"Barbarian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... people to know. There was always some tempest in a teapot over the latest machinations of their enemies. And then there was the whole dead mass of people who sponged upon them and toadied to them; and finally the barbarian hordes outside the magic circle of their acquaintance—some specimens of whom came up every day for ridicule. They had big feet and false teeth; they ate mush and molasses; they wore ready-made ties; they said: "Do you wish that I should do it?" Their grandfathers had been butchers ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... enterprise gasping for life. With no deeper tap-root than the Gallic love of novelty and the infectious enthusiasm of a few men of great genius, the Shakespearean mania had a short life, and Frenchmen shrugged their shoulders over their own folly, in temporarily preferring the English barbarian to Racine, Corneille, and Moliere. The letters of Berlioz, in which he scourges the fickleness of his countrymen in returning again to their "false gods," ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... fall of the Roman empire was another chaos of upheaval, confusion, war, and night. The Christian element had been poured into the Roman, which had long effervesced with the leaven of Greece and the oriental world. Then wave after wave of barbarian power, fury, and life, came pouring into all, and threatening to drown the world, like another flood, and sweep away the monuments, institutions, and ideas of all past time. The rolling in of those savage waves was like pouring rivers of ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... archbishop. A numerous council of the Eastern prelates, who were guided from a distance by the advice of Theophilus, confirmed the validity, without examining the justice, of the former sentence; and a detachment of Barbarian troops was introduced into the city, to suppress the emotions of the people. On the vigil of Easter, the solemn administration of baptism was rudely interrupted by the soldiers, who alarmed the modesty of the naked catechumens, and violated, by their presence, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the mightiest pillar of destiny's throne, we may see once again how restricted her power becomes on such as surpass her in wisdom. For she is barbarian still, and many men tower above her. The commonplace life still supplies her with weapons, which today are old-fashioned and crude. Her mode of attack, in exterior life, is as it always has been, as it was in Oedipus' days. She shoots like a blear-eyed bow-man, aiming ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... it unnecessary to wait for them in Italy. Leaving Catulus, his colleague in the consulship, to check the Cimbri in Venetia, Marius went himself, taking Sulla with him, into the south of France. As the barbarian host came on, he occupied a fortified camp near Aix. He allowed the enormous procession to roll past him in their wagons toward the Alps. Then, following cautiously, he watched his opportunity to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... native African," said Pomp. "He was brought to this country a young barbarian; and he has barely got civilized—hardly got Christianized yet! I will make him tell you more of his history some day. Then you will no longer wonder that his lessons in Christian love have not made a saint of him! Now you must rest, while I help ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... Harry, and the tears of Tommy, who cried in the bitterest manner to see the distress of his friend, made no impression on this barbarian, who continued his brutality till another gentleman rode up full speed, and said, "For any sake, Squire, what are you about? You will kill the child, if you do not take care." "And the little dog deserves it," said the other; "he has seen the hare, and will ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... lie around, licensed and legal, to pounce upon our youth. Not of alcoholics nor for alcoholics do I write, but for our youths, for those who possess no more than the adventure-stings and the genial predispositions, the social man-impulses, which are twisted all awry by our barbarian civilisation which feeds them poison on all the corners. It is the healthy, normal boys, now born or being born, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... of the old Conventionist of '93 was forced, by the views of the men of whom he so strangely found himself the chief, to become in effect the ally of the Austrian Kaiser and the Russian Czar. The Italians, who were seeking only to get rid of "barbarian" rule, and the Hungarians, who were contending for the preservation of a polity as old as the English Constitution against the destructives of the imperial court, were held up to the world as men desirous in their zeal for revolution to overturn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... Babylon may arrest the conquering march. Genius is essentially athletic, resolute, aggressive, persistent. Possession is grip, that tightens more and more. Ceasing to gain, we begin to lose. Ceasing to advance, we begin to retrograde. Brief was the interval between Roman conquest of Barbarians, and Barbarian conquest of Rome. Blessed is the man who keeps out of the hospital and holds his place in the ranks. Blessed the man, the last twang of whose bow-string is as sharp as any that went before, sending its arrow as surely ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction. As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like poke or stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... kindness. Surely it were worth while to try some other weapon than scorn and contumely and hard words upon people of our common race,—the human race, which is bigger and broader than Celt or Saxon, barbarian or Greek, Jew or Gentile, black or white; for we are all children of a common Father, forget it as we may, and each one of us is in some measure his ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... coast by the flux of the sea, but its origin is unknown. It is found on the coast of the Indies, but the best, which is of a bluish white, and in round lumps, is got upon the Barbarian coast: or on the confines of the land of the Negroes, towards Sihar and that neighbourhood. The inhabitants of that country have camels trained for the purpose, on which they ride along the shore in moonshine nights, and when the camels perceive a piece of amber, he bends his knees, on which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... King had vanished before we touched the ground. But, the word was already passing from hut to hut to turn out quietly, and we knew that the nimble barbarian had got hold of the ...
— The Perils of Certain English Prisoners • Charles Dickens
... made: he was to be a rhetorician. From her reminding him that she was even now not all unknown to him, we may perhaps assume that he spoke some sort of Greek, or was being taught it; but he assures us that after leaving Syria he was still a barbarian; we have also a casual mention of his offering a lock of his hair to the Syrian goddess ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Athenians, who are not at a distance, as he was, but close at hand. Instead of attacking your enemy, you wait to be attacked, and take the chances of a struggle which has been deferred until his power is doubled. And you know that the barbarian miscarried chiefly through his own errors, and that we have oftener been delivered from these very Athenians by blunders of their own than by any aid from you. Some have already been ruined by the hopes which you inspired in them; for so entirely did they trust you that they took ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... outward contact, and a stimulus provoked by such contact? Turn a child into the woods, and let him grow up to manhood without the society or the sight of his fellow-men. Where is his self-culture? He is a wild man of the woods; he is a barbarian. So nations need the stimulus which comes from a contact with their fellow nations; and that, not only that they may advance in civilization, but even that they may save themselves from going down into barbarism. See China, the largest empire ...
— National Character - A Thanksgiving Discourse Delivered November 15th, 1855, - in the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church • N. C. Burt
... current of Italian civilisation. At this conjuncture of affairs, who but is reminded of the youth and the education of Gargantua? Till the very end of the fifteenth century Oxford had been that "huge barbarian pupil," and had revelled in vast Rabelaisian suppers: "of fat beeves he had killed three hundred sixty seven thousand and fourteen, that in the entering in of spring he might have plenty of powdered beef." The bill of fare of George ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... moment as he can, and living in squalor, filth, and extreme discomfort, yet daubs himself with grease and paint, and decorates his head with feathers, his neck with bear's claws, and his feat with gaudily-stained porcupine's quills? What of your black barbarian, whose daily life is a succession of unspeakable abominations, and who embellishes it by blackening his teeth, tattooing his skin, and wearing a huge ring in the gristle of his nose? Either of them will give up his daily food, and run the risk of starvation, for a glass bead or a brass ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... into the Christian catacombs, where the image of the Shepherd bearing his lamb might interpret the mystery of death, nor to that house of Cecilia where Marius sees a new joy illuminating every face. Cleon has heard of Paulus and of Christus, but who can suppose that a mere barbarian Jew ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... I have more regard for thee than thou for thyself. If I had let thee dash out to fix up on the public wall that denunciation thou hadst written of the barbarian mob, there had been no life of thine to risk to-day. Fly the town, I beseech thee, or find thicker walls than mine. Thou knowest I would shelter thee had I the power; do not our other lodgers turn to thee in sickness and sorrow to be soothed by thy ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... in the year 1650. We may suppose that the saint's relics were transferred for safety to Ancona at some time in the troubled centuries which followed his martyrdom, when Moesia was occupied and ravaged by successive hordes of barbarian invaders. At all events it appears certain from the independent and mutually confirmatory evidence of the martyrology and the monuments that Dasius was no mythical saint, but a real man, who suffered death for his faith at Durostorum in one of the early centuries of the Christian era. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... independence which made her, according to her nature, a potent force of good or evil. It was now that the intricate threads of social prescription were woven into that ceremonial mantle which was afterwards to sit so uneasily on the shoulders of barbarian men. ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... from her home. Ruthlessly dragged, perhaps, from her evening devotions, by the hands of a relentless barbarian. Could she forgive him? ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... yes; I'm in love," he said. "And she probably thinks me a stupid barbarian, who likes only to drive golfballs and motorcars. She—oh, it's hopeless. She would have let me come over to see them ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... "Barbarian!" cried Susie angrily, feeling sick already, and certain that she would be quite ill by the end of the drive. "And you laugh at him and encourage him, instead of taking up your position at once and showing him that you won't stand any nonsense. He ought to be—to be unboxed!" she ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... soothe me by vain promises,' answered the King. 'Did I not see her caught up into the air, in spite of cries which would have softened the heart of any one but the barbarian who has robbed me of her? The unfortunate girl is pining away in some unknown land, where perhaps no foot of man has ever trod, and I shall see her no more. But go, generous stranger; bring back Rosalie if you can, and live happy with her ever after in ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Leonora Blanche Alleyne Lang
... approach, so that I must act as a watch-dog. She was flurried and fatigued with her migration, and I think that Grace Mavis's choosing this occasion for retirement suggested to her a little that she had been made a fool of. She remarked that the girl's not being there showed her for the barbarian she only could be, and that she herself was really very good so to have put herself out; her charge was a mere bore: that was the end of it. I could see that my companion's advent quickened the speculative activity of the other ladies they watched her from the ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... the evenings. Then her Parisian toilets made poor Sophy's Largo dresses look funnily dowdy, and her sharp questions and affected ignorances of Sophy's meanings and answers were cleverly aided by Madame's cold silences, lifted brows, and hopeless acceptance of such an outside barbarian. Long before a dinner was over, Sophy had been driven into silence, and it was perhaps impossible for her to avoid an air of offence and injury, so that Marion had the charming in her own hands. After dinner, Admiral Glamis and Madame usually ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... but what we shall be thought is the question, so in education the question is not the intrinsic value of knowledge so much as its extrinsic effect on others; and this being our dominant idea, direct utility is scarcely more regarded than by the barbarian when filing his teeth and staining ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... rebel captains, and particularly these bandits, exercise over the mass of Mexicans. A bandit is a man of honor in Mexico. He is feared, envied, loved. In the hearts of the people he stands next to the national idol—the bull-fighter, the matador. The race has a wild, barbarian, bloody strain. Take Quinteros, for instance. He was a peon, a slave. He became a famous bandit. At the outbreak of the revolution he proclaimed himself a leader, and with a band of followers he devastated whole counties. The opposition ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... mother of his children became a houseless and homeless wanderer. We shall find that men were allowed to have as many wives as they could get, either by courtship, purchase, or conquest. The Jewish people in the olden time were, in many respects, like their barbarian neighbors. ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Gainsborough's Lady Lyndoch, though of an entirely different type. There were two Madonnas by Guido, of which I liked the least celebrated one best; and several pictures by Garofalo, who always produces something noteworthy. All the pictures lacked the charm (no doubt I am a barbarian to think it one) of being in brilliant frames, and looked as if it were a long, long while since they were cleaned or varnished. The light was so scanty, too, on that heavily clouded day, and in those gloomy old rooms of the palace, that ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... them in triumph behind a car; and they flung their prisoners to the beasts of the Circus for the amusement of the people. Cicero, who declaimed so vehemently at the notion of crucifying a Roman citizen, had not a word to say against these horrible abuses of victory. It is evident that in his eyes a barbarian did not belong to the same human race as a Roman. On the contrary, in proportion as nations become more like each other, they become reciprocally more compassionate, and the law of nations ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... and alarmed. They had hitherto been accustomed to boast that Christianity was the cement which could unite all mankind, and they had pointed triumphantly to its influence in bringing together the Jew and the Gentile, the Greek and the barbarian, the master and the slave, the learned and the illiterate. They had looked forward with high expectation to the days of its complete ascendency, when, under its gentle sway, all nations would exhibit ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... only too easily remember one of my earlier calls for Dinkie at noon, when I found the entire class turned out and riding a rancher's pig, a heavy brood-sow that had in some luckless moment wandered into the school-yard and had been chased and raced until it was too weary to resent a young barbarian mounting its broad back and riding thereon, to the shouts of the other boys and the shrill cries of the girls. But now, from my car-seat, I could see Gershom surrounded by a multi-colored group of little figures, as he stopped to fix a strap-buckle on the school-bag ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... country and its inhabitants. At first civilization is very hard and very slow; it requires many centuries, many great events, and many years of toil to overcome the early habits of a people, and cause them to exchange the pleasures, gross indeed, but accompanied with the idleness and freedom of barbarian life, for the toilful advantages of a regulated social condition. By dint of foresight, perseverance, and courage, the merchants of Marseilles and her colonies crossed by two or three main lines the forests, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... uncontaminated in this respect, than that corruptions should gradually and stealthily have mingled themselves with the simplicity of Gospel worship. That tendency is plainly evinced by the history of every nation under heaven: Greek and Barbarian, Egyptian and Scythian, would have their gods many, and their lords many. From one they would look for one good; on another they would depend for a different benefit, in mind, body, and estate. Some were of the highest grade, and to be worshipped with supreme honours; others ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... large extent of the Vanderbilt's possessions or those of other ruling families are found warlike garrisons as evidence of ownership. Those uncouth barbarian methods are grossly antiquated; the part once played by armed battalions is now performed by bits of paper. A wondrously convenient change has it been; the owners of the resources of nations can disport themselves thousands of miles away from the ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... hearing tales of LADY SYBIL and the barbarian; and after having the grace to hesitate, she speaks with the directness for which ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... count. However seriously the little cliques of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia may take themselves, they are not regarded seriously by the rest of the country in any degree comparable to the attitude of the British Philistine towards the British Barbarian. Without the appropriate background of king and nobility, the whole system is ridiculous; it has no national basis. The source of its honour is ineradicably tainted. It is the reductio ad absurdum of the idea of aristocratic society. It is ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... don't want to buy, unless there's nothing else for it. I should have to raise the money on the estate; it won't stand much more. I can't believe the fellow would be such a barbarian. Chimneys within three hundred yards, right in front of this ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... we can but imagine morbid cruelty to have formed a considerable ingredient in the disposition of Euripides. Even his pathos is somewhat tinctured with this taste for painful images. As we have beheld in our own times a barbarian alternately glut his sight with executions, and then shed floods of tears, and sink into idiot despondency; so the poetry of Euripides in turn disgusts us with outrageous cruelty, and depresses us with the most painful demands upon ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... demands for what was called a general declaration of policy with regard to native affairs — a policy which should be applied to the highest civilized Native, the owner of a farm, and the naked barbarian. They could not do it. People who demanded a general declaration of that kind had not had the experience which some of them had had. The hon. member who spoke before him said that he was in favour of the underlying principle of the Bill. What was the underlying principle? ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... pathetic to watch the little priest. He interrupted himself by a thousand apostrophes; he lifted hands and eyes to the ceiling repeatedly; he named his poor mistress saint and martyr; he cried out against the barbarian land in which he found himself, and the bloodthirsty tigers with whom, like a second Daniel, he himself had to consort; he expatiated on the horrible risk that he ran in venturing forth from the castle on such an errand, saying that Sir Amyas would wring his neck like a hen's, if he ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... at Crediton, and the ninth demanded that the see should be transferred from Crediton to Exeter. The chief reason put forward was that Exeter was a strong city, and less likely to be ravaged by Irish Danes and other 'barbarian pirates,' but Professor Freeman suggests that Leofric also desired the change because he had been educated on the Continent, where it was never the custom for a Bishop's chief seat to be in a village when a larger town was in his diocese. Anyhow, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... Fred, shaking his head, "I aye thought ye were a barbarian. Now I know it. If you had your way, you would raid your neighbours' womenfolk and bring them in by the hair of their heads, trailing them two at a time. For me, I worship them like stars, standing ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... was right. The sovereign of Rome was not the Caesar, nor yet the aristocracy. The latter was dead. It had been banished by barbarian senators, by barbarian gods; it had died twice, at Pharsalus, at Philippi; it was the people that was sovereign, and it was important that that sovereign should be amused—flattered, too, and fed. For thirty years not a Roman of note had died in his ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... animals) like St. Francis—(and these manifestations can hardly be claimed by the Church, which pretty consistently opposed them)—it may be said that after about the fourth century the real spirit and light of early Christian enthusiasm died away. The incursions of barbarian tribes from the North and East, and later of Moors and Arabs from the South, familiarized the European peoples with the ideas of bloodshed and violence; gross and material conceptions of life were in the ascendant; and a romantic and aspiring Christianity ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... of the meanest tricks that was ever, played was played on Mary Anderson. It will be remembered that in the play of "Ingomar," Parthenia and the barbarian have several love scenes, where they lop on each other and hug some—that is, not too much hugging, but just hugging enough. Ingomar wears a huge fur garment, made of lion's skin, or something. One day he noticed that the moths were getting into it, and he told his servant to see ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... best for the horses. I have said we were four days without drink. That was because we used our last water for the poor beasts. A gentleman has to do that—you will agree?—and the French soldier is not a barbarian. Even then the horses had to go without a drop of water for two days, and I'm not ashamed to say that I wept salt tears to see the sufferings of those poor innocent creatures, who did not understand the meaning of all this bloody business and who ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... right away that you must not be more than twenty years old, for you cry out in amazement, 'Impossible!' and look at me as though I were a lunatic or a barbarian." ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... that was all the easier, as I could not suspect what was the subject of this flow of barbarian words; all I understood was that, when the ladies spoke to me, they addressed me as "Istok,"[7] a jest which I found quite out of place, not knowing that it was the German for "Why don't you eat?" For you must know the coffee was brought ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... ornamented than the rest. On the prow were elaborately carved the heads of the twin deities of the Laconian mariner, Castor and Pollux; in the centre of the deck was a wooden edifice or pavilion having a gilded roof and shaded by purple awnings, an imitation of the luxurious galleys of the Barbarian; while the parasemon, or flag, as it idly waved in the faint breeze of the gentle evening, exhibited the terrible serpent, which, if it was the fabulous type of demigods and heroes, might also be regarded ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... helpless victims of scoundrels and cut-throats, our institutions a mockery, our laws a farce—a Guzman Bento our master! And we have sunk so low that when a man like you has awakened our conscience, a stupid barbarian of a Montero—Great Heavens! a Montero!—becomes a deadly danger, and an ignorant, boastful Indio, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... the whole, were quite content to sacrifice the majority to the minority. Their position, as we said at the outset, was fundamentally aristocratic; they exaggerated rather than minimised the distinctions between men—between the Greek and the barbarian, the freeman and the slave, the gentleman and the artisan—regarding them as natural and fundamental, not as the casual product of circumstances. The "equality" which they sought in a well-ordered state was proportional not arithmetical—the attribution to each ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... for a nation, save so far as it can minister to her cruelty or avarice. The Spaniard was still willing to pay, as far as his means would allow, but he was soon given to understand that he was a degraded being,— a barbarian; nay, a beggar. Now, you may draw the last cuarto from a Spaniard, provided you will concede to him the title of cavalier, and rich man, for the old leaven still works as powerfully as in the time of the first Philip; ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... every-day clothes (with Peter's most carefully pressed and sponged by the intriguing Struthers) and the Twins were put asleep up-stairs in their old nursery and Dinkie was given a place at the table with two sofa-cushions to prop him up in his armchair (and acted like a little barbarian) and Peter nearly broke his neck to make himself as pleasant as possible, chattering like a magpie and reminding me of a circus-band trying to make the crowd forget the bareback rider who's just been carried out on a stretcher. But Constraint was there, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... About Petrovich's neck hung a skein of silk and thread, and upon his knees lay some old garment. He had been trying unsuccessfully for three minutes to thread his needle, and was enraged at the darkness and even at the thread, growling in a low voice, "It won't go through, the barbarian! you pricked me, ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... intrenched behind gold-rimmed spectacles, I made inquiries concerning the pleasures of this independence. They liked it—indeed they did. 'Twas the natural fate of almost all girls—the recognized custom in America—and I was a barbarian not to see ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... placing one above the other these stones, whose enormity now amazes us. And the prodigious feasts, the music of the long harps, the blares of the brazen trumpets; the slaughters and battles when Thebes was the great and unique capital of the world, an object of fear and envy to the kings of the barbarian peoples who commenced to awake in neighbouring lands; the symphonies of siege and pillage, in days when men bellowed with the throats of beasts. To think of all this, here on this ground, on a night so calm and blue! And these same walls of granite from Syene, on which ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... the fashion at the Horse-guards of Constantinople during the reign of Justinian, to encourage barbarian usages in military affairs. Hussars from the country of the Gepids, cuirassiers from Armenia and the ancient seats of the Goths, and light cavalry from the regions occupied by the Huns, were the favourite bodies ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... of the magic of that Round Table, about which the Middle Ages grouped all their ideas of heroism, of beauty, of modesty, and of love. We need not stop to inquire whether the ideal of a gentle and polished society in the midst of the barbarian world is, in all its features, a purely Breton creation, whether the spirit of the courts of the Continent has not in some measure furnished the model, and whether the Mabinogion themselves have not felt ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... The phenomena have been but casually studied; the civilised mind is apt to see, in savage seances, nothing but noisy buffoonery. We have shown that there is a more serious belief involved, and we have adduced cases in which white men were not unconscious of the barbarian spell. It also appears that the now recognised phenomena of hypnotism are the basis of the more serious savage magic. The production of hypnotic trances, perhaps of hypnotic hallucinations, is a piece of knowledge ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... entreaties. This was the very object aimed at by the politic toqui, who immediately caused them all to be seized and put to a cruel death in sight of the Spaniards, who were exceedingly exasperated at seeing themselves so grossly imposed upon by one whom they counted an ignorant barbarian. As the siege was protracted to a considerable length and Antiguenu was impatient for its conclusion, he challenged the governor to single combat, in hope of becoming master of the place by the death of Bernal; who, deeming himself secure of the victory, accepted the challenge ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... a moment, seemed to touch the barbarian's heart: he granted your lives; but first he made her take a most solemn oath, never to inform you who your father was, or to answer any questions concerning him: assuring her that if she did, he would certainly discover her, and put both of you to death in the most cruel manner. ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... frightened at doing right as at doing wrong, was three days before he got courage enough to order the burying in the Tower. I must tell you an excessive good story of George Selwyn -. Some women were scolding him for going to see the execution, and asked him, how he could be such a barbarian to see the head cut off? "Nay," says he, "if that was such a crime, I am sure I have made amends, for I went to see it sewed on again." When he was at the undertaker's, as soon as they had stitched him together, and were going to put ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... the verse in Genesis (xi. 7), "Let us confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech," he says: "Those who follow the literal and obvious interpretation think that the origin of the Greek and barbarian languages is here described; [the contrast between Greek, on the one hand, and barbarian—in which Hebrew, it seems, is included—on the other, is remarkable]. I would not find fault with them, because they also, perhaps, employ right reason, but I would call on them not to remain content ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... flat stone would lie on top of another, and that a little mud, aided by Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravitation, would hold them together, and that walls could be built in the form of a quadrangle. Here was the birth of architecture. And thus, from the magical dreams of this unmausoleumed barbarian was evolved the home, the best and ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... Romans, brings us down to the commencement of what has been deservedly called "the greatest event in history"—the decline and fall of this enormous empire. For fifteen generations, for some five hundred years, did this decay, this vast revolution, proceed to its conclusion. Barbarian hosts settled down in provinces they had overrun and conquered, the old Pagan world died as it were, and the new Christian era dawned. From the latter end of the second century until the last of the Western Caesars, in A.D. 476, it is, with the exception of a short interval when the strong ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... Italian nation. He wrote to Charles Albert, who professed liberal opinions, beseeching him to place himself at the head of the new party. "Unite on your flag, Union, Liberty, and Independence!" he entreated. "Free Italy from the barbarian, build up the future, be the Napoleon of Italian freedom. Your safety lies in the sword's point; draw it, and throw away the scabbard. But remember if you do it not, others will do it without you and ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... employed the people in hard labors, and used them for Roman aggrandizement, but despised them too much to attempt to elevate their condition. Elsewhere the Romans depopulated, where they met with barbarian resistance; they made a solitude and called it peace—for which they gave a triumph and a cognomen to the conqueror; but in Britain, although harassed and endangered by the insurrections of the natives, they bore with them; they built fine cities like London ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... develops this crude instrument until it becomes more suitable for his purpose. But in the course of time man often finds that he can make something new which is better than anything in nature or naturally produced. The savage discovers. The barbarian improves. The civilized man invents. The first finds. The second fashions. The ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... prosy brain could invent, and in the kindest manner recommending its uniform good character as a model for our very respectable society to fashion after. Indeed, we have, in the very best nature of a modern historian, endeavored to enlighten the barbarian world outside of South Carolina as to the terrible consequences which might accrue to the Union did this noble little army assume any other than a standing character. Now that General Jackson is out of the way, and our plebeian friends over the Savannah, whom we hold in high esteem, (the ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... prosecuted in a manner recognized by Christian nations. We must not invade Constitutional rights. The innocent must not suffer, nor women and children be the victims." Before him were some who felt toward the people of the South as Greek toward barbarian. But Douglas foresaw that the horrors of war must invade and desolate the homes of those whom he still held dear. There is no more lovable and admirable side of his personality than this tenderness for the helpless and innocent. Had he ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... reference to what Garibaldi said to Cavour in '53; to round off a sentence with the casual remark, "As was the custom in Alexander's day"; to trace back a religious tendency, or a fair complexion, or the price of boots to some barbarian invasion of a thousand years ago—how delightfully easy it would be, I tell myself, to write with such knowledge at one's disposal. One would never be at a loss for a subject, and plots for stories, plays, and historical novels would be piled up in one's brain for the choosing. ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... contest between the nightingale and the flute was sure to follow or theatrical instinct is a vain phrase. But in the piece Scribe created, Peter the Great took Frederick the Great's place and to give a motive for the grace notes in the last act it was necessary for the terrible Tsar, a half savage barbarian, to learn to play ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... foliage. It was the mouth of the Red River, which is half overarched by the huge trees that incline forward over its waters from either bank. What a contrast to the Mississippi, which flows along, broad, powerful, and majestic, like some barbarian conqueror bursting forth at the head of his stinking hordes to overrun half a world! The Red River on the other hand, which we are accustomed to call the Nile of Louisiana—with about as much right ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... it has often been the case that men, in departing from what was savage, have lost that which was natural; and in their ascent from the rude have left behind that which was essential to the highest civilization. In escaping from the nakedness of the barbarian, they have sometimes carried dress to an extreme of art which renders it untrue to nature and productive of manifold evils. In ascending from the simple and rude gastronomy of the savage, they have brought the art of cookery to such an excess ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... Russia and gallant Spain and our own glorious island only as subordinates or seconds. That duel, first, last, and for ever, was a duel between the Frenchman and the German; that is, between the citizen and the barbarian. ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... "No barbarian, no infidel, no Saracen, ever perpetrated such wanton and cold-blooded atrocities of cruelty as the wearers of the Cross of Christ (who, it is said, had fallen on their knees and burst into a pious hymn ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... Capuchin order; scattered representatives of Britain; sailors from ships ever swinging to the current beside the levee; sinewy backwoodsmen from the wilds of the Blue Ridge; naked savages from Indian villages north and east; raftsmen from the distant waters of the Ohio and Illinois, scarcely less barbarian than those with redder skin; Spaniards from the Gulf islands, together with a negro population, part slave, part free, nearly equal in point of numbers to ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... him while on his march; passing through every place Without molestation, his allies receiving him courteously, and escorting him as he passed the boundaries of each district. Indibilis, who spoke for both, addressed him by no means stupidly and imprudently like a barbarian, but with a modest gravity, rather excusing the change as necessary, than glorying that the present opportunity had been eagerly seized as the first which had occurred. "For he well knew," he said, "that the name of a deserter was an object of execration to former allies, and of ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... great penaltie to let in any stranger into those countreys, shall you reade in the report of Galeotto Perera there imprisoned with other Portugals: as also in the Iaponish letters, how for that cause the worthy traueller Xauierus bargained with a Barbarian Merchant for a great summe of pepper to be brought into Canton, a port in China. The great and dangerous piracie vsed in those Seas no man can be ignorant of, that listeth to reade the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... be destroyed. Any one who shelters a foreigner will be killed, and all converts to the foreign religion who do not recant immediately will be executed. Kill the foreigners who are hoping to seize our country and introduce their barbarian customs! Kill the men who have made friends with them! Kill the foreigners! Kill ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... disadvantages of monastic institutions has the chief stress of the argument been laid upon the great benefits which those institutions produced in ages that were utterly different from our own,—in the dark period of the barbarian invasions, when they were the only refuges of a pacific civilisation, the only libraries, the only schools, the only centres of art, the only refuge for gentle and intellectual natures; the chief barrier against violence and ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... nation. As the nation stood behind its army in all this barbarism, there must be something inherently lacking in it despite its wonderful music, its divine poetry, its record in the sciences. It, too, must be barbarian at heart. We agreed that if it should win this war it would be very uncomfortable to belong to one of the allied nations, or even to live in the world at all, since it was certain German manners and German methods would not improve with victory. And we, as a battalion, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... civilization falling under the spell of the culture exhibited by a more advanced subject population, of a conqueror worshipping the gods of the conquered. It is the story of the conquest of Greece by Rome, of the conquest of Rome by the Germans. But the interesting point to notice is that, when the "barbarian" Frenchman descended from the Alps upon the fair plains of Lombardy, the Italian Renaissance was already showing signs of decadence. It was in the age of the Petrarchisti, of Aretino, of Doni, and of Marini that Europe awoke to the full consciousness ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... thee, unfortunate man; else were there an end of human institutions. The difference of which thou speakest is a simple consequence of the rights of property; and even the barbarian admits the sacred duty of respecting that ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... barbarian, John Gordon," she cried. "He doesn't know a finely turned phrase from a dissecting-knife; does he, Stuart? But really, it sounds far better than I thought it ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... the services, not merely of Christianity, but of the superstitions which had usurped its place, were, during that long period, incalculable; and that, but for them, European society would infallibly have sunk, as Asiatic in every age has done, beneath the desolating sword of barbarian power. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... a denial of the civil rights or social supremacy of woman. People of one race have always been unjust to those of another. The ignorant and sordid Jew despised the Samaritan and scoffed at the idea of his equality. To him the learned and accomplished Greek was a barbarian, and all rights were denied him except those simple rights accorded to the most degraded Gentile. Chinamen, to-day, believe as firmly in the superiority of the celestial race as Americans do in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon. All races of men are unjust to other races. They ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... taught them, and whose spirits they still believed would help the valiant Greek. And yet that feat, which looks to us so splendid, attracted, as far as I am aware, no special admiration at the time. So was the cultivated Greek expected to behave whenever he came in contact with the uncultivated barbarian. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... gate, where he merely paused a few moments, as though to observe the movements of the soldiers and the changing of the guard. The sound of the trumpet seemed to attract especial notice from this barbarian, whose uncouth air and rude manners drew upon him the gaze of many as they passed by. He now turned into a narrower street behind the palace, and here he sought out a common tavern, where the chequers newly painted on the door-posts betokened good entertainment for ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... The barbarian seemed paralyzed. After taking the slight step forward, he paused and stood motionless, staring and transfixed, until his victim was beyond his reach. Then, without a word or exclamation, he turned about, and strode away to where ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... sweetly, "Won't you sit?" But despite all this, her mind seemed leaping backward a thousand years; back to a simpler, primal day when she herself, white, frail, and fettered, stood before the dusky magnificence of some bejewelled barbarian queen and sought to justify herself. She shook off the phantasy,—and yet how well the girl stood. It was not every one that could ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... foresaw, The foreign harvest of a wider growth, And one without an end. Many there are, And are to be, that shall partake of it, Though none may share it with an understanding That is not his alone. We are all alone; And yet we are all parcelled of one order — Jew, Gentile, or barbarian in the dark Of wildernesses that are not so much As names yet in a book. And there are many, Finding at last that words are not the Word, And finding only that, will flourish aloft, Like heads of captured Pharisees on pikes, Our contradictions ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms, blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone. The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... feeling that but for this colossal treachery, the great city of Constantine, to which our own civilization owes more than can ever be adequately told, might, perhaps, have retained enough strength to withstand the barbarian in 1453, and thus have averted one of the most lamentable catastrophes in the ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... the middle of its luxuries and pomp, became aware that here was a mighty force abroad which must be reckoned with; and then the world itself determined upon the capture of Christianity; and how sadly it succeeded can be read in the pages of history; until at last the pure creature, like a barbarian captive, bright with youth and beauty, was bound with golden chains, and bidden, bewildered and amazed, to grace the triumph and ride in the very chariot ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... am afraid I must go back to England though. Should you think me a barbarian if I started to-night and left ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... inhabitants unknown to us) looking on. Here are the venerable walls and streets of Liegnitz; and the Castle which defied Baty Khan and his Tartars, five hundred years ago. [1241, the Invasion, and Battle here, of this unexpected Barbarian.]—Oh, your Majesty, this Liegnitz, with its princely Castle, and wide rich Territory, the bulk of the Silesian Lowland, whose is it if right were done? Hm, his Majesty knows full well; in Seckendorf's presence, and going on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle |
