"Decadence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... gives it a meaning of the greatest social helpfulness. In his view it is not a misfortune that society is being to so great an extent recruited from the so-called "lower classes." If there are signs of decadence anywhere, he thinks, they are not in the "proletariat;" they are among the "pampered ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... masterpiece? Who could rival Arthur Golding's rendering of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, or Francis Hicke's masterly rendering of Lucian's True History? But eternal life means endless change and in nothing is this truth more strikingly manifest than in the growth and decadence of living languages and in the translation of dead tongues into the ever changing tissue of the living. Were it not for this, no translation worthy of the name would ever stand in need of revision, except in instances where the discovery and collation of fresh manuscripts ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... one." He adds that once a handsome book and a new English book were synonymous terms, but that now the production of really fine books is becoming one of England's lost arts. He indulges in a fling at "the efforts of certain recent printers to retrieve this decadence by throwing on to the already overburdened trade several big, heavy, and voluminous works of standard authors termed 'editions de luxe.'" He assures his hearers that his judgments were not formed on the spur of the ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... and Herodotus, and most momentous perhaps for the age to come, of Plato and Demosthenes and of the New Testament in its original Greek. The quick and vivid intellect of Italy, which had been torpid in the decadence of mediaevalism and its mysticism and piety, seized with avidity the revelation of the classical world which the scholars and their manuscripts brought. Human life, which the mediaeval Church had ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... unfortunately, a certain law of decadence seems to have prevailed, because of which every nation, after acquiring great power, has in turn succumbed to the enervating effects which seem inseparable from it, and become the victim of some newer nation ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... reasoned principle, but was due to a sensuous art-instinct: the Greeks felt that the unnatural limitations of the poetic medium were more in keeping with the unnatural[10] brevity of a story which must be short. The exquisite prose tales which have been handed down to us belong to the age of their decadence as a nation; in their great period their tellers of brief tales unconsciously cast their rendering in the poetic mould.[11] In natures of the highest genius the most arduous ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... wealth, or for riches, or for ambition. The man found a higher ideal than any of these things in the pursuit of truth and the benefit of his fellow-men. If we all go and do likewise, I think there is no fear for the decadence of England. I think that our children and our successors will find themselves in a commonwealth, different it may be from that for which Eliott, and Pym, and Hampden struggled, but one which will be identical in the substance of its aims—great, ...
— William Harvey And The Discovery Of The Circulation Of The Blood • Thomas H. Huxley
... Gian Giacomo de' Medici laid the country of Siena waste, levelled her luxurious suburbs, and delivered her famine-stricken citizens to the tyranny of the Grand Duke Cosimo, this town has gone on dreaming in suspended decadence. Yet the epithet which was given to her in her days of glory, the title of "Fair Soft Siena," still describes the city. She claims it by right of the gentle manners, joyous but sedate, of her inhabitants, by the grace of their ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... them. The experiments of St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox or Wesley, were not therefore the natural products of ages of faith. They each represented the revolt of a heroic soul against surrounding apathy and decadence; an invasion of novelty; a sharp break with society, a new use of antique tradition depending on new contacts with the Spirit. Greatness is seldom in harmony with its own epoch, and spiritual greatness least of all. It is usually startlingly modern, even eccentric at the time at which ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... shows the atavistic "pull" of the soil and opposes finesse to force, while Alice Jacobus in 'Twixt Land and Sea (A Smile of Fortune) is half-way on the road back to barbarism. But Nina will be happy with her chief. In depicting the slow decadence of character in mixed races and the naive stammerings at the birth of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the following short treatise is to give an account of some of those superstitions, now either dead or in their decadence, but which, within the memory of persons now living, had a vigorous existence, at least in the West of Scotland. A secondary object shall be to trace out, where I think I can discover ground for so doing, the origin of any particular ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... prepares a grave for its possessor, for there is not a prophet who hath not in his lifetime witnessed the decadence of four kings; as it is said (Isa. i. 1), "The vision of Isaiah ... in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah" (see also ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... travelling with a barren effort at mystery, attended by a sad-faced daughter and two ancient domestics. It was a lesson in the vanity of human wishes which the shallowest moralist would have noted. Nay, I felt more than the moral. Something human and kindly in the old fellow had caught my fancy. The decadence was too tragic to prose about, the decadent too human to moralise on. I had left the chamber of the—shall I say de jure King of England?—a sentimental adherent of the cause. But this business of the bagpipes touched the comic. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... met Geoffrey at the theatre, she took him severely to task for treachery, secrecy and decadence. He, was very humble and admitted all his faults except the last, pleading as his excuse that he could not get Asako out ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... also knew personally most of the great men who had latterly played leading parts. On English politics it was characteristic of the man to have a tremendous belief in the present. For instance, I said something about the decadence of Parliament and Parliamentary speaking. He at once burst out: 'You are quite wrong. The men of to-day are much greater than their predecessors'; and then he went through all our prominent politicians ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... so for the Church, that written word is the guarantee for its purity and immortality. Christianity is the only religion that has ever passed through periods of decadence and purified itself again. They used to say that Thames water was the best to put on shipboard because, after it became putrid, it cleared itself and became sweet again. I do not know anything about ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... condition of decadence was in progress in England, which Alfred's wise reign was powerless to arrest, and which his greatness may even have tended to hasten. The distance between the king and the people had widened from a mere step to a gulf. When the Saxon kings began to be clothed with a mysterious dignity ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... that the best moment to study an artist is not the moment of what is called decadence. The first energy of inspiration is gone; what remains is the method, the mechanism, and it is that which alone one can study, as one can study the mechanism of the body, not the principle of life itself. What is done mechanically, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... hot, ladies and gentlemen, hot! And the cholera is as near as St. Petersburg! Now you've complained to my pupils, Spitta and Kaeferstein, Mrs. John, that your little one doesn't seem to gain in weight. Now, of course, it's one of the symptoms of the general decadence of our age that the majority of mothers are either—unwilling to nurse their offspring or incapable of it. But you've already lost one child on account of diarrhoea, Mrs. John. No, there's no help for it: we must call a spade a spade. And so, in order that you ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... even yet only beginning to be accomplished, were thus saved to both hemispheres! If the discovery of America had been achieved four centuries or even a single century earlier, the Christianity to be transplanted to the western world would have been that of the church of Europe at its lowest stage of decadence. The period closing with the fifteenth century was that of the dense darkness that goes before the dawn. It was a period in which the lingering life of the church was chiefly manifested in feverish ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... before her, and was mildly surprised. Certainly Edward must have changed, or he would not keep such company. But, prejudiced against her son as she had been by her husband's misrepresentations, she feared that this was only another proof of Edward's moral decadence. ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... K'ai-chih makes it clear that the art of this period (fifth to eighth centuries), was a typical primitive movement. To call the great vital art of the Liang, Chen, Wei, and Tang dynasties a development out of the exquisitely refined and exhausted art of the Han decadence—from which Ku K'ai-chih is a delicate straggler—is to call Romanesque sculpture a development out of Praxiteles. Between the two some thing has happened to refill the stream of art. What had happened in China was the spiritual and emotional revolution ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... over-confident. He had passed his life in sporting circles, and though he himself had seen more of jockeys than prizefighters, their respective circumferences intersected; and more than one case had come to his knowledge of a veteran of the Ring unconscious of his decadence, who had boastfully defied a junior, and made the painful discovery of the degree to which youth can outclass age. This was scarcely a case of youth or extreme age, but the twenty years ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... coffee by this time, however, was well established in the homes as a breakfast and dinner beverage, and such consumption more than made up for any loss sustained through the gradual decadence of the coffee house. Yet signs of the change in national taste that arrived with the Georges were not wanting; for the active propaganda of the British East India Company was fairly well launched during Queen ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... the term Renascence cannot be applied to the movement that asserted itself in Hebrew literature at the end of the fifteenth century, as little as the term Decadence can be applied to the epoch ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... Prenant votre vol jusqu'aux cieux, Vous pouvez egaler Voltaire, Et pres de Virgile et d'Homere. Jouir de vos succes heureux, Deja l'Apollon de la France, S'achemine a sa decadence, Venez briller a votre tour, Elevez vous s'il brille encore; Ainsi le couchant d'un beau jour, Promet une plus belle aurore.' ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... add, immortal book. Even were the Persians be blotted out of existence as a nation, even though Tehran, and Meshed, and Shiraz were to share the fate of Persepolis and Susa, it would yet remain as a portrait of unrivalled humour and accuracy of a people who, though now in their decadence, have played an immense and still play a not wholly insignificant part in the complex drama of Asiatic politics. It is the picture of a people, light-hearted, nimble-witted, and volatile, but subtle, hypocritical, and insincere; ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... said Cecil. "It is another example of my decadence. My attitude quite an indefensible one—is that so long as I am no trouble to any one I have a right to do as I like. I know I ought to be getting money out of people, or devoting myself to things I don't care a straw about, but somehow, I've ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... identified their heresy with their nationality. The general decadence of the Empire spread to Spain. The social system was in a state of dissolution. The canons of the Councils show a {74} picture of life which is appalling in its corruption, but at the same time are evidence of the earnest ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... another point of view. It shows that Wagner had his plans for "Parsifal" fairly matured in 1862, and that it was not, as some critics, who see in it a decadence of his powers, claim, a late afterthought, designed to give to Bayreuth a curiosity somewhat after the facon of the Oberammergau "Passion Play." Decadence? Henry T. Finck, the most consistent and eloquent champion Wagner has had in America, sees in it no falling off in the composer's genius; ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... of time visiting each other in their cells, how in the garden some walked on one side and some on the other, how the bitterest enmities had sprung up. But, though she was not told these things, the Prioress knew her convent had fallen into decadence, and sometimes ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... version of the episode, and that the scribe of the Yellow Book has compressed the latter part. It is not, however, usual, in primitive story-telling, to linger over scenes of pathos. Such lingering is, like the painted tears of late Italian masters, invariably a sign of decadence. It is one of the marks of romance, which recognises tragedy only when it is voluble, and prodigal of lamentation. The older version of the Tain is throughout singularly free from pathos of the feebler sort; the humorous ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown
... the G.W.R. loop line from Castle Cary to Langport. Though centrally situated and occupying a prominent position on high ground, Somerton has all the appearance of a town which the world has forgotten. An air of placid decadence hangs about its old-fashioned streets, and few would guess that here was once the capital of the Somersaetas, the Saxon tribe from which Somerset derives its name. Beyond its possession of a small shirt and collar factory ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... striking. The soft, delicate, well-groomed figure of Blanch, the accomplished woman of the world, with eyes intoxicating as wine and a glowing wealth of golden hair, tempting and alluring as the luxuriance of old Rome at the height of her triumphs before her decadence set in—the last fair breath of her ancient glory—the best and fairest that modern civilization had produced. She had no need of the artificial head-gear and upholstery with which the modern society belle ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... is the method of Science, the comparative study of the national poetry of warlike aristocracies, its conditions of growth and decadence, has been much neglected by Homeric critics. Sir Richard Jebb touched on the theme, and, after devoting four pages to a sketch of Sanskrit, Finnish, Persian, and early Teutonic heroic poetry and SAGA, decided that "in our country, as in others, we fail ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... some rash critics fancy that she may be termed effete. But this is far from the truth. The absence of military burdens, rendered needless by the intelligent selfishness, if not the conscience, of the rest of Europe, implies no decadence of masculine spirit in the Dutch. In no department of enterprise, commercial ability, or intellectual energy are they inferior to any of their contemporaries, or to their own great progenitors. "Holland," says Professor Thorold Rogers, "is ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... result is a continuous drain of women out of agriculture—of the very women best fitted in the beginning to be the helpmate of the farmer. In no other calling is the assistance of the wife so valuable; it is not too much to say that part at least of the decadence of agriculture is owing to the lack of women willing to devote themselves as their mothers did before them. It follows that by degrees the farming caste is dying out. The sons go to the city, the daughters go to the city; in a generation, or little more, a once well-known farming ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... reformers. From the beginning they have insisted that the art of bel canto is lost. Tosi (1647-1727), Porpora (1686-1766), Mancini (1716-1800), three of the greatest teachers of the old Italian school, all lamented the decadence of the art of singing. Others before and since have done the same thing. It seems that in all times any one who could get the public ear has filled it with this sort of pessimistic wail. From this we draw some interesting conclusions: First, that the real art of singing was lost immediately ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... and French Courts. Up to nearly 100 years ago roasting was as usual a method of cooking meat in Paris as in London. There were "rotisseries" in Paris in the old days. High prices and thrift have led to the decadence of roasting as a popular method of cooking meat in France, but the great "chef" in a private house in Paris still produces the most perfect roast beef and roast saddle of mutton (better than you will find in England) ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... our powers of observation completely misleading, the inward condition of the class in question is this. However calm the outer surface of their lives may seem, under the surface there is a continual discord; and also, though they alone may perceive it, a continued decadence. In various degrees they all yield to temptation; all men in the vigour of their manhood do; and conscience still fills them with its old monitions and reproaches. But it cannot enforce obedience. They feel it to be the truth, but at the same time they know it to be a lie; and though they long ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... because I mean to be serious," said Mr. Sydney. "In these days of the decadence of civilization if a man is in earnest, terribly in earnest, people think that he is vastly amusing. I shall try to be funny soon, to earn my wage, and people will think me dull ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... For one thing, you will lose prestige writing for ——'s paper. For another, I dread beyond everything your beginning to do hack work for money. It is the beginning of decadence both in work and reputation for you. I know by my own and a thousand other people. Begin to write because it "is a lot of money" and you stop doing your best work. You make your work common and your prices will soon go down. George ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... ill to think of it!" It certainly very nearly made him ill. And as if these exercises in distinction had inflamed his conscience Mr. Brumley wrote two articles in the Hebdomadal denouncing impure literature, decadence, immorality, various recent scandalous instances, and the suffragettes, declaring that woman's place was the home and that "in a pure and exalted monogamy lies the sole unitary basis for a civilized state." The most remarkable thing about this article is an omission. That Sir Isaac's monogamy ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... old, sleepy Rosenmold, death made great parade of itself. Youth even, in its sentimental mood, was ready to indulge in the luxury of decay, and amuse itself with fancies of the tomb; as in periods of decadence or suspended progress, when the world seems to nap for a time, artifices for the arrest or disguise of old age are adopted as a fashion, and become the fopperies of the young. The whole body of Carl's relations, saving the drowsy old grandfather, already lay buried beneath ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Horatio Pater
... to London, in magnifying it into a town of superlative commercial splendour in the days of Nero, which, I repeat, is wildly ridiculous, he more grossly erred with respect to our form of government; for when he decried it, and prophesied its decadence and downfall, his sagacity and ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... consumption of fish, and this decrease had in turn played havoc with the fisheries. Now the fisheries were in reality the national incubator for seamen, and Cecil, Elizabeth's astute Secretary of State, perceiving in their decadence a grave menace to the manning of prospective fleets, determined, for that reason if for no other, to reanimate the dying industry. The Act in question was the practical outcome of his deliberations. [Footnote: State Papers Domestic, Elizabeth, vol. xxvii. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... now saw with something like despair her white skin assuming the yellow tones which proclaim maturity. A slight down on her upper lip, about the corners, began to spread and darken like a trail of smoke; her temples grew shiny; decadence was beginning! It was authentic in Alencon that Mademoiselle Cormon suffered from rush of blood to the head. She confided her ills to the Chevalier de Valois, enumerating her foot-baths, and consulting him as to refrigerants. On such occasions the shrewd old gentleman would pull ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... Jane smiled on, yet waited most acceptably and kept all things decently and in order—for a little while. Along about Christmas-time a further decadence and additional flaw in the jewel was discovered, and it was Perkins himself who discovered it. It happened one day while he was at work alone in the house, Mrs. Perkins having gone out shopping. A friend from Boston appeared—a ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... treasure, and were propounded by him solely in order that he might have the pleasure of solving them himself. Unfortunately very few of them have survived, and when travelling through Spain, collecting material for a proposed work on "The Spanish Onion as a Cause of National Decadence," I only discovered a very few. One of these concerns the three boxes that appear ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... been present where two or three of my countrymen were gathered together, that, after a wrangling review of the weather, they did not turn their conversation upon the theatres. There is no topic more universally discussed than the decadence of the drama, or the engagements, merits, and adventures of the performers. Neither the Lord Chancellor nor the Archbishop of Canterbury is ever so familiarly known by name and person to the public, as the first tragedian and comedian of the day; and the theatrical ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... on the stage, and the unhappy singer, bereft of romance, his career finished, decadence and old age staring him in the face, went to answer the call. But suddenly his face changed; a brightness, an alertness came into it and even, mysteriously, into all his body. There was a woman at the other end ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... growing certainty that fetishism cannot be the original form of religion, and that the higher stages of it are not to be derived from that one. The races among whom fetishism is found exhibit a well-known feature of the decadence of religion, namely that the great god or gods have grown weak and faint, and smaller gods and spirits have crowded in to fill up the blank thus caused. Worship is transferred from the great beings who are the original gods of the tribe and ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... believe in a thing; nothing but Style." For, what is Style in its true and broadest sense save fidelity to idea and mood, and perfect balance in the clothing of them? And I thought: Can one believe in the decadence of Art in an age which, however unconsciously as yet, is beginning to worship that which ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... have never since been able to point out the sunrise to others. It is no extravagance of language to say that diacritical marks lead to the cocaine habit; nor that the ethics of metaphysics points the way to the Higher Foolishness. There are many links in the chain of decadence, but its ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... conditions, and the whole process begins anew. The first half of such a world-cycle corresponds to the Golden Age of legend in which men lived happily and simply; we have now unfortunately reached some point in the period of decadence. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... surroundings are, in the main, free from the abuses and miseries of the stage in English-speaking lands, and, above all, from that all-pervading lubricity and pornographic stench which have made the French theater of the last half of the nineteenth century a main cause in the decadence of the French people. In most German towns of importance one finds the drama a part of the daily life of its citizens—ennobling in its higher ranges, and in its ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... experiments with new ideals. Young Vienna heard the keynotes of the new time, but it was content to evolve a new variety of an old tune. Time-honored pessimism, world-sorrow, gave way to a sophisticated and cynical world-weariness which is symptomatic of decadence. Widely different as their individualities present themselves, between the pages of their books and on the stage, both Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... first chapter of Cope in "Religious Education in the Family," the following is quoted: "The ills of the modern home are symptomatic. Divorce, childless families, irreverent children, and a decadence of the old type of separate home life are signs of forgotten ideals, lost motives, and insufficient purposes. When the home is only an opportunity for self-indulgence, it easily becomes a cheap boarding house, a sleeping ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... out into resounding lamentations over the decadence and decline of taste, and slip in eulogies of Messieurs Etienne Jouy, Tissot, Gosse, Duval, Jay, Benjamin Constant, Aignan, Baour-Lormian, Villemain, and the whole Liberal-Bonapartist chorus who patronize Vernou's ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... there is one striking thing to be noticed. If men behaved in that way in our time, we should, as we have said, regard them as symbols of the 'decadence.' But the men who did these things were not decadent; they belonged generally to the most robust classes of what is generally regarded as a robust age. Again, it will be urged that if men essentially sane performed such insanities, it was under the capricious direction of ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... introductions that evening; and, in the next fortnight, received ample and daily proofs of the proverbial hospitality of Baltimore. There are residents—praisers of the time gone by, who cease not to lament the convivial decadence of the city; but such deficiency is by no means apparent ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... not help smiling with pleasure when she saw its picturesque effect. The countess, in spite of the anxious contraction of her dark brows, looked imposingly handsome. Hers was an old age of positive beauty,—a decadence which had all ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... restrictions even upon the most high-spirited. At that moment Madame de Vallorbes was ripe for the commission of atrocities. Had she been—as she coveted to be—a lady of the Roman decadence it would have gone hard with her waiting-woman, who might have found herself ordered for instant execution or summarily deprived of the organs of speech. But, latter-day sentiment happily forbidding such active expressions ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... that it calls cats dogs and describes the sun as the moon—and is very particular about the preciseness of these pseudonyms. To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence. The disease called aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they mean coffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort is the chief mark of the powerful parts of modern society. They all seem straining to keep things in rather than to let things ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... of Sonora, and in consequence, the finest country in the world is fast receding to a state of nature. I found in the Palace at Mexico a copy of the last report of the Governor of Sonora upon the state of his Department, in which he mentions, among many other causes of its decadence during the last few years, the extensive emigration of its laboring ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... climax of her success, when Rawdon Crawley strikes down the Marquis of Steyne, is one of the finest in all fiction. Though Becky knows that this blow shatters her social edifice, she is still woman enough to admire her husband in the very act that marks the beginning of the decadence of her fortunes. Vanity Fair, read carefully a half-dozen times, is a liberal education in life and in the art of ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... the pages, even of good writers. These are not errors that betoken or lead to general final corruption, and the great Anglo-Saxo-Norman race is many centuries distant from the period when it may be expected to show signs of that decadence which, visible at first in the waning moral and intellectual energies of a people, soon ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... interests. Patriotism cannot be reduced to a mere question of money, and a nation which has grown tired of the responsibilities of empire, and careless of the acquisitions of its past and of its greatness in the future, would indeed have entered into a period of inevitable decadence. Happily we have not yet come to this. I believe the overwhelming majority of the people of these islands are convinced that an England reduced to the limits which the Manchester school would assign to it would ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... reach up into bedrooms—bedrooms where Lady Betty has had her hair powdered, and where the painter's north-light now takes possession of the place which her toilet-table occupied a hundred years ago. There are degrees in decadence: after the Fashion chooses to emigrate, and retreats from Soho or Bloomsbury, let us say, to Cavendish Square, physicians come and occupy the vacant houses, which still have a respectable look, the windows being cleaned, and the knockers and plates kept bright, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... submission may become necessary, then, will be contingent on the virtual abeyance of the spirit of national pride in the peoples who so are to come under Imperial rule. A sufficient, by no means necessarily a total, elimination or decadence of this proclivity will be the condition precedent of any practicable scheme for a general peace on this footing. How large an allowance of such animus these prospectively subject peoples might still carry, without thereby assuring the defeat of any such plan, would in great measure ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Lord Magellan, looking at his companion. "One feels the merest pygmy! From the age of decadence indeed!" He glanced at the guide-book in his hand. "Good Heavens!—if this was their decay, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the front fighting. Instead of being scowled at and ordered about by managers and orchestra leaders, or brow-beaten by hotel-clerks and head-waiters, she met with nothing but the most servile politeness,—due, she was prone to argue, to the unquestioned decadence of the French and English races. They were a bloodless lot, those Frenchmen ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... immoral," Lord Henry murmured. "It is the motto of decadence. It means that the moment the Union Jack is unfurled, the voice of criticism, the intellect, and the first principles of justice and honest self-analysis, must ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... admiration of their neighbours. People said that such an example of conjugal felicity was not often seen in those degenerate days, for even then they prated of the golden age of their grandfathers, lamenting their own decadence.... As behoved good Castilians, burdened with such a line of noble ancestors, the fortunate couple conducted themselves with all imaginable gravity. No strange eye was permitted to witness a caress between the lord and his ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... family circle—of dwarfs. They had their maxim: to enjoy themselves. They lived on public death. There they inhaled shame, and they throve on that which kills others. It was there that was reared up with art, purpose, industry, and goodwill, the decadence of France. There worked the bought, fed, and obliging public men;—read prostituted. Even literature was compounded there as we have shown; Vieillard was a classic of 1830, Morny created Choufleury, Louis Bonaparte was a candidate for the Academy. Strange ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... to be a wonderful document. The narrative deals mainly with the modern history of the Songhay Empire, and relates the rise of this black civilization through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and its decadence up to the middle of the seventeenth century. The noted traveller, Barth, was of the opinion that the book forms one of the most important additions that the present age has made to the history of mankind. The work is especially valuable for the unconscious light ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... Kickham had the poet's soul within him, and it was his compensation for the losses he had sustained. He could still hold communion with nature and with his own mind, and could give to the national cause the service of a bold heart and a finely-cultivated intellect. Subsequent to the decadence of the '48 movement he wrote a good deal in prose and verse, and contributed gratuitously to various national publications. His intimate acquaintance with the character and habits of the peasantry gave a great charm to his stories and sketches of rural life; and his ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... emotions that Le Brun and that kind of person find so magnifique in Raphael's later work—mostly painted by his pupils and assistants, by the way. It is Winckelmann, isn't it, who says that when you come to the age of expression in Greek art you have come to the age of decadence? I don't remember how or where it is said, but of course it is true—can't be otherwise in the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... continued, "that before sailing you had expressed the hope that something really exciting and adventurous would befall the party—that you were tired of the monotonous humdrum of twentieth-century existence—that you regretted the decadence of piracy, and the expunging of romance from ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... have the honour of performing before the nobility and gentry. The bill contained the fare which was to be provided, and intimated the hour of the performance, and the prices to be paid for the seats. The performance was to take place in a very large room attached to the inn, which, previous to the decadence of the town, had been used as an assembly-room. A platform was erected on the outside, on which were placed the musicians, and where we all occasionally made our appearance in our splendid dresses to attract the wonder of the people. There ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... neighbor, unites, with equal or greater charms of landscape, in preaching the old story of the decadence of the great. Lord Clive, the Indian conqueror and speculator, built the house from the designs of Capability Browne at a cost of over a hundred thousand pounds. His dwelling and his monument remain to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... family. A practice which tends to produce such exaggerated notions of what constitutes hardship, which leads men and women to cherish such a degree of ease, makes inevitably for inefficiency, a decline in the capacity to endure and to achieve, and for a general social decadence. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Conservatoire in August, 1905, M. Dujardin-Beaumetz, Under-Secretary for the Fine Arts, in his address to the students made pointed allusion to the difference of results between the instrumental classes and those for singing. Said the orator: "It is claimed that singing is in a state of decadence, and that the cause is largely due to the style of modern music. It is rather owing to the fact that this art is not studied at present with the same methodic diligence that formerly obtained. I would ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... the Baron de Whichehalse before, and was not at all afraid of him, having been at school with his son as he knew, and it made him very kind to me. And indeed he was kind to everybody, and all our people spoke well of him; and so much the more because we knew that the house was in decadence. For the first De Whichehalse had come from Holland, where he had been a great nobleman, some hundred and fifty years agone. Being persecuted for his religion, when the Spanish power was everything, he fled to England ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... de La Fayette, Mme. de Maintenon, Mme. de Caylus, and Mme. de Luxembourg are of the same type—the same world, with little variance and no decadence; in some respects, the last may be said to have approached nearest to perfection. "In her, the turn of critical and caustic severity was exempt from rigidity and was accompanied by every charm and ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... influence, and every one of the planets threatening thee with disgrace, according as they stand seated towards one another, in relation to the horned signs of Aries, Taurus, and Capricorn. In the fourth house I find Jupiter in a decadence, as also in a tetragonal aspect to Saturn, associated with Mercury. Thou wilt be soundly peppered, my good, honest fellow, I warrant thee. I will be? answered Panurge. A plague rot thee, thou old fool and doting sot, how graceless and unpleasant thou art! When all cuckolds shall ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... to exclude the arts from religion, lest they should contaminate it. But the exclusion has been accomplished with difficulty, and to maintain it has been impossible. It is neither an accident, nor a sign of decadence, that painting and sculpture are creeping back into the Protestant churches, to combine with poetry and music in expressing the religious life of man. For the intellect alone is inadequate either to express that life as it exists, or to call ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... The idealist, if he be broadminded, and not merely sentimental, is indeed likely to be the practical man. And the type of mind that is made manifest to us by these great non-Aryan languages and their forms, is the former. Of course idealism in its decadence becomes negative, inactive, self-consuming and no longer creative. But in its bloom the direct vision may be even more active, more practical, than are the ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... ERA. The last stages of the Cretaceous are marked by a decadence of the reptiles. By the end of that period the reptilian forms characteristic of the time had become extinct one after another, leaving to represent the class only the types of reptiles which continue to modern times. The ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... world's work; dextrous Similitude of Acting begins. The world's wages are pocketed, the world's work is not done. Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in. Accordingly, what Century, since the end of the Roman world, which also was a time of scepticism, simulacra and universal decadence, so abounds with Quacks as that Eighteenth! Consider them, with their tumid sentimental vapouring about virtue, benevolence,—the wretched Quack-squadron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... when things propitious reign! Upon the ornamented beam will settle at the close of spring the fragrant dust! Your reckless indulgence of licentious love and your naturally moonlike face will soon be the source of the ruin of a family. The decadence of the family estate will emanate entirely from Ching; while the wane of the family affairs will be entirely attributable to the fault of Ning! Licentious love will be the main reason ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... my permission, the new France which has come into being since the outbreak of the war, and the attitude of the French toward their allies. I knew the old France pretty well. Putting any ridiculous ideas of French decadence aside, the France of the last ten years did not have the international standing of an older France. The Delcasse incident had revealed a France evidently untaught by the lesson of 1870, and if the Moroccan question ended in a French victory, it was frankly won by getting behind the petticoats ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... by the sheik, if failing in the effects intended, had produced a result almost equally fatal to the three fugitives,—it had given warning to the Arabs in their encampment; who, again sallying forth, had arrived just in time to witness the "decadence" of the camel, and now surrounded the group that ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... destroyed, by adding on to or mixing up with it the totally distinct art and art methods of Western civilisation. Were this done it would become a bastard or a mongrel art, and, as history affords abundant evidence, would in due course lapse into a condition of utter decadence. ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... decadence of religion, has a bearing upon the number of suicides. The fear of "God," of judgment, of eternal pain will stay the hand, and people so believing will suffer here until relieved by natural death. A belief in the eternal agony beyond the grave will cause such believers ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... if it gets a chance of a second." From him "Pride and Prejudice" got a chance of three readings at least. This generous universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles Edward at Holyrood, as Mr. Senior wrote in the "Quarterly Review," "we are in the lofty region of romance. In any other hands than ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... and undignified petulance, furnishes a pitiful proof of the intellectual and moral decadence of a once great name;" i.e., The same oration seen from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 17, 1890. • Various
... imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. That is the true decadence, and it is from this ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... "Various Epistles". It must be regarded as a misfortune for Theodoric that his maxims of statesmanship, which were assuredly full of manly sense and vigour, should have reached us only in such a shape, diluted with the platitudes and false rhetoric of a scholar of the decadence. Still, even through all these disguises, it is easy to discern the genuine patriotism both of the great King and of his minister, their earnest desire that right, not might, should determine every case that came before them, their true insight ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... illuminators, with his insignificant, eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the great resource of our manufacturers of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... eventually to drive out the local part or the local drive out all color. Here a process of cancellation or destruction is going on—a kind of "compromise" which destroys by deadlock; a compromise purchasing a selfish pleasure—a decadence in which art becomes first dull, then dark, then dead, though throughout this process it is outwardly very much alive,—especially after it is dead. The same tendency may even be noticed if there is over-insistence upon the national in art. Substance tends ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... time of the decadence of the industry of weaving fine shawls, which was so long a feature of Kashmir, the wool of which they were woven was gradually transferred to the rug industry, and the weavers turned their attention from the shawls to the ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... is focused by dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In this decadence, too, the art of fire-making had been forgotten on the earth. The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... South affords a more promising field for literature than any other part of our country. There is evident decadence in New England. But the climate and scenery, the history and traditions, and the chivalrous spirit and unexhausted intellectual energies of the South contain the promise of an Augustan age in literature. In no insignificant degree ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... man's decadence from the moment when he began to "poor-fellow" irreclaimable savagery on the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... it never is, unless it suits the immediate taste of the cliques. Clique-Art, clique-Literature, clique-Criticism, keep all three things on a low ground that slopes daily more and more toward decadence. And the pity of it is, that the English get judged abroad chiefly by what their own journalists say of them,— thus, if Sarasate is coldly criticised, foreigners laugh at the 'UNmusical English,' whereas, the fact is that the nation itself is NOT unmusical, but its musical critics mostly ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... eight or ten per cent. of our total population in 1900. As a matter of fact the proportion was in 1900 11.6 per cent. These decreasing proportions did not, of course, necessarily imply any positive decadence in the black race, as they might be accounted for by greater prolificacy or vitality on the part of the whites, or in part by immigration. The subject will be resumed in ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Brents had been something similar, but showing the causes of decadence in their aristocratic and not their plebeian forms. They, too, had sent their shoots to the wars; but their positions had been different and they had often attained honour—for without flaw they were gallant, and brave deeds were ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... church is chiefly responsible for the decadence of the French mind. The priests have long controlled the education of the nation and have striven to shut it out from all contact with the culture of America, Germany and England. Under the rule of Napoleon III, the Jesuits obtained the guidance of nearly ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... not break on the wheel alive, burn alive, boil alive, flay alive, crucify, impale, and quarter, blame him not, the fault was not his; the age obstinately refuses to allow it. He has done all that was humanly or inhumanly possible. Given the nineteenth century, a century of gentleness,—of decadence, say the papists and friends of arbitrary power,—Louis Bonaparte has equalled in ferocity his contemporaries, Haynau, Radetzky, Filangieri, Schwartzenberg, and Ferdinand of Naples: he has even surpassed ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Law Act (Ireland), 1881. Being precluded by his political tenets from protecting Irish agriculture against foreign competition, or assisting it with the resources of the State, Mr. Gladstone aimed at alleviating the distress due to the decadence of a national industry by defining with meticulous nicety the respective shares which the two parties engaged in agriculture—landlord and tenant—were to derive from its dwindling returns. He believed that the proportion of diminishing ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... has hitherto been able, and probably it is impossible, to define madness, or to give a clearly marked indication of the boundary line between sanity and insanity. Mental soundness is merged in unsoundness by degrees of decadence which are so small as to be practically inappreciable. It is with the mind-state which precedes the development of recognized form of insanity the therapeutist and the social philosopher are chiefly interested. Although in ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... Britannica (Volume 32, page 32), says truly: "Though it may coexist with national vigor, its extravagant development is one of the signs of a rotten and decaying civilization * * * a phase which has always marked the decadence ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... tunnels are very attractive things, with their alcoved outlooks upon the lovely and inspiriting water. They contain two or three hundred queer old pictures, by old Swiss masters—old boss sign-painters, who flourished before the decadence of art. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... until the following year (1730), when she died at the age of eighty. For several years Handel struggled to build up the fortunes of Italian opera in London, but the persistent rivalry and opposition of his enemies, combined with the decadence of musical taste on the part of the public, caused his losses to accumulate, until, in 1737, he found himself, after repeated failures, deeply in debt, and with his health broken down by overwork and anxiety. The whole of his fortune of L10,000 had been swallowed up in this disastrous enterprise, ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... together, reading and re-reading them, can we suppose that they were composed by the great delineator, of or toward a person under or much below thirty? They imply that the person addressed was not so far below middle life that a statement of the decadence that would come after his fortieth year presented a remote or far-off picture. Besides, if his friend was below thirty years, while it might be well to urge him to marry, hardly would the poet have used language implying that his marrying days were ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... under skilful care, the highest type of perfection, let no one make the mistake of thinking that the time for such improvement is after they have been grown and placed upon the market. If they are found to be knotty, half green, or in a state of decadence, and you are bound to buy strawberries, you can take them, and, by your native woman's wit, you can dress them into a state of palatableness, even if you have to reduce them to a pulp in the ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... mourn his loss. But Charles was poor rather than vindictive at this period, and preferring to adopt the other course, turned a deaf ear to the petitioners. This was probably one of the earliest factors in the decadence of literature as a pastime ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... all sides we hear lamentations about the decadence of art. We are, indeed, far behind the great masters of the Renaissance. The technicalities of art have recently made great progress; thousands of people gifted with a certain amount of talent cultivate ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... comes into our society fresh and unspoiled with each generation, and in its way contributes something of freshness, something of vigor to keep the social world from going down hill on a grade of decadence. The story deals with a man who, although still young, feels that his life is practically over because his marriage, through no fault of his own, has proved a failure and ended in divorce. He meets a young girl just introduced into society, whose wholesome ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... interested me. Her hair was false, her teeth were false, her complexion was shrivelled, her form had lost the round symmetry of earlier years, and was angular and stiff; yet how cheerful and lively she was! She had gone far down-hill physically; but either she did not feel her decadence, or she had grown quite reconciled to it. Her daughter, a blooming matron, was there, happy, wealthy, good; yet not apparently a whit more reconciled to life than the aged grandame. It was pleasing, ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... meals Will and I set out to look at the historic sights, and exhausted them all, real and alleged, in less than half a day (for in addition to a lust for ready-cut building stone the Turks have never cherished monuments that might accentuate their own decadence). After that we fossicked in the manner of prospectors that we are by preference, if not always by trade, eschewing polite society and hunting in the impolite, amusing places where most of the facts have teeth, sharp and ready to ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... being then in a stress of sore need, found all at once that somewhat was adhering to the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to be a gold ring of price, bearing the words, "God speed thee, Friend!"), already in decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and downward as if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors; and that other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched the rest so long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards, that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... he writes, "been left to herself she would, in all human probability, have succeeded, notwithstanding her decadence, in establishing political unity under a military chief. Had the country been brought into peaceful contact with continental civilisation, it must have advanced along the path of modern progress. Even if it had been conquered by a powerful nation, it would at least have participated ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... afoot. In these days when motors are as plentiful as mortgages this may appear but discontented destitution, the cry of sour grapes. And yet much of the adventuring of life has been gained afoot. But walking now has fallen on evil days. It needs but an enlistment of words to show its decadence. Tramp is such a word. Time was when it signified a straight back and muscular calves and an appetite, and at nightfall, maybe, pleasant gossip at the hearth on the affairs of distant villages. There was rhythm in the sound. But now it means ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... absolutely that any household knowledge ended then and there, with no further possibility of its acquisition. It was this state of things, with its accumulated results, which, a generation or so later, faced the few investigators who puzzled over the decadence of morals, the enfeebled physiques, the general helplessness of the young women who married, and the whole series of natural consequences. So startling were the facts developed, that it became at once ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... drift, my Paul, like so many of your countrymen do. You must help to stem the tide of your nation's decadence, and be a strong man. For me, when I read now of England, it seems as if all the hereditary legislators—it is what you call your nobles, eh?—these men have for their motto, like Louis XV., Apres moi le deluge—It ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... It was decadence. There was nothing left for the beings to do. They had solved all their problems and could find no new ones. They had exhausted the intricate workings of reflection, academic hypothetica and mind-play; ...
— The Inhabited • Richard Wilson
... crowd of little suckers, the prophet sees but one shoot, and that rising to more than the original height and fruitfulness of the tree. The prophecy is distinctly that of One Person, in whom the Davidic monarchy is concentrated, and all its decadence more ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... lightsome! The brewers and distillers who put the mirth-inspiring beverages into the market receive more consideration, and a great deal more money, than an average European prince;—and yet the poor dry-rotted unfortunate whose decadence we are tracing is like a leper in the scattering effects which he produces during his shaky promenade. He is indeed alone in the world, and brandy or gin is his only counsellor and comforter. As to character, the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... were extinguished. Whole families were destroyed; and the empire was a scene of anarchy and wild contention. He, who felt himself capable of the most atrocious deeds, declared himself a BLUE, and the GREENS were massacred with impunity. Montesquieu, Grandeur et Decadence ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... hitherto used only as a cosmetic could be made to yield iron by melting it with charcoal he opened a new era in civilization, though doubtless the ocher artists of that day denounced him as a utilitarian and deplored the decadence of the times. ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... outright infidelity, political socialism, religious anarchy, stalk the length and breadth of the land? "Impurity, obscenity, moral corruption in many forms, with the ever consequent cynicism and pessimism, forerunners of moral decadence, destruction of the original, creative, shaping, joyous, confident energies of society, come daily more boldly to the front of the stage and defy criticism or mock at the archaic sanctions of yesterday. One does not need to peruse the great modern historians of Roman morals to foresee ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... scath[obs3]; perversion, prostitution, vitiation, discoloration, oxidation, pollution, defoedation|, poisoning, venenation|, leaven, contamination, canker, corruption, adulteration, alloy. decline, declension, declination; decadence, decadency[obs3]; falling off &c. v.; caducity[obs3], decrepitude. decay, dilapidation, ravages of time, wear and tear; corrosion, erosion; moldiness, rottenness; moth and rust, dry rot, blight, marasmus[obs3], atrophy, collapse; disorganization; delabrement ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... He knows with like completeness the mere fashions of the time—how courtier and soldier dressed themselves, and the large movements of the desperate game which fate or chance was playing with those pretty pieces. Comparing that favourite century of the French Renaissance with our own, he notes a decadence of the more energetic passions in the interest of general tranquillity, and perhaps (only perhaps!) of general happiness. "Assassination," he observes, as if with regret, "is no longer a part of our manners." In fact, the duel, and the whole [22] morality of the duel, which does but enforce a ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... very little writing in prose until the era of their decadence, and showed little instinct to use the concise and unified form of the short-story. The conquering Romans followed closely in the paths of their predecessors and did little work in the shorter narratives. The myths of Greece and Rome were ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... nearly all the other Nueva Vizcaya towns we had seen or were to see, shows signs of decadence. It has a good church and convento, a great plaza, and is surrounded by a fertile country, but something is missing. After dinner, I went over and called on the padre, one of the Belgians, whom we had met the day before. He ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... Leroy-Beaulieu had described years before the practical extinction of the family and the government interference[34] brought about by the discoveries made by the government inspecting committee, upon whom consternation seized as they found decadence of morals, enfeebled physique, and that the ordinary girl-worker at sixteen or seventeen could not sew a seam, or make a broth, or care for a child's needs or the simplest demands of a home. Appalled ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... caps are the author's, and we hope they assist the reader's comprehension.) Of Sir Lionel, the model old gentleman, we are told that "the simple ideal of the middle age, apart from its anarchy and decadence, in him most truly seemed to live again, when the ties which knit men together were of heroic cast. The first-born colors of pristine faith and truth engraven on the common soul of man, and blent into the wide arch of brotherhood, where the primaeval ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... personally, but he had seen her occasionally, at supper in smart restaurants, at first nights, riding in the Park. Now, as he looked at her name, he realized that he had not even seen her for a long time, perhaps for a couple of years. He had heard the rumours of her decadence, and taken little heed of them, not being specially interested in her. Nevertheless, this morning, as he shut up his book and got up to go downstairs to his work, he was aware of a desire to hear the clock strike the half-hour after five, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... wall, it has no features of interest; having wooden-framed windows, square painted pews, walls whitewashed within and without, and a flat ceiling. It greatly needs renovation, being now almost a solitary representative, in the neighbourhood, of that very worst period of architectural decadence. With fairly good sandstone in the present walls, and probably more in the foundations of an earlier church, to be exhumed, and an abundance in situ not far away, restoration, or even re-erection, might be ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... are unspoiled by all their daily traffic in horror. But they have won their souls; and when the days of peace return these men will take with them to the civilian life a tonic strength and nobleness which will arrest and extirpate the decadence of society with the saving salt of ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... sweet, but had a cheese instead, after an anxious debate with the waiter about the health of the Camembert and the decadence of the Roquefort. When this weighty matter was settled ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... makes Gorgiko Brown, the gypsy man, leave his tent and his old wife, of an evening, and thrust himself into society which could well dispense with him. "Brother," said Mr. Petulengro the other day to the Romany Rye, after telling him many things connected with the decadence of gypsyism, "there is one Gorgiko Brown, who, with a face as black as a teakettle, wishes to be mistaken for a Christian tradesman; he goes into the parlour of a third-rate inn of an evening, calls for rum and water, and attempts to enter ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the explorer was always emboldened by that impulse, and, if there ever be a future of decadence, it will live again in his ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... manners, in pulpit oratory, and in the entire type of his nature, that no one will ever be able to describe what he was. Those who saw and heard him the last ten or fifteen years of his decadence can have no idea of his former power as a preacher of ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... unwillingly, he is at last brought to confess that his comfort is not the chief nor even any visible aim of the order in things. In the course of that order it may be, nay, it is nigh certain, that the human species will pass through decadence to extinction along with so many other organisms. Neither as individuals nor as a race, neither in regard to this life nor to the next, does the idea of God, when ennobled by a contemplation of the cosmical relations, permit to man the effrontery of claiming that this universe and all that therein ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... to the Ilium, founded in memory of Troy. This is the town visited by Xerxes, Alexander the Great, and Julian the Apostate.[254] That the town still existed about the middle of the fourth century is proved by medals taken from the ruins, but it evidently fell into decadence soon after that time, for its very .name was forgotten by history, and it was reserved for our own time to resuscitate the ancient city of Priam and its successors from the ruins which lead been piled up by the destructive hand of man and by the lapse of tinge. But this task has ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... sassafras, the poplars, the maples, and the oaks, and then, as the crowning feature of the evolutionary process, the nut tree. I like to let my mind run ahead a bit, particularly at such a time as this when we are setting out new trees. What sort of people will these trees live to see? Will there be a decadence of the taste and fondness for trees, which we hope is growing? Will these trees live to see a race of people who take no interest in such things except a commercial one, who have no thought for the beauty of the trees nor for the rights of posterity? Will ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... gentlemen, generally those no longer young, still like very much the fashion of visiting on New-Year's day, and go to see as many people as they can in a brief winter's sunshine. These gentlemen deplore the basket at the door, and the decadence of the old custom in New York. Family friends and old friends, those whom they never see at any other time, are to be seen—or they should be seen, so these ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... ruled the world before he died, he did not attend. Hardened by his father's heartless severity he learnt to live without sympathy, to despise mankind, to rely on himself. He was the author of a commonplace treatise against Machiavelli, partly founded on Montesquieu's Grandeur et Decadence. This unamiable youth, with the aspirations and the vanity of a minor poet, was the most consummate practical genius that, in modern ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... men are now thought to be more potent for evil jettatura than women; but his general views still coincide with those entertained at the present time in Italy. Ever since the establishment, or rather decadence, of the Church in the Middle Ages, monks have been considered as peculiarly open to suspicion of possessing the Evil Eye. As long ago as the ninth century, in the year 842, Erchempert, a frate of the celebrated convent of Monte Cassino, writes,—"I knew formerly Messer Landulf, Bishop of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Yet out of this decadence natural selection may in time bring forward better strains, and with normal conditions of security and peace nature may begin again her work ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the details of the preparations for the barbarous sepulture of the young Briton. Now and then the cracking of rifle-shots betokened the shooting of his horses and cattle and all the living things among his possessions—a practice already in its decadence among the Cherokees, and later, influenced by the utilitarian methods of civilization, altogether abandoned. Swift steps here and there throughout the town intimated errands to gather all his choicest effects ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... to some of the effects of Western education on the younger generation of Indians:—"It is widely admitted by the thoughtful Indians that there are signs of the weakening of parental influence, of the loss of reverence for authority, of a decadence of manners and of growing moral laxity. The restraining forces of ancient India have lost some of their power; the restraining forces of the West are inoperative in India. There has thus been a certain moral loss without any ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... devoted himself to tranquility and ease. Apparently he preferred to be a farmer-general (publicanus) and not a consul. His chief fame rests in the fact that he was father of Lucan, the poet of the decadence or declining literature of Rome. The only anecdote about him which has come down to us is one that sets his avarice in a very unfavourable light. When his famous son, the unhappy poet, had forfeited his life, as well as covered ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar |
