"St. Vitus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... began to hop up and down in a manner most distressing. Supposing the attack to be only temporary, I paused and, much to my relief, she soon showed signs of recovery; and in the course of time she came to a standstill looking up into my face in an inquiring sort of way, apparently wondering why St. Vitus had not paid his respects to me also. A second attempt to follow the music met with results similar to the first, and during the third attempt, which seemed to be trembling on the verge of a failure, St. Vitus let go my companion ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... St. Vitus has been doubted, and his dance (Chorea Sancti Vit) is supposed to have been originally chorea invita. But the strangest of saints was S. Viar, who is thus accounted for by D'Israeli in his ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... strongest side. The one will not conform to any common practice: the other will subscribe to any thriving system. The one is the slave of habit: the other is the sport of caprice. The first is like a man obstinately bed-rid: the last is troubled with St. Vitus's dance. He cannot stand still, he cannot rest upon any conclusion. 'He never is—but ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... with the other; which of course is very clever of him. He's marvellously ambidexterous so long as he doesn't know you're looking at him. Unfortunately, my eye arrested him in the double act. Lucy, my eye must have some horrible malignant power, for it instantly gave him St. Vitus's dance. Have you ever noticed ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the road, his shoulders were shaking suspiciously. Miss Mattie was watching him through the lace curtains that glorified the parlour windows. "Seems as if he had St. Vitus's dance," she mused. "Wonder why he doesn't mix up some ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... apostle of St. Vitus on the dock was Remsen Van Dam! Well, that's all right. She isn't engaged to ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... as long as I can remember, been very nervous and sensitive. When about seven years of age, I was attacked by St. Vitus' Dance. Before that I cannot say whether I was particularly nervous or not. Afterward it was impressed upon me by the remarks of relatives that I was nervous, so that I soon took note of this condition myself. The manner in which this weakness has been especially troublesome is that it has caused ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... incubating four pretty pale-blue eggs in a nest built on a ledge in an outhouse or on the sill of a clerestory window. This bird, which is thought by some to be a near relative of the sparrow of the Scriptures, is clothed in plain brown and seems to suffer from St. Vitus' dance in the tail. Doubtless it is often mistaken for a hen robin. For this mistake there is no excuse, because the rock-chat lacks the brick-red ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... thus produced. We have seen that many Hungarian swine-herds make fire on Midsummer Eve by rotating a wheel round a wooden axle wrapt in hemp, and that they drive their pigs through the fire thus made. At Obermedlingen, in Swabia, the "fire of heaven," as it was called, was made on St. Vitus's Day (the fifteenth of June) by igniting a cart-wheel, which, smeared with pitch and plaited with straw, was fastened on a pole twelve feet high, the top of the pole being inserted in the nave of the wheel. This fire was made on the summit ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... said, and he jerked and skipped up and down, never stopping an instant, just as if he had St. Vitus's dance. "Ain't I ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, over-heated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St. Vitus's dance, and imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... never seen her keyed to such a pitch, and manlike, he attempted to calm her instead of rising to her own level. "Got what? St. Vitus' dance?" ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... luck it was not safe to loiter near the place after dark, if you wished to keep your senses. And if you took so much as a fallen apple belonging to Miss Betty, you might look out for palsy or St. Vitus' dance, or be carried off bodily to the ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... demanded. "Have you got St. Vitus' dance? Sit down an' quit frettin' people with your eternal ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... not encountered Caleb Plummer leading in his daughter. This spectacle restoring her to a sense of the proprieties, she stood for some few moments silent, with her mouth wide open; and then, posting off to the bed on which the Baby lay asleep, danced in a weird, St. Vitus manner on the floor, and at the same time rummaged with her face and head among the bedclothes, apparently deriving much relief from those ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... The St. Vitus's dance of parliamentary politics gave no satisfaction to anybody except the Jerome-Paturots, to whom it gave a social standing. But how many envious individuals were there to every one who was content? Parliament ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... been more carefully observed. Certain diseases are communicated to the child apparently by a process like inoculation, and the child is from the first affected; such cases may be here passed over. Large classes of diseases usually appear at certain ages, such as St. Vitus's dance in youth, consumption in early mid-life, gout later, and apoplexy still later; and these are naturally inherited at the same period. But even in diseases of this class, instances have been recorded, as ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... marking time with the body, as an accompaniment to music, though the same—without the music—is done with only the head and forefinger in a New England meeting-house at psalm time. (The peculiar dance named in honor of St. Vitus is executed with or without music, at the option of the musician.) But the body is a clumsy piece of machinery, requiring some attention and observation to keep it accurately in time to the fiddling. The ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... once absorbed into his system a love for fishing or hunting, he is under the influence of an invisible power greater than that of vaccine matter or the virus of rabies. The sporting-fever is the veritable malady of St. Vitus, holding its victim forever on the go, as game-seasons come, and so long as back and legs, eye and ear, can wrestle with Time's infirmities. It breeds ambition, boasting, and "yarns" to a proverbial extent, with a general disbelief ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... supernatural proceedings, which went so far that not above two cups and saucers remained out of a valuable set of china. She next abandoned her dwelling, and took refuge with a neighbour, but, finding his movables were seized with the same sort of St. Vitus's dance, her landlord reluctantly refused to shelter any longer a woman who seemed to be persecuted by so strange a subject of vexation. Mrs. Golding's suspicions against Anne Robinson now gaining ground, she ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... until death stopped them. I sometimes think, when I watch the follies at Whitehall, that those graceful dancers, sliding upon pointed toe through a coranto, amid a blaze of candles and star-shine of diamonds, are capering along the same fatal road by which St. Vitus lured his votaries to the grave. And then I look at Rowley's licentious eye and cynical lip, and think to myself, 'This man's father perished on the scaffold; this man's lovely ancestress paid the penalty of her manifold treacheries after sixteen years' imprisonment; this man ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... the head, causing you, when you lift it, to look darkly upon various green spots dancing about your eyes. Raspberries again, and blackberries, sting like the dev—I beg pardon, making your hands twitch up like a fit of St. Vitus' dance. But picking whortleberries is all plain sailing. Here are the berries and there are your baskets; no getting on your knees, (although it must be confessed the bushes are somewhat low,) and no pricking your fingers to the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... in Bruce County, Province of Ontario, Dominion of Canada, there lived a man who was destined to establish a precedent. He was to prove to the world that a rolling stone is capable at times of gathering as much moss as a stationary one, and how it is possible for the rock with St. Vitus dance to become more coated than the one that is confined to perpetual isolation. Like most iconoclasts he was of humble birth, and had no foundation upon which to rest the cornerstone of his castle, which was becoming too heavy for his brain ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... shape of the letter T, not forgetting to add, that T was the hieroglyphic for Thief. The villain himself affirmed it was simply the mark of a cross, burned into it by a blessed friar, as a charm against St. Vitus's dance, to which he had once been subject. The people, however, were rather sceptical, not of the friar's power to cure that malady, but of the fact of his ever having moved a limb under it; and they concluded with telling him, good-humoredly ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... is either an express veracity, the image of what passes within him; or else is a bit of Devil-worship which he and the rest of us will have to pay for yet? Alas, the grins he executes upon his poor mind (which is all tortured into St. Vitus dances, and ghastly merry-andrewisms, by the practice) are the most extraordinary this sun ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... -fish. And then the horrid truth flashed across my mind. The thing in front of me was a ghost—a miserable relic of some bygone pageant, and visible only to myself, who have an eye to that sort of thing. Luckily the bobbie missed his stroke, and as I apologized, telling him I had St. Vitus's dance and could not control my unhappy leg, accompanying the apology with a half sovereign—both of which were accepted—peace reigned, and I shortly had the bliss of seeing the whole sovereign ride by—that is, I was told that the lady behind the parasol, which obscured ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... mind you, who, I believe, hates Willett himself. I've just got him stowed away for the night. Had to take him out of earshot of the store and put him in limbo at Craney's shack, where he can't hear what's going on. I gave him a dose that would flatten out St. Vitus himself. There'll be no budging Case this night unless—but that ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... rowdy Flings— For they made you overseas In politer times than these, In an age when grace could please, Ere St. Vitus Clutched and shook us, spine and knees;— Loosed a plague of jerks to ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... make the man, she was forced into marrying, fall into a trance, just before the marriage ceremony was to take place; and that, instead of bringing this about, the spell Edward Curtis had sold her had caused her to have St. Vitus's Dance,—was adroitly trapped into admitting that she had really wanted her fiance smitten with paralysis. "A wish," Gerald Kirby announced, with a dramatic flourish of his hands, "that so aroused my client's indignation that, instead of giving her the spell she wanted, he ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... a dream, as if they all were only half-awakened somnambulists; but the actors were simply victims of St. Vitus's dance. One of them, a tall old man, a mere skeleton with a long white beard, left the ring and begun whirling vertiginously, with his arms spread like wings, and loudly grinding his long, wolf-like teeth. ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... too hastily by rubbing mercurial or arsenical preparations over the whole body, or on too great a part of it, many bad symptoms are produced; as weakness of digestion, with pale bloated countenance, and tendency to dropsy. I have twice seen St. Vitus's dance occur from the use of a mercurial girdle; and once a swelled liver. I have also seen a swelled spleen and swelled legs from the external use of arsenic in the cure of the itch. And very numerous and large phlegmons commonly succeed the too hasty cure ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... certified to be suffering from St. Vitus's Dance, fits, chronic cold accompanied by violent sneezing, or any disease necessitating involuntary motions, ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... . . . "well, I'm not a physician, and cannot define accurately; but there are certain nervous diseases—hysterical simulation, nervous affections such as St. Vitus' dance—as well, of course, as purely mental diseases, such ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... of the miraculous power of the child-saint from the lives of St. Genevieve (423-512, A.D.), St. Vitus, who at the age of twelve caused the arms and legs of the Emperor Aurelian to wither, but on the Emperor owning the greatness of God, the "child-magician," as the monarch had termed him, made Aurelian ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain |
