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More "Degeneracy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... course of time; remark the several gradations by which corruption steals into the world, and oppose it in every step, by giving perpetual warning and instruction to mankind; which, added to the strong influence of our own example, would probably prevent that continual degeneracy of human nature so justly ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... dialogue called 'Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition, partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis he conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of God intermarried with the daughters of men, for he supposes the earliest race to have been indeed the children of God; and to have corrupted themselves, until 'their spot was ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Leicesters. Since 1810 Mr. Barford has acted on the same principle with the Foscote flock. He asserts that half a century {120} of experience has convinced him that when two nearly related animals are quite sound in constitution, in-and-in breeding does not induce degeneracy; but he adds that he "does not pride himself on breeding from the nearest affinities." In France the Naz flock has been bred for sixty years without the introduction of a single strange ram.[254] Nevertheless, most great breeders of sheep have protested against ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... little for plain Fact, these people, and were in that advanced state of degeneracy on the subject, that instead of being impressed by the speaker's strong common sense, they took it in extraordinary dudgeon. The men muttered 'Shame!' and the women 'Brute!' and Sleary, in some haste, communicated the following hint, apart ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... was disposed to candle-light pleasures and cockney diversions; to Marybone and the Mall, and shrinking from the athletic and social recreations which, like so much that was manly and English, were confined almost to the English squire pur et simple after the Hanoverian accession; when so much degeneracy for a while obscured the English character, debased its tone, enervated its best races, vilified its literature, corrupted its morals, changed its costume, and degraded ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... John, by a very old Yorkshire collector, makes it milk for all time, a perpetual contrast, and a rebuke. Compared with the portrait of Jane Mattock in her fiery aureole of hair on the walls of the breakfast-room, it marks that fatal period of degeneracy for us, which our critics of Literature as well as Art are one voice in denouncing, when the complex overwhelms the simple, and excess of signification is attempted, instead of letting plain nature speak her uncorrupted tongue to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... cottage I have a wine there—the fellow to that—I think you would, I do think you would"—Mr. Thompson meant to say, he thought his client would arrive at something of a similar jocund contemplation of his fellows in their degeneracy that inspirited lawyers after potation, but condensed the sensual ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... much of his appearance was typical of the Kentucky mountaineer. His face was strongly individual, and belonged to no type. Black brows and lashes gave a distinctiveness to gray eyes so clear as to be luminous. A high and splendidly molded forehead and a squarely blocked chin were free of that degeneracy which marks the wasting of an in-bred people. The nose was straight, and the mouth firm yet mobile. It was the face of the instinctive philosopher, tanned to a hickory brown. In a stature of medium size, ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... by the Englishman Cave; he has maintained that the Church of Christ, with respect to life and conduct, had begun to fall into decay immediately after the ascension of our Saviour, and still more after the death of the Apostles, and that this degeneracy had enormously increased since the age of ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... the Bard of the Victors ashamed of his mercenary Muse. In the Second Isthmian Ode, we find an elaborate justification of his practice of praising for pay,—a practice, he admits, unknown to primitive poets, but rendered inevitable, in his time, by the poverty of the craft, and the degeneracy of the many, with whom, in the language of the Spartan sage, "money made the man." With this Pindaric precedent, therefore, for selling Pindaric verses, it is no wonder, if the children of the Muse, in an age still more degenerate than that of their great original, found ample ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... of our masculine appearance in our riding habits, and indeed we think it is but reasonable that we should make reprisals upon you for the invasion of our dress and figure, and the advances you make in effeminency, and your degeneracy from the figure of man. Can there be a more ridiculous appearance than to see a smart fellow within the compass of five feet immersed in a huge long coat to his heels with cuffs to the arm pits, the shoulders and ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... so ever since the morning when Hengist and Horsa, Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle of Thanet. Gildas is the oldest historian of these islands, and his work consists entirely of a good old Tory lament in the Ashmead-Bartlett strain upon the degeneracy of the times and the proximate ruin of the British people. Gildas wrote some fourteen hundred years ago or thereabouts—and the country is not yet quite visibly ruined. On the contrary, it seems to the impartial eye a more eligible place of residence to-day than in the ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... British territory this time. The Rand would be the centre of a great war; and Rudyard Byng was not the man he had been, in spite of his show of valour and vigour at the Glencader Mine. Indeed, that incident had shown a certain physical degeneracy—he had been too slow in recovering from the few bad hours spent in the death-trap. The government at Whitehall still consulted him, still relied upon his knowledge and his natural tact; but secret as his conferences were with the authorities, they ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... allow ourselves, and which all the world admits our right to, happen to be such as waste wealth and time, make light of the advantage of others, and of the good of our own souls. This fact does not imply either original sinfulness or degeneracy—religious and scientific terms for the same thing—in poor mankind. It means merely that we are all of us as yet very undeveloped creatures; the majority, moreover, less developed than the minority, and the ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... favor them Imbecile and immoral minds fell to the lot of the aristocrat as often as to the lowly born. Nature's laws are inflexible and swerve not for any human wish. They outraged them by the admixture of kindred blood, and degeneracy was often the result. A people should always have for their chief ruler the highest and noblest intellect among them, but in those dark ages they were too often compelled to submit to the lowest, simply because it had been born to the position. ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... tribunal, or to the innocent who voluntarily chose to die. Human sacrifices of a different description run counter to the fundamental idea of a sacrificial act, and, wherever they occur among the Indo-Germanic stocks at least, are based on later degeneracy and barbarism. They never gained admission among the Romans; hardly in a single instance were superstition and despair induced, even in times of extreme distress, to seek an extraordinary deliverance through means so ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... by the three children, three different generations are designated, and the gradual degeneracy of the people, which sinks deeper and deeper. But this opinion must certainly be rejected. There is no gradation perceptible. On the contrary, the announcement of the total destruction of the kingdom of Israel is connected immediately with the name of the first child, ver. 4. Nor is it ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... the conclusion that it is an inevitable and characteristic expression of the American spirit. It is only natural for the sons and grandsons of the men who settled this country to take an interest in wholesome and vigorous sports; in fact it would be a sad commentary on the degeneracy of the modern generation if such an expression of their inheritance were not evident. But a distinctively American attitude towards sport is also manifested in the intense personal and university rivalries developed, the very rock upon which the modern system of inter-collegiate ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... which infected the manners of courts and cities, had instilled a secret and destructive poison into the camps of the legions; and their degeneracy has been marked by the pen of a military writer, who had accurately studied the genuine and ancient principles of Roman discipline. It is the just and important observation of Vegetius, that the infantry was invariably covered with defensive armor, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... Professor Davenport expressed the opinion that the human race will ultimately perish, and Major Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, one of the world's leading economists, gave expression to similar views. We are evidently traveling a downhill road and the tide of degeneracy is rising so fast it will certainly sweep us on to race extinction unless we return to sane and biologic living. We are primates, not carnivores like the dog, nor omnivores like the hog. The primates are fruit and nut eaters in whatever part of the world they are found. All the primates ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... social principles have been exposed, that there probably could not be found in any country, an instance in which the virtues of the whole people have been so completely debauched and contaminated (I do not say voluntarily), as those of the Irish have been by the leading advocates of repeal. The degeneracy of character, occasioned by those tampering with our national virtues, is such as we shall not recover from these thirty years to come. Many of our best, mellow-toned, old virtues, that pass in an unbroken link of hereditary beauty from father to son, and from family to family, like ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... enervation, both moral and aesthetic, which had overcome one of the last great French musicians, while, on the other hand, I could not help feeling that a tendency to a hypocritical or frankly impudent exploitation of the universal degeneracy marked all who could be designated as ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... this long history of manners and customs. Those great and magnificent social necessities have been well represented; but we ought surely to renounce the noble title of historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here depict the present degeneracy of the race of nobles, although we have already done so elsewhere,—in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf (in "The Lily of the Valley"), in the "Duchesse de Langeais," and the very nobleness of the ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... Caesar. To Caesar we must accord the merit of having seen that a continuation of the old oligarchical forms was impracticable This Cicero did not see. He thought that the wounds inflicted by the degeneracy and profligacy of individuals were curable. It is attributed to Caesar that he conceived the grand idea of establishing general liberty under the sole dominion of one great, and therefore beneficent, ruler. I think he saw no farther than that he, by strategy, ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... seasons of ease and prosperity living "without God in the world," and in seasons of distress or danger betaking themselves for relief to the rites of a superstitious worship. The apostle describes at once the secret cause and the successive steps of this sad degeneracy, when, speaking of the Gentiles, he says that "when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves wise, they became ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... reacted upon the family not only in preventing women from establishing social conditions suitable for their own best development and that of their children but has thrown over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy and ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... an evil-appearing savage with every mark of brutal degeneracy writ large upon his bestial countenance. To Jane Clayton he looked more gorilla than human. He tried to converse with her, but without success, and finally he called ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the older men lamenting the degeneracy of their people. "Our fathers were hunters and our mothers made good moccasins, but the young men are lazy loafers around the trading posts, and the women get money in bad ways to buy what they should make with ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... exercised a similar influence over his countrymen. Prophets, lawgivers, and sages have formed the character of other nations; it was reserved to a poet to form that of the Greeks. This is a feature in their character which was not wholly erased even in the period of their degeneracy. When lawgivers and sages appeared in Greece, the work of the poet had already been accomplished; and they paid homage to his superior genius. He held up before his nation the mirror in which they were to behold the world ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... relative industry and felicity with which they imitated the language and thoughts of a former age. They were the last monuments of civilized antiquity, the last of a noble race, which, after a long period of degeneracy, became ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... labour used not to be thought too great a price to pay for ultimate success," said Mr. Prendergast, almost sighing at the degeneracy of the age. "But men in those days ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... mental powers of that which succeeds. A race of overwrought brains in enfeebled bodies must be recruited from a more healthful stock, or their posterity will, in time, decline into idiocy or cease from the earth. The process of degeneracy, by an infallible law, will pass from the body to the intellect; and the descendant of a Luther or a Bacon go down to the level of the most stupid boor that drives his oxen over the ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... enforced by our New England fathers more than two hundred years ago, which history informs us were attended with the most beneficial results.[76] Although their descendants of the present generation should blush for their degeneracy, still we should be encouraged from an increasing disposition of late to return to these salutary restraints and needful checks upon ignorance and crime. Said the Honorable Josiah Quincy, Jr., late mayor of the city of Boston, in his inaugural address, "I hold ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... favors the development of the best that is in man; and he who shirks toil misses his opportunity. Whatever tends to wean men from work only weakens them. Luxury and indolence travel on the downward road of degeneracy. They may make pleasant temporary indulgence, but are ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... decidedly against the practice of breeding from any near relatives; it being usually found that degeneracy follows, and often to a serious degree; but it is not proved that this degeneracy, although very common and even usual, is yet a necessary consequence. That ill effects follow, in a majority of cases, is not to be doubted; but this is easily and sufficiently accounted ...
— Cattle and Their Diseases • Robert Jennings
... commencement of the common era, they shrank so small as not to be larger than grapes, according to a law the inverse of the order of nature. Rabbi Yehudah (Sanhedrin, fol. 70, col. 1) says that wheat was the forbidden fruit. Hence probably the degeneracy. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... conservative. In just so far as masculine and feminine types approach each other, we shall see degeneracy. Men and women were never intended to ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... simpler, and so stronger than the Assyrians that the Medes were able to dispossess them of their sovereignty over western Asia. But in this, as in most other cases of conquest throughout the East, success was followed almost immediately by degeneracy. As captive Greece captured her fierce conqueror, so the subdued Assyrians began at once to corrupt their subduers. Without condescending to a close imitation of Assyrian manners and customs, the Medes proceeded ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... prevalent Chinese view, nothing of importance was achieved during this period in north China in the intellectual sphere; there was no culture in the north, only in the south. This is natural: for a Confucian this period, the fourth century, was one of degeneracy in north China, for no one came into prominence as a celebrated Confucian. Nothing else could be expected, for in the north the gentry, which had been the class that maintained Confucianism since the Han period, had largely been destroyed; from political leadership especially ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... Pitt, and especially to those of that profound statesman and most instructed man, Lord Shelburne, to find that we can boast no remarkable superiority either in political justice or in political economy. One must attribute this degeneracy, therefore, to the long war and our insular position, acting upon men naturally of inferior abilities, and unfortunately, in addition, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... command, new morality, new wisdom, predicate of the Future by the Past? In ancient States, the mass were slaves; civilization and freedom rested with oligarchies; in Athens twenty thousand citizens, four hundred thousand slaves! How easy decline, degeneracy, overthrow in such States,—a handful of soldiers and philosophers without a People! Now we have no longer barriers to the circulation of the blood of States. The absence of slavery, the existence of the Press; the healthful proportions of kingdoms, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of such triumphs, and the famous reign of good Queen Anne, had ensued forty years of peace, broken only by one inglorious war. The peace did its work: it settled the dynasty, and filled the purse; but men, considering it, whispered of effeminacy and degeneracy, and the like, as men will to the end of time. And when the clouds, long sighted on the political horizon, began to roll up, they looked fearfully abroad and doubted and trembled; and doubted and trembled the more because in home affairs all patriotism, all party-spirit, all thought of things ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... luxury, her lower classes sunk in vice and ignorance, and both the one and the other decaying in piety and religion (a sure result of neglecting that Bible which has directly and indirectly formed her strength), she may have fallen a victim to the consequences of her own degeneracy, or to an irresistible combination of the enemies who envy and hate her. That picture of the splendid imagination of the great historian of our day may be realized, 'when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... For these and such like reasons I signified to the Printer that I would have no more of their Wicked Courants. I, that have known what New England was from the Beginning, cannot but be troubled to see the Degeneracy of this Place. I can well remember when the Civil Government would have taken an effectual Course to suppress such a Cursed Libel! which if it be not done I am afraid that some Awful Judgment will come upon this Land, and the Wrath of God will arise, and there will ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... code, which is considered Napoleon's greatest achievement, is the most Draconian work I know of. Territorial subdivision carried out to the uttermost, and its principle confirmed by the equal division of property generally, must result in the degeneracy of the nation and the death of the Arts and Sciences. The land, too much broken up, is cultivated only with cereals and small crops; the forests, and consequently the rivers, are disappearing; oxen and horses are no longer bred. Means are lacking ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... sundials in his book, although they were his prop in how many a play back in the golden Nineties!—the golden, promise-laden, contradictory Nineties, that fin-de-siecle decade when Max Nordau thundered that we were going to the dogs of degeneracy, and we youngsters knew that we were headed not alone for a new heaven, but what is much more ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... barbarian powers, and the Frankish king was decorated with the title of Most Christian; the history of that Church was written in Latin by Gregory of Tours. This work, upon which he was engaged from A.D. 576 to 592, bears strong marks of literary degeneracy. Gregory complained of the low state of education in the cities of Gaul. He became a historian only from a sense of necessity, and for fear lest the memory of important events should perish. He has been called the Herodotus of the Franks, and the Herodotus ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... criminal conversation with the wife of my client, is, or very lately was, a preacher of morality; an expounder of that divine doctrine which inculcates the precept, 'Do unto others, as you would have others do unto you;' he is a gentleman, who, beholding with horror the degeneracy of the times, and believing, no doubt, it required some extraordinary exertions to recall us unto virtue, has voluntarily, for no idea of gain, or means of livelihood, publicly devoted his talents to the pulpit. Such conduct, if we had not other most ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... private psychopathic institution, and thinks there's no good in life. But I suppose this pessimistic view is natural if you eat three meals a day with a tableful of melancholics. He goes up and down the world looking for signs of degeneracy, and finds them everywhere. I expected, after half an hour's conversation, that he would ask to look down my throat to see if I had a cleft palate. Sandy's taste in friends seems to resemble his taste in literature. Gracious! this is ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... a work on the catatonic states in degenerates, describes this condition at length. Although recognizing a good many hysterical features in these patients, he prefers to place these catatonic conditions under the general group of the psychoses of degeneracy. He does not add anything worthy of note to what Raecke had to say concerning this mental disorder, but the differentiating points which he advances between it and the genuine catatonia are of interest and should be mentioned here. Among these he mentions, first, the development ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... that you cannot conceive of an honest friendship, even between near relations. You fill me with repulsion—I measured the depth of your degeneracy at Pisa. That is why I left you. I wanted to breathe in an uninfected atmosphere. My cousin is a person of remarkable intellectual powers, of chivalrous ideals, and of superior character. He has had great troubles. He is far from well. I am ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... of lamentation over the degeneracy of the British seaman, my experience may be accepted as a contribution to the mass of evidence on this vexed question. I have not been surrounded by such smart seamen as can only be found on a man-of-war, but I have no ground for general or serious complaint. Many ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... modified by a weak reminiscence of the old kingship in the not very effective sovereignty' (or prytany) 'of Zeus. In the East the national god tended to acquire a really monarchic sway.'[12] Australia escaped polytheistic degeneracy by having no aristocracy, as in Polynesia, where aristocracy, as in early Greece, had developed polytheism. Ghosts and spirits the Australians knew, but not polytheistic gods, nor departmental deities, as of war, agriculture, art. The savage had no agriculture, and his social condition was ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... plans of Divine Providence. It has not the signs of the Lord's blessing. It is a fanaticism which puts forth no good fruit; instead of blessing, it has brought forth cursing; instead of love, hatred, instead of life, death—bitterness and sorrow, and pain; and infidelity and moral degeneracy follow its labours." There is no shirking of the question here. Slavery is proclaimed to be the GOD-appointed means for the regeneration of the African race, and those who seek to bring about the emancipation ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... Peveril, "why will you distress yourself with fixing your eye on deficiencies which arise rather from a change of times and manners, than any degeneracy of my noble friend? Let him be once engaged in his duty, whether in peace or war, and let me pay the penalty if he acquits not himself ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... risen to be a nation that pours out its wealth like water for a noble purpose. Never again will 'the almighty dollar' be called America's divinity. We were sinking fast to low aims and selfish purposes, and wise men groaned at national degeneracy. The summons came, and millions leaped to offer all they had, to fling fortune, limb, and life on the altar of an unselfish cause. The dead manhood of the nation sprang to life at the call. We proved the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... spirits, who, not insensible to this degeneracy of the French theatre, and lamenting the evil, have lately exercised much ingenuity in developing the cause. They have at length discovered, that all the republican tragedies, flat farces, and heavy comedies, are attributable to Mr. Pitt, who has thought proper to corrupt the authors, with ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... though a tyrannical prince in time of peace, an incompetent general in war; nay, he would have equalled his predecessors in that art, had not his degeneracy in other ways likewise detracted from his merit in this respect. He first began the war against the Volsci, which was to last two hundred years after his time, and took Suessa Pometia from them by ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... ever pipe the pure and lofty and highly ennobling sentiments, the spiritually beautiful inspiration which characterizes that book of his—that deft little dip into degeneracy—something about a frozen wedding! Oh, slush! Percy, ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... dreadful houses and their dirty beards.... On the other hand, suppose you work for a long, long time, all you life, and in the end obtain some practical results—what will your results amount to, what can they do against such elemental forces as wholesale ignorance, hunger, cold, and degeneracy? A drop in the ocean! Other methods of fighting are necessary, strong, bold, quick! If you want to be useful then you must leave the narrow circle of common activity and try to act directly on the masses! First of all, you need ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... Time will come, when a Bribe shall remove the most excellent Man from Office for the Purpose of making Room for the worst. It will be called an Error in Judgment. The Bribe will be concealed. It may however be vehemently suspected & who, in Times of great Degeneracy will venture to search out and detect the corrupt Practices of great Men? Unless a sufficient Check is provided and clearly ascertained for every Power given, will not the Constitution and the Liberties of the Citizens for want of ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... these painful relations of landlord and tenant, even in this comparatively happy county, is a perceptible degeneracy in the manhood of the people. Talk to an old inhabitant, who has been an attentive observer of his times, and he will tell you that the vigorous and energetic, the intelligent and enterprising, are departing to more favoured lands, and that this process has produced a marked ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... my God that this degeneracy was transient, that he deigned once more to raise me aloft. I thought upon what I had done as a sacrifice to duty, and WAS CALM. My wife was dead; but I reflected, that though this source of human consolation was closed, yet others were still open. If the transports of ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... beasts of the field? Not so: that were easy to achieve. Human beings, two living, healthy men, one white, one black, were the requirements. Impossible! The experiment could never be performed: its requirements were unattainable. O tempora! O mores! Alas, for the degeneracy of the age! In the days of the Roman emperors men were fed, literally fed, to wild beasts in the arena—Gauls, Scythians, Nubians, even Roman freedmen when barbarians were scarce. This to amuse the populace alone. Frightful waste of life! In India, a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... something of what it means to be really an artist. The framework is perfect and the polish is absolutely without flaw. They are sometimes a little hard, always calculating and dispassionate, but they are perfect. I wish James would write about modern society, about "degeneracy" and the new woman and all the rest of it. Not that he would throw any light on it. He seldom does; but he would say such awfully clever things about it, and turn on so many side-lights. And then ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... not to avail myself of your permission. It has been an opinion pretty generally received among philosophers, that the atmosphere of America is more humid than that of Europe. Monsieur de Buffon makes this hypothesis one of the two pillars whereon he builds his system of the degeneracy of animals in America. Having had occasion to controvert this opinion of his, as to the degeneracy of animals there, I expressed a doubt of the fact assumed, that our climates are more moist. I did ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... the Roman people, of their own free will, pretend to give themselves away,—to sell themselves to a faction whose subversive principles they abhor, their forefathers of all preceding ages would protest against their base degeneracy; the children of the generations to come would curse their memory; all reflecting men of the present time would accuse them of black ingratitude,—ingratitude to the mighty dead among their Pontiffs, to whom they are indebted for their very name, their city's fame, ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... the furnishings, too, were apt to be of a sameness in them all, rather heavy and tasteless, but serving the ends that such things should be meant to serve, and never flamboyant. Of these relics of a simpler day not many survive to us, save in the shameful degeneracy of boarding-houses. But in such as are left, we may confidently expect to find the traditions of that more dignified time kept unsullied;—to find, indeed, as we find in the house of Milbrey, a settled air of gloom that suggests ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... religious ideas. Against the cloud of superstition which naturally gathers in a religion of ceremonies, destitute of the means of keeping alive or cultivating the religious sentiments of the people, there is no resource. In spite of the degeneracy of their clergy, which they are unable to feel, the Russians cling with patriotic affection to their Church, and identify its progress and prosperity with the increase of their empire. As it is an exclusively national institution, every war may become a war of religion, and it is the attachment ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Head is found weak-looking, full of islands and descending downwards on the Mount of the Moon, insanity or the worst form of degeneracy will sooner or later destroy the ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... was poor, and sometimes she went many days in a stretch without making a single kill. And in all beasts, high and low, this is the last step to the worst degeneracy of all. It instils a curious, terrible kind of blood-lust—to kill, not once, but as many times as possible in the same hunt; to be content not with one death, but to slay and slay until the whole herd is destroyed. It is the instinct that makes a little weasel kill all the chickens ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... of public officers. Whenever riches shall be deemed a necessary qualification, ambition as well as avarice will prompt men most earnestly to thirst for them, and it will be commonly said, as in ancient times of degeneracy, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... struggle with his heritage makes him nervous and ill-balanced. He conceives the idea, fostered both by observation and by the study of his own family history, that unchastity is the chief curse of humanity, and the primal cause of the degeneracy of races. He believes that the false modesty which leaves young people in ignorance of one of the most important natural functions is largely responsible for the prevailing immorality, and he advocates, as a remedy, fearless and searching physiological study. His ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... divinities. In fact, there are the popular, the sacerdotal, and the mysterious religions of Greece, represented roughly by Homer, Pindar, and AEschylus. The ancients had no notion of a fall of man, though they had of his gradual degeneracy. Prometheus, in the old mythus, and for the most part in AEschylus, is the Redeemer and the Devil ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... his countrymen on the subject of negro equality. He not alone professes to show the humanity of the project, but its policy—its even necessity. He declares to the whites, "You want these people; without them you will sink lower and lower into that effete degeneracy into which years of licentiousness have sunk you. These gorillas—black men, I mean—are virtuous; they are abstemious; they have a little smell, but no sensuality; they will make admirable wives for your warriors; and who knows but one may be the ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... negation of authority, direction, or organization, as the most perfect state, and the solution of all problems: the extreme point of this aberration being reached by Rousseau and his followers, when they extolled the savage state, as an ideal from which civilization was only a degeneracy, more or less ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... feelings of a well-informed man of thirty; the same thoughts and feelings being clothed in 2the semi-poetic prose of a fashionable novel-writer. Deeply grieved, therefore, am I at being forced both to set at nought so laudable an established precedent, and to expose my own degeneracy. But the truth must be told at all hazards. The only feeling I experienced, beyond a vague sense of loneliness and desolation, was one of great personal discomfort. It rained hard, so that a small ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... malarial fever which for the next six or seven years never entirely relaxed its hold on him. Among his papers has recently been found the long, wild, pessimistic rhapsody to which reference has already been made and in which there is talk of suicide. The plaint is of the degeneracy among men, of the destruction of primitive simplicity in Corsica by the French occupation, of his own isolation, and of his yearning to see his friends once more. Life is no longer worth while; his country ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... to the Iron Age the growth and ascent of Heywood's dramatic power may fairly be said to correspond in a reversed order with the degeneracy and decline of human heroism and happiness in the legendary gradation or degradation of the classical four ages. "The Golden Age" is a delightful example of dramatic poetry in its simplest and most primary stage; in "The ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... giving his reasons for cutting them off. To their chagrin, mortification, even shame, they were compelled to listen to at least a dozen letters that they had written to their father during the period covered by his supposed degeneracy. The originals of these letters, stained, dirty, frazzled but incontrovertibly genuine, were attached to the instrument, and were referred to in certain specific recommendations incorporated in the body ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... light of his countenance, nor ever visits us, save one night in the year; when he rattles down the chimneys of the descendants of the patriarchs, confining his presents merely to the children, in token of the degeneracy of the parents. ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... surface of that bland and factitious normality which he maintained before his fellows. In his veins ran a mongrelized strain of tendencies and vices which had hardened into a cruel and monstrous summary of vicious degeneracy. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Dreams," we do not know; but, with his probable taste in poetry, supposing him to have cared for the poetry of his time, he would doubtless have looked upon Alfred's success as another sign of the degeneracy of the age. As has been hinted, Mr. Tennyson was very careful of his money, and his boys were not allowed much spending money. Alfred and his brother Charles had the natural youthful desire to see their poetry in print, but they could not with all their savings raise the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... fretted on every stone with florid carving, and grotesque devices: but what shall I say of Probus tower, which from top to bottom is covered with delicate tracery cut in granite? it rises above the miserable surrounding village, a satire upon neighbouring degeneracy in things religious: you must often have seen drawings of Probus at the Watercolour Exhibition, as it is a regular artists' lion. At about half-past six we got into Truro, a clean wide flourishing town with London shops, a commemorative column, a fine spired church, bridges over narrow ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... in a revelation that everything human perishes except actions and the consequences that ensue. To orthodox India its tenets were as heretical as those of Christianity were to the Jews. Nonetheless the doctrine became popular. But doctrines once popularized lose their nobility. The degeneracy of Buddhism ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... happen when the government of a nation depends upon the caprice of the ignorant, harebrained vulgar. All the miseries of men for a long series of years grew out of that infamous mode of polity, a democracy; which is to be reckoned to be only the corruption and degeneracy of a republic, and not to be ranked among the legitimate forms of government. If it be not a legitimate government, we owe it no allegiance. He is a blind man who does not see this truth; he is a base man who will not assert it. Democratic power is tyranny, in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... crimson, pea-green or sky-blue, it was all one: these were all flaunting, giddy colours; and as to the lace I talked of, that was but a 'colifichet de plus.'" And he sighed over my degeneracy. "He could not, he was sorry to say, be so particular on this theme as he could wish: not possessing the exact names of these 'babioles,' he might run into small verbal errors which would not fail to lay him open to my sarcasm, and excite my unhappily sudden and passionate ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... of society. Since the year 1876 the birth-rate had declined, and gradually the fear of over-population, which had saddened the lives of such men as John Stuart Mill, began to give way to the much less terrifying but still substantial fear of under-population, caused either by race degeneracy or race suicide. At that period the former of the two was the accepted explanation, and only by vague hints did scientific statisticians indicate that there might be or perhaps must be something else ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... aids and benevolences upon the different travellers on the king's highway. A letter of the old lord, his father, which, by the by, is not the letter of an illiterate man, is still extant, in which he complains in very moving terms of his son's degeneracy and misconduct. The young scapegrace, wishing to make his father know from experience the inconvenience of being scantily supplied with money, enjoined his tenantry in Craven not to pay their rents, and beat one of them, Henry Popely, who ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... that Lucasta made its first appearance. When the fortunes of the gallant poet were at their lowest and never to revive, Marvell seizes the occasion to deplore the degeneracy of the times, a ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... good, great, and glorious things, As much superior unto all thy sire Adam could e'er have been in Eden, as 70 The sixty-thousandth generation shall be, In its dull damp degeneracy, to Thee and thy son;—and how weak they are, judge ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... clergy were, for the most part, composed of a most worthless set of men, shamefully illiterate and stupid, ignorant, more especially in religious matters, equally enslaved to sensuality and superstition, and capable of the most abominable and flagitious deeds. This dismal degeneracy of the sacred order was, according to the most credible accounts, principally owing to the pretended chiefs and rulers of the universal Church, who indulged themselves in the commission of the most odious crimes, and abandoned themselves to the lawless impulse of the most licentious passions ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... are an index to man in the beginning of his existence is an unwarranted conceit; they may point to a degeneracy. The lost arts are indicative of that which might have been repeated many times. Stone implements might have been used, as we know they have been, in times of great civilization. They are an uncertain index of civilization among the tribes who used them, and no index ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... from ruinous weight of color. The engraving which is so admirably represented is thoroughly good, and, to our thinking, it is of a better school than that which largely obtains in England at this time, and the degeneracy and slovenliness of which have been of late so much criticised and deplored by the best judges. The most of the designs have been engraved by Mr. A.V.S. Anthony, who ranks probably at the head of American engravers, and whose delicacy of feeling and touch, beautifully ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... inference, and lastly the events speak for themselves and give their own lesson. The author meant to teach adults as well as children. The graphic history of the Doasyoulikes is rather a clear-cut study in degeneracy for older people, as well as a lively warning for youngsters. But what is the author's main theme? Is his real text in the advice the poor Irishwoman gives to Grimes and Tom? "Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... As I shall thus address myself to a foreign audience, it will of course be my duty to describe the frivolities of American manners—the faults of American ladies, the imbecilities of American gentlemen, the scurrilities of the American press, the weakness of American magazines, the degeneracy of American literature, the roguery of the American public, the want of taste of American engineers, the ignorance of American professors, and to discuss any questions of strictly local interest which may happen ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... birds, or beasts. They were adapted, as we now find them, to their precise sphere of existence, without progressive aptitude, preparatory to a higher and translated condition of being. Geology rather points to the extinction and degeneracy of species than their improvement; and the fossils of the old red sandstone, and of the carboniferous formation, attest a loftier and more magnificent creation of both marine and land ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... indirectly compensated by the improved standing of the game. I quote in this connection Mr. A. G. Mills, ex-President of the League, and the originator of the National Agreement: "It has been popular in days gone by to ascribe the decay and disrepute into which the game had fallen to degeneracy on the part of the players, and to blame them primarily for revolving and other misconduct. Nothing could be more unjust. I have been identified with the game more than twenty-five years—for several seasons as a player—and ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... in his wild and reckless course since he left his father's mansion. It was too painful to witness the degeneracy of our early favorite. But the whole history of the past was written on his haggard brow and pallid cheek. It need not be recorded here. He had thought himself a life-long alien from the home he had disgraced, for never could he encounter his father's indignant ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... a snail was slowly creeping up a steep path; on the other a stag rushed and bounded unrestrained down the sheer proclivities of a wide and darkening hill. Improvement is ever slow and difficult; degeneracy is too often startling rapid. From henceforth, as we shall have occasion to see hereafter, Walter was progressing from strength to strength, adding to faith virtue, and to virtue temperance, and to temperance knowledge, and to knowledge ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... not that this island, in the revolutions of human grandeur, ever made a distinguished figure in the history of the world (for the Achinese, though powerful in the sixteenth century, were very low in point of civilization) yet the Malay inhabitants have an appearance of degeneracy, and this renders their character totally different from that which we conceive of a savage, however justly their ferocious spirit of plunder on the eastern coast may have drawn upon them that name. They seem rather to be sinking into obscurity, though with opportunities ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... recommended the Crown to bestow a pension of two or three hundred a-year on his widow; to which the next Barnacle in power had added certain shady and sedate apartments in the Palaces at Hampton Court, where the old lady still lived, deploring the degeneracy of the times in company with several other old ladies of both sexes. Her son, Mr Henry Gowan, inheriting from his father, the Commissioner, that very questionable help in life, a very small independence, had been difficult to settle; the rather, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... This whole story abounds in evidences of the prejudice and moral degeneracy of the Jewish leaders. They hated Roman rule past all words to tell and yet would pretend loyalty to Caesar to carry out their wicked purpose. By this means they put Pilate in a position that to release Jesus would make him appear to be untrue to Caesar in releasing one announced ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... intelligible to those who hear it, nor always to those by whom it is uttered: I am one of those instruments, to whom it has pleased the Almighty to make known His will, and I am come to declare to you, &c...' and then he went off in a rhapsody about the degeneracy of the times, and the people falling off from God. I asked him what Perceval seemed to be driving at, what was his definite object? He said it was not discoverable, but that from the printed paper which he had circulated to all Privy Councillors ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... 50. Family Degeneracy.—Several impressive illustrations have been published of degenerate families that show the far-reaching effects of heredity. In contrast to these pictures, has been set the life story of families who have ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... am, that the task I have undertaken, lays me under the necessity of divulging this degeneracy in the sentiment of our imperious youth, who was now in the heyday of his blood, flushed with the consciousness of his own qualifications, vain of his fortune, and elated on the wings of imaginary expectation. Though he was deeply enamoured of Miss Gauntlet, he was far from proposing her heart ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Doctor Mosely. He was still shaken with the storm of defending his ideals from profanation, and Hallard easily drew from him an admission that Mr. Dyckman was bent upon matrimony, also a scathing diatribe on the remarriage of divorced persons as one of the signs of the increasing degeneracy ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... some day I shall perhaps find a grand passion, a woman to play the Don Quixote about, like the Pole that I am; a woman out of whose slipper to drink, and for whose pleasure to die; but not here! Few things strike me so much as the degeneracy of Italian women. What has become of the race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos? Where discover nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea da Carpi? Were it only possible to meet a woman of that extreme distinction of beauty, of that terribleness of nature, even if only potential, ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... of age to dwell on the degeneracy of the times and lament the good old days and their superiority, but Yale is infinitely greater and broader than when I graduated sixty-five years ago. The New York Legislature and State executives are governing ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... the descendants of Seth intermarried finally with the descendants of Cain, from whom sprung a race of lawless men, so that the earth was filled with violence. The material civilization which the descendants of Cain introduced did not preserve them from moral degeneracy. So great was the increasing wickedness, with the growth of the race, that "it repented the Lord that he had made man," and he resolved to destroy the whole race, with the exception of one religious family, and change the whole ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... of shape, nor the use of the hand, [Footnote: Traite de l'esprit.] nor the continued intercourse with this sovereign artist, has enabled any other species to blend their nature or their inventions with his; that, in his rudest state, he is found to be above them; and in his greatest degeneracy, never descends to their level. He is, in short, a man in every condition; and we can learn nothing of his nature from the analogy of other animals. If we would know him, we must attend to himself, to the course ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... bright hectic spot of red appeared on each of his hollow cheeks. His hands were tremulous and his voice deep and husky. After a few personal inquiries the old man broke out into a most extraordinary and characteristic harangue on the wretched degeneracy of these evil days. The prophet Jeremiah was cheerfulness itself in comparison with him.... Most of his extraordinary harangue was like an eruption of Vesuvius, but the laugh he occasionally gave showed that he was talking about as much for his ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... men who exerted themselves in the cause of their country with an energy unknown in later times, who had violated the dearest of domestic charities, or voluntarily devoted themselves to death for the public good; and they wondered at the degeneracy of their contemporaries. It never occurred to them that the feelings which they so greatly admired sprung from local and occasional causes; that they will always grow up spontaneously in small societies; and that, in large empires, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the best time; that the seasons were more genial formerly; that provisions were cheaper and more abundant; that men were taller, and stouter, and healthier; that, in a word, everything was better in the days of yore than it is now, and that degeneracy and effeteness are the prevailing characteristics of our age. Philosophers, statists, and political economists tell us that all this regret for the "good old time" is mis-spent sympathy; for that we are in every respect superior—in physique, health, morals, and ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... to harp upon the degeneracy of humanity; to insist that taste is corrupted, and that the faculty of appreciation is dead. We seem incapable of realizing that this is the golden age of authors, if not the ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... have a vision of a sturdier manhood: of the genial, open countenance of an Irving; of the homely, honest strength that shone in every feature of a Walter Scott; of the massive vigor of a Goethe or a Humboldt. How much, too, is said of the physical degeneracy of our own people,—how the jaw is retreating, how the frame is growing slender and gaunt, how the chest flattens, and how tenderly we ought to cherish every octogenarian among us, for that we are seeing the last of them! If this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... whale, for instance, natural selection no longer keeps it at the point of perfection. Variation, however, continues to occur in it. Since the organ is now useless, natural selection will no longer restrain variation in such an organ, and degeneracy will naturally follow, for of all the variations that occur in the organ, those tending to loss are more numerous than those tending to addition. If the embryonic development of a whale's hind leg be compared to some complicated mechanical ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... profest to believe in that doctrine. But we say, "Truth is mighty and will prevail." Yes, I believe it will; but it would surely prevail faster if we were always loyal to it. Besides, is there anything that makes more directly for degeneracy of character ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... were but the sinister means of exciting sectional enmities, and preparing for the final measures of the great conspiracy. Having discarded the rational and humane views of their own fathers—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and others—it was but the natural sequel that they should signalize their degeneracy by aiming to overthrow the work in which those sages had embodied their generous ideas—the Constitution of the United States and the whole fabric of ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ancestors; and, consequently, an expedition that must convince not only us, but all Europe, that if our maritime force be not employed in undertakings of the most important nature, it is not owing to the degeneracy or our seamen, nor to be imputed to our want of able or daring commanders, which is not my business, and which indeed surpasses my ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... the spiritual influence is not exercised and man resigns himself to the uncontrolled influences which spring from his lower nature, he rapidly degenerates. Socially, this degeneracy is noticed by its process of gradually loosening, and finally severing the ties which bind man to his race. He becomes an unsocial being and ceases to contribute to the wealth, peace or establishment of society. His desire for society ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... and tenacity of purpose invests the features and reminds us that Drayton is of the old and sound Elizabethan stock, 'on evil days though fallen.' Let it be remembered, that he was in 1613, when the portrait was taken, in more or less prosperous circumstances; it was the sad degeneracy, the meanness and feebleness of the generation around him, that chiefly depressed and embittered him. The final portrait, now in the Dulwich Gallery, represents the poet as a man of sixty-five; and is quite in keeping with the sunnier and ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... and Days of Hesiod show us that precisely the same succession of ages was held by the Greeks, but without their duration being calculated by years, and with the supposition of a new humanity being produced at the beginning of each; the gradual degeneracy, however, which marks this succession of ages is expressed by the metals after which they are named—gold, silver, brass, and iron. Our present humanity belongs to the age of iron, and is the worst of all, although it began with the heroes. Zoroastrian ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable, high-strung, and anaemic—a typical child of the gutter, with unbeautiful twisted features, small-eyed, with face and mouth perpetually and feverishly hungry, brutish in a cat-like way, stamped to the core with degeneracy. ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... conviction had been given wings with the rumor that Elliott University was to pay him the unheard of amount of $50,000 for a yearns services although, it was grudgingly admitted, if John Brown could bring Elliott out of the slough of athletic degeneracy, he would probably be worth every cent of ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... maudlin look of his reeling eyes, nor listened to some exquisite inanity from his besotted lips, but that my thoughts flew instantly back to the Sir Charleses and the Sir Roberts of my race, and I comforted myself with the hope that the present degeneracy should pass away. Hence, Julia, my family pride; hence, too, another feeling you dislike in me,—disdain! I first learned to despise my father, the host, and I then despised my acquaintances, his guests; for I saw, while they laughed ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rule without exception, and is a reassuring reflection in view of the talk about the degeneracy of the House of Commons, and the decadence of its standard of manner. It would not be difficult to show that the House at present in Session will, from the point of view of manners, favourably compare with any that have gone before—though, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... money hunt. It was this: A certain charitable lady gave some years of her life to the study of those conditions in which, as I have said, the criminally inactive, the hopelessly useless, were produced by authorized routine, at a ruinous cost in money and degeneracy, and to the great ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the English by blood and the English by birth. The first had, indeed, an English name; but they were born in the island, and soon came to be known as degenerate English.—That degeneracy was merely the moral effect of constant intercourse with the natives of their neighborhood. - -The others were continually shifting, being always composed of the latest new-comers ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... prescribed by the founders of the League; but the speeches of the Book, and this hymn, all refer to the League as the work of a past age. The speakers appeal to the wisdom of their forefathers (literally, their grandsires), and lament the degeneracy of the later times. They expressly declare that those who established the "great peace" were in their graves, and had taken their work with them and placed it as a pillow under them. This is the language of men who remembered the founders, and to ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... on the side of the 'common-sense' party. In one of his letters to Mr. James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites,—surely in itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of the times in the matter of religion,—we have an interesting reflection which gives us some insight into the poet's mind. 'This, my dear Sir, is one of the many instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound reason and common sense in matters of religion. Whenever we neglect ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... compliment, and to contrast them unfavourably with our societies for severe research. They were at least evidence of culture, and served to keep alive the traditions of the more masculine Medicean age. And that the members of these associations were not unaware of their own degeneracy and of its cause, we learn from Milton himself. For as soon as they found that they were safe with the young Briton, they disclosed their own bitter hatred of the church's yoke which they had to bear. "I have sate among ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... phrase of Whig coffee-houses have "swinged off" the "Examiner," most of which I had never seen nor heard of before. I remember some time ago in one of the "Tatlers" to have read a letter,[4] wherein several reasons are assigned for the present corruption and degeneracy of our taste, but I think the writer has omitted the principal one, which I take to be the prejudice of parties. Neither can I excuse either side of this infirmity; I have heard the arrantest drivellers pro and con commended for their smartness ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... 3.—Illustrative Cases of Hereditary Degeneracy: Juke Family; Kallikak Family; New Zealand Cases cited; Sir Robert Stout's ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... a corrupted understanding. I am anxious to describe to you what I have experienced or seen of the dispositions and feelings that will aid every other cause of danger, and tend to lay the mind open to the infection of all those falsehoods in opinion and sentiment, which constitute the degeneracy ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... imagined, that our state of civilization must prevent the moral degeneracy here threatened. A neighbouring nation has lately furnished a lamentable proof, that superior polish and refinement may well consist with a very large measure of depravity. But to appeal to a still ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... the "Arcadians" still hold their al fresco meetings. The society dates back to 1690, and the first custos (whose duty was to open and close the meetings) was Crescimbeni. The "Arcadians" organized themselves to protest against the degeneracy of Italian poetry that marked the seventeenth century. To keep their meetings a secret from the populace the "Arcadians" held their meetings in an open garden on the slope below San Pietro in Montorio,—a terrace still known as "Bosco Parrasio ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Hawks, or any other Species; the Scum of which Nation, by the Fertility of the Country, and the want of Foresight in the Cacklogallinians, has been allured to, and permitted to settle in Cacklogallinia, and by their Intermarriages has caused the great Degeneracy those Families, which have kept their Blood untainted, ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... entertained or interested by a detail of transactions such as these, which admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment; a detail of which only serves to exhibit an inanimate picture of tasteless vice and mean degeneracy." On the contrary,—and Smollett might have discovered it, if he had been in the humour,—the subject is capable of inspiring as much interest as even a novellist can desire. Is there no warmth in the despair of a plundered people?—no life and animation in the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... blessing. It is a fanaticism which puts forth no good fruit; instead of blessing, it has brought forth cursing; instead of love, hatred, instead of life, death—bitterness and sorrow, and pain; and infidelity and moral degeneracy follow its labours." There is no shirking of the question here. Slavery is proclaimed to be the GOD-appointed means for the regeneration of the African race, and those who seek to bring about the emancipation of the slaves are branded as apostles of infidelity. Upon these grounds, the confederate ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... combat. In spite of the common belief, however, his plays—thesis plays as they nearly all are in one way or another—seldom attack these evils directly. Caciquismo is an issue only in Mariucha and Alma y vida, and in them occupies no more than a niche in the background. Sloth and degeneracy are a more frequent butt, and Voluntad, Mariucha, La de San Quintn, and, in less degree, La loca de la casa, hold up to scorn the indolent members of the bourgeoisie or aristocracy, and ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... onward progress, and the soul is left in silent harmony to enjoy the change. The passage of the Highlands is most delightful. Figure to yourself, my Julia, the rushing waters, lessening from their expanded width to the degeneracy of the stagnant pool—rocks rise on rocks in overhanging mountains, until the weary eye, refusing its natural office, yields to the fancy what its feeble powers can never conquer. Clouds impend over their summits, and the thoughts ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... papers,[3] which in the phrase of Whig coffee-houses have "swinged off" the "Examiner," most of which I had never seen nor heard of before. I remember some time ago in one of the "Tatlers" to have read a letter,[4] wherein several reasons are assigned for the present corruption and degeneracy of our taste, but I think the writer has omitted the principal one, which I take to be the prejudice of parties. Neither can I excuse either side of this infirmity; I have heard the arrantest drivellers pro and con commended for their smartness even by men of tolerable judgment; ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... is of the decorated species of the early fourteenth century, with its arcaded triforium glazed, whereas in the nave it is without glass. The lady-chapel, of the time of Louis XI., shows that inevitable mark of degeneracy, the "fleur-de-lys," in the elaborated tracery of the window framing. The glass here is, however, excellent, in effect at any rate, with its gorgeous figures of knights, angels, and peers of France, drawn with a ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... One of the curses of the 19th century is the increased skill of the midwife and the physician, who are now able to preserve worthless lives and to bring up semi-abortions whose only effect upon the breed is increased degeneracy." [534] He thought with Edward FitzGerald and many another sympathiser with the poor, that it is the height of folly for a labouring man living in a cottage with only two small bedrooms and earning twelve ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Should the Roman people, of their own free will, pretend to give themselves away,—to sell themselves to a faction whose subversive principles they abhor, their forefathers of all preceding ages would protest against their base degeneracy; the children of the generations to come would curse their memory; all reflecting men of the present time would accuse them of black ingratitude,—ingratitude to the mighty dead among their Pontiffs, to whom they ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... careless of the decencies which were expected from a man so highly distinguished in the literary and political world. The sarcastic bitterness of his conversation disgusted those who were more inclined to accuse his licentiousness than their own degeneracy, and who were unable to conceive the strength of those emotions which are concealed by the jests of the wretched, and by the follies of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... proscription, murdered even his own guardian, murdered Cicero, to whose confidence, too improvidently given, he owed all his power? Was this the master you chose? Could you bring your tongue to give him the name of Augustus? Could you stoop to beg consulships and triumphs from him? Oh, shame to virtue! Oh, degeneracy of Rome! To what infamy are her sons, her noblest sons, fallen. The thought of it pains me more than the wound that I died of; it ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... enacted and enforced by our New England fathers more than two hundred years ago, which history informs us were attended with the most beneficial results.[76] Although their descendants of the present generation should blush for their degeneracy, still we should be encouraged from an increasing disposition of late to return to these salutary restraints and needful checks upon ignorance and crime. Said the Honorable Josiah Quincy, Jr., late mayor of the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... criticisms of men of taste and learning, is by no means exposed to the vicissitudes of those that are polished by refined nations;[AF] and that, however paradoxical it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that the degeneracy of a language is more frequently to be attributed to an extravagant refinement than to the neglect of an illiterate people, unless indeed external causes interfere. May we not hence conclude, that as the Romansh ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... you an instance——" and he went on to describe to me the degeneracy of certain working men employed by his aunt and his eldest brother Claud ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the fear of over-population, which had saddened the lives of such men as John Stuart Mill, began to give way to the much less terrifying but still substantial fear of under-population, caused either by race degeneracy or race suicide. At that period the former of the two was the accepted explanation, and only by vague hints did scientific statisticians indicate that there might be or perhaps must be something else than "natural" causes for the ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... diligence, of which Mr. Carlyle has said, 'that genius is only an infinite capacity of taking pains,' and we can understand somewhat of the causes which produced those statues, human and divine, which awe and shame the artificiality and degeneracy of our modern so-called civilisation—we can understand somewhat of the reverence for the human form, of the careful study of every line, the storing up for use each scattered fragment of beauty of which the artist caught sight, even in his daily walks, and consecrating it in his memory to the service ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... earthly nectar to which the East contributes its arrack, and the West its limes and its rum. In the language of men it is called Punch; I know not what may be its name in the Olympian speech. But tell not the Englishmen of George the Second's age, lest they should be troubled for the degeneracy of their grandchildren, that the punchbowl is now become a relic of antiquity, and their beloved beverage almost as obsolete as ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... degeneracy had been very rapid, and he had become almost a confirmed drunkard, it being well known by the initiated that he indulged in the passion of gambling, by which he lost a great deal ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... ashamed of his mercenary Muse. In the Second Isthmian Ode, we find an elaborate justification of his practice of praising for pay,—a practice, he admits, unknown to primitive poets, but rendered inevitable, in his time, by the poverty of the craft, and the degeneracy of the many, with whom, in the language of the Spartan sage, "money made the man." With this Pindaric precedent, therefore, for selling Pindaric verses, it is no wonder, if the children of the Muse, in an age still more ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... except Lady Glistonbury, the Lady Sarah, and Miss Strictland. He found these three ladies sitting in form in the great deserted drawing-room, each looking like a copy of the other, and all as if they were deploring the degeneracy of the times. Vivian approached with due awe; but, to his great surprise and relief, at his approach their countenances exhibited some signs of life. Lord Glistonbury presented him on his return from abroad: Lady Glistonbury's features relaxed to a ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... almost overwhelming surprise, that it was only four o'clock. It was just an hour since she had entered the cavern-like doorway of the tenement. But in that hour she had come, for the first time, against life in the rough. She had seen degeneracy, and poverty, and—she was thinking of the expression in Jim's eyes—a menace that she did not at all understand. She had seen the waste of broken middle age and the pity of blighted childhood. She had seen fear and, if she had stayed ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... minds than the priests from whom they so entirely withdrew that they even absolved each other. Their strength grew with such rapidity, and their numbers increased to such an extent daily, that the State and the Church were forced to combine for their suppression. Degeneracy, however, soon crept in, crimes were committed, and they went beyond their strength in attempting the performance of miracles. One of the most fearful consequences of this frenzy was the persecution of the Jews. This alien race was given up to the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... can judge, most people have talked so ever since the morning when Hengist and Horsa, Limited, landed from their three keels in the Isle of Thanet. Gildas is the oldest historian of these islands, and his work consists entirely of a good old Tory lament in the Ashmead-Bartlett strain upon the degeneracy of the times and the proximate ruin of the British people. Gildas wrote some fourteen hundred years ago or thereabouts—and the country is not yet quite visibly ruined. On the contrary, it seems to the impartial eye a more eligible ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... the misshapen bodies, by marks of degeneracy, recognizable to your practised eyes everywhere on the streets, by the agony of the mother who bore you, and later wept over you, I conjure you men to live up to your high and holy privilege, and tell all men that they can ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... know that I ever remember seeing a sight more pathetic in its way than that of this beautiful and high-spirited young woman weeping in the presence of her Council over the utter degeneracy of the race she was called upon to rule. Being old and accustomed to these Eastern expressions of emotion, I remained silent, however; but Oliver was so deeply affected that I feared lest he should do something foolish. He went red, he went white, and was rising from his ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... jubilation was beyond bounds, and the victory of the school was swallowed up in the glorious exploits of the five schoolhouse heroes, who had, so their admirers declared, as good as won the match among them, and had vindicated themselves from the reproach of degeneracy, and once for all wiped away the hateful stigma of the boat- race. The night was spent till bedtime in one prolonged cheer in honour of their heroes, who were glad enough to hide anywhere to escape the mobbing they came in for whenever they ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... reptiles of inferior structure; nor the earliest fishes, birds, or beasts. They were adapted, as we now find them, to their precise sphere of existence, without progressive aptitude, preparatory to a higher and translated condition of being. Geology rather points to the extinction and degeneracy of species than their improvement; and the fossils of the old red sandstone, and of the carboniferous formation, attest a loftier and more magnificent creation of both marine and land products than any ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... Englishman Cave; he has maintained that the Church of Christ, with respect to life and conduct, had begun to fall into decay immediately after the ascension of our Saviour, and still more after the death of the Apostles, and that this degeneracy had enormously increased since the age of ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... triumphs, and the famous reign of good Queen Anne, had ensued forty years of peace, broken only by one inglorious war. The peace did its work: it settled the dynasty, and filled the purse; but men, considering it, whispered of effeminacy and degeneracy, and the like, as men will to the end of time. And when the clouds, long sighted on the political horizon, began to roll up, they looked fearfully abroad and doubted and trembled; and doubted and trembled the more because ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... disciple of Lombroso in two notable particulars: He had no quarrel with the world, and he did not wax rich. "One thing thou lackest, O Walt Whitman!" we might have said to the poet; "you are not a financier." He died poor. But this is no proof of degeneracy, save on 'Change. When the children of Count Tolstoy endeavored to have him adjudged insane, the Court denied the application and voiced the wisest decision that ever came out of Russia: A man who gives away his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... sciences, or combinations of sciences, from which physical training draws its facts. These sciences and those phases of economics and sociology that have to do with the economic and social influences of health and disease, of physical efficiency and physical degeneracy, supply physical training ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... which they lived; it only betrays the relative industry and felicity with which they imitated the language and thoughts of a former age. They were the last monuments of civilized antiquity, the last of a noble race, which, after a long period of degeneracy, ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... remarkable instance of the idea that I was illustrating in the article on "Barrel-organs," because Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle had conceived a theory of degeneracy (the exact converse of Darwin's theory of ascension) by which the bear might pass into a seal, and that into a whale. Trusting now to the fairness of "A. M." I leave to him to say whether he has ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... fornication and adultery, nor was the licentious lover exposed to the same dishonor which he impressed on the male or female partner of his guilt. From Catullus to Juvenal, [195] the poets accuse and celebrate the degeneracy of the times; and the reformation of manners was feebly attempted by the reason and authority of the civilians till the most virtuous of the Caesars proscribed the sin against nature as a crime against ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... language not intelligible to those who hear it, nor always to those by whom it is uttered: I am one of those instruments, to whom it has pleased the Almighty to make known His will, and I am come to declare to you, &c...' and then he went off in a rhapsody about the degeneracy of the times, and the people falling off from God. I asked him what Perceval seemed to be driving at, what was his definite object? He said it was not discoverable, but that from the printed paper ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... ranks idle vagabonds," according to the act of Edward I, who went about the country under color of minstrelsy; men who cared more about the supper than the song; who for base lucre divorced the arts of writing and reciting and stole other men's thunder. Their social degeneracy may be traced in the dictionary. The chanter of the "gests" of kings, gesta ducum regumque, dwindled into a gesticulator, a jester: the honored jogelar of Provence, into a mountebank; the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... growth of adolescents; in functional cardiac disorders; in intellectual sluggishness, loss of memory, and color blindness; in loss of appetite, and other neuroses of motion, and marked blunting of various functions of sensation, and in degeneracy of descendants; but that lesser evils are produced must be proved mostly by inference, circumstantial collateral ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... When an organ is no longer necessary, as the hind legs of a whale, for instance, natural selection no longer keeps it at the point of perfection. Variation, however, continues to occur in it. Since the organ is now useless, natural selection will no longer restrain variation in such an organ, and degeneracy will naturally follow, for of all the variations that occur in the organ, those tending to loss are more numerous than those tending to addition. If the embryonic development of a whale's hind leg be compared to ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... caution to the reader, again it may be shown by inference, and lastly the events speak for themselves and give their own lesson. The author meant to teach adults as well as children. The graphic history of the Doasyoulikes is rather a clear-cut study in degeneracy for older people, as well as a lively warning for youngsters. But what is the author's main theme? Is his real text in the advice the poor Irishwoman gives to Grimes and Tom? "Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... fallen!' In the eyes and faith of the godly, by her dropping into the dregs of degeneracy, and so is become the habitation of devils, &c., in order to her falling into utter ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... archangels or angels. Their answers will soon inform him, that the supposed perfection of man was not absolute, but respective; that he was perfect, in a sense consistent enough with subordination, perfect, not as compared with different beings, but with himself in his present degeneracy; not perfect, as an angel, but perfect, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... deficient equipment, but he did the best he could. Under ordinary circumstances he could have given a good account of himself if engaged with even the perfectly appointed ships of the Dutch Republic, or of the Grand Monarch himself. Indeed, in spite of the horrible degeneracy, the prestige of victory was still, as it has ever been, with England. King James, a successful, even brilliant naval commander in his youth, had decided to rehabilitate the navy with a view to putting it on its old footing, and with that object in ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... to relax until a race of parents has arisen which knows no other duty to the state than to rear with heart and brain the children which have been given to them. Then we shall hear no more about physical degeneracy."[13] ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... Kentucky mountaineer. His face was strongly individual, and belonged to no type. Black brows and lashes gave a distinctiveness to gray eyes so clear as to be luminous. A high and splendidly molded forehead and a squarely blocked chin were free of that degeneracy which marks the wasting of an in-bred people. The nose was straight, and the mouth firm yet mobile. It was the face of the instinctive philosopher, tanned to a hickory brown. In a stature of medium size, there was still a hint of power and catamount alertness. If his attitude was at the ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... eyes were still keen and piercing, and a bright hectic spot of red appeared on each of his hollow cheeks. His hands were tremulous and his voice deep and husky. After a few personal inquiries the old man broke out into a most extraordinary and characteristic harangue on the wretched degeneracy of these evil days. The prophet Jeremiah was cheerfulness itself in comparison with him.... Most of his extraordinary harangue was like an eruption of Vesuvius, but the laugh he occasionally gave showed ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... that thinking men find with this sort of girl is, that she becomes sillier every day that she lives. I have heard women complain of the degeneracy of the boys who seek their daughters in marriage; but when I look at the many girls of this type I am tempted to say, "Well, madam, who but a degenerate would ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... Greenwich hospital. The house having taken cognizance of this affair, and made some new regulations in the prosecution of the African trade, presented a solemn address to the king, representing the general degeneracy and corruption of the age, and beseeching his majesty to command all his judges, justices, and magistrates, to put the laws in execution against profaneness and immorality. The king professed himself extremely well pleased with this remonstrance, promised ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... is so corrupt that you cannot conceive of an honest friendship, even between near relations. You fill me with repulsion—I measured the depth of your degeneracy at Pisa. That is why I left you. I wanted to breathe in an uninfected atmosphere. My cousin is a person of remarkable intellectual powers, of chivalrous ideals, and of superior character. He has had great troubles. He is far from ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... appearance in our riding habits, and indeed we think it is but reasonable that we should make reprisals upon you for the invasion of our dress and figure, and the advances you make in effeminency, and your degeneracy from the figure of man. Can there be a more ridiculous appearance than to see a smart fellow within the compass of five feet immersed in a huge long coat to his heels with cuffs to the arm pits, the shoulders and breast fenced against the inclemencies of the ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... hearts of God's professed people. There is an alarming indifference in regard to the doctrines which are the pillars of the Christian faith. The opinion is gaining ground, that, after all, these are not of vital importance. This degeneracy is strengthening the hands of the agents of Satan, so that false theories and fatal delusions which the faithful in ages past imperiled their lives to resist and expose, are now regarded with favor by thousands who claim to ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... that the age is not what we all wish. But I am sure that the only means of checking its precipitate degeneracy is heartily to concur with whatever is the best in our time: and to have some more correct standard of judging what that best is than the transient and uncertain favour of a court. If once we are able to find and can prevail on ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... my mind the far-seeing schemes of Thisman and Thatman, and of the public blessing called Party, for staying the degeneracy, physical and moral, of many thousands (who shall say how many?) of the English race; for devising employment useful to the community for those who want but to work and live; for equalising rates, cultivating waste lands, facilitating ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... devices: but what shall I say of Probus tower, which from top to bottom is covered with delicate tracery cut in granite? it rises above the miserable surrounding village, a satire upon neighbouring degeneracy in things religious: you must often have seen drawings of Probus at the Watercolour Exhibition, as it is a regular artists' lion. At about half-past six we got into Truro, a clean wide flourishing town with London shops, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... moths or humming birds about others, each visitor choosing the restaurant most to his liking? With what infinite pains the wants of each guest are catered to! How relentlessly are pilferers punished! The endless devices of the more ambitious flowers to save their species from degeneracy by close inbreeding through fertilization with their own pollen, alone prove the operation of Mind through them. How plants travel, how they send seeds abroad in the world to found new colonies, might ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... of Hesiod show us that precisely the same succession of ages was held by the Greeks, but without their duration being calculated by years, and with the supposition of a new humanity being produced at the beginning of each; the gradual degeneracy, however, which marks this succession of ages is expressed by the metals after which they are named—gold, silver, brass, and iron. Our present humanity belongs to the age of iron, and is the worst of all, although it began ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Sabbath, and attendance on the ordinances, you will glorify him. By regularity, order, and temperance, crowned with an open acknowledgment of God before all who may surround your board, you will glorify him in an especial manner in these days of degeneracy, and, crowned with family worship, you will glorify him, and his presence will be with you, and great will be your comfort. God's interest in the world must also be yours. The good of his church in general, and that of your own family ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... as a country justice of peace, a man who has scarce ever travelled beyond the excursion of a fox-chase, whose conversation never rambles farther than his stable, his kennel, and the barnyard; who rejects decorum as degeneracy, mistakes rusticity for independence, ascertains his courage by leaping over gates and ditches, and founds his triumph on feats of drinking; who holds his estate by a factious tenure, professes himself the blind slave of a party, without knowing the principles that gave it birth, or the motives ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... life and progress as nations, or even as a race of God's creatures, is much like the life and progress of the individual. The children of men stumble often, fall often, despair often, and yet the great universal movement goes on, and even the degeneracy which must always go on side by side with progress does not appreciably stay our advance. The individual man cannot walk even twenty steps without actually saving himself by a balancing movement from twenty falls. Every ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... succeeds. A race of overwrought brains in enfeebled bodies must be recruited from a more healthful stock, or their posterity will, in time, decline into idiocy or cease from the earth. The process of degeneracy, by an infallible law, will pass from the body to the intellect; and the descendant of a Luther or a Bacon go down to the level of the most stupid boor that drives his oxen over the sands of ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... on the catatonic states in degenerates, describes this condition at length. Although recognizing a good many hysterical features in these patients, he prefers to place these catatonic conditions under the general group of the psychoses of degeneracy. He does not add anything worthy of note to what Raecke had to say concerning this mental disorder, but the differentiating points which he advances between it and the genuine catatonia are of interest and should be mentioned here. Among these he mentions, ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... of warmth and ventilation in Winter an important question. House-builder and stove-maker combine against fresh air, 136. Run-away slave boxed up. Evil qualities of bad air aggravated by heat. Dwellings and public buildings generally deficient in ventilation. Degeneracy will ensue, 137. Women the greatest sufferers. Necessity of reform, 138. Public buildings should be required to have plenty of air. Improved hive, its adaptedness to secure ventilation, 139. Nutt's hive too complicated. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... leading considerations in the choice of public officers. Whenever riches shall be deemed a necessary qualification, ambition as well as avarice will prompt men most earnestly to thirst for them, and it will be commonly said, as in ancient times of degeneracy, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... continue a while longer without the inevitable consequences becoming plainly visible. But sooner or later, if the balance of trade in this human traffic be not adjusted, the raw material out of which urban society is made will be seriously deteriorated, and the symptoms of National degeneracy will be properly charged against those who neglected to foresee the evil and treat the cause. It is enough for my present purpose if it be admitted that the people of every state are largely bred in rural districts, and that the physical and moral well-being ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... about her which, all unknown to the Hon. Morison, was making his task an extremely difficult one—it was that quality of innate goodness and cleanness which is a good girl's stoutest bulwark and protection—an impregnable barrier that only degeneracy has the effrontery to assail. The Hon. Morison Baynes would never be considered ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... for the unattractiveness of the farmer's life, and affecting adversely the farming interest. These touch the matter at various points, and are charged with greater or less importance. We know of no one cause more responsible for whatever there may be of physical degeneracy among the farming population than the treatment of its child-bearing women; and this, after all, is but a result of entire devotion to the tyrannical idea of labor. If there be one office or character higher than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... spirit. But that affrights him [87] not: capons and game, good wine and the dainties of the earth console him and cheer his heart. Then he prays to God and says 'I am poor and in misery.' Were God to answer him He would say, 'thou liest!'" To illustrate the degeneracy of the age, Peire relates a fable, perhaps the only instance of this literary form among the troubadours, upon the theme that if all the world were mad, the one sane man would be in a lunatic asylum: "there was a certain town, I know not where, upon which a ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... horizontal and having a profile which closely approaches a straight line, until it curves inward under the abacus (Fig. 51); in the post-classical period it is low and sometimes quite conical (Fig. 60). In general, the degeneracy of post-classical Greek architecture is in nothing more marked than in the loss of those subtle curves which characterize the best Greek work. Other differences must be learned ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... hold. The 'Kalevala' contains an instance of this practice, where it is said that no one was so hardy as to clasp hands with Wainamoinen, who is at once the Orpheus and the Prometheus of Finnish mythology. These Runoias, or rhapsodists, complain, of course, of the degeneracy of human memory; they notice how any foreign influence, in religion or politics, is destructive to the native songs of a race. {160} 'As for the lays of old time, a thousand have been scattered to the wind, a thousand buried in the snow; . . . as for those which the Munks (the Teutonic ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... science, it has become difficult to imagine Christianity without the attribute of development and the faculty of improving society as well as souls. But the idea was acquired slowly. Under the burden of sin, men accustomed themselves to the consciousness of degeneracy; each generation confessed that they were unworthy children of their parents, and awaited with impatience the approaching end. From Lucretius and Seneca to Pascal and Leibniz we encounter a few dispersed and unsupported passages, suggesting advance towards perfection, and the ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... framework is perfect and the polish is absolutely without flaw. They are sometimes a little hard, always calculating and dispassionate, but they are perfect. I wish James would write about modern society, about "degeneracy" and the new woman and all the rest of it. Not that he would throw any light on it. He seldom does; but he would say such awfully clever things about it, and turn on so many side-lights. And then his sentences! If his character novels were all wrong one could read him forever for the mere beauty ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... system in the past, and it may have conserved some blessings of antiquity; but today it is the worst tyranny and the greatest curse that has blasted the life of the people. It is the source of their physical degeneracy, for it compels them to marry within narrow lines of consanguinity. It has cursed the people with a narrow sympathy; for no man in that system deems it his duty to bless or help those beyond his own caste. ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... high the flame of courage and faith; a new purity and sweetness of domestic life spreading itself like the coming of the dawn. There are wild vagaries of the mind, taking shape in fantastic heresies. There is the degeneracy of a faith held in pureness and peril into a popular and fashionable religion. There are enthroned monsters like Nero and Commodus; "Christian" emperors, like Constantine, ambitious, crafty, and blood-guilty; and noble "heathen" emperors like ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... strength, moreover, is a matter of blood and brain fiber. Urban degeneracy is an accepted biological fact. The dissipation, lack of physical exercise in the open air, and high pressure living and working leaves in its trail a progeny diminishing in numbers and decadent in those high qualities ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst
... poor, and sometimes she went many days in a stretch without making a single kill. And in all beasts, high and low, this is the last step to the worst degeneracy of all. It instils a curious, terrible kind of blood-lust—to kill, not once, but as many times as possible in the same hunt; to be content not with one death, but to slay and slay until the whole herd is destroyed. It is the instinct that makes a little weasel kill all the chickens in a coop, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... their social necessity, their fundamental utility, their possible usefulness, were no longer visible. Only their present inconvenience was felt; people suffered by their friction and burden; their lack of harmony and incoherence created dissatisfaction; annoyance due to their degeneracy were attributed to radical defects; they were judged to be naturally unsound and were condemned, in principle, because of the deviations and laws which the public power had imposed on ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... than the German, that they eat less and breed less, that by temperament they are cheerful and gay and witty convinced the dull German mind that the race had become degenerate and trivial,—negligible. This habit of contemptuously attributing to other peoples vileness and degeneracy because their social ideals differ from her own is part of that lack of imagination which is the ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... picture of a cow, with an American tax-collector at the horns, a foreign-born assessor at the heels, forcibly selling the birthright of an American citizen, while Julia and Abby Smith, in the background, with veiled faces, weep over the degeneracy of Republican leadership. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... selection, but it has its disadvantages also, for it is to be remembered that faults and blemishes are inherited as well as merits, and that the faults have a way of asserting themselves with annoying persistency. Furthermore, breeding between animals closely allied in parentage is prone to lead to degeneracy, physical weakness, and mental stupidity, while impotence and sterility are frequent concomitants, and none but experienced breeders should attempt so hazardous an experiment. Observation has proved that the union of father ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... died. The doctor is a Yankee, and the Finance Minister tells me that this is a common practice in the States, and carried on to an alarming extent, even amongst respectable people, and, that this, and similar, frightful practices are the cause of the degeneracy of much of the American race. He says the Canadian Government have determined to stop it in Canada, in the outset, by hanging this doctor and his employer, and so deterring the rest—and it seemed to me to be right. I ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... married Clergy would have approximated, if the revenues of the Church, as they existed at the death of Henry VII., had been rightly transferred by his successor;—transferred, I mean, from reservoirs, which had by degeneracy on the one hand, and progressive improvement on the other, fallen into ruin, and in which those revenues had stagnated into contagion or uselessness,—transferred from what had become public evils to their original and inherent purpose of public benefits, instead of being sacrilegiously ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of their ruler as the grass bends to the wind, and that virtue 1 Ana. XII. xvii; xviii; xix. 2 ä¸åº¸, xx. 14. would come to the ruler at his call. Many were the lamentations which he uttered over the degeneracy of his times; frequent were the confessions which he made of his own shortcomings. It seems strange that it never came distinctly before him, that there is a power of evil in the prince and the peasant, which no efforts of their own and no instructions of sages are ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... refinement, and that of a life of simple manners and unperverted instincts. That he depicted this as the real life of a primitive epoch only gave greater pungency to the contrast. The eighteenth century, aroused to the consciousness of its own degeneracy, its false and artificial existence, readily accepted an idealized Geneva, an idealized Sparta, as the type of a primitive community, the model on which society was to be refashioned. What the "pure word ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... only by experience. We know that young wives acquire habits which undermine their health and their morals unwittingly. And we also know that the product of this diversified inefficiency is what constitutes the decadence and the degeneracy of the human race. Is it any wonder that mistakes occur, that heartaches abound, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... woman so deplorable; not so much because she is deprived of her liberty as because she is condemned to the most absolute ignorance. And in this ignorance lies one of the principal causes of Oriental degeneracy; for the young, being brought up in the polluted atmosphere of the harem, undergo a fatal enervation of body and soul, and imbibe the germs of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... what a sudden spasm of virtue; and why, if it is such a sin, has not the 'head of the house' taken his sister to task before, instead of indulging in a like degeneracy, and causing several interesting persons to tear their hair, and bewail his forgetfulness, when they ought to have blessed their stars he was out ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... family, she would have suggested with perfect naivete that it was herself. For he had been to her the very pink of courtesy and consideration, and she was of opinion that 'poor Richard's views' of the degeneracy of Oxford men would have been modified could he have seen ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... twilight gatherings that suggests the degeneracy of a rugged race; nor is the contamination of merely local significance. There are those who lie consciously, with a certain frank, commendable, whole-hearted plunge into iniquity. Such men return to their worldly callings with intellectual vigor unimpaired ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... characteristics of these Gothic women. What graces they had they owed to nature, not to any cultivation of the mind. Their health Buffered in a nomadic life from the ills of the country, the dangers of the climate, and the children by whom a few were accompanied, showed a degeneracy of blood which threatened the ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... mythology is discovered it is assumed to be the first in origin, the primordial mythology, and all lower but imperfectly understood mythologies are interpreted as degradations, from this assumed original belief; thus polytheism was interpreted as a degeneracy from monotheism; nature worship, from psychotheism; zooelotry, from ancestor worship; and, in order, monotheism has been held to be the original mythology, then polytheism, then physitheism or nature worship, then ...
— On Limitations To The Use Of Some Anthropologic Data - (1881 N 01 / 1879-1880 (pages 73-86)) • J. W. Powell
... the melancholy spectacle of the elderly man, who is hopelessly bored with existence, and who is the terror of the smoking-room and the dinner-table, because he is only capable of indulging in lengthy reminiscences of his own astonishing athletic performances, and in lamentations over the degeneracy of the human race. ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the hand, the phallic hand, was used as a protection against the evil eye. Ancient representations of Priapus have been found with the hand in this attitude. As further evidence to show the total degeneracy of these beliefs, it may be said that the phallic hand was adopted as ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... long been more abundant than on any other spot of earth, and where Divine worship and Christian ordinances are scarcely intermitted for an hour, but are free and welcome to all, and are very generally attended—what is the reason that corruption and degeneracy should be so fearfully prevalent? If only the enemies of Rome's faith affirmed this degeneracy, we might fairly suppose it invented or exaggerated; but even the immediate Priesthood of this people, who ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... two hundred thousand inhabitants: there are now about ninety thousand; and THESE!! few individuals can conceive, and none could describe, the actual state into which the more than infernal tyranny of Austria has plunged this unhappy city. From the present decay and degeneracy of Venice under the Barbarians, there are some honourable individual exceptions. There is Pasqualigo, the last, and, alas! posthumous son of the marriage of the Doges with the Adriatic, who fought his frigate with far greater gallantry than any of his French coadjutors in the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... or crimson, pea-green or sky-blue, it was all one: these were all flaunting, giddy colours; and as to the lace I talked of, that was but a 'colifichet de plus.'" And he sighed over my degeneracy. "He could not, he was sorry to say, be so particular on this theme as he could wish: not possessing the exact names of these 'babioles,' he might run into small verbal errors which would not fail to lay him open to my sarcasm, and excite my unhappily sudden and passionate disposition. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the sailor's jealousy lest improper innovations should be introduced into the mode of taking their food. Knives and forks, cups, saucers, soup and plain plates were a violation of sound forecastle principles, which in their eyes threatened a coming degeneracy of the profession. Their use was viewed as an attempt to become aristocratic, and those who dared adopt it were looked upon as fops and mongrel seamen. The average man believed in his tin pot, plate and pannikin, galvanized soup ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... again—that the craving for drink and narcotics, especially that engendered in our great cities, is not a disease, but a symptom of disease; of a far deeper disease than any which drunkenness can produce; namely, of the growing degeneracy of a population striving in vain by stimulants and narcotics to fight against those slow poisons with which our greedy barbarism, miscalled civilisation, has surrounded them from the cradle to the grave. I may be answered that the old German, Angle, Dane, drank heavily. ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... understood except in connection with the occasional attempts to end the discord between production and distribution by diminishing the former. It is impossible not to see that in this way morality also would be preserved from a degeneracy the real cause of which this sort of reformers certainly did not understand, but which hovered before their mind's eye as an indistinct presentiment. And now, having noticed seriatim the three conceivable forms of evolution—namely, (1) the adaptation ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... appliances of refined taste and pleasure, for which the Romans, austere and poor no longer, had, since their late acquaintance with Athenian polish and Oriental luxury, acquired a predilection—ominous, as their sterner patriots fancied, of personal degeneracy ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... alone," said Grattan of the elder Pitt. "Modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... a regular soldier of high degree and uncertain nationality appeared to me and said, "Do you not see now, young man, that peace is degeneracy, and that war is an ennobling discipline?" And I, chancing my luck, replied, "Yes, the great von Moltke himself said that peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream." Whereupon my visitor changed into a white owl and vanished with a hoot. And I awoke, and found that I had overslept ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... here the thought that struck fire in the mind of young Schiller, whose bent was all for tragedy. If there was to be a proof that strong passion and bold action were still possible, notwithstanding the degeneracy of the age, what better object could there be for the passion to wreak itself upon than the age itself? If life had become vapid, and the German character servile and pusillanimous, here was the very field for a mad Ajax who should ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... memorials, through the course of time; remark the several gradations by which corruption steals into the world, and oppose it in every step, by giving perpetual warning and instruction to mankind; which, added to the strong influence of our own example, would probably prevent that continual degeneracy of human nature so justly ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... of cuffs that would not have been permitted to an ordinary barmaid. As for her face, there were crow's-feet, and a mole (which had selected with infinite skill a site on her chin), and a general degeneracy of complexion; but it was an effective face. The little thing of twenty-three or so by her side had all the cruel advantages of youth and was not ugly; but she was 'killed' by Annie Brett. Miss Brett had a maternal bust. Indeed, something of the maternal resided ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... in Central America, where an everlasting summer and fertile land yield a harvest of fruits and grain all the year round where it is not even necessary "to tickle the ground with a hoe to make it laugh with a harvest." But thinking over the cause of the degeneracy of the Spaniards and Indians, I am led to believe that in climes where man has to battle with nature for his food, not to receive it from her hands as a gift; where he is a worker, and not an idler; where hard winters kill off the weak and brace up the strong; there only is that selection ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... roots.] "Here," says Beatrice, "are the roots, from whence time springs: for the parts, into which it is divided, the other heavens must be considered." And she then breaks out into an exclamation on the degeneracy of human nature, which does not lift itself to the ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... is elaborate because it is genuine, because it is not looked upon as a mere outlet for the repressions of puritanism. From an Anglo-Saxon point of view Vienna is perhaps the most degenerate city in the world. But degeneracy is geographical; morals are temperamental. This is why the Viennese resents intrusion and spying. His night life involves the national spirit. His gaiety is not a prerogative of the demi-monde, but the usufruct of all classes. Joy is not exclusive ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... the genius of the people. The Spanish viceroys ruled with an iron hand over Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. Poverty and superstition wasted and darkened the minds of the people, and indolence and love of pleasure introduced almost universal degeneracy. But the Spanish yoke, which weighed so heavily at both extremities of the Peninsula, did not extend to the republic of Venice, or to the duchy of Tuscany; and the heroic character of the princes of Savoy alone ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... an abnormal psychical organization. As in the progeny of insane, epileptics, suicides, and criminals, so also among the children of drunkards, do we see cases of congenital idiocy and imbecility, of neurasthenia and inebriety, of psychical and somatic degeneracy, also of depraved morality, of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... entered into the world. The poets in their fables, most of which, however extravagant they may seem, had their origin in truth, speak the same language. Some of these represent the first condition of man by the figure of the golden, and his subsequent degeneracy and subjection to suffering by that of the silver, and afterwards of the iron age. Others tell us that the first female was made of clay; that she was called Pandora, because every necessary gift, qualification, or endowment, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... there, though with a crowd and noise and a brass band, for all the world like an excursion to Coney Island, and though most people, except the grateful natives, were obediently believing with Ruskin that it was the symbol of the degeneracy of Venice and would have thought themselves disgraced forever if they were seen on it. But the Lagoon was as beautiful from the noisy, fussy little steamboat as from a gondola, the sails of the fishing boats touching it with as brilliant colour, the Islands lying as peacefully ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... not dispute the word. Had Melrose, out of his immense income, spent a couple of thousand pounds on the village at any time during the preceding years, a score of deaths would have been saved, and the physical degeneracy of a whole population would have ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... The degeneracy of a people, the decay of religion, and the degradation of woman are inseparable, and it is so-called "religion" that institutes the change, and sets the pace, ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... parents. The vice and infidelity which prevail to such an alarming extent in the present day, may be ascribed to parental neglect of the young. The desolating curse of heaven invariably accompanies neglect of domestic obligations and duties; it was this that constituted that dreadful degeneracy which preceded the coming of the Messiah. The parents were alienated from the children, and the children from their parents. And the only way in which the Jews could avert deserved and impending ruin, was by "turning the heart of ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... faction, party spirit, and bigotry of the country were gathered to a head. In this evil pre-eminence both of the universities and all the colleges appear to have been upon a level, though Lincoln College, Oxford, is mentioned as a bright exception in John Wesley's day to the prevalent degeneracy. The strange thing is that, with all their neglect of learning and morality, the colleges were not the resorts of jovial if unseemly boon companionship; they were collections of quarrelsome and spiteful litigants, who spent their time in angry lawsuits. ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... Elsewhere.] He refers to what Guido del Duca had said in the thirteenth Canto, concerning the degeneracy of his countrymen. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Not so: that were easy to achieve. Human beings, two living, healthy men, one white, one black, were the requirements. Impossible! The experiment could never be performed: its requirements were unattainable. O tempora! O mores! Alas, for the degeneracy of the age! In the days of the Roman emperors men were fed, literally fed, to wild beasts in the arena—Gauls, Scythians, Nubians, even Roman freedmen when barbarians were scarce. This to amuse the populace alone. Frightful waste of life! In ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Burns's temperament and clearness of perception should be on the side of the 'common-sense' party. In one of his letters to Mr. James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites,—surely in itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of the times in the matter of religion,—we have an interesting reflection which gives us some insight into the poet's mind. 'This, my dear Sir, is one of the many instances of the folly in leaving the ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... O'Gradies emulated the art of a Sandwich Islander, and sketched faces as grotesque as any Pagan could desire for his idol; or figures after the old well-established school-boy manner, which in the present day is called Persian painting, "warranted to be taught in three lessons." Now, this bespeaks degeneracy in the arts; for, in the time we write of, boys and girls acquired the art without any lessons at all, and abundant proofs of this intuitive talent existed on the aforesaid walls. Napoleon and Wellington were fighting a duel, while ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... they were going to visit: and what so efficient for the purpose as an old wig? nothing. But, alas! those days are gone! and Beau Tibbs is gone! and, if we question where? only Echo answers. But what becomes of the old wigs? is the question at issue. Alas! again, such is the degeneracy of modern days, that, instead of being used as an appendage to the toilet, though humble, I fear they will be traced to the vulgar bricklayer and plasterer, to be mingled with mortar, and "patch a wall, to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... 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 complaints of the widespread corruption and outcries for "reformation of the church in head and members." The degeneracy of the clergy was nowhere more manifest than in the monastic orders, that had been originally established for the express purpose of reviving and purifying the church. That ancient word was fulfilled, "Like people, like priest." But it was ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... great things, and of performing them as successfully, as ever were done by their ancestors; and, consequently, an expedition that must convince not only us, but all Europe, that if our maritime force be not employed in undertakings of the most important nature, it is not owing to the degeneracy or our seamen, nor to be imputed to our want of able or daring commanders, which is not my business, and which indeed surpasses my abilities, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... far under the surface of that bland and factitious normality which he maintained before his fellows. In his veins ran a mongrelized strain of tendencies and vices which had hardened into a cruel and monstrous summary of vicious degeneracy. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... linen-spinning, and pottery business have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like the rose, and a numerous posterity have inherited the land of their fathers? The sterile soil would at least have been proof against a low-land degeneracy. Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape! Again, perhaps, Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house raised last spring to be the oldest in ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... and drives them to seek return in the more responsive heart of Mortimer. After that she even sinks so low as to wish the king dead. Yet to the end she cherishes a warm love for her son. Probably the author intended that her degeneracy should be attributed to the baneful influence of Mortimer and so strengthen ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... matter of fact, nothing could be more slothful or slow, more given up to a life of ease and degeneracy, than the "reef-building polypifer"—to give him his scientific name. He is the hobo of the animal world, but, unlike the hobo, he does not even tramp for a living. He exists as a sluggish and gelatinous worm; he attracts to himself calcareous ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... placed our feet on the path of oblivion? History is littered with the wrecks of civilization. And always the secret is found in racial degeneracy—the lowering of the standard of racial values. Civilization is a name—an effect. Race is the cause. If a race maintains its soul, it must remain itself and it must breed its best. Race is the result of thousands of years of this selection. One drop of negro blood makes ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... substance. Indeed, he disarmed fanaticism by the curious care he bestowed on making his works conformable to the faith that was in him; for, partly by inheritance and partly by industrious pains, his old house was undermined by a cellar of wine such as is seldom seen in these days of modern degeneracy. He is the last gentleman, that I know of, of that old school that used to import their own wine and lay it down annually themselves,—their bins forming a kind of vinous calendar suggestive of great ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... most travellers are struck by the lowness of stature, the leanness and the paleness which present themselves so commonly to the eye at Manchester, and above all, among the factory classes. I have never been in any town in Great Britain, nor in Europe, in which degeneracy of form and colour from the national standard has been so obvious. Among the married women all the characteristic peculiarities of the English wife are conspicuously wanting. I must confess that all the boys and girls brought before me from the Manchester mills had a depressed appearance, and were ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... Oxford had been rather a period of obscure conflict than of mere idleness and degeneracy, as it had seemed to be. But it might easily have ended in physical and moral ruin, and, as it was—thanks to Courtenay—Delafield went out to the business of life, a man singularly master of himself, determined to live his own life for ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... due time to Tenniel's house, he said nothing, but merely opened the door, and thrust in his face with an air of defiant resignation, and waited. Tenniel started. "You scoundrel!" he exclaimed; "then I must!" And he did. But Leech was proof against this example of degeneracy, and to the end remained true to his views and his vow, although moustaches soon came into ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... concerns the survival of the race. Nature has no favorites: the fittest of the human stock will survive after others have degenerated and disappeared; the fittest animals will ultimately people the earth. Sexual degeneracy is the surest road ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... Catholics from this great work of reconstruction is profoundly un-Catholic. It is the act of a traitor to the Church and country. As Burke so gloriously said: he was aware that the age is not all we wish, but he was sure that the only means to check its degeneracy was heartily to concur in whatever ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... of degeneracy sculpture fell may be judged by the lid of the sarcophagus of S. Hilary, Bishop of Arles, d. 449, now in the Arles museum. Beside the rude lettering, there are but a leaf and two birds on it, but they might have been scribbled by a child. It is to me inconceivable that some ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... and that which is the means of happiness to one man may be to another the cause of misery, we are to consider, what state is best adapted to human nature in its present degeneracy and frailty. And, surely, to far the greater number it is highly expedient, that they should by some settled scheme of duties be rescued from the tyranny of caprice, that they should be driven on by necessity through ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... prepared for the staggering baseness employed by the old man in giving his reasons for cutting them off. To their chagrin, mortification, even shame, they were compelled to listen to at least a dozen letters that they had written to their father during the period covered by his supposed degeneracy. The originals of these letters, stained, dirty, frazzled but incontrovertibly genuine, were attached to the instrument, and were referred to in certain specific recommendations incorporated in the body of the ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... opposing contradicts that law of progress which alone gives meaning and unity to history. Instead of progress, it teaches degeneracy and failure. But elsewhere we see progress, not recession. Geology shows us higher forms of life succeeding to the lower. Botany exhibits the lichens and mosses preparing a soil for more complex forms of vegetation. Civil history shows the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... and searching his memory. Where had he previously seen those heads, so typical of bourgeois degeneracy, those flattened, crabbed faces reeking of millions earned at the expense of the poor? It was assuredly in some important circumstance of his life. And all at once he remembered; they were the Margaillans, the man was that building ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... men of his age and standing, has a great idea of the degeneracy of the times. He seldom expresses any political opinions, but we managed to ascertain, just before the passing of the Reform Bill, that Nicholas was a thorough Reformer. What was our astonishment to discover shortly after the meeting of the first reformed Parliament, that ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... agencies at our command, new morality, new wisdom, predicate of the Future by the Past? In ancient States, the mass were slaves; civilization and freedom rested with oligarchies; in Athens twenty thousand citizens, four hundred thousand slaves! How easy decline, degeneracy, overthrow in such States,—a handful of soldiers and philosophers without a People! Now we have no longer barriers to the circulation of the blood of States. The absence of slavery, the existence of the Press; the healthful proportions of kingdoms, neither too confined ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and characteristic expression of the American spirit. It is only natural for the sons and grandsons of the men who settled this country to take an interest in wholesome and vigorous sports; in fact it would be a sad commentary on the degeneracy of the modern generation if such an expression of their inheritance were not evident. But a distinctively American attitude towards sport is also manifested in the intense personal and university rivalries developed, the very rock upon which ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... their benedictions on her graceful head; old love-letters, shut up in iron boxes in the neighbouring offices, and made of no account among the heaps of family papers into which they had strayed, and of which in their degeneracy they formed a part, might have stirred and fluttered with a moment's recollection of their ancient tenderness, as she went lightly by. Anything might have happened that did not happen, and never will, for the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... "at Mr. Smith coming over to plant in the north." There is a rare black letter still extant, entitled, ["Letter by F.B. on the Peopling of the Ardes"] which Smith wrote to induce English adventurers to join him in his speculation. It is composed with considerable ability. He condemns severely the degeneracy of the early English settlers, "who allied and fostered themselves with the Irish." He says that "England was never fuller of people than it is at this day," and attributes this to "the dissolution of abbeys, ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... half from defective vision, nearly half from defective hearing, and 30 per cent, from starvation. The physical deterioration of the recruits who offer themselves for the army is a subject of increasing concern. There are grounds for at least suspecting a growing degeneracy of the population of the United Kingdom, particularly in ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... plain Fact, these people, and were in that advanced state of degeneracy on the subject, that instead of being impressed by the speaker's strong common sense, they took it in extraordinary dudgeon. The men muttered 'Shame!' and the women 'Brute!' and Sleary, in some haste, communicated the following hint, ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... though he had now such cause for rigid economy. Was it that he grew old?—he could no longer take his wine with disregard of consequence. The slightest excess, and too surely he paid for it on the morrow, not merely with a passing headache, but with a whole day's miserable discomfort. Oh, degeneracy of stomach and of brain! Of will, too; for he was sure to repeat the foolish experience before a ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... create a deep and widespread enthusiasm, how the forms of logic and rhetoric may usurp the place of reason and truth, how all philosophies grow faded and discoloured, and are patched and made up again like worn-out garments, and retain only a second-hand existence. He who would study this degeneracy of philosophy and of the Greek mind in the original cannot do better than devote a few of his days and nights to the commentary of ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... over his countrymen. Prophets, lawgivers, and sages have formed the character of other nations; it was reserved to a poet to form that of the Greeks. This is a feature in their character which was not wholly erased even in the period of their degeneracy. When lawgivers and sages appeared in Greece, the work of the poet had already been accomplished; and they paid homage to his superior genius. He held up before his nation the mirror, in which they ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
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