"Seraglio" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that is it was an absolutism, marked by luxury, display, and taxation so heavy as to amount almost to oppression. Its luxuriousness and display are illustrated by his seraglio, which included seven hundred wives (1 Kings xi. 3); and its despotic nature is seen in such acts as his summary and severe punishment of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... S. Irene stands at a short distance to the north-east of S. Sophia, in the first court of the Seraglio. Its identity has never been questioned, for the building was too much in the public eye and too near the centre of the ecclesiastical affairs of the city to render possible any mistake concerning its real character. It is always ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... court, when I was surrounded by the entire seraglio. Some begged me for physic, some for amber, and all were most desirous of trying the great African specific of blood-letting. They are ten or twelve in number, most of them young and handsome, wearing ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... mattered. For that made it possible to offer the patrons of the theater damaged goods under cover of the delights of luxury. So tricked out, it was displayed in the market, to the joy of old gentlemen and young women. And it all reeked of death and the seraglio. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... to wander in this forbidden field is unwittingly betrayed by his remarking at Sky, in support of the doctrine that animal substances are less cleanly than vegetable: "I have often thought that, if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns, or cotton, I mean stuffs made of vegetable substances. I would have no silks: you cannot tell when it is clean: it will be very nasty before it is perceived to be so; linen detects its own dirtiness." His virtue thawed instead of becoming more rigid in ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... restore or make good the property which he was proved to have taken, or caused to be taken, from travellers. His house had become filled with girls of all ages, whom he had taken from poor parents, as they passed over this road, and converted into slaves for his seraglio. They were all restored to their parents, with suitable compensation; and the Cawnpoor road has become the most safe, as well as the ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... hire with wealth and honours persons capable of assisting him to kill the time, and who, even when the state was brought by maladministration to the depths of humiliation and to the brink of ruin, could still exclude unwelcome truth from the purlieus of his own seraglio, and refuse to see and hear whatever might disturb his luxurious repose. Later in life, the ill-bred familiarity of the Scottish divines had given him a distaste for Presbyterian discipline, while the heats and animosities between the members of ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... under the guise of militia, held the Turkish capital in terror. The situation in Constantinople had finally grown unendurable even to the Turks, and the Pasha of Rustchuk appeared at the gates of the city to restore Selim III, who was still a captive in the Seraglio. When the doors of that sacred inclosure were forced open, the first object seen was the body of the murdered sovereign, killed by Mustapha in the belief that he himself was now the sole available survivor of Othman's line. But the soldiers ransacked the palace, and dragged from his concealment ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the Electress Dowager of Hanover. This was the unfortunate Princess Sophia, the wife of George. Thirty-two years of melancholy captivity she had endured, while George was drinking and hoarding money and amusing himself with his seraglio of ugly women. She died protesting her innocence to the last. In the closing days of her illness, so runs the story, she gave into the hands of some one whom she could trust, a letter addressed to her husband, and obtained a promise that the letter ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... King governed only by the advice of his Ministers. The power of direct address to the throne was denied to any one under the rank of Governor. One ordinance created a constitution, and the next dealt with the status of the ladies of the royal seraglio. At one hour a proclamation went forth that all men were to cut their hair, and the wearied runners on their return were again despatched hot haste with an edict altering the official language. Nothing ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... was their characters that made the fate and doom of the situation. As for the court, Vergennes used an expression which suggests the very keyword of the situation. He had been ambassador in Turkey, and was fond of declaring that he had learnt in the seraglio how to brave the storms of Versailles. Versailles was like Stamboul or Teheran, oriental in etiquette, oriental in destruction of wealth and capital, oriental in antipathy to a reforming grand vizier. It was the Queen, as we now know by incontestable ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... should have so great a prevalence in the female breast, and yet it is certain that to this principle it was owing, that Swift's house was often a seraglio of very virtuous women, who attended him from morning till night, with an obedience, an awe, and an assiduity that are seldom paid to the richest, or the most powerful lovers. These ladies had no doubt ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... she would take the Christian maiden with her. "That you must not," replied the cadi, "for it is not right that the Grand Signor's slave should be seen by any one, much less should she converse with Christians; for you know that when she comes into the Sultan's possession she will be shut up in the seraglio, and must become a Turk ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Ibrahim went to the royal seraglio, and, following his ancient custom, was admitted to the table of his master, sleeping after the meal at his side. At least so it was supposed, but none knew save those engaged in the murder what passed on that fatal night; the next day ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... cross-valleys into six eminences, overhanging the Golden Horn, and a large isolated hill constituting the south-western portion of the territory. Hence the claim of Constantinople to be enthroned, like Rome, upon seven hills. The 1st hill is distinguished by the Seraglio, St Sophia and the Hippodrome; the 2nd by the column of Constantine and the mosque Nuri-Osmanieh; the 3rd by the war office, the Seraskereate Tower and the mosque of Sultan Suleiman; the 4th by the mosque of Sultan Mahommed II., the Conqueror; the 5th by the mosque of Sultan ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... ladies; abbes who wrote every thing but sermons, and were free from the censure of not practising what they preached since they did not preach at all; generals who fought a campaign as deliberately and ceremoniously as they danced a minuet; statesmen whose diplomacy was more of the seraglio than the council; painters who improved on nature, applying the same tricks of art to the landscape as with powders to their curls; and simpering lips of the Marquise, and poets whose highest flights ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... the game you've been playing with this Smith affair. Because Smith's head is small for his shoulders you call him microcephalous; if it had been large, you'd have called it water-on-the-brain. As long as poor old Smith's seraglio seemed pretty various, variety was the sign of madness: now, because it's turning out to be a bit monochrome—now monotony is the sign of madness. I suffer from all the disadvantages of being a grown-up ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... the vizier, taking with him some of those foreign slaves of a seraglio, who know no sympathy with human passion outside its walls, bent his way to the palace of Muza, sorely puzzled and perplexed. He did not, however, like to venture upon the hazard of the alarm it might ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... angel," one to whom the Supreme says, "Thou art not absent from before me for one twinkling of an eye. I am never out of thy heart. And I am contained in nothing but in thy heart, and in a heart like thy heart. And I am nearer unto thee than thou art to thyself." This prince had in his Golden Seraglio three ladies of surpassing beauty, and all four, in this royal monastery, passed their lives, and left ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third—— Can we ever rise above nature or sink below her? Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she not always cry in brutal triumph: "I am here still, at the bottom of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... king commanded me to help reform ye, And how I'll do't, Miss —— shall inform ye. I keep the best seraglio in the nation, And hope in time to bring it into fashion; No brimstone whore need fear the lash from me, That part I'll leave to Brother Jefferey: Our gallants need not go abroad to Rome, I'll keep a whoring ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... toilet, they gathered in groups of four or five, chilled and shivering in their fur mantles, muffs, and triple black veils. Notwithstanding the hasty rouge and powder of the morning, they were unrecognizable, and it required an effort of imagination to find in them a memory of that sublime seraglio of the Parisian theatres, exposed every evening to the desires of several thousand men. On all of these charming types appeared the mark of weariness and age. Some ossified into faded skeletons, others ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... (sic). She is widow of the late vizier, who was killed at Peterwaradin, though that ought rather to be called a contract than a marriage, since she never has lived with him; however, the greatest part of his wealth is hers. He had the permission of visiting her in the seraglio; and, being one of the handsomest men in the empire, had very much engaged her affections.—When she saw this second husband, who is at least fifty, she could not forbear bursting into tears. He is indeed a man of ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... as I walked in, that a long avenue in the distance led directly to a high yellow-walled enclosure. That must be the Imperial seraglio, where the hundreds of young Manchu women provided by tradition for the amusement of the Emperor were imprisoned for life. In the haste of the Court's flight, the majority of them had been abandoned, and only the most valuable taken off. Everybody ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... later with his wife and family and his mother-in-law, Mrs. Dymoke, and eight sailor-artisans, to take possession of the islands, but found there already one Alexander Hare, who meanwhile had marked the little atoll as a sort of Eden for a seraglio of Malay women which he moved over from the coast of Africa. It was Boss's own brother, oddly enough, who freighted Hare and his crowd of women to the islands, not knowing of Captain John's plans to occupy the little world. And so Hare was there with his outfit, as ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... rid of these birds, which occasioned us great annoyance, than we were terrified by the appearance of a fowl of another kind, and infinitely larger than even the rocs which I met in my former voyages; for it was bigger than the biggest of the domes on your seraglio, oh, most Munificent of Caliphs. This terrible fowl had no head that we could perceive, but was fashioned entirely of belly, which was of a prodigious fatness and roundness, of a soft-looking substance, smooth, shining and striped with various colors. In its talons, the monster was bearing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... he had had Lucy's heart—as water to be poured over his feet. By Heaven, when he thought of it, he, James Adolphus, had been the greater rogue: to play the Grand Turk; to hoard that lovely, quivering creature in his still seraglio; to turn the key, and leave her there! And Jimmy Urquhart got in by the window. Of course he did. He was not an imaginative man by nature; but he was now a lover and had need to enhance his mistress. How better do that than by calling himself a d——d fool (the greatest blame he knew)? It follows ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... actual state of the city, the palace and gardens of the Seraglio occupy the eastern promontory, the first of the seven hills, and cover about one hundred and fifty acres of our own measure. The seat of Turkish jealousy and despotism is erected on the foundations of a Grecian republic; but it may be supposed that the Byzantines ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... in recent years that Kublai, or his general, Baian, had captured Quinsai and driven out the King of Mangi with his seraglio and his friends. The exile till then had only thought of pleasure, of wine, women, and song, the "sweet meat which cost him the sour sauce ye have heard," on the approach of danger, had fled on board the ships he had prepared to "certain impregnable isles in the ocean," and if these impregnable ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... nature, in preserving the individual, and in perpetuating the species; but to rely on their use as a principal constituent of happiness, were an error in speculation, and would be still more an error in practice. Even the master of the seraglio, for whom all the treasures of empire are extorted from the hoards of its frighted inhabitants, for whom alone the choicest emerald and the diamond are drawn from the mine, for whom every breeze is enriched with perfumes, for whom beauty is assembled from every ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... in custody; and at length released on condition that he should never be employed again in the empire. The war in Hungary produced no event of importance. The ministry of the Ottoman Porte was distracted by factions, and the seraglio threatened with tumults. The people were tired of maintaining an unsuccessful war; the vizier was deposed; and in the midst of this confusion, the garrison of great Waradin, which had been blocked up by the imperialists during the whole winter, surrendered on capitulation. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... ladies of Venice may be carefully watched by their husbands, they are neither secluded nor guarded in a seraglio like the Turkish women; for during our stay at Venice, a great person spoke to his Majesty of a young and beautiful Greek, who was an enthusiastic admirer of the Emperor of the French. This lady was very ambitious ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Not cosend nor forsworne to gett her favour, Bestowes no rings nor empties his Exchequer To appear still in new rich suites, but lives Free o' the stock of Nature, yet loves none. Like the great Turke he walkes in his Seraglio, And doth command which concubine best pleases; When he has done he falls to graze or sleepe, And makes as he had never knowne the Dun, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... you?" cried the captain. "You find me like Monsieur de Bonneval—in my seraglio, and surrounded by my slaves. You do not know Monsieur de Bonneval, ladies: he is a pasha of three tails, who, like me, could not bear romances, but who understood how to live. Heaven preserve me from such ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... that his women were very desirous to see me, and requested that I would favour them with a visit. An attendant was ordered to conduct me; and I had no sooner entered the court appropriated to the ladies, than the whole seraglio surrounded me: some begging for physic, some for amber; and all of them desirous of trying that great African specific, blood-letting. They were ten or twelve in number, most of them young and handsome, ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... Turkey, in its naked rudeness, hardly admits of representation before a cultivated public. Racine felt this, and merely refined the forms without changing the main incidents. The mutes and the strangling were motives which in a seraglio could hardly be dispensed with; and so he gives, on several occasions, very elegant circumlocutory descriptions of strangling. This is, however, inconsistent; when people are so familiar with the idea of a thing, they usually call it also by ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... said to be of Tatar origin, signifying a dignitary or lord. Among the Turks it is applied to the chief of the janissaries, to the commanders of the artillery, cavalry and infantry, and to the eunuchs in charge of the seraglio. It is also employed generally as a term of respect in addressing wealthy men of leisure, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... beyond all measure Incurred the desperate displeasure Of his Serene and raging Highness: Whether he twitched his most revered And sacred beard, Or had intruded on the shyness Of the seraglio, or let fly An epigram at royalty, None knows: his sin was an occult one, But records tell us that the Sultan, Meaning to terrify the knave, Exclaimed, "'Tis time to stop that breath; Thy doom is sealed, presumptuous slave! Thou ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... old friendship for me, had recently sent me stuffs of Asia and essences of the seraglio, under the pretence of politeness and as a remembrance. I wrote two lines to the Marquise, engaging her to come and sacrifice half an hour to me to admire with me these curiosities. Suspecting nothing, she came to my apartments, when she accepted ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... Apiarian laws would be a strange Utopia! the bowstring would be used there as unmercifully as it is in the seraglio, to say nothing of the summary mode of bringing down the population to the means of subsistence. But this is straying from the subject. The consequences of defective order are indeed frightful, whether we regard the physical or the moral ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... melancholy light of a full moon rising behind the palace. To suit a less-intelligent class, it would perhaps be described as the escape of a Turkish captive by leaping from the upper floor of the Sultan's seraglio into the arms of her gallant rescuer, who would be American, British, French, German, or Spanish, according to the predominating nationality of my audience. Or it might be called 'A Thrilling Incident of the Great New York Fire,' in which case Juliet's moonlight would be spoken ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... the experienced local gunners will tell you that in the mating season you will usually find a gobbler accompanied by two or more Turkey hens. When a female gets ready to make her nest she slips away from her sultan and the other members {56} of the seraglio and, going to some broom-sedge field or open place in the woods, constructs her nest on the ground beneath some slight, convenient shelter. Day after day she absents herself for a short time, and the speckled treasures grow in number until from twelve to fifteen have been ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... have the corrupted name again for once, it is so scented with sweet memories!), the usage was highly laudable, and most worthy of imitation. "O, yes! Let us," said the other creature with a jump, "have a Seraglio." ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... bulawan. They are made generally half a yard wide, and three yards long: these sell at Fas, from two to fifty dollars each. The superior kind made for the ladies of the horam[157], or emperor's seraglio, for the ladies of the bashaws, and for those of the great and opulent, are intermixed with a beautiful gold-thread, much superior to any that is manufactured in Europe, insomuch, that the gold-thread imported ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... respects in the condition of slaves: in one particular they were especially so, namely, that on the death of a sovereign they descended, like any other property, to the heir, who added as many of them as he pleased to his own seraglio. Until this was done, the unfortunate women were shut up in close seclusion on the death of their lord, like mourners who retire from the world when suffering any ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... that he cannot spare his brave Khan; he made an overture, which Krimgirai gladly accepted. One week before we started on our journey, the Khan was received by the sultan in his seraglio. The heads of forty rebels were displayed as a special honor in front of the seraglio, and, in the presence of the sultan himself, my master was again presented with belt and sword, and again reinstalled as Khan. ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... antelope, arms white as alabaster, and of the most graceful and perfectly-formed shapes, while the heart of the reader beats and grows faint, as did that of the happy Gaspard Debaran, the clown, who, when on the highest step of his ladder, was enabled to peep into the Seraglio of Constantinople—that recess concealed from the inspection of man. Sometimes also the reader may imagine himself indolently stretched on a carpet of Persian softness, luxuriously smoking the yellow tobacco of Turkistan through a long tube of jessamine and amber, ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... with her husband. Mademoiselle Celestine is a person whose points of beauty are so numerous that, in order to describe her, it would be necessary to translate the thirty verses which we are told form an inscription in the seraglio of the Grand Turk and contain each of them an excellent description of one of the thirty beauties ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... independence that he refused a most liberal offer from the King of Prussia to become his chapel-master, for some unexplained reason which involved his sense of right and wrong. The first year of his marriage he wrote "Il Seraglio," and made the acquaintance of the aged Gluck, who took a deep interest in him and warmly praised his genius. Haydn, too, recognized his brilliant powers. "I tell you, on the word of an honest man," ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... 24, Mormondom threw up its first trenches in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, as that saline body was then known and recorded. In this salubrious region was planted the analogy of the harem of Mohammed, and the seraglio of Brigham became the center of the sensual system of the Latter-Day Saints. So blatant was the apostle Heber Kimball that he said he himself had enough wives to whip the ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... something divinely inspired and irradiate with spiritual beauty, apparent to his fellows and remembered after his mysterious death, which justified his canonisation, and removed it from the region of Imperial makebelieve. If this was not the case, if Antinous died like a flower cropped from the seraglio garden of the court-pages, how should the Emperor in the first place have bewailed him with 'unhusbanded passion,' and the people afterwards have received him as a god? May it not have been that he was a youth of more than ordinary promise, gifted with intellectual enthusiasms ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... could such a practice exist, even for a single day?—Imagine a revolution brought about in a Turkish seraglio, and the harem rendered the abode of bearded men; or conceive some beautiful woman in our own country running distracted at the sight of her numerous lovers murdering one another before her eyes, out of jealousy ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... hour. He was dignified with the appellation of the king's slave; had, perhaps, been purchased from obscure parents, in a country which he had never known; and was trained up from his infancy in the severe discipline of the seraglio. [53] His name, his wealth,his honors, were the gift of a master, who might, without injustice, resume what he had bestowed. Rustan's knowledge, if he possessed any, could only serve to confirm his habits by prejudices. His language afforded not words for any ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... you, that in participation in this world's affairs, more especially in their moral aspects, the Count of Monte Cristo has never ceased to entertain the scruples and even the superstitions of the East. I, who have a seraglio at Cairo, one at Smyrna, and one at Constantinople, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... clean at his leisure, far ben in the cranny o' the rock, and come out a' tosh and tidy by the first dawn o' licht, to snuff the mornin' air, and visit the distant farm-house before Partlet has left her perch, or Count Crow lifted his head from beneath his oxter on his shed-seraglio. ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... and was condemned by the Kaiser to six months' confinement in his little castle. In Yildiz Kiosk, the tyrant who still throve there conferred on her the Order of Chastity, and offered her the central couch in his seraglio. She gave her performance in the Quirinal, and, from the Vatican, the Pope launched against her a Bull which fell utterly flat. In Petersburg, the Grand Duke Salamander Salamandrovitch fell enamoured of her. Of every article in the apparatus ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... though of that there is almost nothing which represents the great period of the sea-republic, except the fine, and in most parts well-conditioned walls. Here and there a double-arched window, with a bit of fine carving in the capitals, peeps out from the jutting uglinesses of seraglio windows, close latticed and mysterious; one or two fine doorways, neglected and battered as to their ornamentation, some coats of arms, three or four arched gateways, and as many fountains, are all that will catch the eye of the artist inside the walls, unless ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... their curiosity. If it had been some species of food it would at once have revealed itself, but these packages suggested something more important. What could they be? Were there treasures inside—jewels, or golden ornaments from some Moorish seraglio, or strange coin from ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... that I have approached Constantinople from the Marmora Sea and have watched that glorious and fascinating panorama—Seraglio Point, St. Sophia, Stamboul, the Golden Horn, the Galata Bridge, the heights of Pera, Dolmabagtche, Yildiz—slowly unfold, revealing new beauties, new mysteries, with each revolution of the steamer's screw, I have declared that in all the world there is no city so lovely as this ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... second tower there were six other bells, and, finally, six smaller ones inhabited the belfry over the crossing, with the wooden bell, which rang only between after dinner on Good Friday and the morning of the day before Easter. So Quasimodo had fifteen bells in his seraglio; but big Marie ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... did the Pope; the one to guard his women, the other to say his prayers. These were of a peculiar kind, incapable of reproduction. Scarcely human beings, they were useful to voluptuousness and to religion. The seraglio and the Sistine Chapel utilized the same species of monsters; fierce in the former case, mild ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... and extent of Constantinople are not within the compass of one of our pages; but the annexed Engraving furnishes some idea of a section of this queen of cities. It extends from Seraglio Point to the Janissaries' Tower, and though commanding only a portion of the city, includes the domes of the magnificent mosques of Santa Sophia and the Sultan Achmet, which rise from a vast assemblage of towers, palaces, minarets, &c. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... Zembla,' took possession, not only of the affections, but even of the senses of the young king, George III., who, assisted by the widowed Princess of Wales (supposed to be attached to Lord Bute), was 'lugged out of the seraglio,' ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... cushions in the State Pavilion. 'On State occasions, among which it is evident that he included this Quaker audience, he delighted to deck his unpleasing person in a vest of cloth of gold, lined with sable of the richest contrasting blackness. Around him were ranged the servants of the Seraglio—the highest rank of lacqueys standing nearest the royal person, the "Paicks" in their embroidered coats and caps of beaten gold, and the "Solacks," adorned with feathers, and armed with bows and arrows. ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... bold Kurroglu, when he read the lady's billet, assumed the dress of a Haji, gained access to the seraglio gardens on the presence that he was entrusted with a private message to the Princess Nighara from her father the Sultan, whom he had met on the road to Mecca, and carried the amorous young lady to his fortress of Chamley-bill.—The story, together with ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... town of Venice ever recalls a series of Eastern ideas and adventures. I cannot help thinking St. Mark's a mosque, and the neighbouring palace some vast seraglio, full of arabesque saloons, embroidered sofas, and ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... that oozes from a plumb-tree upon your fingers, because it is vegetable, but if you have any candle-grease, any tallow upon your fingers, you are uneasy till you rub it off. I have often thought, that, if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns, or cotton—I mean stuffs made of vegetable substances. I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean: it will be very nasty before it is perceived to be so. Linen ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... in June, 1834; and, though his death had been some time expected, he no sooner breathed his last than charges of 'dinai', slow poison, were got up, as usual, in the zenana (seraglio). ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... he would think it safe to be at such a distance. Yet, notwithstanding, we have found that reason of State hath given place to that of health, or rather, to the intrigues of Rauchenara Begum, who was wild to breathe a more free air than that of the Seraglio, and to have her turn in showing herself to a gallant and magnificent army, as her sister had formerly done during the reign ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... see the world without being seen, certainly gives you a tempting advantage over the untimely caller or the impertinent creditor; but it encourages, in my opinion, a habit of vision better adapted to a sultan's seraglio than to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... the mystery was disclosed. A little white slave from the seraglio of this embryo tyrant had flown the cage! No wonder she was watched, little surprise that she did not care to eat. He straightened himself, the hair on his round head like ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... principle, that common nouns ending in o preceded by a consonant take es for the plural. Murray says, "Nouns which end in o have sometimes es added, to form the plural; as, cargo, echo, hero, negro, manifesto, potato, volcano, wo: and sometimes only s; as, folio, nuncio, punctilio, seraglio."—Octavo Gram., p. 40. This amounts to nothing, unless it is to be inferred from his examples, that others like them in form are to take s or es accordingly; and this is what I teach, though it cannot be said that ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... is commonly felt by every married man; he cannot, from the roving nature of their mode of life, surround his wives with the walls of a seraglio, but custom and etiquette have drawn about them barriers nearly as impassable. When a certain number of families are collected together they encamp at a common spot; and each family has a separate hut, or perhaps two. ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... expect it,' said Scythrop, 'when the whole thousand were locked up in his seraglio? His experience is no precedent for a free state of society like ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... him, feigned a passionate interest in his melons. And he was taken in, and used to discourse on them by the hour. On fine days he was driven to the green-houses in his pony-chair, and waddled through them, prodding and leering at the fruit, like a fat Turk in his seraglio. When he bragged to me of the expense of growing them I was reminded of a hideous old Lothario bragging of what his pleasures cost. And the resemblance was completed by the fact that he couldn't eat as much as a mouthful of his ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... her outer costume of white linen and stood dressed for the house, the seraglio. Upon her head was a chachia, a little velvet cap, embroidered with seed-pearls. Her bust was clothed with a rlila, or bolero of brocaded silk, beneath which was a vest of muslin, heavy with ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... had failed disastrously in their attempt on Malta, and his successor, Selim II (whom Ottoman historians surname "the Drunkard"), was reported to be a half-imbecile wretch, devoid of either intelligence or enterprise. So Europe breathed more freely. But while the "Drunkard" idled in his seraglio by the Golden Horn, the old statesmen, generals, and admirals, whom Suleiman had formed, were still living, and Europe had lulled itself ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... friends. But if you and yours were with me, eating dates in a garden at Constantinople, you might assert that we were in the best of all possible places; and I should answer, Amen: and if our wives rebelled, we would send for the chief of the black eunuchs, and sell them to the Seraglio. Then should Moses [3] learn Arabic, and we would know whether there was anything in the language or not. We would drink Cyprus wine and Mocha coffee, and smoke more tranquilly than ever we did in the Ship in ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... for ransom, and on his return presented himself before the sultan, who fancied he perceived a sort of intimacy between the young man and Zara, which excited his suspicion and jealousy. A letter, begging that Zara would meet him in a "secret passage" of the seraglio, fell into the sultan's hands, and confirmed his suspicions. Zara went to the rendezvous, where Osman met her and stabbed her to the heart. Nerestan was soon brought before him, and told him he had murdered his sister, and all he ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... about four o'clock, I set out for the seraglio with Dr Teriano, the Vizier's physician, and the Vizier's Italian secretary. The gate of the palace was not unlike the entrance to some of the closes in Edinburgh, and the court within reminded me of Smithfield, in London; but it was not surrounded by such lofty buildings, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... as Gholab Bashaw, and the next day set forth amidst great Acclamations, and in sumptuous state, for Constantinople. Arrived there, I was handsomely lodged in a Palace close to the Old Seraglio, and admitted to no less than three solemn Audiences with the Commander of the Faithful, the Caliph Al Islam, the Padishaw of Roum, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... dazzling sunlight, these blue-eyed youths of yesteryear, now dressed in khaki and fez, many of them yellow from the malaria from which they had recovered; and as, amid the applause of the Turkish soldiers, they marched into the seraglio I could understand the amazement of the crowd. I have seen men of spirit and men of determination and courage, but I have found few at the same time so modest, so uncorruptible by fame, as these German soldiers. Can there be a greater temptation to lead young officers astray ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... entered the dungeon, you shall escape, on condition of being my LOCUM TENENS, as we said at the Mareschal-College, until your warder visits his prisoners. But if not, I will first strangle you—I learned the art from a Polonian heyduck, who had been a slave in the Ottoman seraglio—and then seek ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... others have grown rich and have led useful lives. Yes, it is San Francisco at last! And while it looms upon the view with its varied landscape, its hills and towered buildings, I am reminded of another October morning when I first saw Constantinople, when old Stamboul with its Seraglio Point, and Galata with its tower, and Pera on the heights above, and Yildiz to the east, and Scutari across the Bosphorus, all were revealed gradually as the mists rolled away. So the Golden City of the West is disclosed ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... seemed to have contributed some stray fragment of its learning, some example of its art. Nothing seemed lacking to this philosophical kitchen-midden, from a redskin's calumet, a green and golden slipper from the seraglio, a Moorish yataghan, a Tartar idol, to the soldier's tobacco pouch, to the priest's ciborium, and the plumes that once adorned a throne. This extraordinary combination was rendered yet more bizarre by the accidents of ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the morning, I was standing on deck; we made sail towards the mouth of the Bosphorus, skirting the walls of Constantinople. After half an hour's navigation through ships at anchor, we touched the walls of the seraglio, which prolongs those of the city, and form, at the extremity of the hill which supports the proud Stamboul, the angle which separates the sea of Marmora from the canal of the Bosphorus, and the harbour of the Golden Horn. It is there that God and man, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... be taken by a party of Hircanians, who conducted me to their prince's tent, at the very moment that Missouf was brought before him. Thou wilt doubtless be pleased to hear that the prince thought me beautiful; but thou wilt be sorry to be informed that he designed me for his seraglio. He told me, with a blunt and resolute air, that as soon as he had finished a military expedition, which he was just going to undertake, he would come to me. Judge how great must have been my grief. My ties with Moabdar were already dissolved; I might have been the wife ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... respectful audience to Arab fortune-tellers, paying twenty-para pieces for the revelations he is favoring them with, and handing over the coins with the business-like air of people satisfied that they are getting its full equivalent. Consequently I am not much astonished when, rounding Seraglio Point, my companion calls my attention to several large sections of whalebone suspended on the wall facing the water, and tells me that they are placed there by the fishermen, who believe them to be a talisman ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... fresher when speaking of the war of the sexes. For one sentence out of many, though we find it to be but the clever literary clothing of a common accusation: 'Men may have rounded Seraglio Point: they have not yet ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... mortals such as these that nations suffer, that parties struggle, that warriors fight and bleed. A year afterwards gallant heads were falling, and Nithsdale in escape, and Derwentwater on the scaffold; whilst the heedless ingrate, for whom they risked and lost all, was tippling with his seraglio of mistresses in his petite ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Abdoollah was a healthy active boy, indulging in the sports of the field, and anxiously awaiting the time when he should be of sufficient age to join in the more exciting scenes of the chuppao. The old nurse, the proposer of the successful scheme, was highly honoured, and became chief attendant in the seraglio, which office ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... fifteen years of age married Maria, daughter of Stanislas, the dethroned king of Poland. The whole life of Louis was one of idle sensuality. When he was old he established a seraglio of fifteen-year-old girls, the most beautiful that could be bought or kidnapped. On this harem he spent a hundred million francs, or twenty million dollars. It was he who, when warned of the impending ruin of his ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... nor that of Akka has yet dared openly to erect the standard of rebellion; they enjoy all the benefits of the protection of the supreme government, but depend much more upon their own strength, than on the caprice of the Sultan, or on their intrigues in the seraglio for the continuance of their power. The policy of the Porte is to flatter and load with honours those whom she cannot ruin, and to wait for some lucky accident by which she may regain her power; but, above all, to avoid a formal rupture, which would only serve ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... scurvily, that is to say, be always fashionably drunk, despise the Tyranny of your Bed, and reign absolutely—keep a Seraglio of Women, and let my Bastard Issue inherit; be seen once a Quarter, or so, with you in the Park for Countenance, where we loll two several ways in the gilt Coach like Janus, or ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... philosophy of love, and I would ask if it be conceivable that the abominable calumny prompted by theological virus, that he kept a seraglio, as his friend Leigh Hunt informs us was reported, had any real existence. Shelley was too pure for any such idea as that of promiscuous sexual intercourse to be acted on by himself; his life, which ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... they do not eat money,—at least, not in the form of bullion, or specie, or notes. These Washington banks, unlike those of London, Paris, and New York, are open mainly at night and all night long, are situated invariably in the second story, guarded as jealously as any seraglio, and admit nobody but strangers,—that is to say, everybody in Washington. This is singular. Still more singular is the fact, that the best food, served in the most exquisite manner, and (with sometimes a slight variation) the choicest wines and cigars, may ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... man, formerly a leather-seller; the latter going with his family to sea on a party of pleasure, are taken prisoners by Carlos and his servants, disguised as Turks. They are carried to a country house, and made to believe they are in the Grand Turk's seraglio. There is also an underplot, in which Isabella, Francisco's proud and vain daughter, is courted by Guilion, a supposed Count, but in reality a chimney-sweep, whose hand she accepts. In the end everything is discovered, and Guilion comes ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... intrigues of women and eunuchs within the palace, and the sanguinary feuds and excesses of the soldiery without. The Sultan Ibrahim, the only surviving brother and successor of Mourad, was in his twenty-fifth year at the time of his accession; but he had been closely immured in the seraglio from the moment of his birth; and the dulness of his temperament (to which he probably owed his escape from the bowstring, by which the lives of his three brothers had been terminated by order of Mourad) had never been improved by cultivation. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... testify as to no rights or wrongs, as against a white man. So that the master might take his slave with him when he committed murder or did any other act in contravention of law or right, and that slave was like the mute eunuch of the seraglio, silent and voiceless before the law. Indeed, the law had done for the slave-owner, with infinitely more of mercy and kindness, what the mutilators of the upper Nile were wont to do for the keepers of the harems of Cairo and Constantinople—provided ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... near it a trough for the horses. Shielding the house from storms, on the north, were the barns and the farm-yard. There stood the broad-wheeled wains and the antique ploughs and the harrows; There were the folds for the sheep; and there, in his feathered seraglio, Strutted the lordly turkey, and crowed the cock, with the selfsame Voice that in ages of old had startled the penitent Peter. Bursting with hay were the barns, themselves a village. In each one Far o'er the gable projected a roof of thatch; ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... difficult to express by written signs: "May, commang! maydemosels, je suis atonnay! May! commang! Maydemosel Descuilles, je suis surprise! Kesse ke say! vous permattay maydemosels etre lay filles d'ung seraglio! je ne vou pau! je vous defang! je suis biang atonnay!" And so she departed, with our prompter's copy, leaving us rather surprised, ourselves, at the unsuspected horror we had been about to perpetrate, and Mademoiselle Descuilles shrugging her shoulders ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Charles was more a Frenchman than an Englishman; more a courtier than a king; and fitter to be a page in the seraglio than either. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... granite columns, many of them bearing inscriptions, every where intermingled with the masonry, it is evident that the fortifications of Constantinople were built of the remnants of the ancient capital. This is peculiarly visible in the neighbourhood of the seraglio, where Irene's palace is supposed to have formerly stood. Facing the water is that portion of the suburbs inhabited by the Armenians, but presenting no attractions to the stranger, being exceedingly crowded and dirty; and along ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... you'd make nothing out of it if you went to buying evening clothes. I've thought of that. Mrs. Nathanmeyer has a troop of daughters, a perfect seraglio, all ages and sizes. She'll be glad to fit you out, if you aren't sensitive about wearing kosher clothes. Let me take you to see her, and you'll find that she'll arrange that easily enough. I told her she must produce something nice, blue or yellow, and properly ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... father's lifetime, my mother had been supplied with rich dresses by one of the merchants who was employed by the ladies of the grand seignior's seraglio. My brother had done this merchant some trifling favours, and, upon application to him, he readily engaged to recommend the new scarlet dye. Indeed, it was so beautiful, that, the moment it was seen, it was preferred to every other colour. Saladin's shop was soon crowded with customers; and his ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... of the beautiful boats which ply on the canal, I proceeded, accompanied by my janissary and dragoman, to make the circuit of the city, by rowing round the Seraglio Point into the sea of Marmora, then landing at the Seven Towers, and walking across the isthmus by the famous wall to the Golden Horn, where we again embarked, and returned to Pera. On passing the Seraglio Point, we remarked a number of cannon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... So satisfactory was this that Lord Grey expressed the greatest anxiety that the Russian armament should arrive in time to arrest the progress of the Egyptians. They did arrive—at least the fleet did—and dropped anchor under the Seraglio. At this juncture arrived Admiral Roussin in a ship of war, and as Ambassador of France. He immediately informed the Sultan that the interposition of Russia was superfluous, that he would undertake to conclude a treaty, and to answer for the acquiescence of the Pacha, and he sent a project one article ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville |
