with such advantages, not only of higher fortunes, but, as every one said, of superior talents; you, who had then so much ambition, so keen a desire for glory, sleeping with Plutarch's Lives under your pillow, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... am well aware that this custom of adorning graves with flowers prevails in other countries besides England. Indeed, in some it is much more general, and is observed even by the rich and fashionable; but it is then apt to lose its simplicity and to degenerate into affectation. Bright, in his travels in Lower Hungary, tells of monuments of marble and recesses formed for retirement, with seats placed among bowers of greenhouse plants, and that the graves generally are covered with the gayest flowers of the season. He gives a casual picture of filial ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... mistress in The Fisher, and in a case where he is in fact judge as well as party, has no difficulty in getting his claim established. He is for ever reminding us that he loves philosophy and only satirizes the degenerate philosophers of his day. But it will occur to us after reading him through that he has dissembled his love, then, very well. There is not a passage from beginning to end of his works that indicates any real comprehension of any philosophic system. The external characteristics of the philosophers, ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... and the habit of centuries had been more than confirmed by the colossal raids, victories, and annexations of Napoleon I. A Germany which should escape from French control and reverse, by its own energetic action, the policy of Henry IV., Richelieu, Louis XIV., his degenerate grandson, Louis XV., and of the great Napoleon himself, was an affront to French pride, and could not be patiently endured. The opposing forces which had grown up were so strong that the wit of man was unable to keep them asunder; and all the control ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... cabbage patch where the arena had been; and various tumble-down farmsheds built into the shattered masonry —this was the Circus of Romulus. However, it was not the circus of the original Romulus, but of a degenerate successor of the same name who rose suddenly and fell abruptly after the Christian era was well begun. Old John J. Romulus would not have stood for that circus ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... for he was composed and calculating now. A few minutes ago he had sent a jar of oxygen to keep Luke Claridge alive! But for it one enemy to his career, to his future, would be gone. He did not shrink from the thought. Born a gentleman, there were in him some degenerate characteristics which heart could not drown or temperament refine. Selfishness was inwoven with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... but his orders were totally disregarded; many of the unhappy English settlers fled from the country and returned to England; the barons supplied their places with native retainers. Thus the Ersefication of the degenerate Normans became complete; they "donned the saffron"—that is, they adopted the yellow dress of the Celts—abandoned their original language, and gave themselves up to a life of constant ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... very degenerate representative of the ancient Arian stock. Slight and supple in person, with quick, glancing eyes, delicate features, and a vivacious manner, he lacks the dignity and strength, the calm repose and simple grace of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... of basing our psychology on reactions is that it keeps us "close to the ground", and prevents our discussions from sailing off into the clouds of picturesque but fanciful interpretation. Psychology is very apt to degenerate into a game of blowing bubbles, unless we pin ourselves down to hard-headed ways of thinking. The notion of a reaction is of great value here, just because it is so hard-headed and concrete. Whenever we have any human action before ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... manner in which the victim surveyed his tormentors only exasperated them still further. By the threat of the bayonet he was compelled to stand up in front of these degenerate members of the human race and the girl behind the counter, whose laughter could now be heard ringing above the frantic ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... old man who has suffered cruelly. Exile is hard to bear. But if sorrows and deceptions have embittered his character, they have not changed his heart. His apparent imperiousness and arrogance conceal a kindness of heart which I have often seen degenerate into positive weakness. And—why should I not confess it?—the Duc de Sairmeuse, with his white hair, still retains the illusions of a child. He refuses to believe that the world has progressed during the past twenty years. Moreover, people had ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... village, and get home again unmolested. Its action would have no sort of influence on the course of the campaign, and would, therefore, be useless. It would also most likely lead to reprisals; and, if this process were repeated, the war would probably degenerate into the antiquated system of 'cross-raiding,' discarded centuries ago, not at all for reasons of humanity, but because it became certain that war could be more effectually waged in other ways. The nation ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... according to our original intention, has now been brought down to the creation of man. Completeness seems to require that something should be briefly said about other animals: first of women, who are probably degenerate and cowardly men. And when they degenerated, the gods implanted in men the desire of union with them, creating in man one animate substance and in woman another in the following manner:—The outlet for liquids they connected with the living principle of the spinal marrow, which the ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... all experience shows, that any college independent of all inspection, control, or competition in wealth—all its officers securely paid by the state, independent of exertion or success—will in a short time, as a general rule, degenerate into inactivity, indifference, and extravagance. In collegiate institutions, as well as in the higher and elementary schools, and in other public and private affairs of life, competition is an important element of efficiency and success. The best system ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... that seems to discharge the mighty river, whose source is far distant among the mountains of Tibet. His return was along the skirts of the northern hills; nor could this rapid campaign of one year justify the strange foresight of his emirs, that their children in a warm climate would degenerate into ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... my child will grow out of her little heretic prejudices, and learn to love her mother's staunch friends, the champions of Holy Church, and the representatives of true knighthood in these degenerate days. Ah, child! couldst thou but see a true Spanish caballero, or again, could I but show thee my noble cousin of Guise, then wouldst thou know how to rate these gross clownish English mastiffs who now turn thy ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the fine perverse conception of the decorated pyjama, this garment had enjoyed the fullest correctness. Now, after perhaps forty years in the cupboards of Mrs. Maldon, it seemed to recall the more excellent attributes of an already forgotten past, and to rebuke what was degenerate ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... that thine owne sonne should be put to death before thy face?" "Yea truly (quoth the father,) for at home in my garden, when the yong Lactuse begin to growe, I cutte of the bitter and sower stalkes from them: for pitie it were the mother Lactuse should sustaine sorow, for those bastard and degenerate shrubbes: which beinge taken awaye, she prospereth and encreaseth to great sweetenesse and bignes. Euen so (O kinge) if he be hanged that hurteth my whole familie, and offendeth the honest conuersation of his brethren, ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... instead of making your absurd will, ought to have apprized you of our sentiments, which exactly coincide with those of the world, or how could the tale affect a stranger? Why did not some generous friend guide your crazy vessel, and save a sinking family? Degenerate son, he who destroys the peace of another, should forfeit his own—we leave you to remorse, may she quickly ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... atmosphere of squalor and destitution that pervaded our household when the carpets had been stripped up and we were stumbling about among half-packed barrels upon bare, resounding floors. I do not seek to retrace in detail the process of packing, which began with some buoyancy and system, to degenerate at last in its endlessness into dropping things mechanically and hopelessly into whatever receptacle came first to hand. I do not wish to renew the moments of vehemence and exasperation when our Precious Ones, who really seemed to enjoy it all, clattered about among the debris, ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Aphis, plant louse, puceron^; vinefretter^, vinegrub^. wreck, mere wreck, honeycomb, magni nominis umbra [Lat.]; jade, plug, rackabones [U.S.], skate [U.S.]; tackey^, tacky [U.S.]. V. be worse, be deteriorated, become worse, become deteriorated &c Adj.; have seen better days, deteriorate, degenerate, fall off; wane &c (decrease) 36; ebb; retrograde &c 283, decline, droop; go down &c (sink) 306; go downhill, go from bad to worse, go farther and fare worse; jump out of the frying pan into the fire. run to seed, go to seed, run to waste swale^, sweal^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... abdication. The huntress-queen communicated her tastes to her youthful niece, and Margaret soon outrivalled her instructress. The ardor with which she pursued the stag, and the courageous horsemanship which she always displayed, proved her, too, no degenerate descendant of Mary of Burgundy. Her education for the distinguished position in which she had somewhat surreptitiously been placed was at least not neglected in this particular. When, soon after the memorable sack of Rome, the Pope and the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... on the nipples of the Cows in the form of irregular pustules. At their first appearance they are commonly of a palish blue, or rather of a colour somewhat approaching to livid, and are surrounded by an erysipelatous inflammation. These pustules, unless a timely remedy be applied, frequently degenerate into phagedenic ulcers, which prove extremely troublesome[2]. The animals become indisposed, and the secretion of milk is much lessened. Inflamed spots now begin to appear on different parts of the hands of the domestics employed in milking, and sometimes ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... require to be replanted in the same way every autumn, as the plants, if they grow well, spread too wide; if the summer prove dry, many of the roots fail, and if they remain undisturbed in the same spot, they will degenerate and become single, notwithstanding Mr. MILLER informs us, that he never observed ...
— The Botanical Magazine Vol. 7 - or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... ghastly visages of their victims in their huts.39 The Caribs have a sort of sensual paradise for the "brave and virtuous," where, it is promised, they shall enjoy the sublimated experience of all their earthly satisfactions; but the "degenerate and cowardly" are threatened with eternal banishment beyond the mountains, where they shall be tasked and driven as slaves by their enemies.40 The Hispaniolians locate their elysium in a pleasant valley abounding with guava, delicious fruits, cool shades, and murmuring rivulets, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... fallit aut nulla unquam respublica nec major, nec sanctior, nec bonis exemplis ditior fuit; nec in quam tam sero avaritia luxuriaque immigraverint; nec ubi tantus ac tam diu paupertati ac parsimoniae honos fuerit. We see likewise, after that the state of Rome was not itself, but did degenerate, how that person that took upon him to be counsellor to Julius Caesar after his victory where to begin his restoration of the state, maketh it of all points the most summary to take away the estimation of wealth: Verum haec et omnia mala pariter cum honore pecuniae ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... is one of those lowering fellows, the kind that seems to be at outs with mankind. Just the material to become sulky in any but the most skillful hands, the sort to degenerate into a positive brute, in such blundering hands as Mrs. ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... the claret being in ancient days served from the tap, and had the figure of a hen upon the lid. In later times, the name was given to a glass bottle of the same dimensions. These are rare apparitions among the degenerate topers of ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... depravity with the mantle of the philosopher, he placed another canvas before her—something so unrefined, so animal, so destructive of womanly modesty and of all reserve, that any one looking upon it would instantly know that the man who had painted it was a degenerate demon—an associate of dissolute models, an anarchist in the world of women. It was fit only for the banquet-halls of ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Their comparisons must be exclusively amongst what they have opportunities of seeing; that is, between the various pieces presented to them by the managers of theatres. Further than this, it is impossible for them to extend their office of judging and collating; and the degenerate taste which substituted the caprices of Davenant, the rants of Dryden, or the filth of Tate, for the jewellery of Shakspeare, cannot with any justice be charged upon the public, not one in a thousand of whom ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... spoke with love and pride, and the father was a gentleman, like Falstaff, a pure gentleman. The daughter-in-law also peered out to look at Il Giovann', who was evidently a figure of repute, in his sordid, degenerate American respectability. Meanwhile, this figure of repute blew himself red in the face, producing staccato strains on his cornet. And the crowd stood desolate and forsaken in ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... as this, limited, practical, tentative as it always was, had little of grandeur and originality about it; it was apt indeed to degenerate into mere trickery and finesse. But it was a policy suited to the England of her day, to its small resources and the transitional character of its religious and political belief, and it was eminently suited to ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... brooding eyes—eyes that saw everything except the small modicum of good which is in all human things, and to this they were persistently blind. Taking into consideration the small, set mouth, it was eminently a pugnacious face—a face that might easily degenerate to the coarseness of passion in the trough of a losing fight. But, fortunately, Luke's lines were cast upon the great waters, and he who fights the sea must learn to conquer, not by passionate effort, but by consistent, cool resolve. Those who ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... trouble, when these two interests came into ill-tempered controversy, was the conduct of the coureurs de bois. These roving traders taught the savages all the vices of French civilization in its most degenerate days. They debauched the Indian with brandy, swindled him out of his furs, and entered into illicit relations with the women of the tribes. They managed in general to convince the aborigines that all Frenchmen were dishonest and licentious. ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... Your lordship well knows what obligations Virgil had to the latter of them. He saw, beside, that the commonwealth was lost without resource; the heads of it destroyed; the senate, new moulded, grown degenerate, and either bought off or thrusting their own necks into the yoke out of fear of being forced. Yet I may safely affirm for our great author (as men of good sense are generally honest) that he was still of republican ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... no doubt, had lived a life too retired for the learning of such useful forbearance, but Frank Greystock was quite a proficient. He still considered himself to be true to Lucy Morris, with a truth seldom found in this degenerate age,—with a truth to which he intended to sacrifice some of the brightest hopes of his life,—with a truth which, after much thought, he had generously preferred to his ambition. Perhaps there was found some shade of regret to tinge the merit ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... therefore, claim from us no further consideration; it is mere naked rudeness and selfishness, ill-disguised by the gaudy rays of outward decency; a mere cherishing of the sensual nature which, left to itself, would soon degenerate into monstrous barbarism, of which ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... female, who has cultivated the art of draping nudity with suggestiveness and singing immoral songs, all tend to give youth a false impression of the reality of life and to make the path of the degenerate easy and profitable. The rich are growing richer, and their children are pampered and overfed and underrestrained. Time hangs heavily on their hands and their only mental effort is to devise new methods and new ways of satisfying the lust of liberty and overstimulated ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... her. I should like also to omit all reference to the conversation which ensued between them, but for the sake of true art I am constrained to state that Lucifer descended to commonplace. M. Renan tells us that since he left Saint Sulpice he did nothing but degenerate, and the inference is obvious, that he ought to have gone back to Saint Sulpice, despite the literary splendours of the Vie de Jesus. Since he last broke a lance with Michael, the devil has debilitated mentally, and the substance of his causerie ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... they not discover new applications for old principles? Are we to be daunted, therefore, because the conditions are new? Will not old principles be adaptable to new conditions, and is it not our business to adapt them to new conditions? Have we lost the old principle and the old spirit? Are we a degenerate people? We certainly must admit ourselves to be so if we do not follow the old principles in the new world, for that is what ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... are those in which we contemplate an oppressed, yet sublime spirit, agitated by the conflict of two terrific passions: implacable hatred attempting a resolute vengeance, while that vengeance, though impotent, with dignified and silent horror, sinks into the last expression of despair. In a degenerate nation, we may, on such rare occasions, discover among them a spirit superior to its ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... have a heavy hand!" exclaimed one of the least important of beards, one of those that degenerate into side-whiskers as they become conservative. "One ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... falsest of women, When Breffni's good sword would have sought That man, thro' a million of foe-men, Who dared but to wrong thee in thought! While now—oh degenerate daughter Of Erin, how fallen is thy fame! And thro' ages of bondage and slaughter, Our country shall bleed for ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Bibbiena, his Chancellor, the conduct of public affairs, he listened to the proud persuasions of his mother, to whom anything like commercial pursuits were abhorrent. Clarice d'Orsini's forbears had all been soldiers, Lorenzo's merchants, that made all the difference in Rome's degenerate days. ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... "infamous and audacious! By Heaven, I will have thy tongue torn out with hot pincers, for mentioning the very name of a noble Christian damsel! Know, degenerate traitor, that I was already aware to what height thou hadst dared to raise thine eyes, and endured it, though it were insolence, even when thou hadst cheated us—for thou art all a deceit—into holding ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... so much of such a common thing as a wheel. Idiots! Solomon's court fool would have scoffed at the thought of the young Galilean who dared compare the lilies of the field to his august master. Nil admirari is very well for a North American Indian and his degenerate successor, who has grown too grand to admire anything but himself, and takes a cynical pride in his stolid indifference to everything ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... immigrants. But this is by no means enough. Not merely the Anarchist, but every man of Anarchistic tendencies, all violent and disorderly people, all people of bad character, the incompetent, the lazy, the vicious, the physically unfit, defective, or degenerate should be kept out. The stocks out of which American citizenship is to be built should be strong and healthy, sound in body, mind, and character. If it be objected that the Government agents would not always ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... in order that my leisure might not degenerate into idleness and aimlessness, I must set up a claim for due work to do. Nothing to my mind is more important than this demand, and I must ask your leave to say something about it. I have mentioned that ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... sinful, but also the fact that they have fallen from a higher. In such cases, however, there is some danger lest the beauty and appropriateness of the conception should entice us to receive it on insufficient evidence. The fact that some plants in certain adverse circumstances tend to degenerate, and in certain favourable circumstances to attain a higher type, is well known in natural history; but it seems questionable whether these changes ever take place to such an extent, and in such a uniform method, as must be assumed if we take darnel for degenerated wheat. Agriculturists ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... poet of the eighth century, but one whose sentiments indicate a Saxon origin, thus laments the degenerate state ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... it—firmly, because she had to be firm in keeping him within those bounds the invasion of which would have killed her. And after the first struggle with his unchangeable brutality it had been easier: for into his degenerate brain there had come a faint understanding of the real situation and of her. He had kept his side of the gulf, but gloating on this touch between the old luxurious, indulgent life, with its refined vices, and this present coarse, hard life, where pleasures ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... me, forcing that herd of calves on old Dave at that scandalous price—after all, that's what really gaffed me the worst! My stars! If I could have seen that degenerate old crook again that night—but of course a trade's a trade, and I'd said it. Ain't ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... latter is in degree the greater and the worthier, because it tendeth to the conservation of a more general form.... This double nature of good, and the comparison thereof, is much more engraven upon MAN, if he degenerate not, unto whom the conservation of duty to the public ought to be much more precious than the conservation of life and being;' and, by way of illustration, he mentions first the case of Pompey the Great, 'who being in commission of purveyance ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the place, and went on to ruin Reggio beyond the straits. When it was told to his father Ibrahim that Tabermina, as the Saracens called it, had again been passed by, he cried out upon his son, "He is degenerate, degenerate! He took his nature from his mother and not from his father; for, had he been born from me, surely his sword would not have spared the Christians!" Therefore he recalled him to the home government, and came himself ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... representations of the historical facts related in the Bible, in order that those believers who were unable to read might in this way instruct themselves in sacred history, but that great care must be taken that such a practice might not degenerate into idolatry. ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... O degenerate Italy! exclaims Dante; land without affections, without principle, without faith in any one good thing! here was a man who could not hear the sweet sound of a fellow-citizen's voice without feeling his heart gush towards him, and there are no people now in any one of thy towns that do ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Modern physiology has already to a great extent demonstrated the localisation of the various activities of mind, and their connection with definite parts of the brain; psychiatry has shown that those psychical processes are disturbed or destroyed if these parts of the brain become diseased or degenerate. Histology has revealed to us the extremely complicated structure and arrangement of the ganglion-cells. But, for the settlement of this momentous question, the discoveries of the last ten years with regard to the more minute occurrences in the process of fertilisation are of decisive importance. ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... as with the comparative results of it measured with some other player. A defeated player should be led to recognize and do honor to the prowess of his adversary, and so to congratulate him honestly. A sense of superior power should never degenerate into gloating over a defeated adversary or into contempt for his weaker ability. Many thrilling examples of honest mutual admiration between victor and vanquished may be gleaned from the history of warfare, as when Grant handed back the sword ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... D'you think I've done much laughing over being smashed for good? It's rid you of a drunken degenerate. It's you who ought to laugh. How about me? I've lost ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... four degenerate looking dirty East Indians slunk about, very crafty, very insinuating, very ready and skilful to take what advantages they could. I felt a strong desire to kick every one of them out from these joyful concourses ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... wrath of O'Iwa San brought this Cho[u]bei. Does not Iemon, the one-time neighbour Kazuma, recognize Cho[u]bei? And yet all comes through Iemon. Child, wife, means of life, all these have failed Cho[u]bei. In the jail robbed of everything, degenerate in mind and body, Cho[u]bei has found refuge at nights in the booths of street vendors; on cold wet nights, even in the mouths of the filthy drains. Fortunate is he when fine weather sends him to rest on ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... the money I have lost that makes me mad," sez Locals. "It's finding out that a man can become so degenerate that he will impose upon the very ones who save his life—deceive them, lie ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... service, commingled in just proportion with that of paid troops, would prevent absorption of the national element. To reform the abuses of the law, to suppress extraordinary commissions, to reduce to a powerful unity, with parliaments to crown all, that multitude of jurisdictions which were degenerate and corrupt products of the feudal system in its decay, such was the constant aim of the states-general of 1484. They saw that a judicial hierarchy would be vain without fixity of laws; and they ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... We have engraven it there, on the blue table of the cold vault, in letters tall enough for the reading of the nations. And why has the far South not read and believed before this? Because a steam has gone up—a fog—from New England's pulpit and her degenerate press, and hidden the beaming revelation from its vision. The Northern hierarchy and aristocracy have cheated ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of the rustic. Here she accumulated a thousand various gratifications; here she wantoned in all the secret and licentious desires of her heart. But her castle was not merely a scene of thoughtless pleasure. Within its circle she held crouds of degenerate shepherds, groveling through the omnipotence of her incantations in every brutal form. Even the spectres and the elves that disobeyed her authority, she held in the severest durance. She compressed their tender forms in the narrowest prison, or gave them to the ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... prodigious admirer of quality, grew in a short time to be very intimate, and imagining that she may one day make her market of the girls, has much ingratiated herself with them. She introduced me—I drank, and abused this degenerate age with the father—promised wonders to the mother for all her brats—praised her gooseberry wine, and ogled the daughters, by which means in three days I made the progress ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... to medicine and the physical sciences. He was also considered eminent as a philologist and philosopher. Physiology, however, with its various branches and degenerate offshoots, was the idol of the scholars of that age, and of Faustus among the rest. A passionate desire to fathom the mysteries of Nature, to dive into the most hidden recesses of moral and physical creation, had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... we degenerate, the contrast between us and our house is more evident. We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God. We do not understand the notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away from us; the bear and the ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... burnished mirror, wrought about With cunning imagery of twisted vines. He scarcely knew those sunken, red-rimmed eyes, For his who in the flush of manhood rode Among the cliffs, and followed up the crags The flying temptress; and there fell on him A horror of her beauty, a disgust For his degenerate and corrupted life, With irresistible, intense desire, To feel the breath of heaven on his face. Then as Fate willed, who rules above the gods, He saw, within the glass, behind him glide The form of Venus. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... erection of a permanent Temple. The time for the next step appeared to David to have come when he had no longer to fight for his throne. Rest from enemies should lead to larger work for God, else repose will be our worst enemy, and peace will degenerate into self-indulgent sloth. A devout heart will not be content with personal comfort and dwelling in a house of cedar, while the ark has but a tent for its abode. There should be a proportion between expenditure ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... all easy, we should degenerate into weaklings—into human mush. It is the fighting spirit that makes us strong. Nor do any of us lack for a chance to exercise this spirit. Struggle is everywhere; as Kearny said at Fair Oaks, "There is lovely ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... imagination, or at least to avoid all that may distract it. A worship, dazzling and majestic in its external forms, is certainly calculated to fill the soul with the most elevated sentiments; but care must be taken that the ceremonies do not degenerate into a spectacle in which each one plays his part—in which each one studies what he must do at such a moment; when he is to pray, when he is to finish his prayer; when to kneel down, and when to get up. The regulated ceremonies of a court introduced into a temple of devotion, confine the ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... change that then Upon our hapless nature fell, When the degenerate hearts of men Bore sin and all the ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... concluding with a generous deed For Dunlap, Cooper, Woodworth, Knowles, Placide! 'Twas nobly done, ye patriots and scholars! Besides—they netted twenty thousand dollars! "A good round sum," in these degenerate times— "This bank-note world," so called in Halleck's rhymes; And proof conclusive, you will frankly own, In liberal ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... were lost, and their productions literally buried in the wreck. The minds of the composite nations that arose in Europe had no guide. Men were left to their own instincts, only faintly aided by the ruins and traditions of degenerate Rome; and each series of countries had its own style of art, framed or adopted by the genius of the people. During the middle ages, the style most general in Northern Europe was the Gothic; and by that term the whole system of art during the period is popularly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... influence on the Jesuit teachers in Rome, Ingolstadt, and Prague, was the Dominican, Francis of Vittoria (1480-1546). Realising the necessities of the age better than most of his contemporaries he put to an end the useless discussions and degenerate style of his immediate predecessors, re-introduced the /Summa/ of St. Thomas, insisted on supplementing it by a close study of the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers, and inaugurated a new style of theological Latinity freed both from the barbarisms of ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... nothing. Like all sound legislation, it built of materials already prepared. It organized the chaotic past, and gave concrete forms to Indian nature itself. The people have dwindled and decayed; but, banded by its ties of clan and kin, the league, in feeble miniature, still subsists, and the degenerate Iroquois looks back with a mournful pride to the glory of ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... question was clearly due to the fear that such objects might degenerate amongst Christians, as they afterwards did, into little better than idols. And if the sign or figure of the cross did not mainly remind the early Christians of the death of Jesus, it must have mainly reminded ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... to be wondered at that he, the warm-feeling artist, offspring of a school which affected richness and baroque, was no friend of a new tendency, the stateliness and broadness of which were bound to degenerate into coldness and stiffness? Looking through his drawings and etchings (his pictures leave us no town-views taken from nature), we occasionally meet views of town-gates, old houses alone or crowded together, mills, all obviously ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... as thus related by descent or cognation, do not always agree in sense; for it is incident to words, as to their authours, to degenerate from their ancestors, and to change their manners when they change their country. It is sufficient, in etymological enquiries, if the senses of kindred words be found such as may easily pass into each other, or such as may both be ...
— Preface to a Dictionary of the English Language • Samuel Johnson
... ascertains the exorbitant price of volunteers, and the reluctance with which the government admitted of this alterative. [137] Such was the horror for the profession of a soldier, which had affected the minds of the degenerate Romans, that many of the youth of Italy and the provinces chose to cut off the fingers of their right hand, to escape from being pressed into the service; and this strange expedient was so commonly practised, as to deserve the severe animadversion ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... states, republics, and kingdoms; the annihilation of the religion of Greece and Rome; the birth and the progress of the two new religions which have shared the most beautiful regions of the earth; the decrepitude of the ancient world, the spectacle of its expiring glory and degenerate manners; the infancy of the modern world, the picture of its first progress, of the new direction given to the mind and character of man—such a subject must necessarily fix the attention and excite the interest of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... run cold at the calm pride of this degenerate fiend, had it not been boiling at the reference to Helene. He crept nearer to them, along the wall. He lay down on the floor, below the level of the first bullet paths. Then he drew his automatic and the bulb light, ready ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... control. The Mexican leads a shiftless, thriftless life and seems satisfied merely to exist. He has, unfortunately, inherited more of the baser than the better qualities of his ancestors, and, to all appearance, is destined to further degenerate. The American is the last comer and has already pushed civilization and commerce into the remotest corners and, as ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... younger days. I doubt, however, whether it is more dishonest, and whether struggles were not made quite as disgraceful to the strugglers as anything that is done now. You can't alter the men, and you must use them." The younger Duke sat down and sighed over the degenerate patriotism of the age. ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... is no other human love like this, which follows the child from the cradle to the grave, never once abandons, never once forsakes him, no matter how unfortunate or degenerate he ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... two sides of a question is usually a virtue, but it may degenerate into a vice. Thus, a visitor found his bachelor friend glumly studying an evening waistcoat. When inquiry was made, ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... deprived of their jurisdiction, have already lost much of their influence; and as they gradually degenerate from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords, they will divest themselves of the ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... easily shown that Germany alone among nations has the power and the will to expand and to rule; that expansion and rule must be accomplished by war, which, far from being a misfortune, is a noble object to be aimed at and not avoided by statesmen; that all other nations are degenerate and must for their own good be crushed by Germany; and that any nation which resists Germany is through that very act an enemy of the human race. I also believed that German culture is something different from and superior to such culture (if it be worthy of the name) as is possessed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... the mystic feast ended, scarcely heeded amid the slow, half-crippled groping for financial readjustment in the teeth of a snarling and vindictive Congress, mean in its envy, meaner in revenge—a domestic brand of sectional Bolsheviki as dirty and degenerate as any anarchist ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... those arts (as if one should learn to weigh or to measure or to paint the wind) doth work but this effect, that the wisdom of those arts, which is great and universal, is almost made contemptible, and is degenerate into childish sophistry and ridiculous affectation. And further, the untimely learning of them hath drawn on by consequence the superficial and unprofitable teaching and writing of them, as fitteth indeed to the capacity of children. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... only with a few specks scarcely visible on the map of Europe, you are engaged in solving a problem as delicate and difficult as if it arose on a far more conspicuous stage. The people he found to be eminently gifted by nature with that subtlety which is apt to degenerate into sophistry, and prone to be both rather light-minded and extremely suspicious. The permanent officials in Downing Street, with less polite analysis, had been accustomed to regard the islanders more bluntly as a 'pack of scamps.' This was what had done the mischief. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the last two things, you know," said the young girl; "for I am sure that the flag that braved a thousand years was not half so strong as your brocade; and as to buying another, there are none to be bought in these degenerate days." ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... velvet of knavery;" and in his Father Hubburd's Tales, we find "like an old cunning bowler to fetch in a young ketling gamester:" see Middleton's Works, v. 543, 589, ed. Dyce. Keistrels are hawks of a worthless and degenerate breed. ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... said, did not take the higher title; it was first assumed by his son Okkodai. But there are doubts about this. (See Quatremere's Rashid, pp. 10 seqq. and Pavet de Courteille, Dict. Turk-Oriental.) The tendency of swelling titles is always to degenerate, and when the value of Khan had sunk, a new form, Khan-khanan, was devised at the Court of Delhi, and applied to one of the high officers ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... sanctuary steps. I breathe more freely when I reach a book-lined library where a mere handful of men do not overflow the Persian rug before the fire. One of them is Raffles, who is talking to a large man with the brow of a demi-god and the eyes and jowl of a degenerate bulldog. And this is our ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... these various degenerate and illiterate attempts at book-work we have only to watch the last expiring gleams of classic art beneath the ruthless footsteps of the barbarian invaders of ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... of a rough, ignorant and poverty toiling type, but of late years have greatly improved with the introduction of organized labor and education. Previous bad conditions, however, have left their mark in a stunted and physically degenerate type of descendants from the mining population of those times. In contrast to later comers they resemble a race of dwarfs. The men seldom exceed four feet eight inches in height, the women and children appear ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... known to the nations, exhausting, bloody, cruel, sweeping every thing before it; a moral conflagration, bringing every kind of suffering and sorrow in its train, yet made to result as a retribution to worn-out and degenerate races, and a means of vast development of resources among those peoples which have life and energy,—we see the providence of God in the Roman Conquests. The gradual growth of Rome as a warlike state is a most impressive example of the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... John Enderby, he said: "Troublous and degenerate man, get gone from this country, and no more set foot in it on peril of your life. We recalled you from outlawry, believing you to be a true lover of your country, but we find you malignant, seditious ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... often find a race thus degenerating and still oftener a family. You may see poor little feeble washed-out rags, children of a noble stock, suffering morally and physically, throughout their useless, degenerate lives, and yet people who are going to marry and to bring more such into the world, will consult nothing but their own convenience as to where they are to live, or how they ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... feeling to join the Guard, and it is a real sacrifice for an artist to spend time on the exercises; but it well becomes the sculptor of Orpheus. In reference to what I have said of many Americans in Italy, I will only add that they talk about the corrupt and degenerate state of Italy as they do about that of our slaves at home. They come ready trained to that mode of reasoning which affirms, that, because men are degraded by bad institutions, they are not fit for better. I will only add some words upon the happy augury I draw from ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... within narrow limits, and always require careful watching; for they may easily become excessive or even betray an animus; and in either case they pass at once into quite a different category. From cases of excusable oscitancy they degenerate, either into instances of inexcusable licentiousness, or else into cases of ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... his sister and her husband. But I must not distress you with sordid details. Suffice it to say, I turned at last like the proverbial worm. I applied for a divorce ten months ago. It was granted, provisionally as I say. He is a degenerate. He was unfaithful to me in every sense of the word. But in spite of all that, the court in granting me the separation, took occasion to placate national honour by giving him the child during the year, pending the ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... Vane's he had taken much council with himself as to whether he ought not to get a new suit with his first money instead of sending it home. Now he had solved the question, after sending the money home, by the discovery of a place on a degenerate street, in a neighbourhood of Chinese laundries, with the polite name of Misfit Parlours, where they professed to sell the failures of the leading tailors of Boston, New York, and Chicago. After long study of the window of the Parlours, Lemuel ventured within one day, ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... they were anything but part of a machine defending France. These officers, of course, were from the invaded district, and in addition to their isolation, were haunted by fears for their women now in the power of men who were as cruel as they were sensual and degenerate. ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... enough to be so classed. He could read with fluency, and had plenty of cunning intelligence. But he could not keep still. And he had a kind of sickness very repulsive to a sensitive girl, something cunning and etiolated and degenerate. Once he had thrown an ink-well at her, in one of his mad little rages. Twice he had run home out of class. He was a ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... which grew up along the shores of America. So far it belongs to the Spanish Main and to the Isthmus of Panama. The romance remained when the Elizabethans passed away—they were followed by the buccaneers, privateers, marooners and pirates—a degenerate company, but not without their picturesque side. Pierre le Grand, Francois l'Olonnois, Henry Morgan, are captains only one degree more piratical than Drake and Raleigh. Edward Teach, Kidd, Avery, Bartholomew Roberts were pirates only because they plundered ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... distress being attributed more or less to these causes. It is now generally agreed, however, that in most cases these causes may be resolved into more remote causes, laziness being oftentimes attributable to a degenerate or at least ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... current theory therefore fall back on the hypothesis that the Australians are sadly degenerate.(1) Chiefs, it is argued, or kings, they once had, and the gods are surviving ghosts of these wholly forgotten potentates. To this we reply that we know not the very faintest trace of Australian degeneration. Sir John Lubbock ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... that fill them, therefore, with envy and perplexity—such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will find them call everything that is not crude and forcible in life "degenerate." But back to the very earliest writings, in the most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew prophets, for example, you will find that at the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more complicated, for more refined, for more beautiful and ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... anxiety which might have been occasioned by my earlier letters from hence, I hope will be removed, and that I shall be thought not to be totally destitute of political prudence. When that letter was written, I was rather apprehensive I might be censured by some as suffering prudence to degenerate into pusillanimity, for not taking advantage of the impression made by so important an event as the surrender of Lord Cornwallis and his army, and thought it expedient to assign any reasons for not doing it, knowing that we are apt to think events, which so immediately ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. VIII • Various
... a weak voice, his eyes starting from his head. "Life cannot be unchequered by the frowns of fate, but death must bring dumbness to my lips. Caution, when besmeared in blood, is no longer virtue, or wisdom, but wretched and degenerate cowardice; no, never let him that was born to execute judgment secure his honours by cruelty and oppression. Hath not thy Koran told thee that fear and submission is a subject's tribute, yet mercy is the attribute of Allah, and the most pleasing endowment ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Development is equable and orderly, but as in other forms of life the contents of certain capsules seem to start into being with a more vigorous initial impulse than others, and these mature the more speedily. A sturdy infant may be screwing its way out of its cradle, while in a weakly and degenerate brother alongside the thrills of life may be ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... reverence! Turn, turn, my country, and behold That noble band of heroes old, And weep, and on thyself thy anger vent, For without anger, grief is impotent: Oh, turn, and rouse thyself for shame, Blush at the thought of sires so great, Of children so degenerate! ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... of human nature! Oh! you degenerate girl! As if I cared for Clem in that way! Have I not from the first set my heart on this real-life romance ending in the only way it could ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... one— toward the Richardsonian method of laying bare the inner natures of ordinary people. She has here pursued the analysis of character as an end in itself, for in "The Fatal Secret" there is no hint of disguised scandal, nor any appeal to the pruriency of degenerate readers. Sensational in the extreme the story is, but nevertheless the progress of the narrative is delayed while the sentiments of the heroine are examined in the minutest detail. While better known romancers ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... of them waste time in laboriously endeavouring to assimilate the shells of knowledge along with the oysters, others instinctively use their powers of secretion to better purpose. Remember also that in Elizabethan times school-boy study was a far more strenuous matter than it is in these degenerate days, and that it was not chiefly ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... blind as to think that good can come of it? Nothing but evil upon evil can accrue from such a system,—and those who have prophetic eyes to see through the veil of events can perceive, even now, the not far distant end—namely, the ruin of the country that has permitted itself to degenerate into a mere nation of shopkeepers, —and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the "Queen of the South[107]," or of Abyssinia, who was a Jew, and converted by Philip to Christianity. There is therefore no manner of difficulty in accounting for the presence of these corrupt degenerate black Jews, amongst the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... and wife cease to feel that they must exert themselves for each other in little matters. Knowing themselves accepted, they lounge—mentally, mannerly, and physically—when at home or elsewhere alone together. Some of this relaxation is a good thing, but it is a mistake to let home and spouse degenerate into nothing more than an ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... individualism into the most lurid, red- shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color—wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenia and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... occasional and habitual criminals ceased voluntarily from their depredations. There was no longer any need for them to commit crime. They merely changed with changing conditions. A smaller number of criminals was put into hospitals and cured. And the remnant of the hopelessly criminal and degenerate was segregated. And the courts in all countries were likewise decreased in number again and again. Ninety-five per cent. of all civil cases had been squabbles over property, conflicts of property-rights, lawsuits, contests of wills, breaches of ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... The government of college, Those liberal helluos of knowledge, Who, e'en in these degenerate days, Deserve the world's unceasing praise; Who, friends of science and of men, Stand forth Gomorrah's righteous ten; On them I naught but thanks bestow, For, like my cash, my credit's low; So I can give nor ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... dared to lift her eyes in Mary Pidwall's presence. For Mary knew not only the sum of her lies, but also held—or so Laura believed—that she came of a thoroughly degenerate family; thanks to Uncle Tom. And the early weeks spent at close quarters with her bore out these fears. The looks both M. P. and her friend bent on Laura said as plainly as words: if we are forced to tolerate this obnoxious little ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... will wear shoes in summer-time and coats in winter, weather-board their log cabins, put glass in the windows and partitions across the one room inside. Woods-meetings will creep into churches, square sousing in the river will degenerate to the gentle baptismal sprinkle; no picnics or barbecues will delight the inhabitants with flying horses and fights, open fireplaces and sparking-benches will give way to stoves and chairs, riding double on horseback, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... from a higher estate. But the facts do not support the brute theory. Even if the "missing links" could be found, it would be as reasonable—though not so flattering to man's pride—to believe that the monkey is a degenerate man as that man ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... The men are not the same: 'tis we are base, Poor, and degenerate from the exalted strain Of our great fathers. Where is now the soul Of god-like Cato? he, that durst be good, When Caesar durst be evil; and had power, As not to live his slave, to die his master? Or where's the constant Brutus, that being proof Against all charm of ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... may have charms for a lover. There is a certain susceptibility of temper, that sometimes accompanies the pride of virtue, which indicates a quick sense of shame, and warm feelings of affection; in whatsoever manner this may be shown, it appears amiable and graceful. And if this sensibility degenerate into irritability, a lover pardons it in his mistress; it is her prerogative to be haughty; and if he be dexterous to seize "the moment of returning love," it is often his interest to promote quarrels, for the sake ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... commanded sternly. "The Meccans are a people corrupt and accursed. 'Their hearts are black as their skins are white.' They live by fleecing the Hujjaj, by making sale and barter of relics, by turning the holy places into marts of trade. All this is well known throughout Islam. Ah, the degenerate breed of the sons ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... so it has always been, that the counsel which the Upland chiefs have resolved among themselves has always been followed by the men of the rest of the country. Our forefathers did not need to take advice from the West Gautlanders about the government of the Swedes. Now we will not be so degenerate as to need Emund to give us counsel; but let us, friends and relations, unite ourselves for the purpose of coming to a determination." All agreed to this, and thought it was well said. Thereafter the people joined this ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... feast, The Faith's red "Auto," fed with human fuel, While sate the catholic Moloch, calmly cruel, Enjoying, with inexorable eye,[ef] That fiery festival of Agony! The stern or feeble sovereign, one or both 340 By turns; the haughtiness whose pride was sloth; The long degenerate noble; the debased Hidalgo, and the peasant less disgraced, But more degraded; the unpeopled realm; The once proud navy which forgot the helm; The once impervious phalanx disarrayed; The idle forge that formed Toledo's blade; The foreign ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... to strike at the roots of individual initiative. We have secured its execution during the war as to the willing co-operation of 95 per cent of the trades of the country, but under peace conditions it would degenerate into an harassing ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... occurred to me. I remember the time when I, too, deified the "soul's impulses." It is a noble worship; but, if we do not aid it by a just though limited interpretation of what "Ought" means, it will degenerate into idolatry. For a time it was so with me, and I am not yet good ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... conferred for some feat of strength and daring on a stalwart Borderer. We find the corresponding Tornebeuf in Old French, and Turnbuck also occurs. Trumbull and Trumble are variants due to metathesis followed by assimilation (Chapter III), while Tremble is a very degenerate form. In Knatchbull we have the obsolete verb knatch, which in Mid. English meant to strike on the head, fell. Crawcour is Fr. Crevecoeur, breakheart, which has also become a local name in France. With Shacklock, shake-lock, and Sherlock, Shurlock, shear-lock, ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... last eight or nine years; and while I was unavoidably delayed in the writing of this, awaiting material, put in one-half of DAVID BALFOUR, the sequel to KIDNAPPED. Add the ordinary impediments of life, and admire my busyness. I am now an old, but healthy skeleton, and degenerate much towards the machine. By six at work: stopped at half-past ten to give a history lesson to a step- grandson; eleven, lunch; after lunch we have a musical performance till two; then to work again; bath, 4.40, dinner, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Rome—thy sterner, younger sister, she Who awed the world with her imperial frown— Rome drew the spirit of her race from thee, The rival of thy shame and thy renown. Yet her degenerate children sold the crown Of earth's wide kingdoms to a line of slaves; Guilt reigned, and woe with guilt, and plagues came down, Till the North broke its floodgates, and the waves Whelmed the degraded race, ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... they left for the Murchison Pass they had laid in a comfortable supply, but apparently Allister had cached a quantity of the stuff at the Twin Eagles shack. Of one thing Andrew was certain, that four such practiced whisky drinkers would never let their party degenerate into a drunken rout; and another thing was even more sure—that Scottie Macdougal would keep his head better than the best of the others. But what the alcohol would do would be to cut the leash of constraint and dig up every strong passion among them. For instance, Jeff ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... the banner at their head, go in procession along the walls and to every threatened gate, never doubting that at the sight of it the Sultan and his unbaptized hordes will be reft of breath of body or take to flight.... This we pray of Your Majesty, that the Mother of God may in these degenerate days have back the honor and worship accorded her by the Emperors and Greeks of ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... amongst what they have opportunities of seeing; that is, between the various pieces presented to them by the managers of theatres. Further than this, it is impossible for them to extend their office of judging and collating; and the degenerate taste which substituted the caprices of Davenant, the rants of Dryden, or the filth of Tate, for the jewellery of Shakspeare, cannot with any justice be charged upon the public, not one in a thousand of whom was furnished with any means of comparing, but exclusively upon those ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible colours ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the audience. They gained their livelihood. The wolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by the man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which swelled the receipts. "Above all things, do not degenerate into a man," his friend would say ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... churches in Venice we have already spoken; his palaces are mainly to be found in his native city, Vicenza. In these structures he displayed great fertility of invention and a profound familiarity with the classic orders, but the degenerate taste of the Baroque period already begins to show itself in his work. There is far less of architectural propriety and grace in these pretentious palaces, with their colossal orders and their affectation of ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... passed and repassed before the window—Sorenson's figure, of course. Brute, coward, degenerate he was, and to be dealt with as such. Not only as such, indeed, but as a wretch who had dared to touch Janet Hosmer against her will, to drag her from her home to this lonely spot by violence for ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... Common Sense! And more and more with pleasing objects strive To dull his judgment and pervert his will To their behests: who, were he not so wrapp'd I'the dusky clouds of their dark policies, Would never suffer right to suffer wrong. Fie, Lingua, wilt thou now degenerate? Art not a woman? dost not love revenge? Delightful speeches, sweet persuasions, I have this long time us'd to get my right. My right—that is, to make the senses six; And have both name and power with ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... no more power than what every man naturally may have over another. Sect, 10. Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... the Arabic word kafer 'pagans.' These names are used in Binh-Thuan to make a distinction, but Banis and Kaphirs alike are all Chams.... In Cambodia all Chams are Mussulmans." (E. Aymonier, Les Tchames, p. 26.) The religion of the pagan Chams of Binh-Thuan is degenerate Brahmanism with three chief gods, Po-Nagar, Po-Rome, and Po-Klong-Garai. (Ibid., p. 35.)—H.C.] The books of their former religion they say (according to Dr. Bastian) that they received from Ceylon, but ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... degraded yourself, you shall be scourged. For a subsistence, therefore, betake yourself to cultivation; or other drudgeries for which alone you are now fit, and do not bring a disgrace on the character of the sacred order.” In these degenerate days perhaps there is not one Brahman out of fifty who either does not do what he ought to shun, or who does not omit to do what he ought to perform; and all will admit that degraded Brahmans are unworthy ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... anything to shake the power of the throne, he would not submit to be patronized by the mean fawning Mazarin. Not that the hard-hearted Conde would have listened to his wife and mother, even if he had loved them as Coriolanus did, or that his arrogance did not degenerate into wonderful meanness at last, such as Coriolanus would have scorned; but the parallel was very amusing, and gave me a great interest in Conde. And did you ever observe what a great likeness there is in the characters of ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Fowler (919-936), was permitted to make the royal title hereditary, and to assert an effective suzerainty over the other tribal dukes. In France the House of Paris, after ruling for many years in the name of a degenerate Carolingian line, was invited in the person of Hugh Capet to assume the royal dignity (987). We have here a European movement in favour of monarchy; and on the heels of it follows another for the ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... smile his Tyrant can accost, And wield the slavish sickle, not the sword: Ah! Greece! they love thee least who owe thee most— Their birth, their blood, and that sublime record[187] Of hero Sires, who shame thy now degenerate horde! ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... sits sad and solitary—a pale and beautiful ruin, pathetic beyond speech, infested by noisy shop-keepers and petty pilferers, the degenerate sons of the robbers who once roamed the sea and enthroned ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... and red tape! There are nations that will not fling away the empire of earth in order to slight an unknown man and insult a noble woman whose boots they are not fitted to unlatch. There are nations not blinded to Science, not given over hand and foot to effete snobocracies and Degenerate Decadents. In short, mark my words—THERE ARE ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... followed the dusty road and examined the telegraph poles, for the woodpecker of these latter days has departed from the ways of his fathers, deserted the cool and fragrant woods, and taken up his abode in degenerate places, a fitting change of residence to follow his change of habit from digging his prey out of the tree-trunks to catching ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... book, where the heroine receives whacks with patient smiles. Fate boots her from pillar to post and she blesses Fate and is much obliged. That most deadly reproach to degenerate human nature—the accidental fact of sex—had been so skilfully extirpated from those pages that, like chaste amoebae, the characters merely multiplied by immaculate subdivision; and millions of lineal descendants of the ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... more satisfied with herself because she had never for an instant forgotten her dignity so far as to degenerate into the vehemence of passion or to falter with the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... men are monstrously cruel. The guards and the men over me, from the Warden down, were stupid monsters. Listen, and you shall learn what they did to me. There was a poet in the prison, a convict, a weak-chinned, broad-browed, degenerate poet. He was a forger. He was a coward. He was a snitcher. He was a stool—strange words for a professor of agronomics to use in writing, but a professor of agronomics may well learn strange words when pent in prison for the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... of the Khasis. The following is his opinion of them:—"They are a powerful, athletic race of men, rather below the middle size, with a manliness of gait and demeanour. They are fond of their mountains, and look down with contempt upon the degenerate race of the plains, jealous of their power, brave in action, and ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... Robber indeed! My noble Ruperto the purest of patriots, purer than any in this degenerate ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... contemplated by the wildest imagination. The flagitious Queen did not, it is said and believed, hesitate to signify to her son that the King was not his father—and this in the presence of that King and of Napoleon. Could crime justify crime—could the fiendish lusts and hatreds of a degenerate race offer any excuse for the deliberate guilt of a masculine genius, the conduct of this abject court might have apologised for the policy which it perhaps tempted the pampered ambition of Napoleon to commence, and which it now encouraged ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... distance, but forbear the prize. Then fierce Tydides stoops; and from the fields Heaved with vast force, a rocky fragment wields. Not two strong men the enormous weight could raise, Such men as live in these degenerate days:(147) He swung it round; and, gathering strength to throw, Discharged the ponderous ruin at the foe. Where to the hip the inserted thigh unites, Full on the bone the pointed marble lights; Through both the tendons broke the rugged stone, And stripp'd the skin, and crack'd the ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... God's world"—and poet and plagiarist, courtier and courtesan, Kipling and cant—these now dally by the banks of the Thames and dine off the peoples of the earth, just as once the degenerate populace of imperial Rome fed upon the peoples of the Pyramids. But the thing is near the end. The "secret of Empire" is no longer the sole possession of England. Other peoples are learning to think imperially. The Goths and ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the honors of office by his poverty, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and San Gil in the kingdom of New Grenada. In our days its cultivation during twenty-five years has almost entirely removed the apprehension at first entertained, that being transplanted to America, the cane would by degrees degenerate, and become as slender as the creole cane. The third species, the violet sugar-cane, called Cana de Batavia, or de Guinea, is certainly indigenous in the island of Java, where it is cultivated in preference in the districts of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... narrow rather than simple, for simplicity is the work of civilization. They did not understand, and could not adopt, the law of the world into which they had come. Yet neither could they, if they would, force their laws upon the conquered inhabitants. Among these the old civilization lingered on in a degenerate form, and with it the Roman law. One of the first things that happened was that the conquerors drew up for their Roman subjects short codes of the Roman law as it survived in a debased form, as they drew up statements of their own law for their followers. For a long time each man, according ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... Mr. Collier, as evidence of the date at which they were made. And as, according to Dr. Ingleby, "the primal evidence of the forgery lies in the ink writing, and in that alone," with that alone we shall at present concern ourselves. As the careless, half-formed hand of the present day, degenerate from "the round hand of the school-master," appears only in the pencil writing, we have therefore to deal but with the first three styles of writing enumerated by Mr. Hardy; and as he himself admits that "it is perfectly possible that any two of these hands in succession may have been practised ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... he writes to his wife, "that such actions will hurt the reputation of black troops and of those connected with them. For myself I have gone through the war so far without dishonor, and I do not like to degenerate into a plunderer and a robber,—and the same applies to every officer in my regiment. After going through the hard campaigning and the hard fighting in Virginia, this makes me very much ashamed. There are two courses only for me ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... power of the terrible goddess Davee, are not afraid to incur her displeasure by informing of their fellows, they reply, that Davee has done her worst in abandoning them. She can inflict no severer punishment, and therefore gives herself no further concern about her degenerate children. This cowardly doctrine is, however, of advantage to the Government that seeks to put an end to the sect, and has thrown a light upon their practices, which could never have been ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... and he soon became an oracle at the billiard-table, and a hero in the racquet-court. His refined education, however, fortunately preserved him from the fate of many other lively youths: he did not degenerate into a mere hero of sports and brawls, the genius of male revels, the arbiter of roistering suppers, and the Comus of a club. His boyish feelings had their play; he soon exuded the wanton heat of which a public school would have served as a safety-valve. He returned to his books, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... to drink, shrank into as little space as possible; she was nervous and self-reproachful, yet the singing and the uproar gave her a certain pleasure. There was nothing in the talk around her and the songs that were sung that made it a shame for her to be present. Plebeian good-humour does not often degenerate into brutality at meetings of this kind until a late hour of the evening. The girls who sat with glasses of beer before them, and carried on primitive flirtations with their neighbours, were honest wage-earners of factory and workshop, ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... about four of them before abandoning her mule for the detour on foot. But when she had left the town only a little way two horsemen came up behind her. She knew neither of them, and they were immature boys, with the empty and vacuous faces of almost degenerate illiteracy. They seemed unarmed but since it was vital to Alexander's scheme to ride unwatched it became important to have them either go ahead or to distance them. Accordingly she urged her mule into a lumbering canter and when a turn of the road had been reached slowed down only to discover ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... who deceived her. I should like also to omit all reference to the conversation which ensued between them, but for the sake of true art I am constrained to state that Lucifer descended to commonplace. M. Renan tells us that since he left Saint Sulpice he did nothing but degenerate, and the inference is obvious, that he ought to have gone back to Saint Sulpice, despite the literary splendours of the Vie de Jesus. Since he last broke a lance with Michael, the devil has debilitated mentally, and the substance of ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... Silence] You think I don't understand. [His voice trembles] I fully understand. Had you beaten me like a dog, it would have felt less hard. Don't I understand what I am? I am a rascal, a degenerate, I mean. Forgive me for the Lord's sake. [Sobs, throws the parcel on the table, ...
— The Cause of it All • Leo Tolstoy
... in either fit a captive with the jail-rot upon him, and the impurity of his prison worn into the grain of his soul, he revealed his degenerate state to his affectionate child. No one else ever beheld him in the details of his humiliation. Little recked the Collegians who were laughing in their rooms over his late address in the Lodge, what a serious picture they had ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... civilization of our age and its medical science, we see, on the one hand, the crude superstitions of the masses, the subtler superstitions of the educated classes; gross materialism, bewildering Darwinism, pessimism, and degenerate political economy; on the other hand, unmitigated quackery and cupidity, with its weight of oppression on ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... where art thou, My Country? On thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now— The heroic bosom beats no more! And must thy Lyre, so long divine, Degenerate into hands like mine? ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... Doth he so, sir? thou unnatural boy! "Too well," sayest thou? that word shall cost thee[261] somewhat: O monstrous! have I brought thee up to this? "Too well!" O unkind, wicked, and degenerate, Hast thou the heart to say so of thy mother? Well, God will plague thee for't, I warrant thee: Out on thee, villain! fie upon thee, wretch! Out of my sight, out of ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... the least. He had lapsed hopelessly. No urchin in the lower school, brewing cocoa over a form room fire, ladling out condensed milk with the blade of a penknife, would have been more dead to the decencies of life than this degenerate hero of the ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... conditions altered (for better or for worse) with the national prosperity under Elizabeth, and classes and masses reconsidered their relative positions, Robin should fall from the popular pantheon, and should degenerate, as we find him degenerated in the broadsides of the Reformation hacks, into a swashbuckler unheroic enough to be defeated in quarter-staff bouts and so undemocratic as to find for himself a noble title and a wife ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... apt to degenerate into occasions of riot, and in 1432 the following statute was passed with a view to ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... rights, to be capable of enjoying on a sudden, without any preparation, the benefits of absolute liberty. He feared, too, that the opposition inherent in representative governments would not be rightly comprehended in France, and would make a bad impression; that it would degenerate into resistance; and that it would clog the action of the sovereign power, take from it its illusion, its moral strength, and make of it nothing ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... us. Civilized warfare itself, the only field remaining where undying fame may be purchased, seems likely to lose its hold on men, and soon the arbitrator will everywhere replace the commander-in-chief and the noble art of war will degenerate into the ignoble lawsuit. So even universal peace may ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... volunteer and not half a dozen Parsis. Englishmen prefer to join a corps which consists of Englishmen or at least has an English Company. When they have no opportunity of so doing, it is a little unfair to class them with the lazy, unpatriotic, degenerate young gentlemen who have the opportunity and do not seize it. Captain Ross-Ellison was doing his utmost to provide the ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... that had seen you both as youths, notwithstanding Audley had the advantage of being some years your senior—who could have thought that he was the one to become distinguished and eminent, and you to degenerate into the luxurious idler, averse to all trouble and careless of all fame? You, with such advantages, not only of higher fortunes, but, as every one said, of superior talents; you, who had then so much ambition, so keen a desire for glory, sleeping ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hair was up she'd look a little faded, and there'd be moments of stress and strain when her naively insolent drawl would jar on the nerves, like the talk of a spoiled child too intent on holding the attention of a visitor averse to precocity. And her disdain of the practical would degenerate into untidiness, and her clinging-ivyness, if it clung too much, would probably remind a man in his reactionary moments of ennui that there are subtler pursuits than being a wall, even ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... the neighbour which he more perhaps than any of his contemporaries had suffered from, but which he was certain involved enormous dangers not only for himself but also to the next and subsequent generations (see Note B., where "pity" is mentioned among the degenerate virtues). Later in the book we shall see how his profound compassion leads him into temptation, and how frantically he struggles against it. In verses 31 and 32, he tells us to what extent he had to modify ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... she answered, gaily, for she was before her time inasmuch as she was what is known in these days of degenerate speech ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... ghosts in the shadowed avenues, flitting in and out among the trees, joining hands to dance "la ronde" about the pool of Neptune. Gay abbes, cavaliers, beautiful ladies of the late Renaissance, red-heeled, painted, powdered; frail, degenerate children of the hard-headed old Florentine citizens pictured in the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio. No greater shades could ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... and princesses made the grande tournee through the rooms, and then mingled with the guests; all formal etiquette was now laid aside, and a gay and unembarrassed conversation might be carried on till the beginning of the concert. This seemed to degenerate, on the part of the French officers, to an indiscreet, frenzied levity. They laughed and talked boisterously—they walked arm in arm before the ladies, and remarked upon them so boldly, that crimson blushes, or frightened pallor, was ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... used to be described in satirical writings of the first half of the century as "an aristocratic drawl," and his pronunciation was archaic. Like other high-bred people of his time, he talked of "cowcumbers" and "laylocks," called a woman an "'ooman," and was "much obleeged" where a degenerate age is content to be obliged. The frigidity of his address and the seeming stiffness of his manner, due really to an innate and incurable shyness, produced even among people who ought to have known him well a totally erroneous notion ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... I think I will join you in a pipe," said the lieutenant, pulling out a tin case, in which he kept the blackest of little cutty pipes. "In days of old our ancestors loved to fight—now we degenerate souls love to ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... he can get,—a very laughable scene as you may suppose, of awkwardness and agility, and failures on the very brink of success. Now began a dance. The women danced very well, and, in general, I have observed throughout Germany that the women in the lower ranks degenerate far less from the ideal of a woman, than the men from that of man. The dances were reels and waltzes; but chiefly the latter. This dance is, in the higher circles, sufficiently voluptuous; but here the emotions of it were far more faithful interpreters of the passion, which, ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... so-called classical art, historical, genre and landscape painting, all showing the same conventional black grease. The works reeked of uniform mediocrity, they were characterised by a muddy dinginess of tone, despite their primness—the primness of impoverished, degenerate blood. And the friends quickened their steps: they ran to escape from that reign of bitumen, condemning everything in one lump with their superb sectarian injustice, repeating that there was nothing in the place worth ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... "—a degenerate—a dope addict whose greatness lay only in the realms of his sensual dreams. A weak, pitiful figure bereft of followers, ...
— The Clean and Wholesome Land • Ralph Sholto
... mounted among the Indians showed themselves in the moonlight. Travellers who have met only with civilised Indians can with difficulty form any idea of the savage tribes. Nothing less resembled those degenerate Indians than these unconquered sons of the desert; who—like the birds of prey, wheeling in the air before pouncing on their victims—rode howling around the camp. Their figures hideously marked with paint, were ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... a banquet was out of the question. Suddenly the wily building hit on an idea. “I’ll give them a feu d’artifice. There hasn’t been a first-class fire here since I burned myself down fifty-three years ago! That kind of entertainment hasn’t been run into the ground like everything else in these degenerate days! I’ll do it in the best and most complete way, and give Newport something to talk about, whenever my name shall ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... so doing, she had occasion to speak with what she considered undue severity to one of the parties, she would immediately apologise with tears, and in the humblest manner entreat forgiveness. This extreme sweetness of disposition, however, did not degenerate into weakness; and she could testify the utmost displeasure, and reproved with energy when offences were committed against God. It was intolerable to her that His Divine Majesty should be insulted in her abode; and she, the gentlest and most ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... thrown out by his enemies, that he himself was infected with the very crime against which his inquiries were directed;—now Maenius, I say, in order that he might, in a private capacity, meet the imputation, abdicated the dictatorship. I expect not such moderation in you; you will not degenerate from your family, of all others the most imperious and assuming; nor resign your office a day, nor even an hour, before you are forced to it. Be it so: but then let no one exceed the time limited. It is enough to add a day, or a month, to the censorship. ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... original thought amongst them; the froth of society, with the natural tendency of froth to rise to the surface and thence be swept aside; mere bubbles, that shine a moment and then burst. It is fashion that unsexes women and unmakes men. To be in the world of fashion and of it, is to degenerate; but to be in it and not of it, to know it and remain untainted, despising all it has to give, makes towards solid advance. There are some ugly stages to be gone through, however, before the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... parts of Asia. Idolatries of several kinds came into vogue, some adopted from abroad, others developed out of their own system. Temples, some of which had a character of extraordinary magnificence, were erected to the honor of various gods; and the degenerate descendants of pure Zoroastrian spiritualists bowed down to images, and entangled themselves in the meshes of a sensualistic and most debasing Nature-worship. Still, amid whatsoever corruptions, the Dualistic faith was maintained. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... ages the gods were wont, it was believed, to visit the earth and mingle with men. But even in Homer's time this familiar intercourse was a thing of the past—a tradition of a golden age that had passed away. Their forms were no longer seen, their voices no longer heard. In these later and more degenerate times the recognized modes of divine communication with men were by oracles, and by casual and unusual sights and sounds, as thunder and lightning, a sudden tempest, an eclipse, a flight of birds,—particularly ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... alike. The heroine is a demimondaine in everything but her alleged virtue—the hero a young bounder whose better self restrains him just in time. A conventional marriage on the last page legalizes what would otherwise have been a liaison or a degenerate flirtation. ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... magnificent Youantee entered the Hall of Delight, which was illumined with ten thousand lanthorns, and cast his eyes over the portraits of the hundred beauties, but not one feature touched his heart, he turned away in disgust at the degenerate countenances of the age, "Is this all," exclaimed he, "that the world can lay at the feet of its lord?" And the committee of taste prostrated themselves when they beheld his indignation. "And this," exclaimed he, pointing to the supposed portrait ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of life is a song; every sound is a song. But inflections must not be multiplied, lest delivery degenerate into a perpetual sing-song. The effect lies entirely in reproducing the same inflection. A drop of water falling constantly, hollows a rock. A mediocre man will employ twenty or thirty tones. Mediocrity is not the too little, but the too much. The ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... under the Hudson and under Jersey City as I lit my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. When we emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge (which is a degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun was just fringing the crest with fire. Another moment and we flashed onto the Hackensack marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb morning. The day ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... ruling of it; it has always been so, that what the chiefs of the Up-Swedes have resolved among them, to this the other men of the land have listened. Our fathers needed not to receive advice from the West Gauts about their ruling of the land. Now are we not so degenerate that Emund need teach us counsel; I would have us bind our ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... mob, "down with the assassin." And the secretary saw them seize a degenerate-looking wretch and begin pounding him with their fists. After a little while he was thrown to the ground, but was dragged up again and at last, as the chauffeur was guiding his car backwards through the crowd, the secretary heard ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... view naturally suggested the prolongation of earthly life by artificial means; hence the search for an elixir, carried on through many centuries by degenerate disciples of Taoism. But here we must pass on to consider some of the speculations on God, life, death, and immortality, indulged in by Taoist philosophers and others, who were not fettered, as the Confucianists were, by traditional reticence ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... with sunbeams, we proceeded unto Rome (381 miles). An Ohio village, this Rome, and so fallen from its once proud estate that its postoffice no longer bears the name—it is simply "Stout's," if, in these degenerate days, you would send a ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... extremely likely to degenerate into a petty jealousy that is bred of fear. This is how Mr. H. G. Wells wrote of our attitude towards Germany ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... objected against the greatness of these prodigious Adventures, intimating that the resistance our Bucaniers found in America, was everywhere but small. For the Spaniards, say they, in the West Indies, are become of late years nothing less, but rather much more degenerate than in Europe. The continual Peace they have enjoyed in those parts, the defect of Military Discipline, and European souldiers for their Commanders, much contributing hereunto. But more especially, and above all other reasons, the very luxury of the Soil and Riches, the extreme heat of ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... intervened in the affairs of his country with a superior nobility of aim. He was the last champion of the Irish aristocracy and still more the voice of conscience for them, and he spoke to them of their duty to the nation as one might imagine some fearless prophet speaking to a council of degenerate princes. When the aristocracy failed Ireland he bade them farewell, and wrote the epitaph of their class in words whose scorn we almost forget because of their sounding melody and beauty. He turned ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... only too glad to consent to it," he said, "is the sodden depravity of that Floud chap. Really he's a menace to the community. I saw from the degenerate leer on his face this morning that he will not be able to keep silent about that little affair of ours back there. Mark my words, he'll talk. And fancy how embarrassing had you continued in the office for which you were engaged. Fancy it being known ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle. I have therefore in every case thought it proper to keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest on our part, leaving all questions which are not of vital military importance to the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... wretch as I that had been forced by my bitter wrongs to company with all manner of rogues and fellows of the baser sort, this Don Federigo (and all unknowing) served but to show me how very far I had sunk from what I might have been. And knowing myself thus degenerate I grieved mightily therefore and determined henceforth to meet Fortune's buffets more as became my condition, with a steadfast and patient serenity, even ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... Diuels. Saddle my horses: call my Traine together. Degenerate Bastard, Ile not trouble thee; Yet haue I ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... remarked more than once, that Gordon's military career reminds one of the great soldier Cromwell, who did so much to rescue England from the degenerate condition into which it had fallen under the miserable rule of the Stuarts. In the same way the six years spent by Gordon at Gravesend, very forcibly remind us of the great religious philanthropist, Lord Shaftesbury, who did perhaps more than any other man of this ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... might all evaporate away. Anaximenes affirmed that it was air, of which all things were formed by rarefaction and condensation: on such a supposition it could have no permanent personal identity. Critias said it was blood: this might degenerate and lose its nature, or be poured out on the ground. Leucippus maintained that it was a peculiar concourse of atoms: as these came together, so they might fly apart and there be an end of what they formed. The followers of Aristotle asserted that it was a fifth unknown substance, with properties ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... exclaimed Barere, "that men really attached to liberty will imitate the most frightful excesses of despotism!" He proved to the Convention, after his fashion, out of Sallust, that such arbitrary courts may indeed, for a time, be severe only on real criminals, but must inevitably degenerate into instruments of private cupidity and revenge. When, on the tenth of March, the worst part of the population of Paris made the first unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Girondists, Barere eagerly ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was the cynical and open criminal activity of an Englishman named James Stuart. This man was a degenerate criminal of the worst type, who came into a temporary glory through what he considered the happy circumstances of the time. Arrested for one of his crimes, he seemed to anticipate the usual very good prospects of escaping all penalties. ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... with you in detail regarding Berlin and all that which, according to your previous preparations and suggestions, is going on there. Great cities always contain within themselves the image of whole empires, and even though distorted by exaggerations which degenerate into caricature, they nevertheless present the nation in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... have a natural grace and ease in their manner, and make excellent wives and mothers. This character must not, however, be taken in an unlimited sense, for we cannot expect this rule to be without its exceptions, and it is true that some of these females do degenerate, and copy after the manners of the creoles, or white natives; but this is only the case when, by their intercourse with the whites, their Indian blood is merged and lost in the European. That part of the population in which is blended the ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... captivity and poor health. But now another and most unexpected feature developed itself; for, on attempting to remove the last web by placing against it a large wire ring, and cutting the guy-lines, I found that this most degenerate spider had not only failed to make her house perpendicular, but had so far departed from the traditions of our ancestors as to have the centre thereof decidedly eccentric, and four times as near the upper as the lower border of the web, so that its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... last cannot stand the touch-stone of truth; there are mean plebeians, who sweat and struggle to maintain the appearance of gentlemen; and, on the other hand, there are gentlemen of rank who seem industrious to appear mean and degenerate; the one sort raise themselves either by ambition or virtue, while the other abase themselves by viciousness or sloth; so that we must avail ourselves of our understanding and discernment in distinguishing those persons, who, though they bear the same appellation, are yet so different ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the handsomest young man in Athens. He was aristocratic, proud, insolent, and needlessly rich. He had a passion for gambling, horse-racing, dog-fighting, and indulged in the churchly habit of doing that which he ought not and leaving undone that which he should have done. He was worse than that degenerate scion of a proud ancestry, who a-kneiping went with his lady friends in the Cincinnati fountain, after the opera, on a wager. He whipped a man who admitted he did not have a copy of the "Iliad" in his house; publicly destroyed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Think me cold, Frosen and impotent, and so report me? That I had Nestor's hernia, thou wouldst think. I do degenerate, and abuse my nation, To play with opportunity thus long; I should have done the act, and then have parley'd. Yield, or I'll ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... building afforded visible proof of financial progress the Saskatchewan farmers were warned by the directors and the general manager of the "Co-Op" that co-operation which was allowed to degenerate into mere production of dividends would but reproduce in another form the evil it was intended to destroy. The ideal of service was the vital force which must be kept in mind and the work of the Grain Growers' Association in fostering ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... injury. And while the original purpose of this militant, even defiant, attitude is self-protection, those who are long compelled to maintain it conceive a contempt for the law, which they find inadequate to guard them, and not infrequently degenerate into bandits. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... these primitive human beings became tamed and civilized by the gods and heroes, who taught them to work in metals, to build houses, and other useful arts of civilization. But the human race became in the course of time so degenerate that the gods resolved to destroy all mankind by means of a flood; Deucalion {22} (son of Prometheus) and his wife Pyrrha, being, on account of their piety, the only ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... appropriated their military strength, robbed them of most of the fruits of their labour, and thus virtually enslaved them. Such was the origin of the great despotic empires of Oriental type. Such states degenerate rapidly in military strength. Their slavish populations, accustomed to be starved and beaten or massacred by the tax-gatherer, become unable to fight, so that great armies of them will flee before a handful of freemen, as in the case of the ancient Persians and the modern Egyptians. To strike ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... Nor'westers afterwards became as uproarious on that inspiring beverage as if they had all been drunk. There was this peculiarity, however, in their uproar, that it was reasonable, hearty, good-humoured; did not degenerate into shameful imbecility, or shameless impropriety, nor did it end in stupid incapacity. It subsided gradually into pleasant exhaustion, and terminated ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... cease to feel that they must exert themselves for each other in little matters. Knowing themselves accepted, they lounge—mentally, mannerly, and physically—when at home or elsewhere alone together. Some of this relaxation is a good thing, but it is a mistake to let home and spouse degenerate into nothing more than ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... winter were to continue unmitigated from year to year, without the genial influence of summer, the human race, as is apparent in polar regions and upland mountainous districts, would degenerate into dwarfishness. ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various
... good- looking, and I'm making a name for myself in the House; she'll be able to read all sorts of nice and horrid things about me in the papers at breakfast-time. I can be brilliantly amusing at times, and I understand the value of silence; there is no fear that I shall ever degenerate into that fearsome thing—a cheerful talkative husband. For a girl with money and social ambitions I should think I was ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... background. A picture of Spanish society does emerge from the dramas, indeed. It is a society in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty, in which the old titled families are generally degenerate and slothful, and the middle classes display admirable spiritual qualities, but are too often unthrifty and inefficient. Of the laboring classes, Galds has little to say. Bitter religious and political intolerance creates an atmosphere of hatred which a few exceptional characters strive ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... from the see (whose bounty to the just And needy is gone by, not through its fault, But his who fills it basely), he besought, No dispensation for commuted wrong, Nor the first vacant fortune, nor the tenth), That to God's paupers rightly appertain, But, 'gainst an erring and degenerate world, Licence to fight, in favour of that seed, From which the twice twelve cions gird thee round. Then, with sage doctrine and good will to help, Forth on his great apostleship he far'd, Like torrent bursting from a lofty vein; And, dashing 'gainst the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... his degree with no examination but that of his own college, both under the Laudian Statute and after the great statute of 1800, which set up the modern system of examinations. What the founder had intended as an encouragement for industry was made by his degenerate disciples ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells
... army or the navy, or by some communication with those who could give them good examples of accent and pronunciation. By their Lowland neighbours they would not willingly be taught; for they have long considered them as a mean and degenerate race. These prejudices are wearing fast away; but so much of them still remains, that when I asked a very learned minister in the islands, which they considered as their most savage clans: 'Those,' said he, 'that ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... which the town followed the lead of the younger man. My uncle, who was not born to be second to any one, retired instantly to St. Albans, and announced that he would make it the centre of fashion and of society, instead of degenerate London. It chanced, however, that the mayor and corporation waited upon him with an address of thanks for his good intentions towards the town, and that the burgesses, having ordered new coats from ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... at the expense of man is one of the most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all succeeding generations The tendencies and natural purpose of the individual science become degenerate, and science itself is finally shipwrecked: it has made progress, but has either no effect at all on life or else ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of our era, we hear of the Eunuch of the "Queen of the South[107]," or of Abyssinia, who was a Jew, and converted by Philip to Christianity. There is therefore no manner of difficulty in accounting for the presence of these corrupt degenerate black Jews, amongst ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... offering a large ransom if they be given up to him. How anxiously they listen for the reply! The king will not hear of it. The spirit of his father complains that he has been neglected; that his nation must have become degenerate; that they have ceased to conquer, since so few captives have been sent to bear him company in the world of shades. Again the strange white chief speaks, and offers higher bribes. Curious that he should take so much trouble about ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... affairs, he listened to the proud persuasions of his mother, to whom anything like commercial pursuits were abhorrent. Clarice d'Orsini's forbears had all been soldiers, Lorenzo's merchants, that made all the difference in Rome's degenerate days. ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... the true aspects of the world we live in,—these seem to us of first importance. After that, we prize next reasonable and reasoning goodness; for mere rule-of-thumb goodness, which comes by rote, and might so easily degenerate into formalism or superstition, has no honour among us, but rather the contrary. If any one were to say with us (after he had passed his first infancy) that he always did such and such a thing because he had been told it was right by his parents or teachers—still more because priests or fetich-men ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... and lasting impression upon my mind, and I began to think that my own partial indulgence in the practice of drinking so freely after dinner was an act of great weakness and folly, which, if not checked, was likely to degenerate into one of the ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
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